Non-fiction
Crossing The Line: Position Doubtful by Kim Mahood
To cross a line can be to start something – a race or a journey – or to breach a boundary. It can also mark a disruption or a transgression. In her new memoir, Position Doubtful, Kim Mahood crosses many lines. She broaches topics that are fraught with ethical, social and intellectual complexities, and while she does so with a confidence earned through experience, she does not relinquish her uncertainties. She questions herself, her right to be doing what she does, her reactions to people and to her situation as a white artist working with Aboriginal people.’
One F (in Hofmann) – and U-C-K the Consequences
Reading Hofmann has made me wonder whether I got the business of literary criticism wrong. All that straining, for instance: to find meaning and connections, to locate, link up. Why is it a self-evident good? Or the need to be careful, so careful, as in restrained, measured, fair but also taking care of people’s feelings because it’s the right thing to do and because, a separate point this, people break themselves in half to write their books.
Feral with vulnerability: Nelson, O’Shaughnessy and Mann
‘The vulnerable state of speaking ‘freely, copiously, and passionately’, as Nelson writes, demands the unsettling of anything fixed. The freedom to craft, from this unsettlement – from the tilt of failure and into whatever must fall, between what can and cannot hold, resisting a cookie-cutter naming that cuts away what might hover at the edges of existing words and forms – might be where the wounding and suturing enacted formally in each of these works leads to wildness. Nelson says that she writes: ‘Because I do not yet understand the relationship between writing and happiness, or writing and holding’. Perhaps none of us does. Perhaps form – including literary form and the forms of happiness – is always provisional and shifting. Perhaps it is the state of being ‘feral with vulnerability’ that might produce new ways, new understandings of something we think of as truth.’
A Terrible Beauty: Liberty or Death: The French Revolution by Peter McPhee
Balanced and measured though he is, McPhee is aware that the French Revolution is too vital and controversial an event to be subordinated entirely to a historian’s caution. And it is his less cautious, more assertive comments and explanations which make this book not only a great source for learning about the Revolution, but also, perhaps more interestingly, an intervention in the debates surrounding the Revolution’s causes, conduct and consequences.
How To Mediate A Massacre? The Media and the Massacre by Sonya Voumard
[The Media and the Massacre] is, in fact, something more fragile and rare, especially in the largely unreflective world of Australian media. It is a journalist meditating thoughtfully, and at length, on acts of journalism.
To Know Is To Live: On Strehlow’s Journey to Horseshoe Bend
The most inspired writing in Journey to Horseshoe Bend is in Strehlow’s narratives of ‘storied land’. Many ancestral stories relating to animals — wallabies, emus, fish, birds, snakes — are lucidly and meaningfully given.
The Artist as Revolutionary: Remembering Paul Robeson
In this excellent new book, [Horne] identifies Robeson as a neglected precursor to the modern Civil Rights movement. ‘[Y]ou cannot fully appreciate how the Jim Crow system came to an end without an understanding of the life of Paul Robeson,’ he argues. ‘[I]t was only with Robeson’s fall that King and Malcolm could emerge as they did; the undermining of Robeson created a vacuum that these two leaders filled.’