United Nations

Four Days with José Ramos-Horta

Autumn of the Patriarch

By Peter Robb

I got to Dili at seven in the morning and the president of the República Democrática de Timor-Leste arrived from New York via Singapore a few hours later. Seven is a great time to land in Dili. You leave Darwin in the black night, fly over the Timor Sea in indeterminate misty greyness that gets gradually lighter and by the time you’re over Timor itself, the mist has dispersed and the sun

Women in the Military

The Lady Killers

By Anne Summers

A few years later, that soldier asked the other three officers who had assisted her maiden fast-rope that day to be bridesmaids at her wedding. Lieutenant Toni Wilson, who’d been on the bridge, was overseas and unable to be there but Lieutenant Commander Natalee Johnson, the chopper pilot, and Lieutenant Karly Pidgeon, the observer, were able to join Major Matina Jewell in northern New Sout

What We Learned in Copenhagen

By Andrew Charlton

At 10.45 p.m. my phone rang. “The Danes are switching to the back-up plan,” a voice said. “Room 20. 11.30 tonight.” I pulled on my suit jacket, took up my warm coat and ventured downstairs into the night. I followed the now familiar route through Copenhagen’s cobbled laneways and grand boulevards, across the bascule bridge straddling its narrow harbour straits, arriving finally at the United Nations conference venue on Amager

Frank Moorhouse’s 'Cold Light'

Age of Innocence

By David Marr

Edith Campbell Berry has crashed to earth in Canberra circa 1950. She is no longer wanted abroad. All her years at the League of Nations and her efforts rescuing refugees from the rubble of Europe (“my best work”) have failed to win her a place with the United Nations. So this plucky woman comes home at about the age of 40 hoping for the best. Her plan w

Chris Bowen and the Malaysian Solution

The Hot Seat

By Jana Wendt

The Malaysian Solution, a project he claims largely as his own (“Courageous, minister”, I hear Sir Humphrey Appleby snorting), holds out one of the few prospects of redemption in the government’s valley of tears. With unshakeable faith, Bowen believes th

William Lloyd-George Takes a Journey through West Papua

Spirit of Independence

By William Lloyd-George

To show their discontent with the status quo nearly 2000 students and activists have gathered down the road to protest outside the local parliament building. The mostly young protestors chant freedom songs and give speeches detailing human rights abuses and in

East Timor’s Lost Generation

Postcolonial Blues

By Jill Jolliffe

Known as generation foun (‘the new generation’), Lemos’ contemporaries are remembered principally for staging the pro-independence demonstration at Santa Cruz cemetery in 1991, in the East Timor capital of Dili, which ended in a massacre by the Indonesian army. Th

Sex and the AFL

Out of Bounds

By Anna Krien

Proclaiming to be speaking on behalf of all women mistreated by footballers, she had in January attended St Kilda’s first training session and thrown flimsy placards on the ground reading “St Scandal”, “HU$H”, “AFL (All Fucking Lies)” and “RESP

Rupert Murdoch’s Populist Creations

The Fox News Show

By Guy Rundle

It was the usual Palin performance – the sentences tripping over each other, somewhere between natural leader and cheerleader. It’s the style that has wowed supporters across the continent but this time subsequent reaction among mainstream conservatives was curiousl

The Gaza Strips

By Christos Tsiolkas

I’m ageing; I’m becoming the old fart I never wished to be. I am succumbing to nostalgia and its lethal evil twin, bitterness. I listen to the radio – or, recently, more often a 30-second grab of a song on iTunes – and I think that popular music just c

Rudd’s ETS Backflip

Comment

By Tim Flannery

Kevin Rudd’s decision to defer his emissions trading bill until 2012 represents an abrupt and dramatic policy reversal, the significance of which, both nationally and globally, will only grow with time. It’s a funk in the true sense of the word: a shirking

Jonathan Safran Foer’s ‘Eating Animals’

Cold Turkey

By Peter Singer

Jonathan Safran Foer is a talented novelist with a gift for writing amusingly about serious issues. In Everything Is Illuminated (2003), he created a Ukrainian narrator, Alex, who describes in hilarious detail his work assisting an American Jew – named Jonathan Safran

Francis Deron's 'The Trial of the Khmer Rouge'

The Cambodian Genocide

By Simon Leys

One remembers the last lines of Kafka’s Trial: Josef K, an innocent citizen who fell into an incomprehensible and endless web of judicial proceedings for reasons that will never be revealed to him, is in the end taken by two official-looking gentlemen to a deserted quarry; there, with a sort of stupid bureaucratic formality, without violence, without anger

Homer’s "Iliad" & David Malouf’s "Ransom"

Troy Revisited

By Peter Conrad

Which of Homer's two narratives a writer chooses depends on the temper of the times. Romantic voyagers in the nineteenth century favoured The Odyssey. Goethe, visiting an aromatic garden in Sicily, said that for the first time the poem had become a "living truth" to him. As Robert Louis Stevenson crisscrossed the Pacific, he often remembered the idyllic stopovers of Odysseus on islands where seduc