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Peter Craven

Peter Craven

Peter Craven is one of Australia's best-known literary and culture critics. He writes regularly for both the Fairfax and Murdoch press about literature, film, television, and theatre.

Peter Craven reviews 'Murder in the Groove' by Dave Warner

May 1999, no. 210 01 May 1999
Dave Warner, one-time singer and satirist, has been at work as a detective story writer for a few years now, penning long excoriations of West Australia Inc. style shenanigans and, according to reports, working pretty much in the shadow of that L.A. master (with all his fizz and stammer and sparkle), the great James Ellroy. ... (read more)

National Library Australian Voices Essay | ‘The kingdom of correct usage is elsewhere’ by Peter Craven

April 1996, no. 179 01 April 1996
Some years ago the poet John Forbes was addressing himself to that national monument, Les Murray, and he had occasion to remark, ‘The trouble with vernacular republics is that they presuppose that the kingdom of correct usage is elsewhere.’ It was, I suppose, designed to highlight the fact that the homespun qualities of the Bard from Bunyah were dependent on an awareness of the metropolitan st ... (read more)

'Shakespeare in Australia' by Peter Craven

September 2001, no. 234 01 September 2001
In James Joyce’s Ulysses, Shakespeare is referred to as the happy hunting ground of all minds which have lost their balance. He is also referred to by Buck Mulligan, even less reverently, though with a distinct nationalist tilt, as ‘Shakespeare. I seem to recall the name. Ah, to be sure, the fellow who writes like Synge.’ Well, there probably are analogies between the greatest of all dramati ... (read more)

Peter Craven reviews 'Collected Poems I 1961-1981' and 'Collected Poems II 1984-1999' by Peter Porter

July 1999, no. 212 01 July 1999
Peter Porter first came to prominence nearly forty years ago as an ironic, tough, rather dandyish poet who wore his Australian expatriatism with a flair and who kept his poetic distance on a London which enthralled and appalled him. He came out with striking lines like ‘I am only the image I can force upon the town’ – all glitter and brittleness – but he was also the kind of poet who could ... (read more)

Peter Craven reviews the film of Oscar and Lucinda

February–March 1998, no. 198 01 February 1998
Oscar and Lucinda is the next best thing we have to that gleaming oxymoron a contemporary Australian literary classic. It won a swag of prizes (not least the Booker); it is a long vibrant narrative, including history full of the rustle of Victorian costumes, but with a whisper of the horrors on which this country was founded with a brief ghastly moment representing the murder of Aborigines. Peter ... (read more)

Peter Craven reviews 'Apropos of Nothing' by Woody Allen

June–July 2020, no. 422 26 May 2020
Whatever you think of Woody Allen, you will probably find his memoir, Apropos of Nothing, compelling. It’s likely to convince you that he didn’t molest his adoptive daughter Dylan all those years ago. The resurgence of this accusation, first aired in 1992, has caused such widespread concern that Hachette pulled this book because of vehement objections by Ronan Farrow, Allen’s biological son ... (read more)

Peter Craven reviews 'Daddy We Hardly Knew You' by Germaine Greer

June 1989, no. 111 01 June 1989
There are few people on earth I would rather read than Germaine Greer, mad or sane. Whatever reservations I might want to express about Daddy We Hardly Knew You, it is some testament to its compelling power that I read most of it strung-out with fatigue from checking proofs some time towards dawn and I still found it difficult to stop reading. Oscar Wilde cannot have been the first human being to ... (read more)

Peter Craven reviews 'The Book Of Dust, Volume Two: The Secret Commonwealth' by Philip Pullman

March 2020, no. 419 21 February 2020
Philip Pullman must be one of the weirdest figures to emerge from the sometimes dark woods of children’s writing. Not the least striking thing about him is that the woods can be very dark, Dante-dark, indeed. At the same time, he does not have the ballast of those two mutually despising inklings to whom he is routinely compared, C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien, in having the deeper comforts of any ... (read more)

Peter Craven reviews 'The Clean Dark' by Robert Adamson

November 1989, no. 116 01 November 1989
Robert Adamson has as secure a reputation as any poet in this country apart from Les Murray. He rose to prominence in the latter part of the 1960s at the same time as John Tranter, but his affinity was not with the New York poets like John Ashbery and Frank O’Hara, but with the poets of Black Mountain: Charles Olson, Gary Snyder, and, most particularly, with the late Robert Duncan. Adamson took ... (read more)

Peter Craven reviews 'The Puzzles of Childhood' by Manning Clark

October 1989, no. 115 01 October 1989
Manning Clark will be remembered as a historian long after the last jot and tittle of the facts he amassed have been disputed and every revisionism has had its day, proving for those with the needful faith that he made it all up, that he was a waffler, that the diorama he presented as the history of Australia was nothing but an allegory of the inside of his head, and that it was all vanity and a s ... (read more)
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