archytas's reviews
1584 reviews

This is a moving collection of writing from those who have suffered from police violence. This includes Aboriginal people targeted by racist police violence, partners of abusive police officers or their friends, and those who were police officers themselves. The pages quiver with anger, and the stories are impossible to look away from.

This coming-of-age tale is engagingly written, nicely paced and often defies expectations, making it an absorbing and entertaining read all the way through. Gamieldien gives her characters gravitas, as she does young adulthood. While each character has elements of an avatar representing different parts of the ummah, they are also clear individuals, making the kind of choices that determine the adult you are becoming. The women in particular, have warmth extended to them, even as they move into having different priorities and values to each other. The book is strong in its portrayal of the way that friendships - and romantic partnerships - are tested as lives change. The portrayal of Sydney university life is recognisable without being arch, in the way many novels written by young authors can be. There is, in short, authenticity to this writing.
My reading app tells me this is the least popular book I have read this year. That is a shame - this is not showy or overly emotional, but it is a really well-told story with characters you want to spend more time with. Australian literature could use more like this.

Saddler explains towards the end of this set of essays, why he chose to use the official name of Melbourne's muddy river rather than its traditional name, Birrarung. What we have now, he says, is that what we see is a misunderstood river - that the words the Yarra evoke scorn when it should be wonder (my paraphrasing) and only perhaps if we change our perspective could we see Birrarung. It is also an acknowledgement that Indigenous perspectives are absent from this book.
But it is the first intent which I wanted to focus on to start. This book has been suggested a couple of times to me, but only when it popped up on the PM Literary Awards shortlist did I decide to read it. In full disclosure I tried asking my partner to read it instead. "Do you want to read a book on the Yarra?", I asked. He looked at me perplexed. "It's supposed to be quite good", I added helpfully. "Why don't you want to read it?" was the obvious question. "I'm just not very fond of the Yarra", I pointed out, "You like Melbourne a lot more than I do.". "Well, but I don't really like the Yarra", he said. "I mean, I don't think anybody really likes the Yarra". (He did not read the book, hence I did)
This inescapable reputational problem is confronted pretty directly by Saddler (I think now the subtitle, "A Clear Flowing River" was likely supposed to be provocative, but just implied to me unreasonable rose-tinted perspectives) at the start. The Yarra, he points out, is more a sight of jokes about its terribleness than love. People are more likely to joke about dead bodies floating in it than they are to actually swim in it (which to be fair, is not safe for much of the length). Saddler, however, takes us to a different side of the river (quite literally at times), focusing on the marsupials, birds, mammals and occasional reptile who make the banks and waters their home. The essays largely chronicle a pandemic and post-pandemic discovery journey for Saddler (and the book is highly reminiscent and evocative of the pandemic years), as he explores the river on foot, bike and eventually, by flotation. His Yarra is an abused beauty, a natural ecosystem beset by pollution, weeds, rubbish dumping and climate change, but still operating as a lifeline for species that have lived in the region for millennia. This book is largely nature memoir, less languid than Thoreau, but in the same tradition of writing about how nature makes you feel by writing about it.
Saddler also profiles the various defenders of the river, those Melbournians who devote their time and energies to restoration, rubbish clean up, swimming groups and advocacy. Through interviews, he sketches the complexity of solutions, the frustration with work which must be done carefully and slowly and with a long-term eye, in the face destruction which is often swift and unbalancing. Nevertheless, he imbues this with a hope, based on the small successes, a glimpse, which is very pandemic-like, of a different way of life within our reach.
Having said that, for much of the book, as someone who lives in a bush-rich environment, I had my superior eye rolling moments about Melbourne. The sheer excitement at seeing marsupials just an hour's travel away highlights how very alienated our cities are from our ecosystem. This is a vision of how we could live, but it is a long way from how most Melbournians do live, and the sheer exhilaration at seeing other species go about their lives uninterested in humanity and our stuff, is a reminder that an experience which should be commonplace has become exotic.

"With each sunrise nothing is diminished or lost and every single one staggers them. Every single time that blade of light cracks open and the sun explodes from it, a momentary immaculate star, then spills its light like a pail upended, and floods the earth, every time night becomes day in a matter of a minute, every time the earth dips through space like a creature diving and finds another day, day after day after day from the depth of space, a day every ninety minutes, every day brand new and of infinite supply, it staggers them."
Not much happens in this lyrical novel, except of course that the cast circle the Earth sixteen times. Set sometime in the near future (some clues it may be around five years' time) on the International Space Station, six astro/cosmonauts go about an 'ordinary' 24 hours, one in which the second personed mission to the Moon is launched, one of the astronaut's learns her mother has died, and a typhoon descends on the Philippines. The stylistic feats are dazzling: Harvey deploys lush prose to evoke wonder, and curiousity and the drive to push limits. The novel feels both constraining and unfettered in turn, the astronauts are both deeply introspective and alone in their struggles and yet tightly bonded as a crew. Despite hints of climate change, and a proliferation, this is a strangely idyllic view both of the future and of space exploration. It is, as Harvey writes it, deeply satisfying and connecting, and perhaps most of all, deeply human.

"Why, you ask, has no one heard of our nation’s greatest cricketer? Here, in no particular order. Wrong place, wrong time, money and laziness. Politics, racism, power cuts, and plain bad luck. If you are unwilling to follow me on the next God-knows-how-many pages, re-read the last two sentences. They are as good a summary as I can give from this side of the bottle."
This is a long novel, whose meandering is more the point than a distraction. Set in the 1990s, Karunatilaka channels W.G. Karunasena, a mid-60s alcoholic and cricket writer who is obsessively chasing down the story of the mysterious 1980s Tamil cricketer Pradeep Mathew, both out of a deep love of the game and its world and out of an inability to think about what else might matter. Mathew's story is deliberately mythic - the more W.G. digs the most fantastical the claims become - and his story almost, but never quite, becomes the story of the country itself. 
The book is filled with references which bring joy when you use them to draw inferences - there is history, literature and even dense musical references. Much of the book is written in cricket, a language I am completely without. My father watched the Benson and Hedges 1985 World series in our living room - a key setting of the book - which at least means the names and rough roles of the players were familiar to me. But the significance of a double-bounce, or a ball on the line, which here carry much information about character and setting, were all too often lost on me. For cricket enthusiasts who also love literature, I strongly suspect this is the read of a lifetime. Even as a non-cricket-literate, it was pretty special.
This is simply because Karunatilaka brings his characters so deeply to life. These are not softened people - one of WG's closest friends may or may not be a pedophile, WG is a frankly terrible father and doesn't know it, racist and sexist jokes abound. But they are deeply human, and Karunatilaka extends that humanity to corrupt cricket officials, LTTE enforcers, match fixers and more (not, I will say, to Australian cricketers or commentators. These are pretty uniformly presented as arseholes - the second portrayal for me in so many weeks of Australian sporting dominance as a gross mix of wealthy country privilege and unashamed willingness to destroy the opposition). The Lankans here, and some of the (non-Australian) others, want their country to be better just as they want themselves to be. In the end, the inability to celebrate and nurture Mathew, a Tamil great, is the great tragedy of this novel. That so much joy is lived by those who defy that division is its triumph.

Firth excels at using the graphic format to convey complex ideas - unsurprisingly, I guess, given she works creating graphic records of workshops. These essays explore aspects of being alive in this time and place - from our connection or disconnection to moment and place (throughout, Firth uses an effective series of light nodes to indicate humans focused on the internet); to sexuality and shame; to how to keep living with joy in the face of a grim future. Firth's curiousity, love of a good story and a good factoid, bring these essays to life as much as her considerable artistic skill. This is a great, stimulating read, which shows how graphic non-fiction can convey things in ways prose can't.

Foulkes is a academic psychologist, and this is a reflection, based largely on studies into Western teenagers, on how adolescence in WEIRD countries works. Coming in, I was hoping for something more focused on how adolescence has evolved, which would have required a different approach. Instead, this is an in-depth look at how teens navigate risk taking, first loves, sex, and other common new experiences. Foulkes mostly concludes that teenagers take physical risks to avoid taking too many social risks, and that much of teenage behaviour is driven by a strong desire to fit in. She also notes how powerful social, including romantic, bonds are during this period, and looks briefly at impulse control. The most interesting research was into the social network functions of high school, including the researchers' dilemma of how to describe the "popular" kids when it turns out, consistent across studies, nobody actually likes them (as opposed to actual popular kids, who tend to have social capital but not the high status of 'popular' kids).
It was readable, and surprisingly emotional - Foulkes notes how much we all have still unpacked from our own adolescence, which tends to continue to evoke shame, embarrassment and sadness - as well as joy - in adults throughout their lives. 
For action, she advocates against an approach which tries too hard to de-risk adolescence through surveillance, noting that an important developmental stage involves learning to survive challenges, trust in your own resilience and endure bad choices, as well as learning to make better ones. I just wish that had been based on a broader range of evidence.

Mood and atmosphere fuel this novel, which segues between two stories set almost a century apart, with a narrator looking back from an ever further future point. Silences and ellipses abound: characters are mired in confusions driven by repression and assumptions, and desire bubbles up and around attempts to constrain it. At the centre is a farm - a working complex dominated by fear in the past, a lonely ruin in the present. In both, characters forge lives, bringing some of themselves to the place. It feels slight in the end, despite the weight of the story, like a slice or something fleeting.

"The story you will write is obliterative. You think my story cannot coexist harmoniously with yours; because it precedes yours, and in the upward trajectory, everything that existed before must be silenced, disavowed, or be broken on the torture wheel. In your reckoning, I can possess no martyrdom, I am only an object of derision or pity. I am a long shadow in the early afternoon, soon to disappear as the fleeting sun tracks west, like the flocking black cockatoos, as if to roost. Your gift is persuasion. And your stories will overwhelm mine. [Wistfully] But not forever."

Browning wields words with the precision of a scalpel in this collection. The knife less dissects than reveals, with Browning's critical eye on Blak art as the highlight. These essays are magnificent, and their evolution traces Browning's engagement with artists such as Richard Bell and Daniel Boyd, and the ways in which that engagement has impacted both.  
Also worth of note are Browning's profiles, based on interviews with people including Doris Pilkington, Archie Roach and survivors of the Kinchela Boys Home. Here, Browning's words are wielded gently, telling stories of pain and resilience. I was less enamoured with Browning's poetry than his prose. The play, like the essays, is worthy of savouring and lingering to think about what is said so precisely.
In all this volume, as in his career, Browning tells stories that create spaces for Indigeneity and especially queer Indigeneity. There is a joyful sense of community that comes through these pages, admixed with justified anger. "The hereditary original sin – dispossession and the theft of the Australian land mass – is rarely if ever confronted and the barely suppressed rage of Aboriginal people is pathologised as a form of sociopathy. Let’s make this clear: Aboriginal people are entitled to feel deprived. Only the utterly delusional could suggest otherwise. But instead the popular, media and political discourse that constellates around the term ‘Aboriginal’ inheres a radical amnesia or collective delusion, if you like. In fact, if you don’t believe in it, the discourse doesn’t make sense." In this volume at least, the discourse makes all too much sense.

This is a great read. Lonesborough combines great, relatable characterisation with a briskly moving plot, making you want to keep reading to work out where our protagonist will end up. While I enjoyed Lonesborough's Boy from the Mish, it had stilted moments and at times felt closer to how people should be than how they are. None of that could be said about this book, which is noteworthy for how Lonesborough balances Jamie's agency, and capacity to shape his own future, with a realistic portrayal of entrapping institutional violence and racism. Jamie's life is populated by many helpful, but not perfect, adults, none of whom, unlike in many stories involving kids in jail, have magic saviour powers. Here, Jamie must save himself, but there is help available. I hope this book does get into the hands of its intended audience, I could imagine it might help a lot of kids feel less alone, and give them new ways to imagine their own presents, as well as futures.