Archive
Jack Hibberd reviews 'The La Mama Collection: Six plays for the 1990s' edited by Liz Jones
Playwright and professional poéte maudit, Barry Dickins launched this collection as part of La Mama’s thirtieth anniversary festivities. Dickins, it is reported, was not in a festive mood. In an unusually begrudging and self-absorbed frame of mind, he allegedly failed to extol the selected plays and went so far as to hint that one of his own tautly sprung specimens should have been included.
... (read more)Lucy Frost reviews 'The Sound of One Hand Clapping' By Richard Flanagan
Australia in the imagination of its first European mapmakers was a curious place where odd creatures dwelt. Now that a metropolitan culture emanates from cities to encircle the continent with farms, roads, towns, and nature reserves, the spaces marked ‘exotic’ have shifted. But they’re still here. I know, because I’ve recently moved from Melbourne to Tasmania. Why are you doing this? Asked West Australian colleagues when we talked at a conference in south India. Tasmania’s a great place for a holiday, but how could you live there? It’s so far from everywhere, and you’ll have no one to talk to.
... (read more)Alexis Wright reviews 'Snake Cradle: Autobiography of a black woman' by Roberta Sykes
Snake Cradle: Autobiography of a black woman is the first published volume of a three-part life story from Australia’s renowned black rights activist Dr Roberta Sykes. In Snake Cradle, Sykes chronicles the first seventeen years of her life in Queensland and gives us a generously open story in her legendary powerful and thought-provoking style.
... (read more)Stuart Coupe reviews 'Crowded House: Something so strong' by Chris Bourke
Pop and rock’n’roll music is essentially disposable popular culture which throws up comparatively few enduring items. For every 10,000 albums and singles released maybe only a hundred will be listenable a year later, let alone in a decade.
... (read more)David Carter reviews 'Australian National Cinema' by Tom O’Regan
In a course on Australian popular culture, I routinely ask students a pair of questions: is Australian culture increasingly Americanised; is Australian culture increasingly distinctive and original? They routinely answer yes to both. Australian National Cinema suggests why there might be more than poor logic behind their response. Its contradictoriness tells us something fundamental about how Australian cinema exists in the cinema world and the social world.
... (read more)Margaret Jones reviews 'Black Ice: A story of modern China' by Trevor Hay and Fang Xiangshu
In 1992, Fang Xiangshu collaborated with Trevor Hay, a mandarin-speaking Melbourne academic, on a non-fiction book, East Wind, West Wind, an account of Fang’s escape from China to begin a new life in Australia.
... (read more)Here’s the first in a new series from the indefatigable pen of Jennifer Rowe. Verity Birdwood is still going strong, at last check: it wasn’t so long ago that I reviewed Lamb to the Slaughter in these pages. And, of course, as Emily Rodda, Rowe has turned out a couple of dozen Teen Power books, attracting several Children’s Book Awards. She is every inch a professional writer.
... (read more)Rosemary O’Grady reviews 'Emerarra: A Man of Merarra' edited by Morndi Munro/Mary Anne Jebb
Merarra is the local name for the land near Walcott Inlet in the far north-west region of Western Australia where saltwater meets freshwater, coastland meets inland. And the ‘man from Merarra’ was the last ‘full’ speaker of the local, Unggumi language, a senior lawman and famous Kimberley stockman called Billy Munro, or, in his native tongue, Morndi.
... (read more)Incorporating photographs, diagrams, idiosyncratic typography, and even a list of references, Chris Gregory’s Twins is a media kit as much as a short story collection. It beings with a kind of parable about reading:
... (read more)Stuart Coupe reviews 'Crowded House: Something so strong' by Chris Bourke
Pop and rock’n’roll music is essentially disposable popular culture which throws up comparatively few enduring items. For every 10,000 albums and singles released maybe only a hundred will be listenable a year later, let alone in a decade.
The same goes for literature that attempts to define or interpret the music. Sure, that Guns ’N’ Roses, Culture Club or Spandau Ballet picture/text book might have seemed pretty impressive when it first appeared and you, dear reader, thought the artists in question were the greatest thing since the invention of the toaster – but in most cases those books are clogging up bookshelves or went out for fifty cents at a garage sale five years ago.
... (read more)