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’.

To explain the great arc of human experience is daunting. In Guns, Germs and Steel: The fates of human societies (1997), Jared Diamond argued that environment and geography shape culture and technology, allowing some societies to prosper while others fail. In Sapiens: A brief history of humankind (2011), Yuval Noah Harari described successive revolutions that saw one variety of humans transform the planet. Harari lamented the decision to leave the hunter-gatherer life for agriculture; populations grew in number but became victims of regular famine, war, and disease.

Troy Bramston is fast becoming the Peter FitzSimons of Australian political biography. Every few years a door-stopping volume on a prime minister appears, brandishing the same formula of ‘never before seen’ documents and ‘fresh revelations’. In the Acknowledgements to this latest biography of Gough Whitlam, Bramston virtually pleads with readers to render homage to the ‘hundreds’ of interviews he conducted, the ‘thousands’ of pages turned in archives, the miles clocked in libraries visited. There is a diligent busyness to the enterprise. But Bramston’s relentless emphasis on the quantitative smothers his underlying inability to master the material. The result, sadly, is an incomplete picture of Whitlam: a workman-like chronicle of the life, but not a deep exploration of the political and intellectual dimensions of the man.

The Greek diaspora featured strongly in Andrew Pippos’s first novel, Lucky’s (2020), which traced the life of Chicago-born Vasilis ‘Lucky’ Mallios, who develops a chain of eponymous franchise restaurants often run by Greek Australians that mimic mid-twentieth-century American diners. The fortunes, and misfortunes, of Lucky and his restaurants in turn become the subject of a planned New Yorker article by journalist Emily Main.

As the January-February issue of Australian Book Review went to print, a horrifying event was unfolding: the largest terrorist attack on Australian soil and one unambiguously targeting Jews who were celebrating Hanukkah at ‘Chanukah by the Sea’, on Bondi Beach. There is time for examining the deep-seated, long-standing, global factors which led to this – as well as, perhaps, the human-scale, emotional, even banal ones – but, at ABR, we decided now is a time for personal reflection, listening, and grace, as Waleed Aly recently put it. 

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.

There is a video clip somewhere of Dennis Altman on the ABC’s Monday Conference program, a forerunner to the late (and unlamented) Q+A. The year is 1972 and Altman is defending his book Homosexual (1971) against a Methodist minister whose name escapes me and the conservative politician and journalist Peter Coleman. The minister is the more strident of the two, suggesting that homosexuality is the consequence of disordered sexual development and citing some specious research to that effect. Coleman takes a more nuanced line. One of the best things about the book, he suggests, is that it confirms one of the right’s main objections to ‘gay lib’: the movement, he says, is aimed as much at the transformation of society as it is at the liberation of gays. Smiling slightly mischievously, Altman is more than happy to agree.

Arts highlights

This issue we present the best arts productions of 2025, as nominated by our critics. Across film, theatre, music, visual art, opera, dance, and television, ABR Arts continues to publish erudite, long-form, professionally edited, and independent arts reviews at a time when space for such work is diminishing across the sector. Thank you to all our critics in 2025 and to our arts readers, an enthusiastic cohort who enliven us with letters, comments, emails, and a staggering number of website hits. There is an appetite for arts criticism in this country. Our critics show that, despite the pressures facing the arts sector, and the controversies that dominated arts journalism in 2025, there remains an appetite for well-constructed and elevating productions.

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.

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.