AustLit

'With sharp wit and a discerning eye, political commentator Guy Rundle enlightens and entertains, drawing back the curtain on the iconic moments in Australian politics of the 2010s

'From the coal blockade frontline of the Liverpool Plains to Hobart's Cat and Fiddle arcade, from being on the road with last chance Malcolm Turnbull to the fossil fuel fantasies of Adaniland in the north, Guy Rundle gives a first-hand history of Australia in the 2010s, after the brief and hopeful haha insurgency of the Rudd-Gillard-Rudd era and the descent of another decade of reaction. Through multiple elections, rubbing shoulders with the major players and upstart independents, Rundle describes a country changing and fracturing as the global wave of populism swept across conventional politics, and the culture wars solidified. He goes into battle, both against a corrupt, cynical and nihilistic right, and an increasingly elitist and fantastical progressivism. And he steps back into the past, looking at how we got to here, in memoirs and analyses of the shifting personal, cultural and political faultlines of the past half century.

'Between the Last Oasis and the Next Mirage is a raw, thoughtful, very funny and sometimes moving account of a nation dependent on the continuing good graces of history and the plain old dumb luck that is the land's curse.' (Publication summary)

'Trying to disentangle the recent history of Australia from its mythical past sometimes seems akin to labouring under the lights in Ceaușescu's enormous national kitsch factory, Romania's Palace of People, trying to sort plaster myth from real ornament. But it also seems a good time to try to do so, as this magazine of Australian commentary changes its form once again from one begun three decades ago. For that is when the Australia now before us was brought into being. Trying to untangle what we are now from the recent past, the real past and the mythical past seems essential to future action.' (Introduction)

'We were … well, who were we? It was a floating group of 25 or so leftists, radical leftists, ultra-leftists from around Melbourne Uni, people dressed in black, a style still univocal and of a post-punk form: hair close-cropped around the edges, but piled high, boys wearing black jeans and black or dark-blue shirts, buttoned to the neck, girls in a near-compulsory style for a few years: black tights, black skivvy, a highly patterned, op-shop–derived, short skirt over the tights, and a haircut in which one side was shaved, and the other half grew long to the shoulder, bobbed. It appears to have returned a few years ago as a style—in our era, one among a hundred—but for a couple of years it was semi-compulsory, at least among our gang. Then it was the only game in town. Gender fluidity, which had been around in the seventies, had retreated, even with the success of The Cure. We were looking to … well that was the question.' (Introduction)

'There's a fervour in the revivalist tent, where Reverend Kevin of Rudd Ministries, in a sermon from the German translated via Mandarin, tells his congregation that religion is the new politics and vice versa. Called up to testify, his guests, drawn from the Great and the Good, will each bear witness to the powerful spirit moving across this land.

'Folly is his piñata. Max Gillies has been pricking pomp, slaughtering sacred cows and beating up bête noirs for decades. In Godzone his trail of destruction continues with a new cast of victims.'

Source: Melbourne Theatre Company website, http://www.mtc.com.au/
Sighted: 10/12/2009