Welcome to our March issue – a packed one with contributions from about 50 Australian writers, several of them new to the magazine. These include distinguished journalist-editor Luke Slattery, who writes about Volume 3 of Thomas Keneally’s ‘Australians’ and finds it somewhat wanting. David McCooey offers a spirited defence of John Kinsella. Novelist Andrea Goldsmith writes about two new books on Susan Sontag – and likes one of them. We publish the first in a new series of Reading Australia essays on key Australian texts: Kerryn Goldsworthy revisits Jessica Anderson’s much-loved novel ‘Tirra Lirra by the River’. Then we have reviews by people like Glyn Davis, Joan Beaumont, Nigel Biggar, Jane Sullivan – and much more!
March 2015, no. 369
Luke Slattery reviews 'Australians, Volume 3' by Thomas Keneally
The European settlement of Australia, the colony’s earliest years, its expansion into, and alienation of, lands inhabited for millennia by the first Australians: these are the great and abiding themes of the Australian story. Together with the rather overdone nation ...
'A Short History of Richard Kline' by Amanda Lohrey
A prefatory note to this striking novel tells us that it is Richard Kline’s memoir of ‘a strange event that intervened in my life at the age of forty-two’. The following ‘short history’ interleaves sections of first- and ...
'Sack' by John Kinsella
The eponymous poem in John Kinsella’s latest book recounts a group of teenagers witnessing a sack being flung from a speeding car. The sack, they discover, is filled with tortured kittens. This shocking poem of human cruelty begins a collection concerned with Kinsel ...
