University of Queensland Press

Dennis Altman’s major work, Homosexual: Oppression and Liberation was published in the 1970s, first in the United States (1971) and then in Australia (1972). It was fortuitous timing; along with Germaine Greer, Dennis Altman became the intellectual face of sexual liberation in Australia and abroad. Altman and Greer shared a stage at a crowded and sweaty January 1972 sexual liberation forum at Sydney University. Photographs show the audience spilling onto the stage, with Altman’s raffish features offset by Greer’s languid beauty. Arguably, Greer has gone on to greater celebrity and notoriety, as she has drifted from her academic and activist roots. Altman, as he notes in this book, has continued to combine activism and an academic career. In many ways, this book is an extended reflection on that trajectory, now into a fifth decade.

Transactions opens with a scene of duplicity and murder. In the following pages, Ali Alizadeh plunges readers into a ‘whirlpool of greed and apathy’. The collection revolves around an assortment of men and women from different parts of the world. We encounter Anna Heinesen, a Danish charity founder who is revealed to be a sex trafficker and religious zealot; Samia, a rich and racist Emirati student who surfs cyberspace under the alias ‘The Alchemist’; Karina, a Ukrainian sex worker who winds up doing a B-grade horror film in Australia; and a nameless Iranian refugee who criticises ‘pampered Westerners’, but who has sinister secrets of his own. The lives of these characters intersect in unpredictable ways.

Boy, Lost is a sad and shocking memoir, unique in particulars but not in broad outline. Domestic violence and psychological sadism lie at its heart.

According to one study cited in Stuart Cunningham’s book, there are two opposing groups of people: ‘Political Junkies (PJs)’ and ‘Big Brother fans (BBs)’. PJs think that it beggars belief that anyone could think Big Brother was useful. BBs say that politicians are unapproachable and out of touch. As an MP who used to quite enjoy watching Big Brother, I found myself torn. Am I a BB or a PJ? A PJ in BBs? Or a BB in PJs?

Finishing Chris Somerville’s début story collection, We Are Not the Same Anymore, I felt a sense of alienation and ennui. Somerville writes with a stylistic sparseness that is deceptively simple but that repays rereading. Passages of awkwardness and deep introspection are punctuated by moments of humour, warmth, and vulnerability. Embedded within this stark territory, these moments make the journey more enjoyable.

Mullumbimby is a humorous, heartfelt, occasionally abrasive and brave work by a writer with an acute ear for language, an eye for subtle beauty, and a nose honed to sniff bullshit at a thousand paces. A sculptural work, produced by the author and photographed for the cover of the novel, is a bird’s nest, crafted from twigs, various grasses, and earth. It conveys a sense of sanctuary and genuine protection (as opposed to the institutional and violent ‘protection’ Indigenous people have been subject to throughout colonial occupation). But look a little closer at the image and you will notice that the nest is woven into a thorny crown of rusting barbed wire; a simple but effective invention that for the past one hundred and fifty years has maimed, ensnared, and enclosed animals, people, and land. 

In April 2012, barely a week after Queensland had elected a conservative government to office for the first time in twenty-six years, Campbell Newman announced the abolition of the state-funded premier’s literary awards. The decision, despite disingenuous claims to the contrary, was entirely symbolic, coming as it did before Newman’s Liberal National Party had been officially sworn in or had articulated anything approaching a comprehensive fiscal policy. It was an early portent of a regression to a time when philistinism was celebrated and executive power ran uncurtailed. Soon the premier was using his maiden parliamentary speech to pay tribute to his conservative predecessor Joh Bjelke-Petersen, who narrowly avoided a criminal conviction on the back of one of the most infamously tainted juries in Australian legal history. More recently, amid a host of controversies over ministerial nepotism and shady deals, the government has undertaken a sustained attack upon the Crime and Misconduct Commission, the very organisation formed in response to the rampant treachery of the Bjelke-Petersen era. It may be the self-professed smart state, but former Police Commissioner Ray Whitrod put it best in his memoir: ‘Queenslanders are not like other Australians.’

Geoff Page’s 1953 is set in the town of Eurandangee, which, we learn, is about 650 kilometres north-west of Sydney ...

A good novel can use personal drama to humanise history. A small story becomes powerful because of the ideas it represents, and the political, removed from the realm of theory and made concrete, has a tangible impact that can foster empathy and understanding. When done poorly, as it is here, the reverse occurs and the large concepts are reduced, lessened into triviality by the hollowness of the tale.

The Inheritance of Ivorie Hammer is a novel that manages to be absolutely itself, with a wholly idiosyncratic voice, while at the same time acting as a veritable echo chamber of earlier writers. The first page, with its lofty insistence about what ‘should not surprise the world’ in the behaviour of a young woman with the surname Ward, immediately calls to mind Mansfield Park, and the Austen echo is redoubled by the fact that her first name is Marianne. However, Preston’s narrator proceeds to address her readers with a confidence she might have learned from Anthony Trollope, while elsewhere providing information in bulleted lists, a trick Laurence Sterne would probably have found useful had he been writing a couple of centuries later.