y separately published work icon Australian Book Review periodical issue  
Issue Details: First known date: 2022... no. 440 March 2022 of Australian Book Review est. 1961 Australian Book Review
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Contents

* Contents derived from the 2022 version. Please note that other versions/publications may contain different contents. See the Publication Details.
Till ‘Real Voices’ Wake Us, and We Drown : The Mire of Identity Politics, Mindy Gill , single work column

'We can learn much about a culture by listening to how it talks about its art. The way non-white writers, for want of a better phrase, tend to be reviewed in Australia tells us a lot about how we determine cultural value. Some reviewers place a premium on the author’s biography – her identity – rather than on her work itself. The reviewer avoids critical engagement with the text in favour of a kind of reverential praise of its political messaging. This messaging isn’t necessarily determined by the content of the work, but rather by a mistaken conflation of the work with the author’s cultural identity. It’s a kind of habit, a reflexive way of reading literature, especially literature by non-white authors, as if the mere act of writing a book were fundamentally and inevitably political – or, as they say, an ‘act of resistance’.' 

(p. 8-10)
Memory. Silence. Time. A Puzzling, Provocative Look at Historiography, Penny Russell , single work review
— Review of Making Australian History Anna Clark , 2022 multi chapter work criticism ;
'There are many ways one might write a history of Australian history, but from any angle it is a heroic project. In Making Australian History, Anna Clark is open about the difficulties, the possibilities, and her choices. How do you make sense of Australian history, she asks, amid a ‘swirl of changing sensibilities, methods, culture, politics and place’? How do you trace the story of a discipline across time, when each generation has defined the contours and boundaries of that discipline differently? How do you write a genuinely inclusive history of Australian History – one that gives due place to the full range of historical forms, not just those approved in academic circles?' 

 (Introduction)

(p. 13, 15)
Sonnet for Dr Michael Kennedyi"Good doctors and good poets", Bruce Beaver , single work poetry (p. 14)
The Education Minister’s Jackboots : Political Interference in Research Funding, Judith Bessant , Faith Gordon , Rob Watts , single work essay

'No one can doubt the combined impact of the Covid-19 pandemic and Australian policy responses to mitigate its effects, over the past few years. While assessing which groups or sectors suffered more than others will only lead to an invidious victimological contest, we can agree that Australia’s thirty-seven public universities took a number of heavy hits after March 2020. In the year to May 2021, senior managers in Australian universities shed 40,000 jobs, most of them casual teachers, and sixty per cent of them were positions held by women. Unsurprisingly, many inside those universities, along with commentators outside, concluded that the federal government’s decision not to offer JobKeeper payments to public universities reflected a deep animus against and fear of universities. Some reflected on the hostility directed towards the ‘cultural Marxists’ who, it is fantasised in some quarters, still exercise their hegemony in these ‘ivory towers’, notwithstanding the fact that the 2019 report by former High Court Justice Robert French definitively scotched allegations about a rampant ‘woke left’ ruthlessly crushing dissident voices in the academy.' (Introduction)

(p. 21-22)
‘Not Being Talked About’ : Putting the Arts Back on the Political Stage, David Latham , single work essay
'When the Morrison government decided in December 2019 to axe the federal arts department and to fold it into the department of infrastructure, transport, regional development, and communications, it was a strong signal – if another was needed – of the low esteem and influence the arts wields in Canberra. But it shouldn’t have come as a surprise. The decision was made just months after the 2019 election campaign, when the Liberal Party offered no arts policy, and Labor only a nominal one. The depressing news came on the back of a decade of crisis and neglect for the sector, well before the spectre of Covid wreaked havoc for many artists and performers.' 

 (Introduction)

(p. 25)
Party People Fictionalising : Labor’s Years of Hope, Laura Woollett , single work review
— Review of A Great Hope Jessica Stanley , 2022 single work novel ;

'There are decades where nothing happens, and there are weeks where decades happen,’ Vladimir Lenin has been credited with saying, with reference to the Bolshevik Revolution. It’s a sentiment that immediately springs to mind when reading Jessica Stanley’s A Great Hope, a début that, while not billed as historical fiction, is deeply concerned with history and its making.' (Introduction)

(p. 26)
Mutable Worlds : Ambition and Audacity, Debra Adelaide , single work review
— Review of Home and Other Hiding Places Jack Ellis , 2022 single work novel ; Loveland Robert Lukins , 2022 single work novel ; Hovering Rhett Davis , 2022 single work novel ;
(p. 29-30)
Breaking and Entering : Piecemeal Transgressions of a Small Town, Jennifer Mills , single work review
— Review of Australiana Yumna Kassab , 2022 single work novel ;

'Australiana opens with a break-in. Lifting away a flyscreen, strangers climb into a man’s house, help themselves to his biscuits. The crime doesn’t feel important – it’s the fourth in a month, we’re told – but the intrusion does. It evokes the entanglements of small towns, the way in which lives intersect, physical proximity breaking down the barriers of class and culture and personal choice that can divide urban populations into subcultures. As a declaration of intent, the image of trespass is pretty clear: there is no real privacy in this town, and as readers we’re about to gain access.' (Introduction)

(p. 32)
Hearts on Sleeves : Kári Gíslason’s Latest Saga, Dilan Gunawardana , single work review
— Review of The Sorrow Stone Kári Gíslason , 2022 single work novel ;

'In his extraordinary journey through Iceland’s history, Saga Land (2017, with Richard Fidler), Kári Gíslason described Icelanders as ‘being reserved’ and ‘a bit severe’ at first glance, likening them to the Hallgrímskirkja church that looms over Reykjavik with its enormous basalt column wings and stony façade. The first three days I spent alone in that city gave me a wholly different impression of its people. On my first day there in 2013, I was greeted by what appeared to be most of the city’s population lined up on the Lækjargata strip waving flags, smiling from ear to ear, and dancing as the annual Gay Pride parade rolled by in all its garish joy. The following night, as I chomped on one of Iceland’s famous hot dogs from a van by the waterfront, a young woman, soused to high heaven, threw her arms around my neck and yelled ‘I luff you!’ in my ear until her friends, doubled over with laughter, dragged her away. The morning after, in a souvenir store, the young man behind the counter asked me where I was from. When I answered ‘Australia’, a dark cloud crossed his face and he mumbled, ‘Oh, my girlfriend left me for an Australian’, as he daintily popped my little model fishing boat in a paper bag.'  (Introduction)

(p. 33)
Close Contactsi"My husband has returned. A traveller whose flight was cancelled has found his", Jelena Dinic , single work poetry (p. 36)
Out of the Planetary Test Tube : A Rewarding Début from a Porter Prize Winner, Sarah Day , single work review
— Review of Animals with Human Voices Damen O'Brien , 2021 selected work poetry ;

'Damen O’Brien’s first collection is an exceptional accomplishment. His individual poems have won several competitions (including the 2017 Peter Porter Poetry Prize). O’Brien signals the emphases of Animals with Human Voices in his afterword, stating that the world has become a ‘meaner’ place during the ten years of its completion: ‘a place of harsh politics, that values outrage over kindness, tribalism over empathy’. He concludes: ‘Like the animals of the title, the poems are voices for human problems and troubles, for the little moments and cares of the human condition.’'  (Introduction)

(p. 43)
An Upward Fall : A Poet’s Quest for Totality, Joan Fleming , single work review
— Review of Fifteeners Jordie Albiston , 2021 selected work poetry ;

'Every poet has his or her addictions: words they use over and over again, ones they own ‘by right of obsessive musical deed’ (to quote Richard Hugo). For Emily Dickinson, it was theethou, and Death. For Sylvia Plath, it was him, nothing, go, and gone. For Gabriel García Lorca, it was sangrelagrimas, negro, and corazón. For Jordie Albiston, it just might be world, the word that aims to contain everything.'  (Introduction)

(p. 44-45)
Baudelaire’s Dream : Gary Catalano’s Distinguished Prose Poetry, Paul Hetherington , single work review
— Review of Collected Prose Poems Gary Catalano , 2021 collected work poetry prose ;

'The poetry community in Australia, as in the United Kingdom, has been slow to accept prose poetry as a legitimate poetic form. Yet there have been celebrated exponents of prose poetry over nearly two centuries – and even longer if the prose component of the Japanese Haibun, developed by Matsuo Bashō (1644–94), is understood as prose poetry.'  (Introduction)

(p. 47-48)
The Buildingi"Because of its gloomy appearance the building is like a defeated army, and", Gary Catalano , single work poetry (p. 48)
Her Mother’s Sentinel : An Unmissable Filial Portrait, Susan Sheridan , single work review
— Review of Inseparable Elements : Dame Mary Durack, a Daughter's Perspective Patsy Millett , 2021 single work biography ;

'Another book about a mother by a daughter, I thought when I saw this one, summoning to mind Biff Ward’s In My Mother’s Hands (2014), Kate Grenville’s One Life (2015), and Nadia Wheatley’s Her Mother’s Daughter (2018). But while each of those books presents an impressive woman cramped – sometimes tragically so – by her postwar circumstances, in this case we have a subject who was nothing short of a national treasure.'  (Introduction)

(p. 52-53)
Questions of Character : The Troubled History of Colin Manock, Alecia Simmonds , single work review
— Review of A Witness of Fact Drew Rooke , 2022 single work biography ;

'Drew Rooke begins A Witness of Fact in the viewing gallery of Adelaide’s Forensic Science Centre, his eyes scanning the stainless steel benchtops, scissors, ladles, a pair of ‘large, heavy-duty shears used for cutting through ribs’, and an arsenal of knives of different styles and sizes – ‘what you would see in a commercial kitchen’. The atmosphere is cool, sterile, and menacing. This is where disgraced forensic pathologist Colin Manock worked for thirty years. Given that this book is about Manock, the opening could be confused with scene-setting. But there is a deeper significance to the author’s choice of words, one that goes to the heart of his book: what transforms knives in a commercial kitchen into specialist tools of medical forensics? How is our trust in the criminal justice system dependent upon our thinking of the ladles and scissors not as ordinary objects but, when placed in the right hands, as the instruments of experts? Who has the authority to speak for the dead or to interpret the mute language of deceased flesh? And in Colin Manock’s case, what do we do about the four hundred criminal convictions secured by someone juries believed to be an expert witness but who had few formal qualifications beyond that of a general practitioner?'  (Introduction)

(p. 54-55)
Curlewi"What is the use of a full moon", Eileen Chong , single work poetry (p. 59)

Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of

Last amended 10 Apr 2024 10:13:32
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