To complement the essays, commentaries, reviews, and photographic essay in this issue, we asked a group of leading environmentalists, scientists, commentators, and writers what they regard as the most urgent action needed for environmental reform.

Wayne Bergmann

There is an urgent need for widespread recognition of the interrelationship between the protection of cultural heritage and the promotion of native title holders’ role in environmental protection. Native title holders’ role as custodians of traditional lands includes the responsibility for environmental protection of those lands. Native title holders consistently encounter opposition from the private sector and from government.

Promotion of the true scope of custodianship can be achieved in a variety of ways, including through the establishment of effective partnerships between government agencies and native title holders in the regulation of environmental protection. That regulation should make both public and private sector entities accountable not only to government agencies for environmental protection but also to native title holders. There should be requirements by which assessments of the environmental impact of development proposals include a meaningful consideration of Aboriginal social and cultural impacts and impose more stringent measures to avoid, mitigate and manage environmental, social, and cultural issues in relation to development.

(CEO, KRED Enterprises – Ambooriny Burru Charitable Foundation)

Let’s begin, somewhere around 4,500 bce, in a small patch of soil on the south-west coast of Western Australia. An ovule and some pollen combine on the crest of a ridge overlooking the sea, and a plant begins to grow. It’s a little thing with juvenile leaves which will become a faintly glossy bluish-grey green as it matures. This is a eucalypt, a mallee, and it flowers with small white blossoms. The fruits are cup-shaped, perfectly lovely hemispheres.[i]

More than six thousand years later, in 1981, a government researcher happens to walk this ridge, find this plant, and report it to the Western Australian Herbarium, which sends a collector to investigate the following year. It takes a decade before it is formally scooped into science and classified in the Linnean tradition: genera, species; general, specific; Eucalyptus phylacis. The botanists note that the tree is only known from the landscape where its original – or ‘type’ – specimen was collected, and that that population itself has ‘already been damaged by roadworks’. Its name derives, they say, from ‘the Greek phylakis, a watcher or guard (female), referring to its occurrence on a hill overlooking the ocean’.[ii] Thanks to its location, the tree becomes known as the Meelup mallee.

As the decade passes, there are other ways of looking at plants, other scientific information that might be extracted from them – primarily through the advent of sequencing. One of a mallee’s characteristics is that it can grow several stems from a single lignotuber (the below-ground growth that contains the tree’s food reserves and buds). By the mid-1990s, that lone population of the Meelup mallee comprises six small stands that have been divided by a large car park.

By the turn of the millennium, scientists know of more than 240 different species of eucalypts in the south-west region of Western Australia, thirty-five of which are considered rare and endangered, and thirteen of which are known to grow in only one spot.[iii] The Meelup mallee is one of these. The first work done on it in terms of conservation genetics confirms it as distinct from the species it most closely resembles (E. decipiens) and reveals that all the stems of this tree – 173 in total – comprise exactly the same genetic material. Perhaps it is a hybrid, suggest researchers, but although E. decipiens is found growing in the vicinity and proposed as one putative parent, there is nothing apparent that could have provided the other side of the genetic equation.

This is an important and timely book – another gift to public understanding by Australian scientist and author Tim Flannery. Ten years ago he wrote The Weather Makers (2005), one of a handful of books which, together with Al Gore’s film An Inconvenient Truth (2006), brought the climate crisis to a world audience. Now in Atmosphere of Hope, Flannery assesses what we have learned in the decade since 2005 about climate science and the policy options for action. On the eve of the Paris summit, it is refreshing to read such intelligent and lucid words about an issue that vested interests spend so much money trying to obfuscate. Australians especially need this book, for the Coalition government has manipulated a huge and disturbing gap between politics and reality.

There was a moment around the time of the release of the final Harry Potter novel when I began to suspect the hype had become a self-fulfilling prophecy. It wasn’t an event because of the book any more, it was an event because everybody knew it was an event.

‘Pathetically inadequate’ was probably the most frequent description of the government’s voluntary emissions proposal for the United Nations Climate Change Conference; the description fits their climate and energy policies more generally. Clearly, the wholly inadequate aspects are deliberate – but the problem is much broader. Members of the government have used the term ‘sabotage’ to describe the actions of environmental groups when they use the law to slow something like a proposed new coal mine. But the term more accurately describes the government’s own approach to environmental and energy policy, which is nothing less than a form of economic sabotage of the renewable energy industry. It is also an abdication of the basic roles and tasks of government.

Geraldine Brooks credits her son, Nathaniel, with sparking the idea and title for her latest novel. For his bar mitzvah, Nathaniel chose to play an arrangement for harp of Leonard Cohen’s famous ‘Hallelujah’. It begins with these lines: ‘Now I’ve heard there was a secret chord / That David played, and it pleased the Lord.’

Music is crucial to Brooks’s novel – the warp to its narrative weft. And it was Nathaniel’s harp that rekindled Brooks’s interest in the Bible and its legendary harpist king. She is clearly not a writer daunted by precedents: David’s history, told in fragments in the Books of Samuel, 1 Kings and 1 Chronicles, is one of the world’s most famous and familiar accounts of human charisma, power, musical genius, love, ruthlessness, and treachery ever passed down, a history claimed and retold in most of the great religious traditions, and exhaustively represented ­in art and music. Pierre Abélard’s plangent twelfth-century Lament is one of the world’s most poignant evocations of the love of one man (David) for another (Jonathan). David’s person, loves, and wives (Batsheva most famously) have inspired countless representations. Writers over the centuries have mined David’s story, in high-pitched verse (Dryden) and fiction (Arthur Conan Doyle, William Faulkner, Joseph Heller). David’s character, ‘in all its dazzling contradictions’ (Brooks’s phrase), continues to fascinate. Perhaps it is the contradictions that most compel us: David, for all his brilliance, was human, fallible – ‘The baffled king composing Hallelujah’, as Leonard Cohen puts it.

I vaguely knew about Fred Rose as somebody ASIO was after in the 1950s, a communist blackened in the Petrov case who went off to live in the German Democratic Republic. During the Cold War, that kind of boundary crossing was usually definitive. If you went over the wall, you stayed over.

Not Fred Rose. He went over the wall to the GDR, but after that he kept coming back to Australia, stubbornly trying to continue his Aboriginal research and activism despite ASIO’s disapproval. This is a really odd story, not least because Fred Rose, who broke so many rules, seems to have been quite an ordinary bloke – sociable, enthusiastic, adaptable, and sometimes adventurous, but nothing remarkable as a personality.

Born in Britain in 1915 in an aspirational, lower-middle class family, Rose was educated at Cambridge, switching to anthropology in his final year. Australia came into his life because of anthropology: he wanted to do for Aborigines what Bronisław Malinowski had done for Trobriand Pacific Islanders. Rose got himself out to Groote Eylandt in the Gulf of Carpentaria in the late 1930s, working as a meteorologist as a cover for field work (the first of many occupations in his life, the academic profession a comparative latecomer). After a year or so, he was joined by the woman who became his wife, Edith Linde, daughter of a German anti-Nazi lawyer whom he had met in England in his student days.

Before the ceremony began, the woman with hairy legs and an air of having just abandoned a cigarette wandered as though at a party to the coffin where – though it was impossible and not so – Clelia’s mother, Margaret, was. Three days ago, four days ago, Clelia had said to her mother, ‘Come and see the blossom I’ve brought back.’ She had just returned to Sydney after a three-week absence in the mountains.

‘Can’t it come to me?’

‘No,’ she said gaily, insistently, not thinking really, never wondering. ‘No, you’ll have to come out here. It’s so tall. I can’t move the vase.’

So her mother left her chair in Clelia’s sitting room and walked through to the kitchen, where the bower of japonica and peach and pear blossom was.

After the two-hour weekly visit permitted by Theo they said goodbye beside the car in the black soft night.

‘I’ll hear from you before you go away next week?’ her mother asked, knowing, saying nothing.

‘Of course. Naturally.’

‘I do feel old tonight,’ her mother said, knowing.

‘No.’ She smiled and hugged her. ‘No, you’re not.’

Uneasy, affronted, the minister approached her and leaned down, referring to the woman with the hairy legs now swaying past the coffin, reading the cards on the sweet spring flowers. ‘Who is that?’

‘No one,’ Clelia said. In truth she was a stranger, heard of, but met now for the first time, wife of one of Theo’s associates.

Over. Outside on swept gravel. Over, over. A young man spoke to her and wiped his eyes. Others spoke. Clelia and Stephanie, her mother’s cousin, walked towards the car. Another friend said, ‘I must get home to my family.’ Some you might have counted on were afraid of catching death.

‘Of course.’

So Clelia drove with Stephanie to the house where her mother had lived, almost from the time she was girl. She had remained a girl for a long time, which is only to say that she kept a sort of innocence and trust, and resisted knowing what she knew. It was the measure of her strength, so gentle-seeming, that, when she did face what she knew, her nature was unchanged. That is, she lacked all inclination to wound and was not bitter. She had made a grievous mistake, beyond repairing. She accepted this, but failed to become a worse person. That had been Theo’s aim, to reduce her as a human being, to make her over in his image.

Clelia thought of her stepfather, Theo. He was a great figure in his own imagination. Theo … ‘From the Greek,’ he used to say, and laugh. Clelia had not seen him for ten years till today, had never been back to the house. It had been safest for her mother, who had become, anyway, too ill, too worn, to leave him, that he should never see mother and daughter together. He was jealous. Her mother could have no friends, no relations, no pets, nothing but Theo. He got easily jealous if he was not ever and ever attended to first and only. So he always was.

And perhaps there was some justification for his jealousy. Clelia had never known how to describe him to any new acquaintance, lover, asking about her life. What was there to say? She could only move her body, turn her head, breathe in, aware of seeming evasive. There was too much; it was too stark: it would take too long. No one wanted sad stories. Theo had been a tyrant, terrifying in her childhood and girlhood, a man who tortured and smiled and, after her escape, continued in this role in her mother’s life. It sounded excessive, unbelievable, so she said nothing.

She had no idea what he could have seemed to himself, but he could be seen to act and calculate. He had noticed his exceptional power to cause unhappiness and fear. He had also noticed, certainly, his power over Clelia’s mother, and drawn conclusions flattering to his vanity. Those simple others out there in the world, occasionally encountered even in his domain, smiled and performed tiny deeds inspired by compassion or affection, their eyes watchfully on him. But he, Theo, going his own way, got his own way. Others tried to please, but he won.

Before the service she had met him face to face, the leading actor once of all her nightmares. His face was crumpled. He cried. Long ago Clelia had streamed with tears for her mother’s life; there had been streams and years of tears. But now it felt true – what poets said: hearts turned to stone. There was no further harm Theo could do. He had done his worst. The crimes had been committed.

Two neighbours had driven him back to her mother’s house after the funeral. They were there with him when Clelia arrived. Thoughtfully, one of the neighbours had baked cakes and biscuits, and made tea and set it out. They all held cups and looked into them.

Theo sat blowing his nose. ‘I can’t believe it,’ he said, choking.

Even to Clelia it seemed possible that everything could yet be reversed. Since it was all so sudden and recent, with every least incident so clear, with cause and effect so clear, the hideous wrongness with which everything had happened seemed to shout in the room, demanding instant action, instant reversals.

‘Now, Theo ...’   The neighbours watched him because he was dangerous. ‘We’ve put some dinner in the oven for you.’

‘I’ll come back tomorrow,’ Clelia said. ‘We’ll talk about things then. The doctor will call in this evening to see you.’ She rose and one of the neighbours, a widow, went with them to the door.

‘He’s a cruel man,’ she told Clelia, sparing her nothing. ‘He made your mother cry. Even when she was ill, he’d go on and on, driving her to do everything exactly as he ordered. The cruellest man I ever knew.’

Clelia listened with no expression. Who could tell her about Theo?

In her flat the telephone rang and rang. When somebody dies suddenly the lives of survivors explode; hours are minutely cluttered. The telephone rang.

‘Oh, Sam. My mother’s died. Suddenly. No, I can’t see you. No, don’t come over. The telephone keeps ringing. No, I don’t want any dinner. No, I’m not alone. Steph’s staying for a while. She’s brought some work.’

She told Stephanie, ‘Sam’s coming over. He wants me to go to dinner.’

In most intricate detail, in case he should know the magic that would reverse all, she told Sam with passionate fluency of the accidents, delays, absences, mismanagement, leading to her mother’s death.

Sam understood it all, looking at her carefully. He told her, ‘I’m taking you out for a meal.’

‘I’m not hungry.’

‘Eat anyway.’

The suburban shopping centre that she had passed a thousand times – milk bar, delicatessen, wine bar. All there exactly as they had been on Friday when she brought the blossom down from the mountains, and insisted ...

‘What’s going to happen to him?’ Sam wanted to get it clear.

‘He has a family in England, from another marriage. He visited them. He didn’t ruin their lives. Their mother left him when they were almost babies. It’s their turn now. But it’s too late. He can’t do anything else to my mother now. He actually asked if I would like to go and live with him and look after him. I could have anything, if I would.’

‘You’re not going?’ He looked incredulous.

‘Oh, Sam ... But till arrangements are made, I’ll go down and make his dinner and fix the laundry. Steph will come with me. I couldn’t go alone.’

Sam stopped and grabbed her arm. In the window of a gift shop a frilly red lamp was meaninglessly shining. ‘You’re not going to do his washing?’

‘I was going to put it into the machine.’ She was vague.

‘No, you’re not. Send it to a laundry.’ Sam was outraged somehow. ‘Now I’m serious. Promise you will.’

‘Oh ... All right.’ She was unused to being told what to do, but if it mattered to anyone about Theo’s washing she would certainly send it to the laundry.

At the small unlicensed French restaurant up the street, where retired couples, isolated persons, regularly ate, Clelia sat with Sam. He told her what she should eat and ordered it. He then settled down to the history of the Russian Revolution. Clelia had so much to think about. She knew so little about the revolution, and he knew so much. Why now did he feel it vital to pass all this news on to her? Most of her life she’d thought, since no one else was like Theo, everyone was delicate, full of sensibility. Now she knew this to be wildly untrue. But some people really were, and Sam – so large, so towering – was towards her, indeed, exceedingly considerate. Therefore, although it was like having a steel rake dragged through her mind, with her whole nature turned to the undoing of mistakes, the return to Friday and restoration of her mother to life, she responded distractedly to Sam’s talk of revolution, great waves of history battering her head, centuries rushing past.

Late every day she and Stephanie went down the steps to her mother’s house. Everything was unreal – cement steps, sky, absent presence, new ingratiating Theo. Perhaps he, too, thought her mother might return. He was deeply unwilling to leave the country and go to his vaunted sons and daughters, but agreed when he had no choice, he who had granted no choices.

That first evening of the dinner ritual he greeted them with extraordinary smiles and then, looking about in case they might be overheard, so that Stephanie and Clelia, too, glanced over their shoulders, he led them inside. ‘This way, this way.’

Darting ahead, then rushing back, he led them through the sunroom, through his small study, through the kitchen, through the square hall, into her mother’s bedroom. There he stood, bright-eyed, expectant, full of secrets.

Still the women stood. ‘Wait, wait!’ He rushed about the room, lowering blinds, drawing curtains. ‘Now, come, come.’ With commanding gestures he indicated that he wanted help to move the bed. Glancing blankly over at Stephanie (because what that he did could surprise them now?), she helped him edge it out from the wall.

‘Good, good! Now, wait.’ Looking furtively about, Theo dropped to his knees, felt under the edge of the carpet and came up with his hand full of diamonds – rings, earrings, brooches. ‘There! She left them to you, didn’t she? Look after them. Hide them away.’

Bemused, Clelia took them from him. Diamonds. Diamonds. Blossom alive in the kitchen a mile away, diamonds winking under the carpet and now in the palm of her hand. Stones. The person because of whom they all stood there, gone. It is Margaret you mourn for ...

It was very odd. They sat about and talked to Theo while he ate the dinner they had cooked, and there was never a violent or malicious word. There was no hostage any more. He could not hold Clelia or her mother hostage any more, and he understood that. No one had to pander to him any more. But if he was capable of understanding so much now, it was horribly confirmed that he had known then what he was doing.

He asserted, ‘We never had any troubles like other couples. Nothing ever went wrong with us.’

Sometimes, in the first week of that month before he left the country forever, he did eye Clelia and appear inclined to haggle about the furniture.

‘I’m not sure,’ he would say, watching her cagily. ‘I think I bought the sofa, and the television set.’ Then, carried away, he would list every item in sight.

‘All right. None of it was hers.’

‘That’s right,’ he would say, disingenuously, triumphant, the Theo of old.

Less than a week, and all those tears, and all those lies about their halcyon life, and all this cunning thought expended on the furniture! On bits of wood whose only intrinsic value lay in their having been tended for years by such a person as Clelia’s mother. In detective stories wooden people argued over wills and tables and chairs. Clelia had never imagined it happened in real life – that after a death survivors schemed to grab possessions – but it would all happen now, if she cared to play these games of Theo’s choosing.

‘It’s all yours, then.’

‘That’s right.’ Perplexed by his easy triumph, he smiled at her.

‘Maybe,’ he conceded, giving Clelia a canny look, ‘maybe she owned that one chair.’ He cleared his throat and studied her.

‘Oh, the chair. Okay.’ She paused. ‘Will you have some ice-cream now?’

He could see that she wasn’t going to play, and it made him feel discontented when he wanted to jump on them and crow, order them about, and they wouldn’t play. It wasn’t fair. He was clever. He was master. Almost always he had been able to manoeuvre them in the old days. Clelia and her mother. It was his only fun. Otherwise he got so bored. They had been so funny in the old days. So natural. Looking with such big startled eyes. He stupefied them so. They almost fell over backwards. They almost cringed away from him. It was so funny. They couldn’t make him out at all. However they reacted, it had made him want to laugh secretly. He knew how they hated it. With his eyes gleaming, he had sucked in their reactions. He knew that his gleaming look, his smile no less than his words, deliberate pauses, were a sort of torment. Meat and drink, meat and drink. But those days were all over long ago. Clelia had gone long ago. Now they had both left him.

Now there was only Clelia pretending not to care that he was winning the furniture from her. She must care, but she wouldn’t give him the satisfaction, and he wanted the satisfaction. He wanted the reassurance. His whole life had gone into getting: getting goods, getting ascendancy. If at this late time everyone refused to submit, refused to acclaim his rightness in all things, it was very dangerous for him. Somewhere he might have made a serious miscalculation, and that could not be. It was his right to dominate and win.

In the mornings there were countless telephone calls, cables to be sent, doctors to talk to, accounts to be paid, solicitors, agents, banks. Stephanie and Clelia drove Theo to and fro when he had business that had to be attended to in person. He did get agitated sometimes, but he was old. In the evenings they returned to make dinner.

After the first days had passed Theo began to change. Clelia would go at night to the house and unpack her basket of shopping and find that, in the course of the day, Theo had been thinking. He would say, ‘I’ve been thinking,’ and pause tremendously. ‘I think that table belonged to your mother,’ or, ‘I think that silver tray was hers.’

Every day an object that was in truth her mother’s was offered up, turned over to Clelia. What those relinquished objects represented in terms of change, probably only Stephanie, her mother’s cousin, of all her friends, understood. Stephanie had seen Theo if not in his heyday, in the final period, anyway, of his prime.

‘I never used to believe what you said about him. I thought you were inflating him into a monster to make yourself interesting.’

But it was no exaggeration, as Stephanie now knew. He had tormented out of existence someone generous and loving, and had amazed anyone in his power; there was no predicting his moods – sometimes joking, more often glaring, black, bullying.

That he might lose anything of value in his stampede, profoundly indifferent as he was to the means used to conquer, never seemed to occur to him. He was never happy. But at least he was dangerous to other people and their chances of happiness. That was something. Clelia broke away at last, perceiving that Theo was not a fate imposed by the gods, perceiving that there was no sense or virtue in co-operating with a nature that clearly saw nothing good, and intended nothing good. He had done his worst.

When Theo ate his dinner and she and Stephanie talked to him, drinking tea, drinking coffee to keep him company, she drank with one of her life’s teachers. He was a force of nature. She couldn’t have imagined him if she hadn’t known him. She would have known much less about good and evil without his lessons, but she had paid a great deal for them. Having learned, she could have moved on, but because her mother was held as surety his presence had remained, though unseen, pervasive in her life as a serious illness.

So they passed the sugar bowl and stirred.

Often, while she grew daily thinner with unfelt strain, Clelia had to laugh. Theo made her laugh, and Stephanie laugh, as he ate his dinner. He laughed so much that he had to gasp and wipe his eyes. They laughed themselves speechless and weak. None of them could remember afterwards what started them off. Sometimes Theo laughed so much that he was quite unable to convey what was in his mind. Catching laughter from him, the others would say, laughing, ‘What? What is it?’

‘Oh, I can’t – ’ he would gasp, waving his arms at them, and rolling about in his chair.

Exhausted and dazed, they would emerge from these overpowering bursts of mirth and part at the door, Clelia and Stephanie taking away baskets, letters to post, notebooks full of lists for the following day.

With a new, childish good nature, Theo would stand at the door, waving and calling messages.

But Clelia had been a child more recently than Theo, and at first an excessively trusting one; she and her mother had fallen again and again into traps disingenuously prepared. Theo had many tricks and faces.

‘What is it, do you think?’ Stephanie would ask, on the way home. Theo had never been famous as a laugher. This seemed very peculiar.

‘Do you think it’s a symptom?’ Clelia asked, wrinkling her forehead anxiously. ‘Is it some sort of mania?’

But since Clelia had been ten or eleven, most things Theo had said and done had undoubtedly been symptoms of nothing good, so that now it was difficult to judge. ‘When someone is so different from everyone else, you can’t tell what’s happening.’

Their powers of reasoning had somehow to be suspended in Theo’s presence. They felt stupefied. He had often, in the past, been gratified to notice this effect he had on people.

In Clelia’s kitchen the blossom began to fall. In her mother’s house she had to open drawers, wardrobes. Everywhere, in the most remote cupboard, each object was fresh, carefully placed. Jovial, bluff, the doctor said to Clelia on the telephone, ‘We’ll get him on a plane. Don’t worry. If I have to push him in a wheelbarrow.’ On an entirely different note, he added sadly before hanging up, ‘The wrong one died.’

Each day now, as the day of the flight sped towards them, Theo wanted to take less and less. From making off with every last teaspoon, he now could scarcely bother to take his own clothes.

‘At least take your radio. At least take your binoculars,’ Clelia said.

‘Oh, I don’t know. Don’t you want them?’

‘Not really, Theo.’

He had no heart for anything. Clelia was the last sign. She was what he wanted, but she was no longer a possession to be packed.

Stephanie drove Clelia to the house on the last day. Theo was waiting, packed, with clothes, with money, with deeds to property, and yet like a refugee with nothing.

‘Quick! Quick! I want to show you something. Come in here.’ Secretive, he led them through to the sitting room. ‘Now, wait there.’

Outside the mynas called noisily. Up at the junction on the main road to the city traffic was ceaseless.

‘What now?’ Stephanie widened her eyes.

Clelia shook her head, and Theo returned with a big envelope and sat down on the sofa next to her. With shaking hands, he fumbled in the envelope, then carefully drew out a photograph, a studio portrait of a young man. ‘I was twenty when that was taken. Not bad, eh? Would you like it?’ He seemed wistful. He watched her face.

Clelia hesitated. ‘Oh, Theo ... You should take it with you. For your family.’

Restlessly he moved about. ‘They won’t want it. I want you to have it.’

Here it was again – the mystery that pursued her through life in one form, in another, returning and returning, presenting itself relentlessly for her solution: how should human beings treat each other? How to treat Theo now? How to treat people who, when the opportunity was theirs, ill-treated you? How not to be overcome again and again by an aggressor if you were unwilling to meet blow with blow?

Neither her own considerable experience, nor the theories of others, the thinkers of centuries, solved it easily, once and for all, or even in a particular instance. Theo and his varied kind jumped instinctively on anyone down. They gained power from the ‘understanding’ and ‘compassion’ of others, counted on some such weak-mindedness, soft-heartedness, without understanding remotely the movements of thought and feeling from which they sprang. Benefit showered down, regardless of understanding, as if generous or magnanimous natures were part of the public utilities. Arguing in this way with herself, Clelia often concluded that such natures even might be part of the public utilities, magnanimity provided as tap water, electricity are provided. The alternative to seeming to cave in, to seeming overborne, was to deny oneself, become one with the aggressor, offer the final tribute. Theo destroyed the person closest to him, her mother. The worse overcame the better; the worse, the greater.

Theo sat with his own image in his hand, to some extent in her power. But what puny gesture of hers could do more than trivialise the past? A pettish or spiteful jab to Theo’s ego would in its pointlessness insult the true tragedy a feeble gesture of rejection would be meant to avenge, even to point out to the forgetful Theo, with his memories of ‘no troubles’.

This mystery was so familiar to Clelia, had so often before demanded her attention, as though it were her most particular task in life to understand this fully, that her myriad reflections took place simultaneously in the time of receiving from Theo’s hand his studio portrait, and then five or six others.

She held them.

He said, ‘I want you to have them. Would you like them?’ And, reaching across, he shuffled through them.

Clelia said yes to every one.

Theo seemed very pleased, proud, and almost grateful. ‘There, then!’

He looked at her and, since she had already done more than she could do, Clelia met his eyes.

This story appears in A Few Days in the Country: And Other Stories by Elizabeth Harrower, to be published on October 21 by Text Publishing.

Why do you write?

For me, writing is the beginning of so much. It’s how I methodise my thoughts. How I explore issues. My books really are co-explorations with my readers.

Are you a vivid dreamer?

Oftentimes yes. My dreams can be repetitive: the same very specific geographies, the same themes. In the past few weeks they’ve been all about the last illness and death of my father, who passed away late last year. Why those dreams have been so long in coming, I can’t say.

Where are you happiest?

Walking along a wild beach that has interesting and complex geology.

Although the mantra ‘Don’t panic, but get prepared’ guides Jane Rawson and James Whitmore’s handbook for Surviving and Living with Climate Change, they certainly do not paint a pretty picture of climate-change Australia. The scenarios are alarming: Australia will be hotter, drier in some parts, wetter in others, with more frequent bushfires, floods, and heatwaves. Some parts of Australia are already showing signs of a changing climate – look no further than the south-west of the continent where rainfall has declined by ten to twenty per cent since the 1970s. Yet their detailed guide to preparing for, and adapting to, climate change offers a no-nonsense wake-up call to readers. They leave no doubt that the time for action is now.

As Clive Hamilton observes in the book’s foreword, it is an indictment on our political leaders that this Handbook has been written. If they had done more, we would not need to make these kinds of preparations. Alas, our current government gives us little cause for hope. It has dumped the carbon price and laid siege to the renewable energy industry, while coal remains king and ‘good for humanity’. Australia’s emissions target for Paris is extremely modest and is unlikely to be enough to halt global warming at 2°C. Some scientists argue that this benchmark, one of nine planetary boundaries, is already too great and that crossing this threshold will lead to disastrous consequences. Either way, it’s about time we adjusted to a new normal.

The Heart Goes Last is set in a not-so-distant future in which the economy of the United States has collapsed. In the wake of a major financial meltdown, those rich enough to flee have taken up residence in floating offshore tax havens, leaving the rest of the population to cope with a society ravaged by spiralling unemployment, drug addiction, and crime. The novel’s protagonists, a married couple named Stan and Charmaine, have lost their home and are living in their car, dodging thieves and rapists on a nightly basis. Their only income is the pittance Charmaine earns working in a sleazy bar. Stan’s outlook is so bleak that, against his better judgement, he considers asking his criminal brother Conor for help.

Then an apparent solution to their difficulties presents itself. Charmaine sees an advertisement for the ‘Positron Project’. Applicants accepted into Positron are given a place to live in a safe and wholesome-looking town named Consilience, a gated community that is straight out of the 1950s, right down to its mandatory Doris Day soundtrack. The catch is that admission is a Hobbesian bargain: in return for security, Charmaine and Stan must surrender their freedom. Once they enter they can never leave. They are paired with another couple, known as their ‘Alternates’, with whom they share a house; they must then alternate with their Alternates, spending one month leading comfortable suburban lives in Consilience and the next month locked away in Positron’s private prison system, where they work on morally dubious projects that generate profits for the governing corporation.

Narrators in Gerald Murnane’s novels and stories have occasionally scorned autobiography. Near the beginning of A Million Windows (2014), for example, we find: ‘Today, I understand that so-called autobiography is only one of the least worthy varieties of fiction extant.’ Murnane is even more direct in Philip Tyndall’s 1990 documentary Words and Silk, which explores the author’s fictional relationship with horseracing. There he declares, direct to camera: ‘I hate the word autobiographical.’

There is a great deal of autobiographical material in Murnane’s fiction, but it is typically displaced onto fictional ‘personages’, as Murnane calls them. Some readers may be surprised, then, to discover that Something for the Pain: A Memoir of the Turf is directly autobiographical. It features numerous stories, recollections, and anecdotes – all connected to horse racing in some way – and has as much in common with barstool yarns as the fiction and non-fiction Murnane has published to date.

Murnane’s first experiences of the races were, he says, aural. When listening to broadcasts of race calls from his family’s backyard in Bendigo as a child, Murnane heard ‘not distinctive words but vocal sounds: a chant or a recitative that began quietly, progressed evenly, rose to a climax, and then subsided again’. We can trace the unusual syntax of Murnane’s sentences to these early experiences. His first novel, Tamarisk Row (1974), concludes with a race call, and most of its sections are fashioned with long, grammatically correct sentences, which progress evenly at first, then gain pace and complexity before rising to a climax. These sentence patterns are repeated in Murnane’s subsequent fiction, with varying frequency and intensity.

Environmental times

For the second year in a row, generous support from the Bjarne K. Dahl Trust has enabled us to devote much space to environmental subjects. The highlight is a long article by award-winning author Ashley Hay, the second ABR Dahl Trust Fellow. We also survey key scientists and environmentalists about the need for action.

To celebrate this issue, ABR and the Dahl Trust will host a launch party at the latter’s new home within the splendid Royal Society of Victoria. This is at 6 pm on Wednesday, 7 October. Ashley Hay will read from and discuss her Fellowship article. Jo Daniell, our photo essayist, will exhibit some of his superb photographs. Everyone is most welcome. We will be serving billy tea, of a kind.

Ashley Hay

Jolley Prize

Rob Magnuson Smith

Who said a non-Australian would never win one of ABR’s three literary prizes! (No names, no pack drill.) Following the recent shortlisting of Paul Kane (USA) and Faith Oxenbridge (New Zealand), we have a British-American winner of this year’s ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize – Rob Magnuson Smith. He even flew to the Brisbane Writers Festival to find out if he had won (only the judges knew; they wouldn’t even confide in trusty Advances).

Michelle Cahill

After short readings from all three authors (Michelle Cahill and Harriet McKnight rounded out the shortlist), Steven Carroll named Rob Magnuson Smith as the overall winner for his story ‘The Elector of Nossnearly’ (which appeared in our September issue with the other stories). He received $5,000. Our winner told Advances: ‘I am thrilled to be this year’s winner of the Jolley Prize. This important prize encourages all international writers of fiction who want their work to be judged as it should be – on its own merits and strictly anonymously. I am very grateful to Australian Book Review, Ian Dickson, and the judges.’

The point about anonymity is well made. Each year, some people seem to forget that all our judges remain happily unaware of the authorship until the judging has been completed. The Jolley will be back next year, bigger than ever. Meanwhile, the Porter Prize and Calibre Prize are open – lucrative, prestigious, international, and perfectly anonymous. They close on 1 December and 18 January respectively.

Harriet McKnight

Arts Update galore

ABR’s ambitions for its burgeoning arts coverage have just received a major boost with a grant from The Ian Potter Foundation. This substantial three-year grant will enable us to increase the number and range of arts reviews around Australia and to increase payments to arts correspondents. Arts Update – a free online repository of lengthy, timely, edited reviews – represents a major extension of ABR’s publishing. Already the response from readers, artists, and arts journalists has been warm. With this generous grant from The Ian Potter Foundation, Arts Update will be transformed. Truly, it’s ‘nothing but blue skies from now on’.

A goose in a dress

When Harper’s Magazine meets The Spectator it makes for a hilarious, if slightly weird, blancmange. Australians saving up their US$798.06 for dinner for two at the vaunted Per Se restaurant might want to reconsider after reading Spectator food critic Tanya Gold’s eviscerating review of four famous New York restaurants, published in the September issue of Harper’s Magazine. Here is an amuse bouche: ‘If the restaurant is a cult, what then is the diner? A goose in a dress, of course, a hostage to be force-fed a nine-course tasting menu … [G]enerally the food is so overtended and overdressed I am amazed it has not developed the ability to scream in your face, walk off by itself, and sulk in its room … [Per Se] is such a preposterous restaurant, I wonder if a whole civilization has gone mad and it has been sent as an omen to tell us of the end of the world – not in word, as is usual, but in salad.’

Michael Fullilove to deliver the ABC 2015 Boyer Lectures

Michael Fullilove

The 2015 Boyer Lectures will be delivered by Michael Fullilove, Executive Director of the Lowy Institute for International Policy, and a past contributor to ABR. The title of the series is 'A Larger Australia'. Dr Fullilove will deliver the first lecture – ‘Present at the Destruction’ – at Peking University.

2015 Melbourne Prize for Literature

The finalists for the 2015 Melbourne Prize for Literature (worth $60,000) have been announced: Steven Carroll, Brenda Niall, Christos Tsiolkas, Chris Wallace-Crabbe, Alexis Wright. ‘The finalists in this year’s Melbourne Prize for Literature and Awards are a testament to Melbourne and Victoria’s literary capacity, creativity and our reputation as a vibrant literary centre,’ said Simon Warrender, the executive director of the Melbourne Prize Trust.

This year’s winner will be announced at a special event on 11 November at which the winners of the $30,000 Best Writing Award and the new $20,000 Writer Prize will also be revealed. Voting is now open for the $6,000 Civic Choice Award. Visit their website to find out more about the finalists and to cast your vote.

The underrated blues

Ivor Indyk – not alone in this respect – thinks we have a surfeit of prizes in this country. Now we even have one for the year’s most overlooked book – not perhaps an award every author craves. Shortlisted for this year’s Most Underrated Book Award are Isabelle of the Moon and Stars by S.A. Jones (UWA Publishing), The Grapple Annual Number 1, edited by Duncan Felton (Grapple Publishing), and Funemployed: Life as an Artist in Australia by Justin Heazlewood (Affirm Press).

The winner will be announced at an event at the Wheeler Centre on 20 November as part of the Small Press Network’s Independent Publishing Conference. Last year’s winner, Jane Rawson, has shifted her focus from fiction to surviving climate change for her new book, The Handbook: Surviving and Living with Climate Change (written with James Whitmore). Ruth A. Morgan reviews it here.

Stagefright

Joan Acocella – always one of the best reasons to read the New Yorker – has a fascinating article in the August 3 edition. ‘I Can’t Go On!’ concerns the long, perverse history of stagefright. We all know about Laurence Olivier, but some of Acocella’s other examples are surprising. Thomas Jefferson, one sufferer, gave only two speeches as president – his two inaugural orations. Cicero, greatest of orators, once said, ‘I turn pale at the outset of a speech and quake in every limb.’ Pablo Casals, peerless cellist, went hiking in 1901 and a big rock crushed several of his fingers. His first thought was, ‘Thank God! I’ll never have to play the cello again!’ The twenty-four-old Casals had played for Queen Victoria. Sixty years later he performed for the Kennedys in the White House.

Post-haste?

Australian Book Review is concerned about deteriorating Australia Post delivery standards. We want you to receive your copy of ABR by the first day of the month, or earlier. ABR now sends magazines to interstate subscribers by ordinary mail (not the more economical Print Post, as in the past), and we will make this switch for Victorian subscribers with the October issue. Even so, some subscribers are having to wait a week or more for their magazines. Please help us to monitor this worrying trend by notifying us by email, post, or phone as to when your copy arrives. The best way is a quick email to: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

Armed with this information we will do what we can to expedite delivery. Meanwhile, while you wait for your copy of each new ABR, consult ABR Online until the magazine arrives (print subscribers can access the digital issue gratis). Australia Post has advised us that delays in postal delivery should be reported to local post offices or other Australia Post complaints channels. If you have time to do this, it will help our collective cause. Each month on our imprint page, we note the date on which the magazine was delivered to Australia Post. Thanks for your patience as we try to resolve these frustrating postal delays.

Deborah Cass Writing Prize

The family and friends of lawyer and writer Deborah Cass have set up an annual writing prize with Writers Victoria. The prize awards $3000 plus a mentorship program to an unpublished writer from a migrant background. Christos Tsolkias, Alice Pung, and Tony Ayres will judge the first prize. Deadline for entries is October 19. For details, visit the Writers Victoria website.

CHILDHOOD SEX!

Dear Editor,

Shannon Burns’s splendid ABR Patrons’ Fellowship essay, ‘The Scientist of His Own Experience: A Profile of Gerard Murnane’, is rich in insights and pithy observations, plus some rather fine photographs (August 2015). Much of it resonated for me, as Murnane’s first editor; this was soon after I had arrived at William Heinemann from Penguin, aeons ago.

When Gerald Murnane needed a publisher for his first novel, Tamarisk Row, Barry Oakley almost certainly suggested Heinemann because the managing director was John Burchall, a former bookseller, prodigious reader, and long luncher – and one of the few publishers passionate about original Australian writing. After one of those lunches, a fat brown paper parcel landed on my desk. Tamarisk Row immediately impressed me as an eccentric masterpiece, like nothing else.

Walking is the quintessence of human travelling. No other means so involves us in the place through which we move or makes us so aware of our bodies’ presence in it. Early in his book, John Blay writes: ‘walking has become thought. I feel I am in dialogue with nature, I understand it is telling me what I need to know.’ We can stretch Blay’s ‘nature’ to include any environment in which we walk – from bushtrack to urban footpath. We are really only in a place by walking, by feeling our footfalls on that place’s floor. Walking gives a rhythm that frees us to experience and think. We have lost much in our reliance on, even fetishisation of, the wheel, as Blay’s search for an old Aboriginal route from mountain to coast demonstrates.

On Track arises from Blay’s search for what he comes to call the Bundian Way – after the original people who lived in the area – a regularly used track and walking way that ran from the Australian Alps to Twofold Bay on the New South Wales coast. Blay’s method is to walk the area, searching the minutia at his feet as much as the vistas. In the process he becomes naturalist, archaeologist, historian, cartographer, and, perhaps most of all, story-gatherer. Blay is experienced in walking this country, and he needs to be: it is rugged country, including the Kosciuszko National Park and the Byado Wilderness. He draws on Koori friends and elders and older settler residents, as well as on archives, early maps and surveys, and pioneer anthropologists, particularly A.W. Howitt. These sources lead him on many side trips, but the book is at its best when we feel we are with Blay on the ground, as he picks his way through what his describes as ‘the logic of the landscape’.

What is it about caves? An irresistibly enchanting hidey-hole to any small child and yet the birthplace of our deepest fears. Dragons, narguns, goblins, and gorgons are all born of caves, and yet who can go past an opening in the rock without peeking in? We cannot resist exploring this underworld of darkness which seems to provide safety from the perils outside, while at the same time exposing ourselves to the risks and dangers of the unknown and the unseen.

Ralph Crane and Lisa Fletcher, both literary academics from the University of Tasmania, offer not so much an exploration of caves themselves, but rather an exploration of the ways in which we experience caves. This is, quite literally, an anthropomorphic venture. As the authors point out, we define caves largely through the human experience of them. A cave without an entrance is not a cave at all, but a vug. A ‘proper cave’, apparently, has an entrance at least 0.3 metres high, accessible by a human body.

Caves are, literally and figuratively, the gaps and fissures between the bedrock of our knowledge. They are spaces that open up beneath our feet and between the disciplines. The archaeologist will illuminate an entirely different vision of a cave from that of the geologist, the palaeontologist, the hydrologist, the biologist, the poet, the novelist, the film-maker, the artist, or the musician. The catch-all designation of ‘speleologist’ is not so much an academic field as a passion – a term for the adventurous explorers of these spaces who may well also be any one of the above specialists as well.

David Suzuki is well known in this country. Since he was brought to Australia by the Commission for the Future nearly thirty years ago, he has been back for many festivals and conferences. Truly a man of many parts, he was a distinguished geneticist and a leading professor in the field when it emerged as a separate discipline within the biological sciences. As a famous science communicator, he made complex issues accessible to Canadian audiences. His understanding of science led him to be a powerful advocate for environmental protection and the broader social changes needed for sustainable futures.

As the title suggests, this is a reflective book, distilling important messages from a long and productive life. As a child of Japanese parents in Canada during World War II, Suzuki was interned with his family, genetic heritage prevailing over citizenship. This treatment was consistent with other examples of early misuse of genetics, such as the Nazi drive for racial purity, which justified forced sterilisation and mass murder. Suzuki notes that there were laws in the United States and Canada to prevent marriage between people from different racial groups, based on a view that the mixing of their genes would produce ‘disharmonious combinations’. We now know about hybrid vigour, or heterosis, so if eugenics were still being practised we might actively encourage more adventurous sexual unions. Suzuki also points out that the treatment of indigenous people in North America and Australia was based on an assumed racial superiority that justified the seizure of land, the suppression of languages and cultures, and such practices as the removal of children from their mothers. While we no longer subscribe to the legal fiction of terra nullius, which supported the alienation of the original Australians from their land, we have not yet acknowledged their prior ownership or properly recognised our debt to them.

In the United States, a battle is raging between two factions of environmental advocates and ecologists. On one side, those who associate themselves with the tradition of Henry David Thoreau, John Muir, and Aldo Leopold argue for the need to expand protected areas and to reduce the human presence. The other side has embraced the neo-liberal agenda and partnered with corporations such as Dow Chemical and Goldman Sachs. The ‘new conservation’ holds that the purpose of conservation is to benefit the most people possible. The Nature Conservancy, headed by a former investment banker and armed with a budget of up to one billion dollars, is the major force in this camp.

Some would say this is an old debate between intrinsic and utilitarian values for nature. Before the field of conservation biology existed, advocates for the environment could align themselves with Muir’s sacred view of nature or with Theodore Roosevelt’s view that nature should be protected as a human resource. The 1964 US Wilderness Act incorporated elements of both: wilderness was an area ‘untrammelled’ by humankind, but also a ‘resource’ for aesthetic, moral, and recreational enjoyment. Recently, the divisions have become starker, and a new idea presents a challenge to the philosophical foundations of conservation: the Anthropocene.

Australia’s wild dog, the dingo, probably generates the most diverse human responses of any of our fauna – from a determination to exterminate to passionate conservation advocacy. This book is a bold attempt to cover this diversity and asserts that the dingo is a unique wild animal worthy of conservation for its intrinsic value, as well as for its critical role in ecological function and stability. It is a complex story involving the evolutionary history of wolves and dogs, the latest genetic techniques for elucidating relationships between species and populations, Aboriginal culture, and the attitudes about wildlife held by European settlers and modern Australians. ‘

One issue that editor and primary author, Bradley Smith, labours, and eventually stumbles, over concerns the position of the dingo within the family Canidae. Is the dingo a dog or an offshoot of an Asian wolf? For all practical purposes, these taxonomic semantics matter little – the book builds a strong case that the dingo is a distinctive form of wild canid that deserves full conservation attention because of that distinctiveness and, importantly, because of the ecological role that it plays as Australia’s largest predator. That point aside, Smith and his five expert co-authors tackle this complexity with assurance in this comprehensive, well-argued, nicely illustrated book.

If free markets promote themselves as the most effective and efficient way of creating and sharing prosperity, then growing inequality has emerged as one of their deepest failings in the early part of this century. After all, how ‘effective’ is having ninety-nine per cent of the world’s wealth go to less than one per cent of its population? Is it ‘efficient’to allow the gap between the rich and poor in leading Western countries to return to levels not seen since the nineteenth century? The widening gap between haves and have-nots has become the focus of much public, political, and policy angst in recent times. The resulting debate is often big on ideological point-scoring on one side, or arcane debates about definition and measurement of inequality on the other. The result is a shortfall in the clear-sighted argument and analysis of practical solutions needed to tackle the problem.

Inequality: What Can Be Done?, written by British economist Anthony B. Atkinson, is a refreshing departure from these dynamics. Atkinson has been at the centre of research into inequality for more than four decades. As inequality scholarship’s ‘grand old man’, he has developed extensive inequality databases, pioneered new forms of analyses, and coined key terms that have provided the foundations of the current debate. (Atkinson has also been an intellectual mentor to Thomas Piketty, his younger French counterpart, who set the global debate on inequality alight last year with his Capital in the Twenty-First Century, which I reviewed for ABR in August 2014.)

This photograph taken around 1890 shows what was done through over-clearing and grazing. Fifteen years ago, our property on the Mornington Peninsula featured two overused stock dams filled with opaque brown water. The muddy edges had no vegetation whatsoever. With help from a local expert on indigenous landscape and wetlands, we took the plunge and started a project to renew and plant a wetland to attract local wildlife.

In 2003 the two dams were combined, deepened, then extended and given curved banks and edges, with underwater ‘tenements’ constructed from old car tyres to make habitat for fish and water dwellers. To the south, a hill was created and a copse of eucalyptus planted to make a safe place for wildlife in summer. A small island was constructed so that waterbirds could nest there and be safe from the many foxes in the area. Rocks were placed in and around the water to attract frogs. The whole area was fenced to protect it from the stock.

To create the necessary environment for birds and wildlife, thousands of indigenous plants were introduced: eucalypts, understorey plants, reeds, and water plants. Now there are forty-five different species of birds, ranging from a pair of black swans to a large family of moorhens, a pair of wedge-tailed eagles, tiny spotted pardalotes, parrots, several species of ducks, parrots, galahs, butcherbirds, blue wrens, finches, honeyeaters, and even an azure kingfisher. There are frogs galore – also blue-tongued lizards and, of course, brown, black, and copperhead snakes. A small family of Eastern Grey kangaroos lives there, and we have echidnas, black wallabies, and the occasional koala. The following pages give an indication of what has been restored.

Perri Cutten and Jo Daniell

The story of Graeme Clark and the cochlear implant is often seen as the exception to the research trope lauding the brilliance of Australians at basic research but lamenting their ineptness commercialising these opportunities. This book is an adulatory story of Clark’s life.

Clark’s exceptional and driven journey is breathlessly related by Worthing. Graduating in medicine from the University of Sydney, Clark combined his honeymoon with a move to the United Kingdom to undertake postgraduate surgical studies. Eschewing lucrative surgical roles, he returned to Sydney to undertake a PhD to pursue his research into finding a solution to profound deafness. Having won the new Chair of Otolaryngology at the University of Melbourne, Clark used telethons to raise funds for cochlear implant development. Progressing from the first successful human implant surgery in 1978 to the commercial success of cochlear today entailed many trials and tribulations for Clark and his teams.

In one of the reflective essays that complement her new collection of stories, My Hearts Are Your Hearts, Carmel Bird likens short story writing to the art of the conjuror who takes ‘coloured silk handkerchiefs, pull[s] them all in to make a ball, and then, with a flourish, open[s] them up as a full-blown rose’. This charming metaphor suggests not only Bird’s understanding of the subtlety and skill required to create memorable short stories, but also her delight in playing the role of magician. While her essays provide insights into the origins, crafting, and intended effects of the twenty stories in this collection, they also brim with exuberance about the process of writing, especially its often unconscious or ‘mysterious’ nature. One of Australia’s more prolific and renowned authors, Bird clearly hasn’t lost her enthusiasm and sense of wonder as she enters the imaginative world of fiction. It is an experience she’s keen to share with her readers. As one of her essays has it: ‘[t]he stories in this collection are really intended to please and entertain the reader.’

It is not difficult to see why the publisher expects Relativity to find a wide readership; centred on Ethan its eccentric, physics-obsessed young protagonist, this is a touching portrayal of a fractured family.

Claire has always known her son is special, with his talent for numbers and precocious knowledge of astronomical facts. At school, his peers call him ‘Stephen Hawking’, but to Ethan this is ‘the greatest compliment’. Claire gave up her career as a ballet dancer in order to raise her son. Despite Claire’s loneliness and the unspoken mystery of Ethan’s absent father, the two have a loving relationship. When Ethan’s estranged father, Mark, contacts Claire in an effort to fulfil his own father’s dying wish to see his grandson, several coincidences coalesce to draw Mark back into their lives.

The Lost Swimmer is a novel full of movement, colour, and complex plot threads. Although this is her first novel, Ann Turner’s experience as a significant Australian film director and screenwriter has given her a tight grasp on the unfolding of narrative in sharply realised locations. The Lost Swimmer, an expertly scripted psychological thriller, deftly takes its multiple characters and possibilities through a dizzying array of twists and turns.

The story is told through the first person voice of Bec Wilding, a Professor of Archaeology and Head of her academic department at the fictional Coastal University. Not only is Bec weighed down with the usual constraints and toxicities symptomatic of life in the modern university, but she is becomingly increasingly aware that something else is seriously wrong – in both her professional and personal spheres. Her handsome fellow academic husband, Stephen, is acting erratically, and Bec fears he is having an affair with the Dean of Arts, the ruthless Priscilla, who is simultaneously making her life hell.

Set in Melbourne’s cafés, under its bridges, behind its laundromats, and within its zoo, Leap is a contemporary Australian novel about love and loss. It entwines the narratives of Joe, whose guilt over the accidental death of his high-school girlfriend drives him to work dead-end jobs and train furiously in the art of Parkour, and Elise, a recently separated graphic designer who finds clarity in weekly visits to the tiger enclosure at the zoo, where she feels compelled to sketch the animals. The unusual pairing of a twenty-two-year-old traceur and a middle-aged mother is typical of the intergenerational connections Myfanwy Jones weaves throughout the novel. Joe mentors Declan, a disaffected teen who reminds Joe of himself when he was younger, and their relationships with their parents are a recurring theme.

It is tempting to draw parallels between Anton Corbijn’s Life and the director’s own personal history, in particular his series of striking 1979 black-and-white photographs of UK band Joy Division. The Dutch photographer, upon hearing the band’s first album, Unknown Pleasures, was convinced something great was in the offing, and set out for England intent on capturing the band with his camera. His iconic photos of Ian Curtis, who took his own life the following year, have come to define the singer for a later generation.

Issue 59.2 marked Westerly’s sixtieth year of publication and the retirement of its co-editors. Issue 60.2 will be the first with Catherine Noske in charge. Unsurprisingly the editors describe this issue as ‘a bridge between two distinct eras’. There are links to the past in previously unpublished material: memoir from Dorothy Hewett and photographs by Randolph Stow. Concern for Aboriginal displacement is palpable in Kate Leah Rendell’s essay on Stow, as it is in Tony Hughes-d’Aeth’s analysis of ‘the assimilation dream’ through Jack Davis’s play The Dreamers (1982).

The past is registered in different bodies in Marcella Polain’s ‘A Hill Road’ and Martin Kovan’s ‘Trade Routes’, while cultural implications yield to the more personal in other poems: David McGuigan’s ‘Nursing-Home Memory’ uses the present participle – ‘tearing’, ‘twirling’ – to evoke both the past-in-the-present and youthful energy, as does Rose Lucas in the delicately suggestive ‘Daughters’, while Paul Hetherington plays with temporal and locational spaces in dense renditions of water.

The Australian Archaeologist’s Book of Quotations is a veritable time-traveller’s guide for making sense of a continent, a nation, and its people. The editors, archaeologist Mike Smith and historian Billy Griffiths, have served up a smorgasbord of archaeological appetisers, with a feast of pithy insights into how Australians are coming to terms with ancient Australia.

If Smith’s Archaeology of Australia’s Deserts (2013) was his magnum opus, this carefully curated collection is an anthology of his greatest hits. Alongside giants of the field – Jones, Mulvaney, Bowler, and McBryde – are the words of Aboriginal people themselves, the likes of Pearl Gibbs, Big Bill Neidjie, Alice Kelly, and Marcia Langton, speaking for their people and their country. There are the old guard and the new; and some unusual suspects – Saatchi & Saatchi, Agatha Christie, Shakespeare, and Oscar Wilde. And there are those who have contributed greatly to Australian understandings of people and place, time and belonging, politics and history, such as W.E.H. Stanner, George Seddon, Greg Dening, Bernard Smith, and Tim Flannery.

Contemporary Australian poetry has a complex and ever-evolving relationship with the land, both at home and abroad. Almost twenty-five years post-Mabo and entrenched in ongoing ecological crises, Australian poets explore new ways of experiencing and defining place. Where misguided nationalism sought to limit Australian poets to their local landscapes, peripatetic poets have embraced transnational and intimate responses to questions of home. Space in Australian poetry prioritises both dwelling and travelling as intimate psychological activities, a concept that these four poets embrace in their recent publications.

Sarah Holland-Batt’s second book of poetry, The Hazards (University of Queensland Press, $24.95 pb, 112 pp, 9780702253591), is a thrilling psycho-geographical evocation of physical and internal landscapes. It brims with the threat of annihilation and the promise of home. In poems that range in location from her birthplace of Queensland to Nicaragua, Rome, Cuba, and beyond, Holland-Batt demonstrates what it is to be both insider and outsider.

In her ode to California, published in The New Yorker earlier this year, beauty and ugliness cohabit in an explosion of wit in the face of mortality:

I want to ride the long smooth tan body
of California, I want to eat the bear of the flag
of California, I want to roll like a corpse off the highway
of your chase scenes, I want my perfect teeth
preserved, California, my teeth buried
in the earth like a curse, California, and won’t you show me
where the bodies are kept, California,
won’t you show me, show me, show me.

In Holland-Batt’s poems, the drive is always towards death. Home is safe, but death resides in even the most intimate of lived spaces:

When Grandad died, the wonky shack
grew wild, and creepers curtained over.
Through walls thin and threadbare
I heard them hissing, the cold wet tendrils
that cold strangle, and grew on air:
teatree, tangle root, tongue.
                                       (‘The Orchid House’)

Holland-Batt’s stark and sumptuous lyricism is indelible. Her coruscating and percussive landscapes draw the reader into the danger and sublimity of living.

In March 2006, botanical illustrator Celia Rosser travelled to a remote station in Western Australia to witness and draw the first-ever recorded flowering of Banksia Rosserae. The spiky yellow spheres appear only after rain, which, in this arid part of the continent, can be years in the coming. The Australian plant had only been discovered four years earlier, by botanists Peter Olde and Neil Marriott, who were exploring an area of Mulga south of Mount Magnet. It is the only banksia to grow entirely within the arid zone and one of approximately 170 species of the banksia genus, a member of the proteaceae family.

There was never any doubt that Rosser, then seventy-six, would under-take the arduous journey; alongside the fact that this plant was named after her, a singular honour, its discovery was a fascinating addition to a career spanning more than twenty-five years studying and painting every known banksia species. The culmination of that dedication, the three-volume florilegium The Banksias, which combines Rosser’s illustrations with botanist Alex George’s text, is one of the greatest botanical publishing achievements of the twentieth century, the only complete painting of such a large plant genus.