y separately published work icon Australian Book Review periodical issue  
Issue Details: First known date: 2022... no. 444 July 2022 of Australian Book Review est. 1961 Australian Book Review
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AbstractHistoryArchive Description

'St Peter’s first words to the resurrected Christ, ‘Quo vadis?’ or ‘Whither goest thou?’, capture the spirit of these reorienting times. In our July feature, senior contributors and commentators nominate key policy reforms for the Albanese government. Abroad, Ben Saul dissects the Western response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, while John Zubrzycki assesses the prospects of an Indian democratic recovery. In the new mood of rapprochement, Julia Horne and Penny Russell reconsider the relationship between academics and government. New books on the historical divisions of gender and class are examined by Shannon Burns and Yassmin Abdel-Magied. Translation comes in for scrutiny with Frances Wilson’s review of Lydia Davis’s second collection of essays and Humphrey Bower’s review of Alison Croggon’s Rilke. There are reviews of new fiction by Geraldine Brooks, Michelle Cahill, and Yuri Felsen – and much, much more!' (Publication summary)

 

Contents

* Contents derived from the 2022 version. Please note that other versions/publications may contain different contents. See the Publication Details.
Brian Matthews (1936–2022), single work obituary

'Brian Matthews, closely associated with its founding editor, John McLaren, began writing for ABR in 1981, three years after its revival. He went on writing for the magazine for forty years – a total of fifty-four reviews and articles, all of them beautifully crafted and quite distinctive in tone and range. His was a notable contribution to the second series, as frequent users of our digital archive will attest.' (Introduction)

(p. 1)
Ray Lawler – 101 Not Out, single work column

'Over the years, Advances has often lamented the paucity of unaffiliated writers who have received national honours, so we were pleased when Ray Lawler – author of the country’s most famous play, Summer of the Seventeenth Doll (which had its première in 1955) – received an AO in the Queen’s Birthday Honours. About time too! Mr Lawler, who received an OBE back in 1980, turned 101 in May.' (Introduction)

(p. 7)
An Adventurous Nature : A Writer’s Life through Her Own Eyes, Sheila Fitzpatrick , single work review
— Review of The Red Witch : A Biography of Katharine Susannah Prichard Nathan Hobby , 2022 single work biography ;

'Katharine Susannah Prichard is one of those mid-century Australian literary figures like Vance Palmer whose name is mentioned in literary histories more often than her books are read. As it happens, she was a schoolfriend of Vance’s future wife, Nettie, née Higgins, who became a distinguished literary critic, as well as of the pioneering woman lawyer Christian Jollie Smith, and Hilda Bull, later married to the playwright Louis Esson. All were politically on the left as adults, and Prichard and Jollie Smith joined the Communist Party. It was the distant Bolshevik Revolution in October 1917 that converted Katharine to the communist cause; she was a communist in Western Australia before there was a party there for her to belong to.' (Introduction)   

(p. 13-14)
A Tribute to Brian Matthews, David Matthews , single work obituary

'My father, Brian Matthews, who has died of cancer aged eighty-five, was a contributor to Australian Book Review for forty years. He enthusiastically supported the journal from the early days of its re-establishment in 1978 under the editorship of John McLaren. He wrote for it prolifically under later editors – never more so than under the current editorship.'(Introduction)   

(p. 25)
No Stranger to Sacrifice Eda Gunaydin’s Début Essay Collection, Mindy Gill , single work review
— Review of Root and Branch : Essays on Inheritance Eda Gunaydin , 2022 selected work essay ;

'Eda Gunaydin’s collection of essays, Root & Branch, centres on migration, class, guilt, and legacy. It joins the surge of memoir-as-début by millennial writers, who interrogate the personal via the political. Gunaydin, whose family immigrated to Australia from Turkey, grew up in the outer suburbs of Western Sydney – home to a historically migrant and working-class demographic. We learn that her father, a bricklayer, has been the household’s sole income provider as the health of her mother, Besra, meant that she ‘never had a job in this country except cleaning’. Gunaydin meanwhile accepted off-the-books employment in hospitality and retail until she was able to ‘crack into a white-collar position’ at the university where she is completing her PhD. This left her hyper-conscious of intergenerational mobility and class disparity. She worries about what it means ‘to instantly unlock an easier life … while others continu[e] to struggle’. Those others being, namely, her family, whose Blacktown postcode means limited access to adequately funded essential services, reliable public transport, and affordable housing. It is a concern driving much of the book – how to reconcile gratitude with guilt, particularly when Gunaydin cannot divorce the opportunities available to her in life from her family’s sacrifices.' (Introduction)

(p. 33-34)
Reclamation : An Affecting Memoir of Loss and Change, Susan Sheridan , single work review
— Review of Hard Joy : Life and Writing Susan Varga , 2022 single work autobiography ;
'When Susan Varga made the momentous, long-delayed decision to commit herself to writing, her first task was to write her mother’s story – that of a Holocaust survivor who migrated from Hungary to Australia with her second husband and two daughters in 1948, when Susan was five. That story, which is also one of a complex and difficult relationship between mother and daughter, became the award-winning Heddy and Me (1994).' (Introduction)
(p. 35)
Delible Impressions : Liberating Daisy Simmons, Diane Stubbings , single work review
— Review of Daisy and Woolf Michelle Cahill , 2022 single work novel ;

'Daisy Simmons – twenty-four years old, the wife of a major in the Indian Army, mother of two children, ‘dark [and] adorably pretty’ – is an ephemeral presence in Virginia Woolf’s fourth novel, Mrs Dalloway (1925). Clarissa Dalloway’s former lover, Peter Walsh, has travelled to London from India to secure a divorce so that he might marry Daisy. From a mere handful of references, we are able to glean the wavering nature of Peter’s devotion to Daisy and his suspicion that she will, as Woolf writes, ‘look ordinary beside Clarissa’.' (Introduction)   

(p. 38)
‘My God. The World.’ A Coda to the Theft of Weeping Woman, Jennifer Mills , single work review
— Review of The Diplomat Chris Womersley , 2022 single work novel ;

'In Chris Womersley’s novel Cairo (2013), a middle-aged man looks back as his seventeen-year-old self is caught up in the notorious theft of Pablo Picasso’s Weeping Woman from the National Gallery of Victoria by a group of bohemian artists. The heist-Bildungsroman combination is energetic, and decades of distance give Tom Button’s narration a lush, nostalgic quality. His sifted memories of 1986 fall gently, landing somewhere between regret and sustained desire.' (Introduction)   

(p. 39)
Horses for Courses : Geraldine Brooks’s Highbrow Detective Story, Peter Craven , single work review
— Review of Horse : A Novel Geraldine Brooks , 2022 single work novel ;

'Horse? Could that title sound familiar because it was a Richard Harris movie of the 1960s? Well, Geraldine Brooks, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for March (2005) and author of novels about everything from the characters in Little Women to the life of King David, is not one to be deterred by daunting precedents. She is a senior journalist who has gone on to use her capacity to master information and then spin it to spectacular effect in order to tell a story in which historical data and its artful arrangement yield an effect that is epical because of the way a many-voiced choir animates the chorales that underline the Passion that is dramatised.'(Introduction)   

(p. 40-41)
Strange and Unfamiliar Terrain : Three Bold New Short Story Collections, Anthony Lynch , single work review
— Review of The Teeth of a Slow Machine Andrew Roff , 2022 selected work short story ; What Fear Was Ben Walter , 2022 selected work short story ; An Exciting and Vivid Inner Life Paul Dalla Rosa , 2022 selected work short story ;
'In the wake of other recent compelling débuts – Paige Clark’s meticulously crafted and imagined She is Haunted being a standout – three new short story collections, varying markedly in tone, style, and setting, offer bold and unsettling visions of twenty-first-century life.' 

(Introduction)   

(p. 41-42)
Cast Adrift : Three New Young Adult Novels, Ben Chandler , single work review
— Review of Growing Up in Flames Zach Jones , 2022 single work novel ; Sugar Carly Nugent , 2022 single work novel ; That Thing I Did Allayne L. Webster , 2022 single work novel ;
(p. 42-43)
Howard’s End : A Booker Winner Recalls Life in Sydney, Don Anderson , single work review
— Review of Mother's Boy : A Writer's Beginnings Howard Jacobson , 2022 single work autobiography ;

'A Writer’s Beginnings begins: ‘My mother died today.’ One could be excused for thinking that one was reading not a memoir but a Campus Novel without the ‘p’, an experience that Howard Jacobson will suffer later in this book. Who could read this incipit without hearing the famous beginning: ‘Aujourd’hui maman est morte. Ou peut-être hier, je ne sais pas.’ Jacobson, on the other hand, knows. He continues: ‘It is 3 May 2020. She is ninety-seven years old.’ I cannot recall whether Albert Camus specifies his protagonist’s mother’s age in L’Étranger (1942). A Camus novel is surely a Campus Novel without the ‘p’, the latter a sub-genre that Jacobson will both live out teaching English at a polytechnic in a defunct football stadium and come to write. Indeed, so insistent is his use of the locution ‘we’ll come to that later’ that one could be excused for thinking prolepsis a Finklerish (see below) rhetorical device. Give Howard Jacobson enough trope and he’ll surely hang himself.' (Publication summary)

(p. 47)
Bleak Times : The Uber-Burdens of Authorship, Alex Cothren , single work review
— Review of Open Secrets : Essays on the Writing Life 2022 anthology essay ;

'In her introduction to Sydney Review of Book’s latest anthology, Open Secrets: Essays on the writing life, Catriona Menzies-Pike quickly establishes what readers should not expect. ‘There are no precious morning rituals here,’ the editor promises, ‘no magic tricks for aspiring writers.’ It’s true that these essays, each a mix of disarming honesty and polymathic intelligence, hover far above the glut of literary listicles clogging the internet. And thank goodness: if I have to suffer Hemingway mansplaining show-don’t-tell one more time, I may go out and shoot a lion myself.' (Introduction)   

(p. 48)
Word Ecology : Plumbing the Mystery of Inheritance, Tom Griffiths , single work review
— Review of Words Are Eagles : Selected Writings on the Nature and Language of Place Gregory Day , 2022 selected work essay prose ;

'Across Australia today, exciting work is being done to strengthen and renew Aboriginal languages and their deep associations with Country. In those parts of the continent where the history of dispossession has been most traumatic, language regeneration calls for research and reconstruction, for the rediscovery of the old words for places, features, and life itself. Gregory Day’s new book is a distinguished and discerning quest for the lore and language of his beloved place. It eloquently reflects on what it means for a non-Indigenous fifth-generation Australian to seek to live ‘in a properly symbiotic way, in this soil’. Words Are Eagles is more than a book of ‘selected writings’: it is a sustained manifesto for how to think and feel one’s way into Australian nature, place, and history following invasion and at a time of global environmental crisis.' (Introduction)   

(p. 49-50)
Torrents of Springi"I thought I recognised Sorley Maclean", Philip Mead , single work poetry (p. 50)
‘A House before Dawn’ Tracy Ryan’s Poetics of Domesticity and Precarity, Maria Takolander , single work review
— Review of Rose Interior Tracy Ryan , 2022 selected work poetry ;

'Umberto Eco once described the text as a ‘lazy machine asking the reader to do some of its work’; to contribute, in other words, to the production of meaning. Poetry has a particular reputation for being demanding, but Tracy Ryan’s tenth poetry collection, Rose Interior, isn’t challenging in the way that Eco envisages. It is less about engaging readers in the masculinist energy of the ‘machine’ and ‘work’ than about inviting them into a feminine world of domestic spaces and quotidian phenomena. If a reader were to conceptualise the text in the way that Eco describes, the engine for Rose Interior might be located in a poem called ‘Request’, where the poet announces her interest in whatever is

'little and liminal,

won’t take much space, the odd
moment you think of ...  or don’t,

whatever you wouldn’t look twice at ...'(Introduction)   

(p. 53-54)
Open Page : An Interview with Susan Varga, single work interview (p. 56)
Breakneck Elvis : Baz Luhrmann’s Signature Maximalist Style, Jordan Prosser , single work review
— Review of Elvis Baz Luhrmann , Craig Pearce , 2022 single work film/TV ;

'Crafting a biopic is a near-impossible act of curation; of the hundreds of thousands of hours that make up a person’s life, which two and a half will accurately sum up their entire existence? Some recent attempts, like the excellent Steve Jobs (2015) or the Judy Garland biopic Judy (2019), limit their slice of life to a handful of defining moments and allow the viewer to extrapolate from there, essentially opting for quality over quantity – a mantra no one would ever accuse director Baz Luhrmann of adopting.' (Introduction)   

(p. 63)

Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of

Last amended 10 Apr 2024 09:22:52
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