The Age: Review of 2007 UTS Writers' Anthology
The Age
30 June 2007
Copyright
Reproduced with permission.
Reviewed by Owen Richardson
More promise than fully achieved work, but that is inevitable in a student anthology. Among the strongest pieces is Bonita Mason's Anencephaly, about an Aboriginal girl waiting to give birth to a child so disabled it will not live outside the womb: the style is plain enough but the subject matter shows us something new, something unexpected. I also liked Pat Skinner's Girl with a Cockatoo, about a young Canadian girl now living in Sydney, wagging school in the Botanic Gardens and trying to organise her father's life.
These are the more straightforwardly realistic pieces, but elsewhere there's more than enough experimentalism. I liked The Nexus: A Story of the Evidentiary, the Heart and Dramatic Representation, which plays high-tech TV versions of crime investigations off against the "real" thing, here a case reminiscent of the Gordon Wood/ Caroline Byrne affair currently playing out in the Sydney courts.
Of the poetry I liked Bronwyn Morrison's In the Guildhall: A Genealogy for Beowulf best, superimposing the Dark Ages and the Australian past of mining and pastoralism into the same imaginative space, assisted by propulsive versification. There is just the one piece of nonfiction, Peats Ridge: Fluid Memories and the Politics of Groundwater, by Trish Fitzsimmons, and it's a good and timely piece of work.
