The pages of the Argus, advertisements and reportage, represent Australia as a patchwork of colourful but ill-fitting swatches of narrative fabric. The past, in its archived pages, is a chaos from which bits of history are carefully extracted by writers constructing their books and articles. But there is so much more, my forebears' antics amongst them

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Dark Mofo thrives on controversy. In 2016 art students protested when their school was surrounded by poster artworks saying “Your work is shit” and last year, as the ABC reported, one event 'included mock crucifixions set to music, culminating in a frenzied squabble by blood-soaked participants writhing in the entrails from a freshly slaughtered bull'

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Progressive Melbourne playwrights have a brainwave moment and decide to contribute short performance texts inspired by May 18's election. These are published daily online, and the result? Crying trees, wailing authors, a dismal certainty about voters' ignorance and, just for the fun of it, a child burned at the stake

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The difference between the theatre of not-so-long-ago and now is that modern audiences don’t know what has been discarded and what has been added. What seemed youthful experimentation has aged into Alzheimer productions of the classics which have lost all sense and any sensibility.

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Transsexuality, multiple interpretations of gender, racial politics, self-identity fantasies, pronoun dictatorship, and the immediate cry of “transphobia” in reaction to different conversations about dysphoria are weapons in the progressives’ war against everything. As in all wars, the casualties will be horrific

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Welcome to Melbourne, the corrupt City of Literature. The Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards are the nation’s wealthiest writing prizes and administered for the Victorian government by the left-wing Wheeler Centre. In January, guidelines for the 2019 awards were overturned by competition judges to protest against the government’s border security policy which protects the Australian community. […]

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IT’S midsummer in Australia and the Somewheres are fighting bushfires. Elsewhere the Anywheres are going to music and gender and arts festivals, and painting nasty signs for Invasion Day. Somewheres and Anywheres are names, suggested by British writer David Goodhart, to indicate the two sides of the great split that divides Western societies. On the […]

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Our subsidised theatres do not read unsolicited play scripts and have set up layers of barriers to keep real writers away, favouring scripts word-processed by and for the ABC-Guardian-Fairfax Cultural Complex. Playwrights' agent Margaret “Peggy” Ramsay would have given them something to think about

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Philippe Lançon survived, just, the Islamist massacre in the office of Charlie Hedbo and has now written of his hard road to a recovery of sorts. Today, with news of another Christmas market massacre, his story is a timely reminder that West remains under attack regardless of media and officialdom's reluctance to name and counter the enemy within

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The back story to Andrew Lloyd Webber's autobiography is creativity and business. It’s a telling moment in the Phantom when the owners of the haunted theatre are reminded they must pay their resident ghost. An Australian spectre would have had to apply to the Australia Council

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