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ABR Arts

Book of the Week

Interview

Calibre Essays

From the Archive

February 2004, no. 258

Tampering with Asylum by Frank Brennan & From Nothing to Zero by Julian Burnside

It had to be the black metaphor of the season. On Boxing Day, Radio National ran a short, sharp-edged conversation on Australia’s changing relations with the Pacific island-states. One contributor, Professor William Maley, said that the Australian government’s bribery of the destitute statelet of Nauru made him think of ‘the caddish squire seeking out the most wretched prostitute in the village’. Responding. Richard Ackland commented that those who devised the appalling Pacific Solution seemed extraordinarily unconscious of the connotations that still attend that word ‘solution’.

From the Archive

November 2013, no. 356

Ray Cassin reviews 'The Prince'

Church leaders have rarely become national public figures, let alone objects of political contention, in Australia. Since Federation, the number who could be so described can be counted on fewer than the fingers of one hand. There is Ernest Burgmann, the Anglican prelate who earned the sobriquet ‘the red bishop’ for his espousal of left-wing causes during the Depression. Much better known is Daniel Mannix, the long-serving Catholic Archbishop of Melbourne, whose interventions in controversies ranging from conscription campaigns during World War I to Cold War agitation over communist influence in the Labor movement implicated him in two of the ALP’s great splits. And now there is George Pell, Catholic Archbishop of Sydney, a cardinal and a man who is capable, as Mannix was, of arousing both hero worship and intense fear and loathing.

From the Archive

June 2013, no. 352

Daniel Herborn reviews 'Every Parent’s Nightmare' by Belinda Hawkins

Like the best examples of true crime books, Every Parent’s Nightmare goes far beyond the tragedy at its centre and places it in its socio-economic context. Belinda Hawkins details how a death in Bulgaria back in 2007 became a highly politicised incident, and offers a convincing explanation as to why the trial was so sloppy and one-sided ...