Abstract
Introduction
This year’s bibliography includes a large number of items carried over from the past year (entries are marked as 2012 publications in each case) and, in the case of Canberra poet Timoshenko Aslanides, listings go back even further. Many of his works had been missed because they were not covered by our primary review sources. The Australian compilers hope to cast a wider net in future years by citing more newspaper reviews. Meanwhile, for compilers and readers alike, the “silver lining” in this omission provides the opportunity for a short but genuinely enthusiastic review of a long career.
Timoshenko Aslanides self-published his first collection, The Greek Connection, in 1977, and it won the 1978 British Commonwealth Poetry Prize, with his next few works winning prizes which culminated in 1988 with Second Prize in the Bicentennial Literary Awards (for Australian Things) and, more recently, his being named Artist of the Year for 2002 by the Canberra Times. He was effectively “mentored” by Judith Wright for the last two decades of her life and his work has attracted endorsements from Manning Clark, Les Murray, and Gough Whitlam, amongst others. Aslanides strenuously contends that he is “not an ‘ethnic’ writer” and does not write “multicultural poetry”. This justified resistance to simplistic categorization has probably made the task of reviewing his work more difficult – but the title of his most recent 2013 publication, Versatility, hints at a more useful categorization. Aslanides is first and foremost someone in love with language, fascinated by form, committed to a sense of Australian nation, and engaged with human experience at its many versatile levels. In Stop Words (2011) these preoccupations can be seen in witty poetic play on words like “about”, “after”, “should”, “when” – those words which “are useless to index in search engines” (hence “stop words”); Peter Pierce found this book a testament to “a poet with a most welcome and unflagging capacity to surprise” (Canberra Times, 24 September 2011). An example of the surprise for the general reader lies for example in the way an inert word like “any” can generate such a magnificent line of love poetry as “Any time I think of her / I know she’s thinking of me”. Temperament (2013) reveals this engagement in a different way, linking words with music: sub-titled “Twenty-four love poems, one in each key”, the volume grew out of a failed attempt to have a modern piano tuned according to the specifications which applied in the time of Mozart and Beethoven. Aslanides explains: In place of the distinctive and audible characteristics of the well-tempered [piano] tunings, I’ve applied my experience of love to each of the twenty-four keys in the following twenty-four poems. The key sequence for these poems … follows the key sequence of each of the two books that make up J.S. Bach’s 48. (“Preface”)
The engagement with music is also reflected in Versatility, a fascinating (and challenging) “music drama” on the subject of poetry, staging what Peter Sculthorpe in his “Foreword” describes as “friendly antagonism between a sceptical double chorus, representing the community, and a baritone, representing the poet”. The debate engages with serious poetic issues, for the community complaint is that modern verse is “obscure and tedious” and offers little reader-pleasure – “Prose peeled and chopped and diced looks much the same / when thrown upon a page. It’s silly, shallow,” complains Choir 2. Readers wishing to explore Aslanides’ work might start with the Collected Sonnets 1974-2004 (2010) or the more widely representative A Calendar of Flowers: Selected Poems 1975-2000 (2001); Peter Pierce sees the latter selection as demonstrating a career marked by a “consolidation of themes and experimentation with forms”, “relish for a joke”, and “commitment to national celebration” (Canberra Times, 4 August 2001).
Another poet with a long career stretching back to the 1970s is Rae Desmond Jones. According to reviewer Martin Duwell, “There aren’t any Australian poets quite like Rae Desmond Jones, whose distinctive, unusual, and sometimes unsettling voice has been an important, though undervalued, force in Australian poetry since the early 1970s”; Duwell confidently predicts that It Comes from All Directions, a selection of old and new poems across Jones’ entire career, “should ensure that his praises are, at last, sung properly”. Duwell’s review notes that Jones’s poetic career “falls into two halves”, with his first four books appearing 1973-1981 and with a twenty-seven year hiatus before the next four books, which appeared in the last five years. “If there is one defining feature of Jones’s poetry that bridges this hiatus,” says Duwell, “it is the way his voice mixes the high and low” and part of what is distinctive about Jones’s work is “the sense that he belongs to the sordid world [of the early poems] linguistically and poetically”. In It Comes from All Directions it is possible to see that Jones has overcome the restrictions of his early poems and the modes of high and low “have blossomed into many variations” (ABR 357 [December-January]). Another volume encapsulating a poetic career is Rosemary Dobson’s Collected, which reviewer Susan Sheridan says “contains all the poems that Rosemary Dobson wants to preserve”. The qualities that Dobson has always valued – “clarity, even austerity, and ‘an edge of wit’ – are there from first to last,” says Sheridan, “impervious to changes of fashion and able to accommodate changes in sensibility” (ABR 343 [July-August]). Martin Duwell observes that Robert Gray’s Cumulus: Collected Poems is not quite a “Collected Poems” because “far too many good poems from the earlier volumes have been omitted … a bibliographer would describe it as a Selected Poems”. It nevertheless illustrates the celebrated visual acuity of Gray’s work (“The aim is to let the world and its objects declare themselves rather than to subsume them in some transcendentalising project,” says Duwell), his interest in theory, the striking variation in structure and form that runs across his poems, and the many modal variations (which see lyrics and polemics side-by-side with “poems about friends and friendship, homages, semi-narratives”) (ABR 346 [November]). In his review of Randolph Stow’s The Land’s Meaning: New Selected Poems Dennis Haskell reminds us that whilst the literary status of Randolph Stow (who died in 2010) derives from his eight novels, his first major award was the Gold Medal of the Australian Literature Society for his collection of poems Act One (1957) and “he wrote poetry for most of his life”, considering his novels and poetry “to be ‘very closely related’, ‘one … just a different version of the other’”. This new selection, says Haskell, presents Stow’s poems “in the most comprehensive selection yet published”; his review contains interesting details about Stow’s having disowned many poems from Act One and the frustrations encountered by John Kinsella (who compiled the new collection) when permission was denied (by Stow’s sister, the copyright holder) to include certain poems (see ABR 344 [September]). The book also includes interesting excerpts from Stow’s novels and libretti as well as other appendices.
Now approaching his eighties, Vivian Smith produced a new collection, Here, There and Elsewhere. Martin Duwell summarises its contents thus: “It is made up of an imaginary biography of ‘Ern Malley’; another set of sonnets, ‘Diary without Dates’, mainly dealing with momentary meetings; a small group of sonnets imagined as postcards; and two prose pieces: one remembering the 1953 exhibition of French paintings in Hobart, and the other recording visits to Pablo Neruda’s three houses”. Duwell sees the book as “relaxed” compared with Smith’s earlier work – but this is a step forward for a poet who, in Duwell’s view, usually “exploits the possibilities of a very limited palette: like a composer who writes, say, only violin sonatas”. In particular, the conception of the Ern Malley sequence “is not at all dry – in fact it is, dramatically, very rich”, offering a complex “Borgesian sort of narrative” (ABR 342 [June]). Also in his eighth decade – “a time when many [other poets] run dry” – Chris Wallace-Crabbe has produced a New and Selected Poems drawing on fourteen past volumes and including thirty-three new poems – greatly impressing reviewer Geoffrey Lehmann who affirms Wallace-Crabbe’s status as “one of our best poets, with a remarkable range” (ABR 350 [April]). (Michelle Borzi reviews this collection in detail in Southerly – see
Ken Bolton published two books of poems during the past eighteen months: Selected Poems 1975–2010 and Four Poems, both of which resist easy overview because of Bolton’s energetic variety. A review by Gig Ryan identifies characteristics such as a determination to “amusingly undermine any sense of affected certainty or closure”, an interest in both “spacious, extended poems” and “poems of process”, “precariously poised treatise-like poems that mill around art, jazz, and R’n’B”, parody, and a knack for poems which “deify characters simply by naming, and legitimise an aesthetic of fun and impulse” – as well as much more (ABR 345 [October]). Judy Johnson’s sixth collection, Stone Scar Air Water offers “a strong range of closely observed, powerful poems … all linked together by elemental themes: the apparent solidity of stone, the persistence of scar tissue, the promises of air, and the complex gifts of water”; other poems use “the structure of narrative and history as the canvas for poetic exploration, in particular of female experience”. As summarized by reviewer Rose Lucas, “Johnson has produced an evocative and memorable collection, showing a poet clearly in charge of her craft but also brave enough to go beyond the frames of the comfortable, naming and tracking the gossamer threads of the world through which she moves” (ABR 355 [October]). Pam Brown published her seventeenth book, Home By Dark, which “considers change and loss” and “shuttles between the cracks of past decades in a compulsive yet wayward flux, processing a world inseparable from the poet, a participant, not a superior unclinched observer” (Gig Ryan, ABR 353 [July-August]). Laurie Duggan explains that the title of his new volume, The Collected Blue Hills, derives from a “serial poem” which he jokingly named “Blue Hills” after the equally long-running ABC radio program Blue Hills. To reviewer David McCooey the work’s constituent poems are “concerned with the relationship between experiences of place and representation” and despite the cover-blurb assertion that the work is “very Australian”, there are “numerous intertextual references – to Mozart, Turner, Blake, 1930s science fiction, Burning Spear, Wang Zhen, Mark Rothko, Michael Chapman, and so on – [which] show that ‘Australia’ is as much an intersection of various and unpredictable transnational flows as a geographical entity” (ABR 352 [June]).
Geoff Page’s 1953 is set in the fictional small town of Eurandangee in wool and wheat country near Bourke. The poems are all in iambic verse and report on the town and its folk at precisely 2.30 p.m. on 17 February 1953. There is no significance to the date and time: their unremarkable ordinariness is their significance. Reviewer Mike Ladd describes the tone of 1953 as “familiar from Page’s other historical verse novels: amused, critical, affectionate, cutting, blokey”, as reminiscent of “an older Australia, its satire tempered by forgiveness of human frailty, though still biting enough against institutionalised error”; in his view, the book focuses on the “spoken and unspoken racism which Aborigines experience, and the limited choices available to women of the era” (ABR 349 [March]). Taking a more international focus, Jennifer Maiden’s Liquid Nitrogen offers verse conversations between public figures (including Eleanor Roosevelt, Hillary Clinton, Kevin Rudd, and Julia Gillard), confirming reviewer Kate Middleton’s judgement that Maiden is “one of Australia’s most politically engaged poets, a commentator on the local scene and the international set alike” (ABR 348 [February]). The poems are particularly concerned with power and powerlessness.
Michael Brennan’s Autoethnographic prompted reviewer Peter Kenneally to produce what is undoubtedly the year’s most splendid précis: Michael Brennan has looked into the future in his new poetry collection, Autoethnographic, and come to the obligatory dystopic conclusions. There is global warming, social breakdown, closed airports and borders, and so on, and, of course, a mysteriously catalytic event – in this case it is called The Great Forgetting. It would be a mistake, though, to think that Brennan is some kind of post-everything Hanrahan, because he and his characters seem to be loving every minute of it. Picaresque, spiky, with an infectious rhythm that makes Brennan’s tangentially connected mini-narratives almost bounce off the page, it collapses a varied collation of literary modes from the past into a dense knot of decay in the near future. The protagonist’s tales are part Chaucer, part Hunter S. Thompson, two parts Philip Marlowe, and, you realise with a shock of delight, several parts Henry Miller. (ABR 346 (November])
Michael Sharkey’s Another Fine Morning in Paradise was singled out by Paul Hetherington as further evidence of “the variety of Australian poetry…. Neither entirely fish nor fowl, it is by turns satirical, watchful, effusive, and lyrical. Its central preoccupation is with a sharp-eyed scrutiny of what might be called the-idea-of-a-better-life. […] Overall, this volume of poetry offers a critique of modernity and many of its values, while providing diverse visions of the world” (ABR 343 [July-August]). Kate Lilley’s second book, Ladylike, attracted attention because of the section titled “Cleft”, dedicated to Lilley’s mother, Dorothy Hewett, and exploring the complexities of mother-daughter relationships. But astute reviewers such as Rose Lucas saw even more of interest in Lilley’s work: “Ladylike is a book heavily influenced by ideas – ideas of doubleness, dream, lesbian desire, an almost Irigarayen re-imagining of female sexuality, as well as the flexibility and playfulness of a not always referential language. […] Fierce in its intellectual enquiry, it is also a poetry of exquisite form, and consolidates the emergence of a strong voice in Australian poetry” (ABR 342 [June]).
Michael Farrell won the 2012 Peter Porter Poetry Prize, and the first manuscript version of his new collection, open sesame, won the 2008 inaugural Barrett Reid Award for a radical poetry manuscript. Chris Andrews’ second book, Lime Green Chair, also won an award in its manuscript form: the 2011 Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize.
Amongst the many debut poetry collections were Dan Disney’s and then when the (“a slim volume infused with irreverent outings in philosophy and place” – Kate Middleton, ABR 342 [June]); Rose Lucas’s Even in the Dark (which “takes up the imagist movement’s poetic style but ‘makes it new’ in her examination of the role of the poet in both the local environment and abroad. Her observant and mimetic style shimmers in a collage of confronting still-life portraits” – Cassandra Atherton, ABR 357 [December-January]); Vanessa Page’s Confessional Box (“this adamantine, lyrical first collection … In five lines in ‘Sanctuary’ she does everything that Sappho does…” – Peter Kenneally, ABR 351 [May]); Corey Wakeling’s Goad Omen (“this Hadron Collider of ideas…”, “Wakeling’s field of reference is vast and includes Hollywood films from the 1980s, art from Leonardo da Vinci to Nolan, poetry from Yeats to a select cluster of Melbourne University experimentalists, and periods and places enough to satisfy Doctor Who” – Anthony Lynch, ABR 353 [July-August]); and Toby Davidson’s Beast Language (“It is not unusual … to find mythical and spiritual elements everywhere, mirage-like, in the landscape: but Davidson takes it to a new level” – Peter Kenneally, ABR 352 (June), see
Richard Flanagan’s sixth novel, The Narrow Road to the Deep North, about the cruelty of war, the tenuousness of life and the impossibility of love, has been longlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2014, further confirming his reputation as belonging in “the first rank of Australian writers”. Reviewer James Ley describes it as “a characteristically ambitious work that addresses a sensitive historical subject: the Japanese treatment of Australian prisoners of war during World War II”. The central character, reminiscent of “Weary” Dunlop, maintains his stoicism and decency in the midst of the horrors faced by prisoners forced to work on the Thai-Burma railway, but cannot handle post-war life when he becomes unwillingly celebrated as a public hero whilst his personal life and relationships are becoming ever more tangled.
James Ley appreciatively notes the way the novel is “at once appalled and respectful in its acknowledgment of the prisoners’ suffering, but anxious not to idealise their camaraderie, their courage or their powers of endurance” and by Flanagan’s unusual willingness to concede “that the Japanese soldiers are themselves powerless, in the sense that they are subject to a strictly enforced hierarchy and an ideology of unquestioning obedience” (ABR 355 [October]). Tom Keneally’s latest novel, The Daughters of Mars, also deals with wartime experience, in this case through the experience of sisters who escape small-town life in New South Wales by joining the war effort as nurses. Sent to the Dardanelles on the Red Cross hospital ship Archimedes, they become “daughters of Mars” (the Roman god of war) as they experience the carnage of Gallipoli. Unfortunately, “the story is overwhelmed by the attention to detail on which [Keneally] obviously prides himself” (Phil Brown, ABR 342 [June]).
David Brooks’ fourth novel, The Conversation, was widely reviewed with great enthusiasm, Cassandra Atherton declaring that it is Brooks’ “brilliant control of language” that makes him “one of Australia’s finest writers”. The novel turns on a conversation conducted at Caffé Cosini restaurant in the Piazza Unitá: a long-time Australian expatriate converses with a woman who has suddenly appeared and “the characters consume food and wine while they simultaneously devour each other’s philosophical questions and dilemmas” (ABR 346 [November]). Gerald Murnane’s A History of Books continues the blurring between fiction and non-fiction which has characterised his writing. Adam Rivet explains this as follows: Murnane has pursued what could be described as an ongoing portrait of the mind’s inner landscape. […] Rather than describe or evoke any outside world, what Murnane has been pursuing fervently in his recent work is a transcription (in recollection) of fiction’s effect upon his brain: to put it plainer, the image world that overcomes Murnane as he reads, and, after that, the images that stay with him after time has its way. These are inward whorls of thought and remembrance, endlessly moving between the mind that remembers and the younger man that experienced; the fictionalised man, that is. That it is so engrossing is in large part due to the agonisingly precise style employed, a prose of long and syntactically sound sentences that build their case with the unhurried majesty of a Proustian legal brief. […] A History of Books could as well be titled A History of My Reading. (ABR 342 [June])
Another author who has always defied the Australian preference for realism and surfaces is Murray Bail. His latest novel, The Voyage, concerns an Australian who has invented a new kind of piano and heads for the heart of European musical culture – Vienna – to sell his wares. James Ley comments that “[l]ike its predecessors, The Voyage is notable for the sturdy construction of its overarching narrative and the rich minutiae of its many astute individual observations.” In Ley’s view, Bail’s fiction “occupies the shifting ground between the formal rigours of modernism and the reflexive playfulness and generic self-consciousness associated with postmodernism”; the underlying concern of his work is “the tension between the rational, dispassionate, collating side of human intelligence and those less tangible areas of experience that lead us into the slippery realms of aesthetic appreciation, creativity, expression, and seduction” and that Bail’s fiction can be seen as “an extended meditation on Coleridge’s distinction between Fancy and Imagination, in which his hapless countrymen (emphasis on men) are commonly depicted as being in thrall to the former and sadly deficient in the latter” (ABR 345 [October]).
Evie Wyld’s second novel, All the Birds, Singing, won the 2014 Miles Franklin Award. It deals with violence and its aftermath through the experiences of protagonist Jake Whyte, whose life is dominated by the consequences of homophobic bullying: “Jake’s body is the site of a series of brutal payments, many of which are self-administered”. The landscapes are bleak and harsh, “filled with malicious energy”; “it is a novel about fear, escape, and the slight, glimmering possibility of an inviolate future” (Felicity Plunkett, ABR 353 [July-August]). Brian Castro’s Street to Street also offers trenchant criticism of Australian attitudes, particularly shallow philistinism. The protagonist, Brendon Costa, has for all his life dreamed of producing poetry or music, but has been held back by social and paternal mockery of such pursuits until, at age fifty, he is depressed and suicidal. His one link to his dreams is an unfinished biography of poet Christopher Brennan, and the novel uses this as a device to intertwine the stories of the two unhappy lives. Francesca Sasnaitis’ review succinctly captures the fury of the novel’s vision: Castro’s battle cry against the philistines is less a call to arms than the sly hit and run of guerrilla tactics. He takes a dig at academia and the corporate world of stakeholders and work performance evaluation reports. The life of the mind is not well regarded in Chips Rafferty country. Here, what is prized above all is the serious adult business of sport and money or, at best, stoic endurance leavened by a good-natured yarn. […] Apparently, any form of violence and every form of sexuality is acceptable, but heaven forfend should you write philosophically or poetically. (ABR 348 [February])
The Swan Book by Indigenous author Alexis Wright also offers trenchant criticism; reviewer Jen Webb describes it as a “bruising, beautiful, brutal narrative” which despite “snatches of humour” is “a story of almost unrelieved tragedy”. It is set in a future time when Indigenous Australians have no rights, are corralled in camps, and are ignored except for accusations of terrorism. In Webb’s words, “[t]he language twists and flows and folds back on itself in convoluted sentences and paragraphs, in a complex interweaving of demotic and hieratic English. Time stretches, lurches, halts; narrative takes a backseat to allegory; and characters operate more as tropes than as people” (ABR 354 [September]). Sue Woolfe’s novel The Oldest Song in the World deals with related issues from a white perspective, tackling what Jane Sullivan identifies as “one of the most contentious literary questions today” – “How can Australians write fiction about Indigenous Australia?” Woolfe’s novel is set in a remote Aboriginal community which is viewed through white eyes, with the novel demonstrating “how farcically distorted that [white] vision can get” as the reader sees the prejudices and extreme limitations of the narrator, Kate, an unpromising linguistics student who feigns interest in Aboriginal life in order to attract her tutor’s attention (ABR 343 [July-August]). Lily Brett’s Lola Bensky ventures into equally difficult novelistic territory: in the words of reviewer Francesca Sasnaitis, it makes bedfellows of humour and the Holocaust, taking up the tradition of “Jewish or Yiddish humour, which is often crude, self-deprecating, even self-loathing”. Sasnaitis adds: “Nobel Laureate Elie Wiesel writes that the ‘best characteristic [of the Jewish people] is their desire to remember’ and that everyone has a duty to remember, to reject despair, and to transform the experience into something else. I suspect that, for Brett, resolution has come through creative remembering and retelling, and by constructing a fine comic novel from an unspeakable tragedy” (ABR 345 [October]).
Amanda Curtin’s second novel, Elemental, has recently been shortlisted for the WA Premier’s literary prize. It concerns an old woman with terminal leukaemia who writes out her life story for her grand-daughter. Exploring the unreliability of memory and storytelling, Elemental is “temporally and geographically vast”, involving “substantial research” and a “carefully structured story” (Wendy Were, ABR 354 [September]). David Foster’s third Dog Rock novel, Man of Letters: Dog Rock 3, is a further exploration of his experiences as a postman in Bundanoon in the 1980s. Susan Lever describes the series as “a comic foray into rural life”, narrated by a character who was “killed off” in an earlier novel but is here brought back to life because, as Lever puts it, this “is not fact, it’s fiction”. In other respects the novel “reflects current realities in Australia”, including “a lot of fun at the expense of our declining communication skills”, a debunking of celebrity, and at times “a real sense of loss” for our community and culture’s skills and graces (ABR 347 [December-January]). Julienne Van Loon’s short novel Harmless concerns an old Thai man who has come to Australia for his daughter’s funeral and befriends a woman named Amanda. It is a story of “harmed people – the crushed, flawed, abused”, with characters’ back-stories and the events that lead up to their circumstances elucidated in reflective sequences. Van Loon, using an adumbration device familiar to her readers, lays clues as she goes; and at various points they go off like spray bombs, permeating the whole. The taut narrative is excellently controlled, and part of the success of the short novel is that no detail is overindulged. (Milly Main, ABR 351 [May])
There has been a healthy output of short stories, but the three stand-out works were all by women. Susan Midalia’s second collection of stories, An Unknown Sky, won high praise: “The best stories are tightly structured, with linking images that return to make satisfying conclusions, occasionally with a quirk or twist. They are beautifully written, and never over-written; Midalia is a master of inference drawn from detail. She does not judge, but carefully lifts the corner of a curtain to show a teasing perspective. Female readers over fifty may find much to associate with; all readers will find quirky compassion and unfailing engagement” (Robert Horne, ABR 347 [December-January]). Cate Kennedy’s second collection Like a House on Fire follows the “determinedly realist bent” of her celebrated first collection, Dark Roots (2006): “the mostly low-rent settings and struggling characters reprise what in the 1980s and early 1990s was briefly known as dirty realism, though Kennedy’s prose is not as resolutely spare as that of some writers associated with that movement” (Anthony Lynch, ABR 346 [November]). The Secret Lives of Men by Georgia Blain was described by Denise O’Dea as a collection of “subtle, beautifully paced stories” dealing with “mid-life inertia and remorse” as characters realize that “the choices they have been making or avoiding, often with thoughtless repetition, have counted. Some respond with rising panic, others with resignation. Occasionally, as in the final story, they make a kind of peace with their past decisions, missteps and all”; the cumulative effect of this, says O’Dea, “is complex and moving; Blain is at once unflinching and compassionate in her portrayal” (ABR 350 [April]).
Welcome to Normal is the first collection of stories by Nick Earls in more than a decade. In contrast to the “cheerful novels” for which he is best known, reviewer Jeffrey Poacher argues that these stories “suggest an altogether different trajectory for his fiction, one that is more ambivalent, more serious, and much closer to the world we call real” (ABR 343 [July-August]). Ron Elliott warns readers of his Now Showing that if they do not like movies, they may not like these stories: the five pieces in the collection are unproduced screenplays reworked as novellas. Reviewer Samuel Williams suggests a revision to this warning: “unless you are a cinéaste who appreciates screenplay structure and enjoys seeing new variations on the same old Hollywood themes, you may find these stories lacking” (ABR 352 [June]). Fault Lines by Pierz Newton-John is “partly an exploration of contemporary masculinity” by an author “who wields a superb descriptive talent” (Milly Main, ABR 344 [September]); Josephine Rowe won praise for her artistry in Tarcutta Wake: “a truth that holds throughout the book [is that] Rowe has total stylistic control” (William Heyward, ABR 346 [November]); and in The Rest Is Weight Jennifer Mills employs settings in Russia, China, and Mexico as well as well as remoter parts of Australia to piece together what reviewer William Heyward describes as “well-made narratives populated by plausible, complicated characters” (ABR 346 [November]).
Debut short story collections included Laura Jean McKay’s Holiday in Cambodia (“seamlessly extending from the French occupation of Cambodia to the horrors of the Khmer Rouge and the current tourism industry … a powerful portrait of a country long-affected by war and poverty” – Alice Bishop, ABR 355 [October]); Maria Takolander’s The Double: (And Other Stories) (“her stories seem like wordscapes that offer panoramic views without shunning fine, sometimes devastating, details. They reverberate with the passage of time, especially those stories that link Australia to northern Europe, to loneliness”, Patrick Allington, ABR 354 [September]) and Chris Somerville’s We Are Not the Same Anymore (“what links these stories is that every character is drowning somehow in a world they don’t understand and that has been created with their own unwitting complicity. Each is a visitor in her own home, a stranger in her own life…. Reminiscent of the works of Raymond Carver and Philip Roth, … Somerville’s début short story collection is a study of alienation, acute anxiety, and loneliness”, Angela E. Andrewes, ABR 351 [May]).
Debut novels during the period included Yvette Walker’s Letters to the End of Love (“told in a series of letters that cross time and continents, tracing the intimate lives of three couples, one straight, one lesbian, one gay” – Carol Middleton, ABR 352 [June]); Amy T. Matthews’ End of the Night Girl (“a story about one of the most difficult tasks of writing and scholarship in the past sixty years: imagining the Shoah” – Anna Heyward, ABR 343 [July-August]); Jennifer Paynter’s Mary Bennet (“a skilful retelling of Pride and Prejudice, narrated by Mary Bennet, the forgotten middle sister. Mary’s character is true to Austen’s original conception” – Carol Middleton, ABR 342 [June]); Felicity Volk’s Lightning (“Few first novelists are as assured and articulate as Felicity Volk. She has designed an elemental structure for her story: wind, fire, earth, and water each have a section. Her time frame goes centuries deep, naming ancestors who, in the style of Genesis, begat and begat seven generations, until they reach Persia, an Australian with Arab, European, and British heritage” – Alison Broinowski, ABR 353 [July-August]); Courtney Collins’ The Burial (“finely written, with a lovely ear for the cadences of language, but it also has an urgent narrative drive, along with a strong awareness of place, compelling characters, and a whiff of magic realism to enliven the mixture” – Gillian Dooley, ABR 345 [October]); Zane Lovitt’s The Midnight Promise (“billed not as a detective story, but as a detective’s story. […] Lovitt has the sense to recognise that small events can have a great impact on those involved, and the skill to make the reader care” – Sky Kirkham, ABR 345 [October]); Hannah Richell’s Secrets of the Tides (“named the Australian Women’s Weekly ‘Great Read’ for the month of May. A family drama in the style of Jodi Picoult … Richell certainly knows how to pitch a bestseller” – Angela E. Andrewes (ABR 344 [September]); and Vanessa Russell’s Holy Bible (“may not add significantly to our understanding of the psychology of sects or cults, but it is an assured and endearing début” – Francesca Sasnaitis, ABR 354 [September]). John Hughes’ The Remnants is his first novel but not his first book; he won both the New South Wales Premier’s Literary Award for Non-Fiction (2005) and the National Biography Award (2006) for The Idea of Home: Autobiographical Essays (2004). The Remnants is a “sharp-minded regeneration of literary tradition and its enquiries into memory, dying, translation, and translocation” in which “boundaries between history and fiction are elided, while the canons of European art and literature are deployed in a playful and often profound grappling with some of the big existential questions” (Ed Wright, ABR 343 [July-August]).
Several debut novels are set outside Australia: in The Memory of Salt Alice Melike Ülgezer writes of a family with its roots in Istanbul and Melbourne; Manisha Jolie Amin’s Dancing to the Flute is set in rural India; Amy Espeseth’s Sufficient Grace is set in the fictional town of Failing which closely resembles the rural Wisconsin of her upbringing, and Lucy Neave’s Who We Were uses the story of two Australian-born characters to examine life and work in America during the McCarthy era [see
Broomstick: Personal Reflections of Leonie Kramer offered a glimpse into the life and thoughts of Australia’s first professor of Australian Literature. As the “Preface” notes, the book’s scope and depth has unfortunately been limited by the author’s progressing dementia and publication has only been possible due to the efforts of colleagues, friends, and the author’s daughters. For reviewer Brigitta Olubas, “[t]he first difficulty for Kramer’s reader is the genre question, more particularly the way that the memoir form draws ‘personal reflection’ together with more public modes of commentary and reflection. Managing the balance or the alignment between these divergent domains is always an issue for memoirists, and this book traverses the divide awkwardly at best”. Olubas concludes that Broomstick provides “an idiosyncratic account of some of the key events of recent decades (such as the corporatisation of universities and public broadcasters) and an opportunity for contemporary readers to revisit or reconsider some of these events” but “does not itself provide the means for doing so”, leaving it as “a strangely personal, even private book” (ABR 346 [November]). It nevertheless will hold great interest for those (such as the senior compiler of this bibliography) who had the privilege of being taught by and working for “Prof”, as Leonie Kramer was affectionately known in the 1970s. A collection that is equally eccentric – but in an entirely different way – was Here and Now: Letters, 2008-2011 by Paul Oster and J.M. Coetzee. The American and the South African-Australian only met in 2008, despite having read each other’s work over the years, but according to the cover blurb their meeting led to a proposal to create and publish “an epistolary dialogue between two great writers who became great friends”. Reviewer Miriam Cosic is unimpressed by the cold-bloodedness of this “marketing” decision and disappointed that “some of their lengthier discussions – Coetzee on economics, for example – are disappointingly slight” (ABR 352 [June]), but for the literary scholar there will be much of interest in the discussions about writing (including Coetzee’s candid revelation that he does not bother creating back stories for his characters, see
Two of the most important anthologies in the period were quite different in focus. The Quadrant Book of Poetry, edited by Les Murray, selected the best poems appearing in Quadrant during Murray’s second decade as Literary Editor (2000-2010). Murray’s Introduction asserts that readers have been “turned off” by the “academic class-defensiveness” and the general leftist tenor of much modern poetry and that Quadrant provided a “welcome refuge” to fine poets (Hal Colebatch and others) who express their worldview “in precise metre”. Reviewer Anthony Lynch observes that the “stern formalism” favoured by Quadrant founder James McAuley no longer dominates the journal and “quatrains and rhyming couplets, as well as narrative verse, have markedly greater prominence” here than in other anthologies; he predicts that readers “will welcome the accessibility of the poetry” (ABR 342 [June]). Discussing Contemporary Asian Australian Poets, edited by Adam Aitken, Kim Cheng Boey, and Michelle Cahill, reviewer John Kinsella sees it as “an anthology not so much of ‘region’ … as of the experience of being or having been from Asian heritages in contemporary Australia”. Kinsella argues that the collection “analyses and presents ways of viewing the deeply personal and concomitant social manifestations of ‘self’ within an idea of place”: in creating a space for Asian Australian poetry, the editors refuse solely to walk the liminal line between a Eurocentric Australia and the many Asian countries of origin or heritage to, through, and out of which the contributors write. Rather, they show perceived liminalities to be centres in themselves. It is a testament not only to the skill of the editors, but also to the poets included, that few fall into nostalgia or the very debilitating nostalgic “race memory” one finds in many anthologies that equate nation with ethnicity. (ABR 357 [December-January])
Pursuing the multicultural interest, Joyful Strains: Making Australia Home, edited by Kent MacCarter and Ali Lemer, offers what reviewer Harry Brumpton calls “the tattered travelogues of those who have come to call Australia home”, with the editors assembling memoirs and vignettes from a “relatively small but ethnographically varied group of writers” whose insights and experiences hold “a dauntingly representative status” (ABR 349 [March]).
As usual, a number of “Best” anthologies provided a snapshot of the best work of the period, expanding the range to include The Best Australian Business Writing 2012 and The Best Australian Science Writing 2012. The Best Australian Stories 2012 marked the debut of Sonya Hartnett as the editor of this series. Cassandra Atherton comments that the volume “is marked by a series of fictions about dysfunctional families, eccentrics, and misfits. The homeless, lonely, disenfranchised, intellectually disabled, sick, afflicted, even the dead, are featured alongside the privileged, rich, and famous in a macabre Mardi Gras. Readers familiar with Hartnett’s writing will recognise many of her own carnivalesque qualities”. Whilst noting that most stories are “very conventional in form”, Atherton finds the collection “disturbing, darkly humorous, and haunting”, offering special praise for pieces by Marion Halligan and Chris Womersley (ABR 348 [February]). The Sleepers Almanac No. 8, edited by Zoe Dattner and Louise Swinn, marked the tenth year of Sleeper Publishing. The themes include “infidelity, sibling rivalry, mental illness, bullying, child abuse, ageing, death, and the complex nature of love”, but the grimness is offset by “a playful warmth … that belies the gravity of its subject matter without lessening its impact”; reviewer Amy Baillieu observes that “although the stories vary greatly in style (from surreal and experimental to realist) and in length, they are united by the subtle, unsettling ways in which they explore the details of domestic fractures” (ABR 350 [April]). The work of newer writers was represented in Hide Your Fires: 2012 UTS Writers’ Anthology, edited by Lauren Anderson et al., the twenty-sixth collection of work by writers from the University of Technology Sydney. The anthology “contains its share of dysfunctional marriages and families; its griefs, losses, abandonments, and relational dissonances” as well as “humour, irony, and the frankly bizarre”; whilst noting that the contributions inevitably “vary in quality and style”, reviewer Francesca Sasnaitis gives honourable mention to stories by Luke Johnson, Jen Thompson, Amaryllis Gacioppo, Danny Loch, Constantine Costi, Kate Simonian, and Clare Cholerton (ABR 344 [September]). Works shortlisted for the Voiceless Writing Prize are collected in The 2013 Voiceless Anthology, edited by the competition judges: J.M. Coetzee, Ondine Sherman, Wendy Were, and Susan Wyndham. According to reviewer Alex O’Brien, “the anthology’s overall emphasis is on mindfulness: a consideration of the environment and its sustainability” (ABR 349 [March]).
Several “themed” anthologies deserve particular note. John McLaren’s Melbourne: City of Words surveys two hundred years of writing about Melbourne through selected works and extracts. Largely presented in chronological order, the selections begin with European settlement at Port Phillip and concludes with an evocation of Aboriginal spirits in a contemporary poem by Tony Birch. Glorious Days: Australia 1913 marks the centenary of the foundation and naming of Canberra as the national capital of Australia. Edited by Michelle Hetherington, the volume’s aim is “to present a snapshot of Australia in the year in which Canberra was named” and “to look at the shape of Australian life one hundred years ago as the country entered the modern age and, it is implied, before the dreadful blooding in World War I blighted its prospects and dashed its optimism”. Reviewer John Thompson found that the essays “range broadly to present a rich, enticing, and at times depressing view of the young Australian nation only recently federated and feeling its way in the world” (ABR 353 [July-August]). A somewhat similar anthology project is attempted by editors Tanya Dalziell and Paul Genoni in Telling Stories: Australian Life and Literature 1935-2012, with seventy-nine authors offering their brief observations on aspects of Australian cultural life – anything from “titbits about rock music, or children’s novels, films or poetry, or serious pieces on the slow movement towards understanding Australia’s Aboriginal heritage” (Susan Lever, ABR 356 [November]). In the words of the editors it is “a twenty-first century cabinet of curiosities”. Mark Tredinnick’s selection of Australian Love Poems 2013 reflects his view that “there has been a good deal more head than heart in Australian poetry for a while, a good deal more mind than body, more wit than wisdom” and the collection is designed to allow poets “to bring forth work they might previously have felt wasn’t quite acceptable in the rarefied world of poetry publishing”. Reviewer Peter Kenneally praises the book as “free of the rudderlessness that afflicts so many anthologies, and yet fabulously various” (ABR 355 [October], [see
Most items of criticism tell their own story through their titles, so it is only necessary to draw readers’ attention to a few points of interest – critical essays on Anita Heiss, Gail Jones, and Simone Lazaroo; a major study of Shirley Hazzard by Brigitta Olubas; a fascinating account of Australian Crime Fiction in the USA 1943-1954; newly discovered works by Henry Lawson and Mary Gilmore; Jamie Grant’s essay arguing that Christopher Koch is Australia’s “Finest Living Novelist”; Neil Armfield’s centenary tribute to Patrick White; Nicholas Hasluck’s account of the writing of his novel, Dismissal; and Rachel “The Creation of Rachel Henning: Personal Correspondence to Publishing Phenomenon” (see
Biographies of public figures were numerous in the 2012-2013 period. Ai Kobayashi’s W. Macmahon Ball: Politics for the People documents the life of William Macmahon Ball (1901-86) – an academic, diplomat, and writer, best known for his work as Professor of Political Science at Melbourne University 1949-1968, during which time he championed and developed Asian Studies in Australia. The book charts Ball’s rise to national prominence as a radio commentator, attacking the policy that Hitler should be appeased and criticising Australia’s lack of independent foreign policy. Peter Golding’s An Unqualified Success: The Extraordinary Life of Allan Percy Fleming recounts the career of the “teacher, journalist, soldier, spymaster, public servant, and trade commissioner” who was appointed as the new National Librarian in 1923 when the incumbent Harold White was about to retire. Fleming did not claim to be a librarian and thus his appointment was controversial, but he soon gained loyalty and collegial support because his extensive political contacts and thorough understanding of the workings of the Commonwealth Public Service enabled him to strenuously resist threats to the autonomy of the National Library and guide the 1973 amendments to the National Library Act. A Most Generous Scholar: Joan Kerr is author Susan Steggall’s “dispassionate appreciation of [Kerr’s] personality framed by a broad appreciation of her considerable achievements”, her main achievement being the massive task of rewriting established codes of Australian art history to produce the Dictionary of Australian Artists: Painters, Sketchers, Photographers and Engravers to 1870 (1992) and Heritage: The National Women’s Art Book (1995); reviewer Susan Sheridan praises this “well-balanced account of a larrikin crusader’s stoic and provocative resistance to bureaucratic institutions and individuals” (ABR 353 [July-August]).
Other non-fiction studies used biographical inquiry to explore wider aspects of Australia’s historical experience. Although the sub-title of Will Davies’ The Boy Colonel: Lieutenant Colonel Douglas Marks, the Youngest Battalion Commander in the AIF seems to explain its subject’s significance, reviewer Jo Scanlan explains that the book is “best read as an updated history of the 13th Battalion at Gallipoli and on the Western Front”, for Douglas Marks himself proves to be an “elusive and often inconsequential” factor in the narrative. Scanlan suggests that Davies “has done a fine job of melding a range of primary sources into a densely detailed but coherent account of a proud band of men fighting a tough, long and dirty war” and “skilfully brings to life the battalion’s cast of courageous, tenacious fighters” (ABR 355 [October]). 26 Views of the Starburst World: William Dawes at Sydney Cove 1788-91 is Ross Gibson’s account of the language studies undertaken by William Dawes who, as part of the First Fleet, was responsible to Governor Phillip as the colony’s official engineer and surveyor, navigator, cartographer, and astronomer. Living apart from the settlement in the observatory he had built, Dawes began studying the culture and language of the local Aboriginal people, producing two notebooks full of his learnings. Reviewer Andy Lloyd James rates this as an excellent book, with Gibson conveying Dawes’ work at “the crumbling border between two great tectonic plates: the post-Enlightenment world of which Dawes was such a good example, and the much older world of the Indigenous people” (ABR 348 [February]). The interwar dance and variety band known as the Weintraub Syncopators appeared in Josef von Sternberg’s 1930 film The Blue Angel before escaping from Hitler’s sway. Silences and Secrets: The Australian Experience of the Weintraubs Syncopators is Kay Dreyfus’ account of the fate of the band after they reached Australia in 1937. Far from being safe, they found themselves accused of espionage and interned, with the result that the band broke up and was never reformed. Dreyfus uses her impeccably researched account of their fate to highlight issues in Australian society at that time: The Weintraub case becomes a prism through which Dreyfus examines the whole socio-historical context in which the destruction of the band occurred, focusing first on the noxious conniving of the Musicians’ Union, and then on the role of the Australian state as the nation entered the intensely anxious beginnings of World War II. Each of these dimensions becomes a potent narrative in its own right, an illustration of what the author calls “systemic racism and generalised xenophobia”. (Colin Nettelbeck, ABR 354 [September])
Where Is Dr Leichhardt? The Greatest Mystery in Australian History concerns the many search-parties that attempted to find explorer Ludwig Leichhardt after he failed to return from his second expedition. The author, Darrell Lewis, has training in archaeology and in the words of reviewer Martin Thomas “brings to this study a bushman’s understanding and a deep, experiential knowledge of great tracts of Australia. … He confronts ‘the greatest mystery’ with steely determination, combining Holmesian rigour with the practical-mindedness of a bush mechanic”. The result, says Thomas, is the introduction of “an entirely new suite of material to Leichhardt scholarship, which has long been grazing on a familiar set of primary sources. A stunning array of evidence, ranging from local histories to artefacts in provincial museums, informs the investigation” (ABR 354 [September]).
Non-fiction works also dealt with highly personal matters. In Ghost Wife: A Memoir of Love and Defiance Michelle Dicinoski records her travel to Canada in 2005 in order to be able to marry her girlfriend. Conscious that history consigns gay and lesbian individuals to ghost-like invisibility, Dicinoski charts her parents’ awkwardness about her sexuality, the joyfulness of the wedding day, and the surreal experience of crossing into a national jurisdiction in which her marriage is not recognized. Reviewer Jay Daniel Thompson speaks highly of the author’s “lucid and engaging” prose and the skilful interspersing of anecdotes from queer history with personal narrative, concluding that “Ghost Wife is a powerful and deeply moving book” (ABR 349 [March]). The same reviewer also expressed high regard for Helen Sage’s first book, A Flower between the Cracks: A Memoir of Love, Hope and Disability. It records the experience of caring for her disabled daughter after a car accident ruined the girl’s university career and left her with brain injury. “The author should be commended for writing about what must have been painful events with a disarming honesty,” says Thompson; “Sage never glosses over her family’s struggle. Yet, despite this, her tone is free of negativity” (ABR 352 [June]).
The period under review also saw several collections of columns, broadcasts, and occasional pieces by well-known literary figures: Honestly: Notes on Life by Nikki Gemmell; The Local Wildlife by Robert Drewe, and A Point of View by Clive James (see
Bibliography
The bibliography for 2012-13 does not normally include references for drama, book reviews or journals, and offers a very selective listing of non-fiction. Those seeking further information in these categories should consult the following sources:
Australian Book Review <www.australianbookreview.com.au>.
AustLit: The Australian Literature Resource <www.auslit.edu.au>.
Antipodes: A Global Journal of Australian/New Zealand Literature <http://www.australianliterature.org/Antipodes_Home.htm>.
Australian Literary Studies <http://www.als.id.au>.
Poetry
Andrews, Chris Lime Green Chair 93pp The Waywiser Press (Chipping Norton, Oxfordshire UK; Baltimore, Maryland USA) Pb $24.95.
Aslanides, Timoshenko A Calendar of Flowers: Selected Poems 1975-2000 114pp Five Islands (Wollongong, NSW) (2001) Pb $16.00.
— AnniVersaries: 366 poems, One for Every Day of the Australian Year 454pp Brandl & Schlesinger (Blackheath, NSW) (1998) Pb $35.00.
— Australian Alphabet 78pp Butterfly Books (Katoomba, NSW) (1992) Pb $16.00.
— Australian Things 72pp Penguin (Melboure) (1990) Pb $15.00.
— Collected Sonnets 1974-2004 86pp Ginninderra (Adelaide) (2010) Pb $16.00.
— Occasions for Words: Poems for Birth, Marriage, Death and Much Between 196pp Wakefield (Adelaide) (2006) Pb $28.00.
— Ruminations: Two Books of Lyric Mysticism 72pp Ginninderra (Canberra) (2008) Pb $16.00.
— Stop Words 87pp Hybrid (Melbourne) (2011) Pb $19.95
— Temperament: Twenty-four Love Poems, One in Each Key 29pp Hybrid (Melbourne) (2013) Pb $9.95.
—Versatility: or, a Justification for Poetry 30pp Hybrid (Melbourne) (2013) Pb 24.00 [includes a compact disc a capella recording by The Resonants].
Bolton, Ken Four Poems 55pp Little Esther Books (Adelaide) (2012) Pb $9.00.
— Selected Poems 1975–2010 209pp Shearsman Books (Bristol, UK) (2012) Pb $25.00.
Brennan, Michael Autoethnographic 81pp Giramondo (Sydney) (2012) Pb $24.00.
Brown, Pam Home by Dark 131pp Shearsman Books (Bristol) Pb $23.00.
Coleman, Aidan Asymmetry 71pp Brandl & Schlesinger (Blackheath, NSW) (2012) Pb $29.95.
Davidson, Toby Beast Language 79pp Five Islands Press (Melbourne) Pb $24.95.
Davies, Luke Four Plots for Magnets 132pp Pitt Street Poetry (Sydney) Pb $20.00 [reissue; first pbld 1982].
Disney, Dan and then when the 46pp John Leonard Press (Melbourne) (2012) Pb $24.95.
Dobson, Rosemary Collected 378pp University of Qld Press (Brisbane) (2012) Pb $27.95.
Duggan, Laurie The Collected Blue Hills 90pp Puncher & Wattman (Sydney) Pb $24.00.
Edgar, Stephen The Red Sea: New and Selected Poems 112pp Baskerville Publishers (Fort Worth, Texas, USA) (2012) Hb US$19.95.
Emery, Brook Collusion 58pp John Leonard (Melbourne) (2012) Pb $24.95.
Farrell, Michael open sesame 123pp Giramondo (Sydney) (2012) Pb $24.00.
Fitch, Toby Rawshock 89pp Puncher & Wattmann (Sydney) (2012) Pb $25.00.
Gorton, Lisa Hotel Hyperion 64pp Giramondo (Sydney) Pb $24.00.
Gray, Robert Cumulus: Collected Poems 355pp John Leonard Press (Melbourne) (2012) Pb $32.95.
Henry, Kristin All the Way Home 187pp Univ of WA (Perth) (2012) Pb $24.95 [verse novel].
Hetherington, Paul Six Different Windows 112pp Univ of WA (Perth) Pb $24.99.
Hill, Barry Naked Clay: Drawing from Lucian Freud 160pp Shearsman Books (Bristol, UK) (2012) Pb $25.00.
Jacobson, Lisa The Sunlit Zone 165pp Five Islands Press (Melbourne) (2012) Pb $29.95.
Johnson, Judy Stone Scar Air Water 131pp Walleah Press (Hobart) Pb $20.00.
Jones, Rae Desmond It Comes from All Directions 212pp Grand Parade Poets (Wollongong, NSW) Pb $27.95.
Kinross-Smith, Graeme Available Light: New Poems 115pp Whitmore Press (Geelong, Vic) Pb $24.95.
Langdon, Jo Snowline 31pp Whitmore Press (Geelong, Vic) (2012) Pb $19.95.
Lilley, Kate Ladylike 86pp Univ of WA (Perth) (2012) Pb $19.95.
Lucas, Rose Even in the Dark 128pp Univ of WA (Perth) Pb $24.95.
Maiden, Jennifer Liquid Nitrogen 86pp Giramondo (Sydney) Pb $24.00.
Page, Geoff 1953 120pp Univ of Qld Press (Brisbane) Pb $24.95.
Page, Vanessa Confessional Box 78pp Walleah Press (Hobart) Pb $18.50.
Rieth, Homer 150 Motets 174pp Black Pepper (Melbourne) Pb $24.95.
Sant, Andrew The Bicycle Thief & Other Poems 94pp Black Pepper (Melbourne) Pb $22.95.
Sharkey, Michael Another Fine Morning in Paradise 100pp Five Islands Press (Melbourne) (2012) Pb $24.95.
Smith, Vivian Here, There and Elsewhere 70pp Giramondo (Sydney) (2012) Pb $24.00.
Stow, Randolph The Land’s Meaning: New Selected Poems 229pp Fremantle Press (Fremantle, WA) (2012) Pb $27.95.
Wakeling, Corey Goad Omen 96pp Giramondo (Sydney) Pb $24.00.
Wallace-Crabbe, Christopher New and Selected Poems 214pp Carcanet Press (Manchester) Pb $45.00.
Wearne, Alan Prepare the Cabin for Landing 106pp Giramondo (Sydney) Pb $24.00.
Fiction
Alizadeh, Ali Transactions 228pp Univ of Qld Press (Brisbane) Pb $19.95.
Amin, Manisha Jolie Dancing to the Flute 342pp Allen & Unwin (Sydney) (2012) Pb $29.99.
Armanno, Vernero Black Mountain 279pp Univ of Qld Press (Brisbane) (2012) Pb $29.95.
Bail, Murray The Voyage 208pp Text Publishing (Melbourne) (2012) Hb $29.99.
Barry, Peter We All Fall Down 336pp Transit Lounge (Melbourne) (2012) Pb $29.95.
Beasley, Richard Me and Rory Macbeath 371pp Hachette Australia (Sydney) Pb $29.99.
Blackadder, Jesse Chasing The Light: A Novel of Antarctica 431pp Fourth Estate (Sydney) Pb $29.99.
Blain, Georgia The Secret Lives of Men 256pp Scribe (Melbourne) Pb $27.95.
Brett, Lily Lola Bensky 276pp Hamish Hamilton (Melbourne) (2012) Pb $29.99.
Brooks, David The Conversation 240pp Univ of Qld Press (Brisbane) (2012) Hb $29.95.
Brown, Honey Dark Horse 273pp Michael Joseph (Sydney) Pb $29.99.
Burrows, Deborah A Stranger in My Street 342pp Pan Macmillan (Sydney) (2012) $26.99.
Campbell, Marion May Konkretion 148pp Univ Of WA (Perth) Pb $24.95.
Carroll, Steven A World of Other People 279pp Fourth Estate (Sydney) Pb $24.99.
Carter, Paul D. Eleven Seasons 271pp Allen & Unwin (Sydney) (2012) Pb $29.99.
Casey, Melanie Hindsight 368pp Pantera Press (Sydney) Pb $29.99.
Castro, Brian Street to Street 149pp Giramondo (Sydney) Pb $24.95.
Cavanaugh, Tony Promise 327pp Hachette Australia (Sydney) (2012) Pb $29.99.
Coetzee, J.M. The Childhood of Jesus 324pp Text Publishing (Melbourne) Hb $34.99.
Cole, Jessie Darkness on The Edge Of Town 328pp Fourth Estate (Sydney) Pb $24.00.
Collins, Courtney The Burial 291pp Allen & Unwin (Sydney) (2012) Pb $27.99.
Condon Matthew The Toe Tag Quintet: Five Novellas of Murder and Mayhem 352pp Vintage (Sydney) Pb $27.95.
Corris, Peter The Dunbar Case 247pp Allen & Unwin (Sydney) Pb $27.99.
Croggon, Alison Black Spring 286pp Walker (Sydney) Pb $22.95.
Croome, Andrew Midnight Empire 238pp Allen & Unwin (Sydney) (2012) Pb $27.99.
Curtin, Amanda Elemental 448pp UWA Publishing (Perth) Pb $29.99.
De Kretser, Michelle Questions of Travel 528pp Allen & Unwin (Sydney) (2012) Hb $39.95.
Doust, Jon To the Highlands 201pp Fremantle Press (Fremantle, WA) (2012) Pb $27.99.
Earls, Nick Welcome to Normal 288pp Vintage (Sydney) (2012) Pb $29.95.
Elliott, Ron Now Showing 361pp Fremantle Press (Fremantle, WA) Pb $29.99.
Elliott, Will Nightfall 377pp HarperCollins (Sydney) (2012) Pb $22.99.
Espeseth, Amy Sufficient Grace 336pp Scribe (Melbourne) (2012) Pb $29.95.
Faulkner, Annah The Beloved 313pp Picador (Sydney) Pb $27.99.
Flanagan, Richard The Narrow Road to the Deep North 467pp Vintage (Sydney) Pb $32.95.
Foster, David Man of Letters: Dog Rock 3 142pp Puncher & Wattmann (Sydney) (2012) Pb $19.95.
Goldsmith, Andrea The Memory Trap 350pp Fourth Estate (Sydney) Pb $29.99.
Gott, Robert The Holiday Murders 309pp Scribe (Melbourne) Pb $19.99.
Gould, Alan The Seaglass Spiral 299pp Finlay Lloyd (Braidwood, NSW) (2012) Pb $28.00.
Harrower, Elizabeth The Watch Tower 240pp Text Publishing (Melbourne) (2012) Pb $12.95 [reissue].
Harwood, John The Asylum 257pp Vintage (Sydney) Pb $32.95.
Hay, Ashley The Railwayman’s Wife 256pp Allen & Unwin (Sydney) Pb $29.99.
Hearn, Lian The Storyteller and His Three Daughters 266pp Hachette (Sydney) Pb $29.99 [novel].
Holland, Patrick The Darkest Little Room 272pp Transit Lounge (Melbourne) (2012) Pb $29.95.
Hooper, Chloe The Engagement 247pp Hamish Hamilton (Melbourne) (2012) Pb $29.99.
Hughes, John The Remnants 288pp Univ of WA (Perth) (2012) Pb $29.95.
Johnson, Susan My Hundred Lovers 278pp Allen & Unwin (Sydney) (2012) Pb $27.99.
Jordan, Toni Nine Days 247pp Text Publishing (Melbourne) (2012) Pb $29.99.
Jørgensen, Lesley Cat & Fiddle 512pp Scribe (Melbourne) Pb $29.99.
Karunatilaka, Shehan Chinaman: The Legend of Pradeep Mathew 397pp Vintage (Sydney) (2012) Pb $19.95.
Keneally, Tom The Daughters of Mars 592pp Vintage (Sydney) (2012) Pb $32.95.
Kennedy, Cate Like a House on Fire 277pp Scribe (Melbourne) (2012) Pb $27.95.
Kent, Hannah Burial Rites 352pp Picador (Sydney) Pb $32.99.
Kneen, Krissy Steeplechase 224pp Text Publishing (Melbourne) Pb $29.99.
Lavell, Iris Elsewhere in Success 254pp Fremantle Press (Fremantle, WA) Pb $24.99.
Lewis, Steve and Uhlman, Chris The Marmalade Files 311pp Fourth Estate (Sydney) (2012) Pb $29.99.
Limprecht, Eleanor What Was Left 255pp Sleepers Publishing (Melbourne) Pb $24.95.
Lovitt, Zane The Midnight Promise 283pp Text Publishing (Melbourne) (2012) Pb $29.99.
Lucashenko, Melissa Mullumbimby 285pp Univ of Qld Press (Brisbane) $29.95.
Mackenzie, Kenneth The Young Desire It 368pp Text Publishing (Melbourne) Pb $29.99 [reissue].
Macris, Anthony Great Western Highway: A Love Story (Capital, Volume One, Part Two) 362pp Univ of WA (Perth) Pb $29.95.
Matthews, Amy T. End of the Night Girl 280pp Wakefield Press (Adelaide) (2012) Pb $24.95.
McGahan, Andrew Ship Kings: The Voyage of the Unquiet Ice 379pp Allen & Unwin (Sydney) Hb $22.95 [novel for children].
McKay, Laura Jean Holiday in Cambodia 224pp Black Inc (Melbourne) Pb $24.99.
Meehan, Maurilia Madame Bovary’s Haberdashery 272pp Transit Lounge Publishing (Melbourne) Pb $29.95.
Midalia, Susan An Unknown Sky and Other Stories 184pp Univ of WA (Perth) (2012) Pb $24.95.
Mills, Jennifer The Rest Is Weight 241pp Univ of Qld Press (Brisbane) (2012) Pb $19.95.
Moloney, James The Tower Mill 302pp Univ of Qld Press (Brisbane) (2012) Pb $29.95.
Murnane, Gerald A History of Books 206pp Giramondo (Sydney) (2012) Pb $26.95.
Neave, Lucy Who We Were 258pp Text Publishing (Melbourne) Pb $29.99.
Newton-John, Pierz Fault Lines 173pp Spineless Wonders (Sydney) (2012) Pb $19.99.
Orr, Stephen Dissonance: A Novel 408pp Wakefield Press (Adelaide) (2012) Pb $27.95.
Parrett, Favel Past the Shallows 272pp Hachette Australia (Sydney) (2012) Pb $26.99.
Paynter, Jennifer Mary Bennet 342pp Viking (Sydney) (2012) Pb $29.95.
Power, Robert The Swan Song of Doctor Malloy 326pp Transit Lounge (Melbourne) Pb $29.95.
Prakash, Uday The Walls of Delhi 227pp Univ of WA (Perth) (2012) Pb $29.95.
Preston, Edwina The Inheritance of Ivorie Hammer 336pp Univ of Qld Press (Brisbane) (2012) Pb $29.95.
Richell, Hannah Secrets of the Tides 405pp Hachette Australia (Sydney) (2012) Pb $29.99.
Rothwell, Nicholas Belomar 246pp Text Publishing (Melbourne) Pb $29.99.
Roy, James City 298pp Univ of Qld Press (Brisbane) Pb $19.95 [stories].
Rowe, Josephine Tarcutta Wake 104pp Univ of Qld Press (Brisbane) (2012) Pb $19.95.
Russell, Vanessa Holy Bible 343pp Sleepers Publishing (Melbourne) Pb $24.95.
Saywell, Cherise Twitcher 291pp Vintage (Sydney) Pb $32.95.
Scourfield, Stephen As the River Runs 319pp Univ Of WA (Perth) Pb $26.95.
Sievwright, Ashley Walter 214pp Clouds Of Magellan (Melbourne) (2012) Pb $24.95.
Simsion, Graeme The Rosie Project 329pp Text Publishing (Melbourne) Pb $29.99.
Smith, Annabel Whisky Charlie Foxtrot 303pp Fremantle Press (Fremantle, WA) Pb $24.99.
Somerville, Chris We Are Not the Same Anymore: Stories 185pp Univ of Qld Press (Brisbane) Pb $19.95.
Takolander, Maria The Double: (And Other Stories) 257pp Text Publishing (Melbourne) Pb $29.99.
Taylor, Cory My Beautiful Enemy 272pp, Text Publishing (Melbourne) Pb $29.99.
Tulba, Majok Beneath the Darkening Sky 239pp Hamish Hamilton (Melbourne) (2012) Pb $29.95.
Uhlman, Chris [see
Ülgezer, Alice Melike The Memory of Salt 304pp Giramondo (Sydney) (2012) Pb $27.95.
Van Loon, Julienne Harmless 137pp Fremantle Press (Fremantle, WA) Pb $22.99.
Volk, Felicity Lightning 380pp Picador (Sydney) Pb $29.99.
Walker, Yvette Letters to the End of Love 241pp Univ of Qld Press (Brisbane) Pb $22.95.
Woolfe, Sue The Oldest Song in the World 393pp Fourth Estate (Sydney) (2012) Pb $29.99.
Wright, Alexis The Swan Book 340pp Giramondo (Sydney) Pb $29.95.
Wyld, Evie All the Birds, Singing 229pp Vintage (Sydney) Pb $32.95.
Letters and Autobiography
Broomstick: Personal Reflections of Leonie Kramer Leonie Kramer 222pp Australian Scholarly Publishing (Melbourne) Pb $49.95.
Here and Now: Letters, 2008-2011 Paul Oster and J.M. Coetzee 248pp Harvill Decker (London) Pb $27.99.
Anthologies
Australian Love Poems 2013 ed Mark Tredinnick 330pp Inkerman & Blunt (Melbourne) Pb $26.99.
The Best Australian Business Writing 2012 ed Andrew Cornell 256pp NewSouth (Sydney) (2012) Pb $29.99.
The Best Australian Science Writing 2012 ed Elizabeth Finkel 286pp NewSouth (Sydney) (2012) Pb $29.99.
The Best Australian Stories 2012 ed Sonya Hartnett 369pp Black Inc (Melbourne) (2012) Pb $29.99.
Contemporary Asian Australian Poets ed Adam Aitken et al 253pp Puncher & Wattmann (Sydney) Pb $29.95.
Glorious Days: Australia 1913 ed Michelle Hetherington 249pp National Museum of Australia (Canberra) Pb $44.95.
Hide Your Fires: 2012 UTS Writers’ Anthology ed Lauren Anderson et al 304pp Figment Publishing (Sydney) (2012) Pb $26.99.
Joyful Strains: Making Australia Home ed Kent MacCarter and Ali Lemer 288pp Affirm Press (Melbourne) Pb $24.95.
Melbourne: City of Words John McLaren 264pp Arcadia (Melbourne) Pb $39.95.
The Quadrant Book of Poetry ed Les Murray 244pp Quadrant Books (Sydney) (2012) Hb $44.95.
The Sleepers Almanac No. 8 ed Zoe Dattner and Louise Swinn 365pp Sleepers Publishing (Melbourne) Pb $24.95.
Telling Stories: Australian Life and Literature 1935-2012 ed Tanya Dalziell and Paul Genoni 656pp Monash Univ Publishing (Melbourne) Pb $49.95.
The 2013 Voiceless Anthology ed J.M. Coetzee et al 236pp Allen & Unwin (Sydney) Pb $22.95.
Criticism
“Anthologies and the Poetic Stock Market” Jaya Savige Australian Poetry Journal 2(1) (2012) pp84-89.
“Blue Corner and Red Corner, Metropolis and Province: Literature and Education in Contemporary Australia” Richard Lansdown Australian Literary Studies 28(1-2) pp140-148.
“Bookshops, Ebooks and the Future of the Novel: Overland in Conversation with Industry Insiders Jo Case, John Weldon and Malcolm Neil” Overland 207 (2012) pp51-55.
“Cultural Erasure” Patrick McAuley Quadrant 489 (2012) pp76-80.
“Delight and Revolution: Literary Studies, Aesthetics and Ideology” Lyn McCredden Australian Literary Studies 28(1-2) pp125-139.
“Editing ALS [Australian Literary Studies]: A Memoir” Laurie Hergenhan Australian Literary Studies 28(1-2) pp15-25.
“English Studies at the University of New England: A Report from the Field” Jennifer McDonell Australian Literary Studies 28(1-2) pp149-162.
“English Studies in Australia: Repositioning the Subject” Paul Giles Australian Literary Studies 28(1-2) pp26-39.
‘From the Socratic University to the Sophistic” John J. Furedy and Christine Furedy Quadrant 491 (2012) pp45-49.
“The ‘Hollowness’ of English? A Case for Narratology” James Meffan and Kim L. Worthington Australian Literary Studies 28(1-2) pp111-124.
“In the Club: Australian Crime Fiction in the USA 1943-1954” Carol Hetherington Australian Literary Studies 27(3-4) (2012) pp31-45.
“Once We Were a Discipline: Stray Thoughts on English” Vijay Mishra Australian Literary Studies 28(1-2) pp63-74.
“Poets, Apples and Androids” David McCooey Australian Poetry Journal 2(1) (2012) pp97-110.
“The Politics of Dictionaries” Geoffrey Luck Quadrant 492 (2012) pp49-53.
“Reading English” Leigh Dale Australian Literary Studies 28(1-2) pp1-14.
“Reading in Public: Irene Longman and Citizenship” Kay Ferres Australian Literary Studies 27(3-4) (2012) pp46-58 [Irene Longman was the first woman elected to the Queensland parliament].
“Sex and the City: New Novels by Women and Middlebrow Culture at Mid-Century” Susan Sheridan Australian Literary Studies 27(3-4) (2012) pp1-12.
“Taken for Granted” Funding Arts and Humanities Research in Australia” Philippa Martyr Quadrant 490 (2012) pp74-80.
“What Do Poets Drink? Gordon, Clarke and Kendall” Michael Wilding Quadrant 474 (2011) pp18-24.
“Whatever Happened to Australian Literature in the Universities?” Tony Hassall Quadrant 480 (2011) pp30-34.
“Where Literary Studies Is, and What It Does” Anthony Uhlmann Australian Literary Studies 28(1-2) pp98-110.
Studies on Individual Writers
Boyd, Martin “A Boy’s |Best Friend Is His Dick: Homosociality and Homo-eroticism in Martin Boyd’s Scandal of Spring” Robert Darby Southerly 73(3) pp137-152.
Brennan, Christopher “Christopher Brennan and A.C. Swinburne” Michael Buhagiar Southerly 73(3) pp169-188.
Brown, Pam “Review of Home by Dark” John Tranter Southerly 73(3) pp260-264.
Cambridge, Ada “A Note on A.C.’s Echoes and Ada Cambridge” Margaret Bradstock” Australian Literary Studies 27(3-4) (2012) pp140-142.
Clarke, Marcus “A Friend of My People at Home: Marcus Clarke and Captain Frederick Standish” Michael Wilding Quadrant 488 (2012) pp68-76.
— “Marcus Clarke’s Essential Recycling” Michael Wilding Quadrant 481 (2011) pp36-42.
Coetzee, J.M. “The Gate Deferred: J.M. Coetzee and the Battle Against Doubt” Scott Esposito Southerly 73(3) pp90-111.
Davis, Beatrice “Beatrice Davis and ‘The Sacredness of the Printed Word’” Rowena McDonald Australian Literary Studies 27(3-4) (2012) pp13-30.
Dunne, Gary “Bearing Witness: the Narratives of Gary Dunne in the Name of HIV/AIDS” Peter Mitchell Southerly 73(3) pp228-245.
Durack, Elizabeth “The Kimberley Dreaming of the Durack Sisters” Nicholas Hasluck Quadrant 490 (2012) pp33-37.
Durack, Mary [see
Fitzgerald, R.D. “Swinging Theodolite: Robert David Fitzgerald” Rafe Champion Quadrant 485 (2012) pp82-85.
Fortune, Mary “Mary Fortune as Sylphid: ‘blond, and silk, and tulle’” Megan Brown Australian Literary Studies 27(3-4) (2012) pp92-106.
Foster, David “Strange and Beautiful: David Foster’s Sons of the Rumour” Susan Lever Westerly 58(2) pp85-100.
Garner, Helen “Alfred Tennyson and Helen Garner in an Age of Doubt” Michael Jensen Quadrant 486 (2012) pp63-69.
— “The Interviewer and the Subject” Sonya Voumard Meanjin 71(2) (2012) “Meanjin Papers” insert pp1-16 [interview].
Gilmore, Mary “‘Tribute’: An Unknown Poem by Mary Gilmore” Meredith Sherlock Australian Literary Studies 27(3-4) (2012) pp137-139.
Harwood, Gwen “‘Colour and Crazy Love’: Gwen Harwood and Vera Cottew” Ann-Marie Priest Southerly 73(3) pp26-41.
Hasluck, Nicholas “How to Write a Political Novel” Nicholas Hasluck Quadrant 482 (2011) pp26-31 [on the writing of Dismissal].
Hazzard, Shirley Shirley Hazzard: Literary Expatriate and Cosmopolitan Humanist Brigitta Olubas 279pp Cambria (London) Hb $114.99.
Heiss, Anita “Passion and Illusions: Anita Heiss’s Stories” Michael Connor Quadrant 487 (2012) pp32-35.
Henning, Rachel “The Creation of Rachel Henning: Personal Correspondence to Publishing Phenomenon” Bryony Cosgrove Australian Literary Studies 27(3-4) (2012) pp74-91.
Herbert, Xavier “Sir Zelman and the Literary Loony” Laurie Hergenhan Quadrant 487 (2012) pp70-73.
Jolley, Elizabeth “A Marriage of True Minds: Leonard and Elizabeth Jolley” John Barnes Westerly 58(2) pp118-137.
Jones, Gail “From Innocent to Evil: The Representation of the Child in the Works of Gail Jones” Fiona Duthie Westerly 58(1) pp126-147.
Keneally, Thomas “Thomas Keneally, Starving for Evidence” Andrew Roberts Quadrant 482 (2011) pp32-33 [on Three Famines].
Koch, Christopher Christopher Koch, Our Finest Living Novelist” Jamie Grant Quadrant 491 (2012) pp7-9.
Lawson, Henry “Rediscovered Lawson Sketch of 1893: ‘Selection Farms’” Paul Eggert Australian Literary Studies 27(3-4) (2012) pp124-136.
Lazaroo, Simone “The Ghost and the Host: ‘Hauntologising’ Diasporic Difference in Simone Lazaroo’s Fiction” Paul Giffard-Foret Westerly 58(1) pp148-165.
Lucashenko, Melissa “Review of Mullumbimby” [2013] Anne Brewster Southerly 73(3) pp249-259.
Malouf, David “David Malouf’s Remembering Babylon in Tokyo” Kate Darian-Smith Meanjin 71(2) (2012) pp6-9.
McAuley, James “McAuley’s ‘lame lyre nets’” Martin Duwell Australian Poetry Journal 2(1) (2012) pp90-96.
Murray, Les “Les Murray, Anthologist” Alan Gould Quadrant 489 (2012) pp74-75.
Praed, Rosa “‘Our Literary Connexion’: Rosa Praed and George Bentley” Chris Tiffin Australian Literary Studies 27(3-4) (2012) pp107-123.
Sandall, Roger “Roger Sandall (1933-2012)” Keith Windschuttle Quadrant 490 (2012) pp5-9.
Slessor, Kenneth “The Life and Death of Joe Lynch” Lindsay Foyle Quadrant 490 (2012) pp38-41.
Wallace-Crabbe, Chris Review of New and Selected Poems [2013] Michelle Borzi Southerly 73(3) pp120-135.
Warner, Denis “Denis Warner, 1917-2012: The War Correspondents’ War Correspondent” Anthony McAdam Quadrant 491 (2012) pp19-23.
White, Patrick “Adapting Patrick White to the Screen” Michael Griffin Quadrant 481 (2011) pp114-115.
— “Patrick White: A Centenary Tribute” Neil Armfield Meanjin 71(2) (2012) pp18-28.
— “Ruth’s Perfect Boy: Patrick White at 100” Mark McGinness Quadrant 487 (2012) pp64-69.
Williamson, David “David Williamson’s Family Secrets” Michael Connor Quadrant 474 (2011) pp24-26.
Winton, Tim “Reviving Eva in Tim Winton’s Breath” Colleen McGloin Journal of Commonwealth Literature 47(1) (2012) pp109-120.
Non-fiction
The Boy Colonel: Lieutenant Colonel Douglas Marks, the Youngest Battalion Commander in the AIF Will Davies 428pp Vintage (Sydney) Pb $34.95.
A Flower between the Cracks: A Memoir of Love, Hope and Disability Helen Sage 302pp Affirm Press (Melbourne) Pb $29.95.
Ghost Wife: A Memoir of Love and Defiance Michelle Dicinoski 214pp Black Inc (Melbourne) Pb $24.99.
Honestly: Notes on Life Nikki Gemmell 221pp Fourth Estate (Sydney) Pb $19.95 [collected columns and short pieces].
The Last Blank Spaces: Exploring Africa and Australia Dane Kennedy 373pp Inbooks [Harvard Univ Press] (Harvard) Hb $49.95.
The Local Wildlife Robert Drewe 245pp Hamish Hamilton (Sydney) Hb $29.99 [collected columns and short pieces].
A Most Generous Scholar: Joan Kerr: Art and Agricultural Historian Susan Steggall 269pp LhR Press (Sydney) Pb $35.00.
A Point of View Clive Clive James 358pp Picador (Sydney) (2012) Pb $32.99 [collected columns and short pieces].
An Unqualified Success: The Extraordinary Life of Allan Percy Fleming Peter Golding 344pp Rosenberg Publishing (Kenthurst, NSW) Hb $39.95.
Silences and Secrets: The Australian Experience of the Weintraubs Syncopators Kay Dreyfus 315pp Monash Univ Publishing (Melbourne) Pb $34.95.
26 Views of the Starburst World: William Dawes at Sydney Cove 1788-91 Ross Gibson 302pp UWA Publishing (Perth) Pb $29.95
Where Is Dr Leichhardt? The Greatest Mystery in Australian History Darrell Lewis 440pp Monash Univ Publishing (Melbourne) Pb $59.95.
W. Macmahon Ball: Politics for the People Ai Kobayashi 292pp Australian Scholarly Publishing (Melbourne) Pb $39.95.