We can blame the Brothers Grimm for stepmothers getting a bad rap. Mothers were frequently cruel to their offspring in fairytales until the Grimms decided in the process of collecting oral tales and transforming…
- Associate Professor in Literary Studies, Monash University
Australian university campuses last week marked Bluestocking Week, a celebration that remembers the first women who entered English universities in the late 19th century. Women in lecture halls were pioneering…
I’ve just returned from two weeks in unusually warm London. When my days researching in libraries come to a close, I always like to browse the city’s massive music and book shops, enjoying a scale and…
As an undergraduate student in English literature, I took one subject in creative writing. At the beginning of the course, the lecturer explained to the class that the Australian writers many of us sought…
A 34-year-old British-born writer has won Australia’s most prestigious literary prize. Evie Wyld’s All the Birds, Singing was named as the unexpected winner of the 2014 Miles Franklin Award tonight. The…
When the Harry Potter series became a global phenomenon, adult editions were published that replaced the brightly illustrated covers with dignified photographs of inanimate objects on a black background…
The Prime Minister’s Literary Awards were instituted in 2008 by Kevin Rudd. The lucrative prizes survived the recent “tough” federal budget, despite fears that they would be axed in the manner of the Queensland…
Should Australians be as familiar with David Williamson as with Shakespeare? Should we measure our Jane Austen with sufficient doses of Miles Franklin? Britain has recently revised the GCSE (General Certificate…
If you’ve been involved in internet discussions about sensitive topics like sexual abuse, you may have seen the letters “TW”, short for “trigger warning”. The convention originated primarily on feminist…
When you see almost complete shelves of abandoned copies of The Da Vinci Code and Fifty Shades of Grey in charity shops, their near total worthlessness seems to suggest that an individual copy of a book…
Time to adjust your sets. Since October last year, this column has focused on television, but “Square Eyes” has now metamorphosed into “Portable Magic”, and will discuss books, reading, and literary culture…
Today we eagerly embrace new technology for fear of being left behind. A toddler with an iPad in hand is a welcome sign of a child learning to succeed in a digital world. Remainders of the pre-digital…
If you’re under the age of 30 and consider yourself beautiful (if you’re a woman) or intelligent (if you’re a man), now is the time to seize the opportunity to audition for the sixth season of Beauty and…
Television has seen its fair share of characters on welfare with a penchant for flannelette shirts and tinnies of VB in recent years. We’ve seen an obese mother and daughter in Bogan Pride, Sunnydale’s…
In 1978, the cover of Patti Smith’s album Easter was sufficiently shocking and mystifying to many people that some US record stores, especially in the south, according to Smith, refused to display it…
In 1981, MTV was launched with a woman in a tinsel wig being beamed to Earth (well, she actually slid awkwardly down a plastic tube) to join men in shiny suits playing wood-grained synthesisers. The Buggles…
If you had to argue for the merits of one Australian book, one piece of writing, what would it be? Welcome to our occasional series in which our authors make the case for a work of their choosing. See…
Channel 9’s new series Love Child made its television debut this week. Its storylines are based on the systematic practice of removing babies from young, single mothers from the 1950s to the 1970s in Australia…
However 4.2 kilograms of marijuana made its way into Indonesia in a body board bag in 2004, the story of Schapelle Corby’s arrest, conviction and subsequent jailing for drug smuggling is known by every…
The Australian Academy of Cinema and Television Arts (AACTA) Awards are described as Australia’s version of the Oscars. Some wags call it the “Ozcars”. AACTAs are voted for by the screen industry, rather…
The Biggest Loser has entered its ninth Australian season with a vow to trim the waistlines of the residents of Ararat, in Victoria’s north-west. It has been described as the state’s “fattest town” with…
In the B-grade horror film You Can’t Kill Stephen King, a group of young friends takes a road trip to Maine to seek out the world-famous author. After a brief encounter with some unfriendly locals in a…
In 1841, crowds bustled at the New York docks to meet a vessel just arrived from England. “Is Little Nell dead?” people shouted. They were desperate to learn how Charles Dickens’s serial novel The Old…
What follows is not a “best-of” list and is by no means conclusive – but these are some of the Australian TV shows that stood out for me in 2013. Top of the Lake Top of the Lake is a seven-part mini-series…
In a recent post to his Telegraph blog, Piers Akerman identifies a series of faults with the ABC that stem from its purported left-wing bias. It includes a surprising jab at the British television program…
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