Editors tend not to look back – there is simply no time for nostalgia. Many literary editors in Australia work alone, or with one or two part-time assistants. Australian Book Review now has a staff of four (it was three when I began in 2001). This may seem huge, but check out the imprint pages of like publications in London or New York and note the difference. We smile when people ring our office and ask to speak to the advertising manager or the marketing manager. As if!

Often, when people ask me what’s in the current issue or the penultimate one, I draw a blank. I’m too busy thinking about next month or the following one – what’s overdue, what needs special husbandry, what’s likely to excite most interest.

Now, startlingly, I don’t have to worry about coming issues: that’s for others. Inevitably, as I pen this diary (I’ve never been fond of editorials), I have time to reflect on those twenty-four years – further back too. I first wrote for ABR in 1995, somewhat reluctantly, it must be said. My predecessor as Editor, Helen Daniel – who died in late 2000 after years of stalwart service in taxing circumstances – had long tried to persuade me to write reviews. I was wary, mindful of those cautionary lines in Alexander Pope’s Essay on Criticism:

Be sure yourself, and your own reach to know,
How far your genius, taste, and learning go;
Launch not beyond your depth, but be discreet,
And mark that point where sense and dullness meet.

Eventually, Helen prevailed. (Editors are nothing if not persistent.) So I wrote my review, with a kind of absurd tentativeness. First reviews are the hardest, though the hundredth or the thousandth should never be supremely easy. (That shows too.) Mine got me into a spot of bother. Days after it appeared in ABR, I was programmed at the same poetry festival as the author of the book I had anxiously reviewed. (The gods were sporting with me.) He seemed quite bilious when he collared me. Indeed, I began to regret not having taken up pugilism, as my father did as a young recruit down from the Mallee, determined to toughen himself up for the blows that would surely follow on football fields. ‘Thanks, very much, Helen,’ I said to myself. Crisis averted, I began to realise why criticism meant so much to Helen, and, perversely, why I wanted to go on doing it, long before I ever thought of joining ABR.

Reviewers – like editors – can be stubborn creatures.

Poetry was the first thing I added to ABR’s repertoire – not because I happen to be a poet, but because I felt that any literary magazine worth its salt (like any publishing house, for that matter) should publish poetry. ‘Human life without some form of poetry,’ as Randall Jarrell reminded us, ‘is not human life but animal existence.’

Gig Ryan and Rosemary Dobson gave us poems for my first issue, and were soon followed by the likes of Robert Adamson, Peter Porter, and Clive James. New poetry is now an established component of ABR, like the Peter Porter Poetry Prize, first offered in 2005 under a different name.

Apt it thus seems to reprint some of my favourite poems from the past quarter of a century. Salutations to our featured octet (or their shades) and to the hundreds of poets who have enriched our pages.

People have been most generous since I announced that I was leaving ABR. I’m touched by your remarks, as I am by the reflections that open this issue, written by some of our senior contributors and by the new Editor, Georgina Arnott, with whom I have enjoyed working for two and a half years, especially during the recent and most successful transition. ABR is in excellent hands.

I had no idea that I would edit ABR for so many years. I remember saying to Peter Craven and Robert Manne when they sounded me out about joining the magazine after Helen’s death, ‘Yes, I’ll do it for a couple of years.’ But ABR grows on you, warts and all, deadlines and crises notwithstanding.

What comes through in the many emails and messages I have received in recent months is a tremendous regard for the magazine – its work, its mission, its collective and accumulated clout. We all know, in a slapdash and philistine age, how important this project is. Long may it flourish!

At this benighted time, disfigured by the posturing and platitudes of autocrats and their plutocratic enablers, we could all do with a dash of Noël Coward in our lives: witty, garrulous, debonair, appalled. As I end this piece with thanks to all my friends and colleagues at ABR – staff, board members, contributors, volunteers, interns – and to the subscribers and Patrons who make it all possible, these lyrics from a favourite Coward song seem apropos:

I went to a marvellous party
We played the most wonderful game
Maureen disappeared
And came back in a beard
And we all had to guess at her name

As the song goes, ‘I couldn’t have liked it more.’

Peter Rose

Calibre Essay Prize

Jeanette Mrozinski – an MFA candidate in non-fiction at Washington University in St Louis – has won the 2025 Calibre Essay Prize. Her essay, ‘Eucharist’, is the propulsive story of a bureaucrat and part-time sex worker chasing down life-saving medication and of the nameless saints who come to her aid. Ms Mrozinski becomes the first American to win the Calibre Prize, now in its nineteenth year and long established as one of the world’s leading prizes for an unpublished essay.

The Wakefield Companion

Dear Editor,

Bob Ellis’s disappointment with the new edition of TheWakefield Companion to South Australian History, reviewed by Frank Bongiorno (ABR, March 2025), is naturally disappointing to me as general editor. But in justice to the contributors, Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal, his claim that our work deals largely with ‘European items of interest and Eastern European [sic] artists’ is simply puzzling. This especially when the first eleven articles range from ‘Aboriginal −European Frontier Conflict’ through ‘Aboriginal Histories’ and ‘Aboriginal Land Rights’ (including a whole paragraph on native title) to ‘Aborigines Protection Board’. 

Sarah Holland-Batt

When I think of Peter Rose’s legacy and his immense contributions to Australian letters as Editor of Australian Book Review, there are manifold achievements I might highlight. Peter has wholly transformed the magazine’s ambitions and horizons over his tenure, elevating ABR into an indispensable, world-class publication offering outstanding commentary, criticism, creative work, and coverage of the performing arts. He has shaped the national conversation in infinite ways, offering our best minds scope to debate the pressing issues of our times in complex, nuanced exchanges that are vanishingly rare elsewhere. He has served as a distinguished and tireless public advocate for the value of criticism, the arts, and the humanities, and has done so much to advocate for writers and writing, building prizes, fellowships, and other initiatives that continue to create vital opportunities and recognition for writers today. More quietly but no less diligently, he has also worked tirelessly to protect and preserve ABR as a jewel of Australian literature for generations to come.

Underpinning all these diverse contributions is Peter’s spirit of abiding generosity towards his peers and fellow writers and editors, which I have come to see as his most distinctive legacy, and a spirit I hope will continue to animate ABR in the future. Despite being in possession of world-class intellectual talents that might easily have taken up all his days, Peter is one of those rare writers who has chosen to dedicate much of his professional life to the works of others. Finding and championing new writers, critics, and editors has been Peter’s vocation: one to which he has applied himself with rare zeal, energy, and conviction.

In other hands, ABR might easily have become a publication that courted a small stable of established writers; it is down to Peter and his tireless efforts to discover new talent that we publish hundreds of writers who are new to our pages every decade. I have witnessed firsthand how elated and invigorated Peter is by the discovery of a new talent, and how thrilled he is to bring brilliant new writers to our pages, and to mentor and work alongside talented emerging editors. It is impossible now to quantify how many thousands of writers whose careers Peter has started or supported; suffice to say, few Australian writers’ careers have not been touched in one way or another by Peter, and many of our major critics and writers writing today were afforded their first start in ABR’s pages.

I have been privileged to work closely with Peter since 2017, and as Chair of ABR since 2020; even so, it is difficult for me to fathom at times just how Peter manages to lead all aspects of our extraordinarily busy and vibrant organisation with such calm, grace, and good humour. He is an unstintingly thoughtful, courageous, and principled colleague, one who has always remained flexible and innovative – all qualities firmly present in the magazine’s current iteration and future direction. While Peter’s departure may herald the end of an era at ABR, his guiding spirit of generosity – and the camaraderie he has extended to generations of Australian writers, critics, thinkers, and editors – will endure.

Geordie Williamson

I even recall where I was standing when Peter Rose called to offer my first commission: beneath the chandelier in the lobby of Sydney’s State Theatre. It was intermission. I was watching Satyajit Ray’s The Apu Trilogy. And I enjoyed bathing in the callow glow of the chosen, as the Editor of ABR asked if I would write for him, having heard from Don Anderson, one of my tutors at the University of Sydney’s English Department, that I was a more than usually noisome mansplainer and had read a bit to boot.

That was twenty-five years ago. It’s fair to say that my editorial relationship with Peter Rose has been the longest-lasting and most significant of my quasi-career as a reviewer. Peter gave me a chance, then many more chances. He allowed me to follow my interests, which were often eccentric or hermetically marginal, and he never failed to think of me when something big and bold or weird and gnarly landed on his desk.

Peter was, ideally, a minimal intervention editor, but he was willing to wade in when I delivered unclean copy. His suggestions were always improvements, rather than the stylistic micro-aggressions that can sometimes pass for editorial input. He was that rarest of creatures: a practising creative with his own firm tastes, who was always respectful of those belonging to others. That he was a poet of stature who could also run a small magazine with rigour and dash was a matter for quiet awe.

For all his industry, Peter remains warmly sociable: ever ready to man a raid on the cheese trolley at Grossi Fiorentino or to settle in for one last glass on the way home from a convivial meal. Much of what I know of Australia’s recent intellectual and cultural history I learned from Peter, whose delivery mechanism was the exquisitely turned anecdote.

Peter’s departure from the ABR is a personal loss and the golden spike marking the end of an era. But it is also the start of a new and exciting time for the magazine. I hope to see a late explosion of poetry and prose from Peter’s pen now that his days are roomier.  And may the long lunches continue, ad infinitum.

Sheila Fitzpatrick

I can’t say anything about how Peter Rose as Editor changed ABR because I don’t know what it was like before him. That’s one of the oddities of returning to Australia after decades overseas – not knowing things that someone like me would be assumed to know. From my standpoint, Peter and ABR were among the pleasant surprises of returning.

Peter Rose and Sheila Fitzpatrick in conversation at the State Library of Victoria as Fitzpatrick becomes the third ABR Laureate, 2023

When I left Australia in the mid-1960s, A.A. Phillips’s ‘cultural cringe’ still hit home, and you really needed Musica Viva to bring in first-class international performers, because there weren’t that many here. Before my departure, when as a university student I had a summer job working for Meanjin, Clem Christesen wrote an editorial entitled ‘Please Pass the Pabulum.’ That was my personal cringe moment. I wanted to be an intellectual, but not one whose cultural anxieties produced that kind of preciousness.

I don’t remember exactly how I met Peter, but I think he had identified me as a possible contributor sometime in the 2010s and, in his sociable way, arranged to meet me in Sydney, where I was then living. It seemed natural and easy to agree to write for ABR, and I was subsequently impressed by Peter’s habit of suggesting that I review books that weren’t obviously in my line but in fact appealed to me. That, of course, was one of the benefits of his sociable nature: being interested in his contributors as human beings, he could make a good guess about what they would or wouldn’t like to do.

I have never written a lot of reviews. For the past ten to fifteen years, I’ve just written, albeit fairly regularly, for two publications: the London Review of Books in London, and ABR here. That has the disadvantage that, having developed mild dyslexia as I grew older, I sometimes scramble them as LBR and ARB. Otherwise the arrangement is perfect. For LRB, you write long pieces premised on the assumption that you, the reviewer, are as interesting as the author, and that anything like a straightforward good/bad assessment is a bit crude. For ABR, at least in my interpretation of Peter’s message, you write shorter, punchier reviews that don’t lose sight of the basic task of telling readers what the book is about and helping them decide whether they want to read it. I like alternating these two writerly disciplines.

I have also come to cherish ABR as a reader. For me, it is very useful to get an overview of what’s recently been published, especially outside my own narrow scholarly field. I really appreciate several innovations since I’ve been reading the journal: those (non-review) essays on important political and social topics by people who know and have something interesting to say about them; and the coverage of the arts, particularly opera, which deserves to become an international trend-setter. It’s not hard to recognise Peter in these innovations, and also in the feeling of cultural and intellectual community that has developed among ABR’s staffers and contributors. It’s very sad to farewell him as Editor. But he has left his successor – who of course is already part of the ABR community – a great legacy.

Georgina Arnott

Playwrights have helped me think about Peter Rose’s tenure and legacy at ABR, and it is with the utter seriousness of absurdist theatre that I associate Peter’s formidable intellect.

The first lesson is grit. This is apparent on a dark and frigid Melbourne morning, the Editor at work with his heart-starter, fresh prose. An ABR review proceeds down a corridor of stages – mostly orderly – from formatting to final proofing through fourteen rooms (I counted them) in half of which Peter is there, ready. That the review rattles down this corridor, sometimes in a day, is through sheer Peteresque force. But this is the fun. It’s the mornings where one learns of a funding squeeze, or an error that slipped through, or an anguished correspondent, that makes the going truly gritty. Peter is unwavering, and this is not because he is insensitive to adversity’s nuances. ‘You must go on. I can’t go on. I’ll go on.’ (Samuel Beckett, The Unnamable, 1953)

The second lesson is imagination. You’ll say this cannot be learnt, and that is true. But Peter shows how an editor should wield it. This is not to imagine how the sentence could be different. The art here is to suppress this instinct because its effect is inevitably levelling, conforming, an ordering of ideas in easily recognisable form. Familiarity of expression inevitably leads to familiarity of thought. Peter has shown me, and I can only imagine dozens of other editors, cadets, proofers, and interns, that to follow the sentence’s line is our best shot at originality. The lesson is to listen closely, then imagine hard. Through proof marks, he conveys that we must be agile, wary, but hopeful about the sentence. ‘Language in art remains a highly ambiguous transaction, a quicksand, a trampoline, a frozen pool which might give way under you ... at any time.’ (Harold Pinter, 2005)

Peter Rose and Robert Silvers exchange copies of their magazines during ABR’s first international cultural tour, which included a visit to the office of the New York Review of Books in 2016.

The third lesson (while the quicksand holds) is audacity. Thus a small, financially struggling literary magazine is transformed into a hub for literary prizes, arts reviewing, fellowships, editorial training, and on it goes. Behind the transformation has been the ambition, the creativity, a quickness to opportunity, and the drawing in and around of others. Peter says as he does: ‘Be ambitious.’ When I applied to become Digital Editor at ABR, Peter saw the possibilities where some saw postdoctoral scholar. When I once suggested a reviewer who was in fact dead, Peter remarked: ‘I admire your ambition.’ There has been no shame, at ABR, in boldness, ideas, wild fancies. Peter has reserved a death stare for the turgid, the immovable, the compliant thought. The audacity comes home in grant applications and partnership letters but also in the exquisite poetry, reviewing, and dramalogues. ‘I like to exaggerate. It’s all we have.’ (Peter Rose, The Siegfried Idyll, 2024) It is for this lesson in audacity that I’m most especially grateful, the scene I’ll return to most often: the venturing, the rallying, the ceaseless bringing forth of something new.

Morag Fraser

In 2003, within days of my retiring as Editor of Eureka Street, I had lunch with Peter Rose. I can’t recall now which of us issued the invitation, but I do remember that Peter lost no time in asking me to join the board of Australian Book Review. Entrepreneurs never rest!

At the recent launch of Attention, Please!, his new volume of poems (which contains many lyrical evocations of nocturnal restlessness), Peter read commandingly but also remembered to draw attention to discreet ‘takeaway’ piles of the most recent issue of ABR, the magazine he has edited with such grace and skill.

It’s that combination – of relentless artistry, professional integrity, and editorial savoir faire – that is both unusual and gratifying. Peter has been a dream colleague: efficient, honest, open to ideas, far-sighted, and quick to adapt. He is also clear and frank about his own position – a good man with whom to argue.

As an editor, he provides exactly what (I believe) a writer needs: a dispassionate, expert second eye to assist when the writing comes so close that you risk critical, even literal, myopia. Peter grasps what you are trying to achieve, and helps you find the ways. And he does so with a kind of empathetic intelligence – a response that gives you hope. He is neither effusive in his praise, nor, in my experience, caustic in his dispraise. Just right (for this Goldilocks).

There is another dimension: under Peter’s editorship, ABR has grown and developed into a formidable cultural force. It has extended its reach internationally and supports prizes that are testament to a belief in the power and crucial importance of literature. As the media fragments, and truth becomes more and more a tradeable commodity, magazines of integrity, like ABR, are bulwarks of our democracy. They are safe places for intellectual exchange. They are indispensable champions of the arts in Australia. They provide feedback, recognition – reviews even! –  that artists need, for encouragement, for a sense of community, and for survival. Under Peter’s editorship, many Australian writers have had their first experience of publication. I remember that exhilarated feeling – of endorsement – even after forty years. Writers may work alone, but they live in a community – of readers, other writers, editors, and encouragers. Peter knows that from the inside, and has acted on it from the ‘outside’ of his editorial desk.

I wish Peter every possible joy and satisfaction in what I can’t bring myself to call his ‘retirement’. On the available evidence, there will be nothing recognisably ‘retired’ about it. I look forward to seeing the next ‘chapter’, in whatever form that will take. And I do so in profound gratitude for what Peter has given to Australian life and letters throughout his life. May that life be long, and the giving continue.

Ian Dickson

It was a daunting prospect that faced me when Peter Rose asked me to review a biography of the Australian soprano Marjorie Lawrence. I hadn’t written anything resembling a review for thirty years, yet here I was being asked to contribute to Australia’s leading literary magazine. I gulped, agreed, and the book arrived with the usual ABR celerity – and then it sat, an unnerving presence on the dining table. I would shuffle by it, looking the other way, trying to ignore its silent demand: ‘Read me.’ Eventually I received a firm but pleasant note from Peter asking when he could expect the promised review. Finally cornered, I read the book, sat in front of that challenging white screen, and began to type.

I didn’t realise it at the time but this was a manifestation of Peter’s desire to broaden his range of reviewers and his willingness to take a chance on people outside the usual academic/literary circle. This desire to expand the magazine’s horizons and the courage to take risks are what has enabled Peter to turn what was a respected academic journal into the influential powerhouse that ABR is today.

Peter Rose with Peter Porter in Melbourne on 11 September 2002. Porter had just delivered the inaugural La Trobe University/Australian Book Review Annual Lecture. His lecture, later published in ABR, was titled ‘The Survival of Poetry’

One of Peter’s opportune creations has been ABR Arts. At a time when the print media was drastically reducing its arts coverage, leaving the field open to online commentary of wildly varying expertise, Peter realised that there was a need for coverage of the dramatic, visual, and musical arts that came from people who actually knew what they what they were talking about. It has been a great privilege to have been a part of this and to watch it develop over the past decade. An essential quality of Peter as an editor was the freedom he gave his reviewers to fully express their opinions and his rock-solid support for what they wrote. Early in my time with ABR Arts, I happened to disagree with general opinion and wrote a series of negative reviews – one of Peter’s team asked him plaintively, ‘Doesn’t Ian like anything?’ – but Peter never quibbled with my verdicts.

Another aspect of the magazine which Peter has developed are the prizes. I have a connection with the ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize and am in awe of the dedication with which the judges digest the ever-growing number of entries and of the quality of the finalists. I was also in awe of Peter’s trenchant response to one particularly obstreperous also-ran. But the poetry, essay, and short story prizes have produced exceptional work and brought in new readers to the magazine.

Now it is to be hoped that Peter will be producing more poetry and plays for the magazine to review.

Lisa Gorton

With unshowy integrity, Peter has long supported poetry at ABR. There is the flagship poetry prize, started in 2005 and renamed in 2011 in honour of his friend Peter Porter. ABR’s Peter Porter Poetry Prize is not only generous; it is also run with tact and great care: the poems are judged blind, with a different set of judges every year; it celebrates shortlisted poems alongside each year’s winner; and, at the ceremony, Peter Porter is remembered with readings of his poems. All this has meant an enormous amount of work for Peter, year after year. It has been a remarkable act of loyalty to Peter Porter, I think, and a generous commitment to poetry.

The same unshowy integrity has guided Peter’s commitment to poetry in the magazine, and online. Again, he has not held this in his sole remit; he has appointed poetry editors. He has raised the payment for published poems – poets are not accustomed to such efforts to recompense them. He has also supported poetry through podcasts and through ABR’s CAL-funded States of Poetry anthologies (2016-18). These were curated by poets in each state and territory, and they form an amazing online repertoire: readers can hear poets such as Ellen van Neerven, Jessica Wilkinson, John Kinsella, Michael Farrell, Lionel Fogarty, and Zenobia Frost. Many people will also remember the poetry podcasts that Peter put together during Covid-19 lockdowns, an act of community. 

When I think of how much Peter has committed to supporting poetry at ABR, it brings home to me how much of his attention, talent, and energy he has given to this magazine over the years. We have all been lucky to have had him as an editor. Now I am looking forward to reading more of his poetry, following his long-awaited recent poetry collection, Attention, Please!

Shannon Burns

I recall Peter’s initial editorial guidance, when I was new to reviewing and in need of direction: it was astute, assured, and involved, but not overwhelming. My feeling after viewing Peter’s edits has always been: why didn’t I notice that or do that in the first place? They always seem like organic improvements. He works with your style and tightens it.

I want to particularly focus on one aspect of Peter’s tenure at ABR: the utilisation of private patrons, particularly for writers’ fellowships. I received an ABR Fellowship a decade ago, largely, I suspect, because Peter championed my cause. The Fellowship resulted in a long profile of Gerald Murnane. Seen retrospectively, it’s a profile of a once-underappreciated writer who has come to be properly appreciated in the decade that’s followed. Perhaps the profile played a small role in that reputational transition, or maybe not, but it seemed to me at the time that I had done something, that I’d repaid a portion of a limitless debt to literature.

Along the way, I benefited from uniquely generous circumstances for an Australian who was writing about an Australian writer in an Australian magazine. I was surprised to learn that I was being paid scandalously more for that profile than my subject was paid for his most recent novel, which I regarded as a masterpiece.

As editor, Peter was instrumental in both shaping and refining the end-product, and I had the great pleasure of seeing my first notable piece of literary journalism published in a form that I found completely satisfying.

I suspect there’s a desire in all of us to reciprocate as well as we can – to be more than mere consumers, more than stomachs waiting to be filled. We want to show appreciation, and appreciation can take many forms, including critical analysis. But another form of appreciation is patronage, and in my case – and for many other beneficiaries of the fellowship – patronage made analysis possible. So I thank Peter, Christopher Menz, and everyone at the magazine for making such good and innovative use of that commendable impulse on the part of ABR’s Patrons.

Frank Bongiorno

Glance at general histories of Australia, and the importance of leading magazine editors quickly stands out. J.F. Archibald and, much later, Donald Horne at the Bulletin; Clem Christesen at Meanjin; Stephen Murray-Smith at Overland – these are among the best known. Long before he co-founded Australian Book Review, Max Harris – helped by James McAuley and Harold Stewart’s invention of ‘Ern Malley’ – secured a permanent place in our cultural history via Angry Penguins. McAuley himself is remembered not only for his poetry, but his Cold War combat as Quadrant editor.

Peter Rose’s distinguished editorial career at Australian Book Review deserves to be remembered and honoured alongside the achievements of these figures. If Peter had never set foot in the magazine’s offices, he would still be celebrated as a leading poet and author, and for having produced one of the country’s most brilliant memoirs, Rose Boys. He would have been known, also, as a successful publisher, as he was at Oxford University Press.

But Peter’s greatest gift to ABR and all of us is the startlingly unique combination of experiences, talents, and skills he brought to editor’s desk.

Peter’s parents had run a business and so, after graduation, did Peter: in their case, as retailers of sporting goods and in Peter’s, a medical bookshop. The roots of the entrepreneurial gifts that Peter brought to ABR are surely discernible here. In 2001, he inherited a print magazine that most of us thought of as one of Australia’s ‘little magazines’, in a world where the authority of the printed word remained largely intact. The world wide web was still young. Social media was still to come. It is salutary to recall that Apple’s iPod appeared in the same year as Peter assumed his editorial duties.

At ABR, we now have something much larger than a little magazine. It still publishes high-quality book reviews, with a focus on Australian publications but impressive coverage of publications from elsewhere. In some ways, this traditional role is ever more important, since the review pages of the mainstream press have shrunk or disappeared, and Australian stories and voices are also in danger of being submerged under a deluge of American digital content.

ABR is now a cultural and intellectual powerhouse in its own right, with its fellowships and prizes, its political and cultural essays, its reviews of the arts, and so much else. If we think of Australia in imaginative, cultural, and creative terms, rather than as a quarry with nice beaches and national parks, Peter’s stewardship of ABR must be considered a formidable national contribution.

I was in my mid-thirties when I first reviewed for ABR, so not a complete novice, but very nearly so in producing copy for an audience wider than the usual academic suspects. One of Peter’s most valuable legacies is the number of emerging writers he has nurtured. It is striking that no one talks of an ABR ‘stable’ of writers. Good: there is no ABR stable because of that openness to new talent.

Peter’s editorial hand guided gently, and he encouraged generously. Reviewers had the space to write in their own voice, but newcomers soon realised that they had behind them an editor of unusual gifts. We are very much in his debt.

The Yirrkala Bark Petitions were intensely significant in Australian politics, contributing not only to major changes in race relations in Australia but to the way Australians understood their country’s history and its future. Clare Wright’s Näku Dhäruk is a lucid, accessible, and engaging account of those 1963 Yolngu¹ Petitions from the Yirrkala region of Arnhem Land: her book will deservedly be read widely and throw new light on the complex events which shaped this turbulent time. Yet as powerful and moving as this book is, it will leave some readers with lingering questions. This review will outline some of its many strengths, and will also suggest some of those questions.

There has been, for some time, a debate among researchers of Australian history. Should the moral and psychological dimensions of settler experience be examined, or do we know enough already?

It could be said that creative writers have done much of this work. With a subtlety difficult to achieve in historical research, novelists including Eleanor Dark, Thea Astley, David Malouf, and Peter Carey have represented moments of recognition of the strange and shocking truth of living on land that until recently hosted a wholly different cosmos, hundreds of ancient and distinct societies, where now there is cow, fence, suburb, skyscraper. Recently, Melissa Lucashenko’s Edenglassie (2023) drew on Aboriginal intellectual traditions to show how that cosmos extended through Queensland’s horrifying colonial past into the present – skyscraper be damned.

‘Bea never swam with the tide’, observes Judith Brett in her eloquent biography of the social reformer, activist, and public intellectual Beatrice Faust. Brett takes us behind the public face of this confident, outspoken, and strident political figure, whose name became synonymous with second wave feminism in Australia. The psychological reading of Faust that Brett offers, in a refreshingly analytical approach provides depth, complexity, and insight which makes this beautifully written book compelling to read.

‘The unpredictability of biography,’ writes Timothy Snyder in On Freedom, ‘flows into the unpredictability of history.’ This is self-evidently true of leaders who, like William Henry Gates III, also known as Bill Gates, the co-founder of Microsoft, initiate the kinds of change that are destined to be viewed as history. Their lives, like all of ours, are amply shaped by contingency and event, the ‘what if’ moments and decisive decisions, both their own and others’. The mystique of what might never have been, or might have been otherwise, is powerful. Even though there are many alternatives and competitors, it is hard to imagine personal computing evolving as it did without the ubiquitous Microsoft products that have shaped the world. Consumer technologies such as these, which were also an early form of AI, have become all but invisible. Gratifyingly, the Microsoft co-founder and former CEO’s first autobiographical instalment, Source Code, is liberally sprinkled with fork-in-the-road moments and tensions. It is a hero’s journey narrative, blending memoir with personal case studies in business leadership and strategy. The book begins with Gates’s early childhood and ends in 1978. The author foreshadows a further two volumes.

How literature loves to corral its characters in defined, even confined spaces and closed societies. Chaucer anatomised his ‘sondry folk’, his pilgrims, as they gathered in Southwerk’s Tabard Inn. A secluded Florentine villa was Boccaccio’s retreat for storytelling, while the Black Death raged in the countryside. Agatha Christie, who understood immurement-by-loss, lent a lethal frisson to the English country house and the European rail carriage. Umberto Eco chose a monastery for his Name of the Rose intrigue. As recently as 2023, Charlotte Wood brought the protagonist of her novel Stone Yard Devotional into a convent, to confront herself and witness another portentous environmental and social plague – this one of mice.

Erudition for its own sake is perhaps not as prized in the world of Australian letters as it once was; in an age when sparsity is king – where blunt clarity and a kind of punchy journalese dominate contemporary essay writing – loquaciousness and intricate wordplay are undervalued commodities. Feathery intellectualism of the type personified by Robert Dessaix might not be much in vogue, which is precisely why it feels so joyful and necessary. Chameleon, his latest work of memoir, is discursive and prismatic, wise and worldly. For the shambolic musings of an esteemed octogenarian – ‘now at the end of my life, at the fraying, but suddenly illumined, highly coloured end of my life’ – it is expertly calibrated, often remarkably vivid, and always exquisitely articulated.

There is no shortage of statistics pointing to the prevalence of misogyny and violence against women, not least the oft-cited figure that one woman is murdered each week in Australia. But sometimes anecdotes reveal the systemic nature of a problem in a way that figures cannot. In her memoir, Groomed, Sonia Orchard recalls attending a social gathering in St Kilda thirty years after she was abused as a fifteen-year-old high school student. At the party, she recognises a male teacher from her school, who, when he sees her, exclaims loudly in front of other guests: ‘I remember you! You used to think you were so hot, didn’t you? Strutting around in your little school dress.’

There are moments in political history when the electoral contest is real, visceral, and there are other times when the governing party is so visibly exhausted and the context so apparently unfavourable that the prudent move is not to try too hard to win. Such was the case at the last British general election, held in July 2024. After four consecutive victories, five changes of prime minister, and a litany of disasters, scandals, and failures, the governing Conservative regime led by the likeable but hapless Rishi Sunak finally keeled over and gave way to Keir Starmer’s Labour Party. Starmer won a majority of 174 seats, with a relatively modest thirty-four per cent of the popular vote.

As its subtitle suggests, Ellmann’s Joyce: The biography of a masterpiece and its maker is two books in one. Zachary Leader spends the first half recounting the early life and career of Richard Ellmann (1918-87), one of the great luminaries of postwar literary studies. The second half delivers the promised ‘biography of a masterpiece’, in the form of a detailed account of Ellmann researching and writing his most celebrated work, James Joyce (1959; revised 1982), a book still considered a monument of Joycean scholarship and a paragon of the literary biographer’s art.

What is truth in poetry? This unanswerable question is central to Colm Tóibín’s meticulous and attentive reading of American poet Elizabeth Bishop’s poetry. First published in 2015, its thirteen chapters examine her poetry and its relationship to her life through an overarching lens of telling the truth in poetry, the power of the unsaid, and the impact of this on Tóibín’s own writing.

The New York Review Classics series has done much to keep canonical writers in print, having already published in smart paperback editions three lesser-known novels by Henry James: The Other House, The Outcry, and The Ivory Tower. These two new additions to the series, a selection of James’s essays ‘on writers and writing’, edited by eminent James scholar Michael Gorra, and a critical discussion of James’s The American Scene by Yale emeritus professor Peter Brooks, make further valuable contributions to the NYRB library.

Anyone who has read Michael Wilding’s book Milton’s Paradise Lost (1969) will remember what an intelligent and generous critic he is. That book was part of the revival of Milton scholarship in the 1960s, with its skilful reading of the poem’s enigmas: Satan’s humanness, the problems with God. It was also cheering to read Wilding’s scolding of T.S. Eliot and F.R. Leavis for their superficial and prejudicial readings of the poem.

Six hours, forty-six minutes.     

The pharmacy counter at my neighborhood Walgreens opened at 9 am, a full hour later than the rest of the store. I should have known that. When I was sixteen, I worked behind a Walgreens pharmacy counter just like this one, deciphering physicians’ cryptic shorthand and counting pills and holding on the phone with insurance companies and getting yelled at by sexually frustrated men refilling Viagra scripts. I lived and died by that clock.

At thirty-one, I was a low-level bureaucrat and recent divorcee swallowed whole by heartbreak and debt. Because of the heartbreak and the debt, I was also a sex worker. And because of the heartbreak and the sex work, I was also a penitent. On Friday nights, men wined and dined me and paid me in fat stacks of bills to do all the things their wives would not, and on Sunday mornings I broke bread and drank grape juice from a tiny plastic cup and said my prayers.

Twenty-three minutes passed until a teenager who looked as bored as I used to raised the rolling counter door overhead and began serving the other customers. Neighbours unprepared for Chicagoland winters, covering babies under fleece blankets, shivering against colds and strep throat, inched forward. The wait between me and salvation.

When it was finally my turn, I gave the teenager behind the counter my handwritten prescriptions from the urgent care clinic, waited longer, trembling and hunched. He searched the shallow drug shelves, came up empty, stared at me, then asked the pharmacist, who didn’t look up from his screen.

‘We don’t have ’em,’ he said. ‘Try the next store over.’

‘What’s it for?’ the apprentice asked.

The pharmacist shook him off. The kid handed me back my prescriptions and sent me on my way.

Josephine Rowe’s third novel, Little World, is a little novel, at least in terms of its length, which resembles that of a novella. Little World is also about a little person, specifically a child, or rather, the preserved corpse of a child, said to be a saint. There is nothing small, though, about the novel’s impact, which is grandly and enduringly enigmatic.

It always surprises me when I encounter someone so well read that they seem to have every obscure literary reference to hand and yet the late Canadian writer Mavis Gallant has managed entirely to escape not just their attention but their knowledge. ‘Who?’ they will ask. ‘How do you spell that?’ Offer them titles of collections and stories and their perplexity only deepens. The Uncollected Stories of Mavis Gallant, edited by American novelist Garth Risk Hallberg and published by New York Review Books, both tries to explain that underappreciation and to ensure that every serious reader knows precisely why one might wish to spend time in Gallant’s idiosyncratic and determinedly realist house of fiction.

While reading this book, I saw an ABC TV Foreign Correspondent program on volunteer health workers in Ukraine tackling frontline fighters’ horrific injuries. I was moved by the stoic optimism of the soldiers, the dedication and compassion of the doctors and nurses, one of them wearing a brave slash of lipstick.

‘Here’s what I think: there are neither major nor minor tragedies’, writes the Bosnian poet Semezdin Mehmedinovic. ‘Tragedies exist. Some can be described. There are others for which every heart is too small.’

Beginning with these words as an epigraph, Gretchen Shirm’s third novel, Out of the Woods, seems to ask just how far the heart can expand to comprehend the immense tragedy of others. What changes when we become, however indirectly, a witness to suffering? Much of the novel’s action takes place during the trial of Radislav Krstić (‘K’ in the novel) at the United Nations International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia in The Hague in 2000. Yet the story belongs to Jess, an Australian woman in her fifties who, in an act of uncharacteristic boldness, has applied for a job as personal secretary to one of the judges.

Adam lives with his father. Teddy lives with his parents and a sister. Both are children of broken or fragile relationships, about to enter their senior year of high school. Adam’s father appears to have ‘given up’ on life; he has stopped drinking and succumbed to ‘mute anger’. Adam hasn’t seen his mother in six years, since she left the family, and Teddy resents his mother’s extramarital affair. In both cases, the family home is a source of gloomy unease, with fathers who are incapable of dealing with the realities of their lives.

Lying and half-truths. Raging ambition. In the lead-up to another Australian federal election, these traits too often define our political class. But they are also germane to I Want Everything – no, not the autobiography of Elon Musk, but an entertaining début novel from Dominic Amerena, which also happens to be the first title under a new Simon & Schuster imprint, Summit Books Australia.

There is a popular image of the ‘Hexagon’ (the roughly six-sided shape of France) as a powerful, stable national entity with a confident, even overbearing, cultural identity. Colin Jones instead stresses France’s dynamic history as an ethnic and cultural melting pot and its shifting borders as a crucible of military conflict. The central thread of Jones’s engaging story is the tension between contested meanings of ‘Frenchness’ on the one hand, and France’s constant interactions with the wider world on the other.

The Divine Comedy (1308-21) is an iconic narrative poem widely studied in schools and universities all over the world. At a time obsessed with the ‘here and now’, one may wonder, as a student of mine did in their anonymous evaluation of one of my units, why ‘we should still study a poet who died one thousand years ago’. By taking on the job of mapping the reception of the Divine Comedy, Joseph Luzzi’s book powerfully answers my student’s perplexed query.

This is a work based on deep scholarship, by two leading historians of China. The writing is clear and precise, the narrative richly informed by primary sources. Personal stories of individuals are used to great effect.

The book revolves around two major inflection points. First is the Cultural Revolution launched by Mao Zedong in 1966 to entrench his authority and to see off political opponents. It continued with diminishing intensity until his death in 1976. Second is the beginning of the Reform period from 1980, with the final and complete resolution of the post-Mao succession struggles and the launching of Supreme Leader Deng Xiaoping’s economic reforms in 1984.

‘Tasmania is in a new age of fire,’ writes Andrew Darby in an article for The Guardian. The fires in February, which came close to destroying ancient Huon pines in the takayna/Tarkine and pencil pines near Cradle Mountain, were started by a dry lightning strike, as were the fires which tore through the Grove of Giants six years ago. Lightning strikes were once responsible for less than 0.01 per cent of bushfires in Tasmania but now account for the vast majority, an eight thousand per cent increase over a decade. ‘Quite honestly,’ says Jon Marsden-Smedley, a former fire management officer interviewed by Darby, ‘I don’t know of any other climate-change parameter that is as dramatic.’

It is hard to explain the special place that orchids occupy in our hearts and imaginations. Their attraction can’t be solely attributed to their strange form, longevity, or apparent scarcity, since there are many other flowers equally blessed that are not treated with the same passionate intensity and reverence. For some reason, orchids have become imbued with some kind of mystery, desire, and exoticism that has less to do with anything intrinsic about their biology or appearance and everything to do with the stories, myths, and legends that have been created around them.

The three-volume History of the Book in Australia is now complete. Scholars of Australian book history would be aware that an earlier volume, covering 1891–1945, appeared in 2001 (A National Culture in a Colonised Market, edited by Martyn Lyons and John Arnold) and that in 2006 a second volume brought the story up to 2005 (Paper Empires, edited by Craig Munro and Robyn Sheahan-Bright). Both titles were published by the University of Queensland Press. The end of that publisher’s capacity to support the project, with Australian Research Council funds long gone, is one challenge among others cited by co-editor Wallace Kirsop that sheds light on the long gestation of this final volume. The last to be published, it is in fact the first in the History’s series, covering the period 1788 to 1890.  

That the majority of the sounds and experiences of the early years of radio are lost to us poses considerable challenges for historians. The losses include the expressions of local innovations and experimental broadcasts across global contexts that predate the establishment of organisations, often with ambitions of a national reach, such as the BBC (1922), the ABC (1923), and Radio Bangkok of Phaya Thai (1930).

Gerald Glaskin’s 1965 novel No End to the Way is high on melodrama and long out of print, but it had a life-changing effect on Tony Scotland. Published under the pseudonym Neville Jackson, it examines the tangled relations of three gay men living in Australia in the 1960s. Two of them live in a configuration resembling wedlock, until the third (the ex-lover of one of the men), in a spasm of envy, blackmails the couple and dynamites the relationship.

Gregory Day is best known as a prize-winning novelist, but it should not surprise his readers to learn that he has, in Southsightedness, made the move to lyric poetry. The lyrical has always figured in his work, which, as well as novels, includes essays, criticism, and music. (Indeed, poetry can be found in Day’s forays into that occult genre, the artist’s book.) Day’s lyricism is not, and has never been, the breathless kind that traffics in the precious and the inconsequential. For Day, the lyrical mode attends to language’s most powerful affective and cognitive potentialities, doing so both through the linguistic intensity of the poetic idiolect, and an engagement with the daytime domains of politics, history, and the material world.

Linsay and John Knight are the founders and  publishers of the Sydney-based specialist poetry imprint Pitt Street Poetry. When the press was founded in 2012, most mainstream publishers had stopped publishing Australian poetry. Many well-established mid-career Australian poets were cast adrift. PSP was created to help fill that gap. It was generously supported by the Australia Council in its early years.

Barry Hill has written thirteen collections of poetry, including Eagerly We Burn: Selected poems 1980-2018 (Shearsman, 2019). These volumes demonstrate his interest in the natural world, Australian history, White Australia’s relationships to Indigenous and Asian cultures, and cross-cultural experiences more generally. His poetry explores politics, art and ekphrasis, literature, autobiography, and spiritual issues, including, persistently, Mahayana Buddhism and its teachings about ‘emptiness’.

For centuries, popes have been remote figures, information about their private lives carefully controlled to safeguard their image and promote the mystique of the office. Jesus Wept, describing the past seven popes, provides a good argument for this traditional strategy; it shows what fallible, flawed men they are when details emerge. They were often unpleasant, sometimes bullies, sometimes cowards, sometimes expedient, always intensely political – though the last is an unavoidable part of the job.

Rising seas, mega fires, drought, melting glaciers, and animal extinctions are not exactly the stuff of fiction in 2025. But these themes are also precisely the domain of fiction that speaks of the climate at this moment in the planet’s history, as Susie Greenhill’s début novel, The Clinking, demonstrates with its tender yet insistent call for us to pay attention to this fragile world.

In his 1928 collection of poems, Odd Jobs, Ernest ‘Kodak’ O’Ferrall caricatures recitation as an onerous entertainment that has passed its use by date:

Way out in the suburbs howls the wild Reciter,
Storming like a general, bragging like a blighter;
He would shame hyenas lurking in their dens
As he roars at peaceful folk whose joy is keeping hens.

…
Tie his hands and gag him as he rolls his eyes,
Bag his head and bear him swiftly through the night.
That’s the only remedy for villains who recite.