Alex Cothren

Whenever I spot the new flyers of our university’s student communist club, all I can do is admire the gumption. Talk about seriously swimming against the tide, the political equivalent of hawking CDs in a Spotify world. When just broaching the topic of negative gearing can torpedo a major political party in this country, what chance is there that the kids are going to abolish private property altogether? The truth is that communism’s only active role in the West today is playing the bogeyman, a danger label to be slapped on anything conservatives find insufficiently conservative. See, for example, the current US vice-president, who had only to politely request a little more corporate tax, please, sir, and voila, she’s Comrade Kamala, cackling her way to the gulag.

Lately, my bus route home has been taking me past a motley protest. Come rain or shine, a handful of ragged individuals can be found marching up and down a traffic median strip near Flinders Medical Centre, wearing sandwich boards and hoisting neon placards with phrases like STOP VACCINE GENOCIDE or W.H.O. CHILD DEFILEMENT, etc. Contrails feature somewhere in the mix, too, but the bus always zips by before I can parse the finer details.

Briohny Doyle’s third novel, Why We Are Here, threads together just about every literary, philosophical, and pop culture perspective on death and aftermath there is. But nothing represents the heart of the book better than its exploration of both/and thinking. Embraced by the fields of business, psychology, and beyond, both/and thinking is a method of overcoming paradoxes, not by solving them but by honouring how two apparently contradictory truths can co-exist. There’s no explaining the singular effect of this book without it. 

Hassled by deadlines and stricken by illness, I made a very modern deal with the devil. I asked ChatGPT to help me review David Cohen’s new short story collection, The Terrible Event. For the past few months, this text generating tool has made news by using AI technology to write everything from A+ high-school essays to faux-Nick Cave lyrics. Surely, then, it could provide some scaffolding for a thousand-word book review, a few handholds to help a tired reviewer scurry over this task and on to the next?

In her introduction to Sydney Review of Book’s latest anthology, Open Secrets: Essays on the writing life, Catriona Menzies-Pike quickly establishes what readers should not expect. ‘There are no precious morning rituals here,’ the editor promises, ‘no magic tricks for aspiring writers.’ It’s true that these essays, each a mix of disarming honesty and polymathic intelligence, hover far above the glut of literary listicles clogging the internet. And thank goodness: if I have to suffer Hemingway mansplaining show-don’t-tell one more time, I may go out and shoot a lion myself.

Just when you thought there wasn’t enough to worry about, along come bottom trawlers. While the fishing technique of dragging a heavy net along the bottom of the seabed is     nothing new – indeed, there was a British commission inquiry into the practice as far back as 1866 – the sheer size of modern super trawlers maximises their destructiveness. Centuries-old sea coral forests are bulldozed by the thirty-tonne nets, non-targeted fish and turtles become indiscriminately tangled in the web, and the disturbed sediment releases more carbon than the entire aviation industry each year.

In David Whish-Wilson’s new historical novel, The Sawdust House, it’s 1856 San Francisco, where the citizen-led Committee of Vigilance has convened to purge foreign undesirables from a city populace swollen beyond control by the gold rush. Of course, armed nativists ‘enthralled by their own performance’ are a common feature of U.S. history, from the Virginian lynch mobs of the late 1700s to that guy in the fuzzy Viking hat parading around the Capitol Building just last year. In an intriguing twist, however, the pitchforks are aimed this time at those ‘vermin from some hellish southern continent’, aka Australians, particularly a criminal element who congregate in a lawless quarter nicknamed Sydney-town.

In July 1999, ABC’s 7:30 Report ran a story on the Western Suburbs Magpies, an NRL club struggling financially and playing out its final season before a merger with the nearby Balmain Tigers. For that human touch, the story featured shots of a family decking out their children in the Magpies’ black and white, their relationship with the ninety-year-old club described as ‘something in the heart’. It was all very warm and fuzzy, at least until the camera cut away and a voiceover delivered a neoliberal sucker punch: ‘love does not necessarily deliver dollars’. Set in the same Western Sydney suburbs still mourning the loss of their team, Max Easton’s terrific début novel, The Magpie Wing, tracks a trio of Millennials as they similarly battle to retain their identities in a rapidly gentrifying world.