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.

My first encounter with the writing of Anne Manne was ten years ago when I read The Life of I, her incomparable treatment of the various expressions of what she calls ‘the new culture of narcissism’. Some of the examples she adduces in that book are singularly monstrous – like the grandiose bloodlust of Anders Breivik or the sexual malevolence of Ariel Castro – while others are more like expressions of a dominant cultural logic, such as neoliberalism’s valorisation of self-sufficiency and the penalties it accordingly inflicts on both the vulnerable and those who care for them. But in each case she identifies a conspicuous failure of empathy, an incapacity (or perhaps unwillingness) to regard the moral reality of others such that it might present some constraint on the imposition of one’s will, some limit to the realisation of one’s designs.

This attractive and fascinating volume is billed as ‘the first illustrated book on the 1948 Old Vic tour’, and, sure enough, it is jammed from stage-left to stage-right with scores of images – especially of the eternally photogenic two superstars who led the tour. Not among them is one particular photograph – more of a snapshot, really, just 6 x 4½ inches in 1948 measurements. It was taken on the night of 17 May 1948 at a post-performance party at a family home in Melbourne’s St Kilda. Four of the seven people in shot are unidentified; but two of the others, unmistakably, are Vivien Leigh and her husband, Laurence Olivier: she is in a fur coat, sitting in an armchair, a plate of food balanced on her lap; he is two along, perched on a piano stool. But who is that man in the middle in half profile? None other than Chico Marx, who was also in Melbourne, with his own show at the Tivoli.

The title of Omar Sakr’s latest collection references the Covid pandemic and comes from his prose poem ‘Diary of a Non-Essential Worker’. It also reminded me of Plato’s banning of the poets from his ideal republic, and Auden’s line that ‘poetry makes nothing happen’. Throughout Non-Essential Work, Sakr explores the limits of poetry and its function in society, questioning the value of his own art, letting us in on his doubts. In the poem ‘Your People Your Problem’, he asks: ‘What is a song worth singing here? / The silenced are listening.’ Despite these doubts, or perhaps because of them, he has achieved a powerful collection of lyric poetry, simultaneously political and intimate.

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.

On the surface, this encyclopedic work offers a gloriously lyrical exploration of the sea. It could be part of a recent shoal of books about the more-than-human world, limning the wondrous and astonishing. In Deep Water: The world in the ocean, whales learn rhyme-like patterns to remember their songs, a ‘babel of strange, eerie sounds: skittering blips, long cries, whoops and basso moans’. A loggerhead turtle travels more than 37,000 kilometres to return to her birthplace. Sharks’ chemo-receptors prove acute enough to detect blood ‘in amounts as low as one part in a million’. Port Jackson sharks socialise with their peers, and evidence emerges that some fish species use tools.

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 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.

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.

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.