Australian Arts
The pity of war
‘My subject is war and the pity of war,’ Wilfred Owen wrote in the poems which Benjamin Britten set to…
Erotic intensity
We think of television – even in this age of a thousand streamers – as something we pig out on…
Searching in vain for The African Queen
What a weird world we inhabit when it comes to popular culture or indeed to any culture high or low.…
Brooding beauty
The prospect of a revival of Rudolf Nureyev’s Don Quixote by the Australian Ballet in Melbourne is a reminder of…
Deathless dag
You need only pick up Tim Robertson’s Reliques/Pomes to know that you’re in the presence of a man with an…
Shining in the mind
How many people have sat watching something stream (or whatever) on television and found themsleves incapable of turning it off…
An ecstatic torment of self-delight
What a week of music. On Thursday night we listened to the Chamber Philharmonia Cologne do Vivaldi’s Four Seasons at…
Shy old charmer
The Melbourne Symphony Orchestra kicks off its 2023 season with a sumptuously ambitious gala concert on the evening of Friday…
Aristocratic panache
Last week saw the streaming of the sixth and final episode of Happy Valley, the Yorkshire policier with the great…
Serious music
The other week this column blithely announced that the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra would be performing live that mighty and mightily…
Snatches of poignancy
Some decades ago when David Foster Wallace was proceeding to write the great confounding masterpiece of his generation Infinite Jest…
Rite of summer
It’s a strange period of relaxation, isn’t it? The post-Christmas and New Year period in the lead up to Australia…
Cardinal virtues
George Pell is dead. Although he was 81, no one would have predicted it. The Cardinal who had had to…
Feast of epiphanies
January 6, the end of the twelve days of Christmas and the Feast of the Epiphany when the three wise…
I, Spy
Is the new year a time to reflect on the misjudgments of a life spent opining? Thirty years ago, when…
The intensity of Christmas
What a box of contradictions Christmas is. There’s the quest for presents – which can get urgent and exhilarated in…
Howdy, pardner
Someone told me the new TV streamer The English had a weird resemblance to Cormac McCarthy who has just published…
And introducing Michael Caine
It was the night of the Victorian election that might have seen Daniel Andrews fall like Lucifer never to rise…
Firefighters of bounty
Dickens’ A Christmas Carol has been with us for as long as we can remember. The story of the unlovely…
Minimalist but highly imaginative
If you live in the suburb of Hawthorn in the midst of all that leafy greenness, in the federal seat…
A lustre that is blinding
Does Milly Alcock find her characters inside herself or does she sketch them from outside? ‘It’s both,’ she says. ‘You…
Theatre of the soul
Whatever you think of the question of the Voice it was fascinating to hear Noel Pearson, that most formidable and…
Grace and lucidity
The news of Carmen Callil’s death last week shocked the literary world even though it was expected. She made an…
One night in a Gentlemen’s Club
How fascinating it is to see that Australia’s Brendan Cowell is playing John Proctor in the new English National Theatre…
Swerves of warmth and coolness
One of the great things about the Australian Ballet’s Romeo and Juliet is that the kids love it. Even the…
