Prime Minister’s Literary Awards

After the delays and idiosyncrasies of last year, including a detour to Launceston, it was good to see the Prime Minister’s Literary Awards back where they surely belong – in Canberra, at the National Library of Australia.

The ceremony took place on 16 November. With the recent transferral of responsibility for the PMLAs to Creative Australia, authors and publishers booksellers might reasonably hope that in coming years the composition of the six shortlists (Fiction, Poetry, Non-Fiction, Australian History, Young Adult Literature, and Children’s Literature) – and the winners (each of whom receives $80,000) – will be known earlier than that, giving hard-pressed booksellers due time to sell lots of copies in the lead-up to Christmas. ‘Result happiness.’

Hearty congratulations to the six winners: Jessica Au’s Cold Enough for Snow (Fiction); Sam Vincent’s My Father and Other Animals (Non-Fiction); Gavin Yuan Gao’s At the Altar of Touch (Poetry), Shannyn Palmer’s Unmaking Angas Downs (Australian History); Sarah Winifred Searle’s The Greatest Thing (Young Adult Literature); and Jasmine Seymour’s Open Your Heart to Country (Children’s Literature).

Remembering Ian Donaldson

Everyone at ABR and many of its readers fondly recall Ian Donaldson (1935–2020), a stalwart of the magazine following his return to Australia in the early 2000s, and one of the finest literary scholars this country has produced. Ian was Professor of English at the Australian National University and the University of Cambridge, and Regius Professor of Rhetoric and English Literature at the University of Edinburgh. He wrote for the magazine on twenty occasions – reviews and essays of lapidary suavity. Following his death in early 2020, we wrote: ‘Anyone who knew Ian was struck by his charm, his modesty, his erudition, and his phenomenal range of friends and associates. He was a model of intellectual generosity and leadership. His contribution to this magazine was second to none.’

Ian also served on the ABR Board from 2008 to 2017. In 2011, he delivered the ABR Fiftieth Birthday Lecture at the National Library of Australia. His subject on that occasion, fittingly, was ‘Ben Jonson’s Double Life’. His magnum opus, Ben Jonson: A life, appeared that year, followed in 2012 by the Cambridge Edition of the Works of Ben Jonson, of which Ian was a General Editor.

Ian took his first degree at the University of Melbourne and remained a valued member of the community for the rest of his life. Now the University has created the Ian Donaldson Memorial Lecture, to be inaugurated by Emma Smith, Professor of Shakespeare Studies at the University of College and the 2023 Sam Wanamaker Fellow at Shakespeare’s Globe in London. Her subject is ‘Shakespeare’s Magic (Play)houses: Stage Directions and the Editor’.

The Lecture itself, at the University, on 14 December, has sold out, but Shakespearians, Jonsonians, and Donaldsonians can follow it online: https://tinyurl.com/5n6s3rmf

Summertime

The ABR team will take a well-earned break after Christmas. The office will close on Friday, 22 December and reopen on Tuesday, 2 January, which is when we will publish our January-February double issue. Best wishes to all our readers, subscribers, writers, and Patrons.

Changes at ABR

Grace Chang will leave ABR in mid-December after ten years as Business Manager. Rather like me, when Grace joined ABR she expected to spend two years with the organisation. Look what happens!

Grace has made a notable contribution to the magazine during a decade of expansion. The Business Manager is very much the public face of ABR, fielding calls from stakeholders of all sorts. Grace has filled this role with aplomb – courteous, engaged, and so very patient! I sometimes think that Grace must know at least half of the ABR community – writers, subscribers, donors, prize entrants, etc.

Personally, I have always enjoyed working with Grace. Managing a small arts organisation is never straightforward. Roofs leak, birds fly through open windows, the internet fails, pandemics happen. In March 2020, all of us suddenly faced unprecedented upheavals and threats. Throughout lockdowns, Covid, and personal challenges, I appreciated Grace’s steadfastness and consummate professionalism. Ironically, ABR came through those horrors in better shape than ever – thanks to esprit de corps and a shared sense of ABR’s importance to our literary culture.

Everyone at ABR – staff, volunteers, Board members past and present, our Treasurer Peter McLennan and Development Consultant Christopher Menz (both of whom work closely with the Business Manager) – joins me in thanking Grace.

Rosemary Blackney joins ABR as the new Business Manager. Rosemary has extensive business, financial, and administrative experience.

Welcome, Rosemary, and farewell, Grace!

Peter Rose

Do you know whether Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples are recognised in your state Constitution? If you responded with a mental shrug and a muttered ‘No idea’, then you would fall within the vast majority. In fact, from 2004 to 2016, each Australian state amended its Constitution to insert recognition of their Indigenous peoples. Yet the effect has been negligible and hardly anyone knows it happened. Why?

First, the recognition was purely symbolic. There was no practical mechanism included to improve Indigenous lives. Most states expressly rejected any legal consequences of the recognition by adding a clause declaring that the recognition created no legal rights or causes of action, and could not be used to affect the interpretation of the Constitution or any laws.

Second, the state Constitutions were amended without a vote of the people in a referendum. Unlike the Commonwealth Constitution, some parts of state Constitutions can be amended by ordinary legislation, with referendums being reserved for specially designated types of changes. The upside of this flexibility at the state level was that Indigenous constitutional recognition could occur quietly and painlessly within parliamentary walls. The downside was that it wasn’t backed by the moral force of the will of the people and the political pressure this brings. Nor did it build public knowledge and acceptance of that recognition, as a successful referendum would have done.

The defeat of the proposal in the recent Aboriginal constitutional referendum was unsurprising given the forces at work, which I discussed in ‘A Referendum in Trouble’ (ABR, July 2023). Most importantly, it lacked the support of the Liberal and National parties once their leaders decided to oppose it, largely for partisan purposes.

What is more remarkable is that the federal government and Aboriginal leaders proceeded with it, even though they lacked the bipartisan support that every referendum in Australia’s history has required in order to pass and the opinion polls were showing that the No case’s campaign of misinformation and disinformation was causing such a precipitous decline in the Yes vote that their proposal would likely be defeated.

This requires explanation, and it might serve a useful purpose if it were to inform the ongoing task of tackling two of Australia’s most fundamental problems: the legacies for Indigenous people of the dispossession, discrimination, and deprivation they have suffered more or less since the beginning of British colonisation in 1788; and the Australian nation’s lack of moral legitimacy that springs from the absence of a treaty which can be said to have recognised the sovereignty of the Indigenous peoples and negotiated the terms by which they might cede it.

Why did Australia vote against the Voice referendum?

Alastair Campbell – former communications chief to former British prime minister Tony Blair – blames the media. Speaking on his The Rest is Politics podcast, Campbell likened Opposition Leader Peter Dutton’s rogue interventions in the debate to the misinformation he saw in the Brexit campaign of 2016:

Dutton claimed the referendum was rigged … [and] the media didn’t really challenge him on it. They covered it as a big row, a little bit like what we had in [the] Brexit [campaign] where lies were told and the lies then became part of the narrative. And the media is no longer part of that self-righting process within politics. And this, I’m afraid, has been one of the consequences of Trump, Johnson, Berlusconi, et cetera.

Campbell has a point. The traditional media is struggling to keep up with the post-truth antics of politicians. And, with the United States gearing up for another presidential election and Donald Trump currently leading in the polls, the political climate is likely to become wilder.

Alex Miller’s most recent book, A Kind of Confession, begins with notebook entries from his pre-publication period – long years in which his deep trust in his identity as a writer appears to have been unshaken. In 1971, he notes: ‘I’ve been committed to writing since I was 21, 13 years. Quite a stretch, considering I’ve yet to publish.’ He was in his fifties before his first novel emerged. Yet even when he complains about his apparent failure – ‘Almost 40 and only 2 short stories published. It makes no sense’ – there is no real lapse of direction; he knows what he is. We can’t read excerpts from these early notebooks and diaries without an awareness of his later success as the winner of significant prizes, including the Miles Franklin Literary Award (twice), the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, the Melbourne Prize for Literature, the Manning Clark Medal, and the Weishanhi Best Foreign Novel of the Year.

Miller is a genuinely great storyteller whose ostensibly plain narratives carry a tremendous freight of revelation and ethical understanding in many different national and cultural contexts. To date, he has published thirteen novels, a work of non-fiction, and a collection of essays and stories. But it must have been difficult, at the outset, for Miller, who from his early adult life understood the importance and the challenge of the task he had assigned himself. ‘Fiction,’ he writes, ‘is a metaphor for the richness we believe is in us, but for which we can see little external evidence.’ This is a good definition of fiction, but it might also stand as a description of his own years of literary work and invisibility.

Michael Gawenda has written a deeply personal story about his Jewish identity. It comes during a period when conflict in Israel/Palestine has been painful for all. While he remains committed to a two-state future that supports the rights of both Israelis and Palestinians to live in their own countries, the author critiques influential sections of the political left where acceptance has come to require demonising the Jewish state. A key message of the book is that too often on the left the only good Jew is one who publicly rejects Israel’s right to exist and remains silent when it is declared racist and nothing more than a coloniser of an indigenous population.

The author acknowledges that peace will require achieving viable and self-determining states for both Israelis and Palestinians. Blinkered ideologies that engender hatreds operate across the divide. Along with thousands of Israelis, he would prefer a more progressive government than what has emerged in recent years as a move to the right. He also believes overreaction from Jewish organisations can be counterproductive, such as the 2003 opposition to the Sydney Peace Prize going to a Palestinian activist. However, this book argues strongly that total hostility to Israel, and ignoring legitimate Jewish historical, cultural, and religious connections to the country, are not only morally bankrupt but also unacceptably tolerant of the anti-Semitism that too often infiltrates accusations and critiques.

Long-established stereotypes and prejudices against Jewish people are on the rise; in Gawenda’s view, they are largely ignored by sections of the political left. In countries like France and Sweden, threats come largely from radical Islamists. In Australia, confrontations are less common, but there are security guards routinely stationed at Jewish buildings and institutions. Gawenda’s working experience as a journalist and editor of TheAge has included encounters with anti-Semitism. One example provided is the conspiracy theory that Jewish interests somehow control or illegitimately influence the world’s media coverage of the Middle East conflict. That proposition is, to use the author’s phrasing, bullshit. Furthermore, an accusation of this kind has fuelled historical racism towards Jewish people. The message of the forged publication The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, produced in Russia and disseminated in the early part of the twentieth century, tragically lives on in many parts of the Muslim world.

Diplomat and musician Fred Smith’s memoir of his time with the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT) at Kabul airport, and later in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), processing Afghan evacuees fleeing the Taliban’s return to power in August 2021, opens with a richly symbolic vignette. On his first visit to the North Gate, one of only three public entry points to Kabul airport, Smith is confronted by a nightmare vision of the country’s collapse. Amid a cacophony of screaming and gunfire, thousands of Afghans jostle, push, and kick one another, waving passports, holding babies aloft, as they fight their way towards a narrow gap in the razor wire entrance to the gate, guarded by a human wall of US Marines. Every thirty seconds or so somebody squeezes through the scrum to safety, emerging discomposed, bloodied, and bewildered.

As Smith looks on, a small girl of seven or eight emerges from between the legs of one of the Marines, clutching an orange plastic bag and crying for her mother (‘Mudhuhr!’). Smith steps forward, gives her a bottle of water, and leads her to a shady corner near the gate where she might be able to spot other members of her family if they make it through the mêlée. Moments later, somebody releases a CS gas canister and Smith, along with the Marines, turns and runs from the gate, before he stops and goes back to find the girl, bringing her to the safety of the Australian desk at the airport. Here, a Pashto speaker ascertains the girl’s name, Raminah, and takes her details, including her father’s telephone number. After contacting her family, who are still on the far side of the gate, an Australian soldier leads her to the exit point, where those found to have no right to board the departing aircraft are sent back to their fate. Raminah is handed back to her father, safe and sound, but no closer to freedom – and to what future?

There are two powerful images evoked by the waves of revolutions that broke across Europe in 1848. The first is of ‘the springtime of the peoples’, when scores of popular insurrections overturned the conservative Metternich system of a balance of power between monarchical regimes that had ruled the continent since the overthrow of Napoleon Bonaparte in 1815. In France the core demand was popular democracy. Elsewhere, demands for self-determination were linked to dreams of national unity in Germany and Italy, and further to the east to the desire for independence from the Austrian and Russian empires.

An insurrection in Palermo against Spanish Bourbon rule in January 1848 unleashed upheavals from France to Moldavia and from Norway to the Ionian Islands in the Adriatic, then a British Protectorate. The uprisings were spectacular and exhilarating. In Christopher Clark’s opening words, ‘this was the only truly European revolution that there has ever been’. Even in England, the 150,000 Chartists who gathered on Kennington Common in April 1848 caused momentary concern to the monarchy.

When the Berlin feminist Fanny Lewald arrived in Paris in March, she was astonished by the constant singing, the zest for high rhetoric. Across the continent, democrats and socialists organised and debated and were mocked for their utopianism by conservatives, as they were later in novels by Gustave Flaubert and the Hungarian Mór Jókai. Demands for civic equality were expressed by activist women, and in places by Jews and Roma. In France and the German states, hopes were raised for a resolution to ‘the social question’ created by the excesses of early industrialisation and posed by Marx and Engels among many others.

The opinions of Kandiah Kamalesvaran AM, better known by his stage name Kamahl, on the proposed Indigenous Voice to Parliament received extensive media attention in September 2023. A household name for many Australians, the Malaysian-born crooner’s indecision frustrated both the Yes and No camps.

Kamahl’s story is very much one of empire. Arriving in Adelaide from the then British colony of Malaya in 1953 to complete his Matriculation, Kamahl then enrolled in a university degree to avoid deportation and began performing professionally in 1958 under the stage name Kamal – which Australian announcers often mispronounced as ‘Camel’.

Changes to the notorious White Australia policy in 1966 allowed Kamahl to receive permanent residency, and one year later he made his motion picture début, as an ‘Aboriginal prisoner’ in Journey out of Darkness. Kamahl recalls that, when the set broke for lunch, the white actors and crew – one of whom was in blackface – ‘had theirs in the Homestead [but] The Aboriginal actress and I were given ours to be eaten outside under a Tree’.

In Michael Wolff’s telling, the final stretch of Rupert Murdoch’s seventy-year media career plays out like a ghost story. When, in 2016, Rupert’s sons, Lachlan and James, vanquished Roger Ailes – disgraced architect of Fox News – in a rare moment of fraternal unity, the money-printing reactionary machine Ailes had built for their father kept on mutating and metastasising, in ways that would haunt the company and the Murdoch family. Fresh from writing a blockbuster trilogy documenting the Trump presidency, in The Fall Wolff braves the ‘nest of vipers’ that is the late-stage Fox News empire with a deep contact list and a strong stomach. Gone is the rare access to Rupert himself that informed The Man Who Owns The News (2008), but, fortunately for Wolff and his readers, the largely unnamed vipers of The Fall are a chatty bunch.

Their insights, of course, are coloured by the role such disclosures play in the wider power struggles documented in the book. Ousted Fox pundit Tucker Carlson, for instance, is one key player whose reputation for ‘finely calculated indiscretion’ Wolff notes in Chapter 2 – before proceeding to regale us with large swaths of narrative clearly based on Carlson or his allies’ backgrounding. In a recent Good Weekend profile, Lachlan Murdoch’s biographer, Paddy Manning, dismissed as ‘improbable’ The Fall’s flattering claim that Lachlan once excitedly viewed his friend Carlson as a potential president. Brian Stelter’s forthcoming Network of Lies, meanwhile, dismisses as a Tucker-led conspiracy theory the idea that Carlson’s eventual sacking was a secret settlement condition set by Dominion Voting Systems. By the end, Fox had plenty of reasons to jettison him.

The first snake we meet is Ailes himself, isolated and ailing, in a fireside chat at his New Jersey home shortly before his death in 2017. Ailes had been a ‘willing and useful source’ for Wolff over the years. In a not-quite-deathbed monologue, he explains how his Fox News is calibrated to a vision of America dated rather specifically to 1965 – an imaginary pre-civil rights bubble in which many of its white Baby Boomer viewers feel comfortable.

Thirty years ago, wanting to probe deeper into the question of what it meant to make home in Tasmania, I enrolled to do my honours year at the University of Tasmania. During a discussion with the secretary of the History Department about my partially formed dissertation ideas, she urged me to read a thesis by a recent graduate whose work had greatly impressed her: one Richard Flanagan. When I read the thesis and the book that came out of it, the result can best be described as a soul shift. It was not so much the information I gained but that Flanagan’s approach to Tasmania’s past released an imaginative flow in my own research, allowing it to slowly metamorphose over fifteen years into my first book, Van Diemen’s Land. I share this anecdote, not just to highlight what was lost when universities sacked most of their administrative staff, but to show how seriously Richard Flanagan has always taken history.

Flanagan never seems to mention his early historical writings (I particularly recommend Parish-Fed Bastards [1991], a powerful treatise on the treatment of the unemployed in Britain during the Depression). Apart from humility, I am not sure why this is so, but assume that Flanagan became increasingly conscious of the limits of the forgone genre, in terms of what he needed to say about how genocide, slavery, love, and belonging resonated across generations in his island home and connected to the vast tapestry of human existence beyond required literary licence, perhaps even a drowning man, to begin to be told. So the past became fiction in many of Flanagan’s formidable tomes, but in doing so never ceased to be history.

My father is in his last hours
and I stand beside the statue I don’t want
            to pull down, have my photo
            taken. To take a photo. Or its past
participle. I am thinking of students
who almost worship the poet,
            and I am thinking of the missing
            arm of this ‘Hellenic’ Hölderlin,
which I learn held a laurel
before it was damaged, stolen.
            ‘Vandalised’. This happened
            in the nineteenth as well as
the twentieth century. All
that protrudes from the right
            shoulder is a tarnished metal pin.
            In Perth, my father has stopped
wanting to live. Last night he had another
stroke. He is in the private anguish
            of dying and wants it to remain private. Ergo,
            I wouldn’t presume to talk about light,
and he wouldn’t want to hear.
He never worshipped the old gods
            of Greece, and never wanted
            to climb Mount Parnassus.
He was the top apprentice
mechanic in Western Australia
            each year of his apprenticeship.
            He went to a minuscule bush school.
He lived with his mum, dad and sister
at Gleneagle where each was the other’s
            lightning rod. Jarrah trees were monuments.
            He wouldn’t have vandalised a statue
even if it made no sense to him.
Personally, I don’t care what happens
            to a statue of an explorer
            or aristocrat, but I see the statue
of such a poet differently. I am
comfortable having my photo
            taken alongside it. But it’s mounted
             in the old botanical gardens where trees
were sampled and cultivated from around
the world. The collectors have gone, many trees
            remain. The oldest tree is native
            to the region – a 250-year-old
beech tree. Its roots are uneasy.
It’s not far from the God-like
            statue of or to Hölderlin, who suffered
            so much in his life and was no god.
He felt pain gods just can’t feel.
My father’s body is breaking down.
            And as he wants to leave life,
            it’s not his will that’s broken –
in fact, I am sure that it’s thriving,
like the reach of the statue’s
            missing limb, the laurel already
            bestowed upon us all,
whatever our failings,
whatever we’ve cherished.

John Kinsella

Kerryn Goldsworthy

What the authors of these three wildly different books share is a gift for creating through language a kind of intimacy of presence, as though they were in the room with you. Emily Wilson’s much-awaited translation of The Iliad (W.W. Norton & Company) is a gorgeous, hefty hardback with substantial authorial commentary that manages to be both scholarly and engaging. The poem is translated into effortless-looking blank verse that reads like music. The Running Grave (Sphere) by Robert Galbraith (aka J.K. Rowling), the seventh novel in the Cormoran Strike crime series and one of the best so far, features Rowling’s gift for the creation of memorable characters and a cracking plot about a toxic religious cult. Charlotte Wood’s Stone Yard Devotional (Allen & Unwin, reviewed in this issue of ABR) lingers in the reader’s mind, with the haunting grammar of its title, the restrained artistry of its structure, and the elusive way that it explores modes of memory, grief, and regret.

Paul Giles

The major publishing event of the year in Australian literature was Alexis Wright’s Praiseworthy (Giramondo, 4/23), a deeply impressive but long and complex novel that resists political simplifications and demands more than one reading. But the novel I enjoyed most was Richard Ford’s Be Mine (Bloomsbury, 8/23), with Ford’s alter ego Frank Bascombe painting a sardonically evocative picture of contemporary American landscapes as his own physical body starts to crumble. Commenting on the feel-good vibe of his health clinic, Bascombe observes how they promote the idea that ‘anyone and everyone can walk in, sign up for a round of chemo or a cardiac catheterization and be back in the Cities for dinner’. In literary criticism, Barron Field in New South Wales: The poetics of Terra Nullius, by Thomas H. Ford and Justin Clemens (Melbourne University Press, 7/23), offered a quirky but well-informed and perceptive account of the origins of Australian romanticism.

Zora Simic

My major reading project was an Annie Ernaux binge, and it continues, since her Nobel Prize has resulted in a steady stream of new translations. Two memoirs I had great hopes for exceeded my own high expectations: poet Amy Key’s Arrangements in Blue: Notes on loving and making a life (Jonathan Cape), the title and shape of which is inspired by Joni Mitchell’s classic album Blue; and Don’t Tell Anybody the Secrets I Told You (Simon & Schuster) by Lucinda Williams. Pairing them highlights what they have in common, though Key is English and in her forties, while Williams, one of the greatest living American singer-songwriters, turned seventy not long ago. Both are poets who sit with the truth, no sugar-coating. Fiction-wise, my standout was Bryan Washington’s Family Meal (Atlantic) – he hooks me instantly each time. The year is not over though, and I’m excited by new fiction from Tony Birch, Melissa Lucashenko, and Christos Tsiolkas.

Frances Wilson

Two books about marriage are my best reads of the year. Marriage was George Eliot’s abiding fascination, but she lived, for twenty-four years, with a man she could not marry because he was married to a woman he could not divorce. In The Marriage Question: George Eliot’s double life (Allen Lane), Clare Carlisle reflects on the gamble of yoking your happiness to ‘the open-endedness of another human being’. Anna Funder’s Wifedom: Mrs Orwell’s invisible life (Hamish Hamilton, 7/23) is about doublethink rather than double lives. Applying Orwell’s own phrase, from Nineteen Eighty-Four, to his treatment of his first wife, Eileen, Funder explores the contradictions at the heart of his beliefs about equality. Eileen, never mentioned by name in his letters or books, typed and edited his manuscripts, humanised his writing, influenced his style, sorted out the septic tank, and put up with his infidelities until, aged thirty-nine, she died of the exhaustion of being married to Orwell. She was not, he remembered, ‘a bad old stick’. 

Bain Attwood

The most important book I read this year – Enzo Traverso’s Singular Pasts: The ‘I’ in historiography, translated by Adam Schoene (Columbia University Press) – ably delineates the various roots of a major shift in historical practice that is seeing scholarly accounts of the past increasingly written in the first person, and provides a measured critique of the results of this subjectivist turn. He would no doubt welcome the most exceptional history I have read this year: Graeme Davison’s My Grandfather’s Clock: Four centuries of a British-Australian family (Miegunyah Press, 11/23). This brilliantly conceived, beautifully written, and eminently wise book addresses fundamental existential questions – who am I, where do I come from, what familial and generational ties connect me to the past – without slipping into presentism and narcissism as Davison retains an analytical spirit and reveals the historical relationship between the collective and the individual, the particular and the universal, the ‘we’ and the ‘I’.

Philip Mead

Alexis Wright’s Praiseworthy is a huge novel, more than 700 pages. There has never been another Australian novel like it. It is a huge reservoir of story about the lives of the northern Australian residents of Praiseworthy, including the crazy Aboriginal entrepreneur Cause Man Steel (also known as Widespread and Planet) and his wife, Dance, and their two sons, the self-harming Aboriginal Sovereignty and the little fascist Tommyhawk. There are huge waves of humour: widespread plans to survive the Anthropocene by building a global transport conglomerate using millions of feral donkeys – an idea Cause Man Steel got from watching the Discovery Channel. With her Sino-Aboriginal heritage, Dance wonders, movingly, about the stories that battle for precedence in a soul and its homeland. It is also a huge world of ferocious satire and critique of the racist stupidities of governments and their interventions in Aboriginal people’s lives. The wonderful thing about this novel is its huge difference of language and imagination. It is hard to see how it will be assimilated into Australian writing. And that’s its great value.

Stuart Kells

This year was a great one for ‘books about books’ and especially for books about William Shakespeare, given that 2023 is the 400th anniversary of the First Folio, the second collected edition of his plays (often incorrectly referred to as the first collected edition). For me, highlights included Judi Dench’s disarming Shakespeare: The man who pays the rent (Michael Joseph), Farah Karim-Cooper’s intriguing The Great White Bard: Shakespeare, race and the future of his legacy (Simon & Schuster), and Chris Laoutaris’s illuminating Shakespeare’s Book: The intertwined lives behind the First Folio (William Collins). There were also some important reissues and new editions to mark the anniversary. In the wider field of bibliomania, we saw Sarah Ogilvie’s excellent The Dictionary People: The unsung heroes who created the Oxford English Dictionary (Chatto & Windus, 11/23) and a sumptuous new offering from Edward Brooke-Hitching: Love: A curious history (Simon & Schuster). We are in a golden moment for books about book-making and bibliography. 

Joel Deane

The Wren, The Wren (Jonathan Cape, 11/23), Anne Enright’s eighth novel, is effortlessly virtuosic. It nails the first-person voices of three generations of a damaged Irish family – a famous poet, his daughter and his granddaughter. It includes Seamus Heaney-like poetry written by the poet-patriarch, Phil. And it tells a multi-layered, multi-generational story about how Carmel and Nell, the women Phil abandoned, come to terms with the long shadow of familial betrayal. It is a brilliantly written book that doesn’t feel the need to show off. In poetry, I have found solace in Emily Wilson’s vivacious translation of The Iliad. In non-fiction, I’m enjoying Wolfram Eilenberger’s The Visionaries: Arendt, Beauvoir, Rand, Weil and the salvation of philosophy (Allen Lane) – a German take on how the traumas of the 1930s shaped Hannah Arendt, Simone de Beauvoir, Ayn Rand, and Simone Weil.

Jennifer Mills

In a year of troubled reckonings with colonisation, it is stories of justice and struggle that have kept me going. No one else could write about sovereignty and survival the way that Alexis Wright has in Praiseworthy, a magnificent work of politics and imagination. Bookending the year, Melissa Lucashenko’s Edenglassie (UQP, 10/23) is both a ripper riff on the historical genre and a brilliant manual for decolonisation in action – I’ll never see Magandjin the same way again. In between, I was delighted and horrified in equal measure by R.F. Kuang’s page-turning publishing industry satire, Yellowface (William Morrow), and stunned by the audacity of Pip Adam’s abolitionist space opera, Audition (Giramondo, 8/23). 

Patrick Mullins

Biographies have supplied some of my best reading hours this year. Walter Marsh’s account of a lean and hungry Rupert Murdoch, in Young Rupert: The making of the Murdoch empire (Scribe, 8/23), was a fresh and timely counterpoint to the wizened and wily figure who this year ‘retired’ from News Corp. By Marsh’s account, I’d guess Murdoch’s dark appetites are nonetheless still unsated. Ryan Cropp’s thoughtful life of Donald Horne, in Donald Horne: A life in the lucky country (Black Inc., 10/23), charted the restless and provocative habits of his subject with care and elegance, and animated decades of faded news and current affairs with colour and poise. Kate Fullagar’s Bennelong & Phillip: A history unravelled (Simon & Schuster), meanwhile, used an inventive structure and humanistic care to cast her subjects in new light: not as paragons of a European enlightenment or doomed bit players, but as men wrestling with circumstance and culture, taking uncertain steps in uncertain worlds, towards futures they could not see or know.

Felicity Plunkett

Poet Terrance Hayes’s Watch Your Language: Visual and literary reflections on a century of American poetry (Penguin) starts with Toni Morrison’s words: ‘I want to draw a map … of a critical geography and use that map to open… space for discovery, intellectual adventure, and close exploration’. Hayes’s buzzy, inviting map locates illustrated micro-reviews alongside quizzes, biographical slivers, and a ‘bookbioboardgame’. Vaulting between questions, it explores his decades reading and (brilliantly) writing poetry, each ‘mostly a matter of keeping an eye on your thinking, of bearing witness, of keeping record’. This exhilarating catalogue of homage and reflection highlights poets excluded from racist and sexist canons, tenderly witnessing an expansive poetic treasury. The Book of (More) Delights (Coronet) comprises micro-essays by poet Ross Gay about delight, written as a practice of attention and sustenance. Gay parses light and shadow, something Amanda Lohrey’s virtuosic The Conversion (Text, 11/23) does in very different ways.

Tony Hughes-D’Aeth

Alexis Wright’s Praiseworthy was a reminder, in case we needed it, of what she means to the Australian literary landscape. It is a book that modulates effortlessly through competing cosmologies. As much as anything, I love the earthiness of Wright’s world, and the way she weaves a poetry out of the tics and obsessions of her all-too-human heroes. In a rather different key, I was taken by Nicholas Jose’s novel about East Timorese independence, The Idealist (Giramondo, 11/23). A sophisticated and artfully restrained espionage thriller, it also manages to be a portrait of a certain coming-of-age in Australian political life. Finally, and though I cannot claim complete impartiality, Graham Akhurst’s Indigenous Bildungsroman Borderland (UWAP) is a novel that has stuck with me since I first encountered it in an early draft. Its story has an infectious verve, even as it speaks to areas of experience – particularly those of urban Indigenous young men – that have not quite had the attention they deserve.

Penny Russell

Outstanding books by Australian historians have come thick and fast this year. Uniting zest for narrative with immense research and hard-hitting analysis, Alecia Simmonds’s Courting: An intimate history of love and the law (La Trobe University Press) will transform your understanding of both love and law. Hannah Forsyth’s Virtue Capitalists: The rise and fall of the professional class in the Anglophone world, 1870–2008 (Cambridge University Press) is a riveting, iconoclastic account of the problematic idea of ‘virtue’ as the founding principle of the professions, and its beleaguered status today. Graeme Davison’s family history, My Grandfather’s Clock, entwines sentiment, reflection, and research in a narrative that enchants and enlightens. Alexandra Roginski’s Science and Power in the Nineteenth-Century Tasman World: Popular phrenology in Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand (Cambridge University Press) is a rich, enthralling account of the popular science of phrenology and its shadowy practitioners. Great writing is a feature of all four books, but they show that history, at its best, does more than tell a good story. Tying Australia’s history to broader developments in law, science, and industrial and late capitalism, they shed analytic light on some of the knottiest issues of the present day. 

Emma Shortis

It is difficult to describe the plot of Pip Adam’s Audition without sounding as if you’ve lost the plot yourself. Three giants, hurtling through space, must keep talking in order to both stop growing and keep their ship running. It is a relentless, captivating read. Leaping disjointedly through time and space, Audition captures the very real and very 2023 feeling that nothing quite makes sense and that yet everything is, somehow, connected. Reading it alongside Naomi Klein’s Doppelganger: A trip into the mirror world (Allen Lane, 11/23) was a surreal experience. Klein is, as always, singular in her ability to capture and explain our current moment. Likewise, Antony Loewenstein’s The Palestine Laboratory: How Israel exports the technology of occupation to the world (Verso) is a devastating analysis of Israel’s military-industrial complex and its connections with the world. All three explain our nightmares and, more importantly, offer us ways out.

Peter Rose

First, the handsome new edition of Franz Kafka’s The Diaries (Schocken Books). What a service translator Ross Benjamin has performed for devotees of Kafka, after the priggish intrusions of Max Brod. ‘Never again psychology!’ At least, never again the psychology of the self-serving literary executor. He restores Kafka to us: witty, preternaturally lucid, more complex than ever. Shirley Hazzard: A writing life (Virago, 3/23) is one of the finest literary biographies published in Australia, a country that fetishises first books and does scant justice to its finest writers (pace the welcome brace of lives of Frank Moorhouse this year). That literary critic Brigitta Olubas was new to the biographical form only magnifies her achievement in this discerning, consummately researched book. She captures the hurts, the glamour, the pretensions of Hazzard’s life. Better still, she sends us back, armed with new clues, to the novels and short stories. Last, and just finished: The Visionaries by Wolfram Eilenberger, who seems to be offering a kind of ‘salvation of philosophy’ of his own, as in his subtitle. Stirring it was to read of the flight of Arendt, Benjamin, and Weil from the Nazis in 1940, given recent godawful developments in the Middle East.

Tony Birch

I read many novels this year. My favourite was Briohny Doyle’s Why We Are Here (Vintage, 9/23), a story of love, disabling grief, and the raw courage of the novel’s protagonist, ‘BB’. This is a book I will return to again and again. Graham Akhurst’s début novel, Borderland deals with issues confronting young First Nations people. The central characters in the story, Jono and Jenny, embark on a journey, discovering their true selves, their shared heart and Country within a contemporary Australian landscape. For those (like me) who know that Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska is one of the greatest musical albums of all time, Warren Zanes’s Deliver Me from Nowhere: The making of Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska (Crown) affirms our conviction.

Geordie Williamson

J.M. Coetzee’s novella The Pole and Other Stories (Text, 7/23) occupies the same relation to the author’s oeuvre as Beethoven’s late piano works did for his: simpler, yet stranger. Witold and Beatriz’s story is the pure, heady distillate of a remarkable life’s work. Weirder still is English author M. John Harrison’s brilliant ‘anti-memoir’ Wish I was Here (Serpent’s Tail). This is an autobiography without a subject that shades into a writers manifesto whose mission remains obscure. Think of the book as a space shaped so that readers ‘can only navigate with a kind of emotional sonar’. Finally, two titles for a dark year locally – one in which non-Indigenous Australia has, once again, failed to embrace either its past or future: David Marr’s scarifying account of nineteenth-century frontier violence in Killing for Country: A family story (Black Inc., 10/23) and Alexis Wright’s Praiseworthy, an epic, addled, visionary examination of the contemporary implications of those foundational crimes.

Yves Rees

As a 2024 Stella Prize judge, my lips are sealed on (most) new releases by Australian women and non-binary writers – but I can say it’s a knockout year in local publishing. Other notable reads include Noah Riseman’s Transgender Australia: A history since 1900 (Melbourne University Publishing, 11/23). In this pioneering history, Riseman shows beyond doubt that trans is nothing new. Contrary to what conservative naysayers may suggest, gender diversity has always been part of the human experience on this continent. Released against the backdrop of neo-Nazi attacks on the trans community, Riseman’s history could not be more timely or necessary. Dan Hogan’s Secret Third Thing (Cordite, 12/23) also deserves mention. In this début collection from the multi-award-winning poet (who was also shortlisted for the 2023 Calibre Essay Prize), Hogan confirms their place as a wildly inventive wordsmith whose work is as playful as it is political. Australian poetry is having a moment, and Dan Hogan is one to watch.

Diane Stubbings

In The Wolves of Eternity (Vintage) – Karl Ove Knausgaard’s companion novel to The Morning Star (2021) – characters spiral like matter around a point of transcendent singularity. Knausgaard dissects the profound tension between the mundane and the extramundane, the wholeness of self and its inevitable splintering. Few contemporary writers are so utterly enthralling. Mike McCormack’s This Plague of Souls (Tramp Press) is one of the most intriguing and distinctive novels I’ve read in some time. A finely balanced account of the memories evoked when its protagonist, Nealon, returns home after a stint in prison, the novel morphs into a mystifying, yet compelling, interrogation of purpose and providence. The Guest Lecture by Martin Riker (Grove Press) charts the intersection of one woman’s life with the broader political and environmental facets of contemporary society. Hypnotic, intelligent, and beautifully conceived. Paul Lynch’s Booker-shortlisted Prophet Song (Oneworld) is a gut-wrenching account of one family caught within a maelstrom of political violence. A dystopian novel that is all too real.

Frank Bongiorno

David Marr’s Killing for Country has an epic quality that reminded me of Robert Hughes’s The Fatal Shore. In compelling prose, Marr uses the saga of a family – his own – to show how settler Australia was forged through violence and silence. Kate Fullagar’s Bennelong & Phillip, while also dealing with relations between colonial invaders and Indigenous people, works in the opposite direction. By beginning with the deaths and posthumous reputations of the two characters in her dual biography and then working backwards, Fullagar challenges the relentless forward march of time characteristic of imperial and national histories. It is a brave, experimental, ground-breaking history. The second book in Sally Young’s trilogy on the history of Australian media and politics, Media Monsters: The transformation of Australia’s newspaper empires (UNSW Press, 7/23), was a tour through territory often embarrassingly unfamiliar to me. Young is an expert guide.

Glyn Davis

The year of a failed referendum sees bittersweet writing from Australia’s First Peoples. It is invidious to pick just one from the many hopeful guides to the Uluru Statement, but Thomas Mayo’s The Voice to Parliament Handbook (Hardie Grant Books), written with Kerry O’Brien, spoke eloquently to the issues. In a different register, David Marr’s Killing for Country is unflinching in describing the frontier wars. Otherwise unremarkable people prove capable of extraordinary cruelty, in a foundation story still little told. Elsewhere, biographies continue to shape memory and understanding, notably Catherine Lumby’s study of Frank Moorhouse: A life (Allen & Unwin, 11/23) and Ryan Cropp’s Donald Horne. Australian poets continue to impress, with Kathryn Lomer’s AfterLife (Puncher & Wattmann) evoking loneliness after love in Tasmanian landscapes exact and imaged. My favourite novels of the year look abroad: to Zadie Smith’s The Fraud (Hamish Hamilton), about a trial which merges class, race, and greed; Ali Smith’s Companion Piece (Penguin), with intriguing fragments evoking pandemic: and Martin Riker’s The Guest Lecture. In a stream of nervous consciousness, an economist lies in bed, near her sleeping family, agonising over career, choices, and the work of John Maynard Keynes.

Gideon Haigh

The Troubles exert an unfailing grip on imagination. In similar vein to Patrick Radden Keefe’s Say Nothing (2018), Guardian correspondent Rory Carroll’s Killing Thatcher: The IRA, the manhunt and the long war on the Crown (HarperCollins) is a brilliant work of reportage about the 1984 bombing of the Conservative Party Conference in Brighton, starting year by year and condensing steadily to second by second, so that even familiar events grow suspenseful. For readers of John Banville’s The Book of Evidence (1989) comes the story on which it was based. Mark O’Connell’s A Thread of Violence: A story of truth, invention and murder (Granta) concerns the tangled tale of Malcolm Macarthur, scholar, sophisticate, and stone-cold killer.

James Ley

This year, I enjoyed Han Kang’s novel Greek Lessons (Hamish Hamilton), a slim and elegantly composed reflection on the twinned themes of suffering and loss, language and communication. A more fragmented and lyrical work than Han’s best-known book, The Vegetarian (2007), it nevertheless has a quiet intensity that is every bit as impressive. I also found Benjamin Labatut’s The Maniac (Pushkin) particularly engrossing. Presented in the form of a fictionalised oral biography of the scientific polymath John von Neumann, The Maniac is an extended and ultimately disturbing essay on the limitations and dangers of rationalism and the rise of artificial intelligence. On a related note, Richard King’s Here Be Monsters: Is technology reducing our humanity? (Monash University Publishing, 8/23) is well worth checking out as an intelligent and highly readable guide to the brave new world of technology.

John Hawke

The revived attention to women of the surrealist movement has seen the publication this year of major editions of poetry by the Swiss artist, Méret Oppenheim – The Loveliest Vowel Empties: Collected poems (World Poetry Books) – and of the violently transgressive Franco-Egyptian poet, Joyce Mansour: Emerald Wounds: Selected Poems of Joyce Mansour (City Lights). The volume I have returned to most often draws on this tradition. It Must be a Misunderstanding (New Directions), by the contemporary Mexican neo-baroque poet Coral Bracho, is an emotionally devastating reflection on her mother’s dementia. In his poem on the same subject, ‘In Departing Light’, Robert Gray expresses concern that his mother ‘has become a surrealist poet’: Bracho uses this recognition as a vital mode of poetic enquiry. Locally, Alan Wearne’s selection of narrative poems, Near Believing (Puncher & Wattmann, 11/22) was finally launched after long Covid delays. Wearne’s impressionistic survey of social milieux across postwar Australian history is a major contribution to our literature, and deserves a wide general readership.

Beejay Silcox

As chair of this year’s Stella Prize, I’m not able to divulge my favourite Aussie books just yet – you’ll have to wait for the longlist. But what a list it will be! The future of Oz Lit is retina-burning bright. Beyond our shores, two shape-shifting novels captivated me this year: one intertextual; the other, inter-galactic. In Blackouts (Granta), American author Justin Torres conjures a queer-Gothic version of the Hotel California. It’s a tale of cultural resilience and the dark psycho-history of American medicine. ‘From a certain distance, the catastrophic must be indistinguishable from the sublime,’ Torres writes. That’s what he manages in this magnificent meta-fiction – to hold us at the right distance. Cruelly robbed of the Booker Prize (the joy of which is disagreeing with it), Martin MacInnes’s eco-epic In Ascension (Atlantic) is proof – if more was needed – that the Scottish author is one of the most inspired conceptual writers on (and of) the planet.

Michael Hofmann

I had only one substantial difference of opinion with the late and much-missed Dennis O’Driscoll. It concerned the Polish poet Adam Zagajewski. He didn’t care for Adam’s work, and I did. Now he’s dead, and so is Adam, and we shall never know the rights of it. The poems in the ironically entitled True Life (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), published posthumously, have all the hallmarks of late work: weightlessness, speed, blurt, a scribbled calligraphy. They are neither buying nor selling anything. ‘The Old Painter on a Walk’ goes like this: ‘In his pockets treat for local dogs / He sees almost nothing now / He almost doesn’t notice trees suburban villas / He knows every stone here / I painted it all, tried to paint my thoughts / And caught so little / The world still grows it grows relentlessly / And yet there is always less of it.’ Translator Clare Cavanagh is, as ever, a gift to her author. It is sad to think he will never set an adverb again.

Kieran Pender

David Marr’s Killing for Country is an important exercise in truth-telling when, as events this year sadly demonstrated, too many Australians would rather forget the colonial violence at the heart of our nation’s history. Ellen van Neerven’s Personal Score: Sport, culture, identity (UQP) – a unique, poetic memoir and meditation on gender, sexuality, identity, and sport – felt timely as Women’s World Cup fever gripped the nation. My non-Australian book of the year is the engrossing High Caucasus: A mountain quest in Russia’s haunted hinterland (Hachette) by Tom Parfitt. A long-time Russia correspondent for English newspapers, Parfitt embarked on an epic 1,000-kilometre hike from the Black Sea to the Caspian Sea in 2008 to deal with trauma, after reporting on the Beslan school siege. Part travelogue, part political history of a fascinating, complex region, High Caucasus takes the reader on a pacy, compelling journey.

Marilyn Lake

Two bold new books – one by an Australian historian examining changes in capitalism in the imperial ‘Anglophone world’, the other by a US philosopher, currently working in Germany – offer fresh thinking about the political and social outcomes of the ‘moral revolution’ effected by neoliberalism. Hannah Forsyth’s Virtue Capitalists offers a transnational account of the rise and decline of the professional class, replaced by an ascendant managerial class, presiding over a regime of ‘moral deskilling’ as it prioritises moneymaking and profit. In Left is not Woke (Polity), Susan Neiman calls for a return to the values of universal humanism, the distinction between justice and power, and the possibility of progress. In a world now ruled by ‘responsibility to shareholders’, Neiman reminds us of the importance of reclaiming the idea of ‘social rights’.

Lynette Russell

While at first this book seems to be a collection of essays written in a memoir format, Gemma Nisbet’s The Things We Live With: Essays on uncertainty (Upswell, 12/23) is an exploration of our often contradictory relationship with objects. Nisbet inherits her father’s and her father’s father’s collections. From macabre objects like her own discoloured baby teeth to the strange plastic array of tourist magnets, Nesbit interrogates the ambivalent feelings generated by the detritus of another’s life. When does a collection become a hoard, or indeed a collector become a hoarder? This is a question that we are allowed to ponder through her careful charting of the unpacking of her father’s possessions. What did the unknown portrait of a nondescript man mean, and why had it been carefully included in each move the family made? More questions than answers, all beautifully and lyrically described. This is a book for anyone who loves things.

Brenda Walker

Killing for Country is David Marr’s meticulous account of the wholesale and slyly – or overtly – sanctioned massacres perpetrated by the Native Police for the benefit of leaseholders on the sheep-runs of colonial Australia. Marr’s work began as a benign enquiry into his maternal antecedents. The discovery that his great-great grandfather was an officer of the Native Police transformed personal history into a precise and sardonic study of pathological violence, rape, child theft, judicial expediency, the denial of Aboriginal testimony (until 1876), contempt for the Aboriginal access provisions of pastoral leases, influence-peddling, and greed. This story would seem like a dark satire were it not for the fact that it is cruel and true. It would be too difficult to read were it not for Marr’s elegant, insistent style. This is a timely year for such a significant book.

Mark McKenna

This year, three works of history stood out. David Marr’s Killing for Country is a gripping and forensic examination of frontier violence that forces the reader to confront the injustice and inhumanity of modern Australia’s foundation. Kate Fullagar’s Bennelong & Phillip reminds us why history is such an exciting and rewarding discipline. Fullagar enters the well-trodden territory of the first years of the British invasion in colonial New South Wales and, by giving equal weight to the lives of two of the period’s most central figures, allows us to see their world anew. Stuart Ward’s Untied Kingdom: A global history of Britain (Cambridge University Press, 8/23), which tracks the unravelling of Britishness in the second half of the twentieth century, is unmatched for its intellectual verve, geographical span, and the quality of its historical analysis. Finally, I enjoyed Catharine Lumby’s Frank Moorhouse, which circles Moorhouse’s life, diving in here and there, and captures her subject’s warmth and mercurial intelligence. Although I was close to the book in the lead-up to publication, Ryan Cropp’s biography of Donald Horne is surely one of the sharpest, lucidest, and most compelling biographies of the past few years.

James Bradley

My most unforgettable reading experience of 2023 was undoubtedly American author Stephen Markley’s The Deluge (Simon & Schuster). A densely imagined, deeply researched, and frequently overwhelming portrait of global unravelling and eventual transformation as a result of climate change, it does a better job of imagining the human, economic, and political chaos that is descending upon us than anything I’ve read. I also loved Charlotte Wood’s quietly astonishing Stone Yard Devotional, a book which draws together the preoccupations of Wood’s earlier novels in powerfully suggestive ways, and cements her place as a major novelist. Gretchen Shirm’s The Crying Room (Transit Lounge) is also a quiet marvel of a book – beautiful, elusive, and deeply felt. And Thom van Dooren’s marvellous A World in a Shell: Snail stories in a time of extinction (MIT Press) offers a compelling and affecting field report from the frontline of the biodiversity crisis.

Des Cowley

Sebastian Barry’s Old God’s Time (Faber) continues his run of outstanding novels, pitching another of his world-weary protagonists – on this occasion Tom Kettle – against an Ireland bogged down in tradition and prejudice. Barry’s language and rhythmic prose are so ear-perfect, it strikes me as unconscionable that he failed to make the cut for this year’s Booker Prize. I approached Richard Flanagan’s Question 7 (Knopf, 11/23) with some trepidation, having been disappointed by his recent work. Fashioned in hybrid form – neither fully fledged memoir nor novel – his meditation on the mutability of family, place, the past, is imbued with wistful nostalgia, one that resonates deeply. It is by far his finest work since the underappreciated Wanting (2008). And any year that offers up 143 new pieces – should we call them stories, fictions, micro-fictions, poems? – by Lydia Davis is a laudable one. By turn witty, abstract, minimal, obtuse, her new book Our Strangers (Canongate) is to be savoured. 

Suzie Miller’s play Prima Facie is one of Australia’s most celebrated literary exports of recent years. After an award-winning run of performances in Australia, a production helmed by Killing Eve star Jodie Comer triumphed in London’s West End and on Broadway, garnering deserved accolades for Comer as well as a coveted Olivier Award for Best New Play in 2023.

In the wake of the play’s extraordinary success, Miller has now adapted her ninety-minute play into a 300-plus page novel, a reversal of the more familiar trend of novels being adapted for the stage. While it is not uncommon for a playwright to refashion a script into a work of prose – First Nations writers Leah Purcell and Jane Harrison have, for example, both pursued a similar path for their plays The Drover’s Wife (2016) and The Visitors (2020) respectively – few of these novels have met with the acclaim of their original staged versions.

We might speculate as to the motivation behind these transformations: the desire for a larger audience; the arguably greater kudos associated with being an esteemed novelist; the need to afford themes of cultural and political significance a durability that the ephemerality of theatre doesn’t always allow? At the very least, you would hope that it is because there is more to the story than can be told in an hour and a half of performance; that there are complexities in the subject matter which only the broader and deeper possibilities of the novel give an author the space to explore.

'Arrive finally at about three.’ The opening sentence of Charlotte Wood’s seventh novel does a lot in five simple words, emblematic of her gift for compression. With the direct, truncated prose of a diary entry, we are suddenly on intimate terms with another mind, impatient to begin. The unnamed narrator is a woman alone, returning to the country town where she grew up and where her parents are buried. ‘Your bones are here, beneath my feet,’ she thinks, standing at their graves for the first time in thirty-five years. So begins her reckoning.

As the story progresses, it becomes clear that she is staying at a convent. In this place, wryly compared to a 1970s health resort, she can take the respite that she appears to need. Nothing is expected of her, not even faith. She returns to a kind of childhood, but one freighted with all the knowledge and experience of later life.

The landscape of the Monaro is drawn with brief, expressive gestures: the plains are ‘bare as rubbed suede’ or ‘flat like a shoulder blade’; they ‘bristle with a fine skin of pale grasses’. This is an embodied landscape, tactile and close. ‘Like naming the bones of my own body,’ the narrator observes, listing its place names. Later, she tentatively addresses the colonisation and violence that have made this equivalence both possible and unforgivable.

Michael Fitzgerald’s new novel, Late, opens with a camera obscura, a direct reference to Christopher Isherwood’s Goodbye to Berlin (1939). The image is a nifty one – a portrait projected across the Pacific Ocean, as well as across time itself – and it goes some way to signalling the author’s intentions: he wants to create a novel deliberately weighted by the creative works (films, books, art, and sculpture) that have come before and, for his protagonist – who in real life died on 4 August 1962 – those that have come since.

Fitzgerald, coy and suggestive as his subject, keeps certain key pieces of information at bay for a while. We know early on that we are in Sydney in the late 1980s, and that an ageing actor has faked her very public death in California decades before. Certain famous photographs are mentioned, one of her reading James Joyce’s Ulysses. There is a reference to the Actors Studio, and soon the third husband, the tall, nebbish intellectual for whom she converts to Judaism. By now, those familiar with the rudimentary facts about life of Marilyn Monroe will have cottoned on to the conceit.

She never says she is Marilyn; rather, she talks of a persona named Zelda that she wears like a fur coat (whether or not this is a play on another, doomed Fitzgerald seems academic). This public face gets her up and out into the Sydney air, sharp and briny from the nearby sea. It allows her to sneak off to the cinema to see Francis Ford Coppola’s Peggy Sue Got Married (1986); to quote Kylie Minogue’s ‘I Should Be So Lucky’; and, in a neat and moving trick, to read Arthur Miller’s autobiography, Timebends (1987), and correct the record.

What child has not been fascinated to watch the miraculous metamorphosis of a hungry caterpillar to pupae and then butterfly in a glass jar on the table? This transformation is such an everyday part of our ecological awareness as to be almost child’s play. What was once the cutting-edge technology of scientific observation – the transparent glass isolation chamber, the magnifying lens, and the microscope – has now become household tools for educating children, as if we must recapitulate the lessons of our historical scientific development through our own childhoods.

While the life cycles of a great many insects still remain a mystery to be solved through patient observation, others have been well known for thousands of years. Silkworms were said to have been bred and raised for silk production in China since 3000 BCE, an industry that slowly crept west, eventually reaching Germany by the seventeenth century.

Maria Sibylla Merian (1647–1717) seems to have been somewhat ahead of trend when she started raising silkworms as a child. Merian was precocious in a number of ways. Born into a family of artists and engravers, she trained early to draw and paint the flowers and insects that characterise Dutch still-life painting. Having observed silkworms turning into moths, she captured and raised other caterpillars to see what they would turn into. Her exquisite documentation of this metamorphosis led to her pioneering the ecology of insect development, finally putting to rest the notion that insect life spontaneously generated from mud, dust, or putrefaction.

In conversation with the Guardian’s Paul Daley in the final days of 2021, Tony Birch addressed the recurring presence of both strong women and violent men in his work. Citing the Sydney writer Ross Gibson, Birch said he likes to think of the common themes that a writer revisits across his or her body of work as ‘reiterations’. In Birch’s oeuvre, perhaps chief among these reiterations is the impact of male violence on family and community life – from ‘The Butcher’s Wife’ in Shadowboxing (2006) to the Kane men in The White Girl (2019). His latest book, Women and Children, brings this theme into sharp relief.

The working-class, inner-city Melbourne suburbs of the 1960s that readers have come to associate with Birch’s work form the setting of his fourth novel. This time, the milieu’s Catholic culture is centred, in ‘a suburb of sectarian boundaries, with the Catholic community in no doubt that they lived under siege by Protestant leaders who dominated local government and business’, while the mostly Catholic constabulary are in cahoots with local crime bosses. The narrative follows the Cluny family: ten-year-old Joe, his older sister Ruby, mother Marion, grandfather Charlie, and Aunty Oona. When a battered Oona arrives at Marion’s doorstep in need of refuge, Joe is confronted by a threatening reality he is only just beginning to comprehend.

Filtering the violence through the innocent eyes of a child – also typical of Birch’s method – allows an exploration of what can and cannot be voiced in a community, from swearing to uncomfortable truths to dangerous admissions. Joe’s naïve attempts to understand Oona’s victimisation in the context of sin and Hell, concepts drilled in by his Catholic education, expose the fallibility of the adult world, the victim-blaming women endure, and the senselessness of violence.

Laura Jean McKay’s new collection, Gunflower, offers a range of disturbing, deftly satiric, and sometime bizarre short stories. As in her award-winning novel The Animals in that Country (2022), some of the stories in the collection explore the relationship between the human and non-human, and often challenge rational explanations or simple allegorical interpretations for the imaginative worlds they create. Even the conventional realist narratives sometimes defy generic conventions. The story ‘Flying Rods’, for example, moves from standard verisimilitude to Gothic horror. ‘Site’ transforms the familiar terrain of an adulterous affair with repeated descriptions of a ship sighted off the coast, such that the ship’s symbolic meanings remain tantalisingly unclear.

The collection is also centrally concerned with the pleasures and perils of embodiment. As its tripartite structure of Birth, Life, and Death implies, McKay is fascinated by the vulnerability and violence of our creaturely existence, often but not exclusively located in female experience. There are several standouts for me in the first section. The one-page story ‘Less’ is a brilliant example of compression. It begins with a woman’s skittish self-castigation – ‘She had completely forgotten to have children, and it was so embarrassing’ – and then cleverly riffs on the ambivalence of maternal identity. The extended narrative ‘Those Last Days of Summer’ is a visceral and disturbing protest against cruelty to animals, in which generations of doomed creatures locked in cages have their teeth removed, shed their skin, ‘eat slop with their faces,’ and are forced to send their offspring to war.

The strength of comic strips, like poetry, can derive from concise language and startling images. With Bulk Nuts, the latest addition to Mandy Ord’s long list of autobiographical comics and graphic novels, the Melbourne cartoonist attains a new level in her work. One of the ways she does this is by cutting back on words and presenting more considered, finished drawings. Through verbal economy and graphic surety, this collection of comic strips directs our flow of reading deftly from word to image and back again. Several stories end with the light gravity of a haiku or the hesitancy of e.e cummings.

Over the decades that Ord has been producing comic strip stories, we have witnessed her develop a personal iconic picture language, and in Bulk Nuts she has honed the images to a high level of finish. To a long-time observer of Ord’s work, the drawings here are clearer, finer, more precisely observed and produced. She has always been attentive to the ways that black ink falls from her brush to the page, but the brushwork in this book is particularly acute, teetering between representation and a purely graphic emotionality. Ord’s visual metaphors are also a major contributor to her narrative voice: the heavy vocal knottiness of parents fighting, the snaky fingery acquisitive ogling at a trash and treasure market, the vibratingly smarmy responses from the guy in the television show Knight Rider to KITT, his talking car. Ord’s visual correlatives for sound and physical action lead us further along the garden path of her cartooning dialect, which develops readerly intimacy with the emotional tone and sense of humour in these comics, which has to do with vulnerability and an appreciation of the natural world.

Ralph Ellison could be abrasive. His biographer Arnold Rampersad records that James Baldwin thought Ellison ‘the angriest man he knew’. Shirley Hazzard observed that when Ellison was drinking he ‘could become obnoxious very quickly’. His friend Albert Murray recognised something in him that was ‘potentially violent, very violent. He was ready to take on people and use whatever street corner language they understood. He was ready to fight, to come to blows. You really didn’t want to mess with Ralph Ellison.’

His masterpiece, Invisible Man (1952), the only novel he published in his lifetime, begins with a moment of explosive rage. The unnamed narrator is walking down a dark street and accidentally bumps into a blond man, who calls him something – we don’t know what – so he seizes him and shouts at him to apologise, then beats him to the ground and takes out a knife to slit his throat, stopping himself only when he realises that ‘the man had not seen me’.

At this very early stage of the novel, it has been hinted but not made explicit that Ellison’s narrator is a black man. The immediate inference, however, is that a racist slur has enraged him. That sense of anger remains close to the surface. Later in the book, there is a scene where the Invisible Man is threatened with expulsion from his southern Jim Crow college following a misadventure with the institution’s rich white benefactor. When the college president – himself a black man – racially abuses him, the Invisible Man loses his cool again. ‘I’ll fight you,’ he screams. ‘I swear it, I’ll fight!’

Monumental Disruptions could not be more timely. Bronwyn Carlson and Terri Farrelly present settlers – whom historian Patrick Wolfe denoted ‘colonisers who never left’ – with a handbook on the failings of mythologised colonial history and the negative ramifications of this mythical history to this day. They argue that this history-telling is structurally intrinsic to many ideologies held by settlers since their fraught but recent history on this continent began. Over the course of ten comprehensive chapters Carlson and Farrelly describe the history behind colonial monuments and their relevance to a modern Australia.

‘In a sophisticated liberal democracy like the colonial settler state of Australia, the least we might hope for is an authentic interrogation of our uncomfortable shared history,’ write Carlson and Farrelly. Right from the first page, this book doesn’t pull any punches. Establishing that honesty is a far cry from what Indigenous Australians expect when it comes to discussion surrounding our shared history since invasion. What Indigenous Australians expect is the cataloguing of statues that represent colonisers supposed feats, celebratory events that personify the values of the genocide that so-called Australia was founded upon, and current-day mainstream media and governmental voices that uphold anachronistic beliefs embedded in white fragility. Carlson lays out the racist trappings that are foundational to the design of many white institutional systems flourishing at the expense of Indigenous Australians.

In the dying months of the last century, I took a crash course in Modern British Fiction. I had opted for the most contemporary course on the Oxford English MPhil that covered the most contemporary period (1880 to the present, then generally understood to have ended circa 1970). My elective choices had all been a little unpopular: rather than a term parsing Ulysses, I read all of Conrad; where the crowd chose Pound or Eliot for the poetry elective, I turned up at St John’s each week to talk about Yeats.

All a little belated, you might say, though in retrospect, I realise, perfectly consonant with a growing interest in the postcolonial. This final option promised a survey of writing since 1970, though with little sense of what precisely that might include. Perhaps that is why I was alone in electing to take it – and why there was a scramble to find someone to act as tutor. In the event, there we were, a South African in his early twenties and a Creative Writing tutor from Oxford’s Department of Continuing Education, left to come up with our own reading list.

I say ‘our’, but I of course read what Clare Morgan told me to: Pat Barker, Julian Barnes, Kazuo Ishiguro, Caryl Phillips, Graham Swift. If this seems an eclectic selection (aren’t reading lists always susceptible to that charge?), Peter Kemp’s Retroland confirms that Morgan’s selection was on the money, at least in 1999. All of the books I read that term looked backwards, whether to the traumas of the Great War, complicities of country-house politics in the 1930s, incestuous Fenland family secrets, the transgenerational legacies of slavery, or, in History of the World in 10½ Chapters, a sampling of outcasts across time. None was especially formally inventive; there was very little invitation (excepting Barnes) to invoke postmodernism – all the rage in the non-metropolitan English department from which I had graduated. I had been taught there (through Kurt Vonnegut, Italo Calvino, and David Lodge) that postmodernism revisited the past with irony. There was little irony on view here (again with the exception of Barnes): irony was for Channel 4 gameshows. Modern British Fiction, it seemed, was earnest, less playful than suffused with regret, devoted to epiphanies without elation, as chilly as the room in Christ Church where Morgan and I met fortnightly.

'Anything and everything, all of the time.’ This is the refrain to comedian Bo Burnham’s hilarious and subtly disturbing song ‘Welcome to the Internet’, which both precedes and succeeds endless lists of absurd metadata. The idea is that, naturally enough, we have entered an age that simply has no way to escape the internet. Everything is available to us instantly. And with that, since we no longer live within the binary of either being on or offline, life has become increasingly inextricable from what’s happening ‘over there’.

If indeed the internet rules our lives, it’s good to have poetry that engages with that maybe highly alarming fact instead of ignoring it. Dan Hogan’s début collection, Secret Third Thing, is a poetic embodiment of that maxed-out chaos. It is a book both deeply informed by internet culture and deeply disquieted by it.

As evidenced by the title, Secret Third Thing examines the implications of 2022’s most notorious Twitter meme (a demented-looking dog with a text overlay that reads ‘I’m neither joking nor serious but another secret third thing’). This proves to be a perfectly irreverent lens through which to examine class consciousness, language, and gender under late capitalism.

Max Dupain's portrait of Jean Lorraine, a favourite model among Sydney’s artists and photographers of the 1930s and 1940s, graces the elegant cover of Paul Dalgarno’s Prudish Nation. All that gives a somewhat misleading impression of the nature of this book. It is not a work of history. Nor is it an investigation of whether Australia is a notably prudish nation. The variety of gender and sexual identities examined certainly does not leave an impression of prudishness. If Australia was once prudish, it is obviously less so now.

The Scottish-born Paul Dalgarno is himself polyamorous, and much – although by no means all – of the book is devoted to exploring this phenomenon. Dalgarno draws on his own experience with his wife, Jess, and partner, Kate, as well as his and Jess’s young sons. As Dalgarno explains, it can make for awkward moments in filling out the census, and pangs of embarrassment when being invited to events that allow for a ‘plus one’.

None of this will strike most readers as among the most onerous of oppressions or urgent of problems facing the world. Indeed, it might well seem an elaborate rationalisation for sexual selfishness: one partner is not enough, so let’s have two. But Dalgarno emphasises that he is discussing ‘consensual nonmonogamy’, not faithlessness. He explores the obvious objections and pitfalls, such as the management of jealousy and impact on children. He is defensive rather than fervent, thoughtful rather than sophistic – and when he infrequently veers towards the latter, one senses that he is mainly trying to convince himself rather than us.

In May 2021, scientists at Woebot Health, a US-based artificial intelligence company, published a paper titled ‘Evidence of Human-Level Bonds Established with a Digital Conversational Agent’. Reading it back then, I felt like a door had suddenly opened from nowhere. But not just any door: this one led directly to a passage into human inner life and one of its most intimate dimensions: the nature and experience of emotional bonding.

Woebot claimed that the sort of empathetic bonds which help to motivate behavioural change through therapies like CBT (Cognitive Behavioural Therapy) are possible to form with an artificial intelligence chatbot. The implications for its marketing were clear. What might have seemed most human in therapeutic exchanges could in fact be automated, made available at scale, to anyone in need, at any time. ‘The ability to establish a bond, and to do so with millions of people simultaneously, is the secret to unlocking the potential of digital therapeutics like never before,’ states the company’s website. If ‘intimacy has a quality of enchantment’ (Anthony Elliott), then the human enchantment of therapeutic bonding was about to take off in app stores around the globe.

In 2018, I published an essay on the emerging complex of intimate data and machine intelligence, ‘O Brave New World That Has Such Data In’t: Love and self-understanding in an algorithmic age’ (PN Review 242). ‘With massive datasets,’ I wrote, ‘will come a revolution in the ways we understand ourselves and others. Love as an endless ontological striptease will meet the instant nakedness of data.’ In Algorithmic Intimacy: The digital revolution in personal relationships, Elliott, Professor of Sociology at the University of South Australia, develops an urgently needed framework for understanding what has rapidly become the ‘great digital revolution … in which these novel worlds of experience and experimentation make their presence felt in the brave new world of algorithmic modernity’.

There is an honoured tradition of battalion histories in Australia, particularly from World War I. The best of them tell us something of the individuals who served Australia well. This book takes battalion histories to an entirely new level. It is the most complete, and the most absorbing, account of a battalion I have ever read.

James Mitchell calls his account of the 2/2nd Pioneer Battalion a social history. It is most certainly that. The Melbourne Argus described a Pioneer Battalion for its readers: ‘Pioneers are now specialist troops [in early times] they were used mainly for trench digging … and road building [whereas now] they will really be super-infantry battalions.’

The detail in this book is simply extraordinary. Recruitment, training, and the life of the battalion at camps at Puckapunyal and Balcombe, and at sea on HMT Queen Mary, occupy the first 163 pages of the book. Many battalion historians rush through the creation of the battalion in a few pages, eager to get their men to war.

Is Mitchell’s account of camp life as the battalion forms simply a prelude? Not a bit of it. It is full of fascinating insights into the making of a living human institution. The account is quirky, sometimes humorous, but always thoroughly absorbing. Mitchell asks, ‘How do a thousand strangers become a community?’ He answers this question with a unique focus on the details of many individuals who made up the battalion. Men at War is a book about people.

In April 1990, Australia’s high commissioner to New Delhi, Graham Feakes, was in the final year of a six-year posting. Still regarded as one of Australia’s finest diplomats, he had worked tirelessly to invigorate a relationship that had been allowed to drift aimlessly for decades. Under his watch, in 1986 Rajiv Gandhi made the first visit by an Indian prime minister to Australia in almost two decades. Bob Hawke reciprocated shortly afterwards. Ministerial commissions and senior level officials’ groups were established. Aid was set to increase.

Feakes was determined to leave on a high note, but on the morning of 24 April 1990 he was summoned to India’s Ministry of External Affairs for a humiliating dressing down over an ‘unfortunate and regrettable decision’ that threatened ‘the stability of the region’. At a time of heightened tension on the subcontinent and without seeking Feakes’s advice, Australia’s defence department had announced the sale of fifty decommissioned Mirage fighter jets to India’s arch-enemy, Pakistan. Indo-Australian relations went into a decade-long deep freeze. I remember the crisis vividly. As the High Commission’s press secretary, I was charged with the impossible task of putting a positive spin on a disastrous decision.

The interconnected essays in Gemma Nisbet’s début collection, The Things We Live With, revolve around a premise that is as familiar as Marcel Proust’s madeleines or W.G. Sebald’s images: that things – objects, documents, photographs, even colours – evoke memories of the past. Her essays shift seamlessly from childhood to adult travels, jobs, relationships, and the problems that can lurk beneath a functional exterior.

Nisbet begins with ‘Edward Sylvester Hynes’, in the aftermath of her father’s death and the grief associated with sorting through the ephemera he left behind. Among other things she had forgotten or not seen before, she recognises a painting by Hynes, faithfully hauled by her father from residence to residence. This ‘intimate encounter with stuff’ renews her grief. Nisbet’s excavation of the past comes with the hope that discovering the source of her anxiety and depression might give her, if not a cure, at least a modicum of understanding. The problem she faces is that younger manifestations of our parents are unknowable and can only be surmised from what little evidence remains.

Ruth Mackenzie has more than forty years’ experience in the arts world. A former director of Holland Festival, Manchester International Festival, and Chichester Festival, Mackenzie oversaw the official cultural program for the 2012 London Olympics and was Artistic Director for the Théâtre du Châtelet in Paris. She also worked on the first Manchester International Festival as General Director, as Dramaturg for the Vienna Festival, and has directed the Scottish Opera and major theatres in Nottingham and Chichester. She is Artistic Director of the Adelaide Festival, with responsibility for the festivals from 2024 to 2026.

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

As a child, I was lucky to see Peter Brook’s production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. This was the first time I understood the power of a theatre director to change your understanding of a play and draw out of the text a vision you would never forget. It was the start of my lifelong adoration of great directors and their productions.

When did you realise that you wanted to be an artist yourself?

I am not an artist, which I realised when I watched Pierre Boulez rehearsing Pli Selon Pli with the BBC Symphony Orchestra. His musical genius, his technical precision, his generosity in listening to and supporting the musicians was breathtaking. I knew then I wanted to work with artists to create world-class, world-changing art.

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

Very hard to pick just one! At the London 2012 Festival (the official cultural festival for the London Olympics & Paralympics), Pina Bausch proposed her most ambitious project ever – the presentation of her World Cities series, each created in a residency in a different World City; and Elizabeth Streb proposed a series of new commissions called ‘One Extraordinary Day’, each on a London landmark, climaxing in a dance piece made 400 metres above the ground by dancers clipped to the spokes of the London Eye. And they happened at the same time … how can I choose!

Name three performers you would like to work with?

Also on my list of the most brilliant individual performances I have ever seen is Robert Lepage as Hamlet in Elsinore (we worked with him on the UK première in Nottingham Playhouse). He was a bit nervous performing Shakespeare in English in England, but it was so extraordinary. I have worked with Robert many times since 1993 and I am so happy he is coming to Adelaide for the 2024 Festival. At Manchester International Festival and again at the Holland Festival in Amsterdam, I worked with the great visual artist and Oscar-winning film director Steve McQueen, who is always top of my list as an artist making world-changing art. Closer to home here in Australia, I worked with Cate Blanchett on her ground-breaking production of Big and Little by Botho Strauss for Sydney, Vienna, Paris, London. Of all her extraordinary achievements as a performer, this must take the prize.

Do you have a favourite song?

Everybody has their personal playlist they turn to for joy and comfort. I will pick ‘God Only Knows’ by the Beach Boys from my playlist.

And your favourite play or opera?

The Rake’s Progress by Stravinsky. (But that is a hard question to ask somebody who has run an opera company in Scotland and an opera house in Paris.)

Who is your favourite writer – and your favourite composer?

You often find your favourites in childhood, and so mine are lifelong friends found early in life – Jane Austen and J.S. Bach.

How do you regard the audience?

I love and respect audiences. During the festival, listening to audience members talking about the shows is one of the most important and enjoyable parts of my job. Actually, talk to me anytime, not just during the festival.

What’s your favourite theatrical venue in Australia?

Here in Adelaide, the Odeon Theatre is both beautiful and, thanks to Dan Riley, his dancers and team, it has the perfect welcome for audiences and artists – a safe space for adventure and innovation.

What do you look for in arts critics?

Truth and expert knowledge. It is a tough time for art critics, but we need you as guides and critical friends.

Do you read your own reviews?

Yes, of course.

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

Money is always top of the list, but from my many conversations with talented emerging artists, I think there is a shortage of safe spaces where they can develop their work, supported by dramaturgs, producers, artistic directors. We would love to set up a Talent Lab, a safe space where, with experienced artistic director colleagues, we can support the development of ambitious new work by our future stars.

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

Creativity is the most important element for success across the whole business sector, and the creative industries are major engines for economic growth. Artists are vital because of what they contribute to society, but the core skills of the arts and artists are also vital in education, health, community cohesion, economic development, all parts of government. We can help governments achieve their most important social and economic goals. Don’t think of us as something irrelevant on the margins. Let us help you.

What advice would you give an aspiring artist?

Think big. Don’t censor your vision and dreams because you fear they are too ambitious. Don’t say what you think people want to hear – your job is to change our minds, open our eyes, inspire and move us.

What’s the best advice you have ever received?

Defend and protect the artists. Artistic directors are human shields to protect artists and their visions. Our job is to make sure artists can do their job.

What’s your next project or performance?

Easy answer: Adelaide Festival 1–17 March 2024. Please come!