Alex didn’t know that Betty’s husband had tried to have him tortured and murdered. Neither did Eileen, Alex’s wife. By the time this was revealed in Peter Hruby’s book Dangerous Dreamers (2010) they had all died natural deaths. I knew these people at the time of the Vietnam War when Whitlam was just moving into […]

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'It seems impossible for many Muslims to admit that 'Charlie Hebdo' was not guilty of any crime in publishing caricatures of Mohammed,' writes the artist Riss in his survivor's memoir of the 2015 attack. Rightly, he is especially critical of the 'collabos' who politely turn their gaze from the destruction of free speech and traditional freedoms by Islamic fascism

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That the Sydney Morning Herald once boasted a sane, erudite and balanced editorial writer will strike those who have only known that sad publication in its current and debased manifestation as inconceivable. But once, when adults ruled the editorial floor, just such a man helmed its leader page

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The 'Police Gazette' description of my grandmother is concise: 'About 40 years old, 5 foot 7 inches, medium build, fair complexion and hair: dresses shabbily and is addicted to drink.' God knows what the country girl had been through to arrive in this state. Selina is not the grandmother I expected to find when I started my family searches

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If the impresario is remembered these days, it is for his later career as a producer of 'Neighbours'. But before that he brought heresy to the proscenium arch with his popular and long-running Music Hall plays, which he wrote and produced. Unlike so many others then and now, he grasped the simple fact that theatre is about un-boredom

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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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