Author: Barry Gittins And Jen Vuk
-
ARTS AND CULTURE
- Barry Gittins and Jen Vuk
- 14 February 2014
3 Comments
While realpolitik can drive us beyond a healthy scepticism to cynicism and indifference, British cultural thinker Roman Krzaric contends that when we look beyond the real — through imagination, creativity, vulnerability and networking — we can bring about the ideal of 'empathy on a mass scale to create social change' and even go about 'extending our empathy skills to embrace the natural world'. Without dreamers like Krzaric, we're stuffed.
READ MORE 
-
ARTS AND CULTURE
- Barry Gittins and Jen Vuk
- 10 January 2014
A young writer has crash tackled the ugly questions of non-consensual sex, coercion and the male privilege and misuse of power that can flow from sporting success. Yet when it comes to our football codes — let alone our political arena — a conversation needs to move beyond gender name-calling or the 'us and them' polemic.
READ MORE
-
ARTS AND CULTURE
- Barry Gittins and Jen Vuk
- 13 December 2013
3 Comments
Deveny has made a career out of bungee jumping between the chasms of good taste, good writing and good sense. She's never been content to accept societal hypocrisy, and that's an occasional strength in her novel The Happiness Show. It becomes increasingly hard though to separate the author from her lead character, Lizzie. Thanks to an overly generous sprinkling of sex scenes, this quickly goes from disconcerting to downright awkward.
READ MORE
-
ARTS AND CULTURE
- Barry Gittins and Jen Vuk
- 15 November 2013
3 Comments
Punter is a bloke's bloke, 'brung up' in a limited but nurturing suburbia of cricket, cricket, golf and cricket. I was genuinely touched by his acknowledgement of the role his wife, Rianna, and their daughters have played in his maturation. Yet while life experiences invariably expanded young Ponting's mind, it's fair to say that there remains something of the awkward teen in the man.
READ MORE
-
ARTS AND CULTURE
- Barry Gittins and Jen Vuk
- 18 October 2013
1 Comment
The Garden is populated by the larger-than-strife figures who follow their lust of life and self. Kaos the crocodile, who becomes the first man, and Hades the platypus, the first thief. Orpheus the lyrebird, the first actor, and the first healer, possum Prometheus. The giant red kangaroo, Knuckles, the first ruler. This is storytelling that exults in pain and primordial uncertainty, passion and purpose.
READ MORE
-
ARTS AND CULTURE
- Barry Gittins and Jen Vuk
- 20 September 2013
5 Comments
As a parent of a boy, I was concerned by Thomas' experiences doing 'sexual ethics theatre performances'. She recounts negative responses from teenage boys to one scenario dealing with pubic hair — the lads assuming that 'any girl with pubes would be so self-conscious about them that she'd avoid sex altogether', and that malekind is disgusted by non-exfoliated women.
READ MORE
-
ARTS AND CULTURE
- Barry Gittins and Jen Vuk
- 23 August 2013
3 Comments
Chopper's a racist, self-billed sociopath with acknowledged mental and physical health issues and a highly evolved if bizarre set of moral principles. A raconteur ever-ready to discuss the robbing, bashing, torture, murder and disappearance of various peers and colleagues. Yet he is also a man who recognises the damage done by the spiritual, emotional and physical abuse he took as a child.
READ MORE
-
ARTS AND CULTURE
- Barry Gittins and Jen Vuk
- 26 July 2013
10 Comments
What we have here is a memoir of a woman wronged. And by that I don't mean our former PM. Well, not exclusively, anyway. Journalist Kerry-Anne Walsh may deny either a relationship with Gillard or an outright allegiance, but they're connected where it counts: at the heart of injustice. Both have been let down by a party that has seen much, much better days.
READ MORE
-
ARTS AND CULTURE
- Barry Gittins and Jen Vuk
- 28 June 2013
5 Comments
A young writer has crash tackled the ugly questions of non-consensual sex, coercion and the male privilege and misuse of power that can flow from sporting success. Yet when it comes to our football codes — let alone our political arena — a conversation needs to move beyond gender name-calling or the 'us and them' polemic.
READ MORE
-
ARTS AND CULTURE
- Barry Gittins and Jen Vuk
- 31 May 2013
It wasn't so much a phone call as a lifeline — the day the fertility clinic called me with news of my pregnancy. After six years of hoping, the life my husband and I had all but given up on was to be ours. At that same time, radio host Sheridan Voysey and his wife Merryn were facing a more heartbreaking outcome.
READ MORE
-
ARTS AND CULTURE
- Barry Gittins and Jen Vuk
- 03 May 2013
5 Comments
Casting a Victorious PM Abbott as a puppet of Pell and Howard, or a fiddler with women's rights, seems risible; Abbott is bound by social restraints after all. Nonetheless, there is something ominous in David Marr's droll observation: 'His values have never stood in his way.'
READ MORE
-
ARTS AND CULTURE
- Barry Gittins and Jen Vuk
- 05 April 2013
4 Comments
I know and love people who struggle with depression. I've lost friends to suicide. Depression was my constant companion at times and suicide an alluring, far country. A recent novel delves into the life of a family reeling from the suicide of a child, and shows that even in the deepest recesses of grief, joy can interrupt.
READ MORE