AustLit

'For months, Indigenous activist Thomas Mayor carried the Uluru Statement from the Heart around Australia, rolling out the canvas as he told its story. With Labor and mining companies now on board, the push continues for a First Nations voice. “We have bipartisanship on the influences of the Australian public, left, right or centre. That’s the mindset we’re transferring to – fighting for the referendum to win.”' (Publication abstract)

'Road trips, as epitomised by Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, can be a way to unfetter and unbind. Not in Carrie Tiffany’s Exploded View, though, where a car is described as little more than a “moving coffin”.' (Introduction)

'Ask a cancer researcher or oncologist about the most exciting developments in their field, and chances are they will mention immunotherapy. By modifying the body’s own immune system to treat disease, it gives doctors the ability to target specific rogue cells with precision.' (Introduction)

'It is the photographs scattered through the text of Kindred that grab our attention first. Two pairs of battered boots in close-up, hanging on a nail. A rudimentary bush campsite where a couple of thin ropes are tied between two trees and draped with canvas. The corpse of a wombat, strung up to be butchered. Men in puttees and a woman in full Edwardian dress, posed in an alpine heath. And panoramas of gorges, crevasses and mountain peaks in which gums twist out of boulder cracks and human figures are registered as ants with walking sticks.' (Introduction)

'While father and daughter Hans and Nora Heysen both became renowned Australian artists – he for bush landscapes, she for portraits and still lifes – their work had become, until recently, somewhat overlooked. By Miriam Cosic.' (Introduction)