The ABR Podcast

This week on The ABR Podcast, we feature the runner-up in the 2026 Calibre Essay Prize, titled ‘Tumbleweed: How the West was Lost’, by Maria Takolander. Wide-ranging and delightfully digressive, Takolander’s encyclopaedic essay uses the modest tumbleweed as a lens through which to examine Western mythology, colonial violence, environmental crises, and Tsarist Russia, among much else. ‘The tumbleweed is a celebrity, albeit a minor one’, Takolander writes. Maria Takolander was the inaugural winner of the ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize in 2010. She is the author of four poetry collections and a book of short stories. Her début novel, The End of Romance, will be published by Text Publishing in June. The Calibre Essay Prize, now in its twentieth year, is one of the world’s leading prizes for a new non-fiction essay. Here is Maria Takolander with ‘Tumbleweed: How the West was lost’, published in the June issue of ABR.

This week, on The ABR Podcast, Eleanor Spencer-Regan reflects on Melbourne poet Chris Wallace-Crabbe’s poetic career. Wallace-Crabbe made the poem ‘a space for thinking in public’, she writes. In his work, poetry is treated ‘less as statement than as real-time event: a site in which ideas are tried out rather than asserted’. His most enduring legacy, Spencer-Regan suggests, lies in the intellectual capaciousness of this approach: one that is ‘curious, plural, generous, and ever alert to contingency’. Eleanor Spencer-Regan is an Honorary Senior Fellow in the School of Culture and Communication at the University of Melbourne and the Principal of Janet-Clarke Hall, Australia’s first residential college for women. Here is Eleanor Spencer-Regan with ‘Thinking in public: The vulpine poetry of Chris Wallace-Crabbe’, published in the March issue of ABR.

This week on The ABR Podcast, Joel Deane reviews Niki Savva’s Earthquake, an account of the 2025 Australian federal election and the role of political expediency in shaping a country. ‘Like payday loans,’ Deane writes, ‘the costs of short-term political decisions accumulate and compound’, demanding repayment. Joel Deane is a speechwriter, novelist, and poet. He has worked in newspapers, television, and politics in Australia and the United States. He is the co-author of Making Progress: How good policy happens, published in 2025 by Melbourne University Publishing. Here is Joel Deane with ‘Lemmings over a cliff: On political and publishing expediency’, published in the March issue of ABR.

This week, on The ABR Podcast, Mindy Gill reviews Dead and Alive, Zadie Smith’s latest essay collection. For Gill, Smith’s essays ‘have an uncanny habit of arriving precisely when the culture shifts’. Dead and Alive ranges across technology and digital surveillance, authorship and literature, and the erosion of public space, among other urgent concerns. Considered together, ‘these essays reveal continuities otherwise invisible when read in isolation: a set of preoccupations that cut across ostensibly tangential subjects’. Mindy Gill was ABR’s 2021 Rising Star. A poet, critic, and former editor-in-chief of Peril magazine, Gill is an Associate Lecturer of Creative Writing at Queensland University of Technology. She has won the Queensland Premier’s Young Publishers and Writers Award and the Tom Collins Poetry Prize. Her collection of poems, August Burns the Sky, was shortlisted for the Thomas Shapcott Poetry Prize. Here is Mindy Gill with ‘Thought’s tempo: Essays that imagine otherwise’, published in the January-February issue of ABR.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This week, on The ABR Podcast, we feature a special essay by Stuart Kells, titled ‘Less an author than a milieu: Reading Shakespeare in the New World’. Kells discusses the thorny question of the authorship of the First Folio. While some devoted Shakespeareans insist that the First Folio was authored by Shakespeare, Kells points to compelling evidence that Shakespeare was instead a ‘middle stage in a multi-step dramaturgical production process’. ‘Shakespeare is not a hoax,’ Kells observes, ‘but he is hoaxy.’ Stuart Kells is Enterprise Fellow at the Melbourne Institute, University of Melbourne, and an Adjunct Professor at La Trobe University’s College of Arts, Social Sciences and Commerce. He is the author of many books, including Shakespeare’s Library: Unlocking the greatest mystery in literature. Here is Stuart Kells with ‘Less an author than a milieu: Reading Shakespeare in the New World’, published in the December issue of ABR.

This week, on The ABR Podcast, Stephen Long reviews Woodside vs the Planet: How a company captured a country by Marian Wilkinson and Extractive Capitalism: How commodities and cronyism drive the global economy by Laleh Khalili. Long describes the notion that Australia can maintain its current gas exports and save the planet as a delusion, one that is increasingly adopted by our political leaders. In fact, Woodside and the LNG industry at large have a business model, Long explains, that is ‘based on climate catastrophe’. Stephen Long is a journalist who specialises in investigative reporting, analysis, and commentary. He is a winner of the Walkley Award, the Citigroup Award for Economic and Financial Journalism, and the Commonwealth Media Award. Here is Stephen Long with ‘Carbon bomb: Business models based on climate catastrophe’, published in the December issue of ABR.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This week on The ABR Podcast, we feature a special essay by biographer Nadia Wheatley titled ‘Liars, inventors, embroiderers: Rewriting the life and myth of Charmian Clift’. ‘What does a biographer do’, Wheatley asks, ‘when she discovers she has something wrong?’ In Wheatley’s case, it was not something that just she had wrong, but something that her subject, Charmian Clift, also had very wrong about her mother, Amy Lila Currie. It was, in fact, a great big secret, the knowledge of which recasts the life of both Amy and Charmian, as Wheately explains. Nadia Wheatley is the author of The Life and Myth of Charmian Clift, which won The Age Non-fiction Book of the Year in 2001 and the Australian History Prize at the New South Wales Premier’s History Awards in 2002. She is also the editor of Sneaky Little Revolutions: Selected essays of Charmian Clift (2022) and Clift’s previously unpublished autobiographical novel, The End of the Morning (2024). Here is Nadia Wheatley with ‘Liars, inventors, embroiderers: Rewriting the life and myth of Charmain Clift’, published in the December issue of ABR.