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Underworld
This essay is part of a new Sydney Review of Books essay series devoted to nature writing titled the New Nature. We’ve asked critics, essayists, poets, artists and scholars to reflect on nature in the...
View ArticleWho needs cultural gatekeepers anyway?
Australian literary culture and its post-digital anxieties Ours is a very particular moment in cultural and media history. Traditional ‘gatekeepers’ of ideas and culture are being disintermediated as...
View ArticlePark
This essay is part of a new Sydney Review of Books essay series devoted to nature writing titled the New Nature. We’ve asked critics, essayists, poets, artists and scholars to reflect on nature in the...
View ArticleMultilingual Writing in a Monolingual Nation
Australia’s Hidden Literary Archive Australian literature has over the last fifty years witnessed the gradual inclusion of writers and texts formerly considered marginal: from a predominantly white,...
View ArticleC is for Cockroach
I am on a crowded bus heading into the wilds of China. It’s ten degrees Celsius. The driver is swerving all over the place, seemingly for his own entertainment. I feel more than a little travel-sick....
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Museums of Identity and Other Identity Thefts
National cultures are inevitably linked to versions of national identity and identity and difference are tricky concepts to bring into proximity. This essay looks at these questions in relation to...
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Outscape: Twenty-four propositions
This essay is part of a new Sydney Review of Books essay series devoted to nature writing titled the New Nature. We’ve asked critics, essayists, poets, artists and scholars to reflect on nature in the...
View ArticleInterceptionality, or The Ambiguity of the Albatross
Coleridge wrote that ‘Poetry gives most pleasure when only generally and not perfectly understood.’ In his epic, ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,’ published in 1798, the albatross is an uncertain...
View ArticleNotes on a Track
Melaleuca to Cockle Creek (Distance 82km, Walk time: 6 days minimum; allow 7 to 8) Melaleuca can be reached by light aircraft. For details contact…* Once, not so long ago, I walked the South Coast...
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Reading Isn’t Shopping
A few months ago I found myself spending the weekend with a collection of paintings I didn’t much like. I’d volunteered as gallery attendant for a friend’s group show. The paintings were chosen by a...
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An Ocean and an Instant
Lifesaver Station as Chinese Lantern, Glenelg. Photo: Michael Coghlan. Distributed under Creative Commons license. In April 2015 I flew from my home in Sydney to Adelaide for the funeral of an old...
View ArticleA Forest Without Trees
At the Kadimah Jewish Cultural Centre, in a southeastern suburb of Melbourne, a single, cistern-like room houses Australia’s largest collection of Yiddish books. I am standing before the shelves,...
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Protesting 1938 & 1988 – from Capricornia to Oscar & Lucinda
I first read Xavier Herbert’s remarkable novel Capricornia in 1972 – the year I was married – and it led to several heated discussions with my newly acquired father-in-law. Later I discovered that his...
View ArticleNourishing Terrains; or, Solstice
For Deborah Bird-Rose & for Kirli Saunders & for my Children 1. I find myself in unfamiliar territory; I’ve been here all my life. 2. At night the country is scented with pasture and drought....
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Fieldwork
Researcher A sat by the river that morning a hundred metres north of Researcher B’s experiments. A expected her own experiments would fail. Pale and tousle-haired, with sturdy boots, A aimed to listen...
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Little Heart
Shanghai street at dusk. Photo: Terry ChapmanDistributed under creative commons license. I didn’t expect, before I flew to China, that one of the things I’d encounter most often here would be glimpses...
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Intertwining
The estuary of the River Nith, Scotland, at low tide; opening into Solway Firth. Photo: Doc Searls. Distributed under Creative Commons license. The light on Solway Firth is silver, slung low across the...
View ArticleAgainst Motherhood Memoirs
‘Mother was The Woman the whole world imagined to death.’ Deborah Levy, Things I Don’t Want to Know Page two of Making Babies and Anne Enright is apologising to entire bunches of people. Firstly to...
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The Lakeside House
You will come here all your life for renewal. – ‘The Curtain’, Judith Wright The pale oval of R’s face turns to me in darkness. ‘Look, she’s dreaming.’ The baby’s cheek settles into my chest and her...
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When The Clay Has You
The common raven (Corvus corax). Photo: Jon Sullivan I’m a local now. That’s what they tell me, now that I have someone in the ground. I watched my husband, my father, my brother, and my uncle, brace...
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