The former Australian of the Year's memoir is a damning indictment of every institution that failed her A memoir doesn't get written and published in a vacuum. Still, one could be forgiven for thinking Grace Tame's memoir had been finished five minutes before review copies were sent out. I say this not because of the writing itself – the book is well written and polished – but because of the recency of the references, and the climate into which it is being released. The Ninth Life of a Diamond Miner contains allusions to current events, such as the overturn of Roe v Wade and the passing of Archie Roach.

https://www.themonthly.com.au/issue/2022/october/abigail-ulman/marathon-grace-tame-s-ninth-life-diamond-miner

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George Saunders' return to literary, comedic short fiction further essays our basic selfishness George Saunders' early stories came, in part, out of a deep feeling that there was something radically wrong with corporate capitalism. He had this feeling even in the exuberant 1990s and 2000s, when so many people were losing their minds over the possibilities of the ever-growing, everybody-wins, borderless, digital, amazing new economy. But in stories such as 'Pastoralia' and 'In Persuasion Nation', Saunders found ways to show what the possibilities were actually making on the ground: a kind of terrible lurid sameness; a world of artificial, for-profit environments; places where everything had to be recognisable, branded, barcoded – and where there had to be a manic effort to entertain within the sameness, keep it all somehow 'fun'.

https://www.themonthly.com.au/issue/2022/october/sean-o-beirne/liberation-day

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De of Mandy Martin, Romantic Coastal Landscape (1986). TarraWarra Museum of Art collection. Gift of Eva Besen AO and Marc Besen AC. A TarraWarra Museum of Art exhibition reframes landscapes to highlight vulnerability and impermanence Despite tree-change trends and pandemic-propelled city flight, Australia's population remains chiefly urbanised. Some 90 per cent of the nation's people live in built-up areas, with at least two-thirds residing in striking distance of a capital city GPO. It is perhaps for this reason the Australian landscape, beyond city fringes, remains a cornerstone of any serious gallery collection: it is a subject through which visitors can connect to that world beyond the sprawl, to places where 'thanks for visiting' shire signs give way to scraggy creek beds and hazy ranges.

https://www.themonthly.com.au/issue/2022/october/patrick-witton/rhythms-earth

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Remembering the Yolngu elder and former Australian of the Year There is mourning across the nation for a great man. Those who knew him well, as I did, can be in no doubt about the enormity of the loss to Indigenous Australians and to the country. There will be a vacuum of knowledge and wisdom until others can step in to fill the vast space that he inhabited. He defined a generation in so many ways, bringing Yolngu culture and philosophy into the public imagination through his ceremonial performances of the songlines, oratory, writings, and political representation of Indigenous interests, music and art.

https://www.themonthly.com.au/issue/2023/may/marcia-langton/energy-power-strength-dr-yunupingu

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Celeste Barber is mesmerising in this Netflix comedy about a party monster transforming herself into a wellness monster 'Sometimes I feel like everybody is a sexy baby,' sang Taylor Swift in last year's 'Anti-Hero', 'and I'm a monster on the hill.' These lines kept coming back to me while watching Wellmania , a Netflix comedy-drama created by Brigid Delaney and Benjamin Law and loosely based on Delaney's book of the same name. The 'sexy babies' in Wellmania are the upwardly mobile residents of Sydney's eastern suburbs, who dutifully go on daily beachside runs dressed in expensive monochromatic gear, order green juices from weather-always-permitting outdoor kiosks, and spend a hefty amount of time working to achieve the most enviable body, marriage, children and real-estate portfolio.

https://www.themonthly.com.au/issue/2023/may/abigail-ulman/wellmania

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What American political insider series ‘The Circus' learnt (sort of) from the '80s classic newsroom drama 'The future of journalism in America is in trouble.' So said Judy Woodruff, former anchor and editor of the PBS NewsHour , last February at the prestigious Goldsmith Awards ceremony honouring investigative reporting. Her speech was featured in a recent episode of The Circus: Inside the Greatest Political Show on Earth . This episode, 'Fake News', concerning the latest woes of Fox News and the defamation case that's been brought against it, ended with some truly gripping television: a member of The Circus 's own team confessed to crossing a big ethical line while putting together a program about integrity.

https://www.themonthly.com.au/issue/2023/may/judith-lucy/media-watch-james-l-brooks-s-broadcast-news

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https://www.themonthly.com.au/issue/2022/august/bronwyn-adcock/trial

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https://www.themonthly.com.au/issue/2022/august/esther-linder/food-insecurity

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The voice and our inauthentic heart Detail from On The Art of Hunting With Birds . Source: Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana Racism, the Murdoch media and what success or defeat for the voice to parliament means for the stories we tell In the recesses of the Vatican Library, one of the oldest libraries in the world, there was recently discovered a 13th century illuminated manuscript entitled On The Art of Hunting With Birds , a detailed study of falconry and ornithology written by his Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II.

https://www.themonthly.com.au/issue/2023/july/richard-flanagan/voice-and-our-inauthentic-heart

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What appointing a poet laureate would do for the nation In the grim war of attrition waged by successive federal governments against the arts over recent decades, writers have sustained the sharpest losses. Apportioned a meagre 2.4 per cent of the entire 2021–22 budget of the Australia Council, literature has been an afterthought in federal arts policy – if any thought can be said to have been dedicated to it at all. In response to this austerity drive, literary institutions have often advanced claims regarding the sector's economic productivity to appeal for increased support from the government: see our contribution to the GDP; look at the jobs! But while it's true that a small cadre of commercially successful writers do help to underwrite a struggling ecosystem of publishing houses, booksellers and festivals, defending literature in utilitarian terms alone cedes almost all the good ground literature has to stand on.

https://www.themonthly.com.au/issue/2022/october/sarah-holland-batt/australians-all-let-us-read-verse

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Back to Back Theatre's ensemble, work and philosophy have drawn international acclaim, and now theatre's most prestigious prize 'Back to Back Theatre is despicable. It's beastly. It's contagious. Get this filth off our stages. This is rubbish theatre. Too many words. These guys are a pack of punks.' — Back to Back ensemble reviewing themselves, 2019 Those who think of theatre as something more than a subset of the 'entertainment industry' know that every collaboration is a rehearsal for utopia. Embedded in its heart is a gamble on human possibility: how we – as a community, as a nation, as a species – might work or play together, how we might negotiate difference, how we might find through each other a better way to be ourselves.

https://www.themonthly.com.au/issue/2022/october/alison-croggon/strength-strength

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October 2022 The Nation Reviewed Funding to artists shouldn't require bureaucratic acquittals and demonstrated outcomes I often ask myself what it takes to be a visual artist in Australia. This is not because I am one (although I did study painting at art school) but because I so often write about what it is they do – the work that they make and how they carve out an existence amid what is, by any objective measure, an openly indifferent environment. For, beyond a vanishingly small audience, who among us really knows what is happening at the leading edge of Australian art practice? We might take in a blockbuster or two at a large public gallery such as the NGV or the NGA, and even visit one of the smaller exhibitions that those institutions invariably produce on the sidelines, but how representative is that, really, of what our best artists are doing at any given moment? Most Australians would surely give little thought to such oversight.

https://www.themonthly.com.au/issue/2022/october/quentin-sprague/no-purse-strings-attached

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Why Laura Citarella's Borgesian thriller shouldn't get lost among the Venice Film Festival's PR distractions This month, I'm going to review a film I doubt you'll ever see. This is not intended as either a prank or a provocation; it's simply a comment on the way the film industry works and the oddly devalued status we currently enjoy, as consumers in this supposed age of plenty. But first, a cautionary tale, one that may help to explain where we find ourselves: a little over a month ago saw the release of George Miller's latest feature, Three Thousand Years of Longing – his first since 2015, and the critical and commercial triumph of Mad Max: Fury Road.

https://www.themonthly.com.au/issue/2022/october/shane-danielsen/last-tango-venice-trenque-lauquen

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In memory of the political cartoonist who stood against capitalism, exploitation, groupthink and bullshit In Gulliver's Travels , a gentleman from the 'grand academy of Lagado' is employed unavailingly to extract sunbeams from cucumbers. Bruce Petty (1929 – 2023) had more success, as Swift himself did, by extracting from the cruelties and madness of human society, the sunbeams of irony, metaphor and laughter. Amid all the Petty cartoons in the era depicting the Vietnam War, conscription, hippies, hashish, feminism, Johnson and Nixon, the Chinese Cultural Revolution and all manner of other upheavals, including those in the Liberal and Labor parties, the one I remember most clearly had CSIRO scientists in laboratory coats sternly working on the prototype of a motorbike made from merino wool.

https://www.themonthly.com.au/issue/2023/may/don-watson/bruce-petty-s-joke-machine

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As momentum builds to this year's referendum, the man long regarded as the ‘Father of Reconciliation' reflects on a life fighting for a better Australia In August last year, while at Kalkarindji to attend a meeting of the executives of the four democratically elected Northern Territory land councils (which passed a resolution to support full implementation of the Uluru Statement from the Heart), I paid my respects to that great Aboriginal land rights activist, Vincent Lingiari, at his nearby grave.

https://www.themonthly.com.au/issue/2023/july/patrick-dodson/firelight-stick-hill

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https://www.themonthly.com.au/issue/2022/august/sarah-krasnostein/fight-choose

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The writers strike in America brought often solitary artists onto the streets to come together to protect their livelihoods When Australian writer and actor Harriet Dyer first heard about the Writers Guild of America industrial action, she was in Los Angeles. 'We got the email from the union telling us. We knew it was coming, so we were unsurprised when it happened. We knew it was a fight worth having, but I think we all hoped it would be wrapped up soonish, so the feeling was one of hope. But obvs that hasn't happened…' You know Dyer: along with her husband, Patrick Brammall, she created the local comedy series Colin From Accounts , which swept the recent Logie awards.

https://www.themonthly.com.au/issue/2023/october/marieke-hardy/embolden-age-hollywood

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What happened when a non-royalist was invited to photograph QEII for the golden jubilee I am not a royalist I am not a royalist I am not a royalist. I'm from Irish stock. Rumour has it we're related to the Kelly family. My father – a communist, then socialist, then a member of the Labor Party – was raised in poverty in North Melbourne. We wore our 'It's Time' T-shirts and campaigned for Gough Whitlam. We learnt about the injustices of the ruling class and the colonialists towards the rightful owners of Australian land.

https://www.themonthly.com.au/issue/2022/october/polly-borland/five-minutes-queen

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How the Murdoch media obliterated the Liberal Party's centre and its foreseeable future The 2022 election was a tipping point for the Liberal Party. Not because it was tipped out of government – that happens regularly. But rather because six of the party's hitherto safest and wealthiest electorates were lost; not to Labor, but to six women who ran on small 'l' liberal platforms calling for action on climate, gender equality and integrity in government. When you add those six to Mayo's Rebekha Sharkie, Indi's Helen Haines and Warringah's Zali Steggall you have nine of what were once the party's safest seats in the hands of independent, liberal women – three of whom have been twice (or in Sharkie's case thrice) elected with increased majorities.

https://www.themonthly.com.au/issue/2023/may/malcolm-turnbull/libs-are-all-right

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https://www.themonthly.com.au/issue/2022/august/fiona-giles/frank-recollections

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https://www.themonthly.com.au/issue/2022/august/josh-bornstein/what-s-gone-wrong-abc

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https://www.themonthly.com.au/issue/2022/august/sophie-black/line-call-spring-creek

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Martin Scorsese's first Western mishandles its story of colonial exploitation, while Pablo Larraín's darkly humorous, black-and-white satire delivers Pinochet as a vampire For a boring state, Oklahoma has a pretty bloody history. The Trail of Tears. The Tulsa race massacre of 1921. The 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, arguably the first manifestation of the far-right discontent that's currently transforming America. In 1859, oil was discovered near Salina – by accident, in a well that had been drilled for salt – and by 1907, before the then Oklahoma Territory even became a state, it was producing more crude than anywhere else in the United States.

https://www.themonthly.com.au/issue/2023/october/shane-danielsen/histories-violence-killers-flower-moon-and-el-conde

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What Francis Bacon inspired in Australia's great avant-garde painter If it were easier than it currently is for Australian artists to gain international recognition, Gareth Sansom would stand with Sigmar Polke, Amy Sillman, Albert Oehlen, Laura Owens and Charline von Heyl as among the most important avant-garde painters of the 21st century. Sansom was the subject of a major retrospective at the National Gallery of Victoria in 2017, he had a show of paintings this year at Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery in Sydney, and he has a new show, titled Jekyll and Ply, opening at Melbourne's STATION gallery early next year.

https://www.themonthly.com.au/issue/2022/october/sebastian-smee/influences-gareth-sansom

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From impromptu balcony choruses to online choirs, we found our voices during the pandemic Two news stories loomed large for me over the months of the COVID lockdowns, connected by the invisible sticky threads of metaphor. The first was the reportage about the Australian regent honeyeater, a native bird whose population is teetering on extinction. There are only about 350 regent honeyeaters left in the wild, and, according to scientists, as they dwindle in numbers and lose habitat, they are forgetting the special songs that would help them attract mates.

https://www.themonthly.com.au/issue/2022/october/cate-kennedy/how-lockdowns-rekindled-our-need-sing-together

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October 2022 Essays The ideal reader Lesbia Harford's grave in Kew Cemetery, Melbourne. Photo by Eric Timewell A reflection on poetry, on inspiration and on an imagined audience Nearly 30 years have passed since I took my last class as a teacher of fiction-writing at tertiary level. I was employed as such a teacher for 16 years, and during that time I presided over more than 2000 classes. (I'm trying to avoid reporting that I actually taught fiction-writing. I certainly helped many people to write better fiction, but I doubt whether I taught anyone who had never attempted fiction how to write the stuff that we call by that name.

https://www.themonthly.com.au/issue/2022/october/gerald-murnane/ideal-reader

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How the British author's ‘Wolf Hall' trilogy became a family matter of life and death When my mother was diagnosed with terminal cancer, I asked if she had any regrets. Without missing a beat, she said, 'I might not live to read the sequel to Wolf Hall.' This was late 2010. Wolf Hall had been released the year before and my mother, long fascinated by Tudor history, had relished it. She would later be embarrassed that in the face of death she'd expressed the desire to read above all else. But as a writer, I was delighted.

https://www.themonthly.com.au/blog/angela-savage/2022/05/2022/hilary-mantel-my-mother-and-me

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The ever-likeable New Zealander delivers that rarest of things, a memoir by an actor without vanity Sam Neill is one of the more likeable actors around, as well as a fine one. His memoir is both weird and wonderful because, although he is diagnosed as having a blood cancer that might be the end of him, the book, which has a delicious, winding stair structure, finishes buoyant with hope and is all the richer for the terminal framing. Neill is a posh, self-deprecating New Zealander with an accent that he says sounds colonial to the Brits but a bit grand to the Australasian yobs.

https://www.themonthly.com.au/issue/2023/may/peter-craven/jurassic-lark-sam-neill-s-did-i-ever-tell-you

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The 50th anniversary of the Australian architecture firm that has made a mark everywhere from Melbourne to Beijing to Stonehenge When John Denton, Bill Corker and Barrie Marshall set up their architectural practice in 1972, it would be another two decades before screens and keyboards began to displace drawing boards and pencils from their studio. Work had only just started on Australia's first skyscraper to reach 60 floors, the MLC tower in Sydney, impressively designed in sculptural concrete by Harry Seidler, at the cost of the destruction of the grandest hotel in the country.

https://www.themonthly.com.au/issue/2023/may/deyan-sudjic/flair-and-square-architects-denton-corker-marshall

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As the cost-of-living crisis worsens, more people across Australia are going without enough food At the doorway to Olinda Hall, in a mountainside community in the Yarra Ranges an hour east of Melbourne, a tall woman is greeted by name as she enters. She speaks for a few minutes to the volunteers in face masks and yellow fluoro vests, before being handed a box of food. Bread, green beans, pre-packaged salad mix, a tomato, lemons, oranges, a tin of instant coffee. It's early February. A laugh rings out into the wooden beams of the hall, news is exchanged and pleasantries made before the woman departs.

https://www.themonthly.com.au/issue/2023/may/esther-linder/hunger-games

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