Christine Piper

Australia’s history is chequered at best. For every story of military heroism, there is one of discomfiting prejudice. So it is with Christine Piper’s After Darkness, which explores Australian history from the point of view of a Japanese doctor, Tomakazu Ibaraki, arrested as a national threat while in Broome, and sent to the Loveday internment camps in regional South Australia.

How much does the average Australian know about Indonesia? Not the tourist version, with its resorts and beaches and lacklustre nasi goreng – but the wider culture, history, and people. At best, Indonesia is a tantalising enigma to most Australians. At worst, it is ignored – a vast nation about which we neither know nor care, despite its importance as one of our closest neighbours.

Under Stones, a collection of short stories and one poem by first-time author Bob Franklin, reads like a study in subterfuge: a teenage outcast wreaks cyber vengeance on her local Tidy Town group; a man’s online porn addiction is turned against him by a mysterious workmate; a seasoned duck hunter finds that the target has shifted without his knowledge. Yet scratch the surface and you will find that the deception runs deeper than that; the darkly humorous scenarios hint at society’s moral decay. In ‘Soldier On’, a man’s homecoming visit to England to see his retired parents turns from farcical to forlorn, as his infuriation over their addiction to soap operas gives way to a disquieting realisation about the widespread misery of the elderly.