Alison Broinowski

Alison Broinowski has lived, worked, and frequently travelled in Japan. She was Australia’s cultural attaché in Tokyo in the mid-1980s and has recently contributed a chapter, with Rachel Miller, on the history of the Australian Embassy, to a book on Australia–Japan relations edited at Deakin University. She is President of Australians for War Powers Reform.

Alison Broinowski reviews 'Lighting' by Felicity Volk

July–August 2013, no. 353 • 27 June 2013

Few first novelists are as assured and articulate as Felicity Volk. She has designed an elemental structure for her story: wind, fire, earth, and water each have a section. Her time frame goes centuries deep, naming ancestors who, in the style of Genesis, begat and begat seven generations, until they reach Persia, an Australian with Arab, European, and British heritage. A thirty-something patholog ... (read more)

Alison Broinowski reviews 'Desert Passions: Orientalism and Romance Novels' by Hsu-Ming Teo

May 2013, no. 351 • 28 April 2013

I once fell out with an intelligent, well-read woman who refused to believe me when I said I had never read a Mills & Boon book. I should perhaps have admitted that the job I had as a student, proofreading stacks of popular novels for an Adelaide publisher, put me off them for life. Now I am grateful to Hsu-Ming Teo for educating me so thoroughly on romantic fiction by women in English about t ... (read more)

Alison Broinowski reviews 'The Untold History of the United States' by Oliver Stone and Peter Kuznick

April 2013, no. 350 • 25 March 2013

It is ten years since the invasion of Iraq by the United States and the few countries willing to join it. Happening to be in Washington in February, and recalling worldwide protests in 2003, I was struck by what seems to be American amnesia about the war and its consequences. At least in Australia groups are exploring ways to prevent such catastrophic expeditions in the future. Even as Afghanistan ... (read more)

'You are what you read: Asian Australian fiction in the Asian Century' by Alison Broinowski

February 2013, no. 348 • 31 January 2013

White Papers are falling on Australia like confetti. We had two on foreign affairs and one on terrorism in the seven years to 2004; the third one on defence in four years will appear this year, and in October 2012 Ken Henry delivered Australia in the Asian Century. Defence White Papers are perennially concerned with Australia’s need for the material and money to protect us against certain countr ... (read more)

Alison Broinowski reviews 'The Waterlow Killings: A Portrait of a Family Tragedy' by Pamela Burton

December 2012–January 2013, no. 347 • 28 November 2012

To hear that Pamela Burton was writing about the deaths of Nick Waterlow, the prominent gallery director and exhibition curator, and his daughter Chloe, came as a surprise. Anthony Waterlow, Nick’s son and Chloe’s older brother, killed them both in Chloe’s Clovelly house, where he had been invited for dinner, and then, with the same knife, attacked her two-year-old daughter. Sydney was trans ... (read more)

Alison Broinowski reviews 'Beneath the Darkening Sky' by Majok Tulba

September 2012, no. 344 • 28 August 2012

Every migrant has a story. The past two decades have given us accounts of migration to Australia from so many Asian countries, and from so many viewpoints – sad, painful, funny, cynical, mystical – that little more seems left to tell. But now, out of Africa, comes a writer with a new and altogether more terrible tale. ... (read more)

Alison Broinowski reviews '1Q84' by Haruki Murakami, translated by Jay Rubin and Philip Gabriel

March 2012, no. 339 • 01 March 2012

Admirers of Haruki Murakami who waited for two years while successive parts of his twelfth novel sold millions in Japanese, are now rewarded for their patience with a big nugget of a book in English, which is already an international bestseller. The elegant cover shows an enigmatic night sky with two moons, which reappear on the endpapers and between the three parts. Rather than clutter one single ... (read more)

Alison Broinowski reviews 'David P. Forsythe: The Politics of Prisoner Abuse' by David P. Forsythe

November 2011, no. 336 • 25 October 2011

JOAN If you tear me limb from limb until you separate my soul from my body you will get nothing out of me beyond what I have told you […] Besides, I cannot bear to be hurt; and if you hurt me I will say anything you like to stop the pain. But I will take it all back afterwards; so what is the use of it? LADVENU There is much in that. We should proceed mercifully […] THE INQUISITOR It must no ... (read more)

Alison Broinowski reviews 'The Decline and Fall of the American Republic' by Bruce Ackerman

June 2011, no. 332 • 24 May 2011

As people around the world watch events in the United States, many will agree that it is indeed an exceptional, if conflicted, nation. The sole superpower, with the world’s largest economy and the most powerful military ever known, is hugely in debt, and struggles agonisingly just to produce a federal budget. The nation with the world’s best universities and hospitals has an inequitable educat ... (read more)

Alison Broinowski reviews 'Blossoms and Shadows' by Lian Hearn

December 2010–January 2011, no. 327 • 07 December 2010

Within little more than a decade, between the 1850s and the 1860s, seven centuries of Japanese feudalism and more than two hundred years of seclusion came to an end with the collapse of the Tokugawa shōgunate. These tumultuous times have perennially fascinated historians, novelists, and filmmakers, Japanese and foreign, to such an extent that little more, it might seem, remains to be said about t ... (read more)