The object of travel, wrote G. K. Chesterton, ‘is not to set foot on foreign land; it is at last to set foot on one’s own country as a foreign land’. David Whish-Wilson returned to his own country, Australia, at the age of twenty-nine, having spent a decade ‘bumming around’ in Europe, Asia and Africa.... Continue Reading →
Talking about offence with the ABC’s Richard Fidler
http://mpegmedia.abc.net.au/local/brisbane/conversations/201311/r1203534_15602380.mp3
Would You Kill the Fat Man?
Consider the following scenario. Terrorists have hijacked three passenger aeroplanes, two of which have just been flown into skyscrapers in the middle of a busy city. On its first run, the third plane missed its target, but it is now lining up for another attempt. In the meantime, you – the head of the Air... Continue Reading →
On John Kinsella’s Tide
John Kinsella’s new collection of short stories, Tide, begins with an acknowledgement of ‘the traditional owners and custodians of the land he [i.e. the author] writes’. Certainly Kinsella’s work can feel like part of the Australian landscape; with over thirty collections of poetry to his name, and many works of prose besides, the Perth-born writer... Continue Reading →
A chat with the ABC’s Steve Austin
http://blogs.abc.net.au/files/richard-king-1.mp3
Review: The Importance of Being Civil
In his stimulating book The Importance of Being Civil, John A. Hall tears a leaf from the street-fighter’s handbook and gets his retaliation in first. To those who will say that concepts such as decency have no place in a work of sociology, he insists that ‘civility is not sugary froth but an ideal of... Continue Reading →
Generation Ex
Considered in theoretical terms, the modern ideal of ‘marriage for love’ has never been more popular. In traditional societies such as India and China, arranged marriages (and certainly forced marriages) are less common than they used to be, while for many artists and activists in Muslim-majority communities the freedom to choose one’s life partner has... Continue Reading →
Review: Amanda Curtin’s Elemental
If the past is a foreign country, then Margaret Duthie Tulloch (‘Meggie’) is a traveller from a distant land. Indeed the narrator of Amanda Curtin’s splendid novel Elemental has led a life unimaginably different from the woman to whom her story is addressed. That woman is Meggie’s granddaughter, Laura, who in a hundred-page ‘Coda’ at... Continue Reading →
On the side of the Angels: A. C. Grayling
Of all the shady turns of phrase to have lodged themselves in the popular consciousness since the terrorist attacks of 2001, the term ‘Enlightenment fundamentalist’ is surely one of the shadiest. A version of the logical fallacy known as ‘the appeal to hypocrisy’, this ingenious bit of rhetorical jujitsu suggests that the enemies of religious... Continue Reading →
Review: Two Cheers for Anarchism and How to Run a Country
‘Freedom without socialism is privilege and injustice,’ declared Mikhail Bakunin in 1867, ‘[but] socialism without freedom is slavery and brutality.’ This ideological double-bind is no less relevant to party politics as it is practised in contemporary Canberra as it was to what Eric Hobsbawm termed, in his book of the same name, ‘the age of... Continue Reading →