The next week will be interesting
Malcolm Turnbull has by any measure had a good week.
And so it should not come as a surprise to anybody that the final business day of that good week was dominated by the appearance of Tony Abbott.
A cat-detection team are doing important work on Dirk Hartog Island
The stars are bright over Western Australia’s Dirk Hartog Island, which sits within the Shark Bay World Heritage Area. Zoologist Sue Robinson shovels muesli into her mouth without enthusiasm, wipes dew off her quad-bike seat and corrals her gear for the morning’s work.
1934–2016
Today we remember Inga Clendinnen, one of Australia’s great writers, historians and public intellectuals, who passed away yesterday, and extend our condolences to her family.
Matt Ross’ ‘Captain Fantastic’ is a portrait of a family in the wilderness
The opening moments of Matt Ross’ Captain Fantastic (in national release 8 September) introduce us to the rugged, pine-forested world of an ideal – or idealised – family living far off the grid in the woods of Washington State.
The dispute over the South China Sea will come to affect more than just China’s near neighbours
A couple of years ago I used a thought experiment to get some students to think harder about the territorial disputes in the South China Sea. “What if China claimed some of the outer parts of the Great Barrier Reef as its sovereign territory?” I asked them. “How should Australia respond?”
Crisis on high “Deep in the Himalayas sits a remote research station that is tracking an alarming trend in climate change, with implications that could disrupt the lives of more than 1 billion people and pitch the most populated region of the world into chaos. The station...
Evidence of ‘torture’ of children in Darwin detention centre uncovered “Video of the tear gassing of six boys being held in isolation at the Don Dale Youth Detention Centre in Darwin in August 2014 exposes one of the darkest incidents in the history of juvenile justice in...
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Durbach Block Jaggers is a practice in argument
In the garden on top of their offices in Sydney, three architects sit squabbling over buildings. It is the argument of people so familiar with each other they won’t allow a conversation to waste its time in civility. They tease one another. They have a silliness that later seems hidden everywhere in their serious modernist houses. David Jaggers spreads one arm across the back of the chair beside him. He has a loping presence, his eyes soft with agreement. Camilla Block has a dunnart’s energy, sparkling and provoked. Neil Durbach can leave his hands on top of his head for an entire meeting.
Bruce Munro’s ‘Field of Light’ brings 50,000 LED spheres to Uluru
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...
Trackside at a 24-hour ultramarathon
“Are we there yet?” quips first-time ultramarathon runner Angelo Portelli, 46, at 10.01 am. He is one minute into the Coburg 24 Hour Track Championships being held at the Harold Stevens Athletics Track in suburban Melbourne.
Australia’s changing place in Britain’s EU deliberations
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.
Where has demand driven our universities?
Earlier this year Professor Glyn Davis, vice-chancellor of the University of Melbourne, published an essay in which he warned that Australia’s public universities should heed the fate that befell the monasteries in England under Henry VIII. Like the ancient monasteries, he wrote, universities are places apart, places that can become preoccupied with their own concerns.
Australia’s solar champions face an uncertain future
If you haven’t already heard, the solar cell efficiency race is on, and once you’ve dusted off your periodic table, it’s a race as scintillating as any big-ticket derby. The stakes, however, are much, much higher.
An ideology of savagery
Two years ago, the armies of the group that would soon call itself the Islamic State, a group that already controlled large swathes of territory in Iraq and Syria, entered Mosul, the second city of Iraq. The Iraqi Army, in which the United States had invested, or perhaps wasted...
Ms Dhu, Lynette Daley and the alarming rates of violence against indigenous women
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. Their lives were cut short by violence compounded by what...
The coral bleaching signals a defining environmental shift
Many of today’s marine scientists blame Jacques Cousteau, who surfaced in their lounge rooms during their formative years, for luring them into the water. Others were hooked by the psychedelic barrage of coral gardens and sea creatures in National Geographic.
New
The baying pack of Coalition backbenchers demanding the abolition, or at least the dilution, of the Racial Discrimination Act may be sincere crusaders for free speech. On the other hand they may be motivated by a desire to attack small-l liberals, of whom one is (or at least was) their own leader, Malcolm Turnbull. And some are just nasty.
On the island of Ometepe, at Ojo de Agua, I sat half in the sun and half in the shade, my feet splashing in volcanic water. Eye of water? Something like that. This place is a natural pool. A spring, cool and clear.
It is entirely understandable that Australian veterans were disappointed by the Long Tan commemoration stuff-up; it is clear that the negotiations, such as they were, between the governments in Hanoi and Canberra were misconstrued, probably on both sides.
My favourite Olympic Games story comes not from Rio in 2016 but from Thermopylae in 480 BC.
Angel Olsen’s ‘My Woman’ and Sarah Mary Chadwick’s ‘Roses Always Die’
“Doesn’t matter who you are or what you’ve done,” sings Angel Olsen on the opening track to her third full-length release, My Woman, “still gotta wake up and be someone.” The song is called ‘Intern’, and in it the self is a kind of business, while romance may be a bad investment.
Josh Kriegman and Elyse Steinberg’s documentary ‘Weiner’ charts the fall of a congressman who can’t keep out of the spotlight
There has surely never been a greater gift to the singular headline writers at the New York Post than Anthony Weiner, the Democratic congressman compelled to stand down in 2011 after tweeting explicit photographs – including one of his bulging underwear – to
Briggs on hip-hop, humour and a new generation of Aboriginal leaders
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,...
Tom Griffiths’ ‘The Art of Time Travel’ is a thoughtful look at some of Australia’s most prominent historians
This is not so much a history, as an epic poem; and notwithstanding, or even in consequence of this, the truest of histories.
– John Stuart Mill, ‘Carlyle’s French Revolution’
Cultural conflicts in Ivan Sen’s ‘Goldstone’ and the ABC’s ‘Cleverman’
In the famous crop-duster scene from Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest (1959), Cary Grant’s hapless character Roger Thornhill runs for pitiful cover on an isolated stretch of road as a biplane repeatedly sprays him with machine-gun fire.