A small selection of recent reading – two books and three periodicals
- Quarterly Essay 100: The Good Fight: The Labor Party Before and Now: What does Labor stand for? by Sean Kelly [2026];
- Quarterly Essay 101: Blind Spot: Southeast Asia and Australia’s Future by Michael Wesley [2026];
- Hudson Fysh by Grantlee Kieza [pub.2022];
- The Dictionary of Lost Words by Pip Williams [pub.2020];
- Quarterly Essay 102: The God We Made: The Threat and Promise of Artificial Intelligence by Anna Goldsworthy [2026].
Incidentally, readers interested in exploring the contents more fully of the Quarterly Essays referred to below, or indeed other editions, can either purchase individual copies or subscribe to them online at quarterlyessay.com/subscribe.
January to June
In Quarterly Essay 100, ‘The Good Fight: What does Labor Stand For’ by Sean Kelly – Kelly considered the enigma of the Albanese government. With wide yet shallow support, will it change the country? Does it have big ideas, or is it content just to become “the natural party of government”? Kelly gives a definitive account of Albanese’s political style and shows what lies behind it. In speaking to a fragmented, disengaged electorate, the Prime Minister places a high value on moderation. Often that means ducking fights with entrenched interests. But this runs the risk of embedding an ever more unequal society, led by a government that can seem gutless. Described as a subtle and brilliant essay, Kelly explores whether Labor is still up for the good fight.
A wide-ranging essay including a look at the historical development of the Labor Party, the years of the 1980s/1990s , with principal emphasise on it’s current period of government sand it’s leader.
A website titled Cannonball Read described the Essay as follows – The Good Fight examines Anthony Albanese’s Labor government as it moves through its second term. Kelly argues that the Prime Minister has built his leadership style, and the modern Labor movement more broadly, around kindness, collaboration, and a soft-spoken civility. These qualities have distinguished him from his predecessors and resonated with voters who were weary of political combat. But Kelly questions whether this gentler approach has blunted Labor’s sense of purpose. His central claim is that Albanese’s government suffers from a lack of belief: it tends to make decisions based on what is achievable rather than what is aspirational. This pragmatism, Kelly suggests, makes the government safe but timid. It has allowed Labor to quietly abandon or dilute several election commitments whenever bipartisan support proved elusive. The writer notes that ‘ Listening to Kelly’s reflections, I found myself realising things about Australian politics that I hadn’t before. I follow politics casually, but his analysis illuminated the deeper tension between conviction and compromise that defines contemporary Labor. The essay is not a hit piece; it’s a thoughtful, sometimes sympathetic exploration of how belief, identity, and caution interact at a pivotal moment in our national politics’
Certainly. the Esay attracted a broad range of opinions in the large volume of correspondence that would appear at the end of Essay No. 101 [see following review]. Kelly’s response in summarising the subsequent correspondence was that “I would encourage anybody interested in the topic to read all the responses to the essay. Each is original, thoughtful and interesting. Each one adds to my ideas and challenges them”. A great response to often quite critical reflections in his essay.
Kelly in fact, in replying to that correspondence admits that “The writing of my essay began from a place of uncertainty; what to make of this Labor government? By the time I finished it, I was still uncertain. I had some suspicions , obviously; some instincts. I had grown more convinced that Labor might miss its chance to make significant change; and more concerned about the consequences for the country if it did. I certainly wanted to persuade readers these were genuine possibilities that should be taken seriously. But I knew, too, that my fears might be misplaced”.
In Quarterly Essay 101, ‘Blind Spot: South East Asia and Australia’s Future’ by Michael Wesley its suggested that Australia has forgotten what keeps it safe. So argues Michael Wesley in this sharp and compelling essay about our place in the world. Southeast Asia is the key to our national security and prosperity. If China dominates the region, as it plans to, Australia will be very vulnerable. So why are we following an American strategy that isolates and alienates us from our neighbours? Wesley argues that the focus on AUKUS and sticking with Trump is a dangerous distraction. Whereas the United States has little at stake in Southeast Asia, Australia has everything to lose. How did our foreign policy elite become so wedded to the US worldview? What do our Southeast Asian neighbours have to tell us, if only we would listen? Blind Spot is described as a gripping essay about strategic folly and the future of our region.
In writing in the May edition of the Australian Book Review, Varun Ghosh notes that ‘Michael Wesley, Professor of International Relations at the University of Melbourne and an experienced policy contributor, argues that Australia has neglected relationships in Southeast Asia to its serious detriment’ Ghosh’s opening comments in reviewing the Essay are that:
‘It is axiomatic that Australia’s security environment has deteriorated. Strategic competition in our region continues to grow, and our international relationships are becoming more complex and multidimensional. Traditional challenges to sovereign borders and maritime trade routes have combined with new risks to regional peace and security that have been enabled by technological advancements and changing tactics. According to the 2026 National Defence Strategy, the coming decade will be defined by ‘fracture, rivalry and disorder’, and Australia faces elevated levels of geopolitical risk. Successfully managing this increase in risk, volatility, and complexity in the region will be essential for Australia’s future, though perspectives on how to achieve this differ widely’.
One of Wesley’s points – that Australia is so eager to be of service to Washington that government strategy focuses more on North Asia at the expense of South East Asia and the Pacific region – an argument which would have poorly received by the Albanese government, which since coming into government could claim a long list of South East Asia policy initiatives.
Another claim by Wesley was that recent Australian policy has overinvested in the US alliance, and he argues elsewhere that Australia should be treating South East Asia as our primary theatre of interest. His suggestion as noted above that we have neglected the region. In subsequent correspondence about the Essay, Nick Bisley, amongst others suggests that the focus of attention on South East Asia and the Pacific has been much more focused than that of their predecessors, though he admits that whether that focus has been successful is up for debate. On that point, another correspondent, Sam Roggeveen suggests that these long list of activities, of visits, dialogues, agreements, etc, ‘are about inputs rather than outcomes’. Michael Wesley himself argues that without building a sense of enduring mutual interests with our northern neighbours, all the visits, exercises and agreements in the world will not deliver Australia continuing relevance or importance there.
An interesting comment made by Luke Brown, in another piece of correspondence about the Essay was that “A senior former colleague in the Department of Foreign Affairs once privately summarised the problem with Australia’s attempts to find it’s place in Southeast Asia. ;We play different sports, watch different movies, but different stuff, and neither of us are really curious or bothered enough to poke our head over the fence to see what’s going on over the other side’, “ Even the previously strong programs of Indonesian studies at university level have dwindled to the extent that such studies be soon be non-existent at those institutions
In summarising the ABR review noted earlier, it stated that ‘The essay’s most compelling passages advocate for Australia to improve its understanding and interconnectedness with the countries of Southeast Asia. It is true that, historically, Australian governments have not been sufficiently focused on advancing these aims, particularly in the economic sphere, and Wesley is right to point to the inconstancy of these efforts. Thus the author’s frustration with perceived foreign policy missteps, and his sense of urgency in remedying them, are understandable’.
28th July.
A biography – Hudson Fysh by Grantlee Kieza, published in 2022, of 403 pages. Hudson Fysh was a decorated World War I hero who not only founded Australia’s national airline, Qantas, but steered it for almost half a century from its humble beginnings with two rickety biplanes to the age of the jumbo jets. More than anyone, Fysh shaped the way that Australians saw the world.
I found this an interesting read, which perhaps would prove even more enjoyable to someone with at least a basic knowledge of the mechanics and types of aircraft, described in much detail throughout the whole book, basically from the beginnings of ‘flight’ and following the generations of aircraft development, and the constant search and fight to obtain sponsorship and government and/or organisational funding needed to fulfill the dreams that Fysh and others of his generation worked towards.
Hudson Fysh began life in Tasmania, a sickly boy traumatised by his parents’ broken marriage. Born in 1895, his father’s failure as a businessman would have been a sobering lesson to a boy raised by a mother from a wealthy family that had flourished through her father’s entrepreneurial abilities.
As portrayed by Amazon, One of Australia’s celebrated Light Horsemen at Gallipoli, Fysh went on to fly death-defying missions for Lawrence of Arabia with the Australian Flying Corps and battle Germans in deadly dogfights in the skies over Palestine. On his return from the Great War, Fysh launched his bush airline, the Queensland and Northern Territory Aerial Services Ltd (Qantas), with the help of a wartime pilot friend and some western Queensland graziers. After flying the first scheduled Qantas passenger flight in 1922, he ushered in the Flying Doctor Service [after an initial approach by the Rev John Flynn] that still assists remote communities and the first Qantas international airmail services, which revolutionised Australian communications. Fysh went on to guide Qantas through the dark days of the Great Depression, the perilous years of World War II, when the airline flew dangerous missions for the Allies, and into the great boom in international tourism that followed with the jet age, giving millions of Australians their first experience of international travel.
The book contains brilliant descriptions after WW1 of the month long drives in early motor-vehicles that regularly broke down to charter a course through the outback regions of Queensland and the Northen Territory for future planes to fly – obtaining the services of isolated rural landowners and Indigenous personnel to clear spaces of land for use as future aerodromes, etc,
- The Model T then travelled on a narrow camel track for another eighty-five kilometres before McGinness and Girham camped for the night. The reached Daly Waters on 27 October [1919] to plot out the next landing field. The site as covered with small stones that could have torn the fabric or damaged the wheels of aircraft, and McGinness gave a group of Jingili women at the station Turkey red material to make dresses after they spent the day sweeping the stones away. He gave a group of local men , who had watched from the edges of the field, plug tobacco.
- At Matarnka Station, McGinness left some white calico with the manager, as well as instructions on how to use this cloth to mark out the landing area with a circle fifty meters in diameter and a large T. He also left instructions on how to prepare an oil-burning choofer so that an approaching pilot could see the direction of ground winds in the thick plumes of smoke the oil produced.
These kind of instructions and site searches continued over many months through the outback travails of northern Australia through the 1919/1920 period, as aerodromes and routes were prepared for future planes and their pilots.
Hudson Fysh remained at the controls of Qantas, the airline he founded alongside his friend Paul McGinness and first backer Winton grazier Fergus McMaster in 1922 in Western Queensland, until 1966.
He flew the first scheduled passenger flight from Longreach to Cloncurry in that year. What we take for granted with aviation today had its origins in the dreams of men who saw the future for aviation. Those early years were not without their accidents and flying tragedies, and through the reading such events seem to come through on a regular basis as new planes and methods are tested, the challenge of attempting long distance flights over oceans and hostile land masses.
As indicated, an interesting, but quite lengthy read – to my mind mainly because of the aircraft technical and type references, an essential aspect of the Hudson Fysh story.
As for Grantlee Kiera, he is the author [amongst other biographies and histories] of critically acclaimed bestselling biographies of Monash, Banjo, Banks [next review], Macquarie and Lawson.
6th September
In 1901, the word bondmaid was discovered missing from the Oxford English Dictionary. This is the story of the girl who stole it, and other discarded and previously disregarded words during the construction of the Oxford English Dictionary and created her own The Dictionary of Lost Words by Pip Williams [published in 2020] of 423 pages. I wasn’t sure what to expect with this story, purchased on the basis of the ‘library and literary connotations’ from the book title. It proved to be a wonderful and fascinating read!
Basically – The Dictionary of Lost Words is a historical novel by Pip Williams that explores the hidden stories behind words excluded from the Oxford English Dictionary, particularly those reflecting women’s and common people’s experiences.
The novel follows Esme Nicoll, a motherless girl raised by her father, a lexicographer working on the first Oxford English Dictionary in a garden shed called the Scriptorium in Oxford . Esme’s mother died giving her birth, so she is brought up by her father. She spends her childhood under the table in the Scriptorium, where James Murray and his team of lexicographers, including her father, are compiling the Oxford English Dictionary.
As a child, Esme notices that certain words—especially those related to women, domestic life, and everyday speech—are overlooked or discarded by the dictionary compilers. She begins secretly collecting these words, creating her own Dictionary of Lost Words The story highlights the power of language and how it shapes history and social perception. It emphasizes that words used by women, the poor, and marginalized groups were often ignored, reflecting broader societal biases Set during the women’s suffrage movement and the lead-up to World War I, the novel intertwines personal growth, social change, and historical events, showing how language can both include and exclude voices
Let’s have a look at the storyline.
Esme is born into a world of words. Motherless and irrepressibly curious, she spends her childhood in the ‘Scriptorium’, a garden shed in Oxford where her father and a team of dedicated lexicographers are collecting words for the very first Oxford English Dictionary. Esme’s place is beneath the sorting table, unseen and unheard. One day a slip of paper containing the word ‘bondmaid’ flutters to the floor. Esme rescues the slip and stashes it in an old wooden case that belongs to her friend, Lizzie, a young servant in the big house. Esme begins to collect other words from the Scriptorium that are misplaced, discarded or have been neglected by the dictionary men. They help her make sense of the world.
Over time, Esme realises that some words are considered more important than others, and that words and meanings relating to women’s experiences often go unrecorded. While she dedicates her life to the Oxford English Dictionary, secretly, she begins to collect words for another dictionary: The Dictionary of Lost Words.
Set when the women’s suffrage movement was at its height and the Great War loomed, The Dictionary of Lost Words reveals a lost narrative, hidden between the lines of a history written by men. It’s a delightful, lyrical and deeply thought-provoking celebration of words, and the power of language to shape the world and our experience of it.
Some of the women from whom Esme discovers these words are heavily involved in that suffragette movement, or from the local markets, or brothels where she learns many of the more crude and sexually explicit words in use, that the men compiling the Dictionary would refuse to allow any recognition of. They were initially disinterested in words that had not been written in some format and attributed to an individual. Many of the words that Esme came across were spoken only – she would note them on small pieces of paper that she always carried with, and write the name of the woman [usually] who had introduced her to the word, thereby attributing it to that individual irrespective of their position in society.
The Dictionary of Lost Words is a 2020 historical novel by Australian author Pip Williams. It was her debut novel and is based on true historical events surrounding the compilation of the Oxford English Dictionary, the suffrage movement for women’s voting rights, and World War I. The novel won numerous awards, including the MUD Literary Prize for best debut novel and General Fiction Book of the Year at the Australian Book Industry Awards, both in 2021.
Back in 1857, the Unregistered Words Committee of the Philological Society of London called for a new English dictionary to succeed Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language [1755]. In 1879, James Murray was appointed as Editor, and he and his family [including two daughters who continued with his work] lived on site and feature prominently in the novel. It was in 1885 that James and Sada Murray move from London to Oxford and erect a large corrugated iron shed in the garden of their house. The house became known as Sunnyside. The shed is known as the Scriptorium. Over the next 43 years, the alphabet of words is slowly and gradually worked through with Volume 12, V to Z published in 1928. The publication of the Oxford English Dictionary is celebrated that year, some 71 years after it was proposed.
The author notes at the end of her story –
- Perhaps the biggest challenge in writing this book was being true to the real-life people who inhabited its historical context.
- This book began as two simple questions. Do words mean different things to men and women? And if they do, is it possible that we have lost something in the process of defining them?
- In initially reading about the Oxford Dictionary, she writes: ”I was left with the impression that the Dictionary was a particularly male endeavour. From what I could glean, all the editors were men, most of the assistants were men, most of the volunteers were men and most of the literature, manuals as newspaper articles used as evidence for how words were used, were written by men. Finally, the delegates of the Oxford University Press – those who held the purse strings – were men, Where, I wondered, are the women in this story, and does it matter that they are absent? It took me a while to find the women, and when I did, they were cast in minor and supporting roles”.
Those women feature in this novel and together with Esme’s father, form the basis of the story presented by Pip Williams.
Well worth a read if you have the time – not just about words, but of the times, romance, the giving up of as child born out of wedlock – who at the end of the story, after having many years previously been told that Esme was her real mother, appears on a stage in Adelaide, Australia in 1989 at the tenth Annual Convention of the Australian Lexicography Society, From her jacket pocket, Professor Megan Brooks, takes a white envelope , and from it she carefully slides out a frail slip of paper, yellowed with age. This, and only this, she places on the lectern, gently smoothing it with her gloved hands.
She picks up the slip. “Bondmaid”, she says. “For a while, this beautiful troubling word belonged to my mother”.
11th September
Quarterly Essay No. 102 – ‘The God We Made: The threat and promise of Artificial Intelligence by Anna Goldsworthy This is a crucial topic, which in recent weeks and days has been receiving more and more attention in the media and elsewhere, including a recent article in the ‘Age’ newspaper by journalist Toby Walsh headed ‘Will AI kill us all? Doubt it, but we can’t ignore the risks’.
This Essay, written by noted journalist, author and musician, Anna Goldsworthy, asks the question ‘How will we be changed by the rise of artificial intelligence?’. She argues that AI is a rupture that makes us confront what it is to be human – what we do, and want. As it learns human ways, AI raises big questions about work, leisure and education. It brings new existential, social and ethical risks. Above all, it invites us to consider what is irreplaceable in us, starting with the body and the friction of others.
The God We Made is a brilliant inquiry into identity and a transformed future. How can we learn to live with AI? And will AI be happy to live with us?……………………………………………………………………………………………………….
“The experts have spoken, but many of us remain curiously unprepared, burying our heads in the sand – Look at its hallucinations! It’s never going to be as smart as us! – or imagining that the only issue is plagiarism. AI is not just another tool: it is a paradigm shift, a ceding of our superiority.” —Anna Goldsworthy, The God We Made
Some of the comments and/or praises for the Essay include
‘Before the Pope turned to AI, Anna Goldsworthy got there first. This is one of the most important conversations we need to have, and Goldsworthy has it with her trademark grace, rigour and originality. The God We Made is that rare beast, writing that makes even the experts see their field anew.’ —Toby Walsh, author of the forthcoming God AI: Boom or Doom? What to Expect When Machines Outsmart Us
‘A humane and penetrating essay, grounded in the kind of convivial sensibility AI is pushing to the margins of our world.’ —Richard King, author of Brave New Wild: Can Technology Really Save the Planet?
‘Exquisite and troubling and stimulating and frightening and beautiful’ —Bri Lee, author of Seed
‘Goldsworthy’s literary humanism brings perspective to an often breathless story.’ —The Saturday Paper
‘A serious, elegant and unsettling essay about humanity at the edge of a technology it does not fully understand and may not fully control.’ —The Conversation
A few brief quotations from the early parts of Anna’s Essay.
- There’s an unknowable risk that AI will end human civilisation – But that’s a risk worth taking. Without AI, humanity’s expiry date is probably quite soon, and this could extend it, maybe indefinitely [p.13].
- Many of the people building these systems are strikingly young: brilliant kids whose business is the optimization of data and the scaling of systems, but who are now entrusted with decisions that will shape the future of our planet. A similar concentration of power attended the development of nuclear weapons.in which the scientists and military assumed responsibility for a technology that could destroy us all [p. 13].
- And there is no shortage of ways in which AI could harm us. Nuclear hacking and bioterrorism aside, it will be uniquely equipped for blackmail and human manipulation: an exponential , algorithmic Einstein …….AI will have learnt from all the novels that were ever written, all the books by Machiavelli, all the pollical connivances……….A version if this already operates in our social media, engineered to keep us optimally engaged or gratified, but this promises to be another order of mind control again. [p.14].
- From a 2023 Statement of AI risk, signed by many experts in the field ‘Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war’., [p.16]
- Speaking of suggestions that AI will provide an automation of most of humanity’s tasks and referring to her own talent as a musician and the fact her piano talent was not ‘bought off the shelf’ – ‘They were lessons in slowness and patience, in discipline and concentration and embodiment’. But it is one thing to be delivered of busy work; it is another to be relieved of meaningful occupation. There are many way we find purpose in work, ranging from the satisfaction of a job well done to the sense of contributing. Will all that be lost under AI? [p. 24-25].
- In 1930, John Maynard Keynes in a essay titled ‘Economic Possibilities for our Grand Children’ that “Thus, for the first time since his creation man will be faced with his real, his permanent problem – how to use his freedom from pressing economic cares, how to occupy the leisure , which science and compound interest will have won for him, to live wisely and agreeably and well’ [p.27].
- Humans are herd animals and attracted to conformity. It is this that has allowed us to flourish. But whst happens when a tendency towards conformity meets a tool predicated on statistical averages? Does it steer us all further towards the mean? [p.34];
- Illustrating the conflicting views of despair and hope as expressed throughout the Essay, Anna Goldsworthy ends with the note that “Those grandchildren are my central source of anxiety about this issue. They are also my source of hope”[p.85].
Again, referring to the Australian Book Review, August 2026, Flynn Shan Benson, in reviewing this Essay begins with the following paragraphs.
‘Among the many harms wrought on our world by artificial intelligence is the fact that the act of reading any text is now a Turing Test: we cannot now read something free of the suspicion that its ideas and syntax are merely aping human expression. So, we look askew at em dashes and pat phrasing, we hear countless stories of writers passing off slop as the genuine product, and we live in a world where everyone has used ChatGPT and everyone is insulted by the claim ‘You sound like ChatGPT.’
If we must live like this, then let us test the following paragraph, which comes a third of the way through the new Quarterly Essay, The God We Made, in which Anna Goldsworthy considers the future of both humanity and the humanities in light of artificial intelligence.
As with so many of our metrics – from our ten-fingered decimal system to the heartbeat of a second – our words are imprinted with our bodies. Our bodies are our yardstick, our tools of calibration. Across many cultures, a baby’s first word is mama or mum mum mum, the bilabial hum of a mouth clamouring for the breast. From mama we build our palaces of language. And then – as if there were not enough – we seek to recreate them on paper. A strange practice indeed.
The conceit is distinct, if not necessarily original: our measurements are part of our biology, rather than something to be universally replicated. (A sufficiently precise chatbot prompt might get you to the same argument.) But I’m inclined to think the phrase ‘the bilabial hum of a mouth clamouring for the breast’ could only be the product of a human mind, not only for its particularly elegant construction but also for its uneasy erotic undercurrent. Given the myriad biases bequeathed to artificial intelligence, the emphasis on the maternal, the leap from ‘mama’ to ‘palaces of language’, could suggest a mind free of programmed misogyny. The final sentence is indicative of the idiosyncrasy and care that Goldsworthy brings to her practice, both as a concert pianist and a writer.
It is this kind of questioning that Goldsworthy enacts and inspires in her wide-ranging consideration of artificial intelligence and artistic life. As someone who has devoted her life to music and literature – and one of the many writers whose work was stolen to train Large Language Models – Goldsworthy draws together thinkers, podcasters, myths, and conversations with family members to calibrate the hope and despair that she feels’.
Finally, as noted in The Conversation: Books & Idea of 26 June past ‘Just as we always suspected”, writes musician and writer Anna Goldsworthy in her new Quarterly Essay on AI, “the god that may destroy us is the god of ourselves.” This sentence captures the core of the essay: a personal meditation on what AI reveals about humanity. She ponders not logic gates or quantum chips, but the technology’s moral, creative and even theological implications’.
A worrying topic indeed – not so much for myself, but thinking more of what the future holds for my children and grandchildren under the auspices of AI.
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