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Michael McGirr
Michael McGirr is the Dean of Faith at St Kevin’s College in Melbourne, a school that was started by the Christian Brothers. His most recent book is Ideas to Save Your Life (Text Publishing, 2021).
Antarctica feeds the Australian imagination. The two continents are mirror images of each other: dry and largely barren, both managed to elude European description for longer than just about anywhere else. They are yin and yang; hot and cold.
As time goes by and Antarctica, like outer space, becomes one more tourist destination, there is legitimate concern about the damage being caused to the wor ... (read more)
Within church circles, Melbourne’s Catholic Education Office is known as the CEO, making it sound like the boss of a company. The comparison is apt. The Melbourne CEO is nothing if not big. Indirectly, it looks after more schools and more students than a number of state education departments. So it is little wonder that the CEO has long been a turf on which ideological battles have been fought. ... (read more)
This is a book about pain. In December 1999, Arthur Reilly was diagnosed with life-threatening cancer. The methods of relief offered to him, principally morphine, had drastic side-effects which undermined what pleasure he might have found in living. For four months, he lost weight and showed little interest in his usual activities. He became depressed and contemplated suicide.
... (read more)
After Ned Kelly, the story of Burke and Wills ranks high among Australians’ favourite tales of heroic failure. Simpson and his donkey are on the list, followed closely by any number of stories from the locker rooms of sporting clubs both great and small. There are strict conventions governing the telling of these stories. However pointless, futile, and even bloody they may have been, they are ha ... (read more)
Most of us were taught at school to understand the difference between discovery and invention. Both words imply finding, but discovery meant finding something that already existed ‘out there’ in the concrete world; inventions were found in the imagination. Explorers discovered; scientists invented.
... (read more)
Michael McGirr reviews 'Intellectuals and Publics' by Paolo Bartolini, Karen Lynch, and Shane Kendal
About ten years ago, the British writer, Paul Johnson, published a book called Intellectuals. He had evidently formed a low impression of the species. If you look up ‘intellectual’ in the index you won’t find a list of learned personalities, nor of publications, nor of universities or academic societies. Instead you’ll find references to aggressiveness, violence, cowardice, cruelty, dish ... (read more)
A lesser writer than Jon Faine would have found many more cheap laughs in this extraordinary story. One of the two central characters, Paul Alexander McPherson Anderson, was better known as The Mighty Apollo. In what feels like a bygone age, he was the proprietor of The Mighty Apollo Martial Arts centre in West Melbourne. He lived there in spartan quarters, above a panel beater.
His modest circum ... (read more)
Some time ago, I was curious about steam cars and found an advertisement, dating from the 1920s, for the sole Victorian distributor of the Stanley Steamer. The address was Flinders Lane, the street in Melbourne which exudes more personality than most of the others combined. I discovered that the building in question had been turned into a printshop. But its origins as a motor garage were obvious. ... (read more)
Few people come to Gunning, NSW, population 530, for something to read. Before 1993, people came because they couldn’t avoid it. The Hume Highway used to bring 3000 semitrailers a day along the main street. ‘At least you got to read the bumper stickers,’ one resident said when I moved here’. Because it was sure as hell impossible to talk.’
The local real estate agent tells me that, when ... (read more)