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Shane Maloney
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Rabbits are poor conservers of energy. They can’t adapt to drought. Their diet is not diverse. All in all, they are not well suited to the Australian environment. But when it comes to reproduction they can’t be bettered. Mating takes 30 seconds, courtship included. In a single year, one doe can...
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Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3To celebrate the opening of Australia's newest cultural institution, The Wheeler Centre, some of Australia's leading writers and storytellers come together to tell the stories that have been handed down to them. At this glittering occasion, David Malouf, Cate Kennedy,... » play video
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As a small child growing up in Melbourne, Percy Grainger devoured the Icelandic sagas, signed his letters “Grettir the Strong” and bounded up every available stairway. His adoring mother Rose, meanwhile, was showing him what happens to naughty boys who neglect their piano practice. In 1894, aged 12...
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Shane Maloney | Dec 2009 - Jan 2010 | Society & Culture | Encounters
When Margaret Court walked into the locker room at the close of the 1973 French Open, Martina Navratilova tried not to gawk. Court was a figure of awe, the most successful player in the history of women’s tennis. Navratilova was an ungainly teenager competing in her first international tournament....
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Shane Maloney | Foreign Affairs | November 2009 | Politics | Society & Culture | Encounters
On 1 December 1945, as British rule of India entered its tumultuous final phase, Mohandas Gandhi arrived in Calcutta. That night, he held the first of a series of meetings with the Raj’s local representative, Richard Casey, the governor of Bengal.Dick Casey was an Australian, a Cambridge-educated...
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“A funny thing happened in Australia,” Frank Sinatra told a New York audience. “I made a mistake and got off the plane.”The plane in question – the private jet of one of Sinatra’s Las Vegas casino connections – landed in Melbourne on 9 July 1974. Fresh out of self-imposed retirement, the 58-year-...
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In February 1904, Stella Miles Franklin – then aged 24 – received an admiring letter from a 60-year-old former bullock-driver named Joseph Furphy. He requested a photograph and proposed that they meet.My Brilliant Career, Franklin’s semi-autobiographical novel about a spirited teenager’s rebellion...
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Frank Zappa was no stranger to Australia and its wildlife. Inspired by a monotreme encountered during his 1973 tour, the avant-rock polymath composed a complex jazz-fusion instrumental entitled ‘Echidna’s Arf (Of You)’. Three years later, he came face-to-face with that even rarer antipodean...
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Money was tight when Faith Bandler was growing up in Murwillumbah in the early 1930s, but her two older brothers managed to save a portion of their wages to buy records. Paul Robeson was a favourite and the family would all sing along. At 17, Faith sneaked away from a church meeting to see him...
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One lunchtime in August 1948, Peter Finch was doing Molière on the shop floor at O'Brien's glass factory in Sydney when Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh turned up. Olivier and Leigh were the king and queen of the British theatre. He had been knighted for conspicuous enunciation in tights...
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Everybody wanted to be Nicolae Ceausescu's friend - the United States, Britain, China and the premier of Western Australia. To the Americans and the Chinese, the infamous Romanian dictator was a geopolitical thorn in the side of the Soviet Union. To Brian Burke, he was a business bonanza waiting to...
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More than 30 years after his dismissal from office, ‘The Big Fella' was little more than a historical footnote, a near-forgotten figure. But to the 18-year-old Paul Keating, he was a living legend, a man still worth knowing. A self-taught self-improver of the old school, Jack Lang worked his...
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Sir Eugene Goossens was a man who liked a little magic in his life. Sex magic, to be specific.Goossens was a world-famous conductor and composer, a friend of Picasso and Stravinsky. "My heart just loosens when I listen to Goossens," wrote his pal Noël Coward. In 1947, aged 54 and at the height of...
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Shane Maloney | Interview | Literature | Melbourne | Writers at the Convent | Writing | Culture
This highly amusing conversation with Shane Maloney was filmed at the recent Writers at the Convent festival. Maloney talks openly about the writing of his Murray Whelan series, politics, promoting Australian books, the proposed changes to parallel importing rules, and much more. Host of the event i... » play video
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This highly amusing conversation with Shane Maloney was filmed at the recent Writers at the Convent festival. Maloney talks openly about the writing of his Murray Whelan series, politics, promoting Australian books, the proposed changes to parallel importing rules, and much more. Host of the event i... » play video
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More than a century after the event, it remains unclear exactly why Chaja Rubinstein, 23, fled her native Poland and took lodgings with her uncle Louis Silberfeld, a shopkeeper in the hamlet of Coleraine, in the west of Victoria. Some say it was to escape an unwelcome suitor. Whatever her reasons,...
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Alfred Deakin occupied many notable posts and earned several memorable sobriquets in his long and distinguished public career. Member for Ballarat, Minister for Public Works and Water Supply, Chief Secretary and Solicitor-General of Victoria, Executive Chairman of the Federation League, first...
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Until the cakes started to fly, the two artists were something of a mutual admiration society. Thea Proctor was elegant, tasteful and generous, while Margaret Preston was flamboyant and stubbornly single-minded. One painted ladies on fans, the other preferred bottlebrush and banksia. But...
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In 1935 to be Catholic was to be Irish, and the hierarchy ruled its flock with a firm doctrinal hand and an unchallenged tribal authority - no one more so than Daniel Mannix, the venerable Cork-born archbishop of Melbourne. Tall, gaunt and magisterial, Mannix was already ancient. Born in 1864, he...
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In March 1900 in Bloemfontein, in the Orange Free State, Andrew ‘Banjo' Paterson attended a dinner hosted by the commander of the British forces occupying the town. The 36-year-old Sydney solicitor and poet was in South Africa to cover Australia's contribution to the stoush against the...
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