Culture

Banh mi crumbs fall onto my keyboard – a petri dish of despair, skin flakes and granules of instant coffee unlovingly dispelled from the side of my slack jaw. If Hansel and Gretel were to find the office worker on their lunchbreak, they’d only follow the stale breadcrumbs up the cinderblock lift and find me swathed in my sheets of data and formulas for timesaving and cost-cutting. In this reprieve – where my availability blinks yellow (be right back) like I’m stopped in traffic – I consider the big questions.

The climbing game Peak – built almost entirely in a month during a developers’ retreat – has become a viral sensation in the midst of industry gloom.

The Neighbour at the Gate at Sydney’s National Art School explores the shared histories of Aboriginal and Asian Australians as joyful, resilient and inclusive.

Louise Courvoisier’s debut feature, Holy Cow, is lavish in its affection for rural life, but never sentimental.

For more than 30 years, artist Rose Nolan has challenged the hierarchies of art with works of quiet resonance that explore how lived experience and the everyday shape meaning.

The gastronomic temple Grub made headlines a few years back for serving Sydney’s bored pleasure-seekers a Mediterranean dreamfish that caused diners to hallucinate for several days. Since then, Grub opened bookings once a year, an event earmarked in the calendars of a thousand stressed PAs, and the prices grew if not prohibitive, then as gluttonous as the clientele. Like Grub, when Dave called triumphantly from his study that they had secured a date in the summer, Mira was hit by a maelstrom of reservations.

In today’s music industry the real money is in live performance – and many of the biggest pop shows are sites of both auteurish experiment and genuinely inspiring spectacle.