Australian literature

To call into question the literary value of Dalton’s fiction is not to disqualify the pleasure and imaginative release that hundreds of thousands of readers have found in his novels, especially Boy Swallows Universe; it is to take that popularity seriously.

This difference between Sparrow and many other progressive commentators has been demonstrated recently in his nuanced coverage of pandemic politics, of the left assent to hyperinflated surveillance and policing power, and the class-element that comes embedded in Covid-19 policy responses. He clearly retains a strong belief that minds can be changed through engagement, empathy, well-reasoned argumentation, and, most importantly, material support for people’s wellbeing.

What the First Nations writers in This All Come Back Now reveal is that the only civilization in need of saving is the present western capitalist one – for its capacity to self-destruct and for its inability to listen.

‘This idea of difference, reinforcing difference through representation, and how this relates to social power, is what I want to use this book as an opportunity to think more about.’

It is Winkler’s attempt to document Grim’s unfathomable life – to indirectly, absorb and transform some of his pain – that allows us, humbly, to see the beauty and validity in all lives, and to better see our own.

Born in 1890, the second youngest of eight children, Alexander Hugh Chisholm grew up in Maryborough in the goldfields region north-west of Melbourne. He was unhappy at school and often cut classes, to follow, as he put it, the lure of the bush. At first he had no books and no adequate language for the charm of birds, their colours and shapes, their vocal range, nests and eggs, and he invented his own names for them.

We need stories like Borderline to help us see the devastating psychological effects that the growing rates of incarceration will inevitably have on yet another generation of young people.

How Australia and much of the West discusses and reports on Israel/Palestine, compared to other conflicts, goes to the heart of Western chauvinism.

My initial impression of Van Badham’s new book was hardly affirmative. On its cover, the words QAnon and On are…

Here in Neave’s second novel, the author tackles the essential unknowability of our parents and who they once were. Believe in Me tells the story of Sarah as recounted by her daughter Bet. The narrator, whose name we do not learn until page 104, begins her mother’s story in 1974 and, like the narrator of Neave’s previous novel, must also grapple with impressions and events she cannot fully understand.