Accessibility Tools
Released every Thursday, the ABR podcast features our finest reviews, poetry, fiction, interviews, and commentary.
Subscribe via iTunes, Stitcher, Google, or Spotify, or search for ‘The ABR Podcast’ on your favourite podcast app.
This week on The ABR Podcast we reflect on the occupation and liberation of East Timor twenty-five years on from that extraordinary rupture. Clinton Fernandes draws on secret records released last month showing attempts by the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT) to change the Australian War Memorial’s history of East Timor. Clinton Fernandes is Professor of International and Political Studies at the University of New South Wales. Listen to Clinton Fernandes’s ‘History without vexed issues: Liquidating our memories of East Timor’, published in the October issue of ABR.
Andrea Goldsmith is a Melbourne-based novelist, reviewer and essayist. Her literary essays have appeared in Heat, Meanjin, Australian Book Review, Best Australian Essays, as well as numerou ...
I am reading Robert Fagles’s translation of the Iliad (Penguin, $26pb, 0 14 027536 3). Achilles is sulking in his ships while the Trojans and Achaeans slaughter each other. Choreographing the moves with astonishing wilfulness are the self-serving, all-powerful gods. The brilliance of the poetry keeps the brutality always in the high beam. Every spear thrust, every disembowelment, every spillage of brains, every spurt of blood is revealed with lyrical clarity. The violence is unrelenting; this poem is almost unbearable.
... (read more)