First Nations

A Savage Turn Luke Patterson Magabala Books Hachette ISBN: 9781922777928 Reviewed by MICHAEL GRIFFITHS The opening poem of the third and final section of Luke Patterson’s A Savage Turn sees the speaker partly attached to but mostly scathing about his place of birth, Kurnell—the suburb of Sydney’s Sutherland shire that sits at the location of […]

Alien Daughters Walk Into the Sun: An Almanac of Extreme Girlhood, Jackie Wang SemioText(e)/Penguin 9781635901924 Reviewed by TIMMAH BALL Who is the type of person who writes books?  Channel that violence. I want to live in language in a way that makes sense to me. I want to use these words in a way that […]

Marion Kickett is a Noongar woman from the Noongar nation and Balardong language group. She has family connections to Wongatha and Yamatji countries. Born in the wheatbelt town of York, Western Australia she spent her early life on the York reserve and commenced school from here. Although Marion has dedicated her career to the fields […]

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 […]

Not Telling by Alison J. Barton Puncher & Wattmann Reviewed by ANTHEA YANG   In Not Telling, Alison J. Barton paints an expansive portrait of memory, family, culture and the personal and collective grief and trauma caused by the colonisation of Australia. Weaving through the collection’s three main sections, and binding the themes together, is […]

Alison J Barton is a Wiradjuri poet based in Melbourne. Themes of race relations, Aboriginal-Australian history, colonisation, gender and psychoanalytic theory are central to her poetry. She was the inaugural winner of the Cambridge University First Nations Writer-in-Residence Fellowship and received a Varuna Mascara Residency. Her debut collection, Not Telling is published by Puncher and […]

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 […]

Dorothy Lune is a Yorta Yorta poet, born in Australia & a best of the net 2024 nominee. Her poems have appeared in Overland journal, Many Nice Donkeys & more. She is looking to publish her manuscripts, can be found online @dorothylune, & has a substack at https://dorothylune.substack.com/ Author photo: royalty free picture of a […]

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 […]

Vale Alf Taylor (18.11.1945 – 29.7.2023)       Last weekend brought sad news of the passing of Alf Taylor. Alf, a Yuat Nyoongar man, brought his unique perspective to bear on the fields of Aboriginal literature in particular and of Australian Literature more generally for nearly three decades. He produced a substantial opus which […]

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 to […]

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 […]