Almost from the day Jorge Mario Bergoglio was elected Pope Francis in 2013, he began denouncing fake devotees, whited sepulchres, and hypocrites at the Vatican. His targets, as Frédéric Martel makes clear, are the high-ranking clergy who vehemently condemn homosexuality while themselves often living the most lurid form of it, with rent boys, prostitutes, and sex parties. ‘Behind rigidity,’ Francis says, ‘something always lies hidden; in many cases, a double life.’

This, Martel claims, is disquietingly common, with some eighty per cent of the College of Cardinals gay and most of them sexually active. The two popes most obsessed with crusading against homosexuality, John Paul II (1978–2005) and Benedict XVI (2005–13), were the most surrounded by prelates leading a homosexual double life. ‘Reality goes beyond fiction,’ a friar tells the author. For example, Cardinal Alfonso López Trujillo, one of the Vatican’s highest-ranked clerics, went around the world preaching so belligerently against gays that he was nicknamed ‘Coitus Interruptus’, but in the same cities he was cruising gay bars and picking up rent boys.

Joseph Stalin wanted this wartime correspondence published, and one can see why: he comes off best. As the authors comment, ‘the transcript of the Big Three meetings demonstrates Stalin’s careful mastery of the issues and his superior skill as a diplomatist, regularly keeping his silence but then speaking out in a terse and timely manner at key moments’. He is the one with his eye on the ball, always remembering what his main objectives are and keeping his correspondents off balance with his adroit switches between intimacy and admonition.

Compared with him, Winston Churchill is impulsive and over-emotional, and Franklin D. Roosevelt is lazy. The two Allied leaders were excited about the opportunity to ‘build a personal relationship with the hitherto reclusive Soviet leader’, while Stalin, pleased at being finally admitted to the A-league, looked forward to ‘the challenges of playing against (and with) his US and British interlocutors’. One way of reading the epistolary relationship is that Stalin, feigning a personal relationship because that’s what the others wanted, always remained a cold calculator of his nation’s interest. That’s the way Stalin himself surely liked to see it. But it may not be the whole truth.

Whatever benefits it has brought, aggressive globalisation has also dislocated industries, wrecked communities, and fostered social alienation. Large numbers of working-class, blue-collar, and rural voters (these categories overlap) feel abandoned, anxious, and economically insecure, even when they have, as individuals, held on to well-paid jobs. This offers fertile ground to political candidates who claim to be outsiders or anti-élitists. Right-wing populists exploit the situation with a rhetoric of scapegoating. They blame marginalised groups. Their language and their stated policies veer towards nativism, xenophobia, and assorted kinds of bigotry.

Jeff Sparrow’s Trigger Warnings: Political correctness and the rise of the right is published against this background. Sparrow is understandably concerned about right-wing populism, but he views the responses of left-wing and liberal thinkers as largely counterproductive. To some extent, if we follow his reasoning, well-intentioned left-liberal people have inadvertently helped the likes of Donald Trump.

Perched on the precipice of the Blue Mountains, Leura is both quiet and wild, a place of misty romance, sylvan charm, and middle-class entitlement. I am here because some friends have offered me their house as a writing retreat for ten days so that I can pen a chapter on the history of marriage (1788 to marriage equality) for The Cambridge Companion to Australian Legal History. The house is an arcadia of silence: perfect for a task that I accepted with appropriate academic reverence. There are three hundred pages of typed notes arranged in neurotic chronological order on my desk, and a hillock of books at my feet. The problem is that it’s now day seven and I’ve hardly written a thing. The problem, I’ve realised, is MAFS.

Before I left Sydney, a friend suggested that I watch an episode of Married at First Sight (MAFS). I agreed that it would be good to see where marriage was at these days. Has marriage equality queered the institution? Does a show like this demonstrate how trivial marriage has become? Has it shed its historical privileges and status? Now, on day seven, it is MAFS and not my scholarship that I am thinking about. MAFS has sabotaged my chapter.

For those unaware of the show, MAFS was the highest-rating television show in Australia last year. In some ways it works like most reality television: place a group of attractive, psychologically unstable people together, ply them with alcohol, deprive them of sleep, and then watch them randomly emote, break down, or have sex. The difference here is that rather than searching for ‘the one’, contestants are matched with a partner by a ‘panel of experts’ comprising a neuropsychotherapist and two psychologists. They meet their partner for the first time on the altar (at a non-legally binding ceremony that is staged as a marriage); they exchange vows, kiss, partake in a bridal photography session, and then celebrate at a wedding reception. The couples, ‘fast-tracked’ through a series of marital challenges, return at the end of each week to a ‘commitment ceremony’, which is something in between marriage counselling, group therapy, a Quaker church session, and a Star Chamber inquisition. Here, they publicly share their wedded woes and declare if they wish to leave or stay. As long as one spouse votes to stay, both are forced to endure the experiment for another week. In this respect, MAFS conjures a world before no-fault divorce: exiting a marriage involves moral judgement and collusion between the couple. Individual will is irrelevant.

It’s this tension between desire and dictate that I find fascinating about MAFS. Shows about someone’s quest to find the right partner presuppose a person with will and desire; the capacity to choose, seduce, and consent. Since twelfth-century chivalric poetry, the Western romantic subject has been charmingly rebellious, pursuing passion over propriety, defiant of familial, legal, or social constraints. This is why most of our romance stories end with marriage, the moment where women have historically relinquished their autonomy as part of a marital contract whose terms were imposed by the state and which vested formidable power in their husbands. Even today, the language we use is one of discipline – we ‘work at marriage’. Romantic love, by contrast, is frolicsome. What happens when you begin a show with a contract rather than romantic protagonists? And what if this marriage is arranged not according to an individual or a family’s wishes, but by technocratic expertise, by a group of psychologists, one of whom appears in a lab coat?

First, the show becomes very #MeToo very quickly. Once couples are within a marital contract (albeit only a performative one), consent is presumed to extend over the period of the show to cover a range of sexual acts with a complete stranger. A successful marriage, we are told by the therapists, requires intimacy. They tell the contestants that this is a sign of ‘progress’, of ‘opening themselves up to love’. Any lack of sexual feeling is pathologised with vastly different meanings for men and women. For instance, Ning confesses to feeling no physical attraction towards her husband, Mark, and recoils when she awakes to find him naked beside her (‘I don’t usually wake up next to strangers with no underpants on’). The ‘expert’ voiceover has already offered us a different interpretation: ‘She’s now so afraid of being abandoned, she pushes men away.’ When Melissa admits to feeling no chemistry with Dino and turns away when he tries to kiss her for a bridal photo, the expert explains: ‘Melissa has not been intimate for eight years.’ Jess dutifully consummates the marriage after being pressured by one of the other contestants to have sex; otherwise ‘they will end up going their separate ways’. Upon hearing that her husband, Mick, has publicly discussed their sex life, she withdraws, and Mick confides in his friends. They’ve ‘made progress’ he says, but accessing her body in bed is like ‘crossing the Nullarbor’. Jess complains to the therapists: ‘I feel like I give him an inch and he takes a mile. I know that he thinks it’s a joke. But I’m just like, please stop.’ What appears to be a case of sexual harassment is reduced to a romantic dilemma:

Therapist: Mick when this was happening in the bedroom are you picking up on Jess’s cues to stop?

Mick: Yes, but I sort of do it playfully, and then she says enough’s enough …

Therapist: So you know when enough’s enough.

Jess has clearly said that Mick does not know when to stop, yet the scene ends with her agreeing that Mick is just emotionally demonstrative. If you have ever wondered why it took the last state in Australia until 1992 to outlaw rape in marriage, watch an episode of MAFS. When marriage presupposes sex, and consent is assumed to last for an indefinite period of time, your rights to bodily integrity are suspended, or in the least not taken seriously.

The three experts: Mel Schilling, Dr Trisha Stratford, and John Aiken (photograph via Nine)

The story is different when men don’t want to have sex but the women do. Sam, who can only be described as a monster of male entitlement, declares on his wedding day that he prefers petite women: ‘I’ve never really dated someone as big as Elizabeth before.’ He then pursues an adulterous affair with another woman while humiliating Elizabeth for her sexual advances. ‘Matt, the twenty-nine-year-old virgin’, who is always referred to as ‘Matt, the twenty-nine-year-old virgin’, falls for his wife, Lauren, loses his virginity, and then, upon discovering her lesbian history, declares that he is not attracted to her. He explains that he cannot satisfy her sexual appetites. In each instance, the problem resides not with the man but with the terror of a supposedly overly sexual woman who has transgressed the bounds of feminine propriety. The only exception to this is Mel and Dino, where Dino’s cartoonesque Indian identity (he is introduced with sitar music) is seen as effeminising. When Dino explains that he wants to ‘take baby steps’ while on a ‘boy’s night’ at the pub, another husband informs him that Mel has said that she ‘wants to be slammed’. We are then given a montage of Mel laughing about her desire ‘to be slammed once in a while’, after which Dino is advised by the other white men to ‘be a man about it’, to ‘take it’ and ‘give her a slamming’. In a horrifying moment that could be taken straight from Wake in Fright, they bash their beer glasses on the table and chant, ‘Slam her, slam her.’ No expert tells the viewer that this is anything but romantic playfulness.

Of course, there’s little scope for thinking about sexual assault in the show because authority is given to psychologists who apply a supposedly therapeutic lens to the ethics of desire. It’s a modern gloss on a religious anachronism: marriage as a sacrament, a state of grace, whose inviolable bonds are now tended to by therapists rather than priests. The relationship is reified, and individual will or dissent is pathologised. There is no possibility for spouses to exercise ethical judgement of each other because that’s been outsourced to ‘the experts’ who justify moralistic, frankly appalling, pop-psychological advice with reference to ‘scientific research and data’. For instance, when Heidi tells the therapists that she wants to leave Mike – a man who pressured Jess to have sex, callously dismissed Heidi’s stories of childhood trauma, publicly gloated about their sex life, and yelled at her one morning when she had a coughing fit – she is told that the problem is entirely hers. Mike, the expert implies, is ‘a great guy’ but unfortunately Heidi has ‘a pattern of pushing men away and of hanging on to things in the past’. The language of ‘patterns’ is behaviourism at its lowest common denominator. The problem is not the fact that Mike is brutish, but rather the ‘relationship’ in the abstract and Heidi in particular. The solution? Keep working on the relationship.

The idea of a relationship as labour carries problems beyond the effacement of desire. Participants talk about ‘ticking each other’s boxes’ and Mick complains that Jess is ‘operating on Sunday trading hours’ when she refuses to have sex, as though love is a commercial or administrative task that simply requires discipline. On a positive note, this language of work foregrounds emotional labour as labour, and this is possibly the one redeeming feature of the show. In a world where contestants do not engage in paid work, spouses begin to conceive of their relationships as work. When Mike tells Heidi to ‘get to the point’ as she confides in him about her troubled past, he is chastened and seems to genuinely commit to learning basic life skills, like listening to your partner.

One of the more interesting aspects of the show is how it cleaves apart the privacy that marriage has always claimed to provide and reveals a chamber of heterosexual horrors. Throughout history, as feminist theorist Heather Brook argues, marriage has been a strangely desexualised zone, often described as a ‘financial, emotional and spiritual bond’, while those outside it have been overly sexualised. Gays and lesbians have been the hypersexualised foil to heterosexuality’s purported decency, its libidinous Other to their ennobled affections. Seeking access to this refuge partly explains desires for marriage equality. MAFS may be one of the first times where marriage acts not as refuge but as revelation; where heterosexuality appears like an object in a scientist’s laboratory, blinking and shivering under the glare.

Andy Kissane and Belle Ling win Porter Prize

Andy Kissane and Belle Ling, joint winners of the 2019 Peter Porter Poetry Prize

A capacity audience gathered at fortyfivedownstairs on March 18 for the announcement of the fifteenth Peter Porter Poetry Prize, one of the country’s leading awards for a new poem. 

First, there were readings of poems by Peter Porter. Peter Rose read Behrouz Boochani’s poem ‘Flight from Manus’, which has made such an impression on readers since its publication in the March issue. This seemed germane in the light of the appalling events in Christchurch three days earlier – another example of the consequences of the intolerance, xenophobia, and rancorous polemics that have stranded Mr Boochani and many others on Manus Island and Nauru.

Judith Bishop, dual winner of the Porter Prize, spoke on behalf of her fellow judges, John Hawke and Paul Kane. She began by quoting Emily Dickinson: ‘If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire ever can warm me, I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.’

Judith went on: ‘I would like to send my deep thanks to all the poets for their commitment to this art and their desire to share their work with us. The poems I read covered an encyclopedic range of human experience. There were, of course, themes and emotions which recurred. There was anger, sadness, depression, death, violence, and violation. There was a lot of pain, and I want to acknowledge the extraordinary courage and strength that it takes to make poetry out of pain. The Royal Commission into Child Sexual Abuse has touched a chord in many lives, and that was evident in some poems, as was the #MeToo movement and the expression of suffering, injustice, and rage that underlies it. To decide the winner among these poems was an unenviable task. We didn’t know, until we had made our decision, who any of the poets were. The decision came down to what moved us furthest, what took us to a place we hadn’t been before in poetry – what, in a word, took the top of our heads off.’

Morag Fraser (Peter Porter’s biographer and principal supporter of this Prize) then named the two winners, whom the judges couldn’t split: Andy Kissane for ‘Searching the Dead’ and Belle Ling for ‘63 Temple Street, Mong Kok’. Each poet receives $3,500, plus an etching by Arthur Boyd.

Belle Ling, a Creative Writing PhD candidate at the University of Queensland, is the second Hong Kong Chinese to win the Porter, following Nicholas Wong in 2018. Belle, who flew in from China to attend the ceremony, commented: ‘Winning the Porter Prize gives me confidence in transcending the pristine English boundaries in order to tap into the creative potentials of my own cultural background. Thank you, ABR, for such a precious opportunity.’

Andy Kissane, based in Sydney, remarked: ‘I am honoured to be a joint winner. Although writing is a mostly individual and at times lonely practice, I’m very grateful for ABR’s ongoing support of poetry, which reminds me of the communal nature of art – a value that Peter Porter’s work definitely celebrated.’

Congratulations to all five featured poets.

Deadline extended for the $12,500 2019 Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize!

Australian Book Review welcomes entries in the 2019 ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize, one of the world’s leading prizes for an original short story. The Jolley Prize is worth a total of $12,500. Entry is open to anyone in the world who is writing in English. Due to popular demand we have now extended the entry period to midnight 1 May 2019. Thanks to feedback from entrants we have adjusted the rules regarding exclusivity to give entrants more freedom. Please see our Frequently Asked Questions and Terms and Conditions for more information.

Entry extended to midnight 1 May 2019. Click here to enter the Jolley Prize online

Film giveaways: Win tickets to Burning and Celeste!

Thanks to Curious Films, ten new or renewing ABR subscribers will win a double pass to see Celeste, directed by Ben Hackworth. (In cinemas 25 April)

And thanks to Palace Films, ten new or renewing ABR subscribers will win a double pass to see Burning, directed by Lee Chang-dong. (In cinemas 18 April)

Please email Grace Chang at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. with your full name and contact details to be in the running for tickets.

ABR in Germany and the Netherlands in 2020

After the success of its sold-out tour in 2018, ABR will head back to Germany in 2020 for its next tour in association with Academy Travel. This time we’ll venture to western Germany, followed by four days in Amsterdam.

Highlights include some of Europe’s greatest art collections. In Germany, we visit the Städel Museum in Frankfurt and the Hamburg Kunsthalle as well as collections in Cologne, Bonn, and Düsseldorf. In the Netherlands, the tour includes the Rijksmuseum and the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, and the Mauritshuis in The Hague. Along the way there will be opera and music – and the usual ABR conviviality.

Christopher Menz, former art gallery director and curator and a seasoned leader of European tours, will guide this fourteen-day tour (16–29 September 2020).

Enquiries and bookings: For more information about the ABR Germany/Netherlands tour please contact Christopher Menz at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

Sydney Writers’ Festival program launch

The twenty-second Sydney Writers’ Festival – running from April 29 to May 5 – has announced its 2019 program. The Festival (whose theme is ‘Lie to Me’) will feature 55 international writers, including Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah (Friday Black) and Meg Wolitzer (The Interestings), and no fewer than 360 Australian writers and academics, including Melissa Lucashenko (Too Much Lip), Markus Zusak (Bridge of Clay), Toni Jordan (The Fragments), Moreno Giovanni (The Fireflies of Autumn), Candice Fox (Gone by Midnight), and Maxine Beneba Clarke – who is currently one of three judges for this year’s ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize.

For more information about the 2019 Sydney Writers’ Festival, click here.

$20,000 WA Fogarty Literary Award

Fremantle Press and the Fogarty Foundation have announced the creation of a major new prize for Western Australian writers. From 25 March, WA writers aged between eighteen and thirty-five will be eligible to submit an unpublished work of fiction, narrative non-fiction, or Young Adult fiction. The winning entrant will receive $20,000 and a publishing contract with Fremantle Press, with a 2020 publication date.

For more information on the $20,000 WA Fogarty Literary Award, click here.

First Nations Fellowship for First Nations Writers announced

Harlequin Australia at HarperCollinsPublishers has partnered with Flinders University and Writers SA has announced the First Nations Fellowship for First Nations Writers. The Fellowship will include a twelve-month mentorship with Harlequin Publisher Jo Mackay, a writing residency at Writers SA, and a $3,500 stipend. The judging panel features authors Karen Wyld, Jared Thomas, Jo Mackay, and Amy Matthews – a Senior Lecturer in English and Creative Writing at Flinders University. The winning application will also have associate status at Flinders University.

For more information about the fellowship, click here.

KYD Mentorship Program

Kill Your Darlings has announced a 2019 Mentors Program, an editorial mentorship program that will assist emerging writing in the development of a long-form piece of fiction or non-fiction. Those who will be mentoring applicants feature writers such as Benjamin Law, Bri Lee, and Danielle Binks. The mentorship will featuring close reading of a work, 10–12,000 words at a time and up to a total of 60,000 words, as well as five discussions over Skype, phone, or in-person.

For more information about KYD’s 2019 Mentors Program, click here.

ABR welcomes succinct letters and website comments. Time and space permitting, we will print any reply from the reviewer with the original letter or comment. If you're interested in writing to ABR, contact us at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.. Correspondents must provide a telephone number or email address for verification.

Putin’s preference

Dear Editor,

I enjoyed this review. I would have liked Jeff Sparrow and Russell Blackford, the reviewer of Sparrow’s interesting book Trigger Warnings, to have explored the question of why the Russian political mainstream (that overwhelmingly supports Putin’s elected presidency of Russia) feels more comfortable with the American republican pro-Trump blue-collar right than with the anti-Trump Democrat middle-class liberal left. A viewing of Stephen Colbert’s sarcastic and condescending interview with Oliver Stone on Stone’s ‘Putin Interviews’ television series, when Colbert literally sooled a mocking studio audience onto Stone, will give clues – as will any of Rachel Maddow’s many malevolent diatribes on TV against Russia.

Tony Kevin, Gordon, ACT

Australia on his mind

Dear Editor,

Congratulations to Text Publishing for adding D.H. Lawrence’s Kangaroo to its Classics series of iconic Australian books. It reprints the original Martin Secker edition of 1923: apparently, the definitive Cambridge text was unavailable. There is a new introduction by Nicolas Rothwell. He celebrates the novel for its unprecedented insight into the appearance and atmosphere of the Australian landscape, an achievement too often overlooked. There are, however, two other issues.

Rothwell says: ‘Australia was a way-stage for the Lawrences on their long round-the-world journey, nothing more: the destination of the first ship they could find leaving Colombo port.’ However, on the ship from Italy, Lawrence had written, ‘If we don’t want to go on living in Ceylon I shall go to Australia if we can manage it.’ In subsequent letters he confirmed this, using the words ‘probably’ and ‘shall’. In his book D.H. Lawrence’s Australia, David Game meticulously documents Lawrence’s strong interest in the country, which went back to 1907. Australia was very much on his mind.

Rothwell addresses the issue of Lawrence’s knowledge of the existing political background, but cites only Robert Darroch. There certainly were similarities between actual organisations and events in New South Wales and those in Kangaroo, but from them Darroch built an edifice of speculation that the major Australian characters were based on real persons whom Lawrence had encountered. Darroch’s earliest book was the first to appear on the subject, and has been accepted in many quarters as authoritative, overshadowing Joseph Davis’s subsequent D.H. Lawrence at Thirroul. Davis states that one must be ‘extremely cautious’ in considering Lawrence’s possible sources, which ‘mount at an exponential rate’. He mentions several possibilities, concluding that they remain a mystery.

John Lowe, Ormond, Vic.

Behrouz Boochani

Both comments below are in response to Behrouz Boochani's poem 'Flight from Manus', published in the March issue of Australian Book Review. 

Dear Editor,

This man makes music with words, a symphony from the heart.

Clythe Greenwood (online comment)

Dear Editor,

This is beautiful. Says so much. Omid Tofighian’s translation makes it ring too. Thank you, both of you.

Jo van Kool (online comment)

Rosie Waterland was twenty-one, couch surfing, and working at a cinema when she learned she was pregnant. A hot flush, then a wave of nausea, hit her on the toilet. ‘It was the kind of nausea that takes away any sense of dignity that a person has,’ she writes. She stripped off, lay down on the bathroom floor, and prayed for the feeling to pass.

Waterland had met a ‘skinny hipster’ at a Sydney bar. She didn’t know his surname; it was a random hook-up. She was on the pill; they’d used a condom and yet ... An abortion would cost $800 with a general anaesthetic, she was told, or $400 for a ‘twilight sedation’, which could cause ‘discomfort’ but no pain. She would need to wait four weeks for the procedure, to guarantee its success. She went to her alcoholic mother’s house and climbed into a ‘very sad and very, very grimy’ single bed. The next few weeks were spent ‘trying to sleep, waking up, puking, trying to eat, puking, trying to sleep again’.

A Season on Earth is the original version of Gerald Murnane’s second published novel, A Lifetime on Clouds, which appeared in 1976. The story behind this book’s publication is now well known, thanks to interviews Murnane has given and the author’s ‘foreword’ to this edition, where he relates how he reluctantly cut his manuscript in half to fit with Heinemann editor Edward Kynaston’s view of it as ‘a comic masterpiece’. Kynaston was probably trying to exploit the publicity surrounding Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint, which had become a cause célèbre in Australia after being initially banned in 1970 but then published after its acquittal in an obscenity trial. The ‘sin of self-abuse’ is also central to Murnane’s novel. Towards the end of A Lifetime on Clouds, rewritten by the author especially for that earlier version, central protagonist Adrian Sherd imagines Melbourne to be ‘the Masturbation capital of the world’, but then comes to realise ‘the same problem occurred in every civilized country on earth’.

The photographic resources of museums and their archives have emerged as key sources for studying the natural world and human cultures, particularly as those studies have widened to include the techniques and modus operandi of scientists and anthropologists themselves. Their notebooks and field equipment, ranging from collecting jars to cameras, are now routinely exhibited and published together with specimens, artefacts, sketches, and photographs. But while an increasing number of publications and exhibitions draw upon museum archives in this way, less attention has been paid to the ways in which photography entered museum practice and ultimately became one of its vital methodologies. In that sense, Vanessa Finney’s Capturing Nature is a pioneering work, at least in the Australian context.

Through her long-term role as archivist at Sydney’s Australian Museum, Finney has not only become familiar with its impressive collection of photographs taken ‘in the field’, but has also been able to concentrate upon those images taken within the museum, from the 1860s onward. As she outlines in this beautifully written and illustrated volume, the Australian Museum was itself a pioneer in integrating photographic documentation into its documentary practice. Other Australian museums were late adopters; partly through lack of funding, but as Finney makes clear, the personalities and abilities of naturalist and curator Gerard Krefft and of preparator and photographer Henry Barnes were decisive influences. Krefft joined the Australian Museum in 1861, having already observed the British Museum’s use of photography in London during 1858 and having participated in the 1856–57 Blandowski expedition to the Murray and Darling Rivers, one of the first Australian expeditions to deploy photography.

The first volume in this series, Beverley Kingston’s A History of New South Wales, was published in 2006. Since then another five have appeared, including a book on Tasmania by Henry Reynolds and another on Victoria by Geoffrey Blainey. Cambridge University Press may be proceeding with its ‘History of Australian States’ series at a leisurely pace, but it has secured some leading lights among Australian historians to write it.

This history of South Australia, the sixth in the series, has been co-written by two colleagues in the University of Adelaide’s Department of History. Paul Sendziuk and Robert Foster have complementary areas of expertise: Sendziuk’s work has been in the history of twentieth-century Australia with a focus on immigration, disease, and public health, while Foster has published extensively on South Australia’s Indigenous history.

What was your pathway to publishing?

After studying literature, my first role in books was with the Australian Publishers Association. It gave me a good overall view of the industry, here and abroad. I was then the director of Sydney Writers’ Festival for its first five years. This put me in contact with writers, publishers, editors, and the book media; it was wonderful and exhausting in equal measure. Since then I have been a publisher at what has become Penguin Random House. After sixteen years I continue to feel privileged to do what I do.

How many titles do you publish each year?

Abortion was big news in Australia in 1973. In May, a bill was introduced to Federal Parliament that, if passed, would have allowed women in the ACT to terminate a pregnancy in the first trimester. So intense was public interest in this issue that one MP suggested televising the debate. On the day of the vote, activists inside the Women’s Embassy – a tent protest clearly inspired by the Aboriginal Tent Embassy erected a year earlier on the same lawns across from Parliament House – blasted Helen Reddy’s feminist anthem ‘I Am Woman’ on high rotation. No matter how loud they got, the women and their tent were outnumbered and outsized by some two thousand Right to Life protesters and their gigantic marquee. Despite the fact that the majority of Australians supported a relaxation of abortion law, the bill was easily defeated, by ninety-eight votes to twenty-three. Both major parties had given their MPs – all of them men – a conscience vote, an enduring practice which has meant that women’s reproductive rights continue to be debated as a moral question rather than one of personal autonomy or public health.

What happened next – the Royal Commission on Human Relationships, initially interpreted by women’s liberationists as a ‘consolation prize’ for a lack of action of abortion reform – is engagingly explored in Michelle Arrow’s compelling new history The Seventies: The personal, the political and the making of modern Australia. Without making grand claims for the tangible outcomes of the Commission – for the Fraser government barely addressed the recommendations when they were finally released – Arrow aptly describes the Royal Commission as ‘an extraordinary political event’ in Australian history. Thousands of Australians of all kinds took advantage of various opportunities to tell their personal stories, in public hearings, interviews, and written submissions. They talked about ‘abortion, sex education, marriage, parenthood and relationships’, as well as family violence, poverty, sexual assault, and much more. The sharing of these hitherto private experiences in a government-initiated forum, Arrow suggests, saw the animating principle of women’s liberation – the personal is political – ‘performed on the national stage’.

Alison Whittaker’s début collection, Lemons in the Chicken Wire (2015), introduced a genuinely new voice to Australian poetry: that of a Gomeroi woman, a Fulbright scholar, and a poet who can bend and blend forms with the best of them. Her second collection of poems, Blakwork, places her firmly in both the broad community of celebrated Australian poets and the celebrated Aboriginal writers in Magabala’s lists.

Like Lemons, Blakwork is packed with wit, image, and sensibility; with views that surprise, excoriate, charm, and amuse, by turns. It revisits and reviews conventional Myths of Oz: the poem ‘not one silent lamb’, for example, shifts the story of a country that rides on the sheep’s back to one of a country that is simply a ‘grass-fed mine’, carrying on its back the ‘trespassing sheep’. (It also offers a phrase that is new to me, a brilliant and economical characterisation of white settlers/invaders, as ‘them nullius men’.) Then there’s that popular myth, the Picnic at Hanging Rock, retold in ‘MANY GIRLS WHITE LINEN’ (winner of the 2017 Judith Wright Poetry Prize), where Whittaker contrasts those fey, white/whiteclad schoolgirls with the ‘blak girls’ who in that same place ‘hang / nails hang out picking / them hangnails’. And yet another: ‘a love like Dorothea’s’, which reprises and revises Dorothea Mackellar’s ‘I love a sunburnt country’. Whittaker adopts fragments of Mackellar’s often sentimental lexicon while observing – wryly, tragically – how that story of Australia delimited the modes of love for country, excluding Aboriginal ways of inhabiting the land: ‘I loved a sunburnt country, won’t it / gingerly limp back? / I can’t get past the concrete and my blak tongue’s gone all slack’.

It’s probably a miscategorisation to name this collection a book of poems. Individual pieces are image-oriented; ‘scissors anchor pistol’, for instance, is all emojis, while ‘exhibit tab’ is a heavily redacted collection of lines from the inquest into the death in custody of Ms Dhu. A number of poems are set landscape on the page (‘cottonononon’, for example), requiring the reader to swivel the book, and thus doubling as a metaphor for different ways of seeing. There’s play with language, too: the making up of words, or clustering of letters in unpronounceable combinations in ‘fieldwork’, a sequence of letters that remind the ear of the word ‘attack’ – ‘Gatcctccat attacaacggt atctccacct caggttga don’t tctcaacaa ggaaccattg ccgacatgag actagttaggt mind’ (et cetera) – are punctuated by recognisable words that together become a sentence beginning ‘don’t mind me I’m just here …’ Other sections again are not poetry at all, but prose life writing. ‘The abattoir’, for example, is a sequence of short pieces about family, the business of meat, and the need to ‘adapt, always mediators of the squeamish line between life and the lives we have to take to keep living’.

Beyond the Ancient Quarrel: Literature, philosophy and J.M. Coetzee is a new collection of essays on J.M. Coetzee, perhaps the most important author of imaginative literature in the world today. Unifying the diverse strands of argument animating this thoughtful volume, the book’s editors, noted Coetzee scholars Patrick Hayes and Jan Wilm, link the aims of the collection to the ‘ancient quarrel’ between philosophy and literature in Greek antiquity. In their view, Coetzee’s writing can be taken not only to re-examine this quarrel and the way it was settled (in favour of philosophy and against literature in Plato’s Republic), but also, and more importantly, to break with the uneasy truce that has been deemed to govern intellectual life ever since.

In assaying such difficult ground, the volume is enriched by the contribution of several philosophers who use Coetzee either as a foil for an independent investigation or as a sympathetic agent of reform based on what can be known of his commitments. With all this in mind, the reader is not offered straightforward enlightenment of Coetzee’s works and concerns. The collection, indeed, is very much one for the philosophically minded and the specialist – readers well versed in Coetzee’s dense and eclectic worlds of spare prose, unresolved plotlines, and proliferating intellectual complexity.

In the wake of the unexpected Brexit and Trump votes in 2016, academics and commentators have been scratching their heads trying to work out what these extraordinary events represent. The dominant narrative is that in the wake of recession and financial crisis, those doing it tough have punished the political élites, leading to all manner of populist insurgencies. Compelling though such an account may be at an intuitive level, another explanation has been put forward by a number of influential voices such as David Goodhart in The Road to Somewhere (2017), Matthew Goodwin in National Populism (2018), and Douglas Murray in The Strange Death of Europe (2018). This explanation is that what we have been witnessing is a backlash by those alienated by globalisation, open borders, and migration on a scale threatening the culture and identity of the majority community. It is a compelling argument, one often heard in Australia.

Eric Kaufmann’s Whiteshift provides more grist to the cultural backlash story, but does so with some interesting twists and turns in what is otherwise a dense, data-packed text. It is also noticeable that he has succeeded in irritating both the right and the left, which is a welcome sign of someone actually trying to say something interesting as opposed to feeding pre-existing positions. Two arguments in particular catch the eye.

Describe the twelve most influential thinkers who shaped Western political traditions. Chaos must ensue. Your list will be outrageous, but mine also. Consider whom you leave off the roll-call. Just one woman. No one from Africa or Asia. Only Jesus to represent millennia of Jewish thought. Yet books of lists appeal to publishers. Controversy sells. To call a book Prime Movers with the subtitle From Pericles to Gandhi: Twelve great political thinkers and what’s wrong with each of them just looks cynical.

This is unfortunate, for Prime Movers is often enjoyable and insightful. Ferdinand Mount, baronet, Etonian, former editor of the Times Literary Supplement, adviser to Margaret Thatcher, writes with clarity about ideas. His assessment of some big names in political thinking – Pericles, Jesus, Rousseau, Smith, Burke, Jefferson, Bentham, Wollstonecraft, Mazzini, Marx, Gandhi, and Iqbal – can be incisive. Thus Marx is praised in some detail for a perceptive reading of English industrialisation, but criticised at similar length for persisting with a labour theory of value. Jesus is not systematic, with no political program. He leaves a church to fill in the gaps, often with inhumane results. Thomas Jefferson proclaims universal principles but acts like the southern politician he was, failing to confront the original sin of American slavery. Mount has particular animus for Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who fails to think through the consequences of tearing up familiar institutions, and Jeremy Bentham for reducing human motivation to a simplistic formula and applying it to every aspect of society, from prisons to economies. Did the author have Margaret Thatcher in mind when mounting the cost?

In the last four decades, a shift has occurred away from the post-World War II consensus around the role of the state. Conservative parties dominated by neo-liberal agendas have surged, assisted by the abandonment of progressive politics by centre-left parties such as Labour in the United Kingdom, the Democrats in the United States, and our own Australian Labor Party. Since the global financial meltdown of 2008, however, an interesting transmogrification has occurred as conservative politics acquired a populist sheen. From the triumph of Donald Trump to the forces that won Brexit, conservative voices have inflamed social and racial tensions by speaking out against the neo-liberal ‘globalist’ agenda, with scholars and journalists producing an enormous array of material to sift through in examining these trends. Of particular focus have been the organisations and personalities behind this shift, who have seized advantage of the post-Global Financial Crisis moment to try and reshape the world in their own image. Works such as Jane Mayer’s Dark Money: The hidden history of the billionaires behind the rise of the radical right (2016) and Nancy MacLean’s Democracy in Chains: The deep history of the radical right’s stealth plan for America (2017) have traced the impact that right-wing figures and organisations have had in the United States.

Two new books bring these issues into the Australian context. Political Troglodytes and Economic Lunatics: The hard right in Australia by Dominic Kelly is a cool, forensic examination of the forces that have shaped our political and social debates since the 1980s. Rise of the Right: The war on Australia’s liberal values by Greg Barns is an entertaining, albeit embittered screed aimed primarily at the political sins of the Liberal Party.

Of the two books, Political Troglodytes is by far the more comprehensive specimen. Dominic Kelly has established himself as an important new voice in the Australian commentariat. Based on his PhD thesis, Political Troglodytes examines four different organisations that have reshaped conservative politics in Australia: the H.R. Nicholls Society, the Samuel Griffith Society, the Bennelong Society, and the Lavoisier Group. Unlike think tanks such as the Institute for Public Affairs (covered in Kelly’s comprehensive introductory chapters), each group focused on a single issue. For H.R. Nicholls, it was industrial relations; for the Samuel Griffith Society, constitutional issues. The Bennelong Society focused on Indigenous affairs. Bringing up the rear was the Lavoisier Group, with its pathological rejection of anthropogenic climate change. Linking all the groups were the vision and money of two men: Ray Evans and Hugh Morgan. Key players in the Western Mining Corporation, Evans and Morgan – along with ideological partner John Stone – had the money and, most importantly, the time and patience to shift the debate on these key issues.

According to the AFP, two Australians under the age of eighteen are reported missing every hour. Most are found alive, fairly quickly, but an unlucky few will progress to the category of long-term missing persons. From the Beaumont children of the 1960s to the more recent disappearance of toddler William Tyrrell, vanishing children have long troubled the Australian imagination. But the nightmare for their families is not one from which they can easily unsubscribe. Denied confirmation of life or death, families are suspended in an immiscible admixture of grief and hope. Peggy Frew’s third novel, Islands, brings a sympathetic eye to this painful subject.

At around two o’clock on the afternoon of 9 December 1994, fifteen-year-old Anna eats a bowl of Weet-Bix, grabs her backpack, and leaves the house. She is never seen again. Anna was a sensitive child – a little ‘peculiar’, her father thought – prone to fantasy and tantrums. An undiagnosed anxiety disorder presented as an array of facial tics and touching rituals that yielded, after her parents’ divorce, to a new constellation of destructive behaviours: smoking weed, wagging school, staying out all night, and who knows what else. Her mother, whose permissive parenting style bordered on neglect, assumed that Anna would come home when she was ready. It was three days before her father heard the news and reported their daughter missing. By then it was too late: the police had little to go on and their investigation – hindered by all the limitations of a pre-internet age – is a road to nowhere.

John Berger describes emigration as ‘the quintessential experience of our time’ (And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos, 1984), and gives credence to the concept that geographic and psychological exile is pervasive to the human condition. ‘No one willingly chooses exile – exile is the option when choice has run out,’ says the protagonist of Invented Lives, Russian-Jewish émigré Galina Kogan.

Andrea Goldsmith’s eighth novel opens in Leningrad. It is the mid-1980s and Mikhail Gorbachev’s perestroika and glasnost have been eagerly embraced by the West. Soviet citizens are more sceptical. Shortages and privations remain daily facts of life, and long experience has taught them the value of promises made by those in power. Quickly, before the rules change yet again, Galina and her mother, Lidiya, apply to emigrate. But Lidiya dies, and Galina is left alone to make the decisions they would have made together.

Carol Lefevre is the author of two novels and a non-fiction book on Adelaide, all well received and awarded. Yet she is not as well known in her own country as she should be, having spent decades in England. I hope The Happiness Glass will remedy that.

This is a quietly powerful book; part memoir, part linked short stories. Lefevre’s own voice is shared with the fictional Lily Brennan, her alter ego, moving forwards and backwards to her own life, allowing the flexibility and relative anonymity of fiction. This makes for delicious reading, as the different forms expand, reflect, and hide each other.

The book is in five parts, each with a ‘true’ memoir/essay, followed by Lily Brennan’s story and sometimes a more free-floating story, tied back subtly to the main narrative.

What a trajectory it is, singular and universal. Lefevre starts school in 1956 in hot, desolate Wilcannia. The family moves often, to Broken Hill, then high school in Mount Gambier, where Lefevre is forced into the typing stream, her dreams of learning Latin and French crushed. Post-school: a lonely, romantic period in New Zealand, a stint as a barmaid in South Africa, and a job as a nanny in England. She settles into a happy marriage, but soon a harrowing battle with infertility begins. Six years later, the couple adopts a neglected eleven-month-old baby girl from Chile. After years of joyful parenthood, the seemingly happy child begins to move beyond her parents’ reach and eventually severs ties with them.

It’s virtually axiomatic: ‘war can fuck you up’. This pithy observation, made by a veteran in The War Artist, Simon Cleary’s new novel about the travails of an Australian soldier during and after a tour of Afghanistan, goes to the heart of what we now understand about the impact of battle and its psychological aftershocks.

Before PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder) became an identifiable diagnosis in the 1980s, they used to call it by the cruder term ‘shell shock’, that cluster of symptoms experienced by soldiers who continue to suffer after they have left the battlefield. This was a largely invisible injury that was not taken as seriously as more visible war wounds. The British World War I poets famously wrote about shell shock; it is less evident in the writing of their Australian contemporaries, who tended to be more intent on celebrating the exploits of the characteristically extroverted Diggers. A notable exception is the neurasthenic protagonist of Leonard Mann’s Flesh in Armour (1932), who resolves his sense of unworthiness at not living up to the heroic ideal by committing suicide.

At the front of Miriam Sved’s A Universe of Sufficient Size is a black-and-white photograph of a statue. The cloaked figure holding a pen (‘like a literary grim reaper’, reflects one character) is the statue of Anonymous in Budapest, a significant setting in the book. Its inclusion is a reminder that the novel draws on the story of the author’s grandmother, mathematician Marta Sved (née Wachsberger).

Like Marta, the novel’s protagonist is a member of a close-knit group of young Jewish mathematicians locked out of work in the 1930s by the Hungarian government’s anti-Jewish laws. Another notable member of the real-life group, celebrated mathematician Paul Erdős, is recognisable in the brilliance and eccentricity of fictional character Pali Kalmar. Sved’s fictional set – Eszter, Ildiko, Tibor, Levi, and Pali – are vividly drawn characters whose fates the reader comes to care about.

Survivors’ testimonies remain the most important writings we have on the Shoah. Nonetheless, the novelisation of Holocaust narratives in the respectful hands of capable authors can be an important way of engaging with the memory, and legacy, of the horrors. In this, publishers and authors have a special responsibility to distinguish between fiction and non-fiction. This Sved does in her acknowledgments; she is careful to detail connections to the real-life Anonymous statue group members but also the comparison’s limitations, noting ‘some of them are inspirations for characters in this book, although not with any straightforward adherence to real life’. Picador’s media release uses the phrase ‘inspired by a true story’ rather than ‘based on’. Sved has selected biographical details from her grandmother’s life to tell a fictional story. Her prose has the nuance and sensitivity required to support such a task.

Unusually for literary fiction, Alice Robinson’s The Glad Shout opens right in the thick of the action:

Jostled and soaked, copping an elbow to her ribs, smelling wet wool and sweat and the stony creek scent of damp concrete, Isobel grips Shaun’s cold fingers and clamps Matilda to her hip, terrified of losing them in the roiling crowd.

Isobel and her family are escaping a terrible flood that has destroyed Melbourne. Holed up in a stadium – perhaps the MCG – Isobel has no idea what is left of her beachside home or whether there are any plans for anyone to help her or the hundreds of other evacuees now trying to survive amid the bleachers.

Although it has some of the trappings of speculative fiction – a fast-paced opening and a disastrous, dystopian future setting – it quickly becomes clear that The Glad Shout is a novel about families, or, more particularly, about mothers and daughters and their often-fraught relationships. Marooned in the stadium, Isobel grows increasingly angry with her husband, Shaun, for devoting himself to good works among the evacuees, rather than to protecting his wife and three-year-old daughter. The disaster only emphasises a feeling she’s had ever since their child was born:

She wishes that he had more time to pursue his passions, that he was free to spend days writing and reading and getting out to volunteer with the charity … but now they have Matilda it seems those days are behind them … At the same time she longs to shake him. What on earth did you expect our lives would be like?

What exactly is a National Theatre for? What is its purpose? What form should it take? National theatres come in many configurations. There is the four-hundred-year-old Comédie-Française serenely presiding over French culture from the Salle Richelieu. The Habima Theatre of Israel, which mirrors the history of many of its countrymen in its journey from imperial persecution in Białystok to its transplantation to Palestine in 1928 and its final recognition in Israel in 1958. Then there is the more recent National Theatre of Scotland (2006), which proudly declares itself to be a ‘Theatre Without Walls’, and has no home playhouse, preferring to play in all sorts of locations.

The National Theatre of Great Britain, though much younger than many of its brethren, has achieved much in its fifty-six years. In Dramatic Exchanges, Daniel Rosenthal, the author of an exhaustive if slightly stolid history of the National (2013), has compiled a fascinating collection of letters, notes, emails, and countless first-night cards to create an alternative narrative, not as comprehensive perhaps as his history but much more immediate. It is fascinating to read these alongside the various autobiographies and diaries of those involved. Here we have the rough drafts that are often considerably smoothed out in their memoirs.

If you were young and energetic and a believer in a range of progressive causes, Melbourne in the first three decades of the twentieth century was an exciting place. It was even better if you were in love.

Doris Hordern and Maurice Blackburn, the joint subjects of Carolyn Rasmussen’s deeply researched and absorbing new biography, understood each other’s dedication to radical politics from the time they met in February 1913, introduced by the influential leftwing journalist and propagandist Henry Hyde Champion. Maurice, the chief support of a widowed mother, was struggling to make a living as a barrister, mostly for unions and workers: as he told Doris, he ‘could not shut his eyes to suffering and oppression’. Doris, trained as a teacher, was also Vida Goldstein’s campaign secretary in the latter’s unsuccessful bid to enter federal parliament as an independent in 1913. Doris was chronically suspicious of marriage, declaring, ‘I do not trust men as I do most women.’ Nevertheless, after an eighteen-month engagement they married with very little money at the end of 1914.

The atmosphere among Australian electors lining up to cast a vote at a school, hall, or similar institution is generally relaxed and informal, a ‘vibe’ enhanced by the friendly banter of local party members handing out ‘How to Vote’ cards. But the casualness of the Australian way of voting cannot disguise the fundamental importance of each local, state, and federal poll. As the authors of Elections Matter generally agree, elections matter and voters matter: their collective decision-making has shaped the political, social, and economic nature of the Commonwealth of Australia since 1901.

Elections Matter is an edited collection of essays on ten federal elections that presented the electors with clear choices between different public policy approaches, styles of governance, and key personalities. Through compelling evidence and discussion of major electoral themes, each author generally makes a strong case for the inclusion of ‘their’ federal election as a pivotal moment in Australian political history. While the contributors vary in their conclusions, a general picture emerges of an Australian electorate that seeks to be represented somewhere near the comfortable centre rather than at left or right extremes. On the other hand, the book indicates that voters also don’t want to feel ‘behind the times’, which has often meant that a clever politician such as Labor’s Andrew Fisher (1910) or the Coalition’s John Howard (2001) can create an image of himself as the leader most ‘suited to these times’.

Our tutor in Japanese conversation at the Australian National University in 1968, rather than listen to us mangling his language, used to write the kanji for all the political factions on the board, with a Ramen-like chart of connections looping between them and multiple interest groups. Within each one were mainstream and anti-mainstream factions, he told us, whose seething contestation with one another was fiercer than with their political enemies.

This was not what we absorbed from most English-language histories, which, as Peter Carey wrote in Wrong about Japan (2004), misled many with the dominant Western narrative. It might begin with the arrival of Francis Xavier in 1549, and record that Japan, unified in 1600, was ruled by the Tokugawa shoguns for three centuries in almost complete peace, secluded from the world apart from limited Portuguese, Dutch, and Russian contacts. Japan’s recent history was said to have started when American Black Ships arrived in 1853 and 1854, opening up trade and establishing unequal treaties. The Tokugawa retreated, imperial rule was restored, and Japan’s rapid transformation into ‘modernity’s poster-child’ began. Apart from the years when Japan aggressively sought an empire of its own in the Ryukyu Islands, Korea, Taiwan, Manchuria, China, and Southeast Asia, the nation made peaceful progress. It became the world’s second largest economy in the 1980s, officially crediting that success to its unique identity. So why do we need another ‘Japan story’?

Leah Kaminsky’s novel The Hollow Bones focuses on Ernst Schäfer, a German who was sent to Tibet by Himmler in the late 1930s, outwardly to collect plant and animal specimens; secretly to ‘search for the origins of the Aryan race’. Himmler’s abhorrent obsessions are not focused on – indeed, Schäfer’s expedition only makes up the final third of Kaminsky’s book. The first two-thirds concentrate on Ernst’s relationship with his young wife, Herta, and his deepening involvement with the SS.  

Intended to interrogate the moral slip of a man who took advantage of the Reich to advance his career, The Hollow Bones does not have the emotional resonance of Kaminsky’s début, The Waiting Room (2015). That novel – told from the perspective of a daughter of Holocaust survivors – is fluid with the movement of memory, exploring grief with sensitivity and depth. It is warm and funny, detailing its characters and their milieu with tenderness and buoyancy. This authorial affection does not extend to The Hollow Bones, whose characters feel condemned from the outset. Ernst’s loosening grip on his ethics and himself lacks the expected nuance, difficulty, and grit, particularly where it is the pivotal point in the drama. The signals of his changing temperament feel rigid and fall readily into the usual manoeuvres of represented Nazi behaviour. This, coupled with narrations of taxidermy and Ernst’s pleasure in killing animals, makes the work occasionally feel pantomimic.

This could have been tempered with a closer focus on character, but one gets the feeling Kaminsky is not interested in making us feel sympathy for her protagonists. The true hero, the one that is lingered over and mourned, is nature: rendered beautifully in the birds, forests, and flowers near Ernst and Herta’s childhood homes. Here, the author sets out an irretrievable idyll we can all relate to – one which, in this story, Nazism removes access to for good. 

Early on in Kindred: A Cradle Mountain love story, the journalist and walker Kate Legge dwells on an ‘extraordinary coincidence’ that took place over Christmas in 1903. While the Field Naturalists Club of Victoria were on excursion to Mount Buffalo, the itinerant prophet of the National Park movement, the Scottish-American John Muir, was also in the mountains of Victoria. On Christmas Day, Muir plunged into the valleys around the Black Spur to verify optimistic claims of eucalypts ‘as high as the Great Pyramid’. He was soon disappointed by how these mountain giants compared in height and age to the redwoods of the Sierras, but he was charmed by the seclusion and intimacy of Victoria’s forests.

Just a few hundred kilometres away, Gustav Weindorfer and his future wife Kate Cowle were among those sampling the ‘rich pickings’ of the Buffalo Plateau. Among the granite boulders, the party of naturalists collected orchids and asters, beetles and birds’ nests. Other adventurers picked their way through gorges to look upon swirling mists and sublime vistas.

A new anthology of bite-sized New Zealand poems is freshly out from Victoria University Press. VUP is the Wellington-based publisher closely associated with the University’s renowned creative writing school, known affectionately (or pejoratively, depending on your affiliation) as ‘The Bill Manhire School’. The anthology is edited by former NZ Poet Laureate Jenny Bornholdt, a softly spoken giant of New Zealand letters who has been writing lauded poems of deceptive simplicity and depth since she first took Manhire’s class in 1984.

Bornholdt’s self-imposed rules for the anthology were to select poems of nine lines or fewer. Six lines felt too restrictive; ten, somehow, too roomy to be ‘properly short’. What is it, then, that a short poem can accomplish, that longer poems can’t, or don’t?

The link between fundamentalist religion, violence, and madness is well established. The conviction of absolute truth becomes especially toxic when believers are convinced that the end of the world is nigh. This is exacerbated in times of major socio-economic change and political instability, such as during the Protestant Reformation.

Paul Ham’s New Jerusalem vividly illustrates this. It tells the bizarre story of the most radical of the Reformation’s reformers, the Anabaptist sect that seized the city of Münster between 1534 and 1535. What started as a peaceful apocalyptic movement transmuted into a religious monstrosity. Much more than a heretical sect, they ‘stoked civil unrest’ and were, as Ham says, ‘a deeply subversive political and economic movement’, which helps explain the ferocious vengeance that was afterwards wreaked upon them.

My favourite image from Stanley Corngold’s Walter Kaufmann: Philosopher, humanist, heretic is set in Berlin as World War II concludes. Young Walter Kaufmann, a German Jew forced to flee the National Socialist regime to the United States, has returned to his native land as part of the occupying forces. Kaufmann is steeped in a German intellectual tradition of Bildung, meaning education or culture. This humanist tradition sees philosophy and literature as serving to liberate, challenge, and cultivate the self.

In occupied Germany, Kaufmann sees the tradition of Bildung humiliated and degraded by the inhumanity of Nazism. Some of the canonical texts are accused of harbouring proto-Nazi ideas. Others have been claimed by Nazi ideologues seeking to fashion an intellectual foundation for the fascist regime. In a bookstore, Kaufmann discovers an edition of the works of a writer tarred more heavily with the Nazi brush than most – Friedrich Nietzsche – and is absorbed. On his return to the United States, Kaufmann commences an immensely productive career as a philosopher, translator, poet, and photographer, drawing upon and indefatigably defending this German tradition.

1

In my mind he is always half the age
I am now as he stands on a green shelf
of Razorback mountain. I will wait
for him forever in the backseat of a car,
my chin numbing on the window ledge
as I study his black hair shuffling
the void between earth and dark sky.
My eyes walk him back from the edge.
What does he know of life which as yet
is still a question. His wife at home
breastfeeding and reading industrial
relations texts as we hunt for geodes
along the river – chalcedony, bloodstone,
sardonyx – I’ve found, he says, a place to die.

2

Night crawlers writhe violently in a tin.
He washes his hands in dirt and tries
to pull one from the tangle. Hold it still,
he tells me. His hands are shaking.
I squint as he spears a worm with a hook
and slides it up to the line. My eyes open
as he threads another. He drops my line
in the waterhole and ties a blue tarpaulin
to a tree. You’ll never be a full citizen
of this family, she said before we left. I reel
in a catfish. He pins it with a knee and rips
the hook from its mouth. Half of me
disappears and the other half falls to a hard
foundation I wasn’t sure he was holding.

3

The scream of a wet diamond blade
bisecting stone cannot hope to drown
the ancient rhythms and repetitions
of the marital argument I have learned
by heart. I drive the rock into the blade.
My wrists are splattered with slurry.
It greys my hair and coats my tongue.
The language I inherited is not yet
large enough for the work I have to do.
Our last night in Lost World I heard
him sobbing by the fire and years later
I am abducted by a poem as if carried
off by a hawk. When the rock cracks
open there is nothing inside but rock.

According to most accounts, the history of computing is a triumph of enterprise. This story starts in the 1950s and 1960s with commercial mainframe computers that, one stack of punch-cards at a time, assumed business tasks ranging from managing airline reservations to calculating betting odds. But the public’s day-to-day life looked much the same. Then, in the mid-1970s, geniuses like Steve Jobs and Bill Gates pioneered home computing. Personal computers, and later smartphones and the internet, became the defining technologies of our age. Nerdy men, often in their garages, had remade the world.

An appealing story, but it leaves out a lot. In fact, it might leave out the key parts. People were sending electronic messages all over New England in 1968. Around that time, professors and students at Dartmouth College pioneered the BASIC programming language, innovative for prioritising clarity over efficiency. Soon it was the lingua franca of hobbyists and students worldwide. In the early 1970s, the People’s Computing Company organised low-cost classes, school visits, and circulated publications that featured computer programs readers could copy, modify, and redistribute. This social world was the fertile soil from which personal computing grew.

Memoirs of illness are tricky. The raw material is often compelling: dramatic symptoms, embarrassing public moments, and unavoidable relationship pressures. The challenge is to share that raw material in a new way. Not every memoir needs to turn on the conceit that illness is an obstacle that must be overcome.

Full disclosure: I have multiple sclerosis. I approached Caro Llewellyn’s memoir Diving into Glass with excitement and a healthy dose of cynicism. Excitement, because reading about the symptoms and experiences of another person with MS is fascinating. There is a potential common bond when someone I have never met describes the exact feeling I have been trying to communicate to my neurologist. Those of us who are ill need a common language. I also approached the book with a certain cynicism. I am not just looking for stories, I seek prose or insight to illuminate my condition.

Richard Cohen, the American journalist who has lived with MS for three decades, calls those of us who are chronically ill ‘citizens of sickness’. I’ve read many memoirs about illness. There are sub-genres to explore – not just misery-lit and sick-lit, but memoirs of alcoholism and addiction, of recovery from trauma, of grief, of living with mental illness, and, finally, of terminal illness. As a citizen of sickness, I read such memoirs because I want to find someone who has had an experience or a symptom like mine.

‘A book about waiting’ was perhaps a hard sell for Jason Farman to make to his publisher. Waiting, so the consensus goes, sucks. It is the elephant graveyard of time, the dead zone between something and something else. Who would want to spend more time on waiting?

It helps to clarify that Delayed Response is not the type of book that presents its topic as life’s panacea (like ‘tidying’ or ‘making your bed’ or ‘LSD’). Farman is not a waiting advocate; he doesn’t think the good life is spent in a queue. Rather, his book is about waiting as one of the telling contours of existence. Far from being the place where time goes to die, waiting is when the passage of time becomes most noticeable. And if you notice that you’re waiting (so Farman’s argument goes), you can start to notice related things: who is making you wait, for example, and what benefit it has for them; how time affects the meaning of messages; the social structures that value the time of some more than others. ‘Looking at the seams,’ Farman writes, ‘allows us to see how things are put together.’