The Rise of the Amateur

I gave this talk on Monday at the Judith Wright Centre of Contemporary Arts in Brisbane as part of the Low-Fi Forum, organised by Arts Queen...

Independent theatre

The Australian today publishes my whistle-stop and inevitably partial guide to Australian independent theatre. Feel free to note significant...

And what is this blog about, Cameron?

Update: The article is online here. With thanks to Nicholas Pickard. (Now with crunchy comments! [Further update: sadly, it seems that three...

Australian theatre & nationalism

A while back, I teased out some of my thoughts on nationalism in Australian theatre into an essay, How Australian is it?, for the 200th edit...

The return of the amateur critic

Update: The Wheeler Centre has uploaded edited videos of two Critical Failure sessions - film and theatre - on its website.The ABC's opi...

More on Mills, and other stuff

The Wheeler Centre, aka the Centre for Books, Writing and Ideas, nicely asked me for another response to Jonathan Mills's lecture, so th...

Ewen Leslie

A couple of weeks ago I interviewed Ewen Leslie, currently the driving force of the MTC's production of Richard III, for the Weekend Aus...

Theatre Forum

Your correspondent was most pleased today to receive her copies of international theatre journal Theatre Forum, a fab magazine focusing on i...

Festival season

My feature on what arts festivals mean in our culture is in today's Australian. It gave me a chance to do some happy reminiscing:These s...

The trouble with Craven

The National Times - aka Fairfax's op-ed pages - yesterday hosted a Peter Craven polemic which purported to analyse "the trouble wi...

Monday morning rantaround

The Public Intellectual (PI, for the acronymic among you) debate continues with a Guardian blog post by Andrew Haydon, in which he robustly ...

MTC Theatre

My feature on the impact of the MTC's new Southbank theatre is in today's Australian.

Fabulous women

My paean to the women on our stages is in today's Australian. And yes, it was a hard list to make.

Craven on criticism

In today's Age, Peter Craven writes a sober and sensible analysis of this week's excitement, namely Julian Meyrick's attack on C...

Amateur journalism

I see the chairman of News Ltd, John Hartigan, has some harsh words for bloggers. In an address to the National Press Club yesterday, he cla...

Australian theatre

My thoughts on the shifting main stages, the decline (and rebirth) of naturalism and other symptoms of the current renaissance in Australian...

Ushering in an old era?

Will the new Age arts editor, Michelle Griffin, herald a new era of accurate, in-touch arts journalism? Not if alleged arts journalist Robin...

Before I forget...

I should have been on the quivive, as I'm a member of the Companies panel ... but better late than never. The 2008 Green Room Awards nom...

Death of the critic

In a must-read think-piece, Chicago Sun-Times film critic Roger Ebert laments the cannibalistic celebrity culture of the daily press, citing...

The death of ABC Radio National

I've long contended that the arts are the canary in the coal mine of media quality. Healthy arts coverage signals a wider vitality and d...