Peter Porter Poetry Prize

The Peter Porter Poetry Prize, now in its twentieth year, attracted 1,066 entries, from twenty-one countries. Warmly we thank our three distinguished judges – Lachlan Brown (shortlisted in 2020), Dan Disney (winner in 2023), and Felicity Plunkett – who have shortlisted the following poems:

‘Poem of the Dead Woman’ by Judith Nangala Crispin (NSW)

‘Immigration Triction’ by Natalie Damjanovich-Napoleon (WA)

‘Workarounds’ by Dan Hogan (NSW)

‘Cuttle’ by Meredi Ortega (Scotland)

‘Blagaj Mostar’ by Dženana Vucic (Germany)

On our website we list the eleven poems that comprised the official longlist. There you will also find the judges’ report, including their remarks about the individual poems. Our judges had this to say about the overall field:

Arriving at this shortlist of five stylistically diverse poems, each of us was reading for language that was concise and perspicacious, language that arrested our attention in ways that immediately rewarded re-reading. In uniquely different ways, each shortlisted poem demonstrates compelling awareness of the function not only of the poetic line but, more broadly, of syntax, grammar, diction and the power relations transmitted therein. Each of these linguistic thought experiments remains inherently cognisant of the materiality of language. Accordingly, each plays a fascinating language game. Beyond matters of style, each shortlisted poem focuses outwardly towards social modes/models that bear the weight of creative critique; therein, each text parlays a critical qua ethical consciousness, in which the poem is shown again to be a tool with which to construct new thinking, new idealisms, new hope for renewed possibilities to stride across often-bleak horizons.

The shortlisted poems appear in this issue (from page 29).

This year’s Porter Prize ceremony will take place via Zoom on Tuesday, 19 January (6pm). The shortlisted poets will read their poems, then the overall winner (who receives $6,000) will be named. To register your interest, please visit the Events page on our website and RSVP to This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

Meanwhile, our talented quintet is recording the shortlisted poems for the ABR Podcast. This will be available just prior to the ceremony.

Finally, we congratulate the other six poets who appeared on the longlist and who added such lustre to this year’s Porter Prize: Paula Bohince (USA), Marguerite Bunce (France), John Foulcher (ACT), Greg McLaren (NSW), Petra Reid (Scotland), Meredith Wattison (NSW).

Prizes galore

Thanks to all those who have entered the Calibre Essay Prize, from many countries. The Calibre Prize, now worth a total of $10,000 and one of the most lucrative prizes for an unpublished essay in English, closes at midnight on 22 January. The ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize will open on 15 January. The total prize money this year is $12,500 (with three individual prizes). Full details will appear on our website from 15 January. The Jolley closes on 22 April.

Sometimes, for the faithful, it doesn’t do to look too closely into the life of your chosen idol. Saul of Tarsus had been an enthusiastic persecutor of Christians before his spiritual detour en route to Damascus. St Camillus de Lellis, patron saint of nurses and the sick, to whom we owe the symbol of the red cross, spent his early life as a con man, a mercenary, and a compulsive gambler – little wonder he went far in the Church. Where our secular martyrs are concerned, matters become still murkier. Mahatma Gandhi tested his chastity by sleeping naked with nubile young women and girls – one of whom was his grand-niece. And as for Julian Assange ...

To celebrate the year’s memorable plays, films, television, music, operas, dance, and exhibitions, we invited a number of arts professionals and critics to nominate their favourites.  

Ian Dickson

Belvoir is ending the year on a roll. In Lady Day at Emerson’s Bar & Grill, Zahra Newman – directed by Mitchell Butel and ably backed by Kym Purling, Victor Rounds, and Calvin Welch – gave us a disintegrating Billie Holiday and turned Lanie Robertson’s mediocre play into a poignant tragedy (Lady Day was reviewed in ABR Arts, September 2023). This was followed by Eamon Flack’s rollicking, genre-busting version of Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita (ABR Arts, 11/23). Flack cleverly juxtaposed the events in the novel with the terrifying background against which it was written. The Sydney Symphony Orchestra’s season also closed with a bang. Simone Young conducted an in-form band and a uniformly strong cast in a concert version of Wagner’s Das Rheingold, which had its audience avid for the next three operas in her Ring Cycle. Earlier in the year, Musica Viva’s Paul Kildea took John Cage’s Sonatas and Interludes for prepared piano, enlisted the composer and sound artist Matthias Schack-Arnott to create and light a sculpture that rotated as Cédric Tiberghien played, and provided an experience that had an extraordinary, almost spiritual effect on the audience.

Zahra Newman in Lady Day (photograph by Matt Byrne)

Robyn Archer

In the wake of Ryuichi Sakamoto’s untimely death in March 2023, Shiro Takatani (member of the company Dumb Type, which has graced a number of Australian festivals) created a new version, async – immersion 2023, of his collaboration with Sakamoto. Specifically designed for the vast dark industrial basement of the Shinbun Kyoto building in this year’s Ambient Kyoto, and blending Sakamoto’s music in exquisite three-dimensional sound with Takatani’s seemingly endless sequence of images (including landscape, library, seascape, Sakamoto’s work tools and a piano wrecked by the 2011 tsunami, which reignited Sakamoto’s anti-nuclear activism) and their digital manipulation, this work exemplifies everything that a massive screen-based immersion can achieve: meditative, reflective, technically faultless. In the ninety minutes I spent there, only one image was repeated and then in different format: I could have stayed there all day.

 Ryuichi Sakamoto (Flickr via Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license)

Diane Stubbings

Trophy Boys (fortyfivedownstairs), a play about male toxicity in a high-school debating team, was independent theatre at its best. Written by Emmanuelle Mattana and directed by Marni Mount, the play’s sexual politics may have been simplistic, but it had a vitality that few of Melbourne’s mainstage productions could muster. Richard Mosse’s Broken Spectre, a video installation at the National Gallery of Victoria which juxtaposed the extraordinary beauty of the Amazon rainforest with its seemingly inexorable destruction, was transformative. So too Jonathan Glazer’s unflinching perspective on the enablers of the Holocaust in his film The Zone of Interest (ABR Arts, 11/23). For the duration of its four short minutes, The Beatles’ ‘Now and Then’ moves you through a kaleidoscope of long-lost emotions. The cadences of Lennon’s vocals, the supporting strains of McCartney, Harrison, and Starr, are both immediate and hauntingly remote. While some might question the song’s musical qualities, there are few who won’t remember it as a watershed moment in the synthesis of AI and the arts.

The Zone of Interest (courtesy of the Jewish International Film Festival)

Peter Rose

For consistency of singing, for dramatic cohesion, for no-nonsense directorial vision, and for sheer chutzpah, Melbourne Opera’s production of Wagner’s Ring Cycle (ABR Arts, 3/23), performed in Bendigo (without state government support, shamingly), was a clear highlight – pound for pound the finest Ring I have seen in Australia. Meanwhile, the national company remained on mute in Melbourne. In Sydney, Opera Australia presented La Gioconda in concert, a welcome reminder of the riches in Ponchielli’s often-maligned opera (ABR Arts, 8/23). Ludovic Tézier stole the show – a masterclass for baritones. October took us to Europe for ABR’s Vienna tour, the highlight of which was Strauss’s magnificent, preposterous opera Die Frau ohne Schatten at the Vienna State Opera, superbly conducted by Christian Thielemann (ABR Arts, 10/23). Simone Lamsma was an inspired soloist in Britten’s Violin Concerto with the Wiener Symphoniker, under Jaap van Zweden (ABR Arts, 10/23). Earlier, the great Maxim Vengerov tore down the Concertgebuow with a mighty rendition of Brahms’s Violin Concerto (ABR Arts, 10/23).

The cast of La Gioconda with the Opera Australia Orchestra (photograph by Keith Saunders)

Julie Ewington

Notes from a year when Australia’s increasingly complex social and cultural dialogues were manifested in generous projects exploring difference and community. Among the best: Between Waves, the third Yalingwa exhibition of First Nations artists at ACCA, Melbourne, ‘shining a light on our times’: beautiful, limpid, intelligent. Wonderful solo outings include the (overdue) institutional exhibition for Newell Harry, subtitled Esperanto, at MAMA, Albury; Iranian-Australian Hoda Afshar’s exceptional photographs and videos at AGNSW (until 21 January 2024); and Camille Laddawan, at Sydney’s Australian Design Centre, currently showing exquisite small weavings with glass beads that chart the diverse inheritances of her unborn child. Further afield, a first visit to M+, Hong Kong’s brilliant global museum of contemporary art, film, design, and popular culture. M+ is engaging, expansive, a conduit between peoples and cultures; half the visitors are from mainland China, and clearly they are captivated. Finally, a lifetime wish fulfilled: Matisse’s luminous Chapel of the Rosary in Vence, near Nice. Wonderful in any year.

Chapelle du Rosaire de Vence, also known as the Matisse Chapel (photograph by Michel Baret and Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images)

Malcolm Gillies

The Vision String Quartet, which toured in September–October for Musica Viva, was just fantastic. This young ensemble from Berlin directly fronted its audience. How? By playing its programs entirely from memory. Gone were rickety music stands, or even sleek iPads. Their Fourth Quartet of Bartók was technically brilliant, appropriately stylish, and gripping. Another showcase of youthful talent was the Sydney International Piano Competition’s romp, from opening gala to grand-final culmination (ABR Arts, 7/23). This was the first fully staged Competition in seven years; the reincarnation was broadcast online under the management of Piano-Plus. In fact, 2023 was the year of growing market penetration of digital concert halls, purveying specialist, regional, community, and youth arts like never before. No longer, it appears, does quality music need to be geared to high-paying ‘urban élites’. As university students have deserted draughty lecture halls, are our concert highlights also now best found in the cloud?

From the Opening Gala of the Sydney International Piano Competition (photograph by Jay Patel)

Clare Monagle

In January 2023, I saw the Red Line production of Amadeus at the Sydney Opera House and I’m still pinching myself that I experienced its sheer Sydney splendidness (ABR Arts, 12/22). Every element was exciting. Michael Sheen was the iconic star of the stage I had hoped for. The actor who had once played Mozart to David Suchet’s Salieri was now the older jealous composer, burning with resentment at the youngster’s genius. The costumes, by Romance Was Born, were garishly Sydney while still being quite eighteenth century. But the highlight was that the production contained musicians from the Metropolitan Orchestra. Most productions of Amadeus have relied on recorded music. It was a rare treat indeed to test the new acoustics of the renovated Concert Hall, with snippets of Mozart as part of a big and joyfully bombastic theatrical production.

Michael Sheen (courtesy of Red Line Productions)

Andrew Ford

I heard both the Alma Moody Quartet and the Australian Romantic and Classical Orchestra live for the first time (ABR Arts, 8/23). The former played Ligeti, the latter Mendelssohn, and both delivered revelations. Mendelssohn’s Scottish symphony seemed more a masterpiece than ever. Hoda Afshar’s photographs at the Art Gallery of New South Wales (A Curve is a Broken Line) took my breath away. I walked into the room of giant black-and-white photographs of hair-braiding and doves, and felt utterly elated. Turn Every Page, a film about biographer writer Robert Caro (The Power Broker, The Years of Lyndon Johnson) and editor Robert Gottlieb, ought to be impossibly dry, but, lovingly directed by Gottlieb’s daughter, it’s my film of the year. I watched it flying to England, then flying back, and twice more since. I have told everyone I know they should watch it, too; I’m not sure they always believe me.

 Australian Romantic & Classical Orchestra conducted by Rachael Beesley (photograph by Peter Hislop)

Felicity Chaplin

Watching Alice Rohrwacher’s mesmerising The Wonders under the stars on a balmy July night in Florence at the open-air Apriti Cinema in the Piazzale degli Uffizi. Greatly anticipating and then seeing her next film, La Chimera (ABR Arts, 9/23), which completed her trilogy including The Wonders and Lazzaro Felice, all set in her homeland of central Italy and all shot with poetic febrility and technical imperfection by Hélène Louvart. MIFF’s impressive program also included the following outstanding films by women: Marie Amachoukeli’s tender, delicate, and inventive Àma Gloria; Justine Triet’s suspenseful courtroom drama Anatomy of a Fall, an enthralling dissection of marital intimacy with the masterful Sandra Hüller in the lead role; and Alice Englert’s feature film début, the astutely observed black comedy Bad Behaviour, starring Ben Whishaw and the brilliant (and underrated) Jennifer Connelly, followed by an engrossing late-night Q&A with the director.

 La Chimera (courtesy of Palace Films)

Des Cowley

Saxophonist Adam Simmons and Italian pianist Alessandra Garosi delivered an outstanding recital – brimming with masterful improvisation – at Tempo Rubato, freely interpreting Italian composer Damiano Santini’s extended suite Zodiac. The evening felt bittersweet, as Simmons announced his retirement from professional playing. Trumpeter Reuben Lewis’s solo performance at the Primrose Potter Salon proved thoroughly hypnotic, his ambient soundscapes elevated by the presence of dancer Tony Yap. And on a balmy Cup Eve, Nick Tsiavos entered the intimate confines of the La Mama Courthouse, in Carlton, to play his extended piece for solo bass Maps for Losing Oneself, at once austere, timeless, and searingly beautiful. Lastly, the Melbourne Jazz Co-operative’s fortieth-anniversary concert at the Melbourne Recital Centre in May – featuring performances by Mike Nock, Vanessa Perica, Sandy Evans, Paul Grabowsky, Andrea Keller, and dozens more – marked a genuine milestone, celebrating contemporary Australian jazz, along with the indefatigable efforts of its founder Martin Jackson (ABR Arts, 5/23).

 Vanessa Perica at the Recital Centre for the Melbourne Jazz Co-operative 40th-anniversary concert (photograph by Will Hamilton-Coates)

Tim Byrne

Post-Covid, the performing arts are struggling to fully recover – with the greatest devastation wrought on the independent sector. Perhaps this is why the best shows this year came from our larger companies, and one small company that went large. Nikki Shiels brought the flinty, firebrand arts patron Sunday Reed to glimmering life in Anthony Weigh’s thoughtful, incisive three-hander, Sunday, for MTC. David Hallberg put his mark on the Australian Ballet with a glorious Swan Lake, sumptuous and deeply symbolic. His pairing of Benedicte Bemet with Joseph Caley is a triumphant one for the ages. And Melbourne Opera delivered Der Ring des Nibelungen in Bendigo, epic and intimate. Suzanne Chaundy’s direction was clarion and her singers, led by Warwick Fyfe and Antoinette Halloran, superb. It made the heart swell with pride.

 Sunday (courtesy of MTC and photograph by Pia Johnson)

Sophie Knezic

Bare bodies – animated by choreographic contortions or the more understated gestures of intimacy and repose – characterised several contemporary exhibitions this year. Paul Knight’s ongoing photographic series Chamber Music (exhibited in L’ombre de ton ombre at MUMA), documenting intimate life with his long-term partner, exuded a post-coital tenderness, while Lucy Guerin’s NEWRETRO – excerpts from her choreographic back-catalogue (‘21 works, 21 dancers, 21 years in the making’) – had dancers tumbling gracefully across ACCA’s cavernous interior. The most compelling bodies, however, were the brooding figures set in post-apocalyptic environments envisioned by Peter Booth. A spectacular survey at TarraWarra Museum of Art assembled paintings and drawings produced over four decades, collectively creating a mood of nightmarishness and angst. Icy landscapes set aflame against leaden nocturnal skies were the harsh backdrops for despondent, often grotesque, figures trudging through a sepulchral world.

Peter Booth, Painting Two 1984 (National Gallery of Victoria via TarraWarra)

Michael Shmith

For a few weeks in March and April, Bendigo became the Bayreuth of the Great Southern Land. To all those who made the pilgrimage to the Ulumbarra Theatre, Melbourne Opera’s first complete production of Der Ring des Nibelungen was a worthy and engrossing experience. Through Anthony Negus’s superbly controlled and paced conducting and Suzanne Chaundy’s straightforward and vividly telling production, Wagner’s tetralogy did not seem a second too long; rather, it emerged as a true festival piece in which the days between the operas were, like the silences in music, periods of reflection and anticipation. I was at the second of the three cycles. Especially distinguished performances were Warwick Fyfe’s lyrical and bellicose Wotan, and Bradley Daley’s untiring Siegfried, whose sweetness and strength of tone reminded me uncannily of the great Heldentenor Siegfried Jerusalem, who happened to be sitting next to me.

What next for Melbourne Opera and Bendigo? Maybe Die Meistersinger?

 Darren Jeffrey, Warwick Fyfe, Steven Gallop, James Egglestone, Chris Tonkin, Sarah Sweeting, Jason Wasley and Lee Abrahmsen in Das Rheingold (photograph by Robin Halls)

Jordan Prosser

In a year beset by grim omens for the entertainment industry, including not one but two Hollywood strikes, the Melbourne International Film Festival once again proved an oasis in a desert of shifting release schedules and lacklustre streaming content. Two films stood out. In Anatomy of a Fall, the Palme d’Or-winning French courtroom drama from director Justine Triet, a steely Sandra Hüller plays an author accused of murdering her husband, leading to a gruelling forensic examination of her marriage. And in May December, Todd Haynes’s gleefully murky melodrama, Natalie Portman plays a ruthless actress studying every move and mannerism of Julianne Moore’s soft-spoken matriarch, who became infamous twenty years earlier for her tabloid romance with a thirteen-year-old boy. Portman and Moore are in career-best form, but the real revelation here is Riverdale’s Charles Melton as the now-grown husband, sending his own children off to college when he himself was robbed of a normal adolescence.

From May December (courtesy of Transmissions Films)

John Allison

Problematic at the best of times, Prokofiev’s War and Peace  (ABR Arts, 7/23) is a powerful if ramshackle opera with roots in Stalin’s propaganda ministry. Now, in far from the best of times, the Bayerische Staatsoper must have wondered whether its long-standing plan to stage it was wise, but the company and the work itself were vindicated when the conductor Vladimir Jurowski and director Dmitri Tcherniakov – both Russians living abroad, both critics of Putin’s regime – teamed up and, with a large cast drawn across the states of the former USSR, delivered the most blazingly brilliant operatic performance of the year. Not far behind it in terms of epic power was Lydia Steier’s production of Verdi’s Don Carlos at the Grand Théâtre de Genève – set in a modern totalitarian state, sung in French (of course), and the fullest text I’ve encountered in the theatre. With an outstanding cast and conducted by Marc Minkowski, every minute blazed with musico-dramatic intensity.

 Sergei Prokofiev (photograph from George Grantham Bain Collection in US Library of Congress)

Ben Brooker

Two extraordinary women, one young, one old, were behind the work which most uplifted my sprits in a year that too often confirmed the worst of humanity. On the one hand were three productions written by Caryl Churchill – Patalog Theatre’s Far Away at fortyfivedownstairs (ABR Arts, 7/23) and the double-bill of Escaped Alone and What If If Only at MTC (ABR Arts, 8/23). All three affirmed the now eighty-five-year-old British playwright as perhaps the most vital of her generation, an experimentalist but a humanist at heart, raking through darkness in search of light. On the other hand, the mixed bag that was this year’s Rising Festival at least delivered my musical highlight of 2023 in the form of a breathtaking show by American singer-songwriter Weyes Blood at the Forum. Touring her superb new album And in the Darkness, Hearts Aglow, Blood stunned the packed house with her sublime chamber pop and Linda Ronstadt-esque vocal prowess.

Alison Whyte and Darcy Sterling-Cox in Far Away (photograph by Cameron Grant)

Michael Halliwell

My highlight was the outstanding production by the Bavarian State Opera of Sergei Prokofiev’s large-scale opera based on Tolstoy’s War and Peace. It is a troubling work, particularly with the war in Ukraine not far away, but the Russian team of conductor Vladimir Jurowski and director Dimitri Tcherniakov unflinchingly confronted the Zeitgeist with a setting comprising refugees who ‘play act’ the events of the opera, thus distancing the most offensive Stalinist elements in the opera. A brilliant young cast, led by a Ukrainian soprano and Russian baritone as Natasha and Andrei, did full justice to the work. Opera Australia’s co-production of Offenbach’s The Tales of Hoffmann (ABR Arts, 7/23) was a brilliantly quirky staging by an Italian creative team, the vocal highlight being soprano Jessica Pratt. Rounding out the year was polymath William Kentridge’s heartwarming contemporary take on the Cumaean Sibyl myth with an energetic cast of South African singers and dancers: Waiting for the Sibyl (ABR Arts, 11/23).

 Sibyl (photograph by David Boon)

Peter Tregear

My two highlights were encounters with the very small and the very large. The latter was Melbourne Opera’s presentation of Wagner’s Ring Cycle in Bendigo, a mammoth logistical and artistic challenge admirably and successfully undertaken by a company that operates without government subsidy. An effective, narrative-driven staging from director Suzanne Chaundy and designer Andrew Bailey, was well supported by conductors Anthony Negus and David Kram, and by an excellent all-Australian cast. Bendigo’s Ulumbarra Theatre also proved to be a superb venue for this imposing festival of music drama. The former was the NGV’s Rembrandt: True to Life exhibition (ABR Arts, 7/23). Nothing immediately grandiose about the works on display here, many of which were also very small – but they packed a punch. Kudos to curator Petra Kayser for allowing them to bear witness to the artist’s technical and aesthetic brilliance, and his history and humanity.

Rembrandt Harmensz van Rijn, Self-portrait in a cap, 1630, wide-eyed and open-mouthed (Rijksmuseum via National Gallery of Victoria)

Graham Strahle

Simon Trpčeski’s piano recital in November was for me the year’s most exhilarating concert in Adelaide. This Macedonian pianist played at the level of free-flowing inspiration and daring one felt lucky to witness. His Mozart was wickedly effervescent and cheeky, his Tchaikovsky almost unbearably passionate (the ‘Pas de Deux’ from Nutcracker brought tears to many an eye), and his Prokofiev frankly held one in disbelief by its stupendous roar of virtuosity. This makes it two in a row for Guy Barrett’s Harris International Piano Series, following Robyn Archer’s praise for Jean-Efflam Bavouzet last year, in the same series. Jordi Savall and Hespèrion XXI similarly exceeded themselves at Ukaria in February. Despite a string breaking on Jordi’s treble viol, this esteemed Spanish group turned in its most rapturous consort-playing one could remember, highlighted by gorgeous solo dancing from one of its players, Lixsania Fernández.

Simon Trpceski (photograph by Ealovega Kultur)

Sean Turnell is an Australian economist who was detained by Myanmar’s military regime from February 2021 until November 2022. An Unlikely Prisoner, his account of the ordeal, has quite a personal tone as he relates his struggle with unjust imprisonment by a regime whose hallmark was ‘a mix of the needlessly brutal, the petty, and the incompetent’. This personal story is also mixed with politics, for Turnell has an insider’s view of Myanmar’s ongoing struggle for freedom, one of the great dramas of modern Asian history.

In the 2000s, Turnell’s expertise on Myanmar’s economy drew the attention of Daw Aung San Suu Kyi – ‘Daw Suu’, as he respectfully calls her – the leader of the National League for Democracy (NLD), the main opposition to the military regime. For two decades, Daw Suu had been under either house arrest or some other type of restraint, until in 2011 the military tried to change its spots by introducing a new, quasi-democratic constitution. In national elections in 2015, the NLD won an overwhelming victory, forming a government led by Daw Suu, and Turnell joined her team as an adviser. While it kept an iron grip on security matters, the military had to sit back and watch as the NLD steered the country towards greater democracy and a more open economy. In the 2020 national elections, the NLD once more swept the board. This time, refusing to accept this fresh mandate, the military mounted a coup, imprisoning Daw Suu and members of her government, Turnell, and at least ten thousand of her civilian supporters.

For a man many would regard as the very epitome of the type, Raimond Gaita seems rather hostile to the concept of the intellectual. It is ‘irredeemably mediocre’, he explains, inferior to the kinds of moral and political responsibility that attach to teacher or politician. Intellectuals are active in the public domain, grappling with ideas, culture, and politics, but they have often lacked independence of mind, he says, ‘because they never had it or because they sacrificed it to the cause’.

When Gaita articulates his ideal of a university, the vision is of ‘a community of scholars’, of a contemplative life that requires ‘inwardness with values slowly apprehended by living the life of the mind in community with fine exemplars of it’. In that sense, he believes, the university is finished. And while some academics might take time out of their teaching and research to become public intellectuals, it is not an obligation.

Yet Gaita would seem to many the archetype of the Australian academic as intellectual, one of a fairly small number of humanities scholars in this country who have left a significant imprint on the culture. He is best known as the author of a much-admired memoir of his childhood as the son of European migrants, Romulus, My Father (1998), later a film, but here he is essayist, reviewer, and lecturer. The pieces range from the short, sharp reflection on a current event, such as ‘Why the War Is Wrong’ (2003) on Iraq, through to extended reflection of a more challenging – and perhaps ‘academic’ – kind, such as that on whether torture can be a lesser evil.

The story of the extended encounter between Eora Aboriginal man Bennelong and Arthur Phillip, first governor of the British colony at Sydney, has often been told as both emblematic and predictive of the history of British possession of Australia, and of Aboriginal dispossession. Historians such as Grace Karskens and Keith Vincent Smith have peeled back the layers of this narrative to find ways of telling more complex, contextualised, and open-ended stories. Fullagar reaches a new stage in this journey, and the journey of Australian history more generally. She offers a fresh perspective on Bennelong and Phillip, on the nature of their exchange and the broader currents in which they swam.

Fullagar writes the history of these two men backwards, beginning with their deaths and burials in 1813 (Bennelong) and 1814 (Phillip) and with analysis of their surviving next of kin. She then plots events towards and beyond their births, revealing their defining characteristics and the unfolding changes that shaped their respective worlds. Fullagar does this to better understand the context of each man’s life, and the relative importance for each life of the time they spent together. She also wants to break free from the ever-forwards idea of progress, in itself a European narrative form that shaped the idea of British colonisation and, more specifically, Phillip’s own sense of rationalism. As Fullagar observes, European historians have helped to ‘license imperial injustices by presenting them as the necessary if sad cost of modernity itself’, a historiographical project that took off in earnest not long after the two men’s deaths. Going backwards may not bring us closer to how Bennelong and his people understood time and the past, Fullagar admits, but at least it sets his and Phillip’s histories into an ‘equally unfamiliar framing’. Most importantly for this pair of intertwined stories, going backwards shucks off the sense of inevitability that has skewed our understandings of Phillip’s life to some extent, and Bennelong’s. Going backwards takes some additional effort for the reader, but most of it is productive in the way Fullagar hopes it will be.

In October 2014, an article by health reporter Aisha Dow appeared in Melbourne’s Age newspaper titled ‘Deadly flu pandemic could shut down Melbourne’. It began with a dystopian vision of Australia’s second most populous city plunged into a Spanish flu-like crisis:

A deadly pandemic could shut down Melbourne as we know it. Public transport could be terminated, AFL games cancelled and the casino, schools and office towers forced to close. It has been predicted that the first wave of a pandemic could cause 10,000 deaths in Victoria. But families and friends may not be able to publicly mourn lost loved ones, because funeral services could be stopped as part of [a] policy of social distancing.

Nearly everyone in Australia has a story about bad airline service, and many of those stories involve Qantas, whose ‘mishandled bag rate’ recently doubled and flight cancellations tripled. The formerly smooth and efficient Sydney-Melbourne run is now a dispiriting ordeal.

Widespread anger at Qantas provides the context and backdrop for Peter Harbison’s revelatory book (with Derek Sadubin) about ‘the oldest continuously operating airline in the world’. At a sprightly pace, the book walks through Qantas’s recent history of turbulence. Industrial disputes, corporate machinations, and pandemic challenges punctuate the rollercoaster. In 2007, an attempted private-equity buy-out failed, evidently because a hard-to-get United States investor intended to agree at the last minute but miscalculated the time difference, faxing his confirmation ‘five hours too late’.

The death of Gabrielle Carey in May 2023 was a cruel loss for the Australian literary world, especially its Joyce community. I first met Gabrielle shortly after moving to Sydney from London in 2010. She invited me to her annual Bloomsday celebration, which took place in a Glebe pub. I was new in town and delighted to join the readings and revelry. I suspected, rightly, that my Dublin accent would glean me some credibility, if nothing else did.

Gabrielle’s interest in Joyce was deep and enduring, and part of her broader affinity with Ireland, where she had lived for a spell. But that was only one facet of her open and intensely enquiring nature. She had accidentally achieved literary celebrity in her teenage years, as joint author of Puberty Blues (1979), the iconic Australian coming-of-age book. While her co-author, Kathy Lette, gained fame in London, as a raunchy, in-your-face Aussie, Gabrielle went in the opposite direction, eschewing cheap publicity, seeking out quality and truth in her life and interests, living with dignity, grace, and style. She wrote with a ring of authenticity and often with Joycean frankness (and humour) about her life, the terminal illness of her mother, her relationship with a prisoner in a Parramatta jail, her literary passions and connections, her father’s suicide, her own struggles with mental illness. She went through a Mexican phase as well as an Irish one, which endured in the annual ‘Day of the Dead’ parties in her Ashfield home. In the last ten years, she excelled in a hybrid genre, linking literary biography and personal memoir, producing three successive books on Randolph Stow, Ivan Southall, and Elizabeth von Armin. These authors come alive through the intensity of her relationship with them, imbuing her beguilingly clean prose with the qualities of a romance or even a whodunnit.

The Best Australian Science Writing (BASW) anthology is here again, and readers are in for a treat: a wide-ranging selection of easy-to-read articles describing some of the amazing science that is happening right now.

Of course, it is an impossible task, choosing the ‘best’ writing, and in her introduction editor Donna Lu acknowledges her subjectivity. It is the same for a reviewer, and since I don’t have room to name everyone, I won’t single out my own favourites. Instead, I will offer some general thoughts, sparked by Lu’s welcome attempt to grapple with the question of what constitutes great science writing. She takes her lead from a surprising source, novelist Ian McEwan. In a 2006 Guardian essay on the importance of a literary science canon, McEwan asked, ‘Is accuracy … the most important criterion for selection? Or is style the final arbiter?’ Lu finds her answer in another of McEwan’s suggestions: ‘We know what we like when we taste it.’

It takes some considerable effort to remember Theresa May’s time as prime minister. Her two governments ran from the resignation of David Cameron immediately after the political earthquake of the Brexit referendum in 2016, to May’s own tearful resignation in the summer of 2019 as the aftershocks swallowed her minority government. The distending effects of the past three years of UK (and world) politics have already made the May era a kind of historical curiosity. The consequent danger is that we look back to her stint as prime minister as the last gasp of sensible politics avant le déluge.

This volume, we are assured, is not a political memoir. Readers in search of materials with which to reimagine with cosy nostalgia the world before those twin horsemen of the apocalypse – coronavirus and Boris Johnson – will be disappointed. So too will those who want an unvarnished and melodramatic tale of dastardly misdeeds, mendacious populism, and stage villains getting their just deserts. May has instead set her sights on loftier goals. She largely eschews the opportunities to embroider her own life story or to settle scores. Instead, she sets out, crusader style, to slay injustice in public life.

May almost avoids the juicier opportunities of the political memoir genre. We get a light dusting of autobiographical crumbs. These hit notes well suited to conventional Tory autobiography, and dwell on the ways in which May’s status as a daughter of the rectory subconsciously groomed her for a career in politics. Such slim fare nonetheless establishes her personal virtue and moral incorruptibility. This is the same goody two-shoes whose most explosive confession ahead of the 2017 general election was to having run through wheat fields as a girl.

In 1957, Michael Benthall, a director at the Old Vic, took a chance on a young woman straight out of drama school, casting her as Ophelia in a production of Hamlet starring John Neville and Coral Browne. I was lucky enough to be in the audience with my mother when Judi Dench, a velvet-voiced cherub in virginal white, made her début. An infinite variety of stage and film performances have gone by since then, but none has erased the memory of her stage presence that night.

Not all the critics approved of the performance. The role of Ophelia was taken off the newcomer for the tour to Paris and the United States, but restored to her on the company’s return. Benthall’s instinct proved right, of course. Dench went on to become part of the Old Vic company for four years before migrating to the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) at Stratford. Until the 1970s, Shakespeare provided the bread and butter for Dench and her husband, fellow RSC actor Michael Williams. They dubbed Shakespeare ‘the man who pays the rent’.

The smallest, dullest link in the fateful chain binding John F. Kennedy and his assassin Lee Harvey Oswald is that both men were big fans of the fictional spy James Bond. In the immediate aftermath of Kennedy’s assassination in November 1963, when investigators searched the tiny boarding room in Dallas that Oswald rented for $8 per week, they found the four Bond books that citizen Oswald had assiduously borrowed from a local library.

One of these was From Russia with Love, Ian Fleming’s novel from 1957, which has at its heart the cat-and-mouse relationship between Bond and the crack SMERSH assassin Donovan Grant, who is tasked and determined to take out Bond, and with him the agency he represents.

It was mid-afternoon when I turned a typewritten foolscap page from 1939 and found the name I had been searching for: Detective Sergeant Mischenko. The report was a pretty banal cry for resourcing. Poor Mischenko was doing the work of two detectives in Japanese-occupied Shanghai and desperately needed some assistance. On turning the page, I felt like Archimedes himself (though running through the US National Archives yelling ‘Eureka!’ might have been a touch dramatic). My journey to the suburbs in the middle of a clammy Washington DC summer had held no guarantees of finding this.

Feeling like Kafka’s Josef K., I had been sent from the second floor of the National Archives’ sterile concrete building to the fourth, then the fifth, and back again. I waited hours while these boxes from the CIA’s record collection were located, only to find that I wasn’t booked into the correct room. Without a staff member named Randy – who assured me with a kind wink and an ‘I got you’ that he could wrangle me a seat – I might have given up and headed back to my hotel for room service. My hopes of striking archival gold deflated with each obstacle. But here he was: Vladimir Mischenko, as real as one can be in black ink on yellowing paper.

Why so much effort for a few old files? I had been part of a working party consulting with the Australian Dictionary of Biography, the online encyclopedia of the lives of notable Australians. We were looking at their listings for migrants: what significant people, who were not white men of Anglo origin, were missing? I was researching the Petrov Affair at the time, so Vladimir Mischenko – also known as Bill Marshall – sprang to mind. The trouble was that I knew relatively little about him: the information was usually classified. Mischenko was one of ASIO’s earliest recruits, from the late 1940s. But he was also a recent migrant and a refugee.

In Working: Researching, interviewing, writing, published in 2019, the great biographer Robert A. Caro tells of his writing methods and the lengths to which he goes to gain a better understanding of his subject. Reading Tim McNamara’s Paul and Paula, I was reminded of Caro’s way of research and writing and of his determination to place himself in his subject’s milieu. McNamara spent considerable time in Vienna researching Paul and Paula, stalking the streets for clues, and his efforts show. He writes with verve about the book’s three main characters – Paul Kurz and his wife, Paula, and the city of Vienna, before and during the Nazi occupation – and his search to uncover and understand their stories.

Much like Caro with Lyndon Johnson, the story of Paul and Paula Kurz followed McNamara across a lifetime. For McNamara, this work was a labour of love. He met Paul Kurz, an industrial chemist, in Melbourne in 1968, when Kurz was approaching seventy and he was nineteen. Kurz was learned and thoughtful, a wise and welcoming presence for McNamara and his university friends. As they struggled with existential questions provoked by their youth and the heady times, Kurz seemed often to have the answer, through study or experience. McNamara came to see Kurz as a father figure, reassuring and beneficent.

What does it mean to narrate the humiliations of ageing, loneliness, and death in the first person when your background is working class? For such a writer, saying ‘I’ is political too, said Annie Ernaux in her Nobel Prize lecture, because it involves claiming an authority rarely granted in other parts of life. Ernaux uses her incendiary, affectless ‘I’ not just to recount one individual experience, but to transcend it. For ‘I’ to speak to the reader it must become, she says, ‘transpersonal’.

Ernaux’s manifesto on the first-person voice appears in Sigrid Nunez’s The Vulnerables. It’s one of many moments when another writer consoles, guides, and inoculates the unnamed narrator from despair. She is a writer herself, with working-class roots, and her frank, confiding voice narrates her experience of ageing and intimacy during Covid. When the novel opens, she is struggling with lockdown isolation in New York and so agrees to pet-sit a parrot in a luxury condo, and soon her life is upended. Since they are rich, the bird’s owners have fled the city for one of three homes elsewhere. Whatever care you received during the pandemic depended on wealth and geopolitical luck. Think of Colm Tóibín, marooned in Venice, his walks passing through ‘the most beautiful city in the world now become the most beautiful ghost town’. Even so, he thought: ‘One of the subjects to muse on as old age begins is how unfair life is.’ Ahem. Instead of Venetian wonders, Nunez’s narrator moves in with the miniature macaw. In the condo, jungle scenes are painted on the walls: ‘bright butterflies and exotic flowers and other wild birds, all exquisitely drawn and vibrantly colored, as well as a pair of monkeys with keenly expressive, lifelike features’. This chimes with the themes of unhomely spaces, of wildness curtailed.

ABR is pleased to present the shortlist for the 2024 Peter Porter Poetry Prize, which this year received 1,066 poems from twenty-one countries. 

Congratulations to those who reached the shortlist: Judith Nangala Crispin, Natalie Damjanovich-Napoleon, Dan Hogan, Meredi Ortega, and Dženana Vucic. Each of their poems is listed below in alphabetical order by author. For the full longlist, click here.

Poem of the Dead Women

for Marvin Bell

by Judith Nangala Crispin

The dead woman rides a motorcycle, out of Ord River Valley, beyond sand plains, into the serpentine Bungle Bungle Ranges.
And the black sun is over her.

A white dog leans against her back, motorcycle-goggled, his ears flying. He holds himself like a gunslinger, 
muscling into oncoming wind.  They carve a single-wheeled track into the bulldust of a 360-million-year-old cone-karst plateau.

And as she rides, the unveiled land reveals itself in lucid detail – termite nests and grevilleas. Livistona palm trees stand
like thin gods between rock faces, burnished by dusk.

They pass into the valley of the shadow.

The dead woman has never once said what she intended. ‘Before I knew you,’ she tells the dog, ‘I walked the luminous earth.
But I am in Country now, and the Country is in me.’

The dog has no opinion on this, or any other matter.

The motorcycle bears them north over monsoonal savannahs, into deeper valleys studded with orchids and ferns,
into the shelter of steep red cliffs.

The dead woman introduces herself to the Country she rides through. 
She surrenders her name to silverleaf bloodwoods, acacias and rough leaf range gums.

And she tells them how she crossed the desert thirty-six times alive – and once dead.

How she stockpiled electrolytes and anti-venom, water bladders, multi-tools and rope.
How the dog survived a king brown bite and the hungry gaze of eagles.

How she was run over in a remote desert town by a single mum, shouting at the kids in a gigantic SUV.

Grey nomads do not notice the dead woman passing. 
They’re cooking sausages on Webers outside their camping trailers or adjusting solar panels for satellite TV.

She does not stop at the Ranger’s office for permits, kayak hire or a personal locator beacon.

At the bus bay, disembarking hikers upload Instagram selfies under banded domes, lifting 300 meters above the grasslands like titanic beehives.

And the tour guide explains how their tangerine stripes are iron and manganese, but the grey ones are cyanobacteria –
ancient organisms living in a surface-deep layer of clay.  

They have colonised multitudes of domes, holding them in their forms over millions of years. 
The slightest touch could break their living skin, crumbling these sandstone minarets back into dust.

The dead woman introduces herself to the cyanobacteria, to the iron and manganese.
She claims no ownership of this or any other land. 

She is tolerated like seeds of subtropical trees, carried inland on the feet of migrating birds, and dropped where they will not grow.
Country knows this but is too polite to say so.  

The dead woman’s panniers carry journals filled with coloured pencil drawings – maps and pressed plants. There are poems.
There are notes on the movements of honeyeaters, wood swallows and white-quilled rock pigeons.

The journals have many missing pages – torn out, loosed into wind like pollen or white nocturnal moths.
The dead woman knows some stories can’t be spoken.

Over the still world, Gouldian finches turn in kaleidoscopic arcs. Their bone-curved wings are written
with the mystery of seeds – yinirnti and mulga. Seeds of the ground. 
Sky seed. 

The dog and his dead companion pass in chasms where waterfalls cascade down sheer rock,
between fig vines and moss.  Snappy gums regard themselves in the surface of mirrored pools.

The dog shouts at lizards skittering over shiny river stones.
Dunnarts and planigales in the hollows.

A nailtail wallaby crashes through the bush, where cliffs cycle through their colour spectra at dusk, gold to purple,
and a baritone wind explores reefs of an inland sea.  

The dead woman has finally understood that this is not a dress rehearsal.
She dismisses inner whispers that it’s already too late, that her efforts can wait for some future life.
She sees who it is that whispers.  

She is no longer an animal with an angel inside her chest –
the animal rejecting the angel, the angel always looking for an escape. 

The dead woman holds her arms up into the sky. ‘How pale this sky is,’ she says to no one in particular. ‘How pale.’ 

She slows the motorcycle where palm trees drop into rockholes, and the cliffs glow as if lit from the inside.
She chooses a campsite.

Looking down from a tourist helicopter, you’d see an elliptical plateau, 7.5 kilometres wide, surrounded by domes.
This is the remnant of Picaninny Crater, the seventh gate, where the star fell down.  

The dog clambers over boulders tossed by the meteorite. He is a whiteness on incarnadine stone. 

All the creeks and pools are silver on night’s border. Ursa Minor, Centaurus and Crux are sparks
on the watered roots of trees.  She hears palms conversing in their slow vegetal language.  

Crows and their dark spies are signalling across the gorge. Their cries sound like machineguns or breaking glass.
And the dead woman answers, ‘My crow. My black-breasted buzzard.’

Her hair is dark and bright in the sky. Her rivers flow from these ranges to the sea, returning again
to the mountains in deep subterranean veins.  She is a circulatory system, a new topography of light. 

The dead woman is not looking for a door. She will not get drunk and join the Scientologists, won’t search 
for answers in grimoires, tarot cards or wormholes, or in boxing matches, or late-night confessions with online language bots.

She has already written her history in blood and milk and venom.  
She perches above the rockholes like a kingfisher, waiting for the flash of something silver in the deep.

There are mountains and rivers beneath the dead woman’s skin.
Her breath drifts over them.

Judith Nangala Crispin is a poet and visual artist of Indigenous and mixed descent, living on unceded Yuin Country on the NSW Southern Tablelands. She has published two collections of poetry, and her verse novel will be released this year. Judith won the 2020 Blake prize for poetry and has been shortlisted for various other prizes. She has been commissioned by The National Gallery of Australia, The National Museum of Australia, Musica Viva, and Red Room Poetry. Judith has a PhD in music and has just completed a Doctor of Arts in Poetry. Her work has appeared in numerous Australian and international journals and anthologies over the past twenty years. In 2024, a poem Judith wrote about her dog will be deposited on the Moon, by NASAs Polaros mission, as part of the Lunar Codex. 

Immigration Triction

by Natalie Damjanovich-Napoleon

This is an erasure poem created by hand, using white out to remove portions of the source text.
Reference: Immigration Restriction Act 1901. (1901, Dec 23). Federal Register of Legislation.
https://www.legislation.gov.au/Details/C1901A00017 (Commonly known as the White Australia Policy).

Natalie Damjanovich-Napoleon is a writer, songwriter, and educator who was raised on a farm by her Croatian-immigrant parents. Her poetry and creative non-fiction have appeared in Meanjin, Cordite, The Found Poetry Review, Westerly, Australian Poetry Journal and Writer’s Digest (US). Natalie’s work has been widely anthologised in both the United States and Australia. She helped run the Voicebox poetry reading series in Fremantle. She has won the Bruce Dawe National Poetry Prize (2018) and the KSP Poetry Prize (2019). Her début poetry collection, First Blood, was released in 2019 (Ginninderra Press). Her second poetry book, If There Is a Butterfly That Drinks Tears, on motherhood in the wake of the Trump presidency, was released in 2023 by Life Before Man/Gazebo Books. Currently, she is completing a PhD in Creative Writing through Edith Cowan University, where she wrote the poetry collection The Commonwealth of Amnesia’, a series of erasure poems on xenophobia, war paranoia, and the forgotten histories of Croatian people in Australia.

Workarounds

by Dan Hogan

We completed tasks while your computer
was nonplussed. Never under any circumstances
outgather the USB cables as they are known
to the fossil record. Is anyone using this
rubric? A strongly worded mop bides here.
An epoch before us, an equivalent energy.
The moral to the story is a horny talkathon.
Posting generally is a captive curation. A scared

village buys now, pays later. Bags odourous
gains. Inside everywhere is time. Skeletons
made of other skeletons undergo workarounds.
Withdraw a like. Troubleshoot the jig if it starts
to look like your brain on internet, dollied blunt. Histories
of conspiratorial durdum are loading. Uh oh. A tiptoe
extravaganza engrooves serious laughlines. Deceives
blessedly. The droplets collecting on necks are owed

to the multipurpose fog. Order an adapter while
buff. Moths single out appliances to dent. Great
magistrates are coming your way. The depth
of a field is a streaming service. Who humours
the non-electric fence? Is it you who licks it clean?
Resemble the viral. Property the essential. Outdo
outcomes as opposed to going home on time. Plumb
the blameless. Countdown to glitches. Spondulix

when? Depolished chitchat, gutbucket sunrise. Lunch
on the old roof fizzles out. You can fail the creek.
But the bike. The bike is in the creek. Bestow
little quizzes. Then the second moment of area (clue:
see toward a federation of etcetera crises). Surface
a length of singsong worseness, refranchise exquisite
doldrums. Swanky exits expect better. It is time for
your next marathonic ache. Enrapture well, dear salad

and lots of mozzies. An existential kneecapping.
Real windsock hours. Unhallowed visits from
tricky miniatures clog the month. Eventually,
prescriptions. Entablature. Maximum research.
Netlike greenth. Bigheadedly nod if you want
to defragment. Reevaluate persuasions over mild
interludes. Up the revelry. Roster on fleetingness.
Consult moments. Misallocate enthusiasm for

stakeholders. Dream-eating surucucus warm the
pit. Indispensable attunements are down the hall.
Minimalism is for jerk apologists. According to
resorts the cement world is everything a unit of
productivity could want. Put it this way: the forest
wasn’t November. Allegedly joyless. Heart an
an infographic. Repot survival news. Favourite
an unopened secret.

Dan Hogan (they/them) is a writer from San Remo, NSW (Awabakal and Darkinjung Country). They currently live and work on Dharug and Gadigal Country (Sydney). Dan’s debut book of poetry, Secret Third Thing (Cordite, 2023), won the Five Islands Poetry Prize. Dan’s work has been recognised by the Val Vallis Award, the Judith Wright Poetry Prize, and the XYZ Prize, among others. In their spare time, Dan runs small DIY publisher Subbed In. More of their work can be found at: 2dan2hogan.com.

Cuttle

by Meredi Ortega

Meredi Ortega is from Western Australia and now lives in Scotland. Her poems have appeared in the Times Literary Supplement, The Poetry Review, Meanjin, The Best Australian Science Writing 2023, and Scientific American. She contributed to the deep mapping anthology Four Rivers, Deep Maps (UWAP, 2022).

Blagaj, Mostar

by Dženana Vucic

The sky was crumbling; so full of sun it burnt at the edges and hit
the cracked earth of my aunt’s garden in waves. It was a summer
dense with figs splitting flesh on the tree. Pomegranates had burst
open against the concrete drive, spilling their insides. On the steps:
red chillis drying in neat rows on a white keranje she had made
herself. Bundles of herbs. Thyme for čaj and sage to cure a sore
throat. A tidy line of orthopaedic shoes, his and hers, a pair on each
step. Months before the lilac had been in bloom, the forsythia. We
had walked around the garden breathing them in, my aunt pointing
to her silver beet, trellised beans, zucchini ripening against the soil.
Neat rows of carrot and potato. The apple and cherry trees had just
shrugged off their blossoms; there had been elderflower juice.

Today my aunt has cooked with a bountiful harvest: spirals of
cheese and spinach rolled in pastry so thin you can see the new
moon through it; quarter chunks of tomato and cucumber dressed in
oil; spring onions in yoghurt; a loaf of fresh yellow bread. There’s
a watermelon cooling in the river for dessert. Beside it, too: plums,
persimmons, ripe fruit scattered across the ground to be fetched after
the meal. Inside: baked apples stuffed with walnuts and fried dough
soaked in sugar. We are waiting for my uncle, gone fishing. If he’s lucky,
my aunt will fry a river trout or two – lightly, with a little flour, a little
salt. Skin on and crispy. My uncle will make his same jokes, needling
my kind aunt with her plum-soft heart. Take this one away with you,
he’ll tell me. She’s no good – just look at all this food she hasn’t made.

In the war, almost my lifetime ago, my aunt took her children in her
arms and crossed the barebone mountains to our house. Hers had
become a waiting grave. My uncle arrived every three weeks, a two-day
hike each way. Limping, he wore a trail into the stone earth to find her,
to sit in her weather for three days. Alhamdulillah my aunt said. Well,
where’ve you been? my uncle replied. Then he was gone. Then, as now,
my aunt filled our plates: palačinke and uštipci when there was flour;
pickled cabbage; stewed pears; bean soup stretched for weeks. My mother
was a nurse in the village and in the evening the sisters sat together,
drinking coffee when there was some, cracking walnuts between their
palms, waiting for the men to come home. Take this one with you,
my uncle jokes. But he would follow. He knows the way.

Above us the old fort looms its jagged teeth across the mountain.
After coffee we will walk to its base picking blackberries and water
mint along the way, then stand on the karstic lip overlooking history:
the tekija where old Sufi clerics chanted Dhikr and where the mountain
splits itself open to send the green Buna swirling past the house. They
say that after his death, a great cleric had his body buried in seven
tombs across the Balkans – choosing always small towns, out of the
way places, so that as pilgrims made their journeys to honour him,
they would spread the word that there are as many paths to God as
there are breaths in a human body. My aunt knows all the names of
Allah, though like all our people she says sabur, forbearance, most.
My uncle is not a religious man, though he has been a pilgrim.

Dženana Vucic is a Bosnian-Australian writer, poet and critic currently based in Berlin. Her writing has appeared in Sydney Review of Books, Overland, Meanjin, Australian Poetry Journal, Australian Multilingual Writing Project, and others. She is currently working on her first book and tweets at @dzenanabanana.

Max Easton’s second novel begins in early 2022 when an ensemble of thirty-somethings loosely connected through mutual friends and subcultural scenes decide to lease a four-bedroom share house. The house in Sydney has its flaws. Mould colonies grow on ceilings and walls in a ‘rich spectrum’, aided by a series of La Niña weather events. Situated just off a main road and surrounded by high-rise apartment buildings, the property offers little in the way of privacy. The fascia gutters are blocked by champagne corks popped from the apartment balconies above.

Paradise Estate follows Easton’s successful début, The Magpie Wing (2021), of which the chief protagonists – siblings Helen and Walt Coleman – also feature in this loose sequel. Reeling from the break-up of her relationship and in mourning for her younger brother, it is Helen, with the assistance of resourceful friend Sunny, who instigates the move to the share house which Sunny later dubs the ‘Paradise Estate’. Rather than anything material, the name refers to a song by the post-punk band Television Personalities, yet it might also speak to the property’s accessibility in the context of Sydney’s housing crisis, as well as its potential for building something more ‘collectively minded’. Early on, the characters commit to engaging better with one another and the surrounding community, thinking of the household as something approaching a ‘commune’. It is this endeavour that the novel probes over the course of the year that follows.

Through the gates of a kindergarten in Melbourne’s inner-north, a man strikes up a conversation with two little girls, which violently alters the course of their lives. The bolder of the pair, a child who ‘runs at life’, goes with him. The meeker stays behind, becoming the serial predator’s only known survivor.

Eighteen years on, Till – as the survivor renames herself, after Cat Stevens’s song ‘Tea for the Tillerman’ – is back living with her parents in Brunswick and leading a slow existence in the weeks after Melbourne’s final lockdown. That is, until her flight response is triggered upon recognising that ‘long-ago man’ while walking her greyhound, Birdy.

Despite its thriller-like set-up, Lucy Treloar’s third novel, Days of Innocence and Wonder, is less concerned with the details of the crime and its perpetrator than it is with Till’s identity construction in the wake of her childhood trauma. As well as having changed her name, she eschews brightly coloured clothing (her friend, referred to only as ‘E’, wore a red coat on the day of her abduction), is trained in Krav Maga, and sings professionally, believing herself to be channelling E when she is performing.

Elena Ferrante declared Elsa Morante’s début novel Menzogna e sortilegio (1948) ‘fundamental’ to her literary formation. The novel is now available unabridged in English for the first time as Lies and Sorcery, in a brilliant translation by Jenny McPhee.

Like Ferrante’s Neapolitan quartet, Morante’s novel begins with the loss of the woman closest to the narrator, propelling a first-person epic to recover a shared past. However, this novel has little of the visceral realism that Ferrante has become famous for in the Anglophone world. It is instead a delirious mix of ghost story, romantic epic, and Künstlerroman that remains almost as difficult to categorise today as when it was published at the height of Italian neorealism.

Melanie Saward, a Bigambul and Wakka Wakka writer living in Tulmur (Ipswich), is a fresh and insightful storyteller. Her first Young Adult novel, Burn (Affirm Press, $34.99 pb, 296 pp), is a tumultuous narrative about an Aboriginal youth, Andrew, and his obsession with lighting fires. It has a touch of Trent Dalton’s Brisbane struggle street, but the story draws us into psychological observation in Goori Andy’s cries for help and his longing for his parent’s attention. The novel begins with a bushfire lit by an unknown arsonist, in which a boy dies. This tragedy frames the narrative as we go on the journey with Andy and his mates Trent and Doug, wild teenagers who like to smoke dope and eat at McDonald’s. They are innocents in a world that ignores them as the author interrogates relationships between the lads and several irresistible young females.

Andy’s fragile inner world is torn apart by his parents’ and his stepfather’s neglect. Andy’s sadness and fear of never finding security pervade the small fires and the clicking of cigarette lighters in this pyromaniac’s pockets.

The potential for Australian literature to address the history of colonised people in this country and elsewhere is of great consequence. New perspectives not only rewrite history to include ‘herstory’, but also reconsider what we believe and broaden our view of ourselves as active contributors to our collective and individual past. A spate of recent books has attempted to do this: Anita Heiss’s Bila Yarrudhanggalangdhuray: River of Dreams (2021) and Geraldine Brooks’s Horse (2022) are two that come to mind.

Mirandi Riwoe, author of four books and a crime fiction series published under the pseudonym M.J. Tjia, has, with lyrical beauty and passion, been recreating history too few of us know. For me, her latest novel, Sunbirds, lacks cohesion as the narrative flow is deliberately disrupted with abrupt jumps in the timeline and shifts in point of view and setting.

Dennis Altman’s new novel, Death in the Sauna, begins with, yes, a death in a sauna. The respected virologist Pomfrey Lister is found lifeless in a London gay venue, days before a major AIDS conference that he is chairing. His naked corpse is transported home and a death certificate pronouncing natural causes is produced. This hasty denouement is ostensibly aimed at concealing the salacious nature of Lister’s demise, which might overshadow both the conference and his legacy.

As it happens, the hastiness raises suspicions that the scientist might have been murdered. There are any number of suspects. They include his colleagues Spencer and Alejandro, the latter of whom regarded Lister as an obstacle to his research; Lister’s secret lover, Noel; a disgruntled former student, Rahid; and Lister’s wife, Mary, who attributes her suspicions about her husband’s sexuality to ‘her own developing dislike of homosexuals’, and who has for some time overseen a program of gay conversion therapy.

Too often poetry is valued as if it were prose, exclusively by virtue of its subject matter. Such discussions miss the poetry itself, which my wife calls ‘the speech that brings us to silence’, a kind of accuracy beggaring what we say about it. Simon West is a poet who understands this distinction. His essays collected in Dear Muses? (2019) explore ‘the uneasy way my allegiances lie with my language as much as they do with the places in which I dwell’. He knows how complicated such terms as language and place must be, so his landscapes – particularly riverine Victoria and Italy – never seem limitations. ‘The task of the poet is to scrutinize the actual world.’ I read him for the pleasures of both world and word.

West is by any measure an important poet. His third collection, The Ladder (2015), was shortlisted for the Prime Minister’s Literary Awards. His fourth, Carol and Ahoy (2018), signalled a change of emphasis in his writing, more openly acknowledging that poetry, as he put it in an interview, helps us ‘to make sense of ourselves and the world’. Without seeming the least bit confessional, his new book, published in the United States, confirms and deepens this ambition by its scrupulous seeing as well as by the accuracy and grace of its lines. If West is a nature poet, he is an unsentimental one. ‘Nature is that which does not flatter man or heed his self-importance,’ he has written, and Prickly Moses is as much about noticing, paying attention, as anything else. It is a poetics of patience. Stay with it, as the poet stays with his apparently common subjects, and you will be rewarded.

‘Poems reawaken in us,’ writes James Longenbach, ‘the pleasure of the unintelligibility of the world.’ They do so via ‘mechanisms of self-resistance’: disjunctive strategies that work, for Longenbach, to ‘resist our intelligence almost successfully’. What ‘almost’ means here is, of course, a matter of taste – and style. Nonetheless, this Romantic mandate – that poems achieve clarity by integrating opacity – invites a question fundamental to poetics: how much resistance is too much, or not enough?

‘welcome the dark angle that cannot be measured’: this exhortation early in Nathan Shepherdson’s collection betrays an interest in absence and negativity, as well as an aversion to literal sense that another poem calls ‘a terror attack / on the noun’. Tellingly, a line in the next poem asserts that ‘angles are never alone until they’re measured’. In a book addressed to Shepherdson’s recently deceased father and abounding in dedications to others both living and dead, poetry becomes an open field that undermines language’s differentiating – and isolating – impulse, and such openness entails a drawing together, a strange communion.

Andrew Sant is a substantial yet somewhat elusive figure in contemporary Australian poetry. Born in London, he arrived in Melbourne with his parents at age twelve in 1962. Over the years, he has published at least eleven collections, co-founded the literary magazine Island, and been, for a time, a member of the Literature Board of the Australia Council. More recently, Sant has lived and worked in the United Kingdom, but he clearly retains links with Australia, particularly Tasmania, where he first became known as a poet. 

Near the Border: New and selected poems is a generous selection from his work since 1980. At 368 pages, it feels more like a Collected. (Such books by living poets are rare these days.) This reviewer began with the book’s ten new poems and then worked his way back to the beginning.

Catriona Menzies-Pike is a writer and editor based in Vancouver. In 2023, she won the Walkley-Pascall Prize for arts criticism. Between 2015 and 2023, she was Editor of the Sydney Review of Books.

When did you first write for ABR?

I began writing for ABR in 2008. I reviewed a collection of essays by Meaghan Morris, a welcome diversion from the abyss of my graduate studies. I was very pleased by the title my review was given: ‘Gadfly Critic’.

What makes a fine critic?

I am first and last compelled by the presence of the critic in their work, by their willingness to conduct a reader through a reading of a book, that could not, or so it must seem, be written by any other hand. Not for me arm’s length epistles that purport to a timeless, peerless objectivity; I want to hear voices that carry tonalities, affects, lived experience, proclivities, expertise, intelligence. The critics whose company I prefer are distinguished by their style and by their intrepid independence, though I may not agree with them. They are close readers and close writers, in that they pay attention to the syntax and use of language of the writers that they review, and also to their own. ‘Fearless’ is an abused adjective, but I admire critics who are willing to court contempt in their prosecution of their arguments rather than remain in step with the ever-blander consensuses that the market has formed around value, morality, style, identity, and so on.

Which critics most impress you?

This depends on what I am reading right now, and right now I am reading Elizabeth Hardwick’s Collected Essays and finding myself captivated once more by her syntax and her conviction. I will also drop most tasks to read new writing by Terry Castle.

Do you accept most books on offer or are you selective?

I am selective. It takes me a long time to write even a short review, and I am reluctant to do so if I have nothing to say.

What do you look for from an editor?

Close attention, which is to say, an eye for error, pieties, exaggeration, cliché, and all related follies.

Do you ever receive feedback from readers or authors?

Yes.

What do you think of negative reviews?

Critics need to be prepared to deliver negative evaluations of books. Otherwise, their enthusiastic endorsements are worthless.

How do you feel about reviewing people you know?

Australia’s literary world is very small indeed, not so small that everyone knows everyone, but certainly small enough for conflicts of interest to arise frequently. I am old enough to know better, but I am startled still to see Australian critics reviewing work by writers who are their friends or colleagues, or to witness critics heaping praise upon an author with whom they share a publisher. That is what blurbs are for! Of course, proximity to an author can equip a critic to deliver useful insights into their work. The issue is whether these conflicts of interest are disclosed. Not to do so is to break an ethical compact with the reader. I think readers deserve to know whether a critic has a bond of friendship – or enmity, for that matter – with the author under review. If a critic cannot figure out how to tell them so in a review, they should turn down the job. That is the standard I hold other critics to, and it is one I strive to meet as well.

What’s a critic’s primary responsibility?

I am not sure I can isolate just one. To read well and widely. To preserve her independence. To keep her ethical obligations to the reader and to the writer in view. To file on deadline.  

In 2019, Smithsonian magazine published a profile of an American inventor, entrepreneur, and undersea explorer named Stockton Rush. Rush and his company, OceanGate, had recently celebrated the successful descent of their experimental manned submersible Titan to the extraordinary depth of 4,000 metres. Titan’s design was innovative in two important ways: its body was composed centrally of carbon fibre, which made it light and comparatively inexpensive to operate, and it was a cylinder. A spherical sub might have had ‘the best geometry for pressure’, observed Rush, ‘but not for occupation’ – and this represented an unpalatable check on OceanGate’s plans to deliver groups of high-paying tourists to the wreck of the Titanic. ‘I had come across this business anomaly I couldn’t explain,’ Rush reflected: ‘If three-quarters of the planet is water, how come you can’t access it?’

Early coverage of OceanGate’s ambitions, in Smithsonian and elsewhere, framed Titan as an extension of, as well as a departure from, a tradition of modern subsea exploration dating to 1930. In June that year, the zoologist William Beebe and the engineer Otis Barton squeezed into a steel orb called the ‘bathysphere’ before being submerged nearly 250 metres beneath the surface of the western Atlantic Ocean off Bermuda. ‘Ever since the beginnings of human history,’ Beebe later wrote, ‘thousands upon thousands of human beings had reached the depth at which we were now suspended, and had passed on to lower levels. But all of these were dead.’ Undaunted, Beebe and Barton followed them down: a second dive, conducted just five days later, attained about 400 metres. In 1934, the bathysphere completed a plunge to the very end of its more than 900-metre-long tether. If this was supposed to represent a kind of triumph, Beebe himself seemed ambivalent. ‘I’ll tell the world,’ ran a quote in Newsweek, ‘that this is the last time I’ll attempt record-breaking dives which really have no scientific value.’

In 2023, a broken engagement might be followed by tears, the division of possessions, and a reliance on family and friends. It might even involve a few trips to the therapist. But up until the mid-to-late twentieth century, Australian men and women’s heartbreaks could also see them take a trip to court to charge their partner with breach of promise of marriage.

Alecia Simmonds’s Courting: An intimate history of love and the law uses court records and newspaper reports to tell the history of nearly one thousand cases of breach of promise. She unpacks the ‘lacerated feelings’, the gifts, the gossip, the letters and poems of the couples whose relationship led them not to the altar but to the courtroom. There, to a captive audience, they told their tales of love and loss, seduction and betrayal, deception and desperation.

In more than 400 pages, Simmonds offers a provocative and compelling history of the ‘texture, language and politics of romance’. Courting offers readers a history of emotions, romantic material culture, courtship, and dating, as well as insight into the historical pathologisation of love, the rise of the counsellor, and the patriarchal hue of the Australian legal system. It does so through ten case studies from colonial Sydney to early-nineteenth-century Jamaica, Paris in 1848, 1850s Bathurst, late-nineteenth-century Hong Kong, the ‘Syrian Colony’ in Redfern in the 1890s, the pearling towns of Broome in the early 1900s, and depression-era Perth. Simmonds lingers upon the twists and turns of each case, and offers nuanced arguments about the role of location, race, class, and gender in love, especially when subject to the law.

In the film Almost Famous (2000), director Cameron Crowe’s alter ego, fifteen-year-old William Miller, doggedly pursues his dream of breaking into rock journalism. He cold-calls legendary music journalist Lester Bangs (marvellously played by a dishevelled Philip Seymour Hoffman). Next thing we know, he is commissioned by Rolling Stone editor Ben Fong-Torres to head out on the road with fictitious band Stillwater to write a story that ends up on the cover of Rolling Stone. If only it were that easy.

Rock journalism, in its infancy, was fuelled more by passion than good sense. With few literary models, and virtually zero financial return, it was mostly a case of making it up as you went along, while endeavouring to stay abreast of a fast-evolving field. Music journalist Samuel J. Fell’s Full Coverage: A history of rock journalism in Australia fills a welcome gap in the history of journalism, charting as it does the rise and fall of the local music magazines, along with their founders and contributors, that helped shape our perceptions of rock music, and associated genres, in this country.

Well-informed debate on national security, never more important than now, depends on reliable accounts of historical episodes, ones not distorted by latter-day political or diplomatic sensitivities. For more than a century, Australians have benefited from a tradition of official histories of the nation’s involvement in conflicts and peacekeeping operations, for which governments of all persuasions have given independent historians access to all relevant official records, publishing their works without political or diplomatic censorship.

Since C.E.W. Bean was commissioned to create the twelve-volume official history of Australia’s involvement in World War I (1920–42) Australians have generally accepted that official historians present as full and fair an account as possible, without being obliged to a follow a partisan or governmental line. For their part, governments have usually accepted that independent ‘warts and all’ accounts are not only more credible but also more useful than those constrained by an official line.

Two recent episodes have called this tradition into question. Publication of an official history of Australian operations in the East Timor crisis of 1999, Born of Fire and Ash, was delayed for three years by the clearance process conducted by government agencies, principally the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT). When the volume was finally published in late 2022, those agencies pointedly declined to give it an official launch or to promote it in the way that governments had previous official history volumes. Secondly, after decades of clothing its signals intelligence (sigint) activities in secrecy, the Australian Signals Directorate (ASD) has been the subject of the almost simultaneous publication of both a volume of ‘official history’ and another which pointedly declares itself an ‘unofficial history’.

Arnold Schoenberg rarely missed a punch. Whether in music theory, composition, or the fraught polemics of his age, he communicated with a clarity of purpose verging on the tyrannical. Visiting Schoenberg in California during his last years, the conductor Robert Craft commented on ‘the danger of crossing the circle of his pride, for though his humility is fathomless it is also plated all the way down with a hubris of stainless steel’. Harvey Sachs is worried that music lovers of the twenty-first century are failing to appreciate the continuing significance of the composer despite, or perhaps because of, this armour-plating. Addressed to the musical ‘layman’, Sachs’s ‘interpretive study’ is a passionate, occasionally self-doubting essay intended to demonstrate why Schoenberg still matters. Schoenberg’s five chapters follow a chronological track, attempting to account for most of the fifty-odd opuses of Schoenberg’s oeuvre, within a rich context of his life’s turbulent course. His chapter titles dramatically reflect the struggle – battle lines, war, breakthrough, and breakaway – of both his life and his works. Sachs popularises, refreshes, and sometimes refutes the stainless-steel images passed down in the sanctioned texts of musicology, many written by Schoenberg’s acolytes.

His account of the music naturally pays particular attention to two stylistic turns for which Schoenberg is renowned: his move around 1907–8 from the ultra-chromatic tonality of late Romanticism to ‘beyond tonality’, where, as the composer stated, ‘the overwhelming multitude of dissonances cannot be counterbalanced any longer by occasional returns to such tonal triads as represent a key’; and in the early 1920s when he moved to regulate this new atonality through orderly ‘composing with twelve tones’, often known as serialism. These are difficult concepts for Sachs’s layman to understand, let alone musically to enjoy, and Sachs tries to find the simplest possible explanations. His commentaries on the First Chamber Symphony (Op. 9, 1906) and Pierrot Lunaire (Op. 21, 1912), for instance, portray innovative compositional techniques as well as their aural and social reception. This helps the reader to understand why Igor Stravinsky, then companionable enough to Schoenberg, heralded Pierrot as ‘the solar plexus as well as the mind of early twentieth-century music’.

Cameron Lukey is an Australian producer whose credits include acclaimed productions of 33 Variations at Melbourne’s Comedy Theatre in 2019 (starring Ellen Burstyn) and Angels in America at fortyfivedownstairs in 2017. He began his career as an opera singer and joined the team at fortyfivedownstairs in 2016. He was appointed Artistic Director of the theatre in 2023.

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

Seeing Maggie Smith in Bed Among the Lentils by Alan Bennett in my teens (this was in Sydney). It was the first time I had experienced that kind of star stage presence. 

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

My third-grade teacher, Mr Elliot, got the class to perform Joseph and His Technicolour Dreamcoat for a local eisteddfod. I desperately wanted to play Potiphar, so I campaigned for the role during lunch breaks when he was on playground duty. He caved, and I can’t really remember wanting to do anything outside of the arts since.   

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

Audra McDonald singing with the Sydney Symphony. I sat in the middle of the front row at the Opera House concert hall, and her voice just blew me away. Angela Lansbury in Driving Miss Daisy and Robyn Nevin in August: Osage County also stand out in my mind.

Name three performers you would like to work with?

Name a grande dame and chances are I’d kill to work with her.

Do you have a favourite song?

I don’t really have a favourite song to listen to, but my favourite song to sing during my brief stint as a performer was ‘Fear no more the heat of the sun’ by Gerald Finzi. 

And your favourite play or opera?

Turandot. I was lucky enough to catch a general rehearsal of Franco Zefferelli’s production at the Metropolitan Opera in 2012. The finale was complete sensory overload – Puccini’s incredible score, the Met’s massive chorus joined on stage by dozens of dancers twirling ribbons, gold confetti raining down. My favourite play would be Angels in America.

Who is your favourite writer and favourite composer?

I think the writer who had the biggest influence on me was Roald Dahl. I was obsessed as a kid, and my copies of his books were all in tatters. My favourite composer would be a toss-up between Gustav Mahler, Samuel Barber, and Stephen Sondheim. I also love the film scores of Philip Glass and Thomas Newman.

How do you regard the audience?

They’re like a drug. The high – when they’re buying tickets and loving the show. The comedown – when they’re not.

What’s your favourite theatrical venue in Australia?

Bias aside, I really do think fortyfivedownstairs is the most beautiful venue I’ve ever produced in. I’m also a fan of the Fairfax Studio at Arts Centre Melbourne.

What do you look for in arts critics?

I appreciate it when a critic takes the response of the audience around them into account, especially if it differs from their own. I remember one instance where a critic was the only person who didn’t take part in a full standing ovation and then wrote a review that made it sound like no one could enjoy the show. That irked me.

Do you read your own reviews?

I think as a producer, you have to! I’m certainly guilty of clicking refresh a few too many times until certain reviews come up online.

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

Difficult? That the ceiling is lower here than in many parts of the world in terms of audience size and overall respect for the arts. Wonderful? That despite this, we still produce so many committed, persistent, talented artists.

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

I’m not sure about the single biggest action, but the biggest aim should be to encourage a higher regard for the arts, because I think the most valuable thing would be for a larger percentage of the population to not just engage with the arts but to regard them as vital. 

What advice would you give an aspiring artist?

Find people whose opinions you trust and give them your focus. Don’t seek the opinions of those you don’t really rate just for validation. It’ll backfire.

What’s the best advice you have ever received?

An established producer told me that when you are trying to get a project off the ground, you should let it go as soon as you face resistance. That seemed so counter-intuitive to me. I’ve always believed you need to push and fight to make things happen. Now I understand where they are coming from.

What’s your next project or performance?

I am producing the Australian première of the multi-award-winning two-part epic The Inheritance by Matthew Lopez, based on E.M. Forster’s novel Howards End. It’s a beautiful play that I devoured in one sitting, and it felt like it’d be a lovely bookend to the 2017 production of Angels in America at fortyfivedownstairs.

In the 1960s, as Egypt built the second Aswan Dam, the monuments of ancient Nubia, including the colossi at Abu Simbel, risked vanishing beneath a lake. Backed by UNESCO, an international coalition of archaeologists, celebrities, politicians, and engineers succeeded in moving them. Whole temples were cut off their rock bases and lifted with hydraulics, or removed in segments from cliff-faces and sinking islands, for reassembly on higher ground. The struggles involved, American author Lynne Olson’s book Empress of the Nile makes clear, were fiendish. The engineering problems were considered insoluble, the politics foolhardy. For the sake of flood regulation and hydroelectricity, ancient buildings seemed an acceptable loss. Rousing the political will to save them took scholarship, conviction, charm, and sheer nerve. In short, it took French Egyptologist Christiane Desroches-Noblecourt.

In a long career divided between Egypt and the Louvre, Desroches-Noblecourt fused scholarly rigour with a passion – which Olson persuasively characterises as near-religious – for presenting ancient heritage as a public good. Crucially, she was taught by archaeologists who sought artefacts other than kingly treasures. She dug at sites that were considered marginal, such as the Valley of the Queens, where her discoveries shed light on lives beneath or around the pharaohs. This sympathy for the disregarded extended to Egyptian dig labourers, to whom Desroches-Noblecourt gave medical care while learning their dialects and involving them in choosing sites and interpreting finds. In a field run by foreigners, she supported Egyptians to become Egyptologists. By the time the Aswan flood loomed, Desroches-Noblecourt could seek aid from more locals than any other foreign archaeologist.