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Moving house recently reacquainted me with my books as I handled each one, packing and unpacking, dismantling the shelves from under them, banging the shelves together in the new place and lining up the books in a jumbled vestige of the old order. Books carried round for half a lifetime, books read more than once, books that will never be read, gifts, enthusiasms, bearers of memory and desire. ...
The Brisbane Writers’ Festival has come and gone with great success and a sizeable audience. ABR sponsored a session: Chris Wallace-Crabbe, Tim Milfull, Brenda Niall and Peter Rose (photographed by Judith Potts below) discussed ‘The Art of Literary Criticism’. On the Sunday, Delia Falconer launched our October issue: ‘a cracker’, in her words. Describing ABR as ‘an ideal as much as a magazine, and an essential part of our literary culture’, Delia wished us ‘a long and argumentative life to come’ and urged everyone to subscribe. Many did rather than running the gauntlet of the four volunteers who assisted us throughout the festival, and to whom we are grateful.
... (read more)Last month it was autobiography’s turn, when David McCooey examined recent Australian memoirs (La Trobe University Essay, ABR, May 2006). Now it is biography’s turn: the genre will be the subject of the 2006 Australian Book Review/La Trobe University Annual Lecture, titled ‘Matters of Life and Death: The Return of Biography’. Our distinguished lecturer is Professor Ian Donaldson, Director of the ANU’s Humanities Research Centre, head of the latter’s new Biography Institute, and Consultant Editor for The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. He is a general editor of The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Ben Jonson (due for publication in twenty-five volumes in 2007), and is completing a life of Jonson for OUP.
... (read more)It is two fathers punching each other in the footy sheds
shadows extending over the river flats,
over the bachelor nursing a long neck on his porch
over the epileptic twisting on the mechanic’s floor.