Grooming the globe

‘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 Washington’s most influential right-wing think-tanks...

The restorationist impulse

THE CHILDREN COME home from school to be greeted by their mother, who is wearing an apron. They then go off to play with their neighbourhood friends, from families very like their own. After dinner, and after husband and wife have cheerfully washed and...

So you want to rule like an autocrat?

NOTE FOR CANDIDATES The word ‘populist’ has lately come to mean white nationalist, alt-right blogger, neo-fascist and so on. These labels are imprecise. So we’ve produced a short Q&A that will help you decide whether you’ve got what it takes to be a populist leader....

What isn’t there

I DON’T KNOW how to write about something that isn’t there, such as longing. My entire life, it seems, I have been longing for a country, a city, a small space on the side of the road where I needn’t feel like a stranger,...

Poking mullock

Q: Did you hear the one about that politician you hate from the party you despise? A: The establishment and resolution of a hypothetical situation and/or a play on words with similar sounds but different meanings will result in a re-evaluation of your understanding of...

When everybody does better

POPULISM – THE WORD – is surging. It has become the label of convenience for journalists, commentators and politicians to pin on any and all deplorable politicians, policies or voters. A broad consensus has it that Donald Trump, Marine Le Pen, the Brexiters, One Nation and a...

Discontents

FIFTEEN YEARS AGO, the economist Joseph Stiglitz published a book called Globalization and its Discontents (WW Norton, 2002). For Stiglitz, globalisation meant ‘the closer integration of the countries and peoples of the world which has been brought about by the enormous reduction of costs...

The men in green

TO KILL TIME following a minor a delay to their meeting schedule, three middle-aged men with thinning hair, charcoal-grey suits and blue ties stood awkwardly in a line and attempted banter. Peter Dutton: It’s like Cape York time. Tony Abbott: What’s this mate? Peter Dutton: It’s Cape...

Sound, drums and light

IN MY LATE-TEENAGE years, I found myself for a time hovering on the border of bogandom. In those long-gone days of the mid-1980s, the bogans of Perth’s foothills could be identified by a clear dress code: flannelette ‘x-brand’ outer shirts, black T-shirts (often with...

Held on trust

ONE OF THE key reasons that freedom of expression is so hotly contested in Australia, as elsewhere, is that it can be viewed from so many different perspectives. For some, free speech is a personal right, never to be abridged, no matter how offensive...

Marooned in uncertainty

KISH, CHRISTMAS EVE 2015. Thirty or so men and women have gathered in a dimly lit restaurant to celebrate. They sit around large tables, singing freely and loudly along to Tagalog songs playing from a karaoke TV mounted on the wall. They feast on...

Impossible things

IN THE SUMMER of 2016 everything changes. Portentous news should come by phone, or a knock on the door, maybe a letter dropping onto a mat. But in this case, it is everywhere. Inescapable. The Great Barrier Reef is dying, some say dead. A...

Killing Bold

THE FIRST SAFETY message Brett,[i] one of our tour guides, delivered was about wearing seatbelts. The second was about dingoes. ‘If you see a dingo, do not crouch down. Remain upright. Take only photos, walk back to the group. They are native here on...

People are kind

THE PACKET OF soy milk was standing alone on the top shelf of the long-life milk section in the brightly lit aisle of Coles at Corinda. Normally, I could easily stretch up to the second-highest level to grab it. That day, though, the shelf...

Lessons of history

If he were allowed contact with foreigners he would discover that they are creatures similar to himself and that most of what he has been told about them is lies. The sealed world in which he lives would be broken, and the fear, hatred, and self-righteousness...

What ripples beneath

JEREMY B PULLMAN was a tall, slim man with pale grey eyes and a number-three buzz cut along the sides of his skull. The rest of his dark hair was pulled back into a ponytail and tied together at the base of his neck,...

Those who trespass against us

MY CHILDHOOD ENDED when I was ten. It was 21 March 2002. The subdued beauty of an autumn afternoon in Toowoomba. Cool enough to be winter. Dying light and green leaves. A yellow dome glowing in the western skies. Mort Estate remained in the pre-gentrification era....

A case of Dutch melancholy

I FIRST VISITED the Netherlands in 2002, just after the Dutch had kissed goodbye to their beloved guilders and embraced the euro. The atmosphere was one of excitement. This progressive and liberal country was, together with other European Union members, embarking on an audacious...

Crossing lines

THE DAY AFTER the news filled with Hilary Clinton’s pneumonia diagnosis, I found the Al-Salaam restaurant closed. I looked up and down my local stretch of Changi Road, wondering where else I could get some breakfast roti, and quickly gathered this wasn’t a normal...

Rush to judgement

NOWRA SHOWGROUND IS a ten-minute walk from the centre of town: past Best & Less, Jolly Olly’s Discount Variety Store, the Postman’s Tavern, the Bowling Club and along a wide, tree-lined residential street. The gateway is a towering, seven-metre-high sandstone structure with four entrance...

The remixing of peoples

THE TASOS MARKOU AND his fiancé, Maria, were on their sofa avoiding Greece’s summer heat when a video of a man carting a toddler in a green wheelie bin turned up in their social media feeds. The place looked familiar: a Mediterranean coastal village,...

Missing pieces

FOR FIVE DAYS over late August and early September in 2016, a strange case gripped the Australian media. A family of five abruptly went missing from their rural property east of Melbourne. They left their house unlocked, and all potential trace elements behind: phones,...

Rise again

EVERY TIME ANYONE asks me how I came to Australia, I tell them I was adopted from China. It’s a story that doesn’t make anyone uncomfortable. It’s a story that doesn’t draw pitying looks. It’s a story that doesn’t make me look like a...

Shanghai Baby

On the surface of the globe, for living matter in general, energy is always in excess; the question is always posed in terms of extravagance. The choice is limited to how the wealth is to be squandered.Georges Bataille BASRA WAKES TO the sound of knocking...

Sous chef

They have to go.  – Trump This is how I remember you: Thursday nights, stray curlsstrong arms, beads & masks, stretch pants, your brown skinso light and warmI think it meltsin fractions of milliseconds. On Thanksgiving you made empanadas.Next to you I was a tissue waiting...

I am building a wall

when they ask me what i’m doingat the end of this long campaignwhen they ask which course i’m pursuingthese words are my refraini will say:i am building a wall. i am building a wall with the press of my palmsi am building a wall i...

Europe, June 2016

The flight path on the screenacross the aisle is a green linejoining the dots from Manchesterthrough Amsterdam, Bucharest,now Istanbul, now Baghdad.Far below us the Tigris River seepslike history from the Taurus Mountains.Europe is an idea not a marketthe French president is sayingon BBC World...

Content farms

Search optimisation is the bronzewing’s nemesis or indifference if it’s your attention it wants, though it’s not; link farming from Russian capitalists to offset the tender feelings aroused by recently planted olive tree saplings wilting with the frost, or the discovery of a thriving new Jam tree sapling – disturbed...

Signs of life