The ABR Podcast

In our October issue ABR Editor and award-winning memoirist Peter Rose reviews Childhood, a remarkable new memoir by Adelaide critic and writer Shannon Burns in which Burns relates the story of a childhood and adolescence spent in great poverty and neglect. In this week’s episode of the ABR Podcast, listen to Peter Rose and Shannon Burns in conversation.

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As the November election date approaches for Victoria, Daniel Andrews is currently Australia’s longest-serving incumbent state premier. Journalist and author Gideon Haigh examines a new biography of Andrews by The Age’s state political reporter Sumeyya Ilanbey, noting her astute observations of Andrews and his ‘modus oper-Andrews’. In this week’s episode of The ABR Podcast, Gideon Haigh reads his review from the October issue.

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In this year’s ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story prize, we received more than 1,300 entries from thirty-six different countries, a testament to ongoing international interest in the Jolley Prize and ABR. Writers explored themes and topics including the pandemic, climate change, grief, desire, parenthood, and community. In this week’s podcast, the three finalists read their shortlisted stories: ‘Dog Park’ by Nina Cullen, ‘Natural Wonder’ by Tracy Ellis, and ‘Whale Fall’ by C.J. Garrow. They are briefly introduced by Jolley Prize judge and ABR Deputy Editor, Amy Baillieu. A more detailed judges’ report on the three shortlisted stories is available on our website, along with the details of the fourteen longlisted stories.

The stories also appear in our August issue, now on sale. We will announce the overall winner of the Jolley Prize at a special online event this Thursday, 11 August at 6pm Melbourne time. All are welcome to this free event, but please register with [email protected]. We look forward to seeing you there!

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The runner-up in this year’s Calibre Essay Prize, Sarah Gory’s essay ‘Ghosts, Ghosts Everywhere’ confronts spectres of the past in order to pose questions about how to live ethically in the present and about what responsibilities we bear towards the future. Drawing on a wide range of writers and thinkers as well as her grandfather’s experience of the Holocaust, Gory plots the process by which one generation’s traumatic suffering becomes another’s imaginative investment. As Gory observes, rituals of memorialisation, public and private, are beset on all sides by the snares of forgetfulness, by the temptation to ‘relegat[e] to the past what is ongoing’. Shifting between recollection and rumination, the essay refuses to yield to this temptation, proceeding through a series of fragments, ghostly demarcations of historical patterns that continue to repeat.

Sarah Gory is a writer and editor based in Naarm/Melbourne.

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Based on Antonio Garcia Gutierrez’s El Trovador, a romantic melodrama set against the backdrop of a fifteenth-century Spanish civil war, Giuseppe Verdi’s Il Trovatore has been described as the ‘apotheosis of the bel canto opera, with its demands for vocal beauty, agility and range’. Yet in what is also his darkest and most death-haunted work, Verdi invests the brightness and vocal embellishments of bel canto with greater dramatic tension in realising such characters as Azucena, the gypsy woman who must endlessly relive her mother’s tragedy, and her supposed son, the ardent, loyal, ever mystified Manrico. In this episode of The ABR podcast, Editor Peter Rose reads his review of Opera Australia’s new production of Il Trovatore. Rose worries that with Davide Livermore’s relentless and garish direction a newcomer might be led to dismiss Verdi’s great opera – and opera as an art form indeed – as crass and irreverent.

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Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in late February this year was met with near universal condemnation by Western nations. While aggression of this kind and on this scale has been relatively anomalous this side of World War II, Russia’s disregard for the laws and institutions upholding global peace and security is far from unprecedented. In this week’s episode of The ABR Podcast, Ben Saul reads his commentary piece from the July issue, arguing that Western disrespect for international law – from NATO’s intervention in Kosovo to the US-led invasion of Iraq to Australia’s detention of asylum seekers – is entirely consistent with Russia’s violation of ‘a stable, mutually agreed world order’. If, as Saul warns, ‘we expect Russia and China to be law-abiding, we must also look in the mirror’.

Ben Saul is Challis Chair of International Law at the University of Sydney, an Associate Fellow of Chatham House in London, and has taught law at Harvard and Oxford.

This is one of a series of politics columns generously supported by the Judith Neilson Institute for Journalism and Ideas.

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A year before he ascended to the prime ministership of India in 1947, Jawaharlal Nehru proclaimed that his nation was ‘a cultural unity amidst diversity, a bundle of contradictions held together by strong but invisible threads’. Yet, in the seventy-five years since India’s independence, secularist tolerance of religious and cultural difference has been eroded by a rising tide of Hindu majoritarianism. In this week’s episode of The ABR Podcast, John Zubrzycki reads his commentary on India’s transformation under Narendra Modi’s leadership – a tenure that has seen an increasingly unbridled attempt to establish Hindu hegemony across a variety of domains, from citizenship laws to education to beef consumption.

John Zubrzycki is an historian and former diplomat and foreign correspondent. He is the author of The Shortest History of India (2022).

This commentary is generously supported by the Judith Neilson Institute for Journalism and Ideas.

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Of the many pernicious legacies of colonialism, Australia’s servility in the face of Britain’s nuclear arms aspirations is one of the most under-reported and most consequential. In this week’s episode of The ABR Podcast, Elizabeth Tynan reads her essay tracing the clandestine history of, and fallout from, the agreements that allowed the British to test atomic weapons at various sites in South and Western Australia after World War II. By highlighting the Menzies government’s eager consent and the Australian media’s compliance, Tynan shows that far from being a passive victim, Australia was largely complicit in tests that wrought havoc on large tracts of land and on the Indigenous communities who lived there.

Elizabeth Tynan is an associate professor in the Graduate Research School at James Cook University, and the author of Atomic Thunder: The Maralinga story (2016) and The Secret of Emu Field: Britain’s forgotten atomic tests in Australia (2022).

This commentary is generously supported by the Judith Neilson Institute for Journalism and Ideas.

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Ann-Marie Priest’s My Tongue Is My Own, published by La Trobe University Press and reviewed in our June issue, is the first authorised biography of the Australian poet Gwen Harwood (1920–1995). Unsurprisingly, this was not the first attempt to record the life of one of Australia’s most loved and admired poets. In an exclusive feature for ABR, John Harwood reflects on the conflicting motives behind his literary executorship of his mother’s estate – an estate holding the secrets to an at-times fractious marriage between two opposing temperaments.

It's a candid, fascinating addition to the vast literature surrounding Ian Hamilton’s Keepers of the Flame (1992) and the knotty ethics of literary biography.

John Harwood has written poetry, fiction, biography, environmental journalism, literary criticism, and satire. His novels The Ghost Writer (2004), The Séance (2008), and The Asylum (2012) have been translated into several languages and won several awards. 

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The leaked draft judgment in the case of Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, in which US Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito proposed overturning the precedent set by Roe v. Wade, has returned abortion rights to the headlines. In this week’s episode of The ABR Podcast, Linda Atkins reads her essay, ‘Shouting Abortion’, which sets women’s right to terminations within the broader context of intergenerational poverty and the class lines of the medical profession. As personal as it is political, Atkins’ piece offers an unvarnished account of abortion from both sides of the operating table.

Linda Atkins is an obstetrician, married with three children. ‘Shouting Abortion’ was shortlisted in this year’s Calibre Essay Prize.

This commentary is generously supported by the Judith Neilson Institute for Journalism and Ideas.

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