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Michael Williams

Michael Williams is a writer and reviewer. 

Michael Williams reviews ‘The Ballad Of Desmond Kale’ by Roger McDonald

February 2006, no. 278 01 February 2006
How much do you care about sheep? I mean really care about sheep. Because The Ballad of Desmond Kale is up to its woolly neck in them. It’s an unusual and inspired variation on the classic Australian colonial novel of hunters for fortune, for identity and for redemption. The historical record is filled with accounts of early settlers grappling with the hostile and unpleasant environment. The bat ... (read more)

Michael Williams reviews 'Stanley and Sophie' by Kate Jennings

May 2008, no. 301 01 May 2008
How many books should an author have under their belt before they indulge in a piece of frippery? When John Steinbeck wrote Travels with Charley (1962), about his journeys across the country with his poodle, it must have been hard not to see it as a comedown from The Grapes of Wrath (1939). Adding the subtitle (‘In Search of America’) can’t have been enough to convince anyone that this was a ... (read more)

Michael Williams reviews 'Swan Bay' by Rod Jones

April 2003, no. 250 01 April 2003
Reading Swan Bay, one is quickly struck by a sense of the familiar. A damaged, misanthropic man meets a damaged, unbalanced woman. He attempts to penetrate her almost mystical reserve and, in the book’s central flashback sequence, she recounts the past that has almost destroyed her. Back in the present, the truth of her account seems uncertain. The two achieve some sort of equilibrium. This narr ... (read more)

Michael Williams reviews 'The Ballad of Desmond Kale' by Roger McDonald

February 2006, no. 278 01 February 2006
How much do you care about sheep? I mean really care about sheep. Because The Ballad of Desmond Kale is up to its woolly neck in them. It’s an unusual and inspired variation on the classic Australian colonial novel of hunters for fortune, for identity and for redemption. The historical record is filled with accounts of early settlers grappling with the hostile and unpleasant environment. The bat ... (read more)

Michael Williams reviews 'Dead Europe' by Christos Tsiolkas

June–July 2005, no. 272 01 June 2005
So often, the language used to discuss Australian literature is that of anxiety. A.A. Phillips’s ‘cultural cringe’, coined in 1950, is never far from the critical surface as readers and commentators grapple with questions of national and literary identity. The report of the 1995 Miles Franklin Award’s judges offers one such example: [N]ovels about the migrant experience seem to us to be ... (read more)