Non-fiction

Is Garbes’s unifying vision enough to confront what we are up against? Or is radical motherhood only the first stop on the road to mass politics for collective justice?

What Fugitive does is to enact the sensation that emerges when you play or listen to music: a tactile excitement, a kinaesthetic sense of the sacred

If Australia were invaded, should it be defended? This is the question at the heart of a short essay by Guy Rundle published…

The Winter Road, in charting a long and complex case that extends over years, with numerous participants with conflicting agendas and personalities, signals her development as a writer. 

I don’t think good queer memoir needs to have a didactic relationship to ideological representation. But there is, here, a more sophisticated understanding of representation than we’ve seen in Australian memoir recently. It can be important and necessary to build your identity using what you see around you, but this work is collaborative rather than transactional or instructional.

What could be more humiliating than to write and be read, to be thought about and perceived by strangers?

I can’t stop thinking about People Who Lunch. The book interrupts my sleep and I desperately want to discuss it with everybody. I loved it even as I was aware of the ways that it frustrated me.

The ABC may not anymore be in the immediate peril that the BBC is, but the danger remains broadly the same. If we want to save the ABC from that danger, then taking it for granted will no longer be an option.

The Highsmith of Diaries and Notebooks is not someone with a problem that needs to be fixed. It is someone who, gloriously, messily, looked around a nasty world filled with awful people, and saw nothing too fix, and felt no desire to change it.

‘One surprisingly persistent theme in Making Australian History is the historical significance of literature, and in particular poetry. Can a poem ‘know’ something, ‘think’ something that history cannot?’