Archive
More than a recorder
Still they arrive, though slowing to a trickle in recent days – the reader surveys that we sent out with the June–July issue. We expected about fifty to eighty, only to receive more than four hundred, making this a highly representative survey of our readership. Because of the large number, it has taken longer than we ...
Behind the ‘myth’
Dear Editor,
As an unexpected child of the Depression years, I know how one working-class family coped with the economic difficulties that Geoffrey Bolton refers to in his review of David Potts’s The Myth of the Great Depression (October 2006). My father was an unskilled labourer, often out of work. His wages were supplemented by a small war-service disability pension. Some proportion of this income was handed over to my mother, who was expected to pay the mortgage, manage the household and feed five mouths (for I had two older siblings). Even with the income from occasional embroidery and dressmaking that she undertook, this was impossible. Her solution, when we sat down for dinner, was to put out five plates, leaving her own place empty. If my father asked why she was not eating, she would say she was not hungry, and would retire to the kitchen to weep or to find a piece of bread or fruit. So it was not half the population of the household that went hungry, only twenty per cent.
... (read more)
Fremantle’s first real newspaper, The Herald, saw the light of day in a building on the corner of Cliff and High Streets on Saturday, 2 February 1867. The brainchild of two ex-convicts, James Pearce and William Beresford, it soon became the main voice of opposition to colonial autocracy, as well as the voice of Fremantle itself.
... (read more)Unintelligent Design: Why God isn’t as smart as she thinks she is by Robyn Williams
Everything happens fast and then goes –
the new movie you were waiting for
that you’ve suddenly just seen, the tunnel
under the harbour that seemed to take forever
now built and grooved by a million trips.
In winter fruit trees bud, shops
are full of summer clothes; only this
mind is slow, still stalling on the same
questions, never getting it, left behind
by life as by some wild-eyed nag
storming down the street, her hoofprints
pasted in the grass.
Welcome to the feast, piccolo pasero,
A feast that never ends, of loyalty and treachery.
Two are sold for a farthing, little sparrow
Hold the hearts close to your heart:
they’ll feed each other blooms of colour
and the nudity of shapes
until you are bursting
The Partnership: The inside story of the US–Australian Alliance under Bush and Howard by Greg Sheridan
By the Balls: Memoir of a football tragic by Les Murray
