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Te’Ebrini
A few months ago, my brother’s wife visited my parents looking a little forlorn. Her friend, a dedicated Catholic who had suffered multiple miscarriages, had given birth to a stillborn baby at 38...
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Attachment Theory
This essay is part of a new Sydney Review of Books essay series devoted to the labour of writing called Writers at Work. We’ve asked critics, essayists, poets, artists, and scholars to reflect on how...
View ArticleClosure and the Novel
I. ‘Begin at the beginning,’ advises the King in Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, ‘and go on till you come to the end: then stop. This advice may seem obvious, but it stands in stark...
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Trial by Cladding
James Bonnici, Apartment Block, oil on linen, 41cm x 41cm, 2013. Image courtesy of the artist. I recently finished reading Franz Kafka’s 1925 novel The Trial – the unsettling, absurd story of a young...
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The Parts of Her I Did Not See
I was attracted to the amber beer on the plane ride. I had never seen anything like it before, so I asked the air hostess for one. I was four years old. In this memory I am speaking fluent English with...
View ArticleConversation with a Fox
The fox was standing on the side of the road as I drove down towards the Cooks River at Undercliffe. It was a clear bright day, about 3 pm, late winter. Homer Street had the usual steady flow of...
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Wong Shee Ping 黃樹屏
Serialised in 1909-1010, The Poison of Polygamy by Wong Shee Ping is the first novel of the Chinese Australian experience. It recounts the story of a man from southern China who tries his luck on the...
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Always Song in the Water
THE ROAD CODE AUCKLAND– WHANGAREI (SH1) Non-driving, my passenger assures me, is a far higher calling than being in the driver’s seat. Noel McKenna and I are half an hour north of Auckland and not...
View ArticleWolla Meranda and Julien de Sanary
Late one afternoon in May 1920 a French steamship, the Pacifique, pulled in at Circular Quay and discharged its passengers after a four-day passage across the Coral Sea from Nouméa. Among the usual...
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Assyrians in the Aerotropolis
It is hard to know exactly when the suburbs change character. Going from east to west, once you’re off the motorway is probably a safe bet, or when Uber stickers give way to personalised licence...
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Train Lord
Redfern Station. Photo: dykzei eleeot. Distributed under Creative Commons license. 1 The first day of train school our teacher asked us what we would do if we were on the train, and we had to go to the...
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Climbing the Hill
There is a photograph of me from a recent trip to Scotland, taken on a hillside. Loch Lomond is in the background, and the dramatic outline of the Trossachs rise above and around the water. The hill is...
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Giving Up
This essay is part of a Sydney Review of Books essay series devoted to the labour of writing called Writers at Work. We’ve asked critics, essayists, poets, artists, and scholars to reflect on how...
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Maggot and Crow
This essay is part of a Sydney Review of Books essay series devoted to the labour of writing called Writers at Work. We’ve asked critics, essayists, poets, artists, and scholars to reflect on how...
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Park-office
The car helped enable the suburb to become a widespread landscape format, thereby blurring the previously discrete conceptions of the town and the country. Portable computing technology is having...
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The Trouble of Middle Eastern Literature
Australian warships left these shores for the Persian Gulf in August. My body registers the news as instant alienation. In a moment, I become an involuntary foreigner, filled with love for a distant...
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The Writer’s Clutter
In the evening when I go walking I can see into the rooms of the houses I pass by. At this time of day the lights are on inside but people have not yet drawn the curtains, providing a view to the rooms...
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Bushfire Blues
The publicity circuit for A Constant Hum, my first book, has driven me back to the now yellowing newspaper headlines I gathered – pretty obsessively – in the smoke-blurred months following Black...
View ArticleSwimmers and Smoke Masks
The birds fell silent this summer. For three days we didn’t hear or see them. Every morning and evening we stepped into the heat and haze to place containers of water wherever shade could be found. The...
View ArticleDreaming the Critical University: The Mirror or the Algorithm?
‘If I am my measure; I am already dead.’ The dream is not speaking to me, as such. Dreams don’t speak; they provoke — if you let them. They disentangle you from conventional perspective, shove you into...
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