Susan Wyndham’s Elizabeth Harrower and the Book Club

Posted on 2 Feb 2026 | Leave a comment

Susan Wyndham, Elizabeth Harrower: The Woman in the Watch Tower (NewSouth Publishers 2025)

I mistimed my reading of this book. I finished it just before we had to head off to the Book Club meeting, so I can’t do my usual thing of writing a bit about my own take on the book before reporting on the evening’s conversation. It turned out only two of the five of us had read the whole book, and the other completer had also just finished it that afternoon. Of the other three, two hadn’t looked at the book at all and one had read less than a hundred pages.

Nevertheless we had an animated conversation, partly because more of us had read Elizabeth Harrower’s novel The Watch Tower, and there are obvious points of connection between the two books.

Elizabeth Harrower (1928–2020) had four novels and a number of short stories published in the 1950s and 1960s. A fifth novel was accepted for publication in 1970, but she withdrew it in what she later describes as the moment she decided to destroy her life (page 156). From the early 1970s she was a self-identified writer who published nothing. She did go on writing, including copious letters and what she referred to as ‘something big’, which there is no record of anyone clapping eyes on. If the big thing actually existed, she must have destroyed it. Early this century she was rediscovered. Her novels and short stories were republished, or in some cases published for the first time, and in her last years, she enjoyed a degree of celebrity.

Two biographies were published in 2025. Before Susan Wyndham’s appeared, Latrobe University Press published Helen Trinca’s Looking for Elizabeth: The Life of Elizabeth Harrower. To add to the riches, 2024 had seen the publication of Hazzard and Harrower: The Letters, edited by by Brigitta Olubas and Susan Wyndham, consisting of four decades of correspondence between Harrower and Shirley Hazzard.

I’m sorry to say it, but at the end of our evening, none of us admitted to wanting to read further.

This was partly because Harrower tended to guard her privacy, and though she referred to herself as ‘a divorced child’ and much can be inferred about her early life from her novels, Wyndham’s account of her childhood is necessarily vague. Her piling on of whatever information she was able to discover – such as the fancy dress costumes young Betty wore – may be interesting to some readers, but to me they just feel like clutter. The clutter doesn’t end with childhood: there are lists of movies and plays that Harrower attends, descriptions of what she cooks for dinner, lists of dinner guests, and so on – the effect of which, for me at least, is that any broader narrative shape gets lost. Yet such details appear to be the only way available to flesh out the picture.

The portrait that emerges, in my reading, is of a woman who was bullied as a child and continued to see herself as bullied, misunderstood and under-appreciated for the rest of her life: bullied especially by her writer friends, including Patrick White, Kylie Tennant, Shirley Hazzard, Judah Waten and Christina Sread, all of whom loom large in this book. But I don’t entirely trust that picture as it seems to be drawn from her letters – and it may be a mistake to take someone’s bitching about one friend to another as a reliable indication of how that relationship really works.

I wasn’t the only one at our meeting to get a sense of Harrower as unpleasantly self-pitying. Someone asked a number of times, ‘Why did all those people keep being friends with her?’ On reflection, my guess is that it’s because – contrary to the image Susan Wyndham has extracted from the documents – she was actually good company, kind and interested in people, endlessly supportive of friends in need. (I learned a lot about the terrible sufferings of Kylie Tennant’s family, and about Shirley Hazzard’s mother whom Harrower befriended and cared for in trying circumstances). But if, as a biographer probably must, you focus on the toll such other-focused activity takes, you allow a sense of the person as a whingey self-sacrificer to emerge. Likewise with moments when friends complain about her: such moments may have been exceptional in life but come across as typical in the telling.

And then I remembered enjoying Susan Wyndham’s ‘Introduction’ in which she describes her own relationship with Harrower as a journalist and friend. Rereading it, I was struck by this paragraph:

Questions bubbled up in my mind from the depths of her past. How did this good-humoured woman write such disturbing novels? And why did she stop? They were questions she didn’t want to answer, or couldn’t after all this time. Later I realised they were the wrong questions. While I wanted to know about her childhood, her parents, her writing, her love affairs, she veered into talking about friends past and present. I should have taken the clue that her stories about Patrick, Christina and Judah were not just sentimental memories but the scaffolding of her adult life. She was a kind and porous friend, sometimes more concerned about the lives of others than was good for her. Her wide circles of friends were her family.

Perhaps that’s the version of Harrower’s life that is struggling to emerge from the welter of detail. It was a good life. There’s an implied criticism in the question, ‘Why did she stop?’ After all, she wrote five more novels than most people. Shouldn’t that be enough?

The Book Club met on the land of the Bidjigal and Gadigal clans of the Eora Nation, overlooking the ocean. I wrote the blog post on Wangal and Gadigal land as the wind outside my windows gradually died down to a gentle breeze. 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.

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The Book Club at Elizabeth Harrower’s Watch Tower

Posted on 1 Feb 2026 | 5 comments

Elizabeth Harrower, The Watch Tower (1966. Text Classics 1996)

Before the meeting: I’m sticking to my resolve to write only about page 78*.

If you want a brief, thoughtful discussion of this book and its place in Elizabeth Harrower’s life work, there are plenty around. I recommend Kerryn Goldsworthy’s review, published in the Australian Book Review in 2012 (at this link). I particularly like this:

It is an accomplished and sophisticated novel of great power and intensity, but, as with most good psychological realism, the reader approaches the final pages with a sensation of exhausted, bruised relief.

It turns out that focusing on page 78 means paying attention to something I saw as of secondary interest on first reading.

This page features the book’s villain, Felix Shaw. (Sadly Elizabeth Harrower seems to have it in for Shaw men: a number of her villains have our family name.) For most of the book its main characters, Laura and Clare Vaizey, abandoned by their mother, live under Felix’s thrall, Laura as his much younger wife and Clare initially as a teenage girl in his care. There’s no romance, no love, and Felix is a misogynist in the full sense of the word – he actually hates women, and constantly torments, abuses and emotionally manipulates the two under his control.

Most of the book focuses on the sisters’ wretched servitude and isolation, but the moments when we see Felix apart from them, like this one, are interesting to revisit. Here he is giving a lift in his battered old car to a former business partner, Peter Trotter, one of a string of younger men whom Felix befriends, entering into financial dealings that invariably end up with him losing money and them leaving him in their dust as their enterprises flourish.

Felix has just explained that he is moving his office from his factory to his home. At least part of his reason, we know, is to intensify what we would now call his coercive control over his young wife. After a bit of bluster, typical rationalisation of a self-destructive action motivated by weird spite, he asks Peter Trotter’s opinion. There is a minutely observed moment of the kind Elizabeth Harrower is celebrated for.

Expressionless, Peter Trotter gave him a shilling to pay the bridge toll.

‘Expressionless’ does so much work there. Even while Felix is pretending that all is well, there is this wordless abject moment when he accepts the other man’s contemptuous financial help. Then Peter offers what the reader knows is a sensible perspective, but which falls on resolutely deaf ears, while illustrating Elizabeth Harrower’s gift for vernacular dialogue:

‘I say it’s a lousy idea. You save a few quid subletting the office at the factory (incidentally, I’ll be your tenant) and drop a packet.’
‘How do you make that out? Drop a packet!’
‘If you can’t see it – In your shoes, I’d be branching out, not closing down.’
‘Oh, would you? Who’s closing down?’
Peter Trotter shrugged. His indifference was bottomless. Pennies and dimes. Pennies and dimes. Why was he persecuted by the natterings of small-time no-hopers like Felix Shaw with his paltry manoeuvres, when he had real plans cooking?
Tiredly, he made Felix a further donation of his opinions. ‘That’s how it gets round. “Shaw’s doing the paperwork at home. Can’t afford a two-by-four office.” I’m not saying it’s a fact. Only how it looks to the trade.’
Thickly, defiant, Felix said, ‘So what? Who cares what the trade thinks? Mr Shaw’s not too worried about them.’
‘Yeah. Well. This is where I get off. See you.’

And that is the end of a relationship.

This page repays a close look. Felix’s reference to himself in the third person makes me realise that Harrower’s depiction of a self-involved, wildly irrational man with bombastic self-belief and demand for absolute loyalty from those he sees as his subjects is alarmingly relevant to the mid 2020s. But it also, surprisingly to me, evokes the reader’s pity for Felix: this man we experience mainly as a controlling monster is, from another perspective, a small time no-hoper with paltry manoeuvres. This pity is dangerous: though she doesn’t use such terms, Laura, terribly abused and exploited, also sees that Felix is a small-time no-hoper, a man whose sometimes alcohol-fuelled violence is born out of deep self-hatred and lack of self-confidence, and her pity for him (she does use that word) is part of what binds her to stay with him.

None of Felix’s attempts to manipulate young men into dependency succeed because on the whole men aren’t vulnerable economically and socially the way young women are in that era. Towards the end of the book, a young male employee named Bernard collapses at work and Felix ‘kindly’ takes him into his home. At last, a vulnerable man to join his toxic household! He deploys the same emotional blackmail and bewildering switches of mood to exert control over Bernard as he has used successfully on Laura, and through Laura on Clare. There’s genuine, chilling suspense: will Bernard succumb or will he escape, taking one or both of the women with him to freedom?

Evidently publicity for the first edition used the word ‘homosexual’. I didn’t pick up any hint that Felix’s yearning for young men was knowingly sexual. But there is something forlorn in the way Felix yearns for friendship with them and in his violent rages at home when they go their indifferent way.

After the meeting: There were five of us. Three had read the whole book, one had reached the 57 percent mark on her kindle, and the fifth – who was the only one to read Joan London’s introduction to the Text Classics edition – hadn’t got that far. None of us found it a pleasant read, but the conversation was interesting.

S– saw Felix as a cipher for coercive control, and admired the way the novel was an early describer of that phenomenon, about which we know so much more now. She hadn’t read Susan Wyndham’s biography of Elizabeth Harrower, which was also prescribed reading for this meeting, and was curious to know how much the book reflected Harrower’s lived experience – it was hard to believe that she didn’t have first-hand knowledge. (A couple of us were able to satisfy her curiosity.) I would have agreed about Felix as cipher if I hadn’t lingered on page 78. I think there was more to him than that, but it’s true that the narration never takes us inside Felix’s consciousness – we see mainly the chaotic vindictiveness of his behaviour.

K– thought the book was not only painful to read but was badly written. (Gasps all round!) In her view, Elizabeth Harrower’s reputation as a great Australian novelist came mainly from her friendships with members of the Australian literary pantheon – Kylie Tennant, Judah Waten, Shirley Hazzard, Christina Stead, Patrick White. (But that’s getting ahead to the discussion of the biography.)

I talked about two moments that produced a frisson in me. The first was the chilling moment when Laura, the older sister and wife of Felix, transitions from being Clare’s ally in victimhood to being his agent in cajoling/coercing her to bend to his will. I thought this was a richly complex turn in the narrative. Others just didn’t buy it. The second was when (possible spoiler alert), starting the book’s final movement, Clare decides to give up the week escape she had been planning in order to care for the ailing Bernard. The profound ambiguity of this moment made the book come alive for me: Clare sees herself as being able for the first time to make a difference to someone else’s life, and is decides to do it with a sense of elation; but the reader sees that for years she has been coerced into putting her own needs aside to attend to Felix’s whims, and it’s simply impossible to tell whether what she sees as her new dignity isn’t a variation on the servitude she has been enduring. In my reading the remaining pages are animated by that ambiguity, and the resolution (no spoilers this time) is perfect. S– thought there was no ambiguity at all: she was just falling into the same trap with a new man.

The conversation moved on to Susan Wyndham’s Elizabeth Harrower: The Woman in the Watch Tower, about which I will blog next.

The Book Club met on the land of the Bidjigal and Gadigal clans of the Eora nation, overlooking the ocean. I wrote the blog post on Wangal and Gadigal land sheltering from unusual summer heat. 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 78.

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Garner, Hooper & Krasnostein on tape

Posted on 26 Jan 2026 | 1 comment

Helen Garner, Chloe Hooper & Sarah Krasnostein, The Mushroom Tapes: Conversations on a triple murder trial (Black Ink 2025)

A couple of years ago, in an attempt to limit the way this blog ate into my time, I decided that when I was writing about a book, I would focus arbitrarily on the page that corresponded to my age. No attempt at a proper review, no selection of the most quotable bits, just a look at one page.

It didn’t work out to be a time-saver. As often as not, the discussion of page 77, then page 78, became an added extra to a general discussion of the book.

I hereby resolve to stick rigorously to page 78 (and soon to page 79), and assume that my readers can go elsewhere for proper, thoughtful reviews.

The Mushroom Tapes is a good book to start my new policy. Few Australians won’t know about Erin Patterson’s trial last year for murder involving a Beef Wellington made with deadly mushrooms served up to her in-laws. If you really know nothing about it, here’s a Wikipedia link. Almost as few readers won’t know who Helen Garner, Chloe Hooper and Sarah Krasnostein are. (I’ve linked their names to lists of my blog posts where they appear.)

This book was originally conceived as a podcast in which three writers who have covered criminal trials chatted about this one. The podcast came to nothing, and they made a book from the tapes. I come close to being its ideal reader because I managed to pay very little attention to the trial as it was happening, so I didn’t come to it suffering from mushroom-overload.

Page 78 is one of the pages that records the writers/tapers’ conversation while driving around. It occurs in Part II, ‘The Church and the House’. They have visited the church where Erin Patterson and her in-laws worshipped, and then her house. Sarah Krasnostein, the only one among them who is an actual lawyer, has just given a little lecture about the pros and cons of a guilty plea. Helen, always the one to draw attention to details of the environment, has asked what some black cattle all spread out on a hill ‘in a lovely way’ are called. Chloe has a stab at an answer:

It turns out the page gives a good sense of the flavour of the conversations generally. There’s not a lot of rambling. Having raised the subject of the cows, Helen abruptly shuts it down: ‘We don’t even really care – about cows!’ And they’re away trading insights and observations – about the jury, and for most of this page about the journalists following the case.

Sarah’s comment on the jury is the kind of thing that all three of the women contribute. They don’t all manage to get into the courtroom at every session, so each of them has a brief to observe as fully and acutely as they can and report back. What emerges is a number of verbal sketches of Erin Patterson herself in the dock, and of other players – jury member, witnesses, lawyers, and perhaps especially Ian Wilkinson, the Pattersons’ pastor sitting in dignified silence in the back row. Sarah’s comment on this page, ‘We don’t know what they’re thinking,’ is again typical. Though they occasionally agonise over whether they are just a part of the media circus / witch hunt that surrounds the case, and though much of the book feels like chat among friends, at heart these are three serious observers. None of them wanted to take on the slog and heartache of writing a book about the case, but each of them takes her role as witness seriously. As this page exemplifies, all three bring feminist perspectives to the task: here they are talking about the lot of young female journalists, but elsewhere they also bring an unsettling degree of sympathy to a woman who would kill her in-laws.

People who still see Helen Garner as the ogre who was mean about younger women in The First Stone (some of the most vocal of whom haven’t actually read the book ‘on principle’) might find fuel for their fires here: her astonishment at a journalist’s ingenious theory of Erin Patterson’s innocence pretty much leaps off the page, and she expresses amazement at the ‘makeup and hair action’ among the young women journalists. (On page 79, she sticks to her guns: ‘Everybody should smile less, especially women, in public. Every advertisement or commercial is full of people smiling with unnatural vehemence, and it drives me insane.’) I read this grumpiness less as critical of the young woman than decrying the pressure on them to look the part.

Chloe, a couple of decades younger than curmudgeonly Helen, is more sympathetic. She sees the young woman’s theory as bizarre, but recognises the story-telling impulse: ‘She’s thinking like a script-writer.’ Mind you, her image of the attractive young reporters as being ‘like Red Riding Hood with the wolf’s carnage behind her’ shows that she also has a script-writer’s eye. (Which is the kind of thing that makes this book very readable.)

Sarah, who may be a decade or so younger than Chloe, has even less distance. I don’t want to say that she’s humourless, but she tends to be the one who supplies facts in the conversation: facts about the law, and also for instance about toxic mushrooms. Here she reminds the others, and us, of the exigencies of the young female journalists’ worklives. (I remember hearing somewhere that a female television journalist’s hair is an important tool of her trade.) On the top of the next page, it’s Chloe who amplifies the point: ‘Whereas the male crime-journalists look grizzled and broken.’

That’s it. So much more to say about the book. You can read about it all over the place.

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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Bookblog #63: Read-alouds

Posted on 25 Jan 2026 | Leave a comment

[This post originally appeared in my previous blog on 16 April 2009. I’m restoring it now because I’m writing about The Mushroom Tapes, of which Chloe Hooper is one of the authors.]

Chloe Hooper, The Tall Man: Death and Life on Palm Island (Hamish Hamilton 2008)
Donald Horne and Myfanwy Horne, Dying: a memoir (2007, Louis Braille Talking Books 2008)

Over the Easter break, Penny and I drove to Airey’s Inlet in Victoria to spend a very pleasant couple of days with her brother. The drive there and back, down on Thursday in ten hours and back on Tuesday in twelve, was remarkably hassle-free. As is our custom, I read a book aloud; in an extension of the custom, we also took a Talking Book, because on our last long car trip my voice needed enough resting to create long bookless stretches. As it turned out, the constant application of eucalyptus and honey lollies meant I had much greater stamina this time, and we read the whole of our read-aloud choice, and then listened to half of the talking book in our last couple of hours on the road.

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The Tall Man is beautifully written, complex, passionate and about an important topic – so it was a perfect read-aloud. I hadn’t read Chloe Hooper’s article of the same name in the Monthly a while back, and knew only the vague outline of the case: Aboriginal man dies in the cells of horrific injuries; the policeman who arrested him for swearing in the street was the only one alone with him between his arrest in good health and his death a couple of hours later; policeman almost wasn’t even brought to trial, and then was acquitted of any wrongdoing; Aboriginal people who rioted in protest treated to the full force of the law.

A young creative writing student from Melbourne told me that his teacher praised the book for its even-handedness; and I’ve seen it praised elsewhere for not taking sides. In my view such praise is misplaced. Chloe Hooper combines a journalist’s attention to evidence with a novelist’s eye for the telling detail. She is careful to give the process of law its full due and at no stage makes an explicit judgement. Given that Senior Sergeant Hurley, the tall and bulky policeman at the centre of things, wouldn’t talk to her, she does a very good job of conveying a sense of him as a human being – a generous, thoughtful man under incredible pressure of many kinds. But it’s very clear that her sympathies lie with the bereaved Doomadgee family, and it’s very easy for a reader to come to conclusions that are at odds with those of the jury in the final pages.

We stopped reading fairly often to reflect on how the book illuminated or was illuminated by our own recent experiences in Cairns, my niece Paula’s book, my own family’s comparatively tiny brush with the Queensland police force’s culture of violence (I’m talking 50 years ago, when my brother was punched by a policeman who’d arrested him for dangerous driving, and a police enquiry found that it hadn’t happened – that he already had a black eye when he got into the van), the  ‘You can’t handle the truth!’ speech by the Jack Nicholson character in A Few Good Men. We noticed the preponderance of Catholics in the story. We ruminated on the validity or otherwise of the north-south divide (northerners dealing with harsh realities, southerners sitting comfortably in judgement) as a way of understanding the world. Terrible subject, terrific book.

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I suppose the same could be said of Dying: terrible subject, terrific book. It’s also a great read-aloud. When Donald Horne knew he was dying of progressive lung disease he decided to keep a journal of his dying, as well as putting together a number of essays on things he wanted to say about cultural matters before he could no longer write. This book is the result, with the addition of an essay by his long-term companion, wife, editor, lover and friend, Myfanwy Horne narrating the time leading up to his death and shortly afterwards. Our journey ended halfway through Myfanwy’s account, so we didn’t hear any of the cultural essays. I intend to get hold of the book and read the rest, because what we did hear was miraculous. The only other of Donald Horne’s books that I’ve read is The Education of Young Donald (1967). I must read more. I hope it’s not too spoilerish to quote the last paragraphs of Donald Horne’s narrative:

When I have done as much as I am physically able on this project, I would like to be allowed to drift off into greater ease. I don’t mean physical ease – that I’m told will come. The kind of ease that I would like would be to drift off into long established habits of contemplation. For example, I can no longer look around the street and look at things, but I can still remember looking. I can’t go for walks, but I can still remember walking. I can’t go into art galleries, but I can still remember paintings. I am almost utterly unable to read seriously, but I can still contemplate the snatches of reading that drift around in my mind.

My final drifting away by a morphine dose, I would want to be among my memories, with Myfanwy, whom I love, holding my hand.

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Nam Le’s 36 ways of Writing a Vietnamese Poem

Posted on 24 Jan 2026 | 3 comments

Nam Le, 36 ways of Writing a Vietnamese Poem (2023)

I know that I’ve read and enjoyed Nam Le’s first book, The Boat, but I don’t seem to have blogged about it. In one of its early stories, a character who fled from Vietnam with his family as a young child in a dangerously overcrowded boat is now an emerging writer. He resists pressure from all sides to write from within the Vietnamese refugee identity. After several other stories, the book ends with ‘The Boat’, a version of the story the character has been hassled to write. Resist as you may, the collection as a whole seems to say, in the end you will write the kind of thing that people demand from you.

This book of poetry plays with the same dilemma. Interestingly enough, in the acknowledgements, Nam Le thanks Nick Feik, ‘who for years gave my poems a home in The Monthly‘ and goes on, ‘Those poems are not in this book, but they paved the way for these.’ That is to say, Nam Le has not been condemned to write only ‘Vietnamese poems’. He has chosen this task. The poems explores identity, history (including colonial history), autobiography, family relationships. They are full of painful exploration and playful, formal adventure.

Each poem is numbered and named for its ‘way of writing’, beginning with ‘[1. Diasporic]’ and including poems named for their poetic form such as ‘[3. Ekphrastic]’, for their subject matter ‘[12. Communist]’, with puns on their content ‘[Dire critical]’, and so on. Many titles include the word ‘Violence’.

I can’t say that I found all the poems accessible. But I understood and enjoyed more of them than Nam Le’s session at the 2024 Sydney Writers’ Festival led me to expect (my blog post here). I love what J. M. Coetzee says on the back cover. To quote a little:

There is wit aplenty, of a dancing, ironic kind, but the fury and the bitterness that underlie 36 Ways come without disguise, as do its moments of aching love and loss.

The poem on page 47*, is ‘[26. Erasive]’. Normally, I’d photograph the spread where the poem appears and quote at least some of it, but in this case I’ll attempt a description instead.

Beneath the poem’s title is a subtitle in smaller all-caps type, ‘[ERASURE RHYMES WITH ASIA]‘. The rest of the spread consists of what appears to be 46 lines of prose, 23 on each page, that have been almost completely redacted – that is, the pages consist visually of two sets of 23 thick black lines.

There are 25 patches of un-erased text, each consisting of either a single letter or a pair of letters. They can be laboriously piece together to make two sentences:

Left-hand page: N o ar ch iv e is sa fe  
Right-hand page: Bu t is t h i s a l l t h er e is to i t.

The hunt through the archives turns up something, but leaves so much unknown.

This is powerfully evocative – especially just now, when the US Department of Justice has released hundreds of pages of the Epstein files completely blacked out. History is written by the victors, and the archives are controlled by those in power.

In the book I hold in my hand, the erased text on the left hand page is just legible. At least, to my eyes it hovers on the threshold of legibility. With a little help and a lot of squinting, I can tell you that the deleted script begins:

Newspaper Articles Almanacs Treatises (Scientific, Political,
Anthropological. Ethnological), Expedition Reports Ships Logs
Royal Proclamations Acts of Parliament Papal Bulls and Breves
Vatican Decrees Edicts Encyclicals Jesuit Relations

and – I’m leaving out the intervening lines – ends:

White Papers Green Papers Letters Patent Land Grants Titles
Medical Records Inventories Accounts Patents Estimates
of Expense Reports Settlement Proposals Petitions Notice
Dictionaries (Bilingual, Trilingual) Treaties Confessions Poems

I’ve bolded the only letters in those lines that are left un-erased.

Many (most?) erasure poems work on a given text to comment on it in some way – like ‘Sacrificed on Altar of Vice’ by Brittany Bentley in a recent Meanjin, or my own little exercise in my blog post on David Adès’s The Heart’s Lush Gardens. That’s not what’s happening here.

Here the underlying text is a list, composed as part of the poem, of the kinds of documents one finds in an archive. The poem enacts the process of sifting through the archives to find information, encountering colonialist-bureaucratic ways of seeing, from property documentation to papal bulls (the infamous Doctrine of Discovery comes to mind). Then, just as one might be feeling a little smug because, after all, I am the kind of person who reads poems, the last almost-erased word is ‘Poems’. Nam Le does not exclude himself from complicity.

That’s the first page. On the second page the erased text is completely illegible. Erasure is complete: we can never know what is hidden from history.

The more I looked (literally) into this poem, the more I appreciated its ingenuity. More importantly, the more I fond myself responding to its emotional and intellectual charge: ‘Erasure rhymes with Asia.

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.

* My blogging practice is to focus on the page that coincides with my age, currently 78. When, as here, a book has fewer than 78 pages, I focus on page 47 (I was born in 1947).

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Alison Bechdel’s Spent

Posted on 17 Jan 2026 | 1 comment

Alison Bechdel, Spent: A Comic Novel (Jonathan Cape 2025)

This is the fourth ‘graphic novel’ by Alison Bechdel. I use quote marks because they aren’t all novels. The first, Fun Home (2006), the only other one I’ve read, includes fictional elements, but is actually a memoir about her relationship with her father. I believe her second and third, Are You My Mother? (2012) and The Secret to Superhuman Strength (2021) are also predominantly memoirs. 

Even though this book describes itself as ‘a comic novel’, it too feels as if it’s taken from Bechdel’s actual life. The main character, ‘Alison Bechdel’, is a cartoonist whose graphic memoir about her father (here called Death and Taxidermy), became a best seller. The project she is currently working on has striking similarities to book we are reading. In the acknowledgements, the author thanks her ‘stellar agent, Heloise C. Bland Sydelle Kramer’ – the struck-through name belongs to the book’s fictional agent. And so on.

We’re not meant to read the book as describing the actual lives and loves of Bechdel and her ‘annoying, tenderhearted, and utterly luminous friends’. I don’t know if Bechdel has a goat farm IRL, or if her empty-nest neighbours are experimenting with polyamory (‘Indeed, they give “sandwich generation” a whole new meaning’). But the concerns and preoccupations of the characters are definitely taken from life.

This is a book about the members of a haven for leftist LGBTQI+ people in the era of Trump, MAGA, the climate emergency and rampant late-stage capitalism. They write letters, organise, lobby, have ‘Black Lives Matter’ placards on their lawns, argue about gender politics, suffer at the way television adaptation mangles and betrays Alison’s first book. And they are funny.

An early caption (page 14) sums up the mood: ‘How she rues the decades she spent fretting that the country was on the verge of fascism. Now it really is, and she’s worn out.’

Hence one meaning for the book’s title: spent, worn out, depleted. The title also refers to the way Alison and friends are incorporated into consumerism – the ‘S’ in ‘spent’ could have been a dollar sign, as in fictional Alison’s project, $um. The characters are constantly receiving packages from Amazon, and Alison agonises over whether to accept an offer from Megalopub (aka the Murdoch empire?) for her work in progress.

Page 78* gives you an idea of the art, and the general playfulness. A couple of pages earlier Alison and Holly have been startled out of their sauna by a goat thumping about on its roof – and have stood naked in the snow, rude bits discreetly hidden. A couple of pages later their neighbours are playing at the local pickleball palace and have a zing moment when hands touch that is the beginning of the polyamory thread. Page 78 is a quiet page: no nakedness, and just a couple of flirty double entendres.

Holly, in the blue cap, has been chopping wood while Alison films her for Holly’s Instagram account, which is about to go viral. ‘It’s the new vet,’ says Alison. ‘Whoa! What a beauty!’ says Holly. We turn the page and see that Holly is looking at the vet’s truck, not the vet herself.

But the original ambiguity continues. The flirty stuff between Holly and the vet will persist, making Alison a little nervous.

I notice two things about the page.

First, same-sex attraction is the norm in the world of this book, no big deal. One character is a trans man, but no one even mentions it – somewhere along the line he is shirtless and discreet scars from top surgery are revealed. The one cis-het man in the friendship group has fantasies of being a Lesbian. Even the women of the younger generation who identify as asexual are asexual with other women. Heterosexuality is, um, rampant among the miniature goats, which leads to some good-humoured comedy.

Second, there’s a tiny detail in the bottom left frame. No verbal cues given (unless that’s what the vet means about mileage), the car on the right is being charged. Of course, you think, these right-on environmentalist vegans would have an EV. It’s one of the pleasures of the book that such tiny moments abound. A random flick through the pages gives someone commenting at the communal non-Jewish shabbat, ‘I don’t think I’ve ever seen a man light the candles before.’ Or there’s the young gender-non-conforming character Badger wearing a T-shirt that proclaims, ‘Neurodivergent AF’. Monitor screens and floating strips of text regularly bring news from Mar-a-Lago and the disasters of the wider world.

Of my recent reading, the book this most chimes with is Susan Hampton’s memoir, Anything Can Happen. They are both excellent books. This one doesn’t have the Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras, but it’s funnier.

I wrote this blog post on the land of Gadigal and Wangal, where the wind is cool and rain is pending. I acknowledge their Elders past and present and welcome any First Nations readers of the blog.

* That’s my age. When blogging about a book, I focus on page 78 to see what it shows about the book as a whole.

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Huang Fan’s Flower Ash

Posted on 16 Jan 2026 | 4 comments

Huang Fan, Flower Ash (translated by Josh Stenberg, Flying Island Books 2024)

Huang Fan is a Nanjing-based poet and novelist who has received many awards and prizes in his homeland, and has been described as the Chinese mainland poet of most interest to Taiwanese readers. His work has been widely translated, including into English. Flower Ash is a wonderfully accessible introduction to his work.

The Flying Islands website (at this link) quotes US novelist Phillip Lopate::

In these powerful, exquisite poems, Huang Fan, a major Chinese poet, takes stock of his life from the vantage point of middle age, finding deep connections with nature, but also rueful solitude, memories of lostness, and a lingering sense of missed opportunities. These translations beautifully capture a threnody of wonder and sadness which is the poet’s singular achievement.

It’s a bilingual book. On each spread, Josh Stenberg’s English version is on the left and Huang Fan’s original Chinese on the right. Perhaps partly because of this, I was always aware, as I read, that the real poem, over there on the right, was inaccessible to me. (A bilingual reader would of course have a very different experience.)

The poem ‘Mayfly’ on pages 78* and 79 is a good example:

Don’t you just wish you could read those beautiful lines of characters on the right-hand page?

The English, by contrast, feels unadorned. The first two lines lay out the poem’s central idea:

we too are mayflies, knowing the four seasons 
but living only in one season of a single day

Mayflies live for a single day. From some perspectives, our lives are similarly short.

The following lines present different images to represent the same idea: a lifetime is ‘a moment of the milky way’, the High Tang period (the eighth century CE, a golden age of Chinese poetry) is just a day, what we see as an ocean is just a stagnant puddle. And so on. It’s hard to see that anything much is happening that isn’t already there in the first lines.

I think the problem is translation. Not that Josh Stenberg’s translation is inadequate, on the contrary. But translation itself is problematic. I suspect the music of the original, and the visual play that’s happening in the ideograms, are simply untranslatable, and what we get is like a musical score, or a choreographer’s notes.

But even given all that, the poem takes an interesting turn:

with no chance to see the recesses of the mind 
we treat a dewdrop like a shatterproof heart

The imagery is no longer straightforward illustration of a straightforward idea. These lines open out to something deeper, less easily paraphrased. It’s no longer the perspective of deep time or deep space that is being evoked but the depths of the mind and the complexities of human emotion. If it mistaken to think of the dewdrop as a shatterproof heart, is there an implied heartbreak, an unfathomable sorrow – even ‘a threnody of wonder and sadness’?

After briefly returning to a catalogue of oppositions – breeze/gale, lily pads/islands – the poem lands on this:

it seems that only the trees shade, the haze in our eyes 
is praying: the leaves willing to fall from the branch 
have souls the same as us
seizing transience fast with all their life, safeguarding
------- the fleeting vanities

This doesn’t yield coherence easily. I confess I got some help – I went to Google translate, and found this:

It seems that there is only the shadow of the tree - the haze in our eyes 
is praying: may the leaves falling from the trees 
have the same heart as us 
Use your life to hold on to the short-lived and keep
------- the delusion of flying

Again, the Chinese text is a closed book to me, but to my ignorant eye, and to my astonishment, the robot makes better sense than the award-winning human translator. Instead of ‘only the trees shade’, which makes no easy sense, the mechanical translation has ‘there is only the shadow of the tree’ – that is, we don’t see the real world, but something like the shadows in Plato’s cave. Instead of the leaves ‘willing to fall’, it is the speaker who wills –’may the leaves falling’: it’s not a description but a prayer (which follows on from ‘praying’ at the start of the line). And in the last line it’s no longer the leaves ‘seizing transience’, but the reader being urged to do so. What we experience may be ‘fleeting vanities’ (much more resonant than ‘delusions of flying’, even though the latter fits the idea of falling leaves better), but it’s what we have, and we (‘you’ in the robot’s translation, ‘the leaves’ in the human’s) need to seize it fast / hold onto it.

I didn’t set out to do this, but I seem to have taken a single poem and demonstrated that reading poems in translation is fraught.

I did enjoy the book, and am glad that Flying Islands regularly include Chinese–English bilingual books.

I wrote this blog post on the land of Gadigal and Wangal. I acknowledge Elders past and present of those clans, and welcome any First Nations readers.

* My blogging practice is to focus on the page that coincides with my age, currently 78.

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Summer crime audiobooks

Posted on 13 Jan 2026 | Leave a comment

Jørn Lier Horst, The Traitor (translated by Anne Bruce, narrated by Steve John Shepherd, Penguin Audio 2024)
Dervla McTiernan, The Unquiet Grave (narrated by Aoife McMahon, HarperAudio 2025)

In the last couple of weeks the Emerging Artist and I have driven from Sydney to the Great Ocean Road and back. Part of the way back our rear vision mirror was filled with great clouds of smoke that made the sun look like a little pink button, and on just one night we arrived in a motel that was without power for a couple of hours because of the extreme heat. But in our journeying we managed to listen to two audiobooks.

The Traitor is part of the Wisting series – the thirteenth instalment or so. Wisting is a scandi detective whom I’ve seen a bit of on television. It’s not one of my favourite shows, but a novel promised a story to keep us alert when driving and awake when passengering. Sadly, in the event I found my thoughts wandering when I was driving and i fell asleep when I was passenger. It may have been Steve John Shepherd’s matter-of-fact narration or Anne Bruce’s translation, but the relentless attention to detail made it almost impossible for me with my clearly feeble power to concentrate to keep track. If anything, listening to this audiobook confirmed me in my long-ago decision not to read any more crime novels.

But then on the way home we listened to The Unquiet Grave, and my resolve weakened. It’s the fourth in Dervla McTiernan’s Cormac Reilly series, wonderfully complex with at least four cases on the go at once, plus complex relationships among the detectives.

The main murder plot runs through a series of suspects, and I’m not complaining that the final revelation is a bit of a frost. There are a number of subplots – in particular one that involves major cybercrime in which the main criminal gets his come-uppance in a most satisfactory manner

Aoife McMahon’s narration wonderful. She really does do the police in different voices.

[Full disclosure: I am one of two proofreaders acknowledged at the end of the The Unquiet Grave for ‘going the extra mile’. I wouldn’t have mentioned it as we proofreaders usually go unnamed and it feels like bad form to claim an involvement. It’s nice to be acknowledged!]

I listened to these stories as I travelled through a number of lands, including Wiradjuri, Wadawurrung and Yuim. I wrote the blog post on the land of Gadigal and Wangal of the Eora Nation. I acknowledge Elders past and present of all those peoples, and welcome any First Nations readers.

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2025 End of Year List 4: Books

Posted on 5 Jan 2026 | 2 comments

The Emerging Artist now keeps a record of the books she reads so she can easily whip up a list for the blog at this time of year. First her data:

  • 62 novels,  9 non fiction, 3 art books 
  • 29 novels by women
  • 20 novels by non English speakers
  • 2 First Nations authors

Best novels
I’ve tried not just to mention books reviewed by Jonathan. That meant excluding two favourites: Time of the Child by Niall Williams and The Granddaughter by Bernhard Schlink. My best five are:

At the Breakfast Table by Defne Suman. Set in Istanbul, it weaves the story of four generations of a family, focused around one weekend, but giving glimpses into the recent history and politics of Turkiye through the lives of each character. The role of women, class and art are in the process. It was one of my random picks from the library, and I now have another of hers on order. 

Glorious Exploits by Ferdia Lennon. What a terrific read, full of humour, violence, Irish sensibilities set in ancient Syracuse. The love of Euripides’ plays drives our two main characters to stage a production performed by prisoners. We saw Ferdia at the Sydney Writers’ Festival where he was equally entertaining. 

Rapture by Emily Maguire. I had put off reading this but eventually, somewhat reluctantly, picked it up. It was gripping, conjuring up mediaeval Europe and a woman struggling to have independence from the constraints imposed at the time.

Brotherless Night by V. V. Ganeshanathan. Another random pick from the library, this is set in Sri Lanka as the civil war builds over a few decades. Its main character, a young female medical student, tries to sidestep the conflict as her brothers are increasingly caught up in it. A powerful read.

33 Place Brugmann by Alice Austen. During the Second World War, an apartment block in Belgium holds the range of residents that reflect the broader society – those enthusiastic about Nazism and willing to inform, those willing to put their lives in danger to hide Jews and those who become the target of hatred. 

Best non fiction
What does Israel Fear from Palestine by Raja Shehadeh and Being Jewish after the Destruction of Gaza: A Reckoning by Peter Beinart are two excellent books about the current genocide.

From me

I can never pick a favourite or best book. Some highlights of 2024 were:

A comic: Fun Home by Alison Bechdel, an LGBTQI autobiographical work that has become a classic. A friend was shocked that I hadn’t read it already (she didn’t care that I haven’t read Pride and Prejudice).

A novel: Time of the Child by Niall Williams, one of three novels so far set in the small fictional Irish town of Faha. Its picture of the role of Catholicism in the life of the village struck a deep chord for me as a child of a Catholic family in North Queensland.

Another novel: First Name, Second Name by Steve MinOn features a Jiāngshī (a kind of Chinese vampire). This struck a personal note for me as the Jiāngshī’s journey ends at the Taoist Temple in Innisfail – and a childhood friend of mine told me that the MinOns lived down the street from him when he was a child.

A collection of essays: Queersland is full of stories about being LGBTQI+ in the state of Queensland, especially in the Jo Bjelke-Petersen era, co-edited by Rod Goodbun and my niece Edwina Shaw. I love it because it is so necessary and for obvious nepotistic reasons.

Poetry: Rather than sngle out an individual book I’ll mention the Flying Islands Poets series edited by Kit Kelen. I read 12 books in the series this year, and my life is much richer for it.

I should mention Virginia Woolf. I was inspired by a podcast about the centenary of the publication of Mrs Dalloway to plunge into that book. I’m very glad I did, though plunge is probably exactly the wrong word for my three-pages-a-day approach.

To get all nerdy, I read:

  • 77 books altogether (counting journals and a couple of books in manuscript, but only some children’s books)
  • 32 works of fiction
  • 19 books of poetry
  • 5 comics
  • 11 books in translation – 4 from French (including Camus’ L’étranger, which I read in French), 2 from German, and 1 each from Chinese, Icelandic, Korean and Hungarian
  • 9 books for the Book Group, whose members are all men
  • 11 books for the Book Club, where I’m the only man
  • counting editors and comics artists, 39 books by women and 41 by men
  • 3 books by First Nations writers, and
  • 14 books by other writers who don’t belong to the White global minority.

And the TBR shelf is just as crowded as it was 12 months ago.

Happy New Year to all. May 2026 turn out to be unexpectedly joyful. May we all keep our hearts open and our minds engaged, and may we all talk to peope we disagree with.

I wrote this blog post on Wadawurrung land, overlooking the Painkalac River. I acknowledge their Elders past and present and welcome any First Nations readers of the blog.

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2025 End of year list 5: Blog traffic

Posted on 4 Jan 2026 | 2 comments

This is the last end of 2025 list, and I don’t expect you to read it – it’s mainly so I’ll have a record.

Here are the posts that attracted most clicks on my blog in 2025:

  1. Niall Williams’s Time of the Child (February 2025, 861 hits)
  2. Ellen van Neerven’s Throat (July 2020, 847 hits)
  3. There Are Rivers in the Sky, Elif Shafak and the Book Club (October 2024, 734 hits))
  4. Ocean Vuong’s Time is a Mother (March 2023, 591 hits)
  5. Yael van der Wouden’s Safekeep at the Book Club (January 2025, 576 hits)
  6. Andrew O’Hagan on Caledonian Road with the book club (July 2024, 525 hits)
  7. Robert Alter’s Psalms (September 2020, 491 clicks)
  8. Mick Herron’s Standing by the Wall (October 2023, 489 hits)
  9. The Book Group & Richard Flanagan’s Question 7, page 77 (May 2024, 422 hits)
  10. The Book Club and Paul Murray’s Bee Sting (April 2024, 400 hits)

I don’t know what these figures mean. The Mick Herron book is almost not a book.

Here’s WordPress’s list of my all-time top ten posts. This list stays pretty stable. The long-time place-holders don’t need to get many views to stay, and only one of them was in this year’s top ten:

  1. Travelling with the Art Student (November 2014, 3567 hits)
  2. The Book Group and Shirley Hazzard’s Transit of Venus (June 2018, 3010 hits)
  3. (Re-)reading Kevin Gilbert’s poetry (April 2012, 2499 hits)
  4. Mary Oliver’s Twelve Moons (April 2020, 2193 hits)
  5. Ellen van Neerven’s Throat (July 2020, 2074 hits)
  6. Mary Oliver’s House of Light (April 2020, 1909 hits)
  7. Claire Keegan’s Small Things Like These (October 2023, 1880 hits)
  8. Bran Nue Dae (January 2010, 1856 hits)
  9. Ocean Vuong’s Time is a Mother (March 2023, 1672 hits)
  10. The book group’s Harp in the South (February 2011, 1447 hits)

The post at the top of the list is there because someone lifted an image from it and put it up on Pinterest.

That’s it. Thanks to everyone who has contributed to those statistics. Some of you I know IRL, some I’ve met through email etc, some in the comments section, some I know only as anonymous clickers. I’m happy that you’ve visited the blog. Come again.

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