In her latest collection of poems, Empirical, Lisa Gorton demonstrates – definitively and elegantly – how large, apparently simple creative decisions (employing catalogues or lists; quoting from the archive; engaging in ekphrasis or description) can produce compelling and complex poetic forms.

Empirical shows continuities with Gorton’s two earlier collections, especially with regard to a repeated concern with places and things. But the use of a ‘transcriptive poetics’ of bricolage – in which Gorton quotes from and adapts literary and archival works to produce original poetry – is a new development. Gorton is not, of course, the first poet to engage in the transcriptive poetics of found poetry. Conceptual poets such as Kenneth Goldsmith have long produced poetic work through the transcription of non-poetic material. And numerous poets have raided their national and regional historical archives to find, through poetic bricolage, the utter strangeness of what was once simply factual or administrative writing. Such a project is clearly open to post-colonial critique, as the work of Indigenous writers such as Tony Birch and Natalie Harkin shows.

Gorton’s use of the archive is concerned with poetic transformation itself, employing basic poetic strategies such as catalogue, translation, and ekphrasis (or description). Part of the power of Empirical is the way in which it subtly allows critique to form within such poetic forms of transformation.

Don Dunstan tended to divide those around him, even his parents. His father, Viv, moved from Adelaide to become a company man in Fiji. Peter Kearsley, a contemporary of Don’s who later became chief justice of Fiji, said Viv was ‘a fair dinkum sort of chap’, ‘the sort who would have been an office bearer in a bowling club’. His mother, according to Kearsley, was ‘genteel … deliberately countering stereotypes of what Australians were like. She would not even let Don play rugger.’ She disapproved of his friendship with neighbouring children – the part-Fijian Bill Sorby and the young K.B. Singh. Dunstan himself traced his awareness of racism to his childhood.

Dunstan was sent to St Peter’s College where the young men of the Adelaide Establishment were schooled. He was one of a group called ‘Us with a capital u’, which another member, Donald Simpson, recalled was ‘very pretentious’. He spent the war at school and university, unable to return to Fiji. At Adelaide University he was involved in drama and student politics. He moved on from the conservatism of his family and schooling. He married Gretel Ellis, the highly intelligent daughter of Jewish refugees. She and her family brought European culture to Dunstan; he adopted elements of their food and attitudes. After a short period in Fiji, when Dunstan controversially defended Indians in his legal practice, the couple returned to Adelaide. He set up as a lawyer in Victoria Square, but business was slow and Gretel was obliged to take in boarders to make ends meet. The young couple became active in the Labor Party, and Dunstan began his extraordinary political career.

This autobiography by Tim Costello – Baptist minister, lawyer, anti-casino activist, CEO of World Vision Australia for thirteen years – is a clear and straightforward account of his life, free of obvious literary artifice. What Costello has tried to do, he says, is to understand and explain how his memories and experiences, especially of childhood and family life, have made him develop as an adult, often in ways that have become apparent only with maturity.

Costello grew up in 1950s suburban Melbourne, the eldest of three children: his brother, Peter, Australia’s longest-serving federal treasurer, is two years younger. Theirs was a small, safe world, and the Costello children had fairly standard childhoods: Costello mentions the excitement of television, joining gangs, playing in the bush. They also brought stray kids home from school for meals; Tim and his mother usually looked after them. Their father, Russell, joined the Baptist Church as a young man and spent his entire working life as a teacher at a Baptist grammar school. Anne, their mother, came from a middle-class background and overcame cardiac problems to study arts and social studies; she combined family life with teaching. The Costello parents met at university, and Tim, Peter, and his sister, Janet, were all brought up to believe in the importance of education.

When the Bill that became the Modern Slavery Act 2018 (Cth) was introduced into the federal parliament, it was accompanied by a grim message: two centuries after the abolition of the slave trade in the United Kingdom, it is estimated that there are twenty-five million victims of modern slavery worldwide. It also came with a bracing if Panglossian promise: that the Modern Slavery Act would ‘transform’ the way large companies in Australia do business, and drive a ‘race to the top’. Published a year after the introduction of this legislation, Addressing Modern Slavery is a timely reflection on the pervasiveness of modern slavery in global supply chains – and on the role of the state, business, and other actors in combating this serious and complex problem.

From the outset, Justine Nolan and Martijn Boersma tackle one of the persistent bugbears of contemporary discourse on modern slavery: the lack of a standard definition of ‘modern slavery’. In so doing, they also confront critiques of the use of this term. As Nolan and Boersma note, the term ‘modern slavery’ is inherently emotive and calls to mind the spectre of evil wrongdoers to be punished and helpless victims to be saved. This, as the authors observe, obscures the systemic and structural causes of this type of exploitation and ‘den[ies] agency to those exploited’. Nonetheless, Nolan and Boersma adopt the language of modern slavery, explicitly acknowledging its currency in public conversation. They define the term broadly: ‘modern slavery’ encapsulates a ‘continuum of labour exploitation’ – the crux of which is the exercise of ‘abusive control’ by an employer over a worker, including by coercing or manipulating a worker to accept exploitative working conditions. In this way, Nolan and Boersma suggest that labour exploitation can span from conduct ordinarily regulated by workplace laws (such as underpayment of wages) to conduct that is usually characterised as criminal (such as slavery, servitude, and slavery-like conditions). This is part of a conscious effort, by the authors, to recast the problem of modern slavery and locate it within the social, political, and economic realities of our globalised world.