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 Selected Stories, Mark Harman gives us crisp new translations of Franz Kafka’s best novellas and tales and also a substantial scholarly introduction to his life and work. Like most biographers, he explores Kafka’s painful relations with his family, particularly his father, and his anxieties about marriage. The women in Kafka’s life – particularly his twice-rejected fiancée
Felice Bauer and his gifted Czech translator Milena Jesenská – are powerful presences. But Harman looks beyond Freudian family romance for insight. He sees Kafka as a man in search of transformative experience. Kafka tried to enlist during World War I; he reflected with increasing urgency on what it meant to be a Jew; he wrestled with philosophical and religious doubt. Set against all this, there was his absolute commitment to an ascetic writing life, which he sometimes feared was no life at all, making him a man made only of words, a literary fiction, truly absurd – and so in the midst of all these struggles he laughed, primarily at himself. Irony is thus the hallmark of his writing, with, as Harman says, ‘humour hidden in the interstices of his sentences’.

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 the famous opening sequence of the 1946 film A Matter of Life and Death, an RAF pilot, flying his burning Lancaster bomber over the English Channel, talks with a radio operator at a nearby English base. Apparently facing certain death, the pilot quotes Sir Walter Raleigh’s ‘The Passionate Man’s Pilgrimage’, a poem allegedly written just before its author’s execution in 1618. ‘Give me my scallop shell of quiet, / My staff of faith to walk upon,’ the pilot recites, amid the roar of his stricken aircraft.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Bill Hayden might today be recalled as the unluckiest man in politics: Bob Hawke replaced him as Labor leader on the same day that Malcolm Fraser called an election that Hayden, after years of rebuilding the Labor Party after the Whitlam years, was well positioned to win. But to dismiss him thus would be to overlook his very real and laudable efforts to make a difference in politics – as an early advocate for the decriminalisation of homosexuality, and as the social services minister who introduced pensions for single mothers and Australia’s first universal health insurance system, Medibank. Dismissing Hayden would also cause us to miss the counterpoint he provides to Peter Dutton, current leader of the Liberal Party.

My one-woman show A Star Is Torn was a sung catalogue of the great women singers who had ‘taught’ me via their recordings. Having assembled a list of twelve, Bessie Smith and Billie Holiday among them, I realised that they had all died young. The original draft also included a bunch of survivors, including Lena Horne and Ella Fitzgerald. My assessment of Ella was based on scant information. When I premièred that show in 1979, she was in her sixties and still touring the world at a phenomenal pace. The rest was largely mythology. Judith Tick’s mammoth biography is authoritative enough to make me believe I now have something much closer to the truth.