Free Comic Book Day is this Saturday, which means participating comic book shops around the world will be giving away millions of comic books. With three days to go until this action-packed annual giveaway, let’s celebrate with a few little known facts about your favourite superheroes. Marvel and DC claim the trademark for the word ‘superhero’ and any of its variations, having registered it in the 1960’s. Their lawyers have sent ‘cease and desist’ letters to smaller comic book publishers for using the term to describe characters. In 1997, Marvel released an alternative story where Peter Parker, aka Spider-Man, is…
Author: Aideen Weingarth
Former NSW premier Nick Greiner has undergone a mastectomy after being diagnosed with cancer. Greiner had his left breast removed earlier this month and has since been given a clean bill of health. Around 125 cases of male breast cancer are diagnosed in Australia each year, and survival rates are high, with 85% of those men living five years later. The risk of developing breast cancer in men increases with age, as the average age of male diagnosis is 69. Cancer Council Australia CEO, Dr Ian Olver, hopes Nick Greiner’s story will encourage other men to get checked, and remind…
The University of Wollongong will be one of three Australian universities first in line to benefit from Westpac’s $100 million scholarship program, the Westpac Bicentennial Foundation. Presenter – Aideen Weingarth
Wollongong Writers’ Festival will run for a second year after securing a grant from community-funded organisation Culture Bank Wollongong. The new funding will enable festival coordinator Chloe Higgins to book a venue and hire a designer to a build a website. These are crucial elements of an event designed to explore the modern challenges and opportunities presented to writers, while seeking to encourage networking, online digital presence, and the sharing of ideas. Formerly known as the UOW Writers Festival, it first ran in November last year, and was Australia’s first student-run writers’ festival, aiming to celebrate the talent, ideas and success of…
A dozen police cars were called in to break up a St Patrick’s Day party attended by more than 300 university students on Monday night – the second large party to be broken up in less than six months. Students had moved on to the street during the party in Keiraville, which started in two neighbouring share houses. Six Wollongong police cars were called to Robsons Road about 8:20pm, and then called for back-up from the dog squad, highway patrol and Lake Illawarra Command. Inspector Dan Richardson from Wollongong Police said officers would speak with the university to find out…
This weekend Wollongong welcomed writers, readers and creative minds to the second annual Wollongong Writers Festival. Festival Coordinator Chloe Higgins brought the festival into its second year while completing a Creative Arts (Honours) degree and working as Project Management and Admin Assistant at the South Coast Writers Centre. The festival aims to celebrate the literary and exploring how writers interact with the contemporary world, and as the organisers take pride in falling under the banner of ‘emerging’ in all aspects of the process, the people speaking on the panels and running workshops were largely emerging artists. “However, we also have more established…
Trina Collins, also known by the pseudonym Poncho Army, is celebrating her first year of business at Anchors Aweigh Art Studio. A dream that she has held for over ten years, the studio resides in a large warehouse in Coniston and offers urban, contemporary and graphic workshops as well as an art supply store and a design house. The idea for the Anchors Aweigh art workshops began during Trina’s residency at Wollongong City Gallery between 2012 and 2013. While teaching workshops at the gallery, Trina recognised a lack of art classes offered for teenagers in the local area, with most targeting adults or…
There’s only one play in Wollongong right now that involves a magic keytar and a battle with zombie hipsters, and it certainly isn’t The Phantom of the Opera. Hipster Apocalypse: A Zombie Cabaret is a new work at Phoenix Theatre in Coniston, following a band of friends as they attempt to stay alive in a battle of the bands against zombie hipsters. Every performance has a different ending as the audience decides which band deserves to win. A parody of the Wollongong hipster scene with a dash of comedy horror, director and recent UOW Performance graduate Martin Gallagher describes Hipster…
For many artists, their first solo exhibition is an exciting and stressful step, but Towradgi’s Aiden Campbell already has plans for a second show. The seven-year-old artist will hold his first exhibition at the Now You See Me gallery in Crown St Mall. Named after one of his favourite songs by Cyndi Lauper, the ‘True Colours’ opening night will launch over 25 artworks, and includes live performances and a movie about Aiden. Dressed in clothes freckled with green, red, white and blue paint, Aiden Campbell is quiet at first, described by his mother Simone as “a koala” as he holds on to…
Between the launch of her new gallery ‘Now You See Me’, curating a group exhibition, working with Papergirl Wollongong, creating a magazine, teaching art classes and developing her own body of work for a solo show, Wollongong artist Tegan Russell has been busy. “There’s probably too much,” she says, laughing, “But right now I’m working on booking out the space until the end of November, every week with a different artist. Pretty much at the moment this is one hundred percent my life, it’s every second of the day from when I wake til when I sleep.” Sitting in her…