Abstract
Introduction
The looming 2015 commemoration of the original ANZAC Day and other World War I battles prompted researcher Joan Beaumont to warn that
[t]he commemorative tsunami is on its way. As James Brown put it recently in Anzac’s Long Shadow, we are now witnessing an Anzac “arms race”, as Australians compete to find “bigger and better ways to commemorate our sacrificed soldiers”. The bill to the Australian state and federal taxpayers, Brown calculates, will be nearly $325 million. With a further $300 million projected to be raised in private donations, the commemoration of World War I might ultimately cost some two-thirds of a billion dollars. Of course, many of the activities planned for 2015 are fitting. Beyond this, however, much of the commemorative activity planned for the next four years risks being commodified or trivialised. Poppies already adorn everything from neckties to oven mitts. It is possible to buy a pre-recorded Minute of Silence for $2.26. Cruise ships promise “moving and heartfelt experiences” offshore for those Australians who have failed to win a ticket in the national ballot for the Gallipoli dawn service. And there is even talk of a surfboat race across the Dardanelles.
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In all this, one thing is certain: how we remember World War I will not be the way that Australians remembered it a century ago. This should not surprise us. Memory is not history. Rather, it is a changing, dynamic process in which individuals and communities select, interpret, and revise the past according to their current values and priorities. (ABR 361 [May])
Beaumont’s warning prefaced a review of ANZAC Memories: Living with the Legend, compiled by Alistair Thomson and first published in 1994 but now re-issued with extra new material. Thomson “was one of the first Australian historians to recognise this complexity of memory”, says Beaumont; “[t]his important book not only traced the processes whereby the Anzac legend became the dominant narrative of war memory over the twentieth century. Thomson also demonstrated – and this was what earned him such critical acclaim – how the veterans of World War I negotiated their own memories and identities with reference to the dominant public narrative”. In the new material (two new chapters and a postscript), Thomson “reflects on how his own life experience in the past thirty years has changed his understanding of the interviews he conducted with the veterans in the 1980s”, he draws on archival material that was recently released by the National Archives of Australia, including the post-war medical files of veterans collated by the Department of Repatriation; and, in “the most compelling chapter of the new edition”, Thomson follows the post-war life of his grandfather Hector Thomson (ABR 361 [May], see
Another book on this theme which Beaumont would surely approve is Mark Dapin’s anthology From the Trenches: The Best ANZAC Writing of World War One. Geoff Page observes that it “samples all the relevant genres (letters, memoir, journalism, fiction, poetry) and offers a multiplicity of viewpoints (senior ranks, subalterns, NCOs, privates, and nurses). The book is not simplistically pro- or anti-war, but its overall message is unmistakable. The whole enterprise was a huge and bloody mistake, stupidly prolonged by inadequate politicians for more than four years” (ABR 360 [April], see If you read only one book about Australia’s experience of World War I, as the deluge of commemorative publications marking the outbreak of the war becomes a veritable tsunami, make it Broken Nation, an account that joins the history of the war to the home front, and that details the barbarism of the battlefields as well as the desolation, despair, and bitter divisions that devastated the communities left behind. As the war claimed more and more lives, enlistments steadily declined. It is not an uplifting read, but Beaumont’s comprehensive and relentless narrative is a fine achievement, and it will surely become the definitive account of its subject. Bringing together military history and the extensive historiography on divisions on the home front, within a conceptual frame that highlights the process of memory-making, Beaumont provides a path-breaking and sobering work. (ABR 358 [February], see
The poems in David Malouf’s Earth Hour deal with memory, which in one poem is said to be “of its kind one of our rarest / gifts”. Reviewer Lisa Gorton notes that for Malouf, “memory is a medium of recovery: in memory, forfeited possibilities flourish at last”, and this conception “means that when he returns to the place of [an] earlier poem, and to the place of [a] first experience, this is a work not of repetition so much as renewal”. She finds the collection “lit up by memories of childhood and youth”: “In Earth Hour, Malouf’s rapturous sense of things takes its spring, its nerve, from his fascination with what is ‘counterworld’; original in our bodies, and on the other side of the mirror” (ABR 359 [March]). Chris Wallace-Crabbe’s My Feet Are Hungry, published to mark his eightieth birthday, strikes “an autumnal feeling” in the best poems, yet is overall “playful – almost, at times, whimsical” (Geoff Page, Southerly 74[1]) and Tim Thorne’s fourteenth collection, The Unspeak Poems and Other Verses, “shows Thorne at the top of his recent form, particularly in regard to comedy, satire and politics … There are too few books of Australian poetry where you can interrupt your household by laughing out loud every few minutes” (Geoff Page, Southerly 74[1]). Exhibits of the Sun is the tenth collection from Stephen Edgar, dubbed “a master of rhyme” by Geoffrey Lehmann, who adds that Edgar has “a love affair with formal complexity in verse”, which helps his celebration of “the formal complexity of the universe. Form merges with theme”. In this book, says Lehmann, “Stephen Edgar, with his almost Whitman-like embrace of the natural world, encourages us to open our eyes to a universe that physicists are starting to realise is becoming more beautiful and complex as it expands, in defiance of the second law of thermo-dynamics” (ABR 367 [December]).
Geoffrey Lehmann’s own collection, Poems: 1957–2013, includes a final poem which Martin Duwell saw as “something of a gift for reviewers: it is about what poetry has meant to Lehmann – ‘Poetry is our human love of metaphor … Poetry is non-local causality. / We are bathed in a mysterious glow’”. Duwell observes that “[a] striking feature of this collection of poetry of fifty-six years is how few loci of interest there are: ancient Rome, a farm in rural New South Wales, parenthood. His characteristic mode seems to be to explore these exhaustively by holding them up to the light and investigating every facet”. Duwell notes that “Wallace Stevens’s ‘Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird’ hovers behind these poems as an emblem of their method, and it is no accident that the fifth-last poem is called ‘Thirteen Reviews of the New Babylon Inn’”. For Duwell, “the real distinctiveness of this poet’s lifetime work lies in his method of approaching subjects from all different perspectives, inhabiting them but then standing outside of them, not to spin the subject out but to see something of the complexity within” (ABR 365 [October]). Letterature: Verse Letters from Australian Women is the latest work from Timoshenko Aslanides, and the poet has indicated it may be his last. It offers the “literary conceit” of a selection of narrative poems modelled on Ovid’s Heroides, verse letters from women in Greek and Roman mythology. The poems are mainly verse letters to spouses, relatives, friends or colleagues, though some are diary entries, and all are imagined to have been written by exceptional historical Australian women. Aslanides’ Preface provides a succinct survey of the history of the verse letter form, explaining that, in Ovid’s case, its purpose was “to demonstrate to himself and his readers that he could … describe the emotions, explore the psychology and dissect the dilemma or grief of each of the legendary women he’d selected”. Aslanides lists a wider range of functions of this particular form, and wryly notes that his book appears to be the first collection of verse letters written by a male poet in personas of women since Ovid’s anthology from the Age of Augustus. He ranges widely for his selection, including an aviator, a photographer, a nurse, a madam, a wine-maker, and a pastoralist; the literary figures include Miles Franklin, Dorothea Mackellar, Catherine Helen Spence, Kylie Tennant, and Judith Wright. The poems work best when the subject is known to the reader, and those who have taught works by some of the writers can certainly attest to Aslanides’ ability to capture language, nuance, and outlook.
In Devadatta’s Poems Judith Beveridge picks up on concepts first canvassed in Wolf Notes (2003), which showed her interest in Buddhist notions of spirituality. Describing this as a “sensual, supercharged book [which] crackles and teems with all the licence, sensation, and desire, that we, the unenlightened, enjoy”, Peter Kenneally summarises its underlying purpose: “Seeking perfection or ‘enlightenment’ requires a monastic devotion to the life of the spirit and a rejection of material comforts. Judith Beveridge’s writings about the young Buddha and his cousin Devadatta bring out all the intricacies and contradictions inherent in such a quest” (ABR 363 [August]). Kenneally also reviewed Kevin Brophy’s Walking: New And Selected Poems, observing that “Brophy has lived his life, for the most part, in a corridor barely ten kilometres long, stretching from unlovely Coburg in Melbourne’s inner north, through Brunswick to the leafy precincts of Melbourne University. It is a world that inhabits his poetry, and the poetry in turn beats its bounds and treads its laneways, by turns discovering and adding layers of meaning.” He adds that for Brophy this setting is “strangely timeless”, partly because “Brophy reaches back through time via his family, who seem even more rooted in the Coburg dustiness than he is, and partly because his vocation as a poet seems so old-fashioned” (ABR 361 [May]). As its title suggests, place is also crucial to Bowra, by B.R. Dionysius. Peter Kenneally splendidly contextualizes the book as follows:
Australia is one of the most urbanised and docile societies on earth, but its cities are hemmed in by a vast, poetry-laden hinterland. There is Kinsella in the west, Adamson on the Hawkesbury, and, in this book, the western Queensland of B.R. Dionysius. No one ever seems to be matter of fact about the landscape in Australia. It is politically charged, or Gothic, or, most often, mythopoeic. Dionysius’s book is all of these but mostly mythic: it is a murky, flooded, uninsurable world that he depicts, with the Bremer River as its resident deity. (ABR 356 November)
The reviewer acknowledges that the book “is an archaic enterprise in some ways: sonnet after sonnet, laid out, equally weighted like so many sandbags” and that “Dionysius’s language plays at the very edge of its capacity, with quite a few unwieldy, distracting similes and misjudged solemnities”; however “his metaphors are something else: and the final poem sequence ‘Cicada’ employs a sustained, intricate metaphor that takes the book somewhere else entirely, drily and unforgettably” (ABR 356 [November]).
The Beautiful Anxiety by Jill Jones includes “a flurry of short poems, crisp as snowflakes”, “two tiny poems [which] use words from Shakespeare’s plays”, and in general demonstrates that “although Jones uses experimental compositional techniques that can allow a poet to break out of familiar writing patterns, she is not a poet who has set aside a concern with meaning-making” (Ali Jane Smith, Southerly 74[1]). Signal Flare by Anthony Lawrence seemed at times “uneven” to Jacinta Le Plastrier, but she expresses admiration for Lawrence’s “assured yet flexible control of poetic language, syntax, and thought that creates a line of ideas, images, and experiences that yield complex understanding, insight, and responses”; Signal Flare is “one of the most illuminating and moving books of poetry to be written by an Australian in recent times” (ABR 358 [February]). Drawing on the title of Ian Templeman’s The Watchmaker’s Imprint, Dennis Haskell encapsulates this volume of selected poems by declaring that Templeman “is a ‘word bone and rag man’ using words to do what his watchmaker father did – attempt to repair ‘the intricacy of time’” (ABR 357 [December-January]).
Sputnik’s Cousin: New Poems by Kent MacCarter and Leaves of Glass by David Prater were both the subject of review articles in Southerly [see
Debut volumes of verse included Todd Turner’s Woodsmoke, which Geoff Page saw as evolving “intriguingly” from “the ‘anti-pastoral’ mode founded by Philip Hodgins” toward a “metaphysical dimension that develops towards the end of the collection” (ABR 364 [September]) and Anne Elvey’s Kin, which
brings together a wide range of poems full of light and the acuity of close attention. These poems focus on a world of inter-relationships where tree and water, creature and human, air and breathing, coexist – suggestive of an underlying philosophy of humility and acceptance. This is a world which envisions at least the potential of balance and a non-hierarchical sharing, where self and other, the natural world, and the devices and desires of the human might recognise each other. (Rose Lucas, ABR 364 [September])
Scholars of fiction took particular interest in the publication of Elizabeth Harrower’s fifth and final novel, In Certain Circles. Completed in the late 1960s but withdrawn from publication in 1971, the manuscript had been held in the National Library. Reviewer Megan Nash describes the novel as “a kind of Australian Howards End” (Southerly 74[1]), its plot turning on the death of a family matriarch. Bernadette Brennan outlines the circumstances of the novel’s writing:
As [Harrower] explained to Helen Trinca, she wrote the book under pressure, as a means to obtain an Australia Council grant, and she was disappointed with it: “Macmillan accepted it. It was well written because once you can write, you can write a good book. But there are a lot of dead novels out in the world that don’t need to be written”.
Brennan asserts that “In Certain Circles is not one of them”. The novel deals with “[f]amiliar issues of class privilege, destructive power relationships, and the nexus between desire and mental illness” and is “set among the equally familiar Harrower setting of sandstone houses replete with beautiful gardens and private beaches on Sydney’s north shore”, but “In Certain Circles may be read as more outward-looking than Harrower’s earlier fiction set in Australia”. Brennan acknowledges that “[t]he earlier sections are uneven with perhaps too much dialogue, wedding preparations, and focus on the somewhat vacuous Howard social circle. Later, there is an overly contrived, unconvincing plot development … that, given Harrower’s intelligence and skill, affirms that she was writing under pressure” – however her judgement is that “In Certain Circles is a fascinating and important addition to Harrower’s oeuvre” (ABR 361 [May]).
Peter Carey’s Amnesia is about power and resistance, dealing with cyber-activism and the truths this can unlock. As described by Patrick Allington, “Amnesia contains multiple personal, political, personal-political, and cross-generational threads. It is a sprawling construction that draws together the past and something approximating the present, with a nod to a discordant future. Among much else, Carey links three key moments: the 1942 Battle of Brisbane, when Australian and US forces fought each other on Brisbane streets; John Kerr’s removal of the Whitlam government in 1975” (portrayed as a CIA coup designed to protect the US base at Pine Gap); and the activists’ “very twenty-first-century challenge to the established order of things”. “The point of these threads,” says Allington, “is not merely that all events, or all people for that matter, are connected; rather, the point … is to highlight society’s capacity to overlook political crimes and shenanigans”. He observes: “So much of Carey’s earlier work – including themes, provocations, characters, and settings – echo, chime-like, through Amnesia. But Carey isn’t repeating himself: Amnesia is both familiar and a distinctly new moment in his career” (ABR 365 [October]).
Janette Turner Hospital’s The Claimant is a “dense and intricate narrative” offering a “crowded stage” of themes. Reviewer Brian Mathews observes that “you wonder how it is all going to be held together, and how intelligibility and a sense of direction and development will be maintained through multiplying names, varying manifestations of the same characters, the tangle and inter-penetration of the past, the present, and the possible”, but assures the reader that “Janette Turner Hospital is equal to the challenge”: “She has successfully avoided the inherent limitations of the historical novel and has called upon her impressive imaginative resources and formidable intellectual breadth and flexibility to provide the fiction” (ABR 362 [June-July]). Shannon Burns praises Gerald Murnane’s novel A Million Windows as being “in every part the equal” of his earlier, highly acclaimed works:
A Million Windows marks a triumph of creative configuration, where pre-existing contexts, images, and voices are arranged and rearranged for affective resonance. Following hard upon his ‘history’ of reading in A History of Books, this is Murnane’s history of narrative. He reanimates several fictional personages from previous books and seems to suggest, in the process, that those narratives are forever being written by parallel Murnanes who jointly haunt the image-world of their fictions. […] With A Million Windows, Gerald Murnane continues to produce a kind of writing and a kind of sentence that no other writer is able, or inclined, to produce; a writing at once idiosyncratic and elemental; a writing that speaks across communicative divides via the modern caves we call “books”. On top of this, Murnane’s late works have proven embracing enough to incorporate his earlier writing. I cannot recall a more remarkable literary reconfiguration than that achieved by Murnane from Barley Patch (2009) onwards, and find it hard to imagine a greater trust between writer and reader than the one generated with A Million Windows. (Shannon Burns, ABR 363 [August])
Christos Tsiolkas’ Barracuda offers a trenchant critique of Australian society, though Rosemary Sorensen argues that “[w]hile there is no mistaking the Big Issue goals of the novel, this is also an uncompromising, loving portrayal of one man who wants to find a way not to damage himself and those around him. It’s the story of how Dan Kelly fights through personal and social barriers towards an ethical self he can live with – or, to use Tsiolkas’s own imagery, it’s about how he must swim through barracuda-infested waters to reach a safe harbour and tranquility” (ABR 356 [November]).
Tim Winton’s Eyrie takes as its protagonist forty-seven year old Tom Keely, who has dropped out of society and retreated to his “seedy little eyrie” as a bolt-hole. The unfolding story reveals “he has obviously been a significant figure in the environmental movement and seems to have been brought down by the intensity and straightforwardness of his own commitment. Abused and defamed, he is defeated and in retreat.” Reviewer Brian Mathews notes that “Winton has been increasingly moved – in his fiction but also, as it happens, in his personal life – to notice just how thin the cries of Nature have become amidst the clank and whine of the [mining] boom”, and views Eyrie as “a kind of apotheosis of a growing outrage and its attendant helplessness” (ABR 356 [November]). David Whish-Wilson’s Zero at the Bone is set in Perth in 1979 at a time of gold mining revival stimulated by economic boom; it reflects the dawning of the 1980s age of greed and the plot unravels the reasons for a suicide. Zero at the Bone is a sequel to Whish-Wilson’s successful Line of Sight (2010). Another author borrowing tropes from crime fiction is Tracy Ryan, whose new novel Claustrophobia is “a smart and fast-paced hurtle through lust, obsession, and stultifying patterns of dependency and self-delusion” (Rose Lucas, ABR 363 [August]). Dominique Wilson’s The Yellow Papers presents a three-part story of racial prejudice, not only of Australians towards Asians, but also of Asians towards Westerners. The novel tracks this theme from pre-Federation Australia to China during the Cultural Revolution. Reviewer Alison Broinowski complains that the significance of the title is never revealed and “[c]ompressing her [Wilson’s] research on a century of Australian-Chinese interactions into a historical romance novel reduces the reader-appeal she can generate for her characters” (ABR 363 [August]).
Readers wishing for a sense of Bernard Cohen’s new novel, The Antibiography of Robert F. Menzies, are referred to the excellent review by Kathryn Koromilas (ABR 358 [February]) which patiently explains its singularly unique structure as “a work in story and notes, a game, a play of genre, a performance”. Set in the early years of the John Howard government, the novel’s genesis lies in Howard’s speeches portraying Menzies as “a symbol of a benign Australia content with its own prosperity and guiltlessness”. In this novel, says Koromilas, “Cohen takes that invocation to its absurd limit” by bringing Menzies back from the grave. The story is centred upon a narrator suffering writer’s block as he attempts to complete a biography of Menzies. But the real story and narrative lies “below the line” in the footnotes:
The narrator, in twenty exegetical footnotes reflects critically on the story from a number of historical, political, and cultural angles, as well as from personal and professional ones, with insights into the genesis of the project, explorations into the writer’s fragile state of mind, musings on the “self-mythology” of the difficulty of writing, and critical reflections on when and how a novel begins and ends. This works well. The audacious voice of this narrator is bewitching.
Lest this description make the book sound daunting, Koromilas concludes that “Cohen’s is a superb performance of digressions above and below the story line, of transgressions of generic rules, and of intrusions into itself and into the reader’s peace of mind. Every digression is relevant. Every transgression succeeds. Every intrusion is essential to the story and keeps you, the reader, alert to the task – and very entertained” (ABR 358 [February]). John A. Scott’s long novel, N, shared the postmodernist tendency of Cohen’s offering: Don Anderson’s review begins with the following notation:
The last words of the endnotes to John A. Scott’s most recent novel – earlier ones have won the Victorian Premier’s prize for fiction and been shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Award – and thus the last words of this book, if we exclude back-cover plaudits, read: “An additional narrative strand, chronicling the history of Surrealist André Breton in Melbourne, 1952, omitted from this version of N for reasons of overall length [emphasis added], appears in Southerly, Vol. 73, No 3, 2013 (‘The Naked Writer’).” As these words appear on page 599 of N, a sesquipedalian opus if ever there was one, it can only be observed, echoing Francisco in the first scene of Hamlet, “for this relief much thanks”, for N is already over-long, over-plotted, over-the-top, making excessive demands upon the reader’s generosity and her stamina.
Anderson’s review goes on to observe that N “hardly feels ‘postmodernist’. Some mixture, rather, of V and The Count of Monte Cristo. Both structurally and in its humanist political sympathies, it is winningly old-fashioned” and is certainly more like “a modernist rather than a postmodernist novel” (ABR 362 [June-July]).
Lenny Bartulin’s Infamy did not impress reviewer Ray Cassin, who described the novel as the “improbable mix” of “The Wild Bunch meets Captain Blood”: “Bartulin’s narrative style [has] affinities with a certain sort of action movie: the reader is wrenched from short take to short take, with one clutch of characters momentarily left in peril while the plight of others is unveiled. This builds suspense and mostly works, but the relentless violence is more reminiscent of Peckinpah than Scorsese. And, although that does put Infamy in the realm of the western, the tale keeps drifting towards the mood and conventions of an earlier Hollywood genre, the swashbuckling adventure movies of the 1930s.” To this is added a “tendency to sink into romantic fantasy” (ABR 358 [February]). Christine Piper’s After Darkness won the 2014 Vogel award for its account of Australian history from the point of view of a Japanese doctor arrested as a threat to national security and sent to an internment camp in regional South Australia. “Piper’s novel cleverly interweaves three distinct temporal narratives and settings,” says reviewer Laurie Steed; “[t]he first, in Tokyo in the mid-1930s, explores the impact an opportunity to work with the army’s military research division has on Tomakazu’s marriage. The second charts his time in Broome as a locum in the late 1930s as World War II tensions escalate. The third covers his time [in internment]”. Steed concludes that “[a]t its best, After Darkness is a profound study of how governments can lose their sense of humanity during national crises, and of the survivalist strategies inmates and employees adopt when faced with such dehumanising conditions” (ABR 364 [September]). Mark Henshaw’s The Snow Kimono won the NSW Premier’s Award and is his second novel (following a twenty-six year gap since Out of the Line of Fire in 1988 – though according to Delia Falconer “Henshaw appears to have been reworking this book since at least 1994”). Set in Paris, Algeria, and Japan, it concerns the impossibility of fully understanding another person’s life – in this instance that of a writer who, despite nurture by an unknown benefactor, has manifested his resentment in violent psychopathy (ABR 364 [September]).
Other notable novels included Rohan Wilson’s To Name Those Lost (the sequel to his award-winning 2011 novel The Roving Party); Joan London’s The Golden Age (which takes its title from a Perth pub used as a convalescent home for children recovering from polio); Su Dharmapala’s Saree (the six-section structure following the sequence of tying a saree – knot, first drape, pleats, second drape, the fall, and the finishing); Gary Disher’s Bitter Wash Road (a work of police procedural fiction which rises above genre-convention to achieve “the rare feat of philosophising while entertaining, in a tale told in language that is as vivid as it is simple” (Ray Cassin, ABR 357 [December-January]). It is also important to mention The Colonials by historian, intellectual, and civil libertarian Brian Fitzpatrick, the central figure in Sheila Fitzpatrick’s memoir My Father’s Daughter (2010). Brian Fitzpatrick, who died in 1965, wrote this sole novel prior to 1939 when the first of his two major works of historiography appeared.
The number of debut novels appearing in 2014 was encouraging. Moira McKinnon was joint winner of the 2011 Calibre Prize for an essay on an Aboriginal woman whose traditional knowledge prompted McKinnon to challenge Western medicine and philosophy. Her first novel, Cicada, is set just after WORLD WARI in Halls Creek in the Kimberley (where McKinnon practised as a community doctor). Francesca Sasnaitis summarises the book as “a melodramatic flight-evasion-capture story, distinguished from others of that genre by its extreme location, and by the sex and race of its two fugitives, one an Aboriginal servant, the other an aristocratic English lady” and observes that “McKinnon has mined the richness of Aboriginal mythology and language, but seldom manages to break free from the white point of view. Despite her sympathy for the plight of her Aboriginal characters, they remain ciphers, subject to a collective will, their conduct predicated on tribal law and skin names” (ABR 360 [April]). Brooke Davis’s first novel, Lost & Found, also uses the outback as the location for the “unlikely adventure” of her three protagonists, but Alice Bishop was dissatisfied by “the book’s patchwork narrative structure”, an occasional descent into caricature, and the clichés which sometimes trump “the more nuanced depictions in Lost & Found” (ABR 364 [September]).
Paul Carter was impressed by the “taut and deceptively fluid” prose of Miriam Sved’s first novel, Game Day, “a structurally innovative portrait of élite Australian football as a juggernaut that leaves lives scrambling and spent in its wake. Its fourteen stories, each told from a different narrative perspective, form a prismatic study of a single season in the lives of Mick Reece and Jake Dooley, two first-year recruits at an unnamed, present-day AFL club. The novel’s true focus, however, is the internal worlds of those around them – parents, older teammates, club staff, self-identified WAGs, supporters, journalists – caught up in the trick of fame which has ensnared these young men” (ABR 365 [October]). Sport is also the subject of journalist Brigid Delaney’s début novel Wild Things, which is “about an élite Australian university’s cricket team subjecting a Malaysian exchange student to a grisly hazing ritual that goes too far”. The story “follows a group of thinly drawn characters through pained, often melodramatic soul-searching”, traversing what one reviewer describes as “well-trodden territory” and often resorting to “wobbly characterisation and awkward dialogue”; “Delaney wants to pen a damning account of a generation run amok – and an older one looking the other way – but Wild Things is sorely underdeveloped” (Doug Wallen, ABR 363 [August]). In The Return Silvia Kwon “explores the legacy of war on an Australian family, seen mainly through the eyes of the wife of a returned soldier”. Carol Middleton notes that “[t]he plot and characters may not hold any surprises, but Kwon tells the mythic story with conviction, maintaining the suspense throughout this well-structured tale (ABR 363 [August]). Jo Riccioni’s The Italians at Cleat’s Corner Store tells of a family of Italians in the east London farming community of Leyton after World War II, contrasting the concerns of the “exotic” Italians with those of locals such as Connie the shop assistant.
Emily Bitto’s The Strays deals with the artistic temperament, with the narrator looking back from the 1980s, when cultural nationalism was still dominant, to her younger years. Reviewer James Tierney sees the novel as inspired by the Heide artists’ retreat set up by Sunday and John Reed, but notes that “The novel’s events are moved back to an earlier time, and there are no direct parallels to Sidney Nolan, Joy Hester, or Albert Tucker. What Bitto does offer are secret re-imaginings for historical grist. The suggestion that Sunday Reed may have painted small sections of Nolan’s Ned Kelly series, and allowing Helena’s miniatures, which contain ‘the strength of weather’, to echo the recovered en plein air of Clarice Beckett, are both effective. They also point to one of the novel’s most poignant themes – recovery” (ABR 361 [May]). Suzanne McCourt’s The Lost Child tells of a coming-of-age in the Coorong in the 1950s: “Writing from the point of view of a child, McCourt captures the heightened sensibility of her narrator, Sylvie, to portray a family in devastating close-up and a natural world teeming with smells and sounds and sights” (Carol Middleton, ABR 360 [April]).
John Marsden is hardly a debut novelist, but South of Darkness is his first novel for adult readers – or, as reviewer Ruth Starke puts it, a novel for the now-middle-aged readers who, as teenagers, “in 1987 eagerly devoured John Marsden’s first novel, So Much to Tell You, and sent it and the author spinning into bestsellerdom”. Starke describes the novel as “a transportation saga that covers some familiar ground with a light tread”, remarking that “[y]ou will hardly read a more fascinating account of a convict’s voyage to Australia than [this]” (ABR 366 [November]). Another writer making the transition from young adult fiction to an adult audience is Deb Fitzpatrick in The Break. “The pleasure in reading The Break,” says Gretchen Shirm, “derives from the frequently elegant ways in which Fitzpatrick describes her world. The wind on the verandah, she tells us, was ‘seeking out instruments to play’. And later, ‘The sky juggled the sun and the moon.’ The book is a nuanced study of characters, relationships, and landscape. It is not so much about what happens, as it is about how the characters respond to their circumstances. […] Quiet, refined, and captivating, The Break explores the emotional fissures that open up inside and between people, and, ultimately, how those rifts are healed” (ABR 366 [November]).
Amongst the year’s short story collections was J.M. Coetzee’s small volume Three Stories, which offers work produced before and after receipt of the 2003 Nobel Prize for Literature; the final story was Coetzee’s Nobel Lecture. Reviewing the “energetic and ruthless writing” of John Kinsella’s collection Tide, Maria Takolander describes the stories as “a cross between Tim Winton’s The Turning and Kenneth Cook’s Wake in Fright”, except that “Kinsella highlights the corruption of those landscapes and people in a way that aligns his vision more with Cook’s”, noting that this “should come as no surprise, given Kinsella’s anti-pastoral poetry”. The stories portray a polluted landscape, males who are “brutal and brutalizing”, and “situations of impending danger or inevitable disaster”. Takolander concludes: “Kinsella’s writing is stunningly good, but his vision is neither easy nor comfortable. More people will read Winton – his work provides an escape from ugliness – but we should read Kinsella if we want to address it” (ABR 357 [December-January]). Tony Birch’s The Promise collects twelve short stories “united by Birch’s characteristic wit, matter-of-factness, and charm. In many respects, each of the stories in The Promise is an exploration of how the processes of age, attrition, and heartbreak wear away the rougher edges of his characters, though clearly it is what remains that interests Birch: that ember of humanity impermeable to cynicism and the vagaries of fate” (David Whish-Wilson, ABR 361 [May]).
Letter to George Clooney is the first short story collection from Sydney novelist Debra Adelaide. Amy Baillieu detected “a fresh international feel” to the thirteen short stories: “They cover such diverse territory as writers’ festivals, war-torn Darfur, a visit to the ATO, and the tribulations of modern dating. Some of these stories are so distinctive in tone, style, and voice that it is easy to forget they are all by the same author, but there are common themes and preoccupations, among them writing and the different aspects of love” (ABR 359 [March]). Maxine Beneba Clarke’s Foreign Soil – her first collection – won the 2013 Victorian Premier’s Award for an Unpublished Manuscript. Its ten stories are “unashamedly political” but “never reductively polemical”. Thanks to Clarke’s “empathetic imagination”, her narratives “create the lived experience of suffering and despair, resilience and hope, for the powerless, the discarded, the socially adrift. And while the collection focuses on race relations and racial identity – an emphasis perhaps attributable to Clarke’s Afro-Caribbean heritage – it rejects the simple model of white oppressor–black victim” (Susan Midalia, ABR 362 [June-July]). Reviewer Ben Smith admired Abbas El-Zein’s The Secret Maker of the World because of the way these stories “navigate era, place, gender, and culture with aplomb”: El-Zein “is equally convincing as a female Iraqi atheist as he is transcribing the frenzied thoughts of an Afghan construction worker speeding through the Indonesian rainforest”. However, Smith warns that “Despite the verve and adventurousness with which El-Zein approaches his stories, their structures typically run the same course. The reader will not wonder whether tragedy will occur, rather which particular flavour of tragedy it will be” (ABR 360 [April]). Smith was also critical of Robert Power’s Meatloaf In Manhattan: “Power’s stories skip from Papua to digital worlds, the Wild West to contemporary Melbourne. For all their diverse settings, however, many read as if the events are floating in empty space rather than nailed down by concrete details” – but concedes that “Readers will find pleasure in Power’s sharp prose and the colour of his stories’ premises. […] Some will appreciate the sense that meaning is alluded to rather than made explicit, but others will find themselves wondering if this meaning exists, and just what it is Power is alluding to” (ABR 362 [June-July]). The title of Nicholas Jose’s collection, Bapo, literally means “eight broken” (referring to damage to the Chinese lucky number) but Jose’s introduction describes it in relation to “an unusual kind of Chinese painting that tricks the eye into thinking it sees a collage of fragments”. This technique “appreciates incompleteness” and accentuates the beauty of “the fragment, the shard”. Reviewer Felicity Plunkett says “Jose’s evocation of the mode highlights its recuperative energies – its hosting of the broken. Formally, ‘what looks like it comes from something damaged becomes part of something new’. Thematically, Jose’s focus is on similar resilience and reimagining” (ABR 367 [December]).
Ellen Van Neerven won the 2013 David Unaipon Award and the stories in Heat and Light are her first major publication. The collection “focuses on questions of identity”, and reviewer Alec Patrick finds that “Heat and Light showcases Van Neerven’s best writing, but it is a proto-novel that, given more space, might have expanded into an exceptional family saga. […] What is clear is that Ellen Van Neerven is able to produce writing with a rare imaginative force that allows her to rework autobiographical and political preoccupations and offer Australian literary culture a fresh vision”. Patrick summarises her concerns as follows:
Indigenous cultural heritage and its political meaning in contemporary Australia fuel the majority of stories. Explorations of homosexuality give the collection an ardent energy as artificial social roles are pushed aside in a search for authentic moments of being. More than anything, Heat and Light is driven by a growing literary identity, the ways stories carry experience and truth from one generation to another, from one culture to another, from person to person. The collection offers insight into an evolving sense of self which is in the very process of interweaving the many narratives that make an individual. In doing so it often acquires a compelling intimacy. (ABR 364 [September])
Nic Low’s Arms Race was described as an “impressive début short story collection” featuring “characters on the verge of a breakthrough”, according to Gretchen Shirm. This author “deals with issues of real moral substance,” she says: “the effects of mining, global warming, drone strikes. He has a knack of approaching these sobering subjects with humour and whimsy. […] If the endings occasionally left me wanting a deeper emotional resolution, it was never long before the next story delivered me to a beguiling new world” (ABR 364 [September]).
As has been the pattern in recent years, the year’s main anthologies were “best” collections designed to showcase the work of the past year. Review Peter Kenneally celebrates the commitment of publisher Black Inc. to continuing to produce their annual Best Poems selection, commenting that in The Best Australian Poems 2013, edited by Lisa Gorton, the series “goes from strength to strength” and the latest volume “has an élan, almost a swagger, that’s invigorating”: “Gorton looked for poems that seemed to her ‘surprising, generative, memorable’, and notes that after all the ‘transactions with possibility’ involved in writing a poem, some seem to ‘hold like an electric charge the trace of all those forfeited possibilities’. That is the feeling her anthology generates, and by and large it is a modern, metropolitan one, knowing and reflexive” (ABR 358 [February]). Commenting that The Best Australian Stories 2013, edited by Kim Scott, is a selection of “mostly realist stories” with an “eclectic” feel, reviewer Rebekah Clarkson singled out pieces by John Kinsella, Ryan O’Neill, Tony Birch, and Chris Somerville (ABR 358 [February]). Robert Manne’s The Best Australian Essays 2013 “is an informative, thoroughly enjoyable collection” which “serves as a brilliant reflection on the issues that have absorbed us over the past year or so, the problems we face for the future, and what it means to be alive – and thinking – in contemporary Australia” (Susan Lever, ABR 359 [March]). The Sleepers Almanac No. 9, edited by Zoe Dattner and Louise Swinn, continues to produce high-quality works of short fiction; reviewer Luke Horton singles out pieces by Ryan O’Neil, Pierz Newton-John, Carol Lefevre, and Anicca Maleedy-Main. “Eschewing the theme-based model used by many journals and instead offering diversity in subject, style, and tone, the Almanac has never been anything less than an intriguing read,” says Horton (ABR 361 [May]).
According to Peter Kenneally, The Turnrow Anthology of Contemporary Australian Poetry, edited by John Kinsella, “is the most comprehensive collection of contemporary Australian poetry ever published in the United States” and John Kinsella “was the natural, if not inevitable, choice as editor”. Kinsella assembled the collection by encouraging poets to submit ten to twelve poems each, thus compelling the poets to exercise “some objective form of quality control”, and in Kenneally’s view “the process works” with most selections proving “apt”. Kinsella’s introduction “goes to some lengths to disavow any suggestion of what he calls literary canonicity or national representation”. Kinsella “makes ethnicity, diversity, and colonialism central to his ‘definition’ of this collection, particularly the assertion that ‘a paranoid reading of Australian literature across the board soon reveals that knowledge and crisis over occupying stolen lands, and the damage inflicted in the ongoing state of dispossession, gnaws at the work of most Australian poets’”, but Kenneally acknowledges that “[i]t is hard to escape the feeling, though, despite the presence of Ouyang Yu, the Chilean-born Juan Garrido-Salgado, π.O., and a few others, that Australian poetry, for all its formal and intellectual vigour and variety is still solidly monocultural at its core” (ABR 367 [December]). Another contemporary selection of poetry is Outcrop: Radical Australian Poetry Of Land, edited by Corey Wakeling and Jeremy Balius. Jennifer Harrison describes it as “a diverse collection of poems from twenty contemporary Australian poets, each with a substantial selection of poems allowing space for the reader to engage with the individual poetics on offer at some length… What is interesting about Outcrop is the grouping of the poets and how differently they dissect, re-imagine, and newly construct the meaning of land” (ABR 359 [March]).
General criticism in 2014 tended to gravitate toward large issues and questions. Scenes of Reading: Is Australian Literature a World Literature?, edited by Robert Dixon and Brigid Rooney, explores issues arising as Australian literature negotiates the relationship between its legacy as a national literature and its growing international reach. The essays in the collection ask such questions as: how is Australian literature connected to other literatures; might transnational reading practices renew the practice of Australian literary criticism, and to what extent might perspectives routed through the literary province in turn challenge the notion of “world” literature. The Postcolonial Eye: White Australian Desire and the Visual Field of Race, by Alison Ravenscroft, draws on various critical frameworks, including psychoanalysis, to explore the limitations of “white” vision in relation to Indigenous Australian cultural perspectives and Indigenous-authored works. David Carter’s Always Almost Modern collects twenty years of Carter’s essays exploring the phenomenon of modernism in Australia. Reviewer Susan Lever summarises the historical context of these explorations:
Australia was colonised in the period of modernity, with the Industrial Revolution driving much of its development and a belief in improving technology and political progress underlying its public institutions. The society may have been modern but its culture, in particular its art and literature, has borne the recurrent charge of backwardness. The centres of innovation in twentieth-century art have been elsewhere, in the cosmopolitan cities of Europe or the United States of America, so that Australian critics and artists have carried a sense that to be distant from the centre also means to be behind the times. The gap between Australian modernity and its artistic partner and antagonist, modernism, has obsessed many Australian critics over the years; it is as if Australian art somehow ought to match the society’s technological progress as a matter of national pride.
Lever notes that the book “is not about literature but about the culture around literature – the context of its dissemination, attempts to advise readers about it, class elements in its reception, and some of the peculiarities of Australian popular literature and film”. Lever concludes that Carter’s book “is almost always clever, with its sensitivity to paradox and rhetorical strategy, but it does suggest that the professors may be talking to each other while, outside the academy, our literary culture declines from lack of their close attention” (ABR 361 [May], see
The year saw a pleasing array of studies of individual authors and works, ranging from book-length studies of Murray Bail, G.M. Glaskin, Alex Miller, Chris Wallace-Crabbe, and Tim Winton to a book of essays on the work of song-writer Nick Cave and an incisive essay on the movie Wolf Creek 2, directed by Greg McLean, which concludes with a warning: “The film’s message may not be subtle, but it is both desperate and important: wake up, Australia, there is already blood on your hands. If you’re not careful, this is what you risk becoming” (see
The Experimental Fiction of Murray Bail by Michael Ackland is the first book-length study of Bail’s writings, surveying works chronologically with supplementary observations from Bail’s Notebooks 1970–2003; reviewer Bronwyn Lacken laments that “there is little consideration of Bail’s place within the larger canon of either Australian or international literature” but salutes “Ackland’s strongly sustained textual analysis” and endorses the book as “a welcome and needed resource” (Australian Literary Studies 28[3] [2013]). Robert Dixon’s Alex Miller: The Ruin of Time is the first book-length critical study of Miller, arising from Dixon’s ten-year engagement with Miller and his work. Reviewer Brenda Walker observes that “it is easy to imagine a kind of textual friendship here between fiction and criticism. Miller and Dixon are well matched: novelist and critic are both thoughtful, limpid, and deeply concerned with literature and our cultural and historical inheritances”. The monograph explores the “abiding aesthetic and ethical preoccupations” of Miller’s novels, and whilst Dixon modestly categorises it as a “survey”, Walker’s judgement is that it is “a timely consideration of a novelist of immense cultural, artistic, and moral scope” (ABR 367 [December]). Delys Bird’s review of Tim Winton: Critical Essays, edited by Lyn McCredden and Nathanael O’Reilly, notes that Winton is “both a ‘popular and literary’ writer” and his novel Cloudstreet is “securely canonised as an ‘Australian national classic’”; Bird finds the collection “a pleasure to read, with essays that not only address topics and issues familiar to readers of Winton’s work, but explore them in often surprising ways, both extending and deepening appreciation of that work while at the same time opening it up to truly critical examination (ABR 365 [October]). The title of Cassandra Atherton’s Travelling without Gods: A Chris Wallace-Crabbe Companion, derives from the pervading agnosticism in Wallace-Crabbe’s work. Reviewer Anthony Lynch agrees that, as many of these essays demonstrate, “Wallace-Crabbe brings an antipodean sensibility to the Occidental world”, and whilst conceding that “the laudatory tone risks making the book a kind of pre-digital Facebook post we can all ‘like’”, his conclusion is that “Atherton’s assemblage works” (ABR 365 [October]).
The Art of Nick Cave: New Critical Essays, edited by John H. Baker, addresses Cave’s career in its totality, taking account of his novels, screenplays, and compositions for film and theatre as well as the music for which he is best known. Tim Byrne’s review expresses mixed feelings about the volume: though disappointed by the “sometimes tedious academese that mars many of these otherwise thoughtful essays”, Byrne acknowledges “[i]t is an ambitious undertaking, considering the three decades of output involved, and would have benefited from a tighter focus. As with much collated material, it is an uneven and piecemeal assembly” (ABR 360 [April]). John Burbidge’s Dare Me! The Life and Work of Gerald Glaskin deals with the career of a Western Australian writer who was a bestselling novelist in the 1950s and 1960s, translated into French, German, Swedish, Russian, Spanish, Dutch, Italian, Danish, and Norwegian. Burbidge’s “revealing yet compassionate biography” advances three factors to explain why Glaskin has become “erased from the Australian literary consciousness”: “he was much more successful outside Australia than within”, “Australian critics were … very unkind”, and his main claim to literary fame was written under a pseudonym” (Jeremy Fisher, ABR 362 [June-July]). That book – Australia’s first gay novel, No End to the Way – was published in 1965 under the name “Neville Jackson” but was banned in Australia. Jeremy Fisher explains that “Burbidge has scoured the Glaskin archives thoroughly”, corresponding with or interviewing numerous people associated with Glaskin: “This impressive research brings Glaskin back from near oblivion” (ABR 362 [June-July]).
Critical output also included several new essays on Patrick White, each focusing on different works [see
The year’s Non-Fiction included a number of significant biographies. Reviewer Michael Sharkey welcomed Philip Butterss’ An Unsentimental Bloke: The Life and Works of C.J. Dennis, noting that this study “does not stray far from matter-of-fact record of events”, praising Butterss for his candid reporting on Dennis’s alcoholism, and commending this “splendid, even-eyed survey of the man and his work” (Australian Literary Studies [24]4). Bluebeard’s Bride: Alma Moodie, Violinist is Kay Dreyfus’ biography of the heretofore “thoroughly forgotten” Alma Moodie, the “frail child prodigy from central Queensland” who became a renowned concert violinist in post-WORLD WARI Germany and “friend and performer of most of the great figures of international contemporary music, from Max Reger to Igor Stravinsky”. The dedicatee of violin concerti by Hans Pfitzner and Paul Hindemith, and Ernst Krenek, Moodie was “the basis for Anita, the musician who has a brief love affair with the black jazz band leader in Jonny spielt auf, the controversial opera that made [Ernst Krenek’s] name”. Reviewer Sheila Fitzpatrick reports that “Moodie’s story ends sadly with artistic and personal decline before her death in Frankfurt at forty-four, probably by her own hand. But it is the vitality, ebullience, and courage of the earlier years that leaves the strongest impression” (ABR 358 [February]). Elizabeth Morrison’s wittily titled David Syme: Man of the Age explores the life of a man who made his name and fortune through newspapers, particularly The Age. Reviewer Rachel Buchanan notes that “Syme has been the subject of two political biographies, in 1908 and 1965, but Morrison’s ambition is to reveal the many other sides of the radical liberal newspaper man’s life, notably his family, his farming […], his property development […], and his writing” (Syme wrote books on industrial science, representative government, science, and the soul). According to Buchanan, “the book is a chronological, meticulously researched if somewhat conventional scholarly account of a remarkable life” and helps to “humanise a man whose drive to know, breed, build, acquire, control, dictate, and copy check was otherwise unrelenting” (Rachel Buchanan, ABR 365 [October]).
Alan Atkinson’s The Europeans in Australia, Volume Three attracted very high praise from critics, notably Mark McKenna who declares that “Like no other historian before him, Atkinson explains the ‘anchoring [of] European civilization in Australian space’. He draws attention to the importance of ‘scientific management and efficiency’ in dealing with ‘complex problems’”.
To read The Europeans in Australia is to understand how the bonds of community came to extend to the bonds of nation. It is also to understand how local independence and diversity was so often lost in the effort to assert “purity and uniformity” in a nation which strove for “a maximum sameness of appearance, language and habit, and rational and manly citizenship”. (Australian Book Review 366).
Helen Garner’s This House of Grief: The Story of a Murder Trial explores a man’s conviction for the 2005 murder of his three young sons. Despite the dark subject matter, reviewer Felicity Plunkett found the book marked by “exceptional lyricism” as “Garner’s spare, clean style flowers into magnificent poetry” in “a brilliant, poetic work of jurisprudence”:
Garner shifts her focus from [the accused] to the amorphous sphere of these terrible projections. She explores the co-mingling of love and fury, and the cloying fantastical narratives used both to simplify and occlude the contradictory and protean nature of emotions. One of these is grief. In a literal sense, the “house of grief” is the courtroom – stage and repository where the theatre and museum of mourning are played out and curated. (ABR 364 [September])
Works with a more personal focus included Robert Dessaix’s What Days Are For, which records the aftermath of a 2011 heart attack: “For two weeks Dessaix drowned in vivid dreams, moving in and out of his own thoughts, and this is a day-by-day account. But Dessaix uses his dissociated state to spin the book out into something much more: a meditation on life, love, infatuation; travel, religion, and friendship” (Delia Falconer, ABR 367 [December]). In his author’s note to A First Place, David Malouf explains that “These pieces of writing are personal in that they have their basis in personal experience and represent personal opinions, but their purpose was from the beginning public; they belong to that part of my life that is conscious and considered rather than dreamily obscure till it demands to be expressed; to the world, that is, of analysis, and open opinion and discourse”; reviewer Kevin Rabalais hails the book as “a remarkable collection of essays that spans thirty years and reads like an education and a gift from an inimitable voice with a mind at once penetrating and passionate” (ABR 361 [May], see One of the saddest things in this sad book is that after she was released from the hell her family had become, Margaret got better – not fully better, but well enough to live on her own outside an institution and to behave in public no more oddly than any slightly odd old lady. So it was liberation from an intolerable situation for her as well as for them. Perhaps, if Russel had been less determined to do his duty, they would all have been happier. (Sheila Fitzpatrick, ABR 363 [August], see
Germaine Greer’s White Beech: The Rainforest Years recalls the author’s attempt to regenerate sixty hectares of damaged Queensland rainforest, the title referring to a species of tree which had almost been logged to extinction and which became the symbol of regeneration. Reviewer John Thompson describes the book as “a cry … not just for one small patch of earth but for country, every bit as passionate and anguished as that of poet turned environmental campaigner Judith Wright before her” (ABR 358 [February]). The national interest in conservation and environmentalism was reflected in Meredith Fletcher’s Jean Galbraith: Writer in a Valley – the biography of the woman who “turned botanical writing into an art form” (Dina Ross, Australian Book Review 366) over a seventy-year writing career in which she produced numerous articles as well as radio and TV scripts and won the Australian Natural History Medallion for her services to conservation [see
Bibliography
Bibliographies
The bibliography for 2014 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
Aslanides, Timoshenko Letterature: Verse Letters from Australian Women 63pp Hybrid (Oromond, Vic) Pb $19.95.
Bakowski, Peter Personal Weather 75pp Hunter (Melbourne) Pb $19.95.
Beveridge, Judith Devadatta’s Poems 76pp Giramondo (Sydney) Pb $24.00.
Boyle, Peter Towns in the Great Desert 237pp Puncher & Wattmann (Sydney) Pb $29.95.
Brophy, Kevin Walking: New and Selected Poems 104pp, John Leonard (Melbourne) Pb $29.95.
Bufton, Melinda Girlery 44pp Inken Publisch (Sydney) Pb npa.
Carter, Paul Ecstacies and Elegies: Poems 188pp UWA Publishing (Perth) Pb $24.99.
Dionysius, B.R. Bowra 55pp Whitmore (Sydney) (2013) Pb $22.95.
Edgar, Stephen Exhibits of the Sun 69pp Black Pepper (Melbourne) Pb $22.95.
Elvey, Anne Kin 71pp Five Islands Press (Melbourne) Pb $25.00.
Harford, Lesbia Collected Poems ed Oliver Dennis 136pp UWA Publishing (Perth) Pb $29.99.
Johnson, Judy Stone Scar Air Water 131pp Walleah (Hobart) (2013) Pb $20.00.
Jones, Jill The Beautiful Anxiety 84pp Puncher & Wattmann (Sydney) Pb $25.00.
Kissane, Andy Radiance 78pp Puncher & Wattmann (Sydney) Pb $25.00.
Kroll, Jeri Workshopping the Heart: New And Selected Poems 216pp Wakefield (Adelaide) Pb $24.95.
Lawrence, Anthony Signal Flare 100pp Puncher & Wattmann (Sydney) Pb $25.00.
Lehmann, Geoffrey Poems: 1957–2013 UWA Publishing (Perth) Pb $29.99.
Lowe, Cameron Circle Work 76pp Puncher & Wattmann (Sydney) Pb $25.00.
MacCarter, Kent Sputnik’s Cousin: New Poems 144pp Transit Lounge (Melbourne) Pb $24.00.
Magee, Paul Stone Postcard 60pp John Leonard (Melbourne) Pb $24.99.
Malouf, David Earth Hour 88pp Univ of Queensland (Brisbane) Hb $29.95.
Middleton, Kate Ephemeral Waters 130pp Giramondo (Sydney) (2013) Pb $24.00.
Miles, Graeme Recurrence 61pp John Leonard (Melbourne) Pb $24.95.
Page, Geoff New Selected Poems 301pp Puncher & Wattmann (Sydney) Pb $29.95.
Prater, David Leaves of Glass 77pp Puncher & Wattmann (Sydney) Pb $25.00.
Pretty, Ron What the Afternoon Knows 114pp Pitt Street Poetry (Sydney) Pb $25.00.
Templeman, Ian The Watchmaker’s Imprint 88pp Tin Kettle (Hughes, ACT) (2013) Hb $30.00.
Thorne, Tim The Unspeak Poems and Other Verses 96pp Walleah (Hobart) Pb $20.
Turner, Todd Woodsmoke 56pp Black Pepper (Melbourne) Pb $22.95.
Wallace-Crabbe, Chris My Feet Are Hungry 94pp Pitt Street Poetry (Sydney) Pb $25.
Fiction
Adelaide, Debra Letter to George Clooney 295pp Picador (Sydney) Pb $24.99 [stories].
Armand, Louis Cairo 366pp Equus (London) Pb €8.00.
Bartulin, Lenny Infamy 345pp Allen & Unwin (Sydney) Pb $29.99.
Birch, Tony Promise 232pp Univ of Queensland (Brisbane) Pb $22.95.
Bitto, Emily The Strays 290pp Affirm (Melbourne) Pb $24.99.
Brown, Honey Dark Horse 273pp Michael Joseph (Sydney) (2013) Pb $29.99.
Calvino, Félix Alfonso 119pp Arcadia (Melbourne) Pb $22.95.
Capp, Fiona Gotland 295pp Fourth Estate (Sydney) (2013) Pb $24.99.
Carey, Peter Amnesia 378pp Penguin (Melbourne) Pb $32.99.
Carman, Luke An Elegant Young Man 192pp Giramondo (Sydney) Pb $19.95.
Carter, Alan Getting Warmer 352pp Fremantle (Fremantle, WA) Pb $29.99.
Chambers, Martin How I Became the Mr Big of People Smuggling 220pp Fremantle (Fremantle, WA) Pb $27.99.
Chung, Leila Yusuf Chasing Shadows 304pp Vintage (Sydney) Pb $32.99.
Clarke, Maxine Beneba Foreign Soil 272pp Hachette (Sydney) Pb $24.99 [stories].
Clancy, Laurie Jovial Harbinger of Doom: The Short Stories of Laurie Clancy ed Richard Freadman 407pp Michael Hanrahan (Melbourne) Pb $35.00.
Coetzee, J.M. Three Stories 71pp Text (Melbourne) Hb $19.99 [stories].
Cohen, Bernard The Antibiography of Robert F. Menzies 298pp Fourth Estate (Sydney) Pb $32.99.
Condon, Matthew Jacks and Jokers 466pp Univ of Queensland (Brisbane) Pb $29.95.
Davis, Brooke Lost & Found 272pp Hachette (Sydney) Pb $26.95 [debut novel].
De Bont, Genna Privacy 377pp Fourth Estate (Sydney) (2013) Pb $29.99.
Delaney, Brigid Wild Things 368pp Fourth Estate (Sydney) Pb $29.99 [debut novel].
Dharmapala, Su Saree 583pp Simon & Schuster (Sydney) Pb $29.99.
Disher, Gary Bitter Wash Road 325pp Text (Melbourne) (2013) Pb $29.99.
Docker, Peter Sweet One 316pp Fremantle (Fremantle, WA) Pb $29.99.
Edeson, Robert The Weaver Fish 272pp Fremantle (Fremantle, WA) Pb $27.99.
El-Zein, Abbas The Secret Maker of The World 192pp Univ of Queensland (Brisbane) Pb $19.95.
Fisher, Jeremy How to Tell Your Father to Drop Dead 150pp Fat Frog (Sydney) (2013) Pb $26.95.
Fitzpatrick, Brian The Colonials 313pp Melbourne Univ Publishing (Melbourne) Pb $32.99.
Fitzpatrick, Deb The Break 227pp Fremantle (Fremantle, WA) Pb $24.99.
Flynn, Chris The Glass Kingdom 256pp Text (Melbourne) Pb $29.99.
Forsyth, Kate The Wild Girl 539pp Vintage (Sydney) (2013) Pb $32.95.
Grahame, Carmel Macdonald Personal Effects 244pp UWA Publishing (Perth) Pb $24.99.
Harrower, Elizabeth In Certain Circles 256pp Text (Melbourne) Pb $29.99.
Hartnett, Sonya Golden Boys 238pp Penguin (Melbourne) Pb $29.99.
Henshaw, Mark The Snow Kimono 396pp Text (Melbourne) Pb $29.99.
Heyman, Kathryn Floodline 247pp Allen & Unwin (Sydney) (2013) Pb $29.99.
Hillman, Robert Joyful 350pp Text (Melbourne) Pb $29.99.
Hospital, Janette Turner The Claimant 609pp Fourth Estate (Sydney) Pb $29.99.
Jaivan, Linda The Empress Lover 336pp Fourth Estate (Sydney) Pb $29.99.
James, Wendy The Lost Girls 270pp Michael Joseph (Melbourne) Pb $29.99.
Jose, Nicholas Bapo 231pp Giramondo (Sydney) Pb $26.95 [stories].
Kinsella, John Tide 237pp Transit Lounge (Melbourne) (2013) Pb $29.95.
Komesaroff, Paul Riding A Crocodile: A Physician’s Tale 357pp UWA Publishing (Perth) Pb $26.99.
Kwon, Sylvia The Return 284pp Hachette (Sydney) Pb $29.99 [debut novel].
London, Joan The Golden Age 256pp Vintage (Sydney) Pb $32.99.
Low, Nic Arms Race 248pp Text (Melbourne) Pb $27.99 [stories, debut].
Marsden, John South of Darkness 375pp Macmillan (Sydney) Hb $39.99.
McCourt, Suzanne The Lost Child 304pp Text (Melbourne) Pb $29.99.
McDonald, Roger The Following 263pp Vintage (Sydney) (2013) Pb $32.95.
McFarlane, Fiona The Night Guest 275pp Hamish Hamilton (Melbourne) (2013) Pb $29.99.
McKay, Laura Jean Holiday in Cambodia 224pp Black Inc (Melbourne) (2013) Pb $24.99.
McKinnon, Moira Cicada 390pp Allen & Unwin (Sydney) Pb $29.99.
Miller, Alex Coal Creek 292pp Allen & Unwin (Sydney) (2013) Pb $29.99.
Murnane, Gerald A Million Windows 192pp Giramondo (Sydney) Pb $26.95.
Murray, Elisabeth The Loud Earth 96pp Hologram (Melbourne) Pb $14.95.
Newton, P.M. Beams Falling 328pp Viking (Melbourne) Pb $29.99.
O’Flynn, Mark White Light 150pp Spineless Wonders (Sydney) Pb $22.99.
O’Reilly, Paddy The Wonders 301pp Affirm (Melbourne) Pb $29.99.
Orr, Stephen One Boy Missing 288pp Text (Melbourne) Pb $29.99.
Parrett, Favel When the Night Comes 265pp Hachette (Sydney) Pb $27.99.
Piper, Christine After Darkness 297pp Allen & Unwin (Sydney) Pb $27.99.
Power, Robert Meatloaf in Manhattan 224pp Transit Lounge (Melbourne) Pb $27.95 [stories].
Riccioni, Jo The Italians at Cleat’s Corner Store 384pp Scribe (Melbourne) Pb $29.99.
Richell, Hannah The Shadow Year 405pp Hachette (Sydney) (2013) Pb $29.99.
Robotham, Michael Watching You 441pp Sphere (London) (2013) Pb $29.99.
Ryan, Tracy Claustrophobia 240pp Transit Lounge (Melbourne) Pb $29.95.
Scott, John A., N 599pp Brandl & Schlesinger (Blackheath, NSW) Pb $32.95.
Sherborne, Craig Tree Palace 336pp Text (Melbourne) Pb $29.99.
Simpson, Inga Nest 256pp Hachette (Sydney) Pb $27.99.
Sved, Miriam Game Day 278pp Picador (Sydney) Pb $29.99.
Timms, Peter Asking for Trouble 336pp HarperCollins (Sydney) Pb $27.99.
Tsiolkas, Christos Barracuda 528pp Allen & Unwin (Sydney) (2013) Pb $32.99.
Van Neerven, Ellen Heat and Light 226pp Univ of Queensland (Brisbane) Pb $22.95 [stories].
Whish-Wilson, David Zero at the Bone 288pp Viking (Sydney) (2013) Pb $29.99.
Wilson, Dominique The Yellow Papers 348pp Transit Lounge (Melbourne) Pb $29.95.
Wilson, Rohan To Name Those Lost 298pp Allen & Unwin (Sydney) Pb $29.99.
Winton, Tim Eyrie 424pp Hamish Hamilton (Melbourne) (2013) Hb $45.00.
Wright, June Murder in the Telephone Exchange 329pp Dark Passage (Portland, Oregon) Pb $24.95 [reissue].
Zorn, Claire The Protected 254pp Univ of Queensland (Brisbane) Pb $19.95.
Letters and Autobiography
In My Mother’s Hands: A Disturbing Memoir of Family Life Biff Ward 280pp Allen & Unwin (Sydney) Pb $29.99.
Lesbian for a Year Brooke Hemphill 235pp Affirm (Melbourne) Pb $29.95.
Optimism: Reflections on a Life of Action Bob Brown 275pp Hardie Grant (Melbourne) Hb $39.99.
Anthologies
ANZAC Memories: Living with the Legend Alistair Thomson 423pp Monash Univ Publishing (Melbourne) Pb $34.95.
Australian Love Stories ed Cate Kennedy 304pp Inkerman & Blunt (Melbourne) Pb $28.99.
The Best Australian Essays 2013 ed Robert Manne 333pp Black Inc. (Melbourne) Pb $29.99.
The Best Australian Poems 2013 ed Lisa Gorton 251pp Black Inc. (Melbourne) Pb $24.99.
The Best Australian Science Writing 2013 ed Kim Scott 287pp Black Inc. (Melbourne) Pb $29.99.
The Best Australian Stories 2013 ed Kim Scott 287pp Black Inc. (Melbourne) Pb $29.99.
The Best of the Lifted Brow: Volume One ed Ronnie Scott 245pp Hunter (Melbourne) Pb $29.95.
From the Trenches: The Best ANZAC Writing of World War One ed Mark Dapin 413pp Viking (Melbourne) Hb $39.99.
The Great Unknown: Stories ed Angela Meyer 177pp Spineless Wonders (Sydney) Pb $27.99.
Letterature: Verse Letters from Australian Women ed Timoshenko Aslanides 63pp Hybrid (Ormond, Vic) Pb $19.95.
Now You Shall Know: Newcastle Poetry Prize Anthology 2013 [unnamed collective editorship] 141pp Hunter Writers Centre (Newcastle, NSW) Pb $22.00.
Outcrop: Radical Australian Poetry of Land ed Corey Wakeling and Jeremy Balius 243pp Black Rider (Perth) Pb $24.99.
Perspectives: The University of Sydney Anthology 2013 ed Aqmirina Andira et al. 207pp Darlington (Sydney) Pb $25.00.
The Sleepers Almanac No. 9 ed Zoe Dattner and Louise Swinn 356pp Sleepers (Melbourne) Pb $24.95.
The Turnrow Anthology of Contemporary Australian Poetry ed John Kinsella 596pp Turnrow (Greenwood, MS) Pb $45.99.
Criticism
Always Almost Modern David Carter 328pp Australian Scholarly (Melbourne) Pb $44.00.
“Apocalypse vs Utopia: A Writer’s Guide” Lucy Sussex Southerly 74(1) pp90–97.
“Beginnings: 1956–1965” John Barnes Westerly 59(2) pp144–158 [historical reflections on Westerly].
“Bias Australian? Tension in Overland’s Early Years” John McLaren Overland 217 pp86–93.
“The Biography as Periscope: Exploring Australian Ambiences” Jim Davidson Meanjin 73(1) pp95–103.
“Books of the Year” [nominations from numerous writers] Australian Book Review 367 (December) pp31–39.
“The Colour of the Dream: Unmasking Whiteness” Michelle Cahill Southerly 74(2) pp196–211.
“Consolidation: 1966–1975” Elizabeth Webby Westerly 59(2) pp159–168 [historical reflections on Westerly].
“Country: Writing the Australian Landscape” Bill Gammage Australian Book Review 362 pp42–47.
“Deleted Selves in Contemporary Fiction, or the Art of Literary Activism” Tony Simoes da Silva Australian Literary Studies 28(4) (2013) pp65–78.
“Demoyte’s Grey Suit: Writing Memoirs, Writing History” Sheila Fitzpatrick Australian Book Review 362 pp26–30.
“‘Distant and Kindred Analogies’ in Recent Australian Poetry” John Hawke Westerly 59(1) pp144–163.
“Exile on Uranium Street: The Australian Nuclear Blues” Robin Gerster Southerly 74(1) pp55–70.
“From the Nineties to the Noughties: 1996–2005” Paul Genoni Westerly 59(2) pp188–196 [historical reflections on Westerly].
“The Golden Years: 1986–1995” Delys Bird Westerly 59(2) pp178–187 [historical reflections on Westerly].
“The Horizon of the Future” Bill Ashcroft Southerly 74(1) pp12–35.
“Ideas about the Thing, Not the thing Itself: Impact and Other Abstractions and the Politics of Research Performance Measurement” Guy Redden Australian Literary Studies 28(4) (2013) pp13–30.
“The Impact of Literature” Leigh Dale and Louise D’Arcens Australian Literary Studies 28(4) (2013) pp1–12.
“Indigenous Literature and the Extractive Industries” Philip Mead Australian Literary Studies 28(4) (2013) pp31–46.
“The Little Magazine in the Digital Age: 2006–2014” Tony Hughes-d’Aeth Westerly 59(2) pp197–206 [historical reflections on Westerly].
“Making Theatre in Tasmania” Brett Steel Island 134 (2013) pp52–55.
“The Phoenix Rises Repeatedly: Westerly 1976–1985” Dennis Haskell Westerly 59(2) pp169–177 [historical reflections on Westerly].
“The Pleasure of Well-made Rooms: Poetry in Review” Martin Langford Meanjin 73(1) pp42–51.
“Poetry, Activism and Cultural Capital” Anne Collett Australian Literary Studies 28(4) (2013) pp106–117.
The Postcolonial Eye: White Australian Desire and the Visual Field of Race Alison Ravenscroft 183pp Ashgate (Farnham, Surrey) (2012) Hb £55.00.
“Richard Rorty’s Pragmatic Rehabilitation of Literary Criticism as a ‘Kind of Writing’” Ned Curthoys Australian Literary Studies 28(4) (2013) pp47–64.
Scenes of Reading: Is Australian Literature a World Literature? ed Robert Dixon and Brigid Rooney 206pp Australian Scholarly Publishing (Melbourne) Pb $39.95.
“The Year’s Work in Fiction” Robyn Mundy Westerly 59(1) pp124–143.
Studies on Individual Writers
Astley, Thea “Historical Patterns in The Multiple Effects of Rainshadow and The Tall Man” Diane Molloy Australian Literary Studies 28(3) (2013) pp84–94.
Bail, Murray The Experimental Fiction of Murray Bail Michael Ackland Cambria (NY) (2012) Hb $110.00.
Bird, Carmel “Echoes between Van Diemen’s Land and Tasmania: Sound and the Space of the Island in Richard Flanagan’s Death of a River Guide and Carmel Bird’s Cape Grimm” Joseph Cummins Journal of Commonwealth Literature 49(2) pp257–270.
Cave, Nick The Art of Nick Cave: New Critical Essays ed John H. Baker 288pp Intellect (Fishponds, Bristol) Pb $59.95.
Clift, Charmian “Charmian Clift and George Johnston, Hydra 1960: The ‘Lost’ Photographs of James Burke” Paul Genoni and Tanya Dalziell Meanjin 73(1) pp18–37.
Coetzee, J.M. “Coetzee Colloquium” Shannon Burns Australian Book Review 367 (December) pp43–44.
Dolce, Joe “My Craft or Sullen Art: Poetry and Songwriting” Meanjin 73(1) pp116–127.
Dennis, C.J. “[Review]: An Unsentimental Bloke: The Life and Works of C.J. Dennis” Michael Sharkey Australian Literary Studies 28(4) (2013) pp120–127.
Drewe, Robert “Old Rags and Mojitos: A Varadero Notebook” Robert Drewe Westerly 59(2) pp305–310 [personal essay].
Egan, Greg “Geopolitics in Greg Egan’s Science Fiction” Darren Jorgensen Southerly 74(1) pp186–198.
Featherstone, Nigel “Truth Doesn’t Have a Narrative: An Interview with Nigel Featherstone” Andrew Croome Island 134 (2013) pp56–60.
Flanagan, Richard [See Bird,
Glaskin, Gerald Dare Me! The Life and Work of Gerald Glaskin John Burbidge 349pp Monash Univ Publishing (Melbourne) Pb $34.95.
— “Gerald Glaskin Revisited” John Burbidge Westerly 59(1) pp86–91.
Goodwin, Ken “Professor Kenneth Leslie Goodwin MA DipEd (Syd), DPhil (Oxon), Hon. DLItt (USQ), AM 1934–2014” Chris Tiffin Australian Literary Studies 28(4) (2013) pp118–119.
Hooper, Chloe [see Astley,
Jacobson, Lisa “Fluid Worlds: Reflecting Climate Change in The Swan Book and The Sunlit Zone” Jessica White Southerly 74(1) pp142–163.
Johnston, George “My Brother Jack at Fifty” Kevin Rabalais (Australian Book Review 363 [August]) pp46–48.
— [see also Clift,
Keneally, Thomas “Words, Sticks and Stones: Keneally, Literature and Social Impact” Paul Sharrad Australian Literary Studies 28(4) (2013) pp90–105.
MacCarter, Kent “Kent MacCarter: Sputnik’s Cousin: New Poems” A.J. Carruthers Southerly 74(2) pp230–233.
Malouf, David “David Malouf, Earth Hour” Michelle Borzi Southerly 74(2) pp80–95.
McLean, Greg “Horrors of History: The Politics of Wolf Creek 2” Alexandra Heller-Nicholas Overland 215 pp24–27.
Miller, Alex Alex Miller: The Ruin of Time Robert Dixon 246pp Sydney Univ Press (Sydney) Hb $40.00.
Moorhouse, Frank “I, Initiation’ Frank Moorhouse Southerly 74(2) pp43–53 [memoir].
Murray-Smith, Stephen “Stephen’s Vector: On Stephen Murray-Smith’s Progress to Overland” Jim Davidson Overland 216 pp91–97.
Penny, Laurie “Why I Write” Laurie Penny Overland 216 pp3–9.
Plater, David “David Plater: Leaves of Glass” Liam Ferney Southerly 74(2) pp234–237.
Polain, Marcella “Micheline Aharonian Marcom and the haman Shoes” Marcella Polain Westerly 59(2) pp286–297 [personal essay].
Salavert, Jorge “‘His Grief Is the Plague’: Poetry of Loss and the Risk of Losing One’s Readers” Michael Jacklin Australian Literary Studies 28(4) (2013) pp79–89.
Scott, Kim “Anxiety of Reference in That Deadman Dance” Rohan Wilson Westerly 59(1) pp70–85.
Steed, Laurie “Straya” Laurie Steed Meanjin 73(3) pp12–14 [personal essay].
Sussex, Lucy “Apocalypse vs Utopia: A Writer’s Guide” Lucy Sussex Southerly 74(1) pp90–97.
Tranter, John “Form, Artifice and Contemporary Australian Poetics: John Tranter’s ‘The Anaglyph’” Jane Vaughan Westerly 59(1) pp104–122.
Wallace-Crabbe, Chris Travelling without Gods: A Chris Wallace-Crabbe Companion ed Cassandra Atherton 236pp Melbourne Univ Press (Melbourne) Pb $39.99.
— “Unemployed at Last, Again” Chris Wallace-Crabbe Meanjin 73(4) pp162–167 [personal essay].
White, Patrick “The Island Called Utopia in Patrick White’s The Tree of Man” Danny Anwar Southerly 74(1) pp217–234.
— “Ladies and Gentlemen? Language, Body and Identity in The Aunt’s Story and The Twyborn Affair” Bridget Grogan Australian Literary Studies 28(3) (2013) pp59–71.
— “Night on Bald Mountain” Andrew Fuhrmann Australian Book Review 362 pp31–32.
— “Self-Propagation and Self-Dissolution: The Paradox of Patrick White’s Flaws in the Glass” Gregory Graham-Smith Australian Literary Studies 28(3) (2013) pp72–83.
Winton, Tim Tim Winton: Critical Essays ed Lyn McCredden and Nathanael O’Reilly 342pp UWA Publishing (Perth) Pb ($34.99).
Wright, Alexis [see Jacobson, Lisa,
Non-Fiction
Bluebeard’s Bride: Alma Moodie, Violinist Kay Dreyfus 196pp Lyrebird (Melbourne) Pb $39.95.
Broken Nation: Australians in the Great War Joan Beaumont 656pp Allen & Unwin (Sydney) Hb $55.00.
David Syme: Man of the Age Elizabeth Morrison 447pp Monash Univ Publishing (Melbourne) Hb $39.95.
Dreaming Too Loud: Reflections on a Race Apart Geoffrey Robertson 485pp Vintage (Sydney) Pb $34.95 [essays].
The Europeans in Australia, Volume Three Alan Atkinson 492pp NewSouth (Sydney) Pb $49.99.
A First Place David Malouf 363pp Knopf (Sydney) Hb $29.99 [essays].
Jean Galbraith: Writer in a Valley Meredith Fletcher 292pp Monash University Publishing (Melbourne) Pb $39.95.
The Last Man: A British Genocide in Tasmania Tom Lawson 263pp I.B. Tauris (London) Hb $49.95.
Margaret and Gough: The Love Story That Shaped a Nation Susan Mitchell 351pp Hachette (Sydney) Pb $32.99.
This House of Grief: The Story of a Murder Trial Helen Garner 288pp Text (Melbourne) Pb $32.99.
An Unsentimental Bloke: The Life and Works of C.J. Dennis Philip Butterss Wakefield (Kent Town, SA) Pb $34.95.
What Days Are For Robert Dessaix 231pp Knopf (Sydney) Hc $29.99.
White Beech: The Rainforest Years Germaine Greer 383pp Bloomsbury (Sydney) Hb $39.99.