Dennis Altman’s ‘Escaping the Tribe?’ (Overland 196) is a thoughtful attempt to mediate what he takes to be some of the more intransigent ideological positions on both sides of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. I wish, however, to criticise Altman’s concluding proposition

The Choir of London has come to perform classical music across the Occupied Territories. The idea is to promote excellence in the West Bank, to use music to encourage inspiration and dignity. The project emphasises collaboration with local artists and educational programs, to foster performances of the highest standard for people who would otherwise have little access to other musical traditions.

The international education industry has been thrust into the public arena not by the bashings of international students but rather by the responses of those students to that violence. Indian community newspapers have carried accounts of violence for years but the recent protests in Australia and subsequent media attention within India finally forced authorities to respond.

In developed economies, design is valued highly. Designers receive attractive remuneration and are celebrated in glossy trade publications. Video-game designers, however, get treated as a cultural blight. According to a recent white paper by the International Game Developers Association, they even face significant quality-of-life issues, working long hours but with poor job security.

Amidst the chancers, hacks and Groupers who comprise the Rudd cabinet, Attorney-General Robert McClelland scarcely seems to belong to the darker side. The owlish, earnest McClelland was born to wear a V-neck sweater under a suit and so it was painful watching him, with his manifest desire to do good, sell his proposed reforms to anti-terror laws inherited from the Howard government.

I never saw anything so beautiful … you cannot conceive how the Orchids have delighted me. Charles Darwin to Sir JD Hooker, The Autobiography of Charles Darwin and Selected Letters, 1892 Last Sunday I went to church to be with my father, to say goodbye. As I looked in from the vestibule, I could see […]

And yet something wasn't quite right. There was no wind and an eerie stillness hung over the place. The rambling weatherboard homestead that Judith grew up in was long gone, replaced by a large 1970s-style brown brick house that lay unoccupied. It was owned by a family who visited only occasionally, leaving a manager to look after day-to-day affairs.

It's an old habit of Cave's to refer to himself in royal terms, and he's living proof that if you believe in your own cant for long enough, other people might eventually start believing it too.

The Productivity Commission's report on parallel importation gave literary Australia a jolt that was no less unpleasant for being, in some ways, necessary.