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Book of the Week

Let’s Tax Carbon: And other ideas for a better Australia
Politics

Let’s Tax Carbon: And other ideas for a better Australia by Ross Garnaut

Few books are greater than the sum of their parts – many are less. In the case of Ross Garnaut’s latest effort, the parts are greater than the sum. As a book, Let’s Tax Carbon: And other ideas for a better Australia succeeds and fails. It succeeds as a field guide to the past, present, and future of the Australian economy’s three big policy problems: transitioning to a net-zero carbon economy; reversing social and economic inequity; and creating new industries that secure the nation’s prosperity. But it fails as a work of non-fiction.

Interview

Calibre Essays

From the Archive

September 2009, no. 314

'Vanishing wunderkind: The great oeuvre of the enigmatic Stow' by Tony Hassall

The judges of the early Miles Franklin Awards clearly knew what they were about. Their inaugural award went to Patrick White’s Voss in 1957; the second to Randolph Stow’s To the Islands in 1958. At the time, White was in the early stages of a distinguished career that would bring him Australia’s only Nobel Prize for Literature, while the precocious Stow also promised great things. Hailed as a literary wunderkind, he had published two novels, A Haunted Land (1956) and The Bystander (1957), and his first collection of poetry, Act One (1957), by the time he was twenty-two. When Act One was awarded the 1957 Gold Medal of the Australian Literature Society and To the Islands won it the following year, plus the Melbourne Book Fair Award and the Miles Franklin, he seemed to be embarked upon a stellar career.

From the Archive

July–August 2013, no. 353

Letters to the Editor

A question of syphilis

Dear Editor,

I enjoyed Jeffrey Tate’s excellent review of Paul Kildea’s biography of Benjamin Britten (June 2013). It is always interesting when doctors disagree with a diagnosis – especially with the benefits of hindsight.

I agree that syphilis seldom gets to the tertiary stage without being picked up earlier (and Britten’s own cardiologist has disputed the claim that Britten contracted it). Presumably, Peter Pears would have had symptoms as well – assuming that there was no treatment with penicillin, which was available from the early 1940s. If the surgeon was correct (and, like Jeffrey Tate, I would want to see more concrete evidence), then the other possibility is that Britten may have had some fleeting liaisons of his own!

Dr Alastair Jackson, Melbourne, Vic.

From the Archive