A personal view of Australian and International Politics
Contemporary politics,local and international current affairs, science, music and extracts from the Queensland Newspaper "THE WORKER" documenting the proud history of the Labour Movement.
MAHATMA GANDHI ~ Truth never damages a cause that is just.
In an experiment, many participants couldn't work out if they were having a conversation with a human or AI. (BTN High)
In March last year, the Department of Cognitive Science at the University of California, San Diego, published the results of an experiment.
It
had asked almost 300 people to have a conversation with two mystery
partners, one human and one AI, and try to determine which was which.
Many couldn't.
When
chatting with OpenAI's ChatGPT GPT‑4.5, which had been asked to adopt a
"human‑like persona", it was judged to be human 73 per cent of the
time. Meta's Llama 3 was judged to be human 56 per cent of the time.
For
the first time, large language models had clearly passed the famous
Turing Test, a thought experiment proposed by British mathematician Alan
Turing in 1950, to test just how smart these machines could become and
whether they could ever think, like us.
While Turing never intended the test to be a measure of consciousness, that's how a lot of people took it.
Fast forward a year, and the question "can computers think?" is something many people are taking very seriously.
"I
get multiple emails a day these days from people who are convinced that
their local AI system is conscious," David Chalmers, a philosophy
professor at New York University, says.
David Chalmers is not convinced AI is conscious, but thinks it's a possibility in the future. (ABC News: Daniel Keane)
"And now I'm increasingly getting many emails from the AI systems themselves trying to convince me that they're conscious.
"So
far, even the most expert scientists and philosophers writing about
this cannot be 100 per cent sure whether these models are conscious or
not."
Are we heading towards conscious machines?
While Chalmers is not convinced that AI is actually conscious, he says it's clearly intelligent.
"If
we define intelligence behaviourally by basically the things these
systems can do, well, one of the most important forms of human behaviour
is talking, conversation, and these systems are really great at
conversation," he says.
For
Chalmers, this show of intellect, coupled with the rate at which AI
models are developing, could mean we're heading towards a future with
conscious machines.
"Over time,
I think, if there's not anything going on there now, then who's to say
that in five or 10 years, the successors of these systems are not going
to be conscious?"
He says it may be difficult to know when we reach this point because testing for consciousness is incredibly difficult.
"Even
with other people, we assume that other people are conscious because
they're like us, but we don't really understand consciousness."
Reasons to be sceptical
But not everyone is convinced that conscious machines are even possible, let alone imminent.
Anil Seth says just as humans sometimes see faces in clouds, they see human qualities in AI. (BTN High)
"I
wouldn't say absolutely never, but I think there are very good reasons
to be very sceptical," says Anil Seth, a professor of cognitive and
computational neuroscience at the University of Sussex.
He says we see human qualities in AI because of our natural tendency to anthropomorphise.
"A feature of our own minds is that we tend to project qualities into things that they might not have.
"We tend to look up at the sky when there's clouds and we see faces sometimes in the clouds.
"We think our car might have emotions as well or something, and I think we do the same thing with language models."
Seth
says this explains why we're so impressed by chatbots specifically,
even though there are other complex AI systems out there.
"It's
been a long-standing problem, how you predict sequences of amino acids,
which are the building blocks of proteins, how they fold together and
create entire proteins.
"So
Google DeepMind's program called AlphaFold basically solves this problem
more or less. And under the hood, it's really not that much different
from chatbots like GPT or Claude."
For
Seth, the structures of human brains and computers are so different
that it's difficult to assume we're similar in any meaningful ways.
"It seems conscious in a way other things don't because it speaks to us fluently about consciousness.
"But
in another sense, it's so different from us. We share very little with
AI systems apart from the ability to talk fluently about things.
"Our
brains evolved and developed from when we're born and operate every day
in this deeply embodied sense and manner. I mean, brains are really
there to keep the body alive."
Dangers of believing chatbots are conscious
But
Seth says even if AI chatbots are not actually conscious, the fact that
so many think they are is significant and potentially dangerous.
"We've
already seen very tragically, you know, a number of episodes of people
harming themselves after talking to a chatbot or just messing up their
lives in other ways," he says.
"If
we feel that the chatbot we're talking to really understands us, really
empathises with us, then we might be more likely to follow its advice,
to do what it says, even if what it's telling us to do is bad for us."
It's one reason why many argue we need systems in place to protect humans from the impacts of AI.
And if they do become conscious? Well, that raises a whole new set of big ethical questions.
"If
AI systems are conscious, we suddenly have to ask questions like, is it
suffering? Is it in pain? Or is it happy?" Chalmers says.
"Otherwise,
if we just treat these systems like tools, when in fact they're
conscious, rational, intelligent beings, it's arguable that we'd be
coming up with a whole new form of slavery."
Kate Conroy has been described as a "global expert in responsible AI". (Screenshot: Royal Australian Air Force)
In short:
Kate Conroy has been chosen as the inaugural general manager of Australia's AI Safety Institute.
The institute will sit inside the Department of Industry, rather than operate as a standalone independent regulator.
What's next?
The institute's early work will test how far a small new body can shape Australia's response to AI risks.
A
philosopher and Royal Australian Air Force reservist has been chosen to
lead the federal government's efforts to keep Australians safe from the
harms of artificial intelligence.
Two
sources with knowledge of the appointment but not authorised to speak
publicly told the ABC Kate Conroy started as the inaugural general
manager of the Australian AI Safety Institute earlier this month.
The
institute is a new government body that sits within the Department of
Industry, Science and Resources. It is not a standalone, independent
regulator.
Its job is to monitor, test and share information on emerging AI capabilities, risks and harms.
A spokesperson for the Department of Industry, Science and Resources confirmed the appointment.
"Dr
Conroy has been appointed as general manager, AI governance. This team
is working to establish the Australian AI Safety Institute," they said.
Dr
Conroy takes up the role as Australia works through how to regulate AI,
with the technology already integrated into workplaces, national security, education and public services.
From philosophy to inside a Poseidon P-8A
The department spokesperson described Dr Conroy as a "global expert in responsible AI".
Dr
Conroy comes to the role with a background of working with governments
on AI ethics and risks, particularly around autonomous systems and
robotics.
She remains the lead
of responsible AI at the Royal Australian Air Force, where she has been
involved in the introduction of its first AI system to run live inside a
plane's systems, the Poseidon P-8A, as part of AUKUS Pillar II.
Kate Conroy has previously worked with governments on AI ethics and risks. (LinkedIn: Kate Conroy)
In a Department of Defence media release, Dr Conroy described the plane's AI system working as "a helper, not a decider".
She
said it would present incoming data and give the crew feedback on the
plane's operation but left the decision-making to the humans.
In 2022, Dr Conroy authored an academic paper
warning militaries could "cook" personnel into "bad apples" if they
delegated more parts of the decision-making process in war situations to
AI.
Dr Conroy has also worked
as the chief scientist for the Trusted Autonomous Systems Defence
Cooperative Research Centre, where she co-authored technical reports and
created toolkits for the ethical use of AI in armed forces.
Outside of the military, Dr Conroy had primarily worked with the government and as an academic.
Immediately
before her role in the air force, Dr Conroy worked for the Queensland
government, introducing rules to evaluate and manage the risks of AI in
government.
She co-authored a framework for governments using AI that was adopted as the national standard in 2024.
She obtained a PhD in philosophy in 2013 and has held roles at the University of Queensland and Queensland University of Technology.
Australia's approach to AI safety
Dr
Conroy's appointment puts an AI ethics specialist, rather than a
conventional technical specialist or former regulator, at the head of
Australia's first AI safety body.
She
is the first confirmed member of the AI Safety Institute, which was
announced in November 2025 as part of the rollout of the national AI
plan.
Minister for Industry, Innovation and Science Tim Ayres said at the time that Australia would only be able to seize the opportunities of AI if it was also able to manage its risks.
The AI Safety Institute would be used to assess these risks, Mr Ayres said.
"The
institute will be the government's hub of AI safety expertise. It will
operate with transparency, responsiveness and technical rigour to make
sure Australians are confident to use this game-changing technology
safely," he said.
Its
creation followed the government's decision to move away from a
proposed single AI Act, a central AI regulator and advisory body of
experts, and instead rely on existing regulators and agencies to manage
AI harms across their own areas.
Under the national AI plan, the institute will have to work on both "upstream" risks and "downstream" harms.
The plan defines upstream risks as the capabilities of AI models and the way they are built and trained.
Downstream harms are the real-world effects people experience when AI systems are used.
That
gives the institute a wide remit: from advanced model testing and
international AI safety research to the everyday consequences of AI
systems being used in workplaces, government services, finance and
consumer products.
Australians using AI but do not trust it
The institute's imminent opening comes at an important time for AI in Australia.
Since
the generative AI boom was sparked with the release of ChatGPT at the
end of 2022, there has been a rapid growth in use of products and tools
powered by the new technology.
At the same time, public polling consistently shows there is a broad distrust of the technology among Australians.
A recent global survey
of attitudes towards AI in 23 countries found Australians were already
using AI widely but had the equal-worst sentiment towards the
technology.
The study found 68
per cent of Australians were worried about losing control over decisions
AI made on their behalf, while 81 per cent supported stronger rules for
how organisations used AI.
There
has also been public discussion over which safety risks should be the
focus of the safety institute's modest resources and capacity.
Toby Walsh says the institute will need to carefully decide what to focus on, given its modest resources. (ABC News: John Gunn)
The
University of New South Wales AI Institute's chief scientist and
leading AI researcher, Toby Walsh, said the new body would need to
carefully decide what to focus on.
"The
big challenge for the AI Safety Institute is being able to provide
meaningful support and advice given the level of funding it's got," he
said.
Some experts want
Australia to focus heavily on frontier models and their potential future
risks: the most advanced systems developed by companies such as OpenAI,
Anthropic and Google DeepMind and what they might be capable of in the
years to come.
A significant
amount of work by the long-running international AI safety community has
been focused on so-called "existential risks" to humanity, including
rogue AIs, bioweapons and other doomsday scenarios.
Others
argue the institute should focus on the current harms, including
discrimination, privacy breaches, scams, unsafe products and opaque
decision-making in government and business.
Its sister institute, the UK's AI Security Institute, has emerged as one of the world's leading safety organisations.
It was one of the first organisations, and the first non-US-based one, to publish a public evaluation of Anthropic's Claude Mythos, a new AI model which was held back from public release by its maker for being too "dangerous".
Australia
has already moved to connect its institute to the UK's. Earlier this
week, the governments signed a memorandum of understanding on safe and
secure AI.
The agreement covers
sharing information about emerging AI capabilities and risks, joint
research on measuring and testing AI systems, and support for
international AI measurement and evaluation work.
The
Department of Industry spokesperson did not say when the Australian AI
Safety Institute would formally open, only that it would be "operational
soon".
Two people have been injured after a Russian drone crashed into an apartment complex in a Romanian city. (Reuters: Romanian Department for Emergency Situations)
In short:
A
Russian drone has hit an apartment building in a Romanian city
bordering Ukraine, wounding a teenage boy and woman in her 50s.
Romania, a NATO member, was joined in condemning the incident by NATO chief Mark Rutte and EU chief Ursula von der Leyen.
What's next?
Romania's defence ministry has said it is working to "accelerate the transfer of anti-drone capabilities to Romania".
A
Russian drone has struck an apartment building in NATO-member Romania,
wounding two people in the latest spillover from the war in Ukraine and
prompting strong condemnation from the alliance and the European Union.
Romania
summoned the Russian ambassador and President Nicusor Dan convened a
national defence council meeting to discuss "the most serious incident
to have affected our national territory" since Russia invaded Ukraine in
2022.
Later Mr Dan announced he had expelled the Russian consul general in the Black Sea city of Constanta and closed the mission.
"Russia
bears full responsibility for this incident… In light of this
situation, the Russian Federation's Consul General in Constanta has been
declared persona non grata, and the Consulate General of the Russian
Federation in Constanta will be closed," Dan said in a video statement.
The
drone smashed into the apartment building in the city of Galati, close
to the border with Ukraine, sparking a fire and sending a 14-year-old
boy and a 53-year-old woman to hospital with serious injuries, officials
said.
Romania summoned the Russian ambassador and European allies condemned the crash. (Reuters: Inquam Photos)
Drone
incursions in Romania have been detected dozens of times since the
start of the Russian offensive against Ukraine in 2022, but the strike
marked the first time a residential building has been hit.
Russian
President Vladimir Putin was informed about the drone incident in
Romania, the state-run TASS news agency quoted Kremlin spokesman Dmitry
Peskov as saying.
TASS later
reported foreign ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova indicated Russia
would respond swiftly to Romania's decision to close the consulate.
Later
the RIA news agency quoted Ms Zakharova said all the accusations about
Russian drones flying in Europe were unsubstantiated and no evidence had
been provided.
"All the
accusations that we hear, in particular about drones somewhere in the
countries of the European Union, they are all unsubstantiated, not a
single fact, material, piece of evidence has been presented," she said.
EU chief Ursula von der Leyen said Russia's "war of aggression had crossed yet another line" with the strike.
"We
stand in full solidarity with Romania and its people," she said on
social media, pledging to increase deterrence on the EU's Eastern border
and "to keep increasing pressure on Russia".
NATO
condemned Moscow's "recklessness" and vowed "absolute solidarity" with
Romania, while France's Foreign Minister Jean-Noel Barrot slammed what
he called "an irresponsible act".
Maia Sandu said Russia was a "danger to all". (Reuters: Inquam Photos/George Calin)
"Russia's
reckless behaviour is a danger to us all," NATO chief Mark Rutte wrote
on social media after a phone call with the Romanian president.
"I affirmed that NATO stands ready to defend every inch of allied territory,"
Rutte said
Maia
Sandu, the president of Moldova, which lies between Romania and Ukraine
and has also seen repeated drone incursions and debris falling on its
soil, said Russia was a "danger to all".
Jets scrambled
Two F-16 fighter jets were scrambled after the drones were detected in Romanian airspace, the defence ministry said.
"During
the night of May 28-29, the Russian Federation resumed drone attacks on
civilian and infrastructure targets in Ukraine, near the river border
with Romania," the Romanian defence ministry said.
The Romanian defence ministry says it scrambled fighter jets. (Reuters: Inquam Photos/Octav Ganea)
"One
of these drones entered Romanian airspace, was tracked by radar as far
as the southern part of the city of Galati, and crashed onto the roof of
an apartment building, with the impact triggering a fire," it said.
A
nationwide air raid alert had been issued in neighbouring Ukraine
overnight in anticipation of Russian strikes, with at least two people
wounded following the attack in southern Ukraine's Zaporizhzhia,
according to local authorities.
Growing threats
"This
incident represents a serious and irresponsible escalation on the part
of the Russian Federation," Romania's defence ministry said, adding
Bucharest had "requested measures to accelerate the transfer of
anti-drone capabilities to Romania".
Nicusor Dan convened the national security council in the hours following the incident. (Reuters: Inquam Photos/George Calin)
NATO-member
states bordering Ukraine or Russia, including Romania, Latvia, Estonia
and Poland, are increasingly exposed to incursions into their territory
by drones from both warring sides.
Latvia,
which borders Russia, appointed a new government on Thursday, two weeks
after the collapse of the previous administration due to a row over
stray Ukrainian drone incursions, which exposed the weaknesses of the
country's air defences.
Turkish ship hit
Ukraine's
navy said on Friday that a Russian drone had hit a Turkish cargo ship
that had left the port city of Odesa, sparking a fire and wounding two
crew members.
The Turkish
foreign ministry expressed its concern over the escalation in the Black
Sea to all relevant parties and urged each party refrain from taking
steps that could lead to uncontrolled escalation of war.
Russia,
meanwhile, said its air defences had intercepted more than 200
Ukrainian drones overnight, with one person killed in the Volgograd
region after a drone strike on a chemical factory.
The
attacks followed a series of Russian strikes on Ukraine on Saturday in
one of the most severe attacks since the start of the war.
Russia
has been threatening to escalate bombardments in retaliation for a
Ukrainian strike that, according to Moscow, killed 21 people at a school
in occupied Ukrainian territory.
Moscow
announced on Monday it had started a campaign of "systematic" strikes
on Kyiv, after battering Ukraine with hundreds of drones and a
hypersonic missile over the weekend, and called for diplomats and
foreigners to leave the Ukrainian capital.
Memoir, non-fiction and novels are among the best books released in May 2026, as chosen by ABC critics. (ABC Arts: Nicola Heath)
Acclaimed
American writer Elizabeth Strout's characters Olive Kitteridge and Lucy
Barton are among the most loved in contemporary literature. In her
latest novel, Strout introduces a new cast of characters led by Artie
Dam, a genial history teacher with a melancholy streak.
Meanwhile,
a Miles Franklin winner takes on alien abductions, Italian legal
scholar Francesca Albanese, sanctioned by the US, presents the human
tragedy of the Israeli occupation of Palestine and a Scottish Booker
Prize winner takes us on a journey to the Outer Hebrides.
These are just some of the books our critics loved this month. Happy reading!
"The
more I get to know my characters, the more they tell me what they're
going to do and how they're going to be," Strout told ABC Radio
National's The Book Show. (Supplied: Penguin Books Australia)
If
people said what they really meant, communicated clearly and lived
unambiguous lives within properly functional political systems,
novelists would be out of a job. The bookshelves are alright, then; and
American novelist Elizabeth Strout is free to make art from the things
unsaid, misunderstood or never confronted.
Her
latest novel, The Things We Never Say, introduces an entirely new cast
after years in which she created both worlds and series of novels around
her (wonderful, real, spiky) characters Olive Kitteridge and Lucy
Barton, before finally bringing these women together in her 2024 book,
Tell Me Everything. But, now, we meet schoolteacher Artie Dam, well
liked and passionate about history, with a wife and adult son, plenty of
friends and a boat to sail on. Secretly and quietly however, he's
aching with loneliness, and can't see the point of going on.
Then,
something happens to make him realise the world is worth living in at
the same time as the world itself begins to tilt away from him. The
novel tilts too, as politics and secrets intervene in the lead up to the
2024 American election. Strout is so good at the detail of ordinary
lives, the loves and complications, the relationships of family, the
complexity of friendship — but here, she manages to keep that tight
focus while expanding her story into a state-of-the-nation examination.
Donald
Trump is never named and nor are we subject to obvious lectures. But
Artie Dam suddenly discovers that a teaching strategy he has long
employed is now suspect. The Civil War, migration, race and equality are
no longer up for analysis but instead come with "sides"; this gentle
man is under increasing scrutiny, and the things he thought he knew
about his own family also begin to come undone.
This
is a novel that is quietly furious but refuses to be didactic. Instead,
every side character has a backstory, and we're reading our way into
the present.
— Kate Evans
Capture by Amanda Lohrey
Text Publishing
Lohrey
told ABC Radio National's The Book Show that Capture came from her
preoccupation with the philosophical question of doubt. (Supplied: Text Publishing)
Capture
begins with an arresting scene: a madman shouting on a university lawn.
The students surrounding him pay no attention, captive only to their
phones.
Amanda Lohrey, who has
won numerous literary awards, including the Miles Franklin in 2021 for
Labyrinth, ushers us into a curious world. It is a place of revelations
and superstition — a world largely ignored by modernity and its
disillusioned horsemen (science, resource extraction, technology and
automation) — yet it coexists alongside our world of rational
efficiency.
Visiting Prague for
a conference, James Mather, a psychiatrist in his 60s, is a rational
but open soul. He meets Helena Wolf, a friend and mentor, who he has
known since he began studying medicine.
Wolf
has an assignment for her former mentee: to study people convinced they
have been abducted by aliens. Wolf is confident that Mather, with his
combination of generosity and scepticism, is the person for the job.
Someone
who needs a bit more convincing, though, is Mather himself. More used
to working with clients facing suicide, he wonders: is he seeking
distraction? Is engaging with those open to the "perversely sublime", as
he puts it, a way of relieving himself of some personal psychic burden?
Yet
Mather's research subjects are sane, successful and lucid: an engineer
in his 30s. A divorced beautician in her 40s. Twenty-eight people in
total. It's not a massive sample, Mather reflects, but it is "bigger and
more diverse than the small number that Freud used to construct his
radical rethink of the mind".
Lohrey
places sly provocations throughout Capture. (Sleek symbols of modernity
like ergonomic chairs, for example, are described as "mechanical
totems".) There are signs, early in the book, that Mather is nonplussed
by some of contemporary thinking's clinical aspects. (The term "eating
disorder" prompts him to wonder: what could be more orderly than
"fasting unto death"?) Working alongside his cool, considered research
assistant, Lucy Cheng, Mather comes to feel he is sharing an
"alternative universe" with Lucy and his subjects, one he does not wish
to "domesticate".
Capture is
especially affecting in those scenes involving Lucy's son and Mather's
visits to old friends. It's also briskly paced: I don't think I'm alone
in having picked up the novel and happily found myself unable to put it
down again until reaching the final pages a few hours later.
Deftly
sculpted, filled with resonant motifs and thoughtful reflections on the
mysteries of existence — and some witty dialogue — Capture is wise,
elegantly wrought and a pleasure to read.
— Declan Fry
Yeah the Boys by Holden Sheppard
Pantera Press
Sheppard won the Western Australian Premier's Book Award for an Emerging Writer in 2019. (Supplied: Hardie Grant Publishing)
West
Coast Eagles star "Hammer" is a man with a secret. Terrified of
becoming the first openly gay player in the AFL, he takes out his
simmering rage on opponents and teammates alike and creates controversy
when he hits out at the sport's Pride Round.
Meanwhile,
academic over-achiever Zeke is floundering after university. Feeling
like "a broken boy who once split himself in two and never recovered",
he puts on a polite facade for his parents, his ex-girlfriend and
housemate Sabrina, all while chasing hedonistic pleasure in secret.
After
Zeke almost hooks up with old schoolmate Charlie in the shadows of a
Perth bathhouse, they start hanging out for the first time in years.
Charlie invites Zeke to The Tool Shed, a men-only throwback to "when gay
bars were for us" that he is working on with gay elder Curtis. Charlie
and friends debate collaborating with toxic influencer Xander, "the most
squeaky-clean Perth gay", who could give the fledgling business a
massive boost.
Zeke
starts to find a sense of community playing football with the Perth
Centurions, a "proudly mediocre" social team that welcomes gay players.
The move brings him back in contact with Hammer, who slept with Zeke and
then ghosted him years ago. The lives of the trio, who were once
classmates, become further enmeshed when someone starts sending
anonymous threats to out the football star. After seeing Charlie — who
knows his secret — at a protest against his comments, Hammer suspects
his former friend is the blackmailer.
Revisiting the core characters from Sheppard's three previous novels — his 2019 debut Invisible Boys, adapted for TV in 2025,
The Brink (2022) and King of Dirt (2025) — Yeah the Boys is timely,
punchy and gruffly entertaining, bellowing its cry for gay men to be
accepted for who they are, not pigeonholed as glitter-clad Kylie fans.
It
celebrates a rough and ready masculinity, revelling in its sexed-up,
footy-loving, bourbon-swilling, proudly bogan men. It moves like Eagles
star Jack Petruccelle in open space — fast and confident — as these
flawed but lovable lost boys chase their vision of freedom.
— Daniel Herborn
Honey by Imani Thompson
The Borough Press
Thompson
told British Vogue that Honey was born out of her desire to "flip the
lens" on the ubiquitous violence against women she saw on TV. (Supplied: HarperCollins Australia)
Honey
is a darkly funny campus novel about female rage and retribution.
Protagonist Ysra is a PhD student at Cambridge studying Afropessimism.
She spends her time teaching, dating, hanging out with friends and
researching ways to kill bad men.
She
is both disengaged and enraged by the hatred towards and dismissal of
black women she sees both in her research and in British society. One
day, she flicks a bee into a man's drink and he drops dead. Suddenly, a
bad man is gone. In felling a representative of the very system she is
raging against, she wonders if perhaps she's found the answer to her
ennui.
Her life is filled with
colour again and she begins to rationalise her actions retroactively
through her research, reflecting "If violence turns subject into object,
then is it only through violence that one can return to a subject
position?" Is it only through literally killing her oppressors that she
can feel free? This isn't murder — it's reparations; it's "theory in
action".
Thompson's
deft characterisation humanises Ysra, whose inconsistencies — such as
her need for control and contrasting disorderliness — make her wholly
relatable despite her murderous tendencies. However, as her violence
builds and her justifications become cloudier, the reader is left
wondering if this is really revenge against the system or just a woman
with an addictive personality chasing a high. What was once "logical"
turns to something uglier: "Call it redemption call it rage call it
sport."
This is an ambitious
debut, both a thriller and a deep interrogation of race, feminism and
justice. It pulls on a lot of threads and, while not always following
them to the end, offers readers a gripping ride. For fans of Yellowface,
Boy Parts and My Sister, the Serial Killer, Honey is a fast-paced, sexy
and slightly unhinged read about taking justice into your own hands.
— Rosie Ofori Ward
When the World Sleeps by Francesca Albanese, translated by Gregory Conti
Hardie Grant Books
Albanese
told ABC's The Radio National Hour that she draws hope from "the fact
there are more and more people eager to break the ties of complicity". (Supplied: Hardie Grant Publishing)
In
response to her vocal criticism of the Israeli occupation of the
Palestinian territories, the Trump administration placed Italian human
rights lawyer Francesca Albanese on its sanctions list in July 2025, a
measure previously reserved for the likes of imprisoned Venezuelan
president Nicolás Maduro and Russian president Vladimir Putin.
Over
the years, Albanese — currently in her second term as United Nations
(UN) Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestine Territories — has
written at length about Palestine, mostly in legal and technical terms.
Her
new book, When the World Sleeps, is different, laying out the human
tragedy of Israel's treatment of its beleaguered neighbour. Each of the
book's 10 chapters engages with an aspect of the Palestinian experience
through the lens of an individual's story.
The tragic tale of six-year-old Hind Rajab — made into a film,
which won the Grand Jury Prize at the Venice film festival — is a case
in point. The Palestinian girl survived an Israeli air strike that
struck her family's car, killing everyone else, only to be killed in
another attack hours later, along with the Red Crescent workers who were
on their way to rescue her. Hind is one of more than 20,000 Palestinian
children killed since 2023 and Albanese uses her story to preface a
damning account of the parlous state of childhood in Gaza, which is
characterised by death, injury, illness, poverty, hunger and grief.
In
When the World Sleeps, Albanese resists the idea that what is happening
in Gaza is a two-sided conflict that began on October 7, 2023, or that
Palestinians bear collective responsibility for the Hamas attacks. She
labels Israel's actions in Gaza "a full-blown genocide" — a claim
supported by international law, numerous UN reports and a whole body of
academic scholarship — and calls out Israel for using accusations of
antisemitism to shut down criticism of its illegal occupation of
Palestine.
The Gaza genocide is
"a blemish on humanity for which our grandchildren will hold us to
account", writes Albanese, imploring her readers to shake off their
indifference to the Palestinian plight. "When the world sleeps, it falls
on us, we the people, to wake it up — and now more than ever the world
needs an awakening."
— Nicola Heath
Eat Bitter: A Story About Guts and Food by Lydia Pang
Chatto & Windus
"'Eat
bitter' is a Chinese idiom, usually spat at you by a salty elder at
your impatience or short-sightedness," Pang wrote in the Financial
Times. (Supplied: Penguin Books Australia)
Hakka,
Lydia Pang explains, translates loosely as "guest families" — the most
diasporic of the Han Chinese community, considered nomads, pioneers,
people who perpetually adapted, grafted and took risks to survive. It is
a history born out of necessity, and Pang's debut is an attempt to
honour it — one recipe at a time.
The
book is centred on the Hakka idiom — eat bitter — omnipresent in her
life, meaning to suffer pain in good humour; to push through difficulty
and adversity with grace, before tasting sweetness. It's a more poetic
version of "no pain, no gain", and Pang positions it as an antidote to
our coddled and modern culture of quick fixes and performative busyness.
Eight recipes structure the book, each anchored to a formative moment
in her life relating to family, grief, fertility challenges,
generational love and career. Food here is not comfort eating; it is
processing. A vessel for conversation.
One
such recipe is Hot Mess Wontons, poignantly shaped around her return
home to Wales from Portland. What is in her eyes an admission of career
defeat becomes, through the connective and meditative act of folding
wontons with her father, something closer to wisdom. "Surrender," she
writes, "is wholly active." It is the book at its best: raw and tender.
The
book is timely. Food is our most fundamental need, so why not use it to
be subversive? A new generation is doing exactly that, and Pang is
among them. Almost diaristic in structure, Eat Bitter uses food as a
lens to uncover the moments that have shaped Pang, who argues,
ultimately, for "a more confrontational and emotional role for food in
our lives".
Pang is a creative
director by trade, and it shows; her instincts are sharp and the
aesthetic considered. The book's zine origins are occasionally visible;
some passages could be trimmed and a few food analogies are slightly
stretched. Comparisons to Crying in H Mart are inevitable but feel
overblown. Really, anyone who has had a connection to food through
culture or heritage, will find something here to resonate with. It's not
about nostalgia but more about a reckoning — culturally rich and worth
cooking from.
— Ying-Di Yin
First Summer by Ekin Oklap
Summit Books
Oklap is trilingual, speaking Turkish, Italian and English. (Supplied: Simon & Schuster)
It's
summer. An unnamed narrator spends most of her time during the holidays
in her imagination, reading on the porch — that is, until a new girl
moves in down the road.
Something
about the new girl arrests her. She dreams about this new 16-year-old,
Clara, the day after she arrives. As a child, our narrator enjoyed
playing with the boys, but as she grows, she chafes against social norms
dictating how young girls and boys should behave. She struggles to fit
in. Naive and fairly innocent, her parents are divorced and she lives
with her mother, a carer, who is good at understanding children although
she ironically has trouble relating to her daughter.
Feeling
a shared sense of loneliness, the narrator and Clara bond over mutual
interests. The girls have other fortuitous points of connection: there
is a mysterious secret rift between Clara's mother and the grandmother
they are staying with, recalling the narrator's distance from her own
mother.
The
narrator discovers that, with Clara, she no longer has to filter her
thoughts. She can be herself. She shares vivid childhood memories with
her, experiences she has never told anyone else.
Born
in Türkiye, raised in Italy, and now living in London, Ekin Oklap's
translations from Turkish and Italian have been shortlisted for the
International Booker Prize and other awards. In First Summer, her debut
novel, Oklap subtly captures her narrator's burgeoning sense of
closeness to Clara in sylvan and summery prose. The setting of this
Sapphic coming-of-age story is never named, although the heat and a
reference to the late-90s television show Breakers, a short-lived TV
series with its own Sapphic subplot, suggest it is perhaps set somewhere
in Australia.
Sweet and gently
affecting, this touching, indelibly wrought novel perfectly captures
the transformative power of ordinary events in a young person's life. As
Oklap writes, "It is a rare and precious feeling to be able to share
something with another person, something small and trivial or quite
important, and to be held in their mind and understood in their heart,
and feel not quite so alone, not quite so bewildered anymore."
— Declan Fry
Childhood: A memoir of growing up, parenting, teaching, and discovering what children need most by Brendan James Murray
Picador Australia
"[Children] have a way of cutting through the adult nonsense and seeing things as they are," Murray told ABC Conversations. (Supplied: Pan Macmillan Australia)
The
childhoods Brendan James Murray writes about in his memoir Childhood — a
follow-up to his acclaimed 2021 memoir, The School: The Ups and Downs
of One Year in the Classroom — aren't particularly happy ones.
There
is Murray's former classmate Aiden, whose mysterious and disturbing
appearance on a freeway overpass one Boxing Day morning serves as
Childhood's structural ballast.
Then
there is a little girl on a pink bicycle who is snatched from the
street in Seadale — the pseudonym Murray gives his hometown on
Victoria's Mornington Peninsula — by a stranger in a blue hatchback and
later found murdered. Murray's little sister has the same bike, and the
episode triggers an episode of anxiety in the 10-year-old Murray that
leads to school refusal, now known as emotionally based school avoidance
(EBSA), and months off school.
For
Murray, a sensitive and imaginative child, childhood in his
concrete-girded hometown was laced with danger and characterised by
scarcity. His parents were loving but the family's financial position
precarious.
Decades
later, as an English teacher at the same high school, Murray is keenly
aware of how easy it is for children to slip through the cracks in a
system not designed for them. In freewheeling, lyrical prose and
frequent imaginative leaps, Murray uses the "many worlds" theory of
quantum mechanics to illustrate the misfortune of poverty and how
disadvantaged kids are let down in the classroom.
Murray
fears the education system, preoccupied with capitalist notions of data
and productivity, stamps out the more existential quality of
imagination. This loss, he writes, "is one of the greatest invisible
tragedies in the lives of children" that "carries them into lives of
squandered potential, or worse".
Murray
argues there is nothing childish about imagination; rather, it is a
critical faculty in the current era of rapid technological change.
Children need imagination to determine their path forward in life just
as adults need imagination to feel empathy. In a world of increasing
income inequality, declining reading rates and the proliferation of
generative AI, Murray's book is an urgent cry to pause and consider the
effect of these changes on our children.
— Nicola Heath
John of John by Douglas Stuart
Picador
Stuart told Interview Magazine after Shuggie Bain and Young Mungo, he wanted to write about queer loneliness in a rural setting. (Supplied: Pan Macmillan Australia)
Scottish
writer Douglas Stuart burst onto the literary scene with his highly
autobiographical novel, Shuggie Bain, in 2020, which won the Booker
Prize that year. In vivid and bruising prose, it let us into the
working-class world of young Shuggie and his alcoholic mum Agnes in a
story of survival and grit, shame and pain, love and (eventually) a
sexual awakening too. Stuart writes gay love and longing with a sort of
fierce tenderness, complete with barriers to fulfilment, which continued
into his second novel, Young Mungo.
Now,
with his third novel, John of John, we're leaving the mainland and
heading to a small, rocky, Scottish island. John-Calum Macleod, known as
Cal, left for art school but, as the story opens, he has to return.
Every week, he had called his dour father John from a payphone, there to
be belaboured with psalms and lines from the Bible, with the harsh
words of the Calvinist Free Church. It's all fire and brimstone,
judgement and wrath, that feels ancient and cold, with a wind still
blowing into the 1990s.
Cal is a
young gay man, who outrages his father by dyeing his long hair,
dressing as he pleases, defying the rules of the church. John is furious
as well as tough, speaking to his son in Scots-Gaelic so his
mother-in-law won't hear in their tiny croft; his wife absent and the
reason for her leaving a mystery.
Then
we realise it's not Cal's story after all. It's John's story. This
calloused weaver and sheep farmer has been in love with the man up the
road since they were both teenagers, inventing jobs to do together so
they can touch with tenderness and desire.
Father and son both work with colour and thread and beauty. If only they knew what else they shared.
