
Cannes Film Festival 2022 highlights: part one
Mia Hansen-Løve’s ‘One Fine Morning’, Charlotte Le Bon’s ‘Falcon Lake’ and Dmytro Sukholytkyy-Sobchuk’s ‘Pamfir’ were bright spots in an otherwise underwhelming line-upOctober 2013
Encounters
Rex Connor had a dream. Like the man himself, it was a big one. Huge. Visionary. He imagined a rich, independent Australia built on mining, modern technology and a skilled workforce. And when he was appointed minister for minerals and energy, he thought he’d found a way to turn his vision into reality.
It was November 1974, and Connor was the third most powerful man in the Labor government. Encouraged by PM Gough Whitlam, he began looking for money to implement Labor’s policy of public participation in national development. A potential source lay in petro-dollars, the billions accumulating in the Middle East after the price of oil had quadrupled over the past year. But how to tap these funds at reasonable interest rates?
Enter Tirath Khemlani, a London-based Pakistani deal maker. Introduced to Connor by an Adelaide businessman, he talked up a storm, claiming that he could find up to $4 billion for a gas pipeline project.
A massive, shambling hulk of a man, nicknamed “the Strangler”, Connor had begun his political career as an alderman in his hometown of Wollongong. Suspicious and secretive, he accepted the assurances of his department that Khemlani was legit but refused to authorise him as an agent of the Australian government, issuing him instead with a mere expression of interest in obtaining a loan. Khemlani promised he would deliver within a month.
The month became six. Deals were always imminent, forever on the brink of success. Connor waited anxiously for news. He took to sleeping in his office, next to the telex machine. In fact, Khemlani had never raised a loan in his life. A shadowy figure, rumoured to have CIA connections, he spent his days in constant motion, trading commodities and subsisting on potato chips.
With a political scandal building around the so-called “loans affair”, Whitlam told Connor to pull the plug on the mysterious money man. But it was too late. “Old Rice and Monkey Nuts” sold his story to the newspapers and then, when Connor denied his version, arrived in Australia with bulging bags of documents. Locked in a cheap Canberra hotel room with lemonade, potato chips and Opposition front-bencher John Howard, he provided the pretext needed to block supply and bring down the Whitlam government.
Mission accomplished, Khemlani faded into obscurity. In 1981 he was convicted in New York of attempting to sell stolen securities but immediately pardoned. He died in Scotland in 1991. Rex Connor is buried in Dapto. Life, he said, is an equation in hydrocarbons.
Cannes Film Festival 2022 highlights: part one
Mia Hansen-Løve’s ‘One Fine Morning’, Charlotte Le Bon’s ‘Falcon Lake’ and Dmytro Sukholytkyy-Sobchuk’s ‘Pamfir’ were bright spots in an otherwise underwhelming line-upThe art of the teal
Amid the long decline of the major parties, have independents finally solved the problem of lopsided campaign financing laws?The end of Liberal reign in Kooyong
At the Auburn Hotel on election night, hope coalesces around Monique RyanOnlyFans and the adults in the room
The emerging OnlyFans community offering training and support to adult-content creatorsThe quip and the dead: Steve Toltz’s ‘Here Goes Nothing’
A bleakly satirical look at death and the afterlife from the wisecracking author of ‘A Fraction of the Whole’Ghost notes: Simon Tedeschi’s ‘Fugitive’
A virtuoso memoir of music and trauma, and his experiences as a child prodigy, from the acclaimed Australian pianistOne small step: ‘Apollo 10½: A Space Age Childhood’ and ‘Deep Water’
Richard Linklater’s rotoscoped film evokes the optimism of late-1960s America, while Patricia Highsmith’s thriller gets another disappointing adaptationA writer unfolded: Elena Ferrante’s ‘In the Margins’
In an essay collection, the mysterious author of the Neapolitan novels pursues the “excessive” to counter patriarchal literature’s dominanceCannes Film Festival 2022 highlights: part one
Mia Hansen-Løve’s ‘One Fine Morning’, Charlotte Le Bon’s ‘Falcon Lake’ and Dmytro Sukholytkyy-Sobchuk’s ‘Pamfir’ were bright spots in an otherwise underwhelming line-upThe art of the teal
Amid the long decline of the major parties, have independents finally solved the problem of lopsided campaign financing laws?The end of Liberal reign in Kooyong
At the Auburn Hotel on election night, hope coalesces around Monique RyanThe avoidable war
Kevin Rudd on China, the US and the forces of history