Month: December 2003
-
Excerpt from The History of Moomba 1955-2005
This is the Prologue of the book Moomba: A Festival for the People. This is now available to download here. Prologue In 2005, Melbourne’s Moomba Festival became half a century old. Since its establishment in 1955, the festival has become something of an institution, unfolding in the city’s parks, along its streets and on the…
-
Owen Harries Boyer Lectures on Radio National
How to Avoid the Parochialism of the Present http://www.abc.net.au/rn/boyers/ Globalisation and International Relations are two important fields for individuals to engage with at this present time given the collapse of the Soviet Union and the rise of the US as the world’s only hegemon. Globalisation is an vital field to comprehend, not simply because of…
-
Don Watson: Recollections of a Bleeding Heart, A Portrait of Paul Keating
Don Watson’s biography Recollections of a Bleeding Heart is the first biography that I have read since reading David Marr’s Patrick White: A Life in 1995 (about the same time that society collapsed). And what a magnificent segue that it is into the core of things that matter. And even if you aren’t a…
-
Quarterly Essay David Malouf
What a comendable addition the Quarterly Essay is to the national debate. It is refreshing to engage with larger Australian discussions after floundering in the intellectual vacuum of ‘the global’ for such a long time. The problem with much discourse on ‘the global’ is that it is largely dismissive of national discussions. ‘The national’ is seen…
-
Adam Thrilwell’s Politics
Adam Thrilwell’s novel Politics is as energetic as it is neurotic as English as it is universal. The universal themes primarily surround the sex scenes which are generational in an occasional hackneyed fashion, but rescued by a biting insight and honesty (There is a lot of energy in honesty and it is always better to…