Cirrus@Austlit

'Iain McCalman begins John Büsst: Bohemian Artist and Saviour of Reef and Rainforest, his account of another man’s heroic environmental activism, by inserting himself artfully into his introductory narrative. Here, he is the historian who missed something when he was writing The Reef, his acclaimed “passionate history” of the Great Barrier Reef, a decade ago.'  (Introduction)

'This week’s ABR Podcast is a special feature on the work and life of one of Australia’s finest poets, Peter Porter (1929-2010). Morag Fraser, currently at work on a biography of Porter, introduces the podcast, setting out the major currents of his life. From there, fifteen poets and critics read from the Porter oeuvre, in all its ‘variety and depth’, explains Fraser, and offer their own memories of the man. Listen to Gig Ryan, Sarah Holland-Batt, Martin Flanagan, John Kinsella, Judith Beveridge and more read from Porter’s making with words.'  (Introduction)

'In a 1954 letter to his niece Pippa, artist-nomad Ian Fairweather lamented that he could not write with sufficient analytic detachment to look back at his life and ‘see a pattern in it’. (Ian Fairweather: A life in letters, Text Publishing, 2019). The irony – that one of Australian art’s most profound, intuitive pattern-makers should be ruefully unable to ‘see’ the formative structures and repetitions of his fraught life – would not be lost on Amanda Lohrey. Labyrinth, her haunting new novel, is a meditation on fundamental patterns in nature and in familial relations, and our experience of them in time. But this is a novel, not a treatise, its narrative so bracing – like salt spray stinging your face – that one is borne forward inexorably, as if caught in the coastal rip that is one of the novel’s darker motifs. It is a work to read slowly, and reread, so that its metaphorical patterns can come into focus, and the intricate knots of structure loosen and unwind.'  (Introduction)

'Artist, hermit, instinctive communicator, a nomad who built studio nests for himself all over the globe, Ian Fairweather is a consistent paradox – and an enduring one. In an art world of fragile and fluctuating reputations, his work retains the esteem with which it was received – by his peers – when he landed in Australia in 1934 and, with their help, exhibited almost immediately. His way of life – eccentric, solitary, obsessive – was extraordinary then, and continued so until his death in 1974. Success never sanded off his diffident, abrasive edges.'(Introduction)

'The poet James McAuley once told a group of Sydney university students – ‘forcefully’,  as Geoffrey Lehmann recalls – that poets should have a career unconnected with literature. Lehmann had already imbibed a related injunction from his mother:  ‘One day she told me I should become a lawyer and a writer. From the age of twelve I no longer had to think about what I would become.’' (Introduction)

A collaborative. Who is Mick? Who is he really? A potter? A prick? A wanderer? An artist? A good mate? The answers to these questions are explored in this collaborative novel by eighteen writers from around the globe, taking the reader on one hell of a ride. 
Published in conjunction with the ‘Smoke on the Water’ - the 2017 Australian Woodfire Ceramics Conference at Cooroy, Queensland.