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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

From the Archive

December 1990–January 1991, no. 127

'This is how it’s going to be then'

Alex Miller was recently awarded the Braille Book of the Year Award for his novel The Tivington Nott. When he accepted this award, he spoke of the archaeology of writing and how he sees his work as being like a buried city, waiting to be excavated. This is an edited extract from his speech.

Writers and readers, it seems to me, are often driven by a need to confess. Everything. Not just sins. But the lot. To confess in the original secular sense of this word; to utter, to declare (ourselves, that is), to disclose and uncover what lies hidden within us. If I’d not been a writer, I used to think I’d like to have been an archaeologist. It’s only recently I’ve located the connection between writing fiction and archaeology. Historians and biographers are probably just as confessional in their work as writers of declared fictions. But they are undoubtedly able to more easily disguise this because they are accountable to the objective – to outcrops of unrelocatable facts along the way, that is.

From the Archive

December 1988, no. 107

Not Being Miriam by Marion Campbell

Three sections at the beginning of Marion Campbell’s second novel, Not Being Miriam, initiate its preoccupations and problems. They relate incidents from the childhood of Bess Valentine, its major character. In the first and shortest, Bess creates a transforming ritual, a childish game with significant narrative implications. Bess strips herself and Sean, paints their bodies with clay, the children enter the water which washes away the clay; then she dresses in Sean’s boxer shorts and clothes him in her bubble bathers.

From the Archive

September 1986, no. 84

The Gentrification of Inner Melbourne: A political geography of inner city housing by William Stewart Logan

Inner city residential areas of large Australian cities have, it is said, been transformed by a marauding band of the professional middle class. These people bought dwellings with ‘potential’, took up residence, and refurbished their houses back to their original state or into some dainty contemporary form. Such has been the demand placed upon this housing that a sharp escalation in house prices has resulted. Increasing costs associated with this rise have forced many old, long-term, working class residents – the traditional inner city occupants – out into distant suburbs. Thus, inner city residential areas are now dominated by the middle class.