Reviewed Rick Morton, One Hundred Years of Dirt, Melbourne University Press, 2018; Sarah Smarsh, Heartland: A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth, Scribner, 2018 Recently I chaired a session at the Adelaide Writers Centre, an event entitled ‘The Supremacy of Class’ at which Rick Morton and Sarah Smarsh discussed their books One Hundred Years of Dirt and Heartland. Adelaide gives a good festival, with the outdoor setting adding ...
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Reviewed Tony Birch, The White Girl, University Queensland Press, 2019; Claire G Coleman, Terra Nullius, Hachette, 2017; Ambelin and Ezekiel Kwaymullina, Catching Teller Crow, Allen & Unwin, 2018; Melissa Lucashenko, Too Much Lip, University of Queensland Press, 2018 As some recently published works have shown, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander storytellers are continuing to embrace fiction-writing as a vessel for speaking truth to power. Constantly branching out into new genres—experimenting, fusing, transforming—there’s a noticeable increase in First ...
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Reviewed Kyla Schuller, The Biopolitics of Feeling: Race, Sex, and Science in the Nineteenth Century, Duke University Press, 2018 When reports emerged late last year that thousands of migrant children were being forcibly separated from their parents at the United States–Mexico border and placed into state care, much of America (and beyond) reacted with shock. ‘I appreciate the need to enforce and protect our international boundaries,’ wrote former first lady and wife of Republican president ...
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Reviewed Harry Saddler, The Eastern Curlew: The Extraordinary Life of a Migratory Bird, Affirm Press, 2018 Living in the twenty-first century often seems like a state of dissociated anxiety, as if existence is reduced to a live feed of the apocalypse, as if we’re in one of those nineties disaster movies in which TV screens in the background scream out headlines: ‘Asteroid nears Earth’. Except that the headlines are real. In the age of the Anthropocene, ...
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