Seven Words for Les Murray Self-addressed stamped envelope pigeons home. Tear it open! Poetry editor’s comment: sorry I can’t like any of these … Ah—so why do I feel empowered reading those seven familiar words, more so than acceptances by most other editors? Better to be abused than ignored, a habitually mistreated friend once told […]

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TV's 'Bates Motel' is a completely different creature from its cinematic inspiration. It takes place in the present time, with the motel, the famous Gothic house-on-the-hill and interior sets painstakingly recreated. But this is no mere pulp reprise, rather an outstanding five-season prequel with a gifted ensemble cast

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The actor who has brought the artists Turner and Lowry to the screen and, indeed, to life, trained at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, where he was honoured as the year’s most promising actor. Those who recognised his talent were not misguided

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The Battles of Billy Sing Put away your newspaper, and listen to these words, I’ll tell a tale the likes of which, I’m sure you’ve never heard. William Edward “Billy” Sing, Oz’s finest sniper, called the Anzac Angel of Death, and the Ypres Viper. His father, born in Shanghai, mother, an English nurse, his Chinese-Aussie […]

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If you want to understand Hitler, you have to understand he was an artist first.                                                                  —Albert Speer In my poem “If Hitler also Spelled Hiedler”, published in the March 2014 issue of Quadrant, I proposed the following “what if” scenario: If Hitler also spelled Hiedler Hüttler or Huettler at seventeen had remained in watercolour […]

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Cookbooks for Poets Ann Rogers’ Poor Poets’ Cookbook— a nickel dinner, fresh roll, real butter, and a glass of wine, Onion Pie, Black Beans and Rum. Inspired by Mary Randolph’s The Virginia Housewife, 1824— curry of catfish, barbecued shoat & beaten biscuits, fried calf’s feet, pheasant à-la-daube, tansy pudding, pickled nasturtiums, walnut catsup, vinegar of […]

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The serpent that did sting thy father’s life now wears his crown. —Shakespeare, Hamlet Lèse-majesté translates as “injury to majesty”, or an insult to the dignity of the monarch. It was first made a crime during the Roman Empire. The last prosecution for the offence in the UK was in 1715. France created another variation […]

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When Walter Tevis’s novel came out in 1983, it slipped past the mainstream media, but everyone I knew in the Melbourne chess world was familiar with it. Little did anyone at the time suspect that his fantasy of a female chess prodigy would be incarnated in the true story of the three Hungarian-Jewish Polgár sisters

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Disappearance of Harold Holt The PM had been advised to swim less, that day at Cheviot Beach, in Portsea, Harold had often swum there in the past. He wanted relief from the hot day’s blast, to work up an appetite before tea, Harold had often swum there in the past. The doctor medicated his distress: […]

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In August 1945 the British government agreed to give refuge to 300 child survivors of the German death camps. The dramatised account of their stories and those of the men and women who helped them rebuild lives that had known nothing but torment is a compelling testament to both the worst and best of the human heart

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