Author: Walter Marsh
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Flying Penguin turns ‘ridiculous aspirations’ into two decades of compelling local theatre
David Mealor remembers a conversation, with an actor friend in Sydney, way back at the beginning of the century. It was when he first said out loud to someone that he would like to take up directing. “I would see myself as an actor in rehearsals thinking, ‘I could direct this better than them’,” Mealor…
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‘We went on this dig together’: Historical tightrope act to reclaim the Colleano Heart
Note: Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander readers are advised that this article contains the names and images of, and references to, deceased persons. The Colleano Heart is the kind of documentary that makes you want to re-watch it straightaway. Filled with emotion, mystery, adventure and a timeline spanning colonisation to the present day, it’s a…
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Adelaide Film Festival review: Jimpa
Goodwood’s Capri Theatre may not have drink holders attached to its seats like many modern multiplexes, but it does have an organ that rises from the pit of the stage floor, and someone to play for the audience as they crowd into their seats. It’s a nice way to open the Adelaide Film Festival, and…
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‘Harvest of loot’: the colonial legacies of South Australia’s Benin Bronzes
On 21 November 1898, a shipment arrived at Port Adelaide. Arranged inside two crates designated as ‘ethnographic specimens’ lay half-a-dozen items, including a carved ivory tusk, a royal’s head, and a staff topped with a bird of prophecy. “The following specimens were taken in Benin City. W. Coast Africa by the British troops in Feb.…
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Nature Festival review: Flow Fest
With the motto ‘Understand the past, acknowledge the present and look forward to the future’, artist and cultural geologist Gavin Malone of L50K combined live music and eco-education for Nature Fest’s inaugural Flow Fest. Spread among a scattering of river red gums in what’s known as the Tree Theatre, people young and old lounged on…
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Music review: The Tallis Scholars
Much loved and respected, The Tallis Scholars are unarguably one of the great treasures of a-capella singing. More than any other group, they have brought back to life the time honoured choral tradition that spans back to the Renaissance. And it is a remarkable fact that director Peter Phillips has been at their helm since…
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‘History isn’t a straight line towards enlightenment’: First-time novelist navigates Colonel Light’s layered identities
Debut novelist Lyn Dickens’ Salt Upon the Water reveals the fascinating and cosmopolitan past of Adelaide’s famed surveyor and designer Colonel William Light. When Lyn Dickens first set eyes on a self-portrait of Colonel William Light, she was startled by what she saw. “I just stopped and looked at it,” she tells InReview. “Something about…
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Adelaide Film Festival premiere: Sophie Hyde on Jimpa, queer families, and Olivia Colman
When Sophie Hyde’s father Jim died in 2018, the director was left pondering what might have been. Her father had come out when she was a child, and like many LGBTQIA+ people eventually left Adelaide and their family for the more cosmopolitan outlook of the eastern states. Back in Adelaide, Sophie’s own child, Aud Mason-Hyde,…
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Book review: Silence is my Habitat
To say Silence is my Habitat is a concise book of eleven linked essays on living deaf in a hearing world, is to resist seeing the work as a whole. In confident and contemplative prose, White begins with her early childhood of contracting meningitis and losing her hearing, writing, “My mother said I was often…