Australian Book Review

In this week’s ABR podcast, David Rolph, Professor of Law at the University of Sydney, analyses the implications of the aborted Murdoch v Crikey defamation case concerning the January 6 attacks on the Capital building. Rolph argues that it was set to be an early test of the new public interest defence within federal defamation law but that Lachlan Murdoch likely dropped the action because of its implications for legal proceedings in the US involving his media company. Listen to David Rolph, the author of books including Reputation, Celebrity and Defamation Law, read ‘Who blinks first: Lachlan Murdoch v Crikey’, from the June issue of ABR.

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Read the advances from the June 2023 issue of ABR.

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This week on the ABR Podcast we feature the 2023 Calibre Essay winner, ‘Flow States’, by Tracy Ellis. ‘Flow States’ begins with a single drop of water produced by a household tap left running. From here, Ellis crafts a tale on the obliterative power – real, existential, and metaphorical – of floodwater. Tracy Ellis, a Sydney-based editor, was the winner of the 2022 ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize and thus becomes the first writer to win two separate ABR prizes. Listen to Tracy Ellis read ‘Flow States’. ... (read more)

In this week’s ABR Podcast, Gordon Pentland examines the theatrical impulses of contemporary British politics. He argues that these performative elements are an attempt to capture widespread nostalgia for the British past. Gordon Pentland is Professor of History at Monash University and a specialist on the political history of Britain since the late eighteenth century. ‘Parlour games: Britain and the anaesthesia of nostalgia’ is published in the May issue of ABR. ... (read more)

This week, on the ABR Podcast, we look at a major exhibition at the Art Gallery of South Australia, ‘Andy Warhol and Photography: A Social Media’. Ten years in the making, ‘Andy Warhol and Photography’ demonstrates the multiple ways in which Warhol’s aesthetic anticipated the social-media world we live in today, perhaps even helping give rise to it. Patrick Flanery is a novelist and Chair of Creative Writing at the University of Adelaide.

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This week’s ABR Podcast is a commentary from writer and psychologist Debi Hamilton on the world’s growing addiction to background noise. With sound in increasing volumes filling ever more space – from taxis to restaurants, gyms to shops – what does it function to do, psychologically and socially? ... (read more)

In this week’s ABR Podcast, Tony Hughes-d’Aeth reviews Alexis Wright’s new novel, Praiseworthy. Expectations are high: after all, Wright is the only author to have won both the Miles Franklin Award and the Stella Prize.

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This week’s podcast features a review from ABR Editor Peter Rose of Darryl Pinckney’s absorbing new memoir, Come Back in September: A literary education on West Sixty-Seventh Street, Manhattan. The book recounts Pinckney’s early years in New York and his unlikely friendship with Elizabeth Hardwick, the American literary critic, novelist and short-story writer.

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In December last year, the Art Gallery of New South Wales launched its Sydney Modern project, the centerpiece of which was an extraordinary new building overlooking Sydney Harbour. Sydney Modern has received mixed reviews, some lamenting that it seems to have been designed as a chic backdrop for Instagram selfies. In this week’s ABR podcast, Julie Ewington, an arts curator and broadcaster, describes her first encounter with Sydney Modern in a piece titled ‘Lyrical layers at AGNSW’, published in the April issue of ABR.

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In this week’s ABR podcast, James Curran considers the response of Asia-Pacific nations to the government’s decision to retain AUKUS, the major foreign affairs initiative of the Morrison government. In seeking to shape this response, Foreign Minister Penny Wong’s message is necessarily complex, argues Curran.

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