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.

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.

Appropriately for a book by a visual artist/writer, Imants Tillers's Credo is beautifully designed (by Jenny Grigg): it looks small, spare, neat; has a sense of breathing space from the wide margins on the pages, the modernity of the Tiempos Regular font and the brevity of the essays; and its cover is a pale cultured-butter colour with embossed gold (reminiscent perhaps of Eastern European Christian art iconography) for title, publisher's logo and author's name. [...]potential provocations include the following: simulation (apropos of Giorgio de Chirico's paintings) is 'the quintessential quality of Australian life and culture', as in Australia 'the experience of works of art through mechanical reproduction always precedes their direct experience'; 'There can be no doubt that the only original contribution Australia has made to the history of world art in the twentieth century is Australian Indigenous art ... While Tillers notes in his preface-as-overture that there is 'no overarching theme, no grand narrative' in these collected fragments, the dissection of Australian painting, and more broadly Australian culture, and the discussion of his own work process (quoting, repeating, masking) capture a reader in a to-and-fro journey between interconnections which are most often repetitions, but which are more than that latter word implies - that is, the repetition expands on the thing or it has the thing reviewed in a different context, much like his (re)use of his own canvas-board paintings.

A collection of 18 prose poems accompanied by images written with the dried, pressed specimens in the Medicinal Plant Herbarium, Lismore Campus, Southern Cross University. It has a Foreword by Peter Mouatt, Pharmocognocist, Analytical Research Laboratory, Medicinal Plant Herbarium, Southern Cross University and an Introduction by Moya Costello. Published by the small, independent Irish press Beir Bua Press.