Sydney Writers’ Festival 2026: My Day Two

Posted on 27 May 2026 | Leave a comment

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 intimdating, they rule by violence and they are surprisingly fragile

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 Kent 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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Journal catch-up 35: Southerly

Posted on 20 May 2026 | Leave a comment

Roanna Gonsalves and guest co-editor K. A. Ren Wyld, Southerly Volume 80 Number 1: First the Future

After pestilence, after pain, after wholeness, after emptiness, after life, after death, after a long hiatus, Southerly is back. (Page 6)

It has indeed been a long hiatus. Soon after Volume 79 Number 1 appeared in 2019 (my blog post here), the editors started a Go Fund Me page. Vol 79, Nos 2 and 3 were squeezed out by guest editors – one devoted to writing by refugees in 2021 (my post here), and an online-only issue of Covid-related work in 2022 (my blog post here). And then silence!

So welcome back, Southerly! And how good that Roanna Gonsalves is the new editor. I’ve heard her speak a number of times on Writers’ Festival panels, where she has been smart, generous, and always interesting.

There’s lots of good stuff in this re-birth issue:

  • a brief intellectual memoir from Barry Corr, a self-described ‘grumpy old man, highly averse to writing about himself’, who doesn’t mentiopn that his daughter is brilliant poet Evelyn Araluen
  • a wonderful conversation on First Nations poetics, interspersed with actual poems, featuring Natalie Harkin, Kirli Saunders, Elfie Shiosaki and Ellen van Neerven
  • a poem by John Kinsella in which he reveals that he has read Lord of the Rings well over 30 times
  • a poem by Omar Sakr whose title, ‘Walking to day-care in the genocide’ captures its piercing grief
  • a wonderful family memoir by Angelo Loukakis about growing up in a Greek migrant family in Sydney
  • Louise Adler on the implications of recent political interference in the arts – a speech given long before such interference led to her resignation as director of Adelaide Writers’ Week
  • a prose poem by Eileen Chong incorporating myriad internet memes
  • and more, much more, making up 172 rich pages.

There is more passion in these pages than you might expect in a literary journal. So much so that it feels at times like a group therapy session for very real pain, rage and despair created by the Israeli genocide in Gaza, and the ongoing genocidal treatment of First Nations people on this continent. It’s a rough ride at times, but a necessary one, and one that there are powerful forces in this country and elsewhere doing their best to prevent.

Not everything is rage and grief. There’s also a powerful thread laying out work that needs to be done. Elfie Shiosaki for example, has done a lot of work the archives of Noongar country. She says on page 91:

During the [Referendum] campaign, I was reflecting on research I had done at the State Records archives in Western Australia, which included reading letters written by Noongar women calling for representation for Aboriginal people in Parliament since the 1930s and earlier. Their calls have remained unanswered for almost a century.
I want to live in a community that rsponds to what we have been calling for, for such a long time …
The aftermath of the referendum, I wanted to re-envision First Nations poetry as a practice of peacemaking. Regardless of the outcome of institutional processes, poetry continues to contribute to conflict resolution by healing unreconciled relationships in the present and unreconciled narratives of the past as well as imagining futures of peace.

Literature without truth-telling would be rubbish. Truth-telling without discomfort is bull. Three cheers for Southerly, first now, then the future.

No blog post by me on Southerly would be complete without mentioning that, as is only right in a university-based literary journal, there are one or two densely academic pieces that I tried and failed to read. But lest that be taken as me feeling inferior, I will also mention that, embarrassingly, Gandhi’s name is misspelled on page 64.

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.

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2026 NSW Literary Awards night

Posted on 19 May 2026 | 2 comments

It’s been a long time since I’ve attended a NSW Literary Awards Night in person, but I like to give an account of them if I can, based on the video of the streamed event.

If you like, you can skip this blog post and watch the video yourself. (When I watched it, nothing happens for the first 30 minutes.)

If you’re still here (and I hope you are), here’s my version of the evening. (I’ve added only two links to elsewhere in his blog.)

Uncle Brendan Kerin did the Welcome to Country. He addressed the recent Anzac Day booing at the Welcome. He said there were two kinds of people who objected to Welcomes to Country: ignorant people and racists. He’d explain, he said, and if there were still people who objected he’d know which they were, and (he said with a friendly smile) he’d offer further explanation out in the car park after the event. ‘All we’ve ever done is walk with a hand out: come!’ He played a welcome song, urged us to stop calling his instrument a didgeridoo. ‘There are 59 words in language for this instrument, and none of them is didgeridoo,’ he said and then, anticipating a theme of the evening, ‘We’ve lost control of our own narrative.’

The State Librarian Caroline Butler-Bowdon did a Welcome to the Library. Library Council President Bob Debus reminded the audience of Neville Wran’s initial statement of the aims of the awards: to uphold the writer’s place in a free society; to raise and preserve the standards of our literature, and to confirm the community’s respect for a free and flourishing literary culture. He referred explicitly to the book-banning we see in the USA, and obliquely to the disinviting of writers in this country of writers. And he spoke warmly of David Malouf, who won four awards over the decades. The Minister for Arts John Graham reminded us of the ALP’s record as supporter of writers. (A side comment: in the past, Labor Premiers have graced this occasion with their presence, and appeared to be genuinely interested – Neville Wran, Bob Carr, Kristina Keneally, and Nathan Rees come to mind. It’s only recently that the Premier dropped out of the awards’ title.)

James Bradley, in his capacity of Senior Judge, did some more thank yous and contextualising, and then we moved on to the awards.

UTS Glenda Adams Award for New Writing

Find Me at the Jaffa Gate, Micaela Sahhar (NewSouth Publishing) 

Micaela Sahhar thanked Sweatshop in Western Sydney, and was the first speaker to refer to the genocide in Gaza. In particular she spoke in support of the people who protested at the visit of Isaac Herzog in February this year. As a Palestinian person she thanked people who protest.

Multicultural NSW Award

Gather Up Your World in One Long Breath, S. Shakthidharan (Powerhouse Publishing)

‘This book is an act of vulnerability for me,’ he said, and spoke about love across difference as at the heart of multiculturalism. I’m half way through reading this book and am delighted that it won.

Indigenous Writers’ Prize

Apron-Sorrow / Sovereign-Tea, Natalie Harkin (Wakefield Press)

Natalie Harkin, wearing a ‘Readers and Writers Against Genocide’ T-shirt, described the book as ‘a collaborative mixed media project with many amazing and generous women in my community to document South Australian women’s stories’. She said, ‘There can be no truth-telling in this country without access to our archives and our records,’ and spoke of ‘the strength, the love, the strategic resilience and refusal’ of the women whose words she found in the archives.

Betty Roland Prize for Scriptwriting

The Narrow Road to the Deep North, Episode 4, Shaun Grant (Curio Pictures, Screen Australia, Amazon MGM Studios)

‘Our baby-sitter fell through and I have a seven-month-old at the back of the auditorium who should probably go to bed,’ Shaun Grant said by way of explaining that he would be brief, and also perhaps explaining why he looked uncomfortable in suit and tie.

Nick Enright Prize for Playwriting

The Black Woman of Gippsland, Andrea James (Melbourne Theatre Company/Currency Press)

Andrea James said, ‘Theatre-making is very much a collaborative art form.’ And in her thank-yous she demonstrated that First Nations story telling is also very much a collaborative, multi-faceted, relational art form. ‘The cash is going to be great,’ she said, ‘but the biggest prize for me would be the immediate removal or at least reinterpretation of the three memorials to the so-called founder of Gippsland, Angus McMillan, who we actually know as the Butcher of Gippsland.’

Ethel Turner Prize for Young People’s Literature

Desert Tracks, Marly Wells and Linda Wells (Magabala Books)

The mother and daughter award winners appeared on video link from Alice Springs / Mparntwe. Marly: ‘Colonisation caused and continues to cause chaos for all of us. One of its powerful tools is controlling the narrative, so the more that we can contradict those dominant colonial narratives through truth-telling the better off we’ll all be.’ I love that ‘all’: Linda, Marly’s mother, is non-Indigenous; Marly is Warlpiri.

Patricia Wrightson Prize for Children’s Literature

Gone, Michel Streich (Thames & Hudson Australia)

‘Gone is a story about dying, grief and memory,’ Michel Streich said, ‘and bizarrely … it was almost published posthumously.’ He didn’t elaborate on his near death experience.

Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry

How To Emerge, Jill Jones (Vagabond Press)

Jill Jones said she’s probably the only person who has been a judge on these awards, has won one of them and has also administered them. About the book, she said, ‘I was wanting to pay attention to both the infinitesimal and the cosmological – I’m quoting some of the words that the judges used about the book, why not? – the resonance between sky, asphalt, weed, wharf, vulnerability and memory and many, many other things.’ And she quoted William Blake.

Douglas Stewart Prize for Non-Fiction

Näku Dhäruk The Bark Petitions, Clare Wright (Text Publishing)

Clare Wright invoked the Yolŋu name she has been given, meaning ‘special tree’. She spoke of ‘the writing cave, battling the dragon’, and thanked many many people. ‘This is a book about a people speaking truth to power. It’s a story about respect, consultation and consent, values and practices we have seen demolished in recent decisions by publishers, universities and other cultural organisations and boards around First Nations knowledges, cultural representation and freedom of speech.’

Christina Stead Prize for Fiction

The Immigrants, Moreno Giovannoni (Black Inc)

Moreno Giovannoni is mostly a translator. His parents bought him a typewriter when he was 12 because he wanted to be a writer – it took him 51 years to write his first book, The Fireflies of Autumn (my blog post here), and another six years to write this one. Migrants are in the news again – this is a book about migrants.

The University of Sydney People’s Choice Award

Rapture, Emily Maguire (Allen & Unwin) – my blog post here

Emily Maguire described the idea for the book as ‘a weird little mediaeval girl pope story’.

Book of the Year

Näku Dhäruk The Bark Petitions, Clare Wright (Text Publishing)

Wearing a Star of David, Clare Wright confessed that though she didn’t expect to win this award she had written something just in case. And the speeches ended as they had begun with a call to stand up for Palestine:

One of the particularly powerful connected elements of Näku Dhäruk is the way it demonstrates how a strong and sovereign Indigenous people resisted the Australian government’s attempt at erasure and silencing of their voice, of their very existential right to belong on and to their land and their law.
The story told in this book through both documentary archival, and eyewitness oral sources also speaks to the potency of allyship, of defending basic human, civil and democratic rights, even when your own quotidian existence is not directly threatened. At this time of Israel’s genocide in Gaza and resultant moves both in Australia and globally to suppress legitimate criticism of the death, dispossession, and destruction of sovereign people, by Palestinians and their allies, the weight and fortune of this book’s dhäruk, its message, could not be more opportune.
As an academic historian, a Jewish Australian, and a human being, I stand here tonight grateful for the opportunity to participate in the global and timeless struggle for justice and equality under the law, resisting the mounting pressure from governments, universities, funding bodies, and publishing companies to stay quiet, timid, and submissive at a time of patent poly crisis.

And it was all over bar the final thanks from the Head Librarian.

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. I thank Uncle Brendan Kerin for explicitly acknowledging non-Indigenous Elders in his Welcome to Country.

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Toby Davidson’s Grand Reopening

Posted on 17 May 2026 | Leave a comment

Toby Davidson, The Grand Reopening (Puncher & Wattmann 2025)

I know Toby Davidson mainly as a Francis Webb enthusiast. He did a beautiful job of editing the Collected Poems (UWA Publishing 2011) and has organised an annual Francis Webb reading for more than a decade.

Toby is also a poet in his own right. The Grand Reopening is his third collection. My blog post about his first, Beast Language, is at this link.

The Grand Reopening is a post-Covid-lockdown book. There are poems featuring haircuts, live-streamed funerals, the Great Resignation, ambivalence about going to the pub and the theatre. There are poems about crank conspiracies and an ‘Aussie Nazi’.

These poems are engaging, and they reward repeat reading, but the one that stands out has nothing to do with Covid. ‘His Blood Whisper Scolds the Deathless Intelligence’, a poem in sixteen parts, accounts for nearly half the book. It features Klippel-Trenaunay Syndrome (KPS), a rare congenital condition which, according to a helpful note:

affects limbs, especially legs, and is characterised by cutaneous capillary malformation (‘port wine stain’), higher temperature, variable or overgrown veins, tissue, bone and the internal sensation of pronounced or incompetent circulation.

The poem picks up on the word ‘pronounced’. Its speaker is a ‘slewed susurrus / spokeswhisperer / for the Syndrome’. The ‘Deathless Intelligence’ that it scolds is something like divine inspiration – creativity that comes and goes.

At the book’s launch last year, Toby Davidson said that he lives with KPS. So the poem’s narrative elements, mainly dealing with medical interventions and the experiences of ‘Child-He’, are autobiographical or at least autobiography-adjacent. It’s a portrait of the artist as a young man living with KPS, with the device of Syndrome-as-narrator allowing for distance and so reflection on meaning. In a back cover blurb, Kevin Hart says that this poem ‘enters the mind and heart and simply will not leave’. I agree.

Page 79*, happily, falls in the middle of this wonderful long poem. It’s the first of Section XII’s two pages:

The first thing you’ll notice is the patterning of words on the page. The whole poem is structure this way: in stanzas made up of three short lines, with alternate stanzas indented. The effect is of a slow heartbeat, a hypnotic to-and-fro, an expectation of call-and-response that is never consistently met but never totally disappointed. It reminds me of the way religious communities recite the Psalms antiphonally: the sides of the chapel recite/chant alternate lines. On this page you can see the call and response pattern in pairings like: ‘he’d learn’ / ‘I taught’; ‘spot’ / ‘piece’; ‘not a soul’ / ‘not even’; ‘floated’ / ‘leapt’; then ‘leapt’ /’raised his foot’.

The overall narrative moves along in this poem. Where previous sections have dealt with diagnostic and other medical interventions, here the whisperer takes the credit for the un-intrusive, non-surgical intervention of compression. Venosan compression stockings (they exist, I looked them up) bring relief. Paradoxically, and antiphonally, the sea brings relief in its vastness – but the main narrative of this section is about the discovery that that relief is temporary. In an earlier section, Child-He realises he can be alone, unaccompanied by the Blood Whisper, only in his dreams. Here he goes swimming alone, telling no one. On the next page he looks at the foot raised at the end of this one:

and it was shrunken,
bloodless, obscene,
wrong in his mind
_____________unrecognisable.

The emotional impact of the incident is summed up in the lines:

so much
_____________for being normal

The narrative conveys with a gut-punch something of the emotional reality of growing up with a congenital condition. The poem has other interests as well. What to make of this?

_____________not even the 
_____________Deathless
_____________Grand Pooh-bah
who co-wrote,
like I did, his best 
sacramental poems...

(The Deathless Intelligence collects a number of nicknames. The Gilbertian ‘Deathless Poo-bah’ is as disrespectful as they get.)

The Blood Whisper’s assertion that it is co-author of ‘his poems’ is part of what makes the long poem so engrossing. It’s not a simple body–mind opposition. The poet has two co-authors. One is the Deathless Intelligence, something like the traditional concept of a Muse, or the Christian tradition’s divine inspiration. The poem reaches for an understanding of how the physical reality – in this case a syndrome affecting the circulation – can also contribute to the creative process.

I’m a long way from grasping this poem. I’ll keep coming back to it. I’d love to hear in the comments from anyone who has engaged with it.

But that’s all I’ve got time for now.

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.

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Reading with the Grandies 35: Tui T. Sutherland’s Lost Continent

Posted on 12 May 2026 | 4 comments

Tui T. Sutherland, The Lost Continent (Book Eleven of the Wings of Fire series, Scholastic Press 2019)

My granddaughter is an obsessive reader, possibly even more so that I was at her age. She reads a lot of comics, often called ‘graphic novels’ to claim a vague respectability, but mostly of a kind that I find hard to take or even fake an interest in: baby sitters, schoolgirl politics, etc. But one series that takes a lot of her time, reading and rereading, and then rereading in apparently random order, is Tui T. Sutherland’s Wings of Fire series. First the comic versions and then the original proper-novel versions of the ones that haven’t been made into comics yet.

I did read the first of the Wings of Fire graphic novels, The Dragonet Prophecy, eighteen months ago. Recently when my granddaughter spontaneously offered to lend me The Lost Continent, how could I say no? It’s the eleventh novel in the series but, she said, it is the first in a whole new story arc (not her exact words – she is after all only eight). When I’d finished it she told me that her reason for letting me read it was that she wanted someone to talk to about the world of the novels. My motive for accepting was to be a decent grandfather and provide her with some company in her reading life.

Virtuous motivation aside, I have to report that I loved this book and am tempted to sign up for the rest of the series. In a prologue, a dragon called Clearsight arrives on a continent that’s far from her home. Chapter One takes up the story two thousand years later when Clearsight is revered as a prophet who is responsible for all that is good in the society. There are three main tribes of dragons on this continent: SilkWings, HiveWings and LeafWings. There has been a huge war. According to the official account, the vicious LeafWings were wiped out by heroic HiveWings (with a red flag to readers of all ages: trees were also wiped out). The SilkWings, forever indebted to their saviours, are pretty much a slave species. Ruling the whole society is Queen Wasp.

Blue, the main character, is a young SilkWing whose wings haven’t come in yet. He believes that all is well. He accepts as simple facts of life that he and his kind have to pass through checkpoints constantly and must never meet the eyes of a HiveWing. But when his older sister Luna’s butterfly-like metamorphosis is brutally interrupted by HiveWing soldiers he has a rude awakening, the seeds of a revolutionary spirit are sown, and adventures ensue.

(Yes, there are words like metamorphosis. Also inexorable. This series doesn’t insult its readers’ intelligence.)

On page 79* Blue has hidden from a host of HiveWings and has met someone we know from the first moment will be the love of his life, a HiveWing named Cricket. Where all the others of her kind can be mind-controlled by Queen Wasp (who Blue now realises is not a benevolent ruler), Cricket somehow remains untouched, and she has helped him to hide in the hive’s library. At the start of this page she wakes him from an exhausted sleep.

What can I say about this? The story rattles along. We never forget that the characters are dragons (‘the sound of tramping talons’, ‘his tail seemed to be entirely in the way’, she ‘put one claw to her mouth in warning’). The queen’s mind-control is vividly, and creepily, conveyed in the image of eyes as ‘blank white pearls’.

As far as I can tell from a quick web search, the books have been extremely popular and, in spite of fostering discussion of subjects including vegetarianism, pacifism, slavery, authoritarian modes of government, internalised oppression, they don’t seem to have fallen foul of book-banners. Maybe it’s because it’s only dragons.

I don’t plan to go back to the previous 10 books, but my granddaughter has lent me the comic version of Darkstalker, a stand-alone that gives some of the back story. Both duty and desire urge me to read it.

I am a man of settler heritage who has been alive for almost a third of the time elapsed since Arthur Phillip claimed this continent for the British crown. 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 of the blog.

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

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Sydney Writers’ Festival 2026, Day one minus 10

Posted on 8 May 2026 | 3 comments

The Sydney Writers’ Festival is coming. On Wednesday evening this week I had a foretaste of its joys. Niall Williams chatted for an hour with Phillipa McGuinness at the State Library to a largely grey-haired audience. I was one of half a dozen men in the full auditorium.

Niall Williams was at the end of his Australian visit, having done what Seamus Heaney described as ‘standing on his hind legs’ in Hobart and Sorrento. But from where I was sitting I saw no sign of weariness or going through the motions.

His opening remark, ‘Everyone in Faha says hello,’ signalled that he expected the audience to have read at least one of his last three books, and the response indicated that he was right. (For readers who need help in understanding the enthusiasm, I refer you to my blog posts about History of the Rain, This Is Happiness and Time of the Child.

In just one hour the conversation covered a number of topics. Much was said about rain, religion and rural Ireland.

The Irish language, repressed by the occupying English for centuries, was forcibly revived with the establishment of the republic, and only now is having what feels like an organic revival. When Williams and his wife Christine moved to County Clare in 1984, they found that people there had unselfcosciously retained smatterings of Irish: he gave examples of a word meaning a fistful used in a recipe, and one meaning an armful used when asking someone to bring some peat from the yard.

Meditating on the phrase, ‘Once upon a time …’, he asked, ‘Why upon rather than, say, in or at?’ Story, he said with his hands as much as his words, lies on a plane above the real world. It doesn’t reproduce it, but refers to it. In writing about Faha, he doesn’t try to give an accurate picture of life in rural Ireland 80 years ago, but the story he tells rests upon his sense of what it was like.

When he first started writing about Faha – which by is based closely on the community he and Christine found in County Clare – he just didn’t want to stop. The book found its own way of coming to an end, so he went on to write another, and then another, and according to a bookmark given us at the end of the session, there’s another coming out in November, called O Now!

He read a couple of pages from Time of the Child. He chose the passage that ends with the doctor holding the little baby, and beginning to dance. There was magic in the way his body (and I suspect the bodies of half the audience) began ever so slightly to sway to the music of his sentences.

Phillipa McGuinness did a lovely job as interlocutor. Sadly there was no time for audience questions, so I didn’t get to ask how he would pronounce ‘Teige’ (see previous post for explanation). Even more sadly, the Emerging Artist and I had to leave before the end to perform out grand-duties. As we were leaving, Williams was paying tribute to his wife’s creativity in their garden and using gardening as an analogy for his own creative process.

I am a man of settler heritage who has been alive for almost a third of the time elapsed since Arthur Phillip claimed this continent for the British crown. The State Library is on unceded Gadigal land and is built, as Phillipa McGuinness reminded us, from stone that was once sand walked on by the people who have lived here for tens of thousands of years. 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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Niall Williams, The Fall of Light and the Book Group

Posted on 6 May 2026 | 4 comments

Niall Williams, The Fall of Light (Picador 2001, Picador ebook 2010)

Before the meeting: The group has previously enjoyed three Niall Williams novels (my blog posts here, here, and here). This month’s chooser decided that we couldn’t have enough of this good thing.

The other novels have been set in the fictional Irish town of Faha. In so far as this one centres on a particular place, it is the real-life Scattery Island in the estuary of the Shannon River, though the action also wanders over three continents. According to a foreword, the novel is a family story that has passed down through generations, embellished on the way.

The story unfolds in 19th century Ireland. In the context of longstanding, brutal English occupation and the devastating potato famine, we follow the travails and adventures of the Foleys. First Emer the mother leaves. Then her husband Francis and their four sons set out across the width of Ireland, on what they see as an epic quest, seeking a new life in the West, in Galway. First Francis is swept away by a river in flood. Then the brothers are separated. Tomas the eldest falls catastrophically in love and flees for his life with his beloved. Of the next two brothers, twins, Finan finds his way to Africa, and Finbar becomes the leader of a community of Gypsies. The youngest brother, with the deeply Irish name Teige, has an uncanny facility with horses that opens possibilities for him. It’s all told in wonderfully musical prose with a touch of what you could call Celtic magic realism.

The family is dispersed – to Africa, to continental Europe, and to North America. The book is most vibrantly alive in the Irish sections. Finan’s life in Africa is told briefly at third hand. Finbar’s adventures with the Gypsies (probably not what they’d be called if the book were written now) left me unconvinced, though there are some wonderful moments, of which my favourite occurs when Finbar, who has waited outside the caravan where his partner was in labour, calls out, ‘How is my son?’ The midwife replies:

‘Your son has no penis.’ She watched as all the fathers’ heads came up and their eyes opened and their mouths dropped and there was a kind of moan that passed among them like a wind.
‘No penis! But two heads!’ she shouted, and bought her hands up to the sunken sides of her leathery face and leaned back and hooted a kind of hoo-hoo of owl-like laughter to the astonishment of all.

When I told a version of that to my grandchildren they were quick to guess that there were twin girls.

Two sons end up in North America. The westward trek in the USA, paralleling the one in Ireland, is a different kind of desolation – a solitary Meek’s Cutoff. But, like the Gypsy story, these sections lack the Irish sections’ vivid sense of place and I was always glad when the narrative returned to Ireland.

Though I infinitely prefer to read books in hard copy, I had to content myself this time with an ebook from the library. Where page 79* falls depends on your settings, but in my reading it occurs at about the one-third point. Francis and Teige, father and son, have been reunited against all odds. (You might have guessed that the shape of the story is separation and then arduously achieved, partial reunion.) After some time together Teige tells Francis that he has done what they all set out to do in the first place – he has seen the sea, and gone into it, even though he was afraid of its wildness. The father says he was ‘right to try it and keep well out of it’:

Another pause, then Teige added: ‘I didn’t though.’
‘You didn’t?’
The pony flicked her head. Her tail swished. The boy looked at her a moment and felt his father’s eyes upon him.
‘No,’ he said, ‘I still went in, three times.’
The father said nothing then. He sat there and the emotions he held made his lips quiver. He blinked. Dark clouds moved across the sky. The night fell and the stars came and went and wheeled above them and each lay down to the slender hope of their dreams.

This kind of interplay between understated dialogue, big emotions and romantic descriptions, all framed in a mild mockery, is one of the joys of the book. ‘The father said nothing then.’ We have followed Francis’s narrow escape from drowning, so know what lies behind his quivering lips and blink. Maybe the dark clouds and the stars are there to mark the passage of time, but they are also a way of showing the thing that can’t be said by these inarticulate characters: for Francis, the realisation that his son has dared to go into the ocean marks a great shift in his own emotional state. It lends strength to ‘the slender hope’ of his dreams.

You might wonder what that pony is doing there, flicking her head and swishing her tail. Teige has calmed her down and ridden her in a race for the Gypsies, after which she has become his steadfast companion. He is forever moving close to nervous horses, stroking them and speaking to them in language that isn’t quite words, calming them and coaxing them to do what their owners require. It’s an almost magical power that places him at the emotional heart of the book.

This stage of the narrative is a journey. Francis is looking for what will come to be known as Scattery Island – monks who saved him from drowning have given him directions. Both he and Teige are seeking the other sons and their mother.

Still on page 79:

The following day when they were passing a cottage a cry stopped them. The cottage was not unlike others, a small building of dark stone with crooked windows and a door open to the road even in that February. The cry was that of a woman, it came from the garden beyond. The Foleys stopped, the pony flicked her ears. Then Francis called out. There was no response and Francis looked to Teige who slid down the pony. Together they walked in around the cottage and found in a small garden a woman of fifty years trying to pull up from the earthen ridges the fallen body of her husband.

The landscape they travel through is full of suffering and death. Mostly there’s a generosity of spirit among the sufferers. Here Francis and Teige don’t hesitate before they stop to help, and in the nature of fairy tales – or family stories that have been polished and decorated by generations of telling – when they help this couple and their children they gain information that leads them forward dramatically in their quest.

I’ve mentioned Scattery Island a couple of times. The real-life island at the mouth of the Shannon River is better known as Inis Cathaigh (the link is to its Wikipedia page). It became a place of safety for a community of pilots during the Great Famine. How Francis and the other Foleys relate to that actual history is a beautiful invention.

The meeting: We met, unusually, in a pub. It was a beautiful space, though noisy, which made it hard to maintain a single conversation, even with the music turned down. we displaced a women’s baseball team (‘We don’t usually come to the pub on a Tuesday night in our uniforms’) and were displaced in turn by a group of young women toting laptops.

We had a terrific discussion of the book.

A number of us confessed that they had come to the book reluctantly. We’ve read three of his books already. Do we have to read one more? For some, it came alive when the famine appeared. For others, it was the language from the very beginning. I don’t think anyone wasn’t won over completely.

To generalise, we were all willing to forgive its faults because the story rattles along brilliantly, and the writing is wonderful. We differed on what the faults were. One man couldn’t bear the unrealistic elements of the romance between Teige and a wealthy Englishwoman – others (me included) were charmed by its improbabilities. Some loved the sequence where all the Gypsy women give birth on the same day, whereas other (me included) were irritated by the artifice. We were all, I think, unenthusiastic about the North American sections, and even more so by the almost perfunctory treatment of the brother who goes to Africa.

Someone pointed out that it’s a book about men, that the women aren’t fully developed characters. (This observation case an interesting light on the midwife’s joke I quoted above – the character’s assumption that a baby will be male reflects an awareness of the male-centred nature of the narrative in general.)

At the end of the book, the narrator reveals that Tiege is his ancestor. Some of us took this to be an authorial statement – and an explanation for why the narrative is less ‘tight’ than other Williams novels: this is a version of his own family story, so was obliged to go where the actual history had gone, even if fancifully. I’m inclined to think the narrator is separate from the author.

Someone observed that the book is suffused with love, especially love among the Foley men. we agreed that this is true of the book, an it led to a number of us telling stories about their siblings, mainly brothers. There was a theme of connections being lost or broken and re-established after a period. I didn’t realise it at the time, but this was an astonishing echo of the book’s shape.

One question remained unresolved. How =do you pronounce ‘Teige’. Everyone except me rhyme it with ‘intrigue’. I hear it as ‘tyke’ but with a soft end. Opinions welcome in the comments.

The Book Group members are all men of settler heritage. We met on Gadigal land. I wrote this blog post on the land of Gadigal and Wangal of the Eora Nation. I acknowledge Elders past and present and welcome any First Nations readers of the blog.

* My blogging practice is focus arbitrarily on the page of a book that coincides with my age, currently page 79.

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Starting How to End a Story

Posted on 30 Apr 2026 | 2 comments

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

A generous friend gave me this whopping tome for my birthday this year.

Someone said, ‘It’s a book you dip into rather than read from start to finish.’ But I’m not much of a dipper, so I’ve decided to take it on as a slow read – five pages a day for six months or so. I loved doing that with Seamus Heaney’s letters. Why not with Helen Garner’s diaries?

The diaries were originally published in three volumes: Yellow Notebook (2019), One Day I’ll Remember This (2020), and How to End a Story (2021), covering the years 1978 to 1986, 1987 to 1995 and 1995 to 1988 respectively.

From what I’ve read elsewhere, I understand that Garner kept diaries for decades before the entries that begin Yellow Notebook, but she burned them all, and decided in 1978 to write readable diary, not necessarily for publication, but with attention to the crafting of sentences. Four decades after starting the first proper diary in a yellow notebook acquired for the purpose, she decided to publish, with minimal alterations, and none to spare her own feelings.

I’ve just read the first five pages. My initial response is to feel a little deprived that the entries aren’t dated, and people are identified only by a single initial. Any information about what relationship people have to Garner is to be deduced from the text – which is an odd bit of false reticence when of the two character mentioned so far one is clearly Garner’s daughter and the other seems to be a lover whose identity I imagine would be easy to discover. Similarly, there is no scaffolding to say where an entry was written: on the first pages Garner is feeling alone in a city, and only gradually does it merge that she’s in France, probably in Paris.

I’m probably just missing Christopher Reid’s helpful annotations in the Seamus Heaney book, and I’ll get used to this bare approach.

I hope to write a first monthly report towards the end of May.

I am a man of settler heritage who has been alive for almost a third of the time elapsed since Arthur Phillip claimed this continent for the British crown. 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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