October 2011

Robert Helpmann & Anna Pavlova

By Shane Maloney

Little Bobbie Helpman was a delicate infant. On doctor’s orders, anything liable to make him cry was forbidden. His adoring mother, a woman of theatrical disposition, recited Shakespeare to him in his cot. As he grew, they took to acting the roles. He particularly liked to play Juliet, dressed for the part in mother’s costume. When he talked her into sending him to ballet school, he was t

Art Gallery of NSW - 24 September 2011 to 5 February 2012

What’s in a Face? Aspects of Portrait Photography

By Sebastian Smee

What can you read into a photograph of a face? Hurt. Happiness. Confidence. Contempt. There’s no limit. Indeed, if you’re anything like me, you can spend hours staring at family snapshots, greedily seeking – and often finding – things that eluded you in the maelstrom of domestic life. My son, breaking into a toothily anarchic smile: he was proud, ecstatically happy that day. My mother

'Autumn Laing' By Alex Miller

By Janine Burke

The Heide mythos, which has grown from the circle that gathered around arts patrons Sunday and John Reed at their home in Victoria’s Yarra Valley, is a tantalising mix of passion, vision, heartbreak, betrayal and great art. Without the art, Heide would be merely a soap opera. Sunday was the chief engineer of an ambitious plan to invigorate Australian culture – to get it up off its knees where it snivelled before Mother England. Her

'The Street Sweeper' By Elliot Perlman

By Kirsten Tranter

Elliot Perlman’s new novel, set in New York, traces the unlikely lines of connection between a set of characters from a broad social and historical spectrum. The ‘street sweeper’ of the title is Lamont Williams, an African–American man fresh out of prison, having been wrongly convicted of taking part in an armed robbery when he was a teenager. One of

Meeting Mary Finsterer

What Happens Next

By Andrew Ford

Mary Finsterer says she wants to write a Mass. As one of Australia’s finest composers, she’s entitled; composers have been making new musical settings of the Mass for the best part of 2000 years. But it is not such a common occurrence in the twenty-first c

Girls’s 'Father, Son, Holy Ghost'

Out of the Bay

By Robert Forster

Girls are a two-piece band out of San Francisco who write and sing songs about loneliness, heartbreak, the fuzzy disconnect around rock’n’roll and romance, and girls. Father, Son, Holy Ghost follows the EP Broken Dreams Club (2010) and the album Album (200

Daniel Nettheim’s The Hunter and Anh Hung Tran’s Norwegian Wood

Taking to the Woods

By John Collee

Shot in some of Tasmania’s most breathtaking wilderness, The Hunter (in national release) tells the story of an American mercenary (Willem Dafoe) and his search for the last Tasmanian tiger. The last thylacine died in captivity in 1936 but surviving black-and-white fo

Meeting Andrew Fraser

Line of Appeal

By Jack Marx

There is perhaps no justice quite so poetic as when an errant lawyer goes to jail. Like the image of a prancing matador being hoist to the heavens on the horns of a bull, the barrister trading his cape for prison garb somehow tells of a world where justice kno

John Bell’s 'On Shakespeare'

Bowing to the Bard

By Louis Nowra

Watching him rehearse was one of the most fascinating experiences I’ve had in the theatre. In 1980 John Bell was playing the protagonist in Cyrano de Bergerac and I was assistant director to Richard Wherrett. Where other actors will show you flashes of their character

Alice Neel and Louise Bourgeois

Bodying Forth

By Drusilla Modjeska

The bodies of old women are rarely celebrated in art, and representations of them are few. The faces of older women who’ve achieved status and standing have long had their place in portraiture, which can indeed be a celebration. But the aged and unclothed fe

A Correspondence with Clive James

Clean As You Go

By Paola Totaro

Unfortunately my health is indecent at the moment. I’m in Addenbrooke’s being seen to but I should be back in London next week and I’ll contact you from there. You can take it for granted, though, that I think [the interview] is a good idea. All be

Meeting Meow Meow

Queen of the Night

By Peter Conrad

Allergic as I am to cats, whose fur causes my eyes to water and chokes my air passages, I have to admit a guarded fondness for Meow Meow, the many-talented and polymathic cabaret performer. She is an elusive creature, allegedly Australian – born in Canberra, raised in

Meeting Glenn Murcutt

Fathers & Sons

By Peter Robb

So Architects do square and hew, Green Trees that in the Forest grew. It was a long day on the road. We covered 675 kilometres of highway, city street and dirt track, traversing coastal plain and steep hill, driving among trees and city buildings. The distance was broken by short and long stops. We looked over two houses Glenn Murcutt designed many years ago

Jennifer Maiden - 'Friendly Fire', 2005

Poetry Masterpiece

By Lisa Gorton

Jennifer Maiden’s fourteenth poetry collection is a masterpiece in the original sense of that word: fantastical, intelligent, unassuming and conversational, it gives full expression to her talent. In this collection, there are few borrowed or conventional elements; to a remarkable degree, the style of these poems expresses her particular vision. Maiden takes imaginative possession of all that pr

JM Coetzee - 'Summertime', 2009

Fiction Masterpiece

By Geordie Williamson

Is it a cheat to suggest this quasi-memoir by a South African–born Nobel Prize winner as the best work of Australian fiction since the dawn of the new century? Perhaps it shows how problematic those categories have become. Whatever the case, the third volume

Neil Armfield - 'Peter Grimes', 2009

Opera Masterpiece

By Peter McCallum

When Opera Australia staged Benjamin Britten’s Peter Grimes in 2009 (co-produced with Western Australian Opera and Houston Grand Opera), the company already had a venerable Grimes on its books that was far from showing its age. Yet the sad human plainness of

Ten Part Invention - 'Unidentified Spaces', 2001

Jazz Masterpiece

By John Clare

Ten Part Invention is a Sydney band formed more than 20 years ago to perform Australian jazz music. It still has a solid, often ecstatic, following. This album has a wealth of writing from two band members who are among our greatest composers: Sandy Evans and Miroslav B

Classical Masterpiece

By Andrew Ford

It has been a good start to the twenty-first century for Australian composers and correspondingly hard to pick a single masterpiece. Anyway, how do you compare Ross Edwards’ Clarinet Concerto to Liza Lim’s Cy Twombly–inspired piano suite The Four Seasons? Or the public ritual of Peter Sculthorpe’s Requiem and the private whimsy of Richard Mills’s fourth string quartet, Glimpses from My B