Black Inc

In the 1990s, seeing a ‘hot-red weapon’ of a motorbike being ridden into the News Corp car park in Sydney, journalist Paddy Manning could not help but ask, ‘What’s that?’ Still wearing his helmet, the rider answered that the bike was an MV Agusta – at which point Manning realised he had yelled at Lachlan Murdoch.

In the introduction to this latest Best Australian Stories, Delia Falconer – in her second and, she advises, last year as editor – contends that the short story has greater affinities with the poem and the essay than with the novel. She rightly identifies the story as often ‘misunderstood in the public imagination as a kind of less demanding novel-in-miniature’. Stories, Falconer argues, are akin to poems in ‘picking their moment’ rather than working in the novel’s ‘great swathes of time’. The short story advances an argument in the way of an essay, while ‘artfully [hiding] its workings’.

In these relentless times, thirty years ago might be prehistory; events now appear to move so breathlessly that the ‘world-changing’ and ‘historic’ occur with terrible regularity. The flip side of this relentlessness and hyperbole is that wars, floods, financial disasters, coups, and political murders are just as quickly forgotten. As we enter a global recession brought on by the twin pincers of the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the lingering Covid-19 pandemic, it is easy to forget two other events still shaping our world: the global financial crisis of fifteen years ago, never fully overcome, and the 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

What would Samuel Johnson have made of sports writing? Not much, I suspect. He believed literature should strike bold notes of moral activism, of ‘Truth’ with a capital T, be an edifier, not merely entertainment. That’s asking a lot of sports writing. Or it may just be asking a lot of Australian sports writing. I mention Johnson only because I happened to be reading his Lives of the English Poets before I began this lump of a book. I know it’s quite an imaginative leap from Johnson’s book to a sports writing anthology, but they are both, in their own way, catalogues of dead and forgotten people and their forgotten deeds. Whoever remembers John Pomfret or Thomas Sprat, seventeenth-century stanza-makers once thought worthy of Dr Johnson’s attention? Who remembers Clarrie Grimmett or Bob Tidyman, sportsmen of eras past, once thought worthy of the Australian media’s attention? Not even Johnson, writing at his verbally ornate best, could make an enthusiastic poetaster like me to want to bother with the Pomfrets and Prats. As for the Grimmetts and Tidymans – I’m a sportstaster with a quick thumb for flicking tiresome pages.

This is the third book dedicated to the koala that I have reviewed in ABR in the past fourteen years. That level of attention says much about the place we hold in our hearts for this endearing marsupial. It also relates to the fascinating natural and social history of the koala, along with the wildlife management conundrums it throws up. The koala is probably the most widely recognised of Australia’s animal species. It is also probably the most studied of our roughly 380 mammalian species, so there is a strong knowledge foundation around which to build a good story.

On the surface, Scott McCulloch’s début novel, Basin, takes place in a brutal and degenerated landscape; the edge of a former empire in a state of violent flux. Rebels, separatists, terrorists, paramilitary groups, and the remnants of imperial forces clash over borders and interzones in the wake of the ‘Collapse’, an undefined geopolitical and ecological disaster. Print and broadcast media warn of inter-ethnic conflict and Rebel advances. Bazaars, brothels, and a chain of Poseidon Hotels all operate amid industrial waste and military checkpoints, servicing the region’s fishermen, soldiers, smugglers, and drifters. There is a multiplicity of language and religion (Abrahamic denominations mingle with archaic, pagan beliefs). Alcohol consumption and illicit drug use are rife. The climate is oppressively humid.

Oh, how I detest tiny books – those cutesy little hardbacks that are sold next to the novelty bookmarks and greeting cards. 101 Reasons Why Dogs/Cats Are Better Than Cats/Dogs; Inspo quotes for Insta feminists; The Pocket Marcus Aurelias (for the stoic on-the-go); The Pocket Tarot (for the soothsayer on-the-go); The Tao of Something. They are the literary equivalent of supermarket checkout chocolates – sugar-fix books. Stocking stuffers. Gag gifts. Op-shop cloggers. Toilet-floor lint collectors.

The brief and unpretentious biography of Noel Pearson on the dust jacket of Mission: Essays, speeches and ideas describes him as ‘a lawyer, activist and founder of the Cape York Institute’. Although surely accurate, this gives little indication of the stature this remarkable man has assumed in Australian public life over the past thirty years. If Pearson is an activist, it is of an unusual kind: one who has combined the roles of insider and outsider, agitator and wonk, intellectual and politician, in highly original and productive ways.

On the wall of Yindjibarndi leader Michael Woodley’s modest office in the Pilbara Aboriginal community of Roebourne hangs a large framed portrait of Muhammad Ali and a pair of boxing gloves. It seems a highly appropriate metaphor for the tale of this small Aboriginal group’s thirteen-year resistance to one of Australia’s most powerful companies, now recounted by former Australian journalist Paul Cleary.