It’s been a long time since I have read George Johnston’s 1964 Miles Franklin Award-winning My Brother Jack. However, through the lens of undergraduate literary-study nostalgia, I still recognise the seminal Australian novel’s place as part of our country’s canon, despite its challenge to our comfortable assumptions of national character. Still, like many I imagine,…
Have you thought about running your own pub? Could you resist drinking the profits? What about the diverse range of regular customers you’ll engage with? In Two, the attraction of pub ownership will either be cemented or disintegrated before your very eyes! And the three words you never want to hear are “on the house”….
Chloe Hooper has, yet again, taken on difficult terrain and a complex subject matter in The Arsonist. As in The Tall Man, there are victims, family members, affected communities and people still trying to get on with their lives, Black Saturday being ten years ago this month / year in the one of the most…
Celia Pacquola seems to be everywhere at the moment. Her regular appearances on shows like Have You Been Paying Attention? and The Project mean she’s a familiar face. And you may recall how she shone in straight role in the ABC’s political satire Utopia. But if that’s not enough Pacquola for you, you need to…
This is a big ask. Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries was (and is) one of Australia’s most loved TV shows. So even tinkering around the edges of it is going to be fraught; let alone embarking on a sequel of sorts. But Every Cloud Productions (who made both the original and the upcoming Miss Fisher feature…
‘Single Asian Female’… it’s a clever play-on-movie-title precis for dating profile purposes. Zoe (Michelle Law) however, is so much more than just this descriptor… classical musician, sister and daughter. Like many, her fractured family oscillates between being a constant of disorder and an annoying inconvenience… and this is even without her knowledge of her mother’s…
Red Stitch’s 25th anniversary production of Michael Gow’s Sweet Phoebe turns the tables on the platitude that “a dog is a man’s best friend”. Helen (Olivia Monticciolo) and Frazer (Marcus McKenzie) are an uptight couple – both personally and professionally – who look to be going places. She’s a home designer, involved in her first…
“I really love the story and I can’t wait to see what they’ve done with it,” I overheard in the pre-show audience at Brisbane Arts Theatre’s take of the Australian cult classic Picnic at Hanging Rock. It’s hardly a surprising expectation; the story of the disappearance of three boarding schoolgirls and a teacher during a picnic…
“On a normal morning, a lone police car would be parked out the front of the station, waiting for something illegal to happen.” Cedar Valley, Holly Throsby’s second novel, begins with the arrival of two strangers on the first day of summer in 1993. One, Benny Miller, has come to live in a house which…
Coming-of-age stories about the unconventional but uplifting friendship between children and animals have been a staple of cinema for years. Henry Safran’s 1976 film of Storm Boy was a heartfelt classic from the period of the re-emergence of the Australian film industry and it touched a generation of filmgoers. Adapted from Colin Thiele’s beloved 1964…
