After Prime Minister Albanese called an unscheduled media conference at Parliament House on 26 August 2025, assembled journalists were surprised to see him accompanied by ASIO Director-General Mike Burgess. The reason quickly became apparent. The government was expelling the Iranian ambassador because of an ASIO assessment that Iran’s security services were behind two attacks on Australian Jewish premises in the second half of 2024.

In writing Borneo: The last campaign, Michael Veitch has taken on a worthy subject. It was ‘the largest, most complex, most meticulously planned amphibious military operation ever undertaken by the forces of Australia’. Yet, despite its scale and the military prowess displayed, the campaign has received little sustained attention in print since the publication of Gavin Long’s official history, The Final Campaigns, in 1963 and is overshadowed in the public imagination by the great epics of Australian military history, like Gallipoli and Kokoda.

A day when the rain only let up
           for an hour,
and in this brief, clear time
we saw a pair of yellow-tailed black cockatoos
float through a break in the dripping gums.

In a dark age on a burning planet, radical hope is not an easy assignment, but every decade or thereabouts, Bob Brown invites Australians to give it a crack. His Memo for a Saner World (2004) was followed by Optimism (2014), and his new release, Defiance, opens as a redux of both, with the cinematic story of the environmental campaign that changed Australia’s political contours.

The growth in understanding of the tens of thousands of years of this continent’s pre-colonial and post-colonial Aboriginal history has been one of the great intellectual achievements of postwar Australia. But if these two collections of essays are any guide, there are reasons to be gravely concerned about the future of this field of knowledge.

There is a fine tradition in Australia of two-volume prime ministerial biographies. John La Nauze on Alfred Deakin (1965), Laurie Fitzhardinge on Billy Hughes (1964, 1979), John Edwards on John Curtin (2017, 2018), Allan Martin on Robert Menzies (1993, 1999), Jenny Hocking on Gough Whitlam (2009, 2012): all are insightful and enduring accounts of significant figures who exerted deep influence on the country.

In May this year, a selection of stories compiled and published as Heart Lamp by Kannada writer Banu Mushtaq won the International Booker Prize. One may speculate that the presence on the jury panel of prominent translator Anton Hur might have had a seminal role in swinging matters in favour of such a little-known name. Even in her home country, India, Mushtaq’s win, though celebrated, was greeted with curiosity about who this writer was, and what literary tradition she was writing in. Those curious included putative readers of Kannada and of bhasha literatures more broadly in the Indian subcontinent.

From the outside, publishing might look like an industry invested in words, ideas, and the work of authors, and editors. But, as with other centres of cultural production such as universities, the neo-liberal ideologies of increased efficiency, deregulation, and higher returns have increasingly determined how books are made.

There is no still life except in death.
Everything is quick till dead: fish,

Eunice Andrada is the author of three books of poetry. Her début, Flood Damages (Giramondo, 2018), won the Anne Elder Award and was a finalist for the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for Poetry and the Dame Mary Gilmore Award. Her second poetry collection, TAKE CARE (Giramondo, 2021), has gained many honours as a finalist for the Judith Wright Calanthe Award, Stella Prize, Australian Literature Society Gold Medal, and two NSW Premier’s Literary Awards. Her third poetry collection, KONTRA, is reviewed on by Grace Roodenrys in the October edition of ABR.