y separately published work icon Australian Book Review periodical issue  
Issue Details: First known date: 2022... no. 449 December 2022 of Australian Book Review est. 1961 Australian Book Review
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AbstractHistoryArchive Description

'Welcome to the December issue of ABR. This month we celebrate the books of the year, as chosen by thirty-six ABR writers and critics including Frances Wilson, Tony Birch, Yassmin Abdel-Magied, Yves Rees, and Sheila Fitzpatrick. The issue opens with a strong editorial by Peter Rose voicing concerns about the Prime Minister’s Literary Awards and a thoughtful examination of Labor’s new anti-corruption bill by Stephen Charles SC. The issue also covers new works of biography and memoir with Zora Simic on Grace Tame’s memoir, Patrick Mullins on a biography of Lachlan Murdoch, and Jacqueline Kent on Bryce Courtenay. December also includes reviews of new fiction by Inga Simpson, Fiona McFarlane, Fiona Kelly McGregor (our Open Page interview subject), and much more.' (Publication summary)

Notes

  •  Only literary material within AustLit's scope individually indexed. Other material in this issue includes: 

    Restoring Australia’s reputation for integrity by Stephen Charles

    Playing deputy sheriff "Clinton Fernandes’s compelling new book by Kevin Foster 

    The spiral of ideology : An optimistic look at the future of democracy by Ben Wellings

    The Pacific imaginary : Rethinking a monumental work by Lynette Russell 

    The real Edith Berrys :Why Australians turned to Geneva by Michelle Staff

    A poet ‘in between’ : The anomaly of Rainer Maria Rilke by Alison Croggon

    Creative conundrums Australia’s ‘foundational thinker’ by Gordon Pentland 

    ‘Bollocks really’ : The BBC at the crossroads by Paul Long

    Dodgy dossiers : An engaging account of the Five Eyes by Peter Edwards

    Looking across the ditch : History-making and foundational history by Bain Attwood

    ‘A four-star shit show’ The spirit of comic rambunctiousness by Paul Giles 

    Hellish times : Ned Beauman’s hilarious dystopia by J.R. Burgmann

    Automatic dwarves : Haruki Murakami and the craft of writing by Cassandra Atherton 

    The concordat game : Big data and the origins of the West by Miles Pattenden 

    University-made economics : Keith Tribe’s new history by Ryan Walter

    RBG: Of Many, One : A hagiographic depiction of an icon’s life by Gabriella Edelstein 

    'Clouds of charcoal dust' : Fred William's London years by Irena Zdanowicz

    Prolific polymath : The enigmatic Joyce Carol Oates by Sascha Morrell

Contents

* Contents derived from the 2022 version. Please note that other versions/publications may contain different contents. See the Publication Details.
The Narrow Road to Influence, Peter Rose , single work column

'Fifteen years ago, the new Rudd government announced the creation of the Prime Minister’s Literary Awards (PMLAs), to be administered by the Minister for the Arts. There were two prizes at the outset – fiction and non-fiction – each worth $100,000 – tax free to boot. Given the precarious incomes of most Australian writers, the prizes could not have been more welcome. Later, after some lobbying, young adult and children’s fiction were added, followed by poetry and Australian history. Sensibly, like other literary prizes, the PMLA organisers decided in 2011 to reward all the shortlisted authors, not just the winner.'  (Introduction)

(p. 1)
Just Beginning : Grace Tame’s Story on Her Own Terms, Zora Simic , single work review
— Review of The Ninth Life of a Diamond Miner : A Memoir Grace Tame , 2022 single work autobiography ;

'Grace Tame was sixteen years old, and it was 2011, when the first account of the repeated sexual assault and child abuse she had endured as a victim of her fifty-eight-year-old high school maths teacher, Nicolaas Bester, appeared in her local newspaper, the Hobart Mercury. She was hanging out with two close friends, their parents were at work, and she thinks it was probably the school holidays. The headline (‘Teacher Admits to Affair with Student’) was accompanied by ‘a huge picture of his face’ and a ‘romanticised description’ of the first time her abuser had exposed himself to her.' (Introduction)

(p. 18, 20)
Planispherei"Before and after can’t be helped.", Kate Lilley , single work poetry (p. 20)
Dual Focus : The Life of Lachlan Murdoch, Patrick Mullins , single work review
— Review of The Successor : The High-Stakes Life of Lachlan Murdoch Paddy Manning , 2022 single work biography ;

'In the 1990s, seeing a ‘hot-red weapon’ of a motorbike being ridden into the News Corp car park in Sydney, journalist Paddy Manning could not help but ask, ‘What’s that?’ Still wearing his helmet, the rider answered that the bike was an MV Agusta – at which point Manning realised he had yelled at Lachlan Murdoch.' (Introduction) 

(p. 21-22)
Museum Life : A Thoughtful Illumination of a Complex Man, Danielle Clode , single work review
— Review of The Naturalist : The Remarkable Life of Allan Riverstone McCulloch Brendan Atkins , 2022 single work biography ;

'The Australian Museum is starting to develop something of a literary landscape of its own. This is not so much through official publications such as Ronald Strahan’s Rare and Curious Specimens (1979) or the flagship magazine in its various incarnations from Australian Natural History to Explore. Rather, it is through more creative or expansive stories of the weird, wonderful, and personable, from Tim Flannery’s amusingly fictionalised historical recounting of The Mystery of the Venus Island Fetish (2014) to James Bradley’s disturbing future fiction The Deep Field (1999). Museum spaces – front and back of house – have an intriguing capacity to inspire and document their own strange and evolving histories.' (Introduction) 

(p. 23)
The Power of Bryce : A Loving Memoir of the Bestselling Author, Jacqueline Kent , single work review
— Review of Bryce Courtenay : Storyteller Christine Courtenay , 2022 single work biography ;

'In the introduction to her book about Bryce Courtenay (1933–2012), Christine Courtenay writes: ‘To be Bryce’s wife was both a joy and a privilege, and I remain proud of the contribution I made to our years together. Not long after we became a couple, he said, “I love you very deeply and we make a fantastic team, but you do realise you have taken on a full-time job looking after me? Plus, for seven months a year you’re a writer’s widow while you wait for me to finish each book.”’ It is a paragraph that reveals something about their relationship, including its power balance.' (Introduction) 

(p. 25)
Books of the Year 2022 : A Look Back at 2022’s Literary Highlights, Various , single work column (p. 28-34)
Coronation Chickeni"Spare me the black ties", Peter Rose , single work poetry (p. 35)
‘Too Many Slips Showing’ " Alec Bolton and Australian Book Review, Michael Richards , single work column

'When I began work on A Maker of Books, I had no idea that Alec Bolton had succeeded ‘Peter Pica’ (the publisher and bookseller Andrew Fabinyi) as a pseudonymous critic of Australian book design and production for Australian Book Review. He called himself ‘Martin Em’. I had set out to explore in detail Alec’s achievement as a letterpress printer of distinction at his private Brindabella Press, and also his long career in Australian publishing, but this was an unexpected discovery. The clue was a letter from Alec to John McLaren, the then editor of ABR, which I found in a completely unrelated file in the Alec Bolton papers at the National Library of Australia. When I looked at Martin Em’s ‘BookShapes’ columns, published between 1978 and 1982, Alec’s distinctive voice was quite apparent.' (Introduction) 

(p. 36)
The Perfect Bat : That Rarity, a Cricket Novel, Diane Stubbings , single work review
— Review of Willowman Inga Simpson , 2022 single work novel ;

'In American culture, the baseball novel is virtually a genre unto itself, baseball offering a metaphor through which the American dream – the rise and fall and rise again of unlikely heroes – might be interrogated. The prologue of Don DeLillo’s Underworld (1997) offers a stunning example: within all the noise and spectacle of a baseball final an entire nation, as it teeters on the edge of the atomic age, is apprehended.' (Introduction) 

(p. 44)
Reimagining Iris : An Exhilarating Squeezebox of a Novel, Felicity Plunkett , single work review
— Review of Iris Fiona Kelly McGregor , 2022 single work novel ;

'The accordion, or squeezebox, takes its name from the German Akkordeon, meaning a ‘musical chorus’ or ‘chorus of sounds’. This box-shaped aerophonic instrument makes music when keys on its sides are pressed, one side mostly melody, the other chords. Squeezing the instrument and playing with both hands, the musician dexterously produces polyphonous music.' (Introduction) 

(p. 45)
Big-picture Questions : Fiona McFarlane’s Panoramic Fiction, Patrick Allington , single work review
— Review of The Sun Walks Down Fiona McFarlane , 2022 single work novel ;

'Early in The Sun Walks Down, Mary Wallace – mother to six-year-old Denny, who has gone missing in a dust storm – throws her husband a ‘general look of bafflement at having found herself here, in this place, with these people’. It’s a symptomatic moment early in a novel that contains myriad displays of perplexity by various characters – at each other, at situations they create or must navigate, at the meaning of life.' (Introduction)

(p. 46)
Much in Little : Three New Short Story Collections, Debra Adelaide , single work review
— Review of Miniatures : A Collection of Short Short Stories Susan Midalia , 2022 selected work short story ; Bloodrust and Other Stories. Julia Prendergast , 2022 selected work short story ; Women I Know Katerina Gibson , 2022 selected work short story ;

'What is a short short story? More specifically, how short is it (or how long)? The most famous tiny example is attributed to Ernest Hemingway: ‘For sale: baby shoes, never worn.’ Whether he wrote this or not, it represents the gold standard in suggesting much in little. Like poetry, microstories or flash fictions allow no formal wobbling as authors tread a perilous tightrope between banality and inspired ingenuity.' (Introduction)

(p. 47-48)
The Language of Images : Judging a Graphic Book by Its Cover, Bernard Caleo , single work review
— Review of Stone Fruit Lee Lai , 2021 single work graphic novel ; Men I Trust Tommi Parrish , 2022 single work graphic novel ;
'The covers of comic books/graphic novels/sequential narratives, call them what you will, have a fundamentally different relationship to the contents of their books than the covers of ‘ordinary’, text-only works. For the latter, the cover image is usually produced by a designer whom the author does not know and may never meet. In the case of comics, however, the cover image is made by the same hand that creates the images that proliferate within the book. The cover of a text-only book is communicating a sense of what the book is like through the totally different language of images. For the browser, that’s like trying to decide whether to attend a concert on the strength of a billposter. With a comic book, the sort of thing you see on the cover is the sort of thing you get inside. A comic book begins before you even open it. Basically, you can judge a comic book by its cover.' (Introduction) 
(p. 48-49)
The Dance of Connection : A Kind of Epistolary Love Letter, Rose Lucas , single work review
— Review of Ordinary Time Anthony Lawrence , Audrey Molloy , 2022 selected work poetry ;

'These strange years of pandemic and lockdowns certainly brought challenges and unusual experiences – those of constraint but also, surprisingly, of opportunity and richness. The curious spaces we occupy in the ether have become a seedbed for conversation and exchange; for connections that otherwise might not have found a field in which to prosper. Despite or perhaps because of the limits of the digital, perhaps even because we were undistracted by physical proximity, these spaces seemed to offer the potential for a raw honesty – lacunae of sotto voce conversations which brought us ironically into a form of seemingly unmediated communication. From the hermetically sealed bubble of lockdowns, digital connect took on the intensity of embodied dialogue, the intimate voice in the ear.' (Introduction) 

(p. 53)
Mapping the Grey Zone : An Essayist Comfortable with Uncertainty, Shannyn Palmer , single work review
— Review of Wandering with Intent Kim Mahood , 2022 selected work essay ;

'Maps are central to Kim Mahood’s practice as a writer, artist, and intercultural collaborator. She began making them in the wake of her father’s death in a helicopter mustering accident thirty years ago. This tragic event compelled her to make a pilgrimage to the country where she spent her late childhood and teenage years living on Mongrel Downs cattle station in the Tanami Desert. This journey became the subject of her award-winning memoir, Craft for a Dry Lake (2001). This journey set in motion a renewed relationship with the place that has seen her return to the Tanami annually for more than twenty years. The relationships that developed during this period resulted in Mahood’s longstanding preoccupation with maps and mapmaking developing into collaborative mapping projects with Walmajarri and Jaru peoples, the contours of which she traces in her second book Position Doubtful: Mapping landscapes and memories (2016).' (Introduction) 

(p. 54-55)
Visiting Peter, Andrew Taylor , single work poetry
Author's note: i.m. Peter Porter
(p. 55)
A Flawed Hero : Understanding the ‘real’ Matthew Flinders, Matthew Cunneen , single work review
— Review of Mathew Flinders : The Man Behind the Map Gillian Dooley , 2022 single work biography ;
'Few names are so ubiquitous in Australian culture or hold such a significant position in its history as that of Matthew Flinders. More than one hundred sites across Australia have been named in his honour, commemorating his accomplishments as a navigator, hydrographer, cartographer, and scientist. Among them are several statues featuring Flinders with Trim, his ever-faithful pet cat and companion, as well as numerous geographic landmarks, electoral districts, and a university.' (Introduction) 
(p. 56)
The World Deanimated : Inter-species Attention in an Age of Extinction, Prithvi Varatharajan , single work review
— Review of Kin : Thinking with Deborah Bird Rose 2022 anthology criticism ;

'Deborah Bird Rose (1946–2018) was an interdisciplinary thinker who helped establish the field of the environmental humanities (or ecological humanities); in 2012 she also co-founded the scholarly journal Environmental Humanities. Having initially trained in anthropology, Rose strove to push that field and other ethnographic studies beyond their stubborn anthropocentrism. She came to Australia in 1980 from Bryn Mawr College, Pennsylvania, to undertake PhD research in Aboriginal Australia. Her thinking was shaped by the decades she spent with Aboriginal mentors and friends, in the Northern Territory communities of Lingara and Yarralin. Across her writing, in books such as Wild Dog Dreaming: Love and extinction (2011) and Nourishing Terrains: Australian Aboriginal views of landscape and wilderness (1996), Rose demonstrated and promoted attentiveness to, and ethical engagement with, the plethora of beings on Earth.' (Introduction) 

(p. 58-59)
Seizing an Opportunity : A Diaristic Memoir from John Clark, Ben Brooker , single work review
— Review of An Eye for Talent : A Life at NIDA John Clark , 2022 single work autobiography ;

'Theatre director John Clark’s close namesake John Clarke, in character as that infamous Kiwi schlep Fred Dagg, once averred that autobiography

is a highly recommended form of leisure activity, as it takes up large chunks of time and if you’re a slow writer or you think particularly highly of yourself, you can probably whistle away a year or two … It’s not a difficult business and remember this is also your big opportunity to explain what a wonderful person you are and how you’ve been consistently misunderstood … 

 (Introduction)

(p. 60)

Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of

Last amended 9 Apr 2024 15:44:08
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