I write and research criticism, scholarly articles and essays on Australian literature and culture, as well as personal essays and memoir.
(If you’re looking for an article I’ve published and it’s behind an academic journal paywall, get in touch.)
The Thin Veil
Appearing in the US magazine, Harper’s, this is a republication of a longer memoir in HEAT Series 3, No. 9 (2023).
Between Night and Night
Sydney Review of Books, October 20, 2020
A review of Peter Boyle’s award-winning Enfolded in the Wings of a Great Darkness. It has just been republished in Critic Swallows Book (Giramondo, 2023), an anthology of literary criticism from the Sydney Review of Books.
The Ice Was All Between
I took a passenger ship to East Antarctica. The best laid plans turn to slush.
Imaginative Farming: Michael Farrell’s Cocky’s Joy
How do you explain Michael Farrell to the rest of the world?
Stanza and Deliver: The Filmic Poetry of Mad Max - Fury Road
This is how I pretended to be a film critic.
Fautrier’s Birds
Gestural and calligraphic painting illuminated a particular moment in Australian poetry.
Distance
Republics of Letters, edited by Robert Dixon and Peter Kirkpatrick, Sydney University Press, 2012
Part travelogue, part reflection on writing practice, part analysis of the poetry of Jennifer Rankin. This and ‘Fautrier’s Birds’ were produced during an Asialink residency in Japan.
The Lives of Others: Tactics of Encounter and Wandering in Jennifer Maiden’s Poetry
Australian Literary Studies, vol. 26 no. 1 (2011)
Jennifer Maiden’s first collections were overlooked, but they set the foundations for her now highly regarded approach to politics in poetry.
Undulating Separate: Locality and Nation in the Poetries of John Anderson and Lisa Bellear
Journal for the Association of the Study of Australian Literature, vol. 18, no. 2 (2018)
A provocative intersection in Australian poetry: a settler and a Goernpil woman, both writing from the Melbourne suburb of Brunswick during the Keating years.
‘My Father Didn’t Write That: I Did’ – On A Woman of the Future
The conversation around AI generally focuses on three possible futures for the technology, but is it too late to imagine others?
Sydney Review of Books, May 2018
For the mutant in us all. A ‘re-read’ of David Ireland’s 1979 Miles Franklin Award-winning novel.
Unbidden: Settler Poetry in the Presence of Indigenous Sovereignty
What does it mean to be human? Is it about having emotions? Do the relationships we form make us special? Or is humanity just a program that can be emulated?
Cordite Poetry Review, August 2016
A tense and reverberative moment in the poetry of John Mateer, and we’re still talking about it.
Interviewing Sophie Collins
On a tour of Ireland funded by Australian Poetry, I met up with UK-based poet, editor and translator Sophie Collins in Belfast.
Cordite Poetry Review, May 2015
I met up with UK-based poet, editor and translator Sophie Collins in a very old pub in Belfast.