Georgina Arnott is Assistant Editor of Australian Book Review. She is the author of The Unknown Judith Wright (UWAP, 2016) and Judith Wright: Selected Writings (La Trobe University Press, 2022).
William C. Clarke cuts an interesting figure. An anthropologist who has concentrated on Pacific populations, Clarke combined this discipline with an interest in poetry in his 2000 lecture ‘Pacific Voices, Pacific Views: Poets as Commentators on the Contemporary Pacific’. Clarke used his poetry as a vehicle for considering issues such as land tenure, corruption, and tourism. It is angry, astute ... (read more)
‘To fully understand why the shadow of slavery haunts us today, we must confront the flawed way that it ended.’ This premise guides the third book of Kris Manjapra, a Bahamian of African and Indian descent and history professor at Massachusetts’s Tufts University. As Manjapra invites us to see, the ‘voids’ in his family’s history reflect the pernicious afterlife of five hundred years o ... (read more)
On the fortieth anniversary of the 1967 referendum, the Weekend Australian editorial devoted considerable time to savaging the dominant 1970s model of indigenous development, most closely associated with Nugget Coombs: a ‘neo-pastoralist dream [that was] philosophically flawed, a fatal fusion of romanticism and Marxism’. Helen Hughes, in an excerpt from Lands of Shame in the same newspaper, ec ... (read more)
More than a journal, Indigo represents a vibrant creative writing movement based around the Fremantle Arts Centre. Submissions are accepted from those who currently reside in Western Australia or who have lived there for at least ten years. But why start a journal for Western Australian writing alone? Is there something distinctive about Western Australian experience? Certainly, the way sandgroper ... (read more)
Here we have one brand new literary journal, Etchings, and one which, by comparison, is practically geriatric: Famous Reporter. There is now a proliferation of literary journals, and SPUNC (Small Press Underground Networking Community) has emerged to advance their cause. We know that mainstream publishing is producing less diverse material, and that it is increasingly not Australian. The vast majo ... (read more)
In August 1823, Quamina Gladstone and his son Jack led an uprising in the British sugar colony of Demerara where they were held as slaves. The men believed that the British parliament had voted to abolish slavery and that this was being concealed from them. The colonists quashed the rebellion with firepower, torture, and execution. Something had happened in Britain’s parliament: the Anti-Slavery ... (read more)
Switched On showcases the careers of twenty-nine ‘influential’ women who work in the media. Catherine Hanger, interviewer and former editor of Vogue Australia, believes that Switched On ‘connects two major spheres of influence in our society – the media and the women who work in it’ – and argues that the influence of these women is ‘very powerful indeed’. While the title promises ... (read more)
In 2007, Britain’s Royal Mint issued a £2 coin commemorating two hundred years since the Act for the Abolition of the Slave Trade, the zero in ‘1807’ appearing as if a broken link in a chain. While interrupting the notorious transatlantic trade, the Act did not end slavery itself – that was achieved, at least in parts of the British world, with further legislation in 1833 that outlawed en ... (read more)
