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Oct 11, 2024 | 
thesaturdaypaper.com.au | Daniel James
For one reason or another, Alice Springs has been a political football for decades. It’s a town at the heart of the Australian psyche. Quite literally, it is a town at the heart of Australia. The events of recent years have seen a renewed and intense scrutiny on what happens in Alice. Youth crime has risen, with incidents of theft, assaults, property damage and antisocial behaviour almost a daily occurrence. The sense of unease in the town is palpable.
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Sep 30, 2024 | 
themonthly.com.au | Susan Johnson |Tim Winton |Cate Kennedy |Daniel James
Vernon Ah Kee’s 100-square-metre bookstore mural celebrates Queensland authors, poets and artists The world is so vast, history so long and the vanished so countless, a person might quail to consider the living. But an artist, a visual artist intent on including himself in the practice of recording the history of the human story, might narrow his focus so that the universal becomes a few living names symbolising the many, and marks upon a surface become strikes against the infinite.
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Sep 30, 2024 | 
themonthly.com.au | Peter Craven |Tim Winton |Cate Kennedy |Daniel James
The late playwright Jack Hibberd’s ‘Dimboola’ and ‘A Stretch of the Imagination’ offered Australian life through a Beckett lens Jack Hibberd is dead. There’s a knell in that, a suggestion of awe and desolation and mixed feelings. Hibberd had been failing for years – there were cognitive impairments just as years earlier there had been breakdowns – but that doesn’t change the fact that a great spirit is gone.
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Sep 30, 2024 | 
themonthly.com.au | David Neustein |Tim Winton |Cate Kennedy |Daniel James
A monograph and an international magazine highlight small Australian architecture practices innovatively exploring narratives particular to their region When it comes to new buildings, ugliness is almost as immutable as gravity. Today’s designer appears powerless to resist forces exerted by bland software systems and bureaucratic codes, corporate workplaces, mercenary construction contracts and unskilled labour.
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Sep 30, 2024 | themonthly.com.au | Peter Craven |Tim Winton |Cate Kennedy |Daniel James
The late playwright Jack Hibberd’s ‘Dimboola’ and ‘A Stretch of the Imagination’ offered Australian life through a Beckett lens Jack Hibberd is dead. There’s a knell in that, a suggestion of awe and desolation and mixed feelings. Hibberd had been failing for years – there were cognitive impairments just as years earlier there had been breakdowns – but that doesn’t change the fact that a great spirit is gone.
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Sep 30, 2024 | 
themonthly.com.au | Kate Jinx |Tim Winton |Cate Kennedy |Daniel James
An Iranian film about a widow defying post-revolution restrictions and finding love, and Demi Moore in a body-horror film aimed at unreal beauty standards “When will they leave us be?” asks Mahin (Lili Farhadpour) in the potent, warm-hearted Iranian film My Favourite Cake (Keyke mahboobe man). She’s referring to the morality police who, during a routine raid in a public park, targeted a woman wearing an improperly worn hijab.
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Sep 30, 2024 | 
themonthly.com.au | Helen Elliott |Tim Winton |Cate Kennedy |Daniel James
Five women artists come together to challenge the traditional art world’s understanding of “emotional” as female Art, of course, is language, but Mithu Sen is unusually mouthy for a visual artist. Part of her exhibition in Melbourne at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (ACCA) last year was the word “Unacknowledgement”. Beneath that: “I hereby sincerely declare that I will be withdrawing from charades of inclusion and artifices of language through mOTHERTONGUE.” Charades of inclusion?
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Sep 30, 2024 | 
themonthly.com.au | Ellena Savage |Tim Winton |Cate Kennedy |Daniel James
Current IssueNewslettersPodcastsLoginSubscribeOctober 2024Arts & Letters Sarah Manguso’s novel about a woman staying in a terrible relationship seems resigned to male dominance, while Vigdis Hjorth’s gets at more complex realities Novel one: Jane is a writer; John, an artist. Jane and John fall in love and get married. What could go wrong? Jane’s writing career begins to take off. Go, Jane! John’s art career… well, it doesn’t, and he redirects his energy towards starting a company.
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Sep 30, 2024 | themonthly.com.au | Helen Elliott |Tim Winton |Cate Kennedy |Daniel James
Five women artists come together to challenge the traditional art world’s understanding of “emotional” as female Art, of course, is language, but Mithu Sen is unusually mouthy for a visual artist. Part of her exhibition in Melbourne at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (ACCA) last year was the word “Unacknowledgement”. Beneath that: “I hereby sincerely declare that I will be withdrawing from charades of inclusion and artifices of language through mOTHERTONGUE.” Charades of inclusion?
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Sep 30, 2024 | 
themonthly.com.au | Dion Kagan |Tim Winton |Cate Kennedy |Daniel James
The English novelist’s latest dark masterpiece begins with the talented, queer, working-class protagonist invited to his sponsors’ country estate Dave Win, the half-Burmese, working-class protagonist of this delicate new novel by Alan Hollinghurst, starts out in the 1960s as one of very few non-white students at Bampton, a boys’ boarding school in south-east England.
