VIC contributor
Jim Davidson reviews 'Capital Designs: Australia House and visions of an imperial London' by Eileen Chanin
In the 1970s, before Malcolm Fraser (ahead of his time) tightened security and made most of the place a no-go zone, Australia House – a regular embassy – also functioned as an informal social amenity for visiting Australians. There was a howling disjunction between ...
... (read more)Paul Kildea reviews 'The Silent Musician: Why Conducting Matters' by Mark Wigglesworth
Of all the tributary footage screened in the days following the death of Bob Hawke, one short sequence jarred. In it, Hawke conducts the Sydney Philharmonia Choirs and orchestra in the ‘Hallelujah Chorus’ from Handel’s Messiah, jerking and twitching in response to ...
... (read more)David McInnis reviews 'How the Classics Made Shakespeare' by Jonathan Bate
Ben Jonson famously derided Shakespeare’s grasp of ‘small Latin and less Greek’, and vocal sceptics in our own time refuse to believe that a grammar-school education was sufficient to enable the man from Stratford to write the plays attributed to ‘Shakespeare’ ...
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Living, working, and being in the Indigenous space, there are times when it feels as though nothing changes. Indeed, on occasion, it can feel as though things are in fact regressing. When The Hon. Ken Wyatt AM, MP was announced as the new Minister for Indigenous Australians ...
... (read more)Euzebiusz Jamrozik reviews Defeating the Ministers of Death: The compelling history of vaccination by David Isaacs
In the early eighteenth century, smallpox inoculations were introduced to England and promoted by the charismatic Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, one of the many scintillating characters in David Isaacs’s outstanding book Defeating the Ministers of Death ...
... (read more)Keyvan Allahyari reviews Australian Books and Authors in the American Marketplace 1840s–1940s by David Carter and Roger Osborne
While working in the London advertising world in the late 1960s, Peter Carey sent his stories to a leading New York literary magazine, Evergreen Review, only to be unimpressed by another rejection ...
... (read more)Robin Gerster reviews Postcolonial Heritage and Settler Well-Being: The historical fictions of Roger Mcdonald by Christopher Lee
Though he had already produced two volumes of poetry, Roger McDonald first came to popular attention with his spectacular début novel, 1915, published in 1979. A recreation of the Gallipoli Campaign from the points of view of two ...
... (read more)David Haworth reviews Growing Up Aboriginal In Australia edited by Anita Heiss
The late historian Patrick Wolfe did not pull any punches when he wrote that colonialism seeks to eliminate and replace the Indigenous cultures holding sovereignty over the lands and resources that colonisers wish to claim ...
... (read more)Michael Winkler reviews A Stolen Life: The Bruce Trevorrow case by Antonio Buti and My Longest Round by Wally Carr and Gaele Sobott
Philip Larkin famously suggested that ‘they fuck you up, your mum and dad’, but the alternative is usually worse. Twenty years before Larkin wrote ‘This Be the Verse’, his compatriot John Bowlby published Maternal Care and Mental Health (1951), which described profound mental health consequences when ...
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It was a great moment in Australian history when William Cooper walked to the Australian parliament to object to the treatment of Jews in Germany during World War II. At the time, the British and Australian parliaments were ambivalent about the atrocities occurring across Europe ...
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