Your guide to the books in the 2026 Miles Franklin award shortlist: provocation, ruin and empire

Six authors are in the running for Australia’s most prestigious book award, which will be announced on Wednesday night. Here’s your primer * Get our weekend culture and lifestyle email Australian fiction has long been interested in the relationship between the local and the global – and the six books shortlisted for this year’s Miles Franklin award are no exception. They range across time and place, from Tasmania to Malaysian Borneo and the Middle East. And they engage with histories of empire, environmental ruin, migration, ageing, political activism and war. There is a striking willingness to experiment with form. Some authors borrow from poetry or genre fiction, while others draw on avant garde traditions and techniques. Some novels overplay their hand; not every formal innovation succeeds, but the judges have clearly rewarded books that attempt something distinctive, rather than settling for familiar literary realism. Continue reading...

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Rory Stewart and Alastair Campbell Interview Count Binface.

YouTube video by The Rest Is Politics: Leading

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Kindness of strangers: Lost in the Thai rainforest, a fellow backpacker picked me up and carried me home

For hours we hobbled back, until we were close enough for him to place me down and run for help * Read more in the kindness of strangers series We had heard there was an incredible waterfall somewhere deep in the Thai rainforest. Seeking it out almost killed me. In 2003 I was travelling solo through south-east Asia when I met Paul, an American with an easygoing, natural warmth. We were the only two people bunking at a youth hostel somewhere in southern Thailand and got chatting one morning. When the staff told us about a beautiful waterfall not far from where we were staying, we made plans to hike there together. Continue reading...

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Christopher Nolan talks narrative decisions, film critics and whether he Christianised The Odyssey

YouTube video by Nolan Archives

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Book returned to Australian library – 150 years overdue

The book, Antiquities of Athens, was handed back to Kiama library by a man who found it bricked into a wall An Australian public library has had a book returned an estimated 150 years late after being found behind a wall during a home renovation. The book, Antiquities of Athens, published in 1858, was returned to the library in the seaside town of Kiama, south of Sydney, by a man who had found it inside a tea crate bricked into a sealed fireplace Continue reading...

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That's not a bomb, it's my garbage bag - Michael West

The Sydney lawyer accused of calling Alex Rivchin an 'evil Zionist' is also being prosecuted for putting out her garbage. Michael West

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We tested your groceries. This is what we found | Four Corners

YouTube video by ABC News In-depth

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The real love story behind Colin from Accounts: ‘I wouldn’t want to write with anyone else’

As the show takes its final bow, Patrick Brammall and Harriet Dyer reflect on ‘having a ball’ playing exes while being married with kids, ignoring notes from US TV executives and having ‘big old cries’ at the end It began, as all great romances do, with a nipple flash. When Colin from Accounts, the little comedy that could, started airing back in 2022, the world fell in love – hard and fast. It was a surprisingly prickly Australian show about Ashley, a student doctor (Harriet Dyer), and Gordon, an older, brewery owner (Patrick Brammall), who fall in love after she pops a boob at him, he hits a dog with his car, and they jointly land an astronomical vet bill and a new pet. The show shared its name with its furriest star – full name: “Colin from accounts payable, who is working on the big merger” – and it was as charming as the title suggested, winning fans across Hollywood and the world. That Brammall and Dyer were actually a couple, now married with two kids and a dog (no wheels), just made everyone love the show even more. Continue reading...

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What do the heatwaves in Europe and North America tell us about our future? | Fiona Katauskas

The signs are there * See more of Fiona Katauskas’s cartoons here Continue reading...

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Colin From Accounts season 3 review – TV’s most charming romcom comes to a funny, emotional end

This season’s timeline jumps ahead three years, taking the audience back to the eternal question of ‘will they or won’t they?’ Colin From Accounts is one of those shows that sounds totally unremarkable on paper: a romantic comedy featuring two characters who connect via a meet-cute involving a cute dog (and a car, and a nipple). This triggers the old “will they or won’t they?”, to which the answer too often is: well, who cares? As it turns out, quite a few of us did care once we started spending time with medical student Ashley (Harriet Dyer), brewery owner Gordon (Patrick Brammall) and, of course, their delightfully taciturn border terrier, Colin, whose full name is indeed “Colin from Accounts”. Dare I say it: the pooch is in no way essential to, well, anything; that’s kind of the joke. Given Dyer and Brammall are a real-life couple, it perhaps stands to reason that they’d share such effortless on-screen chemistry – but then again Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez were married while making Gigli and generated about as much electricity as a couple of filing cabinets. Continue reading...

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In The Odyssey, Christopher Nolan worries the end of politeness will destroy civilisation. I fear he’s right | Joseph Earp

Since I saw the movie, I have found it difficult not to see Trojan horses everywhere. We live now in a state of perpetual distrustfulness Prior to the release of Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey, I’m not sure many of us would have conceived of the Trojan Horse as a kind of proto-atomic bomb, the sort of norm-obliterating device from which civilisation cannot turn back. If anything, the horse has long existed in our collective imaginations as at best a credulity-stretching plot device – why did those overly trusting Trojans not think to look that particular horse in its wooden mouth? – and at worst a cutely comedic non-threat. The greatest civilisation of its age was taken down by a timber what? But the true masterstroke of Nolan’s film is its parallels to the last one he dropped on us, Oppenheimer. Like that film, The Odyssey is about a haunted genius who, when presented with a problem, solves it with such speed and significance that he must necessarily cast aside implication. But rather than splitting the atom, Odysseus (Matt Damon), dismembers something considerably more significant – the social fabric. Continue reading...

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Catalan Toast

I first came across this in a tapas bar in Barcelona about 100 years ago. Rather different than, say, Italian bruschetta, where the tomatoes are chopped and tumbled on toast, Pa amb tomaquet (as this ...

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