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Brenda Walker Brenda Walker i(A20614 works by)
Born: Established: 1957 Grafton, Grafton area, Grafton - Maclean area, Mid North Coast, New South Wales, ;
Gender: Female
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Works By

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1 Constellations : A Selection of Alex Miller’s Notes and Letters Brenda Walker , 2023 single work review
— Appears in: Australian Book Review , December no. 460 2023; (p. 18-19)

— Review of A Kind of Confession : The Writer's Private World Alex Miller , 2023 single work autobiography
'Alex Miller’s most recent book, A Kind of Confession, begins with notebook entries from his pre-publication period – long years in which his deep trust in his identity as a writer appears to have been unshaken. In 1971, he notes: ‘I’ve been committed to writing since I was 21, 13 years. Quite a stretch, considering I’ve yet to publish.’ He was in his fifties before his first novel emerged. Yet even when he complains about his apparent failure – ‘Almost 40 and only 2 short stories published. It makes no sense’ – there is no real lapse of direction; he knows what he is. We can’t read excerpts from these early notebooks and diaries without an awareness of his later success as the winner of significant prizes, including the Miles Franklin Literary Award (twice), the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, the Melbourne Prize for Literature, the Manning Clark Medal, and the Weishanhi Best Foreign Novel of the Year.' (Introduction)
1 Poems to Share : An Admirable Anthology from Western Australia Brenda Walker , 2023 single work review
— Appears in: Australian Book Review , November no. 459 2023; (p. 42)

— Review of Cuttlefish : Western Australian Poets 2023 anthology poetry
'In Marion May Campbell’s poem ‘in the storeroom,’ which appears in Roland Leach’s anthology Cuttlefish, she writes that ‘poems are letters that go astray’ – a whimsical yet fitting definition of the kind of poetry that appears in this collection. In these digital times, there is something ceremonial about a letter: a personal communication which must be opened and held; possibly shared, intentionally or otherwise. The poems in this collection have a tight focus; each is confined to a single page. They are often personal, poems of memory and family, beginning with reminiscence and hinged with sharp insight. They may be poems about the natural world, thoughtful and observant like missives from a traveller.' 

(Introduction)          

1 Connective Tissue : A Celebration of Social Influence Brenda Walker , 2023 single work review
— Appears in: Australian Book Review , July no. 455 2023; (p. 22)

— Review of Eleven Letters to You Helen Elliott , 2023 single work autobiography

'In an exuberant essay anticipating the publication of Eleven Letters to You, the critic and editor Helen Elliott describes the deep pleasure of working on the book: ‘The satisfaction of writing this book, of making it as good as I can has been unlike anything I’ve ever known. A necessary joy, the deepest new, an entirely selfish pleasure. A small and ravishing bomb inside me’ (The Monthly, May 2023). After this introduction, it was a relief to read the book and find that it doesn’t disappoint. The exuberance of the writing process filters through to the finished pages, populated with ostensibly ‘ordinary people’ – Elliott’s highly provisional term – who have made a deep impression on the writer.' (Introduction)   

1 Nathan Hobby, The Red Witch: A Biography of Katharine Susannah Prichard Brenda Walker , 2022 single work review
— Appears in: JASAL , December vol. 22 no. 2 2022;

— Review of The Red Witch : A Biography of Katharine Susannah Prichard Nathan Hobby , 2022 single work biography
'Early in the Constance Garnett translation of Anna Karenina a few lines appear that suggest something more historically significant than Anna’s emotional turmoil. Anna is travelling back from Moscow to her husband and son in St Petersburg, just after a ball where her romance with Vronsky begins. She has been in Moscow to help repair her brother’s marriage; now her own is at risk. “Moments of doubt were continually coming upon her, when she was uncertain whether the train were going forwards or backwards, or were standing still altogether . . . ‘What’s that on the arm of the chair, a fur cloak or some beast? And what am I myself? Myself or some other woman?’” A cloak is protective. It can be fashionable. A beast is a dangerous monstrosity; terrifying and unknowable. The same object flickers between these poles, and the viewer, herself in a state of extreme personal uncertainty, must stabilise her vision, for the object cannot be both things. At the same time there is some confusion about the actual progress of the train. Is it going forward? Is it going backwards? Is it going nowhere? This dire uncertainty also applies to Soviet Russia, which at one time seemed socially protective, progressive, indeed fashionable to many outsiders, before Stalin’s monstrosity came into full view. Some of these outsiders, Katherine Susannah Prichard included, never really emerged from under Stalin’s cloak.' 

(Introduction)

1 ‘How Will It End?’ : The Terrible Ironies of Colonial Ambition Brenda Walker , 2022 single work review
— Appears in: Australian Book Review , October no. 447 2022; (p. 42)

— Review of The Settlement Jock Serong , 2022 single work novel

'A third of the way through Jock Serong’s sixth novel, The Settlement, a woman asks her new husband a pointed question about Wybalenna, the desolate Tasmanian community in which she finds herself, a community of duplicitous, expedient, and brutally deranged white men and the First Nations Tasmanians they seek to subjugate. ‘How will it end? His wife had asked him when she first arrived. Will the paddock fill and the people empty? Will there be another paddock after this one, if there are more people coming?’ Her husband, the storekeeper of the settlement, is witness to the grim activities of the governing group. He sees terrible cruelties he is largely powerless to prevent. The paddock she asks about is a cemetery. She is describing genocide, not through the widespread slaughter of Tasmanian Aboriginal people on their traditional lands, which has been the pretext for persuading them to join the community, but through deaths caused by disease and displacement. Paddocks imply farming. Her question highlights the morbid and seemingly perpetual industry of death and colonisation, and its horror. This is the subject of Serong’s confronting novel.' (Introduction)

1 Reworking the Narrative : A Critical Study of Amanda Lohrey’s Writing Brenda Walker , 2022 single work review
— Appears in: Australian Book Review , September no. 446 2022; (p. 31-32)

— Review of Lohrey Julieanne Lamond , 2022 selected work essay

'The Labyrinth begins with a woman walking through her childhood home – a decommissioned asylum. In middle age she moves to a run-down house by a wild and dangerous sea, where she notes her vivid and prophetic dreams. The house is convenient because she needs to be close to her son, an imprisoned artist. She befriends a stonemason who offers to carve her a gargoyle (which she refuses). Together they design and build her version of a labyrinth, a prayer or meditation path most famously realised in the great medieval cathedral of Chartres, although Lohrey’s antipodean labyrinth is not a homage to the Chartres labyrinth, or an imitation.' (Introduction)

1 Enemy of the Anodyne : Chloe Hooper’s Search for the Unsentimental Brenda Walker , 2022 single work review
— Appears in: Australian Book Review , May no. 442 2022; (p. 49)

— Review of Bedtime Story Chloe Hooper , 2022 single work autobiography
1 y separately published work icon Hand-to-hand Combat : A New Biography on the Porous and Passionate Life of Gillian Mears Brenda Walker , Southbank : ABR Publications , 2021 23560194 2021 single work review
— Review of Leaping into Waterfalls : The Enigmatic Gillian Mears Bernadette Brennan , 2021 single work biography

'In 2011, Bernadette Brennan convened a symposium on ‘Narrative and Healing’ at the University of Sydney, an opportunity for specialists in medicine and bereavement to meet writers with comparable interests. Helen Garner, for example, spoke about Joe Cinque’s Consolation. The day included an audiovisual piece about death as a kind of homecoming, with reference to the prodigal son, and exquisite photographs, including a picture of an elderly Irishman wheeling a bicycle with a coffin balanced on the seat and handlebars: austere and moving, a vision of austere and careful final transportation. Since 2011, Bernadette Brennan has written two literary biographies: A Writing Life: Helen Garner and her work (2017); and the wonderfully titled Leaping into Waterfalls: The enigmatic Gillian Mears. As with the Symposium, each biography is a genuine enquiry, a gathering of unexpected elements, and an invitation to later conversation. Brennan writes of Leaping into Waterfalls as an extension of a conversation she had with Mears in 2012. The Mears biography is certain to be a talking point for years to come.'(Introduction)

1 ‘Alien of Exceptional Ability’ Recalling Hazel Rowley Ten Years After Her Death Brenda Walker , 2021 single work review
— Appears in: Australian Book Review , August no. 434 2021; (p. 15)

— Review of Life as Art : The Biographical Writing of Hazel Rowley Hazel Rowley , 2021 selected work biography

'The biographer Hazel Rowley enjoyed the fact that her green card – permitting her to work in America – classified her as an ‘Alien of exceptional ability’. This is close to perfect: her own biography in a few words. If not exactly an alien, she was usefully and often shrewdly awry in a variety of situations: in the academic world of the 1990s, in tense Parisian literary circles, and in the fraught environment of American race relations. It helped that she was Australian, and a relative outsider. The people she sought information from were less likely to categorise her and more inclined to talk. Her books – the major biographies of Christina Stead (1993) and Richard Wright (2001), Tête-à-tête: Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre (2005), and Franklin and Eleanor: An extraordinary marriage (2010) – are certainly evidence of exceptional ability, as well as obsession and tenacity.' (Introduction)

1 Beyond Platitudes : Contemporary Resonances in Randolph Stow’s Oeuvre Brenda Walker , 2021 single work review
— Appears in: Australian Book Review , May no. 431 2021; (p. 46-47)

— Review of Randolph Stow : Critical Essays 2021 anthology criticism

'‘Land isn’t always meant to be grasped any more than art is, or dust,’ writes Michael Farrell in the arresting opening sentence of the first essay of Kate Leah Rendell’s Randolph Stow: Critical essays. Stow’s writing shows just how provisional meaning and territoriality can be, and the statement is a fitting beginning to a new book about his work.' (Introduction)

1 The Music of the Virus : Sadness, Relief and Communal Consolation Brenda Walker , 2020 single work essay
— Appears in: The Guardian Australia , 27 September 2020; Fire Flood Plague : Australian Writers Respond to 2020 2020;

'We have a sense of what it means to live in disturbing times, to live under threat. We should not forget the many people who have known this all their lives.'

1 Nothing to Be Done Brenda Walker , 2020 single work column
— Appears in: The Times Literary Supplement , 21 February 2020; (p. 24-25)
1 'Controlled Hallucinations' Brenda Walker , 2019 single work review
— Appears in: Australian Book Review , September no. 414 2019; (p. 31)

— Review of The Returns Philip Salom , 2019 single work novel

'A bookseller, Trevor, sits in his shop in Melbourne making conversation with his customers: an exasperating mixture of confessional, hesitant, deranged, and disruptive members of the public. One man stalks him, armed with an outrageous personal demand; another tries to apologise for assaulting him. The apology is almost as unnerving as the attack. The bookshop is a kind of theatre, with a ceiling mirror reflecting the tops of Trevor’s customer’s heads. Trevor has a seat onstage at ground level, and a seat in the gods. Elizabeth, a book editor, steadies herself against his windows as she begins to faint. His book display is not responsible for this partial loss of consciousness; she has a medical problem and Trevor offers her a cup of tea.' (Introduction)

1 Taut and Dark-Edged Brenda Walker , 2019 single work review
— Appears in: Australian Book Review , May no. 411 2019; (p. 32)

'In Chris Womersley’s collection of short fiction, A Lovely and Terrible Thing, a man is caught in a fugue moment. Just after unexpectedly discharging a gun into the body of a stranger, he gazes at his reflection in a darkened window pane: ‘I saw someone outside looking in, before realising it was, in fact, my own reflection hovering like a small, sallow moon in the darkness.’ He stands for so many characters in this collection, visible beyond the boundaries of human habitation, forlorn, misinterpreted, and somehow failing, initially at least, to notice the mighty forces of chaos and destruction that lie before him. The mismatch between the shooting and the fey rumination is very funny, and black humour is another characteristic of the stories in A Lovely and Terrible Thing, where sensational events and wry, poised writing establish Womersley as an impressive writer of short fiction. His novels, City of Crows (2017), Cairo (2013), Bereft (2010), and The Low Road (2007), work with crime and the Gothic, with displacement in a geographical and psychic sense.'  (Introduction)

1 The Houses That Are Left behind Brenda Walker , 2018 single work short story
— Appears in: Best Summer Stories 2018; (p. 199-211)
1 Water Worries Brenda Walker , 2018 single work review
— Appears in: Australian Book Review , October no. 405 2018; (p. 47)

'‘In time and with water, everything changes,’ according to Leonardo da Vinci, who worked with Machiavelli on a strategic and ultimately doomed attempt to channel the flow of the Arno. Large-scale water management has had some notable successes in parts of Australia, but as poor practices and climate change put river systems under near-terminal stress, we face irreversible and potentially catastrophic ecological failures. Michael Cathcart, in The Water Dreamers (2009), provides an account of this. Attempts to rectify the ecological degradation of our rivers involve expensive and possibly futile federal policies, opportunism, and the potential for suffering in farming communities. Everything may indeed change in time and with water, but changes in water practices in Australia are particularly fraught.'  (Introduction)

1 'Old Growth' by John Kinsella Brenda Walker , 2017 single work essay
— Appears in: Australian Book Review , April no. 390 2017;
'John Kinsella’s short stories are the closest thing Australians have to Ron Rash’s tales of washed-out rural America, where weakened and solitary men stand guard over their sad patch of compromised integrity in a world of inescapable poverty, trailer homes, uninsured sickness, and amphetamine wastage. Poe’s adventure stories and internally collapsing characters lightly haunt the short fiction of Rash and Kinsella. Like Rash, Kinsella can write acute and unforgettable stories about threatened masculinity. Kinsella’s latest collection, Old Growth, closely follows his 2016 work Crow’s Breath in subject and design. Although he is best known as a fine poet, these stories add considerably to his stature as a prose writer.' (Introduction)
1 Review : The High Places Brenda Walker , 2016 single work review
— Appears in: The Monthly , April no. 121 2016; (p. 56)

— Review of The High Places Fiona McFarlane , 2016 selected work short story
1 Roller Skating Brenda Walker , 2016 single work review
— Appears in: Australian Book Review , March no. 379 2016; (p. 59)

— Review of The Simplest Words : A Storyteller's Journey Alex Miller , 2015 selected work short story prose autobiography poetry
1 Review : Second Half First Brenda Walker , 2016 single work review
— Appears in: The Monthly , February no. 119 2016; (p. 55)

— Review of Second Half First Drusilla Modjeska , 2015 single work autobiography
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