Australia

Introduction

In a publishing feat, the anthology Fire, Flood, Plague: Australian Writers Respond to 2020 appeared in the December of the very year it was responding to. Editor Sophie Cunningham brought together 25 essays originally published on the Guardian Australia website. She writes in her introduction:

as the new year dawned — violent, smoky — there were bushfires to contend with, then air quality so dangerous my … loved ones were trapped in their house. Soon enough there were hailstorms smashing into their workplaces. More fires, floods, then the plague. On it went. We understood that summer fires followed by late summer floods were considered to be part of the cascading effect of climate change. We understood that deforestation led to an increased likelihood of pandemics, but frankly, people can’t look every which way all at once and anyway it seemed that the genie was out of the bottle, the cat was out of the bag, the tipping point had tipped and now we were in the territory of the unprecedented, the territory of pivoting, the territory of grief and loss.

Acknowledging that “many years are described as the year everything changed”, Cunningham nevertheless contends “2020 will be remembered, at least by those who lived through it, as the year the human race fell off a cliff” and that “it’s unclear how long that descent will take, how deadly it will be, and what shape we’ll be in when we land”. The anthology includes a detailed timeline of events in Australia, beginning with the Black Summer bushfires which began in September 2019 and were still burning when the country began to report Covid-19 cases in March 2020. Reviewer Adele Dumont writes that “the real achievement of Fire Flood Plague is the way it zooms out from what Jess Hill calls ‘the hour-to-hour dramas that consume us’”, giving the example of Billy Griffiths wondering whether we might now “better grasp the impact of the 1789 smallpox epidemic, which he describes as the ‘single greatest demographic catastrophe in Australian history’” or “fathom the deep wisdom of traditional fire-management practices” (Australian Book Review ¹ 428 [Jan–Feb 2021]). Jessica White notes the unrepresented voices in the anthology — those of the disabled and the young (Sydney Review of Books ² 26 March 2021).

It was a significant year for anthologies of Indigenous poetry. Fire Front: First Nations Poetry and Power Today, edited by Alison Whittaker, “celebrates both the established and emerging” of Indigenous poets, Declan Fry writing that “each contribution is notable for its vivid, breathing compulsion. Together, they speak with — and toward — a living history” (ABR 423 [Aug]). Reviewer Geoff Page calls it an “ambitious attempt to update and/or replace” Kevin Gilbert’s landmark 1988 anthology Inside Black Australia, but Page notes that whilst the “53 poems in Fire Front do much to illustrate the variety of contemporary Aboriginal poetry in English”, the “overall levels of artistry displayed tend to be below the technical accomplishment” of prominent Aboriginal actors and filmmakers (Canberra Times 1 Aug). Critic Timmah Ball finds Page’s review “laced with irritating condescension” and writes, “Settler critics have a limited reading position and when they read First Nations poetry through the lens of protest and activism, they are unable to connect with the craft and diversity within” (SRB 19 October). Guwayu — For All Times, edited by Jeanine Leane, includes poems in both First Languages and English. Leane writes, “much Aboriginal writing in Australia is still subject to imported, introduced and sometimes invasive northern hemisphere, western literary practices” but her collection “knows no such limits, borders or boundaries. The works within are not trimmed or manipulated or edited by settler editors with a settler audience in mind” (Foreword). A third Indigenous poetry anthology, Homeland Calling, edited by Ellen van Neerven, collects hip hop lyrics written by Indigenous youth; “The words are sharp and unapologetic, and each verse reads like the soundtrack to a fiery and hopeful adolescence” (Madison Griffiths, Sydney Morning Herald ³ 15 May). A fourth anthology, maar bidi: next generation black writing, edited by Elfie Shiosaki and Linda Martin, brings together poetry and prose from a Creative Writing program at the University of Western Australia. Raelee Lancaster calls it “a candid collection from this continent’s next generation of Black writers” (The Saturday Paper ⁴ 23 Jan).

The cover of the anthology After Australia, edited by Michael Mohammed Ahmad, declares “After empire, after colony, after white supremacy… twelve diverse writers imagine an alternative Australia”. The contributors are all Indigenous writers or writers of colour. “Many pieces offer an Australia beset by climate change disasters — humidity, unseasonal bushfires and floods, while systemic racism is also seen to stretch indefinitely into the horizon” (Thuy On, SP 1 Aug). Maxine Beneba Clarke writes, “After Australia offers a glimpse of a national literature that is sharp, lyrical, exciting and uncompromising”, envisaging the writers as “singing away decades of the coastal coming of age novels and rural sagas that have come to be revered and canonised as constituting the Australian literary tradition” (SMH 24 July).

Cassandra Atherton and Paul Hetherington, editors of The Anthology of Australian Prose Poetry, suggest that the form “had not been fully accepted as a legitimate part of the Australian poetry landscape”. Their anthology brings together about 160 prose poems published over the last 50 years and “points to contemporary Australian prose poetry as being a vital and dynamic form, one to which younger and diverse voices are increasingly drawn” (Des Cowley, ABR 427 [Dec]).

Living with the Anthropocene: Love, Loss and Hope in the Face of Environmental Crisis brings together Australian writers, thinkers and scientists responding to climate change. Fiona Capp writes, “The beauty of this collection is that it walks a tightrope over this chasm of self-disgust and dread without toppling into it… the quality of writing in these pieces, their delight in nature and their determination not to give in to despair make for stirring reading” (SMH 19 June); however, Jeff Sparrow finds its engagement with solutions inadequate: “Yes, we can mourn and, yes, we can memorialise. More than anything else, though, we need to fight” (SP 31 Oct).

It would be tempting to say that much of Australia’s 2020 output in poetry was based upon Shelley’s characterization of poets as “the unacknowledged legislators of the world”, but it is probably more accurate to point to their motivation as concerned citizens. Jennifer Maiden’s latest book of poetry, The Espionage Act, reflects her mission “to dramatise the aftershocks of geopolitical upheaval at the level of the domestic and intimate” as well as continuing to experiment with “two genres peculiar to Maiden: the ‘diary poem’ and the imaginary conversation” (James Jiang, ABR 419 [March]). Poems of this kind present monologues by or dialogues between public figures such as Alan Turing, Gore Vidal, Dorothy Wordsworth, and Julian Assange. Angela Gardner’s tenth book, Some Sketchy Notes on Matter, offers “an acerbic, technically assured social and environmental commentary” as “[t]he book’s six sections arc the reader from a Romantic exultance of nature through the ravages of colonialism, modernisation, globalisation, and climate change” (Anders Villani, ABR 427 [December]). Gardner’s Afterword is a rallying-call to poets as citizens (rather than as legislators), asserting her belief that “poetry can change how we see the world and our place in it, encouraging us to be open and fearless and take responsibility for our actions”.

Verse novels continued their growing niche popularity. Linda Weste’s Inside the Verse Novel: Writers on Writing places Australia “as the nation at the forefront of the publication of Anglophone verse novels” (Cassandra Atherton, ABR 424 [Sept]); Weste includes interviews with Australians Brian Castro, Geoff Page, and Alan Wearne, amongst others (see Criticism: General Studies). The verse novel Anh and Lucien by Tony Page is set in French Indochina during the Second World War and portrays same-sex love between a young Vietnamese communist serving Ho Chi Minh’s independence movement and a colonial bureaucrat. James Antoniou described this “intricately plotted” story as “a passionate, dignified, and quietly daring work, keenly alive to the sufferings and joys of forbidden love” (ABR 426 [Nov]). Another verse novel, Luke Best’s Cadaver Dog (winner of the 2019 Thomas Shapcott Prize for a poetry manuscript) uses another “plot-driven narrative”, in this case based on the Toowoomba floods of 2011 (Anders Villani, ABR 427 [Dec]).

Jill Jones’s 13^th full-length collection, Wild Curious Air, offers “detailed, sensitive poems with a ‘symposium’ scope; they step back to consider mortality and weave in astronomy, cinema, theatre, literature, and ecology” (Luke Beesley, ABR 428 [Jan–Feb 2021]). Kate Llewellyn’s Harbour: Poems 2000–2019 “displays the poet’s characteristic wit” but, in this volume, the usual “sharpness” of her voice “is somewhat softened” as the poet is “interested in observation and reflection rather than the complexities of sex, marriage, and travel”, meaning that “Harbour is more willing to let the world’s hypocrisies go largely unchecked, though it is by no means a forgiving book” (Ella Jeffery, ABR 428 [Jan–Feb 2021]).

Works of a more unusual or even experimental nature included Todd Turner’s Thorns, which is partly a collection of odes, and John A. Scott’s Shorter Lives, which “is written at an intersection between experimental fiction, biography, and poetry”, narrating “mini-biographies of famous writers — Arthur Rimbaud, Virginia Stephen (Woolf), André Breton, and Mina Loy” and figures from the art world (Michael Farrell, ABR 423 [Aug]). Described as “poetry with a performative tilt”, Noelle Janaczewska’s Scratchland consists of poems which “read more like spoken-word pieces” providing a fragmented “non-linear, anti-poetic urban landscape in which miscellaneous items wash up everywhere” (James Antoniou, ABR 426 [Nov]). Particularly experimental is Jordie Albiston’s Element: The Atomic Weight & Radius of Love, in which the poems “follow the periodic table” in selection of title (“H—ome”) and even to the extent that a stanza will have “the same number of words as the element’s radius (H = 53)” (Luke Beesley, ABR 422 [June–July]).

Reviewing Martin Johnston’s Beautiful Objects: Selected Poems, John Hawke notes the lack of any “comprehensive critical study of the poets associated with the ‘Generation of ’68’, of whom Martin Johnston was perhaps the most naturally gifted and certainly the most intellectually expansive representative”; Hawke suggests that this may be because the poets’ plan “to fully incorporate the stylistic innovations of modernist poetics and its development in postwar American models within local practice” is still an ongoing project (ABR 427 [Dec]). Hawke’s review provides a concise historical summary of this aspect of Australian poetry, noting the contrast between poets such as Jennifer Maiden, Alan Wearne, Robert Adamson and John Tranter — all of whom lived long enough to curate their work in “carefully customised selected volumes” — and poets such as Michael Dransfield, Charles Buckmaster, Vicki Viidikas and Martin Johnston, “whose careers were truncated at an earlier period” (Johnston died aged 42). Lamenting that Johnston’s work has remained out of print for almost 30 years, despite its “quality and sheer originality”, Hawke asserts that the poems “are distinctively singular”, not least because Johnston “derives little influence from those he dismisses as the ‘groovier modern Americans’, the Black Mountain and New York School poets whose example mainly underwrites the approach of his contemporaries” (ABR 427 [Dec]). James Jiang’s review of Robert Adamson’s Reaching Light: Selected Poems notes Adamson’s place as “[o]ne of the ‘Generation of ’68’ and an instrumental figure in the New Australian Poetry”, observing that “[t]he poems in this volume attest to the grace and burden of being one of Australian poetry’s great survivors — of the countercultural mythology of the ‘drug-poet’, alcoholism, and the brutalities of the prison system (recounted firsthand in his 2004 memoir, Inside Out)” (James Jiang, ABR 427 [Dec]). The selection covers four decades of Adamson’s work and is divided into a chronological sequence.

Notable debut poetry collections included Thom Sullivan’s Carte Blanche, which displayed “imagistic power”, “intense linguistic playfulness”, and exploration of “the sonic possibilities of language” (David McCooey, ABR 420 [Apr]); Ella Jeffery’s Dead Bolt, in which “the sensuousness of the lyric comes through painfully; there’s no empty beauty, which is perhaps extraordinary in a début collection” (Luke Beesley, ABR 428 [Jan–Feb 2021]), and Josephine Clarke’s Recipe for Risotto, which was criticised for relying “solely on description” but praised for its “finely rendered” and “arresting” imagery (Ella Jeffery, ABR 428 [Jan–Feb 2021]).

A controversy over a piece published by online literary journal Verity La in May 2020 highlighted ongoing issues of white privilege, racism, and censorship. Queensland writer Stuart Cooke’s creative non-fiction piece “About Lin” described the author’s exploitative sexual encounter with a Filipina woman while visiting Manila. Verity La board member, poet Eileen Chong, requested the journal remove the piece and resigned when they did not. The board added a trigger warning and a preface from the author about his intention to critique exploitation. However, the backlash on Twitter and other forums continued, worsening when Verity La blocked some of its critics. The journal then removed the piece altogether and issued an apology: “We fully accept that, in its depiction of Filipino women, the work contained racism, sexism, misogyny and disablism, and it was therefore grossly offensive”. Filipina-Australian poet Likhain wrote, “If art is meant to critique an injustice, then it is heinously poor execution (to say the least) if it must do so by amplifying the trauma of people who live in the shadow of that injustice” (Djed Press, 28 June). Eileen Chong wrote a piece for Meanjin’s blog, collecting her tweets on the controversy. Poet Alan Jefferies responded to Chong claiming the push toward censoring offensive literature “bodes ill for the future of freedom of speech and freedom of expression within our literary culture and society as a whole” (Spectator Australia, 9 July). In an ironic twist, Chong’s piece itself has been taken down as well for reasons unknown; it is, however, preserved on the National Library of Australia’s Pandora archive site while “About Lin” is not, leaving a significant hole for future scholars as Verity La has no print counterpart.

There was also some controversy over Craig Silvey’s third novel Honeybee. Liam Pieper writes, “Few authors capture the hyper-reality of adolescence so well. As Sam lurches from one calamity to the next, Silvey has a gift for making you feel the turbulence of a teenager negotiating the insecurity and inequity of the adult world” (SMH 25 Sept). Because Silvey is a cis-gender writer and his novel’s protagonist is transgender, some reviewers expressed discomfort over writers of privilege telling the stories of marginalised people. Trans-critic Oliver Reeson tried to move the conversation forward by arguing that “it isn’t necessarily damaging exploitation to employ transness as a narrative device” but “the failure that often happens when cis authors write trans identity badly is this: transness on its own has no narrative function”. Reeson was thus critical of Honeybee on literary grounds: despite the author’s good intentions, the protagonist was not seen as sufficiently complex (SRB 27 Apr 2021).

Kate Grenville’s 2005 novel, The Secret River, sparked a reaction from historians who alleged she was claiming to write history; A Room Made of Leaves, her first novel in nearly a decade, purposefully risked further controversy. Its premise is that Grenville discovered a hidden memoir written by Elizabeth Macarthur, wife of the historical pioneer of the Australian wool industry, and that Grenville was merely “transcriber and editor” of this artifact. Explosively, the manuscript reveals that Elizabeth privately disagreed with many of her own upbeat public statements about colonial life: “Elizabeth’s unease reflects a cosmopolitan anxiety of having benefited from the colonialism that dispossessed First Nations people of their land and profited from its resources” (Gretchen Shirm SP 18 July). But then, as Geordie Williamson explains: “Grenville’s author’s afterword admits the sham: ‘No, there was no box of secrets found in the roof of Elizabeth Farm. I didn’t transcribe and edit what you’ve just read. I wrote it”. Williamson declares this is “fiction as Fake News” — but then crucially adds that “rather than weaponising rumour and innuendo for divisive or defamatory ends, as is so often the case in the digital present, what Grenville has done is use imagination to lie her way to the truth” (Weekend Australian Review ⁵ 11 July). Literary reviewers agreed, with Gretchen Shirm judiciously describing Grenville’s ploy as a “conceit” (not a deceit) and Don Anderson emphasizing the novel’s underlying concern with “the rewriting of history as fiction” (ABR 424 [Sept]).

Gail Jones’ new novel Our Shadows also explores the “cosmopolitan anxiety” created by Australia’s past. Where Grenville relies upon the fictional unearthing of a buried memoir, Jones traces the unearthing of buried memories, at times drawing upon the experiences of her father and grandfather (who were underground mine workers). Set in Kalgoorlie and Sydney, the novel’s focus is upon the mining industry, which functions as both “historical context for the present-day narration” and “a complex metaphor of dispossession and despoiling”; for reviewer Sue Kossew Our Shadows is “a poetic and beautifully crafted evocation of shadowy pasts whose traumatic effects (in the world and in individual lives) stretch deep into the present and the future” (ABR 425 [Oct]).

Arguably one of the most complex novels of recent years, Richard Flanagan’s The Living Sea of Waking Dreams provoked different descriptions from reviewers as they sought to describe its narrative style. The core story concerns an old woman dying in hospital and her children’s insistence that she be kept alive at any cost. Geordie Williamson sees it as “a book in which workaday realism is increasingly marbled with magical effects” and suggests that the “fable” of the dying woman reveals “a novel centrally concerned with the concatenation of environmental crises in which we find ourselves trapped” and which “escapes the mire of consensus and dissensus that surrounds discussion of climate change by resorting to an older form of reality-shaping” (WAR 26 [Sept]). Whilst acknowledging these core themes, James Ley sees the novel as “a ‘growing scream’, prompted by the wilful ignorance and general imbecility of the present”, saying “the novel buzzes with anxiety that the centre will not hold, that language may prove inadequate to the task of addressing all the chaos and fragmentation, that maybe the false determinations of words themselves are part of the problem” (ABR 426 [Nov]). Ley’s review also provides wider discussion of Flanagan as part of “a current crop of Australian novelists, all men of roughly the same generation, whose work combines leftist politics with a distinct element of social conservatism”.

Environmental issues predominated in the year’s best speculative fiction novels. Patrick Allington’s second novel, Rise & Shine, deals with food-scarcity as it “drops us headfirst into a future in the wake of an ecological catastrophe that claimed the lives of more than eight billion people”, leaving survivor-states “constantly at war with each other” (Jack Rowland, SP 13 June) and Kate Mildenhall’s The Mother Fault pictures future Australia beset by waves of climate-change refugees and controlled by a totalitarian government which has microchipped the population. By contrast, James Bradley’s Ghost Species “assumes many characteristics of science fiction” but displays the more nuanced approach “of what Roger Luckhurst calls proleptic realism, ‘a modelling of the present day tilted five minutes into the future … within the horizon of current research’” (J.R. Burgmann, ABR 421 [May]). A program to revive the climate by resurrecting lost species is manipulated into reviving the Neanderthals, prompting one character to voice the novel’s key concern about “the misplaced belief” (of humanity and science) that climate catastrophe is just “another problem they can manage, engineer, control”. Charlotte McConaghy’s The Last Migration deals with a climate-devastated near-future in which Franny, a conservationist, sets out to follow the last-ever migration of the Arctic tern from Greenland to Antarctica. In comments which echo Bradley’s concerns with “misplaced belief”, J.R. Burgmann notes that because the novel conveys “the overwhelming sense that the world centres on Franny” the book “does little to further the sense that larger planetary stakes are unfolding”. Nevertheless, Burgmann asserts The Last Migration

is one of few Australian novels to tinker with genre in such a way that allows for climate change to feature as a contextualising given, rather than as a central narrative device. This is surprisingly rare, disconcertingly so. For while there has been a sharp increase in Australian ‘cli-fi’ in recent years … there has been little by way of works that reflect our current climate reality, some kind of new realism. (ABR 423 [Aug])

2020 saw fewer works of fiction by Indigenous writers than in previous years. Benevolence, the third novel by Julie Janson, a Burruberongal woman of Darug Aboriginal Nation, draws on “the oral histories of Darug elders and the archival snippets of [Janson’s] own great-great-grandmother” (Jessica Urwin, ABR 423 [Aug]). Set in Darug country in the early 1800s, the novel’s characters “evoke notions of belonging and benevolence in early settler Australia,” writes reviewer Urwin, who further asserts that it is “a tale close to [Janson’s] heart”: “Janson told Writing NSW that rage fuelled her writing of Benevolence: ‘I was tired of being told … that I wasn’t Aboriginal. The tiny drops of Darug blood that run in my veins are important.’”.

The Collected Stories of Shirley Hazzard appeared four years after the Australian-American writer’s death, uniting her two published volumes of stories with some previously uncollected. Hazzard grew up in Australia but lived in the USA and Italy for her adult life and just one of the stories is set in Australia. “In Hazzard’s precise fiction, devastation — in love and war — is the subject and the aim”, writes Helen Sullivan; “[Hazzard] writes about people sensitive to beauty and feeling, who are punished for it by those whose ruling planets are reason, machinery, power” (Guardian 18 Dec). Ordinary Matter, Laura Elvery’s second collection, presenting stories about Nobel Prize winning women scientists, was described as “intellectually ambitious; offering unexpected digressions and deliberately odd conjunctions; its ‘wingspan’ traversing the world from Hobart to the Grand Canyon” (Susan Midalia, ABR 424 [Sept]). According to Kerryn Goldsworthy, the title of Perth writer Elizabeth Tan’s Smart Ovens for Lonely People “should give the reader some idea of these stories’ flavour: witty, absurdist, futuristic” (SMH 12 June); Leah Jing McIntosh writes, “Tan maps Perth onto a new Australian imaginary” (SP 27 June).

Drama was the literary genre most affected by the pandemic, with productions shut down for much of the year in Australia. A number of plays were published, including Mark Rogers’ Superheroes, winner of both the Patrick White and the Griffin playwriting awards and the first post-lockdown performance of the Griffin Theatre Company. Superheroes was described as a play that “spirals its way under your skin” and “asks its audience to consider the damage that is done not just to others but to ourselves when we wilfully surrender responsibilities in our personal and political lives” (Kate Prendergast, Limelight 2 Oct). In Merilee Moss’s Running with Emus, a country town faces conflict after it decides to welcome refugees; “despite the heavy themes of racism and prejudice, [the play] manages to be emotive, poetic and powerful while simultaneously continuously engaging and deeply witty” (Flora Norton Theatre Travels 15 March). Reviewing Morgan Rose’s Desert 6:29pm, Cameron Woodhead writes that it is “wrapped in sharply observed black comedy that portrays, with voyeuristic verve, the familiar weirdness and intimate dysfunction of a lower-middle-class Australian family” (SMH 23 Oct 2017).

Signs of a renewed interest in the work of the late Beverly Farmer (1941–2018) included the reissue of her novel A Body of Water (1990) and the publication of Josephine Rowe’s On Beverly Farmer in the Writers on Writing series from Black Inc. “Rowe’s attuned reading adds layers to Farmer’s palimpsestic, citational, allusive work in an exquisitely crafted essay,” writes Felicity Plunkett (WAR 16 Jan 2021) and, according to Anna MacDonald, “Like much of Farmer’s own writing, On Beverley Farmer occupies ‘the gauzy territory’ between ‘observations and desires, memories and dreams’” (ABR 427 [Dec]).

Three volumes appeared in the flagship series Sydney Studies in Australian Literature. The collection Gerald Murnane: Another World in This One arises from a literary conference held in the small Victorian town of Goroke where he lives. In Fallen Among Reformers: Miles Franklin, Modernity and the New Woman, Janet Lee traces Miles Franklin’s difficult years in Chicago from 1906 to 1915. Rachel Franks finds it “a welcome addition to the conversation on Franklin’s life and work”, showing “there is still much that we can learn about, as well as from, Stella Miles Franklin” (Dictionary of Sydney 21 Sept). Gail Jones: Word, Image, Ethics by Tanya Dalziell is the first monograph on the work of the influential contemporary novelist. “In this work of exemplary and extensive scholarship, Tanya Dalziell enters into a kind of conversation, one between herself, as a responsive and knowledgeable guide to Gail Jones’s writing and thinking, and the texts themselves” (Delys Bird, JASAL 20[2]).

Literary scholars Ken Gelder and Rachael Weaver’s new collaboration is The Colonial Kangaroo Hunt, on which Megan Mooney-Taylor comments that “they have distilled their understanding of colonial cultural development with this one metaphor: the kangaroo hunt and its significance to the establishment and development of Australia as a colony” (JASAL 20[2]). For Danielle Clode, it “provides a surreal and disconcerting, yet convincing, evocation of our colonial history” where “the authors cast into sharp relief our own ambitions and ambiguities, our cruelty and our empathies” (ABR 423 [Aug]).

In the year she turned 90, Australia’s foremost biographer, Brenda Niall, published Friends and Rivals: Four Great Australian Writers, giving concise portraits of Henry Handel Richardson, Nettie Palmer, Barbara Baynton, and Ethel Turner and their intertwined lives. Kerryn Goldsworthy comments that in grouping children’s writer Turner with the others, “Niall normalises the notion of children’s literature and its authors as an integral part of literary history”; Goldsworthy calls the book “a formidable combination of meticulous scholarship, reader-friendly lucidity, and ideas … about the nature of feminism, biography, and Australian literary and cultural history” (ABR 421 [May]). A number of other literary biographies appeared, including David Campbell: A Life of the Poet by Jonathan Persse. Campbell (1915–1979) is described by reviewer Philip Mead as “perhaps the best-loved poet of Douglas Stewart’s post-World War II ‘Red Page’ [the literary section of The Bulletin]” (ABR 424 [Sept]). Influential academic, literary critic, and memoirist A. R. Chisholm is remembered in Stanley John Scott’s posthumously published Chis: The Life and Work of Alan Rowland Chisholm (1888–1981).

Richard Broinowski’s Under the Rainbow is the first comprehensive biography of E. W. Cole (1832–1918), the eccentric proprietor of Coles’ Book Arcade, a huge shop which was central to Melbourne’s book culture at the turn of the 20^th century. Another major Melbourne figure of the era, women’s rights campaigner Vida Goldstein (1869–1949), is the subject of Jacqueline Kent’s Vida: A Woman for Our Time. The main strengths of Vida lie in “its contextualising of the time, from ‘Marvellous Melbourne’ of the 1880s to the economic depression of the 1890s to the rigours of the World War I years and later”, and also “in Kent’s elucidation of the wider political scene” (Sylvia Martin, ABR 425 [October]). Cassandra Pybus reaches further back in time with a portrait of the Tasmanian Aboriginal woman Truganini (1812–1876) in Truganini: Journey through the Apocalypse. Truganini is opaque as a historical figure and Billy Griffiths writes that, in this biography, she “remains elusive … always seen through the eyes of others”. Noting a lack of references, he adds that “while its use as a scholarly source is limited, Truganini will reach many readers. It is written with literary flair, compassion, and insight” (ABR 420 [Apr]).

In 1970 Penguin challenged Australia’s strict obscenity laws by publishing American novelist Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint. A series of trials followed in different Australian states, with local writers called on to testify about the novel’s literary merit. The publicity and re-examination of the issues contributed to an eventual loosening of the restrictions. Peter Craven writes that “The Trials of Portnoy is a superb bringing-to-life of a time now dead, when there was a ripening of Australian culture” (SP 20 June) and James Ley sees the account of the incident as an important refuting of the “profoundly stupid and deeply irritating myth” that Australians are “irreverent freedom-loving larrikins and easygoing egalitarians, when it is painfully obvious that we have long been a nation of prudes and wowsers” (ABR 422 [June–July]).

Dual Miles Franklin winning novelist Alex Miller, now in his 80s, has turned to non-fiction for the first time with Max, a book about his late friend and mentor, the mysterious Max Blatt, who, as a communist resistance fighter in Nazi Germany, was arrested and tortured. Jane Sullivan finds it a “deeply absorbing and moving detective story, with Miller as the detective trying to track down the elusive traces of his friend” (ABR 425 [Oct]); to Joseph Cummins, it is “the most personal and vulnerable of Miller’s books” (Guardian 30 Oct). Rebecca Gigg’s Fathoms, a multi-faceted exploration of whales, was published to acclaim in Australia and the USA: “The weightiness of Giggs’s research, and her occasional drift of focus, is balanced by her bright and moving prose, which skilfully blends natural history, science, philosophy and memoir”, placing her “in the ranks of accomplished contemporary nature writers such as Philip Hoare, Robert Macfarlane and Helen Macdonald” (Justine Hyde SP 9 May). Tim Flannery declares the book “a masterpiece [in which] Giggs’s exquisite prose is so striking as to be almost poetic, pulling the reader up constantly, either to savour a particularly apposite phrase, or to ponder a deep, unexpected connection” (WAR, 29 May).

Watsonia: A Writing Life is a substantial selection of essayist Don Watson’s work, promoted as showcasing his many sides as “historian, speechwriter, commentator, humourist, nature writer and biographer”. Frank Bongornio finds that “ambivalence is the keynote in this collection”, calling Watson “a craftsman of musings, impressions, and speculations, more than one of the rollicking story or the grand argument. It is the images, and the larger realities that he gently evokes with them, that remain with you” (ABR 427 [December]).

Poet John Kinsella’s third volume of memoir, Displaced: A Rural Life, narrates the wounds of his youth in the Wheatbelt of Western Australia — bullying, guns, and environmental destruction — and his present-day project of environmental and spiritual rehabilitation, living on a property in the same region. “What Displaced describes is the slow welding of art, ecology and politics that formed Kinsella’s mature worldview,” writes Geordie Williamson, describing this as “a personal ecosystem in which ethics, aesthetics, justice, beauty and truth are interconnected” (SP 28 Mar); for Tony Hughes d’Aeth, Displaced explores “the contradictions and compassion that define one of the nation’s most significant living writers” (ABR 424 [Sept]). Helen Garner was once again the spotlight with the publication of the second volume of her diaries, One Day I’ll Remember This, covering the years 1987–1995. “Insiders will have fun puzzling over who’s who, but that’s not the point,” Nicholas Jose comments; “There’s a larger point concerning the meaning of art, who speaks for the culture, and how to live as a writer — a woman writing in Australia — that comes to the fore, as so often in Garner’s work” (ABR 427 [Dec]).

A significant debut was Ellena Savage’s Blueberries, a collection of autobiographical essays which form an overarching story about the difficult path anyone faces when dedicating their 20s to writing. “This can often be tiresome to those outside the [writing] profession,” writes Giselle Au-Nhien Nguyen, but here it is “compelling, challenging reading. Savage makes it feel like a hall of mirrors — reflective yet distorted; hyperreal — and, for her, writing seems to be an act of evolution and constant learning” (SP 28 Mar). Savage addresses the question of why anyone should write, with the answer, “Because there is a human future; maybe not a forever-future, but one beyond now. Writing is an argument for home: it believes in the future… It believes in the ongoingness, the wanton tenacity, of human beings” (199).

2020 saw the appointment of Tony Hughes-d’Aeth to the Chair of Australian Literature at the University of Western Australia — now the only publicly funded chair of its kind (Alexis Wright holds the privately-endowed Boisbouvier Chair in Australian Literature, Culture and Communication at the University of Melbourne, and Sydney University claims it will re-instate its chair — vacant since the retirement of Robert Dixon in 2019 — when it “can find a sponsor for the position” [Jordan Baker SMH 15 Oct 2019]). The year saw the deaths of poet Bruce Dawe (1930–2020) and writer, poet, and performer Dr Ania Walwicz (1951–2020) (Gina Fairley, ArtsHub 21 Dec). “It’s an end of an era in Australian writing”, said John Kinsella of Dawe’s death; “He taught many of us that poetry had a role to play in society, that it’s not an entertainment or decoration but part of the conversation of life” (quoted by Stephen Romei, The Australian 3 Apr).