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Seated by the glass sliding door looking onto the greenery and gravel of her Hobart home, actor Pamela Rabe is feeling a little “thick-headed” with a cold. Tissue tucked in one hand, she is not surprised she has fallen sick while finally allowing the harsh, erratic matriarch Violet Weston to “disappear” from her daily life.
Rabe has just flown back from the Perth Festival, where she was, in fact, energised by the cruelty of a family angrily spilling secrets about each other in US playwright Tracy Letts’ renowned 2007 play August: Osage Country.
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Kate Grenville crouches down on a rock on Sydney’s lower north shore, feet bare, next to a Cammeraygal engraving of a whale. The writer is careful not to trespass on the art. “You can just see the little figure,” she says, pointing to a faint outline of a mysterious tiny human with outstretched arms and legs in the leviathan’s belly.
Ten-year-old Kate was first brought to this coastal Waverton site on a school excursion almost 65 years ago, but remembered only the big whale, not the little human. “The whole thing was kind of trivialised,” she says.
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In Mitch Cairns’s enigmatic oil paintings on linen, the many thin layers of pigment intentionally leave no evidence of his brush work. “I have accidentally become a technical painter,” says the artist, bespectacled and feet bare amid the paint-flecked walls of his warehouse studio in Rozelle in inner-western Sydney.
The brushes themselves are, surprisingly, cheap synthetic ones. “I want the paintings to reflect the inherent lack of speed which painting hosts,” he explains, “[but] the brush is a little diagram of how fast the hand and mind are moving at any one time.
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