Commentary

This week, on The ABR Podcast, we feature Sean Scalmer’s commentary ‘Albanese’s “Australian Way”: The rise of “progressive patriotism” and its complex past’. Scalmer investigates Albanese’s definition of the ‘Australian Way’, which ‘served as a touchstone on the campaign trail’, and asks what this ethos represents for the Labor government, particularly in the context of Australia’s complex history of labour reform.

Zoom in. The most unusual detail in this painting is the left hand, with tattooed dots carefully spaced across its back and knuckles. The fingers themselves are poorly done. The thumb and pointer are folded into the figure’s thick cloth folds, but the other three digits lie on the material like tapered slugs. Today they might be held up as evidence of AI image generation – bad hands are the quickest tell. In the eighteenth century, to the initiated, bad hands were a sign that the work came from the studio of Sir Joshua Reynolds.

This week, on The ABR Podcast, we feature ‘Deeper into darkness: Iran after the twelve-day war’. Australian journalist Zoe Holman writes on life in Iran after the recent twelve-day war, investigating whether conflict brought Iranians closer to democracy or further away from it.

‘To the victor belongs the spoils.’ The adage is attributed to William Macy, New York senator and defender of Jacksonian democracy. The aftermath of victory allows one to frame significance, settle scores, and proclaim lessons that will justify and guide a new government.

On the steps of Federal Parliament, a scrum assembled. Reporters jostled for position, enraged members of the public shouted over one another, advisers stood with faces drained of composure – even a comedian was caught in the fray. At the centre stood the tall and imposing figure of Prime Minister Gough Whitlam, listening as the governor-general’s official secretary read the proclamation dissolving Parliament. The moment, instantly mythic, would be remembered as ‘the dismissal’ – the most audacious constitutional rupture in Australian history, one that continues to haunt democratic life half a century on.

This week, on The ABR Podcast, we feature Nathan Hollier’s commentary ‘“Come nearer to Asia”: Australia’s place at Bandung, 1955.’ Seventy years after the 1955 Asian-African Conference, Hollier reflects on Australia’s official absence from this historic ‘postcolonial moment’, as well as its unofficial presence.

It’s 5.30 pm on New Year’s Day. Michael and I are sitting at the picnic table under the huge rowan tree in our backyard. The air is thick with heat, citronella, and our lethargy. We had a good Christmas and New Year’s, our kids at ten and thirteen young enough to embrace the magic of it all. End-of-school parties rolling into loops of carols, carrots left for reindeers, treasure piles and tables of food. Last night marked the peak of the revelry: a crowded barbecue around our neighbour’s pool, ritual gathering of eskies, wet children and sparklers in the fading light, cockatoos luminous and screeching the last of 2024 in the bush over the back fence.

The seventieth anniversary of the 1955 Asian-African Conference held in the city of Bandung, West Java, Indonesia, passed earlier this year without evident note in Australia. In Asia and Africa, it was the subject of commemorative conferences and gatherings, impassioned speeches and articles. In Bandung itself, a ‘Global History and Politics Dialogue’ heard from Indonesia’s Deputy Foreign Minister and numerous other serving and past parliamentary leaders that the Bandung Spirit is ‘ever more relevant today’. In India, the prominent economist C.P. Chandrasekhar said that ‘seventy years after Bandung, the Global South is still waiting for independence’ and the Bandung Spirit must be revived. For the Global Times of China, what we make of the historical ‘inheritance’ of Bandung is ‘a matter of practical choices’.

In September 2024, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu sent a video message to the ‘noble Persian people’ of Iran. His address contained both a warning and a promise. ‘With every passing moment,’ he cautioned, the regime of the Islamic Republic was bringing them ‘closer to the abyss. The vast majority of Iranians know their regime doesn’t care a whit about them.’ When Iran was free, however, it would be different – thriving through global investment, tourism, and the innovation of its peoples. He concluded his dispatch by telling Iranians, ‘You deserve more. The people of Iran should know: Israel stands with you.’

Located on Yawuru Country in Rubibi (Broome), Magabala Books is one of the most remote publishers in the world. This First Nations publishing house has helped redefine Australian publishing since the 1980s by continually ensuring that Aboriginal stories and voices are in print. Since its formal establishment in 1987 – following a landmark desert meeting in 1984 and with funding from the Australian Bicentenary Authority’s National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Program and the Kimberley Aboriginal Law and Cultural Centre – Magabala has published more than 250 authors from across Australia. The press emerged in direct response to the widespread appropriation of Indigenous stories by Settler people and publishing houses and continues to define how publishing can best serve Aboriginal authors, artists, and illustrators.