Monday musings on Australian literature: Blake Poetry Prize

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Coincidentally, I reviewed a book of poetry by Paris Rosemont just as the longlist for the current Blake Poetry Prize was announced, and it includes a poem by her. The timing seemed right to give this prize some air. I have mentioned it before – but only in passing in my 2024 Poetry Month post in which I wrote about the Kings College Choir Cambridge Performing an Australian poem set to music. The poem was On finding Charlotte in the anthropological record by poet and visual artist, Judith Nangala Crispin, and it won the Blake Poetry Prize in 2020 (see the poet read it online here).

The Blake Prize is named for William Blake, who, England’s Blake Society writes, was “unusually … equally a writer and a visual artist”. Indeed the Society apparently laid a stone on his grave that reads ‘Poet Artist Prophet’. Now you may have noticed that I wrote “the Blake Prize”, because in Australia it was, initially, an art prize. Australia’s Blake Society and the prize were established in 1951, with the prize awarded annually until 2015. From 2016, it has been awarded biennially. Originally titled the Blake Prize for Religious Art, it is now, simply, the Blake Prize, with the criterion broadening out to, says Wikipedia, “art that explores spirituality”. You can read some of the complicated history of the prize – including controversies concerning the definition of “religious” – in the Wikipedia article.

Meanwhile, I’ll get to the Blake Poetry Prize. It is related to the above prize, and is now managed by the same organisation, the Liverpool Powerhouse, but in conjunction with WestWords. It is for “a new work of 100 lines or less, focused on non-sectarian spiritual and religious topics”, and is worth A$5,000. WestWords currently describes it as

an open poetry prize that challenges poets, both national and international, in conversations concerning faith, spirituality, religion and/or belief.

Further down the page, it reiterates that the prize is “strictly non-sectarian” and says that “all poems entered must have a recognisable religious or spiritual integrity and demonstrate high degrees of artistic and conceptual proficiency”.

AustLit summarises the prize’s short but chequered history:

The Blake Poetry Prize was established in 2008 by The Blake Society, in partnership with the NSW Writers’ Centre and sponsored by Leichhardt Council in NSW. From 2016 (after a loss in funding), Casula Powerhouse Arts Centre (CPAC)* and Liverpool City Council took over funding and managing both the art prize and the poetry prize, with events moving to Casula. From 2017, management was intended to shift to Liverpool City Library, in conjunction with CPAC, but bookshop Westwords ultimately took the library’s role in the partnership.

WestWords, in its current iteration, is far, far more than a bookshop (as you can read here), but it must have started as a bookshop.

Like the art prize, the poetry prize is now presented biennially. And I am confused, because Wikipedia and AustLit say the Poetry Prize was established in 2008, and it has been biennial for a few years, yet this year’s longlist is labelled the 69th. It seems that the Poetry Prize numbering is aligned with the numbering of the Art Prize.

Blake Poetry Prize Winners (2008-2024)

The winners to date are:

  • 2008: Mark Tredinnick, “Have You Seen”
  • 2009: John Watson, “Four Ways to Approach the Numinous”
  • 2010: Tasha Sudan, “Rahula”
  • 2011: Robert Adamson, “Via Negativa, The Divine Dark”
  • 2012: Graham Kershaw, “Altar Rock”
  • 2013: Anthony Lawrence, “Appellations”
  • 2014: Dave Drayton, “Threnodials”
  • 2017: Julie Watts, “The Story of Julian who never knew that we loved him”
  • 2020: Judith Nangala Crispin, “On Finding Charlotte in the Anthropological Record”
  • 2022: Simone King, “Surfing Again”
  • 2024: Coco X. Huang, “Three Lessons”

69th Blake Poetry Prize Longlist (2026)

This year’s prize was judged by three poets – Natalie Damjanovich-Napoleon, Kevin Brophy and last year’s winner, Coco X. Huang.

The longlist for this year’s prize was presented on the WestWords site in a seemingly random order – poetic licence, perhaps? But, it’s a long longlist so, because I am librarian-trained and like to make finding information easy, I have reorganised it into alphabetical order by poet’s last name (to the best of my knowledge). Apologies if I have upset any listing or naming conventions. I have not, however, changed the capitalisation of the titles (to suit my editorial convention) as poets can be particular about things like punctuation. Links on poets are to any posts I have tagged with the poet’s name, though the posts are not necessarily on their poetry!

  • Sela Ahosivi-Atiola, Mending Skies
  • Allison Browning, There’s No Such Thing as Astrology (Or: The last Trump/Odious Joy)
  • Gayelene Carbis, Divinations
  • Phillippa Cordwell, Father 
  • Gregory Day, The Church Was Strangely Empty But The Day Outside Was Full: his collection Southsightedness is on my TBR
  • Adrienne Eberhard, Ten Blessings of Upper Blessington 
  • Jo Gardiner, Giornata
  • Ross Gillett, Cave Faith
  • Ross Gillett, The Room and the River
  • Stephanie Green, Equilateral
  • Catherine Johnstone, THE DRAWING: a sestina
  • Cliff Kemmett, Ahead Of Us, Our Past Burns Still 
  • Cate Kennedy, Suddenly Getting Religion
  • Moira Kirkwood, Tiny home
  • Jeanine Leane, Gundyarri-galang bila-gu
  • Wes Lee, Prayer at the Cove 
  • Wes Lee, The broken smashed rubble of everything I owned
  • Gershon Maller, The Transcendentalist
  • Shey Marque, The Body as Tidal Scripture
  • Freshta Nawabi, Jigar in a Jar
  • Kerrie Nelson, Why would you drive on a day like this, unless for good reason
  • Jenny Pollak, A faint echo from the South
  • Omar Sakr, Ode to Prednisone
  • Kathryn Reese, Post Vespers 
  • Paris Rosemont, Verdigrisleeves
  • Josephine Shevchenko, Invisible but Potent
  • Laura Jan Shore, Sometimes A River Wave
  • Ella Skilbeck-Porter, Intonation
  • Terri Slanovits, Aftermath
  • David Terelinck, Watching the Storm from My Hospital Bed
  • Mark Tredinnick, Nothing Will Be Lost: won the inaugural Montreal International Poetry Prize in 2011, and a previous winner of this prize (among others)
  • Anders Villani, Under the Banner of Heaven
  • Chen Wang, The Woman Who Refused the Kingdom of Forgetting
  • Julie Watts, Ad honorem Patti Smith
  • Kimberly Williams, St. Mary and the Hula Dancer
  • Beth Yahp, Visitation/Turtle-Shaped

Some of these may be available online, but I decided I’d rather spend my time reading than check every one in the hope of finding a couple! Sorry!

The shortlist will be announced on 2 April, and the winners on 1 May.

Have you read any of these poets, or do you follow and poetry prizes? I’d love to hear your thoughts …

* Now the Liverpool Powerhouse.

Paris Rosemont, Barefoot poetess (#BookReview)

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Fierce, raw, honest are all clichés used to describe strong, powerful writing, but when it comes to Paris Rosemont’s poetry collection, Barefoot poetess, they are hard to go past. However, I prefer to avoid review clichés, so let’s start again …

Paris Rosemont’s second poetry collection, Barefoot poetess, turned out to be quite the page-turner for me. This is not something I expect to experience with a poetry collection, albeit I admit to having read some page-turner verse novels. The thing is that it was a page-turner as much for its language, tone and formal inventiveness, as for its content, though the content engaged me too, from the opening poem which I excerpted in my recent World Poetry Day post. Indeed, it was that poem which convinced me to choose this book next from my review copies TBR pile.

Rosemont is a Sydney-based, second-generation Asian-Australian performance poet, and Barefoot poetess is her second collection of poetry. Her first, Banana girl (2023), was listed for several awards nationally and internationally, and won the “Distinguished Favourite” award in the 2025 NYC Independent Press Awards. My sense is that writing as a performance poet is partly what makes her poetry so accessible. Poetry really is best read aloud. Performance poets know this. They know how to infuse their poetry with the sort of power that can quickly draw their audience in. A generalisation – yes – but like most generalisations it has a basis in truth.

As I wrote in my World Poetry Day post, poet Tim Loveday describes Barefoot poetess in his Introduction as “confessional poetry in all its glorious exhibitionism”, which means that, almost by definition, they will embody the cliches of “raw” and “honest”. Certainly they appear to capture something of Rosemont’s life to date, the pain of broken relationships and the thrill of finding new ones, the experience of being Asian in a non-Asian world, the difficult act of balancing motherhood against finding her creative self. It unapologetically confronts living in a complex world. Take the title. We second-generation feminists eschewed gendered nomenclatures like, well, to be blunt, “poetess”. However, in her opening note Rosemont respects the fortitude of women who paved the way for her – which included losing terms like this – but then reclaims “poetess as an act of rebellion”. It feels, she says, “wild and whimsical, seductive and a little dangerous. I like the illicit feeling of it in my mouth… “.

I like this too. I like it because it reclaims this word with intention, because being a poetess in the past could be dangerous. Any woman who was clever with words, who self-expressed with little care for the niceties of feminine expectations, was at risk. This word encompasses that history and Rosemont uses it with vigour. So, back to that opening poem that got me in, “Mama’s flown away with the mockingbirds”. It’s a heartbreaker about mothering when you are broken, about the wisdom of kids who “know”, and about a mother’s recognition of the costs:

I pity these wretched orphans. Imagine
how unsettling it must feel to be sung
to sleep by a ghost who knows
their favourite lullabies and looks so
like someone they once knew.

[But]

… their mother has brokered a fool’s-
gold escape. She has mortgaged her heart.
The cost of her wings. Two tiny souls.

What an opener.

“making poetry tutors blush”

There is a trajectory to the collection, though it’s not simply chronological. It picks up on themes and moves us through aspects of her life – her childhood as a migrant’s daughter, her failed marriage and other relationships that brought pain or joy or both, passion and sexuality, motherhood, not to mention the act of becoming a poet (“paris rosemont: making poetry tutors blush since 2022”, from “(ii) poetry with pip”). The opening poem is followed by poems expressing her anguished questions, before we move back into an earlier chronology – her migrant father’s arrival in Australia (“The Colombo Plan”) and her marriage (“Foot and spouse disease”) – and then out again. Words (like “kawasakis” and “koels”) and people (like her father and lovers, the various yous) link poems and ideas across the collection, while the ordering of the poems leave us in no doubt about intent. Life is complex. Painful poems about fractured and destructive love, are followed by poems about love’s experiments, which are followed by love found. Prose poems, which convey story more straightforwardly (but never simply), are interspersed with wilder poems and quieter ones, encapsulating more emotional responses. The prose poem “Evaporated milk” about motherhood’s dilemmas is followed by poems about the pains and dangers of love, home and childhood. Punches are not pulled, knuckles are bared, in “Terracotta knuckles”, “Home is where the dark is”, and the later “Simon says” (which starts as a prose poem but splinters at the end).

The ideas and feelings in this collection are personal and powerful. They keep us reading – often with hearts in mouths. But what makes the reading exciting is, as I’ve already said, the language, the variety of and experimentation with form, and the wit. Wit underpins many of the poems, regardless of how serious the content. “Lila’s Mixtape of Lovers” comprises 6 stanzas in what Rosemont calls a 69-er, her “contemporary twist on the form 9x9x9”. Each stanza is inspired by songs, ranging from a sitcom theme song to one from alternative rock band Garbage. They document love’s failures, and are part of a group of poems in which innuendo and explicit sexual wordplay bounce against each other to convey love’s power to inspire and destroy. “Fierce” is right for these poems, which can be both shocking and funny at once.

But there are also graceful poems expressing joy (and, admittedly, its uncertainty) and more lighthearted poems (like the self-deprecating “(i) tea with tony”). I enjoyed – partly because I love these cactus and the deserts they are found in – “We are Saguaro”. It’s a reverse poem which neatly questions the speaker’s ability to love. If you read it forwards and then in reverse, the nuance is hopeful. However, if you only read it forwards … It jolts rather than flows, but the point is made.

The poems in Barefoot poetess are accessible but not simple. They require attention – but they repay that attention with surprises of recognition (“is that …? is she really …?”, from “(iii) shooting stars”), and with an energy that is infectious. These are poems I can imagine reading again to see what more they might say.

Paris Rosemont
Barefoot poetess
Parramatta: WestWords, 2025
87pp.
ISBN: 9781923044456

(Review copy courtesy WestWords)

Monday musings on Australian literature: Melbourne, a City of Literature?

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A year ago I finally wrote a post on the UNESCO Cities of Literature, focusing on Melbourne’s designation as UNESCO’s second such city in 2008, and Hobart’s addition as Australia’s second city in 2023. The full list is available online at the Cities of Literature website.

As I wrote in that post, the criteria against which cities are assessed aren’t specifically listed, but the Cities of Literature website says that these Cities “share similar characteristics”, which presumably draw from the criteria. The characteristics are:

  • Quality, quantity and diversity of publishing in the city
  • Quality and quantity of educational programmes focusing on domestic or foreign literature at primary, secondary and tertiary levels
  • Literature, drama and/or poetry playing an important role in the city
  • Hosting literary events and festivals which promote domestic and foreign literature
  • Existence of libraries, bookstores and public or private cultural centres which preserve, promote and disseminate domestic and foreign literature
  • Involvement by the publishing sector in translating literary works from diverse national languages and foreign literature
  • Active involvement of traditional and new media in promoting literature and strengthening the market for literary products.

Again, in last year’s post, I shared that UNESCO has pages for some of the cities. Melbourne’s (Naarm) commences with:

Celebrated for its vibrant literary culture, Melbourne supports a diverse range of writers, a prosperous publishing industry, a successful culture of independent bookselling, a wide variety of literary organisations, a well-established culture of reading and is actively involved in many events and festivals.

In addition to this, Melbourne has its own City of Literature website, in which it describes what this means and what Melbourne does to support literature and reading.

Now here’s the thing, and why I am writing this post today, Melbourne’s credentials are currently being questioned by some of its own, for a couple of very good reasons. Last year, Melbourne University Press announced that it would cease publication of one of Australia’s longest-running literary magazines, Meanjin, at the end of 2025. Established in Brisbane in 1940, Meanjin had been published in Melbourne since 1945. This was devastating news to the literary community, because this magazine is one of our treasures, for both its history and what it still does. Fortunately, a last minute reprieve has seen Meanjin return to its originating state with the Queensland University of Technology acquiring it early this year. This is great for Meanjin, but it does nothing for the City of Literature.

And then, in January of this year, Writers Victoria (about which I have written before in my writers centre series) was told it would not receive the funding it had been receiving from the State Government (via Creative Victoria). It was given emergency funding to help it survive through to June 30, but no more after that. As Angela Glindemann wrote in The Conversation, the loss of this centre – if it cannot change the government’s mind or obtain other funding – “would make Victoria (whose capital, Melbourne, is a UNESCO City of Literature) the only mainland state without a state government-funded peak organisation for writers”. 

In the last three months, I have heard several literary commentators, besides The Conversation’s Glindemann, raise the issue of Melbourne’s City of Literature status in relation to these literary losses. The others include literary journalist Jason Steger (who was Literary Editor for Melbourne’s The Age newspaper), authors and podcasters Irma Gold and Karen Viggers (in Secrets from the Green Room, Season 7 Episode 79), and academic Patrick Stokes in ArtsHub.

Steger wrote earlier this month in his weekly emailed newsletter:

It’s dismally ironic that in Melbourne, Writers Victoria has been denied funding by the state government. Ironic because in 2008 Melbourne became only the second UNESCO City of Literature, but now could become the only state capital in Australia not to have an organisation that supports its writers.

[…]

Why are writers organisations important? Because they give crucial support to writers at all stages of their careers. They provide information, resources, workshops and plenty more. They also employ writers to conduct workshops and teach. In 2025 Writers Victoria employed 70 tutors, paying $50,000 in fees.

Irma Gold and Karen Viggers in their podcast speak from personal experience about the value of writers organisations to their careers, as does Toni Jordan in The Conversation’s article. These three writers (as did others I quoted in my Writers Victoria post) see writers centres as critical to supporting emerging writers and to the ongoing education of established writers. (Worryingly, The Conversation says that Writers Victoria is not the only one to confront threats to its existence in recent times.)

Stokes brings into his argument a recent controversy involving the State Library of Victoria and its direction, about which you can read at the ArtsHub link I’ve provided. Here I will simply share Stokes’ main point which is that

A library that is reduced to a museum has lost its inherent function. Likewise, the City of Literature designation shouldn’t turn a city into a sort of literary museum, a celebration of past glories now preserved under glass or atop marble plinths. It needs to reflect a commitment that’s as much forward-directed as backward. Cities of Literature ought to be as much about the books that are not yet written as the ones that already are.

I’m not sure that these actions would – or should – affect Melbourne’s City of Literature status, but they are a worry, on their own and as potentially indicative of a trend (particularly in Victoria right now) to cutting support for the arts. If you are a Victorian resident, you can sign a petition to the Victorian Parliament requesting it to “reverse the decision to cut state funding to Writers Victoria”. The petition is open until late April.

Thoughts?

World Poetry Day 2026: More poetry on my TBR pile

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As I have written before, World Poetry Day was declared by UNESCO in 1999, with the goal of honouring “poets, revive oral traditions of poetry recitals, promote the reading, writing and teaching of poetry, foster the convergence between poetry and other arts such as theatre, dance, music and painting, and raise the visibility of poetry in the media”. Again, as I have said before, in Australia, like some other places, we also have National Poetry Month, but in August.

Last year, I commemorated the day by sharing two recent poetry books on my TBR – Helen Swain’s Calibrating home and Vanessa Proctor’s On wonder. I thought I would do the same this year. And, I’ll start with two other books by Swain and Proctor.

I briefly mentioned Helen Swain’s last year, as my lutruwita/Tasmanian-based brother had given me both of her books. It is a verse novel published in 2022, titled When the time comes, and is about an ageing mother and her daughter who wants to care for her. The third poem explains the title. It starts:

When Dad got sick
Mum had a sudden thought

I don’t want to be a burden
she told me
When the time comes
just put me out of my misery

(“My Mother”)

I really must read it, given it speaks to issues currently confronting my generation.

Similarly, Vanessa Proctor’s book was given to me by my old schoolfriend, who had given me Proctor’s On wonder. It is an anthology which was edited with two others, Lyn Reeves and Rob Scott. Published in 2023, it is titled under the same moon: Fourth Australian haiku anthology. Haiku has a strong following in Australia, and this anthology contains many that speak directly to Australian experience and landscape:

the blurred outline
of the southern cross
bushfire moon

– Louise Hopewell

while others have a more universal feel, like this one speaking to women

biannual breast check –
the artist places the model
in a hard-to-hold pose

– Alice Wanderer

The other books I want to mention are Paris Rosemont’s Barefoot poetess which joined my TBR in May last year, and two that I have already mentioned on my blog, Evelyn Araluen’s The rot, which has just been longlisted for the Stella Prize, and Maxine Beneba Clarke’s Beautiful changelings, which my reading group will be doing in a few months. I saw and heard both poets read from their books at last year’s Canberra Writers Festival, so I won’t say more now. I will add, however, that another poetry collection, one I don’t have, Eunice Andrada’s Kontra, was also longlisted for this year’s Stella Prize.

Paris Rosemont’s Barefoot poetess is her second collection. Her first, Banana girl, was well received, and was listed for a few awards. The promo for Barefoot poetess says that Banana girl “exploded onto the poetry scene – a hybrid of experimental styles and a fresh, edgy voice” but that Barefoot poetess represents a shift in tone. Her voice is “more distilled, her craft more finely controlled”. It’s “about journeys: through love, disenchantment, and change”. Poet Tim Loveday, who wrote the introduction, calls it “confessional poetry in all its glorious exhibitionism”.

And confessional it surely seems to be. The opening, heart-breaking poem, “Mama’s flown away with the mockingbirds”, is told in a first person voice and tells of a mother, the poet, who has left her children, whether mentally, emotionally, spiritually, it’s hard to tell at this point but it’s clear she’s there in name only:

The children know I died weeks ago. This corpse
masquerading as their mother is an imposter.
Noone else has cottoned on yet. But I raised
savvy kids. They know.

The poem ends with

… their mother has brokered a fool’s-
gold escape. She has mortgaged her heart.
The cost of her wings – two tiny souls.

This feels raw, is certainly powerful, is honest but also witty – and makes me want to read more.

I’ve not researched this year’s World Poetry Day plans, but I did receive an email from the Bellingen Readers and Writers Festival which references World Poetry Day, and includes a Poetry Slam Q&A, but I’ll just share a quote from Khalil Gibran which they open with:

“Poetry is a deal of joy and pain and wonder, with a dash of the dictionary.”
– Khalil Gibran

The “dash of the dictionary” makes me smile. Happy World Poetry Day.

This is my seventh World Poetry Day post.

Have you read any poetry this year? And if so, care to share any that grabbed you?

Monday musings on Australian literature: Hazel Rowley Fellowship

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Book cover er

Back in 2013, I wrote about the Hazel Rowley Literary Fund which was set up in 2011 by Rowley’s sister and friends, in association with Writers Victoria. Hazel Rowley was, as many of you will know, one of Australia’s most respected biographers. Her subjects were diverse, and not exclusively Australian. Indeed, most were not Australian, as besides the Australian writer Christine Stead who spent much of her writing life overseas, she wrote on the African American writer Richard Wright, the French writers Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre, and the American power couple, Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt (my review). Unfortunately, Rowley, born in 1951, died too young – of a cerebral haemorrhage in New York in 2011.

The aim of the fund was “to commemorate Hazel’s life and her writing legacy through activities that support biography and writing in general”. Its main vehicle was the Hazel Rowley Literary Fellowship which provided money to support a writer researching a biography, or some aspect of cultural or social history compatible with Rowley’s interests. It was offered annually, with the initial award of $10,000 gradually increased to the $20,000 this year’s winner received.

Now, those of you with eagle eyes may have noticed that I wrote “was”. As Wikipedia reports, which I confirmed on the official website, the Fellowship ends with this year’s award. The website summarises its achievements in this paragraph:

The Fellowship has been running for the past 14 years since Hazel died in March 2011. It was created to honour Hazel as a skilled biographer and to encourage others to write with the same care and enthusiasm in this time-consuming and exacting genre. Based on Hazel’s own experience we recognised the need to support a work in progress by providing money for research and travel. Over the past 14 years the Fellowship has supported more than 20 writers to progress and finish their projects.

They do not say why it is ending, but presumably the money has run out. Bequests, even well managed ones, do not last forever. I am guessing, but perhaps it was a case of either offering decent prize money – as in a useful amount – until it runs out, or award small amounts that risk not being enough to make a real difference to the winning project.

So now, the final award … $20,000 is going to Jennifer Martin for her proposed biography of Austrian-born Eva Sommer. She was the inaugural Walkley award winner in 1956 when she was a cadet on the Sydney Sun. She died in 2019 at the age of 84. The fellowship also gave $10,000 to each of three commended writers: Monique Rooney, Theodore Ell and Ashleigh Wilson, who are writing on Ruth Park, Les Murray and Barry Humphries respectively. All good subjects, but I’d love to see Ruth Park done.

You can see the complete list of awards made, including which ones have – to date – resulted in publication, as well as the shortlisted authors and their projects, at the above-listed Wikipedia page.

Maxine Beneba Clarke, The hate race

Of the 15 winners to date (including this year’s which, by definition, is presumably still in project stage), 9 have been published, and I have reviewed one of them, Maxine Beneba Clarke’s The hate race. I’d like to read several others, but if I had to choose one, it would be Mandy Sayer’s on Australia’s movie-making sisters, The McDonagh Sisters.

However, there are some on the shortlist that I would also love to see come to fruition, including those on Louisa Lawson (Michelle Scott Tucker), David Malouf (Patrick Allington), Gerald Murnane (Shannon Burns) and Amy Witting (Sylvia Martin). Hmm … given Sylvia Martin was later shortlisted for a different subject, which has now been published – Double act: Eirene Mort and Nora Kate Weston – I fear for my Amy Witting wish.

This brings me to the fact that, of course, several on the shortlist have been published, including those on Shirley Hazzard (Brigitta Olubas, on my TBR), Elizabeth Harrower (Helen Trinca, my review), Elizabeth Harrower (Susan Wyndham, on my TBR).

What these lists show is that biography is alive in Australia. How well it is, is another question. Writing a biography is no simple task. It can take years (and years) of research during which authors receive no money – unless they win or obtain fellowships like this one. It’s a shame it has ended, for whatever reason, but we should be grateful for the 15 years of support it did give.

I’d love to hear your thoughts on biographies. Do you like them? Do you have favourites? What do – or don’t you – like in them?

Johanna Bell, Department of the Vanishing (#BookReview)

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Words can be problematical when it comes to expressing our response to literature, indeed to any of the arts. We are uncomfortable, for example, using the word “enjoy” to express our response to anything that is dark. This is understandable, and yet I think “enjoy” is a perfectly okay word for something that has engaged and moved us. If we say, for example, that we “enjoy” reading good books, then logically, if a good book is dark, as is not uncommon, it should be valid to say we’ve enjoyed it. Shouldn’t it? So, in a similar vein, when I say Johanna Bell’s Department of the Vanishing was fun to read, I don’t mean it was a fun or funny book. It is in fact a deadly serious book about species extinction, but it is so delightfully clever that I enjoyed the reading experience immensely. Let me explain …

Now, I hadn’t heard of Johanna Bell until I saw her listed as a winner in the 2025 Tasmanian Literary Awards – for the unpublished manuscript of this book. So, I searched, and found her website. She describes herself as “a writer and arts worker based in Nipaluna/Hobart”, whose “practice spans fiction, poetry, picture books, audio making and community arts”. She says she is “most interested in projects that encourage experimentation, elevate new voices and challenge the established rules of storytelling”. Well, I can tell you now that she practises what she preaches.

Her website also briefly describes this book:

Set in a time of mass extinction, Department of the Vanishing blends documentary poetry, archival image and narrative verse to explore the vital questions: Can we live in a world without birdsong, and is it possible to create a new opus with the fragments left over? 

“cataloguing the dead”

This description gives you an idea of the subject matter, and a vague idea of its form, but what it actually looks like on the page is something else. I would love to have been a fly on the wall when the publisher and book designer grappled with this one. But, I’m digressing. I still haven’t explained how the book actually works. It’s told in the voice of the rather cutely named archivist, Ava Wilde (as in Wild Bird), from January 2007 when she joins DoV (the Department of the Vanishing) to around 2030. Her job is “cataloguing the dead”, that is, documenting and recreating as best as possible extinct bird species from whatever “archival and cultural materials” exist. After some introductory matter to which I’ll return in a minute, the novel starts with Part 1 of a partially redacted police interview recorded with Anna on 10/11/2029. The irony starts here, with her being told that at the end of the interview the “tapes will be sealed up” and “stored in a secure place”. A few pages later we flash back to her commencing work. The interview records are presented in 10 parts that are regularly interspersed through the text, along with various other documents and narratives, to which I’ll also return in a minute. After all, if Bell can mix it up, so can I.

So, the introductory matter. It tells us much, including that this book requires careful reading, not skimming through the bits that don’t look like story. The first epigraph is presented as a little sticky-taped note and it’s from DH Lawrence, “In the beginning, it was not a word but a chirrup”. The facing page comprises an image of museum drawers containing tagged bird carcasses. The next two pages are covered with bird sounds presented in somewhat jumbled text in different sizes and fonts, giving the impression of a cacophony of birdsong. This is followed on the next page by another sticky-taped epigraph from Stephen Garnett, Ornithologist, “After a few days of fourty [sic] degrees plus the country’s just silent”. Then comes the aforementioned police interview.

In other words, before the story starts, we have an idea of how it is going to be presented (through text in various forms, images and graphics) and what it is about (the impact of climate change on birdsong, and an archivist who has done something illegal). From here the story moves, roughly chronologically, through Ava’s working life at the DoV. The main narrative is presented via poetry in her voice, as she recounts her days – which include weekly visits to her dying mother in a hospice – and through lists and bird obits, departmental emails, images, and headlines. Some factoid, some fact. As she chronicles her increasing despair over the extinctions and her inability to keep up, she tries to unravel the story of her naturalist father who disappeared while searching for lyrebirds when she was a child. She describes the one-night stands that dull the despair for a moment or two, until along comes Luke with his bird tattoo. We also have a compassionate chorus from the sex workers in her apartment who take an interest in her wellbeing.

If you are someone who needs to know what is fact and what is not, Bell helps you out. Under her concluding “Notes and references”, she explains that her “intention was to blur the line between fact and fiction” but for those who “enjoy tracing things back to their origins” she helpfully provides six pages of notes about her source materials. When I am reading fiction, I like the blur, but my archivist-librarian self also appreciates author’s notes like this.

“weird, experimental verse novels”

In her acknowledgements, Bell thanks her family. If she could write a bestseller, she would she says, “but for now you’re stuck with weird, experimental verse novels”. Yes, Department of the Vanishing is weird and experimental, though more in form than language. That is, the language is easy to understand, but to glean the full story, you need to pay attention to the details. It is a strong story about an archivist who is unravelling under the pressure of her concern for bird loss and her increasing workload as the extinctions mount and staff numbers are cut. It is leavened by touches of irony and wit, including well-placed library stamps like “CANCELLED” or “NOT FOR LOAN” scattered across the documents.

I was left with some questions, particularly regarding Luke and his intentions, perhaps the product of seeing a story through one pair of eyes? Whatever the reason, they did not spoil the emotional power or reading experience.

Bell draws on some new-to-me writers for the quotes she scatters through her novel, but there are also the expected suspects – Orwell and Solnit for example – and contemporary writers like Jordie Albiston, Victoria Chang, Angela O’Keeffe, and Ocean Vuong. While they may not all write specifically in the eco-lit sphere, they put truth to the idea that much of today’s writing is backgrounded by ecological concerns, which brings me to some lines about a quarter of the way through, when Ava writes of looking at bird carcasses:

I make myself look
at the horrors we’ve made

if no one else does
I will pay

with an open gaze

This is why we must read eco-literature.

Johanna Bell
Department of the Vanishing
Transit Lounge, 2026
311pp.
ISBN: 9781923023550

(Review copy courtesy Transit Lounge via Scott Eathorne, Quikmark Media)

Stella Prize 2026 Longlist announced

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As I say every year, I don’t do well at having read the Stella Prize longlist at the time of its announcement. In recent years the most I’ve read at the time of the announcement has been two (in 2019). Last year I’d read one. I have read 9 of the 13 winners to date, which is a fair run for me.

As I also say every year, Stella works hard to keep their judging panels fresh, so again none of this year’s judges were on last year’s panel, though some have judged before. This year’s panel comprises bookseller, editor, and author, Jaclyn Crupi; academic and author, Sophie Gee; author, screenwriter, and broadcaster, Benjamin Law; journalist, writer, and facilitator, Gillian O’Shaughnessy; author and editor, Ellen van Neerven. Sophie Gee is this year’s Chair.

The longlist

Here is the list, in alphabetical order by author, which is also how they were presented:

  • Eunice Andrada, Kontra (poetry)
  • Evelyn Araluen, The rot (poetry) (on my TBR) (CWF Session 5 and 6) (Jonathan’s review)
  • Geraldine Brooks, Memorial days (memoir) (Kate’s review)
  • Debra Dank, Ankami: Stolen children, shattered families, silenced histories (nonfiction/memoir) (on my TBR)
  • Miranda Darling, Firewater (novel)
  • Natalie Harkin, Apron-sorrow/Sovereign tea (nonfiction)
  • Lee Lai, Cannon (graphic novel)
  • Charlotte McConaghy, Wild dark shore (novel) (Brona’s review)
  • Lucy Nelson, Wait here (short story collection)
  • Micaela Sahhar, Find me at Jaffa Gate: An encyclopedia of a Palestinian family (nonfiction/memoir)
  • Marika Sosnowski, 58 facets: On violence and the law (nonfiction)
  • Tasma Walton, I am Nannertgarroook (novel)

So, 5 fiction (including one graphic novel and a short story collection), 5 nonfiction (including 3 memoirs), and 2 poetry collections, this year. And four, I think, by First Nations writers – Araluen, Dank, Harkin and Walton. You can read about the longlist, including comments by the judges, at the Stella website.

As I did last year, prior to the announcement, I pre-loaded this post with 25 potential longlistees, partly in the hope that it would speed up writing this post if I had a goodly number of the listed titles already in the post, but I only guessed 4 of the selected books.

As always, I won’t question the selection, though I did have a couple of favourites I’d love to have seen here. But, the Stella is a diverse prize that aims to encompass a wide range of forms and styles, including some I don’t necessarily chase, and I can’t pretend to have read widely from 2025’s output. But I do have some on my TBR or in my sights. Certainly, contemporary political issues are evident in the listing, which is what we’d expect from a prize that wants to encompass good writing that reflects the diversity of Australian writing (by women and non-binary authors). Many of these writers are the brave ones confronting us with their presence and their ideas.

You can read the judges’ report at the link I’ve given above, so I’ll just share two paragraph from it:

As we narrowed the field to a long-longlist, we commented often on how virtually every book reimagined and transformed a different life story, through fine-grained attention, creative intelligence and technical skill. The twelve longlist titles reflect the excellence of all the entries, virtually all of which accomplished something moving and true through narrative, structure, voice or description.

In the other, they define what they mean by originality:

Originality consists in a book that recognisably inhabits its genre or form, and at the same time purposefully breaks it. Original writing changes the scope of what can be thought, felt and envisioned. A sign of great originality is often that, as readers, we think new thoughts, or feel changed by sentences, images and ideas. Originality reaches beyond the book itself to shift the lives of readers.

Each of the longlisted authors receives $2000 in prize money, donated by the Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund, while shortlists will receive $5000. The winer will receive $60,000. There were over 200 submissions this year.

The shortlist will be announced on 8 April, and the winner on 13 May.

Any comments?

Monday musings on Australian literature: Turning 50 in 2026

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No, not me, much as I wish it were! I’m talking books. Today being the day after International Women’s Day, I thought to feature women in this week’s Monday Musings. But how? Then I remembered that somewhere last year I’d seen a list of books turning 50, so decided to take inspiration from that and share books by Aussie women which are turning 50 this year, meaning they were published in 1976.

Researching this wasn’t easy. Wikipedia’s 1976 in Australian literature was inadequate, but I have beefed it up somewhat now. It had only one novel by an Australian woman under “Books” and one entry under “Short Stories”. So, I searched Wikipedia for authors I knew of the time and found more titles. I also used Hooton and Heseltine’s Annals of Australian literature (though that was tedious because many of the authors are listed under last name only. Is Bennett female or male, for example? Female I discovered. In she went into Wikipedia’s 1976 page too, but she doesn’t have her own page despite her body of work.)

By the time I finished I had added four novels by Australian women, two short story entries, three poets, another dramatist, and three children’s works. I could have added a few more but time and, to some degree, the work’s significance (or “notability” in Wikipedia’s world), resulted in my stopping where I did. My point in sharing this is not to beat my own drum but to say that it is really important, when we can, to improve Wikipedia’s listings in less populated areas, such as entries for women and other minorities. For all its faults, Wikipedia is a triumph, but it is up to all of us who have the time and skills to keep it that way. End of lesson …

Books turning 50 in 2026

During my research into writers who, I knew, were writing around this time, I checked, for example. Thea Astley. She published 15 novels between 1958 and 1999, but only 2 in the 1970s, neither in 1976. Jessica Anderson published three novels in the 1970s but not in 1976. The same went for Barbara Hanrahan. Now, the lists …

Links on names are to my posts on those authors. I have made some random notes against some of the listings,

Novels

  • Nancy Cato and Vivienne Rae Ellis, Queen Trucanini: historical fiction, which was of course Cato’s metier. I haven’t read it, but we have moved on in knowledge and thinking so it has very likely been superseded. I haven’t included nonfiction works here, but will mention Cato’s Mister Maloga: Daniel Matthews and his mission, Murray River, 1864–1902, also published in 1976. The mission failed, for various reasons, and I don’t know Cato’s take, but reviewer Leonard Ward praises its detail, and says that “As an historical document Mister Maloga earns a place on the bookshelves of those who have at heart the welfare of the Aboriginal people”. Potentially paternalistic, but Cato did support FN rights in her day.
  • Helen Hodgman, Blue skies: apparently this novel was translated into German in 2012. I’ve read and enjoyed Tasmanian-born Hodgman, but not this one. (Lisa’s review)
  • Gwen Kelly, Middle-aged maidens: a new author for me but worth checking out. This, her third novel, was, said the Sydney Morning Herald, “a perceptive portrait of three headmistresses and the staff of an independent girls’ school” and “was considered somewhat controversial in Armidale” where Kelly was living. Her Wikipedia page shares some of the reactions to it, including that it offered a “fierce appraisal of small-town shortcomings … [an] acerbic depiction of a private school for girls in Armidale.” Another was that “the headmistresses’ characters are sketched with sharp and brilliant lines … Gwen Kelly draws from us that complexity of response which is normal in life, rare in literature”, while a third wrote “spiteful, malicious, cunning, intensely readable … Delicious, Ms Kelly … you know your Australia and you’ve a lovely way with words”. Intriguing, eh?
  • Betty Roland, Beyond Capricorn: I have Betty Roland’s memoir, Caviar for breakfast on my TBR, but still haven’t got to it. For those who don’t know her, she had a relationship with Marxist scholar and activist Guido Baracchi, a founder of the Australian Communist Party. They went to the USSR, and while there, according to Wikipedia, she worked on the Moscow Daily News, shared a room with Katharine Susannah Prichard, and smuggled literature into Nazi Germany. Caviar For Breakfast (1979), the first volume of her autobiography, covers this period.
  • Christina Stead, Miss Herbert (The suburban wife): Stead needs no introduction (Bill’s review).

Short stories

  • Carmel Bird, Dimitra: Bird’s first published book, by Orbit (from her website), but it seems to have almost completely disappeared from view (at least in terms of internet searches)
  • Glenda Adams, Lies and stories: a story by Adams was in the first book my reading group did – an anthology. It wasn’t this story, but so much did we enjoy the one we read, that we went on to read a novel.
  • Shirley Hazzard, “A long story short”: published in The New Yorker 26 July 1976 (excerpt from The transit of Venus)
  • Elizabeth Jolley, Five acre virgin and other stories: for many years this collection was my go-to recommendation for people wanting to try Jolley. It captures so much of her preoccupations, style, and thoughts about writing (including reusing your own material).

Poetry

  • Stefanie Bennett, The medium and Tongues and pinnacles: prolific and still around but does not have her own page in Wikipedia.
  • Joanne Burns, Adrenaline flicknife: Burns won the ACT Poetry Prize Judith Wright award, and was shortlisted for and/or won awards in the NSW’s Kenneth Slessor Prize, but not for this collection.
  • Anne Elder, Crazy woman and other poems: Anne Elder’s name is commemorated in the Anne Elder Award for Poetry.
  • Judith Wright, Fourth Quarter: Like Stead, Judith Wright needs no introduction – to Australian readers at least.

Drama

This is not my area of interest and not only are plays best seen, but I think they have an even shorter shelf life. However, a few playwrights were published in 1976, including Dorothy Hewett, who also wrote poetry and novels.

Children’s literature

I won’t list the books here, but most of the authors are well-known to older Australian readers: Hesba Brinsmead, Elyne Mitchell (of The Silver Brumby fame), Ruth Park, Anne Parry (the least known of this group), Joan Phipson, and Eleanor Spence.

Do you have any 50-year-old books in your list of favourites? Several of these authors are important to (and not forgotten by) me, but the book from this year that is the important one is Jolley’s.

Six degrees of separation, FROM Wuthering Heights TO …

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And just like that, it’s autumn. I can’t believe summer here downunder is already over, but this is what happens. Summer comes and goes, and then I have to wait months and months for it to come again. Oh well, Six Degrees will continue, so let’s continue get on with it … but first, the usual reminder that if you don’t know this meme and how it works, please check Kate’s blog – booksaremyfavouriteandbest.

The first rule is that Kate sets our starting book. This month, she nominated a book I have read … though a long time before blogging. It was once a favourite classic, but I haven’t read it for a LONG time, and I haven’t seen the movie. Still thinking about that one. Oh, the book, you say? It’s Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights.

Jo Baker, Longbourn

Wuthering Heights, as I’m sure you know, is named for a house. So, my first link is going to be another book named for the house in which its characters live, Jo Baker’s Longbourn (my review). If Longbourn sounds familiar but you can’t quite remember, I’ll put you out of your misery: it’s Elizabeth Bennet’s home in Pride and prejudice. In fact, I nearly did the whole chain on Austen or Austen-related books that are titled for the name of a house, but I didn’t.

The little stranger, by Sarah Waters

Longbourn is a Jane Austen sequel/spin-off about the servants downstairs in the Bennet household. Another story with an upstairs-downstairs theme is Sarah Waters’ The little stranger (my review). Of course, it’s not hard to find novels with this topic, but I chose this one because I don’t think I’ve featured it before, and I haven’t heard much of Sarah Waters lately. Have any of you read her? If so, do you have a favourite?

Anyhow, moving on while you ponder that question … The little stranger is a Gothic novel, also classified as horror. It was shortlisted for the Shirley Jackson Award for Fiction, so my next link is the only Shirley Jackson I have reviewed, her short story, “The lottery” (my review). It’s one of many short stories that turn on some idea involving lotteries – after all what a rich vein that idea can produce – and I’ve read a few here.

So, as I hinted above, my next link is another of those stories. The one I’ve chosen is Marjorie Barnard’s “The lottery” (my review). I chose it because it’s a great story about a woman taking control of her life, and it is in a favourite short story collection of mine, Barnard’s The persimmon tree and other stories.

And now, I’m sorry MR, but this next link will not be obvious unless you know a bit about Marjorie Barnard’s life. She was a significant person in Australia’s literary world, particularly through the 1930s and 40s. She and her collaborator, Flora Eldershaw, held salons in a flat in Sydney, and with Frank Dalby Davison they were know for some time as “The Triumvirate“. Consequently, my next link is to Frank Dalby Davison and his novel, Dusty (my review).

Dusty is about a dog, and part of the story is told from the dog’s perspective, albeit third person. Another novel I’ve read recently which is told (completely in this case) from a dog’s perspective is Sun Jung’s My name is Gucci (my review). Both dogs are bitzers (at least Gucci is at the beginning), but as their names imply, Gucci is far more sophisticated than Dusty. Both dogs have good stories to tell, however, stories which have something to say about who we are. They are great reads.

This month’s books are diverse in time, setting and genre, though all were written in English. There are rough cabins on farms and there are grand houses. There are working dogs and more pampered ones. There’s horror, and not only of the occult kind, because people will sometimes just behave badly. And there’s love and loyalty.

As for linking back to the starting book? Well, in the very first chapter of Wuthering Heights, we meet Heathcliff, and he has a dog!

Have you read Wuthering Heights and, regardless, what would you link to?

Aaron Fa’Aoso and Michelle Scott Tucker, Spirit of the crocodile (#Bookreview)

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Aaron Fa’Aoso and Michelle Scott Tucker’s Spirit of the crocodile is a children’s/YA book, which makes it atypical reading for me. However, I’m not averse breaking my rules occasionally, and so I made an exception for this book – mainly because of its collaborative authorship and its setting.

Aaron Fa’aoso and Michelle Scott Tucker have collaborated before – on Fa’Aoso’s memoir, So far so good. It is, apparently, the first memoir by a Torres Strait Islander to be published commercially. Last year I posted on another collaborative memoir, Some people want to shoot me, by Wayne Bergmann and Madelaine Dickie. I sense that collaborative story-telling between First Nations Australian and white writers is increasing. There are probably many reasons why these collaborations happen, but from authors’ perspectives I understand that it results in better understanding and the transfer of skills and knowledge between the participants. In good collaborations, the mutual respect for each other’s skills is usually evident. Certainly, in this novel, we can sense the different knowledge, storytelling and writing skills that have been brought to the work, but the end result is something that flows well for the reader.

As for the setting … As far as I have been able to ascertain there’s been very little First Nations fiction set in the Torres Strait, which makes this one worth considering regardless of its intended audience. But for me, specifically, is also the fact that I visited the Torres Strait last year, heard some history of the islands there, and saw a presentation by Saibai Islanders, so of course, I have additional interest in the region. Now, having said all that, onto the book …

Spirit of the crocodile is set on Saibai Island, which … well, I’ll let the book describe it:

Only a metre or so above sea level, Saibai was a magnificent low-lying wetland – a flat mixture of mangrove trees, grassy plains and salty swamps. Ezra felt connected to every part of it. It wasn’t like one of those typical tropical islands in the movies but Ezra didn’t mind. Saibai had been home to his family for thousands of years – it was part of him and he was a part of it.

It is also just 4 kilometres south of Papua New Guinea.

Spirit of the crocodile, as you will have surmised, features a boy called Ezra. He is 12 years old, and is in the last weeks of his primary school days. Change is coming and he’s anxious because there is no high school on the island. He – and his friend Mason – will have to go to Thursday Island (TI) for that, and Ezra is not so sure he wants to leave the island and his family.

This, however, is not the only change coming. Threaded through the novel is the spectre of climate change. Saibai Islanders know their country and know when things aren’t looking right. The sky looks wrong, the seasons aren’t behaving as they used to, fish numbers are falling, and, most obviously:

Little by little, as the tides rose slightly higher each year, those other Main Roads – and the homes and trees along them – had been claimed by the sea. (p. 5)

This is not future change but happening right now – and it triggers the novel’s crisis, when a huge storm tests everyone’s mettle, particularly Ezra’s and Mason’s. It is, however, Ezra’s older sister Maryanne who makes the point that these unusual storms, not to mention bushfires and excessive hot weather, are no longer surprises:

The whole world knows it’s getting worse, we can see the water rising, our land disappearing, and no one cares! (p. 234).

So we have Ezra’s life changing as he prepares to transition to high school, and the climate changing, but we have one more big change – coming-of-age.

Spirit of the crocodile is about 12-year-old boys (mostly), so we are not so much in the territory of sexual maturation though there are light hints that this is coming too. No, it’s about mental, psychological, moral growth. It’s about that transition from self-centred childhood to responsible adulthood. At the beginning, Ezra and Mason are kids, playing silly pranks and thinking only of their own fun. Ezra in particular has a lot to learn, and some of it he learns from Mason who, he notices without fully understanding, is already starting to make that transition.

Two things particular to Ezra’s life suggest this coming change. One is the appearance of a large crocodile in an unusual place. Ezra feels what Mason sees, that the croc looks straight at him. Well, as Athe Harold says, Ezra “is a crocodile himself, a member of the Koedel clan … The crocodile is his totem and kin” (p. 19). Later in the novel, the crocodile returns, and again looks “directly at Ezra”. This time Ezra is prepared and looks straight back. His mum tells him the crocodile is “a sign … of … change” (p. 116), but doesn’t explain what. Another lesson for him to learn for himself!

The other thing also occurs early in the novel, a beard-shaving ceremony (Ubu Poethay) which marks the initiation of young men into manhood. It’s a few years off yet for Ezra and Mason, but during the novel Ezra’s dad makes the first gentle steps towards introducing him to Men’s (or spirit) business.

So, Spirit of the crocodile is many things. It’s a work of eco-literature documenting the reality of life on Saibai Island right now, and a call to arms, evoked through Maryanne who explains the value of education in a prestigious school:

It might give me an easier way through to the whitefella world … So I can learn how to use their stuff to help our people. Like Eddie Mabo did … I want to learn how to use their rules, their laws, their knowledge. (p. 226)

It is also a coming-of-age novel, that feels like it would appeal to kids of many backgrounds. And it generously shares culture. This does involve a little bit of telling, but is not didactic. When First Nations people tell the rest of us to educate ourselves about their culture, it is to books like this that we can go for some of that knowledge and understanding.

Superseding all this, however, is the fact that Spirit of the crocodile is a warm-hearted story about family and community. It has some important messages but they are wrapped in a story that feels real. Recommended.

Bill (The Australian Legend) has also reviewed this book.

Aaron Fa’Aoso and Michelle Scott Tucker
Spirit of the crocodile
Crow’s Nest in Cammeraygai Country: Allen and Unwin, 2025
248pp.
ISBN: 9781743317099