Non-fiction

In the blurb-saturated present, authors can decry blurbs as corrupt and silly all they like. When they publish new books, however, they will still be obliged to solicit blurbs, and most will provide them for friends and colleagues on request.

Was my father a good artist? Did his work have value? These were never questions that arose.

On a long drive once, in a hot summer, on a stretch of the Hume where rolling, sheep-ravaged hills the colour of bone gave glimpses of a long train full of wheat, my father-in-law explained train wheels to me: how they ran, how they turned, how they stayed on the tracks. The rim on the wheel, he said, was less important than its shape.

These are the suburbs, the world we actually live in: the local beach or park, the corner shop, the servo, the pub, the bus seat in a street. The interiors of the fibro houses, those cupboards, wallpaper, furnishings, the venetian blinds, bedspreads, décor, ‘that vase’, are objects and spaces we know.

Even if Louis, by becoming an international best-selling author has ostensibly left his class background, he knows, as I do, that you never really leave.

The Bankstown Biennale is ‘making locality’ by bringing together Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal artists from across the country whose practice is often in conversation with homelands elsewhere.

Why has it taken me so long to write this review of The Most Important Job in the World? Whenever I…

Is Garbes’s unifying vision enough to confront what we are up against? Or is radical motherhood only the first stop on the road to mass politics for collective justice?

What Fugitive does is to enact the sensation that emerges when you play or listen to music: a tactile excitement, a kinaesthetic sense of the sacred

If Australia were invaded, should it be defended? This is the question at the heart of a short essay by Guy Rundle published…