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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

August 2014, no. 363

'My Brother Jack at fifty' by Kevin Rabalais

The novel begins with the burnished quality of something handed down through generations, its opening lines like the first breath of a myth. Seductive in tone and concision, charged with an  aura of enchantment, the early paragraphs of George Johnston’s My Brother Jack (1964) do more than merely lure the reader into the narrative. In these sentences, Johnston reveals the conviction and control of a master storyteller who, at the outset, establishes his ambition and literary lineage:

From the Archive

May 2007, no. 291

Bad Dreaming: Aboriginal men's violence against women and children by Louis Nowra

There has been a concerted effort in the academy over three decades to argue that Aboriginal women were not oppressed by their men. How many times have I read of the autonomy women secured by being the chief food-gatherers, both for themselves and the men? On this basis the peasants in medieval Europe were the equal of their lords. Louis Nowra’s essay on the violence of Aboriginal men to their women is not the first to break the taboo over this subject; it may be, however, that his gruesome accounts will send the taboo into its death throes. He begins with an Aboriginal man boasting of rape, and proceeds through gang rape to sticks being used to enlarge vaginas.

From the Archive

November 2003, no. 256

North of Capricorn: The untold story of Australia’s north by Henry Reynolds

When Christine Anu sings My Island Home, that great Neil Murray song, there’s always an irony. She’s not singing about the big island that tugs at the heartstrings of most Australians when they hear the song, but a far smaller, more remote home in Torres Strait where things are done differently. The big island-continent may be benign in its fortified insularity, a haven against contaminants from across the seas, but it’s those smaller islands that have, in the song, the qualities of freedom, harmony and belonging that matter.