Pushing Back is a further collection of short stories from the Western Australian writer. In several, the main title resonates: characters rebel in fear or anger. Chafing in non-compliance at the circumstances in which they find themselves, they refuse to resign themselves to the inevitable. Other stories feature stragglers in the thralls of alcohol and drug addiction, their lives in the doldrums because of their dependencies. Kinsella’s exploration of the push and pull of external forces and internal desires often provides the propulsive force of the narrative.

The opening salvo, ‘Having Kittens’, for instance, features a mechanic whose lanky frame and military background spares him the bullying his workmates must endure. When a harelipped bloke cops the brunt of the misbehaviour, the results are as unexpected as they are tragic. The victim’s eyes, never noticed by his tormentors, ‘were storms brewed out at sea, coming in over the coast, bringing mayhem’. Against the casual cruelty there is also a note of grace, the rescue of a drowning kitten from a waste oil pit. But the mechanic’s saving of the creature is offset by his failure to intervene when a colleague is persecuted. It is this moral fuzziness (including his ambivalence about life with his new bride) that drives the story. He is the type of fellow who trusted internal combustion motors. There was clarity there; everything else was subject to confusion.

Straining but failing to connect is a common theme in this volume. When an American and an Australian meet on the Patras–Athens train, the reader anticipates a nascent love affair, but although there is a mutual frisson during their meandering conversation, once they alight the travellers’ roads diverge, simply a case of strangers meeting and moving apart. In another story, ‘The Watch’, a man offers his former partner a new watch in order to curry favour. This ticking talisman of good times past serves instead as a reminder of the silences between them, of familiar territory too fraught to be explored anew.

Pushing Back contains thirty-five stories, some previously published. Given this number, it’s not surprising that the quality is uneven. Some tales seem sketchy and inconsequential; others read like sample chapters from a larger work. Others feel more coherent, discrete units. One of the more potent offerings is ‘Little Red Car’, which concerns a horror road trip involving a rag-tag group of city boys who share an interest in drugs and violence (the two are linked in their minds as ‘manifestations of choice and power’). On a whim they decide to head outback to frighten and possibly harm any unfortunates in their path. Over a dozen lines of speed, a few bongs, and lots of beer, they hoon along the highway towards the Nullarbor in their hatchback, which moves like ‘an angry pulse’. They meet their match in the most unlikely of potential victims, a pair of grey nomads with ‘fifty years of marriage, and fifty years of farming together, that carried a knowledge of isolation and the vulnerabilities it carried’. Equally satisfying is the denouement in ‘Barrows’, wherein a teenage girl quick-witted enough to fend for herself against three predatory boys has an unlikely ally: a castrated pig.

Kinsella’s stories in past collections have worried about the mental and physical health of children; here he continues to fret over them. Several tales deal empathetically with schoolyard bullying, while social ineptitude is yet another burden. The young artist in ‘The Purchase’ fails to understand the codes of a rarefied art world. His mistakes ‘couldn’t be painted out’.

Kinsella is an avid environmentalist whose oeuvre is noted for its depiction of the natural world, of the flora and fauna of the landscape both tamed and wild. Almost every story in Pushing Back is a testament to his sensitivity to and invocation of place, mostly in and around his homeland in the Western Australian wheatbelt. In this book, you can marvel at the red-capped parrots twisting in the limbs of a jarrah tree, at rain falling like silver from granite rock faces, paperbark peeling like sunburnt skin blisters, and trees that ‘pulsate invisibly with heat-insects’. Kinsella’s ornithological interest is on vibrant display here, with many different birds flying between pages.

At his core, Kinsella is a poet who likes constraint and restraint. Even in his longer works, be they novels or short fiction, there are flashes of imagistic brilliance. Metaphor and simile are deployed with a flourish, the river ‘was like fertility flowing through their marriage’; bats are ‘little vacuums of light’.

Had Pushing Back been winnowed, the stronger stories might have glistened in the light, but there is enough in this collection to solidify Kinsella’s reputation as a stalwart practitioner of the form.