Last Friday evening, at the storied old Athenaeum theatre the Wheeler Centre hosted an interview with one of the glitteringest stars of Britlit, over here for various writers festivals and to promote his latest book, The Stranger’s Child. Michael Williams, director of the Wheeler (see left) and interlocutor for the evening: Before he is even [...]
February 22, 2012 – 10:57 am
A couple of days ago, I picked up a bargain from a bin outside one of those slowly disappearing, or slowly mushrooming, second-hand paper-book stores. It was The Best of Petty, ‘a collection of satirical cartoons from The Australian by Bruce Petty’ published in 1968 … that’s um, oh em gee, 44 years ago. It [...]
December 20, 2011 – 11:00 am
Last week I went for a ride with Peter Temple’s publisher, Michael Heyward, to a warehouse in Footscray. Temple, of course, wrote the celebrated The Broken Shore, and its Miles Franklin award-winning follow-up, Truth. He’s also written four novels featuring Jack Irish, a lawyer turned sometime detective, though it’s hard to quite pin down what [...]
September 6, 2011 – 11:09 am
National Poetry Week’s second serving from Culture Mulcher is by the iconic Dorothy Hewett. Communist, feminist, rabblerouser, nonconformist, writer: novelist, memoirist, playwright, poet. Earlier this year I was reading the new Selected Poems of Dorothy Hewett (edited by her daughter Kate Lilley, 2011) to prepare for making an etching of her. (Above is a pencil [...]
September 5, 2011 – 10:44 am
A poem a day for National Poetry Week sounds like a minimum serving. I’m going to pick a favourite poem from an Australian poet each day to make a five-poem sandwich (5-day week, here). That adjective, favourite, is useful too, because the criteria allows all the sentimental associations and personal affinities one might hope to [...]
August 24, 2011 – 11:10 am
From a New Yorker cartoon. Picture two straw-chewing, cockeyed hobos perched on a wall. Hobo 1 to hobo 2:“Crazy busy. You?” How does a witness on oath in court give a sensible answer as to her location on a date say a year ago? It’s hard to remember last week, impossible to recall a day [...]
By W H Chong
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Also posted in art, books, movies, music, photography, wheeler centre
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Tagged aboriginal art, Ballarat, Beethove, Foto Biennale, Jason Greig, Jessica Au, Juan Davila, Konrad Winkler, Mapplethorpe, MUMA, MWF, Namatjira, Randy Newman, Sophie Cunningham
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So I had my little audio intercourse with the Breakfasters at RRR. Radio is fascinating; but watching broadcasters at work it’s clear one has to be wired to fill the allocated time — to sound relaxed is a performance. In radio, a problem second can feel an eternity — will someone find their tongue? Has [...]
April 14, 2011 – 11:27 am
I’ve become reconciled to this blog as being the soft option, when we need to turn away. In Neil Finn’s deathless lyric: “in the paper today / tales of war and of waste / but you turn right over to the T.V. page.” Culture Mulcher, the TV page of Crikey blogs. (Albeit with an unreliable [...]
On a stage a couple of evenings ago, two extremely erudite men conducted a free range conversation of high entertainment value. (Watch on the Wheeler Centre video page next week.) The visitor was Melbourne native Angus Trumble, now resident in Connecticut, having just bought a house there — he is senior curator of painting and [...]
February 8, 2011 – 9:21 am
I’ve been a couple of times to see the NGV’s self-portrait exhibition, Naked Face. Christopher Allen in the Australian totally trashed the show. On the catalogue: “Gerard Vaughan, the gallery’s director, describes Vivien Gaston’s catalogue text as inspiring … The writing is dull, peppered with cliches and seldom even perceptive, let alone thought-provoking.” Paragraph 5 [...]
