AustLit
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AbstractHistoryArchive Description
'This April ABR considers the importance of talk. In his cover essay, historian Frank Bongiorno argues that the Albanese government’s storytelling, not just its actions, directs the ‘possibilities of politics’. Sheila Fitzpatrick gives a moving portrait of her friendship with ‘recording angel’ Katerina Clark and G. Geltner pushes us to rethink our Middle-Ages chatter. Sascha Morrell comes around to the ‘winks and nudges’ in a major new biography of Frank Moorhouse and Frances Wilson insists Hilary Mantel will speak for herself in death. Glyn Davis tells us about a floating university and Morag Fraser puzzles over mothers. There’s Michael Hofmann on Nam Le’s 36 Ways of Writing a Vietnamese Poem, Stuart Kells on rogue corporations, and Robyn Arianrhod on the moon.' (Publication summary)
Contents
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‘When I Am Famous’ : A Masterpiece of Biographical Synthesis,
single work
review
— Review of Frank Moorhouse : Strange Paths 2023 single work biography ;(p. 9-11)'Frank Moorhouse: Strange paths has no introduction, but Matthew Lamb describes it in his author’s note as ‘the first in a projected two-volume cultural biography of Frank Moorhouse’, covering the long writing apprenticeship of 1938–74 during which Moorhouse ‘br[oke] into the literary establishment, on his own terms’. Lamb does not explain his use of the term ‘cultural biography’ within the book, but the term is apt to describe how ‘biography intersects with social history’ as the book tracks Moorhouse’s ‘negotiation of shifting social conventions and historical moments’ (as Lamb puts it in an article on the Penguin website titled ‘“When the facts conflict with the legend” – How does a biographer balance storytelling with the truth?’).' (Introduction)
- Calm Voicei"On a fatherhood weekend, the men drag", single work poetry (p. 12)
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It Might Be … P Is for Peter, Physician, Patient, Poet,
single work
review
— Review of The Cancer Finishing School : Lessons in Laughter, Love and Resilience 2024 single work autobiography ;(p. 20-21)'That doctors aren’t supposed to become incurably ill is something their patients might say, and about as useless as declaring that dentists are forbidden from contracting toothache or that undertakers should live forever – seeing other people out, not themselves.' (Introduction) - Rinbo Abdoi"There’s a poem that begins", single work poetry (p. 21)
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‘We Live Here’ Murray Middleton’s Début Novel,
single work
review
— Review of No Church in the Wild 2024 single work novel ; (p. 30) -
On the Brink : Georgia Blain’s Posthumous Collection,
single work
review
— Review of We All Lived in Bondi Then 2024 selected work short story ;(p. 32)'When Georgia Blain died at the age of fifty-one in 2016, the reading public was robbed of a superb prose writer in her prime. Her final and, some consider, best novel, Between a Wolf and a Dog (2016), achieved wide critical acclaim. Shortly after Blain succumbed to brain cancer, that novel went on to win or be shortlisted in a slew of national prizes.' (Introduction)
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Across Time : Mykaela Saunders’s New Short Story Collection,
single work
review
— Review of Always Will Be : Stories of Goori Sovereignty from the Futures of the Tweed 2024 selected work short story ;(p. 33)'There has been talk in recent years about so-called Indigenous Futurism. Referencing Afro-Futurism, futurist fiction that imagines a new postcolonial Africa, the Indigenous version imagines a postcolonial world for Indigenous people, a future where the world is the way it should always have been. One quirk, however, is that Indigenous Futurism leans on Indigenous notions of time, an eternal now in which past and future are mere directions. Writers of Indigenous Futurism know that it’s not only possible to imagine the future and the past at the same time, but that it is part of cultural practice.' (Introduction) -
Spiral of Silence : Homage to Mrs Dalloway,
single work
review
— Review of Thunderhead 2024 single work novel ;(p. 34-35)'A feminist triumph and homage to Virginia Woolf, Miranda Darling’s Thunderhead is a potent exploration of suburban entrapment for women. The novella opens with a complex satire of Ian McEwan’s response to Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway (1925) in his novel Saturday (2005). All three books are set over the course of a single day, where the intricacies of both the quotidian and extraordinary occur. In this novella’s opening paragraphs, Darling’s protagonist, Winona Dalloway, wakes to see the sky ablaze through her window. While ‘it is dawn in the suburbs of the east’ – rather than a burning plane, evoking 9/11 terrorism, as in McEwan’s novel – she believes it ‘telegraphs a warning, red sky in the morning’. This refers to the opening of Mrs Dalloway, where Clarissa Dalloway feels, ‘standing there at the open window, that something awful was about to happen’.' (Introduction)
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Small Doses : Three Recent Short Story Collections,
single work
review
— Review of The Carnal Fugues 2023 selected work short story ; We Will Live and Then We Will See : Collected Stories 2024 selected work short story ; (p. 35-36) -
Swimming between Islands : An Awkward Account of Rescue,
single work
review
— Review of Saving Lieutenant Kennedy 2023 single work biography ;(p. 41)'In August 1943, John F. Kennedy, then aged twenty-six, was rescued from the threat of Japanese captivity – or worse – by a few brave Solomon Islanders, in an operation coordinated by the Australian naval officer Reg Evans. Evans was one of the Royal Australian Navy’s ‘Coastwatchers’, intelligence collectors based perilously behind Japanese lines.'(Introduction)
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Survivals and Endings : A Hotchpotch of Personal and Global Menace,
single work
review
— Review of Fat Chance : Journalism Poems 2024 selected work poetry ;(p. 44)'Fat chance. A million to one. Buckley’s. We’ve all come across bizarre tales of survival that defy belief. Take the case of sixty-year-old Hiromitsu Shinkawa, found floating ten miles out to sea, clinging to the roof of his house, days after a tsunami wiped out his home town in the Fukushima prefecture of Japan in 2011. What were the odds?' (Introduction) -
36 Mirrors : Force Majeure by the Truckload,
single work
review
— Review of 36 Ways of Writing a Vietnamese Poem 2024 selected work poetry ;(p. 45)'Even in his first publication, the seven short stories of the rightly celebrated The Boat (2008), Nam Le was perhaps always most interested in creating an aura of violent unpredictability. He withheld consistency, offered cruxes, hit the reader with a blizzard of bold plots in settings so varied as to be practically contradictory – Hiroshima, Medellin, New York City, a fishing town on the Queensland coast. Where, as in the title story, Nam Le appears to relent and writes about what may have been his own experience (he was ferried to Australia as an infant), the baby dies. He is like a package determined not to contain what it says on the disclosure form; a letter that won’t be delivered to the stated address.' (Introduction) - Poet of the Month with David Brooks, single work interview (p. 46)
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Trichotillomania : Adele Dumont’s Memoir in Chapters,
single work
review
— Review of The Pulling 2024 selected work autobiography essay ;(p. 47)'‘In the year of my birth, trichotillomania did not exist,’ writes Adele Dumont. Hair-pulling has been depicted in human culture for millennia: in Greek myth, in the Bible, in painting and sculpture, and, most commonly, in vernacular expression (‘I’m tearing my hair out’). But hair-pulling as a compulsive, recurring behaviour – trichotillomania – was only named in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) in 1987. Formal psychiatric diagnosis has become the dominant means by which we understand emotional distress, but this has happened very recently, and diagnosis can leave the sufferer, as Dumont writes, feeling ‘categorised’ and struggling to articulate those aspects of their illness that may seem, in spite of everything, like comfort.' (Introduction) - Critic of the Month with Ian Dickson, single work interview (p. 54)
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A Spectacular Tome : Vincent Namatjira’s Humour and Intense Vision,
single work
review
— Review of Vincent Namatjira 2023 selected work autobiography criticism ;(p. 61)'At last a spectacular tome for the many fans of Vincent Namatjira, one that will also win him new admirers. Originating from an exhibition at the Tarnanthi Festival and the Art Gallery of South Australia, this beautifully laid-out book from Thames & Hudson Australia captures the humour and intense vision of Namatjira’s career to date.' (Introduction)
