Patrick Allington is a writer, critic, editor, and academic. His most recent work is Rise & Shine (Scribe, 2020), and his first novel, Figurehead, was longlisted for the 2010 Miles Franklin award. He has also had short fiction published in Meanjin, Griffith Review, The Big Issue, and elsewhere. Allington has taught politics, communications, and creative writing, most recently at Flinders University.

If you could go anywhere tomorrow, where would it be, and why?

Antarctica: in case it’s not there later. 

In the winter issue of Meanjin, some of Australia’s best writers, including Sophie Cunningham, Lucy Treloar, and Jennifer Mills, grapple with the climate emergency and our relationship to place in these days of coronavirus and the summer that was.

One of the delights of a literary journal is the way that bringing pieces together can seem to prompt a conversation. Sometimes, however, this highlights a disparity. This issue’s cover essay, Lucia Osborne-Crowley’s ‘Depreciated: The Price of Love’, recounts, in the wake of a breakup, how the author subsumed her sense of self to the relationship in a way her partner did not. The gendered nature of this dynamic is ostensibly the essay’s focus, but I was left feeling impatient with the wan observations. Later in the issue, Elizabeth Flux’s ‘Call Him Al’ reads as a riposte: Flux has her protagonist undergo the transformation that Osborne-Crowley means to examine. The short story’s uncanny allegorical twist expresses much more that is vital, and it is aided by far greater technical assurance, imagination, and pathos. Meanwhile, high points of Peter Lewis’s analysis of how the web might evolve in Australia – including how Uber’s frankness about its non-compliance with the law has, thanks to a quirk of Australian common law, meant that a class action can be brought against them – are unfortunately overshadowed by the perplexing editorial decision to let stand a series of outrageous analogies to Indigenous dispossession in which tech titans are cast as colonisers and Indigenous Australia has ‘problems’.

And the standouts? Alexis Wright continues her remarkable exploration of sovereignty in literature, bringing to bear a cosmopolitan Indigenous worldview. Fatima Measham’s exquisitely written and researched ‘Time in the Antipodes’ is a meditation on time that blends the personal with the political, historical, and geological; it synthesises vastly different chronologies to contemplate the current moment, including time as hindered or facilitated by the state, time under capitalism and according to Australian employment laws, and time for the ecosystems that went under the flame this summer. Emerging writer Muhannad Al-wehwah’s memoir ‘Mixtape–Side A’ is a beautifully balanced piece that juxtaposes a history of cassette-tape manufacturing with their role in his childhood and the connection they provided to family in Australia, Palestine, and Lebanon.

First published as The Tasmanian Review in 1979 (soon after the Franklin River Dam project was announced) and renamed Island Magazine in 1981 (the year of the Tasmanian Power Referendum), Island emerged as one of Australia’s leading literary magazines, yet always grounded in a fragile environment. True to its ecological roots, this fortieth anniversary edition, put together by the new editorial team of Anna Spargo Ryan (non-fiction), Ben Walter (fiction), Lisa Gorton (poetry), and Judith Abell (art features), maintains a distinctly local focus while exploring new creative directions.

Over the past forty years, Island has published some of Australia’s most celebrated figures, yet its standing as a relatively small not-for-profit and print-only publication has made it an ideal nursery for emerging and marginal voices. Island’s precarious financial position was severely tested in 2019 when, like other highly respected publications, it was denied a renewal of multi-year state government funding, making the appearance of Issue 159 (made possible by a once-only government grant matched by an anonymous private donor) seem as miraculous as sighting a Swift Parrot among the blue gums on a winter morning.

Unsurprisingly, the contents of this issue cohere around a common theme: that when productivity becomes our only framework for assessing value and usefulness, our ecological and cultural survival are similarly endangered. Sam George-Allen’s essay on the simple, life-affirming joys of starting a garden from scratch (‘Principles of Permaculture’) is contrasted with a bitter triptych of the mechanised capitalist psyche in Andrew Roff’s story ‘The Lever, the Pulley, and the Screw’. The profound grief evoked by Julie Gough’s installations on Aboriginal dispossession and genocide (Mary Knights) is mirrored in the repressed, wordless rage of a young man in Christine Kearney’s story ‘Stingrays’. Jonno Revanche’s essay on Kylie Minogue and Pip Smith’s story of an elderly baker explore the angelic and demonic aspects of embattled femininity, while poets such as Jake Goetz (‘Ash in Sydney’) and Toby Fitch (‘Pink Sun’) remind us how quickly last summer’s devastating bushfires slipped from the headlines. Such an eclectic, invigorating collision of perspectives leaves one hopeful that, just as public outcry against the Franklin Dam led to the creation of the Tasmanian Wilderness World Heritage Area (and Island magazine), audiences will unite to support the arts and the real people making them happen.

One of the most bizarre as well as unfortunate deaths in literary history occurred when the playwright Aeschylus was struck by a tortoise dropped on him by a bird. Bizarre, that is, if we don’t consider what the bird involved was doing, which was clever as well as practical. From the bird’s perspective, the tortoise was being dropped on a convenient stone rather than the bald head of a Greek tragedian who just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Jennifer Ackerman, a leading science writer, is the author of several previous books on birds. Not least among the virtues of The Bird Way is the wealth of Australian material, confirming that this country is an ornithological superpower. Birds are everywhere: we see and hear them even in the most densely populated cities. Notwithstanding human encroachment, birds remain the most spectacular form of wildlife in our daily lives.

Queer memoir is particularly given to formal play, to unpacking and upsetting the conventions of genre in order to question women’s roles as both narrator and subject. Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts (2015) mixes scholarship and bodily transformation. Carmen Maria Machado’s In The Dream House (2019) unpacks the nature of narrative itself to reflect on an abusive relationship. Into this field comes Sky Swimming, Sylvia Martin’s ‘memoir that is not quite a memoir, more a series of reflections in which I act as a biographer of my own life’. For Martin, the critical distance of the biographer enables her to consider the resonances that exist between her own experiences.

Martin specialises in biography that casts her as a queer detective, uncovering the lives of women whose artistic and erotic lives have been lost to Australian literary and cultural history. She mines locations, documents, and works of art for the threads of suppressed stories, the subtexts and absences that expose the private lives of her subjects – writer Mary Eliza Fullerton, librarian Ida Leeson, and poet Aileen Palmer. Her process is consciously rooted in feminist modes of storytelling that give primacy and agency to the teller. In Sky Swimming, Martin turns these processes back onto herself in a collection of fifteen reflective essays, where her biographer’s interest in the landscapes and communities that surrounded her subjects extends to her own life.

It began with a request to overturn a controversial bill that would have allowed people to be extradited to mainland China. According to the bill’s many detractors, this was but the latest example of the erosion of Hong Kong’s freedoms. By June 2019, millions of Hong Kong’s residents had taken to the streets. August saw sit-ins at Hong Kong’s International Airport, and by October clashes between police and protestors were characterised by violence and chaos – tear gas, rubber bullets, arrests, and prosecutions, the norm. This was summer in Hong Kong, a city dominated by increasingly violent upheaval with the world watching on.

By October, the protests had stopped being about just defeating a bill and had morphed into a movement decrying China’s rising authoritarianism. It became ‘a battle for Hong Kong’s very soul’, writes Australian author and lawyer Antony Dapiran in his book City on Fire. Dapiran goes right to the frontline to capture the unrest that plagued Hong Kong in 2019. He writes with journalistic prowess of what he witnessed among protestors and police, the tension mounting in each chapter. One finishes the book with an appreciation of the magnitude of what was achieved by the protestors. This leaderless group of mostly students and millennials succeeded in having the extradition bill overturned. It also symbolically took on a global superpower, with actions that reverberated around the globe. Indeed, pro-Hong Kong rallies happened in Australia, Canada, France, and the United States.

City on Fire also contextualises the movement in the city’s long history of dissent. Dapiran takes the reader through the city’s history of protest. Who would have thought that a large portion of Hong Kong’s citizen, after years of prosperity and relative freedom, would be so willing to fight for democratic rights? As Dapiran writes, ‘It’s as if, twenty-two years after the handover, people woke up and realised that the China they found themselves living in was not the one they expected it to be.’ Yet Dapiran excels at contemplating both the small and big events that have contributed to such a tipping point in Hong Kong society.

The book invites the question, what will happen next? Covid-19 may just be providing a brief respite from the political tension between China and Hong Kong, but Dapiran argues that the events of 2019 will fuel whatever Hong Kong protest comes next. Dapiran promises one thing: there will be another.

Chapter 148 of Craig Brown’s engrossing book is speculative fiction. Gerry and the Pacemakers are ‘the most successful pop group of the twentieth century’, their 1963 recording of ‘How Do You Do It?’, which the Beatles turned down, having launched their career. ‘To this day,’ Brown writes, ‘they remain the only artists to have achieved the number one slot with each of their first three singles.’ The last bit is almost true: they held that record for two decades.

Brown’s fantasy, in which John, Paul, George, and Ringo become Gerry, Fred, Les, and Arthur, makes us wonder how much luck was involved in the Beatles’ achievement. Undoubtedly there was some, but it was the quality and variety of the Beatles’ original music that lay behind their still unparalleled fame. When Gerry and the Pacemakers began to record their own songs, they ceased having those number ones.

Arnold Schoenberg and George Gershwin were two of the greatest architects of twentieth-century art music, each of them simultaneously an agent of continuity and disruption. The disruption is easy enough to chart: Schoenberg’s complete rewiring of tonality’s motherboard; Gershwin’s successful integration of jazz and symphonic music (more successful than the integration into American society of the greatest exponents of this same music). Although the continuity in each instance is slightly more nebulous, it is equally as compelling.

Schoenberg’s early works snuggle up comfortably with Brahms’s late ones: it’s hardly a coincidence that the younger composer undertook an orchestral arrangement of the elder’s piano quartet. Even those works of Schoenberg’s from the beginning of the twentieth century – when the fruit really was starting to rot on the vine – are not coy about their debt to Brahms. And Gershwin – born Jacob Bruskin Gershowitz in New York City in 1898, his parents and their families having escaped the pogroms and anti-Semitism of St Petersburg in the 1890s – followed the path of so many émigrés in these decades, all of them holding on to the borscht and the Brahms they had left behind while simultaneously reshaping the culture of their adopted country. In American music, this reshaping took different forms and used different agencies, though with one key element in common: the gramophone in the 1920s would be unimaginable without Jewish émigrés, likewise cinema in the 1930s and Broadway and the symphony orchestra a decade later.

Mount Sumptuous by Aidan Coleman

Wakefield Press, $22.95 pb, 56 pp

Mount Parnassus remains a proscribed destination for the moment, but Aidan Coleman’s Mount Sumptuous provides an attractive local alternative. Following on from the poems of love and recovery in Asymmetry (2012), this collection marks the poet’s reawakened appetite for the sublimities and subterfuges of suburban Australia, from cricket pitches ‘lit like billiard tables’ and Blue Light Discos to the flammable wares of Best & Less and the implacable red brick of ‘all-meat / towns’. As these poems and their pseudo-pedagogical endnotes show, Coleman is a keen philologist of the language of commerce. The title’s ‘sumptuous’ (from the Latin sumptus for ‘expense’) keys us in to the vital ambivalence of a poetry, which on the one hand honours the rituals of everyday consumption (‘lounging / book in hand, Tim Tams / … tea a given’), and on the other speaks to the exploitative logic of consumer capitalism (‘Take the juiceless fruits / of day labour and a white / goods salesman’s leaden chicanery’).

John A. Scott’s Shorter Lives is written at an intersection between experimental fiction, biography, and poetry. It inherits aspects of earlier works, such as preoccupations with sex and France. As the title indicates, it narrates mini-biographies of famous writers – Arthur Rimbaud, Virginia Stephen (Woolf), André Breton, and Mina Loy – and one painter – Pablo Picasso – with interludes devoted to the lesser-known poet Charles Cros and the art dealer Ambroise Vollard. The narratives are largely distilled from more conventional prose sources. Scott gives himself poetic licence to fictionalise, and anachronise: Paul Cézanne’s collection of twentieth-century American paintings, for example.

The world presses in,
a towering river of debris glittering
with specks of one ongoing explosion.
All of us are morphing,
our faces layered with many faces, two eyes
gazing upward from the ending of time.
Our skin is travelling from country to country
even as we sit still
and the second hand stays
frozen on the wall clock.

From somewhere far inside us
a young woman of a millennium ago
rises to the surface, comes close
and we shiver with all her tenderness.
At the place where our breath is suddenly held back
a child is there, watching the trees above him
spin in fast motion. In the vast
empty bar room of the mind
a skeleton holding a wineglass
gives us a familiar nod.
Birds fly in and out
of the multiple cages
that are our ribcage.
A single cry from any one of their throats
is enough to thread
white light across the darkness.

So large, so impossible –
our hands shake
as we carry the world.

A survey conducted in the UK in 2017 asked people whether they trusted the opinions of a variety of experts, such as doctors, scientists, and nutritionists. Economists came second last in a big field, beaten to the bottom only by politicians. How can it be that practitioners of an academic discipline that traces its intellectual history back at least 250 years have sunk so low in popular esteem? It seems that the blame rests not with economists themselves, most of whom are honest and well-intentioned individuals whose main handicap, at least among the males of the species, is their legendary boringness and appalling taste in ties.

Rather, the problem lies in the discipline. The dominant school of economics that conventional economists practise is founded on the neoclassical principles of free markets, economic efficiency, consumer sovereignty, reduced taxation, and a diminished role for government in managing the economy. As professional practitioners in business, finance, and the public sector, economists steeped in these principles have considerable influence on economic policy, an influence that the public appears to regard with a great deal of disdain.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that pride comes before a fall, and ‘Anyone with a historical sense would have realised that the hubristic attempt to make the world into a frontier and culture-free single market would end in tears.’ This opening salvo in Professor Robert Skidelsky’s new book is part of his answer to what is wrong with economics. Besides arrogance, this includes amorality, ahistoricism, sociopathy, over-formalisation, and unscientific dogmatism.

Skidelsky’s unsparing indictment, laid out in fourteen highly readable chapters, shows how economics transformed from a moral philosophy to the current mathematics-heavy social science favoured by governments. Included here are insights from major schools of economic thought, quotes from well-known practitioners, and descriptions of its troubled relationships with other disciplines. Skidelsky claims that over the past century economics has lost its ethical foundation and multiplicity of perspectives, replaced with models that are divorced from reality and useless in predicting crises. By the book’s end, Skidelsky recommends a wholesale reformation of the discipline’s motivation and practice: reinserting ethics and institutions and highlighting the role of uncertainty in decision-making. Without such changes, he claims, ‘it does not seem that today’s pretentious economics will be of much help’ against the modern challenges of inequality, political disillusionment, and economic crises.

My first encounter with Daniel Deronda (1876) was during a university undergraduate course in Victorian literature. The novel was almost shocking for its romanticised Jewish eponymous hero and its deep evocation of Judaism and modern Zionism’s stirrings. This was a singular experience when it came to reading Jewish characters by writers who were not themselves Jewish. Fictional Jews of this period were more likely to be permutations of vile stereotypes, Shylock or Fagin-like. They induced a feeling of shame, even when arguments could be made for the work’s nuance and literary brilliance. In Genius and Anxiety: How Jews changed the world, 1847–1947, we meet Daniel Deronda’s unlikely muse along with a profusion of other personalities, some famous, others whose legacies have been unnoticed or suppressed.

Prussian-born Emanuel Deutsch – Talmudist, polyglot, and genius – was George Eliot’s Hebrew teacher and friend. His death at the age of forty-three galvanised her to create the novel that may not be her finest but is nevertheless glorious. ‘Promise Lost’ might be an alternative title for Norman Lebrecht’s book. Loss through premature death, as in Deutsch’s case, or through the prevalence of suicide attests to the often intolerable political and social landscape, steeped as it is in virulent anti-Semitism.

As generations of Australian tourists have found, the kangaroo is a far more recognisable symbol of nationality than our generic colonial flag. Both emblematic and problematic, this group of animals has long occupied a significant and ambiguous space in the Australian psyche. Small wonder, then, that Ken Gelder and Rachael Weaver have found such rich material through which to explore our colonial history in The Colonial Kangaroo Hunt.

Despite earlier descriptions of smaller pademelons, quokkas, tammars and hare wallabies, it was the descriptions by James Cook and Joseph Banks of large hopping deer or dog-like animals, known to Guugu Yimithirr people as a ‘kanguru’, which brought these animals to European attention. As with many first-contact encounters, a brief moment of wonder swiftly ended in bloodshed, and it is this aspect – the hunt – that Gelder and Weaver focus on. Notwithstanding the long history of Indigenous hunting, they argue that the first shooting of a kangaroo can be seen as a foundational moment in Australian colonial history, foreshadowing cultural and environmental destruction and appropriation. This initial interaction with the forerunners of British colonisation contains many of the elements that the authors draw out in subsequent chapters, including Indigenous conflict, sustenance, sport, science, and aspirations to colonial aristocracy.

There is a senior partner at my firm who famously harasses young women particularly when he has been drinking at social events. I was groped on two separate occasions. Nothing was done about it the first time I reported it. I did not report it the second time.

A barrister attempted to rape me after a conference. I successfully fought him off – dress torn, bruised. I did not report it. My career would have been ended had I made a formal complaint against a very senior and very highly respected counsel.

I worked for this judge as an associate … The behaviour was physical and highly intrusive and probably a criminal offence … I know of at least five women associates who have been the subject of a similar incident. There must be more.

Writing in 1957, American judge Felix Frankfurter mused about the qualities demanded of those in society who serve ‘in defence of right and to ward off wrong’. Of our lawyers, he observed, we expect certain attributes ‘that have, throughout centuries, been compendiously described as “moral character”’. Frankfurter’s historical analysis took him back to the reign of Edward I in the thirteenth century. Had he delved even deeper into the archives, he might have settled upon the words of Aristotle. Discussing humankind’s first lawyers, the orators of Athens, Aristotle insisted upon the occupational requirement of ‘good moral character’.

When allegations regarding Dyson Heydon’s past conduct were published by the Sydney Morning Herald on a wintry day in June 2020, I was not surprised. We have known for decades that harassment is widespread within law firms, courthouses, and barristers’ chambers. Since the 1990s, dozens of empirical studies in Australia and around the world have reached such conclusions. Law is a profession based on evidence; the evidence here is incontrovertible.

In 2018, a survey I led for the International Bar Association (IBA), the profession’s global peak body, found that one in three female lawyers and one in fourteen male lawyers had been sexually harassed at work or in work-related settings. This data was drawn from a sample of almost 7,000 respondents from 135 countries – the largest survey of its kind. In Australia the figures were even higher: forty-seven per cent of women and thirteen per cent of men said they had been harassed.

Our legal profession has approximate gender parity in numerical terms, although the ratio of men increases considerably with seniority. If almost half of the women – a full quarter of the profession – have been sexually harassed, it follows that there must be harassers in abundance. That is the unavoidable conclusion from three decades of research: there cannot be thousands of targets experiencing this abhorrent misconduct, and few perpetrators.

A crow-shaped shadow flies across the river. Juna knows that her daughter is coming, so the right thing to do is make her favourite feed.

Juna casts a fishing net over the river with her mind. The net drifts onto the surface, slips under the skin, and is swallowed by the water. The net descends through the deep water slowly, resting on the bed. River grass unflattens and pokes up between the spaces. Juna sings a song to attract fish to the area. The bulging tide turns the river over like a slow screw, and the net follows, one corner lifting and twisting over and over itself like a tight cigarette.

O.G. and Tebita sat down by the river. Several minutes of confused communication had concluded, once again, in a revelation of O.G.’s obtuseness. O.G. had asked the name of the river, as it wasn’t yet the Nile. But Tebita kept saying iteru, which O.G. knew meant river. So O.G. pointed again to the water and said ‘But how is this river called? What is the name on it? Which river is this?’ And, despite the frustration, was impressed she could even ask the question three different ways after – was it five? – weeks in Abydos. Time, her friend, her enemy, had become difficult to reckon.

O.G. tried another approach.

‘How many rivers for –’ and not having a word, if there even was one, for Egypt or this country, O.G. swept her arms as wide as she could, tried to include the lands all around them, and shrugged her shoulders.

‘One,’ Tebita had said, and offered O.G. a round of bread without raising her head.

‘There isn’t only one river!’ O.G. said in English. Then, in a pattern she sometimes told herself was just the rest of her brain returning from the future, O.G. became aware Tebita was right.

There was only one river. Here, the Nile was called River, because that’s what it was, the one, the only, river. O.G.’s life was now dependent upon this wild, mysterious, unpredictable water. It had flooded just before O.G.’s arrival; a good flood, everyone had said, and the relief on their faces and in their voices – even the children – had planted a seed of terror in O.G.’s heart. A bad year, the inevitable bad year: what would that look like? In what tremendous and terrible manner would this river now shape her life?

‘Iteru,’ O.G. mumbled into her lap.

It was important that no one took your photograph because you didn’t want to end up a rude picture for bad men to download. We were very sure of that, very certain in our certainty. ‘Noah Potnik has a program,’ Felix and Otis swore, ‘that strips the clothes from any photo to show what the person looks like underneath.’ Noah Potnik had nude pictures of Gal Gadot and Emma Watson and Gigi Hadid, and Felix and Otis told how he’d flashed these images to them with a horrible grin on the bus one afternoon, their eyes growing as big as paper plates because with this power a person could X-ray past the clothes of anyone they wanted, but that meant that even though for some reason Noah Potnik didn’t have any pictures of boys it must be possible that they, too – Felix and Otis – could end up flying around the internet where people would stare at them with their clothes off.

We all nodded and pretended to know a lot about that, because at nine it was important to pretend to know a lot about the internet.

We were suspicious of nice people photographing us too, actually, especially our parents, due to another thing we pretended to know about the internet. Indigo Munro’s brother had let her use his laptop to watch YouTube but left the kids’ lock off, so she decided to search Google to see if anyone else shared her name, and if so would they like to be her pen pal.

What she found instead was herself. All over Instagram and on her mum’s Facebook she saw her own face gazing back, shiny and peach-coloured, smiling in every shot, at beachside kiosks or in front of waterfalls or waiting in line for under-age concerts she couldn’t even remember, and she said she felt this sickly hot bubble rising in her throat because she had finally gotten onto the internet only to find that she was already there.

The photos weren’t really her, though, because Indi didn’t like big crowds whereas the girl in these photos beamed confidence and pride and was totally happy being on the internet where anyone could look at her. Even Noah Potnik, said Big Vivaan, with a concerned stare. Indigo scowled. She said it was like when something you thought you knew really well suddenly feels strange. Do you mean like when you drink orange juice after brushing your teeth? asked Luna, but that wasn’t what Indi meant. She said it was more like if you snuck into your parents’ room and found a secret cupboard where they kept another version of you but it was a robot. Whenever they went to parties they would bring this life-sized doll version of you and show how it could do all of the Fortnite dances and it never got grumpy even when the parents teased it and they definitely never caught it eating dried flies off the windowsill. We all imagined our own parents with such replicas, this secret army closeted away in every home across the globe. It was a horrible thought, and we banished it by teasing Indi mercilessly until she cried, which only made things worse because it meant she really did think there was a robot Indigo Munro somewhere out there, because if she really didn’t think so then why did she get so upset?

At the same time we all began to shy away from cameras. So many images from that era are of smeared cheeks caught mid-turn, eyes dipped or shoulder raised in defence, some instinct for self-preservation forcing us into retreat.

Another one of the things we all pretended to know about was bloody bodies.

‘You not waibala, you not blackfella. You in between.’ So Granny Wiring tells Muraging, the protagonist in Julie Janson’s latest thought-provoking novel, Benevolence. While this is not Janson’s first foray into historical fiction – The Light Horse Ghost was published in 2018 – it is a tale close to her heart. While Benevolence is based on the oral histories of Darug elders and the archival snippets of her own great-great-grandmother, Janson’s characters evoke notions of belonging and benevolence in early settler Australia. Primarily set on Darug country between 1813 and 1842, Benevolence draws attention to the survival and adaptation of Aboriginal communities in the face of the destruction wrought by colonialism.

In the opening pages, Muraging is abandoned by her father and handed over to The Native Institution; confused, she watches her father walk away. Located on the outskirts of Paramatta, this ‘benevolent’ institution seeks to deliver Aboriginal children from sin through Christian education and discipline. Here, Muraging experiences both love and loss, friendship and betrayal, but her overwhelming feeling is one of entrapment. Muraging is haunted by her existence midway between settler society and her Burreberongal roots. In this way, Muraging encapsulates the duality of Aboriginal contact with settlers in the early nineteenth century: settlers are – at times – vital for her survival, but contact is also very often overwhelmed by fear, longing, and a loss of identity.

Janson’s experience as a playwright is evident in her telling of Muraging’s story: the prose is decidedly to the point; the novel’s twists and turns rush by at breakneck speed; days, weeks, months, and years pass in the space of a paragraph; and the nuances of Muraging’s situation are diluted by the sheer pace of the story. But the text’s undulation evokes the ever-changing interactions between settlers and Aboriginal populations following settlement, giving voice to an oft-overlooked Aboriginal perspective.

In embracing this perspective, Benevolence evokes anxieties tied to the author’s own Aboriginality. Janson told Writing NSW that rage fuelled her writing of Benevolence: ‘I was tired of being told … that I wasn’t Aboriginal. The tiny drops of Darug blood that run in my veins are important.’ Throughout Benevolence, the reader is overwhelmed by the intensity of Muraging’s desire to reconnect with her land, culture, ancestry, and identity, vitally refracting Janson’s own desires.

What a title, and what a début novel. Jessie Tu brings us Jena Lin, a twenty-two-year-old Asian Australian sex addict who was once a violin prodigy fêted around the world. She is a character to remember. The reader knows this from the beginning, and the compelling narrative tension is driven by the slow revelation of an event that occurred seven years before the novel begins.

This is an exploration of sex, but from a perspective rarely – if ever – surveyed this way in literature. Here we explore sex and sex addiction from a woman’s perspective; we are spared no details, including masturbation and violent pornography. This work intends to make a statement, which is to be expected from a literary novel with ‘cunt’ on the first page. In A Lonely Girl Is a Dangerous Thing, Tu takes us through the shame and danger that can be part and parcel of extreme sex with strangers, but she also makes clear that there can be moments of tenderness and a path to empowerment.

While sex is central to the story, Tu does not let it overwhelm the other themes she confronts head on. This is a work that explores the weight of giftedness. What is the life of a child prodigy? What choices do they have? And what can they become? A Lonely Girl Is a Dangerous Thing also provides a steady stream of observations and commentary about race, gender, sexual mores, female friendship, and the failures of family. Tu’s observations about race are particularly relevant given the questions reverberating around the world in 2020.

The language is deft and the detail brilliant – the character of Jena Lin feels alive on the page. Jena’s choices, questions, and motivations are fascinating, and her constant practising of the violin only a moment away.

With A Lonely Girl Is A Dangerous Thing, Tu has made a remarkable and strong entry into the national literary scene. Tu herself trained as a classical violinist, and, as with all first novels, one can’t help but wonder how much of her is in this work. That said, this is not Tu’s first work. In 2018 she published her first poetry collection, You Should Have Told Me We Have Nothing Left.

Carol Lefevre has shown herself adept at exploring connection and alienation in different genres. In The Happiness Glass (2018), the ambiguous zone between fiction and memoir forms a creative space within which Lefevre plumbs the intricacies of motherhood and loss; home and exile. Murmurations is imbued with similar tropes, the slight heft of the book belying its ethical density and the scope of its narrative ambition.

The novella, which comprises eight discrete yet interlocking stories, focuses on the lives of six couples who socialised during the second wave of feminism. Opening years later with the funeral of Erris Cleary, one of the women in the group, Murmurations revolves around the mystery of her death – doubts initiated by the discovery of disturbing audio fragments in her husband’s recordings of medical letters. The past is seen through the eyes of four of the remaining women; the other stories are from the perspective of four different characters, three of whom may be crucial in bringing to light a monstrous wrong. The stories, set in varying times between the 1960s and the narrative present, move back and forth in time internally, dwelling on the implications of earlier decisions, with the absence of Erris an urgent presence throughout.

Luke Horton’s novel The Fogging opens with a panic attack. Tom, the book’s protagonist, begins to tremble and sweat when the flight he is on – from Melbourne to Denpasar – hits turbulence. Tom is travelling with his long-term girlfriend, Clara, on a holiday they have organised more out of duty than from any real desire for travel, having booked their flights to use up his mother’s Frequent Flyer points. The turbulence wakes Tom’s ‘ringing nerves’ and anxiety starts ‘chewing his insides’, making him ‘shimmer’ and ‘pulse’. He panics, or comes close to panicking, a number of times throughout the novel. Horton’s handling of this – directly, sensorially, compassionately – is remarkable. Tom’s panic attacks are always vivid and bodily, and they always feel true to life. It’s rare to see this achieved so well in fiction.

Tom’s anxiety, his illness, is ever-present in The Fogging, always sitting just below the surface of the text, or, to use the book’s own metaphor, always hovering in the air and clouding both Tom’s judgement and the perspective he offers the reader. Tom is rarely comfortable and easily embarrassed, acutely aware of his own body and the impression he is surely making on others, always alert for humiliation and shame. So much of what happens to him happens internally – the reader is privy to this in considerable detail – and this comes at the expense of any clear-eyed appraisal of what is going on around him.

This effect is heightened by the fact that not much happens in the novel. Tom and Clara’s holiday mostly involves sitting on the beach or around a pool or eating in restaurants. This means that the novel unfolds almost entirely inside Tom’s mind, which gives the narrative a sense of claustrophobia and a mounting intensity that grows increasingly disquieting. When it does open up, it is because of a young family that Tom and Clara meet beside the resort pool, whose presence complicates the interactions and observations that Tom is relaying. The family – the charismatic Madeline, her more taciturn partner, Jeremy, and their five-year-old son Ollie – have a simpler and more settled way of being than Tom is used to. Madeline is talkative and demonstrative, while so much that passes between Tom and Clara is left unsaid. The family works as a kind of counterpoint, a way of demonstrating everything that Tom is not and is unlikely to ever be.

Luke Horton (photograph via Scribe Publications)

Almost everything else that accounts for plot occurs as memory, mostly where Tom reflects on the last holiday that he and Clara took together. This was a decade ago, before his anxiety became disabling and both of their lives settled into their present groove, with regular (if dissatisfying) work, a home (albeit one that is rented and grotty), and a small circle of friends. That holiday had been a gap year of sorts, which the pair did ‘before they got serious about things’, and involved some of the usual stops – Thailand, Laos, Germany – as well as a month spent working on farms in France. It is this month in particular that Tom thinks about in Bali, in no small part because it precipitated a temporary breakup, the cause of which he has never quite understood but also never discussed with Clara. This clever device offers hints about exactly what is happening now, even as Tom remains oblivious to the undercurrents of emotion that are eddying around him.

Tom’s failure, then, is largely one of empathy. He is so caught up in his own feelings and reactions, his own interior life, that he is unable to appreciate the interior life of his partner and the ways in which it might be different to his own. He is aware that he and Clara don’t talk about their small conflicts or discuss their decisions, but genuinely believes that they don’t have to. He never really sees Clara or appreciates her personhood and agency: in many ways, Tom offers a portrait of a kind of masculinity common in young men, one which is well-meaning and non-violent, but devastatingly harmful nonetheless. But Horton’s depiction is not unkind, and Tom is never completely unlikeable. We see his damage and his efforts to do and be his best, and there’s a real skill in the way that Horton balances this character and keeps the reader connected to him, despite his bad behaviour and his flaws.

The Fogging also does a beautiful job of capturing some of the complexities of place, and of tourists in Bali, especially as the event from which the book takes its name – a thick, chemical spraying of pesticide all over the resort – causes its main crisis. The fogging is a practice that is entirely for the benefit of tourists, and one that is artificial and poisonous; it is both demanded and despised by the people whom it services. More importantly, it is obscuring and insidious, like so much of what passes between the characters.

The Fogging, a remarkably assured début, is bold and striking in its approach and voice. Horton has great control over his characters and their perspectives; he unfurls the narrative slowly and with considerable subtlety. Tom’s illness, in particular, is handled with generosity, directness, and an acute awareness of the effect that it has, the constraints it places on him, and the people he loves. The book is a portrait of indecision and inarticulateness, and the havoc they can wreak, however quietly and unintentionally, upon a life.

Richard Ford, born in 1944, is a North American novelist, short story writer, and anthologist of considerable distinction. His recurring character Frank Bascombe – The Sportswriter (1986), Independence Day (1995), The Lay of the Land (2006), Let Me Be Frank with You (2014) – is a commanding figure of American letters to rank with John Updike’s Rabbit Angstrom, each a protagonist used by his creator over several novels as a litmus test of his contemporaries and their not always united states.

Frank Bascombe does not make an appearance in the nine stories that constitute Ford’s latest collection, Sorry for Your Trouble; nor do any of them bear the book’s title. So many focus on deaths that the book might have been titled ‘Sorry for Your Loss’. Since Ford has been awarded the Pulitzer Prize, the PEN/Faulkner Award, the 2019 Library of Congress Award for American Fiction, among countless others, I guess he can call his book whatever he damned well pleases.

Towards the end of his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Overstory (2018), Richard Powers attempts to articulate why literature, or more precisely the novel, has struggled to encompass climate change: ‘To be human is to confuse a satisfying story with a meaningful one, and to mistake life for something huge with two legs. No: life is mobilized on a vastly larger scale, and the world is failing precisely because no novel can make the contest for the world seem as compelling as the struggles between a few lost people.’

As with climate change, it is the human side of this equation, according to Powers, that is the true variable; literature, to quote Katy Waldman, ‘has always been a humanist endeavour … intrinsically and helplessly affirm[ing] the values of the species’. In other words, storytelling – like our carbon emissions – will shift only insofar as our species does. This is an apt framework through which to view Charlotte McConaghy’s literary début (she has written a number of Young Adult fantasy novels), a novel torn between the struggles of a few individuals and the larger, ineffable backdrop of climate change and disastrous species loss.

Obituaries for neoliberalism have been coming thick and fast in recent years. Resurgent populist governments appealing to white, middle-class values, with rich subsidies for privileged sectors but austerity for others, might sound the death knell for the self-regulating markets, small government, and economising rationality commonly associated with contemporary neoliberalism. ‘That key voices on the right,’ economist Richard Denniss recently quipped regarding Australia, now ‘devote so much time to advocating the importance of Western culture and Australian values is proof that they have abandoned the fundamental neoliberal tenet that economic growth can solve all social and environmental problems’.

As Jessica Whyte shows in her brilliant new book, The Morals of the Market, such characterisations of neoliberalism are misplaced, and the obituaries premature. Whyte argues that we need to challenge the common view that neoliberalism is an amoral, economic rationality and treat seriously its compatibility with ideas of family, civilisation, and especially human rights – a concept with which neoliberalism has shared a parallel ascendancy over the past forty years – if we are to better appreciate how neoliberal ideas shape contemporary politics.

Australian Sikhs delivering free meals to fellow citizens in need has been a heart-warming news story against a backdrop of doom and gloom this year as bushfires then the coronavirus laid waste to life as we know it. Public housing tenants in lockdown, international students stranded without support, and bush-dwellers who lost everything in the fires are among those who benefited from their kindness and competence.

If only the Indian – often Sikh – hawkers who merchandised essential goods by horse and cart to isolated settlers in late colonial and early-Federation Australia could have lived to see the day. The federal ‘White Australia’ policy (1901–73), along with a further layer of discriminatory state laws, variously denied them and their compatriots the right to citizenship and the vote, to family reunion, and to work in all but a narrow range of jobs.

It is curious the way certain books can insinuate themselves into your consciousness. I am not necessarily talking about favourite books, or formative ones that evoke a particular time and place, but those stray books that seem to have been acquired almost inadvertently (all bibliophiles possess such volumes, I’m sure), and taken up without any particular expectations, books that have something intriguing about them that keeps drawing you back.

Sometime in the mid-1990s, I rescued a heavily discounted copy of Georges Bataille’s The Accursed Share, Volumes II & III from an outdoor bargain table. Volume I was nowhere to be seen. I had no real idea who Bataille was, though I was a literature student, so I had probably heard his name mentioned in connection with the abstruse French theorising that was in vogue at the time. At some later date – I have no idea where or when – I acquired the first volume to complete the set. I have been returning to The Accursed Share ever since, not constantly or obsessively, but on a semi-regular basis, lured by its odd combination of audacity, insight, and obliqueness.

In a long career talking to and about politicians, I have learned one thing. While many fantasise about being prime minister, the key driver is to get close to the centre. Christopher Pyne captures this immediately in The Insider, comparing the political world to the solar system in which the skill is to know one’s place relative to the sun (the prime minister), and the aim is to get as close to the sun as possible. To be an insider, to know how things work, with privileged information that few others share, is the allure.

Pyne realised his vocation early. His initial claim, to having been drawn to the ‘mystery of the vaulting ambition of politicians’ is disingenuous. He has already given us the clue: as the youngest child of five, he needed ‘to garner maximum attention in all things’. Having first considered becoming a priest, but calculating that the papacy was closed to him, at the age of fifteen he concluded that the prime ministership of Australia was not: ‘It was to that destination I set my sail’. No vaulting here then. Unlike others of such high ambition, John Howard, say, or Paul Keating, who looked to past heroes as models (for each it was Churchill), Pyne found his inspiration in studying parliamentary procedures.

Four in the morning. Stumbling back
to bed, the softness
of my pillow in the spread
of my fingers assumes
again, after so long, the still longed for
round of your head.

How does it feel,
out there in that undiscovered
country from whose bourne et cetera,
to be recalled, drawn back
to your name on my lips again,
the warmth of the flesh?

I recall the promise
we made and broke. Now,
on a grace note
of unbodied restoration in the dream-space
timelessness of sleep,
I keep it. A late gift.

Though it is his second country of citizenship, Australia might be classified as J.M. Coetzee’s fourth country of residence. He was born in South Africa and served as an academic at the University of Cape Town from 1972 to 2000; he lived in England between 1962 and 1965, where he studied for an MA thesis on Ford Madox Ford and worked as a computer programmer; and he then spent seven years in the United States, taking his doctorate at the University of Texas and being subsequently appointed a professor at the State University of New York. Since his move from Cape Town to Adelaide in 2002, Coetzee’s global literary reputation has risen significantly, helped in large part by the award of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2003.

In South Africa, Coetzee was a highly esteemed but controversial figure, with fellow South African Nobel laureate Nadine Gordimer famously indicting him for deploying opaque styles of ‘transcendence’ and ‘allegory’ in his novels to avoid a clearer narrative depiction of the ‘daily, grubby, tragic consequences’ of apartheid. Coetzee himself has always preferred in his fiction to address political questions indirectly, so Gordimer’s critical appraisal was never quite fair, but his migration to the more tranquil pastures of South Australia did facilitate the framing of his creative work within a less overtly racialised milieu. This has led to the major late novels of his Australian period, from Slow Man in 2005 to the recent ‘Jesus’ trilogy, whose landscapes reflect a world both routine and strangely defamiliarised, reminiscent in their combination of banal modernity and luminous enigma of another one-time Adelaide artist, Jeffrey Smart.

In 2007, Britain’s Royal Mint issued a £2 coin commemorating two hundred years since the Act for the Abolition of the Slave Trade, the zero in ‘1807’ appearing as if a broken link in a chain. While interrupting the notorious transatlantic trade, the Act did not end slavery itself – that was achieved, at least in parts of the British world, with further legislation in 1833 that outlawed enslavement in the British Caribbean, Mauritius, and the Cape of Good Hope. Emphasis on the dramatic, if illusionary, chain-breaking moment in some bicentenary celebrations extended a tradition of dwelling on Britain’s role in slave emancipation. The years 1807 and 1833 functioned partly within British society to obscure the fact that Britain had been a willing and central player in the cruel transatlantic business for almost four hundred years. What’s more, commemorations often overlooked unfree labour practices that continued to proliferate throughout the British world. Britain brought freedom, the coin seemed to say.

The 1807 Slave Trade 2007 £2 coin, designed by David Gentleman. The year’s zero contains the broken link in ‘the chains of oppression’. Around the perimeter of the coin are the words ‘An Act for the Abolition of the Slave Trade’ (photograph via the Chancery Collection).

In much the same way, the 250th anniversary this year of James Cook’s first voyage, and the defacing of his statues in Hyde Park, Randwick, North Fitzroy, and Cairns, have demonstrated the problematic nature of public commemorations. Few would disagree that Cook’s three South Pacific voyages were instrumental to the character of Australia. The difficulty is in coming to some sort of collective agreement about their precise significance and effectively conveying their complex consequences in a commemoration.

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National Library of Australia

Dear Editor,

The National Library Act 1960 empowers the Library on behalf of the Commonwealth to maintain and develop a national collection of library material, including a comprehensive collection of library material relating to Australia and the Australian people. In tandem with its Australian collecting, the National Library of Australia has exercised remarkable foresight in building one of the world’s most extensive collections of South East and North East Asian materials. It has projected to the region a strength and openness in the pursuit of knowledge of the cultures and societies of the region.

No state government library network has the remit or strategic location at the Commonwealth level to achieve this. Australian academic libraries have played an important role in supplementing the national role of the NLA, but they are now facing unprecedented funding challenges, post Covid-19. The National Library Council has, nonetheless, proposed a new Collection Development Policy and Collection Strategy which would effectively require severe curtailment or perhaps even cessation of collection from Japan and Korea and from most South-East Asian countries. According to one estimate, base funding for the NLA from government sources has fallen by at least fifteen per cent, accounting for inflation, between 2009–10 and 2017–18.

Sixty years after the promulgation of the National Library Act and in an uncertain and challenging regional environment, the national interest still demands sustained, not reduced, NLA collection development and maintenance of focus on materials from North East and South East Asian countries, in addition to a continuance of comprehensive collection of library materials relating to Australia and the Australian people. The Commonwealth of Australia and its citizens deserve this. The NLA is a crucial international institution for Australia and its region.

Ian Campbell, Beecroft, NSW and Nicholas Jose, Adjunct Professor, The University of Adelaide

Horrible men!

Dear Editor,

It’s not easy to know what to do with the art of horrible men, although Peter Craven makes it seem so: deny the legitimacy of the case against them, and go on with business as usual (ABR, June–July 2020). Craven, who reviewed Woody Allen’s memoirs, Apropos of Nothing, may consider the allegations posed by Dylan Farrow – that Allen molested her when she was seven years old – to be ‘ancient and none-too-credible’, but many others do not (including Ronan Farrow, who accused Hachette, the book’s intended publisher, of ‘assist[ing] in efforts by abusive men to whitewash their crimes’).

Craven seems to invite us to take Allen at his word, but why should we? Allen’s record of indifference and manipulation speaks for itself. The writer Emily Nussbaum – like me, a lifelong fan of Allen’s films – has called him ‘a malignant narcissist’. Craven mischaracterises the 1990s investigations into Dylan’s claims as exonerating Allen. In fact, Justice Wilk was damning, finding Dylan’s testimony ‘credible’, no evidence to back up the claim Dylan had been coached, criticising Allen’s ‘woman scorned’ defence, and concluding that ‘Mr. Allen’s behaviour toward Dylan was grossly inappropriate and that measures must be taken to protect her’ (Allen’s bid for full custody and visitation rights were denied).

As Nussbaum points out in her essay ‘Confessions of the Human Shield’, even if you put aside Dylan’s accusations, you are still left with the predatory origins of Allen’s relationship with Soon-Yi Previn, his then-girlfriend’s daughter who was a college student at the time.

In what sense is Allen’s career jeopardised, as Craven suggests? He continues to pump out films, with ever-diminishing returns, at a rate of close to one a year. Apropos of Nothing, despite being dropped by Hachette, has finally appeared. For every actor who won’t work for him, I dare say there are a hundred more who will. (Why is it that those most critical or dismissive of #MeToo are also those most likely to overstate its effects?)

Allen was a significant part of my cultural education; conflicted as I feel about watching them these days, I still consider films like Annie Hall, Manhattan, and Hannah and Her Sisters to be classics. But Allen’s character, and the allegations against him, demand appraisals – and reappraisals – that go beyond sycophancy and whitewashing. Surely, after #MeToo, this is the least we can do with the art of horrible men – and on behalf of their victims.

Ben Brooker, Brompton, SA

Deirdre Bair in Adelaide

Dear Editor,

Ronan McDonald’s review of Deirdre Bair’s Parisian Lives (ABR, June–July 2020) sent me back to her biography of Samuel Beckett, which I read more than twenty years ago, hugely impressed by it. As soon as I opened the book again, I remembered how engrossing it was. A day later I am still reading it and will continue reading until I finish it.

I met Deirdre Bair in Adelaide some years ago, and we talked about Beckett. When she came out of the door of the hotel where we were staying and joined the group waiting for her – all women except for me – she apologised for keeping us waiting. ‘I’m sorry I’m late,’ she said, managing to sound and to look very grand, indeed making an entrance rather than being late. I responded, ‘And then you overdressed.’ At this she took my arm and we went off talking at once about books.

Alex Miller, Castlemaine, Vic.

When it was time

Dear Editor,

I enjoyed reading Judith Brett’s review of Malcolm Turnbull’s book (ABR, June–July 2020). I agree that Turnbull turned out to be a disappointment as prime minister, his ability to institute a progressive agenda stymied by the far right of the Liberal/National Coalition, in thrall to coal interests, and unable to imagine a different Australia. But as to Judith Brett’s assertion that the ‘booming Australia of the 1950s’ should rank as an ‘exciting time’ compared with the present day of Turnbull’s reference, I must disagree. The 1950s was a decade when women’s roles were severely curtailed by society and by law. Only misty-eyed white men want to revert to that time. I do however remember the excitement of Gough Whitlam’s election in 1972. Now that brought real, tangible change, for women in particular. And memorable, because I voted for the first time. For Whitlam, of course.

Judith Masters (online comment)

Thinking differently

Dear Editor,

Congratulations to Yves Rees on winning the Calibre Essay Prize. ‘Reading the Mess Backwards’ is an engaging, passionate, intimate story told with humour, raw honesty, and some hurt laced with humour. Due to Rees’s courage, sense of history, and unique talent as an essayist, ‘Reading the Mess Backwards’ provides a significant educational lesson for ABR readers and, it’s to be hoped, for the wider public. As Rees writes about their struggle for gender identity, I sense the way in which the future converges with the past. Both gather underground perhaps, but come together majestically in this brilliant essay. We will think differently and with much more understanding about issues of gender identity because of this essay. Well done Yves Rees and ABR!

Roger Rees, Goolwa, SA

Smutting it up

Dear Editor,

I can only confirm James Ley’s view of ‘us’ (Australians?) as a nation of prudes and wowsers as he describes us in his review of The Trials of Portnoy: How Penguin brought down Australia’s censorship system (ABR, June–July 2020).

Unlike his own response on reading Patrick Mullins’s book, I did not feel better after reading this review. Why did your reviewer have to use the word ‘fuck’ in this august journal? Perhaps he felt he had to ‘smut up’ his review to be in keeping with the novel.

Kim Harris, Sandringham, Vic.

James Ley replies:

I apologise unreservedly for sullying the pages of this august journal and the minds of its innocent readers with my gratuitous profanity. It was an inexcusable lapse of judgement on my part. What I meant to say was f***.

Victorian vicissitudes

The state of Victoria, as we all know, is currently doing it tough, with a marked increase in the number of active coronavirus cases. As we go to press, the outlook is gloomy. We all hope that daily counts will decline soon and that before too long all Australians will be able to enjoy the sort of freedom, movement, and confidence now enjoyed in other states.

Meanwhile, the arts sector is grateful to the Victorian government for its sustained contribution to the creative industries, which have been devastated since March. Even at this disastrous time, when budgets everywhere are threatened, Creative Victoria continues to bolster artistic endeavour in myriad ways. Recently, Australian Book Review received $39,000 to help pay Victorian writers over the next twelve months. We couldn’t be more appreciative.

Copyright and commentary

Over the past fifteen years, the Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund has been a consistent supporter of this magazine’s determination to broaden its influence and to diversify its publishing. The Calibre Essay Prize, ABR Arts, and States of Poetry would not have been possible without seeding grants from the Cultural Fund.

As the pandemic worsens and the world contends with immense challenges – climate change, inequality, illiberalism and populism, and the enduring horrors of racism and slavery – commentary becomes more significant in ABR. To complement recent articles on Covid-19, the Palace Letters, and the climate crisis, ABR is commissioning a series of longer features on related topics, helped enormously by a grant of $20,000 from the Cultural Fund.

The August issue includes three articles in this new series. Historian Georgina Arnott, in an essay that will surprise some readers, writes at length about the legacies of British slavery and the extravagant compensation of British slave-owners, some of which money made its way to the Australian colonies. James Ley, in a withering piece, laments the federal government’s vendetta against the arts, the ABC, and the humanities. Finally, Kieran Pender writes about law’s #MeToo moment in the wake of the Dyson Heydon revelations.

ABR – and our essayists – are grateful to the Copyright Agency.

The Jolley Prize

This year we celebrate the tenth ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize. We received about 1,450 entries. The judges – past winners Gregory Day and Josephine Rowe, and Ellen Van Neerven – have shortlisted three stories: ‘Egg Timer’ by C.J. Garrow (Victoria); ‘Hieroglyph’ by Simone Hollander (Colorado); and ‘River Story’ by Mykaela Saunders (NSW). The stories appear in this issue.

This year’s crop of stories were suitably diverse in both technique and content. The increasingly international profile of the prize meant that this diversity extended also to sense of place, narrative timbre, and even dialect. The dramatic year we are having as a species was also evident in stories that dealt with the pandemic scenario, but, as in any era, the very best of the crop transcended any single issue to dramatise the timeless heart of the human experience.

Here are the judges’ comments on the three feature stories.

Skilfully composed and deeply felt, ‘Hieroglyph’ is a remarkable and entrancing feat of symmetry and style. It’s a rare thrill to encounter a story whose innovative form so seamlessly and sensitively reflects the emotional and elemental terrain of the lives held within.

‘Egg Timer’ is a refreshingly entertaining short story full of acerbic wit and linguistic nerve. Its highly contemporary vernacular prods at the seams of analogue and digital life whilst providing a rendition of a community in the ‘new quotidian’ mode of the pandemic. The story has many dazzling comic moments and a playful verve for the creative potential of everyday speech. The story is also a timeless and rather touching character study, a portrait of a child’s universe, told by a narrator looking back on a Now equally divided by twenty first-century anxieties as by the old xenophobias hovering around the backyard fence.’

‘River Story’ evokes Alexis Wright in its embodiment of the experimental and allegorical lyrical. The story illustrates the strong matriarchal bonds between three generations of women and the grief, birth and death that is shared between them. The river in the work’s title is viscerally described, and the story delicately unfolds at the collision of remembering and forgetting places.

In the absence of public events, ABR will host an online ceremony on August 13 (6 pm). The shortlisted readers will introduce and then read from their stories, then we will announce the overall winner, who will receive $6,000 from total prize money of $12,500. The will be our first virtual ceremony via Zoom. To book, please email This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

The judges have also commended five other stories: ‘Wait for Me’ by Jasmin McCaughey; ‘I Believe’ by V.S. Kumar; ‘Two Africas’ by Jean McNeil; ‘Lucky Charms’ by Jennifer Down; and ‘Bedford Jeune’ by Lauren Sarazen.

We congratulate the eight shortlisted and commended authors, and warmly acknowledge the generous support of Ian Dickson, who makes the Jolley Prize possible in this lucrative form.

Elizabeth Harrower (1928–2020)

ABR was saddened to hear of the death of Elizabeth Harrower on July 7. Harrower was born in Sydney in 1928 and moved to London in 1951. Her first novel, Down in the City, was published in 1957, followed by The Long Prospect a year later. In 1959 she returned to Sydney where she began working for the ABC and as a book reviewer for the Sydney Morning Herald. In 1960 she published The Catherine Wheel, her only novel not set in Sydney. The Watch Tower, acclaimed by many as her finest work, appeared in 1966. As Geordie Williamson noted in The Monthly in 2014, Harrower’s novels are ‘graceful, intellectually acute and possessed of the unrelenting quality of nightmare’.

While Harrower continued to write, she would not publish again for nearly fifty years. When asked what impeded her writing in her 2015 Open Page interview, Harrower reflected: ‘At different times different forces, sometimes not even a world war.’ In Certain Circles, her final novel, was originally completed in 1971 before Harrower withdrew it from publication. As Bernadette Brennan noted in her review of the novel for ABR (May 2014), ‘Harrower withdrew the manuscript of In Certain Circles from publication because she felt “people would be disappointed. Patrick [White] would be disappointed.”’ The novel was finally released to critical acclaim by Text Publishing, which had included her earlier books in the Text Classics collection. A new short story collection, A Few Days in the Country, was released by Text in 2015. ABR was proud to have published the short story ‘It Is Margaret’ in the magazine.

The Porter Prize

The Peter Porter Poetry Prize is now open, for the seventeenth time, with increased prize money of $10,000, of which the winner will receive $6,000. The judges are the 2020 Porter Prize winner, A. Frances Johnson, Lachlan Brown, John Kinsella, and John Hawke (ABR’s Poetry Editor). The closing date is October 1. As always, we thank our supporting Patrons, Morag Fraser and Andrew Taylor.

Camaraderie and connection

Finally, a mid-year note of heartfelt thanks to our readers, contributors, subscribers, and supporters. Since mid-March, when everything seemed to change – our scope, our securities – it’s been a time of immense risk and uncertainty. None of us has gone through anything like this, and it’s not over yet. But it’s also been a season of great camaraderie and connection. This year, ABR subscriptions have risen by twenty per cent. To have increased our readership by a fifth at such a time is not a small thing – and we want to go further. Private donations – never inconsiderable at ABR – have risen by forty-six per cent, many of them, as donors have made clear, prompted by readers’ dismay at non-funding by the Australia Council. We’re so grateful for your support, your concern, your solidarity. It’s profoundly galvanising.

If you would like to contribute to ABR, donate here.

Blake Gopnik’s Warhol is a monumental undertaking. At nearly a thousand pages, there is an intensity of labour present so dense that the tome feels light by comparison. The fifty chapters are arranged in chronological order after a prelude detailing Warhol’s first untimely death. This order, from birth to his second untimely death, charts a linear path through the chaotic, challenging, and extraordinary life of one of the art world’s most precocious and baffling personalities.

A large part of the difficulty in dealing with Warhol’s life is Warhol himself. He proves a most unreliable source of information, one who consciously obscured his presence in the creation of his own work, claimed he wanted to be a machine, became the epitome of ennui, dismissed his own legacy, and, when asked what led to his ground-breaking ideas, would reply in a louche whisper, ‘Oh, I don’t know.’ Even now the monosyllabic responses and the complete disinterest in showing interest can be shocking. The yawning voids that Warhol left were invariably filled by other commentators.

Kokomo has a startling beginning. ‘Mina knew in that moment what love is,’ goes the first sentence. She is looking at Jack’s penis, which is compared to a soldier, a ballerina, a lighthouse, and a cooee. It is also the nicest penis she has ever seen.

This is writing that trembles on the edge of silliness but is saved by irony. The astute reader knows pretty well straightaway that this is not love and that Jack is a bastard. It takes Mina many pages, however, to find this out. Meanwhile, she is saved by a bell, or rather, a vibrating phone. She is being summoned back across half the world to Melbourne because her mother, Elaine, has left the house for the first time in twelve years.

A young Australian radical, who finds academic success later in life, struggles with an inexorable question: what is the relationship between these two worlds: the activist and the scholar? This question animated the life of Vere Gordon Childe, the Australian Marxist and intellectual whose The Dawn of Euro pean Civilization (1925) helped establish modern archaeology, as it has his most recent biographer, activist and labour historian Terry Irving, whose Class Structure in Australian History (1981, with Raewyn Connell) remains a key text.

The two might have met, if only fleetingly, in April 1957. Childe had returned from London in what were to be the final months of his life and was receiving an honorary Doctor of Letters from his Alma Mater, Sydney University. Irving, a young socialist and member of the campus Labour Club, caught glimpses of ‘the collar of [Childe’s] green shirt just visible behind the academic gown and its heavy woollen suit’. While having ‘only the vaguest idea’ who the visitor was, the club had gathered in honour of ‘a fellow socialist’.

Catherine Cho’s Inferno is the first ‘motherhood memoir’ I have read since reading Maria Tumarkin’s essay ‘Against Motherhood Memoirs’ in Dangerous Ideas About Mothers (2018). The topic of motherhood has been ‘overly melded’ to memoiristic writing, Tumarkin argues; it feels ‘too much like a foregone conclusion’.

This tendency to squeeze stories about motherhood into a pre-existing narrative form is driven partly by marketplace – by assumptions about what kind of books people want to read about and by mothers – and both derives from and perpetuates deeply held ideas about what mothers have to say, and what kinds of stories and ideas we want to hear from them.

‘The constant loss of breath is the legacy.’ So wrote poet Ali Cobby Eckermann in 2015 for the anthology The Intervention. The eponymous Intervention of 2007 in the Northern Territory was, in the long history of this continent, the first time that the federal government had deployed the army against its own citizenry. As I write this review, in the United States police are using tear gas, traditionally reserved for warfare, against those protesting the worth of black life, while the president flirts with the idea of calling in the military.

Some of us gasp in shock.

Some, in suffocation.

But the loss of breath is not only that of George Floyd, or Eric Garner. It is the loss of breath which belonged to Cherbourg dancer Daniel Yock in 1993. To David Dungay Jr in 2015.

Dungay’s death in Long Bay jail followed an altercation with prison guards over a packet of biscuits. Footage played during the coronial inquest showed him saying twelve times: ‘I can’t breathe.’

What inheritance, what obligations, does this create for First Nations poetry? How do we catch – if not recapture – our breath?