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Umberto Eco’s 1985 essay that was the centrepiece of his book, Faith in Fakes, asked questions about why United States “culture” is so big on what he called “hyper-reality”, in particular the huge popularity of simulated experiences in theme parks. What the great Italian semiotician would have thought of the so-called “tribute show” we can
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Back in 2016, Bendigo Writers Festival hosted an event with Julian Assange. Robert Manne had written a small book about the “Cypherpunk Revolutionary”, a typically well-researched and carefully argued description of how Assange came to create Wikileaks, so we set up an interview from the Ecuadorian Embassy. One of the positives about the internet (which
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Ah Louise…. She’s done it again. Seriously, if she didn’t exist, we’d need to invent her. Not a decade had gone by since she took over the loose and gently swaying reins of the perennial plodder Australian Book Review in 1988 (and, with her customary style, both made and almost destroyed it) without another dramatic
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God needs a name change. It’s time to park the old God jalopy in the shed and force ourselves to walk for a while, free to contemplate all the wonderful stuff that has gathered in under the word that the Bible says was the start of it all – without all the distracting stuff that
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All those end of year pronouncements about what a year it’s been, what’s been the biggest issues and who has been the noisiest newsmakers, plus the usual lists from arts and cultural sites about best films and books – it has a tiredness to it in 2018, don’t you think? The best novel lists used
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Andrew McGahan’s first book, the disturbingly comic Praise, defined him as a Queensland writer, and that stuck. Even though he has written books set in Sydney and Canberra, even though he has lived in Melbourne for decades, the sultry indolence of Brisbane in that Vogel-Award winner back in 1992 perfectly matched the tone and delivery
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When we read true crime, we might think it’s about trying to work out why people commit murder, what leads to awful events, and how society deals with it. It may, at the same time, feel prurient to be peering into the windows of a house where someone was killed, or to hear in dramatic
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When Nicholas Dattner closed his furniture business ten years ago, he admitted he had been “some kind of evangelist” for the quality of Australian hardwoods. The fine tables he was known for were emblems of not just the majesty of trees but also to an aspiration for the good life, where elegance lasts and where
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Stuart Kells is a rare kind of writer. He is able to tackle global economic power on one hand, and, on the other, write with panache and credibility about whether Shakespeare was a literary conspiracy. He has a friendly, warm style, and packs in heaps of information without lecturing. If ours were a more populous
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The moment when Julie Collins realised a disused bacon factory on Eureka Street in Ballarat was going to be available for the inaugural Biennale of Australian Art must have been sensational. It must have felt very exciting and then very daunting. And it must also have given Collins the sense that this Biennale was meant
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