Joel Deane

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’. 

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William Dalrymple’s The Golden Road: How ancient India transformed the world (Bloomsbury, reviewed in ABR, 10/24) explores the ways in which India shaped the ancient (and by extension modern) world. This expansive work is brilliantly readable. I enjoyed it so much that I downloaded the recorded version, which Dalrymple himself narrates. This I have listened to twice. Dalrymple challenges the Western-centric view of history and highlights India’s under-appreciated impact on Asian and Western cultural and economic developments. My second selection is almost a diametrical opposite: a slim book written in incredible haste. Gideon Haigh’s My Brother Jaz (MUP) is an exploration of grief, guilt, remorse, and survival. In January 2024, Haigh impulsively and, one imagines, frenetically began writing about the night his seventeen-year-old brother Jasper was killed. He finished seventy-two hours later. My Brother Jaz is unflinching, painful, and anguished. It is also a remarkable exploration of what it means to go on, to live, to reconcile and remember. ... (read more)

This week on The ABR Podcast, Joel Deane considers the black and white politics of opposition leader Peter Dutton. Deane explains that Dutton considers these politics a ‘police trait’ that he developed while in the force, and one that now serves him well in politics, especially when making necessary snap judgements. But will this style endear him to the electorate in the next election campaign, likely fought against Prime Minister Anthony Albanese? Joel Deane is a speechwriter, novelist and poet. Listen to Joel Deane’s ‘The Manichaean Candidate: Peter Dutton’s black and white politics’, published in the September issue of ABR.

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Bill Hayden, the first Queensland policeman to lead  a federal political party, wrote of his experiences as  a constable – the violence, the squalor, the tragedy – in his autobiography, Hayden (Angus & Robertson, 1996), and concluded: ‘All of these led me to feel a great anger at the injustices some people had to bear.’ At one point, the former governor-general noted that his ‘humanist’ reaction to injustice reflected his background as the son of a father who was an illegal immigrant and a mother who suffered domestic abuse.

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What the authors of these three wildly different books share is a gift for creating through language a kind of intimacy of presence, as though they were in the room with you. Emily Wilson’s much-awaited translation of The Iliad (W.W. Norton & Company) is a gorgeous, hefty hardback with substantial authorial commentary that manages to be both scholarly and engaging. The poem is translated into effortless-looking blank verse that reads like music. The Running Grave (Sphere) by Robert Galbraith (aka J.K. Rowling), the seventh novel in the Cormoran Strike crime series and one of the best so far, features Rowling’s gift for the creation of memorable characters and a cracking plot about a toxic religious cult. Charlotte Wood’s Stone Yard Devotional (Allen & Unwin, reviewed in this issue of ABR) lingers in the reader’s mind, with the haunting grammar of its title, the restrained artistry of its structure, and the elusive way that it explores modes of memory, grief, and regret.

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Why did Australia vote against the Voice referendum?

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