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Absolutely Revolting

August 2024, no. 467

The August issue of ABR includes the 2024 ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize shortlist – three stories chosen from more than 1,300 entries worldwide. We celebrate James Baldwin’s centenary with an essay on his matchless legacy and Juno Gemes’s cover photograph, taken on a London rooftop in 1976. Robyn Arianrhod surveys the parlous state of Australian science writing and Peter Goldsworthy recounts his first encounter with film director Stanley Kubrick. Our non-fiction reviews include Marilyn Lake on Nuked, Zora Simic on Personal Politics, Nick Hordern on The Trial of Vladimir Putin, and Zoë Laidlaw on The Truth About Empire. We review novels by Jordan Prosser, Rachel Cusk, and Evie Wyld and poetry by Judith Beveridge. ABR’s arts reviews – on King Lear, Paul Gauguin, and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf ? – are not to be missed.

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The Jolley Prize

This year’s ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize attracted 1,310 entries. Of these, 413 came from overseas, attesting to the high regard in which the Jolley Prize – one of the world’s most lucrative prizes for an unpublished story in English –is held internationally.

Our three judges – Patrick Flanery (Adelaide), Melinda Harvey (Melbourne), and Susan Midalia (Perth) – longlisted thirteen stories from twelve different writers (John Kinsella doubled up). These are all listed on our website, and we congratulate the longlisted authors.
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The Jolley Prize

This year’s ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize attracted 1,310 entries. Of these, 413 came from overseas, attesting to the high regard in which the Jolley Prize – one of the world’s most lucrative prizes for an unpublished story in English –is held internationally.

Our three judges – Patrick Flanery (Adelaide), Melinda Harvey (Melbourne), and Susan Midalia (Perth) – longlisted thirteen stories from twelve different writers (John Kinsella doubled up). These are all listed on our website, and we congratulate the longlisted authors.

The judges have now shortlisted three stories, and it’s our great pleasure to publish them in this issue:

‘First Snow’ by Kerry Greer (WA)
‘M.’ by Shelley Stenhouse (USA)
‘Pornwald’ by Jill Van Epps (USA)

In their report, the judges had this to say about the wider field:

We were pleased to encounter a range of forms and genres, from literary realism to satire, speculative and historical fiction, dystopia, autofiction, and more experimental work. The stories explored themes of love, sex, and the pain of being alive, while many took an overtly political stance, addressing anxieties about climate change, social justice, and the rise of Artificial Intelligence.

The judges gravitated towards stories marked by an inventiveness of form and a distinctiveness of voice, stories that had something surprising to tell us and found imaginative ways of expressing ideas. The shortlisted stories negotiate the challenges of the form by skilfully combining brevity and depth, economy and resonance, offering refreshing perspectives on the world.

The judges’ full report, which can be found online, contains remarks on the three shortlisted stories.

The Jolley Prize is worth a total of $12,500, and here, as ever, we thank Ian Dickson AM, who has generously supported this prize since its creation in 2011.

Now to find out who has won the overall prize and thus receives the first prize of $6,000. We don’t have long to wait. Join us at Gleebooks in Sydney on Thursday, 15 August (6 pm), when we will introduce the winner.

It’s been a while since we hosted a big event in Sydney, so this will also be an opportunity to thank our countless writers and supporters in New South Wales.

It’s essential to RSVP via Gleebooks’s event page on their website.

On the roof with James Baldwin

‘Inimitable’ is a trite word – a hairdresser’s word, as Pasternak said of ‘genius’ – but it seems uniquely applicable to James Baldwin – novelist, essayist, activist, incendiary polemicist – who died far too young, in 1987. The centenary of Baldwin’s birth falls on 2 August. To commemorate it, and to explore his matchless and fluctuating influence, Paul Kane writes about Baldwin’s life and work in this month’s cover feature.

This enables us to reproduce Juno Gemes’s portrait of Baldwin, which was taken (at Baldwin’s suggestion) on the roof of the Athenaeum Hotel, London in 1976. Juno, in 2020, wrote about that hour-long photographic session for the Rochford Street Review (still available online). ‘With respect and warmth, I said to [Baldwin] cheekily, “You are the prince of all your survey.” He looked out across the roof parapet. He smiled wryly … In that moment I had my portrait.’

In December, Upswell will publish Juno Gemes’s magnum opus: Until Justice Comes: Fifty years of the movement for Indigenous rights: Photographs 1970-2024.

On the verge

Advances always looks forward to the new iteration of Verge, the annual creative writing anthology from Monash University Publishing. This year’s edition is crisply titled Click. The editors – J. Taylor Bell, Julia Faragher, Isabella G. Mead, and Anna Pane – have included twenty-six writers from Monash University and beyond. Among them are Kayla Willson, Dominic Symes, and ABR’s very own Will Hunt, who has a work of autofiction – his first creative publication. Congratulations to all.

David Marr and LNL

After Phillip Adams’s epic reign at Late Night Live, everyone was looking forward to David Marr’s commencement in mid-July as the new host of this essential late-night radio program. Early on, he spoke at length to military historian Joan Beaumont – a fascinating elaboration of the ideas advanced in her article on Ambon and postmemory in our July issue.

Look out – or listen up – for Paul Kane’s appearance on the program, apropos of James Baldwin. Paul also features on the ABR Podcast this month.

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Tim McMinn reviews ‘The Anxious Generation: How the great rewiring of childhood is causing an epidemic of mental illness’ by Jonathan Haidt
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Finally, after a fortnight of soggy Sydney days a crystalline morning dawned. Our extension roof and back gutter were full of humus from the overhanging branches of our neighbour’s Lilly Pilly. No more putting it off, I decided. Time to get out there before the rain returned. For the first time, my seven-year-old joined me on the job. He enthusiastically cleaned the skylight, chucked decaying leaves and flowers onto the deck below, and held branches while I sawed and pruned. When our cheap secateurs broke, he walked the 500 metres alone to the hardware store and back to buy new ones – twice, because he didn’t have enough cash the first time. As he returned with the new tool clutched in one hand and a bag of lollies in the other, his face glowed with quiet triumph. It was, he said to my wife the next morning on the way to school, the highlight of his weekend.
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Finally, after a fortnight of soggy Sydney days a crystalline morning dawned. Our extension roof and back gutter were full of humus from the overhanging branches of our neighbour’s Lilly Pilly. No more putting it off, I decided. Time to get out there before the rain returned. For the first time, my seven-year-old joined me on the job. He enthusiastically cleaned the skylight, chucked decaying leaves and flowers onto the deck below, and held branches while I sawed and pruned. When our cheap secateurs broke, he walked the 500 metres alone to the hardware store and back to buy new ones – twice, because he didn’t have enough cash the first time. As he returned with the new tool clutched in one hand and a bag of lollies in the other, his face glowed with quiet triumph. It was, he said to my wife the next morning on the way to school, the highlight of his weekend.

I have Jonathan Haidt’s new book, The Anxious Generation, to thank for this Rubicon moment in our family life. Which is, I suppose, a touch ironic, because Haidt’s hopeful message is that when it comes to the hold that digital technologies, and especially social media, have over our lives and the lives of our children, the die is not yet cast.

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‘James Baldwin this time: The centenary of an indispensable prophet’ by Paul Kane
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In 1903 W.E.B. Du Bois famously declared: ‘The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color-line.’ He meant not only in the United States but also elsewhere in the world. As for this century, in America, at least, we can now say it remains the dominant problem. The very fact, for instance, of a movement named ‘Black Lives Matter’ – now a decade old – speaks to something unspeakable: an obvious and overt racism that is driving America to a reckoning.
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In 1903 W.E.B. Du Bois famously declared: ‘The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color-line.’ He meant not only in the United States but also elsewhere in the world. As for this century, in America, at least, we can now say it remains the dominant problem. The very fact, for instance, of a movement named ‘Black Lives Matter’ – now a decade old – speaks to something unspeakable: an obvious and overt racism that is driving America to a reckoning.

This abysmal situation would not surprise James Baldwin, whose centenary is being celebrated – or at least marked – this year (he was born on 2 August 1924). Beginning with his 1953 novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain, and up to the end of his life, the colour line was his subject, the object against which he aimed his polemics. In The Fire Next Time (1963), Baldwin warns, ‘A bill is coming in that I fear America is not prepared to pay.’ He cites Du Bois’s remark and then calls it ‘[a] fearful and delicate problem, which compromises, when it does not corrupt, all the American efforts to build a better world – here, there, or anywhere’. The root of the problem, as he analyses it in ‘Stranger in the Village’, ‘is the necessity of the American white man to find a way of living with the Negro in order to be able to live with himself’. In other words, it’s not a black problem, but a white one – a dialectical inversion typical of Baldwin. He goes on:

And the history of this problem can be reduced to the means used by Americans – lynch law and law, segregation and legal acceptance, terrorization and concession – either to come to terms with this necessity, or to find a way around it, or (most usually) to find a way of doing both these things at once.

This leads to a sentence that clinches the argument with a clutch upon our attention: ‘The resulting spectacle, at once foolish and dreadful, led someone to make the quite accurate observation that “the Negro-in-America is a form of insanity which overtakes white men”.’

Baldwin is at his best in diagnosing this illness, in laying bare the ignorance, hypocrisy, and sheer inanity of American culture and politics as it relates to American blacks. In this, Baldwin speaks from his own experience and gives rein to his anger and anguish in a way that implicates the reader, whether white or black. Baldwin makes us uncomfortable. He sees it as his job. Eddie Glaude admits in his book Begin Again: James Baldwin’s America and its urgent lessons for our own (2020) that Baldwin was someone he evaded for a long time: ‘Baldwin’s essays forced you to turn inward and confront whatever pain was there, and I did not want to do that. I damn sure didn’t know what to do with my pain philosophically. Moreover, and this mattered most, I could not read him with my white colleagues without having to manage whatever he made them feel.’ In the end, Glaude had to come to terms with Baldwin and, therefore, with himself. It’s not just the content but the urgency and intimacy of Baldwin’s style that tears at the reader’s defences so that one either embraces Baldwin or pushes him away, or tries to do both simultaneously. The very coolness of his rage can be discomfiting:

It is a fact that every American Negro bears a name that originally belonged to the white man whose chattel he was. I am called Baldwin because I was either sold by my African tribe or kidnapped out of it into the hands of a white Christian named Baldwin, who forced me to kneel at the foot of the cross. I am, then, both visibly and legally the descendant of slaves in a white, Protestant country, and this is what it means to be an American Negro, this is who he is – a kidnapped pagan, who was sold like an animal and treated like one. (The Fire Next Time)

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Marilyn Lake reviews ‘Nuked: The submarine fiasco that sank Australia’s sovereignty’ by Andrew Fowler
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Nuked – a compelling but depressing read – is a deeply researched and strangely suspenseful account of the AUKUS agreement struck between Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, and United States President Jo Biden and announced in September 2021; a deal that included supplying Australia with a fleet of nuclear-powered submarines at the staggering cost of $368 billion. Nuked should be compulsory reading for all Australian citizens.
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Nuked – a compelling but depressing read – is a deeply researched and strangely suspenseful account of the AUKUS agreement struck between Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, and United States President Jo Biden and announced in September 2021; a deal that included supplying Australia with a fleet of nuclear-powered submarines at the staggering cost of $368 billion. Nuked should be compulsory reading for all Australian citizens.

A tale of ambition, betrayal, duplicity, and deceit, Andrew Fowler’s account unfolds as a tragedy replete with treacherous villains and guileless heroes brought undone. The cast includes political cowards and corporate go-getters. Christopher Pyne was ‘not alone in seeing the possibilities of making money from the heightened concerns of a resurgent China’. As an example of national policy making, AUKUS, Fowler suggests, moves between ‘fiasco’ and ‘debacle’. His account concludes in despair, but there is still a hopeful question mark: ‘No way out?’

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Zora Simic reviews ‘Personal Politics: Sexuality, gender and the remaking of citizenship in Australia’ by Leigh Boucher et al.
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The slogan the ‘personal is political’ is now so well-worn that it has congealed into cliché, though the notion itself can still produce a backlash if we take regular diatribes against ‘identity politics’ as a measure. In such rants, it is as though only some of us possess an identity that we mobilise around politically, whether under the LGBTQI+ umbrella, as First Nations peoples, as part of ethnic communities, or as ‘women’, the world’s largest special interest group. Given that critics of ‘identity politics’ tend to be socially conservative, the targets of their reductive invectives are presumed to lean to the left politically.
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The slogan the ‘personal is political’ is now so well-worn that it has congealed into cliché, though the notion itself can still produce a backlash if we take regular diatribes against ‘identity politics’ as a measure. In such rants, it is as though only some of us possess an identity that we mobilise around politically, whether under the LGBTQI+ umbrella, as First Nations peoples, as part of ethnic communities, or as ‘women’, the world’s largest special interest group. Given that critics of ‘identity politics’ tend to be socially conservative, the targets of their reductive invectives are presumed to lean to the left politically.

What then of fathers’ groups who continue to target the family law system, or women’s groups such as Women’s Action Alliance, which mobilised as stay-at-home mothers to oppose no-fault divorce after its introduction in 1975 – or, more recently, the Australian Men’s Shed Association, commonly assumed to be ‘non-political’, and which has been successful in attracting mainstream support and government funding for its men-only spaces? All of these political actors have made claims on the state at least partly on the basis of gender and sexuality, but to date have mostly been analysed in opposition to other social movements, especially feminism.

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Danielle Clode reviews ‘Everything Is Water’ by Simon Cleary
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There are few places more restful than a riverbank on a fine day, few sights more enticing than a disappearing river bend, few places more intriguing to follow than the tumbled rocks of a creek line. Following the water, to its source or destination, seems hard-wired into our psyche.
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There are few places more restful than a riverbank on a fine day, few sights more enticing than a disappearing river bend, few places more intriguing to follow than the tumbled rocks of a creek line. Following the water, to its source or destination, seems hard-wired into our psyche.

Simon Cleary’s latest book, Everything Is Water, takes this fascination to an extreme. Rivers are easy to take for granted, particularly in cities, where they often become integrated into the urban infrastructure. But they have a way of demanding attention, even from the most inattentive city-dweller, when they rise over their arbitrary banks, flowing across field, forest and mangrove, through streets, basements, and houses. When the Brisbane River flooded in 2011, it forced many people to reconsider their relationship with the waterway their city was built upon. Such floods make Cleary, who could never be described as inattentive, reflect on his lifelong relationship with the river, from his childhood mucking about in the headwaters, to his adult life living and working towards the mouth.

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Stephen Bennetts reviews ‘Dreaming Ecology: Nomadics and Indigenous ecological knowledge, Victoria River, Northern Australia’ by Deborah Bird Rose
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Dreaming Ecology is the posthumous third volume in a trilogy that also comprises Deborah Bird Rose’s earlier anthropological study Dingo Makes Us Human (1992) and Hidden Histories (1991), an account of the recent his-tory of Aboriginal people in the Victoria River District (VRD) region in the north-western corner of the Northern Territory. As an anthropological neophyte, I came across her briefly in 1994 during the Palm Valley Land Claim in Central Australia, in her role as anthropologist assisting the Northern Territory Aboriginal Land Commissioner. Although by the time of her death in 2018 she had worked on nearly twenty Aboriginal land claims, her own anthropological research diverged from Australian anthropology’s preoccupation for nearly fifty years with Indigenous land tenure systems dictated by the land claim and native title claim process.
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Dreaming Ecology is the posthumous third volume in a trilogy that also comprises Deborah Bird Rose’s earlier anthropological study Dingo Makes Us Human (1992) and Hidden Histories (1991), an account of the recent his-tory of Aboriginal people in the Victoria River District (VRD) region in the north-western corner of the Northern Territory. As an anthropological neophyte, I came across her briefly in 1994 during the Palm Valley Land Claim in Central Australia, in her role as anthropologist assisting the Northern Territory Aboriginal Land Commissioner. Although by the time of her death in 2018 she had worked on nearly twenty Aboriginal land claims, her own anthropological research diverged from Australian anthropology’s preoccupation for nearly fifty years with Indigenous land tenure systems dictated by the land claim and native title claim process.

Dreaming Ecology follows another trend, initiated by W.E.H. Stanner, exploring traditional Aboriginal people’s intimate economic, cultural, and spiritual connections (and even kinship relationships) with the natural world and its plant and animal species. Her important insights into Indigenous life worlds are based on a lifetime of engagement with senior Aboriginal authorities from the VRD district, especially the Yarralin community. Many of her Aboriginal ‘teachers’ (she eschews the anthropological convention that objectifies them as ‘informants’) walked the surrounding country from the early years of the twentieth century, sustaining themselves through a detailed knowledge of local plant species and animal behaviour. As Rose’s collaborator Daly Pulkara remarks in a characteristically pithy Aboriginal Kriol exposition of Dreaming Ecology’s key ideas: ‘And some kartiya [whitefella] might [be] walking there [and] he reckon “no tucker”. And he’s walking on top of the tucker now!’

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Alison Broinowski reviews ‘The Light of Asia: A history of Western fascination with the East’ by Christopher Harding
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The world isn’t quite what it seems. We often imagine the modern world as if it were a halved orange, East clearly separated from West. For centuries, the West has claimed superiority over the Rest, despite knowing little about them, as Edward Said copiously showed in Orientalism (1978). An equally influential proposition in The Clash of Civilisations (1996) was Samuel Huntington’s. He saw the world of Islam as having ‘bloody borders’ and being pitted in conflict with the West over cultural differences. In 1984 (1949), George Orwell imagined two fictional hemispheres in conflict, Eurasia and Eastasia, leaving unresolved the problem of what to do about Oceania.
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The world isn’t quite what it seems. We often imagine the modern world as if it were a halved orange, East clearly separated from West. For centuries, the West has claimed superiority over the Rest, despite knowing little about them, as Edward Said copiously showed in Orientalism (1978). An equally influential proposition in The Clash of Civilisations (1996) was Samuel Huntington’s. He saw the world of Islam as having ‘bloody borders’ and being pitted in conflict with the West over cultural differences. In 1984 (1949), George Orwell imagined two fictional hemispheres in conflict, Eurasia and Eastasia, leaving unresolved the problem of what to do about Oceania.

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Nick Hordern reviews ‘The Trial of Vladimir Putin’ by Geoffrey Robertson
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Vladimir Putin must be tried in an international court for ordering the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine. He must be tried, not just indicted, and to do this a new international court explicitly intended to deal with leaders responsible for such territorial aggression must be created. Since the Russian president won’t appear before any international court, he will need to be tried in absentia. Nevertheless, such a trial is essential not only to uphold international law, but to deter other international leaders who are contemplating aggression.
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Vladimir Putin must be tried in an international court for ordering the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine. He must be tried, not just indicted, and to do this a new international court explicitly intended to deal with leaders responsible for such territorial aggression must be created. Since the Russian president won’t appear before any international court, he will need to be tried in absentia. Nevertheless, such a trial is essential not only to uphold international law, but to deter other international leaders who are contemplating aggression.

This is Geoffrey Robertson’s argument in his new book, The Trial of Vladimir Putin. The book has several strands: a discussion of how the veto power of the five permanent members (P5) of the UN Security Council (UNSC) has circumscribed the expansion of an international jurisdiction; a history of how, despite this, such a jurisdiction has haltingly evolved; and a description of the type of new court that Robertson says is needed to try Putin. He goes on to describe a hypothetical trial of the Russian dictator in such a court, and outlines the sort of arguments both the prosecution and the defence would mount.

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‘Beyond the mundane: Popular science writing in our literary landscape’ by Robyn Arianrhod
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After Netflix’s intriguing sci-fi thriller 3 Body Problem streamed into Australia earlier this year, readers rushed out in droves to buy the book on which the series is based: Liu Cixin’s The Three-Body Problem (2008), which was first translated into English in 2014. Most reviews have focused on the philosophical, literary, and cultural aspects of the book – and they are, indeed, fascinating. But the thing that interests me here is the accurate scientific detail that Liu uses to drive the story. Of course, this is sci-fi, so ultimately he presses real concepts into unreal (but imaginative) service. Still, much more physics and maths appear in his book than in the Netflix series, which, according to Tara Kenny’s review in The Monthly (April 2024), ‘offers a welcome workaround’ the science through visual effects. In the book, by contrast, ‘Lengthy passages are spent dutifully explaining physics theories and technological functionality, which is likely to deter readers who haven’t thought about science since they dissected a rat in high-school biology.’
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After Netflix’s intriguing sci-fi thriller 3 Body Problem streamed into Australia earlier this year, readers rushed out in droves to buy the book on which the series is based: Liu Cixin’s The Three-Body Problem (2008), which was first translated into English in 2014. Most reviews have focused on the philosophical, literary, and cultural aspects of the book – and they are, indeed, fascinating. But the thing that interests me here is the accurate scientific detail that Liu uses to drive the story. Of course, this is sci-fi, so ultimately he presses real concepts into unreal (but imaginative) service. Still, much more physics and maths appear in his book than in the Netflix series, which, according to Tara Kenny’s review in The Monthly (April 2024), ‘offers a welcome workaround’ the science through visual effects. In the book, by contrast, ‘Lengthy passages are spent dutifully explaining physics theories and technological functionality, which is likely to deter readers who haven’t thought about science since they dissected a rat in high-school biology.’

Kenny’s assumption about the likely response of Australian readers to complex scientific ideas is telling – and probably fairly accurate overall, judging by the relatively low number (around ten per cent) of Year Twelve students undertaking advanced mathematics and physics courses. Perhaps this is why in-depth popular science writing is rarely rated as ‘literature’ by our literary gatekeepers. For instance, it rarely makes the shortlists of our non-fiction literary awards, now that the special science categories that existed a decade or two ago have disappeared. When it does, the emphasis is on the social and political consequences of science, rather than on its ideas. Still, ‘hard science fiction’ (a science-oriented subgenre of sci-fi) attracts quite a readership here, as does popular science. In fact, many passages in The Three-Body Problem read like popular physics, including, naturally, an explanation of the eponymous problem, in which the paths of three or more gravitationally interacting bodies can become chaotic, unlike the predictable orbital ellipses of a two-body system such as Earth and Sun.

Read more: ‘Beyond the mundane: Popular science writing in our literary landscape’ by Robyn Arianrhod

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Contents Category: Poem
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A citizen of a difficult
memory, I travel at the full speed
of sleep. In my coat pocket: a fruit knife
to peel the sun, a wine
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A citizen of a difficult
memory, I travel at the full speed
of sleep. In my coat pocket: a fruit knife
to peel the sun, a wine
-dark passport that keeps me company
en route to anonymity.
When the war ended, mountains learned
to crouch in the distance
like snow-capped suspicions.
The night in my eyes longs to hold
and be brightened by such distance
and my sleep, when it wraps its lanky arms
around me, will be the sleep
of those wintry mountains: a pale
cold chrysalis, a crystalline coat
a child bride drapes around her shoulders
to vanish, without a trace, from her wedding.
Dear winter, I don’t care what country
your sadness comes from.
You have half of my blood
in your wine cup. Your streetlights
stammer in statics. Your appetite
is a white flower of steam
clarified by heat. And you, dear stranger
whose name winter has scrawled in frost
across my window, don’t vanish
without a trace. Don’t believe the departure
screen above the railway platform.
The overnight train heading east
will never reach dawn.
Don’t trust the news you read –
on the wind’s lips, in the dust dispersed
by the wind, its alternately slurred
and quicksilver speech – the news
of my disappearance. I’m not leaving
without the sun, not without
its entire orchard
of light in my pocket.

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Zoë Laidlaw reviews ‘The Truth About Empire: Real histories of British colonialism’ edited by Alan Lester
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Increasingly, public understanding of issues vital to humanity’s well-being and future – climate change, health policy, international relations – is informed by debate that pits specious prejudice, masquerading as opinion, against expertise. Communicating with a lay audience, experts on complex yet politically charged subjects confront twin challenges: they must present evidence that is multifaceted and can provide no perfect or certain solution, while simultaneously dismantling arguments, founded in denialism, that endorse simple strategies and offer comforting but false hope. Experts and those who wish to construct evidence-based policy are struggling to meet these challenges.
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Increasingly, public understanding of issues vital to humanity’s well-being and future – climate change, health policy, international relations – is informed by debate that pits specious prejudice, masquerading as opinion, against expertise. Communicating with a lay audience, experts on complex yet politically charged subjects confront twin challenges: they must present evidence that is multifaceted and can provide no perfect or certain solution, while simultaneously dismantling arguments, founded in denialism, that endorse simple strategies and offer comforting but false hope. Experts and those who wish to construct evidence-based policy are struggling to meet these challenges.

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Max Walden reviews ‘Revolusi: Indonesia and the birth of the modern world’ by David Van Reybrouck
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In 1906 and 1908, on the island of Bali, thousands of people dressed in ceremonial Hindu attire walked towards Dutch gunfire in acts of mass suicide known as puputan. These were not the first events of mass violence by the Dutch against the indigenous people of what we now call Indonesia – nor the last. In 1621, the native inhabitants of the Banda Islands were slaughtered en masse to secure Dutch access to nutmeg; it was the starting point for Amitav Ghosh’s brilliant non-fiction work The Nutmeg’s Curse (2021). The only Bandanese who survived were enslaved. During the so-called Dutch Golden Age of the 1600s, Batavia (now Jakarta) was home to 27,000 people – half of whom were enslaved. In 1740, the Dutch massacred almost all ethnic Chinese residents of Batavia, establishing what would become a dark history of anti-Chinese violence in the archipelago.
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In 1906 and 1908, on the island of Bali, thousands of people dressed in ceremonial Hindu attire walked towards Dutch gunfire in acts of mass suicide known as puputan. These were not the first events of mass violence by the Dutch against the indigenous people of what we now call Indonesia – nor the last. In 1621, the native inhabitants of the Banda Islands were slaughtered en masse to secure Dutch access to nutmeg; it was the starting point for Amitav Ghosh’s brilliant non-fiction work The Nutmeg’s Curse (2021). The only Bandanese who survived were enslaved. During the so-called Dutch Golden Age of the 1600s, Batavia (now Jakarta) was home to 27,000 people – half of whom were enslaved. In 1740, the Dutch massacred almost all ethnic Chinese residents of Batavia, establishing what would become a dark history of anti-Chinese violence in the archipelago.

Read more: Max Walden reviews ‘Revolusi: Indonesia and the birth of the modern world’ by David Van Reybrouck

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Ben Brooker review ‘Big Time’ by Jordan Prosser
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Given the global resurgence of interest in compounds such as psilocybin, LSD, and ayahuasca, it is a wonder more contemporary novelists have not turned to psychedelic experience for inspiration. It is, after all, hard to think of the golden age of psychedelics – roughly the mid-1960s to mid-1970s – without recalling the trippy, Zeitgeist-capturing literature it produced, including Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1971) and Tom Wolfe’s (highly fictionalised) Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (1968).
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Given the global resurgence of interest in compounds such as psilocybin, LSD, and ayahuasca, it is a wonder more contemporary novelists have not turned to psychedelic experience for inspiration. It is, after all, hard to think of the golden age of psychedelics – roughly the mid-1960s to mid-1970s – without recalling the trippy, Zeitgeist-capturing literature it produced, including Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1971) and Tom Wolfe’s (highly fictionalised) Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (1968).

Then there were those authors, chief among them Philip K. Dick, who refracted the psychedelic experience into fictions altogether stranger and more opaque. Perhaps it is the aseptic nature of the current psychedelic revival – grounded in clinical trials rather than acid tests, its figureheads more likely to sport lab coats than kaftans – that has so far obviated against a fresh wave of psychedelic literature.

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Kirsten Tranter reviews ‘Parade’ by Rachel Cusk
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Dominated by tropes of repetition, inversion, and doubling, Parade feels like a hall of mirrors that reflects and re-imagines pieces of reality while also refracting elements of Rachel Cusk’s own body of work. This is not recognisably a novel or a collection of short fiction, but a new iteration of the style initiated by Cusk’s lauded Outline trilogy (2014), a patchwork of vignettes unfolded by an enigmatic narrator. Cusk continues to push the boundaries of fiction, exploring oscillating paradoxes of connection and disconnection, passion and dispassion, attachment and hatred, creation and destruction. At the heart of all of these is the generative primal conflict of gender; together these form the bleak coordinates of the Cusk cosmos.
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Dominated by tropes of repetition, inversion, and doubling, Parade feels like a hall of mirrors that reflects and re-imagines pieces of reality while also refracting elements of Rachel Cusk’s own body of work. This is not recognisably a novel or a collection of short fiction, but a new iteration of the style initiated by Cusk’s lauded Outline trilogy (2014), a patchwork of vignettes unfolded by an enigmatic narrator. Cusk continues to push the boundaries of fiction, exploring oscillating paradoxes of connection and disconnection, passion and dispassion, attachment and hatred, creation and destruction. At the heart of all of these is the generative primal conflict of gender; together these form the bleak coordinates of the Cusk cosmos.

A painter in the first storyline (classic Cusk, a celebrated misogynist who does not believe that women can be artists) creates inverted landscapes with a quality of ‘demented calmness’, a term that aptly describes Cusk’s own tone. Is it the coldness of absurdist detachment or the eerie sedation of disassociation symptomatic of trauma? Can it be both?

Read more: Kirsten Tranter reviews ‘Parade’ by Rachel Cusk

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Laura Elizabeth Woollett reviews ‘Bird’ by Courtney Collins
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Stories about women from disparate times and places leading parallel lives are almost a genre unto themselves. In Michael Cunningham’s The Hours, a well-known literary example, Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway, connects the lives of three twentieth- century women (one of them Woolf herself) in an intergenerational portrait of queerness and mental illness. In Evie Wyld’s The Bass Rock, a trio on the Scottish coast are linked over several centuries through themes of violence against women. In Tracey Chevalier’s The Virgin Blue, an American woman living in France noses out the story of a persecuted ancestor.
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Stories about women from disparate times and places leading parallel lives are almost a genre unto themselves. In Michael Cunningham’s The Hours, a well-known literary example, Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway, connects the lives of three twentieth- century women (one of them Woolf herself) in an intergenerational portrait of queerness and mental illness. In Evie Wyld’s The Bass Rock, a trio on the Scottish coast are linked over several centuries through themes of violence against women. In Tracey Chevalier’s The Virgin Blue, an American woman living in France noses out the story of a persecuted ancestor.

Read more: Laura Elizabeth Woollett reviews ‘Bird’ by Courtney Collins

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Diane Stubbings reviews ‘The Echoes’ by Evie Wyld
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When we first meet Max in Evie Wyld’s The Echoes, he is dead. He does not believe in ghosts, he tells us, yet that it precisely what he is: ‘a transparent central nervous system floating about like a jellyfish’. Max lingers in the house he shared with his partner, Hannah. He tries to make his presence felt, to signal to Hannah that he is still there, but he lacks any supernatural ability. Hannah moves on with her life, and all Max can do is ‘watch as the flat becomes the home of others – the moths, the spiders, the silverfish, the dust motes and … the leftovers of the dead’.
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When we first meet Max in Evie Wyld’s The Echoes, he is dead. He does not believe in ghosts, he tells us, yet that it precisely what he is: ‘a transparent central nervous system floating about like a jellyfish’. Max lingers in the house he shared with his partner, Hannah. He tries to make his presence felt, to signal to Hannah that he is still there, but he lacks any supernatural ability. Hannah moves on with her life, and all Max can do is ‘watch as the flat becomes the home of others – the moths, the spiders, the silverfish, the dust motes and … the leftovers of the dead’.

A past whose vestiges infect the present moment is a recurring motif in Wyld’s writing. Her previous novels – After the Fire, A Still Small Voice (2009), All the Birds, Singing (2013), winner of the Miles Franklin Award, and The Bass Rock (2020) – braid two or more timelines, demonstrating how knots of violence and desire snarl each new generation of a family; how long-held secrets cast protracted shadows.

Read more: Diane Stubbings reviews ‘The Echoes’ by Evie Wyld

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Giselle Au-Nhien Nguyen reviews ‘Jade and Emerald’ by Michelle See-Tho
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In the opening pages of Michelle See-Tho’s début novel, Jade and Emerald, an unnamed narrator is avoiding someone’s gaze. That someone is ‘pristine, poised like a goddess’ to the narrator’s vision of herself: haircut ‘like an eight-year-old boy’s’, smudged make-up, dress the wrong colour. There is a secret between these two young women, blown open by the prologue’s end.
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In the opening pages of Michelle See-Tho’s début novel, Jade and Emerald, an unnamed narrator is avoiding someone’s gaze. That someone is ‘pristine, poised like a goddess’ to the narrator’s vision of herself: haircut ‘like an eight-year-old boy’s’, smudged make-up, dress the wrong colour. There is a secret between these two young women, blown open by the prologue’s end.

Cut to 1990s Melbourne, where Lei Ling Wen is struggling to fit in. At twelve, she is still treated as a child by her single mother, Jing Fei, and bullied at school by her wealthy classmate Angela Nu, the only other Asian girl in her grade. Lei Ling aches to be seen as her own person, and when she befriends Angela’s rich, worldly aunt Gigi at a birthday party, she senses the opportunity for escape.

Read more: Giselle Au-Nhien Nguyen reviews ‘Jade and Emerald’ by Michelle See-Tho

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David Jack reviews ‘War’ by Louis-Ferdinand Céline
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If Louis-Ferdinand Céline were around today, he would almost certainly be cancelled. So why publish a previously unknown fragment of his? Unlike some writers, whose views are inferred from their work, Céline’s anti-Semitism was beyond doubt, if at times a little confused. He wrote two anti-Semitic novels and a pamphlet, and associated with collaborators and Nazis. He was, however, not a card-carrying member of any political partyand did not subscribe to fascist ideology, beyond the notion of the expulsion of the Jews from France. He certainly didn’t believe in the possibility of some master race. Humans are vile, was his central belief. As the character Ferdinand says in War: ‘Your instinct is never wrong when it faces the ghastliness of man [sic].’
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If Louis-Ferdinand Céline were around today, he would almost certainly be cancelled. So why publish a previously unknown fragment of his? Unlike some writers, whose views are inferred from their work, Céline’s anti-Semitism was beyond doubt, if at times a little confused. He wrote two anti-Semitic novels and a pamphlet, and associated with collaborators and Nazis. He was, however, not a card-carrying member of any political partyand did not subscribe to fascist ideology, beyond the notion of the expulsion of the Jews from France. He certainly didn’t believe in the possibility of some master race. Humans are vile, was his central belief. As the character Ferdinand says in War: ‘Your instinct is never wrong when it faces the ghastliness of man [sic].’

Read more: David Jack reviews ‘War’ by Louis-Ferdinand Céline

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‘First Snow’ by Kerry Greer | Jolley Prize
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The baby had no name because they couldn’t agree on one. She was twenty-nine, and he was thirty-two, and they were going nowhere, but she fell pregnant. And she thought this might be somewhere she wanted to go with him. Only when it happened did she become aware of this urge, like the unfurling of a moonflower. Some process had taken place inside her in the dark, and much later she saw herself in the light, and knew: This is who I am. But Jack noticed none of this. The baby woke every night – wanting to be fed, held, changed, rocked, carried to the broad sash of sky at the window, all the things any newborn wants – and Jack dragged a blanket to the living room, leaving Mara in the bedroom with the baby. In the morning, Jack would shrug his shoulders: ‘You know I have to be alert for work.’
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The baby had no name because they couldn’t agree on one. She was twenty-nine, and he was thirty-two, and they were going nowhere, but she fell pregnant. And she thought this might be somewhere she wanted to go with him. Only when it happened did she become aware of this urge, like the unfurling of a moonflower. Some process had taken place inside her in the dark, and much later she saw herself in the light, and knew: This is who I am. But Jack noticed none of this. The baby woke every night – wanting to be fed, held, changed, rocked, carried to the broad sash of sky at the window, all the things any newborn wants – and Jack dragged a blanket to the living room, leaving Mara in the bedroom with the baby. In the morning, Jack would shrug his shoulders: ‘You know I have to be alert for work.’

Mara didn’t mind those sleepless hours alone with this unfamiliar-familiar person. Something sacred was unfolding in the inchoate night, galaxies colliding and moving apart. She whispered to the baby while feeding him – words that came easily to her, making her think maybe she had been loved once, by someone whose face was unreachable now. Her own mother was a blank space – someone her father referenced with brittle, halting words.

‘It’s okay, baby. It’s okay, Robin,’ Mara said, bending over her son’s head to study the astral blue of his eyes, yet to solidify into a particular colour. The mother’s voice is a kind of naming. The first moments of light and sound reaching down through space and time to leave an indelible mark. It was the Big Bang, over and over, that infinite love. So she called him Robin, and when he heard his name, he turned, and this was love moving, arcing through the air between them. Nobody could cross it. Her voice was a kind of naming, too.

But Mara didn’t tell Jack that she used the name he rejected. Every time she said Robin, she was calling something impossible into being. It was a spell. It was a lullaby. At night, and in the day, it kept Mara going, to have this secret only she and her son knew.

Read more: ‘First Snow’ by Kerry Greer | Jolley Prize

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‘Pornwald’ by Jill Van Epps | Jolley Prize
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In the airless beige office she finds ways to kill time. She spins in her taupe chair until she feels faintly nauseous. She flicks through the papers in the greyish filing cabinet. She kicks the nude heel off her left foot and wedges its leather between her big toe and second-biggest toe. She cradles the putty-coloured phone in her elbow and coos to it like it’s a baby, feeling its plastic coldness. Through the half-open blinds, she stares at the signs for other businesses, reading their names out loud. First with an Aussie accent. Then a British one. Affordable Massage. Life Thrift. MRIs R Us. Poke Town. Inlet Market. Peat Bog Tanning. The Dark Fowl.
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I

In the airless beige office she finds ways to kill time. She spins in her taupe chair until she feels faintly nauseous. She flicks through the papers in the greyish filing cabinet. She kicks the nude heel off her left foot and wedges its leather between her big toe and second-biggest toe. She cradles the putty-coloured phone in her elbow and coos to it like it’s a baby, feeling its plastic coldness. Through the half-open blinds, she stares at the signs for other businesses, reading their names out loud. First with an Aussie accent. Then a British one. Affordable Massage. Life Thrift. MRIs R Us. Poke Town. Inlet Market. Peat Bog Tanning. The Dark Fowl.

‘The Dark Fowl, innit?’ she murmurs to herself.

The fluorescent lights flicker. The air conditioner practically screams. The off-white box of paper clips shudders.

When her boss gets there – you’ll know he’s her boss by the illegible insignia of the company machine-stitched over his left pec – she will knock the box of paper clips onto the carpet. He will ignore her. She will kneel down on all fours. He will ignore her. She will pick up the paper clips one by one, looking up at him and apologising for the great big mess, crawling closer and closer to his knees.

 

Read more: ‘Pornwald’ by Jill Van Epps | Jolley Prize

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‘M.’ by Shelley Stenhouse | Jolley Prize
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At the fellowship lunch after our AA meeting, I’d hear him describing an afternoon sky in Paris, a shaft of shadow on a Tuscany hill. His flat unstoppable narrative was better suited to rambling American suburbs than Europe’s concise landscapes. In the tiny restaurant, we shoved four wobbly tables together, ordered Asian greens, and sat for hours fiddling with our chopsticks and drinking burnt-orange-coloured Thai iced tea. No one but M. talked and no one listened to him. His nervous and joyless verbal traverses were the out-loud equivalent of knee-shaking or leg-swinging. I’d hear occasional individual words: dusk, kindness, playful, accoutrements, heavenly. Make it stop, make it stop, I’d pray (I’d learned to pray in AA), watching his mouth move evenly and continuously like a machine in a factory, punching hole after hole in my day.
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… And when they all were seated,
A Service, like a Drum—
Kept beating—beating—till I thought
My mind was going Numb

from Emily Dickinson’s ‘I felt a Funeral, in my Brain’

At the fellowship lunch after our AA meeting, I’d hear him describing an afternoon sky in Paris, a shaft of shadow on a Tuscany hill. His flat unstoppable narrative was better suited to rambling American suburbs than Europe’s concise landscapes. In the tiny restaurant, we shoved four wobbly tables together, ordered Asian greens, and sat for hours fiddling with our chopsticks and drinking burnt-orange-coloured Thai iced tea. No one but M. talked and no one listened to him. His nervous and joyless verbal traverses were the out-loud equivalent of knee-shaking or leg-swinging. I’d hear occasional individual words: dusk, kindness, playful, accoutrements, heavenly. Make it stop, make it stop, I’d pray (I’d learned to pray in AA), watching his mouth move evenly and continuously like a machine in a factory, punching hole after hole in my day.

I knew M. had very little to do during his early sober weeks – he always looked sad when our lunches broke up. As he was walking me home (I could put up with the two blah-blah blocks to my apartment), I interrupted his monologue about Catholicism’s effect on Spanish architecture to ask him – the request felt altruistic – if he’d be willing to help me carry bags of clothes to Beacon’s Closet to sell. I told him I was broke. He welcomed this change of subject. Oh, I am too, he agreed. This contradicted what he’d rolled out as he walked me home from lunch earlier that week, when I’d asked him what he did for a living. I get a steady flow of royalties from my father’s literary estate; he’s an author. We’d all been trying to figure out who his father was; M. was evasive, while simultaneously dropping constant hints, as if his father were so famous we’d see M. in weak reflected light if we knew. And I’ve got the Schnabel portrait of him I keep in storage, he added. I might have to sell it. That didn’t sound like broke to me. It’s just one Schnabel, he said defensively. And the royalties are more of a trickle, he assured me, flow is hyperbole.

Read more: ‘M.’ by Shelley Stenhouse | Jolley Prize

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Peter Goldsworthy reviews ‘Kubrick: An odyssey’ by Robert P. Kolker and Nathan Abrams
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There might be a million stories in the naked city, but the early childhood of Stanley Kubrick was one of the more typical: born in 1928, in the Bronx, to upwardly mobile, artistically sophisticated Jewish parents, one generation out of the Pale. ‘I’m not Jewish but my parents were,’ he liked to joke.
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There might be a million stories in the naked city, but the early childhood of Stanley Kubrick was one of the more typical: born in 1928, in the Bronx, to upwardly mobile, artistically sophisticated Jewish parents, one generation out of the Pale. ‘I’m not Jewish but my parents were,’ he liked to joke.

A small, shy, nerdy, baby-faced misfit, he ‘preferred the street to school’ and therefore didn’t go much. Instead, he went to the movies – a lot – read comics and pulp magazines, and played a high level of chess, often in Washington Square, for money. Having declined a bar mitzvah, he was given a camera for his thirteenth birthday instead. This proved useful to hide behind, like dark glasses (which he also affected), and helped his social life. Born obsessive, he soon became the school photographer. He discovered Shakespeare through photographing a teacher who would declaim Hamlet, but still watched every movie that came to town, including Italian, French, and Yiddish movies at the local Arthouse cinema.

Read more: Peter Goldsworthy reviews ‘Kubrick: An odyssey’ by Robert P. Kolker and Nathan Abrams

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‘On Being Shy’, a new poem by Judith Beveridge
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Shyness gives you a bouquet of weeds and tells you to exit
quickly by the back door. Shyness shames you into presenting
only a peepshow version of yourself. It tells you never to be bold,
to never give yourself the box seat. The shy can’t perform
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Shyness gives you a bouquet of weeds and tells you to exit
quickly by the back door. Shyness shames you into presenting
only a peepshow version of yourself. It tells you never to be bold,
to never give yourself the box seat. The shy can’t perform

Read more: ‘On Being Shy’, a new poem by Judith Beveridge

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Backstage with Andrew Ford
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Andrew Ford is a composer, writer, and broadcaster, and has won awards in all three capacities, including the prestigious Paul Lowin Prize for his song cycle, Learning to Howl. His music has been played throughout Australia and in more than forty countries around the world. Since 1995 he has presented The Music Show each weekend on ABC Radio National. He is the author of eleven books, including The Song Remains the Same: 800 years of love songs, laments and lullabies (with Anni Heino). We review his new book, The Shortest History of Music.
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Andrew FordAndrew Ford is a composer, writer, and broadcaster, and has won awards in all three capacities, including the prestigious Paul Lowin Prize for his song cycle, Learning to Howl. His music has been played throughout Australia and in more than forty countries around the world. Since 1995 he has presented The Music Show each weekend on ABC Radio National. He is the author of eleven books, including The Song Remains the Same: 800 years of love songs, laments and lullabies (with Anni Heino). We review his new book, The Shortest History of Music.

 

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

Athol Fugard’s Dimetos at the Nottingham Playhouse in 1976, with Paul Scofield, Yvonne Bryceland, and Ben Kingsley. At the end, Dimetos (Scofield) has a monologue during which he begins to juggle and finally falls about laughing. I imagined making an opera from the play and many years later, when Fugard was in Sydney, asked his permission, which he granted. It hasn’t happened yet.

Read more: Backstage with Andrew Ford

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Malcolm Gillies reviews ‘The Shortest History of Music’ by Andrew Ford
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Andrew Ford is a musical polymath. On his website he identifies as a ‘composer, writer and broadcaster’. I suspect the Australian public knows him best as a broadcaster, given his three decades at the helm of the ABC’s Music Show. That broadcasting longevity does not diminish his continuing acclaim as a composer, as seen in the rousing première of his Red Dirt Hymns before a capacity Canberra Festival crowd on 2 May. Nor does it discount his run of hundreds of essays, and a dozen or so books. Some of those books are edited accumulations of his own press articles and reviews, often drawing on his well-researched Music Show interviews. But most of his books are devoted to particular musical passions: memory, harmony, noise, and, most repeatedly, song (David McCooey reviewed Ford and Anni Heino’s The Song Remains the Same [2019] in ABR, March 2020).
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Andrew Ford is a musical polymath. On his website he identifies as a ‘composer, writer and broadcaster’. I suspect the Australian public knows him best as a broadcaster, given his three decades at the helm of the ABC’s Music Show. That broadcasting longevity does not diminish his continuing acclaim as a composer, as seen in the rousing première of his Red Dirt Hymns before a capacity Canberra Festival crowd on 2 May. Nor does it discount his run of hundreds of essays, and a dozen or so books. Some of those books are edited accumulations of his own press articles and reviews, often drawing on his well-researched Music Show interviews. But most of his books are devoted to particular musical passions: memory, harmony, noise, and, most repeatedly, song (David McCooey reviewed Ford and Anni Heino’s The Song Remains the Same [2019] in ABR, March 2020).

Read more: Malcolm Gillies reviews ‘The Shortest History of Music’ by Andrew Ford

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Paul Giles reviews ‘The Performer: Art, life, politics’ by Richard Sennett
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Richard Sennett is a distinguished American-born sociologist who has in the past written compellingly about ways in which social and economic developments have shaped larger cultural frameworks. This new work, which the publishers advertise as ‘the first in a trilogy of books on the fundamental DNA of human expression’, is even more wide-ranging in its scope, attempting as it does to cover how the nature of performance has shaped not only politics but also the creative arts and ‘life’ itself. Sennett’s first words are taken from Shakespeare’s As You Like It, ‘All the world’s a stage’, and he aims to track the implications of Jaques’s words across different periods of history, looking for ‘the bonds between people that stretch across time as well as space’.
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Richard Sennett is a distinguished American-born sociologist who has in the past written compellingly about ways in which social and economic developments have shaped larger cultural frameworks. This new work, which the publishers advertise as ‘the first in a trilogy of books on the fundamental DNA of human expression’, is even more wide-ranging in its scope, attempting as it does to cover how the nature of performance has shaped not only politics but also the creative arts and ‘life’ itself. Sennett’s first words are taken from Shakespeare’s As You Like It, ‘All the world’s a stage’, and he aims to track the implications of Jaques’s words across different periods of history, looking for ‘the bonds between people that stretch across time as well as space’.

Read more: Paul Giles reviews ‘The Performer: Art, life, politics’ by Richard Sennett

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Brenda Walker reviews ‘For Life: A memoir of living and dying – and flying’ by Ailsa Piper
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Shortly after the unexpected death of her husband in 2014, Ailsa Piper put on a grey dress which she wore each day for the next six months. Of all the recurring and often exquisite motifs in her memoir, For Life, this prosaic re-worn grey dress speaks most eloquently of the dullness, constraint, and repetition of grief. Late in the memoir, Piper mentions a photograph that her husband took of her on holiday. She is naked in a thicket of tea-trees, and although she is not, at that point, a swimmer, she is wet from the ocean and thrilled. The contrast between the solitary costume of bereavement and this bare delight could not be more marked.
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Shortly after the unexpected death of her husband in 2014, Ailsa Piper put on a grey dress which she wore each day for the next six months. Of all the recurring and often exquisite motifs in her memoir, For Life, this prosaic re-worn grey dress speaks most eloquently of the dullness, constraint, and repetition of grief. Late in the memoir, Piper mentions a photograph that her husband took of her on holiday. She is naked in a thicket of tea-trees, and although she is not, at that point, a swimmer, she is wet from the ocean and thrilled. The contrast between the solitary costume of bereavement and this bare delight could not be more marked.

Read more: Brenda Walker reviews ‘For Life: A memoir of living and dying – and flying’ by Ailsa Piper

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Tracy Ellis reviews ‘Love, Death & Other Scenes’ by Nova Weetman
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In his book Bereavement: Studies of grief in adult life (1972), psychiatrist Colin Murray Parkes wrote: ‘The pain of grief is just as much a part of life as the joy of love; it is, perhaps, the price we pay for love, the cost of commitment.’ His words received a royal edit when Queen Elizabeth II, speaking at a memorial for the victims of 9/11, said, simply: ‘Grief is the price we pay for love.’ Being the queen, she could take such a liberty, denying Parkes his preamble and his ‘perhaps’. She whittled his words into a more essential and potent truth at a time when it was needed (if there’s ever a time when it’s not), ‘queensplaining’ his question as a comforting answer to the bewildered and bereaved.
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In his book Bereavement: Studies of grief in adult life (1972), psychiatrist Colin Murray Parkes wrote: ‘The pain of grief is just as much a part of life as the joy of love; it is, perhaps, the price we pay for love, the cost of commitment.’ His words received a royal edit when Queen Elizabeth II, speaking at a memorial for the victims of 9/11, said, simply: ‘Grief is the price we pay for love.’ Being the queen, she could take such a liberty, denying Parkes his preamble and his ‘perhaps’. She whittled his words into a more essential and potent truth at a time when it was needed (if there’s ever a time when it’s not), ‘queensplaining’ his question as a comforting answer to the bewildered and bereaved.

Writers are usually looking for answers – writing to find out what they think or to reach a deeper understanding. They tend to be people whose curiosity overcomes their caution; ‘red pill’ people, who would rather know than not know.

Read more: Tracy Ellis reviews ‘Love, Death & Other Scenes’ by Nova Weetman

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David McCooey reviews ‘Tintinnabulum: New poems’ by Judith Beveridge
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Bells are often associated with the sacred. A resonating bell marks out a space for reverence to inhabit. It calls for attention on the part of the devotee, for a shift in perception from the mundane to the sanctified. A ‘tintinnabulum’ is a small bell, and it is the name that the acclaimed poet Judith Beveridge has given to her latest collection of poems. ‘Tintinnabulation’ – the lingering sound of bells – is a word I first came across in the liner notes to Tabula Rasa, an album of music by the Estonian composer Arvo Pärt that explicitly brings together sound and sacredness.
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Bells are often associated with the sacred. A resonating bell marks out a space for reverence to inhabit. It calls for attention on the part of the devotee, for a shift in perception from the mundane to the sanctified. A ‘tintinnabulum’ is a small bell, and it is the name that the acclaimed poet Judith Beveridge has given to her latest collection of poems. ‘Tintinnabulation’ – the lingering sound of bells – is a word I first came across in the liner notes to Tabula Rasa, an album of music by the Estonian composer Arvo Pärt that explicitly brings together sound and sacredness.

Pärt is not mentioned in Beveridge’s new book, but musical references, from the celestial to the earthly, are everywhere. The susurration of cicadas (in ‘Listening to Cicadas’) is – among other things – ‘all the accumulated cases of tinnitus suffered / by fans of AC/DC, Motörhead and Pearl Jam’. In one of numerous poems concerned with maritime themes, Beveridge refers to the ‘dubstep / of the surf’, while in ‘The Walk’, a creek ‘played over stones a tune / from a decrepit piano’.

Read more: David McCooey reviews ‘Tintinnabulum: New poems’ by Judith Beveridge

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Theodore Ell reviews ‘George Orwell’s Elephant and Other Essays’ by Subhash Jaireth
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On the second page of this book are startling facts about Malawi. In the 1980s and 1990s, this country of around ten million people sheltered more than a million refugees, many of them having fled civil war in Mozambique. Malawians, already suffering the crippling effects of poverty and poor health, provided safe haven to waves of displaced and desperate people coming across their border. Perhaps this succour was not always offered happily, but what mattered is that it was offered. Melinda Ham’s placing of this example so early in her book is surely deliberate. With thoughts of Malawian tolerance and generosity echoing through the text, she forces the reader into making unsettling comparisons with recent Australian responses to refugees.
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Subhash Jaireth is both a writer and a geologist. This collection of essays draws inspiration from the international roaming his geological work has involved. Most of the essays explore memories of the Soviet Union, where he studied, or ancient landscapes in Australia, where he has lived and worked since the 1980s, with personal detours to India and Spain.

Jaireth’s writing is not merely an accessory to his scientific career, and not just because he studied literature as well as geology. Jaireth is a writer for the same reason he is a geologist: his chief interest is world-building. Whether reminiscing about the metro stations of Moscow that he knew as a student, or describing the mingling of eucalypt woodlands and suburbia in Canberra where he now lives, Jaireth’s instinct is to read, in intensive detail, the relationship of the physical environment to its historical-cultural legacies. In Jaireth’s world, any physical feature, be it a hillside or an avenue, is incomplete without its imprint on the imagination. These essays recount journeys through places Jaireth has known intimately. In the best passages, there is quiet drama in the struggle to reconcile the disarrangement of physical places, their cultural meanings, and what the author remembers (or thinks he remembers).

Read more: Theodore Ell reviews ‘George Orwell’s Elephant and Other Essays’ by Subhash Jaireth

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Seumas Spark reviews ‘The Lucky Ones’ by Melinda Ham
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On the second page of this book are startling facts about Malawi. In the 1980s and 1990s, this country of around ten million people sheltered more than a million refugees, many of them having fled civil war in Mozambique. Malawians, already suffering the crippling effects of poverty and poor health, provided safe haven to waves of displaced and desperate people coming across their border. Perhaps this succour was not always offered happily, but what mattered is that it was offered. Melinda Ham’s placing of this example so early in her book is surely deliberate. With thoughts of Malawian tolerance and generosity echoing through the text, she forces the reader into making unsettling comparisons with recent Australian responses to refugees.
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On the second page of this book are startling facts about Malawi. In the 1980s and 1990s, this country of around ten million people sheltered more than a million refugees, many of them having fled civil war in Mozambique. Malawians, already suffering the crippling effects of poverty and poor health, provided safe haven to waves of displaced and desperate people coming across their border. Perhaps this succour was not always offered happily, but what mattered is that it was offered. Melinda Ham’s placing of this example so early in her book is surely deliberate. With thoughts of Malawian tolerance and generosity echoing through the text, she forces the reader into making unsettling comparisons with recent Australian responses to refugees.

Read more: Seumas Spark reviews ‘The Lucky Ones’ by Melinda Ham

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Boris Frankel reviews Dear Mutzi by Tess Scholfield-Peters
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After sixty years, Hannah Arendt’s phrase ‘the banality of evil’ has almost become a cliché. Yet, in films like Jonathan Glazer’s Zone of Interest it is powerfully present in every mundane detail of the Auschwitz commandant’s family life. What of the banality and trauma of the lives of survivors or those murdered? There is a view that if the victims had been more aware of their fate, they would have escaped and survived. This claim is an insult, as most had no choice. The overwhelming majority of Jews, many of whom were alert to the risk of mass extermination, were unable to get exit visas, afford to flee, or obtain refuge in North America, Australia, and the United Kingdom. Tess Scholfield-Peters’ grandfather, Hermann (Mutzi) Pollnow, was one of the lucky ones.
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After sixty years, Hannah Arendt’s phrase ‘the banality of evil’ has almost become a cliché. Yet, in films like Jonathan Glazer’s Zone of Interest it is powerfully present in every mundane detail of the Auschwitz commandant’s family life. What of the banality and trauma of the lives of survivors or those murdered? There is a view that if the victims had been more aware of their fate, they would have escaped and survived. This claim is an insult, as most had no choice. The overwhelming majority of Jews, many of whom were alert to the risk of mass extermination, were unable to get exit visas, afford to flee, or obtain refuge in North America, Australia, and the United Kingdom. Tess Scholfield-Peters’ grandfather, Hermann (Mutzi) Pollnow, was one of the lucky ones.

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Cassandra Atherton reviews ‘To Sing of War’ by Catherine McKinnon
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In an exquisite, braided narrative, Catherine McKinnon’s To Sing of War reanimates World War II in a paean to the environment. Set between December 1944 and August 1945, the narrators experience the ways ‘Violence is malleable, it is everywhere’, but find healing and resilience in ‘the heart of the earth’. Importantly, Virgil’s epic poem, The Aeneid, is the key intertext and provides the central conceit and structure for the novel. Where The Aeneid concerns the building of Rome after the destruction of Troy, closely linking the fates of the two cities, To Sing of War grapples with rebuilding lives in a post-atomic world.
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In an exquisite, braided narrative, Catherine McKinnon’s To Sing of War reanimates World War II in a paean to the environment. Set between December 1944 and August 1945, the narrators experience the ways ‘Violence is malleable, it is everywhere’, but find healing and resilience in ‘the heart of the earth’. Importantly, Virgil’s epic poem, The Aeneid, is the key intertext and provides the central conceit and structure for the novel. Where The Aeneid concerns the building of Rome after the destruction of Troy, closely linking the fates of the two cities, To Sing of War grapples with rebuilding lives in a post-atomic world.

Read more: Cassandra Atherton reviews ‘To Sing of War’ by Catherine McKinnon

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