Category Archive: AUSTRALIANIA
The Mushroom Tapes
Conversations on a triple murder trial (By Chloe Hooper, Helen Garner, and Sarah Krasnostein, 2025) Erin Scutter was born in 1974 . Her mother Heather is said, rather vaguely, to have been an academic (“an expert in children’s literature”) and her father, even more vaguely, “a company director”. Although her mother is important in this tale, her father is not. In May, 2025 Erin (now Patterson) was tried for three murders and an attempted murder. Famously, in 2023, Patterson had invited her estranged husband Simon, his parents, his aunt and his uncle, to lunch at her house in Leongatha, New…
Continue Reading →But Is It (Test) Cricket?
(1st ashes test, Perth, 21/22 November 2025) Sir Donald Bradman wrote in 1961: “In recent years the game has been criticized as being too slow for our modern civilization – a horse and buggy game in an aeroplane age.”* After Perth (and Melbourne on 26 & 27 December) one starts to hanker for a buggy whip. I had a ticket at Perth Stadium (the nose bleed section, but still a great view) for Day 2 of the 2025/26 first cricket test between England and Australia, representing a rivalry of over 148 years. Australia had held the Ashes (a historic urn…
Continue Reading →Australia: A History
Mr. Abbott at the launch
(By Tony Abbott) (2025) Many, many years ago, Mark Twain wrote: “Australian history is .. picturesque; It does not read like history, but like the most beautiful lies & all of a fresh new sort, no mouldy old stale ones. Full of surprises, & adventures, & incongruities *& contradictions, and incredibilities; but they are all true!” Australia’s 28th Prime Minister has written a history of Australia, explaining that he did so to try, not to counter, but to balance-correct, the currently prevailing ‘black armband’ narrative of those determining that the ancient evil of colonisation can and should be redressed now,…
Continue Reading →Barrie Robran
(1947-2025) In the Greatest Game of Football ever played, the 1973 Grand Final, where his North Adelaide side was going for three Premierships in a Row (after triumphs in 1971 and 1972, along with the 1972 Champions of Australia Trophy) Barrie Robran just-about won it off his own boot. You can Google his stats and many accomplishments ( https://sanfl.com.au/history/hall-of-fame/barrie-c-robran-mbe/ ): all we can add is that he was the best footballer that most of us have ever seen, and one of the nicest. He was invited by Glenelg Football Club to mark an anniversary of the 1973 GF (1998, from…
Continue Reading →Coonardoo (Katharine Susannah Prichard)
(First published 1929; 2013 edition published by Angus & Robertson) In two of the three forewords* to the 2013 A&R Australian Classics edition of “Coonardoo”, we are told that Prichard, in both her own (the third) foreword and the novel that follows, uses terms and makes assumptions that, while widespread in the nineteen-twenties, are not so popular now. Prichard is not criticised for that, nor should she be. Those were the words and the beliefs of the time. Some of them should be readopted by us, even in our woke wisdom. Naturally we should no longer tolerate the genital mutilation…
Continue Reading →