The seventieth anniversary of the 1955 Asian-African Conference held in the city of Bandung, West Java, Indonesia, passed earlier this year without evident note in Australia. In Asia and Africa, it was the subject of commemorative conferences and gatherings, impassioned speeches and articles. In Bandung itself, a ‘Global History and Politics Dialogue’ heard from Indonesia’s Deputy Foreign Minister and numerous other serving and past parliamentary leaders that the Bandung Spirit is ‘ever more relevant today’. In India, the prominent economist C.P. Chandrasekhar said that ‘seventy years after Bandung, the Global South is still waiting for independence’ and the Bandung Spirit must be revived. For the Global Times of China, what we make of the historical ‘inheritance’ of Bandung is ‘a matter of practical choices’.

In an instance of delicious wit, a new South Australian publisher is called Pink Shorts Press. That Pink Shorts Press has chosen a satirical collection as one of its first titles represents an almost perfect alliance. The only potential fly in this unctuous ointment is the question resounding across the world at the moment: how, as an author, does one challenge reality, distort the facts, and subvert the narrative, when currently one person dominates most of the work traditionally ascribed to satirical creatives?

[      ] commands a thunderless lightning, a noiseless rain
to spill strange – cold and dark –
over the prostrating city. [      ]
does not shout tonight, the veins
in my legs do not swell. overheard:
a child mimics a lightning strike

Urban planners refer to the accidental trails created by foot traffic as ‘desire paths’. These are the unintentional routes shaped by the footprints of where humans wish to go, rather than the signposted pathway. They are the barely-there tracks, sometimes right next to the concreted or cobblestone walkway, in quiet defiance of dictated procession. It is a concept ripe for writerly annexation – author Robert Macfarlane calls them ‘free-will ways’ – which journalist Megan Clement does superbly in this memoir of her beloved father’s death told through the desire paths her own life has taken – from a childhood in Stoke-on-Trent, in England, and Zimbabwe to her teenage years growing up in a leftist, working-class enclave of Melbourne and the years she spent flying between France and her dying father in Australia, until the pandemic grounded her in Melbourne, sans fresh air, human contact, and any possibility of carving out fresh footfall.

More than a decade ago, two academics browsing in an antiquarian bookshop in Lisbon stumbled across a Portuguese language account of the 1974 Captains’ Coup by Wilfred Burchett. A little digging revealed that while the volume had been translated into Italian and Spanish in the year of its publication, with a Japanese edition appearing the year afterwards, no English language edition had ever been produced. Indeed, nobody seemed to know where the original manuscript might be found. A chance encounter and a helpful librarian located the original typescript in the Burchett papers at the National Library of Australia in Canberra. While this detective story makes for an entertaining preface, it is telling that having tracked down and meticulously prepared the manuscript it then took the editors more than ten years to find a publisher for the first English language edition of The Captains’ Coup.

At the end of Maggie Nelson’s arresting new book, she offers a disclaimer: ‘This work conjoins dream and reality; all representations of people, places and events should be understood in that spirit.’ By the second page, though, it has already become apparent that while this work is peppered with recognisable biographical details, Pathemata: Or, the story of my mouth operates in new terrain. Here the limits of reality and dream are at times sufficiently porous that one wonders whether a particular passage belongs to the writer’s conscious or unconscious life.

The fence post was wrapped in old newspaper and kept in the shed. It was all that Aunty Loretta Parsley, Jimmy Governor’s great-granddaughter, had left to touch of his life. ‘His hands touching that,’ she told Katherine Biber, ‘that’s why I asked you to open it. Because you need to connect with this story.’ Overwhelmed, Biber felt the ‘immense responsibility’ entrusted to her.

‘Sixteen, a sick bed.’ This lyrical refrain loops through Katherine Brabon’s fourth novel, Cure, capturing the cyclical, never-ending essence of living with chronic illness. You can be anything, anyone, anywhere, but it always comes back to these facts, this bed, this body.

A Fair Day’s Work: The quest to win back time is a work of history that is both reflective and urgent. It situates the long struggle of the Australian labour movement to secure reductions in the length of the standard working week – from sixty hours a week in the 1850s to thirty-eight hours a week by the early 1980s – within the contemporary fight against the resurgent power of capital, growing economic inequality, and the shrinking of the middle class. As much as it is a historical account of Australia’s leading role in reducing working hours across the world, it is also a call to action for a new generation of working people to rediscover the fight.

An irony of this age, when everyone is connected to everyone else, is that loneliness proliferates. Martin Luther’s claim that a lonely man ‘always deduces one thing from the other and thinks everything to the worst’ is exemplified by the miserable spiralling of fervidly online isolates. This is the world of Tony Tulathimutte’s Rejection.