Noted

Current Issue Sydney Theatre Company

‘The Secret River’

By Henry Reynolds

Soon after her novel was released in 2005, controversy swirled around Kate Grenville’s The Secret River, based on a pioneer ancestor who had profited from dispossessing the local Aboriginal tribe. But the debate about the troubling task of fictionalising history did not deter readers. The book was reprinted ten times in two years, sold well over 100,000 copies in Australia alone, won pr

Current Issue Rod Laver Arena, 29 March 2013

Bruce Springsteen Live in Melbourne

By Mark Seymour

Witnessing a Bruce Springsteen gig is like watching a game of football. It demands commitment, comes with a sense of sweeping drama – the pause, the rebuild, the surging of forces – and lasts as long: three hours on the dot. It’s also loud and relentlessly optimistic. But the fervor is far from spontaneous, for this is a flawless theatrical presentation. Unlike in football,

Current Issue

‘Burial Rites’ by Hannah Kent

By Alexandra Coghlan

The popular fascination with Nordic murder mysteries takes a historical turn in Burial Rites, the debut novel from Australian author Hannah Kent. In 1829 servant Agnes Magnúsdóttir became the last woman to be beheaded in Iceland. Preserved in national legend as a witch and a whore, Kent’s altogether more equivocal Agnes exists beneath the slats of official correspondence: in the sum of folkloric tales, personal encou

Joachim Rønning & Espen Sandberg (directors)

‘Kon-Tiki’

By Michael Lucy

In 1937, Norway’s Thor Heyerdahl decided that the Polynesian peoples had not scattered across their Pacific isles from Asia, as was commonly thought, but rather from South America. In 1947 he set out to prove it by building a traditional Peruvian raft and re-creating the putative journey(s) of settlement. Later he re-created his own journey in a bestse

By Helen Trinca

‘Madeleine: The life of Madeleine St John’

By Catherine Ford

Helen Trinca’s biography of Madeleine St John – the Sydney-born novelist, who decamped to England during the ’60s, fleeing family and much else that she loathed about Australia – isn’t merely a history of a singular writer, it is

By James Salter

‘All That Is’

By Robyn Annear

The back-cover blurb for All That Is misleadingly highlights the protagonist Philip Bowman’s experiences as a World War Two naval officer and his subsequent career in book publishing. In fact, these form but a sketchy backdrop to the novel’s real s

Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney

Anish Kapoor

By Patrick Hartigan

Anish Kapoor has built a career out of exceptionally engineered, slick-looking objects – gleaming dishes, gaping voids and monumental installations. While his work seems to descend directly from the tradition of 1960s Minimalism – the viewer’s physical presence be

‘Earthmasters’ by Clive Hamilton

By David Ritter

In July last year an operation headed by American businessman Russ George dumped 100 tonnes of iron sulphate into the Pacific Ocean. The objective was to stimulate the growth of phytoplankton, which would be used to sequester carbon. Acting unilaterally, Georg

‘All the Way’ by Marie Darrieussecq (trans. Penny Hueston)

By Bethanie Blanchard

In an era when even supermarkets stock the sadomasochistic confections of EL James, it seems strange that a literary work exploring erotic themes would elicit anything more than the lifting of an eyebrow. But the sexualisation of children is truly our last taboo, and Ma

National Gallery of Australia

Toulouse-Lautrec

By Patrick Hartigan

Many years ago, on night-time walks down my street in inner-city Sydney, I used to see prostitutes through the open door of a terrace house: starkly lit women in their 50s and 60s, sitting around in lingerie amid the thick warm city air. Back home, propped on

‘Inheritance’ by Balli Kaur Jaswal

By Peter Pierce

There was no distinctive literary voice in Singapore till after the painful break with Malaysia in 1965. Then, among others, emerged the novelist Catherine Lim and the poet, academic and literary godfather Edwin Thumboo. Now, in the latest generation, a new ye

‘Love Story’ by Florian Habicht (director)

By Michael Lucy

There are times and places to wear a fedora: while boot-legging in 1920s Chicago, for instance, or while being Michael Jackson. Florian Habicht, Love Story’s gangly Kiwi director, co-writer and protagonist, reckons another is while starring in a self-consciously quirk

Radiohead

By Mark Mordue

Radiohead reach for a strange new music. Watching them perform, I wondered how the language of criticism, or any talk at all really, could articulate what they do. I would not be the first to fear that, global warming notwithstanding, the big chill has been on for quite some time in terms of how computers, social networking, chat facilities and a quickened,

‘Butcher Paper Texta Blackboard and Chalk: A Songbook and CD’ by Ruby Hunter & Archie Roach

By John van Tiggelen

In 1997, Archie Roach and Ruby Hunter took a band and three of their kids on a tour of the indigenous communities of Cape York Peninsula, hosting songwriting workshops in schools. They began in Aurukun, and descended down the Cape via Pormpuraaw, Kowanyama, Coen and Lockhart. A film crew accompanied the family. They went home with 12 songs, a few of which Ruby worked up for her solo albums. But th

‘The Rainbow Troops’ by Andrea Hirata

By Ruby J Murray

Indonesian critics claim that Andrea Hirata has single-handedly revitalised the nation’s literary culture. Since its release in 2005, his debut novel The Rainbow Troops (Laskar Pelangi) has sold an estimated 20 million copies in Indonesia. Even accounting fo

‘On Warne’ by Gideon Haigh

By Waleed Aly

On Warne. It sounds like a tome of grave significance. Mill On Liberty. Greer On Rage. No more elaborate title is necessary to justify the inquiry. The subject matter is so central to the human condition, so timeless, that we are duty-bound to engage. And that

‘The Testament of Mary’ by Colm Tóibín

By Robyn Annear

Colm Tóibín’s last book was titled New Ways To Kill Your Mother. In The Testament of Mary he sticks to the old ways. Mary of Nazareth bears witness, in this 100-page novella, to what befell her son. It’s a story that will ring familiar even to readers unacquainted

'Lore' by Cate Shortland (director)

By Fenella Souter

It’s spring 1945 and in a handsome German house deep in a forest, the Dressler family are preparing to flee. The unthinkable is on their doorstep: the Führer is losing the war; the victors are about to become the vanquished. Past and future are deftly sketched in the opening moments of Lore: a doomed German shepherd barks savagely in a blue night; rosy-cheeked children help to pack the family c