Edition 36
What Is Australia For?
- Published 26th April, 2012
- ISBN: 9781921922534
- Extent: 264 pp
- Paperback (234 x 153mm), eBook
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In this Edition
The lost option
MONARCHY IN AUSTRALIA is an idea whose time is past. For some time now the question has been how to convincingly Australianise the British monarchy. Conservatives argue that a monarch is essential to our system of government. Despite overseas precedents – and the shining...
Red Dog
IT was a lazy Saturday morning. The winter sun was throwing a pallid wash through the lounge-room window. I needed to go to the market, but breakfast, first: the steam curling upwards from the porridge, dampening my face; the newspaper stiff in its tight...
Kartiya are like Toyotas
'Kartiya are like Toyotas. When they break down we get another one.'– remark by a Western Desert woman about whitefellas who work in Indigenous communitiesUNLIKE THE BROKEN Toyotas, which are abandoned where they fall, cannibalised, overturned, gutted and torched, the broken kartiya go away...
Pissed off
AUSTRALIA, ANY CITY, Saturday night: red unsteady men in pastel shirts and designer sneakers have groping sweaty fists and angry eyes; bored tall thin men in black jeans, pointed leather shoes and structured mullets stand in copses holding conspicuously cheap beer. Lone middle-aged men...
Paradox of identity
'Make it Australian.' 'How?' 'If I knew it I'd be doing it.'– Alex Miller, Autumn Laing (Allen & Unwin, 2011)IN OCTOBER 2011 Australia hosted fifty global leaders when the Commonwealth Heads of Government met in Perth. The significance of the largest gathering of government...
Cultural creep
TODAY IT WOULD be called a reality show, but in the early 1950s the Australian Broadcasting Commission's Incognito was billed as light entertainment. Alas, no recording of the radio program survives in the corporation's vast audio archive. Nor does it earn a mention in...
Girt by a sea of anomalies
FEDERATION BECAME CLEAR to me for the first time recently – at least fifteen years after I served on the Celebration of Federation Committee chaired by Joan Kirner. That was the first time I had been able to witness this deft politician in action,...
The land at the end of the world
THE INVASION OF Australia just didn't make any sense. A huge, dry, bulbous tile, sitting at the end of a chain of shards that dribbled out from Asia. Unlike the smaller islands in the chain, it had no exotic spices to entice and numb...
Mentioning the war
I BLAME Yasunari Kawabata for my obsession with Japan. When I was sixteen I read his short stories 'The House of the Sleeping Beauties' and 'One Arm', and I was hooked. The first, about a lonely old man who finds a place where he...
Red truths and white lies
IN 2004 I drove to the Wave Hill area of the Northern Territory. I had been contracted to assist its Gurindji residents to develop a plan for their neighbouring communities of Kalkaringi and Daguragu, on the banks of Wattie Creek. A year with the...
Andrew Bolt’s disappointment
MY FRIENDS TAKE a breath, lean across the table and assume the tone of Richard Dawkins explaining dinosaurs to intelligently designed Christians. They believe that in my promotion of Aboriginal achievement I'm simply being loyal to family or wanting to take a belligerent stance...
Headstone
AT THE TIME of his death, in 1883, Wambeetch Puyuun was the only Liwira Gunditj still living on his country in the Western District of Victoria. In its obituary, the Camperdown Chronicle reported: 'As the last remnant of his race in this locality has...
Such is life in Beijing
SUNDAY, 3 APRIL 2011: Crossing the Hay Plain at 30,000 feet.Underway at last! I didn't sleep well last night. In part it was the normal anxiety that precedes international travel, exaggerated by the fact that I haven't been overseas for years and that this...
Marrying health and agriculture
IN the past three years there have been urgent calls – by organisations ranging from the United Nations to the Queensland Liberal National Party – to double food production by 2050 and feed a global population of nine billion. The corporate farm lobby, multinational...
My sweet canary
IT'S SEPTEMBER 2010, one of those gloriously bright, almost clichéd Perth afternoons. My husband and I haven't yet separated, but we will soon. At the moment, though, we have a house to sell, one that's been on the market for six weeks without an...
Looking for utopia
'Nowhere have I felt as safe as in this wilderness.'– Melech RavitchTHE WORLD HAS become a blur, borders losing their definition. Countries chase each other clockwise around the axis of a plastic globe I hold on my lap. With one finger I stop them...
The L-word
AS I WALKED through the school gate, its posts stencilled with turtles and goannas, towards the classroom where I take Drama Group, I heard someone call out, 'Hey, Hairy Hayley!'I turned in the direction of the voice. Katia, a Year 6 Aboriginal girl with...
Half Chinese, half Australian
IN 1990, WHILE dark clouds still hung over Tiananmen, I packed up my life in Beijing and landed in Melbourne with my northern Chinese face and Chinese brain. Twenty years later my face is still Chinese but my Chinese brain has somehow shrunk. This...
The cosmic incident report
THE TAXI WAS late, even later than usual. I was too tired to be angry. It would be a waste of precious energy, and besides, I know very well these taxi drivers are gold compared to most. Some don't show up at all. Most...
If you know Bourke you know Australia
'When the heavy sand is yielding backward from your blistered feet, And across the distant timber you can see the flowing heat; When your head is hot and aching, and the shadeless plain is wide, And it's fifteen miles to water in the scrub...
The Basin
JESS STOOD AT the edge of the dam holding her daughter's hand. She had said they were going to the beach, but it wasn't a beach, just a flat bit of gravel that fell away to the water. The water didn't even lap. Around...
Oxtales
Selected for Best Australian Stories 2012Howqua to Jamieson.My name is Nelson after the Pommy sailor who lost an eye to grapeshot. Or in my case a whip. My left eye is gristle. I can't see Yella the newblood walking beside me. I can't see...
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Frances Guo is a Peking University graduate and journalist who migrated to Australia in 1990.She has since studied journalism...
