Famed Australian director Bruce Beresford loves opera. If you weren’t aware of this before watching his new film, The Travellers, you most likely will be by the time the credits roll. (more…)
Category: Arts
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Prime Minister’s Literary Awards winners 2025: investigating power, privilege and inequality
Michelle de Kretser has won the fiction prize in the 2025 Prime Minister’s Literary Awards. It’s her second major prize this year for her ambitious, experimental novel Theory and Practice, which won the 2025 Stella Prize (and was shortlisted for the Miles Franklin). (more…)
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Regional arts vital, but neglected, community resources
Australia has a unique network of regional art galleries which attract tourism, help local businesses thrive and contribute to overall regional development. (more…)
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The central role of government support for the Arts in defining our national culture
Australians emerged from our cultural cringe in the late sixties when our film and television industries thrived. Has that belief and pride in Australia gone for good? (more…)
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‘Let her voice echo’: Hind Rajab film receives record-breaking standing ovation at Venice Festival
Tunisian filmmaker Kaouther Ben Hania’s harrowing drama “The Voice of Hind Rajab” left not a dry eye in the house on Wednesday night, earning over 20 minutes of standing ovation after its premiere at the Venice Film Festival. (more…)
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Still talkin’ ’bout My Generation
The first time I heard The Who’s My Generation, I was a teenager and it sounded like a punch in the face. (more…)
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Bendigo writers’ festival fiasco
If it weren’t so serious, it would be laughable. A code of conduct for a writers’ festival? (more…)
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First they came for the Palestinians
A Michael Leunig cartoon from 2012, that holds its relevance. (more…)
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Spy novelist Stella Rimington, the first female head of MI5, was a ‘true trailblazer’
Dame Stella Rimington, former director-general of the UK’s domestic counter-intelligence and security agency, MI5, and author of several spy thrillers, has died this week, aged 90. (more…)
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Top Australian writers urge Albanese to abolish Job-Ready Graduates, calling their humanities degrees life-changing
“Earning a humanities degree was not only life-changing, in terms of opening up a world of knowledge otherwise beyond my reach, it also turns out to have been enormously productive – for me and many, many people around me,” said Tim Winton this week. “My little arts degree has created jobs and cultural value for over 40 years.” (more…)
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Kazuo Ishiguro said he won the Nobel Prize for making people cry – 20 years later, Never Let Me Go should make us angry
Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go was published 20 years ago. Since then, the Japanese-born English writer has been awarded the Nobel Prize in 2017 and knighted for services to literature in 2018. (more…)
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Peter Russell-Clarke’s greatest gift was how he made you feel like one of the family
Throughout my teenage years, our lounge room sang “Come and get it, come and get it” and all in earshot would carol back, “with Peter. Russell. Clarke!” (more…)
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The ANU School of Music: Requiem for a Dream?
On 20 September this year, the School of Music at ANU (formally the Canberra School of Music) should be celebrating its 60th anniversary. (more…)
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The Empire has accidentally caused the rebirth of real counterculture in the West
Everyone’s still talking about Bob Vylan, and rightly so. A crowd full of Westerners happily being led through a chant of “Death, death to the IDF” at the 2025 Glastonbury Festival was a historical landmark moment for the 21st century, and the group’s persecution at the hands of Western governments is once again highlighting the way our society’s purported values of free thought and free expression go right out of the window wherever Israel is concerned. (more…)
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The takeaway from the Venice Biennale saga: the art world faces deep and troubling structural inequality
Creative Australia’s decision earlier this year to rescind the selection of artist Khaled Sabsabi and curator Michael Dagostino as Australia’s 2026 representatives at the Venice Biennale sent shockwaves through the arts sector. (more…)
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Creative Australia’s backflip on Venice Biennale representatives exposes deep governance failures
The reinstatement of artist Khaled Sabsabi and curator Michael Dagostino as Australia’s representatives for the 2026 Venice Biennale closes a bruising recent cultural episode and exposes the fragility of the systems meant to protect artistic freedom in Australia. (more…)
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Palestinian genocide gets some big-screen time
Films and the internet are proving to be a valuable way for the message of the Palestinian struggle to be publicised. (more…)
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Albanese should remember his childhood – and the rhymes he learnt
There is much wisdom to be had in what was learnt in the first years of life, (more…)
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‘Adolescence’, misogyny and the power of television
Rarely does a television series stop you in your tracks, through the heartbreaking power of its content and the creative process employed in its making. Such is the Netflix series from the UK titled Adolescence. (more…)
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Words under occupation
In our post-truth world, the art of messing with words has been perfected. When the Ramallah-based Ashtar Theatre issued a global call to creatives of all disciplines to join the cultural intifada in solidarity with the Palestinian people, I responded by writing a series of poems. Words under Occupation is an act of resistance and disentanglement. It comes in two versions: as text and as video. You will find the link to the video under the text. (more…)
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Telling Chinese stories the Chinese way: Why is Ne Zha 2 more than a blockbuster?
One day in February, I had just finished watching Ne Zha 2 when I checked my phone and discovered that the animated film had already grossed more than US$1.38 billion globally – a figure I never imagined a Chinese animated film would earn. (more…)
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A chairman and a president walk into a bar: Review of Donald’s Inferno
Only in Australia could such an edgy political satire be put on stage. Sharp and witty, Donald’s Inferno, written and directed by Jon-Claire Lee, was launched in Sydney this month to a modest but discerning audience. Buried in its wacky story, the comedy pulled no punches in its description of current tensions between the Chinese Mainland and Taiwan. It concluded with a surprising message of hope.
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Leslie landscape prize attracts superb pictures
It’s astonishing enough that 403 landscapes by Australian artists were entered in this year’s John Leslie Art Prize. Even more surprising is the superb quality and diversity of the 52 shortlisted, which are exhibited in Sale’s Gippsland Art Gallery until 24 November. (more…)
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Political void: The end of the Wharf
Forty (40) years ago, the ALP ran its national conference at what was then called Noah’s Lakeside Hotel, with uranium, Timor, taxation, David Combe and south-west Tasmania prominent in discussions. But, who is this meeting up on the dancefloor after the day’s debates and double-crossings? (more…)
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John Olsen’s gift to the nation
My dear friend, the great Australian painter John Olsen was, at 77, the oldest artist to win the Archibald Prize. (more…)
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Scholar or ideologue?
The Economist, a leading British weekly, enjoys wide global readership. It recently covered the thoughts and written work of two scholars, both Chinese, one now government-based, in Beijing and the other based in an academic institution in the US. Only the former, was branded as an “ideologue” however. Paraphrasing Professor Julius Sumner Miller: Why is this so? (more…)
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Thinking intensely about the holocaust, Israel and Gaza
The vengeful, scheming, genocidal response unleashed since October last year in Gaza, by Israel, has prompted a profoundly intensified global review of the punishing history related to the establishment of the State of Israel and its colonial-settler expansion ever since 1948. (more…)
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A welcome new approach to economics
“The Alternative: How to build a just economy” by American author, Nick Romeo, that has been published by Basic Books UK in recent weeks, is a welcome arrival to a human world in crisis. (more…)
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When morality and loyalty pull in opposite directions
What to do if morality and loyalty pull in opposite directions: A review of Nicholas Jose, The Idealist (more…)
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Martin Flanagan’s ‘The Empty Honour Board’ draws us in to an unnatural world
The boarding students were far from home and the variable consolations of family life. They were shackled with priestly companions, pledged to lives of celibacy, who also had been removed from their families in their early teens and isolated from society in religious institutions from which they were then turned out, with scant proper preparation, as teachers. How could things not go wrong? (more…)