Accessibility Tools

  • Content scaling 100%
  • Font size 100%
  • Line height 100%
  • Letter spacing 100%

ABR Arts

Theatre

Gaslight 

Rodney Rigby for Newtheatricals in association with Queensland Theatre

Book of the Week

Ghosts of Paradise
Poetry

Ghosts of Paradise by Stephen Edgar

With a title like Ghosts of Paradise, it is no surprise that Stephen Edgar’s latest poetry collection is haunted by loss, mutability, and mortality – the great traditional themes of elegiac poetry. But Edgar’s poetry has long, if not always, been characteristically elegiac. In this new collection, Edgar’s first since winning the Prime Minister’s Award for poetry in 2021 (and his first for Pitt Street Poetry), the poems are haunted by the poet’s late parents, late fellow poets (especially W.B. Yeats, but also the Australian poet Robert Adamson, for whom there is an elegy), and ancient poetic forms, such as the sonnet. The collection also includes meditations on ageing, corpses, and photographs (including Roland Barthes’ ‘theory / That every photo is a memento mori’). An interest in the intertwining of memory, embodiment, and visual representation is powerfully realised in ‘Still Life’, in which the memory of a trip to Broken Hill is

Interview

Interview

Interview

From the Archive

May 2002, no. 241

John Gorton: He did it his way by Ian Hancock

Robert Menzies cast such a large shadow that the contribution of his immediate successors has tended to be belittled, if not forgotten altogether. Each of the three is remembered mostly for things unconnected with their prime ministerships: Harold Holt for the manner of his death; John Gorton for his drinking ...

From the Archive

October 2007, no. 295

Power Without Responsibility?: Ministerial staffers in Australian governments from Whitlam to Howard by Anne Tiernan

The cover says it all. The photograph comes from the Cole Inquiry, but it could be from any number of recent events. In the centre is Prime Minister John Howard, smiling without hubris, a confident leader going about the business of leadership, ready to inform the Cole Inquiry what he knew and what he was never officially told. But the prime minister is not alone. Blacked out on either side are two of his security detail: ‘fit for office’ does not begin to describe the appearance of lean efficiency of this pair of male and female minders. Just behind them are two classic minders, both more than a little tense but featured in bold colour, one with eyes up as if anticipating the show of prime ministerial confidence; the other with eyes lowered, anticipating what might go wrong. Not that it does.

From the Archive