AustLit

'Stories are at the heart of Peg Fraser’s compassionate and thoughtful book about Strathewen and the 2009 Black Saturday bushfires. The initial impression gained by the subtitle, Not the end of the story, could be one of defiance, a familiar narrative of a community stoically recovering and rebuilding. Yet this book is anything but hackneyed, and the title proves provocative. How could the story of Black Saturday ever end? Is there just one Black Saturday story? Who is making this story, and why? The great American fire historian Stephen J. Pyne has observed that there are three paradigms of academic research on fire – physical, biological, cultural – and that it is the cultural paradigm that is the most neglected. Black Saturday is a ‘story about stories’ and thus represents an important step in the understanding of how Australians live with fire. Fraser challenges the clichés that influence so much public discussion about bushfire tragedies.' (Introduction)

'In the May 2019 issue of Quadrant, its literary editor, Barry Spurr, inveighed against the ‘inane expansion of creative writing courses’. Professor Spurr’s scholarly accomplishments in the study of poetry and Australian fiction do not include creative writing. (His resignation from the University of Sydney was accepted in December 2014.) While many Australian authors have spectacularly succeeded without degrees in creative writing, such courses have certainly helped others – including Nam Le, Ceridwen Dovey, and Matthew Hooton – to write prize-winning fiction. Before studying creative writing in Canada, the United Kingdom, and Australia, where he now teaches in the course at Adelaide University, Hooton worked for four years as an editor and teacher in South Korea. Typhoon Kingdom is his second novel about Korea, following Deloume Road, which won the Guardian’s ‘Not the Booker Prize’ in 2010.' (Introduction)

'Eight Lives is a meticulously crafted first novel by Susan Hurley, a 2017 Peter Carey Short Story Award nominee and a medical researcher with more than thirty years’ experience in the pharmaceutical industry. It’s an intricate thriller told in a multiple first-person style by friends, family, and associates of the late Dr David Tran, all of whom feel some responsibility for his horrific death.'  (Introduction)

'In 1961 the great Australian poet Judith Wright published an influential essay called ‘The Upside-down Hut’ that would puzzle contemporary readers. The basis of its argument was that Australia felt shame about its convict origins, and that we needed to move on. And we have: since 1961 the representation of the convict era in fiction and on screen has undergone a shift. Having convict ancestry used to be regarded as a cause for shame; now amateur genealogists hunt down convicts among their ancestors and celebrate when they find them.'  (Introduction)

'I didn’t write this review. I stole it. Or so a review that echoes the framing conceit of Alex Landragin’s elegant and unusual début might begin. This richly allusive, speculative historical novel opens with a preface from the book’s self-described ‘adopted parent’, the fictionalised ‘Alex Landragin’. Following the sudden death of the ‘Baroness’, an ardent and obsessive bibliophile with a keen interest in Charles Baudelaire, this ‘second-generation Parisian bookbinder’ finds himself in possession of a mysterious loose-leaf manuscript. Despite the Baroness’s strict injunction not to read it, he finally succumbs to curiosity and devours it in ‘one fevered sitting, on a winter’s night so cold ice was forming on the Seine’.' (Introduction)

'On 20 August 2018 the ABC aired a ‘special literary edition’ of Q&A during the Melbourne Writers Festival. It had a stellar line-up: John Marsden, Maxine Beneba Clarke, Sofie Laguna, Michael Mohammed Ahmad, and Trent Dalton. Viewers must have been optimistic. Were Q&A’s producers indulging in a long hour of lively literary debate? Unfortunately, they were not. But even though politics overshadowed much of the discussion that evening, the panellists made a considerable effort to draw on their expertise as writers rather than as political commentators when answering questions from the audience.' (Introduction)

'From the ill-fated explorations of Leichhardt and Burke and Wills through to the Beaumont children, Azaria Chamberlain, and the backpacker murders in New South Wales, the history of Australia is peppered with tales and images of people going missing. And, as the First Peoples might well have been able to warn us, few of those stories turn out well.'  (Introduction)

'How do we get the measure of the phenomenon that is #MeToo? Both deeply personal and profoundly structural, #MeToo has been described as a movement, a moment, and a reckoning. Some critics have dismissed it as man-hating or anti-sex; sceptics as a misguided millennial distraction from more serious feminist concerns. Others distinguish between a ‘good’ #MeToo (focused on eradicating sexual harassment from the workplace) versus a more capacious #MeToo (aimed at destroying the patriarchy). That #MeToo originated from the activism of African-American civil rights campaigner Tarana Burke in 2006 has not negated representations of #MeToo as White Feminism, but nor have the privileged white women who have been its most high-profile faces been delivered justice either.' (Introduction)

'It begins with a projected haze of ocean horizon. In this blurry liminal space, silence is misted with anticipation, like the moment before an echo comes back empty, right across the sea. Then a close-up of multi-instrumentalist Warren Ellis’s hands unpicking tranquillity’s fabric, each piano note a loosened stitch.'  (Introduction)

'People spent a lot of time looking for the pioneering aviator Charles Kingsford Smith. When he disappeared for the final time in 1935 just south of Myanmar, then known as Burma, he was just thirty-eight but felt ancient. Hopeful rescuers came from far and wide, but their efforts were not rewarded. Ann Blainey remarks wryly that one day the Andaman Sea may ‘give up its secret’, but, until then, Smithy’s final resting place is as mysterious as that of MH 370.'  (Introduction)

'There have been at least half a dozen previous biographies of Robert Menzies, but Troy Bramston’s new life of Australia’s longest-serving prime minister is arguably the most attractive combination of research and readability.'  (Introduction)

'Requiem with Yellow Butterflies begins, aptly, with a death. Sitting at his office in Brisbane, the author receives news that Gabriel García Márquez has died at his home in Mexico. Across the world, there is a mushrooming of obituaries. Garlands of yellow butterflies are draped from trees and buildings; outside Mexico City’s Palacio de Bellas Artes, paper butterflies rain down like confetti. From Madrid, Elena Poniatowska eulogises: Gabo ‘gave wings to Latin America. And it is this great flight that surrounds us today and makes flowers grow in our heads.’'  (Publication summary)

'Andy Kissane, who (with Belle Ling) shared the 2019 Peter Porter Poetry Prize, is one of Australia’s most moving poets. He is unfailingly empathetic, a master of poetic narrative – and of the ‘middle style’ where language is not an end in itself but an unobtrusive vehicle for poignancy (or, occasionally, humour or irony). The Tomb of the Unknown Artist, Kissane’s fifth collection, is divided into four thematic sections, all of which contain powerful and memorable poems. Of these, Part Three, a series of monologues from the Vietnam War, is the most disturbing.'  (Introduction)

'Nowadays every second young person seems to want to be a stand-up comic, an occupation that perfectly represents the ‘gig’ economy in its precariousness and occasional nature. Anne Pender gives us mini-biographies of seven Australians who succeeded, often spectacularly, in the risky business of being a comic long before the idea of a ‘gig’ economy entered the collective mind. Beginning with Carol Raye, Pender relates, in forty or so pages each, the life stories of Barry Humphries, Noeline Brown, Max Gillies, John Clarke, Tony Sheldon, and Denise Scott – in other words, members of the two cohorts who rode the national theatre and television wave from the 1960s to the recent past.' (Introduction)