Culture

A chat among the books in a Brisbane bookshop institution.

The National successfully unites three cultural institutions in an exhibition interrogating inequality, colonisation and racism.

In Transit, Christian Petzold transposes a story of World War II refugees into a contemporary setting. By pulling off this feat, he confronts viewers with their complicity in the treatment of asylum seekers today.

As Rosslynd Piggott prepares for I Sense You But I Cannot See You – the second retrospective of her career at the National Gallery of Victoria – she reflects on her childhood in Frankston, her ambition as a young artist and her life’s work. “I did a year of teaching in 1981 in the remote Victorian country at Werrimull. I’d just come out of post-punk Melbourne, thrust up there in the middle of nowhere. I was never going to do three years up there. After that, I just ran away, basically, to St Kilda, doing dishwashing and waitressing. I knew I wanted to be an artist.”

In and out of the kitchen with the owner of the restaurant Paperback, Joey Astorga.

With the transformation of Muriel’s Wedding for the stage, some of the film’s winsome ugly-duckling charm has been lost, and along with it the story’s emotional reality.

A chance introduction to little-known ’70s Memphis power pop musician Van Duren on YouTube led two Australian fans on their own journey of filmmaking discovery.

In his intricate debut novel, Confessions of the Fox, Jordy Rosenberg entwines the lives of an 18th-century transgender thief and the academic who becomes obsessed with his story. In doing so, Rosenberg aims to counteract the historical erasure – and the continuing persecution – of trans people. “There are many things missing from archives but sometimes even what is there can obscure more than it reveals.”

Travelling north from California to Oregon on the Coast Starlight rail line, the traveller observes the fade of Los Angeles’ pressing population until the forests part for a moment’s glimpse of smalltown USA.

A new short story from an award-winning author.