AustLit

'The American novelist Richard Yates once remarked to an interviewer that he had the misfortune of having written his best book first. He might have found an ally in Donald Horne, whose first book, The Lucky Country, is perhaps the most widely read piece of social criticism ever written by an Australian. Published in 1964, its famous and often misinterpreted title entered the Australian lexicon and outlived its creator. Its central argument – that Australia’s prosperity was the result of luck rather than good leadership – is a curse that continues to plague the nation’s unimaginative political class. The book’s success haunted the public career and legacy of its author. Though he was, among other things, a journalist, editor, social critic, novelist, academic, polemicist, and self-styled ‘public waffler’, in public memory, he remains Donald Horne, author of The Lucky Country.' (Introduction)

'Meet Ruth Apps, born 1926 and gleefully proud of her Irish convict ancestry. Her father lost the use of an arm in Gallipoli and was also mentally affected. During World War II he slept in the yard to avoid bombs. Ruth won a scholarship to a selective girls’ high school in Sydney when few girls were educated beyond primary school. She did well and gained work as a stenographer. She loved going to the ‘Saturday arvo flicks’ and family camping beach holidays. She met a railway guard on a train, but was lectured by her mother because ‘Nice girls don’t go out with boys who are not introduced.’ Despite the lack of an introduction, Ruth married Bill and they lived happily. She left work when she fell pregnant. Their first child died shortly after being born with ‘multiple deformities’. There were no scans available in those days. Subsequently, Ruth and Bill had three healthy and successful daughters. Ruth returned to work when her youngest started school and was called a ‘fallen woman’ by some for this. She loved working, was promoted and respected, and managed to win a battle for equal pay. She felt guilty and wondered if she should have had children, despite loving and caring well for her girls. She was an early adopter of the contraceptive pill. In her youth, there were only two ‘foreigners’ living in their street; now there are only two Anglo families on her block in Westmead, Sydney. One of her daughters ‘married a Pole and a granddaughter married a Lebanese man’.' (Introduction)

'Traditional academic festschrifts often lack coherence and consistency, especially when the honorand’s former students and colleagues, as more or less duty-bound contributors, share little in common beyond that association. A posthumous tribute to a departed scholar can be more successful, not least because the circumstances of its compilation permit a less constrained approach to its subject’s oeuvre. The editors of this splendid collection, which had its genesis at the Perth funeral in 2015 of one Australia’s most productive and prominent historians, insist that they intend no ‘detailed examination’ of Geoffrey Bolton’s life work. Yet what they and their fellow contributors have to say about the man and his multifarious historical activities is at least as interesting as what they tell us about ‘how lines of enquiry that he pursued have been extended’.' (Introduction)

'The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.’ L.P. Hartley’s now proverbial observation at the start of The Go-Between (1953) functions as a statement of fact and a warning. The writer who wishes to traverse the terrain between a nation’s present and its past must navigate a minefield – linguistic, cultural, and historical. Therefore, when you attempt to navigate not only across time but across nations – say, Angola in 1986, Hiroshima in 1952, France in 1855 – the exercise is fraught with danger. But this is the ambitious task that Kyra Giorgi has set herself in her first book of fiction, The Circle and the Equator, a collection of thirteen short stories.' (Introduction)

'When a new novel from Kim Scott appears, one feels compelled to talk not only about it as a work of fiction by a leading Australian writer, but also about its cultural significance. In this sense a Kim Scott novel is an event, and Taboo does not disappoint.' (Introduction)

'A rich vein of political writing runs through Australian fiction. From the early days of socialist realism, through the anti-colonialism of both black and white writers, to tough explorations of identity politics today, we have struggled with concepts of justice and equality since Federation.' (Introduction)

'After Stephen Edgar’s nine collections of poetry, the last seven of which are distinguished by an extraordinary control over metre and rhyme, a reviewer feels bound to ask how this new book, Transparencies, differs from its predecessors? There are at least two answers: the recurrent spirit of the poet’s mother, Marion Isabel Edgar (1922–2015), to whom the book is dedicated, and the poet’s elegant conviction that the universe lacks any meaning beyond that which we arbitrarily impose on it. A third concern – not entirely new – is the unreliability of our senses, particularly our vision, and how our perception of the world tends to be layered rather than completed in a single ‘take’.' (Introduction)

'Tehran, April 1987: Going Under
'Descending in a stream of arpeggio broken chords: as we moved through night and the vernal air down into the green earth, my mother thought she heard a children’s song on the stairs as the bombs fell cascading. Like bells, bells of Hades sounding out inverted intervals, the bombs fell interminably. The sirens that were singing sang us downward to the damp islands of the underground shelter, a honeycomb under the Tehran metropolis, buzzing with heat-maddened, with death-maddened men and women. My mother was quick with child and as she ran barefoot down the spiralling stairs she was engulfed by the yawning mouth of the desecrated earth. It was two months shy of my birth. All was opaque and suffocating. Concrete shards broke and fell from the ceiling, missiles rained down in deluge. As a whale yawning wide, trenches on the battle-front split and men were dragged into the void. Later, as I came up out of the waters, I knew this sorrow would abide. I tasted a fruit with an ashen core and I saw over all the earth ashes and soot spread abroad, veiling the stars, this shroud.' (Introduction)