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Giselle AuNhien Nguyen

In the opening pages of Michelle See-Tho’s début novel, Jade and Emerald, an unnamed narrator is avoiding someone’s gaze. That someone is ‘pristine, poised like a goddess’ to the narrator’s vision of herself: haircut ‘like an eight-year-old boy’s’, smudged make-up, dress the wrong colour. There is a secret between these two young women, blown open by the prologue’s end.

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Siang Lu’s polyphonic début novel, The Whitewash (2022), occupied a unique place in Australian fiction. It was written as an oral history, with a cast of voices, sometimes in conflict with one another, coalescing to tell the story of the rise and fall of a Hollywood spy blockbuster. The film was supposed to star the first-ever Asian male lead in such a role, but he was replaced by a white actor at the last minute. Blending real and invented film history, The Whitewash was an original work of satire, providing a breath of fresh air in the local literary landscape – even more so considering that it dealt so adroitly with matters of race and representation, normally approached in a much more conventional, and predictable, way.

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‘The personal is political’ is an axiom that has become ubiquitous. Normally used within the context of feminist activism, in Yumna Kassab’s latest novel – for which it serves as the epigraph – it is a reminder of the human sacrifice of war and how every part of a civilian’s life reflects its surroundings.

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In the modern literary landscape, the novel about a novelist writing a novel has become de rigueur. It can provide an ideal setting for a meditation on the complexities of living a creative life. Jessica Zhan Mei Yu’s début novel, But the Girl, follows in this contemporary tradition, but offers something more compelling than navel-gazing: a critique of classical literature, specifically the work of Sylvia Plath, through personal and academic lenses.

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Melbourne author Aisling Smith’s début begins with a question that snakes the whole way through her novel: ‘What has happened to Benjamin?’

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New Gold Mountain 

SBS On Demand
by
09 November 2021

Prior to watching New Gold Mountain, the only account I had come across of the gold rush of the 1850s from a non-white perspective was in Monica Tan’s memoir, Stranger Country (2019). On a six-month road trip around Australia, Tan met Eddie Ah Toy, an elderly, fifth-generation Chinese-Australian man whose ancestors came to Australia to work on the goldfields. Recently for SBS, Tan wrote, ‘I belong to a new wave of Chinese-Australian creatives who are patiently sifting through the footnotes of Australian history and carrying on the restoration and revival work of those that came before us. Only time will tell if our work repositions the experiences of our community as central to Australia’s origin story.’

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The proliferation of trauma writing in the past few years is a double-edged sword. While giving public voice to subjects once relegated to the dark lessens stigma and creates agency, there is almost an expectation for women writers to reveal or perform their trauma, as well as a risk of exploitation and retraumatisation.

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Go to any suburban shopping centre and you will find a metropolis of consumption. ‘Buy, buy, buy’, it screeches, whether you are contemplating fast-fashion T-shirts, new-age solutions to age-old problems, or services and pampering you don’t really need, all in the harsh glare of white lights and a controlled climate, temperature just right. The shopping centre, uniform and tidy, is where you can get everything you’ve ever wanted while also getting nothing at all.

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