This book is about the battles in which the First Australian Imperial Force took part between June and November 1917. It is not, however, a battle history. Rather, it takes the interesting approach of investigating how Australians remember these battles. Spoiler alert: they don’t.

This is a significant finding. The author contends that while we (endlessly) remember Gallipoli, Pozières, and the final battles in 1918, we are uncomfortable about including in our collective memory the battles of 1917 (Messines and the battles of what is popularly known as the Passchendaele campaign). In The Battlefield of Imperishable Memory, Matthew Haultain-Gall demonstrates why this forgetting took place and makes a strong argument that it set in very early.

Listen to this essay as read by the author.

As the March and April evenings grew hotter, the streets of East Beirut were as empty as our calendars. The grumble of traffic had disappeared. Without the usual smokescreen, the nearby mountains and coastline were visible for weeks. Parks are scarce in Beirut and gardens are private, but this spring, vines and bougainvillea were clambering over the high walls and no one was trimming them. It was possible to take solitary walks and hear birdsong.

The only reminder of the city’s previous energy were the leaves shifting in a sea breeze from the port, which East Beirut surrounds like raked seating in a theatre. All that moved in the lanes of Achrafieh, Gemmayzeh, Mar Mikhaël, and Monot was sunlight and shadows. For the first time, every neighbourhood knew what it felt like to be left alone. That was how the ruin began.

In the conference room the conversation is, like the clothes, ‘business casual’. For my benefit, everyone has switched from Arabic to English. Despite the linguistic shift, my new colleagues converse as fluently as before. I have arrived in Eastern Turkey with an aid organisation to support the humanitarian response in north-west Syria.

In early 2021, the Victorian government announced the creation of the Yoo-rrook Justice Commission to investigate the harms done to Aboriginal people through colonisation. Named after the word for truth in the Wemba Wemba/Wamba Wamba langauge, Yoo-rrook will be the first exercise of its kind in an Australian jurisdiction and one of the most significant responses yet offered to the call for Voice, Treaty and Truth issued by the Aboriginal peoples of Australia in the ‘Uluru Statement from the Heart’.

The Andrews government, having quietly over the past two years progressed its proposal for individual Treaties with each of the First Nations of Victoria (followed by an overarching Treaty), has now turned to truth-telling to guide the process of decolonisation and help determine reparations for past injustices. It is a courageous move, burdened with great expectations. Inspired by the internationally renowned South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) and a subsequent iteration in Canada that focused on the genocidal effects of the residential schools system, Yoo-rrook stakes the future of the Aboriginal–settler relationship in Victoria on a painful confrontation with the truth. All of which raises the question: what exactly can (and what exactly does) truth-telling do?

Yoo-rrook, like all public exercises in truth-telling, is premised on two basic assumptions: that there are things not yet known (or not yet widely known) about the past; and that knowing those things will have a transformative effect. The first premise seems hard to dispute, even though ignorance has long since run out of excuses in Australia. Due largely to the dedication of activists and scholars, the story of Aboriginal societies and the damage done to them through colonisation has now well and truly emerged from what W.E.H. Stanner called ‘the great Australian silence’. After the land rights movement of the 1960s and 1970s, prior occupation by organised political societies became much harder to ignore. But it is particularly since Mabo, and the recognition of native title in the common law, that we have seen a culture of recognition displace a culture of forgetting in our political institutions and everyday lives. Though always at risk of becoming trivialised, Acknowledgment of Country has become the daily ritual that returns dispossession to consciousness and offers a glimpse, however brief and narrow, of another history and a different law. And yet, like a curtain that falls after every performance, that great Australian silence has an uncanny way of reimposing itself. Unless things are said again and said anew, the public seems to drift back into a happy forgetfulness.

The very least that can be said about the Yoo-rrook Justice Commission is that it will be another jolt to consciousness and another unsettling of the narrative of peaceful settlement. One of the lessons derived from truth-telling exercises around the world is that there is nothing quite like testimony to bring history home. Carried into the emotional, fully embodied register of the first person, the truths of the past lose their abstract quality and become powerfully affecting. Yoo-rrook, as Stan Grant has noted, will provide a ‘long overdue opportunity’ for Aboriginal people to tell their stories and to speak of their experience of colonial violence (‘of massacre and rape and theft of land’) and, perhaps even more importantly, of their resilience in surviving and reviving through it.¹ For those giving testimony and those bearing witness, it promises to be a highly charged and potentially life-changing event. And while there is an argument to be made that truth-telling would be more politically effective if it were instituted at the national level, the provincial character of the Yoo-rrook Commission will have its advantages. In line with the local responsibilities exercised by First Nations peoples, it will ensure that their stories are heard in the places they have been lived and where calls for treaties and reparations must find their justification.

However, it would be naïve to think that Yoo-rrook will completely clear up the past or remove all the obstacles standing in the way of a better future. ‘Mature societies,’ suggests Ian Hamm, a Yorta Yorta man and chairman of the First Nations Foundation, ‘own their entire history. We don’t get to pick the bits we like, we must own the lot.’² He’s right – taking responsibility for the past is a mark of maturity because it requires a society to interrogate the selective nature of its own remembering and open itself up to the inconvenient (for want of a better euphemism) experiences of others. But history is not like a great story book to which one simply adds missing chapters until the tale is complete. Tied, as are all forms of social knowledge, to differences of perspective and asymmetries of power, history is invariably a site of political contestation and competing narratives. In this domain, ‘truth’ can meet resistance, not simply in the form of lies or denials (though it has those to contend with too), but in the form of ‘other truths’. By creating a stage for Aboriginal voices, Yoo-rrook will expose the general public to another, still largely hidden and still deeply unpalatable, truth. But since they too will have a perspective on the matter, there is no guarantee that they will listen to or accept it.

‘Mature societies own their entire history. We don’t get to pick the bits we like, we must own the lot’

This brings me to the second premise: that truth-telling will have a transformative effect. Like the public exercises in truth-telling undertaken in South Africa and Canada, the great promise of Yoo-rrook is that it will interrupt two processes that, left to their own devices, threaten to run on endlessly: the process of intergenerational trauma and the process of colonial extermination. As the recently appointed Justice Commissioner, Sue-Anne Hunter, noted earlier this year, ‘We as Aboriginal people conduct truth-telling so our children don’t have to carry the weight of the past into their futures.’³ As a Wurundjeri and Ngurai Illum Wurrung woman who is a recognised leader in trauma and healing practices, Hunter is as well placed as anyone to confirm what trauma specialists like Dori Laub have long maintained: namely, that ‘one has to know one’s buried truth in order to be able to live one’s life’.⁴

At the same time, Yoo-rrook is seen as a means by which the process of colonisation, relentless in its appropriation of Aboriginal land and destruction of Aboriginal life, might finally be arrested. Functioning, as Marcus Stewart, the co-chair of the First Peoples’ Assembly of Victoria, has put it, as the ‘why’ behind the treaty’s ‘what’, Yoo-rrook is expected to play a crucial role in revealing why the relation between first and second nations must be a ‘sovereign-to-sovereign’ relation that secures Aboriginal people against the kind of arbitrary exercises of governmental power that led to the Stolen Generations.

High expectations, especially in this area of public policy, are hardly to be discouraged. But the experience of public truth-telling in the countries Yoo-rrook references as a model suggests that they are likely to be disappointed, at least in part. Although there were a number of (endlessly recited) stories of healing and recovery at the South African TRC, it was ultimately unclear whether the experience of testimony broke the transmission of intergenerational trauma or compounded it. Here, too, one must contend with differences of perspective and the sheer variety of what the South Africans called ‘personal truths’. But the judgment upon the hearings issued by Nomfundo Walaza, long-term director of the Trauma Centre for Survivors of Violence and Torture in Cape Town, is itself a painful truth that commands attention: ‘the pain of blacks is being dumped into the country more or less like a commodity article – easy to access and even easier to discard’.⁵ A similar sense of ambivalence and disquiet surrounds claims that truth-telling has the potential to stem the relentless destruction of Indigenous societies. Though by no means wholly scathing, critics of the Canadian TRC suggested that it had in fact approached the process of colonisation as if it were already over. Angry and resentful at the ongoing destruction of their way of life, Indigenous survivors were treated as though their suffering was nothing but the traumatic legacy of a historical wrong.⁶

One of the difficulties with challenging truth-telling, of course, is that it seems self-evidently right. On what grounds could one be against it? Credit must thus be given to Wiradjuri man Stan Grant for having the courage to pose the question that, at this particular juncture, edges towards the impolitic. ‘The Yoo-rrook Justice Commission,’ he writes, ‘has been praised as an important step to facing up to a brutal history. But is it?’⁷ Grant’s equivocation is built upon critiques of reconciliation, developed in the wake of the South African and Canadian experiences, that draw attention to the subtle (and sometimes not so subtle) pressure it exerts on victims of state violence to forgive and resolve. Now the principal vehicle by which societies revisit the past and move on from it, reconciliation gives victims an opportunity to speak of their pain, but only, it seems, on the condition that they forgo their anger and let everyone escape the prison of the past. In truth and reconciliation, ‘healing’ has come to assume a central importance. But exactly who or what is being healed? Is it Aboriginal people, the relationship between victims and perpetrators, or perhaps, as I have argued elsewhere, the ‘narcissistic wounds’ opened up in settler society by shameful revelations of colonial violence?⁸

It is, perhaps, because of the elusive nature of healing and the way it imprisons Aboriginal people in the identity of the traumatised victim that Ian Hamm is looking to Yoo-rrook as a way of informing the general public about the ‘strong points’ of Aboriginal culture and identity. ‘The last thing we want from truth-telling,’ he writes, ‘is a story that just paints our history as heartbreak and misery – it must be about the positives and what is unique about the Aboriginal community that the rest of Australia can learn from.’⁹ That correction, and the sense of balance it looks to achieve, strikes me as vitally important. Without it, Yoo-rrook could easily become another occasion in which Black pain is turned into a commodity article and white Australia repositions itself as the compassionate healer that has always had the welfare of Aboriginal people at heart.

Australia, to be sure, could learn a great deal from Yorta Yorta man William Cooper, who, after hearing of the events of Kristallnacht in 1938, led a delegation to the German Consulate in Melbourne to deliver a letter protesting against the violence. Cooper’s story was widely publicised in 2018 when that letter was finally delivered to the German government by his grandson, Alf (Boydie) Turner. And yet it remains largely unknown in Victoria and beyond. Might that be symptomatic of something? Sadly, as the Adam Goodes saga has recently confirmed, taking a stand against racism has not been ‘our’ forte. Our habit of displacing responsibility to deal with racism onto those who suffer it speaks of a significant blind spot (one is tempted to say black spot) in our political culture. Why is it always incumbent upon Aboriginal people to ‘do reconciliation’ and repair relationships damaged by systemic racism? Why is it up to them to tell the painful stories that return colonisation to consciousness? Could it be that some truths continually elude ‘us’ because of the sense of self they put at risk?

Yoo-rrook could, of course, open our eyes to those truths and catalyse a real transformation. However, it will have its work cut out persuading the general public to see colonisation as a present problem rather than a historical one and as a white problem rather than a Black one. In their response to the Bringing Them Home Report – arguably the closest we have gotten so far to a national truth and reconciliation commission – Australians demonstrated that they were not without compassion for the sufferings of Aboriginal people. Most of us, I like to think, really were sorry. But something happens when the abject Black subject in need of healing becomes the Sovereign First Nations in pursuit of Treaty. That great motto of survival, ‘Always was, always will be, Aboriginal land’, unsettles us to the core. How could it not? We are, after all, a settler society built upon the expropriation of Aboriginal land and the violence to people and culture that was (and is) intrinsic to that expropriation. Of all the truths that Australians are required to face, this one is clearly the most painful – precisely because it has the most significant repercussions. One of the things Yoo-rrook will surely reveal is whether we really are mature enough to confront it.

This article, one of a series of ABR commentaries addressing cultural and political subjects, was funded by the Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund.

Endnotes

^1.  Grant, S. ‘After the Yoo-rrook Truth and Justice Commission Aboriginal People are not Obliged to Forgive’. 

^2.  Hamm, I. ‘Truth-telling paves the way to brighter future’, The Sunday Age. 16 May 2021, p. 35.

^3.  Hunter, S. ‘Change comes through truth-telling’, The Age, 16 April 2021, p. 21.

^4.  Laub, D. ‘Truth and Testimony: The Process and the Struggle’, American Imago, 1991 48(1), p. 77.

^5.  Walaza, N. cited in A. Krog, Country of My Skull, London: Vintage, 1999, p. 244.

^6.  Coulthard, G. Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition, University of Minnesota Press, 2014, pp. 105–129.

^7.  Grant, S. ibid.

^8.  Muldoon, P. ‘A Reconciliation Most Desirable: Shame, Narcissism, Justice and Apology’, International Political Science Review, 38(2), pp. 213–227.

^9.  Hamm, I. ibid.

The Uluru Statement from the Heart was made at a historic assembly of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples at Uluru in 2017. It addresses the fundamental question of how Indigenous peoples want to be recognised in the Australian Constitution. The answer given is a First Nations ‘Voice’ to Federal Parliament protected by the Constitution, and a subsequent process of agreement-making and truth-telling. This process should be overseen by a Makarrata Commission, from the Yolngu word meaning ‘the coming together after a struggle’. Inspired by the values enshrined in the Statement, Victoria has established such a process through the Yoo-rrook Justice Commission. ‘Yoo-rrook’ is a Wemba Wemba/Wamba Wamba word meaning ‘truth’.

Following 200 pages of at times harrowing detail in which former Labor MP Kate Ellis outlines the extent of the sexist and misogynist behaviour she endured as a member of the Australian Parliament, she asks herself: ‘Is it worth the hard days, the unnecessary crap?’ ‘Yes’, she replies. ‘Every. Single. Second. No question.’

This trade-off for women is a tragedy for Australia’s political culture. Women MPs must balance the opportunities to effect change with the ‘unnecessary crap’. And despite Ellis’s unwarranted confidence, we cannot say with any certainty that things are improving for women in Australian politics.

In 1958, the Australian political scientist A.F. Davies (1924–87) published Australian Democracy: An introduction to the political system, one of the first postwar attempts to combine institutional description with comment on the patterns of political culture. It introduced a provocative assertion: Australians have ‘a characteristic talent for bureaucracy’. Disdaining the myth of Australians as shaped by the initiative and improvisation of our bush heritage (Russel Ward’s The Australian Legend was published in the same year), Davies argued:

this [talent] runs counter not only to the archaic and cherished image of ourselves as ungovernable, if not actually lawless, people, but also to our civics of liberalism which accords to bureaucracy only a small and rather shady place. Being a good bureaucrat is, we feel, a bit like being a good forger. But in practice our gift – to be seen in statu nascendi at any state school sports – is exercised on a massive scale in government, economy and social institutions.

Peter Job, a former East Timor activist, has written a careful, dispassionate account of the stance of Gough Whitlam’s and Malcolm Fraser’s successive governments in relation to Portuguese East Timor. He has consulted a commendably wide range of oral and written sources, interviewing, for example, several retired senior Australian officials formerly engaged in the design and implementation of Timor policy. His story ends in 1983, with Bob Hawke’s election to office. Job should be encouraged to complete his account in the future to acquaint readers with developments up to at least the UN intervention in 1999 that gave Australian diplomacy a new role.

To write of Herbert Vere Evatt (1894–1965) is to venture into a land where opinions are rarely held tentatively. While many aspects of his career have been controversial, his actions during the famous Split of 1955 arouse the most passionate criticism. Evatt is attacked, not only on the political right but frequently from within the Labor Party itself, for his alleged role in causing the catastrophic rupture that kept Labor out of office until 1972.

Evatt is sometimes called ‘mad’, which, if true, would provide extenuating circumstances for poor judgement. Yet the accusation is not only questionable but normally advanced as if derangement were synonymous with venality. Evatt is also dismissed as a cunning opportunist, unburdened by principle. After one discussion with Evatt in the 1950s, Bob Santamaria told his wife that he had ‘encountered the impossible – a man without a soul’ (whatever that means).

Coralie Clarke Rees and Leslie Rees are not remembered among the glamour couples of twentieth-century Australian literary life. Unlike George Johnston and Charmian Clift, Vance and Nettie Palmer, or their friends Darcy Niland and Ruth Park, neither of them wrote novels and they both spread their work across a range of genres. Critics, journalists, travel writers, children’s writers, playwrights, they devoted themselves to supporting the broad artistic culture of Australia rather than claiming its attention. Their lives were spent in juggling their literary interests with the need to make a living at a time when Australian society was even less supportive of writers than it is now. They made compromises to suburban life and the need to care for their two daughters, without ever abandoning their determination to live by the pen.

George Berkeley (1685–1753) proposed a radical solution to the conundrums of modern philosophy. By denying the existence of matter, he dismissed the problem of how we can know a world outside our minds. Only minds and their ideas are real. The problem of understanding how mind and matter interact is dissolved by Berkeley’s immaterialism, and so is the difficulty of explaining how causation works. The source of all that we perceive, he believed, is God. Few philosophers have ever accepted this position. But the brilliance of his arguments for it earned him a place in the Western philosophical canon.

There’s a Judy Horacek cartoon in which a woman tells a friend that she once intended to be the perfect wife, a domestic goddess. When the friend asks, ‘So what happened?’, the woman replies, ‘They taught me to read.’

Many women will relate to this, perhaps including Dale Kent (no relation to this reviewer). The Most I Could Be is the story of her struggle to reconcile her 1950s upbringing – which carried an expectation that she would marry, have children, and disappear into domesticity – with her urgent need to prove herself intellectually in a wider world.

Sweatshop, based in Western Sydney, is a writing and literacy organisation that mentors emerging writers from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds. Racism, their ninth anthology, brings together all thirty-nine writers involved in their three programs – the Sweatshop Writers Group, Sweatshop Women Collective, and Sweatshop Schools Initiative. The section titled ‘Micro Aggressive Fiction’ houses the school students’ work, and the remainder of the anthology includes poetry, fiction, and essays (it can be difficult to distinguish between fiction and non-fiction; the works are not labelled by genre) by emerging writers, though a short story by award-winning poet Sara M. Saleh also appears. This anthology contributes to the recent crop of anti-racist texts aimed at white audiences. Editors Winnie Dunn, Stephen Pham, and Phoebe Grainer write that Racism is for Australians ‘who require an honest reflection of racism that is present and prevalent’. However, unlike other such texts – generally non-fiction works that directly address the issue at hand – anti-racist fiction can have its limitations, frequently risking didacticism.

Two weeks after he announced the reintroduction of conscription in late 1964, Prime Minister Robert Menzies addressed a political rally at Hornsby, in the Liberal heartland of Sydney’s north-west. Menzies received what historian Carolyn Collins described as a ‘rockstar welcome’. However, when he spoke about national service, a group of black-clad women in the audience rose to their feet and covered their heads with black veils, standing silently for several minutes in the face of jeers and boos. They eventually filed out of the hall, handing out anti-conscription pamphlets as they left. Margaret Holmes, who had helped organise the protest, recalled later that it ‘stopped [Menzies] in his tracks’. Organised by the Women’s International League of Peace and Freedom, it was the first women’s protest against conscription in the Vietnam era, but it would not be the last. Weaponising decorous, middle-class femininity would prove to be a potent strategy in the nine long years it took to abolish conscription in Australia.

Studying at the University of Sydney in the late 1960s, Meredith Burgmann and Nadia Wheatley were both living in Women’s College. Burgmann recalls:

Very late one night when I was sitting in my room, struggling with John Donne … I heard a clump clump clump coming along the corridor. Opening my door, I discovered Nadia – wearing a red flannel nightie and gumboots – on her nightly mission to salvage the last of the toast from the kitchenette … our friendship was forged over our protest activity and ensuing arrests.

The Gallipoli campaign has a peculiar fascination for historians of World War I. This new book, by British historian Nicholas A. Lambert, is concerned not so much with the conduct of the campaign as with the reasons for its being launched. The chances for its success were known at the time to be low, so why was this gamble, which cost perhaps 130,000 Allied and Ottoman lives, taken?

Refugee policies around the globe are under strain. As Alexander Betts recognises in the opening pages of The Wealth of Refugees, refugee numbers are increasing due to conflict and political instability in many countries, a situation that will be exacerbated in the future by climate change and the impact of Covid-19. Betts, a political scientist at Oxford University, also notes that populist nationalism has undermined the political willingness of wealthy countries to accept migrants and asylum seekers.

Landholders are cutting, crushing, scraping, spraying, bulldozing, and burning native woodlands and grasslands. Displaced koalas are shot, their bodies dumped in smouldering stacks. Land values double. In 2012, the Turnbull family of Croppa Creek, in north-west New South Wales, bought a property knowing that clearing would be prohibited. Under the direction of patriarch Ian Turnbull, they started clearing before the contracts were signed. They cleared when they were prosecuted, they cleared the areas ordered to be remediated, they cleared as they awaited decision on a second set of charges. They were clearing on the day Turnbull shot and killed government compliance officer Glen Turner. Against this turmoil, Kate Holden forges a sanctuary for contemplation in The Winter Road, which raises questions about our relationships and responsibilities on this continent.

Combining essay with reportage, and drawing on the work of philosophers and historians, Holden’s book transcends true crime. Aside from the prologue, the murder doesn’t appear until the middle pages. Holden alternates between narrative and reflection, piecing together the story of Turnbull’s desperation to create a personal legacy and to seize by illegal means the fortune he thought he was owed, only to cause devastation, splitting his family and shattering the lives of others. The Winter Road, told with stripped-back eloquence, relies on judicious selection of details and dialogue recorded in official documents such as logbooks, police interviews, and court transcripts. Through similar records, as well as the author’s interviews with Glen Turner’s family and former colleagues, we learn about the surveyor turned compliance officer for native vegetation laws.

Clearing became a contentious subject after stronger regulations were introduced in the 1990s. The political will to enforce the laws dissipated. The departments responsible were under-resourced, enforcement was rare, and only the worst cases were prosecuted. Holden’s reflective passages explore the cultural myths and ideologies that shaped these circumstances. The context is the invasion and settlement of inland Australia: the intersection of ideas that justified violence and dispossession and fed an obsession with transforming ecologies into an agrarian ideal. Those who ‘battled the land’ were fêted. A frontier mentality persisted. Private property was absolute.

Although the Turnbulls had only started farming recently, they saw themselves as inheritors of this tradition and of the virtuousness it afforded. They amassed properties worth millions in the southern remnants of the Brigalow Belt near Moree, part of what was once a vast dry woodland forest, stretching into Queensland. Only about five per cent is left. Holden recognises the agency of the native plants, observing their power to regenerate and to shelter and support myriad other living creatures, working the land ‘as surely as farm labourers’. Successive governments have neglected to educate landholders on the science and benefits of retaining native vegetation on their properties, not just for wildlife but for the long-term prosperity of farming.

A minority of landholders quietly continued to clear, although Turnbull told police ‘every farm’ was doing it. The Turnbull family claimed they were being persecuted, yet their belligerent and repeated disregard for the law drew the ire of neighbours, regulators, conservation groups, and senior politicians, who implored the Turnbulls to stop clearing endangered woodland communities. Turnbull is said to have ordered more than one hundred koalas to be shot and burned, pre-empting an ecologist’s headcount. Then he began making threats to kill compliance officers; he claimed to have dug graves on his property.

Structurally, the murder is the black hole at the centre of the book, its weight pulling everything towards it, tearing things apart, throwing the survivors in chaotic trajectories. All light is sucked away in the moment when Turnbull stalks Turner and his colleague Robert Strange around the ute on a lonely rural road, shooting at them for up to forty harrowing minutes. (After the fatal shot to Turner, he let Strange go.)

From prison, Turnbull likened his violence to dropping a bomb that would force political change. Turner’s former colleague Chris Nadolny, on hearing this, called it an act of terrorism. Turnbull had a habit of bullying and blaming others when things went wrong, always seeing himself as the victim. He even blamed Turner for his own murder. ‘Turner has got me in jail,’ he said.

Turnbull died in prison in 2017, before Holden began writing. She uses free indirect discourse, assuming Turnbull’s vernacular to bolster his presence on the page (thus woodlands become ‘bloody scrub’). Readers must stick with him, even though I’d had enough of the man who tells his daughter-in-law, ‘You have disabled children because you have rotten eggs.’ Holden seeks to understand the different positions in the clearing debate; she wants us to comprehend Turnbull as an ordinary person. Many people shared his views and supported his violence. He represents a type: those seething with resentment and victimhood, who believe the system is against them. Identity and privilege are central to the story. Holden might not want to reduce this tale of land and people to a particular moment, but Turnbull could be read alongside the climate deniers who denigrate young women, the white supremacists who plough their cars into pedestrians, the men who say they were ‘driven’ to killing their partners. The story is connected to those who lash out when fearful that they might lose the status and power they have enjoyed over others.

While readers won’t find a metaphor in this careful narrative, Holden writes with more freedom in the reflective sections. Here she can spend half a page tracing a creek on Google Maps, where its meandering ‘wobbles the composure of fencelines’. With intellectual openness and generosity, Holden explores a history of environmental governance, from the ‘decade of environmentalism’ in the 1860s, when settlers and experts were alarmed at the scale of devastation, to questions about our future in the Anthropocene. An idea, she writes, ‘may wriggle under the fence of resolve and, once broken into clear ground, make havoc’. Her sensitive approach honours the loss and pain suffered by people and the brigalow forest.

Holden’s book will bring public attention to an issue that is fraught and ongoing. Clearing rates have soared since regulations were relaxed a few years ago. Australia is notorious for being one of the worst offenders in the world. In The Winter Road, there is no contrived or uplifting answer, but despite the apocalyptic projections of researchers, Holden gestures towards hope. Perhaps lab-grown meat and vegetables will halt the sixth extinction; perhaps regenerative agriculture will allow ecosystems to flourish. So far, both measures are as divisive as clearing. The consumption of those of us in the city is implicated. Refreshingly, Holden admits there is so much we still don’t know.

At the time of the book’s completion, the Turnbull family had not carried out the remediation the courts had ordered. They had not paid damages owed to Glen Turner’s colleague who was with him on that windy road, nor to his widow and two children. All entitlement, no responsibility. The bulldozers continue to roar.

Noongar and Yawuru poet and academic Elfie Shiosaki writes in the introduction to her new poetry collection, Homecoming, that it is the story of four generations of Noongar women of which she is the sixth. The poems are ‘fragments of many stars’ in her ‘grandmothers’ constellations’. Shiosaki ‘tracks her grandmothers’ stars’ to find her ‘bidi home’. The introduction reads as a beautifully crafted prose poem that contextualises the works that follow.

The biographical note to A Thousand Crimson Blooms observes that Eileen Chong’s first book, Burning Rice (2012), is ‘the first single-author collection of poetry by an Asian-Australian to be studied as part of the NSW HSC English syllabus’. Having run many writing workshops for students and adults over the years, Chong takes her pedagogy as seriously as her poetry. It’s no surprise, then, that A Thousand Crimson Blooms, Chong’s fifth collection, is replete with scenes of instruction. In ‘Teacher’, the poet corrects her mother’s pronunciation (‘I say TEAcher, then, I say teacher.  / … I feel like an arsehole’) only to stand corrected by memories of her mother’s gentler tutelage. The collection’s dedicatee, Chong’s grandmother, metes out corporal punishment in ‘Hunger’, but has her own body disciplined in ‘Float’. The poet learns the meaning of ‘thole’ (Scottish for ‘to endure / what is barely bearable’) and after surgery discloses the origins of her nurse’s name. If there is pathos evoked by these anecdotes, much of it has to do with the way knowledge – how to care for the body, where to look for the roots of words – helps the poet overcome the inertia occasioned by violence, whether racial, sexual, or medical.

after Sonia Feldman

When I read there were 170 women
seized from brothels in the Gardenia
district, loaded into police wagons
and crammed into the hull of a ship,
I wonder if they held hands. Or prayed.
If they cried when their lurching cage
docked, and when next morning
they were forced to till the dizzying
fields. I wonder how they felt
when told it was a waste
for pleasure to bear no fruit,
how they must instead keep
the earth fertile with their hands.
I wonder about the small protests:
if they slashed open the mouths
of green coconuts to drink in
the juice in croaking afternoons,
if, while wrenching cassava from
the dirt, they spat jokes about the men
who must be asking for them, if they
sang ballads under their breath
while they worked, if they made
love to each other and did not wait
for the yield.

i.m. Les Murray 1938–2019, after a line by Frigyes Karinthy

Dear god-herd, golden god-horde, Lord 
Protectors of the meek and green-fed:
when we came in from the cold
ten thousand winters back, the terms
of your contract (unsigned since gods
were not yet literate) seemed safely,
fashionably fair trade: a shorter
for a sweeter life, a good life spent
in clover, free from drought, hunger
and the terrorists of steppe and taiga:
cave lions by day, dire wolves by night,
giggling hyenas by random horror.
We knew each monster species
by racing heart except the slowest:
old age, which also plays with its food,
whether left behind the horizon
or lost in the forest, blunt-horned
and toothless and desperately lonely.

Was the fine print also unspoken?
We agreed, sort of, or forgot to say no,
to the repayment terms of your upfront
business investment: the cash-flow
of morning-milk deposits at long-term
fixed rates, but interest only, the capital
mortgaged against our each sole asset,
a debt to be paid in pounds of flesh
on a due date beyond the sum of all fears,
all imaginations. It seemed a lifetime
away, or never, whichever came last,
from this side of the fence, where
the cud of time was chewed as slowly
as childhood, regurgitated each morning,
and chewed again, and swallowed again
through the single stomach of the day,
the four stomachs of the year, until
one sudden day, this day, the different
day, we find ourselves at the gate
of a terrible separation, and what looked
like protection just looks like a racket.

We can walk into a room not knowing.
It doesn’t happen every time.

A white room can be painted to be pure.
I mean, just to show us that it’s clean.

But it doesn’t have to be.
We can walk into a room

not knowing whether,
or when, or even that.

That
can be the hardest room.

Only you will know.
First there is the walking.

The floor, a chair or two.
The posters

of visions
of someone else’s visit

to a room. Take a chair.

Only then the talk begins,
like a reckoning of beads,

like the body measures sweat,
words wrong

as a rainbow that has paled
to a shadow of itself.

There is always an end.
We can stand and walk again.

We can leave the room in silence,
carrying its moment

in and out of days.

Dusk when the people in the trees
stand out against the dark –

but it isn’t dark, only a deep gradation
of the light –

the people in the trees,
crone-like olives,

have been gathering all day,
ravelling, unravelling their hair,

their knotted fingers,
tableaux of maenads, harvesting.

Even on the other side,
the over-underside of the globe,

even here it is not dark but only
a deep gradation of the light.

The eucalypts are people,
dusky-skinned, composed –

they are not people, you know,
though we resemble them,

less stable in our steps,
less able to withstand the wind,

whatever wind we think it is
that tears us from each other.

Our hands are knotted too, our skin
spotted and scarred,

the birds in our brains can learn to sing
and spend their whole lives practising

the change, the measure of light
and deeper light, the spill of stars,

planetary whispers –
what is it? I can barely hear 

Larissa Behrendt is the author of three novels: Home, which won the 2002 David Unaipon Award and the regional Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best First Book; Legacy, which won the 2010 Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for Indigenous Writing; and After Story (2021). She has published numerous books on Indigenous legal issues; her most recent non-fiction book is Finding Eliza: Power and colonial storytelling. She was awarded the 2009 NAIDOC Person of the Year award and 2011 NSW Australian of the Year. She is Distinguished Professor at the Jumbunna Institute at the University of Technology Sydney.

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

The more I travel, the more I appreciate being home. But I often dream of Paris …

An email arrived in my inbox recently with an article from the British newspaper The Times. It was an obituary of John Richards, a former journalist and the man who founded the Apostrophe Protection Society in 2001. This organisation was dedicated to the protection of the apostrophe, ‘a threatened species’, according to Richards. He closed the Society down in 2019; aside from his age at the time (ninety-six), he concluded that ‘the ignorance and laziness present in modern times has won’.

Few punctuation marks arouse such strong emotions as the apostrophe. A quick glance through Google News reveals a number of stories ranging from the outraged (‘Have we murdered the apostrophe?’ from the BBC) to the neutral (‘Apostrophes: are you over- or under-using them? from website StyleBlueprint) to the activist (‘Moving the apostrophe in Mother’s Day’, an article by Ms. that argues that Mothers’ Day would be more inclusive than the current form). My personal favourite was an intriguing headline from the Philadelphia Inquirer from December 2020: ‘Apostrophe anarchy leads to wild speculation over potential Trump pardons.’

In the latter half of this novel, one of its protagonists is viewing a collection of butterflies at the Oxford University Museum of Natural History. This forms part of Jasmine’s holiday with her mother, Della, a tour of famous literary and other notable cultural sites in the United Kingdom. By this stage they have visited Stratford-upon-Avon, Brontë country in Haworth, and Jane Austen’s Bath and Southampton, and have been duly impressed or, in Della’s case, underwhelmed. But now Jasmine can only feel sadness: ‘We take the life of a living thing, hold it to display, because we feel entitled to the knowledge, entitled to the owning, the possessing.’

‘Ern Malley’ – a great literary creation and the occasion of a famous literary hoax – has continued to attract fascinated attention ever since he burst upon the Australian poetry scene more than seventy years ago. But his sister Ethel has attracted little notice, she who set off the whole saga by writing to Max Harris, the young editor of Angry Penguins, asking whether the poems left by her late brother were any good, and signing herself ‘sincerely, Ethel Malley’.

The title character of Laura Elizabeth Woollett’s second novel, The Newcomer, is Paulina Novak, who has arrived on Fairfolk Island after leaving a finance career in Sydney. If she is wanting to make a new start, then she’s mistaken; Paulina’s life seems perpetually sullied by alcoholism, an eating disorder, and a tendency to fall for callous men. Acquaintances say that her head is ‘messy’. Paulina herself remarks: ‘My whole life’s a fuck-up.’

Watching on with growing concern is the young woman’s mother, Judy. The latter spends hours on the phone with her daughter, urging her to eat something or, better still, return home. Judy must listen as her child declares, ‘Mum, I want to die.’

In Two Women and a Poisoning, Alfred Döblin (1878–1957), one of the twentieth century’s greatest fiction writers, brings his other gift – a profound insight into psychological suffering honed by decades of experience as a psychiatrist – to bear on a baffling murder trial in Berlin in March 1923. Like Sigmund Freud’s famous case histories, his account is compelling as both narrative and an analysis of the unconscious inner conflicts of the people involved. Unlike Freud, however, Döblin warns his readers not to expect definitive answers: ‘Who is so conceited as to fancy that he knows the true driving forces behind such a crime?’

Three recent novels by Australian women deal with current and increasingly urgent political questions about female identity and embodiment. They each use the conventions of popular realist fiction to provoke thought about the causes of female disempowerment and the struggle for self-determination. Coincidentally, they are also set, or partially set, in Australian country towns, although their locations are markedly different, and their plots culminate in the revelation of disturbing secrets.

All That I Remember About Dean Cola by Tania Chandler

Scribe, $32.99 pb, 290 pp

All That I Remember About Dean Cola, the third novel by Melbourne-based writer Tania Chandler, uses the tropes of the psychological crime thriller to explore the belatedness of trauma and the moral ambiguities of guilt. Its narrator, Sidney Loukas, diagnosed with schizophrenia, is deeply troubled by the return of repressed memories from her adolescence, focused on an enigmatic young man named Dean Cola. She is also confounded by the state of her marriage. Emotionally and sexually numbed, she begins to suspect her protective, solicitous husband of trying to control her thoughts and actions. From the outset, Sidney’s mind is riven with uncertainties and apparent contradictions about the men in her past and present. Her fractured state of mind is skilfully enacted in the movement between first- and third-person points of view and in repeated, fragmented flashbacks. The evocation of her symptoms – frightening hallucinations, intense panic, claustrophobia – is often visceral and vertiginous. Counterpointing this harrowing intensity is Sidney’s nurturing of a young neighbour, a teenage girl called Aubrey, and her growing sense of resilience and self-worth.

Back in my bookselling days during the early noughties, I spent a grey London autumn in the company of W.B. Yeats. My employers were Maggs Bros., an old Quaker firm and the queen’s booksellers, then based in Mayfair’s Berkeley Square: a venue that sounds glamorous but wasn’t, or at least not for me. The job involved much sitting in an underheated basement, beneath windows that offered a glimpse of passing ankles, cataloguing my way through stacks that bulged with a collection of Irish literature, predominantly by or associated with Yeats, assembled with frugal determination and frankly insane completism over decades by an autodidact bus conductor from South London.

At a sports carnival early in Evelyn Waugh’s novel Decline and Fall, the schnockered schoolmaster Prendergast, unsteadily wielding a starting pistol, shoots poor Lord Tangent in the foot. Thereafter, Tangent barely appears in the narrative, with only a sentence now and then charting his slow medical decline. ‘Everybody else, however, was there except little Lord Tangent, whose foot was being amputated in a local nursing home.’ And later still: ‘It’s maddenin’ Tangent having died just at this time,’ some old sea dog mutters.

Michael Hofmann’s Messing About in Boats is based on his 2019 Clarendon Lectures at Oxford. This series, rather like the Clark Lectures at Cambridge or the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures at Harvard, offers a distinguished literary practitioner the opportunity to address a particular theme in a short sequence of interlinked lectures. Given that the form of oral delivery tends to preclude extensive or detailed critical analysis, the most effective of these sequences usually promote a few challenging ideas in a compact form that lends itself readily to crystallisation. For example, Toni Morrison’s book The Origin of Others (2017), which links racism to constructions of ‘Otherness’, was based on her Norton Lectures at Harvard the previous year.

Hofmann is a well-known poet who currently teaches creative writing and translation at the University of Florida. Though educated in the most traditional English manner at Winchester College, a famous public school, and then at Cambridge, he was born in West Germany; his father was the German novelist Gert Hofmann.

It is well known that Charles Dickens draws an analogy between the novelist as creator and the Creator of the cosmos: ‘I think the business of art is to lay all [the] ground carefully, but with the care that conceals itself – to show, by a backward light, what everything has been working to – but only to suggest, until the fulfilment comes. These are the ways of Providence, of which ways, all art is but a little imitation.’ However, it is not generally recognised that Dickens supported this analogy with a deep knowledge of the Bible. Instead, the thinking that permeates his works is often seen as a facet of secular humanism. John Ruskin, for example, commented that for Dickens Christmas meant no more than ‘mistletoe and pudding – neither resurrection from the dead, nor rising of new stars, nor teaching of wise men, nor shepherds’.

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The aroma of gum leaves

Dear Editor,

Can it really be sixty years since that day when I strolled into the Medical Library of the University of Queensland to see Margaret Waugh, the Librarian, rush out of her office and greet me so excitedly? Admittedly, Margaret usually tempered her Protestant propriety and tact with more than a dash of exuberance. On that visit, she welcomed me with far more than her typical enthusiasm. ‘Have you seen the latest issue of the Bulletin? It contains two astounding sonnets.’ The she rushed to the racks where current journals and periodicals were displayed.

For some reason, I was accustomed to scanning poetic lines vertically, so I recognised the acrostic at once. Plainly, that pair of memorable sonnets, ‘Eloise’ and ‘Abelard’, were intended as a fierce rebuke to the kind of editorial stuffiness that many considered still characterised the poetry in that magazine. Indeed, it was in that very year that Douglas Stewart relinquished his position as Poetry Editor of the Bulletin. The poet and academic, Val Vallis, who published regularly in the ‘Bullie’, once told me that ‘Doug liked our verses to have the aroma of gum leaves’.

Few could have had a more spirited valediction. Frank Packer, publisher of the Bulletin, was rumoured to have attempted to recall as many copies as he could of his magazine and to pulp the rest. Too late! The ‘damage’ was done; or Gwen Harwood’s triumph was assured.

When I next visited Margaret, I was met by a crestfallen Librarian. ‘What’s wrong?’ I asked. ‘Someone has stolen the Bulletin,’ she almost wailed. Thereby, the Library’s collection remains incomplete.

An impossible objective

Dear Editor,

Congratulations on publishing Ilana Snyder’s level-headed account of the recent hostilities between Israel and Palestine (ABR, June 2021). We need more voices able to explain the passions and perceptions of both sides. But Snyder’s hope that a proper reckoning is needed, ‘presumably through two states for two peoples’, clings to what is increasingly an impossible objective. We can argue about the recalcitrance on both sides, but the reality is that the extent of Israeli settlements on the West Bank, and Israel’s refusal to acknowledge Palestinian claims to any part of Jerusalem, have ended prospects for a viable Palestinian state. The reasons for this have been argued cogently by a number of people, most recently Peter Beinart in the Guardian. That the new prime minister of Israel is on record as denying all Palestinian aspirations merely underlines the futility of clinging to a formula that no longer makes sense.

Dear Editor,

I’ve just listened to the podcast about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Ilana Snyder has tried to be as objective as possible. Shew is clearly concerned about the injustices that are taking place in Israel and Palestine. But why she didn’t use expressions such as ‘apartheid’ or ‘ethnic cleansing’? If the expression ‘Palestinian militants’ exists, why not ‘Israeli militants’? Do Gaza’s people consider Hamas’s military wing to be a terrorist organisation?

Presumably, Snyder is walking a fine line that other people don’t have to walk. She said that Israel’s recent bombing campaign in Gaza focused on military targets. This passage comes from ReliefWeb:

Israel has been targeting civilian objects in the Gaza Strip in a manner that exceeds military necessities. In one of the targeted houses, an elderly woman Amira Abdel Fattah Subuh, 58, was killed. Her son, Abd al-Rahman Yusef Subuh, 19, a disabled young man who suffers from cerebral palsy since birth, was also killed.

Later, the Israeli army announced that it had targeted the home of a battalion commander. But field investigations confirm that no one was in the targeted flat during the bombing. The bombing caused the ceiling of the lower apartment to fall, which killed the two citizens and wounded some others.

This incident is an example of Israel’s bombing policy that does not consider the principle of proportionality. Israel targets civilian objects deliberately to inflict damage upon victims and leave them with material losses as a form of revenge and collective punishment, prohibited by the rules of international humanitarian law.

In the end, a spade is recognised for what it is.

Whatever the case, Ilana Snyder is obviously a principled individual, with her heart in the right place.

‘The Split State’

Dear Editor,

You are incorrect to say that ‘as a signatory to the 1951 Refugee Convention, Australia is prohibited from punishing people seeking asylum, regardless of their mode of arrival’ (ABR, June 2021). In fact, the prohibition on the imposition of ‘penalties’ on refugees ‘on account of their illegal entry or presence’ in article 31(1) only applies to ‘refugees who, coming directly from a territory where their life or freedom was threatened in the sense of Article 1, enter or are present in [the contracting states’] territory without authorization’. This excludes the vast majority of asylum seekers in Australia, who came via a third country (like Indonesia) where they were not subject to ‘a well-founded fear of being persecuted’. You are entitled to criticise Australia’s refugee policy, but not to misstate the effect of the 1951 Refugee Convention.

Hessom Razavi replies

Thanks for your comment. I disagree with it on two counts: (1) our government treats all boat arrivals alike, whether they have arrived via a third country or not: e.g. direct arrivals from Vietnam or Sri Lanka are treated the same as people who have come via Indonesia or Malaysia. (2) The government’s interpretation of Article 31 of the Convention does not require people to have come directly from their home country; rather, it requires that third (transit) countries must also have posed threats to their life or freedom. Since many of the countries in our region are not signatories to the Convention, nor to other international human rights treaties, people passing through them are not considered to be ‘safe’ by Australia.

Dear Editor,

Hessom Razavi’s essay ‘The Split State’ is a brilliant and excoriating investigation into the depths of the psychic split in Australia’s response to refugees. Detailed, discerning, informed, this article is the exact remedy needed to counteract the abysmal state of discourse around refugees in this country. The fate of human beings must not be reducible to temporary news fodder and political point-scoring.

Hessom Razavi replies

Thank you for your kind words. As David Corlett suggests, there are many Australians who feel like you do. If only the formula for growing this sort of decency was easy. There’s still much work to be done.

Old companions

Dear Editor,

Thank you, Martin Thomas, for this insightful and thorough reminder of the literary contribution made by Patrick White (ABR, June 2021). Throughout my life, White’s works have been a source of intellectual and, at times, spiritual joy. His novels and short stories are like old friends one doesn’t see often but that remain essential to one’s store of valuable life companions.

An abomination from STC

Dear Editor,

Anton Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard is performed all around the world because it speaks of universals and has as much relevance today as it did more than 100 years ago. Sadly, Eamon Flack’s production of The Cherry Orchard is a travesty (ABR, July 2021). It would be giving this production too high an accolade to call it undergraduate – it’s an abomination. Flack’s production is unrecognisable from the original play, with all its politically correct clichés – added to what effect? The inclusion of ethnically diverse actors did nothing for their cause and nothing for the truth of Chekhov’s play. Write stories for the Sudanese refugees, Indian immigrants, and gay minority groups, but stop using them as convenient tokens. And if you use culturally diverse actors, ensure that their presence serves the text and not some shallow attempt at being inclusive and clever. It is an embarrassment – patronising to actors and audience alike. No one’s story was told by Eaman Flack’s disastrous production, least of all Anton Chekhov’s.

She-Oak and Sunlight

Dear Editor,

What a witty, well researched, and perceptive review of the She-Oak and Sunlight exhibition by A. Frances Johnson. Her critique is thoughtful and incisive. Brava!

Calibre Essay Prize

When ABR reported on the outcome of the 2020 Calibre Essay Prize (won by Yves Rees) in the June–July 2020 issue, we noted a certain elephant in the room. Covid-19, though spreading and mutating, hadn’t been diagnosed when entries closed in January 2020. ‘Next year,’ we predicted, ‘the balance will be upset by something called the pandemic.’ And so it has proved. Among the record field were many essays devoted to the myriad international threats posed by coronavirus.

The climate crisis and endless threats to the environmental continue to exercise Calibristas (as past winner David Hansen has dubbed them). The summer of bushfires that transformed our landscape in 2019–20 figured in dozens of entries. And then, of course, came the almighty explosion on 4 August 2020 that devastated Beirut and shook a nation already teetering on the brink of social and economic collapse.

Theodore Ell, who was living in Beirut at the time, is the winner of the fifteenth Calibre Essay Prize. His essay, ‘Façades of Lebanon’ – reportage at its most visceral – is an attempt to interpret the scale of the disaster and to see its effects in human terms.

The judges – historians Sheila Fitzpatrick and Billy Griffiths, and Peter Rose, Editor of ABR – chose ‘Façades of Lebanon’ from a field of 638 entries from twenty-eight different countries. Here are their comments on Theodore Ell’s essay:

‘Façades of Lebanon’ is a gripping piece of reportage and a powerful meditation on the bonds of community in a time of turmoil and upheaval. It builds slowly, ominously, from the eerie quiet of Beirut during lockdown towards the catastrophic port explosion. The author positions himself as an outsider: a detached observer of crisis and conflict. Yet that façade of detachment is vividly shattered by the end of the essay.

Theodore Ell is an editor, translator, and author of A Voice in the Fire (2015). After working in public service and foreign policy at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, he accompanied his wife in 2018 on a diplomatic posting to Lebanon. His poetry and translations have been published in Australia, Lebanon, Italy, and the United Kingdom. He is an honorary lecturer in literature at the Australian National University.

On learning of his win, Theodore commented:

I am astonished to receive this honour. This turn of events and the joy it has brought were inconceivable when the Beirut explosion struck ... I thank the prize judges for their decision and ABR for its wonderful support. I dedicate the award of this prize to my wife and to our friends from the Lebanon years, for all that we went through together.

Placed second in the competition was Anita Punton’s essay ‘May Day’, a poignant memoir about piecing together her Olympic gymnast father’s life after his death. ‘May Day’ will appear in a later issue.

Here are the eight other shortlisted essays:

• ‘Max Dupain’s dilemmas’ by Helen Ennis
• ‘The Grey Margins of Grief’ by Kerry Greer
• ‘Aria from the Last Act’ by Meredith Jelbart
• ‘“Never ceded or extinguished”: The Australian Sovereignty Debates’ by David Kearns
• ‘Dugongesque’ by Krissy Kneen
• ‘The Way Ahead’ by Judy Rowley
• ‘Remembering the KKK Fifty Years Later’ by Morgan Smith
• ‘Leavings’ by Jessica L. Wilkinson

The judges’ full report is available online.

The Calibre Essay Prize is one of the world’s leading awards for an original essay. We thank ABR Patrons Colin Golvan AM, QC, Peter McLennan, and Mary-Ruth Sindrey for supporting Calibre. We look forward to presenting it for a sixteenth time in 2022 – even if hell freezes over.

Rising Star

Anders Villani is the fourth ABR Rising Star, following Sarah Walker, Alex Tighe, and Declan Fry.

Anders – a PhD Candidate in Creative Writing at Monash University – began writing for ABR in late 2020, soon after taking part in an ABR publishing masterclass at Monash. He holds an MFA from the University of Michigan’s Helen Zell Writers’ Program, where he received the Delbanco Prize for poetry. His first full-length collection, Aril Wire, was released in 2018 by Five Islands Press.

The Rising Stars program – which is funded by the ABR Patrons – is intended to encourage younger writers and critics whose early contributions to ABR have made a deep impression.

Peter Rose commented:

I really can’t think of another young contributor who has made such a distinctive contribution during his first ten months with the magazine – as a poet, a reviewer, and now as co-commissioner of ABR’s poetry. It’s a tremendous vindication of what we set out to achieve in the publishing masterclasses – and a happy extension of our partnership with Monash University.

On being named the 2021 Rising Star, Anders Villani commented:

What began as an ABR masterclass at Monash University has bloomed into perhaps the most enriching partnership yet in my artistic and intellectual life – and now this extraordinary accolade. Poetry has been at the heart of my involvement with the magazine: as a reviewer; as a creative contributor; and, most recently, as assistant poetry editor. In each of these capacities, I have witnessed and benefited from ABR’s invaluable ongoing commitment to poetry in Australia. In a precarious cultural landscape, ABR offers a beacon, as it has for generations. That it has not only survived the pandemic but grown stronger is a testament to its resilience and importance. I could not have wished for a better platform for doing what I love.

Vale Kate Jennings (1948–2021)

Kate Jennings – poet, novelist, essayist, memoirist, anthologist – has died, aged seventy-two. Unusually, her first publication was an anthology – one of the most influential ever published in this country. Mother, I’m Rooted was a collection of contemporary Australian women’s poetry. That year – 1975 – she also published her first poetry collection (there were two in all): Come to Me My Melancholy Baby. Four years later, she moved to New York, where she died on 1 May.

Jennings also published two novels, the most recent one being Moral Hazard (2002), which won the NSW Christina Stead Prize for Fiction in 2003. Reviewing it in our May 2002 issue, Delia Falconer wrote: ‘Jennings has combined the most boysily political of subjects – economics – with the most personal of narratives – the illness and death of a partner – producing a strange, sharp, original book.’

Taking stock

Our new Rising Star is ubiquitous. Anders Villani has just co-edited (with Jessica Phillips and ABR contributor Georgia White) the 2021 edition of Verge, Monash University’s creative writing journal (Monash University Publishing, $19.95 pb, 86 pp).

At a time when so many people have been stranded overseas or have had to pay a king’s ransom to return to Australia, the presiding theme for this issue – Home – is very apposite.

As the editors note in their foreword, the pandemic’s ‘alternation of the rhythms by which we live … carries with it a kind of latitude: a rare opportunity to take stock of experiences we have been too enveloped and swept along by to fully apprehend’.

The submissions, ranging from poetry and prose, capture the diasporic experience of alienation, settler–Indigenous relations, and the moral economy of queuing.