NOBEL PRIZEWINNER Albert Camus played soccer for Algeria. First-time novelist Nikos Athanasou has been likened to Camus — for his writing, not his ball skills — but, on the basis of his début, this comparison is hard to ...

Cronin’s love poetry, and the love it describes, both define themselves by their distance from what we might loosely call the public world: the world of soaps, films, television and the crowd. Cronin’s poems are small, and ...

At the book's heart is the concern for connections, to country and to people, a concern that haunts many Australians, particularly those who have been insulated from the legacies of the frontier. As those legacies make ...

The cover of this substantial volume tells you what's coming: it features a photograph of Xavier Herbert, sixtyish and fit-looking, standing behind the converted 4WD that constitutes his bush camp and dressed in nothing ...

Poetry is a likening, even when no metaphor is being deployed, no simile adduced. It knows that it is a miming, and, as often as not, is trying to find out what is being mimed. Murray and Hall are alike in their having ...

Rivers are important to us in all sorts of ways: usefully symbolic for poets, often loved in childhood while ‘messing about in boats’, sucked dry by cotton farmers, worried over by environmentalists, boosted by local ...

Miller offers a love story coloured and almost subsumed by family and ancestral memory, one located in a landscape that, insofar as it has appeared in Australian fiction. Miller accepts the challenge to write of Aboriginal ...

Peter Bakowski’s Days That We Couldn’t Rehearse is in many ways the most consistent and satisfying of his five collections to date. He has cultivated strengths and eliminated weaknesses found in earlier volumes. Yet it is ...

While not without flaws, “Singo” is an engaging and generally well-researched study of a life not yet complete. Bridget Griffen-Foley suspects the advertising guru would be quietly relieved that his biographer is a journalist; ...