Carving in Snow

Last week I visited my parents at The Entrance, on the Central Coast, about an hour north of Sydney. We holidayed there every year when I was a kid, and I sometimes even got the last week off school to do so. My parents always said that when they retired they’d move there, and that’s what they did. When I visit now, I arrive as a ten year old, excited at being back in a place of childhood delight, my muscles and synapses defying time. The choc-dipped ice cream, probably deficient in da iry, is still to be found, though the price is not, with 40c transformed to $4.50. The pelicans are still fed, but now it’s a daily 3pm tourist attraction. The jetty where I used to fish is untouched, though now seems so much smaller, just like the bream. The Housie Hall is now one of those Base Warehouses, where quality is an apparition and everything is cheaper than you’d imagine. This year is different. My parents are living in a new place, closer to the water. When I scan the room...

Andrew Bolt ’s first published work was written when he was 13. It was a poem published in Quadrant , called 'Fear': The jeering, gloating ring of youths Closed in around a solitary boy, Teasing and taunting him Because he was black. The boy staggered from a blow; The yells grew louder, Humiliating and bewildering the boy. The colour of his skin was a cause For ridicule. I wanted to help him But fear sealed my mouth, Held me back. And soon I was yelling with the rest. Andrew Bolt

An arts festival is an opportunity for artists and audiences to take risks. It’s a chance to experience new forms and new ideas and to lift our gaze beyond the everyday. The arts enable us to walk in the shoes of another for a short while, to experience a different kind of exhilaration or disturbance or reflection or joy, and it has always been my simple hope that those experiences might make us more empathetic, more generous, more valuing of things outside our daily selves. Brisbane Festival is part of that huge ongoing human project, and it gives me hope that making a difference is possible. This year’s Festival, my first, tied together work from five continents and many, many hundreds of artists, all of whom had something to say. These voices spoke powerfully across the city, sharing with us views and experiences of the world that were both challenging and refreshing. Sometimes our securities were shaken, and often our hearts went out. I found myself particularl...

Last week, before a preview screening in Brisbane of the film version of Holding the Man , I joined writer Tommy Murphy for a public talk about how the story came to be, first as memoir, then as theatre, and now as film. It was lovely to be with Tommy, such a crucial figure in how this story has reached a wider audience, and to reflect on what is now a 20-year history adorning the 15-year relationship between Timothy Conigrave and the man he called his husband, John Caleo. Tim was an actor and playwright, but his final form was memoir. Following John’s death on Australia Day 1992, Tim was determined to write a book about his lover. In an interview with James Waites  for a National Library oral history project on HIV/AIDS in Australia, Tim says ‘The only thing I have to live for is these two things that I am writing, which I’d like to finish both of. One’s a play that involves stuff about AIDS but it’s not really about AIDS, and the other one is the book that I’d like to ...

What a fabulous night. I'm just back from Humperdinck's Hansel and Gretel , a student production at the Queensland Conservatorium , directed by Michael Gow and conducted by Johannes Fritzsch . How blessed these students are to be working on this glorious score with two great artists. And the design by recent NIDA grad Charles Davis is worthy of any opera house. Great to see the Con devoting significant resources to what must be a priceless learning experience f or the students involved, in the pit and on the stage.  I love this opera. I've known every note for 25 years, and it's a score that keeps on giving. It's a miraculous synthesis of German folkiness and Wagnerian complexity. Humperdinck was a student of Wagner's - he assisted at the premiere of Parsifal , and even wrote a bar or two for a tricky scene transition. Hansel and Gretel , completed in 1893, with a libretto by his sister who urged on the project, is full of Wagner - the climaxes, ...

Today is the 90th birthday of La Boite Theatre Company, making it, perhaps, Australia’s oldest continuously running theatre company. I’m really looking forward to tonight’s big birthday bash. On this day in 1925, the first show was staged: a one-night season of A. A. Milne’s comedy The Dover Road at the Theatre Royal in Elizabeth Street. The following day The Brisbane Courier raved: “Nothing was left to chance. The cast was admirably chosen, and the large audience was held by the splendid acting f or two hours and three-quarters. The players, one and all, rose to the occasion, and satisfied the sceptics that the repertory movement in Brisbane has come to stay; it will grow from strength to strength; it will enlarge the communal mind, and prove a great and joyous power in our cultural life.”   I love that last stretch: “it will enlarge the communal mind and prove a great and joyous power in our cultural life.” It’s quite confronting to lead a theatre company, a...

Politics and the arts are family. Both are concerned with the affairs of the people. Whenever anyone questions an accepted reality, it becomes a political act – and many people do that most days, whether they think of themselves as artists or political or not. Ai Weiwei, the Chinese artist and vocal critic of his government, goes further: “Everything is art. Everything is politics." It’s easiest to see this in the extreme. The success of any revolution depends on a rupture with the past. In February this year, ISIS burned 100,000 books in the central library of Iraq’s second largest city, Mosul. UNESCO called it “one of the most devastating acts of destruction of library collections in human history." Look at any revolution – French, Boshevik, Chinese and so on – and you’ll find a similar pattern. As Orwell reminded us, “he who controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present controls the past.” Wars against a people always go hand in han...

Today I gave the Commencement Address at the graduation ceremony for the Creative Industries Faculty of the Queensland University of Technology, held in the Concert Hall of the Queensland Performing Arts Centre. Here is what I said: I really don’t know why I’m here.   I think you've been fooled into thinking I'd have something interesting to say.   But no. I’m a fraud.   Standing here, I remember my late friend Nick Enright. He was a great Australian theatre artist. As a playwright he gave us a few classics –  A Property of the Clan, Blackrock, Good Works  and an adaptation of Cloudstreet . As a librettist for musicals he gave us  The Boy from Oz  and  The Venetian Twins . As an acting teacher at NIDA he taught Mel Gibson and Judy Davis and a raft of other big names. He was loved, and a great mentor to many.   He was also nominated for an Academy Award for his screenplay for George Miller’s film  Lorenzo’s Oil . Nick and I ...

The Democratic Republic of Congo sits in the very heart of Africa , in the cradle of all humanity . It is the size of Western Europe with a population of 75 million. It has an astonishing history. But what do we know about it? Arts festivals are made for illumination. In September this year, Brisbane Festival offers a series of brilliant works from or about the Congo.  Why shine a light here? Because the Congo has helped form the history of the world. In more ways than you might think… Congo's Curse The Congo is blessed with more natural resources than almost any other country on the planet. A Congolese legend has it that God , tired after creating the world, stopped at this part of the earth and dropped all his sacks of riches. And these riches have helped make the world as we know it. When the world needed rubber for the tyres of the newly invented motorcar, the Congo was there with half the world’s known supplies. When the world needed copper ...

One of the driving beliefs of the 2015 Federal Budget is that small businesses are well placed to energise the national economy. They are strong of arm and ready to 'have a go', as the language of the budget has it.  The budget certainly helps them to get moving. If a small business has an annual turnover of less than $2 million, from now until 30 June 2017 there’s an immediate tax deduction for every item purchased up to $20,000 (the threshold used to be $1000). Cars and vans, kitchens, machinery, computers... anything under $20,000 bought for that business is instantly 100% tax deductible. There is more: the company tax for these businesses is cut from 30% to 28.5% - the lowest small business tax rate in more than 50 years - and there’s a fringe benefits tax discount on mobile electronics. All in all, it’s a $5 billion boost to GDP over two years. Quite an adrenaline hit for the economy. This is the opposite of ‘trickle-down economics’ – the idea that econo...

When two Australians were put to death in Indonesia last week , the idea that the death penalty is simply wrong was at the heart of protest. In this sense, it did not matter whether these two men had been rehabilitated or not. Capital punishment is not right, anytime, anywhere. We do not accept that race, gender or religion should be the basis of discrimination. Tanya Plibersek makes the point that support for marriage equality should be seen in these term s. She reminds us that her political party, as a matter of principle, does not believe in discrimination before the law and so should, as a body, support the equal right of people to marry irrespective of gender. It is not, she argues, a matter of 'conscience', but one of principle. It's difficult to argue with the logic. Whether it's good politics or not is a different question. It might well inhibit the passage of any relevant legislation through the parliament. But maybe principles should com...

RIP Günter Grass , author of The Tin Drum , Nobel Prize winner, speechwriter to Willy Brandt, environmentalist, jazz musician, and moral voice of the great German trauma, aged 87. A life of triumph and turmoil. When the Swedish Academy awarded him the Nobel Prize in 1999, it praised him for embracing “the enormous task of reviewing contemporary history by recalling the disavowed and the forgotten: the victims, losers and lies that people wanted to forget because they had once b elieved in them.” He was a complex figure. He was part of a German artistic movement known as Vergangenheitsbewältigung, which translates roughly as “coming to terms with the past.” Yet he left it until 2006, in his memoir 'Peeling the Onion', to reveal his conscription into the notorious Waffen-SS in 1944 at the age of 16. “The job of a citizen is to keep his mouth open.” ― Günter Grass

Alan Seymour loved life like no one I have ever known. This made me particularly saddened by his passing, aged 87. I directed Sydney Theatre Company’s 2003 production of Alan’s groundbreaking play The One Day of the Year . The play, written in 1958 when Alan was 31, was famously rejected in 1960 by the very first Adelaide Festival as being too controversial. An amateur company produced the work in that city in the same year, and in Sydney the following year the first professional production earned Alan death threats. It is now one of the great cornerstones of the Australian theatre. Its nominal subject is ANZAC Day and the limits of Australian mateship and masculinity, but it’s a play, I think, that ranks with the best family dramas the world has. The war in Iraq was intensifying as we rehearsed, lending fresh frisson, but finally it was the human drama of father and son that affected people the most. To see Max Cullen as Alf and Nathaniel Dean as son Hughie, with Kris McQuade ...

I hope that the results of this weekend’s Queensland election herald a return to a more civil and communicative society. The astonishing dismissal of the Newman approach perhaps should not have surprised. We saw what happened in Victoria. We can see it happening in the federal sphere. It is now surely clear that the public will no longer tolerate the inauthentic and will not hesitate to deliver swift judgement. There are no longer any second chances. A decade ago the public was still tribal in its allegiances, but those days are now indisputably gone. It is now time for our political parties to abandon the tribal approach too. We want to listen to our political leaders, but too often they do not wish to speak. We long to be persuaded by cogent arguments, but too often we are fed empty slogans. We desire a direct relationship with our politicians, but too often these relationships are mediated out of all humanity. I like watching television election night coverages because f...

A gutless and immoral movie has been nominated for eight Oscars including Best Film, Best Director and, perhaps most offensively, Best Adapted Screenplay. That film is The Imitation Game . Alan Turing It's gutless because it cannot bring itself to look directly at Alan Turing's sexuality. Yet as the end credits roll, and emotive music kicks in, the film tries to position itself as a plea for equality. This is disingenuou s. Even though Turing is surrounded in the film by good looking men, not once is he seen to give them even a sideways glance. Worse, Turing's relationship with Joan Clarke, important in real life, but a sidelight, is here moved to the centre of the story and decorated with the familiar tropes of a cinematic heterosexual love story: romantic picnics, furtive glances, close shots, and so on. In feeling a need to anchor the film with a love story - a need it's easy to dispute - the filmmakers have chosen to play it straight. Gutless. ...

A few days ago, before embarking on a week of fresh frontier works as part of several festivals now playing in New York - Coil , Under the Radar , Prototype and others - I visited two classics of the American theatre: A Delicate Balance and Into the Woods . Edward Albee's 1966 Pulitzer winning play about an unnamed terror is running at the Golden Theater with a starry cast including Glenn Close, John Lithgow and Lindsay Duncan. It's a curious experience. It's the type of production you would never see on an Australian profession al stage - a perfectly realised WASP living room with a curtain rising and falling on tableaux at beginning and ends of acts and scenes.  The performances are mostly disappointing. Few of the cast seem to be living in the play's situation and instead rely on presenting its ideas. Lithgow's extraordinary speech about a pet cat he had put down for avoiding his company and refusing to purr is an exception. So too are perfor...