Arts & Letters: Encounters
CULTURE
Fred Schepisi & Vladimir Putin
As Fred Schepisi was whisked along the Rublyovka highway, past luxury car showrooms and Gucci boutiques, he reflected on how much Moscow...
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WORLD
Gareth Evans & Ali Alatas
One was a career diplomat, the very model of discretion, patience and good manners. The other was a famously volcanic politician, a thrower...
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WORLD
Robert Helpmann & Anna Pavlova
Little Bobbie Helpman was a delicate infant. On doctor’s orders, anything liable to make him cry was forbidden. His adoring mother, a woman...
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CULTURE
Morris West & Ngo Dinh Diem
It was 1963 and Morris West, Australia’s most successful novelist, was researching his next book. Dismissed by the literati as a middlebrow...
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SOCIETY
Helmut Newton and Alice Springs
One day in 1947, a rising Melbourne stage actress walked into a small Flinders Lane photography studio, looking to pick up some extra cash...
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SOCIETY
Captain Arthur Phillip & Jean-François de Galaup, Comte de La Pérouse
On 24 January 1788 Jean-François de Galaup, Comte de La Pérouse, explorer and navigator, beheld a sight as startling as any he had...
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SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY
Howard Florey & Alexander Fleming
On 2 September 1940, as the Battle of Britain raged, a short, grey-headed man with a dapper bow tie presented himself at the pathology...
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POLITICS
Barry Jones & Arthur Koestler
Among the handful of authors who shaped his young mind, Barry Jones told his television audience in September 1968, Arthur Koestler ranked...
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WORLD
Archduke Franz Ferdinand & the Platypus
On 17 May 1893, the newly launched SMS Kaiserin Elisabeth – a battle cruiser of the Austro-Hungarian Navy – steamed into Sydney Harbour. It...
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CULTURE
George W Bush & John Newcombe
For the Bushes, tennis was the family game, like touch football had been for the Kennedys. Olympic players and Davis Cup captains fed the...
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CULTURE
Bunyip Bluegum & Albert, A Magic Pudding
Bunyip Bluegum was a fine, round, splendid, well-bred young fellow. Compelled to leave home by the size of his uncle’s whiskers, he set off...
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CULTURE
John Peter Russell & Vincent van Gogh
Early in November 1886, when the overcast sky was struggling to light his Montparnasse studio, a 28-year-old painter from Sydney took up...
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SOCIETY
Harry Vanda & George Young
At 13, Johannes Hendricus Jacob van den Berg began teaching himself guitar in the basement of the tenement where his family lived in The...
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SOCIETY
Rupert Murdoch & Kamahl
Rupert Murdoch was 27 when he met Kandiah Kamalesvaran, a sensitive young Tamil on the dodge from the immigration authorities. Born in...
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SOCIETY
Patrick White & Sidney Nolan
Patrick White detested Fort Lauderdale, Florida. A mangrove swamp on a road leading from nowhere to nowhere, he called it. The insects were...
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SOCIETY
Doctor Who & Gai Waterhouse
Sadly, only one of Australia’s 114 official National Living Treasures has ever appeared in an episode of Doctor Who. It happened in 1978...
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POLITICS
Joe Lyons & Benito Mussolini
Herr Hitler was busy in the Rhineland so Joseph Aloysius Lyons decided to pay a visit to Signor Mussolini instead. It was 1935 and...
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SOCIETY
Douglas Mawson & Scott of the Antarctic
When Douglas Mawson turned up at Robert Falcon Scott’s London office in January 1910, Scott assumed that the 27-year-old geology lecturer...
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SOCIETY
Count Paul Strzelecki & Lady Jane Franklin
Paul Strzelecki had itchy feet. The son of a minor nobleman, without land or title, he quit Poland aged 33 and headed for England. There,...
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SOCIETY
Allen Ginsberg & Wandjuk Marika
Allen Ginsberg saw the best minds of his generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the negro...
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The Shortlist Daily
3 February 2012
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