Arts and culture
Neil Armfield’s Dream
Benjamin Britten’s setting of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream is an outstanding achievement. In Australia, we have experienced two exceptional…
Orson Welles
The journals of the plague year from the point of view of culture are getting weirder and weirder from Daniel…
Opera Australia’s Attila before shutdown in March
Attila the Hun might have been hard to stop but Verdi’s opera Attila was stopped in its tracks at the…
Too much of nothing
In the world of the arts, some things keep on even in this time of impossibility which the virus has…
Josh Frydenberg
There has been a fair bit of bleating from sectors claiming to have been ignored in the Budget; in fact…
Lockdown
What a strange phase the world of theatre – the world of artistic activity – is going through at the…
Richard Tognetti
They led the way back into the spotlight. Richard Tognetti and members of the Australian Chamber Orchestra were the first…
Agnes Wales
Something is going on with Agnes Wales. Is it possible that the current board of trustees of the Art Gallery…
V. Namatjira Stand strong for who you are
It is a name deeply imbedded in Australia’s cultural memory. Albert Namatjira’s (1902-1957) was a prolific and immensely popular watercolour…
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…
Sheku Kanneh-Mason
The world became aware of Sheku Kanneh-Mason when he played the cello at the wedding of Harry and Meghan Sussex…
Arcadian repose
A friend of mine, a bit of a watermelon really like most of the cultural milieu, asked me why I…
Cynical Theories
They are possibly the most politically incorrect authors in the world. And they have universities squarely in their sights. Helen…
Books shop
When the Irish comedian Dylan Moran was interviewed on ABC radio last year as a precursor to his (now presumably…
Angus Cerini
No longer confined to the digital space, the Australian Chamber Orchestra is returning to the platform in City Recital Hall…
Battle honours
In the cabinet war rooms in Whitehall in London, there is a chart which registers Atlantic convoys en route from…
Churchill
When I first arrived in Australia quarter of a century ago one of the many kind invitations I received was…
Paul Newton
Things are starting to happen culturally, at least outside of Victoria. Sydney’s Belvoir St Theatre is rehearsing a play to…
Culture wars
Forming groups to kill other groups over territory, resources or belief is so much a part of the human condition…
Zadie Smith
She had a heady start to her writing career. The rights to her first novel were the subject of a…
American road trip
Like a lot of Australians I look at what is happening in America with sad bemusement if not alarm. Over…
A.N. Wilson
Kathy Lette says that during lockdown she has been reading Dickens. Her choice illustrates the enduring appeal of Charles Dickens…
Australian arts
Back in my now rather distant days of regular residence in Britain, I listened regularly to a radio program called…
James Darling striding the shores of Limebuners’ Bay
‘Just as I am’ is the recurrent opening line of a hymn written in 1835 by Charlotte Elliott. It was…
