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David Nichols

Pentridge: Behind the Bluestone Walls by Don Osborne

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April 2016, no. 380
David Nichols reviews 'Pentridge: Behind the Bluestone Walls' by Don Osborne

Last year, a trip to the Pentridge Prison grounds – what's left of them – gave me a hundred insights into the horrors of life in that institution: the close quarters, constant surveillance, poor sanitation, and dependence on interminable, senseless routine, an imagined reform through discipline. These insights gave only a small understanding of the rigours of in ...

Trendyville: The Battle for Australia's inner cities by Renate Howe, David Nichols, and Graeme Davison

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June-July 2015, no. 372
Frank Bongiorno reviews 'Trendyville' by Renate Howe, David Nichols, and Graeme Davison

In the Melbourne suburb where I spent my childhood, a café was a place where ethnic men played cards and backgammon, puffed on cigarettes, and looked up from time to time to watch through the window the passing parade on the footpath outside. Now, when I return to Northcote, I am often served in hip cafés by boyish men with Ned Kelly beards and stylishly informal ...

Radio City: The first 30 years of 3RRR by Mark Phillips

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February 2007, no. 288
David Nichols reviews 'Radio City: The first 30 years of 3RRR' by Mark Phillips

1980: a red-haired girl in my Year Ten art class at John Gardiner High School asked me if I knew there was a radio station that only played ‘that new wave music’. She said it with a measure of contempt in her voice – for me and for it. But I was tempted, and soon became part of 3RRR’s small, staunch audience. A quarter of a century on comes Mark Phillips’s lively, if listy (though no more than Ken Inglis’s ABC histories) narrative of this Melbourne institution’s first thirty years.

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