Aug 16, 2022A star is born at the 1983 economic summitAs business and union leaders prepare for next month’s economic summit in Canberra, revisit the historic 1983 summit through an extract from an unpublished biography of former ACTU Secretary Bill Kelty.* — DURING the [1983 election] campaign, [Labor leader Bob] Hawke had promised to hold a national economic summit within weeks of being elected where he would bring together traditional foes to thrash out a consensus behind the government’s economic plan. Critical to the success of the summit would be to secure…Unions9 min readUnions9 min read
Published in Read About It·Aug 3, 2022How I read Ulysses and lived to tell the taleDon’t be put off by the book’s reputation; persist with it and you will be rewarded — ‘yes I said I will Yes’ And so, with those six simple words, the most famous, frustrating and mythologised novel of the past 100 years comes to an end. Like many would-be readers, I had always been put off tackling James Joyce’s monumental Ulysses by its reputation. This is a…Books5 min readBooks5 min read
Published in Read About It·Jul 10, 2022Live Stones deliver pure satisfactionPut aside any prejudices and just enjoy the show from the greatest rock & roll band that ever lived — IT is one thing to worship your musical heroes from afar, quite another to see them in the flesh. The trepidation approaching a Rolling Stones concert for the first time was that they would not live up to the image of greatness held so long in this fan’s head. It…Music7 min readMusic7 min read
Published in Read About It·Jul 8, 2022The oaf at Number 10 finally gets his comeuppanceBoris Johnson should never have become PM and those who enabled his rise to power must still face their day of truth — For the last three years, Britain’s top rating show has been a comedy featuring a hapless bumbling toff with an unruly head of straw coloured hair who finds himself the country’s Prime Minister. The main character is a pathological liar, fraud and cheat who was born into privilege and clawed…Politics7 min readPolitics7 min read
Published in Read About It·Jun 23, 2022It’s only rock & roll, but I like itFor Jagger and Richards, the challenge is not which songs to put on a set list, but which to leave off — EVEN after six decades of playing together, the Rolling Stones still have the capacity to surprise. When they hit the stage for the opening night of their 60th anniversary tour in Madrid on June 1, the Stones stunned their audience by dusting off a song that had been recorded 56…Music14 min readMusic14 min read
Published in Read About It·Mar 21, 2022You can’t always get what you want — or can you?Counting down to see the Rolling Stones play Hyde Park in London on July 3 — ON July 5, 1969, an estimated crowd of up to 500,000 people gathered in Hyde Park, London, on a balmy summer afternoon for a free concert headlined by the Rolling Stones. Held a month before the Woodstock festival, the concert was touted in advance as the London hippie culture’s greatest…Popular Culture6 min readPopular Culture6 min read
Published in Read About It·Jan 13, 2022Oh Manchester, so much to answer for*Four decades of musical excellence continues with latest addition to the lineage — ONE of the best new bands to come out of Britain in the past year or so is an outfit from Manchester called Afflecks Palace. You only have to listen to the first few seconds of the opening track of their debut album to immediately know that they are Mancunian…Music10 min readMusic10 min read
Published in Read About It·Oct 30, 2021Sound as everGrowing up and growing old with the music and words of Tim Rogers — I’VE lost count of the number of gigs I’ve seen Tim Rogers perform live, either with You Am I or solo, but I clearly remember the first time. It was the 1995 Big Day Out at the Melbourne Showgrounds. Sound As Ever had been out for a while and Russell…Music9 min readMusic9 min read
Published in The Walkley Magazine·Jun 18, 2021Stories of humour and pathos from the final days of journalism’s golden ageA review of Upheaval: Disrupted lives in journalism WHEN Fairfax Media announced in June 2012 that 1900 staff would be made redundant, it was only the beginning of a decade of carnage which has seen up to 5000 Australian journalists lose their jobs. A group of Australian academics quickly…5 min read5 min read
Published in Read About It·Jun 4, 2021Lay down your weary tuneA celebration of Bob Dylan’s brilliance on his 80th birthday — DID William Shakespeare’s contemporaries realise that more than five centuries after his death, his plays would still be performed in dozens of languages every year, constantly reinterpreted and reinvented but never less relevant than when he first wrote them, their words and characters now ingrained into the English language? Most…Music12 min readMusic12 min read
