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Fiona Gruber

Fiona Gruber

Fiona Gruber is a journalist and producer with twenty years’ experience writing and broadcasting across the arts as a commentator, profile writer, and reviewer.

Fiona Gruber reviews 'Wedding Bush Road' by David Francis

March 2017, no. 389 24 February 2017
Wedding Bush Road is a novel about contrasts and conflicts: new-age America versus an old-fashioned Australia; messy rural versus shipshape urban; high status versus low; the past versus the present. Expat Daniel Rawson is a successful lawyer in Los Angeles. He has been tempered by seven years of ‘California dreaming’; life is good. His graceful girlfriend, Isabel, practises Kundalini yoga an ... (read more)

Fiona Gruber reviews 'Fair Game: The incredible untold story of Scientology in Australia' by Steve Cannane

December 2016, no. 387 29 November 2016
When you join the Church of Scientology, you sign a contract for a billion years. You are then audited with the help of a machine called an ‘E Meter’, which helps uncover areas of conflict and blockages in your current life and previous ones. The goal, after undergoing an intensive and expensive course of study into the theories and practice of the Church’s founder, L. Ron Hubbard, is to go ... (read more)

Graham Sutherland's portrait of Helena Rubinstein

ABR Arts 25 October 2016
‘There are no ugly women, only lazy ones’ was Helena Rubinstein’s attitude to personal allure, and her mantra has been a source of hope and steely resolve to the millions of customers who have bought her cosmetics and unguents over the past century. Although she died in 1965, the Rubinstein name is still familiar to many; her brand is now owned by L’Oréal. But most will be unaware that R ... (read more)

Fiona Gruber reviews 'The Little Red Chairs' by Edna O’Brien

March 2016, no. 379 24 February 2016
Edna O'Brien, in a recent interview, recalled being stuck for a plot. It was a filmmaker's remark about Tolstoy that sparked her latest novel, The Little Red Chairs: '[Charlie McCarthy] said, "Tolstoy said there are only two great stories in the world. A Man on a Journey, or A Stranger Comes to Town." And at that moment I thought, I've got it. I'm going to bring a stranger with a past – not just ... (read more)

Fiona Gruber reviews 'Banksia Lady' by Carolyn Landon

October 2015, no. 375 30 September 2015
In March 2006, botanical illustrator Celia Rosser travelled to a remote station in Western Australia to witness and draw the first-ever recorded flowering of Banksia Rosserae. The spiky yellow spheres appear only after rain, which, in this arid part of the continent, can be years in the coming. The Australian plant had only been discovered four years earlier, by botanists Peter Olde and Neil Marri ... (read more)

Fiona Gruber reviews 'The Self-Portrait' by James Hall

May 2015, no. 371 29 April 2015
We live in a world obsessed with self-images. Thanks to digital photography and the Internet, we can all star in and manipulate the drama of our lives. But, as James Hall reminds us, artists have been experimenting with self-representation for centuries. From a quartzite stela of Pharaoh Akhenaten’s court sculptor Bak standing with his wife Taheri (c.1350 bce) to Tracey Emin’s Everyone I Have ... (read more)

Fiona Gruber reviews 'The Mystery of the Venus Island Fetish' by Dido Butterworth (Tim Flannery)

March 2015, no. 369 02 March 2015
It is 1932 and as the SS Mokambo steams into Sydney Harbour with Archie Meek on board, the Australian Museum’s young anthropologist is about to discover that he has committed a terrible faux pas. After five years away in the Venus islands studying the customs and culture of its head-hunting inhabitants, Meek is eager to be reunited with Beatrice Goodenough, the beautiful but sheltered registrar ... (read more)

Portraiture by stealth

Roving Blog 13 August 2014
I had my portrait done by stealth the other day. Throughout the innocent chatter of a dinner party, while I artlessly revealed my double chin and paraded my characterful nose, fellow guest and Melbourne art bandit W.H. Chong was scribbling away on his smart phone. I just thought he’d got bored and was playing Angry Birds. I should have realised; as well as being Text Publishing’s illustrious ... (read more)

For Auld Lang Syne: Images of Scottish Australia from First Fleet to Federation | Art Gallery of Ballarat

June–July 2014, no. 362 01 June 2014
I have been looking at the world through tartan frames recently, thanks to the current exhibition ‘For Auld Lang Syne: Images of Scottish Australia from First Fleet to Federation’ and its accompanying catalogue ($75 hb, 335 pp). Actually, to call it a catalogue doesn’t do it justice; its 335 pages ransack dozens of different angles of the Caledonian experience, with essays by its curators,Al ... (read more)

'Australia’s tartan army' by Fiona Gruber

Roving Blog 15 May 2014
I have been looking at the world through tartan frames recently, thanks to the current exhibition ‘For Auld Lang Syne: Images of Scottish Australia from First Fleet to Federation’ and its accompanying catalogue. Actually, to call it a catalogue doesn’t do it justice; its 330 pages ransack dozens of different angles of the Caledonian experience, with essays by its curators, Alison Inglis and ... (read more)
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