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’.

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.

This book is orthodox in its range (from the foundation of Rome to the Covid pandemic), organised into specific historical periods (Renaissance, Illuminismo, Risorgimento), and traditional in telling history largely through eminent biographies and great historical events.

On 27 August 1783, Jacques Charles launched the world’s first hydrogen balloon flight from the Champ de Mars (now the site of the Eiffel Tower). He excluded his rival Jacques-Étienne Montgolfier from the ticketed reserve. Then, on 21 November, Charles and another ‘navigateur aérien’ made the first manned flight, landing thirty kilometres north of Paris. Montgolfier was invited to cut a ribbon as a gesture of reconciliation in the name of science.

‘There are only so many ways to make a story work.’ So begins Liam Pieper’s new novel, Appreciation, a hyper-contemporary chronicle of one artist’s vain attempt to redeem his reputation in the eyes of a disappointed public. Drug-addled, egomaniacal, and hopeless, Oli Darling – an enfant terrible of Australian art – is in desperate need of rehabilitation. And the advice of his equally desperate coterie? Employ a ghost writer and publish your memoir, of course. Pieper having made a career of his own in ghost writing, Appreciation cuts close to the bone. As the opening line suggests, however, there is little room for redemption when all the ways of making your story work have been exhausted.

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.

Gore Vidal (1925–2012) emphatically rejected any conventionally religious version of an afterlife. In an essay, ‘Armageddon?’ (1987), he contrasted his own view on the matter with that of Norman Mailer. ‘[B]ecause there is no cosmic point to the life that each of us perceives on this distant bit of dust at galaxy’s edge, all the more reason for us to maintain in proper balance what we have here. Because there is nothing else.’ Five years later, in Screening History, a meditation on the significance of cinema in his own life, Vidal suggested that the medium of film offers an alternative possibility of immortality.

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.

The concept of Woven, a Fair Trade project from Red Room Poetry, seems simple but the reality is complex: one local First Nations poet is paired with another First Nations poet from another continent, and together they create a poem. This is an ambitious undertaking for the poets themselves and especially for the editor, Māori poet Anne-Marie Te Whiu, who should be commended for stewarding this project through the last few tumultuous years. The resulting book is a gorgeous tapestry of weavings from some fine poets.

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.