SANDY Gutman always had a sardonic Aboriginal character in his arsenal, and was keen to introduce the character to a wider audience.
He had been developing a series of word-play jokes and ironic taglines that added a new dimension to the character – who now became part Jewish kvetcher. The routine was laced with venom and cunning. Comedy writer Trevor Farrant seized on the subject and, together with Gutman and Michelle Bleicher (Gutman’s then girlfriend and whip-smart manager), wrote the spoken-word comic song Highway Corroboree. The single came out in early …

DESMOND Ball’s important account of a crucial conversation with historian Manning Clark provides significant new information about Clark’s close friend Ian Milner.
It makes it clear that Clark withheld the inconvenient truth that he knew about Milner’s close connections with the Communist Party from at least as far back as 1944.
Milner was a significant player in communist espionage. Yet right until their deaths in 1991, and including in the historian’s memoir The Quest for Grace, Clark seems to have chosen to put his friendship with Milner ahead of telling the truth. …

NSW Labor’s demolition at the recent state election confirms a national voting trend at state and federal level.
Labor’s incumbent governments are all behind in the polls and the NSW result has sent a shudder through the ranks.
The thumping election win delivered the NSW Coalition 69 of the 93 seats in the Legislative Assembly. The incoming government, in the full blush of its honeymoon, clearly has a mandate to deliver on its commitments. The outcome reflects voter disgust with Labor and an endorsement of Barry …

HAVING held the seat of Melbourne for the ALP since 1993, the minister for finance, Lindsay Tanner, retired from parliamentary politics at the 2010 federal election. Since then, Tanner, a politician of considerable talent and integrity, has given much thought to the sorry state of politics in Australia.
In its own way, Sideshow is as revealing as Tony Abbott’s important 2009 book Battlelines, which was also part memoir, part analysis and part impassioned critique. Tanner argues that the degradation of civic culture and the dumbing down of democracy is …

THE celebration of the birthday of Alcoholics Anonymous is a cause for joy and sometimes sad reflection.
Of the millions of lives saved and transformed by this extraordinary organisation, just as many have failed to grasp its simple message and the result has been personal hell and untimely death. Such is the destructive power of alcohol, society’s most pernicious drug.
On May 12, 1935, Alcoholics Anonymous had its fragile beginning in the US city of Akron, Ohio, when a recently sober New York stockbroker, Bill Wilson, fearful that being alone on a …

AIDED by a bevy of research assistants, A.J. Brown has produced a comprehensive biography of one of Australia’s most controversial judges and public intellectuals.
The subject’s co-operation in this project was achieved by Brown’s agreement that the book would not be published until after Kirby’s retirement from the High Court of Australia in March 2009. This meant the biographer and his helpers gained access to voluminous materials — personal and professional — that otherwise would have remained inaccessible, as well as to many third-party sources who would not have participated had …