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As a child in the 1950s, growing up on a cattle station in the dusty red Kimberley, Mervyn Street remembers finding a rock in his mother’s kitchen, with numerical markings on one side. This, he would learn, was a “black penny”.
“My dad had, on the back of the penny, three ones – 1, 1, 1 – I didn’t know what that meant,” he recalls now, wearing a worn bush hat and sitting at Mangkaja Arts Centre near his home in the Muludja community, east of Fitzroy Crossing. The numbers, his father told him, were ration entitlements for flour, tea and sugar.
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When Johann Sebastian Bach’s great sacred oratorio was first presented in colonial Australia, the performances were more comically grim than grand.
In 1875, the Melbourne Philharmonic Society assumed that classical audiences would know the composer’s chorales, so it hyped up the country’s first staging of Bach’s St Matthew Passion, which tells the story of Jesus’s last days.
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Addendum: In less than a week after announcing that artist Khaled Sabsabi and curator Michael Dagostino would represent Australia at the 2026 Venice Biennale, Creative Australia has made the unprecedented decision to drop the team.
In a public statement, Khaled Sabsabi said “Art should not be censored as artists reflect the times we live in. We believe in the vision of artists for an inclusive future that can bring us together to communicate and progress our shared humanity.”
Artists and curators shortlisted for the Australian pavilion have condemned the decision and asked for Sabsabi and Dagostino to be reinstated.
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