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2 months ago | 
themonthly.com.au | Quentin Sprague |Paul Barry |Margaret Simons |Louise Milligan
Current Issue Newsletters Podcasts Login Subscribe February 2025 Arts & Letters The work of the great Australian documentary photographer proposes portraits as mirrors, containing both the subject and the artist I have a special love for good documentary photography. You know the kind – the images that show life in all its beautiful, complex, world-making everyday glory.
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2 months ago | 
themonthly.com.au | Louise Milligan |Paul Barry |Margaret Simons |Don Watson
The Monthly has chosen to temporarily remove Louise Milligan’s recent essay from our website. We have been made aware of an active case that is about to come before the courts that had not been previously in the public domain. In the interests of protecting the integrity of that case, we have taken down the story. When the case concludes, the essay will be made available to readers once again.
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2 months ago | 
themonthly.com.au | Louise Milligan |Paul Barry |Margaret Simons |Don Watson
The day politicians, priests and pundits filed into St Mary’s Cathedral in Sydney for the pontifical requiem mass venerating Cardinal George Pell as a Catholic hero, a soldier for truth, a prospective saint and an unfortunate scapegoat in a vast woke conspiracy, a mathematics teacher was at home, seething.
In David’s inbox was a letter from the National Redress Scheme that threw into serious doubt the platitudes of the faithful. It was dated December 7, 2022 – five weeks before Pell’s death.
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2 months ago | 
themonthly.com.au | Jonathan Green |Paul Barry |Margaret Simons |Louise Milligan
The respected intellectual’s writing is a reminder of a moral rigour lost to public debate and universities, replaced by populism and culture-war politics I closed the last page of Robert Manne’s memoir with a sense of faint melancholy, and a nostalgia for a public conversation filled by a form of constructive conservatism that, these days, seems lost. His book describes a political discourse that was a thing of moral parameters, rigour, and an earnest search for truth and reason.
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2 months ago | 
themonthly.com.au | Kate Jinx |Paul Barry |Margaret Simons |Louise Milligan
It’s an all too familiar sight: a daughter in a rush, trying to get off the phone with her probing mother. Early on in Payal Kapadia’s sensuous, incandescent second feature All We Imagine as Light, we see Anu (Divya Prabha), a young nurse trying to wrap up such a call, fibbing that she must return to work: “Of course surgeries happen at night! As if a patient’s heart will wait!” But it’s her own heart and those of the two other women the film follows that are in a state of limbo.
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2 months ago | 
themonthly.com.au | Margaret Simons |Paul Barry |Louise Milligan |Don Watson
Is a biennial indigenous festival in Taiwan an attempt to atone for the grim truth of a people’s extinction? The November moon was behind the clouds, a brushstroke of white in the dark, when the first song began. There were flaming torches. An arrow was shot into the east. Four fires burned in the corners of the arena. Then a long line of people, arms interlinked, paced into the ritual grounds, their voices rising in a wave.
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2 months ago | 
themonthly.com.au | Harry Windsor |Paul Barry |Margaret Simons |Louise Milligan
Current Issue Newsletters Podcasts Login Subscribe February 2025 Arts & Letters In the tradition of Australian crime dramas about fatherless young men, the writer-director’s debut feature is a prison film derived from difficult personal experience The father is a presiding absence in Australian cinema.
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2 months ago | 
themonthly.com.au | Shaun Micallef |Paul Barry |Margaret Simons |Louise Milligan
I was about four when I first heard my grandmother use this expression. She kept a couple of toy cars under the couch for her grandchildren to play with. I couldn’t find either of them the day I visited and so I wandered into the kitchen, where she was usually to be found, baking cakes. “Up in any room behind the clock,” was her answer when I asked where the cars were.
Halfway up the hall to the spare rooms I realised that what I’d been told didn’t make sense.
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2 months ago | 
themonthly.com.au | Tara Kenny |Paul Barry |Margaret Simons |Louise Milligan
The much-anticipated return of the series sharply satirising work-life balance is convoluted but still skewers the quiet violence of the corporate world Before his script caught the attention of director Ben Stiller and together they went on to create the lauded sci-fi office drama series Severance, writer Dan Erickson worked at a door company.
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2 months ago | 
themonthly.com.au | Chris Johnston |Paul Barry |Margaret Simons |Louise Milligan
The Chicago indie trio’s new album of infectious weird pop unaffectedly wears its ’80s and ’90s influences on it sleeve Horsegirl is a three-piece indie band from Chicago that formed in 2019 when they were just kids, around 17. A high-school band. It all grew pretty quickly, as history dictates when cool young things with a familiar, super-catchy sound and the right backers start getting written about.
