Juncture

As judge and author, Barron Field exemplified the Romantic figure of the poet as legislator. Louis Klee reviews a recent study of Field’s legacy that lays bare the connection between the doctrine of terra nullius and the origins of settler verse.

Dreaming Inside: Voices from Junee Correctional Centre is an important anthology of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander inmate poetry, art and storytelling. Now in its twelfth year and tenth volume, over two hundred First Nations authors have shared their stories, songs and critical reflections to a general reading public, not only enlightening ‘outsiders’ about the conditions and contexts of Indigenous incarceration but also significantly contributing to the canon of Indigenous writing.

An unknown philosopher attends a conference, delivers a paper, launches a book: this hardly sounds like a memorable event. But Badiou’s arrival in Sydney was, in some sense, the opening of a remarkable and unlikely chapter in Australian intellectual life.

I started Chilean Poet just before Christmas while I was visiting my family in Brisbane and then I finished it during the first days of the new year, while I was ferociously coming down. It was life-affirming and glorious and gently wise and I loved it, needed it. It temporarily restored some sense of hope, like a synthetic serotonin.

Can the analogy between poetry and work help us understand capitalism in the contemporary moment? Is poetry itself a form of work? 

The act of reading does not guarantee prompt action, or any action, or the right action. It does not guarantee a particular outcome – or even the first step towards one. It does not turn readers into good people, any more than writing a book means you must be an ethical person.

Iris reconsiders our official, public-record history – its absences and silences, its misshapings and misrecognitions. And it also offers a reconsideration of a woman whose position within this history is complicated, doubly, by her queerness.

Even if Louis, by becoming an international best-selling author has ostensibly left his class background, he knows, as I do, that you never really leave.

Essays and reviews written by First Nations peoples are the models and the tools and the terms settler readers/scholars need to consider in approaching First Nations works.

These two speculative works offer visions of the future in which the earth is devastated. Each involves humans living disrupted, transformed lives – defying or redefining extinction, carrying on, muddling through.