EssayWHEN FACEBOOK TURNED ten in 2014, Mark Zuckerberg, the founder and nerdish face of the social network, announced that its motto would cease to be ‘Move fast and break things’, and become ‘Move fast with stable infra[structure]’. For the...

IntroductionTHE WORLD IS full of beautiful places. Beaches and oceans, cliffs, forests, mountains and valleys, deserts, rivers, islands, harbours and bays. Places where the sky is a perfect half dome, and others where it is pinched between mountains and...

IntroductionAUSTRALIA WAS THE last continent to experience the transformation wrought by new settlers arriving to make it their own. For centuries, explorers had set forth to discover lands which others already called home, but that were conquered and renamed...

IntroductionLONG BEFORE 1873, when William Christie Gosse ‘discovered’ the six-hundred-million-year-old sandstone monolith at the centre of Australia and called it Ayers – for the about-to-be-deposed South Australian Colonial Secretary – Uluru has had symbolic power that outstrips even its...

IntroductionTWELVE YEARS AFTER William the Conqueror sailed across what is now known as the English Channel to invade England and claim the crown in 1066, he constructed the Tower of London. Defiant locals viewed the stone Tower, built into...

Introduction‘NATIONS TELL THEMSELVES stories,’ the Irish commentator Fintan O’Toole wrote recently. ‘They are not fully true, they are often bitterly contested and they change over time. But they are powerful: they underlie the necessary fiction that is “us”. And...

Introduction‘I KNOW IT makes you sick to think of that word fairness,’ Arthur C Brooks, president of the American Enterprise Institute, told the Conservative Political Action Conference in March 2013. But, he went on to tell the heads of...

IntroductionMORE THAN SEVEN hundred years ago a young poet commenced a journey that would define the human condition. Dante’s The Divine Comedy continues to resonate – arguably with new urgency in what many feel are dark times. His journey...

IntroductionTHE REFORM CLUB, the imposing Palazzo-style structure on Pall Mall, one of London’s grandest thoroughfares, has entered the popular imagination as the quintessential gentleman’s club. Its camera-ready elegance – the soaring atrium, sweeping staircases and cosy parlours – has...

IntroductionTHE AMERICAN WRITER on the festival circuit had refined his message into this decade’s preferred mode of communication: a list. He identified five points. Just as five is a useful number for a child using her fingers to learn...

IntroductionAFTER THE MAROONS won the first game of the 2016 State of Origin series it was time for another ritual – the breathless post-game interviews as the elated winners left the field. You could predict what would be said...

IntroductionTHE ABILITY TO travel through time in our minds, to inhabit re-created pasts and imagined futures, is arguably one of the defining characteristics of human civilisation. It is one of the great foundations of literature, an age-old tool of...

IntroductionAMONG THE MANY slights and injustices Australia’s most recently deposed prime minister now has time to mull over, the irony of being defined by a phrase that was not of his own making must merit some consideration. Tony Abbott will...

Introduction‘CIVILISATION OFFICIALLY ENDED today,’ the ever-pithy Jane Caro tweeted forty-eight hours before Anzac Day 2015. She was not referring to the looming centenary commemoration of the tragedy on the Gallipoli Peninsula, which we have been urged to believe made...

Lecture‘Culture is created by us and defines us. It is the embodiment of the distinctive values, traditions and beliefs that make being Australian in the 21st century unique – democratic, diverse, adaptive and grounded in one of the world's...

IntroductionWHEN PRIME MINISTER Tony Abbott declared and repeated, just in case it was missed the first time, that ‘the defining moment in the history of this continent’ was the arrival of the First Fleet the reaction was swift and...

Introduction‘I’M NOT ASIAN and never will be,’ wrote Canadian author Karen Connelly in her Thai memoir, Touch the Dragon (Turnstone Press, 1992). ‘But,’ she went on, ‘I am not what I was before I came here, either. Something in...

IntroductionIT SEEMS POIGNANTLY appropriate that the web address gallipoli.net.au, which features the logo ‘Gallipoli: The Making of a Nation’, is owned by Michael Erdeljac of the Splitters Creek Historical Group. Splitters Creek is now a suburb on the western...

IntroductionIN THE BEGINNING it is about land: enjoying, aggregating, owning, using, preserving, developing and selling land. Land is, and always has been, a fulcrum of wealth and meaning. For millennia emperors and kings, colonial powers and trading companies have undertaken...

IntroductionAUSTRALIA WAS ONCE known as the land of the long weekend. It was a snappy catchphrase that, like all the best clichés, embodied enough truth and ambiguity to endure and inspire a book, a film, countless newspaper headings and...

IntroductionWESLEY ENOCH IS a remarkable man. He has an enviable ability to cut through: to see the whole picture, reduce complex problems to their key components and find solutions. And then capture it all in a pithy one liner. An...

IntroductionFOR A NUMBER of years I travelled on a New Zealand passport. It wasn't so much that I identified with the land of my birth, but for pragmatic reasons: when I first needed a passport to travel – fittingly...

IntroductionOVER the past few years the body politic in Australia has had an exceptionally high temperature. If it were possible to take it in the way that one used to measure a child's fever – shaken thermometer under the...

IntroductionA DECADE AGO the first edition of Griffith REVIEW explored the challenges and contradictions of what we were told was a 'new world order'. September 2003 was not long after the terrorist attacks in New York and Bali, but...

IntroductionIT DID NOT take long before posters advertising performance artist Marina Abramovic's show at New York's Museum of Modern Art were defaced – literally. At the 23rd Street subway station 'witch' was scrawled on to Abramovic's beautiful forehead, her...

IntroductionMORE THAN HALF a century ago, Arthur Koestler wrote that much of what you needed to know about a person was revealed by the year of their birth. He called it a "secular horoscope". Rather than the alignment of...

IntroductionAFTER LISTENING TO the eminent scientist cataloguing the ever-increasing evidence of significant climate change – rising temperatures, rising seas, extreme weather, melting ice – and its potentially apocalyptic consequences, the reporter wanted to know how suddenly this would play...

IntroductionTHE BATTLE OVER ideas in education is one of the most hard-fought in public life. No other field carries heavier baggage. Education is regarded as the panacea for social ills and as a repository for personal hopes and fears....

IntroductionIT COMES AS something of a shock when a television advertisement for a car sums up the way we think about family: diverse, adaptable, busy, adventurous and changing. But that is what the creators of the campaign for the...

IntroductionIT WAS JUST a skirmish in the "war on terror", but its symbolic weight was much greater. Books were banned on planes in August 2006.As authorities sought to disrupt what the British Home Secretary described as the "most sustained...

IntroductionFOR SOME YEARS, once upon a time, I lived in a little house on a cliff in a coal-mining village north of Wollongong. The spectacular views along the rugged coastline drew the eye to the industrial city's bustling harbour,...

IntroductionIT MAY BE the product of living in the second most southerly continent, but every generation of Australians has had iconic images of threats from the north. Flip through your memory of popular history and there they are –...

IntroductionTHE BEAT-UP TAXI crawled down the wrong side of the road, along the dusty back streets of Cunnamulla in central-western Queensland. The driver seethed with anger as he punched an arm through his open window: "Look at what I'm...

IntroductionTURNING SEVENTEEN IS important. It is an age when young people are beginning to experiment with being grown-ups – learning to drive, imagining life after school, reaching beyond the family, starting to work, falling in love, having sex and...

IntroductionTHE FIRST TIME I recall being described by the term "people like us" I was quite taken aback. I did not think I had much in common with the man who was defining us as "us". By accident we...

IntroductionIT IS PROBABLY just as well that we cannot see into the future; it would make the present even more confusing.Imagine, for instance, if a visionary futurist had made herself available for interview in August 1988 to respond to...

IntroductionTHE EXISTENCE OF of a vast landmass at the bottom of the southern hemisphere had entered European consciousness – like unseen creatures in the bush at night, present but not visible – well before the last continent was mapped.Fanciful...

IntroductionI and the public knowWhat all schoolchildren learn,Those to whom evil is doneDo evil in return.– W H Auden THE CAPACITY OF people to behave in ways that are incomprehensible to those who do not share the same beliefs and...

IntroductionIN 1853 GEORGES-Eugène Haussmann was given what a lesser man would have considered an impossible task – the transformation of Paris. Two years after his coup d'état Emperor Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte set Baron Haussmann a series of objectives: make it healthier, clear...

Introduction"I NEVER THOUGHT  that globalisation would mean that I would lose my kids," the well-travelled woman across the lunch table complained. Her son is a banker in London, her daughter a lawyer in New York, her other son an...

EssayThe present is a hinge on which the past and the future swing. – Raymond Evans[i]   FOR THOSE TOUCHED by the perverse blessing of a youth spent in interesting times, the echoes of those years are likely to reverberate for a...

IntroductionIN THE FIRST of 2007, when the prospect of a change of government was beginning to be taken seriously for the first time in many years, even close observers of the political process realised there were a lot of...

IntroductionMID-TOWN MANHATTAN, about where the Rockefeller Plaza spills on to Fifth Avenue, is arguably where a Venn diagram of the circles of global money, sex and power would overlap. The footpaths are crowded with people from every corner of...

IntroductionNEARLY TWO HUNDRED and fifty years ago Dr Samuel Johnson­ ­– the essayist, critic, poet and lexicographer ­– became the first English writer to receive a government-funded pension. After decades of struggling to make ends meet, the man who...

IntroductionIT WAS ALWAYS a thrill to find an email from the prospective president of the free world jumping out from the overnight clutter in Thunderbird.‘It's in your hands, Julianne' was the subject line of a tight four-line email Barack...

IntroductionWHEN THOUSANDS OF unemployed miners, steel, clothing and textile workers, their friends, families and organisers pushed through the glass doors of Old Parliament House and into Kings Hall on 26 October 1982 shouting ‘We want jobs,' it was the end...

IntroductionWHEN HE APPEARED  to accept his fourth Miles Franklin award in the elegant surrounds of the Mitchell Library, Tim Winton seemed to have popped in from another world redolent of the remote coast that has informed his writing for...

IntroductionONCE UPON A time in a far-off land, with cobblestone streets and gingerbread buildings, a handsome prince marries a beautiful girl from a distant country. The commoners enjoy a day off work to watch the wedding – live on...

IntroductionWHEN I WAS growing up, in the 1960s, the food we ate and its supply was tangible – literally outside the dining room window.We had cows for milk and cream; sheep that grew from suckling lambs to Sunday lunch,...

IntroductionNAGGING CURIOSITY ABOUT where the rivers originated lured Australia's great European explorers beyond the Great Dividing Range. Equipped with boats, drays and provisions they followed the rivers as far as they could, hoping against hope that the source would...

IntroductionTHERE ARE RELATIVELY few places where a people from a diverse, secular society can come together to find common cause and give voice to shared aspirations. One is sporting grounds; another is citizenship ceremonies.When the number of men, women...

IntroductionDURING THE 2010 election campaign we were told that the prospective leaders' favourite books wereThe Lord of the Rings and Cloudstreet. Both fine books – but, like so much else that was said in the campaign, answers with a...

IntroductionTHE IDEA OF the perfect body may be the ultimate conceit of our age or the final victory of human will over the messy randomness of nature. Either way, this quest for perfection and its potential realisation go to...

IntroductionWALKING ACROSS THE scorched lawns of the quadrangle of a major university, not so long ago when this was a land beset by drought not floods, I found it impossible to ignore the increasingly agitated conversation of the man...

IntroductionTHE MONSTROUS WAVE that engulfed the north-east coast of Japan, sweeping the means and products of decades of industrial production and centuries of cultural and social life into its evil black waters, was a terrifying and heartbreaking reminder of...

IntroductionNEVER BEFORE IN human history has so much been known about so many by so many.The social media revolution is less than a decade old, but it already has nearly a billion people in its thrall – men, women...

IntroductionTHE TECHNOLOGICAL REVOLUTION had scarcely begun to gather momentum when management consultants, alert as ever to an emerging opportunity, coined a new way of describing how business was done. Out went elites, hierarchies and information on a need-to-know basis;...

IntroductionTHE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY has continued as it started – jittery and uncertain. As the countdown to the new century began some worried techno-sceptics took to the bush, loaded with tinned food, wind-up gadgets and kilometres of toilet paper, fearful...

IntroductionIN THE LEAD-UP to Christmas 2011 the usual mix of tension and excitement was underpinned by a new level of anxiety. This century the festive, holiday season has gained a new moniker in many parts of Australia: the disaster...

IntroductionTHERE ARE THREADS that run like arteries through a nation and in this country one is the land. It is the source of many of the sustaining myths, preoccupations and conflicts – the biggest dreams and the greatest disappointments....

IntroductionAT THE END of last century I was charged, for a short time, with helping a major media organisation realise the possibilities of the looming digital world. Looking back from the always-on world of today it seems an odd,...

IntroductionIT'S A GOOD question. How many people in the world travelled as tourists last year? With the global population nudging seven billion, how many do you think visited a country other than their homeland for a short, recreational visit....

IntroductionAS WELL AS producing suffering, adversity can spark genius. And works of genius – paintings, writing, music, science, even buildings – endure long after calamity has been chased into the deepest recesses of memory, to become an inchoate fear...

IntroductionWHEN WE AWOKE to the new century on January 1, 2000, after fireworks had ricocheted around the globe for a day of midnight – and in the spirit of the age been captured live on television – it was...

IntroductionTASMANIA OCCUPIES A unique place in the national imagination. It is different in so many ways to the vast, dry expanses of the continent that it has acquired an almost mythic status – a magical place where nature's power...

EssayROMAN QUAEDVLIEG STANDING tall in his smart black suit – medals glistening, insignia flashing – looked every bit the man-in-uniform from central casting when he stood between Prime Minister Tony Abbott and Immigration Minister Peter Dutton on 1 July 2015 to...