AustLit
Latest Issues
AbstractHistoryArchive Description
'From Plato to plutocrats, the September issue of ABR brings together the best and worst of the cultural moment. In our cover feature, Joel Deane casts his eye over the ‘ugly truth’ of Facebook’s contemptuous exploitation of users, while in a thought experiment inspired by Ursula K. Le Guin, Elizabeth Oliver identifies more worthy candidates for space travel than Branson and Bezos. Megan Clement reports from Paris on the pass sanitaire and Diane Stubbings reviews Peter Doherty’s plague-year dispatches. Sheila Fitzpatrick is our Critic of the Month and was a judge in this year’s Calibre Prize, for which Anita Punton’s ‘May Day’, printed in this issue, came runner-up. We also feature reviews of new fiction by Jennifer Mills, Colm Tóibín, and Laurent Binet, and new poetry by Toby Fitch, John Hawke, and Song Lin – as well as much, much more!' (Publication summary)
Contents
-
Something in the Air : A Haunted Puzzle of a Novel,
single work
review
— Review of The Airways 2021 single work novel ;'There is something, or rather someone, in the air in Jennifer Mills’s dark fourth novel. The Airways represents another leap towards the uncanny for Mills, whose previous book, the Miles Franklin-shortlisted Dyschronia (2018), was already a departure from the more traditionally realist modes of her earlier novels, The Diamond Anchor (2009) and Gone (2011), and short story collection, The Rest Is Weight (2012).' (Introduction)
-
Dark Shapes : Lucy Neave’s Refreshing New Novel,
single work
review
— Review of Believe in Me 2021 single work novel ;'Halfway through Lucy Neave’s new novel Believe in Me, there is an astonishing scene in which an orphaned foal is dressed in the skin of a newly dead foal, the skewbald coat threaded with baling twine and the strings knotted under the throat and chest. Disguised in this fleshy coat, strands of bloody muscle still clinging to it, the foal is presented hopefully to its foster mother. The novel’s main protagonist, Bet, is sceptical: ‘It’s condescending: as if a mare could be fooled by putting her dead foal’s skin on another foal.’ Sure enough, the grieving mare rejects the starving foal, stamping her hooves and moving around uneasily in the stable. Later that night, when Bet goes to check on the animals, she finds them nestled together: ‘Dark shapes, they moved together, away from me, as though they’d been startled from a dream.’ Stunned at this unexpected communion, Bet retreats into her own solitude: ‘I turned off the light, bolted the door and walked back through dew-soaked grass to bed, seeing again the mare and foal, nose to tail. They had no need of me.’' (Introduction)
-
'Smoke in the Head' : Miles Allinson’s New Novel,
single work
review
— Review of In Moonland 2021 single work novel ;'In an ABC interview to promote his previous novel, Fever of Animals (2015), Miles Allinson shares a brief anecdote. When Allinson was aged sixteen or seventeen, a teacher told him that everyone turns conservative eventually. Allinson recalls his repulsion at the notion of this inevitable slide towards orthodoxy. His new novel, In Moonland, feels like a rebuttal. Joe, the narrator of the first part of the book, is caught somewhere between consent and revolt: though ambitious, he feels trapped by the flickering lights of his own computer, by the suburbs, and by his run-of-the-mill job. Orbiting him is a coterie of questions relating to his new status as a father, coupled with one more profoundly unanswerable question: why did his father, Vincent, kill himself? Only some of these questions are answered across a narrative that uses four different perspectives and three different timelines, from the present back to the 1970s and into the near future.' (Introduction) -
Fantasies and Flaws New Novels by Hugh Breakey, Kim Lock, and Sophie Overett,
single work
review
— Review of The Beautiful Fall 2021 single work novel ; The Other Side of Beautiful 2021 single work novel ; The Rabbits 2021 single work novel ; (p. 21-22) - Nth Wavei"This time around", single work poetry (p. 22)
-
May Day,
single work
essay
'The real estate agent told me not to bother cleaning the house. All the serious buyers would be developers, he said: they’d only knock it down. They’d cut down the row of feijoas and the Japanese maple and build all the way to the fence on three sides. And they’d go up, of course, to take advantage of the views. A corner block on the highest hill in the inner east? Tell your dad he’s laughing.' (Introduction)
- Critic of the Month with Sheila Fitzpatrick, single work (p. 37)
-
Labour of Love : The Biography of a Pedagogical Innovator,
single work
review
— Review of The Vetting of Wisdom : Joan Montgomery and the Fight for PLC 2021 single work biography ;'Kim Rubenstein’s biography of Joan Montgomery, the venerable former principal of Melbourne’s Presbyterian Ladies’ College (PLC), has been thirty years in the making and is the definition of a labour of love. It involves Rubenstein, a distinguished and worldly legal scholar and human rights campaigner, revisiting scenes from her own life. She was a pupil at Montgomery’s PLC. As a first-year law student, she addressed the remarkable public meeting in April 1984 that opposed Montgomery’s defenestration by Presbyterian reactionaries, who were avenging the formation of the Uniting Church seven years earlier by asserting control over the school. Rubenstein’s subsequent career has been that of a distinguished old girl following the tenets of a liberal education.' (Introduction)
-
Airwave Feminism : A History of Women Broadcasters,
single work
review
— Review of Sound Citizens : Australian Women Broadcasters Claim their Voice, 1923-1956 2021 single work biography ;'In the era of perpetual Covid lockdowns, many of us can relate to the isolation of the mid-twentieth-century housewife. Like her, we’re stuck at home, orbiting our kitchens, watching the light move across the floorboards. Each day mirrors the last, a quiet existence spent mostly in the company of the immediate household. Yet whereas we can flee our domestic confines via Netflix or TikTok, last century’s housewife had fewer avenues to the wider world. There was reading, of course – books or magazines or newspapers – but this was usually reserved for the end of the day. For most waking hours, her hands and eyes were needed for cooking, cleaning, mending, childcare, and a thousand other tasks.' (Introduction) -
Questions of Belonging : The Consequences of Introduced Species,
single work
review
— Review of Imaginative Possession : Learning to Live in the Antipodes 2021 single work autobiography ;'Wanting to belong forms the root system of Belinda Probert’s Imaginative Possession, marking the terrain – how can she, as an immigrant, ever feel at home in Australia? – and producing shoots of longing for the landscapes of her English childhood. Even now, forty-five years after arriving in Perth to take up a teaching position at Murdoch University, after which she lived briefly in Adelaide before raising a family in Melbourne, that question lingers. Specifically, given that she feels at ease with the people and culture, why does she still feel needled by the natural environment?' (Introduction)
-
‘A Creepy Little Walk’ : Toby Fitch’s Lyricism and Versatility,
single work
review
— Review of Sydney Spleen 2021 selected work poetry ;'Sydney-based poet and editor Toby Fitch has spent much of the last decade traversing the field of radical French modernist poets, especially Arthur Rimbaud and Guillaume Apollinaire. That engagement ignited Fitch’s imagination. He began inverting, recombining, mistranslating, and mimicking their techniques in his own poetry. In his new collection, Sydney Spleen, he has made a sophisticated, fresh move that enhances his signature playfulness and tongue-in-cheek poetic antics.' (Introduction)
-
Exiles and Wanderers : Two Poets’ Lateral Moves,
single work
review
— Review of Vociferate 詠 2021 selected work poetry ; (p. 46-47) -
‘My Childbearing Hips’ : An Emotionally Powerful Anthology,
single work
review
— Review of What We Carry : Poetry on Childbearing 2021 anthology poetry ;'On her explosive, feminist début album Dry (1992), a young P.J. Harvey sang ‘Look at these my childbearing hips’, proudly proclaiming women’s strength and physicality. The word ‘childbearing’ conjures strong feelings and images for many of us – whether of childbirth, sleep deprivation, devotion, or a whole new way of life. It signifies much more than childbirth itself and is a fitting choice for the subtitle of this anthology, Poetry on childbearing. This emotionally powerful collection covers an expansive range of experiences: infertility, conception, pregnancy, birth, and life with a baby (or not).' (Introduction)
-
Details and Disorientation : A Language to Justify Thought,
single work
review
— Review of Whirlwind Duststorm 2021 selected work poetry ;'In the epigraph to this collection, a quote from Jean-Paul Sartre on Edmund Husserl suggests that we are entering a poetic that challenges the possibility of conscious knowledge; consciousness is itself a maelstrom that extrudes the intruder and has ‘no inside’. What follows is both a refutation and embracement of this assertion in chatoyant language that is as thoughtful and melodic as it is powerful. The reader is obliged to work hard to navigate the narrative, and I have rarely read poetry where the search for meaning has been felt so deeply.' (Introduction)
-
Prowess with Numbers : The Life of an Outspoken Economist,
single work
review
— Review of The Gypsy Economist 2021 single work biography ; (p. 57-58) - Carpooli"Tuesday and Thursday afternoons, the rain blew you", single work poetry (p. 59)
- Open Page with Jennifer Mills, single work interview (p. 60)