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Absolutely Revolting

May 2013, no. 351

The May issue contains many highlights. Distinguished author-critic Kerryn Goldsworthy, in a long article titled ‘Everyone’s a Critic’, surveys the current state of book reviewing, both in print and online. Comments by senior critics and literary editors make this essential reading for anyone interested in the health of our critical culture. Andrew Fuhrmann rips into the new production of A Clockwork Orange. We review major new novels by Andrea Goldsmith and Ashley Hay, and Melinda Harvey reviews Alice Munro’s latest valedictory collection of stories. Thanks to the generosity of our Patrons, we also advertise the new ABR Patrons’ Editorial Internship, worth $20,000.

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Custom Article Title: ABR Ian Potter Foundation Fellowship: 'Everyone’s a Critic' by Kerryn Goldsworthy
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‘We place on paper without hesitation a tissue of flatteries, to which in society we could not give utterance, for our lives, without either blushing or laughing outright,’ wrote Edgar Allan Poe in 1846. His title was ‘The Literati of New York City’; his topic was the discrepancy, as he saw it, between the critics’ private opinions of books and the polite reviews of them that appeared in print. Literary criticism in New York in the middle of the nineteenth century, Poe argued, was essentially corrupt: a matter of back-scratching, currying favour, and chasing after influence, power, and money.
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‘We place on paper without hesitation a tissue of flatteries, to which in society we could not give utterance, for our lives, without either blushing or laughing outright,’ wrote Edgar Allan Poe in 1846. His title was ‘The Literati of New York City’; his topic was the discrepancy, as he saw it, between the critics’ private opinions of books and the polite reviews of them that appeared in print. Literary criticism in New York in the middle of the nineteenth century, Poe argued, was essentially corrupt: a matter of back-scratching, currying favour, and chasing after influence, power, and money.

But then, Poe in 1846 was a youngish man of extreme opinions, and he was better known by his contemporaries not for the Gothic fictions most closely associated with his name today, but rather by a nickname that queasily acknowledged his own reviewing style: ‘Tomahawk Man’.

Read more: ABR Ian Potter Foundation Fellowship: 'Everyone’s a Critic' by Kerryn Goldsworthy

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Melinda Harvey reviews Dear Life by Alice Munro
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Contents Category: Fiction
Custom Article Title: Melinda Harvey reviews Alice Munro's 'Dear Life'
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Article Title: A further valedictory collection from Alice Munro
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Philip Roth wasn’t the only writer to take the unusual step of announcing his retirement at the end of last year. Confirmation that Alice Munro was also relinquishing fiction was tucked away on the New Yorker’s blog, Page-Turner, three days after the New York Times ran an interview with Roth on its front page. While literary magazines here and overseas continue to publish tributes to Roth, the dearth of comparable pieces on Munro has been conspicuous. Surely it’s not because we don’t think she’s any good. Like rainbows, sleep, and the Beatles, her short stories are things upon which we can all agree.
Book 1 Title: Dear Life
Book Author: Alice Munro
Book 1 Biblio: Chatto & Windus, $39.95 hb, 319 pp
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Philip Roth wasn’t the only writer to take the unusual step of announcing his retirement at the end of last year. Confirmation that Alice Munro was also relinquishing fiction was tucked away on the New Yorker’s blog, Page-Turner, three days after the New York Times ran an interview with Roth on its front page. While literary magazines here and overseas continue to publish tributes to Roth, the dearth of comparable pieces on Munro has been conspicuous. Surely it’s not because we don’t think she’s any good. Like rainbows, sleep, and the Beatles, her short stories are things upon which we can all agree.

Read more: Melinda Harvey reviews 'Dear Life' by Alice Munro

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Dennis Altman reviews Not Dead Yet: Labor’s Post-left Future (Quarterly Essay 49) by Mark Latham
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Article Title: Mark Latham pulls his punches
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Mark Latham rose to the leadership of the Labor Party unexpectedly, lost the 2004 federal election, retired to sulk from the sidelines, and has done so ever since. Whether he or Graham Richardson has done more damage to the party that nurtured them is a question I leave to the blogosphere. Before Latham became leader in 2003, he published considerably more about his vision for Labor than most parliamentarians have done, though none of his publications was as readable as his post-retirement diaries (2005), in which he displayed a lack of judgement and such scant goodwill to his colleagues that it leaves one astounded that they ever elected him leader. (When Latham ran against Kim Beazley for the leadership, two of the wiser members of caucus, Carmen Lawrence and Lindsay Tanner, counselled me against becoming too enthusiastic. They were clearly correct.)
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Book 1 Title: Not Dead Yet: Labor’s Post-left Future (Quarterly Essay 49)
Book Author: Mark Latham
Book 1 Biblio: Black Inc., $19.99 pb, 101 pp
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Mark Latham rose to the leadership of the Labor Party unexpectedly, lost the 2004 federal election, retired to sulk from the sidelines, and has done so ever since. Whether he or Graham Richardson has done more damage to the party that nurtured them is a question I leave to the blogosphere. Before Latham became leader in 2003, he published considerably more about his vision for Labor than most parliamentarians have done, though none of his publications was as readable as his post-retirement diaries (2005), in which he displayed a lack of judgement and such scant goodwill to his colleagues that it leaves one astounded that they ever elected him leader. (When Latham ran against Kim Beazley for the leadership, two of the wiser members of caucus, Carmen Lawrence and Lindsay Tanner, counselled me against becoming too enthusiastic. They were clearly correct.)

Read more: Dennis Altman reviews 'Not Dead Yet: Labor’s Post-left Future' (Quarterly Essay 49) by Mark Latham

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Rachel Robertson reviews Boomer & Me by Jo Case
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Article Title: An Asperger's memoir
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The last decade has seen a significant growth both in the number of motherhood memoirs and in books about autism and Asperger’s Syndrome. Australia is no exception to this trend, and Jo Case, in Boomer & Me, makes a contribution to both fields. As someone who has written a motherhood memoir about autism, I am a sympathetic reviewer but might also be considered too close to the topic. I have certainly read many memoirs about autism and Asperger’s in the ten years since my own son was diagnosed. I was pleased, then, to find that Case’s memoir offered two interesting points of departure from other Australian motherhood memoirs and Asperger’s stories. It is also well-written and engaging, as expected from Case, who is a literary reviewer and a former deputy editor of ABR.
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Book 1 Title: Boomer & Me: A memoir of motherhood, and Asperger’s
Book Author: Jo Case
Book 1 Biblio: Hardie Grant Books, $24.95 pb, 352 pp, 9781742702582
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The last decade has seen a significant growth both in the number of motherhood memoirs and in books about autism and Asperger’s Syndrome. Australia is no exception to this trend, and Jo Case, in Boomer & Me, makes a contribution to both fields. As someone who has written a motherhood memoir about autism, I am a sympathetic reviewer but might also be considered too close to the topic. I have certainly read many memoirs about autism and Asperger’s in the ten years since my own son was diagnosed. I was pleased, then, to find that Case’s memoir offered two interesting points of departure from other Australian motherhood memoirs and Asperger’s stories. It is also well-written and engaging, as expected from Case, who is a literary reviewer and a former deputy editor of ABR.

Read more: Rachel Robertson reviews 'Boomer & Me' by Jo Case

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Contents Category: Theatre
Custom Article Title: Andrew Fuhrmann reviews A Clockwork Orange, directed by Alexandra Spencer-Jones
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You’ve got to admire the bolshie great yarbles of young British company Action to the Word. It must have taken much courage and not a little jejune presumption to dream of touring Anthony Burgess’s novel A Clockwork Orange (1962) to such capital city main-stage venues as Melbourne’s Malthouse Theatre, QPAC in Brisbane, and Canberra’s Theatre Centre. Such confidence is difficult to understand. This new production is only marginally more advanced than an average – very average – work of student theatre, or at best a fringe festival experiment.
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You’ve got to admire the bolshie great yarbles of young British company Action to the Word. It must have taken much courage and not a little jejune presumption to dream of touring Anthony Burgess’s novel A Clockwork Orange (1962) to such capital city main-stage venues as Melbourne’s Malthouse Theatre, QPAC in Brisbane, and Canberra’s Theatre Centre. Such confidence is difficult to understand. This new production is only marginally more advanced than an average – very average – work of student theatre, or at best a fringe festival experiment.

Read more: Andrew Fuhrmann reviews A Clockwork Orange, directed by Alexandra Spencer-Jones

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Patrick Allington reviews The Railwayman’s Wife by Ashley Hay
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As a woman and her daughter prepare to attend a memorial service for their husband and father, a railwayman, the girl offers the woman her kaleidoscope: ‘You could borrow this, Mum [...] You said it was good for seeing things differently.’ It is a resonant moment, the promise of a magical but fleeting distortion of reality both lovely and desperately sad. The scene also encapsulates The Railwayman’s Wife, a novel imbued with death and the hard slog of new beginnings – and with notions of ‘seeing things differently’.
Book 1 Title: The Railwayman’s Wife
Book Author: Ashley Hay
Book 1 Biblio: Allen & Unwin, $29.99 pb, 256 pp
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As a woman and her daughter prepare to attend a memorial service for their husband and father, a railwayman, the girl offers the woman her kaleidoscope: ‘You could borrow this, Mum [...] You said it was good for seeing things differently.’ It is a resonant moment, the promise of a magical but fleeting distortion of reality both lovely and desperately sad. The scene also encapsulates The Railwayman’s Wife, a novel imbued with death and the hard slog of new beginnings – and with notions of ‘seeing things differently’.

Read more: Patrick Allington reviews 'The Railwayman’s Wife' by Ashley Hay

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Custom Article Title: 'The Lonely Death' by Hayley Katzen
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A human body exposed to summer heat can be reduced to bones in nine days. First the flies and maggots feast on the body’s fluids. As the tissues decay, they feed on the whole body through orifices and wounds. Next the insects and predators gorge on the juicy maggots. Once the body has begun to decompose, in come the beetles that tuck in to the tougher flesh, skin, and ligaments. In Australia the intestines of herbivores are a delicacy for the dung beetle. Then moths and mites feed on fly eggs and hair. Meantime, the bacteria are busy, helping the body to decompose and recycling the nutrients. Is that, I wonder, what happened to our Brahman bull Angel?
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Find Me Before I Die a Lonely Death.com

– Title of an album by electronic band Minuit

A human body exposed to summer heat can be reduced to bones in nine days. First the flies and maggots feast on the body’s fluids. As the tissues decay, they feed on the whole body through orifices and wounds. Next the insects and predators gorge on the juicy maggots. Once the body has begun to decompose, in come the beetles that tuck in to the tougher flesh, skin, and ligaments. In Australia the intestines of herbivores are a delicacy for the dung beetle. Then moths and mites feed on fly eggs and hair. Meantime, the bacteria are busy, helping the body to decompose and recycling the nutrients. Is that, I wonder, what happened to our Brahman bull Angel?

He came to us in spring. It was the year my partner, Jen, extended the trellis to support the bumper broad-bean crop. The paddocks were rich in green pick and cows didn’t trundle after the truck bellowing, ‘Feed me, feed me’.

Read more: 'The Lonely Death' by Hayley Katzen

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Contents Category: Commentary
Subheading: An assemblage of convenience
Custom Article Title: Julian Meyrick: 'National cultural policy-making 101'
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To estimate the amount of waffle in a cultural policy document, try this patented test: (i) identify a given sentence or section; (ii) highlight the key terms; (iii) swap the key terms around. If it still makes as much sense, it’s waffle. Another way of saying this is that there are always two people responsible for cultural policy. The first is reasonable, knowledgeable, historically aware. The second is a nutbag, droning on about specious targets and unprovable effects. The first writes things like ‘government’s role in supporting culture is most visible in the major cultural organisations it funds’ (Creative Australia, p. 32) and ‘there is a need to nurture the most gifted and talented while providing for those who want to take pleasure from arts and culture’ (CA, 69). The second writes baloney like ‘the benefits of our cultural and creative assets must be maximised. Innovation across all industry sectors is essential to driving productivity growth, maintaining high standards of living and growing competitiveness in the global economy’ (CA, 92). Why can’t we just have the first person? Why does someone who sounds as if he has swallowed a Treasury manual with the words in the wrong order thwart the sense of all government intervention in the cultural sector?
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To estimate the amount of waffle in a cultural policy document, try this patented test: (i) identify a given sentence or section; (ii) highlight the key terms; (iii) swap the key terms around. If it still makes as much sense, it’s waffle. Another way of saying this is that there are always two people responsible for cultural policy. The first is reasonable, knowledgeable, historically aware. The second is a nutbag, droning on about specious targets and unprovable effects. The first writes things like ‘government’s role in supporting culture is most visible in the major cultural organisations it funds’ (Creative Australia, p. 32) and ‘there is a need to nurture the most gifted and talented while providing for those who want to take pleasure from arts and culture’ (CA, 69). The second writes baloney like ‘the benefits of our cultural and creative assets must be maximised. Innovation across all industry sectors is essential to driving productivity growth, maintaining high standards of living and growing competitiveness in the global economy’ (CA, 92). Why can’t we just have the first person? Why does someone who sounds as if he has swallowed a Treasury manual with the words in the wrong order thwart the sense of all government intervention in the cultural sector?

Read more: Julian Meyrick on National cultural policy-making

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Myth and misrepresentation

Dear Editor,

Lyndon Megarrity’s review of my book, I Am Bound to Be True: The Life and Legacy of Arthur A. Calwell, begins with assertions about Arthur Calwell that appear to be intended to deter the reader from being interested in my book (April 2013). It recycles comments that have made the history of postwar immigration to Australia a maelstrom of myth and misrepresentation. Megarrity ignores the detailed explanation of Australian Labor Party policy that was binding onevery ALP member, and widespread community support for the Restrictive Immigration Act, which Calwell was the first to amend in March 1947. His efforts were eventually successful in achieving Australian citizenship for Asian residents and those of Papua New Guinea. Megarrity appears indifferent to the environment in which events occurred. The quotation from 1972 (‘No red-blooded Australian wants to see a chocolate-coloured Australia in the 1980s’) was in the context of turmoil overseas by ‘Black Power’ and the wish to protectAustralia from social divisions based on race, while continuing to promote education for people from Third World countries. Megarrity would find many refutations of racist comments by Calwell in Hansard and should have mentioned his support for Australian Aborigines and the people of Papua New Guinea.

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Contents Category: Advances
Custom Article Title: News from the Editor's Desk
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Article Title: The latest literary news from the editor's desk
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‘We live in exacting times – or think we do.’ Advances, ever wary of alarmists, was reminded of Peter Steele’s epigram while reading Kerryn Goldsworthy’s article ‘Everyone’s a Critic’, the fruit of her ABR Ian Potter Foundation Fellowship, which we are delighted to be able to publish in this issue.

We are all familiar with facile notions that criticism is dead, or incurably futile; that long-form journalism is a defunct (or miraculously recent) school; that critics themselves are woefully biddable, incestuous creatures. Dr Goldsworthy – a former Editor of ABR – dubs this the ‘decline polemic’. Her article, based on a survey of sixteen leading reviewers and literary editors, examines these anxieties and points to new forms, new freedoms, new opportunities.

There can be no doubt, though, that book reviewing faces many challenges. Miniscule space in some newspapers; no space at all in others; the valorising of online verdicts from anyone who can negotiate a keyboard; sloppy critical practices: these are just some of the hazards that exercise the minds of Dr Goldsworthy’s subjects, and many others.
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Exacting times

Kerryn Goldsworthy‘We live in exacting times – or think we do.’ Advances, ever wary of alarmists, was reminded of Peter Steele’s epigram while reading Kerryn Goldsworthy’s article ‘Everyone’s a Critic’, the fruit of her ABR Ian Potter Foundation Fellowship, which we are delighted to be able to publish in this issue.

We are all familiar with facile notions that criticism is dead, or incurably futile; that long-form journalism is a defunct (or miraculously recent) school; that critics themselves are woefully biddable, incestuous creatures. Dr Goldsworthy – a former Editor of ABR – dubs this the ‘decline polemic’. Her article, based on a survey of sixteen leading reviewers and literary editors, examines these anxieties and points to new forms, new freedoms, new opportunities.

There can be no doubt, though, that book reviewing faces many challenges. Miniscule space in some newspapers; no space at all in others; the valorising of online verdicts from anyone who can negotiate a keyboard; sloppy critical practices: these are just some of the hazards that exercise the minds of Dr Goldsworthy’s subjects, and many others.

We anticipate a lively response to ‘Everyone’s a Critic’, and look forward to publishing some of them in our Letters pages and in the comments section of ABR Online. And a reminder: Kerryn Goldsworthy and Peter Rose will be in conversation at the 2013 Clunes Booktown on Saturday, 4 May.

Biographies of books

First we had cities, tramps, beverages, even the humble potato; now the book itself is a fitting subject for biographers. American scholar Michael Gorra’s luminous book Portrait of a Novel: Henry James and the Making of an American Masterpiece (Norton, 2012) focuses on James’s most famous novel, The Portrait of a Lady, builds on post-Edelian Jamesian scholarship, and brilliantly complicates our sense of the Master.

Closer to home, Canberra scholar Paul Eggert has done the same for book-historical Henrician studies. Biography of a Book: Henry Lawson’s While the Billy Boils (Sydney University Press/Pennsylvania State University Press, $40 hb, 2013) ‘traces the life’ of Lawson’s classic collection, which appeared fifteen years after Isabel Gardner set about breaking several men’s hearts – and countless readers’ ever since.

The distant shoreZwicky F

Perth writer Fay Zwicky (reliably the last poet in any anthology of Australian verse) is one of our favourite poets, so it’s good to present a new work by her. ‘The distant shore blurs, lost in fog,’ she writes in ‘Charon’.

We invited Fay Zwicky to write about the gestation of this fine poem. After all, she has been teaching and critiquing poetry for decades, and her first volume, Isaac Babel’s Fiddle appeared in 1975. Her short reflection on the poem accompanies it. Writing about one’s own work can be ‘difficult’, as Zwicky notes; authorial reflections can be tendentious, ‘potentially reductive’. But anything that demystifies a poem for readers; persuades them that poetry is necessary, followable, pleasurable; elucidates the poem in cogent, candid, democratic ways (as Zwicky does) must be valuable. We look forward to presenting more of these annotated poems in due course. Meanwhile, enjoy Fay Zwicky’s ‘Charon’, accompanied or not.

Anywhen but nowSC

Darwin veterinarian Sophie Constable works in dog health education in rural and remote Aboriginal communities all over Australia, but later this month she will head to London to find out if she has won the Terry Pratchett Award for a new novel by a Commonwealth writer who has not yet published a book. Dr Constable is one of six shortlisted authors. Her novel, Bloodline, is an alternate history of 1940s Russia, where Alexei Romanov has deposed Stalin.

Sophie Constable told Advances: ‘The Pratchett theme “Anywhere but here; anywhen but now” seemed perfect, so I submitted my manuscript.’ If she wins, she will receive a £20,000 advance and a contract with Transworld (Doubleday). It might lead to a second alternate history in which dogs rule the world.

Jolley Prize closing soon

Our readers love their prizes, and short story writers still have a few more weeks to enter the ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize, which is worth a total of $8000. See our website for full details and the entry form.

Writing the self

Francophiles, essayists, and Proustians will not want to miss a joint ABR and Melbourne Library Services event to be held in the East Melbourne Library on Wednesday, 15 May (6 p.m.). Noted French scholars and enthusiasts Véronique Duché and Colin Nettelbeck (who reviews Camus’s Algerian Chronicles for us in this issue) will be in discussion about Montaigne and Proust, with particular references to convergences in their remarkable works. This is a free event, but reservations are essential: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

ABR and Voiceless

There is much interest in the ABR Voiceless Fellowship, the ninth to date. The theme this time is animal protection, which generates such emotion and a burgeoning literature. As with all our Fellowships, the chosen applicant will receive $5000. Published writers with an interest in animal protection have until 31 May to apply.

Bear in mind when applying for these Fellowships that we are seeking succinct proposals of two pages, not finished works or extracts from such. These Fellowships – unlike the Calibre Prize – are collaborations between the chosen Fellow and the Editor. Usually they take several weeks or months.

We will name the second ABR Ian Potter Foundation Fellow in our June issue. His or her article will appear in our performing arts issue (November 2013).

Giveaways galore!

This month, courtesy of Black Inc., ten prompt new subscribers will each receive a copy of Mark Latham’s new Quarterly Essay: Not Dead Yet, which is reviewed in this issue.

Film-lovers will be pleased to hear that this month ABR has tickets to not one, not two, but three films for lucky subscribers. Thanks to Palace Films we have twenty-five double passes to Tabu, directed by Miguel Gomes. We also have twenty double passes to Broken, starring Tim Roth, Cillian Murphy, and Eloise Laurence, courtesy of Curious Distribution. And, thanks to Becker Film Group, we have ten double passes to A Place for Me starring Greg Kinnear, Jennifer Connelly, and Kristen Bell. 

Subscribe or renew your subscription now for a chance to win a double pass to one of these films.

BrokenTim Roth and Eloise Laurence in Broken

TabuIsabel Muñoz Cardoso and Ana Moreira in Tabu

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Mary Eagle reviews Affairs of the Art by Katrina Strickland
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What happens when a famous artist dies, leaving a wife, husband, or children to tend the flame? The question recurs in Ian Hamilton’s spellbinding Keepers of the Flame (1992), an account of a dozen literary estates over a period of three hundred years, and remains suspended in this journalistic assessment by Katrina Strickland of the management of Australian art estates in our own time.

I felt the strength of a widow’s commitment in 1992 when Maisie Drysdale gave me Hamilton’s book. At the time, I was procrastinating about writing a biography of her first husband, Peter Purves Smith. He had been dead more than forty years; Maisie had remarried in the 1960s and was now an old woman twice bereaved; but she had not forgotten. Through her deliberate gift she intimated that I shared the responsibility of shoring up her dead young husband’s reputation, warned me that she had a widow’s passion, and reassured me that she had taken Hamilton’s point (up to a point).
Book 1 Title: Affairs of the Art
Book Author: Katrina Strickland
Book 1 Biblio: Miegunyah Press, $34.99 pb, 261 pp
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What happens when a famous artist dies, leaving a wife, husband, or children to tend the flame? The question recurs in Ian Hamilton’s spellbinding Keepers of the Flame (1992), an account of a dozen literary estates over a period of three hundred years, and remains suspended in this journalistic assessment by Katrina Strickland of the management of Australian art estates in our own time.

I felt the strength of a widow’s commitment in 1992 when Maisie Drysdale gave me Hamilton’s book. At the time, I was procrastinating about writing a biography of her first husband, Peter Purves Smith. He had been dead more than forty years; Maisie had remarried in the 1960s and was now an old woman twice bereaved; but she had not forgotten. Through her deliberate gift she intimated that I shared the responsibility of shoring up her dead young husband’s reputation, warned me that she had a widow’s passion, and reassured me that she had taken Hamilton’s point (up to a point).

Read more: Mary Eagle reviews 'Affairs of the Art' by Katrina Strickland

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Contents Category: Poem
Custom Article Title: 'Reflections on "Charon"', a new poem by Fay Zwicky
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Twelve noon Monday, 38 degrees and rising.
The phone’s rung twice
and someone else has fallen off
the twig while military files of micro-
ants move in on ancient crumbs.
Who said we’d live forever?
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Read more: 'Reflections on "Charon"', a new poem by Fay Zwicky

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Custom Article Title: 'The Consonants', a new poem by John Tranter
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B, brave brown, C, icicle
pendant, D, dun though pale,
F for faint mauve, fish and bicycle,
G, gothic paint in a green pail
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Read more: 'The Consonants', a new poem by John Tranter

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Chris Wallace-Crabbe reviews Mute Poetry, Speaking Pictures by Leonard Barkan
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Subheading: Dancing through a maze of possible mimesis
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Simonides of Ceos is said to have declared that ‘Painting is mute poetry, poetry a speaking picture.’ All of us know something of what he means, about our thirst for information from the arts: and, if you like, our scrabbling for the visible within a text. One half of his mirrored pronouncement is verified by those people who, in an art museum, hurry to the curatorial information alongside a picture. They want to discover what the painting is about. But the sought-after ‘aboutness’ keeps slipping away from the viewer, much as the point – but is it a point? – of a poem does.
Book 1 Title: Mute Poetry, Speaking Pictures
Book Author: Leonard Barkan
Book 1 Biblio: Princeton University Press (Footprint Books), $31.95 hb, 207 pp
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Simonides of Ceos is said to have declared that ‘Painting is mute poetry, poetry a speaking picture.’ All of us know something of what he means, about our thirst for information from the arts: and, if you like, our scrabbling for the visible within a text. One half of his mirrored pronouncement is verified by those people who, in an art museum, hurry to the curatorial information alongside a picture. They want to discover what the painting is about. But the sought-after ‘aboutness’ keeps slipping away from the viewer, much as the point – but is it a point? – of a poem does.

Read more: Chris Wallace-Crabbe reviews 'Mute Poetry, Speaking Pictures' by Leonard Barkan

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Open Page with Matthew Condon
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My middle-aged dreams are somehow linked to the assorted day-to-day anxieties that come with the territory. When I was young, I had a recurring dream in which a man dressed in black and wearing a fedora stepped out of the cupboard at the end of the bed and stood over me. Years later a psychic told me it was my grandfather, signwriter and poet George Baker, who died when I was eight months old.
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Why do you write?

You might have to ask the ten-year-old that I was, drawing cartoon strips or writing short stories, then binding them and putting them up on my shelf so I could easily observe my collected works. Still, very little since (apart from having my own children) has given me such profound satisfaction. Considering writing’s level of difficulty, if I wasn’t compelled to write I wouldn’t.

Are you a vivid dreamer?

Not particularly. They come in fits and starts. My middle-aged dreams are somehow linked to the assorted day-to-day anxieties that come with the territory. When I was young, I had a recurring dream in which a man dressed in black and wearing a fedora stepped out of the cupboard at the end of the bed and stood over me. Years later a psychic told me it was my grandfather, signwriter and poet George Baker, who died when I was eight months old.

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Dean Biron reviews Three Crooked Kings by Matthew Condon
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Contents Category: True Crime
Subheading: Laying bare the truth of a state
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In April 2012, barely a week after Queensland had elected a conservative government to office for the first time in twenty-six years, Campbell Newman announced the abolition of the state-funded premier’s literary awards. The decision, despite disingenuous claims to the contrary, was entirely symbolic, coming as it did before Newman’s Liberal National Party had been officially sworn in or had articulated anything approaching a comprehensive fiscal policy. It was an early portent of a regression to a time when philistinism was celebrated and executive power ran uncurtailed. Soon the premier was using his maiden parliamentary speech to pay tribute to his conservative predecessor Joh Bjelke-Petersen, who narrowly avoided a criminal conviction on the back of one of the most infamously tainted juries in Australian legal history. More recently, amid a host of controversies over ministerial nepotism and shady deals, the government has undertaken a sustained attack upon the Crime and Misconduct Commission, the very organisation formed in response to the rampant treachery of the Bjelke-Petersen era. It may be the self-professed smart state, but former Police Commissioner Ray Whitrod put it best in his memoir: ‘Queenslanders are not like other Australians.’
Book 1 Title: Three Crooked Kings
Book Author: Matthew Condon
Book 1 Biblio: University of Queensland Press, $29.95 pb, 346 pp
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In April 2012, barely a week after Queensland had elected a conservative government to office for the first time in twenty-six years, Campbell Newman announced the abolition of the state-funded premier’s literary awards. The decision, despite disingenuous claims to the contrary, was entirely symbolic, coming as it did before Newman’s Liberal National Party had been officially sworn in or had articulated anything approaching a comprehensive fiscal policy. It was an early portent of a regression to a time when philistinism was celebrated and executive power ran uncurtailed. Soon the premier was using his maiden parliamentary speech to pay tribute to his conservative predecessor Joh Bjelke-Petersen, who narrowly avoided a criminal conviction on the back of one of the most infamously tainted juries in Australian legal history. More recently, amid a host of controversies over ministerial nepotism and shady deals, the government has undertaken a sustained attack upon the Crime and Misconduct Commission, the very organisation formed in response to the rampant treachery of the Bjelke-Petersen era. It may be the self-professed smart state, but former Police Commissioner Ray Whitrod put it best in his memoir: ‘Queenslanders are not like other Australians.’

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Tony Birch reviews Mullumbimby by Melissa Lucashenko
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Mullumbimby is a humorous, heartfelt, occasionally abrasive and brave work by a writer with an acute ear for language, an eye for subtle beauty, and a nose honed to sniff bullshit at a thousand paces. A sculptural work, produced by the author and photographed for the cover of the novel, is a bird’s nest, crafted from twigs, various grasses, and earth. It conveys a sense of sanctuary and genuine protection (as opposed to the institutional and violent ‘protection’ Indigenous people have been subject to throughout colonial occupation). But look a little closer at the image and you will notice that the nest is woven into a thorny crown of rusting barbed wire; a simple but effective invention that for the past one hundred and fifty years has maimed, ensnared, and enclosed animals, people, and land. 
Book 1 Title: Mullumbimby
Book Author: Melissa Lucashenko
Book 1 Biblio: University of Queensland Press $29.95, 285 pp
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Mullumbimby is a humorous, heartfelt, occasionally abrasive and brave work by a writer with an acute ear for language, an eye for subtle beauty, and a nose honed to sniff bullshit at a thousand paces. A sculptural work, produced by the author and photographed for the cover of the novel, is a bird’s nest, crafted from twigs, various grasses, and earth. It conveys a sense of sanctuary and genuine protection (as opposed to the institutional and violent ‘protection’ Indigenous people have been subject to throughout colonial occupation). But look a little closer at the image and you will notice that the nest is woven into a thorny crown of rusting barbed wire; a simple but effective invention that for the past one hundred and fifty years has maimed, ensnared, and enclosed animals, people, and land. 

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Jan McGuinness reviews The Memory Trap by Andrea Goldsmith
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Andrea Goldsmith, in her seventh novel, plunges once more into a world of characters whose ideas and relationships swirl and churn around a psychological trigger. This time it is memory in all its errant, bewitching manifestations. Memory plays tricks as the old adage goes, and for the novel’s main characters it is the trick of emersion in an idealised but ruptured past.

Two sisters (Zoe and Nina) live next door to two brothers (Ramsay and Sean) in a Melbourne suburban court of Howard Arkley ordinariness, where they are free to roam, play, and imagine at will, form a gang and dream up adventures under the care of relaxed and indulgent parents. It is an enchanted childhood enhanced by music-making, at which Zoe, Sean, and particularly Ramsay excel. While Nina loves music, she never masters an instrument. This sets her apart.

Book 1 Title: The Memory Trap
Book Author: Andrea Goldsmith
Book 1 Biblio: Fourth Estate, $29.99 pb, 350 pp
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Andrea Goldsmith, in her seventh novel, plunges once more into a world of characters whose ideas and relationships swirl and churn around a psychological trigger. This time it is memory in all its errant, bewitching manifestations. Memory plays tricks as the old adage goes, and for the novel’s main characters it is the trick of emersion in an idealised but ruptured past.

Two sisters (Zoe and Nina) live next door to two brothers (Ramsay and Sean) in a Melbourne suburban court of Howard Arkley ordinariness, where they are free to roam, play, and imagine at will, form a gang and dream up adventures under the care of relaxed and indulgent parents. It is an enchanted childhood enhanced by music-making, at which Zoe, Sean, and particularly Ramsay excel. While Nina loves music, she never masters an instrument. This sets her apart.

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Wendy Were reviews Steeplechase by Krissy Kneen
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‘My sister Emily likes ponies and show jumping and arenas.’ Steeplechase, Krissy Kneen’s fourth book, opens innocently enough with this unremarkable announcement of a common girlhood infatuation. Before the first paragraph ends, this innocent observation is tempered by the obviously unwholesome quality that underpins the imaginative equine play of two young sisters. Foreshadowing the intricacies of this sibling relationship, the steeplechase game highlights Emily’s dominance and the narrator’s incompetence. It is also laced with psychic and physical cruelty: ‘She tells me that I am a bad horse, a lazy horse, a slow horse, and I take the whipping silently because it is true. I am a bad horse. I am not any kind of horse at all.’
Book 1 Title: Steeplechase
Book Author: Krissy Kneen
Book 1 Biblio: Text Publishing, $29.99 pb, 224 pp
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‘My sister Emily likes ponies and show jumping and arenas.’ Steeplechase, Krissy Kneen’s fourth book, opens innocently enough with this unremarkable announcement of a common girlhood infatuation. Before the first paragraph ends, this innocent observation is tempered by the obviously unwholesome quality that underpins the imaginative equine play of two young sisters. Foreshadowing the intricacies of this sibling relationship, the steeplechase game highlights Emily’s dominance and the narrator’s incompetence. It is also laced with psychic and physical cruelty: ‘She tells me that I am a bad horse, a lazy horse, a slow horse, and I take the whipping silently because it is true. I am a bad horse. I am not any kind of horse at all.’

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Lyndon Megarrity reviews Air Disaster Canberra: The plane crash that destroyed a government by Andrew Tink
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On 13 August 1940 a Hudson Bomber travelling from Melbourne crashed near Canberra, killing all ten people on board. Three of the deceased were federal ministers: Geoffrey Street (army minister), Sir Henry S. Gullett (vice-president of the Executive Council), and James Fairbairn (minister for air and civil aviation). Also on board that day was Cyril Brudenell Bingham White, a senior Army officer (chief of the general staff).
Book 1 Title: Air Disaster Canberra
Book 1 Subtitle: The plane crash that destroyed a government
Book Author: Andrew Tink
Book 1 Biblio: NewSouth, $45 hb, 335 pp
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On 13 August 1940 a Hudson Bomber travelling from Melbourne crashed near Canberra, killing all ten people on board. Three of the deceased were federal ministers: Geoffrey Street (army minister), Sir Henry S. Gullett (vice-president of the Executive Council), and James Fairbairn (minister for air and civil aviation). Also on board that day was Cyril Brudenell Bingham White, a senior Army officer (chief of the general staff).

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Colin Nettelbeck reviews Algerian Chronicles by Albert Camus, edited by Alice Kaplan, translated by Arthur Goldhammer
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Subheading: A document lived in real time
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On 13 May 1958 a French military junta seized power in Algiers. Choreographed by Jacques Soustelle, the French governor-general of Algeria, in a deliberate plan to bring down the French government, the putsch led to the return to power of Charles de Gaulle, the collapse of the Fourth Republic, and, after four more years of anguish and prolific bloodshed, the end of the colonial war that France had been fighting in Algeria since 1954. At the time of the coup, Albert Camus, who six months earlier had been awarded the Nobel Prize for literature, was about to publish the third volume of his political essays (Actuelles), under the title Chroniques algériennes, 1939–1958. The events made him hesitate, but, hoping to contribute to a future ‘in which France, wholeheartedly embracing its tradition of liberty, does justice to all the communities of Algeria without discrimination’, he determined to proceed with publication.
Book 1 Title: Algerian Chronicles
Book Author: Albert Camus (edited by Alice Kaplan and translated by Arthur Goldhammer)
Book 1 Biblio: Harvard University Press (Inbooks), $29.95 hb, 232 pp, 9780674072589
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On 13 May 1958 a French military junta seized power in Algiers. Choreographed by Jacques Soustelle, the French governor-general of Algeria, in a deliberate plan to bring down the French government, the putsch led to the return to power of Charles de Gaulle, the collapse of the Fourth Republic, and, after four more years of anguish and prolific bloodshed, the end of the colonial war that France had been fighting in Algeria since 1954. At the time of the coup, Albert Camus, who six months earlier had been awarded the Nobel Prize for literature, was about to publish the third volume of his political essays (Actuelles), under the title Chroniques algériennes, 1939–1958. The events made him hesitate, but, hoping to contribute to a future ‘in which France, wholeheartedly embracing its tradition of liberty, does justice to all the communities of Algeria without discrimination’, he determined to proceed with publication.

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Alison Broinowski reviews Desert Passions: Orientalism and Romance Novels by Hsu-Ming Teo
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Contents Category: Literary Studies
Subheading: The abiding romanticisation of the Orient
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Article Title: Sheik baby, sheik
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I once fell out with an intelligent, well-read woman who refused to believe me when I said I had never read a Mills & Boon book. I should perhaps have admitted that the job I had as a student, proofreading stacks of popular novels for an Adelaide publisher, put me off them for life. Now I am grateful to Hsu-Ming Teo for educating me so thoroughly on romantic fiction by women in English about the Middle East, which, as she shows, has many fans. Her comprehensive research relieves me of any need or desire to join them.
Book 1 Title: Desert Passions
Book 1 Subtitle: Orientalism and Romance Novels
Book Author: Hsu-Ming Teo
Book 1 Biblio: University of Texas Press, $118.95 hb, 344 pp
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I once fell out with an intelligent, well-read woman who refused to believe me when I said I had never read a Mills & Boon book. I should perhaps have admitted that the job I had as a student, proofreading stacks of popular novels for an Adelaide publisher, put me off them for life. Now I am grateful to Hsu-Ming Teo for educating me so thoroughly on romantic fiction by women in English about the Middle East, which, as she shows, has many fans. Her comprehensive research relieves me of any need or desire to join them.

Read more: Alison Broinowski reviews 'Desert Passions: Orientalism and Romance Novels' by Hsu-Ming Teo

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Peter Kenneally Reviews Confessional Box by Vanessa Page
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It’s simple. A young woman, her love for her partner slipping away, looks at their suburb, and him, and their relationship, and writes bronze-clad poetry about it. Then she takes to the bush, describing its towns and picking at its history with the same clear eye she uses to examine her lost love. She combines a photographic exactness with a resounding turn of phrase and an ability to use a refrain just enough and no more.
Book 1 Title: Confessional Box
Book Author: Vanessa Page
Book 1 Biblio: Walleah Press, $18.50 pb, 78 pp
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It’s simple. A young woman, her love for her partner slipping away, looks at their suburb, and him, and their relationship, and writes bronze-clad poetry about it. Then she takes to the bush, describing its towns and picking at its history with the same clear eye she uses to examine her lost love. She combines a photographic exactness with a resounding turn of phrase and an ability to use a refrain just enough and no more.

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Cassandra Atherton reviews Hotel Hyperion by Lisa Gorton
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The camera ottica in the epigraph to Hotel Hyperion alludes to Lisa Gorton’s artful play with shifting perspectives in this luminescent collection of poetry. The reader is invited to put her eye to the lines of poetry as if to a Galilean telescope or ‘perspective tube’. By looking at the poems through the peephole as ...
Book 1 Title: Hotel Hyperion
Book Author: Lisa Gorton
Book 1 Biblio: Giramondo, $24 pb, 64 pp
Book 1 Author Type: Author
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The camera ottica in the epigraph to Hotel Hyperion alludes to Lisa Gorton’s artful play with shifting perspectives in this luminescent collection of poetry. The reader is invited to put her eye to the lines of poetry as if to a Galilean telescope or ‘perspective tube’. By looking at the poems through the peephole as an optic chamber, the reader brings the larger concerns of time and space in this collection into sharper focus.

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Custom Article Title: 'P.R.B.', a new poem by Cassandra Atherton
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I wish I had been painted by Millais. Maybe not as Ophelia in a tepid bath.
Perhaps as Lady Macbeth. Or Titania. Or Portia. Not Brutus’s Portia. Portia from
The Merchant of Venice. I used to make you sit on a little wooden stool and pretend
you were painting me. Stroke after stroke rasping against the canvas. I would
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Bronwyn Lea reviews Burial Rites by Hannah Kent
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A novel that can be summarised in a single, captivating sentence is a publisher’s dream. Not that ease of marketing is a reliable measure of excellence. Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse (1927), for instance – which could be described as ‘the story of a mother who dies before taking her son to visit a lighthouse, and later a woman completes a painting’ – achieved classic status despite an unpropitious précis. Woolf’s genius aside, it is difficult to imagine a sentence like that sparking an international bidding war of the kind that erupted last year over Hannah Kent’s first novel. Burial Rites – ‘the story of the last woman to be beheaded in Iceland’ – reportedly netted Kent a considerable advance.
Book 1 Title: Burial Rites
Book Author: Hannah Kent
Book 1 Biblio: Picador, $32.99 pb, 352 pp
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A novel that can be summarised in a single, captivating sentence is a publisher’s dream. Not that ease of marketing is a reliable measure of excellence. Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse (1927), for instance – which could be described as ‘the story of a mother who dies before taking her son to visit a lighthouse, and later a woman completes a painting’ – achieved classic status despite an unpropitious précis. Woolf’s genius aside, it is difficult to imagine a sentence like that sparking an international bidding war of the kind that erupted last year over Hannah Kent’s first novel. Burial Rites – ‘the story of the last woman to be beheaded in Iceland’ – reportedly netted Kent a considerable advance.

Read more: Bronwyn Lea reviews 'Burial Rites' by Hannah Kent

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Milly Main reviews Harmless by Julienne van Loon
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A drunken woman stumbles into a party where people are gathered around a bonfire, determined to give the baby girl under her jacket to its father. When he refuses, she seizes the baby by the foot and throws it into the air above the fire. The child is Amanda and this is her start to a life that will be informed by criminals, harmed people – the crushed, flawed, abused. The image of Amanda as a baby – underweight, ‘wide-eyed’, suspended over the fire – effloresces and settles through this novella by Julienne van Loon.

 
Book 1 Title: Harmless
Book Author: Julienne van Loon
Book 1 Biblio: Fremantle Press, $22.99 pb, 137 pp
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A drunken woman stumbles into a party where people are gathered around a bonfire, determined to give the baby girl under her jacket to its father. When he refuses, she seizes the baby by the foot and throws it into the air above the fire. The child is Amanda and this is her start to a life that will be informed by criminals, harmed people – the crushed, flawed, abused. The image of Amanda as a baby – underweight, ‘wide-eyed’, suspended over the fire – effloresces and settles through this novella by Julienne van Loon.

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Angela E. Andrewes reviews We Are Not The Same Anymore by Chris Somerville
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Finishing Chris Somerville’s début story collection, We Are Not the Same Anymore, I felt a sense of alienation and ennui. Somerville writes with a stylistic sparseness that is deceptively simple but that repays rereading. Passages of awkwardness and deep introspection are punctuated by moments of humour, warmth, and vulnerability. Embedded within this stark territory, these moments make the journey more enjoyable.

 
Book 1 Title: We Are Not The Same Anymore: Stories
Book Author: Chris Somerville
Book 1 Biblio: University of Queensland Press, $19.95 pb, 185 pp
Book 1 Author Type: Author
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Finishing Chris Somerville’s début story collection, We Are Not the Same Anymore, I felt a sense of alienation and ennui. Somerville writes with a stylistic sparseness that is deceptively simple but that repays rereading. Passages of awkwardness and deep introspection are punctuated by moments of humour, warmth, and vulnerability. Embedded within this stark territory, these moments make the journey more enjoyable.

Read more: Angela E. Andrewes reviews 'We Are Not The Same Anymore' by Chris Somerville

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Michael Fleming reviews New Vampire Cinema by Ken Gelder
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The myth of the vampire entered into European literature as a Byronic hero of the Romantic era. This attractive but evil character appears to have shifted from peasant folklore into the written culture at the same time that Lady Caroline Lamb described Byron as ‘mad, bad and dangerous to know’. That would be a perfect description for the classical vampire. Although the demonic figure that lives on blood has an ancient pedigree, it is significant that the modern vampire, the one we are familiar with, is parasitic on Christian mythology. The paraphernalia to ward off vampires are such as to give comfort that ultimately the evil of the vampire is powerless against the Good of the Christ. That evil is of central importance to the myth. The vampire is an erotic dream of the desires forbidden by Christian taboos. In most cases the taboo can read as a fear of disease, especially sexually transmitted diseases. In the nineteenth century, this fear of such diseases as syphilis and ‘consumption’ (tuberculosis) was unspoken, but expressed as metaphor. The three classic texts from which most vampirology derives – Polidori’s The Vampyre (1819), Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla (1872), and Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) – are all essentially Christian, and erotic, in their symbolism. The descriptions of the symptoms of those infected by the vampire were very familiar to the readers of the day. So for nigh on two hundred years the vampire has roamed our nights striking fear but, at the same time, instilling desire.
Book 1 Title: New Vampire Cinema
Book Author: Ken Gelder
Book 1 Biblio: British Film Institute/Palgrave Macmillan, $39 pb, 164 pp
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The myth of the vampire entered into European literature as a Byronic hero of the Romantic era. This attractive but evil character appears to have shifted from peasant folklore into the written culture at the same time that Lady Caroline Lamb described Byron as ‘mad, bad and dangerous to know’. That would be a perfect description for the classical vampire. Although the demonic figure that lives on blood has an ancient pedigree, it is significant that the modern vampire, the one we are familiar with, is parasitic on Christian mythology. The paraphernalia to ward off vampires are such as to give comfort that ultimately the evil of the vampire is powerless against the Good of the Christ. That evil is of central importance to the myth. The vampire is an erotic dream of the desires forbidden by Christian taboos. In most cases the taboo can read as a fear of disease, especially sexually transmitted diseases. In the nineteenth century, this fear of such diseases as syphilis and ‘consumption’ (tuberculosis) was unspoken, but expressed as metaphor. The three classic texts from which most vampirology derives – Polidori’s The Vampyre (1819), Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla (1872), and Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) – are all essentially Christian, and erotic, in their symbolism. The descriptions of the symptoms of those infected by the vampire were very familiar to the readers of the day. So for nigh on two hundred years the vampire has roamed our nights striking fear but, at the same time, instilling desire.

Read more: Michael Fleming reviews 'New Vampire Cinema' by Ken Gelder

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Janna Thompson reviews European Aesthetics: A critical introduction from Kant to Derrida by Robert L. Wicks
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It is possible to imagine a culture that treats art merely as decoration, but to inheritors of the European tradition this idea of art’s function is demeaning. We expect great art to express or reflect the spiritual and philosophical preoccupations of our cultural heritage. No system-building philosopher in modern European history would have failed to incorporate an aesthetic theory into his theoretical scheme. Philosophical system-building has been debunked and largely abandoned, but contemporary European thinkers continue to pronounce on art from the perspective of their philosophies.
Book 1 Title: European Aesthetics
Book 1 Subtitle: A Critical Introduction from Kant to Derrida
Book Author: Robert L. Wicks
Book 1 Biblio: Oneworld Publications (Palgrave Macmillan), $46 pb, 347 pp
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It is possible to imagine a culture that treats art merely as decoration, but to inheritors of the European tradition this idea of art’s function is demeaning. We expect great art to express or reflect the spiritual and philosophical preoccupations of our cultural heritage. No system-building philosopher in modern European history would have failed to incorporate an aesthetic theory into his theoretical scheme. Philosophical system-building has been debunked and largely abandoned, but contemporary European thinkers continue to pronounce on art from the perspective of their philosophies.

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Anthony Lynch reviews Westerly Vol. 57, No. 2, edited by Delys Bird and Tony Hughes-d’Aeth
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‘Tell me about it: you can trust me. I’m a writer.’ This ‘cautionary joke’ – one of few in this sober volume – cited in an essay by Frank Moorhouse, could be an epigraph for the latest Westerly. Editors Bird and Hughes-d’Aeth asked a selection of writers to share their thoughts on the ethics of writing. The ensuing essays include depictions of the past and of family in non-fiction, and play off each other interestingly. Kim Scott, Tiffany Shellam, and Clint Bracknell reflect on the Indigenous experience of colonisation. Scott offers a letter of sorts to an unnamed prison inmate, the result characteristically self-reflexive. Shellam delves into the archives to deconstruct the ‘friendly frontier’ trope, and Blaze Kwaymullina, in a metaphorically laboured appropriation of an appropriation, builds poems from the rearranged words of colonial archival documents.
Book 1 Title: Westerly Vol. 57, No. 2
Book Author: Delys Bird and Tony Hughes-d’Aeth
Book 1 Biblio: Westerly Centre, $29.95 pb, 193 pp
Book 1 Author Type: Editor
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‘Tell me about it: you can trust me. I’m a writer.’ This ‘cautionary joke’ – one of few in this sober volume – cited in an essay by Frank Moorhouse, could be an epigraph for the latest Westerly. Editors Bird and Hughes-d’Aeth asked a selection of writers to share their thoughts on the ethics of writing. The ensuing essays include depictions of the past and of family in non-fiction, and play off each other interestingly. Kim Scott, Tiffany Shellam, and Clint Bracknell reflect on the Indigenous experience of colonisation. Scott offers a letter of sorts to an unnamed prison inmate, the result characteristically self-reflexive. Shellam delves into the archives to deconstruct the ‘friendly frontier’ trope, and Blaze Kwaymullina, in a metaphorically laboured appropriation of an appropriation, builds poems from the rearranged words of colonial archival documents.

Read more: Anthony Lynch reviews Westerly Vol. 57, No. 2, edited by Delys Bird and Tony Hughes-d’Aeth

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Andrew Fuhrmann reviews Southerly, Vol. 72, No. 2, edited by Melissa Jane Hardie
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Custom Article Title: Andrew Fuhrmann reviews Southerly, Vol. 72, No. 2, edited by Melissa Jane Hardie
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Article Title: Andrew Fuhrmann reviews Southerly, Vol. 72, No. 2, edited by Melissa Jane Hardie
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The critical essays collected in this current issue of Australia’s oldest literary journal make for frustrating reading. The theme is true crime, with a focus on the relationship between the sensational and the literary. Topics range from Underbelly Razor to the Jerilderie Letter to Schapelle Corby’s autobiography. Fascinating material, no doubt, but most of the contributions fail to engage and feel more like mutilated book chapters or hurriedly swept-together research notes, characterised by erratic analyses and flabby prose.
Book 1 Title: Southerly, Vol. 72, No. 2
Book Author: Melissa Jane Hardie
Book 1 Biblio: Brandl & Schlesinger, $29.95 pb, 208 pp
Book 1 Author Type: Editor
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The critical essays collected in this current issue of Australia’s oldest literary journal make for frustrating reading. The theme is true crime, with a focus on the relationship between the sensational and the literary. Topics range from Underbelly Razor to the Jerilderie Letter to Schapelle Corby’s autobiography. Fascinating material, no doubt, but most of the contributions fail to engage and feel more like mutilated book chapters or hurriedly swept-together research notes, characterised by erratic analyses and flabby prose.

Read more: Andrew Fuhrmann reviews Southerly, Vol. 72, No. 2, edited by Melissa Jane Hardie

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Contents Category: Children's Fiction
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Article Title: Fine friends
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Animals and friends are a perennial subject in children’s literature, and the junior novels and series books reviewed here highlight those interests. Most of these titles, however, are also notable because they are told with humour, even whilst exposing the anxieties of children.

Fog a Dox (Magabala Books, $19.95 pb, 111 pp, 9781921248559) is a new novel for primary-aged children by esteemed Indigenous writer Bruce Pascoe. The intriguing title springs from fox cub Fog, one of three pups rescued by ‘tree feller’ Albert Cutts and reared by his dingo-cross dog, Brim. Fog’s vixen sisters leave when they are old enough to survive on their own, but Fog stays, balancing his fox instincts with learned dog behaviour; Albert describes him as a ‘dox’.
Book 1 Title: Fog a Dox
Book Author: Bruce Pascoe
Book 1 Biblio: Magabala Books, $19.95 pb, 111 pp
Book 1 Author Type: Author
Book 2 Title: Figaro and Rumba and the Crocodile Cafe
Book 2 Author: Anna Fienberg
Book 2 Biblio: Allen & Unwin, $19.99 hb, 96 pp
Book 2 Author Type: Author
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Animals and friends are a perennial subject in children’s literature, and the junior novels and series books reviewed here highlight those interests. Most of these titles, however, are also notable because they are told with humour, even whilst exposing the anxieties of children.

Fog a Dox (Magabala Books, $19.95 pb, 111 pp, 9781921248559) is a new novel for primary-aged children by esteemed Indigenous writer Bruce Pascoe. The intriguing title springs from fox cub Fog, one of three pups rescued by ‘tree feller’ Albert Cutts and reared by his dingo-cross dog, Brim. Fog’s vixen sisters leave when they are old enough to survive on their own, but Fog stays, balancing his fox instincts with learned dog behaviour; Albert describes him as a ‘dox’.

Read more: Joy Lawn reviews 'Fog a Dox' Bruce Pascoe, 'Figaro and Rumba and the Crocodile Cafe' Anna...

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Jay Daniel Thompson reviews The Passion of Bradley Manning: The story behind the Wikileaks whistleblower by Chase Madar
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Contents Category: Politics
Custom Article Title: Jay Daniel Thompson reviews 'The Passion of Bradley Manning: The Story Behind the Wikileaks Whistleblower' by Chase Madar
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Article Title: Çhase Madar, 'The Passion of Bradley Manning'
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Bradley Manning is famous for being the US soldier who supplied WikiLeaks with its ‘choicest material’. In The Passion of Bradley Manning, Chase Madar argues that Manning is a national hero who has been wrongfully punished for his actions ...
Book 1 Title: The Passion of Bradley Manning
Book 1 Subtitle: The Story Behind the Wikileaks Whistleblower
Book Author: Chase Madar
Book 1 Biblio: Verso, $19.99 pb, 181 pp
Book 1 Author Type: Author
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Bradley Manning is famous for being the US soldier who supplied WikiLeaks with its ‘choicest material’. In The Passion of Bradley Manning, Chase Madar argues that Manning is a national hero who has been wrongfully punished for his actions.

Read more: Jay Daniel Thompson reviews 'The Passion of Bradley Manning: The story behind the Wikileaks...

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Jay Daniel Thompson reviews Reluctant Rescuers: An exploration of the Australian Border Protection system’s safety record in detecting and intercepting asylum-seeker boats, 1998–2011 by Tony Kevin
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Contents Category: Politics
Custom Article Title: Jay Daniel Thompson reviews 'Reluctant Rescuers' by Tony Kevin
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Article Title: Tony Kevin, 'Reluctant Rescuers'
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In Reluctant Rescuers, Tony Kevin addresses the rescue at sea of boat people who have entered Australian waters. He aims to provide a ‘fact-based analysis of a shadowy’ – and deeply controversial – ‘area of public policy’. Kevin begins by correcting the myth that ‘people smugglers’ are the ‘main culprits when people die at sea’ ...
Book 1 Title: Reluctant Rescuers
Book 1 Subtitle: An Exploration of the Australian Border Protection System’s Safety Record in Detecting and Intercepting Asylum-seeker Boats, 1998–2011
Book Author: Tony Kevin
Book 1 Biblio: Tony Kevin, $24.95 pb, 190 pp
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In Reluctant Rescuers, Tony Kevin addresses the rescue at sea of boat people who have entered Australian waters. He aims to provide a ‘fact-based analysis of a shadowy’ – and deeply controversial – ‘area of public policy’. Kevin begins by correcting the myth that ‘people smugglers’ are the ‘main culprits when people die at sea’. He investigates the border protection systems that were implemented by Liberal and Labor governments between 1998 and 2011. There is an explanation of how so-called ‘Suspected Illegal Entry Vessels’ (SIEVs) are detected and intercepted. Kevin describes the dangers of turning asylum seeker boats away from Australia. He argues that ‘it is vital for our nation not to lose our sense of common humanity in administering border protection policies’.

Read more: Jay Daniel Thompson reviews 'Reluctant Rescuers: An exploration of the Australian Border...

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