Who’s that strutting in like a swan, a bull,
An eagle, an ant, a cuckoo, a snake,
Satyr, rain shower, a stallion, a ram,
Six bone-dry dolphins breaking through the foam,

Mariana Enríquez is deep in the catacombs beneath Montparnasse, the dead arranged in obedient rows. She has a plan. All she needs is a distraction, and one arrives in the form of a fainting tourist, a convenient wuss. The man falls hard – his skull thwacks the stone floor – and Enríquez seizes her moment. She slips into an alcove, works a slim bone loose, and slides it into her jacket sleeve ‘like a knife’. She strolls out past the exit guard and into the Paris daylight. ‘Is it a serious crime to steal a bone?’ she asks. ‘The catacombs are a museum, after all. But I feel so innocent!’

Having vivisected Mr. Vowles’s novel in the August issue of ABR, I now feel compelled to defend it. David Bradford’s complaint in his letter, ‘An utterly implausible sauna scene’ (ABR, October 2025), is that Our New Gods is inaccurate and ‘defamatory of the gay community’. The first charge is false: Vowles’s setting is also my setting, and I think he captures Melbourne’s queer scene with forensic accuracy. As for the second charge, maybe the letter writer should familiarise himself with the conventions of psychological thrillers, melodramas, and noir fiction. Our New Gods isn’t a Pride pamphlet that seeks the most flattering presentation of the queer community. Above all, Vowles wants to entertain; to press his reader’s nose up against the glass: here, inside, are all the beautiful, amoral people, the bad people behaving badly, and what a thrill they are to watch.

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 was weaned on Blackadder. It was a series that hit its comedy straps when Ben Elton came on board for the 1986 second season to begin his immensely fruitful collaboration with Richard Curtis. Blackadder played a similar role in my childhood to Horrible Histories in the next generation. Its third season should probably take at least partial blame for the decades I spent studying Britain’s Georgian decades.

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.

In Carralon Ridge, a fictional, dilapidated town in New South Wales, Sam Crowley goes missing on the day of his twenty-first birthday. Every year, the community comes together for an annual vigil, but among the mourners there may be someone who knows what happened. In the background, the incessant activity of a nearby open-cut coal mine threatens the very existence of the village.

In 1996, an Age poll found that seventy-six per cent of Australians wanted their country to become a republic. The issue had been rapidly gaining momentum since the early 1990s. The creation of the Australian Republican Movement (ARM) in 1991, and the active championing of the issue by Prime Minister Paul Keating, turned a fringe issue of the 1980s into a realistic prospect.

Amanda Lohrey

My novel of the year is Italian writer Vincenzo Latronico’s Perfection (Text Publishing), a slyly political novel about a cool young couple in Berlin whose good intentions are undermined by neo-liberalism’s pet child, a rootless cosmopolitanism. I once shared an office with the poet Dorothy Porter and it was an experience. Porter died in 2008 at the age of fifty-four and in Gutsy Girls (University of Queensland Press) her sister Josie McSkimming crafts an affecting portrait of the poet and the resistance of both sisters to their volatile father. Beautifully written and with some of Porter’s best poetry woven throughout the text. Joan Didion’s Notes to John (Fourth Estate) is perhaps the ultimate in literary voyeurism, a diary of Didion’s sessions with her psychiatrist, published after her death. Didion’s therapist is an intriguing character in his own right.