y separately published work icon Australian Book Review periodical issue  
Issue Details: First known date: 2023... no. 455 July 2023 of Australian Book Review est. 1961 Australian Book Review
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AbstractHistoryArchive Description

'Welcome to the July issue of ABR! This month ABR examines questions of politics, history, and immigration. Bain Attwood’s cover feature offers a nuanced examination of the Voice referendum from a historical perspective, drawing on the 1967 referendum on Aboriginal rights. Other major features include David Rolph on the Ben Roberts-Smith defamation case and the vindication of investigative journalism, Jack Corbett on sovereignty games in the Pacific Islands, and ABR Laureate’s fellow Ebony Nilsson on the ALP’s uneasy history with immigration. Sheila Fitzpatrick examines a new history of East Germany and Michael Hofmann reviews Anna Funder’s major repositioning of Eileen O’Shaugnessy, George Orwell’s first wife. Also in the issue, Helen Morse takes us backstage, Brenda Walker reviews a collection of essays from critic Helen Elliott, Geordie Williamson appraises a new short story collection from J.M. Coetzee, and Patrick Mullins looks at transformations in the Australian media.' 

(Publication summary)

Contents

* Contents derived from the 2023 version. Please note that other versions/publications may contain different contents. See the Publication Details.
‘Nasty, Brutish, and Banal’ The Ploys of Media Moguls and Politicians, Patrick Mullins , single work review
— Review of Media Monsters : The Transformation of Australia’s Newspaper Empires Sally Young , 2023 multi chapter work criticism ;

'In 1968, Rupert Murdoch was one step from acquiring his first international media holding, in the British tabloid The News of the World. That Murdoch was so close was a personal coup, given that his press ownership had begun sixteen years earlier with a much-diminished inheritance, largely based in Adelaide. To pull off the News of the World acquisition, however, Murdoch needed government approval to transfer $10 million Australian offshore. Speed, secrecy, and surety were pivotal, and in search of all three Murdoch went to John McEwen, the deputy prime minister and leader of the Country Party. The two had an enduring bond: McEwen had helped Murdoch buy his grazing station and family bolthole, Cavan, and when McEwen was appointed acting prime minister after the death of Harold Holt in 1967, Murdoch had argued in The Australian that McEwen should be prime minister in his own right. Now, in 1968, McEwen took Murdoch to the prime minister, John Gorton, who was also familiar with the young press baron. Gorton had briefly been lined up to work for Murdoch’s father in the 1930s and owed something of his present job now to the influence Murdoch had wielded when it became clear that McEwen could not remain prime minister.' (Introduction)   

(p. 15-16)
A Black Hole : The Airbrushing of George Orwell’s Reputation, Michael Hofmann , single work review
— Review of Wifedom : Mrs Orwell's Invisible Life Anna Funder , 2023 single work biography ;

'Wifedom is both an immovable and an irresistible book, an object and a force. Anna Funder, the author some years back of the bestselling Stasiland (2003), has written another great and important narrative of oppression and covert suppression, in this case of the first Mrs George Orwell, Eileen O’Shaughnessy (1905–45). The oppression and suppression are or were the work of her liberal and emancipatory husband – the nearest thing we have these days to a lay saint – and of his six (male) biographers. While nowhere a nasty book (what the Americans would call ‘mean’), it’s a kind of St George and the six dwarves. What’s strange is the persistence of the old bromides. In a recent Guardian review of D.J. Taylor’s Orwell: The new life (2023) – the biographer’s second go-around – Blake Morrison refers to ‘the practical Orwell’ and ‘the complaisant Eileen’. He wouldn’t have said either thing if he’d been able to read Funder’s new book.' (Introduction)   

(p. 20-21)
Connective Tissue : A Celebration of Social Influence, Brenda Walker , single work review
— Review of Eleven Letters to You Helen Elliott , 2023 single work autobiography ;

'In an exuberant essay anticipating the publication of Eleven Letters to You, the critic and editor Helen Elliott describes the deep pleasure of working on the book: ‘The satisfaction of writing this book, of making it as good as I can has been unlike anything I’ve ever known. A necessary joy, the deepest new, an entirely selfish pleasure. A small and ravishing bomb inside me’ (The Monthly, May 2023). After this introduction, it was a relief to read the book and find that it doesn’t disappoint. The exuberance of the writing process filters through to the finished pages, populated with ostensibly ‘ordinary people’ – Elliott’s highly provisional term – who have made a deep impression on the writer.' (Introduction)   

(p. 22)
Reading the Conditionsi"The sky was white and patched with ultramarine as we set out", Anthony Lawrence , single work poetry (p. 27)
Last Things : J.M. Coetzee’s Antipodal Forces, Geordie Williamson , single work review
— Review of The Pole and Other Stories J. M. Coetzee , 2023 selected work short story ;
'The aphorist Georg Christoph Lichtenberg likened reviews to ‘a kind of childhood illness to which newborn books are subject to a greater or lesser degree’, like measles or mumps, which kill a few but leave the rest only mildly marked. But how should we consider reviews of books that come late in an author’s career? In instances such as these, the reviewer is tempted to avoid any chance of career-ending pneumonia, applying a nurse’s gentling touch to the text. Often the result is career summation, a soft peddle at indications of decline.' (Introduction)    
(p. 36-37)
The Walls Speak : Novelising the Other in Medieval England, Naama Grey-Smith , single work review
— Review of The Fire and the Rose Robyn Cadwallader , 2023 single work novel ;

'Centuries before the Kremlin had a digital presence and long before Ivermectin was trending on Twitter, an early form of disinformation campaigning emerged in medieval Europe: blood libel. These anti-Semitic accusations claimed that Christian children were being killed as part of Jewish religious ritual, a lie used to justify violence against Jewish communities.' (Introduction)   

(p. 39)
The Fortunes : A Triptych of Intergenerational Experience, Giselle Au-Nhien Nguyen , single work review
— Review of After the Rain Aisling Smith , 2023 single work novel ;

'Melbourne author Aisling Smith’s début begins with a question that snakes the whole way through her novel: ‘What has happened to Benjamin?’' (Introduction)   

(p. 40)
The Comfort of Tragedies : Libby Angel’s Second Novel, Jay Daniel Thompson , single work review
— Review of Where I Slept Libby Angel , 2023 single work novel ;

'Where I Slept opens with an ending. The nameless narrator, a twenty-something woman, is leaving her rural hometown and the boarding house where she lived, for new adventures in the big smoke – but not before daubing ‘sentimentality is the enemy of truth’ on the front gate of her soon-to-be former university. That proverb proves prophetic as the narrator establishes a new life in Melbourne’s inner city. This is the 1990s, just before gentrification had gained ascendance, when the area still had a ‘bohemian’ feel. The narrator drifts through sharehouses where rent goes unpaid and housemates are replaced frequently. She frequents seedy bars where strangers shout her drinks, and exhibitions where free booze flows.' (Introduction)   

(p. 41)
Beyond Before : Andre Dao's Amorphous Spaces, Scott McCulloch , single work review
— Review of Anam André Dao , 2023 single work novel ;
'André Dao’s début novel, Anam, deals in the inconsistencies of memory and perception. It is narrated by a writer, a lawyer, an immigrant, a student, a partner, a son, a parent, a grandparent, and many ghosts, yet the motor of the story is Dao’s grandfather, who was sentenced, without charge or trial, to ten years’ imprisonment as a political detainee in the infamous Chi Hoa prison in Vietnam.' (Introduction)   
(p. 42)
Disei"brief like everyone", Lisa Samuels , single work poetry (p. 43)
A Poetic Death Sentence : Poetry as a Key to History, Philip Mead , single work review
— Review of Barron Field in New South Wales : The Poetics of Terra Nullius Thomas H. Ford , Justin Clemens , 2023 single work biography ;

'Literary study tends to be characterised by bipolar episodes, swinging between enjoyment and judgement. There is reading for pleasure and learning to be critical, or making up your mind about how good, bad, or indifferent a literary work is. This way of thinking about literature still pervades all levels of the cultural and social scenes where readers talk to one another. We discuss with our friends or communities whether we like a work of literature or not, but when things get formal or seminar-serious the conversation shifts to whether we think that work is any good – a different thing. The Saturday review pages wobble between these two modes, between chat about whether readers will like a book or film, and whether it’s any good or not. Some texts that have become good over time, canonical in other words, we might not like. ‘Like’, here, of course, is a very fuzzy notion, although you would have to be delusional to think a book is automatically good because you like it. And liking certain texts, Ern Malley’s poetry or Stephenie Meyer’s fiction for example, might be evidence, in some people’s view, of a lack of taste, or bad judgement. But as we say, there’s no accounting for that.' (Introduction)

(p. 44-45)
Collateral : Dispatches from the Mental Battlefield, Kevin Foster , single work review
— Review of Line in the Sand Dean Yates , 2023 single work autobiography ;

'We’ve all seen the video. The black and white images are washed out, almost solarised, by the heat and glare of a Baghdad morning in 2007. As the men walk and mingle on the street, we can make out the length of their hair, pick out the skinny from the stocky, and identify what they are wearing, loose trousers, casual shirts – one with distinctive broad stripes. Mercifully, we cannot discern their individual features. All the while, the Apache helicopter hovers, unseen and unheard, its cameras trained on the men below. The crew exchange terse messages with US troops in the area and their commanders back at the flight line. Having identified weapons that the men carry and confirmed that they are not coalition forces, the crew request and receive permission to engage, manoeuvring the gunship to get a clearer shot.' (Introduction)   

(p. 45-46)
Body and Home : The Grain of the Domestic, Felicity Plunkett , single work review
— Review of Spore or Seed Caitlin Maling , 2023 selected work poetry ; Increments of the Everyday Rose Lucas , 2022 selected work poetry ;
(p. 46-47)
Striking Parallels : Ekphrasis and the Body, Chris Arnold , single work review
— Review of I Have Decided to Remain Vertical Gayelene Carbis , 2022 selected work poetry ; The Drama Student Autumn Royal , 2023 selected work poetry ;
(p. 50-51)
A Rescue Operation : Queer History for the Now, Susan Sheridan , single work review
— Review of She and Her Pretty Friend Danielle Scrimshaw , 2023 single work biography ;

'She and Her Pretty Friend is a collation of stories about lesbians in Australian history, ranging from the convict women of the ‘flash mob’ in Hobart’s Cascades prison to the lesbian separatists of the 1983 Pine Gap Peace Camp. Along the way, the reader meets a couple who farmed together in the 1840s, another couple who taught swimming and started the first women-only gym in Melbourne in 1879, as well as one of the first women doctors and her lifelong companion, who both served at the Scottish Women’s Hospital in Serbia in 1916. There are other figures, like poet Lesbia Harford and her muse, Katie Lush, or suffragist Cecilia John, who rode on horseback, dressed in suffrage colours, at the head of a march of more than 4,000 women and children (Danielle Scrimshsaw credits her with ‘queering the suffrage movement’). A chapter on Eve Langley and other ‘passing women’ prompts questions about whether they would have seen themselves as transgender, in today’s parlance.' (Introduction)

(p. 55)
Poisons and Antidotes : Staging a Chinese-Australian Morality Play, Josh Stenberg , single work review
— Review of The Poison of Polygamy Anchuli Felicia King , 2023 single work drama ;

'The Poison of Polygamy originally appeared serially in Melbourne’s Chinese Times in 1909–10. Wong Shee Ping’s novella is a kind of Cantonese Rake’s Progress by way of Rider Haggard, relating the wanderings and misadventures of a man sojourning in Australia, and the yearnings of the wife he leaves behind at home. Subtitled as social fiction, its chief concern is not migration but the moral ills afflicting Chinese society. Accordingly, the opium-smoking rotter of a protagonist is finally punished for his lust, slovenliness, avarice, and addiction: throttled by his slatternly concubine, who has only just dispatched his wife and child in a bid to improve her social position. Along the way, thylacines attack, business partners are rescued from collapsed mines, and thinly veiled Christian moralism excoriates traditional medicine and religion.' (Introduction)   

(p. 58)
Do Not Go Gentle : Patricia Cornelius’s Marvel of a Play, Clare Monagle , single work review
— Review of Do Not Go Gentle... Patricia Cornelius , 2006 single work drama ;

'Do Not Go Gentle, presented by the Sydney Theatre Company, is a marvel of a play, and this is a marvel of a production. Patricia Cornelius’s words, spoken by Scott of the Antarctic and his ragtag bunch of fellow travellers, are poetic, quixotic, trenchant, and potent. The liminal space offered by the ice and the snow of the setting takes the characters deep into their own psychic extremities. They become ruminative, playful, despairing, and libidinal as they encounter the limits of their physical and emotional capacities. They yearn for the ever-elusive South Pole, seeking to reach an end that promises liberation and obliteration.' (Introduction)   

(p. 62)
Backstage with Helen Morse, single work interview (p. 63)

Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of

Last amended 3 Apr 2024 15:38:43
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