Tom Griffiths

Tom Griffiths reviews 'Words Are Eagles: Selected writings on the nature and language of place' by Gregory Day

July 2022, no. 444 • 26 June 2022

Across Australia today, exciting work is being done to strengthen and renew Aboriginal languages and their deep associations with Country. In those parts of the continent where the history of dispossession has been most traumatic, language regeneration calls for research and reconstruction, for the rediscovery of the old words for places, features, and life itself. Gregory Day’s new book is a di ... (read more)

'History as Therapy' by Tom Griffiths

March 2004, no. 259 • 01 March 2004

At the height of summer fire danger, on Friday, 13 February 2004, the ABC launched on its website an online documentary about the most awesome bushfires since the European occupation of Australia. The Black Friday fires of 1939 still represent the ‘worst possible’ conditions in a continent of fire. The website reveals just how deeply Black Friday burned into the national conscience, and how pr ... (read more)

Tom Griffiths reviews 'Inga Clendinnen: Selected writing' edited by James Boyce

June 2021, no. 432 • 26 May 2021

It is wonderful to immerse oneself for days in the precise, elegant, passionate words of historian Inga Clendinnen (1934–2016), as this welcome collection of her writings enables one to do. Clendinnen’s distinctive voice comes through: warm, confidential, witty, and driven by a fierce intelligence. All her major writings are here – essays, articles, lectures, memoirs, and extracts from her b ... (read more)

'Season of reckoning' by Tom Griffiths

March 2020, no. 419 • 21 February 2020

What do we call this terrifying summer? The special bushfire edition of ABC’s Four Corners predictably called it Black Summer. Perhaps the name will stick, for it builds on a vernacular tradition. Firestorms are always given names, generally after the day of the week they struck. There are enough ‘Black’ days in modern Australian history to fill up a week several times over – Black Sundays ... (read more)

Tom Griffiths reviews 'Alexander von Humboldt: Selected writings' edited by Andrea Wulf

September 2019, no. 414 • 26 August 2019

It can be revelatory to read the original words of a famous writer and thus meet them on the page. Alexander von Humboldt (1769–1859) has been so much quoted and written about that it might be rare even for his admirers to be exposed to his original prose at length and in context. It is a rewarding experience, especially when the writer cared so much for the ‘melody’ of his sentences. Humbol ... (read more)

Tom Griffiths reviews 'Hugh Stretton: Selected writings' edited by Graeme Davison

December 2018, no. 407 • 26 November 2018

This is a deeply rewarding and timely book. Hugh Stretton (1924–2015) was one of Australia’s finest public intellectuals, a historian, ABC Boyer Lecturer, and social democrat with a steely mind and a calm, clear voice of wisdom. Stretton spent thirty years arguing thoughtfully against neoliberalism, a critique he developed at the beginnings of the ideological lurch to the right in the 1980s. P ... (read more)

Tom Griffiths reviews 'The Great Derangement: Climate change and the unthinkable' by Amitav Ghosh

August 2017, no. 393 • 23 July 2017

The planet is alive, says Indian novelist Amitav Ghosh, and only for the last three centuries have we forgotten that. This is because humans are suffering from ‘The Great Derangement’, a disturbing condition which this book analyses with wisdom and grace. Ghosh foresees that future citizens of a world transformed by climate change will look back at our time and perceive that ‘most forms of a ... (read more)

Tom Griffiths reviews 'Atmosphere of Hope' by Tim Flannery

October 2015, no. 375 • 24 September 2015

This is an important and timely book – another gift to public understanding by Australian scientist and author Tim Flannery. Ten years ago he wrote The Weather Makers (2005), one of a handful of books which, together with Al Gore’s film An Inconvenient Truth (2006), brought the climate crisis to a world audience. Now in Atmosphere of Hope, Flannery assesses what we have learned in the decade s ... (read more)

'Coming of age in the great acceleration' by Tom Griffiths

November 2014, no. 366 • 01 November 2014

I am a ‘Sputnik’, born in the year the Soviet satellite launched the Cold War into space. The launching by the Russians of the first artificial Earth satellite on 4 October 1957 seemed to many in the West a threatening symbol of escalating superpower rivalry. And it did unleash extreme military anxiety and triggered what became known as the Space Race. Twelve years later, in the mid-winter of ... (read more)

'At dusk in the Gévaudan', a new essay by Tom Griffiths

September 2013, no. 354 • 26 August 2013

Thirty years ago, I walked out of the railway station at Le Puy in the Auvergne region of the Massif Central of France, put most of my belongings in a locker at the station along with a note in schoolboy French explaining that I hoped to be back, and then walked over the horizon at sunset. I was embarked on my discovery of the Velay and the Gévaudan. ... (read more)