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Articles by Ilona Wallace
Nine of Adelaide’s Finest Florists
A bouquet of flowers is possibly the only gift that can symbolise grief and joy in equal measure. The staple of weddings, funerals and anniversaries, those buds and fronds have to express a range of sentiments and they deserve to be presented in style. You won’t find a single plastic gerbera in the stores of Adelaide’s finest florists – they experiment with their craft, approach the industry with fresh eyes, and operate with ethics and sustainability at front of mind. Here are some of the best.
Book Review: All That You Can’t Leave Behind
Erin Lee Carr’s memoir All That You Leave Behind is written firmly in the shadow of her late father, journalist David Carr. David Carr was a colossal presence at The New York Times: an articulate, prolific writer who devoured and deconstructed more media than most mortals encounter in their lifetimes. He died suddenly in 2015, leaving behind three children, including Erin, our author. So extraordinary is David’s impression that he feels like the main character in his daughter’s story.
Daytripping in Siberia
Half way along the Tran-Siberian Railway, we take a detour to walk on water. Travelling east to west along the Trans-Siberian Railway, a passenger will cross approximately 100 degrees of longitude – nearly a third of the way around the globe. As the crow flies, the distance between Vladivostok and Moscow is 6412 km, but the train is no crow. In fact, the journey stretches over 9200 km, carving a crooked passage through Siberia’s 1.3 billion hectares.
Book Review: Greek To Me
Books May 6, 2019 by Ilona Wallace 0 This new memoir from ‘comma queen’ Mary Norris sees The New Yorker magazine copy editor immerse herself in the language and mythology of Greece. New Yorker copy editor Mary Norris, AKA the Comma Queen, writes absolutely delightful memoirs. Her boundless curiosity and giddy enthusiasm will sweep you up and into her stories. She’s generous with her insecurities, too; though, in this second memoir, she is more confident and less apologetic.
Book Review: Dreyer’s English
Books April 29, 2019 by Ilona Wallace 0 Random House managing editor Benjamin Dreyer shares lessons from his 30 year career in words – but ‘grammar Nazi’ he is not. A charming, footnote-studded guide to writing well. Dreyer is a charming narrator; he writes as though he’s sharing cheeky secrets with you over coffee in a cosy lounge. Dreyer is vice president, managing editor and copy chief at Random House in New York. His editing career spans three decades and his love of words spans a lifetime.
Book Review: From Secret Ballot to Democracy Sausage
Books March 25, 2019 by Ilona Wallace 0 South Australian suffrage, sausage sizzles and postal surveys are among the electoral issues canvassed in this short but sharp account of Australia at the polls. “Australia was born not on the battlefield but in the ballot box,” writes Judith Brett in the early pages of this, a history of the vote in Australia. It’s a slim volume divided into bite-sized chapters covering the laws and social practices that govern how we vote. Brett’s research is meticulous.
Adelaide Writers' Week: Jo Dyer's write connections
Adelaide Festival, Books February 28, 2019 by Ilona Wallace 0 Jo Dyer’s first year as director of Adelaide Writers’ Week has been a whirlwind of grim tales and familiar faces. Dyer gestures widely with her hands as she speaks, crosses and rolls her eyes, laughs easily and beams huge smiles.
Book Review: American Prison
Books February 14, 2019 by Ilona Wallace 0 Journalist and onetime prison guard Shane Bauer examines America’s prison-industrial system from slavery to modern injustices. In 2011, after 26 months in an Iranian prison on charges of espionage, American journalist Shane Bauer returned home with a new focus: incarceration. American Prison is the culmination of years on the beat and four months working as a guard at Winn Correctional Centre, a private Louisiana prison.
Another writer withdraws from Adelaide Writers' Week 2019, replacement announced
Frankenstein in Baghdad author Ahmed Saadawi is the latest writer to cancel their appearance at the 2019 festival. Jo Dyer, the new director of Adelaide Writers’ Week, has been told that pulling together a festival like this is less an act of curation and more one of “creative opportunism”. Popular authors are in high demand, with offers coming at them from all corners of the globe.
Book Review: Rage Becomes Her
Books January 16, 2019 by Ilona Wallace 0 Soraya Chemaly’s Rage Becomes Her is one of three powerful books on women’s anger published in 2018. Eloquent Rage (Brittney Cooper) and Good and Mad (Rebecca Traister) are the others. These feminist triplets have a lot to say about the quantity and quality of fury. In 10 chapters, Chemaly picks apart the causes and consequences of women’s anger.
Book Review: Diving for Seahorses - The Science and Secrets of Memory
How did we come to remember things? Are human memories so vastly different to animal ones? How do we remember, and why do we forget? Diving for Seahorses is an exquisite expedition into the heart of these ideas, led by a team of Norwegian sisters: Hilde and Ylva Østby. Ylva is a neuropsychologist, a leading expert in the field of memory research; Hilde is a novelist, translating Ylva’s science into narrative.
How a beloved Adelaide bookshop found its home
“Let me put it this way: I can’t imagine a heaven without books. That’s how much I love them,” says Tim, an Egyptologist and manager of the Coptic Culture Centre. Not long after arriving in Australia in 2006, Tim found a little slice of heaven on Hutt Street: the Oxfam Bookshop. Ever since then, he has been a regular customer; he’s one of the first people new volunteers and visitors meet. He drops by a few times a week, with Ramses, his three-year-old long-haired Jack Russell, at his heel.
Book Review: The Girl Who Smiled Beads: A Story of War and What Comes After
In 2006, Clemantine Wamariya was reunited her with her family, live on the Oprah Show. This is the moment when most of America came to know her; this is the moment that starts The Girl Who Smiled Beads. Wamariya hadn’t seen her parents since 1994, when she was six years old and fleeing the Rwandan genocide with her older sister, Clare. The sisters spent six years crossing Africa trying to find a safe haven. Finally, they made their way to America, only to encounter new, complicated struggles.
Home: Drawings by Syrian children
“This was the worst moment of my life. It is too hard to draw.” This is how Youssef Mhanna, aged 7, captions his artwork in Home: drawings by Syrian children. The caption accompanies a text piece rendered in bright coloured pencils; it is one of the more than 250 drawings curated by Ben Quilty for Home. Under the banners of Threat, Light, Dark, Dream, Tears and Home, the children’s experiences, terrors and hopes come to life in watercolour, texta and pencil.
Book Review: The Ensemble
How do you remain your own person when you are one part of a whole? Aja Gabel’s debut novel delves into the intimate lives of the players in a string quartet. Henry, the youngest and most talented, has a supportive family and is repeatedly encouraged to pursue a solo career. The other three – ruthless Jana, bitter Daniel and gentle Brit – are estranged or orphaned; the quartet is their only chance for success. They live with a constant, quiet fear that Henry may leave them.
Book Review: Bury What We Cannot Take
In the summer of 1957, Seok Koon must choose to leave one of her children behind as she escapes Mao’s China for Hong Kong. Twelve-year-old Ah Lim, whose actions gave the family sudden cause to flee, will go; his nine-year-old sister, San San, will stay behind. So begins Seok Koon’s desperate quest to reunite her family. Her husband’s attention is torn between his Hong Kong mistress, his devastated finances, and his ambivalence towards his ‘old’ family.
Monstrous maidens hit the screen at Sax & Violins
It’s a monster-movie marathon with a twist: Sax & Violins Film Society is spending the month of August with the baddest mothers on the block, examining and deconstructing the way these women are represented on screen: as “corruptible, conduits of evil, monstrous, alien – ‘other’.
Book Review: The Lost Girls of Camp Forevermore
Five young girls and their camp leader head out on an overnight kayaking trip. The leader promptly dies. Fu leads us through the girls’ lives, one by one, probing the subtle ways this formative experience affects the girls in adolescence and adulthood. Except by coincidence, the Lost Girls’ stories don’t intertwine after their childhood experience. The central story — what happens on the camp — is told through only one girl’s voice, so you come to know her perspective of the event most closely.
Book Review: Staying
Jessie Cole’s essay, The Breaking Point, first appeared in Meanjin, then in Best Australian Essays 2014. In it, Cole explores — tenderly, but openly — the effect of her sister’s suicide on her father’s mental health. Staying, Cole’s memoir, surveys her family’s grief and the loneliness born of unspeakable heartbreak.
Audiences as artists: ACE opens doors for public programs
In 2017, celebrated South Australian artist Sera Waters hosted two embroidery workshops at ACE Open. The sold-out sessions complemented Waters’ exhibition Domestic Arts, and invited the general public to experience what it was like to be the artist whose works could be seen on display. The success of these workshops was greatly encouraging for ACE, which, at the time, was less than two months old. Since its launch in July 2017, ACE has performed at an astonishingly high level.
Hook, line and sinker at Port Lincoln's Line & Label
“Pretty much all the fruit and veg — and herbs! — on the menu are grown here. You can go and have a look at the garden if you like?” I’m perched behind a wine barrel on the deck at Peter Teakle Wines’ new restaurant: the Line & Label. It’s a comfortable perch with an incredible view. The evening light is draping everything in gold — from the grapevines and lavender growing in the west to Boston Bay glittering in the east.
Famous last words: Laura Kroetsch reflects on seven years at Adelaide Writers' Week
“It’s a miracle — a miracle! — I didn’t throw up on my first day. I was so nervous.” Reflecting on her seven years as director of Adelaide Writers’ Week (AWW), Laura Kroetsch has few regrets. The nerves have subsided for the most part — except for a panicked jitter on the very first morning every year: “What if this is the day no one comes?” — so Kroetsch can appreciate what she and her team have achieved.
6 ways to improve your sleep as a hospitality worker
Sleeping well is crucial to feeling good, thinking clearly and making sure your body’s in its best shape. Getting a good night’s sleep after a hard day’s work is difficult for everyone – but it can be even more difficult for a hospitality worker. You’re on your feet for long hours, at all times of the day and night. You can’t control your environment – brightly lit kitchens, extremely noisy bars – but there are a few simple things you can do to ensure a better night’s rest.
Book Review: Unmaking a Murder: The Mysterious Death of Anna-Jane Cheney - The Adelaide Review
Few in Adelaide are unfamiliar with the names Anna-Jane Cheney and Henry Keogh; Unmaking a Murder capitalises on this familiarity to force deeper, systematic failings to the surface. Cheney and Keogh become footnotes to the larger story. The greatest intrigue and outrage come from the evidence of corruption and cronyism in South Australia’s legal and political systems. Everyone understands Adelaide’s ‘two degrees of separation’.
Book Review: Unmaking a Murderer - The Adelaide Review
Few in Adelaide are unfamiliar with the names Anna-Jane Cheney and Henry Keogh; Unmaking a Murder capitalises on this familiarity to force deeper, systematic failings to the surface. Cheney and Keogh become footnotes to the larger story. The greatest intrigue and outrage come from the evidence of corruption and cronyism in South Australia’s legal and political systems. Everyone understands Adelaide’s ‘two degrees of separation’.
Identity Heft: Redefining Australian Art - The Adelaide Review
When Nick Mitzevich and Lisa Slade began working at the Art Gallery of South Australia (AGSA) in 2010, they realised that Adelaide’s sense of complacency needed to be challenged. “We had visitors who had come once for a school excursion, and then 30 years later found the same things in the same places,” Slade says. What’s the point of having a collection of over 40,000 works if we insist on clinging to our favourites? So began the process of rehanging the Australian art galleries.
The Adelaide Review
"This year's Miles Franklin longlist showcases the extraordinary vitality and range of recent Australian fiction." The 2015 Miles Franklin Literary Award longlist has been released, with this year's nominees showing a changing of the guard in contemporary literature. Three of the nominees - Suzanne McCourt, Omar Musa and Christine Piper (pictured) - are debut novelists.
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