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CANADA OH CANADA

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28 October 2026  I was amused to read Jonathan Biggin’s piece in the Guardian about being a cultural tour guide because I too have had that experience. Once, but never again. https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2026/oct/27/a-job-that-changed-me-tour-guide-for-seniors-art-lovers?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other When I first started work at Melbourne Theatre Company, we were in debt. A very large debt. I needed to come up with all sorts of ways to raise money to avoid having to have make too many people redundant. We tried cutting costs via decreasing the number of shows we put on but we also needed to find new sources of income. We looked for new sponsors, applied for philanthropic trust grants, put on gala dinners with raffles and auctions built in, and put on one spectacularly large garage sale. And I came up with the idea of taking a group of theatre lovers to Canada with a “donation” built into the cost of the tour. Why Canada, you may ask? The two biggest theatre companies in ...
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DRINKS ON FOREIGN SHORES

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22 October 2026   During my 2023 exploration of Japan, I tasted a variety of drinks:     Plum wine in Tokyo, Kanazawa and Hiroshima     Lots of different sakes included unpasturised, 40% alcohol, 60% alcohol, yuzu and plum     Locally made (and fairly horrible) white wine     Spanish cava that one could buy in small bottles from the equivalent of 711 stores     Even whiskey shots in a Katsuhiro restaurant (where all the food is covered in fine breadcrumbs and served on skewers).  Loretta & Ann & Sake, Tokyo, 2023 In the historic wooden town of Takayama, we visited the oldest remaining sake brewery, Hirase, which had just celebrated its 400 th anniversary.   A ball made of the small, dried branches of a cedar tree is hung to indicate that the building houses a brewery and when the next season’s sake is available a green ball of the same material is hung up to let people know about the new vintage. ...
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THE WORLD OF BUSINESS

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20 October 2026 I was fascinated to read an opinion piece by Chris Marquis in the New York Times called I Teach at a Business School. It’s Time to Shut Them Down : https://www.nytimes.com/2026/10/18/opinion/business-school-mba-harvard-cornell-cambridge.html?unlocked_article_code=1.KFE.6j_-.CxCpHNcCZCny&smid=url-share As someone with a Masters of Business Administration and, to be somewhat boastful, a “gold” medal for being the best MBA graduate of my year, you might think I’d disagree with him but I don’t. He’s reached the conclusion that “business schools don’t just reflect our economic system – they actively manufacture its priorities and normalize its harms, training the future leaders who will design and defend the structure driving our overlapping global crises.” And to add insult to injury, these very schools have impacted on the universities that house them where it’s now difficult to defend the existence or philosophy or history courses in any other terms than student enr...
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WHAT'S HAPPENING IN VICTORIA?

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19 October 2026 Next week, I head to Victoria for my first Board meeting with Malthouse Theatre. It does seem somewhat ironic to join a Board (I had been saying “never again” a lot recently) in Melbourne (yes, I will be subsidising some of my own travel) of a theatre that was always seen as a competitor to Melbourne Theatre Company. But I admire their current leadership team, Dean Bryant and Vivia Hickman, have always been an audience member at Malthouse and it gives me a good excuse to get back to Melbourne to see MTC shows.   However,   I’m rather worried about the world I’m heading to. In an article called “ Portrait of an arts scene on fire ” by Gabriella Coslovich, there’s a list of Victorian arts organisations that have lost state government funding in the last year: -           Writers Victoria -           Australian Print Workshop -       ...
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WHY ARE THE ARTS IMPORTANT?

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19 October 2026 The October edition of The Monthly contains two articles on the perilous state of the arts in Australia: https://www.themonthly.com.au/   They are worth reading in full but I thought I’d capture some of the ideas they contain in this post and the next. In Art for Art’s Sake , Sean Kelly compares countries like Ireland and South Korea, where governments have actively invested in artists and the arts to both deliver better economic outcomes and to enhance their culture, to other countries where “governments – drowning in debt and afraid of citizens they imagine thinking only about their bills – want nothing to do with funding something so obviously superfluous as higher meaning” i.e. the arts. And if governments are prepared to support the arts, then “[a]lgorithmic capitalism has slashed the number of people willing to pay or, or [be] able to find, new and interesting works of art.” And that same “algorithmic capitalism” in the form of AI is stealing the work that ...
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ITALIAN FILM FESTIVAL

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19 October 2026   Sadly, this year’s Italian Film Festival has been somewhat of a disappointment. We seen films about Ovid and love (pretentious with some very unlikeable characters), about prisoners hiking through the woods to find an inspiring tree (quirky and somewhat twee), about a man addicted to Sicilian sweets who turns to religion to get the girl ( irritating homage to the Pope), a biopic about a Nobel prize winning author (tedious), about infidelity and murder (with some uncomfortable scenes involving a young girl), about a trafficking ring (but with some odd narrative choices), about orphans and a circus (too much like other stories but without the wit or wisdom). There was only one that we collectively liked: Sweetheart : a tender film set in a Slician seaside village that reminded me of childhood holidays with older relatives. A story that touches lightly on old heartbreak and new relationships.   Ceafalu, Sicily - 2008 Perhaps our choices were just bad th...
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TOP 100 AUSTRALIAN BOOKS

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18 October 2026 I knew that at least 5 of my Top 10 Australian books submitted to Radio National’s competition wouldn’t be in the Top 100 because they weren’t on the inspiration list to start with. I suspect Susan was the only other person who voted for Elyne Mitchell’s Silver Brumby , a beloved book from our childhood. But that childhood is now so long ago that I didn’t even remember how to spell the author’s name correctly. Others that weren’t going to make it included a book of images of the woodcut prints by Cressida Campbell. Some cooking books turned up in the Top 100 including one of Susan’s votes (the Stephanie Alexander Cookbook )   but not art books.  It was hard to put together such a short list. After all, which Anna Funder book deserved a gig – Wifedom or Stasiland ? Both made it into the Top 100 along with All that I Am . I could have put Robert Hughes The Fatal Shore on but instead I chose two other history bo...
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