Who’s that strutting in like a swan, a bull,
An eagle, an ant, a cuckoo, a snake,
Satyr, rain shower, a stallion, a ram,
Six bone-dry dolphins breaking through the foam,

In Carralon Ridge, a fictional, dilapidated town in New South Wales, Sam Crowley goes missing on the day of his twenty-first birthday. Every year, the community comes together for an annual vigil, but among the mourners there may be someone who knows what happened. In the background, the incessant activity of a nearby open-cut coal mine threatens the very existence of the village.

In 1996, an Age poll found that seventy-six per cent of Australians wanted their country to become a republic. The issue had been rapidly gaining momentum since the early 1990s. The creation of the Australian Republican Movement (ARM) in 1991, and the active championing of the issue by Prime Minister Paul Keating, turned a fringe issue of the 1980s into a realistic prospect.

Every book is snared in the time and place in which it is written. Few authors create work that remains eternally relevant, not only because books that appear groundbreaking when published can easily date or pale with the passage of time, but for more prosaic reasons as well. Given that approximately 23,000 books are published annually in Australia alone, few survive on the shelf beyond a year or two, and even fewer become embedded in the nation’s literary imagination. Still, most authors dream of writing a ‘classic’ – even a minor classic will do.

This pointed aphorism accompanied my reading of two releases that shoulder the ongoing work of activism against colonialism and empire. Randa Abdel-Fattah’s Discipline and Raaza Jamshed’s début novel, What Kept You?, are both set here, in Australia, but their characters are willed continually to look there, their displaced gaze stacked with invisible lives unseen by friends, colleagues, and intimates. One is urgent, desperate, and resolute; the other wracked by guilt that immobilises.

This is not really a book about Australian foreign policy in the Trump era. It is, however, an attempt to chart the coordinates of President Trump’s approach to the world in his second term. It depicts Australia, not unlike most other US allies in Europe and Asia, scrambling to remain relevant to Washington as the fond and the familiar in the international system are tossed to and fro by the latest Trump hurricane. Clinton Fernandes, a former intelligence officer in the Australian army and now Professor of International and Political Studies at UNSW, is damning of the inability of successive Australian governments to explain to the Parliament or the Australian people why Australia has become, in his words, a ‘US sentinel state’, alongside the Republic of Korea and Japan. The strongest parts of the book are those which ask precisely how this state of affairs has eventuated. The questions are vital, but Fernandes knows that they are unlikely to be answered by this government.

The universe exists on scales that are unimaginable. Its physics are so strange they slip beyond what the human brain can comprehend. At one extreme, we have the grandest scale, a universe likely infinite in size, containing trillions of galaxies and possibly an endless amount of space and time. At the other extreme, we have the true strangeness of the quantum world, a space where particles drift in a haze of possibilities, existing everywhere and nowhere at once. It is the simple act of observing these particles that forces the universe to choose between them. It is a notion so alien to our senses as humans that it can feel like magic.  

Italy is best appreciated at ground level. Flying is irritatingly swift and flattens out the view. Walking is treacherously risky. Bus travel is unendurably cramped and tedious. Driving is unreasonably dangerous. The finest, and to me the only, way to experience Italy in all its depths and glories is to negotiate it by train. Besides, European trains are in a class of their own (conditions apply; read on).

Heather Rose’s mesmerising new novel, A Great Act of Love, draws together themes and settings that have animated her previous work, including an abiding attachment to the landscape of Tasmania, questions of how individuals reckon with the past, meditations on the nature of love, and a fascination with the life of the soul.

Who is Kamala Harris and what does she stand for? This question animated coverage across the political spectrum during her 2024 US presidential campaign, even though she was already serving as Vice President – the first woman, the first African American, and the first Asian American to hold the office. At crucial points, Harris herself struggled to articulate her own distinctive agenda. When asked on the television talk show The View what she would have done differently from Democrat President Joe Biden over the past four years, she replied, ‘There is not a thing that comes to mind.’