December 22, 2018 – January 25, 2019
News
Comment
Comment
Wesley Enoch
Australia Day: Past, present and future
“Change the date, don’t change the date – I am agnostic. I think a national day could be a valuable tool in the binding of a nation, but only if it finds ways of including the three narratives, as Pearson has described them. I can imagine a three-stage national day of the future, one that stretches from our long First Nations history, through the narrative of the British arrival, to the waves of immigrant arrivals and life here now. Past, present and future.”
Comment
Paul Bongiorno
Morrison Broad-sided
“The Prime Minister’s Office insists Morrison only learnt about Broad’s use of a website for ‘sugar daddy’ arrangements on the day New Idea broke the story. It is simply an incredible and grave dereliction of duty on McCormack’s part. He lamely claims he doesn’t ‘tell the prime minister everything about every member of parliament’ because he ‘has enough on his mind’. ”
Letters, Cartoon & Editorial
Culture
Profile
Robin DiAngelo, an agent of change
Robin DiAngelo knows a lot about white privilege – it’s in her DNA. The American academic, author and anti-racism advocate talks about how structures of whiteness and so-called white progressives are continuing to damage the lives of people of colour. ‘I grew up in poverty … I was a feminist for most of my life before I realised I could also be an oppressor. But I draw from my experience of oppression … I think that helps. The key is not to exempt myself from being an oppressor, just because I experience oppression. Ask anyone if they’d rather be poor and white or poor and brown – I knew I was poor, but I also knew I was white.’
Life
The Horne Prize: Ten More Days
“Ten more days and I would have had a chance to delve deeper behind the humorous anecdotes, to gain a deeper understanding of how humour in itself was a form of sustenance. Who knows what I would have discovered about him, what I would have found out about myself.”
Television
The gilded age of Netflix
The Golden Age of television is giving way to a period more gilded, but streaming giant Netflix has still bankrolled some worthy viewing this year, in the form of Dumplin’ and American Vandal.
Visual Art
Love & Desire: Pre-Raphaelite Masterpieces from the Tate
Bursting with colour, overwrought with emotion and rich in symbolism – the grandiloquent works of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood leave the Tate to enliven the walls of the NGA in an exhibition powerful enough to convert even a non-fan.
Portrait
Artist Wendy Whiteley
“The first time I saw Wendy Whiteley is imprinted on my memory. I can’t have been older than 13 or 14 – right in the middle of that most excruciating part of puberty – and was on a school excursion with my art class to the Brett Whiteley Studio in the back streets of Surry Hills.”
Fiction
Louisiana heron
“Luce put her hand on the dash. Check her watch. She shouldn’t-a left Leroy. She the only one even know he alone at the house. She turn her head as they pass a small huddle-a Louisiana heron, grouped together by the roadside. Luce wonder what they doin so far ’way from the water, on a scorcher like this.”
Books
Life
The Quiz
