Accessibility Tools

  • Content scaling 100%
  • Font size 100%
  • Line height 100%
  • Letter spacing 100%

Dennis Altman

The term 'green ban', first used in 1973, is so much part of our political vocabulary that we forget it has a specific and Australian genesis, which had considerable influence on the Greens ...

... (read more)

Dressed in a suit, standing beside a prime minister, Peter Garrett never looked totally convincing as a cabinet minister. We recalled his onstage persona in Midnight Oil, stooped and balding, a towering figure struggling to contain his energy and passion.

Garrett was minister for the environment, heritage, and the arts in the first Rudd ministry; after the 2 ...

The questions Simon Tormey poses in The End of Representative Politics are crucial, and we need more political scientists willing to grapple with them. His is a well-informed, well written discussion of the apparent crisis of ‘traditional’ politics, and it deserves readers beyond the academy.

Tormey’s basic argument is that the forms of repres ...

As Andrew Scott points out, Australians have a limited and very clichéd knowledge of the Nordic countries. Recently, we have come to appreciate Scandinavia for its bleak police dramas, of which The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is probably the best known. For the right, Scandinavia has long represented socialist excess, which merges with vague notions of unlimited sexuality. The reality is that Sweden, at least, has adopted some laws around sex work and sex venues which are far more stringent than those in Australia. For the left, the Scandinavian nations have represented the hope of a liberal democratic egalitarianism, with taxation and welfare policies that are far more successful than ours.

... (read more)

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

... (read more)

Intimate times

Dear Editor,

Tim Byrne, in his review of Meredith Burgmann’s Dirty Secrets: Our ASIO Files badly misread my complaints about my records. He writes that my [and Gary Foley’s] ‘movements were intimately tracked’. The whole ...

There is a built-in paradox for the Greens: they need to both persuade people that we face major ecological disasters and at the same time hold out hope that we can respond meaningfully to them. To do this requires the sort of corny and touching optimism that gives Bob Brown’s book its title.

Optimism is neither a conventional memoir nor a political autobiography; it is rather a collection of sketches from the life of a man who will be remembered as one of the pivotal figures of Australian politics in the two decades that straddle the new millennium. The style is largely prosaic, excepting moments of real feeling when Brown describes the Tasmanian wilderness and his relationship to it.

... (read more)

All writers mine their lives, some most clearly through combining the autobiographical and the fictional, so that, as with Christopher Isherwood, their works become a mixture of the self-revelatory and observations of the worlds in which they have lived. In more recent times, no one has more closely followed Isherwood than Edmund White, now the author of more than twenty books, professor of writing at Princeton, and a regular contributor to the New York Review of Books.

... (read more)

Michael Fullilove, head of the Lowy Institute, has written about President Roosevelt and the men who helped him to guide the US so reluctantly into World War II. Dennis Altman reviews this model of academic research.

... (read more)

I think we all write out of a mixture of egoism and a need to work out how we understand the world – ‘writing as therapy’. Luckily, I have only rarely felt the need to write to fulfil the demands of academia, which are producing vast amounts of ‘writing’ that benefits no one and is a strain on those forced to produce it.

... (read more)