Our perma-crisis present

Sydney writer Tracy Ellis is the winner of the 2023 Calibre Essay Prize. Her name will be very familiar to ABR readers: Tracy won the 2022 ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize. (She is the first person to win both Calibre and the Jolley Prize.)

The judges – Yves Rees (past winner of the Calibre Prize), Peter Rose (Editor of ABR), and Beejay Silcox (critic and artistic director of the Canberra Writers Festival) – chose ‘Flow States’, the winning essay, from a field of 397 entries. They came from twenty-four different countries – a bustling, global field.

Three years into a global pandemic, the resounding preoccupation of our essayists was grief: the recursive grief of intergenerational trauma; the elemental grief of lost (or absent) parents; the quiet grief of endometriosis, infertility, and miscarriage; and the shared, planetary grief of the climate crisis. It has been a privilege to read so many human – and humane – essays; so many portraits of yearning.

Tracy Ellis

Finely wrought and quietly potent, both of our 2023 finalists were anchored in environmental precarity; twin dispatches from the sharp edge of the Anthropocene.

‘Flow States’ begins with a single drop of water – a household tap left running. ‘As any plumber, doctor, or government knows, a little leak is never insignificant,’ writes Tracy Ellis. ‘A dripping hose can fill a swimming pool, a burst artery can drain your life away, a wily hacker can flood the porous, stateless internet with classified information and change the course of history.’ And so, from single dripping tap, Ellis draws out a tale of the obliterative power – real, existential, and metaphorical – of floodwater.

‘Flow States’ impressed the Calibre judges with its elegance, layered richness, and sharp-eyed observation. It is an essay that invites – rewards – rereading. Part memoir, part cultural history, and part solastalgic elegy, ‘Flow States’ behaves like its subject: it ebbs and whorls. The result is something that speaks to our perma-crisis present, but tells a much older story.

Our 2023 runner-up, ‘Child Adjacent’ considers the culturally slippery responsibilities – and possibilities – of aunt-hood. ‘I am not the mother,’ writes Bridget Vincent, a writer originally from Ballarat. ‘I am an aunt instead, if “instead” is even the right word. There are categories – infertile, childless by circumstance, childless by choice – and within these, more specific groups like the Birthstrikers, who are publicly delaying procreation until there is climate action. Being an aunt of the Anthropocene is none of these and all of them at once.’

As wry as it is compassionate, ‘Child Adjacent’ impressed the judges with its conceptual freshness. It is an essay that broadens our understanding of family building, and interrogates the terrors and moral exigencies of parenting in the climate crisis. Vincent’s essay does subtle, private things in reverberative ways, which is the mark of an enduring essay.

‘Child Adjacent’ will appear in a later issue, as will some of the nine other shortlisted essays, which are listed below:

Ben Arogundade: ‘The Dark Side of Paradise’

Ina Skär Beeston: ‘Heimat’

Kevin Brophy: ‘Private Leo, My Imaginary Father’

Martin Edmond: ‘The Genealogies of Mr Senior’

Jaimee Edwards: ‘See it Now’

Madison Godfrey: ‘The Muse of Potential Motherhood’

Dan Hogan: ‘Blade of Grass, Meadow of Knives’

Siobhan Kavanagh: ‘The Morning Belongs to Us’

John Stockfeld: ‘Stone Country’

ABR warmly thanks long-time Patrons Peter McLennan and Mary-Ruth Sindrey for supporting the Calibre Prize.

We look forward to presenting Calibre for the eighteenth time in 2024.

On the verge  

Recently, Monash University Publishing issued the seventeenth edition of its annual anthology of creative writing, Verge. This year’s editors are Samuel Bernard, Thomas Rock, and Vera Yingzhi Gu. Verge is somewhat unusual among compilations of this kind because of its integration of work by current students and those with established publication records. There are thirty contributors in all.

The theme this year is defiance. In their introduction, the editors note: ‘Defiance is too often associated with rebellion, insurrection or revolution … We challenged writers to ponder this timely and universal concept.’

Launching the anthology at Readings Carlton, Peter Rose spoke of the more private forms of resistance:

Each poem, each donnée, each poetic state surely represents a kind of refusal – a retreat from conventional ways of perceiving life, family, nature, relationships, society, mortality. What are we doing as poets when we succumb to a poem but seeking unique metaphors for reality – ones never shared, never conceived before, too weird for public circulation.

In a quotatious mood, Rose drew on W.H. Auden (‘Alienation from the Collective is always a duty’) and James Baldwin: ‘All art is a kind of confession, more or less oblique. All artists, if they are to survive, are forced, at last, to tell the whole story, to vomit the anguish up.’ Rose concluded:

Telling the whole story, yes, vomiting it up – not just half of it either, and certainly not the savoury or orthodox bits – is a writers’ responsibility. It’s the promise of such that admirable publications like Verge enable writers and thus readers to explore.

Reader survey

Every couple of years ABR invites readers to complete a short survey. We always enjoy hearing from our readers. The 2023 reader survey will open on 15 May. Your feedback – positive or negative – helps us to form a sense of what’s working in the magazine and how we might improve it.

What do you think of our design, our website, our podcast, our balance of genres? What and whom do you most enjoy reading in ABR? Which new features should we introduce? 

The survey is totally anonymous – unless you want to be in the running for a five-year complimentary digital subscription to ABR (in which case we will need your name and email address). 

Want to write a letter to ABR? Send one to us at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

Sydney Modern

Dear Editor,

Sydney Modern is a building better suited to wedding receptions than to art (ABR, April 2023). Even its much vaunted Yiribana gallery of Aboriginal art fails. Traditional Aboriginal art is best displayed in natural light, which the new gallery does not do. Much of the overall display is not of museum standard – that is a polite description for its ‘art’ on view. The building itself does not suit its position.

Neal Morrisey (online comment)

Eleanor Catton

Dear Editor,

In his review of Birnam Wood by Eleanor Catton (ABR, April 2023), Michael Winkler leaves out the fact that this book is wonderfully readable, full of brilliantly observed characters, and, above all, tremendously witty. I devoured it over a few days. (I do admit to skipping over some of the character’s ideological posturing, but it was necessary to the story and its wit.)

Desley Deacon (online comment)

Plibersek’s ‘demotion’

Dear Editor,

Why does Patrick Mullins consider an appointment as minister for the environment a ‘demotion’ in his review of Margaret Simons’s biography of Tanya Plibersek (ABR, April 2023)? After the prime minister, it is the most existentially important portfolio.

John Carmody (online comment)

Tightly held shires

Dear Editor,

I am writing in response to Shannon Burns’s review of Who Cares? by Eve Vincent (ABR, April 2023). In my local shire in Central Victoria, on any night one in five houses are unused. The rental crisis in many parts is a wealth crisis. The well-heeled wield their assumed right to unfettered affluence as a cudgel with which to beat senseless the less fortunate. Meanwhile, Australian intellectuals mutter into their teacups and otherwise remain mute.

Patrick Hockey (online comment)

Tyrannous sound

Dear Editor,

Thank you, Debi Hamilton, for ‘The Tyranny of Sound’ (ABR, April 2023). It raises such important questions for public discussion. Brava!

Sarah Day (online comment)

Between the lines

Dear Editor,

Thank you, Lee Christofis, for your review of Don Quixote (ABR Arts, March 2023). As a dancer in the original production and film, and not yet having seen this current production, I am thrilled to read your review. I believe I have read between the lines in a couple of your comments. But I so appreciate your colourful and critical appraisal, clearly written by someone who liked this production, and who knows his dance and music.

We have just farewelled a music director who was fiercely independent, who helped take the Australian Ballet on big journeys, but was not always popular with artists and audiences. I hope the new one can maintain independence while breaching that gap between his own artistic integrity, directors’ wishes, and dancers’ needs.

Graeme Hudson (online comment)

New subscriber

Dear Editor,

I was not mistaken in subscribing to ABR. Such absorbing and interesting articles.

Simon Browne (online comment)

The recent pause announced by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in pushing a controversial legislative package through the Knesset marks a temporary respite from a concerted plan to challenge and overturn the system of government that has been in place since the state of Israel was created in 1948.

After Netanyahu’s re-election on 1 November 2022, he forged a new coalition in which his own conservative Likud party stood in the unfamiliar position of representing the left end of the coalition’s political spectrum. The coalition includes the Likud, two Haredi (ultra-Orthodox) parties, the rabidly homophobic Noam party, the Otzma Yehudit (‘Jewish Strength’) party, and the Religious Zionist party. The leaders of Otzma Yehudit and Religious Zionism (also rivals) are among the most radical people ever to hold positions of governmental authority in Israel’s history.

Bezalel Smotrich, leader of the Religious Zionists and Finance Minister (with an additional portfolio as minister in charge of Israeli settlements in the Ministry of Defense) has publicly expressed his regret that ‘Ben-Gurion didn’t finish the job’ of expelling Palestinians from Israel in 1948. In the wake of the settler-mounted pogrom against the Palestinian town of Huwara, he declared that the state should wipe it off the map.

This is no ordinary history book. It is in part an account of a massacre and in part a biographical study of one of the perpetrators, Patrick Bernard O’Leary, yet it reads more like a novel, or a prosecutor’s statement in court, than like a conventional history. It is a truly angry book, full of rage at the fact that the perpetrators of a massacre were never brought to justice, rage at the justice system’s treatment of Indigenous people. Its desire to ensure that the victims are never forgotten starts with the dedication, to Warrawalla Marga, an old woman ‘who was walked to her death with a chain around her neck by O’Leary and others in June 1926. She and all the others are not forgotten.’

The massacre that forms the core of the book occurred in the Forrest River region in the north-eastern part of Western Australia, the land of the Yiiji people (though Auty does not say so). This area, with its violent history, is the ‘underworld’ of her title. It was cattle country, with a combination of large landholdings and some smaller holdings taken up by soldier-settlers, veterans of World War I. One of these smaller holdings, Nulla Nulla, was owned jointly by Frederick William Hay and Leopold Overheu. In May 1926, after two drought years, several hundred Aboriginal people gathered near Nulla Nulla for ceremony, leading Hay and Overheu to fear an outbreak of cattle killing. At dawn on 22 May, two police and two trackers invaded and dispersed the Aboriginal camp; soon after, they found that Hay had been speared to death. In the manner of the punitive expedition which had been a key feature of frontier violence across the continent for over a century, a large patrol consisting of police, special constables (of whom O’Leary was one), civilians, and Aboriginal trackers pursued the killers for five weeks, until, on information from the local missionary, Ernest Gribble, police found and arrested Lumbia, the man solely responsible for Hay’s death. Despite evidence that Hay had savagely attacked him, Lumbia was found guilty of murder and sentenced to death, which was later commuted to life imprisonment.

In 1962, a small group of scientists from the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC embarked on what would become the most ambitious biological survey of the Pacific oceans. Across seven years they travelled to more than 200 islands over an area almost the size of the continental United States. They banded 1.8 million birds, captured hundreds of live and skinned specimens, and collected ‘countless’ blood samples, spleens, livers, stomach contents. What became of most these biological samples has never been disclosed. The Smithsonian’s Pacific Project was, and remains, shrouded in secrecy. The scientists involved were left to guess at the aims of their research. They were mere subcontractors, following the directives of their funding agency: the biological warfare division of the US Army Chemical Corps. ‘To me, as a bird man, it was a wonderful breakthrough because it was a source of funds,’ said S. Dillon Ripley, the Smithsonian’s secretary during the project. ‘That’s all I know about it.’

In Science, Secrecy and the Smithsonian: The strange history of the Pacific Ocean biological survey, American science journalist Ed Regis seeks to understand the Smithsonian’s Pacific Project in its broader military context. He explores the details of the scientific arrangement, the activities of the Smithsonian crew, and the parallel story of Project SHAD (Shipboard Hazard and Defense), which oversaw three biological weapons tests in the years the survey was active: the Shady Grove, Magic Sword, and Speckled Start trials.

The pace of the book is brisk and Regis achieves a lot in its 200 pages. But he is no stylist, and the story often unfolds in choppy, repetitive prose. We are told, for example, that ‘the establishing event in the narrative arc of James Smithson’s life occurred in 1764’, when he was conceived. At other times it seems that Regis is searching too desperately for details to enliven his text, as if the core narrative were not peculiar enough. (Genoa, we are reminded, was not only where Smithson died but also the birthplace of Columbus.)

When the Whitlam government was elected in 1972, women across Australia responded with elation. The Women’s Liberation Movement had helped bring Labor to power and was in turn galvanised by the programs, reforms, and appointments that began to be put in place. In Women and Whitlam: Revisiting the revolution, Michelle Arrow has assembled a splendid range of memoirs, reminiscences, and short essays that document twenty-five women’s perspectives on this much mythologised era. The collection will be of great interest to those who lived through these momentous times and to readers of Australian social and political history more generally. It will also serve as a useful teaching text.

Lusting for revolution, some women’s liberationists worried about whether reforms of the kind advocated by the more respectable Women’s Electoral Lobby (WEL) would undercut their radical aspirations. WEL wanted to engage the political system and famously sent a questionnaire to all political candidates in the 1972 election. Biff Ward, a self-described ‘Movement junkie’, pays tribute to the impact of the combined work undertaken by two different kinds of activists: ‘The combination of Women’s Liberation, with its wellspring of ideas harvested from sharing the lived experience of women, and WEL, the river of female outrage that swelled to push the issues into politicians’ faces, meant we spread like an unexpected flood into public consciousness.’

The two streams would merge during the time of the Whitlam government to become known as the ‘women’s movement’, personified by the newly appointed Special Adviser to the Prime Minister, the Canberra-based intellectual and first ‘femocrat’, Elizabeth Reid. Femocrats, as American commentator Hester Eisenstein would later observe, were an Australian invention, testament to the active role of government in Australia in responding to feminist demands. They were a novelty, but also an expression of a long-established Australian political tradition. As Marian Sawer points out in her introductory note to the ‘Women and Political Influence’ section, ‘looking to the state’ to promote social justice was an Australian political tradition, quite different from the anti-state traditions that framed women’s liberation theory in the United States.

This is a book about rage, as Chrissie Foster says in her opening sentence. It is motivated and driven by rage and, if this is not an oxymoron, it is a panegyric to rage.

Few people could have more cause for rage than Foster, two of whose three daughters were raped at primary school in Melbourne by Catholic priest Kevin O’Donnell, a paedophile monster about whom the Catholic Archdiocese of Melbourne knew for fifty years yet did nothing. One of Chrissie’s daughters, Emma, took her own life, while the second, Katie, who turned to drink to cope, was left in a wheelchair after a car crash.

As religion reporter for The Age, I often sat alongside the Fosters in the 2013 Victorian Parliamentary Inquiry into how institutions responded to child abuse, which they attended throughout. I knew the rage must be smouldering inside – it would be impossible not to be – but I was constantly impressed by their quiet, stoic dignity and the calm, rational way their passion was expressed.

Respected, not always loved, Macquarie is an exceptional ‘Australian and global financial success story’. So says Steve Harker, a rival investment banker from Morgan Stanley, quoted on the back of this book. The authors tackle an intriguing question: how a bonsai operation grew tall, dominating parts of the world of financial engineering. In 400 pages, with a useful index, plus 25,000 words of notes accessible via a QR code, Moullakis and Wright, two senior financial journalists, provide insights into Macquarie, Australia’s only significant global financial institution, which today directly employs more than 17,000 people in thirty-three countries.

The authors explain how and why Macquarie became what it is today. As the authors say of so many of the investment operations the bank has spawned and owns: ‘Macquarie is on the ground, in the weeds, in the game.’ This is a well-researched, gossipy, perceptive account of Macquarie. It is fascinating to read how in just a few decades the business moved from specialist domestic corporate adviser, and money market and bullion operator, to the world’s leading non-governmental operator of infrastructure assets.

The idea of an ‘inside story’, as suggested by the subtitle, points to cooperation from within the bank, with the four former CEOs and many other veterans and current players giving their views through interviews. Sometimes the authors’ interpretations read like Macquarie speaking notes, but the authors try commendably to offer a fuller picture, frankly admitting at times how the reader might be confused by the complexities of some Macquarie products and strategies.

To date, only Lewis D. Solomon’s The Promise and Perils of Infrastructure Privatization (2009) has covered in book form Macquarie’s history. But Solomon, the Van Vleck Research Professor of Law at the George Washington University, mostly concentrated on the infrastructure funds side of Macquarie. He was persona non grata within Macquarie when doing his research. Solomon questioned the efficacy of the Macquarie model, just as the unfolding Global Financial Crisis (GFC) implicitly did.

It is a truism that all politics is performance. Successful leaders are frequently adept in the manipulation and deployment of scripts, props, stages, and costumes. To their credit, British politicians have worked exceedingly hard over the past year and more to explore the full range of theatrical genres. The vaudevillian moral vacuum of Boris Johnson’s government was reprised in recent weeks as Johnson put on a command performance, all wispy blond hair and faux indignation, for the Commons Privileges Committee. The unbelievable farce that ended his time at 10 Downing Street gave way swiftly to the burlesque-cum-tragicomedy of Liz Truss and her chancellor’s calamitous (not to say ironic) ‘mini’ budget. We seem to have arrived, in the efforts of Rishi Sunak and Keir Starmer to out-gravitas one another, at a sustained attempt to revive the long-lost tradition of the morality play.

Uniting these varied and, for British public life at least, uniformly disastrous experimentations with genre has been an underpinning concern with the technique of historical re-enactment. This is perhaps unsurprising given the huge fillip that Brexit campaigning and the referendum gave to the selective weaponisation of the British past. Acres of academic and op-ed print now assign nostalgia – the painful and poignant longing for the landmarks of a familiar even if largely imaginary past – as a primary cause of, or at least the cultural wallpaper for, Brexit. If no one has yet coined the term ‘hypernostalgia’ to capture the quintessence of the official and institutional response in the United Kingdom to the death of Elizabeth II, I would like to do so in these pages. The universal presence of nostalgia as political appeal and, at least in part, as public mood does much to explain recent British politics and its obsession with historical re-enactment.

Just as the sight of a single Roman legionary wearing an Apple Watch would ruin the spectacle for everyone involved, political re-enactments work best as collective fantasy. Johnson had, of course, been fine-tuning his Winston Churchill travesty for some time. His book The Churchill Factor: How one man made history (2014) was just its lengthiest and most thinly veiled manifestation. As a stickler for verisimilitude, however, Johnson has now almost certainly gone too far in seeking to replicate the kind of pathological distrust Winnie inspired in his parliamentary party. The natural role for Keir Starmer to adopt in this simulated reality and, indeed, one which played to his own strengths, was as a post-World War II Clement Attlee. What better counterpoint to Johnson’s hollow bombast could there be than a serious, modest, and essentially uncharismatic London lawyer, an understated man who could inject some sense of moral purpose back into public life and consensually lead in the task of building a ‘new Jerusalem’ after the pervasive sense of national trauma following Covid (and we might add Brexit, but he almost certainly would not, at least in public)?

In seeking to channel these political personae, Starmer and Johnson had been, at least, shooting for the number one and two spots in most polls for ‘best UK prime minister of all time’. Liz Truss’s crude off-the-peg Thatcher cosplay was altogether too blunt; it was also more pointedly and deliberately divisive. Even while it was an apparently more ‘realist’ effort, it could not escape the inevitable pick-and-mix susceptibilities of historical re-enactments. Like a performance of the US Civil War with the slaves left out, Truss zoomed in on the feel-good growth and tax-cutting dimensions of Thatcherism and entirely neglected the altogether harder, scarier, and less popular driving-down-inflation bits. These latter were sidestepped in favour of outsourcing most of Britain’s current malaise to one of those dei ex machina with which Truss so miserably failed to defend her ‘record’. Following Truss’s grisly and spectacular end in October 2022, Brits might have been forgiven for thinking they had reached a natural endpoint for Tory cosplay and, in John Lanchester’s damning phrase, ‘Larping as a system of government’.

Melvyn Bragg has been a British cultural polymath since he more or less drifted into arts broadcasting after coming down from Oxford more than six decades ago. His own longevity (he is now eighty-three) is reflected in his two most enduring series. The first is In Our Time, a BBC Radio 4 discussion series and podcast that has been running for a quarter of a century. The second was The South Bank Show, whose more than 700 episodes were screened on the ITV television network from 1978 to 2010; from 2012 it has been running on Sky Arts. Bragg, as its editor and presenter, profiled many cultural giants: from Paul McCartney and Laurence Olivier to Marlene Dietrich and Dusty Springfield.

In between all this, Bragg has written more than twenty novels and fifteen non-fiction works, including a history of the English language, a biography of Richard Burton, and the history of the King James Bible. In 1998, the Blair government awarded him a life peerage, Lord Bragg of Wigton – or, as Private Eye magazine waspishly has it, ‘Lord Barg of Ubiquity’.

Omnipresent a public intellectual as Bragg may be, he is still, at heart, a Northerner, a Cumbrian lad of humble stock, who has never forgotten his past. During lockdown, while doing In Our Time via Zoom, he wrote this book, the first of a projected three-volume autobiography. As he says succinctly, ‘This is a memoir of my early life, the lives of my family and friends and of the town of Wigton in which I lived.’ As Bragg rightly points out, Wigton is itself one of the leading characters. Certainly, he makes Wigton far from inanimate; its bricks and cobbles, narrow streets and shadowy alleyways, clanking bicycles and chugging buses are set in counterpoint to the more harmonious bucolic surroundings of Cumbria’s hills and fells, rivers and lakes. This is Wordsworth’s country, but it is also Bragg’s, who observes it with a similar rhapsodic eye, but one tempered with realism. ‘The town was our globe,’ Bragg writes. ‘The streets were our living room.’

When Wheel left his jeans to soak in the bathroom sink one morning, he didn’t notice that the tap wasn’t quite turned off. He went out for the day and while he was gone, a clear, almost invisible, wire-thin needle of liquid continued to flow. It would have looked static, like an icicle, far from voluminous. But it was insistent, continuous. In his absence the trickle turned into a flood. It overflowed the sink and then the bathroom of the third-floor apartment. It crept silently down the hall into the bedroom and the built-in cupboards, blooming inside document boxes in search of absorbent substances. It was drawn through the diaries and notebooks where I, his partner of many years, had documented my adult life. The water seemed to soak my belongings specifically, as if it was coming for me, trying to wash me away. It left tea-coloured tide marks on my charcoal drawings and filled my shoes with puddles in the bottom of the wardrobe.

As any plumber, doctor, or government knows, a small leak is never insignificant. A dripping hose can fill a swimming pool, a burst artery can drain your life away, a wily hacker can flood the porous, stateless internet with classified information and change the course of history.

The smell of old socks and wet dog made itself apparent within a day and we had to pull up the carpet before the mould and mildew set in. In the same way that foundations turn to mud and subside when waterlogged, everything else solid began to crumble. The old built-in wardrobe had to go. We had to repaint, so the blinds came down. Recent homeowners with a mortgage after decades of renting, we had no insurance. Soon we were living in a shell with our boxed-up belongings. We slept on a mattress in the lounge room, an island where we lay in the dark under the bare windows and looked at the sky, as if we were camping. I even saw a long-tailed and fiery meteor tear through the atmosphere.

The place we had lived in before had old vinyl drawstring blinds covering the windows; the owner had forbidden us to remove them. One Sunday morning as we lay in bed, the blinds still drawn against the daylight, I caught a ghostly reflection sweeping across the room – a tiny upside-down car was driving across the wall, growing from small and sharp to large and blurry again. I watched car after car, thinking I was hallucinating or still dreaming, until I worked out that a tiny tear in the blind had turned the whole bedroom into a pinhole camera.

~

‘Wheel told me about the flood,’ said a neighbour. ‘He said you took it well.’

I hadn’t taken it well. I was furious, and later felt guilty about it. I shouted, I shamed – angry-cleaning and laying out every towel to soak up the swamp, squeezing them out and cycling them through the dryer which ran for hours, making the air damp and musty. I piled things on the bed passive-aggressively while Wheel rolled his eyes and walked away. This is how we are different. He stays calm while I catastrophise. I grew up in the inner city. Only child, single mother. I wore a key around my neck to let myself in after school. I was alert to danger from a young age – but it was danger that came in the form of other people rather than from the natural world.

Wheel grew up on a bend of the Murrumbidgee in a modest house on a plot of land big enough for a small farm and a couple of sheds. Cattle grazed on the Crown-land paddock that separated their place from the river. The youngest of nine, he was still a toddler when the eldest was leaving home. There are hardly any gaps between one generation and the next in his family. It’s a waterwheel, continuously dipping into the gene pool to paddle through another child.

His dad would sometimes get him up in the dark on cold winter mornings to launch a home-made wooden dinghy on the river and lay craypots. Murray Crayfish are striking, alien-looking creatures with giant bone-white claws and knobbly bluish-green bodies like daleks. They are listed as a threatened species now, and strict rules govern a brief fishing season along a short stretch of the Murrumbidgee from Ganmain to Gundagai. In the 2022 floods, hundreds rose up out of the Murray River downstream to escape the blackwater – water heavy with sediment and debris that had become deoxygenated and would have suffocated them. The department of fisheries rescued some and held them until the water cleared and they could be returned to the river.

Murrumbidgee is a Wiradjuri word that means ‘big water’ or ‘plenty water’, but only the biggest floods seem to make the news. It creates the impression that a flood is a rare and isolated event, but records show that they happen often and tend to occur in clusters. The flood of 1974, one of the biggest in recent history is recalled as a singular event, but records show that the river broke its banks five times that year.

(photograph by the author)

In Wagga one summer, between Christmas and New Year, I took a screenshot of the weather app on my phone – I wanted proof that it could still be 40 degrees Celsius at 8 pm. When it’s that hot, it’s tempting to swim in the river. I imagine Wheel’s mother anxiously trying to keep watch over so many kids, so close to its banks.

In the main street of Gundagai, there is a belated memorial to Yarri and Jacky Jacky, the two men who saved dozens of people with just a rowboat and a bark canoe when the river rose swiftly in the middle of the night in 1852. Eighty-nine people drowned – settlers who had been warned by the local Wiradjuri people not to build on the flood plain. The water rose even higher the following year, but everything had already been lost. The town was rebuilt up the hill on higher ground.

We sometimes stop at Gundagai for a toasted sandwich or milkshake at the Niagara Café. It’s been renovated now, but the backlit painted façade used to feature Niagara Falls, frozen in its continuous cascade where Lake Eerie flows into Lake Ontario. I was born downstream, in Toronto, and the coincidence was not lost on me when we pulled up outside – how I came to be here, looking at a kind of mystical postcard from there.

Margaret Atwood is fond of repeating the adage that creative writing is ‘10 percent inspiration and 90 percent perspiration’. The same can be said of reading Atwood’s latest story collection, Old Babes in the Wood. When a writer is so venerated, there is a risk of both authorial and editorial complacency. The book’s back cover features this excerpt: ‘My heart is broken, Nell thinks. But in our family we don’t say, “My heart is broken.” We say, “Are there any cookies?”’ This reminded me of one of those film trailers where you wonder: if these gags made the promo, how bland is the rest? If a story collection is like a box of cookies, I’m afraid these are mostly half-baked (if not a little stale and crumbly).

The fifteen stories are grouped into three sections: ‘Tig & Nell’, ‘My Evil Mother’, and ‘Nell & Tig’. The Tig and Nell stories afford glimpses of a long, loving marriage, mostly through the recollections of the widowed Nell. Nell seems likeable enough, and Tig’s harmless eccentricities might prove endearing on closer acquaintance, but they fail to generate enough energy to animate the sequence as a living whole. Perhaps it’s because Atwood is writing from personal experience: in fictionalising her feelings about the loss of her life partner Graeme Gibson, is she holding back?

According to her agent, Karolina Sutton, Atwood’s mastery of her craft leaves editors with little to do. ‘Her editors are basically her publishers,’ Sutton boasts. From the overall conception of some stories down to individual sentences, this hands-off approach looks misguided. Here is Nell getting over her fears about campsite moose attacks: ‘In the clear light of morning, the moose-squashing possibility seemed remote. Not a life-threatening experience, therefore, except in Nell’s head.’ The expression is somehow both matter of fact and ungainly.

First, a confession. I am one of a tiny minority of readers who were underwhelmed by Pip Williams’s first novel, The Dictionary of Lost Words (2020). I thought it a splendid idea, one undermined by facile messages about how women’s words were ignored by the men who recorded our language and its meanings. Clearly, I was in a minority: Dictionary became an international bestseller, one of the most successful Australian novels ever published. Friends raved about it. I wondered what I wasn’t getting.

Fortunately, I’m getting much more from Williams the second time round, where the feminist message is more subtle. Here is another historical novel about women working in a man’s world of books and learning. As it happens, the novel also had an unexpected and sobering personal message for me.

I am proud to be an Oxford graduate, from a time when it was hard for women to get into the university: there were far more colleges and places for men. But my difficulties were as nothing compared to those facing Peggy, the young woman who narrates Williams’s story. I had many privileges: a good education, supportive parents, a comfortable assumption that I was entitled to take my place in academia. Peggy lives in the early twentieth century, a time when education for women and girls was far from assumed. Moreover, she is on the wrong side of the class divide. There are doors she sees every day that she literally cannot enter.

James Burgmann-Milner (writing under the suitably sci-fi alias J.R. Burgmann) knows his cli-fi, or climate fiction. A teaching associate at the Monash Climate Change Communication Research Hub, he received his PhD for research on the representation and communication of anthropogenic climate change in literature and other popular media. He is the co-author of Science Fiction and Climate Change: A sociological approach (2020) and has also contributed several insightful reviews of cli-fi works in ABR in recent years, including those of Ned Beauman, James Bradley, Kim Stanley Robinson, and Richard Powers.

Literary visions of climate collapse are represented in Burgmann’s début novel, Children of Tomorrow, as ‘old realisms no one heeded – Atwood, Bradley, Mitchell, Robinson’. Powers’ Pulitzer Prize–winning ecological novel The Overstory (2018) is quoted in Burgmann’s epigraph: ‘The world is failing precisely because no novel can make the contest for the world seem as compelling as the struggles between a few lost people.’

In response, Burgmann has set out to write precisely this – a story about a few lost people. They include tree researcher Arne Bakke, his brooding brother Freddie, itinerant diver Evie Weatherall, her Canadian cousin and entrepreneurial celebrity Wally, self-assured philosopher John, and spirited bioengineer and coder Kim. Their camaraderie reminded me of the documentary The Most Unknown (2018), where scientists of different disciplines visit one another across the globe in search of common purpose – except that here their brief includes survival.

In Children of Tomorrow, this group of friends – and their descendants – live through the accelerating devastation of anthropogenic climate change. Beginning at ‘Carbon dioxide parts per million: 402.5’ (aka the year 2016) with historic Tasmanian bushfires, this intergenerational narrative is divided into three sections – century’s beginning, middle, and end. As the decades roll on, these ‘lost people’ witness catastrophic climate events that render much of the planet uninhabitable and crumble the seemingly permanent structures of human society.

Subtler in its purring resonances than the cello and more closely resembling the human form in its body, the viola da gamba was cultivated to its greatest heights in the court of Louis XIV. The great virtuoso Marin Marais will be the most familiar name for any who are acquainted with this instrument, but two later figures of equal ability were Antoine Forqueray and his son, Jean-Baptiste. Tumultuous in their relationship, they become the rather unexpected subject of a compelling new novel by Michael Meehan.

Lovers of the gamba and its music will be fascinated but shocked as they turn its pages. Antoine Forqueray’s few surviving pièces de viole have earned the reputation of being among the hardest of all gamba music to perform, surpassing in difficulty even the most technically challenging works of Marais. They are gruff, bellicose works that wrestle over the instrument’s seven strings with a physicality that must have felt dangerously new for its time. Meehan is wonderful at describing his wild improvisations; he makes Forqueray seem possessed by the devil.

Forqueray is known to have possessed a terrible temper, both as husband and father. Meehan conveys in remorseless detail how Forqueray inflicted cruelty on his wife and particularly on his son while teaching him how to play his almost impossibly hard compositions. We quickly learn that this man is a pure sadist, regularly beating the young Jean-Baptiste during lessons and smashing his instrument in a fit of anger.

Reminding us how Leopold Mozart punished his son Wolfgang Amadeus whenever he played a wrong note, Jean Baptiste’s scarred journey through life forms the backbone of this novel. Disturbingly, we read how the father laughs as he pounds his little boy in time to the music, in the process ‘forging links between beauty and the memory of pain’. The confluence of beauty and agony, love and torture, make an ever-present undercurrent.

Susan Paterson’s first novel, Where Light Meets Water, offers readers the various pleasures of the traditional Bildungsroman. Spanning the years 1847 to 1871, it centres on the life of Thomas Rutherford, a man torn between devotion to his work as a mariner and an abiding passion for painting seascapes. The predominant use of an omniscient narrator provides unfettered access to his conflicted inner life and, less frequently, to that of his spirited wife Catherine. The vivid depiction of a host of global settings, including London, the markets of Calcutta, Melbourne during the gold rush, and an increasingly prosperous Dunedin, adds to the effect of a densely particularised and amplified world. Immersive and absorbing, the novel is a triumph of the old-fashioned art of verisimilitude.

Tom’s story exemplifies the Victorian enthusiasm for the concept of the self-made man. After fifteen arduous years at sea, he advances from cabin boy to ship’s captain. In later life, he achieves modest success as a painter, a talent encouraged in his youth by an artistically inclined mother. Self-made women are, of course, a much rarer occurrence in Victorian England. Catherine’s serious ambitions as a painter are unfulfilled, while future public recognition of her experimental art will depend on male patronage. Homosexuality, too, remains unspoken, and must be kept hidden from public scrutiny. Since realism as a genre is required to acknowledge the social and political realities of its time and place, such limits on choice and agency add to the novel’s credibility.

In his preamble to a playlist for Faber Radio, Max Porter writes: ‘So much injustice but so much beauty, life is short and strange and I better run upstairs and tell these noisy little shits [my children] how much I love them.’ The quote would be an apt epigraph for Porter’s splendid new novel, Shy. The story of a troubled teen (Shy) who lives in a special education facility housed in a ‘shite old mansion … in the middle of bumblefuck nowhere’, Shy is a concise and compassionate piece of writing, one that reveals, within the ‘brambly and wild’ existence of a group of psychologically damaged boys, moments of spine-tingling transcendence.

One morning, just after three am, Shy stuffs his Walkman into his pocket, tugs on a backpack filled with rocks – a ‘shockingly heavy … bag of sorry’ – and sneaks out of his room. He makes his way through the ‘[u]ndark, anti-bright’ of night, crossing the ha-ha that separates the facility from the fields beyond. Were it not for the bag of rocks, we might presume that Shy is running away. But eventually, as he negotiates the terrain and as he lurches through the clutter and confusion of the past, we discover his purpose. He is on his way to a place that haunts his nightmares, ‘[d]eceptive, inky-smooth, silent, at ease with its unknown weight’.

First arrested when he was fifteen, Shy has ‘sprayed, snorted, smoked, sworn, stolen, cut, punched, run, jumped, crashed an Escort, smashed up a shop, trashed a house, broken a nose, stabbed his stepdad’s finger’. He is harassed by people demanding that he explain why he acts as he does, but Shy has no explanation. Nor does Porter explicitly propose one. Rather, he situates us within the ‘flicker drag of … [Shy’s] sense-jumbled memories’, the ‘electrical storm’ that rumbles through Shy’s thoughts and precipitates his delinquency. Porter dares us, not to judge Shy, but to submerge ourselves fully in his experience. Shy’s rebellion, Porter suggests, is against a chronicle of trauma buried deep in his cells, a lifetime of hurt, misuse, and dysfunction that Shy struggles to name, let alone understand.

On the surface, there is little connection between these three début novels. Rijn Collins’s Fed to Red Birds (Simon & Schuster, $32.99 pb, 247 pp) sketches an intimate portrait of migration, beautifully illustrating the migrant’s immersion within and isolation from their adopted land. Elva, a young Australian woman, hopes to remain in Iceland, her absent mother’s home country, despite the unique challenges it presents her. Michael Thompson’s How to be Remembered (Allen & Unwin, $32.99 pb, 344 pp) poses an intriguing metaphysical question: what happens if, each year on his birthday, every trace of one boy’s existence is erased? How can a person survive when nobody, not even his parents, knows who he is? Tommy Llewellyn is determined to find the answer and outfox this universal reset. Kate Scott’s Compulsion (Hamish Hamilton, $32.99 pb, 279 pp) revels in music, drugs, food, fashion, and hedonism. Lucy Lux attempts to uncomplicate her chaotic partying lifestyle by escaping to a remote seaside town she remembers from her childhood, where her passions and problems blaze anew. Despite their many differences, these are all essentially stories of self-discovery, coming of age, and obsession.

Elva’s world is shaped by and devoted to oddities. In Reykjavík, she works at a curiosity shop, researching and selling collectibles: antique manuscripts, Victorian mourning rings, mystical artefacts; anything old, unusual, macabre. In her spare time, when not studying at Icelandic language school, she is an amateur tarot card reader and taxidermist dedicated to improving (though far from perfecting) her arts. Glass-eyed birds, a rabbit, and a bat act as talismans and guardians of her tiny apartment, shrivelled sentinels that protect and reassure when her other compulsion grows too strong. Throughout her life, Elva has been haunted by books. She is named after a character in a children’s tale her Icelandic grandfather published to great acclaim. Decades after its release, copies of this modern classic are still everywhere in Iceland: tourist traps, high-street stores, second-hand booksellers, even the little pop-ups she passes on the way to the swimming pool. For her well-being, she must avoid all bookshops, lest she stumble upon a rogue edition of Fed to Red Birds and be compelled to consume it.

While Elva’s occupation and preoccupations are enchanting, and her main relationships with Icelanders and other expats refreshingly lovely, the sense of place in this novel is spellbinding – as is Collins’s prose in describing it. Through her outsider’s eyes, Icelandic plants are like fairy tales, ‘finger tangle, red wrack dabberlocks. They were words a witch might say to cast a spell, protect a journey, or summon someone home,’ the winter days shrink ‘between two hands that were slowly pushing together, squeezing all the light and warmth out of the country’, and scenery contains multiple shades of white: ‘the meringue peaks of mountains, the pearlescent sheen of headlights on snowdrifts, the cotton-wool haze of the clouds hanging low on the horizon’. The gentle arc of Elva’s acceptance of her past, her present, and herself is firmly anchored in this beautiful, inhospitable but welcoming place.

Jillian Graham begins her biography of Margaret Sutherland (1897–1984) with a story that vividly captures two themes that recur throughout the book: Sutherland’s activism, and her sometime exclusion from Australia’s institutional musical life as it developed through her lifetime.

The occasion is the opening of Melbourne’s new, custom-built concert hall on the south bank of the Yarra River. Speaking from the stage on 6 November 1982, Premier Rupert Hamer – for whom the hall is now named – spoke of Sutherland’s role in securing the five-and-a-half acre site that was formerly Wirth’s Circus Park for what became Melbourne’s arts centre precinct. Starting as a founding member of the Combined Arts Centre Movement (CACM) in 1943, she ‘kept the venture on the political agenda’ across the four decades that brought her to this moment, marking significant milestones (the laying of the foundation stone by Elizabeth II during her 1954 visit), and fighting off a competing commercial development. In support of the foundation of the CACM, Sutherland organised a petition of some 40,000 signatures.

In the gala concert that followed, not one note of Australian music was heard. Although Sutherland was present, none of her music was included in the program. Graham writes that this deficit was partially rectified when a tribute concert was given in the foyer –– the foyer, not the main hall – in October 1984. By that time, Sutherland was dead.

In the history of the American musical, Oscar Hammerstein II (1895–1960) presents us with what his Siamese king would have described as a puzzlement. Lacking the sophistication of Cole Porter, the verbal dexterity of Lorenz Hart, and the sly wit of Ira Gershwin, his lyrics, taken out of context, can seem hokey and sentimental. Will he ever be forgiven for The Sound of Music’s ‘lark who is learning to pray’? And yet it is his works, written in collaboration with Richard Rodgers, that are constantly revived rather than the flimsier concoctions of his more favoured contemporaries.

Early musicals were built around stars. The plots were insubstantial affairs that allowed the leads to perform their individual shtick between songs. The standard view of the musical is that Rodgers and Hammerstein’s first collaboration, Oklahoma! (1943), revolutionised the form by integrating the songs and dances into a strong plot with three-dimensional characters, but Oscar – we are going to be meeting many Hammersteins, so first names will have to do – always considered the book of a musical to be of vital importance and to the end of his life complained about the lack of acknowledgment for its creator. Here he is in an early letter to his uncle Arthur on a mooted musical version of the Dybbuk. ‘If the play is a success the praise will go to the producer, the composer, Ansky who conceived it … Otto [Harbach] and I will be away off in some little dark corner. On the other hand – if … the play does not win critical favour you know what they’ll say. “Why did Arthur Hammerstein bring in two musical comedy hackwriters to spoil this fine thing?”’

Oscar’s great strength was as an adaptor. His original works were never really successful, and long before his association with Rodgers, Oscar wrestled Edna Ferber’s baggy novel Show Boat into a workable, coherent theatrical piece in which the songs served and contributed to the plot. He writes that the adaptor is ‘[a] craftsman in his own right, it is his function to create in his own world and with his own tools the characters and situations created by the original author’.

This book has one of the most off-putting jackets of recent memory. Elizabeth Jane Howard, glass in hand, is gazing attentively at her celebrated novelist husband Kingsley Amis, who is beaming with self-congratulatory pleasure at someone out of shot. Howard, no mean writer herself, seems to be performing the good wife’s duty of smiling at a joke she has heard at least ten times. It is a photo that invites the reader to buckle up for five essays about the wives of prominent writers who gave up their own ambitions for the greater good of being ‘handmaidens to genius’.

Lives of the Wives is a little more nuanced than this. In setting out to document marriages of varying ghastliness between writers, Ciuraru was smart enough not to be bogged in the familiar thickets of Ted-and-Sylvia, Vera-and-Vladimir. She does not reject the usual suspects, however: apart from Howard and Amis, she deals with Kenneth Tynan and Elaine Dundy, as well as Roald Dahl and Patricia Neal. But the addition of less well-known couples – Elsa Morante/Alberto Moravia and Una Troubridge/Radclyffe Hall – is refreshing.

The Family Idiot (originally published in French in three volumes in 1971–72) is a study of Gustave Flaubert (1821–80). It was published in a fine translation by Carol Cosman, in five volumes, between 1981 and 1994. The Sartre scholar Joseph S. Catalano has produced a skilful, beautifully edited abridgment of this gargantuan opus.

Jean-Paul Sartre had a lifelong obsession with Flaubert. The reason for this lies in the fact that his predecessor’s purported concern with Form alone, with the perfection of his style, constitutes a flagrant challenge to Sartre’s belief that art is necessary action in the real world. Sartre having chosen to study a writer as different from himself as possible, his antipathy became informed, as he tells us in his preface, by a degree of empathy. His ambivalent feelings towards his subject are to be explained by the fact that Flaubert’s ironic detachment brings into sharp relief Sartre’s own anxieties and frustrations as a bourgeois writer.

Sharply observed mimicry of sporting commentary is a niche comic form, but from the late 1980s, Australian comedian Billy Birmingham took it to chart-topping ubiquity with a series of recordings that gathered his small legion of impersonations under the sobriquet The Twelfth Man. Most famous were his recreations of a goonish Nine Wide World of Sports team from that golden age of television cricket commentary in which an ecru/ivory/white/cream-blazered Richie Benaud led the likes of Bill Lawry, Tony Greig, Ian Chappell, and Max Walker. Birmingham had the vocal measure of all of them, to genuinely hilarious effect.

His other comedic long suit was a roll-call of Sri Lankan, Indian, and Pakistani cricketers that mocked the forms and pronunciations of Urdu or Sinhalese names in a way that today would be called out for its obvious racism, but thirty years ago passed as mainstream comedy. There was no subtext beyond Anglocentric ridicule to the likes of ‘Somejerk Ramdmecar’, ‘Ahbroke Meandad’, or ‘Ramatunga Downathroata’, but one parodic invention carried the weight of sharp inference, Birmingham’s version of the great Pakistani bowling all-rounder and captain Wasim Akram: ‘Wasee A-Crim’.

‘The world is full of persons, only some of whom are human.'

                                                                                                                         Graham Harman

I.

Nietzsche wrote that a human being resides somewhere between a plant and a ghost.

II.

Beauty has always required two agents: a beaut and a beholder. In lieu of a ring, her new fiancé came back from a trip to town with socks for himself, and an extravagance of lilies, their faces already slabbered with a stain of pollen. She arranged them, and then walked through the house feeling a pleasurable emptiness, like a shirt in a shop window, framed, somehow. The flowers were her beaut, and she was the beaut of the house itself, and of the view of the hills, and she in turn beheld the view of the hills – beauty and beholding were pouring freely back and forth and it felt for a moment like something that could not be exhausted, the very flowers like some Jurassic proof of sex, of personhood, full-spreading themselves in the closed container of their vase, gradually making the water rank.

III.

Or maybe that was later. Maybe she bought herself the flowers. And for Bob it was just the socks.

IV.

What is the point of flowers? Their petallic openness to smudge. What is the point of beauty? Branches inosculating in the primalgreen dream forest, a fuse of reach. From the Latin osculare, to kiss. To be a tree kissing itself, pleaching its own branches, she thought. To be a slow and solid home, for the deep past and the dirtying bees.

V.

They were brushing their teeth together in the bathroom when Bob said, When are you going to pluck that? and the part of her that bends to shame said, I just did. Later, in the bed’s atmosphere of distinct chill, he said, It’s not that I don’t think you’re pretty. No? No, it’s just that I’d like looking at your face even more if you didn’t have all that fuzz.

VI.

As a week passed and the lilies browned, she tried to recall her belief that the wilt is also beautiful.

VII.

Evenings, Bob liked to put himself into a slouch container with his bigger screen. Sweet evenings, when he invited her to come and watch something from beginning to end in the slouch container. They piled up all the extra wool behind them like an inert mother sheep, while the real sheep stayed a goodly distance from the house in their green and degraded valleys, having broken down throughout the day their coarse food of grasses, and having let it travel, in the dark and knotted night, to the third true stomach. There was such sweetness in this pact of story reception. Normally Bob would watch the beginning of several films, skipping through at double speed if they couldn’t hold his attention. It’s not that I don’t think you’re pretty. Our world is no container, she thought sadly on nights outside the slouch, fingering her private perforations on the couch.

VIII.

Is it possible she wanted to delight, more than she wanted to be delighted? Did she want, above all, to be a font, a brook, a source, a small pure laughing cut of water that a thirsty hiker would be glad to find – ecstatic to find, to taste?

IX.

Above all, the view of the hills poured back at her. The more she beheld the mountains, the more mountainous they made her. What she wanted above all for the fuzzed and lovely hills was that they not be exhausted.

X.

A textural class of soil known as sand submits to a rage of melt in order to be seen through.

XI.

When the pollen dust was everywhere and she tired of picking up after it, she threw the flowers in the fire. It was a wonder to watch how they burned.

XII.

The vase, emptied of flowers. The vase cooling and shifting on the kitchen bench, next to the candystripe tin that held twists of meat for the dog. The vase did not await fresh flowers, neither did it refuse such waiting. Its relationship with waiting was mysterious, though real. In the smoothed and fired dark form of its vesselbody – a provision to the self of mostly empty space – it tended a thousand options for shatter.

Joan Fleming

Joan Fleming’s most recent publication is Song of Less (Cordite Books, 2022).

The Liver King wants your time. Specifically, your time spent on TikTok.

Australia has the highest monthly TikTok usage in the world at nearly thirty hours per user, up 26.5 per cent since last year. That time is valuable. According to Suzie Shaw, CEO of We Are Social Australia, TikTok’s unique algorithm (which puts reels, or short videos, in front of the app’s users) provides ‘a great opportunity for marketers to reach a highly engaged audience’.

Liver King (aka Brian Johnson) is CEO of the ‘Ancestral Lifestyle’. Every morning he bellows ‘Good morning, Primals!’ to his followers and exhorts them to live like our early ancestors, while marketing his line of liver-based supplements. He has 4.2 million followers on TikTok. He is seriously jacked, and aside from a pair of shorts his only other garments are an occasional ‘Viking’ helmet or fur mantle. His antics include extreme workouts (‘simulated hunts’) and the consumption of copious amounts of raw liver and testicle.

Johnson epitomises hustle culture’s constant grind for profit and purpose, maximising every waking (and sleeping) hour. Alongside the continual spruiking, Johnson frequently, and apparently earnestly, articulates his motivation for founding the Ancestral Lifestyle as helping America’s ‘lost people’ to express ‘their highest and most dominant selves’.

A six-year-old in Canada memorises a poem written by Li Bai in the eighth century. She recites its twenty syllables perfectly in the Mandarin she studies at Saturday Chinese school, but beyond a mechanical conversion into English, makes little sense of it. Murmuring the poem’s words then holding her breath as though waiting, her mother tries to help.

Decades later, Gillian Sze realises her mother wanted not to translate the words but to translate poetry. Across languages and centuries, over the bridge from Chinese characters to the Latin alphabet of English, the small child presses forward into the strange terrain of the poem, a thing William Carlos Williams described as ‘made up of … words and the spaces between them’.

Around the same time, a young Latin teacher begins writing poetry to wrestle his way ‘toward a clarity about something I couldn’t understand in any other way’. My Trade Is Mystery: Seven meditations from a life in writing (Yale University Press, $30.95 hb, 112 pp) contains seven meditations as, decades later, Carl Phillips, the author of fifteen poetry collections and several books about poetry, looks back to the time he began to explore, without ‘map or compass’ the ‘strange territory’ he found himself in, or found in himself. A poem’s ‘record of interior attention paid’ shows ‘evidence-like tracks’ of that quest.

Phillips thinks of the title of Amy Clampitt’s final collection, A Silence Opens, as he reflects on Lucille Clifton’s poem ‘[evening and my dead once husband]’. The speaker asks her dead husband about anxiety, illness, the ‘terrible loneliness / and wars against our people’. In reply, he spells out with his fingers: ‘it does not help to know’.

Phillips approaches a question with the gently enquiring syntax that shapes this wise work: ‘Is it maybe better not just to respect but to continually embrace knowledge’s limits? Past which, like the sea where the land gives out, yes, a silence opens.’

When silence opens, as when darkness arrives, our perception alters. ‘What do darkness, stillness, silence make possible?’ asks Kaveh Akbar. He wraps each poem in The Penguin Book of Spiritual Verse: 110 poets on the divine ($35 hb, 400 pp) in an invitation or question, footprints into the poem’s territory. Here, he explores a poem by sixth century bce Buddhist nun Patacara, who extinguishes a candle to help concentrate her mind ‘the way you train a good horse’.

For Akbar, migrating from Tehran to an America ‘actively hostile to my existence’, poetry became ‘a place I could put myself’. He spoke Arabic, his third language after Farsi and English, only in prayer. ‘God’s own tongue’ might ‘thin the membrane’ between himself and the divine. His quiet, acute editorial comments feel like an overheard whisper, a loose thread of prayer.

Akbar scours a vast archive of doubt and yearning, and conducts voices in hymns of despair, prophecy, petition, and exaltation. Acknowledging that curatorial choice emerges from ‘one vast and unprecedented life’, he says: ‘I claim no objectivity.’ He aims not to fix canonicity but to break it open, ‘in opposition to the colonial impulse’. Unlike the tight fist of colonisation, Akbar’s method is to loosen and include. He looks beyond categories (time, faith, nation, gender) toward ‘a shared privileging of the spirit and its attendant curiosities’. His interest in the body in prayer, the idea ‘that the ecstatic might (or must!) include the body’, is evoked in the anthology’s expanse and sinuousness.

These books seem to speak to one another. Reading them, I cross between known and unknown places, poets, and poems. Names bounce among them (Emily Dickinson, Lucille Clifton, Rainer Maria Rilke). On long walks I listen to Phillips reading My Trade Is Mystery, then return to its pages. Each book exchanges certainty’s closure for mystery’s openness and invites a translation of self and thought. Writers are always translating ourselves from reader to writer, and Sze, Phillips, and Akbar step slightly aside from their own poems to consider poetry. As I write this, hoping to be the kind of reader Phillips identifies as those ‘we write toward, a small hand against disappearance’, I also reach for such readers as I inhabit poetry’s strange territory, where meaning, Phillips writes, ‘is unfixed, ever changing’.

Akbar’s poems are placed to speak to one another. In ‘God’s One Mistake’, Oodgeroo of the Noonuccal situates human discord – ‘[i]ntolerance, unkindness, cruelty’ – amid a peaceful more-than-human world. God’s ‘one mistake’ is the gift of free will, so often making humanity ‘[u]nhappy on the earth’. This line is followed by ‘There was earth in them and / They dug’, the opening of a poem by Paul Celan.

The poets’ lines sit adjacent like parts of a severed couplet. Hélène Cixous described Celan’s ‘writing that speaks of and through disaster such that disaster and desert become the author or spring’. The Shoah, the ‘unimaginable violence inside the Nazi death camps’ (as Akbar says) is a product of the human free will Oodergoo questions. Those who dig call out: ‘O someone, o none, o no one, o you.’

Poems reach out to ‘no one’ (some- or no-one, you or me). Like messages in bottles cast into the sea, they might reach shoreline or heartland, Celan wrote. Readers wait for them. Akbar’s words resonate with Phillips’s when he describes preferring poems ‘certain of nothing, poems that [embrace] mystery instead of trying to resolve it’. For Sze, too, poetry offers an opening: ‘Creative space. Emotional space. A space for possibilities.’

Sze’s tentative ongoing reading of ‘Quiet Night Think’ (Quiet Night Think: Poems and essays, ECW Press, $21.95 pb, 92 pp) cultivates patience and agility. Line breaks remind her of ‘the fractured dialects I grew up with, the skipping from language to language, the acrobatic ear’, mapping a way toward ‘some hiccupped notion of home’. The ‘hesitation’ she finds in William Carlos Williams engenders ‘slow, careful deliberation that sets the reader aglow’. Through false starts and mistranslations, Sze comes to recognise the futility of containment, in texts and life. A ‘fissure ceases to be a flaw’, opening instead to new possibility. Yet, writing as a soon-to-be mother, spaciousness contracts. Time, too, narrows. For the writer whose energy is diverted to ‘the present, the vulnerable, to those whose cries are for me alone’, how might spaciousness be possible? Might the poem itself, like a child, insist on (and teach us) ‘our attention, our un-rest’?

Perhaps poetry is both cradle and archive of uncertainty, space where doubt’s thrum might be listened to rather than muted; might be cherished, amplified and even cultivated. Toni Morrison described her interest in writing into ‘the complexity, the vulnerability of an idea’ (not certainty, ‘that would be a tract’). German artist Gerhard Richter, whose paintings’ gauzy grain blurs the certainty that can rear up into fascism, says: ‘I like the indefinite, the boundless; I like continual uncertainty.’

‘Other qualities,’ he adds, ‘may be more conducive to achievement, publicity, success; but they are all outworn – as outworn as ideologies, opinions, concepts and names for things.’ Phillips, too, is wise about narrow paths to high places, advising ambition not in the sense people ‘too easily confuse with competition’, but something that has ‘nothing to do with other people and their perceptions’.

For Akbar, a time of addiction was one of ‘absolute certainty’. Afterwards, he was drawn to nuance and doubt. Now, though, ‘irony is the default position of the public intellectual’, and language is deployed: ‘the great weapon used to stifle critical thinking is a raw overwhelm of meaningless language at every turn’. ‘Passionately absolute’, it tells us that ‘immigrants are evil, climate change is a hoax, and this new Rolex will make you sexually irresistible’.

For Tracy K. Smith, poetry can be a language beyond that, and beyond ‘our day-to-day errand-running and obligation-fulfilling’. Beyond ‘glib, facile, simplistic and prefabricated’ language, past the sales pitch that pulls us ‘away from the interior’, poetry can ‘inoculate us against the catchy, inescapable, strategically biased language of the market’.

Perhaps instead of the language of selling, poetry is ‘trade’, in the double sense of exchange and skill.

Perhaps, instead of the commodification and sale of certainty offered by Big God, we might find in poetry the spiritual fuel of uncertainty, doubt, porousness, vulnerability.

Perhaps that vulnerability is an aperture, that porousness an admission – in the double sense of acknowledging and letting-in – of mystery.

Perhaps, in the double sense of splitting apart and adhering to, poetry cleaves (to) mystery.

Phillips suggests: ‘To acknowledge limits to what we can know about a thing – to acknowledge mystery – is not, to my mind, an admission of defeat by mystery, but instead a show of respect for it.’ Using the term ‘as secularly as possible’, he describes this as a ‘form of faith… in art’s ability to know’.

Poetry gives us a syntax of uncertainty. For Sze, it is in restive interleaving of lyric prose with pared poems. In Phillips’s poetry and prose, there are traces of his training as a classicist. Latin has a largely free word order. Learning it involves memorising words’ declensions and conjugations the way a musician memorises scales. Each word has shades and tones (tense, gender, case) to fit the sentence. Rigour and mobility are poised, the way a poem’s form might hold fragments even as they scatter and flit, the way a prayer’s words might move at the edges of the unknown.

Akbar makes transparent what more conventional anthologies conceal. Aware that readers might ‘object to the omission of their favourite poet of the spirit’, he hopes to ‘at least make a pass at accounting for the vast complexity of the human project of spiritual writing’. His ‘modest study’ of the ways poets ‘wrap language’ around the unknowable is exhilaratingly full of discovery and rediscovery. It ventures ‘across time and civilizations’, beyond Eurocentric and male-dominated accounts of the spiritual, past shame and fear that attend the magical and spectral. This results in a blazing expanse of words – and the spaces between them, the losses and silences of the unspeakable, ineffable and awesome.

Paradoxically, Sze’s deep exploration of one poem, ‘Quiet Night Think’, is similarly expansive. The title of Li Bai’s poem 靜夜思 (Jìng Yè Sī) is translated as ‘Quiet Night Think’, ‘Thinking on a Quiet Night’, ‘Quiet Night Thoughts’, ‘A Quiet Night Thought’, ‘Contemplating Moonlight’, ‘Brooding in the Still Night’, or ‘Lamentations in the Tranquility of Night’. Its limitless shades of meaning provide an ongoing lesson in the mobile and shifting ground of the poem.

Akbar’s calling forth of ‘pivotal samples from my own reading and discovery’ begins with a poem by the earliest attributable author of all human literature, twenty-third century bce Sumerian high priestess Enheduanna. More than two thousand years before Sappho, she makes, Akbar says, ‘a dizzy stagger’ in ‘ecstatic awe’ at the divine, just as replete with desire.

Sappho’s work burnt with the Great Library of Alexandria and exists in recalled fragments. Its salvaged slivers are traces of something once thought and felt, now ash. Legend has Sappho discovering poetry after finding the singing head of Orpheus, dismembered by the Thracian Maenads, on the shore. If this inheritance was song continuing after violence, her bequest is a smouldering and achy catalogue of what we long to but cannot save.

Spiritual verse moves between wanting and not wanting, from Sappho’s: ‘because I prayed / this word / I want’ to Kind David’s ‘The Lord is my shepherd. I shall not want.’ It moves between compare and ‘false compare’ (or ‘beautiful false compare’ as Michael Ondaatje calls it). Of a section from the biblical ‘Song of Songs’ (‘I have compared thee, my love, to a company of horses in Pharaoh’s chariots’), Akbar notes its echo in Shakespeare’s ‘Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?’ On the other hand, Shakespeare, in sonnet 130, parodied the ridiculous swerve of blazonry’s metaphors from a lover’s features to coral and snow, perfume and roses.

For Celan, poems are ‘gifts to the attentive’. From our un-rest and our attention paid, beyond the limits of what we know, surrounded by what Akbar describes as ‘doubt, the divine, and the wide, mysterious gulfs in between’, yes, a silence opens. 

Dan Disney’s latest books include New Directions in Contemporary Australian Poetry (co-edited with Matthew Hall; Palgrave) and accelerations & inertias (Vagabond Press), which was shortlisted for the Judith Wright Calanthe Award and received the Kenneth Slessor Prize. His individual poems have won numerous prizes, including, most recently, the 2023 Peter Porter Poetry Prize. Disney teaches in the English Literature Program at Sogang University, in Seoul.

Which poets have influenced you most?

Jordie Albiston (a treasured friend and magnificent experimental formalist); Mary Oliver (for her extraordinary open-hearted courage of expression, viz. ‘[m]y work is loving the world’); John Kinsella (a hero, latterly a friend, who peerlessly calibrates creative and critical production to an exemplary, engaged ethics); Juliana Spahr (for her legitimate ferocities); Jane Hirshfield (for her quietly astonished veracities).

Are poems chiefly inspired or crafted?

For me, it changes according to the project’s methodologies. With each book, I try to shift the processes that catalyse the poems.

The Australian photographer Frank Hurley, who accompanied Antarctic expeditions led by Douglas Mawson and Ernest Shackleton, proved to be an able diarist as well as a skilful and adventurous photographer. While Hurley participated in a number of expeditions – as well as serving as an official war photographer in both world wars – the late and much missed poet Jordie Albiston has drawn on Hurley’s diaries from Mawson’s sledging trip of November 1912 to January 1913 and Shackleton’s Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition of November 1914 to September 1916 for what has become her fourteenth and final poetry collection.

Albiston’s workings in and with the historical archive are evidenced in many of her prior collections, most notably Botany Bay Document (1996), The Hanging of Jean Lee (1998) and – drawing from her own family archives – The Book of Ethel (2013). For the 2017 collection Warlines, Albiston drew on letters written home by Victorian World War I soldiers, describing her use as ‘a kind of literary mosaic’ in which she employed no words of her own. In the posthumously published Frank – Albiston died in March 2022 – the poet has painstakingly, and successfully, pursued a similar project. Deploying no words of her own – aside from an enlightening essay adapted from a speech she gave two years ago describing her process and this project, and reproduced at the end of the book in what might be called a ‘postscript’ – the poems build momentum from clusters of words and phrases hewn entirely from Hurley’s diaries.

The title, Frank, pays homage not only to Hurley but to the frankness of his diary entries. Hurley, an avid diarist, articulated the splendour, difficulty, and practicalities of journeying in some of the most challenging and remote parts of the world. Albiston’s task in surveying the extensive archive of material was undoubtedly considerable, though Hurley himself was a keen observer and no stranger to lyrical turns of phrase. The result we may consider a potent Albiston–Hurley envisioning.

Frank is divided into three sections. The first covers the Mawson expedition, wherein Albiston draws from particular diary entries, retaining dates as poem titles, and assembling words and phrases to construct her mosaic. The result is a dreamlike, stream-of-consciousness accruing of detail that dazzles as it unfolds like ‘sastrugi’, or wave-like ridges of ice and snow, before the reader. This collaging sometimes generates metapoetic comments on form – ‘the sky a-glow with prismatic flushings it will rise on the morrow without punctuation’ – while the poems are set fully justified, evoking the photographic medium.

The third section details the ‘Picture Show Tour’ of December 1919 to January 1920, when Hurley toured Australian cities and towns with what were mostly sell-out presentations of film and photos from the Shackleton expedition. Here, Albiston deftly sews lines (italicised) from the expedition diary into fragments from the tour diary. The heteroglossic result is often wry, with, for example, a description of upturned audience faces juxtaposed with an image of penguins following a ship’s wake. Elsewhere, the audience are ‘an unsympathetic mob about as emotional as a crowd of sea elephants’.

It is the second section of Frank, focusing on the Shackleton expedition, that comprises the bulk of this absorbing collection. Albiston summarises the section perfectly in her postscript: ‘I’ve coded the primary source material according to six principal and recurring motifs; a day, a night, a month, a vista, a note and a snap.’ The poet selects, magpie-like, from various Hurley diary entries for each poem. While a ‘day’, ‘night’, or ‘month’ might be based on certain dates, a ‘note’ could be about dogs, food, or ice (things that, as the diary entries/poems accumulate, often prove interrelated). A ‘vista’ might describe ocean or ice, but could equally address pressure or disintegration in their various manifestations, the superstitions of ‘comrades’ or a poker game; and a ‘snap’ – a term redolent with popular notions of both ‘holiday snap’ and ‘cold snap’ – might be of land, the ‘Boss’ (Shackleton), or plummeting temperatures. Much of this section lends itself to ‘list poems’ that variously capture the beauty, hardship, boredom, sheer slog, and, sometimes, humour in this long and arduous venture. These include highly specific lists of provisions (paraffin, kerosene, blubber, etc.), food, numbers of seals and penguins slaughtered for food, books read, and poker scores – and of sledging dogs (Hurley’s favourite is named Shakespeare), who figure in every aspect of the food chain: as carriers, consumers, and (late in the expedition) as consumables. It is not always pretty, but herein lies the frankness of Frank.

Albiston long held an interest in form. Here she makes occasional use of the pantoum and other modes of repetition to good effect, aided by ready use of alliteration, assonance, and internal rhyme (‘sledging terrifically hot what with snow & Sun glare and us …’). Albiston forgoes traditional lineation; breaks are suggested by extra spacing and dashes. The latter, Dickensonian technique echoes other recent works drawing from the archive – Lisa Gorton’s Mirabilia (2022), for example – that have similarly deployed the dash to construct historical bricolage.

Without wishing to overburden the poet’s words on process, we may reflect on Albiston’s statement in the postscript that this project ‘was my chance to cross over into an expanse of seeming endlessness and silence’. With Hurley’s words set to mesmerising effect in this meticulous ‘curation’ of his diaries, long may Frank, and Jordie Albiston’s entire body of work, resonate. 

Ron Pretty has published eight collections of poetry and five chapbooks over his long career. His latest and perhaps last book, 101 Poems, from Pitt Street Poetry’s Collected Works series, includes pieces from his previous collections, as well as some new work. We start with The Habitat of Balance (1988) and go all the way through to his most recent collection, The Left Hand Mirror (2017), before encountering a selection of new poems.  

Pretty is a thoroughly assured poet. His command of the form is evident on every page, from the formal ‘Suburban Aubade’, a kind of domestic-mundane tableau of his partner and their baby, to the free verse in ‘Blue Movies’, where a mother reassures a passing stranger that the adopted child in the pram is in fact her own, regardless of their skin colour. Pretty seems as comfortable in the formal as he is in the free, but his free verse is especially good. ‘Blue Movies’ is a great example of his prowess. It begins: ‘Child in the pram, your dark face laughing up / at your pale mother, the barking dogs that mark / your slow perambulation down the street.’ We read slowly before coming to a crawl as we pronounce that multi-syllabic ‘per-am-bul-at-ion’. Pretty matches the rhythm of a casual stroll enjoyed by mother and daughter. Although simple, the juxtaposition of ‘dark’ and ‘pale’, the assonance and half-rhyme of ‘laughing’ and ‘barking’ which continues in a chain to ‘barking’ and ‘mark’, result in a coherent and affecting expression of experience that, in its simplicity, is satisfying in good poetry. It shows the confidence of a skilled poet. What is striking here and in many other places in this collection is Pretty’s plain language. Rarely does he lean on obscure references or complex language to create or convey meaning.

In the poem ‘September 1913’, W.B. Yeats lamented the mean condition of his nation. It was not what the heroes had fought and died for – nor, in an idiosyncratically Yeatsian turn of logic, what they fled the country for. ‘Was it for this the wild geese spread / The grey wing upon every tide?’

Sean Connolly adopts the phrase for his account of two and a half centuries of emigration from Ireland. He is also charmingly perverse; his book emphasises that very few tides have actually been involved. Only those to the United States, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and, far less strongly, to Argentina.

Four-fifths of all emigrants went to the United States, and Connolly naturally devotes most of his attention to that country. Not merely, however, because of the numbers: the Irish took longer to be accepted and integrated there than in other destinations. The Irish were among the first national groups to arrive in massed numbers into a settled settler society based largely on mainland British stock. During and after the Great Famine of 1846–49, a million Irish sailed for the United States, most of them poor and unskilled. A generation later, many were no more affluent or skilled. Although they came largely from a rural background, few joined the push to open up the West; they lacked the means to finance the journey or take up land. Instead they stayed in cities, above all New York and Chicago. Connolly doesn’t say so, but it is hard to avoid feeling that the early generations of emigrants, especially the Famine victims, were in a prolonged state of shock. Furthermore, there was substantial hostility to them from nativist Americans. They lacked the support that later generations enjoyed from the Catholic church – the Devotional Revolution in Ireland didn’t occur until the second half of the nineteenth century. The lives of priests and parishioners were not nearly as entwined as they became after Cardinal Cullen’s reforms.

American/Australian poet, David Mason, is also a verse novelist, librettist, and essayist. His latest collection of essays, Incarnation and Metamorphosis: Can literature change us?, is clearly the work of a man who enjoys literature as he finds it rather than as he is told to see it. He is not afraid to declare in his introduction that ‘[s]ome literary works are better than others’. It is the works themselves, rather than the author’s origins or identity, with which he is concerned. In the first half of Incarnation and Metamorphosis, Mason concentrates on the issues that the phrase ‘better than others’ implies. The second half is devoted mainly to a number of writers whose work currently risks being undervalued or misunderstood to their disadvantage.

A good example of the latter actually appears in the first half of the book in the essay, ‘Beloved Immoralist’, on the novelist Joyce Cary (1888–1957), who is much less well known now than he once was. Mason reintroduces us to Cary by way of his late father, Jim Mason, an Iwo Jima veteran, who, though not particularly literary, was devoted to Gulley Jimson, the memorable hero of Cary’s novel, The Horse’s Mouth.

‘Beloved Immoralist’ is the sort of criticism that Mason does very well, managing somehow to run the lives of his own father, and those of Joyce Cary and Gulley Jimson, together in ways that illuminate all three. While not the sort of article that would appear in a scholarly journal, it is a powerful reminder of the role certain key books can play in our lives. A nice evocation of this is Mason’s description of his father’s original copy: ‘One of the few possessions I retain of my life in America is my father’s copy of The Horse’s Mouth. Published in paperback in 1957 by Grosset’s Universal Library, it cost $1.45.’ This kind of particularity is a feature of Mason’s own writing as well of that of the authors he admires throughout the book.

Reading a book about online polarisation is a bit like reading a murder mystery novel where the murderer is revealed on page one. We all know it was social media, on our devices, with the trolls, in the bedroom. What we don’t know is the human cost of our newly fragmented online world: the lives destroyed, the families torn apart, the friends permanently estranged when someone falls down an online rabbit hole.

It is easy to demonise those who fall victim to online trolling, conspiracies or fringe YouTube recommendations. What’s harder is to understand why it happened to them and how to prevent it happening again. In Disconnect: Why we get pushed to extremes online and how to stop it, Jordan Guiao reveals this more personal side of the story. ‘They are members of our community,’ Guiao writes. ‘[They are our] mothers, fathers, grandparents, sons, daughters, sisters, brothers, cousins’ – not just statistics in a government report. They are real people, he insists, whose lives have been upended by the online world and who now risk becoming conspiracy theorists or narcissists, sometimes losing touch with reality.

Guiao brings the perspective of a researcher to the book, with a touch of humility and empathy to boot. His work at the Australia Institute’s Centre for Responsible Technology shines through in every chapter. What surprised me was the writing style. This is a book that is hard to put down, which is surprising, given how much we all already know about the topic from the evening news.

Take his story of Diana, a QAnon believer, and her concerned friend, Stacey: ‘As Stacey got to know Diana, one thing stood out to her as a little odd – Diana loved to share conspiracy theories that she found online.’ Over time, Diana began to share more extreme stories. ‘This pattern of progression is characteristic for many QAnon victims,’ Guiao writes. ‘They begin sharing a little with close friends and family, and gradually this escalates in frequency and bizarreness.’ Stacey kept Diana in her life, but Guiao shares other stories where people have had to cut friends and family out of their lives, unable to handle the outlandish rants, the conspiracy ‘facts’ and the ‘evidence’.

Tracking this pain through recent events, the Covid lockdowns, and the US elections can make this book a confronting read. Guiao speaks to Kylie, who lost her job and became homeless during Covid. The only place she found solace was in an online, anti-lockdown group. Kylie jumped at the opportunity to join the convoy to Canberra, an echo of the Canadian ‘freedom truck’ movement. ‘I literally just packed up the car, took my dog, and just went,’ she says. It is when we are at our most vulnerable, Guiao suggests, a time when we need access to social services, a kind word, or a friend, that we become most vulnerable to online extremism.

Far from bringing us closer together, the internet seems to rely increasingly on our personal insecurities, fears, and weaknesses. What’s more, the messaging from extremists is increasingly tailor-made for a local audience. Conspiracy has turned into its own brand of local news, while real local stations are going out of business. Guiao observes how ‘Hollywood sex-trafficking tunnels morphed into storm-drain sex-trafficking tunnels beneath Melbourne; the list of those detained in the military prison Guantanamo Bay grew to include Victorian premier Dan Andrews, who became a target after strict lockdown rules [and] Australian 8chan users claimed a Sydney couple had been cured of Covid-19 after injecting disinfectant.’

Marshall McLuhan famously wrote: ‘The medium is the message.’ So too on social media, where the combination of disembodied anonymised voices, filter bubbles, rage cycles, and information overload creates the perfect breeding ground for systematically targeting our tired, stressed-out minds for recruitment into bizarre fringe extreme groups.

Nonetheless, Guiao sees hope in regulation, especially in the European Union. With privacy laws and an AI Act on the way, there is a tangible sense that the EU is leading here. Other solutions include making tech products ethical by design. He also proposes killing the hero worship of big tech creators and judging them in the light of day. Finally, he suggests that we need to temper our discussion of technology to ‘reflect and reassess’. This will work only if coupled with speedy regulation.

While it is all well and good to point out the dangers of big tech overseas, Guiao fails to grapple with how far behind the rest of the world Australia really is. Guiao cites great Australian research but fails to mention how many of our think tanks take money directly from Microsoft and Google, companies that fail to pay their fair share of taxes. He likewise fails to mention our unique status as one of the few Western countries without comprehensive privacy laws; one of the many reasons why Tinder, Facebook and other tech giants openly admit to ‘testing first’ in Australia before rolling out their updates overseas.

Grappling with the nature of big tech in Australia requires a much more critical look at our institutions, universities, and government than Guiao proposes. As it stands, he lays out the battleground where such a fight should take place. By showing us personal stories of big tech overreach, Guiao proves that the conspiracy theorists we hear about on the evening news are really just our neighbours, and that it is time for us to mobilise to protect citizens. Our future as a cohesive society depends on us preventing further polarisation. To put it bluntly, we must gain control of the tech platforms, before they gain control of us. 

Martin Hughes is co-owner and Publishing Director at Melbourne-based independent publisher Affirm Press. Martin has previously worked as editor of The Big Issue magazine, as a writer, editor and photographer with Lonely Planet Publications, and in journalism and public relations in Ireland and Britain.

What was your pathway to publishing?

I’ve always been around journalism and publishing.

When I left as editor of The Big Issue magazine, I had an idea for a book combining my experiences, passions, and lack of pragmatism: a DIY job called The Slow Guide to Melbourne, which I wrote, publicised, and sold myself. That book went so well that another publisher proposed co-publishing a Slow Guides series. The series didn’t go so well, but by then I had set up the infrastructure of a publishing company. I worked on this part-time for several years, with some great people, but we didn’t really know what we were doing. In 2013, I teamed up with Keiran Rogers, who knew what he was doing.

Australian rural noir – very much in vogue right now – exhibits Australians’ fascination with landscape, crime, and our complex history. Sean Wilson, who was shortlisted for the Patrick White Playwrights Award in 2016, has encapsulated these elements in his début novel, Gemini Falls. What emerges from the novel is a reflection on our modern society. Themes of rising inequality, power, welfare, sexual entitlement, xenophobia, toxic masculinity, and domestic violence entice readers to consider Australian society’s evolution since the Great Depression – seemingly not as far as one might hope.

Gemini Falls transports the reader back to rural Victoria in the turbulent 1930s. The country is battling the Great Depression and an outbreak of polio when we meet thirteen-year-old Morris Turner, his sister Lottie, and their father, Jude, a Melbourne-based detective. When Jude receives word that a young woman has been murdered in his home town of Gemini, he takes the family to the rural town to solve the case. There, Morris meets his estranged family members – Auntie Beth, Uncle Jimmy, and his cousin Florence, who is a budding detective herself. When Florence introduces Morris to Sam, the son of Gemini’s mayor, the three set out to solve the mystery of the murdered woman. The impact of the Depression is being felt across the country: rural townships are no exception. Makeshift camps have appeared outside town, and suspicion soon turns to its outcasts.

The eminent readability of Gemini Falls plays second string only to Wilson’s characterisation. Morris Turner’s singular point of view of allows the reader to stand unencumbered on the wide brown land of rural Victoria, side by side with the protagonist. The perspective of Morris is occasionally flawed, and the reader must navigate the truth from Morris’s understanding of this reality. Jude is also critical to the narrative, as he challenges the toxic masculinity rife in the township. His composure, judiciousness, and empathy for others contrast with the sometimes violent, sexually rapacious, intolerant men in Gemini. Wilson’s characterisation reveals a great deal about the underlying social issues, though the setting similarly plays a leading role in provoking readers to contemplate these themes.

Gemini has all the hallmarks of a rural township struggling through the Depression. Wilson builds a sense of isolation, alienation, and despair, capturing regional citizens at their finest, and vilest. This feels like a very familiar kind of town, from the steeple of the church to the white town hall, the mysteries hiding in the mining tunnels, and the local waterfall from which the novel takes its name. As the world endures the worst financial collapse in modern history, these rural townships battle to survive. The destitute beg townspeople for any food and money they can spare, while the main source of employment, the mine, stagnates due to the financial calamity. This gives Wilson space to explore these cross-generational themes.

In an article in the Guardian on 24 September 2022, Wilson wrote about his inspiration for Gemini Falls and the links between Depression-era Australia and modern-day Australia. ‘Happy Valley [a shanty town in Sydney in the 1930s] and the other camps of the Depression bear more than a passing resemblance to recent reports of more and more people being forced out of unaffordable houses or unable to secure a rental in the tight markets around Australia.’ While there is no doubt that the housing crisis of the 1930s was incomparably severe – in the Depression people didn’t have access to the kind of social welfare that is available today – the novel brings readers attention to the analogous nature of the times. Wilson poses the questions, what happens to a society when the gap between classes widens? How does our society treat the downtrodden, the homeless, the unemployed? This is where Gemini Falls comes into its own.

While literary comparisons to Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird may seem like hyperbole, there are similarities between the two novels. Each one is set during the Depression, the two protagonists are children, and both have widowed fathers who serve as sages and compassionate voices against injustice. Both novels examine prejudice and bigotry, integrity and fairness, themes that surface during times of profound hardship. In doing so, they expose the deepest undercurrents of humanity and the human condition.

Gemini Falls has some teething issues in prose and plot, but these are minor and largely excusable in a first novel. While a few missteps may exist, this does not detract from the fastidiousness of the novel. Beyond character, setting, and plot, Wilson uses a raft of key literary devices throughout to deliver a profound message.

Wilson’s use of motif is surgical. The novel is littered with references to stargazing, the mythology of the constellations, and of course the town itself: Gemini. As astrologers might tell you, people born in Gemini are likely to display a certain intellectual curiosity. Wilson’s main characters fit this definition, though the more profound message here may be to urge readers to be intellectually curious about the social messages emerging from the novel.

Sean Wilson probes deep into the wounds of Australian history to reveal a hidden truth about our current state of affairs. Through his fusion of historical fiction and crime, one cannot help but reflect on the mirror that Wilson holds up to our society as he poses the question: what has really changed in ninety years?