Patrick Allington
Patrick Allington's novels are Figurehead (Black Inc. 2009, longlisted for the Miles Franklin Literary Award) and Rise & Shine (Scribe, shortlisted for the Adelaide Festival Awards for Literature). His short fiction, essays, and book criticism have appeared widely, including regularly in ABR. Patrick received the inaugural ABR Patrons’ Fellowship.
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 ev ... (read more)
You need to look closely at the cover of Shankari Chandran’s novel Safe Haven to notice the sharp edges of the deceptively inviting image it depicts: the handcuffs, the barbed wire, the boat that seems to sit on top of the waves and yet be at the bottom of the sea, and the rebuke contained in the book’s title.
Chandran’s sprawling follow-up to her Miles Franklin Literary Award-winning Chai ... (read more)
In characteristically symbolic fashion, the Rudd government chose the sixtieth anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (10 December 2008) to announce a consultation process into human rights protection in Australia. Attorney-General Robert McClelland appointed a committee, headed by Jesuit priest and lawyer Frank Brennan, to consult the public on issues including whether Australia ... (read more)
Cambodia is best known for the Angkor temple complex, and for Pol Pot. This primer incorporates the famous monuments and the Killing Fields into 2000 years of history, from pre-Angkorean Funan to the present. As John Tully suggests, it suits ‘tourists, students and general readers’. Writing a ‘short history’ presents specific challenges: the author must balance a narrative that tells a com ... (read more)
In The Best Australian Political Writing 2008, the ABC’s Tony Jones, a latish replacement as editor for the Canberra-bound Maxine McKew, has assembled forty-two pieces of non-fiction first published in 2007. The result is a mixed bag of genres, including columns, investigative journalism, polemic, book extracts and essays (but, alas, no fiction). The subject matter includes the November federal ... (read more)
This digressive collection of essays, extracts, cartoons and poems is unified by an interest in colonial and post-colonial responses to London. It stems from a 2003 conference, ‘Writing London’, organised by Flinders University’s Centre for Research in the New Literatures in English (CRNLE). Part 1 focuses on the Malaysian writer Lee Kok Liang (1927–92), in particular his posthumously publ ... (read more)
In Defence of Food is several books rolled into one. It is a primer on nutrition science, a contextual exposé on what we put in our mouths, an advertisement for the joys of eating and even something of a self-help diet and behavioural book. It is also part of Michael Pollan’s ongoing conversation with the reading (and eating) public, and is more satisfying when placed within his oeuvre, particu ... (read more)
Mother Land is a vibrant and charming yet sombre and brutal account of Dmetri Kakmi’s childhood on the Aegean island of Tenedos, now known by its Turkish name of Bozcaada. The book opens with the adult ‘Dimitri’, accompanied by his Turkish friend Sinan, standing on the mainland and surveying through binoculars places he has not seen for thirty years: ‘Three islets sit low on the water ... ... (read more)
One of the best things about the latest issue of Westerly is the cover, a detail from Helen Norton’s painting The shores of the excommunicated. Norton’s image is a wonderfully disquieting take on the modern Aussie beach. It inspires fresh ideas and imaginings, it unsettles, it punctures complacency, it provokes counter-reactions, but it also entertains – typifying what literary magazines sho ... (read more)