Vale Brenda Walker

ABR was saddened to learn of the sudden death of Brenda Walker in December. Brenda was Emerita Professor of English and Literary Studies at the University of Western Australia and a contributor to ABR on twenty-two occasions. On the first, in 2014, Brenda reviewed Alex Miller: The ruin of time by Robert Dixon; most recently, she reviewed For Life: A memoir of living and dying – and flying by Ailsa Piper for the August issue of ABR. Her reviews of fiction, memoir, poetry, and anthologies were always a pleasure to read (and edit) – indeed, often beguiling from the first sentence. ABR offers its deepest sympathies to Brenda Walker’s family and friends, and notes with regret the significant loss to Australian literary studies and criticism.

Peter Porter Poetry Prize

On 26 October 2022, two days before closing a deal to purchase Twitter for US$44 billion (A$61.4 billion), Elon Musk walked into its San Francisco headquarters carrying a white porcelain sink. He walked up to an unattended front desk in the lobby and said, to no one: ‘You can’t help but let that sink in.’ Of course, he didn’t really say this to no one. His triumphant entrance at Twitter HQ was staged, the video shared with his 120 million Twitter followers, with the phrase: ‘Let That Sink In!’

This event is described by Kate Conger and Ryan Mac in their long, detailed account of how Musk, reportedly the richest man on earth, took over, and then radically changed, the social media company Twitter – for the worse.

The title and cover of Great Game On tell us that a struggle is underway between Russia and China for supremacy in Central Asia. But by the time the reader has reached the book’s end, they are persuaded that China has already won and that there is more than just Central Asia at stake.

The strength of Geoff Raby’s book lies in its deep historical perspective. The first Great Game was the shadow contest for Central Asia between tsarist Russia and the British Empire. Today there are different players, but the idea is the same: the course of world history is strongly determined by geography, and dominion in Central Asia – the core of the Eurasian landmass – is the key to global supremacy.

The satirical magazine Private Eye hit the mark with its characterisation of Tony Blair. He was the Rev. ARP Blair MA (Oxon), the pally, trendy, and earnest vicar of St Albion addressing his flock through the parish newsletter. The good vicar would frequently mangle or repurpose Scripture in service to his own agenda. It is delightful, therefore, to see glimpses of this memorable character up to his old tricks in this volume by @realtonyblair, decades after his departure from office (Blair was prime minister from 1997 to 2007). Did you know, for example, that Moses might have boosted his leadership performance by doing more to take control of the narrative of his journey?

Joe Aston’s book persuasively outlines the reasons underpinning the reputational downfall of Qantas, a once highly respected Australian company. In this engaging book, Aston lays bare the way in which greed and distorted loyalties influenced boardroom and top management decisions to the detriment of the travelling public. It should be compulsory reading for all boards, CEOs, politicians, and senior bureaucrats, for it helps to explain the growing lack of trust in senior business figures, politicians, public servants, and the heads of independent integrity-related agencies. The Chairman’s Lounge also details the public’s disdain for those who are paid exorbitant sums of money and extravagant bonuses to run big businesses in this country – Qantas in particular.

Recently, I attended an annual conference organised by research postgraduates at my university in Brisbane. The papers ranged across a range of disciplines in humanities research. The presenters were all local, with one exception. The keynote was delivered by an associate professor from another Australian university – less about the substantive content and impact of her own research than on the colonialist attributes of the humanities and social sciences.

A core message was the necessity of a revolution in research practice. Existing knowledge tainted by colonialism was to be overthrown by adopting the principle of ‘CITATIONAL JUSTICE’ (projected in capitals on a PowerPoint slide). The researchers in training would advance the cause of anti-colonial research by ensuring that the majority of the cited references in their future work was either of First Nations or ‘Majority World’ (presumably what used to be called the ‘Global South’ or, before that, the ‘developing world’).

In her essay ‘This Little Theory Went to Market’ – one of more than thirty pieces included in The Best Australian Science Writing 2024 – Elizabeth Finkel undertakes a pinpoint dissection of the two prevailing theories about the origins of SARS-CoV-2 (Covid-19): ‘natural origin versus a lab leak’. What Finkel is at pains to point out in her essay is that science ‘advances ... on the “weight of evidence”’ and that, based on that weight of evidence, SARS-CoV-2 ‘was made not in the laboratory of man, but in nature’. Finkel’s essay is essential reading not only for her meticulous analysis of the evidence – peer-reviewed papers and US intelligence sources – but also for her approach: ‘I do not blindly trust scientists. My lodestone is the scientific method itself.’

Every December, great white sharks leave the bountiful coasts of California to congregate at a small patch of the Pacific Ocean located approximately midway between Hawaii and Mexico. As the sharks have been diving there, they have been teaching scientists that the area now known as the White Shark Café is much livelier, and more nourishing, than previously thought. Meanwhile, a supposedly humdrum stretch of the deep North Atlantic seabed called the Porcupine Abyssal Plain has been revealed as adorned with rolling hills, some of them hundreds of metres in height, where seabed organisms thrive. Ten thousand kilometres south and east of the Plain, the Indian Ocean’s Saya de Malha Bank supports the largest seagrass meadow in the world, spectacular corals and coralline algae, and, in surrounding depths, pygmy whales, flying fish, and untold others. ‘Some of the most extraordinary, most biodiverse parts of our planet are on the high seas’, writes the science journalist Olive Heffernan. ‘Yet they are unknown to most.’

Criticisms first. Kim Carr’s insightful yet evasive memoir, A Long March, reads more like a short march. As a key left factional leader in the Australian Labor Party for the best part of forty years, the former Victorian senator squibs on details. He doesn’t explain the subterranean workings of the ALP; doesn’t fess up on the genesis of his feuds with the likes of Julia Gillard, Kim Beazley, Greg Combet, Anthony Albanese, and John Cain; doesn’t come clean on the part he played in the fall of the Gillard government in 2013; and doesn’t take his share of responsibility for the Rudd-Gillard-Rudd governments’ failure to implement his laudable industry policies. This book should be more revealing, much longer, and much more reflective.

Despite its flaws, A Long March is an important addition to the growing canon about the political suicide of a Labor government that, much like the Chinese Red Army’s famous long march in the 1930s, spent years staging a fighting retreat following the overthrow of Kevin Rudd in 2010. Unlike the Chinese Communist Party’s military retreat, Gillard’s political retreat didn’t end in glorious victory but in three electoral defeats and the agony of life in Opposition.

You can’t tell the story of American cinema without Al Pacino, but it has taken him eighty-four years to get around to telling his own. Plenty of celebrities have put pen to paper in an effort to enshrine their life story well before becoming an octogenarian, but Sonny Boy, Pacino’s delightfully ramshackle and deeply heartfelt memoir, instantly benefits from feeling like a full, close-to-finished story. ‘I’m a man who has limited time left,’ he says, explaining his desire to share parts of himself that his public persona might have never fully conveyed, things that slipped through the cracks in an otherwise highly visible and well-documented life.

Pacino’s earliest memories are of his mother taking him to the movies (‘I had to have been the only five-year-old who was brought to The Lost Weekend’). It was respite from a destitute upbringing that Pacino nevertheless describes lovingly and vividly. This is the South Bronx in the early 1940s, where Pacino grew up with his single mother, Rose, in his grandparents’ house, running with a crew of adolescent ne’er-do-wells: Petey, Bruce, and Cliffy (who once ‘stole a city bus’ for kicks). These early sections of Sonny Boy read like a lost Dickens novel. Even Pacino acknowledges the fictional sheen of it all: ‘When I try to explain what it was like growing up in the South Bronx to young people, I feel like I’m describing Oliver Twist’s London to them.’

In the Zeitgeist of rising Trumpism, fascism, international paranoia about war and famine, a cataclysmic end of the planet’s climate, and the fatalistic zeal for Armageddon, this collection of essays and other non-fiction texts is welcome. We can concentrate on the Indigenous personal and provocative visions that impact on Australian literature.

In their Introduction to Shapeshifting, editors Jeanine Leane and Ellen van Neerven call the book a ‘collection of brand-new First Nations lyric nonfictions that will shift the shape of the Australian literary landscape and how the whole genre of non-fiction and its craft and construction is considered and expanded into the future’. The editors have subtitled the publication ‘lyric nonfiction’. This puzzles me, because the definition of ‘lyric’ is ‘having the form and musical quality of a song, and especially the character of a songlike outpouring of one’s own thoughts and feelings, as distinguished from epic and dramatic text or a expressive, rhythmical literary piece’. I longed for more of the lyric.

A year before her death in 2000, Judith Wright’s autobiography Half a Lifetime was published. The phrase ‘female as I was…’ peppered her stories. Miles Franklin’s Sybylla Melvyn had been a childhood idol. Wright conceded that Sybylla’s use of a stockwhip to assert power might have seemed ‘a little over the odds’. Then: ‘but if you had to?’

Being a woman had mostly been a nuisance, as Wright told it, a roadblock that she had negotiated without much thought, in her unfussed country way. Wright’s genre-breaking family history Generations of Men (1959) had evinced a ‘subtle feminism’, wrote historian Tom Griffiths, in its awed depiction of her grandmother, who had taken control of the family’s heavily indebted pastoral properties after the death of her husband, in her forties, and secured her own and her family’s fortune – ‘her triumph’ Wright termed it.

Emily Tsokos Purtill’s first novel, Matia, is both ambitiously expansive and, narrated as a series of moments in time, deftly miniaturised. Spanning four individual decades from 1940 to 2070, and moving between continents, it details the lives of four generations of Greek-Australian mothers and daughters. Unlike a conventional family saga, the novel has the associative structure of memory, moving through time and space in unpredictable ways, creating both threads of continuity and a sense of fragmentation. The narrative focus on women charts the struggle for agency through the eyes of the four women, each of them bequeathed a bracelet – the Greek word matia of the book’s title – intended to ward off the evil eye. As such, the modern concept of individualism collides with the realms of prophecy and superstition, producing a fascinating exploration of the crucial issues of female agency and choice.

Inga Simpson’s The Thinning owes a literary debt to the American nature writer Annie Dillard’s evergreen essay ‘Total Eclipse’ (1982). An account of the solar eclipse that Dillard observed on 26 February 1979, ‘Total Eclipse’ aims not merely to narrate experience but also to impart the shock of estrangement. It is an essay in awe, shot through with verbal echoes. In the moon’s long shadow, Dillard glimpsed an otherworld in which the hillside’s ‘hues were metallic; their finish was matte’, in which the living appeared as if preserved within ‘a tinted photograph from which the tints had faded’. When perfectly aligned, the moon and sun come to resemble a ‘thin ring, an old, thin silver wedding band, an old, worn ring’: a partial eclipse’s relation to a total eclipse is the relation of ‘kissing a man’ to ‘marrying him’. What Dillard knew well, and what her sentences know best of all, is that there is a patness to causal narrative that impedes the expression of a genuine revelation. No amount of careful set-up can quite account for the new.

In The Scent of Oranges, Kathy George writes a new story for Nancy, the warm-hearted street girl in Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist (1838). With a deftness that commands admiration, George sutures her story to parts of the novel written by Dickens almost two centuries ago, maintaining the integrity of all his scenes involving Nancy, preserving, while lightly adapting, much of his dialogue; borrowing some of his imagery, but interweaving those scenes with others of her own invention. It is so skilfully done that the stitches barely show, so it takes some time to realise just how much of this admirably Dickensian dialogue is in fact dialogue written by Dickens.

On the cover of Little Bit, a hot-pink neon sign points the way to the dive bars and deprivation within, priming the reader for a certain type of story. Think Natassja Kinski as Jane in her pink peepshow sweater in Paris, Texas. It’s going to be a book about good women, bad men, cheap sex, crime, alcohol, and trouble.

And Little Bit largely is. Set mostly in Minneapolis, at the heart of the story is the author’s mother, Debbie, neglected to the point of abuse by her alcoholic mother, Stella – a victim herself, sexually abused by her father. Spanning from 1955 to the author’s birth in the 1970s, Debbie suffers unfathomable neglect as a small, lonely child while day-drunk Stella loses job after job and brings home man after man, night after night, from the bars she frequents. Stella’s story is as pitiful as Debbie’s, but any sympathy is used up worrying about the child, abandoned to nights alone in roach-infested hovels while her mother slowly drinks herself to an early death.

ABR is pleased to present the shortlist for the 2025 Peter Porter Poetry Prize, which this year received 1,171 poems from twenty-one countries. 

Congratulations to those who reached the shortlist: Sarah Day, Jennifer Harrison, Audrey Molloy, Claire Potter, and Meredith Stricker. Each of their poems are listed below in alphabetical order by author. For the full longlist, click here.

The Orphan

L’Orpheline, a sculpture by Paul Niclausse

for TB and TMc

by Sarah Day

An old woman and man, a goat, a child –
the lines beneath the lichen curve
to tenderness in this chiselled stone;
the old people’s bent backs bookend the form,
he at the head, she at the rear of the goat,
the baby suckling beneath. Each point

connects the whole – this is the point
the artist makes. Her hand cradles the neck of the child,
his hands cradle the neck of the patient goat
who rests her bearded chin on the curve
of his bowed crown.  The two old people form
a pact with the goat in the silence of stone,

their bent knees and folds of cloth in stone
shelter and cradle; the delicate point
where the goat’s tail-tip to the woman’s temple form
a kinship is crucial to our sense that the child
will thrive. The backward sweep of the long horns curve
to the man’s huge fingers gently cupping the throat of the goat,

stilling, not restraining. In her weight of repose, the goat
rests her chin on the man’s stooped head. Cool stone
summons warmth, the animal gazes over the curve
of his head – benign, beatific even – to a fixed point
in the universe as she suckles the child,
she, the goat, summoning the common good, a form

of love. Even the clogs the old people wear form
an alliance around the infant and the goat
with their patina, their workmanlike fidelity to the child.
The couple, half squatted on the stone
from which they’re hewn are grave with effort – their point
of view, the burden of their task, fixed on the curve

of the orb of the baby’s resting head. They curve
to one another, woman and man, form
in their faces of endurance, a point
of concentration on the gravity of the task. The goat
yields to their concern with the tolerance of old stone
while her gaze trusts the long view in which the child

will set forth at some point.  Praise the goat
for her milk, her trust, and each supplicant curve in this form,
a hand unearthing from stone a blooming and unoblivious child.

Sarah Day’s books have won awards, including the Queensland Premier’s and ACT poetry prizes. She has collaborated with musicians in the United Kingdom and Australia, and taught creative writing to Year Twelve students for twenty years. Her ninth collection, Slack Tide (Pitt Street Poetry), was published in 2022.

Hook, Grandmother, Line, Marlin

by Jennifer Harrison

Hook

Shiny, jagged claws, threaded with
mullet bait, gut shreds cast into the ocean,
the peeling boat putt-putting, bobbing,
the horizon moving, too, wreathed
in cloud-haze. Smell of brine, tackle,
wet tarpaulin, the sea filling nostrils
with indelible vetch, that monstrous
edge between omnipotence and death.
The yellow plastic reel in your hand, hollow
where a hand holds the inner rim steady,
hubcap, thumb and forefinger patient
like a musician sleeping. Sonar of the
quivering angle that reaches into deep’s
tug/tug/release. Nothing biting, grandmother.

Grandmother

She fell regularly between the boat
and the jetty. The family would laugh
there goes nan again as she was pulled
aboard, short legs glistening, skirt wet
and clinging. She laughed too, a grimace
that was half remonstrance, half mutiny.
At dusk, she would take herself off to
the jetty with blackfish rod, green weed
and worms wriggling in a rusty Heinz can.
In the outgoing current, silky weeds drifted
towards the entrance. She’d cast, once, into
the fastest part of the stream, then, back bent
against evening’s metal shafts of thread
silvering, she’d begin untangling a matted line.

Line

Over, under. Across. Over, under. Across.
Hook, sinker. Faded green, two-to-four-
pound breaking strain for estuary bream.
Braid (made in the fifteenth century from horsehair,
now gel-spun polyethylene, minimal stretch,
best for lure fishing). Monofilament nylon
(originally made from coal, water and air,
invented in 1937, abrasion resistant, low cost,
large spool, diverse colours, UV protected).
And fluorocarbon strands packed tight for
invisibility in ultra-clear waters. Eight-to-
twelve-pound tensility for trevally and flatties.
Eighty for horse barra and reef dwellers. One-
fifty-to-three hundred pounds for chasing marlin.

Marlin

You are not knowledgeable enough about beauty.
Istiophoridae. Long nib to stab and capture
prey. Fast. Spear extending from your snout.
Threatened. Over-fished. Large eyed,
warm water loving. Thirty to a hundred
million eggs per year floating in the ocean.
Greenpeace. Rainbow Warrior blown up
in 1985 in the Port of Auckland on the way
to protest a French nuclear test in Moruroa.
Now, a wreck’s artificial dive site off
Cavalli Islands. Warriors of the rainbow.
Litter at the bottom of the sea. Spear
extending from a rusting snout. Glistening
metallic fish, jumping over, under, across.

Jennifer Harrison has written eight books of poetry, most recently Anywhy (Black Pepper, 2018). Two new collections, Sideshow History and Finals, are forthcoming in 2025. She is Chair of the World Psychiatry Association’s Section for Art and Psychiatry and won the 2023 Troubadour International Poetry Prize.

Notes from a Room

This beautiful sound. Like you’ve thrown a plum
and an orchard comes back at you.
Richard Flanagan

 by Audrey Molloy

Irena arouses the room.
Deep in the bath, considering
the decline of her flesh, the woman,
giving up on her mortal body, starts to hum
the Bach/Gounod Ave Maria – holy music –
and the room joins in on one low note.

Even walls offer resonance. While every other note
dies off, this tone is amplified – it makes the room
vibrate. One rogue tone, and she has conjured music,
as though the bathroom were an orchestra of strings,
as though she’d plucked – when she began to hum –
an instrument, a marble harp. This woman

doesn’t care for physics. In the glass she sees a woman
rising from the steam, warbling a note.
Across the tiles, down the stairs, Irena hums,
still dripping. At the old piano in the drawing room,
she taps the keys, their hammers ring –
C, C-sharp, D; the walls rebound no music.

That’s how it goes: a signal sent out, seeking music,
the off chance of an echo; it’s how a woman
comes to fathom that this far-flung life-ring
for the drowning – this hurtled little note –
is everything. Almost nothing resonates; a room
is just a room, no matter if you hum.

She floats her cargo back upstairs, hummed
inside her head – throat music, sinus music.
Right where she left it is the glassy room:
each feels the other pulse – walls and woman – 
strange company, naught in common but this note.
Irena’s pale reflection smiles, remembering

the flare of synchrony – like the firing
of a matchbook; hot light, then nothing but the hum
of phosphorous – her story, now, a footnote
in the book of stories. From the street, distant music
drifts through the window, through the ears of a woman
straightening a photo of a bride and groom.

Lowering the window sash, she drowns the music;
where once there was a perfect hum, there’s just a woman,
and where there lived a holy note, a silent room.

Audrey Molloy grew up in Ireland and has lived in Sydney since 1998. Her début collection, The Important Things (The Gallery Press, 2021), won the Anne Elder Award and was shortlisted for the Seamus Heaney First Collection Poetry Prize. The Blue Cocktail was published by both The Gallery Press and Pitt Street Poetry in 2023.

 Moths That Fly by Night

by Claire Potter

An empty room, nothing more than a table and a chair, a faded curtain swaying.
An electric globe to the left of the ceiling.
Closed doors, night beyond and moths pressing glass, powder-grey wings, black spots.
A woman works at the table, her reflection pooled in the starless sky as lights from apartments
flicker across the way. Pebble-blue gown, worn slippers.
Through the window, a crepe myrtle and a palm tree criss-cross in the breeze. Night is fluid,
deep and dolorous like a black vase swimming with waterweeds.
Looking through her reflection (thinking of distant romance), she notices company:
Four large moths, half in light, half in darkness, at the centre of the pane.
Five smaller moths on window’s outer edge, perhaps fledglings since they fall away
after only a few moments of fluttering.
Between trees, higher up, two moths swabbing the glass again and again
for the cold spill of light.
The room whistles. An edge of curtain sways as before.  
Distant lights gloaming on and off.
The woman bites her lip, she has the feeling that life is imposed. As if a troupe of parrots,
a forest of clouds, or skein of jellyfish had imposed in plain sight just to unsettle her.
Wings flutter like soft pewter tongues licking the glass.  
Heavy wind.
The corrugated sails of tilting branches.
Rasps of dogs back and forth as if shuttled by an asthmatic loom. Like a pinned study,       
a single moth waits immaculately for a point in the glass to open.
The woman doubts that it is possible to know anything about moths at all other than
what they recall as tiny brooches of light that pique the darkening sky–––
Her mind swerves to late January, adolescence, seated similarly at the desk, grieving.
A small clock ticking beside a fern. When she looked up, face crinkled, an unexpected
shape appeared out of the dark at eyelevel and rested on the windowsill with such pronounced
markings (across the outer wings) that she believed the moth to be not only watching her
but that her grandfather, by some occultish means,
had reformed and was communing through the glass:
Large, scalloped wings. Papery veins. Clear silence. Lavender outline and thin antennae     
corresponding preternaturally to his face. Coffin under a flag. Pulse of rain in
celestial grey through stained-glass windows. Horses on the radio. Two dots on the wings,
brown haloing blue, fringe of downy silver, twinkling in a way that she recognised,
darkly, as blinking.
She rests her elbows on the table, the memory folds. She rests her elbows on the table,
the memory grows old.  
–––The wind whistles; the moths winter.  
Thirty seconds. Lights out.   

Claire Potter is author of four poetry collections, Acanthus (Giramondo, 2022), Swallow (Five Islands, 2010), N’ombre (Vagabond, 2007), and In Front of a Comma (Poets Union, 2006), as well as numerous essays and translations. She lives between Sydney and London, where she teaches at the Architectural Association.

 The Vastness of What Poetry Can Do

by Meredith Stricker

i| ‘since the imperfect is so hot in us’
                – Wallace Stevens

in my Iliad, the women and slaves walk away
from tight-wound hexameters, unfreezing millennia
they shout their own bright-lit dactyls into the thunder of waves
              as Briseis wakes up and departs
        the inferno of helmets, shields and warships
‘and like this, my poetry names you’ says Cavafy
              like this, lonely in a cafe, then flung out
over starry nebulae – there is the vastness of what poetry can do
         as it cries out stubborn, forlorn, resplendent
and leans into the world like an interlocutory cloud
the poem measures Plato’s blue until it aches
then kicks the door open – Rhapsodes Rhapsodes so hot in us
let heat take our branching form – skin against tree body
           more ocean, more O, more Orphic, more unowned waves
into the cauldron of green sycamores, the keening of raptors

ii | ‘The great interrogation room is the stanza,
       you are standing at its door’
                – Dione Brand

ink that smells of rusty blood, the mind of ink
whose black and dendritic branches trace
the falling away of women’s rights, the rising
of the absolute rights of guns treated
          as though they were living embryos –
                   wouldn’t it be better to be governed by trees?

meanwhile, Achilles, in a funk, throws his spear into sand
and enlarges his grievances as ships idle – Oh glossy swag-Shield
        a mirror, a maze, threads of gold & murex, Tyrian purple
the glisten of seashells, pale mist of marshes, the spoils rotting there
No wonder the sky is tired carrying our heat, bearing the molecules
of countless wars, combustion engines, unmooring weather and homeland
seasons and storms. Tiredness and hunger – these are forms of narrative
just as narrative is a form of hunger and displacement a hunger
for narrative that finally returns to a home
that no longer exists

iii| ‘on the gray sea...
       combed by the wind’
                – Archilochus, fragment 279

even Archilochus dreamed of a peaceful life
instead, face down in mud, sent his words ahead to us

iv | ‘we live
       opposite
       reckless
       men’
                 – Sappho, fragment 24

synopsis:
             spears, blood, honour, betrayal, slaves, men

Achaeans, their wings overhead
         Danae, singing from the bushes
                 Argives, who fly in and out of dreams

while in some other history that we are called to imagine
         Helen undoes fate, unknits Troy
                    washed by the shadows of birds

who is more swift, Eros or the hummingbird?
what is more radiant, Achilles or
         the rings of a tree, the chambers of a beating heart?

v | ‘There must be non-human memories from which our own surges,
       to take us to the next thing’
                – Etel Adnan

hidden in the sound of water like a god or microbes
     there is someone who exists, there is someone in leaves
in mud, in meat, in measuring the space between bird and air
the scansion of twigs, there is someone who is spiral
who arcs her neck back and runs in the rain, there’s someone alive
     in herd, in hive, in highways, someone in grains of pollen
the colour of crushed minerals, I’m holding out my hand
to a place I cannot see, I’m counting on existing, I’m counting
on gravity, on aquifers, I’m counting on forests, their articulation
of thirst, the precision of what cannot be said but is spoken
every day outside language, I’m counting on their prophecy
listening to the curve of birds, as they dip homeward at dusk
into the gaps and fissures between here and Troy
between being born and disappearing

Meredith Stricker is the author of six poetry collections and recipient of the National Poetry Series Award. She co-directs visual poetry studio, a collaborative that focuses on architecture in Big Sur on California’s central coast, along with projects to bring together artists, writers, musicians and experimental forms. 

Surely every university’s creative writing anthology has the tagline ‘these are fresh voices’ plastered somewhere in its pages. In Blood & Bone, the thirty-eighth UTS Writers’ Anthology, this freshness is not some marketing cliché but apropos, characterised by all the gory atavism of its title and the recurrent theme of the body throughout its pages. These eclectic pieces explore the tension and liminality between the dichotomies that construct our reality: there is growth and atrophy; human and non-human; mind and body. Frequently, the contributors return to the medical clinic, but also to the digital world of AI, ChatGPT, and social media.

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

Anna Goldsworthy

Three piano recitals for me this year, speaking to the dazzling possibilities of this instrument. In March, as part of the Adelaide Festival’s Daylight Express series, Anthony Romaniuk roamed between grand piano, electric keyboard, and harpsichord in Elder Hall for a kaleidoscopic program spanning from the sixteenth century to Ligeti, and Romaniuk’s own improvisations. It was masterfully curated and vividly performed, offering one possible version of the future of the piano recital. Angela Hewitt stepped out onto that same stage in a gold lamé gown and capelet, performing Mozart, Bach, Handel, and Brahms to a sold-out audience, with her signature dynamism and unruffability (reviewed in ABR Arts, 10/24). It felt like a throwback to the golden age of Margaret Farren-Price’s Impresaria series at Melba Hall. Later that same week, Olli Mustonen joined brilliant colleagues from Europe and Australia for performances of Grieg and his own compositions at Ukaria. Mustonen has a visceral approach to pianism and is a singular compositional voice. For this small captive audience of Adelaide Hills dwellers and chamber-music enthusiasts, it was a revelation.

 Angela Hewitt

Diane Stubbings

It will be a long time before I forget MTC’s musical adaptation of My Brilliant Career (ABR Arts, 11/24), one of those rare examples of a theatre production where every element comes together so perfectly that a special alchemy takes place. It won’t be long before its star, Kala Gare, is poached by Broadway or the West End. MTC gave us another winner with Topdog/Underdog (ABR Arts, 8/24). On paper this was a risky production, but with two remarkable performances (Damon Manns and Ras-Samuel), and meticulous direction by Bert LaBonté, it was one of the most staggering and visceral productions of the year. NTLive’s The Motive and the Cue – Jack Thorne and Sam Mendes’s homage to the Burton/Gielgud Hamlet of 1964 – not only celebrated the singular chemistry created when an actor meets a part, it was also a strikingly astute reading of Shakespeare’s play. Special mention to Melbourne’s Red Stitch Theatre, whose superb production of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (ABR Arts, 7/24) had a well-earned revival. Two works directed for the theatre by Gary Abrahams – Iphigenia in Splott and A Case for the Existence of God (ABR Arts, 4/24) – showed the extraordinary range and power of this ‘little’ theatre’s work.

 Ras Samuel as Booth with Damon Manns as Lincoln (photograph by Sarah Walker)

Christopher Allen

Gauguin (ABR Arts, 9/24) at the NGA was outstanding, largely because it was put together by Henri Loyrette, former director of the Louvre, and not by the NGA itself. Magritte at the AGNSW offers a comprehensive overview of the artist’s career. The most substantial contribution to Australian art history was the survey of Charles Rodius at the State Library of NSW, by David Hansen, who sadly died shortly after its opening. Emily Kngwarreye at the NGA was well selected and presented. Emerging from darkness was a thoughtful and scholarly reflection on the Baroque, exiled to Hamilton, while the NGV itself was given over to the year’s worst exhibition, the NGV Triennial. Three substantial Egyptian shows – in Sydney, Canberra, and Melbourne – marked the bicentenary of the decipherment of hieroglyphics.

 Paul Gauguin, Parahi te marae (The sacred mountain), 1892, Philadelphia Museum of Art, gift of Mr and Mrs Rodolphe Meyer de Schauensee 1980 (courtesy of National Gallery of Australia)

Julie Ewington

Two extraordinary installations by Aboriginal Australian artists fix 2024 in memory. Archie Moore’s compelling kith and kin – biting, lyrical, sobering, grand in conception, and completely personal – deservedly won the Golden Lion for the best national pavilion at this year’s Venice Biennale. kith and kin will be at Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art (QAGOMA) in late 2025. Don’t miss it. At ACCA in Melbourne, Tennant Creek Brio’s installation of the group’s innovative paintings and videos, grounded in the wisdom of millennia from Warumungu Country, was a joy. Cross-cultural inclusiveness underpins the Brio’s practice, a particularly telling model for this country. I am always grateful for the generosity of retrospective surveys, opportunities to take the measure of a body of work. Among the finest: Brent Harris at AGSA (ABR Arts, 7/24), Adelaide; Rebecca Horn at Haus der Kunst, Munich; Hiroshi Sugimoto at the MCA Australia, Sydney; and Magritte at the AGNSW, this one until early February.

 Brent Harris born Palmerston North, New Zealand 4 October 1956 I weep my mother’s breasts 1996, Melbourne oil on linen 57.0 x 96.7 cm; Courtesy of the artist and Robert Heald Gallery, Wellington © Brent Harris

Richard Leathem

On the rare occasion that the Melbourne Recital Centre screens a film, it is to showcase a live score performance. In March this year, the MRC took the unprecedented step of screening a film without any form of live music accompaniment. So exceptional is the Ryuichi Sakamoto concert film Opus that it warrants its presence in a concert hall. Sakamoto prepared the setlist for Opus knowing he did not have long to live. The composer/pianist performed the pared-down renditions of his most loved works alone on a bare soundstage, with no audience. His son, Neo Sora, shot the film in crisp black and white. In a bold move, the MRC charged $45 a ticket. It soon sold out, as did two subsequent screenings. Audiences were rewarded with an immersive experience enhanced by additional speakers installed throughout the acoustically intimate Elisabeth Murdoch Hall. The famously meticulous Sakamoto would surely have approved. 

 Ryuichi Sakamoto in Opus (courtesy of Janus Films)

Peter Rose

The musical highlight of 2024 was the bicentenary of Anton Bruckner’s birth, though you wouldn’t know it from the meagre programming across Australia. It was depressing to read about the Sydney audience’s tepid response to the SSO’s performance of the mighty Eighth Symphony (ABR Arts, 8/24). European orchestras have marked the birthday with concerts of all the symphonies. Kirill Petrenko opened the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra’s 2024-25 season with a revelatory account of Bruckner’s Fifth (not to be missed on BPO’s indispensable Digital Concert Hall). At least the MSO gave us a Beethoven festival, all nine symphonies over five nights, rousingly conducted by Jaime Martín (ABR Arts, 12/24). Matthew López’s epic play The Inheritance has the odd didactic longueur, but Kitan Petkovski’s production at fortyfivedownstairs was audacious theatre at its best (ABR Arts, 1/24). My theatrical highlight of the year was the scintillating revival of Red Stitch’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? at the Comedy Theatre (ABR Arts, 7/24). As for opera, nothing surpassed the SSO’s phenomenal concert version of Die Walküre (ABR Arts, 11/24).

 David Whiteley, Emily Goddard, Harvey Zielinski, Kat Stewart (photograph by Jodie Hutchinson)

Robyn Archer

It is always daring to present dancers with disabilities in intimate and erotic contexts. Private View by Restless Dance Theatre represents a highpoint in this company’s achievements. The audience is surrounded by three chambers and observation happens at close quarters. Funny, disturbing, and full of joy, it is all the more moving as the final production to include dramaturg and concept provider Roz Hervey in the creative team. Vale Roz. These dancers are always inspiring, but alongside them this time is singer and composer of all the songs and music, Carla Lippis – a real talent. Eucalyptus, the new opera by composer Jonathan Mills and librettist Meredith Oakes, is a skilful and wholly engaging adaptation of Murray Bail’s novel (ABR Arts, 10/24). Given Mills’s formidable international reputation, it is heartening to note the very Australian themes that have underpinned his compositional work from the start: The Ghost Wife, Eternity Man, Ethereal Eye, and Sandakan Threnody. Eucalyptus is his best yet.

 Desiree Frahn as Ellen (photograph by Charlie Kinross)

Andrew Ford

The Emily Kam Kngwarray show at the NGA was far and away my cultural highlight of 2024 – indeed, a highlight of my life. It helped, possibly, that I knew next to nothing of the Anmatyerr artist when I bought my ticket. It was only as I marvelled at the works in the first rooms that the penny dropped that she had begun painting in her seventies. The sheer quantity of her output suggested a lifetime’s dedication to her art. Her technique developed and her style evolved so surely that she seemed to have had an early, middle, and late period – all in the last fifteen years of her life. But it was the sheer artistic ambition that was overwhelming. Glimpsing one of her last works, the eight-metre-wide Anwerlarr Anganenty (Big Yam Dreaming), ahead of me in the final gallery, I gasped loudly – heads turned. I left the show feeling shaken and humbled.

 Anwerlarr anganenty (Big yam Dreaming), (National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Presented through The Art Foundation of Victoria by Donald and Janet Holt and family, Governors, 1995 © Emily Kam Kngwarray/Licensed by Copyright Agency, Australia)

Ian Dickson

Given the surreal chaos that the United States has condemned itself to for the next four years, perhaps the most pertinent offering on Broadway is Cole Escola’s hilarious play Oh Mary!, which envisages Mary Todd Lincoln as a homicidal alcoholic who would happily ditch the position of First Lady to return to her self-proclaimed role as a ‘rather well-known niche cabaret legend’. Escola plays Mary in drag, with a frenetic, superbly timed ebullience. On a more serious note, Gyorgy Kurtag’s compelling operatic setting of Samuel Beckett’s Fin de Partie was given a powerfully effective staging by Hebert Fritsch at the Vienna State Opera. Philippe Sly and George Nigl battled it out as Hamm and Clov, while Charles Workman and Hilary Summers reminisced as Nagg and Nell under the effective baton of Simone Young. Young finished her year in Sydney with a glorious performance of Die Walküre. Both cast and orchestra were in stupendous form, and though it seems invidious to single out special moments, Stuart Skelton and Vida Miknevičiūtė’s first-act encounter as Siegmund and Sieglinde, and Tommi Hakala’s Wotan’s Farewell, will remain in this Wagnerian’s memory a long time.

 Simone Young conducts Die Walküre (photograph by Jay Patel and courtesy of Sydney Symphony Orchestra)

Felicity Chaplin

My year opened with Ludovico Einaudi at the Myer Music Bowl, as part of his tour to promote his then latest album, Underwater. Einaudi did not simply reproduce the pieces on the album but wove them together, along with some of his earlier iconic works to create a soundscape at once familiar and strange. In July, while teaching European cinema at the Monash Prato centre, I had the privilege of attending two very different film festivals: the world-famous Il Cinema Ritrovato held annually in Bologna, and the lesser-known Il Cinema Sotto le Stelle in the Castello dell’imperatore di Prato, a thirteenth-century castle in the centre of the Tuscan city of Prato. A highlight of Ritrovato was attending a rare screening of Luca Guadagnino’s début feature film, The Protagonists (1999), starring Tilda Swinton; and in Prato I was treated to a twilight screening of Italian director Alice Rohrwacher’s 2023 masterpiece, La Chimera (ABR Arts, 9/23).

 Josh O'Connor as Arthur (courtesy of Palace Films)

Tim Byrne

Melbourne audiences were finally given the opportunity to see S. Shakthidharan and Eamon Flack’s gorgeous Sri Lankan epic Counting and Cracking in the new UMAC theatre, many years after it won the VPLA (full disclosure: I was on the judging panel that year). Expansive, funny, and almost impossibly moving, it was community theatre as divine revelation. Back to Back Theatre returned to Geelong after receiving the Golden Lion award at this year’s Venice Biennale with Multiple Bad Things, a dark, pointed exploration of work and leisure, highlighting the insidious appropriation of disability by the able-bodied. It landed like a silent scream. And MTC rounded out the year with the greatest musical the country may have ever seen, an adaptation of Stella ‘Miles’ Franklin’s My Brilliant Career. An astonishing lead performance by Kala Gare galvanised a brilliant cast, all orchestrated by artistic director Anne-Louise Sarks, recovering brilliantly from her serious misfire with A Streetcar Named Desire (ABR Arts, 7/24).

 Kala Gare as Sybylla Melvyn (photograph by Pia Johnson)

Des Cowley

The Necks’ performance at Brunswick Ballroom in February revealed that, three decades on, their music remains as enigmatic and adventurous as ever. In March, saxophonist Cheryl Durongpisitkul’s ‘Straight Up and Down #1’, composed for the Australian Art Orchestra (AAO) and performed en plein air at Melbourne’s Section 8, was a wild and brawny affair, visceral and intense. Little wonder that Durongpisitkul won Jazz Work of the Year at the 2024 Art Music Awards. In October, as part of the Melbourne International Jazz Festival, Herbie Hancock confirmed his standing as one of our greatest living artists (ABR Arts, 10/24). Aged eighty-four, with nothing left to prove, Hancock continues to produce exciting and innovative music. Finally, the AAO’s thirtieth-anniversary concert at Melbourne Recital Centre in November marked a genuine milestone. The program featured works developed by the AAO over three decades, notably Paul Grabowsky’s Ring the Bells Backwards, his radical reinterpretation of European popular song, and Peter Knight’s hypnotic The Plains, inspired by the Gerald Murnane novel.

 Herbie Hancock (photograph by @Duncographic and courtesy of MIJF)

Ellie Nielsen

In a year which saw a dazzling return of the monologue play, Red Stitch’s production of Gary Owen’s, Iphigenia in Splott was a standout. This stark, unstinting work, bought to blazing life by Jessica Clarke, revealed how intensely the monologue can interrogate the human condition. In contrast, Matthew Lopez’s Inheritance, at fortyfivedownstairs, was the equivalent of a theatrical marathon; a seven-hour long journey with thirteen actors. This bold theatrical leap of faith (from a relatively small, unfunded theatre) went to the heart of what great theatre can be. Similarly, Apologia, created by performance artist Nicola Gunn, and produced by Malthouse, expanded and scrutinised the theatrical space, posing questions about interpretation, translation, and the way we create meaning. Apologia is a witty, absurdist piece, ostensibly a fantasy about being a French actress. Gunn’s cool merger of stagecraft with choreography and visual art, together with her versatile performance, was enigmatic and utterly engrossing.

 The Inheritance (photograph by Cameron Grant)

Michael Halliwell

A year with two new Australian operas in one year is cause for celebration. Much delayed, Jonathan Mills’s Eucalyptus premièred in Melbourne. Directed by Michael Gow, this ethereally beautiful adaptation of Murray Bail’s enigmatic 1998 novel was greeted with enthusiasm; one hopes for further performances. Mills’s unique voice combines modernism tempered by a lyricism in his writing for voices and orchestra. Young composer and leader of Sydney Chamber Opera, Jack Symonds, added to his already impressive body of work with a musically challenging version of the ancient Mesopotamian legend of Gilgamesh (ABR Arts, 9/24). His music takes no prisoners, plunging the audience into a world of violence and disruption, but ending on an uplifting note. Finally, a brief trip to icy Stockholm offered the opportunity to see a deeply moving operatic love story set during and after the Holocaust. The Promise (Löftet), by Mats Larsson Gothe, is a journey oscillating between dream and reality, hope and despair.

 Mitchell Riley as Enkidu and Jeremy Kleeman as Gilgamesh (photograph by Daniel Boud)

Clare Monagle

My cultural highlight of 2024 was seeing Pier Paolo Pasolini’s film The Hawks and the Sparrows at the Art Gallery of New South Wales. From 1966, it is a dazzling and weird meditation on Italy’s rapid industrial and commercial transformation in the postwar era, much of it narrated by a Marxist talking crow who offers parables from the past drawn from the Franciscan tradition. It stars Toto, the beloved clown of Italian cinema, who mugs and gestures with vaudevillian panache. In the middle are four minutes of extraordinarily moving footage of the funeral of Palmiro Togliatti. Half a million Romans lined the streets to farewell the communist leader in 1964, and the camera gazes respectfully on their mourning faces. The footage of the funeral procession is accompanied by a plaintive score by Ennio Morricone. Then we go back to talking crows and picaresque adventures. I still don’t know what to make of it, but I loved the film to my marrow and I’m so grateful to the AGNSW for tracking down a beautiful print and showing it on such a big screen.

 The Hawks and the Sparrows, 1966

Malcolm Gillies

This was Simone Young’s year. They say that conductors tend to eternity, while the rest of us plod towards extinction. At sixty-three, Young’s stature is ever-rising – at home and abroad – with new triumphs for her interpretations of Schoenberg, Bruckner, Mahler, and Wagner masterworks. Her reputation for reeling in the really big, sometimes problematic, fish of classical repertory has been further consolidated, whether with Gurrelieder (ABR Arts, 3/24), the craggiest symphonic juggernauts, or her distinctive re-readings of The Ring operas. Under her artistic leadership, the Sydney Symphony Orchestra is approaching high noon. Meanwhile, at the other end of the Hume Highway, its erstwhile rival continues to lick self-inflicted wounds, deflecting attention from the many virtues of Jaime Martín’s Beethoven Festival (ABR Arts, 11/24).

 Simone Young conducts Gurrelieder (courtesy of Sydney Symphony Orchestra photograph by Dan Boud)

Georgina Arnott

In Ali Smith’s new dystopian novel Gliff, the future has no theatre. In 2024, we had My Brilliant Career (Melbourne Theatre Company). Funny, smart, singing, and dancing, Miles Franklin’s 1901 novel arrives on the stage different but recognisable in a moment thirsty for optimism. Kala Gare’s Sybylla, her Broadway smile, nestles into the character’s contradictions and captures Franklin’s hope for her ‘fellow Australians’. A Midsummer’s Night Dream (Bell Shakespeare) was tender and polished, my highlight from a season of thoughtful and riveting Bell productions. LaToya Ruby Frazier’s Monuments of Solidarity (Museum of Modern Art, New York) blended photography, biography, and performance – the despair in neglected Pennsylvanian towns rendered ripe, heavy, and intricately networked down generations and across communities. Bangarra’s architectural Horizon choreographed the human form into complex, extraordinary shapes to tell Indigenous stories from the Pacific Ocean – an immersive performance outside language’s limits.

 Richard Pyros and Ella Prince (photograph by Brett Boardman)

Peter Tregear

My highlights for this year also operatically bookended it. Victorian Opera’s production of Candide in February (ABR Arts 2/24) surely banished any lingering doubt some may still have as to whether Bernstein’s foray into more operatic territory really works (it does!). Director Dean Bryant and designer Dann Barber, alongside a knock-out cast (including Katherine Allen in ‘glittering’ form as Cunégonde), pulled off a theatrical triumph that is deservedly being re-staged by Opera Australia in Sydney early next year. I thought I would never experience a finer production of Handel’s Giulio Cesare in Egitto (1724) than David McVicar’s fabled 2005 production for Glyndebourne. Angel Place is no opera house, but Pinchgut nevertheless approached it for sheer all-round quality (ABR Arts, 11/24). Standout performances from countertenors Tim Mead (Caesar) and Hugh Cutting (Tolomeo), alongside fast-rising Australia soprano Samantha Clarke (Cleopatra), were matched by superb music direction and direction from Erin Helyard and Neil Armfield respectively, alongside a clever, efficient design by Dale Ferguson. 

 Euan Fistrovic Doidge as Maximilian and Katherine Allen as Cunégonde (photograph by Charlie Kinross)

Jordan Prosser

The long tail of 2023’s Hollywood strikes left this year’s release calendar looking unusually thin; all the more room for some genuinely unexpected independent and international fare. Mohammad Rasoulof’s The Seed of the Sacred Fig was the year’s best thriller, starting out as family drama and ending as pure social horror, a blistering indictment of contemporary Iranian culture. Elsewhere, a double bill of films about doubles grappled with our growing cultural appetite for bodily modification: Aaron Schimberg’s A Different Man, with Sebastian Stan and Adam Pearson as dueling off-Broadway actors (ABR Arts, 10/24), and Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance, starring Demi Moore and Margaret Qualley as competing aspects of a fading starlet’s ego (ABR Arts, 9/24). But 2024’s most purely entertaining outing was Edward Berger’s Conclave, featuring Ralph Fiennes and Stanley Tucci among an ensemble of devious cardinals gossiping, quarrelling, and vaping their way through the high-stakes process of electing a new pope (ABR Arts, 11/24).

  Prosser Ralph Fiennes in Conclave (British Film Festival)

Andrew Fuhrmann

Back in late 2022, choreographer Sandra Parker was selected as part of the inaugural Australian Ballet residency. The fruit of that experience is the extraordinary Safehold, which premièred in November at Melbourne’s ETU Ballroom. Performed by Anika de Ruyter, Rachel Mackie, and Oliver Savariego, it is rigorous, formal, austere, and high concept, tackling questions of social cohesion and individual expression. It is also the most engrossing and troubling piece of contemporary dance I have seen in ages. Indeed, I have become obsessed with the secrets of its subtle variations, its allusive gestures, its patterned ambiguities. There is a dim glow of revelation in this work, some hint of the oracular. The choreography is complemented by an otherworldly soundscape by composer Lawrence Harvey. Other 2024 dance highlights include Ghenoa Gela’s beautifully melancholy Gurr Era Op, Lucy Guerin’s new duet One Single Action, and the carnival of colour that is Dancenorth’s Wayfinder.

 Oliver Savariego, Anika de Ruyter, and Rachel Mackie in Safehold (photograph by Gregory Lorenzutti)

Ben Brooker

Helen Garner once wrote that live performance either gives the audience energy or saps them of it, an observation all the more true for sleep-deprived parents of toddlers like me. This year, I didn’t see much theatre by my standards, but two works reminded me of text-based theatre’s ability to vitalise the heart, soul, and mind. At fortyfivedownstairs was Benjamin Nichol’s superb double bill, Milk and Blood, about a socially alienated single mother and male sex worker, respectively (ABR Arts, 8/24). Tight storytelling, committed performances, and adroit direction alchemised into two compelling hours of theatre. Everyone in Melbourne, it seems, was astonished by Sarah Goodes’s trad revival of Edward Albee’s classic Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?. I saw it at Red Stitch when it was already dazzling (ABR Arts, 11/23), and hear it lost nothing on transferring to the much larger Comedy Theatre. Next stop: Sydney.

 Charles Purcell as Daddy in Blood (photograph by Sarah Walker)

Michael Shmith

It was as heartening as it was enlightening to see Victorian Opera’s two very different productions. The first, La rondine, was a tribute to the centenary of Puccini’s death; the other, the première of Jonathan Mills’s long-awaited Eucalyptus. Both operas, well staged and finely performed, were presented in the cavernous Palais Theatre, a makeshift operatic venue that makes me positively long for the reopening of the State Theatre. Elsewhere, at the Athenaeum, Melbourne Opera heralded its Puccini celebrations with a vivacious new production of La bohème that underlined how this increasingly adventurous company, which receives no public funding, can best the so-called national company at almost every turn. As part of its desultory Melbourne season, Opera Australia’s Tosca – originally staged, to great success, by Opera North, in England – was marooned in the middle of the Margaret Court Arena, and suffered accordingly. I felt acutely sorry for all concerned, especially the unseen orchestra and the valiant cast.

February 8 will mark the centenary of the birth of Francis Webb (1925-73). Many will ask ‘Francis who?’ as I did at the start of my PhD on Christian mysticism in Australian poetry, when Petra White told me, ‘You have to read Francis Webb.’ I soon found myself reading the 1969 edition of Webb’s Collected Poems in a Richmond café. It was a sturdy, well-thumbed Angus & Robertson hardback with a purple, pink, and white cover bearing a quote from British poet and critic Sir Herbert Read: ‘A poet whose power, maturity and universality are immediately evident.’ In his five-page preface, Read examined Webb’s debts to Robert Browning, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and Kenneth Slessor, before concluding:

From the beginning, Webb has been concerned with the same tragic problems as Rilke, Eliot, Pasternak and, to mention a contemporary who presents a close parallel, Robert Lowell. I cannot, after long meditation on his verse, place his achievement on a level lower than that suggested by these names.

Come on, I scoffed with the inferiority complex my culture had instilled in me. This guy’s an Australian!

It didn’t take long before I experienced my ‘Webb moment’, something I have seen in so many readers since. For me, it came in the fourth poem, ‘Cap and Bells’ (1945), set on a train over that great symbol of Australian modernity, the Sydney Harbour Bridge, in World War II, when the poet was around nineteen:

Tonight the stars are yellow sparks
Dashed out from the moon’s hot steel;
And for me, now, no menace lurks
In this darkness crannied by lights; nor do I feel
A trace of the old loneliness here in this crowded train;
While, far below me, each naked light trails a sabre
Of blue steel over the grave great peace of the harbour. 

I wasn’t so much struck by one element of this stanza as by all the elements put together: the arresting imagery and atmospherics, wandering line length and slant rhymes, which create a yearning, incantatory tone, plus a classic Webb theme in the search for higher peace imperilled by an ephemeral threat he can defeat, but not escape. Swept up in the hubbub of Australian modernity, Webb declares himself to be radically pre-modern: ‘I have chosen the little, obscure way / In the dim, shouting vortex; I have taken / A fool’s power in his cap and bells …’ Webb compares his art to the skull of Hamlet’s famous fool, ‘a blunt shell of Yorick, that laughs for ever and ever’.

How on earth could a teenager pen this? On top of the artistic bravura, I could see Webb in conversation with Shakespeare, W.B. Yeats’s ‘The Cap and Bells’, and his namesake St Francis of Assisi, the twelfth-century mystic sometimes known as ‘the fool of God’, founder of the Franciscan Order and composer of Cantico di Frate Sole (‘Canticle to Brother Sun’). Yet there was also a deeper personal mythology that intrigued me. In Michael Griffith’s seminal biography, God’s Fool: The life and poetry of Francis Webb (1991), I discovered what ‘the old loneliness’ really was. With his three sisters, Webb was raised by his paternal grandparents in North Sydney as ‘a devout, but not puritanical Catholic’, as he later described it. He was a popular, sandy-haired boy, good at middle-distance running, swimming, and sailing. His love for fine art, classical music, and literature was as obvious as his instinctive resistance to any perceived cruelty or injustice, even if it brought him into conflict with others.

Was the poet born or made? There is a case for the latter in the loss of Webb’s parents. His mother, Hazel Foy, a singer from the famous family behind Foy’s Department Stores, died from pneumonia when Webb was two. Webb’s father, musical performer and piano importer Claude Webb-Wagg, returned to his home city of Sydney so that his parents could help raise Mavis, Claudia, Francis, and Leonie. His grief led to a breakdown that saw him separated (by his own decree) from the children at Callan Park Mental Hospital until his death in 1945. The children needed a myth and their grandmother, now shortened to ‘Ma’, provided it. She told them that God had taken their mother to be the brightest star in the sky, but that their father was lost without her singing and had become The Wandering Star. Webb tried to reach them both through his own music. His earliest poems include a spate of nocturnes, which tease at ‘another wanderer’ in ‘one night’s spacious years’ (‘Palace of Dreams’, 1942) and a ‘careless singer’ (‘Cap and Bells’, 1945). Later, this became explicit in ‘Hospital Night’ (1961): ‘that star, / Housed in glory, yet always a wanderer. / It is pain, truth, it is you, my father, beloved friend …’

Francis Webb with his bird George, 1950 (courtesy of Claudia Snell)

By the time I got to him, Webb had been out of print since the 1991 Selected Poems, Cap and Bells, edited by Michael Griffith and James McGlade. I was astonished at this, but astonished twice over when I read the reactions of other luminaries of his era and since. Although Webb never met Judith Wright, she was a talismanic poet for him. In ‘Crucifixion of the Mind’, her review of his fourth collection, Socrates and Other Poems (1961), Wright declared ‘He’s done so much suffering for me and I’ve read him so much and I think that’s what poetry is for.’ Webb was simultaneously the youngest of the postwar generation and the oldest of the 1960s-1970s generation. His work closed the era-defining anthology New Impulses in Australian Poetry (1968). Gwen Harwood, Les Murray, Bruce Beaver, and Robert Adamson became declared Webb fans, the last composing seven poems in his honour. A third generation followed in the 1990s, most obviously in the character of ‘Frank’ in Dorothy Porter’s verse novel What a Piece of Work (1999).   

For well over a decade, I have taught my edition of Webb’s Collected Poems (2011) to students at Macquarie University, many with the eBook installed on their devices. I have also run the annual Francis Webb Reading at Willoughby Library in Chatswood, where the poet’s personal book and art collection are held. Webb’s artistry has always been respected, but I have seen sentiment shift recently because of his ground-breaking depictions of mental health. Indeed, ‘On First Hearing a Cuckoo’ (1952) and ‘A Death at Winson Green’ (1955) are Australia’s first ‘asylum poems’ by a major poet. They represent a quantum leap in how mental health was represented in Australian poetry. No one else of Webb’s stature had ever asked Australian readers to enter the daily life of a mental patient. ‘On First Hearing a Cuckoo’ does this abstractly, suggesting some kind of English hospital with cuckoo birds outside, but it is left to readers to join the dots, and reviewers of the era never did. ‘A Death at Winson Green’, first published in the Times Literary Supplement in 1955, is reproduced here because it is more unequivocal: ‘Visitors’ Day: the graven perpetual smile, / String-bags agape, and pity’s laundered glove.’ The poet is among ‘The last of the heathens’ who ‘shuffles down the aisle, / Dark glass to a beauty which we hate and love’. 

What happened to this golden boy of Australian letters? While still a schoolboy at Christan Brothers College in Lewisham, Webb’s ‘Palace of Dreams’ was selected for The Bulletin by Douglas Stewart, poet and powerful editor of its ‘Red Page’. Only a few years after he returned from RAAF training in Canada, Webb’s first collection, A Drum for Ben Boyd (1948), was published by Angus & Robertson, with illustrations by Norman Lindsay, who became a supporter in tandem with Stewart. In the tiny, Sydney-centric poetry world of the 1940s, Webb did as well as any young poet could dream of, winning the Grace Leven Prize and befriending other young poets, such as Rosemary Dobson. In 1949, during a second stint in Canada, Webb fell out with Lindsay by correspondence, believing the latter’s attacks on ‘corrupt’ and ‘abstract’ modernists Webb loved (T.S. Eliot, Hart Crane, Gertrude Stein, Dylan Thomas) were veiled attacks on himself, given that Lindsay was reading his latest pieces. ‘I am not following any trend,’ a twenty-four-year-old Webb fired back. ‘I have never before had greater confidence in myself and in my work, and I tell you bluntly that I don’t at this moment give a god-damn whether the Bulletin wants me or not.’   

The Bulletin was secular, brawny, and heroic, but Webb found himself profoundly impacted by an American Catholic contemporary in Robert Lowell. He recalled that ‘I knew that now my poetry must openly acknowledge God and the Redemption.’ Webb decided to return to Australia via London. Before his boat sailed, he read a commentary on Freud’s theories of the subconscious, the libido, infant sexuality, and masochism. To counter Lindsay’s apparent charges of ‘corruption’, Webb interrogated himself and found endless moral faults, including cowardice for not challenging Lindsay’s anti-Semitism. At sea, his torment intensified as he paced the deck for three nights holding a Lindsay sketch for his second collection, Leichhardt in Theatre (1952), before he tore it up and flung the pieces into the Atlantic. Webb disembarked in England in a terrible state, attempted suicide with a razor, and was hospitalised in Surrey, where ‘On First Hearing a Cuckoo’ is set. A second period in England, from 1953 until his final return to Australia in 1960, led to his institutionalisation for ‘persecution mania’ and, later, schizophrenia, though Webb never accepted any one diagnosis.

From his first breakdown in his mid-twenties, Webb wrote about life ‘inside’ and treatments such as ECT and pneumo-encephalographs. He challenged Australian and British society to see the human beings behind institutional walls from their ‘world of commonsense’ as he later put it in ‘Ward Two’ (1964), set in Parramatta Psychiatric Hospital. Webb also leant into his mystical Catholicism, from ‘The Canticle’ to elegies for child and child-aligned saints (‘Lament for St Maria Goretti’, ‘St Therese and the Child’). Childhood innocence, unsurprisingly, was a Webb obsession, foundational not just to his own mythology, but also to his vision of Christ’s Incarnation. ‘Five Days Old’ (1961) combines these two via Webb’s experience of holding a newborn baby (and being trusted to do so, by one of his more sympathetic English doctors). This shows the quieter, more lyrical Webb who is ‘launched upon sacred seas, / Humbly and utterly lost / In the mystery of creation’.

This is another side of Webb’s legacy, the transcendent side to complement the socially minded one, although for Webb they could not be completely disentangled. It extended to his centring of Aboriginal pre-colonial presence and holiness in two anti-colonial masterpieces, ‘End of the Picnic’ and ‘Balls Head Again’ (both 1953), and in poems defending postwar migrants.

It is high time more Australians knew of this genius in their midst, whose reputation has been unfairly impacted by the stigma of the ‘mad poet’ who is thus incomprehensible and corrupting, to be kept away from children (including on the national curriculum). Most Australian poets across the generations saw him very differently. After Webb died from a coronary occlusion in November 1973 (likely exacerbated by heavy smoking and psychiatric drugs), Les Murray’s obituary in the Sydney Morning Herald called him ‘the gold standard by which complex poetic language has been judged … a master of last lines, of last stanzas and final phrases’. As Francis Webb turns one hundred, we can all reflect on the brilliance, urgency, and humanity of his work, and take up the challenge to help new readers have their ‘Francis Webb moment’ by engaging with the essays, podcasts, readings, and social media posts emerging this year in his honour.

This is one of a series of ABR articles being funded by Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund.

Jakob Ziguras – widely published in Australian literary magazines and the recipient of prestigious poetry prizes – was born in Poland and came to Australia as a child with his parents in 1984. He studied fine arts before completing a doctorate in philosophy, which he teaches (he is also a translator). Much of this background is in evidence in his poetry. In recent years he has lived in his birthplace, Wrocław, Poland, translating contemporary Polish poets while working on his third book of poems, Venetian Mirrors.

The English Soul is a history of Christianity in England from the Venerable Bede to the present, a period of roughly 1,400 years. Its enthralling journey leads us from the medieval mystics, including Julian of Norwich, through the torments of the English Reformation and the exhilarating spread of revivalist and evangelical movements in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, to the charismatic Christian movements of more recent times. If the narrative that emerges is principally that of the Established Church and the creation of its High and Low tendencies, it is also one that encounters a shocking array of sects and seekers, doubters and dissenters, ranters and ravers, along the way.

Robert Fisk was one of a few journalists who could rightly be described as a legend in his lifetime. Anyone with a passing interest in the Middle East over the past fifty years will certainly know his name and will probably have come across some of his reporting. Serious students of the region will have read his books. British-born, Fisk was mostly based in Beirut from 1976 until his death in 2020, during which time he covered all the wars – and horrors – of the greater Middle East. What he witnessed infuriated him; seething anger permeated his writing.

Fisk reported for The Times until 1987 and thereafter for The Independent. He turned much of this reporting into books. These included his classic description of the Lebanese civil war, Pity the Nation (1990), and his mammoth 1,366-page account of the region’s other modern conflicts, The Great War for Civilisation: The conquest of the Middle East. The latter took the narrative to 2005. Night of Power: The betrayal of the Middle East, effectively a sequel to that tome, takes the narrative a further fifteen years. It was unfinished at his death, but his second wife, Nelofer Pazira-Fisk, spent four years completing it from his notes, adding a valuable postscript setting out his final thoughts.

In September 2023, ancient Rome became the focus of a viral social media trend. Women were encouraged to ask men how often they thought about the Roman Empire. The results were emphatic. It became apparent that many men thought about the Roman Empire frequently. The enduring fascination with the Romans should not be surprising; they continue to have an impact on our lives every day.

Several lasting influences are identified in Ross King’s The Shortest History of Ancient Rome, many of which we take for granted. Among the most prominent is our system of timekeeping. At the behest of Julius Caesar, a new calendar was inaugurated in 46 BCE that divided the year into twelve months. We owe the lengths of our months and their names to the Romans. King exhibits particular relish in highlighting the Latin roots of English words. For example, readers are informed that words like ‘edifice’, ‘portal’, and ‘society’ are derived from aedis (temple or dwelling), porta (gate), and socius (friend or partner) respectively.

This is a brave book, for it is the biography of a phantom. Archives hold ample evidence of the many professional achievements of the surveyor Thomas Scott Townsend, but of him personally almost nothing is known. Townsend left little trace of his passions, frustrations, or loves, the substance that animates biographies. A letter that Townsend wrote to his brother in 1839 is the only item of his private correspondence known to exist. And yet somehow the book works, and brilliantly so. Peter Crowley has written a compelling account of a remarkable figure in Australian history.

From bountiful feasts on collective farms to choreographed parades in Red Square, Soviet Socialist Realism painted a world of triumphant spectacle. In the eyes of Western critics, however, these images were as bland as they were removed from Soviet reality. As a result, Socialist Realism hovered on the margins of art history almost until the end of the twentieth century, when a series of studies in the early 1990s moved away from the reductive assessment of the movement as vulgar propaganda, revealing a complex and intriguing aesthetic reasoning within its production. A subsequent wave of further research would foreground the influence of this artistic production outside the Soviet Union. With Soviet Socialist Realism and Art in the Asia-Pacific, Alison Carroll aligns with efforts to examine the impact of the movement in a global context, placing focus on a region that certainly merits greater attention.

At the beginning of Hamlet (Act I, sc. 3, 177 ff.), Laertes warns Ophelia against becoming too attached to the young prince.

… his will is not his own; For he himself is subject to his birth:
He may not, as unvalued persons do,
Carve for himself; for on his choice depends
The safety and health of this whole state;
And therefore must his choice be circumscribed
Unto the voice and yielding of that body
Whereof he is the head.

Has any photograph ever changed the course of a war? It is a claim as old as photography itself, expressing a profound faith in the power of the image to communicate and move. However, like most religious statements, it does not stand up to rational scrutiny. It relies on the coincidence of two highly improbable phenomena. First, it assumes that everybody sees the photograph in question. This was a more contingent possibility in the analogue age, and it is even less certain in our image-saturated times. Second, and more problematically, it insists that everybody has (roughly) the same reaction to the image, a conjecture betraying a blissful ignorance of human psychology.

Max Dupain’s photographs are well known to Australian audiences. The monumentally cast upper body of his friend Harold Savage, prostrate on the sand is, as Helen Ennis notes in her new biography of Dupain, the ‘most reproduced photograph in Australian history’. The Sunbaker’s ubiquity has seen it configured, well beyond Dupain’s intention, as ‘an ideal of Australian masculinity’. More recently, it is a photograph that has been restaged by artists as a form of creative and cultural critique.

You can imagine the question popping up on one of those television quiz shows. What connects Miles Davis, John Coltrane, and Bill Evans? Anyone with a rudimentary knowledge of jazz would have hand on buzzer in a flash. Answer: Kind of Blue. There is an altogether darker, and equally correct, answer: heroin.

James Kaplan is best-known for his sizeable, award-winning biography of Frank Sinatra (2015). But with 3 Shades of Blue he has swapped the individual life for that of collective biography. He confesses his original pitch was to craft a very different book, ‘somewhat akin to Lytton Strachey’s Eminent Victorians’, sketching the lives of four figures who died in 1955: Albert Einstein, Charlie Parker, Wallace Stevens, and James Dean. The mind boggles! Little wonder his editors steered him down an alternative path, suggesting three figures whose trajectory at least collided.

It is dreadful to lose one’s voice. Most of us can mime our way through an episode of laryngitis or the anaesthetised numbness that follows dental surgery, confident that normalcy will return. But imagine knowing that normalcy was gone for good. As Flora Willson recently put it, there is an ‘intimate connection between voice and identity’. We are the sounds we make.

Lech Blaine is the author of the memoir Car Crash (2021) and the Quarterly Essays Top Blokes (2021) and Bad Cop (2024). He is the 2023 Charles Perkins Centre writer in residence. His writing has appeared in Good Weekend, Griffith Review, The Guardian, and The Monthly. His latest book is Australian Gospel.

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

Nowhere. I have spent most of the year on separate book tours, while craving unbroken weeks at home. As I get older, I’m becoming more like my mother. She hated holidays.

What’s your idea of hell?

Living in a share house.

What do you consider the most specious virtue?

Tidiness.

What’s your favourite film?

I prefer TV shows to films, just as I prefer novels to short stories. For me, The Sopranos and The Wire are right up there with the great works of literature.

And your favourite book?

Underworld by Don DeLillo. I binged it for the first time while riding trains and buses from New York to Los Angeles. Occasionally, when I can’t sleep, I’ll pull Underworld up on my iPhone and read discursive snatches. A fairly intense bedtime story, to be sure.

Name the three people with whom you would most like to dine.

Nelson Mandela, Princess Diana, and my namesake Lech Walesa. I’ll bring the beers.

Which word do you most dislike, and which one would you like to see back in public usage?

There are no bad words. Even the most overused ones have a utilitarian beauty. ‘Gutless’ should be used on a daily basis in all manner of public and private contexts.

Who is your favourite author?

Helen Garner. What a body of work.

And your favourite literary hero or heroine?

Sybylla Melvyn from My Brilliant Career. My mother and I bonded over our love of that book, due perhaps to our shared identification with the main character.

Which qualities do you most admire in a writer?

Brevity.

Which book influenced you most in your youth?

The Slap by Christos Tsiolkas. I read it in the private quarters of my father’s tavern as a teenager, and wrote an essay comparing it to The Castle. Tsiolkas painted a complicated portrait of the Australian suburbs in the age of John Howard that meshed with my own experiences, thereby verifying that they were fertile terrain for literature.

Name an early literary idol or influence whom you no longer admire – or vice versa.

David Foster-Wallace. Not to completely discount his considerable talent, but young men with literary ambitions are often susceptible to imitating him. My own attempts to recreate his style were cringeworthy and diluted the truths that I was trying to convey. Now, I prefer Mary Karr, the ex-partner whom he treated deplorably.

Do you have a favourite podcast?

Conversations on the ABC has stood the test of time, providing a beacon of quiet enquiry and empathy during an age of breathless antagonism.

What, if anything, impedes your writing?

Lack of sleep and exercise, and bad diet. I am also hypersensitive to sound. I guard my attention span by ignoring pretty much everything except what I am currently working on, to the great consternation of the landlords and companies I owe money.

What qualities do you look for in critics?

Brutal honesty. The literary ecosystem needs it. Writers are often their own harshest critics. I’m not too surprised if someone else finds imperfections in what I’ve written. People learn more from constructive criticism than cheap praise.

How do you find working with editors?

I was incredibly precious at first. I didn’t come from a formal journalism or creative writing background, so I wasn’t used to receiving ruthless feedback. Now I beg for it. I am incredibly fortunate to work continuously with one editor – Chris Feik – across both my memoirs and essays. He is a humble genius.

What do you think of writers’ festivals?

I must say that I enjoy the solitude and repetition of the writing process more than the public events. But writers’ festivals are a lot of fun. Unfortunately for the audience, I am much less vulnerable and insightful on a panel than I am in my prose.

Are artists valued in our society?

Yes and no. They are mythologised in certain ways, and yet taken for granted by governments. But I would also argue there are some incredibly important jobs that are massively underpaid. I don’t think this is a problem unique to artists.

What are you working on now?

I have just finished a book tour and publicity cycle for an emotionally loaded project, so I am working on a backlog of correspondence and aforementioned unpaid bills. I have a couple of future projects in mind – one political, the other personal. First, I want to get back into the habit of reading for pleasure and being an emotionally present partner.

Peter Rose (photograph by Brent Lukey)

ABR readers will be aware of my intention to leave the magazine. ABR has begun advertising for a new Editor and CEO, with a closing date of January 20. (There is a full job description on our website). Christopher Menz will also step down as Development Consultant, a role he has performed for more than a decade.

A panel led by Professor Sarah Holland-Batt (Chair of ABR) will appoint the seventh Editor in the second half of February. I will stay at the magazine until the new Editor has been appointed in February or March. There will be a transition period of several weeks. In our remaining time at the magazine, Christopher Menz and I will do everything we can to support the staff, the board, and the incoming Editor.

The new Editor will inherit an organisation in robust health. So much has been done in recent years to consolidate and improve the magazine. I have always felt that ABR should be different from other Australian magazines – not just in its extensive coverage of Australian literature, but distinctive in tone, range, programs, and ambition. In so many ways, ABR is barely recognisable from the small, valiant organisation I joined in 2001. Here are some of the initiatives: the website, the online edition, political commentary, ABR Arts, the digital archive going back to 1978, three international prizes (one of them featured in this issue), the creative partnership with Monash University, fellowships and cadetships, popular tours, etc.

Next year will be my twenty-fifth at ABR and my forty-ninth since I started my first day job, at the St Kilda Public Library. Coincidentally, my title was Periodicals Officer. (Once a Periodicals Officer, always a Periodicals Officer?) I think that’s long enough. Now it’s time for me to do other things: travel, ease up a bit, enjoy life in the country, write some more books and articles, work with my absurdist troupe The Highly Strung Players, and pursue some other options.

It’s also time for someone else to have the pleasure of editing ABR. Here, inevitably, I think of Emerson’s quip on agreeing to succeed Margaret Fuller as Editor of Dial magazine in 1842: ‘Let there be rotation in martyrdom.’ But I also think of Cyril Connolly’s sage line: ‘Little magazines are the pollinators of works of art: literary movements and eventually literature itself could not exist without them.’ It would be impossible to imagine Australia literature without ABR, that bold creation of Max Harris, Rosemary Wighton, and Geoffrey Dutton back in 1961.

Editing ABR has been the highlight of my professional life. By the time I leave ABR I will have edited close to 250 issues. Doing first edits of every word in all those issues has been my principal pleasure and responsibility. Working with more than 1,500 writers of all kinds and at different stages of their careers – from brilliant young critics and scholars to the elders of Australian letters and academe – has been a privilege. They are the ones who sustain and dignify this magazine.

During my time at ABR I have kept my editorials to a minimum in the belief that it’s much more important – and edifying – for you to hear from our writers rather than from me. But when I do communicate with our readers – socially, at ABR events, via email or telephone, or when an issue or irritant prompts me to editorialise – I am consistently impressed by your keen interest in ABR’s work, its health, and its future. Collectively, you are our raison d’être.

Producing a magazine like this, with its diverse programs and platforms (and with a staff of four, let’s not forget), is hard work. Your loyalty and generosity vivify the magazine and inspire everyone associated with it. I thank you all.

Now I look forward to reading and supporting the magazine for years to come.

Peter Rose

The colloquial term ‘robodebt’ had emerged online by early 2017. It is now used to refer to several iterations of mostly automated compliance programs targeting former and current social security recipients, overseen by the then federal Department of Human Services, which pursued alleged overpayments of social security moneys.

Across more than five hundred pages and written by thirty-three contributors, Dhoombak Goobgoowana contains stories about the University of Melbourne’s relationship with Indigenous Australians. Similarly powerful narratives about Australia’s broader colonial history are interwoven. Jim Berg’s eloquent opening ‘Memoir’ is counterbalanced by Vice-Chancellor Duncan Maskell’s Foreword. These invite readers – not just academics but those interested in Australia’s colonial history – to read, listen, think, and, most of all, learn.

With the recent rise of the alt-right and the Manosphere – a collection of anti-feminist and misogynist online communities – many people rightly want to understand what is going on. Reporting on this community can be fraught, with journalistic fascination often resulting in uncritically giving leaders big platforms to promote hateful ideas. There was every risk that journalists Jamie Tahnsin and Matt Shea’s Clown World: Four years inside Andrew Tate’s Manosphere – described as a ‘gripping, shocking and often absurd story of two journalists who infiltrated Andrew Tate’s War Room’ – would follow this trend. Instead, it provides a unique insight into this world.