Reading Australia

EVIL GENIUS IS set in real-world Sydney, but it is driven by a compelling fantasy: what would it be like to wield power that can change the world? Cadel Piggott, the protagonist of the novel, is a genius. We first meet him, aged seven, in the office of psychologist Thaddeus Roth, where he has been…

IT IS ALMOST impossible to believe: ten young women, all of them aged under twenty-five, held captive because of their past sexual transgressions. Can this be happening? In twenty-first-century Australia? This is the world into which you step when you open The Natural Way of Things. The women in Charlotte Wood’s powerful and distinctive novel…

FIRE IS AN element deeply embedded in the Australian consciousness. In recent times it has been associated with natural disasters such as Ash Wednesday and Black Saturday, terrifying and deadly bushfires with biblical monikers. The danger of fire has been always been present in our literature, too, from the works of Dorothy Mackellar to Judith…

IT’S NOT EASY having a weird name, as many teenagers with foreign or experimental parents can attest – or unusual looks, or a stutter, or being too fat or too skinny, or shy, or any other characteristic that marks a child out from a very narrow mainstream. In a school where Class A bullies rule,…

PUBLISHED IN 2011, Margaret Wild’s picture book Vampyre is a hallucinatory marriage of minimal text and symbolic imagery, rendered in a subdued colour palette. Echoing the image and writing style, the story pivots on a complex exchange of ideas. Chief among these is the individual striving for personal salvation. The journey is fraught and the…

JUST MACBETH! IS Shakespeare like I’ve never read him before. It’s raucous and disgusting, immature and absurd. Kings sing karaoke, there is a time-travel potion made from dog saliva, and children plot regicide for Wizz Fizz rewards. What makes Shakespeare’s collection of works timeless is its ability to be reinterpreted across mediums, regardless of era,…

LIKE THE BIBLICAL story of Christ’s birth, Geraldine Brooks’ Nine Parts of Desire: The Hidden World of Islamic Women begins with a woman refused a room at an inn. In Brooks’ tale, the ‘inn’ is a modern hotel in the Saudi Arabian city of Dhahran in the early 1990s, where the Australian journalist is on…

I FIRST READ the fiction of Alexis Wright when I was writing a thesis on transgenerational trauma for my doctorate at Western Sydney University. I was exploring the ways in which literature testifies to transmissions of psychic trauma, which, in Unclaimed Experience (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), Cathy Caruth defines as the impact of an…

In Café Scheherazade, Arnold Zable has harnessed anecdote and history – the realities of the Second World War and individual experiences of that war – to create a work of fiction that stands as a singular and eloquent whole. Weaving the factual and the invented, the author has created a work that crosses borders and…

A poem…can be a message in a bottle, sent out in the – not always greatly hopeful – belief that somewhere and sometime it could wash up on land, on heartland perhaps. Poems in this sense, too, are under way: they are making toward something. – Paul Celan, Selected Poetry and Prose Edward Hirsch begins…

THERE ARE ALWAYS two landscapes in a Malouf story. The one you can touch with your hands, and the one that is dreamed – discoverable by language, always on the verge of disappearing. In medieval Japanese art and letters, this quality was known as yūgen (幽玄),which might be translated as ‘shadow-filled’ or ‘beyond words’ or…

AS I WRITE this essay the cicadas are shrill outside. The air is heavy and even in my cool study I am sweating with the heat. Later today it might rain; tonight it is quite possible that a storm will sweep over. In several minutes the chorus of cicadas will stop in unison, as if…