The god of lyric poetry in Greek mythology was an attempted rapist. Indeed, one of the primal scenes of Western literature – Apollo’s pursuit of the nymph, Daphne – is a story of attempted rape. When Daphne can no longer outrun Apollo, she transforms into a laurel tree to escape violation. The heartbroken Apollo plucks a leaf from her branches, vowing to honour Daphne by adorning his hair and lyre with laurel and keeping her leaves eternally green. Thus began the long association of the laurel wreath with poetic or artistic achievement in Western culture: the rapist, in his grief, turned to poetry. And his poetry would forever sing of the loss and longing caused by a thwarted rape.

Elizabeth Weiss is Non-fiction Publisher and Digital Publishing Director at Allen & Unwin in Sydney. Her first publishing experience was of a bilingual collection edited and laid out on the tiny screen of a Macintosh SE, using PageMaker 1.0 pirated from the ABC on a floppy disk. The tech seemed amazing at the time. She published academic books for many years and now works in trade non-fiction. She also oversees Allen & Unwin’s e-book program and AI strategy.

Welcome to a special issue of ABR, put together with the help of Melinda Harvey at Monash University. This issue focuses on the future of the book in Australia. The book, like other key nouns in that sentence – Australia, future – might now signify radically different things to each of us. This should not stop us thinking about how we can foster the acts of reading, listening, focusing, evaluating, and imagining – and how we might do it best in Australia – for our pleasure and elevation, for our cultural richness, for our democracy.

The growth in understanding of the tens of thousands of years of this continent’s pre-colonial and post-colonial Aboriginal history has been one of the great intellectual achievements of postwar Australia. But if these two collections of essays are any guide, there are reasons to be gravely concerned about the future of this field of knowledge.

The latest in Don Watson’s intermittent series of books and essays about the United States – which now spans twenty-five years – finds him in a melancholy mood, though not quite ready to write off America.

In writing Borneo: The last campaign, Michael Veitch has taken on a worthy subject. It was ‘the largest, most complex, most meticulously planned amphibious military operation ever undertaken by the forces of Australia’. Yet, despite its scale and the military prowess displayed, the campaign has received little sustained attention in print since the publication of Gavin Long’s official history, The Final Campaigns, in 1963 and is overshadowed in the public imagination by the great epics of Australian military history, like Gallipoli and Kokoda.

As someone whose primary literary interest is Aboriginal writing, reviewing John Kinsella’s aptly titled Ghost of Myself means approaching his poetry with a different perspective from many of his readers. The coolness of the writing, combined with the sombreness of much of his observation of the world around him, gives an end-of-days tenor to the four sections that comprise Ghost of Myself.

In the the current Australian publishing landscape, dominated as it is by conglomerates and mergers, the establishment of new small, independent presses has never been more important. While mainstream publishers continually laud conventional prose and consumable literary plots – giving many readers a false perception of the quality of contemporary Australian literature – numerous small presses instead champion the difficult, the unconventional, the strange and experimental. Evercreech Editions, a new press out of Hobart, Tasmania, maintains this ambition. The founder, Adam Ouston – one of Australia’s most ambitious writers – states in Evercreech’s mission statement: ‘I wanted an outlet for the out of step, the weird, the boldly defiant, a home for the homeless.’ Unfortunately, these qualities aren’t exhibited in Evercreech’s first published book, Konrad Muller’s début novel, My Heart at Evening.

In May this year, a selection of stories compiled and published as Heart Lamp by Kannada writer Banu Mushtaq won the International Booker Prize. One may speculate that the presence on the jury panel of prominent translator Anton Hur might have had a seminal role in swinging matters in favour of such a little-known name. Even in her home country, India, Mushtaq’s win, though celebrated, was greeted with curiosity about who this writer was, and what literary tradition she was writing in. Those curious included putative readers of Kannada and of bhasha literatures more broadly in the Indian subcontinent.

Two months from twenty-nine
as rain slashed into Manning Street. My life,