Gough Whitlam may not have been one of the Australian Labor Party’s greatest prime ministers, but, since his defenestration by Governor-General John Kerr in 1975, he has been embraced as one of the ALP’s great martyrs. Kerr’s dismissal of the Whitlam Government galvanised the Labor movement. To Labor eyes, Kerr was Pontius Pilate and Whitlam the slain Messiah. New followers – many of them, like Whitlam, university-educated progressives – joined the ALP. New ideas were aired through policy think-tanks such as the Labor Resource Centre, headed by Jenny Macklin, a future federal deputy leader. Out of that angst and rage, a new ALP was forged. Labor was no longer a troglodyte party ruled by factional warlords and sectarian hatreds. It was a modern progressive movement hell-bent on winning and wielding power. After all, as Whitlam famously said to an ALP State Conference in Melbourne in 1967, ‘Only the impotent are pure.’

In August 2013, Robert Farquharson was denied special leave to appeal to the High Court against his conviction for the murder of his three young sons Jai, Tyler, and Bailey, aged ten, seven, and two. This was the final legal chapter in the lengthy story Helen Garner explores in This House of Grief.

Garner begins with the ‘Once’ that prefaces fairy tales – stories we think we know well enough to recite from memory; clear, oracular, and resonant: ‘Once there was a hard-working bloke who lived in a small Victorian country town with his wife and their three young sons.’ One day, ‘out of the blue, his wife told him that she was no longer in love with him’. Transformed by this into ‘the sad husband’, Farquharson packs a suitcase and leaves, saddled with the ‘shit car’ of the two owned by the couple.

Favel Parrett’s second novel, When the Night Comes, opens with its teenage protagonist Isla lying awake in her bunk on a night ferry to Tasmania in the mid-1980s, ‘waiting for the rough seas’. Her younger brother sleeps beside her, and her distracted, emotionally distant mother – the kind of woman who is ‘always sitting places by herself in the night’ – is smoking on deck. Together, the three are weathering the roiling overnight passage in order to escape a violent past and make a new life in Hobart. The rough seas the novel goes on to navigate are, as one might expect, both literal and metaphorical.

It takes a village to run the world, and Hillary knows how to do it. These are the main lessons from Hillary Clinton’s new memoir, Hard Choices. The book traces the finality of her presidential campaign bid in 2008 and her four years as secretary of state. Her analysis of this period provides insights into current international conflicts from Russia to China, the lingering controversy of Benghazi, and encourages the reader to look ever closer for insights into Clinton’s potential pursuit of the Presidency.

To read the subtext of this book, two observations may be helpful. I have met and respect Secretary Clinton. She is a rare politician, both a heavyweight and approachable. At a book signing for then Senator Clinton’s last book, Living History (2003), in Washington, DC, the store was closing when I arrived. Clinton was sitting on a small stage: it was just the two of us, and her security detail. She asked me what I did for work; I told her I was a lobbyist for gays in the military. She said, ‘Well I’m going to come around and shake your hand’. She walked around the table to speak to me. ‘That’s very important work,’ she said. This is illustrative not simply that she is friendly, but also that she didn’t have to be. The law to repeal her husband’s policy of ‘Don’t ask, don’t tell’ would not be amended for another seven years. Yet she was making a pointed peace offering.

When Mark Henshaw’s début, Out of the Line of Fire, appeared in 1988, it was, as literary editor Stephen Romei states in his introduction to the recent Text Classics reissue, the ‘literary sensation of the year’. A novel about an Australian author’s difficulties in writing about his fugitive subject, the young German philosopher Wolfi, it was very much a book of its moment, when a joyous postmodernism gripped Australian letters. In 1984 the country had hosted its first conference on the topic, with Jean Baudrillard and Paul Virilio, the rock stars of French theory; and by 1988 any serious young insect – myself included – was reading Jorge Luis Borges’s labyrinthine stories, Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being, and Italo Calvino’s experimental novel, If on a winter’s night a traveler. That same year Helen Daniel would publish her dense but hugely influential Liars, celebrating our novelists as purveyors of an Australian history (borrowing Mark Twain’s term) made up of ‘beautiful lies’. Henshaw’s novel also carries something of the crackling energy of our bicentenary when our literature was shedding a realism associated with colonialism while announcing a stake in international (often, but not always, European) intellectual traditions.

When the polio epidemics at the hinge of the twentieth century were catching hundreds of Australian children and adults in their web of pathogens, a pub in suburban Perth called ‘The Golden Age’ was converted – with its name unchanged – into a convalescent home for children who were recovering from polio but still unready to go back into the world. Joan London has used this fact as the starting point for her new novel, sticking with the allusive and luminous name of the real-life institution.

It is now approaching eighty-five years since Freud published his seminal book, Civilization and Its Discontents (1930). A foundational work of psychoanalytic cultural criticism, Freud’s focus was repression and its cultural consequences. He argued that sexual repression, and its associated guilt, had become the fundamental problem of modern societies. Freud understood society as a kind of trade-off: unfettered sexual pleasure is sacrificed for a sense of collective security. Freedom of the self is limited in the name of social order. ‘Civilization,’ Freud wrote, ‘is a process in the service of Eros, whose purpose is to combine single human individuals, and after that families, then races, peoples and nations, into one great unity.’

From today’s vantage point, to speak of culture in terms of unity or order sounds somewhat quaint. In the light of globalisation and the communications revolution, Freud’s cultural analysis looks increasingly out of date. In our global world of 24/7 digital culture – one shot through with religious, racial, and gender divisions – the production of social order may depend less upon consensus than upon a lack of consensus at the very point where cultural divisions could conceivably translate into political action.

In the spirit of our annual ‘Books of the Year’ feature, in which we ask a range of writers and critics to nominate their favourite new fiction and non-fiction titles, we asked ten Australian short story writers to nominate their favourite short story collections and individual stories. As this is the first time we have run a short-story themed feature of this nature, our ten writers were free to nominate older titles if they wished to do so. Our only request was that at least one of their selections should have been published recently and that at least one be by an Australian author.

Debra Adelaide

Of American author George Saunders’s several brilliant collections, Pastoralia (Riverhead) so cleverly captures the plight of working-class people trapped within the corporate world that it should be a contemporary classic. The voice of the eponymous story’s downtrodden narrator coping with managerialism in the setting of a bizarre yet plausible theme park is hilarious.

Lorrie Moore’s Bark (Faber, reviewed in ABR, 8/14) features the same distressed comedy that distinguished her first extraordinary collection, Birds of America (Faber). I cannot think of a more confronting yet endearing story than ‘People Like That Are the Only People Here’. And Moore is the only writer who can break Elmore Leonard’s famous prohibition on exclamation marks.

Worlds away – or maybe not – is Ethel Anderson, whose collection At Parramatta (Penguin) is distinguished by her deep irony and a keen satirical eye on nineteenth-century Sydney.

Tony Birch

In a year when so many quality short story collections have been released, two by Australian publishers are standouts. Ellen Van Neerven’s Heat and Light (University of Queensland Press, 9/14) is a superb début by a young Queensland writer. (The manuscript won the David Unaipon Award.) After reading the first story in the collection, ‘Pearl’, I took a deep breath and contemplated retiring from the genre myself and leaving it to the very best. Any reader interested in Australian landscapes beyond the suburban back fence will love this book.

Nic Low’s recently released collection, Arms Race (Text Publishing, 9/14) highlights a remarkable depth of voice and narrative range. My favourite from the collection is ‘Rush’, a humorous and intelligent insight into post-colonial relationships in Australia. Low is from New Zealand. We might want to claim him ahead of Russell Crowe.

I have also caught up with collections from my back catalogue this year; books sitting by my bed waiting on me. The best of these has been American Salvage (Norton & Norton) by Bonnie Jo Campbell. It is full of trailer-park ‘somebody done somebody wrong’ stories. If it were an Australian release, it would probably be relegated to the ‘poverty porn’ bin (a term recently favoured by the new brigade of ‘anonymous’ reviewers in Australia). These are great stories from a gutsy writer.

Carmel Bird

I delight in the fact that the ‘short story’ is forever elastic. Three recent collections from small Australian publishers bear this out.

The size of an e-reader, Angela Meyer’s Captives (Inkerman & Blunt) is a collection of thirty-eight micro-stories. It is exquisitely designed, with pen drawings inspired by Kafka. The texts also reference Calvino, Spark, and Orwell. John Clanchy’s Six (Finlay Lloyd) is tall and narrow and thick: the stories are long, the design elegant. The narratives of Six take the reader deep into the detail of the material; those of Captives rely on readers to assimilate evidence and to construct narratives in their imaginations. These are books as handsome cultural objects.

The third collection is Cracking the Spine (Spineless Wonders), edited by Julie Chevalier and Bronwyn Mehan – an elasticcollection from ten writers, with essays explaining how the stories were written. Paperback shape, full of surprises.

Georgia Blain

Tegan Bennett Daylight’s stories are the kind of short stories I love – small, perfect ‘novels’ that are always satisfying, but never neat. So much lurks outside the frame. In ‘J’aime Rose’, published in Kim Scott’s The Best Australian Stories 2013 (Black Inc., 2/14), it is the brief period of awkward adolescence that passes and yet shapes us.

Middle-aged betrayals, regret, and resignation seep through the stories in Richard Ford’s A Multitude of Sins (Vintage). My favourite is ‘Abyss’. Who else but Ford would dare to throw a character off a cliff and do it so well?

Amy Bloom’s stories show us how rich, unconventional, and eccentric we can be. In particular, ‘Love is Not a Pie’, from Come to Me (Macmillan), is a joyous tale of a love that does not fit the mould.

Maxine Beneba Clarke

The best short story collection I’ve read is a tiny book that packs a punch: J. California Cooper’s A Piece of Mine (Anchor Books). The voices of the African-American author’s motley crew of neighbourhood familiarssing off the page, no matter their predicament. She handles voice and sorrow like no other writer. When the characters in this collection speak, you hear their histories.

A close second is Tracy Chapman’s self-titled album (Elektra/Asylum Records). It is well disguised as a record, but it is also micro-fiction at its best. ‘Fast Car’ nails the cycle of poverty and the universal search for upward mobility with bittersweet precision.

Closer to home, Tony Birch’s The Promise (University of Queensland Press, 5/14) has confirmed his reputation as Australia’s short fiction master, and Nic Low’s début collection Arms Race is wryly amusing, thematically fearless, and has left me hopeful and excited for the future of Australian short fiction.

Susan Midalia

The stories in Laura van den Berg’s first collection, what the world will look like when all the water leaves us (Scribe), are offbeat, tender, melancholy, and resonate with a sense of intense loneliness, vulnerability, and hope.

In his fourth collection, Tenth of December (Bloomsbury), George Saunders imaginatively surveys the inner lives of the isolated, damaged, and deranged. By turns mordantly funny and deeply affecting, the stories are particularly good on the psychic effects of capitalism and class aspiration.

I have also chosen two stories that have long stayed with me: Lorrie Moore’s ‘What is seized’, which blends the elliptical and the operatic to reveal maternal love, ferocity, and madness; and Gail Jones’s ‘Modernity’ a paratactic narrative about the advent of the cinema in Russia. Conceptually dense, linguistically virtuosic, and emotionally powerful, the story offers a bold new voice in Australia’s literary culture.

Ryan O’Neill

The Australian short story sometimes reminds me of Schrödinger’s cat; depending on the moment you choose to look at it, it is either in rude health, or dead, with no state in between. Peeking at it now, I would say it is thriving.

Two outstanding collections published in this country in recent years are Las Vegas for Vegans by A.S. Patrić (Transit Lounge) and The Rest Is Weight by Jennifer Mills (University of Queensland Press, 11/12). Both writers adroitly avoid the feeling of ‘sameness’ that can mar even the best collections; their stories display virtuoso shifts in tone, setting, genre, and narration, and an awareness that realism is not the alpha and omega of literary style. Patrić and Mills are very different writers, but they share one remarkable quality: when you begin one of their stories, you never know how it will end. That is rare indeed.

Paddy O’Reilly

When I heard about Liam Davison’s shocking death on Malaysia Airlines flight MH17, I recalled his story ‘The Wetlands’, which I read at university. It taught me much about the structural possibilities of story, about place and its power in text, and about the haunted watery landscape that I will always associate with his work. Vale.

Among the many notable collections by new writers in this golden age of the short story in Australia, Josephine Rowe’s Tarcutta Wake (University of Queensland Press, 11/12) is distinctive, luminous, unforgettable. The Rest Is Weight by Jennifer Mills sweeps across the world of here, there, and beyond with lyrical acuity. Ryan O’Neill’s The Weight of a Human Heart (Black Inc.) plays with form yet also demonstrates mastery of traditional narrative.

Readers would also do well to subscribe to the online magazine Review of Australian Fiction, which publishes two stories each fortnight – an established writer paired with an emerging writer.

Chris Somerville

Although the stories in Rebecca Lee’s collection Bobcat (Text Publishing) aren’t connected, they belong together and her narrators all possess an estranged bemusement as they navigate their, admittedly similar, worlds of university campuses and dinner parties. In the end, it is an endearing work that never sacrifices narrative strength to bring you a message.

Luke Carman’s An Elegant Young Man (Giramondo, 2/14) is one of the best books I have ever read, and manages the rare occurrence in short fiction of actually being funny. Set in Sydney’s inner-west, with the stories revolving around a fictionalised Luke Carman, the voice is fine-tuned and exquisite, and it is rare to find a book that is so enjoyable, energetic, and ultimately heartfelt.

Maria Takolander

I like stories that challenge illusions. The excruciating and hilarious satires of the US writer Lydia Davis are a favourite. Read The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis (Penguin), if you dare. You might just recognise yourself in the pathetic psychological games that her characters play in their most intimate relationships with spouses, friends, parents, children.

The New Zealand–Australian writer Nic Low’s Arms Race is similarly mischievous, although while Davis’s stories are claustrophobically focused on the personal, Low targets the political. He provokes his readers with visions of speculative futures that are always about the present. What would it be like if indigenous Australians started a mining operation at the Shrine of Remembrance? The US writer Rebecca Lee’s Bobcat (Text Publishing) is something else altogether, written in the rapturous language of a lyric poet, but also with humour. Lee reminds us that there is great beauty, sometimes despite our ugliness.

One afternoon some three decades or more ago in a stuffy conference room at W.W. Norton & Company, the New York publishing firm where I then worked, the semi-annual sales conference was underway. Assembled were the national sales reps and the marketing team, members of the editorial board, the publicity director and senior publicists, and our president and chairman. A formidable array for editors to face – especially young ones, as I was then – as they presented their upcoming books on the next seasonal list.

One had about three to five minutes tops (though this was often honoured more in the breach, to the exasperation of the audience) to get across to the reps – a fairly jaded lot, but for the most part tolerant of newbies like me – an idea of a book’s content; its main sales points; a run-down of competing titles; any scintillating pre-pub blurbs one had been able to secure; and a conviction-filled guarantee that the author was an absolute certainty to be interviewed on the Today Show. 

I phoned my father when I arrived.

He said ‘Your mum’s just round at Aunty El’s’ in such a way that I knew she wasn’t; that she’d left the room with her hand to her mouth when he’d first said hullo, love, and I felt so sorry for us all.

The hotel room was cool and masculine. I drew back the curtains and looked out. The cityscape glittered through two big windows, like a part of some vast computer. My fingertips tingled if I stood too close to the glass. I wanted to sleep and slipped between the starchy sheets. I couldn’t hear the city below, but all night I kept waking up and going over to the wide glass panes. I don’t know what I expected.

In the morning the view was different and I could see it all as more than a billion lit squares. There was a sprawling park down below. Far off, the symmetrical peak of Mount Fuji. I sat in front of the window, naked, with the glossy map they’d given me in the lobby. I tried to work out where I was.

I met an American woman in the elevator. She was here for work, she said; she visited twice a year. Her husband had long since stopped coming with her.

‘He thinks it’s exhausting. The sort of place you visit once or twice in your life. He’s from Montana.’ She gave an apologetic smile. She took out a palm-sized mirror and inspected her mouth. ‘Are you here on business?’

‘I’m visiting my brother,’ I said without thinking. A small mercy: her mobile phone rang, and we smiled at each other as the elevator doors opened into the lobby. I walked away with blood buzzing in my arms. I thought I’d better get my story straight.

In the house I shared with him and Sigrid we’d lain on the living room carpet in an oxy dream. I was too fucked to lift my arms. Tom and Sigrid kissed in a slow, decadent way, faces turned toward each other, but not for long. I dozed there on the floor in a thick shaft of sunlight, my face pressed to the carpet. When a knock came at the door, the three of us were paralysed: Tom gave an indulgent laugh, but nobody moved.

It was all summertime and glory that year: pikelets, braided hair, and blood oranges; television, speed, flower crowns, silver dreams, tricks of the light. Long walks home from the city after a night that ended in tears and new jokes and pissing on someone’s front lawn, me and Sig giggling with our skirts up around our hips. Power-pedalling up the big hill at night, foreheads spangled with sweat.

We had a poster of the Milky Way tacked up on the wall opposite the toilet, and another poster of constellations beneath it. I learned the names of stars and the pictures they made.

I had no friends – only Tommy and Sig. I was the spectator, the sister; the joyful witness to their Great Passion. The three of us loved one another very hard.

Eri called to say she was running late. I drank a beer and read my book in the greyish light. When she arrived she said hisashiburi and gave me a quick, tight hug. Her hair was cut to her ears. I liked how small and tough she looked.

‘I was late at work,’ she said. ‘Osoku-natte sumimasen.’ She inclined her head in a parody of her own culture and shrugged out of her coat.

I explained what I wanted. Eri might have known. She looked at me levelly while I spoke. A cigarette burned low between her knuckles.

‘I can’t go with you,’ she said. I was the one who looked away. ‘But my friend Yui – her father will take you. He’s a doctor, but he volunteers there sometimes. You can take a bus to Kawaguchiko station.’ Eri stubbed out the cigarette and took up a pen. She said she’d organise it for me. She wrote down her friend’s nameand phone number on a square of paper, and passed it to me with both hands. I never knew when to be humble, when to be reverent. I remembered the set phrases from high school, but not the feel of them in my mouth.

‘Thank you,’ I said again and again. ‘Osewa ni narimasu. Yoroshiku onegaishimasu.’ Thank you for caring for me. Sorry to be a burden. It’s the thing you say. We did it all back to front: first there was hardness; afterwards, decorum. We stayed there until after midnight. We talked about our jobs, about our families. Eri lied and said my Japanese was still very good. She was engaged to a schoolteacher. She hoped I’d come back for the wedding. I lied and said I would. She reached into her handbag and pulled out a blue envelope. Tucked inside was a photo – Eri, Tom and meon Phillip Island, smiling grimly into the wind. Eri wore the pained expression of the exchange student; Tommy grinned from under a ridiculous knitted beanie. He looked healthy, indefatigable, victorious. I was blinking.

Eri leaned on my shoulder, so close that I felt her hair against mine. She looked down at our pale adolescent faces. ‘I thought that I had taken more pictures that day, but I could only find this,’ she said.

I had the spins at Koenji station. I sobered up on the train back to the hotel. In my room I called Sigrid; lovely Sig who’d stayed with him all that time, who’d weathered his shit when the rest of us no longer could.

‘It’s all sorted. I’m going the day after tomorrow,’ I said. I realised I was going to sob.

‘Come home. You don’t need to do this for anyone else. You’re only doing it for you,’ Sigrid said.

‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I’m sorry.’

‘What’s it like there? Is it cold?’

‘You know Buddhists get a new name when they die?’ I told her. ‘To move away from one world and into the next – the afterlife, or whatever, a dead person gets a new name. So they don’t look back.’

‘Like Lot’s wife.’

I wanted to stick my head into the night, to run around a cricket oval until I was ragged in the lungs. I was aching with a mad, violent energy, but all I could do was curl up like a child in the cool bed. When we were kids walking home from school, mum wouldn’t let me cut across the oval without Tom. ‘It’s not good for a little girl to walk there by herself,’ she said. I did it anyway, but with a thrumming heart and quick legs, thinking of strange men and bodies in paddocks. It was a much shorter way of getting home. Whenever I banged through the screen door out of breath, schoolbag thumping against the small of my back, Tommy laughed. He’d say, ‘What are you scared of, Cammy? Worst thing you’re gunna see is Jade Pitrowski getting fingered in the tunnel.’ He never told Mum. Mostly we walked together.

Dad and I found him once living in a shack up near Marysville. He’d been gone from home a few days. Detective games and phone calls to his friends led us nowhere: we had to wait for Tommy to contact us. He did at last, and we went to retrieve him. We left Mum standing in the driveway at dusk, telling us to ‘drive safe’. I was still in my school uniform. Everyone was frightened of what we’d find that time; of what fool’s gold lay at the end of the treasure-hunt instructions he’d made Dad scribble down over the phone. In the end, it was a monstrous Tommy, huddled like a dog in his windbreaker and filthy jeans in some abandoned shed. We couldn’t go home, he said; we couldn’t leave yet. And so we stayed with him in that wormy wood shack. It was not far from the town. Dad drove in on the second morning and bought food and polar-fleece blankets and we tried to make an adventure of it. I was impatient. When it got dark I lit all the candles and sat at the wooden table with my textbooks, highlighting the words someone else had coloured before me. I learned nothing. I did it only to say, Look, you selfish shit, it’s not always about you. See what you’re doing. I copied notes into my exercise books with their ruled margins, and did every revision question surrounded by my lumps of molten wax. I remembered nothing.

Dad and Tom went for walks that lasted for hours. It was never that I was not invited. Once I looked out the window and saw them standing twenty yards apart, knee-deep in grass. Tommy was bellowing something and they were too far away for me to hear at all, but I could see the strain in his neck, his Adam’s apple tight and tired, and I imagined him hoarse-voiced. He flung out an arm in a posture of desperation. Dad waited for him to finish.

We stayed there for three days. On the fourth day we drove home, all of us grimy and sour-breathed in our greasy wool jumpers and boots. Me, the learner driver up front of the station wagon, easing the car around hairpin bends. Tommy in the back with his headphones, snarling at me to ‘fucken’ step on it, will ya’. Dad beside me mouthing to his Buffalo Springfield tape and looking over the sharp, ferny ledges when I wished he’d keep his eyes on the road, or tell me I was taking the corners too fast, because I was afraid. And the asphalt unfurling impossibly before us, canopied by the thickest forest I’d ever seen.

I slept beside a man I’d met in a bar. He was Dutch, an architect, thirty-two, here for a conference. I didn’t care. We fucked twice, and afterwards we rolled away from each other and I told him everything. He tried to put his arms around me.

‘He was your older brother?’

‘Sixteen months older.’

‘Almost like twins,’ he said. ‘I’ve heard about it, the jukai. Sea of trees.’

‘I don’t know what it will be like,’ I said. I felt the grief rising in weak spasms. I got up and went to the bathroom, drank a glass of water from the tap.

‘In some ways it’s almost a pilgrimage that you’re making,’ he said pleasantly. His accent made everything sound silly. I wished he’d stop talking. Above the bedhead was a mirrored pane. I could see my own body reflected in it, the shadow of pubic hair, the faint tan lines from a summer ago. White breasts, glass of water in my hand, flesh settled on my hips. There was a smudged handprint on the mirror, not left by either of us. We’d fucked efficiently, neatly.

I thought I should leave, but he said I should stay. I got back into bed beside him and he reached for me again. He had his arms around me for a long time. One of those blokes who hated silence and loved touching. I wondered if he had a wife or a girlfriend. We must have slept, because I dreamed lightly of flooded fields. I was seeing them from above; I was seeing the water-damaged crops.

We said goodbye in the morning. I got lost trying to find my way back to my hotel. I ended up on the wrong train, then another. I stood on a train platform I didn’t recognise, looking at the map with its complicated coloured lines. I might have started to cry, but one of the white-gloved station employees approached. He had a badge of the British flag on his lapel. He asked if I needed help.

‘This is Yamanote line,’ he said. His fingers traced the map. He showed me where my hotel was, where Tokyo Tower was, where Ginza was, where Akihabara was, smiling the whole time. I kept saying thank you. I felt as helpless as an animal by a roadside. ‘Since you are here in Ikebukuro,’ the man went on, ‘why don’t you try the bōsai-kan?’

‘Bōsai-kan,’ I repeated dumbly.

‘It is a special and interesting earthquake museum. You can experience an earthquake. To feel the feeling.’ He held out both gloved hands, fingers splayed, and bent his knees as if bracing himself. ‘Wa-a-a-a-a!’He laughed. ‘Actually, there is information on various type of emergency situations. It is a good attraction. The entry is free of charge. I recommend this place.’

He’d been so helpful that I didn’t know how to refuse him. I couldn’t simply get back on a train and head off in the right direction. I thanked him over and over again. He gave me a fold-out map, the one I already had three copies of. Marked the route to the museum with a series of neat dashes; warned me it was easy to miss. I kept saying thank you. I wanted to wash the sex off my thighs.

I walked all over the city. I wandered around the streets as if in a hallucination. I was scared that if I went back to my hotel I’d fall asleep there in my cool, clean coffin room. I took photos in the fish markets; I bought a small bunch of peonies and carried them around all afternoon like a fool. I walked through the park I kept seeing from my hotel window. In a quiet suburb full of trees I sat in a tiny café styled like a French pâtisserie. Charles Bradley was playing over the speakers. The coffee was pale and sweet. Ordinarily I would have hated it, but I ordered another and a cake the size of my palm topped with gelatinous fruits and read my book for an hour by the window. It was late afternoon. The light was swimming-pool green. I caught another train, met Eri again for dinner. She brought her boyfriend. I wasn’t hungry. I was beginning to get nervous. Afterwards the two of them headed off to sing karaoke with some friends. I turned down their invitation. I had to get up early the next morning.

I sat on the end of the bed to call Dad again. The bed was neatly made from the day before. I told him about the earthquake museum.

‘The Life Safety Learning Centre,’ he repeated, and laughed. ‘But how did you bloody end up there?’ He laughed harder when I told him about the man at the station, uniformed and well-intentioned, and how I’d gone out of politeness. I told him about the earthquake simulator.

‘It was frightening,’ I said. ‘It went on for longer than I expected. I was surprised.’

He asked if I wanted to speak to mum. I said I had to get up early the next morning.

There was a car accident. It wasn’t me driving round the Black Spur, it was Tommy dozing off in the car on Swan Street, me in the passenger seat reaching over to grab at the wheel. He ruptured his spleen and in hospital he got high on pethidine. He had a vision – colour and dreams in his arms– and all I got was to sit by his chair. He went off theantidepressantsafter that. We learned about them when I did my psych rotation, their uses and side effects. Of course that doesn’t happen to everyone. Of course if you feel drowsy or otherwise affected, you shouldn’t drive. Of course. He went cold turkey, like you’re not supposed to.

‘What does it feel like?’ I’d heard Sigrid ask him once. One of the afternoons when we’d cycled round the Merri Creek trail with bottles of Mercury tinkling in our crates, sprawled out in the sun, read to one another, done the quiz in the paper. We had so much time.

‘Dizzy,’ Tommy had said, ‘these sort of – electric-feeling brain zaps. Like shivers in your head that roll through.’ He’d pressed his hands to her hair, scrunched his fingers, raked them down her skull to her neck, but tenderly. Sig’s shoulders had tensed. They’d thought I was asleep. I realised it was too late to let them know I was listening. ‘Like looking through fog. I just feel out of it.’

‘Must be dreadful,’ she’d said.

‘Gunna be good when it’s over,’ he’d said. My brother with his silly, lovely grin, withdrawing from the good pills. That was May. He went to Japan in September. We’d all waved goodbye to him at the airport. He’d swaggered off singing ‘The Internationale’ for reasons I’ve long forgotten, waving his windcheater at us until he disappeared through the silver doors. The security guard had laughed and dad had laughed and Sig laughed, too, but she’d been crying. Her eyes were leaking and her breathing was ragged. I thought she was just getting ready to miss him. In a way she was. Maybe she knew something the rest of us didn’t.

I’d brought a book to read on the bus but ended up with my face to the window the whole way. I slipped in and out of light sleep, tiny flickering dreams. A sign in a window I couldn’t read; tunnels into the earth; my father with white smoke rising from his belly or chest, he was on fire and didn’t realise. I woke with a start and looked around me. I wondered if I’d cried out. I kept my headphones on and looked out at the mountain drawing closer.

Mr Ukai met me at the bus stop. He was a small, slim man in a parka. He held out his hand for me to shake. In the car he played Bob Dylan.

‘Osewa ni narimasu. Thank you for doing this,’ I said.

‘It’s good to be able to help. I go there to help anyway.’ His English was clear. His eyes did not move from the road.

‘Even so. It’s a big ask – it’s a big favour. I’m grateful. Yoroshiku onegai itashimasu.’

‘Ii-i-e. I think it is not so good for you to go there by yourself,’ he said gently. ‘I think, if you are not too tired, we will go to there now. We don’t want to be in the forest after dusk. It is a dense place.’

‘I’ve read a little bit about it,’ I said. ‘I read about that book. Kanzen Jisatsu Manyuaru.’

‘The Complete Manual of Suicide.’ He shook his head. ‘I think it is maybe a hysteria. I think you cannot blame a book. This sadness is an epidemic. It did not come from bookstores. But,’ – we slowed at a corner and he turned to look at me, one hand on the gearstick – ‘I have not read this book, so maybe I don’t know.’

The roads were wet. The trees were fat with the sort of haze I imagined would burn off later in the day. I felt as if I’d been awake for a long time, but it was still morning.

‘Yui tells me you are medical student. Very good.’

‘Well, I’m not very good. I’m just passing,’ I said. ‘And I still don’t know if it’s what I want to do.’

‘I still don’t know either. And I am a doctor for thirty years.’ He laughed. ‘What do you like most?’

‘I want to be a diagnostician. I like solving puzzles,’ I said. ‘But I don’t know if I work hard enough for that.’

We pulled in to a carpark. We’d arrived suddenly. I hadn’t been looking for signs. Mr Ukai sat for a moment after he cut the ignition, looking at something I couldn’t see in the rear-view mirror. I thought he was going to ask me if I was ready, but he just reached into the back seat for his plastic water canteen.

From the car boot he took out a smaller women’s rain jacket and handed it to me. He retrieved a backpack, a torch, and a length of fluorescent-yellow nylon cord, neatly coiled. That nearly brought me to my knees. I had a bad feeling in the guts. It smelled like new earth out here, petrichor; like bright air. I tried to think about that instead of the nylon cord.

Mr Ukai shut the boot gently. He slung the backpack over his shoulder, and his waterproof jacket gave out a rustle.

‘Ja, ikōka?’

We started toward the entrance. The leaves were wet underfoot.

‘People say it’s a mystical place, they say, nanka, many kind of thing, but it’s just a forest,’ he said. ‘The mystery is why are so many people sad.’

It struck me as a distinctly un-Japanese thing to say. The woods were darker than I’d imagined. It was all electric green moss and untamed tree roots crawling over the forest floor. It felt prehistoric. We came to a length of yellow rope stretched across the path. There was a sign that said No Entry. Mr Ukai stepped right over it, then held it down so I could do the same.

‘I think it is best, from here, if I walk first,’ he said. He inclined his head. I nodded.

‘Of course.’

‘Cammy-san. If the experience becomes too heavy, nanka, tsurai – we will go back to my car. Please do not be troubled. Do – not – hesitate.’

He pronounced my name kami, like ‘god’. I nodded again. I had my thumbs looped through the straps of my backpack. I felt like a child on an excursion.

We fell into step single file, me behind him. I wondered what he’d meant, exactly, with his polite, broken English. There was such a chasm between us. I thought about Eri saying ‘I can’t go with you’.

I kept my eyes fixed on Mr Ukai’s back, or on my own running shoes, caked with wet leaves. When he started humming to himself, I thought it must be safe to look up. There was tape everywhere, strung between trees. Some of the trunks had numbers spray-painted on them. Mr Ukai stepped off the main trail onto a smaller one. He looked back at me. He said, daijōbu? and I said daijōbu. I could feel sweat cooling on my neck.

It had been weeks before the funeral took place. There were complications bringing Tommy’s body back. For a while the Japanese seemed to think there should be an autopsy, and that they should be the ones to undertake it, but that faded. I took half a valium before the service and another after I’d read my eulogy.

There was no word for closure in Japanese. I’d looked it up online in my hotel room the other night.

Mr Ukai had stopped humming. He was walking respectfully, if that were possible. Everything he did was gentle. He surveyed the forest calmly. His eyes went everywhere. I flinched at it.

There was human detritus everywhere. Plastic umbrellas, food wrappers, mittens, lengths of rope, a bicycle, a pair of scissors, a blue tarpaulin. The trees were so thick overhead, I wondered how they let any light through. I could see why Tommy would have loved it here.

Mr Ukai paused. He waited until I was beside him, then he pointed at the base of a tree a little way off the path. There was a marker at its base. Someone had left a bouquet of flowers, pink cellophane, and a tiny banquet of food, laid out on a piece of cloth.

‘It is recent,’ Mr Ukai said. ‘Maybe someone else is making our same journey today.’

A few steps further I saw a skull turned green and a rotten shoe. There was a crop of tiny mushrooms growing by the heel of the shoe. Their stalks were young and firm. I squatted with one hand on a damp tree and vomited. Mr Ukai handed me a pocket pack of tissues. I wiped my mouth. I waited until I was sure I wasn’t going to do it again, then I stepped past Mr Ukai. I zipped my water canteen back into my backpack. I apologised in a way that sounded too formal.

‘Maybe a place near here would be good,’ he suggested when we started walking again.

‘It’s beautiful, but there’s no light.’

‘Aokigahara is a very dense place. That’s why it is jukai. Sea of trees.’

‘I know,’ I said. I felt rude. ‘I just thought maybe we could find a clearing.’

We walked for a long time. I watched the soil under my feet. The trees closed over almost completely, so that I had to bend my head in parts, but we did come to a clearing. ‘Here,’ I said, ‘I think this is a good place.’

‘It is,’ he agreed.

My mouth tasted like vomit. I took off my backpack and fished out the plastic bag.

‘Cammy-san. If you wish, I can go somewhere else. So you can be discreet.’

I looked up at him. I shook my head. ‘I don’t need to be here long.’

I took the letters and the hammer out of the plastic bag. I chose a tree. I lined up the pieces of paper. They were neatly folded into four, no envelopes. I fixed them to the tree. The nails were probably too small, but they held. I nailed Eri’s Phillip Island photo to the trunk, too, then the yellowed poster from our bathroom in the Yarraville house, the one with the constellations.

When I finished hammering I stood back to look at my shrine. Mr Ukai was on the other side of the clearing, sitting on the trunk of an enormous fallen tree. He was watching me with a placid face.

‘Please take your time. Do not hurry,’ he said.

‘I think I’m done,’ I said. I left the hammer by the tree. I had no further use for it.

Afterward Mr Ukai took me back to his house. His wife served us green tea and small sweet cakes and mandarins with tough skins. We sat at a low table. Mr Ukai said it was all right not to kneel. Mrs Ukai looked at me the way you might look at an orphan. She asked gentle questions. We winced at each other. Once the sugar sadness in my mouth was almost too much, but I looked down at the table and it passed.

Their daughter Yui was my age. She arrived home from university and introduced herself.

‘Yui has just been on student exchange. For one year. In Austin,’ Mr Ukai said.

‘Texas,’ Yui said. She gave a little smile. Fathers and daughters were the same everywhere you went. Mrs Ukai insisted on cooking me dinner. She made yudofu, tsumire, and daikon. I was surprised at how hungry I was.

‘Yudofu is my favourite,’ Mr Ukai said. ‘I have tried to cook yudofu myself, but I am not so good as my wife.’ He laughed pleasantly. His wife did not speak English. She smiled at me through the steam rising from her bowl.

After dinner Yui and I stood in the dark outside on the wooden verandah and smoked a joint. She spoke with an American accent so convincing she even had a slight drawl.

‘I’m sorry about your brother.’

‘It’s okay. I don’t think there’s anything we could have done to stop him.’ My arms were feeling warm on the inside. I had the sudden urge to stand close to Yui, to let our arms touch, to see if hers were hot, too, but some part of me realised I was high.

‘Why did he come here to do it?’ she asked.

‘I don’t know. He did a student exchange here when he was in high school. He never knew what he wanted to do. I’d never heard him talk about Aokigahara before.

But now I’ve seen it, it makes sense to me.’

‘It’s a beautiful place,’ Yui said. I wanted my mother.

The last bus to Tokyo left at 8.10 pm. Mr Ukai drove me back to Kawaguchiko station. As we approached the station I began to thank him again, clumsily. We parked beneath a floodlight.

‘There is a Japanese saying, nodo mo to sugireba atsusa o wasureru. Do you understand?’ Mr Ukai asked. I shook my head. ‘It means, One forgets the heat once it has passed down the throat.’

My backpack was heavy on my lap. I went on thanking him. He got out and waited until I was on the bus. I waved at him from the window. He was still standing there when the bus pulled away. I waved until I couldn’t see him anymore.

I felt as if I’d been gone for days when I got back to the city. I couldn’t bear the trains and the streets. I couldn’t bear this country.

I felt filthy. In my hotel room I took off my muddy running shoes and threw them straight into the wastepaper bin. I started to undress to get in the shower, and then I thought I’d better phone my dad if I was going to do it at all.

‘I went. I saw it.’

‘Oh, Cammy,’ he said. ‘Are you all right?’

I sat on the edge of the bed. ‘Do you remember that time we went to get Tommy from the mountains, and we drove home through the Black Spur? The trees were thicker than that.’

He began to cry. I heard him sucking in air through his teeth.

'Aokigahara' by Jennifer Down won the 2014 ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize. Click here for more information about past winners of the Jolley Prize.

Inherit your great-grandmother’s wild red hair and hear the boys sing Griffin’s Gingernuts are so spicy when you walk past the Four Square court. Feel like a freak. Ask your mother if you can cut your hair short when you start high school and hear her say but it’s your best asset. Worry about your assets. Regret not cutting it on the first day of school when your form teacher christens you Orphan Annie and everyone laughs. Eat your vegemite sandwiches alone at one end of a wobbly bench outside the gym and ignore the fat girl wobbling it at the other end. Howl into the headwind as you bike home from school. Hate your mother when you arrive red-eyed, wind-whipped and she sighs. Wish you were Orphan Annie.

He was a man with a pinboard, and that boosted him a hundred points in her nervy evaluation, the first night she saw his room. On the pinboard were tickets, a laminated backstage pass, a wrapper from a Swiss chocolate, all those things that could wait for drowsy burbling nocturnal stories in the dark, the recounting of Times Before Her recited off like threaded beads. All thrillingly making up the prelude, the teaser, the set-up before the main feature and all its rightness. Discussion of dreams, explanations of scars and tattoos. Former crushes. Photos from real photobooths, with different haircuts, a smile she would tease him about, maybe a picture on his parents’ mantelpiece of him as an awkward partner at a débutante ball and the one of her on her parents’ mantelpiece in braces, in those overalls. Yes, yes, all this would wait, resting, to be edged into place. For now she would borrow a book – because he was also a man with books. Another hundred points, another daring row of five hopeful, shivering stars.

Ben Ball was born in Melbourne in 1970. He grew up in London, New York, and Sydney, and went to school in all of these places. He completed an Arts/Law degree, in Australia, ‘more or less entirely to create the pleasing symmetry B. Ball, BA, LLB’. In the United Kingdom he undertook an M.Phil in Contemporary English Literature. Ball worked in London in publishing for more than a decade, with Bloomsbury, Granta, and Simon & Schuster. He returned to Australia when he began working for Penguin in January 2006. In 2011 he became Penguin’s Publishing Director.

Ben Ball

I interviewed Ben Ball at the head office of Penguin Books, Australia. Situated on the mezzanine of the renovated Goods Shed South in the Docklands, it is a large open-plan space decorated in blocks of bright colours. Ben Ball is seriously tall, with dark Jim Morrison-esque hair. We talked in a sparse room with motion-sensored lights.

Cassandra Atherton: You worked in publishing in London before joining Penguin. What did you do there?

Ben Ball: I started in the publicity department at Granta. It was quite small then – still is.

CA: But impressive.

BB: Yes, they had some terrific authors. Because of their size, everybody did lots of things. That’s when I started editing and commissioning books. Then I joined Bloomsbury, which was probably slightly ahead of its time. They had launched a big web project with a literary magazine attached to it. I was the editor. Then I got back into books proper with Simon & Schuster, as the editorial director, before returning to Australia.

CA: Are the two publishing scenes very different?

Harold Adrian Russell (Kim) Philby was the Third Man of the notorious Cambridge spy network set up in the 1930s and partially unmasked in the early 1950s, when Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean fled to Moscow. He had been in British intelligence (MI6) since the beginning of the war, but had been working for Soviet intelligence for some years before that. A high-flyer, charming and sociable, he rose rapidly as an officer in the British service and was even tipped to be the next head of MI6. After narrowly surviving the Burgess–Maclean fallout, he ended up in Beirut in the early 1960s, working as a freelance journalist for the Observer and the Economist and an agent for MI6 on the side. Son of a famous and eccentric Arabist, St John Philby, his Middle East coverage struck an old friend, Flora Solomon, as anti-Israel, and in criticising it to her old friend Victor Rothschild she mentioned that back in their youth in the 1930s he had tried to recruit her as a communist spy. Lord Rothschild passed that on to MI5, which had had it in for Philby for years, and in the new round of investigation, Philby’s own bosses in MI6 were convinced. An old friend, MI6’s Nicholas Elliott, confronted him in 1963 and obtained a partial confession, but then inexplicably left Beirut and allowed Philby to flee, courtesy of his Soviet handlers.

The Sunday Times of London did a great job on the ‘Cambridge spies’ story back in the 1960s, returning to the topic in the 1980s, when Australian Philip Knightley interviewed Philby in Moscow and wrote what seemed like the definitive study, The Master Spy: The Story of Kim Philby (1989). So Macintyre, who is also a London-based journalist, an associate editor at The Times, had to look around for a new angle. He found it in Philby’s friends, the Eton-and-Cambridge Old Boy network that gave Philby extraordinary protection and support for almost fifteen years while he was under suspicion not only in the service but also – for many years, publicly and relentlessly – in the media. Chief among his friends was Nicholas Elliott, who vigorously defended him in the early 1950s and apparently let him escape to Moscow ten years later.

Albert O. Hirschman (1915–2012) was a development economist and political theorist whose work is essential reading for anyone interested in understanding how economic life figures in the political worlds we inhabit and the ways in which we give meaning to our lives in market-based societies. Perhaps best known for the distinction between ‘exit’ and ‘voice’, Hirschman was a prolific theorist who wrote about the role individual moral virtue and individual self-interest should play in economic activity, how economic growth in the developing world might best be achieved, and the reactionary rhetoric of neo-conservative politicians in the late 1980s, to list but some of the areas he covered. Hirschman’s writing was elegant; further, he understood the importance of the well-chosen word. He was, as this new biography by Jeremy Adelman shows, an economist for whom the essays of Montaigne were as important as the writings of Ricardo and Smith.

Hirschman, it must be said, led a remarkable life, as even the most cursory reading of this biography will attest. Many devoted readers of his work in the social sciences would, I imagine, be completely unaware of the extent to which this writer of scholarly tomes was politically and culturally engaged with some of the most significant historical events and movements of the twentieth century.

Kent MacCarter’s third collection of poems comprises a patchwork of forms and phenomena, in parts influenced by and dedicated to poets of the New York School and the ‘Generation of 1968’. MacCarter’s own cosmopolitan greetings share the offbeat tones and imagery of precursors, including Frank O’Hara and John Forbes. Touches of the former’s dry humour permeate Sputnik’s Cousin, alongside edgier local presences apparent in the poetry.

In her foreword, Emily Maguire says, ‘You need a desperate, hungry energy to tell a story, to write a poem, to scratch at the surface of a life and see what slithers beneath.’ For some, the university campus is the place for this desperation and hunger to find a voice and have a public hearing. For the University of Sydney, the public hearing is in the form of Perspectives, through which we experience almost thirty new writers and artists, who reveal diverse themes, points of view, and technical abilities.

How a writer bears witness to his age is necessarily the expression of many things, not least the possibly quite peculiar nature of an author’s life. Literary works often emerge from complex upbringings, from periods of youthful isolation spent reading and writing. More still seem to have been written as a result of the fraught relationships that befall authors, perhaps because authors so often view their relationships with a degree of creative and critical distance. And yet, if a writer’s output evidences an unusual life, it also witnesses broader questions being asked by a community as a whole. At some level, even the most remarkable figures are typical of their age, and reflections of it. By the close of Paul Binding’s study of the life and works of Hans Christian Andersen (1805–75), we are reminded that extraordinary feats of originality and imagination are often the result of how unique minds enter wider discourses.

Andersen had an impoverished and difficult upbringing in Odense, and at the age of fourteen moved to Copenhagen, where he hoped his talents for poetry and theatre would be better received than they were at home. In 1822 he published Youthful Attempts under the pseudonym William Christian Walter, a name that paid homage to his heroes William Shakespeare and Walter Scott. He came to the notice of Jonas Collin (1776–1861), a leading patron of the arts. Andersen now had a supporter, and went on to form an intense, complicated friendship with Jonas’s son Edvard (1808–86). In the past, this friendship has been analysed for what it might have revealed about Andersen’s sexuality. In Binding’s work, it is the first step in demonstrating how much of Andersen’s writing was the expression of both his humble origins and the manner in which he escaped them, and by so escaping how he entered a richer cultural milieu.

The pots are still dropped and pulled at 4 am,
but no-one fishes near seal rock for weeks, out where the shadows
of sharks and seals are interchangeable.

‘That there should never be air / in a picture surprises me’
Barbara Guest

Feel it even now: such stillness
and yet – there

they are, again:

lights in blue
air, daylight

Of Shakespeare’s tragedies, Macbeth seems the most prescient, apposite to a species rapidly running out of world. Upon hearing of the Witches’ prophecy, and resolving her course with chilling alacrity, Lady Macbeth invokes the nether realm of her potentialities:

Come, you spirits
That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here,
And fill me, from the crown to the toe, top-full
Of direst cruelty.

Usually the subject’s death signals the end of a biography, but for Dylan Jones it is the starting point. Three decades after his death in 1977, Elvis Presley has proven even more ubiquitous, and lucrative, than he was in life. When he died – with the official cause listed as heart failure, but a vast cocktail of drugs playing an undeniable role – his manager, ‘Colonel’ Tom Parker, declared, ‘Why, I’ll go right on managing him.’ And from there Parker helped set the template for a superstar entertainer’s posthumous success.

But that’s not all that Jones, who is Editor of GQ, is interested in here. In truth, it can be difficult to pin down just what he is trying to add to the oversaturated conversation about Presley. Elvis Has Left the Building bears the tagline ‘The extraordinary story of how the rock star who changed everything lives on’, yet Jones takes a more roundabout approach in this book. Jones is a sharp and affable writer, but the book has little in the way of sustained focus. He flits between various themes and anecdotes, and even dips in and out of autobiography.

This is a thoughtful and timely issue of Australian Literary Studies (ALS), one of Australia’s most substantial scholarly journals. It brings together scholars from institutions across Australia, India, and New Zealand to reflect on the state of the discipline of English in the context of a number of recent upheavals, including those directly relating to print media, including literature, which many would consider the traditional focus and matter of English. It also includes shifts in cultural literacy in the Internet age: changes in the nature of reading and the places and ways readers read; changes in school curricula; changes in the higher education sector – in response partly to changes in literacy and school education and to a rise in vocational training at both levels; to the rise of the corporate university; and to developments over the past several decades that we might think of as internal to the discipline: the critiques of syllabi and reading practices focused on canonical texts; the rise of theory; of post-colonial and feminist and minority discourse approaches; of interdisciplinary reading, and so on. The contributors to this volume address these questions in terms of debates around ‘the public humanities’: that is, defences of the traditional humanities by scholars from literary studies along with philosophers and historians in the face of attacks from the political and corporate world about the ‘relevance’ of these fields of inquiry.

Ann Moyal was born in 1926, so now she is heading towards her ninetieth birthday. She has already launched a work of autobiography into the world, written in her mid-sixties. But her life did not, then, ‘take a quieter turn’. On the contrary, she tells us, ‘I’d continued to spend my ageing life with passion, involvement, and intensity.’ And that has inspired her to

gather together those buoyant passages and components; my chequered engagement as a historian; the richly unfolding interconnections and tapestry of people who have influenced and shaped me; love and loss; and the experience of vastly increasing age.

‘Hurry,’ she urges, quoting the wonderful Margaret Olley, ‘Hurry last days!’

The Australian sweet tooth and ongoing love of cakes and desserts is evident in two recent publications. Both cover the basics as well as offering more ambitious fare; they are good places to start if this is your thing.

Phillippa Grogan’s eponymous pâtisserie in Melbourne, established in 1994, offers the type of baked goods presented in this publication: breads, cakes and biscuits, quiches and tarts, superbly made and flavoured and stylishly presented. Novel at the time, the business rapidly became a success and has since expanded considerably. As is de rigueur nowadays for cooks, the book of the shop has followed: Phillippa’s Home Baking (Lantern, $49.95 hb, 313 pp, 9781921383311), co-written with Richard Cornish. Baking, more than any other type of cookery except confectionery, requires precision and accuracy, and this is reflected in the succinct, no-nonsense style of the clearly set out recipes and introductions.

Phillippa’s style is straightforward: good ingredients prepared and presented simply. This is very much a book that can introduce the novice to cooking. As well as a helpful section covering basic implements, materials, techniques, and ingredients, there are useful comments and tips. (I now know why I have had no success with Angel Cakes: eliminate any skerrick of fat from the baking pan and probably have a dedicated pan for this cake.) Phillippa has basic Australian favourites of the CWA style – slices, lamingtons, scones, Anzac biscuits, cupcakes, rock cakes. If I want recipes for these and other nostalgic Australian staples, I know that I will turn to Phillippa’s Home Baking and not bother to resurrect the battered and distinctly unglamorous 1936 edition of the South Australian School of Mines Cookery Book I grew up learning to bake with. After the basic recipes more interesting ones follow. I had great success with the Catalan Tea Cake, the Pistachio and Lemon Cake, and the Indonesian Spice Layer Cake. In the latter, the layers are cooked successively under a grill, rather than baked whole in the oven. Interestingly, this is the same technique recommended for a traditional German cake, Baumkuchen (Tree Cake), which appears in Cakes (1982) by Barbara Maher, an indispensable book for cakes with a central European flavour. The Pistachio and Lemon Cake, in which the combination of the ground nuts mixed with eggs and butter fuse to form a marvellous soft texture, is similar in concept to the superlative and equally unusual Chestnut Cake in La Bonne Cuisine de Madame E. Saint-Ange (1927, English edition 2005). I also made the fine Chicken and Tarragon Pie. There is a good section on yeast cookery – the Hot Cross Buns were delicious – with an excellent introduction to this rewarding area of baking. Anyone wanting to gain further expertise and knowledge in this area should of course consult Elizabeth David’s English Bread and Yeast Cookery (1977).

You will not go to Phillippa’s Home Baking for elaborate gâteaux or meretricious cake decorating techniques. What you will learn from this attractive volume is a fresh view on Australian domestic baking, including many childhood favourites. There are so many delicious things to try in emulation of the shop that one wonders if the business might decline now that the secrets are out.

Sweet (Lantern, $49.99 hb, 231 pp, 9781921383540) by Alison Thompson, who runs a cake business in the Yarra Valley, covers a range of desserts, pastries, and cakes, including elaborate gateaux. I dived in head first and started with one of the more complex offerings, ‘Gâteau Opéra’, a lamination of thin sheets of almond sponge soaked in coffee syrup, alternating with chocolate ganache and coffee buttercream, all covered in ganache. This immensely rich confection was very successful: the directions were clear, as are those for all the recipes in the volume.

This book also commences with a section on equipment and techniques – including a practical entry on tempering chocolate – before leading into the recipes proper. There are interesting takes on pavlovas (one with brown sugar and spiced plums, another with cherries and chocolate curls), custards (coffee, rosewater) and bavarois (mango with coconut macaroon), followed by chapters on ices, pancakes, pastries, puddings, cakes, and confectionery, giving a balanced range of sweet food for home entertaining. There is a fine-sounding sour cherry pie and a summer pudding, also with cherries, to try next summer. Sweet will not supplant Lindsey Remolif Shere’s Chez Panisse Desserts (1985) – the best of all in this genre – but it certainly offers new things to try.

Specialist cookery publications such as these attest to the popularity of, and demand for, books by Australian cooks that reflect our tastes and ingredients. They also reflect the expertise of the chefs and professional cooks who write them. With such an investment by authors, editors, designers, publishers, and printers, it always seems a pity that at least a couple of pages of the glamorous photographs could not be dispensed with and replaced with a select bibliography. Culinary influences are important and reveal a great deal about the taste of the author. And the literature is so vast that a sound guiding hand is invaluable.

Todd Turner’s first collection, Woodsmoke, evolves intriguingly. It starts in the ‘anti-pastoral’ mode founded by Philip Hodgins. Here the poet, long since relocated to the city, looks back with tellingly evocative detail but a divided sensibility on the life he (it’s normally a ‘he’) has now abandoned.

Kin, Anne Elvey’s first full collection of poetry, brings together a wide range of poems full of light and the acuity of close attention. These poems focus on a world of inter-relationships where tree and water, creature and human, air and breathing, coexist – suggestive of an underlying philo-sophy of humility and acceptance. This is a world which envisions at least the potential of balance and a non-hierarchical sharing, where self and other, the natural world, and the devices and desires of the human might recognise each other.

Between 1889 and 1892, young Australian poet Bernard O’Dowd corresponded with the ageing Walt Whitman. Leaves of Glass, David Prater’s second collection, vividly imagines this long-distance relationship. This is not, however, a historical novel in verse. It refracts the correspondence through a perpetually shifting series of voices and forms, from heavily ironic, mock-traditional ones (‘Treading: An Air’) to the language of personal columns. There is even a translation of Whitman’s ‘O Captain! My Captain!’ into the language of LOLcats, that is, rewriting the poem as though by a cat (‘Gowayz Ob Lol: “O Kitteh! Meh Kitteh!”’). Despite having some sharp literary and cultural observations to make, there is nothing precious or stuffy about this book. To take one sample of this mixing of times and voices, ‘Swagman Ted’, a prose-poem/letter from O’Dowd to Whitman, begins: ‘Revered Master, Perhaps it was “Banjo” Paterson’s curse – we’ll never know; as someone once observed, news reaches us slowly over here, is constantly being delayed (or censored?) in the mail.’

What makes a story compelling? When I was an undergraduate student at Deakin University, I was fortunate enough to be instructed in fiction writing by Gerald Murnane. His key criterion for the worth of a story was its capacity to mark his memory with an enduring image. Over time he used to cull books from his shelves that failed to impress him in this way.

Voices of the dispossessed appropriate the narratives in the current issue of Westerly. The fiction in this issue is the strongest section, largely due to the originality and diversity of the writing. M.T. O’Byrne’s magic-realist short story, ‘The Day Before Christmas Island’, introduces the voice of the refugee. Reminiscent of Life of Pi (2001), the narrator and Thommo ‘pull a boy from the sea’, only to find that his siblings, at the end of a long fishing line, appear in the form of a shark and a whale and want to board their boat. Zdravka Evtimova’s ‘Happiness is a Simple Thing’ presents the retribution of the Oshav men who want ‘blood for blood’, while Shokoofeh Azar’s ‘The Woman Who Went to Stand There’ – translated from Persian – is the devastating story of a woman who waits a lifetime at the Somayyeh intersection to elope with her lover. Like Miss Havisham, her demise is charted in her decaying appearance. Finally, Mark O’Flynn’s ‘Turning the Other Cheek’ is a standout for its almost Nabokovian unreliable narration of a father who terrorises his murdering son.

Why do you write?

When all the parts of a story successfully converge it is very satisfying, much like solving a maths problem.

Are you a vivid dreamer?

I seem to dream more awake than I do asleep. As a child, I often acted out imaginary scenarios, speaking the various parts aloud. Every so often I’ll catch myself doing it again.

Where are you happiest?

Somewhere with sunlight, a mild wind, an abundance of greenery, and my loved ones nearby. New York, where I now live, ticks most of those boxes for part of the year.

Certain catchwords – ‘quirky’, ‘heartwarming’, ‘uplifting’ – mark the media coverage surrounding the release of Western Australian Brooke Davis’s first novel, Lost & Found. Perhaps foreseeing this, Davis presents her twee characters in a slightly laboured, albeit fashionable, manner: the elderly Karl in colourful braces; the agoraphobic widow Agatha; and Millie Bird, a Disneyesque seven-year-old grieving for her lost parents while camping out in a closed department store. All three protagonists come together for an unlikely adventure across Davis’s palpable, yet homogenous, Australian outback.

A prestigious prize and national exposure are fine achievements for a writer in her early twenties. Heat and Light is the first major publication by Ellen van Neerven, winner of the 2013 David Unaipon Award. Given her age, it is less surprising that Heat and Light focuses on questions of identity.

Peter Docker knits us into a ‘pea-soup fog’ of Western Australian heat, blanketing us, until we feel it ‘seeping right into the bones’. In the familiar-sounding Baalboorlie, the sun beats down,scorching the airless metal cell of a prisoner transportation vehicle. It cooks the Old Man’s flesh as he is escorted across a vast stretch of his desert country. The floor of the mobile oven sears his bare stomach, the branding ‘raised up and angry red and orange, in the shape of the rising sun badge of the ADF’. His grandmother was right, ‘White men will steal you in the night, then cook and eat you’.

Australia’s history is chequered at best. For every story of military heroism, there is one of discomfiting prejudice. So it is with Christine Piper’s After Darkness, which explores Australian history from the point of view of a Japanese doctor, Tomakazu Ibaraki, arrested as a national threat while in Broome, and sent to the Loveday internment camps in regional South Australia.

Characters on the verge of a breakthrough populate this impressive début short story collection. An aspiring artist in ‘Making It’ is unsure whether a tilt at greatness is worth the personal sacrifice. In ‘Scar’, a middle-aged geologist feels conflicted by prospective fatherhood and observes, ‘Against that slow patience of stone the need to reproduce had always seemed like vanity.’ Low’s stories cover an ambitious range of locations from Melbourne to Mongolia; his prose is energetic and inspired.

Anybody who knows a little about the role played by Australian horses in World War I will know that the story did not end well for the horses: 136,000 left these shores, and one returned. Readers of Morris Gleitzman’s Loyal Creatures (Viking, $19.99 pb, 160 pp) who are unaware of this statistic might be in for a shock.

At the outbreak of war, Frank Ballantyne, not quite sixteen, is working with his father, sinking bores and locating water for farmers in the outback. It is a skill that will serve Frank and the army well in the deserts of Egypt and Palestine, which, after lying about his age, he finally reaches – with his horse Daisy, and his father, who has also enlisted – in 1915.

At its greatest, literature offers us the opportunity to see the world through the eyes of someone else; at its most inviting, through a character whose experience could be our own; at its most powerful, through a view of existence that differs vastly, even frighteningly, from ours. The latter is explored in these two new works of Young Adult fiction that show us intensely ‘other’ ways of seeing.

Ryan Lanyon sees something special in Ariel the moment he meets her. He can tell that she is out of place here, in the middle of suburbia, where the too-bright mall lights offer no real security from the dangers outside.

Ryan is an unlikely hero. Surprisingly insightful, he is the first of many characters in Tigerfish that encourage us to look beneath their rough exteriors. Ryan takes Ariel and her sister Kaydie under his wing. To him, they are exotic and fragile creatures who need to be saved. He’s not sure if he will be able to save them, but as far as he can see he is the best one for the job.

Flipping over fiction

Welcome to our annual Fiction issue! In this issue you will find the three shortlisted stories from the ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize, as well as other features on fiction, including ten writers nominating their favourite story collections, and Maria Takolander and Mary Cunnane on short fiction and the art of pitching, respectively. Enjoy those cupcakes!

You will also find additional reviews of major new fiction releases, as well as our standard range of reviews and features. Thanks to the brilliant Judy Green for the effervescent literary dandelion, which takes pride of place on our cover spread.

Jolley Prize

This year we received almost 1,300 entries in the Jolley Prize. We were delighted to see evidence of the Jolley Prize’s growing international profile; stories arrived from twenty-four other countries. Entries from the United Kingdom, the United States, and New Zealand weren’t entirely unexpected, but we were particularly pleased to receive stories from countries where the Jolley Prize may not have previously had such a high profile (among them the Cayman Islands, the Maldives, Uganda, and Nepal). As word spreads, we look forward to receiving stories from an increasingly diverse and international pool of writers.

Jennifer Down

The shortlist for the 2014 Jolley Prize was announced at a lively event at the Melbourne Writers Festival on August 30. The judges – Patrick Allington, Cassandra Atherton, and Amy Baillieu – shortlisted three stories by Jennifer Down, Cate Kennedy, and Faith Oxenbridge. We have much pleasure in publishing them in this special issue.

After readings from the three stories, Jennifer Down was named the winner for ‘Aokigahara’. The judges described ‘Aokigahara’ as a ‘beautifully controlled story with subtle understated power’. New Zealander Faith Oxenbridge took second place for ‘The Art of Life’, and Cate Kennedy third for ‘Doisneau’s Kiss’.

The judges also highly commended two stories which we will publish in coming months: Gregory Day’s ‘The 900s Have Moved’ and ‘The Great Dying’ by American writer Larry O’Connor.

Thanks to the generosity of ABR Patron Mr Ian Dickson, each of the shortlisted writers will receive a prize ($5,000, $2,000, and $1,000). The 2015 Jolley Prize will open in December this year.

Readers’ Choice Award

To celebrate the Jolley Prize (and to find out which of the three shortlisted stories our readers like most), we are also presenting the Readers’ Choice Award. You have until October 20 (5 pm) to nominate your favourite story. To do so, simply email us with the title of the story you wish to nominate, along with your full name, address, and telephone number: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

We have some special prizes for three lucky voters. One will receive twenty-five Text Classics, courtesy of Text Publishing. Two other voters will receive two-year complimentary subscriptions to ABR Online.

Meet the Publisher

Conscious that features on publishing and writing always prove highly popular with our readers, we have added a new feature on key figures in the publishing industry. Cassandra Atherton interviews Ben Ball, Publishing Director of Penguin Australia. Every few months we will run another of these Q&As. 

Dr Atherton is a seasoned interviewer. Her book In So Many Words: Interviews with Writers, Scholars and Intellectuals (Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2013) contains interviews with such luminaries as Harold Bloom and Camille Paglia. Gillian Dooley reviewed it in our February 2014 issue.

Online survey

Reader surveys help us to assess reactions to the magazine and to make improvements. Last year’s survey of the print edition was instructive, and – always a relief – overwhelmingly positive. Now we are keen to find out readers’ views of our digital platforms – the newly refurbished ABR website and ABR Online (the digital, subscription-only version of the magazine).

Please complete our online survey. It has twenty-five questions and will only take about five minutes. The survey is anonymous – unless you want to be in the running to win a five-year subscription to ABR Online, in which case we will need your email address.

Master list

The website now features a complete list of everyone who has written for the second series of ABR – that is, since it was revived in 1978. This feature also lists all the issues in which they have appeared. Almost 3,000 writers, critics, scholars, and public figures have written for us since 1978. They include prime ministers, prime ministers’ wives, cabinet members, Nobel Laureates, and Miles Franklin Award winners,

Here are just some of the contributors Advances did not expect to find on the list: Neil Armfield (issue no. 99), Noel Counihan (70), John Gorton, whose sole appearance (46) has been eclipsed by those of his granddaughter, Lisa Gorton (forty contributions, nos 245–359), Michelle Grattan (118), Christopher Koch (173), and Hal Porter (14). Readers and students will find the master list an informative way to discover what authors such as Jessica Anderson, Helen Garner, and David Malouf have written for us – and when.

We are presently compiling a similar list of contributors to the first series of ABR (1961–74).

Porter Prize

The Peter Porter Poetry Prize – the most alliterative prize in the world – honours the life and work of the great Australian poet (1929–2010), an esteemed contributor to ABR (twenty-three appearances, nos 75–322).

We now welcome entries for the eleventh Porter Prize, which closes on 15 December 2014. This year we have again increased the prize money. The winner will receive $5,000; $500 will go to each of the other shortlisted poets. The poet–judges this year are Lisa Gorton (Poetry Editor, ABR), Paul Kane (Vassar College), and Peter Pose (Editor, ABR).

The Porter Prize – like our other two prizes (Jolley and Calibre) – is now open to anyone writing in English, irrespective of where they live. We encourage entrants to use our online entry system. It is simpler, quicker, and virtually costless; and infinitely preferable from our administrative point of view. Before entering, interested poets should peruse our Terms and Conditions – plus the Frequently Asked Questions.

Stefan Collini

Do criticism and reviewing have a future? Some seem to think not, but Stefan Collini – distinguished author, Professor of English Literature and Intellectual History at the University of Cambridge, and long-time contributor to LRB and TLS – disagrees and believes that there has always been a plurality of reading publics and that good criticism still finds an audience.

Professor Collini will deliver a free public lecture on Wednesday, 17 September. This will be held at the University of Melbourne (6 pm, The Linkway, Medley Building). ABR is pleased to be co-presenting this lecture with the University’s School of Culture and Communication.

Professor Glyn Davis – vice-chancellor of the University of Melbourne – reviewed Stefan Collini’s most recent book, What Are Universities For?

Sonya Hartnett writes for all ages, her work spanning children’s picture books to novels for young adults and adult readers. Her adult novels have been widely acclaimed; Of a Boy (2002) won the Age Book of the Year award and has been canonised as a Penguin Classic. In many ways, though, her pedigree as a much-awarded children’s writer has always characterised her career.

Golden Boys belongs with Of a Boy and the exquisite Butterfly (2009), novels for adults that document the sharp realities and murky undercurrents of suburban life from a child’s perspective. In these books, her narrators are frustrated by their inability to control their own circumstances, and are marked by their heightened observations of the world’s workings as they come to grips with their universe. Certain truths we have forgotten to question or notice are brought to light in the gaps between her child-narrators’ naïve observations and their burgeoning powers of analysis. Hartnett’s narrators and her readers bridge that gap of understanding, gradually piecing together clues and matching them with their significance, forming a cohesive narrative as the novels build to their climaxes.

Speaking about the process of painstakingly researching the ‘terrible mistakes’ made on climate policy by the Rudd and Gillard governments over the six years of their existence, Philip Chubb told an audience at the Wheeler Centre that he ‘almost exhausted [himself] with gloom’. Indeed, this important book, which covers the Icarian trajectory of climate policy through Labor’s years in power, is hardly cheerful. Rather, Chubb hopes that the documentation and analysis of the many poor decisions will help legislators to overcome the challenges of implementing significant but controversial reforms in the future.

Power Failure provides an invaluable chronicle of the spectacular cock-up that was climate politics between 2007 and 2013. It is the product of 107 interviews with seventy-four people, including all the major political players (one cannot help but note that the notorious backgrounder Rudd was the only politician interviewed who refused to comment on the record), and many senior public servants, political advisers and consultants, as well as a few residents of Victoria’s Latrobe Valley, source of one of the world’s most carbon-intensive fuels, brown coal. The result is a penetrating look into the mechanics of policy-making.

When did you first write for ABR?

May 2012, when I reviewed Thomas Bernhard’s The Histrionic at the Malthouse.

Which critics most impress you?

Dozens of critics impress me, but the critic who made the greatest impression is John Dryden. Everything began with Dryden. It was his Essay of Dramatic Poesy (1668) that first inspired me to write about the theatre. Through Dryden I discovered a way of doing criticism that was more than description and analysis; here was criticism that was also the dramatisation of a contest and an exploration of competing positions; a form that was alive, like art itself, and where honest enquiry meant more than judgement.