New Zealand

'Sarah Thornhill' By Kate Grenville

By Delia Falconer

Each of the three books in Kate Grenville’s loose trilogy – The Secret River (2005), The Lieutenant (2008) and now Sarah Thornhill – is an act of atonement. Each recognises the damage done to Indigenous Australians by Sydney’s colonisation, and writes a sincere ‘sorry’ back into the past. In The Secret River, the strongest of the trio, Grenville traces the anatomy of a massacre on

Why Dialling ‘000’ May Not Save Your Life

Triple Zero’s Emergency

By Christine Kenneally

A few years ago in Terrey Hills, NSW, a man stumbled upon the collapsed body of a jogger who had had a heart attack. He called triple zero, but wasn’t sure exactly where he was. The first four minutes of a heart attack are critical for survival. Yet, because it was so hard to pin down the jogger’s location, it took an hour for emergency services to find him. The man died. Twenty years ago

Child Beauty Pageants in Australia

Sparkle and Shine

By Julia Baird

“I would have girls regard themselves not as adjectives but as nouns.” –Elizabeth Cady Stanton, c.1870 There’s nothing particularly remarkable about the adjectives used to describe the winners of child beauty pageants: pretty, beautiful, lovely. They can’t just be cute, though, these girls; they have to sparkle, shine, glow and glitter as they smile determinedly on stage, parents wringing hands in the wings. With all the tortu

Craig Sherborne on Hiking the Milford Track, New Zealand

The Sound of Silence

By Craig Sherborne

Bliss can never happen of its own accord. When it has been years-long away it needs some outside intervention. Narcotic versions were never for me – look at those grey-faced zombies stumbling down Fitzroy Street in Melbourne. That’s not bliss, that’s blankness. That’s filth and stink, defeat and barren dreams. So is the act of writing a good deal of

The Future of Fairfax

Crises of Faith

By Margaret Simons

Perhaps the worst journalists are believers too – so convinced about the importance of their mission, their own special place as communicators of the Word, that they do awful things in their arrogance. Journalists can lack respect for the laity, otherwise kn

'Hand Me Down World' By Lloyd Jones

By Delia Falconer

“I was with her at the first hotel on the Arabian Sea. That was for two years. Then at the hotel in Tunisia for three years. At the first hotel we slept in the same room. I knew her name, but that is all. I did not know when her birthday was. I did not know

Learning to Swim

An Otter's Life

By Kate Jennings

For our summer holidays, we surfed every year for six weeks at Narrabeen. My brother and my city cousin, Stephen, and I formed a feral and fearless trio, always making for the furthest wave and beyond. We didn’t know Pindar from Pinocchio, but we would’ve agreed wit

Taika Waititi's 'Boy' and Mia Hansen-Love's 'Father of My Children'

Father Knows Worst

By Luke Davies

A man perches awkwardly on the edge of a single bed talking to his two sons, Boy (James Rolleston) and Rocky (Te Aho Eketone-Whitu). He has just returned home from seven years in prison doing time for robbing a service station. “You know this used to be my r

Douglas Mawson & Scott of the Antarctic

By Shane Maloney

When Douglas Mawson turned up at Robert Falcon Scott’s London office in January 1910, Scott assumed that the 27-year-old geology lecturer from Adelaide had come to enlist in his forthcoming expedition to the South Pole. Eight thousand men had already volunteered and M

Les Murray's 'Taller When Prone'

Nobel Calling

By Clive James

In the majesty of his years and accomplishments, Les Murray, sole author of the several increasingly massive editions of his Collected Poems – one of the great books of the modern world – is in the position of a monarch who, having successfully constructed

Influenza

Known Unknowns

By Malcolm Knox

Although it is an everyday virus, there is something about influenza that inspires awe. This microscopic hard-shelled parcel of genetic matter lives in aquatic birds, which have been flying it around in first-class comfort for generations. It is coughed into t

Ghost Writers

By Gail Bell

This time last year, I roamed through the over-furnished rooms of Katherine Mansfield’s birthplace house in Tinakori Road, Te Puakitanga, Wellington. Whenever I enter into one of these strange transactions I wonder what is missing in me, or perhaps slightly askew, tha

The ‘Guinness World Records’

Broken Record

By Malcolm Knox

High noon. A red dust storm has swallowed Sydney, and Brittany Boffo and Dean Frenkel are sitting in a green room readying themselves to make human history. Both are already world-record holders. Brisbane’s Brittany, 11, can do more body skips – contortions involving stepping over her bound wrists and wheeling them over her head – than anybody yet born

Sodom and Gomorrah in Suburbia

By Benjamin Law

At the registration table for Lovelinx, a national conference run by a Christian organisation, an array of educational books and DVDs are on display. Titles include The Battle for Normality, The Courage to Be Chaste, God’s Grace and the Homosexual Next Door and Healing Homosexuality. Their variety risks being overwhelming, but mums and dads can turn their attention to one clearly targeted book,

Only Itself to Blame: The Church of Scientology

By Malcolm Knox

The Surry Hills premises were Spartan and recently opened. Scientology’s central Sydney church, in Castlereagh St, is closed for the addition of two floors and a glass-fronted tower topped with the church’s radiant cross. The development application was ap

Luke Davies on Christine Jeffs’ ‘Sunshine Cleaning’

Dirty Work

By Luke Davies

Television’s police-procedural dramas have suffered for some time now from a disease for which there is as yet no apparent cure. It hasn’t been adequately studied or named, but might best be thought of as Forensic Overkill Syndrome. It multiplies by the da

Cold Comfort

By Nick Bryant

Shirt by fluorescent-orange shirt, the quilt will take shape: a gaudy patchwork emblazoned with the logo of the world's biggest mining company, BHP Billiton, and embroidered with the names of its one-time employees who now have lost their jobs. Shirts are being collecte

Into the Red

By Nicolas Rothwell

“I suppose you think this is beautiful,” said Johnson, in a challenging voice.“Well,” I said, “it does have a certain primal quality.”We had not been getting on for the past 300 kilometres, and this was mostly because of the music issue. Photographers, and their musical tastes, have formed a leitmotif in my desert travelling: Glenn Campbell, who came from Mount Isa, believed the songs