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Morag Fraser
Morag Fraser was Chairperson of ABR and was for many years Editor of Eureka Street. She is currently writing a biography of the poet Peter Porter.
Years before I had set foot in Italy, Masaccio’s frescoes, even in flat reproduction, opened a bright chink into a time and place not my own. There were the indelible faces, the bustle, colour, the human jousting – life so vivid, foreign and shockingly familiar. Vintage is the literary harvest of ten years of a writers’ festival in Mildura. If, like me, you have never been, this is your Masa ... (read more)
It is a brave conductor who would hold a packed Hamer Hall audience and a galaxy of musicians and singers in suspension, in raw silence for what felt like long minutes, late in the performative arc of Bach’s St John Passion. No program crackle, no relaxing of shoulder, no shudder of a bow. Breath stifled.
Conductor Stephen Layton, until recently Fellow and Director of Music at Trinity College, ... (read more)
Reading for this review I came across some apposite words by Jacqueline Rose, biographer of Sylvia Plath, cultural analyst and explorer of the lives and roles of women:
I have never met a single mother (myself included) who is not far more complex, critical, at odds with the set of clichés she is meant effortlessly to embody, than she is being encouraged – or rather instructed – to th ... (read more)
Nugget Coombs never accepted a knighthood. The reason, he told his one-time English teacher, the essayist and academic Sir Walter Murdoch, was that it would be ‘out of character’ for him to do so.
There is no shortage of calculated modesty in Australian public life. We cultivate it. Even the most self-absorbed of our sporting heroes can manage a spot of winning self-deprecation. But in Nugget ... (read more)
Peter Craven calls up an echo of W.B. Yeats’s ‘The Circus Animals’ Desertion’ at the conclusion of his introduction to Germaine Greer’s highly charged and instantly controversial essay Whitefella Jump Up. ‘It is an essay about sitting down and thinking where all the politics start,’ he writes.
Clever, because with that, suddenly, there we all are, caught in one of twentieth-century ... (read more)
Inga Clendinnen came rather late to Michel de Montaigne, the man she acknowledges as ‘the Father of the Essay’. When the professional historian began reading the great amateur, she did so, Clendinnen admits, ‘in that luxurious mood of piety lace-edged with boredom with which we read the lesser classics’. The boredom quickly dissipated as the writer in Clendinnen met a master: ‘It is hard ... (read more)
John Button was rare man, rare for any time, any place and in any calling. The public face – the Senator John Button, long-time Leader of the Government in the Senate, the hands-on, hard-hat minister of the Button car plan, the policy innovator and party reformer, the straight talker, unbridled political wit, notorious doodler, note writer, and scribbler of politically incorrect postcards to Sen ... (read more)
Should the recent turbulent history of one university in one state of Australia matter to us? Some of the critics of Cain and Hewitt’s Off Course think not. Australian higher education has ‘moved on’, they claim. There is no question that the right ‘On Course’ for one-time public entities – from gas companies to universities – is to graduate from public ownership and statutory obliga ... (read more)
Nugget Coombs never accepted a knighthood. The reason, he told his one-time English teacher, the essayist and academic Sir Walter Murdoch, was that it would be ‘out of character’ for him to do so.
... (read more)