The ABR Podcast

This week, on The ABR Podcast, Miles Pattenden reviews Hope: The autobiography

by Pope Francis. It is not every day that a pope writes a tell-all. Pattenden explains: ‘Of Pope Francis’s predecessors, only that preening Renaissance man of letters Pius II Piccolomini contributed to the genre directly.’ Miles Pattenden specialises in the history of the Catholic Church and his books include Pius IV and the Fall of the Carafa. Here is Miles Pattenden with ‘Barefoot in the snow: Of poetics and papacy’, published in the April issue of ABR.

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This week on The ABR Podcast, Ebony Nilsson unearths the letters that Robert Menzies received from the Australian public during the 1950s Petrov Affair. Letters included everything from warnings to exhalations of relief to expressions of concern for the Petrovs’ dog. Ebony Nilsson is a historian of migration and security during the Cold War and the author of Displaced Comrades: Politics and Surveillance in the Lives of Soviet Refugees in the West. Listen to ‘“Congratulations Bob”: The Petrov Affair and the Australian public’, published in the March issue of ABR.

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This week on The ABR Podcast, we bring you a special poetry feature. With Editor Peter Rose’s imminent departure from Australian Book Review and the publication this month of his seventh poetry collection, Attention, Please! (Pitt Street Poetry), eighteen poets and critics read from Peter Rose’s extensive body of work, dating back to 1990. Readers include Sarah Holland-Batt, Lisa Gorton, John Kinsella, Felicity Plunkett, Morag Fraser, Geoff Page, John Hawke, and Peter Rose himself.

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This week on The ABR Podcast we feature a short story from the ABR Archive. The story, ‘A Body of Water’ by Else Fitzgerald, was commended in the 2011 ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story prize. It opens in the desolate, quiet space of a former steel town on the Franklin River. Fitzgerald writes: ‘The town hunkers on the southernmost tip of a cruel spit of land stretching down into the Bite, surrounded by the cold ocean.’ Listen to Else Fitzgerald with ‘A Body of Water’, first published in ABR in 2012 and now part of ABR’s extensive digital archive going back to 1978 – all available to subscribers.

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This week on The ABR Podcast, Christopher Allen reviews James Fairfax: Portrait of a collector in eleven objects by Alexander Edward Gilly. James Fairfax, who was born in 1933 and died in 2017, was born into the ‘greatest press dynasty Australia had yet seen’. Christopher Allen is the national art critic for The Australian. Listen to Christopher Allen’s ‘“Subject to his birth”: The biography of a prince’, published in the January-February issue of ABR.

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This week on The ABR Podcast we feature a short story from the ABR archive. The story, ‘Joan Mercer’s Fertile Head’ by S.J. Finn, was commended in the 2018 ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story prize. (The 2025 Jolley Short Story Prize is now open!) S.J. Finn is an Australian writer based in Melbourne. Listen to ‘Joan Mercer’s Fertile Head’, first published in ABR in 2018 and now part of ABR’s extensive digital archive going back to 1978.

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This week on The ABR Podcast, Matthew Lamb reviews Character Limit: How Elon Musk destroyed Twitter, as told by award-winning investigative journalists Kate Conger and Ryan Mac. Noting Musk’s tendency to favour ‘the virtual over the physical world’, the book gives a ‘blow-by-blow’ account of Musk’s shortcomings while leading X. Matthew Lamb is a writer and the author of Frank Moorhouse: Strange Paths. Listen to Matthew Lamb’s ‘Let That Sink In!: Fantasy without consequence at Twitter’ published in the January-February issue of ABR.

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This week on The ABR Podcast, historian Mark Finnane asks: ‘who gets the right to speak on matters of research within a tradition of empirical scholarship?’ Mark Finnane is a Professor of History at Griffith University and has published widely on Australian and Irish history. Listen to Mark Finnane’s ‘Citational Justice: A revolution in research practice?’, published in the January-February issue of ABR.

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This week on The ABR Podcast, Georgina Arnott discusses the dilemmas of writing an entry on Judith Wright for the Australian Dictionary of Biography. Georgina Arnott is the author of The Unknown Judith Wright, editor of Judith Wright: Selected Writings, and Assistant Editor at ABR. Listen to Georgina Arnott’s ‘“Shimmering multiple and multitude”: Keeping up with Judith Wright’, published in the January-February issue of ABR.

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This week on The ABR Podcast, Toby Davidson marks the centenary of Francis Webb with an essay on the poet. Toby Davidson is the editor of Francis Webb’s Collected Poems and a senior lecturer at Macquarie University. Listen to Toby Davidson with ‘The gold standard: The centenary of Francis Webb’, published in the January-February issue of ABR.

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