Australia

Introduction

Australia spent 2021 trying to limit the spread of Covid-19, before finally admitting defeat in the face of the Delta variant and letting it run through the community. Most Australians were in lockdown for many weeks; Melbourne, the most affected city, was subject to 262 days of restricted movement over 2020 and 2021. The headlines, meanwhile, were dominated by a slow roll-out of Covid vaccines. One anthology was a direct response to the Covid experience, Lockdown Poetry: The Covid Long Haul, edited by Rose Lucas. “In these poems,” writes reviewer Belinda Calderone, “I was struck by the beautiful detail, the naming of specific flora and fauna, as though our shrunken worlds encouraged us to look at things more closely”. Calderone observes that “the pandemic threw everything we knew into flux, forcing us to look at our lives anew, and sometimes to shed parts of ourselves we had long held on to…”, adding that “[i]n times of collective suffering throughout human history, poets are the ones who are able to name what seems unnameable” (Rochford Street Review, 8 April, see Anthologies). As a coda to the release of How to End a Story: Diaries 1995–1998 (the third volume of her diaries — see below), Helen Garner separately published her “Lockdown Diaries” in The Monthly:

As the world closes in on itself, the simplest acts grow mythic. A woman reports shifting a tree in her garden that was not thriving: “I used a mattock. I lifted it above my head. The dirt fell all over me.” A nurse in ICU sets up a laptop for a woman to hear her grandchildren singing to her while she dies. An Olympic diver on the high platform turns her back on the abyss, places her palms beside her feet, and unfolds with terrifying slowness into a perfect, motionless handstand. (The Monthly October, see Non-Fiction)

For The Curve: A Playwright’s Time Capsule, Vanessa Bates and other playwrights formed a virtual writing group to produce a “time capsule” of monologues and scenes representing their pandemic experience (see Drama). Filipino-Australian writer Merlinda Bobis’s story collection The Kindess of Birds is, for reviewer Lisa Hill, “the first book I’ve read that specifically addresses the pandemic and how kindness has nursed us through the difficult times” (ANZ Litlovers, 22 June). Another collection which intermittently reflected on the Covid lockdown was The Incompleteness Book II: Writing Back and Thinking Forward; the editors asked contributors to consider “the incompleteness of human experience” in order to provide “a multi-focal expression of: Where to, from here?” (see Anthologies). The “Where to?” question references drama by Tim Byrne’s “A Plague on all our Houses: How Theatre Companies are Coping after Lockdown” (see Criticism: General Studies).

Carrying on the momentum of the #MeToo movement, there was a significant reckoning over the handling of rape allegations in federal politics, after a political staffer alleged she had been raped in the parliament building, only for the allegation to be initially suppressed. In a separate matter, a historical allegation of rape against the attorney-general was also revealed. Ensuing anger spilled over into a “Women’s March 4 Justice” in 40 locations around Australia, including Parliament House in Canberra. The essays in Women of a Certain Rage, edited by Liz Byrski, serve as “homage to second-wave feminism and a lament that feminism, ‘originally a radical countercultural movement’, has been ‘distorted into a tool of neoliberalism’”, with the collection seeking to draw attention to revitalised “contemporary feminisms, as well as broader feminism-informed political movements and the work that they have done and continue to do” (Caitlin McGregor, Australian Book Review ¹ 429 [March], see Anthologies). Critical studies such as Nicole Moore’s “‘I’ll Tell My Mother’: Dorothy Hewett and Literary Feminism After #MeToo” and Jane Scerri’s “Single Motherhood as a Site for Feminist Reimagination in Helen Garner’s Monkey Grip and ‘Other People’s Children’” continued the scholarly engagement with these issues in relation to literature (see Criticism: Studies on Individual Writers).

Work by indigenous writers continued to be received with acclaim. Shortlisted for literary awards in NSW, Queensland, and Victoria, and winner of the Stella Prize and the Australian Book Industry Award for Small Publishers’ Adult Book of the Year, Evelyn Araluen’s Dropbear is a collection of poetry and essays which “asks readers to listen closer to the stories that underwrite the project of settler colonialism” and to unravel “the racism coded in … childhood ‘Australiana’ classics as Snugglepot and Cuddlepie (1918) and Blinky Bill (1933)” whilst also “holding to account such figures as soldier Watkin Tench and poet Banjo Paterson” (Nadia Rhook, Westerly Online n.d.). Jeanine Leane writes that “Dropbear is blunt, biting and beautifully crafted”, offering “a radical and timely affront to the history, the myths, the gossip and the stereotypes that still confront us all as the Country’s First Peoples” (Sydney Review of Books ² 7 June, see Poetry). Veronica Gorrie’s Black and Blue: A Memoir of Racism and Survival was Shortlisted or Commended for numerous awards, as well as winning the Victorian Premier’s Awards for Literature and for Indigenous Writing. A Kurnai and Gunditjmara woman, the author served as a member of the Queensland Police Service for ten years. As Meriki Onus notes, the title of the autobiography is “a play on the old saying ‘black and blue’, which commonly refers to someone covered in bruises”, though here it also relates to tensions between the black community and the blue-uniformed police. “Black and Blue”, says Onus, “is a story about family and the struggles of a single parent, survival, and colonialism, as well as the process of truth-telling from a survivor of family violence who is also an undercover hero on the frontier of modern-day colonial brutality in Queensland” (ABR 436 [October], see Letters and Auto/biography). The story collection Dark as Last Night by indigenous writer Tony Birch won the Christina Stead Prize (see Fiction), and in the estimation of reviewer John Kinsella some of the poems in Birch’s second poetry collection, Whisper Songs, “rate alongside his best fiction. … [T]he book merges personal-family vignettes and snippets of early memory with questions of flow and connection, loss and prejudice, finding ways through” (Weekend Australian Review 28 August). Fiannuala Morgan’s monograph Aboriginal Writers and Popular Fiction: The Literature of Anita Heiss focuses critical attention on the eponymous Wiradjuri writer, arguably one of the first Aboriginal Australian authors of popular fiction (see Criticism: Studies on Individual Authors).In her new novel, Bila Yarrudhanggalangdhuray (“River of Dreams” in Wiradjuri), “Heiss gives us a somewhat more nuanced portrait of a range of black-white relationships, always insidious because the white side of the equation has the power and dominion” (Jane Sullivan, ABR 432 [June], see Fiction). The recognition of indigenous contributions to Australia was also reflected in two biographies, Tongerlongeter: First Nations Leader and Tasmanian War Hero by Henry Reynolds and Nicholas Clements, and William Cooper: An Aboriginal Life Story by Bain Attwood (see Letters and Auto/biography).

Indigenous work was also important in the year’s poetry. Shortlisted for three poetry awards and winner of the 2022 WA Premier’s Prize for an emerging writer, Homecoming, by Noongar and Yawuru writer Elfie Shiosaki, was hailed as an “exquisite hybrid work [which] develops a new poetics of the archive” by Tony Hughes-d’Aeth; comparing it to Charmaine Papertalk Green’s Nganajungu Yagu, he adds that Homecoming, too, is “a matrilineal memoir that reclaims and re-creates culture, country, and memory” (ABR 438 [December]). Homecoming is the culmination of “five years’ research and engagement with state archives to wrest the stories of ancestors away from the coloniser’s deficit discourses and defeatism”, explains reviewer Jeanine Leane, the aim being “to reinterpret them as narratives of determination and resistance, of women navigating protectionism and assimilation to hold their families together”. Leane comments that “by restoring agency to her grandmothers, Shiosaki reclaims the power and control the state once held over their lives” and as a result “the archive is recast as a place that holds the conversations and knowledges of matriarch-ancestors who still live and breathe through the past like a ‘second heartbeat’, despite the oppressive efforts of the state to silence and destroy them” (ABR 433 [July]). Homecoming tells the story of four generations of Noongar women, of which Elfie Shioski is the sixth.

Stephen Edgar’s The Strangest Place: Collected Poems draws on ten collections published since 1985. His qualities are, for Kevin Hart, “elegance and lightness of touch”, “plain speech” and “the relish of drawing an apt distinction”; now in his early seventies, Stephen Edgar “has assembled a body of work that is as durable as any poetry written in his generation” (Mascara Literary Review 6 October). Reviewing A Thousand Crimson Blooms, Eileen Chong’s fifth poetry collection, James Jiang writes, “There is a pristine plainness about Chong’s characteristic idiom that rises in certain poems to the consciously attenuated lyricism of Classical Chinese” (ABR 433 [July]), while for Terri Ann Quan Sing it is “a collection that allows us to look at the sensuous world through a pinhole camera … tight and perfect poems burning with intensity and sensuality” (SRB 2 December). Poet Emily Sun’s debut collection Vociferate | 詠 uses the term translanguaging to acknowledge her creative process as “a complex personal rhetoric unafraid to push past boundaries when necessary. Words in Cantonese and Mandarin script break through … There’s French and Latin too, and everywhere, a sense of the malleability of … English”. For Nicholas Jose, “Sun’s poetry finds points of stillness, but cannot stay still for long. It is spiky, probing, unexpected in its lateral moves” (ABR 435 [September], see Poetry).

September 2021 marked the 50^th anniversary of Australian drama publisher Currency Press, which continued to publish plays in the midst of lockdown and border closures. Dylan Van Den Berg’s play Milk won the Nick Enright Prize for Playwriting in the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards; it explores a young indigenous man’s exploration of self, asking if the passage of time weakens connection to Country. Them, by Samah Sabawi, concerns the experience of five young people awaiting a boat to take them from a nameless city torn by war, and Joanna Murray-Smith’s Berlin centres upon a growing romance between a Berliner and a foreigner.

Miles Franklin’s novel My Brilliant Career (1901) is a landmark in Australian literature, a bold feminist depiction of growing up as a young woman in Federation-era Australia. Its adaptation to the screen in 1979 by Gillian Armstrong was a high-point in the 1970s Australian film industry golden age. Kendall Feaver’s adaptation for the stage “bring[s]… to life” the “joyous anger” of the original, according to reviewer Cassie Tongue (Guardian 14 Dec 2020). In an interview with Peter Craven, Feaver said, “Every time I directly quoted the book, we found it was quite flat on the stage, so I’ve tried to inhabit that voice, honour her by writing within it” (Saturday Paper ³ 4 Dec 2020). Reviewer Catherine Skipper writes,

In her illuminating and dynamic stage adaptation of Miles Franklin’s My Brilliant Career writer Kendall Feaver has included material from further afield than the original, drawing on [the novel’s 1946 sequel] My Career Goes Bung, Franklin’s childhood memoirs and biographical studies. Consequently, we have a fuller and deeper impression of Sybylla Penelope Melvyn…. (South Sydney Herald 16 Dec 2020)

Playing Beatie Bow is a stage adaptation by Kate Mulvany of Ruth Park’s moving 1980 Young Adult novel about a misfit Sydney teenager who finds herself caught in a timeslip and trapped in the Sydney of 1873 (see Drama)

A year ahead of playwright David Williamson’s eightieth birthday in 2022, his autobiography Home Truths was published. Matthew Condon writes that it

unfurls a sweeping and surprising life. It is a potpourri of Australian middle-class mores, exciting cultural schisms in the nation’s theatre fuelled by young men and women who would go on to change the face of stage and screen, the politics of the day, love trysts and betrayal, backstage drama, fame and financial success, family, enemies made and friends lost, marriage and divorce, all backdropped by Williamson’s remarkable work. (Weekend Australian Review, 25 September)

Kerrie Davies comments on the way the book reflects on the ethics of autobiography and art, writing that “Williamson is now a reformed ‘Bad Art Friend’ and ‘Bad Art Husband’ who learnt to show those who inspire him drafts before they see themselves as art. His candour includes acknowledging the pain that he has sometimes caused off stage [by using autobiographical material]” (The Conversation 20 October, see Letters and Autobiography).

In fiction, Michael Winkler’s debut, Grimmish, the story of a real-life boxer named Joe Grim who toured Australia in 1908 and 1909, became the first self-published work to be long-listed — and then the first to be short-listed — for Australia’s most prestigious literary prize, the Miles Franklin Award. The book’s difficulties in finding a regular commercial publisher were no doubt because its experimental aspects made it difficult to classify: “Grimmish combines fiction with non-fiction, highbrow allusions with lowbrow humour, and avant-garde gestures with sincere discussions of mental illness and personal failure,” observes Emmett Stinson. It also features a talking goat. The book’s narrator calls it “an exploded non-fiction novel”, which is probably as good a description as any, says Stinson, calling it “probably the most unusual Australian book I will read in 2021, and, without a doubt one of the best” (Overland 22 June). Championed by a literary agent, Grimmish developed a cult following and praise from writers like J.M. Coetzee and Murray Bail; its underground success has culminated in not just the Miles Franklin shortlisting but a contract with publisher Puncher & Wattmann.

Two other debut novels were longlisted for the Miles Franklin Award. Max Easton’s The Magpie Wing is a coming-of-age novel set in the suburbs of Western Sydney which Caitlin Doyle-Markwick sees as “an enjoyable if rough-around-the-edges story about the search for community and fulfilment, in a world where both can feel hopelessly out of reach” (SP 30 October); Alex Cothren notes its “impressive restraint for a debut novelist” with “characters’ lives … never forced into neat knots of resolution” (ABR 438 [December]). Alice Pung’s debut novel, One Hundred Days, explores the battle for control between a pregnant teenage girl and her mother living in a housing commission flat. Reviewer May Ngo describes this as “real life in Melbourne in the eighties” about “a girlhood that is indelibly formed by race and most of all — by class” (SRB, August 19). Also longlisted for the Miles Franklin, The Other Half of You by Michael Mohammed Ahmad is a sequel to his two previous novels, The Tribe (2014) and The Lebs (2018), and continues the story of Bani, a young Lebanese Muslim living in Western Sydney. According to Shannon Burns, “The Other Half of You is an account of Bani’s late teens and early twenties, and of an inner conflict between religious, cultural, and romantic pieties” (ABR 434 [August]).

The novel which won the Miles Franklin Award, Jennifer Down’s Bodies of Light, spans 1975 to 2018 and is set in Australia, New Zealand and America. Dealing with “child sexual abuse, a suicide attempt, a series of fractured relationships, allegations of infanticide, recurring social alienation, and a serious drug addiction”, the novel is “mercifully, a story of a woman’s remarkable resilience, the possibility of human kindness, and the necessity of hope” (Susan Midalia, ABR 436 [October]). Midalia detects “affinities with the feminist Bildungsroman popularised in the 1960s and 1970s”; reviewer Declan Fry sees it as “a remarkably empathic book, a bildungsroman in the mode of Jane Eyre or Of Human Bondage”, its characters “credibly invested with hopes, convictions, dreams, and desires” (Guardian October 1). Another prize-winning work of fiction was the debut novel from Maria Papas, Skimming Stones (winner of the T.A.G. Hungerford Award). Leanne Hall’s Young Adult novel, The Gaps, won the Ethel Turner Prize for Young People’s Literature; another Young Adult novel, Kay Kerr’s Social Queue, about an autistic teen, was a Notable Older Reader’s Book in the Children’s Book Council of Australia Awards. Also deserving mention is Mirranda Burton’s graphic novel, Underground: Marsupial Outlaws and Other Rebels of Australia’s War in Vietnam, which won praise for its examination of the wounds left by the war in Vietnam; in the words of reviewer Bernard Caleo (who has played a crusading role in reviewing graphic novels in Australia), because comics traffic in icons (conveying more meaning with less information), they can shuttle between iconic figures (Richard Nixon, Gough Whitlam) and ‘ordinary’ people” and this allows them to “imply, via comics’ sequential logic, causalities between these strata in human affairs. (ABR 438 [January-February] 2022).

Emma Batchelor’s debut novel Now That I See You won The Australian / Vogel prize for an unpublished manuscript by an author under 35. Marketed as a work of autofiction, it follows the reactions of the partner of a person who discloses they are transgender. Vogel judge Stephen Romei calls it a “psychological masterclass in exploring why and how we become who we are and what that means for the people closest to us”. Critic Oliver Reeson is unconvinced, declaring that it “reads like a Livejournal, like writing that doesn’t aim further than being a tool of self-expression and personal emotional exploration”. Reeson sees this as part of a wider problem in Australian literature:

NFTs [non-fungible tokens] are something for people who spend too much time online to trade and outdo each other with. Australia’s literary market is heading towards this as well. A book doesn’t necessarily need to be good, it needs to be programmable, which is to say it needs to be live-tweetable, which is to say it needs to appeal to internet discourse, which is to say it needs to emanate from lived experience and speak to non-specific feelings of trauma. Not that this is what all books in Australia have become, but there is a palpable sense that when publishers are considering the market, this is the thought process. (Oliver Reeson, Kill Your Darlings 31 May)

Although Christos Tsiolkas’ novel 7 ½ uses some of the trappings of autofiction — including a protagonist named Tsiolkas — critic Geordie Williamson reads it as an “attack on the current literary moment”, asserting that “Narrator Tsiolkas returns to this idea doggedly: that the alchemical wonder of artistic creation is at odds with the strict biographical template from which autofiction emerges”. Yet for Williamson 7 ½ “falls between two stools: too real to be passed off as the monologue of a ‘literary’ character, yet too wedded to the free play of story to beat autofiction — which uses subtle modulation of the real for literary ends — at its own game” (SP 20 November). Josephine Taylor’s Eye of the Rook pairs twin narratives of women suffering from vulvodynia, one in contemporary Perth and the other in Victorian London; Jenn Bowden calls it a “rich and passionate exploration of female bodies and lives, and how even women’s most private and intimate experiences can swiftly become subject to public discourse” (Westerly Online, n.d.). Alison Gibbs’ Repentance is set in 1976, in a titular town in which newly-arrived “hippies” confront the town’s logging industry. “There is much in Gibbs’ debut novel that resonates amid our current climate crisis. It insightfully illustrates the real-world impacts of ecological debate and is a sensorial evocation of the Australian landscape” (Jack Callil Guardian 22 January).

Emily Bitto’s second novel Wild Abandon follows a young Melbourne man across the USA in “an extravagant, harrowing novel of ideas filled with granular details, an abundance of surprising similes”, according to Amy Baillieu; she admires its “freewheeling philosophical and factual digressions on everything from modern art and the American military industrial complex to the ethics of keeping animals in zoos and the callow insecurity of youth” (ABR 437 [November]). Jamie Marina Lau’s Gunk Baby is another sophomore Australian novel set in the USA, featuring a woman running an ear-cleaning business who is drawn into a guerrilla network. Giselle Au-Nhien Nguyen calls it “an ambitious work that illustrates the utter hopelessness of the middle-class millennial condition while deconstructing all the ‘isms’ that trap us” (ABR 431 [May]). In Laura Elizabeth Woollett’s second novel, The Newcomer, a mother comes to terms with the murder of her troubled daughter on Norfolk Island. Jay Daniel Thompson calls it “a bleak and beautifully written tome that is tailor-made for the #MeToo era”, noting that “Woollett’s commentary on misogyny and male sexual mores is timely given the current exposes of sexual abuse in Australian culture. Her characters and their interactions seem heartbreakingly real” (ABR 433 [July]).

Australia is known for its literary controversies, and a 2021 novel has caused a new controversy with minor echoes of both the 1943 Ern Malley hoax (in which a literary journal was fooled by “fake” modernist poems) and the 1995 Helen Demidenko affair (in which the Miles Franklin winning novel The Hand That Signed the Paper proved not to have been written by a descendent of Ukrainian immigrants). On the release of John Hughes’ novel The Dogs — the story of a middle-aged son of Italian and Russian migrants finally visiting his mother in a Sydney nursing home and learning of her secret past — reviewer Paul Anderson called it “a seductive shaping of memory and imagination … an allusive and superbly plotted literary fiction, a historical-contemporary cross: widescale and microscopic, metaphysical in aims, with autobiographical imprint” (Newtown Review of Books, 5 October). James Ley commented that Hughes’ writing “is constantly circling back to the twinned themes of memory and forgetting” (SRB, 28 February 2022). The novel was shortlisted for the Christina Stead Prize for Fiction, a triumph for the author and his publisher, Upswell, a new, independent venture by respected publishing figure Terri-Ann White. But after it was longlisted for the Miles Franklin Award, in June 2022 The Guardian alleged that passages were plagiarised from nonfiction by Nobel laureate Svetlana Alexievich (Anna Katharine Verney, Guardian 9 June 2022). The novel was withdrawn from the longlist and the author apologised, claiming he inadvertently incorporated quotes into his work in a long process of revisions, forgetting they were not his own work. Literary scholar Emmett Stinson and author Shannon Burns then shared on Twitter their discoveries of a plethora of instances of plagiarism from canonical works like Anna Karenina, All Quiet on the Western Front and The Great Gatsby. Hughes denied being a plagiarist, giving a new explanation that, “[l]ike T.S. Eliot, I wanted the appropriated passages to be seen and recognised as in a collage” (Guardian 16 June 2022). Connections can be seen to Hughes’ body of work: his collection of essays, Someone Else, discussed his literary influences and was marketed as a work of “literary ventriloquism” (2007), whilst his doctoral thesis explored “Memory and Forgetting: History and the Autobiographical Imagination” (2000). Alyson Miller comments: “the scandal has focused attention on the responsibilities of the author, the complexities of writing fiction, and the ethics of creative practice” (Conversation, 21 June 2022).

Two literary fiction authors imagined bleak futures in their 2021 novels. Michelle de Kretser’s Scary Monsters consists of two novellas, one set in a future Australia and one in 1981 France, published in flip style and meeting in the middle, so either one can be read first. Presenting an Australia where non-white immigrants live in fear of deportation and any mention of climate change has been banned, the “deadpan present-tense narration, devoid of irony, shows Australia as a nation of hollow aspiration and ‘a place free of history’”, says Susan Wyndham; “De Kretser is an ever-sharper satirist and here she exaggerates with comic fury” (Sydney Morning Herald ⁴ 15 October). Inga Simpson’s The Last Woman in the World presents a woman living in isolated country confronting a deadly plague and its survivors. “Simpson’s trademark preoccupation with the rhythms of hinterland life is evident throughout her latest work,” observes Laura Elizabeth Woollett, its use of a “doomsday horror setup” placing Simpson “in the company of other white Australian women, like Briohny Doyle, Kate Mildenhall, and Laura Jean Mackay, responding to the spectre of social and environmental collapse on stolen land” (ABR 438 [December]).

In Trevor Shearston’s The Beach Caves, archaeologists in the 1970s discover remains of a stone Aboriginal village which would rewrite understandings of Aboriginal life before white colonisation. According to Lisa Hill, “Shearston writes beautiful prose, and is master of the landscape he portrays. He also has a grasp of the longevity of the scars on opponents of the Vietnam War…” (ANZ Litlovers, 28 January). However Andrew McLeod writes that “the question of whether it is desirable or necessary to creatively reimagine the story of a culture that has been systemically repressed and misrepresented for more than two centuries is one that probably should be asked today” (Andrew McLeod, ABR 429 [March 2021]).

Pakana writer Adam Thompson’s debut short story collection, Born into This, offers “stories of present-day Tasmania [which] provide a powerful response to trauma that dates from the horrors of the Black War and continues with ongoing ‘celebrations’ of Australia/Invasion Day” (Anthony Lynch ABR 430 [April 2021]). Tristen Harwood writes that the stories are “familiar, what you might hear when you’re sitting around with your aunties and uncles. Here, your proximity to the tale and care for what’s being told, rather than how meticulously it’s being told, are what make the best of these short stories stick” (SP 13 February). In her short story collection She Is Haunted, Chinese-American Australian writer Paige Clark’s “conversational and comic approach to emotionally charged subjects and to subconscious fears and desires is more affecting than one might expect, and more entertaining”, according to reviewer Francesca Sasnaitis. The same reviewer describes Luke Johnson’s debut collection Ferocious Animals as “all grit. Inhabiting a regional Australian town where abuse and violence go unremarked, Johnson’s adult characters have a limited capacity for self-reflection. They bumble through critical moments in life with little understanding, and even less empathy” (Francesca Sasnaitis, ABR 438 [December], see Fiction).

The ongoing process of examining the geography of Australian literature continued in several scholarly works. Meg Brayshaw’s monograph Sydney and Its Waterway in Australian Literary Modernism appeared in the international series “Literary Urban Studies” and examines Sydney and its waterway in the work of five mid-twentieth century women writers. In “‘A Touch of Recognition’: Wetlands in Australian Poetry” John Charles Ryan makes the case for “swamp criticism”, “[e]ncouraging more nuanced appreciation of swamp ecosystems in critical and creative works”. Brigid Magner and Emily Potter’s “Recognizing the Mallee” reflects the concerns of both place and cognitive literary studies with the authors’ fieldwork in the Mallee region of Victoria: “we have tried to find out how Mallee literary works are received by readers who are residents of this region, what understandings of the Mallee emerge from their discussions of the texts, and how cultures of creativity and sociability are enabled through textual engagement”. Readers interested in this topic should also consult “Thinking in a Regional Accent: New Ways of Contemplating Australian Writers”, appearing from Tony Hughes-d’Aeth soon after he became Chair of Australian Literature in 2021.

In praise for Jean-François Vernay’s monograph Neurocognitive Interpretations of Australian Literature: Criticism in the Age of Neuroawareness, David Carter writes that these are “new, provocative ideas which offer unexpected ways of reading a wide range of Australian fiction” and that the “analyses are fully alert to the scopic and haptic pleasures books can provide, the effects of the ‘neurodiversity paradigm’”; it considers “the cognitive mechanisms generated by erotic themes, the interaction between mind and body in Indigenous fiction, the representation of rage in the works of ‘angry gay’ writers, and the major public controversy caused by Demidenko’s novel [The Hand That Signed the Paper]” (see Criticism: General Studies).

The year saw what was possibly a record number of significant special journal issues, covering Irish-Australian literature (Australian Literary Studies), the early work of internationally-acclaimed Australian fantasist Terry Dowling (Science Fiction: A Review of Speculative Literature) and “Writing through Fences: Archipelago of Letters”, an issue of the literary journal Southerly “devoted entirely to the work of past and present refugees” who have been held in the “archipelago of incarceration” created by Australia and “spanning from South East Asia, Micronesia and Melanesia in the Pacific, the Indian Ocean and across mainland Australia”. Angelaki dedicated a special issue to the work of John Kinsella, “the kinsellaverse: the writing world of john kinsella”. Co-editor Tony Hughes-d’Aeth writes:

Despite its epic scale, Kinsella’s work always exists as an intervention and not an edifice. It has a negative capability, akin to the sublime and serial grandeur of paintings of the Last Judgement in Christian eschatology or the sprawling tableaux of medieval tapestry. But if his work is a tapestry, then Kinsella presents his images from the other side, as an assemblage of knots and ends.

The essays grapple with a writer who is simultaneously a “landscape” poet “who repudiates the claims of landscape”, a writer of experimental fiction who also publishes quite conventional short stories, a memoirist, and a vegan-anarchist activist and intellectual (see Special Issues). Also appearing in 2021, Kinsella’s third volume of stories, Pushing Back, offers “nuanced, resonant portraits of characters in place and sophisticated interrogations of small shifts in power” (Judges’ report, Christina Stead Prize). Reviewer Thuy On writes, “[a]lmost every story in Pushing Back is a testament to [Kinsella’s] sensitivity to and invocation of place, mostly in and around his homeland in the Western Australian wheatbelt” (ABR 430 [April 2021], see Fiction).

Robert Pippin’s Metaphysical Exile: On J.M. Coetzee’s Jesus Fictions is the first detailed interpretation of the “Jesus” works, treating the trilogy as a philosophical fable in the tradition of Plato’s Republic and More’s Utopia, and teasing out the extensive inter-textuality of these works. Andrew Dean’s Metafiction and the Postwar Novel: Foes, Ghosts, and Faces in the Water explores the incorporation of reflexive elements into the writing of three key postwar novelists, with a significant chapter on Coetzee, demonstrating how his fictions drew from and relativized academic literary theory and the conditions of writing in apartheid South Africa. Whilst Dean’s work refers to Coetzee’s South African period, its broader approach, like Pippin’s, can be more widely applied: “Whereas Coetzee in his earliest fiction sought to integrate critical debates as he understood them, his later work seeks to disorient schematic literary critical discourse” (Dean 2021, p.21). It should be noted that both scholars are rightly agnostic in relation to Australia’s tendentious “claiming” of J.M. Coetzee (see Criticism: Studies of Individual Authors).

Significant autobiographical works were released by former spouses Murray Bail and Helen Garner. Garner’s is the third volume of her diaries, How to End a Story: 1995-1998, “an intense, even claustrophobic story of the breakup of a marriage — a story told in the incidental, fragmentary form of a diary”, and also the story of the contemporaneous controversy over her non-fiction work, The First Stone (1995), which some saw as a betrayal of feminism. “This is what connects Garner’s diary project with her sequence of books about legal trials: an interest in the meeting of opposing views; a structure which looks for justice out of conflict” (Lisa Gorton, ABR 438 [January-February] 2022). Peter Craven argues that “How to End a Story is further evidence that Garner is a diarist of genius and the intimacies and intensities will long outlast the sorrows that engendered them. It is a book of wisdom in the face of every folly” (SMH 29 October). Bail’s memoir He, covering a much longer time period, “at times has the clipped feel of a diary, but without the dates or names… Bail is considered by many to occupy the upper echelons of Australian letters”, according to Joseph Cummins, who adds, “His writing is divisive, some hailing it as groundbreaking, others as pretentious and impersonal. Bail’s lack of political conviction and the overly intellectual, obscure nature of his prose isn’t for everyone” (Guardian 2 April). Geordie Williamson reviewed both books, finding that while He “failed as autobiography, it succeeded as art. How to End a Story succeeds at both. It is a work that knows, as Flaubert did, that there is ‘not a particle of life which does not bear poetry within it’” (SP 13 October).

Bail’s book was marketed as his final work, as was Gerald Murnane’s Last Letter to a Reader in which Murnane revisits each of his published works and writes a “report of my experience as a reader of each book”. According to reviewer Emmett Stinson, “The essays in Last Letter are neither literary criticism nor memoir. They ruminate instead on unexpected connections between books, ideas and the specific life experiences that informed his writing” (Guardian 16 November). Peter Craven comments,

The Gerald Murnane of these excursions into the deeper erotics of his own mythography is fascinating but weird beyond belief … it is all a kind of necromancy of solipsism. Has any writer ever paraded his aesthetic privacies so shamelessly? It doesn’t matter. These are the ravings of a genius. (ABR 438 [December])

Two significant memoirs (of a kind) are responses to grief. Nick Gadd’s Melbourne Circle is “ostensibly about circumnavigating 50-odd Melburnian suburbs in a series of connected walks. But this book is also a tender tribute to Gadd’s late wife, Lynne, his partner in these perambulations”. Thuy On describes it as “an endearing book about enduring love and serendipitous discoveries; of remnants of the past pasted on old buildings, and the way these ghost signs are portals into another time” (SP 30 January). Anwen Crawford’s No Document responds to the early death of her creative partner; the Stella Prize judges described it as “a longform poetic essay that considers the ways we might use an experience of grief to continue living, creating, and reimagining the world we live in with greater compassion and honour”. Critic Declan Fry writes, “No Document is a tremendous vision of life, all the detail love and loss demand. And the possibility of redemption? Well — she is wrong about that, too. No Document is a galvanic one. A masterpiece” (SP 3 April).

Eleanor Hogan’s dual biography Into the Loneliness is an epic quest to understand ethnographer Daisy Bates (1859-1901) and writer Ernestine Hill (1899-1972), their fraught literary friendship and their engagement with Aboriginal people. Hogan is an insightful and vulnerable quester, asking difficult questions of herself as she frames the narrative with her own travels in their footsteps. Kim Mahood calls it “a remarkable piece of research and writing, and a labour of passion and perseverance” (ABR 430 [April]). Helen Vines’ Eve Langley and the Pea-Pickers is a careful attempt to solve the mystery of Hill’s contemporary, the eccentric Eve Langley (1904-1974), whose titular masterpiece was followed by one published sequel and then a series of increasingly unpublishable manuscripts. The relationship Langley formed with her editor, the famous Beatrice Davis, is also told in editor Craig Munro’s Literary Lion Tamers. Munro’s “personal connection to the stories of his ‘lion tamers’, and sometimes to their authors as well, brings the book closer to the mode of memoir than to history-writing”, says Susan Sheridan; “[i]t’s a most engaging read” (ABR 430 [April]). Bernadette Brennan’s Leaping into Waterfalls is a significant biography of a contemporary Australian novelist, Gillian Mears (1964-2016). Brenda Walker writes, “The biography is exceptional. In [her earlier work] A Writing Life, Brennan identifies the biographer as a ‘literary portraitist — [who] interprets a life through her own imaginative, cultural and political filters’”. Walker contends that “Leaping into Waterfalls is more than a portrait; it is a mighty and populous canvas” (Brenda Walker, ABR 438 [December], see Letters and Autobiography).

In the year’s non-fiction, climate change continues to generate important literary responses. “It seems as though language and culture are reaching a phase shift, a tipping point”, writes reviewer Jonica Newby about Delia Falconer’s essay collection Signs and Wonders: Dispatches From a Time of Beauty and Loss where Falconer “vividly charts” this “head-spinning transition” and

the queasy vertigo many of us are experiencing as we contemplate how much the world has changed, or how much our perception of it has — newly charged with portent, with intimations of disaster, and yet almost unbearably beautiful, as if the prospect of unfathomable loss has imbued everything with wonder and meaning and intent… (ABR 437 [November])

Falconer’s collection and other recent essay collections prompted Maria Takolander to observe that “[t]he essay, if you haven’t noticed, is having a moment. It’s as if, in the age of the Anthropocene, as we face the end of the world as we know it, reality has finally become too real for make-believe…” (SP 2 October).

The Uluru Statement of 2017 is unfinished business for Australia, a petition from Aboriginal leaders calling for a First Nations voice to parliament to be enshrined in the Constitution and a Makarrata Commission to undertake a process of “truth-telling about our history”. Henry Reynolds’ Truth Telling: History, Sovereignty and the Uluru Statement is a revisionist work claiming that the sovereignty of First Nations was recognised by international law at the time of British colonisation. Reviewer Sarah Maddison calls it “an early salvo in this renewed battle to lay bare the truth of Australia’s history” (ABR 429 [March]) while Jeff Sparrow finds that it “outlines, with admirable clarity, the deep injustices the Uluru Statement seeks to address” (SMH 21 February). Mark McKenna’s Return to Uluru focuses on the killing of an escaped Aboriginal prisoner at Uluru in 1934 by a white police officer, followed by an inquiry which left the police officer unsanctioned. “McKenna weaves around this story a wider history of Uluru as the home of the Anangu”, writes Frank Bongiorno; “[o]ne of McKenna’s gifts as a historian has been his ability to help us to see in the local and the particular some of the grandest of themes in Australian history, as well as the dilemmas that we are yet to resolve” (Monthly, April).

Posthumous collections from two significant Australian historians appeared in 2021. In her 2006 Quarterly Essay, The History Question, Inga Clendinnen (1934-2016) criticised novelist Kate Grenville for confusing fiction and history in The Secret River (2005), thereby sparking a controversy. Clendinnen’s Selected Writings reflects the broad scope of her historical interests, from Australia to the Aztec and Mayan worlds. Tom Griffiths notes that, for Clendinnen,

the point of history — indeed any humanistic scholarship — is to expand and strengthen our moral imagination so that we may transcend our own identity, time, and place, and understand the experience of others. Through this process, she argued, history is conducive to civic virtue. (ABR 432 [June]).

While Clendinnen was an academic historian, Les Carlyon (1942-2019) was a journalist turned popular historian. Reviewing Carlyon’s A Life in Words, Seumas Spark says,

his main subject was Australia. He had an eye for character — of people, institutions, and nation — and the patience and skill to describe what he saw. The focus on character gives the collection its glue, uniting a disparate and sometimes unlikely group of subjects. (ABR 438 [December], see Non-Fiction)

An important anthology was Dizzy Limits: Recent Experiments in Australian Nonfiction, edited by Freya Howarth. This is the latest anthology from Brow Books, which was for many years the publisher of the now-discontinued magazine The Lifted Brow, which offered an annual Prize For Experimental Nonfiction. The rationale for the anthology is that “when conventional approaches to writing about real people, real events and real experiences fall short of capturing the truth, it’s time to get experimental” and by “using unorthodox style, voice, point-of-view and form, experimental nonfiction upends the rote to find new ways of conveying meaning”, thereby exposing “the pulsating, dizzying limits of writing” (https://browbooks.com/shop/dizzy-limits). Dizzy Limits includes the best pieces from the first five years of the Experimental Nonfiction Prize and offers both a record of recent innovation in Australian nonfiction writing and “a set of headlights shining on the road ahead”. Attempting to convey the flavour of the collection, reviewer James Antoniou singles out the “flashy, if grandiloquent, prose style” of Rebecca Giggs’ whimsical piece “The Leech Barometer”, then Noëlle Janaczewska’s “Lemon Pieces (Quelques Morceaux en Forme de Citron)”, which Antoniou describes as “a supple postmodern autobiography centred on the author’s relationship with France, in particular Albert Camus, and filtered through the lemon”, and Oscar Schwartz’s “standout” essay “Humans Pretending to be Computers Pretending to Be Human”, an exploration of Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (MTurk) website, which is “a crowdsourcing service recruiting human beings to perform menial tasks of which computers are incapable”. Antoniou also notes that “First Nations writers are especially strong”, commending Ellen van Neerven’s “North and South” (as “a thoughtful reflection on the writer’s life in Brisbane and Sydney that aims to improve cultural literacy in a country that is ‘more likely to name our wine regions than … our language groups’”) and Evelyn Araluen’s “Cuddlepot and Snugglepie in the Ghost Gum” (which “constructs a powerful critique of the ways in which … the notion of the bush as a uniquely inhospitable and dangerous place in Australian literature and poetry is a colonial distortion, induced by settlers’ nostalgia” (ABR 431 [May]). [See Anthologies]

Writer Kate Jennings (born 1948) died on 1 May 2021 in her adopted home of New York City. ABC News reported,

Jennings came to national attention in 1970 … when she gave an incendiary speech at a protest against the Vietnam War which leveraged outrage against military conscription to argue for women’s rights… The speech is credited with marking the start of second wave feminism in Australia. (ABC News, 27 December)

Jennings edited the landmark 1975 anthology Mother I’m Rooted: An Anthology of Australian Women Poets and was herself a writer of poems, short stories, and essays; Gideon Haigh described her novel Moral Hazard (2003) as “one of very few fine Australian novels to grapple seriously with work, and perhaps the only one to engage memorably with finance” (The Australian 2 May). Poet Tim Thorne (born 1944) died in Launceston, Tasmania. The author of 15 poetry collections, he was also involved in a lifetime of left-wing activism. While it tended to be “loosely associated with the so-called Generation of ‘68 poets, Tim’s work transcended the often-rigid sectarianism of Australian poetry and he was one of those rare poets whose work was read widely among readers who normally wouldn’t read poetry” (Rochford Street Review, 26 September). Other deaths included the prolific romance writer, Valerie Parv AM (born 1952) and the noted historian Stuart Macintyre AO (born 1947)