Early on in Russell McGregor’s new book on the history of birdwatching in Australia, he highlights the importance of the initial epiphany most birdwatchers experience when their interest first sparks. This moment of what Julian Huxley called ‘sudden glory’ can happen anywhere and at any time, city or country, day or night, and often fans out into an obsession, sometimes a profession, that endures through a lifetime.

Biographers nearly always rejoice to find a bundle of letters. If both sides of a correspondence have survived, it doubles the pleasure. At its best, an exchange that was maintained over a long period will illuminate personality, time, and place. Love letters are probably the most highly prized. Whether or not the lovers have the gift of words, their closeness in a relationship brings a sense of reality. Readers of some self-revealing intimate letters may feel like intruders, uninvited watchers at a private theatre for which they didn’t buy a ticket.

Where the plantations begin
The scent of the earth, the true-born.
A foot on the earth, your earth.
An electrified fence to keep the cows from straying.

Would-be novelists used to be told that they should write about what they knew. That’s why, over the years, countless volumes have appeared that were at the very least semi-autobiographical.

The celebrity ghost-written memoir is the non-fiction form de nos jours. Publishers see it as a winner that combines quality narrative with mass-market appeal. Such memoirs do not even need to contain fresh insight when there is an established fanbase. Just ask Prince Harry about the trouble it causes when a revelation does shock. The idea that a pope should put his name to a co-developed text is nevertheless novel. Of Pope Francis’s predecessors, only that preening Renaissance man of letters Pius II Piccolomini contributed to the genre directly. Piccolomini’s Commentaries, though light-hearted Latin, are also a self-indulgent, self-justifying piece of self-invention. The precedent for Francis does not encourage.

This is not a book for Scott Morrison, who, as prime minister, declared that Australian history was free of the stain of slavery. Santilla Chingaipe proves otherwise. As she states in her introduction, a key theme of Black Convicts is the exploration of ‘how slavery shaped modern Australia’. In the context of this book, ‘slavery’ is both a specific and an umbrella term for different forms of labour exploitation pursued by the British empire between the 1600s and the 1800s. Chingaipe argues that slavery, convictism, and indentured servitude were linked through a fundamental premise: the abuse and exploitation of people for financial gain. Her primary focus is on convicts, as the title suggests, and how Black men, women, and children transported to Australia ultimately were victims of the same system that enslaved their forebears. These convicts were not chattel slaves – many had once known liberty, and would again – but the direction of their lives, in common with the lives of Black people kept as property and forced to labour on plantations in the Americas, was shaped by colonial masters who placed profit over morality.

The Covid-19 pandemic changed our relationship with public health, perhaps irreparably. For many, it also changed their relationship to vaccination. Before Covid-19, few questioned the role of vaccines in public health. However, vaccine mandates, which were conflated – rightly or wrongly – with other mandated health measures, such as social distancing, face masks, and protracted lockdowns, meant that being vaccinated equated to an assault on individual freedom and well-being, the opposite of how vaccines were viewed in the past. Faith in the science supporting them is falling rapidly. According to leading epidemiologist Raina MacIntyre, the ‘impact of the anti-science movement and medical disinformation since the Covid-19 pandemic has been far-reaching’, resulting in lower vaccination rates across many preventable diseases. Add to this the ‘demonization of public health’ following the pandemic and the growing threat of a new pandemic, and you have a perfect public health storm brewing.

Ben Sando Ode’, the second poem in Ken Bolton’s new collection, Metropole, begins with an epigraph from Ted Berrigan: ‘My dream a drink / with Ira Hayes / we discuss the code of the west.’ The poem is pure Bolton: a jovial flâneur perambulates through both external space – Adelaide, where passers-by make ‘BIZARRE ATTEMPTS / AT NORMALCY’ – and an inner life brimming with peers and heroes, quotations, non sequiturs, art criticism, existential musings, and the hum of a poem being made.

‘Poetry is a speaking picture,’ said Simonides of Keos, and ‘painting a silent poetry’. From ancient Greece until now, these ‘sister arts’ have been frequently conjoined, though it is most often poetry that speaks to or for painting rather than the reverse. We have come to call this interaction ekphrasis (literally, a ‘speaking out’), usually defined as ‘a verbal description of a work of art’. In Classical times it was a school exercise for developing rhetorical skills, but ever since Homer’s elaborate depiction of the shield of Achilles in the Iliad, it has been co-opted by poets, especially during the last century.

Night after night, the protests swirl into one. Slogans blast through the distorted echo of plastic megaphones. Whistles are blown at such a piercing volume that my ears ring when sleep eventually comes, usually around 7 am. Blockades close the city’s main arteries and highways. Police in riot gear are deployed to each of the three main roads that lead in and out of the city. Rustaveli Avenue, the main street in Tbilisi, Georgia’s capital and largest city, has once again become the nation’s political fault line.