y separately published work icon Australian Book Review periodical issue  
Issue Details: First known date: 2022... no. 448 November 2022 of Australian Book Review est. 1961 Australian Book Review
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AbstractHistoryArchive Description

'Welcome to the November issue of ABR. This month we look to history and politics with reviews of works on Australia’s political history (both recent and historical), biographical studies of historical figures (from the Macarthurs to a pioneering plastic surgeon) and historical fiction from Gail Jones and Maggie O’Farrell. Also in the issue is our cover feature by Ronan McDonald on the Cambridge Centenary Ulysses, James Dunk on historians and microbes, Kirsten Tranter on Heather Rose, Amanda Laugesen on language, Geordie Williamson on Geoff Dyer, Morgan Nunan on Shaun Prescott, and Kerryn Goldsworthy on Philip Salom.' (Publication summary)

Contents

* Contents derived from the 2022 version. Please note that other versions/publications may contain different contents. See the Publication Details.
A Great Forest of Voices : A Doubled Historical Awareness, Penny Russell , single work review
— Review of Elizabeth and John : The Macarthurs of Elizabeth Farm Alan Atkinson , 2022 single work biography ;
''If we take it for granted that John Macarthur was a bad man,’ writes Alan Atkinson, ‘then all the surviving evidence takes on a colouring to match. If we think that, then every word he wrote is suspect. On the other hand, leave the question of character open and the evidence takes on a new richness altogether – a deeper and more complex humanity. That is what I aim to do in this book.’' 

(Publication summary)

(p. 8-9)
Joy Is My Discipline : Life and Its Contingencies, Kirsten Tranter , single work review
— Review of Nothing Bad Ever Happens Here Heather Rose , 2022 single work autobiography ;
'The Tasmanian childhood recounted by Heather Rose sounds idyllic, to the point of being suspect, a too-perfect vision of wholesome family life. ‘We do not own a television. Books and games, music and friends, the radio and the outdoors are our entertainment,’ she writes. In this paradise of neighbourly trust, ‘no-one locks their doors. We are welcome in everyone’s houses.’ Rose remembers her mother as a domestic goddess: ‘Along with a career, four children and a husband, she bakes and cooks, sews, preserves, sings, embroiders, gardens, arranges flowers, decorates cakes, and makes kayaks and pottery’, while also contriving to be ‘slender, elegant’, and beautiful. At this point, you might wonder if the title – Nothing Bad Ever Happens Here – is not, as you first assumed, meant to be ironic. But how long can this flawless, nostalgic reverie be sustained?' (Introduction)
(p. 27)
On Dover Streeti"Again, death rolled towards", Felicity Plunkett , single work poetry (p. 34)
Doom Metal Malaise : Shaun Prescott’s Surreal Second Novel, Morgan Nunan , single work review
— Review of Bon and Lesley Shaun Prescott , 2022 single work novel ;

'In keeping with his successful début fiction, Shaun Prescott’s Bon and Lesley is set in a declining regional Australian town filled with oddball characters and plagued by otherworldly phenomena. The Town (2017) was published in seven countries and garnered apt comparison to, among others, Franz Kafka and László Krasznahorkai, as well as Australian writers Gerald Murnane and Wayne Macauley. Like these influences, Prescott’s work eludes definitive categorisation, though his second novel maintains distinctly ontological and surrealist emphases.' (Introduction)

(p. 36)
Dismantled Lives : Gail Jones’s Elegant New Novel, Diane Stubbings , single work review
— Review of Salonika Burning Gail Jones , 2022 single work novel ;

'In 1917, at the height of World War I, a fire destroyed the Greek city of Salonika (Thessaloniki), a staging post for Allied troops. The centre of an ‘Ottoman polyglot culture’, Salonika was at the time home to large numbers of refugees, many of them Jewish and Roma. It was in one of the refugee hovels that the fire started, an ember from a makeshift stove igniting a bundle of straw. From that single ember grew an inferno that burned for thirty-two hours, obliterating three-quarters of the city and leaving 70,000 people – by some estimates half the population – homeless.' (Introduction)

(p. 37-38)
Circle of Fifthsi"Trap metal cathedra.", John Hawke , single work poetry (p. 39)
A Piñata Full up with Words : Luke Carman’s Eclectic Short Story Collection, Sascha Morrell , single work review
— Review of An Ordinary Ecstasy Luke Carman , 2022 selected work short story ;

'Our high school art teacher would often look at a student’s work and judge it ‘interesting’. Sometimes this was a written comment, accompanied by a lacklustre mark like 14/20, which led us to suspect – perhaps rightly – that ‘interesting’ was a euphemism for ‘inept’. Now I wonder if it occasionally meant: curious, out of the ordinary, sui generis, hard to grade or categorise, or distinctive if not fully achieved. If so, Luke Carman’s short story collection An Ordinary Ecstasy is ‘interesting’: eclectic, uneven, at times ungainly. You have the sense that Carman is following the maxim ‘write for yourself’. Past success has earned him that privilege and, as Carman’s tumbleweed talent rollicks untamed across the streets of Sydney’s Inner West out to Blacktown and as far north as Byron Bay, the results are never pedestrian.'  (Introduction)

(p. 39-40)
Life Versus Art : The Joys and Constraints of Artistic Freedom, Charle Malycon , single work review
— Review of The Tower Carol Lefevre , 2022 single work novel ;

'Admirers of Carol Lefevre’s earlier books, and nostalgists in general, will delight in her latest offering. Her artistic eye evokes the patina of a silvering vintage mirror reflecting societal and literary traditions. Both in tone and preoccupations, The Tower (Lefevre’s sixth book) continues traditions cast in several Australian literary classics. Familiar, too, is Lefevre’s favoured form. Several of the book’s chapters have previously been published as short stories, but Lefevre has worked them seamlessly into this novel’s overarching chronicle.'  (Introduction)

(p. 40)
Swatting the Drones : Philip Salom’s Realist Fiction, Kerryn Goldsworthy , single work review
— Review of Sweeney and the Bicycles Philip Salom , 2022 single work novel ;
'Philip Salom, now in his early seventies, has been a steady presence in Australian literature for more than four decades. Until a few years ago he was mainly known as a poet. He has published fourteen collections and won two awards for lifetime achievement in that field. Having turned to fiction in 2015, he has now published six novels. In Sweeney and the Bicycles, he returns to themes that have woven their way through much of his fiction: identity and selfhood, family and friendship, damage and healing, unlooked-for and unlikely middle-aged love.'  (Introduction)
(p. 41)
Blurring Boundaries : Angela Meyer’s Experimental Second Novel, Jennifer Mills , single work review
— Review of Moon Sugar : A Novel Angela Meyer , 2022 single work novel ;

'There is an experiment at the heart of Angela Meyer’s second novel, Moon Sugar. Without going into spoiler-level detail, it unlocks something in her protagonists, offering them new ways to connect with each other and the world around them. This experiment is a neat metaphor for Meyer’s own; by slipping between genres, her fiction strives to upend readerly expectations, expanding the possibilities for engagement.'  (Introduction)

(p. 42)
'Time to Be Grass Again' : Colorado Comes to Tasmania, Geoff Page , single work review
— Review of Pacific Light David Mason , 2023 selected work poetry ;

'Poet, essayist, and librettist David Mason grew up in Washington State, worked for many years in Colorado (where he became the state’s poet laureate) and a couple of years ago moved to Tasmania. Pacific Light, his new collection, is largely about that transition and his getting to know the landscapes and cultures of his new country.'  (Introduction)

(p. 44)
Wearne's World : Doing the Suburbs in Different Voices, Michael Farrell , single work review
— Review of Near Believing : Selected Monologues and Narratives 1967-2021 Alan Wearne , 2022 selected work poetry ;

'The near-religious title of Alan Wearne’s new selection of poems, Near Believing, gives an impression of bathos and deprecation, while nevertheless undermining structures of belief, as represented in the book; at times this belief is explicitly Christian, but can also be seen more generally as belief in others, or in the suburban way of life. It is, then, while modest-seeming, highly ambitious – and, in another irony, further evokes the pathos, and hopelessness, of wanting to believe. In the title poem, which appears in the uncollected section, ‘Metropolitan Poems and other poems’, a ‘near-believer’ is defined by the poem’s priest speaker as ‘that kind of atheist I guess who prays at times’. This formula captures the ambiguity of the book’s many speakers and their addresses.'  (Introduction)

(p. 45-46)
An Interview with Terri-ann White, single work interview (p. 51)
Cons, Ops, and Con-ops : An Engrossing Diplomatic Memoir, Alison Broinowski , single work review
— Review of The Consul : An Insider Account from Australia’s Diplomatic Frontline Ian Kemish , 2022 single work autobiography ;

'When Australians working in diplomatic posts share anecdotes, the best usually come from the consuls. They recount travellers’ tales of love and loss, dissipation and disaster, adventure and misadventure from Australians perpetually on the move – at least until the pandemic. It’s the consuls’ job to help those who are injured, robbed, kidnapped, arrested, or otherwise distressed abroad.'  (Introduction)

(p. 52)
[Review] : Cyrano, Tim Byrne , single work review
— Review of Cyrano Virginia Gay , 2021 single work drama ;
'In Italian playwright Luigi Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author (1921), a handful of people enter a stage during a rehearsal and begin to break down the very structures of theatre itself. They question not just the verisimilitude of acting but the essentialism of character, the idea that we are ever any one thing fixed in time. It is a concept that animates Virginia Gay’s free adaptation of Edmond Rostand’s Cyrano de Bergerac (1897): this is a tragic hero who pushes at the confines of their assigned role, daring to imagine not just an alternate ending but an entirely new way of being Cyrano.' 

 (Introduction)

(p. 54)

Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of

Last amended 9 Apr 2024 15:56:05
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