Scribner

This is not a book for Scott Morrison, who, as prime minister, declared that Australian history was free of the stain of slavery. Santilla Chingaipe proves otherwise. As she states in her introduction, a key theme of Black Convicts is the exploration of ‘how slavery shaped modern Australia’. In the context of this book, ‘slavery’ is both a specific and an umbrella term for different forms of labour exploitation pursued by the British empire between the 1600s and the 1800s. Chingaipe argues that slavery, convictism, and indentured servitude were linked through a fundamental premise: the abuse and exploitation of people for financial gain. Her primary focus is on convicts, as the title suggests, and how Black men, women, and children transported to Australia ultimately were victims of the same system that enslaved their forebears. These convicts were not chattel slaves – many had once known liberty, and would again – but the direction of their lives, in common with the lives of Black people kept as property and forced to labour on plantations in the Americas, was shaped by colonial masters who placed profit over morality.

Joe Aston’s book persuasively outlines the reasons under-pinning the reputational downfall of Qantas, a once highly respected Australian company. In this engaging book, Aston lays bare the way in which greed and distorted loyalties influenced boardroom and top management decisions to the detriment of the travelling public. It should be compulsory reading for all boards, CEOs, politicians, and senior bureaucrats, for it helps to explain the growing lack of trust in senior business figures, politicians, public servants, and the heads of independent integrity-related agencies. The Chairman’s Lounge also details the public’s disdain for those who are paid exorbitant sums of money and extravagant bonuses to run big businesses in this country – Qantas in particular.

Media owners and enablers, autocrats and charlatans, henchmen and underlings, midshipmen and first mates, hangers-on and frenemies populate this book. The Men Who Killed the News is about media moguls over the past 150 years, with the occasional grand-mogul and even anti-media mogul (see Silvio Berlusconi) thrown in.

Even in his first publication, the seven short stories of the rightly celebrated The Boat (2008), Nam Le was perhaps always most interested in creating an aura of violent unpredictability. He withheld consistency, offered cruxes, hit the reader with a blizzard of bold plots in settings so varied as to be practically contradictory – Hiroshima, Medellin, New York City, a fishing town on the Queensland coast. Where, as in the title story, Nam Le appears to relent and writes about what may have been his own experience (he was ferried to Australia as an infant), the baby dies. He is like a package determined not to contain what it says on the disclosure form; a letter that won’t be delivered to the stated address.

Ida, a secondary school teacher in Melbourne with a four-year-old daughter, Aster, in childcare, lives in a post-Covid world of masks, mindfulness apps, remote learning, and video calls. Recently relocated from New Zealand when her partner, a lecturer in Cultural Studies, is offered a more prestigious job at an Australian university, she has relinquished the possibility of continuing her own academic career. He seems unwilling to share household tasks or help to tend to their child, despite the fact that they are both working, and distances himself by immersing himself in his study and going on long runs. In the opening passage, we are presented with Ida’s childhood memory of being on a beach, where she pretends that she knows how to swim – or rather, that she has learned ‘how not to drown’ – which now seems an apt metaphor for her marriage.

The story of the extended encounter between Eora Aboriginal man Bennelong and Arthur Phillip, first governor of the British colony at Sydney, has often been told as both emblematic and predictive of the history of British possession of Australia, and of Aboriginal dispossession. Historians such as Grace Karskens and Keith Vincent Smith have peeled back the layers of this narrative to find ways of telling more complex, contextualised, and open-ended stories. Fullagar reaches a new stage in this journey, and the journey of Australian history more generally. She offers a fresh perspective on Bennelong and Phillip, on the nature of their exchange and the broader currents in which they swam.

When the first season of Aaron Sorkin’s Newsroom premièred in Australia in 2012, Foxtel had its own onscreen news talent cut a series of promos. A bevy of ageless news anchors – all dense hairdos and blazing white teeth – talked admiringly of how the series portrayed their profession. Journalism, in their telling, was fast-paced, often self-righteous, occasionally fallible, but ultimately always a noble occupation that served the public’s interest. Leigh Sales’s new book, Storytellers, follows a similar line, with the content and even the cover art – a black and white photo of Sales at her news desk, shot from behind, à la Will McAvoy – evincing the same reverence for journalism. Implicitly, too, there is the same nostalgia for the days when everything was just a bit more straightforward.

Spellbinding, genre-defying, and powerful in its vision of the future, Kate Mildenhall’s third novel, The Hummingbird Effect, interweaves four matrilineal narratives that span the years 1933 to 2181. Set in Footscray and its surrounds, including the Meatworks, Sanctuary Gardens Aged Care, and a futuristic Forest/Inlet/Island, the novel explores the central concern of ‘unmaking the world’ in order to ‘begin again’.

No publisher or literary agent could have dreamt up or commissioned this remarkable book. It is wholly unexpected and original. It is about some Yolngu clans in north-east Arnhem Land, a group of Vietnam veterans, and an anthropologist named Neville White, who happens to be an old friend of one of Australia’s finest writers, Don Watson. Watson observes Neville, who systematically observes the Yolngu, who are regularly visited by the vets. It sounds like a lugubrious farce and sometimes it reads that way. But it is a deeply serious enquiry into questions at the heart of Australian history, politics, and identity.