One thing is for sure – the first performances of Henry Purcell’s baroque masterpiece Dido and Aeneas, currently playing at the Sydney Festival, would have been seen in a far less spectacular, and challenging…
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For me, one of the most exciting features of Superman’s comic strip adventures would occur when he travelled into the Fourth Dimension to visit his parents Lara and Jor-El on their planet Krypton. He would…
There is speculation that the taiko drum was first used by soldiers in battle. At its best, Chi Udaka, currently playing at the Seymour Centre as part of the Sydney Festival, recalls the ritualised diffusing…
Around 25 new Australian feature films are released into the market each year – so who’s watching them, when and how are they watching, and what makes them choose home-grown films over imported blockbusters…
Air conditioners across the country are running on full this week as Australia battles a heatwave – but are we missing an obvious, leafy solution? Trees, which provide shade and act as natural air conditioners…
The 2014 Sundance Film Festival starts today in Park City, Utah. Launched in 1981 by Robert Redford and friends, this year’s festival showcases a selection of new independently produced films, all vying…
Richard III’s skeleton, dug up from a carpark in Leicester in 2012, is currently the subject of a legal dispute about where he should be buried. In one corner is the University of Leicester, whose archaeologists…
Elevated bike routes have been proposed for many cities, including Chicago, Toronto and Sydney. But when the grandest proposal so far – 220 kilometers of bicycle highways in the air above London’s rail…
Never mind the bush and the outback – Sydneysiders were a maritime people from the start. For proof, browse through the Working Harbour collection, 10,000 images of Sydney’s maritime history recently donated…
In the program notes to Pan Pan Theatre’s outstanding production of All That Fall at the Sydney Festival, critic Nicholas Johnson underlines Samuel Beckett’s well known opposition to having All That Fall…
Summertime and reading always went together in my family. Whether we were sunbathing on hot silky beach sand or cooling off in the back yard under a shady plum tree, our books came too. In those pre-digital…
We don’t see many muscular women in popular culture – and the display of much heavier and obviously stronger female bodies can be overwhelming or shocking. Professional tennis playing sisters Serena and…
Nothing defines our use of the internet as clearly as the concept of the meme (pronounced “meem”). Every day, millions of people laugh at LOLcats, dog shaming, and music videos without music, while others…
An unnamed woman alone in an apartment conducts an increasingly panicked conversation on the telephone with the man she loves, but who has abandoned her for another. Her assumed fortitude gradually crumbles…
Is it a spaceship piloted by a friendly alien, a metallic pine cone or a giant cheese-grater? No, it’s Adelaide’s South Australian Health and Medical Research Institute (the SAHMRI building for short…
General Motors Holden’s decision to pull the pin on its Melbourne manufacturing plant spurred renewed debate around government-subsidised industry sectors. But instead of throwing money into a flailing…
It’s not uncommon, these days, to flip on the television in a foreign country and see a local remake of a show you always thought of as American or British. Talent shows like The Voice, The X Factor and…
It’s no secret that South Australian senator Cory Bernardi is a fan of what he calls “traditional family structures”. His views are back in the news this week with the release of his latest book, The Conservative…
In 1995 Prince Charles caused a ruckus when he lamented the unchecked spread of American English – and the effect of American usage is one that’s perennially lamented. But is it true? Are Americans really…
In 1966, a British planner called Maurice Broady came up with a new term for the architectural lexicon: architectural determinism. This was to describe the practice of groundlessly asserting that design…
Neuroscientific knowledge of how the brain processes the separate attributes of visual images has expanded exponentially in recent years. The mesmeric appeal of the artworks created by the Australian new…
I was somewhere in the middle of Howard Jacobson’s 2010 Man Booker Prize winner The Finkler Question and finding it uncompelling. (Sorry, Howard.) I needed a potboiler pick-me-up stat. What better than…
I once asked a group of my students if they knew what the term postmodernism meant: one replied that it’s when you put everything in quotation marks. It wasn’t such a bad answer, because concepts such…
I’m standing in a line at Brisbane Supanova 2013, a pop culture convention, when I’m approached by a young family with a tiny girl in a sparkly Snow White gown, complete with bright red hair bow. “We were…
It’s not been a long year for arts and culture – at least, not on The Conversation. We launched the section on October 28, sneaking in at the end of festival season like someone who sneaks in at the end…