Cirrus@Austlit

'Sydney Review of Books was established in January 2013 with the aim of creating an online forum where Australia's critics could write at length about literature and cultural issues. The journal is now into its fifth year of existence, during which time it has published more than five hundred essays on Australian and international literature and culture. These essays have been widely circulated and discussed; several have been anthologised or translated; some of them have been controversial. But this is the first collection of Sydney Review of Books essays to appear in book form, and we offer it as a small but representative sample of the essays we have been proud to publish over the past five years.'  (Introduction)

'This is the saddest love story I have ever read. But not for the reasons you might imagine.

'The Swan Book is Alexis Wright’s third novel and like her first two – Plains of Promise (1997) and the Miles Franklin Award winning Carpentaria (2006) – it opens in her ancestral country, the grass plains of the Gulf of Carpentaria. It bears all the hallmarks of Wright’s astonishing narrative powers: her linguistic dexterity, mashing words and phrases from high and low culture, from English, Aboriginal languages, French and Latin; her humour and scathing satire; her fierce political purpose; her genre bending; her virtuosic gift for interweaving stories on multiple levels, from the literal to the metaphoric, the folkloric and the mythic. But The Swan Book takes all these – especially the last – to new levels. In August 2008, as part of her Oodgeroo Noonuccal Lecture, Wright said: ‘Oodgeroo absolutely understood the power of belief in the fight for sovereignty over this land – that if you could succeed in keeping the basic architecture of how you think, then you owned the freedom of your mind, that unimpeded space to store hope and feed your ability to survive.’ The Swan Book constructs this architecture of the mind – and, as with a mind, it operates in many dimensions simultaneously. It teems with songs, stories, images and fragments of culture from across the planet.'  (Introduction)

'Somewhere around 1988, Australian literature changed.

'When the Macquarie PEN Anthology of Australian Literature was published at the end of winter in 2009, there was a one-day forum to discuss it at the State Library of New South Wales. It featured, among others, an assortment of full professors, including both of the country’s Professors of Australian Literature, Robert Dixon from Sydney and Philip Mead from Perth, and the anthology’s general editor, Nicholas Jose. One session featured all of the section editors, of whom I was one. In the course of a discussion about the Ozlit canon and what we thought had happened to it, we were asked when we had first registered that ‘the canon’ as we had all known it in the 1970s and 1980s had begun to break up, after the fashion of polar ice. My answer felt glib at the time even to me, but over three years later and after a great deal of thought, it would still be the same: ‘ASAL Parody Night, 1988.’' (Introduction)

'From 1983 until 2009, Sri Lankans were involved in or endured a brutal civil war. Between 60 000 and 100 000 people died. During the escalated carnage and human rights abuses of the last months of the war, between 10 000 and 40 000 people were killed, most of them civilians. In 2004, a tsunami devastated the island, killing over 35 000 people. As a result of both catastrophes, large numbers of people were left injured, displaced and traumatised, or have disappeared without trace. Recent investigations, including eyewitness accounts in books like Frances Harrison’s Still Counting the Dead (2012), suggest Sri Lanka is a country still suffering, where the full truth remains to be told and acknowledged.' (Introduction)

'Ten years ago, David Marr stirred the pot with his Colin Simpson Lecture by claiming that ‘few Australian novels … address in worldly, adult ways the country and the time in which we live.’ As Sophie Cunningham among others pointed out at the time, plenty of Australian writers had, in fact, been doing this throughout the 1990s. But Marr’s speech expressed a specific view of what writing about contemporary Australia should be like. He wanted a literature of the mainstream – of ordinary life in Australia’s suburbs. The kinds of novels Cunningham and others had been publishing were about daily life in Australia, but they were about sex and poverty, unemployment and drug use. Christos Tsiolkas’ first novel, Loaded(1995), was among them. Ever since, Tsiolkas has been raising questions about what the Australian mainstream is, or might look like.' (Introduction)

'In December 2012, J.M. Coetzee published an article on Gerald Murnane in the New York Review of Books. Coetzee has long written for the NYRB and many of these essays have been collected and republished in Stranger Shores: Literary Essays, 1986-1999 (2001) and Inner Workings: Literary Essays, 2000-2005 (2007). This republication in itself demonstrates that the essays are not only occasional pieces, but contain insights of sufficient importance to Coetzee to justify their preservation. Their relevance to Coetzee’s fiction is apparent: his review of Joseph Frank’s biography of Fyodor Dostoevsky, for example, appeared soon after he published a novel concerned with Dostoevsky, The Master of Petersburg (1994).' (Introduction)

'Book titles are important, albeit troubling things. I have a particular ineptitude in proposing titles for my own books, in deciding on a word, a phrase or a clause that both captures the core contention of the book and also happens to be catchy and accessible to that frightening, intangible, crucial Other of writing practice, the reader. But this conundrum may be unique to the condition of the ‘creative writer’ who has, by the very mechanism of this condition, a rather fuzzy notion of the reader. For a more specialist, academic writer, the task seems somewhat easier: such a writer can enter an existing discourse – apropos of their academic specialty – with more surefootedness, and may, instead of aiming to seduce a fickle reader, simply express the central thesis of their work and be done with it.' (Introduction)

'Almost two decades have passed since Helen Garner published The First Stone (1995), her controversial account of a sexual harassment case at Melbourne University’s Ormond College. Revisiting the book, even from this relatively safe distance, one can still appreciate why it caused such an uproar. It is spiked with incendiary and judgemental language. Garner writes of a generation of younger feminists ‘consumed by rage and fear’. They have an ‘unmodulated vision of the human things we’ – that is, Garner’s generation of feminists – ‘have learned to respect.’ She condemns the ‘cold-faced, punitive girls’ who adopt a ‘certain kind of modern feminism: priggish, disingenuous, unforgiving’. They are ‘puritan feminists’, ‘saboteurs’, ‘ideologues’, ‘thought police’. They display a ‘disproportionate ferocity’. When someone tells a story about the Prime Minister condescendingly touching a woman’s forearm during conversation and someone else exclaims ‘How sexist!’, Garner feels ‘a bomb of fury and disgust go off inside my head’.' (Introduction)

'When Lesbia Harford died in 1927, she left behind three thick and neatly-lined exercise books full of handwritten poetry. These, now housed in the Mitchell Library, provided the basis for Nettie Palmer’s The Poems of Lesbia Harford (1941) and, in 1985, Drusilla Modjeska and Marjorie Pizer’s expanded collection, published under the same title.' (Introduction)

'This is a riddle from the Exeter Book, an anthology of Anglo-Saxon poetry, which the Bishop Leofric donated to the library of Exeter Cathedral in 1072: ‘I mycel englisc boc be gehwilcum thingum on leothwisan geworht’: a big English book about everything, worked into song.' (Introduction)

'Phillip Edmonds’ short story, ‘The Soapbox’, published in the Griffith Review in 2008, is about an Australian named Warwick who moves to London and works at the Ministry of the Arts, where he takes ‘responsibility’ for the public forums at Speakers Corner — a task necessary because ‘the number of voluntary speakers at Hyde Park’ has ‘been dwindling, perhaps due to people getting older and the internet’. Warwick tries different strategies, but nothing draws audiences beyond groups of confused tourists. The ministry seems pleased with his efforts (‘the important thing’, he is told is ‘that things be seen to be done as much as being done’), but Warwick resigns in frustration and decides to return to Australia, though not before erecting a homemade soapbox in Hyde Park as a symbolic protest. The story ends with the narrator telling us that Warwick ‘stopped stressing about whether anyone was listening and gave up on being ashamed of daring to dream’.' (Introduction)

'In August 1961, the Melbourne newspaper Truth ran the headline GREAT POEM HOAX: HOUSEWIFE FOOLS THE EXPERTS WITH HER NAUGHTY SONNETS. The page three article began:

A Tasmanian poet-housewife has become the centre of a literary storm because of two sonnets she sent to a magazine as a hoax. The sonnets concealed a message – and a rude word – in words from the first letter of each line. The poet is Mrs Gwen Harwood, of Hobart, wife of a University Tasmania lecturer … The first sonnet said ‘So long, Bulletin’. The second gave an earthy and uncomplimentary opinion of all editors.'

  (Introduction)

'In the current global zeitgeist, how is it possible to not think about race? The demonisation and racial profiling of Muslims, the institutional brutality that triggered the USA’s Black Lives Matter movement, the Trump ascendancy, the murder of pro-migration liberal Jo Cox, Brexit, the debate over Australia’s Racial Discrimination Act’s Section 18C: these are provocations that we cannot dismiss. Writing about the topic may be deeply traumatic, particularly for those who are historically and socially racialized. Personal rejoinders and accusations of ‘exceptionalism’ are customary responses. Race is a complex, contested concept, a deeply divisive subject. It elicits strong emotional opinions from the liberally educated and from those who cultivate rationality.' (Introduction)

'Les Murray is the contemporary Australian poet one most associates with the celebration of a particular place, but with the publication of the monumental Fitzroy: The Biography, that mantle must surely pass to π.O. Murray’s 40 acres at Bunyah on the north coast of NSW is one-sixth the size of the inner city Melbourne suburb of Fitzroy, though considerably larger, and much more sparsely populated, if you take into account the memory of the larger family territory commemorated in poems like ‘Their Cities, Their Universities’, and ‘Aspects of Language and War on the Gloucester Road’. At little more than 240 acres, π.O.’s Fitzroy is the smallest suburb in Australia, and the most densely populated.' (Introduction)

'Harriet Chandler didn’t make it onto the list of best novels of 2015 as far as I know. That may be because it was published in 2014, when it didn’t make the list either, or because its author, Moya Costello, calls it a ‘novella’, in her own redefinition of the term as a short, intense mix of ‘prose poem and prose fiction’, rather than a novel as such. At any rate, its appearance escaped notice, like some shy bush animal. The closest I can find to a reference in the mainstream media is Xu Qin’s piece in Shanghai Daily, ‘Profile of an inspiring woman’. Harriet Chandler is the first book from Short Odds Publications, another avatar of the author, whose act of self-publishing may also have got in the way. As Anna Couani explains, Costello, like herself, was ‘in the Sydney Women Writers’ Workshop (aka The No Regrets Group) in the 70’s and 80’s … [and] shared the feminist values of the group’ which included, in Costello’s words, ‘a radical critique of the industry context of their creative work’. Taking the means of production and dissemination into your own hands through self-publication is a logical extension of this spirit in technologically as well as politically changed times. It throws a spanner into the established system of book marketing and promotional recognition. The Prime Minister’s Literary Award, for example, makes it explicit that ‘self-published books are not eligible’, even if to self-publish successfully requires a high degree of editorial, design and book-producing skills, collaboratively integrated, as well as the writing talent.' (Introduction)

'Who would want to be a high-profile feminist in the age of social media? I sometimes find myself thinking this as I scroll through the Facebook and Twitter feeds of well-known feminists that I follow or the comments sections of their columns, awed by both their output (I’m an academic – so my work is slow in comparison) and struck by the high volume of cyber-hate that comes in the wake of even the most benign opinion pieces. Earlier this year, Guardian columnist Jessica Valenti went offline after a troll threatened to rape her young daughter. It’s hardly surprising that she and other ‘professional feminists’, to use Valenti’s own descriptor, sometimes take social media breaks, or that navigating misogyny online is central to the contents of several popular feminist books released in 2016. These include Valenti’s Sex Object, Shrill by Lindy West – and Clementine Ford’s Fight Like a Girl. All of these books are memoirs (more or less), that describe (among many other things) the peculiar experience of being a feminist with a public built online, or as Ford wryly puts it, ‘a man-hating, separatist feminazi hell-bent on installing a matriarchy and imprisoning men as its slaves’.' (Introduction)