Book Review – Arena

Mar 2023

The ‘rules-based international order’ is not a set of rules at all, and still less a set of principles. It is a set of material military arrangements that seek to ensure and enshrine US dominance.

In ‘The Far-Off Afterwards’: D. H. Lawrence’s Kangaroo at 100

Arena Quarterly no.12

William Holbrook

Dec 2022

On the occasion of its centenary, Kangaroo ought to be read at the level of ideas. The book, in fact, sums up to being one of the most compelling and prognostic critiques ever made of democracy in Australia.

He’s On A Roll: ‘Holding Patterns’ by Alisdair Cannon

Arena Quarterly no.12

Kathleen Mary Fallon

Dec 2022

There are shades of Swift in Cannon’s solutions to the Birth-Strikes movement: ‘have your child and shoot a banker … gun down a fossil fuel executive … kill a politician for each child you have’.

Pandemic Politics

Arena Online

Alison Broinowski

1 Dec 2022

In epidemiology, MacIntyre says, not everything is as it seems. She mistrusts some of her colleagues who put their reputations and grant applications ahead of scientific evidence and public health.

Cruelty by Design: Australia’s Immigration Laws

Arena Online

Paul Tyson

14 Jul 2022

As a nation we must face the deep root of inhuman cruelty in our national psyche that our politicians so willingly exploit to advance their own power.

Politically Challenged: Review of Scott Ryan’s ‘Challenging Politics’

Arena Online

Richard King

19 Aug 2021

...it may be that the current atmosphere in Canberra represents a perverse form of unity. In arguing more and more about less and less, politicians are sending a message to the electorate that Real Disagreements are being had, when in fact it is clear that the two major parties are different cheeks on the same rear end.

A review of Bill Bowtell’s Unmasked: The Politics of Pandemics

Arena Online

Jeremy Baskin

27 May 2021

Bowtell’s story is wrapped in a larger view of the relationship between science and politics. Crudely put, he sees science as good and true, and politics as compromised and bad. Science should trump politics in a pandemic.

The Backward-Looking Cult of Beatle Worship

Arena Online

Dean Biron

6 May 2021

What’s really sucking the life out of things is this traditionalist drive to be borne ceaselessly backwards, a program that diminishes the dozens of equally transcendent recording artists who’ve roamed the fallout zone since punk detonated the Beatles-led classic-rock hegemony circa 1976.

"Shannon Hayes, Radical Homemakers: Changing the World from Your Own Backyard (Finch Publishing, 2011)