archytas's reviews
1677 reviews

In amped up prose, Richardson gives us a surreal portrait of Melbournians struggling for a foothold. The book thrums with energy, the descriptions frequently over the top as if you just can't contain the hyper reality of their lives. In ways, it reminded me of Arundhati Roy or Alexis Wright's portraits, but where their characters are parts of resiliant communities (well, Roy, maybe that is not so true of Wright), Richardson's degenerates are often spiralling in anti-social ways, scrambling to find a foothold at a cost that others often seem to bear.  And they move through a Melbourne rendered with feverish clarity  -this is an insiders account, with landmarks punctuating their lives just as they do all residents.
 Maha, our storyteller, seeks to give all this, our characters lives, meaning through listening and telling. But the stories have ellipses, gaps, lacuna the reader must fill. Ultimately, this is a search for human meaning somehow on a page or in a book.
I can't really say I enjoyed this book - the characters were too self-involved, I think, even noting that they certainly have their reasons, and over exuberant is not my favourite writing style. But it is really something - I know I will pick up Richardson's next book. It is just too good not to sample, even when tastes don't entirely align.

*"At the heart of Indigenous knowledge systems across Australia lies the tenet that everything is related and that people’s sense of being at ease comes through working towards an ever-deepening understanding of our place within the universe. All communities are connected by sprawling kinship networks that encourage people to respect and care for each other and their respective homelands as a legal obligation."*

This collection works both as an introduction to concepts in the Aboriginal cultures that feature in the various essays, and as a showcase for the work of the Melbourne University Unit that Langton heads up. It is not a critical examination of the work, but rather an explanation for a general audience of what this kind of work is. It is a great, and highly accessible, read.

There is optimistic energy flowing from Maathaí's pen always, making her passionate writing about why forests matter always feel like a balm. There isn't much in this short volume which isn't already in her longer autobiography, but it is a distilled collection focused on traditional forestry practices and how they might be restored.

Criado Perez has assembled a vast array of data here, from a variety of fields. Her contention is that because researchers - and designers, practitioners and others - use male bodies, behaviours and lifestyles as the default, much of the world is poorly designed for women. This applies to everything from public transport routes designed primarily for 9-5 commuting through to heart disease medication that doesn't work on women.
The book is at its most powerful when she articulates the ways in which studies - especially medical studies - have generalised based on all-male samples over and over again (crash test dummies was another gotcha).
But ultimately I did have some issues with the book. It is much less convincing in arguing that all studies must have gender disaggregation to ensure women's needs are met. There is a slightly sticky point here that women are more than 50% of the population, so any study truly representative of the population shouldn't be biased against women by default. They often are, of course, but this can't be explained just by data gaps, but rather by systemic social factors. Which would bring me to my real problem here - the lack of any structural critique of sexism as a power structure. There is scant discussion about how race, class or wealth intersect, a deficit which Criado Perez admits, but accredits to the paucity of data disaggregated into BIPOC women, for example. But it is part of an approach which doesn't look at how research is shaped by broader social structures - in the end, this is a bit of a "sexism happens because men are sexist" view. 
Without that, this often feels like a huge dump of data, one curated to shape the argument of the author. I'm not challenging that her basic premises are correct, but it didn't have the thoughtfulness I tend to like in my non-fiction.

I enjoyed this imagined story of the probably fictional (well, definately here!) Pope John/Joan. Maguire captures her voice, and the imagining her career has a nice puzzle element to it - how to make all the pieces line up right. It wasn't a story with large themes, but it was very well told and I particularly liked the portrayal of an intellectual faith, one that did not feel in the slightest anachoronistic.

While I appreciated what Kim was doing in this wrap-up of her Korean-mythology-inspired series, it often felt clumsier than the two earlier novels in the series, especially in terms of the moral lessons being hammered home. Partly, it was just a busy book with a lot of plot to get through, a large cast of characters and a slightly more teenage tone than the previous ones.

Mean Streak is not a dry book to read. Morton's sentences slash with sarcasm, drip with disdain and set up punchline after punchline. He turns a tale of bureaucracy into a thriller, with villains whose actions get ever more outrageous until the final, reassuring fall from grace. This is cathartic, rage-fuelled writing. he frequently pulls in tangential background, from Milgrim to several references to the novel Piranesi, but quickly returns to his central narrative.
But the thing is, he has earned this, and the story deserves it. For a long time, with some familiarity with such things, I would reassure people that Robodebt was almost certainly more incompetance than malice. But it turns out there were bucketloads of both to go around. And while the incompetence is expected, the malice is a little breathtaking.
Morton demonstrates convincingly that many of those involved in the decision-making knew that this money that was being collected was not debt at all. This system, he contends, was established to steal, both to rescue a deficit and to do so by demonising and humiliating some of our most vulnerable people. Morton understands the dynamics of welfare, the way shame saturates life and his white hot anger largely stems from how this was weaponised, with multiple known victims spiralling into suicidal ideation, and some ultimately dying. 
And behind this is a senior public service that is so absorbed into politics that to object is unthinkable - even to fail to protect the politicians intent is a crime worthy of ostracism. It is junior staff who are heroes here (as well, of course, as activists and the victims themselves and their families). Frontline staff on entry level wages who haven't caught on that the public service part of the job is now just an Orwellian title. The section at the end, in which named individuals statements all contend to explain how whatever went wrong, they didn't know anything, is a depressing shitshow. In a scheme in which every lawyer initially noted it as obviously illegal, in which every test indicated that most of the 'debts' that would be claimed did not exist, in which every experience in the pilot held up that people were not able to 'correct' the arbitrary claims before they were charged, not knowing is just as unconscionable as it is unbelievable.
What happened at DSS and DHS is not I believe typical of the public service. But it is a warning bell, and not just about the integrity of the Australian Public Service. Underneath this is a fascist-style disregard for truth and a desire for a group of victims to blame, to unite society in whipping people who "damage us all". We are not so far from this reality as we think. 
I read this book in a week where I also read Paul Hardisty's book on the failures around the Great Barrier Reef and Carl Elliot's really engaging Occasional Human Sacrifice about medical malpractice whistleblowers, and taken together, it was all a bit much. But also, it highlighted that the exposure of this scheme was a monumental achievement and that every victory counts. In the end, this is a story of something beaten back, not just one dodgy program, but the right of government to lie, obscure and demonise. So let's take the win.

I have struggled with how to review this. I have so many thoughts, and yet so many of many thoughts would spoil the experience of reading. So I settled on bullet points:
1. I didn't want to stop reading this book. Didn't want to put it down, didn't want it to end.
2. It captures so perfectly queer culture of the late 80s and 90s. The days when Oxford Street wasn't posh, and the Sleaze Ball was wild;
3. It also captures the sense of constant violence, abuse and attempted degradation. The way that AIDS education associated queerness with death. The casual acceptable homophobia of "only gays and drug users were affected"
4. Kelly pulls off a real trick here in telling a very contemporary story at the same time, about how quickly things can turn. This is a book to read for our moment.
5. It has been a recent preoccupation of mine thinking about how Australia's community-informed approach the HIV education changed so much. This is a very different angle to tackle it from, but worth it.
6. The book will reward you for close attention - it isn't necessary to enjoy it, but it will be satisfying :)

This is part memoir, part history, part fury as Hardisty recounts his experiences as CEO of the Australian Institute of Marine Science. Along the way, Hardisty clearly explains the threat of rising sea temperatures, the ways that clear science is obscured by politics, and the more complex issues around farm run offs. Someone primarily interested in those issues can probably find shorter form reads, however, and the real focus here is on the nitty gritty of managing science that becomes politicised. I did think the book would have benefiting from committing more explicitly to memoir - there is a brief reference to Hardisty's time in Ukraine which feels like it could have been a book - but I can see why the climate focus is too vital to shift too much away from.

This has an unusually languid pace for dystopian fiction, parallelling a personal unravelling with a social collapse, and a journey across now impermeable borders with a journey to some kind of self acceptance. There is a lot to love here - literary allusions abound, satire often stings deliciously sharp and the worlds - especially the aura surrounding a superstar musician - are wonderfully described.
I did struggle with the pacing, especially towards the end of the book, when I started to lose interest in the journeys. But I suspect this is going to be one of those books that never quite lets me go, even if it wasnt always absorbing to read.