Abstract
controlled burn
A Frances Johnson; Puncher and Wattmann, 2025; 105 pages; $27 (paperback)
Beginning with the cover artwork, ‘Black Lung’ by Peter Gardiner (2017), it is instantly clear that this collection of A Frances Johnson’s poetry is intended to make readers consider the social, cultural and environmental damage that comes from a burn – metaphorical and literal.
The collection – ‘controlled burn’ – is an exercise in contradiction, interrogating the capacity we think we have to control our social and cultural environments. Such a burn is intended to decrease risk. However, a controlled burn can, as we know in the landscapes in which we live, produce exactly the conflagration it intends to avoid. Recognition of that paradox threads through this whole small, inspiring, ‘anti-pastoral’ collection.
Beyond everything – there are parts called ‘optimism’ and ‘pessimism’ (which I blend, not separate) – this is a collection of poems about the human spirit, confronting incongruity and coming to grips with complexity.
As the reader would expect, there are poems about fires and our responses to them.
The poem ‘controlled burn’ establishes the refrain – there will be pain, humanity knows there will be a cost to actions, but, stubbornly, courageously, people will resist, try to do better. Defiantly. Even to lose.
We ‘book our place’ at the disaster shelter of a recreation centre, prepared, knowing, refusing to give in or give up (‘Setting the table’). ‘Clever’ women hold out, ‘limiting’ the sprint past the ‘boiling lake’ (‘The woman who ran from the farm’).
Johnson’s language and form work is delicate and confronting, and political as well as poetic. Johnson resists and rejects colonial naming processes to tell a more thoughtful story of country. Barka, Millewa, Murrundi confront the ‘polyester’ Murray and ‘raping’ Darling. The remnant stands of Grey Box are the terriyergro of the Dharawul people. Staying with the land against the insistence of the son in the ‘city suit’, a widowed mother holds out regarding herself as ‘strong enough’ to stay (consider Patrick White’s TheTree of Man).
Johnson gives us an intensely grounded and contemporary collection.
Take the early work, ‘Mice and Men’ (and when reading, do not forget Steinbeck’s Lenny). Children build a ‘mouse-house’, keenly breeding these small non-threatening rodents in an atmosphere of rising domestic and ‘rational’ menace. Gendered roles are assigned. The boy is drawn into the destruction, the father explaining the problem of breeding and feeding. The girl sits with her mother, her heart ‘spinning’ as the ‘buckets, running water, a shovel, [and] a deep hole at the end of the garden’ are methodically organised before being used to drown ‘blind pup after blind pup’.
More prosaically you can listen for the register that ‘rolls on and on unattended’ in the ‘American supermarket’ or stand in the Aldi aisles with Johnson and find yourself reflecting on being ‘double-glaze happy over quenchable shelves of cheap soda’. You can go ‘on hold’ with others, hoping help comes – ‘are you still there?’, and be consoled (or not) by the ‘remote voice’.
Emotionally confronted, you might like to think about ‘decluttering’ the ashes of a lost loved one and sensations felt when doing so – either or both – the ‘sky open, raining rocks and boulders’ or the ‘dog racing past with stolen flannel, sparking joy’.
Or, in our stratified society, you might remember when you last used a public laundromat where a ‘junkie tethers his needle eyed mutt to the broken kerb’, sliding in to ‘wash his shadow clean’.
You can turn to your weather app and attend to the ‘weathergirl/boy’ delivering anodyne reports on a ‘poisoned river’ or a ‘jaded lake’ with ‘toothy cheer’. Or, sadly, you can consider the ‘bulldozers’ which cover the ‘dump where the Bedouin will be resettled’ – you known they ‘will not flower’ in the deserts which we once heard we could make ‘bloom’. Continuing the theme, you could find your way through to the ‘safe place’ down ‘streets of scaffold and scrim’ where you might buy bread. And then there is always ‘peacekeeping’ and waking every day ‘exhausted’. But waking we do.
Johnson invites us to quietly reflect on ‘Petroleum’ in a poem dedicated to Hannah Clarke and her children. Chillingly ‘the girls saw him [their father] run in front, hesitate and then strike a match to raining birthday fuel’.
Notwithstanding (or possibly because) I have finished my brief comments by mentioning the poem ‘Petroleum’, I loved this collection of poems.
I highly recommend Johnson’s work to anyone who wants to spend some time thoughtfully considering who we are, where we have been, and what we might be.
FLOODLAND
Directed by Jordan Giusti; Bonsai Films, 2026; 91 minutes (documentary); limited theatrical release
In northern New South Wales, the community of the town of Lismore can remember much of its long history of flooding. Yet this did not serve as practice for two record-breaking floods in early 2022 that occurred within a month of each other, resulting in catastrophic losses and widespread devastation. The first of the two floods peaked at an unprecedented 14.4 metres.
The documentary Floodland follows the experiences of residents in the aftermath of these events, featuring personal stories and perspectives from the local community. The film is exceptional in guiding the audience through the stories and motivations of Lismore residents using interviews made over a period of two years.
Eli Roth is a local, born and raised in Lismore, in the process of purchasing his first home. It overlooks Wilsons River, a landscape he strongly identified with and from which he drew comfort. We later learn that Eli relocated after the floods and faced another displacement when the house he shared with his partner Jess and her son Jensen caught fire. Eli’s story captures one of the central tensions in the documentary: the willingness and strength to stay and rebuild, against the painful possibility that the town’s future may ultimately lie elsewhere.
‘Lismore is in a constant state of denial’, we are told by Carlie Atkinson, a Bundjalung-Yiman resident and social worker. She explains that long before European settlement, local Indigenous peoples used the river for fishing and daily sustenance while moving to higher ground during the seasons when floods were expected. Carlie describes the Aboriginal ways of listening to the land and water, how communities once lived with the rhythms of the river, reminding the audience that traditional knowledge teaches us how to live with nature. In this context, the increasing intensity of natural events is portrayed not as an anomaly, but as nature communicating back to humans.
For me, these conversations felt strikingly familiar. Growing up in the Philippines, where powerful typhoons arrive every year, the word ‘resilience’ is often worn as a badge of honour, frequently in the absence of adequate infrastructure and forward-thinking governance.
The film mentions the many investment companies taking advantage of falling property prices in the area, purchasing homes and later reselling them for profit. One former resident shares fond memories of living there. Yet he admits he would not wish anyone the risk of living in the same place, knowing they could lose their child’s first book or first teddy bear in an instant when disaster comes.
I was reminded of another feature on Lismore from 2025. The short film The World Came Flooding In was screened during the annual Melbourne International Film Festival. Using virtual reality (VR) technology, the short presented reconstructed homes of Lismore with 3D modelling, displaying the now lost beloved objects that once filled these homes: that first book, that first teddy bear. The immersive experience allowed the audience to witness the flooding, to feel the urgency and the immediate loss.
Floodland goes further by bringing in the voices of the Lismore residents who underwent those losses. Some left long ago, while others became politically vocal. The many voices represented in the documentary cut across demographics, from business owners to First Nations elders. Their stories range from those who left early, to those who found their political voice through the events, and those who found love amid the aftermath.
The film also offers glimpses of Australian politicians. One articulates the geological history of the region well, but seems to lack urgency. Another appears as part of an election campaign, speaking largely about faith and God, with little discussion of concrete plans or actions.
The documentary does not fail to show some glimmer of hope, however. The home-raising program is featured, an initiative that aims to lift existing houses above projected flood levels. It also highlights the government’s buyback program, part of the Resilient Homes Program which, according to its official website, has an allocation of around AUD 800 million.
Eli is one of the recipients of the program. While he is grateful for the opportunity to start over, he worries about those who may still be left behind. In the end, he bids farewell to the view of Wilsons River from his first home, and a place he once believed he would call home forever.
Whether the causes lie in colonial legacies, unethical capitalism, unchecked urban development or political inaction, disasters like this rarely have a single culprit. But ultimately, every flood story is about the human condition. In Floodland, that story is told with remarkable clarity and devastating honesty.
QUEER JUDGMENTS
Nuno Ferreira, Maria Federica Moscati and Senthorun Raj (eds); Counterpress, 2025; 542 pages; £35.00 (paperback)
What is it to queer judgment? In their introduction to Queer Judgments, the editors argue that to queer judgment is to ‘re-imagine, re-write and re-invent’ (p 3). The scope of the reinventions in their edited collection is wide: ranging from Lynsey Mitchell’s chapter queering abortion law in a way that amplifies the right to bodily autonomy (chapter 20, p 386) to Lucas Lixinski’s chapter queering international cultural heritage law as ‘a pathway to reimagine the way cultural identities are bound up in international legal categories’ concerning kinship (chapter 12, p 216) to a broad gamut of law in between.
The chapters also ‘function both as critique and law reform’ (p 6), rewriting select judgments as a method of critique, but also providing options for law reform to effectively address the issues raised. Unlike similar feminist legislation projects, where the authors assume the role of legislators, in this collection the authors assume the role of judges and grapple with the role of judgment as an instigator for law reform.
In their rewriting of the Australian judgment of Ex parte Langley; Re Humphris, concerning an appeal of a conviction for soliciting for an immoral purpose, Thomas Crofts argues that judges can ‘recommend that Parliament explore the need for reform of the law in a certain area … [and] a bold judge might have felt able to urge for reform to decriminalise homosexuality’, using their judgment to be bold and present the case for law reform (chapter 2, p 31).
Some authors express challenges with law reform through judgments. There is a common injunction in many of the chapters against judicial law-making (chapter 10, p 195; chapter 14, p 253; chapter 21, p 415), and other chapters, such as that by Daryl Yang (chapter 19), highlight that gender and sexuality law reforms have mostly been achieved through engagement with political actors rather than through legal challenges and, where legal challenges have been successful, they have been undermined by subsequent legislative reforms.
Some authors express ambivalence to law reform. In their rewriting of McConnell and YY v The Registrar General for England and Wales, regarding the nomenclature for a trans man on his child’s birth certificate, Liam Davis argues that ‘liberal law reform projects’ for recognition should not be a central demand in politics of queer resistance ‘nor should changing the law (even if favourably) be construed as the end goal’ (chapter 21, p 402). Instead, the end goal should be ‘about creating conditions in which trans parents – and all queer people and families – can flourish without necessarily having recourse to the law’, noting that the law is largely responsible ‘for creating the dire material conditions in which queer people find themselves’ (p 405).
It is this chapter, and its conclusion that ‘it is hard to effectively say “fuck law” while still operating within the confines of a legal system as we know it, especially with rewriting/inventing a legal judgment’ (p 406), which gets to the heart of the issue with rewriting and reinventing legal judgments. As the editors note in their introduction, one of the limitations of the rewriting approach is that ‘the form or genre of judgment remains largely the same in order to make the judgment useful for judges who are constrained by the institutional realities of being a judge’ (p 7). What this means is that more creative processes are constrained and authors ‘play politely with law – making decisions that toy with discrete legal concepts or identities without overhauling normative ways of writing’ (p 7).
But the collection also pushes us to reimagine judgment. The editors also argue that recognising ‘our personal experience’ is part of being a queer jurisprudent (p 11). This is clearly so in Kseniya Kirichenko’s chapter (chapter 5), which reimages KK v Russian Federation, a case of lesbophobic harassment in which she was the victim/applicant. Queer judgment also demands, the editors argue, that different ‘formats [are] adopted to express our voices […] that do not always conform to typical, formal judgment’ (p 12). There is a playfulness in form in many of the judgments. In their rewriting of Judgment No 138 of the Italian Constitutional Court concerning gay marriage (chapter 18), Yàdad de Guerre and Marica Moscati inflect their judgment with rainbow colours. In their rewriting of the landmark Indian decision, Navtej Singh Johar & Ors v Union of India (chapter 4), which decriminalised same-sex relations, Yerram Raju Behara, Malhar Satav and Sal imagine an anonymous judge undertaking ‘a systematic process of sensitisation of queer rights’ through poetry workshops (p 66). Finally, in their chapter (chapter 16), Sanna Elfving and colleagues go a step further by reimagining the case of EB v France concerning lesbian adoption as a musical play, accompanied by a collection of poetry.
This playfulness with judgment invites the question: can we imagine an otherwise to law? Could queering offer another form of judgment, one more colourful, poetic, musical, and playful than that offered by law and legal format – judgment as discernment rather than decision? Or judgment as dance? The editors conclude that ‘we are dancers, and like dancers we innovate by bringing together different styles, pushing our minds, and expressing emotions’ (p 13). So, in the words of the late queer icon David Bowie, let’s dance!