Australian politics, society & culture

Current Issue
Has classical music become irrelevant?
The lost art of listening
By Anna Goldsworthy

Sometimes, while performing the Funeral March from Chopin’s Piano Sonata No. 2 in B flat minor, I am struck by the fact that everyone in the auditorium is marching towards death at the exact tempo of the piece: 54 crotchets per minute or thereabouts, one foot in front of the other, until by movement’s end we are eight minutes closer to our collective destination. It is not an unpleasant thought, encapsulated as it is by the music: the pity it seems to extend to us all (including its long-dead composer), its moments of rage against the dying of the light.

Current Issue
How long can Australia ride in the coal wagon?
Coal crash
By Paul Cleary
It’s raining cats and dogs in the gentrified Southern Highlands, two hours’ drive south of Sydney, and even though flood warnings abound and school pick-up time approaches, more than 300 locals file into the Moss Vale RSL to respond to a presentation about a proposed coalmine.
October 2015
Corruption and collusion in Scott Cooper’s ‘Black Mass’
Don’t call me ‘Whitey’
By Luke Davies
James “Whitey” Bulger, the ruthless Boston crime boss who for more than 15 years was on the FBI’s Most Wanted Fugitives list before his 2011 arrest, has been portrayed in a number of movies and TV series.
Brian & Karl make films that speak their own languages
Passion projects
Sam Twyford-Moore
In 2011, a short film titled Skwerl, but published under the tag ‘How English sounds to non-English speakers’, was uploaded to YouTube by ‘Brian and Karl’. For three and a half minutes a young man and woman have a discussion over dinner in a completely nonsensical version of English – sample dialogue: “No, crustacean is trap.
In business and in politics, the prime minister has a long record of playing hard with the media
The Turnbull files
Andrew Fowler
With the possibility of a change in media laws that would tear up former Prime Minister Paul Keating’s division between print and TV ownership, understanding Malcolm Turnbull’s role in the murky business of media politics has a new urgency. Much has been written about how Turnbull saved Fairfax from destruction at the hands of the late Kerry Packer.

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Today
Cashless welfare
There is a strong case for the trial of the Health Welfare Card in some Indigenous communities
Nick Feik

The intifada will be Instagrammed: How social media has already enflamed the latest Israel/Palestine conflict “While social media played a role in the Second Intifada, which lasted until 2005—the website Electronic...

Syrian army, allies preparing attack in Aleppo area “The Syrian army and allied Iranian and Hezbollah forces are preparing for a ground offensive against insurgents in the Aleppo area backed by Russian air strikes, two senior regional officials familiar with the plans said on...

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The Nation Reviewed

Current Issue
Children’s lit heroes Andy Griffiths, Terry Denton and Jill Griffiths step off the page and onto the stage
The Ipswich treehouse story
By Ashley Hay
The first thing you see inside Ipswich Civic Centre’s auditorium is a set of magnificent burgundy curtains, not draped across a stage to obscure its magical other-world but hung behind the seating. Audiences have to navigate the curtains – as if sneaking backstage themselves – to reach the performance.
August 2015
The many talents of a much-maligned rodent
In defence of the rat
By Anne Manne
One day, as I opened a barrel of chaff to feed our horses, a large rat with a long, grey slithery tail emerged on the rim. I expected him to flee, but he just looked at me for several seconds, twitching his whiskers and eyeing me with a relaxed, even insouciant, air. Then he...
July 2015
What’s next for the entrepreneurial Josh Lefers?
Leaping Lefers
By Antoni Jach
In September, Josh Lefers is going to jump out of a plane naked (apart from a parachute) and land somewhere in New York. “Why naked?” I ask him when we meet in Melbourne.
July 2015
Meet the Melburnians keeping Esperanto alive
Esperantists
By Jeff Sparrow
I’ve come to Melbourne’s Federation Square this Sunday afternoon searching for the followers of a man who had called himself Dr Hopeful.

Essays

Current Issue
A British author’s complicated relationship with the island continent
Australia and I
By Will Self
When, early this year, I was invited to give an address at the Melbourne Writers Festival, I didn’t hesitate to accept – nor did I prevaricate when asked what subject I’d be tackling. Such alacrity on my part is uncommon: my writing room, at the top of my house in south London, hasn’t been cleaned since we moved there in 1997.
September 2015
On lifestyle diseases and quick fixes
Too many pills
By Karen Hitchcock
At a literary festival, during a discussion of how medicine reflects the values of the society in which it is practised, an interviewer asked me if I thought there would ever be a time when mainstream and alternative medicine would become “truly integrated”.
June 2015
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...
August 2015
Why Australia won’t help the Rohingya
Nope, nope, nope
By Richard Cooke
Three years. That’s how long the United Nations thought it would take to solve the world’s refugee problem. The Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees began with this tiny mandate in 1950. It would simply mop up the remaining stragglers from World War Two, then the...
July 2015
Joe Hockey and the myth of Coalition economic management
Of clowns and treasurers
By Richard Denniss
I remember my first lesson in economics like it was yesterday. I’d never heard a bigger bunch of crap in my life. It made no sense. The assumptions were flawed. The examples were ridiculous and the conclusions worse.

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Arts & Letters

October 2015
The femaleness of Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels
Ferrantissimo
By Helen Elliott
“Naples,” Elena Ferrante has said, “should always be in the spotlight.” Ancient, eternally new, the uncontainable Italian city spills down to the sea, the fabled Bay of Naples. To one side Vesuvius slumbers. And here, in August 1944, four months after the volcano’s last eruption, Ferrante’s Elena Greco (known as Lenù) and Raffaella Cerullo (known as Lila) are conjured into life.
August 2015
Emma Kowal’s ‘Trapped in the Gap’ examines the ‘White anti-racist’ in indigenous Australia
White stigma
By Kim Mahood
A few years ago, a friend of mine worked as a nurse for a men’s health organisation in a remote Aboriginal community.
July 2015
Power and resistance at the 56th Venice Biennale
All the world’s futures
By Julie Ewington
The Venice Biennale is the biggest show in town, in any town. Of all the international biennials and triennials that showcase contemporary art, it is the oldest, the grandest. Established in 1895, the year before the modern Olympics (it is often said that the Venice Biennale is...
September 2015
Jess Ribeiro’s ‘Kill It Yourself’ and Sui Zhen’s ‘Secretly Susan’
Highway or driveway
By Anwen Crawford
Jess Ribeiro’s new album, Kill It Yourself, is like an American road trip with a detour via Melbourne, where she is based, or maybe via Perth. The pace is languid, and the mood is dusky. The Triffids once travelled this musical route, as did The Bad Seeds, sensing the affinity...
August 2015
Marina Abramović in Australia
The experience machine
By Fiona McGregor
You enter on condition of silence, leaving your possessions in a locker. A video instructs you to perform exercises that will release the stress from your body. It is the deep, sonorous voice of Marina Abramović, with the body of someone else doing the movements.
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