Jane Goodall

Jane Goodall is a freelance writer and adjunct professor with the Writing and Society Research Group, University of Western Sydney. Her work has appeared recently in Griffith Review, Inside Story, and The Conversation. She won the Calibre Prize in 2009.

'Remembering Robert Hughes (1938–2012)' by Jane Goodall

September 2012, no. 344 • 30 August 2012

When Gore Vidal died a few weeks ago, his publisher issued a statement calling him the last survivor of a postwar crop of American literary giants. ‘It is hard to think of another … who cut as dashing and visible a figure in various public realms,’ said Vidal’s Doubleday editor, Gerald Howard. Less than a week later the obituary columns were taken over by just such another figure – excep ... (read more)

Jane Goodall reviews 'The Office: A Hardworking History' by Gideon Haigh

July–August 2012, no. 343 • 09 July 2012

What two things do the following people have in common: Samuel Pepys, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Honoré de Balzac, Charles Dickens, George Bernard Shaw, Émile Zola, Franz Kafka, P.G. Wodehouse, Dorothy L. Sayers, Kurt Vonnegut, and Gabriel García Márquez? Answer: they all did office work, and they all wrote about it. Regardless of Kafka’s conviction that ‘writing and the office cannot be reconci ... (read more)

Jane Goodall reviews 'The Novels of Alex Miller: An introduction' edited by Robert Dixon

June 2012, no. 342 • 24 May 2012

As creative writing programs continue to surge in popularity, it has become something of an uphill battle to recruit students for literature courses in universities. In an environment overstocked with would-be writers fixated on the image of a potential publisher whose own field of vision is a mass of BookScan figures, a collection of critical essays on a literary writer has something of an ambass ... (read more)

Jane Goodall reviews 'As I Was Saying: A collection of musings' by Robert Dessaix

March 2012, no. 339 • 01 March 2012

‘I’m sitting in my tower, cogitating.’ Well, Dessaix admits, it’s not a real tower, though he likes to think of it that way. Actually, it is an elevated writing room in his house in Hobart, with a view of the mountains to the west. He is cogitating, not meditating – he’s particular about this – and the thoughts he proceeds to capture on the page are those of a mind given to rambling. ... (read more)

'Something is turning: The role of essays in a questioning culture' by Jane Goodall

April 2011, no. 330 • 23 March 2011

Address to the reader is one of the conventions of the modern essay form, going back to Montaigne, who includes a statement of address by way of an introduction to his collected writings. A question or series of questions refreshes the direct address along the way, accentuates the sense of voice, and vitalises the connection by supposing the reader as an interlocutor, someone whose responses may b ... (read more)