LIFE AND TIMES OF....

23 September 2026 A couple of weeks ago I heard a brief radio piece about a woman I’d never heard of although as it turns out, I think I’ve seen her work in the past: Ida Rentoul Outhwaite. Last century, she created utterly charming images of fairies and elves within an Australian context including koala bears and lyrebirds. She published her first book, with her sister as author, when she was 16 in 1904, and in 1916 her work was published in one of Australia’s first fine art books.  But have you heard of her? And the reasons why she faded from favour and lacks recognition are mulitiudinous: She was a woman She was considered an “illustrator” rather than an artist She also did illustrations for commercial companies as well as for books She painted fantasy figures rather than hefty bushman. It was interesting looking at some of the beautiful botanical drawings done by early explorers and colonists in the Eucalyptus exhibition at the Potter Gallery of Art mentioned in a previ...

23 September 2026   I’ve recently spent a weekend in Melbourne (for another celebration of the life of another friend lost) and on advice, went to an exhibition at the Potter Gallery of Art at the University of Melbourne. The gallery itself has been redeveloped and enlarged since I last visited but more impressive than the space itself was Ngarn Wa’ngai - Breathing for Us- Art of the Gum Tree. Having spent weeks in Arnhem Land with its tall slender paperbarks, stringybarks and woollybutts, it was wonderful to be surrounded by images of even more gum trees. Having learnt to identify three last month, I now have 897 more to go. The exhibition is brilliant in its range even though not every piece appealed. There is work by indigenous artists who have a deep, spiritual connection to the trees. There is work by colonist artists who found the gum trees both fascinating and frightening. And then there’s the work of contemporary artists responding to both the beauty of the trees and th...

17 September 2026 I’ve seen many versions of the Scottish Play aka Shakespeare’s Macbeth. You’re not supposed to mention its name in a theatre but as I’m typing this into the Cloud, I’ll be brave and call it as it is. I’ve seen MTC’s production with Jai Courtney directed by Simon Phillips as well as cut down versions we did for our Education program. I’ve seen an interesting take on Lady Macbeth called Macbeth: an Undoing  at Malthouse. I’ve seen the brilliant New York warehouse performance piece based on Macbeth called Sleep No More . I’ve seen an utterly terrible production, unfortunately in Edinburgh. And I’ve seen the impressive Noongar language version of the play in the 2020 Perth Festival. And then there are film versions such as the NT Live production starring David Tennant and Cush Jumbo. But I’ve never seen a ballet based on Macbeth. After all, Shakespeare is all about words, isn’t he? But then one has to remember that those words are about emotions and relatioinships and...

25 September 2026. The Guardian reviewer hated the London production. Said it squandered The Greatest Showman hits, that it lacked a knockout performance, that the narrative was ‘gossamer thin’, that the performances were ‘fairly standard circus stuff’ and gave it 2 stars. But Susan and I loved Come Alive, a circus performance based around the songs from the film starring Hugh Jackman, The Greatest Showman. I’ve seen many circus performances from Ashtons to Circus Oz, from Circa to Cirque dU Soleil, over many decades and this was one of the best. I’m writing about this in advance of some posts from my recent trip to Melbourne because if you are reading this in Perth, you still have a chance to see Come Alive. It finishes on 10 October and for readers elsewhere, there are seasons to come in Adelaide, Brisbane and Melbourne. The show is under a big top at Crown Perth but there’s also a smaller tent with entertainment before the show starts including singers and a magician who did t...

23 September 2026 You still have a few days left to vote in the ABC Top 100 Australian Books: https://www.abc.net.au/listen/radionational/countdown/top100books I confess that deciding on my top 10 books was a particularly difficult task. Firstly, I scoured my bookshelves to see what I’d kept after the big cull in 2025 when we packed up our Melbourne house. That, I hoped, would tell me what I really valued. Then I checked both my old Goodreads account and my newer Libib account to see what books I’d given 5 stars to in the last 10 years or so. Then I perused the list of books that the ABC has listed to provide inspiration. But my list was more like 100 than 10. So how to cull? What got excluded? Should I choose any of Charmain Clift’s books or the brilliant biography of her life by Nadia Wheately? Are any of the rural noir books or even the city noir books by authors such as Jane Harper, Garry Disher or Peter Temple great enough to go on the list? Let alone the charming Kerry Gr...

16 September 2026 For decades I’ve resisted making critical comments about theatre because such views could so easily have been assigned to Melbourne Theatre Company itself rather than me. Even now, I feel somewhat queasy about criticising the well-meaning work of playwrights and directors, actors and designers. But I can’t let Day (after Day) in the Life of the Useless pass without comment. Why? Because before I went there were two extreme views. A dear friend’s comment after seeing it was blunt: “bloody dreadful.” But then the reviewer from Limelight, an eminently respectable arts journal, gave it 4 stars calling it “consistently funny and well written”.   Who was right? And the answer is my theatre loving friend. As for well written, was it a play about AI and its impact on us as humans? Was it an Absurdist comedy? Was it a sad story of a man who keeps making bad decisions? What was it actually about? And as for comedy, I don’t think the occasional tiny burst of laughter fro...

11 September 2026 I have to confess that I’ve never read any of David Malouf’s work but when I saw that local actor Humphrey Bower was performing a version of one of his novels, I decided to give it a go. There were just a couple of performances as part of the City of Melville Storylines Festival and it was a complete bargain at $12 for Seniors which included a glass of sparkling rose!! I knew nothing about the story of An Imaginary Life which turns out to be of Ovid, the Roman poet’s, exile to a small village on the Black Sea. His exile is particularly painful because he doesn’t speak the language and the culture is completely different to cosmopolitan Rome. I won’t tell you the story in case you want to read the book but in many ways it feels like a metaphor for Australian colonists and indigenous communities. In one, the language reflects the need to analyse and explain whereas in the other, it’s a matter of observing and being in the landscape. Humphrey worked with Pavan Kuma...

10 September 2026 Waleed Aly has written the most recent Quarterly Essay reflecting on the responses of both the right and the left to Liberalism – the politics of John Stuart Mill and the economics of Adam Smith and their followers over the centuries. They are the politics and economics that underpin many aspects of democracies such as ours.   In his view, right-wing populists are opposed to Liberalism because they view the world as being run by progressive elites (from universities, bureaucracies, cultural organisations) who are seen to undermine traditional views of family and working class culture. The left-wing “woke” activists object to Liberalism’s focus on individualism because the individuals in power tend to be cis, white, males who oppress groups that aren’t like them. Although Aly acknowledges that Liberalism has achieved great things from the abolition of slavery to bring millions of people out of poverty, he worries whether it can withstand the extreme forces of left ...

The other aspect of indigenous life that we didn’t experience was life for young people. The petrol sniffing epidemic of the late 1990s and early 2000s has all but disappeared but from what we heard, there is still the challenge of trying to live in two worlds - to pursue education and employment opportunities which are usually somewhere else, out of community, and then how much time can be spent/does one wants to spend learning the land. There was a powerful statement about this in the 2026 National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Awards (NATSIAA) exhibition on show in Darwin from women in the Ampilawatja community in the centre of the Northern Territory but I’m sure at applies north as well: “ We worry about the future of our Country and our culture. We are strong women who hold the knowledge and tradition of bush medicine and culture. We learnt from our mothers and grandmothers and grandmothers before, knowledge handed down to keep women’s knowledge strong. Our children ...

Conintuing the story of Arnhem Land....where did we go? Before I launch into our itinerary, I should explain that we went on a tour because the idea of driving all those kilometres through an almost human-free landscape is not my idea of a holiday. The only company that is given permission by the indigenous owners to drive through Arnhem Land and lease land for lodges is Outback Spirit https://www.outbackspirittours.com.au/tours/arnhem-land-wilderness-adventure/  . We were a group of six couples, four widowers, two groups of two female friends, Susan and me, plus a brilliant driver/guide Chris. He made the tour work on many different levels - skilled driver, knowledgeable about indigenous culture, bird fancier and all-round story-teller about the land. And a decent human being. The group itself had (I estimate) an average age of 75 with Susan, the youngest on the bus. But if that makes you think of a group of old crocks, some were more nimble than us and all had actively chosen ...

As usual, I have created a newsletter to cover my recent trip to Arnhem Land so if you haven't already read it, it will follow in three parts. Arnhem Land Newsletter Outback Spirit Tour, August-September 2026 Some of you have already explored parts of Arnhem Land but for those who haven’t, let me save you having to ask Google AI about it with a brief summary.   Arnhem Land is 97,000 square kilometres, about the same size as Portugal or Hungary. Its total population is only 16-17,000 people most of whom are Yolŋu (east) or Bininj (west) Traditional Owners. The biggest town, Nhulunbuy, has a population of 3,600 people. And in just one part of this area, North East Arnhem Land, 40-60 languages and dialects are spoken plus more that have been lost. And these people live in a world where much of the land is flooded for 3-4 months a year during the wet season. I used to say that the 800km drive north from Karratha to Broome where you see just two buildings was desolate but the 420km driv...