Indigenous wisdom, refugee children, the complexity of kinfolk … it’s all here.

Australia’s first farmers

Young Dark Emu (Magabala Books) by Bruce Pascoe helps younger readers to see Australia as it was before Europeans arrived – a land of cultivated farming areas, productive fisheries, permanent homes and thriving villages. Also, that our Indigenous people can teach us much about sustainability in a dry continent. ‘If we dedicated only 5 per cent of our current farming lands to these [Indigenous] plants we would go a long way to meeting our carbon emission targets.’

Rage and restitution

Valeria Luiselli began writing her much-lauded novel, Lost Children Archive (Penguin Random House) to express her rage from a time spent serving as a court translator for children from Latin America caught up in the United States’ migration crisis. The book is an engrossing account of a family’s road trip from New York to the Mexican border and the impact of America’s harsh border protection system. There are big issues here – and small voices.

Gullies of freedom

Kindred (Magabala Books) by Gunai woman Kirli Saunders contains some of the most accessible poetry I’ve read for ages. Saunders’ efforts to keep Indigenous stories and language alive, also make it worth buying. From Dharwal Country, ‘Ashen limbs ache to heal / shattered sky threatens to fall / pine in place of eucalypt / there is trauma here.’ From Trailblazer, ‘learn that a journey / through darkened gully / is your start / to being free.’

Stories happen to you

Earlier this year, Irish writer, Danielle McLaughlin, received one of the world’s most lucrative literary awards, the Windham-Campbell Prize, worth $165,000 for her debut collection Dinosaurs on Other Planets (The Stinging Fly). McLaughlin says the impact of a story on a reader ‘should almost be a feeling, a thing that has happened to you rather than something that you necessarily understand on an intellectual level straight away’. Her stories do this, and the title story is very moving.

Family collisions

In Lucy Kirkwood’s family drama, Mosquitoes (Currency Press) Alice is a particle physicist and Jenny is her erratic sister. The sisters and others parry and collide while the Boson preaches global catastrophe and the dangers of devaluing science, ‘what’s different today is that you can no longer tell the difference between this piece of information and any other piece of information, it arrives in your brain in the same font as any other fact’. A compelling play.

This article first appeared in the July 2019 issue of the South Sydney Herald.