Ireland

'Against Remembrance' By David Rieff

By Maria Tumarkin

In the last decade of the twentieth century American journalist David Rieff was in Bosnia covering the war. His mother, the late Susan Sontag, was there as well, staging Waiting for Godot in the second year of Sarajevo’s 1395-day siege. (A square in the city’s centre is now named after Sontag; nothing so far for Rieff.) Bosnia was not the only terrible and dark place Rieff came to know. H

East Timor’s Lost Generation

Postcolonial Blues

By Jill Jolliffe

Known as generation foun (‘the new generation’), Lemos’ contemporaries are remembered principally for staging the pro-independence demonstration at Santa Cruz cemetery in 1991, in the East Timor capital of Dili, which ended in a massacre by the Indonesian army. The movement in fact began in 1989 during a visit by Pope John Paul II when students held a demonstration and hit world headlin

Chariots of Fire: Tony Blair’s Legacy

By Lindsay Tanner

Ten years later, Blair stepped down, exhausted and diminished. Bullied out of office by a relentless rival, a ravenous media and the accumulated weight of many disappointments, he moved on. Now that the government he led is also gone and Blair has recently published his memoirs, it’s an opportune time to examine his legacy.Few modern political figures have attracted as much adulation and vilification as Blair. Even fewer have seen the

'The Many Worlds of RH Mathews: In Search of an Australian Anthropologist' By Martin Thomas

By Henry Reynolds

With The Many Worlds of RH Mathews, Martin Thomas has brought back anthropologist Robert Hamilton Mathews from almost total obscurity. Thomas has pursued his man with forensic intensity, and astutely located him in time and place. This alone is a significant achievement. But in so doing he examines many wider themes that inhere in the story. He employs the s

The New Castrati

Too Much Heaven on their Minds

By Paul Kelly

Ever since the world began, I suspect, men have been showing off to women and to other men by singing high. Sure, the manly stuff – hunting animals, smashing enemies, guarding the fort, singing baritone – has always played well, identifying a fella, in the

PL Travers and Mary Poppins

Something about Mary

By Alan Saunders

“I’ll stay till the wind changes,” says Mary Poppins to the Banks children after she swept in on the east wind and, overwhelming Mrs Banks, became their nanny. Well, clearly the wind has not yet changed, because Mary Poppins is everywhere these days. She

Jonathan auf der Heide's 'Van Diemen's Land'

Tasmanian Devils

By Luke Davies

“There’s nothing to a piece of man,” intones the mellifluous voice-over (in Gaelic, with subtitles) late in Jonathan auf der Heide’s strange – and strangely compelling – Van Diemen’s Land. The voice-over runs sporadically yet hauntingly through the film an

The discovery of Vashti Bunyan, Sibylle Baier and ‘Connie’ Converse

Lost Women Found

By Robert Forster

"When did you write that? How did you happen ... to ... uh ..." The nervous and incredulous male voice stops there on the tape. It's 1954, and Connie Converse, the singer and songwriter who has elicited this response, has just recorded one of her songs onto th

Brian Burke & Nicolae Ceausescu

By Shane Maloney

Everybody wanted to be Nicolae Ceausescu's friend - the United States, Britain, China and the premier of Western Australia. To the Americans and the Chinese, the infamous Romanian dictator was a geopolitical thorn in the side of the Soviet Union. To Brian Burke, he was

Comment: An Indigenous Game

By John Hirst

Aboriginal people make up 2% of the population and 10% of footballers in the Australian Football League. As anyone who has seen them in action will attest, they seem made to play the game, but were they makers of the game as well? Their role in the game's orig

Frank Hurley: Journeys into Papua

Such Desirable Objects

By Anna Cater

The renowned Australian photographer Frank Hurley made two expeditions to Papua: the first time under the aegis of the Anglican Board of Missions, in 1920 and 1921, and the second as the leader of his own more ambitious expedition, in 1922 and 1923. Now, many

Oliver Sacks’s ‘Musicophilia’

Wunderbar

By Anna Goldsworthy

David Silverman’s ‘The Simpsons Movie’

Ho-Diddly-Hum

By Luke Davies

One day in 1967 my parents loaded my five-year-old self and my two brothers into the Volkswagen, and off we all trooped to see Batman, the feature-length version of the high-camp TV series that starred Adam West and Burt Ward and lasted three glorious Bam! Kapow! years. Excitement was running high, for the black-and-white small-screen world with which I was

The 2007 Venice Biennale

The View from the Pavilions

By Juliana Engberg

Contra Mundum

By Kate Holden

A paean in an arcane language derived from ancient Egyptian and Greek; a ceremonial procession of men in Byzantine beards and robes; a supper table laid with platters of pizza and fried rice; a sermon aided by PowerPoint slides above a Madonna icon outlined in

MJ Hyland’s 'Carry Me Down'

Truth, Lies, Madness

By Peter Craven

Maria Hyland came to prominence a couple of years ago with How the Light Gets In, the mesmerising story of a Bad Girl who is always proving herself more right than her betters. And if there’s any kind of Achilles heel in this bright and blistering talent it

'Voyage and Landfall: The Art of Jan Senbergs' by Patrick McCaughey

By Justin Clemens

Queensland. What is It?

By John Harms

Sarge is firing up. “Noosa is the re-invention capital of the universe. It’s all a facade. The houses are like a Western movie set. Big fronts and nothing behind them. And the pricks are furtively pulling cans of Home Brand baked beans off the shelves so they can pay their mortgages. It’s all so self-conscious. They are looking for a dream but they won’t find it here.”Queensland. What is