AustLit

'‘Follow the money’ is a precept as useful to the historian as the detective, especially when the history in question has anything to do with empire. Decades before Lenin identified imperialism as ‘the highest stage of capitalism’, the English economist Herman Merivale (1806-1874) recognised that colonial possessions functioned above all as fields for economic activity, spaces in which capital and labour could be employed to generate riches both for the encroaching settlers and for the homeland from which they came. However multifarious its legacies, colonisation is at its heart a system for transferring wealth, or the means of getting it, from the original residents and traditional custodians of a territory to its invaders and self-declared new ‘owners’. This is the essential nature and purpose of colonialism. Anything else that may follow – freedom, servitude, religious conversion, political transformation, genocide – is a consequence or rationalisation or side-effect of that core intention.' (Introdution)

'‘Her job, she knew, was to stay still and be petted.’ So thinks Ruth, one of the protagonists of Evie Wyld’s new novel The Bass Rock, as she experiences the uninvited sexual attentions of her husband’s first wife’s father while washing up after a Christmas lunch. Instead of staying still, she dares him to continue, confounding the passive role assigned to her. After he retreats she completes the washing up, then goes into the drawing room and carefully snaps the head off an expensive mantelpiece ornament that had been a wedding present. ‘It made a satisfying noise, but nothing loud enough to arouse suspicion next door, and she took the two pieces and wrapped them in a bit of old newsprint from the coal box, placed it on the hearth and stamped on it with the heel of her shoe.’ That night, when she tells her husband what had happened in the kitchen, he refuses to believe her, instead contemptuously labelling her a self-regarding fantasist.' (Introduction)

'Set in the near future, Ghost Species depicts a frighteningly familiar world. Seasons come early and stay late, to the deep confusion of plants and animals. There are constant forest fires and relentless extinctions. Far from being the stuff of dystopian fantasy, these are the conditions in which we now live our lives. Last summer, choking on smoke under orange-grey skies, many of us in eastern Australia experienced every day the feeling described here, that ‘something is deeply awry’. James Bradley has been one of our country’s most outspoken and prolific commentators on the climate crisis, and his warnings about the environmental devastation that is already locked into the future have started to bite in ways that can no longer be ignored. Now, with coronavirus so quickly following the bushfires, we recognise even more clearly the state of constant, underlying dread portrayed in this novel, with its ‘sense of hastening, a dislocation deep in the fabric of things’.' (Introduction)

'Two deaths – two executions – are at the heart of the darkness that is Richard Flanagan’s new novel, First Person. One takes place in the wild and remote Gulf country of northern Queensland and the other in the seemingly mundane setting of an outer Melbourne suburb. Notwithstanding these different environments, they are two versions of essentially the same scene. In each, a journey to a place beyond streets, houses, families and women culminates in an act of violence, which is conjured out of the chaos of masculine relationships by the agency of bullying dressed up as mateship. Or, more simply: two men go into the bush with a gun and only one of them comes out.' (Introduction)