Hidden Author
Our island home
Dear Editor,Melbourne geographer Peter Christoff may be right that Australia should shake off its island mentality, but he is wrong to suggest that Australia has become much less of an island economy in the half century since the publication of Donald Horne's The Lucky Country. In his review of The Lucky Country? Reinventing Australia by Ian Lowe (ABR, August 2016), Christoff misq ... (read more)
Monash's new performance art space
It's all happening at Monash University, ABR's newest partner. The Matheson Library (though still open and bustling with students) is being transformed in a huge building project, and – most auspiciously for arts lovers in Melbourne south-east – Monash will soon be the home of a new performance centre named The Ian Potter Centre for the Performing Arts. The ... (read more)
Saul at Adelaide Festival
Major arts festivals have been announcing their programs. A highlight of the 2017 Adelaide Festival (3–19 March) will be Berlin-based Barrie Kosky's production of Handel's Saul, which had a huge success at the 2016 Glyndebourne Opera Festival. It will be twenty-one years since Kosky directed the Adelaide Festival, and this will be an undoubted highlight of the festival ... (read more)
Catherine Noske, editor of Westerly Magazine, recently spent time at the ABR office in Melbourne, thanks to a week-long cultural exchange of sorts provided by the Australia Council. Catherine was offered insights into the inner workings of our magazine, and the processes leading up to the launch of our August Fiction issue.
In the most recent ABR Podcast, Catherine spoke to Peter Rose about her t ... (read more)
On March 23, before a big audience at Collected Works Bookshop in Melbourne, Morag Fraser announced the two winners of the 2017 Peter Porter Poetry Prize (worth $7,500). The winners, chosen from a field of nearly 1000 entries from twenty-two countries, are Louis Klee (Vic) for his poem ‘Sentence to Lilacs’ and Damen O’Brien (Qld) for ‘pH’. The winners each receive $2,500.
2017 Porter Pr ... (read more)
Perish the thought
Dear Editor,Mark Triffitt's review of George Megalogenis's Australia's Second Chance: What our history tells us about our future and Balancing Act (May 2016) left me uninspired to read either work (ABR, May 2016). Megalogenis's ideas were described, and perhaps explained to some degree, but Dr Triffitt offered little critical analysis, presumably because he agrees with Megaloge ... (read more)
JOLLEY PRIZE
Highlights of the 2016 Fiction issue include the three works shortlisted in the ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize (now worth a total of $12,500). We received a record number of entries – nearly 1,400 – from thirty-eight countries. The judges – ABR Deputy Editor Amy Baillieu and authors Maxine Beneba Clarke and David Whish-Wilson – chose a longlist of nineteen storie ... (read more)
Bravo ABC!
In recent years governments of different stamps have visited cuts on the ABC, and the Abbott government accused it of bias and irresponsibility. In recent days we have seen that wilfulness at work. 7.30 Report has exposed appalling sexual abuse of minors by Anglican priests and the protection of pederasts by the Anglican Church of Newcastle. Last night's Four Corners' revelations about ... (read more)
ABR's NSW 'States of Poetry' anthology was launched by state editor Elizabeth Allen and ABR Editor Peter Rose, at Gleebooks in Sydney earlier this year. ABR's esteemed Laureate David Malouf introduced the magazine's first Laureate's Fellow Michael Aiken who read extracts from his Fellowship project, 'Satan Repentant', an epic poem about themes of contrition. Elizabeth Allen, then introduced the si ... (read more)