Naag Mountain by Manisha Anjali was launched in April 2024 at The Alderman in Brunswick East during a sold-out evening event. The event featured a speech by poet Autumn Royal in honour of releasing Manisha’s debut book into the world. The speech was followed by a haunting and transcendental vocal and harp performance by Genevieve Fry. Read a transcript of Royal’s speech below.

The following speech was delivered on the unceded lands of the Wurundjeri Woi-Wurrung people of the Kulin Nation. We acknowledge and respect their Elders, both past and present. We extend this respect to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander individuals who may read this speech. Always was, always will be Aboriginal land. We also wish to express that from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.

I first physically met Manisha in a garden. It was 2019 and we were reading alongside each other at a house fundraiser for the Djab Wurrung Heritage Protection Embassy. But I do not doubt our spirits already knew each other intimately as years earlier, Manisha’s stunning poetry gushed into my psyche, and I was enraptured and now – I am here.

At this point, it feels necessary to summon (or depend upon) the words of the brilliant Eunice Andrada when she expresses that Manisha’s ‘Naag Mountain is an exquisite work that resounds with the reminder of what can be reclaimed when a community moves towards their awakening: their dreams, their futures. This is a distinguished debut collection from a poet whose vision is urgent and consuming.’

‘Urgent and consuming’. I respectfully echo Andrada’s words as I attempt to form an articulation of Manisha’s Naag Mountain and the significance of its existence. Speaking about this book in front of you, dear audience, is a privilege and beyond this scripted reading, I promise to consider how I can ever return such a deep honour.

As Manisha explains in her author note to accompany this work of brilliance: ‘Naag Mountain is the recovery and aftermath of the girmit, the period between 1879 and 1916 when Indians [derogatorily termed ‘coolies’] were taken to Fiji for indentured labour on Australian-owned sugar cane plantations’. Manisha’s Naag Mountain potently and generously illuminates the realities of the cultural and cellular inheritance of this indentured labour through a collaboration of dreams, oceans, archival documents, songs, ancestral historiographies, and poetry.

Naag Mountain also reveals a complex and intertwined circuitous narrative spanning across times, oceans, and realms. Within Naag Mountain, there exists an imaginary film called ‘Paradise‘. As Manisha eloquently describes this film within the text:

In this film, the actors are allowed to walk away – to reject their scripted roles and embrace their continuous evolution of identities between human and non-human beings. The existence of the film, ‘Paradise’, allows for such action. The poetry surrounding this film, ‘Paradise’, also generates an action, but without containment. As Naag Mountain declares, nothing should ever be contained.

‘Paradise’ correspondingly brings awareness to the concept of ‘depiction’, and the deplorable truth that this film, this narrative of ‘Paradise’, should already be known and that these actors should have always had agency and dignity.

I quote another passage from Naag Mountain where such agency and dignity are allowed, encouraged, and guided by spirits across oceans in a moment where the actors:

Naag Mountain is an epic poem in which the concept of the ‘single and distinctive hero’ is not just overturned by Manisha’s captivating poetic voice and defiantly vivid expressions, but completely quashed. This is not done out of spite or in a cruel manner – but through a multitude of polyvocal voices, bodies, entities, spirits, animals, elements, and sensations that challenge the notion that there can only be one dominant account of history. As Manisha’s expressive voice guides me over the phone: ‘The Indo-Fijian psyche does not just inhabit the physical realm’.

Radical metamorphic bodily changes occur throughout Naag Mountain during violent scenes and traumatic events, but most significantly, these transformations also take place throughout moments of deep love and celebration. There is also the metamorphosis of yourself as a reader – something that is so very crucial and so very sacred. As Nancy Gray Diaz elucidates, metamorphosis ‘represents the conjunction of self and world, and it plays out the individual’s conflict with, or assumption into, the values of that world’.

Interconnected with metamorphosis is a meaningful and poignant theme in this book is the birth and rebirth as ‘Paper jackal fly out of my mouth, and / into the misty air, and into the monsoon’ (p. 8).

With such lines, both birth and rebirth are intricately woven and profoundly expanded upon throughout the entirety of Naag Mountain with keen attention and generous dedication.

In this work, in Naag Mountain, all matters expressed are actualities and are not merely metaphorical representations. Here, in Naag Mountain, ‘metaphor’ as a concept is considered too simplistic and detached for such a profound understanding of what is occurring. In Manisha’s own words: ‘through the process / of extraction, I see my responsibility. It is standing still at / the top of the mountain (p. 31). There is a view from the top of the mountain and Manisha is showing it to you, dear reader.

At this point in my scripted act, I have exceeded over 300 words. Three – the number ‘3’ – and the time of 3 a.m. is extremely poignant and forceful in the actuality of this work and the history it is based upon. This is the time when ‘the coolies’ were ordered to rise from their dreams and begin work. It is also known as ‘the suicide hour’, a bodily sacrifice often performed as an act of resistance against ‘the company’ that once ‘owned’ Manisha’s family. The Colonial Sugar Refining Company.

I will end/open with Manisha’s evocative and powerful description of ‘this company’:

Two Giramondo authors are shortlisted for the 2024 Stella Prize: Alexis Wright for her epic novel Praiseworthy, and Sanya Rushdi for her autofictional work, Hospital. The announcement was made on 4 April on ABC Radio National.

Six books are shortlisted for the $60,000 prize for Australian women’s writing, which is awarded annually ‘to one outstanding book deemed to be original, excellent, and engaging’.

‘A canon-crushing Australian novel for the ages’, Wright’s Praiseworthy has won the Queensland Literary Award for Fiction, and is currently shortlisted for the Dublin Literary Award and The James Tait Black Prize. Rushdi’s Hospital, translated from Bengali by Arunava Sinha and described by the judges as ‘deeply experiential’, is the author’s debut book.

Judges’ comments, Praiseworthy:

Fierce and gloriously funny, Praiseworthy is a genre-defiant epic of climate catastrophe proportions. Part manifesto, part indictment, Alexis Wright’s real-life frustration at the indignities of the Anthropocene stalk the pages of this, her fourth novel.

That frustration is embodied by a methane-like haze over the once-tidy town of Praiseworthy. The haze catalyses the quest of protagonist Cause Man Steel. His search for a platinum donkey, muse for a donkey-transport business, is part of a farcical get-rich-quick scheme to capitalise on the new era of heat. Cause seeks deliverance for himself and his people to the blue-sky country of economic freedom.

Praiseworthy walks the same Country as companion novel, Carpentaria, published in 2006, and here, Wright demonstrates further mastery of form. Reflecting the landscape of the Queensland Gulf Country where the tale unfolds, Wright’s voice is operatic in intensity. Wright’s use of language and imagery is poetic and expansive, creating an immersive blak multiverse. Readers will be buoyed by Praiseworthy’s aesthetic and technical quality; and winded by the tempestuous pace of Wright’s political satire.

Praiseworthy belies its elegy-like form to stand firm in the author’s Waanyi worldview and remind us that this is not the end times for that or any Country. Instead it asks, which way my people? Which way humanity?

Judges’ comments, Hospital:

Hospital is an unflinching, insightful and delicately wrought work of autofiction that brings devastating lucidity to the often-opaque realm of mental health. Drawn from Rushdi’s own experience with psychosis, it is a novel that bucks the classic tropes and cliches, eschewing sensationalism and sentimentality in favour of an invitation to meaningful engagement and understanding. Through her spare, honest words, deftly translated from the Bengali by Arunava Singha, Rushdi’s ordeal becomes our own. We descend into psychosis with the narrator, acutely feel her disconnections and institutional indignities. We come to question notions of “illness” and “treatment”. There are no jump scares, just the ineluctable clarity that demands we remain in the moment with something we find deeply uncomfortable.

The following excerpt is from Naag Mountain, Manisha Anjali’s remarkable debut collection. Anjali is an Australian and New Zealand poet of Indo-Fijian background, the descendant of indentured labourers. Her book is an imagined recovery of the little-known cultural inheritance of a displaced and exploited people.

The film that emerges from the waves in our place of conception, Port Douglas, Far North Queensland, is misty and blue-green. The reel is entangled symbiotically with kelp, sea lettuce and jellyfish. The film stock is full of salt and coral. Images imprinted on plastic film are visible through fragments of algae, sand and micro-civilisations of the sea.

When the two moons are released from shadow, we unravel the living reel and project the propaganda onto the sky. When we hear the ringing of temple bells, we hear songs that have been backmasked. When we hear the singing of conch shells, we hear songs that have travelled generations to be heard.

We are actors in an obscure, banned film called Paradise. Paradise is comprised of footage of the girmit, the haunted ‘agreement’, the Indian indentured labour system which was established after slavery was abolished. We sign contracts we cannot read, then we wipe the bloods from our brows with our eight hands, then we plant our eight hands into the lungs of the South Pacific.

—

Opening scene. Sugar cane plantation on fire. Tea plantation on fire. Copra plantation on fire. Banana, banana. Copra, copra. Fire. Fire wails with choirs of widows and seabirds: girmit songs of longing, mourning cries and culling prayers.

A circle of flames in the ganna field. In the middle is a white horse named Pajero, eating yellow wildflowers. Next to Pajero is Pilgrim with two black braids bound with red ribbons, a gold nose ring, white blouse and white petticoat. Pilgrim has a white chicken in one hand, and a mirror in the other. In the mirror is the reflection of the blue sea.

—

Things we carried on the Leonidas, 1879: our ganja, our nose rings, our holy water from the mouths of our rivers.

Giramondo Publishing congratulates Alexis Wright, whose highly acclaimed novel Praiseworthy has been shortlisted for the Dublin Literary Award. One of the richest literary prizes in the world, the international award is presented each year to a novel written or translated into English, and aims to promote excellence in world literature.

Praiseworthy is one of six shortlisted books chosen by an international panel of judges from the longlist of 70 books. Wright, a member of the Waanyi nation, is the first Australian to be shortlisted for the Dublin Literary Award since Hannah Kent and Richard Flanagan in 2015. 

Praiseworthy has won the Queensland Literary Award for Fiction, and is currently longlisted for The Stella Prize and shortlisted for the James Tait Black Prize for Fiction. It was published last year in the United Kingdom by And Other Stories, and this year in the United States by New Directions. The New York Times has described Praiseworthy as ‘the most ambitious and accomplished Australian novel of this century’.

Read the Dublin Literary Award judges’ comments below.

Alexis Wright’s Praiseworthy is a wonder of twenty-first century fiction. This modernist more-than-an-allegory about a pernicious haze that settles over a northern Australia town yokes a painfully contemporary tale of political, social and climatic disaster to a narrative consciousness embodying 65 000 years of aboriginal survival. Intimate while epic, the family drama at its center reads like chamber music on a symphonic scale. Wright has authored a blisteringly funny book, replete with situations and speech that elicit wild laughter—a laughter through tears we may recognize from our readings of Beckett and Kafka. She has also written a beautiful one: time and again Praiseworthy delivers unforget- table images, from aerial rivers; of dancing butterflies to hordes of stinking donkeys. Startlingly original, fiercely political, uncompromising in every respect, Praiseworthy expands the possibility of the novel form.

The Dublin Literary Award is unique in that books are first nominated by libraries from cities around the world. Praiseworthy was nominated by the National Library of Australia.

The winner will be announced on May 23 at the International Literature Festival Dublin.

‘The most striking aspect of David Malouf’s life in letters is the multiplicity of forms it has taken, as if one should talk of his lives in letters rather than think of it as a single life,’ wrote Giramondo publisher Ivor Indyk in the Sydney Review of Books in honour of the author’s eightieth birthday in 2014. This March, Malouf turns ninety. We celebrate one of Australia’s best-loved writers and a long-time supporter of Giramondo, with a recorded interview, Malouf’s contributions to HEAT, and a poetic tribute from Nicholas Jose.

The photograph above captured David Malouf at the very beginning of his career, just ahead of the publication of his debut poetry collection. Sally McInerney, the photographer, said of that day: ‘David’s book of poems, Bicycle, was soon to appear, and the publishers had requested a suitable “author” photograph. So, in the summer of January 1970, we wandered rather shyly through the University of Sydney’s semi-deserted grounds, looking for places and light that would lend themselves to portraiture. We have been friends ever since.’

In conversation with Ivor Indyk

In a recording made in April 2021, Giramondo publisher Ivor Indyk spoke with David Malouf about his body of work as a poet and novelist, the time he spent away from Australia in Italy, his international reputation, and the imaginative power of his writing. Listen to their conversation below.

Giramondo Talks: David Malouf in conversation with Ivor Indyk

David Malouf in HEAT

David Malouf has been an important contributor to HEAT, Australia’s international literary magazine, founded by Giramondo in 1996. We feature below five contributions by Malouf, recently digitised in the HEAT archive. The sixth piece is a poem by Nicholas Jose, published in the very first issue of HEAT in honour of Malouf’s sixtieth birthday.

Epimetheus, or The Spirit of Reflection

‘We have all heard of Prometheus, great rebel against the gods and bringer to earth of a commodity, fire, which we have depended on from earliest times for much of what makes us human: campfires, cooked meat, the forging of iron into ploughshares, horseshoes, swords. What is not so well known is that Prometheus had a brother, also a titan and demi-god, but as his name suggests quite opposite in nature and habit of thought.’

Read more

Buxtehude’s Daughter

‘What she found most insufferable was the camaraderie between them, which she could not help but feel was an alliance; that and the assumption, in their careless all-conquering manner, that the world was theirs by right, to be divided up just as they pleased. Well, not if she could help it!’

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Mozart to da Ponte: Words and Music

‘Words act, they get things going, they are sociable. They form unions, found cities, make contracts in which responsibilities are established and dues paid, or they break them and start wars. A sentence is a theatre in which something happens, it is all agents and events. But music is just itself. It has no story to tell, no truth to utter, and it cannot lie because it proclaims nothing but its own perfect presence.’

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Ulysses, or the Scent of the Fox

‘The Greek commanders, Nestor, Agamemnon and the rest, could do nothing but wait, unheroically, for the cloud to lift from their champion’s brow. Till it did, they dared not move.’

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The South

‘On a soft, sunlit morning in March 1959, just a few days before my twenty-fifth birthday, I stood at the rails of an Italian liner, the Fairsky, and after a five-weeks sea-voyage that had taken me via Singapore, Colombo, Bombay, Aden and Port Said, saw the Bay of Naples open before me, and utterly familiar in the distance the dark slopes and scooped-out cone of Vesuvius – all just as I had always imaged it, like the breaking of a dream.’

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Moonflowers

By Nicholas Jose

‘Inside meantime, past sixty, you hold forth, tossing pasta and greens, searing the fish, uncorking wine, adjusting the lights, sentence by sentence giving shape and grace, enthusiasm, optimism, critique — all the while you are out there in the dark…‘

Read more

The following excerpt is from the first pages of Jonathan Buckley’s Tell, the joint winner of the 2022 Novel Prize. It is Buckley’s twelfth novel.

First Session

I can talk for as long as you like, no problem. You’ll just have to tell me when to stop. How far back do you want to take it? Because Lily is what it’s about, in my opinion. And the mother is part of the story too. Father too. Goes without saying. But maybe better to pick them up later. Shall we start with the crash? Seems an obvious place.

[Pause]

Terrible thing is, Curtis would have been on his way home the next day. He’d been gone a week, going around Vietnam and Thailand, inspecting the factories. Cambodia was the last stop, and he’d done what he needed to do there, so he decided to go to Angkor Wat. That might have been the plan all along. I don’t really know. If you’ve flown halfway round the world you can’t come back without seeing it, can you? Even if you’ve only got time to see a small part of it. You need days to explore the whole place, apparently. So he flew from the capital to this other town, right by the temples. Can’t remember the name. And that’s where the crash happened. He hired a driver to take him out to some part of the site that was fifty miles away. More or less. A good distance. They set out in the dark. That’s the thing to do – see the temples as the sun’s coming up. They were almost there when they hit a lorry, or the lorry hit them. Head-on, in the middle of the road, on a bend. I don’t think they ever worked out who was to blame. Curtis couldn’t remember anything about it. One minute he’s in the car, next thing he knows he’s in hospital with all these tubes coming out of him and his head full of staples. The driver – Curtis’s driver – was killed. Don’t know about the chap in the lorry.

[Indistinct]

Six months before we saw him again, up in Scotland. You could see he’d taken a real battering. Asil brought him up in the mighty Mercedes, the battleship. More on Asil later, and the cars. I was in the garden when the battleship came in, and Asil went round to the passenger’s side to open the door, which was unusual. With people in that world, it’s par for the course. You no longer have to trouble yourself with opening a door. Big politicians, film stars, royalty. They don’t open doors. But that wasn’t Curtis’s style. He didn’t have to make a point about his status every minute of the day. We worked for him, but we weren’t his servants, if you know what I mean. Staff is what we were. Staff and servants are not the same thing. The people I was working with in Scotland, some of the places they’d worked, what their employers really wanted were slaves. Curtis wasn’t like that.

[Pause]

Right, so Asil opened the door and gave an arm for Curtis to grab onto. And when Curtis got out, he clearly wasn’t the person he’d been before. It was obvious, within seconds. The way he looked around. It was like he was having to refamiliarise himself with the place. Fix his bearings. He could have been a patient arriving at some super-deluxe clinic. Then he noticed me, and the smile was a good sign. But all he said was ‘How are you?’ Something like that. He didn’t use my name. Before, Curtis always used your name. It was a kind of courtesy. ‘Hello Jeannie. Hello Viv.’ Some people, you could be there a year and they still wouldn’t know you from Eve. But I had the feeling that my name hadn’t occurred to him immediately. He was having to search his memory for it, and it wasn’t available. The next time I saw him, though, in the morning, he knew my name then. And he knew Rosa’s name right off. She managed the household. The chosen one. Captain of the palace.

[Inaudible]

I didn’t get to speak to him properly for a couple of days, so it was the physical changes I noticed at first. For one thing, he’d lost weight. Quite a few pounds. And the way he walked. He had a stick for a while, and he had to concentrate on where he was putting his feet. Things that should have been automatic weren’t. He was uncertain rather than unsteady, like the ground wasn’t completely even. You’d see him stumble now and then, for a few months after he came back. There were headaches as well. Terrible headaches. I mean, the scar was not small. Like a parting, all the way from front to back. He’d get these head-splitters that could go on for hours and nothing would make them go away. He’d fill a sink with iced water and keep dunking his face in it. What Rosa told me. Dizziness too. He’d be sitting down and suddenly he was bobbing around on the sea. It got him down. You could see that. Someone who’d always been on top of things, on top of everything, and then this was happening. His brain had hijacked him. That’s what he said to Rosa. Hijacked by his own brain. The worst was when he couldn’t find the right word. Not just names. Random words, simple words. He just couldn’t get hold of them sometimes. That went on for some time. And he’d get angry about it. He’d never had the longest fuse, mind you. Read any of the articles about him and they’ll say something to that effect. Lara got that right. We’ll come on to Lara in a bit. Not suffering fools gladly. That’s how they put it. Being angry with himself, though – that was new. The tiredness as well. Not the kind of tiredness you get at the end of a hard day. It was like being hit by a wave. That’s how sudden it was. It smashed him. And for a time he had this sensation of trickling water, in his head. That must have been hard to live with. As if there was cold water trickling inside his skull, like a small pipe was leaking in there. It stopped, after a year or so. But still, it would have driven me round the bend.

[Indistinct]

Same with a stroke. My grandfather, Les, he was a mild sort of chap. Never exactly Mr Sunshine, but not what you’d call a gloomy character either. A bit dull, to be honest. Took things as they came. Then he had his stroke, and from that point on he was a miserable sod. Forever complaining. Finding fault. His speech was damaged, so sometimes you didn’t know what he was moaning about. One arm was completely useless too. Some people, they come out the other side of something like that with a sense of how precious everything is. A new urgency. Engagement. They’ve come close to the edge, and they’ve been pulled back, so they start to rethink their priorities. They realise they only have one shot at life and they’d better not waste it. Seize the day and all that. That wasn’t the way Les took it. No silver linings with granddaddy’s clouds. He was always getting depressed. He felt vulnerable, like the switch might go off at any moment. It affects different people differently. It’s amazing what can happen. Weird stuff. I’m not talking about just going from cheerful to miserable or miserable to cheerful. Sometimes the brain gets completely rewired. Harry, the maintenance man, he did some reading, after what happened with Curtis. Found some weird stuff. One woman, she had an accident when she was skiing. Fell and hit her head on a rock, and she went into a coma. And when she woke up, she could speak a language she hadn’t been able to speak before. Spanish, I think it was. She must have learned some Spanish at school and the knock jogged her memory. That’s what I thought. But Harry said she’d never studied it. She knew two or three words, from cookbooks and recipes. But when she came round she could speak whole sentences. Phrases, anyway. She’d picked up a language the way you pick up a virus. I’ll ask him where he read it, then I can send you a link, if you like. We’re still in touch. I’m in touch with most of them, which tells you something, doesn’t it?

The following excerpt is from the first pages of Anne de Marcken’s It Lasts Forever and Then It’s Over, the joint winner of the 2022 Novel Prize. Our heroine protagonist narrates the story from the afterlife.

I lost my left arm today. It came off clean at the shoulder. Janice 2 picked it up and brought it back to the hotel. I would have thought it would affect my balance more than it has. It is like getting a haircut. The air moving differently around the remaining parts of me. Also by turns a sense of newness and lessness – free me, undead me, don’t look at me.

Isn’t it strange that I never knew a single living Janice and now I know three?

—

I stay in bed all day. If I lie on my right side, I can keep the arm balanced as if it is still part of me. Or I can pretend it is your arm and that you are in bed with me. I think about how we used to take a blanket into the dunes and wrap up together. Wake with sand in our hair and in the corners of our eyes. Sound of the ocean big as the sky. I miss sleep. I miss you.

—

Mitchem says I’m in denial. That I am depressed because I am indulging in a sense of loss instead of wonder. ‘Embrace your new existence,’ he says. I picture myself trying to do this with one arm.

When I was alive, I imagined something redemptive about the end of the world. I thought it would be a kind of purification. Or at least a simplification. Rectification through reduction. I could picture the empty cities, the reclaimed land.

That was the future. This is now.

The end of the world looks exactly the way you remember. Don’t try to picture the apocalypse. Everything is the same.

—

Mitchem says it is important to do small, ordinary tasks when you’re depressed. That even if I don’t do anything else all day, I should make the bed. This morning he came in and opened the curtains. He stood over me, that half-moon head of his backlit by the window. He picked up the arm from where it was lying on the floor and held it out like something I needed to account for. He said, ‘You’ve experienced a significant loss.’ He said, ‘It isn’t just your arm.’ He said, ‘You’re grieving your life.’ Since he broke off his penis he’s Mr. Wisdom. When he left, I closed the curtains again. A glow creeps under my room door from the hallway where the lights are always on.

—

Yesterday Mitchem preached in the lobby. Today he set up on the roof. He stands on a side table from one of the rooms. Afterward I saw Bob following him around wearing a rain poncho like the one Mitchem wears. Uh oh.

—

Tried to make a harness for the arm. It is too heavy. Dead weight. Ha ha.

—

Found a shirt today with cuffs that button. It is red. I stuffed in the arm and buttoned myself in with it. The fit isn’t good. The arm slides down bare up to the elbow and flops forward in my way. Like the dislocated limb of a mannequin. It gets turned around in the sleeve and elbows me in the side. It is strange to see it like this. My hand. My wrist. The fingernails.

—

Smoke has settled down in the sound. Sunrises and sets have been dull and angry. The full moon dark red. Even inside the hotel it is hazy. Exit signs are dim irony at the ends of the long hallways. Wildfire, back-burn, blitz. Any way you look at it, a blaze we set.

Mitchem preached on the roof again tonight. Only the undead can truly understand the meaning of life, he said. There is no meaning, he said. Bob was there. He seems to have been promoted. Now he carries the side table around and stands nearby when Mitchem is up there. Which comes first, a believer or a religion? Others are showing up now, too. I can’t describe how strange it is. Someone puts her hands up in the air and then the others do it. Someone moans, and the others moan. You can see how this will go. There is talk of a revival.

—

That’s another thing – most of us can’t remember who we are… were…are. We are character actors to ourselves – people we recognise but can’t name.

It really bothers some of the hotel guests. They always have the troubled, distracted look of a person trying to remember something simple. They are attracted to one another. They sit together saying one name after another hoping if they hear their own name they will know it. They write names on the walls, in the elevator, on the air exchange unit on the roof, in the dust the dust the dust that covers everything. You can take a name for yourself. You can leave one for someone else. But why choose the name Janice when someone else is already using it? And who chooses the name Bob?

Melbourne-based poet Manisha Anjali reflects on her debut book Naag Mountain (1 April 2024), an imagined recovery of the little-known cultural inheritance of a displaced and exploited people.

Dream a dream in your place of conception. Port Douglas, Far North Queensland. This dream will inform the next part of your book, and the next part of your life.

I received this instruction in my dream. I packed my bags, left Naarm and headed north. I wanted this book to be informed by what I would dream in Port Douglas. I ended up on Minjungbal country, Tweed Shire, NSW. Then state and international borders closed. Unable to travel, not all dreams could be re-enacted and performed, but many were. Naag Mountain is a collaboration between history and dream.

During this time, humpback whales were migrating to the warm waters of Queensland from Antarctica to give birth. Whale sightings were a near daily occurrence. I came to think of them as guides in the writing process, symbols of love breaching playfully into the salty clouds. I wrote sitting on the sand, on cliffs and rocks. I listened to the pulses and moods of the wild Pacific Ocean, a prominent entity in Naag Mountain. I was surrounded by sugar cane plantations. I communed with the ghosts of labourers and the darkness known by the land. I dreamed of spirits, music and the afterlife. Life was marked by red lunar eclipses, frog songs and driving down lonesome highways in my 1999 Mazda 626. I was tapping into the inherent creativity of the natural world, in a way that I hadn’t done since I was a child in Fiji. 

Naag Mountain is the recovery and aftermath of the girmit, the period between 1879 and 1916 when Indians were taken to Fiji for indentured labour on Australian-owned sugar cane plantations. Prior to my time living in the Tweed, I researched ancestral historiographies by way of archival documents, historical texts and oral histories from family members. I sought to recover the dignity, beauty and complexity of the girmityas, who otherwise only resided in the shadow of the archive and dissipating cultural memory. Living close to the sugar cane plantations on Minjungbal country, I came to understand history as a living, continuing phenomenon.

It was important that this narrative poem was told in the language of dreams. To follow, perform and write with the subconscious is to be in dialogue with the hidden and symbolic self. It made sense that the hidden stories of the girmit were rendered by this mystical process. The lines between reality and dream, truth and illusion dissolve.

I live a split existence between Australia, Aotearoa and Fiji. And so, Naag Mountain is also split across many lands, realms and timelines. It was written with immense love for the community whom the story is about. 

Melbourne-based poet Grace Yee has won the 2024 Victorian Prize for Literature, Australia’s most generous writing prize worth $100,000, for her verse novel and debut book, Chinese Fish. The surprise announcement was made at the Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards ceremony at The Wheeler Centre in Melbourne, during which Yee was also awarded the VPLA for Poetry, worth $25,000.

It was an exceptional day of recognition for Yee and her book, which was longlisted for the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards in the poetry category earlier that morning. Yee holds dual citizenship in Australia and New Zealand, with Chinese Fish distributed on both sides of the pond.

A polyphonic, multi-generational and feminist tale which tells the story of a migrant family in Aotearoa New Zealand, Chinese Fish began as a PhD thesis. ‘I wrote it for myself,’ said Yee. ‘I had absolutely no ambitions for publishing it…[and] when I finished my thesis, it sat in the top drawer.’ You can hear Yee talk more on her book in her interview with Mel Fulton on Triple R’s Literati Glitterati, which aired a few months after Chinese Fish was published.

This is the second year in a row that a Giramondo author has taken away the Victorian Prize for Literature, with Jessica Au winning it in 2023 with her novel, Cold Enough for Snow.

Read Yee’s acceptance speech for the Victorian Prize for Literature and the VPLA judges’ comments on her book below. A transcript of Yee’s Poetry prize acceptance speech can also be found on her website.

Grace Yee’s VPLA acceptance speech

If my parents were here, they would be gobsmacked. They would be astonished that this little story that I wrote even got published in the first place. This story, which was inspired by very ordinary people like them, to have been acknowledged like this is mind-blowing.

One of the things that has pleased me a great deal since I published the book, which I did not anticipate, is so many readers have reached out to me and told me how much this story has resonated with their own family stories of immigration and resettlement.

I think that literature is crucial for illuminating the ordinary. Ordinary people’s lives. Lives that have been marginalised, hidden, and erased. And for shining light on the darker recesses of the world. Literature raises really big questions and it has no easy answers. It gives us pause and I think those pauses are significant, more significant, when you read a story and the characters in that story, their lives are so very different to your own. That kind of literature gives us the biggest pause.

This award will enable me to have a bit of a pause and reflection. Which doesn’t mean that I’m not going to be doing anything! [laughter] Pausing and reflecting is as much of the writing process as putting pen to paper and putting words on a screen, as all writers know.

I am so very very grateful for this award, it is such an amazing honour. Thank you.

Watch the livestream of Grace Yee’s acceptance speech here.

Judges’ comments

Chinese Fish switches between lyric, dramatic and documentary poetic forms, to tell a multi-generational tale of the Chin family’s migration from Hong Kong to Aotearoa New Zealand. Yee focuses on women’s experience; particularly, how migration tests the relationship between a mother and her daughter. She tells this story with sparkling humour, wit, and stylistic verve, while paying sustained attention to historical circumstance – particularly everyday racism and the discriminatory government policies which affected Chinese migrants. Characters’ voices are interwoven with archival text and scholarly observations. Cantonese-Taishanese characters, peppered throughout the dialogue, enhance a reader’s connection to this fictive family and their past. We were impressed by how intelligently Chinese Fish braids its modes and forms, its feminist vision, and its literary and conceptual sophistication.

Order Chinese Fish on the Giramondo website, or find it in your local independent bookstore.

Additional coverage

’Melbourne poet Grace Yee wins the $100,000 Victorian Prize for Literature, Australia’s richest literary award’ — ABC Arts

‘Australia’s richest writing prize goes to Melbourne poet for family saga’ — Sydney Morning Herald

‘Debut poet Grace Yee wins $125,000 for ‘feminist vision’ at Victorian premier’s literary awards’ — Guardian Australia

Read a poem by the award-winning poet Kate Middleton. It appears in pages 14-5 of Television (1 February 2024), a collection in which Middleton considers the emotional impact that television programs had on her formative years.

The award-winning poet Kate Middleton reflects on Television (1 February 2024), a collection which is part criticism, part autobiography, and always acute in its recollection of the emotions inspired by television drama.

In 1986 I wanted to dress like Punky Brewster. Like her I had dark hair and freckles and a talent for enthusiasm. I wanted to sleep in a flower cart and paint a rainbow on my wall. I wanted to stride into my class as confident as her and make friends with all the kids I met. 

In 1992 Brenda Walsh seemed to represent my struggles: she was an outsider, moving from Minnesota to Beverly Hills with her family, and she wanted desperately to be cool. Which is to say, she wanted the right friends, the right clothes, the right boyfriend, the right future. 

In 2000, I wanted to be Willow Rosenberg. The moment that she told Buffy she was turning down all the fancy universities that had offered her a free ride because she wanted to be the best witch she could be and face down the evil she had already seen too much of right at the lip of the hellmouth, I found her idealism infectious. 

I could go on. I still turn on the television and find myself, among all my critical thoughts and aesthetic responses and guesses at the next plot twist, imagining myself into the lives of characters I somehow identify, or over-identify, with. I find myself imagining their qualities into my own life, trying them on, keeping those that seem important in my pocket for a time. 

When Rilke says you must ‘change your life’, it is a treasured epiphany. When the Pretty Little Liar Aria Montgomery says something like it, it’s silly. I love Rilke, but I admit that I took in Aria’s epiphany a little more, because my own life is filled with similar frivolities to hers, if not with the same horrors. 

I knew a few people as a schoolkid whose families did not own televisions, and I thought they were better than me. They could use their time wisely. They would not be infected by this nonsense that obsessed me. They could live more like Anne of Green Gables, a character I also carried with me, from the page, into a world full of broadcast technology she wouldn’t have recognised. In a way, I probably still think those people are better than me – but I can’t write about what I am not. I have watched a lot of television, as most people my age probably have. I have tried in this book to think about that time watching television not as escapism, but as, in some way, real experience – experience filled with memories and images and emotions that I carry with me into the real world. 

The award-winning poet and writer Bonny Cassidy reflects on Monument (1 February 2024), her first work of non-fiction. Moving seamlessly through genres in its recovery of the past – part poetry, part prose, microhistory, memoir, travel writing, and sometimes counterfactual speculation – Monument traces the complex consequences of colonial settlement across the generations of a White Australian family of mixed origins and ancestries. You can also read an interview with Cassidy in issue 38 of Rabbit.

The research for this book began as a private path; enclosed. While there were signs in stories and documents about some of my relations’ lives, most of the first, second and even third generations in Australia were unlettered and untold. As I quickly found out, this ignorance is common amongst White settlers.

For a couple of years, I travelled around and riffled archives to learn those lives from scratch, or to test the well-trodden parts. I sought out people who I felt could help me gain an understanding of what and who were encountered by my family’s first generations on an already occupied continent. A way to bear witness, my searching grew into a fantasy of reconciliation. I would, I imagined, make deep connections with communities with whom my family has no living link. I would re-start the past.

Eventually, I realised that of course this fantasy could not be fulfilled. Writing a book could not stand in for such relationships. It could not be an express ticket to trust from communities that have often found their trust betrayed. And writing a book alone, no matter how many sources I consulted, would not constitute justice. Moreover, the fantasy was a distraction from what had become abundantly clear: I had to get my own story straight. 

What I find in Monument is a shadow text. A way towards something else. I still might have let this remain a personal store of reference and research, but it had already gotten away from me by connecting with other writings, histories and events that were taking shape out in the world. I have thought a lot about what non-Indigenous people might contribute to the growing wealth of First Nations truth-telling. This book stands adjacent. I think of it as storytelling and sometimes, when it’s corroborated by sources that vary from colonial authorship, as history. While much of my work was meant to seek overlaps, the gaps in it show me what can be forgotten, what recovered, and what paths lie beyond the emblematic nature of a book. 

The following excerpt is from Bonny Cassidy’s Monument (1 February 2024), a hybrid literary memoir which views white settler family history against the impacts on the Indigenous people with whom the family members interact.

In the 1830s two young Palawa men, Tunnerminnerwait and Maulboyheener meet George Augustus Robinson, Chief Protector of Aborigines for Van Diemen’s Land.

Tunnerminnerwait is a Parperloihener man of the north-west coastal nation of lutruwita, Tasmania. As a child he witnessed a massacre of his people at Cape Grim. Maulboyheener is of the Panpekanner group from the north-east tip of the island. He has never known his younger brother, who was taken as an infant from their mother by the English squatter, John Batman. Robinson is an Englishman, a builder by trade, tall with a good deal of strong flab. He keeps a journal.

His story is raked over by historians and writers. Robinson seems to be eternally fascinating and inscrutable to us whitefellas. We have hoped him to have been some sort of noble settler, and yet.

The Governor of Van Diemen’s Land has given him a mission, to meet all Palawa groups and persuade them to join a settlement at Flinders Island in the Bass Strait. Robinson proposes that the Palawa be permitted a reserve on Van Diemen’s Land so that they can remain closer to Country, but the Governor rejects the suggestion. The land is too valuable and the danger too risky – to everybody – he says. The Governor much prefers the idea of sending Robinson off into the forest. He never expects the Chief Protector to return, let alone walk into Hobart one day with a deputation of clan leaders.

Trudging around the island on foot, covering unfamiliar distances and negotiating meetings, Robinson is plagued by rashes during his journey through the estuaries and forests. He sneaks away from camp before dawn to wash, imagining he can’t be seen. His most treasured thing is the rucksack containing his journals of names, language, customs and travels: the journals are intelligence, and his legacy.

Robinson introduces himself to as many Palawa as he can. If they’ll just stick with him, Robinson reassures Tunnerminnerwait, Maulboyheener and the others he meets, they will be able to return to their homelands later. He knows this isn’t what the Governor has agreed to, but Robinson is confident enough in his own powers to believe he can make it so.

And what do the Palawa believe? Their warrior ranks are shrinking, elderly and kids are getting left behind in the warfare, and the number of settlers is rapidly multiplying. How do the Palawa, daily and in diverse groups, negotiate between their will to survive and any settler’s offer of trust? We know that they accept Robinson’s promise to return them home, because of their outrage when he later breaks it.

As for me, I want to believe that Robinson is a true friend, not just a jumped-up chancer or a creepy preacher. Are his efforts of uncomfortable travel, intercultural friendship, language learning – things attempted by no other non-Palawa – really only made for the rewards of status and a salary? I want to believe that, knowing the apocalypse has already come to the Palawa, Robinson is building a safe place for them. And yet.

Robinson returns to the Governor with representatives from his ‘friendly mission’. They walk through Hobart. Before they sail to Flinders Island, Tunnerminnerwait and Maulboyheener have their likenesses painted by the leading society portraitist, Thomas Bock. They are joined by Truganini, born on Bruny Island and wife of Wurati. They are also sketched by Benjamin Duterrau, who tells them he will put them into a painting with their Chief Protector.

The Flinders Island settlement, Wybalenna, is formed in 1834. Overseen at first by Robinson, its residents come from different homelands across Van Diemen’s Land yet are made to cohabit and work together under inspection. They comply with the roster of gardening, manufacture, worship and cleaning, while trying to maintain independent hunting and camping trips away from the settlement. And in just five years Wybalenna is rife with disease and death. Remote and offshore, run to a foreign moral code, language and roster of activity, it is what we now recognise as, at best, a permanent detention centre; at worst, a concentration camp.

At the deepening of his friends’ misery, Robinson chooses to move on. In what seems like a sudden attack of fatalism, cowardly embarrassment, or ambitious opportunism – or all three – he takes up as Chief Protector of Aborigines in Port Phillip, across the Bass Strait.

He tries to keep the relationships going with his closest friends from Wybalenna. In 1839, along with eleven others, Robinson asks Truganini and Wurati, plus Maulboyheener, Tunnerminnerwait and his wife Planobeena to accompany him as cultural liaisons at Port Phillip. They agree to go.

In their absence, things only worsen at Wybalenna. A series of punitive commanders is hired. The remaining Palawa resist. They are becoming increasingly aware that they will not be returning home, and that their good faith in the state’s mission has been abused. They leap the chain of colonial command: Maulboyheener’s elder brother Walter leads a petition to Queen Victoria to protest the community’s treatment.

Meanwhile, Tunnerminnerwait accompanies Robinson in his new role on the mainland. They travel to the west of Port Phillip, into Wathaurong and Gunditjmara lands.

Once he returns to Melbourne, though, Tunnerminnerwait keeps travelling. He joins with Maulboyheener, Planobeena, Truganini and another woman, Pyterruner. They move east around Port Phillip, in the opposite direction to Robinson, along Boon Wurrung Country to Western Port and Dandenong. Stations are ransacked and people assaulted. Eventually the Palawa group is apprehended for murdering two whalers.

Before Robinson’s mission, Truganini and her family were viciously attacked by sailors, sealers, soldiers and timber-getters back at their home on Bruny Island. All the southern coastal nations’ relationships with whalers and sealers have been long, complicated and bloody. The mainland murders will often be interpreted as a long-awaited reprisal. Maybe the slain whalers stand in for those who got away at Bruny; or maybe the Palawa group track and assassinate their targets across hundreds of kilometres of sea and soil. Or maybe they are now using violence and theft because, in the end, it seems the only language that invaders understand. I think of Trawlwoolway artist Julie Gough’s image, Manifestation (Bruny Island): a dining chair pierced by a spear, both on fire. They’re extinguishing one another on a rock shelf beside an estuary.

In court at Port Phillip, the Palawa travellers are not invited to testify for themselves. Robinson is the only witness in their defence. The three women are let off by the jury, but Tunnerminnerwait and Maulboyheener are sentenced for murder. In 1842, they are hanged before a huge crowd at Victoria Street, outside what is now the Old Melbourne Gaol.

There isn’t a chance for the travellers in that foreign courtroom to unfold their story, which is much bigger than murdered whalers at Western Port.

Their story isn’t mine, but I am standing by it.

Monument by Bonny Cassidy, pp. 9-13

Grace Yee’s debut collection Chinese Fish has been shortlisted in the Poetry category for the 2024 Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards.

Wrote the judges:

Chinese Fish switches between lyric, dramatic and documentary poetic forms, to tell a multi-generational tale of the Chin family’s migration from Hong Kong to Aotearoa New Zealand. Yee focuses on women’s experience; particularly, how migration tests the relationship between a mother and her daughter. She tells this story with sparkling humour, wit, and stylistic verve, while paying sustained attention to historical circumstance – particularly everyday racism and the discriminatory government policies which affected Chinese migrants. Characters’ voices are interwoven with archival text and scholarly observations. Cantonese-Taishanese characters, peppered throughout the dialogue, enhance a reader’s connection to this fictive family and their past. We were impressed by how intelligently Chinese Fish braids its modes and forms, its feminist vision, and its literary and conceptual sophistication.

The winners will be announced on Thursday 1 February 2024 at a ceremony in Melbourne.

In the awards’ Fiction category, Max Easton’s second novel Paradise Estate was also Highly Commended.

On a muggy, bright and rain-spattered day in November at the low-slung Pratten Park Bowling Club in Ashfield, Max Easton launched his second novel. Almost two years had passed since the launch of Easton’s first, The Magpie Wing, which also celebrated its entry into the world at the bowlo, and which went on to become a finalist for the Miles Franklin. In the nearby suburb of Hurlstone Park, and perhaps known only to Max himself, was the real-life house that the author walked by a few years ago and began him thinking about the book which would become Paradise Estate.

The launch featured live music from local bands Mope City and Zipper, as well as Max reading of six ‘vignettes’ from the pages of Paradise Estate. Three of these vignettes have been published below.

From p.71

Dale bought another round for the old fellas at the Crystal Palace Hotel. He’d been roped into their conversation about former State of Origin greats, and while he usually liked to drink alone, he appreciated this excuse to keep drinking. After some hectoring, Dale told them about the circumstances that lead to him being made redundant (‘who doesn’t wank at work?’ the eldest at the table said, and when the youngest was hesitant to support Dale, the older man yelled: ‘what are you a priest?!’). Dale laughed meekly with these people, who he felt a comfort with, a generation who had never picked him up on his behaviour. To most that he knew, he didn’t seem to come across as ‘likeable’, and it showed. He’d react pre-emptively to the distaste he saw people feel towards him. It made him sensitive and jumpy, and when stretching that energy over a day, he became tired, and gaunt. And that made him look unwell. If he told friends about this anxiety, they’d try to reassure him by saying, ‘it’s all in your head’ but he would reply: ‘I know! That’s the problem!’ Then his friends would run out of patience and advise him to seek ‘professional’ help, which yielded the same advice delivered over several hour-long sessions—only it came with a bill attached, and sometimes a prescription. He was constantly humming with this energy, his eyes darting, his breath short and laboured, trying to take his ex-girlfriend’s advice, that: ‘no one could possibly hate you as much as you hate yourself.’ That had never helped either.

From p.81

‘Nathan, I’m sorry to bring this news to you, but we’ve received another complaint about one of your essays. It’s an anonymous one again, so we’re not sure how to take it. It’s…another plagiarism accusation. If you can call me back when you get a chance…that’d be great. Thanks.’ Nathan knew this one wouldn’t stick. This ‘anonymous’ member of the community going to each of the editorial committees he volunteered his time to, picking apart every word he said and claiming it was someone else’s work. He was no more a plagiarist than anyone else! Sometimes he’d receive a good pitch by a new contributor, reject it, and write it up as his own, but no one could pin that on him as far as he could tell. This complaint suggested that his recent article (criticising the She-Hulk production team for deflecting criticism of the show’s low-quality CGI by claiming it was ‘body shaming’ the titular character) had an identical argument to an essay published years prior (a defence of the Joker movie’s location shoot at a stairwell in Harlem that since became a tourist destination, stating that any critique of a unionised location shoot gave fuel to the push towards all-CGI sets). In the end, the editorial board had to throw out the complaint; Nathan had published the She-Hulk essay under his own name, and the Joker article under a pseudonym.

From p.162

‘What’s wrong?’ Sunny asked a pale-faced Helen, who entered their shed with a bucket of KFC at midday. ‘I went into the church,’ she said, looking overawed, ‘there were nuns.’ When Sunny started howling in laughter, Helen snapped, saying that ‘it’s too fucking cold’ and she needed some reprieve from the winter. Too fried after her all-nighter on Beth’s acid to get any further than the corner of the street, her blankets damp to the touch, shivering through the house, hoping there might be some kind of warm snack inside the church to tide her over until the KFC opened. ‘One of the nuns talked to me,’ she said conspiratorially, starting work on her bucket, ‘she knew about our house. She told me to take a seat. It was really weird.’ Sunny took a piece of chicken and tried to find a deeper psychological reason for Helen’s decision to walk into a church for the first time in her life, but Helen grew impatient, took her chicken away from them and said that no, she wasn’t in need of help from a higher power, because she was ‘beyond redemption anyway.’

Jessica Au, author of Cold Enough for Snow, has won the 2023 Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Fiction. The announcement was made at a ceremony in November at the National Library of Australia in Canberra.

‘Prizes like these are always a particular blend of luck and happenstance, and I am truly grateful to whatever alchemy has allowed me to stand here tonight,’ said Au in her acceptance speech. ‘I know for sure none of it would be possible without The Novel Prize, without Giramondo, without your support.’

Read the judges’ comments for Cold Enough for Snow:

Cold Enough For Snow relates a short holiday spent together in Japan by a mother and daughter. They live in different countries and the daughter has made a meticulous itinerary, revealing Japan through its natural beauty and through the cultural galleries, houses, rooms, fabrics, places.

Japan itself, with an elaborate and exquisite surface and an elusive interior, is an intricate and sustained metaphor for the relationship between the mother and daughter. As they move through this unfamiliar, cultivated world their own internal lives unfurl. Surfaces are the touchstones in life as well as the place to begin.

The novel is a crystalline technical feat: a series of small portraits and wider scenes, with stillness achieved by capturing arrested motion. The novel is an enquiry into the human heart and how lives are led. Here is the daily embedded in the eternal: here we are in lives past, but also entirely present. Au, by some personal alchemy, uses image the way poets use compression of language. The same poetic is applied to her choice of words. The clarity of language suggests contemporary Korean novels and has an unusual gravity.

Au’s writing has a quietness, a sophistication of expression emerging from a hum of silence and thought. It signals a new direction in Australian literature, intricately structured and with a flow and reach that, like all remarkable writing, is without boundaries.