Afterthoughts Comes then summer smouldering and alightLonger days and shorter attire in brimming daylightOr around the pool-balmy nights or others more coolThat school the thought that cogent rigueur taughtTo sense the season and season the senses Consilient and winding are myriad lenses and memory’s tenses Distinct to indistinct, till sensory’s timeless shift be cast adrift From dizzying day’s endless space, and fizzing nights…

Warning unheeded Over the last 18 months or so I sent five letters to the newspapers, saying there is not enough water in the Darling River system, and what will happen if the water is taken out and not replaced. I did an assessment five years ago, in which I warned of the next drought. I append below the last few lines of…

(Paul Nicholls brings us the grim news) Bill Shorten on the jog? An activity doggedly preparing him to hold sway and exercise authority over the body politic; or an exercise in dodgy swaying trying to control his body playing tricks? In this political struggle Bill’s really going out on a limb, and his limbs, it seems, are really going out on him too! …

“Old farms, new farms, small and large are closing every week. Regional businesses and towns are in crisis,” a Victorian farmer told me. Thousands have attended protest meetings in Albury, Deniliquin and Griffith and down the Murray River to South Australia, over farmers being starved of irrigation water after only a two-year dry. This is “a man-made drought” across the Murray-Darling Basin, the…

AUSTRALIA’S FIRST SPIES: The Remarkable Story of Australia’s Intelligence Operations, 1901–1945 by John Fahey Allen and Unwin, SydneyPaperback: 456 pagesPrice: AUD$34.99 Reviewed by Chris Rule John Fahey’s book is a history of the birth and early development of what have become Australia’s intelligence community and its international connections. It details the organisations involved, operations, sources and methods, successes…

CARDINAL: New Revelations, the Rise and Fall of George Pell by Louise Milligan Melbourne University Press, Carlton Paperback: 400 pages Price: AUD$34.99 Reviewed by Peter Westmore This revised edition of Louise Milligan’s book on Cardinal George Pell is 20 pages longer than the first edition, published in 2017, and now reaches 400 pages. This edition was published after Cardinal Pell’s trial and conviction…

THE RED RUGS OF TARSUS: A Woman’s Record of the Armenian Massacre of 1909 by Helen Davenport Gibbons Connor Court, Redland Bay, 2016 (first published in 1917; this edition with a new introduction and annotations) Paperback: 130 pages Price: AUD$19.95 Reviewed by Edward Fenton The world heard of the “liberation” of Aleppo a few years ago from the hands of…