Australian Books: Part of the solution

7 April 2012
Adam Creighton

Reframe: How to solve the world’s trickiest problems
By Eric Knight
Black Inc Books, $29.95, pp 244
ISBN 9781863955591

The West is enduring particularly uncertain times. What tepid economic growth it can muster is being undermined by a discredited financial system propped up by bureaucratic conceit. Periodic eruptions in the Middle East are a worrying reminder of how quickly international relations could lurch toward disaster. And the Earth’s changing climate, whatever its cause, is widely believed to threaten the living standards of future generations, if not ultimately their existence.

In that fraught context, Australian writer Eric...

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Australian Books: How much suffering?

31 March 2012
Stephen Romei

Us and Them: On the Importance of Animals
By Anna Krien
Quarterly Essay 45, Black Inc,
$19.95, pp 132
ISBN 9781863955607

Anna Krien is a youngish Melbourne writer who won awards for her first book, the 2010 nonfiction work Into the Woods: The Battle for Tasmania’s Forests, an impressive piece of immersion journalism. At the start of Us and Them, she is refreshingly uncertain about the sentiment expressed in the subtitle. Quarterly Essays, after all, are written about the seismic issues — global warming, the financial crisis, the rise of China, the...

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Queensland Diary

31 March 2012
George Brandis

If a political party without a soul can be said to have a spiritual homeland, then Queensland is the spiritual homeland of the ALP. The legend (perhaps, like so many Labor legends, apocryphal) is that the party was formed under the since-defunct ‘Tree of Knowledge’ at Barcaldine during the great shearers’ strike of the late 19th century. The first person elected to any parliament as an official Labor candidate was Thomas Glassey, whose election as the Member for Bundamba at the 1888 election preceded by four years Keir Hardie’s election to the House of Commons.

The first Labor government...

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I should have been a cowgirl

31 March 2012
Victoria Mietchen

I love Newtown: charming despite the chipped teeth and gaudy make-up. I have moseyed her crooked streets for the past six years in my beaten cowboy boots; past vintage clothes stores and graffiti, punk rock screams, Tom Waits tributes and eclectic cafes, proudly calling her home. Amid the kaleidoscopic colours, the retro, the weird, I have forged friendships, made terrific memories and found a niche. Though on the edge of the city itself, Newtown has welcomed me with its own urban breed of western misfit and Dangerfield-clad drifter; close to my personal mythos, but not quite close enough.

Come...

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Cherchez l’argent

31 March 2012
James Morrow

Monday night is the night Australia’s chattering classes get their marching orders. After a good warm up with the evening news and 7:30, there’s Australian Story, Four Corners, Q&A and, of course, Media Watch. Between these shows, the broadsheet press and opinion sites have half their week covered, picking over the corpses of who tweeted what about whom and, especially, the latest batch of confected outrage dished up by Media Watch.

But while Media Watch has long styled itself as the watchdog of press behaviour in Australia, perhaps explaining why it was so defensive when the Finkelstein Report came...

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Australian Notes

31 March 2012
Peter Coleman

No show without Punch. It’s too easy to mock those professors, pundits and pollsters who got the Queensland election wrong. It was an extraordinary night. The pressure on commentators to make precise predictions is too great. Many tipped a close result. Even the judicious Malcolm Mackerras thought the swing against Labor would be nine per cent. It turned out to be almost 16 per cent. (My own record over the years has been patchy and includes some shockers. I confidently predicted, on the basis of local knowledge, that John Howard would hold his seat in 2007.) But the undisputed champion ...

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