Roslyn Jolly

Follow the Money

Truganini was the last First Nations Tasmanian with no European ancestry to die. It is a terrible reason to be famous, and Pybus argues that ‘Australians should know about how she lived, not simply that she died.’ How Truganini lived tells us a gr...

Angry Women

The appearance of Evie Wyld’s novel in Anne Brontë’s bicentennial year prompts thoughts about the relation between the writings of these two angry women. The continuities are striking. Deeply religious, Anne used the back of her prayer book to rec...

Thought Experiments

James Bradley has been one of our country’s most outspoken and prolific commentators on the climate crisis, and his warnings about the environmental devastation that is already locked into the future have started to bite in ways that can no longer...

The Ghostwriters of Henry James

Tales from a Master’s Notebook is an appreciation of James’s creative imagination. I mean, it is an appreciation in the strong sense in which James used that word, to denote not a languid state of passive admiration, but an active process of inter...

The Horror! The Horror!: First Person by Richard Flanagan

At times, when reading this novel, I felt as if I had passed from the realm of colonial romance to that of science fiction, and was learning about a strange society inhabited only by men, in which no women existed except as holographic projections...

Tending and Attending

I have paid my respects at Anne Bront√´’s grave but not at that of my own great-grandmother. Graves haven’t figured at all in my sense of myself as a person with biological progenitors, yet they’ve played a part in my attempts to connect with indi...

Monster or Mohican: Extinctions by Josephine Wilson

John Mohegan’s tragedy is that all of his family and his tribe have died. The tragedy of Frankenstein’s monster is that he never had either to begin with. These two tropes of Romantic agony lie at the heart of Josephine Wilson’s Extinctions, a nov...

Place-Making