1.     worlds inside brown eyes
2.     a figure in a bed
3.     stars in summer
4.     women of clay

It is deeply sobering to be writing about the depth of the history of multicultural Australia only days after rallies against immigration have been held and in the midst of a palpable and disturbing negative response to non-white immigration. There are echoes of the shameful twentieth-century White Australia policy. Far from being a recent phenomenon, multiculturalism has been an integral aspect of Australian society since European settlement in the late eighteenth century. This collection, edited by the artist Zhou Xiaoping, is the outcome of a three-year research project and is the companion monograph for Our Story: Aboriginal Chinese people in Australia, a free, ground-breaking exhibition currently at the National Museum of Australia in Canberra that will run until late January 2026.

But it is the end of the world to River, who’s standing there
thrown by its incomprehensibilities as I play him R.E.M.,
which is otherwise what he needs, total sleep and churning dreams,
not the drums, distortion and irony, he does not feel fine,

In The Season, Helen Garner describes a photograph of Australian Football League player Charlie Curnow celebrating a goal: ‘It’s Homeric: all the ugly brutality of a raging Achilles, but also this strange and splendid beauty.’ There is a mythic image in Australian culture of the AFL player doing battle on the football oval with the strength of Hercules or the wit of Odysseus. Brandon Jack’s Pissants, his first novel, is an inversion of this mythopoeia; it is an exposé of football culture, the false pluralism of Australian masculinity, and a deranged form of identity that runs through ‘the club’. It shows the average life of a footballer at the fringes of a team list. Jack, having played for the AFL’s Sydney Swans from 2013 to 2017, has firsthand experience of the (in)famous ‘Bloods Culture’ – one built on a mantra of self-sacrifice, discipline, and unity – and this experience shows throughout the novel.

During the walk she takes with Michelle de Kretser along the Cooks River, the bit that snakes between Hurlstone Park and Tempe, Belinda Castles, the author of Walking Sydney, muses on the impact of Sydney’s geography. ‘On the footpath-climb to skirt the golf course,’ she writes, ‘the village-like nature of Sydney makes itself felt, the way suburbs are enclosed and cut off by ridges and valleys, cliffs and rivers, the tentacles of the harbour. A city’s form has an effect on thinking and ways of being.’

Ellen van Neerven is a writer and editor of Mununjali and Dutch heritage. Their books include Heat and Light (2014), Comfort Food (2016), Throat (2020), and Personal Score (2023). Ellen’s first book, Heat and Light, was the recipient of the David Unaipon Award, the Dobbie Literary Award, and the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards Indigenous Writers’ Prize. Ellen’s second book, Comfort Food, was shortlisted for the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards Kenneth Slessor Prize and highly commended in the 2016 Wesley Michel Wright Prize. They live and write on unceded Yagera and Turrbal dhagun.

Two distinguished professors have joined forces to write an impassioned book about the recent, concerted attacks on science. While they both live and work in the United States, where what they describe as the ‘forces of darkness’ are most active and influential, the problem they describe is truly global. Mann is a celebrated climate scientist who has been a leading voice in the field since the 1980s, while Hotez is a virologist who became involved in the public debate about the Covid-19 pandemic. The central argument of the book is that we face existential crises in both human health and the health of our planet. While the best hope of successfully tackling these challenges relies on science, there is now ‘politically and ideologically motivated opposition to science’, threatening both our ability to advance understanding of these complex issues and, equally important, the freedom of scientists to communicate their understanding.

My career began at Australian Book Review, and as such I’ve been prompted to reflect on the importance of publications such as ABR to ensuring a robust critical culture in Australia in the wake of Meanjin’s closure. The decision was announced on September 4 that Meanjin, one of Australia’s longest-running literary journals, would cease to be published by its custodian, Melbourne University Publishing, and that the editor and I would be made redundant.

Outsiders, mostly white men seeking answers to burning existential questions, have long been ineluctably drawn to Australian deserts. The continental interior, with its deep-time mysteries, has lured not only explorers on fatal quests, but also lone anthropologists, philosophers, and other restless wanderers in search of themselves, burdened with their interrogations and yearnings for higher truth.

This handsome book is a strange beast: half official report, half pitch to potential clients, half lavishly illustrated history of four decades of collecting Australian art. Clearly, this does not add up. Which is a pity, because Artbank is important to the current visibility, and popular success, of contemporary art in Australia.