AustLit

'Two deaths – two executions – are at the heart of the darkness that is Richard Flanagan’s new novel, First Person. One takes place in the wild and remote Gulf country of northern Queensland and the other in the seemingly mundane setting of an outer Melbourne suburb. Notwithstanding these different environments, they are two versions of essentially the same scene. In each, a journey to a place beyond streets, houses, families and women culminates in an act of violence, which is conjured out of the chaos of masculine relationships by the agency of bullying dressed up as mateship. Or, more simply: two men go into the bush with a gun and only one of them comes out.' (Introduction)

'The Tournament is one of the oddest and funniest books ever published in Australia. It’s like Afferbeck Lauder’s Let’s Stalk Strine, or the poems of Ern Malley: we could never have predicted its existence, but it allows us to see and hear ourselves differently. John’s early drafts made it plain that he was doing much more than imagine the great minds of the century playing each other at tennis. That would have been peculiar enough, but it would also have been merely amusing, a charming gesture.' (Introduction)

'Near the end of Michelle de Kretser’s The Life to Come, an elderly woman named Christabel throws two novels she has been reading into the bin. One of them is by a writer named George Meshaw, whose work ‘concerned itself with the brutal and inadequate mechanism of the world. As if that were any kind of news!’ The other is by Pippa Reynolds, a contemporary version of the ‘silly lady novelist’ who once attracted the withering disapproval of George Eliot.' (Introduction)

'In his author’s note for A Long Way From Home (2017), Peter Carey explains, ‘I have spent my life writing about my Australian inheritance, interrogating our colonial past, or possible futures’. Indeed, Carey’s fiction has always been concerned with iconic events and characters that have shaped Australia’s identity: Dickens’ representation of Australia in Great Expectations in Jack Maggs (1997), the Ern Malley affair in My Life as a Fake (2003), Ned Kelly in True History of the Kelly Gang (2000) and, most recently, the overthrow of the Whitlam government and the leaking of classified information by Julian Assange in Amnesia (2014). Yet Carey admits that despite his ambition to ‘acknowledge the peculiar circumstances of invasion, colonisation and immigration that have made us who we are’ he has always ‘avoided direct confrontation with race, and the question of what it might mean to be a white Australian’. A Long Way From Home changes this position. In 1985, Carey focused on Aboriginal dispossession and terra nullius in Illywhacker; he does this in A Long Way From Home too – but here he also confronts another type of dispossession, that of Aboriginal Australia’s cultural identity.' (Introduction)

‘'Just for Fun’ is Luna Park’s motto, but to any Sydneysider the phrase sounds more like an entreaty than a declaration. Few cities place their fun-fairs so prominently, but the Park’s position – under the Harbour Bridge, facing the Opera House – is a misdirect in a city with such an uneasy relationship with pleasure. It has been harried throughout its existence, and survives only as a carnival where most of the carnival atmosphere has been removed.' (Introduction)