Weaving a Net of Memories Glenda Nicholls Talks About The Veil
University of Melbourne acquisition work by Waddi Waddi, Ngarrindjeri and Yorta Yorta weaver Glenda Nicholls, 'The Reflective Net' and will be shown in the gallery for the first time. NITV Radio speak with Glenda about her practice, inspiration and connection to weaving as a form of storytelling. Glenda shares how she considers herself a generational weaver, learning from her mother and grandmother as well as learning the craft of her husbands Country, saying "the story of Reflection Net of dispossession and dislocation of family"
The veil is a major new exhibition at Buxton Contemporary featuring artists Hayley Millar Baker , Hannah Gartside , Aneta Grzeszykowska , Glenda Nicholls , Lisa Waup and Lena Yarinkura , running from 27 June to 1 November 2025
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News.com.au
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- News.com.au
On The Punt: Caulfield best bets for Saturday June 28, 2025
News Corp form analyst Chris Vernuccio takes a look at the Caulfield meeting on Saturday. • PUNT LIKE A PRO: Become a Racenet iQ member and get expert tips – with fully transparent return on investment statistics – from Racenet's team of professional punters at our Pro Tips section. SUBSCRIBE NOW! â â â â â BEST BET MANOLO BLING (R2 No.1): Three-year-old filly Manolo Bling needed the run when she was run down late at Sandown against the older horses. She was a month and a half between runs and will take catching here against her own age. NEXT BEST THE BLACK CLOUD (R6 No.3): Sydney sprinter The Black Cloud made a pleasing return with a close second at Canterbury and just needs to go on with it now. His last win was a year ago at Flemington but he has been contesting stronger races, including a couple of Group 3s. VALUE BET LIM'S SALTORO (R9 No.3): Ex-Hong Kong galloper Lim's Saltoro should be ready now third-up in an open race. He has form around War Machine and Jimmy The Bear, beaten just 1½ lengths behind the latter at Caulfield last time out. THE JOCKEY JYE McNEIL SONOFKIRK (R1 No.4 – $4.80), TREMBLES (R2 No.5 – $4.40), HARRY'S YACHT (R4 No.3 – $5), RAINBOW DELIGHT (R5 No.16 – $8), RAIKOKE (R7 No.6 – $8), DUBLIN JOURNAL (R8 No.11 – $9), RUN HARRY RUN (R9 No.5 – $11). Originally published as On The Punt: Caulfield best bets for Saturday June 28, 2025
ABC News
an hour ago
- ABC News
The best new books released in June, from Charmian Clift, Gail Jones and more
June was another stellar month in the publishing world, as our regular round-up of the best new releases attests. We have a new offering from Gail Jones, a literary powerhouse who has made the Miles Franklin shortlist four times, and another Franklin-shortlisted author, Jennifer Mills, whose propulsive "bunker novel" is set against a backdrop of environmental catastrophe. But the best books column is also a showcase of fresh talent, with no fewer than five debut releases. Among them are a glimmering short-story collection and a queer literary thriller set in Melbourne. There's plenty to sink into this month — enjoy! Picador Australia Forget the flashy underground bunker — what if, in the case of environmental catastrophe, the uber-rich retreated to a space station? In Jennifer Mills's post-apocalyptic novel Salvage, Celeste, the sister of protagonist Jude, has done just that. Salvage is an impressive addition to an emerging collection of what I like to call 'bunker novels' — eco-fiction that reckons with the morality of self-preservation by the world's richest people (gold-standard 'bunker novels' include Eleanor Catton's Birnam Wood, Tim Winton's Juice and Naomi Alderman's The Future). As a child, Jude is adopted into the ultra-wealthy family of an Australian resources magnate. She grows up in luxury and seclusion and forms a lifelong bond with her adopted older sister, Celeste. But when the opportunity to flee the Earth appears, only the older sister is interested in a future asleep on a space station, waiting out disaster. Salvage is a propulsive novel told in multiple timelines. We see Jude and Celeste grow up, and apart. Years later, Jude is living in what appears to be a post-apocalyptic, post-war version of Europe. As part of a community of 'Freelanders', Jude drives a truck, fixes things and does what she can to help, all while keeping her true identity a secret. One day, an escape pod falls to the water, with a person aboard — could this be Celeste, returned to Earth? The Australian writer Mills is known for her bold experimentation with novels The Airways and the Miles Franklin-shortlisted Dyschronia. With its page-turning story, Salvage is an easier read but Mills's passion for the environment — and glorious descriptions of the natural world — are still front and centre. – Claire Nichols Summit Books I read Lucy Nelson's debut in the course of a single mesmerised sitting. A short-story collection tied together by theme, each narrative reflects on women who are not mothers. Some have chosen not to be; for others, it is a result of circumstance. In Ghost Baby, a woman undergoes an abortion and finds solace in a podcast about mothering. In the title story, a shy housewife learns to visualise giving voice to the things she most wants to say while seeing a therapist; yet it is in those moments of waiting to see him that she becomes aware of how waiting has shaped her life, for both good and ill. In Swooping Season, the protections people use to fend off swooping birds become a potent metaphor for living with grief. Centred on a ballet dancer, The Feeling Bones tenderly depicts the shape of a family in all its felt and physical contours, from the womb to the end of life. Across the stories, characters are often brought out of a state of semi-seclusion or taught to see their relative isolation in a new light. Those around them seek or offer companionship, becoming surrogates for absent figures in the characters' lives. We are encouraged to think about how people might nurture and mother one another, as well as the aspirations they carry in life. Nelson skilfully evokes broader landscapes and personal histories for her characters. Contoured and lean, each story gracefully arcs and coils. Within the space of a passage or single line, resonant details glimmer. Probing and gorgeously realised, Wait Here marks the arrival of a luminous new talent. – Declan Fry Dialogue Books Jamaica Road is a coming-of-age story, set within the Jamaican diaspora of Britain during the 1980s. The story begins with Daphne, the sole Black girl in her class in South London, who is coming to terms with her Black British identity. Every day Daphne scours the papers for mentions of people like her and is disheartened when she sees them presented as criminals and degenerates. When Connie, a young boy recently arrived from Jamaica, joins her class, they become fast friends. As Connie's relationship with his mother's fearsome partner, Tobias, worsens, he seeks shelter with Daphne, literally and figuratively. We follow the pair coming together and apart across the decade as they tackle all the country has in store for them. Both Connie and Daphne are children made to grow up too fast. While the characters are fictional, the dark history of police riots and racial profiling from South London in the 80s is straight from Smith's own research. While this dark environment pulses in the background, Jamaica Road's main focus is the family and community that keeps its main characters nourished. Jamaica Road reads almost like a play, with dialogue that comes to life on the page. It is a character-based, highly readable and unapologetically Black story about 80s Britain — and a love letter to the resilience and spirit of the Jamaican community. – Rosie Ofori Ward UQP In the acknowledgements of his debut literary thriller, Thomas Vowles thanks his mother and then apologises for not writing a novel that "delights" her. It may not be "delightful", but Our New Gods is a clever page-turner set in Melbourne's queer scene, which morphs from a gay coming-of-age story to a narrative that trades in paranoia, jealousy and obsession. Young Ash has recently moved to Melbourne, escaping the misery and emptiness of his father's home. Desperate to connect, Ash launches himself on the dating apps and meets the charismatic James. While they don't initially connect romantically, James invites Ash into his world, taking him to parties, meeting his friends and daring him to be bold. Ash is often out of his depth as he discovers even the local pool is a lavish queer space where "brightly coloured speedos were the uniform". As a guide, James is a life source for Ash whose desperation to escape extreme loneliness motivates his choices, which become increasingly self-defeating. Unease intensifies after Ash attends a bush rave with James and his boyfriend Raf; there, Ash recovers the body of Raf's former boyfriend, Booth, in a lake and becomes fixated on the idea that Raf murdered Booth and now Ash wants to protect James from a similar fate. As Ash reflects: "The difficult task of our lives was to act in the face of uncertainty. But how? To act, one had to make a choice within the treachery of ambiguity. How could this not inevitably lead to tragedy?" Within this "treachery of ambiguity", Vowles skilfully plays with our sympathies and plants seeds of discontent and disconnect which pushes the reader to the tragic end. A compelling Australian debut. – Sarah L'Estrange NewSouth It's a crime that Charmian Clift's marvellous writing is not better known. The past few years have helped ameliorate this neglect with a series of new publications and republications, including Clift's unfinished novel, The End of the Morning, her daughter Suzanne Chick's 1994 memoir, Searching for Charmian (republished in 2025), and We Are the Stars, her granddaughter Gina Chick's 2025 memoir. This month sees the arrival of her glorious second solo novel, Honour's Mimic, first published in 1964. It tells the story of Kathy, a woman learning to find herself outside the confines of marriage and children. Kathy is convalescing on a small Greek island following an automobile accident. She and her sister-in-law Milly are outsiders and objects of curiosity on the island, something Clift nimbly and gracefully captures (while out walking, Kathy notes the "quick shy ripple of teeth" she encounters from the men). Kathy is so vividly drawn, she burns a hole through the page. She is a person who feels deeply and wants to savour the marrow of life. She begins an affair with a wiry, wolfish sponge diver, Fotis. Delicately sketched, intimating things just so, Clift evokes their burgeoning attraction in slow, aching, pointillist detail. The book offers a fascinating portrait, too, of Greece in the 1950s: the small, close-knit community; scant electricity; the ships, barbers and taverns, and the houses hung precariously from cliff-faces, alongside public buildings dating from the Italian occupation during World War II. Raw, real and remarkable, Clift charts one woman's journey into the "expansive reckless" wonder of the world. Her evocation of Kathy and Fotis's interior lives is furious, grand and eclectic. Honour's Mimic is a superbly realised portrait of the links between true love and mortality. It is about how being in another country can unmoor and perhaps free you to find "a passionate affirmation of that old lost desire to face challenge and danger, to be brave, to dare for the truth". – Declan Fry Text Publishing Acclaimed Australian novelist Gail Jones explores the subterranean as well as the surface in her 11 novels (Black Mirror, Five Bells, The Death of Noah Glass, Salonika Burning, just to name a few). Her latest, The Name of the Sister, is a story of the missing. Those people who slipped away or were taken, who fell into mystery or were snatched away. Even more, it's about those left behind, the grieving and the searching, those who fill that missing space with hope, speculation and story. Angie, a freelance journalist in Sydney, is intrigued by the story of a woman found on the side of the road outside Broken Hill. Found, rather than lost or missing. The woman can't or won't speak and nobody knows who she is and what has happened. As Angie pursues the story, she is drawn in by the numerous people who project their own losses onto this woman, who claim that they recognise her, "dead cert, for sure, one hundred and one per cent". Meanwhile, Angie's romantic relationship is unstable, and her family history of silence and secrets lingers in the shadows. Her fierce best friend is the lead detective on the case, too, and so this is almost a crime novel, but not quite: "She had no wish to contribute to the criminal hunt or its shady forms of titillation." Jones takes us into this story with her usual eye for surprising detail and exquisitely realised description: the "windy hollow of the city's loud darkness", punctuated by memories, music, shared song lyrics and the sound of hopeful searches. – Kate Evans Allen & Unwin When you're 10, summer holidays seem like they last forever. It's a feeling Kiwi author Jennifer Trevelyan captures and infuses with unease in her debut novel, A Beautiful Family. A family of four heads to a popular holiday spot on the North Island coast for their annual five-week break. The story is told from the perspective of the younger sister, who remains unnamed for most of the book. It's the 1980s and her days are sound-tracked by the Split Enz album, True Colours, which she listens to religiously on her walkman. In the absence of digital distractions, time takes on an expansive quality. The narrator's 13-year-old sister, Vanessa, is now "too cool" to play, so she befriends a boy, Kahu, who tells her a story about a girl who went missing from the town a few years earlier. The pair spend their days exploring the beach and a nearby lagoon, looking for clues in their hunt for the missing girl. Around halfway through the novel, Trevelyan begins ratcheting up the suspense, and what began as a portrait of family dynamics becomes something more sinister. The missing girl's mother, a sad figure who collects wildflowers to lay at a makeshift memorial for her daughter, is a distressing reminder that however idyllic the beach appears, danger is never far away. What that danger is exactly is hard to say: is it the wild surf? The creepy next-door neighbour? Or does it come from within? Fractures grow in the parents' marriage as the narrator's mother disappears for mysterious walks on the beach while her father is at home watching cricket on TV. Their youngest daughter, small and easy to miss, has learned how to blend into the background. But she's always watching and leaping to conclusions, unchecked by her parents who are caught up in their own affairs. As the adults in her life become increasingly unreliable, the narrator sees the fragility of her family for the first time. "Now I understood that a family wasn't a particularly solid thing — it was a bubble purely of our own making and just like a bubble, it could burst." In the book's final pages, Trevelyan brings together the narrative threads in a gripping denouement. It's an atmospheric and satisfyingly pacy read that serves up a welcome slice of sun-filled escapism. – Nicola Heath Doubleday Liquid features an unnamed and unmoored protagonist. Two years after finishing her PhD, she is spiralling. She reflects, "My career had gone nowhere. My love life was non-existent. And as for sex, here I was, home alone on a Saturday night with a chick flick playing on my laptop because I didn't own a TV." Determined to change her life, she resolves to marry rich, planning 100 dates over the summer. Given her published PhD is a take-down of modern marriage, she feels perfectly placed for this endeavour. The writing is sharp, witty and fun. Our protagonist is a skilled commentator and, with cutting barbs, the dates become academic case studies on America, whiteness, class and sexuality. As a queer woman and the daughter of an Iranian father and Indian mother, she grapples with what it would mean to marry for the sake of comfort, particularly in the pressing whiteness of LA. In the final third of the novel, the tone shifts, as the protagonist travels to Tehran to see her father. Despite speaking Farsi and her olive skin, as an American in Iran she is an outsider. Everything that normally comes with ease or familiarity is met with sanctions and dead ends. She identifies this is not the fault of her destination, but where she's come from: "It wasn't my father's people who had invented the term 'Third World', and they hadn't defined the terms by which its inhabitants were forced to live." With a critique of American imperialism at its centre, Liquid is both a sexy and highly political piece of literary fiction. – Rosie Ofori Ward Tune in to ABC Radio National at 10am Mondays for The Book Show and 10am Fridays for The Bookshelf.
ABC News
2 hours ago
- ABC News
Why Death Stranding 2 is set in Australia and other things we learned speaking with Hideo Kojima
It's not every day you get to meet one of the most visionary storytellers in gaming — let alone sit across from him in a Sydney boardroom. But that's exactly what happened when I joined a small group of journalists to speak with Hideo Kojima, the legendary creator of Metal Gear Solid and Death Stranding . A genre-defying, post-apocalyptic epic about connection and isolation, Death Stranding cemented Kojima's reputation as gaming's great auteur. He was in town for the Sydney Film Festival, where he shared the stage with filmmaker George Miller ( Mad Max ) in a dream pairing of cinematic minds. With Death Stranding 2: On the Beach on the horizon, Kojima opened up about sequels, storytelling, and why Australia is the perfect place to end the world. Sam Bridges (Norman Reedus) treks across Australia in Death Stranding 2: On The Beach ( Supplies ) On why Death Stranding 2 is set in Australia Hideo Kojima: Death Stranding was based in North America, and we kind of recreated it from east to west — like going after gold back in those days. So I was thinking for DS2 , "What's a good continent that's similar to DS1 ?" Eurasia is too big. Africa might be too long. So I thought Australia would be a perfect fit. This is a game where Sam walks — he traverses. So you need a lot of things: great environments, desert, mountains. Animals as well. It's almost like a very specific area in the world that has its own animals, plants, species. That's another reason. But the real reason I selected Australia is this: usually when I decide on a location, I go location scouting. I go there to scan, or to do interviews-things like that. Last time, it was Iceland. It was great-but it was a little cold. So this time I thought, let's make it a little warmer-Australia. But then, no. The pandemic happened. On what inspired Death Stranding 2 Kojima: Sometimes I see movies and get ideas. But usually, it's just talking to people. Eating, walking, or maybe when I'm in the bath-I kind of come up with these ideas. It's almost like a disease, I call it, you know? "I'm imagining things all the time. Even when I'm talking with my family, in my head I'm in a totally different world." So even when I travel, I'm not working-but in my head, I'm always thinking about this stuff. When I talk to George Miller, he understands, because he has the same disease. He says, "I've been like this since I was a child — I've been imagining." A teacher once told George, "If you didn't imagine so much, your grades would go up." He told me that story. And I think for me, it's the same. I'm imagining things. I'm happy to be in this job because I'm free to imagine whatever I want. On the biggest difference between Death Stranding 1 and 2 Kojima: DS1 was a delivery game. It was the very first game of its kind. So I wanted players to understand it. Now people know this is a game about delivery, so I thought for DS2 , I would add more rhythm. More weapons and things you can use — and with that combination, you can now decide: do you battle, go stealth, or avoid? It's more like you have this rhythm, this beat, where you have the choice to change and decide. It's still a delivery game, but you can fight if you want. "So the recommendation is: don't go back to DS1 after you play DS2. You should play DS1, then go straight into DS2." On the hazards of over-connectivity and digital overload Kojima: During the pandemic, everyone got so isolated in real life. It was almost like Death Stranding . The world of Death Stranding came out three months before the pandemic. But we had the internet. It wasn't like the Spanish Flu — they didn't have that. During our pandemic, we could order things online. We could work online. We could connect via Zoom. Even concerts — they did live concerts on the internet. Society kind of shifted to being very digital. Even Kojima Productions had to do that-everyone was working remotely. But I felt that during the pandemic, the direction of the world was heading further and further into digital. And I thought-is that really good? When we were animals, we were born in the ocean. In the water. But we came out, moved to land, and became human. So I think everything on the internet — too much of it-is not healthy. Especially in the digital society we have today. George Miller provides a motion capture performance for Death Stranding 2's Tarman On casting famous filmmakers in his games Kojima: Okay, I'll tell you the truth. It's all people I like. "I want to work with people I like-people I respect, and who respect me back." Like, for instance, George-he's my god. And if I work with him, I'm really happy. But if I put my god in the game, I can't escape. I have to really make him perfect in the game. I can't forfeit that once I commit. On what idea lies at the heart of Death Stranding 2 Kojima: The apes created the stick. You see it in 2001: A Space Odyssey — they become human, but the first tool was a stick. The second was a rope, to pull something you like closer to you. That stick and rope led us to civilisation. With Death Stranding , I thought: if you look at all games, they're stick games. Even though you're connected online, like a big rope, you're still fighting over everything-with a stick. So in DS1 , I wanted to make a rope game. But looking at the world, you can't really connect everything with just the rope. That's one of the themes in DS2 . In the gameplay, you have a lot of weapons-and that has meaning too, in terms of the theme. On what you should feel playing Death Stranding 2 Kojima: I want you to use what you experienced in the game in your real life. Connecting people. Rope and stick. Isolation. Not just in Death Stranding , but when you go outside, I want you to feel something in your real world. And then when you turn the game off, go outside-you realise something different. You see a road, electricity, a bridge. Like the bridge here in Sydney. Someone made that. Someone who created that bridge might have passed away years ago, but you're connected to them. On what makes a great sequel Kojima: You know Ridley Scott's Alien ? It was so scary because you don't see the alien until the very end. Everyone wanted to buy that figure. But then, once you have that figure, it's not scary anymore. Same in Death Stranding . You had the handprints, the BTs come out-that was scary because you didn't know what was happening. But now you do know. So when you do a sequel, it's not scary anymore. "But with Aliens — James Cameron was so smart. He turned the movie from horror into action." DS2 is not 100% action, but it's more like that. You already know what Death Stranding is. So topping that — creating surprise in a world people already know — that was the biggest challenge in making the sequel. Death Stranding 2: On The Beach asks whetner connection is really worth it in a psot-pandemic world. On how the pandemic influenced development Kojima: DS2 is quite special because we had the pandemic-everyone experienced it. We couldn't meet face to face. I've been creating games my whole career, but DS2 was the most difficult challenge I've ever had. I know everyone went through similar things. We all experienced that — and we overcame it. So I think we're a little stronger now. I wanted to go one level higher because of that shared experience. So I created a game about connections. It got to a point where I almost gave up. But I came back. I reconnected-with myself, with this project. And that's another reason I'm doing this world tour now. I couldn't travel or meet people for the past five years. So I thought — it's about time. Angus Truskett presents Culture King, a weekly dive on all things pop culture on triple j Drive each Thursday afternoon.
