Malcolm Knox
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Articles by Malcolm Knox
Why Australia can afford to have the oldest Test team since the 1920s
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Why Australia can afford to have the oldest Test team since the 1920s
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Money talks: Why Australia can afford to have the oldest Test team since the 1920s
Malcolm Knox The cricket world keeps expecting Australia's Test team to act their age, and the players keep saying: “Not yet.” Mitchell Starc's hairline is the only part of him that looks as old as 36. Patrick Cummins and Josh Hazlewood, injury-free in Durban, bowled with the pace and freshness of men in their early 20s – or better, in their case, given how much of their early 20s they spent rehabbing.
Everyone loves to hate the Roosters. But we shouldn't. Their fans have suffered too
Malcolm Knox My favourite memory of the 2026 NRL season is the night I went to a Roosters home game in order to discover that their fans are human, too. It's a difficult case to make this week, when approximately 110 per cent of the rugby league world is wishing for another Newcastle miracle . The Roosters are the appropriate villains, and will embrace being cast as the black princes of this fairytale.
Ed Sheeran made an art of being inoffensive: Here's why it didn't work
Malcolm Knox In Aesop's fable of the donkey, a man is criticised for riding his donkey to market while his son walks. When he lets his son ride, he's criticised for spoiling the boy. He joins the boy on the donkey and is criticised for hurting the animal. Finally, he and the boy carry the donkey, but drop it into a river. Moral: try to please everybody and you'll please nobody, plus you drown your donkey. In the 2026 version, Ed Sheeran is the man with the donkey.
The Long Game - Good Reading Magazine
With its crisp white uniforms and fifth-day miracles, Test cricket has always held a sacred place in the hearts of fans. It is a game of deep tradition – a showcase for top talent, and an epic clash of nations – yet for all its claims to legend, it has continually evolved to suit the times.
Cleary sin bin highlights flawed rule that needs to be changed immediately
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September hate watch: The NRL finals crisis no one saw coming
Malcolm Knox Which top-eight club do you hate the most? This is the annual conundrum for the rugby league world as the weather warms up and the semi-finals start. For the majority of fans, watching the NRL in September is no longer about your team, who are now behind the wire in some secure tropical holiday resort, their mobile phones in lockboxes. When your team is off on Mad Monday, your focus turns to who you most want to lose the premiership.
The NRL finals crisis no one saw coming
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The NRL finals crisis no one saw coming
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People feared the Chiefs would be a joke. The NRL might have created a monster instead
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The deep reaction among Swans fans is the disgust at having been sold a lie. Can they fix it?
Malcolm Knox This was the year we went all-in on the Sydney Swans, buying the membership package and attending as many games as possible. A Swans game – usually a Swans win - became part of the weekend routine. It's a very Sydney occasion, drawing nearly 40,000 people on average, bigger than any rugby league game in the city, festive and feminised, with a roughly 50/50 gender split that is unique among male spectator sports.
Twelve months ago, the Knights were heading for the wooden spoon. Holbrook must be coach of the year
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Despite everything FIFA threw at it, football really was the winner
Malcolm Knox “So it's over – the few weeks every four years when you pretend you know something about football.” Cutting words to hear, at the end of an all-absorbing FIFA World Cup. My son spoke with his hand over his mouth, so I appealed to the referee (his mother) to get him sent off, but she was busy watching video replays. Having lost the point, I went down screaming in agony, ankle in one hand, eye socket in the other, rolling downhill on a flat floor.
Origin’s kryptonite led to Blues adopting a Maroons state of mind
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Queensland got what they deserved from Laurie’s losers
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FIFA’s history of criminality makes it a perfect receptacle for phone calls from a ‘boss man’
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This NSW squad is good enough to win. It’s the starting 13 who are a worry
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Up the Wahs: How Warriors are doing the impossible in New Zealand
All Blacks head coach details what made Anton Segner impossible to leave out "We think he could generally be a high quality seven, but you know he's got a really balanced skill set."
The Blues didn’t just have to beat Queensland. They had to beat themselves
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Arrow response showed the one value that truly unites rugby league’s dysfunctional family
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Daley’s new Blues have a rocks-or-diamonds feel. One player sums that up
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The match that showed the NRL’s plans are working
Stephen Crichton blow-up hints at bigger issue as tensions rise at NRL strugglers We run the rule over the biggest talking points from the second weekend in May. 😃 The good: Kieran Foran flying at Manly 😔 The bad: Dragons' winless …
Book review - The First Friend
What makes psychopathic, murderous despots tick? That archetype – full of amusing insecurities and absurdities but apathetically bent on domination – survives and thrives today, whether amongst the political elite, everyday workplaces or even families. What can we do to resist them without becoming like them? Armed with Aussie wit, Malcolm Knox explores these questions and satirises the bullies in The First Friend, his seventh novel.
Malcolm Knox Finds Comedy in Toxic Friendships
One of my favourite TV writers of all time is British showrunner Armando Iannucci. He created some of my favourite comedy. He was the inventor of Alan Partridge, and I could watch The Thick of It and Veep on a loop endlessly. There's nobody better at the art of the well lobbed insult, nobody with greater faculty for both savagery and bureaucratic ineptitude. He's a comedic genius.
‘Sprint’
Netflix’s series about sprinters preparing for the World Athletics Championships skips around doping scandals in favour of formulaic tales of overcoming the odds A six-part Netflix documentary series that trails the world’s fastest sprinters as they prepare for the World Athletics Championships, Sprint begins with American track star Noah Lyles showboating for reporters. Dressed in cowboy boots, a bedazzled YSL jacket, tinted sunglasses and chains, he instructs his coach to get out of the shot.
Roman Krznaric’s ‘History for Tomorrow’
Roman Krznaric has a way with history. He outlines the familiar, while constantly inserting quirky extras that augment his argument.
A kind of strangeness: MTC’s ‘A Streetcar Named Desire’
The luminous Nikki Shiels plays Blanche as an insouciant youth in a much-changed production of Tennessee Williams’ classic There is one luminous moment in Nikki Shiels characterisation of Blanche DuBois in Anne-Louise Sarks’ production of A Streetcar Named Desire. She sits on the toilet bowl, a bottle of whiskey in one hand and her lit birthday cake in the other, and blows on the candles, not to extinguish them but to make the lights dance and delight.
‘Home again, home again, diggidy-dig’
Homesickness as a family trait, and the author’s persistent feeling she is supposed to be somewhere else As far back as I can remember, my mother has said this. At the end of any car journey, sometimes with a hand gesture like a magician revealing a rabbit, sometimes murmured to herself like a charm. I come from a family of the homesick. My grandmother left England for Australia and was then placed in an orphanage because her mother couldn’t afford to keep her.
The gloom of youth: ‘I Saw the TV Glow’ and ‘Under the Bridge’
Jane Schoenbrun’s instant cult film about the discovery of the authentic self, and Disney’s fictionalised series about teen friendship and the murder of a 14-year-old Jane Schoenbrun’s surreal, crepuscular films have an uncanny ability to get under your skin. Their second feature, I Saw the TV Glow, so lodged itself in my thoughts after the first viewing that I went back for a second only two days later.
Destiny’s children: Destiny Deacon
The internationally recognised Blak artist is remembered as a mentor, a political activist and a visionary who subverted racist tropes I want my pictures to tell a story. Stories of Blak/Koori identity. Racism and sexism. Plus, the truth as I know it.
The jumping girl
Exploring memory and connection – and discovering the true power of fiction – with literary great Gerald Murnane I meant to tell Gerald Murnane about the winter’s month I’d recently spent writing in an old fish factory in northern Iceland. But within minutes of him welcoming me into the Men’s Shed in his home town of Goroke, in Victoria’s Wimmera region, he said something that caused me to put aside what I’d come to say.
Pipeline to power
Australia’s gas producers succeeded in making their product synonymous with modernity, but now they face being excluded in the transition to a renewable future The advent of a new era would take place on a Friday. The official ceremony to mark the completion of the Moomba to Adelaide gas pipeline was planned for November 28, 1969. The mega-project linked the city to the outback. Work had taken 10 months and cost $40 million – roughly equivalent to $569 million today.
Hard pressed
The Albanese government celebrated Julian Assange’s release, but is its commitment to a free press translating into legislative change? You can google the office phone numbers of senior government ministers, state and federal, all around Australia. It’s part of our open democracy. Try them. Many won’t connect to the minister, or even to someone who works for the minister. Some aren’t even connected to the phone network. Or you can email them.
Powder without glory
The history of addictive painkillers Bex and Vincent’s reveals the ruthlessness of Big Pharma and the patriarchal control of women “A cup of tea, a Bex and a good lie down.” It was a catchphrase of near genius. It entered the Australian vernacular in the middle of last century, as a synonym for gathering oneself in the face of life’s slings and arrows, et cetera, and was even the title for a popular 1960s stage show. I’m not sure why I googled that friendly phrase a few months back.
Limelight’s last gleaming
There’s been little precedent in Australia for leaders of Biden and Trump’s age, whose self-regard has driven them on despite obvious declines Average life expectancy has fallen in the face of various hardships in some Western countries in recent years, and for men in the United States it is now about 73. Joe Biden, with the first-rate healthcare that whiteness, privilege and the presidency bring, is 81.
Why Scottie, and God, never miss tricky two-foot downhill putts mogaznewsen
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Blues were brave but ballistic shoulder shot made a victory mission impossible mogaznewsen
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No fault? Hardly. Why NRL needs to stand down contentious policy mogaznewsen
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Australian selectors optimistic at best in ignoring T20’s A-kid mogaznewsen
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Believe it or not, the overblown coverage of Kerr is a step towards equality mogaznewsen
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Fast Eddie and ScoMo take responsibility but it’s not their fault mogaznewsen
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Two Books From Down Under
Dear readers, Maybe it was too many formative basic-cable viewings of “Muriel’s Wedding,” or the fantastical names of their snack foods (Cheezels, Witchetty Grubs, Tim Tams). But as a kid I always imagined Australia to be a sort of sunny, not-quite-real mirror-world; a dusty cosmic boomerang plopped down in the South Pacific, overrun with strange animals and extravagantly diphthonged accents.
Gerry Harvey - Master Of The Trade
The article was written for a previous edition of the Aushorse magazine and has been republished with permission, with some minor updates. The 2024 edition of the Aushorse magazine is now available. In his 51st year in horse racing, Gerry Harvey admits he still hasn’t found the answers. Thousands of horses bred, bought, sold and raced, and he cannot say why one wins and another doesn’t.
David Warner’s leaps and bounds through an era with seven names on it mogaznewsen
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Khawaja may let black do the talking, but words are never just words mogaznewsen
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This World Cup has tightened India’s reign over cricket mogaznewsen
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Warner’s farewell logic is all double Dutch to me mogaznewsen
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The great disconnect between grassroots rugby and Wallaby soap opera mogaznewsen
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Wahs love got to do with it? The NRL team you can’t hate mogaznewsen
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