David Tyler – (AKA Urban Wronski) was born in England, raised in New Zealand and an Australian resident since 1979. Urban Wronski grew up conflicted about his own national identity and continues to be deeply mistrustful of all nationalism, chauvinism, flags, politicians and everything else which divides and obscures our common humanity. He has always been enchanted by nature and by the extraordinary brilliance of ordinary men and women and the genius, the power and the poetry that is their vernacular. Wronski is now a full-time freelance writer who lives with his partner and editor Shay and their chooks, near the Grampians in rural Victoria and he counts himself the luckiest man alive. A former teacher of all ages and stages, from Tertiary to Primary, for nearly forty years, he enjoyed contesting the corporatisation of schooling to follow his own natural instinct for undifferentiated affection, approval and compassion for the young.
The Touska Gambit: Piracy, Power, and the Theatre of Broken Promises Theatre That is the word you need to hold onto as you try to make sense of what happened in the Gulf of Oman […]
A Note on the Instrument. Martin Amis understood that certain horrors cannot be approached frontally. You do not walk up to the monstrous and describe it. You circle it, you find its vanity and its […]
A NOTE ON CLARKE AND DAWE John Clarke and Bryan Dawe were, for thirty years, the sharpest double act in Australian public life. Every Thursday night on the ABC, Clarke played the politician, the bureaucrat, […]
Look at the photo. Anthony Albanese, grinning in his USS Vermont baseball cap like a kid who just won a free submarine from the Pentagon’s lucky dip. Beside him, Vice Admiral Mark Hammond, now our […]
A profile of Australia’s Deputy Prime Minister, Minister for Defence, and Geelong’s enduring gift to Australian satirists Meet Richard Donald Marles. Deputy Prime Minister. Minister for Defence. Member for Corio. Product of the Victorian Labor […]
A Note from the Editor Readers should be warned that this piece pays deliberate homage to Evelyn Waugh’s exquisitely appropriate fondness for long, winding sentences and his unrivalled capacity to report the facts with deadpan […]
This piece is written in homage to the late, great Martin Amis. It borrows, in spirit and sharpness, from his satiric wit and his razor‑sharp edge; a style that skewered the powerful, the pretentious, and […]
A note on length: This piece is shorter than the war’s supply chain disruptions, but longer than the attention span of the man who started it. If you want the sanitised version, Fox News is […]
The war now has the smell of salt, oil, and old empires trying to defy the tide. Thirty-three kilometres. That is the width of the Strait of Hormuz at its narrowest navigable point: two shipping […]
DAWE: Mr Vice President, thank you for coming in. CLARKE: Great to be here, Bryan. Terrific studio. Very fair country, Australia. DAWE: You’ve just come from negotiations with Iran. CLARKE: Correct. DAWE: How did they […]
The US and Israel are not only eager to illegally attack Iran, even to invade; they are at war with the rules of war itself. In a move largely ignored by our corporate media, they […]
The Crime and the Cover-Up How can you spot failure in your press gallery? Simple. You know your news media has failed when your government sends special forces to a war it denies waging. When […]
“Human beings are members of a whole, in creation of one essence and soul. If one limb is afflicted with pain, other limbs uneasy will remain.” (Saadi Shirazi, 13th century. Inscribed on the wall of […]
“Operation Epic Fury” sounds like a fourteen-year-old boy who has been playing too much Call of Duty. It’s a perfect fit for the Peter Pan that Donald Trump has running the Pentagon; a former Fox […]
Trump declared Easter a triumph while two C-130s burned on a dirt strip outside Isfahan. Tonight his deadline expires. This is the war built on the morality of a smash and grab raid, featuring bad […]