
Cannes Film Festival 2022 highlights: part one
Mia Hansen-Løve’s ‘One Fine Morning’, Charlotte Le Bon’s ‘Falcon Lake’ and Dmytro Sukholytkyy-Sobchuk’s ‘Pamfir’ were bright spots in an otherwise underwhelming line-upOctober 2012
Arts & Letters
'Montebello' by Robert Drewe
On the day in 1952 that Britain detonated the first of three atomic bombs off the Pilbara coast, Robert Drewe was in a Perth phone box, begging a late-pass from his mother. He was nine; his mother was anxious. “Atom bombs worry the blazes out of me, and I want you at home,” she ordered. He did as he was told.
If only Dorothy Drewe, spunky housewife and mother of three, had been running the country, the Montebello archipelago might have been spared its nuclear devastation. But Robert Menzies, ever the colonial doormat, ushered in the British, and over four years a combined nuclear load of 138 kilotons was unleashed on the islands, annihilating untold wildlife, and endangering the men in shorts and sandals observing it. It also blew radioactive fallout across the continent as far as the atolls of Fiji.
Who better than Robert Drewe to navigate a national drama with some personal history of his own? Raised in Western Australia, jaundiced by years in journalism, and exercised by novel writing, Drewe has both the chops, and the sensibility, for the task. It is not an easy one, drawing, as it does, on so many episodes of this country’s sorry history.
The memoir takes flight when Drewe, enamoured with islands since childhood, joins a crew of government ecologists on a species repopulation project on the Montebellos. His brilliant account of what he finds there is fleshed out with detours into his own past – boyhood, manhood, fatherhood. “Islomania came close to being my personal narrative,” he writes, by which it seems he means a certain weakness for circular stories, emotional circumnavigation, incarceration fantasies, isolation and despair.
Feeling at once enlightened and stranded on the archipelago, he begins to pull in and manipulate strands of memory, breaking from the task only to seek out telephonic sweet spots to chat with the married woman in Perth he’s seducing, and with his daughter, to whom he sings lullabies. “I missed the children,” he writes. “No matter how pleasant the island, there’s a point when it dawns on you that you’re stuck here.”
Drewe is a born raconteur: brilliantly funny, debonair, a larrikin and a rake. He can also be rather self-regarding, as in chapters charting his career, and one in which he recounts a trip to Rottnest Island to show a daughter the shallows where he once did the business with her mother.
But these are forgiven when the bulk of this memoir works such sweet and poignant charm; and on sharks, parents and childhood pleasures, Drewe is the nation’s undisputed laureate.
Cannes Film Festival 2022 highlights: part one
Mia Hansen-Løve’s ‘One Fine Morning’, Charlotte Le Bon’s ‘Falcon Lake’ and Dmytro Sukholytkyy-Sobchuk’s ‘Pamfir’ were bright spots in an otherwise underwhelming line-upThe art of the teal
Amid the long decline of the major parties, have independents finally solved the problem of lopsided campaign financing laws?The end of Liberal reign in Kooyong
At the Auburn Hotel on election night, hope coalesces around Monique RyanOnlyFans and the adults in the room
The emerging OnlyFans community offering training and support to adult-content creatorsGhost notes: Simon Tedeschi’s ‘Fugitive’
A virtuoso memoir of music and trauma, and his experiences as a child prodigy, from the acclaimed Australian pianistOne small step: ‘Apollo 10½: A Space Age Childhood’ and ‘Deep Water’
Richard Linklater’s rotoscoped film evokes the optimism of late-1960s America, while Patricia Highsmith’s thriller gets another disappointing adaptationThe quip and the dead: Steve Toltz’s ‘Here Goes Nothing’
A bleakly satirical look at death and the afterlife from the wisecracking author of ‘A Fraction of the Whole’Art heist: The landmark conviction of an Aboriginal art centre’s manager
The jailing of Mornington Island Art’s chief executive for dishonest dealing has shone a light on ethics and colonialism in the Indigenous art world‘Loveland’
Robert Lukins’ second novel takes a Brisbane woman to Nebraska, where an inheritance sparks a change in character as well as in fortune‘We Own This City’
David Simon, creator of ‘The Wire’, returns to Baltimore for a present-day examination of rapacious police corruption‘Slow Horses’
A sardonic Gary Oldman heads a misfit branch of MI5 in Apple TV+’s thrilling exploration of personal motivation and political expedience‘The Golden Cockerel’
Barrie Kosky’s Adelaide production of Rimsky-Korsakov’s opera satirising the Russo-Japanese War came with uneasy resonancesCannes Film Festival 2022 highlights: part one
Mia Hansen-Løve’s ‘One Fine Morning’, Charlotte Le Bon’s ‘Falcon Lake’ and Dmytro Sukholytkyy-Sobchuk’s ‘Pamfir’ were bright spots in an otherwise underwhelming line-upThe art of the teal
Amid the long decline of the major parties, have independents finally solved the problem of lopsided campaign financing laws?The end of Liberal reign in Kooyong
At the Auburn Hotel on election night, hope coalesces around Monique RyanThe avoidable war
Kevin Rudd on China, the US and the forces of history