Australian literature

When waiting for a train nothing more is required than presence. This is a stretch of time without additional expectations. Do something or do nothing. Compose thoughts, or don’t. Be attentive, be distracted, the train will arrive regardless.

If the narrative has a driving question, it is the eternal one of how to live, find meaning, amidst all the sorrow and horror.

What Dux wants to know is this: Is there a Catholic shared identity that continues in those who are lapsed? And if so, what should she do about it?

Whether residing in the skull or a book, in the academic paradigm, the head remains the seat of our intellect, and one of the many big struggles when working for a colonial institution is to resist living in the head, and to honour the rest of the mind that lives in the whole body.

Like Flaubert’s Sentimental Education, Easton’s The Magpie Wing is an anxious novel about anxious characters in anxious times. It seeks to register this anxiety in all of its contradictions and complexities, but thankfully does not want to resolve it.

Here is my little hypothesis: People love to say that the problem with Australian literature is a lack of critical culture. It’s not. It’s that people don’t read Australian literature, and then they lie about it online. Every day I open Instagram and think, it is so brave of you to post a picture of that book you haven’t read. Someone could ask you a single question about it and the whole house of cards would come down. But nobody will, because they haven’t read it either.

In the years to come, we may look back on 2021 as the beginning of rugby league’s reckoning with violence and its attendant trauma. In Plum, Cowell has written a book for this cultural moment, addressing the hidden cost of the hyper-masculine culture that sustains rugby league.

John Hughes can be considered an antipodean writer in several senses, one of which is that he knows how to stand an idea on its head, but the most significant is that his preoccupation with memory and forgetting has its origins in the cultural dislocations of his Australian childhood.

When I began
reading how to make a basket
I wanted to find out what I could do
with the text. How would I tend to
the ‘how to’ aspect of its title?

Andrada can share testimony of some of her most painful, personal experiences, but choose exactly which parts of herself to reveal and which to remain hidden. Look, she invites her reader, look at how skillfully I can create all these perfect likenesses of myself. And watch as I destroy them all.