Indonesian Writing

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**The ABR Podcast**

Released every Thursday, the ABR podcast features our finest reviews, poetry, fiction, interviews, and commentary.

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Episode #185

‘Some grotesque Minotaur’: Peter Dutton’s aggressive formation

By Patrick Mullins

This week on the ABR Podcast we review a profile of opposition leader Peter Dutton. Bad Cop: Peter Dutton’s strongman politics by Lech Blaine is the ninety-third issue of the BlackInc Quarterly Essay. In his review of Bad Cop, political biographer Patrick Mullins begins by comparing Dutton to another cop-turned-politician in Bill Hayden. Listen to Patrick Mullins with ‘”Some grotesque Minotaur”: Peter Dutton’s aggressive formation’, published in the May issue of ABR.

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'At least I've told these stories to you'

by Australian Book Review •

The ABR Podcast

This week on the ABR Podcast we tell the story behind Indonesia’s twentieth-century literary masterpiece, the Buru Quartet, a set of novels that began life in a jail cell. The Buru novels were written by Indonesian author Pramoedya Ananta Toer, widely considered a potential winner of the Nobel Prize. Nathan Hollier, publisher at Australian National University Press, explains why the Buru novels hold special significance for Australia, even though, as he writes ‘few Australians have heard of them’. Listen to Nathan Hollier’s ‘”At least I’ve told these stories to you”: Pramoedya Ananta Toer and the Buru Quartet’, published in the March issue of ABR.

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Secrets Need Words: Indonesian Poetry, 1966-1998 edited by Harry Aveling

by John Mateer •

December 2001–January 2002, no. 237

John Mateer reviews 'Secrets Need Words' edited and translated by Harry Aveling

In Australia, despite having Indonesian as one of the languages commonly available to students in primary and secondary school, and despite having departments of Indonesian Studies in all the major universities, the literature of the world’s third most populous country and ‘our closest neighbour’ is not well known. It is mostly the province of academic specialists, not general readers. The reason for this is partly cultural in that Australian readers, particularly readers of poetry, tend to be more interested in American, European or British poetry, and partly a consequence of the poor support given to the art of translation. Yet two of the best-regarded translators of Indonesian literature, Harry Aveling and Max Lane, reside in Australia.

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