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I blame Helen Garner’s Monkey Grip and to a lesser degree, Kate Holden’s memoir, In My Skin, for the guff written by many young Australian fiction writers today. Libby Angel’s novel, Where I Sleep is fair average quality taken from diaries of the narrator’s time in Melbourne in the 1990s. It’s about a young failed…

The UK Chichester Festival is hosting a revival of The Sound of Music, but those planning to attend have been warned they “may find certain themes distressing”. The Festival said the production contains themes of: “Music; family; romance; the threat of Nazi Germany and the annexation of Austria,” as the plot follows the story of…

I never knew why Fifi showed up at RMIT Professional Writing. She was a refugee teacher from the TAFE Business School in Berk Street. I put down my dry martini and copy of Tattler and said, ‘welcome aboard’ and made a note to write three more short courses to pay for her salary. It was…

Remember how PWC (Price Waterhouse) boycotted the last Writer’s Week because they had some Palestinian writers speaking? https://www.smh.com.au/culture/books/pwc-withdraws-support-for-adelaide-festival-20230228-p5co3t.html Now PWC is in deep, deep, deep shit. I wrote about the accountant-consultant corruption issue back in 2019 in Opinion Online, ‘Auditors without Border’, when InDaily in Adelaide was too chicken shit to publish it. In a…

If it’s not censorious religious loonies, it’s the PC Red Guards fucking with fiction. It was only a matter of time before they came after Hemingway. Would-be readers of Hemingway are now warned about the “language” and “attitudes” contained in his writing, and alerted to the novelist’s “cultural representations”. A disclaimer printed in the latest…

I’ve been lucky in my career. In the early days I worked on farms, in factories, built stages for bands and roamed the outback as a shot firer for a seismic team in WA and Queensland. I’ve worked as a journalist and in PR and in senior roles for a Prime Minister, three senators and…

Here is the short list for this year’s Miles Franklin Award: I want to exhort all Anglo Saxon Australians – especially males and those who signify as male – to have a crack at the MF next year. If Robbie Arnott can do it that means a Bruce, Craig, Maxine or a Narelle has a…

I’m curious about who wins and who doesn’t win literary awards. Debra Danks has pulled off a ‘Quaddie’, winning four major awards for her memoir, We Come With This Place. Apart from Kim Cheng Boey and Dylan Van Den Berg, they’re all women. The feminisation of literature is almost complete. It’s curious but makes sense….

Anson Cameron wrote one of the best Australian novels since Peter Carey’s Bliss. Silences Long Gone didn’t sell. Why? It simply wasn’t PC. It talked about Aborigines with a sense of humour, outback characters, asbestosis, middle class inner suburban values and more. Not exactly fodder for the inner urban cultural left. When I read it…

I’m amused when women claim they are second class citizens when it comes to writing and publishing literary fiction in Australia. The story below is a classic example: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-04-16/stella-prize-shortlist-2023-alice-pung-chair-jaclyn-booton/102220502 There certainly were cases in the past when women writers were overlooked for literary awards. Unfortunately or fortunately (depending on your perspective), it’s hard to win…