Johanna Leggatt

Urban planners refer to the accidental trails created by foot traffic as ‘desire paths’. These are the unintentional routes shaped by the footprints of where humans wish to go, rather than the signposted pathway. They are the barely-there tracks, sometimes right next to the concreted or cobblestone walkway, in quiet defiance of dictated procession. It is a concept ripe for writerly annexation – author Robert Macfarlane calls them ‘free-will ways’ – which journalist Megan Clement does superbly in

There is no shortage of statistics pointing to the prevalence of misogyny and violence against women, not least the oft-cited figure that one woman is murdered each week in Australia. But sometimes anecdotes reveal the systemic nature of a problem in a way that figures cannot. In her memoir, Groomed, Sonia Orchard recalls attending a social gathering in St Kilda thirty years after she was abused as a fifteen-year-old high school student. At the party, she recognises a male teacher from her schoo

Podcast Episode · The ABR Podcast · 31/10/2024 · 13m

The Covid-19 pandemic has left its mark on all of us. How could it not? The shuttered small businesses; the warring states; the spectre of aged care residents, hands pressed against glass, unable to touch or receive relatives. The Centrelink queues,…

When journalist Kate Legge’s husband of twenty-five years – former Fairfax CEO Greg Hywood – cheated on her with one of her girlfriends, she was discouraged from taking revenge in her most natural of forums: the printed word. Legge, who at the time…

Journalist, editor, and publisher, Michael Cannon rose to prominence in print during its golden age of boundless advertising dollars, when those ‘rivers of gold’ paid for high salaries, fully staffed beats, and morning and evening newspaper editions.…

Welcome to the April issue! In our cover story, ABR theatre critic Tim Byrne examines the ways in which Australian theatre companies are coping after lockdown and the strategies they are implementing to welcome back audiences. Senior journalist (and…

Is there a profession on Earth more mythologised than journalism? It’s hard to think of one. All that talk about the principles of the Fourth Estate, of keeping the powerful in check and guarding the public interest. In the days of well-funded…

Welcome to the December issue of ABR – always our most anticipated edition of the year because of the inclusion of Books of the Year. Thirty-three leading critics and writers nominate their favourite publications of the year. Find out what people…

To exist in a state of fear, we are told, is to settle for an impoverished version of ourselves. Psychologists, meditation apps and Instagram memes enforce the idea that to reach our full potential we must overcome our corrosive worries and…

Listen to this essay read by the author. During my first month as a trainee journalist at The Sun-Herald newspaper in Sydney, I went on strike. It was the year 2000, and the newspaper enjoyed a full roster of reporters and photographers dedicated…

Modern US culture has a peculiar love of the extracurricular world of teenagers, valorising the spelling bees, debating competitions, and varsity-level football games of its youth. In Ben Lerner’s new novel, The Topeka School, the interscholastic…

Two years before Rachel Cusk published the first novel in her acclaimed Outline Trilogy (2014–18), she wrote a searing account of her divorce, entitled ‘Aftermath: On Marriage and Separation’, which ignited a brouhaha in her homeland, the United…

City of Trees: Essays on life, death and the need for a forest Text Publishing, $24.99 hb, 312 pp, 9781925773439 When Peter Tompkins and Christopher Bird wrote The Secret Life of Plants (1975), many critics labelled their attempt to prove a spiritual…

There is a scene in Kenneth Branagh’s British film, All is True, where the earl of Southampton (Ian McKellen) tells William Shakespeare (Branagh) that The Bard has lived ‘a small life’. As the Southampton points out snidely, there have been no…

Novelist and academic Julienne van Loon does not doubt that the thinking woman is ‘alive and well’, but when she scans the (mostly) male names in bookstore philosophy sections and the (mostly) male staff lists of university philosophy departments,…

Stephanie Bishop’s third novel, Man Out of Time, her most mature work to date, echoes Virginia Woolf’s psychological realism and the claustrophobic intensity of Elizabeth Harrower’s The Watch Tower (1966). Indeed, an unkind reviewer might compare…

In a 2017 essay for the Guardian, author Charlotte Wood spoke about the shame artists often feel when they discover a distinguishing characteristic in their work, something that separates them from their cohort. ‘In the beginning, and for a long…

Granta Books, $24.99 hb, 176 pp, 9781783783557 So much has been written about male–female power dynamics, Trump’s grotesqueries, the public outing of protected abusers, and the growing chorus of women speaking out about sexual harassment that it’s…