To highlight Australian Book Review’s arts coverage and to celebrate some of the year’s memorable concerts, operas, films, ballets, plays, and art exhibitions, we invited a group of critics and arts professionals to nominate some favourites.

John Allison

Creeping nationalism has been one of the more depressing aspects of 2016, but at least most leading opera houses are opening their artistic borders rather than shutting them. My year of highlights began and ended with two striking examples of this, with Polish National Opera inviting an outsider (David Pountney) to direct Stanisław Moniuszko’s Haunted Manor for the first time and the Hungarian State Opera doing the same with Zoltán Kodály’s Spinning Room (Michał Znaniecki). In between, the first production at Covent Garden of George Enescu’s Oedipe (by the Catalan collective La fura dels baus) represented a turning point for this Romanian masterpiece. Happily, this year has also seemed to bring more productions of Bohuslav Martinů’s operas outside the Czech lands than ever before. The only setback for Czech music I heard was Simon Rattle’s patronisingly distorted performances of Anton Dvořák’s Slavonic Dances with the Berlin Philharmonic at the Proms – one of the year’s turkeys.

The Spinning Room (photograph by Szilvia Csibi, Hungarian State Opera)

The most memorable concerts were more intimate affairs at the Wigmore Hall: the Heath Quartet’s sensational Bartók cycle at the Wigmore Hall and an evening of Beethoven songs with baritone Matthias Goerne and period-pianist Kristian Bezuidenhout. Beethoven really created the first song cycle in An die ferne Geliebte, but few performers show how, in addition to his longing for ‘the distant beloved’, the call of the mountains and meadows echo his Pastoral Symphony.

Robyn Archer

Orava Quartet played the Shostakovich String Quartet No 8 in the BBC Proms salon series at Melbourne Recital Centre. These young men are the real deal, and they performed the work with all the intensity it deserves. We’re used to seeing this work played so well by other vigorous quartets such as Brodsky and Kronos, but Orava are the next generation and it’s so good to see a young Australian quartet taking its music so seriously.

The Orava Quartet There is a unique collaboration between Gavin Webber (dancer, choreographer co-founder of contemporary dance company The Farm) and Kayah Guenther, a young man who has Downs Syndrome. With a highly respectful approach, of the kind that Back to Back Theatre exemplifies, this is tough and uncompromising dance in which no quarter is given. Both dancers give their all in a highly physical exchange. When Kayah steps forward and says, haltingly, ‘When I dance I feel strong. I am a strong man’, there’s not a dry eye in the house. You’ll have to travel far to see the next performance – at the Puerto de Ideas in Valparaiso, Chile in November 2016.

Shifting Sands was a large-scale community event for Bleach on the Gold Coast. Directed with characteristic authenticity and flair by Donna Jackson, the event combined paddle-boarders, oral history, local Indigenous people, the Queensland Ballet, synchronised swimmers, and some cool music to document the life and times of the beloved Currumbin Estuary. Held at dusk, it was a beautiful work which celebrated a place and its people with grace, fun, and awe: an object lesson in terrific community process resulting in an excellent end-product.

Ben Brooker

2016 was not, for me, a stellar year for new Australian theatre. My highlights were international – the deeply moving non-professional cast of 600 Highwaymen’s wordless The Record at OzAsia – and musical: Robyn Archer’s fierce and funny Brecht/Weill revue, Dancing on the Volcano, at the Adelaide Cabaret Festival; the State Opera of South Australia’s production of George Palmer’s Cloudstreet (Arts Update, 5/16); and James Morrison in concert with his youthful big band, the prodigiously swinging Academy Jazz Orchestra.

Antoinette Halloran as Oriel Lamb and Nicholas Cannon as Fish Lamb in State Opera of South Australia's production of Cloudstreet (photograph by Oliver Toth)

Neil Armfield’s King Lear at Sydney Theatre Company, with Geoffrey Rush masterful in the title role, did not disappoint (Arts Update, 11/15). I had looked forward to Machu Picchu at State Theatre Company of South Australia, but its reteaming of director Geordie Brookman and playwright Sue Smith from 2014’s superb Kryptonite did not see lightning strike twice. But let’s face it – most everyone had their work cut out for them in what was a bleak year to be an artist in this country.

Lee Christofis

Northern hemisphere choreographers dominated the 2016 Australian dance calendar, beginning with the Pina Bausch Company’s Nelken (Carnations) at the Adelaide Festival (Arts Update, 3/16), and Spanish-born Rafael Bonachela’s Lux Tenebris for Sydney Dance Company.

The Australian Ballet presented short works by three of the world’s most illustrious artists – William Forsythe, Jiři Kylián, and Christopher Wheeldon – but memories of these were but all but eradicated by John Neumeier’s Nijinsky, created for the Hamburg Ballet, which he has directed for forty years (Arts Update, 9/16). Nijinsky is a monumental experience for dancers, musicians, and audiences alike, as it delves into the fantasies and psychotic episodes through which the greatest Russian dancer of his day recounted his glamorous career and his decline into madness. Rarely have the dancers of The Australian Ballet been so drilled and galvanised, dancing beyond their experience into such contrasting worlds of war and terror, as well as the beauty and sexually ambiguous ethos of the Ballets Russes.

Cristiano Martino as the Faun in The Australian Ballet's Nijinsky (photograph by Jeff Busby)

On a much smaller scale, existentialism, absence, and longing have fueled Rafael Bonachela’s recent works for Sydney Dance Company, nowhere better than this year’s Lux Tenebris. Nick Wales’s dense, moody score underpins the vital ways Bonachela has begun to complicate his stage pictures. Lux Tenebris was as exhilarating as it was emotionally commanding, and the dancers of Sydney Dance Company, who always look wonderful under Bonachela’s direction, revealed themselves as heroes of a completely different class.

In cinemas, ‘live’ screenings from the Royal Ballet delivered treasures in spades: revivals of two Frederick Ashton choreographies: Rhapsody and Le Deux Pigeons; and a new Frankenstein by Liam Scarlett, whose A Midsummer Night’s Dream was sold-out hit for Queensland Ballet in April (Arts Update, 4/16). The Australian Ballet has announced it will screen its Sleeping Beauty (Arts Update, 9/16) in 2017, but it will need to find more talented, local choreographers if it wants to show new, home-grown product to the world at large.

Ian Dickson

The Brisbane Baroque festival may have ended chaotically with stories of unpaid artists, but it included several excellent concerts and its imported production of Handel’s Agrippina was an undoubted highlight, fully deserving the several Helpmann awards that came its way. Laurence Dale’s witty production played up the black comedy of Grimani’s libretto, and the cast was uniformly excellent.

An equally excellent cast, combined with Kip William’s compelling production, made STC’s version of Arthur Miller’s All My Sons (Arts Update, 6/16) an unforgettable experience. Sunset Song was quintessential Terence Davies, long, slow, beautiful, and ultimately extraordinarily moving (Arts Update, 9/16).

John Howard and Chris Ryan in Sydney Theatre Company's All My Sons (photograph by Zan Wimberley)

It was good to welcome back to the stage two splendid performers, Keith Robinson at Belvoir and Marta Dusseldorp at Griffin, though it is to be hoped that the next project Dusseldorp takes on is worthier of her talent than Benedict Andrews’s wilfully obscure, overheated melodrama Gloria.

Andrew Fuhrmann

One of the most memorable performances I saw this year was at a half-full theatrette in Brunswick – the Mechanics Institute – where André De Vanny was doing Swansong, the award-winning dramatic monologue by Irish actor and writer Conor McDermottroe. It was an absolute tour de force, but one that got lost in the mad ruck of this year’s Fringe Festival.

This year I decided to forswear all theatre presented at both the Melbourne Theatre Company and the Malthouse, the idea being that occasional abstinence works as a cure against the creep of cynicism. I did, however, break my pledge in order to see the adaptation of Picnic at Hanging Rock directed by Matthew Lutton (Arts Update, 3/16), a gothic nightmare which I enjoyed immensely. I was also very impressed with director Tanya Gerstle’s production of Mill on the Floss at Theatre Works (Arts Update, 8/16): a powerful ensemble piece with a provoking feminist theme.

Harriet Gordon-Anderson, Nikki Sheils, and Elizabeth Nabben in Picnic at Hanging Rock (photograph by Pia Johnson, Malthouse Theatre)

Tony Grybowski

Gustav Mahler’s Second Symphony holds a special place in my life. As a tuba student at the Conservatorium of Music at the University of Melbourne in the early 1980s, the Resurrection Symphony was the ambitious 1985 repertoire for the Conservatorium orchestra. Fast forward about six years and I was working in a management role at the Sydney Symphony Orchestra when the late Stuart Challender embarked on a memorable cycle of symphonies as part of his tenure as Chief Conductor of the SSO. It was therefore very special to return to the mighty Sydney Town Hall and hear that work with the current Chief Conductor, David Robertson, on a Sunday afternoon in July.

David Robertson (photograph by Keith Saunders)

In contrast, I was honoured to step into the world of central Australian artists at the Annual ‘Desert Mob’ Exhibition, Symposium, and Market Place at the Araluen Arts Centre in Alice Springs. The gathering puts a spotlight on and brings together a showcase of artists from the thirty-nine Indigenous arts centres across central Australia. There are very few experiences that mix a gathering of artists and art lovers who can meet, talk, and learn about the culture of this stunning region, as well as presenting an opportunity to purchase a valuable piece of work at the market place.

Michael Halliwell

2016 seems to have been a Così fan tutte year throughout the world, but the Opera Australia production by David McVicar was the highlight. This most difficult opera to bring off successfully was given a searching, elegant, vocally resplendent, and ultimately moving series of performances in Sydney (Arts Update, 7/16). A production of the Mozart opera at the Vienna Volksoper drew on an imaginative concept: staging it as a student rehearsal of the opera, but ultimately failed to deliver, abandoning the concept during the first half (Arts Update, 7/16). My musical highlight was the performance of Schubert’s masterpiece, Die Winterreise, performed by Matthias Goerne, with projections by William Kentridge, as part of the Sydney Festival in January (Arts Update, 1/16). It was stunning both musically and visually.

Markus Hinterhäuser and Matthias Goerne in Winterreise (photograph by Prudence Upton)

Philippa Hawker

I loved German writer-director Maren Ade’s epic and comic Toni Erdmann, which I saw at the Melbourne International Film Festival. Ade lets the relationship between a father and his adult daughter play out in awkward, hilarious, often protracted detail, in a work that seems excessive and perfectly balanced, brutal and generous at the same time. I would also single out MIFF’s program Gaining Ground, consisting of six films directed by women in New York in the 1970s and early 1980s, ranging from the deadpan comedy of Elaine May’s A New Leaf to the feminist near-future uprising of Lizzie Borden’s Born In Flames. Curation at its best.

A New Leaf (1971) (Paramount Pictures)

Paul Kildea

Dancers feel vibrations through a sprung floor. Orchestral musicians too: double basses sawing away on a decent stage, say. This same visceral sensation was there in Opera Queensland’s Snow White, where Silvia Colloca as the Queen lay on the ground wailing like a singer in a Fado tavern, the sound cutting through us all, the show cumulatively reeling us in. Writer Tim Dunlop would approve, for in his book Why the Future is Workless he ring-fences artists from the enormous changes taking place in the way we work. In punchy, elegant prose he writes optimistically of shifting practices and priorities – if only we can all get our heads around it.

Liza Lim’s opera Tree of Codes, based on the cut-out book by Jonathan Safran Foer and premièred in Cologne, is a virtuosic, mesmerising exploration of memory and time, of colour and sound, simultaneously a challenge to the genre and a pretty good roadmap. We need to hear her more.

Opera Queensland's Snow White (photograph by Dylan Evans)

David Larkin

My highlight of the Sydney Festival was an utterly compelling performance of Dusapin’s ‘O Mensch!’ cycle by baritone Mitch Reilly and pianist Jack Symonds. Beautifully lit and directed, this Sydney Chamber Opera production turned the work into an expressionist monodrama.

The new Verbrugghen Ensemble under John Lynch gave a stunning rendition of a radically downsized Fourth Symphony by Mahler, which revealed fresh aspects of an old favourite. Continuing the Mahler theme, the in-form Sydney Symphony Orchestra delivered a monumental Resurrection Symphony with David Robertson on the podium in Sydney Town Hall.

Within the world of opera, the Met broadcast of Strauss’s Elektra showcased a fabulous cast of singers headed by Nina Stemme in the final production of the late Patrice Chéreau: an effectively minimalist staging which humanised the monstrous characters. At home, George Petean was outstanding in the title role of Opera Australia’s Simon Boccanegra, and Nicole Car and Anna Dowsley shone in David McVicar’s stylish production of Così fan tutte.

For 2017, Jonas Kaufmann in OA’s concert performance of Parsifal, and Martha Argerich’s belated Australian début with SSO are unmissable.

Nicole Car as Fiordiligi and Anna Dowsley as Dorabella in Opera Australias Così fan tutte (photograph by Prudence Upton)

Brian McFarlane

In what has been an often-rewarding year for cinema, Terence Davies’ Sunset Song, for my money, just pips at the post such strong competitors as Brooklyn (Arts Update, 2/16), the tonally perfect adaptation of Colm Tóibín’s novel, and Simon Stone’s daring relocation of Ibsen’s The Wild Duck to a modern-day rundown setting in rural Australia: The Daughter (Arts Update, 3/16). Davies sets his film in pre-Great War Aberdeenshire. With his wonderful flair for evoking time and place, he chronicles the life of a teenage girl as she copes with a puritanical father, a bullied mother who dies too early, and a husband who will be traumatised by his wartime experiences. This may sound gloomy, but the overall effect is both elegiac and quietly hopeful.

Geoffrey Rush in The Daughter (photograph by Mark Rogers)

Two theatrical experiences stand out. The Bell Shakespeare’s Othello achieved that rare melding of the poetic and the conversational among its uniformly fine cast (Arts Update, 7/16). At fortyfivedownstairs, Wit was a stark and confronting study of a woman dying from ovarian cancer, played with lacerating lack of compromise – and, indeed, with wit – by Jane Montgomery Griffiths.

James McNamara

On television, I hugely admired The Night Of (HBO, Arts Update, 9/16), The Kettering Incident (Foxtel, Arts Update 9/16), and Stranger Things (Netflix), whose child actors – particularly Millie Bobby Brown – gave wonderful performances.

Elizabeth Debicki as Anna Macy in The Kettering Incident (Showcase/Foxtel, photograph by Ben King)

My theatrical performance of the year is called ASSSSCAT. I know it sounds odd, but in American comedy circles ASSSSCAT has the canonical ring of Bell Shakespeare or Monty Python. It is the flagship improvisational comedy show of the Upright Citizens Brigade, a theatre responsible for a staggering array of talent – Amy Poehler, Aziz Ansari, and Zach Galifianakis, to name a few. Every Sunday night in Hollywood, film and television actors come together to improvise a comedy on stage. It is, consistently, brilliant – with a full-house shouting laughter at a show that crackles with wit, has a polish you would expect from scripted comedy, and the intellectual sparkle of a cast composing lines as they deliver them in bravura comic performances. ASSSSCAT is truly exhilarating theatre.

Christopher Menz

Self-Portrait in Tuxedo by Max Beckmann, 1927 (Harvard Art Museums)Two major exhibitions – Degas: A New Vision (National Gallery of Victoria, Arts Update 7/16) and New Objectivity: Modern German Art in the Weimar Republic, 1919–1933 (Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Arts Update, 10/16) – offered refreshing and innovative takes on their subjects. Degas was curated by former Louvre Director Henri Loyrette and showed the full range of this most creative and inventive of artists, from his student work to the late paintings, and included his remarkable photography and a fine selection of sculpture. New Objectivity – expertly curated by Stephanie Barron – presented a brilliant and at times confronting thematic display of paintings, prints, books, photographs, and film from the Weimar era.

Pierre-Laurent Aimard’s Melbourne recital of Olivier Messiaen’s majestic cycle for solo piano, Vingt Regards sur l’Enfant-Jésus, was one of the great concerts, amply justifying its 2016 Helpmann Award for Best Individual Classical Performance (Arts Update, 3/16). Aimard enthralled the audience with his artistry and technical mastery of this keyboard marathon.

Peter Rose

Several productions confirmed Sydney Theatre Company’s status as the country’s pre-eminent theatre company, notwithstanding regime change and the abrupt ouster of its new artistic director, Jonathan Church. Two productions stood out: King Lear, still running in the New Year. Directed by Neil Armfield and starring Geoffrey Rush, this was a loss-filled and nihilistic Lear, one that eschewed grandiloquence. The STC complemented the world-wide Arthur Miller revival with an inspired production of All My Sons. Director Kip Williams drew consummate performances from his players.

Bravo to the MSO for programming Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis (Arts Update, 8/16), not heard in Melbourne since 1971. Hard-pressed choristers and soloists may not lament its infrequency, but Andrew Davis (more galvanic than usual) led a revelatory performance of the Mass.

Andrew Davis conducting the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra (photograph by Peter Tarasiuk)

Few present will ever forget Pierre-Laurent Aimard’s performance of Olivier Messiaen’s Vingt Regards sur l’Enfant-Jésus. Virtuosic in the extreme, this was a mesmeric performance that somehow transcended pianism.

Mariusz Treliński’s new production of Tristan und Isolde, at the Metropolitan Opera, was similarly unforgettable (Arts Update, 9/16). Nina Stemme confirmed her ranking as one of the finest singers of the age, Stuart Skelton was consummate, and Simon Rattle drew great playing from the Met’s phenomenal orchestra.

Leo Schofield

Australian Chamber Orchestra’s performance featuring the magnificent Russian-born, Vienna-based pianist Elisabeth Leonskaja was one of unalloyed pleasures of a year packed with peerless pianism. Grandest of grandes dames of the piano, Leonskaja’s matchless Mozart Piano Concerto No. 9, the so-called Jeunehomme, was flanked by elegant arrangements by Timo-Veikko Valve of the sextet from Capriccio and Beethoven’s late quartet Opus 127. This was programming at its best, and under guest leader Roman Simovic the ACO seemed to find new energy, new tonal colours.

Two opera productions stood out for me, David McVicar’s wholly satisfying and delicious take on Così fan tutte for Opera Australia and (interest declared but quality attested to by four Helpmann Awards) Brisbane Baroque’s Agrippina.

Elisabeth Leonskaja (photograph by Julia Wesely)

Michael Shmith

The most inspiring highlight of 2016 was the Australian Youth Orchestra’s marvellous concert in August, conducted by Manfred Honeck (Arts Update, 8/16). Normally, the AYO gives its Australian concerts before its international tour – but, for a change, this one, in Hamer Hall, occurred just after the orchestra returned from Europe and China. Therefore, the repertoire (an explosive showpiece from Carl Vine; Ravel’s Piano Concerto in G; Mahler’s First Symphony) was well and truly played in. Honeck is a great conductor, but also a fine teacher. The travelling pianist, Hélène Grimaud, was utterly at home in the Ravel.

Conductor Manfred Honeck and Hélène Grimaud (photograph by Oliver Brighton)

I was away for Opera Australia’s autumn season and, at this writing, the revival of the Melbourne Ring has yet to be forged. But I took particular joy from Victorian Opera and Circus Oz’s Laughter & Tears, which imaginatively paired Pagliacci with a delightful commedia dell’arte pasticcio. Praise, too, to Melbourne Lyric Opera’s adventurous performance of Malcolm Williamson’s 1963 opera Our Man in Havana (Arts Update, 9/16).

Jake Wilson

Jerry Lewis (Metromedia, Wikimedia Commons)Easily the most spectacular film event of 2016 was the Jerry Lewis retrospective at the Melbourne International Film Festival, the most valuable tribute to a single director MIFF has mounted for many years. (The only thing missing was the man himself.) Lewis’s violently coloured, emotionally fractured slapstick comedies still have the power to divide audiences, but those who see him as a chauvinist dinosaur need to look again: his Jekyll and Hyde variant The Nutty Professor (1963) now plays like a ruthless satire on the twenty-first century men’s movement, suggesting that inside every mild-mannered nerd is a raging misogynist trying to get out.

Claims that television has taken over from cinema as a serious artform are premature, to say the least. Still, Vince Gilligan and Peter Gould’s Better Call Saul and Louis CK’s internet experiment Horace and Pete were as engrossing and formally inventive as any of the new films I saw on the big screen this year.

Jacki Weaver

One of the best nights I’ve ever spent in the theatre was in New York with this year’s stunning revival by London’s Young Vic Company of Arthur Miller’s A View from the Bridge. Mark Strong was breathtakingly fine in the lead; he was surrounded by a super-strong ensemble. I also loved Stephen Karam’s play The Humans, with a brilliant Jayne Houdyshell.

This year I have watched eighty-four films! Two I loved are Yorgos Lanthimos’s The Lobster and Matt Ross’s Captain Fantastic, Colin Farrell and Viggo Mortensen in career-best performances respectively.

Phoebe Fox as Catherine, Mark Strong as Eddie, and Nicola Walker as Beatrice in A View from the Bridge (photograph by Jan Versweyveld, Young Vic Theatre)

Barney Zwartz

I was fortunate enough to see Nina Stemme, possibly the finest Strauss soprano at present, in a new Elektra at the Metropolitan Opera with Waltraud Meier as Klytemnestra, conducted by Esa-Pekka Salonen, in a posthumous production by Patrice Chéreau. Simply riveting, such as come seldom in a lifetime.

In the same musical stratosphere was French pianist Pierre-Laurent Aimard playing French composer Olivier Messiaen’s Vingt Regards sur l’Enfant-Jésus at the Melbourne Recital Centre: refined spirituality, deeply moving.

Pierre-Laurent Aimard (photograph by Marco Borggreve)

I must also mention Opera Australia’s Luisa Miller in Melbourne (Arts Update, 2/16) and Così fan tutte in Sydney, both with the stunning Nicole Car, and the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra’s Beethoven festival of all five piano concertos over four concerts, with British pianist Paul Lewis bordering on the miraculous.

Coming up: Opera Australia’s Ring in November and December.

The federal government has been promoting the innovation economy, but is considering recommendations for legal reform which will undermine the financial and cultural interests of creators. This conflict captures the tension around real reform in this area. Are they being serious? The recommendations are contained in the report of the Productivity Commission, an independent panel which reviews options to make our economy more productive, favouring free markets, and eschewing monopolistic practices.

The Tempest is a play set on a ship. In the first scene, the ship is wrecked. ‘All lost ... all lost.’ The play is over. The play begins again. To one side of the stage, on an island a girl is watching. She is defined by watching: ‘O I have suffered with those that I saw suffer.’ The girl has been watching what we have been watching; she is a watcher on the stage, and she is the play’s new beginning. The play opens, this second time, with a kind of creation story. For the first time, her father, Prospero, tells Miranda how she came to be where she lives. It is an old story: a brother’s betrayal, a long journey at sea, a miraculous survival. This strange, subtle, unsettling scene plays out on stage the relationship between a storyteller and his listener, whose name means ‘wonder, admiration’. The story comes to life in her, and the drowned sailors crawl from the sea.

‘You might ask how a man who spent his days with the major poems of Browning could wish to spend his evenings with the minor movies of Chow Yun-fat,’ Clive James asks, rhetorically, in Play All: A bingewatcher’s notebook, then provides a near-tautological answer: ‘It’s a duplex need buried deep in my neural network.’ In mine, too, although my love of screen trash comes from childhood deprivation; we were never allowed an ‘idiot-box’. Mum might sneak next door to watch Peyton Place, but Dad viewed (so to speak) the then-new technology as mind rot.

It has ever been thus. The first scribes of cuneiform or Linear A were no doubt crucified for destroying human memory, and every advance in mass entertainment/communication since, from the printing press to the novel to radio to movies, has met with the same criticisms. Our still-newish magical pocket devices are the most recent focus of those ancient anxieties. In James’s words: ‘It’s as if classic literature had faded into the mind’s background, and images encountered on the screen had become one’s first frame of cultural reference.’ His particular anxiety is that for the next generation they might be ‘the only frame of reference’.

There was an idiot box in my boarding house when I escaped to Adelaide, and I fed my neural need with endless episodes of Star Trek and Mission Impossible and the wonderful Callan, punctuated by the odd twinge of guilt that I was neglecting my medical studies. James’s new book offers a free study pass, albeit a few decades too late. Watching television is such fun, he writes, and so entertaining at its core, ‘that the spontaneous response of the delighted consumer outranks the more ponderous consideration of the professional student of culture’. As such, he adds, ‘I tried to hang on to the sense of irresponsibility when I sat down to write.’

This leads to a fruitful conflict with his other core premise, one shared by many: that the current ‘long-form’ cable-television serials are where much of the best writing of our era is to be found. (James McNamara’s essay ‘The Golden Age of Television?’, published in the April 2015 issue of ABR, explores the reasons behind this renaissance.) James’s book, then, is both a quick romp through various boxed sets, and a simultaneously serious, if never ponderous, commentary. He can’t help the left-field aphorisms – ‘Sartre unaccountably failed to note in his book Being and Nothingness that “binge” and “being” are anagrams of each other’– but he also has serious criticisms of, say, the visually ravishing Mad Men.

Extended visual ravishment is one of the alluring properties of the boxed set, particularly those, like Game of Thrones, that come with the full palette of computerised special effects. Hollywood director Jim Wynorski (Sorority House Massacre II; Ghoulies IV) claimed that ‘breasts are the cheapest special effect in the business’, and Game of Thrones displays a disproportionate number of breasts, but it is the power of modern computerised imaging – the most powerful mimetic art we have short of virtual reality – that repeatedly astonishes.

James is not particularly interested in special effects; he long resisted Game of Thrones because he couldn’t imagine watching a show with dragons in it. ‘The essential difference between a good box-set drama and a comic-book movie’s relentless catalogue of mechanised happenings is that the first leaves you with something to discuss, and then discussion becomes part of the experience; the second does all your reacting for you.’ In the end, he succumbed to the drama of the show. Dragons notwithstanding, it leaves a powerful residue of things to discuss.

Emilia Clarke as Daenerys Targaryen and Peter Dinklage as Tyrion Lannister in Game of Thrones (HBO/Foxtel)

Here’s one. Rereading (quaint habit) Aeschylus’s Agamemnon recently (first episode in the first-ever boxed set, The Oresteian Trilogy), I arrived at the spot where the Chorus describes Agamemnon’s sacrifice of his daughter Iphigenia in order to secure a favourable wind for his ships, and found I had to stop reading. This was not because of the play itself; Greek tragedies in general prefer to tell, not show; their murders and mayhem take place off stage. In Agamemnon this is even more pronounced: the Chorus breaks off the narrative, finding even the telling too unbearable: ‘The rest I did not see / Nor do I speak of it.’ My problem was that I could see it, all too clearly, courtesy of Game of Thrones. Iphigenia’s last cry – ‘Father!’ – instantly conjured up King Stannis Baratheon’s sacrifice of his daughter – at the stake, no less – and her plaintive cries of ‘Father!’ as she burns.

My point is not that Game of Thrones mines and reworks ancient myths and stories – of course it does, often cleverly – but that cinematic images, especially traumatic images, have a deep hold on our imaginations.

James writes brilliantly and at length of Game of Thrones, but also of one of the masterpieces of the long-form genre, The Wire, a series packed with ‘outstanding things’ and ‘so full of life – who wouldn’t want to get drunk with Bunk’, but which in the end also leaves him with an ‘abiding image’: ‘of  The City of the Dead ... the nailed-up slum houses full of lime-dusted corpses’.

Kit Harrington as Jon Snow in Game of Thrones (HBO/Foxtel)

The emotional power of such images is only part of the power of the boxed set – and not part at all of a dialogue-driven show like The West Wing, another of James’s favourites – but in many of the shows it adds to an ambitious no-holds-barred ‘show-not-tell’ program, a realism freed from network constraints. ‘As well as artistic freedom,’ James McNamara argues in his essay, ‘cable gave HBO another advantage: blood, sex and profanity.’ It also offered more freedom to confound our Hollywood-bred expectations. Comparing The Sopranos to various film predecessors – especially The Godfather – James notes that ‘our expectations have been sentimentalised by the movies’, whereas ‘the boxed-set, with more time to explore psychology, has done something to save us from the kind of uplift that lowers the IQ’. He’s right, at least in this case. The Godfather indulges our attraction to what The Book of Common Prayer calls ‘the glamour of evil’, whereas The Sopranos is more a species of Hannah Arendt’s ‘banality of evil’. This is one of the many ‘gates of discrepancy’ between our expectations and the larger-canvas possibilities of the new ‘long-form’ that James is keen to explore.

Game of Thrones opens gate after gate of discrepancy, beginning with the shock beheading of Sean Bean – the apparent hero of the show, a kind of medieval Atticus Finch – in the first season. Perhaps the premature death of Stringer Bell in The Wire is an antecedent, destroying our faint hopes that at least one of the doomed might escape the drug-addled quagmire, but Game of Thrones continues to kill off our favourites (and unfavourites; like God, George R.R. Martin is an equal opportunity executioner) without warning. Martin’s argument is twofold: firstly, in real life, that’s what happens – i.e. arbitrary shit – but also, more interestingly, what are the stakes for readers (or viewers) if not all characters are in real jeopardy? Where is the suspense?

Idris Elba as Russell 'Stringer' Bell in The Wire (HBO/Foxtel)In The Wire, all the characters will die, sooner or later, even if they first shift to fill a niche vacated by another’s death. The Baltimore of this boxed set is a boxed-in ecology of wickedness; the ending of the final season is a profound summation of this: Dostoevskian in its pessimism, to risk a ponderous phrase. I didn’t see that end coming, but immediately realised it was the only psychologically possible ending. Which is the paradoxical heart of great storytelling: continuing surprise at plot or character developments, which simultaneously, or perhaps a millisecond later, seem psychologically inevitable. And often in retrospect, blindingly obvious: why didn’t I think of that? James doesn’t share my enthusiasm for Breaking Bad, a masterclass in such narrative, but he has plenty to say about it and everything else from Mad Men to The Americans to The Borgias: surprising and often funny insights which strike you as true a millisecond later. Other gates of discrepancy open throughout the book: between the film Saving Private Ryan, say, and its spin-off series, Band of Brothers; and – a recurring theme – between our unconscious type-casting of actors, and the traces those preconceptions leave on new roles.

Having been one of the best television commentators of the pre-boxed set era, he has now seen more cable series than most people half his age, if only because he regularly binge-watches four of five episodes per Saturday night. The result is a very different book from his recent more ‘responsible’ – but never ponderous – Poetry Notebook (2014), but of course we need both, duplex needs of that kind being buried in most brains, if too often one suppresses the other. Which begs the question: who will be the first television writer to win the Nobel Prize for Literature? Or – on the subject of binge addiction – the first writer of video game scripts? I guess the answer is still blowin’ in the wind.

John Murphy opens his magisterial study of Herbert Vere Evatt – the fourth major biography of the good doctor – with an essay on the challenge of writing biography in general, and of writing one on Evatt in particular. He prefaces this discussion with a short description of one fateful and illuminating incident late in Evatt’s political career. On the evening of 19 October 1955 in the House of Representatives, during a debate on the Petrov Royal Commission, Evatt, then leader of the federal ALP, stunned his followers and invited the derision of his opponents when he claimed that he had been in communication with Vyacheslav Molotov, Russian foreign minister and a Stalin henchman for thirty years, who had declared that disputed documents before the Commission were forgeries. The prime minister, Robert Menzies, who had feared a forensic dissection of the Commission Report, could not believe his luck: ‘The Lord hath delivered him into my hands.’

Which poets have most influenced you?

Before I knew about poetry it would have been the Grimms, plus Orson Welles reading ‘The Happy Prince’. Then R.A.K. Mason, Carl Sandburg, Robert Creeley – at which point I developed a taste for clunkiness, awkwardness, tonal non sequiturs, all the way from Wyatt, Hardy, and the weirder parts of Browning, to Frank O’Hara and Stevie Smith. My poetry tastes have always been pretty chaotic: in my reading universe, Lorine Niedecker, John Betjeman, Adrienne Rich, and the Beowulf poet all rub along together.

Literary biographers and their intended subjects at times agree and at times disagree about the stories they think should be told. J.D. Salinger and Vladimir Nabokov – the one, fastidious about his privacy, the other, insistent on his version of history – famously took their biographers to court and emerged victorious. Such tussles are settled at times more quietly, through compromise, withholding of copyright, or spoiling tactics of some other kind. Doris Lessing, on learning that no fewer than five different writers were preparing to tell the story of her life, sat down to write a two-volume auto- biography which would serve, so she thought, as a gazumping record of a life about which she knew she knew more than any of her would-be chroniclers. But once she got going she found that her views and opinions had changed disconcertingly over the years, the perspectives of youth giving way to those of old age. Biography, she reflected, was an unstable art, subject always to flux, contingency, and the restless, revisionist movement of time. Her biographers might tell one kind of story about her – or five different kinds – but she too had multiple tales to tell.

The iconography of Indigenous land rights in Australia is fundamentally deceptive. Take, for example, the famous photograph of Prime Minister Gough Whitlam pouring red sand from his hand into that of Gurindji leader Vincent Lingiari on 16 August 1975. In the image, the white emissary from Canberra – pink-fleshed in a wool suit and Windsor knot – appears to bestow something substantial. Lingiari’s left hand holds papers which, moments before, Whitlam described as ‘proof, in Australian law, that these lands belong to the Gurindji people’, while the earth that fills Lingiari’s right hand, Whitlam avowed, is ‘a sign that we restore them to you and your children forever’. The whole scene, for good reasons, resembles the ancient European ritual of ‘livery in deed’ in which the transfer of soil or a branch stands in as material testimony to the transfer of more ethereal legal rights.

The Soviet violinist David Oistrakh made a triumphant tour of Australia in 1959, a few years after his wildly successful New York début. Along with pianist Emil Gilels and cellist Mstislav Rostropovich, he was the spearhead of a campaign to show the capitalist world how cultured the Soviet Union was, and to demonstrate that their violinists and pianists were the best.

American historian Kiril Tomoff tells the story in Virtuosi Abroad, and it is one that – unusually for an American scholarly work – has quite a substantial Australian component. But more of that later. Soviet interest in high culture and its diffusion to the masses goes back to the earliest days of the revolutionary state, but it was not until the 1930s that the Soviets started to focus specifically on winning international music competitions in the West. When Oistrakh won the Ysaÿe competition for violinists in Brussels in 1937, it made the front page of Pravda. The matter was so important that the list of Soviet competitors for such competitions came before the Politburo for approval.

Are you part of the non-Indigenous majority? Have you had too little contact with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people? Do you feel that you do not fully comprehend their worldview, but wish you could? Is entrenched Aboriginal disadvantage eating away at your sense of Australia as a fair and united country? Do you still possess the recollection of your first encounter with an Aboriginal person, and wonder why it remains so enduring? Are you troubled by the time being taken to achieve constitutional recognition and frustrated that an apparently simple issue has become so vexed? If these questions resonate in your mind, you have much in common with many Australians and may benefit from reading these books.

after the painting The grey parrot by Walter Deverell, National Gallery of Victoria

The far city must make itself known
even here in the sitting room and
barred by winter branches. The skyline

with its towers square as pillars
built of blocks could be here
as much as then and there and is

in any case beyond hearing.
Long withdrawn from the city
that oversees life to a home

where rapt stillness is a cultivated
guest and the ghost of light
leavens the chores of daily bread,

she would come to lend her features
to ideas she understood
could be treated most faithfully

in art that generates no
propulsion other than
this same descent into pleasure

gently shared between minds
– those branched apart by
evolution, or merely space and time

Judith Bishop

Judith Bishop won the Peter Porter Poetry Prize in 2006 and 2011.

Be our heart’s north,
daybreak in our daughters’
breath, be the radiance
that listens
as we gather for the singing
of the wood.

Here is night. Somewhere,
to someone, fear is coming:
dark calls out the human
animal. Somewhere,
in someone, the animal
runs forth.

By night the wood sings.
In its radiance we find
ourselves altered.
Somewhere in the night
our hearts settle
and the breath alone keeps watch.

Judith Bishop

Judith Bishop won the Peter Porter Poetry Prize in 2006 and 2011.

Rags of snow unmelting on the southern lawn.
Those younger ones, whose death turns

on the hair’s-breadth incidence of accident,
avoid this perduration of slow misrecognition.

He dreams his cotton blankets are combusting,
but won’t press the hospital buzzer because

the nursing staff are occupied extinguishing flames.
That vandals have broken into the cupboard

of the genial stroke victim in the bed next door
who says only, ‘Here it is’. That children are being

shorn in the corridors. That a chaotic darkness has fallen
on working class districts erased for the concrete husks

of a hulking and labyrinthine construction: apartments
for immigrants and foreign students, with mirrored windows

replicating glare to the suburban boundaries.
The view is of a miniature city in a bottle of smoke,

car pollution mingling with vaporised frost.
An extended family of currawongs gathers

expectantly for the faintest turn of leaf litter.
He requests that his communist newspapers be hidden

in case they are reported – but doesn’t say by whom –
and remembers an article he once wrote for The Nation

about poverty in the Blue Mountains: a young mother
with three clenched children, all without jumpers,

the temperature never lifting above zero degrees.
Soon a plush Pullman carriage will arrive to transport him

to the plains for further tests, flashing through all
the usual stations: Bullaburra, Linden, Warrimoo.

John Hawke

With a few notable exceptions (Michael Kirby springs to mind), judges in Australia do not have a high public profile. Many non-lawyers would struggle to name a judge currently serving on an Australian court. The lack of public profile is not really a problem. In fact, it should be viewed as a benefit. What judges do should be more important than who judges are. Publicity about what goes on in open court is important. As Lord Chief Justice Hewart famously observed, it ‘is of fundamental importance that justice should not only be done, but should be manifestly and undoubtedly be seen to be done’. The principle of open justice is crucial to the proper administration of justice. Publicity about individual judges is less so.

Migration is widely regarded as one of the most important policy issues on the global agenda. Not only does it have economic implications for states, it also poses certain challenges for the political and social fabric of countries. In particular, what does the act of migration say about the continuing social bond between migrants and their countries of origin, and that between the migrant and the country to which they have migrated? At what point does a migrant become part of the political and social world of their new country, and how should law and policy recognise this?

In his new book, Not Quite Australian, Peter Mares deals with an aspect of this question by examining the increasing use by Australia of temporary migration, including workers on 457 visas, international students, working holidaymakers, and refugees holding temporary protection visas (TPVs).

In The Oxford Companion to Australian History, of which he was a co-editor with John Hirst and Stuart Macintyre, Graeme Davison begins his essay on Geoffrey Blainey by saluting him as ‘the most prolific, wide-ranging, inventive, and – in the 1980s and 1990s – most controversial of Australia’s living historians’. In volume one of the Encyclopaedia of Historians and Historical Writing, Geoffrey Bolton notes that Blainey produced Australian history ‘in which explanation was organized around the exploration of the impact of the single factor (distance, mining, pre-settlement Aboriginal society ...)’.

This is an intriguing, if admittedly artificially contrived, juxtaposition: Davison himself has been ‘prolific, wide-ranging and inventive’ and, in City Dreamers, it is fair to say that ‘the single factor’ is a dominant – though never constraining – feature of the book’s structure. ‘Factor’ is too dead a term, however, to characterise Davison’s exploitation of signature events and people to flesh out each stage of his anatomy of cities, city lives, and their dreaming. Far from conducting a sort of on-the-page PowerPoint event – that deadliest of digital age procedures in the wrong hands – his singularities cryptically signal creativity (‘Artists’, ‘Poets’), whimsy (‘Slummers’), satire (‘Snobs’), confrontations (‘Anti-Suburbans’), existential gloom (‘Pessimists’), social investigators (‘Scientists’), existential restlessness (‘Exodists’), and so on. This is a highly organised discussion which wears its careful construction lightly while keeping faith with it.

As we step out of the house,’ writes Virginia Woolf, in her 1927 essay ‘Street Haunting’, ‘we shed the self our friends know us by and become part of that vast republican army of anonymous trampers.’ Into the anonymous crowd Woolf would have us carry that androgynous mind she champions in A Room of One’s Own (1929), a mind that is ‘resonant and porous’, one that is free and ‘wide open’ much like the mind of the walker who, away from the house, becomes ‘a central oyster of perceptiveness, an enormous eye’.

For Lauren Elkin, too, walking the city is entwined with looking, subjectivity, and, ultimately, ‘the utter, total freedom unleashed from the act of putting one foot in front of the other’. As the book’s title suggests, Flâneuse: Women walk the city in Paris, New York, Tokyo, Venice and London presents the figure of the woman walker and seeks to ‘build [for her] a genealogy, or a sisterhood’. Elkin refutes those who have argued that the urban walker, or flâneur, is inherently male:

To suggest that there couldn’t be a female version of the flâneur is to limit the ways women have interacted with the city to the ways men have interacted with the city. We can talk about social mores and restrictions but we cannot rule out the fact that women were there; we must try to understand what walking in the city meant to them. Perhaps the answer is not to attempt to make women fit a masculine concept, but to redefine the concept itself.

Elkin sets out to do just that: to articulate a definition of the flâneuse that is independent of her male counterpart. Flâneuse takes the form of a series of portraits of women who walk – Jean Rhys, Virginia Woolf, George Sand, Sophie Calle, Mavis Gallant, Agnès Varda, Martha Gellhorn, and Elkin herself. These portraits are composed of biographical material, urban history, and close readings of the writing, artwork, and films of Elkin’s chosen flâneuses interspersed with her own experiences of reading these women and the cities they have walked. Via her engagement with their lives and works, Elkin establishes a definition of the flâneuse that incorporates the various forms of movement, trespass, and freedoms to be found by a woman at street level. For Elkin, the flâneuse ‘voyages out and goes where she’s not supposed to; she forces us to confront the ways in which words like home and belonging are used against women’.

It is with this emphasis upon home and belonging that we get to the heart of Elkin’s conception of the flâneuse, because each of these women is writing out of a species of exile. Rhys suffers ‘reverse exile’ and is cast adrift in her ‘foreignness’; Sand ‘refused to be placed’; Calle, lost, begins ‘following people to have something to do’; Gallant, a Canadian in Paris, is ‘a foreigner’; Varda perceives Paris through the eyes of a ‘provincial’, and the protagonist of her film Cléo de 5 à 7 (1962) ‘is out of place from the moment the film begins’; Gellhorn is ‘permanently home-building, permanently homeless’; Elkin, herself an American living in Paris, views London ‘with my outsider’s eyes’ and takes up residence (‘marooned’) in Tokyo’s ‘gaijin (foreigner) ghetto’; even Woolf, whom we have come to consider so at home in Bloomsbury, is at first ‘homesick’ for Kensington. And the remedy for homesickness, for being foreign, lost, out of place? Walking, which, helps to orient you, to come to know the city – any city – from the inside.

Flâneur by van Theo van der Nahmer at Lange Voorhout, The Hague (Wikimedia Commons)This is the great strength of Elkin’s book and her conception of a flâneuse who, by walking out her front door, by claiming her right to roam freely, effectively puts herself out of place, shedding, in Woolf’s words, ‘the self our friends know us by.’ The flâneur, according to Charles Baudelaire in his essay ‘The Painter of Modern Life’ (1863), ‘set[s] up house’ in the crowd. Elkin’s flâneuse rather abandons her house for the crowd: ‘as street haunters we become observing entities, de-sexed, un-gendered’. Out of her (private) place, the flâneuse makes the transition from ‘being “the object of the look” to “the subject who looks”’.

Elkin focuses on the empowering potential of the city streets, and ‘the liberating possibilities of a good walk’. There are glimpses of the gendered violence often associated with the street: Varda’s Cléo asks a female taxi driver, ‘you aren’t afraid at night?’; Woolf’s Rose Pargiter encounters a leering man (‘The enemy!’) on her first independent ‘prowl’; and the book’s epilogue examines Ruth Orkin’s 1951 photograph of Ninalee Craig, surrounded by wolfish men, on a street in Florence. However, these are brief diversions from the dominant narrative of liberation and independence. Ultimately, Cléo’s taxi driver is ‘not afraid of much’, Rose makes a game of her encounter, and Craig insists that Orkin’s photograph is ‘a symbol of a woman having an absolutely wonderful time!’ In this context the omission of, for instance, Rob Bliss’s 2014 video 10 Hours of Walking in NYC as a Woman, is surprising. But this is not to detract from the importance of Elkin’s study, or the pleasure to be gained from reading it. It is to be hoped that the genealogy of walking women Elkin has begun to build in this volume will grow and that flâneuses will continue to abandon the house for the anonymity of the restless street.

At the outbreak of World War II, the British novelist Anna Kavan began a journey around the world that brought her, ultimately, to New Zealand. Her two years there in a landscape that she describes as ‘splendid’ but also ‘sinister’ and ‘frightening’ inspired Kavan’s most famous novel. The surreal and post-apocalyptic Ice (1967) emerged from a mind that found itself adrift, while the world waged war, in the ‘menacing strangeness of an alien hemisphere’, as she writes in ‘New Zealand: An Answer to an Inquiry’ (Horizon, 1943). In that article, Kavan chronicles her time among people who ‘look mad and heroic because they have courage to go on living at all in the face of that alien terror and loveliness, nothing between them and the South Pole’.

At the 2016 Melbourne Writers Festival, Maxine Beneba Clarke received a standing ovation for her opening address in which she pushed for greater diversity in literature. ‘Something powerful stirred,’ she said of reading the few books with diverse characters available to her as a teenager, from Sally Morgan to Judy Blume. ‘These were stories about difference and sameness, about home and unbelonging. They were my stories.’

‘Twins,’ Jacinta Halloran writes, have ‘a special place in worlds both mythical and real’. This line, in the beautifully poetic prologue of The Science of Appearances, is a small but salient foreshadowing for fraternal twins Mary and Dominic Quinn. Both of them struggle across their lives to find their own special place in the world, and make sense of the myths of family, inheritance and belonging that might constrain or explain precisely who they are.

Throughout history, women have been seduced by men who are mad, bad, and dangerous to know. Many of the world’s most notorious murderers and con artists have attracted loyal, besotted, and often very young female accomplices. The twelve stories in Laura Elizabeth Woollett’s collection, spanning the twentieth century, evoke the lives of real women who were all sucked into an abyss of murder, fraud, and violence under this spell. Some are well-known, including the seventeen-year-old politically naïve Eva Braun, who caught Hitler’s eye when still at school; and Myra Hindley, the ‘Moors Murderess’, who cold-bloodedly killed five children with her lover, the psychopath Ian Brady, convinced they could get away with the perfect crime. Others have been relegated to history’s footnotes, such as the so-called ‘Manson Brides’, or Veronica Compton, an aspiring actress and playwright who began a passionate correspondence with jailed serial killer Kenneth Bianchi and committed a copycat crime in order to prove his innocence.

Resolution is the loosely fictionalised story of Captain Cook’s second voyage, begun in 1772, in search of the mythological Great Southern Continent. Told through the eyes of seventeen-year-old German linguist, artist, and writer George Forster, son of the expedition’s naturalist, Reinhold Forster, it is replete with rolling swells, treacherous reefs, perilous storms, and sightings of unknown lands, not to mention scurvy, sauerkraut, cannibals, and albatross pie. As a Boys’ Own adventure, it is irresistible.

Boat, pub, boat, pub, boat, pub: in the fictitious Western Australian fishing town of Stark, residents divide their days between these two brutally masculine locales, and readers will be hard-pressed to decide which is bleaker. Is it the crayfish boat, with its ‘pong of bait’ and ‘hostile company of the breeze’, or the rural tavern, where ‘the trebly call of dog racing’ soundtracks the boozing of ‘men who looked scarcely alive’? And what’s worse, to be circled by sharks or surrounded by meth heads; to be tossed about by vicious waves or to have your face carved open by a pint glass? ‘Stark wasn’t the sort of place one stayed long’, we’re told, which begs the obvious retort: who the hell would stay there at all?

The cover of Sean Rabin’s first novel, Wood Green, depicts a foggy eucalypt forest at dawn (or dusk), and a ghostly figure in the glow of torchlight. With the added element of the story’s setting – a secluded town nestled in the shadows of Mount Wellington, Tasmania – one could be forgiven for assuming that Wood Green is ‘yet another bush gothic’, instead of a modern and humorous discourse on small town life and writing itself.

Michael Pollard, a thirty-something academic from Sydney, arrives in Wood Green to work as secretary to the ageing, reclusive author Lucian Clarke, the subject of his PhD thesis. Their affiliation is interspersed with frequent pot-smoking sessions, musical and culinary interludes, and ponderings on writerly life, but is often strained by the demands of the cantankerous Lucian, who gives Michael the task of sorting through a lifetime of notes and books, whilst concealing a hidden agenda.

On the Blue Train is Kristel Thornell’s reimagining of Agatha Christie’s mysterious disappearance in 1926. Thornell might have let her imagination fly, given that both Dorothy L. Sayers and Arthur Conan Doyle involved themselves in the nationwide search for the missing woman, but instead she has stuck close to the established facts: Agatha was grieving over her beloved mother’s recent death when her husband Archibald asked for a divorce; there was a fracas; Agatha’s car was found abandoned; she vanished and was discovered ten days later, using the surname of Archibald’s lover, at a spa hotel in Harrogate.

Set against the milieu of India’s recent emancipation from British rule and the indelible scars left by the country’s 1947 partition with Pakistan, Black British subverts the classic migrant tale. Instead of detailing a middling family uprooting their lives in search of economic opportunities on foreign shores, it features an affluent Goan family at its centre. They are looking to leave India because their wealth, language, and British-led traditions have grown incongruous with that of the larger population. This sense of privilege is acknowledged throughout the novel, with occasionally heavy-handed passages dedicated to contextualising the discrepancy between the Indians consigned to occupy the lower strata of society and the ‘black British’ with vestiges of the colonial rulers stamped on their beliefs and values system.

As long as there have been moving images, people have fretted about cinema’s special dexterity at breaching sexual and social norms. We now have sophisticated tools to help us understand these breaches and the anxieties they trigger, and the privileged relationship of these dynamics to certain film genres and cycles. For example, women’s home-wrecking desires menaced the unconscious universe of Hollywood erotic thrillers during the 1980s and 1990s in films like Fatal Attraction (1987) and Single White Female (1992). Thanks in part to the work of thinkers in feminist and queer films studies, we know much about these film’s relationship to a broader culture of feminist backlash.

It is a testament to Ralph J. Gleason’s standing in the jazz community, at the time these interviews were made, that a composer of the stature of Duke Ellington would consider him a conversational equal. Says Ellington: ‘I feel like I’m on the same level with you because you have proven that you are a great listener.’ While far from a household name these days, Gleason’s contributions to music – both in jazz and popular form – were many. In 1939 he was founder and editor of Jazz Information, one of the earliest journals devoted to jazz. Several decades on, he co-founded, with Jan Wenner, Rolling Stone magazine. He produced the long-running television series Jazz Casual (1960–68); was co-founder of the Monterey Jazz Festival, still running today; and his many liner notes, for albums such as Miles Davis’s Bitches Brew (1970), are considered models of their kind.

Conversations in Jazz comprises the transcripts of fourteen interviews with jazz musicians, recorded by Gleason between 1959 and 1961. All, aside from the one with Ellington – which was taped for Jazz Casual – were carried out in the informal setting of Gleason’s living room in Berkeley, California. While he later plundered them for various radio shows and liner notes, the tapes languished in his house after his death in 1975, aged fifty-eight, until the early 1990s, when his family rediscovered them. Conversations in Jazz, edited by his son Toby, marks the first publication of the complete interviews. Given the combined standing of Gleason’s roster – which includes Ellington, John Coltrane, Sonny Rollins, Bill Evans, Dizzy Gillespie, Quincy Jones, Horace Silver, and all four members of the Modern Jazz Quartet – their belated appearance, over a half a century on, is to be welcomed.

The casual nature of these exchanges gives credence to the conversations referred to in the book’s title. Gleason’s opening question, in most cases, tends to be informed by his intimate familiarity with the artist’s work, rather than reflecting any set game-plan. For Bill Evans: ‘Have you ever explored the reasons why you’re in jazz?’ For singer Jon Hendricks: ‘You can’t read or write music?’ The path each interview takes routinely flows from these opening gambits, more improvisation than notation. Despite this, a number of common themes emerge: the importance of big bands as a training ground for young players; the growth of European audiences for American jazz, partly the result of the US State Department’s sponsored tours of the 1950s; jazz as a performative, rather than a recorded, medium; and the inevitable struggle to balance musical innovation with financial security.

Several of these interviews took place at a critical point in the artist’s career. In May 1961, Coltrane, fresh from the success of My Favorite Things, was newly signed to Impulse Records, famous for their bright orange covers emblazoned with the slogan ‘The New Wave of Jazz’. Though few could have predicted the radical directions his music would take over the next six years before his premature death in 1967, he foreshadows something of these in conversation with Gleason: including his ‘need to learn more about production of music and expression’; his ‘need for another horn’; and his wanting – despite lacking experience – ‘to do a real good big band thing’. Before the year was out, Coltrane would release his augmented ensemble recording Africa/Brass, and add Eric Dolphy’s alto-voice to his Quartet for the incendiary performances recorded at New York’s Village Vanguard. Upon reflection, it seems apposite that his final studio recording, released posthumously, was entitled Expression.

John Coltrane (photograph by Hugo van Gelderen, Wikimedia Commons)Sonny Rollins, on the other hand, after issuing a torrent of classic recordings in the years leading up to this 1959 interview, was about to embark upon the first of his sabbaticals, during which he famously abandoned performing and recording, and instead practised alone, over a two-year period, on New York’s Williamsburg Bridge. Rollins speaks of wanting his music to reach people, but ‘only if I can satisfy my own level’. Bill Evans, similarly, speaks of being ‘so dissatisfied with what I’ve been doing’. Less than a year before, he had played on Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue (1959) – arguably the greatest album in jazz history – and had recently formed his trio with Scott LaFaro and Paul Motian. The several albums they recorded, before LaFaro’s untimely death in 1961, would forever change the fundamental language of jazz piano.

More than fifty years on, Gleason’s interviews can best be viewed as historical documents, and as such they form a worthwhile addition to the jazz literature of the period. Of course, with ease of hindsight, one might query the presence of a minor artist like Les McCann; and likewise muse upon the absence of figures like Ornette Coleman or Charles Mingus. Presumably, Gleason’s base on the west coast, far from the jazz centre of New York, restricted his choices to musicians residing in or touring his neighborhood.

Ted Gioia notes in his introduction that these interviews ‘date back to a decisive juncture in jazz history’. The year 1959 saw the release of Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue, Dave Brubeck’s Time Out, Ornette Coleman’s The Shape of Jazz to Come, and Coltrane’s Giant Steps. Ironically, this high point also signalled the end of an era when jazz held popular sway across America. With its dominance destined to be eclipsed by rock and roll in the decade ahead, jazz innovators – including a number featured in this book – resolutely went about their business, taking the music to new levels of artistry.

Long before earning a place as one of Australia’s best-loved bands, The Go-Betweens sprang from the close creative pairing of Grant McLennan and Robert Forster, who met as students at the University of Queensland. As Forster makes clear in this tender memoir, he wanted McLennan in the band not because of his musical ability – he had never played an instrument – but because of their intense friendship and shared appreciation of literature and film. ‘We’d come to The Go-Betweens as romantics, me teaching my best friend bass,’ writes Forster. When they began playing together at the end of 1977, McLennan was much more interested in cinema than in music (‘He burnt for the screen’). But McLennan quickly mastered the bass before graduating to guitar and authoring many of the band’s most enduring songs (including ‘Cattle and Cane’ and ‘Streets of Your Town’). The Go-Betweens went on to release nine studio albums. Forster and McLennan were working on a tenth when McLennan died after a sudden heart attack in 2006.

This isn’t Forster’s first time writing outside of songs: He won the Pascall Prize for Critical Writing during his long run as music columnist for The Monthly, and also wrote The 10 Rules of Rock and Roll: Collected music writings 2005–09 (2009). He is a devotee of biography and knows the form well; here he maintains enough briskness to cover his childhood in less than a chapter and to chart The Go-Betweens’ personal and professional exploits with the same poetic vigour that defines their songs. Flowery though his prose can be, Forster knows the value of expressing things simply and letting their truth reverberate: ‘These were my favourite pages of a biography come to life, but they proved harder to live than to read.’

Taking the band to London, Sydney, and beyond, Forster and McLennan experienced the usual vagaries of the music business, in their case hoping for a hit but settling for critical acclaim. Playing eloquent guitar-pop marked by a plucky burnish and layered uplift, the pair established what they called ‘that striped sunlight sound’ – their answer to Bob Dylan’s self-described ‘wild mercury sound’. ‘It was a Brisbane thing,’ Forster recalls, ‘to do with sun slanting in through windows onto objects in a room, and the feelings that evoked.’

Starting out as a scrappy trio singing wobbly odes to librarians and literature – taking their name in part from L.P. Hartley’s famous novel – the band evolved into a quartet and finally a quintet, with the addition of violinist Amanda Brown. The Go-Betweens attained their current cult status through gradual word-of-mouth over several decades; their influence has spread far and wide, especially in Australia, where a new generation of bands are pairing luminous guitar hooks with bittersweet strains of Australiana. But they were more subtle and complicated than their signature brightness might indicate, and their lyrics stowed quiet, distressed revelations such as this one from ‘Cattle and Cane’: ‘But I still don’t know what I’m here for.’

Forster ticks all the boxes one would expect from a music memoir, right down to the inevitable rise-and-fall arc. But he also opens up about the shifting relationships between band mates, including his romantic involvement with Lindy Morrison, whose idiosyncratic drumming helped make the band so unique, and McLennan’s subsequent relationship with Brown. Yet, as the title announces with marquee-level directness, Forster focuses most of all on his time with McLennan, building on the generous body of personal memories he has documented while curating retrospective collections and concerts for the band.

The Go-Betweens (Flickr)

Indeed, some of the dramatic changes in Forster’s own personal life – starting a family, contracting Hepatitis C from shared needles in his youth, going sober in the mid-1990s – share equal weight with his ongoing interactions with McLennan, whether they are separated by hemispheres or both living back in Brisbane, as they were when McLennan died. On the topic of moving his family back to Queensland, Forster tellingly writes: ‘If our relocation pleased Grant it was hard to know – another in the sea of things that went unsaid.’

Such gaps in communication were characteristic for McLennan, even with his closest friends. ‘We hugged, something we rarely did,’ recounts Forster of the band ending their first incarnation in 1989. But even after the success of the pair’s reconvening under The Go-Betweens name in 2000, McLennan remained a dark horse to Forster’s grounded family man: ‘He spoke of depression, the first he’d put a word to what had been festering in him for years.’ Of course, McLennan had other ways of unburdening himself: ‘Music was his confession box.’

Robert Foster (photograph by Stephen Booth)

As with the band’s songs, Forster’s account is melancholic, cheery, and self-deprecating all at once. It is often unruly and mischievous as well. Rather than presenting a stock-standard Australian success story, Grant & I offers up the tangled lives of two kindred spirits who decided to make music together. Younger readers who only know The Go-Betweens as canonised legends with a major bridge in Brisbane named after them can discover how long the band toiled in obscurity before securing that lasting recognition.

In 1996, French rock magazine Les Inrockuptibles ran a cover story on The Go-Betweens that asked, ‘Is this the most underrated group in the history of rock?’ Forster, wry as ever, quips: ‘A fair question. You know my answer.’

It seems a particularly masculine take on the processes of art to examine the way rivalry spurs on creativity and conceptual development. Yet this is not the book the Boston Globe’s art critic, Sebastian Smee, has set out to write. ‘[The] idea of rivalry it presents is not the macho cliché of sworn enemies, bitter competitors, and stubborn grudge-holders slugging it out for artistic and worldly supremacy,’ he writes in his introduction to The Art of Rivalry. ‘Instead, it is a book about yielding, intimacy, and openness to influence.’

Smee has nonetheless chosen some pretty macho subjects among the four pairs he considers: Lucian Freud and Francis Bacon; Édouard Manet and Edgar Degas; Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso; Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning. So sensational were some aspects of their lives – including priapism, suppressed homosexuality, masochism and sadism, glorified paedophilia, alcoholism, mental illness, narcissism, intense personal and professional jealousies, and more that Smee’s text veers towards tabloid in content. So fine are his writing and his critical perceptions, however, that his book is an important one. General readers will certainly find it fascinating, and art historians too might find priceless new nuggets in it.

Like any good storyteller, Christopher Heathcote begins by setting the scene: ‘one of those scruffy unpaved streets on the outer fringe’ of Melbourne on a wintry day in 1956. Two characters step from an American-style automobile and, in true Hollywood fashion, sweep the penurious artist Arthur Boyd into a contract with the fledgling Australian Galleries. The man with the romantic Ronald Colman moustache is Thomas ‘Tam’ Purves. The woman with the Mae West smarts is his wife, Anne. And the rest, as they say, is art history.

Heathcote traces the development of numerous galleries in Australia’s capitals, several with links overseas, and introduces more personalities, interconnections, and rivalries than it is possible to unravel here. The author shapes what might have become an unwieldy tome with succinct chapters that lead the reader from a wider historical perspective to the more intimate particular. As Heathcote makes clear, his focus on the long-running Australian Galleries was dictated by the fact that the Purveses were the only ones who gave him full access to their archives and to the invaluable record provided by Anne Purves’s unpublished memoir.

This beautifully illustrated book explores the ways in which Indigenous Australians have responded to invasion through art. ‘Where colonists saw a gulf,’ writes art historian Ian McLean, ‘Aborigines saw bridges. They didn’t hesitate to be modern, but on their terms.’

The tension between old and new, tradition and modernity, is evoked in the image of the rattling spears in the title. Before battle, McLean explains, Aboriginal warriors would roll their spears against each other to create ‘a chilling sound that calls ancestors from their sleep’. The sound served to focus the powers of supernatural forces, but it was also ‘a strategic manoeuvre’ to assert authority in the fight. The art that appears in the pages of Rattling Spears is similarly potent: it keeps the past alive and makes claims upon the present.

In an extraordinary year for British politics the gloriously unexpected triumph of Jeremy Corbyn in the Labour Party’s leadership election in September 2015 probably ranks just behind ‘Brexit’ on the political Richter scale. To recall, Corbyn is known for his far-left political sympathies, his total indifference to fashion, and his propensity to rebel against his own party while Blair was in power – over 400 times, according to my former colleague Phil Cowley. He was only nominated for the leadership by elements of his own party to give some breadth and interest to a leadership election that would otherwise have featured three identikit figures from the centre and right of the party. His chances of winning the leadership were initially placed at 1000 to one, odds which, at the time, did not seem particularly generous.

In a turn of events that made Leicester City’s triumph in the English Premier League seem predictable, Corbyn trounced the opposition in a landslide victory that has variously alienated his own parliamentary party, energised anti-austerity activists, and allowed the Conservative Party to ride out its own post-Brexit ructions untroubled by effective opposition in Parliament. How did this happen?

John Curtin occupies the top tier in the pantheon of Australian national leaders. ‘Expert’ rankings of former officer holders – a practice lately imported from the United States, where presidential rating exercises have been fashionable for decades – have placed Curtin narrowly ahead of other prime-ministerial virtuosos: Alfred Deakin, Ben Chifley, Robert Menzies, and Bob Hawke.

Curtin’s allure is not hard to fathom. Socialist, committed anti-militarist during the Great War, his political career blighted by bitter setbacks, he conquered adversity and went against type to steer Australia through World War II. In doing so, he subdued his own demons: alcoholism and a melancholic disposition. His leadership also has the stuff of heroism exemplified by his doughty insistence, against the wishes of Winston Churchill, on the return of the 6th and 7th AIF divisions to Australia for homeland defence and his sleepless vigil as the convoys transporting the troops made their perilous voyage across the Indian Ocean. And there is the tragic arc of his prime-ministerial story – careworn by the burdens of wartime office, he died in July 1945, months short of victory.

It seems appropriate in an account of justice thwarted that the name of journalist Peter Greste’s father is Juris. In 2013, Greste, an Al Jazeera journalist, was accused with colleagues Mohamed Fahmy and Baher Mohamed of conspiring with terrorists and endangering Egyptian security. A show trial followed, and Greste was sentenced to seven years in prison. He says of Juris, his mother Lois, and brothers Michael and Andrew: ‘We fought, struggled, argued and ... loved our way through the ordeal ... Normal family life in other words.’

In his introduction to Bob Ellis: In his own words, Bob’s son Jack says of his father that ‘writing was his reason for being ... and through his writing he saw himself in conversation with the world’. That conversation stopped on 3 April 2016 with Ellis’s death from neuroendocrine cancer. He was seventy-three. For devotees or those merely curious about his life and times, the conversation continues in the pages of this book compiled by his wife and companion of fifty years, Anne Brooksbank.

The result is a loose autobiography ranging from childhood to final musings about endings and time passing encompassing Ellis’s thoughts on politics, war, friendships, and the wider world selected from blog posts, essays, journalism, diaries, speeches, and scripts (some unpublished).

In the opening piece of his book of collected essays, the novelist and photography critic Teju Cole feels briefly possessed by the spirit of James Baldwin who, like him, travelled outside the United States as a black writer. In every encounter, from rural Switzerland to Palestine, Rome, Rio, and Moscow, we are privy to Cole’s vantage as an embodied black subject: his seeking out of African vendors in the Lapa district of Rio, the looks he receives in Zurich, the sceptical anti-colonial instinct he brings to the museums in Rome’s Capitoline Hill.

Unlike Baldwin, Cole is not descended from slaves. Born in Kalamazoo, Michigan, he returned with his Nigerian parents to Lagos at five months of age. He studied at college in Kalamazoo and later made his base in New York City. The essays in the book grapple with the complex notions of home for subjects like Cole who traverse cosmopolitan circuits. Like many of us who have made lives in New York City, he calls the city home even when not living there. Throughout his travels, Cole considers and reconsiders what counts as home, describing it as both a location and a state of being.

The four-hundredth anniversary of Miguel de Cervantes’s death serves as a good reminder of the influence and importance of his oeuvre, and perhaps too of our strange obsession with the decimal system. After all, Cervantes’s works will be as relevant next year as they were last, minus the fanfare. On the eve of this quatercentennary, William Egginton’s The Man Who Invented Fiction made a timely appearance. Egginton is the author of several well-known and praised academic books, but even for a scholar of his calibre, the bold proposition in the title of his new book makes one approach it with some scepticism.

This is not a biography of Cervantes (it does not claim to be one), but rather a long essay on Egginton’s definition of modern fiction, interwoven, à la Stephen Greenblatt’s Will in the World (2004) and The Swerve (2011), with the narrative of Cervantes’s life, which functions as its organising structure. Egginton spends most of the book explaining what, precisely, he means by fiction, and how Cervantes created this new ‘space’ of the mind for the modern world. In essence, he argues that fiction is what Cervantes wrote, and proceeds to explain to us why this is so.

In its original meaning, the word ‘philosopher’ simply meant ‘lover of wisdom’. At a time when theories of knowledge were still in their infancy, it was applied to thinkers – often, by the standards of the day, polymaths – who were able to turn the light of their intellects onto a vast range of fields: physics, chemistry, political science, ethics. A philosopher thus defined could not exist today, such is the dramatic specialisation of knowledge that has taken place since Socrates could credibly hold forth on topics as varied as democracy, theatre, astronomy, love, and epistemology.

Invited to nominate a contemporary equivalent of such a figure, many would consider Peter Singer. Since the publication in 1975 of the foundational Animal Liberation, Singer has established himself as both a leading exponent of utilitarian ethics and a reliably contentious public intellectual. In the introduction to his latest book, Ethics in the Real World, Singer describes the shifting ground of philosophy in the academy, its movement, under pressure from the student-led radicalism of the late 1960s and early 1970s, from a discipline concerned primarily with theory and semantics to one that could also encompass practical ethical questions. These students, of which Singer was one (at Melbourne University and then Oxford), demanded that their courses reflect the important issues of the day, prompting their lecturers to: ‘[recall] the example of Socrates questioning his fellow Athenians about the nature of justice, and what it takes to live justly, [summoning] up the courage to ask similar questions of their students, their fellow philosophers, and the wider public.’

Edward sits on Sydney Harbour Bridge, considering jumping. It is 1948, and he has written several times to George VI about building a new naval base in the waters below, and not hearing back, begun to build it himself. Edward was manic depressive, suffering from what is now called bipolar disorder. Greg de Moore and Ann Westmore begin their book Finding Sanity: John Cade, lithium and the taming of bipolar disorder with Edward; they end it with the patient upon whom lithium was pioneered in the early 1950s, Bill Brand. Where Edward came down from the bridge and returned to the peaks and troughs of bipolar life, Bill entered a tortuous triangle of treatment and suffering with the Australian psychiatrist John Cade and that soft, white, lightest of metals, lithium, before finally dying of lithium poisoning.

Finding Sanity, the story of the discovery of lithium as a treatment for bipolar, is told with mild triumphalism, despite lithium’s sometimes crooked path. It takes the form of a biography of its discoverer, John Cade, an Australian doctor. The narrative of discovery becomes something still more profound: Cade, argue his biographers, revolutionised twentieth-century psychiatry by supposing a physiological basis for a mental illness and identifying an element that would treat it.

OUR NEW LAUREATE

Australian Book Review is thrilled to name Robyn Archer as our new Laureate. She joins David Malouf, who became the inaugural Laureate in 2014.

Robyn Archer is primarily, and famously, a singer. She made her professional début in 1974 as Annie 1 in the Australian première of Brecht and Weill’s The Seven Deadly Sins (a role she reprised in the 1990s). Other celebrated roles have included Jenny and Mrs Peachum (The Threepenny Opera). An internationally renowned exponent of classic European cabaret, she continues to tour with new programs. Her one-woman cabaret show A Star Is Torn toured Australia from 1979 to 1983; it also ran for a year in London’s West End. For almost half a century, audiences here and abroad have relished her inimitable voice, presence, and diction.

Robyn Archer (photograph by Claudio Raschella)

More broadly, Robyn Archer’s influence on our culture has been phenomenal. Few Australian performers have made such a varied and substantial contribution. In addition to her own artistic work, which has won her many awards (including a Helpmann in 2013), she has directed and programmed several arts festivals, including Adelaide (1998 and 2000), Tasmania (Ten Days on the Island, 2001–05) Melbourne (2002–05), and Liverpool (2004–06). Deputy Chair of the Australia Council from 2012 to August 2016, she is a ceaseless advocate for the arts and a respected mentor to new generations of artists and artistic directors. Her many honours include an honorary doctorate from Flinders University; Chevalier of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres; and Officer of the Order of Australia.

The Editor and Board of ABR greatly respect this unique Australian artist. Her charismatic stage presence and inspiring commitment to artistic values make her a most deserving ABR Laureate.

In creating the ABR Laureateship, our purpose was twofold: to celebrate distinguished artists, and to advance the work and prospects of younger artists. As with David Malouf, we will invite Robyn to nominate an ABR Laureate’s Fellow. The Fellow will work closely with the Editor on a substantial work for publication. On this occasion, she or he will receive $7,500, courtesy of the ABR Patrons, who fund this program. We look forward to naming the new Fellow in coming months.

Please join us on Thursday, 10 November at the Monash University Museum of Art when we will introduce our new Laureate and also launch the Arts issue, to which she has contributed. Full details are available on our Events page.

ABR GENDER FELLOWSHIP

ABR has four new Fellowships to unveil this month and next. The first of them is the ABR Gender Fellowship. Worth $7,500, this is the first of its kind to be offered by the magazine. We are seeking proposals for a long article on gender in contemporary Australian creative writing in all its forms.

How timely it is too, with a renewed focus in the media, literary circles, and the academy on the representations of women and men, and of gender and gender relations, in contemporary literature. The cultural lenses through which writers and readers, and publishers and critics, see the world continue to be heavily influenced by beliefs, attitudes, and assumptions about gender and gender differences.

This new Fellowship is funded by ABR Patron and board member Emeritus Professor Anne Edwards AO.

Published authors, critics, and commentators have until 1 February 2017 to apply for the Fellowship. See our Fellowships page for guidelines and a fuller description of the parameters.

BOB DYLAN

Bob Dylan (photograph by Chris Hakkens, Wikimedia Commons)In a decision that has upset some purists, the Swedish Academy has awarded this year’s Nobel Prize in Literature to US singer–songwriter Bob Dylan, ‘for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition’. Dylan, now seventy-five, is the first songwriter to receive the honour, and the first American since Toni Morrison in 1993. (The annual neglect of Philip Roth is striking; but then, we are talking about a prize that overlooked Henry James, James Joyce, Marcel Proust, and Virginia Woolf.)

In a review by Barnaby Smith (ABR, December 2015), Dylan is described as one of the ‘relatively few figures in popular music deemed worthy of serious academic attention’, due to his ability to capture the Zeitgeist of American culture through his lyrics. Leonard Cohen, one of Dylan’s peers, likened the award to ‘pinning a medal on Mount Everest’. Much like the mountain, Dylan has remained silent on the matter thus far.

Oddly, the Academicians chose not to cite Bob Dylan’s autobiography, Chronicles: Volume One (2004), one of the great modern American memoirs.

PATRICK WHITE’S LARGESSE

It will be interesting to see what Bob Dylan, presumably an immensely wealthy performer, does with his prize money (approximately US$1,000,000) – that is, if he accepts the Nobel Prize. Let’s hope he does something creative and altruistic with it, like Patrick White, who received the Nobel Prize in 1973. White, despite his reputation as a curmudgeon, promptly created the Patrick White Award to honour writers who have been highly creative over long periods but who have not received adequate recognition. It remains one of the most generous benefactions from an Australian artist.

Christina Stead was the first recipient (1974); other winners have included Amy Witting, Rosemary Dobson, and Fay Zwicky. At times the question of the writers’ supposedly ‘inadequate recognition’ has seemed rather hazy (if not a rather public cross to bear). It would be hard to argue that the work of Thea Astley, Gwen Harwood, Randolph Stow, and Robert Adamson is unsung.

Carmel Bird is the winner of the 2016 Patrick White Award. Since 1976 she has published fiction, essays, anthologies, children’s books, and writers’ manuals. Carmel Bird, who met Patrick White in 1961 (‘in awe’) commented: ‘I am honoured and overcome with joy to have been selected to receive the Award.’ The prize this year is worth $20,000.

HOME TO THE PALACE

We all have our favourite ‘last words’. Arts Update has a penchant for this offering from Primmie Niven, wife of the actor David Niven, who died after a fall during a game of ‘Sardines’ at a Hollywood party. ‘We’ll never be invited again,’ she said.

Famous Last Words, edited by Claire Cock-StarkeyClaire Cock-Starkey has produced an anthology of Famous Last Words (Bodleian Library [Footprint], $27.95 hb). Loftily, J.S. Bach consoled his family: ‘Don’t cry for me, for I go where music is born.’ P.T. Barnum, by contrast, was all business to the very end: ‘How were the receipts today at Madison Square Gardens?’ Lytton Strachey, ever undeceived, remained sceptical: ‘If this is dying, I don’t think much of it.’ D.H. Lawrence, for once, was pragmatic: ‘I think it is time for morphine.’ For sheer style we liked Chekhov’s ‘It is some time since I drank champagne’ and Tsar Alexander II’s farewell, on being targeted by an assassin: ‘Home to the palace to die.’

Australians, clearly, never expire, at least not memorably. No Australian features in Famous Last Words. Do readers of Advances have any mortal nominations?

HAZEL ROWLEY LITERARY FELLOWSHIP 2017

Applications are now open for the 2017 Hazel Rowley Literary Fellowship (worth up to $15,000). The Fellowship commemorates the work of distinguished biographer Hazel Rowley, author of acclaimed biographies of Christina Stead, Richard Wright, and the Roosevelts. The Fellowship is intended to support Australian writers of biography and writers working on an aspect of cultural or social history. Past Fellows include Maxine Beneba Clarke (2014), whose memoir The Hate Race was reviewed by Catherine Noske in our October 2016 issue.

The Fellowship may be used to fund research or travel, to develop a new proposal, or to prepare a manuscript for submission to potential publishers. More information about the Fellowship can be found by visiting www.hazelrowley.com. Writers have until 16 November to apply, at www.writersvictoria.org.au.

BARBARA JEFFERIS AWARD 2016

Peggy Frew’s second novel Hope Farm (2015) has been announced as the winner of the 2016 Barbara Jefferis Award. The award, which is now in its seventh year, is offered for ‘the best novel written by an Australian author that depicts women and girls in a positive way or otherwise empowers the status of women and girls in society’. Frew receives $50,000. Patrick Allington reviewed Hope Farm in our January–February 2016 issue.  More information about the Barbara Jefferis award can be found here.

MELBOURNE FESTIVAL OF HOMER

Later this month the inaugural Melbourne Festival of Homer (18–20 November) will celebrate the epic poet with performances, readings, gallery tours, and events including an Odyssey bookclub. On 19 November, David Malouf and Chris Mackie will discuss Malouf’s 2009 novel Ransom and The Iliad. The Festival is presented by Humanities 21 with the support of the Hellenic Museum, the Greek Centre for Contemporary Culture, and the City of Melbourne. More information and a full program listing can be found here.

FREE GIFT SUBSCRIPTION

New and renewing subscribers have until 31 December to give a friend a six-month subscription to ABR (print or online). You can qualify for this special offer by renewing your current subscription even before it is due to lapse. Renew for two years and give away two free subs, etc. Why not introduce a young reader or writer to ABR?

All you have to do is fill in the back of the flysheet that accompanies this issue, or contact us on (03) 9699 8822 or This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. (quoting your subscriber number, if you have one). We will contact the nominated recipient to establish whether he or she wants the print edition or ABR Online (thus we will need the recipient’s email address). Terms and conditions apply.

TRUMPERY

Dear Editor,
Sandy Thorne seems to think Donald Trump can restore America to prosperity and its past greatness (Letters, October 2016). All great nations rise, decline, and fall. If Caligula can put his horse Incitatus forward as a Senator, I suppose it’s possible that the American people just might vote in Donald Trump as president. As Bob Dylan sang ‘The answer is blowin’ in the wind’. Which brings us to one of the definitions of ‘Trump’ in the Oxford dictionary, ‘To break wind audibly’.

Rhys Winterburn, City Beach, WA