Patrick Allington

The act of reading does not guarantee prompt action, or any action, or the right action. It does not guarantee a particular outcome – or even the first step towards one. It does not turn readers into good people, any more than writing a book means you must be an ethical person.

These two speculative works offer visions of the future in which the earth is devastated. Each involves humans living disrupted, transformed lives – defying or redefining extinction, carrying on, muddling through.

Summertime makes plain what we ought not need to be told: we are already living in the dreaded future, and that this dreaded future already forms part of our past.

These days, I gravitate to strange writing – or writing, at least, that I perceive as strange. It has become the defining criteria by which I gauge my interest in a book and judge its qualities.

Probert gives impossibly big and broad questions a usable, necessarily narrow focus by asking these questions through the perspective of one person as migrant gardener.

Sometimes she is a well-ordered educator: to tell you B, I must first tell you A. Sometimes she is like a friend telling tall tales at the pub, three pints in. Sometimes she is a preacher. Sometimes she is a contextualist, filling in history’s gaps.

No award’ was the determination of the judges of the 1973 Miles Franklin Award. This decision, writes Patrick Allington, ‘offers a misleading snapshot of the state of Ozlit in 1973 – but it is an accurate reflection of a low point in the history of the Miles Franklin…The sixty-year history of the Miles Franklin, including the judges’ shifting understanding of what ‘Australian life in any of its phases’ means, offers a chance to take stock of Australian life in many of its phases.’