This time last year, in lockdown, my partner and I decided to work our way through the novels long-listed for the Booker prize. Surprisingly, we both agreed before the announcement of the winner that Shuggie Bain by Douglas Stuart was the best and, even more surprisingly, it won. A few weeks ago I considered the recently announced 2021 long-list: so many presumably good writers I’d never heard of! I started off with the one writer I’d read before, Kazuo Ishiguro. His book, Klara and the Sun, ventures into science fiction. Klara is an android, an Artificial Friend. Well-to-do young people… [Read more]
White Lenses, Blak Stories
I’m not interested in dictating what people should or shouldn’t write. I’m interested in how we include truth in works of fiction. How we write narratives that honestly portray First Peoples, settlers and refugees living on stolen land.
Faith, Trust and Hesitation
It’s easy to think in stereotypes about people who refuse vaccinations. Anti-vaxxer… conspiracy nut… whackjob! That might be true of some people who fear vaccination, but it’s certainly not all of them. Elizabeth is a cheerful, athletic-looking hospitality worker in her thirties. She says she is careful, but not obsessive about living a healthy life. ‘I like the taste of fresh food much more than processed food, so that’s what I tend to eat. I prefer organic food because I don’t like putting weird chemicals into my body, but it’s a preference not a rule.’ She follows several wellness influencers… [Read more]
Lobbied: The Palestinian Erasure
Those who dismiss claims about the influence of pro-Israel lobbyists often demand ‘evidence’ akin to a smoking gun; proof of a chain of causation between ‘lobbying’ and ‘self-censorship’. There are plenty of smoking guns, but to focus on those alone would ignore the far more insidious way pro-Israel lobbying efforts work on media organisations: the culture of self-censorship lobbying campaigns slowly and cumulatively entrench; the unspoken rules which become dogma, such as the necessity of ‘balancing’ Palestinian voices; the ‘common-sense’ frames that slowly start to reproduce: two-state solution, Hamas, ‘right to exist’ etc. John Lyons’ latest book, Dateline Jerusalem: Journalism’s… [Read more]
What I’m Reading
‘I’ll be watching, because history is going to be made,’ President Trump told his supporters on January 6 as they started their march to Washington’s Capitol Building. History was made that day, and no amount of airbrushing by US conservatives can diminish the horror we saw on the TV, in the papers, via Twitter and Facebook. It’s a reminder that we are blessed to have fearless reporters, photographers and filmmakers in our midst—men and women who are committed to presenting the news the instant it happens. Future historians are also blessed. Without these important documents-of-record, their ability to interpret seismic… [Read more]
Counting Sleep
A particularly cheerful bank worker once told us to expect a letter in ‘five business sleeps’. The phrase tickled me, but it also seemed quite useful. Children count in sleeps because it lends a degree of agency to waiting. You can’t make the days go faster, but you can always go to sleep. As I write this, Melbourne has just overtaken Buenos Aires as the most locked-down city on earth. The Victorian Premier, Daniel Andrews, has now announced target dates for when lockdown is finally expected to end. In this house, we are counting down the sleeps. Not the days,… [Read more]
Clive Ustinov: A Matryoshka doll of bullshit
Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, a thread. I put it to you that a great rabble of opinion writers, especially on the right, in the interest of criticising Australia’s lockdown policies, have magically and mindlessly transformed Sir Peter Ustinov into Clive James. On 12 September 1978, Peter Ustinov spoke at the National Press Club of Australia, where he told the following story. This is an extract from the 2014 book Stand and Deliver: Fifty Years of the National Press Club of Australia. For what it’s worth, the comment was also reported in the Sydney Tribune’s ‘1 Minute Parking’ column… [Read more]
Homage to Melbourne (Reverence to Rockland)
We’re still here in Melbourne
where we held our breath and forgot how to exhale
What I’m Reading
I am reading books about how to murder my family. I blame Australian author SL Lim. They started it. About two, maybe three weeks ago, I was idly Googling books about murdering close family relations, when I came across Revenge: Murder in Three Parts. Lim’s novel tells the story of a truly vile brother and his wonderfully awful sister whose relationship fatally plays out in Malaysia and Australia. I then read How to Kill Your Family, a novel by Irish author Bella Mackie. The book has an entertainingly cold-hearted, female narrator and some very satisfying murder set-ups, one of which… [Read more]
Bodies of Light and the Opera of Trauma Writing
Months before the release of Melbourne author Jennifer Down’s third book, Bodies of Light, the local literary scene was baited with breathless assessments of the book’s impact. Those fortunate enough to get their hands on Down’s tome shared poignant missives from their experiences reading what had come to be known as ‘The Big, Sad Book’. My favourite review comes courtesy of Down’s younger sister, whose text message Down shared on Twitter back in July: [https://twitter.com/jenniferdown/status/1414734955075096578] ‘bro…. this book is fucking sad as’ Bodies of Light, which is Down’s second novel (her second book, Pulse Points, comprises fourteen piercing short stories),… [Read more]
