Non-fiction

Follow the western coastline north from Broome, along the Lurujarri Heritage Trail: trudging across sandy beaches, passing dinosaur prints, through mud and mangroves.

The Three Burials of Lotty Kneen chronicles Kneen’s attempts to locate her grandmother’s story and to find how, without the person who made her, she fits into the world.

That there is no recovery for Blaine as such, that his subsequent path does not offer the pleasures of a neatly resolved narrative, becomes a way of considering broader cultural and political ills.

Epidemic Empire and Apocalyptic Geographies offer valuable lessons in the importance of metaphor to cultural analysis: as a form of sense making, metaphor is always a simultaneous process of revealing and obscuring; as a receptacle of cultural values, assumptions, and beliefs, it can also provide insight into a cosmology.

If a plucky leftist were to organise a book club session on Australian unionism, what readings would they set? Our histories of radicalism and workers movements are largely undocumented.

if the metaphor of the kangaroo is some attempt to speak of what cannot be spoken of, so that it can be objectified and forgotten, the rat speaks of the impossibility of this, the constant return of the repressed, despite the best efforts of settlers to do away with it and live as though the land has always been theirs.

‘Any child we bring into our lives will be ours’, Sentilles writes, and ‘all children – whether we give birth to them or find them some other way – are also not ours.’ They are strangers, all of them, ‘mysterious beings’ whose inner lives we can only guess at, extrapolating from experiences we only half-remember.

In The Warrior, The Voyager and the Artist, Kate Fullagar invites us to rethink the British empire of the eighteenth century, understanding it not as the inexorable outcome of economic and technological superiority but as a more tenuous – even tentative – project, contested at its centre as well as its edges.

Since his disappearance, Leichhardt has accrued a massive secondary literature. The historical studies conventionally move through the evidence towards a hypothesis of the explorer’s fate, but Hurley is more concerned with contrasting representations than likely answers.

I’ve been in therapy for nearly half a decade and I’m only now re-connecting with aspects of myself that I tried to leave behind. Still, now, in my late thirties, I find myself too embarrassed to look back. From where I stand, it is heroic to relive the emotional and physical experience of being teenage again and braver still to write and publish a memoir about it.