The Jolley Prize

This year’s ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize attracted 1,200 entries from thirty-eight different countries. The judges – Gregory Day, Jennifer Mills, and Maria Takolander – longlisted eight stories from six of those countries: France, Japan, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, the United States, and Australia. (The full longlist appears on our website.)

Now the judges have shortlisted three stories, and it’s our pleasure to present them in this issue:

‘Black Wax’ by Winter Bel (France)

‘The Mannequin’ by Rowan Heath (Australia)

‘Our Own Fantastic’ by Uzma Aslam Khan (USA)

Here is the judges’ report:

In a field distinguished by an enriching diversity of voices and styles, the stories submitted for the 2023 ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize are testament to the vitality of the short story form. Encompassing the cosmopolitan and rural, the fantastical and the dirty real, the lyrical and colloquial, the comic and the deeply felt, the submissions for the prize collectively show how the short story form functions as a broad church, inspiring faith.

The best short fiction does many things at once. Stylistic cohesion and polish matter, but so do curiosity and substance. There is a worldliness about the longlisted stories, not only because they are global in origin, but because they show a maturity of outlook, an understanding of power structures, social context, choice, and implication. The three shortlisted stories are layered and deeply considered, but importantly, they also have plenty to say.

All great short stories are a marvel to behold, but a finely balanced story that is also a joyful one is a rare feat. ‘Black Wax’ tells the tale of a fledgling record company inspired to promote unstereotypical Black American music. This engaging set-up provides the vehicle for a superbly incisive, witty, and uplifting love story. ‘Black Wax’ is an example of the short story form at its entertaining and artisanal best.

In ‘The Mannequin’, a solitary truck driver, who fossicks for valuables in junkyards, finds a dumped store mannequin outside a roadhouse. The mannequin becomes an ambiguous companion on his journey, provoking troubling memories of his ex-wife and estranged children, reminding him of what has been lost through his intransigence, while simultaneously suggesting the liberating possibility of transformation. A superbly controlled and nuanced story, ‘The Mannequin’ is a haunting exploration of the mysteriousness at the heart of ourselves. 

‘Our Own Fantastic’ slips between childhood and adulthood as it follows a young Pakistani woman growing up in the United States. In its shadows, its author paints a story of migration, displacement, and loss, a life shaped by the history of Pakistan, by family, and by chance. Beautifully composed with exquisite attention to detail, it shows a fine command of imagery and has a capacious, open-ended feel. The story echoes the architecture it describes, with hidden doors and subterranean emotions. We are offered glimpses of a whole world turning around and through the narrative. 

The overall winner will receive $6,000 from the total prize money of $12,500.

So who will win? We’ll find out on 17 August, at the online ceremony. First the three authors will introduce and read from their stories; then we will name the overall winner. This is a free event and all are welcome, but please register your interest in attending: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

ABR warmly acknowledges the generosity of Ian Dickson AM, who has supported this prize – now clearly one of the world’s leading prizes for an unpublished short story in English – since its creation in 2011. Lovers and exponents of short fiction, like this magazine, have much reason to be grateful to Ian Dickson.

Power, politics, and passion

Beejay Silcox – one of ABR’s most popular contributors, as we know from the magazine’s recent reader survey – has assembled a fine program for her first Canberra Writers Festival as artistic director. The festival will be staged from 16 to 20 August.

No one who has spent more than ten minutes in the company of the irrepressible Beejay will be surprised to learn that the driving theme of the Festival is ‘Power Politics Passion’.

Not surprisingly, given the festival’s location, political journalists are well represented on the program, plus the odd politician. Among them are Barrie Cassidy, Niki Savva, Dave Sharma, David Speers, Michelle Grattan, Stan Grant, and Louise Milligan. Veteran journalist Chris Masters will be in conversation with Laura Tingle about his new book, Flawed Hero: Truth, lies and war crimes, about Ben Roberts-Smith. (In this issue, we review the first book to appear about the recent defamation case: Nick McKenzie’s Crossing the Line. See Kevin Foster’s review on page 11.)

Theodore Ell – winner of the 2021 Calibre Essay Prize – is on the program, along with ABR regulars Astrid Edwards and Kieran Pender.

Visit https://www.canberrawritersfestival.com.au/ for more information about the program.

Shirley Hazzard

A certain highlight of the festival will be the conversation between Frank Bongiorno and Brigitta Olubas, author of the recent biography of Shirley Hazzard.

Olubas’s decades-long scholarly work on the author of The Transit of Venus and The Great Fire continues. Next year, NewSouth Publishing has just announced, it will publish Shirley Hazzard and Elizabeth Harrower: The letters, edited by Brigitta Olubas and Susan Wyndham. According to the publicity material, this collection unearths ‘a deep and vexed friendship carried out mostly through letters between two of Australia’s greatest writers. They met by letter and their friendship was carried out mostly through correspondence between Harrower’s home in north-shore Sydney and Hazzard’s apartments in Manhattan, Naples and Capri.’

Readers of Olubas’s biography will recall Harrower’s 1984 visit to Italy, where she travelled with Hazzard and Francis Steegmuller. The epistolary record of that, shall we say harrowing, meeting will make fascinating reading.

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‘Hearts full of courage’

Dear Editor,

Reading Bain Attwood’s essay ‘A Referendum in Trouble’ (ABR, July 2023), I’m reminded of Professor Anna Clark’s judgement of Australian historians’ complicity in the project of colonisation, and particularly her assessment of the ‘discipline’s striking hypocrisy (‘The book that changed me: I’m a historian but Tony Birch’s poetry opened my eyes to confronting truths about the past’, The Conversation, 29 March 2022). Attwood appears at first glance to offer a dispassionate and reasoned analysis of the differences between the 1967 referendum campaign and the present push for constitutional reform. There may well be validity in his contention that ‘a series of intersecting discourses’ around race and rights has changed in the intervening decades. But the takeaway message from his history lesson is stark and confronting: the current Voice offensive is losing ground because today’s ‘Yes’ leaders (who are largely First Nations) have failed to do what the 1967 campaigners (who were almost exclusively white) did: ‘tell a really good story’. More disturbingly, Attwood sees fit to offer his own solution to the self-styled problem. The federal government, he argues, should ditch the referendum and introduce legislation to create an Aboriginal Voice to Parliament. That is, Attwood’s panacea is the very outcome that the entire Uluru Dialogue process has rejected.

Attwood might have once been considered a progressive scholar, but he is no ally. The upcoming referendum is a political struggle, not a tutorial assignment. Historian Tony Birch has previously expressed his disaffection with the Australian history profession. Writing of the early 2000s, Birch notes: ‘We had not realised that the history war was a dirty war, a guerrilla war, with no rules and no respect for convention.’ Birch condemned white historians for neglecting to get ‘down in the gutter with the political animals’. (‘The Trouble With History’ in Australian History Now, edited by Anna Clark and Paul Ashton, NewSouth, 2013). Attwood’s timing seems similarly out of tune. What good could possibly come now – four months out from a national vote in an era when the electorate is noticeably volatile and opinion polls are notoriously unreliable – from Attwood’s conclusion that, ‘I find it hard to imagine that the “yes” case will succeed’? Why weigh in with such imaginative parsimony at a time when those tireless First Nations campaigners in whom Attwood has so little faith are calling for ‘hearts full of courage and optimism’? Why indulge in intellectual virtuosity when you could, for example, model some ‘truth-listening’ and hold your tongue until after the referendum? Every white academic with a keyboard and a tenured job is entitled to their opinion, but I fail to see what positive benefit to the project of Aboriginal self-determination Attwood’s intervention serves. Let’s hope that his imagination and his intercession are on the wrong side of history.

Clare Wright

Correction

Maria Takolander was incorrectly listed in the July 2023 Advances as the third Peter Porter Poetry Prize judge instead of Felicity Plunkett. As Advances readers know, Maria was one of the judges of the 2023 ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize.

Pressure is mounting on the Albanese government to recognise Palestine as a state. Following a resolution moved by Penny Wong, this became ALP party policy in 2021, and it will almost certainly be reaffirmed at this year’s party conference in August. Former Foreign Minister Gareth Evans has written a powerful defence of the policy, which has been assailed, predictably, by the Israel lobby.

Support for Israel comes from the peak bodies of the Australian Jewish community, in particular the Australia/Israel & Jewish Affairs Council, perhaps the most successful lobby group for a foreign country in our history. It is very active in organising tours of Israel for politicians and journalists, and in winning support from influential non-Jews on both sides of politics. Recently, an explicitly right-wing organisation, the Australian Jewish Association, has emerged with close links to prominent local conservatives. Sadly, these groups have greater influence than such progressive Jewish organisations as Plus61J and the Australian Jewish Democratic Society.

When Justice Anthony Besanko released his judgment on the Ben Roberts-Smith versus Fairfax defamation case on 1 June, there was a lot more riding on his decision than the reputation of the principal parties and who would be landed with the eye-watering legal bills. Had the verdict gone against Fairfax, its reporters, Nick McKenzie, Chris Masters, and, to a lesser extent, Dan Oakes, would have struggled to return to or resurrect their careers. Defeat would have had a chilling effect on genuinely probing investigative reporting. In the face of such a decision, media organisations and editors around the country would have thought long and hard about letting their journalists pursue well-connected and well-resourced public figures, let alone defend their findings in court. But there was more at stake than that. The ‘defamation trial of the century’ was also widely, if inaccurately, regarded as a war crimes trial by proxy. While Roberts-Smith was not on trial for any of the crimes McKenzie and Masters alleged that he had committed or facilitated, had Justice Besanko found that the reporters had defamed him it would have made the pursuit of war crimes charges against Roberts-Smith more unlikely, or more difficult. The sense of relief at Besanko’s judgment was near universal. It not only emboldened the nation’s investigative reporters and their editors but also opened the way for the full and free pursuit of those members of Australia’s Special Forces credibly identified by the Brereton Report (2020) as having committed war crimes in Afghanistan.

Two of my favourite images in Stuart Ward’s important new book reproduce black-and-white photographs. One captures the life-sized butter sculpture of the prince of Wales and his favourite Canadian horse, the star exhibit of the 1924 Empire Exhibition at Wembley. The other shows a group of protesters in London in 1973 contesting European Economic Community restrictions on imports of Commonwealth cane sugar from the West Indies and Queensland. Most of the faces in the picture are obscured, but the body language of a man to the left of the frame, slumped over his hand-rendered ‘Beat Beet. Keep Cane’ placard, communicates depression and dejection.

Together, these two images pull together many of the preoccupations of this formidable volume (which runs to seven hundred pages). The butter sculpture embodies some of the political, economic, cultural, and affective relationships that had underpinned a protean global sense of Britishness across the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries – or, probably more accurately but less sonorously, ‘Britishnesses’. The dejected protester stands proxy for some of the political, cultural, emotional, and psychological consequences of the slow and often painful unravelling of these relationships in the forty or so years after the fall of Singapore in 1942 and of the end of the British ‘world system’ as a geopolitical reality.

These are important, timely, and admirably ambitious themes. They are rendered more so by the author’s aims to pursue his quarry through a genuinely global lens and to blur any meaningful boundary between centre and periphery within Britain’s empire. Conceptual order is lent to his efforts by the canny use of a refurbished version of the idea of ‘Greater Britain’. This had become a key framework for the late Victorian global imaginary, especially through Charles Dilke’s Greater Britain (1868) and John Seeley’s The Expansion of England (1883). Ward’s repurposed version problematises and softens the Victorian trappings of blood and soil patriotism and racial exclusion. Neither Dilke nor Seeley, for example, could readily see India as part of their Greater Britains, however central it was to Britain’s world presence, and however many awkward questions its non-inclusion raised.

Robin Prior opens this monumental military history by stating that Britain was the only power on the Allied side in both world wars to fight the regimes of Kaiser Wilhelm II’s Germany, Nazi Germany, fascist Italy, and imperialist Japan ‘from beginning to end’. Some might quibble. Was not 1937 the beginning of the war against Japan? But few could doubt that Britain’s sustained war effort in both world wars was remarkable. Even though victory often seemed uncertain and the cost in casualties, human grief, economic dislocation, and financial ruin was immense, the nation continued to exhibit ‘stern resolve’, believing that ‘conquer we must’.

The literature on Britain in the two world wars is vast. Prior, himself, is one of the most acclaimed historians of the Allied campaigns in Gallipoli and on the Western Front in 1914–18. This new book’s claim to originality lies in its focus on civil–military relations: that is, the political and military interface that decided where and how Britain would fight, and what resources it could mobilise for these campaigns.

Prior asks: what, if anything, was learned from one war to the next? Did Britain fight a more efficient war in 1939–45 than in 1914–18 and, if so, was that experience accountable for it? Was Churchill, the legendary wartime prime minister from 1940–45, a beneficiary of World War I when he was unceremoniously removed from office in the aftermath of the bungled Gallipoli campaign?

If the Australian government had banned books about Indonesia, it could hardly have been more successful in removing them from bookshops and library shelves than is presently the case. Even when such books appear in catalogues, retailers seem convinced that the public is not interested.

Lowy Institute polling reveals that Australians’ knowledge of their 270 million Indonesian neighbours is still superficial and often wrong. In 2022, some twenty-six years after the overthrow of General Suharto, only forty-eight per cent of Australians were aware that Indonesia had become a democracy, though admittedly that proportion had doubled since 2018.

One thing Australians do seem sure about is that Indonesia is corrupt. Todung Mulya Lubis – respected lawyer, human rights advocate, and anti-corruption campaigner – agrees that corruption has become ‘the norm’ in parliament, the bureaucracy, police, and even the judiciary. War on Corruption tells the story of how corruption has encroached upon and ‘saturated’ Indonesia’s government over the past seventy years.

Lubis ought to know: his own preface and colleague Tim Lindsay’s foreword relate something of his life experience. Lubis was born in 1949; his life has encompassed almost the full extent of Indonesia’s extraordinary transformation from colonial state to independent democracy, military rule, and, since 1998, democratic restoration (Reformasi). As a young activist lawyer, Lubis began working for the new Legal Aid Foundation. After Reformasi, he became, in his own word, ‘obsessed’ with corruption, as well as with human rights, and became an influential public campaigner on both issues.

There is every reason for wanting to get to the bottom of Rupert Murdoch. It is arguable that he has done more than any modern individual to shape public life, policy, and conversation in those parts of the Anglosphere where his media interests either dominate or hold serious sway. His influence is richly textured, transformative. Beyond bringing a populist insouciance to his host of print and television properties, he is also unafraid of using his reach as a political weapon, a tactic used with such vehement ubiquity that governments pre-emptively buckle to what they suppose is the Murdoch line. Debate is thus distorted and circumscribed. Public anxiety is co-opted as a cynically exploited tool of sales and marketing.

The persistent question with Rupert Murdoch is why? Is he driven by ideology and belief, a desire for profit, or a fluctuating combination of the two? That mix is uncertain, but in the sum of everything he does, Murdoch pursues victory, regardless of the damage to individuals or the broader social cost. There is an old joke: if you buy a dog with Rupert Murdoch, your half dies. He is ruthless.

It is intriguing then to wonder how this man was formed, a man who has achieved such extraordinary, if cumulatively malignant, things. That is the implied promise of this book: Young Rupert: The making of the Murdoch empire. What signs were present in the young man whose opportunity was bestowed by his comparatively minor magnate father.

I was keen for clues. In a way, I am this book’s optimal reader. Born in Adelaide, where author Walter Marsh sets his scene, my godfather, Don Riddell, then editor-in-chief of Adelaide’s The Advertiser, is sacked by Murdoch on page 260. My actual father was an Advertiser reporter and columnist. My first paying teenage job was at the Herald and Weekly Times, the organisation two generations of Murdochs strived to conquer. I was working there as an adult when Rupert finally won. All that was then. By now we all have skin in the Murdoch game.

Michael Wesley is an academic and deputy vice-chancellor at the University of Melbourne. During the Covid lockdowns, while the rest of us were baking sourdough, he pulled together several related strands of thought about universities and Australia’s complicated relationship with them. Mind of the Nation, the result, offers a survey of where we are and how we arrived here, looked at from a number of different but intersecting angles.

In seeking to understand why universities have not achieved greater traction in public policy, despite their direct relevance today to more Australians than ever before, Wesley advances a provisional diagnosis of several distinct attitudes towards universities harboured by the Australian public: agnosticism (or sublime indifference); aspiration; and antagonism. He argues that these deeply held and co-existent attitudes generate a series of paradoxes at the heart of the nation’s ambivalence towards universities and higher education generally.

He then sets out to demonstrate, or at least to illustrate, these paradoxes through the lens of half a dozen ‘aspects of Australian universities where they sit at tension points of conflicting expectations and pressures in contemporary Australia’, in chapters entitled Money, Value, Loyalty, Integrity, Ambition, and Privilege.

The historian Jordana Silverstein’s masterful new book, Cruel Care, begins with an account of the Murugappan family. Many Australians will remember this family: the hard-working parents seeking asylum from Sri Lanka, and their two Australian-born children, taken from their home in Biloela by the Australian government at five o’clock one morning in 2018. The family was detained for four years in Melbourne and Perth and on Christmas Island. The case was so drawn out that, in the rare photographs released to the public, we saw the children growing up. Their treatment was illogical, unjust, unkind, and expensive, and provoked a sharp emotional response from the public.

Silverstein poses a question that many Australians have asked over three decades of Australia’s harsh asylum policies. We asked the question in the 1990s, when the length of time children spent in detention expanded inexplicably. We asked it again in the early 2000s, when the rescued passengers of the MV Tampa, including children, were sent to Nauru and Papua New Guinea. We celebrated the release of children from detention in the mid-2000s but then once again questioned our humanity when hundreds of children were sent to Nauru in 2012 and 2013. We asked the question when we learned from the Guardian’s Nauru files that over half of the leaked incident reports related to children, and when we heard of the thirty children who, after years of the violence of detention, succumbed to resignation syndrome and gave up on life; and when we added up the millions of dollars the government spent in legal fees fighting their applications for treatment in Australian hospitals.

How could Australia do this to children? More specifically, how could our politicians and policymakers do this to children? Silverstein’s book considers these questions, and offers two answers.

Despite their proliferation, celebrity memoirs often seem incapable of justifying their own existence: a string of carefully curated anecdotes woven together to approximate a life already lived in the glare of the media. Perhaps because actors are on the one hand concealed by the roles they play, and on the other exposed to the prying eyes of the public, their autobiographies tend to inhabit a paradoxical netherworld of disclosure and obfuscation, cautious oscillations on a back off/come hither axis. Both Sam Neill’s and Heather Mitchell’s recent memoirs traverse this uneasy ground, feeding us sometimes incredibly intimate details while remaining stubbornly mute on the larger questions of their careers.

Both eschew the camp, bitchy pleasures of a memoirist like Rupert Everett (whose Red Carpets and Other Banana Skins [2006] remains the genre’s high watermark), or of the possibly apocryphal but no less entertaining confessional My Wicked, Wicked Ways (1959) from Errol Flynn. Absent are the droll witticisms that abound in David Niven’s The Moon’s a Balloon (1971) or Carrie Fisher’s hilarious Wishful Drinking (2017). There are only the occasional titbits of gossip to be found, flashes of behind-the-scenes revelation that might satisfy our prurience. Instead, Neill and Mitchell focus on the kinds of upheavals and twists of fate pertinent to any life – births and deaths, illness and health, love and friendship – presumably in an attempt to seem ‘just like us’.

Neill’s Did I Ever Tell You This?, the looser and more casually anecdotal of the two, was prompted by his recent cancer diagnosis. It opens in County Tyrone, Northern Ireland, where Neill was born and christened Nigel, to his eternal chagrin. Neill’s father, Dermot, a strikingly handsome New Zealander, was an officer in the British Army, his work taking him from the mountain passes of Austria to a Greece plunged into civil war. His escapades are briefly touched on, but his taciturn nature – ‘He was, as always, slightly distant ...  always partly absent’ – means that Neill barely scratches the surface of the man, nor captures their relationship with any vividness or insight. His mother, Priscilla, ‘was very English, very pretty and very brisk’. Although he seemed closer to her, she also remains a rather shadowy figure, elliptical.

At his death in 1977, Robert Lowell was considered one of the greatest and most influential American poets of the century. He had absorbed the academic formalism of the Fugitives and New Critics, but had gone beyond it with a humanising anger, the suffering visions of a manic-depressive. Among the Confessional Poets – as W.D. Snodgrass, Anne Sexton, Sylvia Plath and others had come to be called – he was loftier, more prodigious and prolific. Seamus Heaney, who outgrew Lowell’s influence to become a figure of global importance, called him our ‘master elegist / and welder of English’. Not wielder, but welder. Lowell forged his poems, putting words together like pieces of steel. Another critic called his early style ‘imbricated’ for its packed masonry of sound.

So it is curious to reread Lowell now and consider his fading legacy. As early as 2003, the poet James Fenton observed that ‘the work of the most famous poet of his day has undergone a partial eclipse’. Many readers, myself among them, can admire Lowell’s poetry without really loving it. The work doesn’t move me, as the best poems by his friend Elizabeth Bishop do. His most anthologised poem, ‘Skunk Hour’, feels dated with its reference to a ‘fairy decorator’. I prefer other works, from ‘The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket’ to ‘Memories of West Street and Lepke’ and ‘Waking Early Sunday Morning’. His best poem fusing history and social criticism is ‘For the Union Dead’, which ends, ‘Everywhere / giant finned cars nose forward like fish; / a savage servility/ slides by on grease.’ It is Lowell’s Howl – not as funny as Ginsberg’s, but more biting.

Spellbinding, genre-defying, and powerful in its vision of the future, Kate Mildenhall’s third novel, The Hummingbird Effect, interweaves four matrilineal narratives that span the years 1933 to 2181. Set in Footscray and its surrounds, including the Meatworks, Sanctuary Gardens Aged Care, and a futuristic Forest/Inlet/Island, the novel explores the central concern of ‘unmaking the world’ in order to ‘begin again’.

Mildenhall alludes to Aldous Huxley’s famous novel in evoking a ‘brave new world indeed’ at the end of the first long chapter, and through her exploration of entropic machinery, controlled reproduction, and tropes of desire and consumption. Mildenhall’s stark postcolonial ecofeminist lens gives the narrative its dark urgency and places women at the forefront of change. Indeed, in the short poetic chapters that bookend the novel, women’s voices are a river in the ‘Upstream, downstream, timestream of always’. The endless flow of water and its many cadences prioritise the natural world over technological advancement and invoke the sublime as essential to humility.

Myths about space travel have always been uncomfortably tangled with incarceration and exile. Author Manu Saadia has described the private plans of the current crop of hubristic billionaires as ‘carceral fantasies’. Despite science fiction’s recent utopian turn, there is no reason to believe that space colonisation will be anything but a repeat of the earthly version’s violent history. Giants, too, have a long mythology and once held a significant place in literature, from Atlas to Swift and Wilde; both burdensome and burden-carrying, they often have an outcast sadness. Pip Adam’s fifth book, Audition, brings these myths together.

Three giants are crammed into a spaceship. When they talk, the ship moves. If they are silent, they grow. We don’t know where the ship is going, but we are told that the giants have been sent away. ‘We got too big for Earth,’ one says. It isn’t clear which of them is speaking at first, because the voices of the giants –Alba, Drew, and Stanley – are choral, their thoughts overlapping and identities hesitant. This three-way dialogue, packed with absurdist, Beckettian humour, sets up a startling puzzle; we are stuck in this conversation along with the giants, grasping at memories we can’t quite trust.

Adam has a long preoccupation with troubled embodiments. In her previous novel, Nothing to See (2021), Peggy and Greta share one life and two bodies: ‘All they ever wanted was to be smaller ... They wanted to take up less space,’ the narrator observes. In The New Animals (2017), Elodie upsets others because she ‘dared to take up the space she took up ... She needed to stop being so goddamn big.’

Anyone who watched the recent SBS survival series Alone Australia will have gained a new understanding of western Tasmania: of how wild it is, and how rugged, and how cold. A hand-to-mouth, hardscrabble life of subsistence farming there would be bad enough today; for the nineteenth-century white settlers of Annette Higgs’s novel it is close to unsurvivable, and indeed some of her most vulnerable characters do not survive it.

On a Bright Hillside in Paradise, winner of the 2022 Penguin Literary Prize, tells the story of a white settler family through three generations. As Higgs explains in a short Author’s Note at the end,

The story of the Hatton family is loosely based on my own family. Eliza Wise was a real person, as was her convict husband Benjamin Walters. One of their daughters married a farmer and settled under the aura of Mount Roland in the Kentish district and raised a large family. They were living there when the Christian Brethren evangelists arrived in 1874 and swept the people up in enthusiasm for revivals and creek baptisms.

When pushed to vote on the bleakest poem among Philip Larkin’s death-obsessed body of work, most would likely stump for his late masterpiece ‘Aubade’, that arid interrogation of human finitude. Yet his ‘The Building’, from 1972, is in many ways a more savage appraisal of individual extinction and the structures we build in an attempt to deny it: ‘Higher than the handsomest hotel / The lucent comb shows up for miles …’ Larkin was referring here to the Hull Royal Infirmary, a modernist pile which loomed over the poet’s hometown after it opened in 1967. Yet the poem could just as easily be translocated to Rochester, Minnesota, where the substantial modern tower of the Mayo Clinic stands: a building around which, too, surrounding streets stand like ‘a great sigh out of the last century’.

The Mayo is the venue on which Frank Bascombe’s latest and seemingly last outing as the American everyman initially centres. It is the place where his surviving son, Paul –whose older brother’s death as a child was the primal loss haunting The Sportswriter (1986), the first Frank Bascombe novel – has gone to undergo experimental treatment for ALS, or Lou Gehrig’s Disease, an incurable degenerative disorder.

Bascombe, that well-worn fictional avatar of Ford’s – a short story writer turned sports journalist turned realtor – is now semi-retired. At seventy-four, he is approaching that point in life where death is coming into tune as a personal matter. Despite having lost both his wives in recent years and living at some distance (emotionally and geographically) from his only daughter, Frank has little choice but to take on the role of caregiver to his ailing son.

Dennis Glover’s third novel centres on the much-mythologised British Antarctic Expedition of 1910–13 that saw Captain Robert Falcon Scott attempt to reach the geographic South Pole for the first time in history. Scott and four companions arrived at the Pole too late (five weeks after Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen) and would later succumb to the brutal conditions encountered on their return journey to Cape Evans. As Glover alludes to in the preface (and dramatises throughout the novel), details of the Scott expedition – possible causes of the tragedy, potential alternatives – as well as its historical, cultural, and/or scientific significance, have long been the subject of voluminous print and broadcast media (both popular and academic) and have fuelled often obsessive and granular debates. Thaw is both a contribution to, and comment on, this discourse.

Structured in eight parts that alternate between dual timelines, the novel depicts the Scott expedition (including its preparation and initial aftermath) alongside a modern narrative that follows Cambridge researchers grappling with the impact of climate change in the polar regions. This duality allows Glover to represent the polar party’s disastrous fate (realised in vivid, apocalyptic detail) while also contextualising events with the benefit of twenty-first century scientific evidence and historical findings, ultimately inviting a link to a more contemporary (and uncomfortably familiar) apocalyptic scenario.

British sculptor Barbara Hepworth wrote that ‘there is no landscape without the human figure’. Similarly, there is no human without the landscape in which they are situated, human and landscape mutually shaping, resisting and defining the other.

Three new Australian novels probe this interdependence, each of them concerned with the historical forces that have silenced and confined women, and each of them testing the capacity of their female characters to assert their stories, their selfhood, in the face of a hostile and unfamiliar landscape. Critically, what differentiates the novels is the degree to which their authors discover within these environments a similitude with their characters’ emotional struggle, the landscape not merely adorning the narrative but becoming essential to it.

Emily O’Grady follows up her 2018 Australian/Vogel’s award-winning début, The Yellow House, with Feast (Allen & Unwin, $32.99 pb, 295 pp), an arresting gothic novel set in a remote Scottish manor house.

Alison, an agoraphobic film actress, bought the house for her mother, Frances, when the latter’s health began to deteriorate as a consequence of old age and dementia. Since Frances’s death, Alison has lived in the house with her partner, Patrick, a once-famous rock musician who now composes film scores. Their lives have fallen into a rhythm that is familiar, if not entirely smooth. There is a restlessness to their days that is aggravated by the sudden arrival of Neve, Patrick’s daughter. Determined to play the doting father, he plans an ostentatious eighteenth-birthday feast for Neve, even extending an invitation to Neve’s mother, Shannon, who lives in Australia.

They met by the smashed call box at the intersection of Homan and 16th, as proposed in her perfectly spelt text message earlier that night.

Her name was Artesia, which Harry would later learn she wrote on her mailbox as ‘Tease ya’. Harry might have guessed that the moment he saw her.

Full-body leather. Tattoo of a honey bee on her neck. A my-body-my-canvas vibe that suggested she had more ink, way more carnivorous, other places too. Most unpromising of all: the Fleetwood Mac T-shirt. (Flamingo-coloured brassiere peeking through, but by this point he was just glad she was wearing underwear at all.)

Harry’s face must have fallen, because Artesia said, ‘Yo, what.’

She had a voice that sounded like she’d been smoking for half an actual century. Maybe that’s why, on the phone, Harry had assumed he was dealing with someone considerably older. In fact, Artesia was in her early twenties, same as him.

Harry didn’t quite meet her eyes, tried to make this as impersonal as possible.

‘Look,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry, but my ad was ... serious, you know?’

‘Uh-huh,’ she said. ‘And I seriously hauled it out here to meet you.’

‘I’m hiring a secretary? For accounting and administration?’

‘I heard you on the phone. I can do that.’

‘Like, your buttoned-down type of secretary.’

Artesia assessed herself. ‘You see any buttons up?’

Zips and rips, that’s all Harry saw.

My father died twenty-eight years ago this December. Each anniversary, I watch a movie that we enjoyed together, or would have. This year, a week before the day, I learn that the hotel his company owned has permanently closed. I’m given this news through an article titled ‘New York City’s historic hotels are owned – and destroyed – by Asians.’

I leave my apartment, hail a cab.

The driver, who’s South Asian, asks which hotel entrance, Vanderbilt Avenue or 46th Street. I cannot remember, so I tell him, ‘The one with the swivelling doors.’

He navigates a memory map of his own. We pull up on Vanderbilt. The building is boarded up. ‘Must be the other side.’ The same on 46th. The shuttering looks final, casketed. The effort to see where the door was, or whether it revolved, strains my eyes.

As the engine putters, the driver leans forward. ‘Wasn’t it here?’

‘It closed.’

‘When?’

‘I don’t know.’ I tip him and we both say thank you.

‘Why should I be expected to rise above my times? Is it my doing that my times have been so shameful? Why should it be left to me, old and sick and full of pain, to lift myself out of this pit of disgrace?’

These are the words of Mrs Curren, the elderly narrator of J.M. Coetzee’s under-appreciated mid-period novel Age of Iron (1990), but it would be easy enough to find similarly anguished sentiments being expressed by the Magistrate in Waiting for the Barbarians (1980), or Dostoevsky in The Master of Petersburg (1994), or David Lurie in Disgrace (1996), or the eponymous protagonist of Elizabeth Costello (2003). It has long been apparent that there is a recognisable Coetzeean type, who appears in various guises in his many novels. These characters tend to be educated products of their relatively privileged social positions. They are conscious of the pain and injustice in the world, conscious of their own suffering, and conscious of their impotence in the face of overmastering contexts. Their common instinct is to philosophise about these problems. Many ironies, gruelling and subtle, arise from their desire for redemption and their simultaneous awareness of its impossibility, not least of which is that their penchant for metaphysical high-mindedness has a distinct tendency – on display in Mrs Curren’s lament – to bend back on itself in a way that resembles self-absorption or even self-pity.

CAST

NOËL COWARD, a playwright, director, actor and composer

IVOR NOVELLO, a composer and actor

GERTRUDE LAWRENCE, an actress

GEORGE GERSHWIN, a composer

W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM, a writer

VIRGINIA WOOLF, a novelist

CHARLIE CHAPLIN, an actor and filmmaker

IGOR STRAVINSKY, a composer

LAURENCE OLIVIER, an actor

GRETA GARBO, a movie star

JOAN SUTHERLAND, a soprano

PET SNAKE, a reptile, allergic to gin

OLIVER SODEN, a biographer (with a good book on Michael Tippett under his belt)

The action moves from London to New York, Australia, Jamaica, France, Switzerland

TIME: 1899–1973 

Part One

You could hardly ask for a better tour guide through the artistic travails and triumphs of the twentieth century. Born as the previous century was closing its shutters, Noël Coward dominated the London stage in the interwar years, butted heads with the Angry Young Men in the 1950s, before wrenching victory from the jaws of disfavour in his final years in a series of stunning revivals.

He knew everybody. In America before the Great Depression, he heard Gershwin play through sketches of his piano concerto, and in 1931 he turned down Stravinsky’s suggested collaboration. In the early 1960s, he helped Joan Sutherland find a chalet near his own in Les Avants, Switzerland. He also retained properties in Jamaica, having discovered the island when holidaying in a house owned by Ian Fleming and where he entertained anyone from Alec Guinness to Winston Churchill. Virginia Woolf wrote of Coward to a friend, ‘He can sing, dance, write plays, act, compose, and I daresay paint’ (indeed he could). Ned Rorem noted that ‘his immodesty is generous’, while Robert Graves distilled 1920s literary England into four major figures: ‘Coward was the dramatist of disillusion, as Eliot was its tragic poet, Aldous Huxley its novelist, and James Joyce its prose epic-writer.’

Emmett Stinson’s brief critical survey centres on Gerald Murnane’s four major ‘late fictions’, beginning with Barley Patch (Giramondo, 2009) and ending with Border Districts (Giramondo, 2017). It is a timely and illuminating companion to Murnane’s recent fiction and works well as an extension of the first monograph on his work, Imre Salusinszky’s Gerald Murnane (Oxford University Press, 1993). Although the two books have different points of focus, they are slim yet substantial studies, each dealing with a distinct period of Murnane’s literary career, and both are eminently readable.

As Stinson notes, Murnane’s late fictions were not influenced by the kind of editorial interventions and publisher’s whims that marked his earlier work and limited his capacity to control his own writerly output. Nor did Murnane have to worry about appealing to a wide readership. Giramondo gave their author almost total control over the finished products, whereas Murnane’s previous writing life was uncertain and chaotic.

Stinson argues that the late fictions – written in these new circumstances – retrospectively reshape and recontextualise the early work and serve ‘to complete, belatedly, his oeuvre and impose some final order on the more contingent and disordered conditions in which his early works were published’. Stinson deals with each book, in four separate chapters, where he subtly extends his central theme, culminating with the concept of ‘retrospective intention’.

In her 2019 biography, Chaucer: A European life, Marion Turner provides a fine-grained social context for the poet’s life – from early days. Young Geoffrey Chaucer, we learn, would likely have been educated in a school such as London’s St Paul’s, with its generously stocked library, and a ‘master’ who ‘sat in a chair of authority, raised up, surveying the room’, and whose pedagogical style allowed for disputation.

I first encountered Chaucer in my convent school in the ‘Library’ that served as the Matric classroom. The room was, to our eyes, rather grand (converted from a nineteenth-century ‘Coffee Palace’) and the ‘mistress’ sat at a high desk, where she read to us in whatever accent the books under study required. She made short work of Chaucer’s ‘th’s’ and feminine endings and participle forms (‘yronne’, etc.), demystifying forever a language that might otherwise have proved a barrier to my rampaging enjoyment. Her name was Mrs Moore. She was austere but had a flinty wit, and she connected a seventeen-year-old girl with a literary world of such astonishing vitality that it has never left her.

The Wife of Bath: A biography is Marion Turner’s second foray into Chaucer’s work, and while her focus in this new ‘biography’ is narrower – on a single Chaucerian character rather than Chaucer’s whole fourteenth-century world and life – her ambition and effect remain consistent. Turner is a builder of contexts and connections – between literature and life, between the medieval and the contemporary, between work and play, culture and politics – sexual or societal.

Andrew Taylor has been an important figure in the Australian poetic landscape since his first book, The Cool Change, appeared in 1971. Identified with no particular group or aesthetic tendency, he has worked as poet and academic in Melbourne, Adelaide, and Perth, and is now retired from teaching and based in Sydney.

At the time of The Cool Change, Taylor looked to be the promising successor to Melbourne academic poets such as Vincent Buckley and Chris Wallace-Crabbe. In later decades he was also identified with Adelaide, where he ran Writers Week for several years, and then with Perth, where he also developed his reputation as a critic.

Almost thirty years ago I wrote: ‘Andrew Taylor is now a poet of great subtlety who consistently moves and entertains his readers as very few others can.’ After almost another thirty years, and having now read Taylor’s latest collection, Shore Lines, I find no reason to modify this opinion. There may be just a little more emphasis on ‘entertainment’ these days, but there is still plenty here to be moved by.

For a long time, Australia has had a conservative poetry culture. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when modernist poets in Europe, Asia, America, and – somewhat belatedly – the United Kingdom revolutionised international literature, Australian poets continued writing mainly conventional verse.

Modernism brought poetry and prose together as more or less equal partners. Notably, in France, these developments were foreshadowed by the 1842 publication of the book of proto-prose poetry, Gaspard de la Nuit: Fantaisies à la manière de Rembrandt et de Callot, by Aloysius Bertrand. The modernist order was subsequently ushered into France through the publication of works such as Charles Baudelaire’s ground-breaking prose poetry collection Le Spleen de Paris (1869), and two radically brilliant collections of prose poetry and poetic prose by Arthur Rimbaud: Une saison en enfer (1873) and Illuminations (1886).

These works spread like a slow earthquake across the international literary world, but, perhaps unsurprisingly, a politically and culturally backward Australia felt barely a ripple. Then, after the catastrophe of World War I and surrealism’s arrival in the 1920s, many Australian poets decided that the unconscious mind and surrealism’s tenets were undeserving of serious attention.

Felicity Plunkett is a poet and critic. Her books are A Kinder Sea, Seastrands, Vanishing Point, and the anthology Thirty Australian Poets (as editor). Her recent essays are ‘Plath Traps’ for the Sydney Review of Books and ‘Strange Territory: Poems as “gifts to the attentive”’ for Australian Book Review. She was an ABR Fellow in 2015 and 2019.

As an abortion provider for more than forty years, and an advocate for abortion law reform and improved abortion services for more than fifty, I approached this book with alacrity. Around one hundred thousand abortions are performed in Australia every year, yet abortion is still not easily talked or written about. I felt that a non-fiction work of nearly three hundred pages on the topic, by a person who had experienced abortion, would be a welcome addition to existing literature, something that other people, contemplating or experiencing abortion, might absorb themselves in.

The author’s own abortion, in the early weeks of her pregnancy, using the medications mifepristone and misoprostol – this was during a Melbourne lockdown in 2021 – is front and centre of every chapter in the book, finishing on page 286, seventy-six weeks after the procedure. It took all that time for her to come to terms with her emotions before, during, and especially after the physical act of abortion. As she travels, she bestows her thoughts on a great many other topics – her childhood, her family, her education, anorexia, gender identity, love, the meaning of pleasure, masturbation, painful sex, joyful sex, many sexual relationships, climate change, overpopulation, her career as a tattooist, the internet, privacy, the Covid pandemic, and more – and relates these as best she can to her central topic of abortion.

Back in the day, I was wary about making a career in science. It wasn’t just the lack of women; it was also a sense of moving into alien territory. After all, I had absorbed feminist critiques suggesting that modern science had been shaped by (male) scientists’ urge to ‘penetrate’ nature by reducing it to its parts – an urge that had blinded them to the power of the whole. And I was all for the whole – for Gaia, the whole Earth, not for atom splitting and nuclear bombs. But it was Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962) that offered the most famous argument against reductionism. Carson pointed out that when scientists developed pesticides to kill specific insects, they didn’t take sufficient account of the knock-on effect on the environment, including the starved or poisoned birds whose absent songs would manifest in increasingly silent springs. Half a century on, we are aware of many examples of the damage reductive thinking can do, especially the burning of fossil fuels to produce electricity, changing the whole climate in the process. In Here Be Monsters, Richard King deftly explores another area of concern, which he calls ‘technoscience’, a mix of science, technology, and neoliberal capitalism that reduces everything to its parts – to genes, bits of information, and individual consumers, losing sight of the whole person and their whole community.

Carson’s concern wasn’t pesticides themselves but their indiscriminate and excessive use; similarly, King knows that, like appropriately used pesticides, our digital devices bring us great gifts. But he does want us to understand the neoliberal mindset that led the ‘tech bros’ to build all this stuff in the first place. It was a mindset that led social media developers to exploit our biological reward systems with the shameless aim of monetising our attention, which, he implies, is egregiously ironic given the way that social media distances us from biological contact – from the touch and eye contact we have long assumed fundamental to meaningful human interaction. Many studies show the power of touch and shared conviviality to flood our brains with feel-good hormones, and King notes that we witnessed the reverse of this during the Covid-19 lockdowns. Digital technologies played an important role in keeping us connected through those difficult times, and yet, asks King, ‘Would social media have been invented at all in a society that accorded greater value to physical community life, or one less in thrall to performative individualism?’

Belinda Alexandra is the daughter of a Russian mother and an Australian father and has been an intrepid traveller since her youth. Her love of other cultures is matched by her passion for her home country, Australia, where she is a volunteer rescuer and carer for the NSW Wildlife Information Rescue and Education Service (WIRES). She is the author of twelve books, including ten historical novels and two works of non-fiction. Her latest book is the memoir Emboldened: On finding the fire to keep going when all seems lost (Affirm Press, 2023).

A confession: I was a child actor. Never a child star, although certainly that was the intention. For years I endured the three-hour drive from Canberra to Sydney, preparing for my five-minute meeting with some Surry Hills casting director, whose first question would inevitably be ‘How’s your American accent?’ The zenith of my career was a thirty-second commercial for the orange-flavoured soft drink Mirinda, a merchandising tie-in with the release of Spider-Man 2, shot at Fox Studios on a full-sized replica of a New York subway carriage. On the soundstage next door, Baz Luhrmann was directing Nicole Kidman in their famously extravagant campaign for Chanel No. 5. There we all were: Australians in Australia, pretending to be Americans for America. Even at that early age, I sensed that Australian cinema existed in the long shadow of Hollywood, and that there has always been, as Sam Twyford-Moore expertly describes in his new book, ‘some kind of psychic gangway between Sydney and Los Angeles’.

So I might be uniquely primed to engage with Twyford-Moore’s group bio-history Cast Mates: Australian actors in Hollywood and at home, which I gleefully devoured as though it had been algorithmically concocted specifically for me. In its pages I found a deep resonance with my own artistic ambitions, and profound reflections on the conditions that continue to shape the Australian arts. While Cast Mates may prove too dense or too niche for the casual reader, those on Twyford-Moore’s wavelength will find it superbly researched, fiendishly funny, and achingly astute, as entertaining as any of the cinematic outings it weaves into its exuberant journey.