It is commonly accepted that the modern European novel begins with Don Quixote. Lionel Trilling went so far as to claim that the entire history of the modern novel could be interpreted as variations on themes set out in Cervantes’s great originating work. And the quality that is usually taken to mark Don Quixote as ‘modern’ is its irony. It is a fiction about fiction. The new sensibility it inaugurated begins in a spirit of mockery, ridiculing the obsolete genre of chivalric romance, insisting on the disconnection between reality and fantasy. As a character observes in The Childhood of Jesus (2013), the first novel in J.M. Coetzee’s trilogy about a precocious orphan named David and his accidental guardian, Simón, the innovation of Don Quixote is to view the world through two sets of eyes: where Quixote sees giants, his loyal sidekick, Sancho Panza, sees only windmills.

Much of the humour in Don Quixote is derived from the premise that Sancho is correct and Quixote is a ‘deluded old man’. This is the interpretation Simón seeks to impress upon David, who is so enchanted by Quixote’s adventures that he memorises them, but who prefers to sees things the other way round. Near the beginning of The Death of Jesus, Simón, exasperated by David’s refusal to read any other book, dismisses Don Quixote as a ‘made-up story … it is an amusing book, it sucks you into its fantasy, but fantasy is not real. Indeed, the message of the book is precisely to warn readers like yourself against being sucked into an unreal world, a world of fantasy.’

A young Aboriginal girl wears an abaya because she wants to see how it feels to inhabit someone else’s experience, someone else’s history. An exiled Iraqi musician plays a piano in a shopping centre in suburban Melbourne. Native Americans protesting the construction of a pipeline on their traditional lands are shot at with water cannons and rubber bullets. Countries are lost, sacred sites invaded by careless tourists, lines on maps exclude and dispossess, sacrifices and compromises are made, and individual lives are disfigured by historical circumstance.

Leaping back and forth in time, spanning continents and cultures, and inhabiting shifting perspectives, Anna Krien’s first novel is a high-wire performance. With its vast historical rigging, epic scope, ethical complexity, and kaleidoscopic view, Act of Grace is enormously ambitious; everything rests on the execution and the stakes are high. The reader watches, breath held, as the novel unspools, but Krien is a skilled funambulist; her step is sure, and she does not fall.

Astronomer Edmond Halley (also known as Edmund, debate still rages over which spelling he preferred) may be best known for the comet that passes through our solar system once every seventy-five to seventy-six years (next sighting due in 2061, set a reminder in your iCal), but in 1692 he proposed an intriguing theory: that the Earth was hollow.

Halley suggested that the surface of the planet upon which we teem was 800 kilometres thick, surrounding two inner concentric shells and a molten core. He claimed that a breathable atmosphere separated these shells; that they were luminous and possibly inhabited. As ludicrous as it now seems, the theory was not definitively disproven until 1774.

The concept of worlds within has captured the imagination of writers and folklorists ever since, with prolific Western Australian poet John Kinsella now adding his name to a vaunted list of subterranean-fiction authors including Jules Verne, Thomas Pynchon, Lewis Carroll, and my childhood obsession, Edgar Rice Burroughs.

The Breeding Season is a novel that grapples with big ideas: the connections between death; grief, mortality and the bodily experience of them; how the male gaze preconditions how women (and female animals) are portrayed and described in science and art. It is an ambitious book, and the ideas that drive it are one of its main pleasures, even if they sometimes overburden the narrative.

Niehaus’s novel centres on a couple: Elise, a scientist who specialises in reproduction, and Dan, a writer whose work has mined his personal and family history, and who is currently ghost-writing an autobiography for his uncle, a notorious artist. Elise has just delivered a stillborn child. The couple are wracked by grief, unable to connect to each other, let alone come to terms with what has befallen them. Elise is bedridden, Dan wanders listlessly through the house, until both are shocked into action – Dan by a phone call from his uncle’s charming and provocative lover and muse, Hannah Wallace; Elise by the death of a sparrow that flies into her bedroom window.

Tasmanian writer Heather Rose’s fifth adult novel, Bruny, about a joint venture between the Chinese, Australian, and Tasmanian governments, is well timed, given current concerns about the covert infiltration of the Chinese Communist Party into Australia’s universities and given Federal MP Andrew Hastie’s recent warning that Australia should approach its relations with China with care, lest its sovereignty be diminished. Rose’s last novel, The Museum of Modern Love, which in 2017 won the Stella Prize and the Christina Stead Prize, is set in New York. In Bruny, Rose returns to Tasmania where her earlier novels are set. Part political thriller, part family saga, part love letter to Tasmania, this is her most ambitious novel to date. Bruny covers a multitude of issues, including family loyalty, betrayal, corruption, environmental protection, and the rise of China.

The novel opens with a massive explosion that almost destroys a bridge under construction from Tasmania to Bruny Island, famous for its natural beauty and isolation. The bridge, built with Commonwealth money and Chinese steel, has split the local community between those in favour of progress and those afraid it will destroy their idyllic way of life. The explosion occurs three months from the bridge’s completion date. Nobody knows who is responsible.

Fortune begins with Napoleon’s triumphant entry into Berlin on 27 October 1806. Does it matter whether the popular image of the emperor astride a magnificent white stallion is an embellishment? ‘Time sullies every truth,’ Lenny Bartulin tells us. History is as much a fiction as this tale of derring-do and dire misfortune heaped on innocent and wicked alike. Coincidence, improbable and highly amusing, propels the narrative in a series of fast-moving, often farcical vignettes that recall Rabelais’s Gargantua and Pantagruel (1532), Voltaire’s Candide (1759), and Joseph Furphy’s classic Australian yarn Such Is Life (1903).

With a mixture of comic bawdiness and earnest philosophising, Bartulin successfully adapts the satirical novel to suit twenty-first-century expectations. He shuffles the overlapping lives of characters as if they are cards in a deck of infinite possibility and combination, thus exposing both their selfless acts and darkest secrets. From Europe to the Dutch colony of Suriname and the penal colonies of New South Wales and Van Diemen’s Land, an otherwise incident-driven narrative is lent pathos by Bartulin’s inventive and insightful attribution of motive both to characters who are major players in historical events and to their most abject subjects. He makes the thoughts of Napoleon, his wives and generals, as banal and elevated as those of ordinary folk affected by the vagaries of their so-called superiors; he forcefully exposes Europeans’ barbarism in the abhorrent treatment of the beautiful slave Josephine and her brother Mr Hendrik.

Speechless, Adolf Hitler sat glowering at Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop. Since 1933 the führer had gambled repeatedly that France and Britain would capitulate to his latest demands. Now he tried again, reassured by Ribbentrop (no aristocrat, a vain man who had purchased his title) that the feckless Allies would not intervene if Germany invaded Poland. Yet an ultimatum threatening war had just arrived from London.

‘What now?’ demanded Hitler.

After so many triumphs, the führer had finally overreached. It was the end of summer, 1939. Hitler would be dead by his own hand in May 1945, amid the ashes of his defeated capital. Tried by the Allies at Nuremberg, Ribbentrop would be the first Nazi leader hanged for his role in a barbarous regime.

South-eastern Europe is a region defined by ambiguity: with few clear geographic boundaries or consensus over its correct appellation, it is a palimpsest bearing the marks of Balkan, Roman, Byzantine, Venetian, Ottoman, and central European cultures. As the identities of the region’s inhabitants have shifted across the centuries, their position within the European imagination has never quite settled – south-eastern Europeans remain at once familiar, yet foreign and mystifying. Of course, such a perception leaves a good deal to be unpacked. Taking up this challenge with The Great Cauldron: A history of Southeastern Europe, Marie-Janine Calic provides a sweeping overview of the history of this region and its people, from the late antiquity to the present day. Translated from the German by Elizabeth Janik, this 734-page volume adopts the perspective of global history in an effort to provide a new account of this contentious quadrant of Europe.

Drawing upon published sources in seven European languages, The Great Cauldron is a tremendous work of synthesis. Its originality lies primarily in Calic’s curation of existing scholarship on territories that in the twentieth century became part of Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, Romania, Albania, and Greece. The work sets aside familiar explanatory frameworks by which the history of this region is interpreted either as a linear evolution of nation states, or else as an imperial periphery viewed from distant centres of Vienna, Istanbul, or Venice. Calic also eschews the approach of reading this history through the Western categories of progress and modernisation. In arguing that these approaches often fail to consider south-eastern Europe on its own terms, Calic traces the history of this region and its inhabitants across a series of global interactions and interrelationships. Her exhaustive mapping of political, cultural, and economic trends is rhythmically punctuated with micro-histories of specific places at critical moments in time, and biographical sketches of those who facilitated transborder encounters.

Sirens wail. Families cry together. Defibrillators shock bodies into convulsion. These are the sounds and images that veteran paramedic, writer, and filmmaker Benjamin Gilmour animates in his latest book, The Gap. His prose is direct, honest, uncompromising; often unembellished. ‘Death is demystified to us; it’s the business we’re in,’ he writes. At times, we feel like we are sitting in the ambulance with him and his band of partners: John, Jerry, Tracy, Matt, and Donna.

The Gap chronicles Gilmour’s experiences in the summer months of 2008 in Eastern Sydney, a fertile time for drownings in Bondi, brawls in Kings Cross, suicide attempts at ‘The Gap’ – an ocean cliff in Watson’s Bay. ‘The Gap is a backdrop for the final act of life,’ Gilmour declares. The book’s elliptical, theatrical structure does a fine job of reflecting the non-stop chaos of emergency work.

In the introduction to Paramédico (2011), Gilmour laments that the public does not know ‘who we really are’. While that book cannot entirely redress such misunderstandings, The Gap provides a more focused, thematically unified account of the paramedic experience. It explores the joys of saving lives, the resolute bonds between one’s paramedic ‘brothers and sisters’, and the haunting burdens of failure.

The Gap preoccupies itself with how life and paramedic work, for better or worse, interlock. Various passages recalling particular call-outs are interrupted by the surfacing of past traumas in emergency situations, Gilmour’s intermittent longing for his now-wife Kaspia – from whom he was then separated – and concern for his professional partners, especially John, who is enduring an unbearable breakup. Gilmour describes John’s face as ‘taut, a dam holding back an impossible pressure’.

Due to the sensitive material of The Gap, one can understand why it took Gilmour a decade to finish. He has created a funny, considered, touching work.

This autobiography by Tim Costello – Baptist minister, lawyer, anti-casino activist, CEO of World Vision Australia for thirteen years – is a clear and straightforward account of his life, free of obvious literary artifice. What Costello has tried to do, he says, is to understand and explain how his memories and experiences, especially of childhood and family life, have made him develop as an adult, often in ways that have become apparent only with maturity.

Costello grew up in 1950s suburban Melbourne, the eldest of three children: his brother, Peter, Australia’s longest-serving federal treasurer, is two years younger. Theirs was a small, safe world, and the Costello children had fairly standard childhoods: Costello mentions the excitement of television, joining gangs, playing in the bush. They also brought stray kids home from school for meals; Tim and his mother usually looked after them. Their father, Russell, joined the Baptist Church as a young man and spent his entire working life as a teacher at a Baptist grammar school. Anne, their mother, came from a middle-class background and overcame cardiac problems to study arts and social studies; she combined family life with teaching. The Costello parents met at university, and Tim, Peter, and his sister, Janet, were all brought up to believe in the importance of education.

The commons, the common good, the commonwealth: all words for humans’ shared right to the fruits of the earth to sustain their lives, and all words with deep political histories. In The Politics of the Common Good, Jane R. Goodall excavates some of these deep histories, beginning with the Diggers and Levellers of mid-seventeenth-century England who, in protest against landlords’ enclosures, laid claim to the people’s traditional rights to common ground. In different circumstances in Australia in the late 1960s, the Gurindji made a similar claim to their traditional lands at Wave Hill.

Although Goodall sees the shared rights to the earth as the basic common good, she is as concerned with social and cultural commons, with what we are as likely to describe nowadays as public goods – civic buildings, like public libraries and halls, and a sense of ownership of shared familiar social spaces that make people feel part of a community. Over the last half century or so, as neoliberalism has become the dominant policy framework for governments from the national to the local, we have been dispossessed of these commons, hence the book’s subtitle. For example, our cities and country towns are full of beautiful stone and brick civic buildings built by earlier generations. Many have been left to deteriorate or been sold to help pay council bills. Goodall observes: ‘There is no end, it seems, to what we cannot afford as the health of the budget trumps all other concerns and we find ourselves in a situation where human welfare comes second to a budget surplus.’ Just ask anyone on Newstart.

This is an unusual book. It is, so the title indicates, about guns and firearm regulations in Australia, with some comparison to the United States. But, as a prefatory note to readers cautions, ‘this book is less about guns and more about the continuing tension between the authority and power of the state and the responsibilities and entitlements of citizens’. It is also a treatise on state–Commonwealth relations in Australia’s federal system, an intriguing case study of collaboration and conflict between the various islands of power embedded in our Constitution. Tom Frame’s latest book is thus, simultaneously, very much about guns and not really about guns at all. That makes it a stimulating and challenging read.

The publication of Gun Control could not be timelier. The debate over firearm regulation rages in the United States, where mass shootings have become the norm rather than aberrations. In the month between receipt of this book and finalising the present review, America endured several multiple-fatality incidents. The Australian experience is commonly cited in discourse in the United States, to mixed reaction in a polarised landscape. In March 2019, New Zealand was rocked by the worst mass shooting in its history; an Australian awaits trial. The 2014 Lindt Café siege remains fresh in the memory of Sydneysiders.

When the Bill that became the Modern Slavery Act 2018 (Cth) was introduced into the federal parliament, it was accompanied by a grim message: two centuries after the abolition of the slave trade in the United Kingdom, it is estimated that there are twenty-five million victims of modern slavery worldwide. It also came with a bracing if Panglossian promise: that the Modern Slavery Act would ‘transform’ the way large companies in Australia do business, and drive a ‘race to the top’. Published a year after the introduction of this legislation, Addressing Modern Slavery is a timely reflection on the pervasiveness of modern slavery in global supply chains – and on the role of the state, business, and other actors in combating this serious and complex problem.

From the outset, Justine Nolan and Martijn Boersma tackle one of the persistent bugbears of contemporary discourse on modern slavery: the lack of a standard definition of ‘modern slavery’. In so doing, they also confront critiques of the use of this term. As Nolan and Boersma note, the term ‘modern slavery’ is inherently emotive and calls to mind the spectre of evil wrongdoers to be punished and helpless victims to be saved. This, as the authors observe, obscures the systemic and structural causes of this type of exploitation and ‘den[ies] agency to those exploited’. Nonetheless, Nolan and Boersma adopt the language of modern slavery, explicitly acknowledging its currency in public conversation. They define the term broadly: ‘modern slavery’ encapsulates a ‘continuum of labour exploitation’ – the crux of which is the exercise of ‘abusive control’ by an employer over a worker, including by coercing or manipulating a worker to accept exploitative working conditions. In this way, Nolan and Boersma suggest that labour exploitation can span from conduct ordinarily regulated by workplace laws (such as underpayment of wages) to conduct that is usually characterised as criminal (such as slavery, servitude, and slavery-like conditions). This is part of a conscious effort, by the authors, to recast the problem of modern slavery and locate it within the social, political, and economic realities of our globalised world.

It’s a disconcerting image. Piercing blue eyes stare out at you from the cover of the book. It renders Adolf Hitler somehow human, which is the intent of the author, Peter Longerich, and which sets this biography apart from the many others that have preceded it. Two other notable biographers, Ian Kershaw and Joachim Fest, refused to engage with Hitler’s personality and declared that he was ‘unhuman’ or a ‘non-person’. This book, on the other hand, does what few have succeeded in doing well – integrating the life of the man with the history of the Nazi regime.

Longerich depicts Hitler up until the end of World War I as a nobody who had an unimpressive childhood, a down-and-outer in the streets of Vienna, an eccentric loner completely on the margins of society, a colourless figure incapable of connecting with people on an intimate or physical level.(Longerich implies that he was asexual and probably died a virgin.) The women that came later in his life – his niece Geli Raubal, Magda Goebbels, and Eva Braun – were only ever appendages used to make him look ‘normal’.

Nothing in the first three decades of Hitler’s life pointed to what was to follow, which is what makes this story all that more remarkable. What we do find, however, are a number of personality traits that help explain his actions once he does come to power: a complete lack of empathy; infantile fantasies about himself and the world that bordered on the delusional; an intense anxiety about losing control of his life; and an exaggerated fear of humiliation.

Adolf Hitler, 20 April 1937 (photograph via Wikimedia Commons)

Hitler’s life only found purpose with the outbreak of war in 1914. Despite the fact that he had earlier moved from Vienna to Munich to dodge the Austrian draft – he was born in Braunau am Inn in the Austrian Empire – Hitler volunteered for the Bavarian Army and, for the first time, led an orderly and disciplined life. He spent most of the war as a runner, that is, relatively safe compared to those in the trenches, although he received the Iron Cross, twice, for feats of bravery.

Germany’s ultimate defeat supposedly came as a great shock to him, which is more an indication of his inability to accept reality, and which laid the foundations for ‘the destructive energy necessary to punish those whom he blamed for the deepest humiliation of his life’. Shortly after the war, at the behest of ultra-conservative members of the German Army, for which he still worked, he joined the German Workers’ Party (later the National Socialist German Workers’ Party). There he uncovered his one and only talent: an ability to speak to crowds for hours about his beliefs and dreams.

When accounting for Hitler’s success as a public speaker in these early years, it is his ‘almost pitiable quality, his awkwardness, his obvious lack of training and … his intensity and ecstatic quality’ that made such an impression on his public. His lack of social graces, shoddy clothing, and poor table manners all betrayed his lower-middle-class origins, but even those flaws did not prevent people from being drawn to him. The enigma is that he was so successful at convincing people that his overblown fantasies and megalomaniacal imaginings were achievable, indeed realistic.

It is because they fed into the dreams, fears, and hatreds of many middle-class Germans. But not only that. Hitler’s rise to power had as much to do with a conservative political and military élite that despised democracy as with Hitler’s powers of persuasion. The complicity of the German Army, both in the early stages of his political career and especially in the crimes committed during World War II, the general acceptance of anti-Semitism in the broader public, and the desire of conservative political élites to undermine the fledgling Weimar Republic coincided with the economic difficulties being faced by postwar Germany and the stock-market crash of 1929. The Nazis thus went from an extreme-right-wing group that garnered only a few per cent of the vote to being one of the largest parties in the country in less than ten years. By the time Hitler became chancellor in January 1933, largely due to political machinations behind the scenes, the Weimar Republic had already ceased to function as a democracy, undermined from within.

What followed was an extreme-right-wing revolution, as the Nazis took hold of the state apparatus and gradually eliminated all organised opposition. This required a considerable amount of political skill, but it was only possible because Hitler had millions of supporters. That said, it is clear that the majority of Germans did not enthusiastically support Hitler. The regime survived because it was built upon the twin pillars of all dictatorships: fear and surveillance. The Party and the Gestapo were ever vigilant and the slightest opposition to the regime could end in a concentration camp and death.

Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler in Munich, June 1940 (photograph via Wikimedia Commons)

All this is outlined in detail, including Hitler’s transformation of German society and his desire to start a war. We have just commemorated the eightieth anniversary of the invasion of Poland and the beginning of World War II on 1 September 1939, but there is an argument that it began a year earlier, with the Western democracies’ betrayal of Czechoslovakia at Munich in 1938. Despite some rapid and notable successes in the opening phases of the war, this was a war Germany could never win, for reasons lucidly explained by Longerich.

This is a Hitler who was no ‘weak dictator’, as some historians have contended, but one who was in control, and whose personality shaped the course of history. Hitler was thus behind the radicalisation of anti-Semitism – even if people like Himmler, Heydrich, and Eichmann carried it out – not from a preconceived plan, as is sometimes thought, but rather as a function of the war against Russia and as a means of deliberately implicating his allies in the crimes of the Nazi regime in order to hold together the Axis alliance even as defeat loomed.

Hitler conducted the war as a racially motivated one of extermination. He refused to listen to advice from his generals, and insisted on his armies ‘standing their ground’ and of fanatically holding the line to the last man, even when tactical withdrawals would have saved hundreds of thousands of troops from annihilation (Stalingrad is only one among many examples). This has often been explained as a result of Hitler being out of touch with reality, unable to give up the illusion of a ‘final victory’, but Longerich explains this irrational decision-making in terms of Hitler’s ‘all or nothing’ attitude, born of the defeat of 1918. There could be no capitulation, only victory or defeat that would end in total destruction, or, as Hitler preferred to put it, a ‘heroic downfall’. It was this fantasy that cost the lives of millions of people in the last years of the war.

This is certainly one of the best biographies of Hitler on the market. Longerich is one of the most established historians of the Third Reich, with acclaimed biographies of Heinrich Himmler and Joseph Goebbels. The reader then is in very capable hands. What is missing, and what I find frustrating as a biographer, is any real sense of getting to ‘know’ Hitler, if that is at all possible. We are told, for example, that Hitler was prone to ‘fits of rage’, without any speculation about the deep source of that rage. Some might argue that this is prudent. It is true that Longerich does a better job than most at trying to get at the personality behind the façade, and of trying to understand Hitler’s motives, but we don’t really get any sense of how, once in power, Hitler so easily developed his murderous disposition.

More than seventy years after the death of one of the bloodiest tyrants in history, our knowledge of the man and his regime is still evolving. This will not be the last word on the Hitler, and it is not the ‘definitive’ biography that some have already made out. It is, however, an object lesson in what can happen when extremes are given a voice and belief in democracy is undermined. History never repeats itself, but we ignore its lessons at our own peril.

In 1921, Hitler wrote, ‘We want to pour hatred, burning hatred into the souls of millions of our national comrades.’ Consciously or not, any number of populist politicians in the West seem to be doing exactly that.

Don Dunstan tended to divide those around him, even his parents. His father, Viv, moved from Adelaide to become a company man in Fiji. Peter Kearsley, a contemporary of Don’s who later became chief justice of Fiji, said Viv was ‘a fair dinkum sort of chap’, ‘the sort who would have been an office bearer in a bowling club’. His mother, according to Kearsley, was ‘genteel … deliberately countering stereotypes of what Australians were like. She would not even let Don play rugger.’ She disapproved of his friendship with neighbouring children – the part-Fijian Bill Sorby and the young K.B. Singh. Dunstan himself traced his awareness of racism to his childhood.

Dunstan was sent to St Peter’s College where the young men of the Adelaide Establishment were schooled. He was one of a group called ‘Us with a capital u’, which another member, Donald Simpson, recalled was ‘very pretentious’. He spent the war at school and university, unable to return to Fiji. At Adelaide University he was involved in drama and student politics. He moved on from the conservatism of his family and schooling. He married Gretel Ellis, the highly intelligent daughter of Jewish refugees. She and her family brought European culture to Dunstan; he adopted elements of their food and attitudes. After a short period in Fiji, when Dunstan controversially defended Indians in his legal practice, the couple returned to Adelaide. He set up as a lawyer in Victoria Square, but business was slow and Gretel was obliged to take in boarders to make ends meet. The young couple became active in the Labor Party, and Dunstan began his extraordinary political career.

Lina. Maggie. Sloane. These are the women – real women, albeit with their names changed – in whose intimate lives Lisa Taddeo invested eight years of her own. She spoke to these women daily, uprooting herself to chronicle and share their worlds. Taddeo’s goal was to reveal the hidden desires and erotic longings of women. She does so, and the result is revelatory – few works are so absorbing or addictive.

Taddeo’s commitment to her craft is inspiring. She gained the trust and confidence of these women, so much so that she became a voyeur in their lives – a voyeur with permission to articulate and express their inner worlds, including the unflattering parts. For this, Three Women is and will remain an exceptional piece of creative non-fiction.

Elizabeth Gilbert compares the work to Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood. This comparison works to the extent that both Taddeo and Capote went to extraordinary lengths over long periods of time to immerse themselves in stories other writers ignored. As a result, they were able to retell events from a vantage point that most journalism and traditional non-fiction can’t match, creating the feel and flow of fiction. But in Three Women there is no one-of-a-kind crime. Instead, the everyday truths of women are given prominence – an uncommon experience in literature. From this intimate perspective, we witness everything from the death of desire, to the sexual fantasies a submissive wife plays out for her dominant husband, to underage grooming by a teacher.

At first I can’t make out the inscription, even though I’m searching for it. Smooth new bark has grown into the cuts, bulging around the incision, preserving the words on the trunk. I run my hand across the surface, tracing the grooves, feeling the letters: R-E-T-R-I-B-U-T-I-O-N. And below, in slightly larger hand, ‘CAMP’.

We are in the boab belt, the ‘western wilds’ of the Victoria River District in the Northern Territory, between Katherine and Kununurra. This is Ngarinyman country: near the northern end of Judbarra/Gregory National Park. It has taken us much of the morning to track down this particular boab, which rises grandly out of long, thick grass. I step back to take it in as a whole. It is immense.

It is hard not to be captivated by boabs (Adansonia gregorii). They are the charismatic megafauna of the botanical world; their bulbous trunks and knobbled limbs lend themselves to anthropomorphism. Ernestine Hill affectionately described the boab as the ‘friendly ogre of the great North-west’: ‘a grizzled, distorted old goblin with a girth of a giant, the hide of a rhinoceros, twiggy fingers clutching at empty air, and the disposition of a guardian angel’. But boabs are more than guardian angels; in remote arid areas, they are life itself. Their soft, fibrous wood can trap so much moisture that the trunk visibly swells and shrinks with the seasons. Even in drought, ‘sweet water’ can be sucked from the wood or scooped from its hollows. In the nineteenth century, certain boabs along the police track between Derby and Halls Creek had jam tins dangling from their trunks for the convenience of thirsty travellers.

If you google the words ‘Night Parrot’, they come up with a companion set of adjectives, the most common being ‘elusive’, followed by ‘mysterious’, ‘secretive’, ‘enigmatic’, ‘mythical’, and, until recently, ‘thought-to-be-extinct’. Apart from anecdotal claims, there were no confirmed sightings of the Night Parrot from 1912, when one was captured and shot, until a dead parrot was found by a roadside in 1990 and a live bird was photographed by naturalist John Young in Western Queensland in 2013. Controversy, compromised reputations, and accusations of faked evidence followed the re-emergence of the fabled bird, but the parrot prevailed and a conservation reserve was established at Pullen Pullen, the location where Young took the photograph and where a female Night Parrot was subsequently trapped and tagged.

In the winter of 2017, somewhere in the northern part of the Great Sandy Desert, the Paruku Indigenous Rangers and a visiting scientist from the World Wildlife Fund set up a sensor camera at a location where a Night Parrot had reportedly been sighted by a local pastoralist forty years earlier. Returning to the ranger base next morning, the team discovered the camera had captured a flare of yellow-green, which the WWF scientist immediately sent to his brother, a bird expert, who identified it as Pezoporus occidentalis, the Night Parrot. A second attempt to photograph the parrot recorded wild camels, bulls, cats, and dingoes, their grunts, bellows, and howls keeping the rangers awake for most of the night. A photo taken a few months later, accompanied by audio identification of its call, confirmed that the Night Parrot was successfully sharing its habitat with predators and ferals.

The Australian outback has long been a muse for artists and storytellers. Australian flora – including the iconic eucalypt in its many forms – has the ability to tell a story about cultural identity and our rich history with the land. This extends to our urban landscape, with native plants common throughout our bustling city streets and parks – they can transform our metropolitan landscapes to become resilient to modern environmental challenges.

The eucalypt encapsulates these artistic, cultural, environmental functions. Eucalyptus trees serve many functions in the Australian experience, from Dreamtime to urban design, and continue to unite generations of Australians over our shared sense of cultural pride.

At a time when many Australians have little connection to country, it is now more important than ever to emphasise the cultural importance of our native plants and animals. Eucalypts have been a prominent physical resource throughout Aboriginal Australian history. Nearly all parts of the eucalypt tree – leaves, roots, bark, and wood – are used in everyday life to create medicines, adhesive resins, tools, weapons, firewood, and musical instruments. The eucalypt trees themselves create their own ecosystem, one that teems with insects and animals, providing a food source for people and animals.

Beyond these practical uses, the eucalypt serves a prominent role in Aboriginal spirituality and philosophy. For tens of thousands of years, Aboriginal groups have marked ceremonial sites by scarring and shaping ancient eucalypts with intricate swirls and symbols, or have hollowed the trunks of large eucalypts to create a birthing shelter for multiple generations. These eucalypts become a sacred and spiritual space, to which families have a deep connection. The spirits of their Dreamtime ancestors remain in these trees, as well as the animals, rocks, rivers, and mountains of today. The Dreaming is perpetual – it links the past to the present and forms a familial relationship between Aboriginal people and the land.

Much like the Dreaming, the eucalypt persists throughout our current urban landscapes, creating a subtle link between Indigenous Australian culture and our day-to-day life in metropolitan cities. Eucalypts continue to serve Australians today, particularly by addressing the modern challenges of urban heat islands and warming associated with the human-induced climate crisis.

These issues are impacting the way people live, work, and travel around urban areas. As the number of new concrete buildings increases in Australia’s major cities, so does the desire to preserve and extend our shared green spaces through ‘urban greening’, especially with native vegetation. City planners and urban designers around the world are becoming increasingly aware of the many environmental, economic, and social benefits of urban greening. This has led to a rise in initiatives aimed at installing green walls, growing green roofs, and increasing canopy coverage throughout Australian cities.

Eucalypts are one of the most commonly planted trees in urban areas, for reasons beyond the aesthetic of their flowers and their association with Australian identity. There are more than nine hundred species of eucalypts, each with its own special characteristics that make it well-suited to a large variety of Australian soils. Native species of eucalypts are extremely adaptive to a changing urban environment and require little to no fertilisers. Certain eucalypts also act as the city’s natural air conditioners, thanks to their evergreen canopy, minimising the worsening effects of urban heat islands throughout our concrete jungles. This can also help reduce energy usage throughout summer. Similarly, eucalypts are particularly effective at removing and storing carbon from the air, owing to their fast growth rate, long lifespan, and dense wood. Urban planners can use this knowledge and curate our metropolitan spaces to become adaptable to long-term changes in climate, weather, and human activity.

Like the demographic landscape of Australia, the role of the eucalyptus tree in society is continually evolving. What remains the same, however, is the eucalypt’s power to ignite a strong sense of unity and cultural connection to land.

It is easy to overlook that nature itself has a history – or at least our thinking about it does. In the years since Henry Thoreau initiated the modern genre of return-to-nature literature in Walden (1854), his autobiographical account of a two-year stint in the woods, the view that the natural world is a sphere apart – a realm untouched by human intervention – has lost nothing of its enticing allure. It is grounded in the assumption that nature is a dimension of the world not just separate from human civilisation but also one outside of time, and outside of human history and its numerous volatilities, dislocations, and tectonic shifts. And yet there is ample evidence to suggest that the natural world exists as much within the human imagination as outside of it; that it is just as much a real space as an imagined one. As Simon Schama and others have shown, ideas of nature and the natural are deeply entangled in our human ways of sense-making. They have a history of their own.

To those interested in untangling a few strands of this history, the Histories of the ancient Greek historian Herodotus are a good place to start. Herodotus’s fame rests on the fact that he authored the first extensive work of human history in the Western tradition. His main subject is the Greco-Persian Wars of the fifth century bce and the human customs and cultures of the peoples that came under Persian influence. Yet in addition to history and culture – the main themes of his book – he also comments frequently on nature. Herodotus embeds the past and present in a storyline that includes the natural world. In the Histories, nature serves as both a setting of human history and as an agent in time, with a logic and order of its own.

By including the natural world in an account of human history and culture, the Histories raise an issue that has gained new urgency in light of a recent environmental concern: man’s relationship to the natural world. Is human history a tale of man’s gradual separation from and mastery of nature, a tale according to which humanity evolves ever farther away from the natural world? Or is there a different story to be told, according to which nature and culture relate to each other in different ways?

The Histories challenge our assumptions about humanity’s ties to the natural world. They show that some views that strike us as modern might have a long history; at the same time, some perceptions of nature have remained remarkably constant over time. Certain ancient views prevail millennia later – it’s just that these days they come wrapped in decisively modern clothing.

It may, for example, be tempting to see the effects of human exploitation of the environment as symptoms of the malaise of modernity – and they certainly are to the extent and rapidity with which they threaten to destroy our planet. And yet already in the Histories, instances of the fundamental and even catastrophic effects of humans on nature are not hard to find.

At several points, Herodotus claims that the Persian contingents marching towards Greece were so huge that they fully depleted several rivers. The Persians and their human and non-human companions – horses, camels, mules – quite literally drank them dry, or so Herodotus has us believe when he asks rhetorically about the Persian King Xerxes: ‘Was there a nation in Asia that he did not take with him against Greece? Save for the great rivers, was there a stream his army drank from that was not drunk dry?’ No matter what we make of this curious claim, Herodotus chose an example from the natural world to illustrate the overwhelming size of the Persian army. Already in antiquity the environment served as a space to visualise destructive human forces. Even if the human footprint on the environment, in this case, is transitory – presumably the rivers will start flowing again once the troops have moved on – the image of humans exhausting natural resources sticks: Long before the Industrial Revolution and the corresponding changes in the nexus between humanity and the natural world, there was an awareness that human intervention could significantly alter the environment.

Xerxes decorating a plane tree (Herodotus, Histories, VII, 31), Andrea Sacchi (1599–1661) © The Samuel Courtauld Trust, The Courtauld Gallery, London.

Elsewhere, Herodotus tells of large-scale engineering feats that leave lasting traces in the physical environment. The Greek city of Cnidus, for example, when faced with the prospect of being overrun by that same river-depleting army, decided to turn their peninsula into an island. The plan was to dig through the narrow land bridge that attached their isthmus to the mainland. In the Histories, such drastic intervention into nature is not a singular occurrence: the Lydians at one point diverted the Halys River in order to allow their army to advance more quickly. We could significantly extend the list of examples here, but one thing has already become clear: already in the ancient world humans sought to alter the course of history by altering the course of nature.

How does Herodotus frame such incidents? As the classical scholar Katherine Clarke has recently pointed out, the Histories present such examples of spectacular human intervention into the natural world with some ambivalence. At times, Herodotus expresses a sense of awe at what is humanly possible; at others, he treads more cautiously by describing the negative consequences of human intervention. The above-mentioned citizens of Cnidus, for example, learn their lesson the hard way: while digging through their isthmus, they are affected by strange eye afflictions serious enough to warrant consulting the oracle of Delphi, which was quick to respond: ‘Do not fence off the isthmus; do not dig. Zeus would have made an island, had he willed it.’ The moral here is clear: not everything that is humanly possible is also prudent and advisable. There are set limits to human action.

And yet to say that Herodotus depicts humans as an invariably destructive force would be to oversimplify. Instances of human care, if not of nature as such, at least of certain parts of it, are also attested. There is the endearing case of King Xerxes delighting in a beautiful plane tree on his march toward Greece: ‘This was the road which Xerxes took, and it was hereabouts that he came across a plane-tree of such beauty that he has moved to decorate it with golden ornaments and to appoint a guardian for it in perpetuity.’ Elsewhere in the Histories,  Xerxes features as a ruthless and cruel king who does whatever it takes to prevail, but here he has not only an eye for the physical beauty of a single tree but also safeguards its future by creating what is perhaps the first conservation job in historical record.

Overall, then, and despite all cases of spectacular human intervention, Herodotus does not depict a fundamental gap between humanity and the natural world. Rather, he variously points to the symbiotic relationship between the two. He tells us of the various ways in which people in different parts of the ancient world carve out a living from the natural resources available to them. About the ancient Egyptians, Herodotus states: ‘Not only is the Egyptian climate peculiar to that country, and the Nile different in its behaviour from other rivers elsewhere, but the Egyptians themselves in their manners and customs seem to have reversed the ordinary practices of mankind.’ Here and elsewhere, nature and culture map perfectly onto each other. Nature reflects culture and vice versa; together they account for local peculiarities.

Occasionally at least, such correspondences go beyond the merely accidental to imply relationships of cause and effect. The view that nature shapes culture is directly articulated by one of Herodotus’s historical characters. Facing the suggestion that the Persians, thanks to their military successes, would be able to abandon their barren homeland and settle in more fertile neighbouring lands, the Persian king Cyrus disagrees. He points out that ‘soft countries breed soft men’ followed by the explanation: ‘It is not the property of any one soil to produce fine fruits and good soldiers too.’ What Cyrus is saying here is that one cannot have both an empire based on military strength and an easy life of natural abundance. There is a direct link between the toughness of one’s lands and the toughness of one’s soldiers.

Although this sort of crude environmental determinism no longer has currency today, its repercussions still ring true millennia later: place, geography, and location – including the natural world – have once again entered the domain of the historian, at least since Fernand Braudel’s landmark study The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II (1949), in which he so expertly showed how nature, geography, and the environment shape history. We seem to have come full circle.

Where does this leave us with regard to the ways in which we conceptualise man’s relationship to nature and conceive of the relationship between nature and culture?

As far as the Histories are concerned, one view, in particular, has a surprisingly contemporary ring: that of nature as a balanced system. Herodotus presents the natural world as a realm in which different forces coexist and keep one another in check: ‘Divine providence, in the wisdom one would expect from it, has made prolific every kind of creature which is timid and preyed upon by others, in order to ensure its continuance, while savage and noxious species are comparatively unproductive.’ There is an intricate balance in nature which ensures that, over time, no species expands unchecked at a cost to the others. In the Histories, this process is still overseen by the divine, but the dynamic of cause and effect is entirely natural: it plays out in the balance between a species’ rate of reproduction on one hand and the number of its natural enemies on the other.

To illustrate this point, Herodotus draws on the example of timid hares and fierce lions: while the former have numerous offspring and can carry foetuses at different stages of gestation at the same time, the latter breed only once in a lifetime, because, as Herodotus claims, towards the end of the pregnancy, the cub’s sharp claws destroys its mother’s womb. Even if today we may find the specifics of how this balance is achieved fanciful, it is astonishing to encounter such views as early as the fifth century bce – more than 2,500 years ago.

In the modern era, the idea of a balance in nature has been linked to the view that human intervention can upset the equilibrium. To conceive of nature and culture/ society as separate and opposing realms makes it possible to think of one as prior to the other. And yet scholars working in the emerging field of environmental humanities have recently advocated for a change in perspective. We are challenged to see nature and culture no longer as opposing and separate spheres of life with the capacity of one to dominate the other; rather, in the face of the unprecedented natural destruction caused by humanity, we have been called upon to write humans back into the history of the natural world.

Herodotus anticipated this move. In the Histories, humans are not outside of nature but an intricate part of the larger processes and patterns that balance things out. This does not concern just the many small examples in the Histories, in which human excesses of all sorts are followed by retributive backlashes – administered divinely or humanly (or both). This also affects the overall explanation that Herodotus offers for how the much smaller Greek contingents triumphed over the vast Persian army in the Greco-Persian Wars: here, too, Persian excess and overexpansion contributed to their unlikely defeat at the hands of the Greeks. In human history, as in the natural world, what goes up must come down.

In the end, it appears that part of the solution to the environmental crisis we are currently facing may well lie in the past and in an insight that was obvious already to Herodotus: a sustainable state between nature and culture, between humanity and the environment, can be reached only if and when we see ourselves as part of the natural world rather than as its masters, and if we respect the processes, cycles, and laws of nature of which we are part.

All translations are from Herodotus’s Histories, translated by Aubrey de Sélincourt, revised with introduction and notes by John Marincola (Penguin Classics, 2003)

In her latest collection of poems, Empirical, Lisa Gorton demonstrates – definitively and elegantly – how large, apparently simple creative decisions (employing catalogues or lists; quoting from the archive; engaging in ekphrasis or description) can produce compelling and complex poetic forms.

Empirical shows continuities with Gorton’s two earlier collections, especially with regard to a repeated concern with places and things. But the use of a ‘transcriptive poetics’ of bricolage – in which Gorton quotes from and adapts literary and archival works to produce original poetry – is a new development. Gorton is not, of course, the first poet to engage in the transcriptive poetics of found poetry. Conceptual poets such as Kenneth Goldsmith have long produced poetic work through the transcription of non-poetic material. And numerous poets have raided their national and regional historical archives to find, through poetic bricolage, the utter strangeness of what was once simply factual or administrative writing. Such a project is clearly open to post-colonial critique, as the work of Indigenous writers such as Tony Birch and Natalie Harkin shows.

Gorton’s use of the archive is concerned with poetic transformation itself, employing basic poetic strategies such as catalogue, translation, and ekphrasis (or description). Part of the power of Empirical is the way in which it subtly allows critique to form within such poetic forms of transformation.

An insight examines a lifetime
while an ocean flows under my feet.
My feet no longer feel

since my body’s beside itself.
I’m at an altar, calling on the gods
of the boggled mind to save me,

pouring two more mother-may-I’s
into the emptiness.
I’m at risk of being pushed

through a plate glass window.
The Hellhound looks down on me
from a higher plane –

two evil eyes and three mouths
all work in tandem in order
to bark out a final decree.

There’s no one to ask what it’s like
being dead to the world.
I imagine a switch gets tripped

as the window gives permission
for each multiplex person to merge
their many selves into one.

Who will be blamed, I wonder,
for living the life that was mine?
A blue bowl catches whatever

comes its way: birds, clouds,
high-wire act reactions.
The hypocrite Hellhound

uses a mirror to decide what looks
enough like it to let live and who
it will smash through the glass.

Hailstones in misshapen formation pound on roof corrugations,
distorted in scrying before reaching their target,
feathers and leaves stripped, birds and trees in transition.

To taste the fracture when air pressure is shaken and unshaken,
and lightning brings its personalised thunder close to a house in retreat,
hailstones misshapen in formation pound on the roof’s corrugations.

What can you portend when there are no signs of exposition,
when as sudden as sky the ground is remade as ice in white heat?
Feathers and leaves stripped, birds and trees in remission.

Which feather belongs to which absent bird, how did it pattern
a flight path laid bare to updraft the wet into frozen conflict?
Hailstones in misshapen formation pound on the roof’s corrugations.

Jagged as quartz exposed in red earth after the deluge’s erosion,
violent as an orbuculum’s sheen of hope broken by its clairvoyant,
feathers and leaves stripped as birds and trees are lost in transition.

Milky-centred fist-sized stones resist melting after devastation –
each leaf green as when torn away, strips of bark clean as skin, feathers rent;
hailstones in misshapen formation pound on the roof’s corrugations,
feathers and leaves, stripped birds and trees in remission.

Many climate activists and scientists are becoming desperate. They have devoted decades to warning the world of the danger of climate change and to forging solutions. But nothing has worked. No climate report or warning, no political agreement, no technological innovation has altered the ever-upwards trajectory of the greenhouse pollution that is ravaging our world. I am not alone in becoming furious at the polluters and those who pander to them, for they are threatening my children and their future as repulsively as any paedophile might.

How astonishing is it to read enthusiastic articles in the financial pages on new fossil fuel ‘plays’, and of the calls of politicians to subsidise new coal-fired power plants. What do their children think? We gain some idea from the latest generation of books by young climate warriors. The most striking thing about them is that they are all remarkably short – as if the new generation have run out of words. What will happen as efforts at persuasion fail?

No One Is Too Small to Make A Difference by Greta Thunberg

Penguin Press, $5.99 pb, 80 pp, 97880141991740

Greta Thunberg’s No One Is Too Small To Make a Difference is the slenderest of books. Its sixty-eight printed pages are filled with breaks and ample spaces, and it takes just minutes to read. But her words are beautiful, ringing with power:

To all the political parties that pretend to take the climate question seriously.
To all the politicians that ridicule us on social media …
To all of you who choose to look the other way every day …
Your silence is almost worst of all.
The future of all the coming generations rests on your shoulders.

Thunberg is a sixteen-year-old Swedish schoolgirl famous for single-handedly instigating the now global school climate-action strikes. She has Asperger’s syndrome and tells us that she sees almost everything in black or white. In the climate debate, that certainty on what is black and what is white is sorely needed, especially among older generations.

For everyone who reads Thunberg’s words, there are thousands who have been moved by her actions. I marched in Sydney, in the school strike of 2019, and saw firsthand the passion of the students. The school strikes are an immensely powerful global movement, for they force principals and teachers to choose: should they forbid their students marching to save their future, or keep them in the classroom learning skills needed for life in a fast-vanishing world?

This Is Not a Drill by Extinction Rebellion

Penguin Press, $19.99 pb, 208 pp, 9780141991443

At around the same time Thunberg was forging her solitary act of defiance, a small group of people in England were creating Extinction Rebellion. This Is Not a Drill is their credo. It lists no author on its cover and consists of a compendium of contributions, none more than a few pages long that document what is at stake with climate change, how social change is brought about, and what it is like to be at the front lines of an environmental rebellion.

The book opens with Extinction Rebellion’s ‘Declaration’. A mere two pages long, it echoes earlier declarations, charters, and manifestos that have altered the course of human history. It begins, ‘This is our darkest hour. Humanity finds itself embroiled in an event unprecedented in its history, one which, unless immediately addressed, will catapult us further into the destruction of all we hold dear.’ And the rebellion knows who is to blame: ‘The wilful complicity displayed by our government has shattered meaningful democracy and cast aside the common interest in favour of short-term gain and private profit …We hereby declare the bonds of the social contract to be null and void.’

The manifesto lists only three demands: ‘to be heard, to apply informed solutions to these ecological crises and to create a national assembly by which to initiate … solutions’. The call for a national assembly, presumably by sortition, is eloquent when highlighting how low the credibility of our current so-called democratic system has fallen among younger people.

The book’s introduction, by Sam Knights, documents Extinction Rebellion’s history. It began in a small British town on 31 October 2018 and today has proliferated astonishingly, with ‘hundreds of extinction rebellions … established in countries across the globe’. The Rebellion’s most impactful moment came in April 2019, when thousands of protesters shut down, for ten days, Oxford Circus, Marble Arch, Waterloo Bridge, Piccadilly Circus and Parliament Square in London. They also blocked access to the Treasury and glued themselves to the London Stock Exchange. More than 1,000 protesters were arrested and the overstretched police force could not cope. Shortly after, senior politicians of all parties agreed to meet the Rebellion leaders, and the following day the United Kingdom became the first country to declare a climate emergency.

Chapter 14, ‘The Resistance Model’ by Roger Hallam, details how Extinction Rebellion came into being as a result of years of research and planning by academics and activists who wanted to understand why previous efforts to stop climate change had failed, and how that could be changed. They decided that peaceful disruption – what they call the ‘civil resistance model’ – offered the best hope of success. They calculated that they needed around 50,000 people, deployed in a capital city, to break the law but remain non-violent. The rebellion must last for days, they felt, and it had to be fun.

The nature writer Jay Griffiths provides a fabulous account of what it’s like to be on the front lines of the Extinction Rebellion. She locked herself on at Oxford Circus, her hand fastened with a chain inside a metal pipe. She relates that, as a writer, watching the angle grinder work a few centimeters from her right hand was disconcerting. She admits to having been ‘mightily scared of arrest’, but also records astonishing support from the police, one of whom said to her, ‘You’re standing up for something that needed to be stood up for. We all needed someone to do that. You are doing it. I totally support you.’ When she was released from prison after overnight detention, one of the police in attendance said, ‘God bless, and good luck.’

Cathy Eastburn, a fifty-one-year-old mother of two teenage daughters, had a more fraught experience. After supergluing herself to the top of a DLR train at Canary Wharf, she was denied bail and put on remand. The loss of her liberty was an unbearable physical pain, but over the weeks of her incarceration she came to feel that even prison can be meaningful – ‘a life-changing experience’.

The transformation of our society that Extinction Rebellion and other new environmental movements work to usher in is profound. They want to end the fossil fuel era before it’s too late to stop climate change, to root out the corruption and privilege that bedevil our governments, and to reverse the destruction of nature. In short, the old order is under threat from Extinction Rebellion. As governments come to terms with the rebels, we shall soon learn whether the old order is a paper tiger, or one willing to cannibalise her offspring.

Global Planet Authority: How we’re about to save the biosphere by Angus Forbes

LID Publishing, £8.99 pb, 184 pp, 9781912555307

Angus Forbes’s Global Planet Authority: How we’re about to save the biosphere is almost quaintly old-fashioned in comparison with the works of Thunberg and Extinction Rebellion. It argues that what is needed to save the world is a transnational global planet authority that will mediate our relationship with nature. Despite the failure of the United Nations to deal with the climate crisis, Forbes feels that there is hope. He cites the Montreal Protocol on Substances that Deplete the Ozone Layer, the treaty banning Persistent Organic Pollutants, and the Paris Climate Accord as evidence that global change through supranational action can occur.

The biggest problem with Forbes’s thesis is the fact that, in every country, there are politicians who prosper from the burning of fossil fuels, the destruction of forests, or the raping of our fisheries. As recognised by Extinction Rebellion, unless we destroy their power, no Global Planet Authority can make progress on the climate issue.

Reading these books, I was sobered by the degree to which young people have become radicalised by our complacency and failure in the face of the overwhelming climate threat. Some will be the doctors, nurses, and other carers to whom we will entrust our ever more fragile bodies. In a world suffering from out-of-control climate change, will they wipe the backsides of incontinent, retired coal executives with the same exactitude they extend to those who acted, or tried to act, to stem the disaster?

Wittenoom is no more. The notorious mine has been abandoned and the township, ten kilometres away across the Pilbara, has been demolished and buried. The name has been erased from road signs along Route 95. Blue asbestos – the mineral that created and then condemned the place – is still virulently present in its soil, air, and water. But while Wittenoom is no more, it is not forgotten. It survives in the diseased lungs and bitter memories of those who lived and worked there.

In 1948, just as the mine was taking off, a young English-born doctor, Eric Saint, visited Wittenoom. Saint was shocked by what he saw. The town – ‘featureless, treeless, waterless streets of hot little asbestos boxes’ – was shocking enough. More shocking still were the working conditions in Australian Blue Asbestos’s mine and mill. As a graduate in industrial medicine from the University of Newcastle, familiar with American and British studies, Saint understood the deadly effects of prolonged exposure to asbestos dust. Workers in ABA’s mill, it was later shown, were exposed to as much as seventeen times the accepted standard. Women washing their clothes were breathing it. Children loved playing with the fluffy fibres that wafted across the plain.

Saint wrote to the Western Australian Health Department. Wittenoom, he warned, would produce ‘the richest and most lethal crop of cases of asbestosis in the world’s literature’. His warnings were ignored. So were those of Jim McNulty, another British-trained public health expert who visited the town in the late 1950s. ‘I advised [the workers] strongly to get out,’ he recalled. ‘I don’t know of a single person who took my advice.’

Drive not too far inland from Melbourne in most directions, past thick bands of ordered suburbia, and you’ll reach bush localities that shiver on breezy days with the sound of gumleaves. At dusk, you might glimpse kangaroos slinking like grey ghosts through blocks of steep, rocky land. Despite this poetry, these bushland escapes represent nature in a third life – a scenic recovery from an industry that left behind a pock-marked, sliced-up, hosed-down moonscape.

Damage is the twin of the lustre of the Victorian gold rush that surged from 1851 and turned this small wedge of south-eastern Australia from a pastoral economy founded on the dispossession of Aboriginal Traditional Owners into a mining stronghold. ‘Two per cent of all the gold ever mined in the world has come from Victoria,’ declare La Trobe University’s Susan Lawrence and Peter Davies. Yet, as they show in Sludge: Disaster on Victoria’s goldfields, such riches cost the newly minted Colony of Victoria a relentless slurry of mining waste that travelled far from its source to distant locations.

Historians have previously noted the environmental toll of the gold rushes, but Lawrence and Davies combine archaeology, archival research, digital-mapping technologies and aerial-imaging systems (LiDAR) to build a timely case study that guides us through both mangled bushland and the long political stoush between aggrieved land users and an industry deemed economically indispensable. The battle at times seems starkly contemporary.

This is a very disturbing book. It’s not just the Chernobyl story, but also Kate Brown’s broader story about the worldwide but inadequately studied impact on public health of lifetime exposure to ‘chronic doses of man-made radiation from medical procedures, nuclear reactors and their accidents, and atomic bombs and their fall-out’. But let’s take Chernobyl first.

Cover-up is a big part of the Chernobyl story. That is by now familiar, as far as the Soviet Union is concerned, from HBO’s Chernobyl television series (2019) and other sources. But Brown’s cover-up story is much more complicated. Certainly, Soviet authorities reflexively, though not entirely consistently, tried to cover up the scandal in their own backyard. The surprising thing is how apparently disinterested international and foreign experts connived or even sometimes took the lead in covering up. United Nations agencies take a beating in this book, though Brown is scrupulous in presenting their side of the story. The dismissive attitude of IAEA (International Atomic Energy Agency) to reports of Chernobyl damage might be understood, if not excused, in terms of its role as the UN’s nuclear lobby, with its ‘own institutional interest for the promotion of peaceful uses of nuclear energy’ and consequent incentive to play down Chernobyl effects. But the World Health Organization, with its ‘whistle-stop’ tour and disdain for local scientists and medical personnel ‘not well versed in radiation’, was no better. Consciously or unconsciously, a parade of foreign experts ‘suppressed and refuted evidence about the epidemic surrounding the smoking Chernobyl reactor’ because they didn’t trust the competence of local Soviet doctors and scientists who raised the alarm; because of a Western scientific consensus on the harmlessness of low-dose radiation (which, in contrast to the immediate impact of the accident, caused most of the long-term damage); and, Brown suggests, because the United States and other countries ‘had much larger radioactive skeletons in the closet from nuclear bomb tests’.

This June I attended a major Aboriginal fire-management workshop in Barmah National Park on Yorta Yorta woka, or Country. Camping on the floodplain of Dhungala – the Murray River – the participants’ discussions of bushfire led repeatedly back to another elemental force: walla, or water. As several elders explained, the flammability of the surrounding red gum forest is inextricably linked to the industrial regulation of the river’s movements. Anthropogenic infrastructures such as Lake Dartmouth have turned the forest’s wetting regime ‘upside down’, repurposing a millennia-old ecological pattern to capture spring floods and create summer flows. One perverse outcome, as Yorta Yorta man Corey Walker said, is that holidaymakers experience the river as rich in water. When urbanites encounter news reports of plunder in the wider Murray–Darling Basin, the channelling of its vitality into irrigation, they think back to summer breaks and long Invasion Day weekends enjoying a generous current, likely unaware that those flows were a gift from water authorities sending a strategic pulse through the system.

Such summer flows are a kind of ‘defeat device’ similar to the one made infamous by the automobile manufacturer Volkswagen. In that instance, investigations by the US Environmental Protection Agency revealed that between 2009 and 2015 the manufacturer had equipped its automobiles with software that recognised emissions-testing conditions, instructing them to ‘defeat’ the test by lowering their emissions to compliant levels. Subsequent investigations unearthed a 2007 email from Bosch engineers politely telling Volkswagen that, while they had designed this software, ‘if you use it in production it will be illegal’.

Rarely is the corruption of such devices, calibrated to enable exploitation, uncovered so conclusively. To return to Dhungala walla, exposés over the past two years regarding the ‘gaming’ and ‘theft’ of water allocations in the Murray–Darling Basin have struggled with the complexity and obscurity of the administrative system and its safeguards. As with native title, the level of technical literacy required to understand the basin’s powerful governance devices (and their defeat) is an obstacle to justice.

Since the 1960s, US military bases have continuously occupied Australian territory, with the permission of successive governments. Of the original sites, the missile-launch tracker Nurrungar is closed and North West Cape no longer communicates with US nuclear submarines, but it has since gained space surveillance and military signals intelligence functions. Pine Gap listens to signals transmissions from satellites in geostationary orbit; it analyses them and transmits the assessed intelligence to allies; it targets drone strikes and supports the US and NATO in military attacks. Familiar claims about contributions made by Pine Gap to ‘global stability’ through arms control, counterproliferation, and monitoring of adherence to treaties are rhetorical, since Australia and its allies are given to abandoning or ignoring rules that no longer suit their purposes.

The pile of books promising to reveal the ‘inside story’ or the ‘secret history’ of US bases in Australia continues to mount. Brian Toohey’s Secret, following his and William Pinwill’s Oyster, coincides with Project RAINFALL by novelist and war historian Tom Gilling. Earlier Australian efforts include David Rosenberg’s Pine Gap, on which a 2018 television series was based, James Curran’s Unholy Fury, Richard Hall’s The Secret State, and the lifetime of work by Des Ball and his Nautilus colleagues. As well there is New Zealander Nicky Hager’s Secret Power, while revelations from Americans of what their government doesn’t want known include Robert Lindsey’s The Falcon and the Snowman, Glenn Greenwald’s No Place to Hide, Sharon Weinberger’s The Imagineers of War, and many more.

The mountain of bases books is a molehill compared to the intelligence collected by the Five Eyes Anglo-allies through ECHELON, which monitors virtually all the world’s electronic communications, more than can be digested. Stored electronically by the US National Security Agency (NSA), ECHELON intercepts would, if printed, make a paper stack 240 kilometres high.

‘Climate change is coming,’ fourth-generation farmer Charlie Prell told an Independent Planning Commission hearing on a proposed expansion of the windfarm near his Crookwell property on 6 June 2019. He and his family constantly hear the noise of the turbines spinning five hundred metres away, generating electricity. They hear the sounds of traffic from the road, the sheep and cattle on the farm. ‘I hear the birds in the garden around my house,’ he said, ‘and I also hear something else … the nearly silent creep of climate change.’

Several weeks later, inveterate environmentalist Dr Bob Brown raised eyebrows with an opinion piece in the Tasmanian Mercury. ‘The world needs energy efficiency and renewable energy to replace fossil fuels,’ wrote Brown, ‘and fast.’ But the 120-turbine windfarm proposed for Robbins Island, off northwest Tasmania, would be visible for fifty kilometres, generate surplus electricity which would be carried to the mainland, see profits dispensed to foreign shareholders, and kill birds. The island lies in the migratory path of twenty-four endangered species. Its cliffs are home to the wedge-tailed eagle and the white-bellied sea eagle. Wind must be farmed elsewhere.

Brown does not fit the typical mould of the windfarm opponent, and his objections point to the complex ecological, social, and economic dimensions of renewable energy, and to the difficulties society faces in adapting to a changing climate.

The enchanting of rats has a long history. The Pied Piper, who enchanted first the rats then the children of Hamelin, is familiar to European readers. Here, Tim Bonyhady brings us a new story of rat enchantment by the Diyari and the Yandruwandha people in the eastern Lake Eyre basin. According to explorer Edwin Welch, they sang ‘in low, weird and dirge-like tones’ that drew the rodents from their burrows, then clubbed them on the head with a waddy until they had sufficient to eat.

A Rodent History of Australia is an ambitious task, and a timely one, as the native rodents of Australia have suffered massive losses over the period of European settlement: indeed, Australia leads the world in small-mammal extinctions. It is a real challenge to inspire the imaginative leap to care about a native animal known as a ‘rat’ – whether it is ‘Long-haired’ (vernacular) or Rattus villosissimus (the ‘most vile’ of rats). Even more difficult when it appears en masse, as a plague or irruption, and eats everything in sight, even the boots of the man recording its presence.

Bonyhady first came across the rat when he was writing his ground-breaking book Burke and Wills: From Melbourne to myth (1991). His own enchantment began with stories of the surging waves of rats that upended the country, destroying all traces of the Burke and Wills party. Nearly three decades later, with a new urgency to understand the climatic patterns of our ancient land, Bonyhady has recast his history of Australia with the rat itself as a key figure.

To complement the reviews and commentaries in our Environment issue, we invited a number of writers and scholars to nominate a book that will give readers a better appreciation of the environment.

Lynette Russell
Director, Monash Indigenous Studies Centre

Understanding our environment – its vulnerabilities and fragility, its challenges, history, and future (our future) – should be a concern for each and every one of us. In recent years, several important Australian books have pondered these questions, written from a range of disciplines and standpoints. Ruth A. Morgan’s Running Out? Water in Western Australia (2015) offers a deeply historical perspective to the ever-present concern of the availability of water. Joëlle Gergis powerful exploration of climate change, Sunburnt Country: The history and future of climate change in Australia (2019), should be compulsory reading for decision-makers and legislators. Tony Hughes-d’Aeth’s Like Nothing on this Earth: A literary history of the wheatbelt (2017) illustrates how the role of the environment has been central to creative writing and, by extension, how settler Australians figure their place on the land. For me, there is still one environmental book that everyone should read: Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962) – still prescient, contemporary, and utterly terrifying.

Ruth A. Morgan
Senior Research Fellow in History, Monash University

Returning to Tim Flannery’s The Weather Makers: The history and future impact of climate change (2005) nearly fifteen years after it was published shows how far we’ve come, but also, how frustratingly far we have to go. When Flannery was writing it, Australia was yet to sign the Kyoto Protocol, and the Millennium Drought was still a reality. What The Weather Makers still offers is an Australian story of planetary change and how our continent is faring in a warming world. We remain ‘the weather makers, and the future of biodiversity and civilisation hangs on our actions’.

Andrea Gaynor
Associate Professor of History, The University of Western Australia

It has been a convenient fiction for settler Australians that their colonial forebears were at best alienated from the land or even hated it: an ignorant and antagonistic past that can perpetually give way to a more informed and sympathetic present. Moving across and between the twin poles of art and law, Tim Bonyhady’s The Colonial Earth (2000) disrupts this myth. By illuminating the aesthetic and moral, as well as utilitarian, impulses that lay behind colonial environmental-protection efforts, the book evocatively demonstrates that environmental appreciation is as deeply embedded in settler culture as is resistance to effective environmental protection. The upshot is that environmental appreciation is not enough: beyond experiencing and declaring our love of particular places and species, we also need to understand the deep and enduring nature of the threats we pose to them, and to organise alternatives to our destructive economy and culture.

Danielle Clode
Inaugural ABR Dahl Trust Fellow in 2014

US-based Australian academic Gillen D’Arcy Wood’s Tambora: The eruption that changed the world (2015) is an impressive piece of detective work. By unravelling the global impacts of a ‘megacolossal’ volcanic eruption in Indonesia in 1815, the author documents the unappreciated devastation even this relatively short-term fluctuation caused. Given current predictions, a drop of 1.5 degrees over a decade seems minor, and yet the ultimate death toll and long-term economic damage are sobering. A few devastatingly cold winters led to opium dependence in Yunnan, westward migration across the United States, the first great depression, famine in Ireland, and typhus and cholera plagues that killed millions. Beautifully written, Tambora draws on scientific and literary evidence to bring together a very personal account of the costs of living through destructive climate change. It reminds us of just how fragile this ecosystem, and our place in it, really is.

Tom Griffiths
Historian and author

Charles Massy’s wonderful book about regenerative agriculture, Call of the Reed Warbler (2017), shows how solutions to the environmental crisis can literally come out of the ground. In the tradition of Elyne Mitchell and Eric Rolls, farmer-scholars who wrote passionately from a knowledge of beloved country, Massy eloquently evokes his farm on the Monaro high plains while investigating the future survival of Earth and humanity. His book begins with a world history across millennia and then takes us into Australian earth with a myriad farming stories – first, Charlie’s own account of how he had to unlearn the imported farming habits of his upbringing, and then those of farmers from around the continent who are regenerating agriculture by working with rather than against nature. It is a visionary book that filled me with practical hope for what can be done, and excitement about what we are already doing.

Tony Hughes-d’Aeth
Discipline Chair for English and Cultural Studies, The University of Western Australia

The Environment: A history of the idea (2018) by Libby Robin, Paul Warde, and Sverker Sörlin is an immensely valuable book. Compact and highly readable, the book brings together three leading lights in the environmental humanities to help us understand how this idea of the environment – one we take for granted and use all the time – actually came into being. While the word was first introduced into English from the French in 1827 (by Thomas Carlyle), its contemporary sense owes much to the emerging planetary sensibility that erupted after the end of World War II. The narrative unfolds like a good detective novel, with the various components of the story of this concept brilliantly rendered. I wish I could have read the book long ago – it answered so many questions. It’s now an indispensable resource for anyone wishing to understand the conceptual foundations of environmental understanding.

Ceridwen Dovey
Writer of fiction, creative non-fiction

The Sea Around Us (1951), by the American environmentalist Rachel Carson, is not as famous today as Silent Spring (her 1962 manifesto documenting the dangers of widespread chemical pesticide misuse), but it’s essential reading. Carson loved to observe the rock pools around her cottage in Maine, while also joining the dots between the bigger ethical and political questions raised by the ocean’s vastness, and preciousness, as a shared resource. She had a brilliant grasp of the science, but also thought of herself as a poet of the sea, infusing her writing with wonder. One of Carson’s most famous rallying cries to her readers was to urge them to ask, ‘Who speaks? And why?’ In the midst of any environmental controversy or uncertainty, somebody always has more to gain from one outcome than another. Carson believed that it is our moral responsibility to pay close attention, not just to nature but to the workings of power.

John Kinsella
Poet, novelist, critic, essayist and editor whose writing is strongly influenced by landscape

It is an interesting thing for me to look back and identify a single work that prompted personal sentiments of environmentalism. Activism came from observation, participation, and a desire to rectify my own culpabilities – of witnessing the damage being done. This is why I turn again and again to the poems that spoke to me of the natural world, of the brute reality of colonial intrusion, and of the need for justice – the Collected Poems of Judith Wright. Increasingly, Wright didn’t separate cause and effect; she saw the interconnections between different injustices. Environmentalism per se cannot operate alone: Wright’s conservation was part of a larger picture of obligation and recognition. So while Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring was a shock to my senses, it reinforced and evidenced what I already knew from direct observation. I have always struggled with Thoreau’s Walden, finding no redress to the contradictions of the privileged space of the Western thinker immersing himself in ‘natural surroundings’ as a route to ‘answers’. Wright’s relationship to colonial pastoral origins, and her efforts to create a dialogic poetry of presence, work hand in hand with her celebration of life. Since I was a teenager, she has spoken to me of a way of being environmentally activist and receptive to contradictory issues involved in acts of conservation.

Billy Griffiths
Historian and lecturer in Cultural Heritage and Museum Studies, Deakin University

Australians are still coming to terms with the idea that their environment is as much cultural as it is natural. In 1969, archaeologist Rhys Jones coined the phrase ‘fire-stick farming’ to describe the intricate means by which Indigenous peoples shaped Country with flame. It was a provocative, revolutionary idea, but the insight wasn’t fully developed until 1975, when Sylvia J. Hallam published her masterful history, Fire and Hearth: A study of Aboriginal usage and European usurpation in south-western Australia. Hallam explores the regional nature of fire histories, the diversity and antiquity of Indigenous burning regimes, and the social contract between people and fire, expressed through language, art, ritual, and Law. It remains a rich and exciting book, and it has shifted the way I view the Australian environment. As Hallam writes in her opening passage, ‘The land the English settled was not as God made it. It was as the Aborigines made it.’

Michael Adams
2017 Calibre Essay Prize winner

The etymology of book takes us to beech in Germanic languages and connects to codex in Latin, both of which refer to blocks of wood. The etymology of geography gives us: geo-graphy, earth-writing. Writing presupposes reading, and the critical book for Australians to read is actually this land, this earth. The story we need is clearly written here already, and its best interpreters are its First Peoples. Two hundred and thirty years of colonial settlement is 0.3% of this land’s human history, an eyeblink in the cognitive, visceral, and sacred understandings of this Country. In the short term, if you want an actual book, I recommend Kakadu Man by Big Bill Neidjie: ‘Dirt, earth, I sleep with this earth. / Grass … just like your Brother. / In my blood in my arm this grass. / This dirt for us because we’ll be dead, / We’ll be going this earth. / This the story now.’

Polluters and their panderers

Welcome to our annual Environment issue. As we noted here in 2018, ‘Each year the threats seem more nightmarish, the political inaction more reprehensible.’ In his Review of the Month, Tim Flannery writes: ‘I am not alone in becoming furious at the polluters and those who pander to them, for they are threatening my children and their future as repulsively as any paedophile might.’

Guest editor Billy Griffiths and our many contributors offer a range of reviews, essays, poetry, and survey pieces, all intended to enhance our sense of present dangers, historical factors, and cultural resonances. Dr Griffiths, whose recent travels have taken him to the boab belt in the Northern Territory, also has an editorial.

Special thanks to Eucalypt Australia, which has supported this special issue for a fifth time.

Jolley Prize

A large audience gathered at Readings Hawthorn on September 11 for the 2019 ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize ceremony. All six shortlisted and commended authors were able to join us. After readings from our three shortlisted authors, celebrated writer Maxine Beneba Clarke (representing her fellow judges, John Kinsella and Beejay Silcox) named Sonja Dechian’s story ‘The Point-Blank Murder’ as the overall winner. She receives $5,000. Raaza Jamshed’s ‘Miracle Windows’ was placed second ($3,000); Morgan Nunan’s ‘Rubble Boy’ was placed third ($2,000).

The judges commented: ‘At once tender and sinister “The Point-Blank Murder” is a story of parental vigilance, with all of its new terrors. On an isolated rural property, a couple learn how to comfort and care for their newborn. The rhythms of parenthood are new and strange to them – almost otherworldly. One of the pair is listening to a true crime podcast to give the days shape. Why does its distant violence feel so claustrophobically resonant? This assured story is drum-skin taut – it trusts that its readers will find their way into its dark corners, and then emerge, bleary-eyed, back into the merciless sunlight.

All three shortlisted stories appear in the September issue.

ABR Favourite Australian Novel Poll

Ten years after the first ABR FAN Poll, the second one was limited to Australian novels published since 2000 (though we received votes for recent classics such as 1984, Voss, and Monkey Grip).  When voting closed in mid-September, Richard Flanagan’s Booker Prize-winning novel The Narrow Road to the Deep North emerged as a clear winner. Ironically, Tim Winton’s Breath came fourth for the second time, ten years after it did so in the original FAN Poll for the best Australian novel of all time. (Alexis Wright’s Carpentaria and The Slap by Christos Tsiolkas were the only other crossover entries between the two lists.) For more information and a full list of the top twenty titles, read the ABR Favourite Australian Novels of the Twenty-First Century Poll. 

Thanks to our friends at Classics Direct and Readings, we were able to offer lucky voters some brilliant prizes, alongside two free digital subscriptions to ABR. Winners will be notified by email soon.

Comes the dark

Newspaper and magazine house styles, beloved of editors and other pedants, reflect common usage and present realities. It’s clear to us that the term ‘climate change’ – first employed in the 1970s to describe global warming and concomitant threats to the natural world – no longer does justice to the immense challenges facing society, notwithstanding the euphemisms of government and the mendacity of certain commentators, with their vested interests and blinkered vision. ‘At one stride comes the dark,’ as Coleridge reminds us in his epic poem.

Henceforth, ABR – which shares Tim Flannery’s incomprehension at the miserabilism of denialists – will adopt the term ‘climate crisis’.

New website!

Many thanks for your comments on our new website, which we launched on September 18 – our first major renovation in some years. We hope you enjoy the fresh new look and functionality.

Hearty thanks to our web developers at Snaffle – especially Nathan Morrow, our valued colleague of nigh on ten years, and his designer, Alice Good.

Which poets have most influenced you?

Trying to answer this question has made me realise how often, in my reading, I am tracking lines of influence. Influence is such a chancy thing – sometimes opening out from a single image, a phrase, an involvement of syntax – and also revelatory. I first read Marianne Moore as an undergraduate. In my mind, the lines lead out from her to Barbara Guest, Elizabeth Bishop, Wallace Stevens, John Ashbery, F.T. Prince, H.D., Ezra Pound. Also as an undergraduate, I wrote an honours thesis on Emily Dickinson. Now, looking back, I realise that Dickinson’s use of prepositions – her sudden way of widening a poem out – originated my interest in John Donne. I spent years reading Donne’s poetry and prose, alongside Shakespeare, Burton, Browne, and Marvell. Reading those many-claused works must have had an effect. So, though there are other poets I like as much – Friedrich Hölderlin, Oodgeroo Noonuccal, Philip Hodgins, Martin Johnston, Antigone Kefala, Gig Ryan – Moore and Dickinson are, for me, at the start of things.

Are poems chiefly inspired or crafted?

Ideally, all the decisions that craft a poem reveal its inspiration.

What prompts a new poem?

Where are you happiest?

In the driver’s seat of our Toyota Corolla on the way to Burleigh Heads. The family’s playing a trivia quiz where you have to answer deep-cut questions about a particular family member sitting in the car, and then my youngest daughter says some gag weirdly beyond her years and we all laugh our heads off, and then my wife calls it all for what it is. ‘M.O.P.H.!’ she hollers. Cheesy as hell but that stands for, ‘Moment of Pure Happiness’, and that’s code for, ‘Life ain’t ever gettin’ better than this so recognise it, knuckleheads!’

What’s your idea of hell?

The driver’s seat of our Toyota Corolla driving home from Burleigh Heads.

This year, the Australian bushfire season began in winter. A long, dry summer – the warmest on record – lingered into and then beyond autumn. By spring, more than one hundred uncontrolled fires were raging across the eastern seaboard, reaching into ecological regions unfamiliar with flame. It is alarming how routine such record-breaking extremes have become, and how readily, in political statements and news reports, cause is decoupled from effect.

In the early hours of September 8, a fire front savaged the Lamington National Park in south-east Queensland. The usually wet rainforest was dry. Vast tracts of the World Heritage region were razed, along with the historic mountain cabins at Binna Burra Lodge, built in 1933 by conservationists Arthur Groom and Romeo Lahey to encourage a greater appreciation of nature. The forest is now rapidly changing. ‘When we reconstruct this place,’ Steve Noakes, Binna Burra’s chairman, told reporters as the fires burned, ‘we have to take into account the impacts of climate change on Australia’s forests.’

In this issue, Tim Flannery explores the tactics and philosophies of activists who are searching for solutions that match the scale of the climate crisis we face. He, like so many others, finds hope in the global school climate strikes inspired by the words and actions of sixteen-year-old Swedish schoolgirl Greta Thunberg (who appears on our front cover). Flannery also charts the rise of the global protest group Extinction Rebellion, which turns one this month. For Thunberg and Extinction Rebellion, the environment is not an isolated issue but an inseparable part of a whole, and action to reverse the climate crisis demands transformative, structural reform.

Julia Kindt’s essay on ‘Nature’s ancient history’ reminds us that the natural world has always been an agent in human affairs, and vice versa. Xerxes, the ruthless Persian king whose army drank rivers dry, was also susceptible to the powerful beauty of nature. In protecting and decorating a plane tree, he became perhaps the first conservationist on the documentary record.

Kim Mahood’s essay in this issue reminds us that conservation efforts invariably tell us more about people than they do about the places or animals being protected. She reflects that the Night Parrot, once thought extinct, survived just fine without human intervention, and now bemused Paruku Rangers are using its re-emergence to support their own millennia-long conservation efforts. It is galling that the remarkably successful Indigenous Ranger programs need ‘a fat budgie’ to ensure their ongoing funding. As Kim Scott laments in his review of The Australian Dream, ‘mainstream Australia’ too often appears to care about heritage but not its custodians.

Threaded throughout the issue are enduring questions about political power, regulation, and obfuscation, whether these relate to water governance, windfarms, nuclear radiation, mining effluent, or small-mammal extinctions. Writing about Australia’s fatal affair with asbestos, Graeme Davison reflects on the many bitter legacies we face – from Indigenous dispossession to environmental neglect – and how they coalesce around the same questions: ‘When did they know? Why did they ignore the truth-tellers? Was the blindness innocent or wilful?’

Once again, Greta Thunberg’s words ring clear: ‘To all of you who choose to look the other way every day … Your silence is almost worst of all.’

It has been a privilege to work on this issue, which has been generously supported by ABR’s long-term partner Eucalypt Australia.

‘War is only the superficial face that you see first. Underneath that, there is so much humanity, so much else taking place. There may be death but there is also normal life here too.’

Anas Habib, co-founder, the Secret Library.

A rebel stronghold on the southern edge of Damascus, the Syrian suburb of Daraya, was violently isolated by the Assad regime for almost four years – a ruthlessly protracted attempt to starve out the city’s pro-democracy insurgency. Power and water supplies were cut, crops were burned, and humanitarian aid was barred. There was no food, no medicine, and no way out.

In August of 2016, after 1,368 days of privation and more than 9,000 shrapnel-filled barrel bombs, a deal was struck between the rebels and regime forces to evacuate the defiant, ruined city, still home to thousands of people. As the citizens of Daraya readied to leave – ‘uprooted from their homes and heading into the complete unknown’ – they made sure to return their library books. Each of the 14,000 volumes in Daraya’s collection had been hard won, saved from burning apartments and municipal wreckage under threat of sniper fire, and preserved in a hidden basement. In Daraya’s final hours as a living city, the university students who had established the library worked frantically to safeguard its treasures by sealing over the entrance. A capsule of hope.

BBC journalist Mike Thomson first reported the tale of ‘The Secret Library’ in a podcast for Radio 4, which aired mere weeks before Daraya emptied and the library had to be abandoned. ‘It got a heart-warming reception,’ Thomson recalls of his award-winning feature, but ‘there was so much more to say’. So arrives Syria’s Secret Library, a tender account of this underground literary sanctuary and the dauntless, young bibliophiles who risked their lives to build it. ‘We began by planting vegetables,’ Shakespeare buff and co-founder Abdul Basit explains, ‘but soon realised that we needed to feed our minds too.’

Ten years after the first ABR FAN Poll, the second one was limited to Australian novels published since 2000 (though we received votes for recent classics such as 1984, Voss, and Monkey Grip). When voting closed in mid-September, Richard Flanagan’s Booker Prize-winning novel The Narrow Road to the Deep North emerged as a clear winner. Ironically, Tim Winton’s Breath came fourth for the second time, ten years after it did so in the original FAN Poll for the best Australian novel of all time (which was won by Tim Winton's Cloudstreet). Alexis Wright’s Carpentaria and The Slap by Christos Tsiolkas were the only other crossover entries between the two lists.

After our Top Twenty feature we list all the individual novels as nominated by voters in alphabetical order. (Many more publications were nominated but these included short story collections, memoirs, non-fiction and international titles, as well as novels published before 2000, all of which were ineligible.)

Have your favourites made the list?

The Top Twenty

1. The Narrow Road to the Deep North

by Richard Flanagan (2013)

The Narrow Road to the Deep North, winner of the 2014 Man Booker Prize, is a dramatic wartime saga. With a deadly day on the Burma Railway at its heart, the tale begins in August 1943 with Dorrigo Evans, an Australian surgeon despairing in a Japanese POW camp. Evans, struggling to save himself and his fellow men from violence, disease, and death, can’t shake the memories of his love affair with his uncle’s young wife. The Narrow Road to the Deep North is a narrative reflecting the depravity of war but also the tentative nature of love.

Read Kerryn Goldsworthy's Reading Australia essay and James Ley's review.

2. Boy Swallows Universe

by Trent Dalton (2018)

Boy Swallows Universe, by Walkley Award-winning journalist and author Trent Dalton, has become a literary sensation. The first book ever to win four prizes at the Australian Book Industry awards, the novel is a funny, sensitive, and gripping coming-of-age tale set in 1980s Australia. Eli Bell and his mute brother, August, live in a housing estate on the fringes of Brisbane, and together they navigate the unpredictable world around them. ‘All of me is in here,’ Trent Dalton writes of his first novel. ‘Everything I’ve ever seen. Everything I’ve ever done.’

Read Trent Dalton's Open Page interview.

3. Carpentaria

by Alexis Wright (2006)

Carpentaria, by Waanyi writer Alexis Wright, is a sprawling narrative set in the small town of Desperance in the Gulf country of north-western Queensland. The tale, admired for its hybridised mix of myth, politics, and social commentary via an array of unforgettably unique characters, is a masterly piece of storytelling. It won the Australian Premier’s Literary Prize and the Miles Franklin Award in 2006, and has captured our imaginations ever since.

Read Kate McFadyen's review. 

4. Breath

by Tim Winton (2008)

Breath by Tim Winton, winner of the 2009 Miles Franklin Award, follows paramedic Bruce Pike as he reflects on his youth. The story is set in Sawyer, a small Western Australian logging village near the fictional coastal town of Angelus, a place recurring in several of Winton's works. This deeply moving book of risk and friendship strikes a balance between the everyday and the extraordinary.

Read Tim Winton's Open Page interview and James Ley's review.

5. The Book Thief

by Markus Zusak (2005)

The Book Thief, set in Nazi Germany, follows Liesel, a young girl who finds a forgotten book, The Gravedigger’s Handbook, partially hidden in the snow.The theft of this abandoned book will alter the course of Liesel's life dramatically. Made into a major motion picture in 2013, The Book Thief was a bestseller from the start.

Read Lorien Kaye's review.

6. True History of the Kelly Gang

by Peter Carey (2000)

True History of the Kelly Gang, a virtuosic achievement, is Peter Carey’s vernacular riff on the Ned Kelly legend that won the 2001 Man Booker Prize. Ned Kelly, that renowned ‘black square with the ominous slit’, is indelibly ingrained into Australian lore. Depicted in innumerable books, films, and documentaries – and perhaps most vividly immortalised by Australian painter Sidney Nolan – Ned Kelly is a figure synonymous with Australian history. In True History of the Kelly Gang, novelist Peter Carey captures the man and myth in a classic outlaw tale: his own ode to the bushranger.

Read Peter Carey's Open Page interview and Morag Fraser's review.

7. The Museum of Modern Love

by Heather Rose (2016)

The Museum of Modern Love, Heather Rose’s mesmerising novel, follows Arky Levin, a film composer in New York separated from his wife. Arky one day finds himself at MOMA and sees Marina Abramovic in The Artist is Present, in which she had silent interactions with members of the public at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. As Arky watches the artwork unravel, so too does he. 

Read Duncan Fardon's review.   

8. The Natural Way of Things

by Charlotte Wood (2015)

The Natural Way of Things is a dark fable about misogyny and corporate control. It follows what happens after two women wake from a drugged sleep and find themselves imprisoned on a remote desert property, held prisoner with other women somewhere in the Australian bush by two male guards and a woman who claims to be a nurse.

Read Charlotte Wood's Open Page interview and Susan Lever's review.

9. The Slap

by Christos Tsiolkas (2008)

The Slap is a popular and provocative novel exploring societal and familial tensions through the fallout that follows a man slapping a child not his own at a suburban barbecue in Melbourne. Hugo, the slapped child, had been misbehaving while his parents failed to intervene. The slap sends everyone into a spiral, with some believing in physical discipline, while others think the police should be called.

Read Kerryn Goldsworthy's Reading Australia essay and James Ley's review.

10. Burial Rites

by Hannah Kent (2013)

Burial Rites, Hannah Kent's richly imagined début novel, explores the life of the last woman to be executed in Iceland, Agnes Magnúsdóttir. Iceland has no prisons, so Magnúsdóttir was held for the winter before her execution at a farm she'd lived at as a young girl. For this winter, she is guarded by the farmer's wife and daughters.

Read Bronwyn Lea's review.

The remaining titles in the top twenty:

11.   Jasper Jones by Craig Silvey (2009)
        Read Andrew Nette's review of the film adaptation

12.   Questions of Travel by Michelle de Kretser (2012)
        Read Michelle de Kretser's Open Page interview and Melinda Harvey's review

13.   The Dry by Jane Harper (2016)
        Read Chris Flynn's review

14.   The Secret River by Kate Grenville (2005)
        Read Kate Grenville's Open Page interview and Kerryn Goldsworthy's review

15.   Ransom by David Malouf (2009)
        Read Peter Rose's review

16.   Truth by Peter Temple (2008)
        Read Chris Womersley's review

17.   A Fraction of the Whole by Steve Toltz (2008)
        Read Louise Swinn's review

18.   Foal’s Bread by Gillian Mears (2011)
        Read Gillian Mears's Open Page interview and Gillian Dooley's review

19.   That Deadman Dance by Kim Scott (2010)
        Read Patrick Allington's Reading Australia essay and review

20.   The Great Fire by Shirley Hazzard (2003)
        Read Brenda Niall's review

2019 ABR FAN Poll results

Below is a listing of all the eligible novels nominated for the ABR FAN Poll by ABR readers. Are your favourites among them?

A

Michael Mohammed Ahmad: The Lebs (2018)
Belinda Alexandra: Tuscan Rose (2010)
Louise Allan: The Sisters’ Song (2018)
Steven Amsterdam: The Easy Way Out (2016)
Steven Amsterdam: Things We Didn’t See Coming (2009)
Charlie Archbold: Mallee Boys (2017)
Robbie Arnott: Flames (2018)
Melissa Ashley: The Birdman’s Wife (2016)

B

Murray Bail: The Voyage (2012)
Peter Barry: I Hate Martin Amis Et Al (2011)
Tony Birch: Blood (2011)
Tony Birch: The White Girl (2019)
Tony Birch: Ghost River (2015)
Stephanie Bishop: The Other Side of the World (2015)
Emily Bitto: The Strays (2014)
Georgia Blain: Between a Wolf and a Dog (2016)
James Bradley: Clade (2015)
Mark Brandi: Wimmera (2017)
Mark Brandi: The Rip (2017)
Geraldine Brooks: Year of Wonders (2001)
Geraldine Brooks: March (2005)
Geraldine Brooks: People of the Book (2008)

C

Peter Carey: True History of the Kelly Gang (2000)
Peter Carey: A Long Way From Home (2017)
Peter Carey: Theft: A Love Story (2006)
Steven Carroll: The Art of the Engine Driver (2001)
Steven Carroll: The Time We Have Taken (2007)
Brian Castro: Shanghai Dancing (2003)
Melanie Cheng: Room For a Stranger (2019)
Rebekah Clarkson: Barking Dogs (2017)
J.M. Coetzee: Elizabeth Costello (2003)
J.M. Coetzee: Summertime (2009)
Claire G. Coleman: Terra Nullius (2017)
Matthew Condon: The Trout Opera (2018)
Peter Corris: Salt and Blood (2002)
Moya Costello: Harriet Chandler (2014)
Jack Cox: Dodge Rose (2016)
Amanda Curtin: Elemental (2013)

D

John Dale: Detective Work (2015)
Trent Dalton: Boy Swallows Universe (2018)
Lea Davey: Silkworm Secrets (2016)
Luke Davies: Isabelle the Navigator (2000)
Michelle de Kretser: Questions of Travel (2012)
Michelle de Kretser: The Hamilton Case (2003)
Michelle de Kretser: The Life to Come (2017)
Garry Disher: Her (2017)
Garry Disher: Bitter Wash Road (2013)
Ceridwen Dovey: In the Garden of the Fugitives (2018)
Jennifer Down: Our Magic Hour (2016)
Sara Dowse: As the Lonely Fly (2017)
Robert Drewe: Whipbird (2017)
Robert Drewe: Grace (2005)

F

Richard Flanagan: The Narrow Road to the Deep North (2013)
Richard Flanagan: Gould’s Book of Fish (2001)
Richard Flanagan: Wanting (2008)
Penny Flanagan: Surviving Hal (2018)
Kate Forsyth: The Wild Girl (2013)
Kate Forsyth: Bitter Greens (2012)
David Foster: Sons of the Rumour (2009)
Karen Foxlee: Lenny’s Book of Everything (2018)
Jackie French: Pennies for Hitler (2012)
Peggy Frew: Hope Farm (2015)
Anna Funder: All That I Am (2011)

G

Enza Gandolfo: The Bridge (2018)
Helen Garner: The Spare Room (2009)
Sulari Gentill: Crossing the Lines (2017)
Scott G. Gibson: Making Tracks (2016)
Alicia Gilmore: Path to the Night Sea (2018)
Dennis Glover: The Last Man in Europe (2017)
Andrea Goldsmith: Invented Lives (2019)
Andrea Goldsmith: The Memory Trap (2013)
Peter Goldsworthy: Three Dog Night (2003)
Kate Grenville: The Secret River (2005)
Kate Grenville: Sarah Thornhill (2011)

H

Eleni Hale: Stone Girl (2018)
Leanne Hall: This Is Shyness (2010)
Rosalie Ham: The Dressmaker (2000)
Chris Hammer: Scrublands (2018)
Jane Harper: The Dry (2016)
Jane Harper: The Lost Man (2018)
Elizabeth Harrower: In Certain Circles (2014)
Sonya Hartnett: Of A Boy (2002)
Ashley Hay: The Body in the Clouds (2010)
Shirley Hazzard: The Great Fire (2003)
Robert Hillman: The Bookshop of the Broken Hearted (2018)
Lia Hills: The Crying Place (2017)
Chloe Hooper: The Engagement (2012)
Eva Hornung: Dog Boy (2009)
Paul Howarth: Only Killers and Thieves (2018)

I

Lisa Ireland: The Shape of Us (2017)
Stephen M. Irwin: The Dead Path (2009)

J

Kate Jennings: Moral Hazard (2002)
Frances Johnson: Eugene’s Falls (2007)
Gail Jones: Five Bells (2011)
Gail Jones: Dreams of Speaking (2006)
Gail Jones: Sixty Lights (2004)
Gail Jones: Sorry (2007)
Toni Jordan: Nine Days (2012)
Toni Jordan: Our Tiny, Useless Hearts (2016)
Toni Jordan: The Fragments (2018)
Mireille Juchau: The World Without Us (2015)

K

Leah Kaminsky: The Hollow Bones (2019)
Cate Kennedy: The World Beneath (2009)
Hannah Kent: Burial Rites (2013)
Krissy Kneen: An Uncertain Grace (2017)
Jay Kristoff: Nevernight (2016)
Ambelin Kwaymullina and Ezekiel Kwaymullina: Catching Teller Crow (2018)

L

Sofie Laguna: The Eye of the Sheep (2014)
Sofie Laguna: The Choke (2017)
Margo Lanagan: Sea Hearts (2012)
Eleanor Limprecht: The Passengers (2018)
Joshua Lobb: The Flight of Birds (2019)
Joan London: The Golden Age (2018)
Joan London: The Good Parents (2008)
Melissa Lucashenko: Too Much Lip (2018)
Melissa Lucashenko: Mullumbimby (2013)

M

Emily Maguire: An Isolated Incident (2016)
David Malouf: Ransom (2009)
Melina Marchetta: The Piper’s Son (2010)
Melina Marchetta: On the Jellicoe Road (2006)
Melina Marchetta: Saving Francesca (2003)
Juliet Marillier: Den of Wolves (2017)
Fiona McFarlane: The Night Guest (2014)
Andrew McGahan: The White Earth (2004)
Andrew McGahan: Last Drinks (2000)
Fiona McGregor: Indelible Ink (2010)
Catherine McKinnon: Storyland (2017)
Dervla McTiernan: The Ruin (2018)
Dervla McTiernan: The Scholar (2019)
Gillian Mears: Foal’s Bread (2011)
Kate Mildenhall: Skylarking (2016)
Alex Miller: Journey to the Stone Country (2002)
Alex Miller: Coal Creek (2013)
Alex Miller: The Passage of Love (2016)
Alex Miller: Autumn Laing (2011)
Jennifer Mills: Dyschronia (2018)
Frank Moorhouse: Cold Light (2011)
Frank Moorhouse: Dark Palace (2000)
Liane Moriarty: Big Little Lies (2014)
Cass Moriarty: The Promise Seed (2015)
Jaclyn Moriarty: The Slightly Alarming Tale of the Whispering Wars (2018)
Zoe Morrison: Music and Freedom (2016)
Kate Morton: The Forgotten Garden (2008)
Gerald Murnane: Border Districts (2017)
Gerald Murnane: Barley Patch (2009)
Gerald Murnane: A Million Windows (2014)
Gerald Murnane: A Season on Earth (2019)
Lois Murphy: Soon (2017)

O

Ryan O’Neal: Their Brilliant Careers (2016)
Stephen Orr: The Hands (2016)
Stephen Orr: This Excellent Machine (2019)
Wendy Orr: Dragonfly Song (2016)

P

Favel Parrett: Past the Shallows (2011)
Favel Parrett: When the Night Comes (2014)
Elliot Perlman: Seven Types of Ambiguity (2005)
Elliot Perlman: The Street Sweeper (2011)
Marcella Polain: Driving into the Sun (2019)
John Purcell: The Girl on the Page (2018)

R

Christopher Raja: The Burning Elephant (2015)
Jane Rawson: From the Wreck (2017)
Jane Rawson: A Wrong Turn at the Office of Unmade Lists (2013)
Matthew Reilly: Seven Ancient Wonders (2005)
Kelly Rimmer: The Things We Cannot Say (2019)
Holly Ringland: The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart (2018)
Michael Robotham: Life or Death (2014)
Michael Robotham: Good Girl, Bad Girl (2019)
Heather Rose: The Museum of Modern Love (2016)
Peter Rose: Roddy Parr (2010)
Heather Rose: The Butterfly Man (2005)
Sarah Ross-Simon: The Woman of Maldon (2017)
Josephine Rowe: A Loving, Faithful Animal (2016)

S

Michael Sala: The Restorer (2017)
Eva Sallis: Fire Fire (2004)
Sarah Schmidt: See What I Have Done (2017)
Kim Scott: That Deadman Dance (2010)
John A. Scott: N (2014)
Kim Scott: Taboo (2017)
Jock Serong: On the Java Ridge (2017)
Jock Serong: Preservation (2018)
Jessica Shirvington: Empowered (2013)
Craig Silvey: Jasper Jones (2009)
Craig Silvey: Rhubarb (2004)
Inga Simpson: Mr Wigg (2013)
Graeme Simsion: The Rosie Project (2013)
Alex Skovron: The Poet (2005)
Tim Slee: Taking Tom Murray Home (2019)
Pip Smith: Half Wild (2017)
Tracey Sorensen: The Lucky Galah (2018)
Anna Spargo-Ryan: The Paper House (2016)
M.L. Stedman: The Light Between Oceans (2012)
Laurie Steed: You Belong Here (2018)

T

Cory Taylor: Me and Mr Booker (2011)
Peter Temple: Truth (2008)
Peter Temple: The Broken Shore (2005)
Carrie Tiffany: Mateship with Birds (2012)
Carrie Tiffany: Everyman’s Rules for Scientific Living (2005)
Carrie Tiffany: Exploded View (2019)
Steve Toltz: A Fraction of the Whole (2008)
Jessica Townsend: Nevermoor: The trials of Morrigan Crow (2017)
Lucy Treloar: Salt Creek (2017)
Christos Tsiolkas: Barracuda (2014)
Christos Tsiolkas: Dead Europe (2005)
Christos Tsiolkas: The Slap (2008)

V

Joanne van Os: Ronan’s Echo (2014)
Karen Viggers: The Orchardist’s Daughter (2019)

W

Josephine Wilson: Extinctions (2016)
Rohan Wilson: The Roving Party (2011)
Tara June Winch: Swallow the Air (2003)
Tim Winton: Breath (2008)
Tim Winton: Dirt Music (2001)
Tim Winton: The Shepherd’s Hut (2018)
Tim Winton: Eyrie (2013)
Chris Womersley: Bereft (2010)
Charlotte Wood: The Natural Way of Things (2015)
Charlotte Wood: Animal People (2011)
Charlotte Wood: The Submerged Cathedral (2004)
Laura Elizabeth Woollett: Beautiful Revolutionary (2018)
Alexis Wright: Carpentaria (2006)
Alexis Wright: The Swan Book (2013)
Evie Wyld: All the Birds, Singing (2013)

Z

Arnold Zable: Sea of Many Returns (2008)
Claire Zorn: The Sky So Heavy (2013)
Markus Zusak: The Book Thief (2005)
Markus Zusak: Bridge of Clay (2018)
Markus Zusak: The Messenger (2002)