It is, of course, irrational; but when I look at Sidney Nolan’s first Kelly painting, and that stark, strong symbol, the two rectangles which stand for Kelly, the hair bristles on the back of my neck- just as it does when I hear someone sing with fire, ” ‘I’ll fight but I won’t surrender,’ said […]

“I hope one day to welcome Behrouz Boochani to Australia as what I believe he has shown himself to be in these pages. A writer. A great Australian writer”, Richard Flanagan writes in the foreword to Behrouz Boochani’s No Friend But The Mountains (2018). In a comment designed to spark public conversation regarding Australia’s ethical obligation to the incarcerated immigrants on islands inside and outside our coastline, Flanagan puts into play the tenuous category of the ‘Australian writer’.

It seems as if Maxine Clarke wins every poetry slam she enters. Clarke writes poetry and produces freelance articles, often dealing with African descendants in a white culture. More importantly, she performs her poetry.

The City’s Outback is based upon an ethnographic study conducted in Mount Druitt, a suburb in western Sydney. Cowlishaw introduces Frank Doolan, a blackfella who helps her find Aboriginal people to interview – ‘the people of the place’ living within the city’s ‘subordinated self’. Doolan is an agitator, poet, protector, confidant and mediator. He recognises something woeful in a world that ‘systemically damages Aboriginal lives’.

This collection’s sixty poems are subtitled ‘psalms’ and each is numbered. There’s something immediately Scorsese-esque about the subtitle ‘A New York Book of Psalms’ but Angela Gardner’s New York experience is too coolly considered for that association. As her subtitle implies, New York evokes a religiosity: ‘I see moonlight as the promised land.’

‘Wimmera’ is a classical epic poem about the Victorian district in which Homer Rieth lives. Here, though, the poet substitutes human beings for gods and goddesses. The scope and ambition in this grand poem is laudable. Interestingly, Rieth is a long-ago migrant to Australia, and there is a distinctly European philosophical subtext here, as is to be expected in an epic – ‘so what is it then about any place/that fills and empties alike/the world with its life’./p>

Singer-songwriters who write poetry are different from poets. Their poetry is always that much nearer to being sung than read. Songs and poetry aren’t seamless – they’re different genre. The writing of Nick Cave, Bob Dylan, Patti Smith, Leonard Cohen, Lou Reed – all trumpeted as ‘poets’ – is not as complicated, as neurotic nor as consciously interested in poetic form as that of most poets.

The book’s title is a homonym for François Villon, the fifteenth-century French poet, thief and vagabond who died at thirty-two and who famously wrote ballads in French criminal slang. His work, once translated into English in the nineteenth century, was frowned upon by those with loftier poetic standards. Clemens makes inventive translations of Villon’s irreverent and often lewd poetry.

Bendable Learnings reprises a theme that Don Watson established in 2003 with Death Sentence and continued in 2004 with Weasel Words. Over the intervening six years, he has tightened his aim to focus specifically on the managerial jargon that pervades all facets of institutional life.

The most memorable character is ‘The Butcher’, leader of an anti-Italian squadron that re-groups as a resistance cell after the surrender. He gets his name because ‘He made us hold down/ Italian prisoners as he cut their throats,/ explaining as he did so/ the importance of saving bullets’.

The last year or so has yielded a good crop of new Australian fiction writers, including Tom Cho, Jacinta Halloran, Steven Amsterdam, Nam Le, Vivienne Kelly and Patrick Cullen. Beyond the fact that (with the notable exception of Nam Le) they are all supported by small independent publishers, the most striking thing about these writers is how unalike they are.

In recent times, academics have been turning to the subject of Australian editorial cartoons for research, thesis subjects, or published projects. Two academics, Robert Phiddian and Haydon Manning, have compiled fourteen essays of contemporary cartooning in Australia, five of which are written by practicing artists.

Replying to bad reviews is a fatal pastime. For those opposed to the tenor of the review, it gives credence to a reviewer who deserves none. For those who agree with the review, the defensiveness of the respondent confirms their opinion. I was not going to reply, but have since decided to do so because […]

John Kinsella has published, as poet, essayist and editor, more than forty books. The latest are the poems, Shades of the Sublime and Beautiful, and the collection of essays, Contrary Rhetoric: Lectures on Landscape and Language. The essays set out material for the poet's main thematic preoccupations: the Western Australian wheatbelt, its history, culture and environment.

In a letter to friend and fellow-conservationist Kathleen McArthur, Judith Wright lamented that for all their hard work nothing seemed to have been conserved except, oddly, the stories of their attempts to conserve them.