Australian literature

It cannot escape notice that, by King’s telling, things really start to go screwy when a much wider range of people get access not merely to politics, but to the political self-expression that was hitherto the preserve of the author… his sometimes acute analysis of particular deployments of notions of offence treats them as akin to an act of state censorship, a charge the Right relies on almost obsessively.

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.

As Tom Keneally observes in his contribution to A Country Too Far: Writings on Asylum Seekers, governments of both persuasions have designed policies on the supposition that ‘people can be frightened out of trying to escape terror or likelihood of death’, an assumption shared by many people in the community. Yet when we understand the horror so many are fleeing and the fact that there is no protection worthy of its name in our region of the world, we can understand why travel to Australia is often the only option.

Kenny was at home in Redesdale, country Victoria, on Saturday 7 February 2009. By mid-afternoon, an advancing column of smoke could be seen from his old farmhouse. He was prepared to defend what he describes as ‘most of my life … this house, library, paintings – my own and those by others – manuscripts, notebooks, sketchbooks, correspondence, photographs, family heirlooms’.

The quality of poetic thought in Armour is erratic. To a significant extent, it borrows the prestige of technical and specialist realms, while using devices that obscure meaning with the aim of suggesting a profundity beyond the commonplace. Despite the flexibility and richness of Kinsella’s associative powers, thought remains largely undeveloped, unassimilated, disembodied.

At first glance, the hero-figure of both Louis Nowra’s ‘biography’ of Kings Cross and Tony Moore’s history of Australia’s bohemians is the urban flâneur, but their approaches to this chameleon subject are as disparate as their divergent purposes.

What a great title: Home by Dark. A mere three syllables that slide from warm to cool, from safe-haven to the unknown. By themselves these three words seem almost nonsensical, only grammatical when we imagine the sentences they might belong to, or have come from.

Eyrie’s central character, Tom Keely, is defeated and ineffectual, a pill-popping and lonely one-time idealist who has fallen out of his own life. He is also arguably a haunted version of Tim Winton.

One of the most intriguing – and largely unanswered – questions posed by Carey in Moving Among Strangers is: ‘Why did my mother correspond with a young man, an adolescent, thirteen years her junior, who wasn’t even a relation?’ Perhaps, she muses, they both felt like outsiders in the West Australian community.

Barracuda continues the unlikely project, initiated by Tsiolkas’ fourth novel The Slap, of bringing troubling ideas about the Australian mainstream within the view of a mainstream readership. Tsiolkas is better than anyone else writing in Australia today at thinking about the affective pull and the sharp edges of communities: ethnicity, family, friendship, class, nation.