Hi friends!

Happy New Year! It’s been a long, long time since my last newsletter, but I have my excuses ready. The past 6 months have been a little crazy.

I’ve wrapped pick-ups for Cooee, travelled to Japan for a close friend’s wedding, hiked the Kumano Kodo trail, visited the new Beedie & Van Grinsven family homes in Orange & the Gold Coast, ran my first D&D campaign, accidentally introduced Samuel’s niece to the concept of death during a wholesome outing at the zoo, started on a couple of new screenplays, worked on all manner of shoots, and… got engaged!

I proposed to Samuel on our 5th anniversary trip out in western NSW, in the Warrumbungle National Park, and — after forgiving me for making him hike up a mountain for the romantic view — he said yes! The wedding will still be a good while away, but we’re very, very excited.

In other news, a wonderful short film I worked on, Souvenir, is making its grand debut at the SXSW Film Festival in Austin in March! Superb work from a team made up of some of my best mates, including Writer & Director Renée Marie Petropoulos, Producer Yingna Lu, and Editor Brendan Cain (who also put together the stunning trailer below, check it out!). Thrilled to see them get their flowers!

And now after months of inactivity I’ve got a massive backlog of things I’m eager to write about, but I’m easing back into it with the first part of my wrap-up of 2025, starting with my favourite reads…

My Year in Reading

Here we are again, my favourite reads of the year! There’s a little bit of everything in the mix — while novels took up most of my reading time in 2025, my list also feature some short stories, histories, graphic novels, manga, poetry and even a blog series. As always, I’m a year or two behind on prize-winners and zeitgeisty titles, although thanks to a new book club I’m slowly but surely catching up. I also dove into lot of Japanese literature this year (inspired by my trip overseas and newfound mid-century fave Yasunari Kawabata), but didn’t make much headway on non-fiction, despite the tomes on local history and religion piling up on my desk. Next time!

My biggest side-mission has been tackling Tales of 1001 Nights (aka. ‘The Arabian Nights’), the compendium of folk stories from across the Middle East that’s the source of Ali Baba, Sinbad the Sailor and Aladdin. Kicking off early last March, I’ve been trying to read one ‘night’ every single day — I’m now 315 nights down, with two more years of reading to go! It’s a strange and thrilling grab-bag of myths, fables, short stories, poetry and questionable pieces of life advice, and I can’t wait to write about these tales in a little more detail soon.

But now, on to my picks…

Voss by Patrick White

There’s no novel quite like Voss. Samuel gifted me a 1st edition of this all-time favourite for my birthday, and it’s instantly become one of my greatest treasures. Re-reading it ten years on, Patrick White’s opus remains inimitable: tempestuous, experimental and wild, an odyssey of land and spirit that might just be Australia’s own Moby Dick. A fictionalised account of a failed 19th century expedition through the red centre, Voss is both cosmic and unbearably intimate. It harbours both awe and abhorrence for its protagonist, one of those men who believe they can shape the world by sheer force of will. But the novel’s true soul is Laura Trevelyan, the flinty and incisive young woman whose relationship to Voss expands from improbable romance to a psychic connection that continues into the desert, and the valley of death beyond. I dream of adapting it into a film, to find a visual language for White’s prose that lets reality slip and bleed, but fear it might be impossible.

Edenglassie by Melissa Lucashenko

As a full-throated riposte to the myopic colonialist adventuring of Voss and his ilk, you can’t do better than Edenglassie. Lucashenko’s novel dominated the local literary prizes for good reason: it’s heartfelt and frequently hilarious, juggling two plotlines — one a satirical rom-com of race relations in modern-day Brisbane, and the second a young Aboriginal man’s coming-of-age quest on the same land in the 1850s. For the eager, ambitious Mulanyin, European conquest is not yet inevitable, and policies of resistance, war and cohabitation are still openly debated by the First Nations clans who still outnumber the invaders. Honestly I wish it was longer, that we could follow Mulanyin and his family through another few hundred pages of historical epic — but the abrupt finish is no doubt Lucashenko’s point, and her payoff is indeed magnificent; those final few pages on the river that bring the two stories together had me in tears.

Hell Screen by Ryunosuke Akutagawa (trans. Jay Rubin)

I worked my way through a swathe of Taishō-era master Akutagawa’s short stories while visiting Japan, but none got under my skin quite like his folk horror tale of a painter driven to horrifying ends to create his masterpiece. Akutagawa layers a disturbing sheen of psychological realism onto this story of the uses and abuses of power. The characters are so fiercely driven to fulfil their duties and desires that they remain oblivious to how their actions ripple outward until it is too late; and that extends to our narrator, a petty bureaucrat wilfully blind to the terrible implications of the events he’s jotting down.

Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan

It was Christmas Eve and I was down with food poisoning (would not recommend), so I sought out the thinnest book on Mum & Dad’s bookshelf to read between glasses of hydralyte. Turns out I couldn’t have picked a better healing balm. If I have a recurring frustration with contemporary literature, it’s that so many novels meander terribly, airy and amiable portraits with barely a plot point in sight, only to end right when they’ve finally arrived somewhere interesting. Claire Keegan puts her peers to shame: in just 110 pages Small Things Like These reaches a remarkable crescendo that hit me harder than anything else I read last year. It’s a meditation on morality and goodness in the face of corrupt religious institutions that climaxes in a simple act that almost feels too large, too Christ-like, for such a slender novel to contain it.

Intermezzo by Sally Rooney

Well call me a Rooney Toon, because every Sally Rooney novel just hits for me. Sometimes I feel like the only person out there who adored Beautiful World Where Are You (yes, even the email chapters!). Her latest, Intermezzo, features the requisite age-gap romance(s) and vaguely-problematic-but-definitely-steamy sex that you expect, but what set it apart for me was the acute and sensitive rendering of Ivan and Peter, two brothers far more similar than they believe, straining to find a point of connection. I felt it deeply. As a bonus, author Brandon Taylor’s mixed review of the novel was one of my favourite pieces of criticism last year: sharp, generous and fully engaged with Rooney’s craft. I disagreed often, yet learnt a whole lot.

Between Two Rivers by Moudhy Al-Rashid

A gorgeous and refreshingly personal introduction to the history of Mesopotamia, using the treasures housed within the world’s “first museum” (disputed), assembled by Babylonian Princess Ennigaldi-Nanna over 2,500 years ago, as a window into millennia of everyday life in the lands that now make up modern Iraq and Syria. Al-Rashid is open-hearted and conversational, clear about the gaps in our knowledge, and welling with passion about what’s still to be discovered via the untold thousands of untranslated cuneiform tablets remaining to us.

The Jaguar by Sarah Holland-Batt

A deeply affecting poetry collection, in which the author works through her father’s arduous, terminal decline, and despair that follows his death. Metaphors flounder and fail, and endless days and nights in hospital rooms give way to aimless travels across the globe. In ‘Alaska’, a memory shared by a lover bleeds into the news of a man’s suicide at the same old fishing spot; in ‘The Proposal’ admonishment follows rejection, yet she insists “I praise whatever it is in me that is stony and unbending”. Relationships collapse, but grief remains. Only in the final piece, ‘In My Father’s Country’, does Holland-Batt turn to look at her father directly, delivering something between a plea, a confession and a tribute in short, stark lines. “We only talk in poetry.”

Monica by Daniel Clowes

A harrowing and riveting graphic novel that’s immediately my new favourite work from Clowes (author of Ghost World and Patience). Every chapter is a new discovery, from a portrait of late 60s societal decay that evokes Joan Didion’s White Album to a Lovecraftian horror tale to a white-knuckle conspiracy thriller. Figuring out how each of these narratives fit together — through the central figure of Monica, naturally — is one of the novel’s extraordinary pleasures. A little confusion is the point; Monica’s desperate desire to decipher the mysteries of her past may promise her (and us) some fleeting resolution, but there’s a creeping danger that delving too deep could swallow her (and perhaps the world) whole.

Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind by Hayao Miyazaki (trans. Rachel Thorn, Toren Smith, Dana Lewis & Wayne Truman)

I’ve always loved Hayao Miyazaki’s anime Nausicaä (the film that led to the formation of Studio Ghibli!), but it was a revelation to discover the original manga — a sweeping fantasy epic, war story and environmental parable written and illustrated entirely by Miyazaki, which reads like an ur-text for interpreting his wider oeuvre. Turns out the film only adapted the early chapters of the manga; Miyazaki continued toiling on this 800+ page opus for another decade in between movie projects, taking his pacifist warrior Princess to thornier and more distressing places. The result is Miyazaki’s most complete (and bleakest) statement on humanity’s dire impact on the natural world, which violently resists pat solutions and heroic saviours — and in the process recalls nothing less than Frank Herbert’s Dune.

Life, Work, Death & the Peasant by Bret Devereaux

A superb blog series by historian Devereaux, exploring how the majority of the human race actually lived day-to-day in the pre-modern era. It answers almost every question I ever had about what it was like to be a peasant, collating the latest research on daily schedules, life expectancy, the threat of childbirth, the impact of war and seasonal farming cycles.

And a couple of other reads that inspired me last year:

• Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle is a horror classic for a reason. Deliciously creepy without every quite showing her hand, Jackson creates an all-time-great unreliable narrator in Merricat.

• The Tainted Cup by Robert Jackson Bennett was one of the most purely enjoyable reads of the year — I devoured it in almost a single sitting. A compelling fantasy world stacked with magical body mods, apocalyptic monsters and a delicious murder mystery.

• Japanese history stand-outs for me were Christopher Harding’s Japan Story, charting the years since the country’s forced re-opening to the world in 1853, and manga artist Shigeru Mizuki’s expansive, autobiographical Showa: A History of Japan, covering the tumultuous era from 1926 - 1989.

• Dart by Alice Oswald is poetry-as-scrapbook, a grab-bag of voices, sounds and images cobbled together by Oswald from across the river’s journey through England. Beautiful and full of surprises.

• Just imagine — a machine that churns out lower quality prose than human writers, but is able to summarily undercut and squeeze humans out of the market with its inexhaustible output (and some corporate strong-arming)! That’s the premise of The Great Automatic Grammatizator by Roald Dahl, as clear-sighted a warning of the threat AI poses to literature as I’ve encountered — and the man wrote it in 1954!

I also have to mention two landmark queer novels that didn’t fully land, but had their stand-out moments. Gary Indiana’s Gone Tomorrow was one of the first novels to genuinely grapple with the AIDs epidemic, but for me its finest passages come in the early chapters dealing with a low budget indie film shoot, rendered in excruciating, hilarious and oh-so-familiar detail. Sumner Locke Elliott’s Fairlyand is a quasi-autobiographical account of a young gay man’s life in Sydney in the 1930s and 40s which rarely rises above a series of loose vignettes — except for a single chapter towards the middle, in which protagonist Seaton falls for a handsome (and evidently straight) sales clerk and weaves their lives together… to the point that the clerk begins romancing Seaton’s best gal pal. It’s morally murky, tense, precarious and altogether brilliant, hinting at a far superior novel that’s just out of reach.

And that’s my literature round-up for the year! I’d love to hear what everyone else has been reading, and your recent favourites — always eager for the next great recommendation!

And speaking of literature…

It’s difficult to think about books this week without taking in the absolute clown-show that’s unfolded over at the Adelaide Festival. Beyond maddening to watch Australian arts organisations continue their bizarre commitment to destroying their reputations and alienating their audience, all thanks to governing boards that appear to be sequestered in NewsCorp echo chambers.

This plays out the same way every. single. time. An artist or their work is abruptly cancelled to pre-emptively head off a feared scandal (often, but not always, due to support for Palestine, and sparked by either a politician’s gripes or a Sky News hit piece), only to set off an even bigger backlash inside the actual arts community. Cue a depressing cycle of hand-wringing, defensiveness, boycotts, non-apologies, mounting cancellations, resignations, lawsuits, now-grovelling apologies, and ultimately the collapse of the whole damn event.

Last year we saw Creative Australia pull artist Khaled Sabsabi out of the Venice Biennale, and the implosion of the Bendigo writer’s festival due to the last-minute addition of a restrictive code of conduct. This time around was the cancellation of Palestinian-Australian author Randa Abdel-Fattah from Adelaide writer’s week. The resigning-in-protest chair of the event, Louise Adler, lays out the stakes rather succinctly.

To be honest, I don’t even think the overarching issue here is curtailing free speech (not to downplay the mounting restrictions and chilling effects across Australia). I think it’s institutional incompetence and cravenness. These organisations would have been within their rights not to select any of these artists in the first place (free speech works both ways) — but to select them and then revoke their support abruptly, without so much as a conversation, as soon as the political headwinds change? It speaks to a complete lack of conviction, fortitude and sense of purpose. What do these boards believe their role is, if not to support the arts and our artists? Why should an artist place their trust in any such organisation going forward if governing bodies won’t dare to push back against bad-faith arguments and manufactured scandals? If this goes on, the whole sector is likely devour itself in a few short years. At a time when authoritarians around the globe are launching wholesale attacks on the arts, it’s mortifying to watch democratic Australia sleepwalk into destroying our cultural institutions with nary a fight.

Odds & Ends

• Public Service Announcement! Australia has a rare total solar eclipse coming on up 22 July 2028, which will pass directly over Sydney and Central NSW. Putting it in the diary early — definitely one of those once-in-a-lifetime events. Hoping it’s not overcast and/or no one has kicked off WW3.

• An international research team has released an extraordinarily detailed interactive map of the ancient Roman road network, dubbed itiner-e. A great new resource for visualising the travel and trade routes of the ancient world, backed up by the latest archaeology.

• Turns out the latest trend in publishing is resurrecting wild and wonderful out-of-print books! It’s so heartening to see there’s such a big appetite out there for discoveries that go way beyond the canonical classics.

• And a fun piece on how to steal a scene by theatre and acting historian Isaac Butler, on how it sometimes pays off to stick with supporting roles.

That’s it for this week, thanks for reading! Very glad to be back. Next time I’ll finish off this particular thought with my favourite Film & TV of 2025, before launching into the new year proper…