Timmah Ball

I can’t stop thinking about People Who Lunch. The book interrupts my sleep and I desperately want to discuss it with everybody. I loved it even as I was aware of the ways that it frustrated me.

If Low gives up on wilderness as a place where scaling ice capped mountains, camping in freezing conditions and traversing icy rivers is about gaining knowledge or progress he does so to reveal the colonial histories which relied on this sort of mythmaking to fortify their connection to the landscape.

Tony Birch tells incredibly important stories incredibly well and Dark as Last Night is both an antidote and a lullaby in pandemic times.

In Nardi Simpson’s impressive debut novel Song of the Crocodile the fictional colonial town Darnmoor ‘itself is nothing’. It is a construction to begin with and for the sovereign Billymil family it doesn’t exist; they are Yuwaalaraay people, removed from their custodial lands and relegated to the Campgrounds on the edge of the town when Darnmoor was built over their Country.

‘Blak anthologies unsettle Australian literary whiteness, which has often marginalised, and categorised First Nations work through stereotypes, assuming it falls into narratives of protest or disadvantage. Guwayu pushes against this, creating what Leane terms ‘a radical intervention in Aboriginal publishing for its breadth of representation, diversity of language, and drafting and editing protocols’. And while a groundswell of Blak anthologies are emerging, there’s a continued need to push Blak practice further, evident in the uneven way this work is often perceived by the industry.’