Drusilla Modjeska is an editor and novelist whose book Stravinsky's Lunch won the Australian Literature Society Gold Medal. She has edited Meanjin and The Best Australian Essays.
Articles by this author
The Museum of Contemporary Art Australia
Sydney Gets a Laneway
Sydney’s Museum of Contemporary Art on Circular Quay West re-opened on 29 March with a new wing, as the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia. Abutting the old building with its...
Alice Neel and Louise Bourgeois
Bodying forth
The bodies of old women are rarely celebrated in art, and representations of them are few. The faces of older women who’ve achieved status and standing have long had their place...
Craig Sherborne’s ‘The Amateur Science of Love’
Ever unforgiven
In 2008 Craig Sherborne wrote an essay for the Monthly on the death of his first wife from breast cancer. The title was ‘Unforgiven’. In it, Sherborne tells the story of his years...
Tufi, Papua New Guinea
In the fjords
Back from Tufi for less than a month, I find myself thinking I should cancel this article, keep the place a secret and let those who think Papua New Guinea is a dangerous place of...
Delia Falconer’s ‘Sydney’
Under the bridge
Returning to Sydney can be an ambivalent experience. And it was for me, this winter, after three months in London. Ducks were swimming on Snails Bay, near where I live in Balmain...
The death of the good father
Towards the end of Dreams from my Father, Barack Obama’s Kenyan half-sister, Auma, tells him that she sometimes has “this dream that I will build a beautiful house on our...
Philip Roth’s ‘Indignation’
Arise!
When, in 1951, Philip Roth affixed decals to the rear of his father’s Chevy – “one proclaiming the name of my new university, the other the Greek initials of my fraternity” – his...
Brian Dibble’s ‘Doing Life’
Between a muddle & a mystery
If, by her own admission, order was not a "strong point" for Elizabeth Jolley, it is a badge of honour for her biographer, Brian Dibble. And well it might be, for Jolley spent her...
What happened to community?
A husk of meaning
‘Community’ has become a soft word. It's not one that belongs in the tough rhetoric of markets and the economy. It's a word that for most of us, most of the time, can slip past...
Lloyd Jones’s ‘Mister Pip’
Letters in the sand
There's more than one way to read a book. On the front cover of Lloyd Jones's Mister Pip (Text Publishing, 220pp; $29.95), which is set on Bougainville, Helen Garner likens the...
Port Vila For Sale
The ads begin before you get there. Air Vanuatu's in-flight magazine offers all manner of access to "paradise": "boutique" resorts, "palm-fringed" bungalows, "dream" tours - even...
The search for the next generation of public intellectuals
Our future thinkers
What makes a public intellectual?
If we lived in a culture which valued the life of the mind and critical thinking, would I need to ask? Would we even use the term? Some people...
Carolyn Burke’s ‘Lee Miller’
The multiple lives of a muse
Vogue model turned photographer, bobbed muse of Man Ray and ‘unofficial’ surrealist, Lee Miller makes a challenge to her biographer that is not dissimilar to the challenge she...
The writings of Alex Miller
Betrayals of faith
In a recent interview, Alex Miller told a story about a friend called Max Blath coming to visit him. It was years ago, before he’d published, when he was living on a farm outside...
Curse of the Dimdims
Ten days after the incident at Brisbane airport, we were in a Port Moresby hotel watching Sunday morning current affairs from Australia. It was a while before Somare’s shoes got a...
‘The Grave at Thu Le’ by Catherine Cole
A sort of homecoming. Familiar strands in an unfamiliar land
Considering the significance of Vietnam in Australia’s post-colonial sense of itself, it is curious that it hasn’t made its way to prominence in our literary culture. There is...
