Scribe

Richard Broinowski, a retired senior diplomat who has served in seven legations, three as ambassador, has long been interested in matters nuclear, as this excellent work demonstrates. Broinowski traces Australian nuclear developments from the early days of World War II to the most recent developments under Prime Minister John Howard. In the process, he chronicles Australian nuclear ambitions, from the early flirtations with acquiring a nuclear weapon and its related strike capability, to the later development of uranium exports.

In the introduction to Troubled Minds, authors Sidney Bloch and Nick Haslam outline the territory they will cover, indicating that they are experts in psychology, psychiatry, and mental illness, with more than eighty years’ experience between them. They are wary of quick fixes (How to… books) and are also wary of professionals publishing in their own fields (potentially biased expertise). Fittingly, they see mental health and mental illness as complex. They have perceived a reader who is looking for a well-written, easy-to-comprehend book that spans conceptual diversity yet concentrates on ‘understanding’ both the ‘emotional and intellectual’ aspects of mental health and illness; one that emphasises contribution from the humanities as well as from science. They hope the book will assist those who first encounter people seeking mental health help (primary practitioners, counsellors, and others). Indeed, Troubled Minds is wonderfully written, highly readable and a tour de force from authors who have seamlessly brought their voices together.

In the year of my birth, trichotillomania did not exist,’ writes Adele Dumont. Hair-pulling has been depicted in human culture for millennia: in Greek myth, in the Bible, in painting and sculpture, and, most commonly, in vernacular expression (‘I’m tearing my hair out’). But hair-pulling as a compulsive, recurring behaviour – trichotillomania – was only named in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) in 1987. Formal psychiatric diagnosis has become the dominant means by which we understand emotional distress, but this has happened very recently, and diagnosis can leave the sufferer, as Dumont writes, feeling ‘categorised’ and struggling to articulate those aspects of their illness that may seem, in spite of everything, like comfort.

A feminist triumph and homage to Virginia Woolf, Miranda Darling’s Thunderhead is a potent exploration of suburban entrapment for women. The novella opens with a complex satire of Ian McEwan’s response to Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway (1925) in his novel Saturday (2005). All three books are set over the course of a single day, where the intricacies of both the quotidian and extraordinary occur. In this novella’s opening paragraphs, Darling’s protagonist, Winona Dalloway, wakes to see the sky ablaze through her window. While ‘it is dawn in the suburbs of the east’ – rather than a burning plane, evoking 9/11 terrorism, as in McEwan’s novel – she believes it ‘telegraphs a warning, red sky in the morning’. This refers to the opening of Mrs Dalloway, where Clarissa Dalloway feels, ‘standing there at the open window, that something awful was about to happen’.

When Georgia Blain died at the age of fifty-one in 2016, the reading public was robbed of a superb prose writer in her prime. Her final and, some consider, best novel, Between a Wolf and a Dog (2016), achieved wide critical acclaim. Shortly after Blain succumbed to brain cancer, that novel went on to win or be shortlisted in a slew of national prizes.

In February 2022, Russia invaded Ukraine. Remarkably, Ukraine fought an effective, close-run defensive campaign and the war turned into a quagmire for Vladimir Putin’s regime. As early as the following month, with the appalling revelations from Bucha of Russian atrocities, it was clear that this was – as they all are – a very dirty war. At the time of writing, the frontline exists in precarious stalemate and serious questions loom about the reliability of ongoing US-led material support, which is necessary for Ukraine to continue the resistance.

In October 2014, an article by health reporter Aisha Dow appeared in Melbourne’s Age newspaper titled ‘Deadly flu pandemic could shut down Melbourne’. It began with a dystopian vision of Australia’s second most populous city plunged into a Spanish flu-like crisis:

Laura Jean McKay’s new collection, Gunflower, offers a range of disturbing, deftly satiric, and sometime bizarre short stories. As in her award-winning novel The Animals in that Country (2022), some of the stories in the collection explore the relationship between the human and non-human, and often challenge rational explanations or simple allegorical interpretations for the imaginative worlds they create. Even the conventional realist narratives sometimes defy generic conventions. The story ‘Flying Rods’, for example, moves from standard verisimilitude to Gothic horror. ‘Site’ transforms the familiar terrain of an adulterous affair with repeated descriptions of a ship sighted off the coast, such that the ship’s symbolic meanings remain tantalisingly unclear.

Michael Gawenda has written a deeply personal story about his Jewish identity. It comes during a period when conflict in Israel/Palestine has been painful for all. While he remains committed to a two-state future that supports the rights of both Israelis and Palestinians to live in their own countries, the author critiques influential sections of the political left where acceptance has come to require demonising the Jewish state. A key message of the book is that too often on the left the only good Jew is one who publicly rejects Israel’s right to exist and remains silent when it is declared racist and nothing more than a coloniser of an indigenous population.

Laura Elizabeth Woollett demonstrates her mastery of the polyphonic novel in West Girls. The book, Woollett’s fourth, comprises eleven nimbly interwoven chapters that explore origin, agency, and delusion in a patriarchal society.