Nicolas Rothwell is a journalist and the Northern Australia correspondent for The Australian

The Australian

The Australian is a broadsheet newspaper published in Australia from Monday to Saturday each week since 14 July 1964. The editor in chief is Chris Mitchell, the editor is Clive Mathieson and the 'editor-at-large' is Paul Kelly....

 newspaper. He is also an award-winning writer with several works of non-fiction to his name.

Background

Rothwell is the child of Czech and Australian parents. His father Bruce Rothwell was a prominent journalist, and the family resided in Australia, Washington DC, and New York among other places. Rothwell attended boarding school in Switzerland and France, and graduated from the University of Oxford. In the 1980s and early 1990s he was a foreign correspondent for The Australian

The Australian

The Australian is a broadsheet newspaper published in Australia from Monday to Saturday each week since 14 July 1964. The editor in chief is Chris Mitchell, the editor is Clive Mathieson and the 'editor-at-large' is Paul Kelly....

, a paper owned by his godfather Rupert Murdoch

Rupert Murdoch

Keith Rupert Murdoch, AC, KSG is an Australian-American business magnate. He is the founder and Chairman and CEO of , the world's second-largest media conglomerate....

, and reported from the Americas, the Pacific and Western and Eastern Europe, latterly during the Yugoslav conflict. Burned out by the latter upheaval, in the 1990s he sought out a posting in Australia, again for The Australian

The Australian

The Australian is a broadsheet newspaper published in Australia from Monday to Saturday each week since 14 July 1964. The editor in chief is Chris Mitchell, the editor is Clive Mathieson and the 'editor-at-large' is Paul Kelly....

 newspaper. He has resided in Darwin, NT since that time. His partner is indigenous activist and politician Alison Anderson

Alison Anderson

Alison Anderson is an Australian politician. She has been a member of the Northern Territory Legislative Assembly since 2005, representing the electorate of MacDonnell, and is a prominent indigenous activist and former Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission Central Zone Commissioner...

.

Journalism

The majority of Rothwell's articles can be found in The Australian

The Australian

The Australian is a broadsheet newspaper published in Australia from Monday to Saturday each week since 14 July 1964. The editor in chief is Chris Mitchell, the editor is Clive Mathieson and the 'editor-at-large' is Paul Kelly....

 newspaper. Some of the best are collected in his book Another Country (2007). He won the Walkley journalist Award in 2006 for his coverage of Indigenous Affairs.

Rothwell has been critical of extensive welfare payments to Indigenous Australians.

Books

Aside from his 1999 novel, Heaven and Earth, Rothwell's books are listed as non-fiction, but always highly personalized and offering romantic accounts of northern Australia. He combines copious literary references with personal observations. Wings of the Kite-Hawk (2003) was widely praised for its accounts of the eccentric people and timeless landscapes of the region, as he followed the foosteps of explorers Leichhart, Sturt, Giles and Strehlow. Another Country (2007) is a compilation of Rothwell's journalism, consisting of shorter accounts of meeting "mystics and artists, explorers and healers". It was deemed to have been finely written but sometimes detached in style. Journeys to the Interior is about "death, friendship, travel and art". In The Red Highway, Rothwell evokes his own path, when he says "people who come to northern Australia come here because they’re lost, or searching, or on the edge of life, and silence, and they're chasing after some kind of pattern, some redemption they think might be lurking, on the line of the horizon, out in the faint, receding perspectives of the bush". The Red Highway is a "sandy, dusty realm", a landscape which has an "interwoven, interconnected quality: a musical aspect – a repetition, and variation: the way the light filtering through the stringy-barks echoes, and speaks to the changes in the landforms; the way shape and pattern are multiplied at different levels, so that the branching arms of a river delta seem like the veins of a leaf ...".

Books

• Rothwell, N. 1999. Heaven and Earth. Duffy & Snellgrove Publishers.
• Rothwell, N. 2003. Wings of the Kite Hawk. Sydney: Picador. Reprinted Black Inc. 2009
• Rothwell, N. 2007. Another Country. Melbourne: Black Inc.
• Rothwell, N. 2009. The Red Highway. Melbourne: Black Inc.
• Rothwell, N. 2010. Journeys to the Interior. Melbourne: Black Inc.

Articles

• Rothwell, N. 2008. http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,24246848-25132,00.htmlIndigenous insiders chart an end to victimhood. (refers to Marcia Langton
  Marcia Langton
  Marcia Lynne Langton is one of Australia's leading Aboriginal scholars. She holds the Foundation Chair in Australian Indigenous Studies at the University of Melbourne, Australia...
  
  ] and Noel Pearson
  Noel Pearson
  Noel Pearson is an Aboriginal Australian lawyer, academic, land rights activist and founder of the Cape York Institute for Policy and Leadership, an organisation promoting the economic and social development of Cape York....
  
  . The Australian Literary Review, Sept 2008
• Rothwell, N. 2009. Our Fourth World. 30 May 2009.

Video

Marcia Langton and Nicolas Rothwell on The Red Highway 2009 http://www.blackincbooks.com/blackitv/red-highway-nicolas-rothwell