Category: Arts

David Stephens reviews Douglas Newton’s Private Ryan and the Lost Peace: A Defiant Soldier and the Struggle against the Great War. (more…)

Abe Saffron, the king of Sydney’s vice rackets, had a long friendship with Dudley Doherty, a top spy with the Australian Secret Intelligence Organisation (ASIO).

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As the Labor Opposition jettisons policies on negative gearing, capital gains taxes, franking credits and climate change policies that don’t embrace coal you have to ask – what’s the point of Labor? (more…)

An eclectic set of essays, the book Upturn: A better normal after Covid-19 tries to put forward a serious reform agenda. While there is a wealth of enthusiastic ideas, Upturn is unfortunately stronger on identifying problems than solutions. This post concentrates on the chapters discussing economic and social welfare. Reviews of other chapters will be posted in coming days.

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Proverbs 22.v.6 states: “Train up a child in the way he should go, and even when he is old he will not depart from it.” I suspect Stan’s character was shaped by his deeply ingrained Jewish faith, the character of his father and father-in-law, the loss of a mother he never knew, an acute observation of inter-family relationships and a respectful obedience to authority. (more…)

Cruelty or Humanity  by Em.Prof. Stuart Rees, is essential reading in our present tumult and bedlam of human cruelty.

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Regarded by international jurist Richard Falk as ‘A road map for humanity’ and by Noam Chomsky as ‘a wonderful guide to the challenges we face’, Stuart Rees’ ‘Cruelty or Humanity‘ identifies world-wide threats to freedom and democracy and displays the humanitarian alternatives.

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Two new books are available or soon will be; (“How to Win an Election” by Chris Wallace and “What is to be Done?” by Barry Jones). Both focus on the state of the nation and the state of the ALP.

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The latest round of The Australia Council funding, announced on 3 April, marks a new level of government interference in the arts. The council was never meant to police the arts on behalf of government, but under the Coalition that has become its function. (more…)

A friend mailed me recently to ask if I was well and safely distanced socially. He also pasted the following letter and asked me if I’d seen it. I hadn’t.  (more…)

I started to cull my books recently. As old age approaches I routinely decide that I need to gain more space, and to really get rid of what I will never get around to reading, sort of like “use it, or lose it”.

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Professor David Walker’s Stranded Nation: White Australia in an Asian Region is a work of great and very readable erudition, which does something new: places Australian cultural, political and diplomatic history in its regional context at the time of Asian decolonisation. (more…)

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

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…)

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…)

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…)