Dick Smith’s Population Crisis
Comment
By Guy Pearse
With the coverage Smith’s means and profile afford, he’s said population is “the biggest issue facing our country”. He’s choked back tears, calling his campaign “the most important thing I’ve ever done”, lamented that “Australia’s no land of plenty anymore”, and seized on Treasury’s 36 million population projection for 2050. He depicts a nation already bursting at the
Janette Turner Hospital on Central Park, New York
Wanted for Loitering
By Janette Turner Hospital
From the NASA space shuttle, Central Park is visible to the naked eye as a bright emerald bar on the fat knuckle of Manhattan – index finger of New York, principal of the five boroughs that make up the city, indisputably the dominant digit as it pokes the soft underbelly of the Bronx while giving the finger casually, insouciantly, to everything west of the Hudson. If an astronaut were to pl
Sinking Sandbanks
By Craig Sherborne
When bankers fly in to Kiribati, a fine evening spread is put on at the main hotel. Blue-cardboard ironies are erected: squat sandwich boards and billowy banners advertising ANZ home loans. Yes, home loans, in a place global warming is meant to be washing away - an impoverished, remote dot in the Pacific, where the most inhabited stretch of land, Tarawa, is only 35 kilometres long and barely 300 metres wide.‘Inhabited' is too inhibite