Melbourne

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has added a second cloud region in Australia and announced plans to invest $4.5 billion (AU$6.8 billion( in the country through to 2037. The 15-year funds injection will go towards the construction of data centres and new jobs needed to support operations at the new region. Located in Melbourne, the infrastructure region comprises three availability zones and runs alongside another region in Sydney, which has been operational since November 2012. Plans for the Melbourne region was first announced…

Business travelers are on the road again. So there's no better time for CNBC Travel to name the best hotels for business travel across Asia-Pacific.CNBC joined with the market and consumer data firm Statista to produce rankings of the "Best Hotels for Business Travelers." A second list of rankings for hotels in Europe and the Middle East will be published next month.In total, we analyzed more than 10,000 four- and five-star hotels in 117 locations to produce a list corporate travelers can trust. We did this using a…

Credit: CC0 Public Domain Residents of a public housing estate in Melbourne, Australia are missing out on education and employment opportunities, and health and income support because of barriers to the access and use of reliable and affordable internet, a new University of Melbourne report has found. …

Ben Joseph Andrews and Emma Roberts stopped all the clocks the moment they arrived in the Daintree Rainforest to start a five month research trip for their epic, 24-hour, virtual reality film Gondwana. Arriving in the wet season of 2019, “we scrambled our phones, our computers. We embraced the cycles of time that occur in the forest,” says Andrews, the film’s director. “That letting go and surrendering gave us time to listen, and gain a deep appreciation of the multi-layered nature of that environment.”Their experience in…

A terrible sense of amorality clings like a rash to Mad Max, which is the core reason it’s still shocking to watch today. George Miller’s 1979 classic is considered a violent film but the vast majority of that violence is only implied – such as during its gut-busting finale, when Mel Gibson’s titular road warrior gives a bad guy the chance to save himself only by hacking through his own ankle.In terms of graphic violence, Mad Max pales in comparison to Miller’s earlier work Violence in the Cinema … Part 1, his 1972 short…

The first photo Richard Crawley ever took was a family portrait, when he was only a boy: a blurry black-and-white picture of his parents and siblings, frozen in time. It’s the kind of forgettable photo others might throw out, but for Crawley, now 71, it was the beginning of the rest of his life.Over the following decades, he captured about 400 hours of footage of everything that made up his life in Victoria, Australia – house moves, holidays, school pickups, pets, renovations. His main subjects were his wife Carol (who…

The pioneering Australian vocalist, who found worldwide fame in the 1960s as frontwoman for Melbourne folk/pop group the Seekers before going solo, has died aged 79…

A creeping sense of dread permeates the second feature film of writer/director Thomas M Wright, who burst out the gates with Acute Misfortune in 2018, which was not just a great biopic (of the artist Adam Cullen), but one of the best Australian films of the decade. The Stranger has a texture reminiscent of films by fellow Australian filmmaker Justin Kurzel, particularly Snowtown and Nitram, with scaled-back colour schemes, compositions that are stylised – but never flashy – and graded in a slightly off-colour way, as if…

The Melbourne international film festival returns with a beefy line-up this year, just like the ol’ days pre-pandemic. Running in cinemas from 4 to 21 August, and online 11 to 28 August, the festival’s 70th edition includes 371 films – including 18 feature film world premieres and 112 feature film Australian premieres.As usual, cinephiles have been pampered with selections plucked from all over the world. Here are 10 titles to put on your radar.1. The StrangerDirector: Thomas M WrightCountry: AustraliaThe Stranger stars…