Cirrus@Austlit

'Theatre director Kate Champion is a special kind of cultural tourist, having spent the past week on a creative retreat at Bundanon, the historic property near Nowra, NSW, that was given to the nation by Arthur Boyd.' (Introduction)

'‘The poem must resist the intelligence / Almost successfully”, the great American modernist poet Wallace Stevens wrote in his poem Man Carrying Thing. In this ode to difficulty, Stevens praises the idea that the poem should include “parts not quite perceived / of the obvious whole, uncertain particles” and be made of “things floating like the first hundred flakes of snow / Out of a storm we must endure all night” before, as morning breaks, “The bright obvious stands motionless in cold”.' (Introduction)

'A breakout success from the beginning, Fox’s prison drama returns for a new season with an old face, a botched heist and all the noirish style for which it is rightly becoming famous On its arrival seven years ago, Wentworth — an adaptation of the famous, if creaky, Reg Grundy-produced Prisoner, the jail soapie that was such a hit in the early 1980s — came with low, if not derisive, expectations. The campy, overacted original might have run for 692 episodes but surely this daggy piece of TV history had no place in the emerging new world of high-end HBO-style ­production, in an era when TV was becoming the new cinema?' (Introduction)

'Pay TV/Streaming Media is a notoriously complicated thing to make. Financial backers, technical crews, acting talent, post-production teams, publicity campaigns, distribution and exhibition partners: the number of people and the amount of money involved can be daunting.'