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“While fossil fuels have played a significant role in our economy to date … continuing to subsidise them and extend their use recklessly ignores the increasing consequences brought on by burning coal and gas,” writes Zali Steggall. mnth.ly/ydcJ07B

“To finish a good book requires some powers of will, concentration and imaginative sympathy – virtues I’d once vainly assumed to possess abundantly, but which I now understand to be preciously finite and possibly in terminal decline.” mnth.ly/3z3MQGs

A reporter returns to the town where he apprenticed 50 years ago: “My eyes kept darting over to the museum-worthy linotype machine where a long-departed compositor named Keith used to retype my last-minute corrections at lightning speed.” mnth.ly/0HlHfyr

Dyani Lewis joins a volunteer fossil hunter: “It’s an irony not lost on Mike that one of his jobs is to teach people about the erosion eating away Inverloch’s prized surf beach. ‘Everyone in Inverloch hates erosion, except me,’ he says with a chuckle.” mnth.ly/gKg8dvq

“Making Zephyr a tourist in a foreign land allowed Byrne to weaponise the American perception of Australians as affable and roguish, in the same way that ‘Wolf Creek’ was the glass-darkly spin on ‘Crocodile Dundee’.” Harry Windsor on #DangerousAnimals mnth.ly/nLOmUun

“Strange as it sounds, I think learning to fail and not let it destroy your life is probably the best lesson I’ve got out from playing music and playing in the band.” Sarah Krasnostein talks to cornet player George Melitsis mnth.ly/vuaP2FS

“Deep Purple’s ‘Smoke on the Water’ is the most famous song about the night in 1971 when the Montreux Casino caught fire during a performance by Frank Zappa. But McGhee’s brass band composition is the trippiest.” Sarah Krasnostein on community bands mnth.ly/MAaXE0L

“What was news? Nothing obvious, except that, despite the forewarned extinction of the town’s arboreal glory due to Dutch elm disease (the biggest local story of 1975), the elms have survived and are glorious as ever.” Ken Haley returns to Camperdown mnth.ly/kLbWhtM

Chris Johnston on e4444e’s ‘Authentic Natural Tradition’: “What’s crystal clear in this hazy and somewhat dazed music is that Church is a lover not a fighter, but he does not maintain a distance; he has not retreated into apathy or indifference.” mnth.ly/aYIi4mX

Low-budget Australian New Wave throwbacks The Surfer and Dangerous Animals deliver dark stories of violent parochialism on the coast | Harry Windsor mnth.ly/vRNcJc0

“John Howard was the evolutionary link between the veterans of half a century of Henry Bucks winter sales and today’s Sky News ultras.” Don Watson picks over the bones of the Liberal Party: mnth.ly/C0EjVP6

Sanjeev Gupta wasn’t always so unpopular. When the British-Indian commodities dealer began buying up ailing steel plants around the world a decade ago, he was welcomed with open arms wherever he went. mnth.ly/BPQKJ4J

“It’s apropos that #TheSurfer and #DangerousAnimals are both about surfers, because the defining voice of Ozploitation was a Californian surfer who moved to Australia at age 22, partly for the breaks and partly to escape the draft.” | Harry Windsor mnth.ly/q64VB44

Getting some face time with a petulant president who holds a grudge is a challenge for many world leaders, not just Albanese, writes Karen Middleton. mnth.ly/QUMXeNe

With Trump leaving the G7 summit in Canada and cancelling his remaining meetings, including with Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, Joe Hockey’s reflections are instructive, writes Karen Middleton. mnth.ly/0sGg5ug

“‘So, Rina has chosen Warren,’ she says, almost amused. ‘And I am now seen as a threat.’ Rina hisses, feral and furious as the cage is emptied and we wait for calm to return.” Andy Hazel on Warren Ellis and ‘Ellis Park’: mnth.ly/9FVeeTz

“Albanese didn’t exactly secure his recent victory by being a Trump supporter. Like newly victorious Canadian prime minister Mark Carney, he won while being the opposite. There was always going to be a price for that.” mnth.ly/ikl70Fz

Harry Windsor on #TheSurfer: “Updating ‘Wake in Fright’ for the manosphere era, Cage’s tormentors are suburban professionals who have descended into a state of nature on the sand.” mnth.ly/R1WPpcO

Sam Roggeveen on the budgetary effect of AUKUS: “The budget for nuclear submarines will comfortably outstrip the air force’s entire capital budget over the next four years, and at the end of that period, we still won’t have a single new submarine.” mnth.ly/5CYzKS6

“It’s also mildly psychedelic, like a low-fi Animal Collective or a less agitated Kurt Vile, with distant shades of those lonesome bedsit minstrels Nick Drake and John Martyn.” Chris Johnston on e4444e’s ‘Authentic Natural Tradition’ mnth.ly/axSQXPk