Tony Hughes d'Aeth

Netflicks is the first book in UWAP’s ‘Vignettes’ series. The series’ brief is to introduce readers to contemporary scholarly thinking about pressing issues of modern life in the format of short, lucid books. Judging from the first iteration, ‘Vignettes’ promises to offer complex and coherent readings of the world we live in now, informed by deep knowledge but wearing its learning lightly. Netflicks is written in accessible prose that invites the reader into the scholarly analysis of television, should they be new to it, with clear and uncomplicated language. When technical concepts are introduced, the author makes sure to provide a definition and to justify his deployment of what might seem to be jargon.

An ochre-coloured haze has gathered permanently over the town of Praiseworthy somewhere in the Gulf country. It is composed of dust, soot, broken butterfly wings, memories, and grief – and it isn’t going anywhere. Meanwhile, on the ground, thousands of feral donkeys are being corralled into the town cemetery by an Indigenous leader called Cause Man Steel. Most call this man Planet because he is always banging on about the collapse of the planet.

Mark Tredinnick’s latest collection of poetry, Walking Underwater, continues his exploration of the relationship between individual experience and the natural world that was visible in volumes such as A Gathered Distance (2020), Blue Wren Cantos (2013), and Fire Diary (2010). Tredinnick is well known for his writing of place, notably his innovative local history-cum-memoir The Blue Plateau (2009), a book that traces the lives, histories, and natural systems of the Blue Mountains, where he lives. His writing in both poetry and prose is noticeably belletristic, and his stance broadly romantic. This occasionally droops into piety, but Tredinnick also conjures moments of muted and moving transcendence: ‘A balcony and a morning and a lassitude / Of fog. A sky blindfolded and bound and flogged; a night-time’s / Pleasure only halfway spent. Awake early, I hear a band / Of correllas come. Chaste bandits, their flight a quiet riot, a lewd and holy throng / Of unhinged song.’ 

There is something quaint about seasons. They do not seem to trigger the same dread that we now experience when we hear the word ‘climate’. I think this is because seasons remain connected to that time in human history during which the annual variations of climatic conditions were evidence of an underlying stability in the world and of nature’s constancy. The Seasons, a collection of essays edited by Luke Fischer and David Macauley, is an attempt to think through the ongoing role that seasons have within human imaginaries. Both editors are philosophers and the book is mainly grounded in forms of analytic philosophy insofar as seasons (and seasonality) are posited as concepts susceptible to abstract contemplation. The approach is inflected by a certain eclecticism of thought and example, but there is also an underlying intellectual and tonal consistency. The prominence of Goethe, Hölderlin, Keats, and Thoreau within the book, for instance, firmly roots the contributions within the romantic imagination. Other key reference points in the book – Rilke, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Rachel Carson – remain within the long shadow of European romanticism.

John Kinsella tends to be a polarising figure, but his work has won many admirers both in Australia and across the world, and I find myself among these. The main knocks on Kinsella are that he writes too much, that what he does write is sprawling and ungainly, and that he tends to editorialise and evangelise. One might concede all of these criticisms, but then still be faced with what by any estimation is a remarkable body of work, one that is dazzling both in its extent and its amplitude, in the boldness of its conceptions and in the lyrical complexity of its moments. An element that tends to be overlooked in Kinsella, both as a writer and as a public figure, is his compassion. What it means to be compassionate, rather than simply passionate, is a question that underpins Kinsella’s memoir Displaced: A rural life.