Born of reform

THE 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 given the private club an...

So dry a homeland

THERE ARE STILL some hot summer nights when I can tool around Adelaide with the windows down and feel like a teenager on the hunt. It’s 30 degrees at eight in the evening, and down at the beach people are queuing for ice-cream. Henley Square’s...

Stormy times

IN SEPTEMBER 2016, South Australia was buffeted by the most ferocious storm in half a century. Apocalyptic clouds gathered as thousands of lightning strikes hit the saturated landscape. The nation watched the unfolding crisis as an intense low-pressure system, two tornadoes, flooding rains and...

In the dark

A CELEBRITY CHEF declares dairy causes osteoporosis, and cholesterol medication is bad. Parents shy away from giving their children life-saving vaccinations. People are stringing crystals around their neck, then necking kale juice on the way to the chiropractors to have their neck cricks cracked. ‘Truthiness’ –...

Diminishing city

EXACTLY FIFTY YEARS ago, in the spring of 1966, my family left the Pennington Migrant Centre in Adelaide to drive up Highway 1 to Whyalla. Our destination, BHP’s Milpara hostel, was a full day’s journey away in a second-hand faded blue Ford Zephyr. As...

Radical roots in Fiji

SOUTH AUSTRALIA’S REPUTATION for progressive reform extends back to its origins in Edward Gibbon Wakefield’s scheme for imperial systematic colonisation. Wakefield’s grand plans, which inspired followers and shaped several colonies in Australasia, aimed to rid Australia of convict transportation and to assist respectable free...

Behind every story

IT MAY NOT be the best painting in the Art Gallery of South Australia, and it may not be the most valuable. But one of the gallery’s most historically significant paintings is an enormous canvas by the nineteenth-century Adelaide artist Charles Hill, entitled The...

Remembering Roxby Downs

IN 1842, THE mainly British and German settlers who had arrived en masse at the beginning of South Australia’s colonial history six years earlier were given a huge economic surprise. The colonists, largely farmers, artisans and public servants and their dependents, learnt of the...

God bless the footy

WHEN IT CAME to colourful and controversial views, the long-time mayor of Port Augusta, Joy Baluch, set elite standards: ‘I hate sport,’ she said in 2008: I’ve never had time for it, been too busy looking after a family, you know, surviving. It’s a waste...

The value of culture

PICTURE ONE: THERE are eight people sitting around a table on the top floor of a high-rise building in the heart of Adelaide’s CBD. Four of us are from a humanities research project looking for new ways to account for the value of arts...

Intercultural futures

‘SO WHAT? THERE’S no story here,’ the marketing consultant snapped down the phone. ‘I mean, bloody hell, the premier’s forever banging on about Asia, and everybody’s heard it all before.’ Welcome to South Australia, a state working hard to internationalise itself so that it might...

The gathering storm

ADELAIDE’S WEST TERRACE Cemetery has its share of famous residents, not all of them human. The sell-out release of the cemetery’s own boutique olive oil, grown on site, has drawn attention to the established groves of olive trees that populate the grounds of the...

Princeland

THIS IS A story about a new, breakaway state that was proposed in 1861, taking 18 million acres from Victoria and nine million from South Australia. It was to be called Princeland. This story is supposed to be a part of a publication with distinctly...

Trace fossils

This was a landscape of fossils and trace fossils – the preserved impressions left by the passage of a living body through sediment – jostling for attention.

Learning the local language

IT WAS IN a Melbourne museum that I realised I didn’t know the traditional name for the area in South Australia where I’d grown up. I was leaning over a large map of Victoria carved in wood and displayed on a low table. On...

Outlaw one

‘THE WIND IS my hairdresser,’ says Sue Coleman Haseldine, known locally as Aunty Sue, stepping out into her dusty yard and letting the hot north wind rush through tangled thick black hair. A wire clothesline stretches across the dirt yard, tractors and car carcasses...

Fly in, fly far away

THE ARGUMENT IN the car starts the way it always does. One brother’s arm is around the other’s shoulders, the two are wrestling, both are laughing and then the eldest uses too much force, the youngest screams and from the front seat I swear....

Bigger than heaven

1 I RECALL VERY little about myself before the age of six. I possess no photographs to jolt the hidden memories, and those few relatives I see at birthday and Christmas celebrations have only the faintest sense of what I was like as a boy....

Dunstan, Christies and me

ADELAIDE’S GOLDEN AGE began when the Beatles flew into town on 12 June 1964, electrifying the citizenry out of their country--town torpor into a screaming mass on the streets. It ended when a dressing-gowned Don Dunstan resigned office on 15 February 1979, the last...

After Barbara

My art is something precious; something locked behind my tongue.Barbara Hanrahan, Sea Green (Fontana Books, 1980) TWO YEARS AGO, a spiritual experience punctuated my otherwise secular existence. I was standing in a strange hallway. The walls were covered with framed prints of the most absorbing...

Dispatches from the radical centre

SOUTH AUSTRALIANS HAVE a reputation for being a little bit up themselves. They speak with soft-toned vowels. They boast of their free-settler status, pride themselves as being the progressive heart of the nation and proclaim dominance in the arts, viticulture and cuisine. In Queensland,...

Waiting for the sun

EVEN THOUGH I have been lost in the pop-culture megastores of Tokyo, and touched the bronze horns of the Wall Street bull, I never truly appreciated the redemptive power of capitalism until I visited an auction of equipment from a decommissioned coal-power station. It...

Changing course

We shall not cease from exploration And the end of all our exploring Will be to arrive where we started And know the place for the first time. TS Eliot, ‘Little Gidding’ ONE WARM LONDON afternoon last autumn, a large group of avant-garde Australian winemakers took over a nightclub...

The Palais

WHEN RUBY FIRST moves to town she stays with the Miss Wrights on Prospect Road, on the recommendation of her Aunt Maude. Aunt Maude is a frequent visitor, and if Ruby is spending the weekend in town, she joins them in the parlour for...

Bad breath

RUMBA WONDERED WHY his parents were taking so long. He was both elated and anxious because he could keep drinking until he heard their car come up the driveway but was worried they might know that he broke into the science lab. Bloody Charlie...

A local footnote

A WRITER HAS come to town. A reputation for greatness precedes him. His prize-winning books are plainly spoken, yet demanding. In person, he is a man of few words. He looks fit, with a sweet smile, and perhaps a little shy. He gets a...

One short mile from land

HE FELT IT first when the horses shifted and cried. They had been muttering among themselves all day, but this was different, a note of panic in it. The horses aren’t yours to care about, George, he reminded himself. He went from cabin to...

The honesty window

A SMALL PRINTED card offered extra towels, if they should need them. They hadn’t been provided in the first instance, Leah read, because the guesthouse was eco-friendly. The card was cream coloured, expensive and embossed with an unfamiliar font. Leah rubbed the corner between...

Adelaide detours

From the southWhat is the smoke?Is this a city or somethingmore inexplicable?Don’t talk of alleys, this isa suburb, see the trees.There is no river, not reallyroads are slightly tattered.There are garlands on the stripsbetween districts, wine and roses.Trucks fall from the hillsfull of heat...

When silence is handcuffed

she knew when she awokethat some one had raped hergathering her clothes togetherin the back alley she dressed quicklyflushed herself pissing behind a treespat and spat and spat to clean her mouthbefore joining the anonymity in the malland watching for the culprits’ eyeswhen we...

Lost geographies

Wadu Matyidi

WADU MATYIDI BEGAN in a curious, perhaps unique way. Jillian Bovoro and I started the Adnyamathanha language course Inhaadi Adnyamathanha Ngawarla. It had been running for a term and a half. Most of the students were beginners, some had a smattering of language. Most...