Rivers, Language, Trees: Above-and-Underground

Book Launch & Conversation

Join us for the Launch of Subhash Jaireth’s new poetry book Lamentations (Gazebo 2026) and a Conversation with Merlinda Bobis about Lamentations and her novel In the Name of the Trees (Spinifex 2025).

This is a free event, but reservations are essential to manage numbers. Please RSVP with name and telephone number via rsvp@thestreet.org.au.
Please RSVP by Wednesday 2 December.

In Lamentations, Subhash Jaireth composes a river of voices – philosophical, tender, and reverent – flowing through landscapes of memory, loss, and renewal. Part meditation, part love story, and part elegy for the natural world, these prose poems move between rivers and deserts, Bashō and Hafez, Australia and Persia, tracing how water remembers, how language listens, and how grief transforms into grace. Through the dialogue of two consciousnesses – intimate, questioning, and profoundly attuned – Jaireth explores the porous boundaries between the human and the elemental. Rivers become voices, rocks become listeners, and words themselves turn liquid, carrying echoes of the world’s oldest stories.

A work of rare beauty and wisdom, Lamentations is both a hymn to water and a quiet reckoning with what it means to belong – to a place, to another, and to the earth itself.
 
Merlinda Bobis’ latest novel In the Name of the Trees charts the story of four generations of women named after trees: Banaba, Narra, Pili and Dao. They refuse to be cut down. Between the Philippines and Australia, these hardwood women defy their colonial inheritance and try to heal. Their rifts are deep, their heartbreaks more wounding. They tell stories to hide, evade, or make truth bearable. But trees remember. They do not lie. Knowing is resistance.

In 2026 Bobis’ novel received the ACT Literary Award for Fiction, was shortlisted for the Prime Minister’s Literary Awards, and was Highly Commended for the ACT Book of the Year.

Foyer | Unreserved | Duration 120 Minutes
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