Carving in Snow

When Louis Nowra's Inside the Island received a savage review in the Sydney Morning Herald, Patrick White hand-delivered an outraged letter to the editor in support of the play and its author. When it was not published, White paid for it to run as an advertisement in the newspaper for two weeks. White later cooled to Nowra, as he did with so many others, and would sometimes refer to the playwright as 'Louis Kiama'.    White was probably unaware that Nowra left his degree at La Trobe University over a dispute with his professor concerning his dislike of White's novel The Tree of Man .   Louis Nowra in Kings Cross with his very clever chihuahua, Coco Louis Nowra was yesterday presented with the Patrick White Literary Award , this year worth $23,000, for his ‘prolific, passionate, principled contribution to Australian literature across many fields’. The annual Award was established by White who used the money from his 1973 Nobel Prize in Literature to establish ...

What is the state of what Mark Twain called the cradle of the human race, the birthplace of human speech, and the mother of history? More than half of India’s population is under the age of 25, with 65 percent under 35. The challenges and opportunities that presents are enormous. It could drive India's flagging economy for a century, overtaking China which is now past its peak. But if the world's largest democracy can't educate, train and feed this burgeoning population, then there is peril. India is home to a third of the world's poor and to half of the world's 30 million slaves. A third of the population lives under the poverty line of US $1.25 a day. I find this frightening. How will India face the consequences of a marginalised youth population existing on a scale unprecedented in modern history? Meanwhile, on Tuesday India launched a mission to Mars. The Mars Orbiter Mission, known as "Mangalyaan" in India, successfully began its 400 million-km ...