y separately published work icon Australian Book Review periodical issue  
Issue Details: First known date: 2022... no. 442 May 2022 of Australian Book Review est. 1961 Australian Book Review
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AbstractHistoryArchive Description

'The May issue of ABR has arrived to keep you company while you wait in line for the next available voting booth. In our cover feature, Frank Bongiorno details how the professionalisation of politics has starved the public of leadership, while Faith Gordon makes the case for lowering the voting age. The issue casts a spotlight on secrets as difficult to face as they are to disinter – from Simon Tedeschi’s Calibre Prize-winning essay on the burden of his grandmother’s memory, to Elizabeth Tynan’s account of the atomic tests in Emu Field, to David Hill’s story of institutionalised abuse at Fairbridge Farm School. Philip Mead assesses Judith Wright’s legacy in prose, while Beejay Silcox wonders if Helen Garner has found the right rhapsodist. There’s new poetry by Michael Hofmann, Theodore Ell, and Katherine Brabon, and reviews of new fiction by Jennifer Egan, Omar Sakr, and Benjamin Stevenson. From busting crooks (political or porcine) to Buster Keaton, there’s plenty to get you through this electoral season!' (Publication summary)

 

Contents

* Contents derived from the 2022 version. Please note that other versions/publications may contain different contents. See the Publication Details.
Paradisei"The joy of rhizomes.", Michael Hofmann , single work poetry (p. 15)
A Din of Competing Noise : Confronting History at Tennant Creek, Kim Mahood , single work review
— Review of Telling Tennant's Story : The Strange Career of the Great Australian Silence Dean Ashenden , 2022 single work autobiography ;

'In Telling Tennant’s StoryDean Ashenden gives a lucid, succinct, eminently readable account of the reasons why Australia as a nation continues to struggle with how to acknowledge and move beyond its past. Travelling north to visit Tennant Creek for the first time since leaving it as a boy in 1955, Ashenden is provoked to question the absence of shared histories on the monuments and tourist information boards along the route. Mostly, the signs record pioneer history, from which the Indigenous people are absent. When the Indigenous story is invoked, it records traditional practices and does not mention white people. ‘How did they get from then to now?’ he muses. ‘Just don’t mention the war.’' (Introduction)

(p. 16-17)
Dancing on Air : The Bunglings of Nosey Bob, Penny Russell , single work review
— Review of An Uncommon Hangman : The Life and Deaths of Robert ‘Nosey Bob’ Howard Rachel Franks , 2022 single work biography ;

'When the offer came to review this book, I accepted enthusiastically, and unthinkingly added, ‘That sounds fun!’. Upon reflection, I deleted that last sentence: what would it say about me, I wondered, that I should expect the account of a hangman and his work to be entertaining? I thought better of the sentence, but the anticipation remained.'(Introduction)

(p. 20)
Pioneering Legacy : A Poet’s Love–fear Relationship with the Past, Philip Mead , single work review
— Review of Judith Wright : Selected Writings Judith Wright , 2022 selected work essay prose ;
'Georgina Arnott’s 2016 biography The Unknown Judith Wright was an absorbing exercise in discovering the facets of Judith Wright’s early life and formative experience that were unknown, hidden, or forgotten, by biographers as well as by Wright herself. It was a revealing study of a writer who had a love-fear relationship with the projects of biography and autobiography. In the 1950s, Wright wrote loving, admiring histories of her pioneering family, but in her autobiography, Half a Lifetime, published in 1999, the year before her death, she began: ‘Autobiography is not what I want to write.’ There were good reasons for this. There were the formal challenges of life writing – the person writing is not the person written about – but also what Wright had discovered, in her archival research for her rewriting of her family history, about her Wyndham colonial ancestors’ role in Aboriginal dispossession, and violence.' 

(Introduction)

(p. 23-24)
Lost in the Bowels : Recasting Helen Garner as an MFA Craft Seminar, Beejay Silcox , single work review
— Review of Sean O'Beirne on Helen Garner Sean O’Beirne , 2022 single work essay ;

'Oh, how I detest tiny books – those cutesy little hardbacks that are sold next to the novelty bookmarks and greeting cards. 101 Reasons Why Dogs/Cats Are Better Than Cats/Dogs; Inspo quotes for Insta feminists; The Pocket Marcus Aurelias (for the stoic on-the-go); The Pocket Tarot (for the soothsayer on-the-go); The Tao of Something. They are the literary equivalent of supermarket checkout chocolates – sugar-fix books. Stocking stuffers. Gag gifts. Op-shop cloggers. Toilet-floor lint collectors.' (Introduction)

(p. 26-27)
This Woman My Grandmother, Simon Tedeschi , single work essay

'A decade before she died, my grandmother Lucy, whose Hebrew name was Leah but who was known to us as Nanna, decided to write her memoirs. English wasn’t her first language, let alone her second or third, so rather than write she chose to speak. When she was finished, the contents of eight cassette tapes were typed up and bound in blue plastic covers. Copies were made for both daughters and all five grandchildren, of whom I am the eldest.' (Introduction)

(p. 29-34)
Warm Broth : A Second Novel from Sean Rabin, Alex Cothren , single work review
— Review of The Good Captain Sean Rabin , 2022 single work novel ;

'Just when you thought there wasn’t enough to worry about, along come bottom trawlers. While the fishing technique of dragging a heavy net along the bottom of the seabed is     nothing new – indeed, there was a British commission inquiry into the practice as far back as 1866 – the sheer size of modern super trawlers maximises their destructiveness. Centuries-old sea coral forests are bulldozed by the thirty-tonne nets, non-targeted fish and turtles become indiscriminately tangled in the web, and the disturbed sediment releases more carbon than the entire aviation industry each year.' (Introduction)

(p. 37)
Cosy Crime : Benjamin Stevenson’s Entertaining Third Novel, Francesca Sasnaitis , single work review
— Review of Everyone In My Family Has Killed Someone Benjamin Stevenson , 2022 single work novel ;

'Enid Blyton’s Secret Seven series (1949–63) was my induction into crime reading. I was smitten with the secret society of children who set out to solve mysteries and right wrongs despite adults’ disbelief and objections. As a teen, I graduated to Agatha Christie and Arthur Upfield (in the 1970s, we were still unaware how offensive his depiction of Detective Inspector Napoleon ‘Bony’ Bonaparte was to Aboriginal Australians). Later, came writers of the hard-boiled school – Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, Chester Himes – and others, like Georges Simenon and James Ellroy, who extended or subverted the conventions of the genre.' (Introduction)

(p. 38)
Desire’s Other Face : Omar Sakr’s First Novel, Jay Daniel Thompson , single work review
— Review of Son of Sin Omar Sakr , 2022 single work novel ;

'The first thing readers will notice about Son of Sin is the snake coiled across the front cover, its inky scales contrasting with the hot pink background, at once disquieting and strangely beautiful. This striking image sets the tone for the rest of the novel, which is the prose début for Sydney poet and social commentator Omar Sakr. The text provides a disarmingly frank perspective on sexuality, race, and shame in contemporary Australia.' (Introduction)

(p. 39)
Literary Escapism : Three New Comic Novels, Debra Adelaide , single work review
— Review of Dinner with the Schnabels Toni Jordan , 2022 single work novel ; The Competition Katherine Collette , 2022 single work novel ; Love and Other Puzzles Kimberley Allsopp , 2022 single work novel ;

'Doubtless there will come a time when one’s more disciplined reading self requires nourishment from serious books that offer sustained intellectual, creative, and moral challenges. In the meantime, books – in particular the contemporary urban novel – may continue to satisfy by being charming, delightful, witty, heart-warming, hilarious, astringently refreshing, sharply observed, and deliciously original.' (Introduction)

(p. 40-41)
Tenebraei"Nightfall on the sill. Trinkets, hardened dust. Sky", Theodore Ell , single work poetry (p. 41)
‘The Unbearable Sound’ : J.S. Harry’s Forms of Attention, Judith Bishop , single work review
— Review of J. S. Harry : New and Selected Poems J. S. Harry , 2021 selected work poetry ;

'J.S. Harry and her lapin alter ego, Peter Henry Lepus, would assuredly have had ‘words to say’ about the war in Ukraine and its manufacture by a group of human beings. Peter, a Wittgensteinian, would have pondered hard the nature of the war ‘games’ that preceded use of arms: games in which each ‘move’ was a crafted piece of language and (dis)information, known as ‘intelligence’ or ‘diplomacy’, but where the ‘endgame’ and ‘stakes’ would involve the disposition of human flesh and blood. ‘The dead do not have a world ... / A human’s world is language: “logic” & “words”, Peter thinks’ (‘After the Fall of Baghdad’).' (Introduction)

(p. 42-43)
Dystopic Presents and Futures : Two Disquieting Verse Novels, Geoff Page , single work review
— Review of Song of Less Joan Fleming , 2022 selected work poetry ; Blight Street . Geoff Goodfellow , 2021 selected work poetry ;
'In the years since Les Murray’s The Boys Who Stole the Funeral (1980) and Alan Wearne’s The Nightmarkets (1986), the verse novel has become, despite its inherent difficulties, an established literary form in Australian poetry (and fiction, for that matter). Verse novelist Dorothy Porter (1954–2008), with The Monkey’s Mask (1994) and other works, gave it further prominence. Steven Herrick is just one of the poets who are making it an important part of the Young Adult field. A series of interviews with Australasian verse novelists (The Verse Novel), edited by Linda Weste, has recently gone into a second edition.' (Introduction)
(p. 43-44)
Autoimmunei"I have two eyes and almost two noses", Katherine Brabon , single work poetry (p. 46)
Poet of the Month with Anthony Lawrence, single work interview (p. 47)
What Colour Is Bitcoin? : Pam Brown’s Lively New Collection, Chris Arnold , single work review
— Review of Stasis Shuffle Pamela Brown , 2021 selected work poetry ;

'The reader of Stasis Shuffle is immediately confronted with the collection’s naming convention. Titles of poems and sections are parenthesised, for example, ‘(best before)’, ‘(weevils)’, ‘(& then). More than simple stylisation, this convention suggests that every poem is a fragment, a meander through consciousness. The first poem, ‘(best before)’, begins ‘liberated / from the drudgery / of usefulness’, a quote from Walter Benjamin. From there, Stasis Shuffle wanders flâneur-style through language, politics, and many different kinds of plant life. The central arc of Stasis Shuffle, however, is its self-consciousness about subjectivity and process. ‘(best before)’ asks ‘is your slowly accreting poem / morphing into a larger cloud yet’? As the collection unfolds, poems begin to comment on themselves and the writing process.' (Publication summary)

(p. 48)
Enemy of the Anodyne : Chloe Hooper’s Search for the Unsentimental, Brenda Walker , single work review
— Review of Bedtime Story Chloe Hooper , 2022 single work autobiography ;
(p. 49)
An Imperial Investment : The Fight for Abused Children at Fairbridge, Jacqueline Kent , single work review
— Review of Reckoning : The Forgotten Children and Their Quest for Justice David Hill , 2022 single work autobiography ;

'In 1959, David Hill, aged twelve, left England and sailed on the Strathaird to Australia with two of his three brothers. Like thousands of children before them the Hill boys were bound for a Fairbridge farm school. Like thousands of children before them, they had come from a poor background, with a struggling single mother who believed that Fairbridge would give her boys a better education and greater opportunities in life than she possibly could.' (Introduction)

(p. 57-58)
Open Page with Chloe Hooper, single work interview (p. 62)
Strange Beast : An Audacious Experiment in Science Fiction, Jordan Prosser , single work review
— Review of Loveland Ivan Sen , 2022 single work film/TV ;
(p. 64)

Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of

Last amended 10 Apr 2024 09:49:40
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