In February 1692, in a secluded village in the isolated British American colony of Massachusetts, 9-year-old Betty Parris and her 11-year-old cousin Abigail Williams, began to behave very strangely indeed. It seems they had recently taken to screaming, ranting and raving, throwing objects hither and thither, making weird noises, and generally behaving in a way [...]
This week Sky News aired the explosive documentary “Lawyer X: The Untold Story”, recounting the sorry tale of the now-notorious double-dealings of former Melbourne Barrister, Nicola Gobbo. Gobbo, who over a lengthy period represented a string of high-profile criminal underworld figures, was earlier this year sensationally exposed as a long-term secret police informant. According to [...]
I was very saddened to hear this week of the passing of Rick Carter, the great Australian actor and comedian, with whom I worked on Gettin’ Square, a film I wrote and co-produced in 2003. A veteran of scores of classic Aussie films, including Muriel's Wedding, Babe, Rabbit Proof Fence, The Great Gatsby and Mad [...]
They say confession is good for the soul. That may be so, but sometimes it seems there's a whole lot of things it's not nearly so good for. Just ask Liam Neeson. The three-time Golden Globe winning actor, listed in “The 100 Sexiest Stars in Film History" and "The Top 100 Movie Stars of All [...]
The wheels of Justice turn slowly, but grind exceedingly fine. One of the biggest movies of 1967 was Franco Zeffirelli’s rollicking cinematic rom-com treatment of William Shakespeare’s comedy Taming of the Shrew, written and first performed four centuries earlier in the late 1500’s. The 1967 movie of the same name starred Hollywood’s then hottest couple, [...]
The concept of an impartial jury is central to the operation of our criminal justice system. For hundreds of years we have put our faith in those twelve ordinarily citizens, unbiased and unswayed by extraneous and irrelevant considerations, to stand as the fail-safe system and last line of defence between citizen and state. But of [...]
On 11 November 1918, at the French town of Compiegne, high-ranking officers of the Entente, the coalition that opposed the Central Powers of Germany, Austro-Hungary, the Ottoman Empire and Bulgaria during World War 1, signed an armistice with Germany, ceasing all hostilities on the Western Front. At eleven o’clock on that morning - the eleventh [...]
They say youth is wasted on the young. But it may not always be so. Around one hundred years ago, a young, little-known American writer by the name of Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald, who later would be posthumously celebrated under the name F. Scott Fitzgerald as one of the greatest American authors of the twentieth [...]
Remember the old joke about lawyers and rats? In case you don't, here's how it goes – “The National Institute of Health announced this week it would start using lawyers instead of rats to conduct its laboratory experiments. The American Bar Association has objected, but the NIH says there are three good reasons why lawyers [...]
The 19th century French novelist Gustave Flaubert was a stickler for style. His scrupulous devotion to literary aesthetics and painstaking attention to detail meant every word of his prose was meticulously selected and perfectly positioned. Lamenting the state of the literary and social discourse of his times, Flaubert once complained to fellow writer Ivan Turgenev [...]
