Kerryn Goldsworthy

Kerryn Goldsworthy reviews 'Sweeney and the Bicycles' by Philip Salom

November 2022, no. 448 • 25 October 2022

Philip Salom, now in his early seventies, has been a steady presence in Australian literature for more than four decades. Until a few years ago he was mainly known as a poet. He has published fourteen collections and won two awards for lifetime achievement in that field. Having turned to fiction in 2015, he has now published six novels. In Sweeney and the Bicycles, he returns to themes that have w ... (read more)

Kerryn Goldsworthy reviews 'Dear Writer' by Carmel Bird

July 1988, no. 102 • 02 September 2022

Auden said once that you couldn’t teach people to be writers, but that what you could do was teach them grammar, prosody, and rhetoric. This remark or some version of it has become the standard defence, like a chess move, when people attack (as they are strongly wont to do) the whole notion of teaching creative writing at all. Most of the how-to books on the subject begin with some such disclaim ... (read more)

Kerryn Goldsworthy reviews 'Island 107' and 'Griffith Review 15'

June 2007, no. 292 • 26 August 2022

It may be the global unease of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries that is causing Australian writers and thinkers to focus more and more on ‘place’: on the fractures and fissures between the homogenising impulse of the nationalist project, on the one hand, and on the other, the impossibility of constructing Australia as a sociological monolith. The current issues of these two ... (read more)

'Abbreviations' by Kerryn Goldsworthy

July 1986, no. 82 • 08 June 2022

I had sworn, in my editorial capacity, not to reinforce or allow to be reinforced, by word or deed, the old Sydney vs. Melbourne scenario in the pages of this magazine; but I realised very quickly that this was a case of one’s reach exceeding one’s grasp. The construction of this inter-city relationship as ‘St Petersburg or Tinsel Town?’, with its suggestion of two (and only two) opposing ... (read more)

Kerryn Goldsworthy reviews 'The Chosen' by David Ireland

September 1997, no. 194 • 01 September 1997

Like much else about this novel, its title The Chosen is not the relatively straightforward affair it may, at first, appear to be. One assumes for the first hundred pages or so that the ‘chosen’ are those citizens of the small NSW Southern Tablelands town of Lost River who have been chosen by a randomising computer program to have their lives represented in the commemorative tapestry being wov ... (read more)

Kerryn Goldsworthy reviews 'Dark Places' by Kate Grenville

July 1994, no. 162 • 01 July 1994

It seems like a slender connecting thread, but reading Kate Grenville’s new novel, Dark Places, reminded me of an experience I had hoped I’d forgotten: reading American Psycho. Reading stories with repellent narrators is like being left alone in a locked room with somebody you’d edge away from if you met him, or her, in a bar. Such stories are unsettling in the way that good satire is unset ... (read more)

Kerryn Goldsworthy reviews 'The Children’s Bach' by Helen Garner

February–March 1985, no. 68 • 01 February 1985

The characters in Helen Garner’s new novella The Children’s Bach make up the kind of social molecule in at least one of which all of us feature as an atom. Athena, who emerges as the core character, runs a household of, initially, four: herself, her husband Dexter Fox (we are not told what surname Athena uses), and their sons Arthur and the ‘strange’ Billy. Then there’s Elizabeth, with ... (read more)

Telecom Australian Voices | 'In the Flesh: Watching writers read' by Kerryn Goldsworthy

December 1992, no. 147 • 01 December 1992

‘To our bodies turn we, then, that soWeak men on love revealed may look;Love’s mysteries in souls may growBut yet the body is his book.’ John Donne, ‘The Ecstasy’ ‘...the unstable self, the fractured ego, Maud thought, who ... am I? A matrix for a susurration of texts and codes? It was both a pleasant and an unpleasant idea, this requirement that she thinks of herself as interm ... (read more)

Survey | Kerryn Goldsworthy reviews the 1987 National Book Council Awards for Australian Literature shortlist

February–March 1987, no. 88 • 01 February 1987

‘If you can’t say something nice,’ my mother always said, ‘don’t say anything at all.’ (I pinch this opening gambit, shamelessly, from Kate Grenville’s Self-Portrait in the last ABR, and hope she does not mind; imitation is the sincerest form etc.) Apropos of parental expectations regarding niceness-or-silence, however, I am reminded of a remark of Elizabeth Jolley’s: ‘I think my ... (read more)

Kerryn Goldsworthy reviews 'Radicals: Remembering the Sixties' by Meredith Burgmann and Nadia Wheatley

July 2021, no. 433 • 22 June 2021

Studying at the University of Sydney in the late 1960s, Meredith Burgmann and Nadia Wheatley were both living in Women’s College. Burgmann recalls: Very late one night when I was sitting in my room, struggling with John Donne … I heard a clump clump clump coming along the corridor. Opening my door, I discovered Nadia – wearing a red flannel nightie and gumboots – on her nightly mission ... (read more)