In the Zeitgeist of rising Trumpism, fascism, international paranoia about war and famine, a cataclysmic end of the planet’s climate, and the fatalistic zeal for Armageddon, this collection of essays and other non-fiction texts is welcome. We can concentrate on the Indigenous personal and provocative visions that impact on Australian literature.

In their Introduction to Shapeshifting, editors Jeanine Leane and Ellen van Neerven call the book a ‘collection of brand-new First Nations lyric nonfictions that will shift the shape of the Australian literary landscape and how the whole genre of non-fiction and its craft and construction is considered and expanded into the future’. The editors have subtitled the publication ‘lyric nonfiction’. This puzzles me, because the definition of ‘lyric’ is ‘having the form and musical quality of a song, and especially the character of a songlike outpouring of one’s own thoughts and feelings, as distinguished from epic and dramatic text or a expressive, rhythmical literary piece’. I longed for more of the lyric.