Ricky Swallow miraculously makes wood look like crumpled paper or scales on a fish, just as he makes plaster look like a backpack.
For the most part, Australians are welcoming of all people. The small differences we all hold, and that inevitably define us, are embraced by our friends, family and neighbours.
Why do novelists write essays? Most publishers would rather have a novel. Bookshops don't know where to put them. It's a rare reader who seeks them out with any sense of urgency.
Consensual homosexual acts between adults are still illegal in as many as 70 countries. Most countries have moved to a liberalisation of those unjust and repressive laws.
Herta Müller, the Romanian-born German novelist and essayist who writes of the oppression of dictatorship in her native country and the unmoored existence of the political exile, won the 2009 Nobel Prize in Literature on Thursday.
We're in the season of the new. As the Turner Prize exhibition opens, and Regent's Park squirrels quake at the imminent arrival of the Frieze art fair, it seems that art's rage for revolution is as passionate as it was 100 years ago when Picasso was dismantling reality.
The jargon-infested public pronouncements of modern political and financial leaders are all potato and no meat. Whatever the shape of the new economic order, the language is sure to continue on its present depressing course.
Just as Monroe understood that you don't have to act for the camera in the way the stage-trained Olivier defined acting, so Warhol realized that you don't need to make art for an audience brought up on film and television in the way Kenneth Clark defined art.
Urgent action is needed to fight a rise in homophobia and hold governments accountable for human rights violations.
Purists may despair that technology is killing the English language but the digital age spells a new era of communication, Australian academics and researchers say.
Cruising on the Gordon River in his home state of Tasmania, Jonathan Auf Der Heide was told the story of the cannibal convict Alexander Pearce. The aspiring film director was soon obsessed.
The middle-aged woman with the black cardigan around her shoulders had assumed a meticulously calibrated posture: feet shoulder-width apart, arms slightly bent, fists loosely clenched, muscles relaxed yet alert.
The masterpieces of Minoan art are not what they seem. The vivid frescoes that once decorated the walls of the prehistoric palace at Knossos in Crete are now the main attraction of the Archaeological Museum in the modern city of Heraklion, a few miles from the site of Knossos.
Last Sunday, at 11pm, a masked gunman walked into a gay and lesbian youth centre in Tel Aviv, pulled out a pistol and opened fire. Nir Katz, a 26-year-old centre counsellor, and Liz Trubeshi, 17, were killed. Eleven others were injured, some seriously.
Most writers will tell you we love writers' festivals, but the truth is not all festival events go according to plan.
Australian scientists have unveiled new DVD technology that stores data in five dimensions, making it possible to pack more than 2000 movies onto a single disc.
A few years ago I attended - for professional purposes only - a literary speed-dating evening at the State Library of Victoria.
For anybody who expects aboriginal music to be a carnival of ethnic costumes, didgeridoos and body-painting, Geoffrey Gurrumul Yunupingu might initially seem like an anti-climax. He wears black jeans, a black leather jacket and thick-soled black shoes.
Was modernism totalitarian? That's coming at it a bit high, but it's true that more than a few top-tier modernists were also one-size-fits-all system-mongers who thought the world would be improved if it were rebuilt from top to bottom -- so long as they got to draw up the plans.
The first hint of intrigue was the secret code on a heater. One day, nine-year-old Cavan Klinsky was in the bedroom of his New York apartment when he noticed dozens of letters carved into a radiator. The letters, he realised, were a cipher and his name was the first word.
A colletion of priceless and culturally sensitive Aboriginal paintings that has languished unseen in vaults for almost 40 years will soon be exhibited in the Northern Territory.
Critics of the Turner prize are used to harrumphing crossly about the absence of painting or drawing from the award's shortlist and condemning a perceived preponderance of video or film work.
Colossal is the word that springs to mind when you arrive at Milan's international design fair, the most important event of the year for designers all around the world. The fair, on the north-west outskirts of Milan, covers four times the surface area of the British Museum.
Cultural realities tend to lag behind economic ones.
Last June, the directors of the leading art museums of the United States agreed to limit their acquisitions of antiquities to works that have left their "country of probable modern discovery" before 1970, or that were exported legally after that date.
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just wanted to stop by and say thank you for your friendship & helping me getting started right on nv. sent you an invite to survivors & friends of abuse, hope to see you there too. maddad
— maddad
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