HRAFF

Life after the Intervention

Hard Times

By Paul Toohey

My interest in Driver came from a story that appeared some weeks before in the Tennant & District Times, the local paper, on 19 November. Driver’s only son, aged 29, had been killed while walking on the Stuart Highway outside Wycliffe Well, a fuel and grog stop for the nearby community of Ali Curung, where both Driver and his son lived, and which lies 170 kilometres south of Tennant Cre

Julian Assange

The Cypherpunk Revolutionary

By Robert Manne

Julian Assange has told the story of his childhood and adolescence twice, most recently to a journalist from the New Yorker, Raffi Khatchadourian, and some fifteen years ago, secretly but in greater detail, to Suelette Dreyfus, the author of a fascinating book on the first generation of computer hacking, Underground, for which Assange was the primary researcher. In what is called the “Resea

Cronulla Five Years On

Comment

By Malcolm Knox

One such line was drawn in the infamous early summer of 2005, when Sydney seemed to fracture into racial violence. From Cronulla to Lakemba, two self-declared tribes took it upon themselves to settle their differences by violent means. An alarmed city, and country, watched and wondered what it meant.Cronulla, in the Sutherland Shire, the land of Puberty Blues, is geographically and culturally unique in the city’s imagination. Paradoxi

Liu Xiaobo

A Nobel Affair

By Linda Jaivin

When I last checked, over 1 million readers had viewed this cryptic message. Among the more than 25,000 comments, the multiple effusions (“Love you!”) and myriad confusions (“Huh?”), was one that quoted from the first volume of Marx and Engels’ Collected Works: The government only listens to its own voice, and it knows it is only listening to

The Bowraville Murders

The Mission

By Malcolm Knox

At Thomas Duroux’s house in Bowraville there are children, too. On the thin strip of his front yard, toys lie warping in the sun. Children scatter when they see me coming. Further down the footpath, children push other children in strollers. Thomas isn’t u

Duty of Care

By Margaret Simons

Pluck an episode from the midstream of human life and it can be hard to glean meaning. Sometimes there is just senselessness and mess. If there is a theme to the events that have interrupted these women’s lives, however, it is surely care, and its opposite,

From Berlin to the Bush

By Ken Inglis

After eight weeks at sea, the internees were disembarked: some in Melbourne, en route to a camp in Tatura, in northern Victoria, but most in Sydney, where they were then taken on a 19-hour train journey to the town of Hay and marched into two camps. There the internees

Life Sentence

By Victoria Laurie

His father, Anthony, has since graduated to one of Perth’s higher security prisons, which is also where Malcolm’s 21-year-old brother, Tyson, is serving his sentence. Malcolm’s 14-year-old cousin, Jayden, is in and out of juvenile detention, and his 23-y

The Child Gangs of Tweed Heads

The Wild Frontier

By Mandy Sayer

Martin climbs off his bike and walks through the piles of rubbish towards the verandah. It’s then that he sniffs a deeper, ruder stench: his front door and its handle are smeared with shit. He lets himself into the house, grabs his shotgun and loads it. Gun in hand, h

What Happened in the Gulf Country

The Brutal Truth

By Tony Roberts

In 1881, a massive pastoral boom commenced in the top half of the Northern Territory, administered by the colonial government in Adelaide.1 Elsey Station on the Roper River – romanticised in Jeannie Gunn’s We of the Never Never – was the first to be esta

Life in a Bangkok Prison

The King & I

By Harry Nicolaides

Compound One. For weeks I lay on my back, delirious with influenza. When I was able to stand, I shuffled around like a zombie, pushed here and there by the heaving population of sweaty, half-naked inmates, most of them Thai, Burmese or Cambodian.One night I wa

Murder on Arena Avenue: Is Charles Zentai Guilty?

By György Vámos

Recently, I spent several months sifting through the surviving records of the Budapest People's Court, which indicate that Zentai's family name (sometimes rendered Zentay) was originally Steiner.The witness testimonies relating to his case should be treated with care. E

Tradition, Truth & Tomorrow

By Galarrwuy Yunupingu

My land is that of the Gumatj clan nation, which is carefully defined, with boundaries and borders set out in the maps of our minds and, today, on djurra, or paper. We have our own laws, repeated in ceremonial song cycles and known to all members of our clan nation. Sung into our ears as babies, disciplined into our bodies through dance and movement - we hav

Life Under Fiji’s Interim Government

Coup-Coup Land

By Craig Sherborne

Even the funeral parlours here are caged, as if there's profitable trade in pawning corpses. In shop windows, houses are advertised for lease as having a "good compound, fully fenced all over and with full security system." And security guards. Fiji has more security guards than you can poke a nightstick at. In Lautoka, in the main island's north-west, the Chilli Tree café, a quiet Formica place

Inside Bali's Kerobokan Prison

The Penalty Is Death

By Luke Davies

In Kerobokan, there are long, idle hours for activity such as that. The hours are only broken by the visiting periods, six days a week, when friends and relatives of the prisoners squeeze into a tiled courtyard about half the size of a basketball court, jostli

A moral equivalent to Anzac Day

Digging

By Don Watson

In countries like our own it seems possible that, relative to lifestyle, life has less meaning than it used to. Life is for people accustomed to scarcity, risk and struggle - for losers, if you like; lifestyle is for those who live in apparent perennial abunda

The Road to the Apology

Sorry Business

By Robert Manne

Two pieces of evidence I stumbled upon shortly after reading the report had a particularly powerful effect on me. One was a passage from Margaret Tucker's autobiography, If Everyone Cared. As I know now but did not yet understand, Margaret Tucker had been one of the man

The Outcast of Camp Echo

By Alfred W McCoy

JUNE 2006 – On or about 11 January 2002, a small, slender 26-year-old Australian named David Hicks, recently captured fighting alongside the Taliban in Afghanistan, was one of the first detainees flown to Camp X-Ray at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. As a high-school dropout, former drug addict, sometime car thief, mercenary soldier in Kosovo, Taliban fighter against America, graduate of four Al Qaed