March 2020, no. 419
Welcome to the fiery March 2020 issue of ABR! Our cover features a luminous, shocking photo from the New South Wales bushfires. Award-winning historian Tom Griffiths writes about this ‘season of reckoning’ during which we saw ‘the best and worst of Australia: the instinctive strength of bush communities and the manipulative malevolence of fossil-fuelled politicians’. Elsewhere, Dominic Kelly writes about privilege and The Economist; Yves Rees reviews several trans memoirs; and we have reviews of new novels by Louise Erdrich, Anne Enright, Philip Pullman, Evie Wyld, and Catherine Noske.
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Full Contents
Theatre
The Australian Musical from the Beginning by Peter Pinne and Peter Wyllie Johnston
Memoir
How I Learnt to Act: On the way to not going to drama school by Francis Greenslade
by Tim Byrne
Music
The Song Remains the Same: 800 years of love songs, laments and lullabies by Andrew Ford and Anni Heino
Interview
Open Page with Andrew Ford
Environmental Studies
Fire Country: How Indigenous fire management could help save Australia by Victor Steffensen
by Tim Low
Biography
Judith Anderson: Australian star, first lady of the American stage by Desley Deacon
by John Rickard
Science and Technology
Antimony, Gold, and Jupiter’s Wolf: How the elements were named by Peter Wothers
Science and Technology
Scatterbrain: How the mind’s mistakes make humans creative, innovative and successful by Henning Beck
by Nick Haslam
Ornithology
Flight Lines: Across the globe on a journey with the astonishing ultramarathon birds by Andrew Darby
Environmental Studies
Botanical Revelation: European encounters with Australian plants before Darwin by David J. Mabberley
Biography
Chis: The life and work of Alan Rowland Chisholm (1888–1981) by Stanley John Scott
History
Who Owns History?: Elgin’s loot and the case for returning plundered treasure by Geoffrey Robertson
Publisher of the Month
An interview with Jane Curry
Religion
A Twentieth-Century Crusade: The Vatican’s battle to remake Christian Europe by Giuliana Chamedes
by Paul Collins
Religion
Attending to the National Soul: Evangelical Christians in Australian history 1914–2014 by Stuart Piggin and Robert D. Linder
by Hugh Chilton
Literary Studies
Liberalism at Large: The world according to The Economist by Alexander Zevin
Love is Strong as Death: Poems chosen by Paul Kelly edited by Paul Kelly
Essay Collection
Somewhere Becoming Rain: Collected writings on Philip Larkin by Clive James
by Geoff Page
Advances