AustLit

'Teaching seemed to me to offer the best kind of life for writing and (l)earning. Solitary excursions, observing nature, and collecting insects and native flowers and orchids on the slopes of Mount Wellington or seaweeds and shellfish on the shores of the Der went River around Hobart or on the beaches at South Arm were an important part of my childhood. The poems in " The Real Life of Ern Malley" are laced with various references and hidden quotations, e.g., "To be born old and never seventeen" refers to Ern Malley's age and his feelings about life, but it also plays on Rimbaud's line "On n'est pas sérieux, quand on a dix-sept ans," and Rimbaud's combative nature and style seem to me to be central to the Ern Malley story, as well as to Sidney Nolan's paintings. Coleridge, Mathew Arnold, T. S. Eliot, and Robert Lowell were iconic poet-critics and in one way or the other have their respective theories of writing poetry and sometimes even try to justify the creative endeavors in the light of their criticism.' (Publication abstract)

'The "plots" of these novels (the term usefully implies narrative purpose, mapping of a course, a calculation or conspiracy, and a piece of land) move beyond formal Aristotelian structures to chart psychological boundaries and the human investment involved in making a life or a garden in difficult or hostile terrains. Aritomo, the Japanese mastergardener/artist in Tan Twan Eng's The Garden of Evening Mists, teaches his initially reluctant pupil, Yun Ling, a woman who petitions him to create a memorial garden for her dead sister, that despite his craft in simulating a garden's timeless quality, an essential element is change-the idea of static perfection, "a garden where nothing dies or decays, where no-one grows old, and the seasons never change," is an anathema (308). Did he borrow from heaven itself? (27) Yun Ling's escape from the hellish death camp, where prisoners and guards were buried alive in the tunnels of their own making, has horrific significance, as the elderly woman now wears her lover's body tattoo that reproduces the layout, the very plot of the garden, its vectors and schema, potentially locating both the grave of her sister and lost treasure. Home, a substantial Sirius Cove property, is threatened by high-rise development, weeds, debt, prolonged drought, Marie's failure to manage financial affairs, and the avarice of an ex-husband.' (Publication abstract)

'Alec Patrić's Black Rock White City (2015), a tale of two cities and two war refugees, won the 2016 Miles Franklin Award against the backdrop of an ongoing worldwide refugee crisis. Besides its topicality, this poignant rendition of migrant experience makes readers privy to the lives of suburban Melbournians, invites them to undertake detective work in solving a crime, and takes them on a journey across genres and modes of writing. The immediacy of the first-person narration is interrupted with scattered fragments of poetry, dislodged from Jovan's mind by the graffiti; passages from a novel-in-progress, which mark the beginning of Suzana's regeneration; and flashbacks from the characters' past, pieces of a jigsaw puzzle that readers are completing alongside the search for clues in a murder mystery. [...]it is up to them to decide if they are convinced by the unraveling and the final image in Suzana's admiring eyes of Jovan, "as expressionless as god remaking the world" (248), as he seizes the second chance to protect his family.'  (Publication abstract)

'A connection to Spain and its land is also played out through food, as characters pull ingredients from just outside their homes and consume such regional fare as jamón serrano (8) and aguardiente (9), each representing one of the few instances of Spanish language in the text. " The Dream Girl" focuses a great deal on the protagonist's growing love of reading and his writing aspirations. [...]The Dream Girl" has the opportunity to bring a fresh perspective to the artist's narrative with its focus on language; the Galician-speaking protagonist is forced to negotiate Spain's desire to homogenize the country's language.' (Publication abstract)

'The breaks in style and point of view match the author's disjointed search through memory to find the lost epiphany that he failed to record in the middle of the night. The information conveyed in this story lacks the purposefulness of the questions posed in "Lost Pages," and though the gaps between segments can create an interesting tension and resonance, the unusual syntax and the lack of cohesion between sections pull the reader out of the story. [...]Napoleon's Roads is an experiment worth conducting, as the places in which fragments resonate across the gap give new perspective on aspects of the human condition.'  (Publication abstract)

'In light of the carnage that lone gunmen have wrought in the United States over the past twenty years, this revelation is chilling and difficult to reconcile with the midfifties grandfather who confidently leaves the National Gallery of Victoria in the collection's final essay, "like a man in boots" (296). While the subsequent two essays find their starting points in Winton's early life- being taken to see Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey by a hapless but well-intentioned friend's mother for said friend's eighth birthday, and a meditation on how "havoc" has shaped his life (particularly his father's catastrophic motorcycle accident when Winton was five)-they also defy easy taxonomy. Winton's passion for Australia as a repository for biodiversity and his commitment to its protection from itself, especially in light of the ugly fact that "Australia has the worst record of mammal extinction in the world" (64), is evident; a number of the essays chronicle various environmental campaigns in which he has fought or whose victory he has celebrated.' (Publication abstract)

'A fierce social activist and feminist, her life both tragic and seemingly enlightened, Wickham boasts a body of work that reveals to us hundreds of glass shards that magnify and reflect the internal life of women and the existential grief of humanity. In "Reverie," however, our speaker breaks from such formal structures and challenges the very notion of poetic form by challenging the status quo for female poets and artists through enjambment and a loose, flowing rhyme structure. Having come out on the other side of Wickham's work feeling more certain that being a grown woman means experiencing loss and uncertainty, I appreciate her inclination toward a work ethic that fills the space from which the things we love eventually and always escape.'  (Publication abstract)

'The work ranges wider than this terrorist event, gathering within its orbit other facets of the "war on terror" that include a 2015 ISIS suicide bombing and the 2005 Cronulla Riots that pitted Caucasian Australians against largely Lebanese immigrants, thus placing issues of domestic and racial violence against a broader backdrop of global unrest. There is also a set of Twitter excerpts from a now-defunct account by Jake Bilardi, an eighteen-year-old Melbourne man who converted to radical Islam and died in a suicide bombing in Iraq, March 2015. ("Graffiti Triptych," 26) Also, The ocean cliff's buoyant wind wantons goose-bumped skin ("Something is Lost," 46) The often lush imagery points toward the realm of wonder and divine, of fertility and the chance for change, countering the violence, racism, and sexism that threads through much of the content.' (Publication abstract)