Tailings

                  'Call one thing another's name long enough, it will answer'
                                                                                                    Jane Hirshfield

Eyelets of cosmos, anaemic stars, only gazing in words. That parrot
bush called budjan with its supernova of stamens, spurious and sacral
Initiate of glinting conversation with long-beaked cockatoo and bee

Hunger is the dugite resigned to regurgitating a blue tongued lizard
Its shingle back unpierced as it swings away, reefing its legs past a dead
raven unsettled by maggots, used condoms, me taking a photo

A man searching the swamp for a hook-up on Grindr scans my hand
for a phone, his vulnerability touching as he passes soundlessly
Keens into the whiteness of paperbark trunks and anonymity

I've been walking, barely felt Prickly Moses exposing flecks of blood
to garnet on my arms in the heat, which kindles this wildness in me
I can't name and meet each time as a stranger, forfeited to sleep

My suitcase yawning at the foot of his bed, him spilling cunning lines across
new sheets as the mirror trembles with a passing train. I know the shame
of wanting him to call me, before distrust stakes its claim on memory

There are worse things than fire. Thriving, a tingle tree, heartwood burnt out
centuries ago, shelters a school tour from a deluge in its still-black bethel
One girl lingering, is moved on by a teacher yelling that she won't drown

How it all turns in and swallows, thinking in unison as everything is
knotted, from trees to throats. Swelling panicle of micro orchid trodden
down to mandibles of ants, their mass smothering a flinch of baby bird

Scudding dragonfly plucked from the wind by dazzle of bee-eater, knows
catastrophe. Congested telepathy of letters nesting on my desk, a ruin
of truth, part flight, breezing devotion through an open door

Here with my son, mantising gooseberries to our mouths in undergrowth
A thrall of silvereyes quicken the fig as a neighbour spits words at her dog
Galahs shear sunflowers above us. Before it rains, I'm burying the seeds

Amanda Joy

Lament for 'Cape' Kennedy

Djirritch Djirritch
the black and white
willy wagtail
fate's messenger
did not tell me you'd gone
but your cousin phoned.

Kids walking to school
found you
flat on your back
on the pavement frost
eyes open
looking for that emu in the Milky Way
but the coroner saw
no evidence of foul play.

I saw you leave
the Dimboola Hotel at closing time
with half a slab
the doctor warned against
with your clapped out guts
at only half three score and ten
but your missus wouldn't let you see your son
what else was there to do.

They haven't taken down the pictures
plastered on your bedroom walls
of Elle Macpherson smiling down
over and over again
and no one will stay there for a while
but you pissed yourself laughing
when the skies opened on your funeral
in the middle of the worst drought
in a century.

I remember you skinny and shy
beanie, five days growth and
'fuck you' painted on the uppers of your boots
taking me up the river
to show me the Bullitch
bent over with age
with the footholes
chopped out by your great uncles
climbing high for honey
and on the other side
the scar from where they'd peeled off a canoe.

No foul play?
What about the feller
shot by the Namatji squatter
not far from where they built the mission church?
What about Dick-a-Dick
left in Sydney to walk home
after the first real Ashes tour?
What about Uncle Nyuk
run down in his horse and cart
by the publican drunk and driving home?
What about Vicky and Bubbles
farmed out to Namatji families
who tried and failed to make them white?
What about the bosses in Canberra now
whose law won't recognise
your lore along the river?

Your bag of bones rots in a cheap coffin
in Dimboola cemetery
while you roam around Lake Wirregrin
waiting for it to fill again
for the Beal to blossom and seed
and for the black and white cockatoos
to fly the same way.

Campbell Thomson

Rage to order

1.
insert here: dark joke about sharks (keep swimming or they die)
cruising around the apartment    something always in her hand
                                                                                                                 movement
from here to there, returning:      every wayward thing
                                                            needing her to find its home

~
idle, idle, wedge-edge of panic     polishing itself
she is easy to dismiss, is difficult, elegant

too, demanding, too
much

in the house
of self, she is the sleeper
                                              cell, rogue

~
sharp whir, levitating
mission: eradication

all the edges singing

all the clean all the blade, only the everything there, and not
                                                                                                              the not-

2.
o darling see this bed I have made you,
                                                                          so white

3.
what she was, under that tree, stack of books
at hand, was lonely (sole, not tragic, still:)
only, clear gone, tumbling
                                                into pages

4.
everything needed her

5.
and meanwhile, back to the cells, doing their job
perhaps a bit too well: look at them shine, O –

if foreign: eradicate
if possibly foreign: no chances
if only
~
                                                         O to be
perfect                 clear                   shot through
                                                                                  all silence in the piercing light

6.
because she read Plato at a tender age
because it feels like fixing
because if she does what they expect they will leave her alone
because the right slant of light
because something to push against

because annihilation

some pure beauty some glacier singing

7.
literally, no metaphorically, no literally

8.
{if in doubt, eradicate.     if skin, if swell, if possible
invader, encompass, wall off, flood
to inflame ::

              repeat

                                             better safe – }

than what? then
what? Some slip

past the bracket-gates, then –
                                                              what?

Lisa Gluskin Stonestreet

Dan Disney

Anne Elvey

The Abbott era already seems a far-off time of jihad on the ABC and the Human Rights Commission, death cults, three-word slogans, celebratory cigars, royal knighthoods, raw onions, and helicopter jaunts. To be reminded of it is to relive the 'tawdry nightmare – a male buddy film of singular fatuousness', to borrow Pankaj Mishra's dismissal of the West's post-Cold War political élite. Mishra could have been discussing the deposed captain of Team Australia. Future political historians might debate whether to place Tony Abbott in the fourth or fifth rank of prime ministers; by the end, Billy McMahon was his only serious rival as a prime ministerial figure of fun.

Wayne Errington and Peter van Onselen tell the story of this dismal era in Australian politics well in a compact and entertaining account. It is probably too early to relate this tale as tragedy, and they wisely do not try. In any event, perhaps Abbott will never be a sufficiently sympathetic character to make such a treatment work, such as in the manner of Warren Denning on James Scullin and his ill-fated Depression-era government in Caucus Crisis (1937).

The authors collaborated previously on a biography of John Howard (2007), who haunts this book's every page. Mentor as well as patron, Howard is also, very often, used as the point of comparison that underlines Abbott's failure. For a Rhodes Scholar with such generous opportunities to observe a political master at work, he was certainly a dull learner. Rather, Abbott remained a student politician, seeing in his prime ministership an opportunity to rub the noses of his enemies in the dirt, promote his friends and, as in his juvenile self-pleasuring over knighthoods, enjoy the thrill that comes to a Liberal Club president when he finally gains the keys to the student union.

Leading a government, however, is a more complicated business than getting the better of one's opponents at Sydney University. Prime Minister Abbott, unlike Howard, failed to establish an effective private office. In this, all roads lead to Peta Credlin, Abbott's chief of staff. The prime minister gave this fierce 'political warrior' much credit for getting him into power, but after the 2013 election victory she quickly enraged ministers and backbenchers alike. The problems with the style and substance of her political micro-management were magnified by her husband, Brian Loughnane, the Liberal Party's federal director.

The authors have interviewed a lot of people supposedly 'in the know' in reaching their conclusions about Credlin's critical role in Abbott's downfall, but feelings on this matter remain raw. The passage of time will probably result in the spotlight moving elsewhere. All the same, Abbott and Credlin were undoubtedly naïve in imagining that men and women capable of making it into federal parliament, ministerial office, and the cabinet would long tolerate being bossed by an unelected staffer. The government's declining popularity rapidly lowered their level of tolerance. Just possibly, as Abbott himself claimed publicly, that Credlin was 'Peta' and not 'Peter' added an edge to the resentment felt by some, but gender was not the whole story.

In one of the most thoughtful of the book's chapters, the authors point out that Abbott – notorious for a string of embarrassingly public comments over the years – generally managed to avoid casual sexism while prime minister. His confidence was shaken by the famous Julia Gillard 'misogyny' speech, but more recently he has, with a few exceptions, maintained an impressive personal discipline in refraining from permitting his mouth to run riot. They rather accuse Abbott of an 'unconscious bias' in matters of gender; a tendency to define merit in a way that necessarily marginalised women.

Here, the authors are perhaps bending a little too far in their efforts to be fair to their subject. There was nothing especially disciplined or restrained in the disgraceful aggression with which he attacked Gillian Triggs for doing her job, all carried out with a rhetorical violence that was unreconstructed male through and through, and debased the office of prime minister. Abbott's failure to register how this looked to voters, and especially women, speaks volumes about the quality of his judgement.

Quentin Bryce with the newly sworn in Abbott Ministry, 18 September 2013 (Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, via Wikimedia Commons)

Nor was there anything truly 'unconscious' about Abbott creating a cabinet with just one female member, or his willingness to reward proven mediocrity when it wore a suit and made noises of which he approved. There is a difference, too obvious to bother wasting words over although this never seemed to worry Abbott, between having independently minded women in your family, and appointing women to cabinet. But there is also a distinction to be made between a (female) staff member, such as Credlin, and a (male) minister of state. The former acts as a symbolic extension of the self; she exercises power in the name of a male authority. A minister's authority works differently; it is not mediated in the same way. To suggest that such distinctions are, for practical purposes, unreal, is to ignore the symbolic dimensions of politics. And one thing we do know about Abbott is that he was a man who took very seriously both formal hierarchy and the choreography of power. Remember all those flags? The knighthoods?

But if in explaining these kinds of matters we need to go back to a time long before Abbott ever entered parliament: for others we need to look more squarely at his period in opposition. It is hard to think of a federal leader who came to the prime ministership with as little recognisable constructive policy as Abbott did. This is why I seriously doubt the authors' contention that Abbott might one day be regarded by historians as the country's 'best ever opposition leader'. Opposition leaders need to do more than drag a government down; they also need to prepare themselves for office by developing good policy that expresses a coherent and attractive vision.

Abbott, the eternal oppositionist, with the help of a mainly co-operative media, was very effective in getting out a message that Labor was unfit to govern because of its dishonesty, incompetence, and (from 2010) minority status. But such rhetoric came back to haunt him when he brazenly broke his own promises and soon appeared dishonest and incompetent himself. And it eventually became clear that the quest that had earlier sent him in the direction of a political career, the defence of Western civilisation against an assortment of enemies that included Marxism, feminism, and homosexuality, could not easily be adapted to include Vladimir Putin, Islamic State, and Gillian Triggs.

Still, it looks like Abbott might remain with us for some time yet. He has recently turned his attention to whether a statue of Cecil Rhodes should be allowed to remain outside Oriel College, Oxford. And it is hard to think of anyone better suited, by experience and conviction, to lead the 'no' campaign in a referendum on same-sex marriage.

Late in 1998, the Times Literary Supplement, as was its wont, sent Randolph 'Mick' Stow a book for review. It was Xavier Herbert: A Biography (1998) by Francis de Groen, and Stow accepted the commission with enthusiasm. 'What a ghastly, embarrassing old pillock,' he wrote to his lifelong friend Bill Grono. 'Well, you'll soon read my opinion of him.' Stow's review tells a personal story of an encounter with Herbert at a 1963 supper party in Perth, and concludes that he liked Herbert even less by the end of the book than he did when he began it.

This story, recounted with a biographer's relish by Suzanne Falkiner near the end of her massive and admirable book, brings up questions about the reviewing of a literary biography. This task should be relatively straightforward: it should consider what research the biographer has done, what truths she or he has uncovered, what quality of analysis is brought to the assembled facts, how good the writing is, what contribution the book makes to literary scholarship, and whether it is, as we say in the reviewing trade, a Good Read.

There is something alluring about the publication of a lost or unknown literary manuscript. How will it fit into the author's body of work? Is it inferior to or better than the published work? Does it illuminate a hitherto unknown aspect of the author's thinking, or make you re-examine the known sequencing or themes? These questions were on my mind as I read Fear Is the Rider, a previously unpublished manuscript by Kenneth Cook, completed in the early 1980s and published for the first time by Text Publishing.

Cook is best known for his 1961 début novel, Wake In Fright (reissued by Text Publishing in 2001), a brutal depiction of drinking and masculinity in Australia's outback. On the strength of this work alone, Cook is regarded as one of the foremost exponents of the small but vibrant body of Australian 'gothic' literature, which, from the nineteenth century to the present, has focused on white Australia's alienated relationship with our harsher regions. Wake In Fright's popular status has much to do with Canadian director Ted Kotcheff's influential 1971 film of the same name.

Alexander von Humboldt, who died in 1859 at the age of eighty-nine, was not only the most famous scientist of his day but also one of the world's best-known figures. He met often with political leaders, from Thomas Jefferson in the new United States to King Friedrich Wilhelm III of Prussia, and he expanded outwards from his bases in Paris and Berlin to pursue various scientific expeditions, particularly across Latin America in 1800 and Russia in 1829, that changed our knowledge of the physical world. ('We have little knowledge of the Spanish colonies', Jefferson told Humboldt when they met in 1804, 'but through you.') Humboldt's 'adventures' are now celebrated in a new biography by Andrea Wulf, a freelance journalist who is the author of two books on gardening. The Invention of Nature is a well-written volume, with a nice eye for comic anecdotes, and it is certain to help restore Humboldt's claims on the public attention.

'Why do we write?' asks David Brooks at the start of this exhilarating collection of short stories. 'What are we groping for?' The entire collection seems like an attempt to answer a question that the author acknowledges is unanswerable. Yet there is no futility here. His groping, as he calls it, charms and disturbs and conjures up images of extraordinary, if fleeting, power.

As the publisher's blurb reminds us, Brooks's first short story collection, The Book of Sei (1985), was heralded as the most impressive début in Australian short fiction since Peter Carey's. While Brooks hasn't achieved Carey's fame, he has maintained a consistently striking output of literary fiction, non-fiction, and poetry. His 2007 novel The Fern Tattoo was shortlisted for the Miles Franklin award; another one, The Umbrella Club (2009), has been underrated: it has a Heart of Darkness sense of wonder.

There is wonder too in Napoleon's Roads, often with a dark heart. I am reminded of the Magritte painting of a pipe, with the caption 'Ceci n'est pas une pipe'. Don't look for conventional beginnings, middles or ends, or easily recognisable protagonists. These stories are more in the tradition of Borges and his followers: each one an exercise in extended metaphor, akin to essay or poetry, juxtaposing ideas in surreal and sophisticated patterns. As with the best metaphors, I am never sure what they stand for, but I respond readily to the moods they evoke.

One of the big attractions of this book is the portraits and self-portraits of the photographers who are its subject. Diane Arbus, in the early stages of pregnancy, looks whimsically at her reflection in a full-length mirror; Robert Mapplethorpe's face leaps out of the darkness, paired with his skull-topped walking stick; Margaret Bourke-White perches with her camera on a gargoyle on the sixty-first floor of the Chrysler building (she must have had an amazing head for heights).

The point of these photographs is to individualise and personalise the photographers Juliet Hacking would like her readers to know better. Hacking is based at Sotheby's Institute of Art in London, where she teaches the history of photography in the graduate program. As she explains in the book's introduction, her project is self-consciously art historical: she begins by referring to Giorgio Vasari's Lives of the Most Eminent Painters, Sculptors and Architects (1550), which for many marks the origin of the genre of artists' biographies. Hacking wants to rectify a situation that she suggests has persisted since the last quarter of the twentieth century, in which biography has been pushed to the margins because of 'its emphasis on interiority and singularity', and to re-introduce its pleasures to her readers. She also aims to counter what she considers the prevailing view that bio-graphy is 'anti-intellectual'. Curiously in light of this claim, her approach isn't particularly scholarly; it is reliant on published sources, both primary and secondary, and not, as she disarmingly points out, 'on original research'.

This is a timely and important book, a message of hope when human civilisation is on a metaphorical Titanic steaming toward an ecological iceberg, with the short-sighted or unprincipled throwing coal into the boilers. My heart sank when I saw the title. I expected more mindless cheer-mongering: blanket assertions of faith that human ingenuity and economic growth will solve all our problems. So it was reassuring to find in the introduction a description of Danish statistician Bjørn Lomborg as 'a 21st century snake-oil salesman who has made a lucrative career out of downplaying the world's environmental challenges'. Boyd notes that Lomborg's book The Skeptical Environmentalist (2001) was a bestseller despite its 'absurd arguments', attesting, he suggests, to 'a large appetite for good news, even when the underlying premises are false'. It was not surprising that the Abbott government wanted to bypass the peer review process and fund Lomborg, expecting him to support their blinkered policies. It was depressing to find managers at two Australian universities willing to risk their academic reputation by accepting the government money, until restrained by the outraged reactions of their own staff and graduates.

Speaking of the un-
spoken, jokes are a smoky
subspecies

This near-haiku is not so much a final definition of jokes as one definition of poetry. It shows up in Peter Goldsworthy's sequence 'Ars Poetica'. What he means is that the wordplay of jokes we make every day is a microcosm, a type and model of the more grandiose verbal surprise packages known as poems. By this measure, Goldsworthy himself is quite a joker. Quips, puns, quadruple entendres, comic allusions, irreverent cross-references, and punchlines are the very stuff of his poetry, oftentimes their driving force and final destination. Laconicism gets the better of him on a visit to the Uffizi: 'About babies they were mostly / wrong, the Old Masters, even / when they stuck wings on them.'

Satiric, benevolent, worldly, his humour conveys more serious intentions, always implies an inhabited culture, and is part of an achieved art. (Those lines expect that you know Auden's famous sonnet.) Irony, for example, can be a humorist's superhighway; it can also be a dead end. Dead end streets in Dublin are charmingly called culs-de-sac, nice self-satisfied corners going nowhere. Australia has the No Through Road. Peter Goldsworthy mistrusts irony. One time he stopped writing poetry altogether because everything was just coming out ironical. Admittedly, irony still glints and glows in Goldsworthy but it is not enough to strike while the irony is hot. Or string out the reader with one interminable comedy festival. Goldsworthy's solution, evident throughout this collection, is paradox.

At the very bottom of Hell, Dante represents Satan with three mouths, each of which endlessly devours a figure personifying treachery and rebellion against God. One of these, predictably enough, is Judas. What may be surprising to the modern reader is that the other two are Brutus and Cassius, the assassins of Julius Caesar. In the medieval vision of the universe and of human history, however, there was a direct equivalence between these individuals: one betrayed the Son of God, the other two attempted to frustrate His plan for the institution destined to govern the temporal life of humanity, namely the Roman Empire.

Should American academics boycott contact with Israeli universities in protest against events in Palestine? The issue has been fiercely debated at many American colleges, argued at meetings of the American Association of University Professors, dilated in the broader media. Those supporting a boycott, writes Stanley Fish in Think Again, rely on an expanded definition of the academic mission. Injustice demands action, and professors must act on their principles. Institutions that teach about justice and fairness should boycott Israel. Those opposed to a boycott annoy Fish with responses he judges as 'weak' because 'counterproductive or merely strategic'. Arguments that defend Israel, point to other countries with similar human rights controversies but not subject to boycotts, or suggest that critics risk being anti-Semitic, all miss the point. Fish is insistent – this issue dominates the chapters that close Think Again – the argument must turn on the nature of academic freedom.

Here Fish reaches for armoury developed in his influential Versions of Academic Freedom (2014). For Fish, academic freedom is a 'useful notion only if it is narrowly defined'. It is freedom to pursue scholarly investigation without interference, licence to do the job of an academic. The principle of academic freedom should not be beaten to airy thinness to cover everything that happens on campus. Events in Palestine are not the concern of the university, even if the subject engages passionately the political attention of some academics. To boycott Israeli academics is to trample their academic freedom, a move that cannot be justified by the same principle. (Fish is scrupulous enough to report commentary that acknowledges the conundrum. He quotes Omar Barghouti from the Journal of Academic Freedom, who argues there is a prior ethical responsibility to resist injustice, even if action injures academic freedom.)

Edna O'Brien, in a recent interview, recalled being stuck for a plot. It was a filmmaker's remark about Tolstoy that sparked her latest novel, The Little Red Chairs: '[Charlie McCarthy] said, "Tolstoy said there are only two great stories in the world. A Man on a Journey, or A Stranger Comes to Town." And at that moment I thought, I've got it. I'm going to bring a stranger with a past – not just a romantic stranger, but a stranger with a political past – to a small Irish town.' And this is what she has done. Weaving recent European history – the Balkan conflict of 1991–2001 – into the story of a woman's longing for a child that is biblical in its simplicity, O'Brien has written a novel of deception and savagery that is unflinching and monstrous and all too human.

The stranger, Vladimir Dragan, appears one evening in the picturesque backwater of Cloonoila, on Ireland's west coast. We see him beside the town's river where he contemplates its dangerous currents. When he enters a local hotel the barman is impressed by Dragan's long white hair and beard, his flowing coat, and his business card advertising services as a holistic healer and sex therapist. 'Your people have suffered injustice just as my people have,' Dragan tells him, linking the bloody history of Montenegro with that of Ireland. Soon 'Vuc' (the name means wolf in Serbian) is the object of fervent town gossip as he is spotted gathering woodland herbs and river pebbles for his East-meets-West healings. Business grows when he is given the all-clear by the open-minded Sister Bonaventure, who decides to test the waters with a hot stone session and duly melts under Dragan's firm manipulations.

At the back of the cupboard of old lies is a crusty one that goes like this: the essay is a lesser form of literature. Oddly, it is perpetuated in collections like Ariel Levy's The Best American Essays 2015, which – in its foreword by series editor Robert Atwan – bashfully admits that essays are the B-team of the writing world. 'The quintessential essayist', Atwan writes, 'parades an enormous ego and yet does so in a modest setting, that is, within a genre widely acknowledged to be unequal to fiction, poetry, and drama.'  This is silly and reductive snobbery, the same that holds anything in a non-realist genre – fantasy, science fiction – to be ineluctably 'commercial'. It is no different from failing to invite the neighbours to your Christmas party because you dislike the way they plant a shrubbery.

Atwan's anxiety stems, I suspect, from the fact that 'fiction' and 'non-fiction' in the American essay is a matter of arbitrary classification. The pieces here exemplify the American trend of literary non-fiction. Largely first-person memoir, written in a fictional style, these essays could be read as accomplished short stories, in the absence of confirmation that they are based in truth. Their supposed literary inferiority, one assumes, is because fiction is based on an invented premise, inhering 'creative genius', and the essay is not. But this is all a matter of degree. The best literary non-fiction – like these American essays – portrays real people and events with all the skill and toolbox of a novelist. And novelists – particularly realists – write fiction informed by careful observations of the world, human nature, and real events.

From time to time, Australian literature has been fortunate enough to attract the enthusiasm of international critics, from C. Hartley Grattan in the 1920s to Paul Giles, who compared Australian and American literature in his scholarly Antipodean America (2013). Nicholas Birns, a New York academic, tells us that he first encountered Australian writing back in the 1980s and has been a member of the American Association of Australasian Literary Studies since then, including a long period as editor of its journal, Antipodes. In 2014 he spent six months in Australia, reading widely and talking to writers and critics. His resulting study of contemporary Australian literature is more the record of a personal encounter with Australian writing than a scholarly reference book.

The subtitle may be disconcerting: 'A World Not Yet Dead' implies a world that is soon to be dead, possibly already moribund. But the implication is intended to go the other way, as a comment on the deadness of prevailing values outside literature. Birns frames his discussion as a critique of neo-liberalism, a term not much used in Australia, perhaps because liberalism has such a range of meanings and ambiguities. He suggests that it is a synonym for what Australians call economic rationalism – simply put, the valuing of all human effort in terms of money and profit, success and failure. It is a surprise to read literary criticism that invokes Thomas Piketty on the growing inequality in the world, but that is part of the idiosyncratic and personal nature of this book. Birns argues that writing – particularly contemporary Australian writing – is one of the last bulwarks against neo-liberal dominance. Imaginative writing, exemplified by the fiction and poetry he discusses, offers ways to 'conceive life differently than merely valuing one another by our financial conditions'.

To his critics, James Merrill was at best a petit maître, a composer of exquisitely manufactured lyrics that reflected his privileged life and over-refined sensibilities. When he won Yale's Bollingen Prize for Poetry, the editorial writer for The New York Times wearily deplored the judges' preference for 'literary' poets. This prompted a sharp response from the critic Helen Vendler, one of Merrill's major advocates, who pointed out that 'the poetry of the illiterate is as literary, of course, as the poetry of the literate, only more unconsciously so'. Mary Karr, in her anti-neo-formalism polemic 'Against Decoration', accused Merrill of deliberate obfuscation and reliance on the esoteric in order to awe impressionable readers. Merrill has often been described as Mozartian, but a more apt comparison is with his near contemporary Benjamin Britten, another homosexual artist whose technical facility was considered suspect and who was also accused of deliberately shielding himself from the cultural and political currents of his time.

In the foreword to his exhaustive biography, Langdon Hammer reminds us that one thing about Merrill that definitely cannot be considered derisory was his output. His Collected Poems, published in 2001, runs to 885 pages and this does not include his magnum opus, The Changing Light at Sandover (1982), the elephant in the room (to which we will come later), nor his novels, memoirs, plays, and letters. If Louise Bogan had a point when she described Merrill's early poems as being 'impeccably written, but everything about them smells of the lamp', as he matured as a writer substance was added to the surface sheen and emotional depths were plunged albeit in a restrained manner. But then, not every poet needs to howl. Much of the criticism seems to be based on two false assumptions: first, that technical facility produces facile work; second, that a life of privilege is somehow less genuine than one of disadvantage. Pace Mary Karr, a dysfunctional family in a mansion in the Hamptons is just as authentic as one in a blue-collar East Texas town.

Ever since the baby boomers hit middle age, the supposed gerontophobia of their youth has been sent back to them with interest. One-liners from the 1960s – such as Pete Townshend's 'I hope I die before I get old' and Jack Weinberg's 'Don't trust anyone over thirty' – have circulated in popular culture like ghostly refrains haunting an entire generation. Falling and Flying, an anthology of contemporary Australian poems on ageing, is explicitly presented as a resource 'for the baby-boomers who are approaching old age'.

Edited by a doctor–poet, Susan Ogle, and one of Australia's leading poets, Judith Beveridge, Falling and Flying is also illustrated by Richard Wu, a psychiatrist and artist. Any publisher that takes on poetry and ageing and illustration deserves our admiration. This project shows the importance of independent publishers to Australian literary culture. In this case, the raison d'être for the collection is also conspicuously functionalist for a work of poetry and visual art. In addition to addressing their collection to the baby boomer generation, the editors also present the anthology as a clinical resource 'for older people and their carers, doctors, medical students, health-care professionals, or indeed any student of medicine and life'.

In 2015 it was virtually impossible to set foot in Singapore without being exposed to the government-led 'SG50' campaign commemorating the island nation's fiftieth year of independence. All over the country the 'little red dot' logo appeared on everything from double-decker buses and A380s to festive Chinese moon cakes and special-edition Tiger Beer bottles. In reality, of course, Singaporean identity is far more complex than is communicable through any multi-million-dollar patriotic branding exercise – which is why Union was such a refreshing inclusion in the abundance of golden-jubilee-related products that surfaced last year.

A dual anthology of Singaporean writing from the past fifty years and of works from Drunken Boat (the New York-based electronic arts journal), Union was conceived at a panel discussion during the 2013 American Writers Festival in Singapore. During the talk, Drunken Boat founding editor Ravi Shankar and Singaporean poet–editor Alvin Pang were prompted to draw parallels between Singapore and the USA. The conversation eventually made it out of the festival and into the pages of Drunken Boat 's twenty-first issue in April 2015; later in the year, they released Union, a 640-page anthology on the same theme.

Crow is wild. His black eyes glint and his beak seems to smile. Malicious and mischievous, he sits in a living room with two boys and their father wrapped in his wings. The woman who was their mother and wife has died, leaving the family 'like Earth in that extraordinary picture of the planet surrounded by a thick belt of space junk'.

Crow is the titular bird of Ted Hughes's 1970 poetry collection. The father is writing a book about him that 'will reflect the subject. It will hop about a bit.' Grief is the Thing with Feathers reflects its subjects too: grief, firstly, but also the myth that Hughes built. And it does hop about, in a warp of prose and poetry that, like Crow, pays no heed to rules or sense. There is, for example, a certain carelessness with facts; this disorientation helps represent grief.

Michau-Crawford's accomplished début collection bears comparison to Tim Winton's impressionistic The Turning (2005) and Elizabeth Strout's Olive Kitteridge (2008), though Leaving Elvis is properly neither the portrait of place nor of a single character. The place might be any dilapidated small town in the wheat-belt region of Western Australia. The chronological stories follow the fortunes, or more aptly the misfortunes, of a family blighted by trauma, poverty, abuse, and silence.

In 'Getting on 1948', the patriarch Len returns from Changi prisoner of war camp. Reuniting with his wife and daughter should be a joyful affair, but it is clear Len has lost more than his foot in the war. He has come back 'alive but not the same', just like his father after World War I. As with his father before him, rage and alcohol are Len's poor defence against 'the night terrors'. History has a terrible habit of repeating itself, and reputations, once gained, are extremely difficult to live down. Scraps of information, which the characters are at great pains to conceal from society, each other, and even themselves, are meted out as sparingly as a thriller, and with the same effect of suspense.

James Ley states in the introduction to his book The Critic in the Modern World (2014) that the significance of a critic 'depends on their ability to position themselves in opposition to certain prevailing tendencies'. Given the widespread shrinkage of space allotted to theatre criticism in the digital age, John Lahr's considered long-form approach to the art could in itself stand as a refutation of prevailing tendencies. His pieces for the New Yorker, where he served as senior drama critic for a record twenty-one years, are a satisfyingly detailed form of biographical criticism which deliberately evoke Samuel Johnson's Lives of the Poets.

In Australia, Lahr is perhaps better known as a biographer than as a critic, having penned the unforgettable Prick Up Your Ears (1978) about English playwright Joe Orton, and the definitive biography of Tennessee Williams, Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh (2014). The son of actor Burt Lahr – the Cowardly Lion in MGM's The Wizard of Oz (1939) – Lahr fils came reluctantly to the position of theatre critic, and has consistently shirked the more bloodthirsty aspects of the role. Certainly, the writings that make up Joy Ride, profiles of playwrights and directors separated by a compilation of reviews, reveal a man more curious than condemnatory.

When Napoleon called England a nation of shopkeepers he claimed to have meant it as a compliment. Its grand resources were not constituted by extensive territories, natural resources, or a burgeoning population, but in the accumulation and dissemination of wares. In Portable Property: Victorian Culture on the Move (2008), John Plotz remarks that certain objects 'come to seem dually endowed: they are at once products of a cash market and, potentially, the rare fruits of a highly sentimentalized realm of value ... a realm defined by being anything but marketable'. David Cavanagh's Good Night and Good Riddance is the latest in a series of attempts to document the cultural legacy of one of England's most devoted and influential purveyors of rare fruits, the radio DJ and producer John Peel.

Peel presented shows across three decades, ranging from The Perfumed Garden in 1967 to Top Gear, Sounds of the Seventies, and The John Peel Show. Cavanagh listened to more than 500 recordings and surveyed more than 800 archived running orders. Not everything made the cut. The work is broken into three parts, with each segment identified by year. The components dealing with 1996–2003 proceed two years at a time, 'to give', as Cavanagh explains, 'the effect of the near past coming closer into view'. Each entry is helpfully date-stamped, the names of the artists and the show on which they featured set out in bold font. It is a dating app of a book, with most risks insured against in advance, rather than a powerful chance encounter which might put the reader in danger of too much excitement.

The history of country music in Australia is in many ways the history of the specialisation of a genre,' writes Toby Martin, explaining how the style evolved from copying the American singing-cowboy model of the 1930s to incorporating Australian bush ballads and staking a 'unique claim to national authenticity'.

Notions of authenticity are among the many lines of conventional wisdom that Martin picks apart in Yodelling Boundary Riders, the latest in the Australasian Music Research series from Lyrebird Press. Martin questions the rugged back-story of several country stars, and why such 'realness' is so valued.

In January 2016, Canadian Jessica Ernst had her day in court. Lawyers for the former oil industry insider debated whether she could sue the Alberta energy regulator over her claim that hydraulic fracturing had so badly contaminated her well that the water could be set on fire. This hearing in the Supreme Court of Canada is the latest chapter in Ernst's twelve-year battle against Alberta Environment, the Energy Resources Conservation Board (which has since become the Alberta Energy Regulator) and Encana, one of Canada's largest unconventional gas drillers. At the time of writing, the judgment was reserved, but if the Supreme Court finds in her favour, Ernst's case will resume.

An environmental consultant for some of North America's largest oil and gas companies, Ernst began to question Encana's operations in 2003 when she discovered the extent of drilling near her rural home north-east of Calgary. Concerned about the impact on her property, the local aquifer, and her community, she probed Encana's practices and found them to be illegal and underhand. When she turned to the province's energy regulator for help, the regulator tried to silence her, attacked her credibility, and branded her a security threat. Not to be intimidated, Ernst launched a multi-million-dollar lawsuit over fracking's contamination of her well water and the failure of government authorities to investigate the pollution. In Slick Water, Canadian journalist Andrew Nikiforuk shares Ernst's story and exposes the dark underbelly of the coal seam gas industry.

Twenty years before Katniss Everdeen competed in The Hunger Games (2008) and dominated the post-apocalyptic landscape, Elspeth Gordie went to Obernewtyn (1987) in her own ruined world. She would grow from orphan outcast to rebel conspirator and community leader, overthrowing religious and secular powers and carrying a darker fate as the Seeker who must save the world from a second nuclear holocaust. In The Red Queen, the seventh and final instalment in Isobelle Carmody's epic Young Adult fantasy series, Elspeth faces her destiny, cementing her place as one of fantasy's most pivotal female heroes.

Elspeth has a tendency to brood. Carmody is at her best when she snaps Elspeth out of it by thrusting her from one impossible task to the next. In The Red Queen, Elspeth doesn't have much left to do other than fulfil her role as Seeker, but her quest to save the world has never been as interesting as her ability to change it. With nothing left but to Seek, Elspeth spends most of her time worrying about what is going to happen or what has happened, and the result of her 'gnawing', as her feline companion refers to it, is a bloated narrative. The Red Queen is too long. Given that most of it is devoted to repetitious introspection and postulation, it didn't need to run to more than one thousand pages.

WHICH POETS HAVE MOST INFLUENCED YOU?

From North America: August Kleinzahler, Frank O'Hara, Ed Dorn, Denise Levertov, and Richard Brautigan. From Australia: John Forbes, Randolph Stow, and Gig Ryan. Also, Ambrose Bierce, James Thurber, Berke Breathed, and Rube Goldberg. Photographers Olive Cotton, Max Dupain, and Gary Winogrand; I am the son of a pro shutterbug bent on mountain lions and hummingbirds – naturally, I prefer smokestacks and necklines. Bombast from bands like Galaxie 500 and Gaslight Radio.

This updated and revised edition of Creating Poetry – first published by Edward Arnold in 1987, and then by Five Islands Press in 2001 – is one of few poetry guidebooks written by an Australian poet. One of its pleasing features is that it uses the work of Australian poets, including John Tranter, Geoff Page, Kevin Brophy, Meredith Wattison, Judith Wright, and many others. The final chapter gives a sobering account of the neglect of poetry by the media, readers, commercial publishers, and most booksellers in this country, as well as the way that poetry, in schools and universities, for the last few decades, has been thrown into a general mix of texts limited to post-structural linguistic readings. As Pretty says, 'If poets took all of this at face value, they might be inclined to slash their wrists – or at least become accountants.' But the overall tenor of the book is a celebration of the power of poetry, its ability to help both reader and writer to uncover meanings and to develop and enjoy a passionate relationship with language.

One of the difficulties of writing a book such as this is finding the right pitch for the intended audience. This is very much a manual for beginning poets and their teachers. Pretty is careful to set out guidelines for teachers. The book aims to help those who have some resistance and reluctance in approaching poetry. In this regard, Creating Poetry may be of less value for more innovative and creative teachers and students who have a better working knowledge of poetry. But for those whose experience is limited, it is a rich resource and takes pains to present poetry in ways that are straightforward and enjoyable.

In their very different ways, these three collections attest that contemporary Australian poetry is alive, robust, and engaging.

Puncher and Wattmann have delivered a generous collection of Martin Langford's most recent poems, Ground ($25 pb, 158 pp, 9781922186751). As we have come to expect from Langford, the voice we find here is strong – passionate and intellectual, intense and political. The collection begins with a section titled 'Achronicas' – meaning out of time, or pulling in a different direction to the chronological impetus of story. However, the evocative lyricism of the opening poem 'Dragonfly', where the 'layers of rock to the southwest of Sydney / were tilted and raised in as long as it takes / for a dragonfly's flight to change tack', initiates the collection's movements between the lateral suggestiveness of the lyric and the linear impetus toward narrative. Langford boldly uses poetry to segue in and out of time, challenging us with story while also creating a non-temporal thinking-feeling space.

Visiting Australia in November 2011, President Obama announced plans for the deployment of United States marines to a Darwin base. The decision to establish a permanent American military presence in northern Australia, taken with the support of Prime Minister Julia Gillard and the Australian government, was part of the 'pivot' to Asia in US defence policy. The idea for this book emerged from the public conversation that followed the announcement: to the surprise of both authors, the discussion included few references to the US Naval Communication Station established in 1963 at North West Cape in Western Australia. For thirty years, US governments had regarded the station, which enabled communication with US submarines in the Indian and Pacific oceans, including nuclear armed submarines, as vital to the prosecution of the Cold War and American defence policy generally.

While Barker and Ondaatje explain how the station emerged from the Australian–American alliance, this is essentially a history of people rather than a book about strategy or technical matters. The authors focus on the men and women who staffed the station and founded the town of Exmouth, conceived to support the US military presence at remote North West Cape.

Mark Latham – former columnist for the Australian Financial Review, former 'special correspondent' for Sixty Minutes, former federal leader of the Australian Labor Party – wasn't the only politician to keep a diary. Writing in The Latham Diaries (2005) – a book most politicians and apparatchiks approach via the index – Latham revealed that we have Stephen Loosley, the ex-heavyweight of the New South Wales right, to thank for his scabrous farewell to politics. 'When I first went to Canberra,' Latham wrote, 'I noticed that Senator Stephen Loosley took notes and kept a diary at Caucus meetings. I decided to adopt a similar practice.'

Sadly, Machine Rules is a major disappointment. Loosley is a former senator, general secretary of the New South Wales branch, and national president of the ALP. He has also spent the past twenty years as a well-connected corporate lawyer and enjoyed a close relationship with the Murdoch empire. Loosley knows how politics and power work in Canberra and Sydney, political party rooms and boardrooms, public and private. Why, then, did he put his name to such a damp squib of a book? Few secrets are revealed, fewer insights proffered, and hardly a toe is trod upon. Instead, Loosley, who retired from political life twenty years ago, trots out a conga line of stale stories, bad jokes, and platitudinous references to mates both political and corporate.

Imagine a child falling ill. Her fever worsens. Becoming paralysed, she screams in pain. Rushed to hospital, she is separated from her family for months. She undergoes agonising treatments: strapped in splints, encased in plaster, weeping as her limbs are stretched on rack-like machines. She may be encased in an 'iron lung' to breathe, like a coffin with her head poking out. She yearns to return home. When she does, steel rods are bolted onto her legs. Shunned as a 'cripple', she takes for granted that she will never work, never marry.

That story was repeated tens of thousands of times in the twentieth century as polio epidemics swept across Australia and the rest of the world. The horror they inspired was amplified by the fact that medical authorities had little idea what caused polio, how it spread, or how to treat it effectively. How do you respond when faced with such a terrifying situation? This was the existential dilemma faced by characters in Camus's novel The Plague (1947). How did Australia react when faced with a similar but real-life plague, poliomyelitis?

In The Simplest Words, Alex Miller's recently published work on his own journey through country, writing, love, friendship, and fatherhood, there is a remarkable scene of levitation. Miller describes his young daughter soaring up his own bookshelves, past the spines of The Heart of Europe, The Cambridge History of English Literature, A Dream of Red Mansions, Voss. This is not magic realism; his child is not afloat in the air. It's a game between father and daughter: she is pretending not to see him, and he is lifting her purposely rigid body by the elbows; lifting her strongly into the zone of books, while explaining to her that, really, she is too big to lift. I imagine the steady euphoria of this child, delivered up into a higher-than-adult perspective of her father's study. Love and trust, two words that recur frequently in Miller's account of his life, are evident in this description of cherished books and a cherished child.

The Simplest Words is a collection of excerpts from Miller's fiction and reflections on his life and beliefs, chosen and introduced by his wife, Stephanie Miller. The pieces form a cumulative account of the substantial intellectual and creative contribution of Alex Miller, who was born in a South London council estate where 'our caste knew nothing of flight, real or lyrical', and whose life and ideas resist confinement.

Kankawa Nagarra Olive Knight is a leader in the Wangkatjungka community, south-east of Fitzroy Crossing in the Kimberley. For The Bauhinia Tree, her eventful seventy-year life story was recorded by Terri-ann White, then 'transcribed and refined' by White and Kankawa Knight. While the material has been edited to remove hesitations and interventions, the oral quality has been retained. The conversational style is intimate and engaging; the cumulative effect is of a generous, pragmatic woman.

The Bauhinia Tree tells of the threat to Kankawa Knight's life at birth – this was because her father was 'half-caste' – her upbringing among the Gooniyandi and Walmatjarri peoples, and her education in Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal traditions and languages. Her strong Christian faith is described, as is the concern with country and the rights of its people. These two passions inform important elements of the book: trainings in community health, and in translating and interpreting; activism in the areas of substance abuse and foetal alcohol spectrum disorder; and a burgeoning career as a gospel blues singer.

Melbourne-based 'attack journal', The Lifted Brow, has gone through another evolution. Once teetering on the edge of the defunct-journal abyss, it was reborn in 2015, phoenix-like, bigger and better than ever. The earlier newspaper-style format has been replaced by a quality A4 magazine. There have been some changes going behind the scenes too, with a new editorial team: Stephanie Van Schilt, Ellena Savage, and Gillian Terzis. Although this, The Art Issue, shows that some things haven't changed: The Lifted Brow remains a fresh and exciting platform for emerging and established voices from Australia (mostly) and overseas.

While the journal has always had a literary bent, it has maintained an interest in art and design. This issue tips the scales in the latter's favour – ever so slightly. Krissy Kneen details the similarities of crafting visual art and literature in her essay, 'The Elements and Principles of Designing a Book'. There is a touching piece on the notion of 'Formless' in Elizabeth Caplice's 'Vile Bodies', the writer exploring how her art practice and terminal illness have become intertwined. Sophie Allan's standout piece is an essay in three parts, each linked by the themes of photography and longing. The Chris Krauss round-table discussion is perfect for this issue; Krauss's art-world novel, I Love Dick, is now starting to find a wide readership almost ten years after it was first published. Perfect, if somewhat inaccessible for those unfamiliar with her work.

WHY DO YOU WRITE?

Because otherwise I wouldn't know what I think. Besides, I haven't proved much use at anything else.

ARE YOU A VIVID DREAMER?

Yes, I sometimes dream such hilarious plots that I wake laughing. But when I try to write them down they have an inconvenient habit of vanishing.

WHERE ARE YOU HAPPIEST?

At a particular beach on the New South Wales south coast; in an evening garden with a friend and a glass of wine; at home.

Porter Prize

Five poems have been shortlisted in the 2016 Peter Porter Poetry Prize. The poets are Dan Disney, Anne Elvey, Amanda Joy, Lisa Gluskin Stonestreet, and Campbell Thomson; their poems can be read here. The judges on this occasion were Luke Davies, Lisa Gorton, and Kate Middleton.

Join us at our studio in Boyd Community Hub on Wednesday, 9 March (6 pm), when the poets will introduce and read their works, followed by the announcement of the overall winner, who will receive $5,000 and an Arthur Boyd print. This is a free event, but reservations are essential.

These ceremonies always commence with a series of readings of poems written by Peter Porter (1929–2010). This year our readers – Judith Bishop (winner in 2006 and 2011), Morag Fraser, Lisa Gorton, and Peter Rose among them – may choose to dip into the new collection of late Porter poems: Chorale at the Crossing (Picador, $24.99 pb).

Peter Porter

States of Poetry

ABR's poetry content continues to expand. To complement the Porter Prize, monthly poems and reviews, and our Poem of the Week podcast, we are delighted to introduce States of Poetry, the first federally arranged poetry anthology project to be published in this country. With handsome support from Copyright Agency's Cultural Fund, each year we will publish individual state and territory anthologies intended to highlight the quality and diversity of contemporary Australian poetry. The full States of Poetry anthologies will appear free of charge on our website, with poems, biographies, recordings, and introductions from our state editors. Each month we will publish a selection in the print edition. South Australia is the mini-anthology to be printed in the print edition while the first full anthology to be published online is ACT, which you can find here. 

Renting a guillotine

Harper's Magazine carried, in its January issue, a list of queries submitted to the New York Public Library's Reference and Research Services between 1940 and 1989. Here are some examples: 'Where can I rent a guillotine?'; 'Who built the English Channel?'; 'Is it proper to go alone to Reno to get a divorce?'; 'Is this where I ask questions I can't get answers to?'

Whenever we advertise one of our literary prizes, we feel for those librarians. Entrants pose the curliest questions. A few instances will serve. 'Does a short story have to be fiction?' 'What is fiction?' 'Do the spaces in my poem count as lines?' 'Can I enter online but send my story by post?' 'If I published my essay online but no one read it, does that count as publication?'

With the Jolley Prize open until 11 April, we look forward to fielding lots of metaphysically elevated if possibly unanswerable questions.

Gwen Harwood

Gwen Harwood

A footnote to our December lament about the paucity of Australian literary biographies. Brandl & Schlesinger, that enterprising Sydney publisher, has issued Gwen Harwood's Idle Talk: Letters 1960–1964, edited by Alison Hoddinott, the recipient, with her husband, of these brilliant missives. No one wrote like Harwood. Her account in 1961 of the furore that followed the Bulletin's unwitting publication of her two famous acrostic sonnets (SO LONG BULLETIN; and FUCK ALL EDITORS) contains some ferocious comic writing quite worthy of Evelyn Waugh, none better than Harwood's transcript of a conversation with the Bulletin's embattled Desmond O'Grady.

Only three letters survive from 1960. Alison Hoddinott records a late conversation with Harwood in 1995 who became annoyed when her friend confessed that she had burned the other letters, at Harwood's request. 'You shouldn't have taken any notice of me,' Harwood replied. 'Writers always say that. They don't mean it.'

Quite right: if authors really want to destroy their private papers, they stoke the incinerator, like Henry James.

Her majesty's pleasure

Prime ministerial post-mortems can be absorbing, and Aaron Patrick's Credlin & Co.: How the Abbott Government Destroyed Itself (Black Inc., $29.99 pb) is entertaining. The author repeats one claim that, to our surprise, didn't gain much traction in the weeks after Abbott's defeat. Greg Sheridan, reliably close to Abbott, suggested in The Australian that Abbott gave Philip his knighthood 'because he learned the Queen wanted her husband to have one'.

The British monarchy can be accused of many things, but in this case Aaron Patrick's reading seems plausible: 'Sheridan's article could not be verified: Buckingham Palace would never answer a question about the Queen's wishes for her husband. The article sounded like after-the-fact justification.' Of which we can expect to hear much more this year, especially from the Malcontents.

Aaron Patrick, like many scribblers, chooses to dedicate the book to the 'love of his life'; but in an Author's Note he also remembers Roger East, the journalist who was murdered by Indonesian troops in Dili in 1975. Royalties from Credlin & Co. will be donated to a fund honouring the Balibo Five, who perished shortly before East did. Impressively, this fund will help train East Timorese journalists in Australia.

ABR RAFT Fellowship

Alan Atkinson

Interest was high in the inaugural ABR RAFT Fellowship, which examines the role and significance of religion in society and culture. Alan Atkinson was chosen from a large and impressive field. He is Emeritus Professor of History, University of New England, and Senior Tutor and Fellow at St Paul's College, and Honorary Professor, University of Sydney. Professor Atkinson, an occasional contributor to ABR, is the author of several award-winning books, including his three-volume magnum opus, The Europeans in Australia.

Alan Atkinson's proposal began, timelily, 'Can a nation, Australia especially, make an effort, just to be good?' We can't wait to publish his Fellowship article, whose working title is 'How Do We Live with Ourselves? The Australian National Conscience'.

We thank everyone who applied for the ABR RAFT Fellowship, and hope to present a second one in 2017.

ABR Laureate's Fellow

Michael Aiken

ABR Laureate David Malouf has chosen Sydney poet Michael Aiken as the inaugural ABR Laureate's Fellow. These Fellowships are intended to advance the work of a younger writer admired by the Laureate. Michael Aiken, who lives and works in Sydney, receives $5,000. He was born in western Sydney and raised on the New South Wales central coast. Michael Aiken spent thirteen years working in the security industry. His book A Vicious Example (Grand Parade, 2014) was shortlisted for the 2015 Kenneth Slessor Prize. His poetry and prose have appeared in various journals in Australia and overseas. Michael is working on a narrative poem, part of which ABR will publish in due course.

Hazel Rowley Fellowship

Shannon Burns's ABR Fellowship profile of Gerald Murnane ('The Scientist of His Own Experience', ABR, August 2015) was admired by many, including Text Publishing, which has commissioned him to write Murnane's biography. Shannon Burns has also been shortlisted for the 2016 Hazel Rowley Literary Fellowship. He is one of nine biographers on the shortlist, and the competition is keen. Others include Jacqueline Kent (for a biography of Robert Helpmann), Jeff Sparrow (Paul Robeson), and Philip Dwyer (Napoleon Bonaparte).

The Rowley Fellowship, now in its fifth year and worth $10,000, commemorates the life and work of one of Australia's finest biographers, Hazel Rowley (1951–2011). The intention is to encourage travel and risk-taking – of which Hazel would have emphatically approved. The winner will be announced on 9 March.

Marathons and Prepositions

Few editors write books (they're not meant to have time for such frivolities). Even fewer run marathons (or break into a jog, in our experience). Catriona Menzies-Pike – editor of the Sydney Review of Books – is an exception. Her first book, The Long Run, is described as 'a personal and cultural memoir about why women run' (Affirm Press, $29.99 pb). One of Menzies-Pike's reasons for doing so was the death of her parents in a light plane crash when she was twenty. Those early losses are described in dignified, telling prose, with a moving description of revisiting the family home in Albury soon after the accident, only to find it barred.

The editor in Catriona Menzies-Pike is never sedentary for long: 'To map the meaning of any kind of run, we need to pay attention to the prepositions.'

Vale John Hirst

Distinguished historian and author John Hirst has died, aged seventy-three. For almost four decades he taught history at La Trobe University, always eschewing a Chair and preferring to remain Reader in History. His prose was impeccable, his scholarship highly influential. ACU Vice-Chancellor Greg Craven has described him as 'one of the greatest historians this country has had'.

John Hirst's frequent contributions to ABR began with the current Editor's first issue in 2001. The pair had worked on several books for Oxford University Press in the 1990s, including A Republican Manifesto in 1994 (Hirst was a founding convenor of the ARM in Victoria). With Graeme Davison and Stuart Macintyre, Dr Hirst co-edited The Oxford Companion to Australian History (1998). After retiring from La Trobe University in 2006, he continued to publish books aimed at an enquiring general audience. These included The Shortest History of Europe (2009) and Australian History in 7 Questions (2014).

The new Children's Laureate

Leigh Hobbs (photograph by Sergion Fontana)

Bestselling author and illustrator Leigh Hobbs – creator of the inimitable characters Horrible Harriet, Mr Chicken, and Old Tom – has been named as the new Australian Children's Laureate for 2016–17, succeeding writer Jackie French. Hobbs intends to use his term 'to champion creative opportunities for children, and to highlight the essential role libraries play in nurturing our creative lives'.

The Australian Children's Laureate initiative was developed by the Australian Children's Literature Alliance with the aim of promoting the importance of reading, creativity, and story in the lives of young Australians.

OPEN LETTER TO THE PRIME MINISTER AND MINISTER FOR IMMIGRATION AND BORDER CONTROL

Dear Prime Minister and Minister Dutton,

As writers committed to protecting and defending human rights, and as citizens of conscience, we the undersigned wish to express our deep abhorrence of the ongoing mistreatment of refugees in Australia's offshore detention centres.

As writers, we are called in our work to engage imaginatively and empathically with the fundamental issues of our time. In so doing we are acutely conscious of the human impact of historical events, and attuned to those individuals whose stories have been repressed and silenced. As one of many countries engaged with the global refugee crisis, Australia is today confronted with the most profound questions about the sanctity of human life, the safeguarding of human dignity and the limits of anguish.

Brian Johns, who died in Sydney on New Year's Day, was a remarkable man, a great friend to many, and a great enabler. His family came to Sydney from Queensland in 1947, and at the age of sixteen Brian entered St Columba's Seminary. After three years he left and went to Canberra to become a journalist. It was the start of a career marked by his passion for providing increased opportunity to Australian writers, artists, filmmakers, television makers, and creators of all kinds. In doing so he became, as Ed Campion said at Brian's funeral, 'the champion of a better Australia'.

Everything Brian did during a successful period in the press drove him deeper and deeper into politics and the arts. He had two great strengths to smooth his path: he was a consummate strategist and he was straight as a die with everyone he met. His currency was ideas: he loved the rigorous examination behind every creative project and loved even more enabling them to fly.

Leaving journalism in 1974 to work with the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet fed his insights into the importance of proper strategy and policy. This was followed in 1979 by a legendary period as publishing director of Penguin, where his strategy was greatly to increase the market presence of Australian books.

That same intense creativity was put to work at SBS when he became managing director in 1987. He was the right leader to build new strategic meaning into an already powerful Charter. He appointed me Head of Television. With a passionate staff, we delivered high-quality programming from all over the world and in almost every language. SBS TV became the proud face of multiculturalism. Both in radio and television, SBS offered new opportunities for new Australian program makers. It was during those years that all of us at SBS got to know Brian's wife, Sarah, the centre of his life and a great supporter of SBS.

In 1992 Brian was asked to chair the Australian Broadcasting Authority, which supervised the regulation of the Commercial Television and Radio networks. He now had hands-on experience of both public and commercial broadcasting and was a natural choice for the position of managing director of the ABC in 1995. Under-standing the massive change that digital technology signalled, in 1996 he announced a complete restructure of the ABC. Before he went to the ABC, we had wrangled ideas about public broadcasting in a digital world. Brian asked me to supervise the National Networks (Radio, Television, and Online) and to shape them into a single creative entity. The whole restructure was a huge and often painful task for ABC staff. The pain was exacerbated by a massive and needless cut to the ABC's budget by the Howard government. But the change succeeded in placing the ABC far ahead of the commercial broadcasters in the introduction and development of digital content. The work, however, was never completed. In 2000, Brian left the ABC and was replaced by Jonathan Shier. Brian maintained the drive for Australian content and sat on a variety of boards, most notably that of Copyright Agency. He never stopped mentoring, advising, and challenging creative people.

Seamus Heaney in one of his essays described a work of creative imagination as being one in which conflicting realities find accommodation within a new order. That was an outcome Brian Johns delivered several times over to the benefit of all Australians.

Andy Lloyd James

All editors dream of working with managing directors of culture and goodwill. Kerryn Goldsworthy, who edited ABR in 1986–87 with distinction, was fortunate enough to work with Brian Johns, who was Chair from 1984 to 1987 (he had served on the Board since 1982). Kerryn recalls her somewhat novel recruitment. The pair had never met, but Brian offered Kerryn the job because he had admired a sentence in one of her book reviews. 'One sentence,' she told me. 'How or why he thought this qualified me to edit the magazine remains a mystery to me even now. But this was typical of his generosity and optimism. He'd take a punt on anyone.'

As a young publisher myself, I knew of Brian Johns – the legend of Ringwood – but I didn't meet him until many years later. This was soon after the Copyright Agency (of which he was then Chair) enabled us, through its Cultural Fund, to create the Calibre Prize for an Outstanding Essay in 2007. Over a series of excellent lunches and dinners, I came to know Brian as a singular presence in our culture – affable, immensely shrewd and well-connected, always interested in results.

Brian served on the board of Copyright Agency for thirteen years and chaired it from 2004 to 2009.

Copyright Agency funded the Calibre Prize for six years: now it stands on its own feet, as was intended. Other support followed. Reading Australia – which presents about 200 essays on key Australian texts – is a testament to his vision, his imagination, his concern. ABR is delighted to be publishing twenty of them. Brian Johns knew that if we endlessly fawn over the new at the expense of past treasures we will diminish our culture and deprive young readers and writers of a full appreciation of Australian culture.

Australian Book Review – just one of thousands of organisations and artists that benefited from Brian Johns's support – salutes this Titan of ideas and culture.

Peter Rose