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The Nation Reviewed

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Begging the Breaker’s pardon

By Catherine Ford
On a rainy Saturday in July, a small audience in Melbourne’s Supreme Court building heard the moot court appeal to overturn the convictions of three Australian soldiers made more than 110 years ago in South Africa. Found guilty by courts martial of murdering prisoners of war, lieutenants Harry “Breaker” Morant and Peter Handcock were executed by a firing squad in 1902, and G
 Current Issue

The battle for the seat of Indi

By Cate Kennedy
A week after the 7 September election, and with several thousand postal and absentee votes still being counted in Wangaratta, Cathy McGowan is on a bus heading south. Her victory in the seat of Indi is still four tense days away, and she’s out with her team to thank some of her 600-odd campaign volunteers. First stop is Murrindindi, one of the Victorian shires badly hit by the 2009 Blac
 Current Issue

Looking for Lasseter’s lost treasure

By Michaela McGuire
Mark Twain observed in 1897 that Australian history “does not read like history, but like the most beautiful lies; and all of a fresh new sort, no mouldy old stale ones”. That same year, Harold Lasseter, a 17-year-old horseman en route from Queensland to the Kalgoorlie goldfields, supposedly discovered a 14-mile reef bulging with gold in Central Australia, at the western end of the MacDonnell Ranges. It took 33 years, howeve
 Current Issue

In defence of high art

By Kim Williams
“The mega-rich also work hard to separate their cultural interests from suburban folk. By any objective test, classical music, opera and ballet are insufferably boring. They have no social worth other than in the treatment of sleeping disorders. But that’s how the elites like it, safe in the knowledge that people below their station in society ar
 Current Issue

Rudd the narcissist

By Judith Brett
When Bob Hawke faced off against Malcolm Fraser in 1983, the political psychologist Graham Little, writing for Meanjin, saw it as a contest between personality and character: Character is organised, socially responsible, predictable; personality is fluid,
Current Issue

What Labor hasn’t learnt

By Richard Cooke
What does the Labor Party value most? We can answer that by looking back to the time before the election, when polling predicted not just defeat but catastrophe. The party responded by putting threatened senators into safe lower house seats, and David Feeney w
Current Issue

Elisabeth Murdoch’s gardener

By Lisa Clausen
Elisabeth Murdoch began planting her garden as a young bride and barely stopped for the next eight decades. When she died last December, aged 103, the great philanthropist left behind one of the nation’s most famous private gardens, Cruden Farm, though it’s
Current Issue

Murdoch’s war on Labor

By Mungo MacCallum
When Kevin Rudd was returned to the leadership of the Labor Party, quite a lot of voters were pleased. This was gratifying to the party chieftains, but the person they watched most anxiously was not actually a voter; indeed, he did not even live in Australia.
Current Issue

Why the Tories want Tony Abbott to lose

By John McTernan
David Cameron, the UK’s Tory prime minister, is secretly afraid that Tony Abbott might be victorious here in Australia. Why is he worried? Because it would bolster his enemies, and, as the political adage goes, “your opponents sit opposite you; your enemies
Current Issue

Sydney’s border insecurity

By Guy Rundle
It’s three o’clock on a Sunday afternoon at the home display centre for The Ponds, western Sydney. The centre, on Ridgeline Drive, marks the very edge of the city, at least until next year, when the kit homes and McMansions, fake Edwardian jostling
Current Issue

The all-purpose election victory speech

By Don Watson
Thank you, thank you, thank you, no, really, please, thank you. A short time ago, my opponent called me to offer his congratulations. He’s a good bloke, whatever his colleagues might say. I thank him and I thank Australia, and the people of Australia.
Current Issue

The art of dodging political gaffes

By Carly Learson
It was the perfect location for a political announcement: the headquarters of a rural company that built crop dusters, a company battling to stay afloat in a time of fear over Chinese dominance of manufacturing, one that would benefit from a new Labor initiative to keep
Current Issue

Andrew Wilkie’s re-election campaign

By Amanda Lohrey
In the 2007 election, Andrew Wilkie was a Greens senate candidate, no. 2 on the Tasmanian ticket behind Bob Brown. On a campaign drive around the state, Wilkie stopped overnight at the house of a Greens supporter in the seaside town of St Helens. The town’s restaurants were few and mostly closed so Wilkie suggested that they dine at the RSL club. His h

In praise of Tony Windsor

By Don Watson
The Hon. Tony Windsor Member for New England Tamworth Dear Mr Windsor, I can find no elegant way of saying this, so I will use plain terms: I have a kind of crush on you. Don’t worry, I’m not after a date or anything. I won’t be stalking you round the hills of New England. It’s more the sort of crush I had on James Stewart after I saw The Man Who Shot Liberty V

What Rudd could learn from Gillard about leadership

By Judith Brett
In her gracious resignation speech after Kevin Rudd finally succeeded in his campaign to oust her, Julia Gillard canvassed the role of gender in her experience as Australia’s first female prime minister. Her gender, she said, “does not explain ever

Rudd’s comeback and Murdoch’s counterattack

By Mungo MacCallum
“When you change the government,” Paul Keating once declared, “you change the country.” On a lesser scale, if you change the leader, you change the politics. The Kevin Rudd renaissance, we were told for months by an insouciant Opposi

The Greens chase the farming vote

By Amanda Lohrey
In 1997, Merrill Lynch executive Peter Whish-Wilson stood at the window of his office in the South Tower of New York’s World Trade Center and decided to give up his career in banking. When four years later a Boeing 767 flew into the tower, Whish-Wilson was back in

Censorship, sex and scandal in Singapore

By André Dao
Almost three years ago, Singapore’s Internal Security Department (ISD) approached Tey Tsun Hang, a Malaysian-born law associate professor at the National University of Singapore (NUS), about becoming a “listening post” – meaning that he would provide information about goings-on in the law faculty, including his own work. In return, Tey would meet the ISD’s boss: someo