John Rickard
On 15 August, Advances and about one hundred lovers of short fiction descended on Gleebooks in Sydney for the announcement of the winner of the 2024 ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize. Not since January 2020 had ABR presented a prize ceremony in public. Since then, because of the exigencies of Covid-19 and pesky lockdowns, all our celebrations have happened online, and goodness knows the popularity of online events of this kind has begun to wane, like those Zoom soirées and cocktail parties we endured.
... (read more)God Save the Queen: The strange persistence of monarchies by Dennis Altman
Judith Anderson: Australian star, first lady of the American stage by Desley Deacon
Australian musical theatre has had a long if chequered history going back to the popular, localised melodramas and pantomimes of the nineteenth century. In the more recent past, we think of successes such as Priscilla Queen of the Desert (1994) and The Boy from Oz (2003) ...
... (read more)Collecting for the Nation: The Australiana Fund by Jennifer Sanders
Of Labour and Liberty: Distributism in Victoria 1891–1966 by Race Mathews
Divas: Mathilde Marchesi and her pupils by Roger Neill
When Take Me to Paris, Johnny was first published in 1993, the AIDS crisis seemed to be at its worst. Many of us had friends and acquaintances who were dying. One began to notice men who, thin and haggard, one feared were suffering from AIDS (women victims being relatively few in number). There was no sign of the drug therapies that would, towards the end o ...