As someone with no background in ecology, I felt uneasy at the prospect of reading the latest work of Darryl Jones, an expert in the field. Partly, my fear was that Jones’s lessons would be too technical for me to understand. Partly, it was a murkier fear: I pictured the Professor of Ecology despairing and exhausted because nobody was heeding his warnings, and readied myself to be scolded, or at least left feeling vaguely guilty. 

In 1921, during his brief tenure editing The Mildura and Merbein Sun, the charlatan and blackmailer Grant Hervey combined satire and legend in a regularly serialised novel, hoping to forge a foundation myth for the Mildura region. The hero of A Don Quixote of the Saltbush was an American adventurer, Stephen Puritan; his loyal sidekick was a poorly conceived, simplistic Aboriginal man known as Pinggali. The two ride the bleak, rusty terrain of Mildura vowing vengeance on wrongdoers, to be enacted through a reinvention of the landscape via the installation of modern irrigation technology.

In 1997, a first-time writer came out of small-town Kerala, God’s own country, and wrote a novel exploring the nature of maternal love and the constrictions placed upon who can love whom and how. Narrated through the perspective of dizygotic twins – with their ordinary words capitalised and scattered across the pages to symbolise children encountering an adult world with equal parts awe and apprehension – this work went on to win the 1997 Booker Prize. Those of us whose minds were forevermore imprinted with Arundhati Roy’s sheer idiomatic chutzpah and semantic cosmopolitanism in The God of Small Things will find the writer in fine fettle in her latest work, Mother Mary Comes to Me.

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 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.

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.

When was poetry turned on its head? Was it with T.S. Eliot and his nemesis, William Carlos Williams? Or perhaps it was the slow burn from Emily Dickinson. Was it with Walt Whitman that everything changed? Or did the Surrealists manage to kick down the walls? Gertrude Stein, e.e. cummings? Sylvia Plath? Adrienne Rich? Or possibly Frank O’Hara? It is hard to say just when it happened, or exactly what happened (two world wars and two nuclear bombs!), but poetry had its part in the explosive history of the arts this past century, and as a result, it is now a job requirement for each poet to find for themselves a personal path towards poetry and some understanding – or invention – of what poetry is.

At first blush, the subject of Carmel Bird’s twelfth novel, the seventeenth-century court of Versailles, might come across as a surprise. Bird was born in Launceston and lives in Victoria, and she has traditionally focused on Australian subjects in her extensive body of fiction. Cape Grimm (2004) and The Bluebird Café (1990) engage with Tasmania’s Gothic past, from the horrors of colonialism to the Martin Bryant massacre. Red Shoes (1998) was inspired by the Melbourne cult known as ‘The Family’, while The White Garden (1995) was based on the controversial deep-sleep therapy and sexual abuse that occurred at Sydney’s Chelmsford Psychiatric Hospital in the 1960s.

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’.

Zadie Smith’s essay collections have an uncanny habit of arriving precisely when the culture shifts. Changing My Mind (2009) appeared as the iPhone began transforming daily life; Feel Free (2018) followed Donald Trump’s first inauguration; Intimations (2020) captured the disorientation of the pandemic’s early months; and now Dead and Alive appears in the wake of Trump’s return to office. Comprising essays written between 2016 and 2025, most of them first published elsewhere, the collection gains an unexpected coherence in retrospect.