In 2013, US Ambassador Jeffrey Bleich asked Australians to stop pirating Game of Thrones. A single episode of HBO’s gritty fantasy drama had been illegally downloaded over four million times, equalling the legitimate viewership of the program. ‘As the Ambassador here in Australia,’ Mr Bleich wrote, ‘it was especially troubling to find out that Australian fans were some of the worst offenders with among the highest piracy rates of Game of Thrones in the world.’

Sniggers about our penal heritage aside, this illustrates a wider cultural phenomenon: the rise of US television drama. Over the past decade and a half – since HBO’s The Sopranos débuted in 1999 – America has produced cable shows that elevated television to an art. Television moved from ‘fast-food entertainment’, ‘mind candy’ (in producer Aaron Spelling’s words) to a medium reviewed in highbrow literary journals and discussed with a passion and currency that literary fiction can only envy.

Paul Keating has an enduring allure. He has been out of politics since 1996, yet in the past year or so we have seen the ABC screen an unprecedented series of four one-hour interviews with him by an unusually respectful Kerry O’Brien; a book of his sayings still sells well, his speeches and pronouncements receive wide publicity, and now historian David Day has given us a new biography.

On my count, this is the sixth biography or hagiography of Keating. It complements two collections of speeches, two books of quotations, and dozens of other books in which Keating is a central figure, most recently, Gareth Evans’s Cabinet diary of 1985–86, which was a salutary reminder that the Hawke government included many other ministers carrying out important reforms.

The unusual case of David Hicks is one of the most spectacular and politically supercharged miscarriages of justice in Australian history. Like the infamous Boer War case of Breaker Morant, Hicks was politically scapegoated and grossly denied a fair trial. Unlike Morant – a war criminal who murdered prisoners of war – even Hicks’s accuser, the United States, never claimed that Hicks had hurt anybody or plotted to harm civilians. No wonder his military lawyer, Michael Mori, felt ‘ripped off’ getting Hicks, after being told he would be defending the ‘worst of the worst’. Whereas the young Australian government demanded answers from Britain about Morant’s trial, the Howard government repeatedly urged US military commissions to prosecute Hicks.

To complement James McNamara’s article ‘The Golden Age of Television?’, we invited a number of cultural commentators and film and television professionals to nominate their favourite television drama series.

Ian Collie

There is no shortage of wonderful television shows in this ‘golden age’ of television. There are the usual suspects: True Detective, Breaking Bad, Mad Men, Deadwood, Six Feet Under; UK/European dramas like The Returned, The Missing, The Killing, and classics like State of Play and Edge of Darkness. And there are Australian dramas like The Slap, Top of the Lake, and The Code – even some I have been associated with, which I am far too humble to mention.

Somewhat perversely I am going to settle on a recent miniseries: HBO’s Olive Kitteridge (2014). It is everything that is counter-intuitive to trends in television today. Yes, it is the dreaded D word: Drama in its traditional, character-based sense that we tend to only see on the stage now; not something grounded in popular genres like crime, mystery, supernatural, or procedurals where stakes are high and where there is a turning point every fifteen minutes to keep viewers engaged. Nor is it a discreet portal into worlds we never see – unless a sleepy fishing village in 1980s Maine is your idea of exotic. The pacing of Olive Kitteridge is deliberately slow, but I found myself engrossed in the lives of the ordinary people, such as Olive’s husband, Henry (played by the brilliant Richard Jenkins), and those who are defeated by it, such as Olive and her son. Frances McDormand’s Olive Kitteridge is a joyless woman who rails against sentimentality and cant and lives a life of regret. Yet there is something touchingly human, almost life-affirming, about this woman who hides her heart from the world.

Peter Craven

In some ways, there has never been anything greater on television than I, Claudius (1976) or Brideshead Revisited (1981) – or Glenda Jackson in Elizabeth R (1971) or Alec Guinness as George Smiley in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (1979). Ingmar Bergman’s Fanny and Alexander (1982) and Scenes from a Marriage (1973) (both conceived for television) are hard to get past. The first season of The Killing (2007–12) is staggering; so too are The Bridge (2011–) and The Fall (2013–). Kevin Spacey’s House of Cards (2013–) is captivating through each of its three seasons. But Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Berlin Alexanderplatz (1980) is an extraordinary masterpiece which provides a parallel vision to a great modernist novel. So I give the laurel wreath to it. [Bravo! Ed.]

Matthew Dabner

Set in Copenhagen, the Danish television series The Killing came into my life several years ago on the recommendation of a friend. The first season, which centred on the investigation of a young woman’s brutal rape and murder, is moody, highly addictive storytelling with enough twists and turns to keep viewers guessing until the end. The series, which ran for another two seasons and was re-made in America for the AMC channel, has inspired many imitators, including, one assumes, the Australian thriller series, The Killing Field (2014). So far none has managed to best the original’s dazzling grip.

Peter Goldsworthy

I thought the magnificent end of The Wire (2002–08) – when all the vacated (mostly by murder) niches in the city had been refilled, and the brand new cogs began grinding together into the same old terrible machine – would be hard to beat, but eclipsed it was. Almost every episode of Breaking Bad (2008–13) was a masterclass in storytelling, especially story’s crucial, and paradoxical, task of continually surprising us with plot developments that at the same time (or a neurophysiological millisecond later at most) feel inevitable, and necessary, and natural. My gong for best actor goes to Matthew McConaughey, the heart of the darkness that is True Detective (2014).

Nell Greenwood

There have been so many extraordinary moments in the last few decades of television, but for me, Twin Peaks (1990–91) is difficult to beat with its masterful blend of craft and imaginative vision. Grabbing us at once with the old-fashioned hook of who-killed-the-murdered-high-school-sweetheart, Laura Palmer, the series then wends its way through the eccentric but never caricatured world of the town as we follow Agent Cooper’s investigation into her murder. The mystical surrealism of Agent Cooper and his dreams, the emotional complexity of the characters, the sophistication of tone and the genuine horror of the killer beautifully complement the simple power of the story.

Christian Griffiths

Those of us who fondly remember the Australian serial drama Prisoner (1979–86) will no doubt acknowledge that, while the production values of the show were rudimentary (to say the least), it was nonetheless ground-breaking for its depiction of realistic female characters and relationships. The HBO-style reboot Wentworth (Foxtel, 2013) takes Prisoner’s reputation for strong writing and gutsy performances and adds a slick production design and an almost cinematic sensibility. To call the result compelling is an understatement, and the program demonstrates that the current trend for complex television narratives has, at least for Australian audiences, existed for decades.

Philippa Hawker

Joss Whedon’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997–2003) was a glorious game-changer, the story of a teenage girl whose high school was built on a hellmouth, and whose destiny was to save the world from demons and their ilk. Intense, emotional, philosophical, and funny, it was horror-comedy-drama genre-mashing of a thoroughly inventive and surprising kind, and it had one of popular culture’s most indomitable, vulnerable heroines. The show grew stronger and stranger over its seven seasons, pushing all kinds of boundaries, without ever losing its essential qualities, its ability to embrace love and hate, friendship and family, embarrassment and apocalypse.

Mike Jones

My favourite television series ever made? Choosing one feels like picking one child out as best over their siblings. Instead I reach for shows that changed perceptions of what television can be. As an Australian writer, I can’t go past the superb crime series Wildside (1997–99). Well before we were talking about the HBO-era, the ABC created a series as dynamic, dirty, and morally complex as any HBO would later produce. Outside Australia, it’s Battlestar Galactica (2004–09) that really shook my tree: a show that reclaimed SciFi as the great allegorical mirror, a genre of ideas, socio-political complexity, and wide audience appeal. These are the shows I wish I had written.

Andy Lloyd James

Redfern Now (2012–13), which aired on the ABC, is worthy for so many reasons. It was absolutely new to our screens, beautifully written and performed and a big step up for Australian drama. It displayed the rich talents of indigenous crew, cast, and directors in an undeniable statement of achievement. Most particularly it was a tribute to the skill, determination, and passion of Rachel Perkins and all at Blackfella Films, who have worked long and hard to bring this project to our screens.

Brian McFarlane

I used to think the BBC’s miniseries The Glittering Prizes (1976) was my top favourite, but on recent re-viewing the glitter seemed distinctly tarnished, especially in regard to its too-knowing protagonist.

Turning to This Life (1996–97), I was prepared to be disillusioned but relieved to find it as freshly observant as remembered in its study of the lives of five young lawyers at the start of their careers: sharing a house, working for the same legal firm, pursuing different social lives, interacting, sometimes scratchily, with each other at home. By coincidence, an Austra-lian favourite, Rake (2010–14), also involves a legal protagonist, the scruffy, charismatic eponym memorably incarnated by Richard Roxburgh.

James McNamara

I had to exclude my favourite television drama from my article because it falls outside the scope. The West Wing (1999–2006) – Aaron Sorkin’s network show about a fictional White House – was the product of a different era of television. Today’s dramas are bleak, but The West Wing gleamed with hope. It celebrated the idealism of political staff, and its cracking dialogue and nuanced characters made the finer points of government exhilarating. Like many, I blame Aaron Sorkin for my legal career. I also love Rake, a show that makes me laugh then horse-kicks me in the heart, all within a scene.

Jennifer Naughton

The Slap (2011) featured nuanced writing, masterful direction, and superb performances from a great cast told from eight perspectives. The series gave us beautifully flawed, real people whose lives are turned upside down by the actions of one in the heat of a moment. Exploring issues of class, desire, and the conflicting loyalties presented by family and friendship, The Slap heralded a new era of quality in Australian television. Honourable mention goes to Deadwood (2004–06), which never condescended to its audience, gave us fully realised characters and made us love the enormously complex and morally challenged Al Swearengen.

Luke Slattery

The first thing you notice about True Detective, an almost Proustian recuperation of lost time that snakes through a seventeen-year murder investigation before erupting into violent climax, is the atmosphere. This heavy southern torpor saturated in menace is largely the work of Australian cinematographer Adam Arkapaw. The second is the writing of Nic Pizzolatto. The narrative springs from the interleaved interrogations of two detectives – the nihilistic Rust Cohle (Matthew McConaughey) and pantsman Marty Hart (Woody Harrelson) – and the dialogue has a spare and taut authority that ranges across pungent detective banter to philosophical musing. More than hard-boiled genre literature for the screen, this is long-form cinematic art.

Liz Watts

So much television has influenced me in some shape or form, like the absurdist humour of doing nothing à la Seinfeld (1989–98); the sharp, satirical, but at times incredibly moving MASH (1972–83); and the more recent cutting humour of Veep (2012–14), with a woman (gasp) at the centre of the comedy. Then there are the dramas that just kind of blew us all away – especially as television moved away from the conventions of serial soap: Twin Peaks, a soap of sorts that gladly dismantled itself; Deadwood, which introduced the glory days of HBO high-end series; and the wonderful The Singing Detective (1986), which did something that no one has done before in a serial form (and no one has since). I still remember watching The West Wing the night the planes flew into the Twin Towers and feeling confused when the president in the news flashes wasn’t Martin Sheen. The Sopranos (1999–2007) did what television so often had tried before but failed to do, something that had seemed to be the sole province of cinema. Even if it was violent and morally screwy, it made us realise that crime is a business like any other, and that even crims need a therapist at times.

Kim Williams

It is so hard to choose a definitive television series with so many rich possibilities. From early comedic gems like The Honeymooners and I Love Lucy or such inheritors as The Simpsons and 30 Rock; through myriad cop shows from Z Cars, The Sweeney, Hill Street Blues, NYPD Blue to The Wire. And great dramas like The Forsyth Saga, The West Wing, E.R., or The Secret Life of Us, with myriad great miniseries including masterpieces like Brideshead Revisited, Edge of Darkness, and The Dismissal (1983) and Scales of Justice (1983). But for me the best shows must be Australian, fresh, confident, bold, original: Love My Way (2004–07) and the miniseries Blue Murder (1995). Timeless, memorable, and ours!

Fitting for a novel about a patient quest, we only fully grasp Kazuo Ishiguro’s precise intentions with The Buried Giant at the end of its final page. Until then, the reader primarily follows the elderly married couple, Axl and Beatrice, as they journey through a memory-dulling fog that hangs heavily over the land. The presence of such magical elements, including pixies and goblins, and the post-Arthurian setting of sixth century England, flag this as potentially Ishiguro’s début foray into the fantasy genre. Knights and dragons await.

The author, who won the Man Booker Prize for The Remains of the Day (1989), is more concerned with the rich allegories offered by that stark, remote premise. While fans of George R.R. Martin’s blockbuster A Song of Ice and Fire series (the basis for the television hit Game of Thrones) might feel quite at home in this book, it is less action-packed and world-building than Martin’s work.

Instead, The Buried Giant manifests gradually as a wise yet plainly told examination of the collective, and selective, memory loss upon which civilisations are necessarily built. As one character observes: ‘I dare say, sir, our whole country is this way … Dig its soil, and not far beneath the daisies and buttercups come the dead.’ A later line echoes the sentiment but underscores how easily a new generation forgets the bloodshed of the last: ‘… the bones lie sheltered beneath a pleasant green carpet. The young know nothing of them.’

It is a familiar England that Axl and Beatrice roam, ostensibly to reach the nearby village of a son they can now barely recall; familiar not just from history books detailing Anglo-Saxon settlement in the country after the Romans departed, but from tales set in a similar quasi-England, like Martin’s and J.R.R. Tolkien’s. In fact, the descriptions of Axl and Beatrice’s hillside dwelling at the start of the book recalls the classic opening of Tolkien’s The Hobbit. Most pronounced, however, is Ishiguro’s inclusion of Sir Gawain, the youngest of King Arthur’s Knights of the Round Table and the humbled star of the fourteenth-century tale Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. The latter inspired Ishiguro to write this book, and two interludes centred on the aged knight’s reveries prove vital to the plot.

‘Most pronounced, however, is Ishiguro’s inclusion of Sir Gawain, the youngest of King Arthur’s Knights of the Round Table and the humbled star of the fourteenth-century tale Sir Gawain and the Green Knight’

To give away too much of The Buried Giant’s often mysterious story would be unfortunate, but suffice to say that the husband and wife are, by dint of their age alone, nearing the end of their long marriage. Where a certain strain of fairy tales, replete with fantastic creatures and painful ordeals, hinges on the standard ‘happily ever after’ finish, Ishiguro is more concerned with following such a would-be happy ending all the way to its natural conclusion: mortality itself.

So it is an elegiac and at times emotionally devastating story, albeit one told with tenderness and remarkable carefulness. Even when utilising quite unadorned prose, as well as roundabout narrative approaches that defy the straightforward efficiency with which ‘genre fiction’ is commonly credited, Ishiguro is ever quietly bolstering his tale. Awkward starts to some chapters yield unexpected rewards for their counterintuitive structure, and so goes the book as a whole.

Ishiguro, who moved to England with his Japanese parents when he was five years old, has spoken in interviews of his fondness for the image, so popular in American westerns, of a lone figure on horseback. He fleshes out that image well in the form of Gawain, and there are deadly showdowns that mirror those of cinema’s duelling gunfighters. But what is made clear repeatedly is that with violence comes a toll, whether borne on the soul of an individual or of a nation. One character points out the fortress past of a monastery, describing exactly how the structure’s apparently innocuous features housed brutal traps to kill invaders. As Ishiguro reminds us, the bloody past is hidden just underfoot, and the consequences continue to reverberate. Sir Gawain recounts his own bloody past, including Arthur’s orders to slaughter Saxon women and children, in a sort of trance, still trying to justify his actions decades later as an anti-war measure.

‘The spectre of a feared dragon may haunt The Buried Giant, but the real peril lies not in mythical beasts’

The spectre of a feared dragon may haunt The Buried Giant, but the real peril lies not in mythical beasts – such as the ogres introduced on the very first page as incidental among other hardships of the time – but in people’s failure to listen to one another and remember what’s come before. If at first the device of amnesia afflicting an aged couple seems like an obvious allusion to Alzheimer’s disease, Ishiguro takes it further, recalling George Santayana’s much-repeated declaration that ‘Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.’ Whether befuddled or simply stubborn, at times these characters talk not in actual dialogue but in opposing monologues that ignore each other’s input.

Despite only spanning a few days, aside from scattered flashbacks that shed some faint light on decades past, the book demonstrates a deceptively wide reach. Its meditations on morality in wartime hold perennial appeal, and the nation-building concept of ethnic cleansing is by no means limited to England’s history. In his first novel since Never Let Me Go (2005), Ishiguro continues that book’s melancholy yet unafraid treatment of mortality, especially when it comes to those we love most dearly. He seems to suggest that something affecting all of us so inevitably – and profoundly – should not be denied clear-eyed scrutiny.

With her long-awaited life of Archbishop Daniel Mannix, Brenda Niall, one of Australia’s leading biographers, has conquered a subject that for decades she regarded as compelling yet ‘intractable’. ‘As a presence (I wouldn’t claim such a remote and magisterial being as a neighbour) Daniel Mannix was part of my childhood,’ Niall recalls. She grew up in the once largely Irish suburb of Kew in Melbourne near the grand mansion inhabited by Mannix and which he named Raheen. Why Mannix chose to reside a considerable distance from Saint Patrick’s Cathedral, to which he would walk every day, was never explained. ‘Whatever the reasons, Raheen suited Mannix. Catholic Kew was his village and he was its tribal chieftain.’

With characteristic insight, sensitivity, and tact, Niall confirms that Daniel Mannix is a major, if elusive, figure in the modern history of Australia, Ireland, and the Catholic Church, insofar as these topics, which overlap each other substantially, can be separated. ‘Half a century after his death,’ she writes, ‘Mannix still challenges biographers and historians. His long life has no parallel in Australia’s history. No political leader, no matter how persistent, durable or charismatic, has commanded the stage to the end, as Mannix did. No other churchman has taken part in national debates with comparable effect.’

Marion Halligan is a prolific writer, and this is not the first time I have reviewed one of her books. Once, when she branched out into the genre of lightweight crime – The Apricot Colonel (2006) and Murder on the Apricot Coast (2008) – I commented on the problem faced by Cassandra, the novel’s narrator. An editor-turned-author, she turns out books less highbrow than those she is used to editing. Anxious to demonstrate that her literary credentials have not been totally compromised by her descent into thriller mode, Cassandra begins the second one, ‘Reader, I married him ...’ (ABR, March 2008).

Halligan continues to grapple with the problem of achieving popular appeal without abandoning literary overtones. Goodbye Sweetheart does it better, aided by an assemblage of less self-consciously bookish characters and the adroit handling of genuine literary elements such as structure. The opening line, ‘This story begins by water’, is from a story by Margaret Barbalet and sounds worryingly incantatory when repeated twice more in the space of three pages. Thankfully, there is no magic lake, just a public swimming pool in Canberra, where a man suffers a heart attack and drowns. An elderly woman who sights the floating body tries to turn, falls, and breaks her hip. The man’s name, we learn, is William. Lynette, his wife, has a business partner called Janice, with whom she runs a shop selling objets such as nutmeg graters, flexible baking pans in ‘gorgeous’ colours, and big copper jam pans. There is also a school-age daughter called Erin. Just as we begin to think that this is a single-strand story about coping with loss, we turn the page to a new chapter called ‘Jack goes Fishing’. It transpires that Jack, extremely happy with his nice wife, Rosamund, is the elder of two brothers, the younger of whom is called Bill. Jack’s history, culminating in Rosamund’s terminal cancer, is so absorbingly described over forty pages that we forget about William – that is, until Jack is awakened by the telephone, which verifies our suspicions: brother Bill was Lynette’s William.

‘I’m Duke Morrison, and I never was and never will be a film personality like John Wayne. I know him well. I’m one of his closest students. I have to be. I make a living out of him.’ In Scott Eyman’s biography John Wayne: The Life and Legend, these words, uttered by ‘Duke Morrison, aka John Wayne’, serve as an epigraph. They are a curious mixture of the frank and the evasive, a combination of the certainty and doubt that characterise the man at the centre of this long, detailed study.

John Wayne occupies a special place in cinema history. His name is synonymous with the western and its place in American culture and mythology, and with a screen presence that spilled over into the political realm. He died in 1979, but he still heads a longstanding list of all-time box office stars, having been listed in the Top Ten on twenty-five occasions.

Kate Grenville’s mother, Nance Gee (née Russell), was an extraordinarily resourceful, resilient, and interesting woman. Born in 1912 to ill-matched, working-class parents and surviving a childhood lacking in stability and opportunity, she went on to become an inspirational mother, businesswoman, and teacher. Some years after her death in 2002, Grenville began sorting through Nance’s papers and found, to her surprise, that her mother had ‘often thought about writing a book’. With the exception of one letter to the Sydney Morning Herald, Nance never published. In One Life: My Mother’s Story, Grenville sets out to remedy that lack.

The memoir is bookended by an engaging prologue and postscript, written in Grenville’s direct and vibrant voice. Surprisingly, Grenville seems tentative about the worth of her prospective tale. She muses that her mother ‘wasn’t the sort of person biographies are usually written about. She wasn’t famous … did nothing that would ever make the history books. Just the same, I think her story is worth telling.’ And it most certainly is. I am not entirely convinced, however, about Grenville’s method of narration.

Shirley Hazzard is probably the most elegantly polished writer in the Australian canon: her novels and stories use traditional structures with great assurance, she writes from a thoughtful moral position, she is outspokenly engaged with the fine and the less fine elements of the Australia she once lived in, and she can be dry and funny. She spent most of her life in New York and Italy. This reminds us of the mobility of many Australians: the postwar travellers and expatriates, largely suburban and anonymous, but in some cases culturally transformative. Germaine Greer and Clive James are obvious examples. The lack of substantial critical response to her writing is surprising. Shirley Hazzard: New Critical Essays, edited by Brigitta Olubas and published in SUP’s Sydney Studies in Australian Literature series, is a corrective to this: a vibrant gathering of critics, discussing Hazzard’s writing with infectious engagement. This book is a great professional achievement for the publisher at a time when we need to consolidate our understanding of established writers, who risk slipping from critical view as we attend to the new.

Midway through Kári Gíslason’s début novel, The Ash Burner, Ted, his dreamy, curious narrator, watches Anthony paint Claire. As she strikes angular poses for him, Ted reflects on how he would paint her: ‘I would have waited for the moments when she relaxed that pose and when her outline, the shape of her waist, was allowed to stand uncorrected by art or design.’

Ted casts himself as the romantic to Anthony’s modernist. Although he is not always a reliable judge of either character or aesthetics, he is certainly a young man who will wait for the shape of events to emerge rather than moulding them to suit his own desires. He is a careful observer, always attentive to the efforts that people around him make to present chosen versions of themselves to the world, and earnestly self-aware – to the point of paralysis – of the poses he too must adopt in life.

Obama has said that the person with whom he would most like to dine is Gandhi.

Morag Fraser

At our AGM in March, Morag Fraser AM left the board after nine years as Chair and twelve years on the board. At a memorable function afterwards, board and staff members paid tribute to our esteemed colleague. Among the tributes published in a small testimonial was this one from Peter Rose: ‘It has been a joy working with you closely. No Editor – no editor intent on effecting change – could have hoped for more support: ready, subtle, questioning, sometimes teasing, always enthusiastic.’

Colin Golvan QC – who joined the board in 2005 – was elected Chair. Anne Edwards AO replaces him as Deputy Chair. Novelist Andrea Goldsmith joined the ten-strong board.

ABR in Literature

Readers of the Times Literary Supplement will have been entertained by the current ‘TLS in Literature: Third Series’, with its weekly listing of published mentions of TLS in novels and poems. Early examples have come from Dylan Thomas, Philip Roth, and C.K. Stead, in whose novel Risk an Australian poet wonders where he should publish a raunchy new poem (‘Or the TLS? Why not? Yes – to hell with it! – he’d try the TLS ... Give them a chance to do themselves a favour!’).

Advances is intrigued. Does ABR crop up in Australian fiction or poetry? Who was our first ‘magazine mentioner’, to paraphrase Edward Albee? This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. and we will reciprocate with a book from our library.

Jolley Prize

You still have until May 1 to enter the ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize, which is worth a total of $8,000. Entries are arriving at an impressive rate – from all around the world. While we endeavour to make our Guidelines and Conditions as comprehensive as possible, we still receive many queries about eligibility and such. Our favourite curly one was: ‘Should the entries be stapled or paper-clipped?’

If you are interested in entering the Jolley Prize, check our FAQs here. Otherwise, give us a ring on (03) 9699 8822.

ABR heads to the Brisbane Writers Festival

There are always lots of good reasons to head to the Brisbane Writers Festival (September 2–6), and ABR readers now have an added incentive: the first of our ABR tours (an ambitious new program that will see us leading tours around Australia and overseas). The highlight of our Brisbane tour will be a special ceremony with our three shortlisted Jolley Prize authors (one of whom will be named as the overall winner, earning $5,000). With tour company Academy Travel and BWF, we are developing a special package that will cover accommodation, selected meals, tickets to BWF events, and invitations to ABR events, including the Jolley Prize ceremony. If you would like to attend the festival as part of the tour, please register your interest if you have not already done so. Telephone us on (03) 9699 8822 or email: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

Unambiguous terms

Those of you who are longing to read Campbell Newman’s memoirs will have to wait until he finds an accommodating publisher. The University of Queensland Press has declined to publish the memoirs because of the former Queensland premier’s decision in government to cease funding the Queensland Premier’s Literary Awards. The UQP board Chair, Professor Joanne Wright, has deplored this editorial decision (‘and this has been communicated to UQP management in unambiguous terms’). In another novelty, we learn that Mr Newman’s memoirs will be written by former MP Gavin King.

Critical Matters

Often the prospect of another panel or seminar devoted to the subject of book reviewing induces a yawn of foreboding, but 'Critical Matters: Book Reviewing Now’, a one day symposium being organised by Monash University’s Centre for the Book, promises to be stimulating, and galvanising. Dr Melinda Harvey – Director of the Centre and convenor of the symposium – has put together an excellent program, one that promises to challenge myths about criticism and highlight some of the ‘hot button issues’: gender bias; anonymity versus bylines; negative reviews; social media; bias; stridency; the efficacy of book reviewing, etc.

After a morning of closed sessions, there will be two public panels, with papers (or ‘provocations’) by critics and editors such as Delia Falconer, Peter Craven, Kerryn Goldsworthy, and Geordie Williamson. ABR Editor Peter Rose, in his ‘provocation’, will lament the serious challenges facing book reviewers in this country and announce a major new ABR campaign to raise base rates for critics.

‘Critical Matters’ will take place at the Wheeler Centre on 9 April.

First series of ABR

To complement our master list of everyone who has written for the second series of ABR, which began in 1978, we have now created a comprehensive list of contributors to the first series (1961–74). Find out when Anthony Burgess, Elizabeth Harrower, and Robin Boyd wrote for us, for instance.

(Meanwhile, our thanks to editorial volunteer Margaret Robson Kett for preparing this fascinating resource.)

Delivery blues

Last month many of you had to wait far too long for your copy of ABR. We lodged it with Australia Post on 27 February, but in some cases it took a fortnight to reach subscribers. Even allowing for Print Post delays and new protocols at Australia Post, this is deplorably slow. ABR is doing what it can to ameliorate these problems; henceforth we will be going to press earlier. We always list our delivery date on the imprint page, and we are grateful to subscribers who notify us when their copy arrives (This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.). Thank you so much for your forbearance.

AN HONEST, FIERCE RESPONSE

Dear Editor,

In his review of John Kinsella’s new book of poems, Sack, David McCooey makes an assertion that my review of Kinsella’s The Vision of Error (2013) was written not from a critical literary position but from one based on a ‘long-running dispute’ with Kinsella (ABR, March 2015). My review is an honest, fierce response to what I believe are badly written poems. I made my case clear based on a number of examples, and I explained my stance. The evidence is in the review. I find McCooey’s statement insulting and predictable. My ‘views’, as he calls, them are serious and hard-won, and were applied to the poems, not to some personal agenda with Kinsella. TEXT ran the review because the editors were in no doubt as to the clarity and insightfulness of my response.

Whereas library shelves tend to sag beneath the weight of volumes penned by, and intended for, theatre actors and directors, the number of comparable handbooks, instruction manuals, and studies pitched at their cinematic colleagues is rather thinner on the ground. To be sure, there are crucial works by David Mamet, Patrick Tucker, and Janet Sonnenberg, along with books such as Michael Caine’s more anecdotal Acting in Film (1990). But Judith Weston’s central study Directing Actors, which Sally Potter’s book most closely resembles, is already more than fifteen years old, and much has happened both behind and in front of the lens (not to mention the editing room) since its appearance.

In her chatty and deliberately informal introduction, Potter offers a series of preliminary answers to her own question, ‘So why write a book about working with actors?’, which the book itself then addresses in more – at times repetitive – detail. In its structure, her study falls into a loose theory/practice division (though the author insists on the connection between the two.) The first three parts consider, in sequence: Preparation; The Shoot; and Post-Production; while the fourth part consists of fourteen extensive interviews with a number of actors, including Julie Christie, Steve Buscemi, Judi Dench, Jude Law, and Timothy Spall. (One notable omission here is Tilda Swinton, star of Potter’s Orlando, 1992.)

‘Published interviews with filmmakers are increasingly becoming a thing of the past,’ writes Jason Wood in the introduction to Last Words. You could have fooled me. I suspect that Wood’s statement would come as a surprise to others as well, especially readers of the invaluable Keyframe Daily column on the Fandor website, a digest of international film news that links to dozens of such interviews each month. Truth be told, there has probably never been an era more obsessed with interrogating creators in every field about their aims and methods: consider, for instance, the unstoppable rise of the high-profile television showrunner, who seemed a rare and exotic creature a decade ago.

It soon becomes clear that Wood’s real complaint is more specific, indeed parochial: the difficulty of getting interviews with ‘specialised’ film-makers into the mainstream British press. This is not an issue that need concern us deeply here in Australia, though it is easy to see why it might be a source of frustration for Wood, a self-described ‘occasional journalist’ who worked until recently as a programmer for Curzon Cinemas, one of the main arthouse chains in the United Kingdom.

Bette Davis once described Hollywood actors as American royalty, a cohort that answered the core human desire to look up to something. Those Hollywood actors who became stars (so named because of the stars in Paramount Pictures’ logo), thus served a purpose not only by acting, but also by representing societal and cultural ideals; not an easy demand, as such ideals are often conflicting. Anne Helen Petersen’s first book, through a series of star profiles, suggests that there is something more sinister than grand about this worship. In the early years of Hollywood, ‘stars weren’t born, they were made’; this may sound glamorous, but Petersen explores the darker side of this phenomenon.

While Scandals of Classic Hollywood feels like a book that might inspire or quash salacious rumours – the cover design features two couples in heated embrace and a selection of sensationalised tabloid-worthy snippets – the real scandal is how studios, journalists, and the public cared more about the image than the person. On the surface, Petersen’s book seems in the vein of Kenneth Anger’s Hollywood Babylon (1959), an infamous tomb of gossip that has largely been disproved. But Petersen, an academic and historian, weaves contemporaneous accounts from newspaper columnists, cultural commentators, and biographical materials into a strong critique of the studio system. She treads the ever-thinning line between pop-cultural journalism (published online by the likes of BuzzFeed, where Petersen is now a staff writer) and considered academic analysis, stemming from her doctoral thesis on the celebrity gossip industry.

‘My name is Frank Bascombe. I am a sportswriter.’ With those opening words in The Sportswriter (1986), Richard Ford introduced one of American literature’s more unlikely protagonists. In his fictional début, Bascombe is a former short story writer-turned-journalist, aged in his thirties, navigating suburban life in Haddam, New Jersey, after the death of a son and the breakdown of a marriage.

‘Why did I quit writing?’ Bascombe asks in The Sportswriter.

Was it just that things did not come easily enough? Or that I couldn’t translate my personal recognitions into the ambiguous stuff of complex literature? Or that I had nothing to write about, no more discoveries up my sleeve or the pizazz to write the more extensive work? And my answer is: there are those reasons and at least twenty better ones … One thing certain is that I had somehow lost my sense of anticipation at age twenty-five. Anticipation is the sweet pain to know whatever’s next – a must for any real writer.

What makes a person useful? What gives them worth and value in the world? And who gets to decide? These are some of the questions Debra Oswald explores in Useful, a novel set in suburban Sydney.

after Koch/Cohen, Malley/Breton, Roussel!

This, too, is about a thousand characters. It’s much like the
last one. I wouldn’t even read beyond the following sentence.
The following sentence is a silky thing – purple in the late
day, drizzled in afternoon fog. Inside a microwave oven is
milk rising to warmth. Inside the dusk is an excuse for certain
birds to frolic on the freshly-cut lawn too long, picking at insects.
They’re eaten by sparrow-hawks. It’s pretty gruesome. The rugby
team on their regular jog start slipping on the mess of birds. From
a distance it looks like a scrum or naval exercise. It’s getting dark
remarkably quickly and the clouds, just above the line of trees
which form the horizon, here, are salmon-pink. At the local gelati
shop they’d call it grapefruit. Navy tinges fringe the pale pink.
Fish await. It’s beyond human understanding how someone might
have reached this sentence. I could write about pork. The sparrow
hawk eats well and feeds the parts of its name to its young, and its
young feed parts of their own name to their first flight. Nature as
documentary, now, and it’s where we slip. See the magpie on the
end of my sandwich? It knew it was to be written, probably, and it
curved here like a ball in a stadium. But there is no crowd, bird, alone
in the credits. Some gaffers. Giraffes with appalling footrot trot
over to the microphone and discoball concussions the wild shining
toffee of the dance floor on this afternoon as the moon pierces in.

Sing, O muse, of the rage of the daemons, soulless sons of Hellenes, that have brought countless ills upon the Greeks. Sing, O Vrasidas Karalis of your descent into the Greek inferno and of the quarrels that have plagued our citizens. Sing, O brave soul, sing your reports from the Great Devastation.

Forgive my classicist sentimentality. How else to begin a review of Karalis’s The Demons of Athens, this auto-ficto-graphical account of his epic return, in medias crisis, to the cherished city of his youth, Athens?

Eminent psychologist Steven Pinker once described art as ‘cheesecake for the mind’. Many people think of culture as a luxury good, high up – and therefore low down – on Mazslow’s hierarchy of needs in comparison with basic physical requirements. Most of the time they are right. When they aren’t, the necessity for a detailed understanding of cultural processes suddenly becomes urgent. The horrible events in rue Nicolas-Appert in Paris this January give the lie to Pinker’s characterisation. When a dozen people die violently, a country plunges into serious unrest, and the world recoils in horror at the violent consequences of a series of satirical cartoons, two things are evident. First, culture matters, if not always and in every manifestation, then certainly at signal moments. Second, that the predominantly secular West has trouble grasping the pivotal role of culture in an era of unprecedented social mobility and media saturation. The End of History is proving to be the beginning of another kind of history. Like it or not, culture is central to current events. ‘Dying for a piece of cake’ is a metaphor of easy consumption. Dying for freedom of speech involves a more complex set of priorities. Pinker’s dessert turns out to contain some unpleasant ingredients: razor-sharp shards of broken glass.

A four hundred-page Thames & Hudson hardback stuffed with photographs? A coffee table book, you might think. And you would be right, since this is a history of the most famous label in jazz – with no discography. But it is gorgeous, full of great images, the design matches the label’s style, and the book tells Blue Note’s history well for the lay jazz fan. We get anodyne liner notes rather than critical reviews of the featured albums, and Richard Havers’s style is that of an amiable journeyman, writing the required book cheerfully and efficiently. Still, the great quality that journeymen have is briskness and efficiency with facts – a surprisingly rare skill.

WHY DO YOU WRITE?

When there’s something I don’t understand. Telling a story about it seems the only way I can think my way into it.

ARE YOU A VIVID DREAMER?

Only the nightmares.

WHERE ARE YOU HAPPIEST?

Anywhere with lots of trees. Water is a nice accompaniment. Perfect if our children are there too.

Our perceptual world is rich in colour and sound. We think and imagine. We experience repugnance and longing. Meanwhile, in our brains neurons are firing and chemical reactions are taking place. Conscious experience and brain events are obviously related. Reputable Australian philosophers insist that they are one and the same. But how can events with such different qualities fit together?

Jennifer Maiden’s eighteenth book of poetry bears yet another title punning on war (remember Tactics, The Problem of Evil, The Occupying Forces, The Border Loss, Acoustic Shadow, Friendly Fire). Her umbrella themes – politics, power, evil, the public and private selves, war, and the role of art – are back. The title is a beautiful droning of her past work – ‘But the problem of evil drums: rhythm / and the drug of immediacy’ – and has a brutal currency, given US drones are coming and going from Middle Eastern airspace, silently yet violently, like phantoms. In ‘The live grey cell’, Obama asks Mandela: ‘You used capitalism over slaughter, but / with the drone that is my brain, whenever can / I relax into reconciliation?’

For the fifth individual collection in a row (starting with Mines in 1999), Maiden exploits the discursive, lyrical, essayistic, philosophical, political narrative mode that she has come to be recognised for, garnering major Australian literary awards.

John Burbidge’s The Boatman was first published last year in India, by Yoda Press. Its moving afterword describes Burbidge’s return to India last year for the book launch and his attendance at an LGBT pride march there. Burbidge was struck by how strongly the cause of sexual rights had been embraced by other elements of Indian society who also face discrimination from their countrymen.

As the author explains in his preface, Incognita had its genesis in events to commemorate the four-hundredth anniversary of the voyages of Janszoon and Torres to the Cape York Peninsula in 1606, with the explorations of these Dutch mariners representing the first European sighting of Australia. This book has been several years in the making, and it offers an eminently readable account of engagements across the ages with the idea and reality of ‘Terra Australis’, from Plato’s time through to the turn of the twentieth century. In some ways it usefully complements the ‘Mapping Our World’ exhibition held at the National Library of Australia in 2013, which traced how the southern continent has appeared over the past 1,000 years on world maps, thus reviewing global cartography, as the exhibition’s catalogue claimed, ‘for the first time from an antipodean perspective’. But if the focus of ‘Mapping Our World’ was exclusively on visual cartography, Mawer’s concern is equally with prose accounts of southern maritime exploration, seeking as he does to address ‘the three great traditions that had been at play in the search for Terra Australia – the supernatural, the speculative and the scientific’.

‘When I think about picture books,’ writes Mark Rafidi in the first line of his foreword, ‘the words of the young girl in David Legge’s Bamboozled strikes [sic] me immediately.’ What strikes me immediately is that Standing on the Shoulders of Giants is a book that hasn’t been properly edited. By the time I reached the final page I wondered if the book had been edited at all.

Rafidi has interviewed twenty Australian writers and illustrators of picture books, all of them talented and arguably all with some claim to being called ‘great’, if not ‘giants’, although one was completely unknown to me and the list was missing a couple of others I would have included – Bob Graham, who recently collected a Prime Minister’s Literary Award, for one. Rafidi lists them alphabetically on the cover.

Lucy Lam is a studious pupil at a multicultural Melbourne Catholic school. Her mother minds the baby at home and sews high-end chain store clothing in the garage, while her father toils at a hazardous carpet factory. With dreams of following a different path, Lucy sits an exam for Laurinda, an exclusive ladies’ college, and is awarded the inaugural Equal Access scholarship for ‘kids with parents the school considered povvo’. She leaves behind her friends to start Year Ten at a school where power doesn’t belong to the adults but is shared among a trio of students called ‘the Cabinet’.

Garth Nix’s Sabriel (1995) remains a high water mark for Young Adult fantasy. With its strong-willed heroine and distinctive setting, which mingled wizardry and necromancy with industrial-era technology, the novel found a devoted following and influenced a generation of fantasy authors.

The World Film Location series aims to articulate the ways in which physical environments shape the ‘emotional spaces’ of characters in cinema. For the Sydney volume, editor Neil Mitchell has corralled a selection of writers to contribute short entries (with a few longer essays) on the city’s various appearances on film.

Enterprise and energy are integral to this story. Without the enterprise of James Lillywhite and John Conway there would have been no Australian tour to England in 1878. Nottingham professional Lillywhite, who captained England in the first-ever Test matches at Melbourne in March-April 1877, arranged the English fixture list and former Victorian all-rounder Conway chose a twelve man touring party, although subsequent disputes over Billy Midwinter would reduce the number to eleven. Without the energy of Australian captain Dave Gregory and his team playing continuously for fourteen months in the Australian colonies, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada, and the Australian colonies again, the development of international cricket might have been long delayed.

The threesome in Trio is a group of friends who meet in the United Kingdom around 1966. Celia, Marcia, and Mickey bond one ‘pea-souperof a London evening’ and soon move in together. They become extremely close, and socialise in the same (largely theatre-based) circles. Their closeness has its limits; the protagonists draw the line at ‘threefold sex’.

Seasons of War is a fictional firsthand account of the Allied invasion of Gallipoli. Opposite the title page, the blurb suggests that it offers ‘the kind of truth that only fiction can’: what it felt like to be there, and how being there transformed the Australian nation (a contention which belongs, truly, to fiction).

Apart from a brief stint as an actor, Hannie Rayson has spent her professional life writing plays, fourteen of them. Now she has shone the spotlight on her own life and brought her sense of dramatic conflict, emotional range and laugh-out-loud humour to her memoir, Hello, Beautiful!

Writers who move in mid-career from one literary genre to another often encounter resistance. Some turfs are well guarded. They can also misapprehend the new form they are planning to join. John Upton, who for almost thirty years has been a successful playwright and screenwriter, has made the difficult move seamlessly in this first collection of poems.

Chris Edwards is an enigmatic presence in Australian poetry. Part of a generation of poets who came of age in the 1970s, he co-edited the short-lived Beyond Poetry (1974–76) but then abandoned publication for many years. With the onset of a new millennium, he unexpectedly re-emerged, publishing a series of chapbooks that culminated in his first full-length collection, People of Earth (2011). If he has come late to the party, the maturity he demonstrates in his recent poems, brimming as they are with intellectual bravura, confirms that his long interval off-radar was put to good use.