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.

I also went to the Sydney Symphony Orchestra’s production of Siegfried, as reviewed by Peter Rose (ABR Arts, 11/25), but to the Sunday performance. The performance had gone up quite a few notches. The singers seemed to let it all out; it was outstanding. In Tuscany, where I lived for many years, the state classical station would broadcast Bayreuth live. Growing up in Melbourne in the 1960s, my mainstay for classical music was the ABC. This was when John Charger was introducing us to Mahler and Bruckner, so difficult out of a tinny radio. I feel that the younger generation and the taxpayers are being sorely treated.

Now eighty-eight years old, the famously private Thomas Pynchon has produced his first book since the publication of Bleeding Edge in 2013. Shadow Ticket – appearing sixty-two years after his first novel, V. – is immediately recognisable within Pynchon’s distinctive, postmodern oeuvre. The plot swerves between real and alternative worlds, various literary and cinematic genres are parodied, and established conventions of narrative representation are undermined.

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. 

Ita Buttrose is someone Australians know; she’s someone that Australians trust’, said Scott Morrison, when he announced Ita Buttrose’s appointment as Chair of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC). For once, Morrison was saying something likely true. Buttrose’s long career in the media, especially in leadership positions, had afforded her a visibility, familiarity, and goodwill enjoyed by few in Australia.

One Thousand and One Nights begins with an ending in sight. Unless Shahrazad can keep her husband, the Sultan Shahryar, entertained with her stories, she will follow the virgins before her who marry him only to be beheaded in the morning. Shahrazad’s means of escaping this response to his first wife’s infidelity opens the heart of Jeanette Winterson’s new book about what stories can do and be: ‘magic words that get us into the treasure and out of danger’.

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’.

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.

As a young regional reporter in Western Australia some years ago, I enthusiastically sounded the alarm about ‘wild dogs’ attacking faraway places in the desert interior. The hybrid offspring of dingoes and feral dogs had bred to ‘plague proportions’ in their remote strongholds and were now returning, nosing through gaps in fences, invading run-down and defenceless farming districts, mining camps, and rail depots. Concerned landholders, the line crackling with distance, described an elusive beast of endless hunger, cruel and cunning, haunting the margins of our world. It was beautiful, the stuff of science fiction or fantasy. The stories were picked up and reprinted by our parent newspaper in the city; an urban public apparently shared our concerns about murderous feral carnivores. All that year, while reporting on them, I never saw a wild dog.

Else is not your average climate change novel; it is too rich and strange and visionary. Civilisation is collapsing, though we see very little of that. We follow the exodus of a woman and her teenage daughter from Melbourne to a future Mornington Peninsula over several seasons, across a territory alternately submerged in floods and blasted by fire.