Welcome to the June issue of ABR – another highly varied one. Emma McEwin – Douglas Mawson’s great-granddaughter – writes about Mawson’s ‘iron gut’ and his fellow Antarctic explorers’ dietary habits, including a queasy penchant for ‘penguins on horseback’. Miriam Cosic reviews the Coetzee–Auster correspondence, and Pascall Prize-winner Kerryn Goldsworthy reviews Lionel Shriver’s new novel. Brian McFarlane is underwhelmed by Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby. Opera is a major theme this month. World-renowned conductor Jeffrey Tate is intrigued by the controversial new biography of Benjamin Britten, and Peter Rose writes about three productions in Melbourne.
June 2013, no. 352
Penguins on Horseback
Wandering through the Mawson collection at the South Australian Museum one winter afternoon, I stare through the glass at the reconstruction of my great-grandfather, Douglas Mawson’s room in the hut, the sound of a moaning blizzard in my ears. The eerie sound ...
Jeffrey Tate on rediscovering Britten
It would be a pity if this well-researched and nuanced biography of the greatest English composer of the second half of the twentieth century became known for the rather sensational medical revelations contained in the last chapter. Certainly, they gave me pause ...
Kerryn Goldsworthy reviews 'Big Brother' by Lionel Shriver
The novel for which Lionel Shriver is best known, We Need to Talk about Kevin (2003), generated endless discussion across the spectrum of readers, from buzzing suburban home-based reading groups to the pages of the Guardian and the New York Time ...
Brian Matthews: A non-canonical anthology
To begin at the beginning. ‘When the first Pakeha ship came,’ Te Horeta told the explorer Charles Heaphy, ‘I was a lad … [about twelve years old].’ Watching the ‘white people’ row ashore, ‘paddling with their backs to the way they were going’, the bo ...
