This handsome book is a strange beast: half official report, half pitch to potential clients, half lavishly illustrated history of four decades of collecting Australian art. Clearly, this does not add up. Which is a pity, because Artbank is important to the current visibility, and popular success, of contemporary art in Australia.

1.     worlds inside brown eyes
2.     a figure in a bed
3.     stars in summer
4.     women of clay

The title of Keri Glastonbury’s latest collection of poems, 51 Alterities, evokes the title of 81 Austerities (2012) by the English poet Sam Riviere. Glastonbury’s collection is, according to its author, ‘offered as a loose “antipodean” adaptation’ of 81 Austerities, a collection that was written ‘in response to the impact of austerity measures on the arts and as a provocation on poetry as a contemporary media in the internet age’. Post-internet poetry, taking on as it does the syntax and lexis of internet discourse (especially, but not wholly, that used in social media), has become a dominant style in contemporary Anglophone poetry. When 81 Austerities was reviewed by The Daily Telegraph the headline was ‘Poetry for the Facebook Age’. Such a caption now seems laughably dated, and perhaps a little naïve, suggesting something of the dangers of writing post-internet poetry. A decade is a long time in cyberspace.

The unbelievable lacework of it all – the patterns and linkages, the flickerings of knowledge and mystery, the astonishing shapes – is what Anne Coombs’s Our Familiars: The meaning of animals in our lives explores. This is a family book; specifically, a multi-species family book. Intimacies made between bodies is the soil in which the work is grown. And it comes from a writer who spent a lifetime thinking about, writing for, and working towards companionship, co-operation, and the safety of others. It is a posthumous publication too; a work fed and raised by Coombs, but finished, edited, and carried into the world by Susan Varga, Anne’s partner of thirty-three years, and close friend Joyce Morgan. Coombs died in December 2021, not long after the Black Summer fires and the Covid-19 pandemic – a time when all our interdependencies were raging (as they continue to).

Suitcase red girl teenager together

New space time moving thataway

Farewell waving family people mindset

Although the tone of their commentaries differs, Jessa Crispin’s What Is Wrong with Men and Simon James Copland’s The Male Complaint are, more or less, examining the same thing: the workings of the patriarchy in general and what specifically has gone wrong, especially in recent times, with what Crispin refers to as ‘the tug of war’ between men and women.

Outsiders, mostly white men seeking answers to burning existential questions, have long been ineluctably drawn to Australian deserts. The continental interior, with its deep-time mysteries, has lured not only explorers on fatal quests, but also lone anthropologists, philosophers, and other restless wanderers in search of themselves, burdened with their interrogations and yearnings for higher truth.

Soon after the conclusion of the 1948 Arnhem Land expedition, its leader, Charles Pearcy Mountford, an ethnologist and filmmaker, was celebrated by the National Geographic Society, a key sponsor of the expedition, along with the Smithsonian Institution in Washington DC and the Commonwealth Department of Information. In presenting Mountford with the Franklin L. Burr Prize and praising his ‘outstanding leadership’, the Society effectively honoured his success in presenting himself as the leader of a team of scientists working together in pursuit of new frontiers of knowledge. But this presentation is best read as theatre. The expedition’s scientific achievements were middling at best and, behind the scenes, the turmoil and disagreement that had characterised the expedition continued to rage.

Who should we celebrate, or perhaps fault, for the publishing success of books labelled ‘outback noir’ in Australia over the past decade? Our starting point could be Jane Harper’s bestselling book The Dry (2016). The cornerstone of the genre for the author of The Leap, Paul Daley, is the seminal Kenneth Cook novel, Wake in Fright, first published in 1961. The longevity of the novel owes much to the 1971 feature film of the same name, directed by Ted Kotcheff, remembered for the infamous filming of a visceral Kangaroo shoot and the actor Donald Pleasence playing a most unpleasant lech. The Wolf Creek film franchise also deserves an honourable mention, along with its larrikin psychopathic killer, Mick Taylor, if not the real-life mass murderer, Ivan Milat himself.

The death of the white male novelist, lately the subject of a fistful of literary think-pieces, has been greatly exaggerated. Yet it is a truth widely acknowledged that such authors now lack much of the cultural cachet that they once brazenly wielded. The challenge for these writers has been to transmute themselves into narrative subjects more palatable to the sensibilities of a shifting readership. Some continue to doggedly write self-adjacent fictions; others have willed a kind of metamorphosis, their subjectivities transposed or otherwise suppressed. Then there are those that try to do both. In the case of Rhett Davis’s Arborescence, this results in a novel with a striking elevator pitch: it is about people turning into trees.