The setting is a gorgeous, somewhat decayed, many-roomed Georgian mansion in upstate New York, near the Hudson, in 2012. Nine screens placed around a darkened gallery space each show a room of the house, most of them occupied by a person and a musical instrument: a willowy woman in a slip on a chaise longue, arms wrapped around a cello; a dark-skinned man seated at an ornate desk leaning intently over a bass guitar. There is a man at a grand piano in a room with densely patterned wallpaper, at a drum kit in a kitchen doorway, on a bed with a guitar next to a naked woman. A naked man in a bathtub holds a guitar, not seeming to mind that it dips into the bubbly water. They all wear headphones, listening attentively, mostly unmindful of the camera. One screen shows the front verandah on which a disparate group of people are gathered, standing, sitting, straddling the balcony rail. One by one the musicians take up their instruments.

For sixty-two unbroken minutes they play, sit, listen, gaze, and sing a spare, mournful lament with the repeated refrain: Once again I fall into my feminine ways. The music swells to a crescendo of sound and feeling, drops away to silence, and begins again.

This is The Visitors, an installation by celebrated Icelandic artist Ragnar Kjartansson. The lyrics are taken from a poem by Kjartansson’s ex-wife, artist Ásdís Sif Gunnarsdóttir; The Visitors was recorded in the wake of their break up. Kjartansson is the guy in the bath. It is hard to tell whether he has any kind of role as conductor or leader; the music progresses in a way that feels organic, almost spontaneous, with that electric sense of shared consciousness between the musicians that happens when a group is in perfect synchrony.

Advertisement

The Bible in Australia is an unpretentious title for a remarkable book, and yet it is accurate enough. The Bible has been an ever-present aspect of life in Australia for 230 years, but no one has ever thought through its profound importance before. By starting her argument in a place both strange and obvious, Meredith Lake comes up with startling possibilities, and they keep surfacing all the way through the volume.

Just sixty years ago, in 1958, Russel Ward published his equally important text, The Australian Legend. No account of the Australian collective character and experience has, I believe, remained so long in print, and none has been so thoroughly influential in explaining Australians to themselves. The Australian Legend was always a more accessible book than, say, Manning Clark’s History of Australia, though the latter was designed to be read as a legend in itself. Australians, said Ward (and Clark more or less agreed), are, and always have been, sceptical about ‘religion and of intellectual and cultural pursuits generally’. The Bible in Australia turns this long-held understanding inside out. In fact, Lake makes a good case for thinking that the Bible, as an amalgam of stories, has had a power like Ward’s legend, and a similar nation-forming impact.

At a recent Passover Seder in Melbourne, I caught the word ‘Gilead’. ‘My favourite book!’ exclaimed the woman opposite me. I was a Catholic guest at a gracious Jewish table, so I whispered my query: ‘Marilynne Robinson’s novel?’ ‘Of course!’ came the emphatic reply. The Seder ritual was suspended for a moment (informality was part of the evening’s graciousness) while people asked about Robinson, about American literature, and what a Calvinist might be.

If I’d had multiples of Robinson’s new book of essays, What Are We Doing Here?, I would have handed them around gratefully, not just for her eloquent explanation of what it means to be a Calvinist in today’s America, but for her profound articulation of what it means to be a writer and an exemplary human being in an age and a country (a world?) where language and truth are daily traduced.

The sadly departed Terry Pratchett once said, ‘Stories of imagination tend to upset those without one.’ While it is difficult to imagine anyone claiming that the great fantasist had no right to tell the stories of witches, orang-utans, and sentient luggage, authors of literary fiction have lately been held to a different standard. Lionel Shriver has been foremost in the cross-hairs, a fact she addresses in Property, her thirteenth book and first short story collection.

Shriver’s public pronouncements on cultural appropriation and defence of imaginative fiction condemn her new work to intense scrutiny, which will not always be conducted in a spirit of critical objectivity.

ABR on Tour

Next month ABR Editor Peter Rose and Development Consultant Christopher Menz will lead the third ABR international cultural tour with Academy Travel. This booked out German tour will include visits to Munich, Berlin, and Bayreuth.

Tickets are now available for the fourth tour, a return to the United States. Join a like-minded group on a twelve-day tour that explores literature, art and architecture, theatre and music in three of America’s greatest cities: Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Chicago. All three cities have magnificent art collections, great music and theatre offerings, splendid architecture, and strong literary traditions. The tour will experience selected cultural highlights in each city. Australian Book Review will also hold a special literary/cultural event.

Details are available from Academy Travel and the ABR Tours page.

Alexis Wright

Alexis Wright’s collective biography of Tracker Tilmouth, Tracker (Giramondo), reviewed by Michael Winkler in our January–February issue, has won the $50,000 2018 Stella Prize. In his review Winkler wrote, ‘Wright takes a polyphonic approach to profiling her quixotic subject. The lead voice belongs to Tilmouth, but she augments and counterpoints his words through interviews with more than fifty informants, in often pungent vernacular. The voices overlap, re-embroider, and articulate different perspectives,’ describing Tracker as ‘a book performed by a folk ensemble rather than a solo virtuoso, [which adds to Wright’s] enduring non-fiction oeuvre.’ The other titles shortlisted this year were The Enlightenment of the Greengage Tree by Shokoofeh Azar, Terra Nullius by Claire G. Coleman, The Life to Come by Michelle de Kretser, An Uncertain Grace by Krissy Kneen, and The Fish Girl by Mirandi Riwoe.

Jolley Prize

When entries closed for the 2018 ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize, we had received about 1,170 stories, from thirty-five countries. Judging is underway, and we look forward to publishing the three shortlisted stories in our August issue, ahead of the Jolley Prize ceremony later that month. Can’t wait to read the shortlist? Visit our Fiction page to read stories by past winners and other great short fiction.

Beverley Farmer (1941–2018)

Novelist, essayist, and short story writer Beverley Farmer died on April 16 at the age of seventy-seven.

Farmer’s first novel, Alone, was released in 1980. Her second book, Milk (1983), won the Christina Stead Prize for Fiction in 1984 as part of the New South Wales Premier’s Literary Awards and her third novel, The House in the Light (1995), was shortlisted for the 1996 Miles Franklin Award. In 2009 she received the Patrick White Award, an annual prize established in 1974 to honour a writer who has been ‘highly creative over a long period but has not necessarily received adequate recognition’.

Beverly Farmer

This Water: Five tales (Giramondo), longlisted for the 2018 Stella Prize, was announced at the time of publication as Farmer’s last work. In her review in ABR’s June–July 2017 issue, Anna MacDonald wrote, ‘Farmer’s prose is virtuosic, she is a stylist unlike any other living Australian writer, and it is difficult to read this last work without a haunting sense of loss.’

Melbourne Jewish Book Week

Melbourne Jewish Book Week will present its first full program between 3 and 9 May with ABR contributor and inaugural Calibre Essay Prize winner Elisabeth Holdsworth appearing at an event on Sunday May 6 at 1.45 pm at the St Kilda Town Hall. ‘The Jewniverse’ will explore ideas raised in Holdsworth’s ABR RAFT Fellowship Essay ‘If This is A Jew’ (November 2017). Moderated by Rebecca Wartell, the event will look at the current Jewish landscape and where things might be heading in a discussion between Holdsworth, historian Paul Forgasz, and Rabbi James Kennard. Visit the MJBW website for more information about this event and to see their full program. 

2018 Film Survey

In addition to a wide range of reviews, commentaries, and articles, we will invite some leading film critics and professionals to nominate their favourite film in the June-July Film and Television issue of ABR. To complement this feature, we want to hear from readers about their favourite film, director, and actor. There are some fantastic prizes for completing the survey, including a one-year Palace VIP Card, thanks to Palace Cinemas, and a pack of ten DVDs from Madman Entertainment. You have until 21 May to vote.

Kendrick Lamar

Predictably, the winners of this year’s Pulitzer Prizes included the authors of exposés on sexual predators in Hollywood, multifarious scandals in US politics, and the plight of refugees worldwide. Less predictable was the Prize for Music which was won by US hip hop artist Kendrick Lamar for his 2017 album DAMN., described by Pulitzer as ‘a virtuosic song collection unified by its vernacular authenticity and rhythmic dynamism that offers affecting vignettes capturing the complexity of modern African-American life’. Lamar is the first non-classical or jazz artist to win the prize, beating Michael Gilbertson’s Quartet and Ted Hearne’s Sound from the Bench. The decision to award the Pulitzer to the thirty-year old rapper has been received well so far, unlike the controversy which greeted Bob Dylan’s unexpected 2016 Nobel Prize for Literature. But as James Ley writes in his review of Why Dylan Matters by Richard F. Thomas in this issue, ‘… those who disapproved of the decision seemed unable or unwilling to disentangle the question of whether or not he deserved the award from the question of whether or not it was appropriate to bestow it upon someone like him … someone whose work falls outside a traditional definition of "literature", someone with the temerity to have succeeded in a popular medium that has allowed his work to reach millions of people and exert a huge cultural influence.’ It’s hard to ignore the insightfulness of certain lines in Lamar’s repertoire which include: ‘Hail Mary, Jesus and Joseph / The great American flag is wrapped in drag with explosives / Compulsive disorder, sons and daughters / Barricaded blocks and borders / Look what you taught us!’ (‘XXX’) as the US, and indeed the world, teeters on the brink of a Trump-shaped abyss.

Kendrick Lamar performs at FIB Benicàssim Festival 2016 (Wikimedia Commons)

T-Shirts and tote bags

While the last vestiges of warm weather cling on for a few weeks more than usual, now’s your chance to pick up a high quality black cotton ABR t-shirt, available in various sizes for men and women for just $25 plus postage and handling. And do you need something to carry your books (and copies of ABR) in? You can also now purchase a stylish ABR tote bag. Visit our Merchandise page for more information.

In the lead-up to the 1999 republic referendum, historian John Hirst published a short guide to Australian democracy and law. ‘This is not a textbook,’ he wrote in the preface; rather, he intended it to be a ‘painless introduction’ to the system of government that had formed in this country under the British monarchy. He did not hide his republican tendencies: ‘The book will still have served its purpose if readers quarrel with it.’

Almost twenty years later, with the failed referendum now a fading memory, historian Benjamin T. Jones has written a short, passionate book in a similar spirit. This Time: Australia’s republican past and future is not a textbook; nor a history of republicanism: rather, it is ‘one long argument’ about why an Australian should be Australia’s head of state. And although there is plenty to quarrel about within it, it will serve its purpose well if it ignites a national conversation about an Australian republic.

In the first half of the book, ‘The Past’, Jones offers a rich, anecdotal overview of the republican movement in Australia, a subject intensively analysed by Mark McKenna in The Captive Republic (1996). It is a story of fantastic visions and unfulfilled dreams, and the book moves rapidly from John Dunmore Lang’s plans for a ‘United Provinces of Australia’ to Malcolm Turnbull’s ‘deafening silence’ about the subject today.

Britain’s withdrawal from Australia’s sphere of interest in the mid-twentieth century catapulted the nation into a crisis of identity. Jones draws on Stuart Ward and James Curran’s book The Unknown Nation (2010) to navigate Australia’s fumbling efforts to find national meaning and symbols in the new post-imperial void. But unlike The Unknown Nation, which emphasises the lingering ambiguity about Australian identity in the wake of empire, Jones asserts a clear vision of ‘what Australian-ness really means’ today.  ‘New Australia has no clear birth-date,’ he argues, ‘but surely we can agree it has arrived.’

So what does ‘New Australia’ mean to Jones? What is his particular brand of patriotism? We get some more answers in the second half of the book, ‘The Future’, which is a series of practical essays on the necessary next steps in the republican movement.

Jones’s national vision echoes that of an earlier generation of republicans. He delights in the ‘sunburnt soil’ of ‘this diverse and lucky country’, and he identifies a ‘sense of pride and uniqueness … even among the first generation of native-born Australians’: ‘Their heritage was British but their Australianness was palpable.’ He sees a republic as an opportunity to ‘adorn this nation in symbols that speak of freedom, justice and inclusion’, and he urges his fellow citizens to ‘get better at celebrating our achievements’, such as our democratic system. To stimulate discussion, he puts forward ideas for a new preamble to the Australian constitution, a new flag, and a new title for Australia’s head of state.

But how are we to agree on this new republican regalia? Jones’s answer is a simple, recurring mantra: let democracy rule. He will support whichever symbols the Australian people choose. ‘I sometimes joke that you could make a flag with Shane Warne eating a meat pie and smashing a VB and I’d salute it.’

In the age of Brexit, Donald Trump, and Boaty McBoatface, it is surprising to find someone with such absolute faith in national ballots. The cause of Jones’s magnanimity is twofold. He is determined not to repeat the mistakes of the 1999 referendum, where internal division derailed a popular movement. Unity is key. There is also an undeniable sense of righteousness to his cause: a missionary zeal. As he writes of his republican heroes,  ‘Fighting for an Australian republic is a supreme act of patriotism, and future historians will honour the women and men who did the heavy lifting that transformed a noble dream into a glorious reality.’

Benjamin T. JonesIn an earlier, co-edited book, Project Republic (2013), Jones wrote with Mark McKenna of the republican movement as an opportunity for ‘national renewal’. A republic, especially a ‘reconciled republic’, could ‘make us feel differently about one another and the country in which we live’. In This Time, however, Jones’s focus seems to have drifted to a tamer republican vision: a simple matter of ending an anachronistic system and updating our national paraphernalia. Indeed, Jones even questions the centrality of Indigenous history and culture in forging new national symbols. ‘Our current flag reserves a privileged position for Britain,’ he writes. ‘It would be against the spirit of a flag for all Australians to replace that with another privileged position.’

Jones makes a powerful case that a republic is overdue, but there is little sense in This Time that it could be a transformative moment for Australia. He is primarily concerned with the mechanics of the republican movement – with winning the argument. His approach comes through most clearly in the chapter ‘Muddled Monarchists’, which is written as a debating playbook. ‘I challenge you to put this to monarchists when you speak to them,’ he urges his readers. ‘Be relentless on the point. Do not let them change the topic.’

John Hirst’s 1998 volume, Discovering Democracy, is still used in schools today. Whether This Time endures so well will have a lot to do with whether Jones wins his argument.

A road to the republic has been mapped out before us. But what kind of republic do we want to be? We desperately need a new narrative in the twenty-first century.

By now, the Robert Manne essay is a well-established form – four decades at the centre of public life will do that. Whatever the topic, his pieces tend to possess certain qualities: an almost lawyerly emphasis on fact and argument over style and rhetoric; a professor’s sympathy for the world of ideas over the muck of institutions; an unfashionable willingness to change his mind without worry or shame; and an overwhelming focus on public questions over private struggles.

Manne’s latest collection, On Borrowed Time, begins on a different note. In late 2016, after a lingering soreness, Manne learned that an earlier cancer had returned to his throat. This time the oncologist offered him a more barbed choice: remove his voice box, or face probable death. For a man who lived for debate – ‘lecturing, tutoring, speaking at writers’ festivals, launching books, appearing on radio and occasionally television’ – the answer wasn’t immediately obvious. The title essay is about Manne’s decision to operate, and the slow attempt to rebuild a life without his distinctive voice.

In 1787, at a time when literary culture was shifting from private patronage and coterie circulation into a new professionalism, the London publisher, bookseller, and journal editor Joseph Johnson offered the position of staff writer to Mary Wollstonecraft, who had already published Thoughts on the Education of Daughters (1787), the first of several books leading to Wollstonecraft’s being named Britain’s first feminist. Fully aware of taking a position hitherto occupied only by men, Wollstonecraft wrote to her sister Everina: ‘Mr Johnson assures me that if I exert my talents in writing, I may support myself in a comfortable way. I am then going to be the first of a new genus – I tremble at the attempt.’

The idea of a ‘new genus’ tracks its way through Outsiders, a group biography of the five women writers whom Lyndall Gordon sees as Wollstonecraft’s descendants – her actual daugher Mary Godwin (later, Mary Shelley), Emily Brontë, George Eliot, Olive Schreiner, and Virginia Woolf – who became well- established literary figures without having had the advantages given middle-class men, including access to institutions of learning. Gordon devotes a chapter to each, labelling them ‘prodigy’, ‘visionary’, ‘outlaw’, ‘orator’, and ‘explorer’, and providing fresh and lively literary biography along with acute critical commentary on their key fictional works as well as letters and journals.

The year 2017 marked the twenty- fifth anniversary of the High Court’s 1992 decision in Mabo v Queensland (No 2) (Mabo), which recognised the existence of Indigenous people’s traditional ‘native title’ rights over the Murray Islands in the Torres Strait. This finding, and the passage through parliament of the Keating government’s Native Title Act the following year, dramatically changed the legal position of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in Australian society. Since then, there have been 338 determinations that native title exists in different parts of Australia, delivering significant benefits to a substantial proportion of claimant groups.

However, native title remains controversial among Indigenous people. In the words of the Kokatha Aboriginal woman Sue Coleman Haseldine, or ‘Aunty Sue’, the subject of Eve Vincent’s Against Native Title: Conflict and creativity in outback Australia: ‘Native title throughout the years has been a really shocking experience … first we had to choose one tribe … [and then] we were demanded to prove to the government our continual existence to the land for the past 200 years.’

‘And so I patch it together … I take the liberty of seeking not only an explanation but a connection between what at first might appear to be disparate ingredients.’ The narrator of Gregory Day’s new novel, A Sand Archive, takes many liberties. Enigmatic in various ways, apparently solitary, nameless, and ungendered, this character is nevertheless full of fascinated admiration and affection for an older man who is virtually a stranger, and candid about the feelings and impulses that compel the creation of an intimate account of his life and career. The patchwork is composed of clues found in an obscure publication titled The Great Ocean Road: Dune stabilisation and other engineering difficulties by FB Herschell, along with an archive in ‘the small prime ministerial library at the university on the edge of the water’ in Geelong.

I will admit that this novel sent me, from time to time, to atlases, library catalogues, and Wikipedia. It is absolutely anchored in its place and time, as befits a novel about a civil engineer employed by the Victorian Country Roads Board in Geelong in the second half of the twentieth century. To foster the illusion of historical plausibility, there are illustrations dotted through the pages – grainy greyscale photos of sand dunes, car factories, and, tantalisingly, scraps of manuscript from Francis Herschell’s ‘diary’. But he is not in the author catalogue of the State Library of Victoria and no book with exactly that title exists. Gregory Day’s novel is, like the narrator’s construction of Herschell’s biography, built from a powerful mixture of established historical circumstance and imagination.

A road that is built on sand dunes is both an engineering problem to be solved and a potent metaphor for the human predicament. In A Sand Archive, the young Herschell – familiarly called ‘FB’ in the novel – travels to France in 1968 to meet the experts and report on the suitability of a species of grass to solve the problems of the Great Ocean Road, which periodically collapsed.

In the exultation and chaos of Paris in May 1968, FB meets Mathilde, a student from the very coastal area of France he is about to visit. Their affair is brief and intense, constrained not by convention or family disapproval, but by Mathilde’s sense of the historical moment, which makes her ‘return to the fray,’ away from her undoubtedly strong attraction to the shy young civil engineer from Australia. FB’s encounter with a passionate French woman becomes his defining moment. He never marries, spending his life in Geelong wrangling with his unimaginative and suspicious boss in the CRB, quoting Hélène Cixous to the seagulls, frequenting ‘the bookshop in James Street, Geelong’ where one day he meets the narrator. He writes his book, an obscure volume in which the narrator finds ‘no schmaltz, no spin, only knowledge, technique, experience, and, every now and again, an unexpected glimmer of poetry’.

Poetry glimmers in the novel, too. Often enough I found myself gasping with delighted surprise at an apt and original phrase. Paris in 1968 is alive with ‘a festivity of discontent’. When FB is with Mathilde, everything felt ‘both electric and ambiguous’. At his moment of plenitude, ‘this quickening convergence of his heart and mind’ in France, he wonders if he is ‘suddenly homesick for the astringent and slightly defensive version of existence which he led in Australia’. This is a beautiful description of the life of an intellectual in the provincial Australia of this period, when the life of the mind tended to be regarded with suspicion. The narrator writes, ‘Perhaps for my generation in Australia it has been easier to live the examined life, easier at least to find friends who would be excited by Proust’s theatrophone, or Marguerite Duras’s honesty, or the creative experiments of Georges Perec and Ouvroir de littérature potentielle (Oulipo).’ But we are warned against pitying FB as ‘a single man shut away with his intellectual obsessions in a quiet house on a quiet street in a small regional city’. The narrator emphasises that this is not the man he met only briefly in person but got to know through the written word, in manuscript and print. ‘My feeling upon meeting him was that he was a man who had fully digested the absurdity of human endeavours, in the sense that we as humans so repeatedly get things wrong.’ He could live with knowing that his great contribution to Victorian road safety was doomed to be condemned by later generations as environmental vandalism: ‘that even as we attempt to rectify our old mistakes we are destined to make new ones’. The introduction of European marram grass to stabilise sand dunes in Australia is perhaps not a mistake on the scale of the introduction of rabbits or cane toads, but the grass is nevertheless now regarded as an invasive species.

Gregory Day (photograph by Reg Ryan)This novel about sand and engineering is also, of course, a novel of ideas and passions; a novel about writing a book about sand, engineering, ideas, and passions. ‘Can I presume?’ wonders the narrator. For the biographer, inevitably the question arises as to ‘whether the FB I have created, or re-created, in these pages bears any real resemblance to the man who actually lived’. For the novelist, there are other questions. This is an ambitious, multilayered novel, a novel for intellectuals, for bibliophiles; a book to contemplate, to burrow into, to enjoy with ‘a thinking heart’.

Barry Hill’s collection of essays from the last four decades is commanding and impressive. Few could match his range of subjects: from Tagore to John Berger, Lucian Freud to Christina Stead – all, for the most part, carried off with aplomb. He catches the ‘raw’ edge of Freud’s studio – ‘worksite’ as Hill calls it – ‘the sea of bare boards that rise into so many paintings, the tatty chair, the piles of used rags on the floor and up the walls, the soiled flotsam of a painter’s toil, tossed aside like offal in an abattoir’. He characterises so well ‘the ambiguous aura of melancholy’ in Freud’s figures, with their paradoxical mixture of ‘implacable vigour’ and ‘their listlessness’, the latter the product of the exhaustion of the models compelled to pose for extended periods.

No less striking is Hill’s contrariness, descending at times into truculence. Bruce Chatwin’s The Songlines (1987) is seen off the pitch as ‘that product of late-Empire metropolitan culture’. Hill takes such exception to ‘the enormous weight of Chatwin’s English condescension’ that it reveals a sliver of Australian defensiveness. How dare the Brits comment on our sacred sites?

body’s habitude begin
with buoyancy, a saturated skin

and musculature that urges toward
this interface with air, insisting itself

There is a field that will persist in everything:
                     what means crucial means
if there never was a thought deflected not to be
                     a path so far gone?

1.
Your beard intrigues me, its rough mystery, patterned complexity.
I imagine burrowing animals under your skin that raise

unreadable braille, tiny things my nails disturb – anemone fronds
in a sea-borne forest. I could analyse what I know

At present it is virtually impossible to make any confident prediction about the future of British politics, or indeed of the British state. The future lies in a fog where shadowy figures can be discerned but none is readily identifiable. Nothing should surprise us, but it now always does. This has been true since the 2015 general election when the Conservatives won an unexpected parliamentary majority, and, as a result, forced David Cameron to have a referendum on whether Britain should leave the EU – a referendum he did not want and which he grotesquely mismanaged.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt is consistently ranked alongside George Washington and Abraham Lincoln as one of the greatest presidents of the United States. His greatness rests on two pillars. Elected in the midst of the Great Depression, he permanently changed how Americans viewed government: as a force that would intervene aggressively in the economy to relieve the burdens of millions. From 1940 onwards, he led his nation through World War II, altering the historical trajectory of the United States and establishing it firmly as a global superpower. Elected for an unprecedented and never to be repeated four terms, Roosevelt remains the dominant presidential figure that his successors have to measure up to.

Other, darker threads emerge when examining the Roosevelt presidency. In an era of racial strife across the South, Roosevelt largely ignored the crimes and lynchings committed against black citizens. Despite seeing off attempts to subvert or overthrow democracy, he nevertheless practised his own underhand tactics at preserving his power, most notably the attempt in 1937 to ‘pack’ the Supreme Court with more justices who would implement his New Deal agenda.

On a Saturday afternoon shortly before Christmas in 1984, Bernhard Goetz was riding the New York City subway. Goetz, who is white, was approached by four black screwdriver-wielding teenagers who asked him for five dollars. Goetz drew a 0.38 pistol from his jacket and shot each of the boys once, then turned to one of them on the floor of the subway and said, ‘You don’t look so bad, here’s another,’ firing again into the boy’s chest. He was convicted only of the most minor charge (possession of a handgun) and served eight months in prison. In a city increasingly gripped by fear, Goetz quickly became a New York folk hero: a real-life civilian Dirty Harry.

Robbie Arnott’s Flames is an exuberantly creative and confident début. Set in an alternate Tasmania, Flames’s kaleidoscopic narrative crackles with energy and imagination. This is a world of briefly reincarnating women, gin-swigging private detectives, wombat farms, malevolent cormorants, elementals and nature gods, fishermen who form lifelong bonds with seals, and coffee-table books about coffins; a world in which the complex bonds of love and family are further compounded by enhanced abilities, supernatural influences, and unusual genetic legacies. While some characters and developments are inspired by real events and people, this is a story that sparks with invention.

In Relatively Famous, Roger Averill combines a fictional memoir with extracts from a faux-biography of the memoirist’s Booker Prize-winning father, Gilbert Madigan. The biography amounts to a fairly bloodless summary of the events of Madigan’s life, and his son’s memoir is similarly sedate. This makes for a limp but sensitively conceived novel about paternal failure and the extent to which parents remain the authors of their children’s lives.

Michael is Gilbert’s eldest son. His father rose to prominence with a début novel that was widely admired for its stylish, modernist framing of working-class concerns. While writing the novel, Madigan Sr relied on the financial and domestic support of his wife (who gave up a teaching degree to support him). He also borrowed his protagonist’s working-class expressions and sensibilities from his father-in-law. Despite these personal and aesthetic debts, Gilbert left his first wife and son soon after achieving celebrity status and went on to live a life unburdened by conventional adult responsibilities.

On its first appearance in Russia, Dostoevsky’s novel Crime and Punishment was the hit of the season. It was serialised throughout 1866 in the journal The Russian Messenger. Nikolai Strakhov, Dostoevsky’s first biographer, described the novel’s effect on the reading public as spectacular: ‘[A]ll that lovers of reading talked about was that novel, about which they complained because of its crushing power … so that people with strong nerves almost became ill, while people with weak nerves had to leave off reading.’ Other contemporaries testified similarly: that the novel, even for Russian readers, was not an easy read.

There is an observation in the titular story of Indonesian writer Intan Paramaditha’s first collection to be published in English, which can be read as the thematic spine of the book: ‘Sometimes it seemed like there was nothing new to talk about. It was the same old story, repeated over and over, all stitched together.’  This notion can be applied quite literally to the first piece in the collection, ‘The Blind Woman Without a Toe’, a feminist revisionist retelling of Cinderella that treads well-trodden ground. This is a story – told from one stepsister’s viewpoint – that readers of revisionist fairy tales have encountered many times before. It is a rather safe choice to open with such a familiar narrative.

In 1969, in a quintessentially Australian town on the remote north-west coast, the locals prepare to celebrate their role in the moon landing. In 2000, as the townsfolk brace themselves for a cyclone, Lucky, this novel’s pink and grey narrator, uses transmissions from a satellite dish tuned to galah frequency to make sense of what she saw and heard from her cage in the 1960s. Quirky? Unbelievable? Tracy Sorensen’s The Lucky Galah upsets preconceptions in a smart and charming account of a human population on the cusp of radical social transformation.

Interwoven short story collections are often at their best when they offer multiple perspectives on the same event. Laurie Steed does this well in his début novel You Belong Here, as he captures the life of a single family through the multiplicity of its members.

Jen meets Steven on her way to a party in Brunswick in 1972; within a few years they are married. Steed shows the way two people bring their respective personal histories to a relationship, ‘a Möbius strip of past and present, with neither gaining traction’. Steven works at Tullamarine in air traffic control, but is unable to quarantine the stresses of his job from his domestic life. By 1980 the couple have three children. One of the strengths of the book is the way that Steed writes about the challenges of parenthood: the weight of the responsibility and the sacrifice of individuality parents make in its name. Moments of love that pass from parents to their children are also rendered nicely.

This speculative novel is of the Zeitgeist. S.A. Jones imagines a civilisation of women – the Vaik – committed to ‘Work. History. Sex. Justice.’ Although they live apart, in ‘The Fortress’, there is a history of exchange between the Vaik and the outside world. All women are entitled to Vaik justice if they have been violated and, according to a treaty that includes ‘biological guarantees’, Vaik are ‘granted access to men and sperm’. Thus, The Fortress accommodates men: national servicemen; ‘isvestyii’ who, having committed crimes against women and girls, are sentenced to life (and death) at The Fortress; permanent residents; and ‘supplicants’. These men work – in the fields, the kitchens, etc. – and must consent to the Vaik ‘direct[ing] the uses of [their bodies] at all times’.

So, who reads poetry? American military cadets, that’s who. And medical specialists. Also, songwriters, journalists, and philosophers. And don’t forget (ex-) poets, priests, and politicians (to quote Sting). But let’s get back to those military cadets. What does poetry do for them? Who Reads Poetry gives us a number of possible answers. When Jeffrey Brown, a senior correspondent for PBS’s NewsHour, asked a poetry class in West Point (the US military academy) about the link between reading poetry and becoming a military officer, one cadet answered that poetry, and art generally, is required because ‘we’re all here training to take lives’. Another argued that poetry is necessary to learning about becoming a leader. Lieutenant General William James Lennox Jr, who also has an essay in Who Reads Poetry, was once the superintendent at West Point. For him, poetry is taught there, in part, because combat leaders ‘must rely on their own morality, their own creativity, their own wits’.

My poor son, forgive your mother,
my poor son, forgive me for giving birth to you,

I won’t do it anymore.

This poem, cited in its entirety, is ‘My Poor Son’ by the Polish writer Ryszard Krynicki, who will be seventy-five years old in June 2018. Likely the finest poet in the generation after Zbigniew Herbert, the dazzling philosopher of modern Polish verse who died twenty years ago, Krynicki was born in a Nazi slave labor camp in 1943. At Windberg in Sankt Valentin, Austria, his Polish parents were forced workers at a tank factory. These stern origins stayed with Krynicki, along with a certain loftiness and reserve. At university, his classmates reportedly referred to him as ‘Archbishop’. In Polish author Ewa Lipska’s novel Sefer (2009), a character generally accepted as being inspired by Krynicki appears at a party in Cracow, a ‘silent poet who was moving around the rooms like an empty city … I learned that he was born in Austria. His esoteric delicacy did not belong to any of the human elements.’

Both Adam Aitken’s Archipelago and Elizabeth Allen’s Present examine the establishment and mutability of identity in the worlds of objects, histories, literature, and media in which they place their speakers. Of course, the exploration of identity is a common theme of poetry, particularly as it pertains to how the material of language helps shape such a tenuous concept. Admittedly, the theme serves primarily as a useful frame through which to enter two starkly different works. All the same, Aitken and Allen’s books prove rewardingly immersive and surprisingly complex in the different ways in which they handle their speakers’ desire for understanding in the crowded spaces of their poetry.

The word ‘normal’ and its derivatives permeate our language, but what exactly does the term mean? It is entrenched in contemporary medical discourse (normal blood pressure, normal heart rate, normal body temperature, normal blood sugar levels), shows up in statistics (normal distribution curve), in geometry (normal lines) and even in chemistry as a measurement term. There were once even normal schools – teacher training colleges – originating from the French tradition of the école normale. These definitions of the term (essentially medical or mathematical) are a long way from popular contemporary usage – a vague and highly contested concept that often rests on the notion of mental and emotional order in the individual. A critical genealogy of the normal over time also involves a close analysis of a range of cognate terms including ‘average’, ‘typical’, ‘regular’, ‘standard’, and ‘ideal’ in all their ambiguity, contestability, and even incompatibility.

Almost twelve years after her death, Bronwyn Oliver (1959–2006) remains one of Australia’s best-known sculptors; her artistic legacy supported by the prolific outputs of an intense and high-profile studio practice across three decades, by public, private, and corporate commissions, and by a string of prizes, awards, and fellowships. She is admired now, as she was throughout her career, as an artist of signal intellectual depth and aesthetic complexity, her work carrying appeal across a broad public.

Bronwyn Oliver’s name conjures the wildly intricate metalwork, the spiked or furled and swirling forms of her sculptures; it also brings to mind the still shocking news of her suicide in July 2006, news which pushed questions of mental health, the individual and private costs of art, of talent and achievement to the forefront of a larger public understanding. The ‘strange things’ to which Hannah Fink directs us in the title of her very beautiful book on Bronwyn Oliver, refer us not just to the otherworldly lyricism of Oliver’s sculptures, but also to the troubled matter of her life; the mix of her talent, her industry, her intense fragility, and her at times inexplicably pitiless treatment of those around her.

Which poets have most influenced you?

Influence is transient – it changes all the time. I can’t always pinpoint it directly or say which poets might be most influential on my poems. From the mid-1960s I read everything – the French, the Dadaists, the Eastern Europeans, Vladimir Mayakovsky. Gertrude Stein reigned supreme for me, then Mina Loy. I was energised by many North Americans from Emily Dickinson to Diane di Prima and the Beats, to the so-called ‘New York School’, to Rachel Blau DuPlessis and the so-called ‘post-avant’, to Claudia Rankine’s cutting lyrical documentaries. The Sydney Women Writers Workshop (aka the ‘No Regrets’ group) in the late 1970s had a significant effect. Over the years my poetry has been under the influence of plenty of Australians. Ken Bolton is my best critic.

Why do you write?

Because I love doing it and because at times I’ve been changed for the better as a result of reading great novels. Bohemia Beach is about a successful woman who is also an alcoholic. My love of Prague aside, I was inspired to challenge the novelistic cliché of the happy-go-lucky female drunk: bad things can happen to women who drink.

Are you a vivid dreamer?

Yes. I go through periods when I record them on a notepad I keep beside my bed. I dream of adapting my novel The River Ophelia for the screen.

There was a certain predictability to the arguments that flared when Bob Dylan was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2016. For the most part, they were variations of the arguments that have shadowed him from the beginning of his career, twisted echoes of a million late-night dormitory discussions about whether his lyrics are ‘poetry’. The oddly revealing thing about them was the extent to which those who disapproved of the decision seemed unable or unwilling to disentangle the question of whether or not he deserved the award from the question of whether or not it was appropriate to bestow it upon someone like him ⎯ which is to say, a mere songwriter, someone whose work falls outside a traditional definition of ‘literature’, someone with the temerity to have succeeded in a popular medium that has allowed his work to reach millions of people and exert a huge cultural influence.

Eileen Joyce’s name is not to be found in books about the great pianists, but a great pianist she was nonetheless. Born and raised in rural Tasmania and Western Australia, she studied in Leipzig and London and eventually found fame as a versatile pianist with an unusually robust technique and a wide repertory (including ninety concertos). The new reissue of her studio recordings (Decca/Eloquence), which includes performances of chamber music and works for harpsichord, will pleasantly surprise listeners with their clarity and vitality of playing.

Joyce was not a specialist in the works of one composer or period. The ten CDs display Joyce’s familiarity with the usual suspects, including Brahms, Liszt, and Mozart, but also her interest in non-canonical repertory, such as works by Bernhard Stavenhagen, Joaquín Turina, Harry Farjeon, and Cyril Scott. Although the recordings date from the 1930s and 1940s, they have been reissued extremely well for CD, and there are few muddy, unclear, or distorted moments.

Australians tend to have an ambivalent attitude to their respective police forces. We automatically expect that they will be there in an emergency. We share their grief when one of their number is killed while on duty, yet we regard Ned Kelly as a folk hero, even though he was responsible for the murder of three policemen in 1878. Many of us are affected either directly or indirectly by serious road accidents, yet we will curse under our breath the police officer who pulls us over for speeding or using our mobile phone while driving.

Robert Haldane was a career policeman. He retired in 2001 with the rank of superintendent after nearly thirty years in the force. While a constable, he undertook a Bachelor of Arts (Hons) followed by a PhD on the history of the Victorian police force, the genesis of the first (1985) and subsequent editions of this book. This new edition revises the text where appropriate and chronicles the twenty-one years since the second edition was published in 1996.

The classic lyric preoccupation with interiority, and how internal life touches and changes the outside world, finds expression in two recent collections of poetry: Fiona Wright’s Domestic Interior and Carolyn Abbs’s The Tiny Museums. In both collections, the speakers draw the shapes of their internal furniture, while building monuments to the intimate scenes and common spaces that define them.

The poems in Wright’s book have a confessional intensity, even if the particularities of the confession are mostly left off the page. While still in her thirties, Wright became an award-winning memoirist for a collection of essays probing the metaphysics of hunger. Self-analysing and revelatory, the essays in Small Acts of Disappearance (2015) do not shy away from the details of private shame and struggle. The poems in Domestic Interior were written around the same time; they are strong in feeling and light on narrative. Biographical details, and the triggering context of the speakers’ sorrow and heaviness, are rarely explicit. The poet instead describes with consummate skill the textural particularities of the touched and tasted world: the ‘pelts of peaches’ and the ‘lukewarm wheatgrass’, sampled while walking ‘past the bakery / where all the bread is cheesed and lurid’. The vulgar suburb-scape is finely observed and vividly described in terms of how it feels against the body.

A quiet revolution is underway in academic literary criticism. Three movements are at the vanguard: ecocriticism, digital humanities, and material culture. At first, they might seem distinct. Ecocritics see literature as a response to the environment. Digital humanists see literature as a repository of machine-readable data. Scholars of material culture see literature as a series of objects – books, libraries, reading glasses, engravings – that exist in the real world. All these movements, however, have a shared foundation, with striking implications for intellectual life today.

What they have in common is an interest in things, in the physical existence of texts. This is a remarkable reversal. At least since Wittgenstein, the pervasive trend among Western intellectuals has been to view literature – and indeed, everything else – as essentially abstract, incorporeal, and symbolic. For a great twentieth-century critic like Roland Barthes, even physical items of clothing are essentially symbols. Our jeans may look like tough blue denim sewn together, but what they are really made of is ideology, the secret language or code that constitutes our reality.

Privacy is having its moment. Google users have unknowingly permitted the corporation to track their every movement and record every web search, YouTube video watched, and more. Facebook allowed data to be collected from users and their friends via a third-party application, which were then used by data analytics firm Cambridge Analytica to target Trump voters with ‘fake news’ in the 2016 US presidential election. And personal data is far from all that can be bought and sold online. In 2014, more than 250 celebrity- owned iCloud accounts were hacked, and their explicit personal photos disseminated online. The prevalence of sharing non-consensual pornography (‘revenge porn’) is not restricted to the rich and famous. In the United States, the Data and Society Research Institute reported in 2016 that one in twenty-five Americans had been a victim of ‘image-based abuse’, to use the terminology now preferred by researchers. In Australia, according to a 2017 RMIT University report, that number is around one in five.

There are cases in which it seems, on the face of it, unambiguously right to restore stolen or misappropriated cultural objects to their original setting or at least to their last known address: we can think of the lamentable looting of museums and archaeological sites during the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria, and the riots of the pitifully misnamed Arab Spring. And yet because their original sites may still be extremely insecure, some such artefacts are best preserved in the safekeeping of Western institutions until stability returns to their homelands.

There are other instances in which the collection and removal of artefacts, especially tribal ones, have certainly saved them from destruction: the Aboriginal items lent to the National Museum of Australia by the British Museum for the Encounters exhibition (2015–16) were collected by missionaries and travellers from the late eighteenth to the late nineteenth centuries, and would otherwise have been discarded and allowed to perish. Unless one is committed to the idea of tribal cultures existing in a prehistoric present without past or future, continually repeating and remaking and re-enacting, preserving examples of their arts and crafts seems commendable.

My earliest memory of Princess Margaret is flicking through my grandmother’s copy of The Australian Women’s Weekly and seeing photographs of a middle-aged woman, in huge sunglasses and a colourful kaftan, on a tropical island. I surmised she was famous but did not know why. My grandmother explained, somewhat primly, that she was the queen’s sister and left it at that. To young eyes, the woman in the photographs seemed to be at once gaudy and dowdy. As I grew older, I became increasingly aware of her more bohemian prime, at the same time as she was declining from middle age into a long period of illness and a relatively early death at the age of seventy-one.

In one of my pedagogical fantasies, I design the curriculum for a course called ‘Modern Theories of Desire’. My students read Marx, Beauvoir, Foucault, and Butler. They study Hegel on desire’s organisation of the everyday relationship between the self and the world; some critiques of developmental psychology, a sociology of addiction; Freud, of course. I also screen films – Almodóvar, Wong Kar-wai – set a novel or two, and in class we read poetry. It may seem a whimsical curriculum, but by semester’s end my students have a rigorous working knowledge of ‘ways of thinking about desire’, their assumptions have been questioned, curiosities aroused.