Essays

‘“I look at them as a criminal group posturing as Islamic radicals,” says “Tiny” Perez, the battalion’s muscular commanding officer, as we have chocolate wafers and coffee in an open hilltop hut.’ This is the third instalment of Matthew Thompson’s account of his 2014 journey into the Sulu Archipelago, a violent, beautiful and contested region of the southern Philippines.

‘The addiction supplied me with a whole way of looking at the world – indeed, of being in the world: of suspicion, protection against the threat of embarrassment, pervasive guilt, the rigorous practices of prevarication: strategic concealment and sophisticated deceit, the utterly endless rehearsal of excuses.’ This is the second installment of Chris Fleming’s account of his drug addiction, and the modes, mechanics, and madness of legal and illegal drug acquisition.

‘It is hard to imagine a life lived if you have not lived it. From the very first time that I could discern shade from light, line from tone, I have been in love with art and the creation of that art. I am here today because I am a creative creature, a creator if you will. But it is a long way from where I began.’ Bronwyn Bancroft on being an Aboriginal Artist.

‘These were, of course, not the only kinds of codes in operation, codes which – like many tacit social rules, one would learn about only when violated. The more time I spent at dealers’ houses, the more I learned that there was a hierarchy of drugs, a sort of regime of acceptability.’ This is the first installment of Chris Fleming’s account of his drug addiction, and the modes, mechanics, and madness of legal and illegal drug acquisition.

‘I don’t understand the West and the Western reader’s reading tastes. What I write, is what makes my blood bubble and boil. As the years advance and one’s exposure to readers increases, a writer’s vision and consideration inevitably undergo changes. I came to the world, but not to pander to the world. I write, but not to pander to the reader.’

A modernist novel of a colonial moment told with a postcolonial mind: ‘Thirty-five years after its first publication,’ writes Drusilla Modjeska in her introduction to a new edition of Randolph Stow’s 1979 novel, ‘Visitants remains, in my view, the finest Australian novel that takes Papua New Guinea as its inspiration and dilemma.’

In 1986 John Morrison received the Patrick White Literary Award and in 1989, the Order of Australia. Today, all his books are out of print and his name has fallen into neglect. What happened? Paul Gallimond tracks the evolution of a distinctive strain of Australian socialist realism.

The End of the Tour is the product of this posthumous celebrity. This is true in the obvious sense that neither James Ponsoldt’s film nor the book on which it is based would exist if David Foster Wallace had lived. But it is also true in the more complicated sense that the film both relies on and participates in the construction of Wallace as a cultural symbol.

The second instalment of Matt Thompson’s reportage on the resistence to terrorism in the Sulu Archipelago of the southern Philippines, during which he performs badly at a karaoke session with the Vice-Mayor of Lamitan City, Oric Furigay, descendent of ‘the last Conquistador’, and accepts his offer of a heavily armed escort to visit the outpost of Tipo Tipo, ‘the capital of the terrorist’.

Philip Hodgins’ poetry is alive with strange images, jolts of perception, sudden beautiful cadences. And his poetry is frightening. I mean not supernatural fear but the intimate animal fear we have for our own bodies, the fear of pain and the fear of death.