Deakin University

• Not all of members knew they had been added to the group at first, and many didn’t participate in the conversations that resulted in the leak.
• Last week, a transcript from the group chat was leaked and uploaded onto social media by pro-Palestinians, including the writer Clementine Ford.
• The leak gives rise to a complex tangle of contemporary ethical issues, including concerns with privacy, doxing, free speech and “cancelling”.

Read more:
Israel-Hamas war: What is Zionism? A history of the political movement that created Israel as we know it

Privacy and public interest

• The WhatsApp group was a private one, where group members would have had a reasonable expectation that their conversation would not be made public.
• Violating people’s privacy (especially through leaking information onto the forever-searchable internet) is always a moral cost.
• But sometimes that cost must be paid, particularly if the exposure is in the public interest.
• It could be argued that revealing the WhatsApp group’s activities was in the public interest.

The ethics of doxing

• It is usually done without the person’s consent, and aims to expose or punish them in some way.
• A statement from those behind the release asserted no links had been made to members’ addresses, phone numbers or emails, which were all deliberately redacted.
• However, the release of people’s identities is still a form of doxing and a serious moral concern.
• Read more:
  What is doxing, and how can you protect yourself?

What was the WhatsApp group doing?

The WhatsApp group conversations were wide-ranging, and some members made statements many might find offensive or upsetting. One part of the group’s activities involved organised letter-writing, including to the employers or publishers of writers or journalists they felt crossed the line into anti-Semitism.

• Letters can be used to raise awareness of ethical concerns, to share information and ideas, and to persuade.
• But letters can also do other things, and an innocuous practice can sometimes gradually progress into more fraught territory.
• They can also try to get people to act in ways that are morally concerning — such as having someone sacked for their political views.

Should artists be protected?

Before the story broke in the media, but after extracts from the group chat began circulating on social media, the Australian Society of Authors Board published a letter noting its “growing concern” that artists and authors in Australia were facing repercussions for expressing their political positions publicly or in their work. The society stated its commitment to freedom of speech (within the limits set by law) and its opposition to attempts to silence or intimidate authors.

• The society also opposed attempts to intimidate or silence people through hate speech, explicitly noting antisemitism, and anti-Palestinian and anti-Arab rhetoric.
• Hate speech, racism and bigotry, and harmful disinformation or stereotyping, should be stopped, and speakers should face the consequences of their wrongdoing.
• What we perceive as dangerous misinformation or harmful speech (like antisemitism or Islamophobia) will inevitably be coloured by our cultural, political and moral worldviews.
• But it is precisely those who think differently who will disagree with us about what counts as harmful or wrongful speech.

Ethical worries

• Punishing, undermining and silencing others on the basis of our political beliefs gives rise to two potential ethical worries (both arise with respect to the modern phenomenon of “cancel culture”).
• Each side declares: “We are a support group nobly taking a stand against harmful bigotry and hate.
• Now, I have reason to push back against you – to no longer tolerate your speech.
• Tragically, some isolated individuals – not necessarily connected to the pro-Palestinians – felt justified in going further, even to threats of violence.

Hugh Breakey does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

• That might be a traditional beach read – typically a genre paperback with a propulsive plot – or an opportunity to catch up on the classics you never got around to during the year.
• We asked six experts in reading and writing to share what they plan to read on the beach.

Love and Other Scores by Abra Pressler (and other Australian romantic comedies)

• The book I’ll be taking to the beach this summer, just in time for the tennis, is one of Pan Macmillan’s latest offerings: Love and Other Scores by Abra Pressler.
• • Harper Collins published Steph Vizard’s The Love Contract (what if pretending to date your neighbour was the solution to your childcare problems?).
• • Simon & Schuster published Amy Hutton’s Sit, Stay, Love (the ultimate rom-com for dog people), my own Can I Steal You For A Second?

Three Assassins by Kotaro Isaka

• With winter receding (David Copperfield, followed by Demon Copperhead), I am looking to what kinds of books might fill my summer, so I’m reading a new-to-me crime/thriller writer, Kotaro Isaka.
• The novel follows three men who’ve made careers out of hiring themselves as assassins.
• And best of all, there is a new Kotaro Isaka novel, Mantis, published this month – just in time for the height of summer, under a shady tree by the sea.

War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy and The Flying Doctor’s Christmas Wish by Kathleen Ryder

• Middlemarch and Moby Dick, and this year will be War and Peace.
• On a recent trip to central Australia, I met romance fiction author Kathleen Ryder.
• Her books include Christmas-themed novellas set in Alice Springs, and my pick for this summer is The Flying Doctor’s Christmas Wish.

Skeletons in the Closet by Jean-Patrick Manchette

• The much-anticipated English translation of the only untranslated novel by the reinventor of dark and darkly witty crime novels, Jean-Patrick Manchette, is the book I most hope to read this summer.
• Skeletons in the Closet features the hermetic, alcoholic Parisian private eye Eugène Trapon, the only fictional creation of Manchette’s to appear in more than one novel.
• Trapon is obviously an heir to Dashiell Hammett’s Sam Spade, but Manchette’s novels are only superficially hard-boiled.

Daisy and Woolf by Michelle Cahill and Between You and Me by Joanna Horton

• Some books can’t be digested at once, so this summer I will be returning to Daisy and Woolf by Goan-Anglo-Indian poet and author, Michelle Cahill.
• Also on my list is Between You and Me by Brisbane author, Joanna Horton.

The science fiction of Samuel R. Delany and Babel, or the Necessity of Violence by R.F. Kuang

• This summer, I’m aiming to dive deeper into the works of Samuel R. Delany, who was memorably profiled in the New Yorker earlier this year.
• Delany is most commonly associated with the New Wave science fiction movement of the 60s and 70s, but his writing spans a fascinating range of genres and subjects.
• I’ve also wanted to read Babel, or the Necessity of Violence by R.F.

• Beth Driscoll receives funding from ARC Linkage Project grant LP210300666 Community Publishing in Regional Australia Liz Evans' debut novel will be published by Ultimo Press in 2024.
• Michelle Cahill is the current Hedberg Writer-in-Residence at the University of Tasmania.

• Already by then a rather outdated term, “postmodernism” never quite gelled with Murnane’s writing.
• Review: Murnane – Emmett Stinson (Miegunyah Press) It is with this exact observation that Emmett Stinson begins his new critical study of Murnane.
• Written for Miegunyah Press’s “Contemporary Australian Writers” series, Stinson’s Murnane is compact and accessible, designed to interest potential and beginning readers of Murnane.

The breathing author

• After a brief stint as a seminarian, Murnane trained as a teacher, then taught in primary schools from 1960 to 1968.
• From 1980, he lectured in creative writing at Prahran College of Advanced Education (now Deakin University), retiring from that position in 1995.
• He has since produced a further seven books, along with a fully restored version of an earlier book.
• Murnane’s many self-imposed rules, such as never wearing sunglasses, never using a computer, and never travelling in a plane (see his 2002 essay “The Breathing Author” for a full list), seem to mirror the contents of his fiction.
• His performance teasingly invites readers to connect the real-life (“breathing”) author with the narrators (or “implied authors”) of his fiction.

Inventive and playful

• All manifest his distinctive rigour, exemplified by his famously “chiseled sentences”, as J.M.
• His work is technically and conceptually inventive, even playful, and it has attracted admiring readers at home and abroad.
• In recent decades, his readership has grown significantly, enhanced by the internet and social media, which have allowed niche readers to connect with each other.
• Noting all this, as well as the vagaries of Murnane’s publishing history, Stinson ponders his subject’s somewhat divided Australian reception.
• Read more:
  Bad art friends – Jen Craig may be the best Australian writer you've never heard of

Post-break

• Their purpose is to revisit, reorder, ramify and complete Murnane’s body of work as a whole.
• Stinson wants us to recognise “Murnane’s desire to frame and shape his own literary legacy”.
• I came away from them with a sharpened sense of each book, even as I could see continuities across the whole.
• The chapter on Barley Patch highlights (among other things) modes of reading and writing that are evident in Murnane’s work.

Late style, late recognition

• In his substantial conclusion, subtitled “Gerald Murnane’s Late Style”, Stinson brings these elements together, succinctly and effectively explaining his larger argument.
• It is marked by the artist’s decision to withdraw from the world, follow his or her own desires, and opt “for complexity over resolution”.
• Admitting that this may be true of all Murnane’s writing, Stinson nonetheless argues for its special applicability to the four post-break fictions.
• Beyond this conclusion, we encounter one more component: the transcript of Stinson’s recent interview with Murnane himself.

This year’s Miles Franklin shortlist takes us from Sydney’s criminal underclass in the 1930s and the quiet waters of rural Tasmania in the 1940s to shopping for design objects in contemporary Japan. Its styles range from the sparse, economical prose of the experimental novella to an intricately plotted page-turner. And the six shortlisted writers include a debut novelist and a Miles Franklin veteran; just one is male-identifying.

Iris by Fiona Kelly McGregor

• McGregor is the most experienced writer on the shortlist: Iris is her eighth book and her accolades include a Steele Rudd Award and an Age Book of the Year (Indelible Ink).
• McGregor knows Sydney well – especially its convoluted history of colonialism, repression and disobedience.
• Her inspired decision to fictionalise the real-life Iris Webber (1906-1953) was no doubt influenced by the extraordinary archives of the Sydney Police photographs (1912-1948).
• Read more:
  In Iris, Fiona Kelly McGregor recreates the criminal underworld of Depression-era Sydney

Cold Enough for Snow by Jessica Au

• Jessica Au’s novel was much anticipated: its manuscript won the inaugural international $US10,000 The Novel Prize, trumping 1500 entries.
• It’s a credit to Au that she lets the reader sit with this at the conclusion: nothing feels artificially resolved.
• Read more:
  The responsibilities of being: Jessica Au's precise, poetic meditation on mothers and daughters

Limberlost by Robbie Arnott

• Robbie Arnott is the only one of these authors to have been shortlisted for the Miles Franklin before – for his second novel, The Rain Heron (2020), which won The Age Book of the Year award.
• Arnott is also the only male-identifying author on this shortlist and masculinity is a central theme.
• Read more:
  Robbie Arnott's eco-fiction uses myth and metaphor to depict a wounded world

Hopeless Kingdom by Kgshak Akec

• Kgshak Akec, a creative writing student at Deakin University, is the youngest writer on this shortlist, at 26.
• Akec’s debut is inspired by her family’s migration from South Sudan to Australia via Egypt, during the early 2000s.
• The book brims with authentic, memorable characters and relationships between family and friends that are complex and subtly complicated.

The Lovers by Yumna Kassab

• This novella’s limited dramatic narrative scale permits the author a sophisticated attention to the poetics of representation: perhaps the book’s key achievement.
• Amir and Jamila, the lovers of the title, unite almost exclusively at nighttime.
• She artfully employs stories within stories: tiny parables that frame or commentate on the larger story of the lovers and their fate.
• Read more:
  Colonial and nationalist myths are recast in Yumna Kassab's Australiana

Chai Time at Cinnamon Gardens by Shankari Chandran

• Chai Time at Cinnamon Gardens is mostly set in a Western Sydney nursing home, run by and for a Sri Lankan Tamil community.
• Shankari Chandran says the novel was inspired and informed by regular visits to her grandmother.
• “As she was walking, she’d be talking, and telling us stories about her life, of her childhood, of her marriage, her migration.” Chandran is a mid-career author whose achievements are gradually accumulating.
• Her debut novel, Song of the Sun God, was longlisted for the International Dublin Literary Award and shortlisted for Sri Lanka’s Fairway National Literary Award.