Hardie Grant

In Hoodie Economics, Jack Manning Bancroft, the founder of the Australian Indigenous Mentoring Experience (AIME), offers an outline of the organisation’s next chapter. AIME, established in 2005, paired Indigenous secondary school students with university mentors. Since 2015, AIME has begun to transition, in collaboration with PwC’s Indigenous Consulting and alliance partner Salesforce, into a learning and mentoring resource network. As the organisation’s website puts it, AIME’s latest incarnation, the IMAGI-NATION [University], is a ‘global community of problem-solvers and change-makers’ earmarked to end – intentionally – in 2033, leaving behind ‘a legacy of tools, case studies, and a healthier system for all species on earth’. In the meantime, the ‘innovative platform is set to revolutionize how we solve global challenges, fostering a community of thinkers, dreamers, and doers’. In other words, AIME has entered the economies of algorithmic data, decentralisation, and gamification.

Those who call 1942 ‘Australia’s most perilous year’ are not guilty of over-dramatisation. It was, after all, the year when Japan’s aircraft blasted Darwin off the map; when her submarines entered Sydney Harbour, sank a ship and shelled the shoreline; when air raids were happening around Townsville, and Australian ships were being sunk off our coast. It was the year when our best military and air forces were engaged far away in Africa and Europe; when ‘impregnable’ Singapore fell, ending long-held illusions of an Australia safe beneath the imperial British umbrella. It was the year in which a proud Australian fighting force began years of cruel captivity. It was the year John Curtin, acknowledging a brute fact of life, placed Australia’s forces under US command; the year we managed (with massive US help) to hang on by a whisker in New Guinea, ‘the nearest’ – in the words of the Duke of Wellington – ‘the nearest run thing you ever saw in your life’.

This insider’s account of the sexual abuse crisis facing the Christian churches is an engaging read – not only for believers, but for us heathens as well. The author wears various hats. A journalist and regular commentator on religious issues for many years, Muriel Porter now lectures in journalism at RMIT. She describes herself as a ‘committed Anglican laywoman’ who has been involved in high-level structural decision-making within the Anglican Church for the past fifteen years. These multiple roles add much to her discussion, but can also produce some tensions.