author: Brian Matthews

  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Winds of change

    • Brian Matthews
    • 22 May 2006

    Towards the end of a bleak, mid-February Friday, the wind started to groan through the narrow, village streets. Shutters creaked and in the valley below a filmy curtain materialised over the vines and blurred the outlines of the farmhouses.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Far canal

    • Brian Matthews
    • 14 May 2006

    Pundits who were left gasping by the announcements of Colin (‘Cry me a river’) Barnett  would have been less surprised if they’d read the last issue of the Okotsk Institute Journal of Research into Inexplicable Public Behaviours.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Taxi cab tales

    • Brian Matthews
    • 14 May 2006

    Cab cultures, not to mention the cabbies themselves, vary widely around the world. The Australian habit of hopping into the front seat with the hack and exchanging a cheery word is not generally welcome in Paris.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Inferno bound

    • Brian Matthews
    • 11 May 2006

    The timelessness of great art is not just a matter of it still being around every time you happen to look.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Lost in Atlantis

    • Brian Matthews
    • 11 May 2006

    ‘Could you tell me how to get to Cudgegong, mate?’

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Bush tales

    • Brian Matthews
    • 10 May 2006

    David is making mud bricks. A small, young wallaby watches him from less than five metres away.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Things that go bump in the night

    • Brian Matthews
    • 08 May 2006

    Between 1 January and 1 October this year I slept in at least 19 different beds.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Tally-ho!

    • Brian Matthews
    • 30 April 2006

    I see that the Brits are about to bite the quirt and outlaw fox hunting. Only in England would the pursuit of the common fox threaten to divide the nation.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Word up

    • Brian Matthews
    • 30 April 2006

    Brian Matthews has words with Julian Burnside’s Word Watching, and Don Watson’s Weasel  Words.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Plus ça change

    • Brian Matthews
    • 29 April 2006

    When February dawned last year, I had been living in a small Provençal village for about a month.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Portuguese invasion

    • Brian Matthews
    • 27 April 2006

    I suppose that, in evolution’s daring script, the millipede has a role, but intense scrutiny has failed to reveal it to me.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Basic necessities

    • Brian Matthews
    • 25 April 2006

    It is common knowledge that the Dunny School of  Philosophy owes little to the medieval philosopher Duns Scotus.

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