Australian literature

Skovron’s work falls across a number of complex cultural modes. While he has many important things to say about the migrant experience, he also has much to say about more general issues relating to human ontology, as well as to his experience of living in Sydney and Melbourne.

‘Happiness, perhaps more than any other experience, is defined in the negative. That we do not in fact have grasp of a pure state, such as happiness, in isolation from its contraries illuminates something important about how our selves and our realities are structured.’ Anya Daly on a book of essays about happiness.

‘Helen Garner is known for her shape-shifting – or rather for her genre-shifting. She moves between fiction and non-fiction, making choices about genre in a way that might seem arbitrary to some readers, but to the close reader is most certainly not. Always up for debate is the notion that while a fine fiction writer, Garner does not write novels. This essay is an attempt to engage with this argument, using Garner’s 1992 novel Cosmo Cosmolino as its focus.’

How could it make sense to call a novel published in 2016 by a young Australian writer modernist?

What is this obsession with facts, so insistent in Fitzroy: The Biography, that their enumeration appears to be fundamental to the composition of the book? One obvious explanation would be that the foregrounding of fact dramatises the encounter with history, which after all presents itself primarily in the form of documents and testimonies. But this can’t be a full answer, first because while the outlines of the featured characters are drawn from historical sources, the facts that embellish them generally are not; and second because π.ο.’s interest in the poetic use of facts and statistics goes back decades, well before the writing of Fitzroy: The Biography.

On Anzac Day, Australian culture anticipates what it confirms: the sending of long-range military expeditions to encourage and support wars in which British or American forces are engaged. Just as there is no serious parliamentary debate over decisions to go to war in the political culture, no interest in ‘war powers’ reform, which might minimise that power in the executive as there has been in Britain, there is little if any questioning of these issues in Australian literary culture either. As Chris Roberts elegantly concludes, Bean’s romance of Anzac excuses our Gallipoli failure by turning ‘failure into heroic achievement’ – or, we could say, by functioning to institutionalise ignorance of our imperial history in a romance that hides behind the false and misleading glory that the nation was born at Gallipoli.

‘We all have an idea that the Dardanelles and Gallipoli campaigns did not turn out well. Dealing with that failure has after all helped to shape the Australian identity. It has given us the Anzac tradition, which rests on a story of heroism in defeat. In his new book on Churchill and the Dardanelles campaign, Tom Curran gives us a penetrating new account of the inception and failure of those campaigns, and so takes us into areas Australian historians have tended to overlook.’

‘Anyone in the publishing department, or indeed the whole company, could put forward a publishing idea. Brian would always ask, “How many and how much?”. While Penguin always had very efficient marketing and sales departments, an essential for a successful publishing machine, Brian through his vast network of contacts could not only tap into potential authors but also do his own very personal brand of marketing by “talking his books up” in influential places.’ Bruce Sims on Brian Johns.

‘It’s my argument that, in dramatising and deprecating acts of direct physical violence – however menacing their perpetrators and however innocent their victims – a work such as this war novel and, perhaps by extension, many others associated with other genres in which grisly violence is central, such as horror and crime fiction, suppress the much more prevalent, far more significant instances of symbolic and structural violence that underpin and regulate our supposedly non-warring, peacetime societies.’

‘The poetry of Dmitris Tsaloumis, who died earlier this month, will be read time and again by young poets who want to feel the otherness of poetic language or experience the otherness within the poetic language. His translingualism is the home of contemporary sensitivity: “I arrived on time though I had no address,” he says one of his poems. He reached Australian poetry at the right moment, when a poetic regime change was necessary and desired. In his best poems, we have the impression that the unseen had found its proper musical translation and localised a home for his poetic existence. As long as young poets exist who worship the plasticity and the solidity of poetic expression, his work will be read—and that’s greatest praise anyone can give a poet.’