Ravings
Aboriginal Australia - A Personal Story
My journey into Aboriginal Australia started almost by complete accident.
I was completing my reading period for the Victorian Bar, having made the transition from solicitor to barrister, and had no idea how or if I was going to get any work. By chance, I heard a radio program on the ABC AM morning show about the need for new laws to protect Aboriginal artworks from unauthorised reproduction.
Your every waking hour
An admiring study of postwar reconstruction
What is it about wars and the military that produce so much innovation and capacity? This a big and bold book which takes the contemporary collective awareness of Australia's wartime efforts on the battlefield and reflects on the building of the country on the back of the victory in 1945. It also invites the question of how best we can address the imperatives of building social infrastructure.
1939 was a watershed year in a number of ways. As Stuart Macintyre explains, the nation was in continuing decline following the Depression of the late 1920s (with nine per cent unemployment), and was faced with yet another major war on top of the terrible losses in World War I. On the backing of Britain's declaration of support in the face of the threat from an expansionist Japan, Australia committed to assist in the defence of Britain and reluctantly entered yet another European war.
Arcadia (Sydney Theatre Company)
Many wonderful things have been written about this sprawling gem of a play since it was first staged in 1993. Two decades later, it still bamboozles, delights, and moves its audience in its uncompromising search for meaning in love and science. This was a production in genuine homage to one of the great plays of modern times.
All They Seem’d To Want
The Spinifex Art Project and Pissaro at the Art Gallery of South Australia and the Gweagal Shield in the British Museum Collection of Aboriginal artefacts at the National Museum of Australia, Canberra.
Letter from Tel Aviv
Tel Aviv and I go back a few decades. I lived there in the early 1980s, working as a journalist. I fell in love with it then and my romance with the city endures. It is not because it is beautiful or historic (it is barely 100 years old), though the area does have a timeless and much-recorded pre-history. Tel Aviv is badly planned, and many of the buildings are ramshackle and as tenuous as the shifting sands on which the city is built. It is famous for its Bauhaus-style buildings, but many of them are in desperate need of repair. In more recent times, the skyline has been dotted with modernist high-rise tenements and office buildings. They give the city a cold and anonymous edge.
Ceaseless enquiry
Ceaseless enquiry
Review
Excursions in the Law
What’s on a judge’s mind? Litigants and advocates would love to know. Former judge Peter Heerey answers that question in his latest book, a compendium of writing over many years, covering a vast array of topics and in myriad forms.
Odyssey in the desert
Odyssey in the desert
Review
Behind the Doors: An art history from Yuendumu
The painting of the Yuendumu doors in 1984 by Warlpiri artists, whose country is north-west of Alice Springs, represented an extraordinary moment in Australian art and modern art generally. In the 1980s some Aboriginal elders painted the doors in the Yuendumu School building to prompt students to show respect for their school and as a marker of their culture. It was the first time that they had painted using acrylics (not ochres), in colours never before used, to record the major stories of their community.
Tottenham Court Road Tube Station – A Romance With Intrigue
London in January. An unforgiving place for a young fellow from
Melbourne on his own.
You can ignore, living in our paradise in the south, how hard and disinterested the world can be, especially with the sun setting on dark and dreary days in London at 4pm or thereabouts.
Of course, it’s the greatest place with a little spare change in the pocket, which I didn’t have.
It is Saturday morning in Russell Square, and Chelsea is playing Liverpool at Stamford Bridge.
Football, the beautiful game, on which I was reared by a migrant father who had thrown up the shutters on all the Australian games - which were either too violent or too boring, or too many rules or not enough.
Just Say What?
My wife moved to Israel from Melbourne at age 18, and planned to spend the rest of her days there. It was a defiant gesture on her part about where Jews should live. A put down to the vicious Nazi assault on the Jewish people only a small number of years before.
I had not developed any particular capacity for defiant gestures. To the contrary, all my post-Holocaust teaching was disposed against defiant gestures. After all, it would only take one defiant gesture in wartime, and you would be killed on the spot or carted away to die. Defiance was for the quick or the dead.
Last hurrahs
The redemptive power of dreams
Review
Scenes from Village Life, by Amos Oz
Amos Oz, who is at the pinnacle of Israeli writing, epitomises the role of writer as a voice of hope, a moral guide, as well as the spinner of dream tales. Speaking recently at the Melbourne Town Hall, Oz captured the mood of progressive thought in Israel when he spoke of the pressing need for a two-state solution to resolve the Palestinian–Israeli crisis, where the warring forces would negotiate over the small tracts of land at issue, and would respect each other’s claims of sovereignty over their lands as indigenous peoples and equals. With his gift for striking images, Oz spoke of a time when Israel and Palestine would have embassies in each other’s countries. Israel, Oz declared, should be the first state to recognise the new state of Palestine. But is it all a dream?
Letter From Brazil
It is odd to thinks of the negative press around the World Cup before we arrived in mid June. It may be that the heavy police presence was a factor as was the apparent incarceration of favela youth in their slums by police acting as guards, but we did not hear or see of any street trouble. To the contrary, the good people of Rio and other places went out of their way to help us when we began to look lost (which happened with disturbing frequency), with little or sometimes no prompting, often with faltering or no English, but with a genuine sense of Brazilian hospitality and kindness.