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Georgina Arnott
Georgina Arnott has been Assistant Editor at Australian Book Review since 2022. She is the author of The Unknown Judith Wright (UWAP, 2016), shortlisted for the National Biography Award, Judith Wright: Selected Writings (La Trobe University Press, 2022), and numerous book chapters, essays, and articles in the field of Australian literary studies, history and biography, as well as the writer/producer of an episode of Radio National’s History Listen. Georgina is a former judge of the National Biography Award (2018, 2019), an ABC Top 5 Humanities Scholar (2021), and a Rockefeller Archive Center fellow (2024).
The Apprentice begins with footage of Richard Nixon addressing a television audience. It is 1973 and the Senate Watergate hearings are underway. ‘People have got to know whether or not their president is a crook … Well, I’m not a crook,’ Nixon intones.
This new Donald Trump biopic, anchored to the real world through such archival footage, is being released at a similarly consequential pol ... (read more)
Tasting Life Twice is a collection of twenty-six interviews conducted by Ramona Koval over the past ten years at literary festivals, on radio programmes and in the homes of such writers as Les Murray, Morris West and Joseph Heller. Any randomly selected shortlist of these writers would impress: among them are Toni Morrison, Michael Ondaatje and P.D. James, and some who have recently passed away: S ... (read more)
What makes a good short story? Zoe Dattner and Louise Swinn, editors of the fifth Sleepers Almanac, say there is no objective measure of quality; that everyone likes something different; and that they simply choose what appeals. As I sit down with their funky-looking volume, I don’t want to believe it. If that is the case, there is no place for literary critics, no real justification for academi ... (read more)
If you believe the hyperbole surrounding her novel – Christos Tsiolkas has pronounced it ‘masterful, poignant, powerful and true’ – Kalinda Ashton is, at thirty-one, her generation’s answer to Helen Garner: a novelist of everyday Melbourne who makes sad, daily truths pleasurable to read because her writing is so easy to consume.
The Danger Game is, at one level, a family saga and a love ... (read more)
Islands, as recent histories of immigration detention and quarantine show, offer unique things to human societies. Rimmed by a watery bulwark, they have more surveyable borders than do mainlands. Their status as sublands suggest that they exist outside the conventions and temporal dimensions of larger, mainland societies. What happens on an island stays on an island; at least, island prison warder ... (read more)
Janet Malcolm knew the difference between the remembered thing and the thing itself. Her writing life and 1984 masterpiece, In the Freud Archives, explored that crevice, asking: is what really matters how we experience life, not life itself?
This makes the photograph a curious thing: its captured details seem to prove memory. An immaculately groomed, smiling mother cradles her wriggling, blurry o ... (read more)
William C. Clarke cuts an interesting figure. An anthropologist who has concentrated on Pacific populations, Clarke combined this discipline with an interest in poetry in his 2000 lecture ‘Pacific Voices, Pacific Views: Poets as Commentators on the Contemporary Pacific’. Clarke used his poetry as a vehicle for considering issues such as land tenure, corruption, and tourism. It is angry, astute ... (read more)
‘To fully understand why the shadow of slavery haunts us today, we must confront the flawed way that it ended.’ This premise guides the third book of Kris Manjapra, a Bahamian of African and Indian descent and history professor at Massachusetts’s Tufts University. As Manjapra invites us to see, the ‘voids’ in his family’s history reflect the pernicious afterlife of five hundred years o ... (read more)
On the fortieth anniversary of the 1967 referendum, the Weekend Australian editorial devoted considerable time to savaging the dominant 1970s model of indigenous development, most closely associated with Nugget Coombs: a ‘neo-pastoralist dream [that was] philosophically flawed, a fatal fusion of romanticism and Marxism’. Helen Hughes, in an excerpt from Lands of Shame in the same newspaper, ec ... (read more)