Bananaland opens in the wake of Covid’s decimation of the performing arts sector. Only the determined can survive, and lead singer of Kitty Litter, 21-year-old Ruby Semblance (Maz McKenna) is certainly determined… uncompromising in her pursuit to have society wake up and also realise her unconventional onstage artistry. It’s all quite tongue-in-cheek as along with…
Shelley Burr burst onto the Australian crime scene in 2022 with her rural crime debut Wake which has gone on to win both the British Crime Association Dagger and Ned Kelly Award for best debut, among others. While Wake contained many of the elements of more traditional Australian rural crime stories, Burr managed to put…
Rarely does a production come along that deserves the tag of ‘landmark’. In The Dismissal, now on at the Seymour Centre in Sydney, a new standard of Australian devised and created theatre has arrived. Put simply, it’s non-stop enjoyment! Politics may not be everyone’s cup of tea. And the events of 11 November 1975 still…
Ego focusses on the impact and legacy of Michael Gudinski through his five-decade involvement in the Australian music industry, from the inaugural Sunbury Music Festival in 1972 through to the establishment of Mushroom Records and to his work promoting tours from both local and international artists. Gudinski was a larger-than-life figure full of passion and…
The superior and effective Australian-produced horror film Talk To Me taps into the trope of a group of teens playing around with the supernatural and facing some nasty consequences (like Ouija, for example) but gives the familiar ideas a freshness. At a party in a small South Australian town, a group of teens play games…
Veronica Lando’s first novel The Whispering won the 2021 Banjo Prize for best unpublished manuscript. That book, set in the rainforests of Far North Queensland involved a man returning to a small rural town, and being caught up in a mystery involving two deaths seventeen years apart. Her follow up, The Drowning Girls, feels cut…
An indigenous lad (Aswan Reid) reshapes the lives of those living at a remote monastery in 1940s Australia in Warwick Thornton’s The New Boy. The outback facility serves as a mission for Aboriginal children. It’s run by a feisty, renegade nun, Sister Eileen (Cate Blanchett). At the time only men could operate missions. But the…
– The New Boy – Only in cinemas from 6 July 2023 We have 2 double in-season passes thanks to Roadshow Films. *(Tickets valid in Australia only)* Watch the trailer HERE Set in 1940s Australia, The New Boy depicts the mesmeric story of a 9-year-old Aboriginal orphan boy who arrives in the dead of night…
Rae Cairns was shortlisted for the best debut crime novel in the Ned Kelly Awards in 2021 for her then self-published book The Good Mother. The book was picked up by Harper Collins and has now been followed up with a another standalone crime thriller Dying to Know. While it is a very different proposition,…
Moving and at times confronting, At What Cost? leaves the audience in a stunned silence for a moment, until the thunderous applause and standing ovation inevitably follow. It’s a powerful piece of theatre in which the one hour and forty-five minutes without interval seem to fly by. Indigenous playwright, Nathan Maynard, has crafted a compelling,…
