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The Torrents
review
The Sydney-born playwright Oriel Gray didn’t particularly like journalists but enjoyed journalists’ banter and their constant search for a scoop. When her ABC reporter partner, John Hepworth, joined the Canberra press gallery prior to the 1949 federal election that ousted her beloved prime minister Ben Chifley, Gray discovered journos went to lots of great parties. “Your head spun from unbelievably believable gossip, suppositions and innuendos both political and sexual, as much as it did from the variegated liquor,” she marvelled decades later.
Her Irish Orangeman grandfather started a newspaper, The Burrangong Argus, in the New South Wales town of Young, and her father, Ben Bennett, worked on the newspaper before becoming a senior public servant.
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UNCONDITIONAL LOVE
By Jocelyn Moorhouse
Text Publishing, $32.99 pb, 296 pp
Every film Jocelyn Moorhouse makes is a love story, by which the Melbourne-born director and writer means she must fall in love with the story behind the movie to commit to the project. Her excellent debut feature Proof, which premiered at the 1991 Cannes Film Festival and won six Australian Film Institute awards, including best film and best director, is, she says, about complicated love.
Moorhouse cast Hugo Weaving as a blind man, Martin, who takes photographs because he does not trust fellow humans, asking different people to describe the same image, then comparing their explanations. In writing the character, Moorhouse was determined Martin’s disability would not define him.
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Fifty essays and dispatches on what it means to be gay today.
On sale at Amazon and iTunes.
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