Just as night will always follow day, so too is any political event immediately followed by the spin. This is a crucial moment, as spin’s architects and mouthpieces try to shape the messiness of reality into a clear line of narrative, sometimes predetermined, other times improvised, before facts can ossify in undesirable ways. Nowhere is this more ( Read more... )

This article originally appeared in issue 4 of The Young Pioneer, an online magazine in 2013. Republished here as this issue has now been archived.The early evening of 14 April 2012: Standing outside the Bird's Nest stadium in Beijing, I am doing something never previously attempted: I am staring directly at the sun. Normally a highly inadvisable ( Read more... )

If you were to make a list of, say, the ten most influential science fiction films and then another of the ten most influential horror films, there would be a very strong case for Ridley Scott's Alien (1979) to be included on both. Not only an instant classic, the film also launched one of the most important and enduring multimedia franchises we ( Read more... )

This article originally appeared in issue 3 of The Young Pioneer, an online magazine in 2013. Republished here as this issue has now been archived.In Ian McEwan’s masterful novel “Saturday” (unquestionably the first great novel about the War on Terror), the main character, Henry Perowne, spends most of that titular day thinking about Iraq. Taking ( Read more... )

Collected here is a compilation of photos taken by my paternal grandparents on their two world trips in 1970-1 and 1976-7. These are just a fraction of the total in existence, but unlike most I don't believe in just dumping hundreds of pics on people for them to ignore. All of these have been carefully chosen because they either A) say something ( Read more... )

It was in late January 2000 that I embarked upon Robert Jordan's The Eye of the World - a millennial beginning to a millennial epic - and I finished the concluding volume, A Memory of Light, this February. This means that the 14 books have taken me almost exactly 15 years to read, literally half a lifetime in my case, and therefore I believe some ( Read more... )

Last year I had the pleasure and the privilege to talk with former Prime Minster, Malcolm Fraser for a couple of hours thanks to taking a subject coordinated by former federal MP and Fraser's former chief of staff, Petro Georgio. Fraser served as the Member for Wannon for 28 years and was prime minister of Australia between 1975 and 1983. He sadly ( Read more... )

The commandments laying out how the 43rd Parliament of Australia would function were etched upon a stone tablet in the afternoon of September 7, 2010. This was when the ghastly blank of limbo that the inconclusive election result of August 21 produced ended. No sooner had Rob Oakeshott's epic and yawn-inducing speech finally lumbered to the (by ( Read more... )

This article originally appeared in issue 2 of The Young Pioneer, an online magazine in 2013. Republished here as this issue has now been archived.In July of 1976, radio listeners from Europe to North America tuning in to their regular programmes suddenly found them almost totally overwhelmed by a strong new signal of unknown origin. These ( Read more... )

As the least open, least visited and least understood country in the world, North Korea is bound to generate many misconceptions, however it seems the most pervasive one is that you can’t actually go there. In reality nothing could be further from the truth. All you do is fill out a visa application, send them some money, and providing you’re not a ( Read more... )