Rowan Heath wins the Jolley Prize

Rowan Heath was named the winner of the 2023 ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize at an online ceremony on 11 August. Heath, a Melbourne writer, receives $6,000 from ABR.

This year’s judges (Gregory Day, Jennifer Mills and Maria Takolander) described ‘The Mannequin’, as ‘a superbly controlled and nuanced story … a haunting exploration of the mysteriousness at the heart of ourselves’.

Rowan Heath (Alice Capstick)

Uzma Aslam Khan was placed second ($4,000) for her story ‘Our Own Fantastic’; and Winter Bel was placed third ($2,500) for ‘Black Wax’. All three shortlisted authors read their stories in recent episodes of the ABR Podcast.

After the ceremony, Rowan Heath commented: ‘I’m honoured by the result of this year’s Jolley Prize. I’m incredibly grateful for the feedback and community connection the prize brings, particularly for writers who are building their careers. Sincere thanks to Australian Book Review for once again connecting lovers of stories across the globe.’

As always, we thank our Patron Ian Dickson AM for his continuing and most generous support. 

More information about the 2023 Jolley Prize, including a list of the longlisted authors, can be found on our website.

Mark Rubbo

Mark Rubbo, bookseller extraordinaire and managing director of Melbourne’s eight Readings bookstores, has announced his retirement (though no one seems to believe him).

In 1976, Mark took over a small bookshop on the east side of Lygon Street. With the move to the west side of Lygon Street soon after, several stores followed across the city (the newest of them, somewhat improbably, is in the glitzy Emporium). Readings – is a vital part of what we are encouraged to call Melbourne’s literary ecosystem – stocks quality books from around the world while steadfastly supporting Australian literature and publishers. It just won’t be the same stepping into Readings Carlton without a glimpse of Mark trundling yet more books towards the shelves.

Advances salutes Mark Rubbo on his unique contribution to this City of Literature.

Prime Minister’s Literary Awards

There seems to be some movement at the station, for the word has passed around…

So, an update on the 2023 Prime Minister’s Literary Awards, following our notes in the July issue.

Advances remains in touch with the organisers. We have enquired about the composition of the judging panels and the timing of the shortlists and the official ceremony. Here is the most recent advice, dated 18 August:

We are thrilled to be stewarding the Prime Minister’s Literary Awards for the first time from July 2023. We have had a fantastic response receiving hundreds of entries. At this stage it is too premature to announce Judges, short lists, and a venue for the official ceremony but this information will be made available to the sector in due course.

Following the unorthodox composition of two of the panels in the 2022 PMLAs, we trust that this year’s judges will be known soon.

Advances will keep you posted.

Indigenous issue

As we go to print, it seems likely that the Voice referendum will take place in October, when ABR will publish its annual Indigenous issue.

This issue – a highlight of our publishing year – will feature ABR’s strongest-ever representation of First Nations titles and writers. Contributors will include Julie Janson, Tony Birch, Anita Heiss, Shino Konishi, Bebe Bakehouse, and Claire G. Coleman. Alexis Wright has a major feature titled ‘The sovereign time of Country’. There are essays on the Voice referendum, the Indigenous Australian Dictionary of Biography project, and newly emerging Indigenous histories of Australian universities.

The issue will be guest edited by Professor Lynette Russell, ABR Board member and director of the Monash Indigenous Studies Centre, and Dr Georgina Arnott, ABR Assistant Editor and author.

Meanwhile, in this issue, Desmond Manderson – Director of the Centre for Law, Arts and the Humanities at the Australian National University – writes about the profound legacy of the late Yolngu leader Yunupingu and the urgent need to regard national constitutions as needing and being worthy of change, renewal, amelioration. He argues that the Yes case in the coming referendum ‘derives from a very different way of thinking about law, time, and citizenship’.

Elizabeth Webby (1942–2023)

Australian literature has lost one of its most prolific and influential champions. Elizabeth Webby AM died on 6 August, after a long illness. Professor Webby, a scholar of nineteenth-century Australian literature and Australian women’s literature, held several instrumental roles in Australian literary studies, most notably Chair of Australian Literature at the University of Sydney (1990 –2007); she had joined the staff as a tutor in 1965. She was Editor of Southerly from 1988 to 1999).

Elizabeth Webby (Diane Macdonald)

Webby’s many publications as editor included The Cambridge Companion to Australian Literature (2000). What is harder to quantify is the encouragement and camaraderie she offered colleagues and younger scholars with the careful thought she gave their work and her receptivity to new ideas. 

Prizes galore

The Peter Porter Poetry Prize – now in its twentieth year and worth a total of $10,000 – remains open until 9 October. Thanks to all those who have submitted new poems from around the world.

To celebrate the Porter Prize and to revisit some outstanding poems of the past two decades, we invited several previous winners to read their winning poems and reflect on the Porter on the ABR Podcast. The poets are Sara M. Saleh, A. Frances Johnson, Damen O’Brien, Judith Beveridge, Alex Skovron, and Judith Bishop (one of only two poets to win the prize twice).

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..

Bain Attwood replies to Clare Wright

Dear Editor,

Professor Clare Wright (ABR, August 2023) fails to make clear why my essay ‘A Referendum in Trouble’ reminded her of ‘Australian historians’ complicity in the project of colonisation’ or ‘the discipline’s striking hypocrisy’ in previously rendering Aboriginal people’s lives largely absent from ‘Australian History’. 

In any case, she has misunderstood and thus misrepresented my essay by claiming that its ‘take-away message’ was that the Yes case is struggling because Indigenous leaders have failed to tell a really good story to advance the case. I suggested there were multiple reasons why the Yes case seems to be in trouble, and gave the Labor government as an example of those that are finding it difficult to provide that story, attributing this to the fracturing of the connection between the politics of recognition and the politics of redistribution.

Professor Wright believes I should have refrained from explaining why the Yes case is facing an uphill battle, even though Indigenous advocates and historians such as Gary Foley have recently expressed the same opinion and on many of the same grounds as I did. It might also be worth noting that one of the leading Indigenous campaigners declared several years ago that if the case for changing the Constitution to recognise and empower Indigenous people could not persuade the vast majority of Australians to endorse it, the cause was lost.

Professor Wright calls on academic historians to ‘hold our tongues’ unless they are willing to be ‘allies’ of this ‘progressive’ cause and ‘get down in the gutter with the political animals’. Many scholars will be troubled by this prescription. As the eminent historian of Native America, Richard White, once observed: ‘If historical knowledge is made simply tactical, then the past becomes valued only as a tool in present struggles … Such tactical uses of the past discredit those who use them within the academy … Nor [do they] serve [Indigenous] interests even in the short run.’

In my view, academic historians have a responsibility to attend to what the traces of the past can reveal and to be as historically truthful as we can; avoid crossing the razor-thin line that separates historical scholarship from political advocacy; and recover that past in such a way that might provide horizons of understanding that a relentless focus on the present often occludes. The performance of those tasks has become more important in democracies in which discussion of important matters is now dominated by partisanship and presentism, and in which what passes for ‘politics’ threatens to cannibalise everything.

Finally, while I acknowledge that enormous passion necessarily informs the political struggle over the referendum, I wish those such as Professor Wright could be civil and courteous towards those who have different views about the referendum. This might even help the Yes case (which I happen to support).

Bain Attwood

An illiberal silencing

Dear Editor,

Clare Wright’s letter taking issue with Bain Attwood’s article ‘A Referendum in Trouble’ is a predictable example of the suppression of dissent: in that it aims to silence opponents, not by defeating their argument but by stigmatising them on political and/or moral grounds.

Attwood’s delinquency, in Wright’s opinion, is not that he argues against the Voice, but that he suggests, on the basis on his thoughtful analysis of the 1967 and 2023 referenda, that the latter might fail, and that the preferable course of action might be for Prime Minister Anthony Albanese to withdraw the referendum in favour of legislating for a Voice. Attwood’s timing is wrong; his intervention unhelpful.

There can be no doubt that it is an urgent national priority to recognise Australia’s Indigenous peoples, and take appropriate action to address their enduring socio-economic disadvantages. But it is deeply illiberal to silence fellow historians who debate the means by which this might best be achieved.

Of course, the writing of history is never value-free. But the primary obligation of the professional historian is to understand the past – even if that understanding suggests conclusions that are unpalatable and unsettling for the present.

Wright concludes with the hope that Attwood will be proved to be on ‘the wrong side of history’. A professional historian should know better than this. If the study of the past teaches us anything, it is that orthodoxies of one generation can become heresies of the next (and the reverse). And even if there were to be something approximating a permanent moral consensus, we cannot be confident that human beings are on a linear progression, improving over time, and emerging from darker, less enlightened times to a more moral present. 

Joan Beaumont

Persistent, civil persuasion

Dear Editor,

Bain Attwood has written a persuasive argument as to why a Yes vote in the upcoming referendum for a Voice to government is a much harder ask than the case for Yes in the 1967 referendum. True, an awful lot, contextually, has changed. Attwood’s case might be even stronger had he cited the supportive international context back then – the US civil rights movement, desegregation, and powerful liberal currents in literature and film. He is right, too, in my view, to emphasise the vicious headwinds of recent times, notably the rise of right-wing populism and the impact of neo-liberalism, the new extremes of inequality, the disenchantment of so many non-indigenous ‘ordinary’ Australians who have lost out and whose resentment and envy can be redirected to those below them.

If 1967 prevailed because voting Yes appeared to be endorsing or emphasising sameness and a ‘fair go’, the problem now is arguing for a Yes vote that seems to be endorsing difference or ‘privilege’, as the No advocates insist. But, implicitly, the Attwood essay does prompt the question: is it that grim today? I think not. There is a voluminous fund of goodwill out there. As a society, we are (if unevenly) infinitely better informed now about the circumstances of Indigenous inequality and the history behind those circumstances; ditto on the question of a sovereignty never ceded. What is being sought is not a ‘special privilege’ but an entitlement long overdue – rightful recognition, more than symbolic, in the Constitution. That word, ‘rightful’, is crucial.

We are also, just now, digesting the upshot of the scathing judgement on Morrison in the 2022 election, the Teal ‘revolution’, and the new moral order post the same-sex marriage plebiscite. Young people and women remain strong supporters of the proposal. There is good reason to be optimistic, notwithstanding the polls. Culture war politics from the right, including the scaremongering and the lies, must be met with the persistent, civil, persuasive case for Yes, emphasising the potential for positive practical outcomes. Attwood’s dark take on our circumstances this time around led on to his call for compromise, but that would not be compromise. That would be defeat. Pulling back on the well-established Uluru position at this point in the campaign, effectively supporting Peter Dutton, whose race-based opportunism is decades long and familiar to us all, is just not on.

On the other hand, Clare Wright’s attack on Attwood is somewhat reminiscent of Noel Pearson’s response to Mick Gooda when the latter called for compromise – nasty indeed. Wright says we need to ‘get down in the gutter with the political animals’. The most impactful of our history warriors, scholar Henry Reynolds, has never done that. Surely this is the wrong metaphor? The take-away, in my view, is simple: we should remain united publicly and express any contrary view internally. There’s room, too, to put the Yes case for rightful recognition in the Constitution with way more clarity than what we’ve seen thus far.

Peter Cochrane

Speechless with fury

Dear Editor,

Thank you, Clare Wright, for that eloquent letter about the relationship of intellectuals to the Voice campaign. I was speechless with fury when I read Attwood’s article, but she said it all.

Susan Lever (online comment)

Stating the obvious

Dear Editor,

What an interesting contribution from Clare Wright (Letters, August 2023). There is something of the ‘protesteth too much’ quality about her letter. I took it for granted that most people would have read Bain Attwood’s article as a statement of the obvious at this point in proceedings.

Patrick Hockey (online comment)

Corruptio

Dear Editor, 

I share your reviewer Howard Dick’s enthusiasm that Melbourne University Press has published Todung Mulya Lubis’s War on Corruption: An Indonesian experience (ABR, August 2023). I did, however, note a common Anglocentric error in the assumption that cognates must indicate borrowing from English. Indonesian korupsi is borrowed not from English but from Dutch corruptie, with both English and Dutch ultimately derived from Latin corruptio through French corruption. Much other Indonesian political, financial, scientific and legal vocabulary has the same borrowing from the colonial language, which is why Indonesian has kasus for case or aliansi for alliance rather than English forms of the cognate – not to mention words such as advokat for lawyer or rekening for account.

Josh Stenberg

Correction

Jonathan Green, in his review of Walter Marsh’s book Young Rupert (ABR, August 2023), sent Rupert Murdoch to the wrong university. Murdoch in fact studied at Oxford. We apologise to everyone at the University of Cambridge.

The stumping of Jonny Bairstow reminded me of reaction chains. Bairstow, in case you didn’t waste winter nights watching the Ashes, was the English batsman controversially stumped by Australian wicketkeeper Alex Carey during the second Test at Lord’s. Pandemonium ensued, with the poohbahs of the Marylebone Cricket Club berating the Australian team during the lunch break as they filed through the holiest of holies, the Long Room. The brouhaha led news bulletins around the cricketing world; even the prime ministers of Australia and the Old Enemy weighed in.

Clare Wright’s letter in response to Bain Attwood (ABR, August 2023) should profoundly disturb and unsettle anyone in this country concerned about the survival of active, rigorous, and engaged historical scholarship.

When historians in the future come to critically assess the public debate over this year’s constitutional referendum on the Voice, they will be confronted by its highs and lows, forced to traverse a terrain of toxicity before locating the genuine substance. On both sides of the argument, the rancour, bigotry, and sloganeering have done little to advance rational discussion on a matter of great import for Australia and its fraught relationship with the Indigenous peoples. Just as wanton scaremongering on the Voice’s freedom to advise on everything from parking tickets to interest rates has pushed the debate into pitiful marginalia, so some leading Yes proponents have indulged in scathing ad hominem attacks. What does Noel Pearson think is gained by labelling Senator Jacinta Price a ‘puppet’ to ‘punch down on blackfellas’?

Having worked for the Democrats in the United States and as chief of staff to Prime Minister Julia Gillard, Bruce Wolpe has credentials. Few in Australia are better placed to examine the implications for Australia, and particularly the Labor government, of a possible Trump return in 2024.

Trump’s Australia, according to Wolpe, reflects how ‘our confidence that American democracy can and will endure is crumbling’. Wolpe seeks to understand the implications of that crumbling for the United States and for the world. Wolpe is utterly convinced that if a second Trump term does come about, ‘American democracy as we know it will have come to an end’. This can and should ‘call into question Australia’s alliance with the United States’. This dramatic framing means that Trump’s Australia is imbued with Wolpe’s own angst over these possibilities – angst that the book rightly argues more Australians, especially politically powerful ones, should share. Wolpe’s entirely valid fears are informed by his own particular politics, which will be familiar to readers engaged with the history (and present) of American liberalism.

On page one, Wolpe is unashamed in his admission that he ‘never really understood – I still don’t – how the United States could go from Barack Obama to Donald Trump’. Like so many of his compatriots, Wolpe feels unable, or may just be subconsciously unwilling, to come to grips with Trump and what he represents. But Wolpe’s writing makes clear that he does understand. Although he contends that the origins of Trump’s successful campaign for the presidency go back to 2008, Wolpe is cognisant of the long threads of American history and particularly the ‘original sin’ of slavery. Wolpe knows that Trump is at least in part the logical conclusion of that history, and not an aberration from it.

Paul D. Kenny’s impressive and engaging book is a corrective to the well-established body of work on populism. This corpus grew in tandem with the most recent successes of populism that have been a feature of contemporary liberal democracies in the past decade, and are a source of anxiety to many who care about democracy and value pluralism.

An explanatory orthodoxy about populism has emerged that Kenny seeks to engage by shifting our focus to the ‘supply side’ of politics. Broadly speaking, there are two main ways of explaining the success of populism. The first is that it’s cultural. In this account, populism is driven by what we might call identity-based concerns over issues like immigration, threats to the traditional heterosexual nuclear family, and the fate of a sense of community at the local and national levels. The second explanation is that it’s economic. Populism is a symptom rather than a cause. In this analysis, populism appeals to those whose sense of security has been undermined by the dysfunction of neoliberalism, which is now seen – like communism before it – as something that worked better in theory than in practice.

'It is too early to say’ was the legendary response of Zhou Enlai when Dr Henry Kissinger asked him about the effects of the French Revolution – proof, if needed, of an ancient culture acknowledging the long cycle of history. Except Zhou misheard. As Chas Freeman, the retired foreign service adviser at that historic meeting revealed many years later, Zhou assumed that Kissinger was talking about the 1968 student protests in Paris, not the storming of the Bastille. It was, said Freeman, a mistake ‘too delicious to invite correction’.

The French Revolution has long reverberated in arguments about politics. Perhaps Kissinger was curious how his Chinese counterpart found the hard and patient work of government after decades as a revolutionary. For Edmund Burke, the lesson was always clear: as his Reflections on the Revolution in France contended, no good can come from the violent overthrow of the existing order. For Burke, social and political change must be gradual if it is to be legitimate and endure. Governing needs the consent of the governed. On this foundation Burke established a philosophical tradition of conservative thought.

In Gradual, two American policy advocates challenge the idea that incremental policy is inherently cautious. Drawing on their experience in the legal system, they present the case for gradualism. American democracy, they suggest, endures because political leaders learn how to compromise and advance change over time. The constitutional division of power favours gradual reform over radical attempts to change society.

The political scientist Karl Deutsch once said that a nation is a group of people united by a mistaken view about the past. These two new accounts of the history of relations between Russia and Ukraine, and the nationalist distortions of that history, would seem to bear him out. Vladimir Putin’s historical arguments for the war against Ukraine are widely accepted by his fellow countrymen and women, prompting the Russian journalist Mikhail Zygar to argue, in War and Punishment, that this ‘imperialist’ history is ‘inherently addictive’ and ‘our disease’. But this is not a vice unique to Russians: the Australian historian Mark Edele points out, in Russia’s War Against Ukraine, that Ukrainian governments have also indulged in a ‘clumsy politics of memory’ by celebrating anti-Semitic, anti-Polish, and anti-Russian nationalists.

Nevertheless, in a crowded field, Putin stands out, having steeped himself in nationalist history to an extraordinary degree. When, in February 2022, President Emmanuel Macron flew to Moscow to try to dissuade him from invading Ukraine, he wound up on the receiving end of a five-hour history lecture. In his current book, Zygar, whose All the Kremlin’s Men (2017) was a study of the cohort surrounding the president, tells us that among the circle of associates Putin developed in the 1990s were the Soviet-era historians Aleksandr Fursenko and Valentin Kovalchuk. Soviet historiography stressed that the United States was a remorseless foe of Moscow and that Ukrainians were not a separate nation. The influence of these Cold War history warriors is a continuing one; Putin spent much of the Covid pandemic in isolation in a luxurious country retreat, closeted with one of Kovalchuk’s sons and wallowing in ‘anti-American conspiracy theory’.

There is a paradox in the title of this book, The Power of One, by Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen. It is an accurate description on one level, because the powerful whistleblowing that led to demands for stronger regulation and accountability in Big Tech was indeed the courageous choice of a lone individual, the author, an American engineer and data scientist. But as the book underscores, Haugen’s whistleblowing was successful – in that it achieved impact and she has walked away relatively unscathed – because of the ecosystem that surrounded her. Lawyers, media advisers, journalists, politicians, and civil society helped her to speak up and then amplified her calls for change. The whistleblowing that Haugen documents might more accurately be described as the power of a community dedicated to ensuring that one voice reaches the minds of many.

In September and October 2021, a 22,000-page trove of internal company documents – dubbed the Facebook Files – became public. The leak was the culmination of whistleblowing by Haugen to an American regulator, the Securities and Exchange Commission, and Congress. The Files were initially published by the Wall Street Journal and then subsequently a consortium of American and European publications. It was a well-orchestrated campaign against Facebook that revealed stunning wrongdoing inside the tech platform.

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander readers are advised that the following story contains images and names of people who have died.

From the age of fifteen until his recent death at the age of seventy-four, the great Yolngu leader Yunupingu (1948–2023) was at the forefront of the struggle to change the Australian legal system in unprecedented ways. In 1963, with his father, Mungurrawuy, he drafted the Yirrkala Bark Petition, which presented to Parliament an eloquent claim for the rights of the Indigenous peoples of Arnhem Land before their country was, without their consent, turned into a bauxite mine. The Bark Petition was no ordinary document. On the one hand, it uses the antiquated language of a traditional ‘humble petition’ to Parliament, concluding in forms of speech that have hardly changed since the seventeenth century: ‘And your petitioners as in duty bound will ever pray.’

But two copies were presented to Parliament, the other in the language of the Yolngu. So, too, the typed petition is attached to a traditional Yolngu bark painting which represents the two clans most affected by the proposed mining activities, and which establish, according to Yolngu law, their legal ownership of the land. The document was an unprecedented act of cross-cultural imagination. In both form and content, it did not simply translate Aboriginal claims into the existing categories of Western law: it aimed to assert the independence and integrity of Indigenous law itself.

The relationship between artists and their sitters has long been a topic of fascination and enquiry – not least for artists themselves. The study of portraiture is often informed by investigations of this relationship as well as that with a third party: the viewer.

In The Sitter (University of Queensland Press, $29.99 pb, 180 pp), Angela O’Keeffe explores this tripartite relationship – artist/writer, sitter/subject, viewer/reader – via the ghost of Hortense Cézanne, wife of artist Paul Cézanne, who sat for twenty-nine of his paintings and smiles in none. Hortense is reawakened in 2020 by an Australian writer who is attempting to tell her story, and accompanies the writer to Paris just as the Covid pandemic sets in. Rather than be observed, the Frenchwoman narrates this story in the first person, herself observing the nameless writer.

This intriguing premise is fertile ground: through the unfolding story of ‘the writer’, O’Keeffe traces the invisible forces that shape the creative process. Hortense watches the writer recount her past in a letter to her daughter – a story within a story. In this moving meta-story, the writer becomes ‘Georgia’, after artist Georgia O’Keeffe. The novel’s sophisticated three-part structure supports the tug and pull of these modes: artist and subject, seeing and being seen, telling stories and having your stories told.

At a time when the world strains under the pressure of multiple crises, it stands to reason that coming of age might no longer hold the same literary value it once did. This ‘polycrisis’ encompasses not only the convergence of myriad catastrophic events – climate change, war, Covid-19, the resurgence of fascism, etc. – but also the failure of metanarratives or belief systems to mitigate against these. Amid all this unprecedentedness, the rise of an anti-Bildungsroman sentiment hardly surprises. In different ways, both Brendan Ritchie’s Eta Draconis and Roanna McClelland’s The Comforting Weight of Water attend to the central question: how does one come of age in a collapsing world? It’s a line of enquiry that just so happens to reflect Franco Moretti’s critique of the Bildungsroman genre in The Way of the World: The Bildungsroman in European culture (1987), articulating how the novel of youth upholds the myth of Western modernity and progress.

Early in his novel, Ritchie captures the conundrum the dying world poses to such progress: ‘Why were people … journeying to cities to begin degrees that stretched away so naively into the future?’ This apocalypse, however, is ostensibly different to our polycrisis. Set in the present to near future, Eta Draconis (which won the 2022 Dorothy Hewett Award for an Unpublished Manuscript) depicts an Earth seized by the cosmic caprices of an unending meteor shower: Eta Draconis. The novel centres on Elora, who is leaving her hometown of Esperance, Western Australia to study drama in ‘the city’ (Perth, though it is not specifically referred to as such), where she lived as a younger child until the cataclysmic arrival of Eta Draconis. Accompanying her on the perilous road is her older sister – and driver – Vivienne, who, now settled into campus life after some years in the city, has returned to Esperance to usher her younger sister to a cultured, brighter future. But their relationship is fraught. Where Elora has grown deeply attached to the town, its people and surrounding country, Vivienne, plucked from Perth in the prime of her teenage years, feels robbed and longs for the meteor-less past, almost to the point of denial.

It is a rare year that goes by without the publication of yet another new biography of William Shakespeare in response to the seemingly insatiable desire for insights into the life and mind of the great writer. The proliferation of life studies isn’t exactly unwarranted: among the most exciting recent discoveries shedding light on how Shakespeare lived is Geoffrey Marsh’s pinpointing of the address at which Shakespeare lived in Saint Helen’s parish in 1598, and Glyn Parry and Catheryn Enis’s identification of numerous writs against John Shakespeare until as late as 1583, when Shakespeare was still a teenager.

Margreta de Grazia’s new book (and her Oxford Wells Shakespeare Lectures, upon which it is based) offers an innovative twist, asking not just why there should be such endless fascination with Shakespeare’s biography, but why that fascination only began two hundred years after Shakespeare’s death. With this startling observation comes the need to ‘bring into view what the later fixation on biography has effectively phased out’, and the recognition that the retrospective imposition of a biographical lens onto Shakespeare’s works has radically altered the way they are understood – including how they were understood for the first two centuries years after his death in 1616.

Given the huge popularity of crime fiction, some readers might wonder why there are not more examples by Aboriginal authors. Perhaps it is because crime in general is too close to the bone. It was only coincidental to be reviewing Julie Janson’s Madukka the River Serpent amid the controversy that followed the ABC’s coverage of the recent coronation, yet the relevance was inescapable. For the tiny number of readers unaware, this is when the slimy gutter of social media-fuelled racism dragged journalist Stan Grant down to the point where the national broadcaster lost one of its best (temporarily, one hopes). Grant’s departure speech at the end of his final Q&A on 21 May was so moving and thought-provoking it will stand in history alongside other landmark speeches – Paul Keating’s Redfern address springs to mind – and may well prove to be a catalyst for reform. Though prompted by cruelty and hate, it responded with generosity and love – love of people, love of culture, love of country.

Only coincidental, yes, but a timely and painful connection all the same. Madukka interrogates the darkest places in the relationship between colonial settlers and Indigenous peoples, through the all-too-familiar lens of environmental destruction and land and water theft. It is bad enough that the land has been stolen, but when the water is too, one can barely comprehend how communities control their rage and frustration, and yet they do. This is a work of fiction based throughout on ugly facts. In some ways, it is crime fiction at its most ironic and layered. One of the greatest ironies is that we readers adore this genre. Yet here we are, a nation still struggling to accommodate its criminal past.

Briohny Doyle’s third novel, Why We Are Here, threads together just about every literary, philosophical, and pop culture perspective on death and aftermath there is. But nothing represents the heart of the book better than its exploration of both/and thinking. Embraced by the fields of business, psychology, and beyond, both/and thinking is a method of overcoming paradoxes, not by solving them but by honouring how two apparently contradictory truths can co-exist. There’s no explaining the singular effect of this book without it.

For starters, Why We Are Here both fits neatly within Doyle’s body of work and is a radical departure from it. Devastated by the deaths of her partner and father in quick succession, BB moves into a soon-to-be condemned beachside apartment on the outskirts of the city, seeking space to be ‘a Thoreau of grief’. A season of relative peace passes as she reconnects with nature and finds purpose as an under-qualified but deeply committed dog-whisperer. But when the area goes into Covid-19 lockdown, personal mourning becomes inseparable from public disaster, leading BB to wonder, ‘What is aftermath in the midst of crisis?’ This is a perfect encapsulation of the question Doyle has been asking all along.

In her début, The Island Will Sink (2013), privileged characters in a climate-ravaged world immerse themselves in haptic disaster films, seeking catharsis while the real apocalypse creeps up on them like a rising tide. The Miles Franklin-longlisted Echolalia (2021) was a deceptively simpler narrative of a mother losing control against the backdrop of a rapidly drying lake. Yet that novel’s structure – jumping back and forth through time to delay a pivotal moment of violence until the last – muddies the binary of crisis and aftermath, and suggests the roots of individual, social, and ecological disaster are too intertwined to ever expect a tidy recovery.

In his essay on the uncanny, Sigmund Freud observed that fiction writers have an unusual privilege in setting the terms of the real, what he called a ‘peculiarly directive power’: ‘by means of the moods he can put us into, he is able to guide the current of our emotions’, and ‘often obtains a great variety of effects from the same material’.

Since The Low Road (2007), Chris Womersley has carved himself a respectable niche in contemporary Australian noir. His work sits somewhere between literary and crime fiction, appealing to fans of both. He combines a Gothic sensibility and broody aesthetic with a finely tuned emotional barometer, blending the sinister and the domestic with apparent ease.

Ordinary Gods and Monsters begins with a foreboding air and the image of a foundry spewing toxic emissions over its suburban setting. The foundry is humble, barely deserving the title; the suburb also goes unnamed, but with its football club, railway line, and local McDonalds it could be any outer suburb of any Australian city.

In Restless Dolly Maunder, Kate Grenville weaves a fictional narrative around her grandmother, a woman she remembers as ‘aloof, thin, frowning, cranky’, and knew through her mother’s stories as ‘uncaring, selfish, unloving. Even a bit mad.’

Dolly Maunder left no written records of her own: no memoirs, letters, diaries, or even account books to show how she carved out a life or filled it with meaning. What Grenville knows of her has been garnered from a sparse historical record, family stories, and – richest of all – the fragments of memoir Dolly’s daughter (and Grenville’s mother), Nance, left behind when she died. Grenville has previously used some of this material in her biography of her mother, One Life (2015). Nance’s memories were coloured by the question that haunted her even on her deathbed: ‘Why did my mother never love me?’ Retelling her stories now, Grenville tries to separate them from Nance’s pain and invest them, instead, with Dolly’s. It is a generous act of imagination that gives the novel much of its emotional clout.

The historian in me found the complex layering of research, memory, and imagination in this book its most fascinating aspect. I kept wanting to puncture the seamless narrative, to question the origin of each new anecdote, and seek out the dissonant points of view that find expression in the singular voice of the fictional ‘Dolly Maunder’. But Grenville does not encourage such speculative reading: her account of her personal and historical quest appears only as a postscript. Unlike One Life, Restless Dolly is a novel and should be read as such. From the opening pages, we are invited directly into Dolly’s world by an authoritative narrative voice that sits – if not quite inside Dolly’s head – somewhere very close to it.

Grief and love in America are the subjects of Lorrie Moore’s new novel, which is part surreal road trip, part love story, and partly made of letters from a woman to her late sibling. Finn, a school teacher suspended for some of his unorthodox ideas about history, attends the bedside of his dying brother, Max, but is then drawn away by his fatal attraction to a suicidal ex-lover, Lily, right around the time of the 2016 election. His story is interspersed with letters written by Elizabeth, an innkeeper, to her dead sister in the aftermath of the American Civil War. Clever, cranky, bitter, and witty, Elizabeth describes herself as ‘unreconciled to just about everything’. The two parts of the narrative are themselves unreconciled, mostly; the connections between them remain oblique, with a lot of space for the reader to imagine different points of association.

Both parts are overtly concerned with the question of how one can possibly manage to live and love in the face of tragedy. A kind of manic cognitive dissonance attends the paradoxes of existence, the impossible necessity of attachment and non-attachment, for Finn as he grieves: ‘He saw that no longer caring about a thing was the key to both living and dying. So was caring about a thing.’ These intolerable contradictions collapse the boundaries between reality and imagination, and the novel shifts between realism and a version of magical realism in which corpses get up out of the ground, smelling like old pond water, and go for a drive, as everyone tries to come to terms with loss in their own quirky way.

Early in Stephen Daisley’s novel about World War II and postwar years, A Better Place, a New Zealand soldier called Roy Mitchell tells a lieutenant they must do something terrible: ‘C’mon boss, we got no choice here.’ This sentiment of compulsion – and this acceptance of the unacceptable – is symptomatic of many of the circumstances Roy endures and of the way he fights, survives, and keeps going across several theatres of war and into the peaceful future he must navigate with his head full of memories.

In 1939, aged nineteen, Roy and his twin brother, Tony, enlist in the New Zealand Infantry Brigade, 22nd Battalion. They fight in Crete, where Tony dies in 1941. Roy, burdened by the guilt of having left Tony behind, fights on in North Africa and mainland Europe. Daisley skilfully captures the camaraderie among the group of Kiwi soldiers: their bawdy humour and relentless banter. At one point, they run in retreat across a minefield, yelling to each other about rugby above the sound of mines exploding and people screaming: ‘Okato might beat Inglewood in the Senior A this year.’

Our planet is in trouble. Climate change is real. Widespread, tumultuous change has occurred in our atmosphere, oceans, biosphere, and cryosphere, driving weather and climate extremes, anomalies, and record heat across the globe. Already, the damage has been substantial. ‘[Climate change] has led to widespread adverse impacts and related losses and damages to nature and people’ (Sixth Assessment Report, UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC). And the cause is well known. Decades of research and legions of scientists attest unequivocally that human-caused greenhouse gas emissions are causing global warming, threatening to precipitate unprecedented levels of global heating across the planet.

In 2021, the IPCC calculated that carbon dioxide (CO₂) emissions must be halved by 2030, relative to 2019 levels, and reduced to net zero by 2050 to limit global temperature increase to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels. The 1.5C target is the threshold warming level which, if exceeded, would unleash ‘far more severe climate change impacts, including frequent and severe droughts, heatwaves and rainfall’ (IPCC). Regrettably, the world is nowhere near where it needs to be; fossil fuel usage continues to expand relentlessly and emissions continue to surpass record levels. Massive increase in climate change action is needed to stem the tide.

There are many impressive things about the first edition of The Oxford English Dictionary (OED), but one in particular has long puzzled me. As an Australian, I have always been struck by its excellent coverage of Australian words. I am not talking about the inclusion of obvious words such as kookaburra, woomera, and fossick, but rather the hundreds of lesser-known words such as wonga-wonga (pigeon), wurley (hut), and yarran (species of acacia), and even more obscure ones such as brickfielder, defined as a ‘local name in Sydney, New South Wales, for a thick cloud of dust brought over the city by a south wind from neighbouring sandhills (called the ‘Brickfields’)’.

All these words were put in by the longest-serving editor, Dr James Murray (1837–1915). But he didn’t come up with them alone in Oxford. Someone in Australia sent them to him, and I have always wondered who that was.

Begun in 1858, and completed in 1928, the OED was the first to attempt to include every word in the English language, to describe these words using historical principles, and to use a descriptive rather than a prescriptive approach. To accomplish this huge task, the editors knew that a small group of men in London or Oxford could not do it alone. They reached out to the public all over the world for help, asking them to read the books they had to hand and to send in words and quotations from those books. The response was massive, and the dictionary became one of the world’s first crowdsourcing projects, the Wikipedia of the nineteenth century.

When I sit down to write this review on a snowy morning during a ten-day trip to upstate New York, are the words I write pre-planned, is the shape of this piece clear in my head, or is it all coming to me as I place my fingers on the keyboard and grapple with the symbols appearing on the screen? Are the words you are reading at this moment the words that I originally wrote on a Northern Hemisphere winter’s morning, or have they been revised, rethought, planned anew?

The truth is that I have been thinking about this review in an on-again, off-again way for several months. The writing has been interrupted more than once by family crises. What I feel about the book I am reviewing has shifted with each delay. Each return to its pages has been informed by the phenomena of close family bereavements and the way that such grief affects the way the mind functions. To examine the archives of parents who were both writers (one a journalist, one an ever-aspiring poet) is to see evidence in file after file of the way both planning and revision were central to their composition process. To write, for me and for countless other writers, is to revise. First utterances are rarely the words that find their way into final printed form. Even if the broad shape of a sentence, its cadences and meaning, are recognisable between first draft and published version, the work of revision is central to the craft – a process that suggests to me the very opposite of ‘suddenness’.

In his new book, Suddenness and the Composition of Poetic Thought, poet, critic, and ethnographer Paul Magee grapples with versions of these questions, approaching the substantiation of his argument through reference to a body of seventy-five interviews undertaken by him and colleagues with poets from across the Anglosphere. For me, the sign of a critically important book is often that it hurls one between poles of epiphanic agreement (finding a sudden elucidation of experiences familiar from one’s own practice as a writer, for instance) as well as profound disagreement. Magee’s book placed me in such a position as reader: throughout it I found myself in a dynamic state of response, agreeing and disagreeing in nearly equal measure, with nearly equal strength of feeling.

In his 1927 essay ‘On Being One’s Own Rabbit’, the British-Indian scientist and writer J.B.S. Haldane surveyed the history of an enduring but contentious approach to scientific discovery: self-experimentation. At the age of eight, Haldane tested poison gases on himself in his scientist father’s home laboratory. As an adult, among other self-experiments occasioning losses of consciousness from ‘blows on the head, from fever, anaesthetics, want of oxygen and other causes’, he once induced sufficiently high levels of oxygen saturation to suffer a violent seizure and the crushing of several vertebrae.

Haldane is one of many maverick self-experimenters rescued from varying degrees of obscurity by Mike Jay in Psychonauts, a fascinating account of psychoactive drug exploration in the hundred or so years before the explosion and subsequent suppression of psychedelics in the 1960s and 1970s. As today’s mainstreaming of consciousness-altering drugs like psilocybin and MDMA continues apace, Jay’s book honours these pioneers of the drug experience’s ‘double consciousness’ – the coterminous ‘inner world of dreams and the waking state of reason’ – who imperilled their bodies and, moreover, their minds in the pursuit of knowledge, pleasure, and transcendent experience.

The milieux they inhabited were about as far as you can get from today’s psychedelic clinical trials: literary salons, occult rituals, and smoke-wreathed gatherings from London and Egypt to Morocco, the Far East, and fin de siècle Paris. Their pharmacopeia was equally eclectic: cocaine, nitrous oxide (laughing gas), opium, ether, morphine, chloroform, amphetamines, cannabis (as well as its more concentrated form, hashish), and, later, the psychedelics mescaline (from the peyote cactus), LSD, and psilocybin (from ‘magic’ mushrooms).

All in the Mind has oscillated the ABC Radio National airwaves for a remarkable twenty-one years. Founded by Natasha Mitchell (2002–12), carried forward by Lynne Malcolm (2012–20), and now hosted by Sana Qadar, the show has created a roomy and inviting space for listeners intrigued by the mind, brain, and mental illness. That space is much more crowded now than it was when the program launched, thanks to the proliferation of podcasts and the growth of science journalism, but All in the Mind remains the forum of choice for psychology and neuroscience enthusiasts.

Although the show has continued to evolve, its main ingredients have remained consistent. It highlights knowledgeable, affable, and authentically curious hosts, professional production, attention to timely topics, and a balance of attention to experts and laypeople. Centring the voices of the now ubiquitous ‘lived experience’ has been one of the program’s enduring features, long before ‘nothing about us without us’ became a catchcry, and it has also made a point of promoting the work of unsung local researchers, shoulder to shoulder with international stars.

Malcolm has now gathered up the work she presented during her nine years at the helm of this institution within an institution. All in the Mind lays out a harvest of ideas drawn from conversations with 135 of her guests. Roughly one third of Malcolm’s interlocutors are people with notable mental gifts, idiosyncrasies, and afflictions, and their loved ones. The remainder are experts of some stripe, commonly researchers but often also therapists, consultants, or leaders of organisations and initiatives, many promoting a new book. A slender majority of these experts are Australian.

Fifty years ago (when I was a very young scholar), I was asked to write an essay review of some recently published books about the Huxleys. None of them in my view, including Julian Huxley’s own volume of Memories (1970), did justice to their subjects’ scientific achievements and social concerns. Half a century later we now have Alison Bashford’s An Intimate History of Evolution: The story of the Huxley family. It has most definitely been worth the wait. Indeed this work is the crowning achievement of her distinguished career.

Instead of producing a densely argued monograph for her academic peers, the Laureate Professor of History at the University of New South Wales has written a highly accessible and entertaining overview of Thomas Henry Huxley’s and his grandson Julian’s efforts to propagate Charles Darwin’s revolutionary ideas over a span of 150 years. In this endeavour, Bashford’s intent to bring the fruits of her scholarship to a wider public echoes the Huxleys’ motivation to educate lay readers about the wonder and importance of evolutionary science. Fortunately, she has also heeded the advice that H.G. Wells gave to Julian Huxley when writing for a reader ‘who is just as intelligent as you are (but does not possess your store of knowledge)’. After all, said Wells, everyone from Shakespeare to Darwin wrote for such a reader. That’s a high bar but one which Bashford clears on every page of this engaging work.

It’s just as well she is such a fine stylist, because the complex ideas she discusses and her novel framework for approaching them, demand that they should (following Einstein) be presented as simply as possible – and no simpler. For Bashford has set herself the challenge of chronicling nothing less than the shared and shifting context of biological and social thought from the birth of Thomas Henry Huxley (THH) in 1825 to the death of his grandson in 1975. Combining her expertise as a biographer and an historian of the biological and human sciences, Bashford uses the family history of the Huxleys to double ‘as an account of evolving ideas about generations and genealogy, genes and eugenics’.

Angus Trumble, who died suddenly last October, was a towering figure with a slight sideways tilt to his head. In his famously dandyish attire he might have stepped out of a Max Beerbohm cartoon, and appropriately so given his expertise in Victorian and Edwardian art. Trumble’s latest, and last, subject also chimes with one of Beerbohm’s earliest literary ventures, ‘A Defence of Cosmetics’, published in 1894.

Helena Rubinstein, who emigrated to Australia from Vienna a couple of years later, managed to produce and market her first beauty product, a face cream she called ‘Valaze’, within six or seven years of her arrival in Melbourne. Keen to protest (protest too much) its ‘natural’ health-enhancing properties, she was adamant to begin with that this was ‘not a cosmetic’, but within twenty years, as Trumble traces, it was to become the basis of ‘the world’s first global cosmetics empire’, which peddled with huge success a lustrous range of make-up from lipsticks to rouges and eyeliners.

'Interracial,’ explains Korey Garibaldi in his compelling first book, is a term ‘not as familiar as it once was’, though it was often used in the United States during the first half of the twentieth century to describe ‘cross-racial collaborations and cultural influences’ across the literary world. One of the most influential advocates of such literary interracialism was W.S. Braithwaite, a poet, critic, and anthologist born in Boston in 1878 to a British Guyanese father and an African American mother, with Braithwaite boldly declaring that ‘all great artists are interracial and international’. Garibaldi’s critical work traces the ups and downs of this interracial aesthetic from the beginning of the twentieth century to the 1960s. In the process, he adds another dimension to our understanding of the complex racial dynamics of this era.

For most of this period, American authors tended to take experimental pleasure in tracing affinities and crossovers between different racial categories. Gertrude Stein’s story ‘Melanchtha’, part of her Three Lives (1909), provocatively describes a love affair between a Black man and a mixed-race woman, while authors such as Frank Yerby and John O. Killens, who are not much read today, were much admired in their own time for aspiring to transcend narrow racial classifications and instead treat human experience as part of a universal whole.

'Not everyone wants to hear about the Holocaust. It’s easier to read Anne’s diary.’ As a survivor of the Shoah, Hannah Pick-Goslar was acutely aware of this piteous truth. She made the statement during a 1998 interview marking the release of a children’s book about her close friendship with Anne Frank and her own remarkable survival. For the countless readers familiar with Frank’s diary, Hannah (referred to as Lies, a pseudonym linked to her nickname) is a recurring presence. There are diary entries in which a distressed Anne, rightly assuming that Hannah is not in hiding, beseeches God to watch over her friend so that she may live to the end of the war. In history and this book’s wake, these passages are rendered even more bitterly tragic.

My Friend Anne Frank is Hannah’s memoir. The publisher’s marketing and titling of the book is disingenuous, perhaps even duplicitous. It is an approach that compounds the bleak reality of Hannah’s statement and works against honouring her as a formidable personality whose story has much to teach us. Written by journalist Dina Kraft, the book is a fascinating, wide-ranging witness statement which takes in a childhood in Berlin and then Amsterdam before and during Occupation, survival at the Westerbork transit camp and the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, postwar physical and mental recovery, immigration to Mandatory Palestine amid a time of upheaval, and life in the formative years of Israel. Hannah’s story extends our understanding of Anne and the Frank family and resists the idea of her friend as a sacred, inscrutable symbol of the Shoah.

Alcatraz is an international anthology of prose poems which builds on the success of previous collaborations between the artist Phil Day and poets Cassandra Atherton and Paul Hetherington. Contributors include many outstanding poets from the United States (twenty-eight), the United Kingdom (ten), and Australia (thirteen), with smaller numbers of poets from India, New Zealand, Germany, Singapore, Vietnam and Hong Kong. The title with its alphabetical alpha and omega, was offered to the poets as an inspiration. I was halfway through the book before I realised the book itself embodies a multitude of jail breaks, vaulting over a range of conventions. These include its front and back cover – entirely taken up by a numinous painted image, the title on its spine the only printed word – and even the luxurious feel of its paper.

Each poem is paired with a line drawing by Phil Day. These have been executed on a cream-coloured Japanese paper whose textured surface, even in the photographs, contrasts with the flatness of the black-and-white text in a pleasurable way. The drawings respond, the notes tell us, to a line in each poem. But neither the poem nor the image is subordinate. Rather, the juxtaposition seems to generate a space in which each art form lifts off the page all the more sharply for its contrast with the other. Not for Alcatraz, either, the usual jostle of poems on facing pages, each poet vying for attention with the other. The image is on the left, and on the right is a poem (with the order reversed toward the end). It’s a small detail, but the sheer spaciousness allows the reader to pay leisurely attention to both poem and image. The sense of freedom is further enhanced by the happy absence of page numbers, releasing the reader from the mirage of speed. In fact, the reading pace decreases the further you go, since the anthology is ordered from shortest poem to longest: another escape from convention. So the poets, too, recur at odd intervals, depending on the length of their poem. It’s all a breath of fresh air.

In her short life, Lesbia Harford (1891–1927) created a body of poems which have become increasingly important to scholars and poets in understanding both the impact of poetic modernism in Australia and shifting concepts of gender, class, and the tensions between a personal and a collective politics. While Oliver Dennis’s 2014 Collected Poems of Lesbia Harford presents Harford’s full oeuvre, the new Text Classics edition, selected and introduced by Gerald Murnane, brings a sharp and accessible focus on this seminal Australian poet, highlighting her key themes and demonstrating a literary style that straddled worlds: from the formal structures and decorous themes of late nineteenth-century poetry to the challenges to form, voice, and subject matter that characterised the emerging revolutions of literary modernism.

Jill Jones has given many interviews about her poetry where, inevitably, an interviewer asks her, ‘What is Australian poetry?’ In one of my favourite quips, Jones says, ‘Is it only Australians who worry about what is “Australian” poetry?’ Related issues are addressed in her pithy foreword to her second volume of new and selected poems, Acrobat Music. She states, ‘I realise, and others have said, my work doesn’t fit easily into a specified school, category or type of Australian poetry.’ This provides a fortifying manifesto to her oeuvre, reflecting Jones’s interest in ‘the possibilities of the poem … form, sound, connotation, address’.

Acrobat Music includes poems from Jones’s thirteen books of poetry published between 1992 and 2020. She states that the impetus for the collection comes largely from the passing of the time (Jones is now in her early seventies) and that, like many significant Australian poetry books, almost half of her published volumes are out of print.

She is also aware that poets in Australia generally receive little public recognition. She has commented: ‘In working as a poet, the most challenging aspect is to readjust your thinking about the reception of your work. In other words, to accept there is little or none, especially in Australia.’

Andy Jackson is a poet, creative writing teacher, and a Patron of Writers Victoria. He was the inaugural Writing the Future of Health Fellow, and has co-edited disability-themed issues of Southerly and Australian Poetry Journal. Andy’s latest poetry collection is Human Looking (Giramondo, 2021), which won the ALS Gold Medal and the Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Poetry.

Which poets have influenced you most? 

I’ve been shaped and invigorated the most by three poets – Sylvia Plath, Gregory Orr, and Adrienne Rich. From them I’ve tried to learn the power of harnessing an intensity of affecting, musical language to an intelligent solidarity. 

Are poems chiefly inspired or crafted?

For me, they are always both (or neither). Every poem I write is written out of a kind of urgent need. But they never arrive complete: poems are a wrestling (or reconciliation) between immersion and detachment. 

What prompts a new poem?

The inability to absorb or let go of an experience, feeling or thought, and a suspicion that there might be a voice that could hold it, a vessel which could be useful in some way.

What circumstances are ideal for writing poetry?

I’m tempted to say oppression, but that would be wrong. The quip ‘at least you’ll get a good poem out of it’ is too facile – suffering can take language away from us. What poetry actually requires is spacious time – the ability to allow the complexity of a situation to find its right shape.

Roughly how many drafts do you produce before ‘finishing’ a poem?

Early in my poetry writing life, I’d write ten or twenty different drafts. Now it’s half a dozen or so. I’m growing to accept, and appreciate, the seemingly imperfect. Being human is messy. Form always relies on deformity. 

Which poet would you most like to talk to – and why?

I always love talking with other disabled poets. There’s less that needs translating. 

Do you have a favourite Australian poetry collection?

Not of all time. For me, Australian poetry is so dynamic and vast (and my reading so partial), especially these days, that I can only feel comfortable saying ‘recent favourite’. That would be Alison Whittaker’s Blakwork.

What do poets need most: solitude or a coterie?

Either, but only if it reaches for the other. For me, I need solitude, but the kind of solitude that wants to connect with others. Other poets, I suspect, will need a crowd of affinity, along with the urge to retreat.

Who are the poetry critics you most admire?

I’m really uncomfortable with the word ‘critic’, which to me smacks of judgement, hovering overhead. I prefer engagement, owning up to being embodied and particular. In terms of writers on poetry, recently I’ve loved the essays of Prithvi Varatharajan, and the book Visceral Poetics by Eleni Stecopoulos.

If Plato allowed you to keep one poem or poetry collection in his Republic, what would it be?

I would intensely resent him for such a brutal limit. Part of the value of every poem is how it relates to the others. So, I’d have to pick the most capacious anthology I could find. Considering the ones on my shelf, that would be either Beauty is a Verb or The Rattle Bag. 

What is your favourite line of poetry? 

‘Without tenderness, we are in hell’ (Adrienne Rich, from ‘Twenty-one Love Poems: X’).

How can we inspire greater regard for poetry among readers?

I don’t think we need to burden poetry with a marketing strategy. I think of poetry as being as diverse (and as potent) as music. Not everyone likes free jazz, or hyper pop, or ambient, but everyone likes something. What will ‘inspire greater regard for poetry’ is readers being able to find the poems that move them. This means making poetry accessible, i.e. published, available, in many formats. Australia having a Poet Laureate should help. 

This is an entertaining family biography of Oxford philosophy from 1900 to 1960. Nikhil Krishnan has mined various autobiographies and reminiscences to craft a series of biographical sketches, anecdotes, and snapshots of philosophy at Oxford during the twentieth century. He has traced the connections, legacies, and disagreements among the philosophers, demonstrating how, over the years, pupils came to inherit the chairs of the professors who had trained them, passing on certain attitudes and practices, characteristic of the Oxford way of doing things.

It is also a defence of Oxford’s way of doing philosophy. Krishnan tells us how, when first tutored at Oxford, in 2007, he resented being asked, ‘Now exactly what do you mean by …?’ Coming from India, he thought of philosophy as poetic and plumbing depths. At Oxford, clarity was demanded, ‘common sense’ respected, and the ineffable distrusted. His conversion to the style culminated ‘in an affection and loyalty that are all the fiercer for having come so slowly’. He does not shy away from acknowledging Ernest Gellner’s attack on Oxford’s obsession with words rather than things or Marxist disgust at its lack of political engagement, but he wants to defend Oxford philosophy as ‘just one more stage in the slow evolution of a basically Socratic picture of philosophy, one that views philosophy as concerned with the pursuit of truth through rigorous, self-aware dialogue’.

Essentially a creative critical biography, The Cinema of Barbara Stanwyck belongs to a greater project of re-examining Hollywood and decentring the phallocentrism of film history. It is the latest book in the series Women’s Media History Now! which focuses on the unexplored work of women in film. Established in 2009, this series became even more timely with the advent of #MeToo and with books such as Helen O’Hara’s call to arms, Women vs Hollywood (2021). The purpose of this new women’s media history is, according to Catherine Russell, to seek out its ‘absent’ or ‘lost’ women protagonists. Barbara Stanwyck (1907–90) may be neither absent nor lost. Indeed, as Russell admits, there is a wealth of material on Stanwyck, including monographs, biographies, and entire archives dedicated to her, and her films are still shown regularly in cinemas, on digital platforms, and on free-to-air television. Nonetheless, Russell argues that Stanwyck has been undervalued as a creative force in the films she helped make memorable. Hence the curious title of the book, which seems more suited to the study of a director than an actress. Russell sets out to show how Stanwyck ‘made’ films by making herself a master of her craft.

While Russell’s approach may be that of ‘the fan and the collector’, she nonetheless demonstrates how Stanwyck ‘challenged the gender conventions that dominated in every decade of her sixty-year career, and […] survived the doctrinal misogyny of the American film industry with her bank account intact’. Russell’s main reference point is Jane Gaines and Monica Dall’Asta’s landmark collection Doing Women’s History, which provides Russell with a critical-historical approach. The first step in this re-evaluation is to shift the focus from ‘women-as-spectacle to women’s agency’, particularly by recognising that acting is first and foremost a type of labour, and it is the image of Stanwyck as above all else a hard-working, independent woman with a shrewd head for business that Russell seeks to promote.

If you think you know about John Glover (1767–1849) and his achievements, then think again. Read this publication and you will discover fresh and compelling information about Glover, his life in Australia, and his house and garden.

The book is also a great read. It reveals the author’s passion for his subject, his years of research, and the authority he brings to it. The emphasis is on an exploration of the paintings Glover produced at his Patterdale estate in northern Tasmania before his death at the age of eighty-two, as well as on the farm and house he created there.

The two previous authors who have written about this artist, John McPhee and David Hansen, have contributed much to our knowledge. This publication tells us much more, not only about Glover’s works, but also concerning the specific sites around Patterdale depicted in the paintings.

Peter Evans is Bell Shakespeare’s Artistic Director.  For Bell Shakespeare, Peter has directed Hamlet, In A Nutshell, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Miser, Antony and Cleopatra, Richard 3, Othello, Romeo And Juliet, As You Like it, The Dream, Tartuffe, Phèdre, Macbeth, Julius Caesar, The Tempest, The Two Gentlemen Of Verona, and Intimate Letters with the Australian Chamber Orchestra. Peter was Associate Director at Melbourne Theatre Company from 2007–10, and has directed for several other companies.