Commentary

At first I can’t make out the inscription, even though I’m searching for it. Smooth new bark has grown into the cuts, bulging around the incision, preserving the words on the trunk. I run my hand across the surface, tracing the grooves, feeling the letters: R-E-T-R-I-B-U-T-I-O-N. And below, in slightly larger hand, ‘CAMP’ ...

Stan Grant’s comment on the prolonged booing of the Australian Rules football star Adam Goodes – featured in Daniel Gordon’s new documentary, The Australian Dream (produced by Grant himself) – has attracted much interest, including more than one million hits on one website ...

In retrospect, the Morrison government’s win in May 2019 is not surprising. After the shift to the right in a number of liberal democracies since the election of Donald Trump, why did we assume that Australia would be immune? The assumption that Labor was certain to win resembled the attitude of most commentators towards Hillary Clinton ...

In June 2019 I got a new perspective on an industry I’ve been part of for twenty-five years. I have attended many Australian Booksellers Association’s (ABA) conferences as a bookseller, but this year’s ninety-fifth annual conference in Melbourne was my first as CEO of the ABA. More than three hundred delegates came together to ...

In June 2019, Australian Book Review announced the ABR Behrouz Boochani Fellowship, an initiative generously funded by Peter McMullin in association with the Peter McMullin Centre on Statelessness (University of Melbourne). This initiative was not only created to highlight issues pertaining to ...

Living, working, and being in the Indigenous space, there are times when it feels as though nothing changes. Indeed, on occasion, it can feel as though things are in fact regressing. When The Hon. Ken Wyatt AM, MP was announced as the new Minister for Indigenous Australians ...

When truth is stranger than fiction, fiction is a potent source of truth. In the first week of the Trump administration, sales of 1984 increased by 9,500 per cent, catapulting George Orwell’s sexagenarian novel to the top of global bestseller charts. As Kellyanne Conway recast White House lies as ‘alternative facts’ ...

As part of his budget speech to the House of Representatives in April, Josh Frydenberg, the federal treasurer, announced that his suite of policy changes would ‘deliver better outcomes for all Australians’. Such talk is par for the course in parliamentary democracies ...

Perched on the precipice of the Blue Mountains, Leura is both quiet and wild, a place of misty romance, sylvan charm, and middle-class entitlement. I am here because some friends have offered me their house as a writing retreat for ten days so that I can pen a chapter on the history of marriage (1788 to marriage equality) for ...