Accessibility Tools

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

Francesca Sasnaitis

Francesca Sasnaitis has returned to Melbourne after seven years in Perth and completing a PhD in Creative Writing at the University of Western Australia.

Oklahoma! (Black Swan State Theatre Company of WA)

ABR Arts 07 December 2020
Musicals remind me of watching midday movies with my grandmother in the days of black-and-white television. Years later, the revelation that many of these films were actually in colour seemed antithetical to the moral certainties they depicted. In Oklahoma!, Rogers and Hammerstein’s first Broadway collaboration (1943), virtue triumphs over villainy, the good guy gets the girl, and the girl gets ... (read more)

Francesca Sasnaitis reviews 'The Time of Our Lives: Growing older well' by Robert Dessaix

October 2020, no. 425 24 September 2020
In the garden of a hotel twenty minutes from Yogyakarta, a group of hopeful, middle-aged Westerners gyrate anxiously to the strains of LaBelle’s greatest hit. Unlike their young Balinese instructor, they are fighting a losing battle. Why bother? Robert Dessaix wonders. Next morning, his travelling companion answers in her husky smoker’s growl, ‘It’s death they’re afraid of – or at leas ... (read more)

Francesca Sasnaitis reviews 'Fortune' by Lenny Bartulin

October 2019, no. 415 03 September 2019
Fortune begins with Napoleon’s triumphant entry into Berlin on 27 October 1806. Does it matter whether the popular image of the emperor astride a magnificent white stallion is an embellishment? ‘Time sullies every truth,’ Lenny Bartulin tells us. History is as much a fiction as this tale of derring-do and dire misfortune heaped on innocent and wicked alike. Coincidence, improbable and highly ... (read more)

Francesca Sasnaitis reviews 'Invented Lives' by Andrea Goldsmith

April 2019, no. 410 25 March 2019
John Berger describes emigration as ‘the quintessential experience of our time’ (And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos, 1984), and gives credence to the concept that geographic and psychological exile is pervasive to the human condition. ‘No one willingly chooses exile – exile is the option when choice has run out,’ says the protagonist of Invented Lives, Russian-Jewish émigré Galin ... (read more)

Francesca Sasnaitis reviews 'Lucida Intervalla' by John Kinsella

March 2019, no. 409 17 January 2019
According to the online resource Climate Action Tracker, Australia’s emissions from fossil fuels and industry continue to rise and are heading for an increase of nine per cent above 2005 levels by 2030, rather than the fifteen to seventeen per cent decrease in emissions required to meet Australia’s Paris Agreement target. What this means for our environment and how the changes will manifest is ... (read more)

Francesca Sasnaitis reviews 'The Man on the Mantelpiece: A memoir' by Marion May Campbell

December 2018, no. 407 26 November 2018
In 1952, Marion May Campbell’s father was killed in an apocalyptic accident when his World War II RAAF Dakota was knocked out of control by contact with a waterspout and was ‘unable to effect recovery’. There were no survivors and little wreckage. The outmoded Dakota was on loan to the CSIRO to conduct experiments in artificial rainmaking that required flying into turbulent cumulonimbus clou ... (read more)

Francesca Sasnaitis reviews 'The World Was Whole' by Fiona Wright

October 2018, no. 405 24 September 2018
For a homeless person, home is the street and the moveable blanket or bedroll. Ultimately, the only home remaining is the body. Fiona Wright is not homeless, she has been un-homed by her body’s betrayal. Whether she can ever feel that she fits again is the primary theme of her second collection of essays, The World Was Whole. That her body was once fitting and knowable, that the world was once w ... (read more)

The Insult (Palace Films)

ABR Arts 27 August 2018
‘No one has a monopoly on suffering,’ says Wajdi Wehbe (Camille Salamé), the barrister representing Lebanese Christian mechanic Toni Hanna (Adel Karam) in his law suit against Palestinian Muslim refugee Yasser Abdallah Salameh (Kamel El Basha). Wehbe’s statement is intended to address what he perceives as an imbalance in the level of sympathy and support offered to the (minority) Lebanese C ... (read more)

Francesca Sasnaitis reviews 'Meanjin A–Z: Fine fiction 1980 to now' edited by Jonathan Green

August 2018, no. 403 26 July 2018
The narrator of David Malouf’s virtuosic ‘A Traveller’s Tale’ (1982) describes Queensland’s far north as ‘a place of transformations’ and unwittingly provides us with an epigraph for this collection. Without doubt, every story selected from Meanjin’s cache of the last thirty-eight years deserves this second airing, but if, as editor Jonathan Green attests, short fiction hardly sel ... (read more)

In Cahoots: artists collaborate across Country (Fremantle Arts Centre)

ABR Arts 05 December 2017
The map of In Cahoots is a tracery of journeys made by road and air, like songlines traversing the continent, speaking to points of departure, conjunction, and communion, and to the central theme of the project: communication. Involving six Aboriginal art centres partnered with five individual artists and one collaborative duo, each artist and community presents a singular set of issues, not mere ... (read more)
Page 2 of 5