Diane Stubbings
Ireland’s now infamous ‘mother and baby homes’ have been the subject of several films. Aisling Walsh’s Sinners (2002), Peter Mullan’s The Magdalene Sisters (2002), and Stephen Frear’s Philomena (2013), as well as numerous documentaries, have focused on the abuses suffered by the women detained in these homes and the fates of their children, many of them sold to wealthy families. According to the Irish Government’s 2021 Commission of Investigation into the homes, between 1922 and 1995, approximately 56,000 unmarried women and 57,000 children were detained, at least 9000 of the children not surviving their time in the institutions. As Claire Keegan writes in the Afterword to her 2021 novella, upon which this film is based, ‘Many girls and women lost their babies. Some lost their lives. Some or most lost the lives they would have had.’
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The Best Australian Science Writing 2024 edited by Jackson Ryan and Carl Smith
Let’s be clear about one thing from the outset. Any resemblance between this Melbourne Theatre Company musical adaptation of My Brilliant Career and the Miles Franklin novel of the same name seems, as times, purely coincidental.
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Watching the denouement of Melbourne Shakespeare Company’s Hamlet, I was reminded of David Edgar’s 1980 stage adaptation of Charles Dickens’s The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby. Ensconced within the travelling theatrical company of Mr Vincent Crummles, Nicholas and his hapless companion Smike are cast in a production of Romeo and Juliet, Smike as the apothecary and Nicholas (of course) as Romeo.
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In The Forever Wars: America’s unending conflict with itself – a searing account of the ways in which the seeds of Trumpism and the MAGA movement reach back to the first throes of American nationhood (reviewed for ABR by Timothy J. Lynch) – journalist Nick Bryant characterises the narrative by which America defines itself as ‘a story of unrivalled national success, shared values, common purpose and continual progress’. The American story was, and is, a ‘blurring of history and folklore … [that] didn’t ask too many troubling questions’; The United States was, and is, a nation that ‘lives and contests its history’ with an unrivalled level of ‘passion and ferocity’.
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