Love in the Time of Colonisation

A review of the many layers of 'Sunbirds' by Mirandi Riwoe

News & Reviews Magazine

This article is part of our October edition. Read the editor’s letter to see what other fantastic writing has just been published. If you’re annoyed that it’s paywalled, then that means you wanted to read it, which means you value it. These writers get paid for what they do because their work is valuable. If you like that this type of independent media exists, please back it!

The piece you’re reading now is by Astrid Edwards. Astrid is the host of The Garret: Writers on Writing and has interviewed more than 200 of Australia’s most prominent writers and publishers. She is a teacher in the Associate Degree of Professional Writing and Editing at RMIT University and sometimes judges literary prizes, including the 2023 Stella Prize. In 2023 she began a PhD at the University of Melbourne exploring potential and perceived barriers to publishing and selling climate fiction in Australia. In 2021 Astrid contributed to the anthology Growing Up Disabled in Australia and made her debut appearance on Q+A in 2021.

Astrid writes for News & Reviews Magazine every month. These are her last pieces, from the August and September editions:

Ben Roberts-Smith: free press; competitor books; and accountability

Reinventing Storytelling One Book at a Time

A plane crashes into the Indian Ocean and a young woman floats among the wreckage. Later we’ll question her identity, but for now the action in the prologue is all blockbuster cinematic. It is March 1942, and World War II is reshaping nations and fracturing European colonies.