Virginia Trioli

1 month ago | abc.net.au | Virginia Trioli

There's something very charming about a pram jam: a jangle of buggies, yawning wide without their usual wiggly passengers, neatly lined up at the edge of the park and inviting a curious question — so, where did all the babies go? Over there! A convention of kids stretching along the edge of a new, green park, sitting neatly on blankets, nibbling decorously on the exquisite little snack boxes their mothers have made them as they all chat in the half-light of a cloudy Osaka morning.

1 month ago | abc.net.au | Virginia Trioli

The plaster warriors line the entrance to artist Tony Albert's rainforest studio, bristling with threat — except, they are only a foot tall, indignantly aiming their spears at my knees. I wince: here is a collection of some of the most awfully familiar, awfully racist bric-a-brac of the suburban 1960s: when white Australians decorated their gardens with figures of "natives", hunting among the hydrangeas.

1 month ago | abc.net.au | Virginia Trioli

Jenny Kee side-eyes me from behind those distinctive, red-rimmed glasses and purses her lips. "Are you going to wear that?" she asks, emphasising "that" in a tone of voice that slices through me, and not for the only time on a several-day shoot for an episode of Creative Types. She's dressed in one of her own intricately detailed patterns of bold black and white.

1 month ago | abc.net.au | Virginia Trioli

Tim Minchin sits beneath the towering glass prow of the Sydney Opera House, the spring sun pouring down on him like a benediction, as he pounds the keys of a grand piano. He's going wild — either barely hanging onto the threads of a musical idea, or masterfully improvising. Either way, we may be in the middle of filming him for an episode of Creative Types, but when Tim is at the piano, the world disappears.

2 months ago | abc.net.au | Virginia Trioli

It was just the kind of thing that the tabloid media loves to call a "cat-fight". Back in the go-go late-80s, when a young Kylie Minogue was hitting the big time with a string of UK and Australian number ones, an equally young Kate Ceberano had something to say about it. In an article in a Melbourne newspaper headlined, "Kate KO's Kylie", Kate said Kylie was nothing more than a marketing success, and that "nobody with any taste buys her records".