Gerald Murnane: An Idiot in the Greek Sense
Last November I visited Gerald Murnane where he lives in the very small town of Goroke in western Victoria. He agreed to be interviewed for a feature article in the Australian Book Review (published in...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Don’t Go To Jolo – Part Four
One of the Vice Mayor’s assistants poses with a weapon after dinner and drinks in Lamitan City. Photo: Matthew Thompson. This is the fourth instalment of Matthew Thompson’s account of his 2014 journey...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Don’t Go To Jolo – Part Five
This is the fifth and final instalment of Matthew Thompson’s account of his 2014 journey into the Sulu Archipelago, a violent, beautiful and contested region of the southern Philippines, where US...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Wide Sargasso Sea, fifty years on
Cover detail from the first edition dust jacket for Wide Sargasso Sea. I first fell in love with Jean Rhys’ writing through reading Wide Sargasso Sea. It was a love affair that changed my idea of what...
View ArticleDirty Realism’s Other Face
Back in 1976, the Franklin Library published a luxurious leather-bound edition of Kurt Vonnegut’s novel Slapstick. Inside the cover, the author had penned a ‘special message’ to his readers. ‘The...
View ArticleHow Many and How Much? Remembering Brian Johns
A friend suggested I apply for the job of editor at Penguin Books in 1982. I had a bit of experience at the Publications Section (not MUP) at Melbourne University ten years before and was currently...
View ArticleA world of bald white days
There’s a poem in Sylvia Plath’s Ariel that I have a memory of reading that’s so visceral it’s almost painful. It’s a relatively quiet poem, for Plath – there’s no bleeding-mouthed flowers, no...
View ArticleClik here to view.
This Little University Went To Market
Photo: Jason Tong The income contingent loan (ICL) is the Hills Hoist of Australian higher education policy. We might think about upgrading the garden furniture, putting in a pool, deregulating fees,...
View ArticleBeyond an Angel At My Table: Contemporary Writing in Aotearoa
This meandering essay was seeded by a rather curious opinion piece commissioned in July 2015 by the New Zealand Book Council for one of New Zealand’s two Sunday newspapers. Provocatively entitled ‘Why...
View ArticleIndirect speech: The practice of contemporary writing in Cambodia today
In 2010 Tararith Kho, co-founder of Cambodia’s Nou Hach Literary Association, was forced to resign his position and leave the country for the United States after repeated telephone and email threats...
View ArticleTwo Cultures (Again): Revisiting Leavis and Snow
Those whose tastes run to regular survey of social media, and who enjoy experiences in a lighter vein, may be familiar with the YouTube character, Dog of Wisdom. This brownish, cartoon canine, usefully...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Bad Writer
‘All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.’ ― Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina Two years ago the British Centre for Literary Translation invited me to Anhui Province in...
View ArticleLost Landscapes of Waterloo
I arrived in Waterloo in mid-2015 when ‘apartmentia’ was already in full swing. From my base on the ground floor of a new apartment complex I have watched industrial facades disappear behind...
View ArticleWe are here and we are significant
1. Stories of Water Long before those postcards of Bondi Beach and Sydney Harbour co-opted our image of Sydney, Parramatta was its watery centre. Most Sydneysiders think of western Sydney as a...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Such Loneliness in that Gold: María Kodama on Life After Borges
James Halford is a recipient of a 2016 SRB-CA Emerging Critics Fellowship. This is the first of three essays by Halford that will appear on the Sydney Review of Books, alongside essays by other...
View ArticleClik here to view.
James Waites: A Man of the Theatre
Ben Brooker is a recipient of a 2016 SRB-CA Emerging Critics Fellowship. This is the first of three essays by Brooker that will appear on the Sydney Review of Books, alongside essays by other...
View ArticleOne F (in Hofmann) – and U-C-K the Consequences
Can you actually do this? ‘Reviewing,’ proposes Michael Hofmann in an introduction to a book he wrote fifteen years back, ‘seems to me to be (perhaps wrongly) as unrepeatable, as “hot” and as...
View Article394 Abercrombie Street
I left my home town of Brisbane in early 1983 after I received a late-round offer to attend Sydney University. I was 20 years old and desperate to give my life some direction after having left art...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Who Knows Where: Netherspace
Disappearing Mural, by flickr user Newtown Grafitti. Where there is space, there is netherspace. 1971 to 1974. The Gove Land Rights Case is fought and lost before Justice Richard Blackburn of the...
View ArticleNightswimming in Dungog
And like a wind I yet want to blow among them one day and with my spirit take away the breath of their spirit. Friedrich Nietzsche, from Ecce Homo: how one becomes what one is. When my brother visited...
View Article