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Television May 21, 2022
The genre-busting pirate romance Our Flag Means Death is straight up hilarious – and artistically and emotionally gorgeous.
Theatre May 21, 2022
At its heart, Meyne Wyatt’s City of Gold is about a family denied the right to grieve.
Theatre May 21, 2022
Playwright, actor and director Elena Carapetis
Playwright, actor and director Elena Carapetis’s latest project brings teenage bad-ass Antigone to the present day.
Visual Art May 21, 2022
Confined 13 demonstrates that the carceral state can’t crush the creative energy of Indigenous artists.
The Influence May 21, 2022
For playwright Morgan Rose, Hofesh Shechter’s dancework Sun opens up the mess and contradictions of being human.
Books May 14, 2022
John Zubrzycki
The Shortest History of India
How does a writer condense 5000 years of Indian history into a single short book without losing themselves in what they’re omitting? India is a fluid tessellation of ethnicities and languages that shift through the blooming of religions, the clash of …
Books May 14, 2022
Elizabeth Tynan
The Secret of Emu Field: Britain’s forgotten atomic tests in Australia
When we recall the British atomic bomb tests in Australia, most of us think of Maralinga, still a byword for imperial indifference to Country and people. Few remember Emu Field – even though, as Elizabeth Tynan shows, the 1953 Totem 1 and Totem 2 detonations …
Film May 14, 2022
Kogonada’s science fiction film After Yang is acutely intelligent but ends up infantilising its characters.
Design May 14, 2022
Artist and curator David Sequeira
Since haunting galleries as a teenager, David Sequeira’s art has been driven by awe of human expressiveness.
Visual Art May 14, 2022
Helmut Newton pioneered the photography of fetishistic glamour, but he never disguised the artifice of seduction.
Fiction May 14, 2022
I have recently taken it upon myself to work my way through the internet in search of my ancestry. I call it my 1080 Project. As a wise old tech-savvy male elder of the family Rattus rattus, and with no chance of a pleasant natural death, I’m …
books
Books May 21, 2022
Two women meet in a cafe. One asks permission to write the other’s life “while she lives it”. The writer is a compassionate and observant interlocutor. Her subject, Jin, is wary and evasive. Their conversation examines words survivors of violence …
Books May 21, 2022
Antigone Kefala, 86, is both a poet and prose writer. She was born in Romania and relocated to Australia in 1959 after living in Greece and New Zealand. Late Journals is the final in a trilogy that began with Summer Visit (2003), followed …
Books May 21, 2022
Claire Keegan
Small Things Like These
Great literature is properly immune to spoilers, having at its core an ambiguity of truth sourced directly from the complex and often contradictory essences of life itself. It isn’t enough that something dramatic, or even beautiful, happens in a story: …