Grief, depression, and trauma do terrible things to the human body and spirit. The brain rebels callously against its vessel, leaving the wounded mind to wallow in the deepest pits of despair, perpetually refreshing pain and obsessively seeking out the recesses of scarred memories.

With more than two decades of experience in interviewing at SBS and the ABC, Kumi Taguchi knows how to craft a person’s story and build a reader’s sympathy. The Good Daughter, her first book, is a memoir. Here she looks inward, transferring these interviewing skills to herself as the subject.

The proposed abolition of the Australian National Dictionary Centre represents a significant retreat from the Australian National University’s long-standing commitment to supporting a national public culture. This should alarm all of us, not least the Australian taxpayer who contributes $220 million a year – received by no other Australian university – so that the ANU can conduct significant research ‘supporting the development of Australia’s national unity and identity, including by improving Australia’s understanding of itself and the history and culture of its Indigenous peoples, its Asia-Pacific neighbours, and its place in the international community’. 

Just after midnight on 6 August 1945, twelve United States military personnel on Tinian Island in the north-western Pacific Ocean had an early breakfast of eggs, sausages, and pineapple fritters. After prayers with a Lutheran chaplain, they boarded a Boeing B-29 Superfortress heavy bomber for a six-hour flight to Japan. Each carried a pistol, and their commander secretly carried a metal box holding twelve cyanide capsules, for use in case of capture. Their aircraft carried a nuclear bomb which would soon be dropped on Hiroshima, a city in the west of Honshu, Japan’s largest island. Accompanying them was a second bomber carrying instrumentation to measure the blast effects, and a third carrying photography equipment. Weather reconnaissance aircraft had departed earlier, to ensure conditions were suitable for the attack.

In a country where property and real estate are central to the national psyche, it is fair to say that, even by Australian standards, we are having a moment. From the Great Australian Dream to the widespread recreational pursuit of watching The Block, real estate has become the nation’s article of faith. Meanwhile, a confluence of factors has seen housing become the hottest political issue in the country. Far from the dream, we have seemingly arrived at the worst of all possible worlds, where housing is too expensive to buy, too expensive to rent, and too expensive to build. Those without a leveraged portfolio of their own are rightly asking how we got into this mess.

One of the advantages of the novel, and a major reason for its endurance into this messy century, is its elasticity. The novel’s willingness to contain a multiplicity of forms can defeat even the most radical attempts to shatter its structure. Another, perhaps contradictory advantage of the novel is its capacity for direct insight, opening a portal into another human mind at a particular time in human history.

Phantom flutes ring in your ears, well past the finish of the music. The kind you get from a migraine or the neurotic howl of cicadas in the summer. The kind that hangs eerily at the back of your neck, a reminder of the thin veil separating real from imagined. The kind that makes your mind chase its own tail. It can’t be (but it is) but it can’t be and so on, into the silence that is not silence. Your father slides around in the back of the car. What slides around in the boot is not really your father but rather a shadow, or an echo or a remembering. Reminds you of shelling peas as a child. Pull out the orbs from between the fleshy green lips, eat the innards until the skin sinks in on itself into a hollowed husk. The body in the boot is just such a vessel, empty now that he has left, just epidermis and bones and irises that will break down into smaller compounds. Organic matter reduced to biology. And in the absence of soul, a peculiar cold sort of smell if a smell can be described like that. Metallic almost, like when you press your head to the concrete as a child and feel the vastness of the earth creep into you.

The subject of this fine biography was my Doktorvater or postgraduate supervisor. He hailed from York, ancient capital of England’s northern counties. So did my biological father, Wilfred Prest (1907-1985). Both won university scholarships to study history. But their family backgrounds and life trajectories were very different.

A son doesn’t love what he’s supposed to love,
so what’s left to abandon? I have abandoned you,
failed forest, I say to the jade plant. A cube of milk
defrosts on the counter and daylight floods the room.

1. When you fall, one speaker goes with you. They’ve been daisy-chained around the house, so those on the deck get the same din that’s piped out to the stairwell, a playlist to pound your Docs to. You’re dancing with a vengeance by now, erotic stomps with industrial tread, your hips a counterweight where gravity meets velvet, fingernails raking the air. Someone has spliced in ultra-long cable, so the speaker follows you, to the bottom. But if it’s still singing when it hits, your brain has switched station.