'In November, ABR surveys some of Australia’s most stimulating thinkers on Australia-US relations, asking whether our almost compulsive fascination with the US election is good for Australian democracy. Elsewhere, Josh Bornstein shows how corporations feed the social-media beast, and Ruth Balint cautions against mob politics in reporting. Paul Giles praises Tim Winton’s new novel and its ‘colloquial brevity’, and our reviewers consider new works by Michelle de Kretser, Alex Miller, Rachel Kushner, and Alan Hollinghurst. We examine life writing on Nancy Pelosi and Race Matthews, and books on film, theatre, law, heritage, robot tales, medicine, information networks, and much, much more.' (Publication summary)
'Raimond Gaita is quoted in his close friend Robert Manne’s new memoir as saying that a ‘dispassionate judgement is not one which is uninformed by feeling, but one which is undistorted by feeling’. That distinction points to one of the many attractive qualities of A Political Memoir: Intellectual combat in the Cold War and the culture wars.' (Introduction)
'Lech Blaine. Lucky bastard. Great stories fall in his lap, like butterflies alighting on an open hand. All he has to do is write them up.' (Introduction)
'Helen Garner has death on her mind. In recent decades, it has permeated her work in fascinating and unexpected ways. There is her novel The Spare Room (2008), which is about a woman’s struggles to care for a dying friend held hostage to dangerous delusions; This House of Grief (2014), a true-crime book about a devastating act of filicide; and, in her most recent volume of diaries, How to End a Story (2021), an account of the death of her marriage to the novelist Murray Bail.' (Introduction)
'W.E.H. Stanner’s coinage ‘the great Australian silence’ must be one of the best known in Australia’s modern history. It must also rank alongside Donald Horne’s ‘the lucky country’ as one of the least understood.' (Introduction)
'I first encountered Race Mathews in the early 2000s, around the time of the publication of my biography of Jim Cairns. He struck me as reserved and cerebral, but generous. As national secretary of the Australian Fabian Society, he invited me to deliver a talk about the biography at the Melbourne Trades Hall. Following Cairns’s death in late 2003, Mathews initiated a Jim Cairns Memorial Lecture as a joint endeavour between the Fabian Society and several university ALP clubs. What struck me about this was that Mathews and Cairns had been from different wings of the Labor Party, the former probably the most fervent disciple of Gough Whitlam, a philosophical and leadership rival to Cairns, and yet here he was helping to preserve the memory of Cairns. It suggested a refreshing ecumenicalism, an open-minded, enquiring spirit.' (Introduction)
'When you are languishing in a prison cell, you can become intensely creative. John Bunyan, Jean Genet, and Miguel de Cervantes used their time to write classic works of literature. On the eve of his hanging, Louis D’Ascoyne Mazzini wrote a memoir to explain why he set out to murder eight people. Louis is fictional, the anti-hero of the film Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949).' (Introduction)
'Let’s be clear about one thing from the outset. Any resemblance between this Melbourne Theatre Company musical adaptation of My Brilliant Career and the Miles Franklin novel of the same name seems, as times, purely coincidental.' (Introduction)
(Introduction)
'In a 2010 interview, Tobin Siebers, the author of Disability Theory and Disability Aesthetics, argued that ‘[d]isability still seems to be the last frontier of justifiable human inferiority’. At the same time, he suggested, the evolution and success of modern art owed much to ‘its embrace of disability as a distinct version of the beautiful’: ‘No object has a greater capacity to be accepted at the present moment as an aesthetic representation than the disabled body.’ A central problem for Siebers was the disconnect between ‘two cultures of beauty’. Could the ‘aesthetic culture’ that celebrated disability influence the dominant ‘commercial culture’ that stigmatised it?' (Introduction)
'Susan Hawthorne is the author/editor of thirty books of fiction, poetry, and non-fiction. Her latest book, Lesbian: Politics, culture, existence (Spinifex Press), interweaves her thinking about these subjects over a fifty-year period. She has worked in Indigenous education and has taught English as a second language to Arabic-speaking women. For fifteen years, she was an aerialist in two women’s circuses. She researched the torture of lesbians on which her novel Dark Matters is based.' (Introduction)
