Over the last decade, when I am moved to write an article I regularly am told by referees that my tone is not scholarly enough and I am insufficiently theorised. Well, having got past the time when I need to do some academic showing off, I think that it is more important to point readers to things of interest in new writing than to bury it under jargon and erudite philosophising. So I am pleased to report that Tanya Dalziell has produced an accessible set of readings of Gail Jones’s work that remind me of important themes, demonstrate how the writing works to express them, and reveal details I had forgotten or not noticed at all (snowdomes, to pick just one).
This is not to say that the study is simplistic. Dalziell mentions at least twenty-five of the usual suspects in theorising time, trauma ethics, photography, narrative, etcetera, but she…