Australian Book Review, August 2019, issue no. 413 by Australian Book Review

Indigenous issue

Welcome to our Indigenous issue, a major addition to our suite of themed issues. In addition to our usual features, there is a range of reviews, essays, commentaries, and creative writing dedicated to Indigenous history, politics, archaeology, and society. Professor Lynette Russell, Director of the Monash Indigenous Studies Centre, writing on page 5, notes the ‘efflorescence of Indigenous creative talent’ and the widespread debate about constitutional reform following the Uluru Statement from the Heart. She welcomes the fact that this themed issue – now an annual feature – marks an ‘engaged commitment to true reconciliation and Indigenous recognition’. Elsewhere, on page 13, Sarah Maddison and Dale Wandin address the vexed and heterogenous Treaty processes underway in different states and territories.

‘Nah Doongh’s Song

As noted in the previous issue, Grace Karskens is the overall winner of the 2019 Calibre Essay Prize, as judged by J.M. Coetzee, Anna Funder, and Peter Rose. With Professor Karskens’s permission, we held over her essay until this issue because of the poignancy of the story of this abiding, embattled Aboriginal woman whose life encompassed nearly all of the nineteenth century. Indigenous subjects often figure in the Calibre Prize, and they always resonate with our readers. (Martin

Thomas’s essay ‘“Because it’s your country”: Bringing Back the Bones to West Arnhem Land’, which won the 2013 Calibre Prize, is by far our bestread online feature ever published.) Grace Karsken’s essay is a powerful addition to this growing literature. The author told Advances: ‘I am delighted to win the prestigious Calibre Prize, and I want to gratefully acknowledge and thank ABR, the sponsors, and the judges. This is also a big win for Aboriginal biography, and for slow history: the time it takes to recover the stories of Aboriginal people who survived the maelstrom of invasion and dispossession with such courage and resolution.’ As we went to press, we were finalising two events to celebrate Grace Karskens’ essay. On Wednesday, August 28, she will be in conversation with Peter Rose at ANU; and there will be a similar event at Gleebooks in early September. Look out for details on our website and social media.

ABR Indigenous Fellowship

To complement the Indigenous issue and to explore some of the issues touched on in these pages, ABR has created a new writers’ fellowship worth $10,000. The ABR Indigenous Fellowship – funded by our growing number of Patrons – is open to Australian Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander writers, commentators, critics, and scholars. Over a period of twelve months, the Fellow – to be chosen by Lynette Russell, dual Miles Franklin

JO S HU A L O

Literary Award-winning author Kim Scott, and Peter Rose – will contribute a series of non-fiction articles on Indigenous subjects. Those interested in applying should consult the Terms and Conditions, and the Frequently Asked Questions, on our website. You have until October 1 to apply.

Blak & Bright

The Blak & Bright First Nations Literary Festival returns to Melbourne. This four-day festival (5–8 September) celebrates First Nations writers across many genres, including speculative fiction, oral stories, philosophy, drama, and poetry. Most events will be free and the full program will be available from 5 August via www.blakandbright.com.au.

ABR Behrouz Boochani Fellowship

The appalling treatment of KurdishIranian writer Behrouz Boochani (author of the celebrated book No Friend But the Mountains) and the other men imprisoned on Manus Island, Papua New Guinea – and the specious reasons advanced to justify their endless detention – are the source of international outrage. Despite the obduracy of Canberra and the malign rhetoric of conservative commentators, much is being done to get Behrouz Boochani and his fellow asylum seekers off Manus Island once and for all. To quote Lucy Popescu, writing in the Literary Review ( July

A novel in twelve stories, The Flight of Birds will change how you think about the planet and humanity’s place in it. sydneyuniversitypress.com.au A D VA N C E S

2019): ‘The perpetuation of this state of limbo amounts to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment , which is prohibited under international law … to which Australia is a state party.’ ABR is pleased to be part of this international campaign. We were delighted when Behrouz Boochani – for whom the organisation and many of our readers have the utmost respect – permitted us to name our new Fellowship after him. The ABR Behrouz Boochani Fellowship is generously funded by Peter McMullin, a Melbourne lawyer, businessman, and philanthropist, and presented in association with the Peter McMullin Centre on Statelessness at the University of Melbourne. The Fellow – to be chosen by J.M. Coetzee, Michelle Foster (Director of the McMullin Centre on Statelessness), and Peter Rose – will contribute a series of articles on any aspect of human rights, refugees, and statelessness. Omid Tofighian, translator of No Friend But the Mountains, writes for us on page 44. ‘Understood as part of other traditions of resistance,’ he says, ‘this Fellowship helps to galvanise a wider dynamic collective process. It has unlimited potential to initiate other projects and actions.’ Let us hope he is right and that this new Fellowship helps to initiate certain actions – and humanity – in Canberra. Behrouz Boochani – eloquent, impassioned, heroic – has also commented: ‘We need to support writers inside the prison camps and also those people who are recording this history outside the prisons. The Fellowship is … a great step in helping to document the history and to transform the present situation. The Fellowship, which closes on September 1, is open to Englishspeaking writers around the world.

of $9,000, with a first prize of $7,000. The judges are John Hawke (ABR’s Poetry Editor), Bronwyn Lea, and Philip Mead. The closing date is October 1. Full details appear on our website.

Jolley Talk

Later this month we look forward to naming the three shortlisted authors (and the three commended ones) in this year’s ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story

Prompter Porter

The Peter Porter Poetry Prize, being offered for the sixteenth time, has been brought forward to separate it from the 2020 Calibre Essay Prize (to be advertised in October). The Prize, open to English-speaking poets around the world, is now worth a total 2 AUGUST 2019

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW

Prize. We will then publish the three principal stories in our September issue. Join us, if you are in Melbourne, on Wednesday, September 11 for the Jolley Prize ceremony (a free event). This year’s venue is Readings Hawthorn. Celebrated author Maxine Beneba Clarke will speak on behalf of her fellow judges (Beejay Silcox and John Kinsella) and will name the overall winner. Full details appear on our website.

Cover artwork Brenda L. Croft is from the Gurindji/Malngin/Mudburra peoples from the Victoria River region of the Northern Territory of Australia, and Anglo-Australian/ German/Irish/Chinese heritage. She has been involved in the Australian First Nations and broader contemporary arts and cultural sectors for more than three decades as an Ghost tears #1, Top Grid, Wave Hill (2016) artist, arts administrator, curator, by Brenda L. Croft, from the series academic, and consultant. Croft’s Wave Hill/Victoria River Country artistic practice encompasses critical © Brenda L. Croft/Copyright Agency, 2019 performative Indigenous autoethnography, Indigenous Storying, representation and cultural identity, creative narratives, installation, multimedia and multi-platform work. Croft’s work is represented in major collections in Australia and overseas. Croft is Associate Professor, Indigenous Art History and Curatorship at the Australian National University and Adjunct Research Fellow with the National Institute for Experimental Arts, UNSW Art and Design Australia, where she is completing creative-led doctoral research. She is represented by Niagara Galleries, Melbourne Artist’s Statement: Ghost tears #1 is a detail from the installation of twentyone images titled Wave Hill/Victoria River Country, 2014, which was exhibited in Croft’s creative-led doctoral research project Still in my mind: Gurindji location, experience and visuality, 2017 (touring nationally until 2021) and Defying Empire: 3rd National Indigenous Art Triennial at the National Gallery of Australia, 2017. The image was taken at the ‘top grid’ near Wave Hill on the Buntine Highway entry into the communities of Kalkaringi and Daguragu, located approximately 800 kilometres south-west of Darwin on 14 March 2016. It was nearby on 23 August 1966 that 200-plus Gurindji (Bilinarra, Nyarinyman, Malngin, Mudburra, Nyininy, Warlpiri, and associated peoples) stockmen and their families walked off Wave Hill Station, initially as an action against decades of maltreatment and abuse. This action developed into a statement of First Nations’ self-determination, instigating the birth of the national land rights movement, and garnering national and international support. Cover design by Judy Green.

August 2019 Bruce Pascoe Sarah Maddison and Dale Wandin Anna Clark Bruce Moore Grace Karskens Omid Tofighian Sandra R. Phillips Ellen van Neerven

Comment

Lynette Russell

Two books by Stan Grant The vexed Treaty process ‘Ever at my elbow’ – exploring Indigenous ways of knowing Australia’s Indigenous languages ‘Nah Doongh’s Song’ – Calibre Essay Prize winner Behrouz Boochani and the politics of naming Tony Birch’s new novel Tara June Winch’s new novel

10 13 18 20 31 44 50 51

Poems

Samuel Wagan Watson 15 Charmaine Papertalk Green 28 Robert Harris 57

Jia Tolentino: Trick Mirror Dan Dixon Anita Heiss (ed.): Growing Up Aboriginal in Australia David Haworth

Literary Studies 45

Memoir & Biography

Antonio Buti: A Stolen Life Wally Carr and Gaele Sobott: My Longest Round Michael Winkler 16

Christopher Lee: Postcolonial Heritage and Settler Well-Being Robin Gerster

Poetry

Robert Harris: The Gang of One Judith Bishop

Publishing

True Crime

Dan Box: Bowraville Stephen Dedman 17

Society & Politics

Sarah Maddison: The Colonial Fantasy Richard J. Martin Niki Savva: Plots and Prayers Paul Williams James Simpson: Permanent Revolution Paul Giles Deborah Lipstadt: Antisemitism Ilana Snyder

Essays & Anthologies

53 54 55 56

22 25 42 60

Interviews

Open Page: Bruce Pascoe 27 Publisher of the Month: Rachel Bin Salleh 39

History

Brian Fagan: A Little History of Archaeology Kelly D. Wiltshire 30

David Carter and Roger Osborne: Australian Books and Authors in the American Marketplace 1840s–1940s Keyvan Allahyari

Fiction

Peter Goldsworthy: Minotaur Chris Flynn Nigel Featherstone: Bodies of Men Patrick Allington Jean-Baptiste Del Amo: Animalia Phoebe Weston-Evans Samanta Schweblin: Mouthful of Birds James Halford

Health

David Isaacs: Defeating the Ministers of Death Euzebiusz Jamrozik

Philosophy

Armand D’Angour: Socrates in Love Julia Kindt

From the Archive

Alexis Wright: Carpentaria Kate McFadyen

ABR Arts

Deborah Cheetham Keren Rosa Hammerschlag Tim Byrne Susan Lever Gillian Wills Michael Halliwell Peter Rose

62 63 65 66 67 68 70

A Night at the Opera Monet: Impression Sunrise Wake In Fright The Torrents The Great Symphony Whiteley Anna Bolena CONTENTS

THANKING OUR PARTNERS Australian Book Review is assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council for the Arts, its arts funding and advisory body. ABR is supported by: the NSW Government through Create NSW; the Victorian Government through Creative Victoria; the Queensland Government through Arts Queensland; and the South Australian Government through Arts South Australia. We also acknowledge the generous support of our university partner, Monash University, and we are grateful for the support of the Copyright Agency Cultural Fund, Eucalypt Australia, the City of Melbourne, and Arnold Bloch Leibler.

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COMMENT

Living in the Indigenous space by Lynette Russell

iving, working, and being in the Indigenous space, there are times when it feels as though nothing changes. Indeed, on occasion, it can feel as though things are in fact regressing. When The Hon. Ken Wyatt AM, MP was announced as the new Minister for Indigenous Australians, after the re-election of the Morrison government, numerous family members, friends, and colleagues expressed dismay that this appeared to represent a dilution of the role, which had been, to that point, the Minister of Indigenous Affairs. In recent weeks I have come to see that having an Aboriginal man as Minister for Indigenous Australians is indeed a step forward. Wyatt delivered his speech while I was at the Australian Historical Association’s annual conference in Toowoomba. The AHA is generally not a hotbed of radical politics; often delegates are far more comfortable in the nineteenth century than they are among contemporary politics. This time, things were different. The Uluru Statement from the Heart and constitutional reform seemed to be a common theme during sessions, morning tea, and indeed the AGM. A colleague of mine who had attended the Association for the Study of Australian Literature conference in Perth the previous week remarked that a similar Zeitgeist seemed to be evident there. It is clear to me things are changing, and that change is political, cultural, and social. Politically, there is talk of constitutional reform. The expansive generosity of the Uluru Statement has been noted by many, and there is talk at the highest levels of government that there will be constitutional reform, though precisely what this might look like is uncertain. Despite the deliberate obfuscation of conservative commentators, it is clear that a third chamber of Parliament is not being proposed. Constitutional reform needs the support of both sides of politics. Now might just be the right time. Culturally, we are seeing an efflorescence of Indigenous creative talent. Tony Birch’s eagerly awaited new novel has been released, along with that of Tara June Winch, both to great acclaim. Birch probes the social and the political as he movingly demonstrates how the past shapes and gives form to the present. Winch draws on the power of language (Wiradjuri) of a lexicon lost, and reclaimed. Fiction, or rather storytelling, is a hallmark of Aboriginal culture; today’s creative authors draw on thousands of years of storytelling and yarning. Through a very modern form, they continue the tradition of sharing and informing. In June, on a cold and wet Melbourne Saturday evening, Deborah Cheetham premièred her magisterial Eumeralla,

a war requiem for peace. The performance was entirely in the reclaimed Gunditjmara language. Eumeralla was sold out weeks in advance, and the effusive praise it received suggests that the audience, black and white, was both moved and awestruck. Cultural productions at all levels from highbrow to popular and vernacular are now visible, even commonplace. The wildly successful ABC television show Black Comedy, along with the film Top End Wedding, indicate that mainstream Australia has finally allowed space for Indigenous ways of telling. It would be difficult not to see this creative energy as an Indigenous renaissance and a significant cultural shift. Social change has been remarkable too, from Acknowledgment and Welcomes to Country, to the official apology to the Stolen Generations, to changes in school curricula. The sporting arena has played an essential role in this. The NRL and AFL Indigenous rounds have promoted the significance of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander players. The pride shown by all players when promoting their club’s Indigenous-designed jerseys melds the athletic with the aesthetic. Ash Barty’s victory at the French Tennis Open, while celebrated by many, unleashed hate-filled comments in the social media space, with criticisms of her physique and her insistence on her pride in her Ngarigo Aboriginal heritage. Sadly, racism abides, often coupled with wilful ignorance. This ignorance was perhaps best demonstrated by the treatment of dual Brownlow medallist and Sydney Football Club champion Adam Goodes. The recent documentary on the Goodes saga, The Final Quarter, revealed the thin layer of civility that covers parts of Australian society. It is telling that following the première of The Final Quarter, the AFL and all eighteen clubs apologised ‘unreservedly for our failures’. Palpably things are changing; sometimes they move forwards, sometimes they regress. This Indigenous-themed issue of the ABR marks the start of an annual tradition. Also, in this issue for the first time, an Acknowledgment of Country has been included, a feature that will henceforth appear in each edition. This issue represents a deepening of the relationship between Monash University, in particular, the Monash Indigenous Studies Centre and ABR. The creation of the ABR Indigenous Fellowship is a welcome extension of this focus. I am grateful to ABR for this proactive, engaged commitment to true reconciliation and Indigenous recognition. g Lynette Russell, Director of the Monash Indigenous Studies Centre, is Guest Editor of this issue. COMMENT

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Guest Editor Professor Lynette Russell is Director of the Monash Indigenous Studies Centre at Monash University, Melbourne. She has published widely in the areas of Indigenous and contact history, post-colonialism and representations of race, ethnographic knowledge and archaeology.

Subscriptions One year (print + online): $95 One year (online only): $60 Subscription rates above are for individuals in Australia. All prices include GST. More information about subscription rates, including international, concession, and institutional rates is available. www.australianbookreview.com.au Email: business@australianbookreview.com.au Phone: (03) 9699 8822 Advertising Media Kit available from our website Contact Amy Baillieu abr@australianbookreview.com.au Letters to the Editor We welcome succinct letters and website comments. All letters and online comments are edited before publication in the magazine. Time and space permitting, we will print any reply from the reviewer with the original letter or comment. Correspondents must provide a telephone number or email address for verification. letters@australianbookreview.com.au Contributors The ❖ symbol next to a contributor’s name denotes that it is the first time that he or she has appeared in the magazine. The August issue was lodged with Australia Post on July 30. Acknowledgement of Country Australian Book Review acknowledges the Traditional owners of the Kulin Nation as Traditional Owners of the land on which it is situated in Southbank, Victoria, and pays respect to the Elders, past and present.

Australian Book Review | August 2019, no. 413 Since 1961 First series 1961–74 | Second series (1978 onwards, from no. 1) ISSN 0155-2864 Registered by Australia Post | Printed by Doran Printing ABR is published ten times a year by Australian Book Review Inc. Studio 2, 207 City Road, Southbank, Vic. 3006 Phone: (03) 9699 8822 | Fax: (03) 9699 8803 Twitter: @AustBookReview | Facebook: @AustralianBookReview www.australianbookreview.com.au Editor and CEO Peter Rose – editor@australianbookreview.com.au Deputy Editor Amy Baillieu – abr@australianbookreview.com.au Assistant Editor Jack Callil – digital@australianbookreview.com.au Business Manager Grace Chang – business@australianbookreview.com.au Development Consultant Christopher Menz – development@australianbookreview.com.au Poetry Editor John Hawke (with assistance from Judith Bishop) Chair Colin Golvan Treasurer Peter McLennan Board Members Ian Dickson, Rae Frances, Sarah Holland-Batt, Vanessa Lemm, Sharon Pickering, Robert Sessions, Ilana Snyder, Elissa Newall (Observership Program) ABR Laureates David Malouf (2014) | Robyn Archer (2016) Editorial Advisers Bernadette Brennan, Danielle Clode, Clare Corbould, Des Cowley, Ian Donaldson, Mark Edele, Kári Gíslason, Tom Griffiths, Margaret Harris, Sue Kossew, James McNamara, Bruce Moore, Rachel Robertson, Lynette Russell, Craig Taylor, Alistair Thomson, Simon Tormey, Peter Tregear, Ben Wellings, Terri-ann White, Rita Wilson Communications Consultant Finemore Communications: Jane Finemore – jane@finemorecommunications.com or 0408 463 873 Volunteers Eloise Cox, John Scully. Environment Australian Book Review is printed by Doran Printing, an FSC® certified printer (C005519). Doran Printing uses clean energy provided by Hydro Tasmania. All inks are soy-based, and all paper waste is recycled to make new paper products.

This work was developed in a studio managed by the City of Melbourne’s Creative Spaces program. 8 AUGUST 2019

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B Y W IL L I A M S H A K E S P E A RE

S Y DNE Y OP E R A HO U S E

D IRE C T OR A DE N A J A C OB S

27 A U G U S T â&#x20AC;&#x201C; 27 S E P T E MBE R

S Y DNE Y OP E R A HO U S E .C OM REVIEW OF THE MONTH

REVIEW OF THE MONTH

The ball and chain of minority Rebelling against the banality of colony

Bruce Pascoe ON IDENTITY by Stan Grant

Melbourne University Press, $14.99 pb, 95 pp, 9780522875522

AUSTRALIA DAY by Stan Grant

HarperCollins, $34.99 pb, 263 pp, 9781460753187

t was a great moment in Australian history when William Cooper walked to the Australian parliament to object to the treatment of Jews in Germany during World War II. At the time, the British and Australian parliaments were ambivalent about the atrocities occurring across Europe, and yet an Aboriginal man could not bear to see the government of his country sit on its hands. Cooper knew a thing or two about oppression, racism, and the way societies allow injustice to cut a swath through an undesired element simply by looking above the heads of brutes enlisted to perpetrate evil until the civilised commercial interests can lower their gaze from their heavens and say, oh, what a shame, they have all disappeared. Every population can find brutes to do the killing, and every population has a vast number who calmly accept the largesse created by such abominable work. Cooper knew all about how Western civilisations work, and he called it out. While the world stood back and supposedly good men did nothing, Cooper raised his voice against injustice. As a result, there is a museum in Israel with a room dedicated to William Cooper. Australia has hardly dedicated a page. Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island society has always produced men and women of enormous peace and honour. Fred Maynard, Essie Coffey, Jack Patten, Faith Bandler: you could write their names for an hour and not have exhausted them. I think my parents

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were the most just people I have ever known, but Dad thought Cooper and Douglas Nicholls were the two best men he had ever met and were the ideal humanity should aspire to. Fortunately, we have wonderful people in their place: Marcia Langton, Rachel Perkins, Tom Calma, the Dodson brothers, Linda Burney, Stan Grant, Gary Foley. One of those leaders is Stan Grant Jr. When he returned to Australia after a decade working for CNN, he began writing about Australia. His seminal work, Talking to My Country, became a bestseller and won the Walkley Book Award in 2016. Grant came home a seasoned journalist and a beautiful writer, and his words about his country had an immediate impact. Here was a man of the world from humble beginnings who could argue with Australia in a calm, urbane voice. Australia was taken off its guard by Grant’s erudition, logic, and rock-solid justice. I saw it as a turning point. When Michael Mansell, infuriated by Australia’s imperviousness to Aboriginal disadvantage, enlisted the financial support of Colonel Gaddafi of Libya, the response was visceral. Mansell was an ungrateful, uppity black: how dare he go offshore for the support of a dictator? Australia’s outrage knew no bounds. At the time, Australian university students were campaigning against the South African rugby team because it so clearly reflected the apartheid regime, even though in those university students’ own country Aboriginal people were not allowed in the commercial districts of towns like Warrnambool. South Africa learned their

apartheid in Australia. Typically, Australians were blind Indigenous dance during a game, though New Zealand’s to their own racism. Mansell was pilloried. black and white footballers do it every game. Or was he When Grant began writing with such mild erudibeing punished for pointing out the racism of a thirteention, Australia was flummoxed. How do you revile civilyear-old girl? He immediately extended his gracious ity? Or had we entered a stage of introspection? Redfern hand in consolation as soon as he learned her age. But Now had been on prime-time that wasn’t good enough for TV, there were Aboriginal the true-blue shock jocks, footy shows, Aboriginal art who savaged Goodes like an was everywhere, and, despite American pit bull terrier. Tony Abbot, Welcomes to Goodes became a symbol Country became the norm. of a nation struggling with its Suddenly, Stan Grant was past. Grant entered the storm reading the news and offerof public shouting, trying to ing commentary on a huge explain what it felt like for array of platforms. What was Aboriginal people. ‘What Australia thinking? we heard was not a boo, but Grant’s two new books, a howl, a howl of humiliaAustralia Day and On Identity, tion that echoed across two ask more and more questions, centuries of injustice and Stan Grant drilling deeper into the Aus- (photograph by Kathy Luu, via Melbourne University Press) exclusion.’ Suddenly Grant tralian psyche, laying down was at the very centre of the traffic-calming systems to make Australia slow down national Australia Day debate. and think. Grant says he wrote Australia Day while Australia Day is a disturbing book, but it is incredibly worrying about his son’s inheritance: the Australian even-handed, as any decent argument should be. Here soul. What is it? What will we become? He states in is a chance to reflect, maybe even to formulate. We still the introduction, ‘We [Australians] prize identity more have that chance to consider our nation without the than citizenship. We look to what divides us; define bluster of bullies. ourselves in opposition to each other.’ He argues that In On Identity, typically thoughtful and probing, we need to argue about our true selves, the true nature Grant – forever untangling the skein of nationalism of the country and its history. Later, quoting Immanuel to analyse its warp – quotes Solzhenitsyn and Martin Kant, he says, ‘We must put away “the ball and chain Luther King Jr. Then Grant writes, ‘Love is kept alive of permanent, everlasting minority”, we must imagine in the darkest corners and against the greatest odds. You ourselves beyond our tribes.’ can put people in chains, you can herd them on boats, Grant wrestles with this idea. This seems wise, you can banish them to faraway lands and love does not because imagining Aboriginal Australia without tribes die … love endures when even hope has died.’ g is exactly what Paul Hasluck, John Howard, and Tony Abbott want Australian Aboriginal people to do: forget their Aboriginality, become plain-label Australian, assimilate, give up. If we did, the world’s oldest culture, the only warless and sustainable culture, would be lost to the world, and the spirit of William Cooper would be forgotten among the ‘discoverers’ of Australian gold, the inventors of rust-resistant wheat, the Hills Hoist, and the stump-jump plough. We cannot do it, we must not do it. Australia should reject that future, rebel against the banality of the colony. Grant wrestles as Australia wrestles, searching for a way to be Australian and excluding nothing. He was disturbed, not just by the jingoistic Union Jack face paint that ‘barely obscured a deeper menace’, but by his love of the Australia ‘that shone like a beacon for those around Bruce Pascoe is an award-winning writer and a Yuin the world looking for a new beginning’. and Bunurong man. His books include Dark Emu, Book Australia’s democratic allure barely concealed a racist of the Year at the 2016 NSW Premier’s Literary Awards. heart. Soon after Grant’s return to Australia, football He is on the board of first languages Australia, Black followers began booing Adam Goodes, an Australian Duck Foods and is Professor of Indigenous Knowledge Rules footballer. Some argued that he was being aggresat UTS. He was 2018 Dreamtime Person of the Year. sively patriotic to Aboriginal Australia by employing He first wrote for ABR in 1979. REVIEW OF THE MONTH

Allowed to Grow Old Portraits of Elderly Animals from Farm Sanctuaries Isa Leshko With a Foreword by Sy Montgomery and Essays by Gene Baur and Anne Wilkes Tucker “This is partly the story of a woman who starts out not knowing how to open and close a farm gate, and ends up learning how to put animals at ease so she can photograph them in close-up. . . . Making the text personal makes the book feel warm and open rather than preachy.”—Observer

Pick Up the Pieces

Nightingales in Berlin Searching for the Perfect Sound David Rothenberg “Lush with literary allusions, Rothenberg’s enlightening and inspiring nightingale immersion attunes us to ‘the vast richness of natural soundscapes’ and the glory of life itself.”—Booklist

Conspiracies of Conspiracies

Excursions in Seventies Music John Corbett

How Delusions Have Overrun America Thomas Milan Konda

“Challenges us to attempt an understanding of an era’s crazy contradictions and to do so through putting on an album, preferably with friends, and letting its sounds tangle around us as we live. If only we could all describe our experiences as perceptively as Corbett does.”—Spectrum Culture

“The theories Konda weighs and finds wanting are fascinating in their perversity, from chemtrails to climate change deniers. A book that deserves wide circulation and consideration”—Kirkus Reviews

A Decent Life

Wherever the Sound Takes You

Morality for the Rest of Us Todd May

Heroics and Heartbreak in Music Making David Rowell

“Explores what ‘decency’ might mean in practice with regard to our relationships with family and friends; the strangers we run into; nonhuman animals; and the political sphere.” —Times Higher Education

“Quirky and delightful. . . Instead of the usual band profiles or reviews, Wherever the Sound Takes You offers eight elegant essays chronicling the odd, the marginal and the forgotten. . . . Beneath Rowell’s cool journalistic facade beats the heart of a romantic.”—Washington Post

The University of Chicago Press Distributed in Australia and New Zealand by

Footprint Books. Go to www.footprint.com.au to order.

COMMENT

So much at stake

Forging a treaty with authority and respect

by Sarah Maddison and Dale Wandin

ustralia remains alone among the settler colonies for its lack of treaties with First Nations. This is despite the fact that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples in Australia have been calling for a treaty for decades – since at least the 1970s and then more forcefully during the Treaty ’88 Campaign. When Bob Hawke received the Barunga Statement in 1988 and committed the nation to a treaty, it seemed the battle was won. Two years later, Hawke reneged on his promise and instead gave us ten years of reconciliation, intended to prepare non-Indigenous Australians to negotiate more just relationships. Even that was not to be. By the end of the decade of reconciliation, John Howard had derailed the process and ‘treaty’ had become a political dirty word. In 2012, calls for treaty were revived during an unfocused campaign for Indigenous ‘recognition’ in the Australian Constitution. The government-funded Recognise campaign argued that the population should embrace recognition, though no model or referendum question was ever agreed. As discontent with the campaign grew, many Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people argued that recognition in a colonial constitution amounted to little more than another form of assimilation. Treaty re-emerged as a more desirable alternative, notably in the 2017 Uluru Statement from the Heart and its call for a Makarrata Commission to supervise a process of agreement-making and truth-telling between governments and First Nations.

As these issues swirled at the national level, subnational jurisdictions started to get on with the job of treaty. In February 2016, Victoria announced that it would embark on a state-level treaty process, closely followed by South Australia later that year (that process was abandoned following a change of government in 2018). The Northern Territory has recently appointed Mick Dodson as Treaty Commissioner in that jurisdiction. With three and half years of continuous work to consider, it is Victoria’s emergent process that is the one to watch. We write this piece from very different perspectives and positions in relation to the Victorian treaty process. For Sarah Maddison, a non-Indigenous settler academic, the issues we outline here are intellectually challenging and speak to her interest in justice. For Dale Wandin, however, every single aspect of the treaty process in Victoria is deeply personal. As a Wurundjeri man, so much is at stake: family and community relationships, the right to practise and sustain his culture, and the economic future of his people on their own territories. By bringing these perspectives together, we hope to make clear the complexities and sensitivities that threaten to trip this process up. The state of Victoria is, by necessity, working without any kind of roadmap towards the successful negotiation of future treaties. There is no formula, there is no timeline; there is only consultation, design, response, and iteration. This is inevitably messy and complex and COMMENT

leaves some stakeholders feeling enfranchised while others feel ignored. Navigating this complexity is an unenviable task. Since the Victorian treaty process was announced in 2016, almost all the energy has gone into developing the ‘right’ (i.e. culturally appropriate and legitimate) representative structures on the Indigenous side of the relationship. This work has proceeded through a government-appointed Treaty Working Group, growing into a Community Assembly, and eventually to the January 2018 creation of the Treaty Advancement Commission and the appointment of Gundijtmara woman Jill Gallagher as Treaty Advancement Commissioner. In July 2018 the Advancing the Treaty Process with Aboriginal Victorians Bill passed in the Victorian parliament – the first legislation of its kind in Australia and an effort to protect the treaty process from a potential change of government in the November 2018 state election. The bill established the basis for creating the Aboriginal representative body that will work with the Victorian government to shape the framework for treaty negotiations. This body, since named the First People’s Assembly of Victoria, will design the architecture for the treaty process, including a treaty negotiation framework that will set out ‘ground rules’ for treaty, including what is on and off the negotiating table and who can negotiate; a treaty authority that will act as an ‘independent umpire’ in the negotiation process; and a self-determination fund intended to support Aboriginal communities to be on an ‘even playing field’ with the state when treaties are eventually negotiated. To be clear about the role of the Assembly: it will never be involved in actually negotiating treaties; rather, its task is to put in place the key frameworks and structures that will guide what will likely be several decades of negotiations with traditional owner groups around the state. Yet the fraught environment into which the Assembly proposals were born tells us much about the complexity involved in trying to assemble lawful relations between Indigenous peoples and settlers so many years after Indigenous territories were invaded and colonised. More than two hundred years of dispossession and harmful policy mean there is a high level of mistrust among Aboriginal people in Victoria about any process agreed by government. Specifically, there is concern that treaty negotiations could be assimilationist if they do not respect Indigenous cultural protocols. Drawing from Dale’s experience, we can group these complexities around three core issues. The first set of issues concerns the degree of pragmatism brought to the process and the degree to which this bumps up against Aboriginal cultural protocols and identities. Jill Gallagher has been explicit about the challenges of trying to navigate this tension: Before colonisation, we had traditional ways of doing business. There was no need for a statewide Representa14 AUGUST 2019

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW

tive Body. Colonisation has changed this. We now need a way to talk Treaty with the state … Our unique situation needs a unique response. We have to make a body that fits our unique culture, history and traditions. But it must also represent us in the modern world.

Here, Gallagher is flagging the need to make Indigenous cultural protocols about organisation, hierarchy, and decision-making intelligible to non-Indigenous peoples and governments. This pragmatism explains some of the features of the model as it has emerged. The Assembly is proposed as a democratic, unifying ‘voice’ for all Aboriginal people in Victoria in the next phase of the Treaty process. It will comprise thirty-three representatives, all Victorian Traditional Owners, with twelve reserved seats – one for each ‘formally recognised’ Traditional Owner group – and twenty-one general seats open to all Victorians Traditional Owners. The newly created and independent-from-government electoral roll is open to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people residing in Victoria. There will also be an Elder’s voice in a form yet to be determined. All of this is proving hugely contentious, most particularly because the pragmatism of the proposed Assembly runs directly into a second set of concerns – those to do with who has standing and legitimacy in Aboriginal politics. A direct challenge to the Assembly model has come from a group of Aboriginal advocates and activists who are concerned that the model does not, according to spokesperson Gunnai-Kurnai Gunditjmara woman Lidia Thorpe, ‘reflect our culture or show due respect to all the Clans and Nations across the state’. By prioritising reserved seats for Traditional Owner groups already recognised through legislative mechanisms such as Native Title or the Victorian Traditional Owner Settlement Act (2010), the model, critics like Thorpe claim, values settler modes of recognition over traditional cultural authority. This group proposes an alternative body made up of seventy-six representatives, two from each of the surviving thirty-eight Clans or Nations in Victoria. Critics are also concerned that the electoral roll being created to elect the Assembly representatives is open to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people residing in Victoria (for three of the last five years). The pragmatism of this decision, which is intended to ensure that all Indigenous people in Victoria are included in some way, contradicts Aboriginal protocols about speaking on or for someone else’s Country. This concern has been amplified by the creation of electoral regions based on total Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander population. This means that Dale’s community, whose territory occupies the majority of the Melbourne electoral region and will have nine elected representatives (plus the one reserved for Wurundjeri), and which is already a tiny minority on their own territory, will likely also be outnumbered by elected representatives from other traditional owner groups.

The Assembly model was announced in April 2019, and elections were originally scheduled for this July. Community anxiety about the tensions between pragmatism, culture, and standing have, however, brought the process into further tension with questions concerning time. Around the continent, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples often express their frustrations with being asked to engage with processes according to a settler political timeline. In the Victorian treaty process, this pressure is coming from a desire to protect the process at the next state election in 2022. Despite the Andrews government’s thumping win in 2018, there is concern that a possible change of government at the next election could see the process dumped, as it was in South Australia. The pressure is on to get the Assembly up and running, and the architecture in place, before this becomes a genuine possibility. For many Aboriginal people in Victoria, however, this timeline is secondary to the need to ensure that the process and model have cultural integrity and authority. Once the Assembly elections were announced, it was quickly clear that there was not enough time to adequately engage with communities, explore their anxieties, and encourage participation through either nomination or enrolment. Recognising these concerns, the Treaty Advancement Commission announced a new timeline in June, with elections now scheduled for

September this year. At this point in time, it is impossible to predict the success or failure of treaty in Victoria. This is a bold attempt to respond to a claim that has been central to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander aspirations over many decades, but for Aboriginal people in Victoria, the fear of assimilation hiding in the acts of treaty is creating high levels of anxiety and concern. While treaty would be a landmark accomplishment, this can never occur at the expense of protocol, culture, and respect. It seems the current process has not done enough to put those fears to rest. g Sarah Maddison is Professor of Politics in the School of Social and Political Sciences, and co-Director of the Indigenous Settler Relations Collaboration at the university of Melbourne. She has published widely and is the author or editor of nine books, including The Colonial Fantasy: Why white Australia can’t solve black problems (2019). She has also published The Limits of Settler Colonial Reconciliation (2016), Conflict Transformation and Reconciliation (2015), Beyond White Guilt (2011), Unsettling the Settler State (2011), and Black Politics (2009). ❖ Dale Wandin is a Wurundjeri Woi-wurrung artist and current candidate for the Metropolitan Region for the First Peoples’ Assembly of Victoria. ❖

Songline contraband

Vale Aunty Kerry Reed-Gilbert Long-serving Chair of the First Nations of Australia Writers Network

Authorised visits, temporarily easing Grafton Correctional Centre blues, a young girl walks shadow-hardened corridors to see a black inmate, observe her little brown fingers as wafer thin as the bars that separate them but with pilot eyes, the only light that shines lines across a dank cell floor upon which an imprisoned father writes poetry, a daughter smuggles out to be published; highly unauthorised material, songline contraband ...

Samuel Wagan Watson Samuel Wagan Watson is an award-winning Indigenous poet. Born in Brisbane in 1972, he is of Munanjali, Birri Gubba, German, and Irish descent. His most recent full-length collection is Love Poems and Death Threats (UQP, 2014). COMMENT

The value of a chance

Generational trauma in Indigenous communities

Michael Winkler A STOLEN LIFE: THE BRUCE TREVORROW CASE by Antonio Buti

Fremantle Press, $32.99 pb, 292 pp, 9781925815115

MY LONGEST ROUND by Wally Carr and Gaele Sobott

Magabala Books, $19.99 pb, 232 pp, 9781921248504

hilip Larkin famously suggested that ‘they fuck you up, your mum and dad’, but the alternative is usually worse. Twenty years before Larkin wrote ‘This Be the Verse’, his compatriot John Bowlby published Maternal Care and Mental Health (1951), which described profound mental health consequences when infants are denied parental intimacy. Bowlby delineated the centrality of this ‘lasting psychological connectedness’ to well-being in later life, something cruelly withheld from many members of Australia’s Stolen Generations. Bruce Trevorrow and Wally Carr were born in the mid-1950s into Aboriginal families that were incredibly poor, living in makeshift huts, foraging for bush food to supplement supplies, and terrified of visits from welfare officers. When Trevorrow was one, he was removed from his Ngarrindjeri family to live with a non-Indigenous family. Carr remained with his own Wiradjuri family. They were very different men with some crucial factors in common. Both achieved national prominence for different reasons. Both died prematurely. Trevorrow’s life was largely miserable. Before he was a teenager, he had been tossed around between different South Australian families, a children’s home, hospital, and psychiatric facility. He was prone to soiling himself, attracted to petty crime, emotionally disturbed, and exhibited psychogenic symptoms such as unexplained limping. In later life he found it difficult to maintain steady employment, suffered 16 AUGUST 2019

alcoholism, and was violent to his partner and children. He is notable as the first – and so far only – member of the Stolen Generations to sue an Australian government for compensation and win. Dr Antonio Buti revisits Trevorrow v South Australia in A Stolen Life. As a lawyer and legal academic, Buti is well credentialled to provide insights into what transpired in the Adelaide courtroom, and why and how former Justice Tom Gray found in favour of Trevorrow. Buti draws extensively on court transcripts, interposing clarifying aperçus and giving a strong sense of the legal arguments and tactics. Julian Burnside QC and the sedulous team acting for Trevorrow shine in this telling. Stephen Walsh QC, leading the defence for the State, may be less enamoured with his portrayal. The hero of the piece is Justice Gray, ‘the decision-maker [who] has to test two truths in conflict’ after opposing counsels have relayed ‘the facts from their standpoint, a contextual truth’. Buti argues that Justice Gray’s finding in favour of Trevorrow ‘shifted the judicial interpretation of historical evidence and acted as a catalyst for a reparations or redress scheme’. However, a ‘national reparations scheme remains elusive’ and the precedent value of his decision remains unclear. In making his determination in this case, Justice Gray took guidance from Justice Dyson Heydon that the trier of fact is not involved in ‘the finding of historical facts on a balance of probabilities, but the assessment of the value

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW

of a chance’. What an evocative phrase that is: the value of a chance. How little chance Trevorrow ever had. Equally powerful is this exchange between lawyer and plaintiff: Burnside: Could you tell His Honour where you think you belong? Trevorrow: Nowhere.

Better decisions by author and editor could have improved this useful book. Choosing the past rather than present tense would have made the prose less awkward. The credibility of the courtroom scenes, otherwise carefully built on records and fact-finding, is undermined by Buti’s imagining, in his words, ‘the conduct and thought process of Justice Gray’. He portrays the judge musing to himself on free-range chickens, Christmas, Habakkuk, sport, birth pangs, Remembrance Day. He guesses what His Honour is thinking in response to witnesses and evidence throughout the hearing. It diminishes the author’s research. Buti notes that trials operate ‘according to procedure shaped by soulless bureaucracy’. It might be argued that there is something bleakly recursive about trying to ameliorate wrongs wrought by bureaucrats in the past by working within the bureaucratic legal system, when both cause and ‘cure’ are products of colonialism. Symptoms of colonialism’s ongoing impact include dispossession, dysfunction, addiction, family pain. These scourges are abundant in My Longest

Round, a headlong rush of first-person reminiscence. At times the text reads like slam poetry in rich Aboriginal English, Carr’s voice unspooling in a rush of memories and digressions. Late in the book, Carr confides that he has brain damage; he is uncertain whether it has been caused by boxing, innumerable street fights, alcoholism, substance abuse, or a combination of these and other factors. He died in April this year, adding poignancy to this testament. The first third of the book, outlining his rural upbringing, is eloquent social history. The threads of Carr’s story become significantly harder to follow once he moves to Sydney and starts boxing. He fought in every weight class from featherweight to heavyweight and won titles in six divisions, but too many of his hundred bouts are referenced. Focusing on the most important fights would have uncluttered the narrative.

There is something recursive about trying to ameliorate wrongs when both cause and ‘cure’ are products of colonialism The pungent vernacular, one of the book’s strengths, is rarely explained. A reader who doesn’t know the definition of brasco, roscoe, swy, or ‘bing and swing’ may wish for a little more assistance from Carr’s co-author, Gaele Sobott. Carr also has a habit of listing names as if flicking through a teledex. Figures as diverse as Johnny Lewis, Christopher Flannery, and Kerry Packer are mentioned in passing, without explanation of their role in society, along with scores of others. Newtown halfback Paul Hayward is referred to numerous times, then disappears with no acknowledgment of his early death or his conviction for smuggling drugs from Thailand. In the latter part of his boxing career and for years afterwards, Carr was a pool shark, pub Lothario, heavy user of drugs (he thinks he lost the most from marijuana use: ‘the yarndi stole my dreams’), and chronic drinker. His health was in tatters, he had depression and was sometimes homeless. Somehow in the

last portion of his life he transformed himself, shut down his addictions, and strengthened his bonds with family members. After following him through the tumult of his sporting career and subsequent saturnalia, it is a pity the reader is not rewarded with insights into how Carr rectified his life, and any reflections from those final years. On the day Carr’s parents were due to marry, his father committed suicide; his mother was seven months pregnant at the time. Carr believes he inherited this damage. ‘I felt like the 22 [sic] bullet that travelled through my father’s brain, just kept on going through my mother’s life and through my life causing injury and pain.’ It is a powerful individual expression of the generational trauma endemic in Indigenous communities. Buti refers to the legal concept of novus actus interveniens, ‘snapping the causal chain’. In 2008, Kevin Rudd delivered the Apology to Australia’s Indigenous peoples. In the following ten years, the number of Indigenous children in out-of-home care doubled. What will be the long-term impact for this generation of children, and what are the wider ramifications for Australia if the causal chain of cultural dislocation and familial fragmentation is not snapped? Larkin’s poem offers a grim clue in its concluding stanza: ‘Man hands on misery to man. It deepens like a coastal shelf.’ g

ABR Indigenous Fellowship Worth $10,000 Applications are now open for the ABR Indigenous Fellowship. The Fellowship aims to help promote vibrant new work by an Indigenous writer. Emerging and established Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander writers are invited to apply. The chosen Fellow will contribute a series of articles for the magazine over the course of twelve months. Applications will be assessed by Professor Lynette Russell, author Kim Scott, and ABR Editor Peter Rose. There is no application fee and applications are open until 1 October 2019

Michael Winkler won the 2016 Calibre Essay Prize for ‘The Great Red Whale’. He works part of the year in the Northern Territory, and is a former columnist for a boxing magazine.

For more information and application guidelines, visit the ABR website: australianbookreview.com.au Funded by the ABR Patrons

LIFE WRITING

‘Ever at my elbow’

Exploring Indigenous ways of knowing

Anna Clark AUSTRALIA’S FIRST NATURALISTS: INDIGENOUS PEOPLES’ CONTRIBUTION TO EARLY ZOOLOGY by Penny Olsen and Lynette Russell NLA Publishing, $44.99 pb, 223 pp, 9780642279378

hat does it mean to really know an ecosystem? To name all the plants and animals in a place and understand their interactions? To feel an embodied connection to Country? To see and hear in ways that confirm and extend that knowledge? Indigenous ways of knowing contain such detail and depth. To the Eora people of Sydney, for example, the migratory Curriy’gun (Channel-billed Cuckoo) announced itself noisily every spring. ‘Its raucous, persistent calling alerted the Eora to the impending arrival of rain, storms and flooding.’ Similarly detailed registers of information were mapped and catalogued by songlines and knowledge systems, filling the entire continent. For the Yolŋu in Arnhem Land, flowering stringybark trees coincided with the shrinking of waterholes. And when the D’harawal people of the Shoalhaven region in southern New South Wales saw the golden wattle flowers of the Kai’arrewan (Acacia binervia), they knew that fish would be running in the rivers and that prawns would be schooling in estuarine shallows. It was knowledge that proved valuable to colonisers, as Penny Olsen and Lynette Russell contend in their new book, Australia’s First Naturalists. The New South Wales Surveyor General Thomas Mitchell learned from Yuranigh, a Wiradjuri man who explained how curious rings of gravel and stones on the river beds were actually the nests of the eel-tailed catfish, and who showed him the leaves of the Goobang, a type of acacia that was used to poison the river to catch fish. Mitchell wrote that Yuranigh’s expertise was indispensable: ‘his intelligence and 18 AUGUST 2019

judgment rendered him so necessary to me that he was ever at my elbow’. A generation ago, the archaeologist John Mulvaney offered the then radical argument that Europeans didn’t enter a timeless and changeless land when they colonised Australia (The Prehistory of Australia, 1978). Yet these interlopers also must have recognised that the land wasn’t terra nullius, but had been sung, walked, mapped, and painted for millennia. That they understood this is confirmed by the ways in which they were dependent on Indigenous assistants to translate the natural world. Australia’s First Naturalists explores those deep knowledges and how they were applied, co-opted, and capitalised upon by European scientists and explorers in their quest to comprehend the continent they were seeing. The nineteenth century witnessed an explosion of Western science, which is rightly celebrated for expanding understandings of the natural world. But that knowledge was also covetous and acquisitive. In an age of discovery and exploration, the natural sciences also became sites of colonial advancement and authority. ’In the words of the marine biologist Gilbert Percy Whitley, Aboriginal people had ‘intimate knowledge of every living thing, but they had no written records’. By contrast, the colonial urge to know and name inserted everything into textual schema (though they needed Indigenous assistants to broker that knowledge). With beautiful illustrations from the National Library of Australia, and accessible (yet never simplistic) writing and explanation, this book is a vivid introduction to some of the questions and troubling paradoxes

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW

in that complex relationship over place and nature in the colonial scientific contact zone. After all, this moment of disciplinary expansion coincided with ‘scientific’ theories of evolution and race. Hierarchies of human ‘civilisation’ were quick to plot indigenous peoples, and Australian Aboriginal people in particular, at nascent stages of human development.

In an age of discovery and exploration, the natural sciences also became sites of colonial advancement and authority In some nineteenth-century immigrants’ guides to Australia, for example, Aboriginal people were included within sections on flora and fauna – despite being central to the accumulation of that knowledge in the first place. Specimen jars increasingly filled newly built museums, and studies of the natural world were professionalised into fields of ichthyology, zoology, ornithology, and botany, overlaying new systems of knowledge across a country that was quickly depleted of its Indigenous epistemologies. ‘By the twentieth century,’ Olsen and Russell explain, ‘with the assistance of Indigenous people, nearly all Australia’s vertebrates had been discovered and described by scientists, while many Aboriginal people had been forced from or left their country.’ The numbers and cataloguing details of such scientific collections are staggering. Hundreds of thousands of birds, fish, marsupials, and monotremes were captured, recorded, and

meticulously classified. By contrast, the names these scientific pioneers often gave to their Indigenous assistants were notoriously generic and vague: references to ‘Jacky’, ‘Blacky’, and ‘Old Jim’ recur in scientific and exploration records; ‘maker unknown’ is prevalent in the providence of museum displays of Aboriginal artefacts. Both reveal the unevenness of the archive in its acknowledgement of Indigenous contributions to Australian science. But there are also lovely stories of companionship and genuine interest, which the book catalogues with historical context and empathy, such as Scottish naturalist John MacGillivray’s collaboration with Neinmal (an Iwaidja man) in the Port Essington region in the mid-nineteenth century. Despite the complicity of scientific disciplines in the colonial project, it’s difficult not to be moved by the colossal natural bounty these naturalists recorded – before waves of pastoralism, population growth, and industrialisation impacted Australia’s ecosystems. In a recent essay (Griffith Review 63), Tom Griffiths describes the Anthropocene as a ‘profound rupture’ in the history of the natural world, where mass extinctions, fish deaths, and disappearing rivers are regularly reported. This moment of rapid and systemic ecological change sees ecologists turning to Indigenous knowledges to develop management strategies for Australian ecosystems. Environmental historians recognise Indigenous archives in the land itself that reveal how it was managed, observed, and understood in the past. Indigenous Ranger programs have been adopted on northern cattle stations, conservation zones, and national parks in an attempt to recuperate country. As well as being a history, there is also a message to the future in this book: the bounty that colonial naturalists were so struck by is also alarmingly fragile. And the increasing (but belated) turn to Indigenous knowledges could be key in responding to that profound rupture. g Anna Clark is an Australian Research Council Future Fellow at the Australian Centre for Public History at the University of Technology Sydney.

From reporter to witness Stephen Dedman BOWRAVILLE

by Dan Box

Viking $34.99 pb, 325 pp, 9780143784395

an Box is a crime reporter for The Australian. In September 2014, Homicide Detective Chief Inspector Gary Jubelin contacted him to ask him to write about the murder of three Aboriginal children from Bowraville in 1990–91. Box later began a podcast about the murders that earned him a Walkley Award, part of a process that would see him go from (in his words) reporter to campaigner to witness in the trial of the man suspected of the murders. Colleen Walker-Craig, aged sixteen, disappeared after a house party on Bowraville’s Cemetery Road in September 1990. When her mother, Muriel Craig, went to Bowraville’s police station to report her missing on the following Sunday, the station was closed. When she returned on Monday, the police suggested that Colleen had ‘gone walkabout’ and didn’t take a statement. Colleen’s body has never been found, but her clothes were discovered in a river in April 1991, by which time Evelyn Greenup (aged four) and Clinton Speedy-Duroux (sixteen) had also been murdered after attending parties on Cemetery Road. Clinton’s body was discovered in February 1991, and a local labourer, who had attended the parties where Colleen, Evelyn, and Clinton were last seen, was charged with his murder. (Following a suppression order by Magistrate Robert Stone on 25 March 2019, the labourer is referred to throughout Box’s book as ‘James Hide’.) Evelyn’s skull was discovered ten days after Colleen’s clothes. ‘Hide’ was also charged with her murder in October 1991. When the cases finally went to trial in January 1994, the defence

lawyers argued that their client should be charged with the two murders separately, and the judge agreed. After white witnesses testified that they’d seen Clinton hitchhiking after the time police believed he’d been killed, the labourer was acquitted in February and the Director of Public Prosecutions decided not to proceed with a trial for Evelyn’s murder. In 1996, a task force was created to investigate the Bowraville murders. Gary Jubelin, assigned to the team, worked on improving communications and trust with the victims’ families. In 2004 Jubelin convinced the state coroner to hold an inquest into Colleen’s and Evelyn’s deaths. In 2005 ‘Hide’ was tried for Evelyn’s murder – and acquitted. When Jubelin contacted Box nine years later, it was in the hope that the publicity would persuade the Victorian government to overturn the rule of double jeopardy and to allow fresh trials. As the case headed to the High Court, Box ultimately became so involved in the investigation that he asked his editor whether he needed to recuse himself from covering it. The editor said no, and Box was called as a witness. Bowraville is a detailed examination of the difficulties that can be faced when seeking justice for Aboriginal families whose children have been murdered. The mistrust between Bowraville’s Goori community and the local police hampered the investigation, as did the clear cultural differences. The Aboriginal witnesses tended to be less obsessed with clocks and calendars than the whites, and less comfortable with yes and no questions, which made them more suggestible when giving statements to police. In the first trial, jurors were more convinced by the white witnesses; the second case collapsed largely because the police relied too heavily on the testimony of jailhouse informants. Forensics proved to be of little use when evidence was lost or destroyed after the first acquittal. Box contrasts the resources allocated to solving the backpacker murders with the situation at the Bowraville Police Station, whose lone detective made notes on butcher’s paper because the station lacked a computer. Box HISTORY

is unsparing in his description of Bowraville’s poverty and its history of clashes between the white residents and the Goori, many of them descended from the Stolen Generations and old enough to remember when Freedom Riders came from Sydney to protest the segregation of the local theatre. Bowraville isn’t a perfect book. The difficulty of determining the facts from so many peripatetic and often contradictory witness statements means that the overall effect is sometimes reminiscent of Rashomon with a touch of Catch-22: Box, becoming involved in the story more than twenty years after the murders, uses dates as chapter headings to try to help readers comprehend the narrative, but a more linear approach might have been easier to follow. There is little information about the suspect, who largely followed his lawyer’s advice not to answer questions from journalists. Unusually for a true-crime book, there are no photos or other illustrations. Obviously, the inclusion of photos of the victims might have been upsetting for their families, but some maps showing important locations and the distances between them would have helped readers to form a clearer picture of the events. That said, Bowraville is undeniably an important book – not only because it does what any good true-crime book should do: showing us how crimes are really investigated and tried, debunking the television myth that all murders are solved instantly. Bowraville also shows how – even when the police are sympathetic – the system can disadvantage Aboriginal people, not just because of mutual distrust, but because of cultural differences that hinder communication and understanding. Early in the book, Box mentions that he decided to investigate the case because of a belief that the Bowraville murders should be as well known as the Beaumont murders. He’s right: every Australian should read this book. g Stephen Dedman is a Perth-based writer. He is the author of the novels The Art of Arrow Cutting (Tor, 1997) and Foreign Bodies (Tor, 1999). 20 AUGUST 2019

Gogobera Bruce Moore AUSTRALIA’S ORIGINAL LANGUAGES: AN INTRODUCTION by R.M.W. Dixon Allen & Unwin $32.99 pb, 197 pp, 9781760875237

ob Dixon has researched Australian Indigenous languages since the 1960s, has constructed grammars of five languages, and has written numerous scholarly books and articles on Aboriginal languages. His latest book is directed at the general reader, and it springs from his frustration at what he sees as the persistent and continuing misunderstandings in the wider Australian community about the nature and history of Australia’s Indigenous languages. Dixon believes there is still a common view that there is only one Aboriginal language. A variant of this error is the notion that the differences between Aboriginal languages can be attributed to dialectal differences, like the differences between the dialects of Yorkshire, Lincolnshire, and Sussex. It is Dixon’s view that such misunderstandings about Indigenous languages, with concomitant judgements about the languages being ‘primitive’, have fed into other misunderstandings of Indigenous societies and cultures, enforcing the racist view of William Dampier’s 1697 description of Indigenous Australians as ‘the miserablest people in the world’, and, in Dixon’s words, becoming ‘a rationale for genocide’. Dixon’s aim is to set the record straight. He provides a timeline. The Indigenous peoples came to Australia more than 50,000 years ago. This is so long ago that we cannot reconstruct what their language was like then. But we can assume that as the people spread out across the land and established separate tribal groups, these groups developed linguistic differences one from the other, and in numerous cases separate languages were created. These languages became as different from one another as English is different from

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW

French, German, and Hungarian. They were not mutually intelligible. At the time of the European invasion, there were about 250 of these languages spoken by about 700 groups. There are more groups than languages because some of the discrete languages did have dialects: for example, what is now called the Western Desert language has fifteen dialects, including Luritja, Pintupi, and Pitjantjatjara. The languages are all very different, but Dixon is concerned to demonstrate some of their typical and core features. For example, there is a chapter on grammatical features, including a discussion of the function of gender in many languages. In his account of gender in Dyirbal (a north Queensland rainforest language), Dixon explains how there is a separate gender for ‘edible plant food’, indicating that even grammatical features can reflect the way a language’s speakers view the world. Technical features are also addressed in a chapter on phonology, with special emphasis on those that will be unfamiliar to people versed in European languages, such as the fact that many Indigenous words begin with the ‘ng’ sound, and the fact that there are usually no phonemic distinctions between the voiceless/ voiced pairs p/b, k/g, t/d, so that whereas there is a sense difference between the English kale and gale, there is no such difference between Kaurna and Gaurna (the name of the Adelaide language). Similarly, kookaburra appears in early records as gogobera. The book is at its most telling when it focuses on the fact that a language both creates and reflects a society and its culture. Attention is paid to the role of language in ceremony, song, and storytelling, but Dixon focuses on less well-known aspects of the social fabric. The complex kinship systems of Aboriginal societies, so different from Western nuclear families in that ‘every member of a community is in a specific relationship with every other member of the community’, mean that a correspondingly complex system of words is necessary to describe the structure. Another common feature of Aboriginal societies is that there were certain classes of kin with whom con-

E S S AY

tact should be avoided, especially in the relationship between a mother-in-law and a son-in-law, and often a special substitute language was used when in one another’s vicinity. Dixon explores some of these avoidance languages. A detailed account of the Warlpiri names used to refer to a male in his transition from child to old man, each name marking a significant change in social role and status, provides a fascinating insight into how language constructs this aspect of Warlpiri society. Most of the 250 languages are now extinct, and Dixon indicates that only about twenty are surviving strongly, mainly in areas where the colonisers felt no need to exploit the land. The surviving languages have responded to social change in various ways, including developing new terms for new concepts. For example, some languages have simply borrowed the term ‘policeman’ in forms such as buliman, whereas others have adapted existing words, often providing interesting evidence of how words can carry history. In Walmatjarri, the word for ‘policeman’ is limpa: ‘a fly that hovers and suddenly dives in to bite’; in Kalkatungu, it is ganimay-ñjirr: ‘he who ties people up’; in Djapu, it is dhapthap: from a verb meaning ‘clench or grip’, referring to handcuffs; and in Djaru, he is yawadaro wainowadji: ‘the chaining horseman’. Dixon is acutely aware that all of the remaining languages are threatened, and notes that even in remote areas young speakers are influenced by outside culture, and that they are ‘adopting a reduced form of the traditional language’. Nevertheless, Dixon supports the current efforts to revive languages that are no longer widely spoken, and is participating in revival programs. In this International Year of Indigenous Languages, it is encouraging to find a leading scholar making such an attempt to explain the nature of Australia’s Indigenous languages to a non-scholarly audience. g Bruce Moore, editor of the second edition of the Australian National Dictionary (2016), was director of the Australian National Dictionary Centre from 1994 to 2011. 22 AUGUST 2019

Eliminating settler colonialism Refusal and resurgence in Australia

Richard J. Martin THE COLONIAL FANTASY: WHY WHITE AUSTRALIA CAN’T SOLVE BLACK PROBLEMS by Sarah Maddison Allen & Unwin, $34.99 pb, 336 pp, 9781760295820

‘F

uck Australia, I hope it fucking burns to the ground.’ Sarah Maddison opens this book by quoting Tarneen Onus-Williams, the young Indigenous activist who sparked a brief controversy when her inflammatory comments about Australia were reported around 26 January 2018. For Maddison, a Professor of Politics at the University of Melbourne, OnusWilliams’s Australia Day comments (and subsequent clarification) convey a profound insight into ‘the system’. She writes: The current system – the settler colonial system – is not working ... Yet despite incontrovertible evidence of this failure, the nation persists in governing the lives of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples in ways that are damaging and harmful, firm in its belief that with the right policy approach … Indigenous lives will somehow improve. This is the colonial fantasy.

Indeed, Maddison dismisses both ‘progressive’ and ‘conservative’ approaches to Indigenous policy as not just failing but actually covertly desiring the ‘elimination’ of Indigenous peoples. Her message for readers is that ‘[w]hite Australia can’t solve black problems because white Australia is the problem’, and while the ‘structure’ of settler colonialism endures in the institutions of Australian society, Indigenous people will fail, and things will continue to worsen. As such, she argues for a complete rethink of policy approaches to ‘Australia’s settler problem’, one that would abandon ‘the liberal settler order’ produced by the colonial fantasy for something else, although she acknow-

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW

ledges that the alternative to settler colonialism ‘is uncertain’ as ‘there are no easy answers’. Central to this book is Maddison’s critique of policies such as Reconciliation, the Apology to the Stolen Generations, Closing the Gap, and the campaign for Constitutional Recognition. Drawing on the influential formulation of Australian historian Patrick Wolfe, she argues that each of these approaches conforms to the underlying logic of settler colonisation with its desire to ‘eliminate’, by which she seems to mean not just physical extermination but the ‘assimilation’ of Indigenous people through the structural encapsulation of Indigenous political difference by ‘the settler state’. To dispel ‘the colonial fantasy’, Maddison calls for a reorientation of Indigenous and non-Indigenous people’s efforts away from constructive engagement in policy development towards support for Indigenous ‘refusal’ and what she describes as a ‘resurgence that is already underway in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander nations around the continent’. ‘Refusal’ and ‘resurgence’ are political theories developed by North American Indigenous scholars like Taiaiake Alfred, Jeff Corntassel, Audra Simpson, and Glen Coulthard. Refusal, Maddison explains, ‘encourages an ongoing, watchful, and critical mode of conduct’ among Indigenous people that urges them to ‘turn away from the settler state’. Resurgence is closely linked to refusal, and ‘means actively restoring and regenerating Indigenous nationhood, focusing on transforming alternatives to settler colonial dispossession’ that involve ‘a turn towards Indigenous institutions, values, and ethics’.

For Maddison, refusal and resurgence in the Australian setting involve a ‘regeneration of place and nation-based Indigenous identities that are expressed and governed through culturally appropriate political formations’. Of course, readers will note that efforts to foster ‘culturally appropriate’ Indigenous political formations have long formed part of Indigenous policy, at least since the 1970s. Since that time, Indigenous political formations have flourished in the form of land councils and Indigenous corporations, as well as various kinds of representative organisations like the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission (1990–2005) and the National Congress of Australia’s First Peoples (2010–). More recently, Indigenous businesses have also flourished.

Maddison argues for a complete rethink of policy approaches to ‘Australia’s settler problem’ However, Maddison is strikingly ambivalent about existing Indigenous political formations. She tends to appraise historical experiments in selfdetermination as failing due to what she sees as systemic limits to Indigenous empowerment set by ‘the colonial state’, while nevertheless calling for further and stronger self-determination. Indeed, Maddison depicts Indigenous organisations ‘intended to function as organs of self-determination’ as instead working to effect ‘the dilution of challenges to settler colonial domination’, arguing that ‘corporate self-determination’ obscures true ‘Indigenous jurisdiction’. Her assessment of the Indigenous business sector is similarly ambivalent, praising some enterprises that market traditional knowledge, while worrying that stories of Indigenous business success risk diverting attention away from the need to critique ‘settler colonial developmentalism’ and to de-colonise. True Indigenous jurisdiction exists for Maddison in Indigenous political formations ‘linked to cultural practices that are deeply traditional’. This requires the ‘disentangling of Indigenous and

settler modes of governance’ to reinstitute tradition, particularly in places ‘where colonialism has damaged systems of authority and decision-making in communities’. However, it is unclear exactly which contemporary Indigenous practices are to be considered ‘deeply traditional’, as Maddison does not discuss cultural difference beyond assertions such as ‘land equals life’. There is also no discussion of adaptation and change, or the complex kinds of relations between Indigenous and non-Indigenous identity that scholars have addressed through the concept of the ‘intercultural’. This is the most interesting and troubling aspect of this book. In parts of Australia, Indigenous polities with their source in traditional laws and customs do survive, albeit in adapted forms, and it is interesting to think about how they should be recognised and resourced by the state. In the Gulf Country, where I have worked for many years, a number of different types of polities have developed from different experiences of colonisation affecting Indigenous people on either side of the Northern Territory–Queensland border. ‘Disentangling’ authentic Indigenous polities from those deemed to be contaminated by the wider society in settings like this will be difficult and will involve invidious decisions that will privilege some Indigenous people and disadvantage others. Whether the old polities, which Maddison calls ‘clans’ (i.e. estate groups) and ‘nations’ (i.e. language groups or regional groups), are better equipped to achieve success than existing Indigenous political formations is of course another question. In other parts of Australia, Maddison seems to acknowledge that it is already too late for refusal and resurgence to be effective strategies of decolonisation, as she describes the loss of knowledge of ‘distinctive ways of living and relating’ as inhibiting ‘the capacity to (re)imagine Indigenous independence’ in the Northern Territory (and by extension it seems most of the rest of Australia). In such settings, Maddison’s recommendation of tradition as the basis for funding decisions made by the state would seem to force Indigenous

people to perform authenticity in return for funding and related resources, which can become a repressive expectation (as numerous researchers including Patrick Wolfe have warned). While perhaps aligned with political strategies aimed at achieving local control of resources, such traditionalism risks distracting attention away from the realpolitik of effective Indigenous political formations, organisations, and businesses in places like Sydney and Melbourne. But it seems churlish to take such arguments as literally comprising actual policy advice relating to Indigenous people. Instead, what is being presented here is the idea of Indigenous tradition, which is really being positioned as a counterfactual in order to critique aspects of Indigenous policy. At its best, this effort suggests new ways for Indigenous people to think themselves free from the epistemological boundaries of colonialism, to pursue an Indigenous ‘sovereignty of the mind’ (as Waanyi author Alexis Wright puts it), which may well result in new kinds of Indigenous political formations such as a Voice to Parliament. The risk is that this effort to critique Indigenous policy by de-historicising Australian colonisation simplifies the kinds of problems and choices that Indigenous people face today, endorsing solutions that sidestep the most difficult questions of continuity and change. g

Richard J. Martin is a Senior Lecturer in Anthropology and the Director of the Culture and Heritage Unit at The University of Queensland. His book, The Gulf Country: The story of people and place in outback Queensland, has just been published by Allen & Unwin. SOCIETY

NEW FROM BRITPOP CINEMA From Trainspotting to This is England Matt Glasby “An exuberant and unashamedly geeky paean to a time when British cinema blossomed.”—Delayed Gratification

FROM MÉLIÈS TO NEW MEDIA Spectral Projections Wendy Haslem From Méliès to New Media explores the presence and importance of film history in digital culture. Using a media archaeology approach, Haslem envisages the potential of new discoveries that foreground forgotten or marginalized contributions to visual culture.

FIELD NOTES ON THE VISUAL ARTS Seventy-five Short Essays Edited by Karen Lang What is the relation of art and history? What is art today? Why does art affect us? In Field Notes on the Visual Arts, seventy-five scholars, curators, and artists traverse chronology and geography to reveal the meanings and dilemmas of art.

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PLANET COSPLAY Costume Play, Identity and Global Fandom Edited by by Paul Mountfort, Anne Peirson-Smith and Adam Geczy Planet Cosplay provides a unique, multifaceted examination of the practice from theoretical bases including popular cultural studies, performance studies, gender studies, and transmedia studies. As the title suggests, the book’s purview is global.

24 AUGUST 2019

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW

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Victors and vanquished Competing narratives about the 2018 spill

Paul Williams PLOTS AND PRAYERS: MALCOLM TURNBULL’S DEMISE AND SCOTT MORRISON’S ASCENSION by Niki Savva Scribe, $35 pb, 408 pp, 9781925849189

t’s a challenge to navigate the maze of books published after an election as winners and losers pore over the entrails of victory and defeat. It’s even more challenging when that election delivers a result almost nobody expected. Who’s telling the truth? Who’s lying to protect their legacy? Plots and Prayers, by The Australian journalist Niki Savva, offers insight into how and why Liberal leader Scott Morrison won an ‘unwinnable’ election, but psephology is not her core mission. Instead, Savva walks us through the Byzantine labyrinth that led to arguably the most traumatic leadership spill in modern Australian politics, which, on 24 August 2018, installed Scott Morrison as Australia’s third prime minister in three years, and the seventh in just over a decade. Savva offers up fifteen chapters across 400 pages in which she canvasses different versions of events through the eyes of competing protagonists. Knowing how fickle history can be, with both victors and vanquished scrambling to write it – she prepared for this book early. She spoke to key players immediately after Malcolm Turnbull’s demise; she wanted interviews to be ‘fresh’ and ‘raw’. The result is a forensically researched and brutally revealing chronicle of the days and weeks before and after the August coup – one told with the precision of an investigative journalist but in the elegant narrative style that always makes Savva a great read. This book’s strength is Savva’s ability to get most if not all voices on the record. Indeed, there are more than a few Liberals willing to share salacious details that would, frankly, shock anyone who still believes that a politician’s en-

emies are found only on the other side of the house. Apart from post-coup confessions of anti-Turnbull plotters that would make even Machiavelli blush, there is, for example, the description of Prime Minister Scott Morrison by the now-retired Michael Keenan as an ‘absolute arsehole’. Similarly, Christian Porter ‘did not think Morrison was a team player’, while Finance Minister Mathias Cormann ‘had seen Morrison up close now, and, in his opinion, Dutton was better’. Savva has some cheeky fun with her subjects. Chapter Three, detailing the marital woes of former Nationals leader Barnaby Joyce, is titled ‘Barnaby’s doodle’. Later, Joyce’s then media adviser Jake Smith, allegedly carpeted by an increasingly irascible boss, wonders ‘how the deputy prime minister gets his staffer pregnant, and somehow it’s the fault of the gay guy?’ Savva doesn’t shy away from the gravity of what transpired last August when another Australian prime minister was cut down in revenge as much as in fear of electoral defeat. We learn how Christopher Pyne, a Turnbull ally, openly wept as he returned home after the coup, and how Dutton’s friend Luke Howarth described that week as ‘pretty shitty’. Savva uses colourful quotes not only to triangulate evidence but to humanise politicians so often perceived as robotic. It’s critical, then, that Savva, a selfdescribed ‘conservative leftie’, doesn’t overtly take sides, even though readers will probably hear a sympathetic timbre for Turnbull, and will catch a whiff of contempt for Turnbull’s initial challenger, Peter Dutton, for Turnbull’s arch-nemesis, Tony Abbott, and for

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26 AUGUST 2019

Mathias Cormann, whose desertion of Turnbull late in the game (after pledging loyalty) sealed his leader’s fate. Even here Savva is fair. She asserts, for example, that Turnbull was a good prime minister but a terrible politician. In what may surprise some people, Savva attests to Dutton’s personal likeability and the fact that he was – at least until the August putsch – better liked in the party room than Morrison, with more friends across the factional divide. It is, then, the constitution of Morrison the man, and not just any alleged role in the coup, that forms the kernel of this book. For Morrison, the key to success during that week in August, and at any subsequent general election, was to appear to the Australian people as a ‘cleanskin’ – a man loyal to Turnbull and with no blood on his hands; a man reluctantly drafted as a compromise ‘centrist’ candidate between the left-leaning Julie Bishop and the hard right’s Dutton. It’s the unpicking of this carefully crafted perception that will probably prove this book’s most enduring legacy. Savva offers, for example, strong evidence that Morrison – and, if not Morrison, then Morrison’s ‘numbers men’ Alex Hawke, Stuart Robert, Steve Irons, and Bert van Manen – countenanced his prime ministership long before the Dutton spill. Savva concludes that Morrison did not initiate the coup and confirms that Morrison, who had worked so well as Turnbull’s treasurer, would never challenge his boss while Turnbull held the job. But Morrison was free to move when Turnbull quit after being presented with forty-three rebellious signatures (more than half the party room of eighty-five). It seems that Morrison and his lieutenants were ‘ready for [the spill] and took full advantage of it. They will not admit to plotting, but they will admit to preparing and planning, and then only in that final week, or, in Morrison’s case, the final days.’ Critically, Savva’s account of that planning paints Morrison as a keen political animal. Hungry for power, this allegedly real Morrison is far removed from the popular perception of ScoMo as a ‘daggy dad’. Morrison, Savva argues, gamed Dutton with aplomb, directing around ten of his supporters in the first

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW

spill – just enough but not too many – to vote for Dutton (whom Morrison disliked, with the feeling reciprocated) to inflate Dutton’s support so that Turnbull would be sufficiently destabilised (and his prime ministership crippled), while filling Dutton with a false sense of security. In the second spill days later, Julie Bishop in the first round received just eleven votes (no fellow West Australian voted for her), Dutton thirtyeight, and Morrison thirty-six. With Bishop eliminated, Morrison defeated Dutton narrowly, forty-five votes to forty. Had just three MPs changed allegiances, Australian history would have been very different. The execution of the Dutton spill is therefore revealed as a shambles, and Savva’s account of shifting party loyalties reveals not one or two Liberal parties but as many as four, including three mutually suspicious conservative tendencies: the ‘delcons’ (delusional conservatives) among the hard-right Abbott group; the Dutton-led mainstream conservatives; and Morrison’s evangelicals. While presenting yet more evidence – if anyone still needed it – of Abbott’s white-anting of, first, Turnbull and, second, Morrison himself, Savva cogently argues (contrary to political commentary at the time, including by this reviewer) that Dutton was not Abbott’s ‘trojan horse’. Instead, given the growing distance between Abbott and Dutton (Dutton was never going to reward Abbott with a ministry, Dutton says), Savva describes Abbott as Dutton’s ‘stalking horse’: Abbott would ride back into the Liberal leadership after Dutton inevitably lost the 2019 election. Savva, after writing her first book So Greek: Confessions of a conservative leftie (2010), said she had only one book in her. Then, after writing the well-received The Road to Ruin (2016), she told friends and family ‘to feel free to slap [her] if [she] ever looked like writing another’. It will be a loss to political journalism if this third volume is Savva’s last. g Paul Williams is a Senior Lecturer in politics and journalism at Griffith University’s School of Humanities, Languages and Social Sciences.

(photograph by Lyn Harwood)

Page OPEN POpen AGE with

Bruce Pascoe Where are you happiest?

Maybe on my jetty as the sun sets over the river and the only company are pelicans and cormorants. Otherwise, in ten feet of water looking at a crayfish and thinking of recipes.

Name an early literary idol or influence whom you no longer admire. Cooper; see above.

What, if anything, impedes your writing?

An office where employees are trying to make the meeting last to knock-off time.

Nothing. If you can write in the cacophony of Sydney airport and look up to find three hours have passed (Rex Airlines delays are common), you can write anywhere.

What do you consider the most specious virtue?

What do you think of the state of criticism?

What’s your idea of hell?

Godliness.

What’s your favourite film?

1900 or Vengo, though One Night the Moon always looms large.

And your favourite book?

The Snopes series of novels by William Faulkner.

Name the three people with whom you would most like to dine.

Mum and dad. I still need to talk to them. My kids, Marnie and Jack. Best meal was scallops and a few beers with my son at Huonville on a pontoon in the river.

Which word do you most dislike, and which one would you like to see back in public usage?

‘Gotten’. It’s a horrible word. I thought Australians would have had too much pride than to ape bad American English. The Age and ABC are current offenders.

Who is your favourite author?

Faulkner, Carson McCullers, or Cormac McCarthy. See what I mean about American English?

And your favourite literary hero or heroine? Lenny in Of Mice and Men.

Which quality do you most admire in a writer? Humility leaching into honesty.

Which book influenced you most in your youth? Jet: Sled dog of the north. I was paralysed by concentration when I read James Fenimore Cooper’s Pathfinder, but reading it again recently I shrank away from the latent racism.

As always, there are some pompous fools ascending to positions of influence to betray the thoughtful critique of more modest and caring men and women.

And writers’ festivals?

I find them tiring but stimulating. I love black writers’ festivals or where there are half a dozen of us. It’s like family.

Do you read reviews of your own books?

Yes, of course – it’s hard not to. But that is not my audience. The stray and thoughtful letter of a reader is what I most love receiving.

Are artists valued in our society?

I used to think Australia was so uncaring about its writers. In Italy you are called Professore; in Scotland you are introduced to their leading politicians: in Australia you are asked to spell your name. I used to think it was terrible, but now I think it is about right. We should celebrate the story, not the writer. A writer without humility is as worthwhile as a game-show host.

What are you working on now?

Two novels, a book of poetry, two histories, a book of stories (Salt), three film scripts, and two plays. Trying to run a farm to produce perennial Aboriginal foods … and to play cricket.

Bruce Pascoe is an award-winning writer and a Yuin

and Bunurong man. His books include Dark Emu, Book of the Year at the 2016 NSW Premier’s Literary Awards. He is on the board of first languages Australia, Black Duck Foods and is Professor of Indigenous Knowledge at UTS. He was 2018 Dreamtime Person of the Year. I NT ERVI EW

Walgajunmanha All Time We write about our existence pre-invasion / And that has made us visible We write about our existence during invasion / And that keeps us visible walgajunmanha

walgajunmanha walgajunmanha We write about the blood they spilt / And that honours ancestorsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; memories We write about the land they stole / And that shows they are savage thieves walgajunmanha walgajunmanha walgajunmanha We write about our connection to country / And that challenges theirs We write about our lived realities / And that shows them we survived walgajunmanha

walgajunmanha walgajunmanha We write about our sky world knowledge / And that shows them the first astronomers We write about our earth world knowledge / And that shows them a sustainable culture walgajunmanha walgajunmanha walgajunmanha We write about our traditional food productions / And that contests their agriculture theories We write about our traditional mud huts / And that debunks their walkabout romanticism walgajunmanha

walgajunmanha walgajunmanha We write about Aboriginal deaths in custody / And that shows them we will fight back We write about deaths in police presence / And that shows them we are not blinded by lies walgajunmanha walgajunmanha walgajunmanha We write about our racism experiences / And that punctures their ethnocentric balloons We write about our campaign for Aboriginal rights / And that their pen is our weapon of choice walgajunmanha

walgajunmanha walgajunmanha We write about deep Aboriginal culture love / And that shatters their assimilation to pieces

Charmaine Papertalk Green Charmaine Papertalk Green is from the Wajarri, Badimaya, and Southern Yamaji peoples of Western Australia. This poem appears in her new collection, Nganajungu Yagu (Cordite Books, 2019). 28 AUGUST 2019

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW

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An essential guide to the art of hitting and getting hit. In On the Chin, sports journalist and former amateur boxer Alex McClintock explores the history, culture and contradictions of boxing. ‘Compelling…I was left hooked until the final bell.’ David Hunt

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A moving tale of grief and memory set in the 1960s in a Victorian country town. Tom has just lost his son when he meets bookseller Hannah, a Holocaust survivor whose son died in Auschwitz. Can you lose a child and still believe in love? ‘A novel of great spirit and tenderness.’ Carrie Tiffany

1797. Seventeen shipwrecked sailors set out to walk hundreds of miles to Sydney through what, to them, is virgin country. And there’s a murderer in their midst. An absorbing historical narrative filled with tension and mystery.

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Treasures Kelly D. Wiltshire A LITTLE HISTORY OF ARCHAEOLOGY

by Brian Fagan

Yale University Press (Footprint)

$37.99 hb, 288 pp, 9780300243215

s the old saying goes, one should never judge a book by its cover; however, the instantly recognisable iconography on the cover of A Little History of Archaeology does provide an insight into this book’s content. In presenting this history of archaeology – which forms part of a larger series that includes histories of philosophy, literature, and science – author and archaeologist Brian Fagan early makes the distinction that ‘today’s archaeology is far more than hazardous journeys and specular discoveries. It may have begun as treasure hunting … But treasure hunting isn’t proper archaeology.’ In making this statement, Fagan establishes a precedent that he uses to repeatedly remind his readers that archaeology is the search for information and not monetary gain associated with looting. This is the main strength of the book; it is used to challenge the misconceptions that have plagued the discipline of archaeology since its infancy. Divided into forty short, chronological chapters, it commences with the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 ad near Pompeii, setting the scene for the investigations of this site that would lay the foundations for the discipline of archaeology. In doing so, the first half of the book is dedicated to the people and places central to archaeology’s establishment as a discipline, including Napoleon’s exploits in Egypt, the discovery and eventual translation of the Rosetta Stone that was pivotal to the interpretation of Egyptian hieroglyphs, Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution, and the Three-Age System, which provided a basic chronology for European artefacts. Fagan makes the point that the numerous artefacts he describes can be viewed at the British Museum, which highlights this institution’s role 30 AUGUST 2019

in the development of archaeology and allows the reader to feel as though they are walking through the various rooms where these objects are on display. Fagan also describes investigations by early Egyptologist Flinders Petrie, whose protégé Howard Carter was a key figure in the discovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb in 1922 – an event that received international media attention and popularised archaeology with the general public. It comes as no surprise that this event is used to preface the second half of the book, which charts the growth of global archaeology during the nineteenth century. Here we are introduced to the work of the first Australian-born archaeologist, Vere Gordon Childe, and his contemporary Mortimer Wheeler, dendrochronology and its study of tree rings to determine past climatic change, the advent of radiocarbon dating in the 1950s that revolutionised archaeology by allowing sites to be placed within a chronological context, the discovery of China’s terracotta warriors, the development of underwater archaeology in the survey and excavation of shipwrecks, and the discovery of Ötzi the Ice Man in the Alps between Italy and Austria. In these chapters, the work of Gertrude Bell and Harriet Boyd is presented in a single chapter – a curious choice considering Fagan’s belief that these woman ‘were the equals of any male archaeologists of their day’. This is particularly surprising considering that Boyd’s work in Crete was carried out alongside the investigations of Arthur Evans, whose work is presented in an earlier chapter. As a result, this chapter instead feels tokenistic in its effort to highlight the trowel-blazing work of these women. Fagan, however, does redeem himself slightly by highlighting how Gertrude Caton-Thompson’s investigations at Zimbabwe’s Great Enclosure challenged racist myths that were used to justify African dispossession. Mary Leakey’s excavations at Olduvai Gorge in northern Tanzania – which revealed a hominin crania, pushing back the age of human origins – are also highlighted. The same considerations cannot be said for Tessa Wheeler – wife of

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Mortimer Wheeler – whose contribution fades into the background of her husband’s achievements, despite the fact that they worked together on numerous excavations as a team. The influence of Cambridge archaeologist Grahame Clark in the development of archaeology beyond Europe, by encouraging his students to work overseas, is also discussed. Fagan was one of these students and subsequently went on to work in Africa. Another of Clark’s students was Rhys Jones, who came to Australia and later become well known for his archaeological investigations in Tasmania, Neither Jones nor Australian archaeology more broadly rates a mention in this book. This is an unfortunate omission, especially considering the number of internationally significant sites found on our shores, including the World Heritage area of Lake Mungo, the highly sophisticated aquaculture structures at Lake Condah, and Kutikina Cave in Tasmania, which was once described by Jones ‘as rich as the richest classic caves of France’. Readers disappointed by this oversight should consult Billy Griffiths’s Deep Time Dreaming: Uncovering ancient Australia (2018), which provides a colourful history of Australian archaeology. Deep Time Dreaming contrasts greatly with Fagan’s controlled and at times disjointed descriptions – a likely side effect of trying to cover a disciplinary history spanning 250 years within the confines of 277 pages. A Little History of Archaeology concludes by focusing on how present-day technologies are being applied to the well-known sites of Stonehenge and Angkor Wat. In the final chapter, archaeological investigations for London’s Crossrail Project, which recently unearthed the grave of Matthew Flinders, also rate a mention, ensuring that the conclusion of this history of archaeology – notwithstanding some omissions – does reflect aspects of contemporary archaeology beyond the misconceptions that continue to plague the discipline. g Kelly D. Wiltshire is a Canberra-based archaeologist and audiovisual archivist specialising in the ethnography of archaeological practice. ❖

CALIBRE ESSAY PRIZE

Nah Doongh’s Song by Grace Karskens

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander readers are advised that the following essay contains images of people who have died.

ah Doongh was among the first generation of Aboriginal children who grew up in a conquered land. She was born around 1800 in the Country near present-day Kingswood, just south-east of Moorroo Morack, Penrith, and she lived until the late 1890s. Her life spanned the first century of colonisation, from the invasion of her Country to the years approaching Federation. She was a contemporary of the famous Hawkesbury River matriarch and landowner Maria Lock and of the astonishing Lake Macquarie religious seer and teacher Biraban. They, and countless other young Aboriginal men and women, endured the most difficult challenges faced by people anywhere – their lands invaded and taken by aliens, their families ravaged by devil-devil (smallpox) and terrorised by massacres and the theft of their infants. They navigated the settler world of the nineteenth century as well as their own: a new, dynamic, dangerous, hybrid world. The great biographical question of this generation is: how did these young Aboriginal people negotiate and survive these challenges? How, in archaeologist Denis Byrne’s words, did they manage to live in Country that no longer belonged to them? Nah Doongh’s band may have been the group the settlers called the Mulgoa Tribe, people of the mulgo, the black swans of Dyarubbin, the Hawkesbury–Nepean River. She could remember the time before the white people came, when tall, dense forests still covered the river flats and the lagoons were alive with ducks, geese, and swans. As a child, she must have heard the ringing report of the white hunters’ guns echoing across the valley; in old age she talked about the way the invaders shot and drove away all the game.

By the 1880s, the old woman Nah Doongh lived in a ‘very shaky habitation’ on the Castlereagh Common, north of Penrith, with her husband, Johnny Budbury. The Commons of western Sydney were areas that settlers never took for farms and estates; instead, they were reserved for grazing cattle, for cutting timber, and as a flood refuge. Aboriginal people often lived on them. Johnny Budbury died one day when the winds were howling. Nah Doongh then kept company with King Charlie, who was probably from Mulgoa. But in July 1885 he died, too. Nah Doongh was alone. Penrith was still a big, slow, sprawling country town at that time. Set in the Nepean farming districts and on the road and railway heading west over the Blue Mountains, it served the local community of small farmers, orchardists, an army of railway workers, and a few of the old local gentry whose estates hadn’t yet been subdivided for small farms and ‘orchard blocks’. There were also Aboriginal groups living around Yarramundi, at the Black Town (now Plumpton), up in The Gully in Katoomba, in the Burragorang Valley to the south, and at the Sackville Aboriginal Reserve on the Hawkesbury. But Nah Doongh avoided these groups. She mixed with the white people and was well known in the local community. They called her ‘Black Nellie’, ‘Queen Nellie’, or ‘poor old Nellie’. After King Charlie died, Nah Doongh was also called ‘the last of her tribe’. As in so many cases, this cliché was untrue; it had far more to do with the settler belief that Aboriginal people would eventually vanish from the earth than with reality. Because of this belief, settlers were constantly making records about Aboriginal people, their language and culture, and collecting their stone tools and other artefacts. It was a kind of memorial archiving, carried out while Aboriginal people were still alive. Old Aboriginal people were especially sought out for interviews and photographs. Nah Doongh was E S S AY

photographed at least twice. One is a close-up portrait of her in old age: she gazes off to one side, her ill-fitting bodice fixed with a pin. In another full-length portrait she stands beside a house, wearing a long dress with buttons down the bodice and a white apron. She looks a little bemused. Her left hand is misshapen, her arm hangs limp at her side. In her right hand she grasps a sturdy walking stick. This second photograph was probably taken by Sarah Shand, playwright and painter, and wife of the local doctor, John Cappie Shand. The Shand family arrived from the north of England in 1886, and Nah Doongh befriended Shand soon after. She appeared on

in oils. The painting has haunted me for years. What became of it? Could it still exist somewhere? The main reason we know about Nah Doongh is that The Nepean Times published Shand’s reminiscences about her in 1914. It was a nostalgic piece sparked by Penrith’s enthusiastic celebrations of its pioneer and foundational history: the centenary of the construction of Cox’s Road. These history-making events were also ‘high seasons of memory’, in Tom Griffiths’s evocative words. Shand’s piece is charmingly written and reveals her as an acute observer. But it seems her narrative was heavily edited for publication, for Penrith Library’s Local History Collection holds another, darker version of Shand’s stories about Nah Doongh. At first, Nah Doongh would always return to her hut on the Common after visiting the Shands. But in flood times she began to stay over with them, remaining for up to six weeks. When the great flood of 1891 roared through the Nepean valley, she decided to move in with the Shands permanently. Shand recalled being slightly discombobulated when a cheery Nah Doongh arrived at the family’s residence and surgery in High Street, Penrith, with all her possessions piled in a cart. The move was clearly Nah Doongh’s idea. Shand wrote that ‘Black Nellie’ became devoted to the family, and Shand descendants say that they loved her too – in the way that families loved their servants. In Shand’s narrative, Nah Doongh’s story ends happily. In old age, she was sheltered and safe, among people who loved her.

N Nah Doongh at Penrith, 1890s (Local Studies Collection, Penrith City Library)

the Shands’ verandah one day, leaning on the doorpost, and when asked what she wanted, replied cheerily, ‘Oh, nothing, just came to see you, yer know.’ Shand was keen to meet a ‘real Aborigine’ and Nah Doongh was charming and eccentric. She wore two dresses and as many as seven petticoats at once, which made her look bigger than she was. Over the following months, Nah Doongh patiently answered all of Shand’s curious questions, told her stories, and tried to teach her Aboriginal words. Shand in turn sketched ‘Black Nellie’ and even painted her portrait 32 AUGUST 2019

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ah Doongh became a familiar figure in local histories of Penrith and the Nepean, her poignant photographs reproduced alongside snatches of her voice. Yet they remain strangely unexamined, a filtered voice from the century before last, played over and over again. What if we place Nah Doongh at the centre of her own story? What if we begin by listening closely to what she was trying to tell Shand? Here we collide spectacularly with the methodological and ethical dilemmas at the heart of so much Aboriginal history: the fact that the richest records were usually created by the colonists. They come to us indelibly shaped by settler-colonial ideas about race and gender. Shand’s narratives are a textbook case of the racist tropes about Aboriginal women exhaustively identified and catalogued in Liz Conor’s fierce book Skin Deep: Settler impressions of Aboriginal women (2016). Old Aboriginal women especially were portrayed as repulsive, primitive, victims of violence, figures of fun. So many of Shand’s stories turn on images of decrepitude, foolish superstition, childishness. And yet, and yet, the stories remain. Shand wrote evocatively about Nah Doongh’s witty and mischievous good humour, her kindness and gentleness, and her strong, dignified, and at times outspoken character. Still more importantly, she wrote down what she could recall

of Nah Doongh’s knowledge and beliefs. Indigenous historians like John Maynard and Martin N. Nakata argue that it is possible for Aboriginal people to reclaim these sorts of records, despite their limitations and corruptions. Nah Doongh’s voice is there, embedded in Shand’s white colonial narrative, at times ‘talking up to the white woman’. Asked how old she was ‘when the white people came’, she responded sardonically with a common settler myth about Aboriginal people: ‘Waal, misses, I carn tell ye ’cos blacks carn count no more than five.’ Shand seems to have taken this literally. But the most striking example of Nah Doongh’s voice is her song. Shand recalled that once a month Nah Doongh would dress in her best clothes and go out. Occasionally, she returned ‘drunk and dirty’ – and that was when she sang. Shand listened as ‘first she mumbled a sort of aboriginal incantation, then the chorus was this’: All the land belong to Mr McCarthy – One finger. All the land belong to Mr McCarthy – Two finger. All the land belong to Mr McCarthy – Three finger. All the land belong to Mr McCarthy – Four finger.

As she repeated each line of this chorus, Nah Doongh counted off four fingers, and ‘then began the aboriginal incantation again, etc.’ Shand said, ‘I don’t know what it meant.’ She did not write down the Aboriginal words of the song. What are we to make of Nah Doongh’s song: freed from throat and tongue by alcohol, sung in both Aboriginal and English ninety years after the invasion of her Country? All the land belong to Mr McCarthy, rhythmically repeated four times, counted out on fingers. It is clearly about a settler family. It sounds like a song about dispossession. Archaeologist James L. Kohen thought Nah Doongh was singing about the well-known local McCarthy family at Castlereagh, descendants of the first James McCarthy, an Irish Catholic emancipist. By the 1870s and 1880s the McCarthys were considerable landowners, and pillars of the local Catholic community. A good, logical guess. But it’s probably wrong. The unspoken assumption here is that Nah Doongh must have been singing about local Penrith settlers, because she never left her Country. But Aboriginal people had rights to multiple areas through their parents and grandparents; with proper permissions and protocols, they customarily travelled on regular ‘beats’ for social and ceremonial business, fights and contests, seasonal harvesting, and caring for Country. And, of course, for marriages.

hese are the journeys – cyclical and purposeful – that archaeologists and historians such as Denis Byrne, Maria Nugent, and Paul Irish have mapped using the techniques of ‘life mapping’ or ‘geobiography’. Reconstructing these journeys from E S S AY

fragments of evidence can recover patterns of the vast social, cultural, and spiritual networks cast across Country, and can reveal the way they continued and evolved after invasion and colonisation. At the same time, I want to acknowledge the limits of biography and geobiography, of what we can know about people so utterly erased from mainstream history. At every turn, evidence is profoundly mediated by happenstance, by vast silences, by loss. Human figures are indistinct, like shapes deep underwater; tiny clues flicker, their significance magnified by the unknown. So this story of Nah Doongh is bookended with what I call ‘ghost biography’. Her early womanhood, and where and when she died, are both tenuous, spun from single names, strung on gossamer threads. In his book Daruganora: Darug Country – the place and the people (2006), James L. Kohen claims that Nah Doongh moved south-east to the Georges River as a young woman and became the wife of Coomun, a leader of the Liverpool band. Coomun and Nelly Colonga are recorded as the parents of two daughters, Eleanor and Elizabeth, or Betsey, in the early 1820s. This seems an improbable leap, involving a shift from the freshwater inland to the saltwater reaches of the Georges River, and from one language group to another. This woman’s name, Colonga, bears no obvious relation to Nah Doongh, and there could easily have been several Aboriginal women with the English name Nellie. Yet Aboriginal women did marry outside their own clans, and often moved to their husbands’ Country. Nah Doongh was not the only Nepean woman to move to the Liverpool area: young Mulgoa woman Judith joined the group in 1822; and the newly married Maria Lock arrived in 1825. There is one more bit of evidence, and it too hangs on a single name: Angelina. Nellie Colonga’s daughter Betsey remained in the Liverpool and South Coast communities, and Betsey’s granddaughter Angelina Timbery was born in Wollongong in 1873. Around the time Nah Doongh’s companion King Charlie died near Penrith in 1885, a girl called Angelina came to stay with her. Was this young girl Nah Doongh’s great-granddaughter, sent to be with her at a difficult time? Were there active family links, stretching over the century, and from the saltwater country to the Nepean? La Perouse Aboriginal man Michael Ingrey doesn’t think so, pointing out that Angelina was a very popular name in the late nineteenth century. Even more telling, knowing where you come from and who your relations are is very important in Aboriginal communities. But Nah Doongh is not recognised as kin among the Aboriginal families of La Perouse today. She doesn’t belong to them.

ometime in the 1830s, a group of Aboriginal people visited Camden Park, the estate of the wealthy and influential Macarthur family. Among

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the visitors was a young woman named ‘Black Nellie’, who met Johnny Budbury, a young Aboriginal constable and tracker. Johnny was born and raised in Camden. Local settler legend says that the two young people were instantly smitten with each other. When her band left, Johnny hid ‘Nellie’ in a barrel. ‘Black Nellie’ and Johnny Budbury then lived very happily together in a slab hut near the orchard at Camden. ‘Black Nellie’ was apparently good friends with the Macarthur women and other women in the district. But by 1865, ‘Black Nellie’ had left Camden: her departure may relate to an incident over fruit. Sir William Macarthur was incensed to discover that Johnny was picking fruit from the orchard and taking it across the river to sell. In righteous rage he instantly ordered Johnny off the estate. It is possible that this high-handed outburst prompted ‘Black Nellie’ to leave Camden and return to her birth Country on the Nepean. Johnny Budbury followed her later, and he and Nah Doongh were living near Penrith in 1882. Of course, there were multiple women called ‘Black Nellie’ . But there is clinching evidence that this woman was Nah Doongh. Penrith’s historian Lorraine Stacker located a photograph of ‘Black Nellie’ in the collection of the Camden Historical Society: an elderly Aboriginal woman wearing a white dress and a flowered hat, seated in front of a screen in the ‘Tile Room’ at Camden Park. Her left hand is withered, like Nah Doongh’s hand in the Penrith portrait. She even holds the same walking stick. Nah Doongh made return journeys to Camden to visit her old friends. By the 1890s she was travelling on the railways to get there. I imagine her sitting in her many petticoats on the dark leather seats stamped ‘NSWGR’, watching Country slide by. She went back to Camden after Johnny Budbury died, to let the people of his Country know. This photograph may have been taken on one of her visits. So we return to Nah Doongh’s song: All the land belong to Mr McCarthy. Given her long association with the wealthy, powerful Macarthurs, I think she was singing about them. By the 1890s, four generations of Macarthurs had owned Camden Park, and vast estates elsewhere as well. Four generations of Macarthurs, all the land belonging to them, the line repeated four times, once for each generation. The fragment of Nah Doongh’s song suggests it was probably about family and Country. She may have been singing settler history to white inheritors. The song carries that inescapable corollary: settler families were the vehicle for the dispossession of Aboriginal people. The more children they had, generation after generation, the more land they took.

he lives of poor and outcast people are so often invisible in written records. Yet life history is also written on the body – clothing, expressions, gestures and deportment, scars and injuries. Shand recalled her first meeting with Nah Doongh by describing her

huge smile, her dark eyes twinkling in the shadow of a told in the family, for she looked after the four young large hat, and the way she stood, ‘pressing her body on Shand children. the doorpost, head slightly to one side’. But this fetching portrait was countered by Nah Doongh’s battered hand was intensely curious about Nah Doongh’s face and head. ‘She had several ugly scars across her memory of her first contact with white people. Inleft eye,’ Shand continued, ‘and one over the upper lip, stead, Nah Doongh told her about Country: ‘all this which caused it to hang over, also a deep hole in her place bush long ago, dis place Penrith, blacks call Mooror skull.’ Traces of Nah Doongh’s injuries are also visible Moorack, plenty of wallaby, kangaroo, plenty of blacks, in the photographs. not many whites’. Her description of the early-contact Strangely, neither Shand nor anyone else ever men- years around Penrith rings true: Aboriginal people did tioned Nah Doongh’s most far outnumber settlers. obvious debility: her withThe conversation ered left hand. What could then took a dramathave caused this deformic turn. ‘Poor Nellie,’ ity? How would it have cooed Shand sympaaffected Nah Doongh’s thetically, ‘People taken daily life? I asked Dr Steall your country.’ Nah phen Oakley, a specialist in Doongh, not quite berheumatology who has a lieving what she was keen interest in historical hearing, stole a furtive cases. He and three medilook at her friend, and cal colleagues reviewed she shot back an exthe photographs of Nah traordinary question: Doongh: her hand, the an‘Wot youm come yourgle at which her arm hangs self den, you another by her side, the width of white folk?’ Invasion her wrists. To my astonand dispossession were ishment they returned a not curious tales from diagnosis: Nah Doongh the distant past: their had Erb-Duchenne palsy. impacts were still unThe bundle of nerves rolling almost a century anchored in the neck and later. There is no doubt connected to the arm is that Nah Doongh saw called the brachial plexus. her own predicament in At some stage in Nah this light, and she asked Doongh’s life, these nerves the obvious question: were violently torn away. If you know my CounWhat we know of Nah try was stolen, why are Doongh’s injuries circle you here? You are white and seem to coalesce: the too. scars on the left side of her Still Shand persistNah Doongh, 1890s (Local Studies Collection, Penrith City Library) face, the depression in her ed with her questions skull, her left arm withered about ‘when the whites and palsied, together speak of a major, violent trauma. came’. For Nah Doongh, Shand was a new friend, Dr Oakley thinks she must have suffered ‘a single mas- someone she hoped to cultivate. So she began the firstsive blunt trauma either from a blow to the side of the contact story again, this time invoking the Aboriginal head … a heavy fall to the ground or being forcefully version of Captain Cook as mythological invaderrammed into a wall or door’. figure, or, in Deborah Bird Rose’s words, ‘the persona People with Erb-Duchenne palsy suffer muscle of conquest, the quintessential immoral European’. weakness, they cannot use the affected arm, cannot flex In Nah Doongh’s telling, Captain Cook was their elbow or pull their wrist back. The outer side of the arm is numb right down to the thumb and index finger. a great big white man, bigger and [than] I ever saw, Yet in the Penrith photograph, Nah Doongh wears an come down from Sydney way. Oh for black fellow apron, the universal symbol of the domestic servant, a frightened, tink a debil debil come. Dat man Captain worker. Her arm and hand limp, she grasps her walkCook … come with guns and tings, shoot em too much ing stick. Michael Ingrey, who is descended from the kangaroo, not plenty for black man to eat, so all of them Shand family, says stories about Nah Doongh are still dies, except me.

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This Captain Cook, terrifying though he was, didn’t shoot people, but game, in a greedy and immoral way. Ultimately, the outcome was the same: the deaths of Nah Doongh’s people.

myself.’ She had no one else. Despite Shand’s claim that faithful ‘Black Nellie’ stayed with them for years, this was not true; it was not the end of the story. By late 1895, Nah Doongh had left the Shand family. The Penrith police had sent an urgent request to the Aboriginal Protection Board: a cottage was needed for ‘Black Nellie’ as ‘no one can be found to take charge of this old woman’.

n old age, Nah Doongh missed her own family. ‘All my folks are dead,’ she told the Shands sadly, ‘Mudder, Fadder, everybody dead, all but myself.’ They probably heard her words complacently, nodding at yet more evidence of the ‘dying race’. Yet for Nah Doongh it was ah Doong told Shand where her home was: a surely not about ‘the race’ but her own family and band. farm on Bringelly Road called Frogmore, in She yearned for long-lost parents and younger brothers. present-day Kingswood. This was likely her If she had daughters and grandchildren on the coast, birthplace. It’s the site of a school now, tidy asphalt, she didn’t speak of them. big gates, a carpark next Her visits were to Camden, door, and a tiny remnant not La Perouse. Young of bushland at the back. Angelina never reapA little more unravelpeared. ling of Shand’s narrative Ironically, it is because reveals that Dr and Mrs Nah Doongh was ‘the last’ Shand bought this farm and reliant on white peoin 1891, the same year ple that we know so much Nah Doongh came to about her. We know far live with them. She may less about the Aboriginal have been seeking more groups who managed to than shelter from the maintain families and floods: she might have communities. But what been trying to secure were they like, these white access to her home, her people Nah Doongh knew birthplace. how to befriend? Nah Doongh also In the decades before tried to explain her Federation, as the idea spiritual beliefs to her of a W hite Australia rather mystified friend. crystallised as a unifying She said that ‘the devidentity and an aspirail caused the windy tion for the coming nadays – (“buoy, buoy” she tion, racialised language, called him)’ and that imagery, and attitudes ‘good devil made the were deeply ingrained sun shine’. Devil was and taken for granted. an early loan word from Nellie in front of a screen outside the ‘Tile Room’ at Camden Park, I n M i l e s Fr a n k l i n’s English used to describe c.1880s (Camden Historical Society Collection) 1909 novel Some Everyboth smallpox (devilday Folk and Dawn, set on the Nepean near Penrith, the devil) and evil spirits. Boy was a coastal Sydney Eora river folk casually use the term ‘black gin’ when they word for death, or being dead, which by the 1840s was want to express ridiculousness or low status. Today the widely used as the name of an all-encompassing spiritual words are startling: they jump from the page. But not Being. Boy could be both benevolent and malevolent in Nah Doongh’s time. Then they were part of everyday and was associated with strong winds. Shand’s narraconversation in the white community. tive tends to relegate all of this to the realm of curious Shand’s oil portrait of Nah Doongh was an object superstition, but Nah Doongh’s beliefs signal cultural of considerable local pride and interest. But on its first continuity, an ongoing Aboriginal ontology of the world public display in 1893, The Nepean Times described Nah as inspirited. Doongh’s face with abhorrence: ‘The very hideousness of We don’t know with any certainty where or when the grin, disclosing the great thick lips, the scanty fangs, Nah Doongh died. Local collector and historian George the jagged gums, the puckered face, the dark subdued- Bunyan thought she was buried in St Stephen’s Cemtreacherous eyes of the ancient aboriginal.’ None of etery at Penrith. But I searched St Stephen’s burial this could have escaped Nah Doongh. But what choice register and found no trace of her. There are no police did she have? ‘Mudder, Fadder, everybody dead, all but or council records that might explain what happened to

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Nah Doongh. Stranger still is the absence of press reShand wrote about Nah Doongh’s fine but faded ports. The deaths of old Aboriginal people were normally beige shawl, which, she said, had been ‘sent out from widely reported with maudlin fanfare: their passing was England for the first MacArthur’s wife’. Clearly it was considered emblematic of the sad but inevitable extinc- a gift from the Macarthur women, one which Nah tion of the race, a core strand in the way settler Austral- Doongh treasured. Shand added that Nah Doongh was ians understood the forces of history. But there were no wearing this shawl when she painted her portrait. Oh, mournful odes for Nah Doongh. This silence suggests that lost painting again! What had become of it? Out that Nah Doongh was not in Penrith when she died. of habit, only half-thinking, I googled those words one The New South Wales Registrar General holds a more time: Sarah Shand Black Nellie painting. death certificate for an Aboriginal woman named Nellie. To my shock, there was a hit: ‘Sarah Shand, Nellie She died of diarrhoea and exhaustion on 10 December the Cook’. It led, ultimately, to an art dealer’s site: I held 1898 at the Newington Asylum for destitute women. my breath. Finally the image appeared on my screen: Nellie was buried the same day at Rookwood Cemetery, a fine painting of a broadly smiling Nah Doongh, wearno doubt in a pauper’s grave. A terse note on the certifi- ing a buttoned dress, similar to the one in the Penrith cate says: ‘This woman could photograph, and a jaunty not speak sufficient English scarf. Her hair is brushed to obtain any particulars over the left side of her for her. No friends.’ There forehead. Her dark eyes are few surviving records twinkle. Mrs Macarthur’s for Newington Asylum, fine, faded beige shawl is and none for this woman, draped around her shoulNellie, so we cannot know ders, just as Shand said. It when she was admitted to falls into her lap, covering the asylum or who brought both her hands. g her there. Nah Doongh, of course, spoke English well. Acknowledgments But then I think of my own I want to gratefully acmother, who after a terrible knowledge and thank Alan fall could only speak her Atkinson, Barry Corr, Tom mother tongue. Griffiths, Duncan Hulme, Could this be Nah Michael Ingrey, Paul Irish, Doongh’s death certificate? Terry Kass, Shino Konishi, If it is, her story ends in dePeter Lane, Stephen Oakspair. Despite her long jourley, Jasmine Seymour, Lorney home and her strategiraine Stacker, Richard Wacally crafted friendships, she terhouse, Leanne Watson, died away from her Country, Erin Wilson, Rhiannon unable to communicate, and Wright, and John Wrigley Nellie the Cook (c.1886), Sarah Shand among strangers. In the end, for their generous advice her song, stories, and teachand help with this project. ing could not make Shand understand the injustices and losses colonisation had wrought upon her and her Grace Karskens is Professor of History at the University people. But what is biography for if not to awaken us to of New South Wales. Her books include the multi-award the shared predicament of hidden and forgotten people, winning The Rocks: Life in early Sydney (1997) and The Colony: the poor and old, the outcast people of Australia at the A history of early Sydney (2009), which won the 2010 optimistic, exuberant brink of Federation? Whoever she Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Non-Fiction. Her was, wherever she came from, this Aboriginal woman next book, People of the River: Lost worlds of early Australia, died far from her Country, unable to communicate, and will be published by Allen & Unwin in 2020. Her esamong strangers. say ‘Nah Doongh’s Song’ won the 2019 Calibre Essay Prize. ❖ iography is not a finite business; it’s a process, a journey. I have been researching, writing, and The Calibre Essay Prize, created in 2007, was origithinking about Nah Doongh, her song and sto- nally sponsored by Copyright Agency (through its ries, for over a decade now, but it was only when the Cultural Fund). Since 2013 Australian Book Review has link with Camden and the Macarthur family became fully funded Calibre, with generous support from ABR clear that another detail in Shand’s narrative suddenly Patron and Chair, Mr Colin Golvan AM QC, and from fell into place. the other ABR Patrons.

E S S AY

Test sites Dan Dixon TRICK MIRROR: REFLECTIONS ON SELF-DELUSION

by Jia Tolentino

Fourth Estate $27.99 pb, 292 pp, 9780008294939

riters describing the contemporary moment abound. Many do it well, but few do it as shrewdly as Jia Tolentino. With Trick Mirror: Reflections on self-delusion, Tolentino has produced a début collection of essays so insightful and moving that it appears to exist in a genre separate to so much perpetually circulated personal and political writing, the surfeit of which seems to define our era. Since joining the New Yorker as a staff writer in 2016, Tolentino has produced a variety of spectacular and important journalism about both the gravely serious (including some of the most formidable analysis of Bill Cosby’s trial and the Harvey Weinstein case) and the ostensibly frivolous (Tolentino, the pre-eminent documenter of Twitter culture, identifies where it is literary and where it is dangerous; in 2018 she also wrote an extraordinary investigation into the rise of vaping in US schools). In Trick Mirror, Tolentino expands her method and style, developing what amounts to a meditation on the consolations of a culture in which people (particularly women) are made to feel complicit in their own degradation. The subtitle elegantly captures the thrumming engine of this book, a lightly ironised recognition that reflecting on self-delusion offers no guaranteed cure. In fact, it is often the process by which delusion is hardened and extended. Tolentino knows that as we continue 38 AUGUST 2019

to record ourselves, share ourselves, consume one another’s identities, we risk losing our capacity for productive self-critique. Each essay is, in some way, concerned with themes that heighten the appeal of self-delusion: the internet, performance, faith, America, feminism, capitalism. Where others would look to gratify the reader by preaching dark generalisations or by mapping out happy escapes, Tolentino models a perceptive equivocation, navigating and confronting the tension between how narrative can both clarify and obscure, framing new and lucid ways of seeing or distorting reality for the sake of a nourishing tale. During the introduction, in a typically self-aware gesture, she describes the book as ‘an even more elaborate mechanism to continue misdirecting myself from the truth’. Trick Mirror’s quality is largely a product of Tolentino’s skill in diagnosing without generalising, revealing that the aetiologies of our various cultural malaise are far more complex than we like to assume. It would be reductive to call Trick Mirror a collection of personal essays. Tolentino is by far the most prominent recurring character, but even the stories in which she is the protagonist – including an account of her stint as a sixteenyear-old reality TV contestant on the dubiously titled Girls v. Boys: Puerto Rico, and the collection’s lovely final essay examining her personal resistance to marriage – are those in which the author’s personhood neatly conveys how the cultural systems being examined ultimately assert their power at an individual level; how a person comes to self-police. The prose is warm and sometimes sharply funny, with no trace of the vernacular corniness that many American essayists seem to consider a prerequisite to intimacy. When the author’s insecurities are disclosed, they do not read as sentimental currency traded for readerly feeling, but as genuine revelations. ‘I still can’t tell,’ she writes, in an essay about religion and MDMA, ‘whether my inclination toward ecstasy is a sign that I still believe in God, after all of this, or if it was only because of the ecstatic tendency that I ever believed at all.’ Tolentino is especially adept at deploying the understated, gut-churning

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW

phrase. ‘Nothing today ever de-escalates’ and ‘porn and modelling are the only careers in which women regularly outearn men’ appear within paragraphs of each other in ‘Always be Optimizing’, an inquiry into athleisure, exercise, and the commodification of bodies. ‘Athleisure,’ she tells us later, ‘is reliably comfortable and supportive in a world that is not.’ Every essay in the collection is good, but the best, ‘We Come from Old Virginia’, is a masterpiece of the form. It begins by describing the context of and fallout from the infamous 2014 Rolling Stone feature ‘A Rape on Campus’, an account of a fraternityhouse gang rape at the University of Virginia (Tolentino’s alma mater) that was discredited shortly after its publication. As Tolentino’s essay unspools, it becomes much more, deliberately and ferociously demonstrating how collective historical amnesia and wilful blindness permit the endless repetition of male sexual violence against women. It’s a searing piece of writing that shows how ‘Women’s bodies have always been test sites upon which governing hierarchies are broken down and reiterated.’ Rape is not exceptional and cannot be treated as an anomaly, Tolentino writes. ‘And there is no way to make that into a satisfying story.’ The essays in Trick Mirror are united by a conviction that whatever makes a story accurate rarely makes it satisfying. In dispensing with the pleasure of the neatly tied bow, Tolentino finds something more invigorating: an understanding that not knowing does not have to mean abandoning ethical commitments. In the opening essay – about how the internet rewards opinion as an end in itself – she wonders what can be done about the fact that she benefits from some of the internet’s worst features, admitting that her ‘career is possible in large part because of the way the internet collapses identity, opinion, and action’, and that as a writer who often depends on the first person, she has ‘some inherent stake in justifying the dubious practice of spending all day trying to figure out what you think’. The clarity of the reflection is justification enough. g Dan Dixon is a writer living in Sydney.

Publisher of the Month with

Rachel Bin Salleh

What was your pathway to publishing?

Unusual and accidental. My Uncle, who was on the management board of Magabala Books, told my dad there was a job going. I was nineteen and needed a job, so I sent my CV. I had zero experience in publishing, had never heard of Magabala, and didn’t choose the ‘pub’ life. After a two-hour phone interview, Peter Bibby, the then managing editor, told me I had the job and asked me when could I get there. I was in Perth at the time. A week later I stole my brother’s bike, packed my bag, and got on a plane. I was first employed as a project editor. Sometime later, Magabala had three positions for trainee editors. I performed so badly at the interview that the committee didn’t want to give me the job, but for some reason they did. I learnt everything on the job and in later positions. I have had the most amazing teachers throughout my career.

How many titles do you publish each year?

We’ve capped the titles between fourteen and sixteen. We’re a small team: to do justice to our creators and books, we’re committed to doing them well and within our capacity.

Which book are you proudest of publishing? Too hard to say. I’ve enjoyed all of them.

Do you edit the books you commission?

Very few these days. My job doesn’t allow me to do many. I love those I do edit. I value the relationship and the conversation around the why and the how, especially the motivation of the creator. It is an extraordinarily humbling craft and profession.

What qualities do you look for in an author? The qualities of the story.

In your dealings with authors, what is the greatest pleasure – and challenge?

My greatest pleasure is seeing and knowing a creator

is happy with their book. The biggest challenge is letting the creator know that there isn’t much money in it.

Do you write yourself? If so, has it informed your work as a publisher?

I have written a children’s picture book. The experience has made me much more aware of the process. I have always believed that publishing is an exercise in the lost art of conversation, in all its stages and all its forms. As an Aboriginal publisher, I believe in deep listening (to our creators). There is as much said in cultural silence as there is in the noise of words and white-speak. Culture is as much as what you don’t say as it is about what you do.

What kinds of books do you enjoy reading?

I rarely read for pleasure these days. When I do I’m not fixated about what I read. I try to read children’s picture books, junior fiction, YA, fiction (good, bad, ugly), general non-fiction, gift books, the back of cereal packets, any blurb I can get my hands on, advertising catalogues in newspapers, comics, graphic novels, bad westerns, cards in newsagencies, scripts. I watch good television drama series to dissect the writing. I read, watch, listen to everything that falls inside and outside the box. It’s about being able to think differently and to reflect this in what gets published.

Who are the editors/publishers you most admire?

The individuals who have impacted my journey, have taught me and continue to teach me: Peter Bibby, Bruce Sims, Meredith Rose, Rhonda Black, Josie Douglas, Sandra Phillips, Lisa Fuller, Ruth Gilbert, Margaret Whiskin, Rachael Christensen, Maryann Ballantyne, Grace Lucas-Pennington, Ellen van Neerven.

What’s the outlook for new writing of quality? As an Aboriginal Publisher at a small Indigenous

I NT ERVI EW

publishing house, it’s about quality storytelling and the process of writing is what may come later, in some instances. Thinking that new writing of quality will come from ‘literate’ peoples marginalises where some of the greatest stories will ultimately come from. I don’t like to assume that great writing and storytelling needs to emerge from individuals or communities who/that are ‘literate’, and I refuse to ostracise those that may have a voice but not the ‘socially accepted’ form to tell it in. I do think that concentrating on getting good stories from literate peoples may be a narrow way of looking at the world. Statements by some nonIndigenous publishers that they have ‘standards’ when it comes to First Nations writing are also extraordinarily limiting. Honestly, you mob seriously need to think outside the box and open up to different ways of thinking. As Adam Savage of Mythbusters said, ‘I reject your reality and [we] substitute our own.’

In a highly competitive market, is individuality one of the casualties?

Different strokes for different folks. I think there is room for all types of literature, at all levels, for all types of people. With many small, quality Indie publishers, and the commitment to great storytelling, there will always be fabulous stories.

On publication, which is more gratifying: a brilliant launch, a satisfied author, encomiastic reviews, or rapid sales? Hands down … always a satisfied author.

Wood?

Rachel Bin Salleh is a Nimunburr and Yawuru

woman from the Dampier Peninsula in the Kimberley of Western Australia. She grew up in the pearling town of Broome and joined Magabala Books in 1993. Rachel has worked with Indigenous writers, storytellers, poets, yarners, songwriters, playwrights, performers, and illustrators from across Australia. Rachel is passionate about publishing First Nations creators on a national and international literary stage.

Scott?

What’s your Favourite Australian Novel published in the twenty-first century?

Flanagan?

Vote now and you could win!

Winton? Wright? Zusak?

De Kretser? 40 AUGUST 2019

1. Readings gift voucher ($500) 2. Complete recordings of Herbert von Karajan on Deutsche Grammophone and Decca courtesy of Classics Direct ($1,281)

VOTE HERE

3. Five-year digital subscription to ABR ($220)

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AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW

A logic of elimination

The differences and commonalities of Indigenous voices

David Haworth GROWING UP ABORIGINAL IN AUSTRALIA edited by Anita Heiss Black Inc., $29.99 pb, 311 pp, 9781863959810

he late historian Patrick Wolfe did not pull any punches when he wrote that colonialism seeks to eliminate and replace the Indigenous cultures holding sovereignty over the lands and resources that colonisers wish to claim. Wolfe considered this ‘logic of elimination’ to be one of the defining and persisting features of colonial societies, manifest not only as early-frontier warfare and land expropriation but also as a whole range of subsequent policies and attitudes working towards the erasure, dispossession, or assimilation of Indigenous peoples. By demonstrating the continuity between these policies and attitudes and the violence of the frontier, Wolfe famously asserted that colonial invasion is not a single event occurring in the distant past – something over and done with, which everyone should now move on from – but an ongoing structure within colonial societies today, including Australia. Heavy stuff, all this talk of invasion and erasure. Not a suitable topic for children, some might think. Indeed, many fully grown white Australian adults balk at thinking about, or even acknowledging, these defining aspects of Australia’s past and present. And yet, reading this ground-breaking anthology as a non-Indigenous person, one is struck by the fact that growing up Aboriginal in Australia often means confronting and negotiating the ongoing structure of colonial invasion, and its eliminatory logic, at a very young age. Growing Up Aboriginal in Australia is compiled and edited by Anita Heiss – prolific writer, anthologist, Indigenous literacy advocate, and proud Wiradjuri woman – who brings together more than fifty contributors to reflect on growing up Aboriginal in

Australia. Heiss begins her introduction coming to these connections later in by emphasising that ‘there is no single life, or talk about the ways these conor simple way to define what it means nections are yet to be made. Many to grow up Aboriginal in Australia’, describe the experience of growing up and that her goal in compiling this an- in two worlds, or the ways their expethology is ‘to showcase as many of the riences of racism intersect with other diverse voices, experiences and stories forms of oppression. One recurring together as possible’. Heiss makes a response to the theme is the observation number of editorial decisions that work that growing up Aboriginal can be an to showcase this diversity. ongoing process that does not necesThe contributions are quite brief, sarily commence or end in childhood; ranging from two to ten pages. This ena- another is the contention that the nables Heiss to include a large number of tion of Australia, as a whole, must ‘grow contributions; it also encourages many up Aboriginal’ in order to reckon with contributors to present a series of snap- the past and present realities of invasion. shots and anecdotes from their lives, Heiss does not confine her selection often combined with a brief family history, rather than ‘Salt demonstrates why Bruce Pascoe’s extended narratives. voice is important to the country.’ Heiss is not prescriptive as to how —Kim Scott contributors address the theme of growing up Aboriginal in Australia; they are simply required to do it in non-fiction. Many contributors relate childhood experiences of racism and racist violence and the ongoing ramifications of these, but not all define their growing up in this way. Many contributors celebrate experiences of growing up with deep connections to language, OUT NOW culture, and Country; others celebrate the experience of Salt ABR ad 82x110.indd 1

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to established writers or well-known public figures. The anthology includes plenty of these: writers such as Tony Birch, Ambelin Kwaymullina, and Celeste Liddle, and public figures like composer and singer Deborah Cheetham, football legend Adam Goodes, and actor Miranda Tapsell. Heiss also includes emerging and unpublished writers, and people from a wide variety of professions, ages, and backgrounds: teachers, doctors, lawyers, homemakers, artists, retirees, students, academics, journalists, prisoners, and veterans of Australia’s armed forces. This diversity means that the anthology not only tells many stories but also moves through a wide range of writing styles, in quick succession. Some pieces are written as lyrical prose poems, some as witty journalistic commentaries; some are written with the staid formality of a high school essay, some in the style of a grandmotherly anecdote or a yarn told at the pub. While there are different levels of literary experience on display, what is more evident is that each contributor has his or her own particular story to tell, often vividly and movingly. Something that unites the contributors is that they all have the ability and opportunity to tell their own story. In light of this, many of them make a point of honouring the memory of those loved ones who are no longer here to tell their stories. The collection as a whole is dedicated to the memory of one of the contributors – poet, teacher, and activist Alice Eather – who took her own life before it was published. Heiss makes one further editorial decision that seems simple but has a profound effect on the reading experience: the alphabetical order in which the pieces are presented. Since the contributors often write about childhood experiences, and since their ages range from thirteen to seventy-something, the collection not only flits through a variety of styles but also skips back and forth in time. This highlights both the diversity of Aboriginal experiences and the connections between generations. A piece by Zachary Penrith-Puchalski about growing up in the nineties, and having his Aboriginality questioned constantly due to the colour of his skin, is followed 42 AUGUST 2019

alphabetically with one by Carol Pettersen about growing up on a mission in the 1940s and being forbidden to have contact with her beloved older brother because of the difference in their skin colour. This hopscotching between decades shows how racist notions of Aboriginality, defined by the eliminatory logic of skin colour and blood percentages, can reverberate through missions and school playgrounds separated by half a century, but it also shows the strength and resilience, extending across generations, of Aboriginal people living with this logic. Celebrating both the differences and commonalities of Australian Aboriginal voices and experiences is important,

because one way the logic of elimination manifests in contemporary Australia is in the persistent myth that there is only one narrowly defined way to be and look Aboriginal. Many of the pieces explore, in sometimes devastating detail, the impact this myth can have on a single life. Taken together, the diversity exhibited by these fifty pieces shatters that myth. One hopes for a sequel. g David Haworth is completing a doctorate in English Literature at the University of Melbourne, looking at depictions of non-human artfulness and creativity. His Masters thesis won the 2013 Percival Serle Prize.

Darker shadows

Synthesising religious history and modernity

Paul Giles PERMANENT REVOLUTION: THE REFORMATION AND THE ILLIBERAL ROOTS OF LIBERALISM by James Simpson

Harvard University Press (Footprint), $79.99 hb, 464 pp, 9780674987135

he argument of James Simpson’s Permanent Revolution is that the emergence of liberalism as a cultural and political category in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was shaped by the ‘radically illiberal history of Protestantism’. Rather than adhering to the ‘triumphalist’ tradition of Whig historiography that regarded the Glorious Revolution of 1688 and its subsequent Bill of Rights as the exemplification and precursor of a great tradition of English liberalism, Simpson suggests instead that the development of liberalism was inextricably entangled with religious dogmatism and intolerance. He points out that, while executing five hundred women for witchcraft between 1566 and 1645, England judicially murdered more Catholics than any other country in Europe between 1580 and 1600, so that the elucidation

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW

of ‘free’ thought always encumbered darker shadows. The larger repercussions of this thesis involve a reconceptualisation of the British Enlightenment as in almost every respect ‘the reflex of religious culture’, as well as a sense of modernity itself as having ‘a variety of faces, one of which is revolutionary, illiberal evangelical religion’. Though Simpson does not push present-day analogies too far, there are clearly implications here for understanding the broader contexts of ‘Contemporary Liberalism’, whose proclivity towards ‘identitarian politics’ he understands as being interwoven at structural levels with the ‘continuing influence of evangelical religion’. One of the characteristics of Simpson’s work has always been to make connections between historical periods normally kept separate from one an-

other, a form of synthesis he justifies on the grounds that smaller conceptual units tend to produce ‘truncated forms of historical understanding’. Simpson thus aims to ‘bring religious history into the story of modernity’, arguing that crossovers between medieval and Renaissance culture are as significant as those between the Reformation and the Enlightenment. There is a playful, donnish aspect to these historical reconstructions, with the author speculating that the late-fourteenth to mid-seventeenth century might productively be recast as ‘The Age of Biblical Literalism’. It was an ‘age’ in which the issue of despair came to enjoy increasing significance, outweighing more conventional humanist notions of tolerance and perfectibility, while the idea of hypocrisy also grew in stature and visibility. Though not considered important enough in medieval times to feature among the seven deadly sins, hypocrisy was given new status by the increasing emphasis on sincerity among Reformation thinkers, to such an extent that by the 1520s a charge of hypocrisy was being applied globally to the entire Catholic Church. Simpson himself is a native Melburnian, and there is an interesting parallel between his work and that of political scientist J.G.A. Pocock, who worked in New Zealand before spending most of his career at Johns Hopkins University in the United States. In a reflective essay published recently, Pocock suggests how his own view of Anglo-American republicanism had been shaped in part by his ‘antipodean’ provenance, his refusal to become incarcerated intellectually within a particular geographic region. The mobility of Simpson’s perspectives carries a similar kind of charge. His traversal of historical time is similar in kind to Pocock’s traversal of national space, and it similarly serves to open up traditionally demarcated fields to more heterodox perspectives. There is a pointed critique throughout Permanent Revolution of many widely respected historians, with the author taking no prisoners as he chastises Christopher Hill’s ‘objectionable and plain ignorant views’, the ‘gross travesty’ involved in Keith Thomas’s misrepresentation of the

medieval church, and the tendency of Jonathan Israel to advance ‘absurdly superficial positions in a number of books, some of them very long’. This is not only a historical work, but also a treatise about how history has been organised and written. Simpson describes himself here as ‘more of a cultural historian than a literary critic’, and the bulk of this work focuses on how questions of theology intersect with issues in political history. But he also maintains that ‘works of art register cultural pressure and/

The larger repercussions of this thesis involve a reconceptualisation of the British Enlightenment as in almost every respect ‘the reflex of religious culture’ or signal cultural change with greater, more luminous clarity than works from any other discursive field’, and this gives him licence as a scholar to consider various ‘exemplary’ texts familiar from the English literary canon, particularly those of ‘great literary authors’ such as Shakespeare, Spenser, Milton, and Bunyan. There is an illuminating discussion of how Shakespeare treats Puritan controversies obliquely, with the Duke’s description of Angelo in Measure for Measure as ‘precise’ being ‘an unmistakable buzzword for the puritan godly in early modern England’. Simpson also argues that Shylock in The Merchant of Venice is ‘less recognizable as a Jew and more recognizable as a Puritan’. He makes the cogent point that this kind of Elizabethan theatre cannot properly be understood unless positioned intertextually in relation to medieval cycles of plays. There are a number of very fine discussions of Milton, whose engagement with theology, politics, and aesthetics in equal measure furnishes an ideal critical space for Simpson’s account of how the idea of liberty developed. Simpson chronicles how Milton’s career was propelled by rejecting former versions of himself, and also how Milton’s attacks on fellow Protestants and former allies were driven by a paradoxi-

cal impetus of reforming the Reformation itself. Paradox, as the oxymoronic title of this book suggests, is a trope and theoretical matrix to which Simpson is particularly attuned. Given his enthusiastic engagement with long theological treatises such as William Perkins’s A Golden Chain of 1591, Simpson does not seem quite as comfortable with creative writers of the more indolent kind. He is not so persuasive on Spenser, for example, expressing impatience with the ‘seriously overweight’ Faerie Queene and indicating, not entirely convincingly, that ‘The Faerie Queene is the original Gothic horror’. As in many recent Harvard University Press books, there seems to be a deliberate and slightly forced attempt here to achieve a lightness of stylistic touch, but there is also a certain resistance to Spenser’s sense of aesthetic luxury and languor, with Simpson’s analytical rigour finding itself perhaps more obviously at home with Milton’s sterner injunctions. Nevertheless, this is an important and erudite book from a major scholar, one that takes issue in a critically self-conscious fashion with the way historical periods have been conventionally formulated, while arguing that we come to understand the cultural history of liberalism more clearly by recognising its continuities with the religious legacies of medieval culture. g

Paul Giles is Challis Professor of English at the University of Sydney. His new book is Backgazing: Reverse Time in Modernist Culture (OUP, 2019). POLITICS

COMMENT

Behrouz Boochani and the politics of naming by Omid Tofighian

n June 2019, Australian Book Review announced the ABR Behrouz Boochani Fellowship, an initiative generously funded by Peter McMullin in association with the Peter McMullin Centre on Statelessness (University of Melbourne). This initiative was not only created to highlight issues pertaining to displacement and exile, but also as an important act of naming in the face of a border regime designed to strip human beings of their personal identities and dignity. Behrouz’s work has meticulously illustrated how Australia’s border politics drives people into submission and insanity by systematically erasing their names. The act of naming and of erasure has far-reaching, multidimensional impacts, and is often part of dynamic collective processes. Acknowledgment and support by ABR can be better understood in relation to Behrouz’s oeuvre of critical writing and creative resistance, and also in the context of the awards he has received in Australia and internationally. In order to appreciate the different functions and dimensions associated with this new Fellowship,it is helpful to consider aspects of the organised transnational strategy Behrouz has been developing in association with various collaborators and confidants. In 2018 Behrouz Boochani won the Anna Politkovskaya Award for Journalism. The award, announced in Ferrara, Italy, was organised by Internazionale magazine. This was a significant moment for a number of reasons. The award was established in 2009 to acknowledge and support the courageous work of distinguished reporters struggling for justice and truth-telling. Named in honour of the Russian investigative journalist who was brutally killed in 2006, the award is a testament to the brave and unrelenting contributions made by many journalists the world over. The Anna Politkovskaya Award is a way of encouraging more critical journalism and opening spaces for radically new and innovative forms of reporting. The very name of the award has both political and epistemic consequences; the award makes a historical statement and helps shape the future of journalism. It also works to incorporate cultures of resistance into the social imaginary. By winning the 2018 Anna Politkovskaya Award, Behrouz has established himself as a significant global actor in the history of reporting.

44 AUGUST 2019

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW

On winning the 2019 Victorian Prize for Literature, Behrouz engraved his name into Australia’s collective consciousness. His influence and example continue to reverberate throughout journalistic, literary, artistic, academic, and political circles around the world. The Wheeler Centre, which administers the Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards, decided to celebrate humanity and creativity rather than observe rigid rules. In deeming No Friend But the Mountains eligible, the Centre recognised the symbolic importance of establishing Behrouz’s name by disrupting standard bureaucracy and procedure. Other Australian awards have since followed suit. A particular meaning-making and meaning-sharing activity takes place when a name either initiates a tradition or becomes an iconic part of a tradition. With the creation of the ABR Behrouz Boochani Fellowship, Behrouz’s name now represents both. Nonetheless, more needs to be said about the affirmation and empowerment associated with naming and how it can transcend institutions, operational networks of power, and bordering practices. Behrouz’s name is an indispensable element of the intellectual and creative challenge against the colonial imaginary conditioning Australia’s border regime and detention industry. Dismantling the material conditions, political representation and policies is a matter of great urgency, but this must be coupled with a transformation of the epistemic and symbolic aesthetic. Behrouz is a political actor in the fight against border violence, but he is also an artist and intellectual. The two are necessary parts of his identity and his embodied experience in what he has named Manus Prison. No Friend But the Mountains produces a new language for knowing and fighting border violence and colonialism, and his method and vision involves radically new acts of naming. Understanding this factor, I tried to embody the same philosophical and political approach in the English translation. The Anna Politkovskaya Award was Behrouz’s first major international prize. It represented a form of recognition and appreciation he had not experienced in Australia. I was privileged to accept the award on Behrouz’s behalf. It was surreal – and a tragedy – that

he could not be there to accept it himself. I also worked closely with the Internazionale a Ferrara Festival – in particular Luisa Ciffolilli, Junko Tereo, and Marina Lalovic – to organise activities and to establish networks. With their profound understanding of the significance of Behrouz’s writing and resistance, they represented a vision that included politics, art, and community. This was clear in the way they integrated Behrouz’s journalism, No Friend But the Mountains, and the film Chauka, Please Tell Us the Time into their programming. (The Italian translation of No Friend But the Mountains will be published later this year by Add Editore; there is already great interest in the book in Italy due to the award and festival.) A significant number of Australian citizens are offended by the idea of removing colonial icons. They occupy digital spaces in an effort to erase or justify historical injustices. Political leaders continue to invest in celebrations of colonial glory in public spaces and further ingrain coloniality into their fabrication of Australian identity and values. In opposition, the act of naming can function as a form of resistance and has potential to disrupt and reclaim digital and public spaces. Behrouz Boochani is one of the many names that needs to reverberate in intellectual, educational, and artistic spaces, in addition to his role as a political and human rights activist. Understood as part of other traditions of resistance, the ABR Behrouz Boochani Fellowship helps to galvanise a wider collective process. It has unlimited potential to initiate other projects and actions. The Fellowship – based on consultation, collaboration, and sharing – can be leveraged in empowering ways. An addition to the shared philosophical activity I discuss in my translator’s note, it is another call to action. Part of a larger movement, this act of naming by ABR helps to form broader alliances and to invite the creation of more radical initiatives in future. g Omid Tofighian is the translator of Behrouz Boochani’s award-winning book No Friend But the Mountains: Writing From Manus Prison (Picador, 2018). ❖

Foundational fiction

Roger McDonald’s contribution to historical fiction

Robin Gerster POSTCOLONIAL HERITAGE AND SETTLER WELL-BEING: THE HISTORICAL FICTIONS OF ROGER McDONALD by Christopher Lee Cambria Press, $134.99 hb, 246 pp, 9781604979497

hough he had already produced two volumes of poetry, Roger McDonald first came to popular attention with his spectacular début novel, 1915, published in 1979. A recreation of the Gallipoli Campaign from the points of view of two temperamentally different boyhood friends (thus anticipating Peter Weir’s movie Gallipoli, which appeared in 1981), 1915 stood out from the ruck of Australian World War I retrospective fiction. It still does. Meticulously researched, it provides a plausible historical reconstruction of a lost world, and an arresting account of the perils and stresses of life in the ‘whirlpool of venomous geography’ around Anzac Cove. 1915 was more than yet another deferential historical novel about Australians at war. By fusing domestic with military brutality, it penetrated the complacent face of the heroic Australian war legend. Country-born Billy Mackenzie starts out as the stereotypical Digger, one of the boys. Attractively cocky and truculent, he is said to be ‘made’ for war; at Gallipoli he becomes a sinister, psychopathic, and solitary sniper nicknamed ‘the Murderer’. But his Gallipoli self was there in the making, in killing kangaroos for pleasure and sexual violence at home before the war. Men like Billy Mackenzie, McDonald writes towards the end of the novel, carry war within them and seem compelled ‘to obey its simple imperative’. This is a disturbing take on C.E.W. Bean’s notion that the bush-bred Australians of the First AIF were ready-made for the battlefield. 1915 marked McDonald as a writer who tackled ‘big’ historical and national subjects on his own artistic (modern-

ist) terms, rather than those imposed by popular taste or tradition. As the Australian Literature specialist Christopher Lee points out in this extensive critique of his work, this did not stop the University of Queensland Press from dragooning the novel into the world of Diggerdom, embarking on a nationalistic PR campaign ludicrously incompatible with the novel’s challenging content. The Canberra launch, Lee observes, featured polo players dressed up as Light Horsemen displaying their riding skills on the lawns outside Parliament House. From 1915, McDonald has gone on to produce numerous novels, as well as film and television scripts, a collection of essays, and (a personal favourite of mine) the wonderful fictionalised memoir Shearer’s Motel (1992). His works are highly readable as well as diverse and moving, and he has made a significant if perhaps undervalued contribution to Australian historical fiction, a genre in which the country has excelled. He deserves the recognition afforded by being included in the ‘Australian Literature Series’ of critical monographs brought out by the US academic publisher Cambria Press. Under the general editorship of Susan Lever, the series has produced several studies of the work, career, and reception of Australian writers as various as Thea Astley and Christos Tsiolkas. Aimed at scholars and students engaged in the study of Australian writing (assuming that they still exist), the series provides a valuable collective survey of the field, in the broader context of international literary developments. A characteristic of McDonald’s fiction, foreshadowed by 1915, has been his trait of situating his stories in COMMENT

what Lee calls ‘foundational’ periods of Australian history, such as World War I, the convict era, frontier settlement and pastoralism, and World War II and its aftermath. Lee’s main focus is on how his predominantly Anglo-Celtic characters search for purpose and fulfilment – or ‘well-being’, to quote the book’s title – ‘within the mythological registers of his nation’s postcolonial history’. Postcolonial criticism is like ploughing a quagmire, or at least the field sometimes looks like it. Ideology churns out commentary that is often messy and unproductive; critique becomes condemnation. It doesn’t have to be this

Australian tradition and the colonial grand narrative is clearly an insufficient basis for postcolonial well-being.’ In his chapter on McDonald’s Miles Franklin-award-winning novel about an Irish convict, The Ballad of Desmond Kale (2006), Lee also shows a welcome willingness to take on the ideological blindness of some revisionary Australian criticism in this country, as exampled in the 1980s and 1990s in the inability of some critics to recognise the pervasive irony in Henry Lawson’s stories of life in the Bush. McDonald’s commitment to ‘art rather than example’, Lee diplomatically suggests, ‘prioritises

Postcolonial criticism is like ploughing a quagmire way. Rudyard Kipling’s Kim is not the kind of novel Edward W. Said might have been expected to admire. But by recognising the book’s difficult-topigeonhole complexity as well as its palpable colonialist attitudes, Said produced a scintillating critical appreciation of an important novel. Postcolonial Heritage and Settler Well-Being contains a little sludgy prose here and there, and some critical clichés that have currency in today’s academic discourse. And some weirdness. On the second page of the book, Lee summarises (presumably for his US audience) Australia as a continent whose national story hinges on the dispossession of ‘First Peoples’ by an anonymous mass called ‘Settler Invaders’. This seems to be rather like reducing the human history of Australia to a computer game. For Australian readers, Postcolonial Heritage and Settler Well-Being contains some wearisome descriptive detail: New South Wales, where McDonald was born, is described as ‘Australia’s largest state by population’, and so on. Lee’s appraisal of McDonald’s take on the challenges faced by Australians – particularly Australian men – is intelligent, illuminating, and ‘appreciative’ without being overly respectful. His final judgement is succinctly articulated in the book’s penultimate sentence: ‘These men are not well served by the myths and legends of the 46 AUGUST 2019

politics and ethics less than many academic critics would like’. Roger McDonald ‘prefers his readers to be the interpreters of his fictions’, Lee writes in the first chapter. This is a somewhat self-effacing thing for a critic to say early in a lengthy interpretative account of the writer. But he is making a point that everyone in the practice of literary criticism should acknowledge. As always, the best recommendation is to go to the novels themselves. g Robin Gerster is Professor in the School of Languages, Literatures, Cultures and Linguistics at Monash University.

‘His civil heart’

A showcase of Robert Harris’s many voices

Judith Bishop THE GANG OF ONE: SELECTED POEMS by Robert Harris

Grand Parade Poets, $26.95 pb, 224 pp, 9780994600226

n a letter to a friend, American poet James Wright reflected on the meaning of a Selected Poems for a peer he considered undervalued: ‘It shows that defeat, though imminent for all of us, is not inevitable.’ He quoted Stanley Kunitz, whose Selected was belatedly in press: ‘it would be sweet, I’ll grant, after all these years to pop up from underground … The only ones who survive … are those whose ultimate discontent is with themselves. The fiercest hearts are in love with a wild perfection.’ Robert Harris’s ‘ultimate discontent’ and his poetry’s survival seem to prove the point. There is a certain irony to the publication of The Gang of One: Selected Poems twenty-six years after Harris’s death at the age of forty-two. The attention that the poet gave to other lost voices has come full circle to his own. He was a former Navy seaman who wrote a long poem on the wartime loss of the HMAS Sydney. One of his best-

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW

loved and award-winning sequences, the brilliant ‘JANE, Interlinear’, ‘translates’ the historically marginal story of Lady Jane Grey, crowned queen of England for nine days. With The Gang of One, Harris’s poetry is lifted back into daylight, set again in the hands of the readers who knew him, and those of us who didn’t. It takes an uncommon kind of care to memorialise the otherwise lost: a sensitivity and resistance to the injustices done to people and places by time and indifference. Such care is evident in the fact that this publication was assisted by donations from more than ninety people, including a roll-call of Australian poets. The Gang of One is a substantial volume, with almost two hundred pages of poetry. The poems were selected by Judith Beveridge and are introduced by Philip Mead. One gathers from this Selected that Harris was a poet who took some time to find his feet. Early influences ranged from the French Symbolist

poets to local performance poetry. As the title suggests, he harboured many voices in his singular body. There are dramatic, historical, lyric, religious, and political poets in Harris, in various admixtures. There are echoes of T.S. Eliot in the early ekphrastic poem ‘Concerning Shearers Playing for the Bride’: ‘The cards say / and the mat says / “Play!”’. Elsewhere, Harris’s dramatic and declamatory voice conjures up a version of Auden. ‘Concerning’, like a number of Harris’s earlier poems, gets a little lost in its wanderings. The second half of the poem reads like a strong draft, in which the poet is visibly feeling his way, as if to demonstrate what Theodore Roethke wrote: ‘I learn by going where I have to go.’ Yet the half-hewn nature of this poem is illuminating. It shows how the smooth stone emerges from the rough, like a sculpture by Rodin. Some sections are visionary, and these divulge the poet’s talent: […] you call to the stony sides of purpling hills defeated and somehow more remote in late afternoon’s recession of vivid, painful light, call to the fossil, call to the vein and lastly call to those shadows awakening nocturnal birds

Reading the middle and later poems, one sees the early strength distilled. Pivotal poems in this regard are those concerning Harris’s conversion to the Anglican faith from The Cloud Passes Over (1986). Here, Harris discovers a new mood or change of key. After all the metaphors for ‘resonant emptiness’ that the earlier poems had learned to deploy, here instead is the light that ‘crashes in’, that ‘lift[s] off silver slush’; ‘the seashell below, / and overhead / gold’; the feeling of a ‘promise / made at the rain’s origin’. The language and the landscape brighten visibly, even in the presence of the ‘shadows of clouds’: Even as you left the shadows of clouds went gliding over the parched, bright hills,

and rainbow-coloured parrots flew alongside you.

The Gang of One ends with more than thirty pages of uncollected poems. In ‘Grip’, Harris’s compassionate and perceptive vision paints a scene to rival Les Murray’s ‘An Absolutely Ordinary Rainbow’. A man on the outskirts of life (‘he had the shuffle someone might who is dying’) carries ‘a cat on his shoulder’, its ‘eyes balanced on panic and trust’. The couple is poised on the cusp of disaster as they cross against traffic. Their fierce relationship, the poem suggests, makes onlookers aware that their own lives are smaller in contrast; thus the startling perception: ‘People seemed to ignore them out of envy.’ Other uncollected poems, such as ‘Winter Firesong’, ‘The Motive’, ‘My Irish Grandmother’, and ‘A Horse on the Bus’, are a joy to read. In these, sensation and memory undergo a transformation into vision. In ‘A Horse on the Bus’, Harris sketches, with a delicate and haunting empathy, a group of schoolgirls drawing a horse. The fragmented form of the lines mimics the swaying of the bus and an old maternal absence: It reminds me of looking through books at all the horses which my mother drew at their age. So this is where they have galloped to.

It is intriguing that the same poet could write ‘Annoyance Poets’, ‘The Bible’, and ‘Christian’. They reveal Harris, even at the height of his career, crouched in his corner – feeling judged for his callings, poetic and religious – and coming out sparring for a poetry that is ‘rare and hard, and frankly good’, with ‘some apprehension / of higher things’. Harris’s dedication to poetry was complete, by the evidence of these poems and his friends’ accounts. Robert Adamson wrote these lines in an elegy for Michael Dransfield, but the same seems true of Harris: ‘That idea of ourselves as poets was an addiction / more terminal than any opiate the chemists could refine.’

Barry Dickins elegised Harris in 2009 with these memorable words: ‘Robert Harris had only known two things in his short life: poverty and poetry. He knew poetry would get him, and it did.’ Given this context, a poem that Harris wrote on Sir Thomas Chaloner the Elder (d.1565) reads as a veiled self-portrait of the poet he desired to be. Harris empathised with the downcast and deplored the aggressions of the world. He was a poet with a heart more civil than fierce: His verse would speak aloud when truth was gone […] when he and all tyrant monarchs were extinct then would his civil heart swim out as words swim into translation, one by one.

Judith Bishop’s awards include the Peter Porter Poetry Prize (2006, 2011) and the Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry for her collection Interval (UQP, 2018).

Quote of the Month ‘White people and whiteness are the center of the Trump presidency. His primary concern is to defend, protect and promote it. All that threatens it must be attacked and assaulted. Trump is bringing the force of the American presidency to the rescue of white supremacy. And, self-identified Republicans absolutely love him for it. We are watching a very dark chapter in this nation’s history unfold in real time. We are watching as a president returns naked racism to the White House. And we are watching as fellow citizens – possibly a third of them – reveal to us their open animus for us through their continued support of him.’ Charles M. Blow, The New York Times, 14 July 2019

POETRY

Transnodal Keyvan Allahyari AUSTRALIAN BOOKS AND AUTHORS IN THE AMERICAN MARKETPLACE 1840s–1940s

by David Carter and Roger Osborne Sydney University Press $50 pb, 366 pp, 9781743325797

hile working in the London advertising world in the late 1960s, Peter Carey sent his stories to a leading New York literary magazine, Evergreen Review, only to be unimpressed by another rejection. He brooded later: there was ‘something glorious and futile in attempting to make Australian literature when, as everybody in London knew, [it] did not exist’. In Australian Books and Authors in the American Marketplace 1840s–1940s, David Carter and Roger Osborne show that the metropolitan triangle of Melbourne/Sydney–London–New York had been a publishing circuit for at least a century before Carey’s transatlantic, or, as it is appositely termed here, ‘transnodal’, misadventure. The book’s prosaic title predicts its consistently empirical approach and macroscopic canvas of the production, circulation, and afterlives of Australian literary commodity in the United States. Literary markets are capricious beasts, with complex set of behaviours and mutations of their own. Add to that competing international trade rules and domestic tax laws, and what you get is a history as messy as any. There is no upward master narrative here either; ‘no evolutionary pattern’ of Australian books or authors crystallises over the period under discussion. The nine chapters cohere roughly around the productive notion of ‘genre networks’ to explore the intersections of authorial practice, editorial and promotional mechanisms, and consumer culture. In most cases, this was modulated through transactions between British ‘traditional markets’ (Great Britain, its colonies and dominions including Australia) and the US territory (the Americas and the Philippines). In the absence of a formal 48 AUGUST 2019

copyright system, the legal framework got off to a patchy start. As the only regulatory measure against literary piracy, ‘trade courtesy’ allowed the first US publisher that printed a book to gain exclusive rights to the title or to lay claim to the respective author’s subsequent works. Harper, for instance, released Marcus Clarke’s His Natural Life in 1876 after heavily bowdlerising the London-based Bentley & Sons’ threevolume version, unbeknown to the author. Upon receiving a flat fee of £15 from the United States, Clarke jibbed, ‘I suppose it represents something in dollars – Harper’s conscience, perhaps!’ In the context of the hunger for new titles in the ‘vast web of romance’, the US market for stories from down under boomed in the final quarter of the nineteenth century. Australian topography played into colonial fantasies, with reviewers registering the bush as a metaphor and a parodic ground for a new settler-colonial genre. In some cases, authors waltzed along strategically as they felt the need to play up or down the Australianness of their stories, depending on the appetite of the international marketplace for local colour. Rolf Boldrewood’s work was described as ‘opera of the wilderness’, his characters ‘as vulgar of speech as all good Australians are expected to be’. With the London publishers as the first stop on the way, the trade route remained more or less exclusively transatlantic rather than transpacific. This meant that Australian literary property continued to be perceived as an offshoot of literatures of England, or its ‘antipodean variation’ in the American publishing imaginary. Brilliant careers were forged; sparse they were, but refreshingly inclusive of women. Australian Books and Authors is a reminder of a spectacular cast of Australian women writers across this period and their remarkable tenacity to break into the male-dominated book business. By the end of the century, Ada Cambridge and Tasma had become relatively recognisable names in the American literary press. Their success was galvanised by the more pronounced role played by literary agents, the separation of subsidiary rights, and cheap fiction ‘Library’ editions. The publication of Rosa Praed’s

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW

Nadine (1882) in George Munro’s Seaside Library made her the first Australian author to be published in America, and a literary celebrity in New York. Accompanied by the sudden rise in mass literacy and the increased demand for serialised forms, detective fiction in all its subgenres began to be seen as a lucrative market division around the turn of the century. Fergus Hume’s Melbourne sensation, The Mystery of a Hansom Cab (1886), became the biggest international hit of its time, selling three-quarters of a million copies. Carlton Dawe and Ambrose Pratt excelled in mystery and horror, while Guy Boothby invented ‘the first international criminal mastermind in fiction’ in Dr Nikola. And there was more: mummies. ‘Indeed,’ Carter and Osborne quip, ‘we might almost claim that Australians had the mummy market wrapped up.’ Fame was fleeting, though. One perennial struggle for Australian authors was how to maintain their constituency among their American gatekeepers. Perceived as old-fashioned storytellers caught ‘on the wrong side of realism and the modern novel’, most of these authors’ literary reputations dissipated once they stopped publishing new titles. At the high end of this literary market in the twentieth century were Henry Handel Richardson, Christina Stead, and Patrick White. Norton ran an enthusiastic campaign for Richardson’s Mahony trilogy, promoting The Way Home (1925) as ‘the greatest event in modern fiction’. Stead resented Viking’s pressure to write a sentimental bestseller for Hollywood, as did her literary rival John Steinbeck. As for White, criticism stung more bitterly at home. He confided in a friend: ‘If it hadn’t been for Americans I would have felt like putting my head in a gas oven.’ This is book history par excellence, assured of its breadth and detail of the archive, but rich with the humanity of its makers. Australian Books and Authors is an elegantly told story of the ebbs and flows of a cultural trademark manufactured by the publishing apparatus of America’s dominant book industry. g Keyvan Allahyari has recently completed his PhD at the University of Melbourne.

Fiction

Tony Birch by the Yarra River at Dights Falls, Abbotsford (photograph by Michael Rayner)

Sandra R. Phillips on The White Girl by Tony Birch Tara June Winch

Peter Goldsworthy

The Yield

Minotaur

Ellen van Neerven

Chris Flynn

Jean-Baptiste Del Amo

Animalia Phoebe Weston-Evans

FICTION

REVIEW OF THE MONTH

‘A piece of scrub like Deane’ Tony Birch’s resonant new novel

Sandra R. Phillips THE WHITE GIRL by Tony Birch

University of Queensland Press, $29.95 pb, 272 pp, 9780702260384

f the number of reviews and interviews are indicators of a new book’s impact, Tony Birch’s novel The White Girl has landed like a B-format sized asteroid. Birch’s publisher estimates a substantial number of reviews and other features since publication. I’ve consulted none of them. Usually I can’t help myself from immersing myself in any and all artefacts of literary reception. With The White Girl I wanted to stay with the work, stay with Odette Brown and with Sissy, stay on the fringes of the fictional town called Deane, stay on that train to the big smoke – stay with The White Girl and reflect on where it took me. Set in early 1960s country Australia, The White Girl opens with Odette Brown rising with the sun, ‘as she did each morning’. One might call Odette a matriarch, but I simply want to refer to her as a woman I am familiar with. Odette (I am resisting the urge to refer to her as ‘Aunt’) is an Everywoman, an every Koori, Murri, Nyoongar, Nunga, Goorie, and every other kind of us-woman. Odette thinks deeply and does what needs to be done. She loves her family, those living and the ones who have already passed. Getting to know the deceased members of Odette’s family reminds me of my knowing since childhood my own maternal great-grandmother, although she passed away two months before I was born. What, though, is The White Girl about? I’ve heard writers answer that question with a well-rehearsed, cut-anddried response or, at the other extreme, say that it’s about many things. Out of respect for the complexity of that question, there is only one thing I can say with an element of confidence. This novel is about family love, where family includes shared ancestry (Odette, the missing Lila, and Sissy), those who are chosen (Millie and Yusuf Khan, Alma and Jack Haines), and sometimes those not chosen. Thematically, The White Girl extends family love beyond home and hearth into the brutality of colonisation. Few of our families were left untouched by the genocidal and repugnant

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AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW

policy of removing children from their Aboriginal families. In portraying an Aboriginal family, it isn’t possible to avoid the tentacles of that brutality. Forced removals were empowered by legislation, auspiced by bureaucracy, and zealously conducted by the constabulary. In building a story around a woman like Odette, Birch both humanises Aboriginal womanhood and infers the violence to which we were subjected. He introduces Odette and readers to the new copper in town: The figure emerged from the fog. Odette first noticed a pair of black shoes, spit polished and almost gleaming, a task the dishevelled Shea was hardly capable of. She looked up at the policeman’s face, at a man years younger than Bill. His skin was opaque. Like death. The policeman removed his cap. His hair was cut brutally close to his skull.

Officer Lowe has volunteered to be posted as head of the police station of ‘a piece of scrub like Deane’, not just he wants to police its citizens but also for the grandiose title of Guardian of the district’s Aboriginal population, one he finds ‘enticing and apt’. If Lowe is a familiar copper – impervious to the horror experienced by others and keen to lord it over those within his tiny dominion – the man he has come to replace, Bill Shea, also seems familiar: slovenly, drunken, past caring. The beauty of the latter for Odette and all her people is that Bill generally minded his own business as long as it took him to the bottom of his whisky flask. Lowe, though, is on a mission: ‘he would begin with auditing each of the Aboriginal children under his guardianship, with a view to deciding the best outcome for their future welfare’. The notion that a white police officer would understand Aboriginal children better than their own families was as absurd in the 1960s as it was in the 1860s – as it is now on the verge of the 2020s. If The White Girl achieves anything in addition to its literary merits, it will be to puncture

the widely held fallacy about the place of ‘good intentions’ in governments’ stealing children from their Aboriginal families and ancestral country. Despite the impoverishment of Odette and her ancestors, she is portrayed as that powerful Aboriginal Everywoman – the one who carefully considers every event, every moment, the one who is always weighing up action and reaction, the one who suffers the losses of loved ones, especially those losses that on the surface make the least sense, in this case the disappearance of her own daughter, Lila, who is Sissy’s mother. Odette is the one who makes a home with her bare hands, the one who creates enterprise and income from nothing but skill and guile, the one who provides. The one who senses danger and is bold enough to devise an escape plan. It is this plan that takes Sissy and the reader on the necessary journey away from Deane and away from Lowe. Odette’s canny mind makes sense of the title for us. There is so much to say about The White Girl, like the bathtub that makes you want to sink into one. This bathtub, craftily acquired by Odette’s late husband, is a small but powerful signifier of love and enjoyment of life. Grandmother and granddaughter labour to ease the harshness of life with water boiled over a hand-made fire; they wash each other’s hair at this tub. Here is love, caring. There are other signifiers of love and enjoyment of life throughout The White Girl, just as other moments remind us of the repression of Aboriginal exuberance and vitality. Tony Birch has stated that this work took him eight weeks to write. All credit to him for bringing a lifetime of knowledge about Australian history, social policy, and cultural identity to this book, a deceptively simple story about family love that is rich in humanity and purpose, and hope. The White Girl is worth your time and will reward you over and over again. g Sandra R. Phillips is a member of the Wakka Wakka and Gooreng Gooreng nations in Queensland, and of the Indigenous professoriate at the University of Technology Sydney. ❖

Returning Ellen van Neerven THE YIELD

by Tara June Winch

Hamish Hamilton $32.99 pb, 352 pp, 9780143785750

iradjuri writer Tara June Winch is not afraid to play with the form and shape of fiction. Her dazzling début, Swallow the Air (2006), is a short novel in vignettes that moves quickly through striking images and poetic prose. Her second book, After the Carnage (2017), a wideranging short story collection, is set in multiple countries. Winch’s new novel, The Yield, is partly written in reclaimed Wiradjuri dictionary entries. Three different voices narrate The Yield in bite-sized chapters: dictionary maker and elder Albert Gondiwindi, his granddaughter August, and nineteenthcentury missionary Reverend Greenleaf. It takes some time to get used to this structure, but ultimately it is rewarding. The different perspectives introduce us to life in the place where the Gondiwindi family live: Prosperous House, in the fictional town of Massacre Plains. Abbreviating, the Aboriginal characters call it ‘Massacre’. This contraction is pointed: Winch reminds us we are in a site of settler–invader violence, one without a treaty. Admirers of Kim Scott’s Taboo and Melissa Lucashenko’s Too Much Lip will enjoy Winch’s Aboriginal realism. August, the main character in the present-day narrative, is in her early twenties but world-weary. She comes back to Country for Pop Albert’s fu-

neral after spending a decade abroad, running away from a past. August never had a childhood, never had a break. Often said to be depressed, she sees her country in less than flattering terms: a ‘sparse, foreboding landscape’, dripping with ‘visual heat’, where everything is ‘browner, bone-drier’. In contemporary Aboriginal fiction, a common theme is ‘returning’ – returning to Country, family, language, and culture, all of them intertwined. August’s family, on her return, is riven by an upcoming mining decision. There is a hole left by a sister’s disappearance: a mystery decades-old. August also comes back to an old love interest, Eddie; this ‘returning novel’ offers something new in its Wiradjuri framing, a language in a state of resurgence, with a growing number of speakers. The New Wiradjuri Dictionary by Dr Uncle Stan Grant Sr and Dr John Rudder informs the language in The Yield. It was an effective move on Winch’s part to resist writing August in the first person. Through the third-person narration we are also able to get inside the heads of other characters, to see the place from multiple angles. It is a novel that rewards readerly patience; it takes a while to realise what’s at stake. Slowly, we become entangled in the characters’ lives. With August’s parents out of action – incarcerated on drug charges (‘never mean and bad parents, just distracted, too young and too silly’) – Winch deftly unpacks relationships between grandparents and grandchildren, aunties and nieces, and cousins. As the tin-mining company claims a stake in Massacre Plains, as pipes and fences are secured, white environmental activists descend, calling into question black and green relations, the future of the environment and native title. August imagines herself free-falling to the bottom of a tin pit. The Yield is an anti-mining novel for the present day in the wake of the approval of the Adani coal mine in central Queensland. Winch is highly skilled at creating portraits and at moving us forward into space. These are not static images. Albert’s commentary on his life makes enjoyable reading: gathering for bogong moths as a child (‘Everyone was there FICTION

Kira Brettschneider brings to young readers two colorfully illustrated books that explore the courage of farm animals facing the challenges of Mother Nature. Mary from the Dairy Mary is from a dairy, but there is a drought in Australia. Come on an adventure with Mary as she travels the world in search of green pastures and a beautiful dairy to call her own. Where would you want to end up? Join the adventure! $34.99 paperback | 978-1-9845-0301-5 | also available in ebook

Betty Saves the Mob This is a story of strength, bravery, courage, and adventure. It will leave you guessing until the last page. $34.99 paperback | 978-1-5434-0749-5 | also available in hardcover and ebook

www.xlibris.com.au 52 AUGUST 2019

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW

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to cook and feast on buuyang – which tasted a little like a pork chop, but more nutritious. After that I felt strong walking back to the Boys’ Home’); fishing on the long Murrumby River, a fictional version of the tributaries of the Murray– Darling basin so vital to the Wiradjuri people and other neighbouring nations. Like many Aboriginal people, Albert is quite ‘worldly’, despite not having travelled overseas. Ancestors visit him every day, mob ravaged by gulgang-gulgang, smallpox sores in a haunting passage, mob speaking from the contact war that lasted one hundred years, all offering Albert guidance on how to continue Wiradjuri survivance. Rich with cultural knowledge, Albert’s story-in-dictionary form shows us not only how to read Wiradjuri but also how to feel and speak and taste it; it decolonises the throat and tongue. Winch asks timely questions: What does contemporary use of language look like? What can it offer us in our lives? What can it do for the overall health of our country? The Yield is about regaining more than language. There are odes to Bruce Pascoe’s Dark Emu, with the pointed inclusions of bush food, bread, and fishing technology. There are only a few places where Winch’s delivery is too didactic, as when Nana tells August, the author speaking directly down the barrel to the reader, ‘we aren’t victims in this story anymore – don’t you see that?’ The Yield will appeal to many because of the way it unpacks complex themes in an accessible way. Australian rural novels are often humourless sketches with characters more like caricatures, grimly serious or full of despair. Refreshingly, the characters in The Yield are capable of communion, humour, and dignity despite tragedy, sexual violence, and substance abuse. In this deft novel of slow-moving water, they are borne by love, not pity. g Ellen van Neerven is a Yugambeh woman from South-East Queensland. She is the author of the poetry volume Comfort Food (UQP, 2016) and the fiction collection Heat and Light (UQP, 2014), which won numerous awards including the 2013 David Unaipon Award.

Soft centre Chris Flynn MINOTAUR

by Peter Goldsworthy

Viking $32.99 pb, 336 pp, 9780143795698

alfway through Minotaur, Peter Goldsworthy’s jauntily satisfying novel about a sharptongued former motorcycle cop blinded by a bullet to the head, Detective Sergeant Rick Zadow gropes his way to a shed behind his Adelaide cottage. Inside lies a partially dismantled 1962 Green Frame Ducati 750SS. Zadow, who had begun disassembling the crankshaft prior to his injury, fumbles round in the dark as he tries to restore the beloved bike he will never be able to ride again. He uses his ever-present companion and virtual girlfriend, Siri, to order parts from a website called Road and Race. I checked if this site was real, not out of pedantry but because two days prior I had bought a vintage Ducati motorcycle and needed to find eraappropriate front fork seals. Fortunately for me, Goldsworthy’s research proved exemplary. Regardless of the author’s unwitting assistance in helping my conveyance pass a roadworthy test, Minotaur convincingly illuminates the darkest recesses of the human sensory experience while also exposing the influence of ‘bikie gangs’ in South Australia – or, as we due-paying, law-abiding members prefer to call them, motorcycle clubs. This is a novel that deals with the

aftermath of a criminal act and the wide-reaching consequences on those involved. We are told early on that Zadow lost his vision when he heroically broke protocol during a hostage situation, but details surrounding the incident remain vague. Two years on, he has learned how to cope with blindness. His home is networked so that he can operate anything via a simple voice command to Siri (with whom he has an ongoing, surprisingly two-sided conversation). Led by his nose, ears, and Siri’s precise step counts, Zadow walks the streets with confidence. Anyone dismissive of Apple’s virtual assistant will be chastened by the realisation of her life-changing usefulness to the visually challenged. Zadow’s ability to duck branches and catch packets of cigarettes thrown at him by his former boss raise interesting questions. Are his other senses more highly attuned now? What is the exact nature of his brain injury? Will he don a red Daredevil suit and become Adelaide’s very own Matt Murdock? Two psychiatrists are tasked with assessing the extent of Zadow’s physical and emotional damage, in order to help him through the trauma but also to calculate how much compensation he is entitled to from WorkCover. Meanwhile, his wife, Willow, is torn between standing by him, despite his gruff, sardonic attitude and short temper, and leaving him to his own devices. The police want him back on the job, taking advantage of his condition and experience to act as an undercover operative. Matters are complicated further when the man responsible for Zadow’s predicament escapes from prison. Zadow’s former colleagues believe the fugitive will flee Adelaide, but he reckons otherwise and lays a trap in his spare room, hoping for retribution. Will the offender return to the scene of the crime and finish the job, or will he flee across the Nullarbor and leave Zadow unfulfilled? Minotaur is about waiting. Zadow has little to do except wander the streets of Adelaide – richly conveyed in a smorgasbord of tastes and smells – provoking confrontations as his frustration rises. It is during this fruitless odyssey that the FICTION

story’s layers are slowly revealed. Who was the man that shot a police officer in the head, and why did he commit such an atrocious act? Who was Zadow protecting? What exactly did his role involve when infiltrating the Golgothans, and did he, like many undercover operatives, go too deep and become the very thing he was sent to destroy? In a more procedural novel, these questions might have been handled in a pat and predictable fashion, but Goldsworthy dives deep into the human psyche during Zadow’s sessions with his main psychiatrist. Shrinks tend to be objects of gentle ridicule in the genre, used in a clumsy way to offload backstory and exposition. Despite initial scepticism, in this case both Zadow and the reader have their presumptions subverted by the psychiatrist’s professionalism and genuine concern. The Professor, as Zadow calls her, leads the wounded policeman to a series of revelations that defuse his cynicism and generate enormous empathy for a character that may seem gruff and patriarchal at first. Goldsworthy’s genius here is to assault Australian male bravado head-on and to expose the weakness of its carapace. Once Zadow’s vulnerability becomes apparent, we feel sorry for the poor bastard. From then on we are deeply invested in his rehabilitation, whatever form that may take. Like any Goldsworthy book, the inherent seriousness of the themes is nicely balanced with an undercurrent of humour. Zadow and his police colleagues, unafraid of tearing strips off one another, are masters of banter. The Australianness of their idiom frequently provokes mirth. ‘Fair suck of the mango stone, mate!’ Zadow’s former chief says at one point, which made me laugh because it reminded me not only of Kevin Rudd’s apocryphal ‘Fair shake of the sauce bottle, mate’ but of the daggy phrases uttered by the president of my own motorcycle club. Like Zadow, he too has a delightful, if unexpected, soft centre. g Chris Flynn is the author of three novels, A Tiger in Eden (2012), The Glass Kingdom (2014) and the forthcoming Mammoth (2020). 54 AUGUST 2019

Soldiers Patrick Allington BODIES OF MEN

by Nigel Featherstone

Hachette $32 pb, 326 pp, 9780733640704

rom its raw and revelatory prologue, Nigel Featherstone’s novel Bodies of Men offers a thoroughly humanising depiction of Australians during World War II. In telling the story of two soldiers, William – too young to be a corporal – and his childhood friend James, Featherstone reflects upon the brutality, drudgery, and absurdity of war but also on the two men’s love and regard for each other: ‘The private smiles and William allows himself to smile too. Something passes between them: a wish, or an echo, or something beyond a soldier’s imagination.’ Early in the story, William and James engage the enemy, a few Italians scrabbling about in the desert west of the Nile. The scene is a stark glimpse of men fighting men, of William seeking to assert and prove himself, of James’s calmness, and of the reality of death in wartime. Soon after, William’s superior officer, Captain Bradley Allen, sends William and a small group of men into the desert. There, they sit and wait, practising endless manoeuvres, perhaps to ready them for battle, perhaps to stave off boredom. James, meanwhile, has a motorcycle accident. He winds up badly injured and AWOL in the house of two strangers, Yetta and Ernst, in Alexandria. While grappling with their own wartime worries and secrets,

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the couple tend to James as he slowly recovers. When William, on leave from the desert, finds James, their childhood bond is renewed and strengthened by their mutual attraction and, soon, their mutual devotion. Featherstone weaves a compassionate tale but one that contains multiple layers of tension. It is also persistently surprising, as if the author has found a way to keep the ground beneath the characters – and readers – constantly shifting. William is a study in anxiety about his soldierly chops. He is keen for his men to see him as a good and proper influence, and he is mindful of the need, at least publicly, to do the right thing by God, King, and Country. But he remains in the shadow of his father, Roy Carrington Fisher Marsh MP, a man with rigid, élitist views and a thirst for unpleasant behaviour towards his family and others. James, meanwhile, endears himself to Yetta and Ernst, though not to their daughter. Gradually he convalesces, reading, brooding, and revealing his free spirit despite being bedridden and housebound. Although William and James dominate the story, Featherstone draws upon a range of intriguing, deftly drawn characters; his characterisations of women are particularly rich and complex. Yetta is fascinating for her motivation, poise, and vulnerability, for the glimpses she offers James of her inner world and personal history, for the solace she takes in working and harvesting her tiny garden, for the force of her views: ‘Our job is to worry only about the present,’ she tells William at one point. Back home, James’s mother is a longtime and committed pacifist, as well as a shopkeeper in difficult times. When James tells her that he has enlisted, she insists that, whatever he endures and whatever his physical wounds, ‘you will still know who you are, and you will still know who I am, and we will recognise each other’. And then there’s William’s mother, for decades enduring an unhappy marriage to an awful man. She also has her secrets. Featherstone’s depiction of war and wartime relies little on grand battles between armies or the machinations of Great Leaders. It is affecting and

nuanced because he dwells on emotions and because the bubble of war in northern Africa remains connected in multiple ways – emotional as well as geopolitical – to the wider world. At times, the prose is reminiscent of Thomas Keneally’s keen and extended gaze, his swirling, exuberant dance with history. Featherstone also has a fine eye for small detail, whether it’s the dust and wind of the desert or the narrow streets of Alexandria, and for phrasing that disarms: ‘Three more Italians emerge from behind the boulder, arms in the air; they look like they’re carrying an invisible boat.’ The simplicity of the prose both anchors and elevates the story. It adds dismaying layers too: there is something deeply confronting about William grappling with the need to be ‘a valuable member of the Australian Imperial Force’ by being an effective enough soldier that he can kill another human being.

Featherstone weaves a compassionate tale that contains multiple layers of tension There are moments when the various elements of the intricate plot, and the way the individual circumstances of different characters intersect, fall into place too neatly. Nonetheless, the reader who is willing to suspend disbelief will reap rewards. At one point, William says to some desert-camp dwellers, ‘I’m so very sorry for all this dreadful business’. His apology, while genuine, is utterly lame, and the sentiment seems to capture so much of the awful reality of war that unfolds in Bodies of Men. This is also a novel about intimacy and devotion, the power of tenderness, the mysteries of time, presence, and absence, secrets revealed and withheld, and friendships between strangers emerging from dire circumstances. As Ernst says to James at one point, ‘there is nothing more important than love and refuge’. g Patrick Allington was the first ABR Patrons’ Fellow.

Guts and gore Phoebe Weston-Evans ANIMALIA

by Jean-Baptiste Del Amo, translated by Frank Wynne

Text Publishing $32.99 pb, 424 pp, 9781925773767

f you’re squeamish, this book probably isn’t for you. Each page delivers shocking or mundane violence and descriptions of guts and gore so frank they become a kind of poetry. There is clear relish in Del Amo’s depictions, and there is nothing gratuitous about them; he brings us rivetingly close to each fold of decrepit skin, the agonies of labour, the fantastic indifference of nature. With encyclopedic precision and almost esoteric punctiliousness, Animalia tells the unsettling story of a family of farmers in south-west France from 1898 to World War I, then jumps forward to 1981, the year (perhaps not coincidentally) of Del Amo’s birth. We begin on a squalid farm, the father prematurely stooped and exhausted, the child, Éléonore, already old, the nameless ‘genetrix’ withered and miserable. When Éléonore is born, after two miscarriages described in gruesome detail, she is laid upon the new mother who lies ‘as still as a gallows’. The body and its physical processes, written with clinical poise, stripped of sensuality and tenderness, seem instruments of anatomical performances: sex is rarely more than perfunctory fornication; birth is parturition; women do not breastfeed but suckle their young. The daily cruelty of life on the farm is normalised to the point of banality: skulls are blithely smashed; still-twitching bodies are flung on the dung heap;

a human foetus is left for the pigs. The poetic, sensual treatment of the minutiae of deliquescence and dissolution climaxes with the drawn-out decline of the father: ‘in the faecal magma of the abdomen, a silent army emerges’. Del Amo never passes up an opportunity to describe the body’s afflictions, from mild pruritus to rectal prolapse. French prides itself on having le mot juste, the exact word for the specific thing. Frank Wynne, in his brilliant and faithful translation, matches this sometimes tortuous effort blow for blow, conveying the French original’s Adamic pleasure in naming. While part two begins in summer with a communal washing scene and hay harvest, any hint of optimism is soon quashed: ‘Even the children seem only to remain children for the blink of an eye. They come into the world like livestock, scrabble in the dust in search of meagre sustenance, and die in miserable solitude.’ We are taken to the battlefields of World War I with Marcel, a distant cousin who comes to help on the farm, but first we experience war through the animals. Requisitioned from the farms, transported to the rear, they are butchered to feed the soldiers, who are themselves butchered by the war machine. On these killing fields, the paroxysm of depravity, indifference, and cruelty reaches biblical proportions, with comparisons to Gehenna and the fourth plague of Egypt. Micro-history meets world history with Marcel’s return, one of millions of gueules cassées, facially disfigured servicemen. His silent trauma is inflicted on Éléonore, who is powerless to protect their son, Henri, from his violent outbursts. Nothing is in stasis; things morph from one state to another in a continuous cycle of growth, decline, putrefaction, death, and renewal. In the earlier sections, people dig wells in the earth with their bare hands and pigs forage for grubs in the layers of pigeon excrement and leaf litter; while in the latter, the telluric connection is lost, severed by concrete and a cocktail of industrial chemicals. By 1981 the smallholding is an industrial pork farm and the anus mundi that is the pig shed produces a ceaseless flow of fetid effluent. The fumes and FICTION

sludge permeate the men’s skin and lungs, no matter how vigorously they scrub themselves, and seep into their waking dreams and sleeping nightmares, oozing in and out of every orifice. We join Henri (now in his sixties), his sons, and their complicated family which deals with its own set of traumas: alcoholism, physical and mental-health breakdowns, silence, incest, deceit. After nearly three hundred pages of violence and misery, the comprehensive downfall of the final section, ‘The Collapse’, comes as a kind of relief, and the thread of animal–human metamorphosis, in the lineage of Franz Kafka and Marie Darrieussecq, reaches an intense culmination. Here, a level of personal anger pierces through Del Amo’s otherwise quiet voice. We are struck by the cycle’s nauseating senselessness; the toxic legacy of the chemical compensations devised to counteract the genetic deficiencies deliberately created in the pursuit of cheap meat. It is difficult to compare the grim violence of the first half of the text with the depravity of the second, yet there is certainly a warning against any nostalgia for the bucolic life on the farms of yore. Animal and familial brutality are presented as umbilically linked, the violence of industrial farming embedded in ancestry, transmitted through some inescapable, atavistic magnetism. Animalia, the first of Del Amo’s four novels to be published in English, continues a steady line of French literature of physical and existential disgust from Rabelais to Houellebecq. It is as magnificent as it is bleak: a sickening and strident alert. In a moment of lucidity, seeing his reflection in a pig’s pupil, Henri delivers an ominous warning: ‘The eye was in the tomb and stared at Cain.’ I wondered whether Animalia is about animals or humans, the body or the mind, our inner lives or our relationship with nature. It seems to be about all of these elements and how they are at once isolated and entwined, bound in language that searches to map and understand them through their complexity and exactitude. g Phoebe Weston-Evans translated Patrick Modiano’s novel Paris Nocturne. 56 AUGUST 2019

Delicate fish James Halford MOUTHFUL OF BIRDS: STORIES

by Samanta Schweblin, translated by Megan McDowell Oneworld $29.99 pb, 240 pp, 9781786074560

espite seven years of expatriate life in Germany, the Argentine Samanta Schweblin’s writerly gaze, like that of Australia’s Peter Carey or Janette Turner Hospital, remains trained upon her homeland: ‘I write from outside, literally and in a literary sense. But always looking toward Argentina.’ Schweblin acknowledges a debt to the fantastic, the genre that, in Tzvetan Todorov’s influential formulation, suspends the reader between belief and disbelief in the supernatural. In Latin America, lo fantástico refers, above all, to a style of literary short story produced in and around Buenos Aires since the 1940s. The influential Anthology of Fantastic Literature (1940), edited by Jorge Luis Borges, Adolfo Bioy Casares, and Silvina Ocampo, inaugurates the genre, and Julio Cortázar’s work during the 1960s Latin American Literary Boom represents its high-water mark. This ‘river plate’ tradition of the fantastic – a poetics of uncertainty and strangeness that emerged through the confluence of avant-garde aesthetics, psychoanalysis and modernity – nourishes contemporary Argentine writing. Born in Buenos Aires in 1978, Schweblin studied film at the University of Buenos Aires because she considered literary studies too theoretical. The stories that make up her first two collections, in their attention to the intersection of the fantastic and feminine subjectivity, sometimes resemble those of Argentina’s most underappreciated twentieth-century master of the form, Silvina Ocampo (1903–93). In 1979, a male-dominated judging panel denied Ocampo the Argentine National Literary Prize on the grounds that her imposing oeuvre, spanning four decades, was ‘far too cruel’. Schweblin’s fiction, like Ocampo’s, contains its share of

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violence toward the vulnerable, but this usually occurs in the context of a clearsighted critique of power. During a 2012 fellowship in Berlin, Schweblin discovered that life abroad allowed more time for her writing. She never went home. With no German and basic English, she was thrown inward and began to produce the strongest work of her career. Her first novel, Fever Dream (2014), was published in English in 2017. A suspenseful, deathbed monologue in the voice of a woman trying to understand the illness that is killing her, the novel explores the intensity of maternal love and the impact of the agrochemical industry in the Argentine countryside. It won Schweblin critical acclaim, a cult following in the United States and the United Kingdom, and a nomination for the 2017 Man Booker International Prize. Mouthful of Birds (2009), her second book to be translated into English, is an uneven selection of twenty short stories written before the move to Germany. While the collection only intermittently approaches the technical command and emotional impact of Fever Dream, it is not difficult to imagine the best of these pieces being anthologised for decades to come. In the title story, the narrator’s troubled thirteen-year-old daughter Sara has developed a habit of eating live sparrows and his ex-wife Silvia threatens suicide unless he takes custody. The father is repulsed by his daughter’s diet: ‘I wondered what it would be like to have a mouth full of something all feathers and feet, to swallow something warm and moving.’ But when Sara refuses other food, he must overcome his disgust and locate a reliable source of birds. It’s a disturbing but recognisable study of a teenager gaining control over her parents through extreme attentionseeking behaviour. The other outstanding story, ‘Olingiris’, first appeared in Granta in 2010 and is named for an imaginary species of ‘delicate fish’. It tells of an encounter between two emotionally withdrawn women who have separately moved to the city and found work in an unusual beauty institute. One of them receives a salary for allowing strangers to pluck her body hair; the other grades her abil-

ity to withstand the discomfort without flinching. Neither the reader nor the characters understands the purpose of this absurd labour, but the story holds our attention through its meticulous observation of female power relations within a total institution. Gradually, the two women’s inner lives are revealed – absent fathers, punishing mothers, and important connections with water and fish – as the story builds to a powerful moment of mutual recognition. Realist setting disappears all together in a cluster of allegorical tales: ‘The Digger’, ‘Toward Happy Civilization’, and ‘Rage of Pestilence’. These Kafkaesque stories, with their skilful management of indeterminacy, linger longer in the mind than those of outright horror like ‘Heads Against Concrete’ and ‘The Heavy Suitcase of Benavides’, where the violence sometimes feels gratuitous. Megan McDowell’s English translation ably matches the lean precision of Schweblin’s Spanish. Indeed, Mouthful of Birds is shorter and more visceral than Pájaros en la boca (Birds in the Mouth). My main quibble as an Australian reader was that a number of Americanisms that have crept into the text without an aesthetic rationale. Kilometres are converted into miles, though Argentina uses the metric system. Colloquialisms and insults are sometimes rendered in an out-of-place, frat-boy drawl: ‘dumbass’ for ‘imbécil ’ ; ‘sorry ass tramp’ for ‘¡infeliz! ’ (miserable person). The English language possesses plenty of more geographically neutral alternatives. None of these minor reservations will deter me from seeking out Schweblin’s second novel, Kentukis (published in 2018, in Spanish, forthcoming in English), or the upcoming Netflix adaption of her first. It is pleasing to see an Argentine woman writer enjoying a level of international success that was denied Silvina Ocampo by the sexism of her era. g James Halford is the author of Requiem with Yellow Butterflies (2019), a Latin America travel memoir. He teaches Creative Writing at the University of Queensland. ❖

Don’t Feel Sorry About It Don’t feel sorry about it, if you remember blue Darlinghurst nights like particular quilts a generation of painters saw before we arrived there, or found ourselves deciduous as apple trees. Don’t feel sorry for our poverty, or I’ll report the mirror winks like a man with bad teeth who has laughed at all who dislike poetry. Be less than sad on the day that you hear the news I fell, they’ll nose you out, the generous, curious ones then rest assured that I will never tell who left her pee in glasses overnight. Don’t be sorry so much ambitious verse grovelled in the cities where we lived, only say for me I walked an older road where poetry was rare and hard, and, frankly, good. That when I had worked it out I laughed and laughed; what piss-ants, what grovelling pick-thanks queued like the British to attack my books. See with what ease I bash the rhythms out, (go fall on it!) set the metaphor to click on their tumblers into place. The reason is I’ve served my bloody indentures: no use getting set for sad atmospheres. You’ll hear of my death one day and start to remember how many times I got you to laugh from the verbal castles I built you.

Robert Harris

Robert Harris (1951–93) published five poetry collections during his lifetime. His poem ‘Don’t Feel Sorry About It’ appears in The Gang of One: Selected Poems (Grand Parade Poets, 2019). Judith Bishop reviews it on page 42. FICTION

Inoculations Euzebiusz Jamrozik DEFEATING THE MINISTERS OF DEATH: THE COMPELLING HISTORY OF VACCINATION

by David Isaacs

HarperCollins $34.99 pb, 368 pp, 9781460756843

n the early eighteenth century, smallpox inoculations were introduced to England and promoted by the charismatic Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, one of the many scintillating characters in David Isaacs’s outstanding book Defeating the Ministers of Death: The compelling history of vaccination. Inoculation, a precursor of modern vaccination, was initially trialled on prisoners, with impressive results, leading to the technique being used by the British royal family and eventually the wider public. Around the same time, when many of his compatriots in France considered the English foolish for apparently giving their children a disease (by inoculation) to prevent them from catching it in future, Voltaire wrote his Letters on the English. He noted that the English meanwhile considered continental Europeans who dreaded inoculation ‘cowardly and unnatural’, since fear of the relatively small risks of the procedure left their children at much greater risk of disfigurement or death from smallpox. Although such debates took place almost three centuries ago, they will be familiar to modern readers who still find such clashes of opinion regarding vaccination in newspapers today. Defeating the Ministers of Death charts the history of vaccines from the early successes and controversies of smallpox to the present day. It is replete with vivid details of historical characters, not only of the scientists who developed vaccines and the famous people affected by vaccine-preventable diseases, but also of the harm done by these diseases to everyday people, especially the poor. The volume includes striking case studies drawn from Isaacs’s long career as a paediatrician working 58 AUGUST 2019

on at least three continents during decades in which increased access to vaccines saved millions of lives. It is an entertaining and engaging work that is sure to delight general readers as well as those with special interests in the history of public health. Isaacs details the worst consequences of vaccine-preventable diseases – now rare events in countries like Australia where vaccines are widely used. These case studies serve as a lucid counterbalance to his careful coverage of the history of vaccine hesitancy and dissent. For example, the book illustrates how the first organised anti-vaccination movement began in England, just 150 years after Voltaire’s visit, in response to compulsory vaccine legislation. By then, in the late nineteenth century, smallpox vaccines were safer and more effective than ever, yet many early sceptics were willing to be imprisoned rather than vaccinate their children. This eventually led to the first exemptions to vaccine requirements, and these historical events make Isaacs’s book especially timely. Nowadays, in many wealthy countries, the increasing number of parents opting not to vaccinate their children has led to outbreaks of infections not seen for decades, and to the spread of harmful diseases to others. At the social level, Isaacs emphasises that vaccinating one individual also protects others. The immunity of mothers protects their children, that of children protects their classmates, and so on. The book gives a sensitive account of the ethical issues raised by vaccination, including what Isaacs refers to as ‘altruistic vaccination’, that is, the moral reasons individuals have to be vaccinated in order to avoid spreading disease to others. This is particularly important for diseases whose most severe effects are confined to certain groups. For example, girls are vaccinated against mumps largely to prevent the virus from spreading to boys and causing male infertility, while males are vaccinated against human papillomavirus largely to prevent cervical cancer in women. Yet the same altruistic reasons apply to infections that pose risks to all people in more equal measure, such as measles or hepatitis B. Isaacs provides an illuminating

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account of how these moral considerations matter for individual children and parents as well as for public health. Isaacs traces not only the triumphs but also the tragedies, false starts, and controversial moments in the history of vaccines – from John Keats, whose poetic genius was cut short by tuberculosis; to Louis Pasteur, a brilliant man whose vaccine experiments were sometimes more lucky than rigorous; to frauds who have made false claims about the risks of vaccines. The book is also candid about cases where accidental contamination of vaccine batches with dangerous microbes resulted in harm, and provides a compelling argument for transparency and truthfulness in vaccine research and policy. Defeating the Ministers of Death weaves together lively anecdotes, historical research, and scientific analysis to tell the tale of vaccination over the last three hundred years. While global health advocates still strive to extend the benefit of vaccines to the world’s most vulnerable populations, those in wealthy countries can easily forget that infectious diseases strike back as soon as key prevention measures like vaccines begin to lapse. Isaacs brings the history of vaccination to life – from the courage and conceits of early vaccine pioneers to the marvel that children can now avoid what were previously inevitable diseases. Infectious diseases and the benefits of vaccines are shared between people, and Isaacs eloquently captures the many characters in his narrative, evoking moments of humour, hubris, and humility. These moments in history are still relevant today, in the complex contemporary landscape of views about vaccines and the pharmaceutical companies that produce them. It is not so long ago that Jonas Salk was asked why he never patented his polio vaccine, replying that its benefits belonged to all people, and famously adding: ‘There is no patent. Could you patent the sun?’ g Euzebiusz Jamrozik works at the Monash Bioethics Centre on research and policy issues related to infectious diseases.❖

All things human Julia Kindt SOCRATES IN LOVE: THE MAKING OF A PHILOSOPHER

by Armand D’Angour

Bloomsbury $34.19 hb, 247 pp, 9781408883907

t may be tempting to think we already know Socrates, the Athenian philosopher whose most famous dictum remains that he was wise only insofar as he was aware of his own ignorance. Although Socrates never published anything of his own, his student Plato presents him in numerous dialogues as a smart and talented (if somewhat pedantic) interrogator who never tired of examining the opinions of his fellow citizens on a range of topics, including such weighty matters as the nature of justice, virtue, knowledge, and love. Plato and several other prominent ancient writers – most notably Xenophon and Aristophanes – depicted Socrates as ‘an extraordinary and original thinker who was always poor, always old, and always ugly’. This image of Socrates has endured to the present. Armand D’Angour’s Socrates in Love reveals new sides to the historical figure: Socrates as young man, private citizen, soldier, and – as the title suggests – lover. D’Angour draws on a range of mostly minor ancient sources that have not received the attention they deserve in reconstructing the historical figure of Socrates. With great skill and mastery, D’Angour teases out the kind of information this evidence reveals about heretofore unmapped territory in the life of the ancient philosopher. The result is an original account that, at its best, reads like a detective story looking for new yet unrecognised clues

in the ancient evidence, piecing together a case that calls existing scholarship on Socrates into question. D’Angour revises our picture of the philosopher. Socrates was not, as is frequently assumed, a member of the lower classes. He grew up in a wealthy and reputable family. At least up to his forties, Socrates was vigorous, physically attractive, and fit; he participated in several important military campaigns of his day. He once even risked his life – and those of fellow fighters – by breaking ranks to rescue the wounded Alcibiades from certain death on the battlefield. D’Angour’s account of Socrates’s life prior to his philosophical career is speckled with detail illuminating a side with which few will be familiar. We learn that Socrates stood up during the performance of Aristophanes’s Clouds at Athens to out himself as the comedy’s infamous protagonist – and remained standing for the rest of the play. He was married to a woman called Myrto before he wed the fierce Xanthippe. He had three children. He had a habit of stopping in his tracks and standing motionless for hours on end to think things through. Of course, one could be tempted to dismiss this sort of information as entertaining but ultimately inconsequential; yet it raises larger questions concerning the link between the philosopher’s earlier life and his contribution to the later philosophical tradition – questions that give Socratic philosophy a new grounding. The case the book builds concerns the question of what may have instigated Socrates’s turn away from worldly matters to the path of a thinker and intellectual. D’Angour argues that it was a love affair with Aspasia of Miletus – a beautiful, intelligent, eloquent woman who ended up marrying the famous Athenian statesman Pericles – which eventually turned cold, inspiring Socrates to embrace the idea of ‘Platonic love’ and what came to be known as ‘the Socratic method’ of investigation. This is a book about a specific historical person. Yet it also speaks to larger questions concerning the principles and practices of the historical imagination and the challenges we face when trying to reconstruct a life lived millennia ago.

As D’Angour provocatively asks, ‘When can a source be trusted to be telling us the historical truth, and when can it not be?’ Even if the author’s historical reconstructions occasionally border on speculative, the general reader will take away much in terms of answers to these important questions. Moreover, in addressing such issues up front, D’Angour has created a deeply personal account taking us both back to classical Athens and forward in time to the intimate setting of an Oxford University supervision during which students reimagine the Socrates of Aristophanes’s comedy Clouds. It is in these sections that D’Angour’s own voice rings through, adding a further dimension to the story: the historian who mediates between the past and the present. Why does this book matter? Socrates is a key figure credited with having started a whole new way of philosophy that has had a lasting impact on the later philosophical tradition. He turned the focus away from questions about the cosmos and towards an enquiry into all things human. Socrates in Love offers a better understanding of the person behind the ideas, as well as of the kind of influences that may have directed Socrates along this path. It is a must-read for all who are philosophically inclined, for those with an interest in the principles and practices of the historical imagination, and also those who merely enjoy a good story. g Julia Kindt is a historian of ancient Greece in the Department of Classics and Ancient History at the University of Sydney and a new Future Fellow.

Translation service Catherine de Saint Phalle, a literary translator and novelist (shortlisted for the 2017 Stella Prize) is available for translation work. She has published translations of novels, film scripts, history, art books, and press releases for art galleries from French to English and vice versa. CONTACT:

catherinedesaintphalle@gmail.com

PHILOSOPHY

It’s back Ilana Snyder ANTISEMITISM: HERE AND NOW

by Deborah Lipstadt

Scribe $32.99 pb, 287 pp, 9781925322675

olocaust historian Deborah Lipstadt is renowned as the woman who defeated David Irving in court after he sued her for describing him as a Holocaust denier. Her portrayal by Rachel Weisz in the film Denial (2016) ensured that Lipstadt and her landmark victory achieved even wider celebrity. Thousands of books have been written on the history of anti-Semitism, and Lipstadt has not set out to write another. Alarmed that people continue to demonise Jews and regard them as responsible for evil, she directs her attention to anti-Semistism’s contemporary resurgence. For Lipstadt, anti-Semitism ‘is not the hatred of people who happen to be Jews. It is hatred of them because they are Jews.’ The existence of antiSemitism, which has never made sense and never will, is a threat not just to Jews but to all those who value an inclusive, democratic, and multicultural society. Indeed, when expressions of contempt for one group become normative, it is virtually inevitable that similar hatred will also in time be directed at other groups. Antisemitism: Here and now addresses questions that people began asking after the white-nationalist rally in Charlottesville in August 2017. Is today’s antiSemitism different from earlier manifestations? Where is it coming from: the right or the left? Is it all about Israel? Are we seeing anti-Semitism where it’s not, or refusing to see it where it clearly is? At the outset, Lipstadt establishes her spelling preference: ‘antisemitism’ rather than ‘anti-Semitism’ because there’s no such cultural and ethnic entity as Semites and because an irrational ideology doesn’t deserve capitalisation. The book is organised as a series of letters to Abigail and Joe, fictional composites of students and colleagues 60 AUGUST 2019

Lipstadt worked with at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia. Abigail is a smart Jewish student who is trying to understand anti-Semitism; Joe is a non-Jewish colleague who counts some of his Jewish associates as important interlocuters. Lipstadt tackles their worries about anti-Semitism on campus and beyond, illustrating her explanations with salient examples. To provide a framework for her thinking, Lipstadt assembles a taxonomy of anti-Semites: the extremist, the enabler, the dinner guest, the clueless. Each category invokes standard anti-Semitic themes: money, power, and conspiratorial control. The enablers, who aren’t openly prejudiced, worry Lipstadt the most; her analysis of their conduct, which emboldens the Jew haters, represents a major contribution to understanding anti-Semitism today. She regards President Donald Trump, on the right, and Labour Opposition leader Jeremy Corbyn, on the left, as prime enablers. Trump, for example, retweeted an image of Hillary Clinton in front of piles of money alongside a six-pointed star on which was written ‘Most Corrupt Candidate Ever’. He also defended the white supremacists and neo-Nazis at Charlottesville. Corbyn, who has a history of criticising Israel and supporting anti-Semites, invited to Parliament Raed Salah, a Palestinian Islamist preacher who contended that American Jews carried out the 9/11 attacks.Corbyn also defended a deeply anti-Semitic mural in London’s East End. Many would argue with Lipstadt that, while Trump is not necessarily an anti-Semite, Corbyn is, making him both an anti-Semite and an enabler: a toxic combination. Lipstadt isn’t just interested in compiling a list of affronts, abuses, and attacks, which would be, in itself, a substantial achievement. She also explores with remarkable insight and balance the difference between anti-Semitism and racism, anti-Semitism within the Islamic world, the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement and the ‘toxification of Israel’, and the new hostility towards Jews within progressive movements and on campuses. While she emphasises that criticis-

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW

ing polices of the Israeli government is not necessarily an act of anti-Semitism, Lipstadt looks at how anti-Zionist discourse often ‘relies on antisemitic motifs or is simply a cover for antisemitism’. She also criticises Jewish organisations that respond to the BDS by seeking to ‘boycott the boycotters’ or to intimidate pro-Palestinian professors and activists by compiling dossiers on them. The pace of recent events made the book difficult for Lipstadt to finish: the murder of a Holocaust survivor in Paris; elections in Hungary, in which the winning side relied on anti-Semitic tropes; a Polish law rewriting the history of the Holocaust; white-power demonstrations in the United States; campus anti-Israel campaigns that morphed into anti-Semitism; Labour Party antiSemitism in England; and the growing resilience of white-supremacist groups. As she anticipated, there have been more examples since she submitted the manuscript, of which the mass shooting at the Pittsburgh synagogue in October 2018 is the most appalling: eleven people killed and seven wounded. There is something formulaic about the structure of the chapters, and the exchange of letters is a pragmatic but constraining rhetorical ploy. However, any criticism of the book fades when we recognise anti-Semitism’s considerable significance in dark political times. In the words of French philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy: ‘Antisemitism is back. Everywhere. Openly.’ While civic education and Holocaust remembrance are important, the challenge is to subject the return of one of the world’s oldest forms of hate to close and careful analysis – its nature, its sources, and the way it operates. Deborah Lipstadt does just that. Lipstadt ends the book with a passionate plea to those of us who think of ourselves as liberal, progressive, or simply decent to insist that anti-Semitism be treated with the same seriousness as racism, sexism, homophobia, and Islamophobia. How we do that is up to us, but this timely, nuanced, clear, accessible, and ultimately optimistic book is a good place to start. g Ilana Snyder is an emeritus professor at Monash University.

Arts

Deborah Cheetham performing in Eumeralla: A war requiem for peace with the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra (photograph by Laura Manariti)

Deborah Cheetham on Joan Sutherland Theatre

Wake in Fright Tim Byrne

Art

Monet

Keren Rosa Hammerschlag

Opera

Whiteley

Michael Halliwell

ABR Arts is generously supported by the Copyright Agency Cultural Fund and the ABR Patrons. Visit our website to read the full range of ABR Arts reviews. ARTS

EPIPHANY

A Night at the Opera by Deborah Cheetham

t’s such a vivid memory. I’m sitting in the carriage my destination. Time only for a last glance at the poster of a train, travelling from Caringbah to Oatley. It’s a as the train pulls away, beginning a gentle crescendo to Saturday afternoon late in January and I am returning accompany those passengers who journeyed on. home after a morning of competition tennis. The members What was it about the poster that stayed with me that of my team, Gilmour 5, have gone their separate ways after day? At home it was time for piano and flute practice and another successful start to the year. It is 1979 and for the musicianship homework before heading off on my bicycle past two years we have won our grade undefeated, having to fill in my afternoon with the kind of unfettered recreareached the pinnacle of Junior comp tennis. I am not yet tion today’s average Year Nine student would struggle to fourteen. Being a Sagittarius, born in late November, I have comprehend. As I cycled around the sleepy bushland suburb, the best part of a year to compete as an Under 14 in the the illusive beauty of that feather-trimmed hat and the many fiercely contested junior tennis tournaments that take poster’s curvaceous script floated in and out of my thoughts. place all year around Sydney. Tennis is my world, doubles Over the next week, every time I boarded a train I my specialty. This year I have my sights set on the Illawarra searched for that poster and one day there it was. In spite Lawn Tennis Association Under 14 singles title. of the early morning crush and the chatter of friends I The rattle and rhythm of the carriage could finally decipher that lovely provide a welcome soundtrack for my script – Lehár’s The Merry Widow, journey. I’ve been making this journey and a name that would shortly beon my own since I started Year Eight at come my Star of Bethlehem: JOAN Penshurst Girls High, when my parents SUTHERLAND. finally granted me that important rite The first period that day was Muof passage. My destination is Oatley sic Class with Mrs King: a wonderful Station. The trip from the heart of The way to begin the school week. It was Shire to the shores of the St George understood and accepted that Mrs District takes thirty minutes; in a preKing’s husband, the Head of Social mobile phone world my awareness of Sciences, was almost as knowledgethe journey is significantly heightened. able about music as Mrs King herself. A modulation in the rhythm and Together they would produce the melody heralds the crossing of the biannual school musical. The year Georges River via the Como-Oatley before I had made my stage début Bridge. This particular day it stirs me in the Penshurst Girls High School from my reverie; something catches my production of Lerner and Lowe’s My attention. On a poster above the winFair Lady, but not as Eliza Doolittle! dow a woman is wearing a large hat, the I was way too young. Besides, somebrim trimmed with feathers of deepest one had to play the role of butler. Deborah Cheetham with Joan Sutherland purple. The font is typical of the belle Mr King, always entertaining, in 1979 époque style, but my thirteen-year-old was a frequent visitor during our muself simply sees it as elaborate and wonderful. The poster is sic classes. This morning was different. ‘Today,’ announced advertising a coming performance, but I barely have time Mrs King, sitting down at the upright piano, ‘Mr King is for the details to register it when I realise the rhythm and going to sing an aria from … The Merry Widow.’ Before harmony of my journey have fallen silent. I have arrived at I knew it, he had launched into a solo rendition of ‘Love

62 AUGUST 2019

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW

Unspoken’ in his fine baritone voice. How exciting – was it possible the Kings knew about my obsession with that poster? The aria came to an end and we all applauded enthusiastically. Mrs King rose from the piano and raised her hand to signal silence. ‘There will be an excursion to the Sydney Opera House to see the most famous singer in the world sing in The Merry Widow’ ‘Joan Sutherland,’ rejoined Mr King enthusiastically. We have a limited number of tickets and the first ten students to return their permission slip and five dollars will be able to come with us to the opera.’ That day was one of the longest in my young life. I had to get home, had to have my form signed and obtain the money. My mother, who had never been anywhere near an opera, was sceptical at first (‘What about your tennis lesson?’), but I reassured her the opera would take place in the evening. Finally the magical phrase ‘It’s for school’ did the trick. The following morning I arrived at school half an hour earlier than usual and stood in the space where I knew Mr and Mrs King would normally park their car. The wait was excruciating. I was so anxious to be the first to return my permission slip and excursion money that I was almost run over when I failed to hear the approach of their car. Crisis averted, I received my ticket. Row L. Seat number 23. My epiphany came on 19 February 1979. As the house lights dimmed in the Concert Hall of the Sydney Opera House, my life was about to change forever. When Joan Sutherland – the Voice of the Century, La Stupenda herself – came floating down the magnificent Kristian Fredrikson-designed staircase as the Merry Widow, I sat enthralled, wondering how I had existed until then without opera in my life. Later that night, travelling home on the train, I looked up from my souvenir program to find the poster proclaiming the Australian Opera’s 1979 season of The Merry Widow. Tennis fixtures and singles titles would have to take second place from that time on. g Deborah Cheetham is a Yorta Yorta soprano, composer, and educator. Short Black Opera, her not-for-profit opera company devoted to the development of Indigenous singers, recently presented her new work, Eumeralla, a war requiem. From 1979 to 1990, she attended almost every performance that Joan Sutherland gave at the Sydney Opera House. She was there on 2 October 1990 when La Stupenda sang for the last time in Australia. She is forever grateful to her teachers, Jennifer and Lionel King, who made possible her journey to epiphany and countless other life-changing moments Deborah Cheetham (photograph by Kristina Kingston) in the theatre. ❖

Monet: Impression Sunrise

Keren Rosa Hammerschlag

hat makes this Monet exhibition different from any other Monet exhibition? This was the question at the forefront of my mind as I approached the National Gallery of Australia’s exhibition Monet: Impression Sunrise. As one would expect, it is an exhibition about painting – colour, brushstroke, the rendering of light and dark by artists who went out into the landscape and sought to capture in paint what they saw and felt. It is undeniable that Claude Monet was an innovative painter whose canvases will continue to enthral audiences. Attractively organised – note how the works in the room featuring Haystacks, midday (1890) are colour coordinated; mauve dominates – Monet: Impression Sunrise is a reminder of the pleasures that come from experiencing Impressionist canvases firsthand. Monet: Impression, Sunrise is a show in two halves. On first entering the exhibition, one encounters paintings by artists associated with the British School. Works such as J.M.W. Turner’s Inverary Pier, Loch Fyne: Morning (c.1845); Whalers (boiling blubber) entangled in flaw ice, endeavouring to extricate themselves (exh.1846); and Stormy sea with dolphins (c.1835–40) anticipate Monet’s Impression, sunrise in terms of the rendering of light, the flattening out of form, the free application of paint, and the innovative use of colour. Across the way from the British School is situated the French Barbizon School. In this section, Gustave Courbet’s Low tide, the beach at Trouville (1865) is worth close attention due to the artist’s astounding rendering of a cloudy sky. Cloudy skies abound in this exhibition, as do rising and setting suns, beaches, harbours, and ponds. Lesser-known French artists who taught and mentored Monet, such as Charles-François Daubigny and Eugène Boudin, are well represented in the following section, and their inclusion comes as a pleasant surprise. The point is well made that Impressionism did not come out of a vacuum, and Monet was not the first artist to paint en plein air. While this idea is not new, it is certainly worth revisiting. ARTS

The focal point of the exhibition is Monet’s Imengines, including The train in the snow. The locomotive pression, sunrise (1872). Never before has this painting (1875); Stacks of Wheat (Sunset, Snow Effect) (1875); reached Australian shores, and we are all grateful to the and The Pont de l’Europe. Saint Lazare Station (1877). Musée Marmottan Monet for parting temporarily with These examples, much like Impression, sunrise, convey a one of its most prized artsense of nostalgia in the works. Impression, sunrise face of the rapidly changwas highly criticised when ing nineteenth-century it was first exhibited in French landscape and 1874 at the Société anonstreetscape. yme des artistes, painters, The relatively intisculpteurs, graveurs, etc. It mate size of the show will then fell into relative oballow visitors the time scurity, only to re-emerge and space to indulge the in the mid-twentieth ceneye and linger over works tury as a foundational that continue to reveal Impressionist icon. At the their layers of pigment very least, an examination and meaning the longer of this painting and its one looks. One approach critical reception offers an would be to follow the opportunity to consider bright red-orange pigwhy some artworks are ment of the sun in ImImpression, sunrise by Claude Monet (1872) canonised and others forpression, sunrise (and the (Gift of Victorine and Eugène Donop de Monchy, 1940, Musée gotten. That certain works marketing material), from Marmottan Monet, Paris © Christian Baraja SLB) are deemed ‘masterpieces’ the erupting volcano in is often based on the Joseph Wright of Derby’s reputation (and gender, class, and race) of the artist, on A View of Vesuvius from Posillipo, Naples (c.1788–90), via how the work was originally received (nobody likes an a couple of dots in Camille Corot’s The fisherman: evenartistic success story; we’d rather our favourite artists ing effect (c.1865–70), through to Monet’s The waterlily die penniless and in pond (1917–19). (The obscurity), and on the significance of sparart-historical narraingly applied brighttives we craft. red pigment recalls the Impression, sunrise tale of Turner’s use of exemplifies some of the a blotch of red paint to most salient tenets of outshine John ConstaMonet’s Impressionble on Vanishing Day ist style. The liberated at the Royal Acadbrushstrokes used to emy of Arts in 1832.) indicate the reflection The bristles of Monet’s of the rising sun on the brush can be seen water, the fog or smog caked into the surthat gives the scene face of Waterloo Bridge a sense of modernity (1899–1901), and The and timelessness, the Japanese Bridge (1918– juxtaposition of na19) reveals the proHaystacks, midday by Claude Monet (1890) ture and industry, and, found impact of Japa(Purchased 1979 National Gallery of Australia, Canberra) of course, that bright nese prints on Monred-orange sun all et’s art. Again, this is make this work worthy of attention. But other works by nothing new. But there is pleasure in familiarity, and in Monet on display, including the NGA’s own Haystacks, seeing Hallmark cards in their original, colourful form. g midday and Waterlilies (c.1914–17), easily rival this Monet: Impression Sunrise continues at the National Gallery of ‘showstopper’, especially in terms of size. Australia until 1 September 2019. If you came to see Monets, you’ll find them in the Keren Rosa Hammerschlag is a Lecturer in Art History exhibition’s second half. In an adjacent room there are and Curatorship in the Centre for Art History and Art a series of impressionistic canvases by Monet and his Theory in the School of Art and Design at the Australian contemporaries that feature depictions of the spaces of National University. modern industrialised France and the impact of steam 64 AUGUST 2019

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW

Wake in Fright

Tim Byrne

he idea of the outsider is a concept shared by all living beings, but there is something particular about the Australian suspicion of otherness, a ruddy and avuncular mask that hides an abiding, almost pathological, wariness. It’s a national quirk so memorably mined by Kenneth Cook’s 1961 novel Wake in Fright – set in the fictional town of Bundanyabba and based on the author’s experiences in Broken Hill – and one that playwright Declan Greene milks to almost uncanny effect in his new stage adaptation. Central to his approach is Zahra Newman, an actor with a seemingly inexhaustible range of skills, who here assumes the role of narrator, along with all of the story’s key characters. We have our protagonist – or chief victim – John Grant, a schoolteacher on his way to Sydney who is waylaid in Bundanyabba; we have the local copper Jock, who offers the first beer and introduces John to the two-up game that will prove his financial ruin; we have the uncomfortably hospitable Tim Hines and his sexually available daughter Janette. Most disturbing of all, we have the ‘twisted and revolting creature’ Doc Tydon, who is here reimagined as South African – presumably white. Tydon isn’t racially identified in the novel, so making him South African is a curious decision – it suggests that nation’s own murky relationship to otherness, and is one of the ways that Greene subtly shifts the locus of the story. He also adds a discussion about the meaning of the town’s Indigenous name, which none of the white townsfolk seem to know. All of this represents not so much a reimagining as a logical expansion of Cook’s theme; Bundanyabba is a synecdoche for the nation, and its seething disgust with outsiders so quickly comes to represent our country’s own. The play opens with preparations for a suicide. Even before this opening, there is a fascinating preamble, possibly Greene’s greatest contribution to the retelling and a rare example of a production that literally cannot exist without the actor performing in it. Newman seems, on paper, an odd choice for Wake in Fright, and yet within minutes it’s clear she is the only actor who can do it. She was born in Jamaica, and immigrated with her family to Australia when she was a young woman, so notions of otherness, and the ways this country commodifies and darkens its welcome, are central to her own experience. Newman initially appears in a ridiculous promotional bear suit, which turns out to be a proxy for the very real, and very frightening, ‘Lead Ted’ who teaches the children of Broken Hill how to mitigate the overwhelming toxicity of their town. She goes on to recount an Uber ride she took with a driver from Broken Hill,

who responded to questions about the well-documented lead poisoning with a chilling rejoinder: ‘Well, maybe we do things differently here.’ Any sense that the actor is merely representing an experience of the other, rather than living it every day, evaporates with the sharing of that anecdote. The first half of the show follows the book quite closely, brilliantly capturing the pummelling heat and the snide grotesquerie of the locals, even while it downplays Grant’s hubris and snobbery. The two-up game is extraordinary, as Newman stands in the centre of a circle of lights and violent images flash on a giant screen behind her. The sequence is a kind of pinball nightmare, a ghastly descent into madness that provides a sample of a greater horror to come: the roo shoot. It was Ted Kotcheff ’s 1971 film adaptation that imprinted this scene onto the retina of all who saw it, so it is impressive to see Greene forge a distinctive theatrical language that can match it. Again, projected imagery and violent use of sound combine to profoundly disturbing effect; Newman, grinning diabolically, sits in the centre of this sequence like something out of a Boschian hellscape. There is a sense that all our collective nastiness, the unlocked id of Australian culture, is being poured into a beer glass and offered back up to us for our delectation. The only truly baffling decision in this otherwise masterful adaptation is a subtraction rather than an addition. In the novel, the roo shoot ends in an obscured debauchery, and a suggested gay rape, that goes to the heart of the work’s critique of Australian toxic masculinity. It’s strange that Greene, a proudly gay man who has championed LGBTI representation on our stages, should omit this, particularly given how germane it is to his own reading of the work. It looks like an evasion, and unbalances the dramatic structure. Grant’s descent into suicidal despair is too abrupt, and the ratcheting dread quickly dissipates. Technically, Wake in Fright is brilliantly accomplished and innovative. Too often at Malthouse, uncomfortable levels of sound and light are employed to create drama rather than augment it, but the sound composition and multimedia design, by art-electronica band friendships, is superbly integrated and supple. Verity Hampson’s lighting is evocative and menacing, and Greene’s direction tight and assured. Newman is a powerhouse, an actor who feels dangerously responsive, and she shifts effortlessly from expressionist to naturalistic, often in a single sentence. This is a new, and often thrilling, retelling of one of our most exposing stories, and it couldn’t have sat in better hands. g Wake in Fright was performed at the Beckett Theatre, Malthouse, from 21 June to 14 July 2019. (Longer version online)

Tim Byrne is a Melbourne-based freelance writer and theatre critic. ARTS

The Torrents

Susan Lever

nyone with an interest in Australia’s drama history is likely to have some curiosity about Oriel Gray’s play The Torrents, joint winner of a Playwright Advisory Board prize in 1955 alongside Ray Lawler’s ground-breaking Summer of the Seventeenth Doll. Unlike Lawler’s play, it was not performed at the time. According to the current producers, it has had only one other professional production before this current version by Black Swan Theatre in Perth, which has reached Sydney after seasons in Perth and Brisbane. The company is conscious of its role in rehabilitating a piece of drama history, with Gray’s name in pink neon lights in front of the curtain. Before the play begins, Celia Pacquola, in her familiar stand-up comedian role, fills in the background for the audience. While Gray’s play languished unperformed, Lawler’s play has been taught in schools and universities for decades, with some dynamic revivals and the addition of two more plays by Lawler to make it a trilogy. Such a comparison hardly helps Gray’s play, which, even in 1955, must have been out of kilter with the Zeitgeist. It is a lig ht-hearted imagining of life in a 1890s goldfields town in Western Australia where the gold is running out and new measures – the piping of water for agriculture – are needed for its survival. For the present, there is wealth enough for the local newspaper to thrive and dominate town politics, but its editor, Rufus Torrent, needs to embrace the modern world of the 1890s if the town and his paper are to survive. The agent of change turns out to be a young woman journalist, J.G. Milford, who has been employed by the editor’s son Ben to shake things up. In this production, the old guard all have accents from the Old Country, with Tony Cogin (Rufus), Geoff Kelso (Christie), and Sam Longley ( Jock) wielding Irish and Scots brogue, while the younger generation – Ben, Jenny Milford, the copy boy Bernie, the water engineer Kingsley, and the local beauty, Gwynne – speak as modern Australians and clearly belong to a less rigid future. The humour derived from the newspaper staff is laboured, with Christie delivering a series of British empire riffs that may indicate something about 1950s comedy but fall 66 AUGUST 2019

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW

flat for a contemporary audience. On opening night, the audience responded more to the bits of business about hat and cane-throwing, or the tall Longley’s struggle to get through doors than to the dialogue. Humour is notoriously bound by time. It is down to the charming Celia Pacquola as Jenny the woman journalist, and Gareth Davies, as Ben, to carry the play. Even a talented actor like Steve Rodgers, as the blustery nouveau-riche John Mason, can do little to help them. Pacquola’s role has similarities with Nat, the part she plays in the television comedy Utopia, where her good sense and evident competence serve as a sane reference point for the audience. Here, she is the voice of the playwright, explaining the New Woman and converting Gwynne to the cause of woman’s independence; she is the adviser to both senior and junior Torrents, winning Rufus over to new causes with her rational arguments and setting Ben on the path to a productive working life. More fantastic to any woman who has found herself an unwanted arrival in a male-dominated office, she is soon loved by everyone. The play presents little in the way of genuine dramatic conflict or narrative development. It depends on its lovable and eccentric characters for its rather dated humour. Perhaps, if Gray had been party to a series of productions she might have had the opportunity to develop the play into something more able to withstand changing tastes. One can imagine it diverting audiences at the New Theatre in the 1960s or providing fun to high-school performers, but it has little to offer adult audiences familiar with the sophistication of television drama. That, of course, was the other development that obscured Gray’s play. In 1956, television broadcasting began in Australia offering viewers a new world of realist drama. It is satisfying to know that Gray quickly adapted to this situation, with six of her plays produced in the ABC’s Playhouse theatre in the 1960s, including The Brass Guitar, Burst of Summer, Wall to Wall, and Drive a Hard Bargain. A quick consultation of Leslie Rees’s The Making of Australian Drama reveals that a production of The Torrents was shown on the ABC in the early 1970s. Interested drama scholars can find these scripts in the National Archives; the ABC probably has a black-andwhite video stashed away somewhere. Yes, The Torrents was professionally produced for television decades ago, and undoubtedly found a bigger audience than it will today. Gray forged a career as a writer for Bellbird, Rush, and other television series. The lamentations about her lost career are somewhat misplaced and more revealing of the studied refusal of Australia’s theatre historians to acknowledge television drama than of Gray’s fate. g The Torrents, produced by the Sydney Theatre Company and Black Swan State Theatre Company, continues at the Drama Theatre, Sydney Opera House, until 24 August 2019. Performance attended: July 20.

Susan Lever is completing a history of Australian television drama for Palgrave Macmillan.

The Great Symphony: Simone Young Returns

‘V

Gillian Wills

iolas should be seen and not heard,’ quipped Malcolm Sargent. Classical music lovers know very well that the viola is ripe for ridicule and has inspired countless jokes. In this concert, the viola was enjoyably celebrated as a worthy solo as well as accompanying instrument. Brett Dean’s Notturno Quieto, an Australian première, begins with a viola solo, as does Bartók’s Viola Concerto. Dean’s composition had its first performance in June 2018 during a Berlin concert farewell for Simon Rattle, who had commissioned it (Dean was a violist with the orchestra from 1985 to 1999). As a composer, he spotlights the viola section, which, after a solo viola introduction set against an agitated shimmer, expands into a restlessly searching episode until it is eclipsed by a woodwind chorale. Dean’s music artfully exploits each orchestral section’s colours, though the prescribed timbres are non-traditional. For instance, there is a prolonged stretch of eerily muted trumpet strains. Theatrical, the music is replete with intricate rhythms and grows into an explosive and triumphant sonic peak. Retreating gradually and travelling back to the opening’s stillness, the final trembling terrain is heard as a peaceful afterglow. Given the provenance of the piece, one might wonder whether Dean’s work was a metaphor for Rattle’s idiosyncrasies as a conductor or if it reflected the conductor’s brilliant tenure in Berlin, which got off to a shaky start. If Dean’s music triggered questions and demanded a second hearing for a full appreciation, there was no doubt about Simone Young’s admirably precise conducting. Young marshalled superior performance of the programmed contemporary and historical works. Behind every viola concerto is a brilliant player. William Walton’s Viola Concerto was written for Lionel Tertis. Schnittke’s Concerto exists because of the virtuoso Yuri Bashmet. The inspirational player behind Bartók’s Concerto was William Primrose, a player who eventually moved to Wollongong and had an influence on the Australian Chamber Orchestra’s Richard Tognetti. Solo repertoire for the viola penned before the twentieth century is light on, though Telemann’s Concerto in G composed in 1722 is a popular staple. Writing for solo viola and orchestra is challenging; the instrument’s mellow, enigmatic voice can easily be overwhelmed by a large ensemble’s robust sonorities. Nils Mönkemeyer’s winning stage presence in Bartók’s Viola Concerto and his insightful shaping, flamboyance, and superb technical skill in the cadenzas, which

herald each of the first movement’s important structural moments, made his performance riveting. His tone was varied and superlative. When the music called for it, he delivered an unusually big, fat sound. Young’s balances between sections and between ensemble and soloist were sensitive to Mönkemeyer’s vision. She gave him room to shape heartfelt solos and to engage meaningfully with the orchestra. Bartók’s predilection for Hungarian folk music is well known, and the soloist’s dancerly manner and winning synergy with Bartók’s spiky tunes and asymmetrical rhythms created an image of a free-spirited country fiddler stamping his foot, playing his heart out, surrounded by a delighted crowd in a rustic setting. Simone Young is a multitasker; she can juggle many things at once. She does everything to ensure success and cues almost every entry point from individual solos to a variety of ensemble combinations. Her hands command the beat; her body embodies the rhythm, expresses emotional content, and anticipates what’s coming next. She evokes a lighter mood by dancing with her hips. Her left hand is lithe and expressive and works independently from her right. In short, she’s a class act, fascinating to watch. About Schubert’s Grand Symphony George Bernard Shaw said, ‘a more exasperatingly brainless composition was never put on paper’. Now it is regarded as a groundbreaking, important symphonic drama that revels in the classical symphony’s architecture yet points the way towards the Romantic era’s rich lyricism and fondness for epic proportions. Beethoven was Schubert’s hero; before he died prematurely from syphilis, Schubert was driven to create a Symphony on the scale of Beethoven’s Ninth. The highly motivated QSO willingly committed to Young’s detailed direction on this occasion. The Symphony – ambitious, bombastic, demanding – boasts endless dynamic contrasts, with some highly energised stretches. Because it’s repetitive it requires inspired expression. There was inspired execution from the horns, which open the work, accomplished woodwind ensemble, lovely cello lines heard not long after the beginning of the second movement, and skilled brass and percussion in general. Young and the players excelled in the first movement and captured the marching template of the second movement, the Scherzo’s dancing exuberance, and the Finale’s relentless exhilaration, with its explosive outbursts and thrilling grandeur. This challenging Schubertian journey, admirably and memorably rendered, concluded a stunning concert, the applause prolonged and appreciative. g The Great Symphony: Simone Young Returns was performed by the Queensland Symphony Orchestra at the Queensland Performing Arts Centre on 20 July 2019.

Gillian Wills writes for ABR and other publications. She is the author of Elvis and Me: How a worldweary musician and a broken ex-racehorse rescued each other (Finch Publishing, 2016). ARTS

Whiteley

Michael Halliwell

nlike the many films about the lives of artists, operas in which visual artists feature are few, though two of the most popular in the repertoire, Puccini’s Tosca and La Bohème, both have painters as central characters. The lives of artists are often messy affairs and resist convenient shaping into narrative arcs, with the actual creative process difficult to dramatise effectively. The new film Never Look Away, by Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, controversially, though loosely based on the life of German artist Gerhard Richter, achieves a remarkable degree of success in showing the development of a creative artist, often actually at work on a series of paintings, while a panoramic sequence of events play out in the background. It is one of the few films that offer a plausible insight into the creative process. The challenge for librettist Justin Fleming and composer Elena Katz-Chernin was to find a way into the jumbled events of Brett and Wendy Whiteley’s rackety lives. Brett’s life is well documented, with several major biographies, including an excellent and exhaustive recent one by Ashleigh Wilson, who acted as consultant on the preparation of the opera. There is also much documentary material, including a theatre work premièred in 2019. Brett Whiteley achieved what must be regarded as rockstar status in his own lifetime. A certain mythology has developed about his early exposure to the work of Vincent van Gogh, but there seems little doubt that the Dutch painter had a profound influence on Whiteley’s artistic vision and sense of self; he saw in Van Gogh the epitome of the artist as outsider. Opera is an exaggerative, mythologising art form, not really effective as documentary, but able through its intermediality to isolate emotional and psychological essences. One thing that emerges is Brett’s bond with Wendy, regardless of all the vicissitudes of their relationship. Opera, of course, does obsession well; W.H. Auden observed that the quality common to all great operatic roles – such as Don Giovanni, Norma, Lucia, Tristan, Isolde, Brünnhilde – is that each of them is in a ‘passionate and wilful state of being. In real life they

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would all be bores, even Don Giovanni.’ These are all obsessive, destructive characters. Whiteley, as operatic character, might well be appended to this list. Donald Friend perceptively observed of Whiteley: ‘His paintings are like wonderful glimpses of the world seen through holes in the death-wish.’ In the end, Whiteley has to stand on its own as a unified work of art. Can it work as a theatre piece for someone who has little or no prior knowledge of the particular place Whiteley occupies in the Australian psyche? Librettist Fleming has isolated three major aspects of the life around which to structure his libretto: the early precociousness; the growing addiction; and the bond between the Whiteleys. The opera follows a chronological course, commencing with Brett’s childhood and culminating in his death in 1992 and Wendy’s creation of the Secret Garden at Lavender Bay on Sydney Harbour. One had the feeling that this dramaturgical structure sometimes placed a straitjacket on a deeper exploration of character, conflict, and emotion. Several scenes felt prematurely truncated by a need to move on to the next event in the life, almost in documentary fashion, with characters often rather obviously announcing the next scene. It is the music that allows the work to soar. KatzChernin’s music is impossible to categorise; her oeuvre ranges across genres, including concert and film music as well a number of operas. Her musical idiom doesn’t fit neatly into any particular aesthetic, and is tailored with a chameleon-like facility to each current project. The music in Whiteley is vividly varied in colour, rhythm, and articulation, from a muted saxophone opening to blazing colours in the many large-scale choral and solo scenes, culminating in a muted Rosenkavalier-like ending for three female voices. One of the most arresting scenes in the opera deals with Whiteley’s series of paintings from 1965 that arose from his fascination with the Christie murders in London in the 1940s and early 1950s. Confronting these macabre events was part of an artistic process for Whiteley that signalled a development of the acclaimed youthfully prodigious and flamboyant talent into an artistic maturity and seriousness through this engagement with good and evil. John Christie hid some of his victims in the walls of his home (the infamous 10 Rillington Place, Notting Hill), and there is a Chorus of Women’s Ghosts that emerges from the darkness of the stage. Whiteley acknowledged: ‘I wanted to try and define evil, to put my finger on some point of evil and say that’s it. I wanted to take something as bad as the human condition could get … something filthy, repugnant, at the very bottom of the scale … and try to purge it.’ These paintings came immediately after Whiteley’s bathroom images; the contrast between the rounded, voluptuous nude forms of the former with the decaying bodies of the murder victims is striking, coloured in the opera by a dramatically

dark and brooding soundscape. both aurally and visually through the series of characters Opera Australia’s utilisation of digital technology they create. bears fruit with many of the most striking Whiteley The musical direction was in the capable hands of paintings emerging on stage at various points in the narTahu Matheson, who leads the large solo, choral, and rative, all selected with skill and appropriateness. A New orchestral forces with style and nuance. Director David York scene has Whiteley’s huge series ‘The American Freeman used the revolving stage to good effect, with Dream’ used to considerable visual effect, accompanied spaces fluidly merging as scenes changed. Production by Gershwin-like bluesy music of rhythmic drive and designs by Dan Potra vividly conveyed a wide range of colour. The use of the LED screens is not overdone, and locations and time periods, complemented by lighting by the final scene of Brett’s death, all colour drained and John Rayment and digital content by Sean Nieuwenhuis, framed by sheer white panels, is visually stunning and all contributing magnificently to this visual feast. poignant. This was very much an ensemble performance led by the Brett of Leigh Melrose and Julie Lea Goodwin’s Wendy. They are both charismatic performers, visually and vocally alluring. Melrose, who is on stage virtually the whole time, has a baritone of power, richness, and nuance. His frequently deliberately exaggerated vocal articulation effectively conveys the obsessiveness of the character, which contrasts with the purity and beauty of Goodwin’s lush soprano. A sympathetic foil for Melrose’s rapidly changing emotional states, she has a number of brief character-revealing arias which display some of Katz-Chernin’s most lyrical and affecting vocal writing. This was most impressive in Brad Cooper as Frank Lloyd and Leigh Melrose as Brett Whiteley in Opera Australia’s 2019 production the poignant death scene of of Whiteley at the Sydney Opera House (photograph by Prudence Upton) their friend Joel Elenberg in Bali. Because opera is such an expensive and labour-inAppealing performances came from Natasha Green tensive art form, chamber opera is rapidly becoming the and Kate Amos as the Whiteleys’ daughter, Arkie, at norm for new works, so it is exciting and heartening to different stages in her life. Beryl, Brett’s mother, was experience a large-scale new opera utilising substantial given strong and authoritative voice and presence by solo, choral, and orchestral forces, and to realise the creaDominica Matthews, and a host of other figures move tive possibilities still inherent in the genre. For Opera in and out of the action. The relationships were clearly Australia, Whiteley follows Brett Dean’s Bliss (2010), dramatised with vivid characterisations by Richard and demonstrates opera’s overwhelming power to tell Anderson, Nicholas Jones, Gregory Brown, Annabelle significant Australian stories. One hopes that Whiteley Chaffey, Alexander Hargreaves, Tomas Dalton, Jonathan will become part of the repertoire and that it presages Alley, Brad Cooper, Leah Thomas, Ruth Strutt, Celeste other new works of similar scale and ambition. g Lazarenko, Sitiveni Talei, and Angela Hogan, as figures Whiteley was performed at the Joan Sutherland Theatre, Sydney such as Robert Hughes, Patrick White, and even the Opera House, until 30 July 2019. Queen, among others, weave through the action. This Michael Halliwell studied literature and music at the is as much a chorus opera as many of the great works University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, in the canon, and the Opera Australia Chorus – one of at the London Opera Centre, and with Tito Gobbi the glories of the company and prepared by Anthony in Florence. Hunt – provides many of the most arresting moments ARTS

Anna Bolena

Peter Rose

pera Australia – in its present expansionary phase – has hitched its wagon to a digital star: a series of seven-metre-high LED screens. The future moves about on a busy automation system, thus creating a series of new dramatic spaces. Interviewed in the July 2019 issue of Opera magazine, Lyndon Terracini – now in his tenth year as artistic director – extolled the new technology: ‘We’re choreographing the screens – essentially they become another character … You can fly them out, send them upstage or downstage, turn them at any angle … What we’re doing is much more progressive than anyone else.’ Like it or not, we’ll have to become accustomed to this bright aesthetic, for the company’s clearly not for turning. While rightly praising David McVicar’s production of Così fan tutte, recently seen in Melbourne (‘the most beautiful Così in the world’, according to Terracini), he was emphatic, in the same interview, that the future looks very different. ‘We’ll keep [Così] – and others. But over the next ten years, as we add new productions, they’ll be digital.’ The aim, he says, is twofold: to find new audiences (‘Aida attracted a lot of digital freaks who were new to art form’) and to save money (lots of it, presumably) on building sets. Next year’s Ring cycle – lost to Melbourne because of major works at the State Theatre commencing in 2020 – will be similarly digital when it moves to Brisbane: a new production to be directed by Chen Shi-Zheng. It will be interesting to see how traditional opera audiences – and the favoured directors – cope with this LED technology. In the right hands, it might be transformative, as radical in a way as Wieland Wagner’s regenerative postwar productions of his grandfather’s soiled operas – a stripping away, a moving on, a veritable shaking up. In less confident hands – used glibly, gaudily, gratuitously – it has the potential to subvert the music and libretti that sustain our fascination with the hundred- or two-hundred-year-old operas that dominate Opera Australia’s repertory. With new productions of Anna Bolena and Madama

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Butterfly (Graeme Murphy’s mixed affair), Sydney audiences have two opportunities to assess the merits of the digital technology, which had its début in 2018 with David Livermore’s production of Aida. Reviewing it, I remarked: ‘Only Enobarbus could do justice to the infinite variety of the Italian director’s busy production. It relies heavily on video, ten LED screens, comely gymgods in G-strings, and inevitable hieroglyphics. There is so much going on in the first hour as to be giddy-making. Nothing, no one, stays still for more than ten seconds.’ Livermore returns for the first in a series of Gaetano Donizetti operas: Anna Bolena, Maria Stuarda, and Roberto Devereux – each one to be directed by him. It’s been done before in Australia, quite recently: Melbourne Opera presented the Tudor trilogy between 2015 and 2017. Albanian soprano Ermonela Jaho, first up as Anne Boleyn, will sing two of the three roles in Sydney. The thirtieth of Donizetti’s seventy operas, Anna Bolena premièred at the Teatro Carcano in Milan on 26 December 1830 (a full sixteen days after its completion). It was Donizetti’s first major international success. Anna Bolena soon moved to London and Paris, with the same principals, Giuditta Pasta (Anna) and Giovanni Battista Rubini (Percy). Donizetti had written the title role for Pasta, the first Amina and Norma, of whom Stendhal wrote, she ‘electrified the soul’. Anna Bolena was performed throughout the nineteenth century, but verismo opera brought an end to that at the turn of the century, and it was not revived until 1956 (in Bergamo, Donizetti’s birthplace). A year later, Luchino Visconti emphatically restored it to the repertory with a famous production at La Scala, which was revived the following year. The sole ‘full’ performance we have is a live recording from La Scala on 14 April 1957 (egregiously cut though it was by conductor Gianandrea Gavazzeni; ‘butchery’ was how Andrew Porter described it). This was one of Callas’s most blazing and vocally even performances since her Lucia with Karajan in Berlin two years earlier. Callas, throughout, while battered and disbelieving, is always queenly, befitting Anne Boleyn’s exalted status. (Anne was, after all, crowned with the same crown as the reigning monarch – a unique honour – making her, in effect, Queen Regnant.) Felice Romani’s libretto is based on two plays: Anna Bolena by Alessandro Pepoli (1788) and Marie-Joseph de Chénier’s Henri VIII (1791). This was their third collaboration, and the first time Donizetti had been presented with a first-class text. (Romani later wrote the libretti for L’elisir d’amore and Lucrezia Borgia.) Anne Boleyn, Henry VIII’s second queen, needs little introduction. Her story, fancifully told here, is very familiar. The opera begins in medias res. Anne, shattered by her husband’s unfeelingness, doesn’t realise that Jane Seymour, her lady-in-waiting, is Henry’s new paramour. Mark Smeaton, the queen’s page, is a gauche, flirty complication, and when Anne’s old admirer Lord Percy returns to court, Henry seizes the opportunity to accuse

her of adultery with practically every male in her circle, Teddy Tahu Rhodes, physically menacing as Henry, including her brother, Lord Rochfort. Anne is duly tried sang throughout with lots of volume but scant focus. and condemned. The opera – performed here without As for Livermore’s production, it is more measured cuts, thus running for more than three hours – ends with than his Aida, but not always convincing. It opens an arresting mad scene in the Tower of London prior with images of present-day London (Norman Foster’s to her decapitation. Gherkin even) repeatedly scaled back to humbler TuJaho, in the title role, is a natural foreboder, ever dor times. Because something must always be done to mannered and tragic. Interviewed in the June 2019 isenliven a mere overture, four dancers dressed in white sue of Opera magazine, Jaho said: ‘We are so naked on rotated on the ubiquitous stage in opera. We can’t fake revolve, miming in vague it. You need to be human, to allusions to facets of Anne’s be real. Singing is vocalizing tragedy. One even took your soul out.’ At times it touristic selfies, fast becomwas like watching a stricken ing a tired trope. Princess martyr from the silent era. Elizabeth, absent from Jaho has sung here once Romani’s libretto, appeared before, in 2017, as Violetta. mutely, slightly too old and Hers is not a big voice. With dressed, oddly, like a Veconsiderable artistry and lázquez Infanta – only to be enormous commitment, snubbed by her imperious Jaho husbanded her voice mother and finally, huffily, and met all the challenges to snub her in retaliation. of this taxing score. The M o s t l y t h e LED scintillating duet with Jane screens were filled with Seymour – when Anne brilliant amber or wrought finally recognises that her iron on which tiny beetles lady-in-waiting is her rival – crawled for all three hours, won a long ovation. Carmen symbolically or not. The Topciu, impressively carnal stage was very dark, and at times despite her seeming the brilliant costumes and contrition, was a powerful wigs (Mariana Fracasso) presence throughout; her accentuated this menacing mezzo soprano is much gloom. stronger than Jaho’s careful, Renato Palumbo drew filigreed soprano. fine playing from the orAnne’s long aria in the chestra, and the chorus was Tower, Donizetti’s first great in excellent voice. mad scene for soprano, is Lastly, a note on a Ermornela Jaho as Anna Bolena one of the finest things in further departure at Opera (photograph by Prudence Upton) bel canto opera. Winton Australia: this one quite Dean considered it ‘a masregrettable. No longer terpiece of dramatic pathos’, much better than the ‘condoes the company offer a substantial program for sale. ventional and far inferior’ mad scene in Lucia di LammerGone are the artists’ biographies, any serious expression moor. Anne, delirious, drifts in and out of consciousness. of directorial intent, substantial synopses, essays on ‘Al dolce guidami’ was beautifully preluded by the cor the opera, notes on past Australian productions, comanglais. Jaho, lying on her back near the edge of her memorative photographs, lists of donors, etc. Presumstage, sang with delicacy and pathos, all the trills and ably, this represents another welcome economy, but how melismas impeccably placed. are amateurs and operatic newcomers meant to cope Of the other singers, Anna Dowsley stood out as without any guidance? Surely Opera Australia – handMark Smeaton. Dowsley, who made such an impression somely subsidised by Australian taxpayers and charging as Dorabella in Melbourne, is fast becoming one of the high prices – should do better than the flimsy leaflets stars of this season. Leonardo Cortellazzi, though not currently on offer. Modern opera, if it’s to have a future, always helped by John Rayment’s sometimes wayward needs informed audiences, not just dazzled ones. g lighting, sang freely and ardently as Percy; he was at Anna Bolena was performed at the Joan Sutherland Theatre, his best in the Act I duet with Anne that signals their Sydney Opera House, until 26 July 2019. (Longer version online) undoing, and in ‘Vivi tu’ in Act II. Richard Anderson and John Longmuir were fine as Rochfort and Hervey. Peter Rose is the Editor of ABR. ARTS

From the ABR Archive

Alexis Wright’s Miles Franklin Literary Award-winning novel Carpentaria was published by Giramondo. Kate McFadyen reviewed it in the October 2006 issue of ABR. (Longer version online)

here is a mesmerising scene in Carpentaria when Joseph Midnight is asked if he has seen the fugitive Will Phantom, a young local Aboriginal man who is single-handedly waging a guerrilla war against a large lead ore mining company. He eyes the questioner and astutely identifies him as a ‘Southern blackfella … a real smart one, educated, acting as a guide. He got on a tie, clean white shirt and a nice suit.’ His response is several pages long, a vivid, vernacular stream of detail about the essence of Will: his relationship with his father and his country, his difference to other men and women, his ability to control his own fate. Midnight’s reverent delivery has lacerating wit; he plays his listener for the outsider he is, yet he does it with a tone of sincerity. Whether it is the charismatic voice of her omniscient narrator or the everyday dialogue spoken by her characters, Wright recognises the strength of the oral tradition as a satirical and ironic tool. The combination of storytelling on a mythic scale with the guile of the knowing look generates the energy required to drive this genius epic. Carpentaria is set in the small town of Desperance. It is a place with a stratified population. The deeply insecure white community occupies ‘Uptown’ with its neat, clean houses and its unquestioning sense of entitlement. The Aboriginal population, represented by the ‘Pricklebush’ mob and divided into two feuding camps, clings to the eastern and western fringes of the town. Much of the dramatic action of the novel is derived from local politics and from the intensity of the surrounding landscape and the extremes of the tropical climate. The narrator guides the reader through the ancient gulf terrain with a tone that can switch from reverence to cackling derision in a flash. The feeling that you are an outsider, an interloper, never leaves you. Anyone who has lived in a country town, especially alongside a sizeable Aboriginal community, will recognise the nasty, thin-lipped strain of racism evident among the townspeople of Desperance. This is a town run by the pugilistic mayor, Stan Bruiser, and by a clutch of founding fathers, most of whom are named Smith. The local policeman, Truthful E’Strange, once a hardened Brisbane cop, is now so unused to police work, due to the diligence of vigilantes, that he has gradually converted the police station into an exotic indoor garden. Yet behind these broader strokes of farce, Wright works in the details that suggest the true roots of racism in Australia. The asides and insults expressed so often by the good citizens of Uptown as they sneer at the decrepit housing and the drunken immorality of the Pricklebush 72 AUGUST 2019

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camps accumulate to expose naked fear and ignorance. This collective anxiety and irrationality reach a climax in the arrest and imprisonment of three young petrolsniffing boys for the murder of a local white youth. They are later found hanged in their cell, among the carefully tended vines of monstera and ficus elastica. The satire at the heart of Carpentaria is sharpened by Wright’s skilful characterisation. Initially, the parade of peculiarly named characters is somewhat off-putting. It is hard to resist the urge to treat the townspeople as caricatures, a series of wacky hayseeds. Soon it becomes apparent that a deeper aesthetic is at play, with many character’s names echoing the tensions between the literal and the ironic that recur throughout the novel. Two of the most memorable of Wright’s creations are the characters of Norm Phantom and his estranged son, Will. Norm, the enigmatic elder of the Westside Pricklebush mob, lives with his wife, Angel Day, and their large family in a house ingeniously constructed from stuff found at the tip. Norm’s deep affinity with the sea is both spiritual and practical. He knows his country intimately, every current, every mangrove, every groper hole. He is also a gifted taxidermist, specialising in fish and crustaceans, painstakingly preserving them, tinting the shimmer of their delicate skin with his own home-made paints. Will, a mystic and a hardened guerrilla, wages a personal war with Gurfurritt, the large international company planning to build a lead ore mine just outside the town. Most citizens of Desperance, keen to do anything to attract the jobs and money accompanying the mining company’s business, hate him for his efforts. There is widespread relief when he is driven from town. Some of the most tense parts of the novel depict Will’s life as a fugitive, dodging an aggressive and lawless enemy. Wright handles these scenes with great skill, carefully controlling the action, never surrendering to cliché or bombast. Will’s impatience and activism are pitted against the monolithic passivity of his father. By the novel’s end, both men have endured transformative spiritual tests, and arrive at very different understandings of manhood and their place in the world. Carpentaria is that rare kind of novel which opens up an entire world to the reader, a place that is both familiar and strange. Wright expects her readers to work, to keep up. If you stumble and lose your bearings, you just have to trust the narrator and let the eddies of digression flow around you until you can regain your toehold. The rewards are plenty. It is the most exhilarating book I have read in a long time. g