Abstract
Introduction
The global COVID-19 pandemic of 2020 in which we write was preceded in Australia by a shock election result in May 2019 and the worst bushfire crisis the nation has known over the summer of 2019-20. The Labor opposition had been expected to easily take power in the federal election and end six years of the centre-right Coalition government. Those years had been marked by leadership instability, inaction on climate change and cuts to the public sector. Yet in a minor echo of the Brexit result and Donald Trump’s election in 2016, the polls were wrong by a wide margin, and prime minister Scott Morrison’s government was returned with a small majority. In Prosperity Gospel biographer Erik Jensen contrasts the confidence and certainty of Morrison – a Pentecostal Christian presenting as the “Daggy Dad” of the nation – and the personal uncertainty of opposition leader Bill Shorten, whose party brought a comprehensive suite of social democratic policies to the election (see
Fires are a threat that the Aboriginal people lived with long before the European colonisation of Australia but the Black Summer (the bushfires of December 2019 to February 2020) was unprecedented, burning 18.6 million hectares along the east coast, directly killing 34 people, and blanketing Sydney and Melbourne in smoke for weeks. More than 500 authors and illustrators responded with an #AuthorsForFireys fundraising auction on Twitter, begun by writers Nova Weetman and Emily Gale, and raising $500,000 for volunteer fire-fighters and bushfire relief. One of the iconic scenes from the crisis is of residents and tourists sheltering on the Mallacoota beach on New Year’s Eve under a red sky, the town completely surrounded by fire. Mallacoota is a small Victorian town closely associated with the poet E.J. Brady, who lived there from 1909 until his death in 1952.
Literature can rarely respond immediately to current events. However, Alice Bishop’s debut short story collection A Constant Hum was a timely release. Set in the aftermath of the 2009 Victorian bushfires, “across almost 50 stories, we step into the lives of those who survived, physically at least, the tragic and calamitous fires” (Emily Philip The Saturday Paper 1 6 July). Debra Adelaide writes, “Trauma often results in silencing, but Bishop’s remarkable achievement is in puncturing those silences. She allows her survivor characters to speak to us in voices frank and tender, chaotic and bewildered” (Australian Book Review 2 416 [Nov.]).
It may take a decade for similar responses to the 2019 Black Summer, and meanwhile there will also be the pandemic to respond to. After some early missteps, the Australian federal and state governments made a unified decision to “shut down”, closing Australia’s borders and imposing strict social distancing measures in March until the growth in cases slowed from exponential to a trickle. The effects on writers were similar to those experienced around the world with book launches and writers festivals cancelled or moved online and many writers losing income from these as well as losing momentum for their new books. One innovative response to isolation was Read Tasmania’s Lockdown Reading Group, releasing a nightly video of Australian writers reading from their work.
Meg Mundell’s The Trespassers, published in August 2019, had eerie resonances with the 2020 headlines about Covid-19 infected cruise ships moored on the Australian coast. The near-future novel is set on a ship of Britons escaping a pandemic as they seek a new life in Australia as part of a migration scheme. Wearing facemasks, the passengers live in fear they may bring the sickness with them; reviewer Bec Kavanaugh writes “[w]hen, despite all the precautions, people start to fall sick on board, fragile hope gives way to paranoia”. Reviewing before the pandemic, she calls it “a clever, complex and ambitious novel that could be about colonisation or seeking refuge; perhaps both” (Weekend Australian Review 3 17 Aug.), while Amy Baillieu writes that it is “intelligent, provocative fiction that uses unsettling echoes of historical and contemporary events to conjure a depressingly plausible future” (ABR 416 [Nov.]).
Others created more sweeping dystopian future visions. In Melissa Ferguson’s The Shining Wall, affluent technologically-enhanced humans are walled off from the mass of “demi-citizens” who battle disease and poverty in a failing eco-system. Reviewer Jacinta Mulders saw this debut novel as “impressive”, “deftly narrated”, and notable for the “entertaining and empathic” portrayal of its “brave, self-possessed heroines” (ABR 411 [May]). Alice Robinson’s second novel, The Glad Shout, presents a “pre-emptive warning” of a “doomsday Australia” with coastal cities flooded by rising sea levels and inland communities “cut off by flood waters to become islands unto themselves” (Thuy On WAR 9 March), whilst in “a story that is ecologically complex” The Old Lie by Claire G. Coleman uses a future scenario of inter-species conflict to offer “a meaty analysis of colonisation and imperialism” in an exploration of “slippages between Indigenous peoples and refugees and their mutual maltreatment and abuse at the hands of institutions, politicians, and diplomats” (Alison Whittaker, ABR 414 [Sep.]). Lucy Treloar’s Wolfe Island attracted respect for its portrayal of a woman’s life on a flooded, food-depleted island in a “vehemently anti-immigrant” near-future America where armed vigilantes hunt and kill refugees. Linda Jaivin was impressed by Treloar’s ability to walk “a thin line between the present and a dystopian future” (SP 31 August) whilst Rohan Wilson described the novel as “superb […] an enormously ambitious book […] by a serious talent” (WAR 21 September).
One problem with such speculative fictions is their use of conventional genres and forms to describe catastrophic scenarios (including the predicted impacts of climate change) which extend far beyond the conventional. Two new novels by eco-writer John Kinsella experiment with alternative strategies. Lucida Intervalla uses a “disjunctive and impressionistic” scatter of ultra-short chapters to create a narrative “in thrall to language and ideas”, with reviewer Francesca Sasnaitis regarding this as “Kinsella’s most extravagant, experimental achievement to date” (ABR 409 [March]). The title means “lucid moment” in Latin but is also the name of the anti-heroine, described by Sasnaitis as a “digital-age Machiavelli”: “[s]elf-serving and superficial, she is without moral compass. In her greed for fame, experience, power, and money […] she is the poster girl for post-feminist despotism, amusing at first but horrifying in retrospect”. The second Kinsella offering, The Hollow Earth, uses astronomer Edmund Halley’s 1692 proclamation that the Earth was hollow as a fittingly far-fetched literary conceit for present times. Unlike the monster-laden subterranean worlds of writers like Jules Verne and Edgar Rice Burroughs, Kinsella takes a Vonnegutian approach to a world that might have been designed by Ursula Le Guin, peopled with pastoral non-violent gender-neutral beings. Three of these creatures are sent to surface-Earth to assess the risk that industrialised mining will penetrate their subterranean world; “a tragic, almost vaudevillian troupe”, their outsider-observations offer naïve, stinging truth: “‘You make rules you don’t live by?’” (Chris Flynn, ABR 415 [October]).
The Yield is the first book in over ten years from Wiradjuri writer Tara Winch. Protagonist August Gondiwindi returns to her homeland to mourn the death of her grandfather, Albert Gondiwindi. The novel is narrated by three different voices – a nineteenth century missionary, August the protagonist, and Albert (whose segments consist partly of entries from a Wiradjuri dictionary he has compiled). Gretchen Shirm writes that “loss in its many iterations pervades this novel, loss of personal history, culture and language” (WAR 6 July) whilst Maria Takolander suggests that The Yield calls to mind Toni Morrison’s classic magical realist novel Beloved, in which a former slave becomes masochistically obsessed with the ghosts of her past. August is similarly, if not literally, haunted by history – by her dead father, her incarcerated mother and her missing sister Jedda (the name referencing the title character in Charles Chauvel’s 1955 film). Underlying these familial tragedies is an attempted genocide through not only frontier wars and massacres but also policies such as child removal and cultural assimilation. Is it any wonder that August – perhaps like the Wiradjuri author Winch herself, who lives in France – wanted some distance from that past? (SP 6 July).
Ellen van Nerveen says “[a]dmirers of Kim Scott’s Taboo and Melissa Lucashenko’s Too Much Lip will enjoy Winch’s Aboriginal realism” and predicts “The Yield will appeal to many because of the way it unpacks complex themes in an accessible way” (ABR 413 [August]). Whilst deeply impressed by this novel, reviewers acknowledged certain weaknesses: “[t]here are only a few places where Winch’s delivery is too didactic” (van Nerveen) and “The Yield’s narrative momentum is not always strong, and minor characters are sometimes too thinly drawn and come across as an indistinct cluster of names. However, these are petty criticisms in light of such aesthetically and ethically ambitious and inspiring writing” (Takolander).
The White Girl by Tony Birch also celebrates the resilience of Aboriginal women whilst deploring their need for it. Sandra R. Phillips observes that “[t]hematically, The White Girl extends family love beyond home and hearth into the brutality of colonisation. Few of our families were left untouched by the genocidal and repugnant policy of removing children from their Aboriginal families. In portraying an Aboriginal family, it isn’t possible to avoid the tentacles of that brutality” (ABR 413 [August]). Describing the central character as “that powerful Aboriginal Everywoman – the one who carefully considers every event, every moment, the one who is always weighing up action and reaction, the one who suffers the losses of loved ones […], the one who makes a home with her bare hands”, Phillips concludes that “[i]f The White Girl achieves anything in addition to its literary merits, it will be to puncture the widely held fallacy about the place of ‘good intentions’ in governments’ stealing children from their Aboriginal families and ancestral country”.
In a 2019 profile of Tara Winch in The Guardian, Sian Cain made a strongly-felt observation about the difficulties and injustices faced by Indigenous authors. Having recounted the details of a 2009 media report claiming Winch was too fair-skinned to qualify for roles requiring Indigenous heritage, Cain pauses to reflect: But ask yourself: how would you have coped with being humiliated before your entire nation, when you were actually 25? How would you deal with a lengthy court battle that would reach Australia’s federal court, that would end with your accuser found guilty of contravening the Racial Discrimination Act but who stood defiant on the court steps, refusing to apologise? (Sian Cain, The Guardian, 11 July 2019)
Sadly, Indigenous writer Bruce Pascoe endured a similar experience in 2019, when, as reported by Paige Taylor in The Weekend Australian, “[o]ne of Professor Pascoe’s most vocal critics, Aboriginal entrepreneur Josephine Cashman, asked Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton for an investigation of Professor Pascoe for alleged ‘dishonesty offences’” (“Author’s black identity queried”, 11 Jan 2020, p.8). The Minister subsequently referred the matter to the Australian Federal Police for an assessment of the allegation that Pascoe had benefited financially from wrongly claiming to be Indigenous. The outcome of the matter, as reported by Lorena Allam in The Guardian, was that the complainant has been sacked from her government advisory role, after allegations that she provided a faked letter from a senior Aboriginal leader as part of a campaign to discredit the author Bruce Pascoe. In a brief statement, the minister for Indigenous affairs, Ken Wyatt, said Cashman’s actions were “not conducive to the constructive and collaborative approach” needed on the advisory council…. (“Josephine Cashman sacked from Indigenous advisory body after letter published by Andrew Bolt”, 28 January 2020).
Bruce Pascoe’s 2019 publication, Salt: Selected Stories and Essays, assembles “the finest of his lifetime’s work […] 10 new short stories along with some previously published gems, and some of the best essays on Australia I ever hope to read” (Melissa Lucashenko, WAR 11 January 2020). For Steve Kinnane, “Salt is layered with tender, ribald, and at times dark characterisations of people, place, memory, and belonging – deeply informed by Pascoe’s humanist values” and “[t]hese narratives are drawn from Pascoe’s writer’s eye and ear and from his personal experience of Australia and Australians over a lifetime of traversing Aboriginal countries spanning the continent”. It is “[t]his tacit experience of peoples and country [which] is the volume’s strength” (ABR 416 [November]).
In the judgement of Maria Takolander, The Weekend by Charlotte Wood “is her best work yet” and “one of the best novels of the year” (SP 5 October). Three elderly women gather at the holiday house of a deceased friend to sort her final possessions. Felicity Plunkett explains how Wood moves slowly from one character to another, drawing back and forth like the tide, patiently accumulating expository details. The women’s collective narrative is shell-like: its weathered surface curls protectively around secrets and tenderness. In some parts this surface has worn translucent; in others, callouses and scars have formed over injuries. As if on holiday, each woman is severed from her ordinary life, becalmed for a few days between the past with its detritus and treasure, and a future lit by flares of hope and fear. (ABR 416 [November])
Wood is “particularly interested in women and women’s relationships, and these are scrutinised here without sentimentality, though not without humour” (Takolander).
Women’s experience is also explored in novels by Sonia Orchard and Marcella Polain. In Orchard’s Into the Fire, 30-something Lara returns to the place where her long-time friend died in a fire. Feeling “liberated” in a world shaped by Germaine Greer, Women’s Studies, the pill and no-fault divorce, the two friends believed their lives would be different from their mothers’ and that women of their generation would finally “have it all”. Keyvan Allahyari notes that Orchard’s writing “is intimate and animated, with a lullaby quality” and sees the novel as “[p]art homage to motherhood, part critique of third-wave feminism[;] Into the Fire is a powerful discernment of the complexity and fragility of human behaviour” (ABR 411 [May]). According to Stephen Dedman, Marcella Polain Driving into the Sun does “an excellent job of capturing the inner emotional landscape of a young girl growing up fatherless in Perth’s outer suburbia in the 1960s”, impeccably recreating “an era of television westerns and Bakelite phones”; for Dedman the novel “deserves to share shelf space with [Randolph Stow’s] The Merry-Go-Round in the Sea and [Robert Drewe’s] The Shark Net for its evocative description of Australian childhood in a much-mythologised decade” (ABR 411 [May]).
The stories in Debra Adelaide’s Zebra and Other Stories examine “what it means to be a good neighbour” in contemporary Australia. Zebra is “full of fences, backyards, and divided spaces, and full of people making choices about the extent of their kindness and compassion for those on the other side” (David Haworth, ABR 399 [March]). Like Polain, “Adelaide is in the great tradition of (mainly) female writers who map the psychological via quotidian detail” and thus “[t]he domestic spins busily through all 14 of these stories” (Helen Elliott, The Monthly March), yet in thematic focus the pieces “exhibit a restless and ambitious desire to examine many of the core myths that Australia as a nation tells about itself – myths about our First Peoples, asylum seekers, the Anzacs, and our elected leaders” (Haworth).
Australian playwright Patricia Cornelius won the prestigious international Windham-Campbell prize in 2019, and appropriately a collection of her plays was also published, Lovely Lovely Sometimes Ugly. The judges’ citation says her work “channels the power of resisting received literary tradition in order to open up a space where the lives of characters on the margins can become vessels of universal truths”. The collection includes her acclaimed play, Love, about a trio of drug addicts. Reviewing it, Alison Croggon writes that Cornelius’s plays “are tough, poetic dramas that walk an edge of abstraction, often concerning themselves with characters who exist beyond the pale of conventional society” and are “as much concerned with the wounds of class as those of gender” (SP 8 June).
Suzie Miller’s play Prima Facie, winner of the Griffin Award, is another significant text in the continuing literary expression of the #MeToo movement. Bryoni Trezise writes that it “puts on the record that women’s experiences of assault have been silenced for as long as women have been abused by men and systems of power”; the play “offers similar insight into the legal system to Queensland author Bri Lee’s award-winning 2018 memoir, Eggshell Skull…. It is punchy, leaving almost no time for pause – witty and despair-making in equal measure” (The Conversation 28 May).
#MeToo: Stories from the Australian Movement is an appropriately diverse anthology, collecting 35 voices across the genres of personal essay, fiction, and poetry as writers reflect on naming and responding to sexual misconduct against women, trans, and non-binary folk. “The value of stepping outside the news cycle to reflect on the deeper dimensions of #MeToo is potently demonstrated by the kaleidoscopic range of contributions” (Zora Simic, ABR 412 [June-July]). Maxine Beneba Clarke concludes that “[f]or the Australian #MeToo movement, this book feels like both war-cry and manifesto – a comfort, a realisation and a reckoning” (Sydney Morning Herald 4 28 June). Reviewer Linda Jaivin was more critical of the anthology, highlighting its omissions, its “peak ‘wokenness’” and its Melbourne-centredness (SP 11 May) and Zora Simic felt the collection does not demonstrate that there is a distinctively “Australian movement” as indicated by the sub-title. Other anthologies attuned to recent topical issues included Everything Changes: Australian Writers and China: A Transcultural Anthology; Choice Words: A Collection of Writing about Abortion and Arab, Australian, Other: Stories on Race and Identity.
Black Inc published two new anthologies in its Growing up in Australia series, which gives voice to marginalised cultures and identities. Growing up African in Australia “offers a counterpoint to the headline-grabbing politicians who would have us believe that Africans in Australia are merely members of gangs” (Melissa Phillips SMH 26 April). Geraldine Fela writes of Growing up Queer in Australia that “[i]n a pleasing departure from the sanitised ‘Love is love’ messaging that has saturated so much of LGBTIQ politics”, most stories in the anthology have “a grittiness” to them and “are about learning to negotiate the realities of queer life: desire, sex (both good and bad), HIV, breakups and breakdowns” (Journal of Australian Studies 44.1). Like the #MeToo anthology, these books include a diversity of genres.
The death in 2019 of Australian poet Les Murray has been likened in its significance to “the passing of Victor Hugo, after which, as Stéphane Mallarmé famously wrote, poetry ‘could fly off, freely scattering its numberless and irreducible elements’” (John Hawke, ABR 416 [Nov.]). Says Hawke, “Murray’s subsumption of the Australian nationalist tradition in poetry, including The Bulletin schools of both the 1890s (A.G. Stephens) and 1940s (Douglas Stewart), has delineated an influential pathway in our literature for more than fifty years”. Coincidentally, 2019 saw publication of Michael Farrell’s Ashbery Mode, a commemorative anthology of homages to American poet John Ashbery (1927-2017), which for Hawke demonstrates “the impact of Ashbery’s work on several generations of local poets, which has in many respects constituted a counter-stream to Murray’s often narrowly defined nationalism” (ABR 416 [Nov.]).
2019 also saw posthumous publication of The End of the Line, the final poetry collection by Sydney poet Rae Desmond Jones (who died in 2017), whilst fiction writer Gerald Murnane – described by The New York Times as “the greatest living English-language writer most people have never heard of” (Maria Takolander, SP 9 Feb.) – issued his first poetry collection, Green Shadows and Other Poems, as “a kind of valediction” after deciding at the age of 80 that he has written all the fiction he intends to write. Takolander observes that “Murnane self-reflexively identifies his poetry as driven by feeling…. He is, as he writes in ‘The Darkling Thrush’, ‘urged / to examine my mood, then to find / its precise cause, and afterwards to try / to explain it in these sorts of words’.”
Much attention was paid to Robert Harris’s The Gang of One: Selected Poems, published twenty-six years after Harris’s death in 1993. Selected by Judith Beveridge and introduced by Philip Mead, the publication “was assisted by donations from more than ninety people, including a roll-call of Australian poets” (Judith Bishop, ABR 413 [August]). A former Navy seaman, Harris was best known for his long poem on the wartime loss of the HMAS Sydney and the award-winning sequence “JANE, Interlinear” which tells the story of Lady Jane Grey, crowned queen of England for nine days. Peter Craven describes The Gang of One as “a humblingly grand book, a magnificent testament to the deliberate art and moral vision of one of the most significant poets to appear in this country in the 20th century” (WAR 10 August) (see also
Phyllis Perlstone’s The Bruise of Knowing examines moral issues relating to ambition and power through poems recounting the story Sir John Monash, “a talented engineer and commander [whose] progress was conflicted by religious bigotry, the rise of feminism and a growing awareness within himself of the devastation wrought by war” (Margaret Bradstock, Cordite 7 Oct.). Writing in a more personal vein, Peter Boyle won the Kenneth Slessor Award in the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards for Enfolded in the Wings of a Great Darkness, “a kind of livre composé covering the twenty months which begin with the author’s discovery that his partner is suffering from an incurable disease” (Martin Duwell Australian Poetry Review 11 Dec.) Also written from a highly personal perspective, Anna Jacobson’s first full-length collection, Amnesia Findings, won the Thomas Shapcott Poetry Prize. Geoff Page explains that “[m]ost of its poems gather around two centres; the poet’s experience of serious mental illness a few years ago and her more recent examination (and sensuous evocation) of her Jewish ancestry” (WAR 7 Dec.). Suzanne Edgar’s Catching the Light demonstrates her appreciation of “the continuing resources of rhyme, metre and cadence”, presenting poems which are at all times “clear, focused and make a definite point” (Geoff Page WAR 7 Dec.), qualities also present in Greg Tome’s second collection, Tilting at Time, which uses moods of playfulness and serious reflection to ruminate on the relationships, things, places and spaces which are central to everyday life.
Lisa Gorton’s Empirical ”shows continuities with Gorton’s two earlier collections, especially with regard to a repeated concern with places and things” (David McCooey ABR 415 [October]) but introduces “a new development” through “the use of a ‘transcriptive poetics’ of bricolage – in which Gorton quotes from and adapts literary and archival works to produce original poetry”. McCooey rates this “an astonishing achievement” which is “perhaps most especially notable in the way it fuses a (postmodern) transcriptive poetics with the (post-Romantic) intensity of lyric poetry”. Brendan Ryan’s The Lowlands of Moyne continues the preoccupation with place and the everyday in recounting “a dairy farm childhood in vivid, almost olfactory recall”, proving that “outstanding poetry can be wrought from the hard and ordinary details of physical labour” (Geoff Page, WAR 7 Dec.).
Andy Kissane’s fifth collection, The Tomb of the Unknown Artist, contains the poem “Alone Again” which was judged the 2015 poem of the year by Australian Poetry Journal; it imagines the poet’s final moments on earth. Part Three of the collection attracted particular praise for its sequence exploring the physical and psychological scars of war from the perspective of a Vietnam veteran; for Broede Carmody “there is a stomach-dropping turn in the award-winning poem ‘Rock the Baby’s’” (SMH 18 May). Paul Hetherington’s Moonlight on Oleander is devoted to the form of the prose poem, which has “recently become very popular” in Australia “with at least one well-known poet, Cassandra Atherton, writing solely in the genre” (Geoff Page, WAR 2 March). Page also commends Steve Armstrong’s first book, Broken Ground, which expresses “love of nature, as it is rather than as it’s romanticised, and an openness to its metaphysical implications” (WAR 2 March).
The sparsely populated Northern Territory is significant to Australian identity and mythology as outback and frontier but the editors of Borderlands, a new literary journal by Territorians, note that “the stories of the Territory most often published are by visiting writers from elsewhere”, resulting in “a lack of the intimacy and nuance that can only derive from a lived experience” (https://borderlands.cdu.edu.au/about/). An online pilot issue was published in November along with a special online issue of Westerly featuring Territorian writers, with a print issue to follow in 2020 (see
Turning to Criticism, the Queensland Review dedicated an issue to new engagements with the work of the novelist Thea Astley (1925-2004). “Fifteen years since Astley’s death, the appearance of this collection of essays marks the development of a growing body of biographical and critical studies of her work”, writes Susan Sheridan in the introduction; “most of Astley’s novels and story collections are in print, and they are being read in new ways, with new eyes and in new contexts”. The collection includes a reconsideration of the measures of literary reputation with Astley as a case study, an examination of her sympathetic depictions of homosexuality, and reviews of three major works which have appeared since 2015 – an Astley biography, an edited collection of essays, and a selection of her poems.
In Beyond Words: A Year with Kenneth Cook, Jacqueline Kent sheds new light on the life and career of Cook, reclaiming him as more than the author of the outback gothic classic, Wake in Fright (1961). In this account of their brief marriage cut short by Cook’s sudden death in 1987, Kent “brings the same precise prose she does to her biographies and journalism, offering clear, lucid and often wryly funny reflections on love, feminism, literature and more” (Sunil Badami, Southerly 78.3). Reviewer Rachel Robertson calls Jessica White’s Hearing Maud a “remarkable work of creative non-fiction … a sophisticated hybrid of memoir, biography, and critical disability studies” as it intertwines the author’s own story of growing up deaf with an account of the life of Maud Praed (1874-1941), the daughter of Australian novelist Rosa Campbell Praed, a deaf woman who was institutionalised for the last four decades of her life (ABR 414 [Sep.]). (See
Cathy Perkins’ debut biography, The Shelf Life of Zora Cross, is an account of the now-forgotten Cross (1890-1964), whose poetry collection Songs of Love and Life shocked Australia in 1917 with its frank eroticism. Structured around chapters on her relationships with other literary figures of the time, Brenda Niall calls this “a beguiling narrative of a literary career that never quite matured” (ABR 417 [Dec.]). Mary Hoban’s An Unconventional Wife: The Life of Julia Sorrell Arnold is also a biography of a forgotten woman. Arnold, a Tasmanian, was sister-in-law to the poet Matthew Arnold, mother of the anti-suffrage novelist Mary Augusta (“Mrs Humphry”) Ward, and grandmother to Aldous Huxley. Restoring her from the background of her well-known family, “Mary Hoban has by-passed poets and thinkers, churchmen and colonial administrators to create a spirited biography” (Brenda Niall, SMH 24 May). (See
Journalist Stan Grant published two books on his dual identity as an Australian and an Aboriginal man – his second collection of writings, Australia Day, and the brief volume On Identity. Sarah Maddison says Grant “writes of unresolved, and perhaps unresolvable questions – the tension between ‘a deep Aboriginal spirit and the yearning to be Australian’ lead him to wonder whether he can ‘live in the Enlightenment and the Dreaming?’” and “whether he can ‘be black and white?’”; according to Maddison, Grant “concludes that if he cannot first and foremost be Australian he is not sure he can ‘really be anything’” (SMH 17 May). Also reviewing Australia Day, Bruce Pascoe finds it “a disturbing book, but incredibly even-handed, as any decent argument should be. Here is a chance to reflect, maybe even to formulate. We still have that chance to consider our nation without the bluster of bullies” (ABR 413 [Aug.]) (see
Australian crime fiction deserves a special mention in the 2019 bibliography, with author, academic and reviewer David Whish-Wilson reporting These are exciting times when the new normal for Australian crime fiction is strong domestic interest and sales, but also international attention in the form of Australian-only panels at overseas writers’ festivals, plus regular nominations and awards in Germany, the United States, and the United Kingdom. Whether this is a literary fad or sustainable in the long term – with Australian crime fiction becoming a recognisable “brand” in the manner of Scandi-noir or Tartan-noir – will depend largely upon the sustained quality of the novels produced here. (ABR 418 [Jan.-Feb. 2020])
Whish-Wilson observes that “a strong and savvy ecosystem of independent publishers” has ensured “Australian crime novels rarely feel as though they’re the over-hyped or rushed-to-print product of authors struggling to meet the demands of multi-book deals”. Reviews of 2019 crime titles suggest that the year’s best works were Christian White’s The Wife and the Widow, Garry Disher’s Kill Shot, Dervla McTiernan’s The Scholar, and Whish-Wilson’s own True West. 2019 also saw important final collections of work from two of Australia’s greatest crime writers, both of whom died in 2018. Peter Corris (the creator of Cliff Hardy) is represented by See You at the Toxteth: The Best of Cliff Hardy and Corris on Crime and Peter Temple (creator of Jack Irish) by The Red Hand: Stories, Reflections and the Last Appearance of Jack Irish.
Readers might also be interested in Kaleidoscope: The Colours of Katharine, a collection commemorating the 50th anniversary of Katharine Susannah Prichard’s death (see
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
The compilers acknowledge that they live and work on Whadjuk Nyungar Boodjar.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.