Mothering Sunday, a film by Eva Husson
4 May 2022
Mothering Sunday, trailer, by French film director Eva Husson, based on the 2016 novel of same name by English author Graham Swift, is a tale of secret love playing out on an unseasonably balmy March day, on an English country estate, in 1924.
The events of Graham Swift’s novel take place over the course of one day — the holiday Mothering Sunday. Maid Jane Fairchild (Odessa Young) has the day off, as her employers, Mr. and Mrs. Niven (Colin Firth and Olivia Colman) are attending an event to celebrate the engagement of their neighbours’ son, Paul (Josh O’Connor). Jane is an orphan, so has no mother to spend the day with — but she does have Paul, with whom she’s been having a years-long secret affair. The story unfolds as they spend their final day together as lovers.
Mothering Sunday opens in Australian cinemas on Thursday 2 June 2022.
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Eva Husson, film, Graham Swift, trailer
NSW bans a bevy of single-use plastic items from 1 June 2022
4 May 2022
Big changes are coming up for people who buy takeaway food and beverages in NSW.
Lightweight plastic bags, single-use plastic straws, stirrers and cutlery, single-use plastic bowls and plates, expanded polystyrene food service items, and single-use plastic cotton buds and microbeads in certain personal care products, are among single-use items the NSW Government is banning from Wednesday 1 June 2022.
It’s all part of the NSW Government’s plan to phase out single-use plastics and reduce the harmful impact these items have on our environment. These bans apply to all businesses, organisations and anyone holding an activity for charitable, sporting, education or community purposes in NSW.
Takeaway coffee cups, along with their profligate plastic lids — of which Australia chews through one billion of per year — look to remain for the time being, but it is the NSW Government’s intention to do away with these by 2025.
The City of Sydney has put together a guide to assist consumers to find reusable alternatives.
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coffee, environment, sustainability
Simone Amelia Jordan on writing your first book
4 May 2022
Sydney based journalist and writer Simone Amelia Jordan, winner of the 2021 Richell Prize for emerging authors, on overcoming your sense of imposter syndrome, and getting on with writing your first book.
…it’s an absolute life goal for writers and non-writers alike, to get these stories out of us and into the world. I’m a journalist by trade, so writing creative non-fiction has been a challenge. But I’m pushing myself out of my comfort zone to learn and be the best I can be.
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Martin Eden, a film by Pietro Marcello
3 May 2022
Martin Eden, portrayed by Italian actor Luca Marinelli in the 2019 film of the same name, trailer, directed by Pietro Marcello, is a barely literate sailor who decides he wants to become a writer.
Inspiration comes in the form of Elena Orsini (Jessica Cressy), the daughter of a well-off Neapolitan family, after a chance set of circumstances bring them together. Determined to become “worthy” of her hand in marriage, he devotes the next two years to self-education, while writing as much as he can.
But writing is not an occupation for the faint-hearted, and as the rejection letters pile up, he begins to wonder if he’s doing the right thing. But Martin Eden, loosely based on Jack London’s semiautobiographical 1909 novel, is perhaps a warning to be careful what you wish for.
You might attain what it is you aspire to, but at what cost? And might you lose sight of what it was you really wanted in the first place?
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film, Jack London, Pietro Marcello, trailer
Fictosexuals: people married to fictional characters
3 May 2022
Sometimes a book is just too good to put down, leaving you no choice but to… marry one of its (fictional) characters. Unofficially at least.
And no, this is no joke. The practice is said to have thousands of adherents in Japan, including Akihiko Kondo, a thirty-something salaryman, who is “married” to Hatsune Miku, a singing voice synthesizer, who features in video games, and even opened a concert for Lady Gaga once*.
In Miku, Mr. Kondo has found love, inspiration and solace, he says. He and his assortment of Miku dolls eat, sleep and watch movies together. Sometimes, they sneak off on romantic getaways, posting photos on Instagram.
*… though can someone who opened a show for Lady Gaga be unreal?
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Evelyn Araluen’s Stella Prize acceptance speech
3 May 2022
In a passionate and moving acceptance speech after winning the Stella Prize last week, Evelyn Araluen implores Australian governments to do more to fund the arts in Australia.
Artists, in this country anyway, are used to instability, we’re used to two or three jobs, we’re used to paltry super, and the constant fear of illness and accident faced by all precarious workers. We’re used to living one pay check away from poverty. Despite this slap in the face, this blunt dismissal of the clear social and cultural good the arts provides to all Australians, artists were still advocating and organising throughout the pandemic, and the fires and the floods. They were still working through the isolation of endless lockdowns in the hope that their creative efforts, their work, would help someone else survive.
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2022 Best Young Australian Novelists awards
2 May 2022
Ella Baxter, Michael Burrows, and Diana Reid, have been named winners of the Sydney Morning Herald’s 2022 Best Young Australian Novelists awards.
Judges Thuy On, Gretchen Shirm and SMH Spectrum editor Melanie Kembrey said the three novels ‘stood out from the many entrants for their strong narrative voices, memorable characters and sharp writing — they’ll make you laugh, cry and keep thinking long after you’ve turned the final page’.
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Australian literature, literary awards
The 2022 Brisbane Writers Festival
2 May 2022
The 2022 Brisbane Writers Festival opens tomorrow, Tuesday 3 May 2022, and concludes on Sunday 8 May. This is the festival’s sixtieth event, and if the program is anything to go by, it looks like there is something for everyone.
In this special year of the sixtieth celebration of the Brisbane Writers Festival, we bring a world of beautiful, wise, strong and urgent voices from across the Pacific Ocean and from around the world to Meanjin/Brisbane.
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How did dinosaurs spend their last day on Earth?
2 May 2022
Riley Black, writing for the Smithsonian Magazine, depicts the last day in the life in of an Edmontosaurus, a dinosaur focussed on finding food and avoiding predators, while trying to divest itself of lice like creatures feeding on his flesh.
There was no impending sense of doom. There was no shift to the wind, or darkening of the clouds. No lightning, no thunder. In this little patch of Hell Creek, Montana, all is as it ever was as far as the dinosaurs are concerned. But more than two thousand miles away, a chunk of extraterrestrial stone more than seven miles across just slammed into the Earth.
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Sergiy Maidukov, Kyiv based Ukrainian illustrator
2 May 2022
Sergiy Maidukov is an illustrator based in Kyiv, the capital of Ukraine, whose work has been published in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Guardian.
During the day he assists in defending his country from the Russian invasion, and at night, while confined to his apartment on account of curfews, draws what he sees from his windows, all too often sights no one should have to witness:
Sometimes, I see an explosion reflected on the glass surface of a skyscraper, or silent flares going up and then burning out in a shower of sparks. One week, I saw anti-aircraft guns firing tracer rounds into the night sky, where a hunt for a Russian drone was under way.
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