Australian literature
A Private Life: Philip Waldron
If you google Philip Waldron, you will not find him. For a man whose career spanned decades in university teaching, in an environment in which academics were told to publish or perish, his research output, as publications are sometimes termed, was almost nonexistent. His passion for literature was articulated on the unfashionable humanist end of the critical spectrum, and he felt only impatience for literary theory. He never bothered to do a PhD, and was one of the last lecturers qualified by MA only in the Department of English at the University of Adelaide. He sounds like a misfit in the modern university, and in many ways he was.
My Father Didn’t Write That: I Did: on A Woman of the Future
As Alethea Hunt matures, the question of her personal fate becomes increasingly bound up with those of potential, agency and attitude within her environment. The novel, then, is an anti-bildungsroman (in which Alethea’s adulthood is replaced with radical biological ‘change’) and an anti-kunstleroman (in which her change renders her unable to continue writing).
What Fills the Silence: The Book of Dirt by Bram Presser
Presser draws draw strands together—historical, cultural, geographical, familial—to create something living, to prevent past atrocities from crystallising and slipping into memory as isolated events that don’t continue to effect the present. The Book of Dirt is both a loving, honest portrayal of lives that would have been erased, and an incorporation of the broader lessons of their experience into contemporary mythology. It keeps the discussion about trauma, memory, and intergenerational acts of transfer alive for those generations that follow, that risk forgetting. It is a potent achievement for a debut novel.
Textures of Language and Thought: Sarah Rice
Sarah Rice’s poems both advocate a poetry that is attuned to the heart, the body, and the spirit, along with the brain, and embody this poetics in richly metaphorical, euphonious, descriptive, and synaesthetic language.
Eccentric Guides: Vanessa Berry’s Mirror Sydney
Mirror Sydney appeals to the notion that people live inside worlds of their own making. This suggests both a certain comprehensiveness or completeness and a limitation: the globe is known in form but so are its borders. However, this is also a world post-globalisation: the great exhibitions of the colonial project have become abandoned variety stores and theme parks, the pathos of which comes from quaintness or the strange, instead of authority or splendour.