Tag Archives: Evelyn Araluen

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.

4 Comments

Posted in Books, Page 7x/47/7

Tagged , , , , , , , , ,

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.

Leave a comment

Posted in Books, Page 7x/47/7

Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

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.

2 Comments

Posted in Books

Tagged , , , , , , , , ,

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.

1 Comment

Posted in Books

Tagged , , , , , , , , , , ,

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.

Leave a comment

Posted in Books, Page 7x/47/7

Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

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.

2 Comments

Posted in Books

Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , ,

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.

5 Comments

Posted in Books, Page 7x/47/7

Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

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.

12 Comments

Posted in Books, Page 7x/47/7

Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Journal Catch-up 18

Posted on 1 Apr 2023 | 2 comments

I’m not across the detail of the Australian government’s National Cultural Policy – ‘Revive: a place for every story and a story for every place’ (here’s a link) – but I hope it means our literary journals are in a less desperately mendicant state. Certainly, I’m grateful that they continue to exist and even proliferate, even though my reading is limited. Just two on this blog post, both from last year, and both blogged with attention to page 76 as per my arbitrary blog policy.

Alexandra Christie (editor), Heat Series 3 Nº 6 (Giramondo 2022)

There are two wonderful homegrown pieces in this Heat: Fiona Wright’s essay about ageing, ‘To Begin / It Broke’; and Oscar Schwartz’s ‘Father Figures’, a collection of ultra-short prose pieces written as the birth of his first child approached. You can read the latter on the Heat website at this link.

There are translations – four poems translated from Chinese and an essay from Norwegian – and six pages devoted to images of witty ceramic pieces by Kenny Pittock with the self-explanatory title ‘Post-It Notes Found While Working in a Supermarket’.

Page 76 is near the beginning of the longest and most ambitious piece, ‘Dear Editor’ by Amitava Kumar. Kumar was born in India and now lives in Poughkeepsie, New York. The story starts with a writer flying to Mumbai from New York composing an op-ed in his head about the plane’s broken toilets and the smell of shit. He keeps it up:

My ability to exaggerate does on occasion get the better of me but, believe me, I’m not being fanciful when I say that even the blue carpet in the aisles exuded a faecal odour – no, a heavier element, a moist miasma, that entered the nose and seemed to paralyse the senses. This preceding sentence was going into the op-ed.

My resistance was immediate and intense. Why is an Australian literary journal giving over more than a third of its pages to an Indian-born USian complaining about his country of origin? There are quite a few more sentences for the op-ed, but just as I was about to skip to the end of the story, the scene changes to a hotel in Mumbai where the daughter of an old friend is to be married.

It took a few pages, but the narrator has a fleeting sense of himself as an obnoxious expat and starts a conversation wth a fellow guest, an older woman. The imagined op-ed takes on a more serious tenor, and eventually disappears altogether as the narrator is absorbed by the woman’s story. I have no idea how much of this story is fiction, how much journalistic truth, but the ‘mix of arrogance and condescension’, as he later describes it, turns out to have been a slipway into an account of the coming of Hindu-style fascism to a small village. My resistance was completely dissolved, and I’ve added Amitava Kumar to the list of writers I wish had been invited to the Sydney Writers’ Festival in May.

Evelyn Araluen and Jonathan Dunk (editors), Overland 248 (Spring 2022)
(Some of the content – less than in the past – is online at the revamped Overland website, and I’ve included links)

Many of the articles in this Overland have a literary academic feel: Thomas Moran writes about M Barnard Eldershaw’s Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow; Michael Griffith compares and contrasts T S Eliot and Catholic German sometime Nazi Party member Carl Schmitt; Abigail Fisher discusses Bella Li’s Theory of Colours. All three are in accessible English, but aim for a readership who is more specialist than usual for Overland articles and, I confess, more specialist than I am.

The poetry, on the other hand, is more accessible than usual. I especially like Isobel Prior’s ‘The Medical Man’, a narrative about a hospital tragedy somewhat in the manner of the late, great Bruce Dawe; and Paul Magee’s ‘Flag mask’, a reminder of what the Australian Parliament was like before May 2022.

Of the five short stories, two play masterfully and unsettlingly with the notion of consent: ‘Espalier‘ by Kerry Greer and ‘What it means to say yes‘ by Megan McGrath.

Page 76 falls in the middle of the other short story that spoke strongly to me, ‘In the garden‘ by Jayda Franks. A character introduced as ‘a young man’ visits another character referred to mainly as ‘the woman’ in an aged care facility. As they chat and play with dirt in the garden, we realise that they have a history but there is a reason beyond her dementia for her not remembering him. It’s a simple, poignant tale whose twist is an emotional twist of the knife rather than a surprise. Here’s a little from the dialogue in the garden to give you a sense of the way the narrative captures the way conversation with someone with demential can go, while suggesting that something else is going on:

‘I don’t remember you,’ she says. She is much more lucid now. Her eyes are sharp and clear and they fix on his own.
‘I know.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘Please don’t be. I don’t blame you at all.’
She watches him crack his fingers and her brow furrows. ‘The counsellor here says we should ask visitors to tell us about themselves. Even if it doesn’t help us remember. Would you like to do that?’
He smiles sadly. ‘I am afraid I am a very different person to the one you remember.’
She turns to the spider lilies and he watches the conversation leach away from her. She beams at their slender petals and her whole face crinkles up like a young bud in bloom. When she looks back at him, she falters and his heart contracts.
‘Hello.’
‘Hello.’

I subscribe to two other journals, but they seem to be on hiatus. May they be revived by Revive before my next Journal Catch-up blog post.

2 Comments

Posted in Books, Page 7x/47/7

Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Journal Catch-up 17

Posted on 28 Feb 2023 | 4 comments

Sadly or otherwise, reading in the sauna turns out to be a prompt for excellent conversations, and I’m tending to walk rather than take public transport. So my standard time slots for reading journals have shrunk, and I’m as far behind as ever.

Alexandra Christie (editor), Heat Series 3 Nº 5 (Giramondo 2022)

Each issue of the current series of Heat gives us a slender collection of excellent writing from Australia and elsewhere, including work in translation and work from Australian writers of non-Anglo background.

The stand-out feature in this issue is Kate Middleton’s three ‘Television Poems’. As someone who watches an awful lot of TV, I enjoyed these a lot. They deal with Dickinson (‘the one they always / had to label spinster, recluse, or else just too intense‘); the revelations about sexual abuse on the sets of TV shows, especially Hey Dad! (‘in suburban Sydney / the sitcom architect turned sinister’); and The Crown, with passing references to The Cosby Show, SVU, Scooby Doo, among others. Plus there are endnotes that are both helpful and funny (‘It’s hard being Kate Middleton and being uninterested in the royals’).

Of the rest, I most enjoyed Jenny Erpenbeck’s ‘Things That Disappear’, translated from German by Kurt Beals of the USA; and Oliver Driscoll’s ‘Two Simple Stories About Friendship’.

I had a vague unease reading this journal, which came into focus with the final piece, ‘Still Life With Cheese’ by playwright, poet and essayist Noëlle Janascweska. (You can read it for yourself on the Giramondo website at this link.) It’s a nicely written essay that interweaves the author’s personal dealings with various cheeses; a smattering of facts about the history of cheese manufacture; quotes from Zola, Auden, and Wallis & Gromit; and reflections on 16th century Flemish still lifes. There’s a reproduction of Still Life with Cheese, Artichoke and Cherries by Clara Peeters, 1625, which is stunning even in black and white. But I found myself wondering why I was reading it. I’m not particularly interested in cheese, and the essay didn’t make me interested. It feels like something written because the writer is a writer looking for a subject, rather than arising from any inner necessity.

At that point, something crystallised in my mind. It feels as if the new series hasn’t yet found its feet, hasn’t yet established a coherent purpose for existing. I already have two more issues on my TBR shelf. I’m hopeful.

Evelyn Araluen and Jonathan Dunk (editors), Overland 247 (Winter 2022)
(Much of the content is online at overland.org.au, and I’ve included links)

By contrast, Overland is suffused with a sense of purpose.

The lead article, ‘That’s not us!’ Wake in Fright and the Australian nightmare by Gregory Marks, is an excellent account of Ted Kotcheff’s film and Ken Cook’s novel it was taken from. It’s odd, though, to argue that the film, directed by a Canadian and starring an Englishman, exemplifies Australia’s ‘cultural cringe’. One moment that stands out in my memory from when I saw the film in 1971 is the alarming first appearance, complete with huge cigarette-lighter flame, of Chips Rafferty’s character (who isn’t mentioned in the article), which is the opposite of any kind of cringe.

‘Serving up colonialism instead of care‘ by Caitlin Prince tackles the pressing issue of how her fellow settler Australians can face and change attitudes that keep colonialist oppression in place. It’s a long article. Here’s a taste of the main argument:

Telling white Australians to ‘get over it’ would be consistent with our colonial stiff-upper-lip inheritance and Australia’s general trend of having the emotional intelligence of a brick, but it would also grossly misunderstand the problem. … People need space to unpack problematic racial views, otherwise they remain repressed, packed in tight, impossible to understand and shift. …

It is radical. and uncomfortable, to imagine meeting racist views with care – uncomfortable for everyone, but impossibly unfair to ask of Aboriginal people, whose lives (and deaths) are impacted by racism. Doing so, however, is sensible if we consider how human beings learn to regulate emotion.

Among the other articles, I particularly responded to ‘An almanac of immeasurable things‘ by Lachlan Summers, which sheds light on the naming conventions of cyclones and other phenomena, and the way the names can mislead. An example:

After the Black Summer [of 2019–2020], calls have been made for a category beyond catastrophic. Far outside the nomenclature of disaster, and generating new conditions of terror, this was a catastrophe that threatened not to end. In fact, ‘Black Summer’ refers to eleven months of waiting for fires to stop reproducing themselves.

The substantial array of poetry includes ‘log‘, a welcome new poem from joanne burns, which begins with this striking image:

dream’s letterhead lies exhausted
in the recycling bin

Among the healthy selection of short fiction, there were some effectively weird, surreal/uncanny pieces. My favourite, however, was a realistic story about a young person living in a share house in a southern city feeling for their home in Far North Queensland as it’s lashed by a cyclone. It’s ‘Sweet Anticipation’ by Jasmin McGaughey, winner of the 2021 Nakata Brophy Prize for young Indigenous writers. Interestingly, only an incidental word or two indicate that the protagonist is First Nations. At least, it’s interesting to me as a Far North Queenslander who was living in Sydney when Cyclone Larry took the roof off my childhood home.

The next issue of Heat kicks off with an essay by Fiona Wright. And a quick look at Overland 248 reveals the presence of an old friend from English Hons at Sydney Uni in the 1970s. Much to look forward to.

4 Comments

Posted in Books

Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , ,