In the allegory of the cave, Plato hypothesised the birth of the philosopher as one who emerged from the darkness of illusion into the light of truth. In the dark days of the Covid-19 pandemic, philosophers are finding a platform, mostly in the press, indicative perhaps that we need an interpretation of what is happening around us beyond that offered by the media and daily conferences. As with Plato’s philosopher, what they have brought back is not necessarily what we wanted to hear, and some have been threatened with pariah-like status for views that sometimes run counter to the prescribed consensus. This was certainly the case with Italian political philosopher Giorgio Agamben.

In early September, the High Court of Australia handed down its decision in Fairfax Media Publications v Voller. The case attracted significant public attention in Australia due to the high profile of the plaintiff. It also attracted not only national but international attention, due to the nature of the central issue: are media outlets liable for the comments posted on their public Facebook pages by third parties?

Dylan Voller came to national prominence through a Four Corners episode, ‘Australia’s Shame’ aired in July 2016. The episode raised disturbing allegations of the mistreatment of young people in the child protection and juvenile detention systems in the Northern Territory. Memorably, it included footage of Voller strapped into a restraining chair, wearing a spit-hood. The outrage caused by the broadcast led the then prime minister, Malcolm Turnbull, to establish a royal commission into the protection and detention of children in the Northern Territory.

In this case, Fairfax, Nationwide News, and the Australian News Channel posted stories on their Facebook pages about Voller. The stories themselves were not defamatory. However, Voller alleged that posts made in response to those stories were defamatory of him. Without engaging in pre-trial correspondence about the posts, Voller commenced proceedings against the media outlets in the Supreme Court of New South Wales.

The parties agreed to have the issue of whether the media outlets were publishers of the third-party Facebook comments determined as a separate question. It is important to understand that, in defamation law, publication is a term of art. It means the communication of the defamatory matter to at least one person other than the plaintiff. It is the communication, not the composition, of the defamatory matter which is the essence of this tort. At the lower levels, the media outlets were found to be publishers.

The issue before the High Court was a narrow one. Had the issue been resolved in the media outlets’ favour, the proceedings would have been dismissed. The decision did not decide whether the comments were defamatory or whether the media outlets might have a defence. They remain to be determined.

Before the High Court, the media outlets argued that they could not be publishers of the third-party comments because publication required an intention to publish. They denied that they could have published the third-party comments because, at the time they were posted on their public Facebook pages, they were unaware of them.

The High Court dismissed the media outlets’ appeal. The majority were clear that, for the purposes of defamation law, publication does not require proof of intention. All that was required was that the defendant voluntarily participated in the dissemination of the defamatory matter. Here, the media outlets were publishers because they established a Facebook page, posted articles, and encouraged and invited third parties to comment. The High Court confirmed that liability for publication is broad and strict.

The case has potential implications for social media users more generally. Defamation law applies to all forms of communication; it is medium-neutral. It obviously has particular application to media outlets because their business is publication in its various forms. However, organisations and even private individuals may be publishers, following Voller.

Whether they are, in a given case, will be a question of fact. Being a publisher is not dependent merely upon having a social media page and posting material, but encouraging or inviting third parties to engage. If a person posts material once every six months, it may be difficult to conclude that they are encouraging or inviting engagement. The nature of the content may also be relevant as a matter of fact. In Voller, there was a clear connection between what was posted and the comments made, as well as the potential risk of defamatory comments being made in response. The situation may be different where the original post is anodyne or where the defamatory comment bears no relationship to the original post.

The decision in Voller may lead media outlets to close comments, to engage in closer moderation of comments, or to be reluctant to post material on social media pages. Other social media users may close comments or be inhibited from posting in the first place. Many organisations and individuals would not have the time and resources to monitor comments.

However, there are some recent reforms to Australia’s defamation laws which mean that the issue in Voller will not arise in quite the same way in the future. First, from 1 July 2021, in every jurisdiction except for the Northern Territory, Tasmania, and Western Australia, a person cannot commence defamation proceedings without having given a concerns notice to the publisher, alerting the publisher to what the person is complaining about and giving the publisher an opportunity to respond. The purpose of this is to encourage potential plaintiffs from resolving their defamation disputes without recourse to litigation. Once a publisher is on notice, the publisher may choose to manage the defamation risk by taking down the content which the person is complaining about. So it is less likely that a person could be held liable as a publisher for content of which they are unaware.

Second, another reform introduced halfway through this year may also be important. Now, a plaintiff in a defamation case will need to prove that what was published actually caused, or was likely to cause, serious harm to reputation. There has been no judicial consideration of what is required for this new element of liability for defamation. The intention behind it, though, is to exclude trivial or marginal defamation cases from the outset. So, if a publisher receives a concerns notice about content they are hosting and they choose to take it down promptly, there may be some harm to reputation but whether it is serious harm may be debatable.

The principles of defamation law developed before the emergence of mass media. They proved to be readily applicable to the mass media technologies which predominated in the twentieth century – newspapers, radio, television – where the steps of content creation, dissemination, and profit were integrated. Internet technologies disaggregate those steps: private users can generate and disseminate content themselves via platforms on a scale previously unimaginable. These technologies challenge the application of basic principles of defamation law, like those relating to publication. Cases like Voller that test how those principles apply to novel and evolving internet technologies are only likely to increase in the future.

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

Because my background is academic (and in English studies), certain disciplinary conventions still find their way into my review writing. In fact, it’s hard for me to think of my reviewing as reviewing rather than as criticism in that more university-bound sense: that is, as having something to do with the art of interpretation. It may help that most of the books I review – works of contemporary poetry and literary criticism – are considered ‘hard’ or at least esoteric, and thus in need of a little explaining. The persona I hear most recognisably in my journalistic prose is that of my former lecturer-self (a good lecture, like a good review, strikes the right balance between granular analysis and makeshift generalisation). I suppose I still think of the primary goal of my reviewing as teaching something about how to read.

Surely it wasn’t meant to be like this. In early September, Prime Minister Scott Morrison was set to attend a lavish ceremony in Washington to mark the seventieth anniversary of the signing of the ANZUS Treaty. On the same trip, he was due to sit down in person for the first time with his US, Indian, and Japanese counterparts, fellow members of the ‘Quadrilateral Security Dialogue’, or ‘Quad’, a gathering primed to be a regional counterweight to China.

Instead, this milestone for the alliance between Australia and the United States occurred as catastrophic scenes in Afghanistan unfolded. After two decades, the United States was pulling out of its longest war, a conflict once dubbed the ‘necessary war’. It ended with the media seemingly sweating as, just before dawn broke, the last US Marine stepped off the tarmac at Harmid Karzai International Airport and disappeared into the belly of a US C-17 transport carrier, headed for home. Meanwhile, the Afghan people are left to an uncertain fate under the rule of a resurgent Taliban.

More than a year ago, I wrote about how those of us interested in language were tracking the many words and expressions being generated by the Covid-19 pandemic. At the time, all of Australia was in iso, and we had all turned to the joys (for some of us) of isobaking or learning to crochet. As the pandemic has dragged on, the language generated by it has changed. The Covidspeak of 2021 reflects our concerns about vaccinations, borders, and the impact of the Delta variant (often shortened to Delta or the Delta). The language of the pandemic has shifted to reflect our increasing frustration with slow vaccination rates, multiple and extended lockdowns and border closures, and government decisions and actions taken around these things.

During the first half of 2021, much of our language focused on the issues of borders and vaccination. Borders – more particularly the continued tough international restrictions in place – led to talk of Fortress Australia. The borders between states have been an issue as never before, with border restrictions, border closures, and border shutdowns. Western Australia’s particularly hard line on letting people in and out of the state has revived talk of Waxit and secession from the rest of Australia.

Vaccination has of course been one of the most discussed phenomena of the year. There has been talk of vaccination rates, our vaccination status, how to tackle vaccine hesitancy and meet vaccination targets, and whether or not we will get vaccine passports. We might refer to ourselves as being vaxxed once we get the jab.

Jab has been a word that many people dislike intensely. ABC language expert Tiger Webb has discussed the reasons why so many people have an aversion to it, as reflected in complaints to the broadcaster. These include the fact that jab is perceived as not being an ‘Australian’ word but rather as ‘imported’, and that jab is a violent metaphor that is off-putting. Nevertheless, jab seems to have won out over alternatives such as shot and injection in our public language; perhaps the violence of the metaphor fits a discourse that often refers to Delta as the enemy.

The slow pace of the vaccine rollout in Australia has generated the memorable term strollout. Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s use of the phrase this is not a race was attacked, as was his reluctance to put in place measures to increase the rate of vaccination – such as vaccination incentives. Social media took up the phrase I don’t hold the syringe (or needle): a play on Morrison’s ‘I don’t hold a hose, mate’ response during the Black Summer bushfires. The phrase is increasingly being used to indicate a refusal to take responsibility for something. Incentives were being offered by some businesses, however, with Hawke’s Brewing offering the very Australian offer of a jab and slab.

The second half of 2021 will be dominated not just by talk of vaccination but by discussion of lockdowns and the attempt to control the spread of the Delta virus, often labelled as a game-changer. The new wave of the pandemic (and we have seen much talk, here and elsewhere, of second waves, third waves, and fourth waves) has had a devastating impact. Thousands of cases have appeared in Sydney with many deaths, and as I write this, there are escalating numbers of cases in Victoria, regional New South Wales, and the Australian Capital Territory.

New South Wales’s initial lockdown measures were criticised as lockdown-lite, a Clayton’s lockdown, or a mockdown. As cases escalated, there was talk elsewhere of the need for a ring of steel around Sydney to stop people moving out of the area. Premier Gladys Berejiklian went on congratulating Team NSW on how well it was doing, though she came under increased pressure to explain the length of time it took to implement stronger lockdown measures. With a move towards hard lockdowns, we have seen implementation of measures such as curfews, mask mandates, and surveillance testing. Single people have had to register their bubble buddies.

Here in the ACT, our Canberra bubble of zero cases was burst on 12 August when we were put into lockdown after a case was identified. The Canberra situation did generate one bit of humour when a press conference by Chief Minister Andrew Barr was televised with the closed caption Ken Behrens instead of Canberrans. This quickly became a meme and a hashtag, with one enterprising Canberran raising money for charity with the sale of Ken Behrens T-shirts.

Australia is moving slowly – and right now it feels very slowly – towards a state of Covid-normal or living with Covid. With some luck, soon many of us will be bi-AZ or bi-Pfi and so max-vaxxed. But there is still a long way to go. We might yet see Covidspeak evolve further.

In 1994, the Afghan mujahideen commander, Abdul Haq, rebuked the United States for forgetting about Afghanistan once the communist-backed government of Mohammad Najibullah had fallen in 1992. He predicted that Washington would rue its neglect: ‘Maybe one day they will have to send in hundreds of thousands of troops,’ he told The New York Times. ‘And if they step in, they will be stuck. We have a British grave in Afghanistan. We have a Soviet grave. And then we will have an American grave.’

While France provided a relative trickle of immigrants – the French in Australia numbered only four thousand at the end of the nineteenth century – its influence in Australia was surprisingly pervasive. Some years ago, an exhibition entitled The French Presence in Victoria 1800–1901 drew together an extraordinary range of materials, including French opera libretti and school textbooks printed here, together with original Marseille tiles and sumptuous fabrics. But Alexis Bergantz’s new book, French Connection, is not concerned with the spread, or penetration, of French goods. Rather, it is a careful examination of the idea of France. It is typical of its verve and elegance that the cover captures this nicely: Fragonard’s frilly beauty swings high at the top, a world away from the bottom-left corner, where Frederick McCubbin’s bushman sits Down on His Luck. (Tom Roberts got it in one: his well-known painting of Bourke Street includes the French tricolor, flapping from a shopfront.)

In late August, it took only a few days for the Taliban to secure control of Kabul in the wake of the final withdrawal of Western troops from Afghanistan. The breakneck speed of the takeover was accompanied by images of mass terror, alongside a profound sense of betrayal. As in the closing days of the Vietnam War in 1975, the international airport quickly became the epicentre of scenes of chaos and collective panic, as thousands rushed onto the tarmac in desperate attempts to board the last planes out of the country. Queues stretched for kilometres outside the country’s only passport office. It is still too early to tell whether the Taliban’s promises of a more ‘inclusive’ government and amnesty for former collaborators of the Western forces will be met. What is certain is that Western governments owe them safe passage, though, from the announcements coming from Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s office in late August, it seems unlikely this will be properly honoured.

Dennis Altman recently published a slice of autobiography, Unrequited Love: Diary of an accidental activist, addressing ‘his long obsession with the United States’. Now, as if to remind us that his training has been in political science, Altman presents us with this lively survey of monarchies old and new, constitutional and absolute, European and Asian. It has its origins in the Economist democracy index, according to which seven of the ten most democratic nations were constitutional monarchies. The list is dominated by the Scandinavian kingdoms, with Norway at the top, and former dominions of the British Empire, with Australia just scraping into the list at equal ninth with the Netherlands. As a committed republican, Altman was set thinking by this apparent alliance of monarchy and democracy.

Barry Jones is a proud member of the Awkward Squad, one who follows his own convictions rather than the exigencies of day-to-day government. He confesses that in Parliament, ‘I was always aiming for objectives that were seen as beyond the reach of conventional politics’. The memo about ‘the art of the possible’ clearly never reached Jones’s desk. His time as a minister between 1983 and 1990 was a strain for both him and the then prime minister, Bob Hawke. Jones recounts with some glee that Hawke once referred to him as ‘Barry Fucking Jones’.

What Is to Be Done is a sequel of sorts to Jones’s Sleepers, Wake!: Technology and the future of work (1982) which deservedly won praise from around the world (as he tells us here in some detail). That work alerted readers to the looming post-industrial society (in 1982, sixteen and a half per cent of the workforce were employed in manufacturing; by 2020 that proportion had fallen to seven per cent). It was prescient about the myriad changes that information technology would bring about in society.

Contemporary Australian parliamentarians tend to be focused firmly on the present. Speechwriters may liberally sprinkle the speeches of politicians with references to a political party’s golden past, but an MP’s sincerest interest in history often emerges when he or she gets around to publishing a memoir of their time in office. A politician’s autobiography is an exercise that encourages selective, rather than frank, reflection on how history will portray them, their enemies and friends. Some politicians, thankfully, embrace a broader, less self-interested view of the importance of history. Labor Opposition frontbencher Chris Bowen is the latest serving politician to display a commendable fascination with historical research. His new book tells the stories of six relatively forgotten figures who made a strong contribution to the Australian Labor Party.

Aunty Ronnie is a Kurnai and Gunditjmara woman. She is also a mother of three, a grandmother of two, and one of Australia’s most underrated comedians. Black and Blue, her autobiography, is an enthralling book set primarily in three places: Bung Yarnda, Morwell (Black), and the Queensland Police Service (Blue), where Aunty Ronnie served as a member for ten years. The title is a play on the old saying ‘black and blue’, which commonly refers to someone covered in bruises.

Black and Blue is a story about family and the struggles of a single parent, survival, and colonialism, as well as the process of truth-telling from a survivor of family violence who is also an undercover hero on the frontier of modern-day colonial brutality in Queensland.

In the sections set in Bung Yarnda, the book focuses on Aunty Ronnie’s father, Uncle John. The depiction of the love and support between these two is one of the most endearing parts of this story. Bung Yarnda means ‘Camp fresh water’ in GunnaiKurnai. It is a place known to many as Lake Tyers Aboriginal Trust, formerly a mission where extreme ethnic cleansing occurred through assimilation. Our people weren’t allowed to speak our language and had to live on mission rations. Today, some have described Bung Yarnda as one the poorest postcodes in Victoria. However, it is also my home, as I am a GunnaiKurnai and Gunditjmara woman from the same place as Aunty Ronnie. An outsider (a white mission manager) once described Bung Yarnda to me as a ‘ghetto’, but it is one of the most beautiful places on earth. Despite the violent colonial history that Aunty Ronnie describes in Black and Blue, we were raised with a strong sense of belonging and culture.

Morwell is a town nestled in the smoky and polluted Latrobe Valley, at the heart of the vast open-cut brown coal mines and power stations. It is the central part of GunnaiKurnai country, 150 kilometres east of Melbourne and about 100 kilometres from the site of the notorious Warrigal Creek Massacre. It is also home to a tight-knit Aboriginal community. Many of the families in Morwell have connections with the mob on Bung Yarnda. Aside from those that take place in the sections on the police force, some of the book’s darkest moments occur in Morwell.

Throughout Black and Blue, Aunty Ronnie takes us into the inner workings of the Queensland Police Service (QPS). Most Indigenous people are aware of the QPS’s treatment of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. Their history speaks for itself with incidents such as the Pinkenba six, the 2004 Palm Island death in custody, the death of a dancer, and many more.

Aunty Ronnie shares parts of our history via the act of truth-telling, which is particularly important in a time of truth and reconciliation. This book unveils the hidden and often silenced forms of colonial violence inflicted on many living in Australia. We are given firsthand insight into how police reinforce surveillance of the Aboriginal community – even rewarding the off-duty policing of civilians. This is why many Indigenous peoples have a fear and distrust of police officers, off or on duty. We also get an insight into ‘ethical standards’, with Ronnie outlining how internal investigations into misconduct are conducted by fellow law enforcement, even friends within the police force. Here she describes how such processes are mismanaged:

These occurrences were common, but no complaints were ever made. White cops know they can pretty much get by with anything and they do ... I often hated being a cop and I hated them even more.

While reading Black and Blue, I was taken aback by how casually disengaged the police force were from things like surveillance, addiction, and police misconduct. Aunty Ronnie touches on the infamous 2004 Palm Island case, where an Aboriginal man died in custody; a police officer was subsequently acquitted of his manslaughter. Mr Doomadgee was picked up by police for being drunk in a public place and died in police custody shortly after. His injuries were said to be akin to those found in plane crashes. During this time, QPS members sold wrist bands to raise funds for the accused, which they wore openly.

These white cops made it unbearable for me when the Palm Island riots were happening … they made racist comments about Aboriginal people in earshot of me and wore wrist bands in support of the police officer who’d been charged with the death in custody.

Aunty Ronnie tells her tale of how, during her time in Queensland as a battling mum in a single-income family, she had to lean on the community around her for support. There were many occasions when Aunty Ronnie had to borrow money to get by, and Christmas was a particularly difficult time for her.

As I made my way through, I found myself laughing and crying on almost every page. Aunty Ronnie gives her readers permission to release their emotions with laughter, and it is a healing experience: a little saving grace, at times like an awkward laugh at a funeral. However, Ronnie’s comic tone dips in ‘Blue’, the second part of the book. Perhaps this is because this part of her life was particularly traumatic, or because it is difficult to laugh at policing.

Black and Blue is a beautiful story of survival and family, and the everyday moments feel familiar. The writer reveals the often untold truths of today’s Australia. The book confronts the actions of the Queensland Police Service, and is a whirlwind ride from country Victoria to Far North Queensland, as we bear witness to Aunty Ronnie’s story. It left me wondering what accountability looks like for Australia in these modern times.

By any measure, Amartya Sen’s academic career has been a glittering one. A professor of economics at Harvard University for more than three decades, Sen has also held appointments at Cambridge University, Oxford University, the Delhi School of Economics, and Jadavpur University. In 1998, he was awarded a Nobel Prize for his contribution to welfare economics, including work on social choice, welfare measurement, and poverty. The same year, he was appointed as the Master of Trinity College, Cambridge (the first Asian head of an Oxbridge college). He has also written extensively on economics, philosophy, and Indian society and culture.

Constantin Brâncuşi famously said that making a work of art is not in itself a difficult thing: the hard part is putting oneself in the necessary state of mind. Eleanor Clayton’s new biography of English sculptor Barbara Hepworth is in its own way a celebration of just how devoted Hepworth was to maintaining that elusive state of mind to which Brâncuşi referred. Unlike Sally Festing’s Hepworth biography, A Life of Forms (1995), Clayton eschews any attempt to narrate or analyse Hepworth’s private feelings or emotional make-up. Instead she narrows her focus most austerely to the practice of the working sculptor, her aesthetic philosophies, and the compelling yet subtle variations of her output.

Born in 1903, Hepworth belongs – with the likes of Alexander Scriabin, the later Yeats, and Piet Mondrian – to that school of metaphysical modernism shaped as much by the spiritual experimentalism of the era as by political or technological concerns. Brought up by Christian Scientist parents in Yorkshire, where her father was a county surveyor, she valued thought over materiality, even as she spent her life wrestling with the expressive possibilities of the supreme materials of wood and stone. For Mondrian, who became friends with Hepworth in the early 1930s, an immersion in Theosophy triggered the dramatic shift from his figurative and rather ultra-Dutch early work to the primary-colour grids that ultimately became a signature of modernist art and design. In Hepworth’s case, however, an extreme sensitivity to the given iconographies of the geological landscape consumed her early, resulting in a lifelong absorption in the dialogue between spirit and matter, and a body of work that continually inhabited the liminal zone between abstraction and the figure.

It is a strength of Clayton’s book that the progression of Hepworth’s sculpture through the decades comes across as an extended metaphor for this acute sense she had of always living in poetic relation to geophysical elements. Well before her celebrated move to St Ives on the Cornish coast in the late 1930s, Hepworth was already grappling with the possibilities of shaping these material elements into three-dimensional similes for human existence. Wood and stone, and more often than not white marble, became her aesthetic guides. It was out of this sense that she shaped a version of the human being as a part of, rather than as adjunct to, life on earth.

Hepworth’s rate of production is legendary, and it is remarkable to think of all the decades she spent grappling with tonnage and heft in her various coastal studios. There is no doubt the physical demands of her work required a ruthless and relentless mode of application, as well as strong forearms. Indeed, it was only in those initial days at St Ives, when she was looking after the triplets she had with her second husband, the painter Ben Nicholson, that she took anything that might have resembled a pause from her art. With Nicholson always nicking off to London, Hepworth most certainly had her hands full with ‘running a nursery school, double-cropping a tiny garden for food, and trying to feed and protect the children’. She managed some brief drawings at night, but momentarily the chisel, the lathe, and the hammers lay still. Even so, she described the coming of the babies as a great boon to her creative life, marvelling at how ‘all the forms flew quickly into their right places in the first carving I did after SRS were born’. SRS was her initialism for the triplets Simon, Rachel, and Sarah, a shorthand that, in its own way, reflects the pressures she was under.

It is implied in the mode of Clayton’s account that Hepworth’s reputation for emotional austerity was, in the epic scheme of her achievement, a surface issue only. That she channelled into her work a passionate love of nature and a fascination with the gravitational realities of existence is self-evident here. As such, Clayton’s decision to demonstrate how the art was the life does the Hepworth oeuvre a great service, decluttering it from preoccupations with personality and second-hand gossip. The carefully calibrated interplay between text and image throughout the volume also serves this cause. The rhythm of text and illustration is wonderfully managed, enabling superbly printed visual examples on sturdy paper stock to clarify much of what is philosophically and aesthetically engaging in the text. For instance, the sculptor’s use of multiple tautly strung fishing lines in her sculptures is augmented by Hepworth’s own description of how ‘the strings were the tension I felt between myself and the sea, the wind or the hills’. Perfectly positioned reproductions of works such as Sculpture with Colour (Deep Blue and Red) and Hepworth’s crystalline Drawings for Sculpture also clarify how her remarkable technical facility was all in the service of a strikingly biomorphic imagination.

Hepworth’s signature mid-century work distilled a blend of the Cornish sea climate and an intuited inheritance of Mediterranean conditions of geology and light. Back in the 1920s, she had been part of the turning away from casting in bronze in favour of direct carving into wood or stone, a shift pioneered by Brâncuşi and perfectly in step with Western art’s spiritual and technological crises. But equally, as the years went by and Hepworth pursued the creation of more exact material equivalences for her intuitive sense of organic scale, she created many monumental sculptures in bronze, such as the famous Winged Figure of 1963, commissioned for the John Lewis Department Store on Oxford Street, London.

Hepworth died in dramatic fashion in 1975, alone in a fire in her studio in St Ives at the age of seventy-two. The welcome reinvestigations of modernism that have occurred in this century, particularly in terms of how abstraction and experimentalism can help elucidate the cultural causes and implications of the ecological crisis, have seen her relevance increase after the neglect she suffered in the years after her death. Added to these neo-modernist layers of the Anthropocene comes the remarkable sense of Hepworth as a feminine hero of unsentimental discipline and profound insight. Naturally enough she resisted categorisation of any kind, once stating that, although she hoped her work would always be constructive, ‘I don’t want to be called “Contructivist”, any more than “Nicholson”.’ Likewise, and in keeping with her self-effacing style, Hepworth made light of what she was up against as a woman in the male hegemony of twentieth-century British art. A salient point to be taken from this is that she saw her art in a more genuinely transcendent light, a perspective perhaps best exemplified in a letter she wrote to the art critic E.H. Ramsden in 1943: ‘I think there’s only one standard of sculpture, painting, writing, music,’ Hepworth wrote. ‘I hate female or male work. The only equilibrium seems to be the fusion of strength and tenderness.’

Tongerlongeter was surely one of Australia’s toughest military leaders. Henry Reynolds and Nicholas Clements expressly narrate his story to affirm the place of the Frontier Wars in the Anzac pantheon. Reflexive conservative responses to such arguments – that Anzac Day commemorates only those who served in the Australian military – are flawed and outdated. The Tasmanian frontier is one of Australia’s best-documented cases of violent operations against Aboriginal people. In 1828, Governor George Arthur, unable to gain control over the ‘lamentable and protracted warfare’, issued a Demarcation Proclamation later enforced by the formation of Black Lines, military cordons stretching several hundred kilometres across southern and central Tasmania to secure the grasslands demanded by white settlers. Despite the efforts of Australia’s culture war protagonists led by Keith Windschuttle and Quadrant magazine, Tasmania’s Black Lines remain infamous in Australian history, with revisionist work emphasising the military planning, enormous cost, and extensive civilian involvement owing to Arthur’s declaration of a levée en masse, a form of conscription, to support the military operations. Comprising more than 2,200 soldiers and settlers, these army cordons remained ‘the largest domestic military offensive ever mounted on Australian soil’. Despite the forces arrayed against him, Tongerlongeter and his compatriots passed through the Black Lines with comparative ease in 1830.

This book hit a nerve. It’s not that Terri Janke sets out to confront her readers; if anything, she is at pains to convey goodwill. Janke, who is of Meriam and Wuthathi heritage, writes to build bridges and, above all, to give useful advice. But beneath this is a profound challenge for those who write and create: that is, to rethink how we know.

True Tracks is a guidebook for both the Indigenous and especially non-Indigenous writer, curator, educator, or researcher. It’s about finding better ways to engage with Indigenous knowledges, ways that uplift Indigenous peoples.

‘For music is greater than our selves’
Göran Sonnevi, Mozart’s Third Brain

It’s our runaway imaginings that seduce us
away from the meanwhiler pleasures:
even as we cross each i, dot every t,
we calibrate our fantasies like rare treasures,
false memory-to-be. Our uses

of chronometry are genius, we can pedigree
our past, while Fate sits there gloating;
we snap screenshots of desire, safely saved
to hardened drives for storage, for uploading:
each temptation like a tune, the fee

exonerably nominal – so we stay behaved
by no benefit of doubt, every song
reminds us song’s not all: our selves hum,
sounder than any music. Yet we long
for a history more remote than real, shaved

from the present it was doomed to become,
future it couldn’t be – World was more serious
in black & white, just take the wartime
movietones, massed marches, those imperious
harangues, infected streets: the thrum

of a newsreel while we drowned in dark, the mime
of marionettes at century’s turn. That’s when
it can hit us, from some planet within, & fuses
briefly with the chyron of our days; then
is gone – supplanted by the next seductive rhyme.

Before you could say Jack Robinson, I was posting
a letter in the box that looks like a lean-to
at the crepuscular end of the mind. The fire-fangled glow
from the South kept sending small birds into the air
until they capitulated as an augury of burnt offerings.
Each wife, a postmistress, you pursued your loveless
schemes through the endpapers of summer while
I played the craftsman maintaining a constant foliage.
We shared an inborn contrariness. Plain sense
is a pedant that demands the sensual offsets of marriage
and mining for, in the green days, we had enjoyed
an abundance of eel-sleek phrases and gentian skies
to profit underneath. Now the body is mere receptacle
and the modernist label returns psalm to sender.
An anatomy of systematic thinking once tissued
skin and tendon, each logician once looked for the light
of human song. Now I replicate bronze décor
and plump feathers that fail to shine. Ballarat is
on borrowed epic, Queenscliff hands out support
in sets of non-adhesive stamps. A flight of parakeets
evades memory, mnemonic perforations to contemplate:
everything was gone now, lost in a blistering haze.

‘I just want you to feel free, I said in anger disguised as compassion, compassion disguised as anger.’ These are Maggie Nelson’s words to her partner, artist Harry Dodge, as the two negotiate the shapes of love, family, and gender. These include Harry’s gender fluidity (‘I’m not on my way anywhere, Harry sometimes tells inquirers’), children, and marriage, which they ‘kill ... (unforgivable). Or reinforce ... (unforgivable)’ when they rush to wed ahead of the Proposition 8 legislation that, for a time, eliminated same-sex marriage in California.

Olivia Laing describes her latest book, Everybody: A book about freedom, as one about ‘bodies in peril and bodies as a force for change’. I would describe Everybody as a biographical project, about people whose work engaged with the ideas of bodies and freedom in the twentieth century. This might seem like a subtle difference, but it’s an important one: had Laing conceptualised and framed the book in the latter way, I think Everybody would be a less frustrating read. As it stands, Laing’s biographical writing, while insightful and rigorously researched, ends up feeling like an (admittedly deft) avoidance tactic; Everybody sets out to be a book that takes a hard and uncomfortable look at the topic of bodies and their roles in the pursuit and denial of freedom, but it doesn’t quite dare to do so directly. It ends up being a book about people who have.

In her novel Frankissstein (2019) – a reimagining of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) that embraces robotics, artificial intelligence (AI), and transhumanism – Jeanette Winterson writes, ‘The monster once made cannot be unmade. What will happen to the world has begun.’  This observation might have served as an epigraph for her new book, 12 Bytes. Comprising twelve essays that ruminate on the future of AI and ‘Big Tech’, 12 Bytes contends that looming technological advances will demand not only resistance to the prejudices and inequalities endemic in our current social order, but also a reconsideration of what it means to be human: ‘In the next decade … the internet of things will start the forced evolution and gradual dissolution of Homo sapiens as we know it.’

The proliferation of trauma writing in the past few years is a double-edged sword. While giving public voice to subjects once relegated to the dark lessens stigma and creates agency, there is almost an expectation for women writers to reveal or perform their trauma, as well as a risk of exploitation and retraumatisation.

In 2018, Australian-born, London-based journalist and writer Lucia Osborne-Crowley penned an essay called ‘I Choose Elena’. It detailed the writer’s violent rape at the age of fifteen, which set off a chain reaction within her body and mind, culminating in ongoing chronic illness. In 2019, the essay was expanded into a short book of the same name, a meditation on the ways in which institutions systemically fail survivors, the physical manifestations of trauma, and the healing power of literature.

Rachel Swart is in the final decline of a terminal cancer when she extracts a promise from her husband, Manie: he agrees to give their maid Salome the deed to the Lombard Place, a small house on the family’s farm. It is an act of recognition. Salome has cared for her, has mopped up ‘blood and shit and pus and piss’, doing the jobs Rachel’s family found ‘too dirty or too intimate’. It is 1986 in South Africa, and already the idea of giving Salome the land on which she lives can’t help but invoke the paranoid spectre of widescale repatriation.

Like Maria in Damon Galgut’s The Good Doctor (2003), the name Salome is burdened by the misplaced weight of Western culture. For hers is not a demand for upheaval – John the Baptist’s head – but a disquieting pull towards the promise of her own place; a promise that is cast aside at every opportunity by Manie and two of his children. The only one committed to upholding Rachel’s wish is her youngest daughter, Amor, who witnessed the deathbed bequest unnoticed: ‘They didn’t see me, I was like a black woman to them.’

Amor’s disempowerment, like Salome’s, allows her behind closed doors, but never comfortably. Her family is unnerved by her strangeness. As a child, she was struck by lightning while out on a koppie, an outcrop on the flat dry veld. It scorched her feet and felled a toe, an absence that ties her to the farm by cosmic joke. The farm itself is a bit of a joke too: ‘one horse and a few cows’. Yet it remains at the centre of The Promise, with Galgut offering this place of diminishing worth as a sardonic addendum to the tradition of the farm novel, so long a staple of white South African literature.

The tradition encompasses the idealised plaasroman of Afrikaans alongside antipastoral novels like Olive Schreiner’s The Story of an African Farm (1883). Here on this solitary koppie, as an early review of Schreiner noted, ‘there come up for solution one after another the simple questions of human nature and human action’. In the first decades after the end of apartheid, the farm novel underwent perhaps its greatest upheaval as J.M Coetzee’s Disgrace (1999) and Marlene van Niekerk’s Agaat (2004) fundamentally unsettled the genre’s governing motif of domestication, challenging in the process the idea that human nature and action could be contained by the pastoral mode. And yet, in these two novels, the farm still acts as a site of generative connection between people broken by South Africa.

The Promise arrives at a time when the farm novel, having moved from pastoral epic to family tragedy, teeters on the brink of farce. But like the geological layers of the land itself, Galgut’s novel evidences in some vestigial form what has come before. If the farm in Schreiner’s novel was a ‘microcosm of colonial South Africa’, as Coetzee has labelled it, so is the Swart farm. It too represents a close-minded society that ‘drives out those of its number who seek the great white bird Truth’. The difference is that, with the progress of history, the isolated farm is no longer a world unto itself, no longer the model for the society around it.

As in Disgrace and Agaat, the Swart family’s delusions of self-sufficiency are pierced by illness and crime. Those pushed from the farm (Amor and, to a lesser extent, her siblings) are drawn back to bury their dead. Spaced at roughly ten-year intervals, a set of funerals provides both a neat structure for the book and a rough gauge with which to measure the promise of the New South Africa. Behind the burials, the country’s history sweeps from the 1986 state of emergency to Thabo Mbeki’s inauguration, drawing into view the AIDS crisis, the World Cup, rolling power cuts, and Jacob Zuma’s resignation in 2018.

This desire to contain everything is the source of the book’s wit. The typical farm novel’s symbolic reach allows much to be left unsaid. Not so with Galgut’s narrator, who fills the silences, shifting promiscuously in and out of the consciousnesses of the family and a host of ancillary characters with high modernist brio (often in the same sentence). He argues with them, teases them, watches them bathe and shit. He tells us what they think, even apologising when he ‘slips’ and refers to Salome’s house, ‘beg your pardon, the Lombard place’. Taking stock of the farmhouse during Rachel’s funeral, his omniscience rises to heights of glorious bathos:

The telephone has rung eighteen times, the doorbell twice … Twenty-two cups of tea, six mugs of coffee, three glasses of cool drink and six brandy-and-Cokes have been consumed. The three toilets downstairs, unused to such traffic, have between them flushed twenty-seven times, carrying away nine point eight litres of urine, five point two litres of shit, one stomachful of regurgitated food and five millilitres of sperm.

Amassing the facts of experience can’t really tell a life. Galgut knows this; the sum of the list signals that there are things that escape the novel’s comprehension.

Comprehension has two interlinked meanings in The Promise: understanding and inclusion. Both falter when it comes to Salome and her son Lukas. Galgut’s attempts to enter their thoughts are tentative, subjunctive. We finally arrive at a silence. In this self-satirising and disturbingly beautiful novel, we see why farms are peripheral in the work of Zakes Mda and not central to the politics of land as they are across the continent in the novels of Chinua Achebe and Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o.

The tragedy of Galgut’s novel is that not everyone can fit in – not when the only way to keep promises is to build new layers on the state, the land and its literature without digging for new foundations.

Nicolas Rothwell is perhaps best known as a critic of art and culture for The Australian, though he has also published several non-fiction books, one of which, Quicksilver, won a Prime Minister’s Literary Award in 2016. Red Heaven, subtitled a ‘fiction’, is only the second of Rothwell’s books not to be classified as non-fiction. Always straddling the boundary between different genres, Rothwell has cited in Quicksilver Les Murray’s similar defence of generic hybridity in Australia: the novel ‘may not be the best or only form which extended prose fiction here requires’. Working from northern Australia, and intent upon exploring how landscape interacts obliquely with established social customs, Rothwell, in his narratives, consistently fractures traditional fictional forms so as to realign the conventional world of human society with more enigmatic temporal and spatial dimensions.

By the time I received my heftily embargoed galley of Sally Rooney’s new novel, Beautiful World, Where Are You, it would have been more lucrative to auction the book online than review it, such is the wild demand for Rooney’s fiction, the monetised eagerness. I’ve ruined my chances for unethical riches with my margin scrawls, dog-ears, and penchant for spine-breaking (reading, after all, is a contact sport). But it is telling that the question I’ve been asked most about the novel, other than whether I intended to sell my advance copy, has not been What do you think? but Are you on Team Rooney? Popularity of any sort inevitably rouses a backlash, and it can be constructive – often revelatory – to parse the stories that capture our collective imagination. But Sally Rooney (the literary product, not the person) has become a kind of shibboleth. To profess a grand love or distaste for her novels, or even – perhaps especially – a lofty indifference to them, has become a declaration of pop-cultural allegiance, a statement that’s almost entirely about ourselves. It’s a fate that too often befalls precocious, art-making women: they’re turned into straw men and set publicly alight.

‘The cult of love in the West is an aspect of the cult of suffering – suffering as the supreme token of seriousness (the paradigm of the Cross).’
Susan Sontag, ‘The Artist as Exemplary Sufferer’

 

‘Don’t be afraid to catch feels.’
Calvin Harris, ‘Feels’

Back when it was all beginning, when everything was new and makeshift and oddly tentative; when the sounds of Faye Wong echoed through Tower Records; when the media could channel a message via magazines bearing Fiona Apple’s face, and television sets, those ancient conduits, mainlined Friends and Seinfeld and NYPD Blue; when everything was tuned to the suffering channel, The X-Files was concluding its third season, and Jackie Chan was launching his fourth Police Story; when all of this seemed obscurely relevant, three men – Jonathan Franzen, David Foster Wallace, and Mark Leyner – sat down to talk with Charlie Rose. Their topic? The future of fiction.

Franzen feared the worst. The question that troubled him was how – or indeed if – fiction could compete with the screen. Franzen’s despair about the American novel had been canvassed the previous month in Harper’s. NYPD Blue had outflanked his ability to write scenes at precinct houses; to infiltrate the seamless mass of consumer entertainment with fiction. David Foster Wallace was agnostic, calling television an ‘artistic snorkel to the universe’, while allying some scepticism to his affections. Mark Leyner avowed that he did not consider the question much at all.

Australian novelist and short story writer Jennifer Down has been rightly acclaimed, with an impressive list of awards to her name, including the Jolley Prize in 2014. Her new novel, Bodies of Light, is both much more ambitious in scope than her first and an altogether more harrowing read. Spanning the years from 1975 to 2018, and traversing many different locations in Australia, New Zealand, and America, the novel confronts us with child sexual abuse, a suicide attempt, a series of fractured relationships, allegations of infanticide, recurring social alienation, and a serious drug addiction. But it is also, and mercifully, a story of a woman’s remarkable resilience, the possibility of human kindness, and the necessity of hope. Bodies of Light thus has affinities with the feminist Bildungsroman popularised in the 1960s and 1970s; a genre that championed a belief in productive self-fashioning by women in the face of systemic misogynistic oppression.

The novel begins with this concept of reinvention as both a literal fact and a striking metaphor. Its central character, Maggie Sullivan, is ‘spooked’ when a man from her past asks if she knows the fate of a young woman to whom she bears a striking resemblance, and who disappeared some twenty years earlier. What follows is Maggie’s narration of her struggle to escape from and even transform her deeply troubled life. We learn that as an orphaned child of heroin addicts, she was shunted into often brutal residential homes, and how, as an adolescent, her desire for friendship and purpose was often painfully thwarted. Most grievous of all, perhaps, in her adult life, were false accusations of infanticide which impelled her to fake her death, flee the country and create an entirely new identity. In the process, this disturbing narrative of repeated suffering and flight raises urgent political and existential questions about female identity. Who am I? Who am I permitted to become, and where, if at all, am I permitted to belong? How can I endure when happiness eludes me; when it might even be undeserved?

Despite her profoundly damaged life, Maggie has a genuine capacity for empathy. As a young child in ‘care’, she is sensitive to the plight of other wards of the state, observing ‘the pictures and magazine pages tacked above their beds in flimsy affirmation of territory’. As an older child, she arranges secret meetings between a foster ‘sister’ and the girl’s mother, only to be punished for breaking the rules. She retains this concern for others throughout her adult life, keenly aware that cherished partners have been hurt by her refusal of intimate disclosure. It’s a complex portrait that makes Maggie’s kindness seem entirely credible, free of sentimentality or fatuous clichés about the ennobling effects of deprivation.

Bodies of Light can also be read in the contexts of global investigations into the institutionalised sexual abuse of children and highly publicised miscarriages of justice for women found guilty of multiple infanticide. In both contexts, Maggie – and by extension countless people in the real world – is powerless to assert her rights. Raped by different men as a child, she quickly learns that men in authority are regarded, and regard themselves, as ‘untouchable’. Later, numbed by depression after the deaths of her three babies, she is reduced to a mute object of suspicion. As Maggie’s father-in-law ominously observes: ‘You don’t feel things as much as other people, do you?’ This chilling moment recalls the widespread public perception of Lindy Chamberlain’s affectless presence at her trial as undeniable proof of her guilt. Later, transcripts of interviews reveal the mounting suspicions of police and their ignorance of Maggie’s past and her turbulent inner life.

Bodies of Light is also a psychologically astute blend of the pared-back language of abuse and repression, and resonant metaphors of despair, or, less frequently, serenity or joy. The novel also creates a vivid sense of physical place, as well as a detailed picture of different cultures and periods of history. Given its epic scope, however, and its use of many different locations and characters, it’s not surprising that the plot sometimes falters. Maggie’s intellectual aspirations as an adolescent, for example, tend to be stated rather than imaginatively realised. The multiple infanticides, though reflecting events in the real world, feel excessive in a plot already crowded with traumatic events. Maggie’s sudden move to America with a new boyfriend has the air of a narrative expedient to propel the plot. Towards the end of the novel, her descent into a humiliating drug addiction feels tacked on, as if rounding out a checklist of problems experienced by the outcast and vulnerable. This is not an issue of implausibility; rather, it’s to suggest that the sheer number of bleak experiences to which Maggie is subjected can result in a lack of subtlety.

Bodies of Light is at its most thought-provoking and emotionally engaging when it pauses in the rush of events to represent the intensity of Maggie’s psychological and bodily experiences. She is both the little girl who feels buried alive by her rapist, and the young woman who, taken by her lover into the darkness of a forest, is transported by the ‘incandescent’ moon and ‘the spine-like outline of ferns, the solemn roadside markers, everything newly consecrated with silvery quiet’. This longing for connection with the human and natural world will sustain Maggie throughout her life, culminating in a conclusion that feels entirely earned, as well as intelligently, tenderly restrained.

Readers of Colson Whitehead’s two recent Pulitzer Prize-winning novels, The Underground Railroad (2016) and The Nickel Boys (2019) – both historical literary novels focused on the Underground Railroad and the Jim Crow era, respectively – may be surprised by his eighth book, Harlem Shuffle, a crime novel written in the swaggering voice of a Quentin Tarantino character. Whitehead has always drawn on elements of genre fiction. His début, The Intuitionist (1999), borrows from sci-fi and speculative fiction to tell the story of Lila Mae Watson, America’s first Black female elevator inspector. Zone One (2011), an unexpected marriage of literary and post-apocalyptic zombie fiction, asks now-familiar questions about human perseverance and survival. Humour features strongly in these works, as do Whitehead’s deftness and apparent joy in making philosophical forays into genre fiction. Compared to the sweeping and more sombre nature of his most recent books, Harlem Shuffle is lighter fare.

To read Michelle de Kretser’s fiction is to sense important details swimming under the surface of our awareness, forming patterns that will come into view by the end of the story, or after contemplating it for a time, or while rereading. There is always enough to satisfy our immediate needs – rich aphorisms, sharp characterisation, satirical wickedness, the play of language, political and historical concerns, mysteries explored – but the presence of morphing repetitions and suggestive references leaves the pleasurable impression that you have only just started reading the novel even as you finish its closing sentence. The structural integrity of de Kretser’s fiction, its intelligence and purposeful virtuosity, combine to induce keen readerly attentiveness. Scary Monsters is no exception.

Lili and Lyle are the narrators of two distinct but connected stories of near-identical length that begin on opposite ends of Scary Monsters and finish at its centre. The stories can be read in either order, which will generate different but related readerly experiences. We bring the ghost of the first story we read into our understanding of the next, but we can choose which ghost to carry into which story.

Lili, an idealistic young Australian with Asian heritage, teaches high school students in the South of France in 1980–81 while awaiting acceptance into a postgraduate course in philosophy at Oxford. She wants to be like Simone de Beauvoir, but finds that she is more timid and constrained than her hero. Lyle is an Asian immigrant husband and father who works for an authoritarian government in a dystopian but not wholly improbable future Australia.

Lili experiences a post-university crisis. Deprived of the scaffolding of academic study and the purposefulness of intellectual ambition, she is disoriented and anxious: ‘My life was a bridge strung across a ravine,’ she says. ‘I was moving over it fast, and it was collapsing behind me like an old film.’ This mirrors her earlier, unsettling experience of moving to Australia: ‘When my family emigrated it felt as if we’d been stood on our heads. Events and their meanings came at us from new angles.’

Lyle is alienated from common human feelings – love and compassion are foreign to him – but he still yearns for approval and acceptance. The disquieting peculiarities of his personality might be symptomatic of the psychological demands of immigration, or of living in a police state in the midst of environmental collapse and rolling pandemics, or it might simply be innate.

Lili wants to be interesting, to be noticed and desired, while Lyle yearns for complete anonymity. The two narratives almost meet in the middle. Their final passages fold into each other in suggestive rather than literal or explicit ways, but the stories also serve as opposites, white against black and black against white, each one sharpening the effect of the other through contrast. Lyle’s story is a heightened satire; Lili’s is infused with horror-story tropes.

The title is drawn from David Bowie’s ‘Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps)’, and several of the men across the novel are registered as monsters or creeps, or potential ones. Lili fears all men because they might be Yorkshire Rippers in disguise, even when she is sexually attracted to them, and she fears a French state and society hostile to North African immigrants and other vulnerable outsiders. There are also elements of ‘creepiness’ in the way younger people dismiss, disregard, and exploit older people or ignore those who aren’t deemed interesting enough, and in the broad hostility to Muslim people and immigrants in both narratives.

Lyle and his wife, Chanel, are indifferent to vulnerable outsiders, favouring a pragmatism that relieves them of any impulse to show warmth or generosity. The poor, sick, elderly or otherwise stigmatised are ‘better off’ dead in their eyes, because ‘what kind of life was that?’ They are versions of the monsters that Lili fears, but Lyle is running from his own fearsome predator: ‘I can’t stop thinking about it now, the way old, forgotten things can suddenly appear … it’s frightening. The past should remain in the past.’ He and Chanel make every effort to leave their old lives behind and thereby become ‘authentic Australians’, but ‘the past crouches and waits, and springs from the long grass’. It is h(a)unting them.

In both parts of the novel, individuals and institutions work to supress an awareness of uncomfortable or inconvenient truths, or to limit what counts as history. For all her unpredictable inventiveness, de Kretser tends to restage versions of this confrontation in most of her novels. When people seek to repress or conceal something in her fiction, it invariably returns in distorted forms. Ghosts feature regularly, partly because they break through perceptual and psychological barriers that separate past, present, and future. The past must be accommodated, even when it assumes scary or troubling forms. In Scary Monsters, Lyle and Chanel embody the failure to accommodate those ghosts. For Lyle, ‘The past should weigh less than a photograph – we abandoned or deleted most of those as well.’ It is implied that this renunciation, which they regard as an exemplary Australian trait, is a symptom or cause of their shallow selfishness.

L’Étranger (1942) casts a noticeable shadow over Scary Monsters. Lili and Lyle share important traits with Meursault, Albert Camus’s protagonist: Lili’s perceptions are often distorted under the influence of alcohol, sickness, or fear, just as Meursault’s perceptions are warped by the fierceness of the sun; and Lyle’s coldness toward his mother accords with Meursault’s reaction to his own mother’s death. Lili wants to scream out that the centrality of L’Étranger to French culture is ‘not normal’, given the events of the Algerian war and its aftermath, yet its influence permeates the novel she appears in. De Kretser wields this kind of irony effortlessly.

Lili is a fallible reader of her world. When she realises that she has made several wrong assumptions about a seemingly close friend – that her beliefs are not aligned with reality – it provokes a rupture in their relationship. She feels as though her trust has been breached. If Lili were to read Scary Monsters, she might find it similarly alienating, because de Kretser sets up numerous booby traps across both halves, subtly inviting us to make wrong assumptions before jolting us out of our carelessness. This reaffirms a foundational novelistic convention: that the smallest unknown detail can radically transform a story. As readers, we are prompted to be mindful of the gaps in our knowledge and wary of the blunders that can result from thoughtless expectations.

One of the novel’s epigraphs is from Nietzsche: ‘The state is the coldest of all cold monsters.’ Lili feels the cold keenly, as does Lyle’s mother, Ivy (names and flowers carry enigmatic significance), and both Ivy and Lili struggle to find warmth and hospitality on foreign soil, even among their friends and family. Throughout Scary Monsters, the refusal or failure to join the past with the present, or one part of a story with another, is consonant with a failure to develop warm and meaningful relationships with marginalised or disposable people. For readers of this novel, the implicit task is to make a seemingly fractured story whole, to locate or construct points of connection between parallel worlds, to warm the pages with our close and imaginative engagement. There is an implied moral dimension to this challenge, but the ultimate result is our readerly delight.

In August of this year, when the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s Sixth Assessment Report was published, the UN Secretary General, António Guterres, described its findings as ‘code red for humanity’. For those of us working in climate change communication, the alarm was familiar, another scream into the void to punctuate the prevailing astonishment at a world so insouciant in the face of its imminent environmental collapse. The aptly titled Bewilderment, Richard Powers’ first book since his Pulitzer Prize-winning The Overstory (2018), examines our code-red present with unnerving clarity, testing the viability of human life on this planet. As with The Overstory, a novel to which Bewilderment is very much a companion, humankind is on trial. Even by the gruelling standards of Anthropocene literature, it makes for unsettling reading.

To those who have followed Alex Skovron’s poetry since The Rearrangement (1988), it’s not a surprise to learn that he has been the general editor of an encyclopedia, a book editor, a lover of classical music and chess, an occasional translator of Dante and Borges, and the author of six well-spaced poetry collections, a stylish novella, and a collection of short stories. He can often seem the very embodiment of the European/Jewish/Melburnian intellectual (despite an adolescence spent in Sydney).

Skovron’s poetry can most conveniently be sampled from Towards the Equator: New and selected poems (2014). Letters from the Periphery is, however, an important step forward both in range and manner. Its impressive opening section establishes the collection’s overall tone: seven enigmatic, metaphysical, indeed uncanny poems that make a point of refusing easy resolution.

New collections from Caitlin Maling and Kristen Lang are situated in vastly different landscapes but pursue similar ideas about the natural world’s fragility and the imminent environmental catastrophe. Maling’s Fish Work, as its title suggests, is primarily interested in marine life and the scientists studying it at Lizard Island Research Station on the Great Barrier Reef, while Lang’s Earth Dwellers explores mountains, caves, and coastlines in Tasmania and Nepal, examining the myriad complexities of ancient ecosystems. Maling’s and Lang’s new books, their fourth collections, urge readers to attend to the work of millennia that has produced these distinctive ecosystems and, in doing so, to appreciate the urgency of protecting them.

Sarah Holland-Batt’s Fishing for Lightning is a book about Australian poetry. As such, it is a rare, and welcome, bird in the literary ecology of our country. It is welcome because poetry, like any other art form, requires a supportive culture that educates and promulgates. Not that Holland-Batt, herself one of our leading poets, is ‘merely’ didactic, or a shill for the muses. Holland-Batt, who is also an academic, writes with great authority and insight, and she is a fine stylist, penning essays that are packed with humour and playfulness. These essays cater for all kinds of audiences, from newcomers to poetry experts, which is no small feat.

There is something quaint about seasons. They do not seem to trigger the same dread that we now experience when we hear the word ‘climate’. I think this is because seasons remain connected to that time in human history during which the annual variations of climatic conditions were evidence of an underlying stability in the world and of nature’s constancy. The Seasons, a collection of essays edited by Luke Fischer and David Macauley, is an attempt to think through the ongoing role that seasons have within human imaginaries. Both editors are philosophers and the book is mainly grounded in forms of analytic philosophy insofar as seasons (and seasonality) are posited as concepts susceptible to abstract contemplation. The approach is inflected by a certain eclecticism of thought and example, but there is also an underlying intellectual and tonal consistency. The prominence of Goethe, Hölderlin, Keats, and Thoreau within the book, for instance, firmly roots the contributions within the romantic imagination. Other key reference points in the book – Rilke, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Rachel Carson – remain within the long shadow of European romanticism.

In 1942, The Pea Pickers was published by Angus & Robertson in Sydney, garnering high praise for its freshness and poetic invention. A picaresque tale of two sisters who, dressed as boys, earn their living picking seasonal crops in Gippsland in the late 1920s, it impressed Douglas Stewart, literary editor of the Bulletin, with its ‘love of Australian earth and Australian people and skill in painting them’. The author, Eve Langley, was at that time incarcerated in the Auckland Mental Hospital, where she would remain for the next seven years, isolated from her estranged husband and three young children, and from her mother and sister, who were also in New Zealand.

During the early 1980s, in a series of attacks on the Family Court in Sydney, a judge was shot dead outside his home, while bombs killed another judge’s wife and injured a third judge and his children as they slept. The man behind these and other attacks, Leonard Warwick, was involved in a custody dispute with his ex-wife over the care of their young daughter, but it would be thirty-five years before the crimes were solved and he was convicted of three murders and the bombings. Media commentators, meanwhile, wondered what had driven the culprit to such violence. Elizabeth Evatt, the court’s then chief justice, described the media’s response: ‘They said, “The Court has been bombed, what’s wrong with the Court?”’

Claire G. Coleman is a Wirlomin Noongar woman whose ancestral country is on the south coast of Western Australia. Her first novel Terra Nullius (Hachette, 2017) won a black&write! Fellowship and a Norma K. Hemming Award and was shortlisted for the Stella Prize and the Aurealis Science Fiction Award. She writes poetry, short fiction, and essays, and has been published widely. Her latest book is Lies, Damned Lies (Ultimo Press, 2021)

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

I think I would return to Country, to the low scrub, the grey stone, white sand, wind, and sea spray. Lockdown in Melbourne and a breakdown in Alice Springs have made me homesick: I just want to be where my family have always belonged. I would also like to return to Melbourne. As much as I love Alice Springs, my

Alex Skovron is the author of seven poetry collections, a prose novella, The Poet (2005), and a book of short stories, The Man who Took to His Bed (2017). His volume of new and selected poems, Towards the Equator (2014), was shortlisted in the Prime Minister’s Literary Awards. His work has been translated into a number of languages, and he has co-authored book-length translations of two Czech poets: Jiří Orten and Vladimír Holan. His new collection, Letters from the Periphery, is now available. He was born in Poland, lived briefly in Israel, and arrived in Australia aged nine. He lives in Melbourne.

Which poets have most influenced you?

It’s a diverse list. In primary school, not long after my arrival in Australia, I was entranced by Coleridge’s ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’: its narrative drive, its music. By the time I started to write, Shakespeare was in my ears, along with T.S. Eliot’s rhetorical élan and authority. A bit later came Gerard Manley Hopkins, his startling rhythms and subversive syntax; the heady intensity of Rimbaud; Ted Hughes with his vigour and richness of grain; and Dylan Thomas, Sylvia Plath, John Berryman, Kenneth Slessor, Les Murray, Bruce Dawe, Gwen Harwood, Peter Porter, Evan Jones; as well as fellow Poles Zbigniew Herbert, Czesław Miłosz, and Adam Zagajewski. Also the elegies of Rilke and Dante’s Commedia. But not only the poets. James Joyce, whose Ulysses taught me so much about prose; Franz Kafka, who could forge a world in a single paragraph; and the magicians Jorge Luis Borges and Italo Calvino.

The history of cinema began twice. All art forms are shaped by technological change, but the advent of the talkie in the late 1920s – only a few decades after the first silent films – did not so much develop the medium as kill it and replace it with something new. So abrupt was the change that the strange visual operas of cinema’s earliest years became imbued with a certain innocence, now almost impossible to replicate. To this day, silent film has an aura of mystery, a quality that cultural critic Peter Conrad addresses in his erudite new book.

Were you one of those reluctant mathematics students who complained, ‘What’s the point of all this?’ If so, rest assured: Michael Brooks has made a compelling case for the role mathematics has played in making ‘civilisation’ possible. If you still need convincing, he also discusses research suggesting that doing maths is good for your brain.

Rising Star

Mindy Gill

ABR is delighted to announce its fifth Rising Star: Mindy Gill.

A poet, critic, and former editor-in-chief of Peril magazine (2017–20), Mindy is currently undertaking a PhD in Creative Writing at Queensland University of Technology. She has won the Queensland Premier’s Young Publishers and Writers Award and the Tom Collins Poetry Prize, as well as a number of prestigious international fellowships. Her collection of poems, August Burns the Sky, was shortlisted for the Thomas Shapcott Poetry Prize.

The Rising Stars program – generously funded by the ABR patrons – is intended to advance the careers of younger writers and critics whose early contributions to ABR have impressed readers and editors alike.

Peter Rose, Editor of ABR, commented:

ABR is acutely aware of the immense challenges facing freelance writers, especially younger ones, during the pandemic. The Rising Stars program assumes even greater importance as we mentor our best young writers and critics. Mindy Gill has made a real impression since joining the magazine in 2020. We look forward to working with our new Rising Star.’

Mindy Gill told ABR:

I am delighted to be named ABR’s fifth Rising Star; the confidence that the magazine has placed in me is an honour. I feel fortunate to write for a publication so dedicated to enriching the marketplace of ideas, especially in a cultural climate as tenuous as this one. But above all, I feel extraordinarily lucky to receive ABR’s mentorship and guidance. Since I began writing for ABR, I have been moved by the staunch support Peter Rose extends to his writers, and by how strongly he values and encourages their independence of thought. I look forward to writing criticism that embodies the magazine’s rigour, fearlessness, and uncompromising vision, and can think of no better place to cut my teeth as a young writer.’

Mindy Gills joins fellow Rising Stars Sarah Walker, Alex Tighe, Declan Fry, and Anders Villani.

Melbourne Prize for Literature 

The Melbourne Prize Trust has announced the finalists for the triennial Melbourne Prize for Literature. The finalists for the $60,000 Melbourne Prize for Literature are Jordie Albiston, Maxine Beneba Clarke, π.O., and Christos Tsiolkas. The finalists for the $15,000 Writers Prize are Vivian Blaxell, Eloise Grills, David Sornig, and Ouyang Yu.

Finalists are also in the running for the $3,000 Civic Choice Award, which will be determined by a public vote and is now open via the Melbourne Prize website.

This year’s prize is judged by writers Alice Pung and Declan Fry, and Sydney Writers Festival artistic director Michael Williams. The winners of the Melbourne Prize for Literature, including the winner of the $20,000 Professional Development Award, will be announced on 10 November via an online broadcast on the Melbourne Prize website. 

Prizes galore 

The sixteenth Calibre Essay Prize will open on October 11. Of the total prize money of $7,500, the winner will receive $5,000. The judges on this occasional will be critics and essayists Declan Fry and Beejay Silcox (both well known to our readers), and Peter Rose. Essayists will have until 17 January 2022 to enter the Prize. All our previous winners appear online, and many have now recorded their essays for the ABR Podcast.

Meanwhile, the Peter Porter Poetry Prize – with total prize money of $10,000 – will close on 4 October. We look forward to publishing the five shortlisted poems in the January–February issue.

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.

Apology to Michael Gronow

In its September 2021 issue, ABR published a letter to the editor from John Carmody entitled ‘Legal Niceties’, which responded to a letter to the editor from Michael Gronow QC published in the July print edition and online. In it, Mr Carmody makes statements that Mr Gronow considers to be false and defamatory of him including that he is ‘formalist and hard hearted’ and lacking in ‘humanity’ in his attitude to refugees who seek asylum in Australia. Whilst ABR’s editorial policy is to encourage debate by publishing correspondence from readers, it does so without endorsing the views expressed, and without agenda or intent to cause distress. ABR notes Mr Gronow’s long history of charitable and pro bono legal work for vulnerable members of the Australian community, including refugees and asylum seekers. ABR has withdrawn the exchange of letters from its online platform and apologises to Mr Gronow for any distress caused to him by its publication of the letter from Mr Carmody.

Space crone 

Dear Editor,

Here’s a thought experiment: humanity’s true representative showcases to extra-terrestrial emissaries the best of what we represent. In her commentary based on Ursula K. Le Guin’s 1976 essay ‘The Space Crone’, Dr Elizabeth Oliver makes the case that a post-menopausal palliative care nurse best fits the bill (ABR, September 2021). In essence, the nurse is an unassuming, committed individual who ‘bears up’ is well acquainted with change writ large (Oliver’s key point). Through this strategy, an intriguing philosophical question is left suspended: does humanity discern anything more in life’s journey than what can be framed via a rational lens? Imagining for a moment that people do apprehend important appreciations beyond what may be rendered in words, would an extra-terrestrial get it? Interestingly, Dr Oliver’s favoured nurse is shown to be deeply intuitive.

Michael John, Newstead, QLD

The Most I Could Be

Dear Editor,

Jacqueline Kent’s reductive, judgemental review of Dale Kent’s memoir, The Most I Could Be (ABR, July 2021) diminishes to a howl of drunken rage against her parents a book avowedly driven by anger, and frank about the author’s faults and mistakes – among them allowing pain to drive her to drink. The Most I Could Be is in fact a reflection by a professional social historian, using the testimony of her own life, on how women, historically maimed by internalising the limitations societies imposed upon them, have at last, over her long lifetime, been able to break free to become the most they could; to live lives rich in experience and experiment, in friendship, joy, and creativity.  

Jacqueline Kent misrepresents the author’s words, motives, and indeed the entire tone of the book. ‘So what was the reason for Kent’s rage? Her parents, she says.’ ‘If other people were hurt in the process’ of her achieving her freedom, ‘too bad’. Speculating against all evidence in the text that its author ‘sought the thrill of danger’, Jacqueline Kent accuses her of ‘failing to understand her own motives, not to mention those of others.’ What the author actually says is that her rage and pain stemmed from finding herself, as a young woman, consigned to ‘second-class citizenship … war with a world bent on restricting what women could be’; that she needed to leave her husband ‘in order to live fully ever again’, but remained terribly conflicted and ‘never got over’ losing her family or being unable to get back to her daughter.

Jacqueline Kent interprets as ‘bleak’ a confession that ‘where love and sex were concerned, I am not sure that I ever grew up’. Most readers have found this funny, as intended, in tune with the tone of wry mocking self-examination that animates the whole book.

Beyond Words has rightly been hailed as an honest, sympathetic, and moving account of the whirlwind romance and tragically brief marriage of a woman who previously had ‘shielded myself behind a wall of books’ from ‘engag[ing] with the messiness of life’. This makes it doubly sad that the reviewer refuses to engage with the messiness of other people’s lives or to encourage readers to similarly open themselves to the varieties of human experience.

When interviewed as ‘Critic of the Month’ (ABR, March 2021) about the attributes of an ideal reviewer, Jacqueline quoted Bob Dylan – ‘Don’t criticise what you can’t understand’ – but admitted her admiration for ‘cranky critics’. Her own reviews are larded with expressions of irritation, impatience, exasperation; their main thrust not only how and what other women should have written, but how they should have lived their lives. Mary Li, (Mary’s Last Dance, ABR, December 2020), is praised for her love of family but criticised for not being resentful about staying at home ‘while her husband went forth to conquer the world’ (and for being humourless). In An Exacting Life, Jacqueline Kent disapproved of her subject, Hepzibah Menuhin, for leaving her children and for lacking assertiveness. 

Richard Freadman, an acknowledged expert on the subject, proposed that life writing is ‘ultimately about recognition’ (ABR, October 2001). Readers of the uniquely humane and experience-extending genre of the memoir, as well as its authors, deserve better from a journal whose editor’s own memoir, Rose Boys, Freadman justly praised in precisely these terms.

Dale Kent, Professorial Fellow, University of Melbourne