Of all the indispensable words to have slipped their definitional moorings in the latter decades of the twentieth century – ‘iconic’, ‘tragedy’, ‘legendary’ – ‘ironic’ is perhaps the most conspicuous. Certainly its fall from semantic grace has been one of the more spectacular: where once this adjective was pressed into service to describe appropriate reversals... Continue Reading →
Review: Stephen Edgar’s Exhibits of the Sun
To say that the pace of modern life is unconducive to lyric poetry is not so much to flirt with cliché as to drop your keys down cliché’s blouse and insist upon retrieving them. It’s also undeniable. Assailed from all sides by all manner of trivia, we’ve lost the habit of sustained contemplation needed to... Continue Reading →
Comrade Tressell’s Problem Novel: The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists at 100
‘The trouble with you socialists is that you don’t know anything about economics.’ The businessman – a wealthy retailer – was talking to a miner in Western Australia. ‘What you don’t seem to understand’, he continued, ‘is that every time you get an increase in your wages, the cost of living rises with them.’ ‘So... Continue Reading →
Fissures in reality: a review of Barbara Ehrenreich’s Living with a Wild God
In a career spanning nearly half a century, the US journalist Barbara Ehrenreich has sought to expose economic inequality and to critique the utopian and delusional character of the arguments used to justify it. In Nickel and Dimed (2001) she revealed how the lives of unskilled workers give the lie to ‘trickledown’ economics, while in... Continue Reading →
The political earthquake shaking New Zealand
Having arrived in Christchurch in the small hours of the morning, I have to wait till my alarm call comes through at 8am for my first proper view of it. It’s a disconcerting experience. It is now four years since the Canterbury earthquake caused widespread damage to ‘the Garden City’ and three and a half... Continue Reading →
Shorten plays politics while Iraq burns
It fell to Labor leader Bill Shorten, doing his usual impression of a hole in the air, to encapsulate this week’s mini debate around the Abbott government’s intentions (or lack of them) regarding the unfolding situation in Iraq, where, if this morning’s reports are correct, 80 men have just been massacred (and their wives and... Continue Reading →
Free speech: the path to true equality
This May, at the Sydney Writers’ Festival, I was lucky enough to be asked to take part in one of the ‘Coffee and Papers’ sessions. Designed for the festival early birds, the purpose of these gatherings was to bring together local journalists with one of the SWF’s invited authors, whose work, it was hoped, would... Continue Reading →
A review of Anne Manne’s Life of I
In the wake of the 2011 Norway massacre, in which Anders Breivik killed 77 people (69 of them on the island of Utøya), a small and unseemly argument broke out amongst the commentariat about whether or not the killer’s actions constituted terrorism. For commentators of a conservative persuasion, the killing spree was the act of... Continue Reading →
The ABC is biased: get over it!
Richard Salant (1914-1993) hardly deserves his reputation as the source of the silliest thing ever said about media objectivity. President of CBS News for most of the 1960s and 1970s, he expended much time and personal courage resisting the encroachment of political power into US news and current affairs and also warned against the now-ubiquitous... Continue Reading →
Our newest national sport: the race to obliterate Rolf
The bicentennial heritage trail through the quiet Perth suburb of Bassendean is dotted with the names of local worthies, not all of whom, I have to admit, are well known to me, or known at all. In fact, of the various dignitaries, sportspeople and religious orders whose names are embossed in oxidised bronze and set... Continue Reading →