Ita Buttrose is someone Australians know; she’s someone that Australians trust’, said Scott Morrison, when he announced Ita Buttrose’s appointment as Chair of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC). For once, Morrison was saying something likely true. Buttrose’s long career in the media, especially in leadership positions, had afforded her a visibility, familiarity, and goodwill enjoyed by few in Australia.

The Greek diaspora featured strongly in Andrew Pippos’s first novel, Lucky’s (2020), which traced the life of Chicago-born Vasilis ‘Lucky’ Mallios, who develops a chain of eponymous franchise restaurants often run by Greek Australians that mimic mid-twentieth-century American diners. The fortunes, and misfortunes, of Lucky and his restaurants in turn become the subject of a planned New Yorker article by journalist Emily Main.

There is change. Then there is rate of change, known as velocity. Then there is rate of rate of change, known as acceleration. In physics, the three are distinct; psychologically, however, the distinction is more difficult to conceive. Certainly, this seems the case for Richard King in his latest book, Brave New Wild: in detailing an apparently new techno-political phenomenon called ecomodernism, he seems to confuse an uptick in the rate of technological change for a distinct change in itself, arguing that we are at the start of a paradigm shift.

Zadie Smith’s essay collections have an uncanny habit of arriving precisely when the culture shifts. Changing My Mind (2009) appeared as the iPhone began transforming daily life; Feel Free (2018) followed Donald Trump’s first inauguration; Intimations (2020) captured the disorientation of the pandemic’s early months; and now Dead and Alive appears in the wake of Trump’s return to office. Comprising essays written between 2016 and 2025, most of them first published elsewhere, the collection gains an unexpected coherence in retrospect.

I also went to the Sydney Symphony Orchestra’s production of Siegfried, as reviewed by Peter Rose (ABR Arts, 11/25), but to the Sunday performance. The performance had gone up quite a few notches. The singers seemed to let it all out; it was outstanding. In Tuscany, where I lived for many years, the state classical station would broadcast Bayreuth live. Growing up in Melbourne in the 1960s, my mainstay for classical music was the ABC. This was when John Charger was introducing us to Mahler and Bruckner, so difficult out of a tinny radio. I feel that the younger generation and the taxpayers are being sorely treated.

Today, women’s sports are undergoing a major transformation. The change is dramatic, especially in cricket and football, sports previously seen as non-traditional for women. These sports are experiencing a surge in player numbers, an increase in revenue, sustained sponsorship, record crowds, improved recognition, media and television coverage, and advances in governance. This has led to a greater thirst for and curiosity about the players’ stories. In turn, this has resulted in the timely commercialisation of their histories.

At first blush, the subject of Carmel Bird’s twelfth novel, the seventeenth-century court of Versailles, might come across as a surprise. Bird was born in Launceston and lives in Victoria, and she has traditionally focused on Australian subjects in her extensive body of fiction. Cape Grimm (2004) and The Bluebird Café (1990) engage with Tasmania’s Gothic past, from the horrors of colonialism to the Martin Bryant massacre. Red Shoes (1998) was inspired by the Melbourne cult known as ‘The Family’, while The White Garden (1995) was based on the controversial deep-sleep therapy and sexual abuse that occurred at Sydney’s Chelmsford Psychiatric Hospital in the 1960s.

Writing about her mother, who is a presence in many of the essays in Attention, Anne Enright recalls the two reciting poetry together. Despite her mother steadily declining into dementia, Enright adjudges the lines of poetry, as well as the books her mother continues to read, as bulwarks against the withering of her mind. ‘It seems’, Enright writes, ‘as though her mind is not putting the words together so much as the other way around.’

To celebrate the year’s memorable plays, films, television, music, operas, dance, and exhibitions, we invited a number of arts professionals and critics to nominate their favourites.

A curious feature of the creamy new edition of Helen Garner’s diaries: it carries only one blurb, and it is not by some literary heavyweight but by Nigella Lawson. At first, I found this confounding, but I soon began to see parallels between the two. Both are funny, spontaneous sensualists; both have been subjected to harsh public scrutiny and experienced a certain degree of messiness in their personal lives; and both are magnificent women. In the words of Anne Enright, they are, in their various ways, ‘acclaimed celebrator[s] of the poetic quotidian’.