Review of Journey to Horseshoe Bend, by TGH Strehlow

This was first published in Sydney Review of Books, July 2016, under the name of Paul Galimond. By the late 1960s, when T. G. H. Strehlow was writing what would become Journey to Horseshoe Bend (first published in 1969 and reissued in 2015 by Giramondo), he had already produced key works of Australian ethnology, such as Aranda Phonetics and Grammar (1944), Aranda Traditions (1947), and … Continue reading

Inattentions of Reading

This essay first appeared in Meanjin, Autumn 2019, in a slightly different form. Whatever else it is, reading is surely one of the central activities and interests of literature.  Literature itself, though, is hardly a central activity or interest in contemporary culture.  So it seems odd that readers of Gerald Murnane who are also critics or reviewers like to point to the author’s eccentricities: he … Continue reading

Paperless Pilgrims

This review first appeared in Arena Magazine, Number 150, 2017. It appears here in a slightly altered form. Oscar Martinez’s The Beast: Riding the Rails and Dodging Narcos on the Migrant Trail is an important book for anyone who wants to know why people are forced to flee their home for life in another country.  It is the first English translation of Los migrantes que … Continue reading

Australian Realism

This essay was first published in Sydney Review of Books, July 2015, under the pseudonym, Paul Galimond. It appears here in a slightly altered form. In The Lonely Voice: A Study of the Short Story (1962) Frank O’Connor argues that a defining feature of the genre is what he calls ‘submerged population groups’.  ‘It may be Gogol’s officials’, he writes, ‘Turgenev’s serfs, Maupassant’s prostitutes, Chekhov’s … Continue reading