UWA Publishing

When the MV Tampa entered Australian waters in 2001, the ensuing row over its 433 Afghan passengers ignited renewed debate about immigration, citizenship and national identity. The Howard government’s subsequent re-election on a platform of border protection and security coincided with the centenary of the first substantial legislation passed by the newly constituted Parliament of the Commonwealth of Australia. The Immigration Restriction Act (1901) was the centrepiece of the White Australia Policy and reflected the new nation’s desire to regulate the composition of its population and culture, free from British interference. This collection of essays, authored by some of the country’s foremost academics in law, history and politics, commemorates that anniversary. It is a timely publication, and demanding in its persistent consideration of what the Australian national project has been and what it could be in the twenty-first century.

Emily Tsokos Purtill’s first novel, Matia, is both ambitiously expansive and, narrated as a series of moments in time, deftly miniaturised. Spanning four individual decades from 1940 to 2070, and moving between continents, it details the lives of four generations of Greek-Australian mothers and daughters. Unlike a conventional family saga, the novel has the associative structure of memory, moving through time and space in unpredictable ways, creating both threads of continuity and a sense of fragmentation. The narrative focus on women charts the struggle for agency through the eyes of the four women, each of them bequeathed a bracelet – the Greek word matia of the book’s title – intended to ward off the evil eye. As such, the modern concept of individualism collides with the realms of prophecy and superstition, producing a fascinating exploration of the crucial issues of female agency and choice.

‘But I think there’s sometimes more emotion in a whisper. It doesn’t cause a fuss.’ So says Teller, the narrator of Bendigo writer Amanda Creely’s novel Nameless. Her story, Teller tells readers more than once, is not nice. She is right: set in an unnamed and unrecognisable country and in a world that seems not to have sophisticated technologies for war or peace, Nameless is the story of everyday citizens facing an invasion by a hostile, brutal, and powerful neighbouring army.

At a time when the world strains under the pressure of multiple crises, it stands to reason that coming of age might no longer hold the same literary value it once did. This ‘polycrisis’ encompasses not only the convergence of myriad catastrophic events – climate change, war, Covid-19, the resurgence of fascism, etc. – but also the failure of metanarratives or belief systems to mitigate against these. Amid all this unprecedentedness, the rise of an anti-Bildungsroman sentiment hardly surprises. In different ways, both Brendan Ritchie’s Eta Draconis and Roanna McClelland’s The Comforting Weight of Water attend to the central question: how does one come of age in a collapsing world? It’s a line of enquiry that just so happens to reflect Franco Moretti’s critique of the Bildungsroman genre in The Way of the World: The Bildungsroman in European culture (1987), articulating how the novel of youth upholds the myth of Western modernity and progress.

Given the huge popularity of crime fiction, some readers might wonder why there are not more examples by Aboriginal authors. Perhaps it is because crime in general is too close to the bone. It was only coincidental to be reviewing Julie Janson’s Madukka the River Serpent amid the controversy that followed the ABC’s coverage of the recent coronation, yet the relevance was inescapable. For the tiny number of readers unaware, this is when the slimy gutter of social media-fuelled racism dragged journalist Stan Grant down to the point where the national broadcaster lost one of its best (temporarily, one hopes). Grant’s departure speech at the end of his final Q&A on 21 May was so moving and thought-provoking it will stand in history alongside other landmark speeches – Paul Keating’s Redfern address springs to mind – and may well prove to be a catalyst for reform. Though prompted by cruelty and hate, it responded with generosity and love – love of people, love of culture, love of country.

A quarter of a century has passed since Ivor Indyk contributed a scathing review of John Kinsella’s first collected poems to the pages of ABR (July 1997), and the contending responses to that opinion have typified the reception of his poetry among the vituperative local poetry community ever since. This extravagant representation of his work – two volumes of close to a thousand pages each, with a third volume pending – might seem almost deliberately designed to expose the author to similar criticism. Rather than a conventionally shaped collected edition, this is more like a throwing open of filing cabinets, and the nearly 1,700 pages presented so far are certainly not all masterpieces.

Childhood is something we take for granted. We all had one, but our idea of when it ended is quite subjective, depending on the society and culture in which we grew up, our economic and class background, and particular family circumstances. In some societies, the end of childhood is quite clear-cut. Most Aboriginal societies in the past (and some in the present) defined the onset of male adulthood by putting boys through stringent initiation ceremonies. Some girls also went through initiation ceremonies, others ended childhood when they reached what was deemed a marriageable age.

Some stories are very familiar to us, as a society, stories whose ugly truths we seem to have accepted, may even have, belatedly, apologised for, but the story of Joy Janaka Wiradjuri Williams, as told by Peter Read, reveals how much White Australia still has to learn about the complexity of our national past and the tragedy of its continuing legacy. Eileen Williams, three weeks after her birth in 1943, was sent to the United Aborigines Mission Home at Bomaderry, where she was renamed Joy. She grew up in state institutions and was later incarcerated in psychiatric hospitals, spending many years struggling with alcohol and drugs. As a young woman she had a baby taken from her, a repetition of the trauma inflicted on her mother and her grandmother. Joy, a poet and activist, mounted a long and unsuccessful lawsuit against the New South Wales state government. She died of cancer, alone, in 2006.

Simon Adams’s thesis is that capital punishment was crucial in how the West was won: ‘The gallows were a potent symbol of an unforgiving social order that was determined to stamp its moral authority over one-third of the Australian continent.’ But hanging was discriminatory; it ‘was never applied fairly or impartially in Western Australia’. Adams points to the fact that ‘there were 17 men hanged between 1889 and 1904, all of whom were “foreigners”: two Afghans, six Chinese, one Malay, two Indians, one Greek, one Frenchman and four Manilamen’, but not a single ‘Britisher’. Capital punishment was racist, reflecting the ‘distortions and prejudices of the British colonial legal system’.

The latest in a new crop of outback gothic fiction, Josh Kemp’s début has everything readers have come to expect from the genre. There’s a messed-up bloke with a past. There’s a lost girl, ten years old and traumatised. There’s plenty of guilt and shame, damaged landscapes, haunted houses, injecting drug use, altered states, brutal acts of violence, and of course, there is the road.