Penrith Station sits broken as a grieving heart in pieces the platform the waystation for essentially low-paid vital workers in the dead-days of iso-lation

murder reduced to counting bodies naming names dates and days processioning through plagued streets grief – a spectacle feeding news

As a result of events that occurred in Redfern on 15 February a seventeen-year-old Indigenous boy named Thomas Hickey is gone from not only his mother, but from us – all of us.

None of us can rehearse grief. It is an intangible force that comes into focus and disables us when we are least prepared to deal with it.

Whether Abbott’s position is genuinely held or simply a vindictive political gesture is difficult to assess. I don’t think it matters as much as his goal – the goal of denialists more generally – to ‘keep minds turned off on the meta-level,’ as philosopher Elizabeth Minnich puts it, so there are ‘no questions about [the issue], no looking back and wondering, no reaching for connections to beliefs.’

A few weeks ago I was on the invite list, along with my colleague Professor Gary Foley, to the opening of a major Indigenous art exhibition at the University of Melbourne. The reasoning for the invitations was threefold: we had both, at one time, been senior curators at the Bunjilaka Aboriginal Cultural Centre at Melbourne Museum (the museum is involved in the exhibition); we had both been recipients of the Chancellor’s Prize for the best PhD in the arts faculty; we are both, obviously, alumni of the university.

I always hated school. Hated the teachers who beat us at the first nervous twitch of the morning. Hated sitting in a box of a room, watching the hands of a clock crawl across its own face. Hated being barked at by teachers: ‘Look this way, Birch!’ they would yell whenever I became transfixed by the river flowing outside the window. But I did love reading.

I worked closely with Jack during the staging of ILBIJERRI Theatre Company’s Coranderrk: We will show the country. Jack played William Barak, the Wurundjeri leader who negotiated with the Victorian colonial government in an effort to ensure the survival of his people. It was Barak, along with other senior Aboriginal people, who agitated for the sovereign rights of the Coranderrk community in the late nineteenth century.

It’s now been over a decade since Indigenous activist group Black GST – Genocide Sovereignty Treaty – occupied Kings Domain, an ornamental parkland in the centre of Melbourne. The occupation, known as Camp Sovereignty, coincided with the 2006 Melbourne Commonwealth Games, which presented an opportunity to draw the international media’s attention to a range of Indigenous political struggles. What began as a two-week occupation soon morphed into a contest over place and memory, an act of resistance on a picturesque parcel of colonial land.

Four years ago, the federal government embarked on an expensive branding and education campaign to convince Aboriginal people and broader Australian society that we should be given formal ‘recognition’ in the constitution. No wording was formalised and the process remained vague at best, and many Aboriginal communities remained sceptical of a proposal regarded as nothing more than a symbolic gesture.

Least anyone in the parliament was unsure of what Morrison held aloft like an extracted pound of flesh, he heightened the drama. ‘This is coal – don’t be afraid, don’t be scared,’ he announced. ‘It’s coal. It was dug up by men and women who live and work in the electorates of those who sit opposite.’

When someone such as Tracey Banivanua Mar leaves a distinct mark on the lives of those around her, we must respond to the values she has left with us. We must, with the levels of energy and commitment she was able to produce, fight for climate justice; for the people of the Pacific, for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander nations in Australia, and for all vulnerable and disadvantaged communities of this planet. Through our own fight for justice we will express our love for Tracey.

In June 1916, my great-grandfather, Boota Khan, decided to return home to Punjab on a family visit with his wife Betsie and their five young children. But this presented a problem for Boota. He had migrated to the British colony of Victoria in the early 1890s, when the Australian nation did not exist.

As I read Ghost River, and the parallel narratives of Birch’s river men – their fear of police and hospitals – alongside Ms Dhu’s death and her family’s fight for justice, I tried to make sense of how to read these stories that are fictional and those that are true. And in the case of Ms Dhu, how to bear a true story that no one in positions of power cared to believe until it was too late.

In the year my uncle Liam turned sixteen he spent twelve months in youth lock-up after being convicted of a break and enter on a newsagency. The shop was run by a Mr Quigley, who had been to war in New Guinea. Although he never spoke a word about it, Quigley returned home traumatised by the experience. He’d wake in the night screaming with uncontrollable rage, which would rouse his wife sleeping beside him. Quigley would lash out and strike her as she attempted to calm him. It was common to see Mrs Quigley walking the streets with blackened eyes and bloodied scratches on her face.

This year, the second Nakata Brophy Short Fiction and Poetry Prize for Young Indigenous Writers attracted a high calibre of entries. The judges – Jennifer Mills of Overland, Tony Birch, University of Melbourne, and Sally Dalton-Brown, Trinity College – unanimously selected this year’s winner.

The winning entry is Jessica Hart’s ‘Land Mountain’. Jessica is to be commended for two very strong poems, with ‘Nouveau’ also being highly rated by the judges. Both her poems were striking in their sophistication and elegant use of language.

I have read a lot this year, and most of it has been rewarding.  In past years I’ve to often struggled to reach my one-hundred-page rule; that is, I never give up on a book before reading a century of pages.  (Except when reviewing, when I trudge on dutifully).  I don’t remember calling on the mercy rule once this year (unless I was re-reading drafts of my own work).  Most of the novels were good.  Some of them were exceptional.

The definition of homelessness itself is more complex than most of us would realise. This point was passionately articulated to an audience attending a forum on homelessness at the Wheeler Centre in Melbourne in early 2013, when a former homeless man who advocates for people in the predicament he endured for many years explained the difference between being provided with shelter rather than a home: ‘I want to close my own door of a night. The door to my home, not someone else’s.’

Together the two writing commandments create a depressing tautology. ‘You have little or no experience, therefore you know fuck-all and have nothing to write about’, or something like that. Costello’s practice highlights that a writer’s ability to observe experience, to document frames of a story being performed on the stage of daily life, will suffice quite well if (unfortunately) you weren’t raised by wolves in the forest.

Bill Cheng’s debut novel is set in the Deep South of the United States during and after the time of the great Mississippi flood of 1927. The book is dedicated to many of Cheng’s blues heroes, including Son House, John Lee Hooker, Muddy Waters, and the man who went down to the crossroads and made a pact with the devil himself, Robert Johnson.

Despite his youthful age Kenno has left school and is holding down two jobs in a determined effort to support the struggling family. He not only works in a shop during the day, but also helps his alcoholic and depressed father in his cleaning business.

The ensemble cast of Harmless includes Dave, a career criminal and all round desperado, who we meet at the beginning a long prison sentence for armed robbery; his young daughter, Amanda, a girl we both fear and admire for her sense of street-wise resilience (who uses wonderfully economical language, including the much neglected ‘fuck-knuckle’); Sua, Dave’s girlfriend, who is escaping a troubled past in her homeland, Thailand, and the dark secret she carries with her; and her father, Rattuwat, a man burdened by a sense of failure as a father, who has arrived in Australia under tragic circumstances.

When I was a teenage boy I often skipped school on a Friday and picked up casual work at the local slaughter yard, so I could make some spending money for the weekend. While working there I saw animals treated with systematic cruelty.

I read this collection, cover to cover, on the Australia Day holiday. It happens to also be the birthday of my grandmother, Alma, and my son, Drew. So, like it or not, I did have something to celebrate.

Last weekend’s newspapers, both local and international, were full of their ‘best of’ reading recommendations for 2012. It seems wherever we were we read pretty much the same books, and we’ll read them again next year just to show how much we enjoyed them.

In 1996 Junot Diaz released his first book of fiction, the linked short story collection, Drown. I had not heard of him or the book, and bought it on impulse, seduced by the cover – black and white photograph of a teenage boy, porkpie hat resting on his head, standing in the door of a heavily tagged train. The image reeked of urban grit and attitude. I took it home with the greatest of expectations.

How short (or long) can a short story be? The length of a literary piece of string, perhaps? Definitions of the short story are as varied as those of the genre itself. We have often heard the comment that we sometimes enter a short story after the first act and leave before ‘The End’.

The novel begins with a car crash, a dramatic device I warn my writing students to avoid. I also tell them that a good writer breaks the rules and produces good, even great writing.

Historical fiction often excites Australian readers. It also creates heightened anxiety, particularly amongst those who covet the intellectual and political turf of the past. (The hysterical wash-up of Kate Grenville’s Secret River is a recent telling example). Nothing gets a history professor hotter under the collar than an Australian novel set in our colonial past that fails the empirical test of ‘accuracy’.

Romy Ash is a Melbourne-based writer, who, prior to the release of this debut novel was best known for her award-winning short fiction, which has appeared regularly in Australian literary journals. Those familiar with her work have been struck by the deceptive nature of her story writing. While sensing the potential menace lurking in the shadows of the central narrative, when the full emotion and occasional shock contained in one of her stories is revealed, it comes as a surprise.