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.

This is not really a book about Australian foreign policy in the Trump era. It is, however, an attempt to chart the coordinates of President Trump’s approach to the world in his second term. It depicts Australia, not unlike most other US allies in Europe and Asia, scrambling to remain relevant to Washington as the fond and the familiar in the international system are tossed to and fro by the latest Trump hurricane. Clinton Fernandes, a former intelligence officer in the Australian army and now Professor of International and Political Studies at UNSW, is damning of the inability of successive Australian governments to explain to the Parliament or the Australian people why Australia has become, in his words, a ‘US sentinel state’, alongside the Republic of Korea and Japan. The strongest parts of the book are those which ask precisely how this state of affairs has eventuated. The questions are vital, but Fernandes knows that they are unlikely to be answered by this government.

Simone Young is Chief Conductor of the Sydney Symphony Orchestra. She has held the posts of General Manager and Music Director of the Hamburg State Opera, Music Director of the Philharmonic State Orchestra Hamburg and of Opera Australia, Chief Conductor of the Bergen Philharmonic Orchestra and Principal Guest Conductor of the Gulbenkian Orchestra and the Lausanne Chamber Orchestra. She has conducted complete cycles of Der Ring des Nibelungen at the Vienna, Berlin, and Hamburg State Operas and at the Bayreuth Festival. Young is a regular guest conductor at the world’s leading opera houses and orchestras, including The Metropolitan Opera New York, the Vienna, Berlin and Bavarian State Operas, Zurich Opera, Opera Nationale de Paris, the Bayreuth Festival, and the New York, Los Angeles, Berlin, Vienna, Munich, BBC and Dresden Philharmonic Orchestras. Her many accolades include Honorary Member (Vienna State Opera), Professorship (Musikhochschule, Hamburg), Honorary Doctorate (University of Sydney), and Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, France.

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.

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.

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.

Adorning the cover of The Wurrumbar, a début novel by William J. Byrne, is a green and brown yabby, an Australian freshwater crustacean; it emerges from slimy brown water and is at once sinister and potentially delicious. I remember catching them in much the same way as the young protagonist does in the novel, crouching by a clear pond in the bush with some bloody meat in a paper bag ready to tie on to a piece of string and catch a big fat yabby to boil in a billy on a fire. In some ways, this novel captures parts of my life, and for that reason it calls to my heart and no doubt conjures childhood memories for countless older readers.

She brings a bag of bundled shades of wool
which overflows beside her corner table
and from it draws a choice of yarn, a range
of needles, lays them out as a surgeon might,
as a thief would, surveying a challenging vault.