Word: perth
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Have you ever felt compelled to pursue any political issues? -Ross Davenport, PERTH, AUSTRALIAI'm only strong as a storyteller. I'm not strong as a politician. Hopefully, with my journeys around the world, having visited the Pakistan earthquake zone, a girls' school in Afghanistan and some refugee camps in the Palestinian areas, then I'll be stronger as an actor at choosing the right kind of material...
...Dreams of Speaking looms as a literary dark horse for next month's Miles Franklin Award (favorites include Peter Carey's Theft and Alexis Wright's Carpentaria), comes the Perth-based writer's Sorry (Vintage; 218 pages). Just as Sixty Lights segued seamlessly into Dreams, this pained, poetic tale of a young girl wracked by dreams of speaking seems to have been born from its predecessor. "We take it for granted, don't we?" muses 12-year-old Perdita Keene, a free spirit made mute by the violent death of her English anthropologist father near Broome, Western Australia, in World...
...Jones is quick to shatter this glasshouse of cultural cross-pollination. When Mary becomes the scapegoat following the murder of Perdita's father and is banished to reform school in Perth, Sorry begins to articulate the deep unease of a family faced with the unfinished business of history. And it is around the grisly events that took place in the kitchen of the Keenes' cattle- station shack that the novel cinematically circles...
...Later, Stella will descend into misanthropic madness in a Perth boarding house, while Perdita, starved of her sisterhood with Mary, will seek out "the families of readership" as a trainee librarian. With a mastery of mise-en-sc?ne, Jones writes of the family's future as if it were the past, and the past as if it were the present. For the surviving members, what happened in the station's kitchen continues to play out, not unlike the true-life case of a Japanese soldier lost for 29 years in the Philippines jungles, who refused to believe World...
...What's amazing is that Durkin very nearly didn't parlay "It" into opera. The daughter of a plumber from Perth's working-class Maddington, she first dreamed of a career in musical theater. But after failing her dance audition for the Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts, Durkin was offered a place at the conservatorium instead. "Everyone's got this idea of what an opera singer is like," she says, "and for me it was always Wagner-huge, you know, the horns." For an art form looking to reinvent itself and draw new audiences, Durkin is a marketer...