IT took four years for Elise Wilson and Geordie Crawley to create their immersive play Logue Lake, which uses multi-channel radio, a cutting-edge set and simultaneous dialogue. The setting is a familiar trope – four friends spend a weekend in a remote cabin in the woods when things start to go awry and a mystery…

PHOTOGRAPHER Greg Branson has traced his great grandfather’s perilous journey across the Aussie outback to create a stunning exhibition that blends history and art. In 1874, James Patrick Sweeny and five other intrepid explorers led by John Forrest set out from Perth to find untapped grazing lands in WA. Sweeny, Branson’s great grandfather, meticulously kept…

BLACK Swan State Theatre Company seems to always come up with surprises and their new production, The Pool is no exception. The publicity promises “theatre that makes a splash” and they deliver. For a start it is staged not in a normal theatre but at Bold Park Aquatic Centre in City Beach. For another, the…

COULD the short story be making a comeback? In an age where everyone has the attention span of a gnat, maybe the novel is dead and the Twitter of the literary world – the short story – shall re-emerge from the Dickensian shadows. The Netflix series Black Mirror – dark, standalone tales in the vein…

AFTER decades of screening other people’s films, Luna Leederville will finally get top billing in a new behind-the-scenes doco about the beloved indie picture house.  And who better to make Luna, Starring than two of its long term employees – duty managers Ailish Beahan and Caitlin Kirk – who know the quirky venue inside-out. Beahan…

An entry from our Summer Reading competition. I HAD a real good friend, Johnny Engler who lived in Westbury Crescent, Bicton.  One day in 1950 it was announced at assembly at Fremantle Boys School that Johnny was to be given two weeks off school to go with his father on a plane trip to the…

An entry from our Summer Reading competition. MY grandfather Herbert William Lee (1875-1921) was a professional soldier.  A company sergeant major drill instructor, he served in the Boer War and the Great War in the 1/28th Battalion as a member of the WA Mounted Rifles. Herbert was an Englishman and married a Welsh girl Mabel…

An entry from our Summer Reading competition. SHELLEY says, “Bon Scott kissed me once. On the cheek.” I look at her with my look of having heard it all before, although in this instance I haven’t heard it at all.  I just don’t want to give her any satisfaction when it’s been a long morning.…

MOST folk eventually give up their crazy dreams to get a ‘sensible’ job and settle down, but the co-founders of Acrobatch did the exact opposite. 21-year-old Simon Wood was studying politics at university and Ben Kotovski-Steele was a graduate engineer, but they gave it all up to run away to the circus. “I was studying…

WHILE perusing parliamentarian speeches during January’s calm, a couple of long-time Chook staff got talking about some of the all-time great orations. One contender by former president Teddy Roosevelt’s 1912 speech titled “Progressive Cause Greater than Any Individual” came to mind: Roosevelt delivered the monumentally lengthy speech after surviving an assassination attempt (the bullet penetrated…