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

Emperor of Rome: Ruling the ancient Roman world
History

Emperor of Rome: Ruling the ancient Roman world by Mary Beard

Those Roman emperors were a funny lot: Nero with his lyre, Caligula with his speedy horse; Elagabalus with his whoopee cushion (what japes he played on guests who came to dinner!). Mary Beard’s new book spills the tea on all the well-known eccentric autocrats who ruled the Roman world. And what a bunch of oddities they were. Hard to believe that they could have wielded so much power so effectively for so long. Yet Beard’s book is not really about the tittle-tattle. It is, above all, about the idea of Rome’s emperor: that fictitious, hypocritical, and probably accidental conceit by which Octavian/Augustus contrived to be something other than a conventional king. Beard’s answer to the apparent paradox of so many weird mediocrities wielding supreme power is that Roman autocracy was, from its first moment, an act, even a sham. ‘One-man rule’ required a huge supporting, and colluding, cast – from wives and mothers to senators, slaves, and freedmen. Beard explains how the pretence was kept up during its supposedly golden phase: from Actium in 27 bce to Alexander Severus’s murder in 235 ce. Fans of ancient history will certainly enjoy her prose.

Interview

Interview

Interview

From the Archive

December 2007–January 2008, no. 297

Advance Australia … Where?: How we’ve changed, why we’ve changed, and what will happen next by Hugh Mackay

Advance Australia … Where? is such an eye-catching pun on Australia’s national anthem that it is no wonder that it has been used, with slight variations, as the title of at least eight books and pamphlets since World War II. Such publications have tended to express an individual author’s vision for the nation. In contrast, the latest Advance Australia … Where?, written by Hugh Mackay, mainly discusses current trends in public opinion, although it includes a few cautious predictions about the future and a number of suggestions for social reform.

From the Archive

November 2006, no. 286

‘Bestiary in Open Tuning’ by Anthony Lawrence

Blessings and praise

to the dark entanglement of caught branches

I continue to see,

after years of crossing the causeway,

as a black swan

holding her place in the current, her head

held resolute and serene,

her cygnets the shadows that advance and recede

in the eddies she makes going nowhere.

From the Archive

May 1985, no. 70

Love and the Outer World: Selected poems by R.G. Hay

It was my good fortune to be born into a family for whom books and paintings had a central place. My parents subscribed to an excellent lending library and were adventurous readers of novels. During the Depression they could not often afford to buy a painting, but they went to art shows and Sunday visits to the Art Gallery of New South Wales were frequent in my childhood.