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Nicola Walker

Nicola Walker is a Sydney reviewer.

'Letter from Mozambique' by Nicola Walker

May 2006, no. 281 01 May 2006
Mia Couto’s most recent novel (translated into English in 2004) begins with a ‘large organ on the loose’: a severed penis, like a ‘fleshy hyphen’, is discovered lying on a road in the Mozambican village of Tizangara. It seems that another UN soldier has exploded, for in a nearby tree is a telltale blue helmet. A delegation of Mozambican and UN officials descends on Tizangara, and an Ital ... (read more)

Nicola Walker reviews 'The Picador Book of Journeys' edited by Robyn Davidson

September 2001, no. 234 01 September 2001
Aged twenty-two, I set out for Mexico, with, like Rousseau in Italy, a ‘heart full of young desires, alluring hopes and brilliant prospects’. I was determined to leave the confines of the sleepy metropolis that is Canberra, much as Isabella Bird, though infinitely more adventurous and literate, desired to escape her cloistered Victorian world. This ‘inner compulsion’, as Robyn Davidson des ... (read more)

Nicola Walker reviews 'The Haha Man' by Sandy McCutcheon

April 2004, no. 260 01 April 2004
It’s not racism that makes my mother – once a poor girl from the Welsh valleys – side with the Howard government on the refugee issue: it’s an instinctive territorial defensiveness that can be easily exploited by emotive phrases: illegals, queue jumpers, people smugglers. She’s not alone, if her friends, other relatively prosperous, tax-paying senior Australian citizens, are anything to ... (read more)

Nicola Walker reviews 'Angel Puss' by Colleen McCullough

February 2005, no. 268 01 February 2005
Wednesday, December 29th, 2004: Ugh: today I realised Colleen McCullough’s latest book (her fifteenth), Angel Puss, which ABR sent to me several weeks ago, needs to be read, reviewed and dispatched by January 3. The dust jacket précis reveals that this novel is ‘exhilarating’ and ‘takes us back to 1960 and Sydney’s Kings Cross – and the story of a young woman determined to defy conve ... (read more)