Archive
Poetry and Philosophy from Homer to Rousseau: Romantic souls, realist lives by Simon Haines
Running Amok: When news deadlines, family and foreign affairs collide by Mark Bowling
An exhibition with considerable radical chic, Cook’s Pacific Encounters, currently at the National Museum of Australia, Canberra, has stimulated a series of cross-cultural debates at an international conference on the collections made by Captain James Cook and his fellow voyagers (arranged by the Centre for Cross-Cultural Research, Canberra, on July 28). Although there were several centuries of European exploration of the Pacific before the British, the importance of Cook’s voyages was unparalleled before or after. The collection on display in Canberra, primarily assembled by two German scientists, Johann Forster and his son Georg, who accompanied Cook on his second Pacific voyage, is on loan from the University of Göttingen. Like many university collections, it is well conserved and published, but rarely seen. Other parts of the Forster collection are distributed around the globe, the principal holding being at the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford.
... (read more)Agamemnon’s Kiss by Inga Clendinnen & Quarterly Essay 23 by Inga Clendinnen
David Campbell: Hardening of the light: selected poems edited by Philip Mead
Encyclopedia of Exploration, 1850–1940: The oceans, islands and polar regions by Raymond John Howgego
Faces of the Living Dead: The belief in spirit photography by Martyn Jolly
It is one thing for Macbeth (of whom more in a moment) to chide himself for ‘vaulting ambition’; it is not, though, the first stick we would choose to beat Australian cinema with. Now, with 2006 nearly over and everybody saying what a good year it has been for local films, I want to identify ‘ambition’ as a key element in the making of this ‘good year’.
... (read more)