Theatre

Mar 31 2021

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The Lord of the Rings

By Don Aitkin | Books, Environment, History, Language, Society, Theatre | 13 Comments

For the last few days I have been revisiting the mammoth film version of J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. I first encountered the story via a three-volume Christmas present from my wife in 1961 (I think), and was immediately enthralled. The depth and the breadth of the story were beyond anything I had ever read before. It took some days to read it, to go into the appendixes, and to marvel at the thoroughness of the detail. Then I read it again, and kept going back to it for some years. A few years later I…

Jul 26 2018

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The changing Australian culture

By Don Aitkin | Books, Economy, Education, Food & Wine, History, Language, Media, Politics, Society, Sport, Theatre | 22 Comments

To write a new website essay is now a challenge, but I feel up to it. And I’ve wanted to write about this subject at a little length, rather than as a series of asides. It is built around a most interesting book by the always interesting John Carroll, Emeritus Professor of Sociology at La Trobe University. Land of the Golden Cities is published by Connor Court, and my copy took me a month to acquire. And then I got ill. But reading it brought back a platoon of memories. Here are three. Late 1950s. Two of us, senior undergraduates,…

Mar 08 2018

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The #MeToo phenomenon and what, if anything, anyone can do about it

By Don Aitkin | History, Media, Politics, Society, Theatre | 145 Comments

For those who have somehow missed all this, ‘Me, too’ is what someone wished she had said when a thirteen year-old girl told her she had been sexually abused. #MeToo became a digital movement in 2006, and spread astonishingly in October last year after allegations were made against the alleged sexual predations of film producer Harvey Weinstein. Weinstein was fired from the company he started, and suffered other losses as well. His career is in ruins. Thereafter came a cascade of allegations about other alleged baddies in the media, Hollywood and television, which you can see here. In the USA…

Aug 21 2016

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Love, sex and Cosi fan tutte

By Don Aitkin | Books, History, Music, Society, Theatre | 35 Comments

For those who don’t know much about the work, Cosi fan tutte is an opera with music by Mozart, for a libretto by Lorenzo da Ponte, who also worked with Mozart in creating Don Giovanni and The Marriage of Figaro. Indeed da Ponte wrote 28 libretti for eleven composers, and had a most interesting life. The opera has a sub-title The School for Lovers, but it is rarely used. Cosi fan tutte means ‘They all do it’, and ‘they’ means women. If both men and women had been meant, the third word in the title would have been tutti. This little exercise in language is important,…

May 01 2016

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Managing comments on the website

By Don Aitkin | Climate Change, Economy, Education, Environment, Food & Wine, Health, History, Humour, Language, Media, Music, Politics, Religion, Research, Road Safety, Society, Sport, Theatre | 43 Comments

I’ve had to think hard about how best to moderate the comments on this website. A number of the recent posts have had more than 100 comments, and one has passed 200. Just following them is a decent amount of work, and it gets in the way of other writing important to me. My own practice has been to respond to anyone who I think is seeking a real answer to something, or who has found a weakness in what I have written, or who seems to have misunderstood what I wrote. I learn from such encounters. If I find I…

Apr 18 2016

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‘Kill Climate Deniers!’ More on public funding of the arts

By Don Aitkin | ABC, Books, Climate Change, Environment, History, Media, Politics, Religion, Research, Theatre | 34 Comments

Back in 2014 I wrote a piece about accountability, which began with the news that the ACT Government had funded a theatre project with the title as given above. I knew nothing about the play, but its title led me to ask what redress any of us sceptics had, if and when it were conclusively shown that the AGC scare was just that, a baseless scare. As taxpayers we had been forced to contribute to large amounts of expenditure that was simply wasted, on the advice of people who claimed to know the truth. Then Andrew Bolt took up the question…

Mar 02 2015

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What sort of conversation do you get on The Conversation?

By Don Aitkin | Climate Change, Economy, Education, Environment, Health, History, Language, Media, Politics, Religion, Research, Road Safety, Society, Sport, Theatre | 22 Comments

Another of my resolutions for the New Year was to get rid of unwanted regular emails. It’s not as easy as you might think. I’ve tried blocking, and that works, to a degree, for anything generated in Australia. But those from overseas are immune. I looked at sites I’ve subscribed to, such as purveyors of goods of various kinds, like clothes. It seems that if you buy something you are offered a goody if you subscribe, and one does. But I’ve got rid of most of those, too. And that leaves The Conversation, which claims 2 million unique hits a month, and seems…

Dec 19 2014

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The last essay for this year

By Don Aitkin | ABC, Books, Climate Change, Economy, Education, Environment, Food & Wine, Health, History, Humour, Indigenous, Language, Media, Music, Other, Politics, Religion, Research, Road Safety, Society, Sport, Theatre | 26 Comments

Even websites need a holiday, and mine starts tomorrow. I’m back at work in the week beginning 12 January, and wish all my readers a relaxing, safe and enjoyable holiday break too. I started this website in June 2012, so it is now two-and-a-half years old. Over that time it has attracted about 27,000 unique readers, who have in total visited the site more than 70,000 times, and read nearly 150,000 pages. Readers have made nearly 3,700 comments to my 608 posts, and of course to one another’s comments. Before I get carried away with such success, I should mention that my…

Oct 22 2014

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The passing of Gough Whitlam

By Don Aitkin | Economy, Education, Health, History, Humour, Media, Politics, Society, Theatre | 8 Comments

I wrote about Gough last year, when he turned 97, and I don’t want to repeat any of that. He was the most interesting politician I met, and he and Bob Menzies, for somewhat similar reasons, have been the two most powerful Australian politicians of my time. He didn’t quite get to 100 years, and thereby receive the Queen’s telegram, but he did have long innings, of which the last few years were not at all his most enjoyable. The tributes are pouring in, and they tell a similar story. He made us conscious of who we were as a nation, and…

Jul 14 2014

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What sort of political system do we have? I

By Don Aitkin | ABC, Books, Climate Change, Economy, Education, Environment, Health, History, Media, Music, Politics, Religion, Research, Society, Sport, Theatre | 11 Comments

This the first of a two-part essay on the current Australian political system. When I was first interested on politics in the 1950s, it all seemed pretty simple. There was Labor and Anti-Labor, with the Country Party serving as the rural tail of the Liberals. You were Protestant or Catholic. You left school at fifteen, or you went on (in consequence you were blue-collar or white-collar). You were probably a union member if you were a worker. Your sympathies were to the Left or to the Right. Republicans were just about invisible. You probably inherited your family’s political sympathies, as…