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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

From the Archive

September 1978, no. 4

Media Handbook by Iola Matthews

Schools are the subject of very mixed treatment by the media. On the one hand, some publish regular feature articles, or even weekly columns; many of a high standard, dealing with education issues. On the other, news stories often focus upon criticism, all too often uninformed, by some public or political personality. Problems in schools are sensationalised, but positive achievements rarely reach the news pages.

Iola Matthews has provided a tool to help those concerned with schools to improve this situation. Media Handbook is a clearly written and intensely practical guide to local school councils and others. It tells how to write and use press releases, how to organise press conferences, how to conduct interviews with the media, and other aspects of the publicity game.

From the Archive

From the Archive

November 2003, no. 256

Older than Hemingway

One of the hardest things a reviewer can be asked to do is to produce copy about a book that is so beautifully done that commentary on it seems both ridiculous and vaguely offensive. That is my predicament here. It is with a certain wry delight that I can report that this is the second time I have been in this position in recent months. The other book was a first novel, too. It is tremendously heartening to know that creative writing not merely good but of the highest order is being produced in these dismal times.

Shantaram is based on the life of its author, Gregory David Roberts. A heroin addict, Roberts was sentenced in 1978 to nineteen years’ imprisonment as punishment for a series of robberies of building society branches, credit unions and shops. In 1980 he escaped from Victoria’s maximum-security prison, thereby becoming one of Australia’s most wanted men for what turned out to be the next ten years.