Alex O'Brien
Alex O'Brien reviews 'A Country Too Far: Writings on Asylum Seekers' edited by Rosie Scott and Tom Keneally
Australia is a country that will not be intimidated by its own decency. On 28 August 2001, as a detail of Special Air Services soldiers was dispatched to MV Tampa, Prime Minister John Howard spoke about the 438 people – mostly Afghan Hazaras – who languished aboard the freighter ...
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Much travel is unpleasant (with over-expectations, too many tourists, and long distances from Australia), but even the sedentary or timorous persist with it in some ‘misguided duty to culture’, as Brendan Shanahan describes in his first collection of essays, Mr Snack and the Lady Water. Assembling journeys from the mid-1990s until now, Shanahan reco ...
Alex O'Brien reviews 'The 2013 Voiceless Anthology' edited by J.M. Coetzee et al.
‘Death has a dual character,’ Zadie Smith writes in her novel The Autograph Man (2002); ‘it seems to be everywhere and nowhere at the same time’. Popular culture is currently awash with cookery programs and diet fads, yet the lives of animals, and the industries that deal in their deaths, have never been more absent from city life. It seems reas ...
Alex O'Brien reviews 'Reframe: How to Solve the World’s Trickiest Problems' by Eric Knight
Infinitely cooler
Alex O’Brien
HipsterMattic
by Matt Granfield
Allen & Unwin, $24.99 pb, 320 pp, 9781742377858
In the past, a twenty-something could exemplify le dernier cri without having to dispense with his bicycle gears, reflecto ...