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ABR Arts

Book of the Week

Bad Cop: Peter Dutton’s strongman politics (Quarterly Essay 93)
Politics

Bad Cop: Peter Dutton’s strongman politics (Quarterly Essay 93) by Lech Blaine

Bill Hayden might today be recalled as the unluckiest man in politics: Bob Hawke replaced him as Labor leader on the same day that Malcolm Fraser called an election that Hayden, after years of rebuilding the Labor Party after the Whitlam years, was well positioned to win. But to dismiss him thus would be to overlook his very real and laudable efforts to make a difference in politics – as an early advocate for the decriminalisation of homosexuality, and as the social services minister who introduced pensions for single mothers and Australia’s first universal health insurance system, Medibank. Dismissing Hayden would also cause us to miss the counterpoint he provides to Peter Dutton, current leader of the Liberal Party.

Interview

Interview

Interview

From the Archive

November 2012, no. 346

Victorian Bloomsbury by Rosemary Ashton

‘Victorian Bloomsbury’ appears to be a contradiction in terms. ‘Bloomsbury’, as in ‘the Bloomsbury Group’, is shorthand for the group of writers, artists, and thinkers including Virginia and Leonard Woolf, Clive and Vanessa Bell, Duncan Grant, and Maynard Keynes, who gathered in the area of central London between Euston Road and Holborn in the early decades of the twentieth century. Disparate in some ways, they united in reaction against what they felt to be the oppressive social conventions and outmoded values of the Victorian period, a reaction epitomised by Lytton Strachey’s irreverent Eminent Victorians (1918).

From the Archive

June 2010, issue no. 322

Dark Bright Doors by Jill Jones

In Dark Bright Doors, her tenth book, Jill Jones again explores a sense of contradiction. Perhaps in tune with this theme, Jones’s work here also shows two distinct types of poems, one that is part-hallucinatory, invoking the elements ‘air’, ‘water’ and an encompassing natural world of breath, rain, sky, sun, wings. In these poems, Jones attempts to describe the indescribable, to remark on or absorb the world’s beauty and peril. Many of these poems consequently feel insubstantial and vague, though that may be their aim – to suggest, to hint at something, to sketch in mystery, rather than to pin it down.

From the Archive

October 2005, no. 275

Advances - October 2005

ABR Poetry Competition

Earlier this year, Stephen Edgar won the inaugural ABR Poetry Competition. He picked up a cheque for $2000, and ABC Television made a feature about him and other shortlisted poets – not bad coverage for poets in a country many of whose newspapers and general magazines have so lament-ably and short-sightedly reduced their coverage of poetry. Well, the competition is on again. Its principal aim is to uncover some of the best new poems being written in this country. Up to six of them will be shortlisted in the March 2006 issue; the winner will be announced in April 2006. Full details appear on page 8. The entry form is also available on our website, or on request. The closing date is December 15.