Australia

Thursday

James Delingpole

Shark treatment

All the good non-fiction things that were ever on TV — from Kenneth Clark’s Civilisation to David Attenborough’s Planet Earth (the bits where he’s not proselytising about climate doom, I mean), from Andrew Graham-Dixon’s arty jaunts to Italy to Jonathan Meades’s bizarro forays into architecture, from The World at War to all those more recent war porn documentaries narrated by Sam West, from Werner Herzog’s Little Dieter Needs To Fly to Louis Theroux doing a number on Jimmy Savile — have one thing in common: they were all made by middle-aged men. Middle-aged men are the business. They’re comfortable in their skin; they’ve got hinterland and character; they’ve put in

Douglas Murray Douglas Murray

Antipodean notebook

Whenever I visit a country I try to pitch high and meet the president or prime minister. In Australia this proves tricky. At the start of the week Malcolm Turnbull and I are on for lunch, but commitments force me to call off. By the end of my visit he is no longer prime minister. One of his excellent predecessors comes to see me at my hotel. At first I marvel at the ease with which former prime ministers can move about in Australia. But I soon wonder if people are unfazed because they reckon it might be their own turn to run the country next. I am here for

Thursday

Cindy Yu

The Spectator Podcast: return of Ukip

It’s safe to say that Brexit negotiations haven’t gone smoothly. The Tories are down in the latest polls, but Ukip is up. Are we witnessing the beginning of Ukip’s return? Meanwhile, Australians are stuck between a rock and a hard place as China and America continue to bicker; and Cosmo Landesman complains about modern parenting. You don’t have to be following Brexit very closely to know that it’s not quite going to plan. May has lost the main Brexiteers in her Cabinet, and Jacob Rees Mogg is leading a Leavers revolt from the backbenches. If you voted for a hard Brexit, you would understandably be worried. Is this what explains

Tom Switzer

Australia at the crossroads

 Sydney For decades, Australia has been known as ‘the lucky country’. At the end of the world geographically, we are separated from the global troublespots by vast oceans. We have recorded 27 years of uninterrupted growth, partly because of a surge in exports of commodities to China. At the same time, our tough border protection policies boost public confidence in, as John Howard put it, ‘who comes to this country and the circumstances in which they come’. As a result, our politics have not been profoundly affected by the kind of populist forces dismantling established parties across Europe. Nor have we witnessed an anti-globalisation backlash. Not for us any Trump-

Thursday

Laura Freeman

Grim and glorious

Tick, tock. Tick, tock. Stay too long in the Lee Miller exhibition at the Hepworth Wakefield and the metronome might drive you mad. Considerate curators will only set it swinging in stints to spare the gallery guards. Man Ray, who made the metronome ‘Object of Destruction’ (1923), meant it to infuriate. His assembled sculpture came with instructions. ‘Cut the eye from a photograph of one who has been loved but is seen no more. Attach the eye to the pendulum of a metronome and regulate the weight to suit the tempo desired. Keep going to the limit of endurance. With a hammer well-aimed, try to destroy the whole at a

Michael Tanner

Too much information | 12 July 2018

When Kasper Holten’s production of Don Giovanni was first staged at the Royal Opera in 2014, I disliked it intensely, even more than I have disliked most of his other productions, or for that matter most productions of Don Giovanni. I missed the first revival, but when I saw it this time round my reactions were more complex, though I still think there is a lot wrong with it. In the meantime, I have watched the 2014 production on Blu-ray. Holten and Es Devlin the set designer give a commentary throughout, which at least helped me to understand what was intended, even if it didn’t convince me that most of

James Walton

Between a rock and a hard place

According to the opening captions in Picnic at Hanging Rock (BBC2, Wednesday), ‘the infamous events’ it depicts ‘began whena mysterious widow purchased a mansion out in the Australian bush’. The first few scenes, set in the late 19th century, were then dedicated to proving quite how mysterious she was: Hester Appleyard (Natalie Dormer) wasn’t merely veiled, but also filmed largely from behind and — just to be on the safe side — in the dark. What she might not be, though, is a widow. As she explored her new house, her voice-over dropped a series of dark hints that her mourning dress was a cunning disguise — and that she

Thursday

Sebastian Faulks

Diary – 5 April 2018

When the much-admired (and very tall) literary agent Gillon Aitken died in October 2016, he left most of his estate in a charitable trust to be named after his daughter Charlotte, who had, very sadly, predeceased him. Quite soon, the trust will start its work, which is to ‘educate the public in the appreciation of literature’, including poetry and drama, by whatever means seem appropriate — to include prizes, grants, scholarships, the funding of retreats, courses and so on. As one of the trustees, my job is to find the best ways to fulfil Gillon’s wishes. The slate is blank. My first feeling is that there are too many prizes

Roger Alton Roger Alton

What a pantomime this ball-tampering scandal has been

I haven’t seen so many men crying since the end of A Tale of Two Cities at the Scala Cinema in Oxford in the late 1950s. As the credits rolled, stern-faced blokes whipped out their hankies and dabbed their eyes. But by the time the lights went up, the hankies were replaced and upper lips stiffened. These after all were men, many of whom had served in the war. On balance, you feel, that is how men should behave, rather than sobbing uncontrollably with their parents around, like Steve Smith, or — in the case of wee Davey Warner — doing an absurd name, rank and number impression from a

Wednesday

Michael Heath

Australia notebook

I went to Australia with my constant companion Hilary, the only woman in England I’m not paying alimony to. She is also my spirit guide, and can get me through airports by simply waving her phone at various machines. I’m ashamed to say I still expect my ticket to be punched by a ticket collector, and my suitcase marked with a chalk cross by a cheerful customs officer. ‘No smutty arts books from Paris I hope, sir?’ We start the day (I have no idea what day it is, owing to jet lag) having breakfast at the Bathers’ Pavilion on Balmoral beach. It could be California in 1935, so charming is it.

Thursday

Patrick Flanery

A brutal race

More than 25 years ago, Peter Carey co-wrote one of the most audacious road movies ever made, Wim Wenders’s Until the End of the World, which circles the globe before concluding with a long interlude in the Australian outback. While the film was in the mode of speculative science fiction and Carey’s captivating A Long Way from Home is a fiercely realist story set in the 1950s, this new book nonetheless shares both that earlier work’s fascination with outsiders whose lives spin off in unpredictable directions, and as a profound reverence for Australia’s interior and its people. Outside Melbourne, in the small town of Bacchus Marsh, Willie Bachhuber — a

Thursday

Carole Hayman

Long-haul travel

For some reason, I decided to go to the other side of the world for Christmas. I may never do it again. Not because I didn’t like Australia (I loved it) but because it takes forever to get there. And spending 23 hours with your knees under your chin on a long-haul flight to the Antipodes will cure you of ever going further than Calais. When you’re flying economy it’s of paramount importance to choose the right airline. I tried four for size: Cathay Pacific, Qantas, Jetstar and Air New Zealand. Cathay Pacific flew me to Hong Kong. The staff were friendly and smart but, alas, the Boeing 777 was

Thursday

Sam Leith

Books Podcast: Clive James

In this week’s Books podcast I speak to Clive James. Since he was diagnosed with leukaemia, Clive has been as it were on borrowed time. But what use he has made of that time: the last couple of years have seen a great late outpouring of poetry, most recently the wittily and wanly titled collection Injury Time.  I travelled to his home in Cambridge to talk to him about poetry, fame, late style, discovering Browning, being silly and serious, watching box sets, facing the end, and why he wants to be buried back home in Australia. You can listen to our conversation here: And if you enjoyed that, do subscribe

Ellah Allfrey

Making sense of an unjust world

These three timely works of creative nonfiction explore the question of race: chronicling histories of colonialism and migration; examining the institutionalisation of prejudice; and charting movements of change and the resistance to change. Maxine Beneba Clarke’s memoir, The Hate Race, tempers a tale of schoolyard trauma with gentle humour; Reni Eddo-Lodge’s debut, Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race, is a broadside, a roar of outrage; while Eula Biss’s elegantly structured essays in Notes from No Man’s Land are delivered with a deceptively quiet insistence that nevertheless leaves the reader shaken. They focus, respectively, on Australia, Britain and the United States. ‘Racism is a shortcoming of the

Friday

Stephen Daisley

How to deal with Pauline Hanson’s political stunts

Before Trump or Farage, before Wilders or Marine Le Pen, there was Pauline. Pauline Hanson was the original rabble-rouser who disrupted the pieties of liberal multiculturalism. Along came this copper-topped fish ’n’ chip shop owner with her screechy, strangled sentences and her gut prejudices about immigrants, welfare wasters and Aborigines. Unexpectedly elected to Parliament in 1996, Hanson stunned her fellow MPs and much of the country by declaring in her maiden speech that Australia was in danger of being ‘swamped by Asians’. She is back in the news after wearing then tearing off a burqa in the Australian Senate. Senator Hanson, who leads the hard-right One Nation party, has made

Thursday

Kate Chisholm

Big Auntie

It’s sneaky, the way in which the BBC, so much regarded as part of the family as to be nicknamed ‘Auntie’, has introduced the need to login (or register) whenever you want to listen to something on iPlayer. Maybe I’m doing something wrong because the alert message assures me I will be kept logged in, and that I should only have to login once. But even that is once too much. After all, until now, we’ve had the chance to listen again to whatever we fancy with very little fuss and almost instantly. That freedom feels very different if you have to rummage around in your memory for the password

Thursday

James Walton

1967 and all that

As you may have spotted, the BBC is marking the 50th anniversary of the decriminalisation of male homosexuality with an extended gay season. (And if you haven’t, I can only assume you’ve seen and heard no BBC trailers for months.) The centrepiece this week was Against the Law (BBC2, Wednesday), which dramatised the story of Peter Wildeblood, a Daily Mail journalist imprisoned for 18 months in 1954 for the possibly overlapping crimes of buggery and gross indecency. But — double entendre alert — Wildeblood didn’t take this lying down. After his release, he published a book making the case for legalisation. In the central role, Daniel Mays captured Wildeblood’s reluctant

Thursday

James Walton

The sting of betrayal

This may seem an odd thing to say about a writer who’s been officially declared a National Living Treasure in his native Australia, and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize three times before winning it with Schindler’s Ark — but I sometimes think Thomas Keneally is badly underrated. After all, Schindler’s Ark won that Booker Prize 35 years — and 19 Keneally novels — ago, and since then his reputation appears to have settled down into that of a solid craftsman: the sort of novelist who rarely lets you down, but who never quite hits the literary heights either. As to how this wildly unjust verdict has come about, my

Monday

Brendan O’Neill

The short path from censorship to violence

The news that Ayaan Hirsi Ali has cancelled her speaking tour of Australia due to ‘security concerns’ should concern anyone who believes in freedom. It is a dark day when a woman who fled to the West to escape the Islamist suffocations of Somalia, and precisely so that she might think and speak freely, feels she cannot say certain things in certain places. That even a Western, liberal, democratic nation like Australia cannot guarantee Hirsi Ali the freedom to speak her mind without suffering censorship or harm is deeply worrying. It points to the mainstreaming of intolerance, to the adoption by certain people in the West of the illiberalism that makes

Thursday

Tom Switzer

Sydney Notebook

The other day, I went to a boozy barbecue near Sydney’s northern beaches. The guests were all political mates of mine and we chatted about those insurgent populists who threaten to upend established conservative parties across the globe: Donald Trump, Marine Le Pen, Geert Wilders, Beppe Grillo and, of course, Pauline Hanson — Australia’s version of all four. We put our wide-ranging discussion about domestic politics in an international context. But it was not until the next morning that I realised that we had not even talked about Malcolm Turnbull: he’s our fourth prime minister in four years, who was famous in the UK in the 1980s as the defence