The Idea of Australia: A search for the soul of the nation

by Julianne Schultz

Published by Allen & Unwin

ISBN 9781760879303

$34.99

Published shortly before the recent Federal election, and being read as profound changes are being debated concerning so many aspects of our cultural, social, political and economic lives, this book is as timely as it is thought provoking. Julianne Schultz AM, a writer and academic best known as the long-term founding editor of Griffith Review, asks us to imagine the community we might become if we were to cast aside our habit of forgetting, our habitual lack of curiosity about our nation and the cultivated, mythologised past which has brought us to where we are today.

From wars at the frontier to the culture wars being waged today, the world’s leading extinction rate from settler colonialism’s brutally exploitive continuum, and an ongoing suppression of inconvenient truths, there is much upon which to strap a black armband. The official foundation story is laid bare while the fallacy of egalitarianism is shown stripped of its pretences by decades of neoliberalism and its tenets of self-interest and individual success. Since publication, we no longer even have our monarchic mother to turn to ‘to tell us who we are.’

Against this, the author draws innumerable stories ‘rich with nuance, inclusion and possibility’ from her decades of immersion within Australia’s writing and cultural spaces, sketching out the society beyond the confines of the economy. In doing so, she provides both hope and considerable support for the idea of an Australia to which we might all belong.

Limberlost

by Robbie Arnott

Published by Text Publishing

ISBN 9781922458766

$32.99

On his family’s small orchard in northern Tasmania, Ned West spends his summer trapping rabbits and dreaming of buying a small boat to sail on the river. Too young to remember his mother’s early death and to follow his brothers into war, he’s conscious of the void they’ve left at Limberlost. Unmoored by dread of further loss and unsure of his fractured family’s love, the boat and his mastery of it come to symbolise his worthiness to their unknowable adult minds, even as he otherwise struggles to make right all that has gone wrong.

It’s a summer of consequence as Ned nurses a wild animal his trap has injured, teaches himself to sail, and meets those who will help him to define his relationship with nature – a source of beauty but not always of peace – and to find his place in the world. Ultimately it steers ‘his short, tight life’ on its quiet course, sliding into the future, its ‘paths raked clear, its stones washed in blinding light’.

Tightly constructed and beautifully written, this coming of age story follows in the classic traditions of Charlwood’s All the Green Year and McKie’s The Mango Tree, perhaps even surpassing them. Its emotive power is striking. It is as well that its effects linger so long as it’s with no small sadness that I realise that, in all the years to come, I cannot reasonably hope to read many more of its like.