Australia

Introduction

A defining moment in Australian literature in 2016 involved two unlikely protagonists — an American novelist and a Sudanese-Australian engineer. It happened at the Brisbane Writers’ Festival in September when journalist and author Lionel Shriver gave the keynote address defending the right of writers to wear “different hats”, while wearing a Mexican sombrero, referencing a controversy at an American college over cultural appropriation. Fiction, Shriver said, will always involve writing about other cultures and identities, and she hit out at the way she felt identity politics made writers reluctant to do this. A number of audience members walked out of the talk and several of these wrote opinion pieces, including 25-year-old Yassmin Abdel-Magied, a mechanical engineer as well as a debut memoirist in 2016. Abdel-Magied labelled Shiver’s speech “a celebration of the unfettered exploitation of the experiences of others, under the guise of fiction” (Guardian 10 September 2016, emphasis original). The Guardian published her response and then, three days later, Shriver’s original speech (13 September 2016).

The controversy was covered not just in Australia but across the English-speaking world, including Time magazine, the New York Times, and the British Spectator. A follow-up article in the Guardian ended with a quote from a key voice in the debate, Australian writer of Afro-Caribbean heritage, Maxine Beneba Clarke:

On the question of progress [in fostering diversity], in Australia at least, Beneba Clarke says: “There are two schools of thought about this: that Australian literature is not diverse enough for Anglo-Australian writers to be even considering writing from other cultures, and the other school of thought is, well, how do we diversify literature then, given that most of our writers are Anglo-Australian? Are we locking ourselves into an inevitably whitewashed world of literature?

“And I don’t really subscribe to either view; I don’t know what the answer is but I can understand both perspectives. But I think what I absolutely can’t understand is disregard for any kind of consultation and an inability to understand when people of colour are outraged.” (Stephanie Convery, Guardian 15 September)

Beneba Clarke’s 2016 memoir, The Hate Race, “is a chronicle of the everyday injustices of racism that are always present in this country,” writes Fiona Wright; “no matter how hard we try to deny that they exist, and the way they accrue, and slowly wear away at the people against whom they are directed.” Ironically, Wright’s one criticism of the memoir is about cultural appropriation. “Clarke’s suggestion is that she is particularly alert to the suffering of Indigenous Australians because of her own experiences of racism, but there’s something deeply uncomfortable about this alignment that elides very real differences of historical context and oppression” (Spectrum ¹ 22 July).

The Brisbane Writers’ Festival controversy came in a year when there were small signs of a process of conscious diversifying in Australian literature. Noteworthy memoirs were published not just by Beneba Clarke and Abdel-Magied but also indigenous journalist Stan Grant and Sudanese refugee Deng Adut. Keynote speakers for the Association for the Study of Australian Literature’s annual conference were indigenous Australian novelist Melissa Lucashenko and American indigenous literature specialist Chadwick Allen. Westerly magazine produced an issue devoted to indigenous writing and culture (61[1]) and appointed an ongoing editor for indigenous writing, Elfie Shiosaki. Maxine Beneba Clarke herself was appointed to edit the following year’s Best Australian Stories. While the major literary prize winners were generally monocultural, Beneba-Clarke’s The Hate Race won the NSW Multicultural Award, given since 2012 as part of the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards for a work which considers “any aspect of the Australian migration experience; and/or aspects of cultural diversity and multiculturalism in Australian society”. Michelle Cahill, a Goan-Anglo-Indian writer, also won the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards for New Writing for her debut short story collection, Letter to Pessoa.

The 2016 “centenary edition” of Judith Wright’s Collected Poems was published to mark the poet’s birth. John Kinsella’s introduction sees Wright’s work as integrating inner and outer landscapes through “remarkable love poems” and “poems of great social and ecological concern” and portrays the collection as “a document of mapping place, language, cultures and the self” (ii). Kinsella salutes Wright’s legacy by attesting that “so many Australian poets of my generation cut their teeth on such poems” and collections from established poets show them to be at the height of their craft (iv). Kinsella’s own work is a fine example, with Michael Farrell observing that his new collection, Firebreaks, has affinities with the work of Les Murray and that “despite Kinsella’s serious critique of ecological destruction, there’s an element of West[ern] Australian romance that aligns him with Randolph Stow and Dorothy Hewett”. Firebreak celebrates Jam Tree Gully (Kinsella’s wheatbelt homeplace) and Farrell insists that “Kinsella’s conceptualist manoeuvring of place is highly contemporary, yet his poetry is historically Australian in its insistence on the literal, colonial relation to the land. Firebreaks’ pursuit of truth acknowledges forces greater than the human, and reads to some extent like a Shakespearean novel” (WAR ² 22 October). Reviewing Kinsella’s second 2016 collection, Drowning in Wheat: Selected Poems 1980-2015, Lisa Gorton finds it “a major achievement, a life work”. To Gorton, Kinsella’s poetry reverses the Wordsworthian notion of “emotion recollected in tranquility”, seeking instead to render “experience broken open in the instant of its happening”: “[h]is descriptions and his syntax open precipitously into memory, history, different ways of thinking”. In a statement that links Kinsella’s concerns with those of Wright, Gorton says “Kinsella is rightly one of the world’s most influential eco-poets” (Spectrum 14 April).

The title poem of Jennifer Compton’s Now You Shall Know which won the 2013 Newcastle Poetry Prize in 2013 “demonstrates what poetry can achieve in the hands of a skilled practitioner” by “transport[ing] a reader into the liminal space suspended between apparent certainties” (Rose Lucas, Australian Book Review ³ 379 March). “As a veteran poet, playwright, and essayist,” continues Lucas, “Compton produces poetry that is strong, intellectual as well as domestic, and utterly no-nonsense.” John Foulcher’s 101 Poems is a personal selection covering 30 years. It deals with themes of mourning and loss, filial feelings, and topics such as rural life, but reviewer Peter Kenneally notes also that

Foulcher has been more inclined in recent years […] to throw his voice beyond his own concerns, to dramatise — imagining Stuart Diver’s experiences at Thredbo, Keats in Scotland […]. This doesn’t tend to work all that well […]. But then, almost at the last, he casts his line over the life of Robespierre, not ventriloquising but capturing, filming, interrogatively, documentary-style. (ABR 382 June–July)

Another experienced practitioner who makes uses of dramatization is Jennifer Maiden. Her 20th volume, The Fox Petition, dramatizes the life of the eighteenth-century British Whig parliamentarian Charles James Fox, who campaigned against slavery, but punningly sets these events against contemporary Australian concerns about eradicating introduced animal species, and, as noted by Gregory Day, “by implication, on the treatment of ‘non-nationals’, or refugees”. Maiden’s book charts “the attenuation of ethics in the political sphere” (WAR 23–24 January).

Fragments is the latest work from Antigone Kefala, who came to Australia at age 25 (having been born in Romania to Greek parents) and “[f]or more than 40 years has been an enigmatic, slightly marginal figure in Australian poetry”, according to Geoff Page. The “almost metaphysical detachment” of her poems together with their “very European” quality characterize her voice as one of diversity. “Fragments may not seem a particularly evocative title,” Page concedes, “but it does apply very well to this collection of discrete encounters, events and memories, described with almost preternatural awareness and compressed, for the most part, into fewer than 20 lines of careful and evocative writing” (Spectrum 25 January 2017). Ali Jane Smith describes Philip Hammial as “a unique figure in Australian poetry” whose life and work “has been a long and intense engagement with literatures from all over the world”:

His poetry is not straightforward, but his work is distinct from the loose group of Australian poets who approach poetry as a process of construction with language. His interest is in the unconscious or subconscious mind. He’s not preoccupied with technique — in interviews he has said he writes in a trance state, and now makes very few revisions to his work before publication — nor in the workings of language as a system.

This is true of his 30th book, Testicle & Tomb. The poems, says Smith, “make reference to fleetingly recognizable events and people. Each poem is like the unfolding of a moment from three dimensions of lived experience down to the two dimensions of the page. Comprehension arrives and abruptly departs” (WAR 17 September). The year’s other Hammial volume, Asylum Nerves: New & Selected Poems, combines seven new poems with earlier work; Aidan Coleman finds the selection “bold in its omission of a number of anthologised pieces”. Martin Langford’s introductory essay describes Hammial’s process as “part modernist, part Tibetan Buddhist”. Coleman adds that “[t]his is helpful because, while much of the work is accessible, many of the poems function the way the koan does in Buddhist meditation: a reader is presented with a little story to contemplate, but comes to realise that it can’t be understood using ordinary categories”. More than half the poems “could be described as disjunctive,” Coleman continues, “and in these Hammial rises to the technical challenge of binding seemingly random utterances and images in ways that are convincing and compelling” (WAR 23–24 January).

Gods and Uncles by Geoff Page, according to reviewer Dennis Haskell,

presents issues and viewpoints that will be familiar to Page’s readers: the power of history, the social effects of war, his refusal of a life on the land, the value of compassion, the poignancy of death, and the improbability of God’s existence. In between dealing with these large issues, Page has many humorous and acute observations on matters as diverse as entropy, apartments, the toadish, work and silly twirps (defined as smart-arses with “breeding”). Satire is never far from his voice. (ABR 384 September)

Peter Kenneally notes that Page’s book “ends with a long biographical poem taking Page from birth to the end of university, but it isn’t a narrative poem, more a lantern show” (Peter Kenneally, WAR 5 November). By contrast, PiO’s 11th book of poetry, Fitzroy: The Biography, was hailed as a full epic biography of the Melbourne suburb: “This is a magnificent monument relentlessly stacked with idiosyncratic yet faithful incident, honouring the many brief flickering lives that have composed Fitzroy,” says Gig Ryan; “Among this vast assembly, PiO mingles his own biography, and his parents’ lives as new migrants in the 1950s” (Spectrum 19 February). There is also a sense of the biographical in Andrew Taylor’s Impossible Preludes: Poems 2008-2014, which is divided into loosely thematic sections covering life experience from recollections of childhood through to old age. Within this structure, some poems reflect Taylor’s enduring interest in Europe and Germany, others display a satirical humour at social pretension, and overall the collection is “urbane, civilised, accomplished, relaxed and, in its retrospectivity, often poignant” (Geoff Page, WAR 26 November). The book’s final section deals with mortality, a common theme in 2016 collections.

Reviewing Peter Porter’s posthumous Chorale at The Crossing, Peter Goldsworthy notes “death was a central preoccupation of [Porter’s] work from the beginning. How could it not be? He lost his mother at the age of nine” (ABR 381 May). Dennis Haskell’s Ahead of Us “focuses unflinchingly on the death of his beloved wife, Rhonda, after six years of pain and struggle. The cancer, the medical interventions, all take their terrible course, and Haskell regards them, in the poems, with a kind of helpless revulsion, whereas death is addressed, challenged, interrogated” (Peter Kenneally, ABR 382 June–July). In A House by the River, her 13th collection, Diane Fahey uses “a book-length sequence of blank-verse sonnets (and one poem of quatrains)” to recount the years she devoted as the carer for her mother: “[i]t proves to be a moving journey and the reader finishes with strong feelings of respect for both the poet and her mother” (Geoff Page, Spectrum 25 January 2017). The White Room Poems is Anne Kellas’s third collection in 26 years and expresses her grief at the drug-related death of her son. Describing the work as “a livre composé”, Geoff Page observes that “Kellas’s technique is generally more than adequate for the intensity of her grief”. He concludes, “Kellas is here using poetry in one of the most important ways: to express the unbearable in words that are almost, but never quite, equal to their task” (WAR 13–14 February). Krissy Kneen’s Eating My Grandmother: A Grief Cycle won the 2014 Thomas Shapcott Poetry Prize for an unpublished manuscript by a Queensland author. Michael Farrell’s comment that “[t]he book is a long poem in free verse that generates a cycle of words on grief: a washing machine of thought, dialogue, memory” (WAR 6–7 February) is not as dismissive, for it attempts to capture the spirit of what Rose Lucas sees as a “passionate” and “haunting” collection which “takes up the more open and reflective mode of the poetic” in order to “allow for the exploration of intense feeling while creating a ritualistic structure, a ‘cycle’ in which to meet, re-meet, and perhaps finally resolve the gaping wounds of grief” (ABR 379 March). Other works dealing with mortality, serious illness and grief include Judith Crispin’s The Myrrh-Bearers, Joel Deane’s Year of the Wasp, and Susan Varga’s debut collection Rupture: Poems 2012-2015.

Each of these works engages in “life-writing”, and the poetic potential of this form strongly underlies Maxine Beneba Clarke’s collection, Carrying the World, which reviewers saw as a poetic supplementation to the concerns of her 2016 non-fiction work, The Hate Race. According to Fiona Wright, “[t]he strongest poems […] are the most personal ones, which deal mostly with family — especially with motherhood, and with coming to terms with family history”, but the collection “is uneven. Many of the poems […] are written for and with the energy of performance poetry, but feel flat or awkward on the page” (Spectrum 22 July). Whilst sharing reservations, Catherine Noske sees Clarke’s work as offering “an unflinching portrayal of the impact of racism, and transcends form in turning a lens on Australian society” (ABR 385 October). Both reviewers single out the “Demerara Sugar” suite of poems, which covers Beneba Clarke’s work tracing her family history.

Performance poetry is strongly represented by Bunratty, the third collection from Duncan Hose, who “single-handedly reinstitutes (an imaginary) Ireland as the mother of the poet-ratbag-leprechaun” and “[t]hrough sheer poetic lewdness offers an antidote to art’s decades of earnestness about the (human) body”. Attracted to “this Poundean pileup”, Michael Farrell asks, “Has there been an Australian poet as troubadourish and piratical as Duncan Hose?” (WAR 7–8 May). One poet entitled to answer is Timoshenko Aslanides, whose short-lived retirement from poetry has ended with Troubadour, a collection of observations about Australian life modeled on the work of twelfth- and thirteenth-century French troubadours. After a substantial offering of poems “for private reading”, the second section of Troubadour is “a sub-set” of poems each accompanied by specially composed violin music and intended “for public recital”. Mentored by Judith Wright and taught musical composition by Peter Sculthorpe, Aslanides has honoured his mission to write of and from his time, as well as to innovate within a troubadour tradition in which the poet was expected to compose his own music as well. Robyn Rowland’s Line of Drift offers poems dealing with both Australia and Ireland, prompting Page to conclude that “Rowland is now an Irish poet as much as she is an Australian one. Line of Drift is […] equalled only by the best of Vincent Buckley’s earlier explorations of similar contradictions and passions” (WAR 13–14 February). The engagement with diversity continues with the lyric poetry of Barry Hill’s Grass Hut Work, which opens “a Japanese Zen [world]” (Michael Farrell WAR 22 October).

Reviewing Clive James’ Gate of Lilacs: A Verse Commentary on Proust, Peter Craven says “it’s an odd book indeed” and an “oddly essayistic set of poems”. “Poignant in one way,” Craven adds, “but a little uncertain for a performance from James. […] [I]t is surprising that the commentary takes the form of poetry and that the poems in question should have so little in common with James’s formidable exercises in strict form.” The attraction of Proust for James (who has been terminally ill for several years) is explained in the endnote to the poems: “Proust was trying to speak the language of someone who has come to the end of life and wants to pass on the summary of his reflections” (WAR 18–19 June). A spirit of intertextuality also pervades Cassandra Atherton’s Exhumed, which is based on Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s admission that, having with reckless romantic impulse buried the manuscript of his poems with his wife, he retrieved these works a few years later. “It is the romance in this scenario that enlivens Exhumed,” claims Peter Kenneally,

rather than the tawdriness. There are many texts interred within the book, to the point where they may just as well be a kind of humus interring the poet, nourishing her, and adding literary spice to her love life, which is the actual matter of the book. (ABR 380 April)

These interred “intertexts” invoke “Magritte, Coleridge, Gwen Harwood, Kay Kyser [and] are like shards of pottery found in a garden: when dug up, they are just pieces, but glinting in the soil they have endless promise” (ABR 380 April). Ghostspeaking is poet Peter Boyle’s 370-page embodiment of his fascination with twentieth-century poetry in Spanish and French. Adapting the example of Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa (1888–1935), Boyle loosely and creatively “translates” almost a dozen Spanish or French voices, prompting Geoff Page to categorize Ghostspeaking as “[s]omewhere between an anthology of unfairly neglected poets and an experimental novel about them” (Geoff Page, WAR 26 November). Jan Owen’s The Wicked Flowers of Charles Baudelaire is “a little book of limericks based on the life and poetry of her beloved Baudelaire (whom she has recently and felicitously translated). [T]he overall intent of the poems is laughter but there are also some clever literary and psychological points made along the way” (Geoff Page, WAR 26 November).

Three markedly experimental works deserve mention. DJ Huppatz’s happy avatar deals with what Michael Farrell calls “the linguistic present”, “loopily ironising consumer and internet culture”. As Farrell explains, “Huppatz’s immersion in flarf (a New York-based poetry movement which produced poems from internet searches, often combined with deliberate bad taste) is apparent: but the tone is less aggressive, happier” (WAR 7–8 May). Word Migrants is by academic and multimedia musician Hazel Smith, a child of Lithuanian migrants. Her concern is with “[m]igration and displacement, the crossing of borders both physically and in language” and Michelle Cahill reports that

as hybrid verse crossing the genres of nonfiction and poetry, theory and social media, these non-poems follow conceptual forms forged by avant-garde poets such as Harkin, Wilkinson, Luke Beesley and Aden Rolfe. Technology, terrorism, transnationalism and the refugee crisis have put the lyric’s privileged status under pressure, provoking poetry to delimit its aesthetic boundaries or risk redundancy. (WAR 13 August)

Reviewer Mandy Sayer described Jordie Albiston’s book-length poem Jack & Mollie (& Her) as a work of “Bit Lit” because it “tells the story of yet another depressed woman at the end of a relationship who finds solace in the company of one, then two dogs, before finding love again in the form of a (hu)man” (Spectrum 2 September). To Geoff Page, however,

Albiston’s new “long poem” or “verse novel” […] is triumphantly experimental in both technique and content. […] The whole book is written in syllabic rather than accentual verse […] deliberately flirt[ing] with the pentameter by ensuring every line across her 136 pages has exactly ten syllables. […] The result is unexpectedly convincing and agreeable to read. (ABR 381 May)

The year saw debut collections from two Indigenous writers, Ellen Van Neerven’s Comfort Food and Alison Whittaker’s Lemons in the Chicken Wire, as well as Frank Russo’s In the Museum of Creation.

Cordite, the new poetry publishing venture which commenced in 2015, produced well-received titles, including Javant Biarujia, Tony Birch, Rachel Briggs, Jen Crawford, Claire Nashar, and Autumn Royal. An even newer independent publisher is Melbourne’s GloriaSMH Press, with Jacinta Le Plastrier (formerly Publisher at John Leonard Press) as Co-Founder and Publisher. The publisher’s name, as explained on their website (http://gloriasmh.com/about/) derives from a WWII Paris cell of Britain’s Special Operations Executive (SOE). Early titles from GloriaSMH include Kevin Brophy’s This Is What Gives Us Time, David Musgrave’s Anatomy of Voice, and Elif Sezen’s Universal Mother (see Poetry).

As was the case with poetry, death and grieving were major preoccupations in fiction. The major work on this topic was Georgia Blain’s eighth book, Between a Wolf and a Dog, and Dorothy Johnston explains that it is

a cruel irony that Georgia Blain should have crafted a novel in which one of her main characters suffers from a brain tumour, and then discovered the axe-blow has fallen on her, too. Blain was diagnosed with brain cancer in November 2015. With this terrible knowledge, she returned to the manuscript and continued to edit and refine it. (Spectrum 23 April)

Between a Wolf and a Dog, told from the competing perspectives of four family members, some of them estranged, unfolds within the framework of one rain-soaked day in Sydney. […] All of them alternate the lived details of their day with intricate reflection on their shared past, centring on a cataclysmic event three years earlier that has dictated where they are now. The twenty-four-hour timeframe, rotating perspective and thematic centrality of time — from the significance of the moment to the ever-present past — echoes Mrs Dalloway, in a way that seems conscious, if never literal. (Jo Case, ABR 381 May)

Critics were unanimous in celebrating this novel. Fiona Wright says it “work[s] beautifully” to create “a kind of counterpointing chorus, of voices of the hurting and broken” and praises “a work of delicately detailed emotion and beautiful balanced”, “so well paced that its narrative is utterly compelling” (WAR 16–17 April). Georgia Blain died in December 2016.

Death and grief are also preoccupations in Josephine Wilson’s Extinctions, which won the inaugural Dorothy Hewett Award for an unpublished manuscript. A former academic moves into a retirement village, taking his memories of grief and loss — only to find that he is surrounded by people burdened with their own losses. Dorothy Johnston describes Extinctions as “a story full of death, yet held together by subtle, lyrical prose that refuses to give way to despair” (Spectrum 24 December). Nike Sulway’s Dying in the First Person concerns twins who in childhood invent their own language. One brother becomes a famous novelist thanks to his twin’s efforts in translating his work out of its original twinspeak. The two become estranged and, when the novelist is drowned overseas, the translator must find a way to mourn the person he has not known for years. For Kerryn Goldsworthy, this “strange, dreamlike tale is an accomplished and beautifully written exploration of the nature of intimacy: between brothers, between lovers, between women. It also explores the nature and function of language, including some extraordinary set pieces on translation and grammar” (Spectrum 3 June). According to Linda Morris, “[d]eath and the strange places it takes the bereaved lie at the heart of Kirsten Tranter’s first two novels, so much so that the author swore to herself the next book would not feature a funeral”; Tranter’s “subconscious trumped her best intentions, however, and death is again front and centre” in Tranter’s third novel, Hold. It opens with the drowning of a surfer, then jumps ahead three years to explore the predicament of his lover, Shelley, as she tries to form a relationship with a new man, only to find that “the merest hint of recognition in strangers’ faces and gestures leave her feeling freshly bereft, awash in grief”. Morris’s thoughtful review links the novel’s preoccupations with events in Tranter’s own life (“Tranter lost two close friends as she started work on The Legacy, [her] first book, 12 years ago”) (Spectrum 4 March). Jennifer Levasseur adds:

Like the traditional Gothic story, Hold reads quickly, easily, affording a few chills. […] But in keeping with its tradition, the novel also questions why some women still need secret places to express themselves, why female emotion becomes easily equated with mental illness. (Spectrum 22 April)

Readers with an interest in the work of David Ireland are urged to read Nicholas Rothwell’s review of Ireland’s latest novel, The World Repair Video Game, which outlines the novel’s genesis and the circumstances of its rejection by publishers (including one judgment “that the book was so dangerous it should never be allowed to see the light of day”). Rothwell provides an excellent summary of Ireland’s career and his important place in Australian literature:

In the great years of Australia’s late 20th-century cultural expansion, novelist David Ireland widely was seen as one of the brightest stars in the literary sky: a voice in tune with the vernacular, a poetic chronicler of everyday experiences; in the form of his writing radical, in the angle of his approach to his subjects direct, demotic, free from convention’s stultifying constraint. (WAR 6–7 May)

The World Repair Video Game is “a precise, controlled exercise in horror writing and cryptic social commentary, elegantly written, unremittingly dark” (ibid.). The narrative is the self-celebratory monologue of a serial killer setting out to cleanse the world. Geordie Williamson’s afterword to the novel argues that the “creepiness” of Ireland’s serial killer

does not emerge from his radical difference from society so much as his complicity with its mainstream impulses. He may be a social isolate these days but his sense of the natural order of things was shaped as much by the schoolboy rugby fields of Sydney’s eastern suburbs as his verdant coastal retreat. […] The respectable ideology of the Australian upper-middle class is bent into a final solution to demographic challenges presented by the welfare state. (see Rothwell, WAR 6–7 May)

In the words of novelist and reviewer Malcolm Knox,

The meat and bones of this work are God, reality, sickness, death, the human and non-human past and future, good and evil. It is a small, tranquil novel hosting a major excavation of eternal ideas, a work of lasting wisdom, perhaps what we should hope for from one of our largest minds, if we are prepared to stop and listen. (Spectrum 2 June)

This is Ireland’s first novel since The Chosen (1997) and was first serialized last year in the literary magazine Island.

Assisted dying is the topic of Steve Amsterdam’s third novel, The Easy Way Out, which is narrated by Evan, the palliative care nurse assigned to help in the peaceful death of a terminal patient. Describing the book as “incredibly funny”, Fiona Wright observes that the “disjunctions” between “Evan’s theatrical and droll descriptions of his world, and his emotional and ethical wrangling with the work that he does in the aptly named Mercy Hospital” are “the main energetic forces operating in The Easy Way Out, and also what make it such a striking and unsettling book” (ABR 384 September). James Ley expresses admiration for

the novel’s carefully cultivated ambivalence, its attempt to balance a belief in mercy with skepticism about the possibility of regulation, drawing us back to the notion that the conflicting demands of principle, pragmatism and personal involvement can never be easily resolved. (WAR 17 September)

Tom Keneally’s Crimes of the Father also deals with a controversial topic, paedophilia. Returning to Australia in 1996 after a period of ostracism in punishment for his stand against the war in Vietnam, a priest feels morally obliged to take up the cause of an angry woman who has been the victim of teenage sexual abuse at the hands of the church. Noting that the novel is “a work of grief at least as much as an account of the perversion of justice” and that “its interests are more profound than the law”, Michael McGirr concludes that it shows “an honest understanding of a deeply wounded culture” (Spectrum 12 November).

Numerous works displayed diversification by venturing beyond conventional geographical and cultural limits of “Australianness”. The Last Painting of Sara de Vos is the fourth novel by Dominic Smith, whose previous novel was shortlisted for two major Australian literary prizes. The central character Sara is fictional, but Smith has written in the Paris Review of his interest in women painters of the Dutch Golden Age and Kerryn Goldsworthy believes Sara has “her genesis in the fate of one or two real women and the shadowy possibilities of many more”, “women whose work may have been misattributed to male artists and whose names may have been obscured by the historical records”. The story ranges from seventeenth-century Amsterdam to 1950s New York and Sydney in 2000, centred on one painting’s impact on three people across the centuries. Goldsworthy likens the novel to Robertson Davies’ What’s Bred in the Bone (1985) and A. S. Byatt’s Possession (1990) and enthuses over “this beautiful novel” (ABR 382 June–July). The Museum of Modern Love by Heather Rose draws upon Marina Abramovic’s “The Artist Is Present”, a performance-piece staged in 2010 at MOMA. Louise Swinn comments that “[t]his [novel] is art about art concerned with looking death right in the eye” and that “the narrative’s philosophical nature is reminiscent of fellow Tasmanian Amanda Lohrey’s outstanding Camille’s Bread” (Spectrum 29 October). The novel has since won the 2017 Stella Prize. J. M. Coetzee’s The Schooldays of Jesus was longlisted for the 2016 Man Booker Prize and offers a continuation of the story begun in The Childhood of Jesus (2013). It is not so adventurous as to deal with Jesus and biblical times directly (there is no character named Jesus), but as Sue Kossew notes, “[i]t is hard to resist the temptation to draw parallels, particularly when the text invites such a reading albeit without ever confirming it”. Three central characters, seemingly displaced persons, are journeying in an unnamed Spanish-speaking country. Biblical parallels aside, Kossew writes that “[t]he story is concerned with different models of learning and knowledge” encountered by the central character: “mathematics […] is set against the mysterious numerology taught through dance and music” in order to dramatize “the age-old battle between reason and the imagination”. Her conclusion is that

The Schooldays of Jesus is both a moving story of a young boy’s formal and worldly education and a complex narrative that engages with big philosophical ideas. It confirms Coetzee’s status as one of the world’s great living writers, one whose work poses important questions without imposing simple answers. (ABR 385 October)

Other works moving beyond conventional borders include Rajith Savanadasa’s Ruins (about a middle-class family in Colombo at the time the war with the Tamil Tigers is ending), George Haddad’s Populate and Perish, which won the 2016 Seizure Viva La Novella Prize (about a young Lebanese-Australian man returning to Lebanon to find the father he has never known), and Rashida Murphy’s The Historian’s Daughter (about an Anglo-Indian girl who is sent to a new life in Australia when her father sells the family home).

John Hughes’ short Kafkaesque allegorical novel Asylum is one of several works experimenting with form. As Lucas Smith explains, it features

a variety of forms, including manuals for the officials of the regime, personal letters, political tracts, and an inverted retelling of the story of the Garden of Eden in which fully clothed Adam and Eve arrive by boat and God removes their clothes in anger. (ABR 382 June–July)

Smith sees Asylum as “a powerful allegory of Blake’s ‘mind forg’d manacles’” but “all a bit too Kafkasque” (ibid.). Emily Maguire’s An Isolated Incident combines fictional narrative with feminist media analyses and interview-transcripts in its crime-fiction-like exploration of media (and public) fascination with the murder of beautiful women. “The only real problem with An Isolated Incident concerns Maguire’s failure to adequately draw out the implications of the title,” writes Jay Daniel Thomson; “femicide cases are often framed as isolated bursts of misogynist violence in an otherwise peaceful society” (ABR 380 April). A degree of experimentation is also present in a story collection, Michelle Cahill’s Letter to Pessoa & Other Short Fiction, which is “strictly speaking a collection of letters, fragments, character studies, and ficto-autobiographical interludes, or, as the narrator of ‘A Miko Coda’ has it, ‘my tightrope, Shinto page, my transmission, infinite possibility of hypertext, open diary, not excluding hybridized epistle’”. This debut collection also challenges wider notions, for “Cahill shows that as far as fiction is concerned, there is no ‘logical conclusion’ but rather, a series of what we might think of as archipelogical paradoxes” (Fiona Hile, ABR 387 December).

Some 2016 works displayed the growing influence of screenwriting on fiction. Scriptwriter Graeme Simsion’s debut novel, The Rosie Project, achieved sales of over three million copies when it was named as book of the year by Bill Gates in 2014, and Louise Swinn observes that “in Australian publishing, Simsion’s is a phenomenal success story. He writes fiction that is enormously popular on an international scale” and “he doesn’t mess much with the formula” in his third novel, The Best of Adam Sharpe (WAR 1 October). Jason Steger summarizes the simple storyline:

the crux is a moral dilemma. Does the piano-playing Adam turn his back on his failing marriage to Claire when the chance of reconnecting with the beautiful Angelina Browne with whom he had an intense love affair in Melbourne 25 years earlier is suddenly on the cards? (Spectrum 30 September)

The novel attracted attention because of its likely success in Hollywood, but Peter Pierce dared a more literary evaluation: “While Simsion’s touch is delicate, this is a dark comedy of manners, an adult entertainment that extends the range of his first, more light-hearted book” (Spectrum 11 November). The Secret Recipe for Second Chances is the debut novel from screenwriter J. D. Barrett, and Kerryn Goldsworthy attests to “the cinematic, fast-paced, highly visual writing” of this gothic thriller (Spectrum 20 May). Out of the Ice, by Australian cinema writer and director Ann Turner, relies strongly upon a gothic plot: a young environmental scientist is posted to Antarctica to evaluate the feasibility of turning an abandoned Norwegian whaling station into a museum. Not surprisingly, the desolate installation harbours a dark secret. “The great strength of this place-based thriller is its cinematic quality,” writes Kerryn Goldsworthy, “moving deftly from scene to scene in the vividly realized and dramatic landscapes of Antarctica, Nantucket, and Venice” (Spectrum 16 July). Katherine Gillespie agrees “[t]his is fast-paced stuff” but insists that “Turner makes a distinct effort to examine the inner life of her heroine as well”, not as “an in-depth investigation of a woman’s psychological trauma”, but as a “thoughtful thriller [which] pays closer attention to the nature of love and loss than you might expect” (WAR 11–12 June).

A work which better represents the full “cinematic” potential of fiction is Kenneth Cook’s Fear Is the Rider, recently discovered among Cook’s papers (he died in 1987). Cook is best known for his 1961 début novel, Wake in Fright (filmed under the same name by Canadian director Ted Kotcheff in 1971), which is a withering depiction of drinking and masculinity in the outback. According to Geordie Williamson, Fear Is the Rider “was first conceived in 1981 as the script for a TV movie that was never made; Cook later rewrote it as a novel, then set it aside”. Williamson adds, chillingly, that “it makes Wake in Fright […] seem like an afternoon on the sofa with a pot of tea and a volume of Proust” (WAR 30–31 January). Reviewers praised Cook’s superb suspense and pacing, but they also attested to the thematic depth of this work, with Geordie Williamson citing Peter Temple’s comment that “No Australian author was so concerned with, or drew such rigid lines between, city and bush as Cook”, whose experience of city and bush “fixed in him a view that there were two Australias (and two kinds of Australians, two species almost)” (WAR 30–31 January).

The year confirmed that single-author short story collections are back in favour (possibly at the expense of general anthologies). In this now large field, the stand-out collections were by Tara June Winch and David Brooks. After the Carnage is the second book by indigenous writer Winch, whose first work, Swallow the Air (2006), won many awards. Reviewer Elly Varrenti says “[t]he power of memory to both comfort and disturb permeates these stories. Sometimes the memory of a moment in a character’s life is so vividly drawn you can just smell it”, and whilst “[o]ccasionally a story feels just a bit too abbreviated or there is an unnecessary data dump”, overall each piece “is satisfyingly complete unto itself, with Winch’s prose supple and potent. At their best, these stories offer vivid insights into our complex humanity, pivoting on that moment when we realise things cannot continue as they were” (WAR 3 September). Kerryn Goldsworthy adds:

The short story is traditionally the preserve of private and inner life: its form is suited to the moment of epiphany, the mood of a day, the unravelling of a relationship, or the turning point in a life, moments at once significant and fleeting that form the nucleus of stories by such masters of the form as Chekhov and Mansfield. Winch’s stories follow this pattern, of emotion intensely felt and moments where lives are changed forever, but behind these tales of individual lives the reader can always sense the politics of race, of class, of gender, and can sense behind those things the massive forces of history, ruthlessly shoving these characters around. (ABR 384 September)

Even higher praise was accorded to David Brooks’s Napoleon’s Roads, his fourth book of short stories and first for 16 years. The collection opens with the question “‘Why do we write? What are we groping for?’” and Jane Sullivan comments that “this exhilarating collection” offers “an attempt to answer a question that the author acknowledges is unanswerable. Yet there is no futility here. His groping, as he calls it, charms and disturbs and conjures up images of extraordinary, if fleeting, power” (ABR 379 March). Fiona Wright sees the title story as “a beautiful sequence of fragmentary reflections” which offer “a meditation on landscape, on history, on travel and its unbelonging”; for Wright it is a “sense of unknowing, of gaps in understanding or consciousness, [which] is the common thread across all of the stories in this collection” (WAR 30 April–1 May).

Ryan O’Neill’s Their Brilliant Careers: The Fantastic Lives of Sixteen Extraordinary Australian Writers, “is a sham, a trick, a gorgeous lie,” according to Adam Rivett:

Resting somewhere between a linked short story collection and a Bolanoesque encyclopaedia, Ryan O’Neill has created a book of imaginary literary biography where the invented rub shoulders with the actual, and where the true story is told in the connections and correspondences — some overt, some hidden — between writers of counterfeit note. (Spectrum 11 November)

Rivett explains that some of O’Neill’s weird mob “are obvious stand-ins for real-life counterparts” (Steele Rudd is reflected in “Addison Tiller, author of the beloved ‘Pa and Pete’ stories”), some are “broader riffs on well-known types” and others are “all the more amusing for having no obvious source of inspiration” (ibid.). Dominic Amerena declares this is “a piss-take, a celebration, a revisionist history” which demonstrates that “O’Neill is fast establishing himself as one of Australia’s most formally interesting writers” (WAR 22 October). Andrew Riemer makes a similarly bold claim about Anthony Macris, describing him as “one of the most interesting writers of our time”. Inexperience and Other Stories is the fourth book by Macris, and Riemer praises its laconic charting of “the impersonality of modern urban life, loneliness in a crowded world, and the absence of ideals, beliefs, commitments, even perhaps of emotions” (Spectrum 8 September). Dominic Amerena was less enthusiastic, saying “Inexperience has its impressive moments but overall is a less cohesive affair”. Amerena finds examples of “bad prose” and judges the titular novella to be “unwieldy and overly long” (WAR 22 October).

Fiona McFarlane’s 2013 novel The Night Guest was shortlisted for the 2014 Miles Franklin Award; her 2016 debut story collection The High Places deals with “excesses of belief: we meet a budgerigar whose owner is convinced it is a mechanical automaton […] and a group of schoolchildren whose mystical belief in the power of a talismanic button in a schoolyard game turns them into a lynch mob” (Sarah Holland-Batt, ABR 378 January–February). Geordie Williamson praises McFarlane’s story “Unnecessary Gifts” as “a horror story of the most mundane kind — and a 20-page masterclass in writing short fiction” (WAR 6 February). Michelle Wright’s Fine was shortlisted for the 2015 Victorian Premier’s Award for an Unpublished Manuscript. Wright has taken “a considerable risk with her debut collection of short stories,” says Johanna Leggatt; “the entries — some set in Australia, others in Sri Lanka — explore the themes of grief and tragedy via characters struggling to cope with various kinds of pain, whether it be a momentous event or a relationship breakdown” (Spectrum 13 August). The entire twentieth-century is spanned in Laura Elizabeth Woollett’s debut collection The Love of a Bad Man, the stories evoking “the lives of real women who were all sucked into an abyss of murder, fraud, and violence under the spell” of “men who are mad, bad, and dangerous to know”. Characters include the likes of “seventeen-year-old politically naïve Eva Braun, who caught Hitler’s eye when still at school; and Myra Hindley, the ‘Moors Murderess’, who cold-bloodedly killed five children with her lover […] Others have been relegated to history’s footnotes, such as the so-called ‘Manson Brides’” (Dina Ross, ABR 386 November). However, Sam Cooney expresses reservations — “there is a lack of depth and intensity to the fictions in this collection. Not least because they are each too short, providing only a glimpse into the possible experiences of twelve individual women” (WAR 5 November). Reviewers of Michelle Michau-Crawford’s Leaving Elvis explained that the singer has no part in this debut collection of interlinked stories, the title piece of which won the 2013 Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize. Covering the period 1948 to 2013, the stories are “fragmented intergenerational tales” organized around “the lines of causation and emotional inheritances” between generations of a family in a Western Australian town. “Poor or unlucky choices in men seem to be the primary genesis of the problems for the women in these stories,” says Ed Wright, “yet Crawford is not didactic but alert to the play of culturally inscribed roles with historical events. The writing is pithy but perceptive, and the scenarios range between bleak and wry” (WAR 16–17 July). Francesca Sasnaitis likens this “accomplished” collection to Tim Winton’s The Turning (2005) and Elizabeth Strout’s Olive Kitteridge (2008), noting that Wright “makes subtle shifts in language, which reflect the attitudes of each character and period, from the 1940s through the conservative 1950s, the radical 1970s, to the present” (ABR 379 March).

Discussion of the year’s short fiction should also mention The Collected Stories of Pinchas Goldhar, providing in English translation the stories of this Polish Jew who moved to Melbourne in 1928 and wrote in Yiddish:

Goldhar lived through (and experienced himself) the rise of the Nazi party, and his stories deal in the struggle to find a cultural and ethical foothold; rootless in a new world, the old one annihilated by the unimaginable tragedy and disaster of the Shoah. From the prickle of anti-Semitism felt by a kosher cafe owner in Carlton whose shop is casually graffitied by schoolboys, to the moral despair of a suicide in a Nazi concentration camp, Goldhar’s intensely felt and clear-eyed short fiction illuminates a literary corner of Australia’s multicultural history. (Cameron Woodhead, The Age 11 November 2016)

One of the most unusual anthologies of the year was The Best Australian Science Writing 2016, edited by Jo Chandler and now in its sixth year. As Ian Gibbins explains, “the best Australian science is published in a daunting array of international journals, mostly discipline-specific”, but this material is “aimed primarily at other scientists, using the unavoidable combination of technical terminology and dry writing style necessary for concise professional communication”. As a result, two-thirds of the authors in Chandler’s selection are not practising scientists:

While most are experienced science journalists, poets and novelists add to the mix. Each of the scientists has made or is making significant contributions to his or her field of research. They range from PhD students through hospital physicians to a Nobel Prize winner, all equally intent on bringing their stories to a wider audience. (ABR 387 December)

Gibbins makes special mention of Margaret Wertheim on the nature of conscious experience, Leah Kaminsky on progress in molecular biology, and Kathy Marks on factors in the power and energy industries that have weakened Australia’s policy responses to global climate change. The selection includes Ashley Hay’s essay “The Forest at the Edge of Time” which won the 2016 Bragg UNSW Press Prize for Science Writing.

Black Inc once again published its three “best of” anthologies for the year — essays, stories, and poems — each an important barometer. Reviewer Glyn Davis writes of The Best Australian Essays 2016, edited by Geordie Williamson, “Here is the conversation of our moment — voices we know, new arrivals who startle, personal and shared political concerns addressed in many different ways” (ABR 389 March 2017). Edited by Charlotte Wood, Mandy Sayer writes that “the overall tone of The Best Australian Stories 2016 is one of loneliness, whether it’s existential, figurative or literal”. “The themes of loss and loneliness”, Sayer continues, “are also echoed in this year’s [The Best Australian Poems 2016]. Editor Sarah Holland-Batt acknowledges there is a dark tone running through her selections, which reflect a ‘vertiginous’ year” (WAR 31 December).

Prayers of a Secular World, edited by Jordie Albiston and Kevin Brophy, draws its title from Australian Love Poems (2013), where editor Donna Ward declares poems to be “the prayers of a secular world”. David Tacey’s introduction argues that “the sacred is ineradicable” and reviewer Peter Kenneally praises the volume’s overriding “sense of ‘prayer’ as interrogation”. He singles out particularly strong work by Kent MacCarter, Anna Ryan-Punch, and Kate Lumley (ABR 378 January–February). Falling and Flying, edited by Judith Beverage and Susan Ogle, selects contemporary Australian poems on ageing, accompanied by art by Richard Wu. The editors suggest their book is partly a clinical resource for ageing “baby boomers”, and reviewer David McCooey celebrates this as a “laudable goal”, commenting that “[t]he idea — still prevalent today — that ‘art’ should be inherently non-instrumentalist is part of a long hangover from nineteenth-century aestheticism, and merely one form of poetics among many”: “anything designed to help health professionals see clients or patients as complex human subjects (or, indeed, to help medical professionals recognise the diversity of ‘the human’) cannot be a bad thing”. McCooey notes that while the collection “is largely elegiac, [it] shows an impressive range of tones, styles, and forms” (ABR 379 March).

A significant anthology arising from a non-standard source is The Near and the Far: New Stories from the Asia-Pacific Region, edited by David Carlin and Francesca Rendle-Short. Published by Scribe Publications, it is the product of WrICE (the Writers Immersion and Cultural Exchange Program) and includes fiction, poetry, non-fiction, and essays by Australian and non-Australian writers from the Asia-Pacific region (see Anthologies).

In December 2016, Australian Literary Studies devoted an entire issue to essays on Christina Stead. Many were originally presented as papers at a December 2015 symposium on Stead at the University of New South Wales. At that event, a sold-out audience heard writers Delia Falconer, Gail Jones and David Malouf “plunge, in the way only fellow writers can, into the fiercely libidinal and passionately restless element that is Stead’s writing”. The editors of the volume note that

this lively scene of writerly engagement demonstrated the cultural significance and maturity of Christina Stead studies in the present moment. The symposium was intended to mark the fifty-year anniversary of the first major “re-discovery” in Stead’s career: the 1965 reissue of The Man Who Loved Children (1940) […] Another, more recent American-led “rediscovery” of The Man Who Loved Children was declared in 2010 in the form of a long essay by Jonathan Franzen for the New York Times.

With many of Christina Stead’s works republished in the last few years and a constant flow of scholarly attention, her significance in Australian literature is greater than ever.

Two monographs in Cambria’s Australian Literature Series launched at the Association for the Study of Australian Literature conference in July explored quite different dimensions of Australian literature. Giving This Country a Memory: Contemporary Aboriginal Voices of Australia sees scholar Anne Brewster in conversation with Aboriginal writers, accompanied by a survey essay on each writer’s work. It includes established writers like Kim Scott, Doris Pilkington Garimara, and Melissa Lucashenko as well as emerging writers. Susan Sheridan’s The Fiction of Thea Astley follows on from an acclaimed biography of the late novelist by Karen Lamb in 2015:

Unlike any critical discussion of Astley’s work that has preceded it, this book not only offers multiple comparative analyses of different novels, but also represents a kind of stepping back: a broadening of critical perspective to look at Astley’s entire oeuvre as a single entity, and to discern it. (Kerryn Goldsworthy ABR December)

Also launched at the ASAL Conference was Australian Literature in the German Democratic Republic, edited by Nicole Moore and Christina Spittel, a collection of essays typical of current scholarship for its transnational approach, concern for reception history, and the return to the archives:

[T]he authors materially track the production and reception of one country’s corpus as envisioned by another. The 90 Australian titles published in the GDR form an alternative canon, revealing a shadowy literary archive that rewrites Australia’s postwar cultural history from behind the iron curtain. Cast as a geo-political conundrum — beautiful and exotic, yet politically retrograde — Australia was presented to East German readers as an impossible, failed utopia, its literature framed through a critique of Antipodean capitalism that yet reveals multiple ironies for that heavily censored, walled-in community. (publisher’s description) (see Criticism)

In 2016, UWA Publishing released three of the five significant Australian literary biographies published. Suzanne Falkiner’s Mick: A Life of Randolph Stow is the first biography of the major Australian novelist, who died in 2010. A comprehensive account of the author’s precocious successes, depression, and long exile in a small town in England, critics agreed it is an important work but its approach divided opinion. Kerryn Goldsworthy placed it alongside the major works of Australian literary biography, writing,

The overriding virtue of this book is Falkiner’s steady trust in the intelligence of her readers. She spells very little out, presenting us instead with this carefully curated wealth of textual evidence. There is consideration and mannerliness in this, towards her subject as much as towards her readers; she keeps impertinent speculation about Stow’s spiritual life, his emotional life, and his sexuality to a minimum, quietly setting down such evidence as exists in his own words and in those of the people who knew him best. (ABR 379 March)

The same features Goldsworthy finds virtues were seen as flaws by some reviewers, with Nathan Hobby noting that in its restraint it avoids “not just speculation but also, largely, interpretation” (Westerly online) and Bernadette Brennan feeling “[t]here is a surfeit of detail […] that results in a certain flatness” (Spectrum 25 March).

Like Falkiner, Sylvia Martin is an experienced biographer and her third biography is Ink in Her Veins: The Troubled Life of Aileen Palmer. Palmer (1915–1988) was a poet and communist who volunteered to serve in the Spanish Civil War only to spend decades in the shadow of severe mental illness. Despite being near the centre of Australian literature through her parents, Nettie and Vance Palmer, Palmer’s poetry was only sporadically published in her lifetime.

Paradoxically, Palmer’s literary obscurity widens the potential audience for Ink in her Veins. It isn’t a biography just for readers who know the writer’s work. Nor is it primarily a biography arguing for her posthumous recognition as a major writer, even though it finds much to value in her work. Instead, the biography’s purpose is to recover a significant story: that of Palmer’s troubled life as a writer who was also a woman in under-recognised military service, a closeted lesbian in a time of intolerance, and a mental patient in a time of stigma and institutionalisation. The biography stands on its own as the compelling story of an unusual and important life, a story worth recovering and well told. (Nathan Hobby, Westerly online)

Unlike Stow and Palmer, the great Australian poet Judith Wright (1915–2000) has already been the subject of a biography, written by Veronica Brady and published two years before Wright’s death. Georgina Arnott’s The Unknown Judith Wright is a historical examination of the first 21 years of Wright’s life, revealing crucial aspects of her life which have been obscured. Ian Donaldson finds that it “works best as a study in social history: in tracing the pastoral settlement in New England, the growth of ‘agrarian politics’ in the region, the attractions of ‘modern’ life in pre-war Sydney, and the general fervour of 1930s Australian academic life” (ABR 386 November). Felicity Plunkett’s review questions the ethics of the whole enterprise of biography: “Does putting words into the public sphere — perhaps especially poetry — involve an offering of the private self? Why are poets’ (especially women’s) sexual lives so important to literary biographies?” (WAR 29 October). Yet Arnott’s book is far from salacious and fills in the picture of Wright’s formation, both familial and intellectual.

The two other literary biographies of the year are both concerned with popular Australian writers of the 1950s and 1960s, now largely forgotten. The Hero Maker by Stephen Dando-Collins is a biography of Paul Brickhill (1916–1991), author of The Great Escape. “Brickhill claimed to have sold more than five million books in his lifetime but his work is not much read nowadays […]. While solidly researched and readable, this biography doesn’t make the case for that to change” (Tom Gilling, WAR 6–7 August). Our Man Elsewhere: In Search of Alan Moorehead sees Thornton McCamish following in the footsteps of non-fiction writer Alan Moorhead (1910–1983). Reviewers generally felt Moorehead more worth remembering than Brickhill: “As both a significant individual figure and a writerly exemplar of his time and place, Moorehead warrants the kind of sympathetic investigation that McCamish provides” (Robin Gerster, ABR 384 September). McCamish’s writing itself was widely-praised: “This book is a delight, about as polished and readable as Australian nonfiction ever manages to be, and the secret is the quality of the writing, the quiet authority, the flashes of wit and a refusal to bow to the conventions of biography” (Les Carlyon, WAR 12–13 March).

In non-fiction more broadly, 2016 saw a profusion of hybrid books which combine memoir with manifesto or reportage. More than ever, non-fiction authors tend to be personally involved in the issue or story they are exploring and to include this personal angle in their books. One instance is prominent feminist Clementine Ford’s debut, Fight Like a Girl, perhaps the most talked about book of the year. “Ford’s personal reckoning with her own feminist activism,” writes Katharine Brabon, “serves as an apt introduction to the rest of the book, in which she presents a snapshot of contemporary feminism” (Spectrum 10 December). Reviewing the book for the Australian, Stephanie Van Schilt calls it “important” in inspiring feminist activism, while also wondering if its sense of urgency “may feel more hasty than crafted”, possibly “a stylistic inflection inherited through Ford’s op-ed journalism” (WAR 4 February).

In an extreme example of an author’s involvement in the issue, Luke Williams’ The Ice Age “offers something never before attempted by an Australian author: it investigates the allure and popularity of the illicit drug crystal methamphetamine, while simultaneously charting the writer’s spiral into addiction and ‘full-blown psychosis’ at age 34”. Despite making for a compelling book, one reviewer finds the hybrid form is a weakness in this case. “The Ice Age can’t quite decide if it wants to be a first-person account of addiction or a worthy examination of the social, political, scientific and economic factors that led to the crystallised form of the drug becoming so popular this century” (Andrew McMillen, WAR 21–22 May). In another immersive experience, food writer Richard Cornish’s My Year without Meat sees “what started as a four-week experiment for a food magazine became an instructive and gastronomic journey into vegetarianism” (Steven Carroll, Spectrum 12 August)

Other non-fiction books of 2016 emerged from authors’ proximity to tragedies. Elspeth Muir’s “startling yet somewhat uneven debut” Wasted: A Story of Alcohol, Grief and a Death in Brisbane “straddle[s] the line between memoir and journalism” as it links the death of the author’s brother “to the wider problem of binge drinking culture in Australia” (Dominic Amerena, Spectrum 23 July). In Martin McKenzie-Murray’s debut, A Murder without Motive, he tells the story of the killing of Rebecca Ryle on the way home from a pub in the northern suburbs of Perth by a young British migrant. McKenzie-Murray grew up only streets from the murder and his brother had once been friends with the murderer; the narrative moves beyond the usual conventions of true crime to become a reflection on the suburban ennui McKenzie-Murray finds rife in the area.

A year after her debut novel, Waiting Room, physician Leah Kaminsky followed up with a hybrid non-fiction book, We’re All Going to Die, in which she confronts the fear of death not just in herself but Western society broadly, relating stories from her medical practice and profiles of people who work with the dying and the dead. “Kaminsky establishes herself alongside Karen Hitchcock, another popular Australian doctor-writer who has managed to bridge the gap between the medical profession and laypeople by putting into words her experiences of caring for the rest of us” (Andrew McMillen, WAR 18–19 June). Another book on death came from a terminally ill writer, Cory Taylor, who published Dying: A Memoir soon before her death in July. Rachel Robertson calls it

a gift to us all, a book that is not afraid to navigate darkness and that sees us through to the end, to the “edge of words […] to the place where they falter and strain in the face of dying’s terrifying finality”. It is terrifying, and Taylor renders it both real and bearable. We need books like this, a guide to dying, but also, and especially, a guide to living. (ABR 382 June–July)

Alongside Cory Taylor’s final book were other non-fiction books by major fiction writers. Julia Leigh’s Avalanche is an account of the author’s failed IVF treatments. “This rigorously intimate account of Leigh’s personal experience is a clear departure from the cool elegance of her novels” (Gretchen Shirm, Spectrum 29 April). Less focused, Tim Winton’s The Boy behind the Curtain is a kind of composite memoir, a collection of 22 essays of which 16 had been previously published. It follows on from the 2015 collection, My Island Home, and Malcolm Knox writes that like the earlier book, this one “reveals some of the connective tissue between the novels and the man” (Spectrum 7 October). Peter Craven finds it

a rich and brilliant book with a great vibrancy and glow and wisdom. It has a sly account of the enigmas of Elizabeth Jolley and a vivid depiction of the annihilating horror when he discovered that the 1,200-page draft of Dirt Music was not working. (ABR December)

Helen Garner has now become as well known for her non-fiction as her fiction, and her reputation was further enhanced with a new collection of essays written over two decades. Reviewer Peter Pierce writes of “clairvoyant observation” which

runs all the way through these rich and densely textured essays, which are far more than the sum of their parts, even though each is an occasional essay in the sense that the poet WH Auden spoke of occasional poems. It’s hard to exaggerate the satisfaction to be derived from reading someone who can write as well as Garner and brings to her most apparently casual utterance […] superadded lyricism. (WAR 26–27 March)

Indigenous lawyer and novelist Larrisa Behrendt spent 12 years working on Finding Eliza: Power and Colonial Storytelling. The book is an indigenous reinterpretation of shipwreck survivor Eliza Fraser’s encounter with Aboriginal people in 1836, events which inspired Patrick White’s Fringe of Leaves:

Behrendt traces the concepts apparent in Eliza’s story through other European creations such as Coonardoo, written by Katharine Susannah Prichard in 1928; Elizabeth Durack’s invention of an Aboriginal identity to present some of her paintings; and American Marlo Morgan’s application of a “noble savage” identity to Aboriginal people that furthered her own environmental message. Behrendt is as critical of the so-called positive stereotypes of indigenous people in these and other accounts as she is of the blatantly negative ones. Her point, however, is that “these stories do not occur in a vacuum […] they meander into our value systems and our institutions”. (Babette Smith, WAR 12–13 March)

The year’s most significant biography of an artist was Ashleigh Wilson’s Brett Whiteley: Art, Life and the Other Things. Simon Caterson finds it excellent, “neither hagiography nor hatchet job […] a clear-eyed account of an artist whose output was vast, if uneven, and whose legacy looms large in the history of modern art” (ABR 384 September). Peter Craven writes that “Wilson has written a full-dress life of Whiteley that speeds and soars and never ceases to do homage to the colossal confrontation and contradiction the artist represents” (WAR 30–31 July).

Australian journalist Julia Baird’s Victoria: The Queen was named as a book of the year in the New York Times with Janet Maslin writing that the “exquisitely wrought and meticulously researched biography, brushes the dusty myth off this extraordinary monarch” (14, 22 December). Peter Craven, however, disagreed and in one of the more brutal reviews of 2016 writes, “this book will sound to some readers like something from Women’s Weekly. Victoria: The Queen is a tabloidisation of traditional biography and narrative history. It is a model of the brashest, breeziest way biography can project itself as infotainment” (WAR 24 December). What Craven found to be a “tabloid” treatment of Queen Victoria’s life others found to be a compellingly readable narrative informed by extensive research without being “mired in a mass of detail”: “Baird nails Victoria, with sympathy but not uncritically. There can be no higher praise” (Lucy Sussex, Spectrum 10 December). “Like the best biographers, Baird writes like a novelist, and her book is crammed with irresistible detail and description” (Moira Macdonald, Seattle Times 22 December).