SOCIETY

Close at Hand

By Kate Rossmanith

One morning in 1683, Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, a merchant and amateur scientist in the Dutch city of Delft, set about the daily ritual of cleaning his teeth. Proud of his teeth, but perturbed by the solid white growth he could see between them, he scraped off some offending matter, mixed it with rainwater, and looked at it under a self-made microscope. Van Leeuwenhoek’s curiosity led to one

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, that I must tramp to the author’s door and knock like a nosy neighbour hoping to catch sight of the goings-on inside. We pilgr

Water Gods

By Anna Funder

Not long ago I stood at the edge of my local pool in inner Sydney looking forward to getting a load off my feet – not that I had seen them for a while. I was in the last week of my third pregnancy, and my feet, along with quite a bit of the rest of me, had long since disappeared from view. Apart from being just a tad heavy (denial expands-to-fit in the final trimester), I felt completely normal and up for a swim in my usual ‘medium�

The Tree People

By Arnold Zable

A year on from the Black Saturday fires, there’s a perverse beauty in the burnt forests, a striking interplay of black and green. The scorched eucalypts are fringed by halos of young leaves; epicormic growth, it is called – nature’s stopgap measure to revive stressed trees.Flowerdale, located 80 kilometres north-east of Melbourne, was one of the hamlet

The Child Gangs of Tweed Heads

The Wild Frontier

By Mandy Sayer

Martin climbs off his bike and walks through the piles of rubbish towards the verandah. It’s then that he sniffs a deeper, ruder stench: his front door and its handle are smeared with shit. He lets himself into the house, grabs his shotgun and loads it. Gun

Harry Kakavas and Problem Gamblers

The Biggest Loser

By Paul Barry

This occurred in November 2004, shortly after Kakavas was spotted at the tables in Las Vegas by Kerry Packer, who rang Crown’s chief operating officer, John Williams (son of Lloyd, the casino’s founder), to ask why Kakavas wasn’t losing his money in Melb

Supermarket Sweep

By Benjamin Law

It’s 4.20 am in Kingston, 30 minutes out of Brisbane, and already the place is a hive of human activity. In the darkness, people haul crates out of a huge delivery truck – the words “Tribe of Judah Care Services” printed on its side – and into a warehouse. A m

Saga

By Cate Kennedy

It’s one minute past midnight and we are gathered, hushed, in our thousands across the country, trembling in anticipation like a coven of die-hard cultists. Or perhaps that should be Twi-hard, because the altar at which we are here to worship is one of dozen

Strutting & Fretting

By Paul Kelly

In show business, you’re generally either the main act or the warm-up. Over 35 years, I’ve been both. A good show needs different and complementary parts. And someone always has to go on first.Opening can be a sweet gig: your price is fixed, your set is short and yo

Impresario

By Gay Bilson

At first glance, the 2010 Adelaide Festival program felt, well, small, in a sensible, tightly fused kind of way, with far fewer advertised events than the usual cascade of choices one expects from major-city festivals. It is possible of course that this is the

Comforter

By Anna Goldsworthy

“Are you OK, dear?” the nurse asks. Whether I am OK is hardly the issue, when we are surrounded by people screaming. They are trapped in cages behind closed doors; the sounds they make are those of terror or mortal fear. And although they are very small pe

Keith Windschuttle

Comment

By Robert Manne

Windschuttle’s argument can be summarised like this. While there were many separations of Aboriginal children from their mothers, families and communities during the course of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the numbers have been wildly exaggerated by the

The Girl in the Room

Ebony

By Anne Manne

An ambulance officer looks around the room and breathes in the smell. It looks more like the bleakest of prison cells than a little girl’s bedroom. There are no toys or furniture – just the mattress. The window is boarded up entirely. There is just one decoration, a poster of a Victorian painting of a sad-faced little girl, turning away from the world, l

'The Legacy' by Kirsten Tranter

By Peter Craven

Kirsten Tranter, the daughter of famous poet John and formidable literary agent Lyn, has a literary background with bells on. Her first novel, The Legacy, shows her to be a novelist with a commanding talent – a tough plain-stylist who can people her fictional world with characters of great vivacity and vigour.The Legacy will keep you reading later than you’d like because the articulation of th

'The Pregnant Widow' by Martin Amis

By Linda Jaivin

“It sometimes seemed to Keith that the English novel … asked only one question. Will she fall? Will she fall, this woman?” But in Martin Amis’ new novel, The Pregnant Widow, it is the man, Keith, who falls, time and again – who stumbles, trips, fails

Percy Grainger & Edvard Grieg

By Shane Maloney

As a small child growing up in Melbourne, Percy Grainger devoured the Icelandic sagas, signed his letters “Grettir the Strong” and bounded up every available stairway. His adoring mother Rose, meanwhile, was showing him what happens to naughty boys who neg

John Safran's 'Race Relations'

Border Crossings

By Alice Pung

The Torah says that we do not see things as they are. We see things as we are. In our everyday relationships, we take ourselves as the yardstick of normality – of rationality, leniency and consideration. The Dhammapadda tells us that conquering others is simple, compa

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