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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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Since Richard Flanagan won the Man Booker Prize in 2014 for The Narrow Road to the Deep North, Australia’s representation on the most influential of Western literary prizes has been zilch. Not one Australian novel has made the longlist, let alone the shortlist. Certainly, the competition has increased, since the prize opened to the United
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Say you wanted to write your own reactions to, and feelings about, what’s happened this week, the news as it’s reported on the internet alongside things that have happened in your personal life. You can blog or tweet, write articles for print and online newspapers and journals, but any stream of your consciousness is always
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This wondrous book, What Are We Doing Here? by Marilynne Robinson, has been called the work of someone old-fashioned, cranky and difficult. It appears that is now what we call writing that “will flame out like shining from shook foil”, to quote a line from Gerard Manley Hopkins as Robinson does herself to describe the unbounded
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When writers festivals began to take off big time about a decade ago, popping up like mushrooms in leaf litter after a warm autumnal rain, those with a conservative bent criticised them as wanky talkfests for worthy leftist ladies. When that cresting wave turned out to have behind it an even bigger, foam-tipped swell, it
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Suddenly, for a moment, everyone’s an expert on writers festivals; how they’re run, how they should be run, and what’s at stake if they’re not thus run. Certainly, uninviting people as well-known as Germaine Greer and Bob Carr – which is what the Brisbane Writers Festival did recently – is a puzzling and even brash
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When an art gallery is busy, full of young people, noisy, active and with a huge range of things to see and also to do, that’s a success, apparently. Even on a weekday, the National Gallery of Victoria’s free Triennial is packed. You can stick a flower on a wall, you can sniff street smells,
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Excellent! Manchester Art Gallery has taken down the excruciatingly gorgeous and silly Hylas and the Nymphs painting by pre-Raphaelite artist John William Waterhouse, because of the way it depicts women. Does this mean we can expect a purging of the walls? Down comes Gauguin’s Tahitian Women from the walls of the Met for starters. Manet’s
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