Rosalie Gascoigne seems exemplary of the popular fable of the late-blooming woman artist. Famously, her first exhibition was in 1974, when she was fifty-seven. This swiftly led to national recognition, then international exposure at the 1982 Venice Biennale. So this is a story for the times. But the achievement of Nicola Francis, the artist’s biographer, is to unpack how, in Gascoigne’s case, artistic success in later life was the result of long, careful training in two other creative pursuits: flower arranging, as taught by the English authority Constance Spry; then, crucially, training and a thriving career in the most radical form of ikebana, the Japanese art of flower arrangement, through the Sogetsu School popularised in Australia by Norman Sparnon.

Edwin Frank is the founder and editor of the NYRB Classics series and the editorial director of New York Review Books. He is also the author of Snake Train: Poems 1984-2013 and Stranger than Fiction: Lives of the Twentieth-Century Novel. He co-edited At the Louvre: Poems by 100 contemporary world poets, reviewed on page 55.

Genealogy television programs like Who Do You Think You Are? often feature the celebrity gasping – in surprise, excitement, even alarm – as details of their family tree are revealed. Belinda Probert, a distinguished British-born Melbourne academic, had her own moment of incredulity when, four months after her father, Bill, was buried in 1994, her family received a letter from his nephew Denzil. For Denzil, Bill was not Bill, but Uncle Roy, who had spent his childhood living in an impoverished Welsh coal mining village in the Rhondda, and whose mother and siblings were alive when Bill’s children were born. All this was complete news to Bill’s family.

Ben Sando Ode’, the second poem in Ken Bolton’s new collection, Metropole, begins with an epigraph from Ted Berrigan: ‘My dream a drink / with Ira Hayes / we discuss the code of the west.’ The poem is pure Bolton: a jovial flâneur perambulates through both external space – Adelaide, where passers-by make ‘BIZARRE ATTEMPTS / AT NORMALCY’ – and an inner life brimming with peers and heroes, quotations, non sequiturs, art criticism, existential musings, and the hum of a poem being made.

Many students of Australian history are aware of a particularly ugly cartoon published in the Bulletin in December 1946. ‘The Pied Harper’ depicted a hook-nosed Arthur Calwell playing a Jew’s harp welcoming a shipload of ‘imports’ (Jews) into Australia. This was the stereotypical image: bearded, unattractive, and similarly hook-nosed. The analogy with the legendary Pied Piper of Hamelin was clear. In contrast – and to assuage such public anxieties about mass migration – were the published photographs in January 1948 of Calwell, the immigration minister, celebrating Nordic-looking ‘beautiful Balts’, as he termed them, on their arrival to Australia.

for Yumna Kassab

As the bridge appears the train changes its music
Hollow and open like a drum
Every sentence curves to amplify itself the way blue
                springs over and we say ‘sky’

At a time when President Donald Trump seeks to extinguish the legal recognition of trans and gender diverse people, Bonjour, Mademoiselle! and the life of April Ashley feel unexpectedly topical. Ashley, best known in Australia for her role in Corbett v Corbett, a precedent-setting divorce case that set back the legal right of trans people for generations, is the subject of a new biography by Jacqueline Kent and Tom Roberts.

Gregory Day is a writer and musician from the west coast of Victoria. He lives on Wadawurrung country. Gregory is a winner of the Australian Literature Society Gold Medal, the Nature Conservancy Australia Nature Writing Prize, and the Patrick White Award for his ongoing contribution to Australian literature. He has twice been shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Award, most recently in 2024 for The Bell of the World. His newest collection, Southsightedness, was published in April by Transit Lounge.

In a mountain area of south-eastern France that I know well, the locals will often respond to a comment on the beauty of the valleys by remarking glumly that they are not what they were: the forest is expanding, they say. We might see reforestation as a good thing, restoring hillsides devegetated and exposed to erosion by goats and sheep, but to them it marks the loss of a beloved familiar landscape. This bears out a point that Peter McPhee makes throughout his engaging new book, An Environmental History of France: that people have an idealised image of French landscapes, perceiving them as beautiful and timeless. In fact, he shows, they are the product of human activity, most markedly over the past 150 years. In that time, the bay around Mont-Saint-Michel has been largely reclaimed for farming, the hedgerows of Normandy have been destroyed, and freeways and fast train lines have sliced through the countryside.

Australia is timid, insular, conservative. It is unimaginative, hidebound to old orthodoxies, blind to readily identifiable truths. It is meeting with little effective action a host of crises: violence against women, an impending climate catastrophe, intergenerational economic inequality. It has a profound disregard for its First Nations people and, despite a long and significant history of immigration, is hostile to people of colour and people who seek to emigrate to it by boat. It dismisses the arts as so much wankery and regards its environment as a resource to be plundered. It celebrates the philistine and esteems the mining industry as a saviour. Its people cannot lift their eyes beyond parochial and short-term self-interest; the threads that bind them to their communities are fraying. Its public debates are vulnerable to misinformation and disinformation, are dominated by special interests, and are conducted at a volume and pitch too loud and too rancorous to be resolved in ways that serve a common good.