Non Fiction

An essay at the heart of this collection, ‘Against Motherhood Memoirs’ by Maria Tumarkin, is not as insistent as its title suggests. Tumarkin, interested in ‘fissures and de-fusion’, troubles the awkward spots in her analysis. While reading Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts (2015) – which places ‘motherhood and queerness side by side’ with ...

There was excitement. David Marr, newly appointed editor of the National Times at just thirty-three, had agreed to speak with politics students on campus. Volunteers were dispatched to buy the obligatory felafel and cheese, plastic cups, and cask wine, and at 3 pm the famous journalist arrived to address ...

Just as we are unlikely today to think of South Wales when in New South Wales, nor does the existence of the Sydney Opera House does not of itself draw our collective attention towards opera. It is a structure more to be seen than heard; its professed reason for ...

As a young man, George Washington (1732–99) worked as a surveyor. Looking at a landscape, he could plan its division into orderly tracts. These skills would prove useful when he became the first president of the United States in April 1789. At the time ...

‘Chopin is the greatest of them all,’ Claude Debussy told his pupil Marguerite Long, ‘for through the piano alone he discovered everything.’ This ‘everything’ had a long shadow, for Long described Debussy as ‘impregnated, almost inhabited, by [Chopin’s] pianism’. Unsurprisingly, therefore, the young Debussy ...

Many recent American politicians have believed that they could speak Spanish. Presidential candidate George W. Bush stumbled through a Spanish-language interview and was rewarded with thirty-five per cent of the Latino vote in the 2000 election. His brother Jeb, whose wife is Mexican-born ...

Like so many parents of great authors, the fathers of Oscar Wilde, W.B. Yeats, and James Joyce have much to answer for. Certainly, each man had a profound influence on his son’s literary career without for a moment being conscious of the literary consequences of his words and actions ...

As I sat down to write this review, a media release popped into my email inbox with the excited news that more than 400,000 people had visited the National Gallery of Victoria’s MoMA exhibition over its four-month duration, making it the NGV’s ‘second most attended ticketed exhibition on record ...

The danger is complacency. Brendan Taylor cautions readers of this timely assessment of the swirling currents of power in Asia – and currents is the right metaphor, given the heavy focus on disputes at sea – not to simply have faith that everything will turn out okay. ‘The risk of major war in Asia is ...