Gaps

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 debut was much anticipated: its manuscript won the inaugural international $US100,000 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.

• This is the central message from research about the social dimensions of climate hazards.
• As researchers working on gender, diversity and environment, we believe that to effectively address climate hazards like wildfire, we must consider the diverse experiences of people.
• We must also account for longstanding “taken for granted” institutions and create processes that empower local people to plan, respond and learn from their specific experiences.

The diverse experiences of wildfire

• Over the past decade, we have conducted multiple projects in the boreal region of western Canada to learn how residents experience and plan for wildfire.
• And many of these characteristics intersect with one another, resulting in diverse experiences of wildfire.
• These differences are influenced by the social institutions that shape our experiences, such as colonial legacies and gendered norms and expectations.

Institutions can help or hinder

• Institutions we take for granted can exacerbate the secondary risks people face from wildfire events.
• Top-down, command-and-control approaches to emergency management are often very effective in getting people out of immediate harm’s way when wildfires draw near.
• But evacuation triage processes that prioritize physical health risks may result in the fragmentation of extended family support networks.

Working together builds resilience

• This will help communities plan and adapt in ways that account for diversity of experience, address underlying social inequalities and draw on local strengths and knowledge.
• By accounting for social dimensions in each of these contexts, we can help empower communities to leverage local innovation and strengthen their resilience in the face of climate hazards.

• More than a quarter – 27% – of children under five are stunted and 61% of children are iron-deficient.
• One way to accelerate progress on malnutrition is through engaging with the people who are directly affected by policies.
• The respondents in Soweto, an urban township in South Africa with constrained resources, didn’t focus much on health system programmes.
• We suggest policy makers, researchers and funders consider programmes that communities view as essential for improving mother-and-child nutrition.

The study

• It offers a practical way to involve the public in making healthcare decisions.
• Members of the community were invited to select a package of programmes they saw as priorities to improve mother-and-child nutrition.
• Nine programmes were “nutrition-sensitive” (addressed the underlying causes of nutrition), and accessed in non-health sectors (extended paid maternity leave).

The outcomes

Community members’ top three priorities were:
• Affordable healthy food, help in finding jobs, and community gardens were other programmes the participants considered important to improve their community’s mother-and-child nutrition.
• To be able to, if you want to, grow vegetables and sell them to people, to be able to get money and teach children and other older people to do gardening.
• Participants showed a willingness to consider other viewpoints and reflect on the consequences of their choices for the entire community.

Translating public engagement into action

• Public engagement is entrenched in the constitution and in various policy documents.
• Even where public engagement has occurred it has had very little impact on policy making.
• Integrating public engagement, through using tools like CHAT, could complement such efforts.

• Democrats in Congress are making a new push to get the long-dormant proposed Equal Rights Amendment enshrined into law.
• Efforts to amend the U.S. Constitution to recognize women’s rights have faced major challenges for the past century.
• Most recently, in April 2023 Senate Republicans blocked a similar resolution that would let states ratify the amendment, despite an expired deadline.
• Here’s a quick summary of how the country got to this point and the barriers that still exist to adding the Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution.

‘Ladies against women’

• The amendment could help protect women’s access to reproductive health services, including abortion and contraception.
• Proponents also believe that the ERA can be used to push back against legislation that threatens the rights of LGBTQ+ people.
• The push for equal rights first heated up in the 1920s after women gained the right to vote.
• World War II opened many doors for women, who filled gaps in the labor force while men were off fighting.
• In 2023, conservative women’s groups like the Eagle Forum and Concerned Women for America continue to make the same arguments against the ERA.

Another chance?

• Some constitutional experts see Democrats’ latest attempt to codify the ERA as a political stunt rather than a legitimate legal move.
• More than a dozen states have ERA equivalents that protect women’s equal rights in their constitutions.
• In the current polarized political environment, abortion access promises to serve as a political lightening rod in coming years.
• This is an updated version of an article originally published on Dec. 13, 2018.