Australian politics, society & culture

 
Current Issue
Unforced confessions
Joshua Oppenheimer’s ‘The Act of Killing’
By Luke Davies
“I immediately knew I’d never seen anything like [it],” said Werner Herzog recently, recounting the time two years ago when filmmaker Joshua Oppenheimer showed him an eight-minute assembly of what would eventually become the full-length documentary The Act of Killing (in limited release from 3 October). “I’d never seen anything as powerful, as frightening and as surreal as what was on the screen, and I immediately said, ‘This is big. This is truly, truly big.’” Herzog, of course, is no stranger to hyperbole, and his grand enthusiasms are part of his charm. Yet for The Act of Killing he came on board as an executive producer. “You won’t see a film of that power and that surrealism in the next one or two or three decades, period,” he said. The Act of Killing  may belong to that small category of...
Current Issue
Critics give their picks for the year’s top ten
The best of Australian arts 2013
By The Monthly
Architecture Since 2008, global architecture has been hit by a wave of closures, mergers and mass redundancies. Late last year, Brisbane-based Donovan Hill, Australia’s most innovative architectural practice, merged with BVN Architecture, one of the nation’s largest. The creation of...
June 2013
Silk Road and the Fast-changing World of Online Drug Shopping
By Alex McClintock
After an increasingly anxious wait, Will hears the postman drop the A4-sized parcel, bound in butcher’s paper, in the mailbox of his inner-Sydney terrace house. His name and address are handwritten in thick black texta. Will carries the parcel to his bedroom, closes the door and tears away...
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 was the first man they chose. Feeney, the archetypal “faceless man”, had backed Kevin Rudd to take over from Kim...
October 2013
'The Narrow Road to the Deep North' – Richard Flanagan
By The Monthly
October 2013 Welcome to the Monthly Book. Each month Ramona Koval chooses a book, provides reading notes and posts a video interview. For just $32.95 you will receive this month’s book, delivered straight to your door for free!  Buy the Monthly Book for October   THE NARROW ROAD TO THE DEEP NORTH – Richard Flanagan ​ Ramona Koval October,...
STRATEGIC REVIEW
The new communications minister, Malcolm Turnbull, has forced out all but two board members of NBN Co and installed Ziggy Switkowski as executive chairman. This was "not an adverse reflection on the professionalism of the members...

Plus

Read More

Hundreds dead, missing as migrant boat sinks off Italy "More than 300 people drowned or were feared dead after a boat packed with African migrants caught fire and sank off the southern Italian island of Lampedusa, one of the worst disasters of Europe's chronic...

Shutting down the world? "This time around, with the US government shutdown again, there is...

Read More

The Nation Reviewed

 Current Issue
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 George Witton had his...
 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...
 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...
 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...

Essays

 Current Issue
Pigging out with the star of stage and screen
Eddie Perfect unleashes the beast
By Benjamin Law
It’s entirely possible that Eddie Perfect has the most resplendent hair in Australia. The composer-performer might be 35, an age at which most men have started to thin out up top, yet Perfect’s whipped blond meringue is a sight to behold: what happens when electric shock meets quality hair product. When he arrives red-cheeked from Melbourne’s chill, decked in a black Fred Perry...
Current Issue
Her kitchen rules
Dining out with Michelle Garnaut
By Linda Jaivin
Michelle Garnaut and I were finishing lunch at Capital M, her Beijing restaurant. The waiter set down our coffees: a macchiato for me and a plunger for her. I was mid chocolate truffle and she was mid anecdote when she went to pour. Abruptly, she summoned the waiter back over....
September 2013
Christopher Pearson remembered
By Anna Goldsworthy
It was my birthday, and I was eating cake with my children, when my father arrived. “It’s Pop! How are you?” “Not so good actually.” He loitered at the door, away from the children. “I’ve just certified Christopher’s death. He...
 Current Issue
The release plan
Out on parole
By Kate Rossmanith
The 1933 tan building halfway along Broadway in Chippendale, Sydney, has the confident symmetry of art deco design, including a stepped trim at the top like a pharaoh’s headdress. Above the entrance, “BANK” is etched in mighty letters, declaring in perpetuity...
September 2013
Mal Brough crashes through
By Nick Bryant
Despite his military background, Mal Brough had no inkling he was about to fall victim to what he considered an ambush last October. When an indigenous woman from a television production company telephoned the former minister and asked him to take part in a documentary about the...

Video

New

Blogs

Arts & Letters

 Current Issue
Unripe fruit
Puzzling the purpose of Australian literary magazines
By Robyn Annear
Because there is for poets no equivalent of the Large Hadron Collider – a speculative venture supported by billions of dollars from world governments, with no certainty of outcomes that can be monetised or weaponised – literary magazines exist. At least, that was my supposition as I assembled a pile of ten Australian literary magazines for reading. How to account for these oddball...
 Current Issue
The face
The enduring appeal of Kate Moss
By Karen de Perthuis
The year was 1990. It was the “Third Summer of Love”, the Happy Mondays were chanting, “It’s gotta be a loose fit”, and it looked as though high heels would never again be worn by anyone under 30. Fashion culture was changing, and the freckle-faced...
 Current Issue
Light and shadow
Tim Winton’s ‘Eyrie’ and Richard Flanagan’s ‘The Narrow Road to the Deep North’
By Peter Conrad
Although each writer has his personal habitat, the largest state and the smallest, the distance between Tim Winton’s and Richard Flanagan’s opposite ends of the country is more than geographical. Winton sings the praises of sunburnt Australia; Flanagan broods about...
 Current Issue
Honourable failures
Musicians with a literary bent
By Anna Goldsworthy
There is a persistent quote that stalks all music writers. Its provenance is disputed – Thelonius Monk? Clara Schumann? Laurie Anderson? Elvis Costello? – but it is widely held to settle everything: “Writing about music is like dancing about architecture....
Current Issue
A week at the opera
The ‘Ring’ cycle in Melbourne
By Peter Conrad
“My children,” said Richard Wagner to his familial brood of disciples after the first performance of Der Ring des Nibelungen at Bayreuth in 1876, “here you have a truly German art!” That was good news to supporters of Bismarck’s Prussian empire,...