First Nations

The Great Undoing by Sharlene Allsopp Ultimo Press ISBN: 9781761151668 Reviewed by DEBORAH PIKE     Sharlene Allsopp’s debut novel, The Great Undoing, has a great cover that undoes history with a red crayon. Ernest Scott’s A Short History of Australia (1916) is struck out and bold typeface declares an angry and urgent call for […]

Women & Children By Tony Birch UQP ISBN: 9780702266270 Reviewed by PIP NEWLING   Tony Birch holds a rare place in Australian literature – a male writer focused on telling domestic and working class stories. His pages shimmer with the dirt of hard work, difficult choices, and  everyday of life. The joys in reading his […]

Inland Sea by Brenda Saunders Gininderra Press ISBN 9781761091445 Reviewed by BEN HESSION     Inland Sea is the third full collection by Brenda Saunders, a Wiradjuri writer, following a somewhat lengthy hiatus. Saunders’ last collection, The Sound of Red, was published back in 2014. Her debut volume, Looking for Bullin Bullin, had won the […]

Praiseworthy by Alexis Wright ISBN 9781922725325 Giramondo Reviewed by THEODORA GALANIS     ‘Listen!’ cries an oracle. ‘Look proper way. Carefully. See detail, if you want to see properly.’ (p.368). This instruction arrives almost halfway through Alexis Wright’s Praiseworthy, opening the chapter titled, ‘Goddess of Scales’. Before I had reached this page, I was having […]

Harvest Lingo Lionel Fogarty Giramondo ISBN 9781925336177 Reviewed by SAMUEL COX   Despite having been named the ‘poet laureate’ of Aboriginal literature by author Alexis Wright and the ‘greatest living poet in Australia’ by poet John Kinsella, Lionel Fogarty’s poetry, previously published by small independent presses, has remained both critically and popularly underappreciated. I count […]

Song of the Crocodile by Nardi Simpson ISBN 9780733643743 Hachette 2020 Reviewed by PIP NEWLING     To read Song of the Crocodile is to immerse yourself in an unfolding relationship to place. You may not recognise it immediately but the profound connection to place shared by Simpson through this story is a slow build […]

Dropbear by Evelyn Araluen ISBN 978070226318 UQP Reviewed by TIMMAH BALL Dropbear: writing as an act of defiance  when my body is mine i will tell them with belly&bones do not touch this prefix or let you hands burn black with your unsettlement there are no metaphors here -decolonial poetics (avant gubba) Multiple modes and […]

Throat By Ellen Van Neerven UQP Reviewed by DANIEL SLEIMAN     In reading poetry, we look for those rare moments where a creative sequence of words thoroughly subjects our thinking, our feeling and our knowledge to a momentary realisation of reinterpreted or interrupted truth. There are many of those moments one finds while reading […]

Dirty Words by Natalie Harkin Cordite Books ISBN 978-0-994259-63-9 Reviewed by PIP NEWLING ‘Consider this                   words like lives have histories actions     like   knives cut-deep’ (p.23) Natalie Harkin’s first collection of poetry, Dirty Words, illustrates the effects of words down the generations of white Australia’s history. […]

Heat and Light by Ellen Van Neerven UQP ISBN: 978 0 7022 5321 8 Reviewed by Christine Regan In Heat and Light Ellen Van Neerven tells us stories exploring ancestry and identity and the experiences particularly of Aboriginal women and girls in small Australian towns or dwelling on the metaphorical fringes of Brisbane and the […]

Graham Akhurst is currently in his last semester of a Bachelor of Creative Arts in writing at the University of Queensland. Prior to this he completed an Advanced Diploma of Performing Arts from the Aboriginal Centre for the Performing Arts where he studied music, and wrote and co-created several performances that were held at QPAC. […]