Who is Kamala Harris and what does she stand for? This question animated coverage across the political spectrum during her 2024 US presidential campaign, even though she was already serving as Vice President – the first woman, the first African American, and the first Asian American to hold the office. At crucial points, Harris herself struggled to articulate her own distinctive agenda. When asked on the television talk show The View what she would have done differently from Democrat President Joe Biden over the past four years, she replied, ‘There is not a thing that comes to mind.’

The Karratha Gas Plant sits on the Burrup Peninsula, a short drive from Dampier in the remote north-west of Western Australia. From a visitors centre perched on a hill above it, you get a spectacular view of the giant facility: stretching over two square kilometres, it is bound by the blue waters of Withnell Bay and the red rock hills of the Murujuga National Park. The first time she took in this vista, author and journalist Marian Wilkinson was stunned. ‘No image’, she writes, ‘quite captures its breathtaking size and scale.’

Before writing this review, I reread Catriona Menzies-Pike’s award-winning essay ‘Critic Swallows Book’ (2022), a rare piece of Australian literary criticism with a claim to definitiveness, as it was the first clear articulation of something that was crushingly true about Trent Dalton’s début novel, Boy Swallows Universe (2018), and its successor, All Our Shimmering Skies (2020). The short version of the essay’s argument is that Dalton’s novels are, in fact, terrible. They are badly written, retrograde, juvenile, hackneyed, mawkish, and preposterous. The deeper issue the essay identifies is their moral complacency, which arises directly from their embrace of platitudes and sentimentality.

This pointed aphorism accompanied my reading of two releases that shoulder the ongoing work of activism against colonialism and empire. Randa Abdel-Fattah’s Discipline and Raaza Jamshed’s début novel, What Kept You?, are both set here, in Australia, but their characters are willed continually to look there, their displaced gaze stacked with invisible lives unseen by friends, colleagues, and intimates. One is urgent, desperate, and resolute; the other wracked by guilt that immobilises.

Every book is snared in the time and place in which it is written. Few authors create work that remains eternally relevant, not only because books that appear groundbreaking when published can easily date or pale with the passage of time, but for more prosaic reasons as well. Given that approximately 23,000 books are published annually in Australia alone, few survive on the shelf beyond a year or two, and even fewer become embedded in the nation’s literary imagination. Still, most authors dream of writing a ‘classic’ – even a minor classic will do.

A few years ago, conservatives in Australia supported a push to get courses on Western Civilisation into universities, with generous funding from the Ramsay Foundation. They wished to combat what they saw as an overemphasis on the evils of colonialism and postcolonial exploitation and to reinstate a history proclaiming the benefits of European culture. At first glance, Roeck’s book matches this agenda. It retells, in updated form, the grand narrative of a sublime ancient Greek culture – described as ‘an unparalleled achievement of the human mind’ – transmitted by the Romans, then rediscovered and enhanced by the Renaissance, that ultimately brought the benefits of democracy and European science to the world. Its heroes (the word recurs repeatedly) are male thinkers, artists, and inventors, and its ‘modernity’ is exclusively European.

I cannot recall an Australian history book that has received more reviews so soon after its release than Tony Abbott’s recent offering, Australia: A history. Frank Bongiorno, Michelle Arrow, Marilyn Lake, Jane Lydon, Marcia Langton, and even former Australian of the Year Grace Tame have all given their thoughts on Abbott’s tome. The reviews have ranged from mildly positive to utterly scathing. This is hardly surprising, given how polarised opinions are of the former prime minister. Mostly, however, responses from leading historians have challenged the book’s ideological framing, selective storytelling, and the marginalisation of Indigenous and feminist perspectives. This book is in every sense Tony’s Abbott’s ideologically partisan, aspirational history of Australia for Australians.

Poets pop up in these memories require and A Lick of Fireweed, two new volumes by Jacinta Le Plastrier and Erik Jensen, both Melbourne/Naarm-based writers, poets, and publishers. Each book is an act of memory, and of connection, sometimes personal, sometimes imagined.

Early in beautiful changelings, Maxine Beneba Clarke writes: ‘i would like a hysterectomy.’ It is a sentence with no lyrical ambition, arriving in the voice of a medical form or consent document. But in the space of a poem, it performs a different task; it returns medical language to the body that had to speak it. Clarke’s work proceeds from this logic. Her poems do not translate pain into metaphor; they record how pain enters systems: reproductive, racial, bureaucratic.

The Australian philosopher Michelle Boulous Walker – writing in Philosophy and the Maternal Body: Reading silence (1998) – argued that making sense of the exclusion of women from Western philosophy required thinking beyond a ‘spatial logic of “inside” and “outside”’; the marginalisation of women’s voices ‘needs to be understood as something more than a simple exclusion’. In the case of institutional philosophy, at least, this is because there are logics found within it that work to silence women.