At the first Australian Conference on Transsexualism, convened in 1979, a Dr Michael Ross declared that Australia had the highest incidence of transsexualism in the world. Whatever proportion the good doctor was observing, it must be immeasurably higher today; and yet until now there has been no formal history of gender-diverse Australians. 

In the title piece of this posthumous selection of reviews, criticism, essays, and journalism, Hilary Mantel describes how she once visited an irritating psychic she nicknamed ‘Twerp’ in order to guide her back to her former self: ‘I didn’t necessarily think I had a past life, but I wanted to know how it would feel if I did.’ Her former self turns out to have been a ‘miserable illegitimate infant’ called Sara, born to a family of millworkers in the north of England. Sara isn’t an unlikely candidate: Mantel’s mother worked in a cotton mill from the age of fourteen, as did her maternal grandmother, who left school aged twelve; Mantel’s great-grandmother had been illiterate. Mantel comes from ‘a long line of nobodies’. All that ‘Twerp’ wants to ask Sara is whether or not she is courting, when the real love of Sara’s life is Billy, her white bull terrier. ‘If Sara had slapped him,’ Mantel wonders, ‘what sort of a defence would I have had to a charge of assault?’

David Brooks, critic, novelist, short story writer, animal rights activist as well as poet, taught Australian Literature, ran a writing program, and co-edited Southerly at the University of Sydney. He has published six collections of poetry, the latest (The Peanut Vendor) included in his new and selected poems: The Other Side of Daylight (UQP, 2024). He lives in the Blue Mountains with rescued sheep and advocates for kangaroos. The Sydney Morning Herald called his The Balcony (UQP, 2007) ‘an electrical experience’.

The Journal of Australian Political Economy (JAPE) recently published a special issue to mark the (presumed) halfway point of the Albanese Labor government. There was an editorial and nineteen articles. As you would expect, the verdict was mixed. The most striking thing to me, however, was that the authors had enough material to work with. A similar exercise for the Abbott and Morrison governments would have produced the problem faced by Old Mother Hubbard. The Turnbull government might just have provided her poor doggy with a bone, but one without much meat on it.

Back in the 1970s, when I went up to Katerina Clark’s place in Connecticut for the weekend, I was always a bit on my guard. Katerina was a wonderful and generous friend, but inquisitive. Being young, I had things in my personal life I wanted to hide. A silent tussle went on between us as she did her best to ferret them out (probably knowing from her other sources more or less what they were) and I stone-walled.

There has been talk in recent years about so-called Indigenous Futurism. Referencing Afro-Futurism, futurist fiction that imagines a new postcolonial Africa, the Indigenous version imagines a postcolonial world for Indigenous people, a future where the world is the way it should always have been. One quirk, however, is that Indigenous Futurism leans on Indigenous notions of time, an eternal now in which past and future are mere directions. Writers of Indigenous Futurism know that it’s not only possible to imagine the future and the past at the same time, but that it is part of cultural practice.

The gods of the Greeks are uniquely anthropomorphic; they are not only imagined with human bodies but with thoughts and feelings largely similar to our own, except for the fact that they cannot grow old or die, and are thus spared the greatest part of human pain and suffering. They can feel anger at the misbehaviour, or pity for the fate, of mortals, as when Zeus sees that his beloved son Sarpedon is about to be slain (Iliad 16.431 ff.), but compared to us, they ‘live at ease’ (Odyssey 5.122 and elsewhere).

Frank Moorhouse: Strange paths has no introduction, but Matthew Lamb describes it in his author’s note as ‘the first in a projected two-volume cultural biography of Frank Moorhouse’, covering the long writing apprenticeship of 1938–74 during which Moorhouse ‘br[oke] into the literary establishment, on his own terms’. Lamb does not explain his use of the term ‘cultural biography’ within the book, but the term is apt to describe how ‘biography intersects with social history’ as the book tracks Moorhouse’s ‘negotiation of shifting social conventions and historical moments’ (as Lamb puts it in an article on the Penguin website titled ‘“When the facts conflict with the legend”  – How does a biographer balance storytelling with the truth?’).

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Quentin Beresford, an adjunct professor in politics at Sunshine Coast University, has written and edited about a dozen books, including the excellent Wounded Country (2021), which dealt with the failure of water policy in the Murray-Darling Basin. His latest offering explores thirteen ‘business scandals’ in Australia. Beresford’s definition of a scandal is selective and eclectic. The scope of the book extends to corporate collapses but also to wage theft, climate-change denial, occupational health and safety failures, and the destruction of Indigenous heritage sites.