Middle East

It's time to cut and run

A price too high

By John Cantwell

From January 2010 to January 2011, I was the National Commander of Australian defence forces in what our military refers to as the Middle East Area of Operations. I was responsible for a portion of the globe slightly larger than Australia, but almost all my energy was focused on one blighted province, Uruzgan, within a country beset by war for generations – Afghanistan. I went to Afghanista

Women in the Military

The Lady Killers

By Anne Summers

A few years later, that soldier asked the other three officers who had assisted her maiden fast-rope that day to be bridesmaids at her wedding. Lieutenant Toni Wilson, who’d been on the bridge, was overseas and unable to be there but Lieutenant Commander Natalee Johnson, the chopper pilot, and Lieutenant Karly Pidgeon, the observer, were able to join Major Matina Jewell in northern New Sout

Norfolk Island’s chickens

The Baskerville Case

By Ashley Hay

There are several things an astute observer will notice on arriving to Norfolk Island. First, the island’s eponymous pine trees, which rise up like oversized pins marking important spots on a map. Second, a world-heritage listed collection of Georgian buildings, some of Australia’s oldest and best preserved, which stand as testament to the first and second British settlements established on the island in 1788 and 1825 respectively.

The Struggle for Liberation in the Middle East

After Spring

By Waleed Aly

“What happens if you vote no?” I ask. “Nothing. There is no one else.” So, na’m, urged the billboard: yes! This had nothing to do with winning votes, which, after all, are delivered by the forfeiture of democracy. It was an exercise in the most transparent form of self-aggrandising propaganda – a shameless attempt to create the illusion of popula

Shi Zhengrong

The Sun King

By Eric Knight

Shi took six months to make his decision. He had arrived in Australia the year before the Tiananmen Square protests had engulfed his homeland. Since then he had worked hard to achieve a settled life. He had started a family, become an Australian citizen, and t

Drusilla Modjeska on Tufi, Papua New Guinea

In the Fjords

By Drusilla Modjeska

Back from Tufi for less than a month, I find myself thinking I should cancel this article, keep the place a secret and let those who think Papua New Guinea is a dangerous place of dark spirits continue in their ignorance. On the first morning of this most rece

'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 centr

Susanne Bier’s 'In a Better World' and Denis Villeneuve’s 'Incendies'

Triumph of the Kill

By Luke Davies

In Susanne Bier’s In a Better World (in national release on 21 April) – this year’s Oscar winner for Best Foreign Language Film – there’s a character called Big Man, a warlord terrorising local villagers near a Sudanese refugee camp. Big Man amuses h

Comment: The Anzac Spirit

By Sally Neighbour

The tone, almost invariably, is one of awed and sentimental reverence, descending at times into jingoistic puffery. Without question, the Australians serving in Afghanistan deserve our admiration and respect. But gushing hyperbole only serves to distract and detract fro

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

Olivier Assayas’ 'Carlos' and Terrorists in Film

Paths of Glory

By Kate Jennings

Every road leads to a reckoning. In Olivier Assayas’ movie Carlos, the Venezuelan terrorist Ilich Ramírez Sánchez – AKA Carlos the Jackal – meets his reckoning not when he is finally kidnapped in Khartoum in 1994 and taken back to France to be imprison

Mahmoud Saikal and Kabul’s ‘New City’ Proposal

A Tale of Two Cities

By Christopher Kremmer

How like an architect to see the problems of one city as a reason for building another. It wasn’t his idea but Mahmoud Saikal – architect, refugee, ambassador and long-time resident of Walter Burley Griffin’s Canberra – understandably embraced it. The problem ci

Sharia Law

The Way to the Watering Hole

By Sally Neighbour

Meanwhile, in a tiny office in Lakemba, south-western Sydney, with prayer beads hanging from the bookshelves and Islamic texts stacked to the ceiling, the Muslim minister and police chaplain Sheikh Khalil Chami quietly and methodically administers sharia law. A woman has come in asking to divorce her new husband because he lied about his family, profession a

AC Grayling's 'Liberty in the Age of Terror'

Liberal Fundamentalist

By John Keane

In Liberty in the Age of Terror: A Defence of Civil Liberties and Enlightenment Values (Bloomsbury, 304pp; $35.00), English liberal philosopher AC Grayling confronts readers with a disquieting thought: we are living in perilous times in which the tried and true principles of liberty are losing ground to the evils of “fundamentalism, reaction, and their militant expression”. Grayling wastes few

A Short History of the Media Future

Mash-up

By John Birmingham

The formal library, in contrast, has none of this. Occupying the centre of the original house, its one nod to modernity is a rather groovy white lampshade hanging in the centre of the room. The vast and intricate web of optical fibre and wiring, which forms a

John Keane's 'The Life and Death of Democracy'

Democratic Hubris

By Tim Soutphommasane

It has been a mixed year so far for democracy. There have been peaceful elections in India and Indonesia, the world’s largest and third largest democracy, respectively. Yet elsewhere, there has been little to celebrate. In the United Kingdom, Westminster –

Nicolas Rothwell's 'The Red Highway'

Into the Shadowed Heart

By Pico Iyer

The Red Highway (Black Inc., 288pp; $32.95) begins with a spare, haunting account of the Czech artist Karel Kupka clambering out of a plane and (as the book’s first sentence has it) stepping “for the first time into the elusive world of Arnhem Land.” Born in the l

Peter Finch & Vivien Leigh

By Shane Maloney

One lunchtime in August 1948, Peter Finch was doing Molière on the shop floor at O'Brien's glass factory in Sydney when Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh turned up.Olivier and Leigh were the king and queen of the British theatre. He had been knighted for conspicuous enunciation in tights and she had won an Academy Award for her Scarlett O'Hara. Married since 1940, the golden couple were touring A