Culture

Opaque smudge, a Dickinson sh-sh-shift of light and I know better than to try to catch the exact moment the Sydney Tower lights turn off and anyway, eyes on the road. Tell the truth but tell it slant, Emily said, and that’s what I’ve done my whole …

The peacock dress of a new office building in Sydney’s Surry Hills belies its ingeniously modest design.

For his leading role in Denis Villeneuve’s Dune Timothée Chalamet has been charged with ‘saving the film industry’, but he wears the mantle modestly.

Fleur Watson opens The New Curator with the wry observation that curation has well and truly left the gallery. These days folk curate “menus, wardrobes, playlists, social media feeds” and notably also the news they receive and the information …

Artist Shen Xin says the layering of desire, bondage and labour in Hito Steyerl’s video Lovely Andrea has deeply informed their understanding of image.

As a young model, Emily Ratajkowski knew her most bankable feature was also a limitation. Her large breasts and small frame were “valuable and rare”, but she would never be high fashion. She was a nameless “ ‘commercial swim’ girl” until, …

“If you go back to World War I … all elite sportsmen used to volunteer because they thought it was their duty.” So said Corporal Ben Roberts-Smith in 2011, when the NRL employed him to promote its Anzac Cup. In Not Playing the Game: Sport and …

Kip Williams’ bold and devastating production of Julius Caesar brings the 21st-century media machine into a study of political rhetoric.

Julia Ducournau’s Palme D’Or-winning film Titane gives horror a high-octane twist.

Girt Nation is the third volume of David Hunt’s Unauthorised History of Australia, following on from 2013’s Girt and 2016’s True Girt. The series is ostensibly a wry retelling of the history of Australia, with …

Back in the 20th century I used to like walking around Melbourne with my Aunty Joan because she’d always be pointing out everything she remembered that was no longer there. When I read Robyn Annear’s Bearbrass: Imagining Early Melbourne in …

Kate Moore is a feminist biographer whose work is very much of our Time’s Up, #MeToo, SlutWalking, whistleblowing age, but she also provides devastating and inspiring insights into the long history of injustices against which women have had to fight. Moore’s …