The season of giving

Last month, in more confessional mode than usual (needs must!), we wrote about ABR’s funding predicament in 2024: without federal funds and with only one state arts grant. Readers seemed shocked by the stark comparison between 2019 (when ABR received a total of $245,000 from six governments around the country) and 2024 (a total of $12,000, all from Arts South Australia).

Since then the response from supporters – regular donors and a pleasing number of new ABR Patrons (all listed on page 4) – has been extraordinary. Pace sceptics who always said that Australians will never support literature in the same way they support other sectors and related charities, ABR continues to receive sterling support from those who believe that Australia deserves a sophisticated literary magazine culture of its own, not just an imported one.

We thank everyone who has contributed to the magazine. Your generosity is stirring and enabling.

Our new Rising Star

We’re delighted to name the sixth ABR Rising Star: Sam Ryan. An emerging critic and early career researcher, Sam is a PhD candidate at the University of Tasmania, where he is working on a thesis on the poetry in Overland and Quadrant. More broadly, he is interested in the genre of the literary journal and its place in literary cultures. He has worked in publishing – in various functions – for more than a decade. He is Overland’s digital archivist and has a firm belief in the importance of digital preservation of literary journals. He has contributed to several periodicals, including ABR.

Sam Ryan (Bonnie Lavelle)

Our Editor first became aware of Sam in January 2023 when he interviewed Peter Rose for a survey of literary journals and organisations funded by Creative Australia and undertaken by the Sydney Review of Books. ‘I was struck by his incisiveness and his digital savvy,’ Rose told Advances. ‘Happily and cannily, Sam finds time for freelance reviewing around his PhD studies. Sam’s interest in ABR – and its digital ambitions – has impressed us all.’

Sam Ryan had this to say about his appointment:

Australian Book Review is such an important part of Australia’s literary culture. Not only in terms of its critical input, which is undeniable, but also for the ways in which it encourages and nurtures new writing. Since working with the magazine, I have been taken aback by the care applied to all its endeavours. Peter Rose has in the past described the journal as ‘entrepreneurial’. I can’t think of a better description, nor can I imagine a more useful attribute in contemporary publishing. To be a part of the magazine – first as a contributor and now as a Rising Star – is truly an honour. I have such a passion for the written word, and I know the positive effect keen criticism has. I look forward to sharpening my writing with ABR’s guidance. 

The Rising Star program – generously funded by the ABR Patrons – is intended to advance the careers of young writers and critics whose early contributions have impressed readers and editors alike.

We look forward to publishing Sam Ryan often in coming years.

Peter Porter Poetry Prize

Where has the time gone!

It is twenty-one years since ABR created its own poetry prize, to highlight its commitment to the broader appreciation of poetry and to the cultivation of brilliant new work. Back in 2005, it was known as the ABR Poetry Prize. (Stephen Edgar, our first winner, received $2,000.) Six years later, it was renamed the Peter Porter Poetry Prize (possibly the most alliterative competition in the world), following the death of the great Australian poet, who was such a constant in our poetic conversation, as in these pages.

The twenty-first Porter Prize is now underway, with total prize money of $10,000, thanks to the munificence of the ABR Patrons. The winner will receive $6,000, and the four other shortlisted poets will each receive $1,000, plus publication in the magazine (in the January-February 2025 issue).

Poets have until 7 October to enter the prize. Full details appear on our website, including Frequently Asked Questions. Anyone writing in English is eligible (regardless of where they live), as long as the poems have not been published before.

Please note that this year we have reduced the maximum length from seventy to sixty lines. It’s surprising how many prize entrants submit works that are too short or overlong.

This year’s judges are Sarah Holland-Batt (ABR Chair, Professor of Creative Writing at QUT, and author of the award-winning poetry collection The Jaguar), Paul Kane (Professor of English at Vassar College, USA, co-founder of the Mildura Writers Festival, and author of ten volumes of poetry), and Peter Rose (ABR Editor and CEO, and author of seven poetry collections, including the coming Attention, Please!).

Changes at ABR

The extended ABR community knows Amy Baillieu well. She became a volunteer after completing her postgraduate studies at the University of Melbourne and joined us part-time as an assistant editor. She has been Deputy Editor since 2012 – momentous and transformative years for the magazine, to which she has made such an estimable contribution. Throughout those years, hundreds, probably thousands, of contributors, donors, subscribers, prize entrants, and stakeholders have worked or liaised with Amy, an immensely popular member of the ABR team.

At the end of June, Amy went on extended maternity leave. We all wish her and her partner, Ira, well in the weeks and months ahead.

Earlier in June, Will Hunt joined us as Assistant Editor. Will stood out in last year’s intake of students from Monash University’s Faculty of Arts, and subsequently joined us on a casual basis. The new appointment is a great development for the magazine, and a fine opportunity for Will, who told Advances:

I am thrilled to be joining ABR and its bustling community of arts enthusiasts, academics, and booklovers. It is an honour to be joining Peter Rose and the staff at ABR. I look forward to supporting the highest standard of Australian writing and contributing to excellent long-form commentary and robust criticism of Australian arts, literature, and culture. I wish Amy Baillieu all the best with her future endeavours – her stamp on ABR is ineffaceable; she is the crux of this small team.

ABR in Vienna

Zu spät! ABR’s Vienna tour in October – led by Christopher Menz and conducted in association with Academy Travel – has filled up promptly. There’s always next year!

Don’t write them off!

It’s always good to hear about a new literary magazine. The Sydney-based Vitagraph Publishing has launched Written Off, which will feature ‘formally or soulfully inventive’ works by emerging and established writers. We wish the organisers luck.

Want to write a letter to ABR? Send one to us at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

AUKUS anyone?

Dear Editor,

Further to James Curran’s article ‘AUKUS in the dock’ (ABR, June 2024), there are many problems with this program - from the enormous cost to the nation to the fundamental question of the recruitment of submariners, which will only become more challenging in the future.

To obliterate a mountain, one must first drill a series of holes 2.4 metres deep – in either a square or diagonal pattern, depending on the rock type and face condition. A crew moves in to load the holes with blasting agent, typically a mix of ammonium nitrate and fuel oil. Detonators and boosters are laid and an explosive cord is run over the mountain face. A fuse is lit. It explodes the detonator, which explodes the cord, which explodes the boosters, which explodes the blast mix, which in turn explodes the mountain.

The third of February in 1974, the day the top of Mount Tom Price was blown off, was a merry affair. The blast took place on a Sunday afternoon. Some 173,520 kilograms of explosives had been loaded, to break up thousands of tonnes of iron ore which had lain in the mountain since the time Earth was young and hot and still composing itself. Residents of the nearby town drove to vantage points to witness the milestone; the local newspaper later declared the colossal blast ‘worthy of their efforts’.

Fifty years after that explosion, I am on a bus tour of an iron ore mine listening to a young, bearded man in hi-vis gear describe how the mountain once here – Mount Tom Price – was snuffed out. The mine is located about 1,500 kilometres north-east of Perth in Western Australia’s Pilbara region. Owned and operated by global mining giant Rio Tinto, the operation lies at the edge of the Hamersley Range, a swirl of Viennetta-like rock folds containing some of the thickest and purest iron deposits in the world. Most of the ore is composed of an iron compound known as ‘hematite’; the name is derived from the Greek word for ‘blood’.

We alight to inspect a mining pit from above. The tourists press their noses against a wire fence, peering into the sheer-cut expanse. It is 250 metres deep and long exhausted, now half-filled with toxic blue-green waste water. ‘We can get to the vein without using explosives, but it creates so much wear and tear on the buckets and metal that it’s more convenient to blow it up,’ our guide explains. Mount Tom Price is not the only peak to be expunged, he says. ‘That mountain on the corner, you see half its face has been cut off? It used to extend all the way across here – that’s all gone. The rest is going to disappear as well.’ He falls silent to allow us to ponder the splendid efficiency of it all.

The discovery of Tom Price’s high-grade iron ore in the early 1960s triggered a rash of mines across the Pilbara. Some thirty-four iron ore mines now operate in the region, most run by Rio Tinto, BHP, or Fortescue Metals Group. A further eight have been decommissioned and eleven more are proposed. Tom Price was the first but is by no means the largest. The scale of the incursion is hard to grasp from the ground but can be observed when flying into the Pilbara: long maroon welts on old reptilian hide, scored all the way to the horizon.

Blasting at Mt. Tom Price: iron ore mining in the Pilbara, Western Australia, 1974 (Wolfgang Sievers/National Library of Australia)

The story of Mount Tom Price, and indeed of much of Australia’s economic wealth, began 2.5 billion years ago during an auspicious communion in an ancient sea. It was a time of great planetary upheaval, when enterprising microbes began churning out the gas that would activate life on Earth. In a sea where the Pilbara now lies, iron met oxygen. The chemistry was instant. Together the two became a compound – iron oxide – and fell gently to the seafloor; today, the sea is gone but the sediment remains as alternating stripes of iron and quartz, a geological barcode encrypted with the story of Earth’s adolescence.

Iron ore is the main raw material in steel, and some ninety-eight per cent of iron ore mined in the world is used for that purpose. Steel is everywhere: in cars and teaspoons, hip implants and building beams. The world uses twenty times more iron than all other metals combined. Iron ore is Australia’s most lucrative export, worth an expected $131 billion this financial year. Mining began at Mount Tom Price in 1965 and is still going strong; unsurprisingly, the mountain no longer exists in any meaningful form. It has been ground to a stump pocked with thirteen pits, each appearing as a giant open tomb awaiting some poor soul’s internment.

Back on the bus, we scoot over smooth gravel roads and pass the occasional mining vehicle, the driver a shadow in the darkened cabin. Children wave and grin from their window seats.

Before visiting the Pilbara, I found myself binge-watching videos of mountains being exploded. At first I was aghast, but then transfixed by the unfathomable profusion of pattern and form: writhing columns of vaporised rock in scarlet and chestnut, ochre and silver, like a crowd suddenly risen to its feet – arms flailing, backs arching, nerves enlivened. For a split second, an entire mountain ridge would seem to rise then hang suspended in the air: a final act of profundity before thudding down to earth.

Once a mountain has been exploded, waste rock is set aside and the stuff containing iron ore is trucked to the processing plant. The tourist bus rolls past the facility: a maze of conveyor belts leading into super-sized sheds, all of it coated with tangerine grime. There, the erstwhile mountain is crushed, sorted, spun, and loaded onto train carriages, taken to the port of Dampier and shipped to hungry steel mills, mostly in China.

Behind me on the bus, a young boy has been peppering his father with questions all morning. Dad, how much does that digger weigh? How fast does that train go? Is that just a puddle, or a toxic puddle? Now comes another: ‘Dad, what happens if they find a diamond?’ His father is growing weary of his son’s bottomless curiosity. ‘They wouldn’t find a diamond,’ he replies flatly, gazing out at giant pyramids of stockpiled ore. The boy is insistent. He asks again, this time urgently: ‘But dad, what if they did find a diamond?’

In 1962, Thomas Moore Price, vice-president at American company Kaiser Steel and a raw minerals expert, travelled to the Pilbara to appraise its iron ore potential. Promising deposits had been discovered in the region, and Price had been asked to evaluate sites in the Hamersley Range. For two days, Price and his party flew low over the mountains and landed at known deposits. The American was enthused by what he saw. He later described the size of the Pilbara’s ore body as ‘just staggering. It is like trying to calculate how much air there is.’

Soon after, geologists discovered an enormous iron ore reserve in a mountain not far from where Price had flown. Price was informed of the thrilling find. Two hours later, at the Kaiser Steel headquarters in California, the executive suffered a heart attack and died at his desk. The mountain was named Mount Tom Price in memoriam.

The mountain, of course, already had a name: Wakathuni. But even as late as the 1960s, much of the Pilbara was considered by Europeans to be terra incognita – unnamed, unstoried, a vacuum to be filled by their own grand narrative.

As lore has it, pastoralist and prospector Lang Hancock discovered iron ore in the Pilbara in 1952. He claimed to have been flying his small plane low over the Hamersley Range to avoid bad weather when he noticed a tell-tale dark hue along the wall of a gorge. ‘That’s iron,’ he reportedly said to his wife, Hope, who was sitting beside him – and so it was.

Hancock later staked a claim and cut a deal with Rio Tinto which delivered him and his business partner royalties of 2.5 per cent of the value of all ore mined within it. The money was to be paid in perpetuity. Hancock’s daughter, Gina Rinehart, inherited her father’s royalty stream when he died in 1992; Rinehart is now worth about $50 billion. A recent report by Oxfam found the fortunes of both Rinehart and Andrew ‘Twiggy’ Forrest, founder of Fortescue Metals Group, were increasing at a rate of $1.5 million per hour.

A few days after the Tom Price mine tour, I wake early to climb a mountain overlooking the site. As I ascend, the sky thrums an impossible sherbet pink above the domes of the Hamersley Range. For thousands of years the land’s traditional owners, the Eastern Guruma people, have called this mountain Jarndunmunha. In the 1960s, an iron survey team gave the landmark a new identifier: Mount Nameless.

A steep ascent heralds the final leg of the climb. By the time I step onto Jarndunmunha’s summit, the sun is a white flare. In the hardened light, the skin of the range seems to sag over its geriatric bones. Directly below is what now comprises Mount Tom Price: a cluster of administration buildings, then beyond, descending out of sight, a string of open-cut chasms: North Deposit, West Pit, Southern Ridge, South East Prong, Section Six, Section Seven.

Later, a long-time mine worker would tell me how the night-time view from the top of Jarndunmunha had changed since he arrived in Tom Price. ‘Eighteen years ago, you could see a bit of light. Now there are mines everywhere,’ he said. ‘You can see them, all these little things glowing.’ I imagine that sight now, the old Earth pricked with light from machines that never stop, the stars vying for the dark against the mechanical constellation. From this distance, nothing at the mine appears to move. But from the void there comes a low-pitched drone; a perpetual, whirring meta-silence.

Brendon Cook stands on the porch of his home, arm outstretched, his hand clutching a raw chicken drumstick. The white meat glistens in the gloaming. A hawk circles above; Cook whistles, waving his fleshy offering. The bird perches on a telegraph pole, regards us for a moment then, with barely a wingbeat, rises into the sky and disappears. Did my unfamiliar presence deter the bird, I ask? ‘Nah,’ Cook says. ‘It’s just getting too dark.’

Cook lives at a small Aboriginal community about twenty kilometres from Mount Tom Price. The former mountain and the community share the same Aboriginal name – Wakathuni. Cook’s white ute, the clutch gone, rests on blocks in the yard before us; two muscular dogs gnaw a branch at our feet. Cook identifies as an Innawonga, Bunjima, and Guruma man. As we chat on his porch, he tells a story of a Guruma elder known as Old Wagon, who lived decades before mining began in the Hamersley Range. Old Wagon was an important spiritual man who derived his powers from Mount Tom Price. One day he had a fateful vision. ‘He saw the lights, he saw the hill getting blown up,’ Cook says. ‘And they loaded it onto a snake. There were no words then for “train”. The snake was taking it away from Country.’

Prior to the two-century blip of European occupation in Australia, there lies a history of Aboriginal habitation in the Pilbara spanning millennia. In those tiers of time, and still now, the land formed the foundation of Aboriginal people’s spiritual and cultural lives. The arrival of pastoralism in the late nineteenth century dispossessed thousands of Aboriginal people of their traditional homelands. Mining soon followed. For the first four decades of iron ore mining, the socio-economic status of Indigenous people in the Pilbara improved little. Between 2001 and 2014 – coinciding with a boom in iron ore prices – the situation picked up somewhat. A report found about one-third of Aboriginal people, mostly those employed by mining companies, became better off. Yet not much changed for the remaining two-thirds, and many fell deeper into disadvantage. Death rates were almost four times greater for Indigenous males, compared with non-Indigenous, and more than five times for females.

In May 2020, Rio Tinto committed an act of cultural violence against Pilbara traditional owners that was so shameful the company’s reputation may never be remediated. At Juukan Gorge, about sixty kilometres north-west of Tom Price, the company blew up two Indigenous rock shelters – and with them, evidence of human occupancy dating back more than 46,000 years. The shelters were located on the land of the Puutu Kunti Kurrama and Pinikura people. In a video released after the blast, traditional owner Harold Ashburton stands at the former entrance to one of the shelters, now a pile of scree, and recalls bringing his two sons there. ‘[I] show them their great-grandfather’s country, their grandfather’s country. And you feel happy, bringing them,’ he says, his voice quivering. ‘Now all we’ve got is a mess.’ I think back to Tom Price and the young boy’s anxious probing. What if they did find a diamond?

Back at Wakathuni, the dark has descended and the dogs need feeding. But I have one last question for Cook. Traditional owners believe spirits inhabit the rivers, gorges, and mountains that give the land its form. So what happens, I ask Cook, when humans cleave open the mountains where those spirits dwell? Cook doesn’t hesitate to answer. Deaths and injuries still occur in Australia’s mining industry, and mental health problems are common. The accidents and illnesses, he says, are payback wrought by dislocated spirits. ‘It’s a retaliation. They’re coming in and destroying the country,’ he says. ‘We can’t just go in and do a smoking ceremony or Welcome to Country, and everything’s going to be all right. But you need to be thinking like an old-time blackfella, to understand.’

In August 1970, Ron Olsson, his wife and their three young sons drove into the town of Tom Price, the family’s possessions strapped to the roof of the car. They had set out from Victoria three weeks earlier; it had been a slow trip. Somewhere across the Nullarbor, the brakes on their caravan failed. On the final stretch, their vehicles blew five tyres and their pet cat died. The family arrived in Tom Price in the dark, with $20 in the bank.

Olsson had heard of Lang Hancock’s discovery of iron ore and his efforts to open the region to mining. In Melbourne, he interviewed for and scored a job at the Tom Price mine. The family bought a caravan and off to the Pilbara they went.

Upon first seeing Tom Price in daylight, Olsson later recalled in an oral history interview, he was impressed by ‘nice green lawns and the good houses ... It was sort of what we expected, [like] the pamphlets they showed us.’ The family was thrilled to secure a near-new rental home: three bedrooms, brick veneer, fully furnished – all for $10 a week. Hamersley Iron, a Rio Tinto subsidiary, owned the house. In fact, the company built and owned everything. Back then Tom Price was a ‘closed town’; only mine workers, their families, and those who serviced them were permitted to live there.

Olsson drove a truck at the mine, hauling rock from the pit to the processing plant. The money was good, but the hours were long; Olsson averaged two double shifts a week, sometimes three. ‘There was plenty of overtime … if you didn’t do your sixteen-hour shifts, they didn’t want you,’ he said. Olsson recalls becoming so tired he ‘didn’t remember travelling the road. You’d get your load … you’d pull out from the shovel and you’d remember backing into the crusher or wherever you was, but the road in between was just a blank. Did I travel over it, or didn’t I?’

The Tom Price township sits just north of the mine in a valley at the base of Mount Nameless-Jarndunmunha (the joint name was adopted in 2007). Rio Tinto handed over the town to the Shire of Ashburton in the 1980s and it’s now open to all who want to live there. It has a permanent population of about 3,000 people – most of them still mine workers and their families – plus a fluctuating population of fly-in, fly-out workers.

Over the years, Hamersley Iron and Rio Tinto have gone to great lengths to keep workers and their families happy. Olsson, a keen Scoutmaster, recalled the company paying $70,000 – a lot of money in the 1970s – to help build a scout hall that would become the envy of much larger towns. Other recreational offerings in the town include three sports ovals; an Olympic swimming pool; netball, basketball, and squash courts; a lawn bowls green; an indoor cricket centre; an eighteen-hole golf course; a tennis club (with air-conditioned spectator rooms); and a go-kart track. When I visited Tom Price, the skate park was being refurbished; the resulting broken bones will be treated in a new $32.8 million hospital promised to the town, mostly paid for by Rio Tinto.

Life in Tom Price is not without challenges. The summers are long and blisteringly hot. Tom Price is one of the most expensive places to live in Australia: one of those three-bedroom houses the Olssons rented for $10 a week today costs around $2,000 a week. And despite all the efforts to insulate the town’s inhabitants from its surrounds, the Pilbara’s red dust infiltrates everything. It arrives on the wind, on the soles of boots and on car tyres. It permanently begrimes bed linen and shower grout, and embeds itself in food and nostrils. White corellas strut the town’s footpaths, their feathers stained a scummy peach.

Eagle Felix, a New Zealander, came to town fifteen years ago to work for the mining industry, but has since found other work. Felix tells me how the physical isolation, long shifts, and unsociable work hours can fracture families. ‘You hear a lot of sad stories. A lot of families break up,’ he says. On more than one occasion, Felix says, he’s visited Kings Lake, just out of town, and found ‘someone down there by himself, he’s come home from night shift and his family’s gone. Good fellas, I’ve worked with a lot of them.’

Felix tells me a story that struck him the hardest. ‘One fella was a boilermaker in the mine. He got cancer, and his wife left him. He was really heartbroken,’ Felix says. Tragically, the man died. Felix was working as a cleaner and went to prepare the man’s home for the next tenant. ‘I saw all these little things he’d made for his kids. Little swings, little toy things, all out of steel.’ In the months after I left Tom Price, I often thought of that man. I wondered what drove his wife and kids to quit town. I imagined those steel toys – perhaps made with ore dug from the Pilbara – forged into shiny gifts that would one day lie spurned and idle.

Despite its genial vibe and tidy streetscapes, Tom Price beats to a peculiar pulse. Rio Tinto’s logo is omnipresent, emblazoned on almost every public sign and community flyer. One in two shoppers in town wear the Rio Tinto uniform: navy-and-yellow workwear and tan boots. In almost two weeks at Tom Price, I saw not a single elderly person. The streets are scrupulously free of litter. Parked outside the pub each night are utes, four-wheel drives, and trucks. To the visitor it has the feel of walking through a timber plantation – pleasant enough but entirely mediated, a single-species town that exists only for one purpose: to remove a mountain and sell it off, piece by piece.

For all the human capital to flow in and out of the Pilbara, there are those who came and died here. In his 1991 interview, Ron Olsson told of a string of fatalities during his years at the mine. One man was in a vehicle pushing a rock; it ‘rolled under his blade and pulled the machine with him’. The vehicle tumbled down a steep slope; the worker was ejected through the windscreen and ‘straight into some big rocks’. Olsson continued with his grim list of fatalities: three truck accidents, a man thrown from a loader, and a ‘young fellow got killed out on the road. He was one of the Scouts.’

The Tom Price cemetery is located west of town off a dirt road. I visit late one afternoon; it’s deserted. A brown teddy bear hangs over the rusted perimeter fence. Headstones sit askew, their inscriptions lamenting those taken too soon, those dearly beloved, those forever in our hearts. I count the graves – perhaps forty. It seems so few for a town established more than half a century ago. The land around here is filled with the burial sites of Indigenous custodians past, but for many new inhabitants, their bones will sleep in the dirt of elsewhere.

Ron Olsson’s Pilbara gamble paid off. He clocked up decades at the mine and his three sons would also join the payroll. But mining employment can be precarious. In 2016, Rio Tinto cut about 170 jobs from its Pilbara operations after global iron ore prices fell. Workers who had given the company their best working years were suddenly unemployed. Families left Tom Price and houses lay empty. Now, the iron ore boom is back on. But a move towards autonomous mining operations means that human workers become ever more dispensable. More than 130 trucks in Rio Tinto’s Pilbara fleet are now driverless; so too are its mine-to-port trains. The company spruiks the 1,700-kilometre train network as ‘one of the world’s largest robots’. Having erased mountains and sought to annihilate the world’s oldest living culture, the final step, it seems, is to eliminate ourselves.

The most anticipated event on the Tom Price social calendar is the Nameless Jarndunmunha Festival (principal sponsor: Rio Tinto). A grainy video of the festival’s twenty-fifth anniversary year, in 1995, shows a parade of locals marching through town: gymnasts and karate enthusiasts, jugglers, the fire brigade, a child mermaid. The day culminates in a tug-of-war between the town’s residents and a mining vehicle. It’s yellow and big as a bungalow. First go the men, then the women, and finally the children, bodies heaving on the rope in unison: feet planted, legs braced against the might of the machine. But against all the heft their flesh could summon, the vehicle will not yield; they pull and strain and roar, but it barely rolls a goddamn inch.

The township of Mount Tom Price, 1970 (image courtesy of the National Archives of Australia. NAA: A1200, L87807)

All iron in the universe – in the sun, in Mount Tom Price, in our blood – was created by exploding stars. The mineral makes up about five per cent of the Earth’s crust, but much of it is uneconomic to extract. This reveals the conundrum at the core of our economy: on a finite planet, resources eventually run out.

Unless global demand for steel falls, the world will need another source of iron. A new breed of prospector has identified the next celestial body to be flogged: the moon. The moon, of course, is Earth’s natural satellite. It guides bird migration and coral spawning, dictates our rhythms and tides, and steadies the planet on its axis. According to NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, it also ‘holds hundreds of billions of dollars of untapped resource’, including iron.

I consider all this as I sit on a beach at the small town of Exmouth on the Pilbara coast, and watch the moon devour the sun. I have joined 25,000 other people to witness what’s been billed as a once-in-a-lifetime event: a total solar eclipse. Such an event occurs somewhere on Earth only about once every eighteen months, and this one will only lightly touch Australia – here on the Pilbara coast.

The previous day, I had driven seven hours west from Tom Price to Exmouth. I left behind the Hamersley Range – those old mountains so patiently imbibing our dreams and follies – and descended to the moist, liminal sash of the coast. Late in the day, I turn onto the North West Cape, a pinkie-shaped peninsula jutting into the Indian Ocean. The road is bumper-to-bumper with eclipse-goers. As we roll along, the dense blue of the ocean flashes from between the dunes; after the dry of the uplands, the mere sight of water delivers to my brain a shimmery dopamine rush.

In the Pilbara, the relationships between Country and coast are deep and stratified. A Dreamtime sea serpent, the warlu, is said to have traversed north-west Australia searching for two naughty boys, emerging from the ocean and creating waterways as it travelled inland. Rivers run the reverse course, flowing coastward in fast red torrents after monsoonal rains; the Hardey River rises just below Mount Tom Price then runs into the Ashburton River, tipping into the ocean not far from Exmouth. Between it all glide mining trains, their loads of ore hauled to the coast to be conveyed onto ships, then transmuted into a staple of the global economy, somewhere else and far away.

On a grassy strip adjacent to Exmouth’s Town Beach, the eclipse is well underway. Wearing solar observation glasses, I tilt my head skywards. The sun is a mere sickle behind the flat disc of the moon. Light has begun to fall in odd slants; two men in baseball caps wave their arms about, playing with the trippy shadows. Earlier, a Greek tourist named Leon, here for his ninth eclipse, explained to me the physics of the spectacle. The moon is four hundred times smaller than the sun but four hundred times closer to Earth; that cosmic quirk is what allows the moon to block the sun’s light. ‘It’s a science but it’s also very beautiful,’ Leon says. ‘At the time the eclipse happens it’s like you are not on Earth. The shapes, the colours – everything is different.’

All around, a milky twilight has usurped the day. The temperature drops and a breeze picks up. Now, the shadow of the moon sweeps in: it’s happening! The crowd looks to the sky and takes a single, collective breath as the moon locks into place. Shards of white light splinter in all directions: the sun’s corona, the hidden outer layers of its atmosphere now rendered visible to the human eye for one sublime moment. We stare back, slack-jawed.

The moon slips. An arc of silvery beads peeks from behind its dark edge as sunlight streams through the valleys of the moon. Scientists call it the ‘diamond ring’ effect. What happens if they find a diamond? My thoughts fly to the Tom Price mine, the machines that never stop churning. Who there might be looking to the sky, as the moon silences the star that holds our planetary system together?

Now the eclipse is over. The entire spectacle lasts sixty-two seconds; the moon slides on to finish its journey across the sky. Everyone around me looks a little dumbfounded. A woman is dabbing away tears. ‘Oh my god,’ she says, turning to her friend. ‘What the hell just happened?’ A man nearby wearing a rumpled Hawaiian shirt looks a little shell-shocked. I ask what he thought of the sky show. ‘I don’t know if I could put it into words,’ he says in an exalted daze. ‘It was just so goddamn beautiful … the whole thing looks like a giant pupil, a big eye. Like the universe is looking back at you.’

I drive back to Tom Price the day after the eclipse, skirting up the cape and inland across the glinting Ashburton River. Giant insects hover at the roadside and birds arc overhead: raptors and swallows, birds with dark crests and notched tails, and everywhere, wild budgerigars flitting across the sky, a green and yellow rapture.

It’s late afternoon. As I drive, I am transfixed by a writhing lime cloud above the road ahead – a flock of budgerigars. All at once, the birds tilt and descend towards my car; before I can brake the whole lot strike the windscreen, bellies and wings pressed into the glass and then a clatter as their bodies ping-pong over the roof. I gasp. In the rear-view mirror, green clumps are strewn across the road. Should I pull over? The roadside is dangerously narrow. But what if some birds are still alive? I think of the long solo drive ahead, the car loaded with bloodied budgerigars. Where will I take them once I reach Tom Price? And it will be dark soon. I drive on, safe in my shiny steel contraption, prickling with shame.

Mining, by its nature, must damage the body it penetrates. The purported payback is tax revenue for governments and the materials we need to conduct our lives. Steel forged from the Pilbara’s ore built our cities and towns, and the vehicles to travel between them. It built our homes and objects to fill them. But as we fill some voids we leave new ones: pockmarked land, emptied of the spirits and histories it harboured.

In the town of Tom Price, life appears to hum along with a composed indifference to the nature of its enterprise – until I happen upon a counterculture of thought, a trace of regret that the town’s mountain namesake has not been permitted its presence. I am browsing a souvenir shop; I choose a plush crocodile for my son and take it to a young, kindly woman behind the counter. As we chat, I tell her that I am writing about Mount Tom Price. The woman pauses, then leans towards me furtively. ‘It’s not there anymore. It breaks my heart,’ she says in a hushed voice. ‘They mined things that have been there for billions of years. It would have been so beautiful out there. I know they need mining but …’ Her voice trails off. With a wan smile, she hands me the crocodile and my receipt.

I leave the shop and step into the midday heat. Tourists are standing in the shade of a tree, waiting for the bus to take them to the Tom Price mine, to see how humans dig up things that have been there for billions of years.

Yes, it really would have been so beautiful out there.

‘Bloodstone’ was placed third in the 2024 Calibre Essay Prize. ABR gratefully acknowledges the long-standing support of Patrons Peter McLennan and Mary-Ruth Sindrey.

This essay was supported by artsACT (the ACT government’s arts agency) and Creative Australia (the Australian government’s principal arts investment and advisory body).

It was a young Abraham Lincoln’s prediction that the United States ‘must live through all time, or die by suicide’. Nick Bryant wants us to believe the latter is coming true. America has been popping pills from the very beginning. Now the fatal overdose is inevitable. This time, we are reaching an ‘extreme polarization … 250 years in the making … a second civil war’. Rather than the hysteria for and against Donald Trump being an aberration, ‘the hate, divisiveness and paranoia we see today,’ Bryant argues, ‘are in fact a core part of America’s story’. It has been on this path since 1776; Trump is less a waypoint than a destination.

British politics is back in the limelight, after a brief hiatus of relative sanity. The current election campaign will divert attention onto the main parties and key personalities. However, this shouldn’t mask important challenges to the very integrity of the United Kingdom that have occurred since David Cameron took the keys to 10 Downing Street in 2010.

In fact, the United Kingdom has been through a rough trot in the past fourteen years. The independence referendum in Scotland, the different outcomes of the Brexit referendum in England and Wales when compared to Scotland and Northern Ireland, and the contrasting approaches to containing the Covid-19 pandemic coming from London, Edinburgh, and Cardiff all highlighted the pluri-national nature of the United Kingdom in a way that was often masked by habitual invocations of Britain and Britishness. During the past decade, it could not be taken for granted that the United Kingdom would survive in its current form.

I began Mandi Gray’s book while waiting for the judgment to be handed down in Bruce Lehrmann’s defamation case against Network Ten and journalist Lisa Wilkinson. I had tuned into the live-streamed trial months earlier, along with 124,444 others, to hear Brittany Higgins being interrogated about her recollections of that fateful night in Parliament House. Gray’s argument – that some men were using defamation law to inflict further abuse and punishment on their victims, to cow them into silence, to chill public discussion of sexual violence – seemed apt indeed.

‘I had no idea it was possible to be sued for making a formal report of sexual violence.’ Suing for Silence opens with this common assumption. Gray’s incredulity illustrates how recently the gendered implications of defamation law have become clear. Other areas of law – criminal law, family law, and property law – have long been subject to feminist critique, but defamation law has largely escaped scrutiny. Suddenly it has become central to understanding whose stories are told, and how.

after Caspar David Friedrich, Evening on the River (1820-25)

Pilgrimages to war cemeteries have long been part of the rituals of Australian remembrance. It is easy to understand why veterans and the parents and siblings of the men who died in war make these journeys. But why do younger generations do so today, more than a century after World War I and eight decades after World War II? These were not their battles, nor their wars. Why do they seek out the semi-sacred spaces of Commonwealth War Graves Commission (CWGC) cemeteries? And why do they weep over the grave of someone whom they have never met?

The American scholar Marianne Hirsch has coined the term ‘postmemory’ to describe the relationship that the ‘generation after’ bears to the personal, collective, and cultural trauma of those who came before. As she sees it, the experiences of one generation are transmitted so deeply and affectively, through stories, images, and behaviours, as to seem to constitute memories in their own right.

I have never lost a family member in war. But I joined a pilgrimage to Ambon by the Gull Force 2/21st Battalion Association on Anzac Day to understand why children and grandchildren still make this journey, after all the veterans have died.

Gull Force was a group of about 1,100 Australians sent in December 1941 to help the Dutch colonial military forces defend the island of Ambon, in the east of the Netherlands East Indies (now Indonesia). The force was too small. It had little fire power and no air or naval support when a Japanese onslaught came on 31 January 1942. Most of Gull Force was soon taken prisoners of war. Some 229 were then massacred by the Japanese in the vicinity of the strategic Laha airport. The rest of Gull Force spent the war in captivity, either on Ambon or on Hainan Island, off China.

The death toll on Ambon, where prisoners were starved and worked to death, was seventy-seven per cent: it was one of the highest tolls of any group of Australian prisoners of the Japanese. Only the death marches at Sandakan were worse. The death toll on Hainan, where a third of Gull Force was sent in October 1942, was thirty-one per cent, comparable to the worst figures from the Thai-Burma railway.

For all the horror, some of Gull Force’s survivors yearned to return to Ambon after the war. This site of memory not only spoke to their own life-changing personal trauma; it was also where they fought (if only briefly) and where hundreds of Australians who died on Ambon were buried in the CWGC cemetery built on the site of the wartime camp, Tan Tui.

The dead of Hainan, in contrast, had been buried in Yokohama, Japan. Although civil war and the communist victory in 1949 precluded the creation of a CWGC cemetery in China after 1945, Gull Force survivors were enraged at the choice of Yokohama, in the land of the enemy. For all its beauty, this would never become a regular destination for pilgrimages, individual or collective.

Gull Force could not return to Ambon until 1967, given recurrent unrest in the Moluccas and tensions, including ‘Confrontation’ over the creation of Malaysia, between Australia and Indonesia. When the veterans were finally allowed in, they maintained regular pilgrimages, with breaks during the communal violence in the Moluccas from 1999 to 2002 (more of this later), and during the Covid pandemic.

From the start, the veterans had two objectives: to conduct rituals of remembrance for the dead, and to show their gratitude to the Ambonese who had helped them during their captivity, either by assisting escape attempts or by supplying food. Both activities risked Japanese retribution, even execution. The Gull Force Association thus developed significant local aid programs: developing the Ambon hospital, providing professional development, sponsoring orphan children, and so on. These two elements of pilgrimage – remembrance and aid – have continued, as subsequent generations have taken over from the veterans.

The 2024 pilgrims whom I joined almost all had a family connection with the original Gull Force. I had somehow expected that they would be children of those who died in Ambon, but they were not, for the simple reason that three-quarters of Gull Force were unmarried when they enlisted. Four of our party remembered uncles or great-uncles who had been executed at Laha. One married couple were still searching for the burial site of the wife’s uncle, who had been killed in the fighting in February 1942 on Mount Nona, which towers above the town of Ambon. But more than half of the group were remembering men who survived the war. Four had a father, father-in-law, or uncle who had been interned on Hainan. Two family groups – a father and two sons, and a mother, daughter, and niece – were descendants of men who escaped Ambon soon after the surrender and made their way back to Australia by island-hopping in borrowed boats. As these families said, they owed their very existence to these escapes.

Joan Beaumont with members of the 2024 Gull Force Association pilgrimage, above Seri, Ambon

Ambon is not easy to get to. It is only a thousand kilometres from Darwin – hence, more than fifty Australians made successful escapes in 1942 – but there are no direct flights. We had to travel through Jakarta with long transit stops in a nearby airport hotel. This, then, is not an easy pilgrimage option. It is not Pozières on the Somme, less than two hours from that tourist mecca, Paris; or Ypres, in Belgium, now only a morning’s drive through the Chunnel from London, and an attractive tourist destination in itself, replete with its reconstructed medieval Cloth Hall.

We met at Melbourne Airport, with a punctuality worthy of the army. An immediate hierarchy was evident, between the first-timers and the repeat pilgrims who had made the journey to Ambon on eight, nine, ten, even fourteen previous occasions. The latter greeted the renovation of Ambon Airport (a Covid employment project, I was told) with approval. But those looking for signs of the airfield that hundreds of Gull Force had died defending in 1942 were disappointed.

Our first stop was Tawiri, a small village which houses two memorials to the Australians who were beheaded and bayoneted at Laha. The site of one of the mass graves is marked by a modest pillar on a plinth, engraved with a Christian cross. When we arrived, the site was drenched by recent rain, and the clouds threatened to burst again, so our service was brief, almost improvised: a few comments about 1942, a Christian prayer with references to duty, peace, sacrifice, and loyalty; and a poem written by one nephew in honour of a Laha victim, and here read by another: ‘I never knew my uncle. He was killed in the Second World War / He was executed on the Ambon shore … / The year was 1942 and he was 26 years old / It left the family grieving for his life could not unfold / Reginald Wade Monk was the uncle that I did not meet / I never got to shake his hand or with his children greet / No I never knew my uncle …’

Was this postmemory? Uncle Reg’s family rarely talked about his loss, but his nephew, whom I will call A, knew that his mother grieved for her brother. Uncle Reg, though dead, was a lasting presence in his extended family. Coming to Ambon, A said, brought ‘closure’ to this part of his family history, even though, he noted, he did not have an emotional response to the service comparable to that of the older B, who also remembered an uncle killed at Laha. C, too, who lost an uncle, had moist eyes as she laid a wreath of red poppies.

With a recitation of Binyon’s Ode, it was all over. We gathered up the wreath and poppies that C had helpfully supplied. They would be recycled on Anzac Day and, anyway, might be souvenired by the locals if we left them. We devoured cakes supplied by the family of our Ambonese guide and distributed gifts to the local children who were draped over the fence of the memorial space. With frisbees, sweets, soft kangaroos, koala key rings, and diverse Australian kitsch sailing through the air into the outstretched hands of children and adults, the mood became decidedly festive, even irreverent. In the midst of death, we were in life.

At a second memorial marking another mass grave a short distance down the road, it was easier to imagine the spirits of the dead restive in the dank setting. The locals speak of a giant soldier emerging from the jungle at night. We bought more cakes from roadside vendors – a contribution to the local economy, we thought, and a chance to interact with local people.

The drive to our hotel through Ambon town, with chaotic traffic, tangled overhead wires, broken footpaths, rubbish-filled canals, and multiple KFCs, confirmed that here, too, the landscape bears no echoes of World War II. Ambon town is not Hellfire Pass or the cliffs of Gallipoli, where the topography tells its own story, with little heritage interpretation.

But then, I was soon told that the Ambon pilgrimage is ‘not about the war, it is about the people’. Inheriting the local connections and the tradition of aid projects established by their forebears, some pilgrims have maintained, over many visits, deep friendships and loyalty. They greeted their Ambonese contacts with shouts of joy and warm embraces.

It seems, then, that the pilgrimage has itself become a site of memory. We might think this term applies only to physical sites and material objects – battlefields, buildings, cemeteries, and memorials – but, as the French scholar Pierre Nora, who coined the influential term lieu de mémoire, has argued, ‘sites of memory’ can include events, commemorative dates, ritual practices; even ‘the products of reflection, such as the concept of a historical generation’. These non-physical sites become invested over the years with their own meanings, symbolism, and metaphorical representation of values. Take the concept of the returned soldier that is so powerful in Australian discourse about war. It means much more than the individual veteran. It conveys the notion of a consolidated and unified collective, and a figurative and metaphorical representation of loyalty, service, citizenship, and nationhood.

‘Pilgrimage as a site of memory’ helps explain a lot. First, the choice of hotel. I was warned it would be ‘basic’. My window looked onto a wall of pipes next door. The shower never offered hot water. It flooded the bathroom when left running for the recommended ten minutes. The occasional cockroach wandered across the floor. Why were we there? Because Hotel M. is part of the pilgrimage memory. The original veterans stayed here from the 1970s on. The current owner is the son of the manager who hosted them. The banner welcoming Gull Force was draped across the hotel exterior, while Australian flags bedecked the bar (which, alas, sometimes struggled to provide enough cold beer). Comfort mattered little when memories were so rich.

Second, the pilgrimage as a site of memory explains the odd absence of interest in World War II. It was not really Fawlty Towers, but few mentioned the war, or sought to know the details of Gull Force’s history of battle and captivity. That said, the war cemetery at Tan Tui was high on our list. This houses more than 2,000 graves, including many of the 2/21st Battalion which formed much of Gull Force. It is a tranquil garden paradise, with towering moss-covered trees and graves immaculately laid out in terraced lawns between beds of tropical flowers and bushes. A memorial shelter on the first terrace provides sobering lists of the 450 Australian soldiers and airmen who died in the region and have no known grave.

On our first visit, we wandered in small groups or alone, seeking out the grave of a family member or trying to make sense of the rows upon rows of headstones. It was hard to imagine that this was the place where so many Australians starved to death, or succumbed to beriberi, malaria, or dysentery in abject squalor. Busy urban development now hems in the site. A large mosque fills the space that the prisoners of war walked across to the bay, where their latrine, which they called the Bridge of Sighs, stretched out over the water. Two of our group, whose grandfather had escaped in 1942, found the cemetery ‘significant’, but doubted that their children would make the effort to come.

We visited Tan Tui again on Anzac Day. It was a dawn service, and at 5 am several mosques in the vicinity issued amplified calls to prayer. The tsunami of sound washed over the graves of the long-dead Christians triggering at least one set of pursed lips – although another member of the group said, ‘We must all live together … they won’t last long.’ Indeed, the call to prayer soon gave way to triumphant roosters and a magical bird chorus.

Gull Force Association had pride of place at the ceremony, on seats drenched with overnight rain. Several pilgrims wore their relatives’ medals. I muttered gratuitously that in Canada this is prohibited while in Australia it is permissible, so long as the medals are worn on the right side. Perhaps another ten to fifteen Australians were present, as well as the pilgrimage twenty.

The service, led by Australian officials flown in from Jakarta and Makassar, followed a World War I template: Binyon’s Ode, the Last Post, Reveille, John Macrae’s ‘In Flanders Fields’, and Mustafa Kemal Atatürk’s exhortation to the mothers of Australia to ‘wipe away your tears; your sons … have become our sons as well’. The humidity aside, no one would have guessed that we were at the site of one of the great tragedies of the Pacific war. Some words were delivered in Indonesian, for the benefit of the Indonesian officials present, but the rituals were another language culturally, and heavily Christian.

The discourse, as ever, was one of sacrifice. Certainly, Gull Force had been sacrificed when it was dispatched to Ambon in December 1941 with absolutely no chance of stopping the Japanese attack. But ‘sacrifice’ was employed in a reflexive sense. The soldiers made a sacrifice, of themselves, it seems. They were not sacrificed by Australia’s military leaders and their flawed strategic planning.

On Anzac Days in the past, Gull Force moved at the conclusion of its Tan Tui rituals to the nearby Indonesian Heroes cemetery. There, they paid tribute to the soldiers of the Indonesian army, many of whom had died when suppressing the Moluccan secessionist movement in the early 1950s. But this reciprocal honouring of each other’s dead no longer occurs – though no one seems to know why, or even knows that it ever happened. So, gathering up our recycled wreaths and poppies (including the spares provided by the optimistic Australian consulate), and pausing for the obligatory cheerful group photo, we returned, with guests in tow, to our hotel for the gunfire breakfast. The familiar fried eggs, fried rice, toast, and omelettes were supplemented by pastries and the traditional rum.

Fortified, we visited Kudamati, the place where an Australian soldier, Bill Doolan, made a suicidal last stand in a banyan tree on 1 February 1942. The banyan tree is long gone, but Doolan lives on in Ambon folklore. A first memorial was unveiled here in 1968, but in 2013 it was joined by a larger memorial. Conceived by the Gull Force Association and funded by the Department of Veterans’ Affairs (as so many of the memorials of the recent memory boom have been), this installation is notable in that it commemorates the living, not the dead. Like many Great War memorials in Australia itself, it honours those who volunteered to fight, and survived. ‘Somewhere,’ the group leader told me, ‘we wanted our fathers’ names to be seen – a place where we could commemorate those who returned home.’

Here again, we might see postmemory: not cross-generational trauma but pride in a family’s record of military service and affirmation of its place in the national memory of war. Children and grandchildren paused to have their photo taken, sticking a poppy onto a name with blue tack and pointing to it. ‘Is not the poppy for the dead?’ I asked. ‘No,’ D said, ‘it is more than that. It is for remembrance.’

This was the extent of such rituals, at least in the formal program. One day we stopped on a cliff top with a panoramic view of the southern coastline from which more than twenty Australians set sail for Darwin in the immediate aftermath of Gull Force’s defeat. But as we all posed for photos with the Gull Force banner fluttering in the breeze, the view that invested the site with wartime significance became the backdrop.

Only the family of one man who escaped made the journey down to the small fishing village of Seri below. The son and grandsons had struggled to articulate their reasons for coming to Ambon (they were all first-timers), but here, at Seri, the story handed down to them became real. The hills above were so rugged, the village so small, even today, that it must have been very difficult to find in 1942. And Darwin seemed a long way away across the glittering sea. How could you not be in awe of young men who took the gamble of eluding the Japanese?

Yet the spell was soon broken. ‘I bet this rubbish wasn’t cluttering the beach in 1942,’ son E said. Neither, I thought, was the beachfront chapel boasting a more than life-sized image of Jesus’s face and blasting what seemed to be Ambonese Hillsong at the foreign intruders. Grandson F thought he might be stabbed. We did not linger long.

The rest of our five days in Ambon were spent in sightseeing or in local philanthropy. One day we stopped at a tired resort for lunch and a swim. I peered out at the bay that Australians had sailed across, masquerading as Ambonese fishermen, under the nose of patrolling Japanese naval vessels. Down the coast was Paso, the strategic junction of the two peninsulas and the headquarters of the Dutch army in 1942, which collapsed almost immediately, leaving the Australian forces hopelessly exposed. For most of the group, however, the locality was probably memorable for the local dessert: tropical fruit smothered in crushed peanuts, chilli, and cane sugar – a delicacy, we assume, that the POWs never sampled.

As for philanthropy: we visited a privately run orphanage that the Gull Force Association and Rotary now support with donations and in-kind assistance. We brought bags of food and gifts for the children who sat patiently lining the walls of the hall opposite us. They soon erupted into life when given a variety of treasure including balls. One of our group, an octogenarian, played ball with a visually impaired girl. I pondered funding a basketball ring. Others articulated a sense of obligation to ensure this aid program continued.

The following day we visited a village close to where many Australians had been trapped and relentlessly shelled in the last days of their hopeless battle (as I told anyone who cared to listen). It was all very jolly: welcome dances, a communal meal which Gull Force served to the villagers, and the group leader delighting all by playing the ukulele. ‘These are the good days,’ G said to me, ‘when you’re welcomed to their villages.’

This history of cross-cultural connections and friendships, refreshed year on year, is what invests the pilgrimage with its rich layers of memory. These might well be the reason that Ambon pilgrimages continue in the future. The fate of some pilgrimages – and, indeed, of the 23,000 cemeteries and memorials that the CWGC maintains around the world – must surely be in doubt as the decades pass. Even now, something of a hierarchy exists in the CWGC cemeteries. Some are visited by hordes of tourists, others rarely so. A demand-driven model of economics would sit uneasily with remembrance, but the Commonwealth governments that form the CWGC might ultimately choose to privilege those cemeteries that have a high level of usage by visitors.

Beyond that, we do not know how long the communities of the Asia-Pacific region will tolerate these obviously imperial footprints upon their soil. In many places, these have become part of the local landscape, aesthetically appealing green spaces invested with new local meanings over the years. But many are now on prime real estate, as the surrounding cities expand and encroach upon them. Will they all last ‘in perpetuity’, as the CGWC agreements with host governments prescribe?

In the case of Ambon, the cemetery has already endured a sectarian attack. In 1999, Ambon erupted into communal violence, caused by a complex mix of religious tensions and economic and political competition between Christians and Muslims. The violence spread throughout the Moluccas and, by mid-2001, an estimated 4,000 people had died and more than 500,000 had been displaced. The Cross of Sacrifice in the Tan Tui cemetery was another casualty, smashed by Muslim activists. Some years later the CWGC replaced it, but with a less overtly Christian Stone of Remembrance. Few know that this stone was originally designed by that quintessential imperial architect, Edwin Lutyens, and that its inscription, ‘Their name liveth for evermore’, comes from Ecclesiastes. It was recommended by another great imperialist, Rudyard Kipling.

As for the pilgrimages to Ambon: the children of Gull Force veterans are now in their seventies or eighties. Soon they will be unable to cope with the rigours of the long journey, Ambon’s hazardous footpaths, and the enervating humidity. For the grandchildren and great-grandchildren, the cross-generational memory of the war will become attenuated and devoid of emotional power. Who really cares, after all, about the men who fought in the Boer War, let alone Waterloo?

However, the pilgrimage to Ambon might well continue, given that it has become its own site of memory. The philanthropic activities and personal friendships with Ambonese – and the values of cross-cultural understanding and generosity that they represent – do not yet eclipse the rituals of remembrance, but they are a powerful parallel legacy that the descendants of Gull Force will inherit. They might well perpetuate it, even when they know little about why or how the war cemetery at Tan Tui and the Ambon pilgrimage came into being.

Percival Everett is a professor of English at the University of Southern California, and the author of numerous works of fiction published over the past forty years. Throughout his oeuvre, he has explored the ways in which texts engage with other texts, and has vigorously critiqued the persistent stereotyping of African Americans in the cultural history of the United States. His best-known novel is probably Erasure (2001), a complex satire directed at the publishing and media industries. Cord Jefferson’s recent adaptation of that novel, American Fiction, which won the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay for 2023, has drawn further attention to Everett’s whole career. However, James, Everett’s reimagining of Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), from the perspective of the escaped slave Jim, may prove to be his most critically and commercially successful work thus far.

Enniscorthy, a town in County Wexford, was Colm Tóibín’s birthplace in 1955. His father was a schoolteacher and local historian. Micheál Tóibín died young, when Colm was twelve, an early loss explored in Tóibín’s novel Nora Webster (2014), in which the eponymous widow’s son Donal is likewise twelve and a stammerer. In 2009, Tóibín published Brooklyn, which moves between Enniscorthy and New York City. The very modesty of Tóibín’s middle-class settings and characters – their constrained lives, village absorptions, small defeats – could not obscure Tóibín’s subtle artistry or his forensic interest in psychology, especially that of his women, many of whom are so complex, so contradictory, as to make the male characters seem extraneous, unimaginative, stolid.

But I think there’s sometimes more emotion in a whisper. It doesn’t cause a fuss.’ So says Teller, the narrator of Bendigo writer Amanda Creely’s novel Nameless. Her story, Teller tells readers more than once, is not nice. She is right: set in an unnamed and unrecognisable country and in a world that seems not to have sophisticated technologies for war or peace, Nameless is the story of everyday citizens facing an invasion by a hostile, brutal, and powerful neighbouring army.

In the post-invasion world, everyone, not just Teller, has a new name to match their circumstances. As Teller puts it, ‘Now we were just the nameless lost to war.’ And so, Teller’s surviving daughter is named Daughter; her dead husband is Husband, her other daughter is Eldest, and her sons are Son and Youngest; the man who helps Teller and Daughter is Rescuer; and so on. Oddly, given that he is the wager of the war rather than a victim, the leader of the invading forces also earns a descriptive name: Teller calls him Invader.

‘Tell me your crow name. Tell me the name you will wear to the bottom of the sea,’ begins the narrating voice of Francesca de Tores’s new novel, Saltblood. These opening words, spoken by the central character at what we come to realise is the end of her life, highlight the novel’s key themes and imagery: the play of names and identities, sometimes given and sometimes taken, but always something to be worn or cast off; the call of the sea and its persistent presence of sparkle and depth throughout this chronicle of an unusual life; and the blue-black image of the crow itself, the speaker’s constant familiar, an intimate figure who lurks, ominous and comforting, in the sway of rigging. Unfolding her story in the shadow of imminent death, the reflective, determined voice of de Tores’s narrator is as deep and unpredictable as the ocean itself, thereby setting the stage for a story of introspection and observation, resilience and desire, swashbuckling action, and quotidian seaboard life.

In scene-setting a discussion of Lia Hills’s The Desert Knows Her Name, it is difficult to avoid going straight to the matter of genre. What we have is postcolonial, outback-noir eco-fiction. This genre mash-up isn’t new and is arguably a defining fictional mode of post-settlement Australia’s third century. As a form, it provides a meeting place where authors, both Indigenous (Melissa Lucashenko, Julie Janson) and non-Indigenous (Alex Miller, Tim Winton, and Gail Jones), meet to worry through complexly entangled fears around colonialism’s dark legacy, personal trauma, social dysfunction, and environmental degradation. And it isn’t territory new to Hills, as readers familiar with her previous (second) novel, The Crying Place (2017), will be aware.

In early 1971, two Newcastle teenagers are overcome with sapphic appetites. Each is inflamed with lust for her childhood best friend, the literal girl next door. What to do about this forbidden desire? The first – Limb One – acts on her hunger. She enjoys a golden summer of covert fucking, before being discovered by her parents in flagrante delicto. After being beaten and kicked out of home, she hitches a ride to Sydney. True to herself, she is homeless and alone at sixteen. The second – Limb Two – follows the more well-worn path of repression. She buries her desires, acquires a boyfriend, studies hard. The good girl, beloved by her parents. One conundrum, two choices. How will the dice fall?

Lately, my bus route home has been taking me past a motley protest. Come rain or shine, a handful of ragged individuals can be found marching up and down a traffic median strip near Flinders Medical Centre, wearing sandwich boards and hoisting neon placards with phrases like STOP VACCINE GENOCIDE or W.H.O. CHILD DEFILEMENT, etc. Contrails feature somewhere in the mix, too, but the bus always zips by before I can parse the finer details.

On the one hand, I sympathise with these people. The world is terrifying in its opacity. To live one day is to end up with countless more questions than answers. Linking these frayed threads of our understanding into a satisfying knot is as instinctually human as killing something with a stick and sitting by the fire to eat it. But on the other hand, have these people never heard of a freaking library card? Go borrow a stack of mystery novels and scratch your fathoming itch in a way that doesn’t do real damage in the real (and round) world. Try these three recent Australian mystery novels for a start.

In E.L. Doctorow’s The Waterworks (his 1994 novel of post-civil war America), the narrator McIlvaine addresses the reader: ‘We did not conduct ourselves as if we were preparatory to your time. There is nothing quaint or colourful about us.’ Doctorow reminds the reader that our sense of modernity is an illusion. As Delia Falconer has eloquently noted apropos Doctorow’s novel, the contemporary historical novelist has a valuable role to play:

I believe that the best historical novelists make the past new again by reigniting its past struggles and presenting it as a place of competing interests and voices whose story has not ended but continues in the present […] never assume that the past is quaint and safe, that its struggles are over and done with, that its facts are merely facts.

Stories That Want To Be Told is an oddly flat title for this stimulating anthology. Most of its contents are stories that need to be told. Even those that do not quite succeed in becoming more than their authors’ ‘passion projects’ are likely to leave readers better informed and more curious about little-known facets of today’s world.

This is testament to the technical success of an initiative by the Judith Neilson Institute, in partnership with Copyright Agency and Penguin Random House, to sponsor early or mid-career journalists to report in depth on topics of their choice while being mentored by veteran colleagues.

Nilaveli, on the north-east coast of Sri Lanka, is a long way from Sydney’s S.H. Ervin Gallery, but when in 2017 I visited the exhibition Margaret Olley: painter, peer, mentor, muse, which traced the links between Olley and her circle, the name of one of her fellow artists took me straight back to the white sands of Nilaveli Beach.

Juanita ‘Mitty’ Lee-Brown (1922-2012) and Margaret Olley were almost exactly contemporaries. They met when they were studying art at the East Sydney Technical College in 1944 and 1945. In 1949, they shared a cabin on a ship to England. Over the decades their paths continued to cross, but the end of their days found them far apart. Olley had become a Sydney fixture, the doyenne of Australian art, whereas Lee-Brown was a recluse, living at Nilaveli, as she had done throughout Sri Lanka’s civil war, which began in 1983 and ran for twenty-six bloody years.

Spring (1964) by Mitty Lee Brown (© Art Gallery of New South Wales)

In years gone by Australians tended to look askance at their fellow countrymen and women who chose to live abroad; there was a sense of ‘aren’t we good enough for you?’ Against this background, art critic John McDonald judged Lee-Brown’s decision to live abroad a bad career move. Speaking of her work in the Ervin exhibition, McDonald commented in his Sydney Morning Herald review that Lee-Brown ‘could have been a force in Australian art had she not left the country so early in her career’. Perhaps.

Lee-Brown is now remembered, if at all, as a minor figure in the ‘Merioola’ group, the 1940s artistic circle associated with the Woollahra boarding house of that name. But even though Sydney was Lee-Brown’s home town, she didn’t spend much time there. In 1945 and 1946, on leaving art school, she lived with her first husband, the journalist Peter Russo, in Melbourne and Hong Kong. In 1947 and 1948, and again from 1949 until 1962, she was in Europe, including Italy, the home of her second husband, the poet and filmmaker Nelo Risi. She then moved back to Sydney, where in 1964 she and Donald Friend, who had also lived at Merioola, mounted a joint exhibition at Sydney’s Terry Clune Galleries. So at this point she did have a footing in the Australian art world. But when her third marriage, to a Monaro grazier, ended in 1968, she went into a self-imposed exile that lasted forty-four years. Why did she remove herself from the milieu that proved so fertile for her peer Margaret Olley?

Strike one
and it will flare

as Bryant & May,
an unlikely pair of thugs,

Unfamiliar readers may assume that the Australian Dictionary of Biography (ADB) is a dusty, dense, traditional encyclopedia, its pages filled with dull entries on those whom posterity has deemed worthy of remembrance. Consisting of twenty heavy tomes (plus addenda), nine million words, and almost 14,000 scholarly biographies, it may seem like an unreadable piece of work that is of little relevance.

This could not be further from the truth. As the pre-eminent dictionary of Australian national biography, it is a vital historical resource for communities around Australia and abroad, with more than 1.2 million users annually. More than just a book, it is an increasingly vibrant and versatile digital research tool that is opening new avenues of enquiry into the nation’s past and, in so doing, prompting us to think hard about our present moment.

In her fifth full-length poetry collection, Tossed up by the Beak of a Cormorant, Nandi Chinna continues to write about her engagement with the natural world. Authored in collaboration with Wagaba Nyikina Warrwa Elder, Anne Poelina, this book sees her move north and west into the Kimberley. This is where the Martuwarra (Fitzroy River) runs through Bunuba, Gooniyandi, Nyikina, Walmajarri, and Wangkatjungka Country. It is a place that poetry readers will recognise from the geographically proximate classic Reading the Country (1984) by Paddy Roe, Stephen Muecke, and Krim Bentarrak, Ngarla Songs (2003) by Alexander Brown and Brian Geytenbeek, and the ethnopoetic George Dyungayan’s Bulu Line (2014), edited by Stuart Cooke. With that in mind, Chinna’s Kimberley is a place that is remote for many readers, but not entirely unknown.

Damen O'Brien (credit Isaac O'Brien)Damen O’Brien is a multi-award-winning poet based in Brisbane. His prizes include the Peter Porter Poetry Prize, The Moth Poetry Prize, the Newcastle Poetry Prize, and the Val Vallis Award. His poems have been published in seven countries, nominated for a Pushcart, and highly commended in the Forward Prizes for Poetry. Damen’s first book of poetry is Animals With Human Voices (Recent Work Press, 2021). His new book of poetry is Walking the Boundary, available from Pitt Street Poetry.

Which poets have influenced you most?

All of the Australian and world pantheon of poets, but in particular: Kenneth Slessor, Gerard Manley Hopkins, T.S. Eliot, Les Murray, and W.B. Yeats.

Are poems chiefly inspired or crafted?

Inspired. But you can’t wait for inspiration – you’ve got to listen to the whisper of the white page and write down what it tells you.

What prompts a new poem?

Reading good poetry – reading anything good, really. Listening to the radio on the drive home from work. I have lost track of the poems that came from me thinking, ‘Oh, I didn’t know that. That can go in a poem!’

What circumstances are ideal for writing poetry?

A good night’s sleep. A nice cup of coffee. A buzzing café. Some inspiring music playing in my earbuds. I have Florence and the Machine on high rotation at the moment.

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

One or two. ‘First thought, best thought’, supposedly. In all seriousness, one draft is not enough, but I have never been very interested in editing – it takes away precious time from writing. Like the stopped clock, I rely on being right every now and then. I have promised myself that I will try and edit my poems after each rejection. I am doing a lot of editing lately!

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

When I was young, I sent Bruce Dawe long letters full of self-absorbed and naïve comments about poetry and he sent me gracious responses. As an adult, I nearly got to meet him, but he was ill then and died before I had that honour. I would have liked to speak with him as poet to poet.

Do you have a favourite Australian poetry collection?

There are many I treasure, but I return most to the Black Inc. series The Best Australian Poems. It’s no longer in production, unfortunately. I once picked up the full selection from a Lifeline sale. What was the previous owner thinking! So many hidden gems.

What do poets need most: solitude or a coterie?

Solitude, to write the poem – and a coterie, to boast to them why they should be published. And be believed.

Who are the poetry critics you most admire?

Those who are prepared to talk about what they don’t like, not just what they like. Critics who are prepared to risk the wrath of their peers by assaying honest appraisals. There are some critics in Australia who are that brave, but the industry is small.

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

Sharon Olds’s Stag’s Leap. Wow! It’s the best present of a book of poetry I ever received. No wonder it won her a Pulitzer.

What is your favourite line of poetry (or couplet)?

Let’s go with something ecstatic from Coleridge’s ‘Kubla Khan’. This poem is threaded in the wiring of my brain: ‘And all should cry, Beware! Beware! / His flashing eyes, his floating hair!’

How can we inspire greater regard for poetry among readers?

I don’t have the prescription, but perhaps we are asking the wrong question. I don’t read books on architecture, yet that genre has its community. I am sure no one is hand-wringing about the lack of regard for books on architecture. Poetry will find its audience, sometimes in strange ways. ABR does it right, providing a place for poetry among other genres – without apology, without a need to justify its inclusion.

Francesca de Tores (credit Andrew North)Francesca de Tores is a novelist, poet, and academic. Saltblood is her first historical novel. Writing as Francesca Haig, she is the author of four previous novels, published in more than twenty languages. In addition to a collection of poems, her poetry is widely published in journals and anthologies. She grew up in lutruwita/Tasmania and, after fifteen years in England, is now living in Naarm/Melbourne.

If you could go anywhere tomorrow, where would it be, and why?

Ithaka, the most perfect Greek island, to float in the turquoise water. At least Ithaka has literary links, so I could pretend that I was going there as a Homeric pilgrimage and not to drink wine in the sun.

In Poetry’s Knowing Ignorance, Joseph Acquisto borrows a definition of poetry from Phillipe Jaccottet: ‘that key that you must always keep on losing’. Attempting to know its subject, poetry reveals that there is always more to know. But the French poet’s metaphor, for Acquisto, does not mean ‘simple contingency’. It suggests ‘a complex play of certainty and doubt … that actively resists coming to a conclusion’. We might say that poetry expresses the friction in human experience between time and permanence.

Judith Bishop opens Circadia, her fourth full-length collection, with a preface: ‘this fold / holding off / world from world / will dissolve / love portends / and pretends’ (‘Skin’). That Bishop, who has translated Jaccottet’s poetry, keeps ‘Skin’ separate makes us search for a thesis. In its rhyme and visual/syllabic symmetry, the poem says: no union of self and other can happen. Rather, it declares that the union will happen, then recants. Yet love ‘pretends’, supports a claim it knows is false. We can also read ‘this fold’ as what Arundhati Roy calls ‘the skin on my thought’: language. Since Event (2007), Bishop has been engaged in one of poetry’s more nuanced, elegant, and unearthly studies of human intimacy. Circadia locates these relations in a larger study: of ‘the vital connection’, the poet, linguist, and AI researcher writes in an essay, ‘between language and the real’. 

And as five zones th’ aetherial regions bind,
Five, correspondent, are to Earth assign’d:
The sun with rays, directly darting down,
Fires all beneath, and fries the middle zone:
The two beneath the distant poles, complain
Of endless winter, and perpetual rain.    
Betwixt th’ extreams, two happier climates hold
The temper that partakes of hot, and cold.

Ovid via John Dryden*

‘Australia has been a great experience,’ declares Seamus Heaney in a letter to Tom Paulin from Launceston, Tasmania, in October 1994. As well as visiting Melbourne, Brisbane, and Sydney, delivering poetry readings along the way, Heaney gave a lecture in Hobart on Oscar Wilde and The Ballad of Reading Gaol, ‘saying it was as much part of the protest literature of the Irish diaspora as “The Wild Colonial Boy” or the ballad of “Van Diemen’s Land”’. What he most enjoyed in Queensland was a drive through the country – ‘red earth and white-barked gum trees’ – to the town of Nambour, close to where his Uncle Charlie (his father’s twin brother) had lived in the 1920s. Heaney’s letters are a vivid interweaving of travelogue, literary allusion, poetic imagery, and personal history. Sharing pleasure in the power of words is fundamental, even when letter writing becomes a thing of duty, rather than beauty, and the unanswered mail piles up around him.

One of the peculiar formal characteristics of letters, especially the letters of poets, is that they have a capacity to be intimately confiding and, at the same time, hopeful of a future readership. In Heaney’s case, the keynote is not so much posterity as belatedness. Dozens of letters open with a familiar apology – ‘Forgive me for not writing earlier’ – and he repeatedly derides himself as ‘a man of letters’ who doesn’t deserve the title, not having written any in a long time. He routinely undoes his claims to poetic immortality, at one point depicting himself (not without poetic flair) as ‘a frazzled, frizzled item, a worn-out Triton, a punctured Michelin man, a posthumous Paddy, a waft of aftermath’.

Can people have too much wealth? Does extreme wealth have negative consequences? Over the past thirty years, there has been a remarkable rise in the number of billionaires whose annual earnings are so large that they are often difficult to comprehend. To take but one example, it was estimated in 2022 by Forbes magazine that Elon Musk’s personal assets were worth $219 billion and that, if he worked for forty-five years, his lifetime hourly rate from these assets was in the order of US$1,871,794.

Further, many of those in the ranks of the super-rich regularly engage in spectacular forms of conspicuous consumption that appear frivolous and wasteful – think of Jeff Bezos’s 2021 flight into space – especially when one considers the extreme forms of poverty and unmet need that exist across the globe. It is unsurprising, when confronted by these forms of extravagance, that many find such extreme forms of wealth to be morally repugnant.

Jews are central to narratives of the history of modern France. One narrative thread concerns a story of civic emancipation from the time when Jews were first granted equal rights during the French Revolution until the present, when Prime Minister Gabriel Attal is not only France’s youngest postwar prime minister but also, like his predecessor Élisabeth Borne, of Jewish ancestry. The other narrative thread is of continuing anti-Semitism, most obvious in the Vichy government’s active participation in the deportation of Jews during World War II and still evident in the hundreds of anti-Semitic incidents reported in France every year. The Dreyfus Affair is pivotal to both narratives.

The young Alfred Dreyfus, born in 1859, had watched in dismay as German troops occupied his eastern town of Mulhouse in 1870. Like many other Jews from Alsace, he fled to Paris, where he progressed successfully through élite officer training schools. By the 1890s he was a handsome and wealthy officer with a brilliant career and a happy marriage.

This important and arresting book chronicles the way in which Australia, from 1947 to 1952, imported some 170,000 displaced persons from Europe, a reasonable number of whom were fascists. The striking thing that Jayne Persian (a historian at the University of Southern Queensland) lays bare is the insouciance with which this policy was adopted and the way in which all political parties fell over themselves with enthusiasm for it, though all the main actors were well aware of the influence of fascism among this cohort.

Persian notes that at the end of the war in Europe there were about twelve million ‘displaced persons’ (DPs). Many were displaced because they had fled westwards ahead of the advancing Russian armies, and a considerable number of these persons did so because they had fought with or for the armies of Nazi Germany. At the same time, Australia was adopting a ‘populate or perish’ immigration policy, and the DPs were an immediate and cheap source of immigrants.

In 1888, Melbourne hosted a grand Centennial International Exhibition to mark a century of British occupation of the continent. There, a six-year-old girl called Ethel Punshon was excited to see that she had won a prize of two guineas for her needle-work – an embroidered red felt newspaper holder. Almost one hundred years later, as Brisbane prepared to mark the bicentennial with a modern ‘Expo 88’, Ethel – now known as Monte Punshon – was invited to become Expo’s roving ambassador, as perhaps the only person alive who remembered its predecessor.

‘I am an advocate of transgender people because we’re people [who] deserve to have a voice ... and by and large we don’t have a voice. By and large, our experience is squeezed out – by trans-exclusionary ideology.’ On the face of it, this justification by Sophie Grace Chappell for her new book, Trans Figured, is rather puzzling. In recent years, publishers have been falling over themselves to publish transgender memoir, with Chappell’s own publisher, Polity, mining this genre with books supporting both sides of the gender ‘debate’. Far from being squeezed out, transgender voices have become profitable commodities in the literary world.

‘What then? sang Plato’s ghost.’ Editors Lauren Arrington and Matthew Campbell begin their Preface to the massive Oxford Handbook of W.B. Yeats with the poet’s own injunction to old age. And what a life it was: seventy-three years lived over two world wars; a mammoth literary oeuvre criss-crossing Victorian melancholy, Romantic sublimity, and Modernist apocalypse. At different times and sometimes simultaneously, Yeats was a bohemian raconteur in the Cheshire Cheese pub, a radical nationalist leader of the Irish Revival, a cosmopolitan disciple of the occult, and a waspish senator enraged by the philistinism of the Irish Free State.

In 1939, T.S. Eliot famously declared that Yeats was ‘one of those few whose history is the history of their own time, who are a part of the consciousness of an age which cannot be understood without them'. Academics were quick to oblige. Since the pioneering monograph by Belfast poet Louis MacNeice in 1941, followed by volumes from towering mid-twentieth century American critics like Richard Ellman and Hugh Kenner, the academic sub-industry devoted to extending Yeats’s legacy has been busy. This new reference collection, published by Oxford University Press in the Yeats Nobel centenary year and featuring forty-two erudite essays by scholars from across the globe (none of them Australian), comes in at more than seven hundred pages. It is a weighty reminder that the relationship between Yeats and academic literary studies may be inexhaustibly generative.

Lurking in the background of any academic reference collection which claims to bring together new perspectives and establish new dialogues, however, are the ghosts of intellectual history. This is especially so in the case of a major (and majorly studied) poet like Yeats. Two episodes of this history seem particularly relevant to understanding the merits and perhaps some of the limitations of this new volume.