Kerryn Goldsworthy

Kerryn Goldsworthy reviews 'Drylands' by Thea Astley

September 1999, no. 214 • 06 August 2019

Do not attempt to judge this book by its amazingly beautiful but iconographically confusing cover. A close-up photograph of a single leaf shows its veins and pores in tiny detail. The colours are the most pastel and tender of creamy greens. Superimposed over this lush and suggestively fertile image is the book’s one-word title: Drylands. I love Thea Astley’s writing and always have. I love it ... (read more)

Kerryn Goldsworthy reviews 'Dreams of Speaking' by Gail Jones

February 2006, no. 278 • 01 February 2006

If you can say immediately what you think a novel is ‘about’, then the chances are that it may not be a very good novel. Fiction as a genre gives writers and readers imaginative room to move, to work on a vertical axis of layers of meaning as well as along the horizontal forward movement of narrative development. But when hesitating over the question ‘what is this novel about?’, one good ... (read more)

Kerryn Goldsworthy reviews 'Fled' by Meg Keneally

June–July 2019, no. 412 • 23 May 2019

In 1961 the great Australian poet Judith Wright published an influential essay called ‘The Upside-down Hut’ that would puzzle contemporary readers. The basis of its argument was that Australia felt shame about its convict origins, and that we needed to move on. And we have: since 1961 the representation of the convict era in fiction and on screen has undergone a shift. Having convict ancestry ... (read more)

Kerryn Goldsworthy reviews 'A History of South Australia' by Paul Sendziuk and Robert Foster

April 2019, no. 410 • 25 March 2019

The first volume in this series, Beverley Kingston’s A History of New South Wales, was published in 2006. Since then another five have appeared, including a book on Tasmania by Henry Reynolds and another on Victoria by Geoffrey Blainey. Cambridge University Press may be proceeding with its ‘History of Australian States’ series at a leisurely pace, but it has secured some leading lights among ... (read more)

Kerryn Goldsworthy reviews 'Elizabeth Costello: Eight lessons' by J.M. Coetzee

October 2003, no. 255 • 01 October 2003

Something like a double helix of dialectical thinking winds its graceful way through these ‘eight lessons’. Ideas and theories about the nature of human (and other) life and how to live it, about the workings and the relative merits of logic, reason, belief, and faith, are sketched, rehearsed, debated, and set in opposition to each other throughout these eight episodes in the life of J.M. Coet ... (read more)

Kerryn Goldsworthy reviews 'The Secret River' by Kate Grenville

August 2005, no. 273 • 01 August 2005

Kate Grenville is a brave woman. For some years now, the representation of Aboriginal people by white writers has been hedged about by a thicket of post­colonial anxieties, profoundly problematic and important but too often manifested as hostile, holier-than-thou critique, indulging, at its most inept, in wilfully skewed readings of the fiction in order to fit the thesis. As if that were not e ... (read more)

Kerryn Goldsworthy reviews 'The Year of The Beast' by Steven Carroll

March 2019, no. 409 • 22 February 2019

In his 2017 essay ‘Notes for a Novel’, illuminatingly added as a kind of afterword at the end of this book, Steven Carroll recalls a dream that he had twenty years ago. It was this dream, he says, that grew into a series of novels centred on the Melbourne suburb of Glenroy, a series of which this novel is the sixth and last. It was a vivid dream about my old street in Glenroy where I grew u ... (read more)

Kerryn Goldsworthy reviews 'Her Mother’s Daughter: A memoir' by Nadia Wheatley

September 2018, no. 404 • 23 August 2018

When John Norman Wheatley met Nina Watkin in Germany in 1946, he would have regarded her as a lesser being on all fronts: woman to his man, forty to his forty-eight, Australian to his English, nurse to his doctor. They met as fellow employees of the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA), working with wartime refugees from an assortment of European countries. In this heart ... (read more)

'The Oily Ratbag and the Recycled Waratah: Early Years of ABR' by Kerryn Goldsworthy

April 2003, no. 250 • 01 April 2003

This is issue no. 250, and the twenty-fifth consecutive year, of Australian Book Review. Issue No. 1 appeared in 1978, edited by John McLaren and published by the National Book Council. Since then the journal has survived and thrived, through changes of editor (though not very often) and of editorial policy (though not very much); through changes of appearance, ownership, sponsorship and affiliati ... (read more)

Kerryn Goldsworthy reviews 'The Death of Noah Glass' by Gail Jones

April 2018, no. 400 • 23 March 2018

Noah Glass is dead, his fully clothed body discovered floating face down in the swimming pool of his Sydney apartment block, early one morning. Born in Perth in 1946, father of two adult children, widower, Christian, art historian, and specialist in the painting of fifteenth-century artist Piero della Francesca, Noah has just returned from a trip to Palermo. There he celebrated his sixty-seventh b ... (read more)