First Nations

Apron-Sorrow / Sovereign-Tea by Natalie Harkin Wakefield Press Reviewed by SAMUEL COX   It is not merely the spaces we inhabit in the present, nor the connections we hold, which give us our sense of self, there is another unstable and contested dimension which stretches away from us and back into the present to inflect […]

Stories of the Tanganekald Jacob Stengle 2021 ALLSA Reviewed by SAMUEL COX Emu and Brolga © Jacob Stengle 2021 “From time immemorial” – David Unaipon   For the first time, Stories of the Tanganekald: a collection of ancient stories from the Coorong, South Australia shares the narratives of the Tanganekald, a language of the Ngarrindjeri […]

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 […]

Bila Yarrudhanggalangdhuray by Anita Heiss Simon and Schuster      Reviewed by BRENDA SAUNDERS   In the ‘Prologue’, to her novel, Heiss introduces us to Aboriginal tribal life at the onset of colonial expnsion in southern NSW. This is Gundagai in 1838. She provides the historical setting for the action and events to follow. At […]

Born Into This by Adam Thompson ISBN 9780702263118 UQP Reviewed by DAVE CLARK   As a technique pioneered and refined over the past hundred years, keyhole surgery involves a surgeon making small incisions in the skin, so tiny that at times it is hard to tell afterwards that something significant has taken place beneath the […]

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 […]

Samia Goudie is a Queer Bundjalung woman currently living on Ngunnawal country. She has published widely both as an academic working in health and the arts, and as a film and digital story maker. Samia is a member of Canberra based UsMob writers and FNAWN, First Nations Australian writers network. She has received an AFC […]

Where the Fruit Falls by Karen Wyld UWAP ISBN: 978-1-76080-157-1 Reviewed by ANNE BREWSTER   Karen Wyld’s Where the Fruit Falls is an important new novel in the field of Australian Aboriginal literature and a tribute to the work of UWAP under the stewardship of its out-going director Terri-Ann White who, as Wyld says in […]

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 […]

Nicole Smede is a musician, poet and educator of Worimi and European heritage, exploring a reclamation and reconnection to ancestry through language, poetry and song. Her work has been broadcast on national and international radio, published in anthologies and journals and features on ferries, in visual art and sound art works. Nicole is grateful to […]

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 […]