Parallel importation

Dear Editor,
I’d like to thank Colin Golvan QC for his intelligent, articulate, and well-argued response to the Productivity Commission report’s proposed changes to parallel importations and fair use, published as both a podcast and a brief commentary by ABR (November 2016).

These are big issues for Australian authors and illustrators, such as myself, and for the many Australians who value local literary culture and a thriving book industry. It’s so helpful to have an intellectual property and trade practices expert such as Colin Golvan contribute meaningfully to the public debate.

Julienne van Loon, RMIT University, Melbourne

Compasses and radar screens

Dear Editor,
You are not the only reviewer/commentator who has described the opening projection in the Met’s production of Tristan und Isolde (Arts Update) as a compass or a ‘huge nautical compass’. However, it is not a compass. It is a radar screen; a huge, not necessarily nautical, radar screen. Of course, neither a radar screen nor a Zippo lighter was in existence in Wagner’s time, much less in the times of Tristan und Isolde, but, these days, that is neither here nor there.

Let’s hear it for ‘our’ Stuart Skelton!

Minnie Biggs, Kurrajong, NSW

I stand encompassed. Ed.

Bingo!

Dear Editor,
In July 1963, as an eighteen-year-old student travelling from New York to France with my family on board the SS United States, I was paired with Helena Rubinstein for several games of bingo. Although she was travelling under a pseudonym, I recognised her immediately. She was a delight throughout our games. I knew she was ‘of a certain age’ (ninety then), but she looked marvellous. Her coal-black hair was pulled back in a tight bun, and her face was unwrinkled; only her hands, with rings on every finger and looking like talons, gave her age away. Graham Sutherland’s portrait (whose acquisition by the National Portrait Gallery Fiona Gruber writes about in Arts Update), certainly captures the woman with whom I spent an afternoon.

David Palmer (online comment)

Belvoir renaissance?

Dear Editor,
When I saw the production of Brian Friel’s Faith Healer at Belvoir St Theatre (which Ian Dickson reviewed for Arts Update), Colin Friels’s performance was riveting: multi-layered, complex, mesmerising – and in perfect balance with those of Alison Whyte and Pip Miller. It’s another hit for Belvoir following the very different but equally brilliant The Drover’s Wife. One hopes that both these productions will have another life for the sake of those who failed to get a seat this time around.

Is this the long-awaited Belvoir renaissance?

Gil Appleton (online comment)

The MTC will present the Belvoir production, with the same cast, in March 2017. Ed.