I’ve tried to play it open-handed, I’ve tried to make a fist of this;
Even when the questions are candid, my arrows miss.
How great is Deborah Conway, her cool precision vocals belting out Man Overboard for Sydney band Do-Ré-Mi in 1985 (watch below).
The Toorak Temptress is one of Australia’s best singer-songwriters. She is Aussie cannon. As a solo artist, she is best known for It’s Only The Beginning, from 1991.
The fairy dust is still in flight
And this could be the love of a lifetime even if it lasts a week
She married guitarist Willy Zygier and got even better. They came out with the haunting Book of Life.
Blow the horn, blow the horn;
Give a voice to all the mournful souls who search to be reborn tonight.
That gem comes from their 2013 album Stories of Ghosts. I saw them play it in the Northern Territory, I forget where. It wasn’t Darwin, it was outdoors in a big field somewhere. I was blown away.
I never cared or even knew she was Jewish, it just wasn’t a thing.
Conway now stars in Cancelled, the best new documentary in years.
In it, she says she never felt different growing up Jewish in Melbourne, it just wasn’t a thing. Until 2023 that is. October 7 to be exact.
That’s the day Hamas invaded Israel sparking the war in Gaza. On that day, everything changed for Jewish people in Australia, even though they had nothing to do with events overseas.
The arts community took sides. They ganged up against Israel, and made their sympathies felt by bullying Jewish creatives.
Since 2023, artists including Conway have been cancelled, ostracised and kicked off festival programs.
It has been especially devastating for Jewish artists because the attacks come from their own heartland. The arts community is populated by leftists and progressives, but the left has joined forces with Islam. It’s called the red-green alliance. I have written about it before (links at bottom). Islam as an ideology does not like Jews and regards Israel as its territory.
Cancelled reveals what has been happening in Australia to Jewish artists, and their stories are eye-popping. Even I hadn’t realised it had been so bad. I watched the film’s launch at Randwick Ritz on September 16 and I left that cinema a changed person. It was unforgettable. Easily the best documentary I have seen in years.
I am proud to say that my gutsy friend Nicki Roller is one of the producers.
What an amazing woman she is. I remember how hard she worked, the paperwork, the struggle for funding, the frustration - and finally, success. And what a success this is. A documentary’s job is to open your eyes to things you don’t know about, engage your attention, to draw you in to another world. Cancelled does all of that and more.
This is the most important film in years, because it tells our story. I don’t mean Jewish people. I mean all of our story.
None of us have ever seen anything in Australia like what boiled out of the red-green alliance in 2023: it was totally alien to this country.
It went on for two years, in an astonishing and horribly sustained campaign. It’s still going on now.
It ran over Sydney’s east, where Jews live: cars were torched, buildings vandalised, swastikas popped up everywhere. I also live in the east. We had police chopper searchlights in our windows at 3am, regularly.
In front of my face, a stranger unleashed a verbal tirade on three random people having a quiet coffee at Eastgate shopping center, because two of them were men wearing kippot and thus were visible Jews (link at bottom).
Every weekend for years, communists, students, Muslims, and the Australian Greens commandeered Hyde Park. They chanted about Gaza. The speakers said ‘Israel beheads children’. They said they were not against Jews, they just wanted to destroy the world’s only Jewish homeland and replace it with “free, free Palestine” - another majority Muslim nation to join the 56 members of the Organisation of Islamic Co-operation.
Wittingly or unwittingly, they whipped up a mob that turned their pitchforks on Australia’s singers, artists and writers who were visibly Jewish.
The rough cut of Cancelled was finished just before December 14, 2025, when a pair of Islamists, a father-and-son duo, shot up a Chanukah picnic at Bondi Beach killing 15 people including 10-year-old Matilda Bee Britvan.
A couple of weeks later, I remember Nicki saying quietly and clearly that she was wondering if she should leave Australia. She is Jewish and doesn’t feel safe here any more. There were tears in her eyes but she didn’t cry. I hadn’t even realised that she was Jewish, because she grew up here and is one of us. Nobody cared about these things before and it wasn’t relevant to anything.
This film is our story: this is Australia and it’s about us.
Ironically, as the AFR reports, Cancelled was submitted to and rejected by the ABC, SBS, Melbourne International Film Festival, the Sydney Film Festival and the Adelaide Film Festival.
WHERE TO SEE IT
LAST CHANCE to see this important film is at the Jewish International Film Festival (JIFF), which runs until November 26.
For screening times and to book tickets for the Sydney and Melbourne shows, see the official website here. The last listed screening is for November 24.
Or check the venue session times below:
Sydney - Randwick Ritz
Melbourne - Classic Cinemas, Elsternwick
Perth - Palace Raine Square Perth is screening it on Sunday 24 October
Ed’s note: sorry, I have to turn comments off on this post as I haven’t the time to moderate.
