Edition 19
Re-imagining Australia
- Published 3rd June, 2008
- ISBN: 9780733322815
- Extent: 272 pp
- Paperback (234 x 153mm)
It is now time to re-imagine Australia again, to learn from the past and imagine a future for a new century.
Leading legal activist George Williams declares the system of government has passed its used-by date with antiquated rules of democracy that limit involvement.
He proposes a way to repair this and build on the traditions of the past to solve the blame game that paralyses change in Australia. This is a compelling, once-in-a-generation opportunity.
Re-imagining Australia is not a political wish list. It paints the big picture of how the nation evolved and where it might go. It is optimistic and tough minded – personal, political and unpredictable.
In this Edition
Thawing the frozen continent
AUSTRALIA'S SYSTEM OF government has passed its use-by date in too many respects. The federal arrangements are dysfunctional, ministerial responsibility has broken down and the system fails to adequately protect fundamental rights and freedoms. Too many of the processes that made sense when Australia...
Clean, orderly and laminex coloured
WHAT DOES AUSTRALIA look like? In the 1950s a school-aged Hilary McPhee, in an essay on what Australia would be like in 2000, foresaw it as ‘clean and orderly and laminex coloured – and everyone had an abundance of leisure'. McPhee was Chair of...
Dreams of freedom
I'M LYING PROPPED up on one elbow at Kyeemagh beach, looking out over Botany Bay. I love this utterly urban seascape; less than a kilometre away, planes taxi out to the water's edge, turn and lumber into the air, in steady, unbroken lines. A...
Listening is harder than you think
ON THE VARNISHED surface of the table at which I sit to write someone has scored the three quarter view of a naked girl looking over her shoulder. It has a certain copyist facility; the hand spread coquettishly on the hip is surprisingly well...
A radical legacy
Selected for Best Australian Political Writing 2009LIKE ALL GREAT speeches, the Tenterfield Oration delivered on October 24, 1889 – the most significant speech in Australian history – was a call to action, a call to the Australian people to achieve by peace what the...
Stories from the dustbin
‘A WRITER,' DECLARED the novelist Thomas Mann, ‘is someone for whom writing is harder than it is for other people.' University-based historians working in Australian history are fast learning the truth of Mann's little dictum. In schools and universities and in the community's general...
Border tales
THE ROAD TO the Queensland-New South Wales border turns through former dairy farms and tropical fruit plantations, many now abandoned and disappearing under a canopy of camphor laurel and regenerated rainforest: hoop pines, figs, quandongs, even young cedars press in on the narrow road....
The states we’re in
We are the same people sprung from the same race. We bear allegiance to the same throne. Our ideas, our religion – everything, in fact – is common. There is nothing to keep us apart. We are all one people, and why should we be divided by imaginary...
A vision beyond the blame game
THERE ARE THOSE who argue that the only way to improve the performance of government in Australia is the abolition of the states and the establishment of stronger regional councils. The reality is that no referendum to abolish the states will succeed within the...
Passengers on Train Australia
EIGHTEEN-YEAR-OLD Ritika is a first-generation Indian Australian who lives in Sydney's west. Asked about her views on Australia, she described her response to a school assignment on multiculturalism. ‘I wrote that Australia is like a train picking up passengers from all these different countries,...
Trapped in the Aboriginal reality show
Selected for The Best Australian Political Writing 2008; Winner, Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards 2008, The Alfred Deakin Prize for an Essay Advancing Public Debate JEAN BAUDRILLARD GENERATED international controversy when he described in his essay ‘War Porn' the way images from Abu Graib prison in Iraq...
A new land, 1976
SYDNEY. I LIKED its sound. I pressed my nose against the cold plastic window to look out over the city as we landed.‘Look! The Opera House!' my mother pointed.I followed her finger, and in the distance I saw a strange pointy white building jutting...
A letter to my father
DEAR NEVILLE,I know you weren't that keen on poetry – apart from Henry Lawson's ‘Faces in the Street'– but here's a short poem I wrote a couple of years ago. I'd been looking at the black and white snap that shows us standing at...
Never Never Dreaming
WHEN I LOOKED at my father, I imagined Australia. In those first memories he is a tall figure in a dark blue uniform: handsome, glamorous and exciting, rather like a movie star father might seem today in the eyes of a four-year-old. As well...
Mungo memories
ALONE IN MY parents' kitchen on a recent visit, I was drawn to the sheets of slides scattered on the table.I've walked past my father's organised chaos most of my life. Dad was always surrounded by images from his work in the field, as...
Meat
IF YA HEADING up north anyway, why don't ya try and get a job with the meat works up in Broome? Them buggers earn a fortune.'‘He won't get on without a ticket, Jack. It's all union in the slaughterhouses.'Jack set his schooner back on...
Advance Australia green
ON OCTOBER 1, 1988, at Bibbenluke near Cooma in the Snowy Mountains, a feral fish was declared an Australian and a blow was struck against environmental republicanism. A citizenship certificate had been taken – probably from the local shire council – and 124 years...
Life in translation
I DON'T USUALLY like cheery people – those full of gratitude for life's little miracles and small blessings. I have crossed streets to avoid getting fried in the eternal sunshine of their minds. Not Anya though. Her optimism does not grate. Anya is the...
In Lawson’s tracks
ABOUT TEN KILOMETRES south of Hungerford, I get out of the car and start walking. Hungerford sits on the New South Wales-Queensland border more than two hundred kilometres northwest of Bourke. It's a one-pub town divided by a gate in a rabbit fence which...
The soapbox
(For Bruce Murray)WARWICK LOVED HIS soapbox because standing on it he'd become the centre of attention for once, especially when he convinced his friends to come around and listen between games of cricket down the front drive. They didn't seem to understand much of...
The water person and the tree person
FOR SOME REASON, Andy Melrose's wife had recently started describing him in company as a ‘water person'. Perhaps this could sound summery and sporty to others, even vaguely sensual, but he wasn't sure she was suggesting that, not after twenty-three years. No doubt Lynne...
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