Tony Horwitz, fêted American journalist-historian, died in 2019 – on the last Monday in May, a day when America ritually honours its war dead and heralds the beginning of summer. Horwitz was sixty. For his wife, Australian journalist and novelist Geraldine Brooks, his death was more than an ironic anomaly: it was an inconceivable rupture in time:

Rosalie Gascoigne seems exemplary of the popular fable of the late-blooming woman artist. Famously, her first exhibition was in 1974, when she was fifty-seven. This swiftly led to national recognition, then international exposure at the 1982 Venice Biennale. So this is a story for the times. But the achievement of Nicola Francis, the artist’s biographer, is to unpack how, in Gascoigne’s case, artistic success in later life was the result of long, careful training in two other creative pursuits: flower arranging, as taught by the English authority Constance Spry; then, crucially, training and a thriving career in the most radical form of ikebana, the Japanese art of flower arrangement, through the Sogetsu School popularised in Australia by Norman Sparnon.

Venice is a vast project for an historian. Dennis Romano has written what he calls a ‘remarkable history’, generous in its pursuit over 600 pages, with eighty-five pages of impeccable documentation. It is a revisionary history, not only because Romano goes beyond the end of the Republic in 1797, when Napoleon conquered Venice and planted a Tree of Liberty in St Mark’s Square. The three chapters on Modern and Contemporary Venice bring Romano’s history to the present day.

Ben Sando Ode’, the second poem in Ken Bolton’s new collection, Metropole, begins with an epigraph from Ted Berrigan: ‘My dream a drink / with Ira Hayes / we discuss the code of the west.’ The poem is pure Bolton: a jovial flâneur perambulates through both external space – Adelaide, where passers-by make ‘BIZARRE ATTEMPTS / AT NORMALCY’ – and an inner life brimming with peers and heroes, quotations, non sequiturs, art criticism, existential musings, and the hum of a poem being made.

Gregory Day is a writer and musician from the west coast of Victoria. He lives on Wadawurrung country. Gregory is a winner of the Australian Literature Society Gold Medal, the Nature Conservancy Australia Nature Writing Prize, and the Patrick White Award for his ongoing contribution to Australian literature. He has twice been shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Award, most recently in 2024 for The Bell of the World. His newest collection, Southsightedness, was published in April by Transit Lounge.

Product placement, admittedly not a term in vogue in Madame Melba’s time (1861-1931), was lucratively and occasionally indiscriminately deployed in her name. Since that name was itself an invention (one decided upon in late 1886, by Mrs Armstrong, née Mitchell, at the behest of her teacher, Madame Marchesi), it was officially or blatantly unofficially applied to everything from throat lozenges and mouthwash to cigarettes, motorcycles, and a sewing machine. Then, of course, there are Escoffier’s tasty tributes: Pêches Melba and Melba Toast – and let’s not forget that small town in Idaho, Melba (pop. 600). This was named not directly after Nellie, but a Melba once removed: the daughter of the man who founded the town in 1912. At the time, Melba was as fashionable a name for newborn girls in the United States as it was in Britain.

Dear Editor,

Apropos of Joel Deane’s review of Ross Garnaut’s book Let’s Tax Carbon, for all the blame placed on a supposedly but in fact hugely diversified homogenised media, Deane ignores the role of the public (ABR, March 2025). This very magazine remains a key platform for intellectuals both to review and present thought and contribute to it, but the average reader is a non-combatant, lulled by comfort and a sort of existential hopelessness into indifference.

Of  Gustav Mahler’s numerous military sorties, ‘Wo die schönen Trompeten blasen’, a miniature from Des Knaben Wunderhorn, is surely the most affecting. It is the eve of battle, and a young woman is visited by her lover, distant trumpet fanfares and dull drumbeats in the air. But perhaps the lover is already dead and it is his spirit she encounters – or it is a premonition of what the morrow will bring. Regardless, Mahler evokes a mixture of tenderness and gloomy foreboding as the young soldier tells his lover that he is going to the green heath far away. ‘There where the splendid trumpets sound / There is my home of green turf.’

for Yumna Kassab

As the bridge appears the train changes its music
Hollow and open like a drum
Every sentence curves to amplify itself the way blue
                springs over and we say ‘sky’

This book is welcome. The purchase of Blue Poles, the most expensive American painting ever bought by an Australian gallery – for more than US$2 million in 1973 – brought into focus a range of Australian cultural and political attitudes of the 1970s. But what are we to make of the subtitle? Was Blue Poles really ‘the painting that changed a nation’?