Peter Rose

'Thinking in headlines' by Peter Rose

September 2020, no. 424 • 24 August 2020

What we read at difficult times in our lives – plague, insurrection, divorce, major root canal work, etc. – is always telling. Carlyle, miserable and unwell at Kirkcaldy, read the whole of Gibbon straight through – twelve volumes in twelve days – with a kind of horrified fascination. I recall one friend who, at a time of ineffable tension, calmly read Les Misérables, one thousand pages lo ... (read more)

'The Marbles' a poem by Peter Rose

September 2010, no. 324 • 01 September 2010

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Editorial: 'An update on the pandemic and the Australia Council' by Peter Rose

May 2020, no. 421 • 27 April 2020

What a difference a month makes! In late March, as we were sending the April issue to press, how bleak the outlook was here in Australia, but especially overseas. Future print editions seemed doubtful because of the scale of the threat and the imminent lockdown. One month later, any interruption to the print edition seems unlikely, with two caveats. Australia Post deliveries have slowed in recent ... (read more)

Australian Book Review and the Australia Council

Book Talk • 04 April 2020

Australian Book Review, while congratulating successful applicants, deplores the Australia Council’s decision not to fund it and other literary magazines in the 2021–24 round. For the first time in decades, Australia’s national literary and arts review will not be funded by the federal government.  In depriving ABR and other fine literary magazines of funding, the Council and ... (read more)

'Come, Memory', a new poem by Peter Rose

April 2020, no. 420 • 19 March 2020

‘Come, memory, let us seek them there in the shadows.’ Donald Justice, ‘On the Death of Friends in Childhood’   I think of you now for the first timein about five times as many yearsas you actually lived, so uncomplainingly,they always said, as they do of the dead.Your name shadows meas we shadowed your small coffin,toggle-straight in our uniforms –why, I have no idea, for my ... (read more)

Coronavirus and Australian Book Review

April 2020, no. 420 • 17 March 2020

After a summer of bushfires across the nation and phenomenal loss and destruction, Australia – like the rest of world – now faces a health crisis of fearsome scope. As we go to press (earlier than planned because of present uncertainties), the scale of the threat, unprecedented in our times, is becoming stark. Australian Book Review is mindful of the enormous challenges posed by the coronavir ... (read more)

La Bohème (Opera Australia)

ABR Arts • 07 January 2020

Gale Edwards’s production of La Bohème is back for an extended summer season – sixteen performances no less. This production has been filling theatres since its creation in 2011. It may not run for as long as Franco Zeffirelli’s 1981 extravaganza, still an annual fixture at the Metropolitan Opera, but it probably has another good decade to go. Revived here by Liesel Badorrek, it works consi ... (read more)

Turandot (Opera Australia)

ABR Arts • 26 November 2019

Reviewing the recent production of Madama Butterfly in Adelaide, I dwelt on Giacomo Puccini’s ceaseless search for new subjects between operas and how he considered everything from a Zola novel to the historical Marie Antoinette before settling on the story of Cio-Cio San. The path to Turandot, his final, unfinished opera, was similarly curious. Puccini, the world’s most famous composer, ... (read more)

Peter Rose reviews 'Yellow Notebook: Diaries, Volume I, 1978–1987' by Helen Garner

December 2019, no. 417 • 22 November 2019

‘Several new perceptions of the unfortunate creature that I am have dawned upon me consolingly.’ Franz Kafka, 7 January 1911   Anyone who keeps a diary day in, day out for decades knows why Helen Garner, a few years ago, destroyed her early ones, deeming them boring and self-obsessed. Incineration has a long, proud history: think of Henry James, late in life, at his incinerator in ... (read more)

Madama Butterfly (State Opera South Australia)

ABR Arts • 18 November 2019

With certain artists – the luminaries, the abiders – it’s tempting to assign a kind of inevitability to their oeuvres. The musicals of Cole Porter, the satires of Jane Austen, the exiguous poems of T.S. Eliot have a kind of perfection that make them seem nonchalant. But here we run the risk of overlooking the sheer chanciness of most artistic careers – not to mention the false starts and t ... (read more)