University of New South Wales

Shi Zhengrong

The Sun King

By Eric Knight

Shi took six months to make his decision. He had arrived in Australia the year before the Tiananmen Square protests had engulfed his homeland. Since then he had worked hard to achieve a settled life. He had started a family, become an Australian citizen, and taken out mortgages on three properties in outer-western Sydney. But Shi decided he would take the risk. In the winter of 2001, Shi, his

The Cult of Green

By Paul Barry

In the four years BBL was listed on the Australian Securities Exchange (ASX), Phil Green and his team of tyros harvested more than $2 billion in fees from the bank’s satellite funds and other operations, and paid themselves almost $1.2 billion in bonuses. Green, the chief executive, raked in $56 million for himself, while the other head honchos, Peter Hofbauer, Robert Topfer and Eric Lucas,

Like a Virgin

By Emily Maguire

The porn sites tell us that virgins are precious, rare and worth 30 bucks a month; Christian sex-ed tells us that virgins are precious, rare and worth “a price far above rubies”. The porn sites show teasers of their “virgin girls”, starting with breast-flashing and becoming more revealing over weeks or months leading to the “event” itself; abstinence education sites sell T-shirts bearing slogans like “I’m sexy enough to

Tried Again

By Alan Saunders

Well, at least nobody had to wear tights. We were all clad in a seemly manner – academic robes for most of us – when we stepped onto the stage and into a flashy, Renaissance-lite set curiously reminiscent of an amateur production of Kiss Me, Kate. We had an audience, too. It might have been a Monday night but around a thousand people filled the Clancy Au

Racism, Australian-Style

Comment

By Waleed Aly

For all Kevin Rudd’s fantasies of international leadership, Australia rarely impinges on the consciousness of the wider world. We are neither sufficiently powerful nor sufficiently strife-torn to command global attention. Our prime minister can slip in and o

Mike Parr’s Cartesian Corpse

Mind / Body

By Daniel Thomas

To know or not to know anything in advance about an artist's work? That is the question for art curators. They hope the artworks they launch into the public domain are charged with aesthetic force and will put non-specialist minds to work unaided. It's a win w

Wilfred Burchett booklist

By Robert Manne

Tom Heenan, From Traveller to Traitor: The Life of Wilfred Burchett(Melbourne University Publishing, 2006)George Burchett & Nick Shimmin, eds, Memoirs of a Rebel Journalist: The Autobiography of Wilfred Burchett(University of New South Wales Press, 2005)George Burch

Written in the Body

By Ashley Hay

On a table of its own, in the pulmonary section of the Museum of Human Disease at the University of New South Wales, sits a solid-looking object, jet black but glistening as if it's been sprinkled with some crushed jewel, some metallic powder. It's an elliptic

Storm Spotters

By Ashley Hay

It's not every day you get to call Zeus, but that's what it felt like as I dialled the number for Andrew Haigh at the Bureau of Meteorology in Sydney. It's probably not precisely what's on his business card, but I was looking for someone to talk to about big weather - w

Not in Translation

By Malcolm Knox

When Gough Whitlam told the young Kevin Rudd to go out and get a university degree, Rudd chose to study Chinese language and history at the ANU. What if a present-day mentor showed equal prescience and advised an ambitious protégé to go out and learn the lan

As destitute universities count their pennies, students at one Australian institution count their blessings

Over Here, Over Fed, Over-Funded

By Charles Firth

It is seven years since I finished up at the University of Sydney, where there were 30 times the number of students ADFA has and yet no pastry chef. How times have changed. Or have they? A quick survey reveals that ADFA stands alone as the only university camp