Australian Arts
Anne-Marie Duff
Melbourne was just stirring into public cultural life when the hotel quarantine mishap led to that last alarming lockdown that…
The Dig
It was gratifying to see such a quiet and impeccably made film as The Dig make it to independent cinemas…
Das Rheingold
You could hardly ask for a more exorbitant return to mainstage theatre than a production of the first part, the…
It’s a sin
It’s easy to forget what Russell T. Davies has achieved to date. Twenty-odd years ago, Queer As Folk altered a…
On The Beach
The aftermath of Australia Day seems like an appropriate time to watch On the Beach, for a belated first time,…
The Investigation
Slowly, after what seemed like infinite, malingering delays, virus-driven, the world of arts and entertainment is starting to open again…
Bridgerton
Who would have thought that Netflix would score so sumptuously with a Regency soap that flaunts colourblind casting like a…
Orson Welles
It seems on the face of it the oddest proposition on earth. David Fincher, the famous Hollywood director of Fight…
Ned Kelly
All the young millennials I know were raging in Melbourne the other Saturday night and so were some of their…
Gary Garrels
Let me take you down the strange rabbit hole of contemporary art museum culture. The senior curator of painting and…
The Queen’s Gambit
As the Covid virus recedes even from Victoria – and the South Australian scare proves less serious than it looked…
Billy Wilder
Slowly the world of the arts starts to take a timid step forward in plague-torn Australia. Just as alarming new…
The Undoing
It’s a strange prospect for strange times, the young violinist Freya Franzen on the stage of Melbourne’s Concert Hall playing…
Sean Connery
Sean Connery outlived all of them, those great British actors who came to such prominence in the early Sixties: Richard…
Rebecca
Imagine daring to make another version of Rebecca. Hitchcock’s 1940 film is the version that is bound to overshadow any…
Orson Welles
The journals of the plague year from the point of view of culture are getting weirder and weirder from Daniel…
Too much of nothing
In the world of the arts, some things keep on even in this time of impossibility which the virus has…
Lockdown
What a strange phase the world of theatre – the world of artistic activity – is going through at the…
Agnes Wales
Something is going on with Agnes Wales. Is it possible that the current board of trustees of the Art Gallery…
Stuck at home with a serial killer
It’s odd when you think of the way television has usurped almost everything else in the time of the virus.…
Diana Rigg
It was sad the other day to hear of the passing of that scintillating lady of stage and screen Diana…
Arcadian repose
A friend of mine, a bit of a watermelon really like most of the cultural milieu, asked me why I…
Books shop
When the Irish comedian Dylan Moran was interviewed on ABC radio last year as a precursor to his (now presumably…
Churchill
When I first arrived in Australia quarter of a century ago one of the many kind invitations I received was…
Culture wars
Forming groups to kill other groups over territory, resources or belief is so much a part of the human condition…