NewSouth

The ‘Bastard of Bingil Bay’ features on no banknote or coin, nor is he listed in any roll-call of ‘important Australians’, and yet, if it were not for John Büsst, it is likely that twenty-odd national parks and rainforest reserves on the far north-east coast of Queensland would not be so designated and might in fact have been obliterated. It is also probable that, without Büsst, today’s fight for the Great Barrier Reef would have already been lost, the vast ecosystem fragmented into a slew of cement quarries and cheap limestone pits. Considering the extent to which this vast coral labyrinth has shaped the identity of modern Australia, the relative absence of Büsst’s influence from the historical record is doubtless representative of the many such travesties historians seek to rectify.

The Relationship Is the Project is a guidebook to working with communities. The work explicitly asks the reader to consider not only how art is created but from where that art comes – and it so often comes from community.

‘Everyone allows that the talent of writing agreeable letters is peculiarly female.’ So said Jane Austen in Northanger Abbey. Even allowing for Regency hyperbole, there is some truth in the sally. We think of the inimitable letters of Emily Dickinson, who once wrote to a succinct correspondent: ‘It were dearer had you protracted it, but the Sparrow must not propound his crumb.’ In 2001, Gregory Kratzmann edited A Steady Stream of Correspondence: Selected Letters of Gwen Harwood, 1943-1995. Anyone who ever received a letter or postcard from Harwood – surely our finest letter writer – knows what an event that was. She was nonpareil: witty, astringent, frank, irrepressible. Now we have this welcome collection of letters written by Elizabeth Harrower and Shirley Hazzard (unalphabetised on the cover, in a possible concession to the expatriate Hazzard’s international fame).

Charmian Clift was a novelist, travel writer, and essayist who, with her writer husband George Johnston, lived with their young family on the Greek island of Hydra from 1955 to 1964. One member of the artist community who gathered around them there, the young Leonard Cohen, described them as having ‘a larger-than-life, a mythical quality’. That mythical quality was matched by real-life fame when, on their return to Australia, George’s novel My Brother Jack (1964) met with huge success, and Charmian became widely known and admired for her regular newspaper columns. Yet within five years of their return, both had died prematurely, Charmian by her own hand in 1969 and George of tuberculosis the following year.

Quentin Beresford, an adjunct professor in politics at Sunshine Coast University, has written and edited about a dozen books, including the excellent Wounded Country (2021), which dealt with the failure of water policy in the Murray-Darling Basin. His latest offering explores thirteen ‘business scandals’ in Australia. Beresford’s definition of a scandal is selective and eclectic. The scope of the book extends to corporate collapses but also to wage theft, climate-change denial, occupational health and safety failures, and the destruction of Indigenous heritage sites.

Marina Kamenev’s Kin begins with a calmly unadorned outline of the nuclear family’s recent fortunes. In the space of just a few pages, she gives a condensed tour of the concept’s history, concluding with US historian Stephanie Coontz’s suggestion that the nuclear family is a ‘historical fluke’ – one that has, as Kamenev puts it, ‘been idolised long after its use-by date’. The introduction’s mini-tour prefigures, in capsule form, both the book’s thematic emphases and its guiding rhetorical procedures. As Kin’s chapters move through their discussions of the moral panics that accompany non-nuclear family structures, from same-sex parenthood to chosen childlessness to single-parent families, the book reveals that the real moral hazards of reproductive technology lie not in deviations from the nuclear model but in attempts to impose the model where it doesn’t fit.

The Best Australian Science Writing (BASW) anthology is here again, and readers are in for a treat: a wide-ranging selection of easy-to-read articles describing some of the amazing science that is happening right now.

Of course, it is an impossible task, choosing the ‘best’ writing, and in her introduction editor Donna Lu acknowledges her subjectivity. It is the same for a reviewer, and since I don’t have room to name everyone, I won’t single out my own favourites.

In August 1943, John F. Kennedy, then aged twenty-six, was rescued from the threat of Japanese captivity – or worse – by a few brave Solomon Islanders, in an operation coordinated by the Australian naval officer Reg Evans. Evans was one of the Royal Australian Navy’s ‘Coastwatchers’, intelligence collectors based perilously behind Japanese lines.

Just to north of Darwin is the country of the Tiwi people, spread over Bathurst and Melville Islands. These two new books give voice to Tiwi oral traditions and to the power and resonance within that tradition of orality that encompasses song, narrative, and the ways in which they sustain family and relationships to ancestors and to kin.

As I read Everything You Need to Know about the Voice, I was acutely conscious of the significance of the timing – just weeks before Australians are due to vote in a referendum on whether we should establish a constitutionally enshrined First Nations Voice to parliament or not. Over the months leading up to the referendum, we have witnessed a significant rise in lies, disinformation, and misinformation, all intended to influence voters, and hence the outcome. This book provides timely and essential reading that rebuts the tide of misinformation.