Category: Culture

The story of First Nations art in Melbourne’s gallery ecosystem is not a story about representation as accommodation — about a mainstream system making room for a marginalised culture as a corrective gesture. It is a more interesting and more demanding stor…

The founding argument of Chunky Move — articulated by Gideon Obarzanek when he established the company in 1995 and debuted it at the Melbourne International Arts Festival — was deceptively simple: that contemporary dance in Australia did not need to be impo…

What makes a city a film city is not a film festival. It is not, primarily, a production industry, though Melbourne has had that at various points in its history. What makes a city a film city — what produces a population that thinks about cinema as a form…

There is a moment, ascending the staircase from the State Library Victoria’s main entrance on Swanston Street, when the dome becomes visible above: an octagonal lantern of reinforced concrete, its twelve skylights admitting the particular grey-gold Melbourn…

The relationship between a city and its commercial gallery ecosystem is one of the better diagnostic tools for understanding what kind of art culture that city actually has — not what it aspires to, or what its public institutions claim, but what its privat…

Hosier Lane exists. It is real, it has been there long enough to accumulate genuine texture, and some of what appears on its walls is, by any standard, skilled work. But Hosier Lane has also become a destination — a place where tour groups arrive with camer…

There is a specific sound that the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra has been developing over the past several years — warmer than a British orchestra at the same tier, more harmonically transparent than the Central European model, possessed of a particular qual…

Melbourne’s theatre culture is often explained through comparison — more productions per capita than London’s West End, more theatre companies per resident than Sydney — as if quantity were the point. The point is not quantity. The point is that Melbourne h…

The address is not incidental. The Koorie Heritage Trust occupies Levels 1 and 3 of the Yarra Building — now increasingly known as the Birrarung Building — at Federation Square, the corner of Swanston and Flinders Streets, directly above the river that the…

Alfred Felton died in 1904, having made his fortune in wholesale chemicals and hardware — a practical, unglamorous accumulation of Victorian-era capital. He had no particular public profile as a collector. What he left behind was a bequest divided between c…