Launch speech: Astrid Lorange on The Victoria Principle by Michael Farrell

In June 2025, Michael Farrell traveled from Melbourne up to Sydney for the second launch of The Victoria Principle, held at Better Read Than Dead bookshop. Here, we publish a transcript of host Astrid Lorange’s brief reflection on this debut book of fiction by an acclaimed Australian poet.

Hi everyone. I’d like to acknowledge that we are on sovereign Gadigal country tonight. This always was and always will be Aboriginal land.

I am not launching this book, but hosting its launch event. So I will restrain myself, as possible, and only say a few words before I invite Michael here to read from The Victoria Principle.

Many of you will know Michael as a poet, and rightly so: he’s one of the best. You will know Michael’s poems to be full of wit, surprise, humour; a love for games, treats, and music; attention to histories of poetry within and against nationhood, and, especially in the last few collections, narrative.

Some of you will know Michael as a scholar, whose work on poetry and poetics is prodigious for its close reading. Michael’s critical capacities are underscored by intimate, expert knowledge of the poem as a cultural object worked by hand, ear, and chance.

You may also know Michael as a visual artist: over the last four years he’s made more and more works on paper, culminating in an exhibition. If we recall, and we should, Break Me Ouch from 2006, a work of poetry manifest in a comic strip, we might be reminded that Michael’s visual practice is early canon, as the fans say: yet his more recent foray is animated with his poetic subjects and methods: pop, punk, dada, and so on.

All of these different Michaels culminate, I think, in The Victoria Principle, which is both his ‘first’ work of fiction but also in many ways a continuation of what he is and does as a poet, scholar, and artist. The stories are emboldened by the counterrational possibilities of poetry, they profess criticism and judgement in the manner of a very fine essay, and they inaugurate new aesthetic encounters like an artwork might. Above all, they push, extend, and intensify a narrative impulse at work across all these other forms.

Let’s say that the ‘short story’ here affords Michael a new relationship to the sentence. In the stories collected here, each sentence is utterly surprising in its reach, music, reference, and possibility. Things happen in the stories, but they are less plot-driven than shaped by a pleasure in plottiness, a sense that what happens is less important than the wild processes through which what happens is mediated, represented, remembered, repressed. In this sense, my feeling is that a reader is finally left with something of a narrative theory, but a theory of the best kind: immanent in each sentence, full of life and mystery and possibility.