AustLit

'Australian Book Review is thrilled to name Robyn Archer as our new Laureate. She joins David Malouf, who became the inaugural Laureate in 2014.'

'John Murphy opens his magisterial study of Herbert Vere Evatt – the fourth major biography of the good doctor – with an essay on the challenge of writing biography in general, and of writing one on Evatt in particular. He prefaces this discussion with a short description of one fateful and illuminating incident late in Evatt’s political career. On the evening of 19 October 1955 in the House of Representatives, during a debate on the Petrov Royal Commission, Evatt, then leader of the federal ALP, stunned his followers and invited the derision of his opponents when he claimed that he had been in communication with Vyacheslav Molotov, Russian foreign minister and a Stalin henchman for thirty years, who had declared that disputed documents before the Commission were forgeries. The prime minister, Robert Menzies, who had feared a forensic dissection of the Commission Report, could not believe his luck: ‘The Lord hath delivered him into my hands.’' (Introduction)

'Literary biographers and their intended subjects at times agree and at times disagree about the stories they think should be told. J.D. Salinger and Vladimir Nabokov – the one, fastidious about his privacy, the other, insistent on his version of history – famously took their biographers to court and emerged victorious. Such tussles are settled at times more quietly, through compromise, withholding of copyright, or spoiling tactics of some other kind. Doris Lessing, on learning that no fewer than five different writers were preparing to tell the story of her life, sat down to write a two-volume auto- biography which would serve, so she thought, as a gazumping record of a life about which she knew she knew more than any of her would-be chroniclers. But once she got going she found that her views and opinions had changed disconcertingly over the years, the perspectives of youth giving way to those of old age. Biography, she reflected, was an unstable art, subject always to flux, contingency, and the restless, revisionist movement of time. Her biographers might tell one kind of story about her – or five different kinds – but she too had multiple tales to tell.' (Introduction)

'he iconography of Indigenous land rights in Australia is fundamentally deceptive. Take, for example, the famous photograph of Prime Minister Gough Whitlam pouring red sand from his hand into that of Gurindji leader Vincent Lingiari on 16 August 1975. In the image, the white emissary from Canberra – pink-fleshed in a wool suit and Windsor knot – appears to bestow something substantial. Lingiari’s left hand holds papers which, moments before, Whitlam described as ‘proof, in Australian law, that these lands belong to the Gurindji people’, while the earth that fills Lingiari’s right hand, Whitlam avowed, is ‘a sign that we restore them to you and your children forever’. The whole scene, for good reasons, resembles the ancient European ritual of ‘livery in deed’ in which the transfer of soil or a branch stands in as material testimony to the transfer of more ethereal legal rights.' (Introduction)

'Are you part of the non-Indigenous majority? Have you had too little contact with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people? Do you feel that you do not fully comprehend their worldview, but wish you could? Is entrenched Aboriginal disadvantage eating away at your sense of Australia as a fair and united country? Do you still possess the recollection of your first encounter with an Aboriginal person, and wonder why it remains so enduring? Are you troubled by the time being taken to achieve constitutional recognition and frustrated that an apparently simple issue has become so vexed? If these questions resonate in your mind, you have much in common with many Australians and may benefit from reading these books.' (Introduction)

'The federal government has been promoting the innovation economy, but is considering recommendations for legal reform which will undermine the financial and cultural interests of creators. This conflict captures the tension around real reform in this area. Are they being serious? The recommendations are contained in the report of the Productivity Commission, an independent panel which reviews options to make our economy more productive, favouring free markets, and eschewing monopolistic practices.' (Introduction)

'Long before earning a place as one of Australia’s best-loved bands, The Go-Betweens sprang from the close creative pairing of Grant McLennan and Robert Forster, who met as students at the University of Queensland. As Forster makes clear in this tender memoir, he wanted McLennan in the band not because of his musical ability – he had never played an instrument – but because of their intense friendship and shared appreciation of literature and film. ‘We’d come to The Go-Betweens as romantics, me teaching my best friend bass,’ writes Forster. When they began playing together at the end of 1977, McLennan was much more interested in cinema than in music (‘He burnt for the screen’). But McLennan quickly mastered the bass before graduating to guitar and authoring many of the band’s most enduring songs (including ‘Cattle and Cane’ and ‘Streets of Your Town’). The Go-Betweens went on to release nine studio albums. Forster and McLennan were working on a tenth when McLennan died after a sudden heart attack in 2006.' (Introduction)

'You might ask how a man who spent his days with the major poems of Browning could wish to spend his evenings with the minor movies of Chow Yun-fat,’ Clive James asks, rhetorically, in Play All: A bingewatcher’s notebook, then provides a near-tautological answer: ‘It’s a duplex need buried deep in my neural network.’ In mine, too, although my love of screen trash comes from childhood deprivation; we were never allowed an ‘idiot-box’. Mum might sneak next door to watch Peyton Place, but Dad viewed (so to speak) the then-new technology as mind rot.' (Introduction)

'Throughout history, women have been seduced by men who are mad, bad, and dangerous to know. Many of the world’s most notorious murderers and con artists have attracted loyal, besotted, and often very young female accomplices. The twelve stories in Laura Elizabeth Woollett’s collection, spanning the twentieth century, evoke the lives of real women who were all sucked into an abyss of murder, fraud, and violence under this spell. Some are well-known, including the seventeen-year-old politically naïve Eva Braun, who caught Hitler’s eye when still at school; and Myra Hindley, the ‘Moors Murderess’, who cold-bloodedly killed five children with her lover, the psychopath Ian Brady, convinced they could get away with the perfect crime. Others have been relegated to history’s footnotes, such as the so-called ‘Manson Brides’, or Veronica Compton, an aspiring actress and playwright who began a passionate correspondence with jailed serial killer Kenneth Bianchi and committed a copycat crime in order to prove his innocence.' (Introduction)

'In his introduction to Bob Ellis: In his own words, Bob’s son Jack says of his father that ‘writing was his reason for being ... and through his writing he saw himself in conversation with the world’. That conversation stopped on 3 April 2016 with Ellis’s death from neuroendocrine cancer. He was seventy-three. For devotees or those merely curious about his life and times, the conversation continues in the pages of this book compiled by his wife and companion of fifty years, Anne Brooksbank.' (Introduction)

'Boat, pub, boat, pub, boat, pub: in the fictitious Western Australian fishing town of Stark, residents divide their days between these two brutally masculine locales, and readers will be hard-pressed to decide which is bleaker. Is it the crayfish boat, with its ‘pong of bait’ and ‘hostile company of the breeze’, or the rural tavern, where ‘the trebly call of dog racing’ soundtracks the boozing of ‘men who looked scarcely alive’? And what’s worse, to be circled by sharks or surrounded by meth heads; to be tossed about by vicious waves or to have your face carved open by a pint glass? ‘Stark wasn’t the sort of place one stayed long’, we’re told, which begs the obvious retort: who the hell would stay there at all?' (Introduction)

'Edward sits on Sydney Harbour Bridge, considering jumping. It is 1948, and he has written several times to George VI about building a new naval base in the waters below, and not hearing back, begun to build it himself. Edward was manic depressive, suffering from what is now called bipolar disorder. Greg de Moore and Ann Westmore begin their book Finding Sanity: John Cade, lithium and the taming of bipolar disorder with Edward; they end it with the patient upon whom lithium was pioneered in the early 1950s, Bill Brand. Where Edward came down from the bridge and returned to the peaks and troughs of bipolar life, Bill entered a tortuous triangle of treatment and suffering with the Australian psychiatrist John Cade and that soft, white, lightest of metals, lithium, before finally dying of lithium poisoning.' (Introduction)

'On the Blue Train is Kristel Thornell’s reimagining of Agatha Christie’s mysterious disappearance in 1926. Thornell might have let her imagination fly, given that both Dorothy L. Sayers and Arthur Conan Doyle involved themselves in the nationwide search for the missing woman, but instead she has stuck close to the established facts: Agatha was grieving over her beloved mother’s recent death when her husband Archibald asked for a divorce; there was a fracas; Agatha’s car was found abandoned; she vanished and was discovered ten days later, using the surname of Archibald’s lover, at a spa hotel in Harrogate.' (Introduction)

'The cover of Sean Rabin’s first novel, Wood Green, depicts a foggy eucalypt forest at dawn (or dusk), and a ghostly figure in the glow of torchlight. With the added element of the story’s setting – a secluded town nestled in the shadows of Mount Wellington, Tasmania – one could be forgiven for assuming that Wood Green is ‘yet another bush gothic’, instead of a modern and humorous discourse on small town life and writing itself.' (Introduction)