Clik here to view.
A Home in Ananda and the World
The moth, the one on the desk before me, an Indian pantry moth, that has migrated north from the kitchen to the bedroom where I type this, is injured. Its wing (a smudge and soft scattering of pretty...
View ArticleFictions of Newcastle: Dusky Red With Industry
Australia’s second oldest city. Its first industrial city. Now the seventh largest city in the country. The world’s busiest coal port. A Lonely Planet top ten city to visit. Newcastle: the capital of...
View ArticleNorth and South
place-identity I betray Mairwar with my look, only half-looking, out of guilt. It is a sore trip back home to my suburb, hobbling from the ferry – knocked around by a football semi – I want to jump...
View ArticleThe Place of Terrorism in Australia
On Monday 25 July 2016 Four Corners reported on the torture of teenage Aboriginal boys in Don Dale Correctional Facility in Darwin. Footage of prison guards torturing Aboriginal boys burst on to...
View ArticleThe Suspended Image
The Suspended Image How long will this go on? The spruce is there again today, existing by itself, over & over green sleeves folding moss & needles into blood-red tips, conelet fingers pointing...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Precinct
Bunnings Penrith/ Wolseley Street/ Regentville Robert and Arthur Bunning arrived in Fremantle, Western Australia, on June 29, 1886. Their passenger ship, the Elderslie, had sailed from London. The...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Stranger In The House
My cousin Stephen leads me out to the brick extension behind his home in Kingsgrove, opens a cupboard. Before us is a pile of bulging plastic bags, old style foolscap ledger books and stacks of...
View ArticleA Northern Rivers Romance
Tell all the truth but tell it slant — Success in Circuit lies Too bright for our infirm Delight The Truth’s superb surprise As Lightning to the Children eased With explanation kind The Truth must...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The Life In Them Words
Ben Brooker is a recipient of a 2016 SRB-CA Emerging Critics Fellowship. This is the second of three essays by Brooker that will appear on the Sydney Review of Books, alongside essays by other...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Lebs and Punchbowl Prison
‘Jail bro, jail.’ This is what the students at Punchbowl Boys said to the Ten News reporters the day they turned up to our school, filming us from the outside as we rattled the chain-link fence from...
View ArticleClik here to view.
On The Cartographer’s Curse
You may write me down in history With your bitter, twisted lies, You may trod me in the very dirt But still, like dust, I’ll rise Maya Angelou Maya Angelou’s words perfectly embody the embryonic...
View ArticleWriting in Images and Sounds
In hardboiled crime/detective/gangster films of the 1940s, there is often a scene where one character confronts another and hints at something unstated and highly menacing, but awesomely present in the...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Neat and Tidy: The New Magic
Until recently, my sense was that ‘tidy’ wasn’t a word much used in adult conversation. Rather, it was a term – usually a verb, sometimes a noun or an adjective – used by adults to address children,...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Writing on the Precipice
Quelccaya Glacier located in southern Peru in the Cordillera Vilcanota. Image credit: Edubucher Late last year, in the dying days of the American presidential campaign, the World Wildlife Fund...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Plain Text, Real Time
Ali Jane Smith is a recipient of a 2016 SRB-CA Emerging Critics Fellowship. This is the third of three essays by Smith that will appear on the Sydney Review of Books, alongside essays by other...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Southern Conversations: J.M Coetzee in Buenos Aires
James Halford is a recipient of a 2016 SRB-CA Emerging Critics Fellowship. This is the third of three essays by Halford to appear on the Sydney Review of Books, alongside essays by other fellowship...
View ArticleClimate Change, Recognition and Social Place-Making
This essay was first published in Unstable Relations: Indigenous People and Environmentalism in Contemporary Australia, ed. Eve Vincent & Timothy Neale, UWA Publishing 2016. Introduction Recent...
View ArticleWhere Do Writers Get Their Ideas From?
1. Living ‘Where do writers get their ideas from?’ This a question that comes up regularly for writers who find themselves released into polite company in the broader community. I suspect it is most...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Shadowing Billy the Kid
Our interest’s on the dangerous edge of things. The honest thief, the tender murderer . . . Robert Browning On the evening of 14 July 1881, in Fort Sumner, New Mexico, William H. Bonney, better known...
View ArticleSeventy-Two Transformations
‘Since hearing the Way,’ Sun Wukong replied, ‘I have mastered the seventy-two earthly transformations. My somersault cloud has outstanding magical powers. I know how to conceal myself and vanish. I can...
View Article