Niall Williams, The Fall of Light and the Book Group

Posted on 6 May 2026 | 4 comments

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Still on page 79:

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

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

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

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

We had a terrific discussion of the book.

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

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

Someone pointed out that it’s a book about men, that the women aren’t fully developed characters. (This observation casts an interesting light on the midwife’s joke I quoted above – the character’s assumption that a baby is a sly indication that the narration knows its male-centredness leaves out a lot.)

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

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

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

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

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

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Starting How to End a Story

Posted on 30 Apr 2026 | 2 comments

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Pam Brown’s text thing

Posted on 29 Apr 2026 | 3 comments

Pam Brown, text thing (Little Esther Books 2002)

Since 1972, Pam Brown has published 23 books of poetry and almost as many chapbooks (chapbooks are tiny books of poetry, mostly too small to be given an ISBN). She has won major prizes, been an editor including for Jacket and Overland, and is a generous reader of other people’s books.

I enjoy her poetry, but I’m perplexed when it comes to writing about it. Before sitting down to write about Text Thing, approximately her eighteenth book, I looked back over my blog to see what I’d already written. It turns out there’s quite a lot, much revealing the extent of my ignorance about contemporary poetry. If the spirit moves you to read them, here are links to my encounters with Selected Poems 1972–1981, True Thoughts (2008), Home by Dark (2013), Missing Up (2016) and Stasis Shuffle (2021).

There are plenty of places you can go for illuminating accounts of Brown’s poetry. I especially like her 2003 interview with John Kinsella in Jacket2 where he memorably suggests that she has created her own subculture. Among many interesting things in that interview, she says something that’s relevant to page 79* of this book. Referring to the way her poems often include the names of friends without explanation, Brown says:

The … thing is that they’re signifiers. And somehow it’s also a call for community. That sounds corny and old-fashioned but poetry is a marginal art and we’re like the black market of culture — it lends a freedom to do that… include real people, names…

The poem that begins on page 79 is ‘The Night’:

And there are three lines over the page:

nothing cosy
about you.

(curses!)

This poem is uncharacteristically straightforward. Including the title, it consists of a single sentence whose syntax is almost simple enough to meet a primary schoolteacher’s specifications, followed by a one word exclamation. The poem’s speaker eats a pickled onion and is reminded of a friend (or perhaps a frenemy or a former lover?). She indulges in a little rant addressed to that person.

It makes me laugh and I’m not exactly sure how.

Maybe the poem invites me to imagine it being read by the person it’s addressed to. Would she/they (I’m assuming it’s not a man) be amused? Defensive? Dismissive? Retaliate in a poem of her own?

Having now read it a number of times, I realise that there’s quite a lot going on.

The night

Denis bought
Ken's painting 
of a barcode
I ate a pickled onion

This opening clause sets the scene. I imagine the opening night of an art exhibition in a small gallery. Art is on sale and there are snacks, including pickled onions. ‘Ken’ is almost certainly Ken Bolton, poet and painter, named on the imprint page as the publisher of this book artist Ken Searle [see comment from Ken Bolton] . ‘Denis’ is probably a real person too, but his identity doesn’t matter, any more than that of the poem’s ‘you’ does. What does matter is that all four people in the poem – ‘I’, ‘you’, Ken and Denis – are on first-name terms, and seem to belong to some kind of creative community – perhaps Brown’s ‘black market of culture’. Only when I read the poem out loud (to the long-suffering Emerging Artist) did I realise that there’s a lovely contrast between the briefly mentioned masculine, transactional world of buying and selling where even the artwork is an emblem of commerce, and the feminine, relational world of the rest of the poem.

I ate a pickled onion 
& thought of you 
you sourpuss

Is it ridiculous of me to compare Brown’s pickled onion to Proust’s madeleine? Probably. But the taste of this pickled onion, like the smell of the madeleine, transports the poem’s speaker from the external world to the internal one of emotion-charged memory. The word ‘sourpuss’ explains the connection. Then there’s something disarming in the string of qualities, each introduced by an ampersand, with the attention-grabbing words ‘squeam’ (which Merriam-Webster says is a back formation from ‘squeamish’) and ‘demotics’ (which in this context I take to mean the adoption of working-class manners and language, like a recent Australian Prime Minister giving himself an Aussie-sounding nickname). There’s a nice comedy in the transition from criticising an off-putting quest for power and calculated manner to a silly schoolyard insult: 

& your
squeam-inducing 
quest for power 
& your 
fake demotics
& your 
too big 
plastic hairpin 
which doesn't
suit you

You almost expect that to go ‘which doesn’t / suit you / anyway‘ with a teenage emphasis. The first two insults carry the ring of truth. The third reflects back on the speaker.

Learned people refer to Pam Brown’s gift for sprezzatura, a casual appearance that conceals the work that went into it. The veering off in the next line – the fifth to start with an ampersand – is a nice example. I can’t read the opening ‘& also’ without thinking of an angry teenager. Brown’s world of allusion is almost certainly more sophisticated than mine – but I think of Mary-Anne Fahy’s gum-chewing Kylie Mole from the 1990s. (Come to think of it, this book was published in 2002, so Kylie Mole may well have been in Brown’s mind.) So it feels like an easy, natural follow-on from the big plastic hairpin. Then, as if it’s a perfectly natural next step, the poem turns into an intimate attack:

& also
you don't know 
how to
warm eggs
on the outside

Well, maybe it’s not explicitly intimate, but the lines do suggest a shared domesticity in the past. I’m not sure what it means to ‘warm eggs / on the outside’. This conjured in my mind in image of hands holding eggs gently, imparting body heat to them. Why anyone would want to do that, or why not knowing how to do it was a moral failure wasn’t immediately clear. Then I reflected that if you’re baking a cake, a pavlova, or even an omelette, it’s a good idea to let the eggs warm up for a while ‘on the outside’ of the fridge: so there’s a practical meaning. But – for me at least – the image of motherly, protective, feminine warmth persists. And that justifies the final twist of the knife: 

because there's
nothing cosy
about you.

I’m not usually one to notice perfectly conventional punctuation, but I love that full stop at the end. Back in 2002, Millennials probably weren’t yet expressing horror at Boomers’ ending text messages with a full stop, which they saw as unreasonably aggressive. This one fits their reading perfectly.

The full stop may the end of the rant, but it’s not the end of the poem:

(curses!)

The exclamation is a response to everything that has gone before. I love how many ways it can be read: ‘(Did I really just say that?)’, ‘(Do I still have all these feelings about her?)’, ‘(I was having such a nice time before I bit that pickled onion!)’, ‘Why did I ever let her into my life?)’. Or: ‘(And now I hurl curses in your direction!)’, ‘(I’ll sum it all up in the one word!)’. Given that Pam Brown often quotes from other poets and popular culture, or even odd bits of graffiti or commercial copy, it doesn’t seem wrong to hear an echo of comics like Popeye here. No time at all on Google gave me an example.

That’s just one poem. If I were to find a way that it’s representative of the whole book, I’d say it’s something about interruption. The cover illustration, attributed to Kurt Brereton, is of graffiti that reads ‘wile you are reeding th’. The book is full of interruptions, asides, distractions. ‘The Night’ can be read as being about one more distraction. But such a rich one!

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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On the road in dark Yorkshire with J. M. Dalgliesh

Posted on 27 Apr 2026 | Leave a comment

J. M. Dalgliesh, Divided House and Blacklight (both independently published 2018), 2019 audiobook narrated by Greg Patmore

On long car trips, I used to read while the not-yet–Emerging Artist drove. Now, my vocal cords have lost stamina, we have fallen back on audiobooks. For our recent trip to Brisbane, we picked the first instalment of the Dark Yorkshire series – three novels in all. We managed to listen to two of them. We were under the vague impression that we were about to listen to some P. D. James novels featuring her detective Adam Dalgleish. We were wrong.

J. M. (not Adam) Dalgliesh is evidently one of the top ten best-selling authors on Amazon, and Dark Yorkshire was his first, extremely popular series.

In the first book, Divided House, Detective Inspector Nathaniel Caslin has to deal with dead bodies, a cyber-pornography set-up, corrupt colleagues, distrust from his superiors based on past honourable rule-bending, a curmudgeonly inability to deal with digital media (which makes it a surprise to learn he is only in his thirties), a marriage that is falling apart, and all the tropes of a good crime thriller.

This is the kind of storytelling that is consumed rather than engaged with in any reciprocal way. These days I consume it almost exclusively on screen, and mostly the small screen.

The plot is a bit too convoluted for my travel-weary attention span. Award-winning narrator Greg Patmore does a fine job for the most part, though I would have preferred that he didn’t try so hard to give each of the many characters a different voice, especially the women. It seemed that he was focusing on the women characters’ femininity at the expense of other qualities, by speaking in almost-falsetto. I occasionally had to remind myself that the woman character Caslin finds himself attracted to isn’t written as trans – she just sounds that way.

Caslin is also the hero of the second book, Blacklight. This time he’s dealing with a serial killer, and/or MI5. Not my favourite story type. But he does have a female partner, and once I accepted Greg Patmore’s version of a woman policeman’s voice, her bristly relationship with Caslin added some humour to proceedings.

J. M. Dalgliesh’s website has this to say about his books:

Penned in the style of crime thrillers with a touch of Scandinavian noir, readers who enjoy dark atmospheric mysteries will find his books a must-read.

If you can ignore the image of penned readers conjured up by the syntax of that quote, then these books may be for you.

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Remembering David Malouf

Posted on 24 Apr 2026 | 9 comments

David Malouf died on Wednesday. You can read a lot about him elsewhere. The Guardian, for instance, has an excellent obituary by Jennifer King, and a personal reflection from Christos Szoltas. In blogland, Lisa at ANZ Litlovers Litblog has posted an overview of his work. This post is a much more partial thing.

My mind is buzzing with memories of the man. I can’t claim him as a friend, but I first met him more than 50 years ago and have had memorable encounters with him over the years. I want to write about some of them before numbing grief sets in.

I was an EngLit student at Sydney University in the late 1960s when David came back to Australia after some years in the UK. He was a wonderful lecturer who communicated his enthusiasm and love for the writers he was discussing. I remember the delight and awe with which he described Norman Mailer’s sentences – long, looping, sometimes going on for more than a page. I remember him discussing images of food in one of the Jacobean playwrights, bringing out the horror beneath the comedy of the characters’ greed: I don’t think he used the words capitalism or colonialism but he made us feel them – or at least he made me feel them, because he told me after the lecture that he’d seen me looking more and more nauseated as he spoke.

At poetry readings, I remember feeling his translations of Horace as a gift. They spoke of morning light glinting off milk churns beside a country road. I’d studied Latin for years, and loved Virgil and Catullus, but it hadn’t occurred to me until then that the Roman poets wrote about experiences very like ours – mine.

In my two years as a postgrad student I saw more of him. I loved the way he used four-letter words, with the same precise enunciation as he used with all language. I loved his glee when he told an anecdote about Philip Roth, then notorious for the novel Portnoy’s Complaint: a woman who was introduced to Roth at a cocktail party shuddered when he offered to shake hands, and said she’d rather not. And I loved this erudite man’s childlike hilarity when he told us about coming out of a movie and seeing that an academic colleague friend had spilled chocolate ice cream all down his white shirt front.

When he was living in Tuscany and I was planning a trip there, in early 1979, somehow I had a conversation with him. He said that if I went to Campagnatico and asked for il professore Australiano, someone would show me the way to his door. (While I may have been bold enough to propose a visit, I didn’t have the gall to actually knock on his door.)

One day in 2015, I was walking up Broadway in Sydney’s inner west when I saw a man in a grey tracksuit coming towarsds me. He looked like David Malouf, but I had never seen him other than impeccably turned out. Indeed it was him, and the first thing he said was that he had realised he was running late for a poetry reading at Gleebooks and didn’t have time to change into decent clothes. I may be conflating two meetings on Broadway, but I’m pretty sure that that is also the occasion when he showed me his right hand covered in blood. He had been holding a bleeding spot on his left arm. Alarmed, I produced a handkerchief, but it had obviously been used for other purposes and he politely declined the offer. ‘It’s not a big deal,’ he said. ‘when you’re old, you bleed easily.’ He was 81. I’m now 79 and I can confirm that he was right. ‘Besides,’ he said, ‘if I go home to Chippendale with blood on my hands like this, it might be good for my reputation. They’ll think I’ve murdered someone.’ And then, even as he was bleeding and embarrassed to be seen in public in tracky-daks, he chatted appreciatively and illuminatingly about the poetry he’d just heard, some of which couldn’t have been further from the kind of things he wrote himself.

Four or five years ago I was on holiday on Magnetic Island and caught the ferry across to Townsville to go to a reading by David at the Mary Who? bookshop. He read beautifully, as always. In question time, a woman wearing a ‘No More Coal’ t-shirt commented, with more than a touch of reproach, that there were surely more important things to write about than memories of childhood. ‘What,’ she asked, ‘do you think are the important things poetry should be addressing.’ Without missing a beat, he said, ‘I think the most interesting thing in the world is a three year old child.’ At that age, he said, a person is just looking out at the world and putting together their own model of what’s there, and it’s fascinating to witness.

A poem that I’m pretty sure he read on that occasion, and that I heard him read many times over about two decades, is ‘Seven last words of the emperor Hadrian’. He always presented it almost as a technical exercise: the full meaning of the Latin couldn’t be captured in a single translation, so he had seven goes at it. What I didn’t hear him say is that the poem struck a deep chord for him as his own mortality made itself felt. I’ve just listened to a recording of him reading it on the University of Queensland website. Have a listen at this link.

David wrote Quarterly Essay number 41, The Happy Life. I happened to run into him soon after the correspondence on it was published in the subsequent issue. I remarked that it was interesting that all the correspondents wrote about how beloved he is. ‘Yes,’ he said, deflecting effortlessly, ‘it wasn’t the kind of essay they’re used to and they didn’t quite know what to do with it.’

Now I, and you if you want, can say how much we have loved him, and he can’t deflect any more.

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NSW Literary Awards Shortlist 2026

Posted on 21 Apr 2026 | 7 comments

No longer the Premier’s Literary Awards, the NSW Literary Awards shortlist has been announced. As usual, I’ve read or seen very few of them (I’ve included images of those)and have a couple more on my TBR shelf. The State Library of NSW website is a little unwieldy – here’s the list in more accessible form. All the links are to the library’s site, including the judges’ comments.

Christina Stead Prize for Fiction

Judging panel: Jock Serong, Abbas El-Zein, Jenn Martin, Angela O’Keeffe, Jonathan Seidler.

Douglas Stewart Prize for Non-Fiction

Judging panel: Maddison Connaughton, Alan Atkinson, Meera Atkinson, Bridget Brennan, Anton Enus.

Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry

Judging panel: Rico Craig, Alison Croggon, Kate Middleton, Sara M Saleh, Les Wicks,

Patricia Wrightson Prize for Children’s Literature

Judging panel: Tim Harris, Ursula Dubosarsky, Maryam Master

Ethel Turner Prize for Young People’s Literature

Judging panel: Davina Bell, Anna Fienberg, Ambelin Kwaymullina

Highly commended

Nick Enright Prize for Playwriting

Judging panel: Dylan Van Den Berg, Peter Matheson, Paige Rattray

  • Song of First Desire, Andrew Bovell (Belvoir St Theatre/Currency Press)
  • The Black Woman of Gippsland, Andrea James (Melbourne Theatre Company/Currency Press)
  • Snakeface, Aliyah Knight (Fruit Box Theatre and Belvoir 25A)
  • Destiny, Kirsty Marillier Marillier (Melbourne Theatre Company)
  • The Wrong Gods, S. Shakthidharan (Belvoir St Theatre/Melbourne Theatre Company/Currency Press)
  • Troy, Tom Wright (Malthouse Theatre)

Highly commended

  • Koreaboo, Michelle Lim Davidson (Griffin Theatre Company)
  • Nucleus, Alana Valentine (Griffin Theatre Company/Currency Press)

Betty Roland Prize for Scriptwriting

udging panel: Jenevieve Chang, Pauline Clague, Richard Kuipers

Indigenous Writers’ Prize

Judging panel: Aunty Fay Muir, Krystal De Napoli, Glenn Shea

Multicultural NSW Award

Judging panel: Thuy On, Sarah Ayoub, Simon Chan, Farz Edraki, Ita Hanssens

Highly commended

UTS Glenda Adams Award for New Writing

The University of Sydney People’s Choice Award and Book of the Year don’t have short lists.

The winners will be announced at a ceremony at the Library on Monday 18th of May.

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The Letters of Seamus Heaney, third and final progress report

Posted on 17 Apr 2026 | Leave a comment

Christopher Reid (editor), The Letters of Seamus Heaney (Faber & Faber 2023)
– pages 599–800

I’m sad to have finished my daily reading of Seamus Heaney. Though very few if any of the letters in this 800 pages were written with publication in mind, Christopher Reid has gathered them into a wonderful book.

In his last years, Heaney is still apologising for the lateness of his replies to other people’s letters or gifts of books. His excuses are generally wonderful – lists of lectures and readings given, honours received, holidays taken with his wife Marie. Sometimes he encloses a poem. In his final years he complains that he hasn’t been able to write any poetry. He seems cheerfully resigned to having to ‘stand on his hind legs’ and be a famous poet. More than once he explains that he won’t attend an event where a friend is being honoured because he has found that – because of ‘the N word’ – his presence tends to steal the limelight. (Do I need to explain that in this case N is for Nobel?)

He replies generously to graduate students asking him if they’re on the right track. His letters to translators are fascinating. He does a spectacular job of refusing requests without giving offence. He is a wonderful model of how to respond to other people’s writing. He struggles to protect his privacy and that of his family, to avoid the commodification of his personal life that must seem inevitable to many people who become famous. He is reluctant to give interviews about his book Human Chain, because some of its poems are more intensely personal than previous ones: he knows the interview will ask about these personal things, and he won’t go there.

As the decades pass, he increasingly types his letter on a laptop, sometimes offering the excuse that his handwriting has gone all wobbly as a result of a stroke. But he doesn’t use email. I think I’m right that there is only one electronic communication in the book, which is the text he sent to Marie when he was being wheeled into the operating theatre, just before he died:

Noli timere

Reid gives the translation, ‘Don’t be afraid,’ and tells us that the text went viral. But he leaves the reader to savour the way this final message epitomises so much of the book. It feels like a biblical quote – the first thing Jesus said after his resurrection was ‘Noli me tangere’. And though Heaney was no longer a practising Catholic, the language, imagery and stories of his Catholic childhood were still at the heart of his creativity, and often turn up in his correspondence. Latin was part of that, and important in its own right: he would often write ‘Gaudens gaudeo’ in a letter when there was reason to celebrate, and he translated Book 6 of the Aeneid in his last years.

Most movingly, this final text is addressed to Marie. She has been a constant presence, through marriage, parenthood, illness striking both of them, her occasionally mentioned creative endeavours. When the letters mention holidays, ceremonial occasions, social events, it’s often ‘Marie and I’. He quotes her opinions. She is intimately part of who is is. And this is the only time in the book that he speaks to her.

I’m going to miss my daily contact with this lovely mind.

I have written this blog post, punctuated by a walk by the beach in a windy darkness, face pricked by flying sand particles, on Awabakal country. I acknowledge Elders past and present, and welcome any First Nations readers.

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Sean Kelly Fights the Good Fight

Posted on 16 Apr 2026 | 2 comments

Sean Kelly, The Good Fight: What Does Labor Stand For? (Quarterly Essay 100, 2025)
– plus correspondence in Quarterly Essay 101

The subtitle of this Quarterly Essay seems even more relevant now than it did three months ago when it was published, as our Labor governments make mealy mouthed statements of concern about the ongoing genocide in Gaza or the genocidal rhetoric emanating from the White House and the Pentagon, give the go-ahead to climate vandalism by fossil-fuel companies, follow right-wing advisers in responding to the horrific killing of Jews in Bondi last year, come down hard on protest – oh, you name it!

But I was glad that the essay was more than a prolonged wail about Anthony Albanese et al‘s timidity or worse, perfidy. Instead, it’s a thoughtful essay in the original sense of the word, an attempt – Kelly starts out with a question that he doesn’t know the answer to, and he still doesn’t have a definite answer by the end. And my practice of holding off on reading Quarterly Essays until I can read the correspondence in the following issue paid off beautifully.

Kelly is a Labor man, adviser to former Labor Prime Ministers. Like Anthony Albanese he had a working class Catholic childhood. He tells us briefly that he knows Albanese, and likes him – enough to refrain from the fake-familiarity of nicknames. He frames his discussion as the inevitable tension between ideals (call them beliefs) and pragmatism (things you have to do to stay in government). He argues convincingly that it’s a mistake to adopt a strategy of going slowly with reforms in order to hold onto government long enough to make substantial change. The Whitlam government moved fast, he points out, and came a cropper, but it changed Australia society. Albanese’s assertion that he wants Labor to be the natural party of government, that he wants it to represent all interests, sounds good, but it’s largely a formula for futility.

There is an interesting discussion of the decline of the two-party system. The current impressive degree of unity in the ALP, Kelly argues, is not a good thing. Vigorous debate is a way of refining policy, and the ALP has outsourced the arguments from the left to the Greens, where they can be dismissed as hostility. The current disarray in the Coalition is not useful either – if a good part of Labor’s raison d’être is in ‘fighting Tories’, to use Albanese’s phrase, where do you go when the Tories are doing it for you?

Page 47* quotes Graham Freudenberg, legendary speechwriter for Labor leaders including Gough Whitlam and Bob Hawke. He described the ALP as ‘a collective memory in action’. Kelly comments:

That collective memory, driven by emotion, has inevitably harked back to Labor’s longest period in government: a period in which Labor won the approval of the Australian people at five successive elections, and for which it has since garnered much praise, including from its usual critics.

He is talking about the Hawke-Keating government. The current Labor government, he argues, is striding away from what it sees as the failures of its most recent predecessors and moving towards the ‘glittering memory’ of those years:

Hawke and Keating are both Labor heroes for good reason. Their government introduced Medicare, saved the Franklin River, acted on the High Court’s land rights judgment.

But, he goes on, they also deregulated the economy in ways that the right would have been proud of, and this is what they are mostly remembered for. On page 80, he laments:

The remarkable fact is that Labor, which has historically been so good at mythologising its past, has in this case effectively allowed the right to choose what will dominate its collective memory.

Keating’s personal boldness haunts this essay. Kelly quotes him in his final pages saying that ‘great political leaders have the instincts of artists’:

I always believe in leadership there are only two ingredients: imagination and courage.

This idea should be taken seriously, Kelly says:

I think it should be taken particularly seriously because of the way we have more lately come to think of politicians as technocrats, types of elevated bureaucrats.

We can sense artistic heat in Albanese, he says, but he doesn’t say – he doesn’t have to say – that Albanese is more commonly seen as fitting the technocrat, elevated-bureaucrat description. Then, with an almost Montaigne-like swerve, he discusses the writer Ella Ferrante’s creative process, ending the essay with this paragraph:

After establishing a consistent tone, she breaks out of her calmness. There is, she admits, a risk: that the calm will not be able to be recovered. or that the readers will no longer believe in that calm. But it is that risk that gives her writing life.

Correspondence in Quarterly Essay 101 (Blind Spot by Michael Wesley) is well worth reading. The learned correspondents correct Kelly on a number of facts. The one that stands out for me is Judith Brett, whose contribution is in effect a brief and enlightening essay on the word ‘socialism’:

What socialism has meant in Australian political debate has not been opposition to capitalism but belief in the creative and ameliorative capacities of the state to reduce inequality and advance the common good.

There’s quite a bit more, all worth reading, but it’s tangential to Kelly’s central argument. That is, he may be wrong when he says that Albanese has abandoned Labor’s socialist objective by catering to business interests, but his concern stands, and in his reply to correspondents he has interesting things to say about Albanese in relation to that formulation.

The other correspondents include a number of Labor insiders, but it rises well above the inside-baseball dangers of such discussions. They have interesting things to say about the history, about Kelly’s philosophical questions, and about the special dangers of the present moment.

I’ll give the last word to Kelly, whose final question, sadly, suggests an answer in the negative:

The correspondents agreed this was a strange time. I think so too. But it is possible that all of us are wrong: that this is not a special moment, but another moment of change and turmoil in an endless series. We think our era is unique, but we are – like most of those before us – wrong. In that case, Albanese Labor will be graded the way most Labor governments are: did it contribute to the improvement of Australian society in ways that are permanent and important?

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 teh Eora Nation, where the nights are lasting longer but the days are still warm. 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. When, as in this Quarterly Essay, there is no page 79, I revert to ’47, my birth year.

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Eliot Weinberger’s 19 Ways of Looking at Wang Wei

Posted on 31 Mar 2026 | Leave a comment

Eliot Weinberger, 19 Ways of Looking at Wang Wei, (with more ways) (New Directions 2016)

This book must be a classic work on translating poetry. Readers of this blog will know that occasionally I nerd out about translation. Well, Eliot Weinberger does it in spades, only he’s wittier, more erudite and generally much more illuminating.

The book looks at nearly 30 attempts to translate one four-line poem by the classic Chinese poet Wang Wei (c 700–761 CE), mostly into English. The poem is generally but not always, such is the nature of translation, known as ‘The Deer Park’.

Before looking at any of the attempts, there are three short sections presenting and discussing: the original, in Chinese characters, just five on each line; a transliteration into modern pinyin; and a character-by-character translation onto English. To give you some idea of the challenge facing the translator, here is the first line of the character-by-character translation:

Empty_ mountain(s)/hill(s)  (negative)_ to see _ person/people

You can see that the possibilities are vast – and in discussing the different solutions, Weinberger has a lot of fun and at the same time gives an impressionistic account of the influence of Chinese and Japanese poetry on English language poetry in the last 100 years. He doesn’t mind taking on the Chinese language specialists who may know about the language but have no ear for poetry, and he doesn’t hold back with either praise or displeasure.

I’d written to this point when I remembered that I blogged about J. P. Seaton’s Shambhala Anthology of Chinese Poetry almost exactly 16 years ago, and did my own timid, partial, uneducated attempt at comparing versions – of a slightly longer poem by Li Po (701–762). If you’re interested, it’s at this link.

In short, I loved this book, and if you’re interested in Chinese poetry and /or translation in general, you will too. I’m very grateful to John Levy for mentioning it in the comments (at this link).

I’ll give the last word to Weinberger. At the end of the original essay – before Octavio Paz had contributed his learned Afterword, and before Weinberger’s account of a Furious Professor’s response – he writes:

The point is that translation is more than a leap from dictionary to dictionary; it is a reimagining of the poem. As such, every reading of every poem, regardless of language, is an act of translation: translation into the reader’s intellectual and emotional life. As no individual reader remains the same, each reading becomes a different – not merely another – reading. The same poem cannot be read twice.

I am an Australian-born man of settler heritage. I wrote this blog post on the land of Gadigal and Wangal of the Eora Nationa. 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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Ian McEwan’s What We Can Know at the Book Club

Posted on 30 Mar 2026 | Leave a comment

Ian McEwan, What We Can Know (Jonathan Cape 2025)

Before the meeting: I heard Ian McEwan talking about this novel on David Runciman’s Past Present Future podcast a while back (at this link). Well, not so much about this novel as about what it’s like to be contemplating one’s own death at a time when the future of the world as we know it is in doubt. How will the people of the future regard us who were alive at this critical moment in human history? That question, he said, was the genesis of the novel.

What We Can Know is set in Britain long after our time, which is known in that future as the Derangement. In 2042 there has been an Inundation caused by the melting ice caps, and a nuclear winter created by international war has put an end to global warming. Britain is now an archipelago. North America is the domain of lawless warlords. Nigeria has become the preserver of electronic connectivity. Life is simpler and more difficult, but there are still academics, and there is a vast trove of records preserved from our time.

The central characters of the novel specialise in the literature of a period that overlaps our present moment. Their students revolt, seeing such studies as irrelevant to the needs of the times, and regarding literature produced by the generations who allowed such catastrophic events as beneath contempt.

That all works well. The physical environment is always interesting, even for a reader like me who has little knowledge of British geography, and so can’t appreciate the specifics of boat trips from island to island. However, I was far from engrossed by the central narrative thread, which concerns the main character’s search for a long lost poem, written in 2014 but never published. He hunts through the vast reservoir of data, and pieces together a picture of the dinner party when a distinguished poet read the poem aloud and presented it to his wife on a vellum scroll tied up with a bow. The story is told and retold from many points of view, becoming in my experience increasingly tedious, until there is a final telling that may amount to a revelation, but by that time I was well beyond caring.

Page 79*, taken in isolation, isn’t much to write home about, though it’s a nice example of the novel’s intertextuality. It’s a summary of part of an actual book published in 1985, Footsteps: Adventures of a Romantic Biographer by Richard Holmes, which has a minimalist Wikipedia page at this link.

Among its many treasures is an account of a journey on foot the eighteen-year-old Holmes took in the Cévennes, southern France, tracking the same route taken by his hero, his ‘friend’, Robert Louis Stevenson a hundred years before. Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes was Holmes’s bible. He stopped in the same villages as Stevenson, tried to keep to his exact route on the old country tracks and slept like him in the open, ‘à la belle étoile‘. As he walked, he constantly referred to his copy of Stevenson’s book. In the early 1960s, the last remnants of the ancient French peasantry hung on in the rural fastness of La France Profonde.

And so on. I was interested enough in the description of Holmes’s book because I’d enjoyed the 2020 film Antoinette dans les Cévennes, which also traces the route taken by the young Robert Louis Stevenson in the 1870s.

You won’t be surprised to learn that the passage’s context makes it something more than a schoolboy summary. The narrator had come across Holmes’s book when he was a 22 year old student who hadn’t yet settled on a subject for his doctorate. He had ‘eased the hundred-year-old hardback from its shelf’ as a delicate remnant from a past era, and tells us about it now because it contains one of the ‘most exquisitely evoked descriptions’ of a longing for ‘what was never known and is lost’ – the emotion that is the central driver of his academic research and of his quest as narrated in the first half of this book. The world before one was born in what was never known, and its loss is intensified for those who live after the Inundation

Most of page 79 leads up to that ‘exquisitely evoked description’. Then, at the bottom of the page, Holmes is standing at a bridge in the village of Langogne in a semi-hallucinatory state hoping that Stevenson, long dead, would soon be arriving:

Then he saw, fifty yards downstream, picked out against the fading gleam of the western sky, the old ruined bridge into town, the one his dear Stevenson would have crossed. Holmes was bereft, close to tears. ‘There was no way of following him, no way of meeting him. His bridge was down. It was beyond my reach over time, and this ruin was the true, sad sign.’

The narrator draws out the meaning of this:

The collapsed bridge downstream and the man crossing it a hundred years before represent the past from which I too am excluded, the past that from here seems whole and precious, when many of humanity’s problems could have been solved.

But, though Stevenson’s bridge was down, the country he had walked was substantially unchanged in Holmes’s time. In the narrator’s present time, all that land is lost, under water.

And that is the chord that vibrates through the novel. I the reader am living in the time that the character sees as ‘whole and precious’. Logically I can see that the book should have me on an edge – a prolonged moment of appreciating the world I live in, preemptively mourning its loss, and resolving to do what I can to protect and defend it. Whether the failure is mine or the novel’s, it didn’t have that effect on me.

When – spoiler alert – the second half of the novel has a different narrator, in a different time period, that driving emotion fades into a distant background, and the book, in my opinion, becomes a much more commonplace affair.

The meeting: We read What We Can Know in tandem with Carys Davies’s Clear. Like that book, it evoked widely divergent responses. In this case I was the Most Negative, and she who had been Most Negative for Clear enjoyed this one as a satisfying holiday read.

For some the world-building amounted to thinly disguised lecturing about climate change. Others felt there wasn’t enough of it – and I guess I’m in that camp: I would happily have stayed in that future, wandering beyond the confines of university scholarly life. Where my engagement as a reader was fading by the end of the first part and died irretrievably when the narrator and time frame changed, that was where others felt the book finally came alive. I think there were two people (out of five) who were there for both parts. (My interest had died to such an extent that I had to be reminded of the key revelation in the second part.)

I think the key thing that worked for others and not for me is announced in the book’s title. Appropriately enough, the title is hard to remember: I keep misremembering it as ‘All We Can Know’ or ‘All That You Know’ and I keep thinking of Keats – ‘That is all / Ye know on earth and all ye need to know.’ So What We Can Know: the book is about knowledge, specifically historical knowledge. The academics of the future can sift through the mountains of detailed electronic and other documentation of our times but what goes unrecorded will remain unknown, and if the records of significant truth aren’t found then that truth remains unknown.

I’m sailing very close to spoilerish now, but the book’s central search for a lost poem, reputedly a masterpiece, turns out to be wrong-headed. A different document, found thanks to ingenious deciphering of clues in the archive, transforms the meaning of events as they were known up to that point. For some readers, perhaps for most, this is deeply satisfying. It might, I concede ruefully, be a matter of attention span.

The Book Club’s five members are all of settler heritage. Our combined ages add up to many more years than have passed since Arthur Phillip claimed this continent for the British Crown. We met on Gadigal land, and I wrote this blog post on the land of Gadigal and Wangal of the Eora Nationa. I wrote the blog post on Wangal and Gadigal land. 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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