‘Candid’, ‘remarkable’, ‘beguiling’: the best Australian books out in April
Black Duck: A Year at Yumburra by Bruce Pascoe, with Lyn Harwood
Nonfiction, Thames & Hudson, $34.99
Bruce Pascoe became an academic celebrity when his 2014 book Dark Emu challenged the orthodoxy that there was little evidence of pre-colonial agriculture among Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. The success of Dark Emu – which was “adopted by Australia like a new anthem”, as Pascoe writes – and the subsequent scrutiny deeply affected both him and his wife, Lyn Harwood, who eventually separated (they have reconciled, but live separately).
In the aftermath, Pascoe turned his attentions to Yumburra, a farm he bought on Yuin Country in Far East Gippsland, in the hopes of deepening his understanding of Indigenous food production. Black Duck is his diary account of that time, charted by seasons, harvests, bushfires, family and nature, with some lovely illustrations from Harwood. – Sian Cain
Hope by Rosie Batty, with Sue Smethurst
Memoir, Harper Collins, $35.99
Rosie Batty was catapulted from anonymity to a dreadful national prominence in 2014 when her estranged partner murdered their 11-year-old son Luke. She quickly became Australia’s leading awareness campaigner about male violence against women (about one a week dies at the hands of a male partner or ex-partner) and children. When she was named Australian of the Year in 2015, her campaign became ever more tireless.
Ten years after Luke’s murder, Batty chronicles the in-between. It’s a candid personal story of remarkable resilience, endless grief and pain, personal rebuilding, frustration – and, yes, hope that she and others are changing things, albeit too slowly. – Paul Daley
The End of the Morning by Charmian Clift
Fiction, New South, $34.99
Left unfinished when she died in 1969, this coming-of-age novella by Clift introduces us to the adolescent Cressida Morley, a fictional stand-in for Clift and her own childhood in coastal Kiama, New South Wales. Morley might be familiar to readers of Clift’s husband George Johnston, appearing in his autobiographical My Brother Jack and its sequel; The End of the Morning was initially shelved so Clift could help Johnston finish that career-making masterpiece, loaning him Cressida along the way.
Published for the first time this month, edited by Nadia Wheatley, this fragment of a book shows Morley and Clift in control of their own narrative, giving us a glimpse not only of what was, but also what might have been. – Walter Marsh
The White Cockatoo Flowers by Ouyang Yu
Short stories, Transit Lounge, $32.99
These rather beguiling short stories – Ouyang’s first collection written in English – delve into the Chinese diaspora in Australia, and what it means to live within two cultures. Parents grapple with their adult son’s decision to adopt an Engish name. A man discusses the nuances of “She’ll be right” with his taxi driver. A despondent migrant wanders around Melbourne on Christmas Eve, looking for belonging. A father becomes increasingly angered by his young son’s ‘fawning’ over other migrant children.
His protagonists are often troubled by racism, by a sense of being disconnected from the world, frustrated by the limits of the languages they speak. All must navigate cultural differences in gestures of kindness, disdain, generosity and cruelty – SC
The Work by Bri Lee
Fiction, Allen & Unwin, $32.99
Her nonfiction, newsletters and podcast have proved Bri Lee’s nose for the zeitgeist, so it’s no surprise that her first novel would cover all the themes of the moment: consent, cancellation, ethics and AI in the moneyed New York art world, with a bit of romcom thrown in for good measure.
Lally is the young gallerist of a hip space in Manhattan; Pat works at an auction house in Sydney, trying desperately to pass as someone born into money. After a meet-cute at the Armory Show, we follow their affair and sometimes seedy business dealings, in a book that reaches its inventive, gripping peak at a solo show Lally should never have mounted … – Steph Harmon
Deep Water by James Bradley
Nonfiction, Penguin, $36.99
In vivid detail, James Bradley unravels the science of life below the surface as he interrogates our relationship with the ocean. It is not only home to marine life, but to meaning; to a different way of understanding time, the world and our place within it.
From the bioluminescent edges of water on the shores of Jervis Bay to the light-starved depths of the Mariana Trench, from the origins of water to the existential challenge of climate change, Deep Water is an ambitious, far reaching work. Against the spectre of climate breakdown there is a sense of urgency in Deep Water, but beauty and pause too. – Celina Ribeiro
How To Knit A Human by Anna Jacobson
Memoir, NewSouth, $34.99
A young woman wakes in an unfamiliar white room. There is a name on the hospital bracelet, Anna, but “nothing attaches itself to the letters”. The project of Anna Jacobson’s remarkable debut memoir, How to Knit a Human, is to record the splintering of her self and memory after a severe psychotic episode. As well as being a poet and visual artist, Jacobson is a dancer, a musician, a sculptor, a diarist, an inveterate archivist of the self.
It’s through her creative practice, through knitting together the threads of art and memory, that she is able to assert her lost autonomy – and to write this moving memoir. – Catriona Menzies-Pike
Thunderhead by Miranda Darling
Fiction, Scribe, $29.99
Thunderhead takes the form of a day in the life of Winona Dalloway, running the obstacle course of young motherhood before preparing dinner for her husband’s colleagues. The stakes sound low on paper but inside her head, where the novella takes place, her mania is unspooling: a series of inner voices that battle with each other, and with a fear of what could happen if she makes a wrong move.
The writing is wry and whimsical in parts, but while Miranda Darling’s book is billed as a black comedy, any humour is lost to the darkness. Winona’s observations blur with a kind of madness – but the danger, we come to understand, is very real. – SH
Excitable Boy by Dominic Gordon
Memoir, Upswell Publishing, $29.99
In his introduction to Dominic Gordon’s debut memoir, Christos Tsiolkas describes his writing as “a map of [Melbourne] that I have never encountered before … strange and thrilling and dangerous”.
In raw, poetic, often funny prose, Gordon unfolds a young life he was lucky to make it out of. He writes of growing up in poverty as an “obsessive night-time kid”; of petty crime, meth use, and friends lost to drugs, prison, suicide. He picks fights in libraries, visits glory holes in sex clubs, and tags trains at night. Looking back, he grapples with what drove him to these scenes: “Maybe operating in the extreme present tense is the juice of it. Primal, precipice-close. Alive.” – SH
