Australian politics, society & culture

Current Issue
A conversation with Julian Assange
Why Google is a political matter
By John Keane

Since the last time we were together inside his prison lodgings at the Ecuadorian embassy in London, a few things have changed. Julian Assange has grown a beard, looks more pallid and pauses when I ask after his general health. His legal team are warning that the shadows of detention without charge are now taking their toll. The caution is not just legal jousting: for more than a thousand days, locked down in cramped space that is nowhere, the pale rebel with a fearless grin has not lived a normal life. Surrounded by armed police and invisible spies, he enjoys no safe spaces for exercise.

June 2015
Punk and gospel influences combine to make the personal political on Algiers’ self-titled debut
Raised voices
By Anwen Crawford
Image of Algiers
Late in April, as protests grew in Baltimore over the death of an African-American man, Freddie Gray, who died after sustaining a severe spinal injury while in police custody, a young black Baltimore resident named Kwame Rose confronted Fox News reporter Geraldo Rivera over the media’s coverage o
June 2015
When you’re driving a bus full of tourists through the Australian outback, a packet of chewing gum may be your only hope
The art of tour guiding
By Robert Skinner
Tour guiding in Australia is easy on some levels: you feed your charges well, take them to the right places, and try to keep their feet warm.
On pregnancy and birth, tradition and family
Two cultures and a baby
Alice Pung
“What are you doing?” my hospital roommate asks. I’m standing by the door of our shared bathroom, towel in hand, waiting for the nurse to return with a shower cap. In antenatal classes I was told a warm shower is comforting when going into labour, but I don’t want to give birth with wet hair dripping down my back.
George Miller and the evolution of Mad Max
Desert storm
Shane Danielsen
Before he was a filmmaker, George Miller was a medical student. While completing his residency at Sydney’s St Vincent’s Hospital, he worked in the ER department, where he witnessed a grim succession of broken bodies, many of them shattered in car and motorcycle accidents.

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The Monthly Today
Television as teacher
Even someone who was there can learn from ‘The Killing Season’
Sean Kelly

Australian officials paid people smugglers to turn back to Indonesia, says police chief “Australian officials paid thousands of dollars to the captain and crew of a boat carrying asylum seekers, who were then returned to Indonesia,...

Renouncing Australia “Queensland police may have regarded it as a rather bizarre, one-off incident when they recently arrested Murrumu Walubara Yidindji while he was driving with a licence and a car registration issued in the name of his north Queensland...

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The Nation Reviewed

Current Issue
A win for David Cameron and the Conservatives in the UK was inevitable
Disunited kingdom
By Guy Rundle
“Pull over here,” I told the driver of the black cab as I spotted a bottle shop. We were headed out of the tangle of London’s Piccadilly Circus to the boho-prosperous calm of Primrose Hill, an old haunt of threadbare leftists, now gone upmarket. It was 7 May, election night, and the centre was full of theatre crowds, people who neither knew nor cared.
May 2015
Restricted welfare payments may help in many indigenous communities
Health and welfare
By Marcia Langton
Recently, I was driven to comment that the Greens prefer their Aborigines “drunk and stupid”. One of the party’s senators, Rachel Siewert, had frothed in the media that the government was planning to “force” Aboriginal communities “into using an authoritarian cashless welfare...
May 2015
In Sydney, Animal Logic is building a Lego animation empire
Digital bricklayers
By Darryn King
On display in the office of Zareh Nalbandian, the CEO of Sydney animation studio Animal Logic, is a handsome chalkboard from a French monastery.
April 2015
Fancy bottled water is sometimes worth the price
Eau spéciale
By Richard Cooke
Cape Grim is not the most outlandish gourmet bottled water in the world. The claim that its Tasmanian rainwater is so pure that “even the ice you put in it will pollute it” seems restrained compared to those of some of its competitors.

Essays

Current Issue
Richard Di Natale and a new leadership team hit the mainstream
The new Greens
By Amanda Lohrey
The Tasmanian era is over. Since its formation as a national party in 1992, the Australian Greens has been led by Tasmanian senators: first Bob Brown and then Christine Milne. This is an unsurprising fact given that the island state gave birth to the Australian environmental movement as a political force.
May 2015
The mysteries of the microbiome
Gut feelings
By Jo Chandler
The tapas was a mistake. Or maybe the wine that washed it down? Suffice to say that come morning, at the business end of a flying trip to Brisbane, I’m a bit embarrassed about my specimen. But I’m on a deadline. Done is better than perfect.
February 2015
How online organisation can give power back to the people
Fixing politics
By Tim Flannery and Catriona Wallace
Cincinnatus Abandons the Plow To Dictate Laws in Rome (1806), by Juan Antonio Ribera
In 458 BC, with Rome facing imminent defeat by the combined forces of the Aequi and the Sabines, the Senate declared Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus dictator of the city for six months. The retired statesman, an aristocrat of reduced means, drove off Rome’s enemies. Fifteen days...
April 2015
How economic modelling is used to circumvent democracy and shut down debate
Spreadsheets of power
By Richard Denniss
Joe Hockey, Mathias Cormann and Kelly O'Dwyer gather around the Intergenerational Report in March. © Mick Tsikas / AAP
Most people think it is hard to put a dollar value on a human life, but they’re wrong. It’s easy. Economists do it all the time. Most people think that all human lives are equally valuable. And most think economic modelling is boring, irrelevant to their busy lives, and...
March 2015
The costs and causes of domestic violence
Home truths
By Jess Hill
After decades of ignoring domestic violence, Australians have learnt to condemn it. The statistics are now well known: a woman is murdered at least every week, another hospitalised every three hours.

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Arts & Letters

June 2015
Adapting Kate Grenville’s ‘The Secret River’ for television
History wars
By Steve Dow
“Yeah, that’s right!” yells a tall, bearded former convict wearing a green vest, brown pants and knee-high boots. He is standing at the bottom of a valley, in long grass surrounded by gum trees, waving a rifle. Two film crews for the television adaptation of The Secret River track the scene with cameras mounted on wheels.
April 2015
Clive James’ ‘Sentenced to Life’ and Les Murray’s ‘Waiting for the Past’
Late styles
By Justin Clemens
We are entering the old age of humanity.
February 2015
‘No Cities To Love’: The triumphant return of Sleater-Kinney
Start together
By Anwen Crawford
People were cheap,” writes George Packer in his book The Unwinding: Thirty years of American decline (2013). “They’d never pass up a rock-bottom price.” Packer is writing of Walmart from the perspective of its founder, Sam Walton, whose retail empire made him the richest man in...
May 2015
Róisín Murphy ends an eight-year absence from pop with ‘Hairless Toys’
Secret diva
By Anwen Crawford
Róisín Murphy has all the characteristics of a great pop star, except fame. She’s got the poise, she’s got the voice – a light, supple contralto, which she can bend from seductive to sardonic and back again – and, most importantly, she’s got the look. There was an icy blonde...
April 2015
‘Transparent’
Seeing clearly
By Anna Goldsworthy
The title of Jill Soloway’s new comedy-drama series for Amazon Studios, Transparent, speaks of a desire to be seen as who you truly are. It also refers, literally, to a trans parent.