Asia

Akira Isogawa

The Bride Wore Black

By Peter Robb

Think ‘dress designer’ and what comes to mind? Not a whole lot of fun. Think of the last picture you saw of Karl Lagerfeld or John Galliano. I approached Akira Isogawa with great caution and serious questions. How was it that a designer so absorbed in the history of Japan and its ancient silks – their spinning, weaving, dyeing, their cutting into hieratic costumes of gorgeous formality

Australia–India Relations

The Elephant in the Room

By Michael Wesley

Great expectations attend the Australia–India relationship. The Labor Party’s agreement to sell uranium to India has removed a major impediment to closer relations. Planning is underway for mutual prime ministerial visits. Free trade agreement negotiations are ongoing. Bilateral trade and investment is surging, with Australia now India’s sixth-largest source of imports. The 2009 attacks

Norfolk Island’s chickens

The Baskerville Case

By Ashley Hay

There are several things an astute observer will notice on arriving to Norfolk Island. First, the island’s eponymous pine trees, which rise up like oversized pins marking important spots on a map. Second, a world-heritage listed collection of Georgian buildings, some of Australia’s oldest and best preserved, which stand as testament to the first and second British settlements established on the island in 1788 and 1825 respectively.

Window Dressing: The Mirage of Political Reform

By Lindsay Tanner

Such sentiments are understandable but misguided. The rules that govern how our political system works matter, but the development of policies and legislation tends to be driven by more fundamental forces. When governmental process delivers decisions we don’t like, our natural response is to reach for the rule book. Just as supporters of winning teams tend

Lessons in Leadership and Paul Keating

The Book of Paul

By George Megalogenis

Comparisons between leaders can be unfair to the incumbent because the one with the job has yet to receive the clemency of political nostalgia. But there was something in the interviewer’s voice that betrayed what many of my colleagues who cover federal poli

Julia Gillard, Foreign Policy and the Summit Season

Comment

By Hugh White

It’s summit season. Prime Minister Julia Gillard will lift her head above the toxic miasma of domestic politics and breathe the purer, finer air of foreign affairs. On 21 October she’ll be in Bali for the East Asia Summit (EAS); a week later she will host

Hugh White Reflects on Japan

The Foundering Miracle

By Hugh White

The figures moving among the wreckage conducted themselves with a quiet dignity that was not only moving and impressive, but also strangely familiar. The tsunami seemed to push parts of Japan back six decades, and we were reminded irresistibly of the stoicism and dignit

Who’s Afraid of Marcia Langton?

By Peter Robb

Marcia Langton has a longer and more various history than Pearson, and is a lot harder to place. She is 14 years older, a grandmother several times over, and she will turn 60 this year. She describes herself as “now an academic and writer” – which is not

Niall Ferguson’s 'Civilisation: The West and the Rest'

Cry Freedom

By Malcolm Turnbull

In 1759 Samuel Johnson published his novel Rasselas about an Abyssinian prince who travels through Egypt with his philosopher guide, Imlac. Rasselas asks his teacher, “By what means are the Europeans thus powerful? Or why, since they can so easily visit Asia and Afric

The Defence Minister

Comment

By Hugh White

Why is defence so toxic to its ministers? It should be an easy job to look good in – hobnobbing with the Australian Defence Force (ADF), managing weighty matters of national security and spending a lot of money. Of course the portfolio has an unparalleled ca

Bread and Butter

By Gay Bilson

For dessert we ate hot puff pastry with a filling of grated apple cooked with butter, eggs and lemon. It pleased the guests, although one of them asked about the filling and seemed shocked that the ingredients were so rich, which is to say (she implied by her

National Curriculum

Comment

By Waleed Aly

That’s the thing about meddling with a curriculum: it is an inescapably political, often ideological, exercise. I do not, for instance, need to tell you where South Dakota’s legislature sits on the issue of climate change. Theirs is not a scientific judgement, despi

Rudd’s China Policy

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 implication

December 2009 - January 2010 in brief

By kieronb

THE MONTHLY ESSAYS“Never before have I found myself so immersed in an art form that made me question just what it is to be Australian, prompting me to ask of these films – do they really reflect our culture? While watching practically every movie, I found myself wondering why we tell our stories the way we do. There were also moments when I pondered just how the damn film got made, and why. So

Afghanistan

Comment

By Hugh White

Few of us are pacifists, so most of us accept that these strategic decisions must sometimes be made. But, in Australia, we have not faced them for a long time. Not since Vietnam have Australian leaders, and Australian voters, had to take responsibility for del

Australia and the Indian Ocean

Looking West

By John Birmingham

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 Queenslan

Democracy in Indonesia

Comment

By Greg Barton

This year’s parliamentary election was a rather boring affair. Australian journalists and academics found little to get excited about, but this was a good thing: no news really was good news. In Australia we fall, perhaps too readily, into the cynical habit of seeing

The King & I

By Harry Nicolaides

Compound One. For weeks I lay on my back, delirious with influenza. When I was able to stand, I shuffled around like a zombie, pushed here and there by the heaving population of sweaty, half-naked inmates, most of them Thai, Burmese or Cambodian.One night I was so overcome with anxiety that I started to hyperventilate. I begged the cell captain to open the cell door and allow me to walk the corrid