TONIGHT, Adam Goodes, one of Australia’s finest indigenous players, will not be out on ANZ Stadium when his Sydney Swans (now second on the ladder) take on my beloved Collingwood (currently sixth).
Goodes’s absence is a shame, for he is magnificent to watch, even for Collingwood tragics like me. But from the sidelines with a wounded knee, Goodes should still have a significant impact on this evening’s proceedings.
The day after a naive young Collingwood supporter slandered Goodes as he captivated the MCG during the AFL’s indigenous round 8 in May, calling …

HISTORIAN Ross Fitzgerald believes his friend Peter Beattie is the “white knight” who will rebuild Labor after Kevin Rudd yesterday shrugged off years of personal enmity and drafted the former Queensland premier to run in a must-win seat for the government.
Professor Fitzgerald said if Mr Beattie came up trumps in the marginal seat of Forde, but Labor lost the election on September 7, he would be the man to remake the party from opposition.
Labor parachuted Mr Beattie into the Coalition-held electorate yesterday, elbowing aside the endorsed candidate amid concern that …

One sultry summer evening in 1895, near Winton in western Queensland, Andrew Barton ‘Banjo’ Paterson heard Christina Macpherson, the 21-year-old sister of station owner Bob Macpherson, play the Scottish ballad, ‘Thou Bonnie Wood of Craigielee’ on a zither.
It was a moment of serendipity that led to the penning of what many regard as our unofficial national anthem.
Entranced by the tune – which Christina had heard at the Warrnambool races in Victoria – and possibly by the young lady herself, Paterson decided to write his own words for it – …

THE coming federal election may well be the most important in a generation, perhaps the most significant since 1975.
There are very close parallels. Both eras were preceded by long periods of economic prosperity and stability under conservative governments before each culminated in their final years in the hands of reformist but chaotic and ultimately dysfunctional Labor governments.
For those who lived through the era of Gough Whitlam, there was a belief that the period could never be repeated – until Julia Gillard came along. The division, the backstabbing, the disorder and …

by Rick Morton
THE great progressive experiment in crime control is coming to an end, its chief protagonists grappling with a string of vicious acts committed by people with known horrific histories.
A rising chorus of experts and researchers are categorically ruling out the possibility of reform for the most dangerous and violent offenders, the ones whose clockwork histories of serious offending ought to have been red flags for parole authorities charged with protecting the public.
But, faced with failure in the rear-vision mirror, there is no guarantee authorities who turn up the …

When I was barely 25 years old, on Australia Day 1970, with the aid of Alcoholic’s Anonymous, I managed to stop drinking alcohol and using other drugs, and have stayed that way.
In those days, a number of long-time members of AA in New South Wales, including stalwarts like the misnamed “Happy Frank” and the flamboyant “Ukulele Jimmy”, would share at meetings how they only got sober and free of other drugs after being compulsorily medically incarcerated and treated for their alcoholism and addiction – under what was known as the …

THE return of Kevin Rudd to the Labor leadership signals the return of a PM obsessed with the media and manipulating the daily message, coupled with manic work practices that alienate his colleagues and the public service.
We know all this from on-the-record statements of numerous senior Labor politicians, who have provided a rare insight into the inner workings of the first Rudd government from 2007 to June 2010 – with damning public assessments of his leadership style as recently as a fortnight ago.
In addition to his record of chaotic …

MY father, Bill, was not a liar, so it must have been me. I always thought Dad played football for Collingwood Firsts; in fact he only played for the seconds. I must have blown him up in my imagination to be a hero.
In my child’s mind, Dad was famous. I can still see a caricature of him from the newspapers when he captained Sandringham in the Victorian Football Association – all knee bandages and broken-boned – which we kept pinned on the toilet door. Placing it there strikes me now …

THIS month in 1935 the world’s most successful self-help group, Alcoholics Anonymous, was founded in Akron, Ohio. As it happens, it was in Akron and in Cleveland, Ohio, that I did a lot of drinking myself in the 1960s.
I turn 69 on Christmas Day. And if I survive until Australia Day I will have had no alcohol or other drugs for 44 years. This means that, with the support of AA, I’ve had 44 more years on the planet than I would have had.

Like a lot of teenagers who are …

The incompetence of the Labor government is illustrated by Central Queensland University, writes Ross Fitzgerald.
Back in July 2009, Bernard Lane reported in ‘The Australian’: ”Central Queensland University, once the most aggressive player in the degrees for visas market, is running out of cash and has little ability to withstand further blows to its high-risk business model, an official report warns.”
Then acting federal education minister Mark Arbib said the Commonwealth government was ”determined to address the decline in regional student numbers” and would work with the university and the state government …

‘THE Major Minor Party’ is a play performed by Sydney theatre group Version 1.0. Last week it had its world premiere at the Canberra Theatre. Based around the rise of the Sex Party in Australian politics, the play examines the relationships between our major and minor parties.
It couldn’t have come at a more auspicious time. A few kilometres away across Lake Burley Griffin in the federal parliament, the major parties were involved in another form of theatre that related to minor parties.
A few weeks ago the major parties announced a …