Australian Arts
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…
American road trip
Like a lot of Australians I look at what is happening in America with sad bemusement if not alarm. Over…
Australian arts
Back in my now rather distant days of regular residence in Britain, I listened regularly to a radio program called…
Victorian burglars
Spare a thought for Victorian burglars. Just when they thought they could go back to ransacking South Yarra mansions while…
Different words
If you’d been in our house during the Coon cheese debacle you would have heard me shouting at the TV:…
Language notes
One of the most intriguing expressions to come out of the pandemic so far is ‘deep cleaning’. We read that…
Mystery portrait
Shortly after moving to Manhattan in the noughties I was strolling through the West Village when I came across a…
Relief
Recently I touched on the subject of evaluating works of art prompted by what seemed to me rather an empty…
