Calibre returns

The 2024 Calibre Essay Prize returns bigger and better than ever. Calibre opened as this issue went to print and this year it is worth a total of $10,000 with three prizes on offer: a $5,000 first prize, $3,000 second prize, and $2,000 third prize. All three winning essays will appear in print and online in ABR in 2024.

The Prize is open to all essayists writing in English around the world. We welcome essays of between 2,000 and 5,000 words on any subject and written in any style: personal or political, literary or speculative, traditional or experimental.

Entries close at midnight on 22 January and the judges this year are ABR Deputy Editor Amy Baillieu and critics and past ABR Fellows Shannon Burns and Beejay Silcox. Burns is the author of a memoir, Childhood (Text Publishing, 2022) and Silcox is the artistic director of the Canberra Writers Festival.

ABR thanks founding Patrons Peter McLennan and Mary-Ruth Sindrey for their continuing support for the Calibre Essay Prize.

Porter Prize

Judging is now underway for the 2024 Peter Porter Poetry Prize, a task ably undertaken by Lachlan Brown, Dan Disney (last year’s winner), and Felicity Plunkett. We look forward to publishing the five shortlisted poems in our January-February issue and to revealing the winner at a ceremony in January. Keep an eye on our website for more information and event details in coming months.

Alex Skovron wins the 2023 Patrick White Award

Past Peter Porter Poetry Prize winner (try repeating that five times fast) Alex Skovron has won this year’s $20,000 Patrick White Award for his achievements as a writer of poetry and fiction.

On winning the award Skovron commented:

This wonderful surprise has come at something of a milestone moment in my life, on the heels of my seventy-fifth birthday, and to receive the Award means a great deal to me – both as a recognition of my work to date, and as further encouragement towards what I still hope to achieve. Above all, I feel honoured to be joining such an impressive cohort of past winners, many of whose stories and poems I’ve read and admired.

Patrick White established the annual literary award using the proceeds from his 1973 Nobel Prize for Literature and it is presented by Perpetual to authors who have ‘made an ongoing contribution to Australian literature but may not have received adequate recognition’.

Skovron will be officially honoured for his contribution to Australian literature at the Patrick White Literary Award celebration at Readings State Library Victoria, at 6pm on 15 November 2023.

David Harold Tribe Poetry Award

Last month’s Indigenous issue featured a review by Wiradjuri poet Associate Professor Jeanine Leane of Edenglassie by Melissa Lucashenko. Leane has now been announced as the winner of the 2023 David Harold Tribe Poetry Award at the University of Sydney. With a prize of $20,000, the David Harold Tribe Poetry Award is the richest poetry prize in Australia for an original unpublished poem.

Judith Beveridge wins poetry prize

Advances was tickled pink to see it had a role in Judith Beveridge’s win of the $10,000 Australian Catholic University Prize for Poetry. Beveridge’s poem ‘Two Houses’ was inspired by the first house she shared with her husband, fellow poet Stephen Edgar. In her response to the prize news, Beveridge recalled that she had met Edgar one year before moving into the house in a lunch arranged to discuss her review of Edgar’s book in ABR. So reviewing can bring people together, after all.

ABR on tour

As this issue goes to print ABR Editor Peter Rose and Development Manager Christopher Menz are enjoying a European autumn as part of ABR’s 2023 Vienna Tour, presented in association with Academy Travel. Those on the twelve-day tour are exploring the city in depth, attending performances and following in the footsteps of Mozart and Beethoven, Otto Wagner and Gustav Klimt. The tour also ventures into the surrounding countryside with a cruise down the Danube to the beautiful Wachau Valley and on to Bratislava. Advances couldn’t possibly comment on rumours that staff remaining in the office during the European tour are making plans to temporarily relocate to a tropical island soon to balance things out.

Those who want to join in the fun without heading overseas may be interested in ABR’s legendary Adelaide Festival Tour. Following on from successful tours in 2022 and 2023, ABR and Academy Travel will be hosting another cultural tour to Adelaide to coincide with Adelaide Writers’ Week and the best of the 2024 Adelaide Festival. Through ABR you will enjoy special access to Writers’ Week events and some of the featured writers. Academy Travel is the only travel company to be a partner sponsor of the Adelaide Festival, guaranteeing access to excellent tickets and the opportunity to meet artists and directors.

Visit Academy Travel’s website for more information, or to secure your spot! https://academytravel.com.au/adelaide-festival-writers-week-tour-abr-march-2024

Gift offer

For those wanting to avoid the Christmas shopping stress, look no further than an ABR gift subscription. Now, for a limited time, we invite you to give a gift subscription of the print edition to a friend at the special rate of $90 per year, a saving of $10 of the normal rate. (This package includes full online access.) Alternatively, give the online edition for just $60, a saving of twenty-five per cent off the normal price.

ABR subscribers also receive discounted entry in our many literary prizes and competitions, and are eligible for giveaways of film, concert, and theatre tickets.

Bring someone special into the fold of Australian Book Review – the nation’s foremost magazine of literary review and comment.

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Rubinstein in Coleraine

Dear Editor,

Ian Britain’s review of Angus Trumble’s biography (ABR, September 2023) omits any mention of Helena Rubinstein’s time in Coleraine in western Victoria.

Patrick Hockey (online comment)

Ouch!

Dear Editor,

Ouch! I’m surprised that Danielle Clode, in her review of Big Meg by Tim Flannery and Emma Flannery (ABR, October 2023), did not disclose her professional collaborations with John Long.

Vicki Flannery (online comment)

Danielle Clode replies:

My work as a science writer with some shared interests in fossils and museums often intersects with that of Tim Flannery and John Long, both of whom I regard as role models for their contributions to popular science writing. I have reviewed Flannery’s books, taught his work in writing classes, and chaired/hosted his sessions at festivals and museums. In 2021, I published a biography of Long for younger readers, so naturally I was struck by the different accounts of the megalodon tooth discovery.

From time to time, both Flannery and Long have reviewed sections of my own books as subject matter experts. It is expected that reviewers have some level of knowledge or expertise about the authors or books they review, something that does not require disclosure. All my reviews are entirely my own opinion. Obviously, I did not involve Long or anyone else in this review.

Professorial pile-on

Dear Editor,

What a pile-on of professors in the Letters page (ABR, September 2023). Clare Wright dares to suggest that historians might stick to history rather than prophecy, so she is attacked not only there but also by Professor James Curran, who calls her a ‘Stanner in reverse’ and implies that she is some kind of intellectual failure. Who is being silenced here? You did not have to be a professor to see that winning the referendum would be an uphill battle, given the lack of bipartisan support and the shameless lying of federal Opposition leaders. The professoriate may see itself as aloof from the political struggle currently engaging many Voice supporters. It may be happy saying ‘I told you so!’ if the referendum fails. But it doesn’t help anyone.

Susan Lever

Megalodon, the famed prehistoric shark, is the stuff of legends. Their huge teeth – as big as the palm of a hand – fuel unquenchable rumours of their continued survival, a plethora of implausible YouTube videos, and the devoted fascination of a legion of children.

Megalodon presents as a formidable prehistoric predator of epic proportions. But just how big was it? Like the fish that got away, giant creatures get bigger and bigger with the telling, leading to frequent exaggeration and misrepresentation, even in the driest scientific accounts.

The title of Big Meg: The story of the largest and most mysterious predator that ever lived plays right into this Meg-mythology. While hyperbole may be an effective marketing tool, in this case the subtitle is simply wrong. Even the largest estimates of megalodon (twenty metres long and fifty tonnes) are on a par with sizes reported for modern whale sharks or prehistoric marine reptiles such as Kronosaurus and slightly smaller than either modern sperm whales or prehistoric Livytan sperm whales. Megalodon would be dwarfed by the modern blue whale, which reaches a maximum of thirty metres long and two hundred tonnes. All of these are predators – animals which feed on other animals. Such looseness with the truth casts a disturbing pall over the reliability of what should be a factual, science-based book.

When Richard Flanagan left school, he tells us early in Question 7, he worked as a chainman or surveyor’s labourer, ‘a job centuries old set to vanish only a few years later with the advent of digital technology’. Chainmen would have followed the surveyors who mapped Van Diemen’s Land and the rest of the British Empire; their task was to ‘drag the twenty-two-yard chain with its hundred links with which the world was measured’. The clanking surveyor’s measure evokes convict chains, and it demonstrates one of the principles at the heart of this book: that the past lives and redounds in the present. The chainman is a descendant of convicts, and he insists that ‘there was no straight line of history. There was only a circle.’

With My Grandfather’s Clock: Four centuries of a British-Australian family, historian Graeme Davison has offered his readers and bequeathed to his grandchildren a very special book, at once genealogy, travelogue, memoir, broad social history, and a meditation on the sources of personal identity. It is a book to be treasured.

The pursuit of ancestry is a narrative quest, aided by family memory, private papers, public records, and now an ever-expanding archive of digital sources and online data sets, as well as DNA testing. But as sociologist Eviatar Zerubavel has noted: ‘Rather than simply passively documenting who our ancestors were, [genealogies] are the narratives we construct to actually make them our ancestors.’ Davison’s quest takes him way back to the wild Scottish-English border country of the seventeenth century, where he finds unlikely but not unwelcome forebears in the Davidsons, an unruly bunch of ‘reivers’, smallholders who were also cattle thieves and sometime murderers.

He describes a journey beginning in frontier warfare and dispossession in the Scottish Lowlands. But as centuries passed, the Davisons, as they were increasingly known, moved south of the border and transformed over generations into more recognisable family relations: respectable tradespeople, ‘handworkers’, a labour aristocracy that had converted to Methodism, temperance, with a commitment to harmony between masters and men and self-discipline. There was ‘something uptight as well as upright’ about the Davisons, their best-known descendant observes wryly. ‘Methodism and migration turned us into the quiet, respectable folk I knew.’

The Treaty of Waitangi – in Māori, te Tiriti o Waitangi – has in New Zealand, during the past forty years, acquired a degree of significance in relations between the state and iwi and hapū (tribal groups). A permanent commission of inquiry, the Waitangi Tribunal, is empowered to report on claims by Māori that acts or omissions of the state have been or are contrary to the principles of the Treaty and have had prejudicial consequences.

The Treaty was first signed on 6 February 1840 in the far north, and eventually by more than five hundred chiefs as far south as Foveaux Strait, although the leaders of some major iwi did not sign. All but thirty-nine signed the Māori text.

In Māori, by the first article the chiefs gave to Queen Victoria ‘te Kawanatanga katoa o o ratou wenua’, while the second article guaranteed to the chiefs, tribes, and all Māori ‘te tino rangatiratanga o o ratou wenua o ratou kainga me o ratou taonga katoa’. These have been authoritatively translated as ‘the complete government over their land’ and as ‘the unqualified exercise of their chieftainship over their lands, villages and all their treasures’.

Tamryn Bennett’s Icaros and Willo Drummond’s Moon Wrasse both use the natural as their central motif. Nature has of course always been a font of inspiration for poets. These two poets draw from that font in vastly different ways. Bennett’s title refers to a form of South American song that is chanted during rituals of cleansing and healing that involve plants. Drummond’s refers to a hermaphroditic fish, the moon wrasse, which acts as a symbol of transformation.

These compelling poets approach their form in different ways. In Icaros, Bennett’s second book, the visual quality is emphasised while Moon Wrasse, Drummond’s début, favours the literary. Icaros’s stanzas are draped across the pages, crawling in places across double-page spreads with the white space filled in with art by Jacqueline Cavallaro. Some include purely onomatopoeic couplets such as ‘chhh chhh chh chhh / shhh shhh shhhh shhh’ as in ‘serpent scales the gully’. Drummond, on the other hand, goes to lengths to emphasise the poetry’s literary quality, sometimes setting words in italics to indicate a borrowed line, such as ‘suddenly stops the breath’, a line from that famous naturalist Mary Oliver’s A Poetry Handbook (1994), in ‘Up to our knees in it’. In fact, Drummond’s work is so literary that she has chosen to include nine pages of notes as the book’s appendix. This may be a remnant of the works’ origins in research projects.

In 1981, Terence Kilmartin’s revision of C.K. Scott Moncrieff’s 1920s English translation of Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu was published. Against Kilmartin’s wishes, the new edition retained the unfortunate title of Remembrance of Things Past, but in all other respects the Kilmartin version significantly corrected and enhanced the Moncrieff translation.¹ This became my Proust, and I have remained loyal to it.

Every reader of Proust acquires their own Proust – not surprisingly, for À la recherche is about everything. As for the possessive relationship, given that reading is among the most intimate of human activities, after three thousand pages one cannot emerge unconnected from this great book. It is a book that can actually save lives. As a young man, the brilliant theoretical physicist Robert Oppenheimer was going through a very dark patch. It was Proust’s great novel that pulled him out of the mire.

Only rarely does a book of political philosophy inspire a media commotion. Well, at least a small stir – glowing reviews in leading British newspapers, BBC interviews, a speech at the Royal Academy of Arts, praise from the archbishop of Canterbury. Daniel Chandler, LSE economist and philosopher, is the thinker of the moment.

Chandler’s achievement is to take the work of American liberal philosopher John Rawls (1921–2002) and apply the lessons to contemporary British politics. Chandler’s Free and Equal offers a manifesto for change shaped by the ideal of a fair society. Clearly expressed and strongly argued, the book opens with an exposition of political ideas stretching back to the 1970s and closes just a few chapters later with policy proposals for a universal basic income, an end to private schools, and higher taxes to support a more equal society.

In 1971, Rawls published A Theory of Justice, his ambitious project to put fairness, equality, and individual rights at the centre of democratic politics. The Rawls ‘original position’ began with a simple thought experiment inviting readers to imagine a society in which they must choose the rules of political and economic life while ignorant of their own gender, abilities, or place in that society. The resulting social contract, Rawls argued, would require institutions to ensure that opportunities are shared equally, with support for those who miss out. Talents are not distributed equally, nor are markets fair. Policy should encourage those who prosper to help those who do not.

Anyone who is old enough, and had their primary schooling in Australia, would know by heart the lines

I love a sunburnt country,
A land of sweeping plains,
Of ragged mountain ranges,
Of droughts and flooding rains

from the poem ‘My Country’, by Dorothea Mackellar. At a time of climate crisis, when the inhabitants of that country are more apprehensive than ever about sunburn, droughts, and flooding rains, we are also involved in a scarifying national debate about who has the right to call this place ‘my country’ and to love it, a debate highlighted by the referendum on an Indigenous Voice to Parliament. So it may not be the ideal time to appreciate the fame that this poem brought to the young Sydney woman who wrote it. Published first in 1908, it reappeared in numerous anthologies over the following period of the Great War, and spoke to the patriotic sentiments that flourished at the time, reaching the status of something like a national anthem. Nevertheless, it is that poem, and that fame, which constitute Dorothea Mackellar’s claim to our attention today.

Bruce Dowding was born in 1914 into a middle-class family in the south-eastern suburbs of Melbourne. He won scholarships to private schools, including Wesley College, where he taught French during his Arts degree at the University of Melbourne. In January 1938, he departed to France on a travelling scholarship, guaranteed a position on the staff at Wesley on his return.

The riveting story of the young man’s life in France and why he never made the trip home is told by Bruce’s nephew Peter Dowding and co-author Ken Spillman. Many ABR readers will recall Peter Dowding as the Labor premier of Western Australia for two difficult years (1988–90) between Brian Burke and Carmen Lawrence. His uncle’s story is a lifelong obsession.

Evidently a charming young man, Dowding relished Parisian life and its romances and kept finding excuses not to return to Melbourne. Once war broke out, he felt impelled to participate, joining the British Army as an interpreter. His battalion surrendered within days in May 1940, but he managed to escape his internment camp south of Paris and fled south. There foreign intern-ees were able to use a lax parole system to move freely between Marseille, Perpignan, and Toulouse.

Near the end of this biography of Frank Moorhouse, author Catharine Lumby tells a story that will strike retrospective fear into the heart of any male reader who has ever climbed a tree. Watching an outdoor ceremony in which a cohort of Cub Scouts was being initiated into the Boy Scout troop to which he belonged himself, and having climbed a tree to get a better view, the young Moorhouse ‘slipped, and he slid a couple of metres down the trunk of the tree with his legs wrapped around it. He came to rest on a jagged branch, his crotch caught in the fork.’

The resulting injuries to his genitalia, sustained while watching a ritual initiation into masculinity, were serious enough to require hospitalisation, stitches, and at least a month of bedridden recuperation. As an adult, Moorhouse regarded this accident as a turning point in the formation of his personality and the direction of his life: ‘Moorhouse often speculated about whether the event was, in Freudian terms, the fulfilment of an unconscious wish or whether it was an incident he later chose to reinterpret as a touchstone for his own ambivalence about gender. Certainly, it became bound up with his relationship to the bush …’ Looking back from the vantage point of his mid-seventies, Moorhouse wrote of this accident ‘I have experienced an extraordinary incident with primeval overlays with great import for me … It is about landscape bonding – what we use landscape for – and about the amazing intricacies and workings of the mind as it makes a “self”.’

For over a decade, Naomi Klein – the avowedly left-wing Canadian journalist and activist, best known for her first and third books, No Logo: Taking aim at the brand bullies (1999) and The Shock Doctrine: The rise of disaster capitalism (2007) – has been ‘chronically confused’ for ‘the other Naomi’, American writer Naomi Wolf, who first made her name with the feminist best seller The Beauty Myth (1990). Across that period, Klein’s ‘big-haired doppelganger’ has morphed into ‘one of the most effective creators and disseminators of misinformation and disinformation’ of recent times, a development that has led some to remark that Wolf is in fact a ‘doppelganger of her former self’.

In Technofeudalism: What killed capitalism, Yanis Varoufakis wrestles with questions which are giddying in their significance. Do the profound changes we see taking place around us now, in our digital age, amount to a fundamentally new form of society? If so, what kind of society is it? And what, if anything, should we do about it?

As the title of his work suggests, Varoufakis writes within a Marxist tradition and intellectual framework. He believes that capitalism itself is kaput. It has been ‘superseded’ not by communism, as Karl Marx prophesied, but by technofeudalism, a ‘far, far uglier social reality’ than capitalism.

Varoufakis writes ‘to explain my thinking in a book if for no other reason than to give friends and foes outraged by my theory a chance to disparage it properly having perused it in full’. The humility and sense of irony evident here are characteristic, as is the trace of courage. Appealingly, Varoufakis does not claim to be advancing some revelation of economic or technological science, and nor does he ignore the need to connect rhetorically and experientially with his readers, or shrink from offering, in good faith, his assessment of contemporary operations of power.

Our world can best be understood now as a technofeudal one, he argues, because those who own the server cloud, the ‘cloudalists’, have become more wealthy and powerful, from rent, than those who own and profit from capital, from business: ‘It is this fundamental fact – that we have entered a socio-economic system powered not by profit but by rent – that demands we use a new term to describe it.’

This fascinating and frustrating volume is really three books in one: a compilation of revelatory portraits of seven modern economic crises; a beautiful essay on language, literature, and finance; and an effort to draw lessons from the seven calamities. Of the three books, two are brilliant, one less so.

Heroes and anti-heroes loom large in each of the economic crises. Harold James’s descriptions are spiced with unsympathetic portrayals of figures such as Woodrow Wilson, Alan Greenspan, Larry Summers, Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman, Sir Robert Peel, and Napoleon’s nephew, Louis Napoleon, whom German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck called ‘a sphinx without a riddle’.

James evokes well the trauma of the crises. During World War I shortages in Germany, turnips were a common substitute for bread and other staples; the harsh winter of 1916–17 was known as the ‘turnip winter’. Hospital staff left graphic accounts of how starving patients could not be let outside ‘because they would seize unripe fruit, chestnuts, even grass and weeds, in order to attempt to satisfy an unbearable, impossible hunger’. James also captures the calamitous impact of German inflation after World War I, during which the mark fell to one trillionth of its pre-war value.

One striking feature of Nicholas Jose’s fine new novel is its principled versatility. Set in multiple locations – Adelaide, Washington, DC, East Timor – and introducing alternative narrative voices, Jose evokes a world of complex intersections comprising many different angles and viewpoints. As a former diplomat himself, he writes with expert knowledge of a variety of professional and personal environments. His novel ranges across the ‘loyalties and long memories’ of lives rooted in Adelaide, along with some of the city’s ‘dunderhead complacencies’, while also presenting an insider’s view of diplomatic exchanges in Washington, DC and Canberra.

The scenes set in East Timor do seem a bit more of a stretch, but it is here that the idealist tendencies of Jose’s central character, Jake Treweek, are put to their fullest test. As a ‘defence liaison’ and East Timor specialist working for Australian intelligence, Jake’s task is to advise on the status and prospects of the East Timorese struggle for rights of self-determination. Indonesian military forces are their enemy, backed by American political and economic interests that are, much to Jake’s disgust, covertly supported by Australia. He comes to find his empathy with the East Timorese people enhanced and complicated by his romantic feelings for Elisa, a long-time leader in the independence movement, who says she is ‘singing what the sea sang to her’.

Transformation is one thing. Conversion is another. With its Latin roots con (with or together) and vertere (to turn or bend), conversion is haunted by a sense of coercion, the imposition of one will over another. In Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway, conversion comes in the form of Clarissa Dalloway’s daughter’s evangelistic tutor, Doris Kilman, the violence of colonialism, and brutish attempts by psychologist Sir William Bradshaw to instil ‘a sense of proportion’ into his vulnerable patients. Sir William gets what he wants. He ‘shuts people up’ under the auspices of ‘the twin goddesses of conversion and proportion’. Converting, for Woolf, means ‘to override opposition’.

Amanda Lohrey’s ninth novel, The Conversion, is filled with intrusions, insistence, and ghosts. An opulent three-panelled, stained-glass window shapes the light and dreams that fall into the deconsecrated church at the novel’s centre, spectres hover, haunt, and flit.

When Zoe and Nick first visit the church, a snake rustles across its steps. Looking up past plaited brass and costly glass, they watch black cockatoos flock around macrocarpa pines, ‘a good omen’. Nick is keen to evade ‘emotional and spiritual laziness’. A therapist, he has written a thesis on the body’s relationship to the space around it. His renovation projects express ‘uncompromising optimism’ and unwillingness to settle for ‘the make-do and mediocre’, and the church promises to release him from a sense of becoming ‘stale and complacent’. He doesn’t feel, as Zoe does, its mood of ‘melancholy abandonment’. Gutted faith, glass, and augury become motifs as Zoe’s life is converted.

When the London theatres closed due to plague in the late 1590s, a still-young William Shakespeare composed and published ‘Venus and Adonis’, a poem about unrequited love, lust, and devotion to beauty. Shakespeare evokes a desire to touch, to kiss, to smell, to taste, to share breath. Christos Tsiolkas’s book 7½ (2021), written and published under similar circumstances, embodies some of this Shakespearean spirit, but his conception of beauty extends to a fuller range of sensual experience, accommodating everything that is human and alive – the stench as well as the perfume – while rejecting whatever seeks to diminish beauty and liveliness. It is the work of a writer who is in love with this world, despite its cruelties. The In-Between mirrors and extends that sensibility.

‘Perry is going on a date. The word itself strikes him as ridiculous, inappropriate for a man of his age. But if he were not to call it a date, then what the hell was it?’ So begins a novel of love, lust, and courage in the wake of rejection and betrayal. At first, we don’t know why or how Perry lost his former lover, Gerard, but we are informed that the split ‘resulted in the unexpected pain that has wearied him over the last few years’. Perry is trying to emerge from paralysis, to seek out connection in post-pandemic Melbourne. He has been bruised, almost destroyed, but he is willing to try again. That is why he is going to dinner with a man he has never met.

Early in Joel Deane’s third novel, the point of view shifts from the first to the third person as the narrator, Patrick ‘Pin’ Pinnock, reflects on a moment in boyhood, standing atop a diving board at night:

He looks down and sees the white frame of the rectangular pool, but everything inside the white frame is black. The darkness within the frame is his past and future, he thinks, and the diving board is his present. To make the leap from one to the other, therefore, is an act of faith.

This ‘act of faith,’ however, suggests agency, control – a capacity to choose, from the platform of the present, to revisit the past or traverse the future despite not knowing what one will find. Deane’s protagonist lacks such agency. Instead, it is his present that is blackest. The question is to what degree the traumas that ravage him offset Pin’s reprehensible behaviour.

In her essay ‘The Irish Woman Poet’, Eavan Boland (herself considered Ireland’s greatest female poet) noted that ‘The life of the Irish woman – the ordinary lived life – was both invisible and, when it became visible, was considered inappropriate as a theme for Irish poetry.’ The only place within poetry for an Irish woman, history seemed to insist, was as either muse or myth. Any hint of her as a flesh-and-blood creature was effectively erased.

Irish writer Anne Enright’s eighth novel, The Wren, The Wren, is a complex and compelling expansion on Boland’s thesis. Possibly Enright’s best work since her Booker Prize-winning The Gathering (2007), The Wren, The Wren encapsulates the slow but steady evolution of a family and, by extension, a nation over the course of three generations. Enright’s composition of the novel, its weaving back and forth between generations of the McDaragh family, is fluent and intricate, the full significance of the novel only revealing itself when its last words – ‘If we are very lucky, the bird will always be the bird’ – have been placed.

Three new novels from Allen & Unwin explore gender power relations – with mixed results. In Ellie Marney’s Some Shall Break ($24.99 pb, 382 pp), a young woman helps law enforcement hunt a serial killer who is kidnapping and raping young women. Garth Nix’s latest offers interesting parallels, though The Sinister Booksellers of Bath ($24.99 pb 330 pp) includes plenty of fantasy elements to vary the formula. Meanwhile, Kate J. Armstrong’s Nightbirds ($24.99 pb, 462 pp) follows three different women who are navigating magical, political, and romantic intrigues.

In Some Shall Break, Marney returns to the traumatised protagonist of None Shall Sleep (2020), nineteen-year-old Emma Lewis, a survivor and now hunter of serial killers, who is called in to help with a case that echoes her own, giving her another opportunity to team up with former partner, now FBI agent in training, Travis Bell. In theory, her experiences lend her insight into the killer’s mind, and Marney’s set-up promises a tense cat-and-mouse chase. In practice, the tropes come thick and fast, and the investigation plods between dull travel sequences, clues that should have been immediately apparent to even a casual observer, and Emma’s blindingly obvious contributions. The ineptitude of law enforcement borders on farce; it takes over a hundred pages for someone to point out that all the victims look like Emma.

Emma’s trump card is her connection to yet another serial killer, the teenaged Simon Gutmunsson, who saved her life in the previous book. Simon is all cheap charm and insufferable undergrad English major, and his observations are as banal as Emma’s, such as an early suggestion that posing dead women in gutters might hint at the killer’s attitude towards women. No Hannibal Lecter, he.

Journalist Peter Rees’s biography of Tim Fischer was originally published by Allen & Unwin in 2001 with the title The Boy from Boree Creek. Reviewing the volume in this magazine, fellow journalist Shaun Carney had many kind words for Fischer, but said that the book was ‘either a lesson in the wonders of our democracy or a cautionary tale demonstrating the mediocrity of our public figures’ (ABR, June 2001). The subject was a ‘decent, determined, and hardworking person’, Carney wrote, but one who left the National Party in ‘a seemingly permanent existential crisis’.

The updated edition, with the new title I Am Tim: Life, politics and beyond, necessarily tells the story of a more complete life, including a moving account of Fischer’s stoicism in the face of cancer and declining health. The original material has been reorganised and trimmed to furnish a less teleological, and perhaps more writerly, product for Melbourne University Publishing. (Fischer’s love of trains still features prominently, of course.)

Recently, mining giant Rio Tinto disturbed another ancient rock shelter in Australia’s Pilbara during a routine blast designed to ‘mimic’ the natural environment. This time, the company announced its transgression before it hit the headlines, presumably to avoid the kind of public outrage it faced after the Juukan Gorge incident in May 2020. What compelled Rio Tinto to admit wrongdoing, and to what effect? Does this pre-emptive mea culpa signal a new corporate sensitivity to Aboriginal culture and heritage, or is it a strategy to placate the Australian public so mining can continue? Analysing the factors that both enable and constrain mining on Indigenous peoples’ lands is the focus of Ciaran O’Faircheallaigh’s book Indigenous Peoples and Mining: A global perspective.

Throughout history, the alignment between state power and industrial capital has seen mining systematically subjugate Indigenous peoples’ rights and interests. It is against this seemingly immovable backdrop that O’Faircheallaigh (Professor of Politics and Public Policy at Griffith University) describes the complex interactional dynamics that unfold between mining and Indigenous peoples, in different times and places. He asks why mining continues to be prioritised. Why, despite Indigenous peoples’ ongoing efforts to assert rights, does mining command such enormous structural power? And why do some groups succeed in containing mining and securing benefits while others fail, in similar circumstances?

As one of Britain’s most indefatigable and widely read left-wing columnists, Polly Toynbee has weathered the ire of the right for over fifty years. In fact, controversy has never seemed to bother her. She has never felt the need to justify herself, and every chant of ‘champagne socialist’ has seemed only to deepen her resolve to champion causes of the disadvantaged.

An Uneasy Inheritance: My family and other radicals is inflected by her politics but is also an old-fashioned memoir in the sense of a detached survey of an entire family written for posterity’s sake. It is just one in a long tradition of memoirs from the Toynbees, an upper-middle-class progressive family with aristocratic connections. Toynbee focuses far more on her ancestors and family than herself, and never writes about herself for long without veering into her comfort zone of political commentary.

Regular readers of Toynbee’s Guardian columns will relish her shrewd, vituperative attacks on hypocritical Tories who can ‘bathe in champagne without qualms because life on their moral low ground is easy on the conscience’. Whether or not you agree, no one would doubt the sincerity of Toynbee’s socialism nor the depth of her compassion for the under-privileged.

In 1985, five (or four, depending on the source) Australian poets went on a sixteen-city reading tour of the United States and Canada. Π.O. was one of them. Originally titled ‘The Dirty T-Shirt Tour’, The Tour is ostensibly Π.O.’s diary of that trip, the dirty T-shirt standing for the narrator’s ‘difference’: his migrant, working-class background; his flouting of social conventions; his ‘performance poet’ status. While the other poets are (repeatedly) washing and ironing in their rooms, he is out walking the streets, making astute observations, meeting interesting people. Π.O. names the well-known poets and lesser entities he befriends and the famous poets he doesn’t meet – the disreputable T-shirt given as one reason for his exclusion – but he omits the identities of the poets on the tour and the tour organisers.

I can hear Π.O.’s voice clearly from the outset (he inspires me to colloquialisms, parentheses, dashes, slashes, exclamations): his deliberate Greco-Aussie intonation, his conversational voice, the emphases, and rising hysteria, or is it performed rage? Π.O. is both poet and protagonist, performer, and public persona. It is wise to remember that the private person, whom the reader does not know, may be different to the ‘I’ narrator as represented in the pages of The Tour.

Diane Stubbings is a writer and critic based in Melbourne. Her plays have been shortlisted for a number of Australian and international awards, and staged in Sydney, Melbourne and New Zealand. She has written for Australian Book Review, The Australian, The Canberra Times, and the Sydney Review of Books. Her study of Irish Modernism was published by Palgrave.

We woke early that morning as the sun lit up the two shared bedrooms, three of us in each one. The thin, printed cotton curtains were no match for that kind of light. We were eighteen years old. It was the first weekend of our first semester at university, and we had come to the beach house armed with our readers and highlighters.

After breakfast we arranged our readers on the wide front deck. Total War in Europe, Torts, Introduction to Biology, French Cinema, Social Work Theory and Practice 1. Reams of printed paper bound into packages of knowledge, which we believed would lead us to careers. With the deferred debt, it seemed like university was free.

We had to get out of the house before we could study. We left our mobile phones at the beach house because everyone we wanted to talk to was right there. We walked slowly to the beach, up the steep gravel road, black wattle and silver banksia lining the way. Branches stretched out into a blazing day. We passed the house at the top of the hill which overlooked the beach.

‘That house is going to be demolished,’ one of us said, the one whose father owned the beach house we were staying at. The house on the hill was a beautiful, white, rambling weatherboard. To knock it down and build something bigger, with a tennis court apparently, was hard to fathom. We would never knock down something we managed to own, we were sure of that.

Down the sandy slopes to the empty beach, dry, crackling shrubs underfoot. The waves rose and collapsed like breath, unfaltering. We stepped into the water and the salt stung our shaved legs. Seaweed looped around our feet and toes. It was too fresh to get right in.

A book review is a review of a book. This sounds obvious enough but can put the reviewer in a position they would not wish to be in as a more casual reader: that of not just reading a book’s poems, but also feeling a need to attend to the rest of the book – that is, the book’s paratexts.

Like to the Lark, the follow-up to Stuart Barnes’s Glasshouses (2016), includes one hundred pages of poems. It begins with six endorsements and four epigraphs, and concludes with two sections of notes: one of five pages, one of two, plus two-and-a-bit pages of acknowledgments and thank-yous. It also includes three named sections. There are no fewer than sixteen blank pages after the poetry.

Where does the impetus, or model, for all this extra-poetical prose, this volume thickening, come from – and who is it for? Academia is one answer to the first question; America, another. Even well-established writers in the United States lard their books with praise. I can’t convince myself that readers need or want it. As for reviewers – and prize judges – I think they want to make up their own minds.

In my ignorance, I had thought of the lark as being English, or European. It largely is, but the singing bush lark (or Horsfield’s bush lark, after the American naturalist who first described it, in 1821, in Java) is native to Australia (and New Guinea and some islands of Indonesia). I don’t know what constitutes local lark courting ritual, but I want to be hit by the poems themselves pretty quickly.

In Marion May Campbell’s poem ‘in the storeroom,’ which appears in Roland Leach’s anthology Cuttlefish, she writes that ‘poems are letters that go astray’ – a whimsical yet fitting definition of the kind of poetry that appears in this collection. In these digital times, there is something ceremonial about a letter: a personal communication which must be opened and held; possibly shared, intentionally or otherwise. The poems in this collection have a tight focus; each is confined to a single page. They are often personal, poems of memory and family, beginning with reminiscence and hinged with sharp insight. They may be poems about the natural world, thoughtful and observant like missives from a traveller.

The collection has some passionate poems and one quite electric protest poem by Jan Teagle Kapetas, objecting to the brutal and contested incarceration of Indigenous adolescents – a currently unresolved issue in Western Australia – but for the most part these are gentle poems, seldom formally challenging, drawn from the strong community of poets in Western Australia, some of whom also organise readings and publications. Cuttlefish, with its pliable and tactile cover, is an example of fine local initiative in terms of content and production. It is published by Sunline Press, which was established by Roland Leach.

Pitt Street Poetry is a fine and well-established poetry publisher. However, its 101 Poets series is a somewhat puzzling phenomenon. It was started in 2016 and, according to the publisher’s website, aimed to be ‘a new series of selected poems … bring[ing] together the best work of Australia’s leading poets as collectable, definitive editions’. Yet, in eight years, it has only included volumes by John Foulcher, Anthony Lawrence, Geoff Page, and Ron Pretty. These are established figures, but they do not constitute a broadly representative sample of Australia’s leading contemporary poets.

Geoff Page’s 101 Poems does not aim to be definitive either, only selecting from seven of his books – those published in the eleven years between 2011 and 2019 – along with some newer poetry. The relatively limited period covered by the volume may be explained by Page’s publication in 2013 of a New Selected Poems with Puncher & Wattmann. Since 2011, he has written verse novels and poetic biographies as well as shorter free-verse poems. Sensibly, this 101 Poems confines itself to shorter works, along with brief selections from 1953, an unorthodox verse novel composed of linked but more-or-less discrete poems suitable for extracting from their original context.

My edition of the Oxford English Dictionary (1979) defines ‘dictionary’ in two ways: ‘1. A book dealing with the individual words of a language … so as to set forth their orthography, pronunciation, signification and use … arranged, in some stated order, now, in most languages, alphabetical …’; ‘2. By extension: A book of information or reference on any subject or branch of knowledge, the items of which are arranged in alphabetical order …: as a Dictionary of Architecture, Biography, Geography … etc.’

With some inventive twists, Sarah Ogilvie’s book is in effect a dictionary in the second sense of a dictionary in the first – specifically, a biographical dictionary arranged in A-Z order, of the behind-the-scene makers of the original edition of the OED (1884–1928): the editors, the specialist advisers, and, most ‘unsung’ up to now, as she terms them, those thousands of contributors of individual words and their sources among the general public across the English-speaking world. The chief twist is that, except in one instance: ‘Y for Yonge, Charlotte …’, it’s not their names that are marshalled in alphabetical order but a motley range of other categories, including their places of origin, their professions, their sexual proclivities and other psychological quirks, their political affiliations, their family or social connections, and their hobbies – of which word-collecting and -sourcing was only one.

It took me years to gather enough courage to introduce myself. Finally, deep into the Covid lockdown and a few months after receiving an award for my first collection of poems, I began my correspondence with Charles Simic by sending him an email to share the news, as if he were a family member, the one who would understand. He replied warmly, kindly, and in Serbian: ‘Draga Jelena …’

Charles Dusan Simic, a Yugoslavian-born American poet, essayist, and translator, died on 9 January 2023 in the United States, the country that was home to him from the age of fifteen. His other home, or a memory of it, would remain a constant presence throughout his literary life.

Man-Made: How the bias of the past is being built into the future recounts findings from a six-year ‘mission’ to ‘identify the villains’ in the world of Artificial Intelligence (AI). Uncovering the history and future of AI through a feminist lens, Tracey Spicer puts the conservatism at the heart of these oft-touted ‘revolutionary technologies’ on full display. Spicer contextualises AI’s current omnipresence in a world ruled by money, the military, and men. Interlacing an impressive range of vignettes, Man-Made introduces the reader to everything from AI’s origins in women’s weaving, to racist soap dispensers, to Sexbots, to gaming, to driverless cars, to childcare robots, to the end of humanity.

We begin the journey by unpicking the myth of the so-called ‘Founding Fathers’ of AI. The name given to the group of men who attended a conference at Dartmouth in 1956, where the term ‘artificial intelligence’ was coined. Spicer rebukes the conference’s lack of diversity – gendered, intersectional, interdisciplinary – and its overblown status as the beginning of AI as we know it. Although contributions were made, these ‘fathers’ were no more the first to discover AI than Captain Cook was the first to discover Australia. The privileged position occupied by this event and these men reflects a common theme in technology and science narratives where innovations are portrayed as the result of an individual man’s genius.

It was a busy day in February. I was in my office at Monash University, squeezing in some emails with one hand and a quick bite of lunch with the other. Yeah, a typical day for an academic. That’s when I came across an email sent to me by a PhD student from another Australian university who wanted to know about a research paper I had written. They sent me the title of the paper, the abstract, and the author list.

Usually, this would prompt a straightforward reply. I would find the paper and share the PDF with them. This time, I paused. Sandwich mid-air and squinting at the screen, I tried to make sense of the details on my laptop. Sure, it’s not uncommon for academics to become confused about which of our papers appeared in which journal or conference, or when it was published. On this occasion, I almost began to question my sanity. When had I written the paper? More to the point, had I written it? After a few minutes of analysis, I concluded that it was a paper I definitely might have written. In hindsight, it was a paper I should have written. But I had not written it. ChatGPT had made up the title, the author list of people I had previously co-authored with, and a rather well-written abstract, and it had recommended this non-existent research paper to the PhD student.

This was my first brush with ChatGPT.

ChatGPT is an intelligent chatbot that answers queries, explains things, and generates creative text. It was developed by OpenAI, based on the GPT3.5 architecture, where GPT stands for Generative Pre-trained Transformer. In essence, it is an example of what’s called a ‘large language model’ that is trained on vast amounts of data to find patterns as to how words and phrases are related, and that uses this information to make predictions about what words should come next as it responds to user queries or prompts.

Nick Drake’s ‘Fruit Tree’, one of his best-known songs, addresses the idea that even if an artist is ignored in their lifetime, their legacy can be secured, and their work imortalised, with an early death. The song, as we learn from Richard Morton Jack’s exhaustive biography of the English singer-songwriter, was partly inspired by the precocious English boy poet Thomas Chatterton, who committed suicide at the age of seventeen, in 1770.

Drake did not have himself in mind when writing the song (it was among his earliest compositions), yet its foreshadowing of his own life, death, and impact have given heightened resonance to the track since his death at the age of twenty-six in 1974. Drake died in relative obscurity after creating three exquisite albums of baroque folk-pop, amid the colourful milieu that was the English folk revival of the late 1960s and early 1970s. A mainstream re-appraisal of his music gathered momentum in the 1990s; interest in him intensified with the arrival of the internet; and now it is fair to describe him as a major name in music.

A biography as thorough, sensitive, and sober as Nick Drake: The life is therefore overdue. Other notable books to tell Drake’s story include those by Patrick Humphries and Trevor Dann, but these were limited in various ways. For one, they did not have the approval of Drake’s sister, the actor Gabrielle Drake. She allowed Morton Jack free rein here, giving him access to family records, diaries, photos, letters, and other documents, most of which have not been published before. Her brother’s childhood diary entries, and letters to Drake from his father, are particularly illuminating (and moving) among this trove. The result is that this is undoubtedly the definitive chronicle of Drake’s life, and likely to be the final word on an artist who has been the subject of fervent speculation and intrigue.

Nicholas Jose is a novelist and essayist whose thirteen books include the novels Paper Nautilus, Avenue of Eternal Peace (shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Literary Award), The Custodians (shortlisted for the Commonwealth Prize), and Original Face. His latest novel is The Idealist (Giramondo, 2023). He is Emeritus Professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Adelaide.

As a gynaecologist and feminist, I figured that this book would have little new to teach me. By page four, I realised I was wrong. Kate Clancy, an anthropologist by training and a serious researcher into the science underlying menstruation, takes her readers on an adventurous romp through every physiological, political, and social aspect of this monthly bloodletting and tissue-shedding that virtually all women (and other people with uteruses) experience hundreds of times during their reproductive years – myth-busting as she goes.

In medical school in the 1960s, I learned about the menstrual cycle, and subsequently taught that same information – somewhat updated – to later generations. ‘Normal’ cycles lasted twenty-eight days, with five of those days devoted to the shedding of the endometrium, the lining of the uterus, unless conception had occurred, in which case the endometrium took a different course, remaining in the uterus and contributing to nurturing the developing embryo. I learned the special terms for cycles that fell outside this twenty-eight-day rhythm – oligomenorrhoea (infrequent bleeding), polymenorrhoea (too frequent), menorrhagia (heavy bleeding), and so on. You get the picture. Normal and abnormal.