This Perfect Day Losing Anthony Bourdain
Call someone you haven’t for a long time and tell them that you’re thinking about them. Invite someone over for a meal and cook for them. Let them know they can tell you anything.
Fear rules. Fear explains. Fear predicts. St. Vincent on charity, love and light
“I think we should do enough soul-searching to… know when we are being guided by fear or guided by something brighter.”
A Change of Venue Ethnic clubs, fringe culture and strange alliances
Repealing the lockout laws alone is not a silver bullet for Sydney’s live music scene. When not penning tantrum op-eds about this city’s demise, Sydneysiders might begin to imagine a future that aims higher than the live music landscape that directly preceded these laws.
Suggested
The Boat on Dal Lake A letter from Kashmir
Even Google Maps refuses to commit to a border: the region is a tangle of dashed lines on my phone.
The Man in Chippendale Macca’s Moments in time
While waiting in line for my lunch...
‘40,000 Years is Long, Long Time…’ Restoring Redfern’s famous mural
“One woman walking past said it was a childish work. But I think that’s irrelevant. It’s important to community as a whole.”
Features
Eight Years On The Syrian war and its child refugees
“I’m working and saving up so I can save rent for a tent,” Ibrahim says. “The tent owner comes and demands his money. You don’t even get a chance to rest.”
The Best Way to Ruin a Walk The grass is greener for Sydney’s public golf courses, but for how long?
Golf courses – particularly public ones – are caught in the middle of a three-way contest between a population largely unconcerned with golf, developers with eyes for well-located land and the six per cent of us that still play the sport.
Who’ll Stop the Rain? After the horrors of Myanmar, Rohingya refugees now face the monsoon season
Makeshift dwellings of bamboo and sheet plastic sit immediately above one another on slopes of silt. All this is likely to turn to mud as soon as the monsoon season arrives.
Sleep Well Beast How The National brought me back from the dead
‘Let's just get high enough to see our problems, let’s just get high enough to see our fathers’ houses.’
Culture
Blak Douglas and Uncle Roy Kennedy An Archibald finalist
Two blokes get together in a small artists’ studio, on Redfern’s Little Eveleigh Street, and yarn.
White as Snow, Red as Blood Snow White at the Sydney Opera House
You’re a teenager and your mother is dead. Your father marries a narcissist who hates you for your beauty…
Stuck in a Moment You Can’t Get Out Of Bill Henson’s photography is losing its way
Henson likes to quote others in the genius mode and settles on Einstein’s idea that “the most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious”. But now, with these latest images, there is no mysterious threshold.
Books That Change Lives, Apparently Iranian existentialists, chick lit grandmas and spitting in Morse code
How to win the Facebook competition to see who has the most exotic home library.
Food
On Hospitality A philosophy on dining behaviour
"Much of the romance of food is generated by people with idealised versions of what their childhood meant... Their hospitality industry becomes Rosebud; a nostalgic rendering of what unconditional hospitality looks, tastes and smells like."
Getting Southerly Busted At North Bondi RSL
The image of Bondi is one of glitz and glamour… But the salt-blasted reality is somewhat different; the old weathered remnants of what was known locally as Scum Valley still often win out.
Lunch with Friends Bistro Moncur with McLean Edwards
“It is that sort of place, Bistro Moncur, where art dealers, ladies who lunch, colourful lawyers and failed Labor politicians can all convivially share a meal and look down their noses at tedious but ubiquitous real estate agents who seem always to be relegated to Siberia down near the kitchen.”
Secrets of the Sydney Fish Market The world is your oyster
“Sydney Fish Market is one of the best fish markets in the world... Well, it’s not Tokyo’s Tsukiji, but it’s not bad. Living so close and going so often, I’ve learnt a few of its secrets.”