2024 Culture Picks

Madeline Crehan – KYD programming and marketing manager

I went to see the latest Wim Wenders’ film Perfect Days earlier in the year, and I’m still thinking about it. Following a Tokyo public toilet cleaner who finds beauty and joy in his everyday life, the film is gentle and slow-moving, yet draws the viewer into the emotional journey of the protagonist. The beautiful final scene of the film, soundtracked by Nina Simone’s ‘Feeling Good’, will stay with me for a long time.

Another lasting moment for me from 2024, was attending the Melbourne Writers Festival event ‘An Afternoon with Andrew O’Hagan’, a discussion of politics, the power of fiction and the purpose of a writer. The London Review of Books editor and Caledonian Road author was poignant, funny and inspiring all at once. I listened back to the MWF podcast recording of the event months later and think I’ll be doing so again many more times.

Alexandra Dane – ‘Literary Festivals in the Time of War Crimes’

Hear My Eyes: Wake in Fright is the culture that has resonated with me most profoundly in 2024. Ted Kotcheff’s 1971 film Wake in Fright was lovingly restored by Umbrella Entertainment and premiered with a new original score by Coburg’s favourite sons Surprise Chef, performed live at Melbourne’s orchestral-acoustic Hamer Hall during this year’s MIFF. With their characteristic moody and cinematic jazz-funk, Surprise Chef’s score was simultaneously discordant and in harmony with the film, emphasising the tensions between belonging, alienation and class that structure the film.

Seeing Hear My Eyes: Wake in Fright has been the catalyst for ongoing considerations of the ways in which these tensions still animate contemporary Australian life, and how the satirised performance of 1970s white masculinity displayed in Wake in Fright remain the standard for today’s politically endorsed Australian id.

Zowie Douglas-Kinghorn – ‘Where’s the Proof?’

I’m drawn to artists who take risks, and a big fan of sophomore albums. A standout from 2024 is Emily Wurramara’s Aria-winning album NARA (meaning ‘nothing’), which draws from the singer’s experience losing everything she owned during a house fire. Song titles are encrypted in acronyms, such as the sing-along anthem ‘STFAFM’ (‘Stay The Fuck Away From Me’). The music video to ‘Magic Woman Dancing’ invites the watcher into Tasmania’s old growth forests. Collaborators on the album include Wurramara’s brother Arringarri, rapper Tasman Keith, and singers Zeppelin Hamilton and Lisa Mitchell (the latter who joins Wurramara for the melancholy ‘See Me There’). The song ‘Lordy Lordy’ is a song for the times: ‘Lordy, lordy / What have we done? / Lordy lordy / Oh what do we do now?’

Faith Crisis Pt 1 by the Middle Kids, equally, stands up to the test of the post-stadium-success album. The band’s third studio album includes boppers like ‘Highlands’, ‘Dramamine’ and ‘Terrible News’. The song ‘All in My Head’, featuring Dave Le’aupepe, is haunting in its stripped-back piano accompaniment, reminiscent of a Tori Amos song. ‘Bend’ evokes the desperation of post-partum stress, while ‘Go to Sleep On Me’ and ‘Your Side, Forever’ offer a soothing lullaby.

Mia Formichella – ‘No Courage in Concussions’

I saw Angie McMahon perform during her tour earlier this year, and I’ve had her album Light, Dark, Light Again on repeat ever since. There is certain music that I’ll love and leave over time, but I don’t think I’ll ever get the words from this album out of my mind. Angie’s songwriting is pure magic, and it inspires me in a very real way to create and write.

On things that I can’t get out of my head, Stoneyard Devotional by Charlotte Wood has left me with an unshakable eerie feeling (in a good way). The things that are left unsaid in this novel make the story all the more compelling. While at times a slightly unsettling read, I was captivated from the first page and completely drawn into the setting. The mice, the bones, the landscape. It was observant and uncomfortable and beautiful, perhaps my favourite kind of writing.

Suzy Garcia – KYD editor

This year, I added audiobooks to the mix for the first time. Jumaana Abdu’s superb Translations, a story of friendship, faith and the tenuous relationship Australian settlers have with the land they live on, is beautifully narrated by Violette Ayad. Other local book faves include Dusk by Robbie Arnott and Melanie Cheng’s The Burrow (Miles contenders, surely). I also loved John Morrissey’s playful short story collection Firelight, and the first issue of Paraphase Journal, edited by Kasumi Borczyk (an exciting addition to the lit mag space).

My favourite international read was The Anthropologists by Ayşegül Savaş, the story of an expat couple trying to make roots in a city that doesn’t quite feel like home. The author has a knack for quiet, compulsive novels (they also tend to have their seeds in her short stories, which make for interesting studies in narrative development for the curious reader). My non-fiction pick is Sloane Crossley’s Grief is for People, which is at turns funny and heartbreaking.

Other culture faves include Nadir Nahdi’s food history videos, Malthouse Theatre’s Yentl and Nala Sinephro’s new album, Endlessness.

Andrew John – ‘No Language, No People’

It’s very rare that I binge watch a series. Most shows don’t hold my attention past the pilot (I’m more of a feature film kind of guy). Thou Shalt Not Steal on Stan stole my attention instantly (pun intended). Set in the 1980s, the story follows juvenile detention runaway Robyn (Sherry-Lee Watson) on her mission to return a trophy to her estranged father. This beautifully poignant, often hilarious, sometimes wickedly dark neo-western with a Coen-esque twist balances its chase story with moments of unexpected tenderness.

Watson brings both strength and vulnerability to Robyn, while her reluctant road trip with Gidge (Will McDonald) smuggles in heart, humour and a good dose of adolescent awkwardness. Against the backdrop of pursuing madams, fraudulent preachers and federal police, the series weaves together crime caper and coming-of-age journey. It’s the rare show that can shift from laugh-out-loud comedy to gut-punch drama without missing a beat.

Raeden Richardson – Debut Spotlight September: The Degenerates

Alice Rohrwacher’s La Chimera was the most beautiful film I’ve seen in the last year. In cinema’s dark age of regurgitated intellectual property, La Chimera felt free and affirming—of a director’s willingness to linger (Italia’s dance-sequence to ‘Venti km al Giorno’!), of an audience’s desire to be wooed.

I also admired Jen Craig’s depiction of returning to a home that is no longer in Wall. As her narrator excavates her dead father’s hoarded crap, she uncovers all the neuroses that accumulate from pursuing her art overseas. In building these walls of text, Craig weds content with form par excellence.

Sam Twyford-Moore – ‘Sign o’ the Times’

George Miller’s Furiosa hands down. It is perverse that, in 2024, a seventy-year-old director could release a five-part epic, the most expensive Australian film to date, and audiences turned away from it so readily. That resistance was more understandable with the excessive eclecticism of eighty-five-year-old Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis (Miller was rumoured to have shown up for that film at the Sydney Film Festival’s IMAX screening), but Furiosa really had the goods. I was lucky enough to write about the film for the new literary magazine Splinter, arriving out of Tarntanya/Adelaide. Splinter, would, in fact, be my other recommendation for the year. A late-contender, given its November publication date, but I have spent many joyous moments with it (Anthony Nocera’s queer tragicomedy about sex after widowhood is a particular standout). Completely biased, of course, as a contributor for the inaugural issue, but I wish to use this opportunity to flag to any writers reading this that the editorial team were a dream to work with. To paraphrase Furiosa’s Dementus: Ready, setty, submit!

Marlee Jane Ward – ‘To Start Again, Or Try’

I’m loving the podcast Making Magic about the iconic, mains powered vibrator, the Magic Wand. It discusses the effect that this stick-blender-shaped wand vibrator has had on the landscape of sex and pleasure. Good, sexy fun.

Another favourite of 2024 is the British series Big Mood. Starring woman-of-the-moment Nicola Coughlan, who is by turns effervescent and realistically depressed as bipolar Maggie. Lydia West is Eddie, the supportive bestie with her own shit going on. Big Mood captures the feeling of a mood disorder perfectly, the highs and lows that afflict Maggie rendered in all their horrid and beautiful glory. Both characters embody the essence of how it’s both easier and harder to ignore your problems, even when everything is about to fall apart.

Laura Elizabeth Woollett – ‘Girlboss, Interrupted’

In April, I read Dead Weight: Essays On Hunger and Harm by Emmeline Clein, a sociopolitical history of eating disorders, and it still looms large. Clein interweaves her own struggles (and longing for other women) with stories of starving saints, suffragettes, it-girls and interview subjects, exposing the ever-present ideal of thinness within our celebrations of feminine virtue, achievement and bonding. She also interrogates the economic underpinnings of eating disorders, treatment and diet culture, showing how the medical system and social media giants alike profit off making women sicker. Clein’s writing is urgent, hard-hitting, and heavily-researched, while also brimming with lyricism – everything I want from a book of essays.

Of all the memorable novels I read in 2024, Anna Dorn’s Perfume and Pain was the most surprisingly frothy delight. Quippy, pop culture reference-filled fiction can easily seem dated and try-hard, yet there was something so effortless and covertly empathetic about Dorn’s humour, her willingness to celebrate her characters (who include a bi-curious EmRata type) while also poking fun at them. This LA lesbian romp slaked my thirst for unserious, snarky, yet feel-good fiction.

Mekdes Yimam – KYD submissions reader

Standout works for me in 2024 were Richard Gadd’s Netflix series Baby Reindeer and Michelle de Kretser’s Theory & Practice. Both works meld life and art, with at times unclear delineations (and in the case of Baby Reindeer, cause for litigations). Baby Reindeer is the fictionalised account of Gadd’s experience of being stalked, and de Kretser’s book weaves fiction, memoir and essay to examine the gap between what is espoused by theory, particularly feminist theory, and what unfolds in practice. Characterisation is a strength in each, with the writers casting an unflinching gaze on their protagonist’s ‘shadow’ self to reveal the shame, jealousy, prejudice, internalised bigotry and trauma re-enactment that lurk beneath the surface. Binge-worthy viewing and reading that’ll stay with you long after the final episode or page.