Nicola Walker

Nicola Walker reviews 'Griffith Review: Dreams of Land', 'Heat 6: Happy Days' and 'Meanjin Leaves Town: On Travel"

February 2004, no. 258 • 01 February 2004

Oh, happy days indeed. These are good times for readers and perhaps not so bad for writers either, as Griffith Review joins Meanjin and Heat in publishing work that might otherwise struggle to reach us. That such thoughtful and sometimes excellent writing should often be rewarded with risible rates of pay is less satisfactory, but it was ever thus, apart from the pennies from heaven offered so bri ... (read more)

Nicola Walker reviews ‘Tears of the Maasai’ by Frank Coates and ‘Far Horizon’ by Tony Park

June-July 2004, no. 262 • 01 June 2004

According to some bright spark at HarperCollins, Tears of the Maasai is ‘a novel as big as Africa’, while Far Horizon, in the words of a creative Pan Macmillan employee, is apparently ‘driven by an emotion stronger than love, lust or fear: Revenge’. After such fanfare, what can the reader expect? Well, the usual ingredients of putative blockbusters set in Africa (and here I mean southern A ... (read more)

'Letter from Mozambique' by Nicola Walker

May 2006, no. 281 • 01 May 2006

Mia Couto’s most recent novel (translated into English in 2004) begins with a ‘large organ on the loose’: a severed penis, like a ‘fleshy hyphen’, is discovered lying on a road in the Mozambican village of Tizangara. It seems that another UN soldier has exploded, for in a nearby tree is a telltale blue helmet. A delegation of Mozambican and UN officials descends on Tizangara, and an Ital ... (read more)

Nicola Walker reviews 'The Picador Book of Journeys' edited by Robyn Davidson

September 2001, no. 234 • 01 September 2001

Aged twenty-two, I set out for Mexico, with, like Rousseau in Italy, a ‘heart full of young desires, alluring hopes and brilliant prospects’. I was determined to leave the confines of the sleepy metropolis that is Canberra, much as Isabella Bird, though infinitely more adventurous and literate, desired to escape her cloistered Victorian world. This ‘inner compulsion’, as Robyn Davidson des ... (read more)

Nicola Walker reviews 'The Haha Man' by Sandy McCutcheon

April 2004, no. 260 • 01 April 2004

It’s not racism that makes my mother – once a poor girl from the Welsh valleys – side with the Howard government on the refugee issue: it’s an instinctive territorial defensiveness that can be easily exploited by emotive phrases: illegals, queue jumpers, people smugglers. She’s not alone, if her friends, other relatively prosperous, tax-paying senior Australian citizens, are anything to ... (read more)

Nicola Walker reviews 'Angel Puss' by Colleen McCullough

February 2005, no. 268 • 01 February 2005

Wednesday, December 29th, 2004: Ugh: today I realised Colleen McCullough’s latest book (her fifteenth), Angel Puss, which ABR sent to me several weeks ago, needs to be read, reviewed and dispatched by January 3. The dust jacket précis reveals that this novel is ‘exhilarating’ and ‘takes us back to 1960 and Sydney’s Kings Cross – and the story of a young woman determined to defy conve ... (read more)