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Patrick Allington
Patrick Allington's novels are Figurehead (Black Inc. 2009, longlisted for the Miles Franklin Literary Award) and Rise & Shine (Scribe, shortlisted for the Adelaide Festival Awards for Literature). His short fiction, essays, and book criticism have appeared widely, including regularly in ABR. Patrick received the inaugural ABR Patrons’ Fellowship.
Since the November federal election, kicking John Howard while he’s down has become something of a national pastime. While Howard’s take no-prisoners-except-on-Nauru behaviour has now exposed him to gleeful mass taunting, the idea that the end of his resilient political career has instantly created a noble Australia, its citizens and institutions cleansed and renew ed, is wishful thinking. In ... (read more)
The continued success and quality of the Quarterly Essay series has done much to promote the long essay as a legitimate forum for detailed, informed and accessible political discussion. That this has occurred during the Howard era suggests that all is not lost in the quest for genuine public debate. In the latest Quarterly Essay, David Marr acknowledges that, ‘[s]uppression is not systematic. Th ... (read more)
From its opening line – ‘It had been a shit of a day for Sister Annunciata and Sister Clavie’ – Marie Munkara’s collection of stories about life on an island mission in northern Australia is a raw, hilarious and penetrating chronicle. The two nuns stare at the sky waiting for the bishop. His plane overshoots the airstrip and lands with a ‘resounding crump’. It is as if the bishop – ... (read more)
These writer’s scribblings, handsomely reproduced, cover two distinct periods in Murray Bail’s life: London from 1970 to 1974; and Sydney from 1988 to 2003. The notebooks from the London period, which represent roughly two-thirds of this book, were previously published as Longhand: A Writer’s Notebook (1989). While readers may find some interest in comparing the formative and the mature writ ... (read more)
David Malouf’s The Complete Stories brings together the three and a bit books, spanning twenty-five years, that constitute his forays into shorter fiction: Antipodes (1985), Dream Stuff (2000), and Every Move You Make (2006), along with two stories that accompanied his novella Child’s Play (1982). Given that this is a collection rather than a selection – no stories are cut from the earlier b ... (read more)
This issue of open access e-journal Transnational Literature offers contributions from a 2009 symposium on migration, held in Adelaide. It is a diverse collection, appropriately so given persistent themes of dislocation, assimilation and multiculturalism. Still, perhaps diversity has its limits: the issue is burdened with Graeme Harper’s keynote symposium address, a ponderous and misplaced comme ... (read more)
Douglas Adams’s The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (1979) suggests that the Babel fish, which, when inserted into the ear, offers instant translations of any alien language, cannot have evolved by mere chance. Similarly, proponents of Intelligent Design (ID) argue that, as Robyn Williams summarises, ‘there are parts of the natural world so complex and engineered with such precision that on ... (read more)
From its raw and revelatory prologue, Nigel Featherstone’s novel Bodies of Men offers a thoroughly humanising depiction of Australians during World War II. In telling the story of two soldiers, William – too young to be a corporal – and his childhood friend James, Featherstone reflects upon the brutality, drudgery, and absurdity of war but also on the two men’s love and regard for each oth ... (read more)
In his fiction, Steven Carroll stretches and slows time. He combines this with deliberate over-explaining and repetition, the echoing of memories and ideas, coincidence, and theatricality. A distinctive rhythm results: when reading his work, I often find myself nodding in time to the words. Occasionally – and it happens now and again in his new novel, A New England Affair – the prose starts to ... (read more)