Black Inc

A few years ago, I spent a week in the village of Salamaua on the Huon Gulf coast of Papua New Guinea (PNG). I delighted in swimming in the warm tropical waters that lap the village. After a dip or two, I wondered if there might be crocodiles about. My hosts told me that there was a resident crocodile; sometimes it came through the village at night, but I need not worry. In generations past, Salamauans and crocodiles had come to an agreement not to hurt each other, and since then the people of the village and their guests had been perfectly safe. I kept swimming.

When Moreno Giovannoni, in his first book, The Fireflies of Autumn (2018), produced lines like ‘The Angel of Sadness draped its wings over the village and slept’, it was clear we were dealing with a writer of some poetic sensibility. Indeed, Giovannoni writes about his subjects with such care, tenderness, and gentle humour that it is possible to forget that the life he is depicting was more often than not ‘wretched’. He wrote his first book for two main reasons: to give readers the ‘flavour’ of a place and to depict the ‘travails of migrants’. These are also the reasons for his second book, The Immigrants, in many ways a companion to his first.

Toby Walsh’s The Shortest History of AI begins and ends with a sermon against panic. ‘Our children’, writes Walsh, ‘are set to inherit a worse world than the one we were born into, due to a raft of problems, some of which are caused by AI.’ The next couple of decades ‘will be challenging’. Yet Walsh is unequivocal in his faith: first, that artificial intelligence scientists will eventually achieve their final goal, ‘matching human intelligence in all its richness’, and second, that such a feat will be ultimately beneficial to humanity. The secret to such optimism, in the face of acknowledged ‘challenges’ ranging from racial and gendered bias to the ‘existential’, lies in learning ‘the lessons of the past’. And this book, writes Walsh, is not a bad place to start learning those lessons.

There is a popular image of the ‘Hexagon’ (the roughly six-sided shape of France) as a powerful, stable national entity with a confident, even overbearing, cultural identity. Colin Jones instead stresses France’s dynamic history as an ethnic and cultural melting pot and its shifting borders as a crucible of military conflict. The central thread of Jones’s engaging story is the tension between contested meanings of ‘Frenchness’ on the one hand, and France’s constant interactions with the wider world on the other.

Josephine Rowe’s third novel, Little World, is a little novel, at least in terms of its length, which resembles that of a novella. Little World is also about a little person, specifically a child, or rather, the preserved corpse of a child, said to be a saint. There is nothing small, though, about the novel’s impact, which is grandly and enduringly enigmatic.

There has been, for some time, a debate among researchers of Australian history. Should the moral and psychological dimensions of settler experience be examined, or do we know enough already?

Few books are greater than the sum of their parts – many are less. In the case of Ross Garnaut’s latest effort, the parts are greater than the sum. As a book, Let’s Tax Carbon: And other ideas for a better Australia succeeds and fails. It succeeds as a field guide to the past, present, and future of the Australian economy’s three big policy problems: transitioning to a net-zero carbon economy; reversing social and economic inequity; and creating new industries that secure the nation’s prosperity. But it fails as a work of non-fiction.

In September 2023, ancient Rome became the focus of a viral social media trend. Women were encouraged to ask men how often they thought about the Roman Empire. The results were emphatic. It became apparent that many men thought about the Roman Empire frequently. The enduring fascination with the Romans should not be surprising; they continue to have an impact on our lives every day.

In his seminal book I Don’t Want To Talk About It (1997), Terrence Real outlines how contemporary men, within the frameworks of white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy, must undergo a severing of self from self, and self from community. Real identifies how the so-called masculine power attained through this severing comes from a ‘one down’ position in which the struggle for ‘power over’, rather than ‘power with’, is a central doctrine of what he calls ‘patriarchal masculinity’. This power over, rather than power with, is similarly manifest in international governance, statehood, community and the family unit itself – and it is even manifest in the representation of male characters in Australian literature.

Lech Blaine. Lucky bastard. Great stories fall in his lap, like butterflies alighting on an open hand. All he has to do is write them up.

Oh, that it were so easy. Earning great material, in Blaine’s case, has meant more travails in three decades than some people endure in a lifetime. Surviving a horrific motor accident that claimed three young lives and profoundly damaged several others was grist for his first memoir, Car Crash (2021). The early death of his father, his mother’s decline through neurodegenerative illness, and managing a Bundaberg motel when his peers were attending university have produced compelling essays.