Australian literature
Free, compulsory and secular: Taking God to School by Marion Maddox
Taking God to School is instructive reading for anyone interested in understanding how we have reached the stage where towards a third of students attend private schools, nearly all of a religious character, with many receiving substantial support from the federal government. For Maddox, it has been downhill ever since the high water mark of public school attendance in the late 1970s.
Reverse the skin: Night Writing by Kathryn Lomer
Night Writing is divided into five thoughtfully arranged sections which nevertheless bleed into one another. The first, entitled ‘The mother hand’, is something of a miscellany, foreshadowing several themes and concerns that re-appear later — among them parenthood, unrequited love, significant childhood episodes, and tributes to other women of courage and achievement.
Gaslighting: The Poet’s Wife by Mandy Sayer
‘Our marriage wasn’t always unhappy’: so begins this ‘memoir of a marriage’ between Australian writer Mandy Sayer and her first husband, the Afro-American poet Yusef Komunyakaa. What follows is the chronicle of a deeply troubled relationship from the point of view of the poet’s wife.
Dissolution and Reclamation: Unbelievers, or ‘The Moor’ by John Mateer
Places are, of course, not exchangeable, but in Mateer’s roaming imaginary they become, at least to some extent, drawn into a kind of codification of broad historical tendencies and movements. This constitutes a way of rethinking traditional narrative historical accounts and their often doubtful ‘truths’. Unbelievers, or ‘The Moor’ is a book about imagined geographies as much as real ones.
Wave after wave: when they came / for you elegies / of resistance
Barnett’s language works in a kind of shorthand: the reader is left to fill in the blanks, provide conjunctions, make connections. Sense is not a product of grammatical syntax but of progressions and repetitions. Names, place names and languages other than English – there are lengthy quotations in French from sources as diverse as Derrida, Mao Tse Tung, Wittgenstein and the Bible – are given equal weight and poetic rephrasing.