NATALIE POWER SAYS she is a painter because she has to be. “It’s a compulsion”, she says. And visiting her heritage-listed home, it’s clear that it’s a very productive compulsion. Every vertical surface — the walls, the chairs, the sofa — has canvases lying, leaning, propped up, overlapping — against it. Nat’s
Author: Nick Goldie
Kitchen Goddesses refound
Larger, faster, hotter: the megafires are coming
IN 2006 JERRY WILLIAMS, formerly of the US Forest Service, visited Australia to talk to workshops organised by Australian bushfire authorities, and he used the term ‘megafires’. These fires, he said, are essentially ‘unbounded’, but there’s surprisingly little agreement about what the term actually means. Is it a measure of a
Oceans: Science and Solutions for Australia
BOOK REVIEW by Nick Goldie. I love a sunburnt country – and its oceans too Australia (surprisingly) is a maritime nation. We have the third largest marine area of responsibility in the world, almost twice the area of our ‘ragged mountain ranges and sweeping plains’. We have maritime territories in three oceans
FILM REVIEW: ‘Only the Brave’
Originally called Granite Mountain, the change of name to Only the Brave should have been a warning to viewers: beware the cliché! The facts of the story are dramatic enough: in 2013, nineteen members of an elite firefighting team called the Granite Mountain Hotshots were over-run by a fierce wild fire
Palestine Diaries: the Australian Light Horse
Book review by Nick Goldie In 2003 Jonathan King published the Gallipoli Diaries, which was re-issued in a revised commemorative edition in 2014. This year, to mark the centenary of the famous charge at Beersheba, he has published his Palestine Diaries, the “Light Horsemen’s own story, battle by battle”. (These are just two
Why are we stuck on climate change action?
Shadow Minister Mark Butler explains the Australian federal policy sink hole Climate Wars Mark Butler Melbourne University Press, 2017. Book review by Nick Goldie As Shadow Minister for Climate Change and Energy, Mark Butler could be expected to come up with the goods in his new book Climate Wars. And that’s just what he does:
Is the President a Russian spy?
Very fine and informative new bird guide with lovely pictures
The Australian Bird Guide by Peter Menkhorst, Danny Rogers, Rohan Clarke, Jeff Davies, Peter Marsack, Kim Franklin. CSIRO May 2017, 566 pp Periods of history can be measured in bird books. There was Gould in the 1840s, and more recently no home was complete without Neville Cayley’s What Bird is That? first published in
Trees have a life and a chat as two recent Australian books reveal
Book review The Hidden Life of Trees Peter Wohlleben, Black Inc 2016 The Songs of Trees David George Haskell, Black Inc 2017. In The Lord of the Rings, Treebeard the Ent (a sort of sentient tree) is shocked when the hobbits reveal their names and their quest all in a single sentence. “A hasty folk,”