Reviews/Essays

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 […]

Murnane by Emmett Stinson Melbourne University Publishing ISBN: 9780522879469 Reviewed by SAMUEL COX   Emmett Stinson’s Murnane offers a critical and enlightening assessment of the Gerald Murnane’s four late fictions, and through these incredibly self-reflexive works, a reading of the eponymous author’s entire oeuvre. Stinson’s superb introduction gives way to chapter- length considerations of Barley […]

H.D. (Hilda Doolittle) by Lara Vetter Reaktion Books ISBN:9781789147599 Reviewed by NAOMI MILTHORPE   It may say more about my own tastes than about the culture more broadly, but most of my reading in the past months has been about misunderstood and multifaceted women. Lara Vetter’s slim critical life of the modernist poet H.D. has […]

But The Girl Jessica Yu Penguin ISBN: 9781761046148 Reviewed by HOLDEN WALKER Jessica Zhan Mei Yu’s novel But The Girl (2023) is the story of protagonist and narrator “Girl”, as she embarks on a study abroad experience in the UK while immersing herself in British culture, contemplating her thesis, attempting to write her novel, and […]

Slipstream By Catherine Cole Valley Press ISBN: 9781915606341 Reviewed by CAROLINE VAN DE POL As an admirer of Catherine Cole’s earlier novels, short story collections and memoir such as Sleep, Seabirds Crying in the Harbour Dark and The Poet Who Forgot, I awaited the publication of her new book, Slipstream: On Memory and Migration, with […]

slack tide by Sarah Day Pitt St Poetry ISBN 978-1-922080-04-2. Reviewed by KATIE HANSORD “Rules are what people think, They aren’t a law of nature”.  (House Like a Folk Tale, 42) Deeply thoughtful and brilliant, Sarah Day’s most recent collection, slack tide (Pitt Street Poetry, 2022), deftly invokes the wider world of natural imagery and […]

Suyanti Winoto-Lewin lives by the Derwent in lutruwita/Tasmania. She is an ecologist working in consulting and land management. Her creative work has been published in Overland Journal, and her research has been published in the Australian Journal of Botany.         On my friend’s ankle Tipping Points On my friend’s ankle, painstakingly inked […]

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 […]