When Peter Tompkins and Christopher Bird wrote The Secret Life of Plants (1975), many critics labelled their attempt to prove a spiritual link between people and plants as mystical gibberish, with a New York Times review chiding the authors for pandering to charlatans and amateur psychics. The review noted that although Tompkins and Bird made a fascinating case for plant sentience ‘suspended in the aspic of their blarney, it all looks equally improbable’. In the ensuing decades, more books have been published on the life of trees and their relationship to humans, some of which have sold well and been enthusiastically received by critics. Peter Wohlleben’s The Hidden Life of Trees: What they feel, how they communicate – discoveries from a secret world (2016) topped bestseller lists and earned him a flattering interview in the profile pages of The New York Times.

While an interest in trees has certainly emerged among an educated readership, Sophie Cunningham’s collection of essays could be viewed as a heartfelt and timely postscript to much of this tree talk. It’s all very well to read books on trees, but what are we doing to save them and the animals and ecosystems that rely on them for survival? What will become of the groves that cannot replace their felled compatriots fast enough? What irreparable damage will climate change do?

Naturally, it’s a political book, but it’s also touchingly personal, tracing Cunningham’s encounters with trees as she moves across continents and her hometown of Melbourne. Cunningham’s wide roaming acts as an entry point into stories on the trees, gardens, and plants she discovers during her lengthy constitutionals and sojourns. In ‘Escape to Alcatraz’, Cunningham volunteers as a gardening worker over two bird-breeding seasons on the San Francisco Bay island of Alcatraz. She photographs the snowy egret colony and takes a particular interest in ‘survivor plants’, those two hundred or so species that grew defiantly through the forty-year period between the closure of the prison and the start of the garden’s maintenance program. In ‘Tourists Go Home’, she touches on the deleterious consequences of travel for the trees and the broader environment. Cunningham used to preference travel over everything else – superannuation, sensible purchases, meaningful savings – but now she isn’t so sure. Almost nine million people visit Barcelona each year, and it’s getting harder to find places where the locals don’t want you to leave. Tourists, of course, also come in the form of animals and plants, which can sometimes have a severe impact on the biodiversity of the region. In ‘I Don’t Blame the Trees’, Cunningham displays a talent for great observational detail, noting that the debate as to whether eucalypts should be removed from California’s Angel Island is loaded with inflammatory phrases such as ‘immigrant’, ‘invader’, and ‘refugee’. She resists championing the cutting down of non-native species simply because they don’t support local flora and fauna, wondering instead, quite astutely, what will replace the old trees after they are removed and pointing out that these days all of us are from somewhere else anyway.

Cunningham leavens her firsthand stories with summaries of scientific research and interviews. The result is an intriguing mélange of personal journey and journalism. The giant sequoia, we learn, are among the world’s oldest trees and their final numbers can be found along a belt of the western Sierra Nevada. When Cunningham walks through a grove of them, tears streaming down her face, she thinks, ‘I would lay down my life for you’. Indeed, language often fails Cunningham, an accomplished prose writer, when she would like it the most. Standing before old-growth trees, reaching for description, her mind stalls before their majesty. She sketches the trees instead, but even this proves challenging, with Cunningham left to wonder, ‘Is it possible to draw, or write, a forest?’

Sunlight coming through some redwoods (Sequoia sempervirens) in the Muir Woods National Monument in California (photograph via Wikimedia Commons)

There are a range of statistics deployed throughout the essays to emphasise the threat that trees face, but a handful stand out: almost all of the baobabs from Africa – many of them more than two thousand years old – have died; and it’s estimated that koalas will be gone from the wild by 2050. Australia fares especially poorly in looking after its habitats, with thirty-five per cent of all global mammal extinctions since 1500 occurring in Australia, yet we have not listed a critical habitat for protection for more than a decade. Furthermore, less than two per cent of the mountain ash estate in Australia is now old growth, prompting Cunningham to ask, ‘In what universe would a reasonable person think it was okay to cut down an 800-year-old tree and reduce it to a few hundred dollars’ worth of woodchips? Ours, apparently.’ Trees do grow again, Cunningham notes, but climate change is accelerating climate variation, making it more difficult for organisms to adapt.

While researching the essays, Cunningham experiences a succession of personal traumas, which become a way of framing the persistent grief she feels for the loss of global species and habitat. Cunningham and her wife, Virginia, return from living in San Francisco at the height of the internecine debate over gay marriage in Australia, ‘which seemed to devolve into the right of LGBTQI teachers to teach and the right of bakers to refuse the supply of wedding cakes’. While she is writing many of these essays, her father, John, who was originally her stepfather before adopting Cunningham and her brother, is in a high-care ward in Melbourne with frontal lobe dementia. She flies home to be by his side at the end, and he dies surrounded by family. Not long after John dies, her biological father, Peter, dies from Parkinson’s disease.

Following these two losses, Cunningham experiences months of insomnia; she takes comfort in animals and the living world. She opens windows around dawn to hear the birds, or rain, or building works, ‘anything other than the sound of nothing at all’. Biologist E.O. Wilson has described the post-extinction landscape as the Eremocene age, or ‘The Age of Loneliness’, and this is what Cunningham really fears: the emptiness that follows when a vital connection – be it with a father or the natural world – is severed.

In this sense, these fine essays convey what factual reporting on the threat of climate change and the loss of habitat cannot: something beautiful is dying, something precious and monumental may be lost forever. The temptation these days is to look away from the sadness, to rant on Twitter about the threat to old growth rather than to visit extant forests, but Cunningham is doing nothing of the sort. The final essay, ‘Mountain Ash’, ends with a visit to ‘Ada’, who has no surviving old-growth companions around her. Cunningham is aware of scientists’ aversion to overstating the consciousness of trees, of how this leads people to jump to conclusions about their supposed personalities. She is, however, unapologetic, telling Ada, ‘I will drive, I will wade, through fields laid waste by clear-felling, through ancient and perfect rainforest, to stand before you, my queen.’ The effect of this highly confessional approach is oddly mesmerising, and while Cunningham’s essays are accounts of her intimate encounters with trees, her gift is in making them feel like they are our stories as well.

For more than a decade the world has waited, patiently or disbelievingly, for a second book from Nam Le, author of The Boat (2008), a collection of seven tales that won the young Australian author acclaim throughout the world. Finally, it has arrived. A book-length essay running to about 15,000 words, it may not be what the ravenous world had in mind, but it is seriously interesting – interestingly interesting one might almost say. The volume appears in Black Inc.’s neat little Writers on Writers series, with its owlish photographs of authors and subjects: author on top, subject below. Until now, there have been four in the series, including Christos Tsiolkas on Patrick White, and Ceridwen Dovey on J.M. Coetzee. (Michelle de Kretser on Shirley Hazzard, due later this year, promises to be a notable pairing.) 

When truth is stranger than fiction, fiction is a potent source of truth. In the first week of the Trump administration, sales of 1984 increased by 9,500 per cent, catapulting George Orwell’s sexagenarian novel to the top of global bestseller charts. As Kellyanne Conway recast White House lies as ‘alternative facts’, Orwell’s tale of doublespeak read like a manual. Welcome to the land of the free and the home of the brave new world.

The lure of dystopian novels has always been dissonant; they soothe as much as they disquiet – that feverish relief of surfacing from a nightmare to find your world intact, values affirmed. The rise of white nationalism, the preposterous uncertainty of Brexit, climate change – in the face of these waking terrors, there is a perverse comfort in darker dreams.

As part of his budget speech to the House of Representatives in April, Josh Frydenberg, the federal treasurer, announced that his suite of policy changes would ‘deliver better outcomes for all Australians’. Such talk is par for the course in parliamentary democracies. Everyone knows that a large portion of the electorate voted against the policy positions of any incumbent government. Yet no politician can expect to get away with publicly conceding that their policies might be aimed at keeping their base happy while also pursuing some swing voters.

This may sound unduly cynical: Whatever the realities of gaining and holding elected office, why shouldn’t politicians hope to serve everyone? Shouldn’t this be their moral duty? Held in abstraction, this is an attractive and plausible view. But a more practical position needs to recognise the ways in which governing for everyone faces special difficulties in specific policy areas. The problem for tax policy is that benefiting everyone is, much of the time, basically impossible.

In July 1924, a Tasmanian senator from the conservative Nationalist Party, Herbert Payne, introduced a bill to bring about compulsory voting in Australian national elections. His proposal aroused little discussion. Debate in both the Senate and the House of Representatives – where another forgotten politician, Edward Mann, saw the measure through – was brief. Few spoke in opposition. The House debated the matter for less than an hour and passed Payne’s bill without amendment. Its implementation at the 1925 election caused barely a ripple. It has never been controversial since, although a few Liberal politicians have made its abolition another of their hopeless causes.

Apart from marvelling that the nation’s politicians could have agreed so readily to a measure now widely regarded as the Australian political system’s most distinctive feature, you might be wondering how Judith Brett has managed to spin such an undramatic event into a book of almost two hundred pages. The answer is that she hasn’t. This book is a great deal more than an account of how Australia got compulsory voting. It is a meditation on Australian democracy and society.

Ian McEwan’s new novel imagines an alternative history of England in the 1980s, one in which Argentina won the Falklands War and Margaret Thatcher was subsequently trounced at the polls. It also projects an alternative narrative of scientific progress, one in which the brilliant mathematician Alan Turing did not die in 1954, victimised because of his homosexuality, but instead lived on into a ‘glorious patrician present’ to become the ‘presiding genius of the digital age’. Digital communication is presented here as having become ‘a daily chore’ by the early 1970s, with these characters in 1982 communicating regularly by email. The novel’s plot turns on Turing’s invention of robotic prototypes, known as Adam and Eve, one of which ends up as the property of the novel’s first-person narrator, Charlie. Adam’s speed and dexterity in cognitive processing makes a fortune for Charlie on the Asian currency markets, but Adam eventually asserts his independence, becomes Charlie’s love rival and has to be eliminated.

In Chris Womersley’s collection of short fiction, A Lovely and Terrible Thing, a man is caught in a fugue moment. Just after unexpectedly discharging a gun into the body of a stranger, he gazes at his reflection in a darkened window pane: ‘I saw someone outside looking in, before realising it was, in fact, my own reflection hovering like a small, sallow moon in the darkness.’ He stands for so many characters in this collection, visible beyond the boundaries of human habitation, forlorn, misinterpreted, and somehow failing, initially at least, to notice the mighty forces of chaos and destruction that lie before him. The mismatch between the shooting and the fey rumination is very funny, and black humour is another characteristic of the stories in A Lovely and Terrible Thing, where sensational events and wry, poised writing establish Womersley as an impressive writer of short fiction. His novels, City of Crows (2017), Cairo (2013), Bereft (2010), and The Low Road (2007), work with crime and the Gothic, with displacement in a geographical and psychic sense.

The lives of the characters in A Lovely and Terrible Thing follow a relentless personal logic, one often surprising to the rational reader. This logic deposits them in fantastic, sombre, or sinister situations. Many of them are children, with parents who are completely alien: ‘[they] spoke often in their own unintelligible tongue’. Adults look the other way while children involve themselves in illicit and dangerous but oddly understandable enterprises. There is little to trust in the adult world – a grandfather simply disappears, lured away by invisible forces that a child’s father is powerless to resist. Adults are negligent or absent; some are actively homicidal and ruthless. Children, who aren’t yet primed for a world that is so visibly unhappy or peculiar, are perfect subjects for a writer so effectively focused on dislocation. Womersley also writes of bereaved parents, or parents who cannot remedy the damage that their own children suffer. ‘How was a family supposed to be?’ asks one child character. ‘Were they all like ours, bound by such darkness?’ Families in these stories are horribly obscure, especially to the children who inhabit them.

Siri Hustvedt’s latest novel, Memories of the Future, weaves together three distinct threads. The overarching narrative, set in the recent past, unfolds contemporaneously with the book’s composition. It consists of the reflections of a writer with the mysterious initials SH, who is in her early sixties and lives in Brooklyn. She spends her days tending to her elderly mother and marvelling at the clownish mendacity of the newly elected president. SH is prompted to reminisce about her younger self when she comes across an old journal of hers, written in the late 1970s when she had just arrived in New York from Minnesota, a naïve provincial filled with dreams of becoming a writer. Interleaved with the elder SH’s musings and the younger SH’s journal entries are extracts from the unfinished detective novel she was struggling to write.

This three-tiered structure reflects the novel’s preoccupation with the perennial themes of time, memory, and imagination. Hustvedt is fascinated with the fluidity of those related concepts, the way they seem to blur into one another. Again and again in Memories of the Future, the elder SH remarks upon time’s destabilising and estranging effects, its ability to magnify certain remembered details and obscure others, its transfiguration of life into a kind of fiction. ‘I have always believed,’ she declares, ‘that memory and imagination are a single faculty.’

To a weary and frightened people, fatalism does offer the consolation of lethargic peace ... anger and alarm still signal life.

Yi-Fu Tuan (Landscapes of Fear, 1979)

Be afraid. ‘The Uninhabitable Earth’, the viral article published in New York magazine (2017) that was both fêted and scorned for its visceral bluntness, has grown out and up. A scary, 7,000-word portrait of a near-future Earth razed by climate change has matured into a deeper, darker treatise on environmental injustice, or what author David Wallace-Wells calls ‘ethics at the end of the world’. ‘And how widespread alarm will shape our ethical impulses toward one another,’ he writes, ‘and the politics that emerge from those impulses, is among the more profound questions being posed by the climate to the planet of people it envelops.’

The way this book sounds the climate alarm is no mere lyrical feat. Wallace-Wells, a deputy editor at New York, heard his detractors yet did not repent. Be very afraid. For fear is now at the crux of the story.

Vale Les Murray

Les Murray (photograph via Black Inc.)

Les Murray, one of Australia’s most celebrated poets, has died at the age of eighty. In addition to his thirty or so poetry collections, he was a long-time poetry editor at Quadrant, an anthologist, a translator, and a critic. Among the influential anthologies he edited were The New Oxford Book of Australian Verse (1986 and two later editions) and Anthology of Australian Religious Poetry (1986 and 1991). He published two verse novels: The Boys Who Stole the Funeral (1979) and Fredy Neptune (1999). His many honours and prizes included a national one (AO), two Kenneth Slessor Prizes for Poetry – for The People’s Other World in 1984 and for Translations from the Natural World in 1993 – the 1996 T.S. Eliot Prize for Subhuman Redneck Poems, and the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry in 1998. Peter Alexander published his admiring, if controversial, biography in 1999 (OUP).

Reviewing Murray’s most recent Collected Poems (Black Inc.) in our December 2018 issue, Peter Goldsworthy described him as ‘one of the most original poets in the English language’. He concluded: ‘Murray seems to me like some maverick, hyper-verbal angle, plonked down among us to mess with our heads, move our hearts, make us dabble our toes in luscious dung, and shower us with language in Shakespearean abundance.’

Story of the Month: Beejay Silcox

ABR is delighted to announce a new feature to the magazine: Story of the Month. Each month we will publish a new work of fiction by an established or emerging writer, available to read freely for one week. For our inaugural story, Beejay Silcox, ABR's Fortieth Birthday Fellow, has written 'Metal Language', a moving tale about a young girl's experience at a gun range with her father. Keep an eye out for more great fiction in the near future! 

ABR Publishing Profile

Check out the new ABR Publishing Profile. This is intended to give readers and potential subscribers and contributors a sense of the magazine’s diverse programs and long history. Did you know, for instance, that each year we publish about 300 writers of whom about 90 to 100 are new to the magazine? Or that of our twenty-one ABR Fellows to date thirteen are women? Or that between 2016 and 2018 ABR published nearly four hundred poems by eighty poets as part of States of Poetry?

We’ll go on expanding and updating this digest of the magazine’s publishing.

Submissions open for Emerging Artist Award 2019 by fortyfivedownstairs

Submissions are currently open for the fifth annual Emerging Artist Award 2019 presented by fortyfivedownstairs. Artists are intended to submit innovative and original artworks. The artworks themselves can come from a diverse range of media, from the avant-garde to reinventions of traditional styles. The winning selections of works will be offered a two-week exhibition at fortefivedownstairs, which will take place 18–29 June 2019, as well a pool of $3,000 split between two winning submissions.

Submissions for the Emerging Artist Award 2019 close 5pm on Monday, 20 May 2019. For more information, visit the fortyfivedownstairs website.

Giveaways: Win tickets to Peterloo and The Hummingbird Project!

Thanks to Transmission Films, ten new or renewing subscribers will win a double pass to Mike Leigh’s Peterloo (in cinemas May 16).

And thanks to Nix & Co, ten new or renewing subscribers will win a double pass to Kim Nguyen’s The Hummingbird Project (in cinemas April 25).

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.

The 2020 ABR European tour

Thinking of heading to Europe in 2020? After the success of our sold-out tour in 2018, ABR, in association with our commercial partner Academy Travel, will head back to Germany in September 2020 – first Frankfurt, Cologne, Bonn, Düsseldorf, Hamburg, Lübeck, culminating in Amsterdam and The Hague.

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). Those seeking further information should contact Christopher at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. or consult Academy Travel’s website.

Winners of the Calibre Essay Prize 

The two winning Calibre Prize essays will be named in the June–July issue. We thank all the entrants for their forbearance. 

The $20,000 Australian/Vogel’s Literary Award

Applications are open for The Australian/Vogel’s Literary Award, one of Australia’s most lucrative prizes for an unpublished manuscript. Entrants must be aged under thirty-five. The winning author will receive $20,000 plus publication by Allen & Unwin. Past winners include Kate Grenville, Tim Winton, and the late Andrew McGahan.

For more information on how to enter, visit the The Australian/Vogel’s Literary Award website.

Winner of the $50,000 2019 Stella Prize

Vicki Laveau-HarvieA large, enthusiastic audience gathered at Arts Centre Melbourne on April 9 for the announcement of the 2019 Stella Prize, worth $50,000. It was won by Vicki Laveau-Harvie’s memoir The Erratics (first published by Finch Publishing and now by Fourth Estate). Laveau-Harvie – a former academic and translator – writes about her return to her parents’ ranch in Alberta, Canada, and the shocks that await her there. Of this ‘gripping novel’ the judges said, ‘[it] mines the psychological damage wrought on a nuclear family by a monstrous personality.’

Fittingly, the winning author gave the best speech of the evening – personal, generous, heartfelt. She remarked that it should be the year of the Stella (a ‘remarkable beacon’). ‘This is a time when speaking truth seems more important than ever … when the powerful seem determined to make words mean what they want them to mean.’

The five other shortlisted authors each receive $3,000 and a three-week writing retreat supported by the Trawalla Foundation.

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.

Open Letter in support of Behrouz Boochani

Refugee Behrouz Boochani from Iran, on Manus Island, Papua New Guinea, on Tuesday 11 April, 2017. (Photograph by Alex Ellinghausen. © Fairfax Media, MEAA)

Dear Editor,

We, the undersigned, write this letter as Australian journalists, writers, editors, publishers, and lovers of literature, to call for our colleague and fellow award-winning journalist and author Behrouz Boochani to be allowed to enter Australia.

Boochani, aged thirty-six, is a Kurdish writer, journalist, and film-maker. He fled Iran in early 2013 following a campaign of persecution and harassment, and attempted to seek asylum in Australia. He has been imprisoned on Manus Island since August 2013.

In the six years that the Australian authorities have detained him, Boochani has courageously continued to work, writing for publications in Australia and overseas, tirelessly reporting on the conditions on Manus Island, while also helping Australian-based journalists cover the situation there.

In December 2017, the International Federation of Journalists recognised Boochani’s work as a legitimate journalist and granted him an IFJ press card. Australian journalists are acutely aware that his continued detention undermines Australia’s credibility as a leader for press freedom across the region.

Boochani is undeniably talented. In 2017, he co-directed a film that he shot on mobile phone, titled Chauka, Please Tell Us The Time, which was selected for screening at numerous film festivals. His book published in July 2018, No Friend But the Mountains: Writing from Manus Prison (Picador), is an extraordinary account of his experience of the Manus Island offshore detention system. It has been highly acclaimed by critics; in January 2019 it won two of Australia’s most prestigious prizes at the Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards.

We are deeply concerned for Behrouz Boochani’s welfare and safety. The success of his book and his status as a journalist have made him a target of the Manus authorities, a danger that has only increased with his rising profile.

As Australian journalists, writers, academics, and readers, we extend a welcome to Behrouz Boochani. We regard him as a valuable member of the contemporary Australian literary community. He had the courage to stand up for the rights of his people in Iran, and in the past six years, he has borne witness to the trials of his fellow-detainees, and advocated for their freedom on Manus Island. We join with him in advocating for justice for all those detained on Manus.

We call on the Australian government to allow Behrouz Boochani into our country, where he can continue to work safely as a journalist and writer. We also urge that he be offered a pathway to permanent residency. We will all be enriched by this.

Dennis Altman, James Bradley, J.M. Coetzee, Patricia Cornelius, Michelle de Kretser, Delia Falconer, Mem Fox, Anna Funder, Helen Garner, Kate Grenville, Peter Greste, Michael Heyward, Matilda Imlah, Caroline Jones, Mireille Juchau, Tom Kenneally, Kathy Lette, Kim Mahood, David Marr, Phillipa McGuinness, Alex Miller, Kerry O’Brien, Felicity Plunkett, Peter Rose, Kim Scott, Beejay Silcox, Peter Singer, Christos Tsiolkas, Geordie Williamson,Tim Winton, Charlotte Wood, Alexis Wright, Clare Wright, Arnold Zable

As we went to press more than 8,800 Australians had signed this letter. A full list of the signatories may be found at the MEAA website: https://www.meaa.org/campaigns/free-behrouz/

Married At First Sight

Dear Editor,

I loved Alecia Simmond’s article on Married At First Sight (‘Forced Marriage: MAFS and Reality Television’s Chamber of Horrors’, ABR, April 2019). Words fail me about the recklessness shown by the producers and ‘experts’ delivering the content of this television show.

As a gay man, I finally gained the legal right to marry my partner of nineteen years in 2018. When I see how some members of the heterosexual community treat their right to marry and to celebrate marriage, it makes me angry and upset. The marriage equality campaign was timely – a fitting demonstration of what love should be about and the right of celebration. This program just kicks that hard work and commitment in the guts.

Roger Levi (online comment)

Not long into the Obama era, the American comedians Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert hosted a high-profile ‘Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear’ in Washington, DC. In front of an enormous crowd of well-intentioned liberals, Stewart made a case for a return to the sensible centre. ‘We live in hard times, not end times,’ he declared. ‘The press is our immune system. If we overreact to everything we actually get sicker.’

The Australian writer–activist Guy Rundle, who was in the crowd that day, did not see things so simply. Modern politics was indeed a shouting match, he reported on the news website Crikey, but political dilemmas this complex would never be solved by ‘asking everyone to play nice’. Not all responses to problems were even equally valid, and some, like those floated regularly on Fox News, were ‘pernicious in their error’. Was it possible that this model of liberal progressivism – one that made rational appeals to a mass of sensible citizens in a universal political language – had reached a dead end?

This short essay does not appear in the new collection of Rundle’s writing, Practice: Journalism, essays and criticism, but its theme – the tension between the breakdown of political communication and the urgent need for progressive action – appears throughout. In pieces for Crikey, the socialist magazine Arena, and elsewhere, Rundle pulls the rug out from under our politics, insisting that we’re plunging headlong into economic, social, and ecological disaster, and that there doesn’t seem to be anything we can do about it.

The world, according to writer Oliver Bullough, has a problem. One unexpected consequence of globalisation and the liberalisation of financial policy has been an increasing flow of money across borders. This has given rise to a new global élite. Aided by seemingly respectable lawyers, bankers, and real estate agents, it operates largely beyond the reach of domestic regulation. That would be concerning enough if the élite’s wealth was hard earned; it becomes particularly alarming when much of that wealth is derived from corruption. In the world this élite inhabits – what Bullough labels ‘Moneyland’ – dollars, pounds, and euros trump all.

Bullough is an Oxford-educated Brit whose cynical worldview was shaped by seven years in Russia, largely as a Reuters correspondent. He witnessed the rise of President Vladimir Putin and specialised in the post-conflict areas of the Caucasus. These experiences were articulated in his first two books, Let Our Fame Be Great (2010, on Chechnya) and The Last Man in Russia (2013, shortlisted for the Orwell Prize). He publishes widely and brings this journalistic pedigree to bear in this deeply reported, fast-paced work of non-fiction.

for Graham

Even the waves of the sea, in the distance, have turned to stone.
The blue/green rising into outcrops, ridgelines, a lone bull
falling into half-solid ground. How the bull and the fall
hover inside him. How the waves never quite dissolve –
the sway of them, their shudder, leaching into the soil.

Almost all historical events are attended by myths, some of them remarkably persistent, but Australia’s involvement in the Vietnam War has perhaps more than its fair share. Mark Dapin has set out to dispel what he sees as six of these myths, which he first encountered working on his book The Nashos’ War, published in 2014.

The first myth is that all the national servicemen who went to Vietnam volunteered for this assignment. This proposition is repeated in various Australian texts about the war, but Dapin demonstrates that it is not true. It was true that in the Great War and almost entirely in World War II all the Australians who served overseas were volunteers, and the same applied to those who were part of the National Service scheme of the 1950s and posted outside Australia. But the whole point of the conscription ballot, introduced in late 1964 by the Menzies government, was to boost the army with men who could be sent to fight overseas. This was the government’s explicit policy, and it would have been completely undermined if national servicemen had been allowed to refuse to go to Vietnam when their unit was posted there.

When Alison Croggon’s theatre review blog Theatre Notes closed in late 2012 after eight years in existence, its demise was met with a response akin to grief. The first blog of its kind in Australia, and one of the most enduring anywhere, TN became essential reading for anyone interested in Australian performance. Croggon’s often expansive and always erudite critical commentary earned her an international following (and, in 2009, the Geraldine Pascall Prize for Critic of the Year, the first time it went to an online critic).

Moreover, the reviews and essays on Theatre Notes were able to catalyse debate – much of it, in stark contrast to what usually passes for online conversation, respectful, informed, and cogently argued – in a way few comparable blogs have managed. If the typically unnuanced print versus digital debates of the mid-to-late-2000s were won and lost anywhere it was on Theatre Notes, a blog that, arguably more than any other, succeeded in combining the best traditions of newspaper criticism – curiosity, wit, and rigorous argumentation – with the internet’s most promising advantages, especially its potential for wideranging dialogue and community-building, and, above all, its unconstrained space.

People who were university students at a particular time often like to regard those years as exceptional, a perspective which, embellished by nostalgia, memoirs, and media hype, can take on mythic proportions. A case in point is the concurrence of people and talent that led to a high point in student theatre at the University of Sydney during the late 1950s and early 1960s.

In a theatre context, ‘New Wave’ describes the perceived beginning, at the end of the 1960s, of modern Australian drama. Theatre historians like Michelle Arrow and Geoffrey Milne have pointed out that the notion that this was where it all started ignores the work of playwrights from the 1920s onwards, and considers the success of Ray Lawler’s Summer of the Seventeenth Doll in 1955 a virtual anomaly before 1970.

Robyn Dalton and Laura Ginters suggest that historians have also underestimated the flourish at Sydney University and its ramifications, in later collaborations, of those who were involved. For them it is the ‘ripples’ that preceded the Wave: small perhaps, but influential in what followed. They avoid claims of a golden age. As Clive James wryly remembered forty years later, ‘it looks like the biggest concentration of talent in the universe but it was just an historical accident’. That some of those involved later became known nationally (the Johns Bell, Gaden, and Tasker, Richard Wherrett, Leo Schofield, Bob Ellis) and internationally (Germaine Greer, Clive James himself, Robert Hughes, Les Murray, Bruce Beresford, and Madeleine St John) no doubt added retrospective lustre.

Her voice
weeps
sin-
g-
ing
to
God
o-
n a
fre-
quen-
cy
that tu-
nes
out he-
r
cries. We’-
ve
only jus-
t
begun
to fr-
ea-
k —
t-
he
d-
read
l-
on-
ging
to be
cl-
ose
to Y-
ou
wh-
o
tears each soul
to s-
hr-
eds.
Hurting each
other, b-
ut
c-
oming
back f-
or
more.
As i-
f
hurt
is
what
matters.

Charles Bernstein

In his début collection of essays, This Young Monster, Charlie Fox pays homage to a range of artistic icons (or ‘monsters’) who revel in freakish and reckless play. His creatures of choice include filmmakers Buster Keaton and Rainer Werner Fassbinder, photographers Diane Arbus and Larry Clark, performance artist Leigh Bowery, poet Arthur Rimbaud, and many others. These characters move Fox to confront the question: ‘What’s it like to be a monster and what kind of art does such an identification demand you make?’

Fox’s writings come from a personal critical perspective, but he is clearly more interested in transformation and obfuscation than divulgence. He inhabits his subjects’ identities with playful abandon, his sensibility akin to the slightly twisted incarnations and reverential camp parodies of cultural figures by authors Wayne Koestenbaum, Kevin Killian, and Derek McCormack. Their spirit of ‘visitation’ and frivolous role-playing permeates all the collected works here. Like Walter Pater (and like many of Fox’s monsters), the author reveals himself to be a ‘mask’ – many masks – ‘without the face’. In ‘Spook House’, a chapter written as a play script, Fox summons Klaus Kinski (himself in character as Nosferatu), Harry Potter’s Hermione Granger (in a Wicked Witch costume), and Michael Jackson (as a scarecrow) as mouth-pieces for his peregrinations. Here we see most vividly the kinds of masquerades and distorted mirrors that he is keen to evoke in his style of cultural criticism.

Care and compassion, a fair go, freedom, honesty, trustworthiness, respect, and tolerance. These were the nine ‘Australian values’ that former Liberal Opposition Leader Brendan Nelson demanded be taught in schools, especially Islamic schools, across the nation in 2005. How? Partly through the tale of John Simpson and his donkey, Murphy. They clambered selflessly up and down Gallipoli’s Shrapnel Valley with the bodies of Anzacs on their backs like Sisyphus’s boulder, their forty days of toil ended by a sniper’s bullet. Never mind that Simpson’s real surname was Kirkpatrick; that he did the equivalent work of many nameless others; or that Simpson was an illegal Geordie immigrant who had enlisted just for the free ticket back to England. ‘The man with the donkey’ has consistently proven too useful a tool to question for war recruiters and other patriotic tub-thumpers.

Wayne Macauley, long one of Australia’s deadliest satirists, has also found it difficult to leave Simpson and Murphy alone. His short story ‘ Simpson and his Donkey Go Looking for the Inland Sea’ first appeared in Westerly back in 2001, before being republished in Macauley’s surreal collection, Other Stories (2010). This new novella expands but does not dramatically alter that story. In both, Simpson has survived Gallipoli thanks to a mysterious vial of water given to him by a wounded soldier named Lasseter. Simpson, back on Australian shores but still committed to his role as ‘helpmate to the dying’, believes that finding more of this magical substance will allow him to save the country’s ailing: ‘I will stand knee-deep in the healing water baptising all our downtrodden.’ Confusingly, this quest leads him not towards Lasseter’s famously misplaced gold reef but to the Inland Sea, the enormous (and non-existent) body of water that once tricked Charles Sturt into dragging a boat from Adelaide to the Simpson Desert and back again. This conglomeration of Aussie myths and legends is slightly disorientating at first – one almost expects Simpson to encounter a drop bunyip-yowie – but it is effective as a broad allegory for the way solutions to this country’s deepest injustices always shimmer just out of reach.

The plethora of crime stories is such that, in order to succeed, they must either follow a well-trodden narrative path and do so extremely well, or run with a high concept and hope for the best. Having the word ‘girl’ in the title doesn’t hurt. Readers are familiar with genre tropes, to the point of being high-functioning literary detectives, ready to sniff out lapses in logic and to scream at the page (or at a screen) when a plot goes haywire. Treat aficionados of crime fiction with contempt, and you’re dead in the water.

Building a novel around a single concept is risky and difficult to pull off. In choosing this route, Northern Irish débutant James Delargy quickly writes himself into a corner in 55 (Simon & Schuster, $29.99 pb, 426 pp, 9781471184635). The idea must have seemed genius at the time. A battered man called Gabriel wanders into a police station in the remote Pilbara town of Wilbrook. Appearing terrified, he claims to have just escaped from the clutches of an outback serial killer named Heath, who was about to make Gabriel victim number fifty-five. Shortly thereafter, another injured man is led into the station by a local who caught him trying to steal his car. His name is Heath, and he claims to have just escaped from a serial killer called Gabriel, who – well, you get the idea.

What does it mean to live in a place but never to fully belong to it? How does our capacity for intimacy alter when we are in exile? How do we forge an identity among haphazard collisions of cultures and histories?

These are the questions that Melanie Cheng has limned with potent and eloquent effect in her acclaimed short story collection Australia Day (2017), which won the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for an Unpublished Manuscript in 2016 as well as the Prize for Fiction in 2018. The stories in Australia Day chart the baffling cultural and psychic dislocations of a diverse ensemble of characters: people out of place and searching for connection. There is damage and disaffection in these stories, but also unexpected consolations and new configurations of identity. The accretion of experiences in Australia Day gives the collection a powerful cumulative intelligence; read together the stories present a richly tessellated pattern of alienation and connection, of containment and release.

Room for a Stranger explores similar terrain. A young Chinese man is forced to participate in an unusual homeshare program that places students in the homes of the elderly in exchange for companionship and household help. Andy Chan has moved to Melbourne from Hong Kong to study biomedicine; the failure of his family’s cleaning business necessitates his move to the spare bedroom of Meg Hughes’s suburban home. ‘Andy would save money on rent and Meg would sleep more soundly,’ Cheng tells us. ‘It was a win-win situation.’

The American writer bell hooks had characterised the 1990s as a period of ‘collusion’ between well-educated white women and the capitalist patriarchy (Where We Stand: Class matters, 2000). The new workplace gave these women greater economic power but curbed their agency in altering the structures of the ruling system. All the while, division of labour at home remained more or less unchanged, with women as the primary contributors. This made them feel, hooks recalls, ‘betrayed both by the conventional sexism … and by the feminism, which insisted work was liberating’ without addressing the dearth of job opportunities for women of less privileged classes.

Sonia Orchard’s second novel, Into the Fire, catapults the reader into a world rife with this ideological conflict. The novel begins with the thirty-something Lara arriving at a house in southern Victoria that was burnt down a year ago in a fire that ended her best friend’s life. The sight brings back memories of when everything started.

The year is 1990. Two decades have elapsed since Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch; Cultural Studies is booming; the gentrification of Fitzroy is in full swing. Suburban domesticity is a thing of the past, at least as far as Women Studies’ majors Lara and her best friend, Alice, are concerned. The vote, the pill, and no-fault divorce are faits accomplis. Now, possibilities radiate a vague, exhilarating sense of reality. Lara and Alice bond in the reassurance that they are ‘the women who would have it all’, if they want. Most of all, it is the coming-together in the promise of being ‘different’ – from their mothers’ lives – that cements their sisterhood.

The first thing one notices about Jaclyn Moriarty’s Gravity Is the Thing is its narrative voice: distinctive, almost stylised. Exclamation marks, emphasised words in italics, a staccato rhythm, and clever comments in parentheses add up to a writing style sometimes deemed quirky. This style is not restricted to the voice of the first-person narrator but rather is a lens through which the work and its characters are cast. It reflects, more broadly, the author’s playful approach to language (as seen, too, in her website and blogs).

Moriarty is known for her witty, imaginative fiction for children and young adults, which has garnered such prizes as the NSW Premier’s Literary Award, the Queensland Literary Award, and the Aurealis Award. While Moriarty’s 2007 adult début, I Have a Bed Made of Buttermilk Pancakes, was titled and packaged to highlight its whimsy, the cover of her second adult novel, Gravity Is the Thing, suggests contemporary realist fiction with a contemplative tone. (Interestingly, the book’s North American publisher, HarperCollins, has opted for a quirky illustrated cover design reminiscent of Brooke Davis’s Lost and Found.) The book is aimed at the popular market and carries glowing endorsements from bestselling Irish author Marian Keyes, as well as another successful Moriarty – Jaclyn’s sister Liane.

In Driving Into the Sun, Marcella Polain – winner of the Anne Elder Award, the Patricia Hackett Prize, and more – has done an excellent job of capturing the inner emotional landscape of a young girl growing up fatherless in Perth’s outer suburbia in the 1960s. She recreates an era of television westerns and Bakelite phones, a time when Perth residents had just learned to worry about unlocked doors and windows, and when you could buy a house and land for $14,000 – if you were a man. If you were a woman with $13,000, as the novel points out, you needed a man to stand guarantor for the rest.

Young Orla Blest’s main concern is trying to persuade her parents to buy her a horse, until her father dies suddenly. Unable to believe him dead, she awaits his return. Still in primary school, she is given much of the responsibility for looking after her tomboyish pre-schooler sister, Deebee, when her mother has to go out to work full-time. Orla must also deal with the conventional childhood issues of school, Christmas, betrayal by a ‘best friend’, a mutual blackmail pact with her sister, the possibility of miracles, not stepping on cracks for fear of breaking her mother’s back, and the differences between boys and girls. While largely ignoring anything that happens further away than Perth, she is a consistently faithful reporter of the adult behaviour she sees, even when she doesn’t completely understand their fixation on finances, fidelity, and fashion, or their worries about a possible prowler, or a sibling rivalry honed over decades.

Driving Into the Sun deserves to share shelf space with The Merry-Go-Round in the Sea and The Shark Net for its evocative description of Australian childhood in a much-mythologised decade.

Which poets have most influenced you?

Reading Auden and Eliot in high school helped lighten my depression, or at least accompanied me through it. When I started writing poetry in my early thirties, my first teacher, Alan Wearne, read us ‘The Day Lady Died’ by Frank O’Hara. Later, John Forbes got me into Ted Berrigan’s So Going Around Cities and the Sonnets. O’Hara, Berrigan, then Ashbery, Padgett, Hejinian, and Coolidge all shook me up and loosened me up, exploding and extending what I’d understood as ‘poetry’. Other poets who had a strong impact were Yannis Ritsos, Fernando Pessoa, Yves Bonnefoy, John Anderson, Richard Hugo, John Scott, and Gig Ryan.

What circumstances are ideal for writing poetry?

A bit of space and peace are good for writing poetry. I like to feel warm, so a small electric heater should be blowing on my ankles.

In Melissa Ferguson’s impressive sci-fi début, wealthy, tech-enhanced Homo sapiens cordon themselves off behind a shining wall. In the desert outside their City (‘City 1’), ‘Demi-Citizens’ live in slum conditions, riddled with disease, hunger, and mistrust. Among them is orphaned Alida, who hustles to support her sister, Graycie, by scavenging and occasionally being trafficked inside City 1’s wall, where she is prostituted by the dodgy Freel. The City is serviced by a population of cloned Neanderthals. Considered ‘lesser’, they work as nannies, factory workers, and security officers.

Ferguson’s imagined territory is exuberantly populous and satisfyingly specific. The author has dealt carefully with her world’s scientific and ethical mechanics: the details are co-dependent and considered. But the real fizz, the compulsive energy of the novel, comes from how closely her new environment analogises the features of our age. Sex, surveillance, class, corporate control, propaganda, unionism, inequality, trafficking, surrogacy, hate speech, entitlement, wealth as a marker of worth – all are represented here. Wars are streamed on live-feed, mental illness can lead to the revocation of citizenship, mind implants teach, heal, and control. These issues are not given mere lip service; they are occupied by characters and situations. This lends oomph to a critique of late capitalism’s tyranny. Of Alida: ‘She’d worked her butt off to get ahead, but without privilege or clout it was worth shit-all.’

The novel is deftly narrated. There are bold and complementary plotlines and likeable, imperfect characters. The tone is cleverly light and riddled with slang, which sits well against the bleak setting. The recourse to Australian jargon echoes Mad Max: here too there is dusty, half-baked nonchalance among AI-enhanced vehicles, rampant biological meddling, and brave, self-possessed heroines. Ferguson’s work is entertaining and empathetic. It champions courage and care, even in the midst of inequality and a clearly stacked system.

The name of Julia Sorell – the granddaughter of an early governor – never quite died in Tasmania. A faint memory survived of a high-spirited young woman who was the belle of Hobart, a woman who broke hearts and engagements, including one with the current governor’s son. (It was also rumoured – with political intent – that she seduced his father, Sir John Eardley-Wilmot.) An element of scandal arose all the more readily because her own mother had deserted her father for a military man, and had run off with him when he returned to his regiment in India.

Indeed, Mrs Sorell had taken Julia and her younger siblings specially to Brussels, where she foisted them on their gubernatorial grandfather. Thrown on her own resources, the girl became self-reliant and extroverted, the life of every party – she knew how to work the room long before the concept existed. Julia returned to Tasmania, and there lived a charmed life, at the peak of colonial society, occupying her mother’s place in her father’s household. She had, as Hoban points out, all the independence and privileges of a married woman; at the same time, young and beautiful and of marriageable age, she also had the attention of every man who entered her circle. She was not disposed to marry, at least not hastily.

Where are you happiest?

Camping at Thurra River in the Croajingalong National Park, swimming in its tannin estuary, cooking fresh fish, gossiping while walking its long white beaches, watching the sea eagles soar.

What do you consider the most specious virtue?

Loyalty. It seems an essentially masculine virtue, designed for armies and other hierarchies. Where is the virtue in being loyal to a venal and incompetent manager?  

In an address to the National Prayer Breakfast (8 February 2018), President Donald Trump called the United States a ‘nation of believers’. As evidence, he reminded his audience that the American currency includes the phrase ‘In God We Trust’ and that the Pledge of Allegiance is ‘under God’. Trump omitted that, in their present state, these godly references date only from the Cold War era of the 1950s. Secularists had in the nineteenth century repulsed several efforts to have mottos of this ilk permanently imposed upon the nation or the constitution. Trump should – but will not – read Timothy Verhoeven, who addresses Church-State separation after the Revolutionary era, and who provides sober reflection on the complexities of the dividing line between politics and religion in American history.

Readers will probably be unsurprised by the historical US penchant for embracing moral reforms of a quasireligious character, from alcohol and drug prohibition to anti-prostitution and antislavery activism to anti-abortion laws. Perhaps less obvious or understood for the foreign observer than the swirl of evangelical religious influence is the strict separation of church and state, a distinction which does not allow a wide latitude for state support of religious schools, as in contemporary Australia.

Andrew S. Curran recounts the only meeting between the two great philosophes Denis Diderot and Voltaire early in 1778 when Diderot, aged sixty-five, insulted Voltaire, then eighty-five, by averring that contemporary playwrights (including, by implication, the two of them) would not brush Shakespeare’s testicles if they walked between his legs. Two months later, Voltaire was dead; a few weeks later, Jean-Jacques Rousseau also died, aged sixty-six. Diderot – regarded by many as the greatest of the three – lived a little longer, until 1784. The last words his daughter Marie-Angélique heard him say were ‘the first step towards philosophy is incredulity’.

Diderot was born in 1713 into a family of master cutlers in the fortified hilltop town of Langres, north of Dijon in eastern France. Originally destined for a clerical career, he dismayed his respectable parents by turning his back on the church and then, after studies in Paris, on religion altogether. He lived a life of prodigiously creative brilliance, captured here with verve and deep erudition by Curran.

I wanted to like this memoir very much, not least because the inside of the book jacket promises, with some originality, a ‘not-uncritical love letter to Paris’. People (myself included) have a tendency to wax rhapsodic about France’s capital, but anyone who has ever lived there for any length of time knows just how dispiriting the reality of daily life can be. British writer and art critic Michael Peppiatt’s tales of neighbourhood stabbings, communal toilets, and the woman at the local boulangerie who always responds to his orders with a ‘Comment?’ or, more rudely, ‘Quoi?’ – just to remind him of his lowly status as a foreigner – are all too familiar. But Paris and its contradictions, we learn, are only partly responsible for this Englishman’s anguish over his identity.

Encouraged by a Francophile father – who sees in their surname a diminutive of ‘Pépin’ and a link to Carolingian royalty – Peppiatt takes a job in Paris as an arts editor after his graduation. The Existential Englishman is the story of his life there between 1966 and 1994, told in the present tense and structured around the various apartments he inhabits. We follow his path across the city, from a Spartan room in the 14ème arrondissement’s Alésia to a series of flats in the then-unfashionable Marais where, among the narrow streets and derelict hôtels particuliers, he finds his spiritual home. Not for Peppiatt the cultural beacon of the Left Bank, but rather these ‘high and mighty houses’ abandoned with the French Revolution, which, despite having been ‘subject to every known depredation’ and ‘chopped into sordid little dwellings’, he finds ‘infinitely more poignant, more fully historical and more human than ever’. An interest-free loan from employer Le Monde permits him to buy his own small piece of the Marais, which he sets about furnishing with carefully chosen antiques and the work of artist friends.

Bella Li

The first words I ever read by Mike Brearley were in my first Wisden Cricketers’ Almanack, the 1976 edition: they were a tribute to his long-time teammate at Middlesex, wicketkeeper John Murray. The tone was warm, generous, and largely conventional, with a single shaft of cool intelligence that stayed with me. Murray once confided in Brearley that his seemingly effortless style did not always come naturally; sometimes he had to force himself into the requisite shapes and attitudes. ‘I do not mean that he went through the motions,’ Brearley hastened to observe. ‘There is a respectable, anti-Stanislavski theory of acting which says that the actor should let feeling follow bodily movement and gesture, rather than the other way round.’

Wisden was a staid read in those days, and ten-year-old me rejoiced in an observation so unusual, so oblique. I did not know who Brearley was; he had not at that point even played for England, let alone become one of its most revered captains. I was certainly unaware he’d read classics and moral sciences at Cambridge. But it is interesting that I should have first noted his remarks of cricket as performance, as personal expression, and as aesthetic experience, because these have remained preoccupations of his journalism, some of which is collected in Brearley on Cricket.

The Birth of Ethics is a remarkably ambitious and innovative work by one of Australia’s most eminent philosophers. It is the full-length statement of an argument originally set out in Philip Pettit’s 2015 Berkeley Tanner Lectures on Human Values. The aim of the book is to ‘offer an account of ethics … that makes sense of how we come to be an ethical species’. The extraordinary intellectual creativity of this book has to be understood in the context of the historical currents it opposes and the way it attempts to shift the ground of the debate.

Pettit’s heterodoxy consists in his being both a moral realist and a metaphysical naturalist. Moral realism is the view that at least some moral claims are true, in the same sense that descriptive claims about the world can be true. Naturalism in philosophy is an ontological commitment that the materials from which theories are constructed should consist only of entities, phenomena, and causal relationships that are recognised in the natural sciences. With few exceptions, moral philosophy since the early twentieth century has tended to see naturalism as incompatible with a full-blooded moral realism. The heart of the problem is that true moral claims are ordinarily conceived as bearing universal authority. The claim, for example, that killing an innocent person is wrong expresses a reason for not killing that ought to be compelling for any person, regardless of who or when or where she is or whatever individual desires she may happen to have. A number of influential theories have held that a properly scientific view of the world leaves no room for the mysterious authority of the moral.

In 1987, Allan Bloom published his best-selling book, The Closing of the American Mind. The American mind must have remained sufficiently open to allow it, three decades hence, to be coddled. The mind that is being closed or coddled is, in the first instance, the young adult mind in its formative stage – at university. Cultural anxiety about what is going on at universities is nothing new. The latest manifestation is The Coddling of the American Mind. Developing their thesis first articulated in an article in The Atlantic, the authors, Greg Lukianoff, a lawyer focusing on the First Amendment and the president of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (‘FIRE’), and Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist, set out to analyse the particular cultural moment in which American universities find themselves.

Lukianoff and Haidt identify the three ‘Great Untruths’: ‘The Untruth of Fragility: What Doesn’t Kill You Makes You Weaker’; ‘The Untruth of Emotional Reasoning: Always Trust Your Feelings’; and ‘The Untruth of Us Versus Them: Life is a Battle Between Good People and Bad People’. These ‘untruths’, they argue, have been used in parenting and education over the last two to three decades, with the consequences that iGen (or Generation Z) – people born from 1995 onwards, the first generation of people who have grown up in a world in which the internet has been pervasive from the time they were conscious – have internalised them. For Lukianoff and Haidt, this generational shift explains why the problems identified on college campuses have become so prominent and acute (from 2013 onwards, members of Generation Z started entering universities). The authors then proceed to document what they consider to be the evidence for the problem of coddling young minds at university: trigger warnings, safe spaces, micro-aggressions, call-out culture, no platforming, and identity politics. Having explored these manifestations of the problem on university campuses, they then seek to identify the underlying reasons for them. The causes of this phenomenon are not limited to universities, nor could they be. Universities are part of society, so understandably what occurs in society at large is reflected in universities. Lukianoff and Haidt point out that political polarisation on college campuses unsurprisingly reflects political polarisation in the United States more generally. They note that this polarisation informs and reinforces increasing self-segregation: people living in communities of the like-minded, with fewer interactions with those of different views. This is facilitated by the collapse of mass experience, most notably in relation to the profound changes to media and technology. Within a generation, three national commercial television networks have been eclipsed by social media platforms, allowing for individualised content consumption and creation.

In Breaking Point: The future of Australian cities, Peter Seamer quotes satirist H.L. Mencken: ‘There is always an easy solution to every human problem – neat, plausible, and wrong.’ Seamer, a former CEO of the Victorian Planning Authority, Federation Square, and the City of Sydney, has written a clear, pragmatic, and readable account of the complexity of Australia’s urban development. Thinking critically about cities is an urgent task in order to accommodate an estimated additional 11.8 million people by 2046, seventy-five per cent of whom are expected to live in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, and Perth.

While Australia’s cities are famously among the world’s most liveable, they face real and immediate challenges. Soaring house prices, ageing infrastructure, congested public and private transport systems, suburban sprawl, tall buildings of dubious quality, limited response to environmental and climate change pressures, and growing inequality that is manifested in spatial divides all place stress on the country’s urban development, living standards, and economic growth. Based on his years in the planning and management of Australian cities, Seamer proposes an array of ideas that will be more or less controversial in planning circles. His broad approach is evolutionary. ‘Behavioural change,’ he writes, ‘can be nudged rather than forced.’ Well-considered policies and a rational, evidence-based approach to planning can ‘encourage’ types of future work, transport, and consumption behaviours that could preserve the liveability of Australian cities.

Not many peoples are able to read poems in their language written one thousand years ago, as Persian speakers in Iran, Afghanistan, and Tajikistan do today with Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh, meaning the ‘Book of Kings’. The Shahnameh is Iran’s national epic, a vast compilation of pre-Islamic Iranian myths, legends, and imperial history. The summa of the life of Hakim Abol-Qasem Tusi, known by his honorific name Ferdowsi, at 50,000 couplets it is the world’s longest epic poem written by a single poet; it took the devoted poet just over thirty years to write. From its arrival in 1010 ce, the Shahnameh has powerfully shaped poetic writing in Persian and has been credited by scholars with preserving the modern Persian language. Outside Persian, even Turkic, Azerbaijani, Ottoman, Georgian, and Kurdish literary traditions have felt its influence, while Matthew Arnold’s highly popular and beautiful Victorian retelling of the story of ‘Sohrab and Rustum’ is but one instance of its impact, in translation, in European languages.

Its scope is titanic: through sixty-two stories, told in 990 chapters, the Shahnameh tells the story of a people and a land, the Iranians and Iranshahr (‘Greater Iran’), from a cosmogonic, to a mythic, to a historical age. Expectedly, the cast of characters is enormous, ranging from gods, monsters, and mythical animals to warrior kings, troublesome courtesans, and unruly, disobedient offspring. Uniquely, the central character of the poem is Iran itself, not, say, a war (the Iliad), or an individual (Beowulf).

Night Parrot by Penny Olsen is more than a biography of a bird that spent most of the twentieth century successfully hiding from people. It is a historical biography of human determination and obsession, and of the ways in which this bird has acted as a catalyst for transitions between those two psychological states.

Indeed, the book itself is a product of extreme determination: the preface that acknowledges the number and diversity of sources and people consulted is extensive and impressive. The rediscovery of a live population of the Night Parrot in 2013 triggered the decision to produce the book. Much of it is apparently based on material put together for a historically focused work that was set aside. This background now serves as a slow-burning fuse to a clear challenge to the integrity of some recent observations and claims. This is a thorough, brave, and important book. Its impact has been extensive and swift.

Readers may be familiar with Dr Olsen’s similar book on the (some would add ‘supposedly’) extinct Paradise Parrot. The current book, copiously illustrated, follows much the same integration of history based on European explorers’ diaries, Indigenous information (historical and contemporary), museum specimens, letters and publications from ornithologists, and occasional police records. She also includes contemporary art works and some recent poetry by John Kinsella. Even without the renaissance of the species, this would have made an entertaining and enlightening read.

Original voices are always slippery to describe. The familiar weighing mechanisms don’t work very well when the body of work floats a little above the weighing pan, or darts around in it. As in dreams, a disturbing familiarity may envelop the work with an elusive scent. It is no different for poetry than for any other art: the mercurial alloy, or unforeseen offspring, astonish and perturb. They divide opinion. The reception to date of Emma Lew’s poetry, gathered for the first time in her New and Selected Poems, demonstrates this effect.

Crow College takes an uneven number of poems from Lew’s two full-sized collections, The Wild Reply (1997) and Anything the Landlord Touches (2002). A number of the new poems previously appeared in a Vagabond Press Rare Objects chapbook, Luminous Alias (2013). While these new poems are as strong as the earlier ones, they contain a larger proportion of pantoums. Unlike other critics, I regard most of these as less successful than the more organically organised poems. The constraint is often too apparent, and the content made to fit.