Dr Moya Catherine Costello

In The Spare Room, Judy Davis lights up the stage with a singularly vivid performance.
Adapted by Eamon Flack from Helen Garner’s 2008 novel of the same name, Davis plays sharp-tongued Helen (or Hel) to the irrational Nicola (Elizabeth Alexander), who visits seeking alternative treatments for her cancer-ridden body.
But unfortunately, the production does not match Davis’ star performance.

Bibere vinum suae regionis, to drink wine from one’s own region, was an attempt by me and an academic colleague, Steve Evans, in a 2013 scholarly article, to match the neologism ‘locavore’, meaning local eater/local eating, with one for local drinker/drinking ‘locabiber’. Locavore was the New American Oxford Dictionary’s word of the year for 2007. Locavore comes from the Latin roots of local (locus) and eating (vorare). To drink is bibere. Both terms have been short lived! But one hundred miles (160 kms) was being used in the first decade of this century as the distance within which one could readily access locally produced food, to save on transport costs and emissions at the very least.

A short memoir of my development as an Australian writer. Published in Sudo Journal online on 30/12/204 in the fifth volume

My first curiosities about the new opera Eucalyptus, an adaptation of Murray Bail’s multi-award-winning 1998 novel, were regarding how Ellen and the many stories told to her by her ultimately successful suitor would be portrayed.

Would Ellen be a victim of the plans of men, or would she forge her own path, as she does in the novel? Overall, I was relieved the opera remained largely faithful to Bail’s novel by recognising and respecting its various narrative pleasures.

Bail’s story centres on our protagonist, the famously beautiful Ellen (played by Desiree Frahn) and a eucalypt gum-naming competition set up by her father, Holland (Simon Meadows), to find her the perfect suitor. To Holland, little is more precious than his daughter and the hundreds of eucalyptus gums he has planted on his property. But Ellen vehemently rejects his plans for her.

The “storyteller” (Michael Petrucelli) is the unnamed wanderer Ellen stumbles upon in her father’s woods. He wins Ellen’s hand in marriage by naming all the gums (and does so inadvertently by creating name plaques which he then sells to Ellen’s father). Beyond this, he seduces Ellen with various tales of love, loss, death and deception.