With a title that grabs the attention of readers and a subject deserving of a wide readership, I eagerly awaited Julie Marcus’s Sex and Savagery in the Good Colony: South Australia 1836-1901. As an anthropologist who specialises in depictions of race, gender, and sexuality, Marcus is well placed to survey the historical sources and provide fresh insights into early cross-cultural relations, frontier violence, the mistreatment of Aboriginal women, as well as the enduring impacts of colonialism in South Australia. Unfortunately, red flags appeared in short succession.

The sixth year in the cold hemisphere. Our friends,
on the frothy shores of home, dream we do not age,
but spin through the scrape of years
like an astronaut in her cage. Dense darkness

Italy is best appreciated at ground level. Flying is irritatingly swift and flattens out the view. Walking is treacherously risky. Bus travel is unendurably cramped and tedious. Driving is unreasonably dangerous. The finest, and to me the only, way to experience Italy in all its depths and glories is to negotiate it by train. Besides, European trains are in a class of their own (conditions apply; read on).

Walter Lippmann might be the defining example of a public intellectual. He profoundly influenced public and political debate in America during the twentieth century. A prolific journalist and columnist, he also published ten major books and even more edited collections and compilations. The best of these were thought-provoking disquisitions on public opinion, communications, politics, international relations, and the ways in which liberal thought has developed in the United States. His was, argues Tom Arnold-Forster, ‘a six-decade commentary on the vicissitudes of politics’.

The Australian philosopher Michelle Boulous Walker – writing in Philosophy and the Maternal Body: Reading silence (1998) – argued that making sense of the exclusion of women from Western philosophy required thinking beyond a ‘spatial logic of “inside” and “outside”’; the marginalisation of women’s voices ‘needs to be understood as something more than a simple exclusion’. In the case of institutional philosophy, at least, this is because there are logics found within it that work to silence women.

‘I think it is the art of the glimpse’, said William Trevor of the short story.

If the novel is like an intricate Renaissance painting, the short story is an impressionist painting. It should be an explosion of truth. Its strength lies in what it leaves out just as much as what it puts in, if not more.

Who is Kamala Harris and what does she stand for? This question animated coverage across the political spectrum during her 2024 US presidential campaign, even though she was already serving as Vice President – the first woman, the first African American, and the first Asian American to hold the office. At crucial points, Harris herself struggled to articulate her own distinctive agenda. When asked on the television talk show The View what she would have done differently from Democrat President Joe Biden over the past four years, she replied, ‘There is not a thing that comes to mind.’

She brings a bag of bundled shades of wool
which overflows beside her corner table
and from it draws a choice of yarn, a range
of needles, lays them out as a surgeon might,
as a thief would, surveying a challenging vault.

In 1996, an Age poll found that seventy-six per cent of Australians wanted their country to become a republic. The issue had been rapidly gaining momentum since the early 1990s. The creation of the Australian Republican Movement (ARM) in 1991, and the active championing of the issue by Prime Minister Paul Keating, turned a fringe issue of the 1980s into a realistic prospect.