Now in its twenty-second year, Australia’s most alliterative poetry prize is open for entries. The Porter Prize, worth a total of $10,000, is funded by the ABR Patrons, including support in memory of Kate Boyce (1935-2020). This year’s judges are Judith Bishop, ABR Poetry Editor Felicity Plunkett, and Anders Villani – all accomplished poets and poetry critics.

What does it mean to have a past you are estranged from? In Australian-Croatian author Marija Peričić’s third novel, Foreign Country, the title recalls the familiar L.P. Hartley line, ‘the past is a foreign country’, and stretches its metaphorical coverage to include the terrain of grief, childhood, the dislocation of immigrating, and even the afterlife.

Veronica Sumegi and Andras Berkes-Brandl established Brandl & Schlesinger in 1994. Their initial aim was to publish books by authors of culturally diverse backgrounds and to publish translations. They also have a large poetry list and have published several literary journals. As Veronica frequently attended the Frankfurt Book Fair, many of their titles have been sold to overseas publishers. Approaching eighty years of age, Veronica believes she is now the oldest working publisher in Australia.

It’s 5.30 pm on New Year’s Day. Michael and I are sitting at the picnic table under the huge rowan tree in our backyard. The air is thick with heat, citronella, and our lethargy. We had a good Christmas and New Year’s, our kids at ten and thirteen young enough to embrace the magic of it all. End-of-school parties rolling into loops of carols, carrots left for reindeers, treasure piles and tables of food. Last night marked the peak of the revelry: a crowded barbecue around our neighbour’s pool, ritual gathering of eskies, wet children and sparklers in the fading light, cockatoos luminous and screeching the last of 2024 in the bush over the back fence.

At the end of Maggie Nelson’s arresting new book, she offers a disclaimer: ‘This work conjoins dream and reality; all representations of people, places and events should be understood in that spirit.’ By the second page, though, it has already become apparent that while this work is peppered with recognisable biographical details, Pathemata: Or, the story of my mouth operates in new terrain. Here the limits of reality and dream are at times sufficiently porous that one wonders whether a particular passage belongs to the writer’s conscious or unconscious life.

An irony of this age, when everyone is connected to everyone else, is that loneliness proliferates. Martin Luther’s claim that a lonely man ‘always deduces one thing from the other and thinks everything to the worst’ is exemplified by the miserable spiralling of fervidly online isolates. This is the world of Tony Tulathimutte’s Rejection.

Part memoir, part manifesto, part ‘moral reckoning’, Ittay Flescher’s The Holy and the Broken opens with a tribute to Leonard Cohen’s ‘Hallelujah’. Flescher names Cohen’s timeless ballad Jerusalem’s unofficial anthem, infused as it is with Biblical allegory and, at times, a kind of despair-filled nihilism. Whereas Cohen imagined the Hebrew liturgical expression as either holy or broken, depending on the inclinations of those who heard it, for Flescher, his own newly adopted home of Jerusalem is both holy and broken at the same time. It is Flescher’s fervent wish, and the mission of his book, that the city’s diverse inhabitants come together to ‘mend what is broken and build a future that honours the holy aspirations of all of us who call this land home’.

‘Lonely Country’ is the term Arnhem landers use for empty or uncared-for places. Sometimes the custodians have died. In other cases, the land is simply too difficult to get to or inhabit. Whatever the reason, Lonely Country brings sadness. There is no one to burn the bush or manage it; no one to call out to the spirits of the old people who remain on their Country, isolated from the living.

That Elizabeth Harrower should merit not one but two biographies would have both surprised and pleased her. That the biographies would be published within months of each other, by two Sydney writers and journalists, using much the same source material, would have intrigued her, as it did me. I don’t know Helen Trinca or Susan Wyndham, or who had the idea first, or anything of the anxiety they must have felt at being pipped at the post, or of any rivalry for sources and access to people or documents, but the two books arrived on my desk together.

We are now in a time when the race crimes of the past that shored up colonisation, chattel slavery, and segregation can be more safely unravelled. Those of us whose families have been on the ‘wrong side’ of the colour line can discover the forces shaping our families and ourselves. Only in the past two decades or so have the veils of false respectability and dubious notions of human difference based on race been lifted sufficiently to allow a focus on the history of mixed-race family formations. Edward Ball’s Slaves in the Family (1998) was a joyous discovery for me, a mixed-race Aboriginal Australian who recognised the same pattern, every generation having both black and white relations in our families.