It was a great moment in Australian history when William Cooper walked to the Australian parliament to object to the treatment of Jews in Germany during World War II. At the time, the British and Australian parliaments were ambivalent about the atrocities occurring across Europe, and yet an Aboriginal man could not bear to see the government of his country sit on its hands.

Cooper knew a thing or two about oppression, racism, and the way societies allow injustice to cut a swath through an undesired element simply by looking above the heads of brutes enlisted to perpetrate evil until the civilised commercial interests can lower their gaze from their heavens and say, oh, what a shame, they have all disappeared. Every population can find brutes to do the killing, and every population has a vast number who calmly accept the largesse created by such abominable work.

Listen to this essay read by the author.

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander readers are advised that the following essay contains images of people who have died.

Nah Doongh was among the first generation of Aboriginal children who grew up in a conquered land. She was born around 1800 in the Country near present-day Kingswood, just south-east of Moorroo Morack, Penrith, and she lived until the late 1890s. Her life spanned the first century of colonisation, from the invasion of her Country to the years approaching Federation. She was a contemporary of the famous Hawkesbury River matriarch and landowner Maria Lock and of the astonishing Lake Macquarie religious seer and teacher Biraban.

They, and countless other young Aboriginal men and women, endured the most difficult challenges faced by people anywhere – their lands invaded and taken by aliens, their families ravaged by devil-devil (smallpox) and terrorised by massacres and the theft of their infants. They navigated the settler world of the nineteenth century as well as their own: a new, dynamic, dangerous, hybrid world. The great biographical question of this generation is: how did these young Aboriginal people negotiate and survive these challenges? How, in archaeologist Denis Byrne’s words, did they manage to live in Country that no longer belonged to them?

Nah Doongh’s band may have been the group the settlers called the Mulgoa Tribe, people of the mulgo, the black swans of Dyarubbin, the Hawkesbury–Nepean River. She could remember the time before the white people came, when tall, dense forests still covered the river flats and the lagoons were alive with ducks, geese, and swans. As a child, she must have heard the ringing report of the white hunters’ guns echoing across the valley; in old age she talked about the way the invaders shot and drove away all the game.

By the 1880s, the old woman Nah Doongh lived in a ‘very shaky habitation’ on the Castlereagh Common, north of Penrith, with her husband, Johnny Budbury. The Commons of western Sydney were areas that settlers never took for farms and estates; instead, they were reserved for grazing cattle, for cutting timber, and as a flood refuge. Aboriginal people often lived on them.

Johnny Budbury died one day when the winds were howling. Nah Doongh then kept company with King Charlie, who was probably from Mulgoa. But in July 1885 he died, too. Nah Doongh was alone.

Penrith was still a big, slow, sprawling country town at that time. Set in the Nepean farming districts and on the road and railway heading west over the Blue Mountains, it served the local community of small farmers, orchardists, an army of railway workers, and a few of the old local gentry whose estates hadn’t yet been subdivided for small farms and ‘orchard blocks’. There were also Aboriginal groups living around Yarramundi, at the Black Town (now Plumpton), up in The Gully in Katoomba, in the Burragorang Valley to the south, and at the Sackville Aboriginal Reserve on the Hawkesbury. But Nah Doongh avoided these groups. She mixed with the white people and was well known in the local community. They called her ‘Black Nellie’, ‘Queen Nellie’, or ‘poor old Nellie’.

After King Charlie died, Nah Doongh was also called ‘the last of her tribe’. As in so many cases, this cliché was untrue; it had far more to do with the settler belief that Aboriginal people would eventually vanish from the earth than with reality. Because of this belief, settlers were constantly making records about Aboriginal people, their language and culture, and collecting their stone tools and other artefacts. It was a kind of memorial archiving, carried out while Aboriginal people were still alive. Old Aboriginal people were especially sought out for interviews and photographs. Nah Doongh was photographed at least twice. One is a close-up portrait of her in old age: she gazes off to one side, her ill-fitting bodice fixed with a pin. In another full-length portrait she stands beside a house, wearing a long dress with buttons down the bodice and a white apron. She looks a little bemused. Her left hand is misshapen, her arm hangs limp at her side. In her right hand she grasps a sturdy walking stick.

What was your pathway to publishing?

Unusual and accidental. My Uncle, who was on the management board of Magabala Books, told my dad there was a job going. I was nineteen and needed a job, so I sent my CV. I had zero experience in publishing, had never heard of Magabala, and didn’t choose the ‘pub’ life. After a two-hour phone interview, Peter Bibby, the then managing editor, told me I had the job and asked me when could I get there. I was in Perth at the time. A week later I stole my brother’s bike, packed my bag, and got on a plane. I was first employed as a project editor. Sometime later, Magabala had three positions for trainee editors. I performed so badly at the interview that the committee didn’t want to give me the job, but for some reason they did. I learnt everything on the job and in later positions. I have had the most amazing teachers throughout my career.

How many titles do you publish each year?

We’ve capped the titles between fourteen and sixteen. We’re a small team: to do justice to our creators and books, we’re committed to doing them well and within our capacity.

Which book are you proudest of publishing?

If the number of reviews and interviews are indicators of a new book’s impact, Tony Birch’s novel The White Girl has landed like a B-format sized asteroid. Birch’s publisher estimates a substantial number of reviews and other features since publication. I’ve consulted none of them. Usually I can’t help myself from immersing myself in any and all artefacts of literary reception. With The White Girl I wanted to stay with the work, stay with Odette Brown and with Sissy, stay on the fringes of the fictional town called Deane, stay on that train to the big smoke – stay with The White Girl and reflect on where it took me.

Set in early 1960s country Australia, The White Girl opens with Odette Brown rising with the sun, ‘as she did each morning’. One might call Odette a matriarch, but I simply want to refer to her as a woman I am familiar with. Odette (I am resisting the urge to refer to her as ‘Aunt’) is an Everywoman, an every Koori, Murri, Nyoongar, Nunga, Goorie, and every other kind of us-woman. Odette thinks deeply and does what needs to be done. She loves her family, those living and the ones who have already passed. Getting to know the deceased members of Odette’s family reminds me of my knowing since childhood my own maternal great-grandmother, although she passed away two months before I was born.

Wiradjuri writer Tara June Winch is not afraid to play with the form and shape of fiction. Her dazzling début, Swallow the Air (2006), is a short novel in vignettes that moves quickly through striking images and poetic prose. Her second book, After the Carnage (2017), a wide-ranging short story collection, is set in multiple countries. Winch’s new novel, The Yield, is partly written in reclaimed Wiradjuri dictionary entries.

Three different voices narrate The Yield in bite-sized chapters: dictionary maker and elder Albert Gondiwindi, his granddaughter August, and nineteenth-century missionary Reverend Greenleaf. It takes some time to get used to this structure, but ultimately it is rewarding. The different perspectives introduce us to life in the place where the Gondiwindi family live: Prosperous House, in the fictional town of Massacre Plains. Abbreviating, the Aboriginal characters call it ‘Massacre’. This contraction is pointed: Winch reminds us we are in a site of settler–invader violence, one without a treaty. Admirers of Kim Scott’s Taboo and Melissa Lucashenko’s Too Much Lip will enjoy Winch’s Aboriginal realism.

August, the main character in the present-day narrative, is in her early twenties but world-weary. She comes back to Country for Pop Albert’s funeral after spending a decade abroad, running away from a past. August never had a childhood, never had a break. Often said to be depressed, she sees her country in less than flattering terms: a ‘sparse, foreboding landscape’, dripping with ‘visual heat’, where everything is ‘browner, bone-drier’.

In contemporary Aboriginal fiction, a common theme is ‘returning’ – returning to Country, family, language, and culture, all of them intertwined. August’s family, on her return, is riven by an upcoming mining decision. There is a hole left by a sister’s disappearance: a mystery decades-old. August also comes back to an old love interest, Eddie; this ‘returning novel’ offers something new in its Wiradjuri framing, a language in a state of resurgence, with a growing number of speakers. The New Wiradjuri Dictionary by Dr Uncle Stan Grant Sr and Dr John Rudder informs the language in The Yield.

It was an effective move on Winch’s part to resist writing August in the first person. Through the third-person narration we are also able to get inside the heads of other characters, to see the place from multiple angles. It is a novel that rewards readerly patience; it takes a while to realise what’s at stake. Slowly, we become entangled in the characters’ lives. With August’s parents out of action – incarcerated on drug charges (‘never mean and bad parents, just distracted, too young and too silly’) – Winch deftly unpacks relationships between grandparents and grandchildren, aunties and nieces, and cousins.

As the tin-mining company claims a stake in Massacre Plains, as pipes and fences are secured, white environmental activists descend, calling into question black and green relations, the future of the environment and native title. August imagines herself free-falling to the bottom of a tin pit. The Yield is an anti-mining novel for the present day in the wake of the approval of the Adani coal mine in central Queensland.

Tara June Winch (photograph via Wikimedia Commons)Winch is highly skilled at creating portraits and at moving us forward into space. These are not static images. Albert’s commentary on his life makes enjoyable reading: gathering for bogong moths as a child (‘Everyone was there to cook and feast on buuyang – which tasted a little like a pork chop, but more nutritious. After that I felt strong walking back to the Boys’ Home’); fishing on the long Murrumby River, a fictional version of the tributaries of the Murray–Darling basin so vital to the Wiradjuri people and other neighbouring nations. Like many Aboriginal people, Albert is quite ‘worldly’, despite not having travelled overseas. Ancestors visit him every day, mob ravaged by gulgang-gulgang, smallpox sores in a haunting passage, mob speaking from the contact war that lasted one hundred years, all offering Albert guidance on how to continue Wiradjuri survivance.

Rich with cultural knowledge, Albert’s story-in-dictionary form shows us not only how to read Wiradjuri but also how to feel and speak and taste it; it decolonises the throat and tongue. Winch asks timely questions: What does contemporary use of language look like? What can it offer us in our lives? What can it do for the overall health of our country?

The Yield is about regaining more than language. There are odes to Bruce Pascoe’s Dark Emu, with the pointed inclusions of bush food, bread, and fishing technology. There are only a few places where Winch’s delivery is too didactic, as when Nana tells August, the author speaking directly down the barrel to the reader, ‘we aren’t victims in this story anymore – don’t you see that?’

The Yield will appeal to many because of the way it unpacks complex themes in an accessible way. Australian rural novels are often humourless sketches with characters more like caricatures, grimly serious or full of despair. Refreshingly, the characters in The Yield are capable of communion, humour, and dignity despite tragedy, sexual violence, and substance abuse. In this deft novel of slow-moving water, they are borne by love, not pity.

Australia remains alone among the settler colonies for its lack of treaties with First Nations. This is despite the fact that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples in Australia have been calling for a treaty for decades – since at least the 1970s and then more forcefully during the Treaty ’88 Campaign. When Bob Hawke received the Barunga Statement in 1988 and committed the nation to a treaty, it seemed the battle was won. Two years later, Hawke reneged on his promise and instead gave us ten years of reconciliation, intended to prepare non-Indigenous Australians to negotiate more just relationships. Even that was not to be. By the end of the decade of reconciliation, John Howard had derailed the process and ‘treaty’ had become a political dirty word.

In June 2019, Australian Book Review announced the ABR Behrouz Boochani Fellowship, an initiative generously funded by Peter McMullin in association with the Peter McMullin Centre on Statelessness (University of Melbourne). This initiative was not only created to highlight issues pertaining to displacement and exile, but also as an important act of naming in the face of a border regime designed to strip human beings of their personal identities and dignity. Behrouz’s work has meticulously illustrated how Australia’s border politics drives people into submission and insanity by systematically erasing their names.

The act of naming and of erasure has far-reaching, multidimensional impacts, and is often part of dynamic collective processes. Acknowledgment and support by ABR can be better understood in relation to Behrouz’s oeuvre of critical writing and creative resistance, and also in the context of the awards he has received in Australia and internationally. In order to appreciate the different functions and dimensions associated with this new Fellowship, it is helpful to consider aspects of the organised transnational strategy Behrouz has been developing in association with various collaborators and confidants.

In 2018 Behrouz Boochani won the Anna Politkovskaya Award for Journalism. The award, announced in Ferrara, Italy, was organised by Internazionale magazine. This was a significant moment for a number of reasons. The award was established in 2009 to acknowledge and support the courageous work of distinguished reporters struggling for justice and truth-telling. Named in honour of the Russian investigative journalist who was brutally killed in 2006, the award is a testament to the brave and unrelenting contributions made by many journalists the world over. The Anna Politkovskaya Award is a way of encouraging more critical journalism and opening spaces for radically new and innovative forms of reporting. The very name of the award has both political and epistemic consequences; the award makes a historical statement and helps shape the future of journalism. It also works to incorporate cultures of resistance into the social imaginary. By winning the 2018 Anna Politkovskaya Award, Behrouz has established himself as a significant global actor in the history of reporting.

On winning the 2019 Victorian Prize for Literature, Behrouz engraved his name into Australia’s collective consciousness. His influence and example continue to reverberate throughout journalistic, literary, artistic, academic, and political circles around the world. The Wheeler Centre, which administers the Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards, decided to celebrate humanity and creativity rather than observe rigid rules. In deeming No Friend But the Mountains eligible, the Centre recognised the symbolic importance of establishing Behrouz’s name by disrupting standard bureaucracy and procedure. Other Australian awards have since followed suit.

A particular meaning-making and meaning-sharing activity takes place when a name either initiates a tradition or becomes an iconic part of a tradition. With the creation of the ABR Behrouz Boochani Fellowship, Behrouz’s name now represents both. Nonetheless, more needs to be said about the affirmation and empowerment associated with naming and how it can transcend institutions, operational networks of power, and bordering practices. 

Behrouz’s name is an indispensable element of the intellectual and creative challenge against the colonial imaginary conditioning Australia’s border regime and detention industry. Dismantling the material conditions, political representation and policies is a matter of great urgency, but this must be coupled with a transformation of the epistemic and symbolic aesthetic. Behrouz is a political actor in the fight against border violence, but he is also an artist and intellectual. The two are necessary parts of his identity and his embodied experience in what he has named Manus Prison. No Friend But the Mountains produces a new language for knowing and fighting border violence and colonialism, and his method and vision involves radically new acts of naming. Understanding this factor, I tried to embody the same philosophical and political approach in the English translation.

The Anna Politkovskaya Award was Behrouz’s first major international prize. It represented a form of recognition and appreciation he had not experienced in Australia. I was privileged to accept the award on Behrouz’s behalf. It was surreal – and a tragedy – that he could not be there to accept it himself. I also worked closely with the Internazionale a Ferrara Festival – in particular Luisa Ciffolilli, Junko Tereo, and Marina Lalovic – to organise activities and to establish networks. With their profound understanding of the significance of Behrouz’s writing and resistance, they represented a vision that included politics, art, and community. This was clear in the way they integrated Behrouz’s journalism, No Friend But the Mountains, and the film Chauka, Please Tell Us the Time into their programming. (The Italian translation of No Friend But the Mountains will be published later this year by Add Editore; there is already great interest in the book in Italy due to the award and festival.)

Omid Tofighian accepting Behrouz Boochani's Anna Politkovskaya Award at the Internazionale a Ferrara Festival 2018 (photograph supplied)

A significant number of Australian citizens are offended by the idea of removing colonial icons. They occupy digital spaces in an effort to erase or justify historical injustices. Political leaders continue to invest in celebrations of colonial glory in public spaces and further ingrain coloniality into their fabrication of Australian identity and values. In opposition, the act of naming can function as a form of resistance and has potential to disrupt and reclaim digital and public spaces. Behrouz Boochani is one of the many names that needs to reverberate in intellectual, educational, and artistic spaces, in addition to his role as a political and human rights activist.

Understood as part of other traditions of resistance, the ABR Behrouz Boochani Fellowship helps to galvanise a wider collective process. It has unlimited potential to initiate other projects and actions. The Fellowship – based on consultation, collaboration, and sharing – can be leveraged in empowering ways. An addition to the shared philosophical activity I discuss in my translator’s note, it is another call to action.

Part of a larger movement, this act of naming by ABR helps to form broader alliances and to invite the creation of more radical initiatives in future.

Where are you happiest?

Maybe on my jetty as the sun sets over the river and the only company are pelicans and cormorants. Otherwise, in ten feet of water looking at a crayfish and thinking of recipes.

What’s your idea of hell?

An office where employees are trying to make the meeting last to knock-off time.

We write about our existence pre-invasion / And that has made us visible

We write about our existence during invasion / And that keeps us visible

             walgajunmanha

                                                   walgajunmanha

                                                                                            walgajunmanha

We write about the blood they spilt / And that honours ancestors’ memories

We write about the land they stole / And that shows they are savage thieves

                                                                                                    walgajunmanha

                                                           walgajunmanha

                     walgajunmanha

We write about our connection to country / And that challenges theirs

We write about our lived realities / And that shows them we survived

             walgajunmanha

                                                   walgajunmanha

                                                                                            walgajunmanha

We write about our sky world knowledge / And that shows them the first astronomers

We write about our earth world knowledge / And that shows them a sustainable culture

                                                                                                    walgajunmanha

                                                           walgajunmanha

                     walgajunmanha

We write about our traditional food productions / And that contests their agriculture theories  

We write about our traditional mud huts / And that debunks their walkabout romanticism

             walgajunmanha

                                                   walgajunmanha

                                                                                            walgajunmanha

We write about Aboriginal deaths in custody / And that shows them we will fight back

We write about deaths in police presence / And that shows them we are not blinded by lies

                                                                                                    walgajunmanha

                                                           walgajunmanha

                     walgajunmanha

We write about our racism experiences / And that punctures their ethnocentric balloons

We write about our campaign for Aboriginal rights / And that their pen is our weapon of choice

             walgajunmanha

                                                   walgajunmanha

                                                                                            walgajunmanha

We write about deep Aboriginal culture love / And that shatters their assimilation to pieces

Charmaine Papertalk Green
This poem appears in Charmaine Papertalk Green's new collection, Nganajungu Yagu (Cordite Books, 2019).

It’s such a vivid memory. I’m sitting in the carriage of a train, travelling from Caringbah to Oatley. It’s a Saturday afternoon late in January and I am returning home after a morning of competition tennis. The members of my team, Gilmour 5, have gone their separate ways after another successful start to the year. It is 1979 and for the past two years we have won our grade undefeated, having reached the pinnacle of Junior comp tennis. I am not yet fourteen. Being a Sagittarius, born in late November, I have the best part of a year to compete as an Under 14 in the many fiercely contested junior tennis tournaments that take place all year around Sydney. Tennis is my world, doubles my specialty. This year I have my sights set on the Illawarra Lawn Tennis Association Under 14 singles title.

The rattle and rhythm of the carriage provide a welcome soundtrack for my journey. I’ve been making this journey on my own since I started Year Eight at Penshurst Girls High, when my parents finally granted me that important rite of passage. My destination is Oatley Station. The trip from the heart of The Shire to the shores of the St George District takes thirty minutes; in a pre-mobile phone world my awareness of the journey is significantly heightened. A modulation in the rhythm and melody heralds the crossing of the Georges River via the Como-Oatley Bridge. This particular day it stirs me from my reverie; something catches my attention. On a poster above the window a woman is wearing a large hat, the brim trimmed with feathers of deepest purple. The font is typical of the belle époque style, but my thirteen-year-old self simply sees it as elaborate and wonderful. The poster is advertising a coming performance, but I barely have time for the details to register it when I realise the rhythm and harmony of my journey have fallen silent. I have arrived at my destination. Time only for a last glance at the poster as the train pulls away, beginning a gentle crescendo to accompany those passengers who journeyed on.

Living, working, and being in the Indigenous space, there are times when it feels as though nothing changes. Indeed, on occasion, it can feel as though things are in fact regressing. When The Hon. Ken Wyatt AM, MP was announced as the new Minister for Indigenous Australians, after the re-election of the Morrison government, numerous family members, friends, and colleagues expressed dismay that this appeared to represent a dilution of the role, which had been, to that point, the Minister of Indigenous Affairs. In recent weeks I have come to see that having an Aboriginal man as Minister for Indigenous Australians is indeed a step forward.

Wyatt delivered his speech while I was at the Australian Historical Association’s annual conference in Toowoomba. The AHA is generally not a hotbed of radical politics; often delegates are far more comfortable in the nineteenth century than they are among contemporary politics. This time, things were different. The Uluru Statement from the Heart and constitutional reform seemed to be a common theme during sessions, morning tea, and indeed the AGM. A colleague of mine who had attended the Association for the Study of Australian Literature conference in Perth the previous week remarked that a similar Zeitgeist seemed to be evident there. It is clear to me things are changing, and that change is political, cultural, and social.

Politically, there is talk of constitutional reform. The expansive generosity of the Uluru Statement has been noted by many, and there is talk at the highest levels of government that there will be constitutional reform, though precisely what this might look like is uncertain. Despite the deliberate obfuscation of conservative commentators, it is clear that a third chamber of Parliament is not being proposed. Constitutional reform needs the support of both sides of politics. Now might just be the right time.

Culturally, we are seeing an efflorescence of Indigenous creative talent. Tony Birch’s eagerly awaited new novel has been released, along with that of Tara June Winch, both to great acclaim. Birch probes the social and the political as he movingly demonstrates how the past shapes and gives form to the present. Winch draws on the power of language (Wiradjuri) of a lexicon lost, and reclaimed. Fiction, or rather storytelling, is a hallmark of Aboriginal culture; today’s creative authors draw on thousands of years of storytelling and yarning. Through a very modern form, they continue the tradition of sharing and informing.

In June, on a cold and wet Melbourne Saturday evening, Deborah Cheetham premièred her magisterial Eumeralla, a war requiem for peace. The performance was entirely in the reclaimed Gunditjmara language. Eumeralla was sold out weeks in advance, and the effusive praise it received suggests that the audience, black and white, was both moved and awestruck. Cultural productions at all levels from highbrow to popular and vernacular are now visible, even commonplace. The wildly successful ABC television show Black Comedy, along with the film Top End Wedding, indicate that mainstream Australia has finally allowed space for Indigenous ways of telling. It would be difficult not to see this creative energy as an Indigenous renaissance and a significant cultural shift.

Social change has been remarkable too, from Acknowledgment and Welcomes to Country, to the official apology to the Stolen Generations, to changes in school curricula. The sporting arena has played an essential role in this. The NRL and AFL Indigenous rounds have promoted the significance of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander players. The pride shown by all players when promoting their club’s Indigenous-designed jerseys melds the athletic with the aesthetic.

Ash Barty’s victory at the French Tennis Open, while celebrated by many, unleashed hate-filled comments in the social media space, with criticisms of her physique and her insistence on her pride in her Ngarigo Aboriginal heritage. Sadly, racism abides, often coupled with wilful ignorance. This ignorance was perhaps best demonstrated by the treatment of dual Brownlow medallist and Sydney Football Club champion Adam Goodes. The recent documentary on the Goodes saga, The Final Quarter, revealed the thin layer of civility that covers parts of Australian society. It is telling that following the première of The Final Quarter, the AFL and all eighteen clubs apologised ‘unreservedly for our failures’. Palpably things are changing; sometimes they move forwards, sometimes they regress.

This Indigenous-themed issue of the ABR marks the start of an annual tradition. Also, in this issue for the first time, an Acknowledgment of Country has been included, a feature that will henceforth appear in each edition. This issue represents a deepening of the relationship between Monash University, in particular, the Monash Indigenous Studies Centre and ABR. The creation of the ABR Indigenous Fellowship is a welcome extension of this focus.

I am grateful to ABR for this proactive, engaged commitment to true reconciliation and Indigenous recognition. 

Brenda L. Croft is from the Gurindji/Malngin/Mudburra peoples from the Victoria River region of the Northern Territory of Australia, and Anglo-Australian/German/Irish/Chinese heritage. She has been involved in the Australian First Nations and broader contemporary arts and cultural sectors for more than three decades as an artist, arts administrator, curator, academic, and consultant. Croft’s artistic practice encompasses critical performative Indigenous auto-ethnography, Indigenous Storying, representation and cultural identity, creative narratives, installation, multimedia and multi-platform work. Croft’s work is represented in major collections in Australia and overseas. Croft is Associate Professor, Indigenous Art History and Curatorship at the Australian National University and Adjunct Research Fellow with the National Institute for Experimental Arts, UNSW Art and Design Australia, where she is completing creative-led doctoral research. She is represented by Niagara Galleries, Melbourne.

Artist’s Statement: Ghost tears #1 is a detail from the installation of twenty-one images titled Wave Hill/Victoria River Country, 2014, which was exhibited in Croft’s creative-led doctoral research project Still in my mind: Gurindji location, experience and visuality, 2017 (touring nationally until 2021) and Defying Empire: 3rd National Indigenous Art Triennial at the National Gallery of Australia, 2017.

The image was taken at the ‘top grid’ near Wave Hill on the Buntine Highway entry into the communities of Kalkaringi and Daguragu, located approximately 800 kilometres south-west of Darwin on 14 March 2016. It was nearby on 23 August 1966 that 200-plus Gurindji (Bilinarra, Nyarinyman, Malngin, Mudburra, Nyininy, Warlpiri, and associated peoples) stockmen and their families walked off Wave Hill Station, initially as an action against decades of maltreatment and abuse. This action developed into a statement of First Nations’ self-determination, instigating the birth of the national land rights movement, and garnering national and international support.

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander viewers are advised that the following article contain depictions of people who have died.

What does it mean to really know an ecosystem? To name all the plants and animals in a place and understand their interactions? To feel an embodied connection to Country? To see and hear in ways that confirm and extend that knowledge?

Indigenous ways of knowing contain such detail and depth. To the Eora people of Sydney, for example, the migratory Curriy’gun (Channel-billed Cuckoo) announced itself noisily every spring. ‘Its raucous, persistent calling alerted the Eora to the impending arrival of rain, storms and flooding.’ Similarly detailed registers of information were mapped and catalogued by songlines and knowledge systems, filling the entire continent. For the Yolŋu in Arnhem Land, flowering stringybark trees coincided with the shrinking of waterholes. And when the D’harawal people of the Shoalhaven region in southern New South Wales saw the golden wattle flowers of the Kai’arrewan (Acacia binervia), they knew that fish would be running in the rivers and that prawns would be schooling in estuarine shallows.

It was knowledge that proved valuable to colonisers, as Penny Olsen and Lynette Russell contend in their new book, Australia’s First Naturalists. The New South Wales Surveyor General Thomas Mitchell learned from Yuranigh, a Wiradjuri man who explained how curious rings of gravel and stones on the river beds were actually the nests of the eel-tailed catfish, and who showed him the leaves of the Goobang, a type of acacia that was used to poison the river to catch fish. Mitchell wrote that Yuranigh’s expertise was indispensable: ‘his intelligence and judgment rendered him so necessary to me that he was ever at my elbow’.

Bob Dixon has researched Australian Indigenous languages since the 1960s, has constructed grammars of five languages, and has written numerous scholarly books and articles on Aboriginal languages. His latest book is directed at the general reader, and it springs from his frustration at what he sees as the persistent and continuing misunderstandings in the wider Australian community about the nature and history of Australia’s Indigenous languages.

Dixon believes there is still a common view that there is only one Aboriginal language. A variant of this error is the notion that the differences between Aboriginal languages can be attributed to dialectal differences, like the differences between the dialects of Yorkshire, Lincolnshire, and Sussex. It is Dixon’s view that such misunderstandings about Indigenous languages, with concomitant judgements about the languages being ‘primitive’, have fed into other misunderstandings of Indigenous societies and cultures, enforcing the racist view of William Dampier’s 1697 description of Indigenous Australians as ‘the miserablest people in the world’, and, in Dixon’s words, becoming ‘a rationale for genocide’.

‘Fuck Australia, I hope it fucking burns to the ground.’ Sarah Maddison opens this book by quoting Tarneen Onus-Williams, the young Indigenous activist who sparked a brief controversy when her inflammatory comments about Australia were reported around 26 January 2018. For Maddison, a Professor of Politics at the University of Melbourne, Onus-Williams’s Australia Day comments (and subsequent clarification) convey a profound insight into ‘the system’. She writes:

The current system – the settler colonial system – is not working ... Yet despite incontrovertible evidence of this failure, the nation persists in governing the lives of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples in ways that are damaging and harmful, firm in its belief that with the right policy approach … Indigenous lives will somehow improve. This is the colonial fantasy.

Indeed, Maddison dismisses both ‘progressive’ and ‘conservative’ approaches to Indigenous policy as not just failing but actually covertly desiring the ‘elimination’ of Indigenous peoples. Her message for readers is that ‘[w]hite Australia can’t solve black problems because white Australia is the problem’, and while the ‘structure’ of settler colonialism endures in the institutions of Australian society, Indigenous people will fail, and things will continue to worsen. As such, she argues for a complete rethink of policy approaches to ‘Australia’s settler problem’, one that would abandon ‘the liberal settler order’ produced by the colonial fantasy for something else, although she acknowledges that the alternative to settler colonialism ‘is uncertain’ as ‘there are no easy answers’.

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander viewers are advised that the following article contain depictions of people who have died.

Philip Larkin famously suggested that ‘they fuck you up, your mum and dad’, but the alternative is usually worse. Twenty years before Larkin wrote ‘This Be the Verse’, his compatriot John Bowlby published Maternal Care and Mental Health (1951), which described profound mental health consequences when infants are denied parental intimacy. Bowlby delineated the centrality of this ‘lasting psychological connectedness’ to well-being in later life, something cruelly withheld from many members of Australia’s Stolen Generations.

Bruce Trevorrow and Wally Carr were born in the mid-1950s into Aboriginal families that were incredibly poor, living in makeshift huts, foraging for bush food to supplement supplies, and terrified of visits from welfare officers. When Trevorrow was one, he was removed from his Ngarrindjeri family to live with a non-Indigenous family. Carr remained with his own Wiradjuri family. They were very different men with some crucial factors in common. Both achieved national prominence for different reasons. Both died prematurely.

Trevorrow’s life was largely miserable. Before he was a teenager, he had been tossed around between different South Australian families, a children’s home, hospital, and psychiatric facility. He was prone to soiling himself, attracted to petty crime, emotionally disturbed, and exhibited psychogenic symptoms such as unexplained limping. In later life he found it difficult to maintain steady employment, suffered alcoholism, and was violent to his partner and children. He is notable as the first – and so far only – member of the Stolen Generations to sue an Australian government for compensation and win.

Dan Box is a crime reporter for The Australian. In September 2014, Homicide Detective Chief Inspector Gary Jubelin contacted him to ask him to write about the murder of three Aboriginal children from Bowraville in 1990–91. Box later began a podcast about the murders that earned him a Walkley Award, part of a process that would see him go from (in his words) reporter to campaigner to witness in the trial of the man suspected of the murders.

Colleen Walker-Craig, aged sixteen, disappeared after a house party on Bowraville’s Cemetery Road in September 1990. When her mother, Muriel Craig, went to Bowraville’s police station to report her missing on the following Sunday, the station was closed. When she returned on Monday, the police suggested that Colleen had ‘gone walkabout’ and didn’t take a statement. Colleen’s body has never been found, but her clothes were discovered in a river in April 1991, by which time Evelyn Greenup (aged four) and Clinton Speedy-Duroux (sixteen) had also been murdered after attending parties on Cemetery Road.

Clinton’s body was discovered in February 1991, and a local labourer, who had attended the parties where Colleen, Evelyn, and Clinton were last seen, was charged with his murder. (Following a suppression order by Magistrate Robert Stone on 25 March 2019, the labourer is referred to throughout Box’s book as ‘James Hide’.) Evelyn’s skull was discovered ten days after Colleen’s clothes. ‘Hide’ was also charged with her murder in October 1991.

As the old saying goes, one should never judge a book by its cover; however, the instantly recognisable iconography on the cover of A Little History of Archaeology does provide an insight into this book’s content. In presenting this history of archaeology – which forms part of a larger series that includes histories of philosophy, literature, and science – author and archaeologist Brian Fagan early makes the distinction that ‘today’s archaeology is far more than hazardous journeys and specular discoveries. It may have begun as treasure hunting … But treasure hunting isn’t proper archaeology.’ In making this statement, Fagan establishes a precedent that he uses to repeatedly remind his readers that archaeology is the search for information and not monetary gain associated with looting. This is the main strength of the book; it is used to challenge the misconceptions that have plagued the discipline of archaeology since its infancy.

Divided into forty short, chronological chapters, it commences with the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in AD 79 near Pompeii, setting the scene for the investigations of this site that would lay the foundations for the discipline of archaeology. In doing so, the first half of the book is dedicated to the people and places central to archaeology’s establishment as a discipline, including Napoleon’s exploits in Egypt, the discovery and eventual translation of the Rosetta Stone that was pivotal to the interpretation of Egyptian hieroglyphs, Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution, and the Three-Age System, which provided a basic chronology for European artefacts. Fagan makes the point that the numerous artefacts he describes can be viewed at the British Museum, which highlights this institution’s role in the development of archaeology and allows the reader to feel as though they are walking through the various rooms where these objects are on display.

Writers describing the contemporary moment abound. Many do it well, but few do it as shrewdly as Jia Tolentino. With Trick Mirror: Reflections on self-delusion, Tolentino has produced a début collection of essays so insightful and moving that it appears to exist in a genre separate to so much perpetually circulated personal and political writing, the surfeit of which seems to define our era.

Since joining the New Yorker as a staff writer in 2016, Tolentino has produced a variety of spectacular and important journalism about both the gravely serious (including some of the most formidable analysis of Bill Cosby’s trial and the Harvey Weinstein case) and the ostensibly frivolous (Tolentino, the pre-eminent documenter of Twitter culture, identifies where it is literary and where it is dangerous; in 2018 she also wrote an extraordinary investigation into the rise of vaping in US schools). In Trick Mirror, Tolentino expands her method and style, developing what amounts to a meditation on the consolations of a culture in which people (particularly women) are made to feel complicit in their own degradation.

In a letter to a friend, American poet James Wright reflected on the meaning of a Selected Poems for a peer he considered undervalued: ‘It shows that defeat, though imminent for all of us, is not inevitable.’ He quoted Stanley Kunitz, whose Selected was belatedly in press: ‘it would be sweet, I’ll grant, after all these years to pop up from underground … The only ones who survive … are those whose ultimate discontent is with themselves. The fiercest hearts are in love with a wild perfection.’

Robert Harris’s ‘ultimate discontent’ and his poetry’s survival seem to prove the point. There is a certain irony to the publication of The Gang of One: Selected Poems twenty-six years after Harris’s death at the age of forty-two. The attention that the poet gave to other lost voices has come full circle to his own. He was a former Navy seaman who wrote a long poem on the wartime loss of the HMAS Sydney. One of his best-loved and award-winning sequences, the brilliant ‘JANE, Interlinear’, ‘translates’ the historically marginal story of Lady Jane Grey, crowned queen of England for nine days. With The Gang of One, Harris’s poetry is lifted back into daylight, set again in the hands of the readers who knew him, and those of us who didn’t. It takes an uncommon kind of care to memorialise the otherwise lost: a sensitivity and resistance to the injustices done to people and places by time and indifference. Such care is evident in the fact that this publication was assisted by donations from more than ninety people, including a roll-call of Australian poets.

The argument of James Simpson’s Permanent Revolution is that the emergence of liberalism as a cultural and political category in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was shaped by the ‘radically illiberal history of Protestantism’. Rather than adhering to the ‘triumphalist’ tradition of Whig historiography that regarded the Glorious Revolution of 1688 and its subsequent Bill of Rights as the exemplification and precursor of a great tradition of English liberalism, Simpson suggests instead that the development of liberalism was inextricably entangled with religious dogmatism and intolerance. He points out that, while executing five hundred women for witchcraft between 1566 and 1645, England judicially murdered more Catholics than any other country in Europe between 1580 and 1600, so that the elucidation of ‘free’ thought always encumbered darker shadows.

The larger repercussions of this thesis involve a reconceptualisation of the British Enlightenment as in almost every respect ‘the reflex of religious culture’, as well as a sense of modernity itself as having ‘a variety of faces, one of which is revolutionary, illiberal evangelical religion’. Though Simpson does not push present-day analogies too far, there are clearly implications here for understanding the broader contexts of ‘Contemporary Liberalism’, whose proclivity towards ‘identitarian politics’ he understands as being interwoven at structural levels with the ‘continuing influence of evangelical religion’.

Though he had already produced two volumes of poetry, Roger McDonald first came to popular attention with his spectacular début novel, 1915, published in 1979. A recreation of the Gallipoli Campaign from the points of view of two temperamentally different boyhood friends (thus anticipating Peter Weir’s movie Gallipoli, which appeared in 1981), 1915 stood out from the ruck of Australian World War I retrospective fiction. It still does. Meticulously researched, it provides a plausible historical reconstruction of a lost world, and an arresting account of the perils and stresses of life in the ‘whirlpool of venomous geography’ around Anzac Cove.

1915 was more than yet another deferential historical novel about Australians at war. By fusing domestic with military brutality, it penetrated the complacent face of the heroic Australian war legend. Country-born Billy Mackenzie starts out as the stereotypical Digger, one of the boys. Attractively cocky and truculent, he is said to be ‘made’ for war; at Gallipoli he becomes a sinister, psychopathic, and solitary sniper nicknamed ‘the Murderer’. But his Gallipoli self was there in the making, in killing kangaroos for pleasure and sexual violence at home before the war. Men like Billy Mackenzie, McDonald writes towards the end of the novel, carry war within them and seem compelled ‘to obey its simple imperative’. This is a disturbing take on C.E.W. Bean’s notion that the bush-bred Australians of the First AIF were ready-made for the battlefield.

While working in the London advertising world in the late 1960s, Peter Carey sent his stories to a leading New York literary magazine, Evergreen Review, only to be unimpressed by another rejection. He brooded later: there was ‘something glorious and futile in attempting to make Australian literature when, as everybody in London knew, [it] did not exist’. In Australian Books and Authors in the American Marketplace 1840s–1940s, David Carter and Roger Osborne show that the metropolitan triangle of Melbourne/Sydney–London–New York had been a publishing circuit for at least a century before Carey’s transatlantic, or, as it is appositely termed here, ‘transnodal’, misadventure. The book’s prosaic title predicts its consistently empirical approach and macroscopic canvas of the production, circulation, and afterlives of Australian literary commodity in the United States.

Literary markets are capricious beasts, with complex set of behaviours and mutations of their own. Add to that competing international trade rules and domestic tax laws, and what you get is a history as messy as any. There is no upward master narrative here either; ‘no evolutionary pattern’ of Australian books or authors crystallises over the period under discussion. The nine chapters cohere roughly around the productive notion of ‘genre networks’ to explore the intersections of authorial practice, editorial and promotional mechanisms, and consumer culture. In most cases, this was modulated through transactions between British ‘traditional markets’ (Great Britain, its colonies and dominions including Australia) and the US territory (the Americas and the Philippines). In the absence of a formal copyright system, the legal framework got off to a patchy start. As the only regulatory measure against literary piracy, ‘trade courtesy’ allowed the first US publisher that printed a book to gain exclusive rights to the title or to lay claim to the respective author’s subsequent works. Harper, for instance, released Marcus Clarke’s His Natural Life in 1876 after heavily bowdlerising the London-based Bentley & Sons’ three-volume version, unbeknown to the author. Upon receiving a flat fee of £15 from the United States, Clarke jibbed, ‘I suppose it represents something in dollars – Harper’s conscience, perhaps!’

From its raw and revelatory prologue, Nigel Featherstone’s novel Bodies of Men offers a thoroughly humanising depiction of Australians during World War II. In telling the story of two soldiers, William – too young to be a corporal – and his childhood friend James, Featherstone reflects upon the brutality, drudgery, and absurdity of war but also on the two men’s love and regard for each other: ‘The private smiles and William allows himself to smile too. Something passes between them: a wish, or an echo, or something beyond a soldier’s imagination.’

Early in the story, William and James engage the enemy, a few Italians scrabbling about in the desert west of the Nile. The scene is a stark glimpse of men fighting men, of William seeking to assert and prove himself, of James’s calmness, and of the reality of death in wartime.

Soon after, William’s superior officer, Captain Bradley Allen, sends William and a small group of men into the desert. There, they sit and wait, practising endless manoeuvres, perhaps to ready them for battle, perhaps to stave off boredom. James, meanwhile, has a motorcycle accident. He winds up badly injured and AWOL in the house of two strangers, Yetta and Ernst, in Alexandria. While grappling with their own wartime worries and secrets, the couple tend to James as he slowly recovers. When William, on leave from the desert, finds James, their childhood bond is renewed and strengthened by their mutual attraction and, soon, their mutual devotion.

Don’t feel sorry about it, if you remember

blue Darlinghurst nights like particular quilts

a generation of painters saw

before we arrived there, or found ourselves

deciduous as apple trees. Don’t feel sorry

for our poverty, or I’ll report the mirror winks

like a man with bad teeth who has laughed

at all who dislike poetry. Be less than sad

on the day that you hear the news I fell,

they’ll nose you out, the generous, curious ones

then rest assured that I will never tell

who left her pee in glasses overnight.

Don’t be sorry so much ambitious verse

grovelled in the cities where we lived

only say for me I walked an older road

where poetry was rare and hard, and, frankly, good.

That when I had worked it out I laughed and laughed;

what piss-ants, what grovelling pick-thanks

queued like the British to attack my books.

See with what ease I bash the rhythms out,

(go fall on it!) set the metaphor to click

on their tumblers into place. The reason is

I’ve served my bloody indentures: no use

getting set for sad atmospheres. You’ll hear

of my death one day and start to remember

how many times I got you to laugh

from the verbal castles I built you.

Robert Harris

In the early eighteenth century, smallpox inoculations were introduced to England and promoted by the charismatic Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, one of the many scintillating characters in David Isaacs’s outstanding book Defeating the Ministers of Death: The compelling history of vaccination. Inoculation, a precursor of modern vaccination, was initially trialled on prisoners, with impressive results, leading to the technique being used by the British royal family and eventually the wider public.

Around the same time, when many of his compatriots in France considered the English foolish for apparently giving their children a disease (by inoculation) to prevent them from catching it in future, Voltaire wrote his Letters on the English. He noted that the English meanwhile considered continental Europeans who dreaded inoculation ‘cowardly and unnatural’, since fear of the relatively small risks of the procedure left their children at much greater risk of disfigurement or death from smallpox. Although such debates took place almost three centuries ago, they will be familiar to modern readers who still find such clashes of opinion regarding vaccination in newspapers today.

Defeating the Ministers of Death charts the history of vaccines from the early successes and controversies of smallpox to the present day. It is replete with vivid details of historical characters, not only of the scientists who developed vaccines and the famous people affected by vaccine-preventable diseases, but also of the harm done by these diseases to everyday people, especially the poor. The volume includes striking case studies drawn from Isaacs’s long career as a paediatrician working on at least three continents during decades in which increased access to vaccines saved millions of lives. It is an entertaining and engaging work that is sure to delight general readers as well as those with special interests in the history of public health.

It may be tempting to think we already know Socrates, the Athenian philosopher whose most famous dictum remains that he was wise only insofar as he was aware of his own ignorance. Although Socrates never published anything of his own, his student Plato presents him in numerous dialogues as a smart and talented (if somewhat pedantic) interrogator who never tired of examining the opinions of his fellow citizens on a range of topics, including such weighty matters as the nature of justice, virtue, knowledge, and love. Plato and several other prominent ancient writers – most notably Xenophon and Aristophanes – depicted Socrates as ‘an extraordinary and original thinker who was always poor, always old, and always ugly’. This image of Socrates has endured to the present.

Armand D’Angour’s Socrates in Love reveals new sides to the historical figure: Socrates as young man, private citizen, soldier, and – as the title suggests – lover. D’Angour draws on a range of mostly minor ancient sources that have not received the attention they deserve in reconstructing the historical figure of Socrates. With great skill and mastery, D’Angour teases out the kind of information this evidence reveals about heretofore unmapped territory in the life of the ancient philosopher. The result is an original account that, at its best, reads like a detective story looking for new yet unrecognised clues in the ancient evidence, piecing together a case that calls existing scholarship on Socrates into question.

The Indigenous August issue 

Welcome to our Indigenous issue, a major addition to our suite of themed issues. In addition to our usual features, there is a range of reviews, essays, commentaries, and creative writing dedicated to Indigenous history, politics, archaeology, and society. 

Guest Editor Professor Lynette Russell, Director of the Monash Indigenous Studies Centre, writes for ABR about the ‘efflorescence of Indigenous creative talent’ and the widespread debate about constitutional reform following the Uluru Statement from the Heart. She welcomes the fact that this themed issue – now an annual feature – marks an ‘engaged commitment to true reconciliation and Indigenous recognition’.

Elsewhere, Bruce Pascoe reviews two new books by Stan Grant; Omid Tofighian discusses 'Behrouz Boochani and the politics of naming'; Ellen van Neerven reviews Tara June Winch's new novel The Yield; an interview with Magabala Books publisher Rachel Bin Salleh; Sandra R. Phillips reviews Tony Birch's The White Girl; Deborah Cheetham reflects on 'A Night at the Opera'; and Sarah Maddison and Dale Wandin address the vexed and heterogenous Treaty processes underway in different states and territories.

Announcing the $10,000 ABR Indigenous Fellowship

To complement the Indigenous issue and to explore some of the issues touched on, ABR has created a new writers’ fellowship worth $10,000. The ABR Indigenous Fellowship – funded by our growing number of Patrons – is open to Australian Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander writers, commentators, critics, and scholars. Over a period of twelve months, the Fellow – to be chosen by Lynette Russell, dual Miles Franklin Literary Award-winning author Kim Scott, and Peter Rose – will contribute a series of non-fiction articles on Indigenous subjects.

Those interested in applying should consult the Application Guidelines and the Frequently Asked Questions. Applicants have until October 1 to apply. 

'Nah Doongh’s Song'

As noted in the previous issue, Grace Karskens is the overall winner of the 2019 Calibre Essay Prize, as judged by J.M. Coetzee, Anna Funder, and Peter Rose. With Professor Karskens’s permission, we held over her essay until this issue because of the poignancy of the story of this abiding, embattled Aboriginal woman whose life encompassed nearly all of the nineteenth century.

Indigenous subjects often figure in the Calibre Prize, and they always resonate with our readers. (Martin Thomas’s essay ‘“Because it’s your country”: Bringing Back the Bones to West Arnhem Land’, which won the 2013 Calibre Prize, is by far our best-read online feature ever published.) Grace Karsken’s essay is a powerful addition to this growing literature. 

The author told ABR:

‘I am delighted to win the prestigious Calibre Prize, and I want to gratefully acknowledge and thank ABR, the sponsors, and the judges. This is also a big win for Aboriginal biography, and for slow history: the time it takes to recover the stories of Aboriginal people who survived the maelstrom of invasion and dispossession with such courage and resolution.’

As we went to press, we were finalising two events to celebrate Grace Karskens’ essay. On Wednesday, August 28, she will be in conversation with Peter Rose at ANU; and there will be a similar event at Gleebooks in early September. Look out for details on our website and social media.

Blak & Bright 

The Blak & Bright First Nations Literary Festival returns to Melbourne. This four-day festival (5–8 September) celebrates First Nations writers across many genres, including speculative fiction, oral stories, philosophy, drama, and poetry. Most events will be free and the full program will be available from 5 August.

ABR Behrouz Boochani Fellowship

The appalling treatment of Kurdish-Iranian writer Behrouz Boochani (author of the celebrated book No Friend But the Mountains) and the other men imprisoned on Manus Island, Papua New Guinea – and the specious reasons advanced to justify their endless detention – are the source of international outrage. 

Despite the obduracy of Canberra and the malign rhetoric of conservative commentators, much is being done to get Behrouz Boochani and his fellow asylum seekers off Manus Island once and for all. To quote Lucy Popescu, writing in the Literary Review (July 2019): ‘The perpetuation of this state of limbo amounts to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment , which is prohibited under international law … to which Australia is a state party.’

ABR is pleased to be part of this international campaign. We were delighted when Behrouz Boochani – for whom the organisation and many of our readers have the utmost respect – permitted us to name our new Fellowship after him. The ABR Behrouz Boochani Fellowship is generously funded by Peter McMullin, a Melbourne lawyer, businessman, and philanthropist, and presented in association with the Peter McMullin Centre on Statelessness at the University of Melbourne. The Fellow – to be chosen by J.M. Coetzee, Michelle Foster (Director of the McMullin Centre on Statelessness), and Peter Rose – will contribute a series of articles on any aspect of human rights, refugees, and statelessness.

Omid Tofighian, translator of No Friend But the Mountains, writes for us in our August issue. ‘Understood as part of other traditions of resistance,’ he says, ‘this Fellowship helps to galvanise a wider dynamic collective process. It has unlimited potential to initiate other projects and actions.’

Let us hope he is right and that this new Fellowship helps to initiate certain actions – and humanity – in Canberra.

Behrouz Boochani – eloquent, impassioned, heroic – has also commented: ‘We need to support writers inside the prison camps and also those people who are recording this history outside the prisons. The Fellowship is … a great step in helping to document the history and to transform the present situation.

The Fellowship, which closes on September 1, is open to English-speaking writers around the world.

Prompter Porter

The Peter Porter Poetry Prize, being offered for the sixteenth time, has been brought forward to separate it from the 2020 Calibre Essay Prize (to be advertised in October). The Prize, open to English-speaking poets around the world, is now worth a total of $9,000, with a first prize of $7,000. The judges are John Hawke (ABR’s Poetry Editor), Bronwyn Lea, and Philip Mead. 

The closing date is October 1.

Jolley Talk

Later this month we look forward to naming the three shortlisted authors (and the three commended ones) in this year’s ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize. We will then publish the three principal stories in our September issue. 

Join us, if you are in Melbourne, on Wednesday, September 11 for the Jolley Prize ceremony (a free event). This year’s venue is Readings Hawthorn. Celebrated author Maxine Beneba Clarke will speak on behalf of her fellow judges (Beejay Silcox and John Kinsella) and will name the overall winner. Full details appear on our website.

    Vale Aunty Kerry Reed-Gilbert 
    Long-serving Chair of the First Nations of Australia Writers Network

Authorised visits,
temporarily easing Grafton Correctional Centre blues,
a young girl walks shadow-hardened corridors to see a black inmate,
observe her little brown fingers
as wafer thin as the bars that separate them
but with pilot eyes, the only light that shines
lines across a dank cell floor
upon which an imprisoned father writes poetry,
a daughter smuggles out to be published;
highly unauthorised material,
                                                 songline contraband ...

Samuel Wagan Watson

Holocaust historian Deborah Lipstadt is renowned as the woman who defeated David Irving in court after he sued her for describing him as a Holocaust denier. Her portrayal by Rachel Weisz in the film Denial (2016) ensured that Lipstadt and her landmark victory achieved even wider celebrity.

Thousands of books have been written on the history of anti-Semitism, and Lipstadt has not set out to write another. Alarmed that people continue to demonise Jews and regard them as responsible for evil, she directs her attention to its contemporary resurgence. For Lipstadt, anti-Semitism ‘is not the hatred of people who happen to be Jews. It is hatred of them because they are Jews’. The existence of anti-Semitism, which has never made sense and never will, is a threat not just to Jews but to all those who value an inclusive, democratic, and multicultural society. Indeed, when expressions of contempt for one group become normative, it is virtually inevitable that similar hatred will be directed at other groups.

Antisemitism: Here and now addresses questions that people began asking after the white-nationalist rally in Charlottesville in August 2017. Is today’s anti-Semitism different from earlier manifestations? Where is it coming from: the right or the left? Is it all about Israel? Are we seeing anti-Semitism where it’s not, or refusing to see it where it clearly is?

Despite seven years of expatriate life in Germany, the Argentine Samanta Schweblin’s writerly gaze, like that of Australia’s Peter Carey or Janette Turner Hospital, remains trained upon her homeland: ‘I write from outside, literally and in a literary sense. But always looking toward Argentina.’ Schweblin acknowledges a debt to the fantastic, the genre that, in Tzvetan Todorov’s influential formulation, suspends the reader between belief and disbelief in the supernatural. In Latin America, lo fantástico refers, above all, to a style of literary short story produced in and around Buenos Aires since the 1940s. The influential Anthology of Fantastic Literature (1940), edited by Jorge Luis Borges, Adolfo Bioy Casares, and Silvina Ocampo, inaugurates the genre, and Julio Cortázar’s work during the 1960s Latin American Literary Boom represents its high-water mark. This ‘river plate’ tradition of the fantastic – a poetics of uncertainty and strangeness that emerged through the confluence of avant-garde aesthetics, psychoanalysis and modernity – nourishes contemporary Argentine writing.

If you’re squeamish, this book probably isn’t for you. Each page delivers shocking or mundane violence and descriptions of guts and gore so frank they become a kind of poetry. There is clear relish in Del Amo’s depictions, and there is nothing gratuitous about them; he brings us rivetingly close to each fold of decrepit skin, the agonies of labour, the fantastic indifference of nature. With encyclopedic precision and almost esoteric punctiliousness, Animalia tells the unsettling story of a family of farmers in south-west France from 1898 to World War I, then jumps forward to 1981, the year (perhaps not coincidentally) of Del Amo’s birth.

We begin on a squalid farm, the father prematurely stooped and exhausted, the child, Éléonore, already old, the nameless ‘genetrix’ withered and miserable. When Éléonore is born, after two miscarriages described in gruesome detail, she is laid upon the new mother who lies ‘as still as a gallows’. The body and its physical processes, written with clinical poise, stripped of sensuality and tenderness, seem instruments of anatomical performances: sex is rarely more than perfunctory fornication; birth is parturition; women do not breastfeed but suckle their young. The daily cruelty of life on the farm is normalised to the point of banality: skulls are blithely smashed; still-twitching bodies are flung on the dung heap; a human foetus is left for the pigs.

The late historian Patrick Wolfe did not pull any punches when he wrote that colonialism seeks to eliminate and replace the Indigenous cultures holding sovereignty over the lands and resources that colonisers wish to claim. Wolfe considered this ‘logic of elimination’ to be one of the defining and persisting features of colonial societies, manifest not only as early-frontier warfare and land expropriation but also as a whole range of subsequent policies and attitudes working towards the erasure, dispossession, or assimilation of Indigenous peoples. By demonstrating the continuity between these policies and attitudes and the violence of the frontier, Wolfe famously asserted that colonial invasion is not a single event occurring in the distant past – something over and done with, which everyone should now move on from – but an ongoing structure within colonial societies today, including Australia.

Heavy stuff, all this talk of invasion and erasure. Not a suitable topic for children, some might think. Indeed, many fully grown white Australian adults balk at thinking about, or even acknowledging, these defining aspects of Australia’s past and present. And yet, reading this ground-breaking anthology as a non-Indigenous person, one is struck by the fact that growing up Aboriginal in Australia often means confronting and negotiating the ongoing structure of colonial invasion, and its eliminatory logic, at a very young age. Growing Up Aboriginal in Australia is compiled and edited by Anita Heiss – prolific writer, anthologist, Indigenous literacy advocate, and proud Wiradjuri woman – who brings together more than fifty contributors to reflect on growing up Aboriginal in Australia. Heiss begins her introduction by emphasising that ‘there is no single or simple way to define what it means to grow up Aboriginal in Australia’, and that her goal in compiling this anthology is ‘to showcase as many of the diverse voices, experiences and stories together as possible’. Heiss makes a number of editorial decisions that work to showcase this diversity.

Halfway through Minotaur, Peter Goldsworthy’s jauntily satisfying novel about a sharp-tongued former motorcycle cop blinded by a bullet to the head, Detective Sergeant Rick Zadow gropes his way to a shed behind his Adelaide cottage. Inside lies a partially dismantled 1962 Green Frame Ducati 750SS. Zadow, who had begun disassembling the crankshaft prior to his injury, fumbles round in the dark as he tries to restore the beloved bike he will never be able to ride again. He uses his ever-present companion and virtual girlfriend, Siri, to order parts from a website called Road and Race.

I checked if this site was real, not out of pedantry but because two days prior I had bought a vintage Ducati motorcycle and needed to find era-appropriate front fork seals. Fortunately for me, Goldsworthy’s research proved exemplary.

Regardless of the author’s unwitting assistance in helping my conveyance pass a roadworthy test, Minotaur convincingly illuminates the darkest recesses of the human sensory experience while also exposing the influence of ‘bikie gangs’ in South Australia – or, as we due-paying, law-abiding members prefer to call them, motorcycle clubs.

It’s a challenge to navigate the maze of books published after an election as winners and losers pore over the entrails of victory and defeat. It’s even more challenging when that election delivers a result almost nobody expected. Who’s telling the truth? Who’s lying to protect their legacy?

Plots and Prayers, by The Australian journalist Niki Savva, offers insight into how and why Liberal leader Scott Morrison won an ‘unwinnable’ election, but psephology is not her core mission. Instead, Savva walks us through the Byzantine labyrinth that led to arguably the most traumatic leadership spill in modern Australian politics, which, on 24  August 2018, installed Scott Morrison as Australia’s third prime minister in three years, and the seventh in just over a decade.

Savva offers up fifteen chapters across 400 pages in which she canvasses different versions of events through the eyes of competing protagonists. Knowing how fickle history can be, with both victors and vanquished scrambling to write it – she prepared for this book early. She spoke to key players immediately after Malcolm Turnbull’s demise; she wanted interviews to be ‘fresh’ and ‘raw’. The result is a forensically researched and brutally revealing chronicle of the days and weeks before and after the August coup – one told with the precision of an investigative journalist but in the elegant narrative style that always makes Savva a great read.