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Creation Stories

Edition 80
The capacity to tell stories – along with language and the ability to create art – is seen as both intrinsic and unique to the human species. Over thousands of years, we’ve forged narratives of our origins, our journeys...
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Behind the bestsellers 

The argument that independent and small book grocers have a more impressive and widespread range has held for a long time, but in May, Big W was awarded the prestigious Book Retailer of the Year at the Australian Book Industry Awards (ABIAs)… Recognition on this level legitimises the sales of books for half their value.

Calling it out

But the best thing about an intriguing new call-out is that it’s near impossible to not write something new if you want to submit. You can’t jam your shitty old story no other journal wanted into a niche call-out about the pleasure of weekend garage sales. Whether that journal accepts your work or not, at least you’ve got a new piece to play around with at the end. 

Once/Now

IT WAS A night in at Maree’s place, which she found strange, as it was Brad who had recently purchased a new TV. Maree sat in one corner of the couch, knees up to her chest. Brad was on the other side, upright, a glass of scotch resting on the couch arm. Maree had not been to Brad’s place in quite some time.

Reading the room

But if writing and reading about books means we’re ‘perpetually stressed and disappointed with book reviewing’, I can’t help but wonder if this recurrent hand-wringing demands more than to be defended or disputed on the grounds of accuracy or defensibility alone. Are book reviews ‘good’ or ‘bad’? Is the ‘soft vs snark’ binary real?

Consuming content

‘Do food bloggers realize how awful their recipe pages are?’ a Reddit user innocently enquires in a thread I stumble across while googling food blogs bad. ‘Do they take reader satisfaction into account?’ According to more than 600 replies, the answer is largely no.

Beware the funky murals

Yet increasingly murals are rolled out by local government with the aim of rapid redevelopment and gentrification of traditionally working-class areas… The broader function of officially sanctioned public art like this is to make a place more attractive to developers…and middle-class home buyers.

Cloak and swagger

There is a tension that I am trying to provoke – a back-and-forth between invitation and denial, visibility and invisibility, surface and depth – that arises in various ways throughout the work. It is in the presentation of the figure and its ‘lingering traces’, the cloak of costumes with their vibrant materiality, the seductively polished yet impenetrable terrain of the images.

Lunch bars

From cream buns and vanilla slices to cheese-filled sausages and salad sandwiches, working-class culinary culture would not be the same without the lunch bar. Typically tucked away in a corner of the city’s suburban, industrial and commercial districts, lunch bars have sustained the work force with an array of no-frills fast food since the 1950s.

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