Bruce Pascoe is an award-winning writer and a Yuin and Bunurong man. His books include Dark Emu, Book of the Year at the 2016 NSW Premier’s Literary Awards. He is on the board of First Languages Australia, Black Duck Foods, and is Professor of Indigenous Knowledge at UTS. He was 2018 Dreamtime Person of the Year. He first wrote for ABR in 1979.
John and Dorothy Colmer have produced Pattern and Voice (Macmillan, $10.95 pb, 234 pp), an anthology of verse which will be of interest to all teachers and students of poetry. It has a blend of classic and contemporary poetry and includes many Australian poets.
The soft cover may turn to rag in the hands of Year Nine boys, but for $10.95 you get 233 pages of poetry. It is divided into sections su ... (read more)
During the 1970s, when Nation Review was a newspaper and the Labor Party was fair dinkum, this country spawned cartoonists like mushrooms in a paddock where cows have been defecating in a grand manner. The Vietnam war was on, but that didn’t stop the Melbourne Cup or the Grand Final, and it didn’t improve the economy as expected either.
We found lovely ways to get rid of some frightening chem ... (read more)
Most of the poetry books reviewed come out in issues of less than one thousand, most of them well below five hundred. This must make Australia’s census of avid poetry readers no more than five thousand, or .002%. It is not surprising, then, that most published Australian poetry revolves around the process of writing for the poet’s poetic friends. This creates a very élitist form of communicat ... (read more)
McDonald’s latest novel, Rough Wallaby, carves out a fascinating position in contemporary literature: an intricately constructed, fast paced yam drawing its narrative from a contemporary Australian myth, the Fine Cotton race horse switch.
The intriguing aspect of Wallaby is that it makes no pretence at anything but a great big yam. The yam in Australia is in a position of disgrace, not among re ... (read more)
People produce art to explain and honour the life they know, and to many the short story is a logical medium for that expression. The more futuristic art gurus, however, believe that printed pages are destined for extinction as an art form and that the short story will be first on the Dodo list.
This is hard to believe in Australia where huge numbers of writers use the medium frequently and well. ... (read more)
It was a great moment in Australian history when William Cooper walked to the Australian parliament to object to the treatment of Jews in Germany during World War II. At the time, the British and Australian parliaments were ambivalent about the atrocities occurring across Europe, and yet an Aboriginal man could not bear to see the government of his country sit on its hands.
Cooper knew a thing or ... (read more)
