This episode of the ABR Podcast looks at the history behind this year’s referendum on an Indigenous Voice to parliament and Indigenous constitutional recognition. Bain Attwood, Professor of History at Monash University, considers the 1967 referendum on Aboriginal rights, and how that ‘yes’ campaign differed from today’s. Listen to Bain Attwood with ‘A referendum in trouble: Race, rights, and history talk in 1967 and 2023’, published in the July issue of ABR.

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On this week’s ABR Podcast hear leading defamation scholar David Rolph discuss recent proceedings in the Federal Court relating to the reputation of Ben Roberts-Smith, a decorated soldier accused of war crimes in Afghanistan. David Rolph is a Professor of Law at Sydney University and the author of several books, including Reputation, Celebrity and Defamation Law and Defamation Law. Here is David Rolph with ‘Self-inflicted wounds: A vindication of investigative journalism’, which will appear in the July issue of ABR.

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This week on the ABR Podcast we revisit a shortlisted story from the 2016 ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize: ‘Slut Trouble’ by Beejay Silcox. The provocatively titled story was republished in The Best Australian Stories 2017. Beejay is an ABR critic and the newly minted director of the Canberra Writers Festival. Listen to her read ‘Slut Trouble’, commended in the 2016 Jolley Prize.

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This year marks seventy-five years of Indian independence from Britain. The anniversary coincides with India’s Presidency of the G20 summit, which will take place in New Delhi this September. This week on the ABR Podcast, we hear from John Zubrzycki, who argues that Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi is using the G20 platform to articulate a new foreign policy stance. John Zubrzycki has worked in India as a diplomat and foreign correspondent and is the author of The Shortest History of India. Listen to John Zubrzycki with ‘Politics by other means’.

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In this week’s ABR podcast we hear from the runner-up of the 2023 Calibre Essay Prize, Bridget Vincent. Calibre judges Yves Rees, Peter Rose and Beejay Silcox praised Bridget Vincent’s ‘Child Adjacent’ for its wryness and compassion. They noted that it broadened our understanding of the family and interrogated the terrors and moral dilemmas of raising children in the climate crisis. Bridget Vincent is a Lecturer in English at the Australian National University. Listen to her reading ‘Child Adjacent’, published in the June issue of ABR.

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In this week’s ABR podcast, David Rolph, Professor of Law at the University of Sydney, analyses the implications of the aborted Murdoch v Crikey defamation case concerning the January 6 attacks on the Capital building. Rolph argues that it was set to be an early test of the new public interest defence within federal defamation law but that Lachlan Murdoch likely dropped the action because of its implications for legal proceedings in the US involving his media company. Listen to David Rolph, the author of books including Reputation, Celebrity and Defamation Law, read ‘Who blinks first: Lachlan Murdoch v Crikey’, coming soon in the June issue of ABR.

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This week on the ABR Podcast we feature the 2023 Calibre Essay winner, ‘Flow States’, by Tracy Ellis. ‘Flow States’ begins with a single drop of water produced by a household tap left running. From here, Ellis crafts a tale on the obliterative power – real, existential, and metaphorical – of floodwater. Tracy Ellis, a Sydney-based editor, was the winner of the 2022 ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize and thus becomes the first writer to win two separate ABR prizes. Listen to Tracy Ellis read ‘Flow States’.

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In this week’s ABR Podcast, Gordon Pentland examines the theatrical impulses of contemporary British politics. He argues that these performative elements are an attempt to capture widespread nostalgia for the British past. Gordon Pentland is Professor of History at Monash University and a specialist on the political history of Britain since the late eighteenth century. ‘Parlour games: Britain and the anaesthesia of nostalgia’ is published in the May issue of ABR.

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This week, on the ABR Podcast, we look at a major exhibition at the Art Gallery of South Australia, ‘Andy Warhol and Photography: A Social Media’. Ten years in the making, ‘Andy Warhol and Photography’ demonstrates the multiple ways in which Warhol’s aesthetic anticipated the social-media world we live in today, perhaps even helping give rise to it. Patrick Flanery is a novelist and Chair of Creative Writing at the University of Adelaide.

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This week’s ABR Podcast is a commentary from writer and psychologist Debi Hamilton on the world’s growing addiction to background noise. With sound in increasing volumes filling ever more space – from taxis to restaurants, gyms to shops – what does it function to do, psychologically and socially? And what does quietness and even silence now represent within these spaces? Debi Hamilton was the joint winner of the Newcastle Poetry Prize in 2014. Her second poetry collection, The Sly Night Creatures of Desire, was published in 2016. Here is Debi Hamilton with ‘The Tyranny of Sound’, published in the April issue of ABR. 

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