Australian literature

Story by story, what emerges is a belonging to Country, one which is grounded in knowing and in knowledge.

Follow the western coastline north from Broome, along the Lurujarri Heritage Trail: trudging across sandy beaches, passing dinosaur prints, through mud and mangroves.

Bonny Cassidy’s Chatelaine is a gift to a reviewer that doesn’t want to paraphrase poems, for a reader that doesn’t need such summarising.

The Three Burials of Lotty Kneen chronicles Kneen’s attempts to locate her grandmother’s story and to find how, without the person who made her, she fits into the world.

That there is no recovery for Blaine as such, that his subsequent path does not offer the pleasures of a neatly resolved narrative, becomes a way of considering broader cultural and political ills.

If a plucky leftist were to organise a book club session on Australian unionism, what readings would they set? Our histories of radicalism and workers movements are largely undocumented.

if the metaphor of the kangaroo is some attempt to speak of what cannot be spoken of, so that it can be objectified and forgotten, the rat speaks of the impossibility of this, the constant return of the repressed, despite the best efforts of settlers to do away with it and live as though the land has always been theirs.

Today, Indigenous people are asserting their rights to their cultural inheritances, and are reclaiming their cultures. They have continued to practise culture, and the fact that they have had their land stolen makes it even more of a treasure – a gift, a legacy, a heritage that is precious and passed on to the next generations.

There isn’t a neat ending to The Gaps, for a pat resolution would go against the grain of the book.

In The Warrior, The Voyager and the Artist, Kate Fullagar invites us to rethink the British empire of the eighteenth century, understanding it not as the inexorable outcome of economic and technological superiority but as a more tenuous – even tentative – project, contested at its centre as well as its edges.