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Tom Griffiths

The planet is alive, says Indian novelist Amitav Ghosh, and only for the last three centuries have we forgotten that. This is because humans are suffering from ‘The Great Derangement’, a disturbing condition which this book analyses with wisdom and grace. Ghosh foresees that future citizens of a world transformed by climate change will look back at our time and perceive that ‘most forms of art and literature were drawn into the modes of concealment that prevented people from recognising the realities of their plight’ ...

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In late March, one of our larger Porter Prize audiences gathered at Collected Works Bookshop for readings of the seven shortlisted poems and the naming of the winner. This year our three judges – Ali Alizadeh, Jill Jones, Felicity Plunkett – split the Prize, as happened in 2011 ...

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Originally published in German, Albrecht Dümling’s The Vanished Musicians: Jewish refugees in Australia (Peter Lang), a fascinating compendium of Jewish musicians who found refuge in Australia in the 1930s and 1940s, is now available in Australian Diana K. Weekes’s excellent translation ...

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Australian scholars – at least in my field of history – are very good at reflecting on intellectual traditions. It helps one feel part of a long-term conversation that goes beyond individual reputations or achievements.

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Jennifer Maiden's The Fox Petition: New Poems (Giramondo) conjures foxes 'whose eyes were ghosts with pity' and foxes of language that transform the world's headlines

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This is an important and timely book – another gift to public understanding by Australian scientist and author Tim Flannery. Ten years ago he wrote The Weather Makers (2005), one of a handful of books which, together with Al Gore’s film An Inconvenient Truth (2006), brought the climate crisis to a world audience. Now in Atmosphere of Hope, F ...

To complement the essays, commentaries, reviews, and photographic essay in this issue, we asked a group of leading environmentalists, scientists, commentators, and writers what they regard as the most urgent action needed for environmental reform.

Wayne Bergmann

There is an urgent need for widespread recognition of the interrelationship between the ...

Books of the Year is always one our most popular features. Find out what our 41 contributors liked most this year – and why.

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I am a ‘Sputnik’, born in the year the Soviet satellite launched the Cold War into space. The launching by the Russians of the first artificial Earth satellite on 4 October 1957 seemed to many in the West a threatening symbol of escalating superpower rivalry. And it did unleash extreme military anxiety and triggered what became known as the Space Race. Twelve years later, in the mid-winter of 1969, I remember waking up just before midnight to watch on television as a Saturn V US rocket, wreathed in smoke and flame, inched its way off the ground at Cape Canaveral. It powered mightily against the pull of gravity and triumphed. It was beginning its journey out of Earth’s atmosphere towards the Moon.

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Fire, more than any other thing, challenges the divide between the cultural and the natural, between being human and the non-human world. We make a pact, if not with a devil, at least with terrible danger when we use fire; and it is a pact, despite how it might seem in our urban modernity, over which we have no choice. We need fire. It doesn’t need us. If it truly had character, as it so often seems to, it would be indifferent, callous, cruel. And it is this that cooks our food and warms our toes.

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