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

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

Interview

From the Archive

September 1978, no. 4

Recollections of a Birdwatcher by By Brig. Hugh. R. Officer

A person with competence and enthusiasm ‘in the field’ for this or that subject of natural history has ready opportunity to get with it in unusual haunts. Birds seem to be an obsession with such opportunity – the competent enthusiast has an instinctive reaction to give attention, and some write books about it.

From the Archive

September 1983, no. 54

Orienteering: Painting in the Landscape edited by Heather Briggs

In 1968, at the time of the Field Exhibition, Regionalism in painting was not a respectable concept. Not one painting in that exhibition related in any way to place. Internationalism was paramount. Now fifteen years later, even such localised phenomena as the highly stylised spray-can graffiti of the New York subways has infiltrated easel painting and the art galleries of that city, once the capital of Internationalism.

In Australia, as styles flourished and died with rapidity throughout the 1960s and 1970s, a significant number of important painters continued to work, not only with ‘recognisable shape’ as advocated by the Antipodeans, but with one particular form of it, the landscape.

From the Archive

January-February 2015, no. 368

Lyndon Megarrity reviews 'Kevin Rudd' by Patrick Weller

In modern Australia, politics and public policy appear to reflect a narrow range of managerial, political, and economic opinions. Even the much publicised ‘listening tours’ conducted by politicians seem designed to show that they are sensitive to community concerns, but not so sensitive as to want to change policy direction. What makes current discussion of political issues so dispiriting is that over the last three decades, economic measurements and business ideas have come to dominate public life. Citizens are now treated by the public service and their masters as ‘consumers’, former public goods such as education are now narrowly viewed as a form of economic productivity, and community service providers, such as Australia Post, are written about in the media as mere businesses ripe for privatisation. Between 2007 and 2010, Prime Minister Kevin Rudd gave the impression that he might become the ‘circuit breaker’: a leader whose professed faith in the potential for government intervention and community consultation might lead to a more engaged and empowered citizenry, as well as a government more in tune with the needs of the electorate.