Australia in Three Books

Sofie Laguna for Australian in Three Books ...

These three books spell out an anxiety that, in 2025, is there on our newsfeeds on a daily basis ...

We need different ways of doing things. They don’t have to be new: we have tens of thousands of years of human knowledge to draw on when it comes to thriving on this continent ...

There are certain things I grew up knowing so intimately that I never recall having learned them. One of the deepest of these, the oldest, is the idea that to express too much emotion, to be too much, is ...

The books I have selected are all connected to Meanjin—the location, not the literary journal. This is familiar territory for me: I grew up slightly north of Meanjin/Brisbane, on the stolen lands of the Kabi Kabi people in the hinterland ...

no pride in genocide ...

On a wall in my house, near where I keep the books, there is a framed photograph of architect Robin Boyd’s own house on Walsh Street in South Yarra ...

π.O. is advancing a radically new and delightfully anarchic method, not just for Australian poetry but for our entire age ...

I have a story. It will tell you something about me. You may already know me from That Thing or That Event, which I’m now using as a return to writing. That thing about me? It’s sad. I will ...

Reducing my Australia to just three books makes me feel like someone panning for gold in a fast-moving stream filled with the precious metal. If I stand still long enough and shake the pan hard enough, surely just three ...

I first read Toni Morrison’s Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (1992) as an adult with an established career in the arts and culture sector, an emerging practice as a writer myself, and as a long-time ...

Louise Milligan, Cardinal: The Rise and Fall of George Pell (2017) The word came from Rome soon after the charges were laid: Cardinal George Pell, the most powerful Australian ever in the Catholic Church, was coming home to face ...

Don Watson, Recollections of a Bleeding Heart: A Portrait of Paul Keating PM (2002) In 1993, during a diplomatic trip to the United States, prime minister Paul Keating remarked, ‘Tomorrow I go from New York to London, from a ...

My first proper literary memory is of watching Wisława Szymborska’s Nobel Prize speech on television with my grandparents. I was six years old and I can recall only feelings and images related to that moment. My family felt much ...

Growing up I thought that being a ‘real’ reader meant reading dead American men. This feeling was reinforced each year by the school English syllabus and the texts cool young women read in films. In my early teens, I ...