Alison Broinowski

Alison Broinowski has lived, worked, and frequently travelled in Japan. She was Australia’s cultural attaché in Tokyo in the mid-1980s and has recently contributed a chapter, with Rachel Miller, on the history of the Australian Embassy, to a book on Australia–Japan relations edited at Deakin University. She is President of Australians for War Powers Reform.

Alison Broinowski reviews 'Project RAINFALL: The Secret History of Pine Gap' by Tom Gilling

October 2019, no. 415 • 25 September 2019

Since the 1960s, US military bases have continuously occupied Australian territory, with the permission of successive governments. Of the original sites, the missile-launch tracker Nurrungar is closed and North West Cape no longer communicates with US nuclear submarines, but it has since gained space surveillance and military signals intelligence functions. Pine Gap listens to signals transmission ... (read more)

Alison Broinowski reviews 'Typhoon Kingdom' by Matthew Hooton

June–July 2019, no. 412 • 23 May 2019

In the May 2019 issue of Quadrant, its literary editor, Barry Spurr, inveighed against the ‘inane expansion of creative writing courses’. Professor Spurr’s scholarly accomplishments in the study of poetry and Australian fiction do not include creative writing. (His resignation from the University of Sydney was accepted in December 2014.) While many Australian authors have spectacularly succe ... (read more)

Alison Broinowski reviews 'Japan Story: In Search of a Nation, 1850 to the present' by Christopher Harding

April 2019, no. 410 • 25 March 2019

Our tutor in Japanese conversation at the Australian National University in 1968, rather than listen to us mangling his language, used to write the kanji for all the political factions on the board, with a Ramen-like chart of connections looping between them and multiple interest groups. Within each one were mainstream and anti-mainstream factions, he told us, whose seething contestation with one ... (read more)

Alison Broinowski reviews 'The Violent American Century: War and Terror since World War II' by John W. Dower

August 2017, no. 393 • 26 July 2017

A week after the Manchester Arena bombing, it emerged in the British media that MI5 had been warned about some of the terrorists but had apparently done nothing. M16, moreover, had reportedly encouraged British Libyans to join the 2011 civil war against Gaddafi. Their relatives, including the Manchester bomber, later went back and forth unimpeded between the United Kingdom and Libya. Yet this scan ... (read more)

Alison Broinowski reviews 'Subtle Moments: Scenes on a life’s journey' by Bruce Grant

April 2017, no. 390 • 28 March 2017

Opposite a handsome portrait of him by Louis Kahan, Bruce Grant introduces his memoir of a ‘life’s journey’ by proposing that it is also a biography of Australia, and promising to revisit that on the last page. There, he summarises the plots of ‘Love in the Asian Century’, his recent trilogy of e-books, in which affairs between older men and younger women, Australian and Asian, start wit ... (read more)

Alison Broinowski reviews 'The Wild Goose' by Mori Õgai, translated by Meredith McKinney

December 2014, no. 367 • 01 December 2014

Elegantly evoking Japan with cream paper and ink-painted foliage on the cover and inside pages, this slim paperback from the small Braidwood publisher Finlay Lloyd is headed by the single, bold character for ‘wild goose’ (karikarigane). The events recounted in Mori Õgai’s novella occur in Tokyo in the late nineteenth century, in the area north of Kanda around Ueno’s Shinobazu pond, near t ... (read more)

Alison Broinowski reviews 'Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage' by Haruki Murakami

October 2014, no. 365 • 01 October 2014

A recent exhibition at Sydney’s Museum of Contemporary Art included two videos of scenes from modern Japanese life that at first seemed ordinary, even banal. In one, the artist Tabaimo (Ayako Tabata) animates the interior of a train, with views of passing suburbs; in the other, she shows a mansion from a bygone century, opening like a doll’s house to display its plush furnishings. But then thi ... (read more)

Alison Broinowski reviews 'The Yellow Papers' by Dominique Wilson

August 2014, no. 363 • 01 August 2014

The three parts of Dominique Wilson’s story are linked together by racial prejudice, of Australians towards Asians, and of Chinese, Koreans, and Japanese towards Westerners. She picks up this well-worn thread in pre-Federation Australia and weaves it in and out of the narrative, tying it off when China is in the throes of the Cultural Revolution. During the twentieth century, her three men – t ... (read more)

Alison Broinowski reviews 'Dangerous Allies' by Malcolm Fraser, with Cain Roberts

June–July 2014, no. 362 • 27 May 2014

Coinciding with the World War I anniversaries, Malcolm Fraser’s book will polarise Australian opinion on a fundamental issue. It has never been raised in this way, for Australian leaders have not discussed decisions to go to war in public, nor sought popular approval of Australia’s alliances. Yet successive generations of young Australians have fought in British and American wars to support ou ... (read more)

Alison Broinowski reviews 'The Storyteller and His Three Daughters' by Lian Hearn and 'Henry Black: On stage in Meiji Japan' by Ian McArthur

November 2013, no. 356 • 31 October 2013

For centuries, Japan has magnetised the West’s imagination, evoking both fear and fascination. In the late nineteenth century, when most writers and readers in Europe, North America, and Australia had yet to see this ‘young’, newly accessible country for themselves, literary fantasies on the Madam Butterfly theme became a craze. Then, after Japan invaded its neighbours and defeated the Russi ... (read more)