Welcome to Theatre Street. The weather is fine today, and the year is twenty-something. Although you could be in Sydney or Melbourne, I’ve placed my fantasy street in the great Pacific city. Not long ago this was a dusty and decaying thoroughfare, not far from Central Station. Now, it’s a dynamic streetscape which houses half […]

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It’s late October. The Coalition for Marriage has a problem airing a television commercial supporting the No vote in the same-sex-marriage survey. The commercial has been classified as MA 15+ by Free TV Australia. Because of its sexual explicitness it will only be viewable after 8.30 p.m. The words that offended were taken from the […]

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In Australia, stupidity rises, totalitarianism descends. Between them, the judges of the prestigious premiers’ literary awards in Victoria and New South Wales gave prize money of $165,000 to honour a play script in which the central male Aboriginal character is so phoney he confuses European and Australian trees: “We start our walkabout just before the […]

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Did Malcolm Fraser confuse his memories of what was said on the telephone and what took place later at Government House? Sir John Kerr said he did and Fraser insisted his version was correct, so who to believe? Certainly not the latter, a most unreliable source

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Two effeminate young men in dresses prance onto the stage. When the laughter and cheering stop one of them agreeably lisps to the other, “By my troth, Nerissa, my little body is aweary of this great world.” When King James saw The Merchant of Venice in 1605 this is probably what Portia looked and sounded […]

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If Australia’s pre-eminent Aboriginal historian is incapable of reading a wedding certificate dealing with his own family history one can only imagine what fantasies might inform his work. As to his extended speculation about an Indigenous bloodline, why not a DNA test?

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The authorised version of what happened in Canberra on November 11, 1975, was crafted and tirelessly promoted by Labor sympathisers in academia and the press. It is the inspirational story of Gough Whitlam, a great man wronged, and his defiant eloquence. Trouble is, it's just not true

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On the evening of April 8, 1971, some 24 Labor opposition parliamentarians enjoyed a politically seasoned meal in the Soviet embassy. Some 21 months later, when those guests were the government, Attorney-General Lionel Murphy told ASIO to drop its interception of the Soviet embassy’s phones

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Between us, it’s personal. There was a time, I was an admirer. His short stories, of course, and I even enjoyed his novels. That was the problem, I suppose. Sometime in the mid-1990s I chanced upon a copy of Montague Summers’s posthumously published autobiography, The Galanty Show, in the James Cook University library in Townsville. […]

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It would take only small changes to update Goebbels' vision for an upright, uptight BDS audience. The star on the money-lender's chest would not be the familiar yellow one, but a blue Star of David ripped from a flag the thugs have yet to burn. Replace 'Jew' with 'Israeli' and await thunderous applause

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