Pearls and Irritations

Category: Arts

  • JOHN MENADUE. ‘Things you learn along the way’.

    Occasionally friends suggest to me that I should write my autobiography.  Ruefully I explain that I wrote ‘Things you learn along the way’ twenty years ago. The book sold about 8,000 copies but as far as I know is no longer available. 

    The book covers many aspects of my life: The early days as a footloose son of the Methodist manse;  seven years in the ‘wilderness’ working for Gough Whitlam in Opposition;  working for Rupert Murdoch in his better days;  Secretary of Prime Minister and Cabinet to both Gough Whitlam and Malcolm Fraser, including the Dismissal;  enjoyable family days in Japan as Ambassador;  the most meaningful job of my life as Secretary of the Immigration Department during the Indochina Refugee Program;  and a few years at Qantas where I found that Directors and my views were not necessarily the same.  

    See link below if you are interested in reading.  (link also on home page ‘about John Menadue’.)

       ‘Things you learn along the way’.

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  • JUDITH WHITE. NSW arts policy officially in ruins

    Arm’s length funding of the arts is the hallmark of a government attempting to work in the interests of the people. It prevents the arts being used as a political football, and together with peer assessment fosters the development of creativity. It was the founding principle in 1946 of the Arts Council of Great Britain, created by economist John Maynard Keynes and the Attlee Labour government, but came under sustained attack by the government of Margaret Thatcher (1979 to 1990). It was also the basis of the funding model for the Australia Council developed by the Whitlam government in 1973. But today that principle is being trashed.

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  • GRAHAM FREUDENBERG. Vale Evan Williams

    No Australian adorned the professions of politics and journalism like Evan Williams.  He was much more than a beautiful writer.  He was a beautiful man, who brought a shining light and grace to thousands of lives. He died a few days ago. (more…)

  • KATE McDOWELL. Together or not in the performing arts.

    The way the performing arts is funded in Australia hasn’t changed since the 1990s, but the Australian cultural landscape has changed dramatically.  (more…)

  • GRAHAM ENGLISH. Virtue signallers, the left wing, and the politically correct

    I try to follow the advice of one of my old teachers that if you cannot write as well as Jane Austen or one of the greats you can at least aim to be intelligible. Avoiding clichés and popular catch phrases is always a good start. (more…)

  • ANDREW FROST. Alternative Histories, the ANZAC legend re-imagined on canvas

    The assumption of ANZAC as the foundation of conservative Australia has been used to mobilise popular sentiment into dubious alliances in wars of questionable purpose. In this context, Rodney Pople’s latest exhibition, Shell Shocked, has urgency. His paintings are a vehicle for questioning more than a century of myth-making. (more…)

  • CLAIR WILLS. Prodigal Fathers (The New York Review of Books).

    More than twenty years ago, writing about Roy Foster’s Modern Ireland, Colm Tóibín recalled what it was like to study history in Ireland in the 1970s—to be on the cusp of the revisionist wave, questioning all the old narratives. “Imagine if Irish history were pure fiction,” he wrote, “how free and happy we could be! It seemed at that time a most subversive idea, a new way of killing your father, starting from scratch, creating a new self.” The burden of having relatives has been a constant theme of Tóibín’s stories, essays, and reviews: “A Priest in the Family,” “How to Be a Wife,” “The Brother Problem,” “The Importance of Aunts,” “Mothers and Sons,” and, for equality’s sake, both “New Ways to Kill Your Mother” and “New Ways to Kill Your Father.” And these are just some of the titles. The desire to start from scratch, to worm (or to smash, but mostly to worm) your way out from under the yoke of dull, unavailable, or tyrannical parents figures in most of his fiction. (more…)

  • MICHAEL MULLINS. Abstract thinkers living in bubbles.

    During the Christmas break I read Rick Morton’s One Hundred Years of Dirt, which is one of the more acclaimed Australian memoirs published during 2018. It details the wretched life he’s led and also challenges the culture warriors of the left and the right. Speaking about politicians as well as journalists, he says: ‘We don’t need more journalists from the right or from the left… What the media needs is more reporters with the ability to understand their subjects.’  (more…)

  • ROBERT KUTTNER. The crash that failed.

    Review of “Crashed: How a decade of financial crises changed the world” by Adam Tooze, Viking.

    The historian G.M. Trevelyan said that the democratic revolutions of 1848, all of which were quickly crushed, represented “a turning point at which modern history failed to turn”.  The same can be said of the financial collapse of 2008. The crash demonstrated the emptiness of the claim that markets could regulate themselves. It should have led to the disgrace of neoliberalism—the belief that unregulated markets produce and distribute goods and services more efficiently than regulated ones. Instead, the old order reasserted itself, and with calamitous consequences. Gross economic imbalances of power and wealth persisted. We are still experiencing the reverberations.  (more…)

  • GREG LOCKHART. On reading Peter Stanley’s review of Peter Cochrane’s Best We Forget.

    I’ve just caught up with Peter Stanley’s review of Peter Cochrane’s Best We Forget: The war for white Australia, 1914-18, which was posted on Pearls and Irritations on 15 November 2018. I mention this, because it provoked a response that I think deserves underlining: John Mordike’s 15 November reply, which pointed out that a main thrust of Stanley’s review is ‘wrong’. Coming to terms with this thrust will then lead me into a discrete criticism of Cochrane’s book.  
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  • ANTHONY PUN. A response to Kim Wingerei -. It’s Time for Ethical Politics”

    Lord Acton’s “Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely” is still valid today. Man is born innocent and in his acquisition of power, goes astray when unguided by morals and ethical principles. True wisdom is the ability to exercise power with moral and ethical dignity. If these abilities are lost, the people need re-education in moral and ethical philosophy. (more…)

  • LIONEL ORCHARD. Hugh Stretton in retrospect and prospect: reflections on Graeme Davison’s selected writings.

    Graeme Davison has edited a new selection of Hugh Stretton’s writings. Stretton’s work is widely admired but how relevant is it now? Davison presents an assessment. A response follows. (more…)

  • SUSAN CHENERY. The Scribe: portrait of Freudenberg, author of the speech that changed Australia (The Guardian 9.10.2018)

    Legendary Labor speechwriter Graham Freudenberg was at the centre of power for more than 40 years.  A new film sheds light on the man who wrote the script.   (more…)

  • TONY DOHERTY. Review of Hugh Mackay’s “Australia Reimagined – Towards a compassionate, less anxious society”.

    Hugh Mackay has spent almost his entire working life asking Australians about what makes us tick, what are our basic concerns, what gives us hope and meaning, why do we do what we do? His acute observation, honed by the skills of solid social research, has illuminated his readers for at least fifty years. His analysis has been unfailingly optimistic, accessible, crystal-clear and frequently provocative.

    His latest book, “Australia Reimagined: Towards a more compassionate, less anxious society”, is no exception. It extends his study of who we are and who we may become, challenging the better angels within us to build a more tolerant, compassionate and just society.  (more…)

  • SUSAN RYAN. Book launch. ‘Jesus the forgotten feminist’ by Chris Geraghty.

    The Catholic Church here and globally faces a crisis of loss of support arising especially from its deeds and omissions in relation to appalling sexual abuse of children.

    Our secular societies are experiencing a massive epidemic of allegations and charges of sexual harassment and violation of women in their workplaces, be they on film and television sets, in the training of medical specialists, on university campuses, in major corporations, within churches, just about anywhere where men dominate women’s employment prospects.

    The Catholic Church’s failure to protect children, and our first world societies’ failure to protect women, are connected in ways that makes Geraghty’s book highly relevant.   (more…)

  • CHRIS GERAGHTY. Jesus – The Forgotten Feminist.

    I have long been interested in why the officers of the catholic church have been so reluctant to consider involving women in the governance of their institution and in its sacramental ministry. So I decided to write a book about it. (more…)

  • GREG HAMILTON. Not much ado about a helluva lot.

    A stage play that wouldn’t make it into an Australian theatre today caused a helluva stink back in 1962 and said some wise and courageous (aka shocking) things about the ‘most sacred day’ in our national calendar. The reasons it wouldn’t make it today say something tragic about us as a society of people. (more…)

  • KIM WINGEREI. Book review of “Churchill and Orwell: The Fight for Freedom” by Thomas E. Hicks, Pulitzer Prize winner.

    At first glance they may seem like an odd couple, but their influence on the seminal events and the thinking of the 20th century is equally profound. Winston Churchill defined and led the resistance against the tyranny of Adolf Hitler; George Orwell understood and explained the nature of totalitarian regimes. They were both men who were prepared to change themselves in order to change the world.

     Pulitzer Prize winner Thomas E. Ricks has written an insightful account of these two men whose paths never crossed and came from opposite ends of society and ideology. The book focuses on their life and deeds from the late thirties until after the Second World War. Ricks does not eulogise either man, he recognises their flaws and earlier failures, yet puts them both in the historic perspective that they deserve. (more…)

  • RAMESH THAKUR. Incorrigible Optimist by Gareth Evans, a Political Memoir – A review-Part 1of 2

     Gareth Evans’ memoir makes clear his vision of good international citizenship would have foreign ministers pursuing national self-interest within the ennobling vision of global moral purposes.

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  • JOHN TULLOH. Through the Iron Curtain to Moscow and across Siberia 50 years ago.

    Earlier this year, Pearls and Irritations ran an account of the 50th anniversary of my first major foreign news assignment, the Six-Day War. This is about another 50th anniversary assignment, the Russian Revolution. The centenary is next month.  (more…)

  • EVAN WILLIAMS. Dunkirk – film review.

    We all know the story – or do we?  It was one of Britain’s great wartime triumphs.  With the British Expeditionary Force driven back to the French coast by advancing German armies, thousands of Allied troops were stranded on the beach at Dunkirk, and the call went out from Winston Churchill to rally the little ships and bring them home.  Countless small craft – fishing boats, launches, dinghies, even rowing boats –  crossed the Channel  to gather survivors and ferry them home for joyful reunion with their families. (more…)

  • RAWDON DALRYMPLE. A personal link to World War One.

    All of us who have a stake in understanding the Great War should be grateful to Joan Beaumont for her magisterial history of Australia’s involvement in that terrible conflict (Broken Nation: Australians in the Great War). (more…)

  • JUDITH WHITE. Risks of gallery expansion

    The NSW Coalition government has allocated $244m towards a major new building at the state Art Gallery. But questions are being raised about its ongoing funding and its mission as a public institution. (more…)

  • KIERAN TAPSELL. ‘The Attachment’ by Ailsa Piper and Tony Doherty.

    The subtitle to this book is Letters from a Most Unlikely Friendship, and it consists of a series of letters with some occasional background comment between a “lapsed” Catholic (although none of the authors use that word) turned “agnostic with pantheist leanings” and a well known Sydney Catholic priest, Tony Doherty.  (more…)

  • JUDITH WHITE. Arts policy and the need to counter the undermining of public cultural institutions

    Writing a book is a solitary occupation, but with this one I’ve been constantly aware of the hosts of people – staff, members, volunteers, benefactors – who are concerned about what is happening to our public institutions. And they are public institutions: they belong, by Acts of Parliament, to the people.  (more…)

  • MARK COLVIN. “Four Weeks One Summer” by Nicholas Whitlam

    In the summer of 1936, over just four weeks, it all went wrong – for democracy and for Spain, even for the British royals. Politicians failed, and Hitler was emboldened to plan a new European war, and more.  

    When some army generals sought to overthrow Spain’s elected government Francisco Franco quickly emerged as their leader; Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy supported him with men and matériel; pusillanimous politicians in Britain and the United States, even in France, turned a blind eye – and the Spanish Civil War was on. Edward VIII took a scandalous holiday cruise with Mrs Simpson, Berlin staged the greatest sporting event of modern times, the alternative Peoples’ Olympiad never came to be, and Barcelona was transformed into a unique workers’ paradise. All this in four weeks. It was an incongruous, at times brilliant, juxtaposition of events.   (more…)

  • ALISON BROINOWSKI. What Australian Foreign Policy?

    Insider, analyst and adviser Allan Gyngell finds that Australian defence and foreign policy are more bipartisan than ever. But even as Australia’s national security agenda metastesizes, we have more to fear from an unreliable ally and an increasingly lawless world.   (more…)

  • SUSAN RYAN. Book review. The Dark Flood Rises: Margaret Drabble.

    As our sort of societies experience the demographic revolution, most of us are living much longer than ever before, in cultures that have not responded well to this increased longevity. We also find ourselves living in cultures that so far have failed to develop dignified and helpful practices and values for dealing with the inevitable.  
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  • RICHARD LETTS. National Opera Review: propping up the 19th Century

     

    The National Opera Review has reported. Instigator George Brandis is probably well enough satisfied.

    The Terms of Reference are pure Brandis. The name is National Opera Review, the game is a review of the four larger companies funded by the Commonwealth. Excluded are the Victorian Opera and the numerous small companies that are the growing edge of opera in Australia. (more…)

  • Gough Whitlam and Blue Poles.

     

    Blue Poles is in the news again. It was purchased for $1.3 million and is now valued at $350 million. The disparaging nature of the campaign against the purchase is reflected in Molnar’s cartoon (below) of 5 April 1974.

    Mungo would be chuffed!