We are wading out, the five of us. I remember this. The sun an hour or two from melting into the ocean, the slick trail of its gold showing the way we will take.

She says it was a man, an old man (but all men are old to her), which man, what did he look like, what was he wearing, what did he do

Books have long provided fodder for films and television. Now films and television series, particularly documentaries, spawn books. The Killing Season Uncut is a book version of the television documentary in which Sarah Ferguson dissected perhaps the most dramatic seven years in Australian political history. For personal drama, 2006–13 had it all: three defenestrations of Opposition leaders (Brendan Nelson, Kim Beazley, Malcolm Turnbull), two regicides (Kevin Rudd, Julia Gillard), and one more failed and one aborted leadership challenge.

The bleaching event that devastated much of the Great Barrier Reef in recent months made it clear that Earth's ecosystems are in crisis, driven to the brink by rising temperatures, pollution, and habitat loss. While there is a tendency to regard this situation as a product of the past century, the reality is that almost every environment on Earth has been irrevocably altered – or destroyed – by humans over the past 10,000 years. And although our impact on the oceans is occupying our minds at present, it is probably forests that have been hit the hardest. Whereas forests once covered much of the Earth, intensive exploitation by humans has destroyed almost eighty per cent of old-growth forests and radically reduced the complexity and diversity of what remains. Nowhere is this process more evident than in North America, where ninety per cent of the forests have been cleared in the four centuries since European settlement.

Two Jews, three opinions. Jews nod their heads in agreement when they hear those words, just as they chuckle knowingly at the story of the two Jews stranded on a desert island who build three synagogues – one for each of them and one that neither would visit on principle.

Sometimes those differences of opinion can assume an unpleasant character. Since Trouble in the Tribe was published earlier this year, Dov Waxman, a professor of Political Science, International Affairs, and Israel Studies at Northeastern University and the co-director of its Middle East Center, has been the target of abusive attacks and scathing criticism from right-wing American Jews. Ironically, the hostile reactions to Waxman's book only serve to demonstrate the escalating polarisation over Israel within the American Jewish community that he describes. Waxman was shocked, however, at the Manichaean world view of his critics for whom any perspective or analysis that conflicts with their own is denigrated and dismissed out of hand. Some detractors even resorted to ad hominem attacks, accusing him of being a self-hating Jew, a traitor, or simply an idiot.

Hoping to travel to Vienna in the summer of 1950 through a part of Austria then under Soviet control, Bernard Smith sought an interview in Prague with an officer of the Red Army. 'You are English?' asked the officer, glancing at his passport and visa. 'Australian,' said Smith. 'It is the same thing', replied the officer curtly. 'No,' came the measured response, 'not quite.' The officer was lucky perhaps to have been spared a longer disquisition on a subject that was to absorb Smith's attention throughout much of his intellectual life. Australians – Antipodeans, as he preferred to say – differed from those who lived in the north, as the images used to promote the famous exhibition of that name a few years later (designed by Charles Blackman, drawing wittily on the speculations of ancient mytho-graphers) were playfully to suggest. Their lands and oceans, moreover, as Smith was to argue in persuasive detail in the major work of his long career, European Vision and the South Pacific, 1768–1850 (1960), had prompted new ways of seeing and representing the world, first experienced on the great voyages of exploration into the Pacific in the late eighteenth century.

For many writers, the contour and direction of a lifetime's work exists in a shadow-land. The relationship between one book and the next, and the lasting significance of an author's oeuvre remain partly obscure until the culture in which it was produced becomes 'history'. Even then, writers are rarely the best and most willing interpreters of their own work.

If your Friday night companion was to slap the table, spill your pint, and announce to the bar: 'I'm going to collect every single letter Hemingway wrote, and put them in a book! Lots of books!' you might be forgiven for suggesting that your chum's next moves be a warm lamb sandwich and a taxi home to bed.

There is a moment early in the 'Heiliger Dankgesang' movement of Beethoven's Quartet Op. 132 when, without ceremony, an alien, courtly trio is plonked down into the poised chorale underway. It is out of place, secular, overheard: we are left wondering how and when Beethoven will take us back to the chorale, which he duly does, courtesy of a few pivot chords and some shadowy harmonies. It is like those great moments in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century opera when the musical and narrative arguments onstage are interrupted by a banda off – the party Violetta throws in her Paris salon early in La Traviata, say, tuberculosis in the air. In Beethoven's imagination, though, it is played out in the most intimate of textures, that stitched together by a mere two violins, a viola, a cello.

In one of the poems in Summer Requiem, the most recent of the books in this capacious volume, Seth recalls when he decided to write, 'What even today puzzles me by its birth, / The Golden Gate, that sad and happy thing, / Child of my youth, my first wild fictive fling.' Written in the difficult stanza form of Pushkin's Eugene Onegin, it was published to great acclaim and probably remains the best known of Seth's poetic works. It was from reading The Golden Gate (1986) that Gwen Harwood came to use the Onegin stanza, and through Harwood that I discovered it, so I have always felt a sort of gratitude at one remove to Seth. Not included in this collection, it was a virtuoso achievement, hard to foresee from Mappings (1980), his earliest book.

For Pasha Ivanov, memory is 'a warped wound, with a welt or bruise that had arrived inexplicably late'. As the son of political dissidents in Moscow during Brezhnev's rule, his childhood memories wend between impressions of his mother leaning over the typewriter, her back's incline 'like a mountain, severe and strong', and the activists who gather in their small flat copying banned poems and articles. Among them is the trace of Pasha's absent father and the silence surrounding that absence. As Pasha reaches adulthood, just as Gorbachev with his glasnost or openness arrives, the inheritance of lost history begins to reveal its injuries.

When snow falls, it blurs the line of sight. Sometimes it covers the world with a soft blanket, dampening everything else; sometimes it chills to the marrow, taking a vulnerable human body to the limits of freezing. In Julia Leigh's moving memoir, Avalanche: a love story, the movement of snow correlates both to the clinical specificities of the IVF process which she experiences, and to the emotional undulations which accompany it, always threatening to overwhelm.

Some books in a writer's oeuvre are like beacons. Louise Erdrich has shone such lights before, but in a prolific career – this is her fifteenth novel – LaRose is perhaps her brightest. A story of traditional justice, vengeance, and healing, LaRose is also a cohesive weaving of intergenerational stories that links back to the beginning of a writing career spanning more than thirty years.

This month marks a grim anniversary: four years ago, in August 2012, Prime Minister Julia Gillard re-introduced a policy of offshore processing for asylum seekers who try to reach Australia by boat. Since then we have inflicted terrible punishments on thousands of vulnerable men, women, and children who made the mistake of seeking safety in the wrong country at the wrong time.

Thomas Piketty is of course the French economist who shot to fame, somewhat improbably, on the back of an 800-page tub thumper Capital in the Twenty-First Century, published in 2013. Notwithstanding the exorbitant length of the book, one that defeated all but determined professional readers, the message was handily clear. While economic growth is making societies richer, they are also becoming more unequal. This growing inequality is not the result of the rich working harder or longer, but because passive income, or 'rents' earned from land and patents, is far outstripping growth in salaries. Moreover, since these rents can be passed on down the generations, wealth and privilege encrusts itself in the hands of the few, irrespective of talent, merit, or ability.

Set in the modern day, Satan Repentant is a book-length poem about revenge, resentment, and remorse, telling a new myth of what would happen if Satan tried to apologise and atone for all his crimes. Through that story, it explores ideas of power, of authority to judge right and wrong, and the dignity and shame that can be attached to admitting fault or insisting on self-righteous innocence. Here is an extract.

BOOK ONE

Satan knows self-regret

I sing of nothing
for even I won't of myself.
Myself is a cipher I shall not want
for nothing,
for I am nothing.

I sing not of my pity,
nought of my need. For my need
is me
and I am nothing.
My greatness;
my charm,
my father/mother/creator's love;
I sing of Nothing.

Nothing was in the beginning
until nothing gave itself a name.
An author speaking
nice things with the air;

It is said
therefore it is: poesis. Being
is in the mind of the bemuser
and so I sing of nothing ...

Satan whispers to himself, 'We must away,
the day has broken long
since we saw the folly of our crime. My pride has made me sick,
my pride has made me me. I am ill with myself
and vomit it out like a dog that guzzles oil.
I will not bathe in the bile of my pride,
the fester of my hatred, the bog of all my malice
any longer.
Eternity is long enough to see that I was wrong –
not wrong to God but wrong to me – and now I swoon forever
in my own infested bowel.

But how? How to speak to He who hates my hate?
Would enough be made of my pious attempts,
if only for a moment? I
must know I must try, else
it cannot be genuine, yet what hope there is
is nothing.
Enough! I am left no choice
but take the risk, submit to His rage
if that is what it is. Any less
would be a lie.'

An attendant wight, winged
and hidden
above the Enemy's lair,
takes to flight at these words unwholesome to its ear
ascends the caverns of
the lieutenant's lieutenant –
the hooved king of pigs and vermin
to report what has been heard.

The Enemy approaches Peter

On burnt and broken pinions
the morning star implored the Earth
to drag himself out of Hell. Bedraggled, torn,
he, burning yet from the fires
of that place so recently escaped,
sought across the width of the
world
for a ladder, a path
a rope – finding none
was forced to creak and howl
like an albatross across the starry
expanse, cold but illumined,
to those gates such ages since
cast out of in disgrace.

And that one named
'Saint' by his supporters, so late
since Lucifer's days in Heaven installed
to guard the gates, stepped
forward with his record and
a hand raised for the guards:
'What seek you here,
Enemy of Everything?' spoke the
immortalled mortal saint.

At this new slight, not
so much to the previous glorious esteem
in which the star once was
held, as to the earnest hard-worked
journey just completed,
the fixed mind and high disdain
he believed himself in himself
to have mastered, reared
up at once and the Beast
returned – ripped off the head
of that authoritative saint, muscles
bulging and sinews contorted to the
pulse of insulted pride, dismembered
his corpse and flagellated the same
with its own limbs, bellowing
'How fucking dare you!'
before that magic host dwelling within
could lay aside their harps and
contemplations to rescue
their murdered friend.

So not to look at the Right
Hand as He approached, Satan
lowered his head, 'I know,
I'm going' and dropped
like a stone, sleek and
dead-weighted by the grief and
guilt renewed anew, immediately
to reappear
in his black pit.

Beelzebub reissues his spy

'That one's a charm, ridiculous
fool! That he believes he may freely insult
God astounds me not – forever have both been so high,
exalted in the minds of themselves,
that a slight from either is only their nature.
But that he would abandon us! Companions
to his treachery, conspirators in his misery,
now donated to the roadside ditch, the bonfire of courageous charity,
like pieces of elaborate whimsy!
We are not his playthings! Go, winged beast,
and see what he says from here. Conceal that hideous loveliness
beneath a Gregorian cloud. Listen close
outside their gates and report to me what Satan says.
This cannot be; we cannot
allow it.'  The pig king seared and hissed the last;
on seeping wings his agent fled
to spy on their erstwhile master.

The Enemy reapproaches Peter

Arrived once more
at those gates, that same place
of his most recent crime, The Enemy
kneels and lifts his eyes
slowly
to the robe, the hem
of the garment of the one he slighted
yesterday a week ago.

'You,'
the accountant spoke
unmaliced;
the morning star assented
with a nod,
then spoke:
'I would see the
Father, the creator of
all things, she with
no need of 'he', he
that needs no she
to beget the world
and all reality, nor
sees it thus divided.'

Satan is allowed an audience with God's chamberlain

The gatekeeper staring made no sign, save
a gathering at the shoulders to indicate they both
must wait. Neither measured the minutes until
an emissary appeared.
'Your pride undoes you before you cross the door'
the servant spoke between the bars. Satan
lowered himself, prostrate against the firmament
to show once more remorse. 'I grovel' he said.
The chamberlain sneered and spat debris
the length of the devil's body.
'Traitorous snake, what could you say that our
father would hear?'
'I seek repentance. Peel my skin,
lift out my heart. It beats still. I would apologise,
beg forgiveness,
most humbly.'
They raucously dismiss the claims, but Satan
remains prone amongst the clouds
every day into eternity.

Satan's audience with God

The kingdom's chancellor, that
angel at the gate decrying Satan's gambit
for a ploy, deception, invited at once
a parade of fellow godlykin, on feet of wings
with clouds for clothes, to trespass
on the body of their Enemy. Between the bars
they kicked and hissed, some shoved spears
and many spat. 'God loves not what cannot
love itself. God loves not that which abhors
the cause of love. Criminal! Depart!'
While their spectacle unfolded itself, warming
their hearts with distraction from mindless
contemplations, the sinister spy sent out
by Beelzebub arrived unnoticed, to clover
amongst the puffs and mounds nearby the gates
of heaven. Distastefully he adorned himself
in wisps of fluff, held his breath
and opened his ears to see.

The heavens trembled. Monolithic steps
played as rehearsed, the angels taking cue
bowed deep, assumed dignity.
Satan remained face down in the ditch of wool and cotton.

All in silence with mind to listen
heard their lord-god speak, invisible in air,
potent, tangible to every other sense possessed
by empyrean beings.
'Satan' the very name made harm
to creatures of the air earth and sea
when spoken by their author
'Why are you at my gate?'

The morning star remained sheltered,
grovelling low such ages the angels grew quite vexed.

Satan makes his apology

He lifted his gaze but it fell askance.
Silent an aeon.
'What can I say?' shucking his enormous
shoulders
'I am sorry.
By the ledger of my crimes,
my insults to you, so great a tome
it would turn the universe inside out to print;
a plethora you know, of fangs and slights
and mockeries I've made,
all my wiles, all my pain
directed at you and your creation. Yet
still more my mind has relished
without publicity, the private delight
of horrifying your dignity has
tastelessly pleased me an epoch or more.

I am ashamed. Greatly dismayed,
and knowing the enormity of it all
only makes me more contrite.
It is beyond the pale, too much
to ask forgiveness,
and yet I do.
My contrition could not be truthful
if I did not admit that I wish it.

I have offended my own love for you' (at
this his mouth was burned, the lingering malignancy,
his eternal nature, not yet shaken from his lips).
'I do not ask elevation, not rescue
from Hell; I do not ask absolution.
But, Father, please,
allow me to no longer be
the Enemy of everything. A slave
in the inferno is a kinder thing
than to be its King: perverse,
hurt and hurting. I will be that slave
if you will allow me abdicate. Grant me
anything you can if it means I am no more
the leader of this parade of pointless fools humiliating you.

Gladly I surrender my horns, my claws. Without
guarantee I will never again
harass your seraphim,
yet next time my nature makes me hunt one down
in some darkened alley,
the rending of their flesh will be impotent.
I no longer want these tools.' Surveying
his own enormous form, Satan dared look at God.

God responds

'Before you do this thing, before
you shore your mantle
of Enemy, become
some other thing, you must
do something.'

'I listen' spoke Lucifer.

'Replace the replacements. Become human.
Do this thing.'

Silence gathered dust.

'And then? Walk amongst them?
Come to love them? Hold them
dear?'
The creator flexed and pulsed.
'I care nothing whether you love
them; they rarely love
themselves. But you must survive.
To be human is more,
surpasses birth as sapiens sapiens.
It is to transcend, imagine,
understand.
It is easier to account the grains of the sea
than to do this thing.
Do it, and you need never return to Hell.

Become human, know the travails
of not knowing,
live a life, any life, uncertain what it is,
was or will be,
nor what it is when it is no longer.
Have the witness of powerlessness and feel
the tide of power, always as its victim, to see ill
and know not what may be done, nor not what to do
that is not ill;
to die decrepit or in fear,
to die, to die.
Do this, and you shall receive my pardon.'

Saith Satan: 'How long may I ponder?'
'How long is eternity?'
The Enemy nodded, 'I will think.'

That flying sprite invigilator,
friend of the lieutenants of Hell, watched
Lucifer crawl on his belly
away from that awful grace, headed
for some tree or stone, some hidden
succour place where he might mind his mind.
Gasping embarrassed at the indignity of the deceiver,
that gremlin awayed at haste, intent
to relay this betrayal to the dukes of Hell.

Beelzebub indignant

'Huh, how so? Our brother
in most malicious arms
now has gone and impertinently
found God?'
The remaining lord of all damnation
seethed in his seat of viscera.

'Well, let me tell you, revenge and betrayal
both can cut both ways
– I will have
what I will, I will do
what I will; Satan
no longer Satan, the Enemy
appeased – Hater: remorseful, apologetic
penitent!?
Like the dog that forces vomit
by choking on a verdant blade
our hound has gone ill
lain under the hen house
all day
moping to rediscover his good old master, God.'

The pig king shuffled his many legs
upon his vacant throne, offal cascading
as shrapnel sprayed from lice-filled bones.
'Found God? Found God! Well I can find him, too!'
'Find him guilty'
'Find him old!'
'Find him weak
and sentimental' the choirs jeered
dominions recoiled, salved their pride
by denying what they could not kill.
'Silence!' the pig king, self-pronounced,
would brook no open pulpit.

'Who will accompany me? Who will
show me the way (for I confess,
I seem to have lost it)' – at
this his wit gains happy laughs amongst the crowd –
'back to that green field, rotten with love, wormy
with whimsy, weaklings fanning compassion on pretence of action?'
He lifted his body and stamped three hooves
'Who will be my guide,
lead my sleigh and break the gates
our grand old snake slid under
when he left us? The way is hard, and
I'll hate you all the while
but fly me to the moonlit
sky
above the bloated ball,
return me to the battlements
still smoking in our minds
and I'll shake my spear and
take our due – that tyrant above
cannot rob us in our sleep – for we have none –
and even as he grants his prodigal
succour,
he must admit
some lent to us, some key with which
we may gouge the scars,
the old war wounds Lucifer seeks to heal;
God cannot win unless he risks failure
– he must agree to give us our chance
and I will seize it
and make it mine
and though our fate remain tortured beasts
in a pit of pain
still at least we will have our revenge!
Sticks and stones are the breeze on the cheek
of that morning star seeking to regain
fresh airing.
When we are finished he'll favour Hell itself
to the slivers of sweet misery, delicacies of
indecency, outrage
and good old friend here pain,
to teach him for himself what he'll get for being human.
For leaving us
to burn and rot
for betraying the betrayers, betrayed
for that grand old fool on high;
we'll murder his life one thousand times
and delight and delight and delight.

This I pledge, to you, the faithful;
Faith out-enduring the messiah we toasted;
I will get our cross – I will hold
God
to his own stupid rules and sacred game
bring down the tools
with which to strike
and we can war again!'

Cheers and adulation, but no guides
are volunteering. The pig king widens his maw
once more, vomits out the troll of the morning's news,
Satan's old pet, awful best friend of slime
'You! You will take me there. Sniff out
your master and your renewed liege-lord.
The hunt is on, but we need hounds. God
will provide, and we'll ride him down,
that great pacific traitor.
By any means necessary' snarled the lord of the flies 'that
is his great lesson. And though our once compadre now absconds
he cannot cause us forget
that fine fine phrase. By any means
necessary, we shall have revenge. By any means necessary
we shall achieve our ends. By any means necessary, and we shall
succeed. Why? Because our enemy' (a laughed aside) 'denies
himself that very path. By his goodliness and lamb-touching
flaxen-haired dearth of strength, by his unwillingness to do
whatever it takes
he cannot succeed. Let him have his desire for good. Let him have
his wish to see humanity. And leave to us the spoils.'

Satan takes a beating

The morning star, ignorant
of that trailing sprite, that nixie of the netherworld
sent to surveil and spy,
shook and took to air, a wander and amiss.
'Where can I go, to contemplate this offer, this
deal made by the master of the cards?'
Unwelcome on Earth, barred from Heaven,
traitor now in Hell, he wandered in limbos and happened
upon a solitary stone, stopped and sat and thought
and from the side of a shadow stepped Beelzebub
and Shub Niggurath, and all their unseemly host.
'Where for art thou, Lucifer? Where for art thou,
light bearer? See, the sun has fled' gestures at
a darkened sky 'and Satan is the east. We
are leaderless, alone, alone in Hell. Come back.'

Satan turned, could not speak. Roundly
they surrounded him, taunted his broken wings, his
horns. 'You shall repent to us of your repentance!' hissed
the lord of the flies, 'you shall renege on all your good
intentions. Return to us, or we will eat you!'
Satan stood to leave, and the angel of Death tore off his wings.
'You cannot go, we love you so!' Dagon uprooted the horns
of his head, a lieutenant cut off his trotters:
'Repent of your repentance, or face the consequence: take you
this offer to assume humanity, and we will hunt you down:
on Earth we do as earthlings will, and you have none
to shield you. Torment? Speak of torment! Our plans
abound for most abusive scolding of our parent
– see we take your blueprints
for the Jobs and devout priests; we believe, o we believe!
And you cannot surrender. Repent and die one thousand near-deaths
and regret forever your humanity!'

They set upon him, awaiting not the response he could not give,
besmirched his cloth and tore his garments, broke stones and smote
his head, defecated and consumed,
abused and beat and tore.
Satan wore all and gave no quarter, but retaliated none either;
what could be done, nor excuse offered, nor plan
nor jest, but lies?
like the fool who throws firebrands, arrows and death,
he could not speak unless renege
on his pledge to resume honesty.
They beat and they beat and he lay in filth and knew
that this must be.
By time transpired their organs groaned
too long too far from the fires of inferno, too
little fire of their own
to power such turbines of torture, harvester
wheels turned and twisted to reap the screams
of an angel who has exhausted Hell. They,
englobulated, made fleshy and deposed, enfeebled
limbs no longer strong
sufficient to wound that monstrous girth,
barely able to carry each other or themselves
back to the lake of fire,
exited, left Lucifer extinguished in faeces and
pools of sinew, ligaments strung between limbs
and the stars, his skin a sheet so thin,
opaque enclosing the globe,
for how they had flayed him.

Aeons passed and the morning star arose, ascended once more to Earth.

Satan answers God

'You are prepared to do this?' God's doubt,
evaporating mist of sea spray in
Satan's face.
'Submit to suffering, to unknown
ending?'
Lucifer dutifully maintained solemn
earnestness. 'I know a thing or two
about endured suffering.'
God urged him consider the severity
of human dullard painlessness.
'No knowledge outside your own
three senses
no power of flight or manipulation, no
agelessness allowing lengthy plots nor
canvasses. You will grow, birth, grow
incessantly, without understanding or perception
more than a fragment for all around you; gain
some futile grip, momentary awareness of apprehension
before the ground is shifted again
and you are on your knees, no longer growing,
this time dying, ageing away to reinvigorate dust.
Do you want this? You have known the infinite,
you have salved yourself
with time beyond time
and the mind to encompass that same. Now
in this pilgrim's path you contemplate
you will have none. No mind, no
temporal fort nor corporeal magnitude
impervious to nothing, vulnerable to all.
And at the end you still will not know
if the choice you made was fantasy,
phantasmal delusion invented by you
against mundane existence. You will fear
as only the fragile who can be extinguished
can ever hope to fear. Alone and trembling before
the whole of emptiness, with no memory
of all you hoped before you bore to Earth.
What say you?'
'I may be naïve to mortal suffering
But I have known far worse than you. If I
survive what you barely imagine
than I can manage this.'
'Pride' whispered between the wings of angels
sneaking on the hills. 'Pride' seethed
the seraphim, hateful of their kind gone bad.
Satan maintained self-counsel, recognised
error in such diagnoses. No longer proud,
self-reliant and assured, his weird
humility an artefact they could not describe
nor see.
'Lucifer' the father said, and all the angels
wept. 'You will live on Earth. Take your test
and if you fail, be
never again.'
The dauntless morning star surrendered
to the moon, conceived in a glow worm's ball
of shining mercury, shot to Earth to inspire life.

Michael Aiken

Michael Aiken is the inaugural ABR Laureate's Fellow. David Malouf (our Laureate) selected him. This Fellowship was funded by ABR's Patrons. Michael Aiken's most recent publication is A Vicious Example (Grand Parade Poets, 2014). This is his first appearance in ABR.

On 3 August, Michael Aiken read from  ‘Satan Repentant’ at a Sydney Ideas event and discussed it with David Malouf (ABR Laureate) – an illuminating and deeply sympathetic conversation between the two poets. The whole session is now available via the Sydney Ideas podcast.

Michael Aiken and David Malouf in conversation at Sydney Ideas

Michael Aiken's son Artemis with his copy of ABR

David Malouf and Michael Aiken

Michael Aiken and David Malouf in conversation at Sydney Ideas

Michael Aiken and ABR Editor Peter Rose

Australians must start 'thinking like hawks, while moving like doves', James Brown asserts in his viscerally illustrated but poorly argued Firing Line: Australia's path to war. Amid a darkening security outlook – subtext: a rising China – Australia must awaken from its complacency and foster a new national strategy based upon genuine and informed debate about war and our place in the world. Unfortunately, Brown undercuts his reasonable pro-position by insinuating that this debate must result in a deeper dependence on the United States.

Poet and novelist Mark O'Flynn lives in the same street in the Blue Mountains in which Eve Langley's derelict shack still stands. Perhaps her ghost drifts along the well-worn path from Leura to the Katoomba post office that she regularly traversed, in men's attire, pith helmet on head, machete in hand, to post off her latest manuscript to her bemused editor at Angus & Robertson, the poet Douglas Stewart.

In the acknowledgments of Their Brilliant Careers, the author gives thanks to Roberto Bolaño's Nazi Literature in the Americas (1996), which 'provides essential background information for the life of Rand Washington'. Washington, a popular science fiction author with eugenist views, is just one of the eccentrics summarised in O'Neill's fictional compendium. Like Bolaño's book, Their Brilliant Careers draws bold zigzags through literary history, forging connections between real, imagined, intertextual, and metafictional events. It is a chocolate box of parodic Aussie portraits: some are bitter, some have gooey sentimental hearts, and some are just plain nuts.

Though not as astringent as Bolaño's fiction, Their Brilliant Careers nevertheless brims with crackerjack wit. Pressure is subtly built; punchlines are explosive. O'Neill takes his lead from the playful works of the literary group Oulipo, specifically Georges Perec, who even makes an appearance as a contemporary of Arthur ruhtrA, the Fremantle-born experimental writer and founder of 'Kangaroulipo'. Perec's Life: A user's manual (1978) uses self-imposed regulations to create an encyclopedic vision, incorporating a blank chapter to 'include' incompleteness. Their Brilliant Careers also employs restrictions that are then systematically adjusted or inverted.

O'Neill's book is interconnected in a way that tests believability, but so too are the real events into which its web entwines. Indeed, one of O'Neill's creations, Addison Tiller ('The Chekhov of Coolabah'), who almost single-handedly defines the Australian bush identity without ever actually leaving the city, suggests that Chekhovian realism has no business here. Yet one of the text's triumphs is its implication that even if literature is incapable of revealing truth, it is still a formidable force capable of producing seismic reverberations that echo throughout history. Whether they like it or not, O'Neill suggests, Australians are a product of their writing.

Julie Koh's first full-length short story collection, Portable Curiosities, is an electrifying satire on Anglo-Australian hegemony and the underbelly of the Australian Dream. In twelve stories populated with ghostly lizard boys, 3D yellow people who step out of the cinema screen like the Purple Rose of Cairo (1985), and girls who grow cat ears and tails, Koh provides an existential context for the social effects of consumerism, sexism, misogyny, and racism.

Resurrection being the concept underpinning Music and Freedom, fittingly the performance of Rachmaninov's Second Piano Concerto – which marked the composer's return from a four-year bout of depression – is the structural core of this powerful first novel. The concerto's ominous opening chords, aching second movement, and confident yet unsettled finale reverberate through Zoë Morrison's narrative as she explores the complexities of life, love, music, and memory.

Compelling from start to finish, The Healing Party is a mature and illuminating account of the complex ties of family. Micheline Lee's début novel follows Natasha Chan who, after years of estrangement from her family, receives news of her mother's terminal cancer. Natasha leaves her life in Darwin and returns to the family home in Melbourne. Here, the Chans – who became born-again Charismatic Christians when Natasha was a child – speak in tongues, give prophecies, and evangelise. Paul Chan, the domineering yet charming head of the family, announces that he has received a message from God: his wife is to be healed and they must hold a party to celebrate. Terrified of disappointing her father but recognising his manipulation, Natasha swings between feelings of rage, pity, guilt, and self-doubt.

Like James M. Cain's 1943 novella Double Indemnity – better known from Billy Wilder's influential film version of the following year – Black Teeth begins with a dubious-sounding insurance deal. The prologue also features a thickly overgrown Melbourne garden, which provides a better metaphor for the tangled, sometimes stifling narrative that follows.

George Marshall-Hall was a towering figure both physically and intellectually in Melbourne in the last decade of the nineteenth century and the first of the twentieth. Standing six-foot-three in his socks, the English-born and -educated musician was appointed the inaugural Ormond Professor of Music at the University of Melbourne in 1890. Following his arrival from London, he soon made friends with kindred bohemian spirits such as Lionel and Norman Lindsay, and with artists Tom Roberts and Arthur Streeton, regularly camping with them on their plein air painting expeditions.

For many young writers, Julian Wasser's 1968 Time magazine photograph of Joan Didion posed in front of her yellow Corvette remains the epitome of cool. This has less to do with the car and the cigarette than the challenging gaze that seems to say, 'I'd rather be writing.'

Didion's work continues to deliver news to us as readers and instruct us as writers. In essay collections such as Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1968), The White Album (1979), and Political Fictions (2001), and in her novels Play It as It Lays (1970) and A Book of Common Prayer (1977), she captures all the longings of people (or characters) and the place and era they inhabit. Didion didn't just write about her subjects, whether they were John Wayne, Haight-Ashbury, or the candidates in the 1988 Republican and Democrat National Conventions. As the filmmaker Cameron Crowe notes about Didion's essay 'The White Album', in which (among other things) she observes a recording session of The Doors, '[It] ended up being about life in California, the weather, and existence. I thought, "I get it! This is big picture stuff!"' Or, in biographer Tracy Daugherty's words, Didion's essay on John Wayne reads like 'an elegy not just for an individual but for an era'.

When David Bowie died in January 2016, Simon Critchley received many invitations to reflect on the pop star, in part because he had published a collection of brief essays called Bowie in 2014. A New York-based Englishman like Bowie himself, Critchley has repurposed that book after its subject's death, also integrating elements of a eulogy he wrote for The New York Times. The result is a probing blend of criticism, fandom, philosophy, and history, encapsulating what Critchley calls 'a love story that, in my case, has lasted about forty-four years'.

Amid the resurgence of the personal essay, Barbara Blackman's volume is a paragon of the genre. It reminds us how much experience, anecdote, and wisdom can be packed into this small format. All My Januaries has thirty-six pieces, darting from the shortest vignette to more digressive accounts of a barefoot Brisbane childhood, a year living in Paris, and a Sydney Olympic torch run at the age of seventy.

When The Lucky Country was published in 1964, its cover – Albert Tucker's painting of a hat-wearing, stony-faced, beer-swilling Aussie gambler – captured its essence. Donald Horne's interrogation of Australia was a powerful critique of a nation marked by cultural and political conservatism and economic insularity. His conclusion opened with the much-quoted sentence, 'Australia is a lucky country run mainly by second-rate people who share in its luck.' It balanced both the sense of Australia's material capacity and wealth of opportunities, and of its accidental good fortune at not having been brought low by its leaders' incompetence. The book aimed to catalyse a national debate to challenge these elements, and it largely succeeded.

The subtitle of this compellingly readable biography of Thomas Eyre Forrest Hughes AO QC borrows the underlying philosophical metaphor of the independent Bar. A barrister is available for hire by those who will pay the fee, irrespective of personal, political, social, or other co-incidence with the client, or approval or disapproval of his or her cause. As Dr Johnson explained to Boswell:

The Australian National Dictionary – the second edition of which has just been published – is based on historical principles and modelled on the large Oxford English Dictionary. Words and meanings are traced chronologically from their first occurrence in the language through to the present (or to the time when they cease to be used); the evidence for their history appears in the form of quotations from texts of various kinds, including printed books, journals, newspapers, manuscripts, and diaries – from the earliest, a 1698 letter referring to black swans that were seen in a voyage to the 'South Land', to more recent gems such as this quotation for 'footy frank' from a 2005 newspaper: the handsome teenager who was blessed with the personality of a footy frank and a similar bulge in his impossibly tight jeans.

Liam Pieper has been making quite a name for himself in recent years. He published his début memoir, The Feel Good Hit of the Year, to acclaim in 2014. He followed this up with Mistakes Were Made (2015), a collection of four essays. Now, just over a year later, he has published his first novel, The Toymaker; one reviewer has even compared it favourably to J.M. Coetzee's Disgrace (1999).

A new poetry press in Australia should always be greeted with joy, and then interrogated with rigour. These six volumes from the recently created book arm of Cordite Poetry Review, the online juggernaut that churns the great substrate of AusPo like a sea cucumber on the ocean floor, represent the biodiversity and recombinant flow of new work in these interesting times.

Do people hate poetry, as the title of Ben Lerner's terrific book-sized essay implies? In Lerner's account, poetry is associated with hatred and contempt, even by its practitioners, because of the gap between the ideal, imagined poem and the real productions of poets; between 'Poetry' and the embarrassing existence of actual poems. Between these two poles we find poets, and those who, along with Plato, would banish poetry from the ideal Republic.

Undaunted by Joseph Furphy's autodidactic complexities and indulgences, A.D. Hope proposed in his 1974 collection,  Native Companions, Essays and Comments on Australian Literature 1936–1966, that Such Is Life was 'a novel based on a theory of the novel'.

Reading, with great pleasure, Michael Wilding's Growing Wild, it occurred to me that here was a memoir based on a theory of memoir. The theory involves a refusal to pretend to certainty or precision of memory, an insistence on the fluidity of the past as it constantly reconstructs itself in inadequate or tantalisingly partial remembrance of incidents, places, conversations, faces, random yet possibly significant oddities, and so on. Repeatedly Wilding withdraws from a crystallised version of the past that many biographers, for example, used to claim or aspire to, in favour of degrees of uncertainty: 'he seemed a pleasant enough person', he recalls of meeting Morris Shapira. 'Presented himself so, anyway. He proposed we should have dinner together the night before the interview. Perhaps now ... I would decline ... Perhaps his insistence was too strong; perhaps it was my determined openness to experience which I proclaimed at that time ... As it is, I can remember nothing of the experience, where we ate, whether it was after some official sherry party, if such occurred.'

Since the passage of the Native Title Act 1993 (Cth) and related law reform, legal rights and interests in a significant and growing estate have been transferred to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander groups around Australia. As Jon Altman and Francis Markham explain in their contribution to this edited collection, this estate now comprises more than thirty per cent of the continent, and includes areas with significant mineral deposits as well as other economic development opportunities. Yet frustrations with the native title system remain so strongly felt that the subtitle of this collection – native title as 'a vehicle for change and empowerment' – is presented here in the form of a question. Offering diverse perspectives from legal practitioners and academics, this collection asks why such change and empowerment has proved so difficult to achieve, and what might be done to improve the system.

According to A.N. Wilson, the Bible is badly misread by those fundamentalists, whether believers or atheists, who choose to read it in a literal-minded way rather than as the supreme work of the imagination. For Wilson, the Bible is an inexhaustible source of poetic and moral stimulus, not an instruction manual containing strictures of uncertain historical provenance that make no sense to modern minds. The greatest readers of the Bible in our time, Wilson argues, are those like Martin Luther King Jr, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, and Desmond Tutu, who each drew strength from the essential allegory of love and endurance in achieving good in the world rather than being distracted by the sort of details that give rise to disputes between Christians and atheists, and among believers themselves.

This small book is the culmination of a lifetime's thought about some of the deepest and most unfathomable philosophical questions: the limits of our knowledge of the world; the nature of morality; the nature of our being; and our thoughts- about what lies beyond death. Magee is a philosopher and his attempts to grapple with his chosen questions reflect this; in particular, the influence on him of some of the greatest figures in Western philosophy, notably Kant and Schopenhauer. But Ultimate Questions is fundamentally a personal reflection on these questions, reflection that leads not so much to answers but to a deeper sense of what such reflection really involves, including – for limited mortal beings such as us – its limits. Here it is important to note that Magee is not just a philosopher; his rich and varied life has included being a member of parliament in Britain, a music and theatre critic, a BBC broadcaster, and a poet. All of this has influenced Magee's thought in ways that extend well beyond academic philosophy.

WHY DO YOU WRITE?

I'm compelled to do it, as a way of understanding and deepening experience. And (mostly) it's fun!

ARE YOU A VIVID DREAMER?

When I invited a novelist to talk to my history students, she told them to stay in bed in the morning and distil the insights of their dreams. I try to use the subconscious creatively by giving myself time to live with an instinctive idea.

JOLLEY PRIZE

Highlights of the 2016 Fiction issue include the three works shortlisted in the ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize (now worth a total of $12,500). We received a record number of entries – nearly 1,400 – from thirty-eight countries. The judges – ABR Deputy Editor Amy Baillieu and authors Maxine Beneba Clarke and David Whish-Wilson – chose a longlist of nineteen stories before selecting the shortlist.

Anthony Lawrence'Ash' by poet–novelist Anthony Lawrence is the raw, rhythmic story of a couple from the central New South Wales coast whose desire for a different life clashes with the dangerous realities of their current situation. Anthony Lawrence has published sixteen books of poems and a novel. His books and poems have won a number of awards, including the 2010 Peter Porter Poetry Prize and the NSW Premier's Award. His most recent collection is Headwaters (2016). He lives on the far north coast of New South Wales.

Josephine Rowe'Glisk' by Victorian author Josephine Rowe explores the complex bonds of family, love, and memory, and what happens when a man who fled to northern Scotland finally returns to small-town Western Australia. Rowe has written two short story collections and a novel, A Loving, Faithful Animal (2016). Her story 'Suitable for a Lampshade' won the Reader's Choice Award in the 2010 Jolley Prize. Based in Victoria, she is a recent recipient of a Stegner Fellowship in fiction from Stanford University.

Jonathan Tel'The Water Calligrapher's Women' by Jonathan Tel tells the haunting story of a man scarred by China's Cultural Revolution from the layered perspectives of the people who watch him as he works. Tel, based in London, has won several prizes, and his story 'The Year of the Panda' was commended in the 2015 Jolley Prize.

The judges commended three other stories: 'Help Me Harden My Heart' by Dom Amerena, 'Window' by Cate Kennedy, and 'Slut Trouble' by Beejay Silcox. The commended authors each receive $750. Their stories will be published by ABR in coming months.

Join us at a special event at the Melbourne Writers Festival on Saturday, 27 August (ACMI's The Cube, 4 pm) to find out which of the shortlisted stories has won the Jolley Prize. After readings from the shortlisted stories, a special guest will name the winner. This is a free event, but please This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

MILES FRANKLIN

There will be more suspense on the eve of the Jolley Prize ceremony. Five authors are vying for the 2016 Miles Franklin Literary Award, which is being presented at the Melbourne Writers Festival for the first time. The authors are Peggy Frew (Hope Farm), Myfanwy Jones (Leap), A.S. Patrić (Black Rock White City), Lucy Treloar (Salt Creek), and Charlotte Wood (The Natural Way of Things). The winner will receive $60,000; the other shortlisted authors $5,000 each.

SATAN REPENTANT

Our latest ABR Fellow has produced a truly diabolical work. Michael Aiken, the inaugural ABR Laureate's Fellow, has written a book-length poem about revenge, resentment, and remorse, telling a new myth of what would happen if Satan tried to apologise and atone for his manifold crimes. Aiken introduces the poem 'Satan Repentant', and provides a substantial extract from this hugely ambitious and original work.

Michael Aiken, who was chosen by the ABR Laureate, David Malouf, told Advances: 'Receiving the Fellowship gave me an enormous boost psychologically and artistically. To be nominated by David Malouf is an amazing gift, not least in giving me the opportunity to meet and learn from him directly. David is an elegant speaker and gracious conversationalist. Unostentatious yet enormously learned, he is the very epitome of the consummate writer. I am enormously honoured.'

Michael Aiken will read from his work at an ABR/Sydney Ideas event at the University of Sydney on Wednesday, 3 August, and he will also discuss it with David Malouf. This is a free event, but bookings are advisable via the Sydney Ideas website.

We thank Michael Aiken, David Malouf, and all the ABR Patrons, who have made this Fellowship possible.

ALAN ATKINSON

Our next ABR Fellow is one of Australia's most laurelled historians. Alan Atkinson – Emeritus Professor History at the University of New England, and Honorary Professor at the University of Sydney – is the ABR RAFT Fellow. The subject of his Fellowship article – to be published in the September issue of ABR – is 'How Do We Live with Ourselves? The Australian National Conscience'. The questions Alan Atkinson asks in this article are typically large and resonant ones – timely too: 'Can a nation, Australia especially, make an effort, just to be good? Can a whole people draw a line between right and wrong, and then act on the right? What, if anything, would such a conscience owe to the religious past and present?'

Professor Atkinson will read from and discuss his essay at a separate Sydney Ideas event on Monday, 5 September (full details to follow). The essay coincides with the publication of a new edition of his award-winning three-volume The Europeans in Australia (NewSouth).

 PORTER PRIZE

The Peter Porter Poetry Prize is one of Australia's most prestigious prizes for a new poem. The Prize – now open to all poets writing in English – is named after the great Australian poet Peter Porter (1929–2010), and was first awarded in 2005 (Stephen Edgar). The Prize was renamed in 2011, following Peter Porter's death. The winner receives $5,000 and shortlisted poets receive $500. The judges this year are Jill Jones, Ali Alizadeh, and Felicity Plunkett. All the shortlisted poems are published in the magazine. Entries close 1 December 2016.

Perish the thought

Dear Editor,
Mark Triffitt's review of George Megalogenis's Australia's Second Chance: What our history tells us about our future and Balancing Act (May 2016) left me uninspired to read either work (ABR, May 2016). Megalogenis's ideas were described, and perhaps explained to some degree, but Dr Triffitt offered little critical analysis, presumably because he agrees with Megalogenis. Far from being a 'bold and innovative re-writing of our nation's history', Australia's Second Chance seems like a re-hash of the old 'populate or perish' idea, which I had assumed any thinking observer would regard as problematic.