Francesca Sasnaitis
Francesca Sasnaitis reviews 'The Time of Our Lives: Growing older well' by Robert Dessaix
In the garden of a hotel twenty minutes from Yogyakarta, a group of hopeful, middle-aged Westerners gyrate anxiously to the strains of LaBelle’s greatest hit. Unlike their young Balinese instructor, they are fighting a losing battle. Why bother? Robert Dessaix wonders. Next morning, his travelling companion answers in her husky smoker’s growl, ‘It’s death they’re afraid of – or at least dying.’
... (read more)To celebrate the year’s memorable plays, films, television, music, operas, dance, and exhibitions, we invited a number of arts professionals and critics to nominate their favourites.
... (read more)Francesca Sasnaitis reviews 'Fortune' by Lenny Bartulin
Fortune begins with Napoleon’s triumphant entry into Berlin on 27 October 1806. Does it matter whether the popular image of the emperor astride a magnificent white stallion is an embellishment? ‘Time sullies every truth,’ Lenny Bartulin tells us. History is as much a fiction as this tale of derring-do and dire misfortune ...
... (read more)Francesca Sasnaitis reviews Invented Lives by Andrea Goldsmith
John Berger describes emigration as ‘the quintessential experience of our time’ (And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos, 1984), and gives credence to the concept that geographic and psychological exile is pervasive to the human condition. ‘No one willingly chooses exile – exile is the option when choice has run out,’ says the ...
... (read more)Francesca Sasnaitis reviews Lucida Intervalla by John Kinsella
According to the online resource Climate Action Tracker, Australia’s emissions from fossil fuels and industry continue to rise and are heading for an increase of nine per cent above 2005 levels by 2030, rather than the fifteen to seventeen per cent decrease in ...
... (read more)Francesca Sasnaitis reviews 'The Man on the Mantelpiece: A memoir' by Marion May Campbell
In 1952, Marion May Campbell’s father was killed in an apocalyptic accident when his World War II RAAF Dakota was knocked out of control by contact with a waterspout and was ‘unable to effect recovery’. There were no survivors and little wreckage. The outmoded Dakota was on loan to the CSIRO to ...
... (read more)Francesca Sasnaitis reviews 'The World Was Whole' by Fiona Wright
For a homeless person, home is the street and the moveable blanket or bedroll. Ultimately, the only home remaining is the body. Fiona Wright is not homeless, she has been un-homed by her body’s betrayal. Whether she can ever feel that she fits again is the primary theme of ...
... (read more)‘No one has a monopoly on suffering,’ says Wajdi Wehbe (Camille Salamé), the barrister representing Lebanese Christian mechanic Toni Hanna (Adel Karam) in his law suit against Palestinian Muslim refugee Yasser Abdallah Salameh (Kamel El Basha). Wehbe’s statement is intended to ...
... (read more)Francesca Sasnaitis reviews 'Meanjin A–Z: Fine fiction 1980 to now' edited by Jonathan Green
The narrator of David Malouf’s virtuosic ‘A Traveller’s Tale’ (1982) describes Queensland’s far north as ‘a place of transformations’ and unwittingly provides us with an epigraph for this collection. Without doubt, every story selected from ....
... (read more)In Cahoots: artists collaborate across Country (Fremantle Arts Centre)
The map of In Cahoots is a tracery of journeys made by road and air, like songlines traversing the continent, speaking to points of departure, conjunction, and communion, and to the central theme of the project: communication. Involving six Aboriginal art centres partnered with five individual artists and one ...
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