Katie Dobbs

Back to the Old House

Lost child stories have appeared so frequently in our national literature that a vast critical discourse has grown around them. As Peter Pierce suggests, these stories have long been used by white Australians to work through settler anxieties of u...

Tender Maulings

New Skin for the Old Ceremony

Wild Abandon reads like a Künstlerroman by proxy, its subject the self-consciousness of being an Anglo-Australian writer and the challenges of resisting the pull of ‘greater’ cultural centres and finding a ‘natural’ voice.

Matches in the Dark

If the narrative has a driving question, it is the eternal one of how to live, find meaning, amidst all the sorrow and horror.

Tipping Point

The Inland Sea is an omnivorous, heady debut dense with paradox and provocation. With no pretensions to lighting the way out of our current mess, Watts guides us into the thicket, leaves us in an anxious twilight between the material and the figur...

Coming in from the Cold

‘Childhood is long and narrow like a coffin, and you can’t get out of it on your own,’ Tove Ditlevsen wrote in Childhood (1967), the first volume in her autobiographical trilogy, an account of a lonely, impoverished Copenhagen upbringing. It’s a g...

More Story Than Girl

If Lindsay’s novel was as much a knowing pastiche of the lost girl narrative as a compulsive repetition, the latest addition to the canon, Catherine Noske’s debut novel The Salt Madonna, quickly announces itself as a self-conscious work of genre r...