AustLit
Latest Issues
AbstractHistoryArchive Description
'Welcome to the summer issue of ABR – the 450th in the second series, which began in 1978. It’s a blockbuster of an issue, commencing with a powerful account by author-journalist Zoe Holman about the current agitation in Iran following the murder of Mahsa Amini. Political scientist Timothy J. Lynch (writing from Laramie in Wyoming!) examines the recent US midterms and America’s seeming return to the centre. Turning to Australian politics, we have key articles by Mark Kenny, Dennis Altman, Frank Bongiorno, and Kim Rubenstein. We are also delighted to reveal the 2023 Peter Porter Poetry Prize shortlist. Shannon Burns reviews Cormac McCarthy’s brace of new novels, and Penny Russell critiques Alex Miller’s thirteenth novel. In our arts section, seventeen ABR regulars nominate their Arts Highlights of 2022 – to complement our highly popular Books of the Year feature (published in the December issue).' (Publication summary)
Notes
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Contents indexed selectively.
Contents
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An Epic of Perseverance : Where Hope Is Another Survivor,
single work
review
— Review of The Passion of Private White 2022 single work biography ;'No publisher or literary agent could have dreamt up or commissioned this remarkable book. It is wholly unexpected and original. It is about some Yolngu clans in north-east Arnhem Land, a group of Vietnam veterans, and an anthropologist named Neville White, who happens to be an old friend of one of Australia’s finest writers, Don Watson. Watson observes Neville, who systematically observes the Yolngu, who are regularly visited by the vets. It sounds like a lugubrious farce and sometimes it reads that way. But it is a deeply serious enquiry into questions at the heart of Australian history, politics, and identity.' (Introduction)
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'Walking Dollar Signs' : A National History Full of Puzzles,
single work
review
— Review of Freedom, Only Freedom : The Prison Writings of Behrouz Boochani 2022 selected work essay ;'In 2018, No Friend but the Mountains: Writing from Manus Prison became a literary sensation. It was written by Behrouz Boochani, a Kurdish-Iranian journalist and refugee who was incarcerated by the Australian government on Manus Island. Like thousands of others, Boochani had travelled by boat to seek asylum in Australia. From Manus, he texted passages to collaborators in Sydney. There, Omid Tofighian and Moones Mansoubi developed the work further. Through reportage, storytelling and poetry, it bore witness to the horrors of immigration detention. By 2019, No Friend had won some of Australia’s major literary awards and Boochani had become internationally renowned. In November 2019, he was invited to attend a festival in Christchurch, New Zealand. After six years in detention, he was free. The system that had imprisoned him remained intact.' (Introduction)
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The Gillard Effect : Creating a More Equitable Society,
single work
review
— Review of Not Now, Not Ever : Ten Years on from the Misogyny Speech 2022 anthology essay ;'There is more that connects these two books than their bright pink covers – they both highlight a recasting of the patriarchal architecture of power as central to achieving gender equality. How Many More Women? and Not Now, Not Ever tell an uncomplimentary but complementary story of parliament, the executive, the courts, the media, universities, and business as components of a repressive world ‘tend[ing] to oppress and discriminate against women and girls’, while also enchaining men whose values and norms have moved beyond those of the patriarchy.' (Introduction)
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Ambiguous Gifts : Two Young Men from Adelaide,
single work
review
— Review of Wizards of Oz 2022 single work biography ;'What happens when you mix some of the biggest scientific breakthroughs of the twentieth century with the urgency of war? Wizards of Oz, a new book by lawyer and former politician Brett Mason, seeks to provide the answer. It is an account of a friendship between two Adelaide men and their extraordinary scientific achievements during World War II.' (Introduction) -
A Time of Stone : Alex Miller’s Thirteenth Novel,
single work
review
— Review of A Brief Affair 2022 single work novel ;'Frances Egan, ‘a smart-looking woman of forty-two’, seems to lead a charmed life. A scholar of national distinction in the field of management, she was recently shoehorned into the role of head of school by a vice-chancellor who needed a woman ‘for the appearance of the thing’. Driven by ambition (she wants to be a professor), she accepted. She and her husband, Tom, a cabinetmaker committed to traditional methods of woodcraft, live with their two children, Margie and ‘little Tommy’, on a farm near Castlemaine they bought last year, fulfilling a lifelong dream.'(Introduction)
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Sublunary Soap Bubbles : A Young Irelander in Van Diemen’s Land,
single work
review
— Review of Fanatic Heart 2022 single work novel ;'Nobody excoriated England like John Mitchel. He holds his place in the pantheon of Irish nationalism not for his revolutionary heroism but for the power of his rhetoric and his thundering denunciation of British misrule in Ireland, especially in the wake of the catastrophic Famine of 1845–47. Mitchel was the most militant of the separatist Young Irelanders, many of whom ended up in Van Diemen’s Land, transported after the abortive Irish rebellion of 1848.' (Introduction) -
The Key of Admiration : A Critic Views Poems as Gifts,
single work
review
— Review of Eggs for Keeps : Poetry Reviews and Other Praise 2022 selected work poetry essay criticism ;'The point is to deal with the stuff itself,’ wrote John Berryman. He was referring to Randall Jarrell, paragon of mid-century poet-critics – one who did, indeed, deal with the stuff itself, writing of poetry with the practical competence of a mechanic who knew his way around an engine, having built a few himself – but he could just as easily be speaking of Barry Hill.' (Introduction)
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Terror Hour : Speaking the Unspeakable in Poetry,
single work
review
— Review of Totality 2022 selected work poetry ;'Trauma is often said to be unspeakable. There are various reasons for this. Pain and shame are silencing, as are implicit forms of censorship (of the kind scorning trauma literature, for instance) and explicit injunctions against speaking (from perpetrators, enablers, or the law). But it is also the case that trauma doesn’t inhere in language. Trauma lives in the limbic system, which is that of the fight, flight, or freeze response, and which is necessarily more immediate than language processing. After all, when your life is under threat, it’s not words you need, but action.' (Introduction)
- Loss-invaded Cataloguei"The face of the meteoric school", single work poetry (p. 41)
- Running Up That Billi"Maybe Kate was right – Stranger Things have happened –", single work poetry (p. 41-42)
- Periferal, Fantasmali"Angus McMillan is lost (again), bushwhacked", single work poetry (p. 43)
- Field Notes for an Albatross Palimpsesti"Oils, ochre, feather, flower, leaf, cliff, hailstone, storm, spume, wreck, wind wrack", single work poetry (p. 44-45)
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'An Elephant Is Not Logical' Moments of Muted Transcendence,
single work
review
— Review of Walking Underwater 2021 selected work poetry ;'Mark Tredinnick’s latest collection of poetry, Walking Underwater, continues his exploration of the relationship between individual experience and the natural world that was visible in volumes such as A Gathered Distance (2020), Blue Wren Cantos (2013), and Fire Diary (2010). Tredinnick is well known for his writing of place, notably his innovative local history-cum-memoir The Blue Plateau (2009), a book that traces the lives, histories, and natural systems of the Blue Mountains, where he lives. His writing in both poetry and prose is noticeably belletristic, and his stance broadly romantic. This occasionally droops into piety, but Tredinnick also conjures moments of muted and moving transcendence: ‘A balcony and a morning and a lassitude / Of fog. A sky blindfolded and bound and flogged; a night-time’s / Pleasure only halfway spent. Awake early, I hear a band / Of correllas come. Chaste bandits, their flight a quiet riot, a lewd and holy throng / Of unhinged song.’'(Introduction)
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Tales of Hustling : Memoirs of an Indefatigable Editor,
single work
review
— Review of Cannon Fire : A Life in Print 2022 single work autobiography ;'Journalist, editor, and publisher, Michael Cannon rose to prominence in print during its golden age of boundless advertising dollars, when those ‘rivers of gold’ paid for high salaries, fully staffed beats, and morning and evening newspaper editions. This was not a world of shrinking pages and newsroom cuts, of ‘digital-first’ mantras, click bait and Murdoch domination – not yet. But newspapers were not necessarily more sophisticated places either, which makes Cannon’s memoir as much a rejoinder to the lionising of lost newspaper culture – a challenge to the notion that things were always better back then – as the story of a remarkable career.'(Introduction)
- An Interview with Paul Dalgarno, single work interview (p. 51)
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Blazing a Trail : A Transnational Study of Journalism,
single work
review
— Review of Bold Types : How Australia’s First Women Journalists Blazed a Trail 2022 multi chapter work criticism ;'After she left journalism, Patricia Clarke turned to researching and writing books, beginning with The Governesses in 1985. Bold Types is her fourteenth book. The Canberra writer was a familiar figure at media history and other conferences, and in the National Library of Australia reading rooms, until Covid-19 at least. Her books, augmented by dozens of articles and conference papers, focus mainly on the lives, careers and letters of Australian women, especially writers and journalists. Clarke also writes about the history of her city, Canberra, an interest reflected in some of the fourteen entries she has produced for the Australian Dictionary of Biography. The ninety-six-year-old has devoted nearly ‘half a lifetime’ (to borrow the title of one of her tomes, about Judith Wright) to historical endeavours.' (Introduction)
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Seductive Sydney : The Completion of Louis Nowra’s Trilogy,
single work
review
— Review of Sydney : A Biography 2022 multi chapter work biography ;'I recently learned (was it from Martin Amis?) that ‘pulchritude’ is a synonym for ‘beauty’. How can such an ugly word be associated with beauty? I feel the same way about ‘Sydney’, named by Governor Phillip for the British Secretary of State who had suggested an Australian colony. An ugly word that is the name of a beautiful topography, a geologically complex and weathered arrangement of water and land, and more water and land, and a spread of fragmented populations that are in many cases discrete, so discrete that where a person lives and works in this city, defines and confines them. Infrastructure and transport must cope as best they can, and with as much money as government can muster.' (Introduction) -
Isabel, Phyllis, and Paulette : Three Pioneering Filmmakers,
single work
review
— Review of Those Dashing McDonagh Sisters : Australia’s First Female Filmmaking Team 2022 single work biography ;''Bliss it was in that dawn to be alive, / But to be young was very heaven.’ William Wordsworth was writing about the French Revolution, but the sentiment could have applied to the three McDonagh sisters in 1920s Sydney. Isabel (born in 1899), Phyllis (1900), and Paulette (1901) were the beneficiaries of two intertwined revolutions – modernism and feminism – that encouraged them to develop skills outside the domestic sphere and to become experts in their field. Daringly, they chose filmmaking, the great obsession of the period; and they were very good at it.' (Introduction)