Iain Topliss

Bill Leak’s first novel, Heart Cancer, is a quasi-picaresque larrikin’s progress that unexpectedly turns into a tale about addiction and self-destruction. It is an enterprising book, but Leak has the difficulty any novelist might in getting the two tones – the comic and the serious – properly balanced. The larrikin is Frank Thornton, a working-class boy born in the 1950s and raised in a h ... (read more)

Ross McMullin’s Will Dyson is a new edition of a book that first appeared twenty years ago. Over that time,  the author has promoted his subject, according to the book’s subtitle, from ‘Cartoonist, Etcher and Australia’s Finest War Artist’ to ‘Australia’s Radical Genius’. ‘Genius’ is a strong word, and the new edition does not make a case for its use any more than the old ... (read more)

Like many people, I am addicted to a segment called ‘Talking Pictures’ on the ABC’s Insiders programme, hosted by Mike Bowyers. The three minutes are over in a flash. In fact, the brevity is well judged: humour needs understatement, not overkill. Watching those cartoonists for that short time, cheerful and amused as they invariably are in the face of folly, bastardry and disaster, the viewer ... (read more)