Australian politics, society & culture

June 2016
Why disagreement in politics is a good thing
Day 2: Dogs, horses, politicians
By Sean Kelly

Alan Jones this morning said to Bill Shorten “You’ve invested Medicare with the status of Phar Lap and Anzac Day.” He was gently mocking Shorten, as was Paul Kelly when he wrote the article [paywall] that presumably inspired Jones, writing that Shorten had “invested it with a mystic status transcending politics, an idea ‘that speaks to Austra

Current Issue
Consultation and transparency are the keys to successful arts policy
Chaos in the arts
By Wesley Enoch
Illustration
My grandfather died at the age of 43. My father died at the age of 65. My grandparents had no formal education beyond that offered by mission schools and workers on reserves. My father finished his schooling at age ten.
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How does the reinvigorated treaty movement fit with recognition?
Seeking a settlement
By Megan Davis
Illustration
“Is that something you might move towards in government – a treaty?” asked Q&A’s Tony Jones.
Ms Dhu, Lynette Daley and the alarming rates of violence against indigenous women
Two victims, no justice
Marcia Langton
Two Aboriginal women speak to us from their graves. One died from horrific injuries in a police cell in Western Australia, and the other bled out on a beach in New South Wales after an alleged violent sexual assault.
Australia’s changing place in Britain’s EU deliberations
Brexit wounds
Stuart Ward
This month, the British people will finally cast their vote in the long-anticipated “Brexit” referendum, to decide whether the United Kingdom should stay in the European Union. Prime Minister David Cameron’s audacious gamble to appease a fractious Conservative Party in the lead-up to last year’s UK general election has brought the nation to the brink of a historic decision.

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Today
Day 2: Dogs, horses, politicians
Why disagreement in politics is a good thing
Sean Kelly

Dead heat on election eve as final poll points to cliffhanger “Fewer than one in five voters think Bill Shorten will win the election, yet around half intend to give his party either their first or second preference, according to a poll on the eve of the...

EU meets without UK “European Union leaders met Wednesday for the first time without the UK in more than four decades, declaring afterward their determination to stay united but showing no appetite for a grand gesture to tie the remaining 27 nations closer together....

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The Nation Reviewed

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Illustration
Bruce Munro’s ‘Field of Light’ brings 50,000 LED spheres to Uluru
Desert blooms
By Ashley Hay
In the new-moon black of early winter, a coach draws up on a hillside just outside the Northern Territory town of Yulara, and four dozen or so of us clamber down into the night. The sky is cloudy and the air cold. But something special shimmers in the land’s wide dip below. Some 50,000 softly coloured lights – combinations of oranges, blues, whites, greens and reds – sway a little in the breeze. It looks like magic.
May 2016
Melbourne Museum’s Thomas Rich has devoted more than 30 years to Australia’s polar dinosaurs
Dinosaur digger
By Chloe Hooper
Illustration
On a fine March morning, while staff at Melbourne Museum put the finishing touches on its blockbuster exhibition Jurassic World, eminent palaeontologist Dr Thomas Rich, 74, grey haired and bearded, strides to the Royal Exhibition Building next door. In his faded beige shirt,...
May 2016
Are we treating the symptoms of our problems rather than the causes?
Signs of anxiety
By Michael Currie
“I think I’m stuck,” Louis* said when I asked why he had come to see me. “I finished my commerce degree last year and I started in a job, which I thought was going to be fine. And it is … but I’ve started feeling really anxious again, like when I was a teenager.”
April 2016
Artist Jan Senbergs prepares for his NGV retrospective
Life’s work
By Quentin Sprague
Jan Senbergs sits surrounded by the ephemera of his life’s work: folders of correspondence, press clippings, catalogues and plastic sleeves of 35mm slides that document his five-decade career as a painter.

Essays

Current Issue
Rachel Perkins
The Arrernte Women’s Project is preserving vital songs and culture
Songs to live by
By Rachel Perkins
I am standing in a supermarket in Alice Springs, comparing the width of my upper arm to a frozen, foil-wrapped kangaroo tail. I’ve been instructed that this is a good guide for selecting a suitable size. Any fatter and the meat will be too muscly; too skinny and the meat is stringy.
May 2016
When human nature and the law intersect
Trans teens
By Jenan Taylor
At a Saturday farmers’ market, two little girls in floral sundresses gaze up at a tall, red-lipped, ponytailed busker with a guitar.
March 2016
Indonesia’s mass killings have been overlooked for 50 years
Rivers ran red
By Robert Manne and Mark Aarons
Dipa Nusantara Aidit and Sukarno image
 
April 2016
Ten years after the Eagles’ 2006 premiership, a culture is laid bare
The West Coast boys done bad
By Martin McKenzie-Murray
West Coast Eagles 2006 premiership team
It was the morning of the 2005 Australian Football League grand final, and nerves were shredding the bowels of two of the country’s finest midfielders. Chris Judd and Daniel Kerr, in between numbly staring at music videos, were making earnest trips to the bathroom. Other players...
March 2016
The dominance of baby boomers is becoming total
The boomer supremacy
By Richard Cooke
Mike Baird, the premier of New South Wales, can’t have been prepared for this. Two months ago he was probably the most popular politician in Australia, presenting a wet Liberal surfer persona that gelled with the state’s better nature.

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Arts & Letters

July 2016
Briggs
Briggs on hip-hop, humour and a new generation of Aboriginal leaders
Smart black man with a plan
By Anwen Crawford
Adam Briggs – better known simply as Briggs – is a rapper, writer, performer and record label owner. As a rapper he has released two solo albums, The Blacklist (2010) and Sheplife (2014), and is working on a third. He acts in Cleverman, the dystopian drama screening on the ABC, and co-wrote the show’s theme song.
June 2016
The Kiwi charm of Taika Waititi’s ‘Hunt for the Wilderpeople’
Don’t lose that Ricky
By Luke Davies
In Taika Waititi’s Hunt for the Wilderpeople (in national release) we open on a majestic aerial view of dense New Zealand forest. It could be the beginning of some ominously dark Norwegian crime thriller – or Top of the Lake.
May 2016
The 20th Biennale of Sydney
Artistic immunity
By Julie Ewington
Conscious Sleep by Chiharu Shiota
It’s raining in Sydney, and Cockatoo Island has been flooding. But that hasn’t put a dampener on the crowds trooping off ferries from Circular Quay. Over the past decade, the largest island in Sydney Harbour has become one of the city’s iconic venues. Haunted by generations of...
June 2016
Beyoncé’s powerful ‘Lemonade’
The reckoning
By Anwen Crawford
Beyoncé in Lemonade
“The most disrespected person in America is the black woman,” said Malcolm X, on 5 May 1962. It was part of a wide-ranging speech on racism that he gave at the funeral service of Korean War veteran and Nation of Islam member Ronald Stokes, who was shot in the back by Los Angeles...
May 2016
An interview with Jonathan Franzen
Canon fodder
By Richard Cooke
There’s something a little old-fashioned about Jonathan Franzen. I don’t mean old-fashioned in the bird-watching, fist-shaking at the internet and wearing thick black-rimmed writerly glasses way.
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