Reason and Lovelessness : Essays, Reviews and Encounters, 1980-2017

Barry Hill is a multi-award winning writer of poetry, history, biography, fiction and reportage. This collection of essays, variously published in Australia, India and London, includes ‘satellites’ of his major works—such as Sitting In (1992), a landmark memoir in Labour History; Broken Song: TGH Strehlow and Aboriginal Possession (2002), a literary biography on Aboriginal and frontier poetics; and Peacemongers (2014), a pilgrimage book about Rabindranath Tagore and Mahatma Gandhi in the years leading up to the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Other essays are new: ‘Brecht’s Song’, on his working-class mother; ‘Dark Star’, an expansion of his meeting with Christina Stead on her 80th birthday; ‘Loving Roughneck’, his critical appreciation of John Berger; and ‘On the Edge of the Cliff’, on his private meeting with the Dalai Lama in the Blue Mountains. As has been the case with his book-length works, Hill’s essays collected here are ground-breaking: freshly, deeply researched, genre-crossing, multi-disciplinary, combining the candidly personal with the philosophical.