Tasmania

How the Franklin was saved

Environmental Flows

By Bob Brown

Thirty summers ago, on 14 December, the blockade of the Franklin Dam site began. Tasmania’s Liberal government, then headed by premier Robin Gray, who once described the Franklin River as a “brown leech-ridden ditch”, had turned down a $500 million offer from prime minister Malcolm Fraser to forgo the dam. Instead Gray sent the bulldozers rumbling into the valley, and Fraser decided aga

Truganini & George Augustus Robinson

By Shane Maloney

By 1829, Truganini was running out of options. Her mother had been stabbed to death by a sailor, her uncle shot by a soldier, her mother-in-law kidnapped by escaped convicts and her sisters abducted into sexual slavery by sealers. She had seen her betrothed’s hands cut off with a hatchet after he was thrown out of a dinghy by sealers, after which she was repeatedly raped. Small, courageous,

The Australian Greens Party

Divided We Fall

By Sally Neighbour

*Nine days after the Christmas drinks in Canberra, a far more toxic atmosphere prevails as the NSW Greens assemble for their bi-monthly meeting of the State Delegates Council (SDC) at the Indigenous Yaama Dhiyaan centre in Darlington. It’s been a tortuous year for the party in New South Wales, with festering tensions brought to a head by an ugly bunfight over BDS, the ‘Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions’ campaign targeting Israel t

Pedro Almodóvar’s 'The Skin I Live In' and Lars von Trier’s 'Melancholia'

An Auteur Planet

By Peter Conrad

Ah, to be an auteur, with the power to impose your own kinked or crazy worldview on reality! Pleasing only yourself, you can cosmetically rejig the human species, or – if you happen to be a miserable depressive – ensure that your gloom spreads through the cosmos by decreeing a planetary collision that will exterminate all life on earth. New fi

The Orange-bellied Parrot

By Nicholas Shakespeare

Alison had never liked her grandmother, who lived alone in a big overheated apartment in Zurich, and so when Helen went into hospital after a mild stroke and, rather than consent to enter a nursing home, decided on a “self-determined death” with the tidy a

The Case for a National Disability Insurance Scheme

Two Nations

By Anne Manne

Seven years ago, while bathing in a private backyard pool, she was terribly injured when a 90 kilogram man accidentally fell on her. The muscles were stripped from her spine, leaving nerve signals but no muscles to translate them. At age 31, Lillian was told s

Nicholas Shakespeare on Tasmania

The Quiet Peninsula

By Nicholas Shakespeare

Joan Masterman’s matchless four-day walk, the Freycinet Experience, turns 20 this year. For her traditional end-of-season party, she has invited the guides, lodge co-ordinators and office staff, plus Gil the bus driver and Shep the skipper, to fit into clothes they mi

David Walsh and Tasmania’s Museum of Old and New Art

High Priest

By Amanda Lohrey

The Moorilla estate is set on a peninsula of sandstone cliffs that juts out into the Derwent estuary on Hobart’s northern fringe. Framed to the south-west by the looming grandeur of Mt Wellington and to the east by Mt Direction, the slopes of the peninsula a

'Into the Woods: The Battle for Tasmania's Forests' by Anna Krien

By John Birmingham

Tasmania is another country, sometimes another world. To move beyond the edge of settlement, which largely peters out a short drive from the fairytale towns of Hobart and Launceston, is to pass into an antipodean Middle Earth.As quickly becomes clear in Into the Woods,

Body Politic

By Emily Maguire

“Shame!” someone shouts. Jeffreys pauses and looks up towards the back of the auditorium as another voice calls out, “Absolutely!” It’s unclear whether the interjections are aimed at Jeffreys or those she is speaking about. She continues: “Anti-sex

Count Paul Strzelecki & Lady Jane Franklin

By Shane Maloney

Paul Strzelecki had itchy feet. The son of a minor nobleman, without land or title, he quit Poland aged 33 and headed for England. There, he pursued geology and began to style himself as count.Then it was Africa, then Canada and the US, Mexico and Cuba. Charm

'Community: A Compilation of Hobart Music'

Distant Sounds

By Robert Forster

When is Tasmania going to produce some great bands? It must be soon, if only through the converging of cultural forces, time and the fact that both Brisbane and Perth have had a fruitful past decade of breakthrough artists and bands and the frontier needs a new place to

Dead, Wrapped in Cardboard

By Benjamin Law

People might flock to the Gold Coast to feel alive, but it is increasingly also a destination for the dead. Drive inland, away from the scorching beaches, breakneck theme parks and thumping nightclubs, and you’ll eventually hit the quiet, bushy hinterland that locals affectionately call “the green behind the gold”. One of the suburbs here is Mudgeeraba

Small-Time Big Top

By Cate Kennedy

Perry Bros Circus has set up again at the showgrounds in town, its familiar red and yellow striped tent rising like a rare winter flower behind the Saturday footy match. Its two elephants, Minyak and Saigon, don’t perform anymore; they’re just for “display”, as the circus poster says. Behind the Big Top, where they’re tethered, local kids watch them stolidly munch hay before the show sta

'Tom Is Dead' by Marie Darrieussecq

By Jacqueline Dutton

Marie Darrieussecq is one of the rare French novelists who has had most of their work translated into English. Her debut novel, Pig Tales, became an international success and another nine novels have followed in the decade since then. Her latest, Tom Is Dead,

Recent Australian History Writing

Genesis

By Alan Atkinson

Australian history writing is on the move. For a long time, the stories of our origins were completely subordinate to our history as a whole, particularly the long legacy of Aboriginal dispossession. But our historians are beginning to recognise that origins i

Boxing for Palm Island

By Chloe Hooper

Ten years ago, Ray Dennis found himself out of work. Each day he made more home-brew and started killing himself drinking it. Then he remembered the talent of the young men he'd trained from Palm Island, the Aboriginal ex-mission community north of Townsville. He decide

Gone with the Wind

By Peter Conrad

By now all those questions have had the same dismal answer. The few grudgingly favourable reviews Australia received chose to be amused by its giddy, garbled, retrograde kitsch - the lurid sunsets and silhouetted roos that pander to fantasies about an exotic continent, the genuflection to tawdry Hollywood blockbusters of bygone decades. The worst of the critical verdicts dismissed the whole effort