Brian Matthews

Brian Matthews reviews 'Eyrie' by Tim Winton

November 2013, no. 356 • 30 October 2013

Tim Winton’s Eyrie begins with one word standing alone like a defiant minimalist paragraph: ‘So.’ Not so strange, because ‘so’ is a popular, usually sarcastic or ironic opening gambit in the argot of twenty-first-century Letters to the Editor – ‘So Tony Abbott has refused to …’; ‘So Michael Clark thinks his team can …’, etc. – and likewise many of the Twittersphere’s s ... (read more)

Brian Matthews reviews 'Coal Creek' by Alex Miller

October 2013, no. 355 • 26 September 2013

The writing of a novel, Alex Miller has said, ‘is a kind of journey of the imagination in which there’s the liberty to dream your own dream … There’s always got to be a model located somewhere in fact and reality … But some of your best characters are what you think of as being purely made up, just characters that needed to be there.’ There is no way of telling and no need to know if ... (read more)

Brian Matthews reviews 'The Auckland University Press Anthology of New Zealand Literature' edited by Jane Stafford and Mark Williams

June 2013, no. 352 • 26 May 2013

To begin at the beginning. ‘When the first Pakeha ship came,’ Te Horeta told the explorer Charles Heaphy, ‘I was a lad … [about twelve years old].’ Watching the ‘white people’ row ashore, ‘paddling with their backs to the way they were going’, the boy and his companions ‘thought they must have eyes behind their heads’. ... (read more)

Brian Matthews reviews 'On Warne' by Gideon Haigh

December 2012–January 2013, no. 347 • 27 November 2012

In his The Art of Wrist-Spin Bowling (1995), Peter Philpott remarks: ‘If there is one factor in spin bowling which all spinners should accept … it is the concept that the ball should be spun hard. Not rolled, not gently turned, but flicked, ripped, fizzed.’ Richie Benaud agrees: ‘Spin it fiercely. Spin it hard.’ The intensity of the grip that produces ‘fizz’ will also often result in ... (read more)

Brian Matthews reviews 'Montebello: A memoir' by Robert Drewe

November 2012, no. 346 • 25 October 2012

Robert Drewe’s first memoir, The Shark Net (2000) – an account of ‘memories and murder’ – opens in the transforming ‘different sunlight’ of a courtroom, a light that seems ‘harsher, dustier, more ancient looking’, making the figure in the dock somehow ‘uglier, smaller’, ‘like a criminal in a B-movie’, the very ‘stereotype of a crook’. ... (read more)