Brenda Walker

Brenda Walker reviews 'Company of Images' by Janine Burke

May 1989, no. 110 • 01 May 1989

Janine Burke’s Company of Images is a funny and socially astute book about painters and their promoters in contemporary Melbourne. The humour comes from sharp observations and deft characterisations. Burke’s minor figures are like good caricatures, but her major characters are a complex blend of impulses and emotions, which can be funny or sad. She takes the opportunity to send up predictably ... (read more)

Brenda Walker reviews 'The Returns' by Philip Salom

September 2019, no. 414 • 27 August 2019

A bookseller, Trevor, sits in his shop in Melbourne making conversation with his customers: an exasperating mixture of confessional, hesitant, deranged, and disruptive members of the public. One man stalks him, armed with an outrageous personal demand; another tries to apologise for assaulting him. The apology is almost as unnerving as the attack. The bookshop is a kind of theatre, with a ceiling ... (read more)

Brenda Walker reviews 'A Lovely and Terrible Thing' by Chris Womersley

May 2019, no. 411 • 21 April 2019

In Chris Womersley’s collection of short fiction, A Lovely and Terrible Thing, a man is caught in a fugue moment. Just after unexpectedly discharging a gun into the body of a stranger, he gazes at his reflection in a darkened window pane: ‘I saw someone outside looking in, before realising it was, in fact, my own reflection hovering like a small, sallow moon in the darkness.’ He stands for s ... (read more)

Brenda Walker reviews 'The Year of the Farmer' by Rosalie Ham

October 2018, no. 405 • 25 September 2018

‘In time and with water, everything changes,’ according to Leonardo da Vinci, who worked with Machiavelli on a strategic and ultimately doomed attempt to channel the flow of the Arno. Large-scale water management has had some notable successes in parts of Australia, but as poor practices and climate change put river systems under near-terminal stress, we face irreversible and potentially catas ... (read more)

Brenda Walker reviews 'Old Growth' by John Kinsella

April 2017, no. 390 • 24 March 2017

John Kinsella’s short stories are the closest thing Australians have to Ron Rash’s tales of washed-out rural America, where weakened and solitary men stand guard over their sad patch of compromised integrity in a world of inescapable poverty, trailer homes, uninsured sickness, and amphetamine wastage. Poe’s adventure stories and internally collapsing characters lightly haunt the short fictio ... (read more)

Brenda Walker reviews 'The Simplest Words' by Alex Miller

March 2016, no. 379 • 26 February 2016

In The Simplest Words, Alex Miller's recently published work on his own journey through country, writing, love, friendship, and fatherhood, there is a remarkable scene of levitation. Miller describes his young daughter soaring up his own bookshelves, past the spines of The Heart of Europe, The Cambridge History of English Literature, A Dream of Red Mansions, Voss. This is not magic realism; his ch ... (read more)

Brenda Walker reviews 'Shirley Hazzard' edited by Brigitta Olubas

April 2015, no. 370 • 26 March 2015

Shirley Hazzard is probably the most elegantly polished writer in the Australian canon: her novels and stories use traditional structures with great assurance, she writes from a thoughtful moral position, she is outspokenly engaged with the fine and the less fine elements of the Australia she once lived in, and she can be dry and funny. She spent most of her life in New York and Italy. This remind ... (read more)

Brenda Walker reviews 'Alex Miller: The ruin of time' by Robert Dixon

December 2014, no. 367 • 01 December 2014

We do nothing alone,’ writes Alex Miller, in his brief memoir ‘The Mask of Fiction’, where he gives an account of the generative processes of his writing. Art, according to Miller, comes from the capacity of the writer to ‘see ourselves as the other’. Early in his career, Miller’s friend Max Blatt woke him, in his farmhouse at Araluen, in order to dismiss the weighty and unsuccessful m ... (read more)