Sylvia Lawson
Sylvia Lawson was a journalist, academic and author, known for her support for cinema in Australia through her work with the Sydney Film Festival from its inception in 1954.
Bob Brown tells us the worst: ‘Half of the planet’s forest and woodlands are already gone’; every year, forest areas twice the size of Tasmania vanish from the map. At the same time, ‘There is a thin green line round the world’ – more than seventy Green parties contend for votes everywhere from Scotland to Mexico, Mongolia to Kenya. Jacques Chirac is trying to change the French constit ... (read more)
Don’t be fooled by this book’s splendid appearance; it’s not to be left on the coffee table. It is an excellent compendium of cultural, political and social history, complementing Philip Drew’s The Masterpiece (2001) and Françoise Fromonot’s superb study, Joern Utzon et l’Opéra de Sydney (1998). It also establishes Anne Watson as a distinguished historian, both in her own contr ... (read more)
Rupert Murdoch is the Napoleon of our times. He has gone on conquering largely because certain governments – Bob Hawke’s among them, in early 1987 – have persistently acquiesced, changing or moderating regulations as his battle plans required. It was once possible to view him as bound, in George Munster’s phrases, ‘on a random walk … [on which] despite the ever greater accumulation of ... (read more)
As an ‘imagined community’, Australia ‘imagined imagining needs more that community’, most strenuous imagining than most. Post-colonial? Not really – we are recolonized over and over. Wall Street shivers, the Australian dollar gets pneumonia; Japan revises its shopping-list, and our coal industry verges on collapse. Britain’s hold began to loosen after World War II, but our cultural co ... (read more)