Culture

Stunning new albums from Lala Lala and Hand Habits disprove the adage that dealing with your inner demons is detrimental to art.

This year’s Melbourne and Sydney Fringe Festivals put together lively online programs that prove theatre can successfully translate to screen.

Selwyn Atchison rumpled over the old coach bridge to come see my Uncle Ferny, who was always first in line when local groups wanted money. The Atchison dray announced itself as the bridge planks paradiddled in the sunlight. The woody music of timber buckling …

Sri Lankan–Australian sculptor and ceramicist Ramesh Mario Nithiyendran refuses to be pigeonholed.

Author Charlotte Wood explains how the still-life paintings of Jude Rae help her write.

Five-year-old female Japanese spitz, “Mitzy”. Free to a good home with no children or other pets. It wasn’t until she’d brought the dog home that Jill noticed it. She’d poured herself a glass of pinot grigio. Mitzy had jumped up next …

“At night I lay in bed and counted the bodies I’d left behind … I pictured them all laid out in a paddock like human dominos. I had no way of knowing what happened to any of them.” So speaks the narrator of Jennifer Down’s novel Bodies …

One of the most startling things about Love and Virtue, Diana Reid’s debut novel, is its unabashed and often brutal interest in class, something that passes unacknowledged in so much of our cultural and political discourse. This is almost inevitable, …

McKenzie Wark and Kathy Acker met in June 1995 at a launch event in Sydney’s Ariel bookstore for the now defunct 21C magazine, of which I was editor. Both Wark and Acker were contributors, and it fell to me to introduce them. Wark was at the …

The first thing to know about Scary Monsters is that it consists of two novellas bound top to tail within a single paperback. It’s a design decision that reinforces the world-turned-upside-down nature of the stories contained: one a narrative …

In 2005, the CSIRO predicted that climate change would lead to catastrophic fires in south-eastern Australia by 2020. But rather than treating the climate crisis as “a question of science and how we prepare”, as journalist Bronwyn Adcock writes in …

In 2020, the murder of George Floyd by policeman Derek Chauvin in Minneapolis sparked a long overdue global reckoning with police violence and accountability. More than a year later, this debate is increasingly relevant. A recent study by the University …