Cirrus@Austlit

''Arrive finally at about three.’ The opening sentence of Charlotte Wood’s seventh novel does a lot in five simple words, emblematic of her gift for compression. With the direct, truncated prose of a diary entry, we are suddenly on intimate terms with another mind, impatient to begin. The unnamed narrator is a woman alone, returning to the country town where she grew up and where her parents are buried. ‘Your bones are here, beneath my feet,’ she thinks, standing at their graves for the first time in thirty-five years. So begins her reckoning.' (Introduction)          

'In his essay on the uncanny, Sigmund Freud observed that fiction writers have an unusual privilege in setting the terms of the real, what he called a ‘peculiarly directive power’: ‘by means of the moods he can put us into, he is able to guide the current of our emotions’, and ‘often obtains a great variety of effects from the same material’.' (Introduction)

'Late in 2021, I attended a conference in Tarntanya (Adelaide) organised by a collective of thinkers called Reset Arts and Culture. I listened particularly closely to a panel about labour and the arts that was chaired by Vitalstatistix director Emma Webb. I’d been writing about these issues, and against the backdrop of the ongoing pandemic, discussions had taken on a new urgency.' (Introduction)

'Over the past decade, arts policy has been dominated by an increasingly incoherent ‘creative industries’ mindset that places artistic labour in an entrepreneurial framework, ultimately a private-sector concern. The Australia Council has reflected this turn, slowly drifting from the language of public funding and towards ‘investment’.' (Introduction)

'Welcome to the March issue of ABR. We examine everything from the new National Cultural Policy to Volodymyr Zelensky, Shirley Hazzard, First Nations incarceration, infidelity, exciting new fiction, machines behaving badly, TÁR, the young Robert Menzies, women’s cricket and much more. And while Australia is now set to receive its own Poet Laureate, ABR continues its longstanding commitment to the form, publishing four new poems and reviewing four verse collections.' (Introduction)

'There is an experiment at the heart of Angela Meyer’s second novel, Moon Sugar. Without going into spoiler-level detail, it unlocks something in her protagonists, offering them new ways to connect with each other and the world around them. This experiment is a neat metaphor for Meyer’s own; by slipping between genres, her fiction strives to upend readerly expectations, expanding the possibilities for engagement.'  (Introduction)

'Limberlost opens with an image of nature as dangerous: a whale, reportedly driven mad or feral by a harpoon in its side, is alleged to be destroying fishing boats in a vengeful spree. Ned is five, and the whale stories haunt him so much that his father takes him out to see for himself. The frightened child waits in a small boat for the animal’s power to show itself.'  (Introduction)

'In Chris Womersley’s novel Cairo (2013), a middle-aged man looks back as his seventeen-year-old self is caught up in the notorious theft of Pablo Picasso’s Weeping Woman from the National Gallery of Victoria by a group of bohemian artists. The heist-Bildungsroman combination is energetic, and decades of distance give Tom Button’s narration a lush, nostalgic quality. His sifted memories of 1986 fall gently, landing somewhere between regret and sustained desire.' (Introduction)   

Brown shapes move across the screen, leaving dark streaks in the mud behind them. Salt glitters, and some darker crystal. The bodies move purposefully, now and then a flash of teeth that must be laughter. Happy workers, covered in the earth they think they’re saving. Later the mud will dry on their skin, cracking and burning.

'The latest in a new crop of outback gothic fiction, Josh Kemp’s début has everything readers have come to expect from the genre. There’s a messed-up bloke with a past. There’s a lost girl, ten years old and traumatised. There’s plenty of guilt and shame, damaged landscapes, haunted houses, injecting drug use, altered states, brutal acts of violence, and of course, there is the road.' (Introduction)

'Last Wednesday a historic mass meeting of freelancers took place online as freelance writers, photographers, illustrators and other media workers came together, beaming in from around the country. With over 120 people in attendance, it was the biggest meeting of any kind MEAA has had since the start of the pandemic and the biggest meeting of freelancers the union has ever had. Members voted overwhelmingly to endorse the new Freelance Charter of Rights.'  (Introduction)

'Australiana opens with a break-in. Lifting away a flyscreen, strangers climb into a man’s house, help themselves to his biscuits. The crime doesn’t feel important – it’s the fourth in a month, we’re told – but the intrusion does. It evokes the entanglements of small towns, the way in which lives intersect, physical proximity breaking down the barriers of class and culture and personal choice that can divide urban populations into subcultures. As a declaration of intent, the image of trespass is pretty clear: there is no real privacy in this town, and as readers we’re about to gain access.' (Introduction)

'Eight years ago, I wrote  a short piece for Overland called ‘Pay the Writers’. I was fed up with being asked to work for ‘exposure’. It was a time when a lot of writing work was moving online, and this work was often unpaid. Writers were at risk of losing our incomes entirely. If anything needed some exposure, it was the working conditions of freelancers.' (Introduction)