y separately published work icon Australian Book Review periodical issue  
Issue Details: First known date: 2022... no. 447 October 2022 of Australian Book Review est. 1961 Australian Book Review
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AbstractHistoryArchive Description

'Welcome to the October issue of ABR. This month we turn to politics of various kinds – local, national, and international. Our cover features include Clare Monagle’s irreverent take on King Charles III, Gillian Russell on recent Northern Irish fiction, Claudio Bozzi on the turbulent state of Italian politics, Peter Goldsworthy on mortality and Salman Rushdie, and Gideon Haigh on a new biography of Daniel Andrews. Also in the issue are reviews of new fiction from Robbie Arnott, Ian McEwan, Kamila Shamsie, Jock Serong, and Eliza Henry-Jones. Graeme Davison reviews Jim Davidson’s book on Clem Christesen and Stephen Murray-Smith. Other highlights include David Jack on Chip Le Grand, Peter Rose on Shannon Burns, and Anwen Crawford on Jeff Sparrow.'  (Publication summary)

Contents

* Contents derived from the 2022 version. Please note that other versions/publications may contain different contents. See the Publication Details.
Handsome Harold : Mythologising Robert Menzies’ Successor, James Walter , single work review
— Review of Harold Holt : Always One Step Further Ross Walker , 2022 single work biography ;

'If Scott Morrison taught us nothing else, it is that we must pay attention to the behaviour of leaders who can take decisions that potentially impact us all. That is reason enough to welcome serious political biography. Yet a reader new to the field might be puzzled to find on her bookshop shelves (or in an online search) multiple volumes on, say, Robert Menzies or Bob Hawke and now Harold Holt – even Scott Morrison – and many others. There is no dearth of choice: the question is how to choose?' (Introduction)

(p. 10-11)
The Daily Dan : A Timely Political Biography, Gideon Haigh , single work review
— Review of Daniel Andrews : The Revealing Biography of Australia's Most Powerful Premier Sumeyya Ilanbey , 2022 single work biography ;

'During his first electoral campaign, Daniel Andrews hung a sign in his office containing a timeless political wisdom from Lyndon Baines Johnson: ‘If you do everything, you will win.’ He has continued taking it literally. Australian politics has, it is agreed, few harder workers than Victoria’s premier: he is in the same class as LBJ, who famously said that he seldom thought about politics more than eighteen hours a day.'  (Introduction)

(p. 12, 14)
A Scandalous Insistence : In Pursuit of Social Change, Anwen Crawford , single work review
— Review of Provocations : New and Selected Writing Jeff Sparrow , 2022 selected work essay ;

'In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a number of cycling groups in Europe were founded on socialist principles. I had some notion, before reading Jeff Sparrow’s Provocations, of the link between cycling and that era’s feminist politics – the independent, bloomer-clad woman on her bicycle, which Sparrow also sketches – but not of Italy’s Ciclisti Rossi (Red Cyclists) or England’s Clarion Cycling Club.'  (Introduction)

(p. 15-16)
Warm and Cuddly : Drawing on Robert Menzies to Settle Old Scores, Patricia Mullins , single work review
— Review of A Sense of Balance John Winston Howard , 2022 single work autobiography ;

'Since his (involuntary) retirement from politics in 2007, John Howard has gone to some lengths to encourage comparisons with Robert Menzies. He authored a lengthy paean to Australia’s longest serving prime minister (2014), appeared in a television series to appraise his leadership and era (2016), and curated an exhibition on him at the Museum of Australian Democracy. And while he does not don the knightly robes that Menzies did on the cover of his volume of essays, The Measure of the Years (1970), Howard does ape Ming’s serene, far-seeing gaze on the dust jacket of this, his third book, A Sense of Balance.'  (Introduction)

(p. 21-22)
Ask Stuart! : Essays on the Macintyre Effect, Christina Twomey , single work review
— Review of The Work of History : Writing for Stuart Macintyre 2022 anthology essay ;

'History was work for Stuart Macintyre (1947–2021), writing was his pleasure, and he excelled at both. Peter Beilharz and Sian Supski, scholars from outside Macintyre’s own discipline of history, underscore the breadth of his interests and networks by initiating this collection of twenty-seven essays. They wish to honour Macintyre’s work and interrogate ‘the Macintyre effect’. That effect stemmed from prodigious scholarly output, intervention in national debates, political connections, service to professional bodies and key cultural institutions, a long career of teaching and leadership at the University of Melbourne, and mentorship. The editors seek to establish Macintyre’s legacy through the reflections of others on the interests and issues that inspired his life’s work. They want contributors to avoid genuflecting before launching off into tangential discussion of their own work, the bane of many a Festschrift. Most of them succeed. Contributors were instead asked to ‘add something new, or of themselves’.' (Introduction) 

(p. 22-23)
The Spirit of Place : A Timely Antidote to Cultural Amnesia, Graeme Davison , single work review
— Review of Emperors in Lilliput : Clem Christesen of Meanjin and Stephen Murray-Smith of Overland Jim Davidson , 2022 single work biography ;
(p. 30-31)
Unconditional Refusal : A Stark and Uncompromising Memoir, Peter Rose , single work review
— Review of Childhood : A Memoir Shannon Burns , 2022 single work autobiography ;

'That the boy depicted in Shannon Burns’s nightmarish memoir survived to write it at the age of forty reflects no credit on society or on those around him. His persistence seems remarkable, given the world he entered.' (Introduction)

(p. 31-32)
Tit for Tat : The Conflicted Life of Sandra Willson, Sam Elkin , single work review
— Review of Between Me and Myself : A Memoir of Murder, Desire and the Struggle to Be Free Sandra Willson , Rebecca Jennings , 2021 single work autobiography ;
'What could compel a woman to murder a complete stranger? This is the obvious question posed by Sandra Willson’s execution-style murder of Sydney taxi driver Rodney Woodgate in 1959 following the traumatic end of her lesbian relationship with a fellow trainee psychiatric nurse. It is something that Willson grapples with in her searing memoir, which she wrote over several decades. Posthumously edited by historian Rebecca Jennings, it joins one of a small group of books that provide a first-hand account of the criminalisation and institutional repression of lesbianism and gender non-conformity in mid-twentieth-century Australia.'

 (Introduction)

(p. 33)
The Figure in the Carpet : The Stories We Tell Ourselves, Robert Phiddian , single work review
— Review of The Idea of Australia Julianne Schultz , 2022 multi chapter work criticism ;
'A new monarch succeeded the day I sat down to write this review about the idea of Australia. Prime Minister Albanese, in a blessedly unpoliticised speech about Elizabeth II’s death, was direct in announcing that he and the governor-general would be heading to London, ‘where we will meet the king’.' (Introduction)
(p. 34-35)
Salman’s Throat : Living with Cancer and a Fatwa, Peter Goldsworthy , single work essay

'Restricted to phone consultations due to the Covid lockdown and my chemo-blasted immune system, I rely increasingly on the selfies of body parts that patients text me to help diagnosis. My iPhone library of lumps, bruises, wounds, rashes, boils, red eyes, and even vaginal discharges, grows rapidly, a luminous pathology museum that often reminds me of Dr Azov in Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (1981), who examines his future wife through a hole in a sheet and, over the course of many house calls, assembles a jigsaw picture of the complete woman with whom he will slowly fall in love.'  (Introduction)

(p. 36)
A Distant Leviathan : Robbie Arnott’s Realist New Novel, Jennifer Mills , single work review
— Review of Limberlost Robbie Arnott , 2022 single work novel ;

'Limberlost opens with an image of nature as dangerous: a whale, reportedly driven mad or feral by a harpoon in its side, is alleged to be destroying fishing boats in a vengeful spree. Ned is five, and the whale stories haunt him so much that his father takes him out to see for himself. The frightened child waits in a small boat for the animal’s power to show itself.'  (Introduction)

(p. 38)
‘How Will It End?’ : The Terrible Ironies of Colonial Ambition, Brenda Walker , single work review
— Review of The Settlement Jock Serong , 2022 single work novel ;

'A third of the way through Jock Serong’s sixth novel, The Settlement, a woman asks her new husband a pointed question about Wybalenna, the desolate Tasmanian community in which she finds herself, a community of duplicitous, expedient, and brutally deranged white men and the First Nations Tasmanians they seek to subjugate. ‘How will it end? His wife had asked him when she first arrived. Will the paddock fill and the people empty? Will there be another paddock after this one, if there are more people coming?’ Her husband, the storekeeper of the settlement, is witness to the grim activities of the governing group. He sees terrible cruelties he is largely powerless to prevent. The paddock she asks about is a cemetery. She is describing genocide, not through the widespread slaughter of Tasmanian Aboriginal people on their traditional lands, which has been the pretext for persuading them to join the community, but through deaths caused by disease and displacement. Paddocks imply farming. Her question highlights the morbid and seemingly perpetual industry of death and colonisation, and its horror. This is the subject of Serong’s confronting novel.' (Introduction)

(p. 42)
Witch Marks : Eliza Henry-Jones’s Fifth Novel, Katherine Brabon , single work review
— Review of Salt and Skin Eliza Henry-Jones , 2022 single work novel ;

'Salt and Skin is the fifth novel by Victorian-based writer Eliza Henry-Jones. Following the death of her husband, Luda moves with her two teenage children, Darcy and Min, from Australia to the remote Scottish islands. Luda, a photographer, is employed by the local council to document the effects of climate change on the islands and to raise funds for related activism. They will live on Seannay, a small tidal island off the main Big Island, in the isolated and ramshackle ‘ghost house’ that bears centuries-old markings on the ceilings, ‘witch marks’ thought to ward off evil.' (Introduction) 

(p. 44)
Experimental Flair : Three New Short Story Collections, Alex Cothren , single work review
— Review of Cautionary Tales for Excitable Girls Anne Casey-Hardy , 2022 selected work short story ; Here Be Leviathans Chris Flynn , 2022 selected work short story ; Everything Feels like the End of the World Else Fitzgerald , 2022 selected work short story ;

'There’s a theory that short fiction is the perfect panacea for modern life. As our attention spans grow weak on  a diet of digital gruel and as our free time clogs up with late-night work emails, enter the short story as an efficient fiction-booster administered daily on the commute between suburb and CBD. I love this theory, and I will forever resent Jane Rawson for exposing its flaws in a 2018 Overland article on the subject. Rawson explains that most time-poor readers prefer to dip in and out of long novels, where they can greet familiar worlds without the awkward orientation period required by a new text. In contrast, says Rawson, collections of ‘stories plunge you back into that icy pool of not-knowing every 500, 800, 2000 or 5000 words. Who wants that? Pretty much no-one, if bestseller lists are anything to go by.’' (Introduction)

(p. 49-50)
Poet of the Month : Joan Fleming, single work interview (p. 52)
Imitating Rural Imitation After Robert Browning’s ‘Two in the Campagna’i"This place we live is termed ‘rural’", John Kinsella , single work poetry (p. 53)
Mordant Marvels : A Wondrous, Disquieting Poetry Collection, Anders Villani , single work review
— Review of Mirabilia Lisa Gorton , 2022 selected work poetry ;

'Mirabilia is the plural form of the Latin mirabile: wonderful thing, marvel. Since the publication of her first book, Press Release, in 2007, Lisa Gorton has cultivated such a voice in Australian poetry. Mordant political wit, formal and thematic bricolage, a liquid control of the line, and the ability to trace patterns across the strata of history and society – to rove between time and the timeless – have long characterised Gorton’s oeuvre. She showcases the full complement of her gifts in this wondrous and disquieting new collection.'  (Introduction)

(p. 55)
‘Floating in Nutrients’ : Poetry as an Engine of Community, Ender Baskan , single work review
— Review of Bath Songs Lia Dewey Morgan , 2022 selected work poetry ; Strange Animals Bridget Gilmartin , 2022 selected work poetry ; Eternal Delight Paralysis Daniel Ward , 2022 selected work poetry ; Can We Rest Tonight in the Amnesia of Pleasure Shannon May Powell , 2022 selected work poetry ;
(p. 56-57)
Open Page with Shannon Burns, single work interview (p. 58)
Fable or Fact : A Storyteller First and Foremost, Jordan Prosser , single work review
— Review of Three Thousand Years of Longing George Miller , Augusta Gore , 2022 single work film/TV ;

'For the casual moviegoer unconcerned by matters of auteurship, it can still come as something of a shock to learn that the person behind the original Mad Max trilogy (1979–85), as well as its decade-defining follow-up, Mad Max: Fury Road (2015), also brought us the madcap animal antics of Babe: Pig in the City (1998) and the all-singing, all-dancing penguin colony of Happy Feet (2006) and Happy Feet 2 (2011). George Miller has one of the most eclectic oeuvres in modern cinema, but all his films are defined by a rich, seemingly limitless vein of imagination, as well as by the technical and aesthetic mastery necessary to mine it. Whether dabbling in live-action or 3D animation – whether wrangling penguins, pigs, or eighteen-wheeler ‘War Rigs’ – Miller is a storyteller first and foremost. It stands to reason that his latest film is a story about stories themselves: where they come from, what they mean to us, and what their place is (if any) in the modern world.'  (Introduction)

(p. 62)

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Last amended 9 Apr 2024 16:08:54
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