| The Monthly

April 2013

Sri Lanka's Troubles. Niromi de Soyza and Frances Harrison

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Frances Harrison, journalist and author of Still Counting the Dead, and Niromi de Soyza, former child soldier and author of Tamil Tigress, talk to David Corlett about Sri Lanka's civil strife, then and now. Adelaide Writers Week, March 2013

March 2013

Beautiful Thing. Sonia Faleiro in conversation with Kate Holden

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In her book Beautiful Thing (Black Inc.), journalist Sonia Faleiro investigates the lives of Mumbai bar girls, following the tough story of one girl in particular. At this...

March 2013

I shall not hate. Izzeldin Abuelaish

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This Sydney Writers' Festival session features one of the most extraordinary human stories you're likely to encounter. Izzeldin Abuelaish is a Palestinian doctor and...

March 2013

How food shapes our lives. Carolyn Steel, State of Design Festival 2011

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At the State of Design Festival 2011, Carolyn Steel’s keynote address highlights how feeding cities arguably has a greater social and physical impact on the planet and us...

March 2013

D-Day. Antony Beevor (p1)

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Part 1 | Part 2 Internationally acclaimed historian Antony Beevor talks at the Melbourne Writers Festival about his vivid and engaging opus, D-Day: The Battle For Normandy, the...

March 2013

Pursuing Peace and Rights in Israel. Naomi Chazan

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Naomi Chazan is a senior Israeli academic, an activist for peace and women’s rights, and a former member of the Knesset. In this wide-ranging conversation with Rafael...

March 2013

Israel: Peace, War and Storytelling. Amos Oz

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At a time of great upheaval in Israel, one of the country’s most admired thinkers, Amos Oz, takes to the stage in Melbourne to deliver a stunning oration on the life and...

An incurious encounter takes flight

The Insult

By Peter Robb

It was getting dark and the plane for Darwin was almost full. Well back in Economy, the two seats between me and the window were empty. The doors were about to close. I was reading my book, and hoping to spread out later. Eric Ambler was made for moments like

China’s Twelfth Five-Year Plan

Bitter Fruits

By Andrew Charlton

Wo Ju depicts a generation trapped between hope and despair. The series was wildly popular because it captured the human dimension of China’s astonishing economic story. China’s industrial growth has swept tens of millions of young Chinese from their traditional liv

Liu Xiaobo

A Nobel Affair

By Linda Jaivin

When I last checked, over 1 million readers had viewed this cryptic message. Among the more than 25,000 comments, the multiple effusions (“Love you!”) and myriad confusions (“Huh?”), was one that quoted from the first volume of Marx and Engels’ Colle

The International Student Sector

Exodus

By Margaret Simons

Only a few years ago you could see them being preyed upon at major city railway stations. Touts would hand out leaflets urging them to approach certain migration agents. The noticeboards at TAFEs and universities featured the same gaudy promises: ring this num

Julian Assange’s WikiLeaks

The Man Who Fell to Earth

By John Birmingham

Semantics aside, it remained a benighted sinkhole, although nearly 1300 years of fierce parochialism and independence shone through even after Rahman’s conversion of the locals. During the Soviet occupation (1979–89), the area was renowned as a graveyard for Red Arm

Asylum Seekers

Comment

By Robert Manne

The first boatpeople were South Vietnamese fleeing from the communist victory of 1975. Between 1976 and 1982, 2000 reached our shores. In order to stem the flow, the Fraser government accepted more than 50,000 Vietnamese from the archipelago of refugee camps in Thailand, the Philippines, Malaysia and Indonesia. Australians were easily panicked by the spontan

Joe Lyons & Benito Mussolini

By Shane Maloney

Herr Hitler was busy in the Rhineland so Joseph Aloysius Lyons decided to pay a visit to Signor Mussolini instead. It was 1935 and collecting dictators was de rigueur for Australian politicians on visits to Europe. ‘Honest Joe’, then in his second term as prime minister, was returning home from imperial talks in London. A defector from Labor, he headed a conservative coalition. Popular, uncomp

Not Rocket Science

By Anna Funder

It’s Sunday, 13 June 2010. My phone beeps an SMS: “Successful separation of space return capsule from mothership. Re-entry at 11.21 pm SA time. All looking good.” It’s hard to capture the excitement of this – the excitement I know is in the heart of

From Berlin to the Bush

By Ken Inglis

After eight weeks at sea, the internees were disembarked: some in Melbourne, en route to a camp in Tatura, in northern Victoria, but most in Sydney, where they were then taken on a 19-hour train journey to the town of Hay and marched into two camps. There the

After Copenhagen

Comment

By Robert Manne

Over 200 years ago human beings began burning large quantities of the coal, oil and natural gas that had been buried under the Earth’s surface for hundreds of millions of years. This may eventually come to be seen as the most fatal misstep in the history of humankind.

Comment

By Hugh White

The big story of 2009 has been the economic downturn, better known as the Global Financial Crisis, and the biggest part of that story has been the continuing upswing of China. Its ability to keep growing at 8 or 9% has so far saved the world from a much longer and deeper crisis, and saved Australia from recession. This has interesting and lasting implications far beyond economics. Future historian