The Relationship Is the Project is a guidebook to working with communities. The work explicitly asks the reader to consider not only how art is created but from where that art comes – and it so often comes from community.

Netflicks is the first book in UWAP’s ‘Vignettes’ series. The series’ brief is to introduce readers to contemporary scholarly thinking about pressing issues of modern life in the format of short, lucid books. Judging from the first iteration, ‘Vignettes’ promises to offer complex and coherent readings of the world we live in now, informed by deep knowledge but wearing its learning lightly. Netflicks is written in accessible prose that invites the reader into the scholarly analysis of television, should they be new to it, with clear and uncomplicated language. When technical concepts are introduced, the author makes sure to provide a definition and to justify his deployment of what might seem to be jargon.

From across the ditch, New Zealand can look like a place where settlers and Indigenous people have forged a successful, postcolonial modus vivendi. The image conceals more than it reveals. As in Australia, relations between Indigenous people and the state are fraught. At the November 2023 election, right-wing minority parties won electoral support by rejecting what they have characterised as special privileges to Māori. And a long-standing, bipartisan consensus on ‘biculturalism’ is breaking down.

Thirty years before the Australian career criminal Gregory David Roberts travelled to Bombay and sought to make for himself, in the words of critic Peter Pierce, ‘a good Asian life’, another socially alienated Australian pursued such a life, in Indonesia, one which in its own way was as remarkable as that novelised by Roberts in Shantaram (2003).

In late 1999, NASA announced that its Mars Climate Orbiter, a multi-million-dollar robot probe designed to study the weather and climate of Mars, was lost somewhere in space. The craft had failed to manoeuvre into its optimal orbit, ending either on a course towards the sun or in a fatal collision with the red planet. Investigations uncovered the source of the blunder: one team working on the orbiter had been using metric measurements, another team had been using imperial.

You need to look closely at the cover of Shankari Chandran’s novel Safe Haven to notice the sharp edges of the deceptively inviting image it depicts: the handcuffs, the barbed wire, the boat that seems to sit on top of the waves and yet be at the bottom of the sea, and the rebuke contained in the book’s title.

The ‘Bastard of Bingil Bay’ features on no banknote or coin, nor is he listed in any roll-call of ‘important Australians’, and yet, if it were not for John Büsst, it is likely that twenty-odd national parks and rainforest reserves on the far north-east coast of Queensland would not be so designated and might in fact have been obliterated. It is also probable that, without Büsst, today’s fight for the Great Barrier Reef would have already been lost, the vast ecosystem fragmented into a slew of cement quarries and cheap limestone pits. Considering the extent to which this vast coral labyrinth has shaped the identity of modern Australia, the relative absence of Büsst’s influence from the historical record is doubtless representative of the many such travesties historians seek to rectify.

Decolonising has reached the classics. Complexity, diversity, and entanglement are in. Greece and Rome are, well, out. The movement to ‘reclaim’ Antiquity began with noble aims: to emancipate the ancients from the prism of politics and war through which we like to see them, to emphasise the role of technology and trade in their lives, and to make women and people of colour visible among them again. Alas, decolonisation all too often seems to have descended into ugly arguments over restitution of artefacts (Elgin marbles, anyone?) or the skin shade of this or that Roman notable (Septimius Severus or St Hadrian of Canterbury, for example). Books such as Josephine Quinn’s are the sensible, balancing side of the equation, an antidote to so much virtue signalling and grievance mongering. Quinn’s is an ancient world decentred – provincialised, to invoke Dipesh Chakrabarty’s celebrated term. Greece and Rome remain, but must jostle with others for attention, space, and significance. The argument is simple. Antiquity was far more multipolar, dynamic, and integrated in reality than in the civilisational – and, indeed, civilising – narratives that Europeans since Petrarch have been telling themselves about it.

Studies of ‘regional modernisms’ have frequently framed the non-metropolitan in strictly Northern Hemisphere terms, construing London or New York as centres of innovation, and cities and towns further afield – but still in the same country or region as those art-world capitals – as the belated adopters of phenomena that are often perceived as the province of metropolitan actors and audiences. Margot Osborne’s monumental volume The Adelaide Art Scene: Becoming contemporary 1939-2000 tells a far more complex story of modernism’s reach, impact, and legacies in twentieth-century art practice. In forensic detail, Osborne and her contributors explore the ways in which modernism’s significance was expressed in and affected a city that found itself both connected to and rival with Sydney and Melbourne, as well as with the established international centres. Whether through the training or travel of artists who called South Australia home at one point or another in their lives, Adelaide has been an important node in those movements for longer than many might imagine.

Werner Herzog is perhaps the only cinéaste from the epoch sometimes referred to as the ‘golden age of art cinema’ whose reputation as a pop cultural figure eclipses that of his films. One of the key members of the New German Cinema movement, and the director of celebrated feature films such as Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972) and The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser (1974), Herzog has come to be known among internet users for his drawling Bavarian accent and his existential musings about solitude, despair, and the brutality of nature. However, as Herzog’s new memoir, Every Man for Himself and God Against All (translated by Michael Hofmann) reveals, behind this ironically morose façade lies a sentimental and deeply thoughtful man who is endlessly fascinated by the human soul and the superhuman drive to transcend what we thought possible.