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Fellowship Essays

It begins with a projected haze of ocean horizon. In this blurry liminal space, silence is misted with anticipation, like the moment before an echo comes back empty, right across the sea. Then a close-up of multi-instrumentalist Warren Ellis’s hands unpicking tranquillity’s fabric, each piano note a loosened stitch ...

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Moments began as medieval measures, the time it took for a sundial’s blade of shadow to shift – ninety seconds or so, depending on the season. A slice of sunlight. A moment now carries cultural as well as temporal weight. A slice of spotlight. Increasingly, we speak of our present as a moment, as if its minutes are sprung ...

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Far from being a flimsy, frilly story for women full of antique charm and middle-class manners, Joan Lindsay’s Picnic at Hanging Rock is a novel of sharp social observations and nuanced critique; subtle and sometimes latent sensuality; and layered, intricate allegory. The ‘shimmering summer morning warm and still’ brings the opposite to what it promises ...

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From the Herbig family who lived in a hollowed out tree trunk to Dr Bosisto’s ‘Syrup of Red Gum’, from the trauma and regeneration of bushfires to the ill-fated Burnside Village tree, the Tree of Knowledge, and the ‘dig tree’ - how can we understand Australia’s complex relationship with the eucalypt? The

For most of my life I have thought of myself as a secular Jew; fascinated by the turbulent history of the Jews, not part of synagogue life. All that changed in 2012. We were living in Goulburn, New South Wales, at the time. My husband was on the point of retirement and we were about to move back to Victoria. During winter ...

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First, I need to visit Dean Nicolle’s eucalypt arboretum. Four hundred rows of trees, four specimens of each species of Eucalyptus, Corymbia, and Angophora (the eucalypts) nestled together, sharing pollen and landscape, dropping limbs in the grass. Each group of trees is a result of the previous year’s fieldwork. The year ...

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This year marks the thirtieth anniversary of the publication of Bruce Chatwin’s The Songlines, one of the most influential books about Australia to reach an international audience. It appeared just months after ...

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When Australian federation was being planned and its implications first worked through, various men and women with agendas of their own set themselves ...

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In 2015, ABR published Ashley Hay's Dahl Trust Fellowship essay, titled 'The Forest at the Edge of Time', that examines ‘what our mongrel trees tell us about our past, the present, and the future’. The essay was the main feature in our October 2015 Environment issue. The ABR Podcast is available from iTunes and SoundCloud. You can also listen to episodes on our website.

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In 2015 we published James McNamara's Ian Potter Foundation Fellowship essay 'The Golden Age of Television', that considers the ascendancy of television drama and its cultural significance. The article was the main feature in our inaugural Film and Television issue in April 2015. The ABR Podcast is available from iTunes and SoundCloud. You can also listen to episodes on our website.

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