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Absolutely Revolting

December 2013–January 2014, no. 357

Welcome to our summer edition! Never before have we published 78 people in a single issue. ‘Books of the Year’ is our major feature – always fun to commission. Find out what leading writers, critics and artists enjoyed reading in 2014. Poetry is a strength this month: we have poems from Felicity Plunkett, American Paula Bohince, and Porter Prize winner Michael Farrell, among others. Dion Kagan reviews that audacious French film Stranger by the Lake, and Ian Dickson admires the STC’s Waiting for Godot. Other highlights include Robert Dessaix on Colm Tóibín’s The Testament of Mary, Robyn Williams on Stephen Hawking, and former agent Mary Cunnane’s defence of the slush pile.

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Books of the Year is always one our most popular features of the year. Find out what 30 senior contributors liked most this year – and why.
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Robert Adamson

Robert Duncan’s The Collected Later Poems and Plays (University of California Press), impeccably edited by Peter Quartermain, is one of the great books of our time. If you have ever wondered about Duncan’s work, this book brings it all into focus. Now we can finally enjoy the full force of his vision.

Robert-Duncan-Collected-Poems

Peter Quartermain has also published Stubborn Poetries: Poetic Facticity and the Avant-Garde (University of Alabama Press), an outstanding collection of essays on key poets of our time, including Bunting, Niedecker, and Zukofsky. These essays are illuminating as well as completely engaging.

 

One volume of new poetry grabbed my attention and held it for months: Peter O’Leary’s Phosphorescence of Thought (Cultural Society of Chicago). Another striking book is Lisa Gorton’s Hotel Hyperion (Giramondo, reviewed in ABR 5/13), a volume of poetry alive with intelligence and skill. Gorton’s poetry is cool and lucid, as well as passionate.

 

Dennis Altman

James Button’s Speechless: A Year in My Father’s Business (MUP, 11/12) is an account of his year spent in Kevin Rudd’s office and of the Canberra public service. It blends personal and analytic writing, and helps us understand both the world of Labor over several generations and the business of government.

two-boys-kissing

David Levithan’s Two Boys Kissing (Text Publishing) is a Young Adult novel that transcends the genre to write of the changing experiences of being gay across generations, of the ongoing tension between acceptance and a sense of being an outsider.

Will Davis’s The Trapeze Artist (Bloomsbury) echoes these themes in ways that are unexpected and bring a sense of physicality into the novel similar to Christos Tsiolkas’s evocation of the pain of swimming in Barracuda (Allen & Unwin, 11/13).

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Mary Cunnane, who has worked in the publishing industry since 1976, laments the laziness and irritation of those publishers who resent and underestimate unsolicited submissions from authors
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There’s a hashtag used among the publishing Twitterati to denote the laughable efforts of would-be authors whose approach to agents and/or publishers is not up to snuff. #Queryfail appears regularly in the tweets of one Major Publishing Player in particular, signalling the sins of yet another supplicant who failed to contact her in the preferred manner, didn’t read her submission guidelines, or asked her to be friends on Facebook and then sent her a publishing pitch. The nerve.

Read more: '#Queryfail' by Mary Cunnane

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Robyn Williams reviews My Brief History by Stephen Hawking
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I’ve interviewed Stephen Hawking twice. On both occasions it was in his old office in Silver Street, Cambridge – in front of his huge poster of Marilyn Monroe. The first time, in 1989, I was a little anxious, not because I was with the world’s best-known scientist, but because I found the awkward silences waiting for his answers hard to manage. What do you do, having asked a question, during the two or three minutes it takes him to put together a sentence on his machine? You can’t stare at him for that long – we’re not equipped to do that with anyone for more than seconds. Ignore him? The way we ignore other crippled folk, without realising it? Hardly!
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Book 1 Title: My Brief History
Book Author: Stephen Hawking
Book 1 Biblio: Bantam Press, $29.95 hb, 127 pp, 9780593072523
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I’ve interviewed Stephen Hawking twice. On both occasions it was in his old office in Silver Street, Cambridge – in front of his huge poster of Marilyn Monroe. The first time, in 1989, I was a little anxious, not because I was with the world’s best-known scientist, but because I found the awkward silences waiting for his answers hard to manage. What do you do, having asked a question, during the two or three minutes it takes him to put together a sentence on his machine? You can’t stare at him for that long – we’re not equipped to do that with anyone for more than seconds. Ignore him? The way we ignore other crippled folk, without realising it? Hardly!

Read more: Robyn Williams reviews 'My Brief History' by Stephen Hawking

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Shane Carmody reviews The Mad Marathon: The story of the 2013 election by Mungo MacCallum
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Tim Bowden, ABC journalist and historian, hosted a television program called BackChat between 1987 and 1994. Viewers could write in with their comments on Aunty’s offerings. One correspondent criticised the Rob Sitch-inspired spoof of the commercial current affairs programs, Frontline ...
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Book 1 Title: The Mad Marathon
Book 1 Subtitle: The story of the 2013 Election
Book Author: Mungo MacCallum
Book 1 Biblio: Black Inc., $29.99 pb, 298 pp, 9781863956185
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Tim Bowden, ABC journalist and historian, hosted a television program called BackChat between 1987 and 1994. Viewers could write in with their comments on Aunty’s offerings. One correspondent criticised the Rob Sitch-inspired spoof of the commercial current affairs programs, Frontline. The correspondent was appalled that the ABC could waste taxpayers’ money on a program that was such a poor example of critical journalism. Bowden, po-faced as ever, recalled some advice from an old hand when he was starting out in journalism: ‘Never give them satire, they’ll think it’s the real thing.’

Read more: Shane Carmody reviews 'The Mad Marathon: The story of the 2013 election' by Mungo MacCallum

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Susan Sheridan reviews Moving Among Strangers: Randolph Stow and My Family by Gabrielle Carey
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When Gabrielle Carey wrote Puberty Blues (1979) with her school friend Kathy Lette, it was closely based on her own experience as a teenager. This initiated a writing career specialising in autobiography. Her novel The Borrowed Girl (1994) is based on her experience of living in a Mexican village, and So Many Selves (2006) is a personal memoir. Her new book extends the work of mourning and remembering her parents, which began with In My Father’s House (1994), an attempt to understand the suicide of her father, Alex Carey, and continued with Waiting Room (2009), an account of her mother Joan’s illness with a brain tumour.
Book 1 Title: Moving Among Strangers
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Book Author: Gabrielle Carey
Book 1 Biblio: University of Queensland Press, $29.95 hb, 232 pp, 9780702249221
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When Gabrielle Carey wrote Puberty Blues (1979) with her school friend Kathy Lette, it was closely based on her own experience as a teenager. This initiated a writing career specialising in autobiography. Her novel The Borrowed Girl (1994) is based on her experience of living in a Mexican village, and So Many Selves (2006) is a personal memoir. Her new book extends the work of mourning and remembering her parents, which began with In My Father’s House (1994), an attempt to understand the suicide of her father, Alex Carey, and continued with Waiting Room (2009), an account of her mother Joan’s illness with a brain tumour.

Read more: Susan Sheridan reviews 'Moving Among Strangers: Randolph Stow and My Family' by Gabrielle Carey

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John Kinsella reviews Contemporary Asian Australian Poets edited by Adam Aitken, Kim Cheng Boey, and Michelle Cahill
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Subheading: Resisting sentimental backward looks
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This is one of the more vital and significant poetry anthologies to appear in Australia. It has been compiled with a purpose as sophisticated and complex as the arguments for existence that it posits. It is an anthology not so much of ‘region’ (it is a rather massive one), as of the experience of being or having been from Asian heritages in contemporary Australia.
Book 1 Title: Contemporary Asian Australian Poets
Book Author: Adam Aitken, Kim Cheng Boey, and Michelle Cahill
Book 1 Biblio: Puncher & Wattmann, $29.95 pb, 253 pp, 9781921450655
Book 1 Author Type: Editor
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This is one of the more vital and significant poetry anthologies to appear in Australia. It has been compiled with a purpose as sophisticated and complex as the arguments for existence that it posits. It is an anthology not so much of ‘region’ (it is a rather massive one), as of the experience of being or having been from Asian heritages in contemporary Australia.

Read more: John Kinsella reviews 'Contemporary Asian Australian Poets' edited by Adam Aitken, Kim Cheng Boey,...

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Ian Gibbins reviews Gardens of Fire: An Investigative Memoir by Robert Kenny
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As I write this article in my Adelaide Hills home, surrounded by native eucalypts and introduced fruit trees, large areas in New South Wales are dealing with the consequences of some of the worst bushfires in recorded history. Remarkably, given the unseasonally extreme weather, the rugged terrain, and the ferocity of the fires themselves, there have been few human casualties. Nevertheless, the cost will be enormous, not only in terms of the physical reconstruction required, but also of the effort required for individuals and families to rebuild lives from the ruins of their destroyed habitations. I live in a bushfire-prone area, in a house that could not be easily defended in the inferno of a firestorm. We have made our plans. We think we know what to do in the face of the fire emergency we hope will never eventuate. But how would we cope in such a situation? In practice, we have no idea.
Book 1 Title: Gardens of Fire
Book 1 Subtitle: An Investigative Memoir
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Book 1 Biblio: UWA Publishing, $29.99 pb, 260 pp, 9781742585109
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As I write this article in my Adelaide Hills home, surrounded by native eucalypts and introduced fruit trees, large areas in New South Wales are dealing with the consequences of some of the worst bushfires in recorded history. Remarkably, given the unseasonally extreme weather, the rugged terrain, and the ferocity of the fires themselves, there have been few human casualties. Nevertheless, the cost will be enormous, not only in terms of the physical reconstruction required, but also of the effort required for individuals and families to rebuild lives from the ruins of their destroyed habitations. I live in a bushfire-prone area, in a house that could not be easily defended in the inferno of a firestorm. We have made our plans. We think we know what to do in the face of the fire emergency we hope will never eventuate. But how would we cope in such a situation? In practice, we have no idea.

Read more: Ian Gibbins reviews 'Gardens of Fire: An Investigative Memoir' by Robert Kenny

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Gillian Dooley reviews The Night Guest by Fiona McFarlane
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The depredations of time on the ageing human is an unusual topic for a young writer to confront, especially in a first novel, but why not, if the negative capability is not wanting? After all, it’s common enough for an older writer to inhabit young characters. The difference is, of course, that a young writer hasn’t yet been old. In Fiona McFarlane’s first novel, The Night Guest, the main centre of consciousness, through whom the whole narrative is perceived, is more than twice the author’s age. In an interview in the Sydney Morning Herald, McFarlane revealed that both her grandmothers suffered from dementia and that writing about Ruth, a seventy-five-year-old widow who is clearly becoming increasingly confused (the D-word is never used), is an act of homage and remembrance.
Book 1 Title: The Night Guest
Book Author: Fiona McFarlane
Book 1 Biblio: Hamish Hamilton, $29.99 pb, 275 pp, 9781926428550
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The depredations of time on the ageing human is an unusual topic for a young writer to confront, especially in a first novel, but why not, if the negative capability is not wanting? After all, it’s common enough for an older writer to inhabit young characters. The difference is, of course, that a young writer hasn’t yet been old. In Fiona McFarlane’s first novel, The Night Guest, the main centre of consciousness, through whom the whole narrative is perceived, is more than twice the author’s age. In an interview in the Sydney Morning Herald, McFarlane revealed that both her grandmothers suffered from dementia and that writing about Ruth, a seventy-five-year-old widow who is clearly becoming increasingly confused (the D-word is never used), is an act of homage and remembrance.

Read more: Gillian Dooley reviews 'The Night Guest' by Fiona McFarlane

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Open Page with Garry Disher
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When not preferring silence, I like to listen to Leonard Cohen and Emmylou Harris, but a friend recently introduced me to the early music ensemble, Accordone (Marco Beasley and Guido Morini).
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Why do you write?

To tell stories. My father didn’t read to us at night, but he did tell his own made-up stories. Crucially for my crime writing, I saw the value of the cliffhanger (‘I’ll finish this tomorrow night, son’).

Are you a vivid dreamer?

I’m sometimes aware of surviving a monochrome epic, but mostly I’m not aware that I dream. Dream content doesn’t interest me (listening to others relate their dreams is a form of hell).

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Readers’ survey

We tend not to burden our readers with surveys. There are quite enough of them in this solicitous world without our adding to the clamour. But it is time for us to take some soundings: to ask you (readers of all sorts, subscribers or not, lapsed readers or devotees) what you like (or don’t) about the magazine, and how you think we can improve it.

Unlike previous surveys, this is an online one. To complete the survey (which will take about five minutes) please click here.

For those who would prefer to complete a hard copy, there is a PDF available here which you can print off and return to us. You can also call us: (03) 9699 8822.

The survey will close on 1 February and will inform the magazine’s future directions. Many thanks for assisting us, if you choose to do so.

 

Readers’ Choice Award

Rebekah Clarkson – author of ‘The Five Truths of Manhood’ – was the clear favourite in the Readers’ Choice Award that complemented this year’s Jolley Prize. David Malouf, you will recall, named Michelle Michau-Crawford’s ‘Leaving Elvis’ as the overall winner in late October. Both stories appeared in our October issue, with Kim Mahood’s ‘The Accident’.

Thanks to everyone who voted. At the start of our Gerald Murnane–Andy Griffiths event at the Southbank Library (Boyd) on 14 November, the hugely popular children’s author named the three voters who won our special prizes. Amanda Murray (Victoria) won a library of fifty Text Classics, and Marshall Willan (Western Australia) and Amanda O’Callaghan (Queensland) each received a three-year subscription to ABR.

We will repeat the Readers’ Choice Award in 2014.

The event on 14 November – which we co-presented with Melbourne Library Services, our first joint event in the public library at Boyd – was such a romp that we will be presenting similar ones in 2014. Keep an eye on our website for more details.

MurnaneGriffiths-event-at-Boyd-November-2013Andy Griffiths and Gerald Murnane at Boyd, November 2013

 

Jolley Prize

The ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize goes from strength to strength, and because of the generosity of Mr Ian Dickson (our first Olympian Patron!) we will present it again in 2014. Total prize money will be $8000, making it one of the most lucrative short fiction prizes in the country (the winner receives $5000). It is certainly the most visible.

Short story writers will have until 1 May to enter the 2014 Jolley Prize. The judges on this occasion will be Patrick Allington, Cassandra Atherton, and Amy Baillieu. The overall winner will be announced at a major event during the 2014 Melbourne Writers’ Festival.

For the first time, the Jolley Prize will be open to short story writers anywhere in the world (stories must be in English). Authors can enter the Jolley Prize online, saving them small fortunes in postage and couriers, and assisting us enormously in terms of administration.

Good luck!

 

Prizes galore

The Calibre Prize for an Outstanding Essay and the Peter Porter Poetry Prize have now officially closed. We know what our judges will be doing over summer!

The Calibre Prize winner will be named at a ceremony in March or April. As for the Porter Prize, the shortlisted poems will, as usual, appear in our March issue, followed by a ceremony later that month.

 

New Fellowship

ABR has broadened its repertoire considerably in recent years. Among our new programs the ABR Writers’ Fellowships have been especially popular.

The next of our Fellowships is devoted to the visual arts. We are looking for a profile of a major artist or a discursive article on any aspect of the visual arts. The chosen Fellow will produce a long article for publication in our 2014 Art issue. Those interested have until 1 February to apply for this ABR Ian Potter Foundation Fellowship. We always encourage prospective applicants to consult the Editor first. Ring Peter Rose on (03) 9699 8822 or send him an email: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

 

Astrid Lindgren Award

Six Australians have been nominated for the 2014 Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award, the world’s major prize for children’s and young adult literature. They are authors Ursula Dubosarsky, Mem Fox, Morris Gleitzman, and Melina Marchetta – and illustrators Sonia Kretschmar and Marc Martin. The large field befits a huge literature: there are 238 nominees in all.

 

Remembering Hazel Rowley

Hazel Rowley – celebrated biographer of Christina Stead, Richard Wright, Sartre and Beauvoir, and the Roosevelts – is much missed by her Australian friends and admirers. She died in New York City in March 2011, aged fifty-nine, after a brief illness. Since Hazel Rowley’s death, her family and friends have created the annual Hazel Rowley Literary Fellowship. Worth $10,000, it is presented annually. Funded by the Hazel Rowley Literary Fund, the Fellowship is open to Australian biographers who are working on a cultural or social history project that aligns with Rowley’s research interests. The Fellowship may be used to develop a new proposal or to advance an existing project.

Now we learn that a new prize has been created for first-time US and Canadian biographers to commemorate the life and work of Hazel Rowley. The BIO Rowley Prize is administered by Biographers International Organisation (BIO), of which Dr Rowley was a founding member. The organisers have described Rowley as ‘a passionate advocate for the art and craft of biography and a writer of exacting standards, as well as a helpmate to fellow biographers’.

The Prize is open to citizens or permanent residents of the United States and Canada who are working on a biography that has not been commissioned, contracted, or self-published, and who have never published a biography, history, or work of narrative nonfiction. The winning author will receive US$2000, agent support, and publicity.

Entries for the first BIO Rowley Prize close on 31 December. The winner will be announced at the BIO conference in Boston on 17 May. See www.biographersinternational.org for details.

 

Four summer giveaways

This month lucky ABR readers will have the opportunity to win tickets to one of four new films when they subscribe or renew their subscription. We have twenty double passes to Philomena, starring Judi Dench and Steve Coogan, based on the novella by Martin Sixsmith (thanks to Hopscotch Films) and twenty double passes to The Railway Man, starring Colin Firth and Nicole Kidman, based on the war memoir by Eric Lomax (Transmission Films). We also have fifteen double passes to French comedy The Gilded Cage (Palace Films), and another ten to On My Way starring Catherine Deneuve (Umbrella Entertainment). Break out the popcorn and subscribe now for your chance to win a ticket!

 

Farewell to 2013

As we finalise our summer issue, we want to thank all the critics and writers who have contributed to the magazine – and all the Patrons, partners, advertisers and supporters who have made it such a ringingly successful year. Everyone at ABR is committed to improving and diversifying the magazine. Readers and writers will see major new features and programs in 2014.

Meanwhile, the office will remain open over Christmas and the New Year, so don’t forget – when renewing your subscription (or subscribing for the first time) – to take up our gift subscription offer. For every twelve months you subscribe you can give a friend or colleague a six-month print or online subscription.

Until February, when we’ll be back, all good wishes to our friends and readers.

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Robert Dessaix reviews The Testament of Mary by Colm Tóibín
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What a scandal! The Blessed Virgin sprawled on a bed in the half-dark, dead as a doornail, belly swollen, bare legs sticking out for all the world to see. What could Caravaggio have been thinking of?
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Book Author: Colm Tóibín
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What a scandal! The Blessed Virgin sprawled on a bed in the half-dark, dead as a doornail, belly swollen, bare legs sticking out for all the world to see. What could Caravaggio have been thinking of?

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Last week I received an envelope in the mail, the address written in my father’s hand. My heart accelerated a little and it struck me as unseemly, at my age and in my circumstances, to be still so easily rattled by a parent.
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Last week I received an envelope in the mail, the address written in my father’s hand. My heart accelerated a little and it struck me as unseemly, at my age and in my circumstances, to be still so easily rattled by a parent.

The envelope was light – inside I found only a newspaper clipping and a small note. I spread them out on the kitchen bench. A friend was staying with me – a recent acquaintance – and I had the odd experience of my new life moving about the room while my old, half-buried life rose up out of the newspaper print.

Read more: 'Out of Bounds' by Debi Hamilton

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Maria Takolander reviews Tide by John Kinsella
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Imagine a cross between Tim Winton’s The Turning and Kenneth Cook’s Wake in Fright, and you might very well imagine John Kinsella’s latest collection of fiction, Tide. Kinsella, a Western Australian like Winton, writes of the coast and of the desert, of small-town life and small-town people. However, Kinsella highlights the corruption of those landscapes and people in a way that aligns his vision more with Cook’s (which should come as no surprise, given Kinsella’s anti-pastoral poetry). There are ships pumping ‘alkaline hell’ into the waters where children swim, meatworks leaking blood to the sharks, factories, mines, old batteries, and trenches. Men are ‘brutal and brutalising’. Even boys torment and humiliate one another, often with the approval or complicity of their guardians. If someone outside Australia wanted to understand a country that hounded its first female prime minister out of office and voted in Tony Abbott on a platform against boat people and the carbon tax, this is the book I would recommend.

 
Book 1 Title: Tide
Book Author: John Kinsella
Book 1 Biblio: Transit Lounge, $29.95 pb, 237 pp, 9781921924491
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Imagine a cross between Tim Winton’s The Turning and Kenneth Cook’s Wake in Fright, and you might very well imagine John Kinsella’s latest collection of fiction, Tide. Kinsella, a Western Australian like Winton, writes of the coast and of the desert, of small-town life and small-town people. However, Kinsella highlights the corruption of those landscapes and people in a way that aligns his vision more with Cook’s (which should come as no surprise, given Kinsella’s anti-pastoral poetry). There are ships pumping ‘alkaline hell’ into the waters where children swim, meatworks leaking blood to the sharks, factories, mines, old batteries, and trenches. Men are ‘brutal and brutalising’. Even boys torment and humiliate one another, often with the approval or complicity of their guardians. If someone outside Australia wanted to understand a coutry that hounded its first female prime minister out of office and voted in Tony Abbott on a platform against boat people and the carbon tax, this is the book I would recommend.

Read more: Maria Takolander reviews 'Tide' by John Kinsella

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Kári Gíslason reviews His Stupid Boyhood: A memoir by Peter Goldsworthy
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Italo Calvino once observed that the ideal condition for a writer is ‘close to anonymity’, adding that ‘the more the author’s figure invades the field, the more the world he portrays empties’. These comments about anonymity were made during an interview on Swiss television, no less. Calvino must have felt his imaginary worlds slipping away as he spoke ...
Book 1 Title: His Stupid Boyhood
Book 1 Subtitle: A Memoir
Book Author: Peter Goldsworthy
Book 1 Biblio: Hamish Hamilton, $29.99 pb, 248 pp, 9781926428505
Book 1 Author Type: Author

Italo Calvino once observed that the ideal condition for a writer is ‘close to anonymity’, adding that ‘the more the author’s figure invades the field, the more the world he portrays empties’. These comments about anonymity were made during an interview on Swiss television, no less. Calvino must have felt his imaginary worlds slipping away as he spoke.

What, then, is the place of the writer’s memoir? That is, what relationship do these works of non-fiction bear to the creative output that, in a sense, makes an autobiography necessary and interesting? The answer in Peter Goldsworthy’s warm and entertaining memoir about his childhood and teenaged years is essentially one about curiosity as a creative method. In the relatively unknowing state of youth, the ‘stupid’ world that we revisit later almost as strangers to our younger selves, we find the basis of how we come to write, if never entirely why.

Goldsworthy’s youth is overwhelmingly a fortunate one. His father is a school principal who every few years is shipped to new and at times remote schools, and whose career eventually takes the family to Darwin. There, Peter Goldsworthy becomes one of the few regulars at the library and, seemingly, the only bona fide serious young man in town. However unsuited this status might be to life in a frontier community, his mother is unfailingly supportive; she even congratulates the young poet on a cravat that his truest friends have already planned to steal and destroy.

Goldsworthy, here, is allowing us to see a version of himself that many would prefer to leave in a box somewhere, in a loft or in our parents’ garage. Of course, there’s comedy in such a self-portrait. But in this memoir the portrait also reveals an interesting middle ground that exists between an embarrassing earlier self and its function as the necessary precondition to something better.

We’re given a few early poems to read. They are rather closely related to the other experiments of youth, which we learn are mainly performed with the left hand. You don’t have to be a wanker to become a writer, but perhaps on balance it helps. The performance of an author-caricature – the cravat, as indeed the beret and the pipe, other props in the performance – may be just the thing to face out to the world while the authentic poet begins to develop. What I find interesting about Goldsworthy’s early role as author-in-waiting is not the fact of the cravat (after all, he didn’t replace the one his friends stole), but rather the inquisitive collector’s mindset that goes into its acquisition. For that is the enduring quality that, to some extent, the cravat helps to define.

‘...this memoir reveals an interesting middle ground that exists between an embarrassing earlier self and its function as the necessary precondition to something better.’

It is Goldsworthy’s faith in material objects, in life as a science of experiments and replications, that supplies the young man with his author prototype: an overdressed, politically active consumptive who, regardless of his appearance, is immensely attractive to women. Put those elements together and you’ll surely get an author, just as certain combinations in a chemistry set will produce an explosion.

The early parts of His Stupid Boyhood recount Goldsworthy’s attempts at bomb-making and petty theft as the first expressions of this collector’s mindset, and of a mind drawn equally to the physical and the poetic, including the poet as a certain kind of cultural performer. Gathering equipment and materials for experiments connects to other collections, not least a visual gallery of the women he meets. A fondness for objects finds its way into his early poems and, perhaps most profoundly, into a collector’s attitude to words.

Strangely, Goldsworthy very nearly achieves the author prototype he’s established in his mind. On one occasion, he actually bumps into a swottish beauty impressed by his first poems. At readings, it seems that most are prepared to take Goldsworthy’s authorial ambitions as fair warning that he might actually one day be an author. But it’s not until he’s faced with the kind of broken body that he’d once thought constituted the author’s physical self that he abandons the prototype. While at medical school, both his lungs collapse. A grave illness alters forever his attitude to both language and the body, or, perhaps more accurately, unites his attitude to these things with what has been developing underneath, an enduring and innate trust in lived experience.

No doubt it’s fitting, therefore, that this book adopts the same inductive approach, and only towards the end reaches for general ideas about authorship. As Calvino put it, ‘a place has to become an inner landscape for the imagination to start to inhabit that place, to turn it into theatre’. That is, it has to be lived again from the inside.

In returning to the foreign and at times ‘stupid’ places of his childhood, Goldsworthy for the main avoids the general in preference for the particular. The result is a book that leaves much for the reader to decide, and to some extent veils its ardour in a tone that the teenaged Goldsworthy might have found too light. I suspect most readers will have no trouble with that. After all, a great deal about Goldsworthy is implied at the book’s very beginning, in an extraordinary list of publications that precedes this memoir. It will be to this ultimate collection in the writer’s life that many will now return.

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Ray Cassin reviews Bitter Wash Road by Garry Disher
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Garry Disher’s World War II novel Past the Headlands (2001) was inspired in part by his discovery of the diary of an army surgeon in Sumatra, who wrote of how his best friend was trying to arrange passage on a ship or plane that could take them back to Australia before the advancing Japanese army arrived. But one morning the surgeon woke to find that his friend had departed during the night. Mateship in a time of adversity, that most vaunted of masculine Australian virtues, had turned out to be a sham. The elusiveness of real friendship and love, and the difficulty of discerning what is true and what is false in human conduct, are recurring themes in Disher’s writing, and he visits them again in his latest book, Bitter Wash Road.
Book 1 Title: Bitter Wash Road
Book Author: Garry Disher
Book 1 Biblio: Text Publishing, $29.99 pb, 325 pp, 9781922079244
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Garry Disher’s World War II novel Past the Headlands (2001) was inspired in part by his discovery of the diary of an army surgeon in Sumatra, who wrote of how his best friend was trying to arrange passage on a ship or plane that could take them back to Australia before the advancing Japanese army arrived. But one morning the surgeon woke to find that his friend had departed during the night. Mateship in a time of adversity, that most vaunted of masculine Australian virtues, had turned out to be a sham. The elusiveness of real friendship and love, and the difficulty of discerning what is true and what is false in human conduct, are recurring themes in Disher’s writing, and he visits them again in his latest book, Bitter Wash Road.

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Simon Collinson reviews Getting Warmer by Alan Carter
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Fremantle is rapidly becoming a preferred setting for novelists seeking to explore the hidden costs of the mining boom. Within weeks of the publication of Tim Winton’s Eyrie, which is haunted by the crime and gritty emptiness of the city’s rough side, we now have Getting Warmer, Alan Carter’s second novel and the sequel to Prime Cut (2011).
Book 1 Title: Getting Warmer
Book Author: Alan Carter
Book 1 Biblio: Fremantle Press, $29.99 pb, 352 pp, 9781922089205
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Fremantle is rapidly becoming a preferred setting for novelists seeking to explore the hidden costs of the mining boom. Within weeks of the publication of Tim Winton’s Eyrie, which is haunted by the crime and gritty emptiness of the city’s rough side, we now have Getting Warmer, Alan Carter’s second novel and the sequel to Prime Cut (2011).

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Milly Main reviews The Shadow Year by Hannah Richell
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Shadows, shallows, tides, secrets, aching hearts, and tragedy. ‘The love and the grief and the joy and the pain and all the emotion’ – oh the emotion – in Hannah Richell’s new novel, centred around a secluded lake, can leave one feeling thoroughly water-logged. Richell’s close follow-up to Secrets of the Tides (2012) uses similar techniques to depict another troubled family that must confront secrets from its past.
Book 1 Title: The Shadow Year
Book Author: Hannah Richell
Book 1 Biblio: Hachette Australia, $29.99 pb, 405 pp, 9780733630507
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Shadows, shallows, tides, secrets, aching hearts, and tragedy. ‘The love and the grief and the joy and the pain and all the emotion’ – oh the emotion – in Hannah Richell’s new novel, centred around a secluded lake, can leave one feeling thoroughly water-logged. Richell’s close follow-up to Secrets of the Tides (2012) uses similar techniques to depict another troubled family that must confront secrets from its past.

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Ray Cassin reviews Watching You by Michael Robotham
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Ever since Raymond Chandler decreed in The Simple Art of Murder (1950) that ‘Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid’, writers of hard-boiled crime fiction have queued up to take a shot at creating a hero who is less of a paragon than Chandler’s prescription and therefore supposedly more credible. Some, like James Ellroy, even abandon the project altogether, declaring the streets of the modern Western city to be so detestably mean that no one resembling Philip Marlowe could possibly be found on them.
Book 1 Title: Watching You
Book Author: Michael Robotham
Book 1 Biblio: Sphere, $29.99 pb, 441 pp, 9781847445278
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Ever since Raymond Chandler decreed in The Simple Art of Murder (1950) that ‘Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid’, writers of hard-boiled crime fiction have queued up to take a shot at creating a hero who is less of a paragon than Chandler’s prescription and therefore supposedly more credible. Some, like James Ellroy, even abandon the project altogether, declaring the streets of the modern Western city to be so detestably mean that no one resembling Philip Marlowe could possibly be found on them.

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Sara Savage reviews Banana Girl: A Memoir by Michele Lee
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Writing a memoir at the age of thirty may seem like an exercise in self-indulgence: what wisdom could one possibly impart amid the universal tumultuousness of the Saturn Return? Seemingly aware of the predicament, the author of Banana Girl doesn’t pretend to deliver any answers, her memoir instead giving a more immediate snapshot into the life of a twenty-something; specifically, the life of Michele Lee, an Asian-Australian playwright on the cusp of thirty, living in Melbourne’s inner north.
Book 1 Title: Banana Girl
Book 1 Subtitle: A Memoir
Book Author: Michele Lee
Book 1 Biblio: Transit Lounge, $29.95 pb, 255 pp, 9781921924552
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Writing a memoir at the age of thirty may seem like an exercise in self-indulgence: what wisdom could one possibly impart amid the universal tumultuousness of the Saturn Return? Seemingly aware of the predicament, the author of Banana Girl doesn’t pretend to deliver any answers, her memoir instead giving a more immediate snapshot into the life of a twenty-something; specifically, the life of Michele Lee, an Asian-Australian playwright on the cusp of thirty, living in Melbourne’s inner north.

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Alastair Collins reviews Changing Gears: A Pedal-powered Detour from the Rat Race by Greg Foyster
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With resource shortages looming and climate change a topic of intense discussion, it is becoming increasingly important for people to find ways to reduce their day-to-day consumption and carbon footprint. Greg Foyster’s Changing Gears seeks to explore the question of how to do so through the author’s own interesting, and no doubt exhausting, cross-country journey toward a greener way of living. Setting out to cycle from Melbourne to Cairns via Tasmania, which makes more sense in context, Foyster and his partner used the journey to force themselves into the sparse life of bicycle travellers, while visiting and interviewing a number of prominent experts and practitioners of conservation, green living, and social dynamics.
Book 1 Title: Changing Gears
Book 1 Subtitle: A Pedal-powered Detour from the Rat Race
Book Author: Greg Foyster
Book 1 Biblio: Affirm Press, $24.95 pb, 368 pp, 9781922213136
Book 1 Author Type: Author
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With resource shortages looming and climate change a topic of intense discussion, it is becoming increasingly important for people to find ways to reduce their day-to-day consumption and carbon footprint. Greg Foyster’s Changing Gears seeks to explore the question of how to do so through the author’s own interesting, and no doubt exhausting, cross-country journey toward a greener way of living. Setting out to cycle from Melbourne to Cairns via Tasmania, which makes more sense in context, Foyster and his partner used the journey to force themselves into the sparse life of bicycle travellers, while visiting and interviewing a number of prominent experts and practitioners of conservation, green living, and social dynamics.

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Jay Daniel Thompson reviews How to Tell Your Father to Drop Dead by Jeremy Fisher
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The title of Jeremy Fisher’s latest tome is deceptive. This reviewer expected a zany children’s book. Actually, How to Tell Your Father to Drop Dead is a subdued look at masculinity in Australian history. The text comprises autobiographical fragments and short stories. Fisher recalls growing up in a culture where homosexuality was ‘invisible’. He describes the heady days of the Gay Liberation movement in the 1970s. The author remembers his relationship with his father. The older man is described as an Errol Flynn lookalike who, at the age of sixteen, killed a boar and whose body was (decades later) cremated alongside that animal’s tusks. There is a piece on gay male sadomasochism in Sydney’s western suburbs.
Book 1 Title: How to Tell Your Father to Drop Dead
Book Author: Jeremy Fisher
Book 1 Biblio: Fat Frog Books, $26.95 pb, 150 pp, 9780959035049
Book 1 Author Type: Author
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The title of Jeremy Fisher’s latest tome is deceptive. This reviewer expected a zany children’s book. Actually, How to Tell Your Father to Drop Dead is a subdued look at masculinity in Australian history. The text comprises autobiographical fragments and short stories. Fisher recalls growing up in a culture where homosexuality was ‘invisible’. He describes the heady days of the Gay Liberation movement in the 1970s. The author remembers his relationship with his father. The older man is described as an Errol Flynn lookalike who, at the age of sixteen, killed a boar and whose body was (decades later) cremated alongside that animal’s tusks. There is a piece on gay male sadomasochism in Sydney’s western suburbs.

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Contents Category: Poems
Custom Article Title: 'Descending Geese at Katada', a new poem by Paula Bohince
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As flown from orange sunset, over mountain-
shaded sea, at eventide. As boats
are drawn in, sails begin to undress, or arrive anxious,
fully bare-masted. Fishermen navigate reeds
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As flown from orange sunset, over mountain-
shaded sea, at eventide. As boats
are drawn in, sails begin to undress, or arrive anxious,
fully bare-masted. Fishermen navigate reeds
that signal harbour,
and the homecoming emotions enlarge.
Water holds blueness not much longer. Death
will costume it in its colour, and the honking of geese
will give voice to the grieving.

 after the woodblock print Descending Geese at Katada
by Utagawa Hiroshige, 1797–1858, Japan--

descending-geese-at-katada

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Contents Category: Poems
Custom Article Title: 'Kangaroo Scientists of the Nineteenth Century', a new poem by Michael Farrell
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In their crucibles they attempt a new kind of tea
every day, usually through a combination of
Methods, such as the fox method, the hydrangea
method and the sunlight method this is a colour-
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In their crucibles they attempt a new kind of tea
every day, usually through a combination of
Methods, such as the fox method, the hydrangea
method and the sunlight method this is a colour-
Determined method in effect, though efforts are
Made to avoid repeating any method on consecutive
days another of their efforts has gone into producing
A quietness spray to be used at peak noise times
Of the day they are an outwardly calm but spiritually
Restless bunch they have studied the letters of
the great bushrangers and are as often to be found
Reading under a tree as concocting and examining
In a lab they have their own journals and calendar
several of the apprentice chemists have been pawing
At the dates in search of a suitable one to celebrate
The career of Mandy, the most senior scientist in
the area, and who deserved pretty much all the credit
For the quietness spray and pheasant flash (the latter
is worn behind the ear and involves a kind of fishing
Fly which swings out in the peripheral vision, encouraging
speed it belonged to her earlier days as a physicist
Mandy was thirteen she studied her face in a mirror
As if looking back in time to her ancestors who could
Never have conceived of such a thing as science and
would never have thought the invention of a quietness
spray necessary even if they had but the bush is
Not the same, she thought she took her mother’s
Copy of Pride and Prejudice from the shelf, hoping
that the reading of quality literature would continue
To keep her species from using weapons she idly
sipped at a lukewarm cup of tea, nodding and
acknowledging the reasonable sound of the bellbirds
And gathered the equipment necessary for collection
Of plant extracts there were always new illnesses
to deal with, and a kind of malaise of the nerves
She could only call neurosis she believed that for
Better or for worse that the coming century would
focus much more on the study of the mind than it
Ever had before, the mind as a kind of bank that
Was always putting in and taking out dirty bits
Of money not at all like the kind of dirty bank she
Spent her days rooting in, looking for a flower often
she intuited that she was about to find something
Miraculous a new daisy, fungi, herb or cacti
Only to realise she was making tea a new way

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Contents Category: Poems
Custom Article Title: 'Yellow', a new poem by Felicity Plunkett
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Yellow-1
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Custom Article Title: 'Crying on cue', a new poem by Anthony Lynch
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An American wannabe child star
told the workshop of his still-born
brother. How his mother had said
the lost one, endlessly cast in a silent
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True Stories: Babes in Hollywood, directed by Dan Sturman and Dylan Nelson (2011)

An American wannabe child star
told the workshop of his still-born
brother. How his mother had said
the lost one, endlessly cast in a silent
movie, looked just like himself.
Niagara broke over the boy’s
cheeks. The fat kid to his left,
cast always as a bully, patted
his arm. The workshop leader said
That’s great.

I cried too when my own mother
rapped on the earth and said
Let me in – a role for which
I did not audition.
But recalling my theatrical
run for her departing
Holden on my second day of school,
I had perhaps rehearsed
this loss all my life.

Maybe that was method acting.
A performance with no dry run.

I have also played support
in the soft focus of someone else’s
grief. Perched by an elbow
or unshallow grave, I have sung
a solemn line in condolence. Offered
my own off-key anthem.

For the aspiring child actor,
imagining the death of their Burmese
or labradoodle can further provoke
a successful crying jag.

Later we learnt the boy crying
for his sibling self
got to play a kid vigilante
barking orders to brothers-in-arms
who stood and took it, mute
as still-borns. And I had always
thought the Americans
had no workshops for silence.

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Custom Article Title: 'Your Paintings', a new poem by Lucy Dougan
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More and more I live with your paintings
or more precisely the moment
you first saw them and chose them:
the red bird sitting in
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More and more I live with your paintings
or more precisely the moment
you first saw them and chose them:
the red bird sitting in
the round of its glade;
the woman who has become
a train trip and a forest
as if her memory were a strip of film
containing both.

The man who helped you choose the paintings
had a name that sounded
like a small animal.
He was the same man
who persuaded you
that instant coffee
tasted better with the milk
stirred in first.

Every few weeks
I buy the cheapest tinned coffee,
come home, and stir it with that spoon of his.
With each motion
I sense your careful steps around the gallery.
You halt here, you halt there,
waiting for the lady with the coloured dots
on the ends of her fingers
to close the deal
on the red bird
and the woman who is becoming
both a trip by train
and a forest.

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Robert Dare reviews Unfinished Empire: The Global Expansion of Britain by John Darwin
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Contents Category: History
Subheading: Empire as an activity rather than an entity
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The main title of John Darwin’s new book is simple but mischievous. Its primary purpose is to announce that he sees empire as an activity rather than a thing. People, millions of them, made it, and remade it constantly, over long stretches of time; it was always in progress, always being finished ...
Book 1 Title: Unfinished Empire
Book 1 Subtitle: The Global Expansion of Britain
Book Author: John Darwin
Book 1 Biblio: Allen Lane, $45 hb, 492 pp, 9781846140884
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The main title of John Darwin’s new book is simple but mischievous. Its primary purpose is to announce that he sees empire as an activity rather than a thing. People, millions of them, made it, and remade it constantly, over long stretches of time; it was always in progress, always being finished. They built empire from a variety of motives, some commercial, some geopolitical, some religious, some vainglorious, but for most as a way of building a better life. Darwin wants to give us less a taxonomy of the British empire – what its bits consisted of – than an account of how it was built. He depicts the empire as constantly in flux. ‘Empire-building,’ he writes, ‘was always a work in progress, like a house extension in which the design, the builders and even the building materials were constantly changing.’ The secondary purpose of his title is thus a playful one. Wouldn’t we suspect that a finished empire was one already in decline, the victim of irresistible entropy – finished in both senses? Empires are restless, or they are dead. The play in the title, then, is that the British Empire is unfinished because it finished.

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Jay Daniel Thompson reviews The Baby Farmers: A Chilling Tale of Missing Babies, Shameful Secrets and Murder in 19th Century Australia by Annie Cossins
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In The Baby Farmers, legal scholar Annie Cossins revisits a bizarre episode in Australian criminal history. Her text focuses on a pair of baby killers who operated in Sydney during the nineteenth century. In October 1892, Sarah and John Makin were arrested after a baby’s corpse was found buried on their farm. An investigation revealed the bodies of twelve more babies, all buried in properties that had been inhabited by the Makins. The couple’s crimes stemmed largely from their poverty. Purchasing babies provided them with an (albeit limited) income. These babies had often been born out of wedlock, and their mothers relinquished them to avoid the stigma surrounding ‘illegitimate’ children.
Book 1 Title: The Baby Farmers
Book 1 Subtitle: A Chilling Tale of Missing Babies, Shameful Secrets and Murder in 19th Century Australia
Book Author: Annie Cossins
Book 1 Biblio: Allen & Unwin, $29.99 pb, 302 pp, 9781743314012
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In The Baby Farmers, legal scholar Annie Cossins revisits a bizarre episode in Australian criminal history. Her text focuses on a pair of baby killers who operated in Sydney during the nineteenth century. In October 1892, Sarah and John Makin were arrested after a baby’s corpse was found buried on their farm. An investigation revealed the bodies of twelve more babies, all buried in properties that had been inhabited by the Makins. The couple’s crimes stemmed largely from their poverty. Purchasing babies provided them with an (albeit limited) income. These babies had often been born out of wedlock, and their mothers relinquished them to avoid the stigma surrounding ‘illegitimate’ children.

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Paul Pickering reviews The Writing Culture of Ordinary People in Europe, c.1860–1920 by Martyn Lyons
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Contents Category: History
Subheading: An excellent study of scribal culture
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‘If in this I have been tedious,’ admitted William Cowper in a letter published in 1750, ‘it may be some excuse, I had not time to make it shorter.’ In The Writing Culture of Ordinary People in Europe, c.1860–1920, Martyn Lyons has accomplished what Cowper could not. This is a short book but withal it successfully tackles an expansive agenda. It is in no way tedious. Indeed, it is an excellent book – ambitious and thought-provoking – and deserving of an equally large audience within the academy and beyond it.
Book 1 Title: The Writing Culture of Ordinary People in Europe, c.1860–1920
Book Author: Martyn Lyons
Book 1 Biblio: Cambridge University Press, $130 hb, 288 pp, 9781107018891
Book 1 Author Type: Author
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‘If in this I have been tedious,’ admitted William Cowper in a letter published in 1750, ‘it may be some excuse, I had not time to make it shorter.’ In The Writing Culture of Ordinary People in Europe, c.1860–1920, Martyn Lyons has accomplished what Cowper could not. This is a short book but withal it successfully tackles an expansive agenda. It is in no way tedious. Indeed, it is an excellent book – ambitious and thought-provoking – and deserving of an equally large audience within the academy and beyond it.

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Contents Category: Film
Custom Article Title: Stranger by the Lake
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Stranger by the Lake is set entirely within the perimeters of a cruising ground for men by the shores of a lake in France. There unfolds a perfectly simple temporal conceit in which the cruiser, a handsome thirty-something everyman called Franck (Pierre Deladonchamps), arrives each summer day, parks his car, and walks down to the pebbled beach by the lake’s edge. That this is a narrative of repetitions becomes clear the third or fourth time we see the sunny establishing shot of the makeshift carpark where Franck parks his Renault. His routine documents almost ethnographically what happens at the cruising ground: he walks down to the beach, greets some acquaintances, takes off his clothes, swims, sunbakes, waits, rummages around in the scrub for sex, then does it all again.
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Stranger by the Lake is set entirely within the perimeters of a cruising ground for men by the shores of a lake in France. There unfolds a perfectly simple temporal conceit in which the cruiser, a handsome thirty-something everyman called Franck (Pierre Deladonchamps), arrives each summer day, parks his car, and walks down to the pebbled beach by the lake’s edge. That this is a narrative of repetitions becomes clear the third or fourth time we see the sunny establishing shot of the makeshift carpark where Franck parks his Renault. His routine documents almost ethnographically what happens at the cruising ground: he walks down to the beach, greets some acquaintances, takes off his clothes, swims, sunbakes, waits, rummages around in the scrub for sex, then does it all again.

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Hamish Ford reviews Cinema by Alain Badiou, translated by Susan Spitzer
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In recent years, the work of French philosopher Alain Badiou has been discussed with increasing regularity as part of an academic dialogue between cinema studies and philosophy that is often called ‘film-philosophy’. His various writings on cinema were for a long time scattered among many different sources, the majority untranslated. With its original 2010 French version and now this English translation, Cinema has finally changed all that. Containing thirty-one different pieces, all but five appearing in English for the first time, this important book offers a unique contemporary philosopher’s rich, varied, yet always coherent and evolving response to cinema spanning seven decades.
Book 1 Title: Cinema
Book Author: Alain Badiou, translated by Susan Spitzer
Book 1 Biblio: Polity, $34.95 hb, 280 pp, 9780745655673
Book 1 Author Type: Author
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In recent years, the work of French philosopher Alain Badiou has been discussed with increasing regularity as part of an academic dialogue between cinema studies and philosophy that is often called ‘film-philosophy’. His various writings on cinema were for a long time scattered among many different sources, the majority untranslated. With its original 2010 French version and now this English translation, Cinema has finally changed all that. Containing thirty-one different pieces, all but five appearing in English for the first time, this important book offers a unique contemporary philosopher’s rich, varied, yet always coherent and evolving response to cinema spanning seven decades.

Read more: Hamish Ford reviews 'Cinema' by Alain Badiou, translated by Susan Spitzer

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Benjamin Millar reviews World Film Locations: Melbourne by Neil Mitchell
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Reflections upon Melbourne’s reputation as a world cultural capital often sideline film-making, but the relationship is long and fruitful. The Story of the Kelly Gang (1906), filmed on the former Charterisville Estate in Heidelberg, is history’s first feature film. The first Australian entry in this series of global guides highlights the centrality of location to emotional spaces and film narrative. Melbourne-set films are defined by a ‘dispersed and piecemeal psycho-geography of the city’. The guide loosely groups forty-six films into six eras, providing snapshots of pivotal locations and scene-setting stills, from the dusty dystopian carnage of Mad Max (1979) to the subterranean blues of the brutal Romper Stomper (1992) opening sequence.
Book 1 Title: World Film Locations: Melbourne
Book Author: Neil Mitchell
Book 1 Biblio: Intellect Books (Footprint), $26.95 pb, 128 pp, 9781841506401
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Reflections upon Melbourne’s reputation as a world cultural capital often sideline film-making, but the relationship is long and fruitful. The Story of the Kelly Gang (1906), filmed on the former Charterisville Estate in Heidelberg, is history’s first feature film. The first Australian entry in this series of global guides highlights the centrality of location to emotional spaces and film narrative. Melbourne-set films are defined by a ‘dispersed and piecemeal psycho-geography of the city’. The guide loosely groups forty-six films into six eras, providing snapshots of pivotal locations and scene-setting stills, from the dusty dystopian carnage of Mad Max (1979) to the subterranean blues of the brutal Romper Stomper (1992) opening sequence.

Read more: Benjamin Millar reviews 'World Film Locations: Melbourne' by Neil Mitchell

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Jake Wilson reviews Stolen Glimpses, Captive Shadows: Writing on Film 2002–2012 by Geoffrey OBrien
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As film critics go, Geoffrey O’Brien is a lover, not a fighter: unconcerned with starting quarrels or settling scores, he simply aims to share his pleasure in what he has seen. Perhaps his remarkably good temper stems from the fact that he is not a full-time critic, but an example of that nearly extinct species, the all-round man of letters. He is editor-in-chief of the Library Of America series, and oversaw the latest edition of Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations; he has published six collections of poetry, along with books on pop music, hard-boiled fiction, and the history of Times Square.
Book 1 Title: Stolen Glimpses, Captive Shadows
Book 1 Subtitle: Writing on Film 2002–2012
Book Author: Geoffrey O'Brien
Book 1 Biblio: Counterpoint Press, $34.95 hb, 336 pp, 9781619021709
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As film critics go, Geoffrey O’Brien is a lover, not a fighter: unconcerned with starting quarrels or settling scores, he simply aims to share his pleasure in what he has seen. Perhaps his remarkably good temper stems from the fact that he is not a full-time critic, but an example of that nearly extinct species, the all-round man of letters. He is editor-in-chief of the Library Of America series, and oversaw the latest edition of Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations; he has published six collections of poetry, along with books on pop music, hard-boiled fiction, and the history of Times Square.

Read more: Jake Wilson reviews 'Stolen Glimpses, Captive Shadows: Writing on Film 2002–2012' by Geoffrey...

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Contents Category: Theatre
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With aching feet, bursting bladders, and the odd carrot for sustenance, Samuel Beckett’s famous pair of tramps have shuffled on to the stage of the Sydney Theatre for an extended run, though run is hardly the apposite word for this stationary duo. Perhaps one could call it an extended slump.
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With aching feet, bursting bladders, and the odd carrot for sustenance, Samuel Beckett’s famous pair of tramps have shuffled on to the stage of the Sydney Theatre for an extended run, though run is hardly the apposite word for this stationary duo. Perhaps one could call it an extended slump.

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Christopher Menz reviews Living in a Modern Way: California Design 1930–1965 by Wendy Kaplan
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Living in a Modern Way:California Design 1930–1965 is the catalogue accompanying an exhibition of the same name at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 2011–12. The exhibition is now showing at Queensland’s Gallery of Modern Art, after a stint in Seoul.
Book 1 Title: Living in a Modern Way
Book 1 Subtitle: California Design 1930–1965
Book Author: Wendy Kaplan
Book 1 Biblio: MIT Press (Footprint), $114 hb, 360 pp, 9780262010670
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Living in a Modern Way:California Design 1930–1965 is the catalogue accompanying an exhibition of the same name at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 2011–12. The exhibition is now showing at Queensland’s Gallery of Modern Art, after a stint in Seoul.

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Cassandra Atherton reviews Even in the Dark by Rose Lucas
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William Carlos Williams once famously stated, ‘No ideas but in things’, about his poetic method. Rose Lucas, in her first poetry collection, Even in the Dark, takes up the imagist movement’s poetic style but ‘makes it new’ in her examination of the role of the poet in both the local environment and abroad. Her observant and mimetic style shimmers in a collage of confronting still-life portraits. In the opening poem, ‘Heat Wave, Melbourne’, the death of a possum – ‘her young / still alive in the pouch, / squirm and cling / to the dead fur / to each other’ – is juxtaposed with a tragic Darcey-esque West Gate Bridge moment when a father ‘unbuckles his small child / from the back seat / and / then / in the rush / hot / as she falls / through sky and / slick of water –’.
Book 1 Title: Even in the Dark
Book Author: Rose Lucas
Book 1 Biblio: UWA Publishing, $24.95 pb, 128pp, 9781742585321
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William Carlos Williams once famously stated, ‘No ideas but in things’, about his poetic method. Rose Lucas, in her first poetry collection, Even in the Dark, takes up the imagist movement’s poetic style but ‘makes it new’ in her examination of the role of the poet in both the local environment and abroad. Her observant and mimetic style shimmers in a collage of confronting still-life portraits. In the opening poem, ‘Heat Wave, Melbourne’, the death of a possum – ‘her young / still alive in the pouch, / squirm and cling / to the dead fur / to each other’ – is juxtaposed with a tragic Darcey-esque West Gate Bridge moment when a father ‘unbuckles his small child / from the back seat / and / then / in the rush / hot / as she falls / through sky and / slick of water –’.

Read more: Cassandra Atherton reviews 'Even in the Dark' by Rose Lucas

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Peter Kenneally reviews Ephemeral Waters by Kate Middleton
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‘As if cuffed by the ear, the Colorado river pulled me onward.’ The current that seized Kate Middleton can be felt throughout Ephemeral Waters, as she takes us from the headwaters of the Colorado, through the Grand Canyon, over the Hoover Dam, until the great river, all its water plundered along the way, expires a hundred miles from the sea. The fate that the ‘mighty Murray’ has barely avoided is accepted for the Colorado, with a few crocodile tears, because all the water stays in the United States, while the dried up ex-river is in Mexico.
Book 1 Title: Ephemeral Waters
Book Author: Kate Middleton
Book 1 Biblio: Giramondo, $24 pb, 130 pp, 9781922146489
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‘As if cuffed by the ear, the Colorado river pulled me onward.’ The current that seized Kate Middleton can be felt throughout Ephemeral Waters, as she takes us from the headwaters of the Colorado, through the Grand Canyon, over the Hoover Dam, until the great river, all its water plundered along the way, expires a hundred miles from the sea. The fate that the ‘mighty Murray’ has barely avoided is accepted for the Colorado, with a few crocodile tears, because all the water stays in the United States, while the dried up ex-river is in Mexico.

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Dennis Haskell reviews The Watchmakers Imprint: Selected Poems by Ian Templeman
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The last page of Ian Templeman’s Selected Poems asks us to imagine that ‘every touch / expressing affection, left a handprint / on the heart’ that scientists could later ‘analyse, / to trace a profile of love’. Templeman envisages retired scholars who would prefer to find these traces ‘above a life of research texts’. The poem is titled ‘Night Journey’ and the scholars are ‘Approaching the dark’. It establishes the scale of values by which Templeman assesses ‘life’s puzzle’, and he is surely right: intimacy, personal relationships, the links between the generations are in the end what really matter to us, above learning, knowledge, adventure, professional achievements, and ‘research texts’. The gentleness of this poem is characteristic, and it possesses added poignancy in this Selected because of circumstance. Templeman himself is seriously ill, and the selection has been made by fellow poets Paul Hetherington and Penelope Layland. The book, explicitly ‘a gift to the author’, includes a generous introduction and is superbly produced. It is as beautiful-looking a poetry book as I have ever seen, appropriate for a poet who has been deeply involved with the visual arts.
Book 1 Title: The Watchmaker's Imprint: Selected Poems
Book Author: Ian Templeman
Book 1 Biblio: Tin Kettle Books, $30 hb, 88 pp, 9780646900346
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The last page of Ian Templeman’s Selected Poems asks us to imagine that ‘every touch / expressing affection, left a handprint / on the heart’ that scientists could later ‘analyse, / to trace a profile of love’. Templeman envisages retired scholars who would prefer to find these traces ‘above a life of research texts’. The poem is titled ‘Night Journey’ and the scholars are ‘Approaching the dark’. It establishes the scale of values by which Templeman assesses ‘life’s puzzle’, and he is surely right: intimacy, personal relationships, the links between the generations are in the end what really matter to us, above learning, knowledge, adventure, professional achievements, and ‘research texts’. The gentleness of this poem is characteristic, and it possesses added poignancy in this Selected because of circumstance. Templeman himself is seriously ill, and the selection has been made by fellow poets Paul Hetherington and Penelope Layland. The book, explicitly ‘a gift to the author’, includes a generous introduction and is superbly produced. It is as beautiful-looking a poetry book as I have ever seen, appropriate for a poet who has been deeply involved with the visual arts.

Read more: Dennis Haskell reviews 'The Watchmaker's Imprint: Selected Poems' by Ian Templeman

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Martin Duwell reviews It Comes From All Directions by Rae Desmond Jones
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There aren’t any Australian poets quite like Rae Desmond Jones, whose distinctive, unusual, and sometimes unsettling voice has been an important, though undervalued, force in Australian poetry since the early 1970s.
Book 1 Title: It Comes From All Directions
Book Author: Rae Desmond Jones
Book 1 Biblio: Grand Parade Poets, $27.95 pb, 212 pp, 9780987129154
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There aren’t any Australian poets quite like Rae Desmond Jones, whose distinctive, unusual, and sometimes unsettling voice has been an important, though undervalued, force in Australian poetry since the early 1970s.

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Gay Bilson reviews One Soufflé at a Time: A memoir of food and France by Anne Willan
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Not everyone’s father sends his daughter a brace of pheasants while she is studying economics at Cambridge. With a choice of two gas rings on which to cook them, Anne Willan eviscerated and plucked the birds, then used one gas ring to cook a pheasant casserole and the other to make a caramel custard that she ‘steamed over a galvanised tin laundry bucket’. She was, I’d guess, nineteen.
Book 1 Title: One Soufflé at a Time
Book 1 Subtitle: A Memoir of food and France
Book Author: Anne Willan
Book 1 Biblio: St Martin’s Press, US$27.99 hb, 313 pp
Book 1 Author Type: Author
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Not everyone’s father sends his daughter a brace of pheasants while she is studying economics at Cambridge. With a choice of two gas rings on which to cook them, Anne Willan eviscerated and plucked the birds, then used one gas ring to cook a pheasant casserole and the other to make a caramel custard that she ‘steamed over a galvanised tin laundry bucket’. She was, I’d guess, nineteen.

Read more: Gay Bilson reviews 'One Soufflé at a Time: A memoir of food and France' by Anne Willan

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Ian Donaldson reviews Shakespeare Beyond Doubt: Evidence, argument, controversy by Paul Edmondson and Stanley Wells
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It was not until the middle years of the nineteenth century, so far as we can tell, that anyone seriously doubted that the man from Stratford-upon-Avon called William Shakespeare had written the plays that for the past two and a half centuries had passed without question under his name. In the early 1850s, however, a private scholar from Connecticut named Delia Bacon began to develop an alternative view. She believed that the plays had been composed not by Shakespeare but by a syndicate of writers headed probably by Francis Bacon, whom she later came to think of as her distant ancestor.
Book 1 Title: Shakespeare Beyond Doubt
Book 1 Subtitle: Evidence, argument, controversy
Book Author: Paul Edmondson and Stanley Wells
Book 1 Biblio: Cambridge University Press, $35.95 pb, 298 pp
Book 1 Author Type: Editor
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It was not until the middle years of the nineteenth century, so far as we can tell, that anyone seriously doubted that the man from Stratford-upon-Avon called William Shakespeare had written the plays that for the past two and a half centuries had passed without question under his name. In the early 1850s, however, a private scholar from Connecticut named Delia Bacon began to develop an alternative view. She believed that the plays had been composed not by Shakespeare but by a syndicate of writers headed probably by Francis Bacon, whom she later came to think of as her distant ancestor.

Read more: Ian Donaldson reviews 'Shakespeare Beyond Doubt: Evidence, argument, controversy' by Paul...

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Alexander Howard Reviews English as a Vocation: The Scrutiny movement by Christopher Hilliard
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Christopher Hilliard’s meticulously researched and richly detailed English as a Vocation: The Scrutiny Movement opens with a historical anecdote regarding an after-hours, postwar negotiation ‘between literary analysis and popular culture’ undertaken in that most evocative of English holiday destinations: Scarborough. In these opening lines, Hilliard describes how the founder and director of Birmingham University’s renowned Centre of Cultural Studies, Richard Hoggart, working in an earlier capacity as an adult education tutor in North Yorkshire, spent his evenings in the late 1940s combining classes on Shakespeare with sessions scrutinising advertising rhetoric and the language of newspaper articles.
Book 1 Title: English as a Vocation
Book 1 Subtitle: The Scrutiny movement
Book Author: Christopher Hilliard
Book 1 Biblio: Oxford University Press, $109.95 hb, 311 pp
Book 1 Author Type: Author
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Christopher Hilliard’s meticulously researched and richly detailed English as a Vocation: The Scrutiny Movement opens with a historical anecdote regarding an after-hours, postwar negotiation ‘between literary analysis and popular culture’ undertaken in that most evocative of English holiday destinations: Scarborough. In these opening lines, Hilliard describes how the founder and director of Birmingham University’s renowned Centre of Cultural Studies, Richard Hoggart, working in an earlier capacity as an adult education tutor in North Yorkshire, spent his evenings in the late 1940s combining classes on Shakespeare with sessions scrutinising advertising rhetoric and the language of newspaper articles.

Read more: Alexander Howard Reviews 'English as a Vocation: The Scrutiny movement' by Christopher Hilliard

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Christopher Allen reviews Pliny and the Artistic Culture of the Italian Renaissance: The legacy of the Natural History by Sarah Blake McHam
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When the intellectuals, writers, and artists of the Renaissance sought a theoretical basis for the new styles they were developing – at a time when the new meant all’antica and the term modern was still coloured by associations with the Middle Ages – they found that ancient sources were relatively abundant in some areas and scarce or non-existent in others. Poets could find inspiration in Horace’s Ars Poetica, and later in Aristotle’s Poetics. And there was a wealth of material on rhetoric – Aristotle, Cicero, Quintilian, Tacitus – in fact an abundance out of all proportion to the practice of the art in an age when public speaking was represented by sermons and university lectures rather than by the deliberative and forensic oratory that were the lifeblood of Greece and Rome.
Book 1 Title: Pliny and the Artistic Culture of the Italian Renaissance
Book 1 Subtitle: The legacy of the 'Natural History'
Book Author: Sarah Blake McHam
Book 1 Biblio: Yale University Press (Inbooks), $110 hb, 336 pp
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When the intellectuals, writers, and artists of the Renaissance sought a theoretical basis for the new styles they were developing – at a time when the new meant all’antica and the term modern was still coloured by associations with the Middle Ages – they found that ancient sources were relatively abundant in some areas and scarce or non-existent in others. Poets could find inspiration in Horace’s Ars Poetica, and later in Aristotle’s Poetics. And there was a wealth of material on rhetoric – Aristotle, Cicero, Quintilian, Tacitus – in fact an abundance out of all proportion to the practice of the art in an age when public speaking was represented by sermons and university lectures rather than by the deliberative and forensic oratory that were the lifeblood of Greece and Rome.

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Lyndon Megarrity reviews For The True Believers: Great Labor speeches that shaped history by Troy Bramston
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Gough Whitlam’s famous words during his impromptu speech after the Dismissal in 1975 remain a potent symbol of the excitements and turbulence of the Whitlam era. As Troy Bramston’s collection of ALP speeches since 1891 reminds us, political speeches can capture a national mood or sentiment at a particular time in history. Indeed, a carefully crafted set of words can become a treasured part of our national self-image. They can also boost or destroy a politician’s reputation. In an age when the media has become uncritically obsessed with gaffes, Twitter banalities, polls, and sound bites, it is worth remembering that a good speech can elevate the national conversation and appeal to our better instincts.
Book 1 Title: For the True Believers
Book 1 Subtitle: Great Labor speeches that shaped history
Book Author: Troy Bramston
Book 1 Biblio: The Federation Press, $64.95 hb, 480 pp
Book 1 Author Type: Editor
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‘Well may we say “God Save the Queen”, because nothing will save the Governor-General.’

Gough Whitlam’s famous words during his impromptu speech after the Dismissal in 1975 remain a potent symbol of the excitements and turbulence of the Whitlam era. As Troy Bramston’s collection of ALP speeches since 1891 reminds us, political speeches can capture a national mood or sentiment at a particular time in history. Indeed, a carefully crafted set of words can become a treasured part of our national self-image. They can also boost or destroy a politician’s reputation. In an age when the media has become uncritically obsessed with gaffes, Twitter banalities, polls, and sound bites, it is worth remembering that a good speech can elevate the national conversation and appeal to our better instincts.

Read more: Lyndon Megarrity reviews 'For The True Believers: Great Labor speeches that shaped history' by...

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Graeme Powell reviews An Unqualified Success: The extraordinary life of Allan Percy Fleming by Peter Golding
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In 1939 President Roosevelt nominated the poet Archibald MacLeish to be the Librarian of Congress, replacing Herbert Putnam, who had held the post since 1899. MacLeish had not previously been employed in a library. American librarians reacted to the news with outrage and disbelief, with one of their leaders claiming that he could no more think of a poet as the Librarian of Congress than as the chief engineer of a new Brooklyn Bridge. Roosevelt was unmoved by the protests and petitions, and MacLeish duly took up the position. He held it for less than five years, but in that time he achieved a major reorganisation of the Library, broadened its research and cultural roles, and made some astute staff appointments, including two of his successors.
Book 1 Title: An Unqualified Success
Book 1 Subtitle: The extraordinary life of Allan Percy Fleming
Book Author: Peter Golding
Book 1 Biblio: Rosenberg Publishing, $39.95 hb, 344 pp
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In 1939 President Roosevelt nominated the poet Archibald MacLeish to be the Librarian of Congress, replacing Herbert Putnam, who had held the post since 1899. MacLeish had not previously been employed in a library. American librarians reacted to the news with outrage and disbelief, with one of their leaders claiming that he could no more think of a poet as the Librarian of Congress than as the chief engineer of a new Brooklyn Bridge. Roosevelt was unmoved by the protests and petitions, and MacLeish duly took up the position. He held it for less than five years, but in that time he achieved a major reorganisation of the Library, broadened its research and cultural roles, and made some astute staff appointments, including two of his successors.

Read more: Graeme Powell reviews 'An Unqualified Success: The extraordinary life of Allan Percy Fleming' by...

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Michael Crennan reviews Henry Friendly: Greatest judge of his era by David M. Dorsen
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Henry Friendly was a judge of the highest reputation – greater than Learned Hand in Justice Scalia’s opinion. His output was prodigious, his legacy unmatched: of his fifty-one clerks, twenty-one (including the present incumbent) became justices of the Supreme Court of the United States; in that Court’s decisions, only Learned Hand was cited more often than Friendly.
Book 1 Title: Henry Friendly
Book 1 Subtitle: Greatest judge of his era
Book Author: David M. Dorsen
Book 1 Biblio: Harvard University Press (Inbooks), $49.95 hb, 512 pp
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Henry Friendly was a judge of the highest reputation – greater than Learned Hand in Justice Scalia’s opinion. His output was prodigious, his legacy unmatched: of his fifty-one clerks, twenty-one (including the present incumbent) became justices of the Supreme Court of the United States; in that Court’s decisions, only Learned Hand was cited more often than Friendly.

Read more: Michael Crennan reviews 'Henry Friendly: Greatest judge of his era' by David M. Dorsen

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Wilfrid Prest reviews Queens College, The University of Melbourne: A pictorial history 1887–2012 by Jennifer Bars, Sophia T. Pavlovski-Ross, and David T. Runia
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Notwithstanding occasional media focus on misbehaving students or senior members, the residential colleges and halls dotted around or about most Australian university campuses keep a low profile. Their influence has undoubtedly declined since the early twentieth century, when as many as one quarter of Melbourne’s enrolled undergraduate population, and a much higher proportion of full-time students, were attached to Trinity and Janet Clarke Hall, Ormond or Queen’s. But the collegiate ideal to which all these institutions aspire, more or less, still provides a vital alternative to the regrettably prevailing view of higher education as mere vocational training – especially now, when the future viability of universities themselves is called increasingly into question.
Book 1 Title: Queen's College the University of Melbourne
Book 1 Subtitle: A pictorial history 1887–2012
Book Author: Jennifer Bars, Sophia T. Pavlovski-Ross, and David T. Runia
Book 1 Biblio: Queen’s College, $70 hb, 320 pp
Book 1 Author Type: Editor
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Notwithstanding occasional media focus on misbehaving students or senior members, the residential colleges and halls dotted around or about most Australian university campuses keep a low profile. Their influence has undoubtedly declined since the early twentieth century, when as many as one quarter of Melbourne’s enrolled undergraduate population, and a much higher proportion of full-time students, were attached to Trinity and Janet Clarke Hall, Ormond or Queen’s. But the collegiate ideal to which all these institutions aspire, more or less, still provides a vital alternative to the regrettably prevailing view of higher education as mere vocational training – especially now, when the future viability of universities themselves is called increasingly into question.

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Margot McGovern reviews The Last Girl by Michael Adams
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With a stepmother she hates and a father who’s barely there, sixteen-year-old Danby Armstrong knew Christmas Day would be bad, but she wasn’t expecting the apocalypse. While families tear the wrapping off the latest iGadgets and share excited status updates, something strange happens. Suddenly, people are not just reading each other’s thoughts in their news feeds; they’re actually in each other’s heads. Everything from a neighbour’s affair to a planned terrorist attack is suddenly known; ‘the elephants in every room had been set loose to stampede’. Sydney erupts in violence as people seek revenge or just a place to shut out all those voices. But while Danby can hear them, they can’t hear her, and that makes her almost invisible.
Book 1 Title: The Last Girl
Book Author: Michael Adams
Book 1 Biblio: Allen & Unwin, $19.95 pb, 384 pp, 9781743316368
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With a stepmother she hates and a father who’s barely there, sixteen-year-old Danby Armstrong knew Christmas Day would be bad, but she wasn’t expecting the apocalypse. While families tear the wrapping off the latest iGadgets and share excited status updates, something strange happens. Suddenly, people are not just reading each other’s thoughts in their news feeds; they’re actually in each other’s heads. Everything from a neighbour’s affair to a planned terrorist attack is suddenly known; ‘the elephants in every room had been set loose to stampede’. Sydney erupts in violence as people seek revenge or just a place to shut out all those voices. But while Danby can hear them, they can’t hear her, and that makes her almost invisible.

Read more: Margot McGovern reviews 'The Last Girl' by Michael Adams

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Emma Hayes reviews Wildlife by Fiona Wood
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Fiona Wood’s second novel addresses a theme that is common in Young Adult fiction: the loss of innocence. Wildlife, a cleverly composed coming-of-age novel, introduces the reader to the world of Crowthorne Grammar’s outdoor education campus at Mount Fairweather. Although it revisits the character of Lou from Wood’s début novel, Six Impossible Things (2010), Wildlife is an absorbing, stand-alone book.
Book 1 Title: Wildlife
Book Author: Fiona Wood
Book 1 Biblio: Pan Macmillan, $16.99 pb, 369 pp, 9781742612317
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Fiona Wood’s second novel addresses a theme that is common in Young Adult fiction: the loss of innocence. Wildlife, a cleverly composed coming-of-age novel, introduces the reader to the world of Crowthorne Grammar’s outdoor education campus at Mount Fairweather. Although it revisits the character of Lou from Wood’s début novel, Six Impossible Things (2010), Wildlife is an absorbing, stand-alone book.

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Never ruin a perfect plan’ is one of the masterful Shaun Tan’s Rules of Summer (Lothian, $24.99 hb, 52 pp). On a bone-strewn landscape, four thimbles with legs, tails, and horned heads are caught mid-procession. Two of them carry a knife and fork twice their height. The smallest one has turned its Ned Kelly visor head to salute. In doing so, he has trodden unaware on the tail of the one in the lead, who is carrying a strawberry as big as himself. The tip of the tail lies under his foot, dropped like a skink’s. A crow watches from the shadows. The narrative in this one picture would be enough to keep a reader absorbed for hours. The many colours of summer are textured contrasts.
Book 1 Title: Rules of Summer
Book Author: Shaun Tan
Book 1 Biblio: Lothian, $24.99 hb, 52 pp
Book 1 Author Type: Author
Book 2 Title: Kissed by the Moon
Book 2 Author: Alison Lester
Book 2 Biblio: Viking, $19.95 hb, 32 pp
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‘Never ruin a perfect plan’ is one of the masterful Shaun Tan’s Rules of Summer (Lothian, $24.99 hb, 52 pp). On a bone-strewn landscape, four thimbles with legs, tails, and horned heads are caught mid-procession. Two of them carry a knife and fork twice their height. The smallest one has turned its Ned Kelly visor head to salute. In doing so, he has trodden unaware on the tail of the one in the lead, who is carrying a strawberry as big as himself. The tip of the tail lies under his foot, dropped like a skink’s. A crow watches from the shadows. The narrative in this one picture would be enough to keep a reader absorbed for hours. The many colours of summer are textured contrasts.

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