Arts and culture
Here come the judge
1968 was a year of recurring turbulence for the United States, all of it witnessed in American living rooms, courtesy…
Billy Wilder
Slowly the world of the arts starts to take a timid step forward in plague-torn Australia. Just as alarming new…
Ernani at Teatro all Scala
The Opera is coming back! Unable to perform for nine months, the company has suffered great financial loss, forcing substantial…
The Undoing
It’s a strange prospect for strange times, the young violinist Freya Franzen on the stage of Melbourne’s Concert Hall playing…
Arthur Streeton Land of the Golden Fleece 1926
In February 1922, Princess Mary, the only daughter of King George V and Queen Mary, was married in the first…
Sean Connery
Sean Connery outlived all of them, those great British actors who came to such prominence in the early Sixties: Richard…
Simon Fieldhouse Mozart Statue, Vienna
Simon Fieldhouse is a Sydney- based artist who has developed a very particular area of expression. Typically, he uses watercolour…
Rebecca
Imagine daring to make another version of Rebecca. Hitchcock’s 1940 film is the version that is bound to overshadow any…
Neil Armfield’s Dream
Benjamin Britten’s setting of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream is an outstanding achievement. In Australia, we have experienced two exceptional…
Orson Welles
The journals of the plague year from the point of view of culture are getting weirder and weirder from Daniel…
Opera Australia’s Attila before shutdown in March
Attila the Hun might have been hard to stop but Verdi’s opera Attila was stopped in its tracks at the…
Too much of nothing
In the world of the arts, some things keep on even in this time of impossibility which the virus has…
Josh Frydenberg
There has been a fair bit of bleating from sectors claiming to have been ignored in the Budget; in fact…
Lockdown
What a strange phase the world of theatre – the world of artistic activity – is going through at the…
Richard Tognetti
They led the way back into the spotlight. Richard Tognetti and members of the Australian Chamber Orchestra were the first…
Agnes Wales
Something is going on with Agnes Wales. Is it possible that the current board of trustees of the Art Gallery…
V. Namatjira Stand strong for who you are
It is a name deeply imbedded in Australia’s cultural memory. Albert Namatjira’s (1902-1957) was a prolific and immensely popular watercolour…
Stuck at home with a serial killer
It’s odd when you think of the way television has usurped almost everything else in the time of the virus.…
Diana Rigg
It was sad the other day to hear of the passing of that scintillating lady of stage and screen Diana…
Sheku Kanneh-Mason
The world became aware of Sheku Kanneh-Mason when he played the cello at the wedding of Harry and Meghan Sussex…
Arcadian repose
A friend of mine, a bit of a watermelon really like most of the cultural milieu, asked me why I…
Cynical Theories
They are possibly the most politically incorrect authors in the world. And they have universities squarely in their sights. Helen…
Books shop
When the Irish comedian Dylan Moran was interviewed on ABC radio last year as a precursor to his (now presumably…
Angus Cerini
No longer confined to the digital space, the Australian Chamber Orchestra is returning to the platform in City Recital Hall…
Battle honours
In the cabinet war rooms in Whitehall in London, there is a chart which registers Atlantic convoys en route from…
