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. 

Christians so often have problems with sex these days. Australians saw this when, during the Marriage Law Postal Survey, the Anglican Archbishop of Sydney begged them to uphold a ‘biblical definition’ of marriage – if there were such a thing. Representatives of every denomination fret endlessly over their responsibility for enabling the sex offenders and abusers of children who were hidden in plain sight in their midst. That some do this even as they fulminate against overt sexual expression in the public sphere (the Paris Olympics opening ceremony anyone?) makes them seem even more out of touch.

Angela Hewitt, one of the world’s leading concert pianists, appears in recital and as soloist with major orchestras throughout Europe, the Americas, Australia, and Asia. Her interpretations of the music of J.S. Bach have established her as one of the composer’s foremost interpreters of our time. Her latest Australian tour takes in Adelaide, Melbourne, Bendigo, and Sydney, from 9 to 15 October.

Shakespeare’s world view – his multiplicity and pluralism, all that teeming vitality crashing up against itself – acts like a tabula rasa even when it is precisely the opposite: one can project oneself onto his work not because it is a blank slate but because it contains multitudes. When it comes to his actual opinions, however – his inclinations and proclivities, his personal, political, and spiritual beliefs – he is notoriously difficult to pin down. One of his greatest skills, after all, is a consummate ability to play both sides of an argument.

In the dying days of the ignominious Conservative government that he led from 2019 to 2022, the former UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson compared his fall to that of Shakespeare’s Othello. ‘It is the essence of all tragic literature,’ he claimed, ‘that the hero should be conspicuous, that he should swagger around and that some flaw should lead to a catastrophic reversal and collapse.’ Fintan O’Toole seizes on this self-serving, deluded commentary as an instance of a widespread misconception of Shakespeare’s tragic art and one that can be traced, in part, to the playing fields of Eton.

William Dalrymple’s tour de force avoids all the pit-falls of superpower competition, identity politics, and over-simplification, but nonetheless places Indian cultural and economic achievements at the centre of the changing worlds of the West and Asia from c.250 bce to 1200 ce. The Golden Road: How Ancient India transformed the world explains how and why Indian influence in China reached a high-water mark ‘never to be reached again’ during the reign of Empress Wu Zetian (the Fifth Concubine), who died at the age of eighty-one in 705 ce, having ruled China for some fifty years.

Whenever I spot the new flyers of our university’s student communist club, all I can do is admire the gumption. Talk about seriously swimming against the tide, the political equivalent of hawking CDs in a Spotify world. When just broaching the topic of negative gearing can torpedo a major political party in this country, what chance is there that the kids are going to abolish private property altogether? The truth is that communism’s only active role in the West today is playing the bogeyman, a danger label to be slapped on anything conservatives find insufficiently conservative. See, for example, the current US vice-president, who had only to politely request a little more corporate tax, please, sir, and voila, she’s Comrade Kamala, cackling her way to the gulag.

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 fifteen years from the end of the World War II to 1960 were in many ways a dark period of queer history in the United Kingdom. The 1920s and 1930s were relatively relaxed in their attitudes to the gay world. As Adam de Hegedus, writing as Rodney Garland, wrote in his novel The Heart in Exile (1953), ‘the war broke down inhibitions and the element of danger made sex rampant. Public opinion was lax and the understaffed police had many other things on their minds.’

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.