Review: The Rover
Director David Michôd’s dystopian Western “The Rover” is a Spartan, intimate affair played out over vast distances in the Australian outback. Set ten years after a global economic collapse the...
Category: Oceania
The Man Booker Prize Longlist 2014
This year’s Man Booker Prize, in its first outing since the controversial rule change, was widely tipped to be The Coming of the Americans writ large. Previously open only to novels by Commonwealth...
Review: Alexis Wright’s The Swan Book
“Even true stories have to be invented sometimes to be remembered…” The winner of Australia’s premier literary prize, the Miles Franklin Award, was announced last week – it went to Evie...
New South Wales Decimates Women’s Shelters
In Sydney, women’s shelters are days away from being decimated. 15.39 million dollars has been allocated to homelessness services, with only 1.1 million of that going to women’s services. And no,...
The Death of Environmentalism in the Age of Denial
Last year, naturalist Sir David Attenborough got into trouble when he called humans “a plague on the earth.” Apparently, some folks get a bit peeved when you slip ‘plague’ and ‘humans’...
Australia’s Budget Attack on Its Poor, Young and Vulnerable
Australians woke up this morning in bewilderment, anger, and, for many, without the secure future they’d been promised in the supposed Lucky Country. Federal Liberal Party Treasurer Joe Hockey...
Miles Franklin Awards 2014: A longlist overview
The longlist for Australian’s biggest literary award, the Miles Franklin, was announced on 3 April, and it’s quite an interesting list as lists go. It comprises the following 11 titles: Tracy...
A Legal Third Sex? Norrie’s Win in Australia
International media are abuzz with the recent news out of Australia, where Scottish-Australian Norrie sued for the right to select “non-specific” as a sex option on her (Norrie’s been...
Australia’s Manus Island Shame: Where’s the Inquiry?
This week has brought a halt to a human rights inquiry concerning the detention centre on Papua New Guinea’s Manus Island, one of the off-shore facilities in which asylum seekers to Australia are...
The Australian Aboriginal People With Disabilities Being Held In Prison Without Trial
Last week, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation highlighted the circumstances of Western Australia resident Rosie Anne Fulton, who has been incarcerated without being convicted of a crime or...