Australian politics, society & culture

Current Issue
Illustration
Welcome to the Collingwood English Language School
New students
By Ingrid Laguna

There is a New Student folder in my pigeonhole. I flip it open and scan the enrolment form. From her listed date of arrival, Kafa* has been in Australia for less than two months. She has come from Ethiopia, speaks Oromo and lives with her aunt. She is 15. Years of schooling: two. Country of schooling: Ethiopia. Date last attended school: 2009. Interruption to schooling: approximately six years. Orphan child visa: 117 – “for a child whose parents are dead, permanently incapacitated or of unknown whereabouts”.

October 2016
The PM is not solely responsible for the government’s fortune
Not a one-man show
By Sean Kelly
Some days I don’t mind admitting defeat.
Current Issue
The arts funding cuts are just a symptom of a broader malaise in Australia
Culture crisis
By Alison Croggon
Image of Force Majeure’s Never Did Me Any Harm
It is difficult to grasp the cultural devastation that is occurring across Australia. Even a partial glimpse is unnerving; surveying the whole is depressing beyond words.
Helen Pynor’s bio-art explores life after death
The bird on the floor
Rebecca Giggs
The chicken pieces, sold in a plastic tub in Dresden, were still alive. Earlier, Helen Pynor collected the meat from an over-lit supermarket refrigerator, paying the cashier €2.79. “Fine & Juicy”, read the label, though Pynor had no intention of cooking the cuts.
Scenes from the flooding of the Lachlan River in central west New South Wales
The Lachlan rises
Dean Sewell
[Photos best viewed in full screen mode – Ed.] I drove to Condobolin in the central west of New South Wales to anticipate the Lachlan’s peak (of 7.15 metres) there on 5 October, where Australian Defence Force personnel were brought in to help the State Emergency Service workers fortify the town.

Keep up-to-date with Australian politics, society and culture, for FREE.

Today
Not a one-man show
The PM is not solely responsible for the government’s fortune
Sean Kelly

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...

Read More

The Nation Reviewed

Current Issue
Illustration
Video artist Heath Franco is making a name as a provocateur
Shocking art
By Darryn King
A few years ago, Australian video artist Heath Franco made a work designed to be displayed in the toilet. The video, installed on the back of the cubicle door, starred Franco himself, naked from the waist down, applauding and congratulating the water-closeted viewer. Intra-toilet art is just one example of Franco’s creative sensibility, which one Sydney curator has described, not without enthusiasm, as “invasively shocking”.
August 2016
Why are our pets so pampered?
A companionable rooster
By Anne Manne
Illustration
As I was walking into the local vet’s to buy some cat food, I noticed out of the corner of my eye a woman stroking what looked like a large fluffy white cat tucked under her arm. The sight of a devoted owner and their pet is unremarkable. As I sidled past, however, I did a...
July 2016
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.
June 2016
Trackside at a 24-hour ultramarathon
Foot soldiers
By Paul Connolly
“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.

Essays

Current Issue
Image of Nauru
Richard Flanagan delivers the inaugural Boisbouvier Lecture
Does writing matter?
By Richard Flanagan
Every day we hear grim and grimmer news that suggests we are passing through the winter of the world. Everywhere man is tormented, the globe reels from multitudes of suffering and horror, and, worst, we no longer know with confidence what our answer might be. And yet we understand that the time approaches when an answer must be made or a terrible reckoning will be ours.
September 2016
Where has demand driven our universities?
Thinking caps on
By Thornton McCamish
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.
July 2016
An indigenous leader reflects on a lifetime following the law of the land
Rom Watangu
By Galarrwuy Yunupingu
Galarrwuy Yunupingu
Our song cycles have the greatest importance in the lives of my people. They guide and inform our lives. A song cycle tells a person’s life: it relates to the past, to the present and to the future. Yolngu balance our lives through the song cycles that are laid out on the...
August 2016
A region returns to earth
Bust  in  the  Pilbara
By Hamish McDonald
Image of mining workers flying from Perth
To get the optimistic view in Port Hedland, 1600 kilometres north of Perth, you go to the little park at the end of Wedge Street and look out to the harbour channel at high tide. That’s when it’s deep enough for ships fully loaded with iron ore. One night recently, tugboats...
July 2016
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.

Video

New

Blogs

Arts & Letters

October 2016
Image of Joy Williams
Celebrate short-story practitioner Joy Williams turns to micro fiction in ‘Ninety-Nine Stories of God’
Language to transcend
By Barry Hill
Joy Williams writes word-perfect stories. They are often wretchedly funny; she makes you laugh even when you don’t want to. She writes out of a damaged or wild or ecstatic or even a divine madness. And she strives for a new prose for our eerie times: “We must write with a pen – in Mark Twain’s phrase – warmed up in hell,” as she recently told the Paris Review.
September 2016
Philippe Sands’ ‘East West Street’ mixes memoir, biography and thriller to explain the origins of ‘crimes against humanity’ and ‘genocide’
The secrets of others
By Martin Krygier
Lemberg, Lwów, Lvov, Lviv.
August 2016
Tom Griffiths’ ‘The Art of Time Travel’ is a thoughtful look at some of Australia’s most prominent historians
Strong boots
By Barry Hill
Cover of The Art of Time Travel
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’
October 2016
Six stories of 100 words
6 x 100
By Paul Connolly
  THERAPY
September 2016
Ben Lerner’s ‘The Hatred of Poetry’ brings together questions of art and politics
Double dissolution
By Justin Clemens
“The fatal problem with poetry: poems,” Ben Lerner writes in this brief, engaging and occasionally irritating book (Text Publishing; $19.99).
×
×