The history of my onomastic apprehension and misapprehension about the big thing in the middle of Australia: It is called Ayers Rock. No, it is Uluru. I am pronouncing Uluru incorrectly. It is wrong to use the name Uluru. It's not even called Uluru anyway. I do not know what to call it.

Which is also my own progression, in microcosm: initial awareness; learning; evaluation and relearning; doubt and uncertainty; uncomfortable unknowing. The definite child who became an often adamantine young man has ceded the stage to a muddler who knows less each day. An experience far from unique that could be styled, beautifully, as 'through infancy's unconscious spell, boyhood's thoughtless faith, adolescence' doubt ... then scepticism, then disbelief, resting at last in manhood's pondering repose of If'.

That is Herman Melville, in Moby-Dick. The first time I read his mad swirling novel was in Darwin. It was a hardback edition with thick deckle-edged pages that seemed to swell in the humidity. Now it travels with me as an eBook. There is no rule that says your vade mecum cannot be digital. I am reading it now on my tablet in the shallows of a central desert summer, bewildered by the reverberance between the novel (so capacious it felt like traversing a new land) and the landscape (as overwhelming and provocative as any novel).

That is what you want to write. An elegant piece bouncing coincidences between the two monoliths, book and rock. Deft and resonant.

I travel to the Centre a few times every year. Sometimes I arrive in good shape. Not always, and not now. Where I stay has no television, no radio, and the internet is intermittent. This is a good thing. When I've been in the city, sometimes, listing like a ship in a storm, timbers groaning, coming apart at every nail – the central desert can be safe harbour. I spend time near the great red rock, and it usually helps. If you are seeking an anchor, you may as well make it a big one.

I call the rock The Rock. Or nothing. The other day I asked one of the most senior traditional owners what she calls it. She said 'puli' – Pitjantjatjara for a rock or a hill. That is, any rock or hill. I said whitefellas like me think we are doing the right thing by calling it Uluru, and I was careful to pronounce it correctly, stress on the first syllable, tongue towards hard palate for the retroflex 'r'. She didn't say anything, just laughed. It sounded like wind through spinifex. She is an important woman, not old in Western terms, but her health is failing. She now lives in aged care. Telling me about it, she rubbed at a place above her heart.

Uluru, 2009 (photograph by Michael Winkler)

The man I ask when I want to know things explains that the word Uluru is not used because it is 'Kunmanara', being the name of the dead father of another traditional owner. (When a person dies, their name becomes Kunmanara for an amount of time, meaning it is culturally inappropriate to use. How much time? That is a perfect whitefella question. The perfect Anangu answer is, 'an amount of time', although that would never be explicitly verbalised, but conveyed by a shrug or a few words that say without saying.)

The people and the land are indivisible, but this anabranch is not where you want to paddle. Plus, a trillion words have been written about white excursions into black Australia. It's the big story of this country, yes, but it's beyond passé.

It seems, however, that Uluru is not the name of The Rock anyway. I think I have been told where Uluru actually is. If that information is correct, it is a specific place not much bigger than a blanket. Is it possible that at some future time I will find out that this is also incorrect? Yes, it is more than possible. I have learned to understand knowledge – leastwise, my knowledge – as malleable, slippery, temporal. As far as I can ascertain, there are some very important sites at The Rock, but all in all it is only reasonably significant to Anangu. There are places to the west and the south that are more important, and it is a source of surprise and relief to Anangu that millions of visitors funnel in to look at the big red icon and leave more sacred areas relatively well alone.

The local kids call the tourists who climb The Rock 'ants'. I don't know if it is because they look like ants as they climb, or if it is an expression of contempt for outsiders making the ascent in direct contravention of clearly articulated Anangu wishes. I doubt the kids have contempt for ants – they certainly like eating honey ants – but I am frequently surprised by the terms they use when slinging off. When they see 'ants' on the rock, they often give a short laugh. Do I know what these Pitjantjatjara-speaking teenagers are thinking? No, I haven't a clue. What I do know is that they belong here, without contradiction, and they know they belong.

John Lardner wrote that French-Senegalese boxer Battling Siki, 'lived as a man without kin or country, roots or guides, and that, it seems to me, is a hard way to do it'. Siki lived on three continents and won a world title before being murdered at twenty-eight in 1925. I have moved little, geographically or otherwise. And yet. I grew up in a small town where I was intermittently unhappy. I was born in a different small town. Neither is my home. My identity existed more in my head than in relationships, except with my family. When I was twenty, deracinated in Sydney, almost inert, someone organised for me to see a psychiatrist. The original diagnosis, schizophrenia, was corrected the following year to endogenous depression, an old term for an old affliction. The schizophrenia designation never tallied with the way I understood myself, but of course that could have been an artful contradiction inherent in that mendacious illness.

However, the word 'depression' was a snug fit. Hard to believe now that the idea of depression as a definable condition was foreign to me then. I knew the term 'nervous breakdown' from childhood, knew it was something pitiful and maybe shameful, and had never drawn a connection to myself. But depression sounded right, a fitting word for the drab remorseless bastard that was throttling me. John Cade, the giant of Australian psychiatry, called depression 'the most painful illness known to man'. It is not a contest; I do not need my pain to be worse than yours. But as with many sufferers, my pain has intermittently seemed unendurable. I nod knowingly when Captain Ahab begs, '"can ye smoothe out a seam like this, blacksmith", sweeping one hand across his ribbed brow; "if thou could'st, blacksmith, glad enough would I lay my head upon thy anvil, and feel thy heaviest hammer between my eyes."' I have spent half of my life on medication, a peculiarly modern experience. I am one member of a strange and growing troupe that has not previously existed: those who might not be alive save for psychopharmacological intervention.

Uluru with star time-lapse (photograph by Michael Winkler)

Okay, so now this is about your madness? Everyone you know has either suffered from, or cared for someone with, mental illness. Perhaps the only topic more clichéd than traversing Australia's interior is traversing the interior of your own diseased mind.

I have had psychotic episodes where I have lost all knowledge of who I am. Those periods without any concept of self are my personal definition of horror, reminiscent of something David Foster Wallace wrote in a different context: 'the oblique terror of a game whose rules are unknown and its stakes everything.' I was a religious teenager, and when I lost that belief I invested heavily in politics as a source of guidance. That faith proved even flimsier. My outlook now is bewildered agnosticism about most things, a workable standpoint when my mind is right, but dangerously rootless when the winds of insanity are blowing.

So your own psychotic episodes revolve within the greater wheel of existential ambiguity. Surprising you haven't contrived it the other way round. You are dancing swiftly towards the grandiose.

Perhaps it is not my outlook alone. I meet a number of whitefellas (the Pitjantjatjara 'Piranpa' is a gentler word) who feel the same equivocation about their place in this country. I was born here, I am not leaving, but it does not belong to me by birthright. When I am grasping for something firm to hold onto, a fixing point of identity, I cannot cling to my country. While I care deeply about Australia, I don't like our flag or our anthem or our jingoism. Nor do I rally to cries of Reconciliation – a nonsense, since there was no conciliation in the first place. My attachment to Australia is a deeply conflicted affair, brought into sharper relief by spending time with Anangu near The Rock, amplifying my feelings of simultaneous connection and disconnection.

Can we leave the abstract and revisit The Rock? If you are making this about place, at least try to give a scrap of it.

In the accidie of a central desert December, not much moves. A few slow vehicles. Maybe the tittuping head of a gecko or a central netted dragon. The heat is remorseless, but I am hoping it will cauterise my illness. While the coast is traditionally associated with renewal, the tidal flush-clean, there is an ancient time frame here, deep geological time, which says: even you can be remade; it will only take forever.

That is the fibre of hope that, along with the clever concoctions of Pfizer and Eli Lilly and others, keeps me vertical. Where does hope come from? The same place as the legless lizard, the gracefully swaying desert oak, the colours in the dirt at either end of the day; which is to say, I have no answers.

Late in his life, Manning Clark wrote, 'Sometimes when I stand in the Australian bush on a clear windless day, I am visited with strange thoughts ... I wonder whether I belong ... I am ready, and so are others, to understand the Aboriginal view that no human being can ever know heart's ease in a foreign land, because in a foreign land there live foreign ancestral spirits. We white people are condemned to live in a country where we have no ancestral spirits. The conqueror has become the eternal outsider, the eternal alien.'  I accept the incorrect diagnosis of schizophrenia because the schisms in my self must have been so prominent. The psychiatrist mapped the terrain accurately, but placed it on the wrong continent. As within, so without. Divisions, fissures, disruptions, contradictions. It is a perverse twist that the people most truly citizens of this country have a less-than-equal place in the body politic. Conversely, someone like me, replete with personal and political power, remains an intruder in the land of my birth.

Toula Nicolacopoulos and George Vassilacopoulos have analysed this disconnectedness: 'Unable to retreat from the land we have occupied since 1788, and lacking the courage unconditionally to surrender power to the Indigenous peoples, white Australia has become ontologically disturbed.' They argue that, 'the white Australian national imaginary has produced a story through which to "restore" the ontological balance of white Australian being and to alleviate the anxiety associated with its onto-pathological condition. This is the story of "the perpetual-foreigner-within".' This tallies with my field observations, but it also speaks to the bifurcation within my own self.

So, a shimmy from the personal to the universal, with yourself neatly foregrounded. It is fine to tear your hair in public, but is there anything you are prepared to give? Manning Clark also wrote, 'we must become assimilated or live the empty life of a people exiled from their spiritual strength'. What a wild idea, that a member of the dominant group should submit to assimilation.

I have worked in Indigenous-linked areas for most of this century without edging closer than the periphery. I am and am not the species that academic Emma Kowal calls the 'white anti-racist' (WAR), endemic in the remotest parts of the continent. (Her chosen term chimes with that coined several years earlier by Teju Cole, 'The White-Savior Industrial Complex'. Cole's devastating critique was, 'All he sees is need, and he sees no need to reason out the need for the need.' If he spent some time with Australian WARs, I have no doubt Cole's X-ray mind would ascertain the inner need that propels these bleeding hearts.) I care, and I despair, but have never truly put my self on the line. I was convinced and disheartened by Peter Sutton's arguments in The Politics of Suffering. Sutton called the welfare-manic blandishments of the well-meaning 'a sustaining fiction, one perhaps defended at times on the grounds that the masses cannot handle the subtlety of the truth and are inclined to simplicitudes.' I now believe that do-gooders like me are undermining Indigenous agency. My people are hugging those people to death.

And yet, there are still children eligible for schooling, old people wanting medical care, a bulk of Indigenous people who want to intersect with non-Indigenous Australia right now. Who am I to argue that their current needs are less important than the possible improved outcomes I privately think can only be achieved via separatist, even oppositional, Indigenous efforts? There is a vast mob of well-meaning non-Indigenous individuals proliferating in remote Australia, and I sense that most of them suffer from disconnection with the land, or their upbringing, or their peers, or themselves. They seek meaning in being needed and overt helpfulness. Kowal argues that their number and influence is increasing, that 'this unadulterated remedialism, this quest for equality without ambivalence, is on the rise'. Forever off balance, we are prey to the capriciousness of prevailing Indigenous sentiment. I almost found it funny when I heard that some Anangu are asking businesses at Yulara resort to show respect and stop using the word Uluru.

(photograph by Corey Leopold via Wikimedia Commons)

This is the wrong place to go back to Melville, but wish you could somehow reflect here your man Ahab: deranged, yes, but such enviable single-mindedness and self-containment. 'The path to my fixed purpose is laid with iron rails, whereon my soul is grooved to run. Over unsounded gorges, through the rifled hearts of mountains, under torrents' beds, unerringly I rush! Naught's an obstacle, naught's an angle to the iron way!' Ahab would not have been a WAR.

A handy technique when cooking lungkata (blue-tongued lizard) is to make an incision and pull the creature's skin over its body until it is inside out. It is a simulacrum of the contortions performed by WARs like me, for whom giving offence is the least forgivable sin. I have relationships with a number of Indigenous people, but not one is an equal and reciprocal friendship. I am hired help. I am careful with my language. That is my choice, and if it is a 'price' I am paying for my privilege, it is preposterously cheap – but I should not delude myself about my motivations, or my emotional proximity.

When Gary MacLennan and Maria Mitropoulos charted what they called 'the differentiated Other' in non-Indigenous Australians' apprehension of Indigenous Australians, they included sub-categories like Comical, Resented, and Pitiable, but also Exotic, subdivided into Erotic and Fascinating. Nicolacopoulos and Vassilacopoulos observed that, 'White Australians typically insist on knowing more about the Indigenous other' and titrated what they call 'a triple act of displacing, claiming and denying ... the act of displacing the Aboriginal other generates an infinite distance between the (white) knowing subject and the Indigenous other, a distance that the knowing subject perpetually aspires to traverse'. I recognise that aspiration but – at least for me – the journey is Sisyphean.

It kills you, doesn't it, that there's something you can't have. Possessed of every privilege, you are used to recognising your desires, then framing strategies to satisfy them. But you'll never be indigenous to this land, no quantity of gold or guilt or good deeds can buy that connection, and in your guts you know this is plain unfair.

The first time I read Moby-Dick I did so out of a sense of obligation. It would probably be an error to go through a lifetime without reading it. It has cachet. Likewise, intersections with remote communities. Well, it's nice to be able to say you've done it. It positions you beyond a certain ignorance threshold – and those who have never entered remote Australia need never know how peripheral the experience of 'interaction' might be. Nor will they guess the extent to which it involves unfulfilled desire; just because I will never have knowledge or understanding or deeper relationships does not mean the longing will be erased.

I remember one of my early interactions with the locals. I had been talking, in a misfiring, one-sided way, to a group of kids. The oldest lad waved his hand at me and shouted 'Ara, Puulanya!' The other boys screamed with laughter; fluency in Pitjantjatjara is not required to translate children's malicious glee. 'Ara' is roughly 'Piss off', a term habitually hurled at dogs. My friend, who speaks the language superbly, said 'Puulanya' maps into English via 'puula', which means fat and is derived from the word 'ball'.

It didn't hurt my feelings. It just reinforced that I don't really belong here and never will. Central Australian psychotherapist Craig San Roque has written of 'the interactions of two cultures that don't have the slightest notion of how to deal with each other's presence'. That is it, exactly, and goodwill is insufficient motive force to leap the chasm.

The profound field observations you recount, pith helmet jauntily askew! No one might know that your most common 'conversation' with Anangu involves you bellowing 'Palya', one of the handful of words you know, while grotesquely mugging goodwill – to which the response is most oftentimes a desultory 'Palya' or no words at all. Unless there is a painting to sell, when the exchange will be longer and less happy. You claim your eye has sharpened for central desert art, but all you've actually learned is that the true meaning of many paintings is that they represent the sort of paintings that are likely to be purchased by the sort of people who purchase paintings by Anangu artists.

There is still the land, and while it is not mine I am permitted to walk in it. Melville noted, 'Sands immense / Impart the oceanic sense', and the central desert feels limbic, even so far from the littoral. The rock is more than 600 million years old and originally sat at the bottom of the sea. Notwithstanding ideas implanted by reading Moby-Dick, there is something curiously oceanic about the topography in general and the geology specifically.

Just on the community side of the Mutitjulu waterhole, a jutting section looks like a sea creature, perhaps a dolphin, conceivably a whale, including an eye and mouth. Then again, maybe it looks like a hawk or a handsaw. The brain seeks familiarity, eschews ambiguity. When I see The Rock from a distance, slowly turning in my vision as the road planes in and away, I can see a dugong, a dolphin's head, and a rumpled walrus. I do not see any land animals.

The object that is not called Uluru stands 348 metres high and is 9.4 kilometres in circumference, but all we see is a nub; most of it is underground. Subterranean metaphors abound, but Melville cautions against them. 'So ignorant are most landsmen ... they might scout at Moby Dick as a monstrous fable, or still worse and more detestable, a hideous and intolerable allegory.' In truth, The Rock forbids it. It is sui generis, fulfilling what Nicolacopoulos and Vassilacopoulos call the 'seminal desire for unmediated embodiment'.

There is a long and interesting document which details precisely which parts of The Rock should and should not be photographed. Accountable bodies such as government departments tend to abide by these rules, but of course visitors never do. It seems pitiful, that they travel from all parts of the globe to be with The Rock but then waste their time trying to photograph it. No photo, ever, has captured its immensity and grandeur and strangeness. But being photographable is a key part of its function as 'Uluru' – a modern economic commodity. It is freighted with cultural value and history, but in the capitalist twenty-first century the primary importance of these intangibles is enhanced dollar-worth. A tick on a bucket list, an image on a tea towel, an advertising go-to, an object to point a camera towards; it takes effort to move beyond that. Perhaps these time-poor tourists are trying to make meaning with their iPhones and long-lens SLRs, just as I impatiently try to make meaning from my fundamentally baffling intersections with the locals. I sense they are failing just as utterly.

This is fair, but perhaps note that your own experience is not universal. Your friend the language wizard has deep, complicated, rewarding relationships with Anangu and always will. Other Piranpa have friendships and connections with varying degrees of complexity. You, for whatever reason, are at the far end of the continuum, possibly because you want something you cannot have – such as the message, 'You're different; you're okay; you can belong.' Another sustaining fiction.

Kata Tjuta, 2009 (photograph by Michael Winkler)The Rock's patina, iron oxide, beguiles me more than any fussy Etruscan pot. The extraordinary H.H. Finlayson was facing west to Kata Tjuta when he wrote, 'In the finished symmetry of its domes it is beautiful at all times; but now the sunset works upon it a miracle of colour, and it glows a luminous blue against an orange field, like some great mosque lit up from within.' That captures the wonder of The Rock's interplay with sunlight too. Finlayson said that weathering of the surface had produced 'grotesque shapes'. I see them as subtle lacunae that hide the light or catch water. I love the long dark worry lines that slant top to bottom and the tumid upper corners pushing out into the blue air where the eye expects to see the surrender of tapering. I can look and look. Everyone can. Finlayson: 'Whatever their past history may be, the two great rocks in their present aspect may well stand as symbols for the land itself: huge; red; bizarre.'

There is reassurance in standing before something bigger than yourself. Part of the painful process of losing religious belief is giving up the sensation of being small in the presence of something large. It is one of our first surenesses – the comparatively great size of our parents' bodies holding our own when we are tiny. It happens with great art, music, and literature. Awe can zig to awesome or zag to awful, but it is a state we crave. Melville argued that, 'Though we know the sea to be a everlasting terra incognita, (through familiarity) man has lost that sense of the full awfulness of the sea which aboriginally belongs to it.' The insouciance of the sentiment seems affected, an attempt at old-salt swagger. I don't think he believed his own words. Even today, in the age of GPS and Google Maps, you can be thoroughly lost on land or sea.

Not that Anangu can be lost around here. You must recall travelling in a ute over remote hilly back country with some old women who almost certainly had not been there for some time. They not only sang the land, but accurately foretold every bend and dip in the track. San Roque wrote that for Indigenous Central Australians, 'humans are the custodians and perhaps incarnations of that which exists in the geographical sites. It is the site which makes and remakes the human mind.' I know this from Anangu, but can it be true, however superficially, for me?

It occurs to me that the idea of escaping myself in the outback is not new. I was born in a red-dirt town, so perhaps it was something conferred through imprinting as an infant, or maybe the bush novels I read as an adolescent. I recall now something I had presumably forgotten, should have forgotten: an in-class essay on the innovative topic, 'Where would you go to get away from it all?' I wrote poetically and I hoped persuasively about a fantasy of working along the dingo fence, not encountering another human for weeks on end, labouring from before dawn until after dusk, body screaming from toil, while the remorseless sun bleached the pettiness from my worries and my soul was sandblasted into a state of purity. I wrote myself into the scene until I thought I was actually there, with the honesty of benighted work, the pitilessness of the barren inland, the abnegation leading to renewal. I looked forward to handing it in and knew how impressed the teacher would be. 'These are practice essays only. Time to share what you've written. You first, thanks.' I read, dead-voiced, a version I tried to expurgate and truncate on the fly. The next kid read two sentences about wanting to go to the Gold Coast. The next kid fancied a cruise. The next one was the Gold Coast again. Camping, cruise, Queensland. Someone nearby said to me, Why do you always write stuff that's fucking stupid? I knew he was right, and lashed myself: why hadn't I predicted what other people would write and mimicked that? Why was my brain incapable of guessing that 'cruise' would be the popular answer? And if I could not be invisible – all I ever wanted at high school – then why could I not work out how to approach being normal?

That's years ago. Years and years ago. But, thank you Melville, 'like a hawk's beak it pecks my brain'. Still the hope of desert salvation persists. If I cannot be autochthonic, cannot be at ease in this nation with an unremediated conscience, I must find my ties where I can and make fast the connections that I have. Where, beyond wife and family, can I find solidity or refuge, a dwelling place? Landscape and literature. The consolations of geography and my own cultural inheritance. An aerial survey photo shows the upper surface of the rock as striated lines, pushed together like so many humidity-swollen deckle-edged pages. I know it is coincidence or transference on my part, but can't think the concurrence other than remarkable. By correspondence, when I see my inner travails expressed in Moby-Dick, rather than marking the universality of Melville's insight, egoism whispers that it is all about me.

Yes, again, it is all about you. We know you ache and suffer: the new White Man's Burden. Your identity is pockmarked with voids, and that is hard – but do not embarrass yourself by drawing parallels to the conflicted identity of many Indigenous people you know. Find some other track.

Zen master Seung Sahn taught, 'only keep the mind that doesn't know', and titled one of his books Only Don't Know (sage advice not invalidated by his sexual relationships with acolytes while supposedly a celibate monk). The mind, however, does not want to not know. On the contrary: it grabs for meaning; tries to establish patterns and causation and precedent and predictions; and skitters wildly like a cat on glass when denied the traction of knowing. If you have been riven by mental illness, the mind's unsuccessful scramble for understanding is a shitty reminder of the confusion and dissociation inherent in some conditions.

Trying to sit placidly in a state of not knowing elicits the same panic sensations as the furious futility of trying to calm a mid-episode mind through meditation. In both cases, it is like wearing a shirt made of bull ants and being expected to stay still. As a young person, I read Thoreau's memo, 'sat in my sunny doorway from sunrise till noon, rapt in a revery', and thought it the gold standard for bliss; I longed to claim for myself his boast that, 'if the birds and flowers had tried me by their standard, I should not have been found wanting'. Instead, I had a mind that, at its most untrammelled, could split each second into a hundred parts, and be aware of an infinitude of time in each, via the exquisite discomfort of hyper-awareness. The terror of existing without a secure foothold.

It always seemed that this essay would not be capacious enough for your Melville ruminations, and it isn't. But since it is what fires you most just now, sail that vessel if you really must – but make the voyage brief, and try to find something, anything, of worth you can drag back to shore.

Melville described existential insecurity as being rocked by 'the inscrutable tides of God. But while this sleep, this dream is on ye, move your foot or hand an inch; slip your hold at all; and your identity comes back in horror. Over Descartian vortices you hover.' There is much in Moby-Dick I will never unravel, and I don't want to. I have read through the footnotes in the standard Penguin edition, and they are illuminating, but I will not use a dictionary for the words I do not know, will not labour to unstitch Melville's more opaque grammatical constructions, will not try to remember any of the cetology he shares. Quite the opposite. I consciously try to forget the plot, such as it is, or the accretion of incidents, treating myself at some unknown future occasion to uncovering the happenings on the Pequod as if anew.

At times it is as if Melville is inventing how to write a book while writing it. Other times it appears he is writing for his own amusement rather than the reader's. But such authorial selfishness can be liberating. I like the blunt, unmelodic names he chooses: Ahab, Peleg, Bildad, Bulkington, Queequeg, Stubb, Snodhead. I mutter them like a mantra until the words knock together like rocks. They remind me, obliquely, of Pitjantjatjara; the first time I heard the language spoken, it reminded me of stones tumbling along the bed of a creek.

Sometimes Melville seems feverish, as in a sudden jag where he crams ten words starting with 's' into a half sentence, or when he bubbles 'this white-lead chapter about whiteness is but a white flag', or another swoon of indulgence, 'what wonder remained soon waned away; for in a whaler wonders soon wane'. But then he lurches from madness into music – 'the ivory-tusked Pequod sharply bowed to the blast, and gored the dark waves in her madness, till, like showers of silver chips, the foam-flakes flew over her bulwarks' – and, breath caught, one can only wish for a smidgeon of such efflorescence if one's own mental upswing ever comes.

'Human madness is oftentimes a cunning and most feline thing,' he wrote. 'When you think it fled, it may have but become transfigured into some still subtler form.' And this, as Melville himself would have known, is the most treacherous thing about mental illness. It sets your self against your self. It cannibalises trust. It allows for unhinged notions to seem feasible: that, for example, a nineteenth-century literary genius foresaw that I would be bedevilled by Weltschmerz, flickering with agoraphobia, seeking solace in a red monolith in the middle of Australia many years hence and wrote – for me! – 'The intense concentration of self in the middle of such a heartless immensity, my God! Who can tell it?' Then, lest I think I have switched on some light through the bracketing of Australian geology and mid-nineteenth century literature, he has the cut-snake Ahab mutter to himself as he muses on a beheaded whale, 'O nature, and O soul of man! how far beyond all utterance are your linked analogies! not the smallest atom stirs or lives in matter, but has its cunning duplicate in mind.'

Okay. Words have almost outrun their usefulness. Time to find a ngiyari, a thorny devil, and hold it in your palm for a while, and watch the way it twitches and stares, and be thankful. And remember perhaps your mate's observation, that the ngiyari spends its whole lifespan seeking and eating ants, and then it dies, and then its body is eaten by ants. Something the tourist ants who insist on climbing The Rock might profitably meditate upon.

Thorny Devil (photograph by Michael Winkler)

We have brought ourselves to a precarious point in the secular West. If you don't have a rock, or a whale, how do you go on? Psychopharmaceuticals help keep us alive, but do not resolve the eternal problem of how to live. Without God or Marx to shield and guide us, shelter is sought within other vastnesses. Bach, maybe, or booze, or bucks. Melville might have been trading Zen with Seung Sahn when he wrote, 'So man's insanity is heaven's sense; and wandering from all mortal reason, man comes at last to that celestial thought, which, to reason, is absurd and frantic; and weal or woe, feels then Uncompromised, indifferent as his God.'

And that is where I am: seeking something, from The Rock and from Anangu and from Moby-Dick, which I will never ultimately grasp; knowing with needle-sharp certainty that I know less today than yesterday; a dot in a sun-blasted desert where I can only ever be a visitor. I will make another pilgrimage to that big sandstone inselberg today, and be grateful that it is, and know that I don't know its rightful name, and listen to it for meaning that will not come, and know that it was there for millennia before I existed and will be there for millennia after I exist, and if no one is around I might whisper to it that henceforth I will call it Ishmael. And tonight I will turn to Melville again, and be glad. 'Has the Sperm Whale ever written a book, spoken a speech? No, his great genius is declared in his doing nothing particular to prove it. It is moreover declared in his pyramidical silence.' Solace within, beside, before the profound Is.

References

Moby-Dick or, The Whale by Herman Melville, published 1851. Version cited: Penguin, 1992

Mending the Mind by J.F.J. Cade, Sun Books, 1979

'The White-Savior Industrial Complex' by Teju Cole, The Atlantic, March 21, 2012

Speaking out of Turn by Manning Clark, MUP, 1993

The Red Centre: Man and beast in the heart of Australia by H.H. Finlayson, Angus & Robertson, 1952 edition

Trapped in the Gap: Doing good in Indigenous Australia by Emma Kowal, Berghahn, 2015

'Battling Siki' by John Lardner, The New Yorker, 19 November 1949

Indigenous Sovereignty and the Being of the Occupier: Manifesto for a White Australian philosophy of origins by Toula Nicolacopoulos and George Vassilacopoulos, re.press Melbourne, 2014

Only Don't Know: Selected teaching letters of Zen Master Seung Sahn, Shmbhala, 1999

Craig San Roque's The Long Weekend in Alice Springs, adapted and drawn by Joshua Santospirito, SanKessto Publications, 2013

The Politics of Suffering: Indigenous Australia and the end of the liberal consensus by Peter Sutton, MUP, 2009

Walden and Other Writings by Henry David Thoreau, 1854

Both Flesh and Not by David Foster Wallace, Hamish Hamilton, 2012

Michael Winkler lives in Melbourne and works in the Northern Territory. He has worked in all branches of the media – radio, television, print, and online – as well as corporate communications.

The Calibre Prize for an Outstanding Essay, created in 2007, is Australia's premier essay prize. Originally sponsored by Copyright Agency (through its Cultural Fund), Calibre is now funded by Australian Book Review. Here we gratefully acknowledge the generous support of ABR Patron and Chair, Mr Colin Golvan QC.

In August 2014, then Prime Minister Tony Abbott gave a short speech disagreeing with the contention put forward in Triumph and Demise: The Broken Promise of a Labor Generation (2014), Paul Kelly's history of the Rudd/ Gillard years. Australia's political system was not broken. Abbott's newly elected government would prove 'that the last six years – the six years between 2007 and 2013 – is not the new normal; that it was in fact just a passing phase'. But, as Marx observed, history repeats itself.

Aaron Patrick's Credlin & Co., released eighteen months later, tries to explain one of Abbott's least intentional broken promises. Patrick focuses his critique on the personal failings of Abbott and Peta Credlin, his chief of staff. Similarly, Niki Savva's The Road to Ruin, launched the following month, emphasises the seductively simple linkage between Abbott, Credlin, and self-inflicted destruction. These two veteran journalists meticulously unearth the dramatic tales of a train wreck tragedy.

Over the past three decades, and particularly since the prime ministership of John Howard, there has been an extraordinary growth in the number of young Australians making the pilgrimage to Gallipoli. Most of these people have no ancestors among the 'fallen', but rather are following what has become a rite of passage for patriotic young Australians. Lest we forget, they intone. But what exactly is being remembered? And to what purpose is it being used? After all, until recently, few young people visited the site of this appalling military failure in which Australians were used as cannon fodder by their colonial masters. For that matter, until recently, flag-waving nationalism and loud-mouthed patriotism played little part in any aspect of Australian life.

We must all die, but many of us live as though we don't know this fact. When death comes close to us or our loved ones, we may feel totally unprepared. The distance from death many of us feel in Australia is a relatively new phenomenon, made possible by prosperity, improved health care, and the development of residential care facilities. Dying used to be accompanied by an agreed set of customs; guides to the art of dying were once very popular. Ars moriendi, a Christian medieval Latin text from 1415, was reprinted in more than a hundred editions across Europe, the first in a Western literary tradition of guides to death and dying. Other traditions had similar guides. But what about those of us living a contemporary, largely secular life? Has the valedictory memoir come to replace ars moriendi, giving us a way to contemplate death?

Nobody would have expected an ordinary life for Stalin's only daughter, but Svetlana's life was extraordinary beyond any expectations. Her mother killed herself in 1932, when Svetlana was six; her father treated her affectionately until as a teenager she annoyed him by becoming interested in men. Much of Svetlana's close family disappeared in the purges of the late 1930s or after the war, leaving both Svetlana and, paradoxically, Stalin lonely and isolated. When, a few years after Stalin's death in 1953, his sometime protégé Nikita Khrushchev publicly denounced his crimes, Svetlana sadly recognised the justice of the indictment. After a series of unsuccessful marriages and affairs, she defected to the United States at forty-one, leaving behind two children and becoming an unwilling celebrity and political symbol. In her late fifties, she defected back again to the Soviet Union with her non-Russian-speaking teenage daughter of an American marriage in tow, settling first in Moscow and then in her father's birthplace, Georgia. When neither worked out, she went to England, living for a time in a room with a communal kitchen in a London charitable home, as the money she had made from her memoirs after her first defection had long since run out. But she was always a nomad, and in her early seventies returned to America. She died in 2011 in a retirement home in Wisconsin.

When we talk about the importance of Australia's remembered wartime past, we mostly think of home-front experiences or Australians who went away to fight in overseas wars. Yet more than a quarter of our population was born overseas, and many of their early lives were shaped by war, with migration often a consequence of wartime dislocation or postwar persecution and poverty. The war memories these migrants bring to Australia are not just a vital family heritage; they also impact on Australian society and politics. As Joy Damousi argues in this important book, while Anglo-Australia has been keen to celebrate the legacy of Australian servicemen and women, we have been less willing to acknowledge migrant war stories and their impact. Focusing on the case study of Greek postwar migrant memory of World War II and the Greek Civil War, Damousi highlights a gap in recent Australia war and migration scholarship. The extensive literature about Australian Holocaust survivor memory, Damousi's work, and Nathalie Nguyen's recent books about Vietnamese Australian war memory suggest that this gap may already be closing. Perhaps some migrant communities are more able, or more willing, to talk about their war. Perhaps Australian society prefers to hear some migrant war stories more than others.

Among Don DeLillo's sixteen previous novels, White Noise (1985) is commonly held up as the apotheosis of his satirical vision, while his postwar epic Underworld (1997) tends to be lauded as his grand statement, his unofficial entry (they're all unofficial) in the never-ending competition to write the Great American Novel.

For me, the essential DeLillo novel is Libra (1988), his fictionalised account of the life of Lee Harvey Oswald. This is partly because it grounds the author's interest in paranoia and catastrophe in an attempt to solve the riddle of Oswald's character, but also because what Libra has – which DeLillo's novels as a general rule tend not to have – is an irresistible teleology. Its speculative history has an air of fate and something of the gravitas of genuine tragedy, because we all know in advance the point at which its wealth of provocative and insinuating detail must converge: that stunning moment at Dealey Plaza in November 1963, captured for all time by Abraham Zapruder's home-movie camera, when President Kennedy's head explodes.

In her new biography, Sylvia Martin tells us that Aileen Palmer wanted to be remembered as a poet. Until now, she has been best known as the elder daughter of Vance and Nettie Palmer, those beacons of Australian literature who devoted their lives to developing our literary culture. Aileen, with her sister Helen, carefully preserved the legacy of her parents, ensuring that their papers were deposited in the National Library of Australia. These papers, with their voluminous correspondence with other Australian writers, have proved an invaluable source for any scholar working on Australian literary history, particularly biographers. Aileen also left her own unpublished manuscripts, her fragments of autobiography, her diaries and poems in her parents' archives. Perhaps she hoped that a biographer like Martin would come along to make a narrative from them.

More has been written about Rolf de Heer than about most Australian film directors of his generation, but Jane Freebury's Dancing to His Song contains its share of fresh material. Who knew, for instance, that de Heer spent five months in the Philippines as the original, uncredited director of the obscure action movie Driving Force (1989), starring Patrick Swayze's lookalike brother Don and billed as 'Mad Max with tow trucks'? Still more intriguing is the revelation that de Heer turned down the chance to direct Alien 3 (1992), which in retrospect seems an opportunity missed. Whatever challenges he might have faced in adjusting his stubborn temperament to Hollywood, there is no denying the resemblance between Sigourney Weaver's Ellen Ripley – the hardbitten protagonist of the Alien series – and the vengeful outsider heroines of later de Heer films such as Epsilon (1995) and Alexandra's Project (2003).

Arnold Zable may be unafraid of pain, but he is no masochist. Masochism wants to control pain: Zable is much more of a liberator. Since the publication of his first book, Jewels and Ashes (1991), Zable has embraced profound stories of struggling people with honesty and wisdom. Zable has been a servant of those stories, never trying to smother them with his own voice or bury them under fancy theories. He has enabled people to speak who may never otherwise have been heard. Take, for example, these bald opening lines from a recent piece of Zable's journalism about an asylum seeker on Manus Island. For Zable, the general issue of detention is first and foremost about real people:

His name is Behrouz Boochani. He was born in Ilam city in west Iran on July 23, 1983. He graduated from Tarbiat Madares University in Tehran with a masters degree in political geography and geopolitics. He worked as a freelance journalist and for several Iranian newspapers – Kasbokar Weekly, Qanoon, Etemaad – and the Iranian Sports Agency. He published articles on Middle East politics and interviews with the Kurdish elite in Tehran.
Boochani's passions are human rights and the survival of Kurdish culture ...

Australian-born Dominic Smith grew up in Sydney but has spent most of his adult life in the United States; he currently lives in Austin, Texas, where he is claimed as a 'Texan writer'. Despite the fact that this is his fourth novel, the fact that his previous novel was shortlisted for two major Australian literary prizes, and the fact that he is clearly a major talent, his name is largely unfamiliar to Australian readers. The question 'What exactly is an Australian writer?' has popped up regularly for the last 200 years, but is getting harder and harder to answer.

'Sara de Vos is a character built out of gaps and silences,' Smith has said in an essay for the Paris Review (April 2016). Titled 'Daughters of the Guild', the essay gives some fascinating background information to the writing of this novel, discussing the art of the Dutch Golden Age and the women painters of that time and place who have been all but lost to history, and giving some insights into the creative process as Smith both imagined and experienced it in the writing of his latest novel. The character of Sara is an imagined one, but she has her genesis in the fate of one or two real women and the shadowy possibilities of many more – women whose work may have been misattributed to male artists and whose names may have been obscured by the historical records.

After the horrific massacres in Paris and the ensuing ones in Belgium that were purportedly intended for France, the French were spontaneously drawn together in a defiant affirmation of their fundamental values. In the weeks following the killings, they marched, they ate at restaurants, they took the métro, they gathered in museums, galleries, and cinemas. They were not, in short, going to be immured or intimidated.

Today, while not forgetting, Parisians no longer feel the need for such public demonstrations of solidarity. The State of Emergency declared by President François Hollande after the attacks at the Stade de France and the Bataclan on 13 November 2015 is still in force at the time of writing; it is indeed likely to be prolonged to cover the upcoming UEFA Euro 2016 soccer competition and the Tour de France. One is put through airport style security at museums, in many public buildings, and even some shops. There is an increased police presence, but it is not overwhelming, and certainly nowhere as intimidating as what I remember from my student days in Paris during the Algerian War. What some Australians may find surprising is that so many of the police one sees patrolling around railway stations, big parks, and certain 'sensitive' neighbourhoods like the suburban housing estates or the Place de la République, are of Caribbean, African, or North-African background. It is a reminder that in most aspects of public life – in the shops, the banks, the professions, the trades – ethnic diversity is a norm rather than an exception. Front National leader Marine Le Pen is whistling to songs that have no connection with current reality – which of course doesn't stop her from catching the ear of nostalgics and those who seek simple solutions to complex problems.

In 1885 the Singleton MHA and Militia officer Albert Gould reflected that, New South Wales having sent a contingent to fight for the empire in the Sudan, 'we shall be expected to do it again'. (Henry Reynolds, reliably casual about Dead White Men, just calls him 'AJ Gould'.) But indeed they did; next in South Africa in 1899, the subject of Reynolds's Unnecessary Wars, and again and again. Reynolds has for more than forty years served Australia well as an historian of the colonial frontier and of relations between white and black. In Unnecessary Wars, he writes, 'past and present meet' again. One of the Unnecessary Wars in question is the Boer War, aka the Second Anglo-Boer War, aka the South African War of 1899–1902: the war that Australians were fighting even as the six colonies federated on 1 January 1901.

Memoirs of Eastern European children of the 1920s could hardly be more different than this pair. The old age Marcel Weyland describes in The Boy on the Tricycle is a happy outcome for a boy who fled the Nazis. 'Fortunately,' he writes, 'I quite like what I am.' Before World War II, he describes 'a fairly typically, affluent, middle-European and middle-class, and in our case Jewish, household' in the Polish city of Łódź. They were lucky: Marcel's older sister Halina, who worked at the Republika newspaper, foresaw the events of September 1939, and they fled at her urging. Otherwise, 'we would have perished as the bulk of the Jewish population of Łódź, including most of our relatives, perished'. They set off eastwards, escaping Nazi bombs by a combination of luck and Halina's resourcefulness. Another hero was the Japanese consul in Eastern Europe, who devised a scheme to issue Polish Jews with 'transit' visas allowing them to travel to Japan and (relative) safety. By another tortuous series of accidents, the family spent several years in Shanghai.

The dislocation of international travel often prompts spontaneous moments of clarity, sparking a renewed awareness of where one is at in life. Stepping out from well-established comfort zones forces us to take stock, whether we like it or not. Australian singer–songwriter Hugo Race details his own scathing scrutiny of his life choices throughout Road Series, a vivid travelogue that follows his idiosyncratic career over the last three and a half decades.

Although he has toured Europe several times and released some twenty albums, Race chooses to single out moments when everything seems to be falling apart for him, both socially and personally. He is acutely aware of the world around him, providing snapshots of a planet always swarming with new threats, from Aids and SARS to escalating terrorism.

I hazard a guess that more books are published on Anzac – the day, the legend, the myth – than on any other subject in Australian history. The least of these contributions, which often harness the nebulous concept of the 'Anzac spirit' to tell whatever story the author is interested in, add little or nothing to our understanding of the place and role of Anzac in Australian society past and present. For authors hoping to cash in on a lucrative market, Anzac is surely the subject of choice. The best Anzac writing, on the other hand, challenges us to think anew about the origins, ideals, and purpose of Anzac. Anzac Day Then and Now achieves this admirably.

Two doors, two characters, two colours – black and white – produce a surfeit of grey in John Hughes's short allegorical novel Asylum. Featuring a variety of forms, including manuals for the officials of the regime, personal letters, political tracts, and an inverted retelling of the story of the Garden of Eden in which fully clothed Adam and Eve arrive by boat and God removes their clothes in anger, Asylum is a powerful allegory of Blake's 'mind forg'd manacles'. The swift propellant of narrative change builds a sense of a larger, orderly world which is for some reason being withheld from view. Snippets of bureaucratic reports which employ a god-like tone pepper the narrative. Hughes, the librarian at Sydney Grammar School, and a previous winner of the New South Wales Premier's Award and the National Biography Award for his collection of autobiographical essays, has Ukrainian heritage, and Asylum, with its subtly drawn themes of displacement, liminality, and cultural forgetting, points towards the refugee experience.

It is the morning after a husband's affair has been discovered, and the house is in chaos: the opening to Tolstoy's Anna Karenina (1877) is deliberately evoked in Toni Jordan's novel Our Tiny, Useless Hearts. Now, three couples – Caroline and Henry, Lesley and Craig, and Janice and Alec – and the marital interloper, Martha, must redefine love under new circumstances. As marriages break up and re-form, the narrator, Janice, attempts to protect her nieces, Mercedes and Paris, from a reproduction of her own largely fatherless childhood.

I interviewed Lindsay Tanner once, back in 2012. Tanner was sixteen months retired from political life, and I had come seeking insight into the workings of the Victorian branch of the Australian Labor Party and Canberra's byzantine politics. The former member for Melbourne – a unionist and Socialist Left factional player who had risen to become one of the brighter minds of his generation of Labor parliamentarians and a member of the so-called Rudd Government's 'gang of four' (together with Kevin Rudd, Wayne Swan, and Julia Gillard) – invited me to his office at Lazard, a global firm peddling financial advice.

We met in a boardroom on the 33rd floor of 101 Collins Street. Tanner was as expected: a man of quiet authority with thoughtful views on the workings of Australia's economy and democracy. Although not as Olympian as Gough Whitlam in his disdain of state politics, Tanner was also, to my dismay, dismissive of Spring Street. He both impressed and annoyed me as an interviewee. Much the same could be said of his probationary novel, Comfort Zone.

In the Bulgarian capital, Sofia, an expat American teacher goes down into the subterranean bathroom beneath the National Palace of Culture, a known beat. There he encounters Mitko, a young Bulgarian hustler. Through foreign words with plural and ambiguous meanings, they negotiate a sexual transaction that initiates an intense, potentially ruinous relationship. Garth Greenwell's masterly début, What Belongs to You, begins with this descent, both literal and emotional, from which the narrator won't resurface for the duration of the novel, or perhaps ever.

This narrator is unnamed, but that's all of him that remains anonymous; his desires, past wounds – everything is revealed in intricate, deeply felt intimacy. Mitko is charming, inscrutable, and occasionally forbidding. To the narrator he is sexual heroin. Mitko makes him imagine 'thrown switches in a house'; he is helpless with lust for him.

CALIBRE PRIZE

Michael Winkler is the winner of the 2016 Calibre Prize for an Outstanding Essay. The judges – Sophie Cunningham (winner of the 2015 Calibre Prize) and Peter Rose – chose Mr Winkler's essay 'The Great Red Whale' from a field of almost 200 entries submitted from thirteen different countries. Michael Winkler receives $5,000; his essay appears in this issue, beginning on page 31.

'The Great Red Whale' is an essay about fractures, overlaying the ruptures within the author's psyche with the fissure between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians, something he believes keeps us 'heartsore as a nation'. This excoriating yet remarkably subtle meditation is also a tribute to consolations: landscape, specifically the desert of Central Australia, and literature, notably Moby-Dick.

Michael Winkler (photograph by Chris Riordan)On learning that he had won the Calibre Prize, Michael Winkler – a Melbourne author and journalist – told Advances: 'Reading ABR every month gives me access to sophisticated and important ideas in accessible form. The Calibre Prize essays are not only an annual ABR highlight but notable events in our national life. I remember reading the first Calibre Prize-winning essay by Elisabeth Holdsworth (2007), her pungent masterwork about memory and return. I never see the name Slavoj Žižek without thinking of Kevin Brophy's astonishing account (2009) of living near an abusive neighbour. When I worked with children with autism, I sought insights from rereading Rachel Robertson's 'Reaching One Thousand' (2008). I feel simultaneously completely unworthy and utterly overjoyed to have any proximity to this stellar list of past winners.'

The judges have commended two other essays: Joshua Barnes's 'Terra Australis Incognita' and Sarah Viren's 'Dear Julie'. We will publish both in coming months.

This is the tenth Calibre Prize, which is intended to advance the essay form. We look forward to offering Calibre again in 2017. We gratefully acknowledge the generous support of Mr Colin Golvan QC.

SUPPORTING AUSTRALIAN WRITERS

Because of strong continuing support from the Australia Council for the Arts, subscribers, and private donors, Australian Book Review has again increased its standard rate of payment for freelance reviewers. Critics will now be paid at least $50 per 100 words. This represents a 150 per cent increase during the past three years. Essayists and creative writers will also be paid more.

In May 2015, ABR launched a campaign to increase payments to writers and to highlight the low or non-payment of some freelance writers elsewhere (especially younger ones). The response to this campaign has been enthusiastic.

Peter Rose, Editor of Australian Book Review, has commented: 'ABR takes its responsibilities to its writers seriously. Critics deserve to be paid properly – like authors, publishers, printers, and booksellers. I am delighted that ABR is in a position to increase its rates and to support Australian writers.'

Last month, Australian Book Review (a Key Organisation of the Australia Council from 2011 to 2016) learned that it will receive four-year funding for 2017–20. The magazine is committed to increasing its standard rate to $75 per 100 words over the course of this period.

Cuts visited on the Australia Council in the 2015 federal budget have reduced the number of arts organisations in receipt of multi-year grants. We sympathise with those that did not have success in this round, and we thank the Australia Council for its support.

VALE GILLIAN MEARS

Gillian Mears – essayist, short story writer, novelist – died on 16 May, aged fifty-one. Her novels include The Mint Lawn (1991), which won The Australian/Vogel's Literary Award in 1990, and Foal's Bread, which was shortlisted for the 2012 Miles Franklin Literary Award. Mears won two Commonwealth Writers' Prizes for Ride a Cock Horse (1988) and The Grass Sister (1995). Reviewing Mears's last novel in the November 2011 issue of ABR, Gillian Dooley wrote: 'Foal's Bread is a grand, bittersweet romantic saga, at once laconic and mystical, tragic and optimistic ... How marvellous to hear her unique voice again.'

Gillian Mears (photograph by Shannon Hemmings)

Mears's most recent book was the children's fable The Cat with the Coloured Tail, which was shortlisted in the 2016 ABIA awards. She was our Open Page guest in the July–August 2012 issue. Her essay 'Alive in Ant and Bee' was commended in the inaugural Calibre Prize for an Outstanding Essay in 2007.

POETRY AND ABR

Les Murray (source: Kritzolina, via Wikimedia Commons)Despite one recent freakish suggestion to the contrary, new poetry appears in every issue of ABR – works by emerging poets and by some of the world's most eminent poets. Since 2001 we have featured poets such as Rosemary Dobson, J.S. Harry, Clive James, John Ashbery, Dorothy Porter, David Malouf, Peter Porter, and Les Murray.

Poets too deserve proper payment from magazines. They will share in our increased payments to authors. Poets appearing in the print edition will be paid $400 per poem (an increase of twenty-five per cent). Poems published online will attract a fee of $150.

Since 2013, Lisa Gorton has been our Poetry Editor (she succeeded our inaugural editor, David McCooey). Lisa has now resigned because of other commitments. We thank her sincerely for her dedication, perspicuity, and openness to a wide range of poetries. One notable feature of her term as poetry editor was her thoughtful, meticulous responsiveness to those poets whose work she chose not to publish in the magazine – a real measure of a sympathetic editor–writer. We look forward to reading her own poems – and to publishing some of them in the magazine. Dr Gorton – a Rhodes scholar – is now writing a monograph on the subject of her Oxford dissertation: John Donne.An announcement about the poetry editorship will follow in coming months. Meanwhile, poets wishing to submit work should email them to This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

SHARON OLDS

Sharon OldsOne of America's most laurelled poets, Sharon Olds is a welcome new contributor to ABR (her poem 'Woodwind Ode' appears on page 26). Sharon Olds has published a dozen collections since 1980. Her most recent book, Stag's Leap (2012), won the T.S. Eliot Prize and the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry. She teaches at New York University.

Advances first met Sharon Olds at Collected Works, that indispensable poetry bookshop in Melbourne. She was en route to the 2015 Mildura Writers Festival, one of Australia's most poetically inclined literary gatherings. The program of this year's festival has been announced. Guests include Tony Birch, Emily Bitto, Judith Beveridge, and Jan Owen. This small Australian festival is widely regarded as one of the more congenial of its kind. 

RECORDINGS GALORE

States of Poetry – our new online poetry resource – highlights the quality and diversity of contemporary Australian poetry. Five states and the ACT are now online and freely available. We have also invited the six featured poets in each state and the ACT to read and introduce at least one of their poems. This is a great way for lovers and students of poetry to become acquainted with the rhythms and tenor of individual poetic voices.

To date, we have posted recordings of the following poets: Amy Brown (Victoria), Adrian Caesar (ACT), Jill Jones and Kate Llewellyn (South Australia), Ellen van Neerven (Queensland), Barbara Temperton (Western Australia), and Fiona Wright (New South Wales). Twenty more will follow in coming weeks and months. You can listen to the available recordings here.

This complements our 'Poem of the Week' podcast, where you can find seventeen extended recordings, all freely accessible. Recent contributors include Ali Alizadeh and Alexis Lateef.

CANBERRA LARGESSE

The University of Canberra is admirably liberal in its support for contemporary poetry. Currently it is offering three prizes for poetry, the flagship being the (deep breath) University of Canberra Vice-Chancellor's International Poetry Prize, which has a first prize of $15,000 and second prize of $5,000. This lucrative prize was created in 2014.

The University has now added a Health Poetry Prize, with total prize money of $2,500. The inaugural theme is 'Living life well', the aim being 'to inspire others through poetry to consider the journey to live life well'.

Both of these prizes close on 30 June 2016. Entrants in the third one have until 15 August to enter. The Young Poets' Award, is open to Year 11 and 12 students in New South Wales and the ACT. Total prize money is $1,000.

DOROTHY HEWETT AWARD

This important new manuscript prize is open for the second time. Authors have until 1 August 2016 to enter. Unusually, this is a multi-genre prize. The judges welcome submissions of fiction, poetry, and narrative non-fiction. The winner of the 2016 Dorothy Hewett Award will receive $10,000 and 'the offer of a publishing contract with UWA Publishing'. For more details, visit the UWAP website.

The work of Brisbane-based author Patrick Holland is reputedly influenced by Estonian composer Arvo Pärt, whose Tabula Rasa cemented his standing as one of the so-called 'holy minimalists' of late-twentieth century music. Reading Holland's new novel, One – based on the hunt for the Kenniff brothers, bushrangers operating in Western Queensland circa 1902 – the influence of Pärt's sparse, bell-like compositional technique known as 'tintinnabuli' is not especially obvious. What stands out more clearly is Holland's debt to that paragon of literary minimalism, Cormac McCarthy. One is a Blood Meridian for the antipodes, and a writer looking to develop a frontier narrative of isolation and violence could do worse than take inspiration from an acknowledged master of the style.

In the opening pages of Kiera Lindsey's fictionalised history, The Convict's Daughter, a young 'currency lass' named Mary Ann Gill makes her precarious way to the third-floor ledge of her family's hotel in central Sydney, readying herself for the descent. 'Clutching hard to the wooden frame, the fifteen-year-old girl hoists herself up, knees first', all too ignorant of the turmoil and scandal which her bold action will precipitate. This is the moment of truth in the so-called 'Parramatta Romance' between Mary Ann, the daughter of Martin and Margaret Gill – once convicts and by 1848 owners of a successful hotel in what is now Martin Place – and James Butler Kinchela, a 'sterling settler' and son of the former New South Wales attorney-general. Their bungled elopement becomes a matter for the courts when the outraged and trigger-happy Martin attacks his daughter's paramour.

Kings Rising is the final in C.S. Pacat's Captive Prince trilogy. Set in an invented world that evokes medieval France and Ancient Greece, it follows Damianos, the Prince of Akielos, and Laurent, Prince of Vere. When Damianos's half-brother overthrows their father in a palace coup, he imprisons Damianos and sends him to Vere as a pleasure slave for Laurent. The first two books follow Damianos, renamed Damen to disguise his identity, and his life as a palace slave in Vere. Damen not only carries the secret of being an Akielion prince; he is also the prince-killer, having killed Laurent's older brother in battle. By birth and circumstance they are born enemies, yet political intrigues and necessity gradually unite them. By the third book, the pair have created an uneasy truce and must work together to win their thrones.

With Emperor of the Eight Islands, Lian Hearn delves into the mythic past of the world she crafted so perfectly in the Tales of the Otori series (2002–07). It is a pleasure to read a writer in top form, and Hearn is at her best here, demonstrating her characteristic flair for uncluttered, elegant prose.

The Eight Islands are torn between two warring factions fighting over the emperor's throne. Behind the scenes, sorcerers, ghosts, and demons seek to control the fate of the empire or just cause mischief. Caught between all of these forces, young Shikanoko in turn utilises and is manipulated by them.

When D.H. Lawrence arrived in Australia on 4 May 1922, he was so ignorant of the country's actual conditions that he was, as David Game observes in his fine new book, expecting to arrive 'in late spring and find apple blossom'. Game's extensively researched and informative monograph recounts ways in which Australia operated for Lawrence mainly as a utopian idea, a potential site for 'regenerative potential' and thus 'an alternative to his earlier hopes for America'. There has been much academic consideration of Lawrence's intellectual investments in the United States, interests that manifest themselves most clearly in his landmark Studies in Classic American Literature (1923), but not nearly so much on the author's engagements with Australia. In this sense, the work of Game, a Visiting Fellow at the Australian National University, represents a welcome intervention. His book makes the cogent case that the significance of Australia to Lawrence's aesthetic vision has generally been under-estimated.

By the end of the eighteenth-century, botany was one of the few sciences regarded as suitable for women. Carolus Linnaeus had infamously declared that his system of botanical taxonomy was so simple that even 'women themselves' could understand it. Botanical collection, identification, and cultivation extended the traditionally feminine occupations of flower arranging, gardening, and herbal lore, and were thought to bring order to the undisciplined female mind.

Women played vital roles in the popular communication of botany, in the education of the public, as collectors, cataloguers, and artists, but rarely as scientific authorities themselves. As botany and science became increasingly professionalised during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, our definition of science narrowed to focus on those scientific authors who, by virtue of their exclusive and tightly restricted access to formal education, employment, and membership of academic societies, were almost entirely male.

There may or may not be an epidemic of autism, but the idea of 'autism' has been remarkably catching. Once understood as a vanishingly rare condition, identified only in 1943, decades after Sigmund Freud and his followers first explored the psychopathology of childhood, autism has become commonplace. Popular culture celebrates it as an amusing quirk, often embodied in the figure of the boy genius, and some people attribute everyday failures of empathy, tact, or etiquette to their perpetrators being 'on the spectrum'. How did we get to this point?

Chicago-based music critic Jessica Hopper disdains introductory tedium. Were I to mimic her style, we'd be off and running by now, or grappling with a question that shoots straight to the topic's heart. When this anthology's forty-two think-pieces, reviews, and ephemera first appeared in Village Voice, Chicago Reader, SPIN and elsewhere, a few words of context may have preceded each of them. Here, we just have bald beginnings such as 'Kurt Cobain died for somebody's sins, but not mine', 'The first thing I noticed was that Michael Jackson was gone', and '"People used to compare him to Jesus", says a backstage manager as David Bazan walks off stage, guitar in hand. "But not so much anymore".'

Charles de Gaulle remains, for many, the quintessence of Gallic defiance through the dark years of World War II. Not only did he symbolise the famed resistance, he organised it, led it, conquered the Boche, and delivered national salvation after the humiliation of 1940.

As Robert Gildea makes clear in this new history of the French Resistance, it was not always thus. In France's moment of crisis, de Gaulle's supporters at home and abroad were thin on the ground. Acolytes among the exiled Free French diplomatic and military community in London were difficult to find. The British government early recognised de Gaulle as the leader of the Free French, but wondered whether perhaps it had backed the wrong horse. As for Franklin Roosevelt and his administration, they regarded the Frenchman as 'an egoistic troublemaker whose personal ambitions divided a French people otherwise considered happy under Marshal Pétain, and who harboured Napoleonic fantasies about seizing power in France as a dictator'.

Reading these three books in April, it was impossible not to see in them flashes of what Ross McMullin has described in war artist Will Dyson's drawings from World War I: 'He sketched Australians waiting, resting and sleeping. He captured them stumbling out of the line, drained and dazed. He drew weariness, perseverance, fatalism.' Ordinary and terrible: in poetry, as in war, whichever side the coin lands on, the other is always beneath it.

WHICH POETS HAVE MOST INFLUENCED YOU?

Contemporary influences include C.D. Wright, Peter Gizzi, Vahni Capildeo, and Harryette Mullen. I have learnt much from the great Danish poet Inger Christensen. George Oppen, Gertrude Stein, Frank O'Hara, and John Ashbery are always important. As ever, Baudelaire, Dickinson, and Rimbaud.

ARE POEMS 'INSPIRED' OR MAINLY THE WORK OF CRAFT?

Poems are made things, first of all. In that sense, craft; poets are makers. Words and possibilities in structure are things that emerge in making. So, I guess, the inspiration, or art part. It's a kind of thinking around the materials. Refining the initial structure can take time, years even, or sometimes the poem's found quickly. You have to learn the difference.

Even before I'd finished talking, hands shot up from the grey heads in the audience. 'I'm very concerned,' said the jowly chap with the sailor's suntan, 'that advances being made in drugs mean that most cancer patients will soon be kept alive indefinitely.' That's a problem? People who used to suffer and die will be able to live longer, quality lives. You don't hear this said about the advances in care for the HIV positive.

Welcome to discussions about the ageing population. Be prepared for the 'tsunami' of old people inundating the continent, the time bomb of the cost of their care, the crushing burden of meeting their needs. Opening Mark Butler's Advanced Australia, I was prepared for doom, gloom, and mega-blaming, but the author is not of that school. His book 'attempts to bring a more positive perspective to the process of population ageing'. Like the World Health Organization, Butler celebrates as 'one of humanity's greatest triumphs' the thirty years added to the average Australian's lifespan over the past century.

'With time,' writes Australian Rules Football goal umpire Chelsea Roffey, 'I wrapped my lady brain around the mathematics of scoring.' Roffey's account of being an élite football official doubles as a sharply funny take on the progress the AFL community has – and hasn't – made in its approach to gender. Employing a sequence of well-aimed one-liners, Roffey gets the sarcasm level just right, a deceptively tricky feat. But she does more than chase laughs, by offering a penetrating personal account of her push into a traditionally male domain; she also makes pertinent and expert observations about the game and its curiosities, including that television commentators 'have a surprising level of influence on the public's critical-thinking ability'.

Claire Halliday's Things My Mother Taught Me opens thus: 'History is a personal thing.' But in this book – a collection of interviews with famous Australians about their mothers – each personal story feels too similar, shorn of the thing which makes memoir so particular and powerful: the voice of the individual. The result is lacklustre; trapped somewhere between essay and interview. The effect is hard to describe, akin to the anonymity of ghost-written magazine articles. There are bursts of pleasure and skerricks of momentum, but too often something halts the prose. This could be a sudden change in narrative direction, conceivably impelled by an excluded question. One example, from the interview with Lawrence Mooney, is the way in which four entirely different subjects are broached on the same page: Mooney's grandmother's death; significant Australians sharing his mother's name; a stereotype of the sexes; and the secretive nature of the comedian's parents. Another result of that half-interview, half-essay constriction is cautious writing.

Summer Skin (Allen & Unwin, $19.99 pb, 347 pp, 978192526-6924) by Kirsty Eagar, a raunchy romance for older readers, is set in the halls of residence of a Queensland university during O-Week. Jess Gordon – nickname Flash – has devised a little game for the freshers, a payback for what her friend Farren endured the previous year when she was secretly filmed and Skyped having sex with a boy from Knights, an élitist all-male college.

The game for the Unity girls is to lure a Knights boy back to their room, tie him up, and, after giving him a 'creative makeover', post the photographic evidence on Instagram, the winner to get a Knights jersey. It is the stealing of this jersey that occupies Jess for the opening chapters and puts her on a collision course with Mitch Crawford, the handsome and arrogant rugby champ who has his own reason for wanting that stolen jersey. A 'meet cute' then, followed by Jess and the freshers of Unity proving that they are just as adept as the boys at inflicting humiliation amplified by social media.

There is an odd moment halfway through The Dry when Aaron Falk, the Federal Police officer unofficially investigating the apparent murder–suicide of the Hadler family in the dismal country town where he grew up, is sifting through items left behind by Karen Hadler, one of the dead. Falk comes across a library book, 'a battered paperback crime novel'; he describes it as, '[s]tandard stuff. Not quite to his taste, but he wouldn't be in the job he was in if he didn't enjoy a good mystery.' The point is belaboured. 'It was an obvious storyline, nothing special'; and 'the realisation that this mediocre thriller could have been the last thing she'd read in her life made him feel deeply depressed'.

Ethel Livesey was a piece of work. By the time she stood trial in 1946, she had already served several terms in prison. The serial fraudster had accumulated more than forty aliases, married eight times (twice bigamously), borne four children to different men, and divorced four times. She fleeced shopkeepers, business owners, society élite – and her husbands – during a spectacular career as a silver-tongued swindler. And the press lapped it up: the scandalous Livesey affair made the Australian headlines for nearly a year.

WHAT DREW YOU TO WRITING?

The American poet Howard Nemerov described poetry writing as a spiritual exercise 'having for its chief object the discovery or invention of one's character'. I'm sure that at heart this is what my writing is about.