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'Into the Woods: The Battle for Tasmania's Forests' by Anna Krien

By John Birmingham

Tasmania is another country, sometimes another world. To move beyond the edge of settlement, which largely peters out a short drive from the fairytale towns of Hobart and Launceston, is to pass into an antipodean Middle Earth.As quickly becomes clear in Into the Woods, Anna Krien’s closely observed and beautifully written first book, Tasmania is a deeply riven place. In the very first pages

'Freedom' by Jonathan Franzen

By Michelle de Kretser

Artists in fiction are coded confessions. Freedom gives us Richard Katz, rock musician and homme fatal, pitched suddenly, just like Jonathan Franzen following The Corrections (2001), into fame. Since this is a novel that doesn’t fear platitude, liberal doses of sex and drugs attend Richard’s disenchantment with his fate. But the self-destructive wishes delivered by the backwash of stardom

David Grossman's 'To the End of the Land'

The Politics of Prose

By Inga Clendinnen

The Israeli novelist David Grossman leapt to international attention in the late ’80s with the release of his See Under: Love, translated into several European languages. Now comes To the End of the Land (Jonathan Cape, 592pp; $55.00). I used to think reviewing was a gentle art, but getting a grip on this huge, unruly novel has been a sumo-wrestle with a large, fast and unpredictable opponent, with me spending rather more time out of

Taika Waititi's 'Boy' and Mia Hansen-Love's 'Father of My Children'

Father Knows Worst

By Luke Davies

A man perches awkwardly on the edge of a single bed talking to his two sons, Boy (James Rolleston) and Rocky (Te Aho Eketone-Whitu). He has just returned home from seven years in prison doing time for robbing a service station. “You know this used to be my room?” he asks. Boy, 11, who only vaguely remembers his father and who has, in his absence, inflate

Jimmy Barnes's 'Rage and Ruin'

Barnsey's Blues

By Robert Forster

What do Sarah Blasko, Silverchair, The Grates and Jimmy Barnes all have in common? Their latest albums were all made outside Australia using overseas producers. Other bands such as Powderfinger and Bridezilla brought in the overseas producer, while Tame Impala

Meeting Neil Armfield

The Diary of a Maestro

By Jana Wendt

We are approximately an hour into Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure – first performed in 1604 – when a phone rings on stage. The appliance is lying on the bedside table of a starkly lit Novotel-like hotel room, glass-walled bathroom and toilet included.

The Blast Zone

By Nicolas Rothwell

Stalker, which was made under the Soviet Union’s studio system in 1979 with limited resources, tells a science fiction tale in stylised fashion. The stalker of the title is a professional guide, who leads two pilgrims into a forbidden “Zone” where the laws of natu

Body Politic

By Emily Maguire

“Shame!” someone shouts. Jeffreys pauses and looks up towards the back of the auditorium as another voice calls out, “Absolutely!” It’s unclear whether the interjections are aimed at Jeffreys or those she is speaking about. She continues: “Anti-sex

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 o

Taking Care

By Gail Bell

My mother-in-law is bracing herself for loss. As moving day approaches, appetite and sleep have deserted her. She is shrinking in size. Her voice is going. The family, rallying to help, creep back and forth like cat burglars wrapping keep-sakes that rightfully

Bread and Butter

By Gay Bilson

For dessert we ate hot puff pastry with a filling of grated apple cooked with butter, eggs and lemon. It pleased the guests, although one of them asked about the filling and seemed shocked that the ingredients were so rich, which is to say (she implied by her

'Brisbane' by Matthew Condon

By John Birmingham

Cities have memories that outlive those who first held them. London will always recall the Blitz, Rome the glories of empire. Some memories are, of course, lost. Time, war, civilisational collapse all take their toll. But how do you explain a city that forgets itself in

'Rocks in the Belly' by Jon Bauer

By Brenda Walker

British–Australian writer Jon Bauer’s superb first novel Rocks in the Belly is a finely drawn vision of jealousy, resentment and self-vindication, revealing how this toxicity can flourish in childhood and develop in adult life. As a novel of childhood, it’s as good as MJ Hyland’s Carry Me Down, with a similar spare, clean style and an understanding o

'Tangle' (Season Two) and 'Spirited'

Connective Tissue

By Delia Falconer

All the bullies I remember from school had Ben Mendelsohn’s build: heavy-legged, thick-armed and slightly soft around the middle. Or perhaps it only seems that way because the actor played Tangle’s bully, sociopathic builder Vince Kovac, so well. Mendelsohn’s portrayal of a womanising liar was especially disturbing because it combined the wilful physicality of a sturdy five-year-old with the

Richard Linklater's 'Me and Orson Welles' and Nadia Tass's 'Matching Jack'

Theatre of Operations

By Luke Davies

If you are looking for signs of the apocalypse, you need look no further than High School Musical, the film franchise that began life as a Disney Channel telemovie in 2006. The first film was the most-watched movie on American television in 2006 and its soundt

Sonya's Hartnett's 'Midnight Zoo'

Strange Beasts

By Geordie Williamson

Two boys enter a small town under cover of darkness, one of them carrying a baby in swaddling. It is Europe in wartime; even so, the village is more ruined than most, and wholly bereft of human presence. But when the children take refuge in a moonlit garden th

Adventures in Lexiconia

Infinite Anthology

By Les Murray

Here is a brief sample of words I have submitted to Australia’s Macquarie Dictionary over the last two or three years: pobbledonk – scarlet-sided banjo frog. Large robust frog common in swamps in coastal Queensland and New South Wales.kiddy-fiddler – child mo

Duty of Care

By Margaret Simons

Pluck an episode from the midstream of human life and it can be hard to glean meaning. Sometimes there is just senselessness and mess. If there is a theme to the events that have interrupted these women’s lives, however, it is surely care, and its opposite, carelessness. The principal actor is the 60-year-old anaesthetist Dr James Latham Peters, who, the evidence suggests, damaged these women, t