The Iranian city of Ramsar, overlooking the Caspian Sea, was the site of a meeting that brought together delegates from around the world at the beginning of 1971. The meeting was held to determine the future global management of the world’s few remaining wetlands, vital habitats for transnational migratory bird species such as Latham’s Snipe (Gallinago hardwickii), which fly annually between Australia and Japan.

Happy the media company that can afford to shed almost a hundred journalists without jeopardising the quality of its newspapers. That’s what Nine has done, with eighty-five journalists, many of them senior ones, taking up voluntary redundancies from The Age, The Sydney Morning Herald, and the Australian Financial Review. Among them were Jewel Topsfield, Royce Millar, Farrah Tomazin, Jack Latimore, Osman Faruqi, and Martin Boulton, as reported in the Guardian.

In Vex Ashley’s film Machine Learning Experiments, a body – she, they, he, them, take your pick – is penetrated by a luminescent black tube. The body’s boundaries dissolve in the pleasure of becoming: animate/inanimate, human/non-human, interior and exterior, inorganic and inorganic. Backed by the steady pulse of Boy Harsher’s Augustus Muller, the series’ tripartite sequence – ‘Automation’, ‘Orgone Theory’, ‘Hydra’ (this last ‘about invading and consuming’) – offers a psychosocial exploration of transmission and penetrability of all kinds.

For German literary critic Walter Benjamin, translation belongs to the ‘afterlife’ of a work, by which he means the ‘transformation and a renewal of something living’. In this sense, a new translation extends this afterlife, renews and sustains it. This does not mean every new translation is worthy of the original, but it does bring it back into the light.

The Covid-19 pandemic has left its mark on all of us. How could it not? The shuttered small businesses; the warring states; the spectre of aged care residents, hands pressed against glass, unable to touch or receive relatives. The Centrelink queues, the taped-up playgrounds, the closed borders. The stranded cruise ships, the panic buying of toilet paper, the unrelenting and crushing boredom of our four walls. Personally, I can’t see a North Face jacket without a visceral flashback to our erstwhile Victorian premier and his trademark press conference opener: ‘We right to go?’ The desire to forget all of this, to move on from the pandemic, is what makes Australia’s Pandemic Exceptionalism: How we crushed the curve but lost the race such an important contribution to the literature of Covid-19 post-mortems.

Aby Warburg (1866-1929) was an influential figure in the academic development of interdisciplinary studies during the early years of the twentieth century, and Hans Hönes’s excellent new biography charts the contributions and contradictions of Warburg’s life and work. Born into an immensely rich banking family in Germany, Warburg nevertheless resisted the expectations associated with his Jewish family background and, despite his grandmother’s hope that he might become a rabbi, opted to carve out for himself a career in humanities scholarship.

Everyone gets at least one lucky break in life, or so the saying goes. For me, one of the luckiest was a childhood spent in Papua New Guinea (PNG). In 1966, my father left Melbourne for what was then the Territory of Papua and New Guinea, prompted by curiosity and the opportunity to work on kuru, a fatal neurogenerative disease affecting the Fore people of the Eastern Highlands. My mother joined him two years later, in 1968, and in PNG they remained until 1990.

Dominic Kelly’s surgery on Frank Brennan’s and Damien Freeman’s analysis of the failed Aboriginal and Torres Voice referendum (ABR, August 2024) reveals how blinkered all three of these worthy commentators remain about bipartisanship. By putting the issue into the populist arena, the Albanese government lost the chance of the century. All state Labor governments and the Liberal-held Tasmanian legislature supported the Voice, as did the Territory Assemblies. Section 51, Article 37 of the Australian Constitution allows the federal Parliament, working in tandem with state legislatures, to enlarge federal legislative power without approval by a national referendum. Long before the vote on 14 October 2023, John Menadue’s wonderful Pearls & Irritations published this analysis. Not a single voice challenged that prospect. 

In his famous outburst before the gathered men of the Symposium, Plato has Alcibiades declare that behind his ‘Silenus-like’ mask, Socrates is full of ‘divine and golden images’. He can see the gold where others see only the mask, and it is this which makes Alcibiades so desperate for the old man’s approbation. 

In 2014, while judging the Forward Prize for Poetry – one of poetry’s most prestigious awards – broadcaster and author Jeremy Paxman declared that ‘[p]oetry has connived its own irrelevance’. Paxman was talking about his desire for poetry ‘to engage with ordinary people’, to speak beyond the borders of sandstone institutions and for poets to become what Shelley called ‘the unacknowledged legislators’.