i.
I forget tradition, a tray of sticky dates passed around the kitchen table, bismillah
in our mouths before we ravenously break the dusk, chew and spit back the pits. Ma ladling
lumpy lentil soup, abandonment pouched in her long sleeves, an old injury she does not
stop pressing. How are we still here? Made of garlic breath, violent affection, arrears.
Ma pushes, alhamdullilah for these bounties, we are blessed, girls.
These pleasantries,
these communal myths we tell to spare each other.

ii.
I forget how I cannot see the stars, how the barbecued smoke eats at the sky, how we
elbow our way through chattering heads congealed in every crack on Haldon. I cannot
see the sidewalk, but I hear it – Sahlab! Sahlab! Mustachioed men in red tarbooshes
summon us beneath strings of plastic crescents – dangling babies shriek parents into
surrender – a siren wails somewhere. This evening orchestra. My sisters dervish and
droop: shiny baubles, painted gold lids and hips, desires too big for the lives that chose
them. Ma says, this love is haram, so we learn to keep our distance. Together we
remember the Lord.
These celebrations,
these distractions we share to comfort one another.
And naming those who stray will not bring them back in any religion.

iii.
I forget how our Lebanon made its way to Lakemba. Mothers of disappeared sons wait;
they hold up headscarves like white flags, like nooses; war wants us even in peacetime.
These Muslim dogs, these ragheads, chalk outlines and choppers crawling low. Our loss
barely literate. We pretend not to notice, this neighbourhood is an obituary.
These farewells,
these griefs we silence so we do not set ourselves on fire.

iv.
I forget how I awaken in the arms of another. How there are no muezzins interrupting
dawn, only this tango of breaths and gasps. How I have dared to worship in a language
that is not Arabic, how I tried to scrub and scrub ma’s beauty spots off my face. You are
devoted to them, to this altar of soft, turmeric skin and sadness. I shake the shame out of
my curls, I dip into the surge, the stagger, the rapture and the rupture. The din – it ruined
me, it split my god. I want to pray, but I cannot recall the verses.
These divinations,
these transgressions, so I do not forget
every lonely night that ever was.

Read the full shortlist for the 2021 Peter Porter Poetry Prize by clicking here.

‘If victims don’t come forward, what then?’

Louise Milligan, Witness

The street entrance to the Melbourne Magistrates’ Court is a scoop-hungry gauntlet of journos who spend the day jostling for soundbites, ever ready to give chase. As a rookie reporter, Louise Milligan used to be part of the Sydney court scrum, but when she arrived to give evidence in Australia’s ‘Trial of the Decade’, she had become the story. In her investigative work for ABC’s Four Corners – which begat the Walkley Book Award-winning volume Cardinal: The rise and fall of George Pell (2017) – Milligan had been the first person to hear one of the criminal accusations against the Vatican’s disgraced treasurer. If Pell’s defence team could discredit her, they could discredit what she’d heard. ‘As journalists, it’s always drummed into us that you are not the story. Never become the story,’ Milligan writes in her follow-up, Witness. ‘It’s the weirdest thing, when you have no interest in becoming the story, but you have no choice.’

Long before Amazon, Twitter, and Facebook, a company called Simulmatics Corporation sought to predict and control human behaviour through the analysis of big data. If Then tells the story of that company, from its humble beginnings in a tiny office on Madison Avenue to the hallways of political power in Washington, DC.

The story starts and ends with Ed Greenfield. Greenfield was an adman, businessman, and early adopter of new technology. An optimist might regard him as an entrepreneur in the vein of Bill Gates. A cynic might call him a huckster, a Hollywood-style conman whose life seems almost too bizarre to be true, until you see the closing credits read: ‘Based on a true story’.

Although most of the ten million annual visitors to the Louvre think of it as an art museum and former royal palace, for much of its history it has performed other functions. The Louvre has also played a defining role in many events in French history. Its raison d’être in the Middle Ages was as a fortification in the then most westerly part of Paris. Transformed into a royal palace during the sixteenth century, it has undergone more than twenty different extensions and renovations under successive rulers and administrations, emerging as the behemoth we know today. Surprisingly for a building that so much embodies Paris and feels so permanent, much of the Louvre was created during the third quarter of the nineteenth century under Napoleon III, when it was almost doubled in size and given its external ‘dizzying opulence’, as James Gardner describes it in this new book.

David McAllister, known affectionately as ‘Daisy’ to his fellow dancers, completed this memoir just as Covid-19 put paid to the exciting program he had devised for his final year as artistic director of the Australian Ballet. In spite of the cancelled world premières, McAllister makes no complaint about what must surely have been a disappointing finale to a stellar career, but he remains upbeat, turning his hand to modest ‘Dancing with David’ videos, alongside the company’s filmed performances and the Bodytorque.Digital program.

McAllister is retiring from the Australian Ballet after forty years, twenty of them as artistic director. He is the longest-serving AD in the company’s history, an indication of his competence, vision, popularity, and determination. He attributes some of his success to luck, as well as to the mentorship of luminaries in the world of ballet, but he admits that a competitive nature drove him to prove the naysayers wrong. What would have stopped many of us in our tracks added fuel to McAllister’s passion for dance.

Louise Milligan is an investigative reporter for ABC TV's Four Corners. Her book Cardinal won the Walkley Book Award. She is also the recipient of the 2019 Press Freedom Medal. Her new book, Witness, is reviewed in the December issue.

Louise Milligan in front of the Magistrates’ Court, 2017 (Subel Bhandari/dpa/Alamy Live News)

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

Were it not for Covid-19, I would love to travel around Italy. I love the food, the people, the culture. I’d also like to take my husband and children to Ireland, where I was born, and Scotland, where I lived as a young child before moving to Australia.

David Frith’s slim biography of Archie Jackson reflects his subject’s tragically short life. When Jackson made his Test match début for Australia at Adelaide in the 1928–29 Ashes series, scoring an eye-catching 164, it was he, rather than the young Don Bradman, who instilled the most excitement in this country’s cricket-loving public. When Jackson was included in the 1930 tour of England, one ex-cricketer, Cecil Parkin, remarked that he was ‘a better bat than Bradman’, who had débuted in the same series as Jackson. This is but one example of the lavish praise that the gifted, though inconsistent, young cricketer received during his lifetime.

One of the blessings of Covid-19 lockdown was discovering the wildlife cameras streaming on the internet in real time. With a click it became possible to observe brown bears catching salmon in Alaska, sea lions clambering on and off a rocky beach in British Columbia, and white-bellied sea eagles nesting in an eyrie high in bushland on Sydney’s fringes. Watching newly fledged eaglets literally stretching their wings as they stare across the treetops, it’s impossible not to wonder what they must experience in that moment, as they sense for the first time the instinctive urge to take flight. What does it feel like to be a bird? What sense does a bird have of itself as a subjective, experiencing being? How might its consciousness be characterised?

Scuba diving along the Australian coast, and contemplating octopuses as they wrestled near piles of empty scallop shells, Peter Godfrey-Smith, a philosopher of biology at the University of Sydney, found himself asking similar questions. His first attempt at uncovering an answer was Other Minds: The octopus and the evolution of intelligent life (2017). Metazoa: Animal minds and the birth of consciousness, his new book, extends that quest. Godfrey-Smith moves beyond cephalopods (molluscs such as octopus) and explores the evolution of consciousness more broadly.

Disaster movies tend to follow a similar arc. Our band of heroes not only has to survive flames engulfing the skyscraper or sea water flooding the cruise liner, but must also triumph over the calculated selfishness of others who are also scrambling for salvation. The implication is that, with few exceptions, Thomas Hobbes was right. Amid the upheaval of the English Civil War, Hobbes declared that our natural human condition is a war of all against all, and that order can only be secured by a powerful ruler, a Leviathan, that keeps our naked urges in check. The social contract of considerate behaviour and thoughtfulness towards others is a thin veneer. Under pressure it peels away, and we are soon at one another’s throats in a life that is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.

A detailed timeline prefaces Fire Flood Plague. Stretching from September 2019 to September 2020, it charts events so momentous that Christos Tsiolkas describes them as being ‘imbued with an atavistic, Biblical solemnity’. Sophie Cunningham, the book’s editor, notes in her introduction that many of the contributors (herself included) have found themselves drafting their essays ‘once, twice, thrice, as we’ve progressed from bushfire and smoke-choked skies, to the early days of the pandemic … and into the exhaustion of what is becoming a marathon’. Indeed, many of the writers, aware of the ground shifting beneath them, are precise about when they begin writing. This instability surely mirrors how many of us have experienced the past year: doomscrolling through an eternal present; one crisis eclipsing another. And though this anthology deals with recent events, already it has the quality of an artefact: Cobargo and Mallacoota sound like names from another era; the end of Trump’s presidency is in sight; Victoria has had a string of ‘double doughnut’ days; the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines are imminent.

Philosophers attending a conference in the Swiss resort of Davos in 1929 eagerly anticipated a debate between Ernst Cassirer, a celebrated member of the academic establishment and a supporter of progressive liberalism, and Martin Heidegger, whose radical break from tradition had impressed younger philosophers. For those who expected a clash of titans, the result was disappointing. There were no denunciations, no rhetorical bolts of lightning. The true parting of their ways came later, in 1933, when Cassirer, a Jewish supporter of the Weimar Republic, was forced out of his position and into exile, and Heidegger, now a member of the National Socialist Party, told students of Freiburg University to be guided by the Führer.

Walter Benjamin, the brilliant but erratic thinker who never succeeded in acquiring a university position, was not at Davos, but Wolfram Eilenberger imagines him attending in his capacity as a journalist. The presence of Ludwig Wittgenstein, who in 1929 was taking up a position at Cambridge University, cannot be plausibly imagined. He hated such gatherings.

On Getting Off is an attempt to think about sex philosophically, through the lens of personal, literary, and artistic experience. Damon Young, a Melbourne philosopher, is keen on reflective sex and legitimises this fetish with a carrot and stick, seducing readers by arguing for its superior pleasures and threatening us by implying that the alternatives are morally dubious or diminishing. He considers a wide variety of subjects and circumstances along the way, including the power and peculiarity of sexual attraction, the place of humour in sex, ‘teasing’ and suspended pleasure, the bounties and pitfalls of beauty, the stigma of prostitution, the complexities of sexual fantasy, the function of sex robots, and the importance of meaningfulness. He approaches these matters with fluency and an impressive variety of references – literary, artistic, and philosophical – but the insights are often dull.

‘Bad language’ comes in many forms, but, as the title suggests, the focus of Amanda Laugesen’s new book is on slang and, in particular, swear words. She documents Australia’s long and often troubled love affair with this language, dividing the history into four parts: the earliest English-speaking settlements of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; the period of Federation and World War I; the heart of the twentieth century; and the ‘bad language landscape’ of modern Australia. These four time periods highlight Indigenous stories as well as migrant contributions to the diverse swearing vocabulary of Australia.

The distinctive and creative way of speaking explored in Rooted is viewed by many Australians as core to their collective sense of identity. Laugesen shows how characters such as the convict, the digger, and the bushranger came together to shape a society that celebrated larrikinism and bad language. The ‘B-words’ (bloody, bastard, bullshit, and bugger) became the keywords of Australian English – linguistic expressions of cherished ideals such as friendliness, mateship, and anti-authoritarianism.

The invasion of the Soviet Union by Nazi Germany in 1941 caused massive destruction over a huge area. The number of deaths is uncertain, though a figure of around twenty-seven million is now widely accepted. The lives of many more millions were affected – as soldiers, as workers in war-related industries, as civilians in besieged and occupied territories, as refugees – and the experience of hardship and self-sacrifice in what is widely referred to in Russia as the ‘Great Patriotic War’ or the ‘Great Fatherland War’ continues to dominate the Russian historical narrative.

The personal experience of the Soviet Union’s war has become well known in the West from works such as Vasily Grossman’s A Writer at War (2005) and Svetlana Alexievich’s The Unwomanly Face of War (2017). What is perhaps less known is the extent to which the Great Fatherland War was also a literary and specifically poetic phenomenon, parallel in some ways to World War I in English literature. Maria Bloshteyn’s major bilingual anthology makes the significance of this verse legacy plain. This is writing valuable not only for its historical significance, but also for the depth and range of human emotion that it encompasses.

Precise observation is considered a prerequisite for poetry, but there are limits as to what a surfeit of detail can bring to a poem, or even to an entire volume. Three new poetry collections, each different in tone and subject matter, deploy close observation to varying degrees of success across poems that scrutinise domestic tension, interspecies dynamics, landscape, and everyday grace.

Hear the way these poets use moonlight. According to a delicious detail in Jill Jones’s thirteenth full-length collection, Wild Curious Air, ‘The moon’s light takes just over a second to reach our faces.’ In the context of meaning, note the length of the sound in the word ‘faces’. Jones affectingly contrasts this second with the light that left a star, centuries ago: ‘Always a past touches us, as this hot January forgets us.’

Last month I was volunteering with a group of botanists surveying coastal heathland in the Tarkine Forest Reserve in North-West Tasmania when one of them cried out, ‘Orchid!’ We all rushed over excitedly, our phones and pocket magnifiers at the ready. It was a Green-comb Spider-orchid (Caladenia dilatata), with long, delicate-green limbs and a reddish-purply face, hovering like a ballet dancer in mid-leap. The first thing that astonished me was how tiny it was – no bigger than a human eye – and then, how solitary. Like many orchids, C. dilatata uses sexual deception to mimic the shape of a female wasp; when males attempt to mate with it, they accidentally collect pollen, fertilising the next orchid they visit. Millions of seeds scatter on the wind, but only a few will land on a sunny patch of soil where the correct mycorrhizal fungus is present for it to germinate. Given the myriad chance events needed to complete this symbiotic dance between plant, insect, and fungus, it’s remarkable there are any orchids at all. A fractional two-week shift between the plant blooming and the pollinating insect developing to maturity can threaten an entire species.

How could she write happiness so well? For Gabrielle Carey, this is the driving question in her search for Elizabeth von Arnim (1866–1941), an Australian-born writer of more than twenty bestselling satirical novels who married a German count and then an English lord, bore five children, lived all over Europe, and hosted the British intellectual and literary élite at her Swiss chalet. Von Arnim’s novels are still available in many editions. A literary celebrity in the early twentieth century, she retains a loyal readership but has been largely forgotten by literary history. After losing ‘faith in the very idea of happiness, let alone the pursuit of it’ in a deep personal crisis, Carey turns to von Arnim as a guide to restore her faith, following the author’s dictum that happiness is ‘attainable by all except the unworthy and deluded’.

Beejay Silcox began writing for ABR in September 2016 after infiltrating a Trump rally in rural Virginia. In 2018, she was ABR’s Fortieth Birthday Fellow. Her literary criticism and cultural commentary appears in national and international review publications.

What makes a fine critic?

Doubt. We have enough opinions – a vast, suffocating excess of certainty. I think our finest critics don’t just understand the distinction between opinion and criticism, they explore it. They’re our much-needed cartographers of context. And if we’re lucky, they’re also wondersmiths, and their work crackles with awe for the whole wild, maddening, and sublimely human project of storytelling.

Paul Dalgarno’s fiction début, Poly, charts a romp through the romantic and sexual lives of married couple Chris and Sarah Flood. When the sexual intimacy in their relationship dies, Sarah opts to sleep with, as Chris describes it, ‘all but the worst of Melbourne’s walking wounded’, and takes her woebegone husband along for the proverbial ride. A reluctant Chris eventually finds his polyamorous feet with the understanding artist Biddy. True to the logistics of polyamorous lives, almost the entire book is in the form of communication – either conversations between lovers and friends or Chris’s internal machinations (the story is told from his perspective). Indeed, Poly might well be a masterclass in how to write dialogue.

The style is fast-paced, fresh, and funny. The reality of having multiple partners and romantic friendships offers some comedic moments. Chris needs space after an argument with Sarah and soon receives a litany of text messages from everyone who cares for him. Eventually, the police call and demand to know his whereabouts. He wasn’t thinking about suicide before, but after this barrage of love he finds himself swinging his legs over the CityLink Bridge, just to see how it feels.

The pleasures and pitfalls of trusting others are front and centre in this story. Poly is admirable in its portrayal of human vulnerability. Sarah is characterised as aloof, a touch manipulative, even deceitful. Her main redeeming feature seems to be her beauty (that old chestnut). In chicken-and-egg style, the reader is left wondering which came first, Sarah’s disinterest in Chris or Chris’s chronic insecurities – his love for her described as ‘the ever-diminishing returns of long-term addiction’.

The book’s strength is that it doesn’t shy away from confronting the inherent emotional gymnastics of polyamorous dynamics, in all their ecstasy and peril, nor from presenting the fun and fraught logistics of loving and sleeping with multiple people. Perhaps the most beautiful elements in this book are the simplest – Chris’s acknowledgment of his wife’s love for another being one of them: ‘It was nothing against me – she loved me too.’

Sardonic and playful, this is a world in which virtues don’t have definable corresponding vices. Love isn’t a concept of wholeness or oneness, nor can it be divided. It is a natural state – wonderful, often chaotic, fully lived – and this is what Paul Dalgarno gives us in Poly.

Dystopias, apocalypses, and postapocalypses have been part of Young Adult literature long before ecological disaster became the prevalent social narrative. They give writers a chance to indulge the youthful desire to upset the table and start over, rather than partake in the tedious and often fruitless work of actual progress. Blowing stuff up is far more exciting than endless meetings or political discussions. Asphyxia’s Future Girl, Amie Kaufman and Meagan Spooner’s The Other Side of the Sky, and Charlie Archbold’s Indigo Owl each deal with the end of the world and how young people navigate it.

‘Every last word that follows from here is a word I have tortured out of myself. If what I have written sometimes warbles towards the inarticulate, that is the price exacted by torture and the price of articulating ... at all.’ So warns the narrator of Daniel Davis Wood’s first novel, Blood and Bone (2014). He may well be describing Davis Wood’s second novel, At the Edge of the Solid World, which is, above all, deliberate. Davis Wood has written precisely the book he meant to write.

The story concerns the aftermath of the death of a man’s firstborn. In the throes of grief, insomnia, and a destructive impulse, he becomes estranged from his wife in their home in Switzerland. Meanwhile, he becomes fixated on the details of a violent crime in his homeland of Australia, identifying in turns with its victims and its perpetrator.

‘When I was three days old, a nurse … stole me from the obstetrics ward … and raised me as her own,’ the voice of Nella Gilbert Pine tells us in the compelling opening of Joyce Kornblatt’s fifth novel, Mother Tongue. This is a moving contemplation on core elements of human experience: the complex connections between mothers and daughters, what it means to love and be loved. It is also an exploration of the ripple effects of trauma, those shocking events that ‘explode’ in the unsuspecting hand, leaving trails of harm far into the future.

On one level, the novel is driven by the force of powerful narrative. A pretty young nurse, Ruth/Eve, scoops up a baby from a maternity ward in Pittsburgh, kidnapping her to another life, another lineage, on the New South Wales coast. The baby, Naomi/Nella, is taken from her shattered family, about whom she is not to learn until after her ‘mother’s’ death. Paradoxically, what transpires to be a life built on lies is one that Nella also recognises to be filled with the ordinariness of love and connection.

The story arc is both dramatic and skeletal: the abduction of a baby, the revelation half a lifetime after the fact, and its explosive consequences. Yet the apparent simplicity of this structure allows Kornblatt to delve profoundly into the nuances of lives. Is it possible to be lost if we don’t recognise ourselves to be so? What is the nature of home and human attachment – and to what extent is it connected to biology, to place, and to a continuity of stories? When trauma occurs, rending the fabric of that ‘home’, what are its signs within the bodies and minds of those involved – and is it ever possible to heal such wounds? Even more fundamentally, what ‘compels’ us, as Eve puts it, to do anything; what forces of wanting, pain, or delusion coalesce to lead to such actions?

Nested inside dramatic external narrative, the novel is a series of introspective voices: Nella, the daughter who finds herself ‘lost’; Eve’s voice in her letter of confession; Leah, the sister who was also traumatised; Deborah, the mother nearly lost to dementia, who nonetheless feels the returning presence of her lost child. This poetic weaving of voices suggests the possibility of repair, maybe even dialogue.

Eugen Bacon’s début short story collection, The Road to Woop Woop, plays with the genres of speculative fiction and magic realism. Using familiar tropes such as time travel, shapeshifting, and prescient characters, the stories typically refuse formulaic outcomes. The title story, for example, confounds expectations about the horror of bodily disintegration. The ominous angel of death in the story ‘Dying’ turns out to be a true wit. The surreal is transformed by the blessing of love in the heart-warming story ‘He Refused to Name It’.

Bacon experiments with other genres. The story ‘A Good Ball’ uses the drama competitions of ancient Greece to obliquely warn about the contemporary crises of climate change and the inhumane treatment of refugees. The crime fiction story ‘A Case of Seeing’ uses stock characters and whip-smart dialogue to complicate our understanding of heightened intuition. The meta-fictive ‘Scars of Grief’ is both a clever story about the uses of narrative and a moving expression of parental grief.

Other stories reflect Bacon’s African heritage. Characters are endowed with animal spirits, including snakes and toads, even a quokka. The story ‘A Maji Maji Chronicle’ charts the invasion of an East African village by ‘the Whiteman’ and the shocking process by which the victim becomes the brutal oppressor. ‘Swimming with Daddy’ deals with the village–city divide in a black culture but is fundamentally an exploration of a father–daughter relationship. Indeed, while the collection as a whole is focused on cultural specifics as well as bizarre experiences, it is ultimately concerned with the transcultural and ‘ordinary’ human need for connection and love.

The collection is also stylistically inventive, like the description of a ‘billow of cloud’ as ‘a white ghoul, dark-eyed and yawning into a scream’. The writing is often rhythmically energetic and metaphorically extravagant, but there is also space for eloquent simplicity, such as a daughter’s realisation that her father’s work ‘took him to everywhere but you’, or the tender description of tears as ‘[t]endrils of grief [that] bud and burrow’.

As the book’s title suggests, with a nod to the Australian vernacular, the stories can be read as road trips leading to the wildly improbable or to the absence of definitive meaning. Either way, The Road to Woop Woop is a highly entertaining and thought-provoking ride.

In the mid-1990s, the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade paid me to research the year 1948. Although a little narrowly conceived for my liking, it wasn’t a bad job for a recently graduated PhD in history. I lasted a year. Most days I would head to the National Archives of Australia, then nestled among the panel beaters and porn shops of a Canberra industrial estate. My task was to work through departmental files, identifying and photocopying the most promising candidates for inclusion in a series of published foreign policy documents. The idea was that the general editor, a formidable old historian with a large corner office back in the city, would then select the documents to be included. The job itself, or at least the way it was organised, was itself redolent of an industrial world that was flourishing in 1948 and on its last legs by 1995. Indeed, I recall a demonstration in the department that very year of a newfangled thing called the World Wide Web. I took away from the demonstration that it was the internet with fancy pictures.

Rivers seem to be something of a preoccupation for Melbourne writer Anna MacDonald. They feature prominently in her 2019 essay collection, Between the Word and the World, and are both setting and centrepiece to her first novel, A Jealous Tide.

For MacDonald, rivers – whether London’s Thames or her beloved Yarra – are so much more than a way to navigate a city. They are also an invitation to see: to look beyond the murky surface and sound out the depths; to see the world as it is rather than simply how it appears. To travel a river, she says, quoting German writer Esther Kinsky in Between the Word and the World, is to relinquish oneself to a ‘restless, transient land’; a border zone that conjures up ‘dislocation, confusion and unpredictability in a world that crave[s] order’. Far from being places of peace, rivers are dangerous territory where it is easy to become unmoored and lost.

When you begin to read a book about a remote town heralded by the sign ‘Darnmoor, The Gateway to Happiness’, you know it’s not going to be a happy place. The opening chapter of Nardi Simpson’s first novel describes a neat, drab town of streets with names like Grace and Hope. Under a vast cerulean sky, a whitewashed war memorial lies at its ‘bleeding and dead centre’.

Outside town, a bush track leads past the rubbish tip to the banks of the Mangamanga River and to a hardscrabble settlement known as the Campgrounds. This is the home of the land’s original inhabitants before the white settlers arrived. Darnmoor is a grim place of de facto apartheid, where Indigenous families eke out whatever humble living they can, under the heel of the respectable and resentful white folk who consider them nothing but a disgrace to their town.

Nardi Simpson is a Yuwaalaraay woman from the north-west New South Wales freshwater plains. She’s already made her mark as a composer and playwright and as one half of the singing duo the Stiff Gins. A musician’s sensibility to voice and rhythm enhances this engrossing lyrical tale, which won a black&write! Writing Fellowship in 2018.

Since the publication of her acclaimed first novel, Blood Kin (2007), Ceridwen Dovey has established herself as an intelligent author who typically probes what it means, and might mean in the future, to be human. Equally au fait with literary analysis, politics, and science, Dovey has since 2007 published several more books of fiction, two non-fiction books, and numerous essays, contributing regularly to The Monthly and The New Yorker. Now she has extended her range in fiction to a lighter mode, focusing on contemporary life and the pleasures of storytelling. Publishing in audio form has worked well in signalling Dovey’s new voice: Life After Truth was first published through the Australian and New Zealand Audible Originals program in November 2019, and her novel Once More with Feeling was released as an Audible Original in May 2020.

There are at least two types of ‘snowdroppers’ in the world. I grew up around economic snowdroppers, working-class women who stole laundry from clothing lines in more affluent suburbs and sold the contraband, mostly linen and women’s clothing, to pawnshops across inner Melbourne. The snowdropper introduced early in Garry Disher’s new crime novel, Consolation, is of another variety. He steals underwear, women’s underwear specifically, then trophies the garments home and enjoys their company. The thief is pursued by Constable Paul Hirschhausen, the local cop in the town of Tiverton, whom we know from Disher’s previous novels in this series, Bitter Wash Road (2013) and Peace (2019).

In addition to the mystery of the missing undergarments, a more disturbing scene confronts the reader early in the story. ‘Hirsch’, as the copper is affectionately known, discovers a child who has been held captive in a caravan parked in the driveway of a family home. She has been kept in a destitute state and watched over by a CCTV camera to ensure that she cannot escape. The child is taken into protection, and both the policeman and reader are forced to speculate on the origins of such cruelty and what may have occurred inside the caravan.

These plot threads not only hold our attention but accelerate the pulse rate, initially suggesting a hint of a depraved sexual nature. But Disher, as he has masterfully done in his previous works of fiction (this is his thirty-ninth), entwines Consolation with additional narrative threads. Some are eventually woven together, while others remain determinedly loose. Neither of these elements becomes the central focus of the novel, and yet they inform the darkening portrait of yet another rural gothic tale.

Through Hirsch we are introduced to small-town life in Australia. Disher again leaves behind the badlands and backblocks of Victoria’s Mornington Peninsula (the setting of several of his previous works) for regional South Australia. Hirsch investigates crimes from the absolutely petty to gruesome murder. He often visits the lonely and elderly. He walks the streets of the town to reassure the locals of a police presence, while dodging a persistent stalker, who may either want to date the policeman or do him harm. Or is it both?

Garry Disher (Darren James/Text Publishing)

Disher’s crime novels, as with other fine books in the genre, are about much more than criminality. He is a writer with an acute sociological sensibility. The ensemble cast of Tiverton and the surrounding countryside represent a microcosm of rural life. Some people in the town are loving. Others are funny, dry, or eccentric. As a member of the community, Hirsch is expected not only to hunt down criminals but also to work on his singing voice for a local performance. As a result, while the plot never stalls, it isn’t driven at the breakneck speed of some crime fictions. Consequently, the story is better served.

What drives Consolation is greed. Certain people in Tiverton stand to benefit financially from the demise of others. Property and land are at the heart of this avarice, an economic staple underpinning the viability of families and communities amongst settler-Australians. There is both a sniff of old money and the realities of the marginal existence endured by those who have little money and no place else to go. The fragility of rural life can unify communities, but as Disher highlights, it can drive seemingly ordinary citizens to contemplate darker possibilities. We are never sure whom we can trust in this novel, and we remain wary of apparent truth.

Disher is a great landscape writer. We taste the dust, listen to the rain, and smell the same air as his characters. Being a fiction writer with an appreciation of Disher’s long career, I have often thought about his process of writing place. He must have driven along the same lonely roads that Constable Hirschhausen does. This produces an atmosphere of real authenticity. The fictional town of Tiverton surely exists somewhere, along with its occasionally menacing characters.

Debates surrounding the relative value of literary and genre fiction have been around for a long time. When the crime writer Peter Temple won the Miles Franklin Literary Award in 2010 for his book Truth, some people were surprised. Others were relieved that the division between the genres had broken down. This was not strictly so, of course. Good crime fiction delivers gripping plot and character. Australian crime fiction is in a healthy state at the moment. In recent years, writers such as Jane Harper and Chris Hammer have enjoyed remarkable and deserved success. They write great books and they sell well.

Garry Disher is something of an elder of the genre in Australia these days. (He has also enjoyed international success.) He has consistently hit the mark with books that satisfy crime readers while producing all the qualities expected of a literary novel. Disher is one of this country’s finest writers, as Consolation attests.

‘Orange balloons. Orange streamers. Orange shirts.’ Cathy McGowan’s memoir is saturated and literally wrapped in the colour. Cathy Goes to Canberra begins with an account of the election of her independent successor as Member for Indi, Dr Helen Haines, in May 2019 – ‘with orange everywhere’.

For McGowan, this hue was a symbolic way of differentiating herself and her model of politics from Australia’s major parties. Orange, of course, has been used by other minor parties, such as Pauline Hanson’s One Nation, perhaps with similar differential intent, but with dramatically different effect. Rather than instigating fear or disquiet, orange is McGowan’s way of infusing ‘a little bit of optimism’ in our public discourse.

Paul Jennings’s literary career can be traced back to three whispered words from the author Carmel Bird, who taught him writing at an evening class in Melbourne in 1983. ‘You are good,’ she told him. Jennings was an unpublished forty-year-old at the time, yet within two years Penguin had launched his first short story collection, Unreal!

Jennings recalls this moment with Bird in the opening chapter of Untwisted. It is this memoir’s departure point for charting the English-born writer’s journey from a disrupted, often unpleasant childhood, through a teaching career, and ultimately to his status today as, at seventy-seven, arguably Australia’s greatest living children’s author.

‘A voyage round my father’, to quote the title of John Mortimer’s autobiographical play of 1963, has been a popular form of personal memoir in Britain from Edmund Gosse’s Father and Son (1907) to Michael Parkinson’s just-published Like Father, Like Son. The same form produced some of the best Australian writing in the twentieth century, with two assured classics in the case of Germaine Greer’s Daddy, We Hardly Knew You (1989) and Raimond Gaita’s Romulus, My Father (1998). The tradition has continued into the present century with – to list some of the choicest plums – Richard Freadman’s Shadow of Doubt: My father and myself (2003), Sheila Fitzpatrick’s My Father’s Daughter (2010), Jim Davidson’s A Führer for a Father (2017), and Christopher Raja’s Into the Suburbs: A migrant’s story (2020). Mothers in such sagas are far from absent, and they can emerge, though not always, as the more obviously loveable or loving figures. As signalled by most of those titles, however, mothers loom less large over the unfolding narrative. Fathers may not always know or act best, but, partly because of their often tougher, commanding mien, they become irresistibly the centre of attention.

At one point in Boy on Fire, music critic Mark Mordue’s strange, hybrid biography and social history of the early years and musical development of singer–songwriter Nick Cave, Mordue describes his subject as ‘the nominal ship’s captain, a drug-spun Ahab running amok on stage and off’. It is a typically sharp image, but it may reveal more than was intended; for all that Cave is Mordue’s Ahab, he is far more like the white whale itself: a great and receding mythical creature that will swallow the world before giving up any of its secrets. For a long while, the reader is cajoled into thinking this work might be the first in an exhaustive series on the artist, but by the end the truth is revealed: the subject simply got the better of his biographer, who languishes still in the belly of the whale. After an unnaturally long gestation, it seems to have become a case of publish or go mad.

Graz, 16 May 1906. Richard Strauss is conducting his scandalous, recently premièred opera, Salome. The expectant audience includes Giacomo Puccini, Arnold Schoenberg, Gustav and Alma Mahler, Alexander von Zemlinsky, Alban Berg, and, slipping surreptitiously into a cheap seat, possibly a certain Adolf Hitler, having borrowed money from relatives for the trip from Vienna. So begins Alex Ross’s exploration of the kaleidoscopic twentieth-century musical world in The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the twentieth century (2007), his now classic study. Ross is well known as the chief music critic of The New Yorker.

Perhaps not quite as dramatic an opening is the picture of the sixty-nine-year-old Richard Wagner playing excerpts on the piano from his opera Das Rheingold, in Venice, just hours before his death:

At around 3 p.m., Dr Kepler entered, and established that the Meistersinger, the Sorcerer of Bayreuth, the creator of the Ring, Tristan und Isolde, and Parsifal, the man whom Friedrich Nietzsche described as ‘a volcanic eruption of the total undivided artistic capacity of nature itself’, whom Thomas Mann called ‘probably the greatest talent in the entire history of art’, was dead.

The participation of the International Brigades in the Spanish Civil War, from 1936 to 1939, was a great but overwhelmingly tragic adventure. According to Geoffrey Cox, an enthusiastic young journalist from New Zealand in Madrid at the time, it was ‘the most truly international army the world has seen since the Crusades’. Romance, bravery, and sacrifice were combined with bastardry, suffering, and humiliation, marred by often lazy and amateurish tactics, including the fatal notion that military discipline was a form of ‘class oppression’. Giles Tremlett’s richly documented new account overflows with exhilaration and alcohol, along with sabotage, treachery, and utter disorganisation. Perhaps it was the very failure of this romantic intervention that has encouraged, over the decades, a rose-tinted vision: a history, in effect, written by the losers.

Tremlett, for two decades a Madrid-based correspondent for the Guardian and Economist, and author of three books on Spanish history, has written his most ambitious work to date. The International Brigades is a monumental piece of research and synthesis. While there have been more than 2,000 books on the International Brigades, many of them have focused on specific nationalities, military units, or geographic locations. It is more than four decades since a broad overview has appeared in English. Tremlett’s timing is perfect: he has been able to access Soviet archives that were unavailable to previous researchers, and he writes as the last survivors of that time are passing away.

ABR is pleased to present the shortlist for the 2021 Peter Porter Poetry Prize, which this year received a record field of 1,329 entries from thirty-three different countries. Sara M. Saleh was announced the winner of this year's prize on 27 January 2021 for their poem 'A Poetics of Fo(u)rgetting'.

Congratulations to those who reached the shortlist: Danielle Blau, Sara M. Saleh, Jazz Money, Raisa Tolchinsky, and Y.S. Lee. Each of their poems is listed below. For the full longlist, click here.

The Vernal Equinox Story
by Danielle Blau

Are we not drawn onward, we few, drawn onward to new era
– a palindrome

On the twentieth of March, day & night
hung in the balance, & we
would chant our palindromes – Redder. Peep. Noon. Oh who was it I saw. Oh who
– would fold
into ash
tree shadows, till cloven
sky quivered, aswarm, & Light
spake again: Behold,
                        my Forms.

Then came a reckoning
for us, the indefinite – for the smoke
skinned &
vapornatured – for the reedy – for
the roily of temper, roily
of hue – as Sun, uncaging

coiled ribs, exhaled pure
vitriolage of Spring
& – once more
newly heaven-
bent on ravishment, & scour, & scraping
clean without

distinction – down-
lusted blind translucence towards us,
who clutched
the wasting
dusk cast
by burnished junipers – we few – for

splendid pestilence, sad
match, we burnt &
lumpish dust – who cherished the stalk, begetter
of shade – who picked our first-
borns’ names from
the thousand words for gray – who hymned to

without form & void, Oh Void
& formless Void – while all
around, the spindlebushes, Winter’s
shrinking nuns, by red-
blooded enormity were drawn, drawn to the brink, drawn on
to shrieking

bloom – as there
beneath, the crouched
in prayer – the blasted, the dazzleworn –
scorched wheat in wind were
our skirling limbs, who
sing: But – but it’s
us – we few out here – here – here – us now
still – we silt – we here – we water & sand – we muck – we filth – we
Matter. Yes. Behold,
                        our Forms.

_____________

Danielle Blau’s Rhyme or Reason: Poets, philosophers, and the problem of being here now is forthcoming from W.W. Norton. Her chapbook mere eye was selected for a Poetry Society of America Chapbook Award and published with an introduction by poet D.A. Powell, and her poems won first place in the multi-genre Narrative 30 Below Contest. Poetry, short stories, articles, and interviews by Blau appear in The Atlantic, The Literary Review, Narrative Magazine, The New Yorker’s book blog, The Paris Review, Ploughshares, The Saint Ann’s Review, several volumes of the Plume Anthology of Poetry, and elsewhere. A graduate of Brown University with an honours degree in philosophy, and of New York University with an MFA in poetry, she curates and hosts the monthly Gavagai Music + Reading Series in Brooklyn, teaches at Hunter College in Manhattan, and lives in Queens. You can learn more about her at danielleblau.com.

A Poetics of Fo(u)rgetting
by Sara M. Saleh

i.
I forget tradition, a tray of sticky dates passed around the kitchen table, bismillah
in our mouths before we ravenously break the dusk, chew and spit back the pits. Ma ladling
lumpy lentil soup, abandonment pouched in her long sleeves, an old injury she does not
stop pressing. How are we still here? Made of garlic breath, violent affection, arrears.
Ma pushes, alhamdullilah for these bounties, we are blessed, girls.
These pleasantries,
these communal myths we tell to spare each other.

ii.
I forget how I cannot see the stars, how the barbecued smoke eats at the sky, how we
elbow our way through chattering heads congealed in every crack on Haldon. I cannot
see the sidewalk, but I hear it – Sahlab! Sahlab! Mustachioed men in red tarbooshes
summon us beneath strings of plastic crescents – dangling babies shriek parents into
surrender – a siren wails somewhere. This evening orchestra. My sisters dervish and
droop: shiny baubles, painted gold lids and hips, desires too big for the lives that chose
them. Ma says, this love is haram, so we learn to keep our distance. Together we
remember the Lord.
These celebrations,
these distractions we share to comfort one another.
And naming those who stray will not bring them back in any religion.

iii.
I forget how our Lebanon made its way to Lakemba. Mothers of disappeared sons wait;
they hold up headscarves like white flags, like nooses; war wants us even in peacetime.
These Muslim dogs, these ragheads, chalk outlines and choppers crawling low. Our loss
barely literate. We pretend not to notice, this neighbourhood is an obituary.
These farewells,
these griefs we silence so we do not set ourselves on fire.

iv.
I forget how I awaken in the arms of another. How there are no muezzins interrupting
dawn, only this tango of breaths and gasps. How I have dared to worship in a language
that is not Arabic, how I tried to scrub and scrub ma’s beauty spots off my face. You are
devoted to them, to this altar of soft, turmeric skin and sadness. I shake the shame out of
my curls, I dip into the surge, the stagger, the rapture and the rupture. The din – it ruined
me, it split my god. I want to pray, but I cannot recall the verses.
These divinations,
these transgressions, so I do not forget
every lonely night that ever was.

_____________

Sara M. Saleh is the daughter of migrants from Palestine, Egypt, and Lebanon, living and learning on Gadigal land. A human rights activist, community organiser, and campaigner for refugee rights and racial justice, she has spent over a decade in grassroots and international organisations in Australia and the Middle East. A poet and writer, Sara’s pieces have been published in English and Arabic in SBS Life, Australian Poetry Journal, Meanjin, Cordite Poetry Review, Bankstown Poetry Collections, and the Sweatshop Women’s Anthology: Volume II, and global anthologies Making Mirrors, Solid Air: Australian and New Zealand Spoken Word, and A Blade of Grass, alongside internationally renowned Palestinian poets Fady Joudah and Naomi Shehab Nye. Sara is co-editor of the recently released anthology, Arab-Australian-Other: Stories on Race and Identity. She is currently developing her first novel as a recipient of the inaugural Affirm Press Mentorship for Sweatshop Western Sydney. Sara is a proud Bankstown Poetry Slam 'Slambassador’. 

bila, a river cycle
by Jazz Money

this is what became of the river
who rose up
            and called them-self human
stepped upon the land
containing the memories of snow melt and well spring
            smooth worn stones along their ribs
and with water curiosity      sought to know more about the humans on the land
whose invasion of the waters choked the river

bila never sleeps for forwards for foreverness
for flow and gift and on and on …
and yet has become stagnant with
                      cruel touch a non touch and toxic intervention
dams rise where new humans demand
and irrigation sucks dry
to nourish not the plants of this land but those with poisonous intent
            yes the pesticides and all those carried in canola yellow plastics
in turn run this and that towards once sweet water and so
                      bila is transformed to the one you see today
                                                                                                      here la look la
to water not clear with flow and laughing bodies
                                                                           small mouths and delicate fronds
but a sludge of gasping fish       carp muck       cow shit
                      don’t drink from here no more no good
                      and when rain returns a moving sick comes across the land

                                         but a river is always a river ey even when submerged
                                         even dispelled even poisoned or damned
                                         cos spirits walk this land and ancestors placed bila
                                         just so with cause of course

(ngarradan watched) (bilbi and budharu and dinggu watched)
(even bunyip waawii had not seen rivers walk upon two feet in this world)

and so
            not dripping as the fish that leaps
but as a mist will rise from a dry river             so the mist turns solid rain
so bila became a human
skin shimmering a cool flesh green
walks             tumble glide over rocks
            or else some misted enormity
                      fish swim under skin
dangur flash of scale
along veins wrist and throat
yabi out of sight under
a lover can see in still morning light tails fins scales
dawn moon reflected in muck around
                          dropped branches collecting decaying
            damp cool flesh with the grey mud smell
            but a river can learn it all and still
must flow on and on to new mist and like the delta
where all is fertility and possibility
            bila seeks the mangrove to clear the silt cycle
to move towards the sea
to dive into a world known as kin but always one hard to hold
to flow out and out to be reimagined as rain
and rejoin the lands of all rivers
of all stars
            welcomed again into bilabang

1) bila – river | 2) ngarradan – bat | 3) bilbi – bilby | 4) giralang – the stars | 5) dinggu – dingo | 6) waawii – bunyip | 7) dangur – catfish | 8) yabi – yabby | 9) bilabang – a pool of water cut off from the river / the galaxy that contains our solar system, the ‘Milky Way’

_____________

(photograph by Natalie Ironfield)Jazz Money is a poet and filmmaker of Wiradjuri heritage, currently based on the beautiful sovereign lands of the Darug and Gundungurra nations. Her poetry has been published widely and reimagined as murals, installation, and film. Jazz is the 2020 winner of the David Unaipon Award from the State Library of Queensland, and her début collection of poetry is forthcoming from University of Queensland Press in 2021.

before dawn, with the street
lamp’s beam across your face
by Raisa Tolchinsky

if you’ve dreamt you’ve dreamt of red
an open palm an ocean which takes you swinging
your legs out of bed bruised as if with hammers
packing your bag with the lights off putting things that don’t
belong: butterfly wing, lock of hair, opal rattle
of your mind: you ask for help, you pray
to spell your own name with biceps, shoulders,
breath & if the sky looks like a wound,
what does that say about you? it’s blue
as your upper thigh as the sun rises & lowers
you down the subway’s wet steps:
sour of urine, puddled rain, everything a cave
a grave of you & construction workers:
the midnight shift coming home,
eying your pink boxing bag – you wear it like a badge
of honor, a bulletproof vest in the train filled with birds,
now the sky the lightest pink.
now you are not a girl walking through the park,
but a myth of in-between preparing for an ending
bell then a (get up, who said you could rest) – the door
of the gym broken, shattered
with glass as you write down your name, flat clipboard:       I was here, again
down the stairs to the basement covered in posters of men
with rutted faces, some of them still alive
with the sound of hard-work happening before you see it:
thwack of mitt against pad, hard breath, jump rope stinging
linoleum, & the bell that never turns off, sweet swinging silver
pendulum that will keep ticking even after you quit
though you haven’t quit yet – the rest of the girls are in the ring
already but you’re late on purpose, you’re afraid
you’re afraid of too much time inside – How you doin, Queen of Roses,
Rodrick says, famous coach who asked what your name meant
& you told him, though you almost lied – Queen of roses, roses, roses –
two doors in the locker room keeping the sounds out – Where are your thorns?
Sometimes Mia is there, or Alex, smelling like expensive perfume.
They bring their own hairdryers, lipstick, powder. Ponytails smoothed
back, scuffed boxing shoes, lace under everything until they armor
up & strap down. Mia always shows her 6 pack (the coaches are bored,
she says, entertain them from far away
& they’ll leave you alone) – but you pull
your hoodie over your headphones, tie your shoes tight.
jump rope, headgear, hand-wraps –
Good luck out there, Andy says, winking.
She’s got a 3 year old she brings in
to watch her spar – Watch what mommy does,
you’re next, next, the jump rope, 3 rounds, but you trip
when Marco comes over & says will you go on a date with me?
& you say Marco, no a thousand times no but he circles as you double-under
cross-over & whip yourself with rope & Rodrick yells, Marco, leave her alone
while you drop into a plank, planking until Cristian puts a foot on your back
& says Stay strong, 2 minutes left, & the burning, & Cristian’s foot
pressing down – so (you choose this, don’t you?)
when you finally get up to shadowbox, you punch the air so hard
you hear a whistling & What you so angry about, girl,
another coach asks from across the room & you smile
whenever they speak to you: Do you have a boyfriend?
What do you do for work? How many rounds? – easier
to give away nothing but teeth in a land
of sweat & leather & sewage; ten rounds on the heavy bag with two
kinds of pain, dull & hot. you feel both,
& time stretches until your shoulders give.
oh, bells. The Gatorade red as blood.
the locker room, emptied.
you catch your breath, watch your red
face in the mirror. Swipe of lipstick & a pencil skirt,
heels and perfume. soon you’ll pour water for business men
as they lunch. you’ll smile & ask, how can i help you?
you’ll hide (hide them!) your scabbed hands.

_____________

Raisa Tolchinsky is a poet, editor, and teacher. She has previously lived and worked in Chicago, New York, Italy, and Iceland, and she is trained as an amateur boxer. Raisa received her BA in English Literature and Italian Studies from Bowdoin College and the University of Bologna. Currently, Raisa is a Poe/Faulkner fellow in poetry at the University of Virginia. More of her work can be found at www.raisatolchinsky.com

Would You Rather
by Y.S. Lee

Fly or be invisible?
asks my son.

Cranes glide over the Himalayas
at inconceivable heights.
Even muffin-plumped mallards
commute in domestic convoys
a thousand metres above our heads.
You’d have to be a little dead
inside not to choose the sky.

Yet invisibility was always the goal.
As a child, I lived by its rules.
Never speak Teochew in public.
Shampoo the garlic funk from your hair.
Cringe at your mother’s voice, plangent
in any room, full-time fortissimo.
Stand a little further from her every year.

I squandered over half my life in the quest
to be good: crouched like prey, all thunderous
pulse and terror-tamed muscles, striving
for perfect camouflage in this country
that would scope out, then scoop out, my heart.
Later, I grasped that good meant White.
By then, my body was the shape of apology.

My white-passing kid is very interested
in his Chineseness, I tell a friend. Her eyebrows
leap high. Well, she says, at last. That’s progress.
Like winning the lottery but keeping your day job,
I think, though I’d never say that aloud.
I can identify all the selves I despise, recant
all the banana jokes I ever cracked. Still.

Do I have to choose? I ask my son.
He grins, like the answer is easy.

_____________

(photograph by Scott Adamson)Y.S. Lee’s fiction includes the young adult mystery series The Agency (Candlewick Press/Walker Books), which was translated into six languages and has either won or been shortlisted for various prizes. In July 2020, her poem ‘Mr. T in Your Pocket’ won Arc Poetry Magazine’s monthly Award of Awesomeness. She lives in Kingston, Ontario, Canada, within traditional Anishinaabe and Haudenosaunee territory.

In Recollections of a Bleeding Heart (2002), Don Watson wrote that Lowitja O’Donoghue ‘seemed then and has seemed ever since to be a person of such transcendent warmth, if Australians ever got to know her they would want her as their Queen’. Robert Manne, in the first-ever Quarterly Essay (2001), portrayed her as ‘a woman of scrupulous honesty and great beauty of soul’. These qualities gleam in Stuart Rintoul’s handsomely produced biography.

O’Donoghue was born in Indulkana, South Australia, in 1932, the fifth child of Lily and Tom. Her mother was Anangu and her father Irish. When she was two, South Australia’s Aboriginal Protection Board removed Lowitja to the Colebrook Home for Half-Caste Children, where she was renamed Lois. She did not see her mother for the next thirty years, and never spoke to her father again. Colebrook was ‘a crowded house, full of children taken from their parents and told to forget’. Why? A clue lies in the description of the children by Violet Turner of the United Aborigines’ Mission as ‘pearls to adorn the diadem of the King of kings … these little dark children … brought up from the depths of ignorance, superstition, and vice’.

At first glance, the slender paperback, with its cover drawing of dark-skinned men and boys, looks like a conventional illustrated children’s book. A few pages in, it’s clear that Tjanimaku Tjukurpa is something else. The version I have is in Pitjantjatjara and English. There is also an edition in Ngaanyatjarra and English. To anyone familiar with remote Aboriginal communities, the illustrations vibrate with authenticity – the landscape, the buildings, the cars, the appearance and demeanour of the people. This is a story embedded in the reality of community life. Told through the eyes of a concerned grandfather, it is a narrative played out in various iterations across the Indigenous world. A baby boy is born to parents who are without work, resources, or money. As they resort to bringing grog and drugs into the community, and spend their time drinking and gambling, the child Tjanima feels neglected and abandoned: ‘Before long he was hanging around with kids who were older than him. He saw them smashing windows and getting up to all sorts of trouble. He saw all kinds of things.’

The illustrations amplify the text. Among the kids smoking cigarettes and smashing things, a blank-eyed child is sniffing petrol. When Tjanima decides to try marijuana, he goes to the local car graveyard to find the young ganja smokers huddled in one of the wrecks. The book’s artist, Jan Bauer, ran an art project at Yuendumu, and the drawings strike the perfect note. Nothing is overstated, no judgement is implied, but it’s all there: camp dogs, overflowing bins, graffiti-covered buildings, a circle of figures playing cards while a barefoot toddler wanders among beer cans and broken glass. When Tjanima gets into trouble with the police and is sent to live with his grandfather, the drawings reflect a more orderly world. Tjanima’s grandfather teaches the boy how to make tools, takes him out bush, and shows him how to hunt and prepare food the proper way. These details were the subject of much consultation, especially the right way to cook a kangaroo, as the illustration on page fifty-five attests.

With his grandfather’s guidance, and the love and support of his older brother, Tjanima gains confidence and self-respect. He grows up and gets a job working in land management, marries, and has a child. Although he’s been estranged from his parents for years, he takes his new baby to meet them, and discovers that he is no longer angry with them, only sad that they have not been able to break the cycle of poverty and depression. Later, when his grandfather asks the young man ‘Who will keep the Tjukurpa for future generations?’, Tjanima answers, ‘I will hold onto everything you have taught me. I will hand it over to my son and my grandchildren after that.’

Tjanima’s story is a parable of redemption through family, culture, and country. It is embedded in the narratives of cultural knowledge, learning how to care for Country, caring for one another, and passing on knowledge and skills through the generations. Tjanimaku Tjukurpa translates as Tjanima’s Story. Tjukurpa also means Law and Dreaming. It reinforces the implication that while Tjanima has his personal story, it is also part of the fabric of desert life, of patterns and purposes much greater than the individual.

All too often the outcome for boys like Tjanima is one of crime, violence, and early death. Tjanimaku Tjukurpa is a labour of love, created to address both the real-life challenges of the story it tells and the literacy gap that is part of the problem. Bilingual, beautifully illustrated, telling a story that reflects the lived experience of Aboriginal boys and men, Tjanimaku Tjukurpa is the product of a remarkable collaboration between a group of Anangu men and the Ngaanyatjarra Pitjantjatjara Yangkunytjatjara (NPY) Women’s Council.

The NPYWC, based in Alice Springs, is an advocacy and support organisation for Aboriginal women from the cross-border region of South Australia, Western Australia, and the Northern Territory, and for many years has been addressing the emotional and psychological damage experienced by desert people. It was successful in persuading the local hospital to allow traditional healers (ngangkari) to visit and treat patients who often didn’t speak English and had little understanding of what was happening to them. As the ngangkari and the doctors began to share knowledge, it became apparent that there was a dearth of vocabulary to discuss Indigenous mental health, and the project that came to be known as Uti Kulintjaku – to listen, think, and understand clearly – was born. Uti Kulintjaku is based on the recognition that if people have access to complex information in their own languages, and can in turn have their own complex knowledge interpreted for the non-Indigenous doctors, the shared dialogue becomes a meaningful exchange that translates into effective actions.

This evolved into workshops that explored, among other things, the latest discoveries of neuroscience and the healing potential of ancestral stories, always with a skilled interpreter present. Uti Kulintjaku continues to be an exemplary model of communication, process, and evaluation, with outcomes that include a meditation app in language and an illustrated story for girls, Tjulpu and Walpa, which covers teenage pregnancy, domestic violence, and the possibility of recovery and rehabilitation.

The success of Uti Kulintjaku prompted the women to invite selected Anangu male leaders to develop their own working group. Established in 2016, this became the Uti Kulintjaku Watiku (men’s) group, with around twenty members from across the NPY lands. Since then, the men have been developing a ‘toolkit’ of resources to deal with destructive behaviour and its causes.

Tjanimaku Tjukurpa is one of these, the product of commitment, compassion, collaboration, and the collective will towards healing.

Barack Obama has written the best presidential memoir since Ulysses S. Grant in 1885, and since Grant’s was mostly an account of his pre-presidential, Civil War generalship – written at speed, to stave off penury for his family, as he was dying of throat cancer – Obama’s lays some claim to being the greatest, at least so far. This first volume (of two) only reaches the third of his eight years in the White House.

Of all the extant presidential autobiographies, Obama’s is, by a distance, the most engaging. Admittedly, the competition is not fierce. Calvin Coolidge’s penmanship is a cure for insomnia. Lyndon B. Johnson had material for a remarkable memoir, but Robert Caro’s multiple-volume biography of him is much more revealing. According to one reviewer of RN: The Memoirs of Richard Nixon (1978), the ex-president ‘whines more and seems incapable of sustained analysis, irony, humor or any grasp of larger philosophical or historical dimensions’. Bill Clinton’s My Life (2004) starts compellingly but peters out as he gets sucked into legislative machinations. George W. Bush wrote about key Decision Points (2010) in his presidency, avoiding the narrative arc that Obama constructs so well.

This is a book in the expansive American tradition of long, well-researched historical works on political topics with broad appeal, written in an accessible style for a popular audience. David Nasaw has not previously worked on displaced persons, but he is the author of several big biographies, most recently of political patriarch Joseph P. Kennedy.

If you are interested in displaced persons because you happen to have a Polish grandfather or Latvian grandmother who came to Australia from the DP camps in Europe after World War II, don’t expect too much from this book. Nasaw’s real interest is not in DPs as a whole, but rather in the minority of DPs who were Jewish, in the first place, and ended up in the United States, in the second. On behalf of your Latvian grandmother, you might even find yourself slightly offended by the book, whose central theme is the (overt) anti-communism and (covert) anti-Semitism that underpinned arguments by some influential leaders in the US Congress to limit the entry of Jewish DPs while simultaneously welcoming the immigration of DPs from the Baltic states, against whom supporters of Jewish immigration made counter-allegations of Nazi collaboration. Nasaw dismisses out of hand the charges of communism made against the Jewish DPs, but gives many examples of Latvian and Lithuanian DPs who, decades later, would be deported from the United States for war crimes, perhaps unintentionally leaving the impression that Baltic DPs – many of whom voluntarily left their countries in the northern autumn of 1944, as the German occupiers were retreating to the west and the Soviet occupiers were arriving from the east – were collaborators as a group.

At the time of writing, Julian Assange – an Australian citizen – is detained at Her Majesty’s Prison Belmarsh in Thamesmead on the outskirts of London. Belmarsh is a high-security facility; Assange’s fellow inmates are terrorists, murderers, and rapists. The WikiLeaks founder is being held in solitary confinement, permitted out of his cell for just one hour each day. His crime? Assange is awaiting the outcome of extradition proceedings, in relation to charges brought against him by the US government. In 2019, he was indicted on one count of computer hacking and seventeen counts of violating the Espionage Act (1917) for his role in obtaining and publishing military and diplomatic documents in 2010.

It is an understatement to say that Assange is a divisive figure. He was widely lauded when WikiLeaks first gained global recognition for the 2010 publication of a video labelled ‘Collateral Murder’, which showed an American attack helicopter murdering Iraqi civilians. He subsequently helped international media outlets, including the Guardian, The New York Times, and The Sydney Morning Herald, publish major revelations about diplomatic relations and state-sponsored wrongdoing. Assange retains a loyal following of supporters.

In April 2011, the landmark High Court victory of four elderly Kenyans revealed a dark episode in British colonial history. Between 1952 and 1960, barbaric practices, including forced removal and torture, were widely employed against ‘Mau Mau’ rebels, real or imagined. Upon the granting of independence in 1963, thousands of files documenting such atrocities were ‘retained’ by the British authorities, eventually coming to rest in the vast, secret Foreign and Commonwealth Office archives at Hanslope Park. Now a small portion of that archive was opened to scrutiny, and a tiny ray of light shone on one of history’s greatest cover-ups.

The late twentieth-century retreat of empire posed a global challenge – what to do with the paper trail. Australian officials, rushing to grant the territories of Papua and New Guinea independence in 1975, considered moving a large swath of files from Port Moresby to Canberra. This cover-up was only avoided by the intervention of a diligent Australian archivist, Nancy Lutton, who judged that a new nation ought to inherit its history. A similar passion for ownership of the national narrative animated Jenny Hocking, Emeritus Professor of History at Monash University, to undertake her own legal battle to access files locked away by royal order and bureaucratic culpability.

Porter Prize

When the Porter Prize closed in October, we had received 1,329 entries from thirty-three different countries, our largest field to date (last year we received 1,046 entries). Our four valiant judges – John Hawke (Chair and ABR’s Poetry Editor), Lachlan Brown, John Kinsella, and A. Frances Johnson (winner of the 2020 Porter Prize) – have now completed the judging, and we thank them warmly.

None of the five featured poets has been shortlisted in the Porter Prize before. They are Danielle Blau (USA), Y.S. Lee (Canada), Jazz Money (NSW), Sara M. Saleh (NSW), and Raisa Tolchinsky (USA). 

As with the Jolley Prize earlier this year, the Porter Prize ceremony will take place via Zoom (at 5pm on January 27). To register your interest, please RSVP to This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.. We will send an access link to all registrants closer to the event. Another seven poems formed the longlist from which the judges chose the shortlist. We list them all on our website.

Jolley Prize

Meanwhile, the ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize will open on January 20, with a closing date of May 3. There are three cash prizes: $6,000, $4,000, and $2,500. Full details appear on page 21. As always, we thank ABR Patron Ian Dickson for enabling us to present the Jolley Prize in this lucrative form.

Gregory Day

Gregory Day – joint winner of the inaugural Jolley Prize in 2011 – is the recipient of the 2020 Patrick White Literary Award for his achievements as a novelist, poet, and short story and nature writer. The Award, which was first presented in 1974 (to Christina Stead) and which is now worth $15,000, goes to an author who has made an ongoing contribution to Australian literature but who may not have received adequate recognition.

In their citation, the judges – Felicity Plunkett, Julieanne Lamond, and Michelle de Kretser – remarked:

Day is alert to movement across time as well as across space. The past is never far from the present in his work. It manifests as a reckoning with colonial violence and an honouring of Indigenous experience; as an interest in local stories and histories; and as an engagement with twentieth-century turning points … Day’s work is marked by both lyricism and intelligence. His fiction is realist in its depiction of character and precise natural detail but can slip the bounds of realism without strain. These features, taken together with Day’s thematic concerns, make his fiction truly distinctive – there is no one else writing like him in Australia. His novels, poems and essays are like parts in music: independent, yet coming together to form a grand whole.

Sheila Fitzpatrick

We got wonderfully carried away on the cover of our December edition, listing Sheila Fitzpatrick as one of the contributors to our Books of the Year feature. Unfortunately, Sheila – who has recently moved to the Australian Catholic University as professor of history – didn’t have time to contribute this year. We can only attribute our lapse to the fact that we’d like to publish Sheila Fitzpatrick in every issue of ABR. She is unmistakably in this issue, with a review of David Nasaw’s book The Last Million: Europe’s displaced persons from World War to Cold War. Prolific as ever, Sheila has a new book herself. Black Inc. will publish White Russians, Red Peril: A Cold War history of migration to Australia in April 2021.

Books of the Year

Contributors to Books of the Year emphatically included Beejay Silcox and Billy Griffiths. In a recent ABR podcast with Peter Rose, they discussed some of their nominations and looked ahead to 2021 highlights. From the January–February issue, the Editor interviews Jon Piccini, whose review of two new books on the Palace Letters is in the current issue.

Don’t miss the ABR Podcast, which appears each Wednesday. Listen and subscribe by searching for ‘The ABR Podcast’ on your favourite podcast app.

Mungo MacCallum (1941–2020)

Mungo MacCallum, the legendary, fearless political commentator who died on December 9 aged seventy-eight, wrote for ABR several times over the years. His first appearance was in the fourth issue of the second series (September 1978). In his review of journalist Don Whitington’s posthumously released work Strive to Be Fair: An unfinished autobiography, MacCallum explained that the book’s title came from a remark by one of Whitington’s editors: ‘There is no such thing as a good objective journalist. If you are not sensitive enough to feel for your subject, to have a point of view, to suffer joy or agony or sympathy about a story you are covering, you will never be a good journalist. Don’t strive to be objective. Strive to be fair.’ MacCallum described this advice as ‘eminently sound’.

MacCallum’s articles and commentary were published widely. His books included The Oxford Book of Australian Political Anecdotes (1994), Mungo: The man who laughs (2001), and The Mad Marathon (2013).

A week before his death, MacCallum announced his retirement from journalism due to increasing ill-health. Writing for the website Pearls and Irritations, he said: ‘I am sorry to cut and run – it has sometimes been a hairy career, but I hope a productive one and always fun. My gratitude for all your participation … Thank you and good night.’

Melbourne Poets Union

Melbourne Poets Union (MPU) has two smart new series of chapbooks: the Blue Tongue Poets and the Red-bellied Poets. The former is devoted to poets who have previously published at least one collection; the latter to those who have yet to publish a collection. The seven poets are Linda Adair, Kevin Brophy, Jeltje Fanoy, Dominique Hecq, Michael J. Leach, David Munro, and Ouyong Yu. The chapbooks, which cost $25 each, are available from MPU.

MPU, a not-for-profit organisation, has been supporting poetry since 1977. In a recent Book Talk article, Tina Giannoukos, editor-in-chief of MPU, writes about the special challenges of creating the new series during a pandemic.

Prime Minister’s Literary Awards

The Prime Minister’s Literary Awards were announced in December, offering welcome and lucrative recognition to several authors in what was an unusually disrupted year. Omar Sakr’s The Lost Arabs won the poetry award, while Tara June Winch’s novel The Yield won for fiction. The Non-Fiction award was shared by Christina Thompson’s Sea People and Songspirals by the Gay’wu Group of Women. Jasmin Seymour’s Cooee Mittigar won the Children’s Literature award, while Helen Fox won the Young Adult Literature Award for How it Feels to Float. The winners each receive $80,000; shortlisted authors $5,000 each.

Want to write a letter to ABR? Send one to us at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Crossed McCallums

Dear Editor,

Thanks for a most interesting review of the short-lived Summer of the Seventeenth Doll in Adelaide. A quick correction, though: in his review, Ben Brooker quotes John McCallum as having described Richard Mills and Peter Goldsworthy’s subsequent opera, Batavia, as ‘the vilest thing [he had] experienced in the theatre’. It was Peter McCallum who said this, not John. It caused quite a furore at the time. I profoundly disagreed with Peter at the time, and I still do.

As for the Doll, it had a rather one-sided, if not biased, reception in 1996. In certain circles there was still a rigid adherence to operatic modernism, and the operatic Doll didn’t conform to the agenda. I found the original performance in Melbourne most impressive and remember well the wonderful quartet in the final act – ‘The old year vanishes, like music in the air’. Mills had, and has, one of the most lyrically beautiful operatic ‘voices’ in Australia.

Michael Halliwell (online comment)

Ben Brooker replies:

Thanks for your correction, Michael. I did indeed have my McCallums crossed!

Dear Editor,

I agree with Ben Brooker about Olive’s decision to leave behind the contemporary ideals of wife and mother for an alternative life with Roo. It is Roo’s staying home and getting a job and proposing that is the tragedy for Olive. They chose, in the first play, to deny these conventions for a life together that was progressive, and chose not to have children and marriage. Roo reneges on this promise, and Olive sees this as a betrayal. He is settling for all the conventions they had denied. This makes her mourn the loss of their wonderful alternative life and then brings into sharp relief what she has sacrificed for nothing, cradling a child. Even the strongest of feminists can mourn this instinctual yearning in the face of a pact being shattered. Seventeen years for what? It is a tragedy.

Antoinette Halloran (online comment)

Ben Brooker replies:

It sounds like we’re on the same page in regards to the nature of the play’s, and Olive’s, tragedy. But I still think the image of Olive cradling the doll in that way scans less as a testament to her ‘sacrifice’ than as an affirmation of the view that her tragedy is a failure to achieve ‘womanhood’. I think we both know this to be a fundamental misreading of the play and the opera.

Commodifying children

Dear Editor,

The issue with IMMACULATE has nothing to do with Jenkins or their right to procreate, and everything to do with their denial of the rights of donor-conceived people, which Jenkins’s child(ren) are, like it or not. If Jenkins would acknowledge this and consider the rights of this marginalised group of people (the DCP community), there would be less outcry.

Also, it is simply unethical to use public funds for procreation – art or not.

Helen Balzer (online comment)

Dear Editor,

A more progressive and important issue here is that of donor-conceived people and the fact that, in Victoria (the world’s most progressive state in legislation of donor conception), someone can completely go outside of these laws and accept payment to create a child, use their conception for personal and professional gain, and invalidate all of the genetics that child will inherit. The very name Casey Jenkins’s project discredits the full genetic being and is some odd throwback to religion. The project is supposed to conclude when a child is conceived.

This is absolutely not a pro-choice or pro-life argument. It is about the commodification of children and the human rights that projects like this violate. The point is to create a child – the reckless, exploitative, and unethical ways they were conceived are only relevant after they are born. There are reasons why donor-conceived people have progressive laws in place to protect them for future generations.

No one is talking about the real reasons why the funding was pulled – of donor conception itself – and the worldly foresight the Australia Council has had on the matter.

Katherine Vowles (online comment)

Dear Editor,

There are significant intersectional issues that Casey Jenkins hasn’t addressed in their work. Quite separate from the pro-life arguments that give rights to embryos, there have been significant legislative changes in Victoria based on the ethical and legal recognition that donor conceived people have a right to their own genetic identity. While DIY insemination may not be covered by the same laws that clinics are held to, Jenkins has refused to consider or address the nuances given that the intentional choices she is making with their body will have inherent impacts on the child that they are actively intending to conceive. In fact, Jenkins has actively sought to personally attack and marginalise any donor-conceived voice that has posted questions or queries on their page. This is acutely counter to the progressive changes in the donor conception space. The issue goes beyond conception and into the realm of purposeful denial of best practice for donor conception.

Hayley Smith (online comment)

Lara Stevens replies:

Thanks for these responses. There seems to be a common concern that Casey Jenkins’s artwork is denying the rights of donor-conceived people, but each of the comments is elliptical about precisely which rights are being infringed. Katherine Vowles is concerned that the artwork will ‘invalidate all the genetics’, though it’s unclear what this means. Basic biology shows that everyone inherits half of their genes from each parent. This remains the same whether you’re conceived via procreation or a donor. Hayley Smith is concerned about the hypothetical child’s ‘right to their own genetic identity’ but does not explain what they are referring to here. Anyone today can send a buccal swab of cheek cells to a lab to have their genes and DNA tested and analysed for a small fee, though I don’t see how this knowledge of one’s genetic identity strengthens anyone’s human rights. It is worth noting that Jenkins never broke the law, nor did they ever accept payment to create a child. Jenkins was very explicit with the Australia Council from the outset of the submission process that they were attempting to conceive a child independently, in their personal life, and that the artwork (for which they were applying for funding) was mere documentation of this process.

The symbolic realm

Dear Editor,

I love Jay Daniel Thompson’s recognition of Geoff Goodfellow’s fine talent ‘for bringing to life the minutiae of a bygone era’ (ABR, December 2020). For me, this is reminiscent of South Australia’s late author and printmaker Barbara Hanrahan’s equally skilled use of the ‘micro-vision’ to activate people, places, and objects firmly into our fantasies and realities. Both authors elevate the ordinariness of past inner-city life in Adelaide to the symbolic realm.

Judith Thomas (online comment)

Dear Editor,

As a long-time admirer of Goodfellow’s poetry, I tremendously enjoyed this collection of non-fiction short stories. I too am hopeful of a follow-up volume. I have no doubt the author has (many) more tales to tell of a life well lived.

Daniel Howard (online comment)

It was obvious that Nick Bryant’s insightful new book would be a requiem for American greatness. More revealing is its history of Trumpism, which long predated the man’s presidency.

Donald Trump’s policies, slogans, and style have preludes and precursors going back to the 1960s. His presidency is over, but as of late November almost 74 million Americans had voted for him, the second highest presidential vote tally on record. Even in defeat, Trump cleaved away great segments of the working-class, the immigrant, and even the gay vote from Democrats.