Peter Craven

Peter Craven reviews 'Horse' by Geraldine Brooks

July 2022, no. 444 • 25 June 2022

Horse? Could that title sound familiar because it was a Richard Harris movie of the 1960s? Well, Geraldine Brooks, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for March (2005) and author of novels about everything from the characters in Little Women to the life of King David, is not one to be deterred by daunting precedents. She is a senior journalist who has gone on to use her capacity to master information and ... (read more)

'The Well': A sensitive adaptation of Elizabeth Jolley's dramatic novel

September 1997, no. 194 • 01 September 1997

The Australian film industry got going in the 1970s perhaps just a little before the resurgence of Australian publishing and perhaps for that reason there has been less interplay between Australian film and Australian writing than there might have been. Patrick White raged and roared about the prospect of Joseph Losey and Max Von Sydow making a film of Voss, but that was the tormenting hope of a m ... (read more)

Peter Craven reviews 'Last Letter to a Reader: Essays' by Gerald Murnane

December 2021, no. 438 • 24 November 2021

No contemporary Australian writer has higher claims to immortality than Gerald Murnane and none exhibits narrower tonal range. It’s a long time since we encountered the boy with his marbles and his liturgical colours in some Bendigo of the mind’s dreaming in Tamarisk Row (1974). There was the girl who was the embodiment of dreaming in A Lifetime on Clouds (1976). After The Plains (1982) c ... (read more)

'Highbrow and Lowbrow' by Peter Craven

October 1998, no. 205 • 01 October 1998

The last thing a highbrow hack needs is to find himself in a sustained bout of controversy with a blockbusting writer from the other side of the tracks. A few weeks ago at the Melbourne Writers Festival, I found myself a participant in a discussion about reviewing (and whether the critic was a friend or a foe) which rapidly turned into a sustained accusation on the part of the bestselling novelist ... (read more)

Peter Craven reviews 'Reading the Holocaust' by Inga Clendinnen

October 1998, no. 205 • 01 October 1998

The Holocaust is a subject which numbs the mind and petrifies the soul. This is the point at which Inga Clendinnen starts her remarkable set of essays about it. The Holocaust is a Gorgon and the only way to destroy it, Perseus-like, is to hold it’s image on the screen of the shield and stare back. The historian of The Aztecs, this remarkable woman who has always attended to the inflections of hu ... (read more)

Peter Craven reviews 'Murder in the Groove' by Dave Warner

May 1999, no. 210 • 01 May 1999

Dave Warner, one-time singer and satirist, has been at work as a detective story writer for a few years now, penning long excoriations of West Australia Inc. style shenanigans and, according to reports, working pretty much in the shadow of that L.A. master (with all his fizz and stammer and sparkle), the great James Ellroy. ... (read more)

National Library Australian Voices Essay | ‘The kingdom of correct usage is elsewhere’ by Peter Craven

April 1996, no. 179 • 01 April 1996

Some years ago the poet John Forbes was addressing himself to that national monument, Les Murray, and he had occasion to remark, ‘The trouble with vernacular republics is that they presuppose that the kingdom of correct usage is elsewhere.’ It was, I suppose, designed to highlight the fact that the homespun qualities of the Bard from Bunyah were dependent on an awareness of the metropolitan st ... (read more)

'Shakespeare in Australia' by Peter Craven

September 2001, no. 234 • 01 September 2001

In James Joyce’s Ulysses, Shakespeare is referred to as the happy hunting ground of all minds which have lost their balance. He is also referred to by Buck Mulligan, even less reverently, though with a distinct nationalist tilt, as ‘Shakespeare. I seem to recall the name. Ah, to be sure, the fellow who writes like Synge.’ Well, there probably are analogies between the greatest of all dramati ... (read more)

Peter Craven reviews 'Collected Poems I 1961-1981' and 'Collected Poems II 1984-1999' by Peter Porter

July 1999, no. 212 • 01 July 1999

Peter Porter first came to prominence nearly forty years ago as an ironic, tough, rather dandyish poet who wore his Australian expatriatism with a flair and who kept his poetic distance on a London which enthralled and appalled him. He came out with striking lines like ‘I am only the image I can force upon the town’ – all glitter and brittleness – but he was also the kind of poet who could ... (read more)

Peter Craven reviews the film of Oscar and Lucinda

February–March 1998, no. 198 • 01 February 1998

Oscar and Lucinda is the next best thing we have to that gleaming oxymoron a contemporary Australian literary classic. It won a swag of prizes (not least the Booker); it is a long vibrant narrative, including history full of the rustle of Victorian costumes, but with a whisper of the horrors on which this country was founded with a brief ghastly moment representing the murder of Aborigines. Peter ... (read more)