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ABR Arts

Book of the Week

Working for the Brand: How corporations are destroying free speech
Business

Working for the Brand: How corporations are destroying free speech by Josh Bornstein

In November 1997, Bryce Rose was travelling for work in northern New South Wales. Rose was a technical officer with Telstra, and his help was needed in the Armidale area to address a surge in reported faults. Required to spend a few nights away from home, he arranged to share a hotel room with a colleague. On the third night, the pair went for dinner and then on to a nightclub. Much alcohol was consumed, and there was an altercation between them. Around 3 am, Rose returned to the hotel room, only to find the other man waiting for him. The furniture had been rearranged to create a space in the middle of the room. ‘Well, that’s your boxing ring if that’s what you want, mate,’ Rose’s colleague told him. There was a scuffle, and Rose began bleeding. He ultimately needed twelve stitches at the local hospital. Rose appears to have been the more innocent of the parties; his colleague was later convicted over the altercation.

From the Archive

August 1986, no. 83

'Minding the Minders' by James Walter

This book is about the role played by ministerial staff in Australian federal government. It is particularly concerned with the potential influence on policy making that this group may have through their capacity to advise ministers. It is, then, about the nature of the relations between personal advisers and their principals – a general issue that can be explored through history, and in countries other than Australia (see chapter 2). From the outset, however, it is important to differentiate between advice to ministers and advice to government, and the term ‘adviser’ does not sufficiently alert us to that differentiation. Indeed, the term ‘adviser’ is traditionally used to signify public servants, who are formally charged with the responsibility of advice to government. I have therefore elected to borrow the term ‘minder’, a term that is creeping into journalism and into the vernacular to refer to a member of a minister’s staff. We can thus distinguish at once between minders (personal advisers) and mandarins (public servants).

From the Archive

June 2010, issue no. 322

Indelible Ink by Fiona McGregor

In the May issue of ABR, a new Australian novel was praised as being ‘a respite from the anodyne family dramas that seem to plague contemporary commercial publishing’. Of course, there are plenty of uninspiring domestic novels on bookshop shelves – just as there are uninspiring examples of every kind of novel – but when done well, contemporary family drama can be the opposite of anodyne, stimulating readers to analyse and debate the world. The best domestic novels use characters in a specific family or social setting to reflect and explore the values and issues of a particular time and place. Indelible Ink, which follows the intersecting lives of one Sydney family during the last days of the Howard era, is such a book – and looks set to be the most talked-about Australian novel since The Slap.

From the Archive

April 1996, no. 179

'A "tongue of wonders": writing in between languages' by Sophie Masson

The French literary world was agog last year with the news of the awarding of two prestigious prizes, the Prix Goncourt and the Prix Medicis, to a novel called Le Testament Français, by a writer called André Makine. The unusual nature of the novel is that it was written in the most beautiful, yet freshly distinctive French by a man whose maternal tongue is not French at all, but Russian.