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Absolutely Revolting

April 2025, no. 474

This April, ABR eyes the fragile state of Australian democracy and institutions. In a special election survey, senior ABR contributors brace for a federal election at a time when democracy around the world is under threat. We ask leading voices in the arts about the future of Opera Australia, a major cultural institution now under review by Creative Australia. ABR reports from Georgia’s capital, Tbilisi, on cancel culture and the Pope’s memoir, and reviews work by Geraldine Brooks, Santilla Chingaipe, Laila Lalami, Martha C. Nussbaum, Caro Llewellyn, Kevin Brophy and more.

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I am delighted to congratulate Dr Georgina Arnott on her appointment as Editor and CEO of Australian Book Review. Following Peter Rose’s distinguished editorship of twenty-four years, Georgina’s appointment marks a major milestone in ABR’s history, and I know this news will be warmly welcomed by our many patrons, subscribers, contributors, and staff, who have already had the pleasure of engaging with Georgina in her previous role as Assistant Editor, where she has made invaluable contributions to the culture and direction of the magazine.

Georgina’s broad-ranging intellectual interests, outstanding leadership skills, deep knowledge of contemporary literature, and ambitious editorial vision for ABR make her an ideal Editor and CEO, and will stand the magazine in excellent stead for many years to come. Georgina possesses a profound appreciation for the singular role ABR plays in Australia’s cultural ecosystem; she is a passionate advocate for the art of criticism, and will continue the magazine’s proud tradition of championing and defending literature, the arts, and the humanities. Her commitment to nurturing the next generation of writers and critics will bring an energising plurality of views and diversity of voices to our pages, building on the magazine’s longstanding commitment to discovering, mentoring, and supporting new talent, while continuing to publish the very best Australian and international writing today. I have no doubt Georgina will also uphold the magazine’s strong entrepreneurial streak, and bring important innovations to our readers in due course.

At a time when the media landscape is contracting and increasingly polarised, ABR is a beacon for so many who turn to our pages for solace, provocation, rigorous debate, and timely and informed commentary. Indeed, it is no exaggeration to say that for many of our readers, ABR is an intellectual home. I am so pleased ABR has been fortunate enough to attract a leader of Georgina’s calibre, as she commands the requisite vision, skill, and commitment to deliver the same exceptional standard our readers have come to love and expect over so many years, while also bringing fresh ideas to invigorate our pages. I wish Georgina all the very best in her new role, and hope that our patrons, readers and contributors are as excited by this new chapter as we are. I look forward to seeing how Georgina will shape the urgent debates of our times – and to her own contributions to our pages, too.

Professor Sarah Holland-Batt
Chair

I am very happy to have been appointed ABR’s next Editor and CEO. ABR has become a vital publication in our society and played a powerful role in my life too. I first wrote for ABR in 2003, when I was in my early twenties and had just commenced an MA on Australian national poetry anthologies. One Peter Rose kindly extended the invitation. Through an interrupted university career – research and lectureships in literary studies, a turn to historical and biographical work, a period with young children – I continued to write for ABR, each occasion a reminder that there existed a public realm based around thoughtful conversation; that books were read, that art was seen, heard, and felt – and by active minds: that we were each elevated by this shared enterprise.

I have seen ABR from the inside and outside, as a reader, reviewer, essayist, book author, and editor, and can attest that this enterprise matters deeply to many people. The connection we experience on the page is real and to be nurtured.  

ABR writers converse in the truest sense: they sit with a book, idea, or work of art; they turn over its possibilities. For me, these conversations – open spirited, informed, engaged – are fundamental to a humane, sophisticated, and mature society. I share with ABR readers a sense of the magazine’s distinctiveness and value, not least in these times of intellectual siloing, media contraction, illiteracy of various kinds, diminished public funding of the arts, the marginalisation of certain voices, and unsophisticated uses of artificial intelligence.

I look forward to being ABR’s next custodian after a period of extraordinary growth under Peter Rose, who has kept alive in Australia many of the values I revere and from whom I have received a world-class editorial apprenticeship. My story is echoed in the experience of dozens of early-career publishing professionals and writers who, without ABR, could not have gone on to distinguish the next generation of publishing and criticism. 

ABR is peopled by writers, staff, supporters, and a board who take seriously the promise of our shared conversations. It will be my privilege to extend this critical undertaking.

Dr Georgina Arnott
Editor and CEO

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Letters – April 2025
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Dear Editor,

Apropos of Joel Deane’s review of Ross Garnaut’s book Let’s Tax Carbon, for all the blame placed on a supposedly but in fact hugely diversified homogenised media, Deane ignores the role of the public (ABR, March 2025). This very magazine remains a key platform for intellectuals both to review and present thought and contribute to it, but the average reader is a non-combatant, lulled by comfort and a sort of existential hopelessness into indifference.
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Our hugely diverse media

Dear Editor,

Apropos of Joel Deane’s review of Ross Garnaut’s book Let’s Tax Carbon, for all the blame placed on a supposedly but in fact hugely diversified homogenised media, Deane ignores the role of the public (ABR, March 2025). This very magazine remains a key platform for intellectuals both to review and present thought and contribute to it, but the average reader is a non-combatant, lulled by comfort and a sort of existential hopelessness into indifference.

Patrick Hockey

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‘Is our democracy failing us?: Looking beyond the cost-of-living crisis’
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As we go to press, a May federal election seems likely – though anything seems possible in 2025. Last November, we invited a number of key commentators to reflect on the US presidential election, with a particular focus on the Australian obsession with American politics. As Australians prepare to vote, we wanted to do something similar – to come at our election from a different angle.
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As we go to press, a May federal election seems likely – though anything seems possible in 2025. Last November, we invited a number of key commentators to reflect on the US presidential election, with a particular focus on the Australian obsession with American politics. As Australians prepare to vote, we wanted to do something similar – to come at our election from a different angle.

Rather than engaging in psephology or trying to predict who will win the most seats and claim government, we have invited four of our senior writers and commentators to reflect on, speculate about, the broader issues that seem likely to be swamped by the vaunted ‘cost-of-living crisis’ that threatens to dominate the commentary.

There are so many urgent and interesting challenges facing government and electors – tax reform and inequality; the state of education; AUKUS, sovereignty, and foreign conflicts; the climate change that denialists seek to marginalise; Indigenous Australia after the Voice; economic reform; media diversity; the sorry plight of arts funding in Australia. Should not these too exercise us, trouble us, galvanise us?

Frank Bongiorno

Neighbours has been cancelled, again. The television program’s demise in 2022 after thirty-seven years might conform to Lady Bracknell’s definition of a misfortune. The trigger was Channel 5’s dropping of the program in Britain; Fremantle Media, dependent on that source for production costs, announced that it would be unable to continue. But Amazon gave Neighbours a second life, only to pull the plug last month. It now looks like Ramsay Street’s days are numbered – devastating for those who make the program, including a few actors who have inhabited Ramsay Street for decades, and no doubt disappointing for fans.

Lady Bracknell might have called a second cancellation carelessness, and perhaps she would have a point. When Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and Arts Minister Tony Burke launched the government’s Revive in St Kilda’s Esplanade Hotel (‘The Espy’) in January 2023, there were echoes of an older cultural nationalism in both the stress on telling Australian stories and the recognition that government regulation would need to play a role in making that happen. It even looked a bit Whitlamite. ‘A place for every story, a story for every place’ was the tagline. Revive would help make that a reality by applying local content requirements to commercial streaming services.

Today, the mandatory Australian content policy remains little better than a bright idea. The Free Trade Agreement with the United States is apparently a stumbling block. In any case, perhaps earlier implementation would not have saved Neighbours. After forty years, maybe the time had come for Neighbours to go to wherever former hit soaps spend their afterlife: possibly late-night reruns or box sets of DVDs that will make the ideal Christmas present for a Generation Xer you love.

All the same, it is another disappointment from a government that many find disappointing. That is a word I hear often: it hasn’t been a bad government, but words like ‘timid’ and ‘disappointing’ are then trotted out to say what the government has been. Albo is governing for two terms, the defenders say – a good point while the polls suggested that an early Coalition return to government would be about as likely as a Neighbours comeback by Bouncer the dog. Now that the polling suggests this is a possibility, the defence of the government’s caution looks less convincing.

The government has some achievements to its name in the arts. Under Revive, it replaced the old Australia Council for the Arts with Creative Australia, and it has since established Creative Workplaces (to improve conditions for workers in the sector), Music Australia, First Nations Arts and – scheduled to commence this year – Writing Australia. Injections of funding mitigated the combined effects of what became known as the ‘Brandis cuts’ – after Coalition minister George Brandis – and the pandemic. The government claimed $950 million of new spending over four years in the 2023-24 budget. Cultural institutions that, by the final dark days of the Morrison government, said they would need to shut down some of their core activities received funding that has allowed them do things like repairing disintegrating buildings, upgrading outdated computer software, and restoring some of the morale of staff and users shattered by Coalition hostility and neglect. There has been more money for organisations that train performing artists and for improving the accessibility of the arts – for both practitioners and audiences – regardless of where you live or who you are.

That’s quite a lot of activity and fair bit of money, if not quite in the same league as nuclear-powered submarines: but is it making a difference? Some arts and cultural organisations are in better shape than when they emerged from the twin disasters of Coalition government and Covid-19. They are also in a game of catch-up. It is not as if they have been given the money that they missed out on over a decade: no government can ever do that.

The cost-of-living crisis has prevented organisations from rebuilding audiences to pre-pandemic levels. Live venues are struggling, music festivals closing, and too many artists and musicians earning very low incomes. People with access to a wide array of entertainment options at home are less inclined to spend money going out or even just to buy a book. In many ways, the story of the arts reflects that of the government as a whole: good intentions confounded by economic conditions and a government that hasn’t been all that good at stamping its own values and priorities – in this case, creativity and inclusion – on the nation.

Albanese’s is a government that often seems to behave as if it has a conservative Queensland regional voter looking over one shoulder and a feral Murdoch media commentator peering over the other. It is therefore entirely to its credit, and to that of Tony Burke as arts minister, that it has managed to smuggle a pretty decent arts policy into the mix given all the constraints.

Yet that sense of disappointment remains. There has recently been a divisive controversy over Creative Australia’s withdrawal of the commission for the Venice Biennale awarded to Khaled Sabsabi and his curator, Michael Dagostino, on the basis of objections to a video montage about 9/11 created by Sabsabi almost twenty years ago. Burke called the CEO of Creative Australia after the matter was raised by the Coalition shadow minister in Senate question time, but denies influencing the decision. Members of the arts community are furious. There have been recriminations and resignations.

It has been a squalid, destructive affair that will surely live on as an example of the poisonous impact of the culture wars on the arts in these intolerant times. But it is the election outcome that will determine whether it is also seen as a cardboard cutout epitaph to a Labor government that lacked the will to deliver on the cultural vision that Albanese and Burke articulated with such zest and optimism at St Kilda’s Espy on a summer’s day only a little more than two years ago.

Dennis Altman

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Catriona Menzies-Pike reviews ‘The Cancel Culture Panic: How an American obsession went global’ by Adrian Daub
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Each year the Macquarie Dictionary convenes a panel to select a word of the year. In 2019, the panel chose ‘cancel culture’, which it defined as ‘the attitudes within a community which call for or bring about the withdrawal of support from a public figure’. Since then, cancel culture has been a preoccupation of Australian journalists and politicians, with cancellation serving as shorthand for punishment for expressing dissenting views, and sometimes just for being out of favour with a powerful and homogeneous cohort of unnamed leftists.
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Each year the Macquarie Dictionary convenes a panel to select a word of the year. In 2019, the panel chose ‘cancel culture’, which it defined as ‘the attitudes within a community which call for or bring about the withdrawal of support from a public figure’. Since then, cancel culture has been a preoccupation of Australian journalists and politicians, with cancellation serving as shorthand for punishment for expressing dissenting views, and sometimes just for being out of favour with a powerful and homogeneous cohort of unnamed leftists.

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Phillip Deery reviews ‘Lost Souls: Soviet displaced persons and the birth of the Cold War’ by Sheila Fitzpatrick
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Many students of Australian history are aware of a particularly ugly cartoon published in the Bulletin in December 1946. ‘The Pied Harper’ depicted a hook-nosed Arthur Calwell playing a Jew’s harp welcoming a shipload of ‘imports’ (Jews) into Australia. This was the stereotypical image: bearded, unattractive, and similarly hook-nosed. The analogy with the legendary Pied Piper of Hamelin was clear. In contrast – and to assuage such public anxieties about mass migration – were the published photographs in January 1948 of Calwell, the immigration minister, celebrating Nordic-looking ‘beautiful Balts’, as he termed them, on their arrival to Australia.
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Many students of Australian history are aware of a particularly ugly cartoon published in the Bulletin in December 1946. ‘The Pied Harper’ depicted a hook-nosed Arthur Calwell playing a Jew’s harp welcoming a shipload of ‘imports’ (Jews) into Australia. This was the stereotypical image: bearded, unattractive, and similarly hook-nosed. The analogy with the legendary Pied Piper of Hamelin was clear. In contrast – and to assuage such public anxieties about mass migration – were the published photographs in January 1948 of Calwell, the immigration minister, celebrating Nordic-looking ‘beautiful Balts’, as he termed them, on their arrival to Australia.

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Margaret Plant reviews ‘Venice: The remarkable history of the lagoon city’ by Dennis Romano
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Venice is a vast project for an historian. Dennis Romano has written what he calls a ‘remarkable history’, generous in its pursuit over 600 pages, with eighty-five pages of impeccable documentation. It is a revisionary history, not only because Romano goes beyond the end of the Republic in 1797, when Napoleon conquered Venice and planted a Tree of Liberty in St Mark’s Square. The three chapters on Modern and Contemporary Venice bring Romano’s history to the present day.
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Venice is a vast project for an historian. Dennis Romano has written what he calls a ‘remarkable history’, generous in its pursuit over 600 pages, with eighty-five pages of impeccable documentation. It is a revisionary history, not only because Romano goes beyond the end of the Republic in 1797, when Napoleon conquered Venice and planted a Tree of Liberty in St Mark’s Square. The three chapters on Modern and Contemporary Venice bring Romano’s history to the present day.

Read more: Margaret Plant reviews ‘Venice: The remarkable history of the lagoon city’ by Dennis Romano

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Seumas Spark reviews ‘Black Convicts: How slavery shaped Australia’ by Santilla Chingaipe
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This is not a book for Scott Morrison, who, as prime minister, declared that Australian history was free of the stain of slavery. Santilla Chingaipe proves otherwise. As she states in her introduction, a key theme of Black Convicts is the exploration of ‘how slavery shaped modern Australia’. In the context of this book, ‘slavery’ is both a specific and an umbrella term for different forms of labour exploitation pursued by the British empire between the 1600s and the 1800s. Chingaipe argues that slavery, convictism, and indentured servitude were linked through a fundamental premise: the abuse and exploitation of people for financial gain. Her primary focus is on convicts, as the title suggests, and how Black men, women, and children transported to Australia ultimately were victims of the same system that enslaved their forebears. These convicts were not chattel slaves – many had once known liberty, and would again – but the direction of their lives, in common with the lives of Black people kept as property and forced to labour on plantations in the Americas, was shaped by colonial masters who placed profit over morality.
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This is not a book for Scott Morrison, who, as prime minister, declared that Australian history was free of the stain of slavery. Santilla Chingaipe proves otherwise. As she states in her introduction, a key theme of Black Convicts is the exploration of ‘how slavery shaped modern Australia’. In the context of this book, ‘slavery’ is both a specific and an umbrella term for different forms of labour exploitation pursued by the British empire between the 1600s and the 1800s. Chingaipe argues that slavery, convictism, and indentured servitude were linked through a fundamental premise: the abuse and exploitation of people for financial gain. Her primary focus is on convicts, as the title suggests, and how Black men, women, and children transported to Australia ultimately were victims of the same system that enslaved their forebears. These convicts were not chattel slaves – many had once known liberty, and would again – but the direction of their lives, in common with the lives of Black people kept as property and forced to labour on plantations in the Americas, was shaped by colonial masters who placed profit over morality.

Read more: Seumas Spark reviews ‘Black Convicts: How slavery shaped Australia’ by Santilla Chingaipe

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Miles Pattenden reviews ‘Hope: The autobiography’ by Pope Francis and translated from the Italian by Richard Dixon
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The celebrity ghost-written memoir is the non-fiction form de nos jours. Publishers see it as a winner that combines quality narrative with mass-market appeal. Such memoirs do not even need to contain fresh insight when there is an established fanbase. Just ask Prince Harry about the trouble it causes when a revelation does shock. The idea that a pope should put his name to a co-developed text is nevertheless novel. Of Pope Francis’s predecessors, only that preening Renaissance man of letters Pius II Piccolomini contributed to the genre directly. Piccolomini’s Commentaries, though light-hearted Latin, are also a self-indulgent, self-justifying piece of self-invention. The precedent for Francis does not encourage.
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The celebrity ghost-written memoir is the non-fiction form de nos jours. Publishers see it as a winner that combines quality narrative with mass-market appeal. Such memoirs do not even need to contain fresh insight when there is an established fanbase. Just ask Prince Harry about the trouble it causes when a revelation does shock. The idea that a pope should put his name to a co-developed text is nevertheless novel. Of Pope Francis’s predecessors, only that preening Renaissance man of letters Pius II Piccolomini contributed to the genre directly. Piccolomini’s Commentaries, though light-hearted Latin, are also a self-indulgent, self-justifying piece of self-invention. The precedent for Francis does not encourage.

Read more: Miles Pattenden reviews ‘Hope: The autobiography’ by Pope Francis and translated from the Italian...

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Patrick Mullins reviews ‘What’s the Big Idea? 34 ideas for a better Australia’ edited by Anna Chang and Alice Grundy and ‘Age of Doubt: Building trust in a world of misinformation’ edited by Tracey Kirkland and Gavin Fang
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Australia is timid, insular, conservative. It is unimaginative, hidebound to old orthodoxies, blind to readily identifiable truths. It is meeting with little effective action a host of crises: violence against women, an impending climate catastrophe, intergenerational economic inequality. It has a profound disregard for its First Nations people and, despite a long and significant history of immigration, is hostile to people of colour and people who seek to emigrate to it by boat. It dismisses the arts as so much wankery and regards its environment as a resource to be plundered. It celebrates the philistine and esteems the mining industry as a saviour. Its people cannot lift their eyes beyond parochial and short-term self-interest; the threads that bind them to their communities are fraying. Its public debates are vulnerable to misinformation and disinformation, are dominated by special interests, and are conducted at a volume and pitch too loud and too rancorous to be resolved in ways that serve a common good.
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Australia is timid, insular, conservative. It is unimaginative, hidebound to old orthodoxies, blind to readily identifiable truths. It is meeting with little effective action a host of crises: violence against women, an impending climate catastrophe, intergenerational economic inequality. It has a profound disregard for its First Nations people and, despite a long and significant history of immigration, is hostile to people of colour and people who seek to emigrate to it by boat. It dismisses the arts as so much wankery and regards its environment as a resource to be plundered. It celebrates the philistine and esteems the mining industry as a saviour. Its people cannot lift their eyes beyond parochial and short-term self-interest; the threads that bind them to their communities are fraying. Its public debates are vulnerable to misinformation and disinformation, are dominated by special interests, and are conducted at a volume and pitch too loud and too rancorous to be resolved in ways that serve a common good.

Read more: Patrick Mullins reviews ‘What’s the Big Idea? 34 ideas for a better Australia’ edited by Anna...

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David Jack reviews ‘Vaccine Nation: Science, reason and the threat to 200 years of progress’ by Raina MacIntyre
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The Covid-19 pandemic changed our relationship with public health, perhaps irreparably. For many, it also changed their relationship to vaccination. Before Covid-19, few questioned the role of vaccines in public health. However, vaccine mandates, which were conflated – rightly or wrongly – with other mandated health measures, such as social distancing, face masks, and protracted lockdowns, meant that being vaccinated equated to an assault on individual freedom and well-being, the opposite of how vaccines were viewed in the past. Faith in the science supporting them is falling rapidly. According to leading epidemiologist Raina MacIntyre, the ‘impact of the anti-science movement and medical disinformation since the Covid-19 pandemic has been far-reaching’, resulting in lower vaccination rates across many preventable diseases. Add to this the ‘demonization of public health’ following the pandemic and the growing threat of a new pandemic, and you have a perfect public health storm brewing.
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The Covid-19 pandemic changed our relationship with public health, perhaps irreparably. For many, it also changed their relationship to vaccination. Before Covid-19, few questioned the role of vaccines in public health. However, vaccine mandates, which were conflated – rightly or wrongly – with other mandated health measures, such as social distancing, face masks, and protracted lockdowns, meant that being vaccinated equated to an assault on individual freedom and well-being, the opposite of how vaccines were viewed in the past. Faith in the science supporting them is falling rapidly. According to leading epidemiologist Raina MacIntyre, the ‘impact of the anti-science movement and medical disinformation since the Covid-19 pandemic has been far-reaching’, resulting in lower vaccination rates across many preventable diseases. Add to this the ‘demonization of public health’ following the pandemic and the growing threat of a new pandemic, and you have a perfect public health storm brewing.

Read more: David Jack reviews ‘Vaccine Nation: Science, reason and the threat to 200 years of progress’ by...

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‘Cordon Sanitaire’, a new poem by Adam Aitken
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Where the plantations begin
The scent of the earth, the true-born.
A foot on the earth, your earth.
An electrified fence to keep the cows from straying.
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‘Letter from Tbilisi’ by Scott McCulloch
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Night after night, the protests swirl into one. Slogans blast through the distorted echo of plastic megaphones. Whistles are blown at such a piercing volume that my ears ring when sleep eventually comes, usually around 7 am. Blockades close the city’s main arteries and highways. Police in riot gear are deployed to each of the three main roads that lead in and out of the city. Rustaveli Avenue, the main street in Tbilisi, Georgia’s capital and largest city, has once again become the nation’s political fault line.
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Before the nearest objects and furthest ideas,
before this universe, this life,
maybe one at a time or in groups,
maybe in a straight line or in utter chaos
enters us,
rushes into us!
What do we possess?
Perhaps this second,
this second between sleep and waking –
like an Eden
between two countries at war.

from Besik Kharanauli’s The Lame Doll (1973)
(translated by Timothy Kercher and Ani Kopaliani)

 

Night after night, the protests swirl into one. Slogans blast through the distorted echo of plastic megaphones. Whistles are blown at such a piercing volume that my ears ring when sleep eventually comes, usually around 7 am. Blockades close the city’s main arteries and highways. Police in riot gear are deployed to each of the three main roads that lead in and out of the city. Rustaveli Avenue, the main street in Tbilisi, Georgia’s capital and largest city, has once again become the nation’s political fault line.

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Morag Fraser reviews ‘Memorial Days by Geraldine Brooks’
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Tony Horwitz, fêted American journalist-historian, died in 2019 – on the last Monday in May, a day when America ritually honours its war dead and heralds the beginning of summer. Horwitz was sixty. For his wife, Australian journalist and novelist Geraldine Brooks, his death was more than an ironic anomaly: it was an inconceivable rupture in time:
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Book 1 Biblio: Hachette, $32.99 hb, 212 pp
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Tony Horwitz, fêted American journalist-historian, died in 2019 – on the last Monday in May, a day when America ritually honours its war dead and heralds the beginning of summer. Horwitz was sixty. For his wife, Australian journalist and novelist Geraldine Brooks, his death was more than an ironic anomaly: it was an inconceivable rupture in time:

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Joan Beaumont reviews ‘Bill’s Secrets: Class, war and ambition’ by Belinda Probert
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Genealogy television programs like Who Do You Think You Are? often feature the celebrity gasping – in surprise, excitement, even alarm – as details of their family tree are revealed. Belinda Probert, a distinguished British-born Melbourne academic, had her own moment of incredulity when, four months after her father, Bill, was buried in 1994, her family received a letter from his nephew Denzil. For Denzil, Bill was not Bill, but Uncle Roy, who had spent his childhood living in an impoverished Welsh coal mining village in the Rhondda, and whose mother and siblings were alive when Bill’s children were born. All this was complete news to Bill’s family.
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Book 1 Biblio: Upswell, $29.99 pb, 266 pp
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Genealogy television programs like Who Do You Think You Are? often feature the celebrity gasping – in surprise, excitement, even alarm – as details of their family tree are revealed. Belinda Probert, a distinguished British-born Melbourne academic, had her own moment of incredulity when, four months after her father, Bill, was buried in 1994, her family received a letter from his nephew Denzil. For Denzil, Bill was not Bill, but Uncle Roy, who had spent his childhood living in an impoverished Welsh coal mining village in the Rhondda, and whose mother and siblings were alive when Bill’s children were born. All this was complete news to Bill’s family.

Read more: Joan Beaumont reviews ‘Bill’s Secrets: Class, war and ambition’ by Belinda Probert

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A. Frances Johnson reviews ‘Gutsy Girls: Love, poetry and sisterhood’ by Josie McSkimming
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I lament hearing the late poet Dorothy Porter (1954–2008) read in public only once, having devoured her work voraciously over the years. In the National Portrait Gallery, I once came across Rick Amor’s smallish 2002 portrait of Porter, which shows candid brown eyes framed by hawkish eyebrows inherited from her renowned barrister father, Chester Porter. ‘Chester Porter walks on water’ was her father’s vainglorious self-descriptor when he wasn’t monikered as ‘The Smiling Funnel-web’ at the bar (see Chester Porter, Walking On Water: A life in the law, 2003).
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I lament hearing the late poet Dorothy Porter (1954–2008) read in public only once, having devoured her work voraciously over the years. In the National Portrait Gallery, I once came across Rick Amor’s smallish 2002 portrait of Porter, which shows candid brown eyes framed by hawkish eyebrows inherited from her renowned barrister father, Chester Porter. ‘Chester Porter walks on water’ was her father’s vainglorious self-descriptor when he wasn’t monikered as ‘The Smiling Funnel-web’ at the bar (see Chester Porter, Walking On Water: A life in the law, 2003).

Read more: A. Frances Johnson reviews ‘Gutsy Girls: Love, poetry and sisterhood’ by Josie McSkimming

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Brenda Niall reviews ‘Expatriates of No Country: The letters of Shirley Hazzard and Donald Keene’ edited by Brigitta Olubas
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Biographers nearly always rejoice to find a bundle of letters. If both sides of a correspondence have survived, it doubles the pleasure. At its best, an exchange that was maintained over a long period will illuminate personality, time, and place. Love letters are probably the most highly prized. Whether or not the lovers have the gift of words, their closeness in a relationship brings a sense of reality. Readers of some self-revealing intimate letters may feel like intruders, uninvited watchers at a private theatre for which they didn’t buy a ticket.
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Book 1 Title: Expatriates of No Country
Book 1 Subtitle: The letters of Shirley Hazzard and Donald Keene
Book Author: Brigitta Olubas
Book 1 Biblio: Columbia University Press, US$22 pb, 216 pp
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Biographers nearly always rejoice to find a bundle of letters. If both sides of a correspondence have survived, it doubles the pleasure. At its best, an exchange that was maintained over a long period will illuminate personality, time, and place. Love letters are probably the most highly prized. Whether or not the lovers have the gift of words, their closeness in a relationship brings a sense of reality. Readers of some self-revealing intimate letters may feel like intruders, uninvited watchers at a private theatre for which they didn’t buy a ticket.

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Morgan Nunan reviews ‘Orpheus Nine’ by Chris Flynn
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Chris Flynn’s Orpheus Nine takes as its title the name given to the grisly mass death event that provides the novel’s premise and animates its plot. The event afflicts people across the globe at an identical moment and in an identical way, and its ill-fated victims are all children, specifically nine-year-olds. Curious already, owing to its scale and arbitrary application, this phenomenon proves all the stranger for what occurs immediately before these children finally succumb to its brutal consequences. Before their bodies swell and distort, before their organs fail due to an overload of sodium chloride, they sing, in angelic chorus, a Latin translation of a verse from King Lear: ‘As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods; / They kill us for their sport.’
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Book 1 Title: Orpheus Nine
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Chris Flynn’s Orpheus Nine takes as its title the name given to the grisly mass death event that provides the novel’s premise and animates its plot. The event afflicts people across the globe at an identical moment and in an identical way, and its ill-fated victims are all children, specifically nine-year-olds. Curious already, owing to its scale and arbitrary application, this phenomenon proves all the stranger for what occurs immediately before these children finally succumb to its brutal consequences. Before their bodies swell and distort, before their organs fail due to an overload of sodium chloride, they sing, in angelic chorus, a Latin translation of a verse from King Lear: ‘As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods; / They kill us for their sport.’

Read more: Morgan Nunan reviews ‘Orpheus Nine’ by Chris Flynn

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Kirsten Tranter reviews ‘Elegy, Southwest: A novel’ by Madeleine Watts
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The themes in Elegy, Southwest are big, nothing less than life and death. Madeleine Watts sets them against a backdrop of monumental scale: the endless desert vistas of the American south-west, the overwhelming monolith of the Hoover Dam, the massive grandeur of the Grand Canyon. The narrative Watts has crafted to explore these big themes rejects anything epic and instead goes small-scale, bringing an almost microscopic lens to the emotional world of a marriage coming apart.
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Book 1 Biblio: Ultimo Press, $34.99 pb, 276 pp
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The themes in Elegy, Southwest are big, nothing less than life and death. Madeleine Watts sets them against a backdrop of monumental scale: the endless desert vistas of the American south-west, the overwhelming monolith of the Hoover Dam, the massive grandeur of the Grand Canyon. The narrative Watts has crafted to explore these big themes rejects anything epic and instead goes small-scale, bringing an almost microscopic lens to the emotional world of a marriage coming apart.

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Will Hunt reviews ‘The Dream Hotel: A novel’ by Laila Lalami
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On 22 January 1840, the Mettray Penal Colony officially opened. Mettray was a French prison farm for juvenile criminals that was imitated by other incarceration programs throughout Europe as a disciplinary model. For Michel Foucault, in Discipline and Punish (1975), its creation was a turning point in human power relations, as its structure reconfigured punishment as discipline and surveillance; it transformed society into a carceral culture. As Foucault claims, power and knowledge are one and the same.
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On 22 January 1840, the Mettray Penal Colony officially opened. Mettray was a French prison farm for juvenile criminals that was imitated by other incarceration programs throughout Europe as a disciplinary model. For Michel Foucault, in Discipline and Punish (1975), its creation was a turning point in human power relations, as its structure reconfigured punishment as discipline and surveillance; it transformed society into a carceral culture. As Foucault claims, power and knowledge are one and the same.

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Jason Steger reviews ‘Love Unedited’ by Caro Llewellyn
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Would-be novelists used to be told that they should write about what they knew. That’s why, over the years, countless volumes have appeared that were at the very least semi-autobiographical.
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Would-be novelists used to be told that they should write about what they knew. That’s why, over the years, countless volumes have appeared that were at the very least semi-autobiographical.

These days, not everyone agrees with that advice. Nobel laureate Kazuo Ishiguro called it the stupidest he had ever heard: ‘It encourages people to write a dull autobiography. It’s the reverse of firing the imagination and potential of writers.’ But it is advice that Caro Llewellyn, who has already written three works of non-fiction, including her Stella Prize-shortlisted memoir, Diving into Glass (2019), has embraced with enthusiasm in her first novel. She has written a book that is literary without really being what might be called a literary novel. While Love Unedited is firmly located in the world of writing and publishing, it is at heart a love story – two actually – and a mystery.

Read more: Jason Steger reviews ‘Love Unedited’ by Caro Llewellyn

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Jacqueline Kent reviews ‘Blue Poles: Jackson Pollock, Gough Whitlam and the painting that changed a nation’ by Tom McIlroy
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This book is welcome. The purchase of Blue Poles, the most expensive American painting ever bought by an Australian gallery – for more than US$2 million in 1973 – brought into focus a range of Australian cultural and political attitudes of the 1970s. But what are we to make of the subtitle? Was Blue Poles really ‘the painting that changed a nation’?
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Book 1 Title: Blue Poles
Book 1 Subtitle: Jackson Pollock, Gough Whitlam and the painting that changed a nation
Book Author: Tom McIlroy
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This book is welcome. The purchase of Blue Poles, the most expensive American painting ever bought by an Australian gallery – for more than US$2 million in 1973 – brought into focus a range of Australian cultural and political attitudes of the 1970s. But what are we to make of the subtitle? Was Blue Poles really ‘the painting that changed a nation’?

Tom McIlroy starts off with a straightforward biography. Jackson Pollock, born in 1912 into an itinerant Wyoming farming family, decided at the age of eleven to become an artist. He moved to Los Angeles and New York to study art and came into contact with influential art dealers and other established and emerging artists, including Max Ernst and Robert Motherwell. He began developing his famous ‘drip technique’ in the New York studio of the Mexican muralist David Siqueiros, who poured, dribbled, and spattered paint across large canvases on the floor, using unorthodox tools such as airbrushes.

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Poet of the Month with Gregory Day
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Gregory Day is a writer and musician from the west coast of Victoria. He lives on Wadawurrung country. Gregory is a winner of the Australian Literature Society Gold Medal, the Nature Conservancy Australia Nature Writing Prize, and the Patrick White Award for his ongoing contribution to Australian literature. He has twice been shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Award, most recently in 2024 for The Bell of the World. His newest collection, Southsightedness, was published in April by Transit Lounge.
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Photograph Simon O'Dwyer. The Age Newspaper 'Spectrum'.030615. Photograph Shows. Gregory day author photographed near the Lorne Pier. Gregory has written a new novel titled 'Archipelago of Souls'.Gregory Day is a writer and musician from the west coast of Victoria. He lives on Wadawurrung country.  Gregory is a winner of the Australian Literature Society Gold Medal, the Nature Conservancy Australia Nature Writing Prize, and the Patrick White Award for his ongoing contribution to Australian literature. He has twice been shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Award, most recently in 2024 for The Bell of the World. His newest collection, Southsightedness, was published in April by Transit Lounge.


 

 

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Julie Ewington reviews ‘My Own Sort of Heaven: A life of Rosalie Gascoigne’ by Nicola Francis
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Rosalie Gascoigne seems exemplary of the popular fable of the late-blooming woman artist. Famously, her first exhibition was in 1974, when she was fifty-seven. This swiftly led to national recognition, then international exposure at the 1982 Venice Biennale. So this is a story for the times. But the achievement of Nicola Francis, the artist’s biographer, is to unpack how, in Gascoigne’s case, artistic success in later life was the result of long, careful training in two other creative pursuits: flower arranging, as taught by the English authority Constance Spry; then, crucially, training and a thriving career in the most radical form of ikebana, the Japanese art of flower arrangement, through the Sogetsu School popularised in Australia by Norman Sparnon.
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Book 1 Title: My Own Sort of Heaven
Book 1 Subtitle: A life of Rosalie Gascoigne
Book Author: Nicola Francis
Book 1 Biblio: ANU Press, $85 pb, 410 pp
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Rosalie Gascoigne seems exemplary of the popular fable of the late-blooming woman artist. Famously, her first exhibition was in 1974, when she was fifty-seven. This swiftly led to national recognition, then international exposure at the 1982 Venice Biennale. So this is a story for the times. But the achievement of Nicola Francis, the artist’s biographer, is to unpack how, in Gascoigne’s case, artistic success in later life was the result of long, careful training in two other creative pursuits: flower arranging, as taught by the English authority Constance Spry; then, crucially, training and a thriving career in the most radical form of ikebana, the Japanese art of flower arrangement, through the Sogetsu School popularised in Australia by Norman Sparnon.

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Anders Villani reviews ‘Metropole: New poems’ by Ken Bolton
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Ben Sando Ode’, the second poem in Ken Bolton’s new collection, Metropole, begins with an epigraph from Ted Berrigan: ‘My dream a drink / with Ira Hayes / we discuss the code of the west.’ The poem is pure Bolton: a jovial flâneur perambulates through both external space – Adelaide, where passers-by make ‘BIZARRE ATTEMPTS / AT NORMALCY’ – and an inner life brimming with peers and heroes, quotations, non sequiturs, art criticism, existential musings, and the hum of a poem being made.
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‘Ben Sando Ode’, the second poem in Ken Bolton’s new collection, Metropole, begins with an epigraph from Ted Berrigan: ‘My dream a drink / with Ira Hayes / we discuss the code of the west.’ The poem is pure Bolton: a jovial flâneur perambulates through both external space – Adelaide, where passers-by make ‘BIZARRE ATTEMPTS / AT NORMALCY’ – and an inner life brimming with peers and heroes, quotations, non sequiturs, art criticism, existential musings, and the hum of a poem being made.

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Paul Kane reviews ‘At the Louvre: Poems by 100 contemporary world poets’ edited by Antoine Caro, Edwin Frank, and Donatien Grau
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‘Poetry is a speaking picture,’ said Simonides of Keos, and ‘painting a silent poetry’. From ancient Greece until now, these ‘sister arts’ have been frequently conjoined, though it is most often poetry that speaks to or for painting rather than the reverse. We have come to call this interaction ekphrasis (literally, a ‘speaking out’), usually defined as ‘a verbal description of a work of art’. In Classical times it was a school exercise for developing rhetorical skills, but ever since Homer’s elaborate depiction of the shield of Achilles in the Iliad, it has been co-opted by poets, especially during the last century.
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Book 1 Title: At the Louvre
Book 1 Subtitle: Poems by 100 contemporary world poets
Book Author: Antoine Caro, Edwin Frank and Donatien Grau
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‘Poetry is a speaking picture,’ said Simonides of Keos, and ‘painting a silent poetry’. From ancient Greece until now, these ‘sister arts’ have been frequently conjoined, though it is most often poetry that speaks to or for painting rather than the reverse. We have come to call this interaction ekphrasis (literally, a ‘speaking out’), usually defined as ‘a verbal description of a work of art’. In Classical times it was a school exercise for developing rhetorical skills, but ever since Homer’s elaborate depiction of the shield of Achilles in the Iliad, it has been co-opted by poets, especially during the last century.

Read more: Paul Kane reviews ‘At the Louvre: Poems by 100 contemporary world poets’ edited by Antoine Caro,...

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‘Shorebirds’, a new poem by Kate Fagan
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for Yumna Kassab

As the bridge appears the train changes its music
Hollow and open like a drum
Every sentence curves to amplify itself the way blue
                springs over and we say ‘sky’
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Sarah Day reviews ‘An Inventory of Longing’ by Kevin Brophy
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‘About Happiness’, the striking opening poem of Kevin Brophy’s latest collection, An Inventory of Longing, anticipates many that follow in the first half of this book. Empathy and reflectiveness are present in a melding of the individual with the social, with landscape, and with the enigmatic passage of time. The poem contains a moment, and it is timeless. It takes its readers on a walk along ‘the river’ in Paris where, at a confluence with a seamy canal, we meet a homeless man who sleeps beneath plastic sheets and shares his phone video of Sufi dancers, whose songs give him happiness and ‘can cure hunger’. ‘Meet’ is the operative word; this is not indifferent observation, but a human exchange. That only one of the parties can eventually walk away is troubling, for reader and speaker. The written poem is evidence of this. The encounter is humbling; the poem reflects deeply on the nature of happiness and, equally, suffering, in the broader context of time, which ‘slips ahead and past us, / pauseless as this river’s sleepless spinning onward happy rush’. In context, the final use of ‘happy’ becomes nuanced.
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Book 1 Title: An Inventory of Longing
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‘About Happiness’, the striking opening poem of Kevin Brophy’s latest collection, An Inventory of Longing, anticipates many that follow in the first half of this book. Empathy and reflectiveness are present in a melding of the individual with the social, with landscape, and with the enigmatic passage of time. The poem contains a moment, and it is timeless. It takes its readers on a walk along ‘the river’ in Paris where, at a confluence with a seamy canal, we meet a homeless man who sleeps beneath plastic sheets and shares his phone video of Sufi dancers, whose songs give him happiness and ‘can cure hunger’. ‘Meet’ is the operative word; this is not indifferent observation, but a human exchange. That only one of the parties can eventually walk away is troubling, for reader and speaker. The written poem is evidence of this. The encounter is humbling; the poem reflects deeply on the nature of happiness and, equally, suffering, in the broader context of time, which ‘slips ahead and past us, / pauseless as this river’s sleepless spinning onward happy rush’. In context, the final use of ‘happy’ becomes nuanced.

Read more: Sarah Day reviews ‘An Inventory of Longing’ by Kevin Brophy

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Brian Nelson reviews ‘Marcel Proust: A very short introduction’ by Joshua Landy
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For many, Marcel Proust (1871–1922) is the supreme European writer of the twentieth century. His seven-volume masterpiece, À la recherche du temps perdu (1913–27), is astonishing in the range of its themes and ideas. It is a philosophical novel about time, memory, imagination, and art; a psychological novel about sexuality, love, and jealousy; a sociological novel about how the social world is organised into groups and how our identities are formed by those groups; a political novel containing acute analyses of class perceptions, social mobility, racism, homophobia, and war; and a comic novel of manners, character, and language. In Search of Lost Time (as it is now commonly translated) is also a boldly experimental novel, quite unlike what contemporary readers understood to be a work of fiction. Proust is a key figure in the development of modernism: he redefined the boundaries of fiction, breaking open the French heritage of realism by shifting the focus of the novel from ‘the real’ to the creative mind of the novelist.
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Book 1 Subtitle: A very short introduction
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Book 1 Biblio: Oxford University Press, £8.99 pb, 170 pp
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For many, Marcel Proust (1871–1922) is the supreme European writer of the twentieth century. His seven-volume masterpiece, Àla recherche du temps perdu (1913–27), is astonishing in the range of its themes and ideas. It is a philosophical novel about time, memory, imagination, and art; a psychological novel about sexuality, love, and jealousy; a sociological novel about how the social world is organised into groups and how our identities are formed by those groups; a political novel containing acute analyses of class perceptions, social mobility, racism, homophobia, and war; and a comic novel of manners, character, and language. In Search of Lost Time (as it is now commonly translated) is also a boldly experimental novel, quite unlike what contemporary readers understood to be a work of fiction. Proust is a key figure in the development of modernism: he redefined the boundaries of fiction, breaking open the French heritage of realism by shifting the focus of the novel from ‘the real’ to the creative mind of the novelist.

Read more: Brian Nelson reviews ‘Marcel Proust: A very short introduction’ by Joshua Landy

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Paul Kildea reviews ‘The Tenderness of Silent Minds: Benjamin Britten and his War Requiem’ by Martha C. Nussbaum
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Of  Gustav Mahler’s numerous military sorties, ‘Wo die schönen Trompeten blasen’, a miniature from Des Knaben Wunderhorn, is surely the most affecting. It is the eve of battle, and a young woman is visited by her lover, distant trumpet fanfares and dull drumbeats in the air. But perhaps the lover is already dead and it is his spirit she encounters – or it is a premonition of what the morrow will bring. Regardless, Mahler evokes a mixture of tenderness and gloomy foreboding as the young soldier tells his lover that he is going to the green heath far away. ‘There where the splendid trumpets sound / There is my home of green turf.’
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Book 1 Title: The Tenderness of Silent Minds
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Book Author: Martha C. Nussbaum
Book 1 Biblio: Oxford University Press, £19.99 hb, 295 pp
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Of Gustav Mahler’s numerous military sorties, ‘Wo die schönen Trompeten blasen’, a miniature from Des Knaben Wunderhorn, is surely the most affecting. It is the eve of battle, and a young woman is visited by her lover, distant trumpet fanfares and dull drumbeats in the air. But perhaps the lover is already dead and it is his spirit she encounters – or it is a premonition of what the morrow will bring. Regardless, Mahler evokes a mixture of tenderness and gloomy foreboding as the young soldier tells his lover that he is going to the green heath far away. ‘There where the splendid trumpets sound / There is my home of green turf.’

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David Garrioch reviews ‘An Environmental History of France: Making the landscape, 1770-2020’ by Peter McPhee
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Article Title: 2,800 oaks per warship
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In a mountain area of south-eastern France that I know well, the locals will often respond to a comment on the beauty of the valleys by remarking glumly that they are not what they were: the forest is expanding, they say. We might see reforestation as a good thing, restoring hillsides devegetated and exposed to erosion by goats and sheep, but to them it marks the loss of a beloved familiar landscape. This bears out a point that Peter McPhee makes throughout his engaging new book, An Environmental History of France: that people have an idealised image of French landscapes, perceiving them as beautiful and timeless. In fact, he shows, they are the product of human activity, most markedly over the past 150 years. In that time, the bay around Mont-Saint-Michel has been largely reclaimed for farming, the hedgerows of Normandy have been destroyed, and freeways and fast train lines have sliced through the countryside.
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Book 1 Biblio: Bloomsbury, $35.99 pb, 224 pp
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In a mountain area of south-eastern France that I know well, the locals will often respond to a comment on the beauty of the valleys by remarking glumly that they are not what they were: the forest is expanding, they say. We might see reforestation as a good thing, restoring hillsides devegetated and exposed to erosion by goats and sheep, but to them it marks the loss of a beloved familiar landscape. This bears out a point that Peter McPhee makes throughout his engaging new book, An Environmental History of France: that people have an idealised image of French landscapes, perceiving them as beautiful and timeless. In fact, he shows, they are the product of human activity, most markedly over the past 150 years. In that time, the bay around Mont-Saint-Michel has been largely reclaimed for farming, the hedgerows of Normandy have been destroyed, and freeways and fast train lines have sliced through the countryside.

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Gregory Day reviews ‘Enchantment by Birds: A history of birdwatching in 22 species’ by Russell McGregor
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Early on in Russell McGregor’s new book on the history of birdwatching in Australia, he highlights the importance of the initial epiphany most birdwatchers experience when their interest first sparks. This moment of what Julian Huxley called ‘sudden glory’ can happen anywhere and at any time, city or country, day or night, and often fans out into an obsession, sometimes a profession, that endures through a lifetime.
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Book 1 Biblio: Scribe, $39.99 pb, 309 pp
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Early on in Russell McGregor’s new book on the history of birdwatching in Australia, he highlights the importance of the initial epiphany most birdwatchers experience when their interest first sparks. This moment of what Julian Huxley called ‘sudden glory’ can happen anywhere and at any time, city or country, day or night, and often fans out into an obsession, sometimes a profession, that endures through a lifetime.

Read more: Gregory Day reviews ‘Enchantment by Birds: A history of birdwatching in 22 species’ by Russell...

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Edwin Frank is the founder and editor of the NYRB Classics series and the editorial director of New York Review Books. He is also the author of Snake Train: Poems 1984-2013 and Stranger than Fiction: Lives of the Twentieth-Century Novel. He co-edited At the Louvre: Poems by 100 contemporary world poets, reviewed on page 55.
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Edwin Frank NEW 2025Edwin Frank is the founder and editor of the NYRB Classics series and the editorial director of New York Review Books. He is also the author of Snake Train: Poems 1984-2013 and Stranger than Fiction: Lives of the Twentieth-Century Novel. He co-edited At the Louvre: Poems by 100 contemporary world poets, reviewed on page 55.

 

 

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Michael Shmith reviews ‘Nellie Melba: The legend lives – a biography’ by Richard Davis
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Product placement, admittedly not a term in vogue in Madame Melba’s time (1861-1931), was lucratively and occasionally indiscriminately deployed in her name. Since that name was itself an invention (one decided upon in late 1886, by Mrs Armstrong, née Mitchell, at the behest of her teacher, Madame Marchesi), it was officially or blatantly unofficially applied to everything from throat lozenges and mouthwash to cigarettes, motorcycles, and a sewing machine. Then, of course, there are Escoffier’s tasty tributes: Pêches Melba and Melba Toast – and let’s not forget that small town in Idaho, Melba (pop. 600). This was named not directly after Nellie, but a Melba once removed: the daughter of the man who founded the town in 1912. At the time, Melba was as fashionable a name for newborn girls in the United States as it was in Britain.
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Product placement, admittedly not a term in vogue in Madame Melba’s time (1861-1931), was lucratively and occasionally indiscriminately deployed in her name. Since that name was itself an invention (one decided upon in late 1886, by Mrs Armstrong, née Mitchell, at the behest of her teacher, Madame Marchesi), it was officially or blatantly unofficially applied to everything from throat lozenges and mouthwash to cigarettes, motorcycles, and a sewing machine. Then, of course, there are Escoffier’s tasty tributes: Pêches Melba and Melba Toast – and let’s not forget that small town in Idaho, Melba (pop. 600). This was named not directly after Nellie, but a Melba once removed: the daughter of the man who founded the town in 1912. At the time, Melba was as fashionable a name for newborn girls in the United States as it was in Britain.

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Sam Elkin reviews ‘Bonjour, Mademoiselle!: April Ashley and the pursuit of a lovely life’ by Jacqueline Kent and Tom Roberts
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At a time when President Donald Trump seeks to extinguish the legal recognition of trans and gender diverse people, Bonjour, Mademoiselle! and the life of April Ashley feel unexpectedly topical. Ashley, best known in Australia for her role in Corbett v Corbett, a precedent-setting divorce case that set back the legal right of trans people for generations, is the subject of a new biography by Jacqueline Kent and Tom Roberts.
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At a time when President Donald Trump seeks to extinguish the legal recognition of trans and gender diverse people, Bonjour, Mademoiselle! and the life of April Ashley feel unexpectedly topical. Ashley, best known in Australia for her role in Corbett v Corbett, a precedent-setting divorce case that set back the legal right of trans people for generations, is the subject of a new biography by Jacqueline Kent and Tom Roberts.

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