If you’re in Melbourne, today’s the last day you can catch The View from Here: 19 Perspectives on Feminism at the Next Wave Festival. Curated by Victoria Bennett and Clare Rae, the project pairs eight writers with eight artists to examine contemporary feminist ideas. The works explore themes of identity, sexuality, gender politics, representation, ‘post’ feminism and femininity. As well as the exhibition, which is showing at West Space, there’s a publication
containing work including Nella Themelios’s ‘Machine – Feminism – Politics’, on Alicia Frankovich’s durational performance art; Jo Latham on imagining feminist futures; and Rachel Fuller’s inquiry into personal identity, ‘Who am I?’

‘To censure an artist for forgery is to confuse an ethical with an aesthetical problem.’ Oscar Wilde.

Sam Leach recently caused a fuss by winning the Wynne Prize for Australian landscape painting with a work that replicated a 17th century Dutch painting, Adam Pynacker’s Boatmen Moored on the Shore of a Lake, but with the figures removed. The work caused mixed reactions in the art world and the newspapers, which splashed the story across front pages around the nation – not a common fate for artworks in Australia where mainstream papers usually couldn’t give a flying Albert Tucker about landscape painting. Read more

Starring: the Tape Projects company; Lee Anantawit, Cait Foran, Eugenia Lim, Tanja Milbourne, Michael Prior, Zoe Scoglio, Jessie Scott

Appearing at: Victorian Space Science Education Centre (Meet at Next Wave Festival Club, 1000 £ Bend for shuttle bus)

How much do you accept as truth without question, and what is truth anyhow? Tape Projects’ (TAPR) 100 Proofs the Earth is Not a Globe asks the big questions with few words at all.

You have a mission and you won’t be entirely sure what it is. But if you take the time to really observe, the experience all will become clear (or terribly unclear – if you get the point) by the time your ship delivers you back to home base. ‘Try to forget the difference between remembering and imagining,’ you’re told via announcement. You – well, some of you – are clad in laboratory attire. Your name is no longer your own. You are awaiting entry to the facility with the rest of your department. (The other department is god knows where.) You are carrying a rock. Read more

There’s nothing like the hospitality of a food blogger on an autumn eve. Cradling a little glass bottle of chinotto in my gloved hands, I spoke to Rachael Kendrick of Thus Bakes Zarathustra, Motor Coconut, The Vine (click on that last one for sure – I ate of that cake, people) about blogging and social media. We leapfrogged from how blogging and her PhD research on obesity interact to the ethical concerns of Twitter, how to manage attention with all the stimulation that social media offers us, Masterchef (of course) and the wild and woolly issue of how to monetise a blog.

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Music is by Pompey.

European settlement of the new world is almost invariably portrayed as a purely human occupation or “conquest”. In ecological terms, however, the real conquerors of Australia were not humans.

Brian Coman, Tooth and Nail: The Story of the Rabbit in Australia

One of my earliest memories is helping my parents lay out poisoned carrots. I wasn’t allowed to handle the poison, but I like to imagine I provided some help finding the burrows. That was in the late 1980s, a few years before the RHD virus – or calicivirus – had its devastating effect on Australia’s rabbit population. By the time Brian Coman’s Tooth and Nail was originally published in 1999, RHD had all but wiped out the rabbit in much of the country. Poisoning rabbits was no longer a standard part of Australian childhood, and for any number of reasons – environmental, economic, animal welfare – this was a very good thing. The publication of a revised edition ten years on is timely; rabbit numbers in Australia are again are on the rise. Read more