Grant Featherston (1922–95), the most prominent and successful furniture designer working in postwar Australia, is noted for his moulded, upholstered plywood modernist chairs from the 1950s, which combined comfort and style and which resembled work by Charles Eames. Featherston’s importance as a designer is well known: he was the subject of a retrospective exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria in 1988, and his work appeared in Mid-Century Modern: Australian Furniture Design, also at the NGV (ABR, August 2014).

What is tinkering? As Katherine Wilson makes clear in Tinkering: Australians reinvent DIY culture, there is an easy answer to that question – but also several complex ones.

At the physical level, tinkering is what the protagonists in Wilson’s book do: they convert cars to run on vegetable oil; they build their homes by hand and perfect quince jam. One tinkerer whom Wilson profiles made a pedal-powered Random Excuse Generator; another fashioned a block of wood and slate to the exact proportions of an iPhone. Tinkering is the informal repair, improvement, and hacking of objects – and is an unconventional area for academic study. Wilson says that she feels ‘like the square-kid trying to codify the cool-kids’ fun’. But she needn’t worry; her writing is upbeat and delightful. Throughout the book we sense the rapport and deep care she develops for her subjects (one tinkerer died during Wilson’s research; the book is dedicated to him).

A major new exhibition opened at the end of September at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London: Opera: Passion, Power and Politics. The first of the three qualifying terms needs little explanation as a potential subject; as the title of Peter Conrad’s book A Song of Love and Death (1987) has it, opera is popularly seen as the supreme dramatic embodiment of passion in its various forms. The art form evolved in the city courts of Mantua and Florence in late Renaissance Italy, with the first public opera houses appearing in republican Venice in the 1630s. Opera has never completely lost its connection to centres of power and influence, however egalitarian its later intentions. This is made manifest in many European cities, where pride of place is given to an opera house as a display of royal or civic authority and prestige. And not only in Europe, but the saga surrounding the opera houses that were situated in three different locations on the island of Manhattan tell us much about the society of the city, so eloquently articulated in the fiction of Henry James and Edith Wharton. The case for Sydney needs no explanation. The Janus face of power is, of course, politics, and opera has always been imbrued with the political.

Reading Bruce Beresford is enough to make any aspiring filmmaker think twice about following in his footsteps. ‘The Best Film I Never Made’, the title article of this collection of Beresford’s occasional writing over the last fifteen years, says it all. This is the sad, but in its way hilarious, story of his attempt to put together a movie based on the life of James Boswell. He knows from bitter experience that ‘skating on thin ice is the modus operandi of most film producers’; but he is ever optimistic, and his heart is in the project. With shooting only nine days away, however, his mobile rang: ‘Nik Powell was on the phone from Germany. The conversation was brief, just a few seconds – ‘There’s no money. The film’s off.’ The mobiles (supplied by the production office) all stopped working a few minutes later. A day or so later the production office in Shepparton had gone. No one connected with the film could be found.’