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Released every Thursday, the ABR podcast features our finest reviews, poetry, fiction, interviews, and commentary.
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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.
Hear the way these poets use moonlight. According to a delicious detail in Jill Jones’s thirteenth full-length collection, Wild Curious Air (Recent Work Press, $19.95, 76 pp), ‘The moon’s light takes just over a second to reach our faces.’ In the context of meaning, note the length of the sound in the word ‘faces’. Jones affectingly contrasts this second with the light that left a star, centuries ago: ‘Always a past touches us, as this hot January forgets us.’
... (read more)In this episode of Australian Book Review's States of Poetry podcast, Ken Bolton reads 'Gilbert Place - Cafe Boulevard' which features in the 2016 South Australian anthology.
... (read more)In this episode of Australian Book Review's States of Poetry podcast, Ken Bolton reads 'Salute' which features in the 2016 South Australian anthology.
... (read more)for Lee Harwood
Softly solarised and parallel
two lines echo each other, glow slightly,
in a space that is nowhere
#
  ...
Should the unique serve to typify?
Have they been ill-used? To what purpose?
The Asian couple.
I am inclined to think Chinese –
mostly on the basis of size,
but not Japanese (the ...
I wonder what happens
in Seb's kitchen, I see
him round the corner
into the room, sun shining, cat
ready for food, a grin
that is mixed of resignation
& amusement eyes alight
for the opportunity
each day brings. I always
liked the way he understood
things – things I've
never understood –
as an open secret, knowledge
with w ...
Thoughtful –and yet forgetful, easily distracted, hardly there sometimes Ken Bolton's is a lyrical figure limned against the harsh outlines, the stark colours, of the Adelaide art world
... (read more)What am I going to write here?
Something, I hope. A year
or so since I last launched out