New York City

Janette Turner Hospital on Central Park, New York

Wanted for Loitering

By Janette Turner Hospital

From the NASA space shuttle, Central Park is visible to the naked eye as a bright emerald bar on the fat knuckle of Manhattan – index finger of New York, principal of the five boroughs that make up the city, indisputably the dominant digit as it pokes the soft underbelly of the Bronx while giving the finger casually, insouciantly, to everything west of the Hudson. If an astronaut were to pl

Hans Keilson’s 'The Death of the Adversary' and 'Comedy in a Minor Key'

Case Histories

By Inga Clendinnen

Hans Keilson, a retired psychiatrist of German birth who lives in Amsterdam, was four months away from his one-hundred-and-first birthday when, in August 2010, the New York Times critic Francine Prose pointed her magic pen and declared his two long-ago novels, Comedy in a Minor Key (1947) and The Death of the Adversary (1959), to be “masterpieces” and Keilson himself “a genius”. The c

Geoffrey Gurrumul Yunupingu’s 'Rrakala'

To the Heart

By Robert Forster

Elcho Island is 560 kilometres from Darwin, off the north-east Arnhem Land coast. A strong musical community there has produced members of Yothu Yindi, the lead singer of the Warumpi Band, George Burarrwanga, the country/gospel band Soft Sands, the Chooky Dancers and Geoffrey Gurrumul Yunupingu. Gurrumul was born blind in 1970. He learnt to play a right-handed guitar left-handed and is proficient on a number of other instruments, includ

David Walsh and Tasmania’s Museum of Old and New Art

High Priest

By Amanda Lohrey

The Moorilla estate is set on a peninsula of sandstone cliffs that juts out into the Derwent estuary on Hobart’s northern fringe. Framed to the south-west by the looming grandeur of Mt Wellington and to the east by Mt Direction, the slopes of the peninsula are planted with grapevines, and a cluster of modern buildings perch atop the rise. It is here that t

Learning to Swim

An Otter's Life

By Kate Jennings

For our summer holidays, we surfed every year for six weeks at Narrabeen. My brother and my city cousin, Stephen, and I formed a feral and fearless trio, always making for the furthest wave and beyond. We didn’t know Pindar from Pinocchio, but we would’ve

Patrick White & Sidney Nolan

By Shane Maloney

Patrick White detested Fort Lauderdale, Florida. A mangrove swamp on a road leading from nowhere to nowhere, he called it. The insects were a pest, the television was rubbish and the climate made him feel like a beachcomber. Only the avocados made it tolerable

'Mad Men: Season Four'

Quaint Misogyny

By Kirsten Tranter

Let the cocktail theme parties begin.Season Two is still showing here on SBS but in July the fourth season of the award-winning cult series Mad Men started on American cable. The title refers to the advertising men of Madison Avenue, New York, in the early 1960s. The sh

Tom DiCillo’s 'When You’re Strange: A Film About The Doors'

The Infinite

By Robert Forster

The film starts with a smashed car in a ditch on a desert road. Out of the wreckage climbs Jim Morrison. The next scenes have him hitchhiking, and then suddenly he’s in a car again driving through the desert; he turns on the car radio to hear an announcer br

'Up Close'

The Faith of Images

By 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”. Although mouths find it easy to lie by twisting their corners upwards, “the eyes”, as Jerrems put it, “reveal the suffering”

Julian Assange’s WikiLeaks

The Man Who Fell to Earth

By John Birmingham

Semantics aside, it remained a benighted sinkhole, although nearly 1300 years of fierce parochialism and independence shone through even after Rahman’s conversion of the locals. During the Soviet occupation (1979–89), the area was renowned as a graveyard f

The Minogue Sisters

Sister Act

By 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 clubbing her to death in the video for ‘Where the Wild Roses Grow’, one of his Murder Ballads, had enticed her into appearin

The Cult of Green

By Paul Barry

In the four years BBL was listed on the Australian Securities Exchange (ASX), Phil Green and his team of tyros harvested more than $2 billion in fees from the bank’s satellite funds and other operations, and paid themselves almost $1.2 billion in bonuses. Green, the c

Means of Production

By Anna Funder

Speaking before going onstage at the Sixth Annual New York Burlesque Festival in 2008, Angie Pontani tried to encapsulate her genre of performance. “Some people say it’s, like, how many ways can you think of to take your clothes off,” she admitted, patting cream on her face. “But burlesque is all about tease. At the end you know people are going to b

Joe Lyons & Benito Mussolini

By Shane Maloney

Herr Hitler was busy in the Rhineland so Joseph Aloysius Lyons decided to pay a visit to Signor Mussolini instead. It was 1935 and collecting dictators was de rigueur for Australian politicians on visits to Europe. ‘Honest Joe’, then in his second term as prime minister, was returning home from imperial talks in London. A defector from Labor, he headed a conservative coalition. Popular, uncomp

Tim Burton: The Exhibition

Primal Scenes

By John Baxter

When I taught at an American college in the 1970s, my students asked if I’d mind finishing my afternoon lectures early: local TV was re-running Dark Shadows and they didn’t want to miss a minute of it. I had to have Dark Shadows explained to me, and even t

Vampire Weekend at Brisbane’s Tivoli

Out on the Weekend

By Robert Forster

The big discussion has been about Ezra’s hair. Recent photos have had it fluffy and a little out of control. No problems tonight, though; it’s clipped and up over the ears, with a fringe that curls just above the left eye. He’s in old-school trainers san

David Michôd’s 'Animal Kingdom' and Banksy’s 'Exit Through the Gift Shop'

My Three Sons

By Luke Davies

First-time director David Michôd, whose Animal Kingdom is one of the best Australian films in years, served notice in 2007 that something was in the offing with his short film Crossbow. In that film, a sensitive teenage boy, bewildered by the lives of the grown-ups aro

Writing from the Grave

By Peter Conrad

Eugene O’Neill thought of his Long Day’s Journey into Night as a posthumous work. Completing it in 1941, he decided that it should only be published 25 years after his death; he also stipulated that it should never be performed, effectively killing it before its creation. Writing it made him feel like a dead man – a ghost haunting himself or a gravedigger exhuming his own cadaver. The play i