Alison Broinowski

Alison Broinowski reviews 'The Consul' by Ian Kemish

November 2022, no. 448 • 25 October 2022

When Australians working in diplomatic posts share anecdotes, the best usually come from the consuls. They recount travellers’ tales of love and loss, dissipation and disaster, adventure and misadventure from Australians perpetually on the move – at least until the pandemic. It’s the consuls’ job to help those who are injured, robbed, kidnapped, arrested, or otherwise distressed abroad. T ... (read more)

Alison Broinowski reviews 'Dreaming of East: Western women and the exotic allure of the Orient' by Barbara Hodgson and 'Women of the Gobi: Journeys on the Silk Road' by Kate James

June 2007, no. 292 • 09 September 2022

Jane Austen’s latest biographer, Jon Spence, observes that by deciding to support herself by writing rather than live on a husband’s income, Austen was spared the likelihood of annual pregnancies, exhaustion, infection and early death, fates that confronted many married women of her day. Another means of avoidance was travel abroad. That was not the only motive, of course, of the many European ... (read more)

Alison Broinowski reviews 'Good International Citizenship: The case for decency' by Gareth Evans

September 2022, no. 446 • 25 August 2022

Over the course of a long and distinguished public life, Gareth Evans has held fast to his conviction that as individuals aspire to personal decency and moral behaviour, the same should be replicated among nations. As a foreign minister and an author, and in his international organisations and academic roles, Evans has consistently advocated ‘good international citizenship’. Care for our commo ... (read more)

Alison Broinowski reviews 'Shanghai Dancing' by Brian Castro

May 2003, no. 251 • 01 May 2003

If we lived in the kind of country – and there are some – where people not only chose their presidents but chose as leaders poets, philosophers and novelists, a new novel by Brian Castro would be a sensation, even a political event. Students would be hawking pirated copies, queues would form outside bookshops, long debates would steam up the coffee shops, and the magazines would be full of it. ... (read more)

Alison Broinowski reviews 'Kofi Annan: A man of peace in a world of war' by Stanley Meisler

April 2007, no. 290 • 01 April 2007

The United Nations’ eighth secretary-general, Ban Ki-Moon, has just taken over what has been called the world’s worst job. But it is one that attracts fierce, devious and polite competition. Why would anyone seek, for less than $400,000 a year, to be the chief administrative officer of a non-government that cannot govern, a non-corporation that cannot borrow or invest? The UN’s total budget ... (read more)

Alison Broinowski reviews 'The Genius of Donald Friend: Drawings from the diaries 1942–1989' by Lou Klepac

April 2001, no. 229 • 14 December 2020

Here we have the first intimations of the coming flowering of the Donald Friend diaries, which are to be published by the National Library with support from Morris West’s benefaction. Friendliness was not always the same as ugliness or cleanliness when he was alive. So, it is somehow comforting that two Australian artists, so different from each other in lifestyle, should after their deaths find ... (read more)

Alison Broinowski reviews 'The Sweet and Simple Kind: A novel Of Sri Lanka' by Yasmine Gooneratne

June 2009, no. 312 • 01 June 2009

The Gooneratnes’ mountain bungalow, overlooking rippling tea plantations, is called Pemberley, after Mr Darcy’s mansion. A wall plaque commemorates Elizabeth Bennet’s description of it. In the style of a modern Jane Austen, Yasmine Gooneratne takes up the enduring and universal question of who will marry whom, as Vikram Seth did in his mega-novel A Suitable Boy (1994), and at similarly enter ... (read more)

Alison Broinowski reviews 'Detritus' by Robyn Archer

September 2010, no. 324 • 01 September 2010

A sarcastic little slogan on a wall in Australia’s arts funding organisation in the mid-1990s read ‘Il y a trop d’art’. All right, it was meant in jest, but it seemed to hint broadly at shared bureaucratic resentment of importunate artists, even though they were the Council’s clients and the reason, indeed, for its very existence. Remember the national health hospital in Yes Minister tha ... (read more)

Alison Broinowski reviews 'Power Shift: Australia’s Future between Washington and Beijing' (Quarterly Essay 39) by Hugh White

October 2010, no. 325 • 01 October 2010

The Japanese people should admonish each other every morning before breakfast not to let their guard down in foreign relations, and only afterwards proceed to eat. Fukuzawa Yukichi, An Outline of a Theory of Civilization Not for forty years have Australians had real arguments with their governments about international relations. Many marched in 2003 against the Iraq invasion, but were ignore ... (read more)

Alison Broinowski reviews 'Amnesty' by Aravind Adiga

April 2020, no. 420 • 20 March 2020

Much political mileage has been made in Australia from the turning back of ‘boat people’. Travel by boat is the cheapest means of getting to this island continent, and the most dangerous. Boat travellers are the poorest and the most likely to be caught and deported or sent to an offshore camp. But their number is less than half of those who arrive by air as tourists and apply for refugee prote ... (read more)