Tag Archives: Evelyn Araluen

Jennifer Maiden’s Mandatory Sentence

Posted on 19 Mar 2026 | Leave a comment

Jennifer Maien, Mandatory Sentence (Quemar Press 2026)

Mandatory Sentence is the latest in Jennifer Maiden’s continuing tightrope act of producing a book of poetry at the start of each year. As in previous years, most of its contents are in effect occasional poems, that is, poems written in response to breaking news – developments in the Gaza genocide, the demolition of the East Wing of the White House, Anthony Albanese’s visit to China, news about AI, and so on. Many of the poems feature fictional or historical characters responding to these events, sometimes in dialogue with current politicians.

If you’re new to Maiden’s poetry, you might need help with the characters who populate the book. George Jeffreys and Clare Collins, familiar from Maiden’s four novels and many poems, appear with their ever-increasing family that includes a son named Corbyn and a number of animals. There’s a weird, cuddly little creature named Brookings – named after the Brookings Institute and originally perhaps emblematic of what Maiden sees as that organisation’s deliberate naivety, but now taking on a life of its own. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Eleanor Roosevelt and other make brief repeat appearances. Maiden’s daughter Katharine, has appeared in her mother’s poetry since The Winter Baby (1990) – as well as being the book’s publisher in real life.

I read Mandatory Sentence just after my first reading of Evelyn Araluen’s The Rot. They’re very different books, but they both respond with some immediacy to world events from a left / progressive perspective, so it’s not surprising that there are moments when they chime. One such moment is the opening of ‘Brooking Becomes a Bomb Bay Door’, which echoes that of Araluen’s ‘Uplock Actuator System’. For this blog post, I’ll stay there.

Both poems were evidently inspired by the same interview Richard Marles gave on the ABC in August last year – at this link – in which he asserted repeatedly that Australia does not supply weapons to Israel, but is ‘part of the F-35 process’. Neither poem is limited to satirising that assertion – the Shovel does that brilliantly, here. How they each make distinctive poetry from the material is interesting.

‘Uplock Actuator System’ begins:

We aren't sending weapons, they said, 
just the only lock for the only door that 
opens when they are fired from the air.

The poem progresses in nine three-line stanzas of almost intolerable intensity, evoking the suffering of Gaza and linking it to the ‘parallel occupation’ of Australia and the unwilling complicity of all of us. It ends with a call to engagement .

‘Brooking Becomes a Bomb Bay Door’ is by comparison laid-back and playful, adjectives I wouldn’t easily associate with Maiden’s political poems. You can hear her performing it, pretty much deadpan, at this link. Here’s how it appears in Mandatory Sentence:

It begins with the titular Brookings – a ‘small fur baby wombat-possum cross’ who could have come from a children’s cartoon – watching the television, cutely ‘like a kindergarten’. And there’s some almost silly play on words – the word ‘cross’ appears three times, each with a different meaning.

The small fur baby wombat-possum cross 
sits watching Marles on the ABC say we send no arms 
to Israel. Brookings is at present tired and cross 
sitting with his four legs crossed in attention 
like a kindergarten,

The adult shorthand – ‘Marles on the ABC’ – alerts us that this is not a cute and cuddly poem. Contemporary Australian readers will know that this is Richard Marles, Minister for Defence, and the context is Israel’s genocidal bombing of Gaza (the context has moved on since the book was published – but the poem’s concerns are still sharply relevant). The language of political denial-not-denial is skewered in just three lines.

like a kindergarten, so I probably should not 
have stirred him up by explaining that 
Australia does not send whole weapons but
the doors for bomb bays in their planes
which it replaces as often as they ask.

The poem’s central tension is set up: on one hand, there’s the innocent, naive, playful fantasy creature and on the other the poem’s speaker who is aware that the Australian government is complicit in terrible things.

For the next 14 lines, the rest of the first page, innocent Brookings plays. In the Brookings poems – this book also includes ‘Brookings Becomes a False Flag’ – it’s clear Maiden’s invented character is not simply a mouthpiece for the poet but has an independent imaginary existence. (This may not be obvious with other Maiden characters, but I think it’s always true – Maiden sets her imagined people/creatures up and is interested to see what they have to say – what, for instance, would Dietrich Bonhoeffer say to Kevin Rudd this time? Do I need to say that Bonhoeffer isn’t as cute as Brookings?)

Brookings’s metaphorical origins may be at work in the background, suggesting that liberal organisations like the Brookings Institution aren’t serious about addressing things like genocide. Nerdily, I went to the Institution’s website to see what it was up to at about the time this poem was published – and while it wasn’t playing at being a bomb bay door (or a Bombay door with beads and velvet curtain), it was hosting a discussion about the future of drone warfare (link here). Make of that what you will.

But the poem doesn’t mount an argument about the Brookings Institution. It just gives a picture of innocent, or at least oblivious, playfulness.

There’s a turn, and in the second part of the poem the narrative moves to bedtime, which is a pretext for introducing Tolstoy’s War and Peace. This might seem a bit forced, but if you can accept a ‘fur baby wombat-possum cross’ then why not also accept War and Peace as its ‘best book’?

Embarrassingly, I haven’t read War and Peace (though I saw the King Vidor movie on Super 8 in 1964 and fell in love with Audrey Hepburn). Other readers will know what specific bearing the scene from the novel has on the rest of the poem:

He’ll ask I read him the bit in War and Peace
he likes best at the moment when
Natasha clears belongings from the cart
to make room for some wounded men
as the Rostovs' Moscow house is left
so Kutuzov can defeat Napoleon.

But those of us who haven’t read the novel can still see/feel how it works in the poem.

The War and Peace moment is juxtaposed with the image of Tolstoy at the time when he wrote it:

Tolstoy never fails to soothe
with his independent post-view of
history in its merciful details as
in reality he sits in his wooded plantation
under a tree to school some gathered children.

As often happens with poems, it seems as if this one has gone wandering, from Marles to Brookings, to War and Peace, to Tolstoy sitting with children under a tree. Then the next couple of lines bring it home:

The ABC of Marles does not interplay vision
of children firebombed in tents or shot
in line for food

The poem has interplayed vision of Tolstoy schooling children in a safe ‘independent post-view of / history’ with a scene from his great novel. If tha ABC was to interplay vision of children with the Marles interview, those children would not be safely ‘post-history’ but concurrent with the interview, victims of atrocity. The tension in the opening lines between child-like naivety and a violent reality comes to a head here.

Incidentally, ‘the ABC of Marles’ seems at first to be a slightly odd way of saying ‘Marles on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’, but it can also read, less oddly, as ‘the alphabet of Marles’ – that is, the evasive language Marles uses.

The poem doesn’t go to graphic description of the atrocities – it gives enough to let us know the heaviness that sits in the speaker.

But – and it’s an important question – what is a parent or quasi parent to do? The speaker allows Brookings to continue in ignorance, and the poem ends with the peaceful image of mother and not-quite-child at bedtime;

And now he rests his furry heavy head
in its impossible softness up against my arm
and I read to him again from his best book,
which he opens and shuts a few times first,
transfers to it his bomb bay doorway function

Just two things complicate the image and provoke further thought and feeling.

First, the word ‘impossible’ suggests that, just as any soothing Tolstoy has to offer is dubious because he was writing from a safe historical distance, so any comfort afforded by Brookings is illusory because he is after all an invention, an impossibility.

And second, the last line: what does it mean that the ‘bomb bay doorway function’ can be transferred to a book? What is released when a book ‘opens and shuts’? If you’ve read this far, you probably have as good an answer to that question as I have and together we could probably come up with better ones. I’m reminded of a long history of assertions of the power of the word. There’s the proverbial: ‘The Pen is Mightier than the Sword’, ‘You can kill a person but you can’t kill an idea,’ and so on. The idea seems to be everywhere just now that the narratives we tell are crucial: we can believe the story coming from the White House, or commit ouselves to a different story. That final image gestures towards this kind of thinking. Perhaps what is released in those last lines is the possibility of resistence.

It’s not a call to arms like Evelyn Araluen’s poem, but it is a call to think, to reject double-talk, maybe even to hope.

I am a man of settler heritage who has been alive for almost a third of the time that has elapsed since Arthur Phillip claimed this continent for the British crown. I wrote this blog post on the land of Gadigal and Wangal, where the nights are lating longer and small lizards seem to be everywhere. I acknowledge their Elders past and present and welcome any First Nations readers of the blog.

* When blogging about a book, I currently focus on page 79, which is my age. Mandatory Sentence has just 70 pages, so I gave myself permission to go with a whim.

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Evelyn Araluen’s Rot

Posted on 10 Mar 2026 | 2 comments

Evelyn Araluen, The Rot (University of Queensland Press 2025)

This is a brilliant follow-up to Evelyn Araluen’s first book, Dropbear. It’s passionately raw, intellectually challenging, and full of rabbit-holes. Araluen says in her acknowledgements, ‘In most ways this is a book for girls.’ She goes on to say, ‘A girl is so many things. Everything, really.’ It’s pretty safe to say that I’m not a girl. But as an oldish man of settler heritage I was swept away.

Alison Croggon in the Guardian (at this link) called it ‘a hurricane of a book’ and says (among other things):

The Rot is an experiential plunge into the nightmare of the present moment, as seen through two centuries of colonisation on this continent. Dark though it is – as dark as our times – it is not hopeless. The book is dedicated to ‘my girls, and the world you will make’: Araluen looks to the ‘Long Future’, a term coined by the Unangax̂ scholar Professor Eve Tuck, for what can be imagined for those who survive colonisation – contingent and elusive as that future might be. At the core of this collection’s bitter truths beats a sublime tenderness.

[In case you need a footnote: Unangax̂ are the Indigenous people of the Aleutian islands. Some of the most powerful moments in Rot come when Araluen wrestles with the implications of Eve Tuck’s thinking. You don’t have to go down this tempting rabbit-hole to feel the full force of the poems.]

Araluen was recently interviewed by Sian Cain for the Guardian (at this link) when she won the 2026 Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards. Here’s a snippet:

She worked on The Rot ‘after work, after dinner, in the bath’ for months, though she now admits that such prolonged focus on such a traumatic subject was ‘irresponsible of me’.
‘I do not recommend drinking wine in the bath and listening to Mitski and crying and calling that a writing practice,’ she added.
The Rot reflects ‘a really panicked, distressed window of a time that I hope we all look back on with horror and despair and a real sense of regret,’ Araluen said.

[Mitski, another of the book’s many potential rabbit-holes, is a Japanese-American singer whose music has been described as a ‘wry running commentary on twentysomething angst, raw desire, and often unrequited love’ (link to Wikipedia article here).]

These quotes give an idea of the book’s tone and its scope, though there’s a lot that they don’t mention. For instance, the genocide in Gaza is a pervasive presence. I recommend that you read both the review and the article in full – and then I hope you’ll decide to read the book.

There’s so much to take in, so much to say, such complexity and intensity to untangle, so many rabbit-holes to be profitably explored. I’ll just offer a small note, keeping to my resolve to focus on one page.

Page 78* is the beginning of ‘What You Can Do with Your Hands’:

Before looking at the poem itself, it’s worth considering it in context. It’s title suggests that it is a direct response to an earlier poem. ‘You’ (page 25) ends:

no less human than yourself. Around us the
world sways, sometimes crumbles. It's not that
you think you can change this, but you need
something to do with your hands.

The hands motif turns up again in ‘Analysis Act Three’ (page 76), which launches itself with a quote from J H Prynne (from his 2022 lecture ‘Mental Ears and Poetic Work‘, another potential rabbit-hole).

Prynne: no poet has or can have clean hands, because 
clean hands are themselves a fundamental contradiction.
Clean hands do no worthwhile work.

Sections viii and ix have this: (Apologies, but my WordPress theme doesn’t allow me to include section numbers as they ought to appear.)

Every day I ask myself what the machine doesn't want 
me to know. Every tomorrow will be the day I find a 
way to learn it. Every night I read poetry just to give 
my hands something to do.

Refusal, resistance, disavowal and survivance are
tenors of a liveable life. In action they are compromised,
bloody-handed, in the world and of it.

The book is full of theory, grief and rage. But the motif of hands beings it down to earth: thinking and feeling are not enough. We need to work, to engage. Reading poetry can be work. So are ‘refusal, resistance, disavowal and survivance’.

‘What You Can Do with Your Hands’ responds in the form of an instructional poem in 15 sections’. Page 78 has just the first two instructions:

First, verify. Count the fingers, the sharpness of the 
lines, check for smudges or extra limbs. Is there a blur?
A hollow aura where the wrong light strikes? What 
shadows loom from an open door? Wear eucalyptus 
on your wrist, invoke that old verse. Don't swallow
the fruit. Don't make deals with their kind.

Temple, brows, slide index fingers down the nasal canal, 
swipe thumbs under the eye. Push harder than you think you 
should. Swallow. It will hurt until it won't.

A quick and dirty summary of these sections would be something like: first, pay attention to your actual hands, and second, use them to become aware of yourself as physically present.

But this is poetry. The words matter. And they introduce an element of the uncanny, something that disturbs the prose meaning. ‘Check for smudges,’ Ok. I can do that, and it is an injunction to self-reflection: smudges – of ink, dirt, foodstuff – will show what I’ve been doing. But ‘check for extra limbs’? The mind goes wandering, and who knows where? Then the questions about light and shade ask the reader to notice their actual context, recognise that they are in a place, in relationship to whatever creates a looming shadow. (In my case right now, the shadows on my hands are cast by light from an open window.)

‘Wear eucalyptus’: fair enough. But what is the old verse we are to invoke? I lay that aside as another of the book’s potential rabbit-holes. If you have an idea, please say in the comments.

‘Don’t swallow the fruit’: I read this as referring to the tale where a person taken to a fairy land must not eat anything if they want to avoid being trapped there forever. That and the final sentence, ‘Don’t make deals with their kind,’ are warnings to keep one’s own integrity against the tide of disinformation and distraction that we live in – ‘Don’t drink the kool aid.’ Already the poem has moved quite a way from literal hands.

The second section comes back to the literal. It insists that the reader notice they are a body: that they push hard to make contact with their own physical existence.

I won’t discuss the rest in detail – the remaining sections cover how to acknowledge place; how to repair; how to cook; how to throw soil into a grave. They cover self-defence, self-care, first-aid, violence, tenderness, and finally connection. Section by section, the instruction form opens up possibilities, creates small and large riddles, resonates. Even Section 12, the shortest, ‘Pick up your fucking litter,’ repays a moment’s attention: the tone shifts and the speaker of the poem becomes for a moment an irritable Auntie. But the comic irritation doesn’t detract from the importance of the advice. Section 14, the second shortest section, is, among other things, a gloss on Section 2: ‘Remove your grip from your own throat.’ It’s one thing to push hard with your thumbs under your eyes until it hurts; it’s a different thing altogether to do violence against yourself, to stifle your own voice. I love Section 15, but it’s against my religion to quote the final line of a poem.

Do read the book if you get a chance.

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.

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Journal Catch-up 31: Overland 256

Posted on 13 Jul 2025 | 4 comments

Evelyn Araluen and Jonathan Dunk (editors), Overland Nº 256 (Spring 2024)
(Links are to the online versions unless otherwise indicated.)

This is the third of four promised editions of Overland dedicated to commemorating its 70th year. In some ways it marks the end of an era as Toby Fitch, who has been poetry editor for a decade, breaks his silence with ‘A farewell and a poem from poetry editor Toby Fitch, 2015–2025‘, and resigns from the ‘simple work, of carving down a cornucopia of submissions into a small set menu for each issue’.

There is an element of nostalgia in the design and the illustrations reproduced from past issues – by artists including Fred Williams (from 1985), Ian Rankin (from 1987) and Richard Tipping (from 1993). The writing by contrast tends more to the urgent.

‘Plant hatred in our hearts‘ by Sarah Wehbe, ‘the child of refugees who are the children of refugees’, contextualises the current atrocities in Gaza by listing events reported from there in the first week of the writer’s life. The essay includes this, a reminder of Edward Said’s resonant statement that ‘Palestinians have been denied permission to narrate’:

The recent genocide in Gaza has planted hatred in the hearts of its survivors and onlookers, a painful wound so immense that it will continue to throb generations on. Plant hatred in our hearts and watch as hope and resilience grow in its place. Long after the rubble has settled and the refugees have dispersed across the world, we will share our stories. … We are here, we tell our stories, and as long as that is true, there is hope.

There’s a lot else besides. ‘Dust‘ by Lilli Hayes is a brief, harrowing first-hand account of the impact of asbestos-related mesothelioma on her family. In ‘Résonances‘, Daniel Browning – whose book of essays Close to the Subject won the 2024 Prime Minister’s Literary Award – writes about the work of Swiss–Haitian artist Sasha Huber, as seen through an Australian First Nations lens.

There is more poetry than usual (Toby is going out in a blaze of glory). There are some big names, but I’ll just mention ‘speed, a pastoral‘ by Ruby Connor, which has a subtitle ‘(After John Forbes)‘. It doesn’t feel very Forbes-ish to me, but it captures an episode in a young woman’s life in vivid, unpunctuated three-line stanzas.

My page 78* practice serves me well with this Overland. It falls in the middle of one of the three pieces selected by fiction editor Claire Corbett, the masterly ‘Daryl’s wombat farm‘ by Rowan MacDonald.

The image gives you an idea of the retro design – the chunky type face and larger font size, and the plain white, matt paper stock. I don’t necessarily prefer this to the modern design, but the larger font is a relief to my ageing eyes, and the poorer paper stock creates a companionable vibe rather than an austerely professional one.

I know I said there’s not much nostalgia in the writing in this Overland. I’ll now contradict myself. This story reminds me solid, social realist, working-class fiction that was a staple of Australian short fiction decades ago. I hasten to add that it does it in a good way.

At the start the narrator, wearing his girlfriend Chloe’s pink gumboots, is shovelling cube-shaped wombat poo. What grows from there is a portrait of a small, marginalised rural community filled with histories of violence, untimely death, ‘unspoken stories’, and a cast of characters who are known only by their first names and vague reference to their status, exploits or fates. Within that portrait is the sweet, elliptically told story of fatherhood.

When I say elliptically-told, I mean it sometimes take a bit of pleasurable work to figure out what’s going on. The beginning of page 78 is an example. The narrator has just returned Curly’s borrowed Skyline (a make of car – my four-year-old grandson would be ashamed of me that I had to look it up) with mess on the seats. Curly, who hasn’t been mentioned previously, doesn’t make a fuss about the mess. Instead he says, ‘Congrats, brother. You’re one of us now.’ Only as the first sentences of page 78 unreel, the reader understands. Curly has played a good role in the narrator’s life in other ways than lending the car, and his ‘one of us’ refers to fatherhood. The narrator has borrowed the car when Chloe was in labour, but didn’t make it to the hospital in time:

I’m relieved he doesn’t mention the seats, instead welcoming me to an unspoken club. He got me a gig on the council road crew — fewer potholes between here and the hospital now.

On the rest of the page, the aftermath of the birth plays out and a number of economically sketched subplots are resolved. The narrator catches himself voicing some of Chloe’s hippie-book-derived philosophy. He has an oblique conversation with his mother about breaking the pattern of neglect and abuse set by his father. Daryl of the wombat farm gets a degree of justice for his role in the narrator’s father’s death. The mother of a missing boy overcomes her dislike of libraries and education enough to put posters back up. Maureen, mentioned once before in connection with pavs, gets another mention. A wedding is mooted. And there’s a tiny, beautifully pitched conversation about the future.

Chloe did great. I knew she would. It wasn’t ideal but life rarely is. You learn to roll with the punches. Promise I haven’t been into those hippie books. This stuff just changes you, does something to how one sees the world.
Never thought I’d see you in church,’ laughs Mum, when we arrive at the baptism.
‘Must do everything right,’ I tell her. ‘About time someone did.’
Daryl doesn’t attend. He’s back inside, doing time for perverting the course of justice. Had to sell his farm. Tourism developers snapped it up. Rumour says it will be a wildlife sanctuary – has enough wombats already.
Billy Kerslake’s mother did the catering for us. She’s turned over a new leaf. She put up posters of Billy in the library again, says the place isn’t so bad, after she discovered their Women’s Weekly cookbooks. Now her pavs give Maureen’s a run for their money.
‘Do you have a date?’ asks Mum, eager for our wedding. She’s given up the smokes, says she wants to be around to see her grandchild grow up.
‘Once we’re settled,’ I assure her. ‘You’ll be first invited.’
Chloe and I walk the beach each day. I push the pram while she collects seashells. ‘Think I might attend a craft course,’ she says. ‘With the mums from post-natal class.’
She never ceases to amaze me.

The story could end there, really, but it continues for another 75 words, and concludes on an explicitly optimistic note that sings:

We hold our baby girl, smile in awe at this creation, the love we share, an unwritten future ahead.
‘Thank you,’ I say to Chloe.
‘What for?’ she laughs.

It’s a story that repays the closer attention that my page 78 practice requires.

I wrote this blog post on the land of the Wangal and Gadigal clans of the Eora nation. I gratefully acknowledge the Elders past and present who have cared for this beautiful country for millennia, and lived through extraordinary changes in the land and climate over that time.

* My blogging practice is focus arbitrarily on the page of a book that coincides with my age, currently page 78.

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Journal Catch-up 29: Overland Nº255

Posted on 30 Mar 2025 | Leave a comment

Evelyn Araluen and Jonathan Dunk (editors), Overland Nº 255 (Winter 2024)
(Links are to the online versions unless otherwise indicated.)

I sometime approach literary journals as if shouldering a grim obligation – doing my bit in the cultural ecology. (Added later: The morning after I uploaded this post, I read in a letter from Esther Anatolitis, editor of Meanjin, that my subscription ‘supports the ecosystem of Australian writing: that fragile yet incredibly powerful space where the finest new work is written’. Great minds draw on the same tropes.) The austere retro design of this Overland, one of four to mark a 70th anniversary, didn’t do much to dispel the grimness. Nor did the editorial, which underlines the darkness of our times. But then …

The first thirty pages or so are taken up with ‘Writing from the South: an interview with Kim Scott’. It’s leisurely, full of unfinished sentences and swirling crosscurrents of thought and information – there’s no apparent attempt to tidy up the spoken conversation, and as a result you (or at least I) get to feel you’re in the room with the the living, breathing, thinking author of, among other things, That Deadman Dance, Taboo (links to my blog posts) and (what I haven’t read but now really want to) Benang. He’s in conversation with Samuel J. Cox.

I’ll mention two other non-fiction pieces: ‘The Australian media’s problem with Palestine’ by Juliet Fox, which tells about decades of government suppression of Palestinian voices on a Melbourne community radio station; and ‘“Arts funding is fucked”: Overland 1973–1975’, a plus-ça-change piece by Overland‘s digital archivist Sam Ryan about the politics of funding to the arts in Australia 50-odd years ago.

As always, there’s poetry, ranging in this issue from probably-very-good-if-you’re-motivated-to-spend-a-lot-of-time-with-it-but-today-I’m-not to a beautifully executed punch to the guts. The latter is ‘The Killer in Me’ by Ann-Marie Blanchard, in which the speaker personifies her uterus after a miscarriage. Somewhere between the two extremes is the dauntingly titled ‘Poem in asymmetric transparency’ by Shari Kocher, a meditation on a Margaret Preston painting:

Three lotus lookalikes floating in solar darkness.

As it happens, page 78* occurs in the piece of fiction that speaks most to me, Jordan Smith’s ‘Something Is Rotten’, in which a technological solution to the climate emergency goes terribly wrong, seen from the point of view of young lawyers who thought their normal work was high-pressure. At page 78, the catastrophe is beginning to unfold, though the characters stay with their usual preoccupations. Paul, one of the barristers, looks out of his high-rise window at the ‘sat-drones’ doing hi-tech stuff to the upper atmosphere:

‘Fuck knows what they’re doing but it does look good.’ The sat-drones twinkled as, one by one, they flew up then plunged down, like waves running up and down a skipping rope. The colour of each oscillated between a crystal blue and a sharp, metallic crimson. Rob felt a bit dizzy. He and Sarine looked at each other.

As required by a tight deadline, Rob puts the dizziness aside, takes ‘a few painkillers’ and gets back to work.

His phone buzzed incessantly.

Sydney 6G
Friday, 6 June 11:43
Notification centre
News alert:
PM urges calm after atmospheric pressure dr… (10+)

Rob cleared notifications and switched on do not disturb.

The reader feel the disaster happening while the character sticks to the his mundane urgencies. It’s deft storytelling. Like the poems I’ve mentioned it’s marked as ‘Online soon’ on the Overland website, and may be available by the time you read this.

I don’t usually google authors, but I did look up Jordan Smith. He’s a barrister who has an Honours degree in nuclear physics, so I guess he knows what he’s taking about on both sides of the equation.

I haven’t exactly dispelled the notion of grimness I invoked in my first sentence – colonisation, genocide, miscarriage, climate catastrophe aren’t cheery subjects. But taken along with the evocative decorations from past issues (Richard Tipping in the 1970s, Rod Shaw and John Copeland in the 1990s) there’s something exhilarating about the way Overland has survived so much change in the world and in itself, still giving a platform to new voices, still saying things that aren’t easy to hear elsewhere.

I wrote this blog post on the land of the Wangal and Gadigal clans of the Eora nation. I gratefully acknowledge the Elders past and present who have cared for this beautiful country for millennia, and lived through extraordinary changes in the land and climate over that time.

* My blogging practice is focus arbitrarily on the page of a book that coincides with my age. This is first time I’ve looked at page 78.

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Journal Catch-up 27: Overland Nº254

Posted on 29 Dec 2024 | 2 comments

Evelyn Araluen and Jonathan Dunk (editors), Overland Nº 254 (Summer 2023)
(Only the editorial is online at the time of writing – so I haven’t included links, sorry!)

The first thing you notice about this issue of Overland is its design – an austere black and red cover and monochrome throughout, a smaller format, and surely the paper stock is cheaper than we’ve become used to. Could this be a sign of a funding crisis?

Of course there may be a funding crisis – this is an Australian literary journal after all. But there’s a definite retro aesthetic to the new look. Editors Evelyn Araluen and Jonathan Dunk call it an ‘archivally informed design’, and explain that it’s the first of four issues to mark Overland‘s seventieth year of publication. The internal illustrations are all from the archives, and include stunning ink drawings by Noel Counihan from the 1970s and Rick Amor from the late 80s and early 90s. Fabulously, page 128 features a Bruce Petty cartoon from 1976.

The nostalgia stops with the look. The words are all 2024.

I recommend the whole issue, but want to single out two articles that make me sorry so little of this content has made it to Overland‘s website. They are ‘“A State of Waste”: Myall Creek, the Sydney Herald and the Foundations of Australian Capitalism’ by Jeff Sparrow, and the anonymous essay, ‘Writing after … October 7’.

I’ve recently read how the 16th century Papal ‘Doctrine of Discovery’ (Wikipedia entry here) was explicitly invoked to justify dispossession and genocide of Indigenous people in the Americas and elsewhere well into the 19th century. Jeff Sparrow’s magisterial essay offers a very different account of how similar acts were justified in Australia. It’s a clear and cogent history of how the closing of the commons in 18th century Britain led to a new understanding of ‘ownership’ of land, which was applied ruthlessly by the settlers in Australia. The content may not be startlingly new, but Sparrow’s copious quotation from the Sydney Herald in the first part of the 19th century is, for me at least, revelatory. It’s not that the way First Nations people related to the land was strange to the settlers. It was all too familiar:

Like the British commoners, Indigenous people clearly did ‘make use’ of the land. They lived in a use-value society, tending their country to encourage the animals and plants they required. The Herald, however, understood ‘productivity’ in capitalist terms, with use values significant only insofar as they generated profit. (Page 67)

The essay spells out the way this thinking leads shockingly, but logically to the minds of the Sydney Herald editors, to justification of massacres.

What can I say? If you get a chance, read this essay.

The author of the other stand-out essay is a person of Arab background, writing in the context of conversations with Arab and Palestinian friends who work in academic or cultural contexts. They describe how they have always held in their mind the history of Palestine as ‘a bustling site of plurality and coexistence’. The establishment of the state of Israel in the nakba put an end to that condition but it has remained as a vision of possibility.

Jews worldwide were shaken by the visceral hatred shown for them in the Hamas attacks on 7 October last year. Palestinians and Arabs have been no less shaken by the hatred and disregard for them that subsequent events have demonstrated. The multi-religious and plural world of pre-1948 is now unthinkable. ‘We had not realised until this carnage started,’ the author writes, ‘how dehumanised Palestinians and Arabs are in the eyes of most Israelis.

There’s more. Back here, well-intended and well-informed colleagues have been carefully ‘balanced’ when discussing the situation of Palestinians in Israel, in large part because of not wanting to be seen as antisemitic. The author and friends have believed that if a point came when Israel unleashed its full fury on Palestinians their colleagues would take a stand. But it has happened, and many have not changed their stance:

It is not hyperbole to say we are grieving as we watch our kin annihilated on an hourly basis … We feel neglected, betrayed and discarded. We have always stood in solidarity with the causes these colleagues are most passionate about because those causes are ours too. Why isn’t Palestine their cause? (Page 49)

There’s another fine Palestine-related essay – providing devastating perspective on the brouhaha over three actors wearing a keffiyah at a preview of The Seagull in Sydney last year. But it’s the anonymous writer’s cry from the heart that strikes home.

There’s poetry – including the winners of the 2023 Judith Wright Poetry Prize and an excerpt from Nam Le’s 36 Ways of Writing a Vietnamese Poem.

There are short stories, of which my favourite is ‘Who Rattles the Night’ by Annie Zhang, a comic ghost story that won the Neilma Sidney Fiction Prize.

I finished writing this blog post in the land of the Bidjigal and Gadigal clans of the Eora nation, overlooking the ocean and surrounded by birdsong. I gratefully acknowledge the Elders past and present who have cared for this beautiful country for millennia.

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Journal Catch-up 25: Overland 253

Posted on 30 Sep 2024 | 1 comment

Evelyn Araluen and Jonathan Dunk (editors), Overland 253 (Summer 2023)
(Some of the content is online at the Overland website – I’ve included links)

This Overland begins with a trio of generational contrasts.

First, gen x-er Brigid Rooney, Associate Professor of English at Sydney University has an article on the late Professor Elizabeth Webby in which, though she describes herself as a friend of her subject, she maintains a serious academic distance where you can feel a more personal tone struggling to assert itself.

Second, baby-boomer John Docker, also an Associate Professor at Sydney Uni, has a review article on a book about Sydney’s New Theatre. He begins with a convincing account of himself as a non-theatre person, and one, moreover, who is strangely ill at ease when he visits the current site of the New Theatre, which is about ten minutes by car from the suburb where he currently lives. Amusingly self-indulgent, but it might have been better to reject the commission.

In the third item, Dženana Vucic, self-identified as a millennial, has a piece about Sailor Moon, a manga serial that was big in her 1990s childhood and I’m sorry to say of very little more interest to me after reading her article than it was before – though I enjoyed the complex irony in which she pretended to claim a deeply anti-capitalist message in the show.

After that, things get serious with ‘Prison healthcare as punishment‘ by Sarah Schwartz, a gruelling article which begins with the grim statement that an Aboriginal woman ‘passed away on the floor of a prison cell on 2 January 2020, after days of crying out for help.’ It continues, ‘Three years later, a Coroner found that if she had received the healthcare she needed, she would not have died.’ It’s a penetrating look at the way for-profit prison healthcare in Victoria and other Australian states leads to terrible outcomes, especially for First Nations people. A year after the coronial findings mentioned in its first paragraph no one had been held accountable for the neglect.

Of the poetry, curated by Toby Fitch, ‘Water under the bridge‘ by Jeanine Leane stands out. Among other things, it looks at the way different generations of First Nations people have responded to colonisation. The title phrase takes on a telling ambiguity:

that there were names in the river
that were not just water under a white man's
bridge

Fiction editor Claire Corbett has gathered four excellent, diverse short stories. ‘Parliament‘ by Simon Castles is a sketch of young love and protest on the lawns of the new Parliament House in Canberra in 1988. Anna May Samson, currently starring in the dreadful Australian spin-off of Death in Paradise, packs a complex set of relationships into a very few pages in ‘Summer work‘. ‘Hot season‘ by Anna Quercia-Thomas is a post-apocalyptic pastoral vignette. In ‘At first, nobody died‘ by Nasrin Mahoutchi-Hosaini the protagonist, herself an immigrant, is on vacation from her work as a counsellor of ‘boat people’.

It took me a long time to read this journal. It wasn’t for lack of interest.

I wrote this blog post in Gadigal Wangal country, where the weather is swinging back and forth between a nurturing warmth and a chilly wind that murmurs in the casuarinas. I acknowledge Elders past and present for their continuing custodianship of this land.

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Journal Catch-up 23

Posted on 23 May 2024 | Leave a comment

Two more journals in my endless attempt to keep up to date!

Evelyn Araluen and Jonathan Dunk (editors), Overland 252 (Spring 2023)
(Some of the content is online at the Overland website – I’ve included links)

This Overland‘s editorial describes itself as a ‘second run’. The first run had reflected on the Voice referendum, but as publication came closer – in October last year – ‘the temptation to linger on the politics of symbolic recognition and constitutional reform seems a luxury in the face of escalating violence against Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank’. With feet and throats sore from a solidarity march, the editors draw attention to an essay by Palestinian-Australian writer and historian Micaela Sahhar, ‘which reminds [them] of Overland‘s historic role in indexing Palestine’s survival and resistance’.

Quite apart from its serendipitous relevance, the essay, ‘An idiosyncratic archive: Overland 169 & the Wolstonecroft years‘, is a joy to read, as Sahhar revisits two copies of Overland she acquired in 2002 and 2004. She compares her reading of them then and now, talks of her relationships to people who appeared in them, and generally takes us on a journey into her mind. I love this passage – and so, I assume, do the editors:

As a journal at odds with the mainstream, Overland offered a younger version of me an intellectual place where radical thinking could reside, and a dawning awareness of a community I could take a place in. In this sense, Overland was the tangible expression of a counter to the indifference and invisibility of a young Palestinian woman, the significance of whose identity was rewritten just as she came of age at the time of a catastrophic intellectual nadir represented in 9/11; and a place of refusal against socio-political disengagement and apathy which have been the horsemen of these neo-liberal times.

The other stand-out essay is ‘The Disappearance of a.k.a. Victor Mature‘ by Vivian Blaxell, which ranges far and wide, high and low, into memoir and poetry appreciation, circling the subject of beauty. It’s a great read, from which I can’t resist quoting what may be the silliest paragraph, but one that made me laugh:

Australian English is wanton with beautiful. Beauty pops up in not the usual beautiful places there, thereby revealing the radical contingency of beauty itself, probably unintentionally: beautiful, Australians might say of a pork sausage, which seems a surprise at first until you realise that beauty does not exist before we say it exists, for beauty relies entirely on disclosure for its existence. That lucky sausage.

Other essays are a discussion by Peter D Mathews of Sophie Cunningham’s 2004 novel Geography and an idiosyncratic but fascinating essay by πO on concrete poetry in Australia and related matters.

There are five pieces of fiction and nine poems.

Of the poetry, ‘Balloch’ by Eileen Chong stands out for me. An apparently simple poem about a visit to a Scottish loch, it leaves an uncanny aftertaste that only gets richer with further readings.

The fiction covers a wide range, from a celebration of Rotuman culture (I had to look it up) by Dorell Ben to a fantasy of a catastrophic world post climate emergency by Jodie How, with a little social realism by Chloe Hillary and other pieces in between.

Alexandra Christie (editor), Heat Series 3 Nº 12 (Giramondo 2023)

This may be my last issue of Heat before my subscription expires. Despite having a selection of poems from Nam Le’s 36 Ways of Writing a Vietnamese Poem, a book I’m looking forward to, the journal is a bit of a fizzer for me, though the dominating US presence I’ve complained of in earlier issues is absent, and only one member of Heat‘s editorial advisory board gets a guernsey.

  • You can read Paddy O’Reilly’s ‘Redundant‘ on the Heat website. It’s an experimental prose piece in which the experiment seems to consist of not finishing sentences. See what you think.
  • Jordi Infeld’s ‘Poet’s Pocket’ would and indeed does pass for a short essay on sewing and related matters – just a footnote identifying one of its otherwise unremarkable phrases as a quote from Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons suggests deeper undercurrents.
  • ‘The Phoenix Apartment’ by Bella Li feels to me like notes towards a larger project.

Items from beyond the Anglosphere are ‘We Shall Be Monsters’, a meditation on Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein by Argentinian writer Esther Cross, translated by Alice Whitmore, and six terrific short poems by Iranian Maryam Nazarian, translated by Malaysia-based Arash Kohshsafa. Here’s the first and shortest of the poems, which does wonderful things with an echo of William Carlos Williams’s poem about the plums:

One
I've set the breakfast, the kisses, and the keys on the table.
Please, forgive me
if I find freedom more pleasant than your love.

The most interesting piece is Stephanie Radok’s ‘Inventory 2020’, an impressionistic chronicle of a working artist’s life, made up of mostly very short entries. It reminded me of the late Antigone Kefala’s journals in the way it combined observations of the passing moment with considered reflections and descriptions of the artist’s process. As 2020 was a year when the even tenor of our lives was disrupted by Covid, a narrative emerges. Here’s the entry for 23 February, on page 77*:

23. What you thought was passing/casual was your life. And a particular red purple near a blue hillside that seemed to reflect you.

As for Nam Le’s poems, they seem to be part of a larger whole. I’ll wait for the book.

* My blogging practice for some time has been to focus arbitrarily on the page of a book or journal that coincides with my age.

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Journal Catch-up 22

Posted on 28 Mar 2024 | 2 comments

Two more journals in my endless attempt to keep up to date!

Evelyn Araluen and Jonathan Dunk (editors), Overland 251 (Winter 2023)
(Some of the content is online at the Overland website, and I’ve included links)

As always, this issue of Overland is full of good things. In particular, there’s ‘Close to the subject‘ by Bundjalung and Kullilli journalist Daniel Browning, whose mellifluous voice is familiar to me from his stint as presenter of ABC’s Awaye. The book Close to the Subject was published by Magabala Books in 2023. On the strength of this essay, it’s worth reading. Of his time as a journalist for the ABC, Browning writes:

My stories are always collaborative, and I try to produce content that represents not simply the who, what and why — but the cultural context in which these dialogues take place. I no longer excise myself from my stories, as I used to do (although I always insist that my team practise a simple rule: you are always the least important person in the room). … [The kind of journalism I practise] is one which embeds my blackfella subjectivity. It centres my own story, but only to make clear that I am in relationship with the person I am conversing with. By establishing my own credentials, I am drawing a reflexive enclosing circle around the conversation – its cultural context.

(page 51)

There are a other excellent articles on First Nations Issues from Barry Corr and Hana Pera Aoke, essays on literary matters, and a heart-wrenching episode of World War Two history from Bill Gammage.

The poetry section is wonderfully rich. I’ll just mention ‘Nothing out of the ordinary‘ by Heather Taylor-Johnson. The speaker of the poem lists any number of extraordinary adventures – mainly involving skydiving – that, she says, never happened. The negative is clearly ironic in some way, and you live with the tension of that until the very last line. It wasn’t until I heard Heather Taylor-Johnson read the poem at an Avant-Gaga evening at Sappho’s cafe that I realised with full force that (excuse the spoiler) the poem is an elegy.

Of the stories, ‘The expectations of sparrows’ by Jane Downing (which the website has tagged ‘online soon’) stands out. Its opening sentence, ‘Mavis was contemplating death,’ led me to expect one more story about a young woman suffering from depression as a result of chaotic sexual experiences or worse. But no! Mavis is in a cemetery when a pimply young man approaches her with a proposition involving his desecrating some graves and the two of them sharing the reward when she dobs him in. It’s a tale centred on a solid ethical dilemma, with some finely judged twists.

Alexandra Christie (editor), Heat Series 3 Nº 11 (Giramondo 2023)

I’m not getting on well with Heat. According to its website, it has always aimed to ‘publish innovative Australian and international writers of the highest standard’. The current issue accordingly includes work by two Australian writers and two international writers. So far so good. But look a bit closer and see that of the Australian writers one is listed as a publisher of Heat, and the other is on the editorial advisory board, while one of the ‘international’ writers and both translators live in the USA. Is all excellence, one wonders, to be found within the Heat family or imported from the USA? Must all translations into English include words like ‘faucet’ and ‘gotten’?

Evelyn Juers’ ‘Totality in Wallal. Woolf in Yorkshire. Einstein in Scharbeutz.’ is the high point of the issue, an essay on biography as a form, full of fascinating details from the lives and influence of its subjects. I enjoyed the three prose poems (flash fictions?) from Suneeta Peres da Costa, and the excerpt from Sara Mesa’s novel Un Amor, translated by Katie Whittemore, delivers a terrific final twist that made me almost forgive its leaking faucet. (The excerpt is on the Heat website.)

I hope to be less grumpy in my next journal catch-up.

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Journal Catch-up 20

Posted on 24 Jul 2023 | 5 comments

My current practice of focusing on page 76 when blogging about books serves me well when the subject is journals. It helps to resist the pull to go on at tedious length about the whole contents.

Alexandra Christie (editor), Heat Series 3 Nº 8 (Giramondo 2023)

This is a fabulous issue of Heat. A clutch of ‘animal poems’ by Judith Beveridge would have justified the cost of the magazine. ‘Mourning a Breast’ by the late Hong Kong writer Xi Xi, translated by Jennifer Feeley, is an excerpt from a yet-to-be-published novel that includes, among other things, a gruelling account of breast surgery and some fascinating reflections on different Chinese and English translations of Madame Bovary. Send Me a Sign? is a charming essay on Henry Handel Richardson and spiritualism by Cameron Hurst (this one can be read on the Heat website).

Page 76 occurs in the short story ‘Shopping’ by Katerina Gibson, whose collection, Women I Know, won the Christina Stead prize this year. Like Xi Xi’s narrator, the protagonist of this story is interested in translation. She works at a writers’ centre where she is in love with her boss. The story is like an elegant tapestry of twenty-something lostness and finding a way: her work; her relationships, both those at work and her initially unromantic sex life; her compulsive overspending on clothes and her general angst/anomie. I loved it, especially for a key turning point where she reveals her compulsion to a friend and instead of running a mile he laughs and says, ‘But you don’t seem crazy at all.’ (Sorry for the spoiler!)

This seems an appropriate place to mention Giramondo’s promising new online initiative, Re:Heat. It’s a bi-monthly newsletter in which a current contributor to Heat Series 3 encounters an item from the archives. The first of the newsletters features an article by Josephine Rowe on ‘Alive in Ant and Bee’ by Gillian Mears, which was published in Series 2 Number 13, in 2007. You can read Gillian Mears’ piece here, and Josephine Rowe’s response here.

Evelyn Araluen and Jonathan Dunk (editors), Overland 250 (Summer 2022)
(Some of the content – less than in the past – is online at the revamped Overland website, and I’ve included links)

Great editors think alike. Overland is also launching a series in which current writers respond to items from the archives, in their case as part of the print journal. Jordana Silverstein kicks it off with a response to a 1988 story by Lily Brett, which is republished in the journal. Neither piece in online yet, but both are interesting.

At the other end of a readability spectrum is the issue’s first article, ‘Structures don’t go out onto the streets? Notes on John Tranter’s radical pastiche‘ by Louis Armand, which must be the ultimate in poetry insider talk, making no concessions to readers who don’t know their Jacques Lacan from their Ern Malley. Definitely for the spectacularly well read.

Other articles are more accessible and, to me at least, infinitely more interesting: Dallas Rogers on early colonial maps as instruments of colonialism, Jeff Sparrow on elite capture of identity politics, Fiannuala Morgan on colonial literature and bushfires are all worth reading. That’s all before we get to the poetry and fiction sections.

The twelve pages of poetry include the runners-up in the 2022 Judith Wright Poetry Prize (the winner was published in the previous issue). Of these, ‘Camperdown grief junk’ by Wiradjuri poet Yeena Kirkbright spoke most to me in its tour of the Camperdown Cemetery, so beloved of poets. Cameron Lowe’s prose poem ‘Ribbons’ ten pages later also spoke to me. Having just gone on about line breaks in a recent post, I found this phrase just a little squirm-making:

in the rear view mirror there were the back slappers, as usual, jerking off over line breaks.

I’ve been told.

There are 23 pages of fiction, ranging from grim to dystopian, all interesting. The story beginning on page 76, ‘Song and dance’ by Sik Chuan Pua is at the grim end of the spectrum, taking us inside the mind of Clara O’Brien, once a celebrated pianist who is now struggling with physical and mental incoherence in an institution of some kind. Right from the start, the story deftly maintains a double perspective: what Clara sees and what the reader understands in play with each other. It’s no spoiler to say that the story builds towards the word ‘Parkinson’s’. That condition, or something close to it, is there in the first non-bold sentence of this:

She was forty-seven when it began
Her head is locked towards the timber casement windows. Beyond the glass, a lake spreads out. A breeze rattles the shutters. It could be morning. Or late afternoon.
Look, a mysterious orange hue appears. What a hoax, for lakes should be blue as ink. Someone has been up to mischief. Someone has dumped such obnoxious colour, contaminating the lake, transforming beauty into farce. Will someone please restore the lake to its natural colour?

This is Overland‘s 250th issue. Long may it thrive.

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Journal Catch-up 19

Posted on 18 May 2023 | 12 comments

I’m almost caught up on my journal-reading. This isn’t a result of my diligence, but of the difficulties besetting literary journals just now. Heat has been appearing like clockwork, but the Summer 2022 edition of Overland arrived in my mailbox in mid Autumn 2023, and Southerly and the Australian Poetry Journal and Anthology – to which I subscribe – haven’t published hard-copy issues for two years.

Here are two almost-current issues, blogged with attention to page 76 as per my arbitrary blog policy.

Alexandra Christie (editor), Heat Series 3 Nº 7 (Giramondo 2023)

From the Heat website:

The first issue of HEAT was published in July 1996, in the wake of the Demidenko Affair, in which an Australian author of English background posed as Ukrainian in order to gain credibility for her Holocaust-inspired novel. The anger provoked by this hoax accounts in large part for the magazine’s name, and a commitment to the publication of genuinely diverse writing.

The third series is different from the first two in many ways, but it continues to make a rich contribution to Australian literary culture through its commitment to writing from non-British backgrounds. This issue includes translations from Chinese, Spanish, French and Ukrainian, as well as work by two non-Anglo Australians – П.O. and Eda Gunaydin. Five poems by Melbourne poet Gareth Morgan may make him an exception, though a man in one of his poems says, ‘He must be fresh off the boat,’ which seems to imply a non-Anglo appearance.

I most enjoyed Eda Gunaydin’s ‘Fuck Up’, a comic tale of two young Anglo men who set up a Go Fund Me for an imaginary anti-Islamophobia conference, whose scheme goes awry when they find themselves actually trying to organise the conference. Two stories by Zhu Yue (translated from Chinese by Jianan Qian and Alyssia Asquith) reminded me of Jorge Luis Borges; Andriy Lyubka ‘Roasted Uganda’ (translated by Yulia Lyubka and Kate Tsurkan), a letter from the war in Ukraine, is available to read on the Heat website.

Noémie Lefebvre’s ‘Les non-dupes errent and other ghosts’ (translated by Sophie Lewis), which begins on page 76, overcame my codgerly resistance to stories that invoke French Theorists: the narrator is stuck in the middle of writing a tragedy, pondering the futility of literature given the state of the world and remembering her mother’s anorexia as she prepares to eat some toast – as one does – when Lacan (no first name) turns up and they have a weirdly obscure, but funny and resonant conversation.

Evelyn Araluen and Jonathan Dunk (editors), Overland 249 (Summer 2022)
(Some of the content – less than in the past – is online at the revamped Overland website, and I’ve included links)

Apart from its usual excellent content this issue of Overland brought tears to my eyes with a letter to ‘the Overland family’ from the editors committing themselves to the MEAA’s Freelance Charter, which among other things means not passing on the effects of funding challenges to their contributors. I’m an MEAA member, book editors’ section. They’ve just guaranteed that I’ll keep subscribing for the foreseeable.

The issue kicks off with an excoriation of Heather Rose’s Bruny, which almost makes me want to read the novel to see if Elias Grieg, the excoriator, might have failed to notice that the narrative was deeply ironic. But I can resist. There are also interesting articles on forced adoption (by EJ Clarence), brain tumour as experienced by an environmental activist (Bonnie Etherington), and language liberation (Natalia Figueroa Barroso).

Of the generous array of poems, I most enjoyed Ouyang Yu’s uncharacteristically upbeat ‘To Richard Ouyang’, a meditation on the naming of his bicultural son.

There are five short stories, including one (by Avi Leibovitch) that features a talking cat, another (by Tim Loveday) that features small dogs in a bushfire (and mentions in passing a horrific practice in commercial dog-breeding), a family drama (by Rob Johnson) told from a child’s point of view (‘it was like a movie and I wasn’t part of it’). I enjoyed all of them. Fortuitously the one beginning on page 76, ‘Black Spring’ by Hossein Asgari, is perhaps the most interesting.

The protagonist of ‘Black Spring’ is a university teacher who has moved back in with his parents during the pandemic. It begins:

He pushes his chair back and stretches his limbs, turning himself into a multiplication sign before taking his glasses off and rubbing his eyes. He knows how they must look: red, irritated, thirsty for a few artificial tears. Has he just snapped at a student? In an online class which was recorded? God damn it! He slams his laptop shut, opens his desk drawer, picks up his eyedrops, and walks to the window. His father still squats where he’s been for the last hour, under the shade of the fig tree, a garden trowel in his hand.

The family relationships reveal themselves – the father is in early stages of dementia, the mother has health issues, the pandemic brings its own problems, it’s not easy working from home when it’s also your parents’ home, and so on. It reads as a Melbourne story, like most of Overland‘s contents, with mild hints of non-Anglo culture in the father’s habit of sucking on sugar cubes, or the mother’s offer of a choice between dates and dark chocolate with a cup of tea. Then there’s a deft reveal, first with the mention of an Imam influencing the water supply, and then with a place name, that the story is unfolding in Iran. No big deal is made of the reveal, and the story continues – a sweet, understated piece of anti-Othering.

Heat 8 has already landed (and been reviewed by Lisa at ANZ LitLovers LitBlog). The good things just keep coming.

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