y separately published work icon Australian Book Review periodical issue  
Issue Details: First known date: 2023... no. 459 November 2023 of Australian Book Review est. 1961 Australian Book Review
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AbstractHistoryArchive Description

'As spring slowly turns to summer, the November issue of ABR addresses questions of memoir, biography, and autofiction. Catriona Menzies-Pike engages with Richard Flanagan’s new hybrid work Question 7 while Zora Simic assesses Naomi Klein’s journey into the ‘mirror world’ in Doppelganger and Marilyn Lake reviews Graeme Davison’s ‘uncommonly good family history’. Also, Susan Sheridan reviews a new literary biography of Dorothea Mackellar and Kerryn Goldsworthy reviews Catharine Lumby’s biography of Frank Moorhouse. Memoirist Shannon Burns reviews Christos Tsiolkas’s tangy new novel The In-Between, Felicity Plunkett looks at Amanda Lohrey’s The Conversion, and Jelena Dinić pays tribute to Charles Simic.' (Publication summary)

Contents

* Contents derived from the 2023 version. Please note that other versions/publications may contain different contents. See the Publication Details.
The Measure of Things : Flanagan’s Looping Book of Questions, Catriona Menzies-Pike , single work review
— Review of Question 7 Richard Flanagan , 2023 single work prose ;

'When Richard Flanagan left school, he tells us early in Question 7, he worked as a chainman or surveyor’s labourer, ‘a job centuries old set to vanish only a few years later with the advent of digital technology’. Chainmen would have followed the surveyors who mapped Van Diemen’s Land and the rest of the British Empire; their task was to ‘drag the twenty-two-yard chain with its hundred links with which the world was measured’. The clanking surveyor’s measure evokes convict chains, and it demonstrates one of the principles at the heart of this book: that the past lives and redounds in the present. The chainman is a descendant of convicts, and he insists that ‘there was no straight line of history. There was only a circle.’' (Introduction)

(p. 9-10)
The Ancestors : An Uncommonly Good Family History, Marilyn Lake , single work review
— Review of My Grandfather’s Clock : Four Centuries of a British–Australian Family Graeme Davison , 2023 single work biography ;
'With My Grandfather’s Clock: Four centuries of a British-Australian family, historian Graeme Davison has offered his readers and bequeathed to his grandchildren a very special book, at once genealogy, travelogue, memoir, broad social history, and a meditation on the sources of personal identity. It is a book to be treasured.' (Introduction)           
(p. 11-12)
Like an Anthem : The Life behind ‘My Country’, Susan Sheridan , single work review
— Review of Her Sunburnt Country : The Extraordinary Literary Life of Dorothea Mackellar Deborah FitzGerald , 2023 single work biography ;

'Anyone who is old enough, and had their primary schooling in Australia, would know by heart the lines

I love a sunburnt country,
A land of sweeping plains,
Of ragged mountain ranges,
Of droughts and flooding rains

from the poem ‘My Country’, by Dorothea Mackellar. At a time of climate crisis, when the inhabitants of that country are more apprehensive than ever about sunburn, droughts, and flooding rains, we are also involved in a scarifying national debate about who has the right to call this place ‘my country’ and to love it, a debate highlighted by the referendum on an Indigenous Voice to Parliament. So it may not be the ideal time to appreciate the fame that this poem brought to the young Sydney woman who wrote it. Published first in 1908, it reappeared in numerous anthologies over the following period of the Great War, and spoke to the patriotic sentiments that flourished at the time, reaching the status of something like a national anthem. Nevertheless, it is that poem, and that fame, which constitute Dorothea Mackellar’s claim to our attention today.' (Introduction)          

(p. 17-18)
Caught in the Fork : The Work, the Life, His Times, Kerryn Goldsworthy , single work review
— Review of Frank Moorhouse : A Life Catharine Lumby , 2023 single work biography ;
'Near the end of this biography of Frank Moorhouse, author Catharine Lumby tells a story that will strike retrospective fear into the heart of any male reader who has ever climbed a tree. Watching an outdoor ceremony in which a cohort of Cub Scouts was being initiated into the Boy Scout troop to which he belonged himself, and having climbed a tree to get a better view, the young Moorhouse ‘slipped, and he slid a couple of metres down the trunk of the tree with his legs wrapped around it. He came to rest on a jagged branch, his crotch caught in the fork.’' (Introduction)           
(p. 19-20)
Endingsi"I like to think about the endings,", Geoff Page , single work poetry (p. 21)
The Extractive Nation : A Novel of Troubled Manners, Paul Giles , single work review
— Review of The Idealist Nicholas Jose , 2023 single work novel ;

'One striking feature of Nicholas Jose’s fine new novel is its principled versatility. Set in multiple locations – Adelaide, Washington, DC, East Timor – and introducing alternative narrative voices, Jose evokes a world of complex intersections comprising many different angles and viewpoints. As a former diplomat himself, he writes with expert knowledge of a variety of professional and personal environments. His novel ranges across the ‘loyalties and long memories’ of lives rooted in Adelaide, along with some of the city’s ‘dunderhead complacencies’, while also presenting an insider’s view of diplomatic exchanges in Washington, DC and Canberra.' (Introduction)          

(p. 26)
Jolts and Dislocation : Amanda Lohrey’s Bravura New Novel, Felicity Plunkett , single work review
— Review of The Conversion Amanda Lohrey , 2023 single work novel ;
'Transformation is one thing. Conversion is another. With its Latin roots con (with or together) and vertere (to turn or bend), conversion is haunted by a sense of coercion, the imposition of one will over another. In Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway, conversion comes in the form of Clarissa Dalloway’s daughter’s evangelistic tutor, Doris Kilman, the violence of colonialism, and brutish attempts by psychologist Sir William Bradshaw to instil ‘a sense of proportion’ into his vulnerable patients. Sir William gets what he wants. He ‘shuts people up’ under the auspices of ‘the twin goddesses of conversion and proportion’. Converting, for Woolf, means ‘to override opposition’.' (Introduction)          
(p. 27)
To Share Breath : Christos Tsiolkas’s Tangy New Novel, Shannon Burns , single work review
— Review of The In-Between Christos Tsiolkas , 2023 single work novel ;

'When the London theatres closed due to plague in the late 1590s, a still-young William Shakespeare composed and published ‘Venus and Adonis’, a poem about unrequited love, lust, and devotion to beauty. Shakespeare evokes a desire to touch, to kiss, to smell, to taste, to share breath. Christos Tsiolkas’s book  (2021), written and published under similar circumstances, embodies some of this Shakespearean spirit, but his conception of beauty extends to a fuller range of sensual experience, accommodating everything that is human and alive – the stench as well as the perfume – while rejecting whatever seeks to diminish beauty and liveliness. It is the work of a writer who is in love with this world, despite its cruelties. The In-Between mirrors and extends that sensibility.' (Introduction)          

(p. 28-29)
Falling into a Dream : Joel Deane’s Visceral Novel, Anders Villani , single work review
— Review of Judas Boys Joel Deane , 2023 single work novel ;

'Early in Joel Deane’s third novel, the point of view shifts from the first to the third person as the narrator, Patrick ‘Pin’ Pinnock, reflects on a moment in boyhood, standing atop a diving board at night:

'He looks down and sees the white frame of the rectangular pool, but everything inside the white frame is black. The darkness within the frame is his past and future, he thinks, and the diving board is his present. To make the leap from one to the other, therefore, is an act of faith.' (Introduction)           

(p. 30)
Gender and Power : Three New Young Adult Novels, Ben Chandler , single work review
— Review of Some Shall Break Ellie Marney , 2023 single work novel ; The Sinister Booksellers of Bath Garth Nix , 2023 single work children's fiction ; Nightbirds Kate J. Armstrong , 2023 single work novel ;

'Three new novels from Allen & Unwin explore gender power relations – with mixed results. In Ellie Marney’s Some Shall Break ($24.99 pb, 382 pp), a young woman helps law enforcement hunt a serial killer who is kidnapping and raping young women. Garth Nix’s latest offers interesting parallels, though The Sinister Booksellers of Bath ($24.99 pb 330 pp) includes plenty of fantasy elements to vary the formula. Meanwhile, Kate J. Armstrong’s Nightbirds ($24.99 pb, 462 pp) follows three different women who are navigating magical, political, and romantic intrigues.' (Introduction)          

(p. 32-33)
Metrici"Poetry shouldn’t be measured,", Aidan Coleman , single work poetry
Author's note: 

for Peter Goldsworthy

(p. 35)
'Scrape the Side!' : Π.O. in America, Francesca Sasnaitis , single work review
— Review of The Tour TT. O , 2023 single work novel ;

'In 1985, five (or four, depending on the source) Australian poets went on a sixteen-city reading tour of the United States and Canada. Π.O. was one of them. Originally titled ‘The Dirty T-Shirt Tour’, The Tour is ostensibly Π.O.’s diary of that trip, the dirty T-shirt standing for the narrator’s ‘difference’: his migrant, working-class background; his flouting of social conventions; his ‘performance poet’ status. While the other poets are (repeatedly) washing and ironing in their rooms, he is out walking the streets, making astute observations, meeting interesting people. Π.O. names the well-known poets and lesser entities he befriends and the famous poets he doesn’t meet – the disreputable T-shirt given as one reason for his exclusion – but he omits the identities of the poets on the tour and the tour organisers.'  (Introduction)          

(p. 36)
An Interview with Diane Stubbings, single work interview (p. 37)
The Morning Belongs to Us, Siobhan Kavanagh , single work essay

'We woke early that morning as the sun lit up the two shared bedrooms, three of us in each one. The thin, printed cotton curtains were no match for that kind of light. We were eighteen years old. It was the first weekend of our first semester at university, and we had come to the beach house armed with our readers and highlighters.' (Introduction)

(p. 38-40)
Glittering Diadem : The Paraphernalia of Poetry, Michael Farrell , single work review
— Review of Like To The Lark Stuart Barnes , 2023 selected work poetry ;
'A book review is a review of a book. This sounds obvious enough but can put the reviewer in a position they would not wish to be in as a more casual reader: that of not just reading a book’s poems, but also feeling a need to attend to the rest of the book – that is, the book’s paratexts.' (Introduction)           
(p. 41)
Poems to Share : An Admirable Anthology from Western Australia, Brenda Walker , single work review
— Review of Cuttlefish : Western Australian Poets 2023 anthology poetry ;
'In Marion May Campbell’s poem ‘in the storeroom,’ which appears in Roland Leach’s anthology Cuttlefish, she writes that ‘poems are letters that go astray’ – a whimsical yet fitting definition of the kind of poetry that appears in this collection. In these digital times, there is something ceremonial about a letter: a personal communication which must be opened and held; possibly shared, intentionally or otherwise. The poems in this collection have a tight focus; each is confined to a single page. They are often personal, poems of memory and family, beginning with reminiscence and hinged with sharp insight. They may be poems about the natural world, thoughtful and observant like missives from a traveller.' 

(Introduction)          

(p. 42)
Diversity and Invention : Two New Poetry Collections, Sam Ryan , single work review
— Review of Icaros Tamryn Bennett , 2020 selected work poetry ; Moon Wrasse Willo Drummond , 2023 selected work poetry ;
'Tamryn Bennett’s Icaros and Willo Drummond’s Moon Wrasse both use the natural as their central motif. Nature has of course always been a font of inspiration for poets. These two poets draw from that font in vastly different ways. Bennett’s title refers to a form of South American song that is chanted during rituals of cleansing and healing that involve plants. Drummond’s refers to a hermaphroditic fish, the moon wrasse, which acts as a symbol of transformation.' 

(Introduction)          

(p. 43-44)
Fischer's Life : From Boree Creek to Bhutan, Joshua Black , single work review
— Review of I Am Tim Life : Politics and Beyond Peter Rees , 2023 single work biography ;
'Journalist Peter Rees’s biography of Tim Fischer was originally published by Allen & Unwin in 2001 with the title The Boy from Boree Creek. Reviewing the volume in this magazine, fellow journalist Shaun Carney had many kind words for Fischer, but said that the book was ‘either a lesson in the wonders of our democracy or a cautionary tale demonstrating the mediocrity of our public figures’ (ABR, June 2001). The subject was a ‘decent, determined, and hardworking person’, Carney wrote, but one who left the National Party in ‘a seemingly permanent existential crisis’.' 

(Introduction)          

(p. 44-45)
Open Page with Nicholas Jose, single work column (p. 57)

Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of

Last amended 5 Mar 2024 12:06:02
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