‘Bea never swam with the tide’, observes Judith Brett in her eloquent biography of the social reformer, activist, and public intellectual Beatrice Faust. Brett takes us behind the public face of this confident, outspoken, and strident political figure, whose name became synonymous with second wave feminism in Australia. The psychological reading of Faust that Brett offers, in a refreshingly analytical approach provides depth, complexity, and insight which makes this beautifully written book compelling to read.

Adam lives with his father. Teddy lives with his parents and a sister. Both are children of broken or fragile relationships, about to enter their senior year of high school. Adam’s father appears to have ‘given up’ on life; he has stopped drinking and succumbed to ‘mute anger’. Adam hasn’t seen his mother in six years, since she left the family, and Teddy resents his mother’s extramarital affair. In both cases, the family home is a source of gloomy unease, with fathers who are incapable of dealing with the realities of their lives.

The Wakefield Companion

Dear Editor,

Bob Ellis’s disappointment with the new edition of The Wakefield Companion to South Australian History, reviewed by Frank Bongiorno (ABR, April 2025), is naturally disappointing to me as general editor. But in justice to the contributors, Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal, his claim that our work deals largely with ‘European items of interest and Eastern European [sic] artists’ is simply puzzling. This especially when the first eleven articles range from ‘Aboriginal −European Frontier Conflict’ through ‘Aboriginal Histories’ and ‘Aboriginal Land Rights’ (including a whole paragraph on native title) to ‘Aborigines Protection Board’. 

There is no shortage of statistics pointing to the prevalence of misogyny and violence against women, not least the oft-cited figure that one woman is murdered each week in Australia. But sometimes anecdotes reveal the systemic nature of a problem in a way that figures cannot. In her memoir, Groomed, Sonia Orchard recalls attending a social gathering in St Kilda thirty years after she was abused as a fifteen-year-old high school student. At the party, she recognises a male teacher from her school, who, when he sees her, exclaims loudly in front of other guests: ‘I remember you! You used to think you were so hot, didn’t you? Strutting around in your little school dress.’

‘Tasmania is in a new age of fire,’ writes Andrew Darby in an article for The Guardian. The fires in February, which came close to destroying ancient Huon pines in the takayna/Tarkine and pencil pines near Cradle Mountain, were started by a dry lightning strike, as were the fires which tore through the Grove of Giants six years ago. Lightning strikes were once responsible for less than 0.01 per cent of bushfires in Tasmania but now account for the vast majority, an eight thousand per cent increase over a decade. ‘Quite honestly,’ says Jon Marsden-Smedley, a former fire management officer interviewed by Darby, ‘I don’t know of any other climate-change parameter that is as dramatic.’

There are moments in political history when the electoral contest is real, visceral, and there are other times when the governing party is so visibly exhausted and the context so apparently unfavourable that the prudent move is not to try too hard to win. Such was the case at the last British general election, held in July 2024. After four consecutive victories, five changes of prime minister, and a litany of disasters, scandals, and failures, the governing Conservative regime led by the likeable but hapless Rishi Sunak finally keeled over and gave way to Keir Starmer’s Labour Party. Starmer won a majority of 174 seats, with a relatively modest thirty-four per cent of the popular vote.

It always surprises me when I encounter someone so well read that they seem to have every obscure literary reference to hand and yet the late Canadian writer Mavis Gallant has managed entirely to escape not just their attention but their knowledge. ‘Who?’ they will ask. ‘How do you spell that?’ Offer them titles of collections and stories and their perplexity only deepens. The Uncollected Stories of Mavis Gallant, edited by American novelist Garth Risk Hallberg and published by New York Review Books, both tries to explain that underappreciation and to ensure that every serious reader knows precisely why one might wish to spend time in Gallant’s idiosyncratic and determinedly realist house of fiction.

While reading this book, I saw an ABC TV Foreign Correspondent program on volunteer health workers in Ukraine tackling frontline fighters’ horrific injuries. I was moved by the stoic optimism of the soldiers, the dedication and compassion of the doctors and nurses, one of them wearing a brave slash of lipstick.

Josephine Rowe’s third novel, Little World, is a little novel, at least in terms of its length, which resembles that of a novella. Little World is also about a little person, specifically a child, or rather, the preserved corpse of a child, said to be a saint. There is nothing small, though, about the novel’s impact, which is grandly and enduringly enigmatic.

‘The last word on The Ring will never be written,’ writes Michael Downes in the Prologue to his new book outlining the creative history of Richard Wagner’s tetralogy. As with everything else in Story of the Century: Wagner and the creation of The Ring, Downes makes good sense, for a seemingly infinite number of interpretations of Wagner’s magnum opus are possible. Wagner believed in the power of myth, and the Ring is timeless – about more than the giants, gods, dwarves, and humans it portrays. While on one hand it seems to be a warning against the abuse and retention of power in which love ultimately triumphs, on the other it has been taken as a manifesto for German nationalism and unsavoury racial views. The Ring has also been viewed as a comment on the industrialisation of Wagner’s era, a warning against ecological disaster, as a socialist allegory, even in terms of Jungian psychology – to mention just a few examples, all of which testify to the hold it has over people.