Paul Genoni

In scene-setting a discussion of Lia Hills’s The Desert Knows Her Name, it is difficult to avoid going straight to the matter of genre. What we have is postcolonial, outback-noir eco-fiction. This genre mash-up isn’t new and is arguably a defining fictional mode of post-settlement Australia’s third century. As a form, it provides a meeting place where authors, both Indigenous (Melissa Lucashenko, Julie Janson) and non-Indigenous (Alex Miller, Tim Winton, and Gail Jones), meet to worry through complexly entangled fears around colonialism’s dark legacy, personal trauma, social dysfunction, and environmental degradation. And it isn’t territory new to Hills, as readers familiar with her previous (second) novel, The Crying Place (2017), will be aware.

In August 1964, Charmian Clift returned to Australia from the Greek island of Hydra after nearly fourteen years abroad. As Paul Genoni and Tanya Dalziell portray her return – a description based, as always in this book, on solid or at least reasonably persuasive evidence – she ‘was leaving her beloved Hydra ...

In this collection of more than thirty pieces of fiction, journalism, criticism, academic papers, and ephemera (acceptance speeches, parliamentary questions, university course outlines), Frank Moorhouse gives evidence of, and attempts to explain, the durability of Henry Lawson’s classic short story ‘The Drover’s Wife’ in ...

Telling Stories is a great brick of a book full of diverting bits and pieces about Australian culture over the past seventy-seven years. It is hugely entertaining – a sort of QIin book form, with seventy-nine authors offering their brief observations on aspects of Australian cultural life. No one will read it cover to cover: it’s the sort of book you can leave about the house for anyone to pick up and amuse herself with for fifteen minutes or so. They can jump from titbits about rock music, or children’s novels, films or poetry, or serious pieces on the slow movement towards understanding Australia’s Aboriginal heritage. The editors suggest it is ‘a twenty-first century cabinet of curiosities’. By and large, it creates an optimistic, even celebratory, account of the experience of Australian life in the twentieth century.

In 2010, some 272,461 pilgrims received a Compostela (a certificate of completion) upon reaching the city of Santiago de Compostela in north-west Spain. The great majority of these had arrived by walking, having covered at least one hundred kilometres on foot in order to qualify. Most, however, had travelled considerably further, using the network of medieval pilgrim routes that cobweb across southern Europe to this remote city. The number receiving a Compostela substantially understates the pilgrim traffic on these paths; many walk sections of the routes without reaching Santiago and claiming their credential.

Nick Cave, against the odds, is one of the great survivors of Australian music. Cave, who made his first recording in 1978 and established his international reputation after moving to London in 1982, has experienced critical and popular success with a variety of musical ventures including The Boys Next Door, The Birthday Party, Grinderman and, most notably, The Bad Seeds. It is a measure of Cave’s durability that it is difficult to think of any other Australian rock act, with the exception of AC/DC, that has maintained an international profile for such an extended period. It is also salutary to consider how few of the international acts that emerged from the punk and post-punk moment of the late 1970s are still making high-profile and critically acclaimed music.

            Cave’s ambitions have not been limited to music. As the dust jacket to Cultural Seeds proclaims, he is ‘now widely recognized as a songwriter, musician, novelist, screenwriter, curator, critic, actor and performer’. With the years, Cave has won a larger audience as the range and scope of his talent have been manifest in various forms of cultural production. His oeuvre includes works of fiction (And the Ass Saw the Angel, 1989; The Death of Bunny Munro, 2009) and a film script (The Proposition, 2005).

This updated edition of essays on Thea Astley’s fiction will appeal to readers beyond the academy. It plays with the question as to why Astley (1925–2004) has been the subject of so little literary scholarship, despite her many literary awards (including four Miles Franklin Awards – only Tim Winton has won as many).