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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

October 2006, no. 285

Bellini, Giorgione, Titian, and the Renaissance of Venetian Painting by David Alan Brown et al.

Some years ago, Robert Hughes bemoaned the capitulation of art museums and galleries to ‘the whole masterpiece-and-treasure syndrome’. Although made in the 1980s, Hughes’s point may still be valid, especially if the number of recent exhibitions with the word ‘master’ in their titles is anything to go by. A quick check reveals that, in Australia, the National Gallery of Victoria is particularly fond of the word. In Melbourne last year, we had ‘Dutch Masters from the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam’ and ‘Albrecht Dürer: Master of the Renaissance’. In 2004 the NGV put on ‘The Impressionists: Masterpieces from the Musée d’Orsay’.

From the Archive

September 1997, no. 194

Continent of Mystery: A Thematic History of Australian Crime Fiction by Stephen Knight

Continent of Mystery, subtitled ‘A thematic history of Australian crime fiction’ is, in the most simplistic terms, a daunting and inspiring book. My Australian crime fiction, mystery and detective fiction magazine, Mean Streets, was launched by Knight towards the end of 1990, not long before his move to the United Kingdom. For better or worse upon Knight’s departure I assumed, or at least so I was told, the mantle of Australia’s expert on crime fiction. I always perceived that observation as a compliment but having read Continent of Mystery with a sense of awe I can only say that I’m not sure I’m even fit to sit at Knight’s feet when it comes to local fiction with criminality at its core.

From the Archive

July–August 2012, no. 343

Ken Whisson: As If by Glenn Barkley and Lesley Harding

This catalogue accompanies the current exhibition of Ken Whisson’s work at Melbourne’s Heide Museum and, later, at Sydney’s Museum of Contemporary Art. The exhibition and catalogue are a joint exercise by MCA curator Glenn Barkley and Heide’s Lesley Harding. As with most exhibition catalogues, it offers an artist’s statement; a Foreword (by MCA director, Elizabeth Anne Macgregor); a 10,000-word curatorial essay; a list of works; biographical notes, listing Whisson’s exhibitions and the collections that represent his work; a Bibliography, detailing references to Whisson; and Acknowledgments. All of the works in the exhibition are reproduced in thumbnail illustrations, and more than sixty paintings and twenty drawings are reproduced in larger colour plates. Also featured is an interview that Whisson gave to Sydney-based artist (and friend) Joe Frost in 2009. All this comes in a modestly sized catalogue that has been crisply designed by Liz Cox.