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Matthew Dewey was one of five composers featured during Sounds Tasmanian: New Works by Tasmanian Composers, which played at Hobart Town Hall, Saturday 17th May 2008. Matt’s Symphony No.1 for String Orchestra was developed out of a score written to accompany the 2007 theatrical premiere of Tom Holloway’s play Beyond the Neck, which explores the lives of characters affected by the Port Arthur massacre of 1996. Speaking to him following the performance of his symphony, Matt reflects on how and why music moves us, and the possibilities inherent in composition as a form.

In the true spirit of fringe performance, Mary Anderson’s Horse Opera! An Epic Pageantwas neither operatic, nor epic. The show, written and directed by Californian Fulbright scholar Anderson, was based on fragments from famous literature and stories from early European settlers to Australia, references to animals - especially horses - throughout. It is useful to highlight at this point that none of the content of the script is in anyway important to the success of the performance. The show itself is awfully constructed (!) and a couple of the performances extraordinarily rough, but the fact that it was delivered in such an un-pretentious manner, directed in a truly absurd way, and that it was presented in a fringe festival meant that they got away with it. Just. It was, in point of fact, charming - and one of the more enjoyable nights in the theatre I’ve had for a little while – simply because the show has style.

I became a fan of Gunther von Hagens in 2006, when his TV program Anatomy for Beginners, a grisly fusion of Grand Guignol spectacle, self-promotion and serious scientific discourse, hit the small screen on SBS. Surrounded by a studio audience, the lugubrious Professor and crew, the flayed, dismembered and gutted products of his Plastination process, and their naked live counterpoints, piloted me through a choppy sea of earnest narration and skin to skeleton dissection.

It’s World Environment Day as I write this, in a time that we’re finally realizing the precarious state of our planet and starting to see our role in this. Thanks, in part, to mini-cams and the media savvy-ness of environmental disasters, but more importantly to government programs and the ongoing drought that create popular awareness of ideas and knowledge long held by a minority of people in the know. Art is one forum used for raising public consciousness about the environment and related issues, an effective and lasting one.

What did our newish Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, find “absolutely revolting”? No it could not be Bill Henson’s latest exhibition because we know he has not actually seen it. Maybe it was some reproductions picked up from the Gallery website; we don’t know. But we do know that a telephone caller whispered in the ear of the NSW police leading to a police raid on Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery in Paddington and the seizure of some 20 Henson artworks (known in the media as photographs). It was stated by the constabulary that charges would be laid.

Hunter/Gatherer: Search Theory or Data Bodies ¹ in X.s.²

site e-gallery’s current exhibition Hunter/Gatherer brings together works by three international artists that postulate on the notion of 'the search'. The search cuts across local and global boundaries, it fuses visceral and quantitative knowledge, imagination and data. The collective unison is that we all know, understand, embody and manifest the search in our lived experience. The ability of a search to yield unexpected results prevails in what can often feel like a bland, increasingly generic world. This drives the works in Hunter/Gatherer.