The foremost challenge of our time remains the passing of Jewish ethnicity, the idea that Jews are automatically joined at the hip by language, history and memory ... Without doubt that era is gone ... The age of ethnicity has become the age of fractured identity, where we struggle to decide what aspect of identity takes priority and when.

Rabbi Lawrence Hoffman¹

For most of my life I have thought of myself as a secular Jew; fascinated by the turbulent history of the Jews, not part of synagogue life. All that changed in 2012. We were living in Goulburn, New South Wales, at the time. My husband was on the point of retirement and we were about to move back to Victoria. During winter, influenza and then pneumonia raged through the town; some people died. Despite being vaccinated, I too succumbed. One morning, I was convinced that someone had placed a ton of concrete on my chest. Something had. My next memory is of waking during the night in hospital in an isolation room, hooked up to tubes and monitors. A man was sleeping in an armchair next to the bed. I recognised him as the doctor who had admitted me, hours, days, years ago. I learnt later that he had been there most of that night pumping antibiotics into me.

‘You’re a lucky woman,’ he said. ‘During the worst of this you were trying to remember a Jewish prayer. I think you may have unfinished business. By the way, you don’t have much in the way of white blood cells. Neutropenia is endemic amongst Sephardic Jews. Your husband tells me you’re Dutch. Up to you now to figure out the jigsaw.’

Australia’s politicians may be too mired in power skirmishes to notice that 31 October 2017 marked the five-hundredth anniversary of Martin Luther’s trumpet blast of the Reformation: the posting of the Ninety-Five Theses, his ‘Disputation on the Power of Indulgences’, on the bulletin board of a castle church in the provincial university town of Wittenberg. Pity. Even self-serving men might learn, from one of history’s most brusquely eloquent and determined figures, how to bring about change while remaining steadfast – and shrewd – in the face of hydra-headed opposition and mortal risk.

To celebrate the year’s memorable plays, films, concerts, operas, ballets, and exhibitions, we invited twenty-six critics and arts professionals to nominate some personal favourites.

Robyn Archer

While the original production of Saul (ABR Arts, 3/17), directed by Barrie Kosky, was made in Europe, this version included several Australian singers, a local chorus, and the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra. Christopher Purves in the lead role was superb.

Christopher Lowrey as David (top) and Christopher Purves as Saul (in front) in Saul at the 2017 Adelaide Festival (photograph by Tony Lewis)

I include David Hockney: Current (NGV) for a number of reasons. While I constantly advocate appropriate support for living artists in all genres, the visual art ‘contemporary’ bandwagon begs interrogation. Hockney said, ‘All art is contemporary, if it’s alive: and if it’s not alive, what’s the point of it?’  I’d argue that there’s as much alive in old stuff as there is in the new – and as much corpsed and pointless in the new as in the old.

Confessing bias (I was the MC and performed in it), I mention The Coming Back Out Ball (Melbourne Town Hall) not for the night itself, which was a moving hoot, but for the three-year project. Tristan is a terrific creator/performer but this work showed his dedication to the social issues facing elderly LGBTIQ people, and showcased the special ability of the arts to bring hard societal material into a joyous and celebratory space.

Ian Dickson

In a strong year for theatre, Lucy Kirkwood’s Chimerica (ABR Arts, 3/17) stood out. Kip Williams’s production matched the scale and sweep of Kirkwood’s enthralling play. Banished from the Opera House, Opera Australia presented two works in concert form. Nicole Car and Étienne Dupuis made an exciting pair of protagonists in Massenet’s Thaïs (ABR Arts, 7/17). Good though the much-heralded Jonas Kaufmann was as the eponymous Parsifal, the performance (ABR Arts 8/17) was dominated by Kwangchul Youn’s Gurnemanz. Best of all was the sound of the Opera Australia Orchestra, finally liberated from underneath the stage of the Joan Sutherland Theatre.

Terence Davies’ biopic of Emily Dickinson, A Quiet Passion (ABR Arts, 6/17) could have been a sombre affair, but Davies and the magnificent Cynthia Nixon found the humour and resilience in the belle of Amherst.

Cynthia Nixon and Joanna Bacon in A Quiet Passion (Palace Films)

Rosalind Appleby

I’ve been brooding all year on the metaphors in Dmitry Krymov’s Opus 7 (Perth Festival). The production was a requiem for lives obliterated by the Nazi and Soviet regimes. Puppetry, mime, dance, string, cardboard, and buckets of black paint constructed an immersive journey underpinned by the swagger and pathos of Shostakovich’s music. Lost & Found’s innovative Trouble in Tahiti was similarly provocative, presented so physically and emotionally close to the audience that the work took on an uncomfortable personal resonance. The opera was set in a home in Perth’s affluent western suburbs, where Bernstein’s critique of consumerism and silver screens couldn’t have been clearer to the audience watching with voyeuristic fascination from the patio. In contrast, the rippling energy of WA Opera’s The Merry Widow was sheer fun. A young, versatile cast premièred Graham Murphy’s beautiful, dance-infused production where every act was a party fizzing with romance and comedy.

Harry Windsor

The best local features I saw this year were comedies, not a genre we do well often. But Pork Pie, a remake of Kiwi classic Goodbye Pork Pie (1981), directed by the son of the original film’s director, and Ali’s Wedding, directed by tyro Jeffrey Walker, were confident exceptions, deftly made charmers bursting with colour and a very Antipodean strain of self-importance-busting humour. In terms of international fare, the most affecting film I saw was Katell Quillévéré’s Heal the Living (Réparer les vivants). Set in Paris, it’s the story of a heart transplant seen from every angle: from the point of view of the donor and his grieving parents, the recipient and her frightened sons, and the hospital staff who trundle between them. It features the scene of the year, in which three teenage boys go surfing: a hypnotic symphony of music and image that rousingly celebrates a life being lived joyously, shortly before it’s snuffed out.

Heal the Living (Playtime)

Des Cowley

There were many memorable performances by jazz and improvising musicians throughout 2017. Two that stood out incorporated strong visual and theatrical elements. Pianist and composer Erik Griswold partnered with the Australian Art Orchestra and visiting musicians from China and Singapore to perform his extended suite Water Pushes Sand at Jazzlab. The dramatic work, which features both traditional Sichuan melodies and jazz improvisation, was highlighted by Zheng Sheng Li’s startling ‘face changing’ dance. Composer and multi-instrumentalist Adam Simmons’s The Usefulness of Art (ABR Arts, 8/17), performed by a large ensemble at fortyfivedownstairs, similarly incorporated theatrical costume and design to heighten the power of this impassioned music. The Melbourne International Jazz Festival (ABR Arts, 6/17) was distinguished by the first Australian appearance by pianist Carla Bley, who, aged eighty-one, demonstrated why she is considered one of jazz’s finest composers.

Adam Simmonds and his ensemble perform The Usefulness of Art at  fortyfivedownstairs (photograph by Sarah Walker)

In a year that included many films, I continue to be haunted by Andrey Zvyagintsev’s Loveless, an excoriating vision of contemporary Russia. Raoul Peck’s powerful documentary on James Baldwin, I Am Not Your Negro (ABR Arts, 9/17), confirmed that the writer’s words remain as powerful today as when first published.

Anwen Crawford

Robin Campillo’s BPM – an urgent recreation of AIDS activism in Paris during the early 1990s – felt resonant and still timely. BPM won the Grand Prix and the Queer Palm at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, but seemed to fly under the radar at the Melbourne International Film Festival. Other MIFF highlights included Maud Alpi’s Still Life and Sergei Loznitsa’s Austerlitz, two experimental documentaries that investigate how we confront – or fail to confront – killing on an industrial scale. The former film is set inside a slaughterhouse; the latter takes Holocaust tourism as its subject. On a lighter note, Kelly Fremon Craig’s The Edge of Seventeen was a cut above the usual coming-of-age dramedy. Kelly Reichardt’s acutely observed Certain Women and Barry Jenkins’s exquisite Moonlight (ABR Arts, 1/17) both reached local screens at last; two gifted directors, two contemporary masterpieces.

Alex Hibbert and Mahershala Ali in Moonlight (Roadshow Films, photograph by David Bornfriend)

Andrew Ford

I didn’t expect much from Myuran Sukumaran: Another Day in Paradise (Sydney Festival), but was deeply moved by the evidence of his burgeoning talent. He was a real artist – obsessed and hard-working. Had he not been executed, he might have become a very good one. Also in the festival, Mary Finsterer’s Biographica was full of fine music. The actor protagonist was distracting – shouting to be heard above the singers of Sydney Chamber Opera and players of Ensemble Offspring – so I blotted him out. As a result, I can’t tell you exactly what the opera was about, but it sounded magnificent.

At WOMADelaide, The Manganiyar Classroom called to me across a crowded park. I knew nothing about it in advance, but couldn’t move until it was over. I live in the country with a seven-year-old daughter, so don’t get too much. Together, we saw Disney’s Moana at the Bowral Empire. It’s rather good. To get the full effect, watch it in a cinema next to a child trembling with excitement.

John Allison

Coincidentally, Austria provided my two most thrilling opera experiences in 2017. The Landestheater Linz’s staging of Hindemith’s Die Harmonie der Welt vindicated a great rarity by this now sadly unfashionable composer. The hit of the Salzburg Festival was the artist–director William Kentridge’s staging of Wozzeck, an unusually satisfying realisation of Berg’s masterpiece. Several of the best concerts in Britain this year have often come courtesy of Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla, the new music director of the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra. Her free-thinking flair makes her the most exciting thing to have happened to the CBSO since Simon Rattle.

The cast of Wozzeck (Salzburger Festspiele, photograph by Ruth Walz)

While not wanting to appear unserious about my work, I cheerfully admit to planning reviewing trips around art exhibitions. My most memorable show away from this year’s international blockbusters was at Bucharest’s National Gallery, where its brilliantly curated exploration of Romanian socialist realist art – Art for the People? 1948–1965 – proved fascinating to someone interested in Balkan culture.

Michael Halliwell

Pride of place goes to Brett Dean’s Hamlet (ABR Arts, 6/17), which premièred at Glyndebourne with an all-Australian creative team. A taut, musically mesmerising version of this highly challenging play makes it one of the most significant new operas in recent years. For my second choice I conflate two recent London productions: Girl from the North Country and Woyzeck in Winter (ABR Arts, 9/17). The first incorporates lesser-known songs from Bob Dylan into a searing melodrama by Conor McPherson, while Woyzeck, adapted and directed by Conall Morrison, conflates the play with Schubert’s Winterreise. Both extend the boundaries of the so-called ‘jukebox musical’, fusing Steinbeck with Brecht.

Jacques Imbrailo, John Tomlinson and Allan Clayton in Hamlet at the 2017 Glyndebourne Festival Opera (photograph by Richard Hubert Smith)

Finally, a Sydney production (Hayes Theatre Co) of Stephen Sondheim’s Assassins, directed by Dean Bryant, gives a welcome outing to this neglected work. A cast of young singers led by David Campbell provided an evening of unfailing energy and vivid characterisation. The performance I saw was coloured by the Las Vegas shootings a few days before. America and its guns – nothing changes!

Lee Christofis

Men in a state of meltdown dominate my two top dance shows this year: The Winter’s Tale, from London’s Royal Ballet, at QPAC (ABR Arts, 7/17); and Cockfight, by Joshua Thomson, Gavin Webber, and tiny Gold Coast company The Farm, at Dance Massive, Melbourne. Created by British choreographer Christopher Wheeldon and composer Joby Talbot, Winter’s Tale is the best dance drama to appear here in decades. Edward Watson, as the deranged Leontes, King of Sicilia, led a superlative cast in a strange story of deranged jealousy, brutal injustice, and gentle redemption. Cockfight is a hyper-kinetic contact improvisation work about a dysfunctional manager (Webber), who taunts and nearly kills a younger, smarter job applicant (Thomson) in a battle of wit and will. Seduction, lies, threats, and rage take dangerous flight across a sterile office. Each object, especially the phone cord, becomes a weapon as they fight for supremacy. Too brutal to watch, too funny to miss, this was Aussie Grand Guignol at its best.

Francesca Hayward and Steven McRae in The Royal Ballet's The Winter's Tale (photograph by Stewart Tyrell)

Will Yeoman

Beyond Caravaggio at London’s National Gallery was impressive but also slightly oppressive. Stepping from this gloomy world into the blazing Australian and southern French sunshine of the Australia’s Impressionists (National Gallery) showing at the same time made a strong impression.

Back in Perth, the highlight of PIAF’s Beethoven and Beyond, with the LA-based Calder Quartet, was Brahms’s Clarinet Quintet, with local clarinettist Ashley Smith: a performance characterised by subtle and exquisite balance and phrasing, with Smith’s floating, plangent tone and deeply expressive playing matched by the Calder’s unerring instinct for light and shade. I enjoyed Terence Davies’ masterful biopic of Emily Dickinson, A Quiet Passion, Lost and Found’s innovative, witty production of Leonard Bernstein’s Trouble in Tahiti, mounted in a private home, and a sublime Mahler Fifth from WASO under chief conductor Asher Fisch, who, it appears, can do no wrong.

Morag Fraser

I Am Not Your Negro is the work of art to heed in 2017. Directed by Raoul Peck and narrated by Samuel L. Jackson, the film is artfully compiled – a model documentary. But it is James Baldwin – that mobile face and inimitable voice – who is the compelling, prophetic presence, as provocative and unanswerable now as he was when he uttered these confronting words: ‘The story of the Negro in America is the story of America. And it’s not a pretty picture.’

I am Not Your Negro (Madman Entertainment)

Baltimore offers guided tours of The Wire’s bleak territory, but its Museum of Art revealed another side of this intriguing, evolving city when it mounted a grand comparative exhibition of works by Henri Matisse and Richard Diebenkorn (many of the Matisses came into the Museum’s collection courtesy of Baltimore’s redoubtable and philanthropic Cone Sisters). The art was breathtaking, and the documentation – encompassing both artists’ lifelong shuttle between representation and abstraction, and the subtlety of Matisse’s influence on the Californian – a curatorial triumph.

Zoltán Szabó

Two highlights came from the same genre: opera, presented by different companies. Neither work was staged, thus the artistic impression was entirely musical. In June, Pelléas et Mélisande (ABR Arts, 6/17) by Claude Debussy was performed in Sydney for the first time since 1998. At the helm of the SSO, Charles Dutoit led a mostly native French-speaking cast with restrained passion and boundless sensitivity. Debussy’s opera was much influenced by Wagner’s music dramas, so it was fitting that the latter composer’s Parsifal made a long-awaited return to the Opera House. Pinchas Steinberg conducted the excellent cast, where primus inter pares Kwangchul Youn’s mesmerising performance stood out in the role of Gurnemanz as much as Jonas Kaufmann’s singing of the eponymous hero.

Pelléas et Mélisande (Sydney Symphony Orchestra, photograph by Darren Leigh Roberts)

A final memorable experience came from Tokyo, where András Schiff (who will visit Australia in October 2018) offered a thought-provoking and terrific juxtaposition of the penultimate sonatas of Mozart, Haydn, and Beethoven (ABR Arts, 3/17).

Tony Grybowski

With the closure of the Joan Sutherland Theatre, Opera Australia grasped the opportunity to present opera in different venues across Sydney. One of these experiences was a concert presentation of Wagner’s Parsifal. It was a treat to see the Opera Australia Orchestra (usually hidden in the pit) shine on the stage of the Concert Hall.

Every five years the German town of Kassel is transformed into a magnet for lovers of contemporary art. At documenta 14, founded after World War II as a way to enable artists to join and express a voice to help rebuild a nation, it is exciting to see Australian artists on an international stage. This year, three Australians were represented: Gordon Hookey, Dale Harding, and Bonita Ely, all presenting large scale work that drew on narratives involving displacement, ecological destruction, and oral traditions of Aboriginal communities.

Bangarra Dance Theatre’s major 2017 production, Bennelong, by Stephen Page took the company to a new level – compelling and captivating with beautiful movement, dance, design, and a wonderful score by Steve Francis.

Beau Dean Riley Smith (centre) in Bennelong (Bangarra Dance Theatre, photograph by Daniel Boud)

Susan Lever

After Nina Stemme’s and Stuart Skelton’s heart-stopping performance of Tristan und Isolde with the TSO in Hobart (ABR Arts, 11/16), concert opera performances were again high points of this year. Opera Australia’s Parsifal was glorious, but OA’s concert version of Thaïs was delightful in a different way, with the energetic young singers Nicole Car and Étienne Depuis clearly enjoying singing Massenet’s melodic music together in the warm atmosphere of the Sydney Town Hall.

I saw two exceptional theatre productions: first, Bell Shakespeare’s thrilling interpretation of Richard 3 (ABR Arts, 3/17), with Kate Mulvany; second, New Theatre’s revival of Dorothy Hewett’s The Chapel Perilous. The young performers of this play, especially Julia Christensen in the lead, found both the poetry and political power in Hewett’s classic. It was an intelligent and engaging production. If only more people had known about it.

Tim Byrne

Apart from Malthouse Theatre’s sensitive but radical production of Michael Gow’s Away (ABR Arts, 2/17) and some magnificent local choreography in Australian Ballet’s Symphony in C, this year’s best work came from sublime interpretations of major international work. Kate Mulvany was so poised and savage, so damaged and damaging as Richard III for Bell Shakespeare that she seemed born for the role. It was the most impressive performance of the year.

MTC’s production of Annie Baker’s John (ABR Arts, 2/17) was perfect; complex and meticulous, it used its cultural specificity to universal effect, and contained riveting performances from Helen Morse and Melita Jurišić. Sarah Goodes has quickly established herself as one of the country’s finest directors.

Johnny Carr, Helen Morse, and Melita Jurišić in Melbourne Theatre Company's John (photograph by Jeff Busby)

Gary Abrahams’s extraordinary rendition of Tony Kushner’s Angels in America at fortyfivedownstairs, with Morse joining a stellar ensemble, was so compassionate, so articulate, it seemed like a totally contemporary play. Galvanising and angry, it was theatre as a monumental political act.

Barney Zwartz

Two near-perfect performances: one an opera, one by an opera singer led 2017. Listening to brilliant bass Ferruccio Furlanetto singing Russian songs by Rachmaninov and Mussorgsky in the glorious acoustic of the Melbourne Recital Centre in October was like watching a Ferrari in a go-kart rink: far too much power for the arena, with a purring richness that was seldom extended, but the interest was in the incredible delicacy and control, the fine tunings and shadings, the intimacy, the emotional conviction. Opera Australia’s concert performance of Parsifal, with superstars Jonas Kaufman and Michelle deYoung, and another massive bass in Kwangchul Youn, was mesmerising. Honourable mentions go to Victorian Opera’s beautifully crafted and performed production of Janáček’s Cunning Little Vixen (ABR Arts, 6/17), Opera Australia’s ambitious and deeply satisfying account of Szymanowski’s King Roger (ABR Arts, 1/17), and the MSO’s concert performance of Massenet’s lyrical opera Thaïs (ABR Arts, 8/17), with Erin Wall in the title role.

Cunning Little Vixen (Victorian Opera, photograph by Jeff Busby)

Brian McFarlane

It’s a large claim, but I suspect that Simon Phillips’s production of Macbeth (ABR Arts, 6/17) is the best I have ever seen. In a contemporary military setting, it never struck a jarring note as it melded two eras. Without interval, it made remorseless the rise and tragic fall of its eponym.

So many films clamour for mention that it is hard to limit my choice to three. In the part-Australian feature, Lion (ABR Arts, 1/17) first-time director Garth Davis showed himself admirably versatile as well as compassionate in dealing first with the child’s agonising loss and then in rendering the decent feelings of the foster parents without descending into sentimentality. Loving, the UK/US drama of interracial marriage and its ensuing legal struggles, was note-perfect in its retelling of a poignant, ultimately triumphant, real-life story. As for ‘real-life’, Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk is a stunning recreation of this ‘finest hour’ in all its chaos and courage.

Nicole Kidman, David Wenham, and Sunny Pawar in Lion (Transmission Films)

Peter Rose

Nothing quite matched Pierre-Laurent Aimard’s phenomenal 2016 Messiaen recital (absurdly overlooked in the Helpmann Awards) or the TSO’s Tristan und Isolde concert, with Stuart Skelton and Nina Stemme, but there were some memorable performances. Two Hamlets I saw in June couldn’t have been more different: Brett Dean’s brilliant new opera at Glyndebourne, with an exceptional cast of singers, many of whom will return for the Adelaide Festival. Then came Robert Icke’s version of the play, with Andrew Scott’s searching, mystified prince cogitating his way through the soliloquys.

I relished Kip Williams’s revival of Caryl Churchill’s Cloud Nine (ABR Arts, 7/17), brilliantly mounted, hilarious in places, and featuring a memorable performance from Heather Mitchell.

Heather Mitchell and Josh McConville in Sydney Theatre Company’s Cloud Nine (photograph by Daniel Boud)

And films? Sally Hawkins deserves an Oscar for her role as the eccentric painter Maud Lewis in Aisling Walsh’s underrated Maudie: physical acting at its best. James Baldwin, in the superbly edited documentary I Am Not Your Negro, makes present-day orators look like pygmies. Baldwin’s message, fifty years on, remains incensingly topical.

Leo Schofield

At the Edinburgh International Festival, I heard an unforgettable concert performance of Die Walküre, with a superb line-up of singers, including Bryn Terfel, Christine Goerke, Simon O’Neill, Amber Wagner, and Karen Cargill, plus the Royal Scottish Orchestra under Andrew Davis. A week or so later, Opera Australia came up with a magnificent concert Parsifal, with Jonas Kaufmann, Michelle deYoung, Michael Honeyman, Warwick Fyfe, the mighty Korean bass Kwangchul Youn, and the Opera orchestra and chorus under Pinchas Steinberg. If anything, this was musically finer than the Edinburgh performance, the half dozen Sydney Flower Maidens easily outsinging their eight Scottish Valkyrie sisters.

Michael Honeyman, Kwangchul Youn, Jonas Kaufmann, Pinchas Steinberg, and Michelle DeYoung in Opera Australia's Parsifal (photograph by Keith Saunders)

Other unforgettable events were the Brisbane season of the Royal Ballet and the open-air gala in Cairns; Daniil Trifonov’s dazzling solo recital at Angel Place; the ACO’s concert with the spotlight on Sätü Vanska, Timo-Veikko Valve, and Glenn Christensen; the Adelaide Festival trifecta of Glyndebourne’s smashing Saul, the third and by far the finest incarnation of The Secret River, and Lars Eidinger’s in your face Richard III. The once-great Adelaide Festival had finally its mojo back.

Diana Simmonds

In March I wrote, ‘Three of the most memorable musical experiences of my life have happened in Adelaide: Elke Neidhardt’s production of Wagner’s Ring, the State Opera of South Australia’s Cloudstreet, and now the Armfield–Healy Adelaide Festival’s offering of Barrie Kosky’s Saul.’ Meanwhile, in Sydney, independent theatre has been spectacular, with Siren Theatre’s The Trouble With Harry, and Dorothy Hewett’s The Chapel Perilous. Musical theatre hub Hayes Theatre Co thrilled with Paul Capsis in Cabaret, Virginia Gay in Calamity Jane, and Emma Matthews in Melba. The rise of Red Line at the Old Fitz continued; outstanding were Doubt: A Parable, the beautiful 4:48 Psychosis, a new work from Louis Nowra: This Much Is True (ABR Arts, 7/17), and a breakout performance from Gabrielle Scawthorn in The Village Bike. Women dominated the landscape: Kate Mulvany as Richard 3, Genevieve Lemon in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, Helen Thomson in Hir, and Heather Mitchell in Cloud Nine.

Ben Brooker

Like almost everyone who saw it, I was blown away by Glyndebourne Festival Opera’s Saul, the Barrie Kosky-directed centrepiece of this year’s Adelaide Festival. The return of Adelaide’s prodigal son did not disappoint, proving a feast for all the senses. Also in this year’s Festival was Wot? No Fish!! (ABR Arts, 3/17), as intimate as Saul was epic. Based around sketches made by his great-uncle, a working-class East End Jew, British writer–performer Danny Braverman’s simply and sparklingly adumbrated family history moved me deeply. Mr Burns, a co-production by STCSA and Belvoir, brought American playwright Anne Washburn’s 2012 post-apocalyptic play, ostensibly about The Simpsons, to vivid life in a production directed by Imara Savage. I must mention Lucy Kirkwood, the young British playwright whose uncommonly ambitious dramas The Children and Chimerica I was fortunate enough to see in London and Sydney respectively. I’m excited about MTC’s production of The Children next year.

Danny Braverman in Wot? No Fish!! at the 2017 Adelaide Festival (photograph by Tony Lewis)

Christopher Menz

Fred Williams in the You Yangs (ABR Arts, 10/17), at the Geelong Gallery, was a model exhibition of one of Australia’s greatest artists. A judicious and thoughtfully displayed selection of just over sixty works – oil paintings, prints, gouaches – highlighted his best work from the 1960s.

Opera Australia’s concert performance of Parsifal, with a superb cast under the impressive baton of Pinchas Steinberg, was electrifying and showed how well Wagner’s music dramas present in the concert hall. Angela Hewitt (ABR Arts, 5/17) was in dazzling form during her Musica Viva tour, with intelligent, balanced programs including works by Scarlatti, Ravel, and Chabrier, as well as the obligatory Bach: this time, selected partitas.

Angela Hewitt (photograph by Keith Saunders)

Michael Shmith

For various reasons, Melbourne Lyric Opera’s production of Monteverdi’s L’incoronazione di Poppea (The Coronation of Poppea) was one of my highlights of the year. As I wrote at the time, ‘the work itself is hard-edged – in soap-opera terms, more pumice stone than Palmolive. Accordingly, it duly received a swift and sinewy performance, keenly driven by [artistic director] Pat Miller, who conducted from the keyboard.’

Damian Whiteley in Lyric Opera of Melbourne's The Coronation of Poppea (photography by Sara Walker)

The National Gallery of Victoria’s monumental exhibition of almost 180 works by Katsushika Hokusai elevated him far above his self-deprecatory summary, ‘Old man mad about drawing’. In fact, the exhibition made one as eternally grateful to the NGV’s Felton Bequest as it did for the eternally fecund genius of Hokusai. Thanks to Alfred Felton (old man mad about art?), a woodblock print of Hokusai’s most famous work, The great wave off Kanagawa 1830–34 has been in the Gallery’s possession for 108 years.

Kim Williams

Whilst there have been many pleasures this year in music, film, and opera, there were three pieces of standout Australian theatre, all conceptually large and all produced by the STC. Lucy Kirkwood’s Chimerica and Caryl Churchill’s Cloud Nine were both directed by Kip Williams. The other was a memorable revival of Neil Armfield’s production of Andrew Bovell’s The Secret River at the Adelaide Festival. The Secret River and Chimerica had substantial casts, all too rare on the Australian mainstage in today’s straitened times for the arts. Both were cinematic in their sweep, superbly acted and designed, and hauntingly dramatic. Cloud Nine, one of Churchill’s greatest works, is another reminder as to why she is one of the theatre’s true creative imaginations and a leader. Each play is relevant to today’s polemics on human rights, diversity, and reconciliation. We have much reason to be thankful to Williams, Armfield, their casts and creative teams for making theatre that matters.

Another major personal moment was the Sam Mendes’s London production of Jez Butterworth’s The Ferryman – a cast of twenty-one in an intimate but sweeping piece which was emotionally and politically shattering.

Chimerica (Sydney Theatre Company, photograph by Brett Boardman)

Andrea Goldsmith

Thirty years ago I saw Anthony Sher play Richard III. It was a memorable portrayal, one which became the Richard for me. When I read that Bell Shakespeare had cast a woman in the role, I was, frankly, appalled, dismissing it as part of the current trend of having female actors play Shakespeare’s major male roles. How wrong I was. It was a superb production. Kate Mulvany’s Richard was utterly compelling and showed him as wily and evil as well as humorous and seductive. Mulvany played the king in a way that revealed nuances of his character I’d never seen before. One of Bell Shakespeare’s best.

Kate Mulvany in Richard 3 (Bell Shakespeare, photograph by Prudence Upton)

It’s a risky business revisiting old loves. In April, Patti Smith, performed the songs from Horses, her best-known album, originally released in 1975. By the end of the first song, I was on my feet, seized by the familiar music and Smith’s irresistible performance, and so I remained until the music died away. Patti Smith is seventy, she’s still creating, and she is magnificent. At home I dusted off my LP and prolonged the pleasure.

On learning that the premise of Peter Carey’s new novel involved a test of automobile reliability on a round trip across Australia, my first response was to dismiss it as a thin conceit for encompassing the country’s remoter landscape within a work of the imagination. The internet, however, quickly delivered old Pathé newsreels revealing not only that this Redex Trial was a demonstrable historical event, but also that no less than 50,000 people showed up at Sydney Showground to see the cars off on their cross-country journey. Truth, indeed, can sometimes seem stranger than fiction. Didn’t they have anything better to do, even in 1954?

Like Wonder Woman loping across a battlefield, arms raised, bracelets repelling bullets, Laurie Penny charges boldly into the culture wars. In Bitch Doctrine, we traverse trigger warnings, misogynistic trolls, sex work, commodity feminism, gender identity, transphobia, free speech, nerd entitlement, left-wing rape apologists, and toxic masculinity, exemplified by the rise of Donald Trump.

Naturally, ‘Orange Hitler’ gets some of Penny’s best lines. He is ‘a lacquered, lying sack of personality disorders’, and the 2016 US election campaign resembled ‘a wet dream that David Lynch might have had after falling asleep watching Fox News’. Wit is an essential part of the armour worn by Penny, a young, British, ‘genderqueer’ feminist. ‘Some of my best friends truly are straight, white men,’ she assures us late in this book. ‘Sometimes we do straight white men things together, like eating undercooked barbecue meat and scratching ourselves in front of Top Gear.’

Arts Issue

Peter Corrigan (photograph by John Gollings, image courtesy of Matthew Corrigan)Readers of ABR – and our contributors in particular – appreciate how much cultural philanthropy has transformed this magazine in recent years. Generous donations from well over two hundred ABR Patrons have enabled us to diversify our programs, broaden our content, and pay writers much better than we were able to do in the past.

Recently, the magazine received its most generous bequest to date from Melbourne architect and theatre designer Peter Corrigan AM – a long-time reader of ABR. After studying at Yale University in 1969 and working for Philip Johnson and others in New Haven, he returned to Australia in 1974 and created the architectural pratice Edmond and Corrigan with his wife, Maggie Edmond. He taught at RMIT University for more than thirty years and was a Professor of Architecture. (RMIT Building 8 is one of his most celebrated creations.)

The 2017 Arts issue of ABR is dedicated to the memory of Peter Corrigan. It carries reviews of books on music, theatre, art and architecture, plus our annual survey of some of the arts highlights of the year as nominated by a range of arts critics and professionals. (Books of the Year follows in December.)

ABR's new Poetry Editor

John HawkeJohn Hawke – poet, critic, and academic – is our new poetry editor. John is a Senior Lecturer, specialising in poetry, in the Department of English at Monash University. His poetry collection, Aurelia, won the 2015 Anne Elder Award. He has edited two anthologies of Australian poetry. With Ann Vickery, he co-edited an anthology of critical essays, Poetry and the Trace (2013).

In addition to the States of Poetry national anthology project and the Peter Porter Poetry Prize, ABR publishes two or three new poems in each issue. We pay $400 per poem. Poets wishing to be considered should direct their submissions to This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

John Hawke is also judging the 2018 Peter Porter Poetry Prize (with Bill Manhire and Jen Webb). Entries close on 3 December 2017.

ABR Fortieth Birthday Fellowship – worth $10,000

Next year marks the fortieth anniversary of the second series of ABR. (The first series ran from 1961 to 1974, mostly as a monthly, latterly as a quarterly.) Since June 1978, ABR has appeared ten times each year. The April 2018 issue will be the 400th in the current series.

To celebrate this milestone, we look forward to announcing a range of new programs and initiatives throughout the year – beginning with the ABR Fortieth Birthday Fellowship, worth $10,000. The Fellowship is funded by the ABR Patrons.

This Fellowship is different from previous ABR Fellowships, including Elisabeth Holdsworth’s ABR RAFT Fellowship essay on Progressive Judaism, which appears in this issue. The Fellowship is not themed, and we are not looking for a single, lengthy essay. Rather, we seek proposals from Australian critics, commentators, and scholars for four substantial contributions to the magazine – review essays, commentaries, and/or interviews – to be published in 2018. All our ABR Fellows enjoy a very special status at the magazine, and this suite of fortieth-birthday contributions will be a highlight of our publishing year.

Full information about the new Fellowship appears on our website. As always, those interested in applying are encouraged to sound out the Editor, Peter Rose (This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.) beforehand.

Applications close on 31 December 2017. The Fellow will be named in February.

Voss Literary Prize 2017

The commendations keep coming for previous ABR Prize winners. Jennifer Down and Josephine Rowe are among six Australian writers shortlisted for the 2017 Voss Literary Prize. Jennifer Down, who won the Jolley Prize in 2014, has been shortlisted for her novel Our Magic Hour (Text Publishing, 2016), and Josephine Rowe, who won the Jolley in 2016, has been shortlisted for A Loving, Faithful Animal (UQP, 2016). Other shortlisted writers include Mark O’Flynn for The Last Days of Ava Langdon, Zoë Morrison for Music and Freedom, Toni Jordan for Our Tiny, Useless Hearts, and Jack Cox for Dodge Rose. The winner will be announced on 1 December 2017 at the annual meeting of the Australian University Heads of English.

John Ashbery memorial at Collected Works

Few contemporary poets have generated such reverence (or antagonism) as John Ashbery, who died in September 2017. The sceptics were not represented when a large audience gathered at Melbourne’s famous (and precious) Collected Works Bookshop to hear eight poets read from the work of this formidable poet, whose publishing career lasted for sixty years, culminating in 2016 with the Commotion of the Birds: New Poems. The readers were Judith Bishop, David Dick, Michael Farrell, John Hawke, Kris Hemensley, Peter Rose, Gig Ryan, and Ann Vickery.

Buenos Aires

The Literature Program of MALBA, the Museum of Latin American Art in Buenos Aires, offers five-week residencies to writers from abroad, in the form of airfare, a studio apartment in the city, and a small stipend. Applicants should have at least two published books behind them. A record of publication in Spanish translation will be an advantage. Further information can be found here.

Hazel Rowley Literary Fellowship 2018

Applications are now open for the 2018 Hazel Rowley Literary Fellowship (worth up to $15,000). The Fellowship commemorates the work of distinguished biographer Hazel Rowley, author of acclaimed biographies of Christina Stead, Richard Wright, and the Roosevelts. The Fellowship is intended to support Australian writers of biography and writers working on an aspect of cultural or social history. Past Fellows include Maxine Beneba Clarke (2014), whose memoir The Hate Race was reviewed by Catherine Noske in our October 2016 issue, Caroline Baum (2015), Matthew Lamb (2016), and Ann-Marie Priest (2017).

The Fellowship may be used to fund research or travel, to develop a new proposal, or to prepare a manuscript for submission to potential publishers. More information about the Fellowship can be found by visiting www.hazelrowley.com. Writers have until 5pm on Monday 16 November to apply, at www.writersvictoria.org.au.

Kazuo Ishiguro

Kazuo Ishiguro

The University of East Anglia must be cock-a-hoop. New Nobel Prize Laureate Kazuo Ishiguro completed his Masters in Creative Writing there in 1980. Two years later he published his first novel. There have been only seven novels in those thirty-five years. Not everyone knows the two early Japanese novels, A Pale View of Hills (1982) and An Artist of the Floating World (1986), but they are as good as anything Ishiguro has produced. Then came the uncanny The Remains of the Day (1989). Doug Wallen reviewed his latest novel, The Buried Giant, for us (April, 2015).

Free Gift Subscription to ABR

Many new and renewing subscribers have already taken up our regular end-of-year special offer. You have until 31 December to give a friend a six-month subscription to ABR (print or online). You can qualify for this special offer by renewing your current ABR subscription – even before it is due to lapse. Why not introduce a young reader or writer to ABR?

All you have to do is contact us on (03) 9699 8822 or This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. (quoting your subscriber number please). We will contact the nominated recipient (thus we will need the recipient’s email address). Please note that online-only subscribers are entitled to direct online subscriptions. Terms and conditions apply.

In his powerful eulogy for Gough Whitlam at the Sydney Town Hall in November 2014, Noel Pearson described the former prime minister – this ‘old man’ – as one of those rare people who, though he never suffered discrimination, understood the importance of protection from its malice. Pearson speculated on the apparent paradox. How was it that Whitlam, an upper-middle-class white man, carried such a ‘burning conviction that the barriers of class and race [Pearson did not add, gender] should be torn down and replaced with the unapologetic principle of equality’?

Part of the answer might lie in Whitlam’s unique and complex relationship with his boyhood town, Canberra, a relationship explored by Nicholas Brown in this new anthology of essays about the Whitlam governments (1972–75).

The literature of the modern era contains any number of stories about doppelgängers, divided selves, alter egos, obsessive relationships, and corrosive forms of mutual dependence. The enduring appeal of these doubling motifs is that they give a dramatic structure to abstract moral and psychological conflicts, but they can also be used to suggest that there is something unresolvable or false about our identities. The awareness that the selves we present to others are a kind of projection or performance introduces an element of uncertainty into our social interactions. It opens up the possibilities of self-invention and manipulation and deceit; it raises the question of whether or not we can ever truly claim to know another human being. As an unreliable character points out near the end of Richard Flanagan’s First Person, the word ‘person’ is derived from the Latin persona, meaning a mask.

Gareth Evans is one of the more interesting figures from the Hawke–Keating governments, not alone as a high achiever in a talented team, nor in the tenacity that saw him remain so long in the inner circle, but unusual in forging a cosmopolitan career of such substance thereafter. His political memoir demonstrates the continuity of his principal concerns – identified in the thematic chapter headings of his book – from his earliest exposure to student politics through his success as foreign minister (1988–96) to stewardship of the International Crisis Group (and many other international panels and commissions besides). It is a story spiced with both the idealism and megalomania that he concludes drive productive political engagement.

It was the late Robert Hughes who said that ‘apart from drugs, art is the biggest unregulated market in the world’. Journalist Gabriella Coslovich quotes him in her account of the 2016 Whiteley art fraud trial, repeating the line to one of the accused, art dealer Peter Stanley Gant, as he complains to Coslovich about the ramping of certain artist’s prices, the avaricious nature of the art world, and his belief that its chief enthusiasts are tone-deaf in their tastes and wholly obsessed with making money. Never mind that it was a business Gant himself was routinely profiting from, as Coslovich points out to him.

Whiteley On Trial is Coslovich’s detailed and impeccably researched investigation into the Victorian Supreme Court prosecution’s attempt to prove that Gant and Melbourne conservator Mohamed Aman Siddique were engaged in a fraudulent enterprise. The pair was convicted in 2016 – in defiance of a Prasad direction from the trial judge to find the defendants not guilty – but later acquitted when the prosecution with-drew the case on the eve of the appeal.

Anyone who has paid any attention to the words coming out of the mouths of populist figureheads like Donald Trump, Nigel Farage, Marine Le Pen, and Geert Wilders will know this: populists traffic in nostalgia. For them, the best days are always our yesterdays – before the West was corrupted by the onslaught of progressive values, unchecked self-expression, secularisation, multiculturalism, globalisation, and the rejection of tradition. That is why they are forever promising to ‘bring back’ what has been lost and to ‘restore’ the West to its former glory. Their recent successes come down to the fact that many in these societies, feeling left behind and betrayed by their own countries, long for simpler times. In the lead-up to the 2016 US presidential election, for example, numerous polls showed that a majority of Americans felt that the country had ‘lost its identity’ (Quinnipiac University Poll) or that its ‘best days are in the past’ (American Values Survey). For political scientists Ronald Inglehart and Pippa Norris, this was the pervasive sense of cultural estrangement – felt most acutely by older generations, white men, the less educated, and those holding conservative political beliefs – that led to the populist cultural backlash of the past several years.

In early October 2017, Thomas Albrecht, the Canberra-based Regional Representative of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), took to The Guardian to register his dismay about the Australian government’s response to asylum seekers. ‘The current policy has been an abject failure,’ he wrote. ‘A proper approach by Australia must include, at a minimum, solutions for all refugees and asylum seekers sent to Papua New Guinea and Nauru, and an end to offshore processing.’

It was highly unusual for a senior UNHCR diplomat publicly to take issue with the government’s policy by penning an opinion piece in a newspaper. How extraordinary it was becomes evident when reading Claire Higgins’s Asylum by Boat about Australia’s response to Indochinese ‘boat people’. Higgins’s account draws extensively on the papers of Guy Goodwin-Gill. For many years he has perhaps been the world’s most authoritative expert on international refugee law. Now an emeritus fellow of All Souls College at the University of Oxford and professor of law at the University of New South Wales, in the late 1970s and early 1980s Goodwin-Gill served as the UNHCR’s legal adviser in Australia. In that capacity, he contributed to the Determination of Refugee Status (DORS) interdepartmental committee, which was set up by the Fraser government to assess asylum applications.

With the help of new data such as Google searches, economist Seth Stephens-Davidowitz promises to reveal our innermost secrets. ‘Everything is data!’ he writes, ‘And with all this new data, we can finally see through people’s lies.’ Everybody Lies is a techno-evangelist’s search for clean answers amid the tangle of society, a glossy catalogue of online activity realised as a prized commodity in the information age.

Every author has some version of origin story: a narrative describing what it was that first compelled him or her to write, or at least what attracted them to the role. You can hear the tale harden into myth as an emerging author shapes themselves to those obligatory rubrics of self-disclosure required by writers’ festivals. Sometimes the transition from would-be novelist or short story writer is so smooth as to be seamless, an osmotic passage from student of literature to practitioner. These are more likely to be authors already inculcated with the requisite cultural confidence and tutored intelligence of their caste. The children of the creative classes are those who are born to write, as others are born to rule.

But there is another, perhaps more interesting kind of author – the sort who emerges from nowhere. The progenitor figure in the modern Anglosphere tradition is D.H. Lawrence, that wild, weird, proletarian genius (in the local context, Miles Franklin offers a different yet no less compelling case, based on gender and nation rather than class). Unlike those who have been raised up in the relatively sophisticated cultural infrastructure of English literature departments or creative writing degrees, whose tendency is to address themes or subjects removed from direct experience, self-made writers are likely to take their own emergence as a subject. They have willingly chosen their way, not inherited the possibility of the writing life. The story they have to tell, at least in part, is the story of their becoming.

In the first chapter of her memoir, The Rules Do Not Apply, Ariel Levy writes, ‘Daring to think that the rules do not apply is the mark of a visionary. It’s also a symptom of narcissism.’ Born in New York during the Reagan era, she is describing the world she grew up in, one in which you were told that you were in control of your life and could achieve anything. In suggesting that this world view might be narcissistic, Levy foreshadows the moment when she lost everything: her baby, her life partner, and her house.

The pivotal moment was first recorded in her award-winning essay ‘Thanksgiving in Mongolia’ (2013), which she wrote for The New Yorker, where she has been a staff writer since 2008. This personal essay marked a departure from her usual profiles of outstanding people, such as Caster Semenya, Nora Ephron, and Edith Windsor. Now she had turned the lens on herself, to tell the story of how she gave birth, prematurely, in a hotel bathroom in Mongolia. It is a riveting story, slightly distanced, and told with a journalist’s verbal acuity. When I first read the essay, I was stunned by the account but not deeply moved, though I too had given birth prematurely in a similar situation, with the same disastrous outcome.

Invoking the Rubik’s Cube – a puzzle where twenty-six ‘cubelets’ rotate around a core crosspiece – Rubik is less a novel and more a book of interconnected short stories exploring narcissism, neoliberalism, and consumerism. At the book’s core is Elena Rubik, who dies in the first chapter with a Homestyle Country Pie in her hand. Despite her demise, Elena remains the protagonist of the novel via her robust digital footprint: people write ‘condolence messages on her profile ... express[ing] their grief in 420 characters or less’, weekly newsletters amass in her inbox, she endures as a contact in her friend’s mobile phone directory, and her comments remain on internet forums. Elizabeth Tan responds to the cube’s solution of returning all sides to a uniformity of colour by emphasising the isolation, despair, and quotidian nihilism at the heart of contemporary society’s obsession with competitive self-interest and extreme individualism.

Within the last decade, a new wave of writers has emerged whose work is indebted to W.G. Sebald. Sebald’s name, become an adjective (‘Sebaldian’), is often used as shorthand for describing a writer’s approach to history and memory, or his or her use of images alongside word-text, or the presence of a peripatetic narrator, or the rejection of conventional generic categories such as ‘fiction’ and ‘non-fiction’. Edmund de Waal, Valeria Luiselli, Teju Cole, Jáchym Topol, Erwin Mortier, and Katherine Brabon, to name a few, have all been critically associated with the German author.

While women scanned the horizon, fishers
and hunters tended their nets, someone
etched the Lapwing crown-plumes in clay.

The blue painted wall and the blue painted pipe
with its throat jagged out
is the first thing I photograph
because I like blue
and to my very shame
I have liked brokenness.

As Ratty observed to Mole, ‘There is nothing – absolutely nothing – half so much worth doing as simply messing about in boats.’ In Roger McDonald’s A Sea-Chase, lovers Wes Bannister and Judy Compton would certainly agree, but before they achieve Ratty’s state of nautical transcendence much that does matter has to be dealt with.

Having survived the last, tumultuous period on Friday afternoon, Judy, a new, thoroughly disillusioned teacher, is ‘sobbing at her desk’, when she is suddenly and unexpectedly comforted by Ken Redlynch. He is an Education Department inspector who drives ‘a jungle-green Austin Healey sports car, the BJ8 with an exhaust note like a trumpet blast, had been married three times and was blind in one eye like a pirate’. In no time at all, Redlynch outlines how Judy can rejuvenate her teaching career. He discovers she is the daughter of Dr Elizabeth Darke, one of ‘an intellectual, freewheelingly arrogant sort of brainy family ... not left-wing political the way Ken was ...’ Judy accepts his offer of a lift – he drives the Healey with the top down, wearing a black Pablo Picasso beret and a ‘red neckerchief’ – and tells her about his invention, ‘the Mark II International Educator ... You wedged into a tiny desk, spoke into a mini-cassette Dictaphone, listened back through hissing headphones, and watched Kodak colour slides jerk past on a small grainy screen.’ On its ‘four spindly legs like a lunar lander’, it is portable and is ‘aimed at rescuing teachers from drudgery’. Only half listening as Redlynch describes his brainchild, Judy accompanies him to the pub to meet his wife, Dijana Kovačić, an artist and teacher. At the pub she also meets Wes, who lives on Redlynch’s ketch Rattler, and they fall deeply in love at first sight. It is, we are told, the week in which Robert Menzies – ‘the abominated Pig Iron Bob’ – died (for the record: on 15 May 1978).

The text tells us this is Venice, or more precisely Giudecca, but what we see is an empty arcade, a distant tower, and the long shadow of the photographer. It is a scene with an understated surrealism, like a painting of de Chirico, but both photo and adjacent text are by Teju Cole. Giudecca, writes Cole, means ‘“Jewry,” though there’s no proof a Jewish community ever lived here’. In the act of scanning the photo’s negative, however, this absence takes on a different meaning. ‘I get an unexpected text message from A,’ the text continues, ‘who is a doctor: “One of my patients is a holocaust survivor. 93 years old. Still has PTSD and screams at night”.’

Sir Philip Sidney in the 1580s proclaimed the superiority of the creative maker of ‘poesy’ over the moralising philosopher and historian – ‘the historian wanting the precept, is so tied, not to what should be, but to what is; to the particular truth of things, and not to the general reason of things; that his example draweth no necessary consequence, and therefore a less fruitful doctrine. Now doth the peerless poet perform both ...’ Ever since, literary studies and history, while closely allied, have also kept a wary distance from each other. To imaginative writers and text-based critics, historians can seem literal-minded in their pronouncements on literature, treating works of art as of the same status as any other document, however mundane, and thus unable to transcend their own historical contexts to speak to later generations. Meantime, to the historian, literature (and literary historians, even of the New Historicist school), may seem maddeningly reductive and biased in dealing with complex issues from the past, in an effort to advance some ahistorical theory.

Recently, the chief classical music critic of The New York Times, Anthony Tommasini, adroitly summarised the nebulous perils of his job: ‘Music, especially purely instrumental music, resists being described in language. It’s very hard to convey sounds through words. Perhaps that’s what we most love about music: that it’s beyond description, deeper than words. Yet the poor music critic has to try.’ Many have indeed tried and, despite the demands of daily or nightly deadlines, more than a few of them have succeeded in conveying to the general reader the essence of what they hear and see. Mr Tommasini, who attends at least three (probably more) musical events a week, is certainly one of these critics. His preparation: ‘A lifelong immersion in music.’

Rayner Hoff, the most significant sculptor to work in Australia between the wars, is most admired for his sculptures in the Anzac war memorials in Sydney and Adelaide. His work was in the classical figurative tradition in which he had trained. While never part of the international avant-garde, he remained modern for his era and adapted to the idiom of art deco. Hoff’s work is known to all Australians through a logo depicting a lion with its paw on a ball, which he designed for Holden in Adelaide in 1927. While his name may be unfamiliar to many people, the Holden lion mascot, instantly recognisable even in its modified form, is still in use today. Now ninety, the Holden insignia is one of the great examples of Australian logo branding; at a time when so many cars are indistinguishable, the mascot is still the easiest way to identify a Holden.

Researching Australia’s most iconic building and writing about its beleaguered history from the time Jørn Utzon resigned in 1966 until it opened in 1973 might result in an indigestible plot for many of the building’s enthusiasts. Yet narrating the fraught circumstances behind the completion of the Sydney Opera House by Australian architect Peter Hall and the newly formed consortium Hall, Todd, & Littlemore is just what architectural and design writer Anne Watson has accomplished, warts and all. The outgrowth of a PhD thesis, as she readily acknowledges, this book results from forensic scholarship and is handsomely produced.

For those readers interested in the history of twentieth-century modern architectural styles, this revealing investigation apprehends Utzon’s romantic and organic modernism and fairly dethrones the hagiography surrounding him but not the SOH masterpiece. There are informative references to Hall’s work for Sydney interior designer Marian Hall Best, and to Scandinavian and American modernisms gleaned primarily from Hall’s study trips abroad, and insights into his revelations in Japan. The Australian plywood detailing in the final design of the SOH Concert Hall, for instance, was inspired by the Japanese architect Kunio Maekawa’s new Saitama Community Centre concert hall, near Tokyo, which Hall saw in 1966.

One of the most appropriate titles since Pride and Prejudice, Balancing Acts adroitly captures the drama and appeal of Nicholas Hytner’s account of his twelve years as director of London’s National Theatre. There have been several different takes on this often-controversial site of some of the world’s most riveting theatrical fare. Previous directors Peter Hall and Laurence Olivier have both had their say, as in Hall’s often contentious Diaries (1983) or in the numerous biographies of Olivier in which his own sometimes irascible views emerged beneath the ‘luvvie’ surface. Best of all to date was Australian Michael Blakemore’s even-handed chronicling in Stage Blood (2013).

So, what has Hytner to add to this list? In charting his years at the National from 2003 to 2015, he reflects on the challenges of running such an institution. This is not just a history, nor a memoir, though there are crucial elements of each. There is a wonderful sense of a highly productive period in the National’s history, and there is an equally strong sense of Hytner’s personal involvement in the making of that history.

Thea Astley had a way with words. Her novels are studded with arresting metaphors, atrocious puns, hilarious one-liners, arcane words, technical terms from music, geometry and logic, religious and literary allusions. Her verbal pyrotechnics can be dazzling and infuriating, in equal measure: as Helen Garner once wrote, it is a style that can drive you crazy. So it’s no surprise to learn that Astley served her writerly apprenticeship in poetry, in the arts of verbal play and condensation of meaning.

As a young woman she wrote a good deal of poetry, some of it appearing in school and university magazines, and in newspapers, but much of it never published. In this intriguing volume, editor Cheryl Taylor has selected 116 poems, representing about half the extant range to be found in the Astley archives. The earliest was published in the Courier-Mail when she was eight years old, the latest while she was teaching at Macquarie University in the 1970s.

When Svetlana Alexievich won the Nobel Prize in 2015, the response in the Anglophone world was general bewilderment. Who was she? The response in Russia was the opposite: intense, personal, targeted. Alexievich wasn’t a real writer, detractors said; she had only won the Nobel because the West loves critics of Putin.

Alexievich is kind of a journalist, kind of a social historian. What makes her work different, and important, is that she collects the voices of real people, collates them, and redistributes them, without imposing narrative or explanation. Even biographical information is scant. There is enough to give the speaker authority, but not enough to construe character or personality.

Watching Out belongs to a rare class of book. Written by a lawyer, concerned largely with law, and touching upon such legal esoterica as interim injunctions, it defies all odds in still being eminently accessible to a lay audience. It has, predictably, set off a frisson of excitement in legal Australia, where each new Burnside title is eagerly received and much discussed. Yet even strangers to the law will find it an edifying, rewarding examination of what it means to secure justice.

Like Burnside’s Watching Brief (2008), Watching Out is ambitious in scope. Its avowed aim is ‘to explore the reasons we have a legal system at all, to look at the way it operates in practice, and to point out some ways in which its operation does (or does not) run true to its ultimate purposes’. This grand design is made grander still by Burnside’s wide-ranging method: much of the book is devoted to traversing a diverse range of case studies, from petrol-price-fixing investigations to the landmark stolen-generation case of Bruce Trevorrow. Yet for all the risks involved in such an approach, Burnside succeeds in keeping his overarching theme in focus, and in building to a sophisticated assessment of the limitations of the legal system.

The deadline for this review was 15 August, India’s Independence Day, freedom at midnight in 1947 for India and Pakistan (whose independence is celebrated on 14 August). The British euphemistically called it a ‘transfer of power’. The subsequent division was termed Partition, an anodyne definition of the act of severing. Centuries of surrender and snatching of the Koh-i-Noor saw many transfers of power. Graphic descriptions of torture and murder in this absorbing and timely book are an early mirror for the bloodshed and horror of Partition.

Why do you write?

Through a love of words.

Are you a vivid dreamer?

Marriage equality

Dear Editor,
I voted Yes in the Australian Marriage Law Postal Survey. However, I tend to agree with those who consider that a survey of this nature should not be necessary. On the basis of its international treaty obligations, the federal government already has a constitutionally valid means of legislating for same-sex marriage.

Homosexuality is a perfectly natural phenomenon, just like heterosexuality. There is no such thing in nature as ‘the norm of the heterosexual union’. Both heterosexual and homosexual unions are ‘normal’. As Petter Boeckman, a zoologist at the Norwegian Natural History Museum of the University of Oslo, has pointed out: ‘No species has been found in which homosexual behaviour has not been shown to exist ... a part of the animal kingdom is hermaphroditic, truly bisexual. For them, homosexuality is not an issue.’ Boeckman observes social advantages to the free expression of homosexual behaviour and adds: ‘It has been observed that the homosexual couple are often better at raising the young than heterosexual couples.’ (source: http://pactiss.org/2011/11/17/1500-animal-species-practice-homosexuality/)

Religion historically regards homosexual sex acts as sinful, based essentially on an erroneous understanding of ‘natural law’ (the law of nature). Religious dogma is constantly proven wrong in its interpretation of nature by scientific research.

There is a perfume of déjà vu regarding the current debate on homosexual marriage, e.g., Galileo’s condemnation for heresy when he declared in 1610 that the earth revolves around the sun. Homosexual behaviour has never been noted as a possible cause of the diminution or disappearance of any animal or plant species. There is no objective reason to discriminate against either heterosexual or homosexual behaviour as regards the adoption and raising of children. The role of the State should be limited to the public – not the private – sphere, as per Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights.

Rodney Crisp (online comment)

Galilee Basin

Dear Editor,
Immense gratitude, Susan Reid, for your beautifully worded commentary on the Galilee Basin and its proposed devastation (ABR, 10/17), so inexplicably backed by both the Australian and the Queensland governments.

Pat Grainger (online comment)

Maria Callas

Dear Editor,
Just a slight correction to Barney Zwartz’s review of the Maria Callas Live Remastered Edition (ABR Arts). The Lisbon La Traviata took place in 1958, not 1959. This was also the year she sang the role at Covent Garden, a recording of which also exists. However good the Lisbon performance, I can’t help wishing Warner had chosen the latter, as it is one of Callas’s most profoundly moving performances, and the sound is not bad. I have a few question marks about some of the other choices, too. Like most Callas aficionados, I prefer the 1955 La Scala Norma to the Covent Garden one, the 1958 Dallas Medea to the 1953 La Scala, and the 1957 Cologne Sonnambula to the 1955 La Scala one (also in much better sound). I wonder, too, why they went for the Mexico Rigoletto, when the studio set is one of the classics of the gramophone, and this Mexico one, both in terms of performance and sound, a bit of a mess. Surely La Scala’s 1957 Un Ballo in Maschera would have been a better choice.

Still, it’s good to have these performances more readily available, though casual buyers should be advised that the sound of some of them (Nabucco, La Vestale, Parsifal, Armida, Alceste, to name a few) can be pretty intransigent, and requires a good deal of forbearance on the part of the listener. You have to listen ‘through’ the sound, as it were, to the performance itself. If you can do that, the rewards are prodigious.

Philip Tsaras (online comment)

Barney Zwartz replies:

Thank you, for those illuminating remarks, and also for the correction about the La Traviata.

I didn’t have the space to talk about the sound quality on individual operas, but I note there has been some debate and criticism about this set in various forums, with some experts saying there are better sources sometimes than the ones Warner used. You list some operas as having poor sound, which is true compared with modern recordings, but I found the Parsifal pretty good. I had it previously on an old Cetra set, which was vastly inferior.

Basically, your advice is excellent: listen through the mud, and you will be richly rewarded.

Dear Editor,
I heard Callas live on three occasions, twice in recital in Festival Hall, London, and, more importantly, on stage at Covent Garden in the legendary Zeffirelli production of Tosca in 1964. On that latter occasion, I was in a stage box with the critic Andrew Porter and his sister Sheila, then working in the PR department at the ROH. Both had heard Callas in all of her appearances on stage there, I asked Porter if he sensed the voice was in serious decline. He had a clear memory of her previous Traviata and said that, apart from the odd hollow head note and the acknowledged wobble when she sang forte, the impact, musical and dramatic, of those earlier performances remained undimmed.

Leo Schofield (Online comment)