‘Creative writing is, in sum, as American as baseball, apple pie and homicide.’

Mark McGurl, The Program Era (2009)

My rejection from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop arrived by mail. Iowa was steadfastly old-fashioned: there were no online portals or login codes at the near-mythical mothership of American fiction; no emails or text alerts. I only knew they had received my application because they sent back the self-addressed postcard I had included with my brace of earnest short stories. When the rejection letter arrived, I opened it with a good knife because I hoped it might be a letter I’d want to keep. I did keep it, just not for the reasons I’d hoped. There was a handwritten message underneath the pro-forma niceties: This is strong work. Iowa hadn’t said yes, but – with those four words – it hadn’t said no.

The week after America’s oldest graduate fiction workshop turned me down, I was accepted by one of its youngest – less than a decade old, but cloned, as all MFA (Master of Fine Arts) programs are, from Iowa’s metastasising DNA. I was offered a yearly stipend of US$15,000 (before tax), which I would earn by teaching freshmen undergraduates how to write essays, and a tuition waiver for three years of study – enough time to write a book. As MFA offers go, it was generous; I wouldn’t be in debt, and, if I lived lean, I might be able to stay that way.

I wanted to go to a place where fiction was being read, discussed, and made. I wanted to read and talk and make. I wanted, to paraphrase novelist (and Iowa MFA graduate) Alexander Chee, to take a couple of decades of wondering whether or not my work could reach people and funnel it into a couple of years of finding out. So I flew for twenty-two hours from Canberra to Washington DC, and then rode a bus for another six out west, up into Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mountains. There were billboards with the Ten Commandments and pick-up trucks with Confederate flag bumper stickers, and a hundred other tired American clichés that tell you everything about the country, and nothing at all.

Iowa Writers Workshop director Paul Engle with students at The University of Iowa (1950s). Frederick W. Kent Collection / University of Iowa Archives

Like all nations, America is built on fictions: from its founding fathers to its middle-class dreams. Some would argue that is all the country has even been: a stars-and-bars fiction wrapped around fifty separate countries, wearing ever more threadbare. How these fictions work – how they are made, and for (and by) whom – is a potent reflection of how the country works.

In pondering the construction of public memory in Ireland, the eminent American historian Richard White insisted on the demythologising work of history as a discipline: ‘History is the enemy of memory. The two stalk each other across the fields of the past, claiming the same terrain. History forges weapons from what memory has forgotten or suppressed.’ In Best We Forget: The war for white Australia, 1914–18, Peter Cochrane wants to jog Australia’s memory by reminding us that the celebrated myth of Anzac obscures a problematic history. But in joining the battle between history and memory, he notes the warning of his friend, the late John Hirst, who wrote: ‘My own view is that history will never beat myth.’ But does this assumed opposition really hold?

The Uluru Statement from the Heart, in May 2017, might not have had much resonance with the federal government. However, it coincides with a new phase of writing and research that helps to round out its long-term significance and impact. Mark McKenna has expanded on the importance of the Uluru Statement in the March 2018 Quarterly Essay (Moment of Truth). He points out that, among other things, this remarkable document is partly an appeal for truth telling about the past, as a fundamental means to reconciliation, and his essay includes examples of the way that is already happening.

Why do you write?

To find out what I truly think and believe. Every novel is a new journey of discovery. It’s just a shame it has to end one day …

Are you a vivid dreamer?

Yes. But nearly all my dreams turn around the same anxiety: being lost. Sometimes I’m in an alien city or sometimes in a wilderness, or sometimes in a banal environment like a hotel corridor or a car park, but in every case I have no idea where I’m going, or how to find true north.

Where are you happiest?

Supporting the ABC

ABR, like many writers and media organisations around the country, worries about the future of independent journalism, especially in this trumpacious age, often so hostile to reason and open commentary. We share many Australians’ concerns about the health and viability of the ABC. The threats are myriad and sustained. Funding cuts (by all regimes), political interference, and daily taunts from News Corp have weakened the organisation. Recently, the Liberal Party’s Federal Council voted to privatise the organisation. This would surely spell the beginning of the end for the national broadcaster.

Auntie is far from perfect (which media organisation is?). Many of us grimace through those comedic Wednesdays; local drama is scarce; and ABC Classic FM is but a shadow of itself: populist, unedifying, and maddeningly nice. But consider what the ABC has contributed to our culture, our educational system, our democracy since 1928, and try to imagine an Australia without Four Corners, Q&A, Background Briefing, Rear Vision, the 7.30 Report, AM and PM, not to mention Geraldine Doogue, Fran Kelly, and good old Jim Maxwell, to name but a few.

We take things for granted in the Lucky Country, but can we really be sure that the ABC will be around in 2028 to celebrate its centenary – searching, unfettered, well resourced? More and more people think not and have begun to lobby government. Major rallies have taken place around the country. In this issue,

Ranald Macdonald (a spokesman for ABC Friends) writes about the present threat. Elsewhere, one hundred writers, artists, commentators, and public figures have signed ABR’s Open Letter supporting the ABC.

Jolley Prize

The ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize, now in its eighth year, is worth a total of $12,500. This year we received about 1,200 entries from thirty-five countries. The judges – Patrick Allington, Michelle Cahill, and Beejay Silcox – longlisted fourteen stories (all of which are listed on our website) before shortlisting three of them: ‘Vasco’ by Claire Aman (NSW), ‘Between the Mountain and the Sea’ by Sharmini Aphrodite (Singapore); and ‘Ruins’ by Madelaine Lucas (NSW/USA). They appear in this issue.

Claire Aman (photograph by Ravi Watt-Nersesian), Sharmini Aphrodite (photograph by Varkur), and Madelaine Lucas

The judges commended three other stories: ‘Joan Mercer’s Fertile Head’ by S.J. Finn (Victoria); ‘Hardflip’ by Mirandi Riwoe (Queensland); and ‘Break Character’ by Chloe Wilson (Victoria). These stories will be published online in coming months.

The judges said this of the overall field: ‘We were privileged to read this teeming, diverse mass of unpublished short fiction from around the world. A number of stories, from the realist to the absurd, captured our attention with their conceptual ambition and original conceits. But the stories that sustained our interest created worlds that felt complete; offered genuine representations of different peoples, places and cultures; celebrated the human spirit, warts and all; were bold and funny, with language that sang; made us think and rethink; and offered endings that shook, surprised or satisfied us.’ (Their remarks on the shortlisted stories will follow in September, with the name of the winner.)

If you are in Melbourne on Monday, 20 August, join us at fortyfivedownstairs (CBD) for the Jolley Prize ceremony – always enjoyable, if tense-making for the authors (only the judges know the winner until he or she is named on the night). This is a free event and all are welcome, but bookings are essential, as this is a popular occasion: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Complete our readers survey

Australian Book Review is a fast-changing and responsive cultural magazine with a growing international profile. The magazine now offers many more features and programs than it did ten years ago – and there are more changes to come.

We love hearing from readers as to what they like about Australian Book Review – whom they enjoy reading; what they would like to see more (or less) of; what concerns them most as engaged readers and citizens. We look forward to hearing from readers of all kinds (ABR subscribers, non-subscribers, website browsers, social media followers, devotees, occasional readers) as to how they rate the magazine and how they think we can improve it. The survey takes about five minutes to complete. Feel free to skip any questions that don’t interest you.

The survey is totally anonymous – unless you want to be in the running for one of two five-year complimentary subscriptions to ABR Online (in which case we will need your name and email address). Click here to take the reader survey.

Consider this

Stephen Spender once said of a certain antipodean upstart who had just appeared in the vaunted Penguin Modern Poets series: ‘Who is Peter Porter?’ This was in 1962. Although the Brisbane-born poet was in his early thirties and already a prolific poet, he was relatively new to London – where he would continue to live until his death in 2010 – and he was still audibly and complicatedly Australian.

No one ever said of Porter’s great influence, ‘Who is W.H. Auden?’ – certainly not Stephen Spender, who remained captivated by his brilliant contemporary for the rest of his life. Auden, born in 1907, seems to have been famous from the outset. Celebrated while still at Oxford, he was cited in his fellow students’ essays. Grudgingly, F.R. Leavis said, ‘the undergraduate notability became a world figure overnight’. Faber published Auden’s first volume of poems when he was twenty-two, soon after T.S. Eliot had published a play of his in Criterion.

Auden, one of the great disapprovers, objected to lives of artists (‘I do not believe that knowledge of their private lives sheds any significant light upon their works’), but in his case there have been many biographers, including Humphrey Carpenter, Richard Davenport-Hines, and Peter Porter’s Queensland contemporary Charles Osborne. We also have Auden’s silly table-talk, his verbal frothings, his inimitable essays and aphorisms. Peter Porter, reviewing the Davenport-Hines, described Auden as ‘the greatest English (as distinct from English-speaking) poet since Tennyson’.

W.H. Auden (Wikimedia Commons)Auden – unwise in love perhaps – was cannier in his executorial choice. Edward Mendelson was in his twenties when Auden tapped him to be his literary executor. Mendelson, now professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, has written extensively about Auden ever since. Key works include the six-volume The Compete Works of W.H. Auden: Prose and those indispensable commentaries, Early Auden (1981) and Later Auden (1999). Mendelson is not done yet. Early Auden, Later Auden: A critical biography (Princeton University Press [Footprint], $84.99 hb), his latest study, revises and augments those previous editions. Seumas Perry, a professor of English at Oxford University, reviews it brilliantly in LRB (10 May 2018).

Perry, who is beginning a life of Auden, is fascinated by his corrugated face, which Auden himself likened to ‘a wedding cake left out in the rain’. (Perry notes that only a poet, only someone ‘rather sad’, would think of leaving a wedding cake out in the rain.) Auden’s visage – possibly the result of a medical condition called Touraine-Solente-Golé syndrome, not to mention a phenomenal addiction to Player’s cigarettes and Benzedrine – attracted the attention of famous sculptors, photographers, and painters. David Hockney, who drew him, quipped, ‘I kept thinking, if his face looks like this, what must his balls look like.’

Eureka!

Meanwhile, Morag Fraser – former editor of Eureka Street, where she often published him – is writing the biography of Peter Porter, whose phenomenal archive now rests in the National Library of Australia. In a country with a sorry dearth of poets’ biographies, what a book this promises to be.

Admirers of Morag Fraser’s artful journalism should not miss her exceptional review of Berlioz’s L’Enfance du Christ (recently performed by the MSO), which appears in the ABR Arts section of our website.

Porter Prize

Entries are now open for the 2019 Peter Porter Poetry Prize. This is the fifteenth time we have offered the Porter Prize. Past winners have included Stephen Edgar, Tracy Ryan, Judith Beveridge, and Michael Farrell (who has a poem in this issue).

The Porter Prize is worth a total of $8,500, and here we thank Morag Fraser and all our ABR Patrons for their support. The winner will receive $5,000; the runner-up, $2,000; the three other shortlisted poets will each receive $500. All five shortlisted poems will appear in the March 2019 issue of ABR.

The judges on this occasion are Judith Bishop (who has won the Prize twice, the only person to do so, yet), Paul Kane, and John Hawke, ABR’s Poetry Editor. Entries close on December 3. For more information about the Porter Prize, including entry guidelines and terms and conditions, please visit our Porter Prize page.

ABR in Perth

The WA presence in ABR has increased markedly in recent years, coinciding with welcome funding from the WA government. Peter Rose – Editor of ABR – will be in Perth in mid-August. He is keen to meet as many reviewers and arts journalists as possible. If you would like to arrange a meeting, contact him at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.. Rose will be based at the Centre for Stories on Thursday, 16 August, before ducking off to review WASO’s concert performance of Tristan und Isolde, with Stuart Skelton and Eva-Maria Westbroek.

Changes at ABR

Dilan Gunawardana left ABR at the end of July. Dilan joined us in 2016 as the ABR Editorial Intern and became Deputy Editor (Digital) in 2017. His stamp is all over our website. A popular contributor to ABR Arts, Dilan will continue to write for the magazine.

Jack CallilThanks to everyone who recently applied for the 2018–19 ABR Editorial Internship. Jack Callil has now joined the staff as Assistant Editor. Jack is not the only editor in his family. His great-aunt, Carmen Callil, founder of Virago Press and long-time managing director of Chatto & Windus, is one of the most illustrious publishers Australia has produced. Carmen (who was appointed Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 2017) is our Publisher of the Month.

Birthday largesse

To celebrate our fortieth birthday and to spread the word about the magazine, we’re partnering with some of Australia’s major bookshops and offering free copies of the magazine to customers who purchase books worth $40 or more. This month our partner is the excellent Avenue Bookstore. Staff there have 500 copies to give away in their three outlets: Albert Park, Elsternwick, and Richmond. Buy the book, then read the review. Be quick though.

ABR salutes the work of our fantastic independent bookshops. More promotions of this kind will follow.

John Bell is Back as the Miser

John Bell in Bell Shakespeare's 2019 production of The Miser

Bell Shakespeare has announced the first of its 2019 productions: Molière’s comedy The Miser, which marks the return of the company’s founder John Bell in the titular role. Bell stepped away from the company in 2015, having created it in 1990. Bell will play the tyrannical penny-pincher Harpagon, a bourgeois deviant prepared to sacrifice everything, whether it be his children or his dignity, to come out on top.

Australian playwright Justin Fleming has been assigned as translator of the Bell Shakespeare adaption, who has worked previously on other well-known Molière satires such as Tartuffe and The Misanthrope. Directing The Miser will be Peter Evans, Artistic Director of Bell Shakespeare, who said the decision to bring back John Bell as Harpagon was ‘too tantalising to resist’. ‘Having the opportunity to invite back our Founding Director to Bell Shakespeare, in a role that will have you laughing in the aisles, if not a little scandalised by the naughtiness of Justin Fleming’s translation, is a pleasure.’

Tickets to The Miser are exclusively available to Bell Shakespeare Members now; they will go on sale to the general public in November 2018. 

The Miser will play at Sydney Opera House from 2 March–6 April 2019; Canberra Theatre Centre from 11–20 April 2019; and Arts Centre Melbourne from 25 April–12 May 2019.

Geoffrey Rush Pulls Out of Twelfth Night

 Promotional image of Geoffrey Rush as King Lear

Actor Geoffrey Rush has announced that due to medical advice he is withdrawing from the Melbourne Theatre Company’s production of Twelfth Night, where he was set to play the role of Malvolio. ‘I do so with the greatest regret,’ Rush said in a statement. ‘I know that I would not be able to provide the necessary creative spirit and the professional stamina required for the project.’

Brett Sheehy, Artistic Director and CEO of Melbourne Theatre Company, said the company is seeking a replacement.

Twelfth Night will be performed at Melbourne Theatre Company from 12 to 29 December 2018.

Brisbane Writer Wins Drama Award

Brisbane playwright David Megarrity has won the Queensland Premier’s Drama Award 2018–19 for his play The Holidays. Selected from over ninety entries, Megarrity’s delicate, family-oriented play was chosen ahead of fellow finalists Hannah Belansky for‘don’t ask what the bird look like’, and Anna Yen for Slow Boat.

‘David Megarrity’s The Holidays is a disarming meditation on mortality and father son relationships,’ said Queensland Theatre Artistic Director Sam Strong. ‘It’s a delicious combination of high-tech ambition and low-fi theatricality. David Megarrity, speaking of his winning work, said, ‘This visual theatre piece combines live performers, projection, audience participation and music to explore the impact of dementia, as experienced by one family, focussing on the connections between son, father and grandfather – told through the eyes of a young person.’

Before I learnt the language of map-making, the word cadastre sounded like a timbre or a cadence. It was a momentous drum, a hollow ratatat. Bone, fire, dirt, stone. Like a shout, a ring, a knock, a blow. But when I learned maps, I discovered cadastre meant the legal boundary. There was no sound to it at all, only lines. The lines are normally black, but I have a range of colours and hatchings to choose from. Anyone wanting a map just needs to tell me which features they want.

A map can show anything. It’s possible to make maps of black cockatoo sightings, of cropland, of underground cobalts or silvers. I can show all the creeks and rivers, with the sea as a great green mass. Or I can plot cockatoos and creeks on a map together, adding minor roads and tracks. This was the sort of map my neighbour Vasco once might have asked me to send her.

Help me remember something good, Vasco. Sadness is making me forgetful.

It was the first thing she noticed: all the clocks had stopped. She only mentioned it when she was shown to the dining table and the woman – his grandmother – placed in front of her a glass of bandung, bright pink and sweating. Thanking her, she held the glass, the chill of it shocking the heat of her palm.

‘Your clocks – none of them are working.’

‘They haven’t for years,’ the woman said. She smiled. A gold snake coiled around her wrist; the bone pressed sharply against tissue-paper skin.

•

In the car we wound around the bay, which, on the map, made the shape of an ear with a tear-shaped island off the coast like a jewel earring. My mother and I were going to see the lighthouse out on the cape – or what was left of it anyway, which was not much, she told me, but stones and rubble. Sandstone stump crowning the headland.

Worth documenting though, she said, since we’re staying so close by.

Midway through this account of his life as a gay doctor who specialised in sexually transmitted infections, David Bradford diagnoses his first case of AIDS. It is February 1985 and Bradford is the director of the Melbourne Communicable Diseases Centre (MCDC) and the chief venereologist of Victoria. His patient James is a working class Maltese-Australian man in his late twenties whom Bradford had met while conducting a clinic testing for syphilis at a gay sauna. James, a good-looking and popular patron, presents with troubling symptoms: black spots on his skin; swollen glands; weight loss. He is terrified. Bradford gently breaks the probable diagnosis of AIDS. ‘James looked like a scared school boy.’ He departs with a referral to the Fairfield Infectious Diseases Hospital and Bradford’s home phone number. Bradford watches him leave and then takes a moment to collect himself. ‘I trembled for the future. Was James the first of many? Was my practice now to become an endless succession of gay men turning up with AIDS … Was my lot going to be to provide a medical service for my patients as they gradually became weaker, and eventually died because their immune systems had shut down completely? What a grim outlook I was facing.’

While there have been many histories of Israel written over the decades, Arthur Hertzberg’s The Zionist Idea, published in 1959, remains a classic guide to the intellectual underpinnings of Zionism. It is now joined almost sixty years later by Michael Brenner’s excellent book, In Search of Israel: The history of an idea. Inspired by the seventieth anniversary of Israel’s establishment, the passage of time has allowed Brenner to do something different from Hertzberg in his retelling of the Zionist idea. He has written a book that uses the founding voices of Zionism to test whether their vision has been fulfilled. In this sense, In Search of Israel is a retrospective overview of Israel’s history, a kind of parlour game in which the reader gets to ask if so-and-so came back to life, would they recognise the state in its contemporary incarnation. This method of mixing vision with current reality can also be read as a counterfactual history, opening up questions about the paths not taken, or the options available in the Zionist armoury beyond military occupation. As Brenner writes of his project: ‘It is the story of the real and the imagined Israel, of Israel as a state and as an idea.’

‘The Drover’s Wife’ was one of the first stories I read when I arrived in Australia. I was living in the bush then, in hard beautiful country, and though my difficulties were First World Problems I shared the Wife’s nostalgia for nights in comfortable hotels, reliable transport, medical services. I did admire the story, though its casual racism disturbed me; but I remain surprised by the hold that story has on our culture. She just won’t fade away, that exhausted woman, or her dog, or her sons (forget the daughters, as Lawson himself did); they keep re-emerging.

What was your pathway to publishing?

I put an advertisement in the London Times newspaper in 1964 or thereabouts, which stated ‘Australian BA, typing, wants job in publishing’. I got three offers and accepted one, which was being a menial for a sponsored book editor at Hutchinson’s. But my real pathway was my mother and father, both great readers; I grew up surrounded by books.

Do you edit the books you commission?

Sometimes, but as time went by I had editors who worked with me. I did the first read, made notes, and the final editorial

Kudos concludes the extraordinary trilogy that began with Outline (2014) and Transit (2016). Following the distinctive format of the first two books, Kudos is structured by a series of conversations between the narrator (a writer named Faye, who seems to be a barely disguised version of Cusk) and various interlocutors, in which the narrator herself speaks barely at all. As before, there is nothing much in the way of a traditional plot or narrative. The trilogy’s profound emotional weight exists in strange contrast to the seemingly weightless quality of the prose, translucently clear, somehow communicating deep feeling and loss through a seemingly dispassionate medium. The effect is one of paradoxical intimacy and distance, and a voice like no other in contemporary fiction.

With The Narrow Road to the Deep North (2013), Richard Flanagan became Australia’s third winner of the prestigious Man Booker Prize for Fiction, leading many people to pick up his novels for the first time and to look for some critical support in reading them. After my own review of the novel in SRB, I was bailed up by friends – many of whom had read it in book groups – to report on lively disagreements (often with my review). Apart from reviews, there were a few articles scattered in academic journals but no easily accessible, book-length study. So this new collection of essays on his work, edited by Robert Dixon, is a welcome addition to the ongoing discussion of our latest literary superstar.

Recently I solicited impressions of his job from the new head of external affairs at a big financial organisation. What had struck him first was the manpower at his disposal. The total headcount ran into many hundreds – larger than most if not all Australia’s print and electronic newsrooms. There was not merely one department. Each division of the institution had its own well-resourced team.

Yet what struck him next was a paradox. Only a relatively small proportion of the external affairs personnel dealt with anyone ... well, external. What did they do all day, I asked? ‘That’s easy,’ he replied. ‘They talk to each other.’

Five years ago, this paradox, and others like it, provoked the American anthropologist David Graeber to publish an essay in the magazine Strike! entitled ‘On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs’, based on a ‘hunch’ that corporations were replete with jobs that didn’t ‘do much of anything’: in this category he lumped the like of ‘HR consultants, communications coordinators, PR researchers, financial strategists, corporate lawyers’. It touched, as they say, a chord. In Bullshit Jobs: A theory, Graeber seeks to strum it.

No longer content simply to observe the phenomenon, Graeber aspires to explain it. The bullshit job he defines as a ‘form of paid employment that is so completely pointless, unnecessary or pernicious that even the employee cannot justify its existence even though, as part of the conditions of employment, the employee feels obliged to pretend that this is not the case’.

Bullshit jobs are not to be confused with shit jobs, such as those of cleaners, ditchdiggers etc. The blue collar latter involve being ‘paid and treated badly’ and ‘held in low esteem’ despite involving ‘work that needs to be done’; the white collar former often offer ‘excellent working conditions’ despite their futility. Why? Because bullshit jobs have proliferated as a kind of balm for the workplace attrition wrought by neoliberalism and mechanisation, ‘the ruling class’ having ‘figured out that a happy and productive population with free time on their hands is a mortal danger’. Graeber wants Bullshit Jobs to be ‘an arrow aimed at the heart of our civilization’. With the best will in the world, it is more like a protest rock thrown at a departing tank.

‘Write about what you don’t know,’ British novelist Rose Tremain advised young authors. That has been her own strategy during a long and star-studded career. It is quite a stretch from the court of England’s Charles II in Restoration (1989), or that of Christian IV of Denmark in Music and Silence (1999), or that of the muddy goldfields of The Colour (2003) set in nineteenth-century New Zealand, or The Road Home (2008), which movingly reveals an East European migrant’s struggles in today’s London. Impressive research and an imagination that flourishes on challenge have made Tremain one of the finest and least predictable of novelists.

The Western world was well into the swing of our proverbial digital age when Patrick White passed away at his home on Martin Road in Centennial Park at the age of seventy-eight in 1990. Yet, as Christos Tsiolkas suggests at the outset of this taut and lively meditation on Australia’s greatest novelist, Patrick White is often perceived as a relic from a long- forgotten and irrelevant era, a twentieth-century dinosaur who, with his privileged background and famously curmudgeonly disposition, has little to offer today’s pluralistic, multicultural milieu. As Tsiolkas asks, ‘Isn’t White as white as his name?’ To some readers, there is something musty about White’s aura that ensures he is kept safely in the past.

There was a time when Tsiolkas himself was of this opinion – that White was just ‘another dead white male’. When the author of The Slap (2008) and Barracuda (2013) was a student in the 1980s, White was decidedly unfashionable on campuses that were exploding with ‘post-modern, anti-canonical, feminist and postcolonial criticism’. Yet the intervening years have shown that, to varying degrees, there is a place for White’s novels in all of these schools and others. A friend recently completed a doctoral thesis on queerness and sexuality in White’s work, with a chapter on The Twyborn Affair (1979) titled ‘Is Prowse’s Rectum a Grave?’ The progressive and colourful enclaves of theory are ripe to give White a new lease of life in the twenty-first century.

On Patrick White also does this. This splendid latest instalment in Black Inc.’s Writers on Writers series is an innovative critical reappraisal of White with a special emphasis on his partner Manoly Lascaris, a moving tribute to White’s devastating skill with language, and an enlightening insight into the nature of literary influence.

Having acknowledged his lack of familiarity with White’s books beyond a few dalliances as a student, Tsiolkas took on the task of reading throughout 2016 the entirety of White’s oeuvre. Having done so, he concluded that White wrote three of the twentieth century’s greatest novels: The Tree of Man (1955), The Solid Mandala (1966), and The Eye of the Storm (1973), and his analysis of each of these is heartfelt, poetic, and occasionally awestruck.

The director of the Australian War Memorial, Brendan Nelson, recently announced plans for a $500 million underground expansion of the memorial. In justifying the expenditure, Nelson claimed that commemoration ‘is an extremely important part of the therapeutic milieu’ for returning soldiers; ‘I’ve particularly learned from the Vietnam experience it is important to tell the stories and tell them now. We tell them broadly and deeply and we don’t wait a decade.’

Christina Twomey’s new book, The Battle Within, traces the experiences of a group of returning soldiers who had to wait a lot longer than a decade to have their stories told. It was not until the 1980s that prisoners of the Japanese during World War II were invited into the temple of Anzac. Twomey uses the metaphor of the Thai–Burma railway, which she first saw as a twelve-year-old in 1980 and revisited in 2012, to describe their passage from exile to the increasingly elaborate centre of Anzac commemoration:

A few pages into this collection we read the line: ‘all of it is lies’. ‘It’ signals the irritation that motivates much of Pam Brown’s writing in click here for what we do. Memory, in these poems, is a problem. Brown’s is very much a poetry of movement: she desires to stay light and mobile, not to be detained by memory (in this way she sometimes brings to mind a serious hiker, weighing the items in her pack by the gram). And yet, she cannot help but take on that extra weight of the past; her present is perforated by it. This dialectic of memory and forgetting runs through the collection. For Brown especially, there is no satisfactory point of rest or synthesis: it is not only memory’s burden that she has to contend with but also the particular ways that the memories of her own generation of sixty-eighters have been imagined and historicised.

He went down to the shed to look for a chook
a particular one he’d seen earlier that morning
one he realised he’d never seen before, and
that seemed to have disappeared. It was brown
with white markings, distinctive, like wallpaper

a spirit into splinters    or a night
into day    the quavers levitating
just the same    see a kind of orangeness
tinge the wrenched event    & head falls & sun
caws & moon forgets her name    a muteness

Moreno Giovannoni’s collection of tales – populous and baggy, earthy and engrossing – offers not a history but the lifeblood, the living memory, of a small town in northern Italy called San Ginese, or more specifically a hamlet in its shadow called Villora. Villora is the point of departure and return for generations of Sanginesini, and the locus of the tales told.

The tales begin with Ugo, who relates them in an Italian diminished by long years in Australia and thus transcribed by a translator not unlike Giovannoni. The reader learns that ‘all the tales are true’, and that while we might find a map or image of the town (one is sketched at the front of the book for convenience, if not proof), we will never find the Villora of the tales. Ugo confides, ‘Just as migrants do not ever truly arrive at their destination, so those who remain behind disappear and become untraceable’, and that, finally, if left unwritten, the people and events recounted ‘would have faded into boundless oblivion’.

With his maiden voyage into fiction, Anthony Uhlmann, a professor of English at Western Sydney University, has produced an ambitious novel that dramatises the intertwining of time and memory. Saint Antony in His Desert is a literary thought-experiment partly concerned with a famous quarrel between Albert Einstein and French philosopher Henri-Louis Bergson, where the German physicist’s theory of relativity was unwisely rejected by the latter. Some believe that their disagreement led to the division between philosophy and science. Ingeniously, Uhlmann’s novel seeks to unearth a common ground between these thinkers, and undertakes this task by exploring time as an intuitive, psychological, and even literary phenomenon.

The narrator of David Malouf’s virtuosic ‘A Traveller’s Tale’ (1982) describes Queensland’s far north as ‘a place of transformations’ and unwittingly provides us with an epigraph for this collection.

Without doubt, every story selected from Meanjin’s cache of the last thirty-eight years deserves this second airing, but if, as editor Jonathan Green attests, short fiction hardly sells, then his parsimonious introduction could bear expansion. It would be interesting to know, for example, why 2009 boasts five contributors, among them Georgia Blain’s astute rendition of childhood injustices in ‘Intelligence Quotient’, and Chris Womersley’s account of a sudden flood of grief spiked with ghostly undertones in ‘The Very Edge of Things’; and why the 1990s warrant a scant two inclusions, both of which, ‘The Wolfman’s Sister’ (1996) by Barbara Creed and ‘The Swimmer’ (1999) by Kevin Brophy, portray disconcerting aspects of gender relations. Nor does Green’s alphabetical-by-author arrangement illuminate his claim for the gradual admission of the broadest range of voices to Australian letters.

Harold Evans, the celebrated former editor of London’s The Sunday Times and ex-president of Random House USA, is angry. He fulminates against lazy journalism, against the impenetrability of government announcements, and against the pseudo-legal language of terms and conditions we are bullied into accepting during almost any online transaction these days, no matter how trivial.

Most of all, he wants to push back against the way the digital era is ‘making it easier to obliterate the English language by carpet-bombing us with the bloated extravaganzas of marketing mumbo-jumbo’. He is not so much a Don Quixote as a modern-day linguistic gumshoe, both a detective and an assayer, who confesses: ‘I don’t get mad. I enjoy finding the clues, the footloose modifier, the subject in search of conjugation with a friendly verb, the duplicitous pronoun.’ (But, hey, shouldn’t that first comma be a colon?)

On the dust jacket of Elements of Surprise is the well-known picture by John Tenniel, illustrator of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865), depicting Alice gazing up at the grinning Cheshire Cat perched on a branch of a tree. I felt very much like Alice while reading Vera Tobin’s book, as if I had fallen into a world in which the rules, concepts, and vocabulary were completely alien to my own.

In her analysis of surprise in plot, Tobin, a cognitive scientist at Case Western Reserve University in the United States, is primarily interested in two issues: how it can happen that in book after book, readers can be surprised, even though the same plot tricks are used over and over again; and secondly, how readers can believe one thing through several chapters, then, when a surprise is revealed, easily switch to another view without condemning the whole novel as incoherent. These are questions that no fiction writer would ask; rather, we assume that such reader responses will occur if we writers do our job properly, if we create coherent narratives fuelled by secrets and mysteries, desires and ambitions, all carried by fleshed-out, credible characters.

The name Sisonke Msimang may be familiar because of her reported claim in 2015 that Australia was ‘more racist’ than South Africa was during the apartheid era. What she in fact criticised were Australians’ failure to deal adequately with racial difference. Their recourse, she claimed, is to treat historical and present-day practices and manifestations of racism with ‘fake kindness’ rather than ‘honesty’, promoting a monoculturalism that obliterates, for example, deep-seated differences regarding land ownership and the land.

A healthy suspicion should surround books that arrive neatly on some commemorative due date – in this case, the bicentenary of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. It is not that biographer Fiona Sampson is less than able and diligent in her efforts to celebrate a novel which has resonated like few others during the long modernity inaugurated by the European Romantics. Nor is it wrong that she should foreground Mary Shelley’s life experience as a woman and a mother as a way of revivifying a text so absorbed into our collective consciousness as to be paradoxically invisible.

In The Rapids: Ways of looking at mania, Sam Twyford-Moore takes a personal, exploratory, and speculative approach to the subject of mania. Because the author has been significantly governed by manic episodes on several occasions (he was diagnosed with manic depression as he ‘came into adulthood’), The Rapids offers an insider’s perspective. It also considers some of the public and cultural manifestations of the illness, via figures as diverse as Delmore Schwartz, Saul Bellow, Kanye West, Carrie Fisher, Andrew Johns, and Matthew Newton, but with a particular focus on literature and film.

At first glance, Traumata seems to provide an exception to the rule not to judge a book by its cover. Featuring photos of the author’s mother, a woman in her forties, alongside photos of the young Atkinson on the precipice of adolescence, the cover portrays the filial relationship that is central in this memoir. But Atkinson’s exploration is much more kaleidoscopic than the cover suggests. While the familial bonds and betrayal hinted at in these pictures are evident in the book, the author is chiefly concerned with what lies outside the frame: namely, the social forces that shape our selves and our intimate relationships.

General ‘Pompey’ Elliott was a famous Australian in 1918, half forgotten seventy years later, and is now a national military hero. This Anzac Day he stood high. On French soil he was praised by France’s prime minister, Édouard Philippe, in one of the most mesmerising and sensitive speeches ever offered by a European leader to Australian ears. Probably Elliott now stands just below General Sir John Monash in the honour roll of Australia’s military leaders, though we cannot foretell whether Pompey’s status – he was a cult figure in his day – will persist.

Over the past few years, no term has been more ubiquitous, among political scientists and political commentators alike, than ‘populism’. The 2016 Brexit referendum in the United Kingdom, Donald Trump’s election later that year, and, more recently, the formation of a government mostly supported by two populist parties (the Movimento Cinque Stelle/Five Star Movement and the Lega/League) in Italy, are only some examples of what many observers consider a global populist wave. Most of the growing debate on populism, however, has focused on right-wing populism, due to the ideological underpinnings of the majority of populist movements and actors emerging in Europe and North America as part of this global wave. Yet populism is not inherently associated with right-wing ideological positions. It is, itself, an ideology, but one that is sufficiently broad, or ‘thin-centred’ (Cas Mudde), to be combined with thicker ideological positions, both on the right and left of the political spectrum.

The role of religion in public life in Australia has become a prominent issue again as a consequence of the Australian Marriage Law Postal Survey. Significant opposition to the passage of marriage equality in 2017 was due to the mobilisation of many faiths and denominations. The centrality of religion in the marriage equality debate is best demonstrated by the title of the legislation amending the Marriage Act 1961 (Cth) to permit same-sex marriage – the Marriage Amendment (Definition and Religious Freedoms) Act 2017 (Cth). Although religious and other objections to marriage equality did not prevail, the interests of religion were protected. Before marriage equality became law, the Turnbull government established an expert panel, chaired by Philip Ruddock, to conduct a review of the adequacy of legal protections of religious freedom in Australia. After receiving more than 15,000 submissions and conducting private hearings, the expert panel gave its report to the government in mid-May 2018. What it recommends, and whether its recommendations are acted upon, are as yet unknown.

Peter Atkins writes a sentence at the beginning of this bewildering book that seems both preposterous and cheeky: ‘I would like to assert that not much happened at the Creation.’ And then: ‘I would like to replace the “not much” by “absolutely nothing”.’ How can any leading scientist, and Atkins is certainly that, claim that the very beginning of the universe and everything could have been just a bit of a doddle? All that Big Bang and stupendous expansion, all that evolution in microseconds, from nothing to lumpy gas and, eventually stars and galaxies, was ‘not much’?

It saddens me to say it, but Lorrie Moore’s first collection of non-fiction is a serious disappointment. Having long admired her astonishing fiction, I came to this new book expecting to find obscure essays and little-known gems from across Moore’s long career. Instead, I came away wishing that Moore would give up writing non-fiction and devote herself entirely to short stories and novels.

Despite being described in the subtitle as a collection of ‘Essays, Criticism, and Commentary’, the bulk of these pieces are in fact reviews, spanning thirty-four years of writing for such prestigious publications as The New York Review of Books, The New York Times Book Review, and The New Yorker. The collection’s seemingly endless list of reviews is broken up with the odd essay or reflection on writing craft, along with some occasional pieces commissioned by various glossy literary periodicals (soliciting Moore’s reflections on such topics as 9/11, the GOP primary debates, and her first job) and introductions to other people’s books. It thus seems disingenuous to be marketing the book in ways that make it look like an essay collection.

Early in What Goes Up,  Michael Sorkin shares an anecdote from the final collection by fellow architecture critic, the late Ada Louise Huxtable. ‘Just what polemical position do you write from, Madame?’ asks a French journalist of Huxtable, who, to Sorkin’s discomfort, fails to produce ‘an appropriate polemic’, instead responding that she prefers to write ‘from crisis to crisis’. Treating the question as daft, Sorkin argues, reveals both Huxtable’s position and limitations. Likewise, Sorkin’s meditations on the exchange are telling of his own raisons d’être as a critic.

Aside from Jane Jacobs – a clear and oft-cited influence in his writing – it feels apt to consider Sorkin in relation to someone like Huxtable, not least because he has a tendency to invoke her views in order to assert his own. In an earlier collection, Exquisite Corpse (1991), Sorkin makes mention of Huxtable on several occasions in not uncolourful ways, among them ‘the doyenne of development’ and ‘the erstwhile Hedda Hopper of post-modernism’. In What Goes Up – an anthology of his more recent work – Sorkin shares an obituary of sorts for Huxtable in the form of a 2013 Architectural Review column published five months after her death. In a rare moment of praise for Huxtable, Sorkin commends her critique of the New York Public Library in Midtown Manhattan – that Beaux-Arts bellwether designed by Carrère and Hastings at the dawn of the twentieth century and, at the time of Huxtable’s fierce commentary, under threat by a controversial Norman Foster-designed renovation that would have seen three million books shipped offsite to New Jersey. The plans were famously scrapped the following year, thanks in no small part to Huxtable’s efforts. ‘It was Huxtable at her best,’ writes Sorkin. ‘Impassioned, learned, acute, rising powerfully in defence of an architecture of real value and real values.’

To which ‘values’ is Sorkin referring? In ‘Critical Measure’, an excerpt from a 2014 anthology published by the International Committee of Architectural Criticism, we get some idea. Sorkin’s penchant for concluding his columns with a rousing exclamation mark is elucidated when we read that he believes architectural criticism must be ‘tireless propaganda for the good, the just, the fair’. He continues: ‘Criticism must play a role both in advocating for the most expansive ideas of artistic self-expression and human possibility and in making ardent arguments through which to expand, refine and acquire real outcomes for real people …’

This attitude is particularly alive in the first half of What Goes Up, with the collection split into two sections: ‘New York, New York, New York’, covering Sorkin’s beloved home state, then ‘Elsewhere and Otherwise’, covering, well, everything else. The opening section sees the author scrutinising Greenwich Village, his cherished neighbourhood, (‘A Dozen Urgent Suggestions for the Village’); the reconstruction of Ground Zero (‘Ground Zero Sum’; ‘Business as Usual’; ‘The Cathedral at Ground Zero’); property rights, zoning regulations, and affordable housing (‘The Fungibility of Air’; ‘What’s behind the Poor Door’); plus MoMA and the former American Folk Art Museum (‘Big MoMA’s House’), among much more. The spirit of resistance bubbles up in the latter section, too: ‘Cells Out!’ is a call to action urging architects to refuse the temptation to design prisons and other spaces of discipline, while ‘Architecture against Trump’ – a letter to the executive director of the American Institute of Architects (AIA) immediately following Donald Trump’s election in 2016 – presents a collective denunciation of the ‘temperate, agreeable, indeed feckless’ statement issued by the AIA after the election. This is peak Sorkin: fired-up and deliberately provocative, but with a purpose rooted in social-minded pragmatism.

Michael SorkinThis isn’t the case across the board in What Goes Up. The chapter ‘Lost at Sea’ – which ends with an unforgiving takedown of art historian and critic Ingrid Rowland’s ode to the Whitney Museum in the New York Review of Books, ‘drown[ing] in nautical-metaphorical overdetermination’ – feels like a purposeless, if admittedly entertaining, attack. In the same vein, though with comparatively acute motivation, is ‘Krier ♥ Speer’ – essentially a roast of architectural theorist Léon Krier, known defender of the formal qualities of Nazi architect Albert Speer’s buildings. On its own this is a surprisingly humorous read; in What Goes Up, it is an extreme example of Sorkin’s broader speculation that architectural form can never be divorced from its function or context. (‘Buildings have motives,’ he writes later in ‘Critical Measure’. ‘As Gilles Deleuze puts it: “No one ever walked endogenously.’”The chicken did have a reason to cross the road!’ – there’s that galvanising exclamation mark again.) Overall, Sorkin’s idiosyncratic, unabashed critique of critique is a vital aspect of the collection and his oeuvre on the whole, and reading What Goes Up in Australia makes palpable at times how small the pond of Australian architectural discourse can feel by comparison.

Ultimately, the ‘real values’ to which Sorkin refers hinge on the book’s subtitular ‘right to the city’ – the slogan first introduced by French sociologist Henri Lefebvre in the 1960s, and made sense of by Sorkin as ‘a style of [community] participation grounded in both need and consent’. It is not uncommon for Sorkin’s critics to complain that his own architectural and planning practice (through Michael Sorkin Studio) fails to properly address many of the issues so prominent in his writing. And while this may be true in some instances, it is hard to overlook the real value of a voice like Sorkin’s, whose enduring critical reflections on architecture, public space, and the city are concerned with people first, and buildings second.

Jennifer Maiden’s first books, Tactics (1974) and The Problem of Evil (1975), introduced a fantastically complex and enquiring poetry, with strangely fragmentary assemblages of character wrought from conflict. Both books were partly inspired by television’s gory nightly footage of the Vietnam War. While much poetry in the 1970s was of seditiously unvarnished protest, Maiden’s was intricate and stylised, poems toppling with moral dilemmas and extraordinary images, or restrained in pure lyricism such as ‘The Windward Side’: ‘The island has a windward side / walkless long and crossless wide / & winds across the cliff-face ride: / a woman’s face / caved in with pride / that craves for every blow.’