Culture

Patrick Hartigan

An exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art creates new myths for a new technological world.

Michael Blake The 13 seconds in which you break both your legs and reflect – but briefly – on the virtue of humility Are long. They are long. There are only 13 of them but they feel like – like minutes. Like a meaningful period of time. Not …

Kate Holden Watching Claudio Abbado conduct the Berliner Philharmoniker taught violinist Daniel Dodds about the genius of the ensemble.

Conrad Landin “The way of the train is also the way of the boarding school, the convent, the prison and the psychiatric hospital,” Jenny Diski wrote in her 2002 travel memoir Stranger on a Train, in which she interweaves the story of a trip around the …

Nathan Smith Almost one in five Australian women – and one in 20 Australian men – will experience sexual violence after the age of 15. These bleak statistics open Katrina Marson’s Legitimate Sexpectations, a measured yet impassioned call for comprehensive …

Isabella Trimboli Early in Mothercare, a hospital room offers a good analogy for the incompetence of the American healthcare system. Lynne Tillman’s mother has had a seizure and is rushed to hospital in an ambulance. Once she gets there, she’s barely lucid, …

Tristen Harwood Where Lakes Once Had Water and Rhythms of the Earth illustrate the tensions between Indigenous and colonial ways of knowing.

Leila Lois Nana Biluš Abaffy’s Victory Over the Moon is a capricious but promising work that explores the paradoxes of conflict.

Jake Dean I came across a crab while surfing an empty beach break one afternoon. It was a real big one. “Howdy, partner,” he said as I waited for a wave. “G’day,” I said, in my friendliest voice. I didn’t want any trouble. “How’s it going?” …

Miriam Cosic Many years ago, before algorithms channelled our interactions with the written word, it was possible to stumble upon the quirkiest pieces of writing. I once turned a page in The New Yorker to a very long story about American baseball. I knew …

Kurt Johnson Gallipoli’s power to sustain the culture wars is probably the only thing preventing the Pacific theatre from becoming Australia’s most important wartime legend. The Pacific resonates deeply with the present, as an ascendant Asian power expands south …

Gregory Day The power of simile and metaphor often hits its peak in the poetic line. When describing something as apparently commonplace as soil, a writer might be forgiven for unleashing all their rhetorical strategies to enliven the topic. But as Alisa Bryce shows …