Category: Arts
-
Alex Mitchell’s WEEKLY NOTEBOOK – Mad Monk is on death row with execution date pending
Tony Abbott will remain prime minister until after the NSW election on March 28, Anzac commemorations at Gallipoli Cove on April 25 and his second federal Budget in May. Then all bets are off. His survival is directly linked to this week’s poll which tested public opinion on federal Liberal leadership. Malcolm Turnbull easily topped…
-
Alex Mitchell’s WEEKLY NOTEBOOK – Field Marshal Abbott’s Last Post at Gallipoli?
Part of Field Marshal Tony Abbott’s survival plan is to present himself as a modern-day heir of the ANZACs. The embattled Mad Monk is travelling to Wellington today to meet NZ Prime Minister John Key to announce a 400-strong joint training mission to Iraq. On April 25 when the 100th anniversary of the catastrophic defeat…
-
Alex Mitchell’s WEEKLY NOTEBOOK – Abbott’s secret begging mission to Baghdad
Just before New Year the Abbott government’s final action as chair of the UN Security Council was to vote against a resolution supporting the establishment of a Palestinian state and ending Israeli occupation of the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem. The only other country to vote against the declaration of Palestinian national rights was…
-
Alex Mitchell’s WEEKLY NOTEBOOK – The irreplaceable nature of Edward Gough Whitlam
Everything that needed to be said about Gough Whitlam’s life has been said. And it has been done with a grandeur worthy of the man himself. The Sydney Town Hall memorial service was an affirmation of the virtues of a political life spent in the service of people and not wealth. All the speeches –…
-
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…
-
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…
-
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…
-
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:…
-
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…
-
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…