Author: Warwick McFadyen

In a secondhand bookshop, a remarkable discovery has been made. An exercise book, yellow-paged and time-worn, would seem to be an alternative, and abandoned, version of the classic novel Lord of the Flies.  This one, say those who have read extracts, appears to be set in the early 21st century. Adults have replaced the boys,

A park bench. It is spring, the earth is returning to life, a faint warmth can be felt in the air. Two friends are discussing their finances. Rosencrantz: We need a plan no one has thought of. We need a plan to make money that is so original it is startling in its simplicity. We

Life is truly strange. One can be blissfully walking the dog when, out of the light blue of morning, a question flashes before you like a comet piercing the sky. It is this: how to decide between a lump of coal and six days. Granted it is not a comparison of like with like. One

There’s a shortage of rain. There’s a shortage of public housing. There’s a shortage of hospital beds. But now, perhaps indicating the frightfully dire state of this nation, we are learning there is a shortage of au pairs. How else to explain the surfacing of the compassionate actions of the Home Affairs Minister, and onetime

At the end of a week of blood and carnage a phrase from insurgent Tony Abbott skewed the whole sorry chaotic mess into another arena. As Abbott was leaving the executioners’ room in which Scott Morrison had leapt out from the barricades and ambushed rampaging Peter Dutton, slain his ambitions, and thus part of those

What fresh hell can this be? Ah Dorothy Parker, if only it were so. This is not a fresh hell formed in the political world of Canberra. This is a cycle of ambition and revenge. This is a scene from Dante’s Inferno. This is the raw lust of Shakespeare’s players who strut upon the stage,

The town in which you live on the fringe of the city has long receded into the distance, the familiar markers have vanished hours ago. When you look in the rearview mirror the view is the same as that which is before you. You are across the border, driving north and the horizon has opened

Claiming the high moral ground on what constitutes an Australian value is no more an exercise for social studies. Now it is a relentless battle of crude sloganeering and blunt instruments. Since we have always had a problem with race (after all, we tried for a long time to extinguish one type either through death