Obligations of Voice by Anne Elvey

Recent Work Press, $19.95 pb, 89 pp

I was surprised by the title of Melbourne-based Anne Elvey’s recent collection, Obligations of Voice. Though quite a mouthful, it’s bravely deliberate; Elvey wants you to slowly voice and feel the syllables. Several poems centre on the mouth or lips for political, theological, even surrealist ends. The poem ‘Afternoon Tea, Seaford Beach Café’ begins with the line ‘A woman stands’. Floating in the right margin is the phrase ‘at the back of a throat’. These fragments coalesce to describe the woman’s mouth or the mouth she’s lodged in. Breathing and ‘charcoal’ gums are collaged with the ‘Dark // corrugations’ and the landscape of the sea. The last line surprises by changing tack: ‘A skiff // bounces on a swell.’ This clipped linguistic dexterity, with a flash of painterly movement, characterises Elvey’s nuance and facility.

Yves Rees

The Transgender Issue by Shon Faye

Living through the world’s longest lockdown has few consolations, but abundant reading time is chief among them. I’ve read 136 books and counting in 2021, a tally that includes marvellous reads aplenty, with some definite standouts. Shon Faye’s The Transgender Issue (Penguin) is an astonishingly lucid argument for trans liberation that promises to become the canonical text on this subject. Faye’s thinking is on par with the best gender theorists of her generation, but her crystalline prose makes this book accessible for a mass audience. Equally memorable is Torrey Peters’s novel Detransition, Baby (Serpent’s Tail), a spiky comedy of manners that portrays millennial transfemme culture in 2010s New York. Closer to home, I adored Jennifer Down’s Bodies of Light (Text), an epic Bildungsroman that honours the dignity of crafting a life in the wake of childhood trauma, and I marvelled at S.J. Norman’s Permafrost (UQP), a beguiling collection of queer ghost stories.

Glyn Davis

The Labyrinth: An argument for justice by Amanda Lohrey

In the closed-in, introspective time of pandemic, the 2021 Miles Franklin judges wisely chose Amanda Lohrey’s The Labyrinth (Text) – moody and allegorical with overcast skies, distant waves, and silences. Though very different in style, Nicolas Rothwell’s Red Heaven (Text) has similar resonance, obscure events in an engrossing novel of ideas. Hermione Lee’s long-awaited Tom Stoppard: A life (Faber) proved an exemplar of modern biography. She gives us Stoppard as a central European intellectual recast by fate as an English schoolboy. Janet McCalman is a national treasure, and her Vandemonians: The repressed history of colonial Victoria (MUP) deploys her trademark approach: take the local and specific and use them to illuminate a whole stratum of life, in this case the secrets of former convicts who found their way to Victoria. Finally, 2021 saw the return of the pamphlet, through the innovative In the National Interest series curated by Louise Adler (Monash University Publishing). Here are multiple voices, in short but often powerful essays, grappling with substance.

Beejay Silcox

Grimmish by Michael Winkler

In January, I read two magnificent novels back to back: Grimmish (Westbourne Books) by ABR alum, Michael Winkler, and Painting Time (MacLehose Press) by French writer Maylis de Kerangal. It’s been a bountiful reading year, but I’m still raving about these early favourites. Painting Time is a tale of trompe-l’œil artists, painters of 3D trickery. De Kerangal revels in the sensuality of artistic mastery; hers is a novel of rich pigments and capable hands. Grimmish, meanwhile, is a feral, unpinnable creature. Ostensibly a biography of the thick-skulled boxer Joe Grim – a fighter most opponents could beat, but none could knock out – Grimmish takes the little that’s known of Grim’s life as an invitation to riff. Winkler’s ‘exploded non-fiction novel’ is a bruised and bruising vaudeville, complete with talking goat. It’s dissonant, doubt-ridden, grotesque, and entirely sublime. Twin novels of ecstasy: the pain of art, and the art of pain.

Peter Rose

The Promise by Damon Galgut

I’d not read the South African novelist Damon Galgut until The Promise (Chatto & Windus) came along. Then I had to read everything of his. Perspectivally, The Promise is full of Joycean slippages and subversions. Galgut – wry as Addison DeWitt – says of one of his characters: ‘She has a cat curled up on her lap. No, she hasn’t, there is no cat. But allow her a couple of plants at least.’ Well, allow us a few more novels by this brilliant satirist. And just when you thought nothing could be done to enliven or radicalise that old tart Biography, along comes Frances Wilson with Burning Man (Bloomsbury), her thrilling life of D.H. Lawrence, not long after her equally restorative study of De Quincey. Wilson’s prose reminds us of Hilary Mantel’s fiction: rhythmic, comic, surging with fact. Copious dangling modifiers aside, David Storey’s posthumous A Stinging Delight: A memoir (Faber) is the most fearless account of lifelong mental illness, familial woe, and sheer artistic grit. Finally, The Game: A portrait of Scott Morrison (Black Inc.), Sean Kelly’s illuminating psychological exposé of Scott Morrison, makes grim but essential reading. Seldom has Donald Horne’s diagnosis of Australia’s incurable good fortune seemed more apt.

Brenda Niall

Life As Art: The biographical writing of Hazel Rowley edited by Della Rowley and Lynn Buchanan

You don’t have to be a biographer to enjoy Life As Art: The biographical writing of Hazel Rowley, edited by Della Rowley and Lynn Buchanan (MUP). This vibrant collection of essays and journal extracts gives a portrait of the writer at work, engaging with her subjects, interviewing family and friends, negotiating with publishers. Above all, it shows the intelligence, curiosity, and empathy that Hazel Rowley brought to her biographies of Christina Stead, Richard Wright, Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre, and, just before her sudden death in 2011, a double portrait of the Roosevelts: Franklin and Eleanor. Jennifer Higgie’s The Mirror and the Palette: Rebellion, revolution and resilience: 500 years of women’s self-portraits (Weidenfeld & Nicolson) looks at women artists. How did they see themselves and why did they choose to put themselves on show, often in brutally candid versions? Hazel Rowley would have enjoyed exploring those questions.

Jennifer Harrison

Poems 1962–2012 by Louise Gluck

Since living in Boston from 1989 to 1991, I’ve followed the career of American poet Louise Glück. I was delighted when she received the 2020 Nobel Prize in Literature. This year, a career-spanning publication, Poems 1962–2020 (Penguin Classics), brings together 697 pages of her extraordinarily precise and musical poetry. Among the many terrific books by Australian writers, I’ve particularly enjoyed John Hawke’s Whirlwind Duststorm (Grand Parade Poets) and Mal McKimmie’s At the Foot of the Mountain (Puncher & Wattmann). Both are innovative, intelligently creative, almost fearless collections. Finally, as a child psychiatrist I must mention Walk of the Whales (Hardie Grant Books), the new picture book by writer and illustrator Nick Bland. In his work there is a wonderful sense of poetic fun. The child in me trusts his vision completely.

Judith Brett

The Brilliant Boy: Doc Evatt and the great Australian dissent by Gideon Haigh

There was plenty of time to read during lockdown. Gideon Haigh’s The Brilliant Boy: Doc Evatt and the great Australian dissent (Scribner) concerns H.V. Evatt’s compassion as a High Court judge in a negligence case. A young immigrant boy was drowned in an unfenced council trench and his mother sued for her pain and suffering. Stuff happens, concluded the court’s majority; Evatt disagreed. One Hundred Days by Alice Pung (Black Inc.), told in the gutsy voice of a sixteen-year-old girl struggling for distance from her controlling, Chinese-Filipino mother, is a warm, funny, compelling read. Sean Kelly’s The Game: A portrait of Scott Morrison, the best thing I have read on our current prime minister, is full of insights and ideas. And to distract me from the troubles of the world, another Garry Disher, The Way It Is Now (Text), this time back on the Mornington Peninsula.

John Kinsella

The Complete Poetry of Percy Bysshe Shelley edited by Nora Crook and Neil Fraistat

I celebrate each time a new volume of the Johns Hopkins University Press The Complete Poetry of Percy Bysshe Shelley appears, and I do so again with the Nora Crook-edited seventh volume (JHUP). Out of sequence (the last volume published was the third) following the death of Neil Fraistat’s co-founding editor, Donald H. Reiman, this, to quote the editorial overview, ‘penultimate volume of this edition … consists almost entirely of the fragments and the few complete but unpolished poems that Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley included in the Posthumous Poems ... (1824)’. Rigorously, enthusiastically, and innovatively edited, this volume has brought excitement and zest to my Shelley-reading life. In a year of many significant volumes of new Australian poetry, I mention some standouts: Evelyn Araluen’s discourse-altering Dropbear (UQP), Maria Takolander’s confronting and sculpted Trigger Warning (UQP), Emily Sun’s cultural-presumption-shredding Vociferate | 詠 (Fremantle Press), and Toby Fitch’s existential linguistic meltdown Sydney Spleen (Giramondo).

Sheila Fitzpatrick

China Panic: Australia’s alternative to paranoia and pandering by David Brophy

First up, David Brophy’s China Panic: Australia’s alternative to paranoia and pandering (La Trobe University Press) provides some uncommon common sense on Australia’s current hyped-up alarm. If only one could hope that the panic-mongers would read it. In A Matter of Obscenity: The politics of censorship in modern England (Princeton), Christopher Hilliard takes us through England’s obscenity panics, from Lady Chatterley’s Lover to Oz, but in this case, as well as silliness and busybodying, serious questions were raised about the obligation of liberal societies to protect their members. In Destination Elsewhere: Displaced persons and their quest to leave postwar Europe (Cornell), Ruth Balint recovers a strange moment after World War II when Europe’s ‘displaced persons’ had to prove, by fair means or foul, their suitability for resettlement in Australia and elsewhere. Finally, for anyone wondering how ‘theory’ became an object of reverence in the humanities and social sciences in the late twentieth century, Philipp Felsch gives some funny and unexpected answers in The Summer of Theory: History of a rebellion, 1960–1990 (Polity).

Don Anderson

Leaping Into Waterfalls: The enigmatic Gillian Mears by Bernadette Brennan

It was, I think, French anti-novelist Michel Butor who suggested that we organise our personal libraries under friends. Here goes. Bernadette Brennan: Leaping Into Waterfalls: The enigmatic Gillian Mears (Allen & Unwin). The achievement of Brennan’s critical biography – scholarly, passionate, readable – is that it renders her subtitle otiose. But it is not her subtitle: it is the marketing department’s. For shame! Edmund Campion: Then and Now: Australian Catholic experiences (ATF Theology). Humane, literate, hospitable, engaging essays on, inter alia, B.A. Santamaria, Manning Clark, Lord Acton, John Henry Newman, and ‘Why I am Still a Catholic’. Even a non-Catholic may profit from it. David Williamson: Home Truths: A memoir (HarperCollins). A big book for a big life. Let us recall W.B. Yeats: ‘Think where man’s glory most begins and ends, and say my glory was I had such friends.’

Sarah Holland-Batt

Scary Monsters by Michelle De Kretser

Michelle de Kretser’s brilliant, chimeric novel Scary Monsters (Allen & Unwin) offers the reader two possible beginnings and endings, and two protagonists, Lili and Lyle, whose lives run on parallel tracks yet are rife with mirrorings, echoes, and inversions. While the novel’s dual settings are a dystopian near-future Melbourne and early 1980s France, its great trick is making the monsters of the present – racism, misogyny, ageism, Islamophobia, nationalism, ecocide – felt most palpably. Intensely poetic, bitingly satirical, poignant, and unsettling, Scary Monsters still hasn’t left me. I also loved Emily Bitto’s lushly baroque, ruinous, and fantastically inventive Wild Abandon (Allen & Unwin), which follows on from her Stella Prize-winning The Strays, and takes her Australian protagonist, Will, deep into the small-town wreckage of American capitalism. A devastating and sharply observed Bildungsroman concerned with masculinity and male friendship, Bitto’s unforgettable novel also has style in spades: its lyricism is exhilarating.

Anders Villani

The Shut Ins by Katherine Brabon

Katherine Brabon’s début, The Memory Artist, won the Australian/Vogel’s Literary Award in 2016, and her new novel, The Shut Ins (Allen & Unwin), cements her status as one of Australia’s finest and most innovative young novelists. Set in Japan and told in four voices, the book uses the story of Hikaru, one of the country’s young social recluses known as hikikomori, to reflect on more nebulous forms of personal withdrawal – from loved ones, from the self, and from the vital and unreachable ‘other side’ of life. What sets the book apart is Brabon’s decision to intersperse the main sections with ‘notes’ from a wandering, autofictional narrator, an Australian novelist in Japan for research. A conventionally plotted narrative thereby becomes a series of found testimonies, which both mask and accentuate the self-inquiry at the book’s heart. It is a poignant conceit, reminiscent of the work of W.G. Sebald and Patrick Modiano. I cannot think of another Australian novel like it.

Felicity Plunkett

When to Start and When to Stop: Advice for authors by Wisława Szymborska

For thirty years, Nobel Prize-winning Polish poet Wisława Szymborska wrote for the magazine Literary Life and responded anonymously to letters sent to its Literary Mailbox, offering ‘evaluation in one official-sounding sentence’. When to Start Writing (and When to Stop): Advice for authors (New Directions, translated by Clare Cavanagh) compiles this. Szymborska assessed its didactic value as ‘minimal, it’s mainly entertainment’. While the advice is often hilarious, this understates its sharp edges and compassion. ‘I sigh to be a poet,’ writes Miss A.P. ‘We groan to be editors,’ replies Szymborska, masked. Tracy K. Smith’s Such Color: New and selected poems (Graywolf Press) includes work from her four volumes with new poems. It maps sustained and exhilarating formal experimentation, song, and witness. Jhumpa Lahiri’s Whereabouts (Bloomsbury) tenderly parses a moment of uncertainty, exile, and hope in the life of its unnamed narrator obliquely, in poem-like, exquisite slivers.

Morag Fraser

The Magician by Colm Toibin

Two Irishmen and a South African-born Australian expanded my horizons during the months of confinement. All three wrote novels wrung out of that ur-generator of stories, the family, in all its permutations, fracturings, and cohesions. Colm Tóibín pondered Thomas Mann for years before committing himself to writing The Magician (Picador), his fictionalised rendering of the great German novelist’s life. Tóibín’s time was well spent – the novel is panoramic, and intriguingly intuitive about the repressions that fired Mann’s fiction. In Apeirogon (‘a shape with a countably infinite number of sides’), Colum McCann builds a complex form to tell of two men, one Palestinian, one Israeli, who each lose a daughter to conflict in the Middle East. Reading Apeirogon was like hearing small explosions of a poetry of revelation. In mid-winter, I reread all four Jack Irish novels, then The Broken Shore and Truth (all Text), and wished, fervently, that Peter Temple were still alive.

Gregory Day

Burning Man: The ascent of D.H. Lawrence by Frances Wilson

Much to my surprise, two of the books I enjoyed most this year were biographies, Frances Wilson’s incendiary retake on D.H. Lawrence, Burning Man, and Eleanor Clayton’s beautifully researched chronicle of Barbara Hepworth’s epic creative arc in Barbara Hepworth: Art and life (Thames & Hudson). Interestingly, these books take very different approaches to the biographer’s art, with the fearless Wilson attempting both a comic and a metaphysical take on Lawrence’s turbulent existence, while Clayton focuses on the elemental physicality of Hepworth’s work as the best possible description of her subject. The two approaches work equally well in the hands of such wonderful writers. I also loved two striking local poetry collections, Maria Takolander’s Trigger Warning and Save As by A. Frances Johnson (Puncher & Wattmann). Both of these collections contain some of the most moving confessional and elegiac poems you’ll read anywhere.

Nicholas Jose

Becoming a Bird: Untold stories about art by Stephanie Radok

A calendar year with its daily tour of the back yard and walks with the dog to the park as months go by. Artist–writer Stephanie Radok’s Becoming a Bird: Untold stories about art (Wakefield Press) is a marvellous book about the freedom of the mind to take wing from within the confines of a loved locality and a committed routine. Radok roams far and wide, remembering museum and art gallery visits around the world, books, places, and people, enquiring into complex things with a candid clarity of utterance and insight. ‘Who are you?’ a Prague cousin asks. The answer comes: ‘In this suburb in a room in a house in a garden in a book on a shelf behind a door in a cupboard, complete worlds are present and folded together.’ Not forgetting The Right to be Lazy by John Knight, a work of art the author saw in Berlin that consisted purely of weeds left to grow.

James Ley

When We Cease to Understand the World by Benjamín Labatut

The two books that stood out for me this year were Benjamín Labatut’s When We Cease to Understand the World (Pushkin Press) and Anwen Crawford’s No Document (Giramondo). The former consists of series of elegantly written biographical essays on some of the most brilliant mathematicians and physicists of the last century. Labatut weaves his accounts of their often remarkable lives into an exploration of the nature of genius and the psychological pressures that come with working at the limits of human understanding. Crawford’s book is a striking collage-like essay written in a spirit of lucid grief and righteous anger. Switching artfully between fragments of history, poetry, and memoir, its deliberately disjointed style belies the precision with which it has been assembled. No Document develops, slowly and purposefully, into a deeply considered and intensely personal reflection on the imperatives and disappointments of political resistance. 

Jacqueline Kent

Great Circle by Maggie Shipstead

In such a gloomy, exasperating year, it was a relief to turn to a novel and a biography depicting such different – though perhaps equally difficult – worlds, especially with both books distinguished by such powerfully elegant prose and perceptiveness in evoking character. The Booker-shortlisted novel Great Circle by Maggie Shipstead (Doubleday), with its dual timeline and driven, courageous heroine, is not only a highly satisfying and enjoyable read but a meticulously researched account of 1930s aviation, its perils and challenges. It wears its learning lightly, as does The Brilliant Boy: Doc Evatt and the great Australian dissent by Gideon Haigh. Haigh’s clever use of one particular court case to illuminate the career of one of this country’s greatest lawyers produces an account that is exemplary in its forensic analysis and sympathetic treatment of a brilliant man whose contribution to Australian life has often been inadequately recognised.

David McCooey

Mike Nichols: A life by Mark Harris

In another bad year, it has been a good year for life writing. Mark Harris’s Mike Nichols: A life (Penguin Press) is a compelling and entertaining account of the film and theatre director’s remarkable rags-to-riches life. Lining up to register at the University of Chicago in 1949, Nichols struck up a conversation with the sixteen-year-old Susan Sontag. He had that kind of life. Compelling for different reasons is Polly Barton’s stunning Fifty Sounds (Fitzcarraldo), a memoir about living in Japan and learning the language, though, as Barton shows, ‘learning’ is too simple word for the enigmatic process of recalibrating one’s sense of both world and self. Lastly, I loved Things I Learned at Art School (Penguin) by the New Zealand writer Megan Dunn. This ‘memoir in essays’ is both hilarious and sad in extraordinarily inventive ways.

Tony Hughes-d’Aeth

Homecoming by Elfie Shiosaki

Elfie Shiosaki’s exquisite hybrid work Homecoming (Magabala) develops a new poetics of the archive. In a similar spirit to Charmaine Papertalk Green’s Nganajungu Yagu (Cordite), Homecoming is a matrilineal memoir that reclaims and re-creates culture, country, and memory. Also bristling with spiky maternal reclamations and intercultural electricity is Emily Sun’s volume Vociferate | 詠. It shifts suddenly from Keanu Reeves to Hong Kong television, and from Bak Kut Teh to Vagina Dentata. I was also really swept away by Caitlin Maling’s fourth volume of poems, Fish Work (UWAP). It follows the poet embedded on a research island in the Great Barrier Reef, where the fish are strange and the scientists even stranger. It has the terseness of an Anthropocene novella. In the background, the reef is quietly asphyxiating, while in the foreground the humans search for answers, and even for adequate questions.

A. Frances Johnson

The Mirror and the Palette: Rebellion, revolution and resilience: 500 years of women's self-portraits by Jennifer Higgie

Despairing at Covid’s artless halls, I turned to brilliant outliers of art-historical connoisseurship. Providing the most wonderfully immersive art experience outside of a museum, Jennifer Higgie’s The Mirror and the Palette is a spellbinding update of Germaine Greer’s and Linda Nochlin’s seminal feminist research. Julian Barnes’s updated Keeping An Eye Open (Jonathan Cape) includes seven revelatory new essays, ‘Berthe Morisot: No Profession’ and ‘Mary Cassat: Not Boxed In’ among them. Barnes’s signature dance between (unkosher) biography and a corrective desire to read works of art on their own terms is beguiling. Islands of Abandonment: Life in the posthuman landscape (Viking) by Cal Flyn extols the art of ecological resilience. This fine global study of abandoned towns and exclusion zones shows what happens when nature is allowed back in. The fine art of Australian poetry did not disappoint, new collections by Maria Takolander, Eileen Chong, Evelyn Araluen and others giving just the right jab.

Zora Simic

No Document by Anwen Crawford

My most eagerly anticipated read this year was Anwen Crawford’s No Document. At once a eulogy to a friend, a counter-history of the Howard years, and an art manifesto, No Document was so beguiling I read it twice. Veronica Gorrie’s Black and Blue: A memoir of racism and survival (Scribe) and The Mother Wound (Macmillan Australia) by Amani Haydar have lingered with me as powerful accounts of experiences that clearly needed to be told – in Gorrie’s case, of being an Aboriginal woman in the police force, and in Haydar’s, of the double loss of her mother at the violent hands of her father, and her grandmother to war. The most delightful surprise was Zarah Butcher-McGunnigle’s novella Nostalgia Has Ruined My Life, the best book this year about being a young woman who is extremely online. The book I never wanted to end was Bernadette Brennan’s enthralling biography of Gillian Mears, Leaping into Waterfalls.

Frank Bongiorno

The Game by Sean Kelly

I much enjoyed Sean Kelly’s The Game, which takes us underneath the forced bonhomie, artifice, and confections of our first post-truth prime minister to reveal a darkness about our politics and ourselves. It deserves to become a political classic. Gideon Haigh returns to a flawed giant of an earlier era in The Brilliant Boy: Doc Evatt and the great Australian dissent, a fascinating and moving story of callousness, compassion, and creativity centred on the unlikely topic of tort law. Melissa Harper and Richard White have assembled a rich feast in a new expanded edition of Symbols of Australia: Imagining a nation (NewSouth). Fresh essays on ‘The Great Barrier Reef’ by Iain McCalman and ‘The Democracy Sausage’ by Judith Brett remind us of how national imagining continues to evolve. Mark McKenna’s Return to Uluru: A killing, a hidden history, a story that goes to the heart of the nation (Black Inc.) is a powerful microhistory and meditation on frontier violence and its legacies.

Giselle Au-Nhien Nguyen

Happy Endings by Bella Green

One of my favourite discoveries this year was audiobooks. Months alone in lockdown meant I took great pleasure in walking Melbourne’s inner north with a voice in my ears – a new way to experience storytelling. Memoirs by women were my favourite for this – I loved Bella Green’s Happy Endings (Macmillan Australia), Amani Haydar’s The Mother Wound, and Clem Bastow’s Late Bloomer (Hardie Grants Books), all narrated by the authors. These books cover such different topics – sex work, domestic violence, and autism, respectively – but all three are astute and illuminating. I read many novels this year for both work and pleasure, but none floored me as much as Jennifer Down’s Bodies of Light, equal parts devastating and hopeful. Down has long been a favourite writer of mine, and this saga – her most compelling and accomplished work yet – captures an entire life and all its nuances in arresting detail.

Brenda Walker

Signs and Wonders: Dispatches from a time of beauty and loss by Delia Falconer 

Delia Falconer’s Signs and Wonders: Dispatches from a time of beauty and loss (Scribner) is an illuminating book on the climate crisis by a writer whose work, from The Service of Clouds on, reveals a powerful attachment to the natural world. The ‘signs’ of the title are quantifiable losses; ‘wonders’ include ancient creatures and artefacts exposed by climate change. Falconer brings them together, pointing out that ‘the web is constantly inviting us to marvel – and yet our wonder rarely translates into action’. Bernadette Brennan’s haunting biography of Gillian Mears, Leaping into Waterfalls, is an exceptional work. Helen Garner’s How to End a Story: Diaries 1995–1998, the third volume in this series, is equally notable. The entries have the taut shape of a fine novel, pivoting between the revelations of the writer, her therapist and her husband, all set in Elizabeth Bay, the same area Falconer describes decades later as the scene of fire-induced smoke hazard and solitary Covid walks.

Geordie Williamson

The Dancer: A biography for Philippa Cullen by Evelyn Juers

Evelyn Juers’ biography of Phillipa Cullen, The Dancer: A biography for Philippa Cullen (Giramondo), is both a labour of love and a richly researched cultural history. I had no interest in dance and no knowledge of Cullen before opening The Dancer; Juers’s work obliged me to open my mind. Mark McKenna’s Return to Uluru is a metaphysical true crime story awful in its unfolding – one that reveals the whole continent as a crime scene. Yet the sense of Uluru as a place of power and site of potential reconciliation is what stays with the reader. May it change hearts and minds. Jennifer Mills’s The Airways (Picador) was launched into the vacuum of Covid lockdown, which is desperately unfair, since her queer ghost story is subtle and fierce – the work of an author coming into full command of her gifts.

Mindy Gill

Intimacies by Katie Kitamura

Katie Kitamura’s Intimacies (Jonathan Cape) is my favourite kind of novel – about language and the schism between what we say and what we actually mean. I love Kitamura’s deceptive use of linguistic and narrative simplicity as she reveals the many ways people go about their lives without having any ‘idea of the world in which they [are] living’. I returned again and again to Sarah Holland-Batt’s luminous essays on Australian poetry in Fishing for Lightning: The spark of poetry (UQP). My favourite essay is on the exquisite poem ‘On Loss’ by Antigone Kefala, which traces the history of the fragment from Sappho to the Romantics to T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. The collection is essential reading for anyone interested in poetry – and indeed literature. I love Jeet Thayil’s Names of the Women (Jonathan Cape), a feminist corrective to the New Testament, and biblical in the most fundamental of ways: its language is pure poetry.

Tom Griffiths

The Winter Road: A story of legacy, land and a killing at Croppa Creek by Kate Holden

A book that has stayed with me all year is Kate Holden’s powerful environmental parable, The Winter Road: A story of legacy, land and a killing at Croppa Creek (Black Inc.). It is a brilliant, sensitive work of non-fiction that disturbed my dreams. Holden analyses a murder at a farm gate that was really an act of terrorism; she puts the whole psyche of modern Australian settlement on trial. Delia Falconer’s Signs and Wonders captures the fragility and incredulity of living at a tipping point of earthly life where we experience the uncanny every day. Two superb books that challenge Australians with the responsibility of truth-telling are Henry Reynolds’s Truth-telling: History, sovereignty and the Uluru Statement (NewSouth) and Mark McKenna’s Return to Uluru.

Paul Giles

The Right to Sex: Feminism in the twenty-first century by Amia Srinivasan

The most surprising book I read this year was The Right to Sex (Bloomsbury) by Amia Srinivasan, born in Bahrain and now a professor at Oxford, a collection of essays that takes the stale bureaucratic and legal controversies around sexual harassment to a different conceptual level. I also enjoyed two expertly written novels of ideas by distinguished old hands. Richard Powers’ Bewilderment (William Heinemann), which articulates alternative universes through the mind of an autistic child, continues Powers’ unparalleled artistic project to assimilate complex scientific information within engaging narrative frameworks. Similarly, Michelle de Kretser’s Scary Monsters, besides being typographically ingenious in the way the book is produced, creatively repositions contemporary concerns around race, immigration, and national identity within a more expansive spatial and temporal orbit. De Kretser’s provocative and illuminating style, with its satirical edge, evokes conjunctions between different continents as well as across past, present, and future.

Alice Nelson

Mangiri Yarda (Healthy Country): Barngarla wellbeing and nature by Ghil’ad Zuckermann

Mangiri Yarda (Healthy Country): Barngarla wellbeing and nature (Revivalistics Press) by Ghil’ad Zuckermann (who holds the wonderful title of Professor of Linguistics and Chair of Endangered Languages at the University of Adelaide) and Barngarla woman Emmalene Richards – part of an ongoing project to reclaim lost languages – is an inspirational examination of the deontological and utilitarian benefits of language revival and the profound importance of reawakening languages that Zuckermann, who founded the trans-disciplinary field of revivalistics, calls ‘sleeping beauties’. Carole Angier’s 600-page opus Speak, Silence: In search of W.G. Sebald (Bloomsbury) is a fascinating and meticulous study of the elusive German writer. It raises fraught questions about the aestheticisation of catastrophe and the fine line between empathetic identification and appropriation. Second Place (Faber) by Rachel Cusk and Real Estate (Hamish Hamilton) by Deborah Levy both interrogate the woman writer’s quest for creative freedom and the complex geometries of human relationships.

Peter Goldsworthy

Harbour: Poems 2000–2019 by Kate Llewellyn

Kate Llewellyn is a living national treasure and, at eighty-five, still one of the most provocative performance poets in the country: acerbic, funny, heart-wrenchingly honest – and always in your face. Her poetry is at one end of a continuum with her frank memoirs, and her wonderful letters – everything feels fresh and spontaneous, even when hard earned. Harbour (Wakefield Press) is a more meditative book overall, a safer haven, but she is still plenty naughty. Jelena Dinic’s In the Room with the She Wolf (Wakefield Press) was the first collection of poetry to win the Adelaide Festival’s Unpublished Manuscript Award. Dinic arrived from war-torn Serbia in Australia at the age of seventeen, perhaps having packed the minimalism of her great compatriot Vasko Popa in her luggage. Her book is an understated wonder, a journey from war to peace, and from one poetic tradition to another. If there is a poem anywhere about language migration as subtle and moving and funny as ‘J like Y’, I have yet to read it.

Declan Fry

Byobu by Ida Vitale

Readers, look no further: Ida Vitale’s Byobu (Charco) is the best book of 2021. Cheers also to Sean Manning for bringing it into English. Andrea Bajani, grazie mille. If You Kept a Record of Sins (Archipelago) is a marvel – Frank Ocean set to paper, tender, diaphanous, and far more lovely than it has any right to be. Elizabeth Harris deserves kudos for her translation. Evelyn Araluen, how do you do it? Dropbear (UQP) showed us where it’s at! Emma Do, Kim Lam, oh my gosh – Working From Home (may ở nhà) – this book! Eunice Andrada, thank you for your care and TAKE CARE (Giramondo). Anwen Crawford, No Document. Bella Li’s Theory of Colours (Vagabond, 11/21), unholy progeny of Poe and Anna Kavan – thank you for this gloriously disquieting combo of image and text. Chelsea Watego said fuck hope and you should read Another Day in the Colony (UQP). Lucy Van, The Open (Cordite): read it with an increasing sense of excitement – that door!

Jane Sullivan

The Five Wounds by Kristin Valdez Quade

My happy surprise was a funny and heartbreaking début novel from Kirstin Valdez Quade, The Five Wounds (Allen & Unwin), about a year in the tough life of the Padilla family in a small New Mexico town. It begins with Amadeo about to play Jesus on the cross, and it never lets up. For me, Klara and the Sun (Faber) was the cleverest and most moving Kazuo Ishiguro novel since Never Let Me Go. Here’s humanity seen through the puzzled eyes of an artificial intelligence that gets so much wrong, yet has a heart in the right place. Anita Heiss’s Bila Yarrudhanggalangdhuray (Simon & Schuster) is a much-needed look at white settlement from an Indigenous maid’s point of view, and the delicately balanced yet inevitably unequal friendship she forms with her mistress.

Melinda Harvey

Simple Passion by Annie Ernaux

If I had to sum up in one word why I love Annie Ernaux’s books, I would say it is for their modesty. This is literature with absolutely no tickets on itself. As Ernaux says in A Woman’s Story, ‘I would like to remain a cut below literature.’ It seems to me no accident that Ernaux was born into a working-class family in Normandy. Ernaux writes to chronicle what has bechanced her – from a conversation overhead on a train to her own illegal abortion forty years ago – all the while subjecting this need to chronicle to ruthless questioning. These books completely trash the idea that writing memoir needs be a self-aggrandising enterprise. Two of her titles were reissued in English by Fitzcarraldo this year: A Simple Passion (48 pages) and Exteriors (74 pages). The occasion for the first book is a love affair with a man from Eastern Europe, but it is really a meditation on waiting. The second book collects sights seen in her neighbourhood of Cergy-Pontoise. These events often hinge on something human surviving the largely transactional encounters of urban life.

Andrew West

With the Falling of the Dusk: A chronicle of the world in crisis by Stan Grant

With more than three decades of journalism behind him – half of it in conflict zones and Asia – Stan Grant could have easily written a satisfying memoir of a foreign correspondent. But in With the Falling of the Dusk (HarperCollins), he has gone much further, producing an insightful analysis of a world unravelling since the 1990s. Always conscious of being an Indigenous man, he uses this identity, not as a fortress but as an opening to the world. Andrew Lownie’s The Traitor King: The duke and duchess of Windsor in exile (Bonnier) reveals what might have been had Edward VIII, sympathetic to Hitler, not abdicated the throne to marry Wallis Simpson. George Blake signed up to the communist cause during the Korean War. What Simon Kuper’s The Happy Traitor: spies, lies and exile in Russia: The extraordinary story of George Blake (Profile) illustrates so well is the way this little-remembered but hugely damaging Soviet agent quickly lost faith in communism once he escaped to its bosom in the mid-1960s.

Tony Birch

Love Objects by Emily Macguire

Emily Maguire’s Love Objects (Allen & Unwin) was my book of the year: a tender and aching story of love, dysfunction, and insight into those around us we may not understand but who do us no harm. Colson Whitehead’s Harlem Shuffle (Fleet) is both a page-turning crime novel and social insight into 1960s Harlem seen through the eyes and experiences of our sharp protagonist, Ray Carney, who takes us on a wild ride. Evelyn Araluen produced a remarkable poetry collection. Araluen interrogates colonial violence, the Australian literary canon, absent of the reality of an Indigenous presence, while reserving tenderness for the family, community, and Country that have shaped her creativity and politics. In Uprising: Walking the Southern Alps of New Zealand (Text), Nic Low invites us to experience a Maōri understanding of language, land, and history. The book provides both a comfort read and education.

Peter Craven

The Hands of Pianists by Stephen Downes

Stephen Downes’s The Hands of Pianists (Fomite) is an extraordinary book which appropriates the style and strategies of W.B. Sebald but then succeeds in equalling him in this dark enthralling drama of potential annihilation. Helen Garner’s How To End A Story is the most formidable book of excerpts from the diaries so far, a devastating portrait of the breakdown of a marriage and not least of the narrator: a staggering achievement. In less self-critical mode, David Williamson’s Home Truths is a continuously diverting account of a brilliant career. Hermione Lee’s Tom Stoppard captures the mesmeric charm of his subject as well as his depth. John le Carré’s Silverview (Viking) is a ghostly reminder of the creator of Smiley. Robert Bolano’s Cowboy Graves: Three novellas (Picador) has the breathtaking unpredictability of a literary master who rewrote the rule book, captivatingly. Karl Ove Knausgaard’s The Morning Star (Harvill Secker) is a novel in the vicinity of apocalypse told by a chorus of narrators through a spellbinding lens of realism.

Diane Stubbings

The Death of Francis Bacon by Max Porter

Max Porter produced two striking pieces of writing: All of This Unreal Time (Manchester International Festival), his monologue for actor Cillian Murphy, a luminous invocation celebrating the agonies and wonders of life; and The Death of Francis Bacon (Faber & Faber), a prose poem in which Porter engages in a private communion with Bacon, evoking both the rough and jagged energy of the art and the fractured confusion of a life enduring its last hours. Francis Spufford’s Light Perpetual (Faber & Faber) – a graceful and generous novel – reincarnates five children killed during war, vividly imagining for them long lives full of heartache and joy. Get past the mundane title and Claire-Louise Bennett’s Checkout 19 (Jonathan Cape) reveals itself as an experiment in narrative form that is both daring and thrilling. Bennett braids together writing, reading, and living, eloquently demonstrating that books carry us ‘back to the beginning’ of ourselves.

Some people are diving with a whale shark off Stradbroke Island. I saw it on a news story on the internet. The whale shark is the largest known fish. It is extremely rare. It has never before been seen off the coast of Stradbroke Island. Something to do with La Niña, climate change, over-fishing, the tides. There is a rare fish off the coastline of my favourite island and a group of divers are swimming with it.

I would have been diving this weekend. To be fair, I am not sure where the dive school would have taken me. Maybe it wouldn’t have been Stradbroke. It could have been somewhere else, the marine park near Fingal, the waters of Byron Bay.

I hear about the whale shark on the news and something hurts in my chest. It is like the beginning of a panic attack, tight and heavy, as if I have swallowed a stone.

I swallow a stone, but it isn’t heavy enough to get me under the water. I swallow another. Nine stones. I put them on my weight-belt and when there is no room left I put them in my pockets. It takes nine weights to get me to the bottom of the pool. I need to empty my lungs, but I just keep breathing and breathing, inflating myself, popping up to the surface like a balloon. Fully inflated lungs are worth two weights, my instructor told me, and still I can’t breathe out.

Diving is just not for me.

Bruno Latour’s new book, After Lockdown: A metamorphosis, is so engaging from the first that one feels obliged to begin just where he does: with an arresting portrait of a man who wakes from a long sleep to find that everything, save the moon and its indifferent rotations, makes him uneasy. Everywhere he sees reminders of the lost innocence of the Anthropocene. The sun brings to mind global warming; the trees, deforestation; the rain, drought. Nothing in the landscape offers solace. Pollution has left its mark everywhere, and he feels vaguely responsible for it all. And now, to top it off, the very breath that sustains his life carries the risk of premature death. How many of his neighbours might he infect (or be infected by) amid the vapour trails of his evening walk? Nature, it seems, is having its revenge, and the ‘in-out-in’ of lockdown threatens to become interminable.

Though a generation has grown up with online technology, we are only just starting to grasp what it means for our understanding of humanity. As a historian, I’m surprised to find that I can now trace the emotional and intellectual experience of individuals, through long periods of their lives, with a new kind of completeness. Fragments of detail from all over the place, gathered with ease, can be used to build up inter-connected portraits of real depth. A new inwardness, a richer kind of subjectivity, takes shape as a result.

This ought to improve our history-writing. Being drenched with the detail of other people’s lives should make it harder to indulge in backward-looking condescension, the historian’s original sin. Those with the skill of, say, Janet McCalman can aim to approximate, just a little, the efforts of some of the best nineteenth-century novelists – George Eliot, Leo Tolstoy – in the creation of a multiverse of human understanding and interconnection. It is a wide-open prospect.

We routinely think of the past as a subtext of the present, but in The Women of Little Lon Barbara Minchinton flips this around. She aims not only to ‘dismantle the myths and counter misinformation and deliberate distortions’ about sex workers in nineteenth-century Melbourne, but – in an explicitly #MeToo context – to ‘reduce the stigma attached to the work today’ while heightening our ‘understanding of and respect for the lives of all sex workers’.

The name of Yorta Yorta elder William Cooper shines bright in the history of Aboriginal activism in Australia between the two world wars. It is linked with the formation of the Australian Aborigines’ League, of which he was the founding secretary; the Day of Mourning on the anniversary of white settlement in 1938; and a petition intended for George V, signed by almost 2,000 Aboriginal people and demanding Aboriginal representation in parliament. This last was perhaps Cooper’s most cherished project. He spent years gathering signatures and waiting for the most opportune moment to present it; his disappointment at the indifferent response of the Australian government darkened his final years.

In 2011, Bernadette Brennan convened a symposium on ‘Narrative and Healing’ at the University of Sydney, an opportunity for specialists in medicine and bereavement to meet writers with comparable interests. Helen Garner, for example, spoke about Joe Cinque’s Consolation. The day included an audiovisual piece about death as a kind of homecoming, with reference to the prodigal son, and exquisite photographs, including a picture of an elderly Irishman wheeling a bicycle with a coffin balanced on the seat and handlebars: austere and moving, a vision of austere and careful final transportation. Since 2011, Bernadette Brennan has written two literary biographies: A Writing Life: Helen Garner and her work (2017); and the wonderfully titled Leaping into Waterfalls: The enigmatic Gillian Mears. As with the Symposium, each biography is a genuine enquiry, a gathering of unexpected elements, and an invitation to later conversation. Brennan writes of Leaping into Waterfalls as an extension of a conversation she had with Mears in 2012. The Mears biography is certain to be a talking point for years to come.

Mears, born in Goonellabah, New South Wales in 1964, was intensely rural and Australian, but she always had an international perspective because of her parents’ English and South African origins. As a child on a family visit to the Acropolis, she souvenired potsherds. In her first novel, The Mint Lawn (1991), she wrote that ‘growing up in a country town organises your childhood and your life. And how unfair that is … it traps you into peculiar patterns of passivity … girls could only be involved in a limited number of interests: marching, sex, horses, Christian youth groups.’ In Grafton, Mears chose horses but also writing – conspicuously absent from this list of activities. But she defied entrapment. Her horizons were broad. Late in her life, in very poor health, she drove long distances in an old ambulance, often camping alone. Her literary influences were similarly unconfined; they included Carson McCullers and Marilynne Robinson. Brennan notes that Raymond Carver spoke to her writing class at the NSW Institute of Technology (now UTS).

In 1985, at twenty, she married her high-school English teacher. The marriage ended within five years, but it brought her back to her girlhood town and back into the complicated dynamics of her family – the allegiances of sisters, the seemingly wistful, kind father, the restless mother who died relatively young, at fifty-five, in 1991. In her self-described ‘family essay’, ‘Southern Hemisphere Human’, Mears portrays ‘the centre of the family which rather than folding calmly around itself, seethes with angers and misunderstandings it sometimes seems impossible to bear’. This story is about a specific rupture in Mears’s family, but one of the achievements of Brennan’s biography is the charting of a family with deep and difficult attachments, hosting a writer who took note of everything: parents, siblings, friends, lovers.

‘So porous were the boundaries between her life and fiction,’ writes Brennan, ‘that during the course of my research I often became confused. Had I read about certain events or conversations in a story, novel, letter or diary?’  This porousness caused a good deal of distress to people who found versions of themselves in Mears’s work, or who believed that she had appropriated their memories and material. Pity the ex-husband who saw ‘blackness and dislike and resentment’ in her break-up novel, The Mint Lawn. Pity him further when you discover that schoolgirls carried copies of the sexually graphic novel into his classrooms, or that Mears sold photos of his grandmother to the State Library for inclusion in her archive.

Mears’s next novel, The Grass Sister (1995), is anchored in the life she led with a woman partner on her father’s property, living in caravans and planning a cottage. Mears was experiencing the early symptoms of multiple sclerosis, which would take some time to diagnose. (It appears in the form of lightning-induced paralysis in her final novel, Foal’s Bread [2011].) Like The Mint Lawn, The Grass Sister is astute, passionate, and revelatory. The novel generated a rift with her uncle because of her undisguised use of family history. It also distressed her eldest sister, a fellow writer, partly because the title was similar to the name of the work-in-progress she had shared with Mears. Mears’s use of personal material raises questions of tact, privacy, and boundaries. It lies at the heart of her writing. But there are other more valuable dimensions to her work.

Mears had a precocious and sustained talent. At the NSW Institute of Technology, Susan Hampton noticed Mears’s early capacity to structure narrative, her ‘sense of the architecture of a short story’, as Brennan puts it. Her early story collections, Ride a Cock Horse (1988) and Fineflour (1990), are remarkable for the cohesion of individual stories, for startling details, for truth of character, especially when those truths are grim, and for their insight into rural life and the natural world – an ever-present quality in Mears’s writing. The first two novels, with their looser structure, shimmer on the page. The style is acutely observant, witty, and sometimes whimsical.

Both early novels have a distinct sexual frankness, consistent with Mears’s passionate life. But this may have been a deliberate liberating strategy. In a speech Mears gave in Bangalore in 1995, she spoke out against the limitations and passivity imposed upon women. In The Mint Lawn, she writes about the difference between the narrator’s life and that of the far older woman, Lettie, inappropriately married and ‘trained and raised to suffer’. Patricia Lockwood, in an essay in the 12 August 2021 issue of the London Review of Books, writes about the Canadian writer Marian Engel’s sexually transgressive novel Bear (1976): ‘[There was] a deep and violent sense of propriety that her generation, just as violently, was trying to cut out … The books are in hand-to-hand combat against that, and ultimately they are a triumph.’ Despite the differing time-frames and national contexts of Engel and Mears, I like to think of Mears’s books – and the books of many other Australian women writers of the past few decades – as engaged in strategic hand-to-hand combat with restrictive proprieties.

In 2008, Gillian Mears went to live in Mount Barker in order to train as a mana yoga teacher, convinced that the discipline would cure her multiple sclerosis and provide her with a teaching qualification and employment. This was not to be. The instructor was ultimately dismissive, the qualification was impossible to achieve, and her disability became more pronounced. Instead of teaching yoga, she worked on a story for children, The Cat With the Coloured Tail (2015), and finished her final, magnificent novel, Foal’s Bread. This difficult labour, undertaken in illness and solitude, resulted in a charming story and a significant and still somewhat under-regarded historical novel, her best, in her own estimation.

Near Mears’s house was a firing range. Brennan writes that ‘Mears was a gentle-mannered person, deeply in tune with the natural world, yet she was drawn to the explosive power of a rifle.’ This is a good description of her life, and one of the many contradictions identified by Brennan: Mears was, as Brennan suggests, ‘one of the most important Australian female writers of the last forty years’. She was gentle, yet she could be explosively disruptive.

The biography is exceptional. In A Writing Life, Brennan identifies the biographer as a ‘literary portraitist – [who] interprets a life through her own imaginative, cultural and political filters’. This is necessarily the case, but Leaping into Waterfalls is more than a portrait; it is a mighty and populous canvas. I recommend it to anyone with an interest in Australian literature.

What meaning can be drawn from an individual life? Most of us will disappear without much trace, forgotten by all but friends and family. Writers may hope for more, leaving their art behind for posterity. Performance artists, though, live their art in the moment.

Philippa Cullen was a gifted dancer and choreographer who died in 1975 at twenty-five years of age. Her sudden death in India, probably from complications after hepatitis B, cut short a career that promised much more than the choreographic experiments she had already achieved. Evelyn Juers met her when they were both university students in the early 1970s, and joined her network of friends and supporters. Following her death, Cullen was all but forgotten until her friends arranged a memorial exhibition of her work in 2016. This stimulated Juers to try to piece together a biographical study of her long-dead friend.

In winter 2019, Victoria’s Labor government tabled legislation that would make it easier for trans people to correct the sex marker on their birth certificate. Previously, trans people were required to have surgery on their reproductive organs before they could amend this foundational legal document. This requirement caused significant problems for the many trans people who don’t want or cannot afford surgery. Unable to correct their birth certificate, trans people often lived with a mismatch between their gender presentation and legal identity, a situation which forced them to disclose their transgender status and expose themselves to harassment and discrimination – or worse.

In 2002 the English filmmaker John Bridcut visited The Red House in Aldeburgh, the archive housing the papers of Benjamin Britten and his long-time partner, Peter Pears. Bridcut was early in his research for a project he would realise two years later as the documentary film Britten’s Children, and then, after another two years, as a book of the same name. I was then head of music at the Aldeburgh Festival, with a few books of my own on Britten under my belt. Partly because the topic interested me and partly because I was soon to leave Aldeburgh, I sidestepped the archive’s historical rectitude regarding Britten’s sexuality and told John that he really needed to track down and interview Wulff Scherchen, Britten’s lover in 1938, who had moved to Australia and was now known as John Woolford. I dug up the last address we had on file for him and left Bridcut to it.

Beneath the Creator’s reach, the Golden Ratio
of tourist thrum stirs guards to the mike.
Silenzio. Silence. No photo. No video.

Wonder at what ate the eyes of Michelangelo;
anciently capture a spreading dark
beneath the Creator’s reach, the Golden Ratio

breathed into brushstrokes of imagini di Dio.
The roof is eternity, tongues slowly spike.
Silenzio. Silence. No photo. No video.

This century’s guests, from Beijing to Rio,
quell themselves by Christ’s raised hand, snake
beneath the Creator’s reach, the Golden Ratio

pinched from nature’s windings. The cameo
of a fleshless selfie on a flayed saint strikes.
Silenzio. Silence. No photo. No video.

Adam sighs. Your stretch of time finito,
you can’t take with you as much as you’d like.
Beneath the Creator’s reach, the Golden Ratio,
nessun silenzio. No silence. Photo. Video.

We bring the horses back to their own fields because we like
To see them among purple hay as if they signify black seeds
A hoof can break any kind of feeling along a dramatic stretch
The gate is where I go to then proclaim my woes to his street
And ask him pointed questions like I’m in the Roman Senate
Imagine me among the morning glory wretched ’n’ bothered
But I should listen to my cornflake box anthropology degree
Everyone doesn’t have to be the same way like Keats’ eagle
Are you are or are you aren’t care you care or care you can’t
Having favourites is the same as being dead or a coincidence
When I wake up first thing I reach for is a streaming service

Because that’s the nicest fruit when it’s got sugar on it and
That is why it should control your life and sense of purpose
Let it be changeable and not what Romans say so musically
They don’t actually have a great rep except according to them
And no blame on a village for accepting too much Spanish
Influence or a weak music culture that bowed down to trade
Agreements we can’t really hear that song with its tales of
Canadian schoolgirls and boys who don’t understand mixed
Messages this cake is a message too of seeds amid yellow
Fruit we don’t want to burn the air more than we have to so
No candles listen the car’s still in the garage and the horses

Probably dead because fifty years goes by in a flash so few
Lifetimes actually since Captain Cook e.g. and he had his
Issues leaving school at thirteen thirsty for maps and blood
Read you is or read you aint readn’t you can or readn’t you
Cain’t he could have made better sense of his timing though
When we were together and unlucky to be standing at a pew
Evading one reality through singing another the icing always
On the other shoe I could hear the horses entering through
Gates of the future where music had circulated and returned
What was a lie looked not at all now a provocation in the sky
But rather truth playing keyboards with a mane for a vine

Beside the fountain’s troupe of sun-bleached rubber ducks,
in the gardens, under a shade sail,
my father is crying about Winston Churchill.
Midway through a lunch of cremated schnitzel
spoon-fed by the carer with the port-wine stain
my father is crying about Winston Churchill.

In the night he cries out for Winston Churchill.
During his morning bath he cries for Winston Churchill.
When the nurse does up his buttons he will not stop his weeping.
When the therapist wheels him to Tuesday piano
my father ignores the Mozart and cries for Winston Churchill.

He cries not like a child seeking absolution,
not like the mourner or the mourned, but free and unconstrained
as one who has spent a long time denying an urge
and is suddenly giddy and incontinent in his liberation.

The cleaners are unmoved. The woman
who brings his hourly cup of pills is bright as a firework
and goes about her round with the hardness
of one who has heard all the crying in the world
and finds in that reservoir nothing more disturbing
than a tap’s dripping drumbeat in a sink.

But the night supervisor is frightened
in the early hours when the halls ping
with the sharp beep of motion sensors and my father’s crying.
His longing for silence is fierce and keen
as a pregnant woman’s craving for salt and fried chicken,
as my father’s crying for Winston Churchill.

And the women in their beds call for it to stop like a Greek chorus
croaking like bullfrogs each to each in the dark –
unsettled, loud, insatiable – the unutterable fear
rippling through them like a herd of horses
apprehending the tremor of thunder
on a horizon they cannot see but feel.

Evelyn Juers (photograph by Sally McInerney)

Evelyn Juers is the author of House of Exile (2008), The Recluse (2012), and The Dancer: A biography for Philippa Cullen (2021).

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

I’d go to the seaside town of Whitby in North Yorkshire. Stay for a month in a cosy hotel overlooking the ferocious North Sea. Bring a stack of books about, or set in, Whitby, like Elizabeth Gaskell’s least known but wonderful novel Sylvia’s Lovers. Find more books while I’m there. I’d walk a lot. Why? A slowly forming

No contemporary Australian writer has higher claims to immortality than Gerald Murnane and none exhibits narrower tonal range. It’s a long time since we encountered the boy with his marbles and his liturgical colours in some Bendigo of the mind’s dreaming in Tamarisk Row (1974). There was the girl who was the embodiment of dreaming in A Lifetime on Clouds (1976). After The Plains (1982) came the high, classic Murnane with his endless talk of landscapes and women and grasslands, like a private language of longing and sorrow and contemplation.

The brief and unpretentious biography of Noel Pearson on the dust jacket of Mission: Essays, speeches and ideas describes him as ‘a lawyer, activist and founder of the Cape York Institute’. Although surely accurate, this gives little indication of the stature this remarkable man has assumed in Australian public life over the past thirty years. If Pearson is an activist, it is of an unusual kind: one who has combined the roles of insider and outsider, agitator and wonk, intellectual and politician, in highly original and productive ways.

Pearson is one of several Indigenous leaders who has argued that Aboriginal communities are drowning in passive welfare, a sea of grog, and an epidemic of violence. He is also the most influential of them, and Pearson’s critique is part of a wider argument that his people claimed and received ‘rights’ – to land, to equal pay, to vote, to drink – while failing to develop a culture of personal responsibility or economic participation. As these pages make clear, this analysis comes out of his own experience and observation, his understanding of history, and his engagement with the ideas of conservative African American intellectuals. Pearson is especially hostile to the left’s approach to Indigenous affairs. A conspicuous progressive altruism, he says, fails to conceal the left’s shoddy thinking, moral vanity, and self-interest. The ‘soft bigotry of low expectations’ he calls it, borrowing a phrase from a George W. Bush speech. Pearson is an unsparing critic.

Pearson presents his own position as ‘the radical centre’. Left and right, we are told, share ‘the common ground of mutual racism’. This is the familiar rhetorical technique of locating one’s own attitude as between two undesirable extremes. Pearson came to national prominence in the 1990s advocating ‘rights’ – specifically land rights – and would at that time have been considered by most observers to be Labor-leaning. As a young lawyer from Cape York, he was in the room with Paul Keating when an agreement was hammered out over native title legislation following the Mabo decision. It is obvious from many passages in these writings that Keating has been for Pearson the model of what a committed and inspiring leader should look like. Pearson is also a Whitlam man. His powerful eulogy at ‘this old man’s’ memorial service in 2014 was acclaimed; it captured not only Whitlam’s contribution to Aboriginal affairs but a reforming zeal and imagination that it would be ungenerous not to recognise in Pearson himself.

Others have stressed how much Pearson’s outlook owes to his Lutheran upbringing at Hope Vale, a mission with a history stretching back to the 1880s. The writings and speeches presented here only confirm this view. So much of his politics looks like an effort to restore what he sees as best about that time and place: its order and security, and its decency and self-discipline, but not its entanglement in paternalism and deference. The intimacy of family life, and the ‘gentle friendship’ with his father, are suggested in a beautiful image of a young Pearson lying in his father’s arms on the bed as they read together. As a nineteen-year-old university student, on his visits home, Pearson ‘still napped next to my old father on a quiet Sunday’. ‘[L]ife’s purpose’, he learned from his father, ‘is to serve God and serve your fellow man.’

Pearson is often seen as having moved to the right over the years, but there is sufficient continuity across his writings to make us wary of simple judgements of this kind. The problem of the grog is there in the very first of his papers, co-written with a mentor from Hope Vale, Mervyn Gibson, back in 1987. Also, central to his outlook is the rejection of a victim mentality, alongside a seemingly hardening resistance to policy and identity based on the discredited concept of race.

An insight into his political trajectory is provided by the chapter headed ‘Betrayal’, an article from the December 2017 issue of The Monthly, which responded to the Liberal–National Party government’s rejection of the Uluru Statement from the Heart. It has the elegiac quality of a man who believes his central political strategy of trying to win over the right, pursued since the end of the 1990s, has yielded only failure. Pearson complains, reasonably enough, that Tony Abbott spent his political capital on ‘that dumbass knighthood’ for Prince Philip instead of constitutional recognition for Indigenous people. He has hard words about his own misjudgement, as well as about the miserable prime ministerships of Abbott and Malcolm Turnbull.

Pearson’s relationship with the right had elements of both a marriage of convenience and a love match. With support from conservative politicians and media, corporate leaders, and philanthropists, Pearson became arguably the country’s most influential Indigenous leader. He acquired formidable influence and resources for his work on education and economic development on Cape York. Meanwhile white conservatives in the Liberal Party, the Murdoch press, and business were able to engage with Indigenous affairs on terms that suited them well. It seems most unlikely, too, that they were indifferent to the value to their side of politics of Pearson’s attacks on the left.

Pearson’s writings are usually eloquent, invariably intelligent, and often provocative. He has the preacher’s gift with words, the intellectual’s and the policy wonk’s delight in ideas, and the politician’s feel for how power is acquired and exercised. It is not an easy performance to hold together, one senses. And Pearson is still picking through ideas: Modern Monetary Theory seems to be among the latest to catch his attention.

In his John Button Oration in 2010, Pearson suggested that a problem with Australia’s political parties is that they tend to attract predominantly structural leaders who depend on formal institutions for recognition and influence. Natural leaders, who exercise their authority in a range of contexts outside formal politics and are without such institutional supports, have fewer such opportunities.

Pearson belongs primarily in the latter category. In a new piece of writing that begins this collection, he regrets not having seized the opportunity to try ‘the political path to power inside the tent’. There were earlier opportunities for him to do so, he says: one would have been in 1998, the other in 2007. It raises a stimulating counterfactual: Australian national politics of the past generation with Pearson as a major parliamentary player.

In the years since, a small number of Indigenous men and women have served in the federal parliament. One of them is currently Minister for Indigenous Australians in a coalition government. It is hardly surprising that, in the circumstances, Pearson is wondering whether he should also have pursued that path. And perhaps he might yet.

In some of his most recent writings and speeches, Pearson’s voice is blatantly that of national prophet, appealing to the white conscience to recognise First Nations People in their constitution, to the black conscience to make an accommodation with the sovereignty established by the British, and to all Australians to mark both 25 and 26 January as symbolic of an ancient sovereignty and a new order. The ‘conservative’ looks like a ‘radical’ again, the practical reformer a man of rights and symbols. But it is really the same man grappling with the conundrum of how a small, politically weak, but morally important minority can help itself and the nation attain a wholeness that their conjoined history since 1788 has permitted neither.

She Is Haunted by Paige Clark

Allen & Unwin, $29.99 pb, 264 pp

Paige Clark’s She Is Haunted opens with the story ‘Elizabeth Kübler-Ross’, a title that alludes to the five stages of grief – denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance – that inform the rest of her début collection. Clark doesn’t explain why the narrator feels anxious about the survival of her unborn child and its father. The reader is left to assume that the prospect of too much undeserved happiness impels her to embark on a series of amusing and escalating bargains with a capricious God. That the narrator bears the losses with equanimity is indicative of the deadpan humour with which Clark deflects serious matters.

Clark’s Chinese-American heritage is apparent in the location of her stories and in the cultural tropes that are pivotal to her exploration of relationships and familial entanglements. In the title story, the dead narrator enjoys her status as invisible observer and recipient of such privileged information as the moon being ‘nothing like a brie or a Jarlsberg […] more like a Grana Padano’. Her reaction, ‘I’m lactose intolerant’, is another of the droll one-liners that pepper Clark’s narratives. What this ghost wants most, however, is to finally understand her family, in particular her mother. What she learns is disappointing. Her mother’s private persona is as self-obsessed as her public face: ‘She grieves the only way she knows how – with extreme self-pity.’ The second half of the story is narrated by her grandmother, a hungry ghost whose dissatisfaction with life and her ‘ungrateful’ children leaves her starving. Confined to hell, except for the month when hungry ghosts are free to roam the earth, she is on friendly terms with the Devil, a far more benign character than God. The racist slurs she endured growing up in America as the child of Chinese parents provide a disquieting refrain to her litany of complaints, a shift in tone that belies the story’s fairytale quality. Clark’s conversational and comic approach to emotionally charged subjects and to subconscious fears and desires is more affecting than one might expect, and more entertaining.

The Kindness of Birds by Merlinda Bobis

Spinifex Press, $26.95 pb, 230 pp

Of the fourteen stories that make up Merlinda Bobis’s latest collection, The Kindness of Birds, more than half focus on Nenita and her experience of migration from the Philippines to Australia with her ne’er-do-well first husband, her happier second marriage to Latvian-Australian Arvis, the deaths of both her parents in the Philippines, her own brushes with mortality, and her friendships. The remaining six stories follow Filipino migrants and their interactions with the gamut of ethnicities that constitute Australian society: Malaysian, Italian, Irish, German-Jewish, Indigenous, and Anglo. Narratives slip effortlessly between continents as characters find connection in memories of different cultures, times, and places.

Bobis was born in the Bikol region of the Philippines. The cadences of the Bikol, Filipino, and Spanish phrases that punctuate her text add lyricism to her prose and speak to the effects of colonialism: inequality, revolution, and sacrifice. That each story ends on a positive note, however, overstates Bobis’s message of reconciliation. The motifs of kindness and birds as messengers of grace and solace lose potency with repetition. In the title story alone, orioles, rosellas, a tame magpie, two types of duck, galahs, a cormorant, fairy-wrens, moorhens, a lone black swan, a pied fantail, and sparrows provoke memories of parents lost, gardens, flowers, places in Australia and overseas, and memories both cherished and bitter. For Nenita, this plethora of life-affirming birds is associated with the quaint colloquialism ‘she’ll be apples’, as if reminders of joy are an antidote to sorrow. Nenita’s anthropomorphising is remarked upon by a friend, but she argues that even if birds sing not out of kindness, that is how they are perceived. And for that she is ‘forever grateful’.

A fully rounded picture of Nenita’s travails gradually emerges in poignant recollections of the heartbreak of separation, the strain of cultural displacement, and her fraught relationships with family members. In the final story, ‘Ode to Joy’, Nenita remembers the panic attacks provoked by a potentially nasty stalker and the fear that is alleviated simply by being addressed as ‘love’, a careless endearment that ‘blew her away the first time she heard it’. For Nenita, the expression represents ‘a fleeting love that helped her find her feet quick-smart on this road, despite the fear planted by the man’. Bobis is undoubtedly sincere, but she oversteps the fine line between sentiment and sentimentality too often for her stories to remain credible.

Ferocious Animals by Luke Johnson 

Recent Work Press, $27.99 pb, 224 pp

Another first collection, Luke Johnson’s Ferocious Animals, is, by contrast, all grit. Inhabiting a regional Australian town where abuse and violence go unremarked, Johnson’s adult characters have a limited capacity for self-reflection. They bumble through critical moments in life with little understanding, and even less empathy. Children are neglected and usually left to negotiate their own way through tragedy and loss.

In ‘The Names of Dead Horses’, a train’s emergency stop is the springboard for a story within the story narrated by Neville, the henpecked husband of a woman whose self-assurance and authority never falter. Once a panel beater in charge of the town’s vehicle impound yard, Neville remembers another accident: the death of a young girl while riding, and the children who arrived at his yard, not out of morbid curiosity but ‘drawn by the obligation of having known the girl before she died’. Neville provides these youngsters with an opportunity to commemorate their dead friend. Far from being the ‘idiot listener’ to his wife’s certainties, Neville proves to be a silent but compassionate man.

Most of Johnson’s male characters do not fare so well. In ‘The Garden of Earthly Delights’, a married salesman aggressively insists that the prostitute he has picked up finish a plate of pancakes she doesn’t want. Later, as she’s sneaking out of the hotel, the prostitute passes a television screening the finale of a Formula One race. As young women try to shield themselves from the spray of champagne, the winning driver whips ‘the bottle up and down like he was ringing a church bell. Or flogging a horse.’ After recounting her telling exchange with the waitress who served them, the narrative shifts to the waitress and her relationship with an equally unpleasant boyfriend. The reader can infer from these vignettes of thoughtless or deliberate humiliation that women are powerless to do anything other than comply. Johnson’s female characters are often ‘visibly worn’, like the mother in ‘The Secret Spot’, the impressive last story in the collection.

The ferocious animals of the title story are, of course, human beings. In the preparations leading up to a local grand final, a father and son decorate the house with their team colours. The ‘men’ have not yet breakfasted, but the father is already swigging beer. The mother is indifferent to these festivities. They are ‘a traditional household in this way’. When a passing car gives a prolonged horn blast of disdain, the father throws his beer bottle at the driver: ‘It sailed from beneath the veranda with beer spiralling from the open top like a Molotov cocktail and exploded on the road just behind the car.’ As one might expect, the situation escalates. Johnson has taken the creative writing dictum ‘show, don’t tell’ to heart, slipping significant details into his stories without obvious signposting. ‘Ferocious Animals’, like his most successful stories, has the effect of a parable, a lesson in how not to behave.

Death, loss, and grief are common to the human condition and, not surprisingly, provide the authors of these three disparate short story collections with a varied palette from which to draw. What is more disturbing is the picture of contemporary Australian society that emerges, rife with casual racism, brutality, and domestic violence.

Rachel isn’t the last woman in the world, but she might as well be. Cloistered in her bushland home on Yuin country, in New South Wales, Rachel’s days consist of birdsong, simple meals prepared from a pantry stocked with home-made preserves, and glass-blowing in her private studio – a craft that is both her livelihood and her religion. It’s a peaceful yet precarious existence. The land is scarred by bushfires. Rachel’s senses are attuned to the absence of wallabies and small birds. For all her proficiency with sourdough starter, Rachel isn’t self-sufficient. Her older sister, Monique, provides an emotional tether to the world, while townswoman Mia delivers supplies and transports Rachel’s glassworks to a gallery. When Mia fails to show, Rachel rues the lack of a back-up plan. When Hannah, a young mother, raving about a nation-wide outbreak of death, arrives on her doorstep with a sick infant, luddite Rachel must choose between taking Hannah’s word for it or rejecting her.

‘I loathe romans à clef as much as I loathe fictionalised biographies,’ wrote Simone de Beauvoir (1908–76). For this reason, the novel and the memoir were her preferred genres, even though the boundaries between the two were frequently blurred, a distinction that Beauvoir insisted must be maintained: fiction has ‘only very dubious connections with truth’. While Beauvoir was adamant that her fictional women protagonists are ‘not her’ in any recognisable sense, she conceded that characters may resemble living models. The most famous example is Lewis in The Mandarins (1954), loosely based on Nelson Algren, the American writer and Beauvoir’s lover for some twenty years. It may be loose, but the resemblance was enough for Algren to take his revenge by panning subsequent American editions of Beauvoir’s work. Even memoir has a very particular relationship to reality for Beauvoir. The writer of the memoir is not the same as the subject: the future, she notes in Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter (1958), ‘would turn me into another being, someone who would still be, and yet no longer seem, myself’.

The Inseparables has been called the fifth instalment of Beauvoir’s four-volume autobiography – Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter, The Prime of Life (1960), Force of Circumstance (1963), and All Said and Done (1972). Yet it differs from her memoirs in that, despite the first-person narration, the characters are ostensibly ‘fictional’ avatars. The book follows the sporadic and intense relationship between the young Sylvie (read: Beauvoir) and Andrée (read: Elisabeth ‘Zaza’ Lacoin) from their first meeting as students at a private Catholic school in Paris to Andrée’s death from viral encephalitis at the age of twenty-one. The Inseparables, then, occupies a unique place in Beauvoir’s oeuvre: a fictionalised memoir of the very sort she vowed never to write. Where it differs from memoir is primarily in its form: it is, to use translator Lauren Elkin’s words, a ‘deliberately patterned, attentively sculptured narrative, streamlined and disciplined where the memoirs are digressive, and unified in its plot’. In her dedication, Beauvoir describes The Inseparables as ‘pure literary artifice’; a story only ‘inspired’ by her friendship with Zaza.

Zaza first appeared in Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter as companion, platonic love interest, and alter ego of the young Beauvoir. Here, Beauvoir describes meeting Zaza as the ‘blinding revelation’ by which ‘conventions, routines, and the careful categorisation of emotions were swept away … by a flood of feeling that had no place in any code’. Like all forbidden love, the tacit mutual acknowledgment of these feelings manifested itself in a somewhat ‘stiff and formal’ relationship: ‘there were no kisses, no friendly thumps on the back; we continued to address one another as “vous”, and we were reserved in our speech’. The relationship does not move beyond this, despite references to the occasional ‘excessiveness’ of Simone’s feelings for Zaza. Like Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter, The Inseparables depicts, as Deborah Levy points out, the ‘enigma of female friendship that is as intense as a love affair, but that is not sexually expressed, or even particularly repressed’. It is this interstitial space between repression and expression that the book occupies.

If there is an erotic subtext, it is well hidden, condensed into a single sublimated gesture: the presentation of an embroidered bag by a flush-faced Simone/Sylvie to a bemused Zaza/Andrée. This scene, among others, appears in both Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter and The Inseparables, rewritten or reimagined in the latter work. Zaza’s attitude towards the gesture is confused and distant in the former book; Andrée’s is ecstatic and ardent in the latter. Beauvoir’s nostalgia for her relationship with Zaza was evidently complicated by the realisation that this relationship was not as important to Zaza as it was to her. Thus, one can expect in The Inseparables some secondary elaboration recasting events in light of this realisation.

Critics in France speculated that the book was not published in Beauvoir’s lifetime because it was too intimate, too scandalous, or because Jean-Paul Sartre deemed it unworthy of Beauvoir’s talent. Sylvie Le Bon de Beauvoir, Beauvoir’s adopted daughter and executor of her literary estate, rejects these speculations, claiming the real reason was that Beauvoir simply wanted to move away from fiction to concentrate on memoirs. The book was important to Beauvoir, who was nostalgic for her friendship with Zaza her whole life. It was her relationship with Zaza which made Beauvoir ‘attach so much weight to the perfect union of two human beings’. It was a formative experience for Beauvoir, who considered herself bisexual from an early age, rejecting homosexuality as just ‘as limiting as heterosexuality: the ideal should be to be capable of loving a woman or a man; either, a human being, without feeling fear, restraint, or obligation’.

Despite Beauvoir’s claim that the book is Zaza/Andrée’s story, Sylvie remains the novella’s protagonist. The Inseparables is in essence a coming-of-age story that deals not only with the situation of young women in French society at the time (‘Join a convent or get a husband’), but also Sylvie’s loss of faith at a young age which, rather than produce suicidal despair, as it does in Andrée, instead gave birth to the existential affirmation of life without God that would become foundational for Beauvoir’s worldview. ‘Faith,’ Beauvoir once said, ‘allows an evasion of those difficulties which the atheist confronts honestly.’ So at times does fiction, which is why she was wary of it as a mode of writing. This is not an honest confrontation of Beauvoir’s relationship with Zaza; that can be found in Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter. What The Inseparables does is colour the past with its afterglow in the present. This may be contrary to Beauvoir’s ideas of truth, but it reveals an aesthetic sensibility that is not always apparent in the memoirs. The scandal of the book, according to Le Bon de Beauvoir, is not so much social or sexual as philosophical. In existential terms, it is the story of the struggle between two forms of Being, Being-for-oneself and Being-for-others, between a unique individuality and the constraints of its milieu. The question the book poses, very early on, is ‘can you really be punished for the things you think?’ The answer Beauvoir gives is ‘yes’.

One year after Sri Lanka’s civil war ended in 2009, my family travelled to the city of Jaffna after the main highway leading to the country’s north reopened to tourists. Driving up the narrow, two-lane road as it became progressively bumpier, the busy towns, Buddhist temples, and green rice paddy fields of the central region gave way to scrubland sparsely broken up by army checkpoints, villages with ruined buildings dotted with bullet holes, and small roadside stores in front of which sat people whose eyes followed our van with a mixture of curiosity and suspicion. We were met by the same enquiring eyes when we reached Jaffna, a port city whose temples and institutional buildings are marked by Hindu and colonial Portuguese architectural styles, respectively. Jaffna’s population differs culturally and linguistically from its neighbours in the southern provinces of the island, where my family originates. Essentially, we had landed in a foreign country.

The region known as Tamil Eelam sits on the island nation’s brow; its borders begin from just above the ancient Buddhist kingdom of Anuradhapura and extend northwards to Sakkotai Cape, with two slender tracts of land reaching down along the eastern and western coasts. However, Tamil Eelam does not really exist, at least not according to Sinhalese-Buddhist nationalists and the Sri Lankan government, which, since the war’s brutal conclusion, have been systematically removing shrines to LTTE (Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam) fighters and desecrating the burial places of their fallen, obliterating and building over all traces of the separatist movement that engaged in a decades-long campaign to create (by whatever means deemed necessary) a separate homeland. For the Tamil civilians left behind in Sri Lanka and scattered across the globe in diasporas, scarred physically and mentally by the incessant shelling, shooting, and pillaging of the Sri Lankan army (the United Nations estimates that 40,000 civilians were killed during the final phase), there are few landmarks remaining that commemorate their pursuit of independence, let alone reignite the separatist movement. As Anuk Arudpragasam writes in A Passage North, without these markers ‘memory had to be cultivated consciously and deliberately’. Through his elegant and political novel, he memorialises the Tamil lives senselessly lost in the civil war and its reverberations.

 The novel’s narrator, Krishan, is a young, middle-class Tamil-Sri Lankan who works for an NGO and lives in Colombo with his mother and his infirm grandmother. Appamma, as the latter is known, is aided by her caretaker Rani, a bereaved mother who has lost two sons in the war. As he doesn’t directly share the traumatic experiences of his people in the north, Krishan immerses himself in accounts shared online by witnesses and survivors of the carnage in the final days of the civil war, the countless atrocities committed by the government forces.

The story begins with a phone call from Rani’s village informing Krishan that his grandmother’s caretaker has died from a broken neck caused by a fall. Compelled to find out whether her death was accidental or intentional, Krishan decides to attend the funeral. The same day, he receives a letter from his ex-lover Anjum; on his journey by train to Rani’s village, he reflects on his time with Anjum, and how the lives of his people are inextricably tied to trauma, loss, and a longing for something; whether that’s justice or a conscious or unconscious obliteration of self.

Shortlisted for the 2021 Booker Prize, A Passage North is Arudpragasam’s second novel. The first, The Story of a Brief Marriage (2016), was a visceral study of survival told from the unfolding perspective of a Tamil civilian in the final days of the civil war. The new novel, broader in scope, hews more closely to the author’s own experiences as a Colombo-born Tamil person burdened by survivor’s guilt.

Arudpragasam avoids direct dialogue and overly detailed descriptions of places in favour of a flowing, meditative prose that draws on Krishan’s recollections, recent Tamil histories, and classical texts – the story of Poosal who builds a grand temple to Siva in his mind (a ‘memory palace’), from the twelfth-century epic Periya Purānam, and Kālidāsa’s fourth-century elegiac Sanskrit poem Meghadūta (The Cloud Messenger), to name two – to explore the many facets of loss and yearning felt by Tamil survivors. Like Poosal, the reader is left to mentally construct the physical landscapes through which Krishnan moves, while the author provides a macroscopic view of the war and its aftermath in engaging, Proustian digressions.

Arudpragasam is equally adept at writing domestic scenes, from the ritual of buying and smoking cigarettes, to flirtations with lovers and confrontations with other males, to observations on Appamma’s slow decline and her childlike stubbornness. Originally, Arudpragasam set out to write an account of a young man’s relationship to his dying grandmother, but he found that he couldn’t prevent the war from seeping in. The musings on Appamma’s senescence, and Rani’s sleepwalking into the arms of death after personal tragedy, contextualise the precarity of life in postcolonial Sri Lanka

perhaps because of the frequency of sudden and violent death in the country in which [Krishan] was born, he’d never really stopped to consider the fact that people could also die slowly … for most people in most places, even Sri Lanka, death was a process that began decades before the heart stopped beating.

Hinted at in The Story of a Brief Marriage and greatly enlarged in A Passage North, the ruminations on death and insurmountable grief are counterbalanced with rich, sensual descriptions of Krishan and Anjum’s sexual interactions and the indescribable feelings of attachment and fear of abandonment one can develop early in a relationship.

Works like Arudpragasam’s and those of other diasporic Tamil writers give voice to the dead and dismembered, and unearth hitherto buried stories. In an age of activist journalism, the truism that ‘history is written by the victors’ is being challenged. Never mawkish or clichéd, Krishan’s short journey by rail is impelled by mystery, sexuality, and a quiet, clear-eyed rage.

A year before his death in 2015 following a cancer diagnosis, the writer–playwright Henning Mankell responded to a question about his love of the crime genre. He stated that his objective was ‘to use the mirror of crime to look at contradictions in society’. Mankell’s mirror was evident in his Kurt Wallander series (1991–2009), in which the detective was faced with contradictions not only in the landscape of crime and murder but also in his own domestic life. Great crime fiction does not need to focus a lens on the overlapping worlds of the private and the public. But well written, the genre’s interconnected spheres address the moral complexities that drove Mankell’s passion for crime fiction.

Studying The Crucible in English class engendered fierce competition for the part of John Procter, drawn as we schoolgirls were to his irradiating idealism and dogged pursuit of truth, and besotted by his nobility. The play’s force remains even as the passage of time has worked upon subsequent rereadings. When resisting false allegations of witchcraft, Proctor’s plea is harrowing: ‘Because I am not worth the dust on the feet of them that hang! How may I live without my name? I have given you my soul; leave me my name!’

In July 1999, ABC’s 7:30 Report ran a story on the Western Suburbs Magpies, an NRL club struggling financially and playing out its final season before a merger with the nearby Balmain Tigers. For that human touch, the story featured shots of a family decking out their children in the Magpies’ black and white, their relationship with the ninety-year-old club described as ‘something in the heart’. It was all very warm and fuzzy, at least until the camera cut away and a voiceover delivered a neoliberal sucker punch: ‘love does not necessarily deliver dollars’. Set in the same Western Sydney suburbs still mourning the loss of their team, Max Easton’s terrific début novel, The Magpie Wing, tracks a trio of Millennials as they similarly battle to retain their identities in a rapidly gentrifying world.

Judith Brett, historian and La Trobe University emeritus professor of politics, is characteristically direct – in her questioning, her analysis, and her engagement with readers. If there is something declarative about ‘Going Public’, the title of Doing Politics’s introductory chapter, that is exactly what Brett intends: to go public, to offer a general reader her considered reflections on Australian political and cultural life. This is not an assemblage of opinion pieces, though her writings have a related journalistic conciseness and impact – they speak to the times. What distinguishes Brett’s collection of essays is their scholarly depth and habit of enquiry. They prompt thought before they invite agreement, or conclusions. Even the bad actors, the political obstructors, the wreckers in Brett’s political analysis, are psychologically intriguing. Why are our politicians like this? What’s going on? Judith Brett studied literature and philosophy as well as politics as an undergraduate. Perhaps Hamlet drills away in her consciousness: ‘There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, / Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.’

Since the time of celebrated figure painter Gu Kaizhi (345–406 CE) of the Jin dynasty (266–420 CE), artists in China have been researchers of sorts. Over millennia, a scholarly ideal in painting would emerge. Late in their working lives, many artists sought an aesthetic that was uncontrived and conformed to the inner workings of nature. For Nanjing-based art historian Xue Xiang, this was Fairweather’s achievement. A Scottish-born artist, son of civil servants to the British Raj, war survivor, migrant, vagabond, builder of makeshift rafts and huts, well-connected recluse, acclaimed foster child of Australian art: what makes Ian Fairweather resonate with Chinese artists across millennia?

‘The past only comes into being from the vantage point of the future,’ the novelist Michelle de Kretser told an interviewer recently. History is written in a present that is inexorably moving forward, while historians explore as far back as their interests take them. All the while they are backstitching, a step forward, a half step back. Post hoc ergo propter hoc?

Paul van Reyk begins his story of Australian foodways some 50,000 years ago, and leaves us in 2020 amid serious concerns about climate change, drought, and the threat of bushfires (to all of which he pays full attention). Land, climate, and distance have profound impacts on what we eat and how much it costs.

How would we have viewed the seven hundredth anniversary of Dante Alighieri’s death if there had been no Covid-19? The editors of Divining Dante are candid about their fears that the pandemic might narrow their celebratory anthology to poems of doom and disaster. After all, the cosmic system of Dante’s Comedy is one of the few fictional creations to match the scale and reach of the pandemic. Dante’s souls are aware of their insignificance among millions, but their pain or bliss is unique and absolutely meaningful. Punishments or blessings are matched to their deeds; character is fate. Today we, too, are confined to private places and must face whatever we find there. The times suit that side of Dante.

Censorship is to culture what war is to demography: it creates absence where presence should be. Christopher Hilliard’s fascinating and deeply informed monograph on the politics of censorship in Britain (and by extension its colonies) from the 1850s to the 1980s is concerned with the many books, magazines, and films that fell afoul of the authorities, from translations of Zola in the wake of the Obscene Publications Act 1857 to the skin mags of the 1970s.

Stanley Kubrick’s Napoleon is perhaps the best-known film never made. But what about others that never happened? What might a closer look at these reveal about the state of filmmaking? Such unmade films constitute the ‘dark matter’ of British director Michael Winterbottom’s book Dark Matter: Independent filmmaking in the 21st century. The invisible dark matter of the cosmos shapes our universe; without it many galaxies would fly apart. For Winterbottom, an examination of cinematic dark matter ‘might help to explain the wider landscape of British independent cinema’ this century.

We academic philosophers get annoyed when people suppose that the purpose of philosophy is therapeutic. But we need not deny that philosophical enquiries into the nature of mind, knowledge, and the good can be sources of personal inspiration or solace. In his earlier work, Books That Saved My Life (2018), Michael McGirr, teacher, aid worker, and former priest, explained how literature and poetry can enrich our lives. Now it’s the turn of philosophy.

I guess every reviewer comes to a book with expectations, especially when the author’s reputation precedes him or her. On opening this collection, I knew that Les Carlyon (who died in 2019) wrote well. I remember my parents reading him in The Age and murmuring approval of his lyrical style and, sometimes, the content. I knew he loved horses, the track, and the punt. To me these were disappointments to overlook: I have hated horse racing since I was a kid driving around with my grandfather in his Datsun, windows up and the races on. My grandfather never wound down the windows, presumably so he could hear the call: perhaps it was the lack of fresh air that poisoned me against the sport. And I knew that Carlyon had written huge tomes on war and the Australian experience: Gallipoli (2001) and The Great War (2006) won acclaim, sold well, and left some military historians with reservations about his scholarship. My expectations, mostly, were realised. I sped through A Life in Words, encountering witty and whimsical delights along the way.

The age of Artificial Intelligence (AI) has arrived, though not so much an age of sentient robots as one of ubiquitous data collection and analysis fuelling automated decisions, categorisations, predictions, and recommendations in all walks of life. The stakes of AI-enabled decision-making may be as serious as life and death (Spanish police use a system called VioGén to forecast domestic violence) or as trivial as the arrangement of pizza-toppings.

AI is a loose category that describes all kinds of automated decision-making systems. Techniques range from relatively simple logic-based algorithms (if A and B, then C) to complex ‘deep learning’, where brain-like neural networks refine and optimise predictions and categorisations derived from unstructured data.

The gift of ABR

Looking for literary gift ideas for book lovers in your life? Why not give a discounted print and/or digital subscription to Australian Book Review?

Until 10 January 2022, a one-year print & digital gift subscription (Australia) costs only $85 (usually $95). And also, until 10 January, a one-year digital gift subscription costs only $60 (normally $80). Contact us for more information on how to redeem this special discounted offer, or visit our website for more information.

Beejay Silcox joins the ABR Board

ABR is delighted to announce that Beejay Silcox has joined the ABR Board. Beejay is one of our most popular reviewers. Her association with ABR began when her short story ‘Slut Trouble’ was commended in the 2016 ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize and later published online. In 2018, she was the recipient of ABR’s Fortieth Birthday Fellowship. Her literary criticism and cultural commentary regularly appear in national arts publications, and are increasingly finding an international audience, including in the Times Literary Supplement and The Weekend Australian. Her short stories have been published at home and abroad, and have been selected for a number of Australian anthologies. Welcome, Beejay!

Melbourne Prize for Literature

The winners of the 2021 Melbourne Prize for Literature were announced at a special online event on November 10. Congratulations to Christos Tsiolkas, who won the $60,000 Melbourne Prize for Literature for a body of work that ‘has made an outstanding contribution to Australian literature and to cultural and intellectual life’. Plaudits also to Evelyn Araluen, who won the $20,000 Professional Development Award; to Eloise Grills, who won the $15,000 Writer’s Prize for her essay ‘The Fat Bitch in Art’; and to Maxine Beneba Clark, who won the $3,000 Civic Choice Award. The Melbourne Prize for Literature is awarded triennially.

Dominic Amerena wins the Speculate Prize

In other Jolley Prize-related news, Dominic Amerena has won the inaugural Speculate Prize for his speculative fiction manuscript ‘In Real Life’. Amerena – commended in the 2016 Jolley Prize and shortlisted in the 2017 Jolley Prize – receives $5,000, a mentorship from Giramondo, and a week-long residency at RMIT’s McCraith House. The prize was established by RMIT University and Giramondo Publishing in 2021 to ‘uncover and support writers who embrace new literary modes and extend the possibilities of the novel and short story form’. The biennial prize is open to Australian and New Zealand writers ‘who explore the expansive possibilities of literature’.

Helen Anne Bell Poetry Bequest Award

Sydney poet Emily Stewart has won the 2021 Helen Anne Bell Poetry Bequest Award for her manuscript ‘Running Time’. Jeanine Leane, the runner-up, was awarded the School of Literature, Art and Media (SLAM) Poetry Award for her manuscript ‘Gawimarra-Gathering’. The biennial award increased its cash prize from $7,000 to $40,000 in 2021, making it the richest poetry prize in Australia. The Helen Anne Bell Poetry Bequest Award is presented by the Department of English at the University of Sydney and is funded by the bequest of former student Helen Anne Bell.

Free gift subscription

We’re feeling generous again! New and renewing subscribers can now direct a free six-month digital ABR subscription to a friend or colleague. Why not introduce an avid reader – especially a young one – to ABR?

To qualify for this special offer, just purchase or renew your current ABR subscription – even before it’s due to lapse. Renew for two years and give away two free subs, etc. Contact us on (03) 9699 8822 or at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.. We will then contact the nominated recipient.

Terms and conditions apply. Visit our website for more information about this special offer.

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.

Shaggy dog story

Dear Editor,

It was with a sense of dread that I continued reading the first paragraph of Declan Fry’s review of 7½ by Christos Tsiolkas (ABR, November 2021), after his opening sentence and his reference to Soseki’s Kusamakura. Having traced the structure of Christos Tsiolkas’s The Slap to Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, from the opening pages through to the last chapter, and posted it on a website in response to a review written by James Ley, a reference to Natsume Soseki’s Kusamukura, better known to me as Three-Cornered World, rang warning bells of increasing dissonance.

Declan Fry is generous enough, in his review of this latest pastiche by Tsiolkas, to consider the question of failure as ‘an artistic goal’ and generous to the point of being disingenuous when he compares a working-class Christos Tsiolkas to a working-class D.H. Lawrence. The two ‘working-class’ backgrounds, aspirations, and abilities could not be more different. When Fry calls it a ‘shaggy dog number’, he comes nearer to the truth about a writer who relies on original texts from masters of the craft to provide a recipe to be followed that he can call his own. The joke of this ‘shaggy dog story’ is on Tsiolkas, however, among those who can distinguish authentic ingredients.

Paul Cleary

Dear Editor,

Not having read Paul Cleary’s book Title Fight (ABR, November 2021), I cannot comment on Stephen Bennett’s review of it. I can, however, sadly attest that Stephen’s review is very accurate in its outline of the history of Yindjibarndi Aboriginal Corporation, FMG’s impact on the Roebourne community, and the state of heritage protection in WA.

Linda McCartney

Dear Editor,

I saw the Ballarat exhibition of Linda McCartney’s photography (ABR Arts, November 2021) last weekend. She has always been one of our most loved photographers. Over our years, many tertiary students in photography have been exposed to her work, but also to the artist herself. Thank you, Alison Stieven-Taylor, for an insightful review of this exhibition.

Andrew West on Rob Barton

Dear Editor,

From this well-written and considered review (ABR, November 2021), this sounds like a most interesting book. I just wish Andrew West had not used that phrase ‘anti-war rent-a-crowd’. To whom he is referring? Why would anyone anti-war be referred to in such a disrespectful manner?

Dear Editor,

I do not agree with Andrew West, and I don’t consider Rod Barton a prophet. He did know, and he didn’t do anything. What about the chemical weapons that the West supplied and that Sadam Hussein used against Kurds in northern Iraq?