Terri-ann White was Director of UWA Publishing (2006–20). In 1999, she established the Institute of Advanced Studies, a cross-disciplinary centre at the University of Western Australia. She has been an independent bookseller and writer. In 2021, she established a new publishing house, Upswell Publishing, based in Perth and building a list of distinctive literary works in fiction, poetry, and narrative non-fiction.

What was your pathway to publishing?

A pathway of passion. Corny but true. A lucky break in my university career: asked to develop a creative writing list for a seventy-year-old publishing house that had never published fiction and poetry. I started the task by writing to people I trusted in universities around the country asking for the best work by their students, as I knew most were not being published. The first book I published was Josephine Wilson’s first novel, Cusp, in 2005. (I also published her second novel.)

How many titles do you publish each year?

When I announced Upswell in early 2021, I declared I’d be doing four to ten books each year. I released the first three at the end of 2021 and somehow managed to release eighteen in 2022, my first full year. I’m a maniac, but perhaps I was also getting something out of my system. Each of these books was given dedicated attention before being released.

In the middle of 2022 researchers at the Kirby Institute at the University of New South Wales announced that Covid-19 had infected more than half of Australia’s twenty-six million people. The number came not from polymerase chain reaction tests, nor from the results of rapid antigen home tests, but from the sampling of Australian blood banks. After all the tables, graphs, and pressers, the serosurvey demonstrated that the virus was everywhere among us and inside us, reconfiguring our bodies as well as our social and political worlds.

Not that this was news: we knew it in our bones. Many had already, in earlier phases of the pandemic, fallen into pandemic fatigue. We were exhausted by talking about the virus and the vaccine, exhausted by the numbers, exhausted by the moral labour of reading about death, counting deaths, all around us, while trying to function. As 2022 wears on, that exhaustion is compounded by the sequelae of the virus in our health systems and our bodies and minds. We are fatigued by coming to terms with novelty.

After the first shocking news about hard lockdowns in China, social distancing in Hong Kong, the grim footage of ventilating, prostrate patients in overflowing Italian hospitals, we struggled to adjust to what was being asked or demanded of us. And yet all of us, even vocal libertarians and protesters, have adjusted in myriad ways to the post-pandemic world, sometimes intuitively, even unconsciously. Now that the virus seems to be in an excruciatingly slow ebb, perhaps it is time to revisit Covid-19. Given the extent and pace of social change, we might wonder how historians, those whom Tom Griffiths calls ‘time travellers’, have been making sense of the pandemic.

Within the Australian natural history genre, this book stands out: a quirky mix of autobiography, insights into the behaviour and adaptability of familiar Australian birds, and a fine example of the role of science-based enquiry to help solve human–wildlife problems. Darryl Jones, the author, is one of Australia’s most engaging and high-profile ornithologists. Although the tone of this book is decidedly non-academic, it is packed with information and insights.

The first third of the book is autobiographical. With much self-deprecation, Jones recounts important themes and events in his rural childhood and student years that led to a fascination with wildlife, culminating in an academic appointment at Griffith University in the late 1980s. The remainder of the book describes selected elements from his research career focusing on urban birds that manage to annoy us, including the Australian Magpie, Australian Brush-turkey, Rainbow Lorikeet, Sulphur-crested Cockatoo, and the enigmatic ‘curlew’ of the title – properly known as the Bush Stone-curlew, a surprising resident of many cities in northern Australia, but seriously in decline in the south.

Jones has been at the forefront of Australian research into human–wildlife interactions, positive and negative, and how the negative aspects can best be mitigated. To succeed in this field requires an understanding of human behaviour and attitudes, and the ability to investigate wildlife behaviour in the field. The inclusion of this human element among the wildlife science adds greatly to the interest and entertainment provided by this book.

The near-religious title of Alan Wearne’s new selection of poems, Near Believing, gives an impression of bathos and deprecation, while nevertheless undermining structures of belief, as represented in the book; at times this belief is explicitly Christian, but can also be seen more generally as belief in others, or in the suburban way of life. It is, then, while modest-seeming, highly ambitious – and, in another irony, further evokes the pathos, and hopelessness, of wanting to believe. In the title poem, which appears in the uncollected section, ‘Metropolitan Poems and other poems’, a ‘near-believer’ is defined by the poem’s priest speaker as ‘that kind of atheist I guess who prays at times’. This formula captures the ambiguity of the book’s many speakers and their addresses.

A highlight of this section of new poems is ‘They Came to Moorabbin’, about Nance Conway, a diplomat’s widow, who repeatedly refers to post-World War II Moorabbin as Mars, and her relationship with married couple Iris and Keith. The play of voice in this poem is as complicated (or rich) as in Pride and Prejudice. For example, ‘That something / also saying Please never lay a hand on me …’ is a paraphrase by the poem’s speaker of ‘something’ that is not exactly spoken, nor thought, by Nance. Later in the poem:

         ‘Possibly,’ Nance muttered back to Keith,

Keith speaking for his Iris.

                           Possibly?

He lets her say it since, except when Iris contradicts,

Keith rather likes an opinionated woman,

each brings out a similar boorish edginess.