Australian Book Review
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The nexus between ABR and La Trobe University has always been strong, and our summer issue is a good example of this, with a long essay on George Orwell’s enduring influence by Robert Manne, Professor of Politics at La Trobe University (pictured in the next column with Professor Michael Osborne, Vice-Chancellor (centre), and Peter Rose, Editor of ABR). Two years ago, La Trobe University be ... (read more)
Judith Bishop wins the ABR Poetry Prize
The judges of the ABR Poetry Prize certainly earned their pastrami on rye this year! Could the short list have been closer, the final choice more difficult? Doubtful. Morag Fraser, Peter Rose and Craig Sherborne agree that a number of the six short-listed poems (which appeared in the March issue) would have made worthy winners. Such is the tyranny of compet ... (read more)
Painting by numbers in ADB
Dear Editor,
Beverley Kingston’s riposte (ABR, March 2006) to my review of the ADB Supplement 1580–1980 (ABR, February 2006) accuses me of ‘reflecting the traditional bias of those early volumes in considering the work of the stock and station agent more worthy than that of the cookery teacher’. I do not. I pointed out that the same space allocated to a writer ... (read more)
Lifting the flap
Dear Editor,
I had always believed that the only thing worse than a bad review was not to be reviewed at all, to be ignored. Now I find that there is something even more galling: to be reviewed by someone who is more concerned to air his and other people’s opinions on the subject than to address the book or books concerned. Nicholas Brown has some interesting things to say abo ... (read more)
Reading the tea leaves
Dear Editor,
Patrick Allington (May 2008) astutely discerned an essential characteristic – I consider it a flaw – of The Best Australian Political Writing 2008, which was edited by Tony Jones of the ABC. He did not quite nail it down, however: I think that the book would have been better described as the ‘best’ political journalism because that, overwhelmingly, is ... (read more)