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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

August 2004, no. 263

A Cedar Heritage

For a timber of such beauty and usefulness, red cedar has had a somewhat perverse history. Recognised for its domestic potential in the first few years of European settlement in New South Wales, it wasn’t long before supplies were so depleted around Sydney that government attempted, unsuccessfully, to regulate its logging. By the end of the century, it was all but cut out of accessible land from Sydney to north Queensland, leaving in its wake large tracts of denuded rainforest and sometimes dislocated Aboriginal communities.

From the Archive

June-July 2006, no. 282

Vital Signs, Vibrant Society by Craig Emerson

Craig Emerson is a good man to have around in federal politics. He has ideas, which is what politics should be largely about. And ideas, in the barnyard of Canberra politics, are almost as scarce as hen’s teeth. Emerson has a PhD in Economics from ANU. In earlier times, as an adviser to Prime Minister Bob Hawke, he had a reputation for being a bit of an environmentalist. Traditionally, the two disciplines don’t sit happily together. He managed to embrace them both.

From the Archive

February–March 1983, no. 48

One Continuous Picnic: A history of eating in Australia by Michael Symons

Adam Smith’s economics foresaw that capital would seek new ways to save us kitchen time, to brighten the dinner table and to stop us for a roadside snack, but each time an investment saved a minute here, lifted a moment there, filled a gap in the market, it separated eaters further from the source of food. The ‘middle­man’ slandered agrarian values, insulated us from the seasons, took away the diversity of distance, compromised quality for price, and then distracted us from the deterioration with the baits of cheapness, convenience and gourmet entertaining.

That statement on page 229 more or less summarises Michael Symons’s book and indicates several of its basic muddles. Yet in many ways it is an invaluable pioneering history and, if it often exasperates, it at least leads the reader to some stimulating and constructive fury, in a very enjoyable way.