Maria Reva’s Endling and the book club

Posted on 7 Jun 2026 | Leave a comment

Maria Reva, Endling (Virago 2025)

An endling is the last surviving individual of a species. Famous ones were Benjamin the Tasmanian tiger, and Martha the passenger pigeon. The species facing extinction in Maria Reva’s novel are less impressive than thylacines or pigeons: they are snails. The central character, Yeva, is a Ukrainian woman who has made it her life mission to find individuals from endangered snail species, keep them alive in her laboratory–van, find mates for them, and with any luck release the results of their pairings back into the wild. As other sources of funding have dried up – because who cares about snails going extinct? – she funds her project by joining a ‘romance tour’. Men, mainly from the USA, come to Ukraine in search of wives and a bridal agency rounds up women who are desperate or foolish enough to let themselves be put on offer. Our heroine has no intention of marrying one of the men, but their compulsory gifts have become her source of funding.

The first chapter of Endling is all about the snails – how richly varied in their behaviours, mating habits and generally lifestyles. One snail in particular, whom she names Lefty, has a shell that spirals to the left, severely limiting its chances of finding a mate. Yeva’s snail obsession comes to make complete sense to us. We understand how death after death, extinction after extinction, takes its toll. Yeva sinks into a deep depression and decides to end her life. It’s a grim, compelling stand-alone short story.

But another of the ‘brides’ has also joined the agency with complex ulterior motives. She has a plan to kidnap a hundred of the ‘bachelors’ and expose the horrors of the bride trade, and she wants Yeva’s help. And chapter two sets a whole new direction.

Things proceed pretty much as you would expect: there are obstacles, unexpected changes of plan, oddly comic missteps, and the van full of kidnapped bachelors sets off on some half-arsed plan to expose the marriage trade. Then there’s an explosion. Russia invades Ukraine and the novel comes to a sudden halt. There’s an interim as the author scrambles to get back on her feet. I loved the scrambling, but don’t want to say too much more because the surprise of how the disruption plays out is a big part of the sometimes grim pleasure of the book. I was enjoying the more or less conventional story-telling in the first part of the book, so was relieved that the story does continue, transformed. Lefty survives to play a key role in a climactic scene involving terrible violence, unlikely romance, and what seems to be the author giving instructions to a character over the phone.

Page 79* is all about Pasha, the only one of the ‘bachelors’ to be treated sympathetically. Like Maria Reva, he is Ukrainian-Canadian. His parents were immigrants who did everything they could to assimilate, and part of his motive for coming to Ukraine has been to reclaim his Ukrainian identity. Here he is imagining the woman he wants to meet on the romance tour:

She’d be sitting on the sidelines, in what she thought was her best dress – something comely but plain, like a church smock – hardly distinguishable from the interpreters, and she’d be wondering why she’d come to this glitzy social. She’d feel like she didn’t compare to the svelte femmes fatales, though she was decidedly more beautiful in an unplaceable ethereal way. She’d regret not having put on more makeup, having stayed up the night before finishing a university assignment (some rigorous program) so that the delicate skin under her eyes bore the slightest hint of blue. No, the woman of Pasha’s dreams did not belong on this romance tour any more than Pasha himself did, but they’d both been spurred by the hope of love. They simply did not know what else to do.

We’re being played with there. The woman in Pasha’s hopelessly romantic fantasy is described in a way that could apply to Yeva, and more unlikely matches have occurred in fiction. But everything in my readerly soul rebelled at the thought of Pasha and Yeva pairing up to live happily ever after. At the same time, I so wanted him to find happiness: he’s naive, but his heart is in the right place, and his yearning to be part of Ukraine is genuine. I won’t tell you what happens, but I don’t think it’s a spoiler to say that in this book that focuses on a handful of fabulously unconventional female characters, the last couple of pages belong to him.

The meeting: We had three books on our agenda. Along with Endling there was Maria Reva’s Endling and On Not Climbing Mountains by Claire Thomas (see here).

I probably shouldn’t have been surprised, but I was, that one person hated this book and one didn’t finish it. They found the disruption of the form self-indulgent and tedious. When I mentioned the passage that Maria Reva had read out at the Sydney Writers’ Festival, which I found hilarious, they screwed up their noses and said that was exactly the kind of thing they hated. One of them liked the snails, but found the romance tours story repetitive and then improbable. Oh well, as my high-school Latin teacher used to say, de gustibus non est disputandum.

The three of us who did enjoy the book, really enjoyed it. One said it was bonkers, a good thing.

One of the unrelated joys of the evening was a reading-aloud of Evelyn Araluen’s poem ‘Acknowledgement of Cuntery’. I will make my acknowledgement anyhow. The Book Club’s five members are all of settler heritage. We met on the beautiful, unceded land of Gadigal and Wangal of the Eora Nation, which is also where I have written this blog post. I gratefully acknowledge the Elders past and present who have cared for this beautiful country for millennia, and welcome any First Nations readers of this blog.

* My blogging practice is to focus on the page that coincides with my age, currently 79.

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How to End a Story, report 1

Posted on 6 Jun 2026 | 3 comments

Helen Garner, How to End a Story: Collected Diaries 1978–1998 (Text Publishing 2025)
– pages 1 to 193.

Someone at the recent Sydney Writers’ Festival said that we ought to stretch our attention spans by reading for twenty minutes at a time – or it may have been by reading twenty pages at one sitting. That’s probably good advice, but I’ve now been reading just five pages of Helen Garner’s diaries every morning for a little over a month, and I’m convinced this is the best way to read them.

I expected the experience to be similar to reading Seamus Heaney’s letters in the same way (first of several blog posts here). But a diary entry is a different beast from a letter, even one written to an intimate friend. Garner is not concerned to present an acceptable face or to spare people’s feelings. I expect she has done some sparing in the editing – by anonymising most people, and probably by cutting some entries – but this is not a public face on display.

The diaries were, however, meant to be well written, to wrangle her observations and reflections into precise words. Nearly two-thirds of the way in the first volume, Yellow Notebook, narrative threads have emerged. Her second marriage, to a man identified only as ‘F’, has come to an end after a long period of bitter rows, and she is coming to terms with her new unpartnered life. Her first novel, Monkey Grip, won a prize on the first page, in 1978. Now, in 1986, she seems to go to a lot of writers’ festivals where people are all too happy to give their opinions about The Children’s Bach (1984) and sometimes mistake her for a staff member. A film she wrote the script for goes to Cannes – she doesn’t name the film (it was Two Friends, directed by Gillian Armstrong) or say any more about it. There’s a thread to do with religion: she senses the approach of what she calls ‘The Mighty Force’, and the thread has peaked in a brief entry (on page 185): ‘ I dread having to become a Christian.’ Perhaps related to that is her deep friendship with ‘J’, transparently Tim Winton (they laugh at gossips who assume they’re sleeping together).

I won’t be surprised if some time in the next decade or so an annotated edition of the diaries appears with notes identifying people and places, and elaborating on contexts. Without that apparatus, it’s like reading the ghost of an autobiography – tantalising, but still oddy satisfying.

There are dreams, conversations, snippets from her reading and film-going, lovely moments with her daughter and sister, irritating moments with various men, deft little pen portraits both physical and psychological, and entries that amount to prose poems.

There’s is a recurring fascination with murder, especially child murder. Several gruesome news items make their way into the diary, and then in 1985 she attends her first trial. Here she is talking to the father of a murdered girl:

I asked him if I could come to the trial.
‘Why do you want to?’
‘First because I thought you might like people to be with you. And second because I’m curious.’
The real truth would be in reverse order. In fact the real truth is part 2. The first is cosmetic, though it is true also, in another way.

How could she have known that this interest would lead to her brilliant non-fiction books Joe Cinque’s Consolation (2004) and This House of Grief (2014), both published well after the end date of these collected diaries.

In today’s reading there’s a long, gruesome account of a visit to the dentist, a number of notes on possible books and stories to write, comments on movies (Visconti’s Bellissima) and books (she reads surreptitiously from a novel about a sadomasochistic affair at Readings book shop), snippets from conversations, descriptions of nature, quotes from a reader and a critic. Here’s a sample just from these five pages:

A micro-fiction:

At the school concert a girl’s proud father says, ‘I love you!’ and squeezes her in his arms. She shrieks, ‘Ewww,YUCK!’ and fights to break free. He grips tighter with a demonic grin

A delicious name-drop (‘the law student’ is her lodger):

Raymond Carver called collect when I wasn’t home, and the law student, confused, caused him to hang up.

A neighbourly conversation:

Out near the rubbish bins I ask my neighbour if she knows anything about Melanie Klein. ‘I absolutely detest psychoanalysis,’ she snaps. I bet you do. Look at your life.

A gruesome moment observed:

Outside the post office the dog shat out a tapeworm. It trailed behind her and I had to put my foot on it to snap it off.

A tiny addition to the underlying narrative:

Spring comes. People fall in love – or they will, when the sunny breezes blow and exams are soon and cafe tables are put out on the pavements. Will I? I can’t imagine who with?

I’m so glad she decided to publish these diaries. I’m pretty sure I’m also glad I’m not ‘the neighbour’, ‘the law student’ or even the ‘proud father’.

I am a man of settler heritage who has been alive for almost a third of the time since Arthur Phillip raised his flag on the shores of Warrane. I wrote this blog post on the land of Gadigal and Wangal of the Eora Nation. I acknowledge their Elders past and present and welcome any First Nations readers.

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Hannah Kent’s Always Home, Always Homesick at the book club

Posted on 5 Jun 2026 | 2 comments

Hannah Kent, Always Home, Always Homesick (Picador Australia 2025)

Before the meeting: You don’t have to have read Hannah Kent’s first novel, Burial Rites (my blog post here), to enjoy Always Home, Always Homesick, but having read it had me loving this book. It’s a memoir about Kent’s love affair with Iceland, beginning with a period she spent there in her teens as an exchange student. It’s also about the making of that first novel – the landscape and history that inspired it, the persistence and serendipity of research, the critical reception, and especially the way it was received in Iceland.

Soon after I finished reading my library copy, I visited the Queensland Gallery of Modern Art to see the Olafur Eliasson exhibition, Presence. Although the most striking works there are installations that play with light in miraculous ways, there are also many photos of Icelandic landscapes – treeless, austere, other-worldly. These works formed a magnificent accompaniment to Hannah Kent’s loving descriptions.

Of course, it’s not all about the book and the landscape. Relationships are important. An Icelandic family weren’t originally meant to be her hosts but stepped in when they saw she was less than happy. They became like a second family for her, and over the years since that original visit they have stayed in her life. The language casts a spell on her; the weirdness of day–night cycles so close to the pole fascinates, and of course there’s food, which brings me to page 79*.

At this stage of the book, teenage Hannah is still finding her way in Iceland, staying with a taciturn family who make her feel strangely isolated. If I had picked the book up in a shop and read this page, I’m pretty sure I would have bought it:

The traditional midwinter feast:

There are hrútsprungar, lambs’ testicles, pressed into a loaf bound with something clear and gelatinous. There is also sviasulta, which is the boiled meat of a sheep head that has been pressed into a mould. It, too, is jellied, and as I cut a slice 1 am told that the eyes and tongue are included in the mix. I glance at my plate, half expecting to find the steady, clouded gaze of a boiled eye. Alongside these dishes are blood pudding, blóğmör, dark red and granular, and liver sausage, lifrarpylsa.

Yum!

After the meeting: We had three books on our agenda. Along with Always Home, Always Homesick there was Maria Reva’s Endling and On Not Climbing Mountains by Claire Thomas.

I found the first five pages of the Claire Thomas book deeply unpromising and gave up on it. Only two of the five of us had read it: they loved it and made us non-finishers regret our life choices.

But we all enjoyed Always Home, Always Homesick. We admired young Hannah Kent’s courage in going to the ends of the earth as a teenager. We commented on the evocation of place and though none of us were inspired to visit Iceland, we were reminded of other examples of its austere beauty.

Someone pointed out that there was very little if anything about Hannah Kent’s relationships with people of her own age group in Iceland. The difficulty involved in attending school where only Icelandic was spoken is mentioned, but the social difficulties are passed over in virtual silence.

People who hadn’t read Burial Rites apparently enjoyed the book as much as those who had.

The Book Club’s five members are all of settler heritage. We met on the beautiful, unceded land of Gadigal and Wangal of the Eora Nation, which is also where I have written this blog post. I gratefully acknowledge the Elders past and present who have cared for this country for millennia, and welcome any First Nations readers of this blog.

* My blogging practice is to focus on the page that coincides with my age, currently 79.

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Edwina Shaw’s Dear Madman

Posted on 4 Jun 2026 | 2 comments

Edwina Shaw, Dear Madman (AndAlso Press 2026)

Revisionist exploration of family lore is a rich vein of story telling. As one of many examples, Tasma Walton’s novel I Am Nannertgarrook grew from that kind of impulse, and it’s part of the truth-telling project that stems from the Uluru Statement from the Heart. Dear Madman doesn’t deal with First Nations issues, but it is a gripping addition to the genre, and it also deals in truth-telling.

Edwina Shaw’s great-aunt, her maternal grandmother’s sister, was murdered as a small child. The murder was part of family lore, a historic family tragedy, a scary tale told to children by a loving grandmother. The book is part memoir – how the story featured in the lives of Edwina and her family, and how she scoured newspaper accounts, prison records, the murderer’s mental health files and more, to find a fuller story. And it’s part novel: alternating chapters take us into the life of the early 20th century family and, most grippingly, into the murderer’s mind.

Edwina is my niece, and I have been privileged to see the book in a number of drafts, so I should leave it to others to discuss it in detail. I’ll just say that it’s a white-knuckle tale of suspense and a marvellous achievement of empathy. It’s a family history, a True Crime essay, a horror story, a dark and violent version of A B Facey’s A Fortunate Life, a hard but rewarding read.

Page 79* is in one of the sections where the author speaks about her task:

I didn’t know whether it was the murderer, the girl who was killed, or me who wanted the story told more. I only knew I couldn’t put it off any longer. It had to be told. Not only that, it had to be me who told this story, showing all sides, looking back with compassion for all of them, even the murderer.
… I began researching in earnest, trying to understand the murderer, his past, his crimes, the times. To even attempt forgiveness, I had to know why he’d killed. I understood why my ancestors had not been able to forgive him, or Life or God. For a child to be taken so violently, for no reason. How is that forgivable?
Why should they forgive?
I had the story Nana Franny told – the murder, the murderer’s notes of confession, the ending – and I had Great Aunty’s version too, not the same story, no ending, but a name. Joe Frisby. And the name he’d worked for them under, Charles Davies. I knew that to begin, I had to bring this Shadowman out of the darkness and see him as human like the rest of us, not imbued with some mystical evil. He was just a man.

It’s rare that a book includes such a neat statement of its goals. Maybe it’s an underlying goal of all good story telling – to have compassion for all one’s characters. And maybe the extent to which that’s achieved is a test of all serious story telling. I think this book does it in spades.

Without being too spoilerish: the cover image is the photo of the murderer taken on his admission to Goodna Mental Asylum ten years after the murder, which Edwina found very late in the research process, after reading about him, having conversations with him on car journeys, meeting some of his descendants, and imagining her way into his mind. In some ways, the appearance of this photo is the moment in the book when he becomes ‘just a man’. Here’s Edwina’s description of it:

Joe’s forehead is deeply creased, and his moustache, huge and grey, is hiding his lips. Above the collar of his rough cotton uniform, you can make out the scar across his neck from where he slit his own throat, but there’s also a softness about the image that makes him look like an old Labrador. His eyes, dark and bright and mad, are looking up with hope as if he’s glimpsing God. He seems happy to me, though others don’t see it.
I propped up his photo as I wrote on, but when it came to the murder scene, I had to turn the picture face down.

I’m one proud uncle (on the murderless paternal side).

I am an Australian man of settler heritage. I’ve written this blog post on the land of Gadigal and Wangal of the Eora Nation. I acknowledge Elders past and present of those clans, and welcome any First Nations readers and commenters.

* My blogging practice is to focus on the page that coincides with my age, currently 79.

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Sydney Writers’ Festival 2026: My Day Four

Posted on 2 Jun 2026 | 1 comment

I don’t know how it happened but my only event on the festival’s final day this year was the closing address. Happily, it was at Carriageworks, so didn’t involve a trek to the city. Incidentally, speaking of treks to the city, I’ve been told that since the festival moved from Walsh Bay on the Harbour to Carriageworks on the edge of Newtown, historically home to a large Aboriginal community, the demographics of festival attendees has changed. Now the vast majority are from the Inner West, and very few from the Northern Suburbs or even the East. For the benefit of readers unfamiliar with Sydney’s social geography, this means that broadly speaking the sympathies of the audience skew to the left. (Tony Abbott’s book sold well, all the same.)

Anyhow, I went to 5.45 pm: Closing Address: A Braver Australia.

As in the last couple of years, the closing address was actually a series of six addresses. I don’t imagine that the speakers got together and planned anything, but their takes on the notion of bravery had a huge amount of overlap.

After introductory remarks by the chair of the Festival and its artistic Driector, in which all the necessary thankyous were made, Sisonke Msimang stepped into the role of host. ‘My father was a freedome fighter,’she said by way of positioning herself in relation to the evening’s topic, ‘and my mother was an accountant.’ Her father’s advice was, ‘Don’t start trouble, but if trouble comes to you, finish it.’ We have got plenty of bullies making trouble right now, and it’s time to be brave.

And then the speakers proper.

Amy Remeikis, so strikingly dressed on the Barrie Cassidy and Friends panel, outdid herself in a splendid green frock with huge puffy sleeves falling from her shoulders. She gave an impassioned speech: We have been trained to expect little of our politicians. We’re letting them sleepwalk us off a cliff. It’s time to hold them accountable. She called on us to do the decent thing, the kind thing, the community-responsible thing, and ended to enthusiastic applause: ‘Let’s pull our nickers up!’

Tony Birch struck a different note. Quietly taking the stage, he spoke of the importance of those who have gone before us, who have been our mentors, and talked about Jack Charles as such a person. (If you don’t know who Jack Charles was, I recommend his Wikipedia page.) In prison after years on the edge of society, Jack discovered the pottery wheel and realised you can make something through gentleness. He became a much loved actor, story-teller, and mentor to young Aboriginal men. Tony Birch ended with a story from the set of a verbatim theatre project in Melbourne. The white actor Robert Menzies asked Charles, ‘What is sovereignty?’ I understood him to mean specifically Aboriginal sovereignty. Here’s what I managed to write down of Charles’s reply: ‘Sovereignty is within me. My sovereignty is only as strong as my responsibility. That responsibility extends to all people in my country.’

Amy Thunig-McGregor was next. She picked up Sisonke’s father’s advice. As a child she was told, ‘Don’t hit first, but you are to hit back.’ She focused on the way the important community dimension of media and story consumption is being actively smothered. Not so long ago, we saw diversity of beliefs and opinions play out, not as debate or rage, but as part of being with each other. Now our media consumption is being weaponised against us. ‘Hard yarns can be had,’ she said, ‘and change can be made.’

Jack Toohey, activist and writer of Better Things Are Possible, came to the podium with his face largely obscured by a peaked cap. ‘I’ve got a wedgie, Amy,’ he said. ‘Does that count?’ He told his story of being at the Sydney Town Hall protest against Israeli President Isaac Herzog’s visit earlier this year. The unprovoked police violence, defended later by the Premier, is symptomatic, he said. We might not always be the targets of state violence, but this doesn’t mean the state is on our side. It’s there to defend power and profit, not people and the planet. He too spoke of the importance of connection: disconnection is how the system works. Solutions to our current problems aren’t to be found in parliament. (I understood him to mean that it’s not enough to vote for someone and feel you’ve done your bit.) We have to connect.

Shankari Chandran said when she was asked to give an address, she did what she always does, wrote five thousand words. (She’s a lawyer.) They were good words and we would have enjoyed them, but then she decided something more personal was needed: ‘What do I need to change about myself in order to be brave?’ And she too spoke about the need for connection and difficult conversations. Bravery is required in places of disagreement, she said. A braver Australia will not be built by louder argument. Listening, really listening, communicating in order to be hear rather than to win – this needs to happen. It might be slow, relentless, exhausting, but it is necessary.

And Ben Quilty was the last speaker. He half apologised for being an artist speaking at a writers’ festival, but gave a fine speech anyhow. He had recently realised that priorities matter. Money can be found for sport – 23 billion dollars for Olympics by some counts. It can be found for Canberra’s War Memorial, the biggest in the world. But not so for art, including literature. To judge by its effects, the priorities for much public spending is to distract and deflect. (I’ve been reading John McDonald’s substack Everything the art world doesn’t want you to know, and though he talks about vast amounts of money that nominally go to art, I think he would agree with Quilty’s point about priorities.) We need art and writing that address the realities that we face, and that takes bravery.

And with that multivocal call for connection, real conversation, respect and accountability, the festival was over. We all went home with our nickers pulled up, at least a little.

I had a thought as I was writing these reports. David Malouf, a wonderful and much loved poet, novelist and essay writer, died recently, and his passing was mentioned a couple of times – at the NSW Literary Awards and in the session on The World According to Trump. How good it would have been to have a whole session to honour him: perhaps a number of people reading favourite poens or passages from this work. Maybe in planning future festivals it wouldn’t be too ghoulish to schedule an In Memoriam session, whose specifics could be organised at the last minute depending on who, if anyone, should die.

The Sydney Writers’ Festival took place on the beautiful land of Gadigal of the Eora Nation. I have written this blog post on Gadigal and Wangal land, a couple of kilometres down the hill. I acknowledge their Elders past and present, and welcome First Nations readers of this blog.

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Sydney Writers’ Festival 2026: My Day Three, part 2

Posted on 2 Jun 2026 | 2 comments

Poetry may fill a room at the Carriageworks, but when you get a panel of pundits talking politics, you have to go big. The Sydney Town Hall was packed for both these sessions, one looking at the state of Australia, the other the USA and therefore the planet.

3.15: Barrie Cassidy and Friends: State of the Nation

This session, a kind of spin-off from the TV show The Insiders, is now a regular at the SWF. It may not be as pleasurable as the now defunct Big Read, where a string of writers entertained the audience by reading to us. But there is pleasure in hearing well-informed, thoughtful people talk to each other about the state of politics.

The host was veteran journalist and panel discussion host, Barrie Cassidy. His fans are clearly legion. In the past his panels have been criticised for the absence of people of colour. This year Waleed Aly (who has also garnered a fan base through TV’s The Project and radio show/podcast The Minefield), broke that barrier. Amy Remeikis, who has also built a following from her TV appearances on the now defunct The Drum, improved the visuals of the occasion by sporting a brilliantly coloured flowing garment. Nikki Savva, acerbic chronicler of the conservative side of Australian politics, added a modest touch of colour with a red jacket, while the men were thoroughly drab. Sean Kelly, known to me from his regular writing for The Monthly and most recently a Quarterly Essay (my blog post here), completed the line-up.

The conversation ranged intelligently over the current political landscape.

The apparent collapse of the Liberal Party and virtual extinction of the National Party loomed large. Amy Remeikis preened just a little, saying that she had predicted it, then explained that as a’geriatric millennial’ she understood all too clearly the deep unpoopularity of their policies, especially but not only on housing. Waleed Aly said that for a long time the Nationals had coasted along because they ‘had no natural predators’. But now One Nation has turned up as a party of grievance and put an end to their easy ride. Sean Kelly said the issue isn’t just the rise fo One Nation, but a general volatility in the Australian electorate: One Nation rose from 6 percent to 40 percent of the vote in 20 months; the independent teals took votes from the major parties on the right in the other direction. Someone listed all the functions of the president of the Liberal Party and observed that incoming president Tony Abbott ticks none of the boxes.

Waleed Aly spoke eloquently in defence of the recent budget. Someone said it was bad news for Labor that the Coalition broadly approved of their increase in the capital gains tax – Labor needed a fight to define themselves, but the Coalition have chosen a different tack. The panellists generally agreed that the Murdoch empire’s response to the budget amounted to asking us to pity the poor billionaires.

I enjoyed the discussion, liked all the participants, and came away none the wiser really, but that says more about me than about the panel.

5.30 The World According to Trump

As someone pointed out, this was a panel of non-USers talking about US politics. They were: Canadian David Moscrop, author of Too Dumb for Democracy, who says that Trump has turned him into a reluctant nationalist; Jon Sopel, British journalist who lived in the USA for eight years; Nick Bryant, also British, who hosts a weekly program on the ABC and has written books with titles like When America Stopped Being Great; and facilitator Amelia Lester, deputy editor of the US journal Foreign Policy, who I believe lives in Sydney. (No people of colour – a rarity at this festival.)

Starting from the question, ‘What is it that makes us so interested in Trump, when there are many other erratic, dangerous autocrats in the world?’ the conversation ranged widely and interestingly, from David Moscrop’ rejection of a can of gravy (a can of gravy) because it was made in the US, to John Sopel letting himself off the leash in a diatribe about Trump’s gangsterism and corruption.

Nick Bryant said that when you ‘excavate’ US history you realise that Trump isn’t an aberration, but the product of a strand that has been there from the start. Jon Sopel spoke of Trump’s brilliance at reading the mood of the country and appealing to its demons. (Obama appealed to its better angels.)

I learned just how entwined with the US Canada is – industrially, politically, culturally and militarily. The US defence plan in case of missile attack from over the Arctic is to knock any missiles out of the sky – above their obliging northern neighbour. Trump’s imposition of tariffs and rhetoric about a takeover creates for Canadians in general a visceral sense of having been punched in the face by a neighbour.

It got very gloomy, especially on the subject of allies’ failure to deal with Trump and Trumpism. But the session finished with a call from David Moscrop for a revitalisation of democracy with things that have been shown to work, of which the only one I noted down was citizen’s assemblies.

Oh, and then a little note, right at the end from either the Canadian or one of the Britishers, about how Australian electoral system has got so much right: compulsory voting, the independent electoral commission, and (to a burst of applause) the democracy sausage. Nick Bryant ended the panel by quoting David Malouf’s phrase, ‘citizenship lightly but seriously assumed’.

The Sydney Writers’ Festival took place on the beautiful land of Gadigal of teh Eora Nation. I have written this blog post on Gadigal and Wangal land, a coiuple of kilometres down the hill. I acknowledge their Elders past and present, and welcome First Nations readers of this blog.

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Sydney Writers’ Festival 2026: My Day Three, part 1

Posted on 28 May 2026 | Leave a comment

Saturday was my busiest day at the Festival. I had four sessions booked and then was given tickets to a fifth. There were three writer-in-conversation sessions and two panels about current politics. This post is about the former.

10 am Amitav Ghosh in Conversation

Amitov Ghosh was ‘in conversation’ with Michael Williams.

Michael Williams set up the conversation by suggesting that Amitav Ghosh had a kind of double vision: on the one hand he is a journalist with a PhD in social anthropology and a commitment to knowledge; on the other he writes fiction that involves ghosts and other supernatural phenomena. After Ghosh’s initial smiling response that writers are not normal people, the conversation expanded to take in elements of his biography, the genesis of his novels (including the brilliant Ibis trilogy, which wasn’t originally intended to be about the opium trade, but the facts got in the way of the other story), his love of travel, the absurdity of colonialist thinking, the British Empire as the world’s second narco state, the importance of Indigenous knowledge systems, and at last his most recent novel Ghost Eye.

I could have listened to him for hours. Here are some highlights:

  • A British reviewer of his first novel, The Circle of Reason (1988), commented that poor benighted third worlders could only write about politics, they had no inner life. Ghosh laughed and said, ‘Look at the United States now. They’re experiencing what we did then.’
  • Ronald Ross was a British doctor who was awarded the Nobel Proze in 1902 for discovering the malaria parasite. When Ghosh read his case notes, he found that all his major findings were in fact made by his Indian servants – who were given no credit.
  • He spoke about language in the Ibis trilogy. In colonial India, there were many Englishes. The multi-ethnic ship crews, the English colonisers who adopted Hindi words, etc. He said of those glorious passages where the language goes wild, that they don’t advance the story: Language is like white noise sometimes, its purpose is not to convey meaning but to establish the context in a kind of background hum. He referred us to Melville in Moby Dick for a similar use of language.
  • He mentioned his non-fiction book addressing climate change, The Great Derangement, which he wrote after the Ibis trilogy. I hadn’t heard of this book, and wonder of Ian MacEwan’s use of the phrase in his future-looking-back novel What We Can Know owes something to Ghosh.
  • In Western thought the world has come to be regarded as a machine whose function is to have goods extracted from it. We badly need to pay attention to First Nations / traditional ways of knowing, where teh world has not been desacralised. This is happening to some extent – he gave the example of the Wanganui River in Aotearoa/New Zealand being acknowledged as having legal personhood. But mining Indigenous cultures for their knowledge can be another form of extraction. The knowledge can’t really be separated from the stories by which it is communicated.
  • In the same reasonable tone, he told us that he doesn’t believe in reincarnation, but numerous studies in India and elsewhere have recorded phenomena which can only be explained by the existence of past lives: children suddenly recite long passages of classic books they can’t have read, etc.

I felt like we were in the presence of a great mind, who manages to communicate important, difficult ideas with an extraordinary lightness of touch and generosity of spirit, and also enjoys stirring the pot a bit.

We had a cup of tea with a friend, and a bite to eat, then off to Track 8, where train carriages were once built:

1.00: Melissa Lucashenko: A Writing Life

Winnie Dunn, author of Dirt Poor Islanders and an important part of the Western Sydney literary movement, was on stage with Melissa Lukashenko. As the session got under way, Melissa called out to people up the back to come and fill empty seats down the front – eventually people bowed to her benign authority and the front rows, perhaps reserved for celebrities who didn’t show, were filled.

The reason for the pairing of these two writers soon became apparent: Melissa lived for some time on Tonga, and Winnie is the first Tongan Australian writer to have a novel published. There was a relaxed vibe between the two of them: Winnie maybe not all that experienced at interviewing in front of a big, mainly white audience, and Melissa seeming competely comfortable in her own skin, right from that early moment when she beckoned us closer.

Melissa was there partly to promote her most recent publication, Not Quite White, a collection of essays, and she read beautifully from two of its essays. But the guts of the conversation was the story of her writing life.

Some highlights:

  • At a time of her life when she was newly divorced and living poor, she earned a living by driving an Uber and wrote her fifth novel, Mullumbimby, in her spare time. By the time it was published she was tossing up whether to go (back) to a life of crime [my brackets represent her smiling retraction of the word]. Then it won some significant awards and she was out of the poverty trap.
  • The story that’s allowed about Aboriginal people has shifted enormously in thirty years. When she wrote Too Much Lip, which also won substantial prizes, she feared that she would be attacked for its portrayal of family sexual violence, but she felt it had to be written – partly because of her activism with Sisters Inside. It turned out the attack didn’t come.
  • Asked how she found the voice for the main character in Too Much Lip, she said that character was written in anser to the question, ‘Who might I have become if I hadn’t gone to uni?’
  • Asked what she wanted from white readers, she said, ‘Stop the deficit narrative!’ (This was a nice echo of Amitav Ghosh’s mockery of the assumption of white superiority.)
  • On awards culture, she said that when her first novel, Steam Pigs, was short listed for a number of prizes, she had no idea what it meant. She kind of thought, ‘Oh well, you publish a novel, and then it gets listed for prizes.’ What mattered to her, then and now, is the response from readers, especially Aboriginal readers and family.
  • Advice to new writers: Have a second job!
  • When Winnie Dunn asked how she approached community responsibilities in her writing, she turned the question back on the questioner, ‘How do you do it?’ This came across as a real question, and Winnie Dunn took it that way and spoke eloquently of her own writing about and for the Tongan community. Melissa did say that when she writes she always has the voices of a couple of Elders in her head, especially one scathing old man. Sadly, she didn’t elaborate.

There were a couple more sessions, to be discussed in my next post, and then, after dark, with a ticket I had been given unexpectedly:

8.00: Maria Reva: Endling

Literary critic Beejay Silcox was on stage with Maria Reva, Ukrainian Canadian author of Endling, a book that I have read for the Book Club and enjoyed enormously. The book is about snails, the trade in brides in Ukraine, the Ukrainian war, and the impossibility of writing a novel about all that.

There were some nice moments of comedy. When Beejay spelled out her understanding of how metaphors worked in the novel. Maria said, ‘You should have written it!’ This became a running joke, I’m not sure at whose expense.

They discussed the process of writing the novel, which felt oddly like a synopsis of the novel itself, though its most splendid twists and turns were not revealed.

The novel started from an article about a scientist in Hawaii who had a project of saving snail species from extinction. And it also started out as a novel about ‘romance tours’ in Ukraine, where men from the USA come on tours wth the aim of finding a wife. Maria Reva found a way of combining these two themes and was feeling pleased with her plot-making abilities, as three of the young women from the romance tour kidnap a van-load of bachelors. Then Russia invaded Ukraine and she couldn’t see the point of the novel any more. She gave up on it and wrote the draft of something completely different – that went nowhere. Then came the moment of decision: ‘If the genre was imploding on me, I would take the reader down with me.’

She read a passage from the novel which, she said, was mostly verbatim from actual email correspondence, in which a journal editor wanted her to write what, in order to make the connection to the two other speakers today, I’ll call a ‘deficit model’ account of the Canadian Ukrainian community’s response to Russia’s invasion. It was funny when I read it a couple of weeks ago. It’s much funnier when you know it really happened! Maria Reva was clearly enjoying her revenge.

There was a lot more. I’ll mention just two things. One, the structure of the novel was inspired by the movie Everything Everywhere All at Once. I knew it was familiar from somewhere! Two, the book started out being about women’s oppression in Ukraine, but once the war started, Maria Reva forgot about gender and the question became, ‘How do different minds cope with the cataclysm?’

My companion had read one book from Ukraine, ‘the one about tractors’. I had also read one, the one about bees. This was a whole other version of Ukraine and Ukrainians.

And so to bed.

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Sydney Writers’ Festival 2026: My Day Two

Posted on 27 May 2026 | 6 comments

I just had two sessions at the festival on Friday. A third – S Shakthidharan’s session – was cancelled, so I was given a free evening as well as a long break in the middle of the day.

10 am: Big Histories

A historian, a novelist and a scholar walk onto a stage …

I’m a fan boy for Amitav Ghosh, whose Ibis trilogy (Sea of Poppies, River of Smoke and Flood of Fire) we’ve read at my Book Group (links are to my blog posts). I was swept away by Luke Kemp’s recent appearance on David Runciman’s Past Present Future podcast. Clare Wright’s democracy trilogy (The Forgotten Rebels of Eureka, You Daughters of Freedom and Näku Dhäruk: The Bark Petitions) is a big deal. I felt like genuflecting when they took their seats.

Clare Wright set the ball rolling with some comments about history – how it needs to be endlessly discussed, debated and debunked. She said she intended to stay out of the way of the others because she knew they were keen to talk to each other. Happily, she didn’t fade into the background, but did an excellent job as facilitator.

Two books lay on the table for this session, each with a curse in the title, one looking at the broad sweep of history, the other beginning with a tiny, pretty much forgotten incident. Luke Kemp’s Goliath’s Curse (2025) has a subtitle that announces its scope: The History and Future of Societal Collapse. The subtitle of Amitav Ghosh’s The Nutmeg’s Curse (2021) does similar work: Parables for a Planet in Crisis.

Luke Kemp’s field of study is Existential Risk, which he explained is the risk of extreme societal collapse or even human extinction. Given the current state of the world, perhaps it will help, he said, to go back and study the way large societies have collapsed in the past. He names these large societies goliaths, and defends what might be seen as a gimmicky bit of language by saying that the usual word, civilisation, is misleading. The societies he discusses, ranging antiquity to the present, are not in fact civilised – they have all been brutal, increasingly unequal organisations built on the acquisition and defence of what he calls lootable resources. These are resources such as wheat or corn that can be seen, stored and stolen – as opposed to, say, yams, that grow underground, can’t be stored for long, and are not attractive to thieves. The goliaths are huge thieving organisations – civilisations as a title for them is pure propaganda. Like the biblical Goliath, they are huge and intimidating, they rule by violence and they are surprisingly fragile.

[Added later: I missed out one of Luke Kemp’s main points, possibly because once stated it’s obvious: before the coming of goliaths, humans lived in egalitarian communities. They weren’t without violence but it wasn’t organised warfare over territory or resources.]

Amitav Ghosh’s book is non-fiction. It tells the story of a massacre in 1621 on tiny Banda Island in what is now Indonesia. The island was the only place in the world where nutmeg grew. The islanders refused Dutch East India Company’s demand of exclusive access and, to cut a long story short, the Dutch murdered almost the entire population. Ghosh sees this ruthless act as part of the desacralising of nature, in which everything is seen in terms of potential profit. Barbados is now the world’s largest producer of nutmeg, he said, but no one there sings to the nutmeg trees as the Bandans once did, and the descendants of survivors still do.

There was a lot more. A brief discussion of what novels offer that histories can’t flew past before I cold take decent notes. Amitav Ghosh told stories of Dutch superstition in the 17th century as seen with amazement by the Bandans, whom they saw as benighted savages. The 17th century witch hunts in Europe were not, as we’ve been led to believe, driven by superstitious peasants, but were instigated by the elites as part of the project of destroying the sense of all things being connected and replacing it with the dominance of the profit motive. Not a lot of time was spent on contemporary USA, but when Luke Kemp listed the signs that a goliath was about to collapse, the relevance was shockingly clear.

There were so many ideas in this session I look forward to listening to it again when it comes out as part of the SWF podcast series.

Our next session brought a completely different kind of joy:

4 pm: Great Adaptations

Mick Herron, author of the Sloane House series of spy novels that have been made into the wonderful TV series, Slow Horses, says he writes novels without any idea of them becoming anything else. The adaptation was other people’s idea, and other people’s work.

Suzie Miller describes herself as a creature of the theatre. Her phenomenally successful play Prima Facie has been performed in many languages in many countries, and has been instrumental in having the law about rape changed in the UK. Partly because she had much more material than one actor could be expected to perform, she decided to adapt it to a film including the bits she’d had to ‘put in the garage’. She abandoned the film project and did a novel version. Then took up the film again, and it’s now in production.

Benjamin Law led them tactfully in an entertaining conversation that shed a lot of light on the differences among the forms: stage, TV, film and novel.

Playwrights are an interesting addition to television writing rooms, because they keep reaching for a sense of the whole form – which is what theatre demands. There was much talk about the excellent food and decor in writing rooms.

I think it was Suzie Miller who answered Benjamin’s question about the difference between the different forms: Theatre is basically an aural landscape, and as a writer you’re always dealing with other people’s input; cinema is primarily visual; novelists have space to develop their own vision.

Asked about ways they had been surprised in the adaptation process, Mick Herron said Gary Oldman is a lovely man. (In one of his books he described Lamb as looking like Timothy Spall gone to seed – people thought he might be disappointed to have Gary Oldman cast in the role, but it wasn’t so, he’d only mentioned Timothy Spall as shorthand descriptiion because he has no visual imagination.) Suzie Miller’s surprise has been to have people say to her about the novel, ‘That is my story.’

As a little side note, I was impressed about Benjamin Law’s facilitation. For example, someone told a story about egregious ignorance on the part of an unnamed senior writer in a TV room, a story that was remarkably similar to one I’d heard Benjamin tell in another context. An undisciplined person would have leapt into the conversation to tell that story, but he gave not a glimmer. He might looks like he’s on stage for a relaxed chat, but he’s very good at his job.

The Sydney Writers’ Festival is happening on beautiful, unceded Gadigal land. I have written this blog post on Gadigal and Wangal land. I acknowledge their Elders past and present, and welcome First Nations readers of this blog.

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Sydney Writers’ Festival 2026: My Day One, part 2

Posted on 26 May 2026 | Leave a comment

After a quick lunch at the pub a block away from the Carriageworks, we were back for three more sessions.

4 pm: Bringing the Past to Life

This was three novelists talking about historical fiction. Robbie Arnott (author of Limberlost and Dusk, links to my blog posts), Yann Martel (Life of Pi, which I read and loved long before blogging, and most recently Son of Nobody), and Tasma Walton (actor most notably in the Mystery Road television and film franchise, author of I am Nannertgarrook). They were wrangled by the incomparable Kate Evans.

Tasma Walton started from a family story, a great love story: one of her ancestors, an Aboriginal woman, met a white man and eloped with him to live on an idyllic island. She knew early on that something was not right about that version, and when she explored it she found the now familiar story of sealers raiding First Nations communities in what is now Victoria and kidnapping women to live a life of slavery. The book is part of the larger project of reclaiming language, and she told us that her training as an actor was important in creating these historical characters: she would give them a back story, imagine herself into the skin of the character, like an actor preparing for performance, then write.

Robbie Arnott was charming and funny. After saying, ‘I don’t like to be perceived,’ he cooperated and talked interestingly about himself and his books. No one had noticed, he said, that the sealers from Tasma’s book turn up in Dusk. ‘Oh, I noticed,’ Kate Evans said, ‘but we’ll get to that.’ Robbie said that Dusk had its origins in fishing trips with his father to the Tasmanian/lutruwita highlands. He was enchanted by that landscape and in particular by a moment when a herd of deer appeared out of the bush. He tries to capture the feel of that land in the book. Questioned about his invention of giant bones poking up out of the earth, he said they were his way of communicating how ancient the land felt. Jokingly (I think), he said that Dusk, the giant puma who gives the book its title, was inspired not by legends about big cats in the Australian bush but by cane toads – the prime example of disastrously introduced species.

Yann Martel really wanted to talk about his earlier book, Beatrice and Virgil, which is more accurately described as a historical fiction than Son of Nobody. But he did what Kate Evans asked of him and discussed the latter book – it’s a story of the Trojan War with footnotes. There’s a black line across the middle of each page – the Troy story unfolds above the line and the story of the footnote creator below it. Though he didn’t read the actual Iliad until he was an adult he was fascinated by the story as a child (Robbie Arnott interjected that he had read it as a child – ‘I didn’t have any friends.’) Because Troy is myth as much as history, he had freedom to invent, to jin the many authors these days who, for instance, retrieve the women’s stories. His Holocaust book features two taxidermied animals, a donkey and a monkey. He didn’t elaborate on how that relates to the history, beyond saying that it was his way of taking a fresh look at the familiar horrors.

There was an interesting discussion of violence. All three books include a lot of it. Tasma Walton said that every act of violence in her book comes from the colonial records, so it was difficult to write in the first person. Again her training as an actor came into play, especially the instruction, ‘Open your heart.’ Which is a good instruction for readers as well.

I came away from the session with Book Club possibilities in mind.

Two hours later, we came back for:

7 pm: Writing in the Age of Trump

This was a panel. Sisonke Msimang did a terrific job as host/facilitator. After introducing her three US writer guests – Tayari Jones, S.A. Cosby and Deborah Baker, all from the south of the USA – she said something like, ‘The title of the session means we have to talk about Donald Trump, but first tell us what your southern heritage means to you.’ And we didn’t get to Trump for at least 40 minutes.

S.A Cosby writes crime novels, but that was not what he was there for and I came away knowing very little about his books. He, like Tayari Jones (see previous blog post), writes against the assumption that the South is all about the oppression of Blacks. He and she spoke eloquently about Black culture, and Black community. She identified herself as a suburban Southerner.

Deborah Baker, the only non-Black person on stage, is the author of Charlottesville: An American Story, which gives the background of the ‘Unite the Right’ demonstration in 2017. She did a lovely job of explaining that there was debate in that city over three Confederate monuments – a lot of emotion, but generally attempts to hear each other – some African Americans, for instance, were in favour of keeping the memorials because without them important history is in danger of being forgotten. But white supremacists, emboldened by the election of Donald Trump, decided to make it their issue, and things turned lethal.

In the lifetimes of the panellists – and none of them is as old as me – public schools in the south called the Civil War the ‘War of Northern Aggression’. It wasn’t about slavery but about state rights, they were told. I think it was Sean Cosby who said his response to that is, ‘States’ rights to do what?’

Some tidbits:

  • In 1956 Ezra Pound, incarcerated in a mental hospital in Washington DC because of his support for the Nazis, sent one of his disciples to start a race war in Charlottesville. History has echoes.
  • When Tayari Jones was at school, her parents wouldn’t give permission for her to ‘participate in white supremacist activities’ including an excursion to see the largest bas-relief sculpture in the world at Stone Mountain Park.
  • Sean Cosby’s face was mostly obscured by a baseball cap, which I think was to protect his eyes – because when he read to us, he seemed to have so much trouble making out the words that it was hard for us to follow the thread. But when at last the conversation turned to Donald Trump, he delivered a wonderful, passionately articulate rant that made one’s heart sing.

Again, with moments to spare, the Emerging Artist and I headed to our next sessions. She went to ‘Brave Conversations‘, which left her less than enthused, while I went to:

8 pm: Rhythm of Truth poetry gala

As the title suggests, this was a line-up of poets, the only poetry event I managed to attend in the whole festival. It was terrific.

Sara M. Saleh was in the chair. Sadly , she didn’t read any of her own poetry, though Maxine Beneba stepped into the breach and read one of Sara’s poems in her set. Riffing on the festival’s theme, ‘Show me the truth’, Sara said in her general introduction: ‘It’s a poet’s job to tell the truth, the kind that slips in before your mind catches up.’

Mariel Roberts Musa had two solo spots where she played the cello with electronic effects. They were intense and mesmerising intervals, but the poets were the main event (I’ve found links to some of the poems in case you want to chase them up):

  • Evelyn Araluen (I’ve blogged about Dropbear and The Rot) read three poems from The Rot, which she said were originally intended to be three parts of one long poem: ‘Sleep Act One’, ‘Sleep Act Two’ and ‘You’.
  • Michael Pedersen, among other things, Edinburgh’s Makar/Poet Laureate, stepped onto the stage with a stand-up’s flair and a thick Scottish accent, and performed ‘The cat prince‘ (featuring a weird little boy and a wonderful mother) and what he elsewhere calls a super-short friendship love poem, ‘Boys holding hands‘.
  • Nikita Gill, of Irish and Indian heritage, is apparently big on instagram. She read to us from a work in progress called ‘Men say things to me and then I have an existential crisis’. I especially loved the one where a man tells her to go back to the kitchen imagining it to be a confining space, but which she reimagines as the place where women connect and make things happen, including perhaps a revolution.
  • After reading a poem by Sara M. Saleh, Maxine Beneba Clarke read from her own book Beautiful Changeling. ‘I want to grow old’ speaks back eloquently to the idea that ageing is a bad thing, from the perspective of someone not yet 50. Good poem, I thought, but what do these whippersnappers know about growing old?
  • David Stavanger asked landlords in the audience to raise their hands and then sneered when no one did, ‘Landlords never raise their hands.’ His main theme seems to be mental illness. I liked ‘I’ve been thinking about your birth lately‘.
  • Omar Musa finished up the evening with a number of poems accompanied by ‘my beautiful wife’ Mariel Roberts Musa. He performed a version of ‘Queanbeyan‘. Then they totally destroyed the room with ‘The burning‘, which you can get some idea of from the video at the link: ‘you and me / we have become numb / numb even to burning’.

And that was the end of our first day.

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Sydney Writers’ Festival 2026: My Day One, part 1

Posted on 25 May 2026 | 8 comments

The Sydney writers’ Festival is one of the highlights of my year. The venue, the Carriageworks, is a comfortable 40 minute walk from home. Though there are fewer free events than there used to be, the trade-off for the extra expense is the absence of huge queues with the prospect of a terrible seat, or no seat at all.

When I walked into Carriageworks early on Thursday afternoon I spotted volumes of Tony Abbott’s Australia: A History piled right next to Randa Abdel-Fattah’s Discipline on the Gleebooks tables. I had arrived.

I got to my first session with minutes to spare, though because of problems with the sound system the session started late, so I had time to catch my breath.

1 pm: Holding Up the Mirror

This was a panel of three Jews reflecting on the current rise of anti-semitism in Australia, with Avril Alba, professor of Holocaust Studies and Jewish Civilisation at the University of Sydney, as a restrained, non-interventionist facilitator.

Lee Kofman, with flaming hair and a strong Russian/Ukrainian accent, appeared on this blog years ago for an essay about scars on women’s bodies (link here), which I mention only because she said that before Hamas’s 7 October massacre in Israel and the Israeli government’s horrific response, she wrote about personal things, including women’s issues and migrants’ concerns, but since then, and especially since the mass shooting at Bondi last December, she has been driven to write about Jewish issues.

Michael Visontay interviewed Ittay Flescher on a feed from Israel at last year’s festival (blog post here). This year he speaks for himself. He writes for the Jewish Independent – and says that the main effect that the Gaza genocide and Bondi murders have had on his writing is that he recognises more than ever the importance of being precise. In any conversation, with Jews and non-Jews alike, he feels the question before anyone says a word: where do you stand in relation to what’s happening in Palestine–Israel?

Jon Sopel, an English journalist, quoted Jonathan Miller’s quip that he wasn’t a Jew, but Jew-ish. (He mis-attributed the line to the very Jewish Woody Allen.) He was just finishing his book about returning to the UK after eight years in the USA when 7th October happened, and he realised he had to address anti-semitism and his own identity as a Jew.

The conversation ranged over a lot of hot-button topics. Is anti-Zionism antisemitic? Is the left’s wholehearted support of Palestinians tainted with antisemitism? Would people talk of a Blak person’s experience of ‘real or perceived racism’ as they talk of a Jew’s experience of ‘real or perceived antisemitism’? To what extent have concerns about anti-semitism led to a shutting down of free speech? What does it mean that in some places the extreme right have taken up anti-antisemitism?

All three panellists said they abhorred Netanyahu’s war on Gaza. None of them is actively religious. Antisemitism is viscerally important to all of them.

John Sopel, perhaps because he had more distance from recent horrific killings in Sydney, was able to offer a little historical perspective. He spoke of the way Sephardic Jews were mainly assimilated in Britain, and then in the early 20th century Ashkenazi Jews began to arrive, fleeing Russian pogroms. Institutions were established to help the newcomers assimilate. Lee said, correctly, that historically there hasn’t been safety in assimilation, but I would have loved someone to talk about the similar project of assimilation in Australia. (I believe, for instance that rabbis in the early 1900s wore Roman collars, so that Judaism presented itself as another denomination, rather than a whole other religion.) I guess that’s another subject.

My companion and I came away with a lot to talk about, but talking had to wait, because the session finished late and our next one was well under way when we shuffled as undisruptively as possible into our seats.

2 pm: Tayari Jones: Kin

Tayari Jones, African American novelist, was in conversation with Shankari Chandran. I haven’t read anything by either author, but I loved this conversation.

Tayari Jones’s most recent novel is Kin. Her previous one, An American Marriage (2018), was a critical and popular success, but then in May 2020 George Floyd was murdered and she found she couldn’t write. Until then she had thought writer’s block was an invented excuse for laziness, but faced with this harsh reminder of the depth of racism in her country she was overwhelmed with a sense of the futility of writing fiction. After a time, she realised that though a book could not put out a fire, ‘a book was what I had.’ At which Shankari Shadran exclaimed, ‘I think there are a lot of writers in this room who needed to hear that!’

It was an interesting conversation. Jones spoke of her childhood in Atlanta, Georgia, where the majority of the population is Black. She didn’t encounter white racism as a major thing when she was young: class was much more visible to her. There was a serial killer who preyed on children: in another part of the USA the press would have described his victims as Black children, but in Atlanta they were described as poor, or at least that’s how young Tayari saw it.

Among other things, Jones said that she was inspired by one of the slogans on the wall of her school – perhaps the Benjamin Elija Mays High School. The quote, roughly from Robert Browning’s poem ‘Andrea del Sarto’: ‘Your reach should exceed your grasp.’ This, she said, has stayed with her, reminding her not to settle into a rut. It occurs to me it’s a good thing for me to bear in mind as a reader as well, in two ways: first, not to shy away from difficult texts (see my future blog post on Jill Jones’s How to Emerge, with which I am currently struggling); and second, to appreciate when a piece of writing is ambitious in a good way even if it doesn’t quite pull it off.

I’m writing this when the festival is over. It’s interesting to note that both these sessions dealt with the way terrible events had a dramatic impact on a writer’s practice. This turned out to be a recurring topic. The festival’s motto, ‘Show me the truth,’ could easily have been swapped for, ‘What the heck just happened?’

The Sydney Writers’ Festival is happening on unceded Gadigal land. I have written this blog post on Gadigal and Wangal land. I acknowledge their Elders past and present, and welcome First Nations readers of this blog.

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