Australian literature

‘“Begin, I tell myself, at the beginning of an adventure, not at the end of a marriage of twenty years.” It is with this line that Hilary McPhee opens the second chapter of her second memoir. It’s telling, both because it reads almost like an editorial intervention – as if the editor is present even as she writes – but also because it indicates that there’s something much more important going on than the ‘adventure’ that forms the main narrative arc of the book.

It is to Zable’s great credit that, in giving voice, he does not deign to speak for the marginalised but, rather, writes to amplify.

It is easy to think of writers pursuing their aims with a noble persistence, despite the fact that they will only have a few readers, and little support along the way – but it would be truer to see the experience of isolation as constitutive of their writing, as a formative influence, rather than as an impediment to it.

The word clicked something into place. Bibliomemoir: it was books that had helped me to do this, because I didn’t know any other way to do this. I didn’t think there was anything remarkable about this way of writing the self while I was doing it: it seemed self-evident, inevitable that books would help me think about myself.

Lisa Gorton’s new collection Empirical translates the notion of charismatic megafauna, which may be seen alongside more lyrical creatures at the Melbourne Zoo…, into that of charismatic megapoems.

Often against my will, but in my imagination, I would force myself to drive into that river, out of it and alongside it.

What Khatun so deftly accomplishes is the almost impossible task of working from inside imperial intelligence (in all senses of the word), but thinking from traditions outside them, bringing entire repositories of knowledge from epistemes not accorded legitimacy by hegemonic codifications of colonial world-making.

Culture might not live off Country, in the city, but all culture will be lost if the child is taken; a child taken by the welfare system loses Country anyway, and at the same time they lose their family.

If memoirs are confessions, then Chris Fleming’s autobiographical treatise On Drugs moves in wonder and probing curiosity over the events, actions, and impulses that he confesses.

Invented Lives is structured around a series of upheavals. The characters’ worlds change and they must decide whether to take a risk or keep their lives as close as they can to before.