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1 month ago | 
themonthly.com.au | Morgan Campbell |Geraldine Brooks |Margaret Simons |Jackson Ryan
Remembering lessons in the art of derailing and the power of obfuscation at a Year 10 Model United Nations day In 2007, the Year 10 students at my school in Newcastle were invited to apply for two spots as delegates to a University of Sydney Model United Nations day. Even at a selective school full of bumptious twerps, I was bumptious enough to see this as an exciting opportunity, and to get selected for our team.
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1 month ago | 
themonthly.com.au | Peter Craven |Geraldine Brooks |Margaret Simons |Jackson Ryan
Current Issue Newsletters Podcasts Login Subscribe March 2025 Arts and Letters A new production of ‘Macbeth’ starring David Tennant is an opportunity to consider if it might provide the quintessential tragic role How real is the Macbeth curse, which makes the mere articulation of the title in the theatre a source of dread?
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1 month ago | 
themonthly.com.au | David Marr |Geraldine Brooks |Margaret Simons |Anna Krien
Nothing. Six months passed without a fight. Then a year. The Quadrant crowd was silent. I’d written a book about slaughter on the Queensland frontier on a mighty scale, and the old history warriors were not out denouncing my work as lies, all lies. I thought for a time the history wars were done and dusted.
I was fooling myself.
Squabbles in little magazines are chickenfeed these days. The battlefront moved years ago to the highest levels of politics.
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1 month ago | 
themonthly.com.au | Margaret Simons |Jackson Ryan |Ceridwen Spark |David Marr
Current Issue Newsletters Podcasts Login Subscribe Essays The Nation Reviewed Vox Arts and Letters Noted Life sentences Essays The Nation Reviewed Vox Arts and Letters Noted Cartoon Essays Federal politics End matter The demise of the China Matters think tank raises questions about how governments deal with voices they don’t want to hear Science and technology The Sun also revises A scandal in Australia’s space science community suggests the need for increased rigour in reviewing possible...
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2 months ago | 
themonthly.com.au | Quentin Sprague |Paul Barry |Margaret Simons |Louise Milligan
Current Issue Newsletters Podcasts Login Subscribe February 2025 Arts & Letters The work of the great Australian documentary photographer proposes portraits as mirrors, containing both the subject and the artist I have a special love for good documentary photography. You know the kind – the images that show life in all its beautiful, complex, world-making everyday glory.
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2 months ago | 
themonthly.com.au | Louise Milligan |Paul Barry |Margaret Simons |Don Watson
The Monthly has chosen to temporarily remove Louise Milligan’s recent essay from our website. We have been made aware of an active case that is about to come before the courts that had not been previously in the public domain. In the interests of protecting the integrity of that case, we have taken down the story. When the case concludes, the essay will be made available to readers once again.
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2 months ago | 
themonthly.com.au | Louise Milligan |Paul Barry |Margaret Simons |Don Watson
The day politicians, priests and pundits filed into St Mary’s Cathedral in Sydney for the pontifical requiem mass venerating Cardinal George Pell as a Catholic hero, a soldier for truth, a prospective saint and an unfortunate scapegoat in a vast woke conspiracy, a mathematics teacher was at home, seething.
In David’s inbox was a letter from the National Redress Scheme that threw into serious doubt the platitudes of the faithful. It was dated December 7, 2022 – five weeks before Pell’s death.
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2 months ago | 
themonthly.com.au | Jonathan Green |Paul Barry |Margaret Simons |Louise Milligan
The respected intellectual’s writing is a reminder of a moral rigour lost to public debate and universities, replaced by populism and culture-war politics I closed the last page of Robert Manne’s memoir with a sense of faint melancholy, and a nostalgia for a public conversation filled by a form of constructive conservatism that, these days, seems lost. His book describes a political discourse that was a thing of moral parameters, rigour, and an earnest search for truth and reason.
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2 months ago | 
themonthly.com.au | Kate Jinx |Paul Barry |Margaret Simons |Louise Milligan
It’s an all too familiar sight: a daughter in a rush, trying to get off the phone with her probing mother. Early on in Payal Kapadia’s sensuous, incandescent second feature All We Imagine as Light, we see Anu (Divya Prabha), a young nurse trying to wrap up such a call, fibbing that she must return to work: “Of course surgeries happen at night! As if a patient’s heart will wait!” But it’s her own heart and those of the two other women the film follows that are in a state of limbo.
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2 months ago | 
themonthly.com.au | Margaret Simons |Paul Barry |Louise Milligan |Don Watson
Is a biennial indigenous festival in Taiwan an attempt to atone for the grim truth of a people’s extinction? The November moon was behind the clouds, a brushstroke of white in the dark, when the first song began. There were flaming torches. An arrow was shot into the east. Four fires burned in the corners of the arena. Then a long line of people, arms interlinked, paced into the ritual grounds, their voices rising in a wave.
