Scholars

John Strehlow’s 'The Tale of Frieda Keysser'

On a Mission

By Peter Sutton

Among a right-thinking crowd you can still get a laugh with a missionary joke. At the 2008 conference of the Association of Social Anthropologists of the UK and Commonwealth in Keele, the doyenne of British anthropology, Professor Marilyn Strathern, brought the house down with one such joke during her keynote address. In the coffee queue afterwards I asked her how many people’s lives she th

Reflections on Scholarship

The Life Not Lived

By Peter Robb

Donaldson’s eyes narrowed when I mentioned Oxford’s own great edition of Jonson. Eleven thick octavo volumes printed magnificently and bound in apple-green canvas over the first half of last century. He relaxed when I praised not so much the scholarship of his predecessors Herford and Simpson as the craft of the Oxford printer John Johnson. Ben Jonson was a friend of Shakespeare’s and o

'The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution' By Francis Fukuyama

By Tim Soutphommasane

Most scholars have in them at best one major work. Had Francis Fukuyama ceased writing after The End of History and the Last Man, his hugely influential book of 1992, he could have been content with having produced a magnum opus. In the years since, Fukuyama has continued writing well-received, thoughtful books, but only now has he created something to rival his best known work.The Origins of Political Order is the first instalment of a

Rodney Hall on Mali

To Timbuktu and Back

By Rodney Hall

The greatest ancient library in the world is being unearthed and reassembled at Timbuktu – an astonishing archeological discovery – so I set out to see for myself, travelling with my daughter Cressida. Mali is poor – very, very poor. Countless catastrophes have struck since Mansa Musa, Emperor of Mali, made his famous pilgrimage to Mecca in 1324 attend

'Claude Lévi-Strauss: The Poet in the Laboratory' By Patrick Wilcken

By Michelle de Kretser

In 1938 an obscure French anthropologist, sporting a topee and with a monkey clinging to his boot, led an expedition into deepest Brazil. Part scientific enterprise, part youthful lighting out for the territory, its fieldwork was patchy, impressionistic and la

The Destruction of Burrup Rock Art

Into the Beehive

By Robyn Davidson

We all know what justifications, arguments and perspectives are likely to be heard from the competing interests (competing visions of value). But what, ultimately, is being argued for? And is there ground for fair negotiation or is negotiation really just defe

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 ha

The Hard Stuff

By Malcolm Knox

It was a recession; that’s my excuse. A friend got me a job interview with the world’s second-biggest management consultancy. A man and a woman sat me down in a conference room. They seemed barely older than me, children somehow left in charge of the shop.

Australia and the Indian Ocean

Looking West

By John Birmingham

In the Australian imagination, for the most part, the future arrives every day from the east, where the sun’s first rays wash over the lighthouse at Byron Bay, before flooding across the thin green band of settlement running from the jungled tip of Queensland down to

Judith Wright & Nugget Coombs

In the Garden

By Fiona Capp

When Coombs died he was farewelled with a state funeral. He had been an enormously influential figure in Australian political and cultural life since the 1940s, first as Director-General of Post-War Reconstruction and later as Governor of the Reserve Bank, adv

"The Accidental Guerrilla" by David Kilcullen

Turning a Mouse into an Elephant

By Hugh White

Soldiers who are also scholars have always had a certain cachet, but since 1914, when major warfare became unrelentingly industrial, soldier-scholars have flourished best at the margins, in the small wars of imperial decline. It was only in these wars that bru

Haydn in the Outback

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 t

Incentivising

By Gideon Haigh

An age-old conjugation of democracy runs something like this: I am guided by the will of the people; you are a slave of public opinion; he is a crude and craven populist. It was on show in March, during the crazy few weeks that began with the hounding of the hapless CEO of Pacific Brands, Sue Morphet, and ended with the lulling sensations of another Rudd gov

Simone de Beauvoir & Jean-Paul Sartre

Going Private

By Hazel Rowley

I loved writing Tête-à-Tête: The Lives and Loves of Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre (2005). Never have I written a book with such white-heat intensity; never have I taken more pleasure in writing a book. The problems began when I finished it. The book met with censorship - from quarters where you would not normally expect to encounter censorship. The book met with reviews that trotted o

Macbeth on Monday

By Gail Bell

For nearly 15 years, on the Monday nights I'm in town I've driven to a house at a nearby beach where a group of people (all women, although we've had men in the past) meet to read Shakespeare. At least five times in the cycle of tragedies we've tackled Macbeth

The Voyage of Globalisation’s Forefather

In the Wake of Magellan

By Simon Leys

First, though Magellan was indeed Portuguese, he sailed for Spain - personally commissioned by Charles V. His foreign origin provoked suspicion and resentment among his Castilian officers; some of them detested him, and their hostility was to climax in a mutin

Levelling with China

By Linda Jaivin

It was my first visit to Beijing, some 28 years ago. Chairman Mao had died in 1976; two years later, the new Communist leadership under Deng Xiaoping declared itself in favour of economic reform and modernisation, an end to ideological extremism, and an open door to Wes

Patrick White

By David Marr

We climbed down and after some hesitation found a spot where waves were washing through a rock pool. A couple of fishermen had lines in the surf not far off. One of the young friends wanted to read a love poem by Cavafy and said a few words about Manoly meeting the poet in Cairo, an old man in a yellow suit with teeth stained from cigarettes. I said, "He told me it was Alexandria." One of the nurs