Category: Books
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Alex Mitchell’s WEEKLY NOTEBOOK – Why Gough Whitlam was simply magnificent
I rejected social democracy in the early 1960s when I worked on the Mount Isa Mail and saw the Labor Party and trade union leaders betray the miners who were struggling for a pay increase against US-owned Mount Isa Mines Limited. Jack Egerton, later Sir Jack, president of the Queensland Trades and Labor Council, and…
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The poet as hero
When the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC) convened in Havana on January 28, proceedings began with a huge torchlight procession in tribute to the poet José Martí, born 161 years ago on that day. The celebration has been held every year since the revolution of 1959, but to have the participation of…
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Windows on the world
Translation, writes one of its outstanding practitioners, “helps us to know, to see from a different angle, to attribute new value to what once may have been unfamiliar. As nations and as individuals, we have a critical need for that kind of understanding and insight.” The words are Edith Grossman’s, from her 2010 book Why…
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Class and culture
The black arts of marketing, Murdochism and right-wing academia have made the term “working class” almost as much of a taboo as the word “socialism” in mainstream public discourse. As Noam Chomsky says about the US, “you’re supposed to say ‘middle class’ because it diminishes the understanding that there’s a class war going on”. (Occupy:…
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Germaine Greer: a message of hope from the rainforest
Germaine Greer’s new book, White Beech, is essential reading for everyone who cares about the future of the planet – and a revelation to anyone who, like me, has ever fallen in love with the area of the Mount Warning caldera and the Numinbah Valley. In Byron Bay on October 24 we joined a packed…
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Elmore Leonard’s 10 tips for writers
Elmore Leonard, who died last week, started out writing westerns, then turned his talents to crime fiction. One of the most popular and prolific writers of our time, he wrote about two dozen novels, most of them bestsellers, such as Glitz, Get Shorty, Freaky Deaky, Kill Shot, Maximum Bob, and Rum Punch. Leonard left some…
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Art Lovers the book
My book Art Lovers has just arrived from the printers, and it looks terrific! It’s the 60-year history of the Art Gallery Society of New South Wales – six decades of social and cultural change. I’ve loved working on it. It will be launched by the Governor of NSW, Professor Marie Bashir AC, during a…
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Scottish writer’s stand on Palestine
There’s sad news about Iain Banks, the Scottish novelist. He has cancer, and only months to live. His brilliantly imaginative novels include The Wasp Factory and The Crow Road, and he can also write in a lighter vein. I liked his satirical post-9/11 thriller Dead Air. There must have been something in the air in…
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Looking for Garcia Marquez
Half a lifetime ago, when I was a student, I went to Colombia in search of the historical background to the novel One Hundred Years of Solitude. Recently there came news that there will be no more books from its author, the great Gabriel García Márquez. I’ve been moved to write an account of my…
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A many-splendoured writer
Han Suyin, who died in Lausanne last week at the age of 96, was a writer who bridged cultures. Born in imperial China of a Flemish Belgian mother and a Chinese father, she was best known in her lifetime as the author of the 1952 satirical novel of Hong Kong expat life, A Many-Splendoured Thing,…