Articles Archive

Aesthetic suicide

My daughter, who loves Andy Warhol, was horrifiedby your Super-8 re-enactment of his attempted executionby Valerie Solanas, who wrapped...

By Justin Clemens

The persistence of February 1st 2012

Yesterday Wislawa Szymborska, eight-eight,died. It is the least we can doto return to this announcementand contemplate whether to endor...

By John Watson

More than a job

AUSTRALIA WAS ONCE known as the land of the long weekend. It was a snappy catchphrase that, like all...

By Julianne Schultz

My ten Cadillacs

WHEN I WAS nine, I won ten Cadillacs from my father in a bet. The deal was that I'd...

By Peter Meredith

Interview with
Maria Tumarkin

Maria Tumarkin is a cultural historian and the author of three books of ideas: Traumascapes (2005), Courage (2007) and Otherland (2010). She has taught at...

By Madeleine Watts

Interview with
Craig Cliff

Craig Cliff is a Wellington-based writer. His short story collection, A Man Melting, won the Best First Book in the...

By Madeleine Watts

Stories that must be told

'Unique – Having no like, equal, or parallel;one and only; unmatched; unequalled…'I AM NOT an historian, merely a retired...

By Betty Birskys

Map for a vanished landscape

BRITISH ART HISTORIAN and veteran wheelman Tim Hilton once wrote that most cyclists are topographers by nature. It's true;...

By Liam Davison (1957–2014)

We are not just passing through

IT’S AUGUST 2013 and I’m in a café on another cloudless late winter day in Bourke, northwest New South...

By Graeme Gibson

Wash your hands! That may have been touched by a Chinaman

FORTY YEARS NOW have passed, but I can still smell the scent of her thick black hair. Juliette, my...

By Trevor Graham

‘Please explain’

No one sews a patch of unshrunk cloth on an old garment, for the patch will pull away from...

By Victor Marsh

Tree changers moving and shaking

IT IS 1.15 pm on a blistering Saturday in early 2003. I have missed the newsagents and will not...

By Lucy Mayes