Australia

Thursday

The Spectator

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

Home Nigel Farage, the leader of the Brexit party, climbed down from his resolution to field 600 candidates in the general election, promising not to contest the 317 seats won by the Conservatives in 2017. The Conservatives, Labour and the Liberal Democrats said they would spend large sums of taxpayers’ money on things that might please voters (such as the NHS or, from the Lib Dems, a ‘skills wallet’ of £10,000 for every adult). The Conservatives claimed that Labour’s promises would cost £1,200 billion, which Labour denied. A review commissioned by the government into the HS2 railway said it should be built, despite the cost. Asked by the BBC if

Thursday

Taki

The most uplifting film ever made

New York   Should art mirror the world as it is, or does an artist fail the public if the work looks back to a time before the grotesqueries of the present? Back, back, I say, but that’s to be expected. I’m such a fan of the past that if I could have one wish granted by The Spectator it would be for a review by Deborah Ross of the most uplifting movie ever, Ladies in Black, directed by the great Australian Bruce Beresford. My, my, what memories of Australians and Oz it brought back. The great Lew Hoad, Mervyn Rose, Roy Emerson, Neale Fraser, Ken Fletcher, all great tennis

Thursday

Lloyd Evans

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

The Secret River opens in a fertile corner of New South Wales in the early 1800s. William, a cockney pauper transported to Australia for theft, receives a pardon from the governor and decides to plant a crop on 100 acres of Aboriginal land. His doting wife, Sal, begs him to take her and their young sons back to her beloved London. They make a deal. William must succeed as a farmer within five years or pay for their passage home. He clashes with a tribe of spear-waving Aboriginals who make it clear that they want him off their ancestral turf. Neither side speaks the other’s language. ‘This is mine now.

Wednesday

Matthew Lesh

What the Tories can learn from Australia’s election upset

It is hard to exaggerate the level of shock caused by Scott Morrison’s Australian election victory. The re-election of the country’s Liberal party prime minister – and the defeat of left-wing Labor leader Bill Shorten – took the polls and plenty of Aussies by surprise. Earlier this year, Shorten told a bemused Arnold Schwarzenegger “I’m going to be the next prime minister of Australia”. The Australian people had a different idea. In his victory speech, Morrison thanked “quiet Australians” for supporting him. A similar dynamic was, of course, at play among shy Tories in the 2015 election in Britain, shy Brexiteers in 2016 and then shy Trump voters later that same year. “I’ve always believed

Monday

Stefan Boscia

How climate change decided Australia’s election

Australian Labor leader Bill Shorten will forever have the ignominious label of the man who lost the unlosable election – Australia’s answer to Neil Kinnock. After six years of the conservative Liberal-National coalition government, and three different prime ministers, Labor were considered the clear favourite to win Saturday’s general election. The government had been wracked with disunity over climate change and same-sex marriage and were governing in a minority for the past nine months. The Liberal party also saw several high-profile retirements in the lead up to the election as MPs started jumping off what they thought was a sinking ship. Newspoll, Australia’s largest political poll, had Labor in front

Stephen Daisley Stephen Daisley

Scott Morrison’s ‘miracle’ win in the Australian elections

‘I have always believed in miracles,’ Scott Morrison beamed. Australia’s first Pentecostal prime minister was addressing a victory rally after an upset in Saturday’s federal election. Throughout the campaign, pollsters and pundits had been as one: the Coalition (a centre-right alliance between Morrison’s Liberal Party and the agrarian National Party) was finished and Labor was headed into government after six years in opposition. Morrison was the fractious Coalition’s third prime minister since 2013, his ministry was divided over climate change and Labor leader Bill Shorten had tapped into public anger at the banks and the top end of town. Then they voted. One by one, marginal Coalition seats held firm and

Thursday

Daniel Swift

Daydreams in the outback

Gerald Murnane is the kind of writer literary critics adore. His novels have little in the way of plot or even character, and it is hard to tell the narrator from the writer, so that all his stories might be essays; his sentences are weirdly flat but interrupted occasionally by wild visions. Try this, for example: There in a room with enormous windows a man with a polka-dotted bow tie broadcasts radio programmes to listeners all over the plains of northern Victoria, telling them about America where people are still celebrating the end of the war. Where are we? Who can see the bow tie on the radio announcer, and

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

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