The Pool: Architecture, Culture and Identity, exhibition by Aileen Sage Architects (Isabelle Tolandand Amelia Holliday) with Michelle Tabet, commissioned for the Australian Pavilion by the Australian Institute of Architects for the Venice Biennale of Architecture 2016.
Brett Boardman
Swimming pools are much more than holes in the ground - they are often beautifully designed, as a new exhibition at the NGV shows. They also document Australia’s history of racism and sexism, and gradual relaxation of social mores.
Discontinuities, a triple bill staged at La Mama in 2002.
La Mama
From Cate Blanchett to David Williamson, some of Australia’s most well known theatre artists have performed at La Mama, which celebrates its 50th birthday this year.
Australia’s videogame industry has called for an end to the government’s silence around funding. And with local games competing on the world stage, it’s time for the cultural medium to be recognised alongside TV and film.
Waleed Aly’s 2016 Gold Logie win tells us that the audience has been more appreciative of Australian television’s diversity than the industry.
Joe Castro/AAP
The Logies are fantastically daggy, but they let us compare audience and industry definitions of achievement. Looking back, it’s clear the public celebrates new, diverse and varied television.
Small organisations are creating Australia’s most exciting art. Yet a recent report shows that even the most popular art-forms are bleeding revenue, while government funding dwindles.
Pages one and two of issue 31 of OZ magazine.
UPS via Wikimedia
Richard Neville was a man of his times: a smart-alec student in the 60s; a drug-smoking hippie on trial in the 70s; to a family man, writer and public speaker in the 80s and 90s.
Meanjin has published leading writers, including Patrick White and Peter Carey.
Charles Stanford
The literary magazine Meanjin was founded to ensure the nation did not ‘drop its mental life’ during World War Two. Given the decision to starve it of funding, will future Miles Franklin winners be generated by blogs?
At what point does a wildly speculative idea become worthy of national and international press coverage?
Brian Tomlinson
The idea that the Australian accent may be the product of drunkenness in early European settlers is wildly speculative. And yet it has gained international attention in the past week. Why?
Angus Young is still touring the “Australian Sound” with AC/DC.
EPA/Sara Johannessen
Blood + Thunder offers an entertaining insight into the development of the “Australian Sound” – but why do the producers fail to acknowledge the influence on the blues on that sound?
As always, funny young people are busy self-curating extreme carnival.
Marley Cook
In Australia, from its beginnings, humour and irony have been small weapons in the armoury of the oppressed, the outcast, or those simply fed up with cultural uniformity.
Andrew Bovell’s adaptation of Kate Grenville’s The Secret River is a key example of post-Apology theatre.
AAP Image/Heidrun Löhr
It’s been seven years since Kevin Rudd delivered his apology to Indigenous Australians. On Australia’s stages dramatists continue to explore the ramifications of that apology and colonial history.
Graeme Macfarlane (Goro) and Hiromi Omura (Cio-Cio-San) in Opera Australia’s Madama Butterfly (2015).
Jeff Busby
Opera Australia has once again posted a major operating loss and is weathering criticism for its very safe repertoire. Both these points merit consideration in the federal government’s National Opera Review.
The NSW town of Nyngan has announced it will build a Big Bogan as a tourist attraction. The question is, what kind of bogan does the town council have in mind?
We know whether a play such as Andrew Bovell’s Secret River works onstage – but can we explain its effect?
AAP Image/Heidrun Löhr
Anyone who has seen a play can tell you whether it “works” or not – but very few people can tell you exactly why. We all need a better grasp of this. Why? So that playwriting can better represent contemporary Australia.
Five faces of oppression and Tony Abbott.
Elizabeth Tunstall with images drawn from Wikimedia.
Goths, punks and hipsters roam the streets, wilfully asserting their counter-cultures. But in an age of cultural appropriation, is this resistance just another way of fitting in? In 2015 can anyone truly…
How’s your year been? Thanks for sharing it with us.
AAP/MONA, Exxopolis by Architects of Air
Paul Dalgarno, The Conversation; Catriona Menzies-Pike, The Conversation, and Alix Bromley, The Conversation
Hey luvvies! We’ve made it! 2014 is in the bank – and here’s what we did, what you read, how we all came through it. Think of the following as a music festival: loads of highlights, one after the other…
Creating a unique Australian culture has been an enduring challenge.
AAP/'Bungaree, The Showman' by Mervyn Bishop
Australia today is very different to the place I grew up in: our culture has changed and is changing, but public discussion is still framed by old tropes. We need a new shorthand to capture the reality…
You don’t have to look too far to find homophobia, hostility and discrimination against LGBTI people.
Network Ten/ AAP
Few who watched Ian Thorpe’s “coming out” interview with British interviewer Michael Parkinson on Sunday night could haved failed to be moved by his story. The anxiety and turmoil he felt in telling the…