Culture

For Corrie Chen, the chance to direct the groundbreaking television series New Gold Mountain was the fulfilment of a dream.

The much-anticipated new season of Succession digs further into grotesque family dysfunction – and it doesn’t disappoint.

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 …

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 …

Isklander is an interactive online thriller that puts the audience at the centre of its plot.

A Tokyo exhibition of Australian and Japanese photographers explores how the image affects history, memory and our notions of self.

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 …