Peter Conrad
An Auteur Planet: Pedro Almodóvar’s 'The Skin I Live In' and Lars von Trier’s 'Melancholia'
Peter Conrad
Ah, to be an auteur, with the power to impose your own kinked or crazy worldview on reality! Pleasing only yourself, you can cosmetically...
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Cabaret, Arts & Letters
Queen of the Night: Meeting Meow Meow
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,...
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Film, Arts & Letters
Shakespeare in Australia: Fred Schepisi’s 'The Eye of the Storm'
Peter Conrad
It’s fortunate that Australia’s new capital was called Canberra not Shakespeare, as a few Empire loyalists proposed at the time of...
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Arts & Letters
Under the Skin: 'Fred Williams: Infinite Horizons'
Peter Conrad
Until not long ago, Australian nature seemed averse to art. The trees were unkempt and drab, the vistas flat and dry, the colours...
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Arts & Letters
Empire of the Mind: Robert Hughes’s 'Rome'
Peter Conrad
In 1966 Robert Hughes concluded his first book, The Art of Australia, with a sardonic farewell to a country he had already quit. The final...
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The Monthly Essays
Can We Be Heroes?: Peter Conrad on Chris Lilley and the Politics of Comedy
Peter Conrad
Why indeed? Laughter is instinctive, and what it conveys is a flushed awareness of superiority. But there is more to it than one boy’s...
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The Monthly Essays
Falling Stars: The Plight of the Windsors
Peter Conrad
I, too, once saw her passing by, for a few seconds in 1954, on a scrubby hill in Hobart during her first Commonwealth tour. She passed by...
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Books, Arts & Letters
Lest We Forget: Hugh Lunn’s 'Words Fail Me: A Journey through Australia’s Lost Language'
Peter Conrad
Hugh Lunn, vegging out as he sunbakes in his popularity, has come up with an unstrenuous new method for manufacturing a book: why not...
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Art, Arts & Letters
The Faith of Images: 'Up Close'
Peter Conrad
Why, confronted by a camera, are we expected to smile? A face, as Carol Jerrems said, “tells the story of what a person is thinking”....
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Books
Sister Act: The Minogue Sisters
Peter Conrad
At the Royal Albert Hall in 1996, Kylie Minogue had an awe-inducing glimpse of the vacuum that she exists to fill. Nick Cave, after...
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