Australia

Why are trans activists and a Melbourne bookstore trying to cancel me?

10 February 2021 2:44 am

Imagine my surprise to wake up this morning to be told that Readings book store in Melbourne had posted an…

Isolation nation: how Australia is dealing with its pandemic

10 February 2021 1:12 am

At 6.20 p.m. on Friday evening, Scarborough Beach, an oceanside suburb of Perth, looked like it always does: families picnicked…

Australian border closures would work for Britain. Here’s why

30 January 2021 9:00 am

Closing the borders worked Down Under. Could it work here?

The human costs of an ‘Australian-style’ quarantine system

26 January 2021 7:00 pm

Richard Curtis’ iconic Love Actually airport scenes may fall on the wrong side of saccharine, but they capture something of…

Could the Australian approach to Covid work in Britain?

23 January 2021 9:00 am

The government’s most important economic policy is its vaccination programme. The speed at which people are immunised will determine when…

The burden of guilt: The Living Sea of Waking Dreams, by Richard Flanagan, reviewed

16 January 2021 9:00 am

Thanks to the Booker Prize, Richard Flanagan is probably the only Tasmanian novelist British readers are likely to have heard…

Transport to Australia was the saving of Carmen Callil’s family

12 December 2020 9:00 am

If 2020 has given us something to talk about other than Covid, it’s been history — and, more precisely, to…

The case for Chinese reparations

5 December 2020 9:00 am

It is time we started to talk about reparations. I am not of course referring to the demands made by…

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Twitter is in China’s pocket

3 December 2020 6:01 am

Twitter has been quick on the draw when responding to tweets by President Trump in the last month, as he…

It isn’t always easy to give money away

3 October 2020 9:00 am

I always felt sorry for my father, then president of a chronically strapped educational institution, for having ceaselessly to approach…

Forlorn Plorn: The Dickens Boy, by Thomas Keneally, reviewed

5 September 2020 9:00 am

Parents are always terrified of bad family history repeating itself. Prince Albert dreaded his son Bertie turning into a roué…

Hugging China hasn’t done us any favours

9 May 2020 9:00 am

Like nearly everything named a ‘scandal’, ‘affair’ or given the post-fix ‘gate’, almost nobody now remembers the Dalai Lama affair.…

Not merely funny but somehow also joyous: Sky One's Brassic reviewed

9 May 2020 9:00 am

Danny Brocklehurst, the scriptwriter for Sky One’s Brassic, used to work for Shameless in its glory days — although if…

The Amazon Prime doc that will convert anyone to cricket

18 April 2020 9:00 am

Imagine rooting for the Australian cricket team. If you’re Scottish, Welsh or Irish — or Australian obviously — it might…

Portrait of the week: Crisis in Iran, fires in Australia and Manchester rapist jailed

11 January 2020 9:00 am

Home Dominic Raab, the Foreign Secretary, who had not been told in advance of America’s killing in Iraq of Qassem…

Fight fire with fire: controlled burning could have protected Australia

11 January 2020 9:00 am

 Sydney By modern standards, my grandfather would probably be considered an environmental criminal. To clear land for his farmhouse in…

Is the patriarchy as all-powerful as it’s cracked up to be? The Baby Has Landed reviewed

30 November 2019 9:00 am

Anybody who watched the opening episode of The Baby Has Landed (BBC2, Wednesday) might have found themselves wondering if the…

Portrait of the week: Farage’s climbdown, Yorkshire’s floods and Australia’s fires

16 November 2019 9:00 am

Home Nigel Farage, the leader of the Brexit party, climbed down from his resolution to field 600 candidates in the…

Angourie Rice, who stars in Bruce Beresford’s 2018 film Ladies in Black [Photo by Pascal Le Segretain/Getty Images]

The most uplifting film ever made

26 October 2019 9:00 am

New York   Should art mirror the world as it is, or does an artist fail the public if the…

A decorative pageant that would appeal to civic grandees: The Secret River reviewed

7 September 2019 9:00 am

The Secret River opens in a fertile corner of New South Wales in the early 1800s. William, a cockney pauper…

Credit: Ian Hill

The Australian James Joyce: the novels of Gerald Murnane reviewed

2 February 2019 9:00 am

Gerald Murnane is the kind of writer literary critics adore. His novels have little in the way of plot or…

Douglas Murray: I can’t think of a time when more people have lost their minds

1 September 2018 9:00 am

Whenever I visit a country I try to pitch high and meet the president or prime minister. In Australia this…

The rough, simple and cheerily thick lifeguards of Bondi Rescue. Image: Mojo Down Under

All the good non-fiction that was ever on TV was made by middle-aged men

1 September 2018 9:00 am

All the good non-fiction things that were ever on TV — from Kenneth Clark’s Civilisation to David Attenborough’s Planet Earth…

Australia’s choice: Chinese trade – or American security?

28 July 2018 9:00 am

 Sydney For decades, Australia has been known as ‘the lucky country’. At the end of the world geographically, we are…

Warner and Smith are paying for the sins of a generation of Australian cricket players

7 April 2018 9:00 am

When the much-admired (and very tall) literary agent Gillon Aitken died in October 2016, he left most of his estate…