Kit Kelen’s Food of Love

Posted on 24 Jun 2026 | Leave a comment

Kit Kelen, Food of Love: concert pieces / 101 poems (Flying Island Poets 2026)

‘If music be the food of love, play on.’ Anyone who did the Queensland Junior Scholarship exam in 1972 will recognise that as the opening line of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, which we read with commentary at least four times over the year. (Oddly, though I was in a class of 15 year old boys, I don’t remember any sniggering about the play’s gender-based comedy, but that’s another story.)

Each of the 101 poems in this pocket-sized book includes the name of a piece of music as a subtitle, and often the combination of title and subtitle could stand as a poem by itself. For example, ‘placating a serial killer / Rimsky-Korsakov’s “Scheherazade”’ or ‘we sing what the ghost sings / “Waltzing Matilda”’. Just the titles give joy. My favourite title-as-mini-poem is ‘trout as earworm / Schubert’s “The Trout”’.

Most of the music is classical, but the book casts a wide net – ‘The Teddy Bears’ Picnic’ and the theme tune from The White Lotus both get a guernsey.

What the poems do with their musical ‘sources’ varies widely. They might describe the music, as in the first line of ‘at the castle keep / Rimsky-Korsakov’s orchestration of Mussorgsky’s “Night on Bare Mountain”’ (page 38):

great insect or whirr of the orc hoard

They might enlarge on the music’s theme or narrative – as in ‘the cloud sorter’s dream / Joni Mitchell’s “Both Sides Now”’, or ‘numanah numananah and where are we now / Ron Grainer’s Dr Who theme’ (page 103):

someone must yet invent this planet

they have already in time to come
in time for supper sometimes

Some play with the associations the music has gathered over its lifetime – so Rossini’s Barber of Saville has inspired ‘on the occasion of Bugs Bunny’s 80th birthday’.

There’s nothing obvious or facile in the way the poetry does these things. At the book’s Sydney launch at the Addison Road Writers’ Festival last month, Peter Boyle described Kit Kelen’s poetry as ‘cubist’. Whether or not you know the relevant music, you have a sense that the poem is looking at it from a number of points of view – bouncing off it, coming back at another angle, sometimes going off and doing its own thing. This can make for difficulty, even incomprehensibility, but there’s pleasure in it.

I usually single out one poem when I write about a poetry book. Here, rather than my arbitrary choice of page 79 (my age), I’m looking at page 101 (may I live so long): ‘Cordelia’s song / John Cage’s 4’33”’:

I love the pairing in the title. In case you need reminding, Cordelia is King Lear’s favourite daughter who, when asked what she can say about her love for him, replies, ‘Nothing, my lord.’ In case you also need reminding, the score John Cage’s ‘4’33″’ instructs the musicians not to play their instruments for 4 minutes and 33 seconds. They are two great Nothing moments, where the ‘nothing’ is rich – Cordelia will not speak because to do so would belittle her love; Cage, as I understand it, invites the audience to attend to the unscripted music of life itself.

The poem proceeds in the manner Kit Kelen has made his own. There are sentences whose subject is understood, and sentences that stop as soon as enough has been said for the reader to know (or guess, or invent) their endings. Syntax is just slightly out of kilter. Punctuation is scarce, which leads to teasing ambiguities. Language is made strange, but it stays friendly.

What I like most about the poem after a number of readings is the way its apparently fragmentary nature comes together into a deeply satisfying whole.

Take the first couplet:

imagine just inside your scone 
(rarely gets airplay)

A prose paraphrase might be: ‘Imagine what’s going on inside your head, and only that. It’s something that you rarely pay attention to.’ But ‘scone’ is more interesting than ‘head’ – apart from the effect of its slangy informality, it implies the thinking mind as well as the physical head. And ‘airplay’ is more than attention: with Cage’s composition in mind, the word suggests that the piece allows what’s in your ‘scone’ to be heard as if in a concert: the random thoughts as well as the tinnitus (or whatever people who don’t have tinnitus hear in their ears).

The second triplet places us in the concert hall:

face all emotion, one would expect 
conductor's hands open 
as if she/he would receive

Well, not exactly in the concert hall. The book is dedicated ‘for everyone at ABC Classic FM, for all you have taught me over many years’. The dominant voice of the book isn’t that of a concert-gooer, but of a music-listener. This line implies that the poem’s speaker has not seen the piece performed. ‘One would expect…” The beautifully evoked image of the conductor about to begin has a mildly ironic flavour here.

We shift again in the next line, to an abstract reflection on the piece, placing it, perhaps, in the context of Eastern meditation practices:

the effort at nothing in mind

The next couplet takes another leap altogether, into pure, tantalising, paradoxical nonsense, about which I have nothing to say:

imagine a funnel the planet falls through 
and that's the proof – imagining!

As I read it, the next few stanzas are versions of what goes through this listener’s mind during the piece. First, he realises that the absence of played music is not the same as silence, that there is never silence (the contorted syntax – ‘there is no ever’ – creating the effect of a thought being reshaped as it forms), that instead of silence there’s hush in which the sound of a distant bird can be herd, and the sound of what feels like your own brain at work:

there is no ever silence 

there's hush and through the wall 
some far bird breaks the day

you will think it is the mind's mechanics

As with any experimental art, derisory voices are heard, and responded to. 

could do this in your sleep 
and I do

This couplet reminds me of Alice Miller’s discussion of Picasso’s late paintings in her wonderful collection of essays on the role of trauma in creativity and destructiveness, The Untouched Key. People might look at those paintings and say, ‘A four year old could do this.’ Miller argues that it took genius create something with the simplicity that comes naturally to a four year old. Here, ‘You could do this in your sleep,’ is meant as a similar slur, but the response ‘and I do’ turns it into praise – the piece does something that most of us can only do when sleeping.

Then another resistant comment. Who hasn’t thought when faced with a piece of conceptual art, ‘I see the idea, I don’t need to see it played out’? 

this theory's already proven 
no need to show it off

In response, the poem takes off, with one couplet and four one-line stanzas, groping to put words to the experience of listening to Cage’s piece. It’s worth paying attention to pronouns. So far, there has been ‘one’, ‘you’ and ‘I’. Now it is ‘we’. 

a melody commences
here where we’ve never met before

it’s only the world turning we hear

it’s just this old hat for a head

here’s the answer to a prayer

Each of those stanzas takes a different tack: perhaps it’s a pause at the start of something new; perhaps it’s a chance to think about our place in the cosmos; maybe it’s just something comfortable and undemanding (though ‘this old hat for a head’ refuses to be tied down to a specific neat meaning); perhaps it’s a quiet sense of spiritual presence. Maybe it’s all of those. Whatever:

an orchestra’s required

An orchestra and being part of an audience. I’m reminded of a passage from David Malouf’s essay ‘Being There’, which could well have had Cage’s piece in mind:

All those elements of noise out of which organised sound arose – the street noises we have just stepped away from, voices in the foyer, the whispers and shuffling before the conductor is quite ready, the slight disturbance of the air that is created by 2000 men and women breathing, even the occasional cough, that substratum of undifferentiated sound against which made music has to assert itself, and against which we bring ourselves to attention. Somehow, to experience the fulness of what music offers we have all to be there. Presence is everything.

I think David Malouf would have enjoyed this poem.

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 currently blue-skied 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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Michael Winkler’s Griefdogg at the Book Group

Posted on 17 Jun 2026 | 4 comments

Michael Winkler, Griefdogg (Text Publishing 2026)

Before the meeting: Many smart, thoughtful people with excellent taste love this book, so don’t take too much notice of me when I say I found it irritating, chaotic, self-indulgent, contrived, box-ticking and maybe just a little bit culturally appropriating. Also the back cover blurb gives away the two shoe drops that I didn’t know I was waiting for.

I kept reading after the first couple of pages out of devotion to the Book Group, and resolved to hold my tongue at the meeting so as to glean what other people love about the book.

My usual practice of looking at page 79 (my age) would just lead to a lot of grumpy exclamations, which would add nothing to the sum total of human knowledge, so I’ll refrain.

I did have an unexpected stab of pleasure on page 141. The narrator is indulging in one of many digressions on environmental issues, and moves on from fracking and mining to ‘the mindless introduction of pests and weeds’:

Who decided to introduce buffel grass in the 1950s? Names should be named. It is on the public record that government entomologist Reginald Mungomery was the first to bring in cane toads. Thomas Austin, the wealthy buffoon, is credited with setting loose thirteen rabbits imported from England at Winchelsea in 1859. I know a man who knows the names of the brothers who released the Boolarra strain of European carp in pondage near Merbein in 1964, after which they swam into the Murray River and wrecked the ecology forever. Induct them all into a hall of shame for ecological and waterway degradation. Let us piff rotten fruit at them.

Reg Mungomery was a relative of mine, a cousin several times removed. He visited us once when I was a child. He wasn’t proud of the cane toads. I’m thrilled enough when the town I come from is mentioned in Literature. But this is actually a Family Member! I almost decided to like the book. But only almost.

I expect I’ll look like an idiot when it’s shortlisted for every pretigious award.

The meeting; I didn’t manage to hold my tongue, partly because I’d said something blunt on the pre-meeting WhatsApp chat. Once we’d sat down to our usual excellent bring-something dinner and canvassed the state of architecture in Sydney (are developers running the show or are they weeping with frustration?), theatre (David Wenham is brilliant in An Iliad), they made me vent my spleen. Reluctantly at first but increasingly enjoying myself I complied. I happened to be sitting at one end of the table. Then, brilliantly, the man sitting at the other end spoke eloquently and at length about why he loved the book. I don’t think I’ve ever enjoyed a conversation more.

I’m a firm believer that the perspective of someone who loves a book will be more interesting than that of a hater, so I’ll try to summarise what the lover said – and refrain from verbalising my different take.

In the previous week, he had started on a number of books that adhere to contemporary norms (a number of points of view presented turn by turn, etc.), and couldn’t finish any of them. He picked up Griefdogg and was delighted from the start that he didn’t know what was happening or where it was going. It felt like a brave book. It’s messy, throws a lot of stuff into the mix and sometimes it doesn’t work, but how much better to have something that tries and occasionally fails than something that plays safe the whole time.

Specifically, he loved the masculinity theme. There’s a sex scene near the start that makes comedy from a focus on performance, and the main plot line asks what happens if you radically reject the expectation that men will be over-responsible and over-worked.

The treatment of place is brilliant: Mildura as a small rural community where everyone knows everyone’s business, but everyone has secret griefs. At one point the main character’s adult child comes home from a time in Melbourne and names the way the city is ignorant and uncaring about rural realities – the book as a whole addresses that ignorance.

There’s a lot of hydrology, much of it highly technical, which provides a metaphorical underpinning.

Towards the end the main character creates a piece of public art, which my Book Group friend described in wonderful lyrical language.

The respectful treatment of Aboriginal issues in a book with only one peripheral Aboriginal character is impressive. In particular there’s a dig at urban pieties that turn out to be lethally uncaring when push comes to shove

As I was typing this, I received a text that began ‘A last ditch attempt to influence your blog.’ I’d love to quote the whole text, but I want to avoid spoilers (and if you want to avoid them, don’t read the back cover blurb). I’ll just quote this:

We have a new male hero created from a vey different story arc. A sometimes clumsy and overwritten one, but one that places the man’s newfound awareness squarely and beneficially in his community.

There were six of us, and we were pretty evenly divided. Of the two non-finishers, one had tried a number of times and failed to get enough traction to take him past the 7 percent mark. The other was still partway through the first of the three sections and quite enjoying it. Of the other two, one liked the book, and particularly found the ending wonderful (I can’t hold back completely – I loathed the ending, even more after he said why he loved it). The other was pretty much in my camp. He compared it to the work of theatre directors like Barry Kotsky – always drawing attention to themselves rather than to the work: it needed a couple more revisions, he said.

There were some points of agreement. We all enjoyed the high-quality dad jokes that are scattered through the text. A favourite was: ‘Why did the chicken cross the Möbius strip?’ You can find the answer on the interwebs.

A final thought: I’ve recently listened to Zac Seidler talking to Richard Fidler on ABC’s Conversations (you can hear it at this link). He talks about the limited opportunities in our society for men to talk about meaningful things. It made me realise all over again what a terrific thing this Book Group is.

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.

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Raewyn Connell’s Trans Lives

Posted on 14 Jun 2026 | 3 comments

Raewyn Connell, Trans Lives: Social Realities Across the Globe (Polity 2026)

Raewyn Connell is an Australian social scientist who has written widely on education and gender issues. She is also a trans women. She brings a scholarly insider’s perspective to this short book on trans issues. The back cover does a nice job of summarising:

Raewyn Connell gathers the evidence about the lives of trans women and men, hijr, travesti, and other groups around the world. She looks at the forces shaping trans lives, including medicine and its limitations, precarity and poverty, unequal gender relations, the role of sex work, the state and the corporate economy. She discusses what is behind anti-trans campaigns, criticising the simplistic idea that ‘transphobia’ explains these, suggesting more potent causes. Finally, by exploring the creative ways trans groups have organised, she argues for the contribution they can and should make to solving our shared contemporary crises.
Written in clear and vivid language, this book offers illuminating new perspectives on gender transitions, and on gender itself.

In a field that often features mudslinging polemic from one direction and rigid insistence on correct language from the other, the book’s first sentences set a steady, good-humoured, magisterial tone:

Call it sex change, gender reassignment, gender affirmation, or gender transition. It is a very intimate and a very public process. It often means changes in the body, and always means changes in the way the body is seen by others.

‘Call it what you will, here are some realities.’ The book is interested in groups more than individuals. While acknowledging that voices from the individualistic USA tend to frame the way trans issues are discussed all over the world, it casts its net wide, citing scholars from Africa, Latin America and Asia, and reporting on personal visits to some of those places.

The most influential ideas in this discussion come from the global North, especially the USA. But most trans groups actually live in the post-colonial, majority world. Any attempt to understand transition and issues around it must take careful account of their experience. (Page 2)

Careful is a good word. The book does feel careful, not as in treading on eggshells, but handling with loving, scholarly care. Even its flashes of radical lefty-ism feel careful. On page 87, for example, Connell writes, ‘Perhaps the most researched of all social divisions, class is also the most denied.’ Or this on page 102: ‘Populist and fundamentalist influence has surged; the liberal oligarchies called “democracies” are in retreat.’

The most interesting bit of information about trans politics worldwide is that although homosexuality is vehemently condemned in Iran, in 1986 the Ayatollah formally declared that change of sex was not forbidden under Islamic law – and a bureaucracy now exists to deal with gender transitions in that country.

There’s an excellent discussion of gender, as it concerns people who are not trans as well as those who are. First, Connell questions the term ‘cisgender’ for a number of reasons, of which I really like the third:

It gives far too rosy a picture of sexed bodies and gender identities being ‘aligned’ … Cisgender people, it seems, have no gender trouble. They are the normals, the sun shines as they sit around their swimming pools in their married couples … The image of trouble-free conformity conveyed by the concept is unreal.

Humans share the ‘clever device’ of sexual reproduction with many animal and plant species. As humans (or, as she says, humanid apes) developed, ‘the process of biological evolution was gradually mingled with, and then outpaced by, the social dynamic of history’. She uses the term social embodiment: our bodies are given us by evolution, but ‘how they work in practice is given to us by our history’:

Our lives are both social and biological, and these realities are necessarily interwoven. There is not an either/or.

That is true of food, shelter, sexuality, and also of gender. I’m truncating her line of reasoning terribly, but what follows is that gender can be thought of as a project – that is, individuals respond to situations and expectations, and make their own paths. We all do this. For trans people the gender project is not ‘aligned’ with biology. The concept of gender dysphoria focuses on the emotional pain of this difference. As I understand Connell’s account, a trans person is someone who just knows that, for example, he is a girl even though his body is male. Any emotional pain, such as a sense of being betrayed by one’s body at puberty, is a consequence, not a cause. Some people who have this knowledge manage to conform to social expectations, others struggle to act on what they know of themselves. Some are lucky enough to find a community, a group, that they can join.

There’s a lot more. The history of trans medicine is fascinating. Likewise the placing of trans struggles in the context of other social realities including women’s issues and class struggles.

I’ll just draw attention to two more things, both aiming to break down the sense that trans people are inevitably set apart from the rest of humanity.

The cover blurb mentions that Connell criticises the USA-originated term transphobia. Her most interesting objection to the term is this:

I am concerned that the concept of ‘transphobia’ loads the responsibility for bigotry onto the general population, and lifts it off the right-wing politicians, bishops, journalists, sectarian feminists and other ideologues who have so visibly been stirring up fear and hatred recently. Even if we assume a vague popular prejudice in the background, that explains neither the wild exaggerations of supposed threat nor the spectacular cruelty of recent anti-trans campaigns.

The first thing I saw when I opened the book was the final entry in the ‘Notes and References’ section, which refers to the parable of the Good Samaritan in the Gospel of Luke:

Luke’s text was compiled at least half a century later, yet this seems likely to be a valid oral tradition about Jesus. It is consistent with both the style and content of his social teaching generally attested.

I love that careful framing of the Biblical quote as a historical resource of a particular kind. When I reached the section ‘Solidarity’ in which the Good Samaritan is mentioned, I was pleased all over again:

The point of the story is the despised outsider giving help, when the privileged do not.
Trans groups … have some resources: energy and agency, a history and distinctive experience, creativity, capacity to organise. Loving our neighbours, using those resources in cooperation with them, is the best thing we can do.

I know very few trans people, but those I know are well placed to rise to this challenge.

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 currently rain-soaked 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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Reading with the Grandies 36: Tui T. Sutherland’s darkstalker, the graphic novel

Posted on 9 Jun 2026 | Leave a comment

Tui T. Sutherland, Darkstalker: The Graphic Novel (adapted by Barry Deutsch & Rachel Swirsky, art by Jake Parker, colorist Maarta Laiho, Graphix Press 2025)

Tui T. Sutherland’s Wings of Fire series continues to dominate my granddaughter’s reading. When I asked her about a character in The Lost Continent, the second book in the series I’ve read, she handed me the comics version of Darkstalker, a stand-alone novel, saying that it would explain the background. She was right.

The action of Darkstalker takes place two thousand years before the main series. It answers my questions about the nature of Clearsight, the dragon venerated almost as a god in The Lost Continent. I’m guessing from its final image that the character Darkstalker emerges as a major villain in the series. This is his origin story: a tale of love and ambition, of good intentions leading to terrible deeds, of epic battles and bloody assassinations. It includes a scene that resembles the Blood Wedding from Game of Thrones. There’s a magical device that could be a satirical take on Donald Trump’s golden dome. At the heart of the narrative are challenging ethical issues.

For what it’s worth, I would recommend the prose novels rather than the comics. I found the art in this book generally unattractive compared to that in The Lost Prophecy (different artist, same colorist). To my eye, the many characters aren’t different enough from each other – I suppose there’s only so much you can do with dragon faces and bodies. But the story is gripping, and ends in a satisfying cliffhanger.

Page 79* illustrates both my dissatisfaction with the art and my enjoyment of the complexity:

These two characters are Darkstalker (on the left, with crooked horns) and Clearsight. They are both animuses (or is it animi? a question raised by the characters, not me), that is to say, they both have magical powers. [Ny granddaughter has read this and informs me that Clearsight is actually NOT an animus.] Clearsight is a seer, who can see many versions of the future with remarkable clarity, and is acutely aware that a decision made in the present determines which of many futures will come to pass. Darkstalker has the most powerful magic of any living dragon. They have just met for the first time, though because of their remarkable powers it’s as if they know each other intimately from their intense future relationship. On page 77 Darkstalker takes one of Clearsight’s claws/hands in his, and page 78 shows us the kaleidoscopic visions this produces in her mind – a smattering of blood, images of grief, tenderness, pride, a scroll and a bracelet whose meaning will be made clear later …

On this page, we realise that Darkstalker has not seen the visions, and he promises in gentlemanly manner that he will never read Clearsight’s mind. Only then do they introduce themselves. Clearsight can say her name is Tailbite because she knows that he knows that she knows he was expecting her. It’s love at first sight, but that sight has been preceded by detailed visions of each other. Clearsight’s thought bubbles in the final frame might be read as expressing pure romantic love, but there’s terror there as well: ‘I want to fly away and I want to keep having this conversation for eternity’. This moment of first meeting is filled with joy. But Clearsight knows how many ways and how terribly things could go dark. Well, reader, they do go very dark, and she was right to want to hold onto this moment. People coming to this after reading books in the series published before it will know that already, so the moment is charged with tragic irony.

From the little joke about the plural of animus to the complex play with what the ability to read minds and see the future can do to relationships, this is a book that treats its young readers with respect. The popularity of the series is comforting evidence that young people’s attention spans may not be as monstrously shortened as we some people fear.

Also, I enjoyed this story a lot.

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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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 | 1 comment

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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