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Absolutely Revolting

June 2025, no. 476

From frontier wars to artificial intelligence, the June issue of ABR explores Australia’s past and present – and what it all means for our future. In this first issue from Editor Georgina Arnott, we include a special long-form essay by philosopher and author Raimond Gaita on the irreducible humanity of others. Rebecca Strating reports on how Trump’s America is reshaping our global region and John Byron explains why the federal election result was not as emphatic as we might think. The June issue features Natasha Sholl’s stunning Calibre essay ‘The Chirp/The Scream’, and reviews by Kate Fullagar, André Dao, Clinton Fernandes, Emma Dawson, Kerryn Goldsworthy, and Marilyn Lake on books about the Middle East, national myth, and the careers of Jenny Macklin and Mary Fortune. We review fiction by James Bradley, Jennifer Mills, Matthew Hooton, poetry by Alan Wearne, theatre, books about Melanesia, Australian music, ‘inconvenient’ women, and much more. 

June’s cover artwork is by Alice Lindstrom.

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Advances – June 2025
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Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes

Discerning readers will notice that ABR has undergone a modest cover redesign, a literary nip-and-tuck, to coincide with the arrival of a new Editor. The format will allow ABR to feature the work of Australian artists and underline its fellowship with the visual arts world. Like writers, illustrators and cover designers in the book industry face challenges with the rise of AI-produced content. ABR, meanwhile, is for human-produced creativity. This issue we feature ‘Mother and Child Gaze at the Moon’, a paper collage by South Australian artist Alice Lindstrom, whose work can be found at alicelindstrom.com
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Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes

Discerning readers will notice that ABR has undergone a modest cover redesign, a literary nip-and-tuck, to coincide with the arrival of a new Editor. The format will allow ABR to feature the work of Australian artists and underline its fellowship with the visual arts world. Like writers, illustrators and cover designers in the book industry face challenges with the rise of AI-produced content. ABR, meanwhile, is for human-produced creativity. This issue we feature ‘Mother and Child Gaze at the Moon’, a paper collage by South Australian artist Alice Lindstrom, whose work can be found at alicelindstrom.com

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Letters – June 2025
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To attack a pinata

Having just seen Bell Shakespeare’s Henry 5 in Melbourne – where it has this week opened – and reading so many flattering reviews of the production, I was beginning to wonder what I’d missed. It was therefore heartening to read Jonathan Ricketson’s (online) review which, for me, encapsulated the many flaws of the production as well as its few inspired moments. This was a king who did not seem to have the vigour to attack a pinata, let alone the Kingdom of France. More egregiously, this was a production that appeared to have nothing at all to say.
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To attack a pinata

Having just seen Bell Shakespeare’s Henry 5 in Melbourne – where it has this week opened – and reading so many flattering reviews of the production, I was beginning to wonder what I’d missed. It was therefore heartening to read Jonathan Ricketson’s (online) review which, for me, encapsulated the many flaws of the production as well as its few inspired moments. This was a king who did not seem to have the vigour to attack a pinata, let alone the Kingdom of France. More egregiously, this was a production that appeared to have nothing at all to say.

Read more: Letters – June 2025

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‘A bullet with butterfly wings: Precarity obscured by an emphatic federal election result’ by John Byron
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Last month’s remarkable federal election result has produced a metric plethora of articles explaining how it was achieved and what it means for the government, for the electorate, and for elections to come.
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Last month’s remarkable federal election result has produced a metric plethora of articles explaining how it was achieved and what it means for the government, for the electorate, and for elections to come.

Despite the sprawl of red across the chamber, the result should not blind us to the degree of uncertainty that now prevails in the electorate. We are living inside a new electoral calculus and all the major parties need to adapt for future elections, or we will need another, bigger word for ‘landslide’.

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‘The Cut’, a new poem by Audrey Molloy
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After I cut your hair, running
the clippers back and forth
until the tiles are littered with tufts
like grey lint swept from the drum
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After I cut your hair, running
the clippers back and forth
until the tiles are littered with tufts
like grey lint swept from the drum
of the tumble dryer, you pull
your T-shirt off and ask
if I can trim your chest hair. I oblige,
and the whole time you grip
my roving wrist. Next Tuesday
will be one year since they ran
a circular saw up your sternum
and jacked you open,
since they hooked you up
to the heart-lung machine
so they could do their work –
their blessèd work – in a bloodless field.

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Kate Fullagar reviews ‘Uprising: War in the colony of New South Wales, 1838-1844’ by Stephen Gapps
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Readers of Stephen Gapps’s work will be delighted to see this latest instalment of his quest to highlight the reality of Australia’s internal wars from 1788. Gapps’s first major contribution to this literature was The Sydney Wars (2018), which detailed the military conflicts between the Darug-speaking peoples of Sydney Harbour and the British newcomers from the First Fleet to 1817. His second, Gudyarra (2021), focused on the battles between the Wiradyuri and the settlers around today’s Bathurst region from 1822 to 1824. Gapps’s new book, Uprising, takes us over the full middle swathe of colonial New South Wales, including campaigns from dozens of clans, between 1838 and 1844. Each volume moves us forward in time and over greater expanses of Country. Collectively, the Gapps trilogy is a clear and detailed refutation of Australia’s continued reluctance to name the violent episodes that occurred between black and white peoples before 1901 as what they so plainly were: war.
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Book 1 Title: Uprising
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Readers of Stephen Gapps’s work will be delighted to see this latest instalment of his quest to highlight the reality of Australia’s internal wars from 1788. Gapps’s first major contribution to this literature was The Sydney Wars (2018), which detailed the military conflicts between the Darug-speaking peoples of Sydney Harbour and the British newcomers from the First Fleet to 1817. His second, Gudyarra (2021), focused on the battles between the Wiradyuri and the settlers around today’s Bathurst region from 1822 to 1824. Gapps’s new book, Uprising, takes us over the full middle swathe of colonial New South Wales, including campaigns from dozens of clans, between 1838 and 1844. Each volume moves us forward in time and over greater expanses of Country. Collectively, the Gapps trilogy is a clear and detailed refutation of Australia’s continued reluctance to name the violent episodes that occurred between black and white peoples before 1901 as what they so plainly were: war.

Read more: Kate Fullagar reviews ‘Uprising: War in the colony of New South Wales, 1838-1844’ by Stephen Gapps

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Clinton Fernandes reviews ‘The Great Betrayal: The struggle for freedom and democracy in the Middle East’ by Fawaz A. Gerges
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Fawaz Gerges is a leading expert on mainstream Islamist movements, jihadist groups, and social movements in the Middle East. He has interviewed hundreds of civil society leaders, activists, and mainstream and radical Islamists in the Muslim world and within Muslim communities in Europe. Two decades ago, his in-depth field research resulted in The Far Enemy: Why Jihad went global (2005). It showed that the 9/11 terror attacks united social forces in the Muslim world against Al Qaeda. The dominant response of jihadi groups was an explicit rejection of Al Qaeda and total opposition to the internationalisation of jihad. The US invasion of Iraq in 2003 and its subsequent occupation gave Al Qaeda a ‘new lease on life, a second generation of recruits and fighters, and a powerful outlet to expand its ideological outreach activities to Muslims worldwide’.
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Book 1 Title: The Great Betrayal
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Fawaz Gerges is a leading expert on mainstream Islamist movements, jihadist groups, and social movements in the Middle East. He has interviewed hundreds of civil society leaders, activists, and mainstream and radical Islamists in the Muslim world and within Muslim communities in Europe. Two decades ago, his in-depth field research resulted in The Far Enemy: Why Jihad went global (2005). It showed that the 9/11 terror attacks united social forces in the Muslim world against Al Qaeda. The dominant response of jihadi groups was an explicit rejection of Al Qaeda and total opposition to the internationalisation of jihad. The US invasion of Iraq in 2003 and its subsequent occupation gave Al Qaeda a ‘new lease on life, a second generation of recruits and fighters, and a powerful outlet to expand its ideological outreach activities to Muslims worldwide’.

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Marilyn Lake reviews ‘Nation, Memory, Myth: Gallipoli and the Australian imaginary’ by Steve Vizard
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Women give birth to babies, but according to patriarchal myth men give birth to nations. As the eminent political theorist Carole Pateman observed some time ago, literature is full of stories of men giving birth to nations, political orders, or political life itself, an explicitly male appropriation of procreative power. In the new discursive order of modernity, political creativity belongs to masculinity.
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Book 1 Title: Nation, Memory, Myth
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Women give birth to babies, but according to patriarchal myth men give birth to nations. As the eminent political theorist Carole Pateman observed some time ago, literature is full of stories of men giving birth to nations, political orders, or political life itself, an explicitly male appropriation of procreative power. In the new discursive order of modernity, political creativity belongs to masculinity.

Read more: Marilyn Lake reviews ‘Nation, Memory, Myth: Gallipoli and the Australian imaginary’ by Steve Vizard

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André Dao reviews ‘The Shortest History of AI’ by Toby Walsh
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Toby Walsh’s The Shortest History of AI begins and ends with a sermon against panic. ‘Our children’, writes Walsh, ‘are set to inherit a worse world than the one we were born into, due to a raft of problems, some of which are caused by AI.’ The next couple of decades ‘will be challenging’. Yet Walsh is unequivocal in his faith: first, that artificial intelligence scientists will eventually achieve their final goal, ‘matching human intelligence in all its richness’, and second, that such a feat will be ultimately beneficial to humanity. The secret to such optimism, in the face of acknowledged ‘challenges’ ranging from racial and gendered bias to the ‘existential’, lies in learning ‘the lessons of the past’. And this book, writes Walsh, is not a bad place to start learning those lessons.
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Book 1 Title: The Shortest History of AI
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Toby Walsh’s The Shortest History of AI begins and ends with a sermon against panic. ‘Our children’, writes Walsh, ‘are set to inherit a worse world than the one we were born into, due to a raft of problems, some of which are caused by AI.’ The next couple of decades ‘will be challenging’. Yet Walsh is unequivocal in his faith: first, that artificial intelligence scientists will eventually achieve their final goal, ‘matching human intelligence in all its richness’, and second, that such a feat will be ultimately beneficial to humanity. The secret to such optimism, in the face of acknowledged ‘challenges’ ranging from racial and gendered bias to the ‘existential’, lies in learning ‘the lessons of the past’. And this book, writes Walsh, is not a bad place to start learning those lessons.

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Emma Dawson reviews ‘Making Progress: How good policy happens’ by Jenny Macklin with Joel Deane
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Jenny Macklin was an unusual politician, so it should not surprise that hers is an unusual political memoir. Anyone looking to Making Progress for salacious tales from the internecine warfare of the Rudd-Gillard Government, in which Macklin was a senior minister, will be disappointed. Macklin is widely regarded as the most serious policy thinker among her generation of Labor politicians, and this account of her career, written in collaboration with Joel Deane, will only enhance that reputation. It is a book for policy wonks, and one that is perfectly timed to remind readers that, for all the sound and fury of the recent election campaign, government is a serious business.
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Jenny Macklin was an unusual politician, so it should not surprise that hers is an unusual political memoir. Anyone looking to Making Progress for salacious tales from the internecine warfare of the Rudd-Gillard Government, in which Macklin was a senior minister, will be disappointed. Macklin is widely regarded as the most serious policy thinker among her generation of Labor politicians, and this account of her career, written in collaboration with Joel Deane, will only enhance that reputation. It is a book for policy wonks, and one that is perfectly timed to remind readers that, for all the sound and fury of the recent election campaign, government is a serious business.

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Maria Takolander reviews ‘Always Home, Always Homesick’ by Hannah Kent
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If you were asked to come up with three cultural touchstones for the nation of Iceland, there’s a good chance that you would nominate Hannah Kent’s 2013 novel Burial Rites, perhaps along with the music of Björk and Sigur Rós. Burial Rites might be a bit of a cheat, given that Kent is an Australian novelist. Nevertheless, this novel, which tells the story of a woman executed in Iceland in the nineteenth century, has been an enormous success. Translated into more than twenty languages, it sold millions of copies worldwide and is set to become a film. It surely put Iceland on the map for many readers.
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Book 1 Title: Always Home, Always Homesick
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If you were asked to come up with three cultural touchstones for the nation of Iceland, there’s a good chance that you would nominate Hannah Kent’s 2013 novel Burial Rites, perhaps along with the music of Björk and Sigur Rós. Burial Rites might be a bit of a cheat, given that Kent is an Australian novelist. Nevertheless, this novel, which tells the story of a woman executed in Iceland in the nineteenth century, has been an enormous success. Translated into more than twenty languages, it sold millions of copies worldwide and is set to become a film. It surely put Iceland on the map for many readers.

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Tanya Dalziell reviews ‘Searching for Charmian’ by Suzanne Chick
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The new edition of Searching for Charmian, Suzanne Chick’s autobiographical account of discovering her birth mother’s identity, is published at a moment when the reputations of two of the book’s subjects are in their ascendency.
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Book 1 Title: Searching for Charmian
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The new edition of Searching for Charmian, Suzanne Chick’s autobiographical account of discovering her birth mother’s identity, is published at a moment when the reputations of two of the book’s subjects are in their ascendency.

The book was first published in 1994. With its publication, Chick emerged from what she saw as a quiet life into the public spotlight. She eloquently told of her discovery that the author and journalist Charmian Clift, then nineteen years old and unwed, had surrendered Chick immediately after her birth on Christmas Day in 1942. Reviewing the book in the May 1994 issue of ABR, Helen Eliot admitted to initial cynicism (‘crass cashing-in on a famous and alluring name’) which gave way to admiration.

Read more: Tanya Dalziell reviews ‘Searching for Charmian’ by Suzanne Chick

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Varun Ghosh reviews ‘My Fellow Americans: Presidents and their inaugural addresses’ edited by Yuvraj Singh
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The inaugural addresses of presidents of the United States have inspired and comforted, set new national directions, and defined not only presidents but entire eras of American history. Franklin D. Roosevelt’s assurance ‘that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself’ gave hope to an America suffering through the Great Depression and signalled the beginning of the modern American welfare state. John F. Kennedy embodied a youthful American idealism and challenged a new generation of Americans during the Cold War: ‘Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.’ Ronald Reagan set a different ideological course for the nation with his diagnosis that ‘government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem’.
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Book 1 Subtitle: Presidents and their inaugural addresses
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The inaugural addresses of presidents of the United States have inspired and comforted, set new national directions, and defined not only presidents but entire eras of American history. Franklin D. Roosevelt’s assurance ‘that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself’ gave hope to an America suffering through the Great Depression and signalled the beginning of the modern American welfare state. John F. Kennedy embodied a youthful American idealism and challenged a new generation of Americans during the Cold War: ‘Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.’ Ronald Reagan set a different ideological course for the nation with his diagnosis that ‘government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem’.

Read more: Varun Ghosh reviews ‘My Fellow Americans: Presidents and their inaugural addresses’ edited by...

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‘“Rejecting the system it created”: How Trump’s America is reshaping Australia’s regional relations’ by Rebecca Strating
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For Australia, a nation that has long balanced its economic ties to Asia with its security alliance with the United States, the second Trump administration represents an unprecedented challenge to its foreign policy. The return of Donald Trump to the White House has ushered in a new era of economic nationalism that threatens to reshape the Asian security landscape. For the newly re-elected Albanese Labor government, this presents plenty of risks. But its decisive mandate also provides an opportunity for Australia to develop greater self-reliance in foreign policy and deepen relationships across Asia.
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For Australia, a nation that has long balanced its economic ties to Asia with its security alliance with the United States, the second Trump administration represents an unprecedented challenge to its foreign policy. The return of Donald Trump to the White House has ushered in a new era of economic nationalism that threatens to reshape the Asian security landscape. For the newly re-elected Albanese Labor government, this presents plenty of risks. But its decisive mandate also provides an opportunity for Australia to develop greater self-reliance in foreign policy and deepen relationships across Asia.

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‘Folk Taxonomy’, a new poem by Eunice Andrada
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Red maya birds that are not
maya birds, but sparrows and munias.
Words for the kind of rain that will leave us
without power for days, then the kind that sprinkles on
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Kerryn Goldsworthy reviews ‘Outrageous Fortunes: The adventures of Mary Fortune, crime-writer, and her criminal son’ by Megan Brown and Lucy Sussex
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To begin, a reviewer’s disclosure: I have known Lucy Sussex since we worked together in the mid-1990s on a research project about nineteenth-century Australian women’s writing. Lucy had already been following the various trails and clues left by crime writer Mary Fortune (1832–1911) along the winding, dimly lit corridors of pre-digital cultural history, as she reports at the end of this book: ‘In 1987 I moved from librarianship to working as a researcher for Professor Stephen Knight … I got the delightful job of largely reading old and vintage crime texts and reporting back … Stephen asked me to look into “Mrs Fortune” [and later] told me that Mary Fortune was no longer his research project, but mine. “You have that gleam in your eye!” he said.’
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Book 1 Title: Outrageous Fortunes
Book 1 Subtitle: The adventures of Mary Fortune, crime-writer, and her criminal son
Book Author: Megan Brown and Lucy Sussex
Book 1 Biblio: La Trobe University Press, $36.99 pb, 341 pp
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To begin, a reviewer’s disclosure: I have known Lucy Sussex since we worked together in the mid-1990s on a research project about nineteenth-century Australian women’s writing. Lucy had already been following the various trails and clues left by crime writer Mary Fortune (1832–1911) along the winding, dimly lit corridors of pre-digital cultural history, as she reports at the end of this book: ‘In 1987 I moved from librarianship to working as a researcher for Professor Stephen Knight … I got the delightful job of largely reading old and vintage crime texts and reporting back … Stephen asked me to look into “Mrs Fortune” [and later] told me that Mary Fortune was no longer his research project, but mine. “You have that gleam in your eye!” he said.’

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Clare Monagle reviews ‘Poet, Mystic, Widow, Wife: The extraordinary lives of medieval women’ by Hetta Howes
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When teaching the history of medieval Europe it is hard to resist regaling students with lurid accounts of some of the extreme devotional practices performed by medieval women mystics. Saint Catherine of Siena, so it was claimed, drank the vomit of lepers to abase herself before God. Marie of Oignies, apparently, refused to eat anything but the consecrated host and died of starvation. Julian of Norwich lived in seclusion, inside a cell attached to a church, having renounced all things of the world including the opportunity to go outside. These women’s lives, in the retelling, can offer a visceral sense of the strangeness of medieval religious culture, and can also provide a sense of the particularity of gendered celebrity in pre-modernity. As a teacher, however, I am loathe to lean too heavily into the ostensible spiritual otherness of the Middle Ages. I worry that presenting these women as freaks risks alienating students from the historical work I am training them to do; to make sense of historical difference on its own terms.
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Book 1 Title: Poet, Mystic, Widow, Wife
Book 1 Subtitle: The extraordinary lives of medieval women
Book Author: Hetta Howes
Book 1 Biblio: Bloomsbury, $34.99 pb, 320 pp
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When teaching the history of medieval Europe it is hard to resist regaling students with lurid accounts of some of the extreme devotional practices performed by medieval women mystics. Saint Catherine of Siena, so it was claimed, drank the vomit of lepers to abase herself before God. Marie of Oignies, apparently, refused to eat anything but the consecrated host and died of starvation. Julian of Norwich lived in seclusion, inside a cell attached to a church, having renounced all things of the world including the opportunity to go outside. These women’s lives, in the retelling, can offer a visceral sense of the strangeness of medieval religious culture, and can also provide a sense of the particularity of gendered celebrity in pre-modernity. As a teacher, however, I am loathe to lean too heavily into the ostensible spiritual otherness of the Middle Ages. I worry that presenting these women as freaks risks alienating students from the historical work I am training them to do; to make sense of historical difference on its own terms.

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Geordie Williamson reviews ‘Stranger than Fiction: Lives of the twentieth-century novel’ by Edwin Frank
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What is the twentieth-century novel? asks Edwin Frank in Stranger than Fiction. What it is not, he begins, is the nineteenth-century kind. This doesn’t mean he argues from a merely negative premise; rather, he’s attempting to wrest the discussion from certain warping assumptions. The very notion of periodisation by centuries – a ‘convenient, newly minted unit’, writes Frank, ‘larger than a lifetime, conformable to the memory of the nuclear family and designed to connect past to future in the developing narrative of human history’ – is itself a product of the nineteenth century.
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Book 1 Title: Stranger than Fiction
Book 1 Subtitle: Lives of the twentieth-century novel
Book Author: Edwin Frank
Book 1 Biblio: Fern Press, $36.99 pb, 480 pp
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What is the twentieth-century novel? asks Edwin Frank in Stranger than Fiction. What it is not, he begins, is the nineteenth-century kind. This doesn’t mean he argues from a merely negative premise; rather, he’s attempting to wrest the discussion from certain warping assumptions. The very notion of periodisation by centuries – a ‘convenient, newly minted unit’, writes Frank, ‘larger than a lifetime, conformable to the memory of the nuclear family and designed to connect past to future in the developing narrative of human history’ – is itself a product of the nineteenth century.

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Nicole Moore reviews ‘Inconvenient Women: Australian radical writers 1900-1970’ by Jacqueline Kent
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Was Katharine Susannah Prichard one of those present at the first meetings of the Communist Party of Australia (CPA), or not? Did she or didn’t she later pass intelligence to the Soviets, as charged by historians of ASIO Desmond Ball and David Horner? What difference would it have made to have had Lesbia Harford’s full queer oeuvre before the Australian public when it was written? Why didn’t Dymphna Cusack join the CPA if, as this book asserts, her politics were just as far left as Frank Hardy’s? How aware was Eleanor Dark of First Nations activism when writing The Timeless Land (1941)? Politics sit at the heart of Australian literary history, but a raft of questions remain for contemporary readers.
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Book 1 Title: Inconvenient Women
Book 1 Subtitle: Australian radical writers 1900-1970
Book Author: Jacqueline Kent
Book 1 Biblio: NewSouth, $34.99 pb, 311 pp
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Was Katharine Susannah Prichard one of those present at the first meetings of the Communist Party of Australia (CPA), or not? Did she or didn’t she later pass intelligence to the Soviets, as charged by historians of ASIO Desmond Ball and David Horner? What difference would it have made to have had Lesbia Harford’s full queer oeuvre before the Australian public when it was written? Why didn’t Dymphna Cusack join the CPA if, as this book asserts, her politics were just as far left as Frank Hardy’s? How aware was Eleanor Dark of First Nations activism when writing The Timeless Land (1941)? Politics sit at the heart of Australian literary history, but a raft of questions remain for contemporary readers.

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David Rowland reviews ‘Shakespeare’s Tragic Art’ by Rhodri Lewis
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In 1588, with England facing the threat of Spanish invasion, Elizabeth I visited her troops assembled at Tilbury to deliver some rousing words: ‘I know I have the body of a weak and feeble woman; but I have the heart and stomach of a king, and of a king of England too.’ This assertion, the idea that the body politic was eternal and existed in a sacred realm beyond historical time, was ideally suited to a moment of national crisis. But rhetorical force notwithstanding, Elizabeth was propounding a fiction. In Shakespeare’s Tragic Art, Rhodri Lewis explores how William Shakespeare was able to use the tragic form to interrogate those ‘fictions of order, stability, and perpetuity’ that humans deploy in their desire to make sense of a random universe. Beginning with Titus Andronicus and ending with Coriolanus, Lewis shows how each play is a response to a particular set of aesthetic challenges. Shakespeare’s motivations lay in exploring the possibilities of the tragic genre. Through plays as various as Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, and King Lear, he explored ‘never-settled notions’ of what tragedy could achieve.
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Book 1 Title: Shakespeare’s Tragic Art
Book Author: Rhodri Lewis
Book 1 Biblio: Princeton University Press, US$39.95 hb, 392 pp
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In 1588, with England facing the threat of Spanish invasion, Elizabeth I visited her troops assembled at Tilbury to deliver some rousing words: ‘I know I have the body of a weak and feeble woman; but I have the heart and stomach of a king, and of a king of England too.’ This assertion, the idea that the body politic was eternal and existed in a sacred realm beyond historical time, was ideally suited to a moment of national crisis. But rhetorical force notwithstanding, Elizabeth was propounding a fiction. In Shakespeare’s Tragic Art, Rhodri Lewis explores how William Shakespeare was able to use the tragic form to interrogate those ‘fictions of order, stability, and perpetuity’ that humans deploy in their desire to make sense of a random universe. Beginning with Titus Andronicus and ending with Coriolanus, Lewis shows how each play is a response to a particular set of aesthetic challenges. Shakespeare’s motivations lay in exploring the possibilities of the tragic genre. Through plays as various as Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, and King Lear, he explored ‘never-settled notions’ of what tragedy could achieve.

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Adam Rivett reviews ‘Landfall’ by James Bradley
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Article Title: Cyclone season
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Defined meteorologically, landfall refers to a storm which strikes land after forming over water. By another definition, it is the first sight of a traveller who, like the aforementioned storm, has spent too long at sea. Both are destination and terminus, so it is unsurprising that the writer who edited The Penguin Book of the Ocean (2010) would pen a novel obsessed with water, and with people crossing it, sheltering from it, or simply trying to stay afloat. The inhabitants of Landfall are already deluged, and another storm is on the way. Beginning on a Monday morning and with a tropical cyclone due by week’s end, time in the novel is running short from the very start.
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Book 1 Title: Landfall
Book Author: James Bradley
Book 1 Biblio: Penguin, $34.99 pb, 317 pp
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Defined meteorologically, landfall refers to a storm which strikes land after forming over water. By another definition, it is the first sight of a traveller who, like the aforementioned storm, has spent too long at sea. Both are destination and terminus, so it is unsurprising that the writer who edited The Penguin Book of the Ocean (2010) would pen a novel obsessed with water, and with people crossing it, sheltering from it, or simply trying to stay afloat. The inhabitants of Landfall are already deluged, and another storm is on the way. Beginning on a Monday morning and with a tropical cyclone due by week’s end, time in the novel is running short from the very start.

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Kirsten Tranter reviews ‘Everything Lost, Everything Found’ by Matthew Hooton
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Article Title: Fordlândia
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We meet Matthew Hooton’s narrator Jack as an old man in urban Michigan. Jack has lived his adult life in this mid-western place and has seen the manufacturing boom of the American twentieth century flourish, expand, and collapse. His body struggles with all the mundane realities of old age – a fall that bruises a hip, the struggle to climb out of a car – while he navigates the decline of his beloved wife in a hospice. His mind is elsewhere in time and space, forever captive to the trauma and wonder he lived through as a child in Brazil. He sees imaginary vines trailing the edges of things, searches for papaya at the grocery store, and makes do with Floridian oranges. It is ‘unsettling to live in a nation of plenty’, Jack observes, ‘and yet find oneself constantly seeking substitutes for that which brought the senses alive as a child’. The narrative shifts back and forth along with Jack’s thoughts, focusing largely on his childhood in the 1920s in the bizarre and ultimately doomed settlement founded by Henry Ford in Brazil named Fordlândia. In this outpost of American culture and within Ford’s brand of strict Christian morality, settlers tried and failed to carry out Ford’s dream of cultivating rubber plantations.
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Book 1 Title: Everything Lost, Everything Found
Book Author: Matthew Hooton
Book 1 Biblio: Fourth Estate, $34.99 pb, 290 pp
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We meet Matthew Hooton’s narrator Jack as an old man in urban Michigan. Jack has lived his adult life in this mid-western place and has seen the manufacturing boom of the American twentieth century flourish, expand, and collapse. His body struggles with all the mundane realities of old age – a fall that bruises a hip, the struggle to climb out of a car – while he navigates the decline of his beloved wife in a hospice. His mind is elsewhere in time and space, forever captive to the trauma and wonder he lived through as a child in Brazil. He sees imaginary vines trailing the edges of things, searches for papaya at the grocery store, and makes do with Floridian oranges. It is ‘unsettling to live in a nation of plenty’, Jack observes, ‘and yet find oneself constantly seeking substitutes for that which brought the senses alive as a child’. The narrative shifts back and forth along with Jack’s thoughts, focusing largely on his childhood in the 1920s in the bizarre and ultimately doomed settlement founded by Henry Ford in Brazil named Fordlândia. In this outpost of American culture and within Ford’s brand of strict Christian morality, settlers tried and failed to carry out Ford’s dream of cultivating rubber plantations.

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Jonathan Ricketson reviews ‘Salvage’ by Jennifer Mills
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Article Title: Fictions of resistance
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Why read a dystopian novel when the present already feels dystopian? In a round-up in The New Yorker of speculative fiction released during the first Trump administration, the historian and critic Jill Lepore criticised the ‘radical pessimism of an unremitting dystopianism … [which] cannot imagine a better future’. Her point was that the genre had become mired in despair and hopelessness; that what had once been a literature of resistance in the age of George Orwell and Aldous Huxley had descended into a ‘fiction of submission’. In her masterful new novel, Salvage (2025), Jennifer Mills offers the antidote that Lepore sought: gleaming speculative fiction with a core of humanism and hope.
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Book 1 Title: Salvage
Book Author: Jennifer Mills
Book 1 Biblio: Picador, $34.99 pb, 448 pp
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Why read a dystopian novel when the present already feels dystopian? In a round-up in The New Yorker of speculative fiction released during the first Trump administration, the historian and critic Jill Lepore criticised the ‘radical pessimism of an unremitting dystopianism … [which] cannot imagine a better future’. Her point was that the genre had become mired in despair and hopelessness; that what had once been a literature of resistance in the age of George Orwell and Aldous Huxley had descended into a ‘fiction of submission’. In her masterful new novel, Salvage (2025), Jennifer Mills offers the antidote that Lepore sought: gleaming speculative fiction with a core of humanism and hope.

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A. Frances Johnson reviews ‘The Sun Was Electric Light’ by Rachel Morton
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From whiskey priests and crazed conquistadors to sun-maddened tourists, stories of white exile in South America are staples of Western literature and film. Such tropes are productively complicated in an outstanding début novel by Rachel Morton.
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Book 1 Title: The Sun Was Electric Light
Book Author: Rachel Morton
Book 1 Biblio: University of Queensland Press, $34.99 pb, 224 pp
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From whiskey priests and crazed conquistadors to sun-maddened tourists, stories of white exile in South America are staples of Western literature and film. Such tropes are productively complicated in an outstanding début novel by Rachel Morton.

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David Jack reviews ‘The Immigrants: Fabula mirabilis, or, a wonderful story’ by Moreno Giovannoni
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When Moreno Giovannoni, in his first book, The Fireflies of Autumn (2018), produced lines like ‘The Angel of Sadness draped its wings over the village and slept’, it was clear we were dealing with a writer of some poetic sensibility. Indeed, Giovannoni writes about his subjects with such care, tenderness, and gentle humour that it is possible to forget that the life he is depicting was more often than not ‘wretched’. He wrote his first book for two main reasons: to give readers the ‘flavour’ of a place and to depict the ‘travails of migrants’. These are also the reasons for his second book, The Immigrants, in many ways a companion to his first.
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Book 1 Title: The Immigrants
Book 1 Subtitle: Fabula mirabilis, or, a wonderful story
Book Author: Moreno Giovannoni
Book 1 Biblio: Black Inc., $36.99 pb, 304 pp
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When Moreno Giovannoni, in his first book, The Fireflies of Autumn (2018), produced lines like ‘The Angel of Sadness draped its wings over the village and slept’, it was clear we were dealing with a writer of some poetic sensibility. Indeed, Giovannoni writes about his subjects with such care, tenderness, and gentle humour that it is possible to forget that the life he is depicting was more often than not ‘wretched’. He wrote his first book for two main reasons: to give readers the ‘flavour’ of a place and to depict the ‘travails of migrants’. These are also the reasons for his second book, The Immigrants, in many ways a companion to his first.

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‘The irreducible humanity of others: What philosophy has meant to me’ by Raimond Gaita
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Some readers will know me as the author of Romulus My Father (1998). Romulus is not a book of philosophy, but it was obviously written by a philosopher profoundly affected by painful events in his childhood and the influence on him of his father and his father’s dear friend Pantelimon Hora, who helped raise him. Many people who have read the book said that it is obvious why I became a philosopher.
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Some readers will know me as the author of Romulus My Father (1998). Romulus is not a book of philosophy, but it was obviously written by a philosopher profoundly affected by painful events in his childhood and the influence on him of his father and his father’s dear friend Pantelimon Hora, who helped raise him. Many people who have read the book said that it is obvious why I became a philosopher.

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‘The Chirp/The Scream’ by Natasha Sholl
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My mother is chirping, like a small bird. I laugh. What a fun game. And when I run through the house to find her, there is a man in a balaclava with a knife to her throat. She is not chirping. She is screaming. The expectation of one thing when the opposite is true. And yet in my memory it is still a chirp, not a scream.
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My mother is chirping, like a small bird. I laugh. What a fun game. And when I run through the house to find her, there is a man in a balaclava with a knife to her throat. She is not chirping. She is screaming. The expectation of one thing when the opposite is true. And yet in my memory it is still a chirp, not a scream.

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Seumas Spark reviews ‘Melanesia: Travels in Black Oceania’ by Hamish McDonald
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A few years ago, I spent a week in the village of Salamaua on the Huon Gulf coast of Papua New Guinea (PNG). I delighted in swimming in the warm tropical waters that lap the village. After a dip or two, I wondered if there might be crocodiles about. My hosts told me that there was a resident crocodile; sometimes it came through the village at night, but I need not worry. In generations past, Salamauans and crocodiles had come to an agreement not to hurt each other, and since then the people of the village and their guests had been perfectly safe. I kept swimming.
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Book 1 Title: Melanesia
Book 1 Subtitle: Travels in Black Oceania
Book Author: Hamish McDonald
Book 1 Biblio: Black Inc., $36.99 pb, 330 pp
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A few years ago, I spent a week in the village of Salamaua on the Huon Gulf coast of Papua New Guinea (PNG). I delighted in swimming in the warm tropical waters that lap the village. After a dip or two, I wondered if there might be crocodiles about. My hosts told me that there was a resident crocodile; sometimes it came through the village at night, but I need not worry. In generations past, Salamauans and crocodiles had come to an agreement not to hurt each other, and since then the people of the village and their guests had been perfectly safe. I kept swimming.

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Peter Tregear reviews ‘The Cambridge Companion to Music in Australia’ edited by Amanda Harris and Clint Bracknell
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Article Title: ‘Make things right’
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We all know not to judge a book by its cover but sometimes the temptation to be at least a little influenced by it can be hard to resist. This is especially so when an author (or, in this case, editors Amanda Harris and Clint Bracknell) draws particular attention to it. 
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Alt Tag (Featured Image): Peter Tregear reviews ‘The Cambridge Companion to Music in Australia’ edited by Amanda Harris and Clint Bracknell
Book 1 Title: The Cambridge Companion to Music in Australia
Book Author: Amanda Harris and Clint Bracknell
Book 1 Biblio: Cambridge University Press, £85 pb, 447 pp
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We all know not to judge a book by its cover but sometimes the temptation to be at least a little influenced by it can be hard to resist. This is especially so when an author (or, in this case, editors Amanda Harris and Clint Bracknell) draws particular attention to it. 

Those familiar with the traditional format of Cambridge Companions will note that Harris and Bracknell chose not to style their own contribution as a ‘Companion to Australian Music’, but rather a ‘Companion to Music in Australia’, even though the former would have chimed with comparable volumes such as The Cambridge Companion to Australian Literature (2006) or The Cambridge Companion to French Music (2015). In their Introduction they explain that this was done to acknowledge ‘the dynamic fluid nature of music itself and the complexity and contestation inherent in the term “Australia”’. Given that there is also a hint of possession and erasure in the conjunction ‘Australian music’, this heightened sensitivity towards how their book would be titled is understandable. They also wished to signal to the reader that this book will be unapologetically vague about what the physical and conceptual boundaries of a companion to Australian music might be (beyond a declaration that the music of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples will be ‘at its very heart’).

Read more: Peter Tregear reviews ‘The Cambridge Companion to Music in Australia’ edited by Amanda Harris and...

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Geoff Page reviews ‘Mixed Business’ by Alan Wearne
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Article Title: Elevated gossip
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For almost fifty years, Alan Wearne has been one of Australia’s pre-eminent users of dramatic monologue. Since The Nightmarkets (1986), he has also become one of our most persistent and accomplished writers of verse novels. It is a form which to many seems paradoxical (how can something be two contradictory things at once?), and yet it is undeniably capable of producing fast-moving and powerful narratives which remain vividly present in the mind.
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Book 1 Title: Mixed Business
Book Author: Alan Wearne
Book 1 Biblio: Puncher & Wattmann, $32.95 pb, 120 pp
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For almost fifty years, Alan Wearne has been one of Australia’s pre-eminent users of dramatic monologue. Since The Nightmarkets (1986), he has also become one of our most persistent and accomplished writers of verse novels. It is a form which to many seems paradoxical (how can something be two contradictory things at once?), and yet it is undeniably capable of producing fast-moving and powerful narratives which remain vividly present in the mind.

Of course, it’s a difficult trick to pull off, requiring not only the psychological insight and narrative facility needed by ‘ordinary’ novelists, but also the metaphoric and linguistic agility of a poet. The texture needs to be denser than prose (otherwise what’s the point?), but if it is too dense the narrative momentum will stall.

Read more: Geoff Page reviews ‘Mixed Business’ by Alan Wearne

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Will Hunt reviews ‘The Drop Off’ by David Stavanger
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Article Title: Disappearing into an idea
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David Stavanger’s third collection of poetry, The Drop Off, disintegrates binaries and social expectations with post-structuralist fervour, occupying and exploring the liminal space of broken families, neo-liberal cultures, mental health and, of course, language. Stavanger’s poetry is both pithy and undercutting, anathematic and loving, political and personal – and often, as is the case with such duplicitous poetry, these themes express themselves simultaneously, almost co-dependently.
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Book 1 Title: The Drop Off
Book Author: David Stavanger
Book 1 Biblio: Upswell, $24.99 pb, 104 pp
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David Stavanger’s third collection of poetry, The Drop Off, disintegrates binaries and social expectations with post-structuralist fervour, occupying and exploring the liminal space of broken families, neo-liberal cultures, mental health and, of course, language. Stavanger’s poetry is both pithy and undercutting, anathematic and loving, political and personal – and often, as is the case with such duplicitous poetry, these themes express themselves simultaneously, almost co-dependently.

It is appropriate, then, that the first poem in The Drop Off references both dichotomy and play. ‘The Chess Game’, a pseudo-ekphrastic poem in conversation with Marcel Duchamp’s painting of the same name, begins ‘My son and I play chess / every morning during his custody visits.’ Chess functions as a symbol of polarity: white versus black, father versus son. Yet Stavanger is more interested in the cultural and social ambiguities that infiltrate such dichotomies, immediately undercutting the starkness of the first line with the enjambed revelation of domestic tension in the second. ‘Sometimes’ he lets his son win, other times his son wins fair and square. They ‘hunch over, contemplating next moves’, their bodies contorting and pliable, not straight and uncompromising. In a bracketed aside, Stavanger underlines the impermanence that perfuses The Drop Off: ‘he’s never glued my pieces to the board.’ ‘The Chase Game’ contextualises many of the poems in The Drop Off, situating the collection within the perimetric conditions of family life.

Read more: Will Hunt reviews ‘The Drop Off’ by David Stavanger

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Sam Ryan reviews ‘Greatest Hits: Poems 1968-2021’ by Tim Thorne
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Article Title: Bookended by death
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The selected work of a long-lived poet presents the reviewer with so much to consume. A long life and career give a poet plenty of time to make their way through different styles and themes and, perhaps most importantly, to witness moments in history and shifts in culture. In this case, we have a career spanning fifty-something years and a life that ended in 2021.
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Book 1 Title: Greatest Hits
Book 1 Subtitle: Poems 1968-2021
Book Author: Tim Thorne
Book 1 Biblio: Puncher & Wattmann, $32.95 pb, 233 pp
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The selected work of a long-lived poet presents the reviewer with so much to consume. A long life and career give a poet plenty of time to make their way through different styles and themes and, perhaps most importantly, to witness moments in history and shifts in culture. In this case, we have a career spanning fifty-something years and a life that ended in 2021.

Read more: Sam Ryan reviews ‘Greatest Hits: Poems 1968-2021’ by Tim Thorne

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Wilfrid Prest reviews ‘Culture is Not an Industry: Reclaiming art and culture for the common good’ by Justin O’Connor
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Article Title: Intractable definitions
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A book written by an English author and published by an English academic press with first-page references to New Labour, Conservative austerity, and Brexit might seem, at first glance, of little interest to or relevance for Australian readers. Yet anyone concerned with or about the state of the arts in this country and further afield will find much stimulus, provocation, and food for thought in the latest work of a prolific academic-activist entrepreneur who has occupied posts in three Australian universities since 2008, besides presenting at conferences and consulting widely with UN agencies and local and national governments throughout Asia, Europe, and the Pacific.
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Book 1 Title: Culture is Not an Industry
Book 1 Subtitle: Reclaiming art and culture for the common good
Book Author: Justin O’Connor
Book 1 Biblio: Manchester University Press, $34.99 pb, 294 pp
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A book written by an English author and published by an English academic press with first-page references to New Labour, Conservative austerity, and Brexit might seem, at first glance, of little interest to or relevance for Australian readers. Yet anyone concerned with or about the state of the arts in this country and further afield will find much stimulus, provocation, and food for thought in the latest work of a prolific academic-activist entrepreneur who has occupied posts in three Australian universities since 2008, besides presenting at conferences and consulting widely with UN agencies and local and national governments throughout Asia, Europe, and the Pacific.

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Ben Huf reviews ‘An Unlikely Survival: The politics of welfare in Australia since 1950’ by John Murphy
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Article Title: Means testing
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By the end of April 2020, more than 600,000 Australians had lost their jobs as the economy was locked down in response to the emerging Covid-19 crisis. Images of long lines queuing outside Centrelink offices inspired despondent think pieces and tweets. Here was proof of what had become of Australia’s welfare state – not quite dead but hollowed to a shell after decades of retrenchment and privatisation driven by a neo-liberal ideology embraced by both major political parties. Amid a national shutdown, the social security net appeared to have been cut to shreds.
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Book 1 Title: An Unlikely Survival
Book 1 Subtitle: The politics of welfare in Australia since 1950
Book Author: John Murphy
Book 1 Biblio: Melbourne University Press, $50 pb, 408 pp
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By the end of April 2020, more than 600,000 Australians had lost their jobs as the economy was locked down in response to the emerging Covid-19 crisis. Images of long lines queuing outside Centrelink offices inspired despondent think pieces and tweets. Here was proof of what had become of Australia’s welfare state – not quite dead but hollowed to a shell after decades of retrenchment and privatisation driven by a neo-liberal ideology embraced by both major political parties. Amid a national shutdown, the social security net appeared to have been cut to shreds.

Read more: Ben Huf reviews ‘An Unlikely Survival: The politics of welfare in Australia since 1950’ by John...

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Nick Haslam reviews ‘When Nothing Feels Real: A journey into the mystery illness of depersonalisation’ by Nathan Dunne
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Looking down on Athens from the Acropolis, a first-time visitor observed, ‘So all this really does exist, just as we learnt at school!’ As he noted later, ‘the person who gave expression to the remark was divided … from another person who took cognizance of the remark’. The first person was surprised to see something whose reality had seemed doubtful, the second astonished that the reality of the Athenian landscape could be in doubt. Both people were named Sigmund Freud.
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Book 1 Title: When Nothing Feels Real
Book 1 Subtitle: A journey into the mystery illness of depersonalisation
Book Author: Nathan Dunne
Book 1 Biblio: Murdoch Books $34.99 pb, 254 pp
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Looking down on Athens from the Acropolis, a first-time visitor observed, ‘So all this really does exist, just as we learnt at school!’ As he noted later, ‘the person who gave expression to the remark was divided … from another person who took cognizance of the remark’. The first person was surprised to see something whose reality had seemed doubtful, the second astonished that the reality of the Athenian landscape could be in doubt. Both people were named Sigmund Freud.

Freud’s fleeting experience of estrangement is a well-known example of what came to be called derealisation. It frequently co-occurs with depersonalisation, a feeling of disconnection from self. These phenomena share a sense of alienation and unreality and fall on a spectrum extending from momentary wooziness to chronic mental illness. Once understood as expressions of hysteria, depersonalisation and derealisation later became recognised as among a group of dissociative conditions that involve alterations of consciousness, selfhood, and memory.

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Article Title: Open Page with Susan Hampton
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Susan Hampton began her writing life as a performance poet. Her latest book is a memoir called Anything Can Happen, published by Puncher & Wattmann in 2024. It recently won the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for Non-fiction.
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Susan Hampton SQUARESusan Hampton began her writing life as a performance poet. Her latest book is a memoir called Anything Can Happen, published by Puncher & Wattmann in 2024. It recently won the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for Non-fiction.

 

 

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

Kyoto, maybe a hundred years ago.

What’s your idea of hell?

Rabid autocrats or a mosquito plague.

What do you consider the most specious virtue?

I’m so non-virtuous that I tend to admire all the virtues – they seem unattainable.

What’s your favourite film?

Babette’s Feast. Plus, on television, all of the Ozark series.

And your favourite book?

When I was six, it would have been a Phantom comic: Ghost Who Walks. I no longer have favourites in that sense – I have phases. Currently, it’s all about Georges Simenon’s Maigret novels. Then there are Annie Ernaux, Claire Keegan, Percival Everett, Rachel Cusk, and Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov. Not that I can read much of it at a time. I need long breaks.

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

Cathy Wilcox, Simone Young, Penny Wong. 

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

I would retire ‘awesome’ and ‘robust’. ‘Stupefaction’ deserves a comeback.

Who is your favourite author?

To refresh my brain, I read Michael Connelly’s crime fiction. When I was writing my memoir, I learned a lot from him about keeping the action moving, even if at the level of tone or rhythm. I learned a lot about narrative.

And your favourite literary hero or heroine?

I don’t really have one. I did like Frankie in Carson McCullers’ The Member of the Wedding (1946). I liked Patti Smith in the memoir Just Kids (2010).

Which qualities do you most admire in a writer?

Lack of mannerisms.

Which book influenced you most in your youth?

I didn’t read much. We were told to go outside.

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

I liked Richard Ford the first time I read Let Me Be Frank With You (2014). Years later I read it again and found the voice disaffected, bored almost with the trashier side of American popular culture, the weather events, the radio, the public discourse. First time round, what I noticed was Frank as a patient witness to the pain or disorder of others.

Do you have a favourite podcast?

Conversations on Radio National.

What, if anything, impedes your writing?

Myself. I need to get out of my own way. It’s the same with anyone. Don’t intervene. Don’t editorialise.

What qualities do you look for in critics?

Intelligence.

How do you find working with editors?

Fine. I enjoy it.

What do you think of writers’ festivals?

I rarely go. But when I do, it’s usually better than I thought it would be. Good and sometimes adept discussion.

Are artists valued in our society?

Sometimes.

What are you working on now?

A short novel narrated by a hospital orderly.

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Article Title: Matter over mind
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David Szalay’s characters drift, indifferent and alone, caught in currents of seemingly trivial events that carry them further from comfortable shores. Encounters begin and end without resolution, connections form and dissolve in passing, and only in retrospect, if ever, do scars appear. ‘Are you happy that you’re alive?’ one character asks another in Turbulence (2018), Szalay’s short story collection that circumnavigates the globe via consecutive aviation encounters. The protagonist of each story meets their successor, with ubiquitous woe making Senegalese businessman indistinguishable from Canadian novelist. The twelve travellers crammed into roughly one hundred pages suffer the consequences of globalised relationships, of a single human network in which personal connections are stretched thin and tension ripples far, as their lives are thrown off-kilter by cold gusts of fate. Characters’ sense of their own existence and surroundings is tenuous. One character reflects: ‘It was strange to think that the same people would walk around the same paths tomorrow, without him being there to see them.’
Book 1 Title: Flesh
Book Author: David Szalay
Book 1 Biblio: Jonathan Cape, $34.99 pb, 349 pp
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David Szalay’s characters drift, indifferent and alone, caught in currents of seemingly trivial events that carry them further from comfortable shores. Encounters begin and end without resolution, connections form and dissolve in passing, and only in retrospect, if ever, do scars appear. ‘Are you happy that you’re alive?’ one character asks another in Turbulence (2018), Szalay’s short story collection that circumnavigates the globe via consecutive aviation encounters. The protagonist of each story meets their successor, with ubiquitous woe making Senegalese businessman indistinguishable from Canadian novelist. The twelve travellers crammed into roughly one hundred pages suffer the consequences of globalised relationships, of a single human network in which personal connections are stretched thin and tension ripples far, as their lives are thrown off-kilter by cold gusts of fate. Characters’ sense of their own existence and surroundings is tenuous. One character reflects: ‘It was strange to think that the same people would walk around the same paths tomorrow, without him being there to see them.’

Read more: Ned Lupson reviews ‘Flesh’ by David Szalay

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John Allison reviews ‘Story of the Century: Wagner and the creation of The Ring’ by Michael Downes
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Article Title: Who’s afraid of Richard Wagner?
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‘The last word on The Ring will never be written,’ writes Michael Downes in the Prologue to his new book outlining the creative history of Richard Wagner’s tetralogy. As with everything else in Story of the Century: Wagner and the creation of The Ring, Downes makes good sense, for a seemingly infinite number of interpretations of Wagner’s magnum opus are possible. Wagner believed in the power of myth, and the Ring is timeless – about more than the giants, gods, dwarves, and humans it portrays. While on one hand it seems to be a warning against the abuse and retention of power in which love ultimately triumphs, on the other it has been taken as a manifesto for German nationalism and unsavoury racial views. The Ring has also been viewed as a comment on the industrialisation of Wagner’s era, a warning against ecological disaster, as a socialist allegory, even in terms of Jungian psychology – to mention just a few examples, all of which testify to the hold it has over people.
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Book 1 Title: Story of the Century
Book 1 Subtitle: Wagner and the creation of The Ring
Book Author: Michael Downes
Book 1 Biblio: Faber, $45 hb, 336 pp
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‘The last word on The Ring will never be written,’ writes Michael Downes in the Prologue to his new book outlining the creative history of Richard Wagner’s tetralogy. As with everything else in Story of the Century: Wagner and the creation of The Ring, Downes makes good sense, for a seemingly infinite number of interpretations of Wagner’s magnum opus are possible. Wagner believed in the power of myth, and the Ring is timeless – about more than the giants, gods, dwarves, and humans it portrays. While on one hand it seems to be a warning against the abuse and retention of power in which love ultimately triumphs, on the other it has been taken as a manifesto for German nationalism and unsavoury racial views. The Ring has also been viewed as a comment on the industrialisation of Wagner’s era, a warning against ecological disaster, as a socialist allegory, even in terms of Jungian psychology – to mention just a few examples, all of which testify to the hold it has over people.

Read more: John Allison reviews ‘Story of the Century: Wagner and the creation of The Ring’ by Michael Downes

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