Australia

Introduction

For many Australians 2022 marked a return to a more normal life resembling pre-pandemic conditions, as almost all Covid restrictions, mitigations, and reporting were wound back. Yet a new “normal” was also emerging, with over 20,000 excess deaths, half of them directly attributed to Covid, and increasing concern over the effects of long Covid (Alison Barrett, British Medical Journal 13 April 2023). In the May 2022 election, Australia had a change of government, with the centre-left Labor Party taking power after nine years of conservative government. The most remarkable aspect of the election was the huge cross-bench returned in the lower house, including six independents running on a platform of climate action and integrity in traditional conservative strongholds and four Greens members. Literature funding through the Australia Council had declined 40% under the previous government and the new Arts Minister, Tony Burke, declared an end to “the nine-year political attack on the arts and entertainment sector”, announcing the development of a new National Cultural Policy (ABC News, 24 August). Unveiled in late January 2023 the policy included a “First Nations First” focus on Indigenous people and their stories and established “Writers Australia” to provide “direct support to the literature sector from 2025”, to “grow local and international audiences for Australian books and establish a National Poet Laureate for Australia” (“Revive”, Office for the Arts).

One of several important new Australian novels to use historical settings, Gail Jones’ ninth novel, Salonika Burning, concerns the 1917 fire which destroyed the Greek city of Salonika (Thessaloniki). The conflagration is viewed through the perspectives of four characters linked by “the disconcerting frisson of excitement the fire’s fury engenders within them”, each seeking “a new sense of stability, one that might counter the disequilibrium the fire has occasioned” (Dianne Stubbings, Australian Book Review ¹ 448 [November]). These four are based upon real historical characters: novelist Stella Miles Franklin, surrealist painter Grace Pailthorpe, artist Stanley Spencer and philanthropist Olive King. “What seems key to Jones’s purpose,” writes Stubbings, “is that each of the central characters … has their own biography, their own presence in the historical record”; however Jones “refuses to be bound by the way history has depicted these lives” but instead “casts a smoke haze around these biographies, thus emphasising the blurred edges of selfhood”. Kerryn Goldsworthy concurs that “each character has a different way of seeing, and they use their respective jobs or vocations to try to create order from chaos”. For Jones and her characters, Goldsworthy contends, “the ‘Great Fire of Salonika’ comes to stand for the entirety of this, or any, war: ‘The burnt city. That was the omen. That was the sign everything was coming apart. Demolition by fire.’” (Sydney Morning Herald ² 30 December). Reviewers were remarkably divided in their evaluations of Robert Drewe’s historical novel, Nimblefoot, recently shortlisted for the 2023 WA Premier’s Book of the Year Prize. The protagonist is real-life figure Johnny Day, who in the 1860s was a successful competitor in the international sport of pedestrianism (a kind of race-walking) before winning the 1870 Melbourne Cup at age 14 on a horse named Nimblefoot. Day then vanished from the historical record and Drewe’s story offers an imagining of what might have caused this. The story touches upon numerous historical characters (Adam Lindsay Gordon, Anthony Trollope, Lola Montez) and historical events such as Prince Alfred’s several visits to Australia between 1867 and 1871. Conceding that “Nimblefoot contains more stuff than Colonel Pewter’s holdall”, Michael Winkler nevertheless sees it as “a book of abundance. A true picaresque” (ABR 445 [August]), whereas for Per Henningsgaard “even the purely fictional elements are imbued with an excessive penchant for period research” (The Conversation 8 August). In Steven Carroll’s novel Goodnight, Vivienne, Goodnight the protagonist is a rendition of Vivienne Haigh-Wood, the first wife of T.S. Eliot. Reviewer Patrick Allington interprets the novel as a deliberation on “the messy ways people interact and, especially, the inner worlds of those people” (ABR 441 [April]) but some would wonder why this necessitates the imaginative co-opting of a “real person’s” life. Avoiding this problem, Michelle Cahill’s novel Daisy & Woolf is about Daisy Simmons, a “real” but not “real-life” minor character from Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway (1925). The result “is a novel that becomes more about the craft and business of writing – about the way reality and fiction curve in and out of each other like a Möbius strip – than about either Daisy or Woolf”. However, Cahill ultimately fails “to assemble all these keenly rendered impressions and experiences into a novel of consequence” (Diane Stubbings, ABR 444 [July]). Coincidentally, Sophie Cunningham’s novel This Devastating Fever concerns a novelist struggling to write about Woolf’s husband Leonard. Jasper Lindall judged this “a masterfully told story of intertwined literary lives, old and new” with the Bloomsbury set in full presence, “living in squares, painting in circles, loving in triangles, and all that” (Canberra Times 9 September), but for Anne-Marie Priest “the metafictional frame comes with few benefits, and some very obvious disadvantages” (ABR 446 [September]). Pulitzer Prize winner Geraldine Brooks’ historical fiction Horse concerns a racehorse from the 1850s and the modern-day museum scientist working on the animal’s bones. Peter Craven finds the researched details are laid on “a bit thick” with Brooks “never quite getting the pace right in the face of the richness of her material”:

The difficulty with Horse is that, while its intellectual and historical data are genuinely challenging and its technique is adeptly displayed, at the end of the day we’re looking at a rather conventional novel which is presented through the beguiling tesserae of its set of different narrative strands. This … doesn’t make Horse an achieved piece of writing. It is not the realisation of the forces that fed into the tragedy of the American Civil War, the horrors of slavery […] except as these can be scattered intriguingly and entertainingly like so many clues and clusters of gold in a kind of highbrow detective story… (Peter Craven, ABR 444 [July]).

Inga Simpson’s novel Willowman also divided reviewers. It is a novel about cricket, a rare thing in cricket-mad Australia, Dianne Stubbings claiming “[in] the Australian context there is Steven Carroll’s The Gift of Speed (2004) – about a young boy in thrall to the West Indies cricket team – but few other novels spring to mind” (ABR 449 [December]). Conceding that Willowman “steps into this apparent void”, Stubbings nevertheless finds it “reads like a boy’s own adventure” and “the effect is a portrayal of Australian cricket that is not only romanticised but also heavily sanitised”, making it “a genial, if ultimately unsatisfying, summer novel”. Penelope Cottier, by contrast, feels that “in writing a detailed and loving story about cricket, Simpson has achieved something to be cherished” and speaks admiringly of its “important thread” of concern with “the changes occurring [in cricket], including the emergence of T20 cricket” and “the gradual (and still far from complete) recognition of the skill and depth of women’s cricket”. Cottier concludes “this is more a five-day read than a quick bash, and all the better for it” (Canberra Times 18 November). (Surprisingly, there was a second cricket novel published in 2022, Justin Smith’s Cooper Not Out, but this was reviewed as “summer” reading.)

Thomas Keneally’s new historical novel, Fanatic Heart, recreates the life and times of historical figure John Mitchel, a militant separatist Young Irelander known for his fiery denunciations of British misrule in Ireland after the Famine of 1845–47. Eleanor Limprecht’s “meticulously researched historical novel” The Coast offers “a broad tapestry of historical experience” in its account of Sydney from the 1890s to the 1920s, with its poverty and lazarets; The Coast was seen to offer “beautifully crafted historical background” but the “views and values [of the main characters] are sometimes jarringly anachronistic” (Penny Russell, ABR 445 [August]). Fiona McGregor is “one of our foremost cartographers of settler Sydney” (Declan Fry, SMH 28 October) and her new novel Iris fictionally recreates the life of the 1930s petty criminal Iris Webber, twice charged with murder and known as “the most violent woman in Sydney”. Fry says McGregor writes from the perspective of the downtrodden, “excavating that part of Australia often elided in our proliferating middle-class distraction reels and doomscrolls”, carefully capturing the language of the era because for McGregor “honouring language, in all its forms, is a matter of political integrity, of respect for the cultures of the past and the vocabularies that form among different communities”. The interest in early Sydney continues in Dominique Wilson’s Orphan Rock, described as “like an animated dictionary of Sydney” from 1870 to 1941, paying attention “to issues of the time ranging from women’s rights to anti-Chinese riots, from economic depression to public health concerns about syphilis and smallpox” (Susan Sheridan, ABR 441 [April]). Other historical fictions worthy of attention include Jane Rawson’s A History of Dreams, which uses young apprentice witches in 1930s Adelaide as “avatars of women in [Australia] today” (Lisa Bennett, ABR 441 [April]) and David Whish-Wilson’s The Sawdust House, set in 1856 San Francisco, when a Committee of Vigilance seeks to rid the city of its foreign criminals, many of whom were Australians. Alex Cothren praised the complex and sophisticated way Whish-Wilson “weaves fact and fiction” into “both a stylish retelling of one extraordinary life and an investigation into the truths that slip through history’s net, sinking to depths only imagination can plunge” (ABR 441 [April]).

Experimentation with form and structure were so widespread across the year’s literary output that the works by Drewe, Cunningham and Brooks could almost be seen as experimenting with the limits of researched “abundance”. Two collections explored the microstory form, Susan Midalia’s Miniatures offering “beautifully polished gems” and pieces in Julia Prendergast’s Bloodrust said to “flow like poetry” (Debra Adelaide, ABR 449 [December]); edging towards microstory, some items in Else Fitzgerald’s début short story collection Everything Feels Like the End of the World are only a few paragraphs long. Mothertongues by Ceridwen Dovey and Eliza Bell is “a hybrid, genre-defying book about contemporary motherhood” (Sarah Gory, ABR 443 [June]), lying at the intersection of auto-fiction and non-fiction. It joins “a rich thread of contemporary motherhood life writing that uses the fragment as a building block”; however, Dovey and Bell “take the fragmented structure further, stretching it and playing with different devices from the theatrical, the conversational, the musical, the listicle”, says Gory. In Chris Flynn’s Here Be Leviathans “stories are narrated by either an animal (bear, fox, platypus, sabretooth tiger) or object (airplane seat, gun, hotel room). The collection is part of a wave of Australian works “giving voice to the non-human”, says Alex Cothren (ABR 447 [October]). In Shaun Prescott’s Bon and Lesley “surreal elements rise to the surface: biblical wildfires, invisible portals, a towering and faceless stalker named Colossal Man, and an all-consuming darkness that begins to envelop the town” (Morgan Nunan, ABR 448 [November]) – though Kerryn Goldsworthy notes that “Prescott’s writing … embodies the same sort of preoccupation and sensibility that informs the work of Gerald Murnane, David Ireland or Andrew McGahan, and recalls movies such as Wake In Fright and The Cars that Ate Paris” (Guardian, 23 September). The experimentation in Adam Ouston’s first novel, Waypoints, is too various and complicated to explain in limited space, but has seen it longlisted for the 2023 Miles Franklin Award; readers are referred to two enlightening reviews [see Criticism: Studies on Individual Authors]. Indigenous writers experimented with speculative fiction in This All Come Back Now: An Anthology of First Nations Speculative Fiction edited by Mykaela Saunders and Unlimited Futures edited by Rafeif Ismail and Ellen van Neerven. Signalling a large shift in accepted notions of form, graphic novels seem to have consolidated a long-overdue legitimacy, with works by Lai Lee and Sam Wallman [see Fiction] receiving reviews from respected critic Bernard Caleo in the prestigious Australian Book Review. Interested readers should consult the listed reviews by Caleo which set out the rationale and aesthetics of fiction in this form [see Criticism: Studies on Individual Authors].

Two novels raised questions about the portrayal of Indigenous people in historical fiction. Felicity McLean’s second novel, Red, re-tells the Ned Kelly legend in “a curious mash-up” which casts feisty Ruby “Red” McCoy in the role of Kelly and shifts the action to the Central Coast of NSW in the late 1980s. In comments echoing reviewers’ concerns about other works mentioned earlier, Laura Elizabeth Woollett asks “Why update such a quintessentially Australian story of police violence and discrimination, without their contemporaneity?”. Noting that “the 1987–91 Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody was underway during the period in which Red is set” and that “a further 500 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people have since died in custody”, Woollett declares Red disturbingly deficient. “For all McLean’s enthusiasm for the Kelly legend, and her formal inventiveness in rehashing it, the author fails to engage meaningfully with colonial history and its reverberations”, says Woollett, disappointed that for all McLean’s “name-checking of 1980s working-class Australian culture — from Neighbours to Kerri-Anne Kennerley to Cottee’s Cordial — McLean offers only a celebration of Australiana, detached from the inequities of life in Australia” (ABR 443 [June]). There was a different issue with Jock Serong’s sixth novel, The Settlement, which re-imagines the story of George Augustus Robinson, who played a key role in the cultural suppression and removal from traditional land of Aboriginal Tasmanians. “The Settlement is deeply connected to history and prior literature through style and subject matter”, says Brenda Walker, “but its emphatic concern with miscommunication as an instrument of resistance and evasion, and its use of canonical literature at points of crisis and of soundscapes to represent country, are distinctive” (ABR 447 [October]). Michael Winkler, however, challenges aspects of Serong’s achievement. He frames his review by observing that “The fiercest discussion in contemporary literature involves who gets to tell which stories. In Australia, this has resulted in some non-Indigenous authors shrinking from writing about First Nations people” (SMH 23 September). Winkler then outlines a growing conundrum in Australian literature:

Serong’s sensitivity is flawless. … Extensive research has been overlaid with cultural consultation and diligent application of protocols. This is laudable, but it compromises the novel. None of the First Nations characters are fully realised because they are drawn without flaws. The extreme care that Serong has exercised has the unfortunate consequence of rendering them less interesting. This is where Australian Literary culture is at. The respect is important, but the outcomes can be counterproductive.

Arguably the year’s most significant contribution to writing about Indigenous experience was Lionel Fogarty’s Harvest Lingo: New Poems. A Yugambeh man born on Wakka Wakka land in South Western Queensland near Murgon, Fogarty’s first collection was Kargun (1980) and Ngutji (1984) is generally regarded as his finest work. In 1990 Mudrooroo (then Colin Johnson) described Forgarty as “Australia’s strongest poet of Aboriginality” and in 2013 John Kinsella declared him “the greatest living ‘Australian’ poet” — yet Fogarty remains less well-known than many other poets of similar career longevity. Reviewing Harvest Lingo, Philip Morrissey suggests Forgarty is “an enigma to many readers” because they unfortunately find his poetry “dense and incomprehensible”; Morrissey vigorously defends “the breadth and quality of [Fogarty’s] work and the magnitude of his contribution to Australian literature and Indigenous culture” (ABR 446 [September]). One reason for Fogarty’s “niche” status may be the impressive breadth of his concerns as a poet: he refuses to be confined to “Indigenous” issues and Harvest Lingo covers topics as diverse as India, globalisation, and Artificial Intelligence. If this has gone against him, it sadly reinforces Winkler’s view that “This is where Australian Literary culture is at”. Readers interested in Fogarty should consult “Reading Lionel Fogarty” by Louis Klee [see Criticism: Studies on Individual Authors].

To say that Alf Taylor’s Cartwarra or What? is more readily “accessible” than Fogarty’s work is not to belittle the achievement of either writer. A survivor of the Stolen Generations, Western Australian Nyoongah Alf Taylor spent his childhood at the Spanish Benedictine Mission at New Norcia (see his autobiography God, the Devil and Me [2021]). Cartwarra or What? assembles poems and stories from his 30-year writing career, covering issues relating to community, land, dispossession, alcoholism, family, and profound loss of identity. Taylor writes largely on “‘Indigenous issues”, but his work is infused with a unique openness to humour and wry irony. Contrastingly, Blackbirds Don’t Mate with Starlings by Sri Lankan-Australian poet Janaka Malwatta is characterized by its activist rage, any hope for “a just future for the next generation” (Malwatta’s words) being juxtaposed with fury at historic injustices.

In Australia, poetry is “having a(nother) renaissance” according to reviewer Ender Baskan, who found much to praise in the first publications from new Melbourne-based publisher called no more poetry, which by mid-2022 had published “twelve books in small print runs and developed a robust local following” (ABR 447 [October]). The collection eternal delight paralysis is by Daniel Ward, general editor of no more poetry; Baskan says Ward “writes with a cleverness and self-assuredness that hums when in the second person, often addressing the lover, or the first-person plural, invoking a collectivity that elevates the work”. Lia Dewey Morgan’s Bath Songs tells of the poet’s transition into femininity through hormone replacement treatment, developing “a playful, resonant poetics of emergence”; Bridget Gilmartin’s Strange Animals offers “intimate” poems that engage with “enigmas of identity, the self, and the texture of relationships”; and Shannon May Powell’s Can We Rest Tonight in the Amnesia of Pleasure explores “sex, the body, and gender” (Baskan). A second new poetry publisher, Life Before Man (the poetry imprint of Gazebo Books) produced stylishly-designed volumes including Anthony Lawrence’s seventeenth collection, Ken, and Aflame, the fifth collection from Subhash Jaireth. Ken takes its name from the plastic boyfriend of the Mattel Barbie Doll, reviewer Luke Beesley noting “it’s no coincidence” that the Ken Doll appeared in the late 1950s, when Lawrence was born, since “a mode of self-reflection in the context of hypermasculinity is not unusual in an Anthony Lawrence poem” (ABR 440 [March]). Jaireth’s Aflame roams the world with poems about Moscow, Japan, and Tibetan Buddhist monks, covering topics from friendship, memory, landscape, and the power of art and music; Lisa Hill found this work “poignant”, “quintessentially Australian”, and sometimes anguished (ANZ Litlovers 14 June 2021).

Ender Baskan noted “a strong presence of [visual] artists” among the poets of no more poetry, and the link between poetry and art is strongly present in recent works by John Kinsella. Having worked on a series of Graphology Poems for nearly 30 years, in Saussure’s Kaleidoscope: Graphology Drawing-Poems, Kinsella presents “work from a recent series of ‘drawing-poems’ composed in a continuous sweep often interlinked with journal-writing” and these newer works are juxtaposed against “an earlier unpublished sequence of Graphology poems” which “served as the incipient ‘form’ for the kaleidoscopic drawing-poems series” in Saussure’s Kaleidoscope (publisher’s website). Kinsella’s aim is to create an illuminated book influenced by William Blake, “wherein the poem and drawing are inseparable as forms of written text”, thereby raising issues of perception and modes of writing. Another long-term Kinsella project begins to reach fruition in The Ascension of Sheep, Collected Poems Volume One (1980–2005), the first of a three-volume Collected Poems covering Kinsella’s 41 years of writing. Music and art are frequent presences in these poems, together with a range of different poetic forms and an experimental challenging of the meaning of “lyrical”. In another extremely productive year, Kinsella also co-authored ART, a second poetic dialogue with Yamaji woman Charmaine Papertalk Green, responding to paintings by the late Nyoongar painter Shane Pickett. The potential of interwoven poetic dialogue is also explored in UnHistory, in which Kinsella and Kwame Dawes survey the global turmoil of the last few years, offering “an elegant enactment of friendship and memory” as they explore “history’s undertones, its personal, familial, and institutional resonances and … the relationship between public events and the literary imagination” (publisher’s website).

Les Murray died in 2019, leaving a binder containing three-quarters of an untitled book. This has been published as Continuous Creation: Last Poems and will be his last book “unless dingoes and other scavengers find forgotten work and pick it clean” (William Logan, New York Times, April 21). Describing Murray as “the best poet Australia had seen for a generation or two”, Logan views the collection as “intelligent, high-spirited, coolly or crudely argued”, exhibiting the “homemade, maddening density” characteristic of much of Murray’s work, if often sounding “like a man who had just emerged from a cave, a century too late”. Poignantly, Logan says Murray “had trouble finishing poems in his last months because his old typewriter and his spare had both broken; and his wife, lame after surgery, could not walk to her study to type them into her computer” (Murray himself “could barely move”). Logan salutes Murray as “that rare thing, a poet who whatever his debts seemed an original”. Another posthumous collection was New and Selected Poems by J.S. Harry. Martin Duwell notes that these poems complement Harry’s Not Finding Wittgenstein: Peter Henry Lepus Poems (2007) with some new poems using the “Lepus” alter-ego. Describing Harry as “one of the really distinctive voices among those poets whose careers begin in the 1970s”, Duwell explains that her work “shows no particular allegiances among the groups, anthologies and received influences (usually American) of that period, doing her own thing in her own way” (Australian Poetry Review, 1 February). Judith Bishop says Harry’s work “shows at least three poets vying for their place on the page”: “an analytical-philosophical poet…; an ecological-lyrical poet…; and a political-erotic poet who tears the skin off social convention and politesse (ABR 442 [May]). Also published posthumously was Collected Prose Poems by Gary Catalano, the poet, art critic and short fiction writer who died in 2022 aged 55. Geoff Page writes that “while Catalano wrote many lineated poems it is in his prose poetry that his most characteristic work was achieved” — a view shared by Les Murray who declared that Catalano’s “prose poetry (was taken) to a higher pitch of excellence than any other Australian has attained” (Geoff Page, Canberra Times, 11 March). Agreeing that “the prose poetry represents the best of [Catalano’s] writing”, Paul Hetherington adds that these works “are informed by a broad knowledge of culture, particularly Australian and European visual art, and with important ideas about human conduct and judgement” (ABR 440 [March]).

Two large collections canvass the oeuvres of poets still living and writing. Robert Gray nominates Rain Towards Morning: Selected Poems and Drawings as “a definitive book” of the poems he wishes to preserve (“Author’s Note”). Reviewer Judith Beveridge cautions that “Gray has an unsettled relationship to his work”, given that over the years he has published more “Selected Poems” volumes “than any other Australian poet” and these “often contain (sometimes substantial) revisions” (ABR 446 [September]); she observes that “more than a third of the poems” selected for Rain Towards Morning are “formal or semi-formal compositions, indicating that [Gray] wishes to showcase this aspect of his work”. More than fifty years of work by Alan Wearne are covered in his Near Believing: Selected Monologues and Narratives 1967–2021. Launching this selection, Jurate Sasnaitis quoted Martin Duwell’s assessment that Wearne is “better than our novelists at evoking time and place” and Peter Craven’s view that “Wearne is like no one else in Australian poetry” (launch speech, Rochford Street Review). Perhaps best-known for his seminal 1986 verse-novel The Nightmarkets, Wearne is widely regarded as a master of the long verse narrative, but the selection in Near Believing displays the full breadth of his work as “a poet observing his own postwar generation” (Martin Duwell, Australian Poetry Review, 1 October).

Tracy Ryan’s tenth book of poetry, Rose Interior, is divided into three sections respectively titled “A room within a dream”, “For this inside/an outside” and “World”. The first section “gives an idea of the poet’s deep relationship with her environment”, says Beatriz Copello; the second section is “more personal” and concerns memory and reflections, creating “a rich domesticity”; and the third section deals with “issues such as schooling children during the pandemic and global warming” (Compulsive Reader, 25 June). Maria Takolander writes that Ryan offers “a poetics of domesticity and precarity, of homes and lives always on the threshold of breaking down or vanishing” and that her aesthetic is “committed to redeeming the marginalised and typically feminised as worthy of interest” and is “inseparable from the feminism that has marked Ryan’s career as poet, novelist, and activist” (ABR 444 [July]). Sarah Holland-Batt’s third collection, The Jaguar, may be like a personal memoir in its narration of the illness and death of her father from Parkinson’s disease, but its concern with the aged and their care echoes enduring themes of Holland-Batt’s journalism and public advocacy. Finding her poetry charged with “a strong writer’s intelligence and vulnerability”, David Mason detects “figures like Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath” in the rhythms of her work (ABR 443 [June]). (Care for the ageing postwar generation has been a major social issue in Australia for some years, and in 2022 was also canvassed in Brooke Dunnell’s notable debut novel The Glass House, which won the Fogarty Literary Award). Other poets have presented their personal concerns through the prism of increasing internationalisation. Alison Flett’s Where We Are reflects her Scottish heritage in some poems — “today ahm alive, taes / pointin taewards / ooter space” — but her work is generally “sensitive to its site of writing, and to international and interpersonal connections” (Chris Arnold, ABR 445 [August]). Reviewing Adam Aitken’s Revenants: New Poems, Toby Davidson observes that “Aitken has been at the forefront of the diversification of Australian poetry as it moved, slowly but irreversibly, to incorporate multicultural and transnational voices” (ABR 443 [June]). Aitken “has always been a world citizen”, says Davidson, and Revenants is “profoundly transnational, drawing upon Aitken’s multicultural childhood and his adult life divided between Australia, Southeast Asia, the Pacific, and France”.

Many of the plays published in 2022 had themes taken from recent newspaper headlines and not all critics were happy. Suzie Miller’s Anna K, loosely inspired by Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, centres on social media shaming. Alison Croggon writes “the op-ed play seems to be making a comeback” but is critical that “it’s incurious about theatrical form and aesthetic, or about what utterance or performance might mean on a stage”. Anna K, Croggon claims, “is an egregious example” because “the entire point of a play like this is to animate an issue of the day, with the actors reduced to puppets that embody a series of talking points. It’s a deeply conservative form that is, for all its self-professed progressiveness, profoundly reactionary” (Saturday Paper, 27 August). More successfully, Brooke Robinson’s bad machine took on the Robodebt scandal just as the Royal Commission into the government’s illegal automated debt scheme began. “So much contemporary theatre with an overt agenda is mediocre or worse because, in the rush to score points, the quality is sidelined,” writes John Shand, but “Robinson, by contrast, has beautifully humanised her agenda via showing the scheme skewering of the lives of diverse, fully fleshed characters” (SMH, 20 March).

A key preoccupation of the year’s anthologies was diversity — and the fear of its nemesis, the “identity categories or categorisations that risk flattening out difference” (Nadia Rhook, ABR 442 [May]). In The Language in My Tongue: An Anthology of Australian and New Zealand Poetry edited by Cassandra Atherton and Paul Hetherington, diversity involves celebrating the differences between Australian and New Zealand outlooks; in Borderless: A Transnational Anthology of Feminist Poetry, edited by Saba Vasefi, Melinda Smith, and Yvette Holt, it involves finding threads of commonality between otherwise disparate works. Reviewing Borderless, Nadia Rhook writes “a thread holding this unusual collection together is the way that poems are formed through and against forces of oppression,” citing the claim of editor Vasefi that “these poems carry with them the ancestral journey of marginalised storytelling which has survived and thrived throughout the checkered season of colonialism and patriarchy” (ABR 442 [May]). Borderless “might be seen as ‘diverse’ in the neoliberal sense that these writers identify with an array of sexualities, ethnicities, and nationalities,” Rhook continues, but the differences between these poems “are deeper and more significant than the shorthand labels often deployed to denote ‘diversity’ in the neoliberal order”:

[E]ach poem in this collection lives within what feminist historian of race relations Samia Khatun has called a “knowledge relation”; here, a relation between poet and experience, between experience and history, between history and feminist cultures and ideologies. If colonial knowledge seeks to dissect the world scientifically, poetry proves to be an affective space in which to make it whole again.

In a similar vein, the editors of The Language in My Tongue make a case for “poetry as resistance”, a concept which reviewer David Mason equates with “what Wallace Stevens elegantly called ‘the imagination pressing back against the pressure of reality’” (ABR 445 [August]). In Blacklight: Ten Years of First Nations Storytelling, edited by Hannah Donnelly, and Another Australia, edited by Winnie Dunn, resistance is a key strategy in the protection of diversity. Produced entirely by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander creatives from Western Sydney and beyond, Blacklight offers ten years’ worth of short stories, vignettes, poems, essays and artworks developed by the literacy movement known as Sweatshop. Edited by the General Manager of Sweatshop, Another Australia articulates the experience of hyphenated identity (such as Australian-Asian or Australian-Arab). New kinds of identity are also explored in Family: Stories of Belonging, edited by Alaina Gougoulis and Ian See. Predicated on the observation that the “storybook” idea of family (involving father, mother, children, grandparents) does not necessarily reflect contemporary realities, the contributors “reimagine what family can mean in the twenty-first century” by exploring situations in which the people with whom we feel the greatest kinship can be a teacher or friendship group or godparent, not necessarily someone with a biological connection. Diverse and often unheard voices also speak in Admissions: Voices within Mental Health and Nothing to Hide: Voices of Trans and Gender Diverse Australia. Finally, a new annual anthology, Best of Australian Poems, promises to collect previously published and unpublished poems to create a poetic snapshot of the year that was.

Roger Osborne’s The Life of Such Is Life: A Cultural History of an Australian Classic accompanies a digital archive of Joseph Furphy’s 1903 novel. Julian Croft writes that “Osborne gives us a comprehensive account of the physical and metaphysical milieux which produced the phenomenon of Furphy’s grand opus” (JASAL 22.2) while Brigid Magner notes the “cogent chapter-by-chapter breakdown of the major revisions, excisions, and textual transfers, and of their effects on the material condition of Such Is Life” (ABR 445 [August]). Following on from her 2016 biography The Unknown Judith Wright, Georgina Arnott has edited Judith Wright: Selected Writings, described by Philip Mead as “a first collection of Wright’s prose from across her writings in literary criticism, the environment and conservation, settler history, Indigenous activism, autobiography, and women’s issues”. It is a “carefully curated collection” says Mead, presenting Wright’s contributions to “Australian public life and intellectual debates in the decades after World War II” (ABR 442 [May]). [See Non-Fiction] Julieanne Lamond’s Lohrey is from the series “Contemporary Australian Writers”; it “makes a convincing case for [Amanda] Lohrey as a novelist of ideas, of uncertainties, and a writer of the politics of the contemporary everyday” and is “a fine study: intelligent, compelling, generous, and with a proper attention to historical, political, and literary contexts” (Margaret Henderson Australian Literary Studies 38[1]).

Australian Literary Studies dedicated a special issue to “Writing Disability in Australia”, editors Amanda Tink and Jessica White seeking to apply “nuanced critical attention” to Australian disabled authors, and representations of disabled people; they argue that “literary studies combined with disability studies, mad studies, deaf studies and crip reading establish a vantage point from which to analyse a range of well-known Australian titles afresh, as well as some yet to be well-known titles”. Commonwealth Essays and Studies produced a special issue on Alexis Wright; TEXT on “Historical Biofictions from Australia and New Zealand”; and Journal of Australian Studies on Christos Tsiolkas [see Special Issues].

Debra Dank’s memoir We Come with the Place won the New South Wales Premier’s Literary Awards Book of the Year. The judges called it “an outstanding narrative of outback Aboriginal life, family and traditional philosophy […] a stunning exploration of a community deliberately silenced for generations”, saying “Dank seeks to expand the horizons of the reader in a way which centres, not the author as an individual, but rather her Country and the wider community she has grown within” (judges’ comments, State Library of New South Wales). Another notable memoir was Shannon Burns’ debut, Childhood, telling of his emergence from neglect and abuse growing up in Adelaide’s working class north to become an academic and writer. Peter Rose writes that it “elevates an often lazy and indulgent genre” (ABR 449 [December]). In Carmel Bird’s Telltale, the writer re-encounters books in her library, ranging across eight decades of reading. “At the heart of Bird’s method is the time she takes to immerse us in the provenance of specific illusions she inherited in her youth about the brutal history of the island where she grew up — lutruwita — Tasmania — Van Diemen’s Land”; on the other hand, “she also admits the pleasure she takes in the cultural products of that self-same colonial empire she is native to” (Gregory Day, ABR 446 [September]). In Chloe Hooper’s Bedtime Story, Hooper addresses her young son as his father is diagnosed with cancer. The writing is “rhythmic and atmospheric, with a sharp clarity to its depictions of domestic, family life” says Fiona Wright and alert to “the ways in which the sudden interruption of illness and death illuminates the beauty and the fragility of this domain” (Saturday Paper 7 May). Between Me and Myself is a posthumously published memoir written by Sandra Willson over decades spent in prison and psychiatric hospitals after she murdered a taxi-driver in 1959. Willson died in 1999 and the manuscript existed in many different versions, with historian Rebeca Jennings editing and condensing it for publication and adding footnotes. Jennings describes the memoir as “a powerful account of a life lived on the social margins of post-war Australia”, praising the “vivid style of writing” and “the frankness with which [Willson] reflects … on her traumatic experience of persecution as a lesbian and incarceration” (Preface).

My Tongue Is My Own by Anne-Marie Priest is the first biography of the major Australian poet Gwen Harwood (1920–1995). A “trickster poet”, Harwood published many poems under male pseudonyms as she broke through the patriarchal post-war poetry scene. Stephanie Trigg finds it “a compelling biography” because “Priest puts Harwood’s voice — or rather, her many voices — at the heart of this volume” (ABR 443 [June]) and Susan Sheridan writes of Priest’s use of Harwood’s poetry, “It is not so much a question of reading the poems as autobiography, or as ‘confessional’” — an approach which “Harwood specifically denied” — but “a matter of the pleasure of recognising, for Harwood fans, the wellspring of a poem” (Saturday Review of Books, 6 June). Nathan Hobby’s The Red Witch is a biography of communist novelist Katharine Susannah Prichard (1883–1969). Ian Syson calls it “an eloquent and powerful tracing of the life of one of Australia’s once most celebrated writers” (SMH, 22 July) while David Carter notes that it “offers a full account of Prichard’s private and public lives, but … presents only limited interpretations of Prichard’s fiction” (The Conversation, 9 June). Bryce Courtenay: Storyteller is a biography of the commercial fiction writer often said to be Australia’s bestselling author before his death in 2012. Written by his widow, Catherine Courtenay, reviewer Jacqueline Kent finds “too many unchecked assertions” and not much about “Courtenay’s influences or his work as a writer” (ABR 449 [December]).

Eda Gunaydin’s Root and Branch is “a series of essays that fuse life writing and cultural criticism” with “Gunaydin bring[ing] her tremendous intellect to bear on questions of class, capital, labour and diaspora” (Judges’ report, Victoria Premier’s Literary Awards). Kim Mahood’s Wandering With Intent: Essays is “an important contribution to a growing body of writing about the inland that is being shaped by women’s perspectives, both black and white”, these perspectives being “less oppressed by the existential void, less impressed by the explorer narratives” and offering a “very different sensibility” (Shannyn Palmer, ABR 449 [December]).

Several reviewers compared Julianne Schulz’s The Idea of Australia: A Search for the Soul of the Nation to Donald Horne’s influential book on Australian identity, The Lucky Country (1964). Schultz’s Australia “is the overlapping and inconsistent stories that we tell of ourselves, rather than some integrated identity that can be distilled” (Robert Phiddian, ABR 447 [October]) and Melissa Lucashenko writes that Schultz “uses the metaphor of Covid as an X-ray […] to show classic Australian fracture lines. Race. Labour versus business. The role of the states, and the question of women’s rightful place” (Guardian, 7 March). Frank Bongornio’s Dreamers and Schemers: A Political History of Australia was described by Judith Brett as “a masterpiece of comprehensiveness and compression” which tells the story of Australia’s politics “since the autocratic rule of governors was challenged by an emerging sense of political community among the emancipated convicts and their children” (SMH 11 November).

A number of significant Australian writers died in 2022. Among them was Melbourne poet, Jordie Albiston (born 1961). When Albiston won the Patrick White Award in 2019 for her body of work, the citation praised “her exhilarating formal inventiveness, her originality, and her close, ethical work in the terrain of non-fictional poetics”, stating that Albiston’s “attentiveness to remaking form and her empathic portrayals of lives, especially the lost and silenced lives of women, are some of the qualities that make her work outstanding”. Antigone Kefala (born 1935) was honoured with the 2022 Patrick White award before her death in December; “one of the first writers to bring the diasporic experience and European sensibility to Australian readers”, Kefala’s “bold, minimalist poetry and prose will continue to influence current and future generations of writers” (Wenona Byrne, Australian Society of Authors webpage, 7 December). Robert Adamson (born 1943) was known as “poet of the Hawkesbury River”, the area north-west of Sydney which provided “the inspiration and life force of his work” (Thuy On, Arts Hub, 19 December). Frank Moorhouse (born 1938) and David Ireland (born 1927) were both Miles Franklin Award winning novelists, Ireland three times. “Moorhouse wrote prolifically and with irreverence and humour of his passions — food, drink, travel, sex and gender” and was best known for his League of Nations trilogy of novels beginning with Grand Days (1994) (Sian Cain, Guardian, 27 June). David Ireland was “fascinated by sweeping existential issues and their impact on the lives of those oblivious to them, compassionately haunted by the plight of society’s underclasses and the great silence about them”; he left “an intricate mosaic of Australian existence in his time” (Van Ikin, The Conversation, 1 August). Other deaths included poets Craig Powell (born 1940) and Evan Jones (born 1931), playwright Peter Yeldham (born 1927), novelist Annah Faulkner (born 1949 or 1950), writer and diplomat Bruce Grant (born 1925) and biographer and Henry Lawson scholar Brian Matthews (born 1936).