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Peter Conrad
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In 1987 on her British talk show, Dame Edna Everage abruptly asked Sir John Mills when he intended to retire – a tactless query, expressed with her usual indifference to the feelings of others. Mills, a spry little rooster then nearing his eightieth birthday, said he had no plans to do so, and...
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Peter Conrad | Arts & Letters | February 2010 | Society & Culture
Australia’s girdling oceans used to serve as a prophylactic, our defence against the infectious depravity of the northern hemisphere. The Customs Act 1901 fiercely preserved our innocence; during my adolescence in the late 1960s I made an impatient inventory of the prohibited books and films I...
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Peter Conrad | Books | Dec 2009 - Jan 2010 | Society & Culture
In 1960, when Robin Boyd published his attack on the stylistic cowardice of our suburbs, it took courage to call Australia ugly. The country has never bragged about its beauty, as America loudly does in the hymn that celebrates its azure skies and shining seas and fields of waving grain, but the...
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Peter Conrad | The Monthly Essays | Music | October 2009 | Opera
With the connivance of an airline official, her husband Richard Bonynge had caught the first flight out to London; the diva was left behind with their impedimenta, the tiles and rugs they had bought as souvenirs, and also – as she told me on a later occasion – with the fees they had been paid in...
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Peter Conrad | The Monthly Essays | August 2009 | Society & Culture
Cave’s entangled artistic and religious preoccupations are on display this month in Nick Cave: The Exhibition at the National Library in Canberra. Originally conceived and curated by the Arts Centre in Melbourne, the travelling show uses anecdotes, reminiscences, doodles, scribbles and souvenirs to...
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Peter Conrad | May 2009 | The Monthly Essays | Society & Culture
Which of Homer's two narratives a writer chooses depends on the temper of the times. Romantic voyagers in the nineteenth century favoured The Odyssey. Goethe, visiting an aromatic garden in Sicily, said that for the first time the poem had become a "living truth" to him. As Robert Louis Stevenson...
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By now all those questions have had the same dismal answer. The few grudgingly favourable reviews Australia received chose to be amused by its giddy, garbled, retrograde kitsch - the lurid sunsets and silhouetted roos that pander to fantasies about an exotic continent, the genuflection to tawdry...
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Let me begin with a digressive excursion into the fast-retreating past. It concerns memory, which is not only the ligature that holds civilisation together, as Clive James contends in Cultural Amnesia (Picador, 900pp; $49.95), but also the medium in which we conduct our personal moral reckonings....
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