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Australian Book Review is assisted by the Australian Government through Creative Australia, its principal arts investment and advisory body, and is also supported by the South Australian Government through Arts South Australia. We also acknowledge the generous support of our university partner, Monash University; and we are grateful for the support of the Copyright Agency Cultural Fund, Good Business Foundation (an initiative of Peter McMullin AM), the Sidney Myer Fund, Australian Communities Foundation, Sydney Community Foundation, AustLit, Readings, our travel partner Academy Travel, the City of Melbourne; our publicists, Pitch Projects; and Arnold Bloch Leibler.
View items...ABR Prizes
Calibre Essay Prize
Australia’s leading award for an original essay is intended to foster new insights into culture, society, and the human condition. All non-fiction subjects are eligible for submission. The prize is worth a total of $10,000, and is supported by Peter McLennan and Mary-Ruth Sindrey.
Peter Porter Poetry Prize
ABR’s prestigious international poetry prize is named in honour of the late Australian poet Peter Porter. The prize is worth a total of AU$10,000. The Peter Porter Poetry is funded by the ABR Patrons, including support in memory of Kate Boyce.
ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize
ABR’s annual international short fiction prize is named in honour of the late author Elizabeth Jolley, and is worth a total of AU$12,500. The Prize is supported by ABR Patron Ian Dickson.
Past ABR Fellowships
ABR Behrouz Boochani Fellowship
Hessom Razavi was the recipient of the 2020 ABR Behrouz Boochani Fellowship. The Fellowship, worth $10,000, honoured the artistry, courage, and moral leadership of Behrouz Boochani, the award-winning author of No Friend But the Mountains (2018). Dr Razavi made a significant contribution to the magazine in 2020 with a series of three substantial articles on refugees, statelessness, and human rights.
ABR Patrons Fellowship
Felicity Plunkett is the recipient of the 2019 ABR Patrons’ Fellowship, worth $10,000. Felicity has been a frequent contributor to the magazine since 2010 and was a past Fellow (2015). A poet, critic, teacher, and editor, Felicity was chosen from a large field and will contribute several articles to ABR over the course of the year.
ABR Fortieth Birthday Fellowship
Beejay Silcox is the recipient of the ABR Fortieth Birthday Fellowship worth $10,000. Beejay, who first wrote for us in 2016, has quickly become a regular in our pages, and elsewhere. She will contribute several articles and review essays in 2018, commencing with a survey of magazine culture in our 400th issue (April).
ABR Gender Fellowship
Author and academic Marguerite Johnson is the 2017 ABR Gender Fellow. Her Fellowship essay ‘Picnic at Hanging Rock fifty years on’ looks at Joan Lindsay's 1967 novel Picnic at Hanging Rock, drawing on studies of gender and sexuality, Australian art, and Classics. The ABR Gender Fellowship is worth $7,500. Her essay appeared in the December 2017 issue of ABR. The Fellowship is funded by ABR Patron Emeritus Professor Anne Edwards.
ABR RAFT Fellowship
Elisabeth Holdsworth is the 2017 ABR RAFT Fellow. Her essay 'If This Is a Jew' explores the nature of Progressive Judaism as practised in Australia, Israel, and the United States. Her essay appeared in the November 2017 Arts issue of ABR. The Fellowship is supported by the Religious Advancement Foundation Trust.
ABR Eucalypt Fellowship
Adelaide novelist and essayist Stephen Orr is the 2017 ABR Eucalypt Fellow. Stephen Orr’s essay 'Ambassadors from Another Time' explores the way the eucalypt 'flourishes from Tasmania to the Philippines, how it has colonised poor soils, provided food for the First Australians, images for May Gibbs’s garden sketches, but also informed a sense of isolation about lost children, and terror in the burnt-out cars left in the wake of Ash Friday.' Stephen Orr's Fellowship essay appeared in the 2017 October Environment issue of ABR. The Eucalypt Fellowship is supported by Eucalypt Australia and the ABR Patrons.
ABR Patrons' Fellowship
Philip Jones is the ABR Patrons’ Fellow. His essay titled ‘Beyond Songlines’ is revisionist article of considerable importance examining the Bruce Chatwin phenomenon thirty years on – Jones is widely regarded as one of the country’s leading ethnographers and anthropologists. The essay was published in the September 2017 issue of Australian Book Review. We are able to fund this Fellowship with support from our many supporters. We thank all our Patrons.
ABR RAFT Fellowship
Alan Atkinson, one of Australia's most distinguished and lauded historians, is the recipient of the inaugural ABR RAFT Fellowship. The Fellowship is funded by the Religious Advancement Foundation Trust and is intended to consider the role and significance of religion in society and culture. Alan Atkinson's essay, 'How Do We Live With Ourselves? The Australian National Conscience', was published in the September 2016 issue of Australian Book Review.
ABR Laureate's Fellowship
Sydney poet Michael Aiken was the inaugural ABR Laureate's Fellow, chosen by ABR Laureate David Malouf. Michael Aiken used his Fellowship to write an extended narrative poem in the epic tradition. Entitled 'Satan Repentant', this is a book-length poem about revenge, resentment, and remorse. ABR published a long extract from the poem in its August 2016 issue. Michael Aiken's first collection, A Vicious Example (Grand Parade 2014), was shortlisted for the Kenneth Slessor Prize. His poetry and prose have appeared in journals in Australia and overseas. This Fellowship is possible because of the generosity of ABR Patrons.
ABR Dahl Trust Fellowship
Award-winning author Ashley Hay is the 2015 ABR Dahl Trust Fellow. Her long article, ‘The Forest at the Edge of Time’ examines ‘what our mongrel trees tell us about our past, the present, and the future’. It appears in this year’s Environment issue. Ashley Hay has published several books, including Gum: The Story of Eucalypts and Their Champions (2002), The Railwayman’s Wife (2013), which won the Colin Roderick Award, and (as editor) Best Australian Science Writing 2014. This is the second ABR Fellowship to be funded by the Bjarne K. Dahl Trust.
ABR Patrons’ Fellowship
The third ABR Patrons’ Fellowship was for a substantial article on any topic. Shannon Burns was appointed in November 2014. His article, entitled ‘The Scientist of his own experience: A profile of Gerald Murnane’, in the August 2015 issue, combines investigative journalism, critical analysis, and literary and historical research to profile award-winning novelist Gerald Murnane.
ABR Ian Potter Foundation Fellowship
The third ABR Ian Potter Foundation Fellowship was for a substantial article on any topic. James McNamara was appointed in November 2014. His essay, entitled ‘The Golden Age of Television?’, considers the ascendancy of television drama and its cultural significance. The article was the main feature in our inaugural Film and Television issue in April 2015.
ABR Dahl Trust Fellowship
Australian Book Review congratulates the recipient of the ABR Dahl Trust Fellowship, Danielle Clode, for her essay: ‘Seeing the Wood for the Trees’. Clode’s essay examines the representation of eucalypt forests in Australian culture and the implications this has for debates over forest resources. This is the first ABR Fellowship to be funded by the Bjarne K. Dahl Trust.
ABR Ian Potter Foundation Fellowship
The second ABR Ian Potter Foundation Fellowship was for a substantial article on any aspect of the performing arts. Andrew Fuhrmann was appointed in May 2013 and his article ‘Patrick White: A theatre of his own’ was published in our November 2013 issue. In it Fuhrmann examines the plays of Patrick White and his influence on contemporary theatre.
ABR George Hicks Foundation Fellowship
The ABR George Hicks Foundation Fellowship was for a substantial article with a focus on the visual arts. Helen Ennis was the seventh fellow and her article (‘Olive Cotton at Spring Forest’) was the main feature of the 2013 July-August Art issue. In her article Ennis offers a fascinating reading of the great modernist photographer's second marriage and gradual re-emergence as a photographer in the latter decades of her life.
ABR Ian Potter Foundation Fellowship
The ABR Ian Potter Foundation Fellowship was for a substantial article with a literary studies focus. Kerryn Goldsworthy was the sixth Fellow. Goldsworthy is a former Editor of ABR and one of Australia’s most prolific and respected critics. In her article, titled ‘Everyone’s a Critic’, Goldsworthy examines the current state of book reviewing in Australia, online and off. ABR published the article in May 2013.
ABR Patrons’ Fellowship
The second ABR Patrons’ Fellowship was for a substantial article with a film, media, or TV focus. Ruth Starke was the fifth Fellow. Starke’s project, titled ‘Media Don’, focuses on the resilient and charismatic South Australian politician Don Dunstan, a long-serving premier who skilfully used the media to fashion his persona and perpetuate his influence, but who in the end was brought down by it. Starke, who used the extensive resources of the Don Dunstan Collection held by the Flinders University Library Special Collections, also sheds light on the private man. Her article is published in the March 2013 issue of ABR.
ABR Copyright Agency Fellowship
The ABR Copyright Agency Fellowship was part of ABR’s Asian project, with the generous support of Copyright Agency through its Cultural Fund. Jennifer Lindsay was the fourth Fellow. Lindsay wrote a profile of the Indonesian writer Goenawan Mohamad – activist, journalist, editor, essayist, poet, commentator, theatre director, and playwright – whose essays she has been translating for two decades. The profile, 'Man on the Margins', in the October 2012 issue of ABR, focuses on the man and his work, but provides an understanding of the context in which Goenawan Mohamad writes and of the complexities of Indonesia.
ABR Sidney Myer Fund Fellowship
This ABR Sidney Myer Fund Fellowship was for a substantial article with an Indigenous focus. Felicity Plunkett was the third Fellow. Her project was titled ‘Sound Bridges: A Profile of Gurrumul’, a profile of this internationally acclaimed Indigenous artist and his reception. Her essay is published in the June-July 2015 issue of ABR.
Plunkett is a freelance writer, critic, and lecturer. She has a BA (Hons) and PhD (Sydney) in Literature. She is the current Poetry Editor of the University of Queensland Press, which recently published her anthology, Thirty Australian Poets. She has taught in several Australian universities and has often written for ABR.
ABR Sidney Myer Fund Fellowship
This ABR Sidney Myer Fund Fellowship was for a substantial article with a literary studies focus. Rachel Buchanan was the second Fellow. She is a lecturer in Journalism at La Trobe University, Melbourne, holds a Phd in History from Monash University, and has worked as a journalist for The Age. She is the author of The Parihaka Album: Lest We Forget (2009).
Rachel's long article on archival uses of private papers appears in the December 2011– January 2012 issue of the magazine. In ‘Sweeping up the Ashes’, she investigates the politics and purposes of collecting personal papers at a time when writers, collectors, and institutions are caught between the mystique and permanence of material made by hand and the banality and fragility of machine-made works.
ABR Patrons’ Fellowship
The first ABR Patrons’ Fellowship was for a substantial article with a literary studies focus. Patrick Allington was the inaugural Fellow. Allington’s project was a critique of the Miles Franklin (‘What is Australia Anyway?: The Glorious Limitations of the Miles Franklin Literary Award’). In an article in the June 2011 issue of ABR, he reflects on the Award’s history, strengths, quirks, and past controversies, and fascinatingly, elicits comments from some of the major authors whose works have been excluded from consideration because they don’t ‘present Australian Life in any of its phases’.
Open letter concerning Fairfax
There is, understandably, much umbrage and anxiety in Canberra following Fairfax’s decision to remove its literary editor at the Canberra Times and to rely exclusively on literary reviews and commentaries emanating from Fairfax’s two main broadsheets, The Age and the Sydney Morning Herald – broadsheets that will themselves become tabloids next year, presumably with less literary and cultural content. Australian Book Review regrets this decision, and hopes it will be reconsidered. The Canberra Times has long carried some of the most distinctive and extensive books pages in the country. It seems extraordinary that such a wealthy city – a major university city – a national capital even – cannot support its own bespoke literary pages and must, like some outpost, rely on the word from Melbourne or Sydney. Variety of opinion and sensibility in such a deplorably concentrated media environment as ours is surely worth defending. Without it there will be many victims: writers, readers, critics, booksellers, publishers, etc. We support the campaign to overturn this unfortunate and philistine economy.
Below we carry an open letter from many of those involved in this campaign. We will update it regularly as more names are added, and we welcome readers’ comments.
Peter Rose
Editor, Australian Book Review
Dear Editor,
We, the undersigned, wish to draw to national attention the implication of the upcoming Fairfax consolidation of The Age, Sydney Morning Herald, and the Canberra Times book sections. This has the potential to reduce significantly the content of the three separate sections in terms of both the number of books covered and reviewers. The same review would appear in all three outlets. This will particularly impact on the Canberra Times, currently one of the best book review sections in the country, if, as seems likely, most of the reviews in future will be sourced from ‘Fairfax Central’.
This consolidation will considerably reduce divergent voice and opinion on both fiction, non-fiction, and poetry books in Australia. While Fairfax has indicated that some ‘local content’ will still be included, there is no doubt that many authors and their books will no longer be reviewed. Unlike the United Kingdom and America, where there are numerous publications, Australia is not well served by alternative national literary outlets, Australian Book Review being an honourable exception.
Canberra has the highest book purchasing and reading per head of population in the country, so it seems counter-productive that a search of the Canberra Times book section already only brings up reviews sourced from Sydney and Melbourne. We recognise the challenges confronting the newspaper industry, but we also want to emphasise that the digital era provides opportunities which are currently not being recognised in local content, advertising, and bookshop sales.
We would argue that the reading publics of Canberra, Melbourne, and Sydney are sufficiently different that online literary diversity should be promoted by Fairfax, rather than the opposite trend. The lack of public dialogue within the Fairfax papers on this issue to date, despite numerous submissions, is also a matter of regret, especially given the need for public debate is so often espoused by those organs.
Jaki Arthur, Joel Becker, Carmel Bird, Alison Broinowski, David Brooks, Sally Burdon, Alexa Burnell, John Byron, Tracey Cheetham, John Clanchy, Paul Cliff, Kirstin Corcoran, Sara Dowse, Suzanne Edgar, Christine Farmer, Heath Farnsworth, Jane Finemore, Ian Fraser, Brendan Fredericks, Irma Gold, Alan Gould, James Grieve, Janet Grundy, Robert Grundy, Marion Halligan, Paul Hetherington, Chris von Hinckeldey, Claudia Hyles, Subhash Jaireth, Brian Johns, John Kerin, Cora Kipling, Kathy Kituai, Alisa Krasnostein, Elizabeth Lawson, Lesley Lebkowicz, Caroline Le Couteur, Charlie Massy, Andrew McDonald, Debbie McInnes, Patti Miller, Jennifer Moran, Ann Moyal, Kerrie Nelson, Hoang Nguyen, Susan Nicholls, Jane Novak, Benython Oldfield, Kate O’Reilly, Frank O’Shea, Moya Pacey, Geoff Page, Andy Palmer, Bettina Richter, Andrew Schuller, David Skinner, Melinda Smith, Linda Spinaze, Peter Stanley, Colin Steele, Jen Stokes, Dallas Stow, Faye Sutherland, Peter Tinslay, Bethia Thomas, Leon Trainor, June Verrier, Kaaron Warren, Judith White, Robert Willson, Belinda Weaver, and Cameron Woodhead
Seymour Biography Lecture
Investigative Reporter of the Spirit: The Search for Five Women
Presented by Jeffrey Meyers
Renowned biographer Professor Jeffrey Meyers delivered the eighth annual Seymour Biography Lecture – on the craft of biography, autobiography, and memoir. In his work on Joseph Conrad, Wyndham Lewis, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and Robert Frost, Meyers was fascinated to learn that each of these married writers had an intriguing, but elusive, lover. He found that these mysterious lovers assume an independent existence and had extraordinary lives worthy of a full-length study. In this lecture, Meyers reveals what happens when minor characters take on lives of their own.
Jeffrey Meyers – one of twelve Americans who are Fellows of the Royal Society of Literature – is one of the most respected scholars in his field. He has published fifty books and 800 articles on modern American, English, and European literature, has edited two collections of essays on biography and has lectured at numerous universities across the world. His interests include bibliography, editing, literary criticism, art history, and film. Based in Berkeley, California, Meyers is the author of several works on T. E. Lawrence and George Orwell and has written about the lives of Katherine Mansfield, Robert Lowell, D.H. Lawrence, Edgar Allan Poe, Edmund Wilson, Humphrey Bogart, Errol and Sean Flynn, Somerset Maugham, Arthur Miller and Marilyn Monroe, Samuel Johnson, and John Huston.
Jeffrey Meyers delivered the lecture at Australian Book Review on 17 September 2012.
Click here to stream the podcast
Seymour Biography Lecture 2012, recorded at the National Library of Australia on 13 September 2012.
Supported by John and Heather Seymour, Australian Book Review, the State Library of New South Wales, and the National Library of Australia.
The Seymour Biography Lecture was also presented in Canberra and Sydney at the National Library of Australia and the State Library of New South Wales respectively.
ABR Events & Programs
Announcing the winner of the 2025 Peter Porter Poetry Prize in Melbourne
Join us at 6pm on Tuesday, 18 February as we celebrate the 2025 Porter Prize and announce the winner.
Peter Rose (Editor and CEO) will host this event, which will feature readings from the shortlisted poets. A special guest will announce the winner.
Where: Readings bookstore, 309 Lygon Street, Carlton, Victoria.
RSVP: Please email the following address with your name and the number of people attending: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
The Peter Porter Poetry Prize is generously funded by ABR Patrons, including Andrew Taylor AM and in memory of Kate Boyce.
Remembering Peter Steele
Bricks, knowledge, gravity
‘I just read a history of bricks.’
We learn about the ways our teachers have influenced us over many years. As an undergraduate student at the University of Melbourne, I took every class taught by Professor Peter Steele SJ. More than a decade after I first sat in his office, and only days after his death, I recall a statement he made almost as an aside during one lecture. The class was on travel writing. Not the popular genre, where narratives of Tuscan revelations or adventures on the trans-Siberian railway abound, but a more ragtag bundle of texts: The Odyssey, The Travels of Sir John Mandeville, and, a particular favourite of Steele’s, Gulliver’s Travels. He wrote his doctoral thesis on Jonathan Swift, a fellow priest with an appetite for the world’s many wonders.
The reading list for Steele’s class was already an odd selection, but his casual statement in class that he had been reading about bricks revealed a world of reading that lay before me. A lover of fiction and poetry, I had devoted almost all my reading to these genres, dipping liberally into the literary essay along the way. But here was a radically different suggestion: a history of bricks; essentially a history of the buildings we construct that are meant to last. I thought of the different character of homes made of red brick, and those made of yellow brick. I pondered again the Yellow Brick Road of Oz. Later, when reading of Timbuktu’s mud architecture, and when visiting adobe pueblo sites in the American Southwest, I thought again of this history of bricks. How like the Peter Steele I came to know over a number of years to understand the world from the perspective of the materials with which we build it. In various library catalogues, I have looked up the subject of bricks, and a number of books have come up. I have often wondered which volume he read, and am sorry I never asked him. I am grateful, however, that he introduced me to the work of, among many others, Mandeville. The weird account of this knight’s travels eastward into an increasingly wild and unrecognisable medieval world is one I have returned to often, both in imagination and on the page.
Another text Steele revealed to me was the poem ‘Matthew XXV: 30’ by Jorge Luis Borges. He often brought a poem to class, projecting it on a transparency, and talked us through the reasons why the poem impressed him. Borges’ poem ends with the following lines:
… In vain have oceans been squandered on you,
in vain the sun, wonderfully seen through Whitman’s eyes.
You have used up the years and they have used up you,
and still, and still, you have not written the poem.
These final four lines, he said, never failed to humble him, to haunt him – and they have come to have the same place in my own life. I read those lines and reflect that every poem I have written fails, somewhere – is still not the poem; will probably never be that poem. Yet when I read last year’s Best Australian Poems, I was struck by Steele’s poem ‘The Knowledge’. In its gentle gathering of worldly phenomena and its almost serenely contemplative mood, I felt that this poem distilled so much of what I loved about him as a poet. I read it and thought: ‘He has written the poem’ – that is, the poem that, for me, most simply represented his poetic voice and concerns. Ever questioning that knowledge which was his life’s quest, the poem ends ‘No end of wisdom: but what does a frog / in a well know of the waiting ocean?’ The ocean had not been squandered. I wrote him a letter to tell him how much I admired the poem.
I remember, too, the day he told me of his diagnosis, now several years ago. It was before I moved to the United States to study at Georgetown, a move I may not have made if I had not been Steele’s student. I already knew he was sick, and wanted to see how he was feeling. When I arrived at Newman College he was waiting outside the gates. In a nearby café he told me frankly and clinically of how his illness had been discovered.
As ever, he was interested in talk of other things. I told him that Susan Stewart’s book Columbarium, which I had just read, contained four words that were new to me. Looking them up, I was pleased that Stewart had – of course – used them correctly, and thus taught me, better than the dictionary, how they should be used. This seemed to amuse him. We spoke of Elizabeth Bishop, and I said casually, ‘Bless her heart.’ He paused, and then with both amusement and gravity, then finally his priestly gentleness, agreed, ‘Yes. Bless her heart.’ I told him that I had recently taken up trapeze lessons. He told me, ‘I often think of you as gravity defying.’
Remembering that last statement, and a number of other things he told me over the years, I feel that, perhaps, I have not defied gravity enough; nonetheless, I like to think that Peter would be pleased to see how my interests have broadened and broadened over time, and that each time I deviate from the literature area of a bookstore or library to another set of shelves – science, history, theology, philosophy – it is not a little because of him. I am certain I am just one of the many students to whom Peter Steele delivered a much richer vision of the world.
Kate Middleton’s first collection Fire Season was published by Giramondo in 2009, and won the Western Australian Premier’s Award for Poetry. She holds an MA in literature from Georgetown University and an MFA in Poetry from the University of Michigan. From 2011–12 she is the inaugural Sydney City Poet.
Below we reproduce Peter Steele’s late poem ‘Maze’, which appeared in our June 2012 issue:
Maze
Birds are amazing, newspapers, stoves, friends.
James Richardson
But wait, there’s more – as when the hummingbird
flies backwards for the hell of it, or
the odd flamingo’s pinkened up by snacking
on blue-green algae. Aeschylus, potted
by a dropped tortoise, was one unlucky Greek –
from the same stable as Melvin Purvis,
who pioneered belching on national radio.Were you an ant you’d start the day by stretching,
and, at a pinch, have a big yawn;
were you a cricket you’d listen through the slits
of your eager forelegs: were you, alas,
a white shark, you’d never take sick but always
be hungry: and if a caterpillar,
you’d boast to the end a couple of thousand muscles.The ermine in white is the weasel in brown, and the chow
the only dog with a black tongue:
mice were sacred to Apollo: a camel-hair
may be a squirrel’s tail: the mosquito’s
wings are thrashing a thousand times a second.
If you look for the only crying creature –
or laughing come to that – consult a mirrorand find, your mind bested by wonder, your eyes
lit up again at the starry torch,
rue and its makings, something of jubilee,
the shot-silk of the hours. Better,
as the man said, to keep on dreaming small,
than see given to dissipation
the friends, the stoves, the newspapers, the birds.
Peter Steele
Australian Book Review goes to Brisbane
As we broaden our team of contributors and extend our non-Victorian content, we are currently focusing on Queensland, with good results and some excellent new contacts. We expect this quota to increase markedly in coming months. In mid-July I will be spending a few days in Brisbane, spreading the word about the magazine and recruiting new contributors. I’ll be taking part in a few events at the University of Queensland and the Queensland Writers Centre.
On Thursday, 19 July I will take part in an event at the Queensland Writers Centre – ‘an intimate evening of wine, cheese and chats’. I very much look forward to meeting Brisbane’s pool of talented and emerging writers. My aim will be to give them practical information about how they can engage with ABR and the best way to do so.
Date Thursday 19July
Time 6:00–7:30 pm
Where Queensland Writers Centre, Level 2, State Library of Queensland, Stanley Place, Cultural Centre, South Brisbane 4101
RSVP This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
As ever, I welcome approaches from seasoned reviewers or from those who want to chance their arm in a critical sense. All you have to do is send me an email outlining your experience and interests (authors, genres, etc.) and sending me one or two examples of your work. My email address: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
From time to time I chat to Sky Kirkham on the excellent 4ZzZ Book Club, our subject being literary news and recent developments and offerings at ABR. Here is a podcast of our latest conversation (courtesy of 4ZzZ Book Club). Click the Play button to stream the podcast, or click the link ('peter_rose_interview.mp3') to download it.
Peter Rose
Editor, Australian Book Review
Dial M for a horror story
‘An important book’ is one of those facile terms that usually have an off-putting effect – like ‘the defining election of our time’. But some publications do have a galvanising effect, and one of them is Dial M for Murdoch, written by Tom Watson and Martin Hickman, and published (with laudable speed) by Allen Lane. For this reader – this anxious addict of the print media – it’s one of the most troubling books of the year; essential reading for anyone interested in the media or in our democratic processes. It’s a perfect companion to the Guardian’s brilliant, valiant coverage of this lamentable affair.
Tom Watson, of course, is by now very familiar to us. The Labour MP – no friend of News International (‘the tub of lard’ they dubbed him sweetly) – traces the origins of the scandal, right back to 2005, when an innocuous news story about a prince’s knee injury led to something rather bigger and darker. Watson, with a few courageous, relentless colleagues – lawyers, parliamentarians, journalists, actors, some of them sick of being traduced in Murdoch’s papers and indignant at being stalked or having their phones hacked – pursued the story for years, often at some professional risk and without much support, until the revelations in July 2011 about News of the World’s conduct after the murder of Milly Dowler accelerated the process of exposing the institutionalised criminality, mendacity, corporate megalomania, and sheer immorality.
Watson and Hickman’s book is quite chilling. Peter Wilby, reviewing it in the Guardian Weekly (18 May 2012), began:
Even if you are familiar with the News of the World phone-hacking saga, you will be gobsmacked by this account. It is a tale of stupidity, incompetence, fear, intimidation, lying, downright wickedness and corruption in high places.
Robert Manne, covering the story in the June issue of The Monthly, mused about the likely coverage of the book in Australia, where Murdoch controls seventy per cent of our newspapers. Well, the book is in reliable hands at ABR. Anne Chisholm – journalist and biographer – will review Dial M for Murdoch for us. Anne is very accustomed to writing about dubious and domineering media moguls. With her late husband Michael Davie (a former editor of The Age), she wrote a biography of Lord Beaverbrook (1992).
Look out for Anne Chisholm’s review in the July–August issue and earlier in ABR Online Edition, where major articles of this kind now appear in the weeks leading up to publication.
Peter Rose
Editor, Australian Book Review
Patrick White – ‘Edges slightly rubbed’
While the Brits prepare to traipse up and down The Mall brandishing their Union Jacks and Coronation Chicken to fête our remote head of state’s Diamond Jubilee, what better way to mark a rather more momentous local milestone – the centenary of Patrick White’s birthday (28 May 2012) – than by reading the man again, and reading one’s favourite book by him, after more years than one cares to recall.
A few weeks back I headed to Clunes Booktown with thousands of other readers and bibliophiles. Away from the dozens and dozens of antiquarian book displays and the brass band in the quaint rotunda and the ferocious Punch and Judy and the hay-bale maze in the main street, Tess Brady and her colleagues presented an interesting program of interviews, panels, and workshops. I chaired one of these sessions, a tribute to Patrick White, and was joined by three friends and colleagues: Peter Goldsworthy, Michael Heyward, and Nicholas Jose. We began by discussing our first encounters with White. Peter Goldsworthy, borrowing The Tree of Man from the Glenelg library, thought White was from South Africa. For Michael Heyward, it was The Aunt’s Story. ‘It changed the shape of your mind.’
That’s exactly how I felt when I read White for the first time. This was earlier, in 1973, when I was seventeen. I bought a copy of The Aunt’s Story for about a dollar and read Part One in a single gulp. I don’t think I’d ever been so stirred by anything in my life, especially that last, inexpressibly tragic paragraph:
Theodora looked down through the distances that separate, even in love. If I could put out my hand, she said, but I cannot. And already the moment, the moments, the disappearing afternoon, had increased the distance that separates. There is no lifeline to other lives. I shall go, said Theodora. I have already gone. The simplicity of what ultimately happens hollowed her out. She was part of a surprising world in which hands, for reasons no longer obvious, had put tables and chairs.
I recall having to put the novel aside for a couple of weeks before I could read the other two parts. I couldn’t bear much more of that knowledge.
To be sure, Theodora’s domestic metaphysics or epistemology are guaranteed to speak to a moody adolescent, but the beauty of the prose and its rare simplicity (‘the moment, the moments, the disappearing afternoon’; and this of Theodora: ‘She was as negative as air’) move me still as I read a rather more expensive copy of the second edition (1958), which I bought recently from Kay Craddock: ‘corners of boards slightly bruised, edges slightly rubbed ... From the library of Australian journalist and critic, Neil Jillett with his bookplate, designed by Spooner ...’
Never, for me, was White’s prose more expressive, more original, more observant. I had forgotten how much energy he derives from his verbs, often of the simplest. ‘And the cows wound into the yard at evening to be milked. And Gertie Stepper punched the dough.’
It’s prose that deserves to be read aloud, slowly and savourly. In Clunes, during our panel, Nick Jose wished we could step back and just read from The Tree of Man. There’s a thought for the next Booktown. ABR might do something similar ourselves when we move to The Boyd next month.
It was salutary to be reminded in Clunes that only 464 copies of The Tree of Man have sold this century. Let us hope that Peter Goldsworthy, who came up with this dismal statistic, was responsible for a few more sales when he extolled, and briefly read from, White’s 1955 novel, for many people his greatest achievement.
Well, now we all have many reasons to reflect on and explore this uniquely gifted Australian novelist. There has been much coverage of his life and oeuvre in the press. The ABC has produced a short, interesting documentary on the man, replete with fascinating photographs and footage. At ABR we’ve been pleased to publish Peter Conrad’s review of the posthumous (and incomplete) The Hanging Garden (April issue) and David Marr’s article about White’s intermittently abortive career in the theatre (May issue). Now comes the welcome news that Text Publishing will reissue White’s first (and long suppressed) novel, Happy Valley. Copies are scarce, and very expensive. I’ve never read it, and can’t wait to do so. Text will publish it in September, with an introduction by Peter Craven (who is said to be writing a full-length book on White for Penguin).
Barbara Mobbs – White’s long-time agent and friend – speaking at the opening of the National Library’s The Life of Patrick White exhibition (which is on display there until 8 July), wondered if her famous client would emerge from the twenty-year quiescence that often follows the death of a writer, however celebrated. It’s hard to imagine – deplorable to imagine – that such a voice, such a prodigious talent, will cease to be relished by readers of all ages and types for decades to come.
Peter Rose
Editor, Australian Book Review
ABR FEBRUARY 2013, NO. 348
Purchase the February 2013 print edition
Purchase the February 2013 print edition
Features
The outlook for America in Obama’s second term Morag Fraser
Fit audience of readers Bernadette Brennan
The cult of Rupert Murdoch Joel Deane
A copious biography of J.M. Coetzee Gillian Dooley
Shapes of feelings in Brian Castro Francesca Sasnaitis
When Nettie Palmer visited Henry Handel Richardson Brenda Niall
Asian Australian fiction in the Asian Century Alison Broinowski
The life of David Foster Wallace Shannon Burns
Biography
Artur Domosławski: Ryszard Kapuściński Sheila Fitzpatrick
Diana Wyndham: Norman Haire and the Study of Sex John Rickard
Anthology
Sonya Hartnett (ed.): The Best Australian Stories 2012 Cassandra Atherton
Fiction
Anthony Macris: Great Western Highway Patrick Allington
Graeme Simsion: The Rosie Project Jo Case
Jessie Cole: Darkness on the Edge of Town Romy Ash
Annabel Smith: Whisky Charlie Foxtrot Stephen Mansfield
Matthew Condon: The Toe Tag Quintet Simon Collinson
Australian History
Ross Gibson: 26 Views of the Starburst World Andy Lloyd James
Letters
Valerie Eliot and John Haffenden (eds): The Letters of T.S. Eliot James McNamara
William Shawcross (ed.): Counting One’s Blessings Michael Shmith
Music
Charles Rosen: Freedom and the Arts Michael Morley
Art
Kelly Gellatly (ed.): 101 Contemporary Australian Artists Doug Hall
Film
Lincoln Morag Fraser
Essays
Nikki Gemmell: Honestly Gillian Dooley
Indigenous Studies
Jon Altman and Seán Kerins (eds): People on Country Richard J. Martin
Nuclear Studies
Richard Broinowski: Fallout from Fukushima Gillian Terzis
Poems
‘Life Cycle of the Eel’ Sarah Holland-Batt
‘Fragile Pranks’ Emma Lew
Young Adult Fiction
James Roy: City Laura Elvery
Alison Croggon: Black Spring Bec Kavanagh
Literary Studies
Glyn Maxwell: On Poetry David McCooey
Memoir
Simon Armitage: Walking Home Bronwyn Lea
Poetry
Don Share and Christian Wiman (eds): The Open Door Stephen Edgar
Jennifer Maiden: Liquid Nitrogen Kate Middleton
Graeme Kinross-Smith: Available Light Mike Ladd
Alan Wearne: Prepare the Cabin for Landing Peter Kenneally
Journal
Julianne Schultz (ed.): Griffith Review 38 Imogen Smith
History
J.H. Elliott: History in the Making Norman Etherington
Purchase the February 2013 print edition
Purchase the February 2013 print edition
