Prime Minister’s Literary Awards

In the December 2022 issue, some readers may recall, ABR lamented the tardiness of the Prime Minister’s Literary Awards and questioned the representativeness of two of the juries: fiction/poetry and non-fiction/Australian history. In our editorial, we also recalled past interference in the judging process by two former prime ministers (one Labor, one Liberal).

The industry was heartened, earlier this year, by the federal government’s announcement that responsibility for the management of the PMLAs (worth a total of $600,000 in prize money last year) would move from the Office for the Arts to the Australia Council for the Arts (soon to become Creative Australia), as part of Revive, the National Cultural Policy.

Halfway through 2023, Advances put several questions to the organisers, including: when the PMLAs will be opened; if the judges have been appointed; how representative the juries will be; when the shortlists will be announced; and when and where the official ceremony will take place.

As we went to press, we received this statement from the Australia Council: ‘We are working with the Office for the Arts through the transition, including the selection of the judges and timing of the announcements.’

Last year’s PMLAs were announced on 13 December, far too late in the publishing calendar, according to many publishers and booksellers. Let us hope that this year’s prizes – which should be so transformative for the winners and their commercial prospects – will be known well before then.

Backstage

To complement our four existing Q&As (Open Page, Poet of the Month, Critic of the Month, and Publisher of the Month), last month we created Backstage, a monthly column featuring a noted performing artist or someone closely associated with the arts sector. Fittingly, Robyn Archer – legendary performer and ABR’s second Laureate – inaugurated Backstage, with some typically pithy, original comments about seminal performances, favourite songs, artists she would have liked to work with, the best advice she’s ever received, and so forth.

Asked to nominate her favourite theatrical venue in Australia, Archer opted for the Dunstan Theatre at the Adelaide Festival Centre. Archer’s current national tour (An Australian Songbook), which supposedly coincides with her seventy-fifth birthday (though we don’t believe it for a minute), took her to the Dunstan in mid-June. Chris Reid reviewed it for ABR Arts (now online).

This month’s Backstager is Helen Morse, veteran of theatre, film, and television – and a superb reader of poetry, too, as we were reminded during her tribute to Gwen Harwood at the recent Adelaide Writers’ festival.

Morse, who will soon perform in Caryl Churchill’s Escaped Alone for the MTC, has this advice for aspiring artists: ‘Train your voice, body, and mind, but don’t forget to live life! Serve the play – it’s all in the text.’ And her favourite venue? Fortyfivedownstairs, that valiant project in Flinders Lane, Melbourne.

Backstage appears on page 63. If Advances were on the ABC, we’d encourage you to nominate future Backstagers – but actually we’re always open to suggestions.

Reader survey

Apropos of openness, or suggestibility, we’re grateful to everyone who responded to our recent survey. Several hundred people did – thoughtfully, informedly, mostly supportively, sometimes grumpily (what’s a survey without a bit of ‘lively feedback’!).

We’ll repeat the survey in due course, all part of our ongoing refreshment of the magazine that obviously means as much to many readers as it does to everyone at ABR.

We offered two prizes in our promotion. Judith Bishop has won a bundle of tickets to the Spanish Film Festival, courtesy of Palace Films, and Prakash Subedi receives a three-year digital subscription.

Facsimile edition

One response did surprise Advances. Asked to nominate their preferred format of ABR, almost ten per cent of respondents named the facsimile edition (the digital reproduction of the print edition that we produce each month). We had no idea so many people were using it regularly. ABR started to publish this format in 2020 because of the long postal delays caused by Covid-19. Now, it seems, many readers are turning to this add-on digital version, which offers a facsimile of the entire issue – ads and all!

A reminder to all our subscribers (print or digital): you can access the facsimile edition via our website.

Encouraged by the response, we will now set about creating facsimiles of all past issues of ABR, to complement our unique digital archive going back to 1978.

Peter Porter Poetry Prize

Where have the years gone? It’s been thirteen years since Peter Porter, one Australia’s greatest poets, died, and nineteen since ABR first offered the poetry prize that now – abundantly alliteratively – bears his name. Open to all poets writing in English around the world since 2014, the Porter Prize has become one of the world’s leading awards for a new poem. Past winners include Judith Bishop and Anthony Lawrence (twice each), Judith Beveridge, Stephen Edgar, and Sara M. Saleh.

The twentieth Porter Prize will open on 3 July, with a closing date of 9 October. Again, we welcome poems of all shapes and styles. The prize money totals $10,000, with a first prize of $6,000, to be chosen by our three judges, distinguished poets all: Lachlan Brown (shortlisted in 2020), Dan Disney (winner in 2023), and Felicity Plunkett. Full details appear on our website.

We remain truly grateful to the prize’s principal patron, Morag Fraser, and also to Andrew Taylor.

Brent Lukey

Amy Baillieu – Deputy Editor of ABR – has done some fine covers this year, but this month’s one is choice, greatly helped by a characteristically stylish and atmospheric photograph from Melbourne artist Brent Lukey, a finalist in the 2023 Olive Cotton Award. Brent is actually a neighbour of ours at the Boyd Community Hub, through Creative Spaces, our mutual landlord. It’s great to have him on our cover.

The finalists’ works in the Olive Cotton Award will be on display at the Tweed Regional Gallery (NSW) from 14 July to 24 September. Brent’s entry is a luminous new portrait of Marcia Langton. 

Correction: An earlier version of Advances incorrectly listed Maria Takolander as the third Peter Porter Poetry Prize judge instead of Felicity Plunkett. Maria was one of the judges of the 2023 ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize. 

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..

Fickle testimony

Dear Editor,

I was surprised that neither Kate Lilley, in her warm tribute to the late John Tranter (ABR, June 2023), like Philip Mead in his detailed Sydney Morning Herald obituary (8 May), mentioned the ‘poetry wars’ between Tranter and Les Murray in the 1970s, which were so bitter that, at the last moment, Murray even withdrew from an Academics and Writers conference (at the University of New South Wales) because Tranter was scheduled to speak on the following day.

When I wrote to them a few years ago asking about the true basis of that ‘war’, both poets flatly denied all recollection of any such thing. Testimony, plainly, is fickle and fallible.

John Carmody

Barry Humphries in full flight

Dear Editor,

I am grateful to Peter Tregear for his tribute to Barry Humphries (ABR, June 2023).

I first saw Humphries in Adelaide in 1960, when Edna Everage was a much gentler character. My favourite was and remains Sandy Stone, who was so laid-back in his chair and slippers that I didn’t think he would get up again.

The last time I saw Humphries was at Australia House in 2019 at a University Alumni event. It was rumoured that Humphries would attend, but there was no sign of him until the vice-chancellor was halfway through his speech. The double doors of the room were suddenly flung open and there was Humphries, in hat, coat, and scarf. He pushed his way through the standing crowd and positioned himself halfway between the audience and the vice-chancellor. Unannounced, he interrupted the vice-chancellor and broke into a speech as Barry Humphries that had us all in stitches for thirty minutes. As he spoke, he patrolled the front row of people, who feared they might be picked on by Edna. Humphries exhausted himself and stopped. He had a quick word with the vice-chancellor, spoke calmly to a few members of the audience, and left through the same double doors that hadn’t closed.

I will miss him.

Dennis Muirhead (online comment)

Beyond the lane

Dear Editor,

Oxford is a favoured setting for novels exploring tensions between town and gown (from Jill Paton Walsh’s renovations of Dorothy Sayers’s texts to R.F. Kuang’s more recent dismantling of power in Babel), but Pip Williams’s depiction of The Bookbinder of Jericho (reviewed by Jane Sullivan in the May issue) embraces issues of language and loyalty that troubled an ancient walled city, and not simply a district in a university town, in a country fractured by class, education, repressed aspiration, and diminished opportunity.

At its heart is a love story that celebrates a gift of creation in one man’s restoration of women’s words arbitrarily censored. The bookbinder who sorts, repairs, and steals fragments of revered texts in order to read the byways of a world beyond the ‘lane’ that is Oxford, is an agent registering change at a place and time of world crisis, where words have irremediably tipped order into chaos. Beyond the grand rhetoric, where the limbs of compatriots and enemy are being amputated or the horrors of witness transcend speech, mute silence shouts. Williams’s text is metaphoric, an evocatively nuanced investigation of the power, eloquence, saving grace, and inadequacy of the languages of the world’s words. But Williams implies that the narrow boat, with its remnant but resilient human cargo fighting to stay afloat, offers a potential for recovery in the face of change.

For its kindness and acuity, this generous book will undoubtedly be rightly treasured.

Lyn Jacobs

On 27 May 1967, a proposal to change two clauses of the Australian Constitution won the approval of 90.77 per cent of those who voted, the highest ever achieved in an Australian referendum. In the forthcoming referendum, according to various opinion polls, the best the advocates for a ‘yes’ vote can hope to achieve is a bare majority. How can this difference be explained? Several factors appear to be at work. They range from the simple, which are acknowledged, to the complex, which don’t seem to be known.

In 1967 the Aboriginal question in the referendum enjoyed bipartisan support or at least no major political party recommended the punters vote ‘no’. No official ‘no’ case was presented. Few Australians expressed misgivings about the ‘yes’ case in the media. No one campaigned against it. The forthcoming referendum does not have bipartisan support. There will be an official ‘no’ case. And many non-Indigenous and some Indigenous people have already expressed opposition to the proposal.

In 1968, Rupert Murdoch was one step from acquiring his first international media holding, in the British tabloid The News of the World. That Murdoch was so close was a personal coup, given that his press ownership had begun sixteen years earlier with a much-diminished inheritance, largely based in Adelaide. To pull off the News of the World acquisition, however, Murdoch needed government approval to transfer $10 million Australian offshore. Speed, secrecy, and surety were pivotal, and in search of all three Murdoch went to John McEwen, the deputy prime minister and leader of the Country Party. The two had an enduring bond: McEwen had helped Murdoch buy his grazing station and family bolthole, Cavan, and when McEwen was appointed acting prime minister after the death of Harold Holt in 1967, Murdoch had argued in The Australian that McEwen should be prime minister in his own right. Now, in 1968, McEwen took Murdoch to the prime minister, John Gorton, who was also familiar with the young press baron. Gorton had briefly been lined up to work for Murdoch’s father in the 1930s and owed something of his present job now to the influence Murdoch had wielded when it became clear that McEwen could not remain prime minister.

McEwen and Gorton brought the matter to Cabinet a few days later. Treasurer Billy McMahon raised objections. An unequivocal departmental brief was McMahon’s main prompt, but another was his close relationship with Murdoch’s rival Sir Frank Packer, who had once promised to send Murdoch back to South Australia ‘with his fookin’ tail between his fookin’ legs’. Not this time. Murdoch’s path, with Gorton and McEwen behind him, was cleared. Politely ignoring a comment from Paul Hasluck that Murdoch was a ‘brigand’, Cabinet approved the transfer and Murdoch duly took his money offshore and got The News of the World – and then the world.

Justice Anthony Besanko’s dismissal of Ben Roberts-Smith’s defamation proceedings against a trio of mastheads – The Age, The Canberra Times, and The Sydney Morning Herald, at the time all owned by Fairfax – was a comprehensive victory for those newspapers. It was a vindication of their serious investigative journalism on matters of high public interest. And it was a devastating blow to the reputation of Roberts-Smith.

The stakes in this litigation were high. On one side was a highly decorated soldier, a Victoria Cross recipient – a person of high reputation in a country where the Anzac tradition is memorialised and valorised. On the other side was an exercise of the freedom of the press, to expose real or alleged crimes and abuses of power. At the centre of the dispute were allegations made against Roberts-Smith in a series of newspaper articles from June 2018 of the utmost seriousness. He was accused of murder, war crimes, bullying, and domestic violence. In response to the publications, Roberts-Smith elected to sue the newspapers and their journalists.

The articles themselves and the subsequent defamation trial may form the beginning of a reckoning with the truth of what happened during Australia’s involvement in the war in Afghanistan. Extremely serious findings were made in the Brereton Report (2020), but no criminal charges have yet been laid in response to them. The findings against Roberts-Smith may increase the political pressure for charges to be laid against him or others in relation to their conduct in Afghanistan. In the meantime, his defamation trial served, in significant respects, as a de facto war crimes trial. This was obviously undesirable but was an inevitable consequence of Roberts-Smith suing upon those allegations.

Katja Hoyer, born in East Germany, was four years old when, on the eve of the state’s collapse in 1989, her parents took her to the Berlin Television Tower and she gazed spellbound from its rotating visitors’ platform at the protesters and police cars gathering in the square below. In this book, Hoyer sets out to show an East Germany that amounted to more than just the Berlin Wall and the Stasi. That now-vanished, would-be-socialist world is presented critically, but also with empathy and the undertone of affection you may feel for something that mattered to people you love.

I started Beyond the Wall with high expectations that were at first somewhat dashed. Yes, East Germany had good child care, support for the advancement of women, cars for the people (Trabants, affectionately called ‘Trabi’), regular paid holidays at resorts for workers, a fair amount of comradeship, and even some rock musicians, as well as offering much more opportunity for upward mobility than most countries in the West. Yes, it had deutsche Qualitätsarbeit, that is, a level of workmanship and technical finish that was the envy of the socialist world. And yes, this all coexisted with boring sanctimonious leaders (first, Walter Ulbricht, then Erick Honecker) who seemed either old before their time or just old; the country was kept under surveillance by the secret police, whose reach and size (proportionate to population) were without parallel; and a Wall had to be built to keep the population in. But, while some of this might be a shock to those who know East Germany only via Anna Funder’s Stasiland, it isn’t too much of a surprise to anyone with any acquaintance with the GDR before 1989.

Wifedom is both an immovable and an irresistible book, an object and a force. Anna Funder, the author some years back of the bestselling Stasiland (2003), has written another great and important narrative of oppression and covert suppression, in this case of the first Mrs George Orwell, Eileen O’Shaughnessy (1905–45). The oppression and suppression are or were the work of her liberal and emancipatory husband – the nearest thing we have these days to a lay saint – and of his six (male) biographers. While nowhere a nasty book (what the Americans would call ‘mean’), it’s a kind of St George and the six dwarves. What’s strange is the persistence of the old bromides. In a recent Guardian review of D.J. Taylor’s Orwell: The new life (2023) – the biographer’s second go-around – Blake Morrison refers to ‘the practical Orwell’ and ‘the complaisant Eileen’. He wouldn’t have said either thing if he’d been able to read Funder’s new book.

As the title would suggest, Wifedom amplifies effortlessly into the question of what it is that allows clever men, productive men, brilliant men, impractical men, to produce work, if not their invisible, misunderstood, neglected, and then effaced wives. To men, whether husbands or sons, brothers or lovers, old men or New Man, it will be more or less painful reading. To women, it will, I dare say, be shockingly familiar. When I read it – short sentences, plain language, and slashing conclusions – I was reminded that Anna Funder once trained as a lawyer. It has the lawyerly virtues: urgency, mobility, tenacity, consequence.

In an exuberant essay anticipating the publication of Eleven Letters to You, the critic and editor Helen Elliott describes the deep pleasure of working on the book: ‘The satisfaction of writing this book, of making it as good as I can has been unlike anything I’ve ever known. A necessary joy, the deepest new, an entirely selfish pleasure. A small and ravishing bomb inside me’ (The Monthly, May 2023). After this introduction, it was a relief to read the book and find that it doesn’t disappoint. The exuberance of the writing process filters through to the finished pages, populated with ostensibly ‘ordinary people’ – Elliott’s highly provisional term – who have made a deep impression on the writer.

Eleven Letters to You is, as the title suggests, a collection of letters written to the people who guided Elliott away from the life that she might have led: a life without higher education, with a job in the Postmaster General’s office at a lower rate of pay than male employees, a dull boyfriend, and limiting ideas about national identity and about women. Elliott reflects on their gift, and now readers may hold her small and ravishing book in their hands.

In 22 May 2023, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Papua New Guinea (PNG) Defence Minister Win Bakri Daki signed a defence and maritime cooperation agreement in Port Moresby. Blinken stepped in after US President Joe Biden’s last-minute cancellation. Had he attended, it would reportedly have been the first time a US president had visited a Pacific Island country other than US territories such as Hawaii and Guam. This is on the back of having pledged an additional US$800 million at a US-Pacific Summit in late 2022 to help tackle climate change, overfishing, and maritime security.

The increased presence of the United States in the Pacific is a consequence of its escalating geopolitical competition with China. The recent deal with PNG follows the security agreement China signed with Solomon Islands, with China then attempting to replicate it with other Pacific states, in early 2022. But it also reflects the extent to which Washington has lost faith in Canberra, to whom it has long delegated the management of regional affairs. Australia may be a key member of AUKUS, but its status as the most influential state in the Pacific, which for much of the post-World War II period has been on the periphery of global affairs, has been lost, likely for the foreseeable future, despite its allocation of more than a billion dollars annually in foreign aid.

The explanations for this perceived failure have varied, ranging from criticism of the preponderance of dovish views of China’s rise and a neglected defence and foreign aid budget, through to Australia’s reluctance to accept the science of climate change and its ineffectual public diplomacy. This debate was central to the 2022 federal election campaign, the first in recent memory where the Pacific featured prominently. It likely won’t be the last.

As I write this review, Stan Grant’s name is everywhere as the media and the public absorb his decision to step aside from compèring ABC Television’s Q&A after citing the cumulative wear and tear on him and his family of weeks of online racist abuse. Yet such is the pace of the twenty-four-hour news cycle that by the time this review appears, another episode in the seemingly never-ending racist diatribe against Australian First Nations peoples will have moved Grant off the front pages. The ‘trolls of the Twitter sewer’, as Grant calls them, will have found another target for their hatred and aggression.

Most First Nations people have long experience of the kind of cheap and nasty racism they espouse: muttered insults in the street; insults hurled from passing cars. The common or garden racists are part of the scenery of modern Australia and generally attract disdain rather than fear. Yet the possibility that empty threats might lead to deadly violence – witness the brutal and callous murders of Warren Braedon/Louis Johnson in 1992, and of Cassius Turvey in 2022, both teenagers from Perth – is a reminder that the streets of our cities and country towns are not safe places if you are young and black. Too many First Nations people have experienced overt racist violence to ignore its presence in White Australia.

BREAKING – Australian Border Force has intercepted an illegal boat trying to reach Australia. Keep our borders secure by voting Liberal today.

On election day in 2022, thousands of Australian voters – perhaps already in line at their local primary school, democracy sausage in hand – received this text message. Refugees had not been a hot-button issue in this election, and the messages were generally seen as an unsuccessful last-ditch effort by a Coalition government already on the ropes. But the new Albanese Labor government was quick to confirm, just a day after being sworn in, that it had turned the boat back without hesitation. A public warning was issued to people smugglers that Australia’s border policy remained iron-clad and inflexible. Such statements are usually for the benefit of the Australian public, rather than an imagined audience of people smugglers.

But why did a Labor government so recently handed a mandate for political change feel the need to demonstrate its tough border security stance immediately? In part, it stems from the Australian Labor Party’s long history of unease about immigration. The ALP was at first one of the White Australia policy’s staunchest defenders and became, eventually, the party to declare it dead and buried, in 1973. But even where Labor leaders made radical, progressive changes to immigration policy, there were deep undercurrents of equivocation and ambivalence. The ALP struggles, still, to tell a coherent story about itself when it comes to immigration – particularly about its history with refugees and asylum seekers.

Australia’s first foray into the mass migration of people from outside Britain and Ireland came with a Labor government. Following World War II, thousands of central and eastern European refugees migrated to Australia and were followed by large numbers of southern Europeans in the 1950s. Arthur Calwell, Australia’s first immigration minister (1945–49) and architect of this postwar migration scheme, was a late convert to any kind of mass assisted migration. He was the image of a traditional Labor man: connected strongly with the trade unions, and concerned that facilitating the arrival of people who could not afford emigration would put downward pressure on wages and increase poverty in Australia. Robert Menzies himself later wrote that he thought only someone ‘known as a life-time Labour man of the strictest orthodoxy’, like Calwell, could have pulled off this radical change to Australia’s immigration policy. Australians needed to be pulled along by a leader who had himself changed his mind – at least about European migrants.

Karl Marx was coy about what lay on the other side of capitalism. Communism, in his phrase, amounted to ‘the real movement which abolishes the present state of things’. As a guide to the organisation of society, the pugnacious phrase left something to be desired – literally. Though he appreciated capitalism as an essential stage in the progress of humanity, Marx nevertheless treated its supersession as both a historical necessity and a moral desideratum. The very status of the person as a person is at stake. Under capitalism, we are damaged and incomplete, alienated from our labour and deprived of the means to realise our true potential.

Where Marx approached capitalism through a philosophy of history, Michael Sonenscher prefers the techniques of intellectual history. Among the lessons learned from Sonenscher’s dense and provocative ‘story behind the word’ is the fact that Marx never used it. The object of his mature analysis was capital, not capitalism. Used in French debates in the 1830s, the word ‘capitalism’ would acquire a more general resonance with Max Weber in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. But the force of Weber’s usage nevertheless depended on Marx’s example. What, then, were the bases of Marx’s thinking?

Islands, as recent histories of immigration detention and quarantine show, offer unique things to human societies. Rimmed by a watery bulwark, they have more surveyable borders than do mainlands. Their status as sublands suggest that they exist outside the conventions and temporal dimensions of larger, mainland societies. What happens on an island stays on an island; at least, island prison warders and sojourners imagined this to be the case.

In this history of Wadjemup (Rottnest Island), one of more than 3,500 islands off the coast of Western Australia, nineteen kilometres from Perth, Ann Curthoys, Shino Konishi, and Alexandra Ludewig ask us to consider islands as a kind of tabula rasa, the site of mainlander ‘projections and metaphors’ or, as Robert Aldrich and Miranda Johnson have chillingly put it, ‘laboratories’. This book sits within the growing area of Island Studies, an adjunct to the cross-disciplinary Ocean Studies.

Imperial powers have long recognised the strategic benefit of islands. The authors note that ‘islands were the first overseas places to be colonised by Europeans’. The European colonisation of Africa is usually held to have begun with the Castilians in the Canary Islands from 1402. Britain’s occupation of islands from the seventeenth century – across the Atlantic oceans, within the Caribbean Sea, and along the east coast of Australia – is instructive context for how Western Australia’s first governor, James Stirling, himself the beneficiary of island exploitation, approached Wadjemup in the 1830s. These adventures might be summed up by one word – utilitarian – but others are also important: ruthless, profit-seeking, transitory.

The aphorist Georg Christoph Lichtenberg likened reviews to ‘a kind of childhood illness to which newborn books are subject to a greater or lesser degree’, like measles or mumps, which kill a few but leave the rest only mildly marked. But how should we consider reviews of books that come late in an author’s career? In instances such as these, the reviewer is tempted to avoid any chance of career-ending pneumonia, applying a nurse’s gentling touch to the text. Often the result is career summation, a soft peddle at indications of decline.

The Pole is a collection of short fiction (or rather, one novella large enough to draw a number of narrative asteroids into its gravitational field) which refutes the assumptions of that palliative approach. At the age of eighty-three, Coetzee has produced a book in which the waning of the writer’s powers is masterfully anticipated: incorporated, even, into the structure and concerns of the stories it contains. It is a collection, moreover, whose intensities are only sharpened by the proximity of death. Coetzee’s gaze, in a manner that only Tolstoy and a few other writers might realise, is unblinkingly directed here towards last things.

The Pole takes the author’s perennial concerns (particularly those dealing with our treatment of animals – four stories relate to Elizabeth Costello) and reworks them in minimalist form. Alberto Giacometti’s sculptural output during World War II was apparently so winnowed by circumstance and aesthetic design that it fitted into a matchbox. The Pole and Other Stories does something similar for Coetzee’s long career. 

'A fifteen-year-old African genius poet altar boy who loves blondes is not a criminal, not a racist, not a sell-out.’ Perhaps not unlike other fifteen-year-old males, he is prone to bouts of solipsism and radical empathy, as absorbed by superhero fantasies of escape (and retribution) as he is by the semiotics of text messaging and sneakers. He is as unique as the next genius-poet altar boy – but also as generic, an utterly predictable mix of reticence and masturbatory self-aggrandisement. This is the wager of Stephen Buoro’s engaging début, and what renders its narrator-protagonist, Andy Aziza (a genius-poet altar boy who is also, it turns out, a genius mathematician), so memorable.

The novel opens with adolescent swagger. The scene is Kontagora in northern Nigeria, where Andy and his mother, Gloria – silent about his father’s identity – are members of the Christian minority. Gloria hails from Ososo, in Nigeria’s south, a town Andy has never visited, though he and his friends will make the journey by the end of the novel. These friends – ‘the Scadvengers’ – are Morocca, would-be rapper, and Slim, gay aspirant artist. There is also Fatima, a bright Hausa-Fulani classmate escaping a brutalising father in the home of their teacher Zahrah, who nourishes and exasperates in equal measure. Then there is the local British priest’s visiting platinum-blonde niece, Eileen, for whom our genius-poet altar boy falls madly in lust. While making their way to Eileen’s welcoming party, Andy recalls the friends’ youthful intoxication with superhero fantasies:

Centuries before the Kremlin had a digital presence and long before Ivermectin was trending on Twitter, an early form of disinformation campaigning emerged in medieval Europe: blood libel. These anti-Semitic accusations claimed that Christian children were being killed as part of Jewish religious ritual, a lie used to justify violence against Jewish communities.

A notable historical instance of blood libel – and the one at the centre of Robyn Cadwallader’s The Fire and the Rose – is the story of Little Saint Hugh of Lincoln. This boy’s death in 1255 was falsely blamed on Lincoln’s Jewish population, to the benefit of both Church and Crown during the reign of Henry III.

In her ten-page Author’s Note and Acknowledgements, Cadwallader shows a well-considered approach and rigorous method in researching and writing this book: ‘As is the practice of historical fiction writers, I have researched deeply then imagined characters and events into the gaps.’ She sets out the fact from the fabled, noting, ‘This is what fires the creative imagination of historical fiction – the gaps, the elisions, the veiling.’

Melbourne author Aisling Smith’s début begins with a question that snakes the whole way through her novel: ‘What has happened to Benjamin?’

The asker, at first, is his wife, Malti Fortune. It is 1987 and her husband, once doting and attentive, is now distant. Gone are their dreamy days bonding over their love of words (she’s a lawyer, he’s a linguist). Benjamin now frequently works late and is vacant when he does finally come home. They have just bought a house and are trying for children, but Malti can’t help but notice that this man, once so dear, feels more and more like a stranger. There are flashes of the old Benjamin and the comfort they once shared, but he is erratic and unreliable, despite his reassurances. All the while, Malti’s homeland of Fiji is experiencing political unrest, exacerbating her sense of dislocation and loneliness.

In two later timelines – 2000 and 2006 – the couple’s daughters, Ellery and Verona, are asking the question, or another version of it: who is Benjamin? Ellery, older by one year, is increasingly conscious of the disconnect between her father’s words and actions; Verona adores him, patiently awaiting his next visit. He has a revolving door of girlfriends and a troubling relationship with alcohol, but he’s the fun dad, isn’t he? The girls’ dichotomous relationships with their slippery, unpredictable father drive a wedge into their sibling bond.

Where I Slept opens with an ending. The nameless narrator, a twenty-something woman, is leaving her rural hometown and the boarding house where she lived, for new adventures in the big smoke – but not before daubing ‘sentimentality is the enemy of truth’ on the front gate of her soon-to-be former university. That proverb proves prophetic as the narrator establishes a new life in Melbourne’s inner city. This is the 1990s, just before gentrification had gained ascendance, when the area still had a ‘bohemian’ feel. The narrator drifts through sharehouses where rent goes unpaid and housemates are replaced frequently. She frequents seedy bars where strangers shout her drinks, and exhibitions where free booze flows.

Throughout, the narrator aspires to become an artist, despite being assured by at least one (un)kind soul that she is nothing of the sort. She learns the saxophone and establishes a career as a busker and band member – her only real paid employment in the book’s 324 pages. When somebody cautions that ‘poetry will break your heart’, our heroine notes that ‘maybe it’s the only thing that won’t’. And yes, the narrator continues to pen cryptic messages on public spaces. These include ‘Where I slept’, which is scrawled during a period of homelessness. Such postings provide avenues for creative expression and enable the young woman to make her mark (literally and symbolically) on an urban environment that is at once exhilarating and alienating.

Where I Slept is Libby Angel’s second novel. She does a brilliant job of bringing to life her protagonist’s squalid surrounds. For example: ‘Bodies lie on mattresses with vomit buckets and soft-drink bottles full of urine by their sides. Fat blowflies circle tardily beneath the crumbling ceiling roses.’ Such passages might suggest moralising melodrama or poverty porn; happily, Angel eschews both.

André Dao’s début novel, Anam, deals in the inconsistencies of memory and perception. It is narrated by a writer, a lawyer, an immigrant, a student, a partner, a son, a parent, a grandparent, and many ghosts, yet the motor of the story is Dao’s grandfather, who was sentenced, without charge or trial, to ten years’ imprisonment as a political detainee in the infamous Chi Hoa prison in Vietnam.

Incarcerated by the communist regime for being a Catholic intellectual, the grandfather converses with ghosts inside the prison. They speak of working in hordes, from sunrise to sundown, singing songs as they tap trees for rubber. ‘The sour ghost’s singing voice was not a strong one, but still, my grandfather said, I could imagine them among those trees, a choir of the living dead.’ The ghosts and spectres that populate Anam are as tangible as any living character appearing throughout. Unearthing their marks, the narrator’s tides of memory become a surge of contradictory forces and apparitions, becoming a chain of portraits of various psyches. Simultaneously, the grandfather’s quarters in 6, Section FG, Chi Hoa – likened to both the panopticon as well as the I Ching – also becomes a cell within the larger narrative, which in turn becomes a memory, and this memory becomes a sensory organ of its own, creating what it perceives.

Literary study tends to be characterised by bipolar episodes, swinging between enjoyment and judgement. There is reading for pleasure and learning to be critical, or making up your mind about how good, bad, or indifferent a literary work is. This way of thinking about literature still pervades all levels of the cultural and social scenes where readers talk to one another. We discuss with our friends or communities whether we like a work of literature or not, but when things get formal or seminar-serious the conversation shifts to whether we think that work is any good – a different thing. The Saturday review pages wobble between these two modes, between chat about whether readers will like a book or film, and whether it’s any good or not. Some texts that have become good over time, canonical in other words, we might not like. ‘Like’, here, of course, is a very fuzzy notion, although you would have to be delusional to think a book is automatically good because you like it. And liking certain texts, Ern Malley’s poetry or Stephenie Meyer’s fiction for example, might be evidence, in some people’s view, of a lack of taste, or bad judgement. But as we say, there’s no accounting for that.

The trouble with this whole mode of reading is that it has never focused on what actually happens as and when we read a text, individually or collectively. It is always defined by the end point of reading, the fact of having read a work, the impression of its overall meaning or value, rather than the infinitely complex process of reading it. That is why this book of Thomas Ford and Justin Clemens is both an exciting and useful intervention in our ideas of reading generally and, as it happens, for how we understand the colonisation of Australia. It tells the story of the role of literary language in white Australia’s foundation. In that sense, it’s a new kind of history. Its focus is on the poetry and other writings of Barron Field (1786–1846), the judge of the Supreme Court of Civil Judicature in New South Wales from 1817 to 1828, the highest legal authority in the early colony, and who, as the authors recognise, wrote and published embarrassingly bad poetry. This has always been annoying for those looking for a serious foundation for Australian literature. Some of the earliest literary products of the Australian colony, Field’s First Fruits of Australian Poetry (1819), the first published book of Australian poetry, and Michael Massey Robinson’s annual Governor Macquarie-sponsored odes, are both poor foundational candidates for a national literature.

We’ve all seen the video. The black and white images are washed out, almost solarised, by the heat and glare of a Baghdad morning in 2007. As the men walk and mingle on the street, we can make out the length of their hair, pick out the skinny from the stocky, and identify what they are wearing, loose trousers, casual shirts – one with distinctive broad stripes. Mercifully, we cannot discern their individual features. All the while, the Apache helicopter hovers, unseen and unheard, its cameras trained on the men below. The crew exchange terse messages with US troops in the area and their commanders back at the flight line. Having identified weapons that the men carry and confirmed that they are not coalition forces, the crew request and receive permission to engage, manoeuvring the gunship to get a clearer shot.

Suddenly, shockingly, the ground around the men erupts as the Apache deploys its 30mm Cannon Chain Gun. This weapon is not a ‘gun’ like a rifle, shotgun, or other small arm, but ‘a combat-vehicle mounted war cannon engineered to take out enemy vehicles, convoys or troop concentrations’. It fires 300 rounds per minute. You can imagine, but probably shouldn’t, what it does to a human body. Most of the men fall where they are hit, some manage a few paces before they are cut down. Through the cloud of dust and debris that has been thrown up by the hail of fire, those still twitching or crawling are shot again. When a minivan driver taking his two children to school stops to help the wounded, his vehicle is riddled with fire, the driver is killed, and the children injured. Besides the driver of the van, Saleh Matasher Tomal, two more of the victims are civilians, both employees of Reuters, one a twenty-two-year-old photographer, Namir Noor-Eldeen, the other a driver and fixer, Saeed Chmagh, a forty-year-old father of four. The Apache crew had mistakenly identified the telephoto lens on Namir’s camera as an RPG – a rocket propelled grenade launcher.

It would be interesting to know how many Australians have heard of the Regional Assistance Mission to Solomon Islands (RAMSI). My guess is that not many have, and then only vaguely. It is interesting, then, that Melbourne University Publishing has published a book about the mission. Written by political scientist Michael Wesley, Helpem Fren is a detailed and meticulously researched account of the intervention, from an Australian perspective.

Apart from some notable exceptions, publishers often ignore scholarship by those of us who conduct research in the Pacific. That Melbourne University Publishing is playing in this market suggests either that they think Wesley is a drawcard or that there is renewed interest in Australia’s role in the region. Wesley, a leading scholar on Australian foreign policy, has the relevant credentials having served as former assistant director-general of the Office of National Assessments.

Sharon Olds, author of twelve poetry collections including the Pulitzer Prize-winning Stag’s Leap, has said that when she wrote about motherhood forty years ago, she was advised by editors (‘very snooty, very put-me-down’) to try Ladies Home Journal. For Olds, now celebrated as a bold poet of the body, there is some Schadenfreude in the anecdote, like Bob Dylan’s in ‘Talkin’ New York’ as he recounts his arrival in New York, ‘blowin’ my lungs out for a dollar a day’, only to be told ‘You sound like a hillbilly / We want folksingers here.’

Decades before Olds’s experience, around the time of Dylan’s, part of the ambivalence about Sylvia Plath’s poems was her writing about miscarriage and motherhood. When she placed things like the ‘stink of fat and baby crap’ and a woman stumbling ‘cow-heavy’ from bed to cot alongside rapture (‘O love, how did you get here?’), each was risky. Meanwhile in Australia, Gwen Harwood found that adopting one of her male noms de plume made poems about motherhood and the domestic publishable, where (the same) poems by Mrs Harwood from Hobart were not.

A generation on, a defiant shift co-exists with continuing caution about writing (in poetry and beyond) about the dreadful spectre of the domestic, or worse, a woman’s body not transformed by blazonry and objectification. The anthology What We Carry (2020), which included more than thirty poets’ work about birth, pregnancy loss, and infertility, exemplifies that defiance, as do Tracy K. Smith’s blazing and unabashed motherhood poems. 

There are striking parallels between I Have Decided to Remain Vertical by Gayelene Carbis and The Drama Student by Autumn Royal. Both are new collections from experienced Melbourne poets; both think through women’s places in social and material contexts; both display an intense interest in material things and material places; both engage with works of art beyond their own pages.

I Have Decided to Remain Vertical continues the meditations and reactions to social life that were the focus of Carbis’s Anecdotal Evidence (2017). Carbis writes frequently of women in, or recently out of, relationships. More often than not, there is a quiet devastation moving through the speaker’s body. Even in company, ‘Afterwards / I feel bereft. / Trails / on my skin,’ as Carbis writes in ‘Snake’.

In terms of relationship as a theme, I Have Decided to Remain Vertical is beautifully paced as a collection; it rewards reading from start to finish. The poems disclose information slowly, and phases of the speaker’s life develop over a number of episodes. Time with an Egyptian partner dominates the beginning of the second section, and the relationship is fraught at every turn. Early on, ‘Not Marrying the Egyptian’ begins with this man under pressure from his family: ‘“Why won’t you marry her?” his mother says. “Why won’t you marry her?” echoes his brother.’ It ends with ‘“You’re not really with me.” “I’m still / here, aren’t I?” he says.’ ‘The Egyptian’ turns up repeatedly, the reader getting more detail each time, an evolving picture of the speaker’s feelings towards him, and towards herself in relation to him.

The image of a solitary goldfish aimlessly circling in a glass bowl recurs in cartoons and children’s books, a metaphor for a crowded and over-scrutinised life. John Simons’s account of the mid-nineteenth-century aquarium craze reveals the rather horrifying historical reality of this mostly symbolic image. At the height of the craze for aquariums, not only were resilient goldfish kept in bowls, but a wide range of wild-caught marine and estuarine life were dredged from the British coastline and plunged into buckets, bowls, tubs, pots, as well as glass aquariums of various sizes, with precious little consideration given to the complex needs of maintaining aquatic ecosystems in captivity. The death toll, not to mention the smell, must have been horrifying. As Simons points out, the British seaside has never truly recovered from this mass decimation.

At one time or another, many of us have participated in our own version of this craze: sacrificing the lives of small fish in the name of education or entertainment or collecting shells on a beach. Despite being an enthusiastic shell collector in my youth, before reading Simons’s book I had never really placed these semi-scientific activities of childhood in any kind of historical context.

In Peter Wohlleben’s newest book, trees are characters, not commodities. In making his compelling case for a fresh approach to forestry, which values old-growth forests for their climate-cooling capacities, the acclaimed German forester treats trees as individuals with feelings, abilities, memories, and families. We are sometimes left to wonder what it means to say a tree feels emotions such as worry, surprise, and consideration for others, but this unapologetic anthropomorphism nevertheless invites empathy on the part of readers. It is easy to feel an affectionate second-hand embarrassment for the chestnut tree which ‘panicked’ in response to sudden rain by unfurling its blossoms too soon, or indignant on behalf of multi-centenarian beeches threatened by encroaching excavators. Seeing trees as sensate characters also provides a contrast with the unfeeling utilitarianism attributed to mainstream foresters; their industry comes off badly bruised.

By now we are familiar with the idea that trees can help to offset human-caused climate change by absorbing carbon dioxide. Protests against deforestation, especially in the Amazon, are often framed in these terms: we must protect the globe’s ‘green lungs’. Trees’ contribution to managing climate change goes further. Thanks to the process of transpiration, even a single tree outside a suburban house has a cooling effect on those around it. This effect is magnified in large forests, which draw huge volumes of water from the ground and release it to the atmosphere, changing global temperatures and even affecting rainfall on distant continents through the creation of aerial rivers.

She and Her Pretty Friend is a collation of stories about lesbians in Australian history, ranging from the convict women of the ‘flash mob’ in Hobart’s Cascades prison to the lesbian separatists of the 1983 Pine Gap Peace Camp. Along the way, the reader meets a couple who farmed together in the 1840s, another couple who taught swimming and started the first women-only gym in Melbourne in 1879, as well as one of the first women doctors and her lifelong companion, who both served at the Scottish Women’s Hospital in Serbia in 1916. There are other figures, like poet Lesbia Harford and her muse, Katie Lush, or suffragist Cecilia John, who rode on horseback, dressed in suffrage colours, at the head of a march of more than 4,000 women and children (Danielle Scrimshsaw credits her with ‘queering the suffrage movement’). A chapter on Eve Langley and other ‘passing women’ prompts questions about whether they would have seen themselves as transgender, in today’s parlance.

Scrimshaw’s motive for writing this book was ‘because I am a queer woman who craves queer history and researching the past helps me navigate my identity in the present’. So it is ‘both a history and a self-reflection’. The author herself is present, offering anecdotes about her own life, or judgements and speculations about her subjects and their chroniclers. She undertakes a historical rescue operation, building on the work of other historians to make visible some of the many queer women who have been written out of history, or are acknowledged only as ‘spinsters’ or their lifelong relationships as ‘close friendships’.

Nick McKenzie is one of the nation’s most decorated investigative journalists, having been named Australian Journalist of the Year on four occasions and awarded the Walkley a record fourteen times. His investigative reports into Ben Roberts-Smith were central to a defamation trial brought against Fairfax media. Last month the Federal Court found that Nick McKenzie’s account of Roberts-Smith’s criminal actions in Afghanistan was substantially true and that these actions could be said to amount to war crimes. Hachette will release his new book, Crossing the Line, this month.

If you could go anywhere tomorrow, where would it be, and why?

Anywhere but a courtroom!

What’s your idea of hell?

Long airport lines.

What do you consider the most specious virtue?

Good looks.

What’s your favourite film?

La Haine or The Big Lebowski.

And your favourite book?

Catcher in the Rye.

Name the three people with whom you would most like to dine.

Christopher Hitchens, Barack Obama, and Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

Which word do you most dislike, and which one would you like to see back in public usage?

‘Nice’, and ‘Blackguard’.

Who is your favourite author?

Cormac McCarthy.

And your favourite literary hero or heroine?

Atticus Finch.

Name an early literary idol or influence whom you no longer admire – or vice versa.

Tim Winton: I used to struggle with his books in my teens. Now he’s my favourite Australian writer.

Which quality do you most admire in a writer?

Ability to evoke place and character.

Which book influenced you most in your youth?

Lord of the Flies.

Do you have a favourite podcast?

The Daily.

What, if anything, impedes your writing?

The internet.

What qualities do you look for in critics, and which ones do you enjoy reading?

Acerbic honesty. Norman Mailer on Tom Wolfe.

How do you find working with editors?

If they can put up with me, great.

What do you think of writers’ festivals?

Affirmation that people still love books.

Are artists valued in our society?

Not as much as they should be.

What are you working on now?

Crossing the Line – my book about Ben Roberts-Smith. 

Helen Morse’s work with major theatre companies and independent ensembles covers a wide range of classics, contemporary Australian and international plays, recitals, and the odd cabaret. In August she will appear in Caryl Churchill’s play Escaped Alone, for MTC.

What was the first performance that made a deep impression on you?

There were two: The Miracle Worker at the Comedy Theatre Melbourne, 1962, with Bronia Stefan as Annie Sullivan and Suzanne Heywood as Helen Keller – unforgettable – and The Black Theatre of Prague’s The Seven Visions of Mr S (Comedy Theatre, 1964), created by the artistic director Jiri Srnec. One astonishing vision was a clothes line of garments blowing in the wind – a coup de théâtre revealed to be the multi-skilled performers.

When did you realise you wanted to be an artist?

I was a player from an early age. My schoolgirI dreams met the reality of a life in the theatre when I joined a two-week workshop for teenagers run by the UTRC (now MTC) at the Russell Street Theatre. Directors, designers, props makers, and actors showed us how the magic happens.

What’s the most brilliant individual performance you have ever seen?

First, the peerless Jeannie Lewis and band The Cacophonists in Tears of Steel & The Clowning Calaveras – impassioned, political, life-affirming poems and songs, inspired by Pablo Neruda and the Mexican Day Of The Dead and designed by Martin Sharp (Seymour Centre, 1975). Second, Paul English’s complex, heart-breaking portrait of flawed, tormented Willy Loman at the centre of Arthur Miller’s masterpiece, Death Of A Salesman (Hearth Theatre, fortyfivedownstairs, 2022).

Name three performers you would like to work with.

Will Shakespeare’s company at the Globe – to witness their process firsthand! Susheela Raman, an Australian-Indian musician, ever since I saw her concert Ghost Gamelan in 2019. Director Kate Cherry – we have collaborated on three very special productions.

Do you have a favourite song?

Among the many across all genres: ‘Art Thou Troubled’, a poem set to music from Handel’s Rodelinda. The song, which expresses music’s healing power, was my mother’s favourite; ‘It’s Only a Paper Moon’ (lyrics by Billy Rose and E.Y. Harburg, music by Harold Arlen) – Blanche’s song from A Streetcar Named Desire.

Who is your favourite writer – and your favourite composer?

Shakespeare; Anna Akhmatova; Helen Garner, with her remarkable body of work. ‘Bach, Bach, mighty Bach!’, to quote Dylan Thomas.

And your favourite play or opera?

Impossible! I delight in difference. So; the entire European, British, American canon.  Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia. Australian plays include Alma de Groen’s The Rivers of China and Nick Enright’s Good Works. As for opera, La Traviata, The Marriage of Figaro, Richard Meale’s Voss, and Batavia created by Richard Mills and Peter Goldsworthy. Music theatre: Stephen Sondheim’s A Little Night Music.

How do you regard the audience?

With respect and as essential to what is a shared experience; individuals who bring their own energy and understanding of life to meet the play, through the work of the players. This is why I love theatre – it’s alive.

What’s your favourite theatrical venue in Australia?

Fortyfivedownstairs in Flinders Lane, Melbourne, an old rag-trade workshop with high, pressed-metal ceilings and wonderful windows – a lived-in space and a cradle of new work. Also, Theatre Royal Hobart (1834), the oldest working theatre in the country. From the stalls to the gods you feel embraced by its Georgian design.

What do you look for in arts critics?

An understanding that theatre is an organic experience. Prejudice, ego and ‘cancel culture’ tendencies should be left at the door. Remaining open to the life of the play and bearing witness to what is actually happening.

Do you read your own reviews?

I prefer not to, but usually do towards the end of the run. Sometimes friends pass on helpful comments. 

Money aside, what makes being an artist difficult – or special – in Australia?

Fallout from lockdowns. Post-Covid, the wonderful groundswell of young, independent theatre-makers (especially in Melbourne) who are excited by the possibilities of this ancient art form. I’m inspired by the remarkable creative work of First Nations artists in all areas of the performing arts.

What’s the single biggest thing governments could do for artists?

Continue to support and nurture the smaller companies, emerging artists – the storytellers of the future.

What advice would you give an aspiring artist?

Train your voice, body, and mind, but don’t forget to live life! Serve the play – it’s all in the text.

What’s the best advice you have ever received?

Listen. Be true. Don’t be afraid of making a fool of yourself. Courage, mon amie!

What’s your next performance?

Escaped Alone by Caryl Churchill, directed by Anne-Louise Sarks for the MTC. I’m one of a cast of four older women. It’s mind-bending, original, unsettling, and blackly funny – ‘a visionary play about afternoon tea and the apocalypse’.