Cirrus@Austlit

'For many Australians 2022 marked a return to a more normal life resembling pre-pandemic conditions, as almost all Covid restrictions, mitigations, and reporting were wound back. Yet a new “normal” was also emerging, with over 20,000 excess deaths, half of them directly attributed to Covid, and increasing concern over the effects of long Covid (Alison Barrett, British Medical Journal 13 April 2023). In the May 2022 election, Australia had a change of government, with the centre-left Labor Party taking power after nine years of conservative government. The most remarkable aspect of the election was the huge cross-bench returned in the lower house, including six independents running on a platform of climate action and integrity in traditional conservative strongholds and four Greens members. Literature funding through the Australia Council had declined 40% under the previous government and the new Arts Minister, Tony Burke, declared an end to “the nine-year political attack on the arts and entertainment sector”, announcing the development of a new National Cultural Policy (ABC News, 24 August). Unveiled in late January 2023 the policy included a “First Nations First” focus on Indigenous people and their stories and established “Writers Australia” to provide “direct support to the literature sector from 2025”, to “grow local and international audiences for Australian books and establish a National Poet Laureate for Australia” (“Revive”, Office for the Arts).' (Introduction)

'Australia spent 2021 trying to limit the spread of Covid-19, before finally admitting defeat in the face of the Delta variant and letting it run through the community. Most Australians were in lockdown for many weeks; Melbourne, the most affected city, was subject to 262 days of restricted movement over 2020 and 2021. The headlines, meanwhile, were dominated by a slow roll-out of Covid vaccines. One anthology was a direct response to the Covid experience, Lockdown Poetry: The Covid Long Haul, edited by Rose Lucas. “In these poems,” writes reviewer Belinda Calderone, “I was struck by the beautiful detail, the naming of specific flora and fauna, as though our shrunken worlds encouraged us to look at things more closely”. Calderone observes that “the pandemic threw everything we knew into flux, forcing us to look at our lives anew, and sometimes to shed parts of ourselves we had long held on to…”, adding that “[i]n times of collective suffering throughout human history, poets are the ones who are able to name what seems unnameable” (Rochford Street Review, 8 April, see Anthologies). As a coda to the release of How to End a Story: Diaries 1995–1998 (the third volume of her diaries — see below), Helen Garner separately published her “Lockdown Diaries” in The Monthly:

As the world closes in on itself, the simplest acts grow mythic. A woman reports shifting a tree in her garden that was not thriving: “I used a mattock. I lifted it above my head. The dirt fell all over me.” A nurse in ICU sets up a laptop for a woman to hear her grandchildren singing to her while she dies. An Olympic diver on the high platform turns her back on the abyss, places her palms beside her feet, and unfolds with terrifying slowness into a perfect, motionless handstand. (The Monthly October, see Non-Fiction)' (Introduction)

'Novelist, journalist and activist Katharine Susannah Prichard won fame for vivid novels that broke new ground depicting distinctly Australian ways of life and work — from Gippsland pioneers and West Australian prospectors to Pilbara station hands and outback opal miners. Her prize-winning debut The Pioneers made her a celebrity but she turned away from jaunty romances to write a trio of inter-war classics, Working Bullocks, Coonardoo and Haxby’s Circus. Heralded in her time as the ‘hope of the Australian novel’, her good friend Miles Franklin called Prichard ‘Australia’s most distinguished tragedian’.

'This biography of a literary giant traces Prichard’s journey from the genteel poverty of her Melbourne childhood to her impulsive marriage to Victoria Cross winner Hugo Throssell, and finally on to her long widowhood as a 'red witch', marked out from society by her loyalty to the Soviet Union and her unconventional ways.

'Through meticulous archival research and historical detective work, Nathan Hobby reveals many unknown aspects of Prichard’s life, including the likely identity of the mysterious lover who influenced her deeply in her twenties, her withdrawal from politics during her remarkable five-year literary peak and an intimate friendship with poet Hugh McCrae. Lively and detailed, The Red Witch is a gripping narrative alert to the drama and tragedy of Prichard’s remarkable life.'' (Publication summary)

'In a publishing feat, the anthology Fire, Flood, Plague: Australian Writers Respond to 2020 appeared in the December of the very year it was responding to. Editor Sophie Cunningham brought together 25 essays originally published on the Guardian Australia website. She writes in her introduction:

as the new year dawned — violent, smoky — there were bushfires to contend with, then air quality so dangerous my … loved ones were trapped in their house. Soon enough there were hailstorms smashing into their workplaces. More fires, floods, then the plague. On it went. We understood that summer fires followed by late summer floods were considered to be part of the cascading effect of climate change. We understood that deforestation led to an increased likelihood of pandemics, but frankly, people can’t look every which way all at once and anyway it seemed that the genie was out of the bottle, the cat was out of the bag, the tipping point had tipped and now we were in the territory of the unprecedented, the territory of pivoting, the territory of grief and loss.'

(Introduction)

'A defining moment in Australian literature in 2016 involved two unlikely protagonists — an American novelist and a Sudanese-Australian engineer. It happened at the Brisbane Writers’ Festival in September when journalist and author Lionel Shriver gave the keynote address defending the right of writers to wear “different hats”, while wearing a Mexican sombrero, referencing a controversy at an American college over cultural appropriation. Fiction, Shriver said, will always involve writing about other cultures and identities, and she hit out at the way she felt identity politics made writers reluctant to do this. A number of audience members walked out of the talk and several of these wrote opinion pieces, including 25-year-old Yassmin Abdel-Magied, a mechanical engineer as well as a debut memoirist in 2016. Abdel-Magied labelled Shiver’s speech “a celebration of the unfettered exploitation of the experiences of others, under the guise of fiction” (Guardian 10 September 2016, emphasis original). The Guardian published her response and then, three days later, Shriver’s original speech (13 September 2016).'  (Introduction)