Australia

Introduction

The Australian literary community engaged heavily in the national debate leading up to the Indigenous Voice referendum held on 14 October 2023, which sought to enshrine in the Constitution a representative body of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders to advise parliament on issues affecting their people. Literary journals foregrounded Aboriginal voices and campaigned directly for a “yes” vote. In Meanjin, Noongar novelist Claire Coleman wrote, “I fight for the Voice … because the Voice is what is on offer: an opportunity to begin dialogues that will lead to treaty and truth” (Meanjin 19 September). After the strong rejection of the Voice in the referendum, the editors of the literary journal Overland cited “the collective fiction [which] WEH Stanner diagnosed as settlement’s constitutive occlusion of Aboriginal reality”, concluding that “watching the majority of the settlers on stolen land reject even such minimal terms has starkly clarified the failed project of reconciliation that has already demanded so much from Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people and communities” (Evelyn Araluen and Jonathan Dunk Overland 252). Australian literature in 2023 determinedly continued to explore the perspectives of Indigenous people and the socially marginalised, as well as reflecting concerns about the environment, and issues pertinent to women; there was also a surge of interest in what might be called matters of intergenerational connection, together with a continuing readiness to experiment with form and structure.

Several noteworthy novels explored an environmentally and socially precarious future. Reflecting Australia’s increasingly polarised climate, Roanna McClelland’s The Comforting Weight of Water depicts a savage world of perpetual rain. The novel is “searing in its portrayal of utter environmental annihilation and the death of humanity and humaneness”, writes Jane Turner Goldsmith, arguing that McClelland’s “angry passion” represents “the depressed voice of a generation whose future has been stolen” (Conversation 8 June). Eta Draconis by Brendan Ritchie won the 2022 Dorothy Hewett Award for its story of a young woman leaving home for university amidst a long-running meteor shower that makes it deeply questionable to be “searching for a future in a world that feels like it has none” (Jemimah Brewster, AU Review 13 September). Kate Mildenhall’s The Hummingbird Effect explores “political and ethical heartlines” in stories of Australian women across two centuries: slaughterhouse worker Peggy facing job insecurity and intimate violence in depression-era Footscray; elderly Hilda facing the final weeks of her life in a COVID-era nursing home; La and Cat confronting grim socioeconomic realities in 2031; and a post-apocalyptic 22^nd century in which sisters scavenge the wreckage of our former civilization.

Indigenous writers also maintained a focus on climate and socio-political critique. “If one wants to feel the grit of Indigenous sovereignty, or to see it working in its most unassimilable and joyously maddening forms, then [Alexis Wright’s] new novel offers that possibility,” observes Tony Hughes d’Aeth of Alexis Wright’s Praiseworthy (Australian Book Review ¹ 452 [April]), which won the Stella Prize. As a mysterious haze gathers over the novel’s eponymous town – an event framed as both ecological disaster and a gathering of the ancestors – the plot follows fringe-dwellers whose disparate lives “take on the epic magnitude of Dreamtime myths and legends” (Jack Cameron Stanton, Sydney Morning Herald 31 March). “The novel constantly returns to its twinned obsessions — Aboriginal sovereignty and a climate-changing world” as it speculates on “what the future might hold for Australia, while drawing from stories of the past in order to reflect on the present” says Stanton; “Australia, from Wright’s perspective, has a fractured soul. She makes no apologies for the stark portrayals of the ongoing injustice of assimilation policies and political indifference.” Melissa Lucashenko likewise interrogates past and present in Edenglassie (the settlement that became Brisbane) following present-day Aboriginal centenarian Eddie and her activist niece Winona, interspersed with the 19^th century story of Mulanyin and his lover Nita. Imogen Dewey comments that “[i]f, as Chelsea Watego has written, the coloniser has a vested interest in insisting a veil somehow separates us from the past, Lucashenko uses her intergenerational stories to tear it down” (Guardian 6 October).

Kate Grenville turns to the intergenerational trauma wrought by patriarchy in Restless Dolly Maunder, a fictionalised account of her grandmother’s life in which young Dolly seeks to escape domestic drudgery. The novel “is unafraid of pushing the scope of what it means to unpick the intricacies of family history” says Ellie Fisher (ArtsHub 22 August). Emily O’Grady also explores the conjunction of family psychodrama and women’s desires in Feast, as a retired actress navigates an unplanned midlife pregnancy amidst complex personal relationships. For Bec Kavanagh the novel is “a triumph: bloody, haunting and pulsing with the lives of the expertly rendered ensemble at its core” whilst examining “the frustrations and unmet needs that leave women hungry for more” (Guardian 23 June). Laura Woollett’s novel West Girls experiments with form, utilising interwoven short stories to explore the experiences of three young women as they come to grips with identity, agency and the meaning of female beauty in a patriarchal society — shifting, says Donna Lu, “between first and third person to converge upon femininity itself, vividly depicting the desire, insecurity and existential uncertainty of girls and women” (G 4 August). Christos Tsiolkas’ new novel The In-Between follows a budding romance between two middle-aged men in post-pandemic Melbourne. Highlighting a “thrilling combination of tenderness and brutality”, reviewer Shannon Burns says the novel shows that “the sacred sits on a borderland near the erotic and they can merge together in unsettling ways” (ABR 459 [November]). Reviewers heralded The In-Between as a maturation of the characters, themes and authorial voice in Tsiolkas’ earlier works such as The Slap or 7½: “[t]his novel is liminal in content but also in craft”, providing “evidence of a writer making the transition from cage rattler to elder statesman" (Beejay Silcox, Guardian 24 November).

Other prominent male authors explored domestic violence. Trent Dalton’s Lola in The Mirror tackles female homelessness, particularly the vulnerability of women fleeing abuse. It divided reviewers. Thuy On surmised that “[t]his novel is quintessential Dalton in that his detractors will find much to cast a withering eye over, while fans will celebrate his signature style of meshing real life and fanciful, imaginative flights” (ArtsHub 4 October) but for Jack Callil it is Dalton’s “worst” novel, trivialising homelessness: “Dalton does confront darker elements – violence, addiction, suicide – but these moments are almost always denuded by his preoccupation with ‘community, hope and love’, mentioned in his author’s note as the book’s impetus” (Guardian 13 October). Tony Birch received more universal acclaim for his sensitive portrait of family life and domestic violence in Women & Children, the story of an eleven-year-old in 1960s inner-city Melbourne. “Birch asks important questions about the persistence of violence across generations and, with that, the persistence of silence” says Michael McGirr, noting that “[a]n afterword suggests that this story comes from close to home” (Sydney Morning Herald 28 November). “It is in response to violence in Women and Children that caring for others becomes a defiant form of resistance” observes Naama Grey-Smith, also explaining that “women and children” is a phrase associated with family and domestic violence supports “in a community services context” (ABR 460 [December]).

Graphic novels continue to grow in readership and acceptance, with works by Rachel Coad, Sarah Firth and Many Ord appearing from major publishers and attracting positive reviews, whilst Sarah Winifred Searle’s The Greatest Thing won the 2023 Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Young Adult Literature. In “genre” writing, David Whish-Wilson’s I Am Already Dead continued to advance his reputation as a major Australian crime novelist and for unknown reasons Greg Egan, one of the world’s leading science fiction writers, issued his latest novel, Scale, as a self-published Ebook.

Environmental concerns were present in the year’s drama, with three plays exploring either fire, flood or asbestos contamination. Drawing on research, Campion Decent’s Unprecedented critiques Australia’s response to the 2019–20 bushfires, raising urgent questions about the nation’s handling of environmental crises and climate emergency. Set in the now-abandoned Western Australian town of Wittenoom, the site of one of Australia’s worst asbestos-related industrial disasters, Mary Anne Butler’s Wittenoom emphasises the human toll exacted by corporate irresponsibility about exposure to asbestos. Therese Collie’s White China combines climate anxiety with intergenerational trauma. Against the backdrop of the Brisbane River, the play unfolds across three generations of women, confronting hidden family truths. When Daisy’s mother disappears from her nursing home amid rising floodwaters, Daisy searches for her, reluctantly accompanied by her daughter Jaz, who challenges her mother’s way of life. Together with its future-looking concern about climate change, the play’s narrative examines the intergenerational complexities of family ties, cultural heritage, and the burden of unacknowledged history.

Other plays experimented with intertextuality, which may also be an expression of intergenerational focus. Keziah Warner’s Nosferatu takes a darkly humorous turn by setting the classic vampire tale in Bluewater, Tasmania, a town facing environmental and economic collapse. Warner connects the vampire’s exploitation of the town to capitalism’s exploitation of labour. Christine Davey’s Frankenstein is a second monster-appropriation, reversing the gender of Mary Shelley’s creature. According to Cameron Woodhead, Davey’s monster is not “a mute site of feminine body horror, she’s a rebellious feminist heroine who resembles a wild-eyed Pippi Longstocking and declares the cause of her rejection from society to be that she has been created ‘a woman without fear’” (Age, 22 June). In This Rough Magic, Helen Machalias reimagines Shakespeare’s The Tempest against the backdrop of the Christmas Island detention centre as shipwreck survivors Prospero, Miranda and Ariel seek asylum as refugees. (The asylum problem was also critiqued in Staging Asylum Again, edited by Emma Cox [Anthologies]). Phillip Kavanagh and Elise Hearst revisit Dickens’ novel A Christmas Carol through the dramatic lens of Jewish culture in A Very Jewish Christmas Carol. A more contemporary refashioning is Colleen McCullough’s Tim by Tim McGarry, a reworking of the 1974 novel about a man with a disability. McGarry critiques the neglect of disadvantaged members of society by both private and governmental entities, as well as examining notions of ageing and sexuality. For the stage production, McGarry was adamant that Tim be played by a young male actor with lived experience of disability.

Strong female leads were a stand-out feature of several dramas, two of which achieved awards. Eloise Snape’s Pony, about a 37-year-old party girl who unexpectedly finds herself pregnant, was shortlisted for the Rodney Seaborn Playwrights Award 2021, the Griffin Award 2022, the Patrick White Playwrights Award 2022 and the Queensland Premier’s Drama Award 2022–23. Both Joanna Murray-Smith’s Julia and Emily Sheehan’s Monument portray female politicians and the gender discrimination they confront in politics; Monument was a 2022 Finalist for the Max Afford Playwrights Award. Kerryn Beatty’s Her follows a woman’s journey through rural and urban landscapes as she confronts the lack of access to specialist medical care for a heart condition and women even more marginalised are given voice in Runt and Kerosene, two monologues in one volume by Patricia Cornelius with collaborators Susie Dee, Nicci Wilks, and Benjamin Nichol.

Nicholas Brown’s Sex Magick uses humour to navigate its central character’s queerness, masculinity and his Asian-Australian identity. Another comedy-drama, Unconditional by Seán Dowling and Cameron Hurry, draws on personal experiences for its examination of the dynamics of a relationship when one partner transitions. First Nations Monologues, edited by playwright Jane Harrison, assembles excerpts from work by First Nations playwrights (including Jada Alberts, Kodie Bedford, Wesley Enoch, Andrea James, Leah Purcell) expressing the diverse perspectives and lived experiences of First Nations individuals [Anthologies].

Beginning discussion of the year’s poetry with The Tour by Π.O. allows an eye-catching quotation as reviewer Francesca Sasnaitis illustrates what this poet “does brilliantly, somewhere between ekphrasis and transcription, [creating] a sound poem made of recognisable language imitating music”:

(Now…) Saaaaaaax!! Now: How do you / hit

a cymbal, now?! Like… /// that! How?! Side-on??? Sideways?

Side-long???? Scrape the sides! Scrape… scrape… POUND!

Thump-BANG-boom! (What was * That?) Was it a scratch?! A. .

scratch ///// your head?! A, mouse? WHO CARES?! WHO

CARES?! — We do! — [applause] [applause] SAX!!!! What?! ( )

The Tour is ostensibly the diary of several Australian poets’ 1985 reading-tour of cities in the United States and Canada. Whilst admiring the volume’s energy, Sasnaitis found it “does not have the breadth (nor the heft!) of [Π.O.’s] Heide (2019) or Fitzroy: The biography (2015)”, its focus being “smaller and more personal, a desire to set the record straight, perhaps” (ABR 459 [November]). Also based upon real events, Frank by the late Jordie Albiston draws upon the diaries of Australian photographer Frank Hurley, who accompanied Antarctic expeditions led by Douglas Mawson and Ernest Shackleton. Albiston’s work is in its own way as experimental as that of Π.O.: “Deploying no words of her own – aside from an enlightening essay adapted from a speech [Albiston] gave [in 2021] … – the poems build momentum from clusters of words and phrases hewn entirely from Hurley’s diaries” (Anthony Lynch, ABR 453 [May]). The “speech” to which this reviewer refers, outlining Albiston’s process and vision for this project, is reproduced at the end of the book.

Paul Hetherington prefaces his review of Luke Beesley’s In the Photograph by observing that “Australia has had a conservative poetry culture” for “a long time” and that “[n]ow, in 2023, Australian poetry is dominated by an often ‘confessional’ free verse at a time when even the slow-to-move poetry culture in the United Kingdom is becoming increasingly radicalized”. This radicalisation “is marked by the rise of various forms of literary hybridity” including the “hybrid or prose-poetical forms”. Luke Beesley is a practitioner of such hybridity, stating that his works “began as ‘short fiction’” although he refers to them as “poems”. Many “still read like short fiction, microfiction, or poetic prose” writes Hetherington (ABR 456 [August]). David McCooey’s fifth collection, The Book of Falling, also experiments with form and structure: it includes narrations, turns lists and questions into poems and pairs family photos with shorter observational or reflective pieces. (“The poems associated with these photos are short and full of sarcasm and irony, quite different to other poems in the book”, observes Beatriz Copello [Compulsive Reader 12 May].) McCooey’s book “keeps faith with the representational mode and affective powers of contemporary lyric” writes Judith Bishop, contrasting it with Justin Clemens’ A Foul Wind which “is a vigorous exemplar of the anti-lyric mode” (ABR 452 [April]).

There was acclaim for two important new verse novels. John Kinsella’s Cellnight evokes Fremantle, Western Australia during the 1980s protests against American nuclear warships entering the port town. “Throughout the discourse there is beauty threaded amongst the anger and deep sadness”, writes Janet Mawdesley; “[t]he beauty has within it the bitter sting of the words” (Blue Wolf Reviews 8 June). The novel is written in what Kinsella calls “‘spindle’ sonnets”, resulting in “a cat’s cradle of a verse novel — intersecting threads pulled tight and tense between prison bars, protest signs, booze bottles and warships” whilst “[f]eathered visitors also flit among the narrative fibres, bearing witness to the fists raised over prone and vulnerable bodies in the carceral corners of a swelling port city” (Cass Lynch, publisher’s website). The other verse novel, She Is the Earth, by Yankunytjatjara/Kokatha poet and artist Ali Cobby Eckermann, achieves a “dreamlike quality” which “resonates in a musical cadence” that is “redolent of First Nations’ musicality, reminding us of Northeast Arnhem Land Yolngu song cycles and Central Australian Inma, but also of an Ancient Greek chorus” (Julie Janson, ABR 458 [October]). Aidan Coleman says “the literature of First Nations peoples in Australia is undergoing a resurgence” and places Eckermann “at the forefront” of this movement in poetry, declaring “She is the Earth is unlike any other book in Australian literature” (Conversation July 31).

Also participating in the “resurgence”, Bardi Jawa descendant Bebe Backhouse made his poetry debut with More Than These Bones, which offers “a polyphonic voice from a young Indigenous man who embraces his sexuality and sensuality and blak queer identity” (Julie Janson, ABR 458 [October]). Reviewing The Body Country by Wergaia and Wemba Wemba woman Susie Anderson, poet Backhouse (writing as Bebe Backhouse-Oliver) hailed this “collection of fragmentary odes” to country and life experiences as “a perspicacious example of the creativity and spirit of First Nations poetry” (ABR 458 [October]) and Elaine Chennatt was impressed that “Anderson doesn’t shy away from some of the tougher realities of her lived experiences as a First Nations woman and the emotional weight that comes with being a black body on Country in contemporary Australia” (Aniko Press Review 6 September).

Sarah Day’s ninth collection, Slack Tide, is “one of her most thematically diverse”, offering “a thoughtful mix of environmentalism …, her British roots …, and a teacher’s precision with free verse” (Jennifer Harrison, ABR 451 [March]). Jill Jones’ Acrobat Music: New and Selected Poems draws upon her thirteen previous books of poetry with a focus on poems “remarked on by readers and critics/ reviewers through the years” or which “seemed to work when read aloud”; Cassandra Atherton finds it “significant that some of Jones’s more linguistically challenging poems have been excluded from this volume” (ABR 457 [September]). Andrew Taylor “has been an important figure in the Australian poetic landscape since his first book, The Cool Change, appeared in 1971”, writes Geoff Page in reviewing Taylor’s new volume, Shore Lines. Now in his eighties, Taylor is “understandably interested in what remains and what has vanished of his family’s history in Warrnambool, his birthplace” says Page (ABR 456 [August]). Reviewing Andrew Sant’s Near the Border: New and Selected Poems, Page describes Sant as “a substantial yet somewhat elusive figure in contemporary Australian poetry”, his new book providing “a generous selection from his work since 1980” plus “ten new poems” (ABR 461 [January–February]). Geoff Page’s own work is represented in 101 Poems, part of Pitt Street Poetry’s “101 Poets” series which aimed to be “a new series of … the best work of Australia’s leading poets as collectable, definitive editions” (publisher’s website). Paul Hetherington argues that the series still has not achieved “a broadly representative sample of Australia’s leading contemporary poets”, although “the achievement of the poems in [Page’s] volume is considerable. Page’s writing is almost always clear and thoughtful, acknowledging human and societal complexities rather than choosing didacticism or easy positions” (ABR 459 [November]). Another book in this series, 101 Poems by Ron Pretty (who died in 2023), was “striking” because of “Pretty’s plain language” and his use of narrative and biography (Sam Ryan, ABR 453 [May]).

According to Geoff Page, volumes of collected poems by living poets “are rare these days” (ABR 461 [January–February]). This seems true, but John Kinsella has defied the trend with Collected Poems: Volume One (1980-2005), The Ascension of Sheep and Collected Poems: Volume Two (2005–2014), Harsh Hakea. Noting that these are “two volumes of close to a thousand pages each, with a third volume pending”, John Hawke observes that “Kinsella is a poet who favours combination over selection” (ABR 454 [June]). Defying the rarity of scholarly reprints of works by dead authors, the Text Classics edition of Lesbia Harford’s Selected Poems, selected and introduced by Gerald Murnane, brings “a sharp and accessible focus” to the work of Harford (1891–1927) whose poems “have become increasingly important to scholars and poets in understanding both the impact of poetic modernism in Australia and shifting concepts of gender, class, and the tensions between a personal and a collective politics” (Rose Lucas, ABR 457 [September]).

Novelist Frank Moorhouse (1938–2022) “[set] his pen against the dominance of the bush in the Australian literary imagination [and] wrote about the contemporary urban lives of people negotiating shifting sexual mores and expectations of gender” (Judith Brett, Saturday Paper 23 Sept). A year after his death, Moorhouse was remembered in two biographies. Reviewing the shorter biography, Catharine Lumby’s Frank Moorhouse: A Life, Susan Lever says “Moorhouse, the performer, may matter more than Moorhouse the writer of a trilogy. This is why this biography matters: it tries to appreciate the performance of a life, not simply its residue of work” (Inside Story 1 September). Matthew Lamb’s Frank Moorhouse: Strange Paths is the first of two volumes of a “cultural biography”, this volume spanning his birth to the 1970s. Sascha Morrell writes “the term ‘cultural biography’ … is apt to describe how ‘biography intersects with social history’ as the book tracks Moorhouse’s ‘negotiation of shifting social conventions and historical moments’” (ABR April 2024). Australian-born Shirley Hazzard (1931–2016) lived her adult life in the USA and Brigitta Olubas’s Shirley Hazzard: A Writing Life was reviewed on both sides of the Pacific. According to Alexander Moran, “[w]hile sometimes too detailed, this is an impressive, revealing, and worthy biography of one of the most important writers of the last century” (Booklist 1–15 November 2022). Ryan Cropp’s Donald Horne: A Life in the Lucky Country is a biography of the influential Australian public intellectual. Calling it “impeccably researched and beautifully crafted”, Phillip Deery concludes that “this compelling biography reminds us of the need, today, to retrieve those values Horne championed” in his landmark non-fiction work The Lucky Country (1964): “raise the standard of public debate, replace mediocrity with vision, and reinvigorate the political culture with ethically charged arguments about Australia’s future” (Sydney Morning Herald 7 September).

In a variant of “intergenerational” concerns, several works sought to recover lost voices. Anna Funder’s Wifedom: Mrs Orwell’s Invisible Life recovers the story of Eileen O’Shaughnessy, George Orwell’s wife, with a blend of biography, fictionalisation and memoir. Michael Hoffman calls it a “great and important narrative of oppression and covert suppression”, although commentators have criticised the downplaying of Sylvia Topp’s 2020 biography Eileen: The Making of George Orwell and alleged inaccuracies (ABR July 455; Richard Brooks, Guardian 12 September; Peter Hayes, Quadrant 6 April 2024). Danielle Scrimshaw’s collective biography She and Her Pretty Friend offers “an appealing and accessible” recovery of queer women’s lives in Australia from 1830 to 1980 (Jinghua Qian Saturday Paper 13 May) and Shauna Bostock makes a similar recovery of intergenerational Indigenous histories in Reaching Through Time: Finding My Family’s Stories. Jacinta Walsh calls this book “the epitome of Indigenous family life writing … a journey through more than 200 years of Australian history, from early invasion and colonisation to the present day, through the lens of Indigenous family lived experience” (ABR 458 [October]). In Killing for Country David Marr uncovers the stories of his own ancestors who killed Aboriginal people while serving with the Native Police in colonial times, “shin[ing] a light into the dark shameful corners of our collective national experience” (Julianne Schultz, Conversation 10 October).

Experimenting with form, Helen Elliott’s Eleven Letters frames memoir as a collection of letters to influential people in the author’s formative period. “Readers join in the illusion of reading a personal communication, a reunion between writer and subject”, writes Brenda Walker (ABR 455 [July]). Richard Flanagan’s experimental Question 7 is described by Catriona Menzies-Pike as a “pluriform work” striving for coherence “through a process of what we may term speculative autobiography”, but for her this self-mythologisation is “working on a scale that brings Question 7 right up to the edge of self-parody” and “Flanagan’s looping book of questions about the inescapable past provided me neither with consolation nor with new tools to take the measure of our contemporary world” (ABR 459 [November]). Australian Book Review published a rare standalone rejoinder to Menzies-Pike’s review: “The wonder of Question 7 is that it gives words to what we usually only sense in silence. It is to be expected that some will find parts of it too mystical for their liking” (James Boyce, ABR 460 [December]).

Reviewer Yves Rees reports that “the publishing landscape has been transformed” in Australia in the last few years and “[d]uring the early 2020s, Australian readers have been treated to a smorgasbord of TGD [trans and gender-diverse] life writing” from major publishers. One new addition, Kris Kneen’s Fat Girl Dancing, is the author’s third memoir, this time focused on their own body. “Like Kneen’s earlier work … Fat Girl Dancing experiments with form, using life writing as a broad frame to capture surreal imaginings, thought experiments, dreams and theory” (Bec Kavanaugh, G 5 May). Also experimental in form, transmasculine social worker Erin Riley’s A Piece of Work is a memoir in essays. “Whereas essayists often come to the page armoured by theoretical references and ironic distance, Riley writes with an unwavering earnestness so heartfelt that it promises to wear down even the most cynical reader” observes Yves Rees (ABR 458 [October]) [Letters and Auto/biography]. (Two anthologies were also part of the “transformation” noted by Rees: Nangamay Dream Mana Gather Djurali Grow: First Nations Australia LGBTQIA+ Poetry, edited by Alison Whittaker and Steven Lindsay Ross and An Unexpected Party: Queer Speculative YA Fiction, edited by Seth Malacari [Anthologies].)

In Non-Fiction, Shannyn Palmer’s Unmaking Angas Downs: Myth and History on a Central Australian Pastoral Station won the Prime Minister’s Literary Award for its nuanced examination of history, colonisation and indigenous culture surrounding a now derelict pastoral station. Palmer’s research is rooted in community engagement, particularly with the Anangu people, blending Western anthropology with indigenous storytelling methods. Challenging romanticised notions of pioneer life in the Outback, Palmer’s work of recuperative ethnography emphasises the need to listen to marginalised voices and to re-evaluate established historical narratives. Abandon Every Hope by Hayley Singer (no relation to animal rights activist Peter Singer) is an “experimental collection of fragmentary essays” which “both deploys well-worn tropes of slaughterhouse literature and attempts to nudge the [animal rights] form forwards or, perhaps more accurately, sideways” (Ben Brooker, ABR 451 [March]). Singer is “concerned with the idea of disappearance, how the plight of animals raised for human consumption is elided by obfuscation and euphemism”, says Brooker, noting that Singer shares David Brooks’ awareness of “how language shapes and distorts animal–human relations”. Michael Richards’ A Maker of Books: Alec Bolton and his Brindabella Press was selected by the National Library of Australia (NLA) as its “flagship title” celebrating 50 years of NLA Publishing. Richards calls his book a “biblio-biography” which views the life of Alec Bolton (1926–1996) through the lens of the books produced by his Brindabella Press. Despite some overly detailed technical descriptions, Richards highlights Bolton’s meticulous approach to book production, from paper and typeface to cover design [Non-Fiction].

The number of published anthologies dropped in 2023, but without decline in their significance. In Family: Stories of Belonging, editors Alaina Gougoulis and Ian See assemble pieces by nineteen Australian writers about experiences of family. Many propose new ideas about what families can be: for one contributor family is “not a group of people at all but an environment, a collection of phenomena”; another extends family into the animal realm to include relationships with pets; and Indigenous contributors see family extending across time into ancestry. Alcatraz, edited by Cassandra Atherton and Paul Hetherington, offers an international selection of prose poems, each paired with a line drawing by artist Phil May. Thirteen Australians are included, together with poets from Germany, Hong Kong, India, New Zealand, Singapore, Vietnam, the UK and the United States. Cuttlefish: Western Australian Poets, edited by Roland Leach, offers poems which reviewer Brenda Walker found “for the most part gentle” and “seldom formally challenging”, with “some exceptional poetry of the natural world” (most notably John Kinsella’s “Villanelle of Watering the Trees”) (ABR 459 [November]). Donna Lu’s selection of The Best Australian Science Writing 2023 prompted reviewer Robyn Arianrhod’s observation that “a decade ago, male writers dominated BASW anthologies, but … this year there are seven male, one non-binary, and twenty-five female authors”. Noting that “it is difficult to find the right balance between writing that distils complex scientific concepts — about the physics of climate, say — and that which documents scientific projects, such as those tracking the effects of climate change”, Arianhrod detects a “current trend towards science journalism rather than science writing”: “[a] third of the pieces this year are from general rather than science-focused outlets” (ABR 461 [January–February]).

Two major critical reference works appeared in 2023: The Cambridge History of the Australian Novel, edited by David Carter and The Cambridge Companion to the Australian Novel, edited by Nicholas Birns and Louis Klee, the latter providing a genre-specific updating of The Cambridge Companion to Australian Literature (2001), edited by Elizabeth Webby. New essays on Patrick White, Tim Winton, Alexis Wright and J.M. Coetzee were also noteworthy. Among book-length critical studies, Melinda J. Cooper’s Middlebrow Modernism: Eleanor Dark’s Interwar Fiction considers selected fiction by Eleanor Dark (1901–85) as an expression of “middlebrow modernism”. For reviewer Susan Sheridan “[t]his “apparently contradictory term signals its thesis that Dark ‘repackaged experimental devices and progressive ideas in accessible and entertaining stories’ that ‘provided readers with a winning combination of both quality and entertainment’”. Sheridan affirms that “it is good to see Dark treated as a writer seriously engaged with ideas, and as part of a wider, and more widely defined, modernist movement” but doubts if the “belittling epithet [‘middlebrow’]” is useful “as a central critical term in accounting for Dark’s distinctive qualities as a writer” (ABR 451 [March]). Emmett Stinson’s Murnane discusses Gerald Murnane’s four major “late fictions” (Barley Patch [2009], A History of Books [2012], A Million Windows [2014] and Border Districts [2017]). Acknowledging that “possibly no other author’s body of literary work is so rigorously and relentlessly autoreferential, recycling and repurposing its own content across books in slightly altered forms”, Stinson nevertheless claims that Murnane “is without question both the most original and most significant Australian author of the last fifty years, and the best writer Australia has produced since Christina Stead”. Barron Field in New South Wales: The Poetics of Terra Nullius by Justin Clemens and Thomas H. Ford examines the poetry and writings of Barron Field (1786–1846), who was judge of the Supreme Court of Civil Judicature in New South Wales from 1817 to 1828 and thus the highest legal authority in the early colony. Field also wrote very bad poetry, embarrassingly resulting in the first published book of Australian poetry, Field’s First Fruits of Australian Poetry (1819). In a remarkably detailed review of this important book, Philip Mead writes that Ford and Clemens use “deeply knowledgeable and sharp-eared readings” to historicise “the ways in which Field lived and worked within the discourses of colonization”. Field’s belief that Aboriginal culture was doomed to extinction became a “death sentence … pronounced over Aboriginal people” and enabled “the replacement and assimilation of Aboriginal cultural expression with ‘Australian poetry’” (ABR 455 [July]).

Alex Skovron received the 2023 Patrick White Award for achievements as a writer of poetry and fiction; the 2023 Colin Roderick Award went to Sarah Holland-Batt for The Jaguar (2022); and Debra Dank’s memoir We Come with the Place (2022) won the 2023 ALS Gold Medal and an unprecedented four prizes in the 2023 NSW Premier’s Literary Awards (the Douglas Stewart Prize for Non-Fiction, the UTS Glenda Adams Award for New Writing, the Indigenous Writers’ Prize and overall Book of the Year).

2023 saw the deaths of novelists Gabrielle Carey, Lee Harding and Gabrielle Williams; poets Andrew Burke, John Egan, Alison Flett, Ron Pretty, Michael Sariban, Alf Taylor, John Tranter and Cath Vidler; Australian literature scholars John Barnes, Ross Gibson and Elizabeth Webby; feminist writer Dale Spender; journalist John Pilger and satirist Barry Humphries.