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John Birmingham
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You cannot blame them, because Perry’s restaurant, located in a grand old insurance building, does soar. To stand in the entry foyer is to find yourself unable to resist craning your neck to gaze up into the vast high spaces, artfully lit by two illuminated working sculptures fashioned from...
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The Flinthart of that once-upon-a-time rarely flinched from the confronting, and occasionally violent, practice of direct action when demonstrating his displeasure with the black-hearted devils of the old Bjelke-Petersen regime in Queensland. Thus, he found himself very much out of place when he...
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John Birmingham | The Monthly Essays | Media | October 2009 | Society & Culture
The formal library, in contrast, has none of this. Occupying the centre of the original house, its one nod to modernity is a rather groovy white lampshade hanging in the centre of the room. The vast and intricate web of optical fibre and wiring, which forms a sort of nervous system for the rest of...
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In the Australian imagination, for the most part, the future arrives every day from the east, where the sun’s first rays wash over the lighthouse at Byron Bay, before flooding across the thin green band of settlement running from the jungled tip of Queensland down to Hobart’s old world waterfront....
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The dimpled orange, bursting with sweetness, that you cut for your breakfast this morning had been dying from the moment it was plucked from its twig. Human hands might have grabbed it from the branch, or perhaps a giant mechanical harvester shook the whole tree like a small, localised earthquake....
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The small, wiry and intense man who discovered his luck had run out on Black Friday is happy to be known by his internet handle, Havock21. Hundreds of people know him by that name, on Twitter, Xbox Live and the numerous blogs he visits, including mine. On his own blog, too, of course. There he has...
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The Mays own and run Solartec, a boutique renewable-energy company specialising in solar panels. Phil May, a country boy, didn't start out as a "tree-hugging type", according to the company's homey, avuncular website. He more or less blundered into renewable energy as a business...
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Lawyers are a bit like junkies in some ways. If you let one into your life, you might as well throw open the door to a crack house full of them. While Bradley John Murdoch, the toothless, grotesquely tattooed outback killer, was on trial for the murder of Peter Falconio, beset on all sides by...
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Just up from the corner of Vulture and Boundary streets, where the short commercial strip of indie cafés and bars gives way to a remnant cluster of slumping, unrenovated wooden houses and the occasional Whitlam-era unit block, the West End Coffee House looks very much in character with its locale;...
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Having ventured once before across the boundary between life and death – to famously declare that there was fucking nothing there – the big man lay dying at last, holding on long enough to do two things: to talk to his son, James, who rushed back from overseas when he received word of his father’s...
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This spin doctor’s exasperation, causing her to abandon the content-free babble of modern political discourse for the more revealing pop-cultural babble of Reese Witherspoon and Alicia Silverstone, had been set alight by John Howard. We were standing in a grand old town hall in Ballarat, a week out...
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Brendan Nelson, John Howard’s education minister, did a funny thing a while back. Funny strange, that is, not funny ha-ha. He apologised to an opponent. Even stranger was the choice of enemy upon whom he bestowed this rare benevolence: Tony Windsor, independent MP for New England and bête noire of...
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The feeling that it was a good town to leave was only confirmed when I returned a decade later to cover the freak show that the rest of the country knew as Pauline Hanson and One Nation. I can’t recall which magazine sent me up there, but I remember only too well picking up a copy of the local...
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