- 115: SPACE
with A Sometimes
114: NO THEME 13
with J Toledo & C Tse
113: INVISIBLE WALLS
with A Walker & D Disney
112: TREAT
with T Dearborn
111: BABY
with S Deo & L Ferney
110: POP!
with Z Frost & B Jessen
109: NO THEME 12
with C Maling & N Rhook
108: DEDICATION
with L Patterson & L Garcia-Dolnik
107: LIMINAL
with B Li
106: OPEN
with C Lowe & J Langdon
105: NO THEME 11
with E Grills & E Stewart
104: KIN
with E Shiosaki
103: AMBLE
with E Gomez and S Gory
102: GAME
with R Green and J Maxwell
101: NO THEME 10
with J Kinsella and J Leanne
100: BROWNFACE
with W S Dunn
99: SINGAPORE
with J Ip and A Pang
97 & 98: PROPAGANDA
with M Breeze and S Groth
96: NO THEME IX
with M Gill and J Thayil
95: EARTH
with M Takolander
94: BAYT
with Z Hashem Beck
93: PEACH
with L Van, G Mouratidis, L Toong
92: NO THEME VIII
with C Gaskin
91: MONSTER
with N Curnow
90: AFRICAN DIASPORA
with S Umar
89: DOMESTIC
with N Harkin
88: TRANSQUEER
with S Barnes and Q Eades
87: DIFFICULT
with O Schwartz & H Isemonger
86: NO THEME VII
with L Gorton
85: PHILIPPINES
with Mookie L and S Lua
84: SUBURBIA
with L Brown and N O'Reilly
83: MATHEMATICS
with F Hile
82: LAND
with J Stuart and J Gibian
81: NEW CARIBBEAN
with V Lucien
80: NO THEME VI
with J Beveridge
57.1: EKPHRASTIC
with C Atherton and P Hetherington
57: CONFESSION
with K Glastonbury
56: EXPLODE
with D Disney
55.1: DALIT / INDIGENOUS
with M Chakraborty and K MacCarter
55: FUTURE MACHINES
with Bella Li
54: NO THEME V
with F Wright and O Sakr
53.0: THE END
with P Brown
52.0: TOIL
with C Jenkins
51.1: UMAMI
with L Davies and Lifted Brow
51.0: TRANSTASMAN
with B Cassidy
50.0: NO THEME IV
with J Tranter
49.1: A BRITISH / IRISH
with M Hall and S Seita
49.0: OBSOLETE
with T Ryan
48.1: CANADA
with K MacCarter and S Rhodes
48.0: CONSTRAINT
with C Wakeling
47.0: COLLABORATION
with L Armand and H Lambert
46.1: MELBOURNE
with M Farrell
46.0: NO THEME III
with F Plunkett
45.0: SILENCE
with J Owen
44.0: GONDWANALAND
with D Motion
43.1: PUMPKIN
with K MacCarter
43.0: MASQUE
with A Vickery
42.0: NO THEME II
with G Ryan
41.1: RATBAGGERY
with D Hose
41.0: TRANSPACIFIC
with J Rowe and M Nardone
40.1: INDONESIA
with K MacCarter
40.0: INTERLOCUTOR
with L Hart
39.1: GIBBERBIRD
with S Gory
39.0: JACKPOT!
with S Wagan Watson
38.0: SYDNEY
with A Lorange
37.1: NEBRASKA
with S Whalen
37.0: NO THEME!
with A Wearne
36.0: ELECTRONICA
with J Jones
CONTRIBUTORS
Phillip Hall
Phillip Hall Reviews Robert Harris’s The Gang of One: Selected Poems
In ‘The Day’, Harris writes a stunning eschatology for Gough Whitlam. For Harris the dismissal was ‘the day of deceit’, ‘the day to lose heart’. As I write this review, I too am demoralized and anxious, despite the beta-blockers.
Posted in BOOK REVIEWS
Tagged Phillip Hall, Robert Harris
Phillip Hall Reviews Quinn Eades and Gabrielle Everall
St Ignatius of Loyola is supposed to have said: ‘Give me a boy until the age of seven, and I will own the man’. Well, the Baptists had me for a lot longer than my first seven years, and subsequently, I have lived a most conventional life.
Posted in BOOK REVIEWS
Tagged Gabrielle Everall, Phillip Hall, Quinn Eades
From Garden to Gallery
In the Garden I cross the threshold of glasshouses seeking succor with bromeliads whose leaves are banded with scales, like blotting paper, to inhale this morning’s fog: outside I meander amongst upright natives: one is shaped like a pine but …
Posted in 79: EKPHRASTIC
Tagged Phillip Hall
Phillip Hall Reviews Judith Wright, Georgina Arnott and Katie Noonan
When Judith Wright died in 2000, at the height of Prime Minister John Howard’s cultural hegemony, Veronica Brady was called upon to deliver a eulogy at the public memorial held in Canberra. This eloquent and impassioned speech was reprinted in a national newspaper under the headline, ‘Giant in a Land of Pygmies’.
Posted in BOOK REVIEWS
Tagged judith wright, Katie Noonan, Phillip Hall
Phillip Hall Reviews Maggie Walsh
Maggie Walsh is a Bwcolgamon woman from the First Nations community of Palm Island, a tropical paradise located in the Great Barrier Reef only sixty-four kilometres northwest of Townsville. But this is a paradise with a troubled history since European settlement – with a lack of jobs and housing, and a tragic reputation for violence and disadvantage. In 1999, for example, the Guinness Book of Records named Palm Island as the most violent place on earth outside of a combat zone.
Posted in BOOK REVIEWS
Tagged Maggie Walsh, Phillip Hall
Phillip Hall Reviews Ink in Her Veins: The Troubled Life of Aileen Palmer by Sylvia Martin
This biography is another powerful testament to the tragedy of difference. Sylvia Martin writes of an idealistic creative pragmatist who was victimised for her gender disphoria and, while loved, never accepted. Aileen Palmer is yet another outspoken and independent woman hounded to the mental hospital and shock treatment.
Posted in BOOK REVIEWS
Tagged Aileen Palmer, Phillip Hall, Sylvia Martin
Build-up
The bardibardi call time on mununga slogans of ‘stop the boats’; shaping-up and giggling their Makassan memories of brown bodies coming ashore in a spray of surging sea: for centuries these boat people cultivated tamarind trees in a highlight of …
Posted in 74: NO THEME V
Tagged Phillip Hall
Phillip Hall Reviews Mick: A Life of Randolph Stow
Suzanne Falkiner describes her aim in writing this biography of Randolph Stow as being ‘to contextualise the [literary] works within the broad arc of Stow’s life’. She notes that Stow’s desire for an ‘authorial invisibility – and an accompanying silence – extended to a desire for a chameleon-like camouflage in his personal life’. This camouflage included a retreat from Australia and ‘from the world of published books, in a gradual progression towards silence and into a richer inner landscape’. But, Falkiner shows, this ‘richer’ inner life was always plagued by depression (and one serious suicide attempt), a one-time addiction to prescription drugs, a very complicated (dependency) relationship with alcohol, a fear of madness and a failure to establish long term sexual relationships and to acknowledge and accept his sexuality.
Posted in BOOK REVIEWS
Tagged Phillip Hall, Randolph Stow, Suzanne Falkiner
Natural Selection: Ecological Postcolonialism as Bearing on Place
Australian poetry reminds us that we cannot encounter the natural world except by cultural means.
Posted in ESSAYS
Tagged Andrew Lansdown, Caroline Caddy, Charles Birch, David Brooks, David Martin, Eric Beach, Gary Catalano, Jennifer Martiniello, John Kinsella, John Manifold, judith wright, Kevin Roberts, Laurie Duggan, Lionel Fogarty, Oodgeroo Noonuccal, Phillip Hall, Romaine Moreton, Rosemary Dobson, Samuel Wagan Watson, Shirley Walker
Talking English
The Gulf’s ancient tongues are hobbled by inherited trauma, gene-crackers sadistically scabrous and burgeoning in the remembered fluency of wire-tipped stockwhips and all those manhandled civilisers of a splendid frontier’s orders. And though munanga were not to prosper in these …
Posted in 72: THE END
Tagged Phillip Hall
New Moon
for my bardibardi kujaka: Gloria Friday, Marjorie Keighran & Clara Roberts This is my recovery road, to follow the bardibardi into the Gulf’s wild pharmacy; I let myself surrender to those hallelujah hands outstretched to a sandalwood’s leafy collection dis …
Posted in 71: TOIL
Tagged Phillip Hall
My Intervention (in Cowdy)
My Intervention story began in 2011 when I moved to the Northern Territory’s remote Indigenous Borroloola community; a designated growth town located in the Gulf of Carpentaria, a few hundred kilometers from the Queensland border.
Posted in ESSAYS
Tagged Phillip Gijindarraji Hall
Dystopian Empire
Gossip spot-fires in Borroloola’s Big Camp, excitement incites The Gravel, at Malandari, shopkeepers look up from their stocktaking and the whitefulla foreskins forget their power: dem people fightin’! twobula bardibardi ini dirt an dem whitefullas can’t stop’em… The grey nomad …
Posted in 66: OBSOLETE
Tagged Phillip Gijindarraji Hall
Borroloola Blue
All around our steel home’s broad bull-nosed veranda we’d jack-hammered rock, dug garden beds and ponds, fenced an oasis as we planned for shade, blossoms, wildlife and fruit. Amongst the natives we’d cultivated paw paws, frangipanis, mangoes, bananas … Security …
Posted in 66: OBSOLETE
Tagged Phillip Gijindarraji Hall
