Ian Dickson reviews theatre and books for ABR and is the co-author of the musical Better Known As Bee. As a schoolboy, visiting London in the 1960s to catch Saturday matinees, Ian developed his obsession with the performing arts, which followed him through degrees at the University of NSW and Yale. A lifetime spent one way or another around the theatre has made him understand the importance of the critic to make a record of that most ephemeral art.

At the first Australian Conference on Transsexualism, convened in 1979, a Dr Michael Ross declared that Australia had the highest incidence of transsexualism in the world. Whatever proportion the good doctor was observing, it must be immeasurably higher today; and yet until now there has been no formal history of gender-diverse Australians. 

There has been talk in recent years about so-called Indigenous Futurism. Referencing Afro-Futurism, futurist fiction that imagines a new postcolonial Africa, the Indigenous version imagines a postcolonial world for Indigenous people, a future where the world is the way it should always have been. One quirk, however, is that Indigenous Futurism leans on Indigenous notions of time, an eternal now in which past and future are mere directions. Writers of Indigenous Futurism know that it’s not only possible to imagine the future and the past at the same time, but that it is part of cultural practice.

Reading for this review I came across some apposite words by Jacqueline Rose, biographer of Sylvia Plath, cultural analyst and explorer of the lives and roles of women:

Murray Middleton’s début novel, No Church in the Wild, opens beneath Flemington’s public housing towers in inner-city Melbourne. Residents of the towers flood the street to witness the police arrest a group of children ‘pinned on the concrete, knees digging into their spines’. One of these observers is Ali, a grade six primary school student. Ali recognises a Somali friend of his, Walid, as one of the boys under arrest. From Ali’s perspective, it is the latest provocation in a months-long campaign of police harassment against the local African migrant community. When things escalate and police direct the observers to leave, Ali responds: ‘Why should we? ... We live here.’ As the first of five parts, this opening scene is prologue to the action of the novel, which takes place five years later as Ali and Walid embark on their final years of schooling amid a community still suffering from problematic police interactions.

In the title piece of this posthumous selection of reviews, criticism, essays, and journalism, Hilary Mantel describes how she once visited an irritating psychic she nicknamed ‘Twerp’ in order to guide her back to her former self: ‘I didn’t necessarily think I had a past life, but I wanted to know how it would feel if I did.’ Her former self turns out to have been a ‘miserable illegitimate infant’ called Sara, born to a family of millworkers in the north of England. Sara isn’t an unlikely candidate: Mantel’s mother worked in a cotton mill from the age of fourteen, as did her maternal grandmother, who left school aged twelve; Mantel’s great-grandmother had been illiterate. Mantel comes from ‘a long line of nobodies’. All that ‘Twerp’ wants to ask Sara is whether or not she is courting, when the real love of Sara’s life is Billy, her white bull terrier. ‘If Sara had slapped him,’ Mantel wonders, ‘what sort of a defence would I have had to a charge of assault?’

Frank Moorhouse: Strange paths has no introduction, but Matthew Lamb describes it in his author’s note as ‘the first in a projected two-volume cultural biography of Frank Moorhouse’, covering the long writing apprenticeship of 1938–74 during which Moorhouse ‘br[oke] into the literary establishment, on his own terms’. Lamb does not explain his use of the term ‘cultural biography’ within the book, but the term is apt to describe how ‘biography intersects with social history’ as the book tracks Moorhouse’s ‘negotiation of shifting social conventions and historical moments’ (as Lamb puts it in an article on the Penguin website titled ‘“When the facts conflict with the legend”  – How does a biographer balance storytelling with the truth?’).

David Brooks, critic, novelist, short story writer, animal rights activist as well as poet, taught Australian Literature, ran a writing program, and co-edited Southerly at the University of Sydney. He has published six collections of poetry, the latest (The Peanut Vendor) included in his new and selected poems: The Other Side of Daylight (UQP, 2024). He lives in the Blue Mountains with rescued sheep and advocates for kangaroos. The Sydney Morning Herald called his The Balcony (UQP, 2007) ‘an electrical experience’.

On a fatherhood weekend, the men drag
a dead manna gum, chained to a ute, into camp.
They’re talking innocence. Is it inborn, or clad
layer by layer by behaviour? Around the grey stump
the men start chainsaws and crack beers, open
a phone (there’s reception), search innocence definition.
Blamelessness. Chastity. Childhood. But also
integrity, which means innocence. The confusion
– that integrity means wholeness too –
heats up when one man says he heard children
arrive with sin. Then two-stroke fumes
drown the twilight bush’s scat-and-pepper scents.
They cut it. Some of the men scream, some don’t,
when spiders erupt from the warm hollow.

Tunde, a photographer and art professor at Harvard, attempts to photograph a hedge in his neighbourhood in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Waved away by a white property owner suspicious of a Black man on his street, Tunde tries again midway through Teju Cole’s new novel, Tremor, but, trusting his feeling of unease, leaves. (One is put in mind of the notorious 2009 incident in which neighbours reported Henry Louis Gates Jr for trying to force open his own Cambridge front door.) It is not until the final pages that Tunde returns to the scene and tries again, in the dead of night, after a party he has hosted with his partner, Sadako. The first exposure is too bright, the second too inky; too much is in frame, then not enough. Finally, he makes what he believes might be a successful image. Makes not takes; the difference is significant.