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At home with Rosie Batty
Mother courage
By Helen Garner

One hot afternoon in February 2014, in the pleasant Victorian township of Tyabb, south-east of Melbourne, an 11-year-old boy called Luke Batty was playing in the nets after cricket practice with his father, Greg Anderson. Without warning, Anderson swung the bat and dealt the child a colossal blow to the back of his head, then crouched over him where he lay, and attacked him with a knife. The police shot Anderson and he died in hospital the following morning.

Current Issue
In central Victoria, locals are taking up arms against the invading wheel cactus
She’ll be cactus
By John van Tiggelen
Cartoon showing man fighting cactus
Pigeon Hill, a granite outcrop just west of Maldon, in central Victoria, overlooks plains that roll out all the way to the Murray. These can look lovely in early spring.
Current Issue
The chimes they are a-changing at the Sydney Opera House
A little foyer music
By Darryn King
One piece of music has been heard at the Sydney Opera House more than any other. It is played sometimes dozens of times a day and more than 1000 times a year. The entire composition consists of two alternating notes, A and F sharp, in a plodding loop on a fake xylophone.
David Fincher's "Gone Girl", reviewed
Hit me, baby, one more time
Anwen Crawford
(The following review of Gone Girl (2014) contains a necessary plot spoiler. If you're planning to see the film and have no knowledge of the plot, perhaps read this afterwards. – ed.)
On the spot fines and the unchecked power of Melbourne's transport officers
Little kings
Russell Marks
“Authorised officer; ticket, please.” It’s become an unyielding refrain on Melbourne’s trams and trains since ticket inspectors replaced conductors in 1996.
BAD ECONOMICS
There will be predictable reactions to Treasurer Joe Hockey's announcement that the government needs to scale back its budget surplus predictions because of global factors outside of his control. The Right will agree, and will continue to...

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Taliban tortures Abbott government deportee "The first Hazara asylum seeker refouled by the federal government was taken by the Taliban inside a month."

No exit "The ‘umbrella revolution’, as the movement has been dubbed, is the nightmare Communist Party leaders in Beijing have long feared from Hong Kong."

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The Nation Reviewed

Current Issue
Remembering a man of letters, and a friend
Pierre Ryckmans
By Murray Bail
“Dying is so banal,” Pierre Ryckmans said from his bed in Sydney a few weeks before he died. To a visitor who suggested he’d call again the following week, on the Tuesday or Wednesday, he said from his bed set up in the lounge room facing the harbour and the sunrises, “I’ll be here.” And now that he has died he is here, and yet not here.
Current Issue
Contesting Paul Kelly’s ‘Triumph and Demise’
Kelly country
By Robert Manne
Paul Kelly and Kevin Rudd laughing together at the launch of The March of Patriots in 2009
Paul Kelly’s The End of Certainty, published in 1992, is probably the most influential book of contemporary Australian political history written in the past 50 years. In it, Kelly married a detailed chronology of the surface politics of the Hawke–Keating era with a compelling...
September 2014
Sydney's CB radio scene is a battlefield
Airwave wars
By Richard Cooke
Listen,” my friend said, “to this.” He’d taken some walkie-talkies with him on a beach holiday and idly switched one on when he came back to Sydney. “Ready?” A male voice, so gravelly it was chilling, let fly a florid, minute-long insult into the ether.
September 2014
Medieval records show that attitudes to suicide have changed little
Intent unknown
By Ceridwen Dovey
In 1254, Walter Beche of Essex, England, drowned himself in a well. Four men later testified to a jury that Beche had killed himself “for fear because he thought that they would seize him on suspicion of theft”.

Essays

Current Issue
Early examples of gene silencing in transgenic plants
Gene silencing, miracle cures and Balmain’s biggest biotech company
Dr Graham’s patented elixir
By Michael Lucy
Mick Graham was working at CSIRO’s plant industry labs in Canberra in the 1990s, trying to genetically engineer virus-resistant potatoes, when he had his big idea about RNA interference. RNA is ribonucleic acid, DNA’s less-famous sibling and a fundamental cog in the machinery of all living cells. RNA interference is one of the body’s natural antiviral defence systems.
Current Issue
How the Abbott government is funding a high-culture war
State of the arts
By Steve Dow
On a stormy Monday morning in August, the Australia Council released its strategic plan for 2015–19 at the Sydney Opera House.
September 2014
In Port Augusta, an Israeli linguist is helping the Barngarla people reclaim their language
Voices of the land
By Anna Goldsworthy
Umeewarra Mission
In a bluestone former school building in Port Augusta, now a campus of the University of Adelaide, four generations of Barngarla people sit conference-style around a table. Harry Dare, a local elder, wears a snug beanie pulled down to his eyebrows: a ganoo-ganoo moona, or “warm...
Current Issue
A trip through the Torres Strait to see the Coming of the Light festival
Island time
By Thornton McCamish
Warren Entsch at the Coming of the Light festival on Thursday Island, July 2013. © Aaron Smith
Just before dusk on 1 July 1871, the Reverends Samuel McFarlane and Archibald Murray of the London Missionary Society, together with eight New Caledonian mission teachers, arrived off the coast of Erub, or Darnley Island, in the far eastern Torres Strait. Their vessel, the...
September 2014
The brief life and quiet death of Tony Abbott’s love of liberty
Freedom Abbott
By David Marr
In Tony Abbott’s Australia, a young woman faces jail because word got out that one of his daughters was given a $60,000 scholarship to study at the Whitehouse Institute of Design. This scholarship was never advertised.

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Arts & Letters

October 2014
Bloomsbury; $25.99
‘Stone Mattress’ by Margaret Atwood
By Claire Corbett
“Without the bone and sinew of wings, no flight,” muses one character in Stone Mattress, the latest book of stories from Margaret Atwood. This line, a reflection that all we are can only be felt and expressed through the body, also serves as an artistic credo, on the way the detail and grit of the mundane give force to the imagination.
October 2014
Macmillan Australia; $32.99
‘The Political Bubble’ by Mark Latham
By Richard Cooke
“The cornerstone of democracy rests on the foundation of an educated electorate,” wrote Thomas Jefferson. The political theorists of the past fantasised about what governance could solve in conditions of universal learning and material abundance.
October 2014
A century of Dylan Thomas
Majesty and burning
By Kevin Rabalais
The young Dylan Thomas
It sounded like a hoax. In June, more than half a century after the poet died following yet another marathon binge, the Guardian reported the discovery of a drinking song “dashed off in pencil by Dylan Thomas while seated at a London bar” in 1951. The impromptu “song”, found in...
October 2014
Black Inc.; $32.99
‘Acute Misfortune’ by Erik Jensen
By Geordie Williamson
Robert Hughes’s notorious 1988 demolition of the New York art-world darling Jean-Michel Basquiat was called ‘Requiem for a Featherweight’. Erik Jensen’s brief, episodic biography of Adam Cullen could not be further from Hughes’s article in tone: neither lordly in condemnation...
October 2014
A journey through time and mind in Hugh Sullivan’s ‘The Infinite Man’
Overthinking
By Luke Davies
“You want blood and guts?” says Dean (Josh McConville), an intense, over-thinking brainiac who seems to be in the process of losing his girlfriend, Lana (Hannah Marshall), to her ex-boyfriend, Terry (Alex Dimitriades). “I’ll give you blood and guts!”