Tracy Ellis wins the Jolley Prize

Sydney writer Tracy Ellis is the winner of the 2022 ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize for her story ‘Natural Wonder’. From an overall field of 1,338 entries, she was named the overall winner at an online ceremony on 11 August. Ellis receives $6,000 from ABR. This year’s judges (Amy Baillieu, Melinda Harvey, and John Kinsella) described ‘Natural Wonder’ as having ‘a gently melancholic undertow … The story is remarkable for its quietness, acknowledgment of knotty feelings, and the room it makes for small miracles.’ (The judges’ full report, and a list of the longlisted authors, is available on our website.)

Nina Cullen was placed second ($4,000) for her story ‘Dog Park’; and C.J. Garrow, a former runner-up, was placed third ($2,500) for ‘Whale Fall’.

Our three winners read their stories in a recent episode of the ABR Podcast.

We look forward to offering the Jolley Prize for the fourteenth time in 2023.

As always, we thank our chief Patron Ian Dickson AM for his continuing and most generous support.

Contemporary takes

Given the paucity of new literary monographs in this country, it’s with some relief that we welcome the creation of Contemporary Australian Writers, a new series from the Miegunyah Press. Melbourne University Press will publish two titles each year. The series editor is Melinda Harvey, of Monash University. Nathan Hollier, Publisher and CEO of MUP, told Advances:

I still think there is a great value in talking about literature and what it says about our worlds, because creative writers can say things about those worlds that other writers can’t; they can represent the complexity of the world in a way that other forms of writing and other artforms can’t.

First up is the emphatically titled Lohrey, a needed study of the author of Camille’s Bread, The Philosopher’s Doll, and The Labyrinth, winner of the 2021 Miles Franklin Literary Award.

Coming titles in the series include Tanya Dalziell on Joan London and Emmett Stinson on Gerald Murnane – just in time for his Nobelisation perhaps?

A new environmental festival

Regional festivals often prove more intimate and congenial than boisterous metropolitan ones, and it’s hard to think of a more atmospheric setting for Australia’s newest one: the Mountain Writers Festival, which will run from 4 to 6 November 2022 in Macedon. MWF (though we doubt that will catch on without some contestation from the older festival down the Calder Freeway) was twice delayed because of Covid, but it arrives in confident shape, with an impressive line-up.

The organisers state that this will be ‘the first Australian writers’ festival to focus exclusively on the environment – the most important topic of our times – with a forever theme of “Place, Story, Nature”’. Speakers will include Evelyn Araluen, Claire G. Coleman, Tim Flannery, Declan Fry, and Anna Krien.

ABR, with its keen interest in these subjects, is pleased to be a sponsor of the festival. Historian Billy Griffiths (Deputy Chair of ABR and Macedon resident) will chair the ‘Trouble in the Outback’ panel on 6 November, with panellists Kate Holden, Joshua Kemp, and Tyson Yunkaporta.

The Festival will take place, mostly, at the capacious Jubilee Hall in Macedon. Early bird weekend and day passes go on sale on 5 September; single session tickets will follow on 20 September. Visit https://mountainwritersfestival.com.au

Staff changes at ABR

James Jiang left ABR in late August after sixteen months with the magazine as the ABR/JNI Editorial Cadet and Assistant Editor. We wish James well in his new role at Griffith Review.

We’re delighted to welcome Dr Georgina Arnott, who has joined ABR as Assistant Editor. Georgina, an author and academic, first wrote for the magazine in 2006. She is the author of The Unknown Judith Wright (2016) and Judith Wright: Selected writings (2022). Recently she undertook a year-long ABC Top 5 Humanities media residency. Readers will recall her illuminating August 2020 cover feature ‘Links in the Chain: Legacies of British slavery in Australia’. 

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.

Adam Aitken and Robert Adamson

Dear Editor,

David Mason, in his review of the anthology The Language in My Tongue (ABR, August 2022), writes: ‘I feel a bit unfair picking on Adam Aitken, whose poems open the book by virtue of alphabetical order, but his lines too often forgo the poet’s brief in favour of triviality: “Reaching forty now I ask: Why did Mum / never sew the hems of my jeans, even if Death on the TV / reminded her of her children?”’

Perhaps Mason is unaware that, in these lines, Adam Aitken is referencing Robert Adamson’s famous and not-trivial poem ‘My House’, from Where I Come From (1979). Far from being trivial and a forgoing of the poet’s brief, these lines are an intertextual play with a well-known poem by a Hawkesbury/Sydney poet, and appear not to have been understood by the reviewer, giving a false impression of Aitken’s ‘The Fire Watchers: A memoir (in the Sydney Style)’.

Tracy Ryan, Toodyay, WA

The Amateurs

Dear Editor,

One thing that struck me about The Amateurs (reviewed by Tim Byrne in ABR Arts, July 2022) was its playing, first, of humans’ relatively long trip into the modern, and then the relatively short trip into post-modernism with the arrival of Brian Lipson’s character, the person of the now. The lived, present feeling in the theatre of our togetherness and inter-reliance was strong and powerful, in the way or parallel to the way the Noah and the Ark story presents itself.

Jim Dal (online comment)

Il Trovatore

Dear Editor,

Ah, a refreshing review. I loathed this production (attended on the same day) and was tempted to walk out on numerous occasions. The whole thing was a disgrace; the singing shocking; the sets hideous.

Naim Kassar (online comment)

‘Natural Wonder’

Dear Editor,

I like the quandary of the time travelling young wonderer who may well want to go back and fix up fate differently with his mother, or is that just the grandmother’s take on his question. A lovely impressionist collection of telling and slightly blurred details; harbour, shark beach, boats adrift, and needing their anchors cut free, evaporation.

Stephen Kimber (online comment)

Australia’s fraught journey with China continues. The Albanese government now wrestles with the same harsh global and regional realities as its predecessors.

The crisis brought about by US House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan in early August now appears to have ruptured much of the initial attempts on both the Australian and Chinese sides to at least begin talking to each other again. That cautious resumption of ministerial contact with Beijing at the defence and foreign ministerial levels had not ushered in any reprieve from Chinese economic coercion. Two Australian citizens – Yang Hengjun and Cheng Lei – remain incarcerated in China.

In the era of Russia’s war in Ukraine, who would be a ‘Putinversteher?’ (‘Putin-understander’) is the disdainful German term used for someone trying to negotiate the perilous path between Putin-apologist and Putin-denouncer. Understanding Vladimir Putin means grasping how Putin himself sees the world he is operating upon. Philip Short, a former BBC foreign correspondent in Moscow, has committed himself to this path, and more power to him, say I.

Some readers will fault him for his failure to match the ‘evil genius’ rhetoric of most Australian media reports on Putin. But anyone seriously interested in Russia and Ukraine should read this book, regardless of their preconceptions. True, its heft – the paperback is almost six centimetres thick – may deter some, but that is largely the result of Short’s thoroughness. He examines the evidence for each of the specific allegations that have been made of Putin’s personal responsibility for political assassinations and other acts of malfeasance, for which thankless effort we should all be grateful. All I can say to a potential reader is: give it your best shot, preferably resting the book on a flat surface. Do not attempt to read it in bed unless you have very large hands.

In these relentless times, thirty years ago might be prehistory; events now appear to move so breathlessly that the ‘world-changing’ and ‘historic’ occur with terrible regularity. The flip side of this relentlessness and hyperbole is that wars, floods, financial disasters, coups, and political murders are just as quickly forgotten. As we enter a global recession brought on by the twin pincers of the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the lingering Covid-19 pandemic, it is easy to forget two other events still shaping our world: the global financial crisis of fifteen years ago, never fully overcome, and the 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

These key moments emerged, in their turn, from another which has been singularly influential in shaping our world today: the global political and cultural realignments brought about by the end of the Cold War, the end of communism, and the collapse of the Soviet Union between 1989 and 1991. Far from signalling the end of history, these years were seminal to a new era whose unstable foundations continue to shift and loosen. Putin’s nostalgia for a lost – albeit failed – empire is just one indication that the end of the Soviet Union is a story still unfolding: it will play out on a timescale beyond the lightning immediacy of social media and trending topics.

This book will at times quite literally take your breath away. A deeply reported account of the fall of Afghanistan’s capital, August in Kabul tells the harrowing stories of those who escaped and those who were left behind in the maelstrom of those two weeks between the arrival of the Taliban on 15 August 2021 and the final US flight to depart – at one minute to midnight on 30 August. Compelling, vivid, and distressing all at once, it is a damning indictment of the Taliban’s wanton cruelty and of the domestic and foreign policy failures that allowed them to return. It is an impressive book-length début by one of Australia’s pre-eminent photojournalists.

Quilty, a nine-time Walkley Award winner who had lived in Kabul since 2013, almost missed the shocking events that would become the basis for August in Kabul. Just as the rapid march of the Taliban into cities across Afghanistan in early August last year took Western intelligence by surprise, so too it blindsided Quilty, who was in France at the time, attending a wedding. And so on 14 August, ‘as anyone with the means of leaving Kabul’ was exiting the country, the Australian was on one of the last Emirates flights into the country. This is where August in Kabul begins, and it was in Kabul that Quilty stayed, chronicling the chaos of the American exit and the early months of Taliban rule, until returning to Australia last November. He was one of the few foreign journalists in the country during the fall – indeed, one of the few working journalists, as many local reporters were forced into hiding.

August in Kabul is thus a first draft of history, a work drawing on Quilty’s own experiences of those two weeks (including ten hours in Taliban detention), informed by his eight years reporting across the country, and supplemented by more than one hundred interviews. In a prefatory note, he concedes that ‘more forensic retellings of the last days of America in Afghanistan will be written as information is declassified and others who were involved come out of self-imposed public exile’. Until then, he continues, ‘this book represents the most accurate accounting of events – collected as they happened and in their immediate aftermath – that I can offer’.

This was not the book Quilty initially set out to write. He admits at one point that a project had been on his mind since 2020, after the Taliban signed the Doha Agreement with the United States to mark the beginning of the end of American-supported Afghan government rule. ‘I saw the Doha Agreement as a death knell for the Afghan Government, but I never anticipated it would come so quickly,’ he says. Instead, Quilty wanted to write about the gulf between rural Afghanistan and those in the cities, particularly Kabul.

The rural experience of the two-decade war ‘was one of deprivation and disaffection – a story less often told’, and a central explanation for the US failure in Afghanistan. The ‘punitive neglect of the rural class’ was ‘creating an increasingly unbridgeable gap between rural Afghanistan and the central government’. (Quilty won an Overseas Press Club of America award for his investigation into massacres committed by CIA-backed militias, a ‘lack of accountability’ that was ‘self-defeating’ and, he suggests, ultimately ‘the war’s essential theme’.) Then Kabul fell, and ‘made the themes I’d followed in Afghanistan over the preceding six years all of a sudden seem less urgent’. Perhaps – but Quilty’s wider contextual understanding informs August in Kabul, making it an incisive and analytical read.

The book is focused on particular figures: Captain Jalal Sulaiman, commander of several Afghan National Army outposts in Maidan Wardak, two hours south of Kabul; Hamed Safi, a press attaché in former President Hamid Karzai’s retinue; Najma Sediqi, a female journalist (who, harrowingly, purchases a knife: ‘before they take me, I will kill myself’); and more. They deliver heart-wrenching human stories. Through them Quilty offers a broader narrative, of state failure, foreign policy missteps, and, ultimately, government betrayal. The book is full of minor details that, cumulatively, serve as a condemnation of counterproductive American methods – such as the use of local intelligence operatives disguised as humanitarian workers. ‘In 2018, such practices resulted in bans on house-to-house vaccination campaigns in Taliban-controlled areas and the subsequent spikes in the spread of the polio virus,’ the author recalls.

Quilty, an assured narrator, lets the facts speak for themselves, but imbues the story with this wider perspective informed by his long stint in Afghanistan. When he does offer judgement, it can be damning: ‘The Taliban’s military victory would never have come without the ineptitude and malfeasance of successive administrations in Kabul and their armed forces, and the hubris of the American-led international military coalition.’

Two stories stand out. The book begins with a finely detailed account of a stand-off between the army’s Antenna Post, overseen by Sulaiman, and a local Taliban contingent, in the months prior to the fall of Kabul. Quilty tells the story of the siege of this outpost – on-and-off fighting, lack of interest from army headquarters in Kabul, impact on the surrounding community – through Sulaiman’s eyes and those of his Taliban counterpart, Abudajanah. It is unusual for its inclusion of Abudajanah’s perspective – a tale of cruelty at the hands of the state that pushed Abudajanah towards the alternative: the Taliban. Quilty does not excuse the Taliban’s inexcusable acts, but this perspective does help explain. He recalls a night-time raid by US-backed forces on a local madrassa that saw five students mercilessly executed. It is unclear if they were students or Talibs – or (most probably) both – but there is little room for fine distinctions under international humanitarian law in the case of extrajudicial killing of unarmed individuals. ‘And regardless,’ Quilty writes, ‘the effect … [was] akin to fuelling the fire rather than putting it out.’

Quilty also tells the story of Nadia, a nineteen-year-old woman, who tried unsuccessfully to leave via Kabul airport during the chaos, only for her family to try and marry her off to a Talib, to save themselves. Living in an abusive home, Nadia is repeatedly beaten by her father and brothers; in one sickening scene, she is flailed with the plastic hose ordinarily used to connect the family’s stovetop to a gas bottle. When she attempts suicide by slitting her wrist with a razor, her mother suggests taking her to the hospital; her brother simply scoffs: ‘Let her do what she wants.’ (Remarkably, Nadia retains some empathy for her family against the backdrop of the Taliban’s return – ‘she empathised with her father’s predicament and reasoned that her brothers were only acting out of fear’.) Nadia’s story has a positive ending; she managed to escape from Afghanistan in April 2022. But so many have been left behind, including many who worked for Australian forces – offered minimal assistance by the former and current Australian government and in a constant state of fear of Taliban retaliation.

Any faults in the book are minor ones. The level of detail is at times overwhelming and can require close readerly attention. The book proceeds largely chronologically in covering the two weeks as Kabul fell, filling in the necessary context on recent Afghan history as the issues arise. This is done well, providing the detail when relevant rather than opening with a priming chapter, but readers with little knowledge of Afghanistan may feel disoriented. On the whole, though, August in Kabul is gripping, accessible, and empathetic. Quilty’s photographic background shines through with vivid, scene-setting prose, plus the inclusion of over a dozen jaw-dropping images midway through the book.

Almost twelve months later, just a day before the first anniversary of Kabul’s fall, Quilty was in Canberra speaking at the local writer’s festival. It was a world away from the chaos he left behind. But on the panel, it was clear that Quilty’s heart is still in Afghanistan. ‘It was my home,’ he told the audience.

Reflecting on the frantic days in the lead-up to the final US airlift, Quilty quipped that ‘I didn’t do a good job as a journalist in those two weeks’, given his preoccupation with the city and efforts to help evacuate locals. Any deficiencies in Quilty’s reporting during the fall – real or imagined – have been more than made up for by August in Kabul. This is a heartfelt account of one of the greatest tragedies of our era. Long-form, first-hand journalism at its finest.

Almost fifteen years ago, struck by the paucity of information in the media about the ADF deployment to Afghanistan, I edited a short collection of essays that posed a modest question: What are we doing in Afghanistan? (2009). I wish I had known then half of what Tom Frame reveals about the ADF’s activities in Central Asia in his new book, Veiled Valour.

As it turned out, the Australians in Afghanistan were doing a lot less and a lot more than they were prepared to reveal. They were doing a lot less in the sense that the mission’s political goals extended no further than demonstrating the nation’s support for the United States as it struck out against its enemies in the wake of the 9/11 attacks and launched the War on Terror. Accordingly, Australia’s mission in Afghanistan was accomplished simply through the presence of its forces there. The exact nature of the forces’ task, what they were doing in Afghanistan, was an operational afterthought that presented the ADF’s senior command with a confounding military challenge – how to pin a strategic tail on this political donkey. They responded by committing the special forces to counter-insurgency operations, identifying and interdicting prominent Taliban operatives. Meanwhile, the regular forces were organised into Reconstruction (and Mentoring) Task Forces whose assignment was to deliver nation-building projects in Uruzgan Province – roads, healthcare facilities, schools, training the nurses, electricians, plumbers, and bricklayers needed to run and renew them, and safeguarding these assets, and the country’s security, by mentoring Afghanistan’s burgeoning army and police forces.

Despite the political and strategic vacuum they emerged from, these missions still generated occasional good-news stories about the ADF’s efforts to improve life for the Afghans. Yet the Australian public rarely heard about this work because, petrified by the potential for bad news, the Department of Defence erred on the side of caution. For all but the final twelve or eighteen months of a twelve-year deployment, it corralled the media within the ADF’s Tarin Kot base and prevented journalists from moving ‘beyond the wire’ to report on the contest with the Taliban for influence and territory. The great silence that ensued was more than a missed public relations opportunity for the ADF. It helped facilitate the years-long concealment from senior command, politicians, and the public of increasingly plausible rumours that elements within the Special Air Services Regiment (SAS) had killed unarmed prisoners, non-combatants fleeing violent contact (‘squirters’), as well as dozens of innocent Afghans.

Ironically, while the SAS were allegedly concealing their execution of ‘persons under control’, planting radios and weapons (‘throwdowns’) on the bodies of their victims to justify their use of lethal force, there were those in the regiment who were desperate for publicity. They felt that because the mainstream media could not witness their covert missions to kill or capture Taliban commanders and bomb makers or laud the individual acts of heroism performed in their commission, they had been denied the acclaim they merited. Worse still, it seemed that their rivals in the Commando regiments were receiving the publicity the SAS believed was their due. Occupying segregated areas of Camp Russell, like a divorcing couple living in the same house, the SAS and the Commandos carried on like the Real (but better-armed) Housewives of Tarin Kot, denigrating one another’s performance and attributes to anybody who would listen and plotting bigger and bolder demonstrations of their prowess.

Alerted to an upsurge of bad behaviour in the regiment, David Irvine, the former Director-General of ASIO and ASIS, was brought in to review Special Operations Command, within which the SAS and the Commandos sat. He found an organisation in a state of decay and men who had forgotten who they were and what they were there for. The humble self-confidence of the Special Forces operator had been replaced by boastfulness and arrogance, ‘can do’ thinking had become an ‘only we can do’ mentality. Élitism had crossed over into entitlement: ‘“Special” no longer meant different; it meant “superior” and applied to individuals and not their missions.’ In this context, the secrecy that routinely marked Special Forces’ actions was now employed to cloak their misdeeds and evade accountability. The rules-free ethos that developed encouraged the growth of a ‘warrior culture’ in which combat performance was the currency of authority and experienced Troop Commanders, battle-hardened non-commissioned officers (corporals and sergeants), accrued unassailable power, undermining the chain of command.

Irvine suggested that, in part, the roots of this organisational collapse lay in the repeated rotation of SAS force elements through Afghanistan and the unforgiving operational tempo when they were there. Taking a longer perspective, Tom Frame looks back to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in late 1979 and the organisational and moral collapse of its 40th Army, its descent from a conventional military force into an assembly of rapacious criminal gangs that murdered and pillaged the Afghans at will. It’s a striking allusion, if not quite a comparison, especially in light of events in Ukraine. Frame argues that like the 40th Army, when the ADF was sent to Afghanistan it had no concept of the human or social terrain it was entering. Clueless about the enormous complexity that clan and family affiliations brought to the distribution, exercise, and transference of power in Afghanistan, the conceptual frameworks through which the Australians sought to understand and master the country and its people were hopelessly ill suited to the reality on the ground. As Mike Martin’s extraordinary study of the conflict in Helmand, An Intimate War (2014) demonstrated, efforts to reduce the fighting to simplistic oppositions between government and Taliban, pro- and anti-coalition, insurgency and counter-insurgency, good and evil, merely exposed how out of their depth were the Australians and their coalition colleagues.

Frame’s invocation of the Russians takes the book into potentially contentious territory when he asks the reader to consider whether it was conceivably Afghanistan’s ingrained political corruption, the shameless shifting of loyalties among its warrior class, and the country’s indecipherable cultural and moral codes that had corroded the occupying forces’ moral armour and set them on the road to perdition. This is not a proposition that bears scrutiny. Afghanistan may have been a political hall of mirrors, a military quagmire, a cultural conundrum, and a profound challenge to conventional Western moral values, but these facts do not absolve from responsibility those who ignored their training, abandoned their principles, and succumbed to savagery. Afghanistan was not something that happened to the SAS. It did not turn its rogue operators into anything they were not already, though it may have hastened the transformation. They never surrendered agency. Frame’s (indecent) exculpatory proposal is familiar from Vietnam, which purportedly did terrible things to wholesome American boys sent there; Northern Ireland, whose tribal polarities similarly led good British men astray; European colonies in Africa and India; and all those other conflicts where the mask of civilisation suddenly fell away. It is no truer for all its repetition.

Frame’s book unerringly demonstrates that the SAS’s alleged crimes in Afghanistan arose from Australian political, strategic, organisational, and moral failures. At a political level, the failure to define campaign outcomes, to describe what success might look like and when it might be achieved, the failure to provide a vision for the operation beyond the validation of support for the United States, required the nation’s military commanders to knock up a DIY strategy and compelled them to remain in Afghanistan as long as the United States was still there. Within Special Operations Command, the failure to exercise close and effective oversight over the SAS and to enforce military discipline and strict accountability for infractions disempowered the chain of command, enabled the reign of the charismatic troop commander and entrenched the warrior ethos as the only measure of military competence. Once the killing had started, the failure of some troopers to restrain themselves, or of others to report their comrades’ cold-blooded crimes, and their fear of retribution – even death – should they do so, illustrates how easily a once-disciplined military force could begin to operate more like a death squad. Organisational collapse magnified and multiplied individual moral failures. The crimes in Uruzgan were not the product of a few bad apples: the whole orchard was diseased.

Responsibility for the moral failures laid out in Veiled Valour extends to every Australian who complacently professes faith in the inherent combat prowess of the nation’s forces, who believes in the moral and military exceptionalism of its servicemen and women, in the proposition that its military virtues are among the country’s defining – and best – qualities. The refusal to countenance the fact that, like soldiers from every other national force, our soldiers might transgress, egregiously so at times, first delayed and then obstructed the path to accountability and the discovery of the truth about what we were doing in Afghanistan. 

Over the course of a long and distinguished public life, Gareth Evans has held fast to his conviction that as individuals aspire to personal decency and moral behaviour, the same should be replicated among nations. As a foreign minister and an author, and in his international organisations and academic roles, Evans has consistently advocated ‘good international citizenship’. Care for our common humanity he sees as both a moral imperative and a national interest.

However, Australia’s record as a good international citizen has ranged from patchy to lamentable. Evans measures it against four criteria: foreign aid (ODA), human rights, peace and security (including refugees), and collective action in the face of existential threats. Labor’s internationalist approach to these activities, he recalls, was displaced after 1996 by the Coalition’s reversion to promoting ‘national values’ based on our European heritage. Australia steadily fell to much lower levels than its OECD counterparts in ODA, trustworthiness, media freedom, and peacefulness. Australia’s grudging and minimalist performance, as Evans describes it, on human rights and Indigenous people, and our miserliness towards refugees, asylum seekers, environmental degradation, and climate action, have been internationally criticised.

The American poet Robert Lowell (1917–77), I don’t suppose, intended to eclipse his contemporaries, competitors, rivals, wives, any more than in one of his poems the new esplanade along the Charles River intended to stamp down ‘grass and growth’, as he rather vaguely puts it, with ‘square stone shoes’, but it’s what he did. Now, in the almost half a century since his passing, and the end of ‘the age of Lowell’, as one critic christened it back in the 1960s, his largely unintended oppression has unbent; as in the Grimms fairy tale called ‘The Frog King’, one hears the succession of hoops giving way.

Think of Nobel Laureate Seamus Heaney and you mightn’t automatically think of Australia. What the name invokes for most readers, I would hazard, are the vivid landscapes of Ireland (‘The cold smell of potato mould, the squelch and slap / of soggy peat’). Heaney (1939–2013) might have been a man of the world, but he was rooted half a world away.

As I embarked on a research project, ‘Seamus Heaney in Australia’, earlier in the year, I wondered if there might be an element of folly to the endeavour. I’d applied to undertake the annual O’Donnell Fellowship in Irish Studies, offered by the University of Melbourne, on the basis of the limited archival research it was possible to do from Ireland (the country I’m from, where I recently finished a PhD on the Northern Irish poetry of the 1960s and 1970s). To my surprise, the application was successful. So there I was in a taxi to Belfast airport (the city in which Heaney remains beloved, where he’d been to university and taught briefly); queuing for a sandwich at London Gatwick; running for a connection in Dubai; and, finally, touching down in Melbourne, the furthest I’d ever been from home.

One of the dangers of academia is that ego interferes with the formation and sharing of knowledge. Colleagues are enemies, discussion is manipulation, subject matter is weaponised. British author James Cahill studied at Oxford and Cambridge, worked at a gallery in London, and recently joined King’s College London, but his first novel, Tiepolo Blue, is burdened with a feeling that these environments have few redeeming features. In a different tone, the novel could have been a satire, but if Cahill exposes his characters to ridicule, it is to make us recognise the sadness and loneliness behind the veneer of dignity. Cahill’s vision is tragic, not absurd. In Tiepolo Blue, love, for persons as much as for intellectual subjects, is stifled by power plays and abominable behaviour. Cahill’s academia is self-defeating because it poisons self-knowledge.

Early in This Devastating Fever, a writer named Alice has a difficult conversation with her agent, Sarah, about the novel she is working on, which she is considering calling This Devastating Fever. The novel is supposed to be about Leonard Woolf, left-wing journalist and activist, novelist, publisher, best-selling memoirist, and husband of Virginia Woolf, whom he outlived by almost thirty years. Things are not going well for Alice, however. She cannot settle on a theme (the parallels between Leonard’s era and her own proliferate alarmingly) or an approach (experimental approaches have failed her, historical fiction bores her), and her agent is increasingly concerned. In its current iteration, the book is both fiction and non-fiction – which makes it potentially unsaleable, Sarah tells Alice sternly. Forced to choose, Alice picks fiction.

Hong Kong’s hottest property, JK Jr, has it all: boyish charm, acting chops, and a set of ‘crazy ripped’ abs. He’s set to star in Brood Empire, a spy thriller backed by the financial might of Hollywood and China, and destined to smash box-office records in all markets. However, the new era of mainstream western films featuring hunky Asian male leads must wait, as the whole enterprise suddenly falls apart. Enter a not-so-humble web tabloid to piece together this sordid tale of hubris and unfulfilled dreams from the debris.

Paul Daley will be familiar to many readers as a respected journalist expressly committed to exposing the blind spots of white culture’s dominant myths about Indigenous history and Australia’s national identity. Daley is perhaps less well known as a novelist and playwright. These two interests in his work – historical research and imaginative writing – inform his powerful second novel, Jesustown, Daley’s seventh book, and one which he felt ‘compelled’ to write.

It can only be coincidence that two very similar novels have been produced by contemporary doctors, but the overlapping characters and themes of Cut and The Registrar are so striking that it’s hard not to visualise their authors, Susan White and Neela Janakiramanan, getting together somewhere to sketch out their early drafts. Both novels feature young female protagonists working in teaching hospitals, who are as dedicated to their patients as they are to advancing their careers.

The Labyrinth begins with a woman walking through her childhood home – a decommissioned asylum. In middle age she moves to a run-down house by a wild and dangerous sea, where she notes her vivid and prophetic dreams. The house is convenient because she needs to be close to her son, an imprisoned artist. She befriends a stonemason who offers to carve her a gargoyle (which she refuses). Together they design and build her version of a labyrinth, a prayer or meditation path most famously realised in the great medieval cathedral of Chartres, although Lohrey’s antipodean labyrinth is not a homage to the Chartres labyrinth, or an imitation.

Scene like a Banksy mural:
tiny Flower Thrower lobbing
blood and vernix onto our

chests, squirming pink-
purple skin gliding on Māmān,
alien as amniotic fluid,

charging the night
with witchery and colostrum, 
red-cheeked grace that

remakes the ride home,
each minor pock, each distant
car a quandary to skirt until

home: white muslin drifts
into the hallway, raider cloaked
at the threshold, no return  

as natural disaster hits
revelation – singularity – we who
fancied ourselves faithless

know a goddess has arrived.

I was once subjected to a lecture by a Dublin taxi driver ‘on the extensive inequities of the Central Intelligence Agency’. Its every atrocity, in Southeast Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East, was relayed to me. It was an object lesson in the popular contempt in which the CIA has been held since its founding in the 1940s.

As if
the black window
at the solitary pass
from I to this (or you or now)
could let a human mind
slip through the glass
once,
let’s practise seeing water,
looking hard at the harbour,
that detritus of worn
mussel shells, rock ledges
graffitied
with an ecstasy
of lichen, waves
writing out the riddles
of harmonics,
breath held
for a moment
as Elizabeth Bishop
in her posthumous voice
says cold dark deep
and absolutely clear
to the innermost air,
despite the murky distance,
surfacing
grey like a wandering seal,
as our minds try
colluding with existence
in a fantasy
of what we might
be doing, or imagining     
we do, standing at the sheer
bald windows of our corneas,
beside a grey
harbour on a careful
winter day, feeling
sharpened, conjugal
and stuck

Algeria, June 1835. General Camille Alphonse Trézel’s expedition to pacify the western tribes had failed. Under the leadership of Emir Abdel Kader, Commander of the Faithful, the Algerians had bloodied the French invaders badly. Outnumbered and compelled to withdraw to the port of Arzew to resupply, Trézel’s column fought desperate rearguard actions for three days and nights. On the fourth day, the Algerian cavalrymen outflanked the exhausted French and were waiting in ambush on the edges of the Macta marshes. Trézel’s men suffered a complete rout, with several units abandoning the field in panic. By the end of the day, 300 French soldiers were dead or missing; many more were wounded. The shaken survivors who managed to board the supply vessels at Arzew were evacuated to Oran. According to Colonel Charles Henry Churchill’s Life of Abdel Kader (1867), ‘written from his own dictation and compiled from other authentic sources’,

[t]he Arabs knew no bounds to their exultation. Shouts of joy resounded, and the glare of torches flashed to and fro in the defile all through the night. An aerial spectator might have seen one part of it occupied with busy architects. Drawing near, he would have seen something growing up from the ground like a pyramid. Bending down and listening, he would have heard frantic cries of ‘more heads, more heads!’ A closer inspection of this work of art would have revealed to the astonished gaze hundreds of French heads, piled up promiscuously.

¥

In 1985, the American poet and essayist Susan Howe deftly jettisoned any pretensions to objectivity in the field of literary analysis with her ground-breaking critical work My Emily Dickinson. The possessive pronoun in Howe’s title says it all: when a writer’s work goes out to its readers, it reignites in any number of imaginative and emotional contexts. What rich and varied screens we project onto everything we read.

The Elizabethan Mind attempts nothing less than a comprehensive summary – within the limits of existing scholarship – of the literary, philosophical, theological, religious, scientific, political, social, emotional, and cosmic contexts for understanding the nature of the mind in the age of Elizabethan England. Insofar as is possible for a cultural history of this kind, the book succeeds. It is an impressive achievement. The prose is not only lucid, but at times positively breezy. And yet, within the confines of its particular approach, The Elizabethan Mind does not betray the complexity of its subject in achieving this lucidity.

The book’s subject is demanding, and we can understand some of those demands by looking at a single word that appears throughout the book: ‘melancholy’. In the Elizabethan age, the term melancholy ‘referred to both the humoral substance in the body – black bile – and the psychological state it produced’. It referred as well to the black, dark, and sluggish planet Saturn, which principally governed the humour. At the same time, Jean Bodin and others claimed that Africans suffered from an excess of black bile and melancholy because the hot climate made Africans ‘swarthy and deeply black’.

Alexis de Tocqueville was born in 1805 into an eminent Norman aristocratic family, with ancestors who had participated in the Battle of Hastings and the conquest of England in 1066. This was a family and social milieu that was to be deeply scarred by the French Revolution of 1789–99. His parents were Hervé, Comte de Tocqueville, formerly an officer of the personal guard of Louis XVI, and Louise Madeleine Le Peletier de Rosanbo, a relative of the powerful political figures Vauban and Lamoignon. The couple married in 1793; the following year they barely escaped the guillotine. Louise’s grandfather Malesherbes (Louis XVI’s minister and defence lawyer at his final trial) and both of Louise’s parents were condemned to death, as were her elder sister and her husband.

Persons of Interest does not fit readily into any familiar genre. It crosses the borders of biography, psychology, Cold War history, and family studies. When Pamela Burton and her sister Meredith Edwards decided to write a book about their parents, they realised that different readerships would be attracted to different parts. Who would be interested in a book about the marriage, and the post-divorce lives, of a man who had been a central figure in public controversies many decades ago and a sensitive, introspective woman who was little known to the public but for whom their daughters felt far greater sympathy? By crossing those borders with what their prologue calls ‘a unique, intimate and candid account of our parents’ complexities and interweaving relationships’, they have written a book that will be ‘of interest’ to many readers, no matter what their usual focus.

According to his author’s note, Rain Towards Morning is ‘a definitive book’ of the poems Robert Gray wishes to preserve. Nameless Earth (Carcanet, 2006) is the most generously represented of Gray’s previous eight books. This is followed by his mid-career volume Piano (1988) in which he first began to publish a range of poetry with tight rhyme schemes and controlled rhythms. More than a third of the poems Gray has chosen for Rain Towards Morning are these formal or semi-formal compositions, indicating that he wishes to showcase this aspect of his work. Fewer poems have been chosen from his free verse books Grass Script (1978), The Skylight (1983) and Afterimages (2002), arguably his best books.

One of the many life-challenging things that poetry can do is to prise open unexpected spaces and take us somewhere entirely unanticipated, whether it be in terms of how we live, how we understand the world, or how we link the fabric of textual utterance with that of our lived experience. These two new poetry collections set about this labour of disruption in very different ways, demonstrating some of the pathways available between poet and reader.

If nothing else, Lionel Fogarty’s longevity as a poet should bring him to our attention. Kargun, his first work, was published forty-two years ago amid the ferment of utopian Black Panther politics, discriminatory legislation, and racialised police violence. Fogarty’s finest work, Ngutji, published in 1984, drew on his experience growing up in Cherbourg Aboriginal Settlement, but the breadth of his poetic vision was already evident. Some of the early poems such as ‘Jephson Street Brothers Who Had None’ and ‘Remember Something Like This’ originate in Fogarty’s experience of Cherbourg Aboriginal Mission and radical politics, but the poems’ truths are non-propositional and essentially human.

Fogarty is a poet who remembers each poem he has ever written and the circumstances of its composition, and his devotion to poetry, the language art, is absolute. It needs to be said that, despite the praise and recognition of fellow poets and the explicatory work of critics and scholars, Fogarty remains a niche poet, and an enigma for many readers – the man who is dutifully allotted his twenty minutes at writers’ festivals but whose poetry remains dense and incomprehensible to some. The practical consequence of this for Fogarty has been that honours have been few, which is odd given the breadth and quality of his work and the magnitude of his contribution to Australian literature and Indigenous culture.

Ostensibly, Life with Birds is about the author’s search for her father, a Vietnam War veteran who died when she was young and whose story she hardly knew. As I read it, though, I was reminded of a line from Svetlana Alexievich’s seminal oral history The Unwomanly Face of War (2017): ‘Women’s stories are different and about different things.’ In the end, Life with Birds is less about men and war than about the women left behind – in this case, three daughters and a wife – and the shape of their lives in the wake of his silence, and then his absence.

In early 2020, as the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic took hold, a special kind of viral hazard appeared upon the surface of the sea. Offshore from Sydney, Yokohama, San Francisco, and elsewhere loitered cruise liners turned floating hot spots. As they awaited permission to dock and disembark their passengers, the boats became an inadvertent exhibition of cruising-industry foibles. Behind sluggish and patchy Covid action plans, we learned, lurked other forms of misbehaviour, from grotesquely unscrupulous labour practices to systematic tax avoidance. The high seas, it seemed, really were wild.

Why do publishers do this? The cover of this book screams that the Cowra breakout is an ‘untold’ story, and ‘the missing piece of Australia’s World War II history’. Neither claim is remotely true, as the author himself acknowledges. Once we get past the sensationalist cover and into the text, Mat McLachlan notes that the story of the Cowra breakout has been told several times before, and well: he even salutes Harry Gordon’s Die Like the Carp!, first published in 1978, as the ‘definitive’ account. So this is hardly the missing piece of an Australian military history jigsaw. Another stretch is the suggestion in the shoutline that the breakout was a conventional military ‘battle’.

Nicholas Hasluck is that relatively rare combination of practising lawyer and accomplished writer. A former judge of the Supreme Court of Western Australia, he has also produced more than a dozen novels and as many works of non-fiction. This duality of roles is not unknown. Two contemporary examples that come to mind are Jonathan Sumption, who was on the UK Supreme Court and is a medieval historian, and Scott Turow, a Chicago attorney whose works include the trial novel Presumed Innocent (1988). It is, however, still unusual, both in Australia and elsewhere. As Hasluck himself points out, there is little respect in the legal profession for those few members who have an interest in literature:

It has always struck me as an endearing trait of those who work within the legal system that if a chap works five days a week at the law, and spends his weekends playing golf or yachting, he is thought to be treating the law with the respect it deserves. On the other hand, if a fellow works five days a week at the law and then goes home and writes novels about truth and justice, he is often thought to be somehow, well, rather … frivolous.

In November 2011, amid the Occupy Movement that followed the 2008–9 recession, seventy-odd Harvard students walked out of their introductory economics course taught by Greg Mankiw, author of the world’s bestselling economics textbooks. The students protested that Mankiw’s faith-in-markets economics had little relevance for their crisis-riddled world. The walkout proved more than a campus stunt. Similar protests followed in universities across the world. Senior academics threw in support. New networks and organisations emerged, proposing alternative economics curricula, forums, and ideas. Their aim, as one campaigner put it, was to combat the ‘fantasy world of neoclassical economics – a faith-based religion of perfect markets, enlightened consumers and infinite growth that shapes the fates of billions’.

Long gone are the days when the discipline of classics was almost exclusively focused on the golden ages of fifth-century Greek and first-century BCE Roman literature and their antecedents. During the past decades, under the leadership of the indomitable Peter Brown and others, the period of later antiquity has become a burgeoning field of research. Yet it cannot be said that the study of specifically Christian thought and literature has been fully integrated into this development. Too often it has remained the domain of departments of theology and religion and of their associated vehicles of publication. In his thought-provoking and stunningly erudite new cultural history of time, the distinguished Cambridge classicist Simon Goldhill not only diagnoses this state of affairs but also seeks to remedy it.

Robbie Arnott’s début, Flames (2018), won a Sydney Morning Herald Best Young Novelist award and a Tasmanian Premier’s Literary Prize. His follow-up, The Rain Heron (2020), won the Age Book of the Year award, and was shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Literary Award, the ALS Gold Medal, the Voss Literary Prize and an Adelaide Festival Award. His latest novel is Limberlost (2022). He lives in Hobart.

If you could go anywhere tomorrow, where would it be, and why?
I’ve always wanted to go to Patagonia. Even thinking about it fills me with a sense of adventure and isolation and natural beauty. I feel as though if I went there I’d come to some new understanding of things. It’s a silly feeling, but I can’t shake it. 

What’s your idea of hell?
Any meeting that goes for more than half an hour.

What do you consider the most specious virtue?
Passion (or the dreaded Vision). I think both are often used as excuses to treat others poorly.

What’s your favourite film?
Jiro Dreams of Sushi (2011).

And your favourite book?
Old School (2003), by Tobias Wolff.

Name the three people with whom you would most like to dine.
I have some friends who died young, so I’d go to the pub with them.

Which word do you most dislike, and which one would you like to see back in public usage?
Learnings (or any corporate jargon). Every time I hear jargon, I feel as if the world loses a bit of colour. I’d like to see blood referred to as claret more often. It reminds me of my grandfather, and the vibrant way he would use language and colloquialisms.

Who is your favourite author? 
I find this hard to answer, because there are many writers who have written books I adore, but I don’t necessary love their whole body of work. So I’m just going to say Annie Proulx. Her writing means a tremendous amount to me.

And your favourite literary hero or heroine?
Philip Marlowe. He’s compelling, charismatic, and funny. Despite all his toughness and bluntness, he is kind to people who need kindness. 

Which quality do you most admire in a writer?
Curiosity.

Which book influenced you most in your youth?
The Redwall series, by Brian Jacques.

Name an early literary idol or influence whom you no longer admire.
J.K. Rowling.

‘I want to tell you about a different kind of world, one that exists within the world we live in,’ writes Akuch Kuol Anyieth in her memoir, Unknown, thus inviting her readers to empathise with the singular plight of refugees. For much too long, refugees have been overlooked or rendered invisible; they are confined to refugee camps, detention centres, and hotel rooms, condemned to the margins of society, and denied entry to territories in order to seek safe haven. Anyieth’s endeavour, through the personal medium of the memoir, to foreground the lives and perspectives of refugees is admirable, given that it obliges her to relive past traumas. Unknown is a vivid, embodied portrait of Anyieth’s resilience and her will to overcome.