Category Archive: AUSTRALIANIA
Burning Bright
Round One vs Port @ The G (7 April, 2017) Indian Summer: a warm afternoon and night, just the time to have a shot at the Olde Enemy. Your correspondent was feeling as fragile as the Sparkes stand, now touted as a crumbling ruin and monument to feelings of dilapidation at the Club. What would Henry Yorke Sparkes have made of the decision to craft a mound out of the historic grandstand? Evidently the Council, in an excess of zeal, has now also banned members from the back stairs of the Rix Stand, on health and safety grounds (we can’t recall any…
Continue Reading →Beyond the Rock
(by Janelle McCulloch) (2017) Do you know where you were in the early afternoon of August 8th 1975? Thanks to Janelle McCulloch, I do. I was at the world premiere of Peter Weir’s film Picnic at Hanging Rock. It is not that I could ever forget that day – it changed my life – but I was not sure of the date. The closest I have come to finding a description of the feeling which this film aroused in my upon my first viewing is C S Lewis’s explanation of what he calls “joy.” This is from his memoir – “Surprised…
Continue Reading →Something on a Stick Day
We at TVC regret that we failed to mark that important celebration, “Something on a Stick Day” on the 28th March, as is traditional. So, please accept our apologies and enjoy this touching cartoon by Michael Leunig, even if we are posting it a little late :-
Continue Reading →Gwen by Goldie Goldbloom
Gwen by Gwen
(2017) It is difficult to see, from reproductions of Gwen John’s paintings, why her lumpy daubs are thought by many to be better than the skillful if dull portraits painted by her brother, Augustus John. Goldbloom is at pains in Gwen, her novelised version of Gwen John’s life, to say that it was so, that even Augustus knew it. Nor is it easy to understand, at this distance, just why women found those lumpy bawds Augustus and the sculptor Auguste Rodin to be utterly irresistible, but again, apparently they did – or at least the artistic ones like Gwen and Dorelia (the mistress…
Continue Reading →The Hitler Club
(by Gary Gumpl and Richard Kleinig) (2007) It’s not easy being a Kraut. Hitler saw to that. He took more than two thousand years of German contributions to the world – legacies from sources such as Beethoven, Bonhoeffer, Brahms, Charlemagne, Marlene Dietrich, Dürer, Einstein, Friedrich, Goethe, Hesse, Hoffmann, Kant, Kleist, Liebniz, Luther, Mann, Mozart, Schiller, Schubert, and yes, Wagner (especially Wagner) – and sullied them, perhaps for ever. The ‘don’t mention the war’ running joke in that Fawlty Towers episode is closer to the truth than we care to admit. In modern Germany especially, the shadow cast by Nazism is long. Grotesque irony abounded in the Nazis’ world. For example, Himmler rattled around in a special train…
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