By this author
‘Butcher Paper Texta Blackboard and Chalk: A Songbook and CD’ by Ruby Hunter & Archie Roach
Indigenous Australian Music
In 1997, Archie Roach and Ruby Hunter took a band and three of their kids on a tour of the indigenous communities of Cape York Peninsula, hosting songwriting workshops in schools. They began in Aurukun, and descended down the Cape via Pormpuraaw, Kowanyama, …
October 2012 Editor’s Note
Six months ago, when this editor was still very fresh in the job, October’s special arts issue loomed as a challenge. Having spent close to half my adult life in the Deep North, the arts had faded from view, the Big Mango excepted. A little added perspective …
November 2012 Editor’s Note
Julia Gillard
How different things look in spring. Take ‘Rudd’s forces’. Back in the gloom of winter, they radiated real menace. Now they’re more like a ‘trick or treat’ Halloween posse. There they go, door to door, trying their darnedest to look scary: …
September 2012 Editor’s Note
Julia Gillard
Quality journalism may be several things, but it is not the hunt for an imaginary Order of Lenin medal. In 1996, a few months after John Howard replaced Paul Keating as prime minister, the editor of Brisbane’s Courier-Mail, then still a broadsheet, …
August 2012 Editor’s Note
Rupert Murdoch
In this month’s cover essay, ‘A Dark Victory’, Robert Manne analyses how the push for urgent global action on human-induced climate change was defeated. Manne focuses on the United States, where nothing has been done nor, in all probability, will …
Cape Tribulations
nation_reviewed
Noel Pearson and the Welfare Reform Trial
July 2012 Editor’s Note
Australian Politics
When lining up the photo shoot in mid May for the Bill Shorten profile, I put the question whether anything was likely to happen soon, leadership-wise. Don’t worry, the press secretary said. Nothing was going to happen before June. Sure, but the story …
Watch This Face
essay
Bill Shorten
June 2012 Editor’s Note
Australian media
When the federal Treasurer wrote an essay in the Monthly's March issue on the threat to Australia's egalitarian ethos posed by vested interests, the Australian interpreted it as the opening shot in a "class war". It marked an interesting …
May 2012 Editor’s Note
Federal Budget
It’s budget time, that onset of chill when the leaves turn golden, the currawongs descend from the mountains and the billionaires swing into activism. Two years ago, vested mining interests set about scuttling a tax on their super profits, going at …
April 2012 Editor’s Note
Malcolm Turnbull
In a typically clear-eyed blog post for the Monthly’s website, Robert Manne spells out what needs to be spelt out: Tony Abbott will be Australia’s next elected Prime Minister. There is nothing quite to describe the rictus that this realisation …
March 2012 Editor’s Note
Lachlan Murdoch
In May 2010 the country's treasurer, Wayne Swan, proposed a tax on mining super profits that, according to Treasury estimates, would have netted Australian taxpayers $15 billion per year. It was a tax that should have made eminent sense to Australians …
February 2012 Editor’s Note
blog
The Greens have withstood a number of disruptive forces, but the one that continues to build is from within. In this issue, Sally Neighbour exposes how the radicalism of the NSW branch has never ceased scratching away at the national party's veneer …
