Extraordinary though it is, narrative film has its limitations. It is a truism of film criticism, for instance, that biopics of writers are usually at their weakest when representing the process of writing. It is an understandable problem. How, in the dynamic medium of film, is one to represent the (in)action of writing, which is largely solitary, motionless, and internal? In biopics of poets such as Syliva Plath and Dylan Thomas, the process of composing poetry is usually rendered in a Terrence Malick–like montage of soft-focus, shallow depth of field, handheld shots meant to signify the numinous, visionary experience of poetic inspiration. This cinematic convention is more or less nonsense. Biopics of writers are also largely indifferent to issues of technique – the slow, uneconomical labour of dealing with language as a medium. Who cares if that verb in the last line should be a gerund?

As someone whose primary literary interest is Aboriginal writing, reviewing John Kinsella’s aptly titled Ghost of Myself means approaching his poetry with a different perspective from many of his readers. The coolness of the writing, combined with the sombreness of much of his observation of the world around him, gives an end-of-days tenor to the four sections that comprise Ghost of Myself.

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

The god of lyric poetry in Greek mythology was an attempted rapist. Indeed, one of the primal scenes of Western literature – Apollo’s pursuit of the nymph, Daphne – is a story of attempted rape. When Daphne can no longer outrun Apollo, she transforms into a laurel tree to escape violation. The heartbroken Apollo plucks a leaf from her branches, vowing to honour Daphne by adorning his hair and lyre with laurel and keeping her leaves eternally green. Thus began the long association of the laurel wreath with poetic or artistic achievement in Western culture: the rapist, in his grief, turned to poetry. And his poetry would forever sing of the loss and longing caused by a thwarted rape.

In a recent university seminar, I wanted to give my students a sense of how capitalism is a way of being, rather than being the way of being. Hoping to paint an affective picture, I turned to personal anecdote.

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.

How might we measure the value of a locally produced book? Or, in a more collective sense, how might we put a value on a local books and literary sector, one that is distinct from the larger English-language markets of the Northern Hemisphere and attentive to our own regional and cultural ways of being, doing, and belonging? What does value mean in the context of the local book? And on whose terms might it be expressed?

In the the current Australian publishing landscape, dominated as it is by conglomerates and mergers, the establishment of new small, independent presses has never been more important. While mainstream publishers continually laud conventional prose and consumable literary plots – giving many readers a false perception of the quality of contemporary Australian literature – numerous small presses instead champion the difficult, the unconventional, the strange and experimental. Evercreech Editions, a new press out of Hobart, Tasmania, maintains this ambition. The founder, Adam Ouston – one of Australia’s most ambitious writers – states in Evercreech’s mission statement: ‘I wanted an outlet for the out of step, the weird, the boldly defiant, a home for the homeless.’ Unfortunately, these qualities aren’t exhibited in Evercreech’s first published book, Konrad Muller’s début novel, My Heart at Evening.

A university librarian mentioned in a recent conversation how a famous writer had sold his computer hard drive to an American archive without realising this could give future researchers a record of not only his emails but all the internet sites he had ever visited. Ian McEwan was not the author in question, but it is precisely such issues that frame the narrative of his latest novel: the first part is set a hundred years from now, while the second section consists of a fictional journal set in our own recent past. As the novel’s title suggests, a key concern here is epistemology – how lived human experience differs from knowledge in forms of representation and rationalisation.

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.