Culture

Walking slowly around the tree, the man looked for a face in the trunk, but he couldn’t find any cavity from which a voice might emerge. I’m not imagining it, thought the soldier. Truly this thing is talking.

The man said he’d come on foot from a nearby town, where he’d failed to find continuing work of any kind. And while someone had offered him a few nights of accommodation –  a blanket on the floor of an outbuilding – today they had asked him to leave.

“Do you have any friends?” asked the tree.

The soldier said he did not have anyone.

“A person without a single friend? That must be unusual,” said the tree.

Not only did Chopin’s Preludes intrigue Musica Viva’s artistic director Paul Kildea, the piano the composer completed them on captured his imagination as well.

Pierre Bonnard’s mastery of colour and light is on full display in NGV International’s extraordinary winter exhibition.

In sticking closely to the verbatim transcription of an FBI interrogation, Reality director Tina Satter has created a disturbing and powerful film.

The designers of the Victorian Pride Centre in St Kilda took on a number of almost insurmountable challenges – and triumphed.

In her latest book, Miles Franklin winner Anna Funder rescues George Orwell’s first wife, Eileen O’Shaughnessy, from the shadows of incuriosity.