the abr podcast

In this week’s ABR Podcast, historian Ebony Nilsson tracks the lives of mid-century migrant Australians with the aid of ASIO and CIA files. Ebony Nilsson is a Research Fellow at the Australian Catholic University, the current ABR Laureate Fellow, and recently published her first book, Displaced Comrades: Politics and Surveillance in the Lives of Soviet Refugees in the West. Listen to ‘The lives of ‘ordinary’ people: From Siberia and Shanghai to Kings Cross’, published in the January-February issue of ABR.

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On this week’s ABR Podcast hear leading defamation scholar David Rolph discuss recent proceedings in the Federal Court relating to the reputation of Ben Roberts-Smith, a decorated soldier accused of war crimes in Afghanistan. David Rolph is a Professor of Law at Sydney University and the author of several books, including Reputation, Celebrity and Defamation Law and Defamation Law. Here is David Rolph with ‘Self-inflicted wounds: A vindication of investigative journalism’, which will appear in the July issue of ABR.

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This week’s podcast features a review from ABR Editor Peter Rose of Darryl Pinckney’s absorbing new memoir, Come Back in September: A literary education on West Sixty-Seventh Street, Manhattan. The book recounts Pinckney’s early years in New York and his unlikely friendship with Elizabeth Hardwick, the American literary critic, novelist and short-story writer. Peter Rose terms it a ‘distinctly New York kind of book’. Listen to the review, published in the April issue of ABR.

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Whereas many look to Vienna for its imperial architecture, the city developed a rich and complex relationship with modernist forms when they exploded across Europe in the early twentieth century. In this week’s ABR Podcast, Christopher Menz, former Director of the Art Gallery of South Australia, explains this fascinating aspect of Viennese cultural history – including its surprising connection with Australia. Christopher Menz and ABR Editor Peter Rose will be leading a cultural tour of Vienna from October 13 to 24 for Academy Travel. Listen to Christopher Menz in conversation with Academy Travel’s Stuart Barrie here.

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This week’s ABR Podcast is a special feature on the work and life of one of Australia’s finest poets, Peter Porter (1929-2010). Morag Fraser, currently at work on a biography of Porter, introduces the podcast, setting out the major currents of his life. From there, fifteen poets and critics read from the Porter oeuvre, in all its ‘variety and depth’, explains Fraser, and offer their own memories of the man. Listen to Gig Ryan, Sarah Holland-Batt, Martin Flanagan, John Kinsella, Judith Beveridge and more read from Porter’s making with words.

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In this week’s ABR Podcast, Timothy J. Lynch, Professor of American Politics at the University of Melbourne, considers the November 2022 American midterm elections. Lynch finds reason to ‘to be cheerful’, for what voters communicated – more than anything else – was their growing intolerance for a new brand of ideologically driven, conspiratorial politics. Here is Timothy J. Lynch with ‘Enough already! Post-Trump America returns to the centre’.

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Since the May 2022 federal election, several books have been published seeking to explain the rise of the teal independents. In this week’s ABR Podcast, Dennis Altman, a Vice-Chancellor’s Fellow at La Trobe University, reads his review of three such books. Altman argues that the media’s concern with the teals borders on an ‘obsession’, blinding them to other cross-currents in the Australian political landscape. Listen to Dennis Altman’s ‘Teal Talk: Exaggerating the independents’ revolution’.

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What has spurred thousands of ordinary women in Iran and throughout the world to take to the streets under the slogan ‘Woman, Life, Freedom’? How unprecedented is this recent uprising in the history of Iran’s women’s movement? In this week’s ABR podcast, author-journalist Zoe Holman discusses the distinctive features of this protest and argues that its primary drivers are members of Iran’s Generation Z, who are educated, fearless, and angry. 

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This week we draw on ABR’s expanding digital archive and head back to December 2010, when ABR Editor Peter Rose wrote at length about E.M. Forster, author of novels such as Howards End and A Room with a View. In this podcast, Rose discusses Wendy Moffat’s biography of Forster, before roaming more widely to revisit those influential novels and dipping into the immense Forster literature – and the even more gargantuan literature of Bloomsbury, of which Forster was a peripheral and somewhat wary member.

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This week’s episode of the ABR podcast is devoted to the Books of the Year. ABR Editor Peter Rose, critic and writer Beejay Silcox and historian Frank Bongiorno discuss the books that stirred them most in 2022. This follows a Books of the Year feature in the December issue of ABR, with contributions from thirty-six writers and critics. Listen to Peter Rose, Beejay Silcox and Frank Bongiorno discuss the best books of 2022.

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Unlike in the United States and several other Western nations, Australian governments are under no compulsion to consult parliament before sending troops to war. In Subimperial Power: Australia in the international arena, Clinton Fernandes argues that this reflects, and furthers, Australia’s longstanding ambition in foreign affairs, which is to demonstrate its usefulness to the United States. In this week’s ABR Podcast, Kevin Foster, an academic at Monash University who has published widely on war in the Australian media, reviews Subimperial Power. 

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Lachlan Murdoch will almost certainly be the next head of News Corp, one of the world’s largest media companies and the dominant force in Australia’s media landscape. In this week’s ABR Podcast, Patrick Mullins, visiting fellow at the ANU’s National Centre of Biography, reviews a new biography of Lachlan Murdoch by Paddy Manning, titled The Successor: The high-stakes life of Lachlan Murdoch. Listen to Mullins read ‘Dual Focus’, which appears in the December issue of ABR.

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In this week’s ABR podcast, Amanda Laugesen asks what the word ‘bogan’ says about Australian culture and society. Laugesen, who is Chief Editor of The Australian National Dictionary, explains the history of the word and its derivatives, including boganity. Listen to Amanda Laugesen’s reading ‘On Boganism’, which appears in the November 2022 issue of ABR.

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This week’s ABR Podcast features Anne Rutherford’s review of the new SBS miniseries The Australian Wars, published in the November issue of ABR. Directed by Arrernte and Kalkadoon woman Rachel Perkins, the series is an attempt to recast Australian frontier conflict by posing new questions. Echoing Perkins, Rutherford asks: ‘Why is the extreme violence of the frontier not recognised as war?’ and ‘Why is the death of an estimated 100,000 people on the frontier, both black and white, not acknowledged and memorialised?’ Listen to the ABR Podcast here.

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In this week’s ABR podcast, listen to Ronan McDonald discuss one hundred years of James Joyce’s Ulysses, among the most famous books of the twentieth century. McDonald, who is the Gerry Higgins Chair in Irish Studies at Melbourne University, explains that Ulysses is a work with a complex publishing history, even setting aside its censorship record. To mark the Ulysses centenary, Cambridge University Press has republished a splendid facsimile of the original version of Ulysses, raising new questions about the book we thought we knew.

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Italy is used to political volatility. In today’s ABR Podcast, we learn about the new test facing Italy’s fragile political system following the cessation of the relatively stable leadership of Mario Draghi. Claudio Bozzi, a barrister and Lecturer in Law at Deakin University, describes the chaotic seaside campaign that took place in the lead up to the September general election. He concludes with a postscript on Italian politics written in the days after his commentary went to print. Listen to Claudio Bozzi reading 'Under the beach umbrellas', from the October 2022 issue of ABR.

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In our October issue ABR Editor and award-winning memoirist Peter Rose reviews Childhood, a remarkable new memoir by Adelaide critic and writer Shannon Burns in which Burns relates the story of a childhood and adolescence spent in great poverty and neglect. In this week’s episode of the ABR Podcast, listen to Peter Rose and Shannon Burns in conversation.

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As the November election date approaches for Victoria, Daniel Andrews is currently Australia’s longest-serving incumbent state premier. Journalist and author Gideon Haigh examines a new biography of Andrews by The Age’s state political reporter Sumeyya Ilanbey, noting her astute observations of Andrews and his ‘modus oper-Andrews’. In this week’s episode of The ABR Podcast, Gideon Haigh reads his review from the October issue.

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The runner-up in this year’s Calibre Essay Prize, Sarah Gory’s essay ‘Ghosts, Ghosts Everywhere’ confronts spectres of the past in order to pose questions about how to live ethically in the present and about what responsibilities we bear towards the future. Drawing on a wide range of writers and thinkers as well as her grandfather’s experience of the Holocaust, Gory plots the process by which one generation’s traumatic suffering becomes another’s imaginative investment. As Gory observes, rituals of memorialisation, public and private, are beset on all sides by the snares of forgetfulness, by the temptation to ‘relegat[e] to the past what is ongoing’. Shifting between recollection and rumination, the essay refuses to yield to this temptation, proceeding through a series of fragments, ghostly demarcations of historical patterns that continue to repeat.

Sarah Gory is a writer and editor based in Naarm/Melbourne.

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A year before he ascended to the prime ministership of India in 1947, Jawaharlal Nehru proclaimed that his nation was ‘a cultural unity amidst diversity, a bundle of contradictions held together by strong but invisible threads’. Yet, in the seventy-five years since India’s independence, secularist tolerance of religious and cultural difference has been eroded by a rising tide of Hindu majoritarianism. In this week’s episode of The ABR Podcast, John Zubrzycki reads his commentary on India’s transformation under Narendra Modi’s leadership – a tenure that has seen an increasingly unbridled attempt to establish Hindu hegemony across a variety of domains, from citizenship laws to education to beef consumption.

John Zubrzycki is an historian and former diplomat and foreign correspondent. He is the author of The Shortest History of India (2022).

This commentary is generously supported by the Judith Neilson Institute for Journalism and Ideas.

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