At the end of 1910, Irving Berlin took a winter holiday in Florida. James Kaplan writes, ‘Here we must pause for a moment to consider the miracle of a twenty-two-year-old who in recent memory had sung for pennies in dives and slept in flophouses becoming a prosperous-enough business man to vacation in Palm Beach.’

In his new biography of the songwriter, Kaplan does a nice job of describing the vertiginous progress of Berlin’s early success. Israel Beilin was born in 1888, probably in Siberia, the eighth child of Lea and Moses Beilin. The family moved to Belorussia and then to New York in 1893. The spelling of their surname was changed to Baline, and Israel quickly became known at Izzy. Moses, a peripatetic cantor in Europe, found himself mostly unemployed in New York, so the teenage Izzy, who seems to have inherited his father’s singing voice, busked and sang at tables, plugged songs for publishers, and was a ‘slide singer’ – which is to say he led cinema audiences in singalongs, the lyrics projected on slides. In bars, he would sometimes substitute his own risqué words and before long was writing original songs – first words, then words and music – his name appearing as ‘I. Berlin’. By 1910 he was Irving Berlin. He still hadn’t written anything you’ve heard of, but was sufficiently well-off to take that Palm Beach holiday.

Any definition of what constitutes ‘outsider art’, or art brut, is elusive. The boundaries of this ‘category’ are notoriously porous. There is no manifesto, no consistent medium, nor is it especially tied to any single period in time. However, it can be argued that outsider art is often regarded as art created by those on the margins of society, such as people in psychiatric hospitals, in prison, or the disabled. Outsider artists are also usually self-taught. For several decades, Anthony Mannix has been at the forefront of Australian outsider art, his particular qualification for the label being serious mental illness (though the term ‘illness’, as The Toy of the Spirit implores, is problematic). Mannix was diagnosed with schizophrenia in the mid-1980s, and spent periods as a patient in psychiatric hospitals over the next decade. Now based in the Blue Mountains, he has been free of schizophrenic episodes for many years.

This beautiful book is ostensibly a conventional art monograph. In its innovative tweaking of the standard model, however, Centre of the Centre is one of the most rewarding publications about an Australian artist in recent years. Exploring two decades of ambitious work by Mel O’Callaghan, an Australian based in Paris, the book begins now, with her latest projects. In a quasi-geological enterprise, it then mines works whose interconnected seams comprise expansive video installations, sometimes including objects; wonderful paintings on glass; and, always, performed actions. Speaking about Parade (2014), Juliana Engberg noted the ‘ritualised, Sisyphean endeavour’ characterising O’Callaghan’s work.

James Bradley is a writer and critic. His books include the novels, Wrack, The Deep Field, The Resurrectionist, and Clade; a book of poetry, Paper Nautilus; and The Penguin Book of the Ocean. In 2012 he won the Pascall Prize for Australia’s Critic of the Year. His latest novel, Ghost Species, is reviewed in the May 2020 issue.

Where are you happiest?
In the ocean at dusk or dawn – or at my desk.

In Australia, debate about population runs in well-worn grooves. The focus is on size – ‘big Australia’ versus ‘not-so-big Australia’ – and the tool used to regulate numbers is immigration. When politicians link population growth to excessive house prices, traffic congestion, unemployment, or crime, they call for immigration cuts, not for birth control.

Liz Allen wants us to think about population more broadly by introducing readers to the wonders of demography, which she calls a ‘superpower’. Its transformative possibilities operate at two levels in this book.

Madness ‘haunts all of our imaginations’, writes Andrew Scull in Psychiatry and Its Discontents, but it is more than a nightmare. Each year, one in five Australians will experience mental illness, according to the Black Dog Institute, and the World Health Organization warns that one in four globally will experience a mental or neurological disorder during their lifetime. The essays gathered here, however, raise grave doubts about the psychiatric knowledge and practice upon which these epidemiologies are based.

The book opens with a lucid mixture of biography, bibliography, and historiography – a personal narrative of the shifting terrain of madness scholarship over five decades. The sixteen articles and reviews in this volume were written over the last decade. Although they have been revised, sometimes extensively, those who read the book cover to cover will notice episodes to which Scull returns again and again: the professional politics that produced the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Third Edition in 1980; the rapid decline of psychoanalysis in American psychiatry over the following decade; and the competition of hospital superintendents, outpatient clinicians, neurologists, and psychologists over the human mind. Anathema in a monograph, here the repetition makes for an emphatic, iterative articulation of the recurring themes of Scull’s research.

How do you define love? How much of yourself do you need to sacrifice to keep a friendship afloat? And can we ever truly understand the inner workings of other people’s lives? These are some of the questions that Laura McPhee-Browne explores in Cherry Beach, a gentle tale of female friendship.

The story is narrated by Ness, a shy young queer woman who is hopelessly in love with her straight best friend, Hetty. When the pair decide to embark on a new phase of their lives by moving from Melbourne to Toronto, their friendship is tested; the two women realise that they want different things and slowly start to drift apart. The ever-increasing distance between the two becomes the catalyst for Hetty, at first so charismatic and vivacious, to reveal her vulnerability and to subsequently fall into chaos.

The story of Ness and Hetty’s time in Toronto is interspersed with Ness’s adolescent memories of growing up with Hetty in Melbourne. Through spontaneous swimming trips and playground friendships to past loves and break-ups, a deeper portrait of the duo’s shared past and deep love for each other is painted, allowing for a greater insight into the devastating effects of their changing relationship.

Throughout the book, McPhee-Browne explores themes of love, friendship, and mental health with poetic insight, using water as a metaphor for the ebb and flow of life. Each chapter is named after a different body of water and the prose shimmers like reflected light. At times the languid pacing, overwrought metaphors, and deep introspection threaten to smother the plot. However, the dark undercurrent that is present throughout manages to push events towards the novel’s inevitable conclusion.

Ness’s voice is melancholy and distinct, and her experiences of sexual explorations are delicately and honestly portrayed. McPhee-Browne immerses the reader in the experience of awkward emotional growth with great tenderness and insight. At its core, Cherry Beach is a compelling examination of love and loss in all their guises.

Today’s transgender community is woefully ignorant of its past, beholden to ‘historical amnesia’ and the ‘erasure of much trans history’ – or so Barry Reay would have us believe. Reay, a prolific historian of sexuality at the University of Auckland, begins his new history, Trans America, by decrying the supposed trans failure to look to the past, before setting about the task of correcting, as he puts it, ‘the significant structural and conceptual weaknesses in trans history’.

It is indeed undeniable that Reay’s monograph has few predecessors. Internationally, scholarly transgender histories are few and far between. In the United States, the field is essentially limited to Joanne Meyerowitz’s How Sex Changed: A history of transsexuality in the United States (2002) and Susan Stryker’s recently updated Transgender History (2008, 2017), the latter strangely unacknowledged by Reay. Here in Australia, an Australian Research Council-funded project on ‘Transgender Australians’ (2018–21), led by Professor Noah Riseman at the Australian Catholic University, marks the first concerted foray into a local trans past.

What is the value of useless knowledge? One of the by-products of the rise of artificial intelligence is that the realm of what one really needs to know to function in society is ever shrinking. Wikipedia makes learning facts completely redundant. Pub trivia competitions now seem a fundamentally anachronistic form of entertainment, like watching a jousting tournament in the age of artillery. One can appreciate the skill, but one also knows that its time has come and gone.

In recent decades, nowhere have we seen greater advances in technology than in language. Grammar, spell-checkers, and online dictionaries have relieved us of the burden of learning orthography (or even that the word ‘orthography’ exists). Software packages promise to watch over you as you write, constantly providing prompts to improve your syntax. It comes at the cost of never being allowed to use the passive voice, but this seems a small price to pay to write copy that would impress any advertising agency. While it is still extremely buggy, it is clear that translation software will soon make it unnecessary to learn a foreign language for the purposes of everyday communication.

In 1991, French sociologist Jean Baudrillard provocatively claimed that ‘the Gulf War did not take place’. His argument was not a denial of the violence, suffering, and death experienced by civilians but rather that those very realities were absent in the mediatised consumption of the conflict. Dominant discourses reproduce the key events of the age, and the distant spectator can hardly escape the saturation of simulated symbols they entail. In Baudrillard’s words, ‘the warriors bury themselves in the desert leaving only hostages to occupy the stage, including all of us as information hostages on the world media stage’.

Since the Gulf War, media coverage of conflict has evolved alongside the emergence of an expanded apparatus of propaganda and misinformation. The advent of ‘fake news’ wars, accompanied by social media bots and trolls, has arguably resulted in a devaluation of truth in journalism. Sophie McNeill’s We Can’t Say We Didn’t Know: Dispatches from an age of impunity is framed as a call to arms against this status quo from within the media industry. As the ABC’s former Middle East correspondent, McNeill tells the story of the region’s post-Arab Spring conflicts and continued injustices through a series of civilian profiles.

In this multi-perspective novel, Mirandi Riwoe trains her piercing postcolonial gaze on Gold Rush-era Australia, lending richness to the lives of the Chinese settlers who are often mere footnotes in our history. Ying and Lai Yue are outsiders before their arrival in Far North Queensland, where they have gone to find their fortunes after their younger siblings are sold into slavery. While Ying struggles with hiding her gender in the male-dominated goldfields, Lai Yue is haunted by his betrothed, Shan – killed in a landslide back in China – and by his failure to protect the family from penury. Meanwhile, in nearby Maytown, a white woman, Meriem, grapples with her exile from respectable society while working as a maid to local sex worker Sophie.

As in her Stella Prize-shortlisted novella The Fish Girl (2017), Riwoe masterfully wields the interiority of marginalised characters to destabilise dominant colonial narratives. Riwoe’s depth of research is evident in her intricate descriptions of late-1800s Queensland. Food is a signifier of both cultural difference and shared humanity: on the goldfields, hunger is universal; sweet morsels and quaffs of rum connect characters when language cannot; the whites are no less foreign than the Chinese whose dietary customs they mock.

The opening of the novel is somewhat languorous, as Riwoe lingers on characters’ memories of the lives they have left behind. It is with Ying’s relocation to Maytown, and the challenging of expectations as she befriends Meriem, that the pulse of the story quickens. Lai Yue’s fate feels comparatively separate, as he takes a job as a carrier on an all-white expedition; nonetheless, it’s a heartbreaking depiction of the long-term effects of shame and alienation.

Aboriginal claims to the land are alluded to at various points. ‘[I’m] as fearful of the natives as anybody,’ Lai Yue reflects, downplaying a massacre he has witnessed. In highlighting the perspectives of non-white settlers, Riwoe paints a nuanced portrait of our violent past and maps the fault lines within our multicultural present.

Fans of The Fish Girl will doubtless enjoy reading Riwoe as she works with a larger canvas and a bigger cast of characters. This is innovative historical fiction, and a vital reappraisal of an oft-glorified period in Australian history.

In its long war in Afghanistan, Australia lost forty-one soldiers. These deaths were felt keenly, and usually the prime minister, other senior politicians, and army chiefs attended the funerals. In addition, more than 260 soldiers were wounded. Service in Afghanistan was trying and demanding. Yet, while Special Forces units were constantly rotated through numerous deployments, at any particular time fewer than 2,000 Australian soldiers were serving in Afghanistan.

How much more difficult, then, was it for a democracy like Australia to maintain tens of thousands of soldiers overseas during the six years of World War II? Casualties were far heavier. For instance, in the battles in Egypt between July and November 1942, the 9th Australian Division lost 1,225 killed, 3,638 wounded, and 946 captured. Many soldiers had been overseas for more than two years. How did they maintain their morale? How did Australia find the trained reinforcements to keep the division up to strength?

Listen to this poem read by the author.

I

Charles Baudelaire’s mother—
                       orphaned at seven—living
                       on the charity of friends—
                       at twenty-six married
                       an ex-priest, widower—     
After her husband died she married again
                       and was happy—

It is said—     ‘This second marriage
                       was to have a disastrous effect on his life’—
                       ‘No longer being the sole focus
                       of his mother’s attention gave him a trauma’—

‘When you have a son like me
                       you do not remarry’—

                       He asked her endlessly for money—
                       She repaid his publishers—

He wrote to her—
                       ‘I am the only object which makes you live’—
                       ‘After my death, you will no longer live, that’s clear’—

He wrote repeatedly of returning to Honfleurs—
He passed through there once by train
                       and did not stop—

II

Rainer Maria Rilke’s mother—
                       whose first child died at two weeks—
                       it is said—      ‘acted as if she sought to recover the lost girl
                       through the boy
                       by dressing him in girl’s clothing’—
                       and hurt her husband’s ‘sensibilities’
                       by ‘parading the boy in female dress’—

Victoria and Albert Museum of Childhood—
                       ‘In Western European countries until about 1920
                       boys would wear dresses until they were ‘breeched’—
                       ‘breeching’ happened from the age of about four-
                       to eight-years-old’—

She gave him the doll, doll-bed and kitchen that he wanted—
He spent hours combing his doll’s hair—
He had a ‘saber hammered in gold’, a knight’s ‘tin decoration’—
He was, he wrote, ‘eating like a wolf, sleeping like a sack’—

When he turned six she breeched him and took him to school—
He suffered from headaches and fevers—
She sat by his bed, through all the hours, to soothe him—
                       In his second year of primary school, 200 hours—
                       In his third year of primary school, two whole quarters—

His father left—The grandparents were no help—
His father blamed his mother for his unhappiness at the military school
                       that his father had chosen—

He wrote to her almost every day—
He wanted letters, food packets, skates, visits—
She gave him these—
Whenever she left—they say—he felt abandoned—

‘If in my father’s house’
                       (his father had left)
‘love was shown me with both care and concern only by my father’
                       (he lived with his mother)
‘you know those persons who are to blame—
and that the woman whose first and most immediate care
                       I should have been
loved me only when bringing me out in a new little dress’—

‘Quiet endurance and courageous resignation’,
                       he said, were his thing—
                       and his suffering, ‘only the whim
of a pitiful, pleasure seeking creature (Mother)’ —

III

Arthur Rimbaud’s mother—
                       according to reports—
                       was ‘sour-faced’—
                       was ‘narrow-minded, stingy,
                       completely lacking in a sense of humour’—
                       was ‘renfermée, têtue et taciturne’—
He named her his ‘Mouth of Darkness’—

His father—
                       ‘good-natured, easy-going, generous’—
                       came home on leave only to give her another child—
                       ten weeks with her—five children—
                       after which he did not come back again—
                       When the youngest was four he retired
                       easily to Dijon—

She named herself a widow—
She worried about the children’s education—

She had to call the police to bring him home—

In Paris, he put sulphuric acid into Charles Cros’s water—
He stabbed a knife into Verlaine’s wrist—
His ‘teen rebel phase’—they say—was ‘a reaction to life with Vitalie’—

He stayed with her all summer writing ‘A Season in Hell’—
She paid for it to be published—
When she asked him what it meant he answered
‘It means what it says’—

From Africa, he kept writing her letters—
he wanted books, goods—he had tasks for her—
He had ‘a romantic view of his father’—

‘My dear Mummy—
                       I got your letter and the two stockings alright—
                       Do not be upset about all this, however—
                       But it’s a poor reward for so much work—
                       so many privations and troubles—
P.S. As for the stockings, they are useless—I shall sell them somewhere’—

In 1890, a photo—she stands in her garden with flowers—

IV

Philip Larkin’s mother
                       sent him ‘seven enormous pairs of socks’
                       and lilies to brighten up his room—

‘Dear Creaturely Mop, this seems a good time to warn you
                       I am down to my last three pounds’—

She wrote to him—
‘Marriage would be no certain guarantee
as to socks being always mended,
or meals ready when they are wanted.
Neither would it be a good idea to marry
                       just for these comforts. There are other things
                                              just as important’—

for which, she has been held responsible for his not marrying—
                       ‘He couldn’t marry anyone
                       because he was involved with his mother’—

It is said—      she was ‘nervous, constantly whining’—
                       ‘she was the poet’s muse—and his millstone’—
She wrote—   ‘When I came to the sketch of me, I laughed outright’—

His father attended Nazi rallies—
In his mother, though, he complained of
                       ‘a kind of “defective mechanism”. Her ideal is
                       “to collapse” and to be taken care of’—

‘Dear Mop Creature—send some underclothes please’—

The Aboriginal tracker is a stock character in certain Australian films, employed as set dressing, catalyst, curio. Although fictional trackers have been celebrated on celluloid, few real trackers have been given life within the national memory. Some people may recall Billy Dargin and his role in locating and shooting Ben Hall. Others might think of Dubbo’s Tracker Riley, or Dick-a-Dick, who found the missing Cooper and Duff children near Natimuk in 1864 when they had been given up for dead.

In Pathfinders, Michael Bennett reveals that there were more than one thousand Aboriginal men and women employed as police trackers in New South Wales between 1862 and 1973. Apart from trailing criminals or seeking missing people, trackers were also engaged in cadaver recovery, horse-breaking, station upkeep, grave digging, and rudimentary forensic investigation. The narrow acknowledgment by police of the superiority of Indigenous skills in this setting made tracking ‘one of the few jobs on offer for Aboriginal people in colonial society where traditional knowledge and training gave them a comparative advantage over the invaders’. At its essence, tracking meant ‘knowing how humans and animals modified the land as they moved across it’. The best trackers’ ability to traverse the bush was overlaid with minute attention to detail, psychological insight, and the application of informed guesswork.

In lectures delivered at Princeton University in November 2016, science historian Naomi Oreskes asked why, at a time when the epistemological and cultural relevance of science is subject to increasing doubt, we should still have confidence in science as our primary source of knowledge about the physical world. Why Trust Science? is the culmination of those lectures, and includes not only Oreskes’s appraisal of the scientific method but also four commentaries on the lectures. It is a work predicated, rightly or wrongly, on the assertion that the eminence of science ‘can no longer be maintained without argument’.

Who better to shepherd us through a once-in-a-century pandemic than Rebecca Solnit? The prolific essayist, activist, and critic has long acted as a lodestar for progressives to follow in times of despair, providing encouragement to find Hope in the Dark (2004), as she did in a collection of essays after the beginning of the Iraq War, and demonstrating how human ingenuity can shine through in the wake of a disaster like Hurricane Katrina in A Paradise Built in Hell (2009).

It’s not surprising, then, that Solnit has been widely sought in 2020 to dispense her trademark brand of radical hope that we will emerge in better, fairer shape after our Covid-19 nightmare. But the Solnit we meet in Recollections of My Non-Existence, a memoir which covers her early years of adulthood, is not the Solnit we know today. This is a nineteen-year-old loner trying to find her voice as a writer in San Francisco against the insistent drumbeat of the threat of male violence, a writer who is ‘unbearably anxious, preoccupied, indignant and exhausted’.

I read this book about a young woman falling into the dislocating world of a puzzling mental illness at a time when the global pandemic was disrupting many people’s equilibrium. I started to wonder: might living through this time of enhanced anxiety encourage empathy towards people who experience extreme anxiety in non-pandemic times? If those living in the ‘kingdom of the well’ (as Susan Sontag puts it) now start to recognise the contingent, temporary, and often accidental nature of well-being, could that trigger a deeper understanding of those who always live with chronic illness or disability?

The confusing aspects of this book begin with the title, She I Dare Not Name. Instead, there is a whole book about this person, a self-described spinster. Then there’s the S-word itself, which has carried a heavy negative load since about the seventeenth century. (A minor irritation is the back-cover blurb, which describes this as ‘a book about being human’ – as distinct from being what?)

She I Dare Not Name is a series of essays in which Donna Ward explores herself as a single, childless woman. She tells her own life story, moving backwards and forwards in time. She was evidently a girl and young woman who expected marriage and motherhood to be part of her life. Presumably she intends to show how, through her experience of living, she has learned to assimilate the aspects of the person she is, wrestling with the difficult business of living, growing, being an adult. I was expecting her to grab the title ‘spinster’ by the scruff of the neck and send it packing, with forceful arguments about single women’s courage in rejecting unsuitable opportunities to couple and/or procreate, as well as their intelligence and general assertiveness, along with a few statistics about how much healthier, happier, and long-lived single women are.

Some years ago, a crime-writing friend of mine was at a writer’s festival with Lee Child. After a few drinks, my friend asked Child how he’d gone about preparing to write his Jack Reacher novels. Child’s reply was something along the lines of not putting pen to paper before he’d spent six months reading all of the successful crime novels he could find, and before parsing out exactly what made them popular with readers. Once this was done, he sat down to write. The rest, of course, is history.

If Child were setting up shop here in contemporary Australia, the chances are strong that one of the key elements he’d take from commercially successful novels of recent years would be a rural setting. This makes sense, in that it’s partly Australia’s vast and varied landscapes that make the country unique and of interest to overseas readers in particular. Neither does the rural turn of much recent Australian crime fiction point toward a formulaic bent – there exists a great variety of representation of character and place.

Connor is a thirty-something Australian who bides his time grifting in India. His targets are Western female tourists, whom he describes as ‘talent’, and whom he seduces and fleeces. Connor seems to be escaping something, most likely the upbringing in which his masculinity and personal safety were constantly called into question.

Sasha is an American tourist with an equally bleak back-story. Her marriage has just ended, and she is in India to attend an ashram. Sasha hopes that this experience will deliver her to ‘another level’ of spiritual enlightenment, one she could not achieve in the cacophony of New York City.

These two troubled souls cross paths on a train and begin something resembling a relationship. This connection is threatened by the domineering individuals who have inserted themselves into Connor’s and Sasha’s lives. The couple are menaced by a past that’s never far away.

Sweetness and Light, the fourth book by Melbourne writer Liam Pieper, is a character-driven affair. The sad and sordid world inhabited by the protagonists is evoked with disarming vividness; the unfolding of Connor and Sasha’s relationship, and the danger it faces at every turn, keeps the reader on edge and encourages us to turn the pages.

Admirably, the novel avoids moralising about his protagonists’ actions. This is no easy feat when considering Connor’s transgressions. Sweetness and Light also eschews the kind of glib psychologising that could so easily pervade a narrative such as this.

Substance abuse is a key theme here, as in Pieper’s first book, The Feel-Good Hit of the Year (2014). In Sweetness and Light, the author conveys both the thrills and the ongoing harms wrought by alcohol abuse. Pieper also provides a corrective to the naïve, exoticising cultural narrative of Westerners trekking to India in search of spiritual highs.

As may be evident, the contents of Sweetness and Light are anything but. The title’s irony is a bit too obvious. Nonetheless, Pieper’s book is compelling, crackling as it does with a tension that doesn’t let up.

Talking animals in fiction have, for the most part, been confined to children’s or otherwise peripheral literature. Yet they often serve a serious purpose. Aesop’s fables, with their anthropoid wolves, frogs, and ants, have been put to use as moral lessons for children since the Renaissance. The ‘it-narrative’, fashionable in eighteenth-century England and perhaps best exemplified by Francis Coventry’s History of Pompey the Little: Or, the life and adventures of a lap-dog (1752), saw various animals expatiate their suffering at human hands.

In a similar vein, the equine hero of Black Beauty (1877), the creation of Victorian Quaker-reformist Anna Sewell, railed against life as a taxicab horse. The habit of contemporaneous critics has been to dismiss such works as irredeemably sentimental, anthropomorphic, or merely curious, even when – as with George Orwell’s political fable Animal Farm (1945) or Virginia Woolf’s Flush (1933), a ‘biography’ of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s cocker spaniel – starkly adult concerns are operating.

What each of these examples has in common is that the animals depicted in them nevertheless remain indexed to the human realm, their otherness and agency – in a word, their animalness – elided. By contrast, a recent flurry of ‘serious’ Australian literature – including Eva Hornung’s novel Dog Boy (2009) and Ceridwen Dovey’s short story collection Only the Animals (2014) – offers complex, unvarnished portraits of the inner lives of animals, and of the often fraught entanglements between them and us. To this emerging body of work we can now add Laura Jean McKay’s début novel, The Animals in That Country.

Laura Jean McKay (photograph via Scribe Publications)

Its unconventional narrator is not, in fact, an animal, but a human: grandmother Jean Bennett, a tough-as-nails, possibly alcoholic guide in an outback wildlife park. ‘Tourists just want to stare into the eye of a four-metre croc,’ she says, ‘hold a blonde python, then sit on the zoo train with the breeze in their faces while I chug them on down to the back of the Park, to where we keep the dingoes.’ It’s the dingoes Jean likes best, and one in particular: ‘sweet’ Sue. Dingoes are one-person animals – and here the novel feels indebted to the demonological trope of the witch’s familiar. In the opening chapter, Sue even bites Jean and draws blood, as familiars are said to need to do in order to live – but Jean, characteristically, is under no illusions: ‘You can’t pop them in a backyard and expect them to be there when you get home from work. They’ll jump clean over your fence, be out ripping up chickens, finding a pack before you can blink.’

Jean’s relationship with the humans in her life is even thornier. She clashes with Angela, the Park manager who is also her daughter-in-law. Jean, separated from her ex, Graham, has a ‘weakness for… sausage-like guys [that] look like they’re about to burst out of their skin’, drunkenly bedding a succession of them. Only Kimberley, her granddaughter by Angela and troubled son, Lee, commands her unalloyed affection. Having established these characters with vivid economy – Kimberley is ‘like a toothpick in checks with a mop stuck on her head’ – McKay introduces the novel’s fulcrum with equal concision: a ‘superflu’ that becomes an epidemic in less than a week.

The parallel with the coronavirus pandemic currently sweeping the world is too eerie to miss, but the effects of ‘zooflu’ are altogether stranger: anyone who contracts it begins to understand the language of animals – mammals initially, then even the birds and insects too. Overwhelmed by the babble of strange voices – McKay’s animals don’t merely ‘talk’ but issue meaning, often of an oblique kind, through the sum of their minds and bodies – many are driven to a kind of madness, some drilling holes in their own heads to stop the voices getting in. Animals are released en masse, scorned, and killed. Civilisation begins to collapse.

Lee, effectively kidnapping Kimberley, takes off down south, seemingly intent on communing with a pod of whales. Jean, also infected, follows, unable – like Sue, whom she cannot bring herself to abandon – to resist the pull of her kin. All of this is sketched out in prose that is spare but colourful, viscerally imagined and alive with a distinctively Australian gallows humour. The book errs, perhaps, only in its resort to a deus ex machina-style development to tie off the plot.

What is so striking about the way that McKay depicts human–animal communication in the wake of the epidemic is its avoidance of mawkishness or wish fulfilment (Doctor Dolittle this isn’t). The animal language, appearing on the page in bold typeface with poetry-like line breaks, carries a harsh, uneuphemised logic of survival. In ‘animalese’, petrol is ‘dead whales’ and crows are ‘sky meat’. As Jean says: ‘They’ve got it in their heads we’re out to kill them and keep dropping food along the way. We’re just messy predators too clumsy to catch them. That’s how all these animals see us. We’re not “friend or foe”; we are the enemy, every single time.’

The novel’s boldest stroke is to recast the dream of interspecies communication as a nightmare, in the process reasserting rather than diminishing the alterity of animals (which here, in a further alienation, inhabit a temporality distinct from our own). In turn, McKay exposes our own animality anew, and challenges us to reconsider our unstable relationships with the non-humans in our lives without providing a pat moral.

This is an absorbing and affecting book, and one to which I’m able to pay the highest compliment: that, in the days after finishing it, the world felt different to me, its animals not speaking but not silent either.

One of the few details we learn about the unnamed narrator of Ronnie Scott’s début novel, The Adversary, is that he is fond of Vegemite. Although only a crumb of information, this affinity for the popular breakfast tar reveals much about our hero. Just as Vegemite ‘has to be spread very thin or you realised it was salty and unreasonable’, his human interactions give him a soupçon of a social life, a mere taste that never threatens to overwhelm his senses.

Despite being in the prime of his life and free of obligations during university break, this young gay man rarely ventures beyond his Brunswick share house, preferring to ‘read books, take a break from study, and stare all day at Grindr’. Amid the sexual buffet of hook-up apps, his problem is not so much finding company as keeping those in his network in equipoise between available and physically present: ‘my ideal boyfriend would be found in a hard-to-reach location, large and silent, mythical in several important ways’. He is confused by the countervailing surges of lust and disgust he feels for the bodies around him. ‘I was basically a sexual being … I just knew people were gross and preferred them to keep their distance’.

Everything about Chris Flynn’s Mammoth – the characters, plot, and structure – should not work. But it does, and beautifully so. Mammoth is narrated by the fossilised remains of a 13,354-year-old extinct American Mammoth (Mammut americanum), who likes to be addressed as Mammut. On 24 March 2007, the eve of his sale at the Natural History Auction in New York, Mammut finds himself in a room with Tyrannosaurus bataar (who prefers to be called T.bat).

Time, especially deep time, is a major preoccupation in the novel. Mammut is an infant from the point of view of T.bat (who lived around seventy million years ago), but because Mammut walked the Earth with ancient humans and has lived as a fossil among humans for more than two hundred years (T.bat was only unearthed in 1991), he has experience other fossils do not. To pass the time on the night before the auction, Mammut tells the tale of his life, his death, and his reawakening as a fossil travelling the world at the whims of Homo sapiens (whom all characters refer to as hominids).

For anyone feeling stir-crazy after weeks cooped up in self-isolation, A Theatre for Dreamers offers an appealing escape, a virtual vacation on the Greek island of Hydra. Dive into these pages and you can swim vicariously in a perfect horseshoe-shaped bay, dry off in the summer sun, admire countless young, scantily clad men and women, and end the day with a glass of retsina while you watch the moon set and listen to a young Leonard Cohen enunciate profundities about life and art.

Polly Samson’s novel is set in 1960, when eighteen-year-old Erica Hart travels from England to Hydra with her lover Jimmy and brother Bobby. Her pilgrimage is inspired by opening a copy of Charmian Clift’s book Peel Me A Lotus sent by the author, a friend of her mother’s, which arrives soon after her mother’s death from cancer. Clift’s writing about her creative, bohemian family life in Greece offers a vision of life beyond the stifling conformity of suburban England, an existence that Erica’s mother might have longed for, and one that Erica has the chance to embrace thanks to a surprising legacy of money that her mother sequestered from her weekly housekeeping allowance.

It is quite an apposite time for the appearance of Nick Cook’s Fighting for Our Lives: The history of a community response to AIDS, when the world is dealing with the impact of another deadly virus. There are always lessons to be learned: where better to start than from historical experience.

It was nearly four decades ago, in November 1982, that the first case of HIV/AIDS was diagnosed in Sydney, heralding the onset of an epidemic that terrified the country. Part of the reason for the fear and paranoia it engendered was that it was utterly unexpected. Even though Sydneysiders had survived many epidemics in the past – from smallpox in 1789 to the Spanish flu epidemic of 1918–20, all of which affected thousands of people, some with immense death rates – a range of medical developments over the twentieth century, such as inoculations and vaccinations on top of existing strict quarantine regulations, had led to a belief that medical science had finally got ‘disease’ under control. Since World War II, new generations of Australians had grown up secure in the belief that epidemics were a thing of the past: they would not have to face something that had been almost commonplace in their grandparents’ times.

I am ashamed to recall that when our high-school history class in the late 1970s was set K.S. Inglis’s The Australian Colonists (1974), I – and I don’t think I was alone – didn’t quite know what to do with a text that focused on ‘ceremonies, monuments and rhetoric’, one that began as a study on 26 January 1788 but worked back as an historical enquiry from 25 April 1915.

Inglis declared his determination to challenge ‘tunnel history’, but we still felt lazily safer with a neat progression of names and dates. I remember our teacher’s disappointment as we repeatedly missed the point. Rob Wilton was fresh from his own university studies, with the aura of being the draft-deferment-card-burning son of a general who, despite his own reservations, oversaw Australia’s commitment to war in Vietnam. Wilton also gave us Russel Ward’s A Nation for a Continent (1977), Anne Summers’s Damned Whores and God’s Police (1975), and Humphrey McQueen’s A New Britannia (1970). It took me a long time to realise just what we had been offered.

There seem to be fewer post-election books doing the rounds after the 2019 federal campaign than has been the case in recent decades. Why is this? The 2019 campaign may have been achingly bland, but the result shocked pollsters, voters, and a news media that had long predicted a Labor win. Morrison’s ‘miracle’ victory is probably Australia’s most historically significant one since the last ‘unlosable’ election, back in 1993, when another cocksure opposition took its own ‘big target’ tax package to the people.

Samantha Maiden’s hefty account of the Coalition’s surprise win – or Labor’s shock loss, which followed a fiasco of a campaign – fills this void. Maiden, a former News Corp and Sky News journalist (now writing for The New Daily), offers a book that, in eighteen chapters, fulfils two critical roles.

1.
Two birds scoop white sky
into the lank pines behind your stone
as if to say we’re with you.
In front the road crofts and peaks.
You can’t pinpoint the sector
but it was adamantine
like your knowing to pull out
to sail through the lock, ink a renunciation
into an oiled bay.
The monstrance twinkles ahead, a wheeled pizza,
while catastrophe tourism tails them with its clothes.
My friends in books clash
but offset the revenue stream.

2.

Another glassed city, its users a charnel house of vacuous donations.
The stray cat enters the soft-hearted,
as hooped magpies cry
beneath the lamp’s ‘pitch and tow’,
the kale-faced dog moored to its owner tilts as you pass.
Gossip enlivens a queue
dimmed by its saviours
who puzzle at the gated votes that snuff them out.

3.
Sagely, we reach the bridge,
its pylon rows in cataract sky.
You couldn’t elsewhere, broken up.
Slide guitar bends sunset. Planes crunch. Do what you like,
some flutter will tether you aloft
while we remain, dripping palace, spectral heath.
The phone sparkles in your hand,
your life on a plate.

4.
A wall of art chops to heaven,
isolated showers and plaintive consumerists
wobble from strasse to jalan
beneath the book’s mite of optimism
and Khachaturian’s clapped jigs
that tease the spray-on air after the election.

Mauvaise foi being rampant, I have reverted to the existentialists. It took me back to when I was twenty-one. I was in Florence, at the Boboli Gardens. Back then you could sit on the tiered steps without fear of arrest or ostracism. One afternoon I sat there in the notional December sunlight. I was reading Simone de Beauvoir’s All Said and Done (1972), the last instalment in her four-volume autobiography, which I had devoured on my travels. A pair of bourgeoises from Paris, chic and disapproving, walked past and glared at me de haut en bas. ‘Beauvoir!’ they sniffed, moving on. Well, Simone, still alive then, more radical than ever, was always divisive.

I’ve just read Kate Kirkpatrick’s Becoming Beauvoir: A life (Bloomsbury, 2019). It reminds you what a force she was: bold, ravenous, supremely intelligent, indefatigable, deeply treacherous to her younger lovers of both sexes, and weirdly deferential to Jean-Paul Sartre.

Then I read Sartre’s Words (1964), one of the acutest memoirs of boyhood. Aged nine, Sartre knew that ‘when a lot of men get together, they have to be separated by rituals or else they slaughter each other’. ‘Dying is not everything: you have to die in time,’ he also reminds us.

Death is pandemic in Albert Camus’s The Plague (1947), another work to be savoured. Is there a more intelligent or stoic character than Dr Rieux? ‘It may seem a ridiculous idea, but the only way to fight the plague is with decency,’ he concludes. Here’s a further taste of this necessary novel:

Moreover, in this extremity of solitude none could count on any help from his neighbours; each had to bear the load of his troubles alone. If, by chance, one of us tried to unburden himself or to say something about his feelings, the reply he got, whatever it might be, usually wounded him. And then it dawned on him that he and the man with him weren’t talking about the same thing. For while he himself spoke from the depths of long days of brooding upon his personal distress, and the image he had tried to impart had been slowly shaped and proved in the fires of passion and regret, this meant nothing to the man to whom he was speaking, and who pictured a conventional emotion, a grief that is traded on the market-place, mass-produced.

(trans. Stuart Gilbert)

I have asked a few colleagues and contributors to nominate some books that have beguiled them – might even speak to others – at this unusual time.

Peter Rose

Tim Flannery
Tim Flannery’s most recent publication is Life: Selected writings (2019).

Annals by Tacitus

The Covid-19 pandemic comes to Australia on the back of horrific, climate-influenced bushfires, then floods. After the bushfire smoke and coronavirus, Australians are becoming used to life in masks. Perhaps the kindest word to describe the events engulfing us is ‘instructive’.

Both climate change and Covid-19 work silently, unseen. Action needs to be taken against both before the true horror they are capable of wreaking manifests. The Morrison government was slow to address both crises, but after March 15, when cases of Covid-19 were doubling every four days, the federal government decided to put aside ideology and listen to the experts. Our best hope for the future is that this is an enduring change, one that will be applied to the climate emergency. But the early signs are not good. Behind the scenes, Angus Taylor continues to prop up the fossil fuel industry.

I’m rereading Tacitus’s Annals. With Augustus dead, Tiberius had the chance to remake the governance of the Roman Empire. Cautious, uninspired, and seemingly visionless, he fails spectacularly and retreats to the Isle of Capri. Tacitus feels that he is living in a hopelessly corrupt and self-destructive world. He teaches me how very much, in times of crisis, hinges on excellent political leadership.

Felicity Plunkett
Felicity Plunkett’s new poetry collection is A Kinder Sea (2020).

The Coconut Children by Vivian Pham

Vivian Pham drafted The Coconut Children (2020) when she was sixteen, in a novella-writing course run by Sydney’s Story Factory, a Creative-Writing centre for marginalised young people. Sharp as the ‘blade of water’ refugees cross in its preface, The Coconut Children’s anatomy of intergenerational trauma sits under the surface of what Pham calls a ‘coming-of-age story’. Anyone who remembers being a teenager will recognise the glitchy hopscotch of playground negotiations. Pham’s savvy parody of cloistered classroom melodrama sits over a framework of resilience and pain experienced by her protagonists, Vietnamese refugees living in Sydney’s Cabramatta.

Pham describes herself as a closet poet. I was absorbed by the plot and characters, but also dazzled by Pham’s poetic talent. As the lyric slivers of Pham’s novel trace the grain of fierce and fragile resilience, I traced their jagged and meticulously layered pieces to prophesy: here is the start of a luminous literary trajectory.

Judith Beveridge
Judith Beveridge’s most recent collection is Sun Music (2018).

The Soul of an Octopus by Sy Montgomery

Being isolated from friends and family during this pandemic is hard, but any feelings of self-pity quickly vanish as I read Ovid’s Poetry of Exile (translated by David R, Slavitt). The isolation and loneliness that Ovid experienced during his relegation to the bleak, barbaric outpost of Tomis on the Black Sea is intensely moving. The poems are masterpieces of argument and complaint. Ovid wrote many of them to try to persuade Augustus to relent and have him returned, if not to Rome, then at least somewhere less primitive. They must have been what kept him sane and purposeful. Perhaps more importantly, they attest to the power of art as a spiritual resource.

Sy Montgomery’s The Soul of an Octopus (2015) is enabling me to leave the human world behind and to gain some understanding of these most remarkable creatures and keep in mind the wonder of creation.

Andrea Goldsmith
Andrea Goldsmith’s latest novel is Invented Lives (2019).

Apeirogon by Colum McCann

The numbers soar, there’s no curve in the graphs, coffins stacked high in warehouses, panicked crowds in India, huge menacing cruise ships, crouching people being hosed with disinfectant: the litany of doom drones on. And there’s Africa still to come. Even if I restrict my intake of news, the news manages to find me. When my dog and I go for a walk through the deathly quiet streets, rather than the greetings of old we walkers now avoid each other – yes, like the plague.

Jane Austen has come to the rescue as she always does. Plunging into the familiarity of her novels provides a much-needed embrace. I balance Austen with Volker Ullrich’s biography of Hitler – have to keep an eye on the tyrants – and Zbigniew Herbert’s illuminating poetry. Herbert brings intellectual succour; he’s a gift in these troubling times. As is Colum McCann’s Apeirogon (2020), a brilliant, humane novel about everything in life that matters.

Chris Wallace-Crabbe
Chris Wallace-Crabbe’s most recent book is Rondo (2018). 

Self-Portrait by Celia Paul

A most diverting book, indeed compelling, is Celia Paul’s Self-Portrait (2019). An English artist who paints with pastoral attentiveness, she can also write. Married for some years to Lucian Freud, she portrays another bloke naked, flat on his back. Her most compelling portraits were of her curiously ugly mother, ageing towards death. Paul has told her life with a lucid persuasion. And her mother is quite strange: unforgettable.

Chris Flynn
Chris Flynn’s new novel, Mammoth, is reviewed in the May 2020 issue.

Lady Chatterley's Lover by D.H. Lawrence

When my partner and I moved to Phillip Island – whose lovely Boonwurrung name is Millowl – we joked that we would congratulate each other in the event of a zombie apocalypse. The island is easy to quarantine. Dynamite the bridge, throw up a cordon and hunker down until the plague burns itself out, or the zombies run out of brains to eat.

A year later, it doesn’t seem so funny. Fortunately, there are as yet no cases of Covid-19 in the region. I have taken refuge in D.H. Lawrence. The opening passage to the evergreen Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928) is apt: ‘The cataclysm has happened, we are among the ruins, we start to build up new little habitats, to have new little hopes. It is rather hard work: there is now no smooth road into the future: but we go round, or scramble over the obstacles. We’ve got to live, no matter how many skies have fallen.’

Kirsten Tranter
Kirsten Tranter’s most recent novel is Hold (2016).

Station Eleven by St John Mandel

Quarantine might seem like the perfect time to embark on a deferred epic literary challenge like Ulysses or Proust, but I find myself quite incapable of the concentration that would require. Time, thought, attention have all been fractured in a way that wrecks the usual refuges of reading and writing. Now more than ever I forgive myself for turning to books for solace, connection, escape.

In our first week of isolation, I reread Emily St John Mandel’s Station Eleven (2014) in something like a state of panic, reassuring myself that the deadly virus she describes is so much more deadly than Covid-19, desperately needing her assertion of the value of art in a post-apocalyptic world. The motto painted on the caravan of the travelling group of actors and musicians at the centre of the story encapsulates why we read, why we create, why we explore other worlds in fiction: ‘Because survival is insufficient.’

Dennis Altman
Dennis Altman’s latest book is Unrequited Love (2019).

Paul Takes the Form of A Mortal Girl by Andrea Lawlor

The Editor has asked for books that ‘solace, beguile, edify, or amuse’. I am cheating by nominating two recent American queer novels that have expanded the idea of trans-fiction, already a rich genre (think Virginia Woolf, Patrick White, Gore Vidal, Brigid Brophy). Andrea Lawlor’s Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl (2017) is sexy, witty, and a send-up of queer theory from an insider. Jordy Rosenberg’s Confessions of the Fox (2018) retells the story of The Beggar’s Opera in an extraordinary voyage into gender confusion and colonial exploitation. It is set during the Great Plague of 1665 in London. And the memoranda of the Minister of Publick Health, and his concern for foreign vessels, seem remarkably apposite right now. But for escapist comfort nothing beats reading – or rereading – E.F. Benson’s Mapp and Lucia series (1920–39), which remind us of the glorious triviality of everyday life.

Kim Mahood
Kim Mahood’s latest book is Position Doubtful (2016).

A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles

My pick for a book to read while in lockdown is Amor Towles’s A Gentleman in Moscow (2016). In 1922, Count Alexander Rostov, a Russian aristocrat, is placed under house arrest by the KGB. Evicted from the luxury suite of rooms he occupies in the Hotel Metropol, he is relegated to a small attic room in the same building. Over the next thirty years, the count employs wit, intelligence, learning, humour, curiosity, and compassion to stretch the boundaries of his circumscribed world and to create a life rich in human relationships, intellectual adventure, and occasional intrigue. Through the microcosm of the Metropol Hotel and the eyes of the urbane and resourceful count, Towles offers us glimpses of Russian history, the rise and fall of the Soviet Union, and a fabulous tale of the capacity of the individual to turn incarceration into a remarkable kind of freedom.

Alice Nelson
Alice Nelson’s latest novel is The Children’s House (2018).

Letters: Summer 1926 by Boris Pasternak, Marina Tsetayeva, and Rainer Maria Rilke

During the summer of 1926, Boris Pasternak, Marina Tsvetayeva, and Rainer Maria Rilke wrote a long series of fervent letters to one another limning every aspect of their lives and work (published as Letters: Summer 1926). To call the collection a correspondence seems to diminish the incandescent beauty and passionate intensity of their communion. These are not mere letters: they are hymns and exaltations, seismographs of the human heart. As they penned their letters, each poet was struggling to navigate a world divided and disfigured. Tsvetayeva was living in desperate exile in France, Pasternak was suffering under the repressive new Bolshevik regime in Moscow, and Rilke was dying in a Swiss sanatorium. Though the shadows were gathering, these letters feel like hope distilled. Their ravishing epistolary dance is a paean to human connection, but also a profound argument for the essential nature of literature and the power of poetry as a flare against the darkness.

Patrick Allington
Patrick Allington’s novel Rise & Shine will appear in June.

 Chariots of the Gods? Unsolved mysteries of the past by Erich von Däniken

For me, strange times call for strange books. For example, dipping in and out of Erich von Däniken’s frankly bonkers speculation on the past, Chariots of the Gods? Unsolved mysteries of the past (1968), is amusing me. But I’m drawing particular, if discomfiting, solace from rereading Lisa Jacobson’s 2012 verse novel The Sunlit Zone. Set between 2020 and 2051, this dark, tense tale is anchored in a sense of grief and loss, time and ageing. It’s also a quite beautiful, subtle, intelligent vision of an imperfect future: cloned whales and damaged fish; ‘The news subedited by hackers’; hot pink synthetic lawns. Jacobson squeezes contradictory elements together: the story is trenchant but compassionate. It’s not comic but it’s frequently funny. Good books come and go too quickly: The Sunlit Zone, for its astute observations of the human spirit and for the audacious way Jacobson works her words, warrants a longer gaze.

Kerryn Goldsworthy
Kerryn Goldsworthy is working on a new edition of her book on Adelaide for NewSouth.

Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë

Early on the morning of what we knew would be the last day of my father’s life, I stood in front of the bookcase with my car keys in my hand, looking for something I could rely on to get me through my shift of the bedside vigil while he sank deeper into the dark stream. In the overnight bag that I keep packed for last-minute travel or sleepovers or hospital stays, there are battered paperback copies of George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1871–72), Dorothy Dunnett’s Checkmate (1975), and A.S. Byatt’s Possession (1990). But this day I needed something less cerebral, something elemental, something that felt like bedrock. Late that night in his quiet room as we sat with him and waited for the funeral people to come and take him away, my sister looked at my book. ‘Jane Eyre! You must have read that a hundred times!’

Michelle de Kretser
Michelle de Kretser’s latest novel is The Life to Come (2017).

Since I don’t know you, I can’t recommend reading that will comfort and sustain you through lockdown. I can’t say that I find any reading particularly soothing at present. Nevertheless, I’ve bought books in the last three weeks, and I encourage you to do the same. By ‘books’ I mean books by contemporary Australian writers. Like so many other people, writers are doing it tough. I’m okay: most are not. Literature is a small and vulnerable affair in this country. Further down the line, bookshops and publishing programs will take a hit. So please buy Australian books. Whether or not they help you, you’ll be helping others scrape through.

Listen to this essay read by the author.

I was operating when it arrived. Between patients I read the email hastily. It concerned an article from surgeons at Stanford University. Along with colleagues in the United States, Italy, China, and Iran, they were reporting an increased risk of death from Covid-19 among otolaryngologists, neurosurgeons – and ophthalmologists, like me. Surgery around the nasal passages or other mucous membranes of the face seemed to release a potentially lethal aerosolised load of the SARS-CoV-2 virus. Among the casualties were surgeons in their thirties.

I thought of Dr Li Wenliang, the thirty-three-year-old Chinese ophthalmologist who died from Covid-19 after blowing the whistle on the outbreak in late December 2019. I closed my inbox and focused on the next patient. Amid the din in the theatre, a new alarm sounded a worrying thrum.

Cycling home, I pedalled faster than usual. My wife, also a doctor, was in her third trimester of pregnancy; she was posted in Accident and Emergency at the time. Her commitment to work both impressed and concerned me. So far, Covid-19 had only affected pregnant women in a mild to moderate degree, with no cases of in utero transmission to newborns. Some babies had been affected by maternal illness after delivery, causing fever, respiratory distress, and, in one case, neonatal death. My wife and I considered the evidence – a tug of war of uncertainty, risk, and the limits of her duty to medicine. Soon afterwards, three MV Artania cruise-ship passengers, confirmed as Covid-19 positive, were transferred to A&E during her shift. That night, there were tears and hugs at our home.

At work, in both public and private hospitals, the impact came in waves, each one bigger than the last. New infection-control measures rolled in daily: screening stations, thermometers, personal protective equipment (PPE), wall-to-wall public health announcements. The undertow swept away hundreds of non-urgent appointments, all rescheduled to a later date in order to depopulate waiting rooms, maintain physical distancing, and preserve PPE. For deferred ophthalmic patients, there was, and remains, the small but significant risk of vision loss.

The languid water of a fountain
rises to a steady height, collapses
upon itself, splashing

a stone bowl on a pedestal.
The elliptical pool ripples
in the afternoon’s light air.

This is where people gather
to be alone or with others,
where children lend their

exuberance – festive – to
the otherwise tranquil scene.
We are in the midst of a plague,

but you wouldn’t know it, just as
we don’t know we won’t exist
someday every day. Perhaps it is

because we never will die – but
that is at best a belief and more
likely a faith in benignity.

The plague gathers impetus and
victims, passing among us before
it, too, passes away. No death, no life.

Whistleblowing has a long history. The Ancient Greeks had a term for it: parrhēsia, or fearless speech. In the seventh century, a British king introduced the world’s first whistleblowing law, encouraging his citizens to report those who worked on the Sabbath. Ever since the phrase ‘whistleblower’ was coined in the 1970s, the concept has gained renewed salience. In an era of widespread fraud and corruption, those prepared to speak up perform an essential service to society.

While whistleblowers may be vitally important, their experience is typically not a happy one. As Tom Mueller, an American based in Italy, outlines in his superb new book, Crisis of Conscience, the hardships faced by the average whistleblower are severe. Having interviewed more than two hundred whistleblowers, plus ‘scores of attorneys, advocates, politicians, historians, government watchdogs, intelligence analysts, cognitive scientists and other experts’, Mueller tells the story of whistleblowing. The reprisals, the job losses, the threats, the blacklistings, the financial pain, the social isolation, the psychological scars – in harrowing detail Mueller highlights the human suffering behind the newspaper headlines of ‘scandal’, ‘corruption’, ‘fraud’, and ‘abuse’. It makes for riveting but painful reading.

I read with interest Professor Jenny Hocking’s article ‘At Her Majesty’s Pleasure: Sir John Kerr and the royal dismissal secrets’ regarding the release of the ‘Palace letters’, the correspondence between Governor-General Sir John Kerr and Queen Elizabeth, covering the period of the dismissal of the Whitlam government (ABR, April 2020).

There is no doubt that central to the ‘Palace letters’ case – currently being considered by the High Court – is the fundamental issue of control over and access to our nation’s significant archival records. Access to authentic Commonwealth records is core to accountability in our democratic process, and is diligently executed by the National Archives of Australia in accordance with the legislation set out in the Archives Act 1983 (Cwth). However, Professor Hocking makes several erroneous assertions about the National Archives in her article (including the wilful withholding of these historically important records) that I would like to address here.

The National Archives is a pro-disclosure organisation and operates on the basis that a Commonwealth record should be made publicly available, unless there is a specific and compelling need to withhold it. This is the intent of the Archives Act. Disclosure of primary source material should not be an automatic process, however. It requires judgement, skill, and responsibility.

The National Archives is entrusted with the care of valuable information and tasked with making accessible that information once its sensitivity has sufficiently diminished. In the case of Commonwealth records, this is usually after twenty years (the ‘closed period’). Beyond that time, records should be made public, unless one of a few special exemptions apply. During 2018–19 the National Archives wholly released ninety-six per cent of records on request, partially released three per cent, and completely withheld only one per cent.

In the case of personal records, an agreement is entered into between the National Archives and the depositor specifying the conditions under which access can be given.

The Palace letters were deposited by Sir David Smith as Sir John Kerr’s agent with the Australian Archives in August 1978. In accordance with Kerr’s instructions, their release would occur sixty years (later changed to fifty years) from the end of Kerr’s appointment, ‘only after consultation with The Sovereign’s Private Secretary of the day and with the Governor-General’s Official Secretary of the day’.

In March 2018 and again after appeal in February 2019, the Federal Court determined that the letters are not ‘Commonwealth records’ as defined in the Archives Act, and therefore are not subject to the access provisions defined in the Act for Commonwealth records. In August 2019 the High Court of Australia gave a grant of special leave for a further appeal, heard in February 2020. The High Court is now considering its judgment. It goes without saying that the High Court’s decision may change the situation. For now, the National Archives is bound to follow the law in the manner confirmed by the Federal Court and to continue to treat these records as personal papers.

Stewardship of personal records requires a respect for the depositors. The National Archives is an institution of profound importance to Australia’s system of democracy and government. To fulfil its role it must maintain the highest level of public trust. If we were to start releasing personal records against the wishes of depositors, that trust would be quickly and irretrievably lost. The historical significance of these letters and the public’s interest in their content have never been in dispute. However, given the Federal Court judgments to date and the agreement made between the National Archives and the depositor, it would be a massive breach of trust if the National Archives were to make them public.

Professor Hocking claims that the National Archives is spending hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal fees to ‘fight’ access to the Palace letters. We do not ‘fight’ access. On the contrary, the National Archives works very hard to make access possible.

The National Archives is accountable for the decisions we make. Quite appropriately, from time to time we are required to appear before a tribunal or other court to have those decisions scrutinised and tested for propriety and lawfulness. This is part of being open, accountable, and trustworthy. We do incur legal costs, but it’s wrong to suggest this expenditure could be avoided by simply opening all records without regard for the law or our depositors.

As previously stated, the Archives Act provides a general right of access to records in the open-access period, unless they are exempt under certain categories. Before records are released, they are examined by National Archives staff for any information that should be exempt. Professor Hocking makes reference to the ‘inordinate and unacceptable delays’ in dealing with requests to access records.

Every year, the National Archives receives tens of thousands of applications for access to records in the national archival collection. I acknowledge that for some there are unacceptable delays in processing these requests. A few high-volume or complex applications, often lodged by a handful of individuals, currently tie up the bulk of available resources. For example last year, 12,700 of the almost 25,000 requests for access were made by just four people. This resulted in a reduced capacity to process access requests made by the vast majority of applicants.

Central to the ‘Palace letters’ case is the fundamental issue of control over and access to our nation’s significant archival records

In April 2019, amendments to the access provisions of the Archives Act took effect. These amendments provide the National Archives with tools to appropriately manage applications for access to large numbers of records. We continue to manage the backlog of applications in addition to responding to new requests for access to records.

Finally, Professor Hocking quite wrongly asserts that the ‘Archives appears a broken institution, paralysed by delay, hamstrung by resource pressures, and indifferent to its core function “to connect Australians to the nation’s memory, their identity and history”’. This is far from the truth, and here I will let the facts speak for themselves. During 2018–19:

• hundreds of thousands of visitors engaged with the national archival collection through our research centres, public programs, events, and exhibitions across the country
• tens of millions of people accessed our services and information through our websites and social media channels
• more than 62,000 Australians received help with their research
• 310,452 records were wholly released, and 3,492 were partially released to the public
• digitised records continued to be published online, bringing the total to more than sixty million images available through our database RecordSearch

The National Archives is a crucial national institution with a clear purpose and responsibility. Clearly, we are not broken. We proudly go on connecting Australians to the nation’s memory, identity, and history.

Listen to this essay read by the author.

Closeted but not isolated, everyone will have a story, so there’s nothing special here. But the common difference is clear. When it’s about Brexit or Trump there, it’s us to them; when it’s bushfires here, it’s them to us. We have been globally entwined for decades, but the economic and political truths are mostly covert. It’s taken Covid-19 to put us all overtly at the same risk at the same time.

For me, in the first weeks a world of words and friends opened up. In Tokyo they’re doing well at first: a culture of respect and teamwork as opposed to individualism. It’s what scientist and resilience champion Brian Walker calls the ‘we’ society versus the ‘me-me-me’: more from him later.

Our Tokyo colleague is in her eighties and has been unwell, but she’s used to being isolated in her tiny space. ‘I have no work now,’ she writes, as if she expected to be still working at this age. It’s what I expected of her, the indefatigable entrepreneur. The colleague in Brussels is not as old but has been unwell for some months and is also used to being confined to her apartment. She says people can come over. She expresses her concern for artists, ‘the last in the chain’ and, with a typically broad view: ‘Human hubris is knocked out, and I’m sure this was high time.’

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A downright disgrace

Dear Editor,

This looks, on the face of it, to be a downright disgrace. In a country which still hopes to be literate and educated, this journal links us to our major cultural tradition. No doubt somebody will purport to explain and support the decision. I also note that the cruel choice was made at exactly the point in history when – beset by pandemic – we will lack cultural education very sadly indeed.

Chris Wallace-Crabbe (online comment)

Dear Editor,

I wouldn’t have a writing career without Australian Book Review, and I know I’m far from alone. ABR is many things, but its most vital role is as an incubator of new Australian voices, both creative and critical; our makers, thinkers, and dreamers. And with ABR’s unwavering – and distressingly rare – commitment to paying all of its contributors a fair (and growing) rate, the magazine gives us the support we need to keep writing at a time when it has never been harder to carve out a sustainable life on the page. The Australia Council decision is just the latest example of a myopic and feckless government mortgaging its country’s creative future.

Beejay Silcox, Albany, WA

Dear Editor,

Now, when the mainstream press is substantially reducing, or even eliminating, review pages; when radio and television arts and review programs are also diminishing; and when many fear that Australian cultural production will simply become invisible, we need the ABR more than ever. Many will be dismayed at the Australia Council’s failure to understand ABR’s contribution.

What is less well understood is the importance of a well-regarded general review, such as ABR, in sustaining long-form research in the humanities and social sciences. Arguably, since much of this work is publicly funded, a capacity to engage lay audiences with what is produced, rather than it being limited to other specialists, is desirable. More significantly, if books in these fields cannot gain attention (and sales) beyond other professionals and students, they will not be published. In short, it is about the survival of such books and the dissemination of ideas well beyond the academy.

ABR has served that purpose admirably for a long time. It is more important than ever now. Local publishers and academic journals are struggling to compete with British, European and US competitors whose larger audiences guarantee a greater impact factor. As a result, researchers are pushed to publish specialised ‘international’ research overseas; Australian case studies and topics drop off the agenda; and Australian books can seem irrelevant. In my field, political science, the principal Australian journal has ceased publishing book reviews. In consequence, ABR has become a necessary resource even for those of us in specialist fields to identify what, in the case of substantial long-form research (rather than journal articles), is being published.

The Australia Council must be encouraged to reconsider this decision.

James Walter, Monash University, Melbourne

Dear Editor,

Australian Book Review is our assurance of our freedom as writers. It occupies a uniquely critical space in our culture that we leave vacant at our peril. If ABR is forced to close due to a lack of support from the Australia Council, the Australia Council will have failed all of us. To lose ABR would be a humiliation of the freedom of thought in this country. The critical voice of ABR is essential to the intellectual health of our society.

Alex Miller (online comment)

Dear Editor,

Thank you, ABR, for your unflagging commitment to quality literary and arts journalism in these testing times. We have not only a global pandemic on our hands but also a muddy deluge of misinformation and disinformation. As Peter Rose writes, ‘Never has reasoned argument or cogent journalism been more important than it is now.’ In this, ABR is a necessary voice.

Naama Grey-Smith, Melville, WA

Jenny Hocking and the ‘Palace letters’

Dear Editor,

Congratulations to Jenny Hocking for her brilliant and revealing article ‘At Her Majesty’s Pleasure’. It is both a record of the tumultuous events of 11 November 1975 and an exposé of the Thomas Cromwell-like intrigues and plots conducted by the then governor-general, Sir John Kerr, his secret confidant the High Court Justice Sir Anthony Mason, along with Her Majesty the Queen, her private secretary, and her heir.

All reveal that the hapless Kerr, contrary to official opinion, never acted alone. Professor Hocking’s examination of the Archives Act (1983) reveals that only rules that suit the monarch and by extension Australia’s coalition government will be adhered to. Hocking reveals how our federal government has now spent more than $800,000 to prevent Commonwealth records being released, on the spurious grounds that the letters relating to the dismissal of a twice-elected prime minister are now deemed personal property.

Where will this end? There are enough characters in this essay for an all-revealing play to be written by the award-winning playwright Emily Steel in conjunction with Jenny Hocking and perhaps advised by Hilary Mantel. This play, At Her Majesty’s Pleasure, would fill theatres here and overseas, thus further rewarding Hocking’s research and scholarship. Never would a script be so theatrical and revealing.

Ultimately, thanks to Jenny Hocking and ABR, the truth will out, never mind how long it takes. We can take comfort, as Walt Whitman reminds us: ‘All truths wait in all things, / They neither hasten their own delivery nor resist it.’

Roger Rees, Goolwa, SA

Dear Editor,

The more I read about our constitutional monarchy, the less benign it appears. Well done to Jenny Hocking for pursuing this matter so vigorously. I think the Australian public is being blinded by the soap opera the royal family has become and not pausing to think about how inappropriate it is for our modern, forward-looking nation to cling to its colonial origins so fiercely. The secrecy surrounding the monarch’s interactions with democratically elected governments is quite breathtaking when you take time to think about it.

Judith Masters (online comment)

Dear Editor,

Thank you, Jenny Hocking, for your fantastic historical contribution and for your courage and resolve in taking on the power of the monarchy and the obfuscation of the National Archives.

Sally Gray (online comment)

The least of our worries

Dear Editor,

Long-lasting fires, like the ones experienced in many parts of Australia this season, certainly cause great trauma and distress as well as enormous damage. The need for Australians to find ways to live safely in fire-prone regions has never been more urgent. But to imply, as Tom Griffiths does in his article ‘Season of Reckoning’, that such fires might become the new normal or last forever is to ignore ecology and to miss the most terrifying threat they pose.

The more frequent, more severe, and longer lasting fires we are seeing under a changed climate will inevitably exhaust the natural regenerative capacity of our native ecosystems. Over time, forests will disappear, accelerating reduced rainfall and falling water tables, and leading to the aridification and desertification of previously habitable areas.

Fires may be the least of our worries when there is nothing left to burn.

Danielle Clode, Bradbury, SA

Tom Griffiths replies:

I’m grateful that Danielle Clode is keeping the vital conversation about bushfires going, and I agree that the most fearsome long-term threat the fires pose is ecological. Over the summer, we saw fire interact with different ecological regions in new and frightening ways; we saw blazes in New South Wales behave like Victorian firestorms; and we saw the fires across Australia burn longer and with more ferocity than we have before. We are already experiencing – in our lifetimes – significant changes to native ecosystems due to fires exacerbated by climate change. ‘This is not the new normal,’ as I quoted James Bradley as saying; ‘It is just the beginning.’ I wrote my essay in the hope that this can be our season of reckoning – that we will indeed ‘worry’ about the fires – and that we will curb our society’s obsession with fossil fuels and thus minimise the dire ecological outcomes that Clode describes.

Our tragic red summer

Dear Editor,

The world may be grinding to a halt, but I have been immersing myself in my first copy of ABR as a subscriber. I was saving it up for a long-awaited trip to Tasmania, but alas this was not to be. Tom Griffiths’s reflective essay on our tragic red summer took me back to all the times I have stood outside with the smell of smoke filling the sky. Griffiths gives not only an Australian retrospective on bushfires but a call for climate action, a reckoning. As the world becomes more dystopian by the day, I hope his call reaches a wide audience. The more articulate and strident voices on the state of our nation we have, the better.

Jenny Esots, Willunga, SA

Tom Keneally’s new novel

Dear Editor,

Tom Keneally needs to research the methods of lamb castration. The method he describes would have resulted in the extinction of the Sunday roast and the lambs that underwent the procedure he describes. Tom is a bit like Banjo Paterson, extolling the droving life but never going a-droving – pure theatre. Another comment on life on the land from the metropolitan armchair.

Gill David Egan (online comment)

Jennifer Maiden

Dear Editor,

Thanks for this in-depth review of Jennifer Maiden’s The Espionage Act by James Jiang. This line is great: ‘One of Maiden’s great strengths is her ability to preserve a tender awareness in the midst of privation and intrigue.’ To clarify regarding weariness: weariness, weariness in corruption, weariness in politics/espionage and weariness of the artist are actually themes in the collection, not a commentary on the poems or the poet. In terms of politics, it was interesting how media sources tended to try to apply the term ‘too weary to continue’ to Bernie Sanders until his recent success in Nevada. It seems it’s used often to mean ‘a physical state in which someone is worn-down or practically handicapped’ and the idea that someone cannot function in that state. But far from anything eugenic or Darwinian, survival (physical, artistic and political) depends often on reflecting on tiredness to continue. In ‘Diary Poem: Uses of Corruption’, Maiden writes: ‘Talking of the weariness of actors, Richard/Burton on a set once advised his daughter Kate, / who was exhausted, that the best thing was to use / the tiredness in playing the part, / not hide it.’ Just to quickly clarify a couple of things: Maiden uses the term ‘honeytrap’ not ‘honeypot’ to look at the deliberate the use of intimacy to compromise someone politically. Maiden was also not saying that that Turing’s preoccupation with Snow White was related to his death, but that Intelligence forces may have used that preoccupation to suggest that he had died by self-poisoned apple, while in fact there was apparently no poison in the apple.

Katharine Margot Toohey, Quemar Press (online comment)

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Bruce Dawe (1930–2020)

Bruce Dawe, the so-called Australian ‘protest poet’, died on April 1, aged ninety. Dawe was born in Fitzroy in 1930 and grew up in a working-class milieu, moving between seven schools before working myriad jobs – labourer, farmhand, postman, and more. His socially conscious poetry was enjoyed by a diverse audience; his collection Sometimes Gladness (1978) was a standard text on high-school curricula.

John Kinsella, in a fine tribute published in The Guardian on April 3, wrote: ‘Always behind Dawe’s seemingly playful banter with us, his readers and public, is his commitment to sympathy and connection with the less empowered, the disenfranchised, downtrodden, neglected and exploited.’

Jolley Prize

As we go to press, entries are pouring in for the 2020 ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize, which is worth a total of $12,500. Entries close on May 1 at 11:59 pm. Our judges – Gregory Day, Josephine Rowe, and Ellen van Neerven – will then start assessing the large field. The shortlisted stories will be published in the August 2020 issue of ABR. The usual ceremony remains moot: we’ll host one if we can.

Meanwhile, for all those poets out there who are cooped up at home: the Peter Porter Poetry Prize will open on July 15.

Calibre Essay Prize

Judging of the 2020 Calibre Essay Prize was delayed because of the pandemic and the unprecedented number of entries, but the judges – J.M. Coetzee, Lisa Gorton, and ABR Editor Peter Rose – have now finalised their deliberations. The two winning essays will appear in the June–July issue. The winner receives $5,000, the runner-up, $2,500.

Jess Hill wins Stella Prize

Congratulations to Jess Hill for winning the $50,000 Stella Prize for her pioneering work See What You Made Me Do: Power, control and domestic abuse (Black Inc.). This is a book of immense importance to discussions about domestic abuse and systemic violence against women. Hill, a Walkley Award-winning investigative journalist, combines forensic research and immersive narrative. Zora Simic, reviewing See What You Made Me Do in the September 2019 issue of ABR, predicted it would be ‘the most important work of Australian non-fiction this year’.

The ABR Podcast

The response to our first ‘Poetry for Troubled Times’ podcast was enthusiastic. Various poets and critics read poems of considerable meaning to them – ones that seemed to speak to these anxious times. Readers included Judith Beveridge, Peter Goldsworthy, Lisa Gorton, and Paul Kane from New York.

Such was the response that we have recorded a second cohort of poets and aficionados in 'More Poetry for Troubled Times'. They include Anthony Lawrence, Chris Wallace-Crabbe, Maria Takolander, and Claire G. Coleman. (Jaya Savige reads Bruce Dawe’s poem ‘Happiness Is the Art of Being Broken’.)

Look out for more poetry on the ABR Podcast in coming months. Previous episodes include Robyn Archer on the way we live during the pandemic and how it might change Australia once the crisis is over. Billy Griffiths reviews Cassandra Pybus’s Truganini, and previous Calibre Prize-winners Michael Adams and Martin Thomas read their celebrated essays. Be sure to tune in – and don’t forget to subscribe so that you don’t miss any upcoming episodes. The ABR Podcast is available on the ABR website, iTunes, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Vogel bounty

After last year’s contentious decision not to award a winner, K.M. Kruimink has won the 2020 The Australian/Vogel’s Literary Award for her novel A Treacherous Country. Set in nineteenth-century Tasmania, it was shortlisted alongside three other works, all unpublished of course: Emily Brugman’s The Islands, Belinda Lopez’s Tete and Maree Spratt’s The Followers. Kruimink receives $20,000.

Allen & Unwin published A Treacherous Country in April.

What a difference a month makes! In late March, as we were sending the April issue to press, how bleak the outlook was here in Australia, but especially overseas. Future print editions seemed doubtful because of the scale of the threat and the imminent lockdown.

One month later, any interruption to the print edition seems unlikely, with two caveats. Australia Post deliveries have slowed in recent days, and we’re unable to deliver the print edition to overseas subscribers, all of whom can access the digital edition free of charge. We will resume normal overseas delivery as soon as possible. It goes without saying that ABR – and the print edition – are here to stay.

Magazines matter, but infinitely more important than our schedules and vicissitudes is the health of the world community. While the situation in places like Italy, Spain, Iran, Turkey, India, and the United States is alarming (like the antics of America’s rabid leader), here in Australia the situation is so much more promising than seemed likely in the middle of March. Following clear messages from government and a range of preventative measures, the rate of infection with Covid-19 has decreased markedly. The Australian community has demonstrated immense unity and self-discipline, despite the loss of income and employment, and despite the curtailment of basic entitlements that would have been inconceivable in February. Nonetheless, we all know what has been delayed, undone, jeopardised, or even destroyed along the way. Arts companies have been ravaged, though canny ones are finding ways to innovate, entertain, and survive.

What will Australia look like when the crisis is over and when a vaccine becomes available (if that is possible)? Will we work as we formerly did? Will we fill cinemas and restaurants and concert halls? Will we travel in the old compulsive way? Will we be prepared to play sardines on trams and trains, exposing ourselves to all sorts of health risks – not just coronavirus? Might Australia emerge as a more self-reliant and compassionate society, a less plutocratic and chauvinistic one? These are some of the questions that inform Robyn Archer’s commentary on ‘the way we live now’, and Dr Hessom Razavi’s first article as the ABR Behrouz Boochani Fellow (a rather different début from the one we had in mind before the pandemic).

Imagine the nation’s arts council – Gough Whitlam’s proud legacy no less – choosing not to support the country’s premier opera company or string quartet or writers’ festival. Then imagine an Australia Council withdrawing its historical support from literary magazines, with the exception of one current periodical.

Well, the latter happened on April 2 when we learned that ABR – the recipient of multi-year funding for several years and of uninterrupted federal funding for at least three decades – would no longer be funded. Much has been said about this unfair and unjustifiable decision.  ABR – believing in the kind of transparency and accountability that we look for from the Australia Council – has been very direct in its response. We have made it clear that non-funding has significant consequences for readers, authors, freelance writers, and publishers.

The untimeliness of this decision has not escaped people’s notice. It seems extraordinary that the Council, at such a perilous time, will not fund seasoned, proven, innovative magazines that play a crucial role in the literary ecology.

ABR has many questions about the process. Federal funding in 2017–20 has enabled this magazine to flourish in unprecedented ways. We have met all our KPIs in spades. In our application we foreshadowed an even more ambitious and expansive program, with many new features: an extra issue each year, rising rates for our 300-plus writers each year, and total payments of $1,200,000 in 2021–24 (more than half of it from our own revenue). These commitments must now be reviewed.

Readers, though, should be in no doubt about the magazine’s viability or resolve. ABR is diminished, but not dimmed. This organisation has been through crises in the past, and doubtless there will be more in coming years, but nothing will shake our belief that Australians deserve a robust critical culture worthy of our national literature – and one that pays writers properly.

The response from readers, subscribers, contributors, and ABR Patrons has been phenomenal. Countless people have expressed their dismay and incredulity to the federal government and the Council. A few of the many messages we have received at ABR appear on our letters page. Your goodwill, your concern, your prompt subscriptions, and your exceptional donations are tremendously heartening and galvanising. We are particularly grateful to those contributors who have offered to donate their fees back to the magazine. Clearly, more is at stake here than just ABR. The Australia Council may think we can do without magazines of this kind; Australian readers certainly don’t.

All I can do, as Editor, all we can do collectively – staff, board, contributors, the army of volunteers and supporters that sustain this sixty-year-old enterprise – is to provide you with the most searching journalism we can, notwithstanding this lamentable decision by the Australia Council.

James Bradley’s Ghost Species arrives at a time when fiction seems outpaced by the speed with which we humans are changing the planet. Alarmingly, such writerly speculation has been realised during Australia’s tragic summer, when the future finally bore down on us. And there are few writers of climate fiction – or ‘cli-fi’, the term coined by activist blogger Dan Bloom and popularised in a tweet by Margaret Atwood – who so delicately straddle the conceptual divide between present and future as Bradley.

Ghost Species assumes many characteristics of science fiction, but it also has the quality of what Roger Luckhurst calls proleptic realism, ‘a modelling of the present day tilted five minutes into the future … within the horizon of current research’. Unlike Kim Stanley Robinson, whose climate novels abound with scientific detail, Bradley pursues a minimalist aesthetic, translating science into poetic terms. There is a striking sparsity to the prose, a rendering of the world with a precision that elicits a sense of the scientific, a poetics of observation, record, and projection.

Armed with more than half a century’s worth of knowledge, experience, the fermentation of ideas and approaches in literary history and criticism over that period, and her own formidable reputation as a scholar and teacher of Australian literature, Brenda Niall returns in her latest book to the territory of her earliest ones. In Seven Little Billabongs: The world of Ethel Turner and Mary Grant Bruce (1979), Niall broke new ground not just in writing a serious and scholarly full-length treatment of Australian children’s literature, but also in departing from the orthodox biographical tradition of focusing on a single figure.

As Niall recalls in her introduction, children’s literature was still being dismissed as ‘Kiddylit’ as late as 1987. Approaching it as a serious field of scholarly research had been a revolutionary idea in Australia in 1979; in this context, Niall’s name is now the first that anyone thinks of. Nor is the group biography a new thing for her, as demonstrated by her award-winning The Boyds: A family biography (2002), in which she revisited, from a new and wider angle, her early work on Martin Boyd.