Culture

Brodie Wilkinson The wind and rain lashing the building is far beyond what the blonde in the red dress had predicted in her forecast on the television last night. It claws and screams at the window, trying to get inside. The rain comes down in pulsating sheets, each compounding …

Natasha Cica This month, a tribunal ruling that may force the Ladies Lounge at MONA to either admit men or close has sparked debate over the written and unwritten rules of exclusion.

Katherine Cross The classic role-playing game Baldur’s Gate 3 rejects the capitalist predations of contemporary gaming to create a rich, enchanting world.

Jacob Robinson Netflix’s lavish adaptation of Liu Cixin’s allegedly unfilmable 3 Body Problem is spectacular, if flawed, epic television.

Cassie Tongue Drawing on the harsh realities of drought and flood, STC’s production of Angus Cerini’s Into the Shimmering World  is an exploration of silent shame and suffering.

Naomi Stead The Biennale of Sydney’s occupation of White Bay Power Station, a vast temple of the industrial revolution, is an inspired metamorphosis – and it’s only the beginning of the site’s possibilities.

Yen-Rong Wong The story of modern Australia is one of migration, adaptation and an ongoing struggle over the idea of an “Australian identity”. The characters in award-winning poet and novelist Ouyang Yu’s short story collection, The White Cockatoo Flowers: …

Neha Kale Photographer Pia Johnson finds beauty and dissonance in Fiona Tan’s complex video works, which explore the hidden histories of empire.

Neha Kale Maria Madeira, the first artist to represent Timor-Leste at the Venice Biennale, draws on a heritage of abundance to investigate the darkest histories.

Ben Brooker “How inappropriate to call this planet ‘Earth’,” observed English science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke, “when clearly it is ‘Ocean’.” Seventy per cent of the planet’s surface is water. The largest sea, the Pacific, is bigger than …

Maria Takolander Nova Weetman’s Love, Death & Other Scenes is an elegiac memoir, a subgenre of memoir that gives ballast to stories of everyday lives by focusing on life’s ultimate drama: death. Of course, the everyday and mortality are intimate companions. …

Miriam Cosic As with all of Charmian Clift’s writing, The End of the Morning – published almost 55 years after her death – is a combination of mid-20th century charm and sharp-edged observation. Called a novel in the new book, it is more of a long …