Edition 29
Prosper or Perish
- Published 7th September, 2010
- ISBN: 9781921656170
- Extent: 264 pp
- Paperback (234 x 153mm), eBook
Even for a country built on immigration, the continuing high rates of population growth are testing the consensus of national identity and demand a visionary approach to imagine a very different future, with a bigger, older population in a world that is bursting at the seams.
A major essay by award winning author and ABC presenter of The National Interest, Peter Mares explores the tensions between a humanitarian and an environmental approach to migration and population, with a look at the emergence of an anti-growth movement and political party and an evaluation of how we measure economic growth and quality of life.
The pressure of how to strike the right balance between environmental preservation, cultural diversity and a robust economy will make population and immigration policies a significant factor in this year’s federal election.
Prosper or Perish explores what’s at stake in getting the mix right, and reports on the realities for a new generation of global citizens whose work, lives and relationships stretch across borders and blend traditional identities.
It includes moving memoirs, reportage from the front line and insightful analysis of the competing perspectives.
In this Edition
Who cares for Cohen?
THERE WAS A time when romance flourished at sea, when ships traversed the globe under clouds of steam, set free by champagne bottles smashed into glass shards. Men in boater hats and women in fine dresses sailed from one exotic port to another, eyes...
Ngati Skippy
FROM DEEP INSIDE the tunnel, a tinny engine revs. It’s Storm Man, half Ned Kelly, half Phantom, a living mascot for all us losers. He bursts out onto the Anzac Day green of Melbourne’s Etihad Stadium, lime quad bike screeching, fists pumping, muscles quivering...
Violence against women
THE CULTURAL AND social bases for violence against women have been a focus of public attention for at least four decades. Women’s refuges were among the earliest manifestations of the feminist revival that commenced about that time, in the late 1960s. There is no...
We are all learners now
Shortlisted, 2010 Australian Human Rights Commission Awards, Print Media Category I AM NOT an ocean person. I don’t like the sea particularly – it makes me nervous, and I find its endlessly shifting tidal sighs annoying and distracting rather than calming. And then there is...
Thousandth miles
PHUC COMES TO give me flowers and my husband a bottle of wine. He has to catch two buses and walk a fair way from the city to deliver his gifts. His reason for coming this evening, he says, is that Richard was one...
A humanist on thin ice
I FEEL LUCKY to have visited both of Earth’s polar ice caps. Seven years ago I voyaged to Antarctica on an Australian routine expedition ship to resupply one of the scientific stations down south. I experienced that awesome encounter by sea with the great...
The greatest spoiler
‘The hard-nosed realists who claim there is no need for another world have clearly not been reading the newspapers.’– Terry Eagleton, The Gatekeeper (Allen Lane, 2002) AUSTRALIA'S DEVELOPMENT HISTORY is, as the historian Geoffrey Bolton describes it, a tale of spoils and spoilers. White settlers unleashed a...
Garden cities of tomorrow
A PROJECTED AUSTRALIAN population of thirty-six million people by 2050 is being touted as a figure to fear. The pressure on food supply, lifestyle, natural resources, transport, housing and urbanisation, the thinking goes, means ‘we’ll all be rooned.’ Yet the raw numbers and past experience...
Bardon, 1949
IN MY MIND'S eye, it all begins with the grass: long, wild-green and waving. Like a head of unruly hair parted and re-parted by the wind. I am seeing it still, bowing and tossing itself about above me on the hill, an almost indigo-blue...
Where is home?
WHEN I GET the urge to be elsewhere, as I sometimes do, it’s often my childhood home, Hong Kong. As I hanker for it, my mind’s eye evokes the sights, sounds and smells of the place with all the veracity of Aldous Huxley’s ‘feelies’...
Crossings
THE PASSAGE FROM the small island city of Victoria to Vancouver across the Strait of Georgia was a ferry ride of nearly two hours. The British Columbia Ferry was a leviathan of a ship, its carrying capacity impressive. The lower decks were crammed with...
Mixing it up in Bennelong
OUTSIDE EASTWOOD VILLAGE Superfresh, a cavernous fruit and vegetable store, a ruddy-faced Italian in a leather apron is spruiking the day’s specials to a stream of Chinese shoppers. In the nearby pedestrian mall, two Korean teenagers – one with dyed-blond locks, the other wearing...
O Maker of Distances
A POEM FELL out of a folder marked Creative Writing that was handed to me by the co-ordinator of the Refugee Language Program. The author was a real poet,’ the co-ordinator, Lesley Carnus, said as she mused over the works in the folder. ‘By...
Monday morning in Mernda
When I visited the display homes at Mernda Villages, I was acutely aware that Mernda will be anything but a village once all the sites are sold, the houses built and the homes occupied.
The salesman
Selected for Best Australian Stories 2010MARLY SAT ON the front veranda, waiting. Shaun and Azza had been working on Azza’s car all day, driving Shaun’s ute to the wrecker’s for parts, taking Azza’s black V8 for spins around the streets, steering the big car...
The bridal lesson
‘When a woman has her regular flow of blood, the impurity of her monthly period will last seven days, and everyone who touches her will be unclean until evening.’Leviticus 15:19 A MONTH BEFORE they left for Australia, just after Gorbachev was elected and her father had...
Sunday Sunday
‘Politics is the art of shifting trouble from the living to the unborn.’– George Monbiot‘...let no man talk to me of these and the like expedients, ’till he hath at least some glympse of hope, that there will ever be some hearty and sincere attempt to put...
Settling
Outside and the blue below,the forming and vanishing slits of white:the Pacific Ocean. Always that momentdeep into the fifth hourgoing on the eighthwhen a settling has overcomemy upright seated body.My eyes rest on nothingbut space through the rounded windowand the air is measured into...
Ways to kill cane toads
Some mornings come so thick with sleepwe cannot find the stubble on our faces.That first step into a working dayis a bunching of nerves and breath,a little like how I felton driving the woodheap axeinto my first cane toad. His kind have inspired an unspoken...
Featured Contributors
Lee Kofman
Lee Kofman is the author of three works of fiction and the two memoirs Imperfect (Affirm Press, 2019), which...
Peter Mares
Peter Mares is program director at the Cranlana Centre for Ethical Leadership at Monash University and a contributor to...
Brendan Gleeson
Brendan Gleeson is a professor of urban policy studies in the Faculty of Architecture, Building and Planning at the University...
CK Stead
CK Stead is one of New Zealand's foremost literary figures.He is a distinguished novelist, literary critic, poet, essayist and...
