AustLit

'Just over a decade ago, Ross McMullin published Farewell, Dear People (2012), a magisterial biography of ten remarkable Australians killed in World War I. The book met with much acclaim, including the award of the Prime Minister’s Prize for Australian History in 2013. Life So Full of Promise, a sequel to this volume, provides three more biographies of men whose early lives suggested that they would have made extraordinary contributions to Australian public life, had they survived the war.'(Introduction)

'Bomber Command operations cost about 3,500 Australian lives in World War II. This was more than five times the number of Australians who died in the Battle of Kokoda from July to November 1942. Yet the strategic bombing offensive over Germany has never held a comparable place in the national memory of war.' (Introduction)

'In previous memoirs, Brisbane-based writer Kris Kneen has examined their life through the lens of their sexuality (Affection, 2009) and their family history (The Three Burials of Lotty Kneen, 2021). In Fat Girl Dancing, Kneen’s lens is their body, specifically the body of a ‘short, fat, ageing woman’.' (Introduction)

''Who hasn’t longed to run away?’ asks Susan Johnson at the beginning of this memoir-cum-travel book about her time on the Greek island of Kythera. It is a question that invites a show of hands. Fewer people, however, might be inclined to bring their mothers with them.'(Introduction)

'Poet and editor extraordinaire John Tranter died on 21 April 2023, after a few cruel years of illness with Lewy body dementia. Friends and family gathered at his funeral in the inner Sydney suburb of Rozelle on what would have been his eightieth birthday (29 April) to celebrate John’s remarkable life and mourn his loss. I was honoured to be one of the speakers: what follows incorporates what I said there.' (Introduction)

'The nuclear family has a bad literary rap. As we know from fiction and memoir, the traditional two-heterosexual-parents-and-biological-kids model, a structure that provides stability and nourishment for some, can also be a stricture, a disappointment, even a crucible of cruelty. The opening sentence of Anna Karenina notwithstanding, unhappiness is unhappiness; there are common experiences for the survivors of family difficulty, even when specifics differ.' (Introduction)

'I feel like I need to come out every day. I’m pushing the stroller, fishing out the dummy, pointing out dogs, but this isn’t what it looks like. At the playground or the checkout, I take the nods and maternal solidarity, staying inside the parenting illusion until it feels slightly disingenuous. I am not the mother. I am an aunt instead, if ‘instead’ is even the right word. There are categories – infertile, childless by circumstance, childless by choice – and within these, more specific groups like the Birthstrikers, who are publicly delaying procreation until there is climate action. Being an aunt of the Anthropocene is none of these, and all of them at once.' (Introduction) 

'The remarkable second act of Jimmy Little’s career commenced with the release of Messenger in 1999. The album was a selection of atmospheric renditions of classic Australian rock songs. In stark contrast to the reassuring homeliness of his earlier recordings, Little’s reading of them evoked an Australia of vast empty spaces, melancholy, and solitude. Those lucky enough to attend the concerts that followed were struck by his goodwill and by the assured mastery of his performance and the fineness of his voice, which hadn’t deteriorated with age.' (Introduction)

'Hassled by deadlines and stricken by illness, I made a very modern deal with the devil. I asked ChatGPT to help me review David Cohen’s new short story collection, The Terrible Event. For the past few months, this text generating tool has made news by using AI technology to write everything from A+ high-school essays to faux-Nick Cave lyrics. Surely, then, it could provide some scaffolding for a thousand-word book review, a few handholds to help a tired reviewer scurry over this task and on to the next?' (Introduction)

'Tara Calaby’s début novel, based on her doctoral studies, wears its clearly extensive research lightly as it weaves an engrossing story of a young woman’s struggle in 1890s Melbourne towards something a contemporary reader might call social, emotional, and sexual independence. Focused around the story of an individual, House of Longing also traverses a broad canvas of social issues – class, gender roles, attitudes to mental health and its treatment, the importance of friendship, and the possibilities of sexual love between women.' (Introduction)

'A few pages in to Return to Valetto, the narrator Hugh Fisher is on a train from Rome to Orvieto and is being eyed suspiciously by an elderly Italian woman, who can see the photograph of himself with his daughter that he is using as a bookmark:

I looked up from my book and into her Old Testament face. Mia figlia, I said, my daughter. For good measure, I told her in Italian that I was a widower, that it had taken me the better part of five years to remove my wedding band, that Susan was getting her PhD in economics at Oxford … This information passed through her like a muscle relaxant as she returned to knitting a tiny mauve sock.' (Introduction)

'A quarter of a century has passed since Ivor Indyk contributed a scathing review of John Kinsella’s first collected poems to the pages of ABR (July 1997), and the contending responses to that opinion have typified the reception of his poetry among the vituperative local poetry community ever since. This extravagant representation of his work – two volumes of close to a thousand pages each, with a third volume pending – might seem almost deliberately designed to expose the author to similar criticism. Rather than a conventionally shaped collected edition, this is more like a throwing open of filing cabinets, and the nearly 1,700 pages presented so far are certainly not all masterpieces.' (Introduction)

'Barry Humphries loved telling a story concerning a visit he and the painter David Hockney made to an art exhibition held at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 1991. What drew them there was a reconstruction of the Entartete Kunst (Degenerate Art) exhibition the Nazis had assembled in Munich in 1937 to help validate and promote their racial ideology. The crude argument it promoted was that the distorted forms typical of much modern art of the time somehow demonstrated the corrupting influence of the artists (often Jewish) who had painted them.' (Introduction)