Nick Mattiske

Reviews

Ecological Wisdom from the Serpent’s Tale

Review: Snake Talk, Tyson Yunkaporta and Megan Kelleher, Text Publishing In the Jewish-Christian scriptures the snake gets a bad rap. In other spiritual traditions, the snake is more celebrated, the Rainbow Serpent being one example. Tyson Yunkaporta’s latest book, written with his wife Megan Kelleher, is something of an attempt at reptilian reputation rehabilitation, but […]

Nick Mattiske · 4 November 2025

Features

Technology, AI, Ellul, me and you

With all the claims and confusion around AI and what it can and might do, it’s instructive to turn to a thinker such as Jacques Ellul, who wrote extensively about the effect of technology on our lives, long before current developments. While not writing about AI specifically, Ellul’s thoughts on technology are helpful for alerting […]

Nick Mattiske · 21 October 2025

Reviews

Ningaloo – ‘desert with its feet in the sea’

Review: Ningaloo: Australia’s Wild Wonder, Tim Winton and Cindy Lane, Fremantle Press Tim Winton is well known for his passion for the marine environments of Western Australia, through his fiction and his conservation work, for which he has been awarded an Order of Australia. In this book for young readers he, along with illustrator Cindy […]

Nick Mattiske · 17 October 2025

Reviews

Making Moral Points About Difference and Welcome

Reviews: After the Great Storm, Ann Dombroski, Transit Lounge & The Theory of Everything, Yumna Kassab, Ultimo Press Here are two Australian novelists pushing the boundaries of fiction, playing with format and narrative, but also using fiction’s flexibility to make moral points about difference and welcome. Ann Dombroski’s book has some similarities to recent dystopian […]

Nick Mattiske · 9 October 2025

Reviews

America’s Religious Recession

Review: Why Religion Went Obsolete: The Demise of Traditional Faith in America, Christian Smith, Oxford University Press In recent decades there have been many books arguing not only that religious beliefs are misplaced, but that religion is not good for culture and should be made obsolete. This is not one of those books. It is […]

Nick Mattiske · 26 September 2025

Reviews

The Rabbit Hole of Sovereign Citizens

Review: Conspiracy Nation, Ariel Bogle and Cam Wilson, Ultimo Press The recent events in Victoria with the manhunt of (alleged) police killer Dezi Freeman, as well as continued protests in our cities, have again put conspiracy theorists into the spotlight. This book from journalists Ariel Bogle and Cam Wilson, who go down the Australian rabbit […]

Nick Mattiske · 19 September 2025

Reviews

The Black Comedy of Stalin’s Death and Its Aftermath

Review: The Death of Stalin, Sheila Fitzpatrick, Black Inc. Books Joseph Stalin’s death was something of a ‘black comedy’, writes Sheila Fitzpatrick, and, indeed, it is treated as such in the 2017 film that shares its name with Fitzpatrick’s book. By 1953 Stalin was aged and was in the habit of subjecting his colleagues to […]

Nick Mattiske · 10 September 2025

Reviews

Voices of Extraordinary Medieval Women Who Wrote Their Lives

Review: Poet, Mystic, Widow, Wife: The Extraordinary Lives of Medieval Women, Hetta Howes, Bloomsbury In the Middle Ages women ate, drank, slept, made love, had babies, worked, danced, prayed. They were daughters, wives, widows, friends, lovers and mothers. Less commonly, they were mystics and poets. It was rare for them to write about their experiences, […]

Nick Mattiske · 3 September 2025

Reviews

Apocalypses and New Beginnings

Review: Apocalypse, Lizzie Wade, William Collins This book is about apocalypses and new beginnings, cities and civilisations collapsing and starting anew, of disasters and new worlds. We think of apocalypse as catastrophic ending, and Lizzie Wade describes it as such, but the book overall steers closer to the biblical and original meaning of apocalypse as […]

Nick Mattiske · 20 August 2025

Reviews

A Rare Combination of New Tech and Old Sounds

Reviews: Nevertheless, Hammock | Translucent, The Choir Marc Byrd was once a member and producer of The Choir, and he wrote the popular worship number ‘God of Wonders’ (which, one assumes, was pretty lucrative). He was in the appropriately named duo Glassbyrd, with wife Christine Glass, which rode the wave of post-grunge Christian alt-pop. This […]

Nick Mattiske · 13 August 2025

Reviews

Pop Culture, Patriarchy, and Power

A comparative review of three timely works :The Male Complaint by Simon Copland, Girl on Girl by Sophie Gilbert and Disciples of White Jesus by Angela Denker. These three books all, in their various ways, deal with a recent resurgence in Western culture of misogyny. They are not exactly fun reading but highlight an important […]

Nick Mattiske · 7 August 2025

Reviews

How Pilgrimage Changed the World

Review: Holy Places: How Pilgrimage Changed the World, Kathryn Hurlock, Profile Books The writer Samuel Johnson thought it showed a deficiency if people weren’t inspired by particular historical and religious sites, and it seems that there is a natural impulse in human beings to revere certain places and want to visit them, hoping to be […]

Nick Mattiske · 28 July 2025