Review: Loaded, Malthouse Theatre

For The Saturday Paper, I reviewed the long-awaited stage adaptation of Christos Tsiolkas’ Loaded which is playing at the Malthouse Theatre in Melbourne.

Danny Ball plays Ari in Malthouse Theatre’s 2023 production of Loaded. Photo: TS Pubicity / Tamarah Scott.

Ari’s casual assertion that he’s a wog, not white, scorns millennia of Western empires claiming Greek epistemology as an intellectual forebear while systemically deorientalising it. This feels particularly salient for how homoeroticism in Greek antiquity is absorbed into the lineage of anglophone gay culture today. That troubled relationship to history and lineage is also a recurring trope in migrant narratives, as the point of origin recedes into a romantic homeland fading into the horizon, or becomes a risk and a burden, a chorus of voices clamouring for tribute. Or a third thing: a ship with new parts but the same name.

It’s really interesting to see all the different iterations of this story (I also reviewed the audio play in 2020) and be pushed to tease apart my responses and figure out what’s in the work vs what’s changed in the world or the presentation context or my point of view. A good exercise as a critic!

Club Critique | Emerging Writers’ Festival


And further on criticism, I’m chairing this panel at Emerging Writers’ Festival and the National Writers’ Conference featuring Prithvi Varatharajan, Dan Hogan, Jess Ho and Vyshnavee Wijekumar.

How and why should one write deeply engaged, contemplative, and authentic criticism? From literature to food, music to screen, join these writers as they consider the purpose and scope of criticism, the role criticism plays in the arts, as well as hopes and ambitions for the future of the form.

Club Critique
Saturday 17 June 2023
12:30pm to 1:30 pm AEST
Online via Zoom with closed captioning, Auslan on request
Free – details here

Also if you’re an arts critic or editor in Australia, you can add yourself to the Critical Mass database I made to help media outlets access a more diverse pool of critics.

Promo graphic with Club Critique in pink all-caps text over a purple background. Emerging Writers' Festival logo and website in green and white at the bottom of the square.

Finalist for the Pascall Prize for Arts Criticism!

The Walkey Foundation announced their finalists for the 2023 Mid-Year Celebration of Journalism today and I’m shortlisted for the Pascall Prize for Arts Criticism alongside Catriona Menzies-Pike and Christopher Allen! How thrilling!

The piece that’s nominated is my review of Chinese theatremaker Wang Chong’s solo show at the Malthouse, Made in China 2.0. So many great critics have won this prize in past years, including Anwen Crawford, Jeff Sparrow, Sarah Krasnostein, and my editor for this piece and so many others, Alison Croggon. It feels like an unthinkable privilege just to write criticism at all, let alone get recognised for it, so I’m really startled, chuffed, blushing, beaming.

Review: She and Her Pretty Friend by Danielle Scrimshaw

For The Saturday Paper, I reviewed She and Her Pretty Friend, an appealing and accessible history of queer women’s lives in Australia from roughly 1830 to 1980. There’s a lot I liked about it and a few things that bugged me too. As always, I can send a read link if you can’t access it through the paywall, just leave a comment.

Scrimshaw code-switches easily between the cautious register of the historian and the more colourful lexicon of chronically online queers, reading real events in relation to memes and fandom tropes such as “oh my god, they were roommates” and “be gay, do crime”. The effect is chatty and conspiratorial, like catching up with a friend who can’t wait to tell you about what she just read, and it’s endearing to witness her transparent disappointment when women treat each other badly or don’t get the life we feel they deserve.

Australian Literature in the Shadow of the Colonial Patriarchy

I’m speaking at this conference next week hosted by ANU, and I’m really impressed with the program and how accessible it is: registration is free and every session is livestreamed.

Organised by Evelyn Araluen, Julieanne Lamond and Monique Rooney, the program features Melissa Lucashenko, Jackie Huggins, Jeanine Leane, Elizabeth Flynn, Natalie Harkin, and many more. Full program and registration here.

Australian Literature in the Shadow of the Colonial Patriarchy
Monday 24 October & Tuesday 25 October
ANU Canberra and online via Zoom
Free registration

Against Disappearance: Essays on Memory | The Saturday Paper

‘Nearly every writer here seems wary of the risks of putting something on the record and into the crosshairs of the governable. The space between the lines is heavy with purposeful omissions as well as inherited silences.’

I reviewed the latest Liminal anthology, Against Disappearance (ed. Leah Jing McIntosh and Adolfo Aranjuez), for The Saturday Paper.

Folding tofu skins while Shanghai stills | Going Down Swinging

‘When I do refer to recipes, I prefer to use the web, and my usual process is to skim half a dozen recipes from different websites so I can triangulate the common denominators, and then proceed with the laziest version possible.’

I’m not much of a cookbook user but I read, reviewed and cooked and ate my way through Fuchsia Dunlop’s celebrated Jiangnan cookbook, Land of Fish and Rice, for Going Down Swinging – which occupies a soft spot in my heart because it was the first lit journal I was ever published in.

You can also check out the social threads I did leading up to the review on Going Down Swinging’s Twitter account: 1, 2, 3, 4

As Beautiful As Any Other | The Saturday Paper

I reviewed Kaya Wilson’s memoir, As Beautiful As Any Other for The Saturday Paper. Really appreciated having the space to think deeply about this book and the transition memoir as a growing genre.

‘Trans people are under immense pressure to present a coherent and palatable origin story that helps cis people make sense of us – even when we are not seeking medical treatment, we are treated by laypeople as if presenting to them for diagnosis. We are supposed to be intelligent, untroubled, sympathetic and reassuring.’

The Saturday Paper book review graphic showing the cover of Kaya Wilson's As Beautiful As Any Other