In Gabriel García Márquez’s most famous novel, One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967), Colonel Aureliano Buendía twice requests that his poetry be destroyed – first when he is in prison, preparing to face the firing squad. He hands his mother a roll of sweat-stained poems and instructs her to burn them. ‘Promise me that no one will read them,’ he says. His mother promises, but does not burn the poems. Years later, as a different family member is about to light the oven, the colonel hands her the same roll of yellowed papers. ‘Light it with this,’ he says. When she refuses, the colonel feeds the poems to the fire himself.

Charmian Clift was a novelist, travel writer, and essayist who, with her writer husband George Johnston, lived with their young family on the Greek island of Hydra from 1955 to 1964. One member of the artist community who gathered around them there, the young Leonard Cohen, described them as having ‘a larger-than-life, a mythical quality’. That mythical quality was matched by real-life fame when, on their return to Australia, George’s novel My Brother Jack (1964) met with huge success, and Charmian became widely known and admired for her regular newspaper columns. Yet within five years of their return, both had died prematurely, Charmian by her own hand in 1969 and George of tuberculosis the following year.

In 2020, with Katie Holmes and Andrea Gaynor, Ruth A. Morgan co-authored ‘Doing Environmental History in Urgent Times’, an article which was published in a dedicated ‘In urgent times’ edition of History Australia. With more than 8,800 views since its publication, which coincided with the first Covid lockdowns, the paper has gone on to become that journal’s most read article in its twenty-year lifetime. In it, the co-authors staunchly called for ‘barbed and incendiary histories that hold wrongdoers to account and keep watch over the present’. History writing is an inherently political act, and they stressed – in italics, no less – ‘there is no justice without history’. Four years on, there remains an ever-accelerating and palpable urgency to the work of history writing. With coruscating prose and assiduous scholarship, Climate Change and International History adds its voice to this chorus.

This attractive and fascinating volume is billed as ‘the first illustrated book on the 1948 Old Vic tour’, and, sure enough, it is jammed from stage-left to stage-right with scores of images – especially of the eternally photogenic two superstars who led the tour. Not among them is one particular photograph – more of a snapshot, really, just 6 x 4½ inches in 1948 measurements. It was taken on the night of 17 May 1948 at a post-performance party at a family home in Melbourne’s St Kilda. Four of the seven people in shot are unidentified; but two of the others, unmistakably, are Vivien Leigh and her husband, Laurence Olivier: she is in a fur coat, sitting in an armchair, a plate of food balanced on her lap; he is two along, perched on a piano stool. But who is that man in the middle in half profile? None other than Chico Marx, who was also in Melbourne, with his own show at the Tivoli.

Say, you’re a school teacher in the Kimberley region of Western Australia, and you’re looking for a play for your class to perform that is set in Broome. Or maybe you’re a crime writer playing with the idea of writing a novel set in Sydney and want to check out what other crime novels have been set there. Perhaps you just found out that your great aunt once wrote a series of poems, and you want to know more. It could even be that you’re an author wanting to find the reviews of your latest short story collection. All this, and more, can be found in AustLit. Scholars of Australian literature know how valuable AustLit has been for over two decades, but anyone with an interest in Australian literary culture will find something worth exploring in Australia’s national literary database. AustLit will not only answer your questions, it will surely inspire more.

In the year leading up to his death, the poet Robert Adamson (1943-2022) gathered together a selection of his work that focused on one of his enduring passions: the birds and fish of the Hawkesbury River, beside which Adamson lived much of his life. Adamson was best known for exploring this passion in poetry, but the pieces collected in this new book are works of prose and include selections from Adamson’s autobiography Inside Out (2004), and from his late collection, Net Needle (2015). They also include material that is likely to be less familiar to readers, pieces published in the magazine Fishing World, and extracts from a journal Adamson kept between 2015 and 2018 titled ‘The Spinoza Journal’.

On the surface, this encyclopedic work offers a gloriously lyrical exploration of the sea. It could be part of a recent shoal of books about the more-than-human world, limning the wondrous and astonishing. In Deep Water: The world in the ocean, whales learn rhyme-like patterns to remember their songs, a ‘babel of strange, eerie sounds: skittering blips, long cries, whoops and basso moans’. A loggerhead turtle travels more than 37,000 kilometres to return to her birthplace. Sharks’ chemo-receptors prove acute enough to detect blood ‘in amounts as low as one part in a million’. Port Jackson sharks socialise with their peers, and evidence emerges that some fish species use tools.

I first met Boris Frankel when he was a thirteen-year-old, in the pages of a file at the National Archives of Australia. I was working on Russian migrant families in Australia that decided to return to the Soviet Union, but then tried to come back to Australia. Boris and his sister Genia had travelled more than 1,500 kilometres from the Crimea to Moscow, alone, in 1959, in the hopes of persuading British authorities to allow their return to Australia. It was a remarkable story: two teenagers who negotiated Soviet bureaucracy and surveillance, made an impassioned plea, and secured the support of a British ambassador. The file even contained letters the children had written to Prime Minister Robert Menzies – their own, teenaged voices. Letters like this are a historian’s dream: I felt I had got to the heart of the story. And yet, in Boris Frankel’s historical memoir, No Country for Idealists, I saw the trip to Moscow anew. In the texture of Frankel’s narrative – their Siberian cabin-mate on the train journey (named Rasputin!), the ambassador’s chef who cooked them breakfast – the wonder of the journey emerged afresh.

In this latest instalment of Black Inc.’s ‘Writers on Writers’ series, we have the intriguing prospect of Tony Birch reflecting on the work of Kim Scott. While most of the previous twelve books in this series have featured a generational gap, Birch and Scott, both born in 1957, are almost exact contemporaries. This is also the first book in the series in which an Indigenous writer is considering the work of another Indigenous writer. It will not be giving too much away to say that Birch’s assessment of Scott’s oeuvre is based in admiration. There is no sting in the tail or smiling twist of the knife.

The title of Omar Sakr’s latest collection references the Covid pandemic and comes from his prose poem ‘Diary of a Non-Essential Worker’. It also reminded me of Plato’s banning of the poets from his ideal republic, and Auden’s line that ‘poetry makes nothing happen’. Throughout Non-Essential Work, Sakr explores the limits of poetry and its function in society, questioning the value of his own art, letting us in on his doubts. In the poem ‘Your People Your Problem’, he asks: ‘What is a song worth singing here? / The silenced are listening.’ Despite these doubts, or perhaps because of them, he has achieved a powerful collection of lyric poetry, simultaneously political and intimate.