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Essays

In the year of my birth, trichotillomania did not exist,’ writes Adele Dumont. Hair-pulling has been depicted in human culture for millennia: in Greek myth, in the Bible, in painting and sculpture, and, most commonly, in vernacular expression (‘I’m tearing my hair out’). But hair-pulling as a compulsive, recurring behaviour – trichotillomania – was only named in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) in 1987. Formal psychiatric diagnosis has become the dominant means by which we understand emotional distress, but this has happened very recently, and diagnosis can leave the sufferer, as Dumont writes, feeling ‘categorised’ and struggling to articulate those aspects of their illness that may seem, in spite of everything, like comfort.

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For a man many would regard as the very epitome of the type, Raimond Gaita seems rather hostile to the concept of the intellectual. It is ‘irredeemably mediocre’, he explains, inferior to the kinds of moral and political responsibility that attach to teacher or politician. Intellectuals are active in the public domain, grappling with ideas, culture, and politics, but they have often lacked independence of mind, he says, ‘because they never had it or because they sacrificed it to the cause’.

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The interconnected essays in Gemma Nisbet’s début collection, The Things We Live With, revolve around a premise that is as familiar as Marcel Proust’s madeleines or W.G. Sebald’s images: that things – objects, documents, photographs, even colours – evoke memories of the past. Her essays shift seamlessly from childhood to adult travels, jobs, relationships, and the problems that can lurk beneath a functional exterior.

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The vibrant state of Aboriginal intellectual life is immediately evident upon reading Melissa Lucashenko’s foreword and Daniel Browning’s introduction to his Close to the Subject: Selected works. Lucashenko combines insight with an engaging, colloquial style; Browning, without apology or artifice, weighs up the successes, failures, and resentments of almost three decades as a journalist.

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This week on the ABR Podcast we feature the 2023 Calibre Essay winner, ‘Flow States’, by Tracy Ellis. ‘Flow States’ begins with a single drop of water produced by a household tap left running. From here, Ellis crafts a tale on the obliterative power – real, existential, and metaphorical – of floodwater. Tracy Ellis, a Sydney-based editor, was the winner of the 2022 ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize and thus becomes the first writer to win two separate ABR prizes. Listen to Tracy Ellis read ‘Flow States’. ... (read more)

There is a slaughterhouse-like logic to the way humanity’s mistreatment of animals tends to be written about. Repetitive. Relentless. Atrocity piles upon atrocity, with no hope of remedy. Readers, probably appalled by the abattoir to begin with, likely vegetarians or vegans or animal fosterers, discomfort themselves yet again in the name of … what exactly? Duty? Academic interest? A renewed sense of the righteousness of animal liberation? We read on grimly, plumbing the depths of a despair that would feel commonplace if it didn’t remain, always, so excruciatingly raw.

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Admissions: Voices within mental health edited by David Stavanger, Radhiah Chowdhury, and Mohammad Awad

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January-February 2023, no. 450

'There are 206 bones in our bodies / and mine / are just like yours,’ writes Luka Lesson, rejecting the idea of the fundamental difference between the neurotypical and those who fill the pages of Admissions: Voices within mental health. ‘But I’ll be white ochre if I want to,’ the poet clarifies. ‘I’ll be eaten and reclaimed / decomposed and desired / if I want to.’ These words are about difference and dying, but the speaker is not ready ‘to feed the dirt’, and the poem is a resolute stocktake – of bones, of veins which have been named, and of the breaths transliterated here, breaths ‘that I may have never taken / and they / are the best shit / that I ever wrote.’

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Maps are central to Kim Mahood’s practice as a writer, artist, and intercultural collaborator. She began making them in the wake of her father’s death in a helicopter mustering accident thirty years ago. This tragic event compelled her to make a pilgrimage to the country where she spent her late childhood and teenage years living on Mongrel Downs cattle station in the Tanami Desert. This journey became the subject of her award-winning memoir, Craft for a Dry Lake (2001). This journey set in motion a renewed relationship with the place that has seen her return to the Tanami annually for more than twenty years. The relationships that developed during this period resulted in Mahood’s longstanding preoccupation with maps and mapmaking developing into collaborative mapping projects with Walmajarri and Jaru peoples, the contours of which she traces in her second book Position Doubtful: Mapping landscapes and memories (2016).

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Novelist as a Vocation by Haruki Murakami, translated by Philip Gabriel and Ted Goossen

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December 2022, no. 449

In Novelist as a Vocation, Haruki Murakami describes himself as a ‘very ordinary person’ who has ‘a bit of ability’ in writing novels. It is a point Murakami labours in the eleven essays loosely focused on the craft of writing in this book, where he variously insists that ‘I was just a regular guy who in his spare time tossed off a novel that happened to go on to win a new writer’s prize’. While it is difficult to imagine that an international bestselling author is a kind of everyman figure, these statements are put under pressure in this volume in discussions about his ‘magical’ creativity.

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Over the last few years Australia has undergone a nationalistic cultural renaissance. Just as manufacturers have discovered that the addition of the Advance Australia logo has added a healthy percentage to retail sales, so too the ‘manufacturers’ of popular culture have discovered a more receptive home market, which has helped them weather the recession better than other industries.

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