Carving in Snow

( Published in The Courier-Mail , 10 October, 2019) The great Australian sport is criticising the Grand Final pre-match entertainment. OneRepublic was caught offside before the NRL match, after Dean Lewis missed the mark at the AFL. Daryl Braithwaite and Paul Kelly saved the days. Arts criticism is alive and well. On AFL Grand Final day, I played my own grand final. The whistle blew on my fifth and final Brisbane Festival. It’s been a privilege to be captain of the team, and to curate 3,000 performances and 30 world premieres from 7,000 artists. This year, we broke our box office record for the third year running, topping $4m. More than 1.2 million people turned up, many of them tourists.   But hey, arts and sport aren’t in competition. We can be passionate about both, and on the same day. In fact, people encounter the arts more than sport, mostly without knowing it. Every time you mouth the words to a song in a supermarket, or are attracted to an image on a billb

My friend Andrew McGahan, that great Australian novelist, passed away yesterday . Pancreatic cancer is persistent and February is the shortest month. I first met Andrew in 1991, just at the moment when Praise changed the shape of Australian fiction and became the book of a generation. I had taken up a job at Queensland Theatre Company, charged with finding ways to develop the state’s playwriting culture. For a young director at the beginning of his career, this was quite a task. I had never set foot in Queensland. Praise was my introduction and Andrew became my buddy. We hit it off immediately, hanging out, devouring beers, and talking about and exploring anything that took our interest. He was very happy to discover the theatre and even became a resident writer at the company. I commissioned him to write a play. Bait follows the story of Gordon Buchanan, the central character of Praise , just as he begins working in the absurd bowels of the Department of Social Security. If Pra