Readers of Stephen Gapps’s work will be delighted to see this latest instalment of his quest to highlight the reality of Australia’s internal wars from 1788. Gapps’s first major contribution to this literature was The Sydney Wars (2018), which detailed the military conflicts between the Darug-speaking peoples of Sydney Harbour and the British newcomers from the First Fleet to 1817. His second, Gudyarra (2021), focused on the battles between the Wiradyuri and the settlers around today’s Bathurst region from 1822 to 1824. Gapps’s new book, Uprising, takes us over the full middle swathe of colonial New South Wales, including campaigns from dozens of clans, between 1838 and 1844. Each volume moves us forward in time and over greater expanses of Country. Collectively, the Gapps trilogy is a clear and detailed refutation of Australia’s continued reluctance to name the violent episodes that occurred between black and white peoples before 1901 as what they so plainly were: war.

If you were asked to come up with three cultural touchstones for the nation of Iceland, there’s a good chance that you would nominate Hannah Kent’s 2013 novel Burial Rites, perhaps along with the music of Björk and Sigur Rós. Burial Rites might be a bit of a cheat, given that Kent is an Australian novelist. Nevertheless, this novel, which tells the story of a woman executed in Iceland in the nineteenth century, has been an enormous success. Translated into more than twenty languages, it sold millions of copies worldwide and is set to become a film. It surely put Iceland on the map for many readers.

David Stavanger’s third collection of poetry, The Drop Off, disintegrates binaries and social expectations with post-structuralist fervour, occupying and exploring the liminal space of broken families, neo-liberal cultures, mental health and, of course, language. Stavanger’s poetry is both pithy and undercutting, anathematic and loving, political and personal – and often, as is the case with such duplicitous poetry, these themes express themselves simultaneously, almost co-dependently.

We all know not to judge a book by its cover but sometimes the temptation to be at least a little influenced by it can be hard to resist. This is especially so when an author (or, in this case, editors Amanda Harris and Clint Bracknell) draws particular attention to it. 

In 1588, with England facing the threat of Spanish invasion, Elizabeth I visited her troops assembled at Tilbury to deliver some rousing words: ‘I know I have the body of a weak and feeble woman; but I have the heart and stomach of a king, and of a king of England too.’ This assertion, the idea that the body politic was eternal and existed in a sacred realm beyond historical time, was ideally suited to a moment of national crisis. But rhetorical force notwithstanding, Elizabeth was propounding a fiction. In Shakespeare’s Tragic Art, Rhodri Lewis explores how William Shakespeare was able to use the tragic form to interrogate those ‘fictions of order, stability, and perpetuity’ that humans deploy in their desire to make sense of a random universe. Beginning with Titus Andronicus and ending with Coriolanus, Lewis shows how each play is a response to a particular set of aesthetic challenges. Shakespeare’s motivations lay in exploring the possibilities of the tragic genre. Through plays as various as Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, and King Lear, he explored ‘never-settled notions’ of what tragedy could achieve.

A book written by an English author and published by an English academic press with first-page references to New Labour, Conservative austerity, and Brexit might seem, at first glance, of little interest to or relevance for Australian readers. Yet anyone concerned with or about the state of the arts in this country and further afield will find much stimulus, provocation, and food for thought in the latest work of a prolific academic-activist entrepreneur who has occupied posts in three Australian universities since 2008, besides presenting at conferences and consulting widely with UN agencies and local and national governments throughout Asia, Europe, and the Pacific.

Looking down on Athens from the Acropolis, a first-time visitor observed, ‘So all this really does exist, just as we learnt at school!’ As he noted later, ‘the person who gave expression to the remark was divided … from another person who took cognizance of the remark’. The first person was surprised to see something whose reality had seemed doubtful, the second astonished that the reality of the Athenian landscape could be in doubt. Both people were named Sigmund Freud.

Fawaz Gerges is a leading expert on mainstream Islamist movements, jihadist groups, and social movements in the Middle East. He has interviewed hundreds of civil society leaders, activists, and mainstream and radical Islamists in the Muslim world and within Muslim communities in Europe. Two decades ago, his in-depth field research resulted in The Far Enemy: Why Jihad went global (2005). It showed that the 9/11 terror attacks united social forces in the Muslim world against Al Qaeda. The dominant response of jihadi groups was an explicit rejection of Al Qaeda and total opposition to the internationalisation of jihad. The US invasion of Iraq in 2003 and its subsequent occupation gave Al Qaeda a ‘new lease on life, a second generation of recruits and fighters, and a powerful outlet to expand its ideological outreach activities to Muslims worldwide’.

We meet Matthew Hooton’s narrator Jack as an old man in urban Michigan. Jack has lived his adult life in this mid-western place and has seen the manufacturing boom of the American twentieth century flourish, expand, and collapse. His body struggles with all the mundane realities of old age – a fall that bruises a hip, the struggle to climb out of a car – while he navigates the decline of his beloved wife in a hospice. His mind is elsewhere in time and space, forever captive to the trauma and wonder he lived through as a child in Brazil. He sees imaginary vines trailing the edges of things, searches for papaya at the grocery store, and makes do with Floridian oranges. It is ‘unsettling to live in a nation of plenty’, Jack observes, ‘and yet find oneself constantly seeking substitutes for that which brought the senses alive as a child’. The narrative shifts back and forth along with Jack’s thoughts, focusing largely on his childhood in the 1920s in the bizarre and ultimately doomed settlement founded by Henry Ford in Brazil named Fordlândia. In this outpost of American culture and within Ford’s brand of strict Christian morality, settlers tried and failed to carry out Ford’s dream of cultivating rubber plantations.

Red maya birds that are not
maya birds, but sparrows and munias.
Words for the kind of rain that will leave us
without power for days, then the kind that sprinkles on