Welcome to Eureka Street

back to site
Forgot your password?
Subscribe

Search Results: Manning

  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    The wet sheep: a football eulogy

    • Brian Matthews
    • 07 October 2009
    1 Comment

    The one thing more potent than the anticipation of seeing your team in a grand final is the misery of seeing them defeated. A wet, bedraggled lamb glimpsed en route to Melbourne proved to be an ill omen for one footy fan.

    READ MORE
  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Larrikin poet's Sentimental 'slanguage'

    • Brian Matthews
    • 16 September 2009
    3 Comments

    C. J. Dennis once wrote that, as a boy, he had 'a devout and urgent desire to become a larrikin'. The Songs of a Sentimental Bloke provides a window on part of Australian culture and the traditions, speech and images that forged it.

    READ MORE
  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Economists and other prophets

    • Brian Matthews
    • 12 August 2009
    3 Comments

    Economists are often, sometimes spectacularly, wrong. But like all prophets, they are unabashed by and unpunished for abject failures. They pop up from each new set of ruins, surprised yet unrepentant, princes of a plethora of evanescent predictions.

    READ MORE
  • AUSTRALIA

    Regulation could make Kyle a good boy

    • Michael Mullins
    • 10 August 2009
    5 Comments

    Kyle Sandilands and other shock jocks may want to behave well, but they are constrained by commercial logic, and need the helping hand of regulation. Even John Laws intimated this last week when he told VEGA 95.3: 'I never wanted to create mischief that would be damaging to people.'

    READ MORE
  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Malcolm Turnbull and the parable of the pelicans

    • Brian Matthews
    • 08 July 2009
    3 Comments

    Years ago, a trout fisherman with 'irresistible' bait was outsmarted by a flock of pelicans. Like a punter with unshakeable conviction, Malcolm Turnbull also learned the hard way that there's no such thing as a dead certainty.

    READ MORE
  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    The parable of the dirty floor

    • Brian Matthews
    • 17 June 2009
    1 Comment

    The mysterious stain on the kitchen floor was evoking obscure feelings of unease and danger. What was happening in the cosmos that could be making me feel that way? A hell of a lot, as it turned out.

    READ MORE
  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Shakespeare and the F word

    • Brian Matthews
    • 13 May 2009

    If Shakespeare had dabbled in cuisine, dishes such as 'eye of newt' and 'fillet of fenny snake' may have been a sensation. As the first 'foody' to emerge from the obscurity of Stratford-upon-Avon, he would have an unlikely successor: Gordon Ramsay.

    READ MORE
  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Australians shaped by the spirit of place

    • Alexandra Coghlan
    • 16 January 2009

    Landscape has long been acknowledged as central to Australian colonial history. In contrast to the harsh conditions endured by settlers in Sydney Cove, convicts in Tasmania experienced a veritable Eden. (March 2008)

    READ MORE
  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Scenes from a taxi

    • Brian Matthews
    • 17 December 2008
    1 Comment

    I don't support the view that cab drivers are sources of homespun wisdom and arcane knowledge. Australian cabbies are an amiable, diverse lot, not given to philosophy, though I encountered one spectacular exception.

    READ MORE
  • AUSTRALIA

    Zimbabwe's disappeared

    • Oskar Wermter
    • 17 December 2008
    6 Comments

    Jestina Mukoko was a television presenter, but left to become director of the Zimbabwe Peace Project, which has documented many atrocities and crimes of Mugabe's regime. Last week she was abducted by a group of armed agents.

    READ MORE
  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Crabs, cars and Peter Carey

    • Tim Kroenert
    • 11 December 2008
    1 Comment

    Of the notorious Australian low-budget genre films of the 1970s and 1980s, few would feature 'social commentary' as a selling point. But then, few have the distinction of being based on a Peter Carey short story.

    READ MORE
  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Secret life of a bullied writer

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 05 December 2008
    4 Comments

    If Manning Clark was oversensitive to criticism, he was also strongly, sometimes brutally, criticised by his peers and by journalists. Matthews' biography presents the relationship between Clark's writing and his dramatic inner world.

    READ MORE