Robert Manne
On Borrowed Time
Black Inc
Your book in your own words: Following a diagnosis of throat cancer in spring 2016, my life was changed forever. My response provides the subject of the first piece in On Borrowed Time, a collection of recent essays. Academics who accept the title of “public intellectual”, as I now reluctantly do, must range more broadly than their university colleagues but without sacrificing depth. Through their chief weapon – the written word – they try to understand and influence even a little the trajectory of their own society and world.
Because of the corrupting influence of the Murdoch media, one essay dissects our most influential conservative columnist, Andrew Bolt, and another our most influential conservative newspaper, The Australian. Yet another traces the evolution of the terrifying ideology of the post-al Qaeda group, the Islamic State. Several grapple from different angles with our era’s overwhelmingly most consequential and puzzling issue – humankind’s failure to rise to the challenge of climate change. Through this failure, are we not all living at the expense of future generations, on borrowed time?
What you were reading when you wrote it: While writing, a 50-year-old four-volume collection of George Orwell’s essays sat by my desk. Orwell’s combination of lucidity, fearlessness, independence, self-deprecating humour and ability to face “unpleasant truths” provided a daunting reminder of what a political essay can be.
The next Australian book you’ll read: I’m about to read Dunera Lives: A Visual History by Ken Inglis, Seumas Spark and Jay Winter and am fascinated to see whether these distinguished historians can find the language to convey a sad and curious rather than tragic second world war detention story, involving the transportation to country Australia of mainly Jewish “enemy aliens” arrested in Churchill’s Britain at the time of the Dunkirk panic, where the captors were soon apologetic and the captured, in general, unembittered.
Tracy Sorensen
The Lucky Galah
Pan Macmillan Australia
Your book in your own words: The Lucky Galah is a story about the 1969 moon landing from the point of view of a pink and grey galah. Stolen from her tree before she has even fledged, Lucky is stuck in a cage with a clipped wing, tantalised by a mammalian story of super-flight, flight beyond the stratosphere. With the help of data emitted by a decommissioned NASA-era satellite dish, she tells the story of Evan Johnson, radar technician, who has come to a remote north-west Australian town to work at the NASA tracking station.
It’s about the fall of (a) man and the rise of a bird: as Evan’s fortunes fall, the galah’s fortunes rise. It’s about a woman, Evan’s wife Linda, who tries to impress with cleverly carved carrots and falls for a visiting entomologist. It’s about finally tuning in to voices that were there all along.
What you were reading when you wrote it: I was reading and rereading Donald Horne’s The Lucky Country. I was taking note of elements such as the wooden salad bowl, the bead curtain and the pink roll of toilet paper, and thinking about the laconic pest inspector that appears on page 218 of the 1964 Penguin paperback.
The next Australian book you’ll read: Dyschronia by Jennifer Mills. It’s a story about waking up one morning and finding that the sea has gone. As a climate change activist myself, I’m drawn to stories that take imaginative leaps into the future while holding a sense of a more familiar present.
Tim Winton
The Shepherd’s Hut
Hamish Hamilton
Your book in your own words: It’s about a 15-year-old borderline sociopath called Jaxie Clackton. Jaxie’s been beaten and cowed all his life. His father’s a vicious drunk and his mum recently died of cancer. Jaxie seems doomed to replicate his father’s violent misogyny – he’s the school bully and the local wild boy. But when he comes home one night, concussed and nursing a swollen eye, he finds his father dead in grisly circumstances and he panics and bolts into the bush with only what he can carry to keep himself alive: a high-powered rifle, a backpack full of food, and five litres of water.
On the face of it, this begins as a survival story, but it turns out to be a more of a sentimental education. Out in the barren saltlands, Jaxie stumbles upon an isolated camp and his story takes another sudden turn. He encounters a ruined priest who presents an entirely different way of being a man.
What you were reading when you wrote it: It’s a couple of years since I was working on the book but I remember being really impressed by Charlotte Wood’s The Natural Way of Things which was provocative and timely. I also really admired Howard Cunnell’s Fathers and Sons about a man who grew up without a father and has to learn how to father a girl he adores. His journey is complicated as his daughter transitions to being a boy.
The next Australian book you’ll read: I’ve just finished a really lovely book by Jessie Cole called Staying (to be published by Text). It’s a book about the lasting effects of trauma and how it radiates through families. It’s beautifully written and I’m full of admiration for the heart and the craft in this memoir.
Cynthia Banham
A Certain Light
Allen & Unwin
Your book in your own words: A Certain Light tells the story of the interrupted lives among three generations of my family. There’s my Italian grandfather, a forced labourer in Germany in the second world war. There’s my mother, who migrated to Australia when she was nine. And there is me.
I was a journalist for the Sydney Morning Herald in 2007 when, on assignment in Indonesia, I was in a plane crash. I suffered horrific injuries and for years couldn’t write about what happened. It took seven years before I found a way to do it. I would back into my story, writing first about some of the traumatic experiences of family members before mine. In writing about them I found a certain solace; my sense of isolation about my own trauma lessened slightly. I wrote the book because writing is what I do. I wrote it for my son, so he would know what happened to his mother.
What you were reading when you wrote it: The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million, by Daniel Mendelsohn. I read this book on the plane on the way to Europe in 2015 where I was doing research into my grandfather’s second world war experiences. Reading Mendelsohn’s incredible story of his search for the truth about his family, lost during the Holocaust, made me feel inspired but daunted as I went about my own quest.
The next Australian book you’ll read: The Shepherd’s Hut, Tim Winton. I read my first Tim Winton novel for HSC English in 1989, An Open Swimmer, and love the rawness of his writing and the way he brings the landscapes and characters of Western Australia alive. I’m looking forward to seeing how he does this in his latest book.
Ceridwen Dovey
In the Garden of the Fugitives
Penguin
Your book in your own words: In the Garden of the Fugitives is my attempt to grapple with how we remember – or misremember – our own pasts, and how we invent rather than recall history as a whole.
One strand of the novel dramatises the struggles of a young woman artist, Vita, to build a new identity from the rubble of the past, a confessional performance of white guilt which she tries to find a language for through psychotherapy. The other narrative strand is inspired by Sigmund Freud’s observation that “there is no better analogy for repression than the burial which was the fate of Pompeii, and from which the city was able to rise again.”
Freud believed that the human psyche could be excavated like an archaeological site, made to throw up fragments. Much of my novel is set in Pompeii in the 1970s, where Royce – an Ivy League graduate, one of the silver spoon set – has followed his love interest, Kitty, an archaeologist, over to the ancient city where they spend two summers working in the ruins before something goes horribly wrong.
What you were reading when you wrote it: Resurrecting Pompeii by Australian archaeologist Estelle Lazer – a fascinating account of her pioneering work on the human remains within Pompeii. Also From Pompeii: The Afterlife of a Roman Town by Ingrid D Rowland, which is a wonderful survey of the various ways the excavations at Pompeii have been interpreted by visitors over time.
The next Australian book you’ll read: Kate Rossmanith’s forthcoming Small Wrongs: How We Really Say Sorry in Love, Life and Law. I’m really interested in hybrid/blended books at the moment, and this one is a close study of remorse in the criminal justice system but is also a memoir about remorse/regret within family life.
Michael Mohammed Ahmad
The Lebs
Hachette
Your book in your own words: Following the notorious Skaf gang rapes in 2000 and the 9/11 attacks on New York in 2001, an explosion of public debate concerning the lives and activities of young men from Arabic-speaking backgrounds in western Sydney spread throughout Australia. The media and politicians gave these young men many names, including Arabs, Muslims, Middle Easterners and Lebanese. But behind the barbed wire, cameras and red-brick walls of Punchbowl Boys high school, the boys went by a different name: Lebs.
The Lebs is the story of Bani Adam, a second-generation Lebanese-Australian Muslim studying at Punchbowl Boys high school during a turbulent period in which the school had become a war zone of violent, racist, sexist and homophobic tensions. Bani Adam attempts to distance himself from the other Lebs within his school by reading the great works of Shakespeare, Vladimir Nabokov, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Kahlil Gibran and Ernest Hemingway. But when he is finally presented with an opportunity to join a community of white left-wing artists from Sydney’s inner west, he discovers that escaping the stereotypes about his identity will be far more difficult than he first imagined.
What you were reading when you wrote it: I was reading Michael Duffy’s Drive By: Inside a Western Suburbs Crime Family just as I had started writing The Lebs. And I was thinking, “If an ignorant white guy can write a book about dumbass Lebs from western Sydney, then surely an actual dumbass Leb like me can do it.”
The next Australian book you’ll read: The next Australian book I’ll read is a poetry collection called The Hijab Files (Giramondo, 2018) by Maryam Azam. Maryam identifies as a Pakistani-Australian Muslim woman from Kellyville. Her ability to blend the experiences of everyday western Sydney with the spiritual and historical language of the Muslim tradition is radical, political, subversive and unique in the purest sense of the word “literature”.
Kitty Flanagan
Bridge Burning and Other Hobbies
Allen & Unwin
Your book in your own words: Rather than an autobiography, my book is a collection of funny true stories. I’ve picked out some of my life’s highlights like the time I went to my school dance dressed like a 60-year-old dowager shopkeep, and the time my car was pelted with two dozen eggs by a (justifiably) angry mob. I’ve also dissected a few of my failed relationships for your reading pleasure because I think stories of failure are funnier than tales of triumph. Plus there are even some handy life hacks, like how not to die while hitch-hiking and how to do a DIY repair on your petrol tank. In some ways I’ve written the Where’s Wally of self-help books, in that this book contains some seriously brilliant advice, you just have to look really really hard to find it.
What you were reading when you wrote it: Tina Fey’s Bossypants. That’s why I didn’t write an autobiography. I haven’t had such an insanely interesting, high-powered showbiz life. I tour regional Australia and mostly hang out with my sister or my pets. I read a lot of David Sedaris while I was writing to remind me that stories about ordinary people can be funny and interesting too.
The next Australian book you’ll read: The Tattooist of Auschwitz. I have been fascinated by second world war stories since I was 10 and did a school project on Nazi Germany. I found it so terrifying that I drew a ridiculously incongruous border of teddy bears around the page to try to make it less frightening.
Eileen Ormsby
The Darkest Web
Allen & Unwin
Your book in your own words: The Darkest Web takes a deep-dive into three different areas of the dark web, which is like a parallel internet that can only be accessed using special software. Part one, Dark, takes the reader into the darknet markets, where drugs, guns, stolen identities, credit cards and hacking tools are bought and sold. Part two, Darker, examines online hitmen, and follows one murder in particular, as well as my own relationship with the owner of the most profitable murder-for-hire website in history. The final part, Darkest, goes to a place some readers might not want to enter: the world of hurtcore, which is even worse than it sounds.
The book doesn’t merely take place online. I travelled the world to meet many of the characters behind the sites, whether attending their trials, visiting them in jail or having a beer with them.
What you were reading when you wrote it: Researching The Darkest Web took me to very bleak places and I turned to Liane Moriarty for escape. She is like thinking woman’s chicklit but much sharper and funnier than that term implies. I love her quirky structuring of story and incredibly rich and nuanced characters.
The next Australian book you’ll read: It may not be the very next book I’ll read, but I’m really looking forward to journalist Ginger Gorman’s book on internet trolls. Besides my obvious interest in the subject matter, I admire her depth of research and way with words.
Geoffrey Robertson
Rather his Own Man
Knopf Australia
Your book in your own words: I have reached three score years and ten so I am in my anecdotage, which seemed a good time for an autobiography. It charts my progress from pimply state schoolboy to an Old Bailey barrister and then to acting for prisoners on death rows around the world and trying to bring tyrants to justice. It’s an opportunity to think back on some of the absurdities of growing up as one of “Ming’s kids” in the 50s – the repressive censorship, the white Australia policy, fighting for Indigenous rights and against conscription for the Vietnam War.
The book moves on to the life of an expatriate but never an ex-patriot in Britain and some of the cause celebres I became involved with at the Old Bailey. It’s also been an opportunity to explain my beliefs about the importance of human rights and the need to find new ways of fighting for them in a world which is becoming more polarised and less cooperative. An autobiography is an egregious exercise but I have tried to make fun of myself as well as of my opponents.
What you were reading when you wrote it: Whilst writing my memoirs I mainly read the memoirs of others. David Hare’s The Blue Touch Paper was a treat and Claire Tomalin’s memoir A Life of My Own inspired me to greater self-revelation. She’s such a good writer: where I talk about the workings of Providence, she speaks of “the randomness of things” which better describes the ebbs and flows of my own life.
The next Australian book you’ll read: I think I will pass on Jacquie Lambie. On this trip I only have time to read on aeroplanes so for my next short flight I bought David Marr’s book, Factions (a great title – in the Labor party, factions speak louder than words) and for longer flights, the latest Richard Flanagan, First Person.
Meg and Tom Keneally
The Power Game (Book Three, The Monsarrat Series)
Vintage Australia
Your book in your own words – Meg Keneally: When a boatman on a lonely island off the coast of Van Diemen’s Land is murdered, the authorities believe they have the perfect suspect. In 1826, Maria Island – an island dangling off an island dangling off an island, and one of Britain’s most remote penal settlements – is home to very inconvenient political prisoner. Thomas Power is the son of a baronet, and a former member of the House of Commons. He’s also an Irish revolutionary who is too popular to hang. He has been tucked away in the hopes his followers will forget him, which they show no sign of doing.
The government hopes pinning the boatman’s murder on Power will dent his reputation so he can be executed without causing a revolt. But the murder victim was hardly an innocent, having read all the letters he delivered to the island and using the knowledge in a wide-ranging blackmail scheme. And when former gentleman convict Hugh Monsarrat and his friend Mrs Mulrooney are sent to investigate, they find the evidence is leading them down paths the government doesn’t want them to follow.
We were very interested in exploring the idea that one person’s free speech is another’s sedition, and the ownership of communication as a path to power.
What you were reading when you wrote it: The Roving Party by Rohan Wilson, which is a confronting story about a band of trackers and their prey, the Aboriginal people of northern Tasmania. It was so affecting, as tales about the massacre of innocents are, that I occasionally needed a deep-breathing break. The arrogance of the colonists, the flexible morality of the bloody business they were engaged in, and the perspective of the hunted are themes that resonated strongly with me.
The next Australian book you’ll read: Terra Nullius by Claire G Coleman. This is an alternative story of the colonisation of Australia. I like speculative fiction, and my favourite kind of story is one which jolts you out of your own perspective. I’m also a sucker for novelists who use landscape as a character, which I’ve been told Coleman does to great effect. The book has won numerous awards and been nominated for the 2018 Stella prize. I’m very much looking forward to it.
Martin Flanagan
A Wink from the Universe
Viking
Your book in your own words: Melbourne’s west has always been Melbourne’s “other”. Its river, the Maribyrnong, was used as an industrial drain. Its working class community bore the brunt of the depressions of the 1890s and the 1930s. Its football club survived, but only just – its single VFL/AFL premiership, in 1954, having become a dim memory. “No one expected us to win in 2016,” says club historian Darren “Ace” Arthur. “Not even us”.
Enter coach Luke Beveridge and captain Bob Murphy, the Lennon and McCartney of the Bulldog revival. The team they conjure into being suffers crippling injuries and limps into the finals in 7th place. No one gives them a chance. They beat four more highly fancied teams, three of them on their home grounds, to win the premiership.
As the campaign builds, the west, now with one million people of all races and religions, finds it has a cause in common. Bulldog family stories buried for generations come zooming to life. People start seeing the dead and pray to statues.
What you were reading when you wrote it: The two books I kept close by were The Book of Fame by Lloyd Jones, a novel which succeeds in being evocative and lyrical while being utterly authentic in sporting terms, and Dylan Thomas’s Under Milk Wood, which I love not just for its language but for the author’s shrewd appreciation of ordinary life. As happens in Under Milk Wood, I wanted to create a crowd effect.
The next Australian book you’ll read: Losing Streak by historian James Boyce on the Tasmanian gambling industry – fearless, informed political journalism at its best, and a book that shaped a state election.
