One Thousand and One Nights begins with an ending in sight. Unless Shahrazad can keep her husband, the Sultan Shahryar, entertained with her stories, she will follow the virgins before her who marry him only to be beheaded in the morning. Shahrazad’s means of escaping this response to his first wife’s infidelity opens the heart of Jeanette Winterson’s new book about what stories can do and be: ‘magic words that get us into the treasure and out of danger’.

Like many edited collections, Fault Lines bears the marks of its origins in a conference, one on ‘Injustice, Survival, Memory’ at the Australian National University in 2022. The editors, in their introduction, explain that the central idea was to use the histories of the Dunera and Queen Mary (ships that carried interned Europeans to Australia during World War II) ‘as a basis for an examination of the theme of injustice in Australian history’.

Aboriginal poetry has the ability to hold love and rage simultaneously. Luke Patterson’s début A Savage Turn does this masterfully, constructing pieces full of fire and defiance ‘amongst the love / poems’. In this collection, Patterson - a Gamilaroi poet, educator, and musician – unpacks colonial myth and legacy, subverts reader expectations, and teases out a tenderness that nourishes this collection.

Ita Buttrose is someone Australians know; she’s someone that Australians trust’, said Scott Morrison, when he announced Ita Buttrose’s appointment as Chair of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC). For once, Morrison was saying something likely true. Buttrose’s long career in the media, especially in leadership positions, had afforded her a visibility, familiarity, and goodwill enjoyed by few in Australia.

In 1997, a first-time writer came out of small-town Kerala, God’s own country, and wrote a novel exploring the nature of maternal love and the constrictions placed upon who can love whom and how. Narrated through the perspective of dizygotic twins – with their ordinary words capitalised and scattered across the pages to symbolise children encountering an adult world with equal parts awe and apprehension – this work went on to win the 1997 Booker Prize. Those of us whose minds were forevermore imprinted with Arundhati Roy’s sheer idiomatic chutzpah and semantic cosmopolitanism in The God of Small Things will find the writer in fine fettle in her latest work, Mother Mary Comes to Me.

A curious feature of the creamy new edition of Helen Garner’s diaries: it carries only one blurb, and it is not by some literary heavyweight but by Nigella Lawson. At first, I found this confounding, but I soon began to see parallels between the two. Both are funny, spontaneous sensualists; both have been subjected to harsh public scrutiny and experienced a certain degree of messiness in their personal lives; and both are magnificent women. In the words of Anne Enright, they are, in their various ways, ‘acclaimed celebrator[s] of the poetic quotidian’.

Considering the number of biographies published about distinguished Australian women in the past few years, we have had to wait a surprisingly long time to read the life story of Quentin Bryce, Australia’s first woman governor-general. Certainly, her achievements merit a full biography: she has been a lifelong advocate for women and children, one of the first women barristers in Queensland, a prominent member of the National Women’s Advisory Council (NWAC), Federal Sex Discrimination Commissioner, CEO of the National Childcare Accreditation Council, principal of the Women’s College at the  University of Sydney, and governor of Queensland. She was not satisfied with carrying out a purely ceremonial role as governor-general either, making comments that suggested she supported an Australian republic and same-sex marriage.

In her ambitious and skilful examination of childhood and play, Emily Gallagher has carefully foregrounded the voices and thoughts of children, situating them as sources as well as historical actors. This is no easy task. Histories of childhood are mostly told from the viewpoint of adults: they are about children, rather than by children. In colonial Australia, the daily existence of children was harnessed to the circumstances of the adults – mostly parents – who cared for them, and who made key decisions about their education, work, and aspirations. Wider social commentary about young people, either sparked by moral panic or casting the next generation as the embodiment of a hopeful future, was proclaimed by adult authority figures.

When was poetry turned on its head? Was it with T.S. Eliot and his nemesis, William Carlos Williams? Or perhaps it was the slow burn from Emily Dickinson. Was it with Walt Whitman that everything changed? Or did the Surrealists manage to kick down the walls? Gertrude Stein, e.e. cummings? Sylvia Plath? Adrienne Rich? Or possibly Frank O’Hara? It is hard to say just when it happened, or exactly what happened (two world wars and two nuclear bombs!), but poetry had its part in the explosive history of the arts this past century, and as a result, it is now a job requirement for each poet to find for themselves a personal path towards poetry and some understanding – or invention – of what poetry is.

In 1921, during his brief tenure editing The Mildura and Merbein Sun, the charlatan and blackmailer Grant Hervey combined satire and legend in a regularly serialised novel, hoping to forge a foundation myth for the Mildura region. The hero of A Don Quixote of the Saltbush was an American adventurer, Stephen Puritan; his loyal sidekick was a poorly conceived, simplistic Aboriginal man known as Pinggali. The two ride the bleak, rusty terrain of Mildura vowing vengeance on wrongdoers, to be enacted through a reinvention of the landscape via the installation of modern irrigation technology.