The genocide of the First Peoples of Tasmania, concentrated within a brief, sixty-year span from 1815-75, was an incalculable tragedy that destroyed a remarkably adaptable and ecologically sustainable group of nations who occupied the island for at least 40,000 years. The rapid destruction of Aboriginal Tasmania in a colonial environment that was rapacious and profoundly racist meant that there was next-to-nothing left that might allow us to understand how they saw themselves, or the nature of their social structures and customs, and the belief systems of their world. This is especially tragic for the descendants who have sought to affirm their Aboriginal identity in the face of the ignorance and self-satisfied indifference of the immigrant society.

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 an 1843 letter composed on a barge in Holland, a young Karl Marx wrote of a ‘national shame’ that made him want to hide his face. He anticipated his addressee, his friend Arnold Ruge, would remind him that ‘no revolution is made out of shame’. But Marx disagreed. ‘Shame’, he insisted, ‘is already a revolution of a kind’. It is from Marx that Frédéric Gros takes the subtitle of A Philosophy of Shame: A revolutionary emotion. Although we never really discover what kind of revolution Gros has in mind, the book can best be seen as an attempt to revolutionise how we think about shame itself.

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 writing Borneo: The last campaign, Michael Veitch has taken on a worthy subject. It was ‘the largest, most complex, most meticulously planned amphibious military operation ever undertaken by the forces of Australia’. Yet, despite its scale and the military prowess displayed, the campaign has received little sustained attention in print since the publication of Gavin Long’s official history, The Final Campaigns, in 1963 and is overshadowed in the public imagination by the great epics of Australian military history, like Gallipoli and Kokoda.

Welcome to a special issue of ABR, put together with the help of Melinda Harvey at Monash University. This issue focuses on the future of the book in Australia. The book, like other key nouns in that sentence – Australia, future – might now signify radically different things to each of us. This should not stop us thinking about how we can foster the acts of reading, listening, focusing, evaluating, and imagining – and how we might do it best in Australia – for our pleasure and elevation, for our cultural richness, for our democracy.

Eunice Andrada is the author of three books of poetry. Her début, Flood Damages (Giramondo, 2018), won the Anne Elder Award and was a finalist for the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for Poetry and the Dame Mary Gilmore Award. Her second poetry collection, TAKE CARE (Giramondo, 2021), has gained many honours as a finalist for the Judith Wright Calanthe Award, Stella Prize, Australian Literature Society Gold Medal, and two NSW Premier’s Literary Awards. Her third poetry collection, KONTRA, is reviewed on by Grace Roodenrys in the October edition of ABR.

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.

Last year, the European and International Book Federation revealed that Australia had lower reading and book buying rates than nineteen other countries. Only sixty-four per cent of Australians had purchased a book in the past twelve months, compared to an average of seventy-two per cent of people in the other countries.

This book starts with something of a bum steer. The cover declares that Survival in Singapore is about the ‘triumph and tragedy of Australia’s greatest commando operation’. It turns out that the commando operation is not its main subject at all, as Tom Trumble acknowledges in his note to readers, but the hook for a tale of sacrifice and suffering in Japanese-occupied Singapore during World War II. This faint misdirection did not trouble me – the subject of wartime Singapore interests me more than a tale of derring-do – but it did surprise. Is this part of marketing a popular war history – always go with the more dramatic angle?