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Keywords: Orwell

  • ECONOMICS

    Deciphering capitalism's corrupt metaphors

    • David James
    • 07 February 2014
    15 Comments

    'All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others'. This was George Orwell's parody in Animal Farm of the vicious use of language in communist states. It was one of his memorable depictions of how the absurdities of language not only reflect evil, but also predicate it. Language was a tool of oppression in communist states. In capitalism it is no less vicious.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Pilgrim's misguided tilt at TV fame

    • Tim Kroenert
    • 27 June 2013

    Luciano pleads with two startled widows at a funeral, who reassure him that he is on the right path to getting into 'the house'. While they think they've offered comfort to a troubled seeker, he thinks he's received an inside tip from Big Brother's spies. The dissonance between his pursuit of fame, and the comfort found by others in religious faith, is profound.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Labor's cult of Rudd-hate

    • Ray Cassin
    • 05 April 2013
    29 Comments

    In Orwell's 1984, the daily 'two-minutes hate' sees citizens gather to scream their loathing at images of Big Brother's enemy, Emmanuel Goldstein. The ritual has become so entrenched that what Goldstein is supposed to have said or done has become mostly forgotten and largely irrelevant. So now it is with Rudd.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    George Orwell's chicken feed solution

    • Brian Matthews
    • 01 March 2013
    4 Comments

    'On this day in 1939: Belgium signed a trade treaty with France, 71 people died in the Black Friday bush fire, and Orwell's chickens laid two eggs.' Orwell's domestic diaries seem trivial, but it is wrong to assume he saw his recording of vegetables, egg laying and other small-holder concerns as dwarfed by the great world. 

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  • AUSTRALIA

    George Orwell's example for Australian journalists

    • Sarah Burnside
    • 20 September 2012
    9 Comments

    BBC director general Mark Thompson turned down a proposal to erect a statue of Orwell on the broadcaster's premises because the writer was 'too left-wing'. But political animals of all stripes have long sought to claim Orwell. His political writing transcends both time and ideology.

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  • MEDIA

    Orwell in 2012 Australia

    • Fatima Measham
    • 16 July 2012
    2 Comments

    As word of the national security inquiry filtered through Twitter last week, one wit remarked, '1984 is meant to be a cautionary tale, not a manual'. The proposed reforms constitute a disturbing concession that our intelligence sector is not equipped to deal with the increasing sophistication of covert online activity, without resorting to questionable laws.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Sandal-wearing pinkos of the modern era

    • Brian Matthews
    • 25 May 2012
    7 Comments

    George Orwell lamented that socialism attracted 'fruit-juice drinkers' and 'sandal-wearers'. Former prime minister Paul Keating accused Sydney mayor Clover Moore of being a sandal-wearer and 'muesli-chewer'. 'Sandal wearing' survives nearly a century to be the star insult for each of them.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Publishing George Orwell

    • Brian Matthews
    • 14 April 2011
    2 Comments

    In 1981, a few months before actor Peter Davison became the fifth Doctor Who, Professor Peter Davison, the literary scholar, accepted a commission to produce the corrected editions of Orwell's nine books. The project was to be fraught by false dawns and recurring frustrations.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Ode to my mechanic

    • Sasha Shtargot
    • 04 August 2010
    4 Comments

    You don't get many words out of him, and when he does speak they always end in a question. 'It's gonna cost a lot to get new tyres, knowata mean? You're better off getting re-treads, knowata mean?' In our society there are hundreds of jobs that barely rate a mention, and armies of unsung workers who keep it functioning and well-oiled.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Economists and other prophets

    • Brian Matthews
    • 12 August 2009
    3 Comments

    Economists are often, sometimes spectacularly, wrong. But like all prophets, they are unabashed by and unpunished for abject failures. They pop up from each new set of ruins, surprised yet unrepentant, princes of a plethora of evanescent predictions.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Shakespeare and the F word

    • Brian Matthews
    • 13 May 2009

    If Shakespeare had dabbled in cuisine, dishes such as 'eye of newt' and 'fillet of fenny snake' may have been a sensation. As the first 'foody' to emerge from the obscurity of Stratford-upon-Avon, he would have an unlikely successor: Gordon Ramsay.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Confessions of a rogue library book buyer

    • Malcolm King
    • 13 January 2009

    Even though the university was now in phase seven of its Orwellian audit on 'where money was coming from and where it was going', they still had not yet twigged that there was a cell of book buying anarchists wearing sensible shoes in their midst. (February 2008)

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