Besha Rodell

Australian Floral Designs That, at Long Last, Embrace Australian Flora

For a floral designer, Australia’s geographic isolation is a complicated legacy. The country’s native plants, like its fauna, are unique in their often outlandish beauty but, traditionally, arrangements here have tended toward the staid and…

Our Favorite Wine Bars in Melbourne

Terrific wine bars (in our favorite food cities) to visit now. There are moments in Melbourne, when you're sitting at a charming sidewalk table with a glass of wine in hand, looking out over a cobblestone streetscape, that you might imagine you're in…

I’ll Trade You Some Cursed Baby Dolls and Metal Frogs for That Unwanted Banana Statue

The Australia Letter is a weekly newsletter from our Australia bureau. Sign up to get it by email. For the past few months, the British American comedian John Oliver has been locked in talks with the Yarra City Council, in Melbourne, in what has…

Midnight Oil Brings Australia Home

The Australia Letter is a weekly newsletter from our Australia bureau. Sign up to get it by email. In the days immediately following my return to Australia in September 2017, after almost 30 years of living in the United States, an old high school…

Readers Reflect on the State of Australian Politics

In last week’s Australia Letter, Besha Rodell wrote about her frustrations with the current state of Australia’s politics. She invited readers to send in their own feelings on the matter. Here are some excerpts from the many responses we got: How…

Why I’ve Learned to Loathe Australia’s Trivial Politics

The Australia Letter is a weekly newsletter from our Australia bureau. Sign up to get it by email. MELBOURNE, Australia — Before the U.S. election in 2016, I visited Australia from Los Angeles, where I was living at the time. I stayed with my father…

The Giant Who Lives in the Melbourne Museum

The Australia Letter is a weekly newsletter from our Australia bureau. Sign up to get it by email. In a long corridor at the back of the Melbourne Museum, Tim Ziegler slides open one of many metal drawers. Ziegler, the collections manager of…

Giving Thanks in Australia

The Australia Letter is a weekly newsletter from our Australia bureau. Sign up to get it by email. Thanksgiving in Australia has always been an odd affair for my partly-American family. The springtime weather is all wrong for a huge harvest-season…

Laughs No More? Australians Are Reassessing a Beloved Cartoonist.

The Australia Letter is a weekly newsletter from our Australia bureau. Sign up to get it by email. Among my family’s most prized possessions is a small framed drawing of two faeries holding hands, flying through the night sky. It is an original by…

Why Reviving the Right to Picnic Offers Hope in Melbourne

The Australia Letter is a weekly newsletter from our Australia bureau. Sign up to get it by email. I used to joke that someone in Melbourne ought to make a song to the tune of the 2 Pac song “California Love,” but instead of the line “California…

Struggling to Explain Australia’s Covid Reality

The Australia Letter is a weekly newsletter from our Australia bureau. Sign up to get it by email. When I moved from Melbourne to the U.S. in 1991, I remember feeling as though Australia had just vanished. Phone calls were blindingly expensive, the…

Surviving Australian Hotel Quarantine

The Australia Letter is a weekly newsletter from our Australia bureau. Sign up to get it by email. Two weeks of solitary confinement. No fresh air. An underground network of bartering and information. It sounds like a prison drama or a dystopian…

The Eerie Familiarity of a Melbourne Lockdown

It’s all so eerily familiar. The gray weather and afternoon sunsets. The anxious wait for the day’s numbers. The obsessive checking of exposure sites. The rumors of restrictions, followed by the reality of lockdown. The kids home from school.…

Australia’s Never-Ending Travel Ban

The Australia Letter is a weekly newsletter from our Australia bureau. Sign up to get it by email. This week, it was reported that travel restrictions to and from Australia are likely to remain in place until mid-2022. For some, this won’t matter…

What is Australian Food? A New Cookbook Provides Some Answers.

The Australia Letter is a weekly newsletter from our Australia bureau. Sign up to get it by email. What is Australian food? Is there even such a thing? These are questions I’ve been asked so many times, and I admit to finding them incredibly…

Attica Summer Camp, Outside Melbourne, Is a Dreamy Distraction

MELBOURNE, Australia — This past summer in Australia had a dreamlike emotional dissonance, like pantomiming normalcy while the outside world remained overrun with illness and death. Everyone I know reads the news, speaks to loved ones in less-safe…

Momofuku Seiobo, in Sydney, Will Close in June

MELBOURNE, Australia — Momofuku Seiobo, the acclaimed restaurant that David Chang opened in 2011 in a back hallway of the glitzy Star Casino in Sydney, will close at the end of June. Mr. Chang said in an interview last week that when the restaurant…

Australia Reacts to a Facebook Without News

The Australia Letter is a weekly newsletter from our Australia bureau. Sign up to get it by email. If you’re reading this, it’s not because someone you know posted it on Facebook. Though most readers of the Australia Letter come to it via their…

T Magazine Australia Launching in March

The Australia Letter is a weekly newsletter from our Australia bureau. Sign up to get it by email. Ever since we opened a Sydney bureau in 2017, readers of The New York Times in Australia have been asking for a print edition — something they can hold…

Saying Goodbye to Melbourne’s Weird and Wonderful Taxidermy

The Australia Letter is a weekly newsletter from our Australia bureau. Sign up to get it by email. January 2021 is the end of an era. Yes, of course, for the United States and all that, but also for something far less contentious: The “Wild”…