Australian Book Review, September 2019, issue no. 414

Jolley Prize

australianbookreview.com.au introduce groups of twenty graduate As always, we warmly acknowThe ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story students to the rudiments of magazine ledge the generous support of Ian Prize is now in its ninth year. On this culture with a view to encouraging Dickson, who makes the Jolley Prize occasion we received about 1,350 entries them to write for ABR or like pubpossible in this munificent form. from thirty-eight countries. The judges lications. Topics include writing for – Maxine Beneba Clarke, general readers, pitching, John Kinsella, and Beeworking with editors, online jay Silcox (chair) – have publishing, and the art of shortlisted three stories: criticism.

‘The Point-Blank Murder’ The most recent masterby Sonja Dechian (Vic.), class concluded on August 20, ‘Miracle Windows’ by just as we were going to press.

Raaza Jamshed (NSW), All the participants are enand ‘Rubble Boy’ by Morcouraged to submit a review gan Nunan (Vic.). They all or Op-Ed piece for considerappear in this issue. ation by the editorial team, so The judges also that we can award two paid commended three other commissions. As happened stories: ‘Supermarket last time, the quality was so The 2019 ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize shortlisted authors Love’ by Elleke Boehmer high we ended up tapping (L-R): Sonja Dechian, Morgan Nunan, and Raaza Jamshed (United Kingdom), ‘Hero four PhD students: Merav ABR and Monash University Fima (Literary and Cultural Studies), Manifest’ by Bill Collopy (Vic.), and Since its inception in 2016, ABR’s ‘Lizard Boy’ by Brendan Sargeant Luke Forbes (Theatre Performance agreement with Monash University (ACT). These stories will be published and Music), Christine Lambrianidis has led to a regular ABR presence online in coming months. The other (Theatre Performance and Music), and on campus and a marked increase in four longlisted stories are listed on James Milner (Literature and Cultural Monash contributions to our pages. our website. Congratulations to the Studies) – photographed together A major facet of our agreement authors and thank you to our judges opposite. Merav Fima submitted a with the Faculty of Arts is a series of and to all those who entered this year’s review of Elizabeth Bryer’s novel From publishing masterclasses. Over the Jolley Prize.

Here On, Monsters ( James Halford course of three weeks, the ABR editors reviews it for us on page 40). Last year, If you are in Melbourne on Wednesday, September 11, join coincidentally, Bryer was offered us at Readings Hawthorn for the one of these paid commissions Jolley Prize ceremony – always at ABR. Doubtless, someone atenjoyable, if tense-making for the tending the next masterclass will authors (only the judges know elect to review a new book from the winner until he or she is Brill – Gal Ventura’s Maternal named on the night). The overall Breast-Feeding and Its Substitutes winner, to be named by Maxine in Nineteenth-Century French Art Beneba Clarke – a stalwart of the – which Merav Fima, deployJolley Prize – will receive $5,000. ing her French and Hebrew, All six authors share in the total has translated in her spare prize money of $12,500. time. (She has just received the On this occasion, for the Monash University Literary and first time, all six shortlisted Cultural Studies Best Publicaand commended authors will tion Prize for this monograph.) be present. This is a free event We look forward to pub(L-R): Christine Lambrianidis, James Milner, and everyone is welcome, but lishing this talented quartet in Luke Forbes, and Merav Fima bookings are essential: rsvp@ coming months. (photograph by Julia Lamb, Monash University) A D VA N C E S

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Calibre at Gleebooks

Join us on September 9 at Gleebooks to hear Grace Karskens – winner of the 2019 Calibre Essay Prize – in conversation with author and historian Mark McKenna about her essay ‘Nah Doongh’s Song’. The event starts at 6 for 6.30pm at Gleebooks in Glebe, NSW. Booking details can be found on our website.

New website!

ABR is getting a makeover! While our website has served us well over the years, it’s time for a major structural and aesthetic renovation. The website, due to be launched in early September, features a new design specially optimised for reading on phones and tablets. Enjoy reading the Jolley stories and all the other September features – plus our fast-growing digital archive – on our new website. Let us know what you think.

ABR Fellowships

We’ve been heartened by the response to our Indigenous issue in August and to the creation of the ABR Indigenous Fellowship, which is worth $10,000.

We encourage interested writers and commentators to contact the Editor, Peter Rose, before formally applying.

(Applications close on October 1.)

Email him at editor@australianbookreview.com.au The ABR Behrouz Boochani Fellowship has now closed and the judges – J.M. Coetzee, Michelle Foster, and Peter Rose – are considering the applications. We look forward to naming the Fellow in coming weeks.

Behrouz Boochani himself, meanwhile, continues to garner plaudits for his memoir, No Friend But the Mountains: Writing from Manus Prison (Picador, 2018), while still languishing on Manus Island because of the obduracy of the Australian government. The most recent of his prizes is the 2019 National Biography Award, which is worth $25,000. Accepting the Award from afar, Behrouz thanked his many supporters but ‘didn’t want to talk about literature’. He described the resistance to his incarceration and that of his fellow prisoners as part of 2 SEP TMBER 2019

the opposition. He concluded: ‘I think history will judge this generation and will judge all of us for this hard and dark period in Australian history.’

FAN Poll

Have you voted in our Favourite Australian Novel since 2000 poll yet? Do so before entries close on September 16 and be in the running to win one of our three special prizes: a $500 gift voucher from Readings, Herbert von Karajan’s Complete Recordings on Deutsche Grammophon and Decca, courtesy of our friends at Classics Direct, or a five-year digital subscription to ABR. The October issue will include a feature on the Top Twenty novels nominated by readers.

Prizes galore

The Peter Porter Poetry Prize doesn’t close until October 1. We’ve been impressed by the prolificity of the poets. In the first few weeks there was a marked increase in the number of entries compared with recent years.

A record field seems likely. Perhaps the new first prize of $7,000 is a factor.

Just a heads-up, as they say, on our other international prizes. To help administratively and promotionally, we’ve separated all three prizes.

The Calibre Essay Prize will open a week after the closure of the Porter (October 8), and the next Jolley Prize will open on January 20, soon after Calibre’s closure.

NED

A major new digital resource is now available for writers, publishers, and readers. NED (the National edeposit), as it is affectionately called, is a nationwide digital collection of Australian publications. We’re talking books, journals, magazines, music, pamphlets, newsletters, novels, children’s stories, self-published poetry anthologies, maps – even government reports, if you are so inclined.

NED was made possible by the national, state, and territory libraries coming together to combine their digital archives. Kate Tormey, CEO of State Library Victoria, writes for our new online column Book Talk about ‘the herculean task’ behind the NED and its profound implications for consumers of Australian literature.

Letters Nick Cave

Dear Editor, Felicity Plunkett’s essay on Nick Cave and trauma’s aftermath (ABR, June–July 2019) exhibits qualities worthy of its subject. Many of us were wondering how it was all going – the film allows insight without intrusion.

I was shocked and delighted to see that it existed. And what a graceful and exquisite artist the boy from The Birthday Party grew into. I walked out on them in a garage in Alexandria once. They were making a raucous noise, unbearable even by punk’s low bar. Normally, I would have danced to the sound of a dripping tap, but I had to leave. It might have been 1987.

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW

Nick Cave feels like a brother to many of us now. Let’s appreciate this reminder that he’s here, doing the work, creating and sharing the gold he spins from straw and shit.

Janelle Trees (online comment)

Much ado about Much Ado

Dear Editor, After reading Tim Byrne’s online review of Bell Shakespeare’s new production of Much Ado About Nothing (ABR Arts, July 2019), I am left wondering if I’d seen the same production.

While not totally perfect, there was so much more to admire about the play than your reviewer indicated.

[Letters continue on page 5]

September 2019

Zora Simic Brenda Niall Alexander Wells Rémy Davison Dennis Altman Bronwyn Lea James Bradley Patrick McCaughey

10 12 13 16 18 26 29 58

Letters

Janelle Trees, Robyn St George, Edwina Tribe, George Greenberg, Yvonne Smith, Paul Menman

Biography & Memoir

51 Ivo de Figueiredo: Henrik Ibsen Kári Gíslason Jessica White: Hearing Maud 54 Rachel Robertson

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Politics

Poems

Adam Gopnik: A Thousand Small Sanities Russell Blackford 15 Hugh White: How to Defend Australia Chengxin Pan 21

53 Sarah Holland-Batt 63 Michael Farrell

Essays

True Crime

Andrea Wulf (ed.): Alexander von Humboldt Tom Griffiths 20

55 Matthew Condon: The Night Dragon Ben Smith

Society

Shakespeare

David Leser: Women, Men and the Whole Damn Thing Paul Dalgarno 23 Kate Gleeson and Catharine Lumby (eds): The Age of Consent Dean Biron 61

Jonathan Bate: How the Classics Made Shakespeare 56 David McInnis

Architecture

Interview

57 Eileen Chanin: Capital Designs Jim Davidson

Open Page: Helen Garner 24

Fiction

Claire G. Coleman: The Old Lie Alison Whittaker Philip Salom: The Returns Brenda Walker Lucy Treloar: Wolfe Island Naama Grey-Smith Elizabeth Bryer: From Here On, Monsters James Halford Catherine Jinks: Shepherd David Whish-Wilson Peter Polites: The Pillars Crusader Hillis Lucy Caldwell (ed.): Being Various Chris Flynn

Two books on rape and domestic abuse Geoffrey Blainey’s memoirs Mass suicide in defeated Germany Antecedents of contemporary illiberalism Contradictions in the 2019 federal election Two new short-story collections Andrew McGahan’s posthumous novel A prodigious and controversial architect

Education

Craig Campbell and Debra Hayes: Jean Blackburn 60 Ilana Snyder

30 31 38 39 40 46 47

Poetry

Jeremy Noel-Tod: The Penguin Book of the Prose Poem 62 John Hawke

Music

Mark Wigglesworth: The Silent Musician 64 Paul Kildea

Jolley Prize

‘The Point-Blank Murder’ Sonja Dechian 32 ‘Miracle Windows’ Raaza Jamshed 41 ‘Rubble Boy’ Morgan Nunan 48

From the Archive

72 Markus Zusak: The Book Thief Lorien Kaye

ABR Arts

Tim Byrne Tali Lavi Lisa Gorton Jake Wilson Jane Montgomery Griffiths

66 67 69 70 71

Golden Shield My Dearworthy Darling A Room of One’s Own Palm Beach Epiphany: Becoming Electra CONTENTS

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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 Government of Western Australia through the Department of Local Government, Sport, and Creative Industries; 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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AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW

The whole slant on locker-room ‘bro culture’ contrasted perfectly with Beatrice’s beautifully acted frustration about being a woman – still so pertinent. This contrasted with the relationship of Claudio and Hero, which made way more sense to me than it did in the Kenneth Branagh film version. I, too, was a little nonplussed by the opening scene, but when that scene returned at the end it made total sense, rounding this production nicely.

There is such flexibility in the dramaturgy of Shakespeare plays. There is always a new angle to be explored, and Bell Shakespeare has often used this to great advantage.

Robyn St George (online comment) Having seen this production, I agree with every word of Tim Byrne’s review. I was so appalled by most elements of this production that I went online hunting for reviews. As a teacher of English and Drama, I was glad I hadn’t taken my students to see this as an example of contemporary Shakespeare or as an example of acting and direction. It’s always a relief to read a review that more succinctly articulates what I’m feeling.

Edwina Tribe (online comment)

The scourge of anti-Semitism

Dear Editor, What an outstanding review by Ilana Snyder of Deborah Lipstadt’s extraordinary book Antisemitism: Here and now (August 2019). The reviewer’s deft understanding of the issues covered by Lipstadt is apparent.

That there are varied facets of antiSemitsm is not new, but that the facets are increasing in complexity as well as in intensity is new.

Snyder’s review highlights the im-

Christina Stead and the Matter of America Fiona Morrison

portant issues unpacked in Lipstadt’s book, many of which will resonate with diaspora Jews and with Israelis – and, it is to be hoped, with others.

The importance of our own individual, proactive, educative, and responsive actions is also highlighted. As the reviewer comments, ‘[Lipstadt] 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.’ This sort of ‘reverse vilification’ is often counterproductive. By way of example – in 2003 Hanan Ashrawi was awarded the Sydney Peace Prize, which offended some critics. Much of the public criticism from sections of the Australian Jewish community was not fact-based and verged on the hysterical – to what end?

As Lipstadt concludes in her Note to the Reader: ‘[This book] is written with the conviction that action starts with understanding, which will be applied differently by different people in different circumstances. My attempt to explore a perplexing and disturbing set of circumstances is written in the hope that it will provoke action. What precisely the action remains in the hands of the reader.’ One hopes that Lipstadt’s book will lead to a better understanding of the scourge of antiSemitism in all its guises, and that it will be a catalyst for understanding and change.

George Greenberg (online comment)

about David Malouf (ABR, May 2019). But has he really understood Malouf ’s background? The description that Malouf is ‘half-Lebanese’ (although he might equally be described as ‘half ’ English, Jewish, or Catholic) and the suggestion that he might be suppressing ‘half his identity’ seems to offer a skewed angle on his upbringing. Unlike Nam Le, Malouf never heard his parents speak a language other than English; he heard no ‘old country’ stories from his father who grew up in Brisbane and was determined to identify as Australian.

Malouf ’s grandfather never learned English.

Given his parents’ example and the experience of a wartime childhood, it is not surprising that Malouf came to have a deep sense of the dangers of perceived differences. If Nam Le aspires to have in the future a body of work of the quality of David Malouf ’s, he should follow what he recognises in Malouf: that a great writer must be fully and frankly himself and not worry about being ‘half ’ anything.

Yvonne Smith, Leura, NSW (Longer version online)

Nil by half

Correction

Dear Editor, In your review of Nam Le’s recent publication on David Malouf, you rightly point out that Nam Le writes mainly about himself rather than

Bruce Pascoe’s Open Page

Dear Editor, What a man! We could all learn something from Bruce Pascoe.

Paul Menman (online comment)

In Michael Halliwell’s review of the opera Whiteley in the August issue, the composer’s name was misspelt.

It is, of course, Elena Kats-Chernin not Elena Katz-Chernin.

In the first critical study to focus on Stead’s time in America, Morrison argues that the author’s American novels “reveal the work of the greatest political woman writer of the mid twentieth century”. sydneyuniversitypress.com.au

LET TERS

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AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW

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B Y WIL L IAM SHAKESPE ARE

DIREC T OR JAMES E VANS

BEL L SHAKESPE ARE.C OM.AU

11–19 OC T OBER C ANBERR A THE ATRE CENTRE 22 OC T OBER – 24 NO V EMBER S YDNE Y OPER A HOUSE

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AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW

Australian Book Review | September 2019, no. 414 Since 1961 First series 1961–74 | Second series (1978 onwards, from no. 1) ISSN 0155-2864 Registered by Australia Post | Printed by Doran Printing

Cover Design Judith Green 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 27 August.

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.

ABR is published ten times a year by Australian Book Review Inc. Studio 2, 207 City Road, Southbank, Vic. 3006 Phone: (03) 9699 8822 Twitter: @AustBookReview | Facebook: @AustralianBookReview Instagram: @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 Jane Finemore – jane@finemorecommunications.com or 0408 463 873 Volunteers Eloise Cox (Monash University Intern), 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.

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REVIEW OF THE MONTH

Overarching questions Two books on domestic abuse and rape

Zora Simic SEE WHAT YOU MADE ME DO: POWER, CONTROL AND DOMESTIC ABUSE

by Jess Hill Black Inc., $32.99 pb, 416 pp, 9781760641405

RAPE: FROM LUCRETIA TO #METOO

by Mithu Sanyal Verso, $29.95 hb, 236 pp, 9781786637505

D

omestic violence and rape are not easy topics to write or read about. It’s not just because of the subject matter itself, as grim and distressing as the details can be. The writer must grapple with centuries of cultural baggage, competing theorisations and research paradigms, and the politicisation of these issues, for better or worse. They have responsibilities to those affected, including among their readership, and there may be legalities to navigate. There’s the question of what language to use; some terms – like ‘domestic violence’ – may no longer be fit for purpose, if they ever were, while others – like ‘rape’ – retain a rhetorical power that can flatten out the complexities. Statistics, inevitably, must be presented but also qualified and carefully deployed. Persistent myths and assumptions should, at the least, be dutifully considered. Gender, of course, has to be reckoned with, including in relation to class, race, and religion. Looming over all of these concerns are overarching questions – what’s the intervention here, is it useful, and who will pay attention?

Walkley Award-winning investigative journalist Jess Hill spent four consuming years researching domestic violence, or ‘domestic abuse’, a term she convincingly prefers because in ‘some of the worst abusive relationships, physical violence is rare, minor or barely present’.

To elucidate both the range of behaviours that encompass domestic abuse and their astonishing uniformity across different families and relationships (as though plucked from what she calls ‘the perpetrator’s handbook’), Hill spoke to survivors and perpetrators, experts and activists. She sifted through decades of research to distil the main approaches to comprehending domestic abuse. This included canvassing explanations for the

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AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW

higher rates of family violence in Aboriginal communities where, as she notes, Indigenous women are thirtyfive times more likely to be hospitalised and eleven times more likely to die from their injuries. Children, oftneglected in or peripheral to previous studies, are given a dedicated chapter, but they are present throughout.

Current legal options for dealing with domestic abuse, namely the police and the courts, are scrutinised and revealed as mostly failing. The Family Court system, in particular, is nightmarishly depicted. With cautious optimism, Hill offers examples of positive initiatives from within Australia and across the world. See What You Made Me Do is a thorough, thoughtful, solutionsoriented examination that demands to be taken seriously.

I

n her new book, Rape: From Lucretia to #MeToo, an English-language translation and revision of the 2016 German first edition, writer and cultural commentator Mithu Sanyal takes a radically different approach to her subject than Hill. Both writers are obviously feminists, but Hill’s exemplary reportage stands in contrast to Sanyal’s more freewheeling and self-consciously provocative style. The title ambitiously suggests a sweeping history that takes us from a foundational ‘rape myth’ through to the contemporary moment.

But Sanyal is no historian, though she does draw substantially on Joanna Bourke’s Rape: A history from 1860 to the present (2008), a deeply researched and thoughtprovoking work I would recommend to any reader seeking out the historical approach Sanyal’s title references, but only intermittently provides. Rape is instead an emphatically contemporary book, primarily concerned with joining in on and extending current conversations

about rape and ‘rape culture’, a loaded term she dissects with some skill. Rape may be a depressing subject, Sanyal writes in her introduction, but ‘this doesn’t have to a be a depressing book’. On this front, Sanyal delivers. Hers is a rather jaunty book, in the mode of Laura Kipnis or Laurie Penny, two feminist commentators she quotes liberally throughout.

Given the heightened visibility of both domestic violence and sexual assault in recent years, both books are obviously timely publications. This is a point each author makes more than once, Hill somewhat hyperbolically in her introduction. ‘For the first time in history,’ she declares, ‘we have summoned the courage to confront domestic abuse.’ In Australia, the horrific murder in 2014 of eleven-year-old Luke Batty in broad daylight was the ‘decisive turning point’, eventually leading to the Royal Commission into Family Violence in Victoria, the most comprehensive political response to the problem thus far.

But as Hill also recognises, the current moment is not unique insofar as, for decades now, violence in the home has circled in and out of public consciousness as a serious issue in need of attention. In some ways, we’ve gone backwards. The system of emergency refuge for women and children fleeing violence is ‘practically broken’, and governments have stopped properly investing in affordable housing. New technologies have produced new forms of coercive control. While maintaining a firm grip of essential details and a carefully calibrated narrative, Hill does not hold back from sharing her own despair at the lack of options available or her fury at failures in policing and social services that have sometimes led to death. Hers is a book to shake readers out of their complacency, not through sensationalising the issue but by doing the necessary work of giving every essential facet of the problem due consideration.

As feminists, Hill and Sanyal are necessarily invested in the larger project of cultural change, which they both recognise takes time and must include men. In various ways, they each extend, complicate, and occasionally refute feminist analyses from the 1970s. For Sanyal, the obvious touchstone is US author Susan Brownmiller’s landmark text on rape, Against Our Will (1975), so influential that its legacy endures in contemporary discourses and activism around rape, including in racist stereotypes about alleged perpetrators. In contemplating Brownmiller’s influence from her European vantage point, Sanyal’s book offers a refreshing perspective on how and what feminists should prioritise. For Sanyal, the project of sexual self-determination is not served particularly well by feminist constructions of rape that reproduce retrograde notions of female sexual passivity and vulnerability on the one side, and male sexual aggression on the other.

In addressing men who have been raped, Sanyal achieves her goal of opening up alternative narratives, though at times she overstates her case. Not unlike Germaine Greer’s short, shambolic essay On Rape (2018),

Sanyal’s is a somewhat messy book, perhaps inevitably so considering the myriad themes that attach themselves to the topic of rape. But it’s also a more engaging and sustained provocation, including her analysis of the racialised dynamics of the alleged ‘mass sexual harassment’ in the streets of Cologne on New Year’s Eve 2015; the evident Islamophobia of which is transferable to the Australian context.

Mindful of how some men’s rights activists have succeeded in bringing a misleading counter-narrative about male victims of domestic violence to public consciousness, Hill is more careful than Sanyal in contemplating feminist interpretations of the problem. She notes the benefits and limitations of both feminist and psychological explanations and advocates for an approach that incorporates the best elements of both. A chapter is devoted to women who commit violence against men. She takes seriously the ways hegemonic notions of masculinity harm women and men. The notion that gender equality can eradicate or reduce rates of domestic abuse is scrutinised and mostly dismissed. Having done all of this, Hill’s ultimate framing of the problem as rooted in patriarchy – a term which, she notes, was still a ‘dirty word’ before #MeToo came along – is both persuasive and reductive.

There is no question that See What You Made Me Do is a feminist book. Occasionally, I did wish for more direct engagement with feminists who have struggled with similar dilemmas to those posed by Hill – such as how to attend to the macro and micro dimensions of the problem. A notable exception is her illuminating and powerful chapter on violence in Indigenous communities. Here, Hill prioritises the work and activism of Aboriginal women such as Judy and Caroline Atkinson, Marcia Langton, Josephine Cashman, Melissa Lucashenko, Hannah McGlade, Amy McQuire, and Celeste Liddle, as well as community-based initiatives.

To return to my opening questions, See What You Made Me Do and Rape: From Lucretia to #MeToo are both useful books, especially the first. Hill has given the topic of domestic abuse the gravitas and attention it demands, but she is also right to be concerned with its reception and possible impact. As she notes, increased visibility of the problem can have mixed effects – incidents of domestic violence have spiked after documentaries focused on the issue have aired in prime time, but it may be that the coverage has made it easier or more possible for victims to speak out. At the policy level, governments have set national targets without concrete goals, and have funded expensive awareness campaigns but not refuges. I hope her hefty tome lands with a thud on the desk of every politician in Australia and that each one reads it. I predict it will be the most important work of Australian non-fiction this year. g Zora Simic is a Senior Lecturer in History and Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of New South Wales.

REVIEW OF THE MONTH

11

Mosaics of tiny facts Early signs of a contrarian historian

Brenda Niall BEFORE I FORGET: AN EARLY MEMOIR

by Geoffrey Blainey

Hamish Hamilton, $45 hb, 340 pp, 9781760890339

U

nlike an autobiography, which tends to be time-bound and inclusive, the memoir can wander at will in the writer’s past, searching out and shaping an idea of self. Although Geoffrey Blainey’s memoir, Before I Forget, is restricted to the first forty years of his life, its skilfully chosen episodes suggest much more. The memoir shows how Blainey set his own course as a historian and forecasts the brilliant but sometimes unexpected career that he achieved.

As a maker of memorable phrases, Blainey has few equals. As well as ‘the tyranny of distance’, which comes from one of his book titles, he has given us the ‘black armband’ view of Australia’s past and its ‘three cheers’ antithesis. His account of childhood is one of difficulties overcome without fuss. No black armbands in his private story, no regrets or complaints. He is too polite to give himself more than two cheers.

Blainey’s narrative celebrates the pleasures and challenges of growing up in rural and provincial Victoria in the 1930s and early 1940s. The second in a family of five, he was the son of a Methodist minister who earned a meagre stipend in several small towns before being moved to Geelong and Ballarat.

Nurtured by loving parents, the young Geoffrey was favoured by a lucky chance that brought him to the city, and to early and dazzling success.

Always an avid reader of newspapers, Blainey discovered a scholarship that seemed made to measure for him.

The winner had to be a thirteen-yearold son of a Methodist minister, living more than forty-eight kilometres from Melbourne. As well as a free place as a boarder at Wesley College, Melbourne, 12 SEP T MBER 2019

it offered an allowance for textbooks, weekly pocket money, and train fares home. Geoffrey’s parents were doubtful about sending their son into a less religious environment among boys from affluent homes, but they allowed him to travel to Melbourne to sit for the exam.

‘I went by myself,’ Blainey writes, as if to assert some agency in this magical windfall.

Another clergyman’s son, historian Manning Clark, claimed (with some self-dramatisation) to have been tormented and patronised at Melbourne Grammar School. Blainey has no complaints about being a ‘scholarship boy’ at Wesley. He counts himself lucky to have been taught English by writer and critic A.A. Phillips, who was forthright about ‘flabby’ or ornate prose. Blainey was not quite seventeen when he entered the University of Melbourne, with a senior government scholarship and a free place at Queen’s College.

Blainey writes warmly about his time as a history student, the kindness of his tutor Manning Clark, and the charm of Kathleen Fitzpatrick’s incomparable lecturing style. Editing the student weekly Farrago gave him a whiff of the exciting world of print. His co-editor, law student Tony Harold, a Catholic and ALP member, was deeply and publicly committed to abolishing the White Australia policy. Blainey valued social cohesion over diversity.

Although he was a wholehearted follower of Prime Minister Robert Menzies, he admired the opposition leader, Arthur Calwell, who had rigidly administered the White Australia policy during his term as Labor’s immigration minister. In 1950 the two Farrago editors took it in turns to bring out a paper

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW

that differed in style and tone from week to week. ‘We didn’t argue or quarrel,’ Blainey recalls. They just got on with it, on parallel lines.

Blainey completed his arts degree with first-class honours, as expected.

But when it was time to take his place in the academic procession, he opted out. Later, he refused the formality of accepting his Master of Arts degree. It is hard to understand his motives, or to reconcile them with the calm and amiable young man who had moved so easily through his university course.

Did he suddenly rebel against doffing his hat to the vice-chancellor? Was it because everybody walked in procession together, wearing the same robes?

Could this be an early showing of the contrarian historian Blainey was to become? His own explanation is that the graduation fee felt like a tax on knowledge. He had no known personal grievances; the university system had treated him well. The refusal to take out

As a maker of memorable phrases, Blainey has few equals his degree appears as the only wayward gesture of his student days. Years later, when Blainey was appointed to the Australian Studies chair at Harvard, the anomaly of a professor with no degree was resolved by David Derham, the vice-chancellor, who had the two degrees conferred in absentia.

If Blainey had embarked on an academic career in 1951, it would have meant a few years as a tutor, followed by an overseas scholarship to study at Oxford or Cambridge. That was never what he wanted. More ambitious and more of a risk-taker than most, he planned to write history, not to teach it.

He was helped on this adventurous path

by Max Crawford, head of the history department, who recommended him to the board of the Mount Lyell Mining and Railway Company, then in search of an historian. The Peaks of Lyell, published

by Melbourne University Press in 1954, was the first in a series of commissioned histories, written with flair and judgement, from which Blainey made a

precarious living for some years before taking an academic post. Bestsellers followed. Ideas tumbled out in generous profusion. The Rush that Never Ended (1963) and The Tyranny of Distance (1966) were reprinted many times. Well before his fortieth birthday, Blainey had found a wide general readership.

Blainey’s habitual nostalgia appeared in Black Kettle and Full Moon: Daily life in a vanished Australia (2003).

He writes with the same affection in Before I Forget about his mother’s household work. Coming home from school, he would find her baking cakes, making jam, bottling fruit, darning socks. She had no refrigerator, no electric or gas stove, no vacuum cleaner. The values embodied in these memories sustained the historian in later years, but did not rule out a lively curiosity about the changes the future might bring.

Before I Forget conveys the romantic excitement the young Blainey felt in discovering primary sources. Old letters, even columns of figures, were brought to life in the Mount Lyell project. Blainey learned how to make ‘a mosaic of tiny facts culled or scrounged from everywhere’. The Mount Lyell chapter shows the awakening of the young writer, alone in the Tasmanian wilderness. The ghostly remnants of the old copper mine near Zeehan brought him close to the past. For the way they faced danger and solitude, miners became his heroes. They still are. In the present context, this may seem unhelpful. But, take it or leave it, that’s Geoffrey Blainey. g

Brenda Niall’s most recent book is Can You Hear the Sea? (Text Publishing), a memoir of her grandmother.

‘Urgency, contagion, fear’ Waves of suicides in defeated Germany

Alexander Wells PROMISE ME YOU’LL SHOOT YOURSELF: THE MASS SUICIDES OF ORDINARY GERMANS IN 1945

by Florian Huber, translated by Imogen Taylor Text Publishing, $32.99 pb, 224 pp, 9781925773699

E

veryone knows about the final days of Adolf Hitler – his abject suicide in a clammy Berlin bunker. Many prominent Nazis followed suit, including the master propagandist Joseph Goebbels, who broadcast messages to the public espousing the virtue of death over defeat. His wife, Magdalena, wrote: ‘Our glorious idea is ruined, and with it everything beautiful, admirable, noble and good that I have known in my life. The world that will come after the Führer and National Socialism won’t be worth living in, so I have taken the children with me.’ There were six of them, all killed with cyanide.

But what of the everyday people?

This is the subject of Florian Huber’s Promise Me You’ll Shoot Yourself: The mass suicides of ordinary Germans in 1945, a 2015 bestseller in Germany now translated into English by Imogen Taylor. Huber, an author and documentary filmmaker, examines the tens of thousands of Germans who took their own lives in 1945 – mostly in eastern states, where the much-feared Red Army was brutally advancing (some two million German women were raped during this time).

The first part of the book, Huber’s strongest, focuses on the small northeastern town of Demmin. From April 30 to May 3, some 700 to 1,000 people took their own lives there – men and women, young and old, Nazi Party members and non-members. Abandoned by the German army, which burned the bridges behind them, Demmin’s civilians were stranded. Corpses filled the rivers and woods; many of those who committed suicide killed their children as well.

Huber makes artful use of eyewit-

ness accounts – diaries, letters, memoirs – to construct a fast-paced narrative and a ‘view from below’. Medical student Lotte-Lore Martens observed the smoking town, its doomsday scenery: The meadows by the river, resplendent in their spring finery, were edged, like the borders of a dress, with about 1.5–2 metres of baby’s clothes and other garments – expensive frocks and furs in particular – and identity papers and passports. Money, too – a lot of money – but nobody stooped to pick it up; it seemed to us worthless.

Huber’s primary interest is psychological. In Demmin as elsewhere, he argues, Germans saw no way out of the horrors they anticipated: the vengeful Russians, but also a seemingly unbearable transition to a world where Germans were ruled (and judged) by hated enemies. There were far fewer suicides in western regions, but Huber insists that the nationwide picture reflected the same disorientation and terror. ‘Urgency, contagion, fear,’ he writes. ‘Demmin was everywhere.’

At times, Huber seems overly eager to ascribe a sense of moral reawakening.

When accounts report a loss of faith, it is not certain they have realised the wrongness of Nazi ideology: they might just be disappointed that a righteous war was failing. An illustrative sequence explores the diary of Johannes Theinert, a teacher at a Nazi school, and his wife.

When a former pupil informs them about the extent of German atrocities, they realise that the advancing Russians have, in Huber’s words, ‘every reason to feel hatred and anger towards the Germans’. The Theinerts soon decide MEMOIR

13

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14 SEP T MBER 2019

to kill themselves. Huber speculates that this was caused by a realisation of their own complicity, but here is his supporting quote from Frau Theinert: ‘How lovely the future could be, if only – yes, if only – grim reality hadn’t destroyed all our dreams of life after the war.’ It sounds more like Magdalena Goebbels than sincere moral repentance. The notion of self-accusing suicides might be reassuring – everyday civilians waking up and beginning to prosecute the past – but the evidence is unconvincing.

Germans saw no way out of the horrors they anticipated The book’s German subtitle is Der Untergang der kleinen Leute. The beginning, Der Untergang (‘downfall’), evokes the canonical film about Hitler’s suicide, while kleine Leute (‘little people’) is an idiom that can mean ‘ordinary folks’, but here it seems to emphasise civilians’ comparative powerlessness. When narrating the ruins of 1945, Huber’s characters seem helpless – but we do not see their previous years of accelerating hatred, petty compromises, cruelly misdirected enthusiasms. (Herr Theinert’s career indoctrinating children does not feature.) The dangerous idea that Nazi crimes were perpetrated by an influential minority, separate from good (if naïve) everyday Germans, was a popular reactionary myth right after the war.

No doubt many eyewitnesses did feel powerless – plenty will have wanted to emphasise their impotence in hindsight – but Huber seems unduly ready to take them at their word.

In the book’s second section, an emotional history of the Nazi period, Huber argues that Germans spent twelve years in an ‘intoxicated’ state of moral avoidance. What remained for the defeated was nothing but guilt, fear, and ‘despair at the emptiness that now faced them’: many chose death instead. This historical background, though somewhat incongruous, provides essential context by including true believers alongside compromisers, registering the agency many Germans did have, and discussing

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW

the widespread postwar victim complex.

These mass suicides have been relatively understudied, partly because of taboos around the discussion of German wartime suffering. Progressive Germans have largely shied away from anything that might encourage myths of German victimisation. Yet recent decades have seen a renewed mainstream interest in these topics, notably W.G. Sebald’s essay on Allied bombing and Günter Grass’s novella Crabwalk (2002), which considered the risks of leaving such ‘unploughed fields’ of collective trauma to right-wingers.

Suicides occupy a difficult status, resistant to categories of victim and perpetrator. Huber attempts to avoid the temptations of victimhood, and he generally succeeds – especially in the book’s broader second half. Still, the emotional force of the book lies with those helpless civilians in the horrorscape of Demmin. Huber’s narration, due to its force and narrow focus, threatens to fall into old traps.

Huber is passionate about giving voice to these people overtaken by history. One chapter ends with Frau Theinert’s final diary entry: ‘Who will think of us, who will know how we ended?’ The price of Huber’s devotion to individual narratives is that he risks repeating their delusions and elisions – this book pays alarmingly scant attention to the Nazi regime’s victims. Where are the dissidents, the Jews, the Romani, the homosexual or disabled people? These were all ordinary Germans as well – until the Germans decided they weren’t. g

Alexander Wells is a freelance writer and history researcher who lives in Sydney. ❖

All you need Russell Blackford A THOUSAND SMALL SANITIES: THE MORAL ADVENTURE OF LIBERALISM

by Adam Gopnik

I

riverrun $35 hb, 245 pp, 9781529401578

n an era of dogmatism, polarisation, and intolerance, visible on both the right and left wings of politics, liberalism needs more love. Part of its image problem is a widespread perplexity about what values and principles it really stands for. In different times and places, liberalism has meant many different, even contradictory, things.

There are, among others, British and American traditions of liberalism (dating back to the 1830s and the 1930s, respectively), varied liberal traditions in continental Europe, and still others in Latin America, while in Australia our so-called Liberal Party is firmly perched on the centre-right of the political spectrum (where it has nothing obvious to do with the ideas of, say, Benjamin Constant or John Stuart Mill).

In A Thousand Small Sanities, the New Yorker essayist Adam Gopnik acknowledges this confusion. At one point, he compares liberalism to a rhinoceros: an ungainly, imperfect, and superficially unattractive sort of animal – yet real enough, unlike a pretty unicorn, and effective at what it does.

Gopnik explains that liberalism’s values include liberty, equality, and democracy, as well as tolerance, kindness, pluralism, self-realisation, and autonomy. Among its principles are freedom of speech, judicial independence, and, more generally, the rule of law. My own list of liberal values and principles might be slightly different, but Gopnik’s is a pretty good starting point.

Gopnik argues that the essence of liberalism is not centrist but radically reformist. It aims at removing the many sorts of cruelty that mar human societies, and this requires large changes to practices and institutions. However, liberals seek reforms over time, through

constant small steps supported at each stage by discussion and debate, rather than through revolutionary upheavals.

Furthermore, liberalism is conciliatory rather than triumphalist. As Gopnik points out, it accommodates the interests of as many people as it can, even, where possible, those of its defeated opponents.

A Thousand Small Sanities is an attempt to make liberalism seem more lovable, and part of the strategy is to present us with lovable liberals. Gopnik sketches the lives and ideals of some famous liberal thinkers, including John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor – British liberalism’s iconic couple. As Gopnik tells their love story, Mill and Taylor seem far more passionate, less inaccessibly cerebral, than in most accounts.

They are touchingly human in their hesitations, complications, and compromises. Gopnik offers a similarly sweet portrayal of Mary Ann (or Marian) Evans – who wrote as George Eliot – and her lover, George Henry Lewes.

However, some of Gopnik’s excursions into the past, and some of his pigeonholing of various historical and contemporary individuals as liberals, create a suspicion about his overall project. He co-opts for liberalism numerous people who would not usually be regarded as liberal thinkers – or at least not as exemplary liberal thinkers.

Among these are Michel de Montaigne, Jürgen Habermas, and the political scientist Robert D. Putnam. Conversely, he is silent about many prime movers of liberal thought: among others, Jeremy Bentham, Benjamin Constant, Richard Cobden, John Bright, Herbert Spencer, Leonard Hobhouse, and Franklin D. Roosevelt. Montaigne, for example, influenced the rise of toleration as a social and political virtue in late-Renaisssance Europe, and in that sense he can be seen as a proto-liberal or one of liberalism’s important precursors. However, liberalism appeared as a distinct political force in the early nineteenth century, more than two centuries after Montaigne’s death. (Gopnik also claims that liberalism preceded modern science, but quite the opposite is true.)

I am conscious that this might seem like quibbling. Gopnik is entitled

to define liberalism however he wants, perhaps in such a way that Montaigne turns out to be a liberal, while less sympathetic figures, such as Spencer, don’t make the cut. But if we manipulate definitions until liberalism is no more than kindness, tolerance, and good-hearted scepticism, defending it becomes too easy and rather pointless. There’s more work to be done, and more intellectual profit to be had, if liberalism is understood as a specific phenomenon with an identifiable history. Liberal parties and movements arose in Europe soon after the French Revolution, and they synthesised ideas from Benthamite utilitarians, religious dissenters, Manchester economists, and supporters of the Revolution’s early ideals prior to the Terror.

Gopnik is on stronger ground when he locates the emergence of a recognisably modern, somewhat revisionist form of liberalism in the period from 1859 to 1872. This was when liberal thinkers, especially Mill, made some of their most crucial intellectual interventions.

It was also when British liberalism began to soften such core doctrines as free trade and freedom of contract. This revised version of British liberalism soon became dominant within its home territory, influenced Roosevelt in the United States, manifested in the New Deal, and helped shape the American liberal tradition, with its characteristic emphasis on market interventions and social spending.

Most impressively, Gopnik includes two long chapters – the heart of the book – devoted, respectively, to right-wing and left-wing critiques of liberalism. He presents these vividly, persuasively, and at considerable length, before offering deft responses.

A Thousand Small Sanities is journalistic in style and highly accessible. It’s polemical, though in a gentle, enjoyable way, rather than analytical or systematic, and is none the worse for that. Gopnik has crafted an appealing, largely successful defence of liberalism as a live political option. g Russell Blackford’s latest book is The Tyranny of Opinion: Conformity and the future of liberalism (2019).

POLITICS

15

Plus ça change

Antecedents of modern illiberalism

Rémy Davison DEMOCRACY AND DICTATORSHIP IN EUROPE: FROM THE ANCIEN RÉGIME TO THE PRESENT DAY

by Sheri Berman Oxford University Press, $53.95 hb, 560 pp, 9780199373192

D

emocracy won the Cold War. As East Germans breached the Berlin Wall in November 1989 to screams of joy, a young KGB officer watched the concrete crash to the ground. Systematically, he destroyed sensitive Soviet diplomatic papers in the East Berlin embassy. Ten years later, that KGB officer, Vladimir Putin, would launch his own quiet counter-revolution and re-establish dictatorship in Russia.

‘Illiberal democracy’ has become reality. From Washington to Budapest, political leaders seek to abrogate constitutionalism. In some cases, they do so with voters’ implicit or explicit consent. Boris Johnson, the new British Prime Minister, has intimated that he might prorogue Parliament in order to implement Brexit in the absence of the Commons’ approval. Like their twentieth-century predecessors, some contemporary European democracies have deconsolidated into illiberalism; Viktor Orbán in Hungary eulogises ‘Christian values’; in France, the twice-divorced presidential hopeful, Marine Le Pen, preaches Catholic conservatism precisely because it differentiates ‘French’ Christians from ‘non-French’ Muslims.

Liberal democracy is a hybrid form of governance, with a rule-of-law system and separate executive, legislative, and judicial institutions. The legal system forms a nexus with a human-rights framework, governed by a constitutionally limited executive government. Liberal thought preceded true democracy by more than two centuries in Britain; universal suffrage for women was only achieved in 1918, somewhat later than Australia.

Sheri Berman traces the history of democratisation and dictatorship in 16 SEP T MBER 2019

Europe from the ancien régime to the postwar period. Her thesis explains how individual liberties and human rights are constantly under challenge from both the extreme left and the far right.

From the seventeenth-century English Revolution to National Socialist Germany, reform movements and unstable democracies are exceedingly vulnerable to a coup d’état by a well-organised dictator. The dictators have many faces, but the mechanics of oppression remain constant: the republican military dictatorship of Oliver Cromwell; Napoleon’s First Empire; and the scientific war machines created by Fascism, Nazism ,and Soviet socialism. Rhetorically, both Stalinism and Nazism were stridently anti-Semitic, anti-intellectual, and anticapitalist; in practice, they were united in their totalitarian vison of the complete suppression of individual rights.

Democracy, it is often said, was invented to stop Europeans from wiping one another from the face of the earth.

From the dawn of the Inquisition in the twelfth century, through the wars of the Reformation, to the Thirty Years’ War (1618–48), Catholic Europe was rent with apostates, mostly from within its own ranks. The papacy struggled with autonomist bishops and secessionist princes. In the struggle between Roman Catholicism and Protestantism, millions of Europeans were slaughtered.

The only answer to such bloodshed was religious tolerance, but such a democratic concept had to await the eighteenth-century Enlightenment.

In revolutionary France, men and women got the vote, but from 1799 Napoleon’s dictatorship quickly quashed any remnant of female suffrage with a deeply patriarchal constitution. Para-

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW

doxically, Napoleon’s counter-revolution also exported the liberal principles of the Revolution, even as his armies swept across the continent. The French military’s occupation of Prussia, Westphalia, and Spain led not only to popular uprisings against the oppressors, but also to the spread of liberalism. Ironically, French imperialism awoke the spirit of German nationalism; however, Otto von Bismarck relied ‘upon war, rather than parliamentary or democratic processes to bring about German unification’ in

‘Illiberal democracy’ has become reality. From Washington to Budapest, political leaders seek to abrogate constitutionalism

1871. He could not have imagined that his confederal project would unleash an arms race that ended in the trenches of Flanders Fields. Unsurprisingly, when the kaiser’s dictatorship ended in 1918, the defeated, unstable, and vulnerable Weimar Republic merely trod water until Hitler extinguished the nascent democracy, inaugurating the ethnonationalism of Kristallnacht and the horror of the Holocaust.

Economic crises are overwhelmingly the single most important factor behind both liberal and illiberal revolutions. From Charles I’s inability to convince Parliament to grant him supply, to James II’s far-too-efficient taxation regime, absolutist monarchs have tried – and failed – to govern without the legislature and paid the price. The medieval revenue system in France, which forced the peasantry to pay for the palatial indulgences of both nobility

and clergy, forced Louis XVI to summons the Estates-General to plead for financial reform. The French aristocracy and nobility, with telescopes to the blind eye, refused to pay tax, thus paving the way not only for the Declaration of the Rights of Man and (Female) Citizen, but also the Jacobin Terror.

As Berman writes, on the eve of the 1848 revolutions, ‘bad harvests, a financial crisis, and an economic depression hit France’. In the Chamber of Deputies, Tocqueville warned the ruling classes that they were sitting on a powder keg. In twentieth-century, neo-feudal Russia, Nicholas II’s regime, confronted by the German threat in 1914, resorted to printing money in the face of a food crisis; his failure led to not one but two revolutions in 1917, exacerbated by chronic bread shortages. Mussolini’s March on Rome was preceded by a severe economic crisis where the pauperisation of the middle class led to a wave of paralysing strikes.

In Germany, Hitler’s accession to power could not have occurred without war reparations and the mass unemployment of the 1930s Depression. Similarly, the 2008 financial crisis destroyed so much wealth that Eurozone austerity, Brexit, Trump, and the electoral rise of the far right can be traced, plausibly, to the dislocation and deflationary wages wrought by the ‘Great Recession’.

The ‘Velvet Revolution’, Timothy Garton Ash’s description of the 1989 Czechoslovakian abandonment of Soviet socialism, became a portmanteau to describe the post-Berlin Wall democratisation of central and eastern Europe, where barely a shot was fired as eastern-bloc totalitarianism collapsed.

Repressed communists transmogrified into capitalists virtually overnight. Germany unified as a federal, democratic republic. Czechoslovakia dissolved, peacefully and constitutionally. None of this could have been achieved without first handcuffing the Soviet bloc to Western banks. Eastern Europe became a Soviet financial liability by 1980. Under Mikhail Gorbachev’s perestroika, Russia accumulated US$70 billion in foreign debt; by 1991, Poland owed almost $US50 billion. The failure of socialist economics led to a debt addiction

that could only be cured by a liberal democratic surrender to Western capitalism.

Neoliberalism dominated the postcommunist transition to capitalism, but it also imposed uneven development upon deeply unequal societies. Is modern illiberalism the populist response to the austere strictures of neoliberalism?

Berman is right to point to the loss of faith in democratic institutions and structures wrought by the free-market deregulation initiated by Thatcher and Reagan. After forty years of deindustrialisation, even as London banks boomed, is it surprising that Brexit became a working-class revolt led, bought, and paid for by glib Europhobe élites, with Cambridge Analytica an enthusiastic accessory? That people who lost their jobs, homes, and security fell for Trump’s populism? Or that unemployment, inequality, and immigration led to parliamentary seats for racists and ultra-nationalists?

Democracy’s failures are failures of the political élite: their inability to explain to Brexit Britain that three million casual workers receive parental, sickness, and holiday-leave benefits because the EU mandates them, entitlements that neither Labour nor the Tories guarantee. Instead, élites have squandered the post-1945 democratic consolidation by plundering the public purse for their own benefit; they have studiously ignored the theft of national wealth by powerful multinationals stashing billions in tax havens and special-purpose entities, aided and abetted by an army of expensive accountants. Liberal democracy, once a beacon of consensus and wealth distribution, has become corrupted, leading to voter indifference or abandonment.

Winston Churchill labelled democracy the worst form of government ‘except for all those others’, but in the final analysis, he remained a steadfast political élitist: ‘The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter.’ g Rémy Davison is Jean Monnet Chair in Politics and Economics at Monash University. His forthcoming book is The Political Economy of the Eurozone Crises.

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POLITICS

17

COMMENT

‘Things that never were’ Contradictions in the 2019 federal election

by Dennis Altman

I

n retrospect, the Morrison government’s win in May 2019 is not surprising. After the shift to the right in a number of liberal democracies since the election of Donald Trump, why did we assume that Australia would be immune? The assumption that Labor was certain to win resembled the attitude of most commentators towards Hillary Clinton in the United States in 2016. This is not to suggest that Scott Morrison is another Trump, but rather that the deep suspicion of government and the anger at the rapidity of social change that undermined Clinton were also factors in the Australian elections.

The vicious polarisation of views now evident in the United States was clearly apparent in some areas of Australia. This was reflected in the blatant racism of some senators and in the bitter divisions between pro- and anti-Adani supporters. The willingness of right-wing commentators to abandon any pretence at civility, already clear in the attacks on Julia Gillard as prime minister, is poisoning political debate and undermining confidence in government.

Over the past several decades, Labor’s base has steadily declined, with union membership now one million fewer than in 1976, despite a much larger population. Elsewhere, most notably in Germany and France, social democratic parties no longer seem viable for government. Australia is exceptional in that the choice for government remains essentially the same as it has been since Robert Menzies created the modern Liberal Party in 1944.

In 2016, Malcolm Turnbull almost lost his majority and was regarded as a failure. Morrison narrowly increased the government’s standing three years later in what is widely regarded as an extraordinary victory. Yet outside Queensland and Tasmania, little changed: in New South Wales, the parties each lost a seat; in Victoria, Labor won two, aided by a favourable redistribution.

In the end, a few thousand votes in key seats could have returned a hung parliament rather than the status quo. The 2019 election was undoubtedly a triumph for Morrison, but it was not a total disaster for Labor. Labor’s greatest decline came in the coastal cities of central Queensland, where, presumably, support for the Adani mines lost the party thousands of votes. At the same time, the Liberals were forced to put resources into defending some of the richest areas in the country: Wentworth (which includes Point Piper and Vaucluse), Higgins (Toorak and Malvern), and Warringah (Mosman).

18 SEP T MBER 2019

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW

The difference between 2019 and 2016 was largely one of expectations. Internal turmoil within the Coalition and polls showing a swing to Labor made us expect a government defeat. Just why the polls were so inaccurate is unclear, but possibly the expectation of a Labor victory caused some voters to panic on the day and change their vote.

Both major parties lost votes, but in Queensland the government benefited from a flow of preferences from Clive Palmer’s United Australia Party and Pauline Hanson’s One Nation. The government parties polled more than forty-one per cent of the vote; Labor’s share fell to a third, slightly better than in 2016, which was the lowest recorded firstpreference result since 1934. Our preferential voting system supports the two major parties – more accurately two and a half, as the Nationals can win substantial number of seats with less overall support than the Greens.

The Greens polled surprisingly well and maintained all six of their outgoing Senate places, but they face the dilemma that to increase their vote, now around ten per cent of the electorate, they would need to radically discard the policies that make them unique. In the medium term, at least, they will remain an irritant and a necessity for Labor, a relationship of codependency that neither party relishes.

The government campaigned on a policy of the status quo and sought to build their campaign around the personality of the recently anointed prime minister. Labor offered a swag of policies that amounted to a redistribution of wealth in order to support greater government funding of health and education.

The government’s campaign against higher taxes seemed to persuade former Labor voters to switch. It has been claimed that Labor did particularly badly among older Australians, unhappy at Labor’s plans to limit the benefits of franking credits and negative gearing. National Seniors Australia, a lobby group as ferocious in defending self-interest as any militant union, has claimed that it delivered a two per cent swing to the government, aided by unscrupulous claims that Labor favoured a ‘death tax’.

Labor’s policies of minor-income redistribution seemed least popular in the poorer parts of the country; the two seats that swung heavily in northern Tasmania are hardly centres of major dividend imputation.

Against expectations, the Liberals outsmarted Labor on almost every front. By focusing heavily on Morrison, they made the election seem presidential, gambling on

the apparent unpopularity of Bill Shorten. I have long felt that Shorten’s unpopularity was largely a media creation: constant attacks on him as untrustworthy led to people responding negatively to him, which in turn fed media attacks.

The government had near hysterical support from the Murdoch press, which turned on Labor with greater vituperation than usual. (A former Murdoch journalist, Rick Morton, has written of the press’s stoking of ‘culture wars’ [‘Murdoch media fuels far-right recruitment’, The Saturday Paper, 10–16 August 2019].) It is likely that the government also used social media more effectively than Labor, although it’s hard to get reliable evidence. From what evidence we have, the right was far more successful in running a scare campaign, drawing on tropes already rehearsed in the United States and United Kingdom.

We don’t yet have reliable demographic analysis of the elections, but it seems that the government was more successful than Labor in winning support among certain ethnic communities. The clearest example of this comes from the Melbourne electorate of Chisholm, which both sides expected Labor to win. Chisholm has a large recently arrived Chinese community and both major party candidates were Chinese-Australian women. The Liberal, Gladys Liu, used Chinese-language social media very successfully, building on her role in the campaign opposing marriage equality.

(There was a swing to Labor in Chisholm, and we don’t know how far Liu’s campaign may have moderated that.)

The steady drip of right-wing paranoia over the past few years has created an audience for crude attacks on anyone threatening the political and cultural status quo. Labor’s attempts to neutralise these attacks have resulted in pusillanimous policies on asylum seekers and constant temporising on coal mining, which has bled off votes to both Greens and Liberals.

In an unsympathetic article after the election, Parnell Palme McGuinness argued that ‘Labor must change or die’ (AFR, 10 July 2019). This is pure hyperbole; similar articles appeared about the Liberal Party after their defeat in 2007.

Neither party can rely on the automatic loyalty of earlier generations, and both Labor and Liberal remain vulnerable to attacks from their flanks as they seek to balance the competing demands of an increasingly complex electorate.

Labor’s problems were not that they promised too much; in the case of Newstart, they should have promised more. Rather, they failed to construct a meaningful alternative to the dominant neo-liberal scripts that have hollowed out belief in government and extolled individual affluence.

The Liberal slogan ‘The Bill You Can’t Afford’ rested on forty years of relentless propaganda painting taxation as robbery, rather than the way in which we collectively pay for services from which we all benefit.

One of the abiding myths of Australian politics is that Labor are bad managers of money. Morrison consistently played on fears that a Labor government would mean higher taxes and power bills. Bill Shorten and Chris Bowen answered these criticisms repeatedly, but their rational economic arguments were swamped by a distrust of politi-

cians. What Labor described as fairness was attacked as the politics of envy and class warfare, even though the changes in taxation proposed were aimed at removing extraordinary perks that disproportionately favour the best off.

The most disappointing contradiction of our politics is that, while most Australians are aware of the threat of climate change, the government is aligned with Trump’s United States in denying the urgency of the issue, and this appears to have cost them little support. Climate change remains a boutique issue, one that swept away Tony Abbott and produced swings to Labor in the richest areas of our cities, but one that is ignored in current debates about Australia’s future in an unstable global environment.

Foreign policy played no part in the election debates; our new foreign minister, Marise Payne, is both highly competent and largely ignored by the media. Rapidly growing tensions between China and the United States demand more than platitudes about bipartisanship from both parties. A government that was genuinely concerned about the fate of Pacific Islands nations would worry less about increasing military expenditure and more about the realities of global warming.

Reconciling the needs for greater sustainability and a more equitable society is the challenge facing any party that challenges the Morrison government. If Labor follows the advice of those who wish to jettison its policies, there will be less, not more, reason to support it. It is strange to define refunds to people who pay no tax as somehow rewarding ‘aspirationals’.

To convince people living in those marginal areas of our suburbs and regional towns where elections are decided, Labor needs to portray a better world, which means restoring the belief in politics as a means of solving problems that individual aspiration cannot. The challenge for the mainstream left is to capture the public’s imagination by demonstrating how change benefits both the individual and the broader society.

In his campaign, Morrison appealed to self-interest, Shorten to altruism for the common good. That the former won out, even if narrowly, is grounds for regret but not necessarily for pessimism. Recent actions by state governments – allowing abortion and the right to die; the development of treaties with Indigenous Australians – remind us that this is not the United States.

Too often Labor seems to be intent on scoring debating points rather than creating a positive story that counters the deep distrust of government that is now prevalent. It is always harder for those who want change than for those who wish to preserve existing structures. Both Gough Whitlam and Paul Keating challenged Australians to think beyond immediate self-interest and were loved and hated as a result. As Robert Kennedy said: ‘Some men see things as they are and ask why. I dream of things that never were and ask why not.’ g Dennis Altman is a Professorial Fellow in Human Security at La Trobe University. His latest book is Unrequited Love: Diary of an accidental activist (Monash University Publishing, 2019).

COMMENT

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‘Grand, wild nature’ A scientist unembarrassed by lyricism

Tom Griffiths ALEXANDER VON HUMBOLDT: SELECTED WRITINGS edited by Andrea Wulf Everyman, $49.95 hb, 792 pp, 9781101908075

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t can be revelatory to read the original words of a famous writer and thus meet them on the page. Alexander von Humboldt (1769–1859) has been so much quoted and written about that it might be rare even for his admirers to be exposed to his original prose at length and in context. It is a rewarding experience, especially when the writer cared so much for the ‘melody’ of his sentences. Humboldt was a scientist unembarrassed by lyricism and remarkable for his confluence of empiricism and emotion, science and poetry. Therefore, it is welcome to have this almost 800page anthology of his six most popular and influential writings, published to mark the 250th anniversary of his birth, and edited and introduced by his biographer, Andrea Wulf.

Humboldt was described by contemporaries as the most famous man in the world after Napoleon. He was a spellbinding lecturer and an electric dinner companion; he so fizzed with ideas that he was ‘steaming like a pot full of boiling water’. Some said he was like a meteor that whizzed through the room. Humboldt became a guiding influence on Charles Darwin, a stimulus to Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, a hero of George Perkins Marsh, an inspiration to Henry David Thoreau, a foundation for Rachel Carson’s ecological vision, and a precursor of James Lovelock’s ‘Gaia’ (Humboldt’s book Cosmos was initially titled Gäia). He remains essential reading for anyone wishing to understand the unity of nature and the integration of science and the humanities. Instead of dividing animals and plants into taxonomic units, Humboldt studied nature as a global force and as ‘a living whole, not a dead aggregate’.

His global perspective alerted him to 20 SEP T MBER 2019

the destructive power of humans on the environment, even on the climate.

The formative experience of Humboldt’s life was his five-year expedition to Latin America from 1799 to 1804.

With his travel companion, French botanist Aimé Bonpland, Humboldt set out to experience the ‘grand, wild nature’ of ‘the torrid zone’. It was a daring and dangerous adventure: when exploring the Orinoco River, he was flung from his capsized boat into a stream full of crocodiles (but still managed to rescue his diary). When he happened upon a jaguar in the jungle, he recalled, ‘There are moments in life when it is useless to call upon reason. I was very scared.’

Thankfully for the future of world science, he did not run from the big cat but walked steadily to safety. They travelled 10,000 kilometres through rainforests and volcanic ranges, bringing home forty-five cases of specimens, including 60,000 plants. But Humboldt’s central purpose was to collect ideas rather than things. He carried an array of instruments from Europe with which he recorded and measured everything.

It was the Personal Narrative of these travels (in seven volumes) that Darwin kept on a little shelf next to his hammock on the HMS Beagle; he knew them almost by heart. His predecessor’s fresh descriptions and intellectual excitement helped Darwin make his own voyage a life-changing experience that would seed a scientific revolution.

It is appropriate that almost half of this anthology is devoted to selections from this gripping expedition narrative.

The height of Humboldt’s expedition in every sense was in 1802: the climbing of Chimborazo, a dormant stratovolcano in the Andes. At almost 21,000 feet, it was then thought to be

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW

the highest mountain in the world. The experience of the climb crystallised Humboldt’s understanding of nature: he observed plants distributed according to location and climate; at his feet, he saw a unified Earth, a systematic cosmos of life. At the base of the volcano, Humboldt began to sketch his vision, and the resulting Essay on the Geography of Plants is the second text anthologised in this volume. It has at its heart a ‘tableau’ or engraving depicting Chimborazo in cross-section and showing the distribution of plants from the valley to the snowline, accompanied by readings of gravity, temperature, air chemistry, barometric pressure, humidity, the temperature of boiling water, and other careful measurements. In this single graphic, Humboldt aimed to summarise ‘almost the entirety of the

Humboldt was like a meteor that whizzed through the room research I carried out during my expedition in the tropics’. Goethe ‘devoured’ the Essay when he received it in March 1807 and immediately reread it several times, declaring Humboldt had lit science into a ‘bright flame’.

The third set of passages are drawn from Humboldt’s own favourite of his books, Views of Nature, a tour de force of nature writing created during a difficult time for the scientist. Writing the book enabled him to escape into his travels, where he reinhabited ‘the glowing womb of the earth’. He vividly evoked the animal uproar of the nocturnal rainforest, a sensuous, raucous vision of competing, questing, abundant nature. Writing in 1808, he spoke of ‘the gradual transformation of species’.

The next two selected texts are Views of the Cordilleras and Monuments of the Indigenous Peoples of the Americas, which in its original form contained sixty-nine engravings, and Political Essay on the Island of Cuba. They reveal Humboldt’s deep engagement with the human world. He was fascinated by the ancient civilisations of Latin America and their sophisticated cultures, languages, architecture, and art. His essay

on Cuba is notable for his detestation of slavery, which he called ‘possibly the greatest evil to have afflicted humanity’.

Wulf reminds us that when a US edition of this book left out Humboldt’s criticism of slavery, he issued a press release to newspapers denouncing it – and emphasised that the deleted sections were the most important in the book.

The anthology concludes with Cosmos, Humboldt’s final and most famous book and an instant bestseller.

This Sketch of a Physical Description of the Universe took his readers from outer space to Earth to microscopic organisms, from stars to volcanoes to art; it was about nature in all its majesty and intricacy, about human history from ancient civilisations to modern times, and about feelings, aesthetics, poetry, and the imagination. He evoked a ‘wonderful web of organic life’. This enthusiastic measurer of everything knew that ultimately, ‘What speaks to the soul escapes our measurements.’

Wulf confesses that selecting writings from the vast work of such a prolific author was not easy, but she has succeeded in preserving the breadth of his thinking and the power of his prose. She concludes her introduction by celebrating Humboldt as ‘the link between the arts and the sciences; between the Enlightenment and the poetry of the Romantics’. Many readers will be prompted to revisit Wulf ’s marvellous biography, The Invention of Nature, published in 2015. But nothing quite brings Humboldt to life like his own words – and they resound with new meaning today. g Tom Griffiths is Emeritus Professor of History at the Australian National University, and author of The Art of Time Travel: Historians and their craft (Black Inc., 2016).

Alone with a big stick Hugh White’s middle-power dreaming

Chengxin Pan HOW TO DEFEND AUSTRALIA

by Hugh White

La Trobe University Press, $34.99 pb, 318 pp, 9781860640996

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arely a decade ago, Australia was in the middle of much excitement about the Asian Century.

Today, those heady days seem a distant memory. A growing number of pundits see the north as troubled by dangerous flashpoints and great power rivalries.

On top of that is an America apparently in strategic retreat from the region, further aggravating Canberra’s longheld fear of abandonment by its great and powerful friends.

No wonder debating Australia’s defence has lately become a booming cottage industry. The 2018 issue of Australian Foreign Affairs on ‘Defending Australia’ warns of the ‘collapse of Australia’s defences in a contested Asia’.

At home, we are told that China, the fast-expanding Asian power, is busy engaging in a ‘silent invasion’.

Hugh White’s book How to Defend Australia is the latest and so far the most substantial entry to the popular ‘defending Australia’ genre. There has never been a shortage of opinions on Australia’s security challenges and their defence implications, but White takes one step further by methodically mapping out the country’s strategic options and by boldly asserting the need for strategic independence without the United States as its dependable ally.

Australians have long lived by two cherished assumptions about defence:

no country in Asia can threaten Australia because of US deterrence; and even if there were a threat, the United States would come to its rescue. Sensible as these assumptions were in the past, White argues that they no longer apply in light of a tectonic power shift from the United States to China. As Beijing’s influence grows, it is seen as determined to replace the United States as Asia’s dominant player, though not to the point of making an existential threat to US security. Against this backdrop, White believes that Washington has little to gain and much to lose in any war with China on behalf of its allies, especially if such a war were to spiral into nuclear conflict.

For White, this poses an acute problem for Australia. It will be left alone, exposed to heightened strategic risks in Asia. No longer able to count on Washington, Canberra’s only viable alternative, argues White, is to build up its own armed forces to the point where they are capable of defeating a direct major-power attack on its territory.

He takes it upon himself to develop a list of concentrically arranged strategic interests and corresponding strategic objectives and operational priorities for Australia. To meet those objectives, White calls for ‘a new Australian way of war’: focusing on maritime denial instead of expeditionary operations.

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strategist’s job to prepare for worst-case scenarios, it is also their responsibility to canvass a wider array of scenarios and to weigh up the probabilities of various contingencies. If White believes that Australia should commit tens of billions of dollars (three and half per cent of GDP) to thwart a major-power attack, he owes it to the reader to explain how such a threat might realistically happen and why on balance it alone – not other types of risks and threats such as a chronic shortage of investment in human capital and climate change – warrants the ‘big investments’. Also, given that China is repeatedly mentioned as the chief suspect, the mere three-page space given to China is nowhere near enough to enlighten this reader as to how and why Beijing would want to attack Australia militarily.

As it turns out, the book has let history do much of the explainProtesters call on Hong Kong’s leaders to step down in Hong Kong, China, ing. The 1942 Japanese 16 June 2019. (photograph by VOA via Wikimedia Commons) attack on Australia is fending Australia. This is no mean feat, taken as sufficient evidence that a future given that Australian defence policy has major Asian power would likely do the long revolved around the oxymoronic same. Indeed, for White, the tragic hiseuphemism of ‘Forward Defence’ in the tory of power politics, best exemplified service of US global power projection. by European experiences of the two He is onto something when questioning world wars, never changes, except its the often taken for granted reliability of specific balance-of-power formations.

US protection and when arguing that His notion of defence remains an excluAustralia can defend itself indepen- sively conventional military affair, where dently. Indeed, if you accept White’s hardware capabilities equate power and basic assumptions about the growing security, never mind the more recent strategic risks and America’s waning history in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Meanwhile, White’s Asia – no influence and commitment in Asia, it is hard to find fault with his book. It is longer subject to ‘Anglo-Saxon primacy’ lucidly written, logically unfolded, and – is little more than a Hobbesian jungle. dispassionately argued, something of a One gets a feeling that his otherwise cool-headed analysis is nevertheless hallmark in White’s work.

Still, some of his own assumptions grounded, perhaps subconsciously, in invite scrutiny. His thesis is based on a some lingering colonial anxiety about future attack by a major Asian power Asian invasion. Nowhere to be seen is on Australian soil. True, many Asian any sensitivity about diverse cultures, countries now seem materially capable different but coexisting aspirations, or of committing such a ‘sin’, but why contemporary dynamic socio-economic they would choose to do so remains linkages across the region. One might seriously underexplored. While it is a be forgiven for thinking that, apart from This new strategy requires a much larger fleet of submarines and a force of 200 F-35 fighters, among other types of hardware (nuclear weapons are discussed at some length, though White takes pains to add that he is not advocating for them). He insists that Australia can both do it and afford the higher costs.

White’s valuable intervention in the debate brings the focus of Australian defence back to its original goal: de-

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AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW

the international struggle for power and dominance, nothing else happens or matters as far as defence is concerned.

White’s untainted realist lens might obscure more than it clarifies even when it comes to the United States.

While Donald Trump’s ‘America First’ slogan signals a more Jacksonian and isolationist turn in American world view, one cannot underestimate the enduring influence of the values-based neoconservative strategic thinking in the United States or its continued appeal to many opinion leaders here. Consequently, White’s proclamation of the effective end of the US alliance seems premature. Besides invoking Lord Palmerston’s famous aphorism, White has not elaborated on how exactly the alliance would unravel or how Washington could execute a strategic volte-face and stay home quietly ever after.

None of this is to belittle the merit of White’s strategic independence push.

Rather, true independence might lie in some genuinely independent and openminded ways of imagining Australia’s relations with Asia and its security challenges in a broader and forwardlooking fashion. Much of the trepidation in Australia’s defence circles has stemmed from the unquestioned belief that Australia is geographically close to, but fundamentally different from, Asia (China in particular) – hence the ever-present need to find security from Asia, now apparently on its own. So long as this mindset continues to set the parameters for defence thinking, even White’s provocative thesis might not take us very far. g

Chengxin Pan is an Associate Professor of International Relations at Deakin University. ❖

What next?

Paul Dalgarno WOMEN, MEN AND THE WHOLE DAMN THING

by David Leser

Allen & Unwin $29.99 pb, 336 pp, 9781925266108

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ustralian journalist and author David Leser’s 2018 Good Weekend article, ‘Women, Men and the Whole Damn Thing’, sparked a wildfire of commentary, confession, and praise. Written in the early white heat of the #MeToo movement, the Harvey Weinstein exposé, and Oprah Winfrey’s 2018 Golden Globes speech in which she spoke out on behalf of the Time’s Up campaign, it crackled with questions that were age-old yet suddenly pressing: ‘Why is it that men have killed, enslaved, scarred, diminished and silenced women of every age, race and class, on every continent, for so long?’; ‘What is it we have so deeply normalised that we are blind to?’ And most pertinently, or practically, in the midst of this cultural reckoning: what happens next?

Women, Men and the Whole Damn Thing expands on those themes and features well-crafted interviews with activists, intellectuals, campaigners, authors, and family members, and also selected correspondence the author has received from victims of abuse.

As a ‘straight, white, middle-class male who has breathed the untroubled air of privilege’ all his life, Leser is at pains to point out that he isn’t a spokesperson for women and can’t ever know their lived experience. Rather, as a father of two daughters, he wants to show ‘there were men prepared to listen and learn’ – men who might ‘become part of

the change that is so urgently required’.

A daunting task. So fast-moving are events that a number of high-profile legal cases – including those of Australian actors Geoffrey Rush and Craig McLachlan – are presented as being up to date ‘at the time of writing’. And sadly, there’s no shortage of up-to-the-minute material for Leser to choose from.

Statistics, testimonies, and anecdotes combine in this hair-raising, frequently stomach-churning compendium of violence against women, and men’s role in perpetuating that violence. Flitting between the personal and global, Leser argues compellingly that misogyny in its multifaceted modern form is inherited from the world’s main religions, that the dubious privileges of masculinist culture are there for the atheist and pious alike, and that those of us who notice them least are those they serve the best.

A recurring opinion – articulated most devastatingly by Eve Ensler, campaigner and author of The Vagina Monologues – is that men have long been policed, by others and themselves, to ‘cage and kill the feminine within their own beings and consequently the world’ – a deeply ingrained trait that makes crying unthinkable and ultimately, in Leser’s words, ‘obliterates women and girls’, as well as ‘weaker men, more feminine men, gay men, different men, transgender men and, of course, children in all their divine innocence’.

With Zainab Salbi – author, broadcaster, and founder of Women for Women International – he discusses the allegations published in 2018 on Babe.net against stand-up comedian and actor Aziz Ansari by a young woman, dubbed ‘Grace’, whose romantic date with the star, described in some detail, ended with her being ‘taken advantage of ’. The backlash against Ansari, a self-proclaimed feminist, was swift, as was the counter-reaction against Grace, who was pilloried on air by the Canadian–American broadcaster Ashleigh Banfield for having potentially destroyed Ansari’s career on the back of ‘a bad date’. Because of the ambiguities it touches on, Salbi believes this story is, in many ways, more important than the transgressions of the Harvey Weinsteins of this world.

When it comes to what most women

actually go through, she tells Leser, ‘80% of the story is the Aziz Ansari case.

Helen Garner, a friend of Leser, had a ‘squirmy feeling’ when reading the Ansari story, and says she’s primed to detect a ‘whiny’ note of entitlement in the political position taken by certain – invariably younger – women: ‘It’s like someone with road rage: anyone bumps into them and they go berko …’

Leser’s twenty-four-year-old daughter, Hannah, is incensed by Garner’s comments; his twenty-nine-year-old daughter, Jordan, views the Ansari story as a ‘disgusting one-night stand’ but not sexual assault. Which is to say, there is generational and geographical dissonance as to which male behaviours merit private redress and which ones – if any – warrant a potentially ruinous trial by social media.

That lack of consensus extends to consent and what it should look like in practice. There is now an app – uConsent – that generates a ‘consent barcode’ digitally stored when willing sexual parties agree. And then there’s what is for me, personally – a straight white man with two young boys who still cry freely and clutch teddies – a more promising initiative. Leslee Udwin, following her documentary India’s Daughter about the gang rape, torture, and murder of medical student Jyoti Singh in Delhi in 2012, founded Think Equal, a widely piloted school program to teach children aged three to six skills such as empathy and self-regulation, ‘so that they don’t grow up to rape, bully, become addicted to substances or commit suicide’. Get them young, in other words, to start countering the brutal exceptions and universal pressures of masculinity.

This as an important book, heralding and contributing to what, with luck, will become a workable roadmap beyond patriarchy. I would challenge anyone to read it without pangs of recognition and/or self-recognition. It’s a testament to the strength of Leser’s thesis that the inevitable conclusion seems at once counter-intuitive, simplistic, and profound: for everyone’s good, men – all men – need to find ways to start loving and respecting themselves. g Paul Dalgarno is a Melbourne-based editor and writer.

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(Photograph by Nicholas Purcell)

Open Page with

Helen Garner Where are you happiest?

At the desk, in the moment between putting a full-stop and rereading the sentence.

What’s your idea of hell?

Not being able to read for ten days after cataract surgery.

What do you consider the most specious virtue?

Obedience.

What is your favourite film?

The Marx Brothers’ A Night at the Opera.

And your favourite book?

Excellent Women by Barbara Pym.

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

My three ex-husbands. One at a time.

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

Name an early literary idol or influence whom you no longer admire – or vice versa.

Joan Didion. Not sure what happened, to her or to me, but she lost me about twenty years ago.

What, if anything, impedes your writing?

Fear, and the combination of my hearing loss and the muffled acoustics in courtrooms.

What do you think of the state of criticism?

I’m okay with it as long as I can find a good tough fair review, and trustworthy guidance.

And writers’ festivals?

The big city ones scare me. I like small regional ones, like Mildura, where there’s only one session at a time. Everyone goes to everything, and a conversation grows over several days.

Do you read reviews of your own books?

Of course. I’m a bottomless pit of existential uncertainty.

Are artists valued in our society?

Inappropriate. Gay, in its original meaning.

Judging by the number of people I see in bookshops, I would say yes.

Who is your favourite author?

What are you working on now?

Primo Levi, particularly at the moment, because I’ve just reread If This Is A Man and The Truce.

And your favourite literary hero or heroine?

Mattie Ross in Charles Portis’s novel True Grit.

Which quality do you most admire in a writer?

Readiness to cut without remorse.

Which book influenced you most in your youth?

Arthur Mee’s Children’s Encyclopedia.

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An essay about grandmothers. Harder than it sounds.

Helen Garner writes novels, stories, screenplays

and works of non-fiction. In 2006 she received the inaugural Melbourne Prize for Literature, and in 2016 she won the Windham–Campbell Prize for non-fiction and the Western Australian Premier’s Book Award. In 2019 she was honoured with the Australia Council Award for Lifetime Achievement in Literature. Her books include Monkey Grip, This House of Grief, and Everywhere I Look.

OPE

Fiction

Andrew McGahan (Allen & Unwin)

James Bradley on Andrew McGahan’s posthumous novel Lucy Treloar

Claire G. Coleman

Philip Salom

Wolfe Island

The Old Lie

The Returns

Naama Grey-Smith

Alison Whittaker

Brenda Walker

FICTION

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REVIEW OF THE MONTH

Nomads and timid souls Two new short-story collections

Bronwyn Lea HERE UNTIL AUGUST: STORIES

by Josephine Rowe

Black Inc., $29.99 pb, 208 pp, 9781863959933

THIS TASTE FOR SILENCE: STORIES

by Amanda O’Callaghan

University of Queensland Press, $29.99 pb, 200 pp, 9780702260377

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he inciting incident in Josephine Rowe’s short story ‘Glisk’ (winner of the 2016 Jolley Prize) unpacks in an instant. A dog emerges from the scrub and a ute veers into oncoming traffic. A sedan carrying a mother and two kids swerves into the safety barrier, corroded by the salt air, and disappears over a sandstone bluff. Three-quarters of a family are erased. And it all happens ‘in a glisk’, Fynn, the driver of the ute, will say years later.

After the hearing, in which he is acquitted, Fynn either ‘ran, slunk, snuck, crawled, choofed off, fucked off, hauled arse or simply went’ – depending on who is doing the telling – to the Northern Isles of Scotland to lose himself in ‘some shit-kicking work’ at a whisky distillery. Back in Perth, the narrator of the story, Fynn’s younger half-brother Raf has married and become a cytologist. One Saturday morning in January six summers later, Fynn resurfaces with his duffel bag and bomber jacket, his 26 SEP T MBER 2019

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW

blond hair greying at the temples and gone to seed. He’s missed the mining boom, the ice boom, the rehab boom.

He missed his father’s bypass. Fynn has come back to confess what really happened that day at the bluff. The truth, like all gifts, conceals within it a burden.

Rowe writes about place and memory with a potency that pitches beauty against its wreckage. By day, an island looks like ‘a rough dog slouching up from the ocean’; after sunset the ‘putrid birds’ and ‘bogans sinking tinnies’ are obscured by nightfall. Perched on a high bluff in a sprawl of blankets, a young Raf witnesses a swarm of bioluminescent phytoplankton ‘on their anxious, brilliant way to whoknows-where’. It is an ‘eerie sort of magic’ he knows he will never see again. But this, Raf tells us, is not the point.

Rowe is an author deeply concerned with the human animal.

Bioluminescence is mere ornamentation in her larger purpose, which is to stage the ‘bright migratory-

animalness’ of a family wading to island during a neap tide. At the deepest point of the crossing, their makeshift raft breaks apart and Fynn scoops his little sister onto his shoulders. Seawater, stinking of dead things, fills his nose and mouth. He delivers his sister to dry sand and, when his mother turns away, regurgitates seawater onto a patch of salt brush. His legs, Raf sees, are quaking and lashed by stingers. The future hasn’t happened yet and everyone still has a chance to live.

Here Until August ends in January, when it began, but having relocated to the northern hemisphere this time it is winter. In ‘What Passes for Fun’, a couple ‘somewhere close to the end of things’ drives past a frozen pond held aloft by the thin hollow stalks of a stand of cattails. Everything beneath the ice has drained away and the lake appears to levitate above a field.

Later, at the in-law’s dinner table, the woman sets free a dangerous metaphor and watches it teeter across the table towards her husband. Still hopeful, he is waiting for something he can trust his weight on. But everything between them that was not solid has just drained away.

Rowe’s first book, Tarcutta Wake, is composed of lyrical vignettes fuelled by poignancy and nostalgia. A Loving, Faithful Animal, a novel longlisted for the Miles Franklin Literary Award in 2017, lengthened Rowe’s narrative stride. Here Until August sees her return to the short story in full command of the form. ‘Glisk’ and the other nine stories that make up the collection are idiosyncratic, multifaceted, and exquisitely structured. Significance unfurls by stealth: absences accrete, insight pools in shadows, motivation refracts and misdirects, such that the characters that populate Rowe’s imagination arrive unprepared at their inevitable devastation.

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manda O’Callaghan’s début collection, This Taste for Silence, is an assortment of twenty-one stories of varying lengths, from substantial narratives – such as ‘A Widow’s Snow’ or ‘The Painting’ that bookend the collection – to flash-fiction pieces of a few hundred words. Whereas Rowe, a guardian of idiosyncrasy, grants her characters nomadic lives and climactic interiorities, O’Callaghan’s satirical eye is drawn to characters – usually older women living predictable lives – who prefer generalities over particulars, timid souls who ask for little and deliver less. Hemmed in by convention and ridden with fear, their lives collide, at O’Callaghan’s dark bidding, with a human menace that moves all around them and within.

‘A Widow’s Snow,’ a black comedy of sorts, proves the maxim that late-life dating is not for sissies. Married

for forty-six years, Maureen is newly widowed and hopeful that love might bloom twice in her lifetime. She settles on Roger, an antique dealer from South Africa.

He is ‘the kind of man who would appreciate an oldfashioned pudding’ and she is the kind of woman who would cook it for him. Lacking introspection, Maureen projects her sense of self onto her home and its furnishings: she regards her clotted-cream walls, the waterygreen plates stacked on an open shelf and wonders how someone, ‘seeing this kitchen, this house’, might describe its owner. Predictably, the dinner is a disaster: Roger is a bore and quite possibly a psychopath. The night ends with the pair both snowbound, Maureen locked alone in her bedroom, watching the snow-lit square of window and waiting for morning.

Silence comes in many forms – deceptions, departures, deletions – but, for O’Callaghan, silence typically takes the shape of death. In ‘The Golden Hour’, a woman spends the ‘sixty precious minutes’ after her husband’s heart attack walking around her house. The little clock her grandmother gave her chimes each fifteen-minute interval with a single fairy-bell note. Her husband is on the bathroom floor, eyes open, underpants tangled round his feet. After the third chime she picks up the phone and calls an ambulance.

‘Come quickly,’ she urges.

The half dozen or so flash-fiction pieces that punctuate A Taste for Silence hover in the liminal space somewhere between poem and short story. Chiefly portraits, they reveal O’Callaghan’s more tender side, trading humour and narrative for resonance and deep image. In ‘Tying the Boats’, a migrant bride cuts her long hair a week after her wedding and stores the hank, bound in red ribbon, in an old oak drawer. Years later, she retrieves the fading relic and weighs it in her hands: it is ‘thick, substantial, heavy as the ropes they’d used when she was a girl, tying the boats when storms were coming’. Likewise, ‘The Way It Sounds’ makes a study of how significant events continue to haunt long after they have ended. Uncle Hector is a returned soldier with a hole in his neck from where he was shot. The children like to plug their fingers into the little trench at the back of his head. One day someone asks him where the bullet went. Uncle Hector rubs his hands together as if he were cold: ‘Straight into the head of my mate.’

Later, the kids listen to Hector digging in the backyard for hours and for no good reason. His shovel makes ‘the sound of metal, hitting hard.’ g Bronwyn Lea is Acting Head of the School of Communication and Arts the University of Queensland.

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AUSTRALIAN STORIES: PAST AND PRESENT New from Text

What happens when we view the world from an Indigenous perspective?

How does it change the way we see history, money, power and learning?

Sand Talk is about everything from echidnas to evolution, cosmology to cooking, from sex and science and spirits to Schrödinger’s cat. Tyson Yunkaporta challenges us to think differently—and save the world.

In 1934, twenty planes took Why is Australia’s imagined off from London heading to community so far behind its lived Melbourne in a heroic air race community, and how can we that captured the world’s work towards building a more attention. Lost in a fierce inclusive society? In The Golden thunderstorm, one aircraft Country, Tim Watts, progressive faced certain calamity—until federal MP, explores the problem the astonishing efforts of of Australia’s national identity Albury residents, against all from federation to today.

SEP TMBER 2019 AUST RALIAN BO OK REVI EW the2 8odds, saved the day.

‘I hope every politician reads this.’ George Megalogenis

Lucky Ticket explores the lives of displaced people around the world—from grungy Melbourne streets to the pink-washed skies of Abu Dhabi. Joey Bui’s vibrant stories make us think differently about identity, family, war and dislocation. ‘A masterful storyteller.’ Melanie Cheng

Now in a new format!

The home-grown suffragettes: Stella-Award-winning historian Clare Wright reveals how Australian women won the vote for themselves and went on to inspire the world. ‘Uplifting.’ Penny Wong

textpublishing.com.au

The Wheel James Bradley THE RICH MAN’S HOUSE

by Andrew McGahan

Allen & Unwin $32.99 pb, 594 pp, 9781760529826

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ndrew McGahan’s final book, The Rich Man’s House, opens with an apology. ‘It’s a finished novel – I wouldn’t be letting it out into the world if it wasn’t – but I can’t deny that my abrupt decline in health has forced the publishers and I to hurry the rewriting and editing process extremely, and that this is not quite the book it would have been had cancer not intervened … for once I can fairly plead – I was really going to fix that!’

Exactly how long before his death from pancreatic cancer in February 2019 these words were written isn’t clear, but McGahan’s concern was unfounded.

While it’s impossible to say what changes he might have made had he had more time, the novel as it stands feels neither rushed nor unfinished.

At its heart is the brooding physical presence of an imaginary mountain rising from the Southern Ocean between Antarctica and Australia. Christened the Red Wall by Captain Cook, but now known as ‘the Wheel’ due to a typographical error in the first edition of Cook’s Journal, the mountain is of truly astonishing proportions: more than fifteen kilometres taller than Everest, taller even than the vast Olympus Mons on Mars, it rises almost twenty-five kilometres above sea level, stretching far up into the stratosphere, its top so high it can be seen only indistinctly from its base.

Despite the Wheel’s physical improbability (or perhaps impossibility), McGahan goes to considerable lengths to make it feel plausible. He provides not just physical explanations (it is a small tectonic plate that has been tilted upward) but an elaborate imaginary history of its discovery, conquest, and cultural significance, most of it delivered in excerpts from books and magazines.

Central to this history is the story of

one man, Walter Richman, the billionaire adventurer who has the distinction of being the only human being to reach the mountain’s summit, and whose conquest of the mountain – and mysterious actions at its top – remain controversial.

A contempt for the heedless privilege of power is written deep into McGahan’s fiction, as visible in the colonial violence at the heart of 1988 (1995) and The White Earth (2004), as it is in Last Drinks’s portrait of political corruption.

Richman embodies both, his indifference to the human cost of his conquests a reminder that ‘billionaires make their own rules’. As the novel opens, he is in the process of completing his greatest project: a palatial residence built into the peak of the smaller mountain that rises beside the Wheel, a venture that has not only attracted furious criticism from environmentalists and others but has resulted in the deaths of a number of workers, including, most recently and publicly, the building’s designer, the celebrated Australian architect Richard Gausse.

At Gausse’s funeral, his daughter Rita is approached and invited to visit the house. The request comes as a surprise, not least because Rita and her father were, to all intents and purposes, estranged, largely as a result of Rita’s now-abandoned career as a sort of medium, capable of communicating with ‘presences’: non-human intelligences that inhere in places of power such as mountains.

Against her better judgement, Rita accepts Richman’s invitation, and soon after finds herself among a select group the great man has gathered at the house that is her father’s last and greatest achievement. But, as becomes clear when a disastrous earthquake traps Rita, Richman, and the others in the house, Richman has invited Rita because he believes – or at least half believes – the various accidents that have befallen the project are the work of the presence that inhabits the Wheel, and its desire for revenge on him for defiling its peak.

McGahan was often praised for his preparedness to inhabit different genres, but while reading The Rich Man’s House it’s difficult not to wonder whether he mightn’t be better under-

stood as a writer of speculative fiction and fantastika who occasionally wrote in more realist modes. After all, of his eleven published novels, only Praise (1995), 1988, and Last Drinks (2000) are strictly realist; the others veer from straight fantasy (the four Young Adult novels), to fabulist fantasy (Wonders of a Godless World, 2010), science fiction (Underground, 2007), and the gothic (The White Earth).

Through this lens, the failed career as a horror novelist of McGahan’s alter ego, Gordon (Praise and 1988), looks suggestive as well as satirical. But it also creates interesting affinities. Some of these are reasonably obvious – The Rich Man’s House’s haunted building, use of invented documents, and interest in ancient, inchoate terror place it in a tradition that flows back through Chuck Wendig and Stephen King to M.R. James and others. Likewise, its careful and occasionally over-extended working out of the practicalities of the science and history of the Wheel often has echoes of science-fiction writers such as Neal Stephenson.

More interestingly, however, the novel’s interest in geology and nonhuman presences makes it read like a companion piece to McGahan’s antepenultimate adult novel, Wonders of a Godless World. While it is difficult to know where their use as metaphors for questions about deep time and human transience ends and their role as something closer to manifesto begins, the two have a tension that lends the book as a whole a fascinating oddness.

Sadly some of this oddness slips away in the book’s final third, when the machinery of the plot takes over and Rita and her companions find themselves fighting to escape the Wheel’s malefic power. However, it also suggests that McGahan’s writing was continuing to evolve and change in fascinatingly unpredictable ways right up to the end, and underscores not just the uniqueness of his voice and vision, but the scale of his loss. g James Bradley is a writer and critic.

His books include the novels Wrack, The Deep Field, The Resurrectionist, and Clade.

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Frontiers Alison Whittaker THE OLD LIE

by Claire G. Coleman

Hachette $32.99 pb, 356 pp, 9780733640841

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n The Old Lie, Claire G. Coleman has given herself a right of reply to her award-winning début novel, Terra Nullius (2007). Here, she strips away some of the racial ambiguity of the human–alien invasion allegory of that novel and leaves in its place a meaty analysis of colonisation and imperialism.

The Old Lie is also a hoot, a rollick through both sci-fi and speculative fiction.

While some early action sequences may leave the reader scurrying for purchase in a vacuum not unlike the great yawn of space, they reflect the confusion of war and displacement. Although it strands us, as bodies boil or suffocate and planets succumb, it has the merit of making her readers work hard – encoding revelation after revelation about contemporary realities into a knotted, visceral plot.

Coleman continues her practice of weaving seemingly disparate stories of survival closer and closer throughout the book. Because of this, The Old Lie starts slowly; we become oriented to many stories, which, in the fog of war between two forces with diverging visions for the fate of Earth, initially have vague and merely reactive narrative paths. The characters, too, avoid being too explicit or knowable. Despite being thrust into raw and vulnerable trajectories (refugees, commanders of a rapidly declining force, slack-jawed survivors), each one shares an unflinching voice that has a resolve and clarity of expression ultimately at odds with their circumstances. Perhaps a 30 SEP T MBER 2019

symptom of the unreasonable persistence and sure-headedness that appear to be prerequisites for surviving interplanetary conflict.

In subtle ways, the tendency to analogise race with species recurs – even when characters recall specific colonial events that bring us back to race. But how can it not in inter-species sci-fi?

Human scholars in Coleman’s world lament the lack of inter-species harmony, comparing it with intra-human interpersonal racism. What is initially missing, in this analogy, is a more structural analysis of racism and colonisation. Coleman does take us there eventually: as relationships become complicated and desperation surges, she reveals how frontier wars don’t just take place via conquest and skirmishes, but how they remain in institutions and manifest in seemingly firm alliances. Taking the analogy, which she launched in The Old Lie, to a scale as vast as the universe allows Coleman to explore slippages between Indigenous peoples and refugees and their mutual maltreatment and abuse at the hands of institutions, politicians, and diplomats. Not just their explicit maltreatment by the enemy, but how malformed allegiances can more powerfully betray them, having first earned trust.

Even though race–species comparisons slip back in, they recede as if placed there only to be pulled away. Coleman is at her strongest when she gets specific about Country, about cultural location, and about the gravity of loss or the endurance of intergenerational dormancy. A powerful scene, when a character returns to a place on his grandfather’s Country, is the most moving in the whole book. It is also the briefest and simplest. We could attribute its impact on this reviewer to familiarity in an alien world, which is always the tension in speculative fiction. It represents a break for the reader in their capacity to imagine atrocity after atrocity of incomparable scale. Like Terra Nullius, however, Coleman’s specificity about character, place, and power is mostly reserved for humans, and in The Old Lie mostly for Indigenous peoples, and that might deny us useful detail on the dynamics of racial power at play. People

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW

are hurt – but who is doing the hurting and how?

If Coleman would allow me one indulgence in a diversity discourse we both consider insufficient to improve our stake as Indigenous peoples in literature – it is significant to see her queer and transgender Indigenous characters, living the most fulfilled, complex lives they can in the colony and the war. The downplayed narrative significance of their status as queered, gendered, and racialised bodies again plays with the trope that Coleman necessarily exploits to get the whole story off the ground – that all inter-human oppression ends when they unite to face a greater force – but it is still satisfying to witness.

Tiny glimpses of the undergirding hegemony remain in the characters. This is interesting to observe in Coleman’s complex web of relationships between equally sure-headed people. Those glimpses reveal the tension – again, even in war – between structural oppression and its more obvious interpersonal manifestations. Even careful readers might not catch them, especially in descriptors of transgender and intersex characters, which makes them difficult to evaluate as part of The Old Lie’s offering. Are they a character’s demonstrable failing or an inadvertent endorsement? Is The Old Lie too dependent on the good faith of a readership?

This is a difficult novel to review without adding spoilers – plotting and twisting have always been Coleman’s forte – but it is one that is worth pushing through to the end. Ultimately, she presents us with a dense and satisfying suite of stories to which the reader has to bring deeper reading and deliberation. Coleman is never straightforward, but if you do the work, you will get a story that is ecologically complex – both in terms of the worlds it has conceived, and how it sits with Indigenous peoples enduring reality in this colony. g Alison Whittaker is a Gomeroi poet and legal researcher. Between 2017–18, she was a Fulbright recipient at Harvard Law School, where she was named Dean’s Scholar in Race, Gender and Criminal Law. Her latest book is BLAKWORK (2018). ❖

‘Controlled hallucinations’ Brenda Walker THE RETURNS

by Philip Salom

Transit Lounge $29.95 pb, 324 pp, 9781925760262

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bookseller, Trevor, sits in his shop in Melbourne making conversation with his customers: an exasperating mixture of confessional, hesitant, deranged, and disruptive members of the public. One man stalks him, armed with an outrageous personal demand; another tries to apologise for assaulting him. The apology is almost as unnerving as the attack.

The bookshop is a kind of theatre, with a ceiling mirror reflecting the tops of Trevor’s customer’s heads. Trevor has a seat onstage at ground level, and a seat in the gods. Elizabeth, a book editor, steadies herself against his windows as she begins to faint. His book display is not responsible for this partial loss of consciousness; she has a medical problem and Trevor offers her a cup of tea.

This is the dramatic set-up of Philip Salom’s latest novel, The Returns, a tightly plotted story with a knowing and satirical edge. Salom is a Melbourne writer, initially known for his exceptional poetry, which has won notable prizes, including the Commonwealth Poetry Book Prize – twice. He made a seamless transition from poet to novelist in 1991. The Returns is his fourth novel, following the successful publication of Waiting (2016), which was shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Literary Award.

Trevor’s bookshop and the editor, Elizabeth, allow Salom a rich field for literary commentary. Trevor has a student clientèle and he offers, somewhat discordantly, ‘Family sagas, latest fiction, [and] Marxist theory’. He has self-help books, which, in his view, have a ‘placebo effect’. He indulges customers who say things like, ‘Books are so totally true’. Memoir is popular, as is home renovation. He recommends Karl Ove

Knausgård and Patrick White. He puts up with ridicule from his ex-wife, who accuses him of being unsociable: ‘sitting by yourself all day in the dark like a book’. When he does circulate, at her birthday party, things don’t go well for either of them. He thinks that books are ‘controlled hallucinations’; he is a steady, self-assured character, whose deep beliefs have to do with the dynamic act of painting. His source of creativity is not writing, as we might expect, but visual art: montage and paint. Painting, for Trevor, is a way of ‘carrying the past out and dumping it on the median strip’.

But it also provides a record of the faces he has seen in the city, and even though his canvases might seem like ‘oddments from a Salvo’s store’, they have considerable impact on the people who view them. Trevor, whose ‘life has stalled’, registers his own renewal through paint and is also revived by art and by his responses to the tragedies of his past and the possibilities of his future.

Trevor takes a room in Elizabeth’s house, and we witness the beginning of a dance between two very different characters. Reaching out to Elizabeth as she is fainting, he ‘looks like the guy holding the ballerina’. Physically slight Elizabeth leads a settled life with a house, a dog, and a grumbling and difficult neighbor. Her work involves a kind of self-effacement. Good editing is invisible but significant. ‘She never lets authors know how ferally invigorating she finds her job. When she thinks up phrases to embolden the anxious types who brood too little and drink too much. There are a lot of them. Whether they write too much or write too little they agonise with a sad intensity over their words and over writers who are feted.’ Through Elizabeth, Salom comments on the vacuity of a book-award ceremony where Elizabeth’s shortlisted author is ‘ghosted’ in favour of the winner, and the joy of being assigned an author with an interest in the destructive world Elizabeth inhabited as a child.

In the end, frail Elizabeth, who ‘knows herself as an inner voice and being’, is the most constructively assertive character in the novel.

The Returns is rich with character and change and an understanding of

its Melbourne setting. Melbourne is a city of sudden storms, overpriced renovations, and pitiful homelessness, but Trevor, on the way back from a disastrous party, notices ‘a strange light over the city’ and registers the effect of the light: ‘something has changed, shifted, from banality to beauty’.

Character and place in a state of modest redemption: these are the hallmarks of the traditional novel, and The Returns offers all the satisfactions of tradition, with plenty of humour and generosity and a certain insight into the way that painting and reading might function. Painting, according to Elizabeth, is ‘all there at once, at attention’, yet you read one sentence at a time, running page by page, linear. These moments are fairly seamless, like consciousness is, moving forwards in time. You comprehend its cause and effect and coherence.

Whenever you pause, or put the book down, the awareness of what came before returns into awareness. Reading is always this elegant moving forward then catching up. It accretes.

Elizabeth is predisposed to reading rather than painting. This is a metatextual moment in a novel that jokes about the publishing industry and reveals the limitations of conventional exhibitions for an unknown artist like Trevor, while exploring love and connection, including textual connection, with great seriousness. g

Brenda Walker is Emeritus Professor of English and Literary Studies at the University of Western Australia. She has written four novels and a memoir, Reading by Moonlight: How books saved a life (2010).

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ABR ELIZABETH JOLLEY SHORT STORY PRIZE

The Point-Blank Murder

by Sonja Dechian

I

rene and I are on the verandah at her grandparents’ house, in the two chairs we’ve managed to clear of spiderwebs. The baby is awake in her arms.

‘Did you sleep?’ I say.

‘Yeah, a few hours.’

‘That’s good.’

She offers no sign of agreement.

The sunset is orange, the sky scattered with clouds. We’re eating pumpkin and lentil soup out of bowls from home. I didn’t think it was necessary to bring them, the cupboards here are well stocked, but Irene insisted. She says they’re the perfect size.

Also, she read in her online mother’s group that the glaze on old crockery often contains lead, so our modern bowls are safer. That’s one of the things about having a baby, you have to think things through.

You’re no longer just eating from this bowl or that, you need to consider it all, how the bowl was made, how the food will affect Irene’s milk, then the baby’s digestion, her growth, etc. From production to final consequences. It’s an unsettling development.

Irene’s food is untouched. ‘Eat something,’ I say, and I put my bowl down and take the baby, who stares, seeing me or not, I’m never sure.

‘Do you think we made the right decision, coming here?’ I say.

Irene shrugs. She can’t answer, because how would she know what a right decision would look like?

She shrugs again. ‘We’re here now.’

It’s just like her to say that.

We moved out here with a three-week-old baby so we could have time alone together, get to know one another, in our new formation of three. Now we have never been more alone, together.

Irene picks up her bowl, rests it on her lap, but

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AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW

still doesn’t eat.

‘I remembered something,’ she says. ‘My grandpa was missing two fingers. I’d forgotten. Isn’t that weird?’

‘Is it?’

‘Not whole fingers, just from there,’ she drags a finger across her top knuckles.

‘I guess that explains his furniture construction.’

I rock from side to side on my chair but she looks alarmed, since I’m holding the baby, and I think better of making light of her recollection.

‘What happened?’

‘He always told me different stories. I was fascinated, so it’s weird I would forget about it, completely.

Like if you’d asked me yesterday how many fingers he had, I would have sworn black and blue, five normal fingers on each hand.’

‘I guess being here, it reminds you.’

‘But it’s funny that being in the place is different to thinking about the place.’

‘Is it?’

‘And it’s also the baby, you know? I just remember things because of her.’

We look at the baby. As if this is something she has done. Our baby is called Raia, but we’re not used to calling her that, so we mostly still say ‘the baby’.

A whirring sound starts up, it’s hard to pinpoint where it’s coming from.

‘Is that an insect?’ I say. ‘What is that?’

Irene knows the sounds of all the insects. She can tell them by name.

‘I think it’s a frog.’

‘That’s a frog?’ I don’t believe her.

‘Well, I’m not an expert on frogs,’ she says. As if I’ve forgotten she is only an expert on insects.

I look at the baby to see if she’s hearing it too.

It sounds as if a giant dial-up modem has sprung to life in the depths of the property, although I am not sure how I would ever explain that. All the layers of knowledge it takes to understand any one thing.

Where do you begin?

The baby stares. I am sure she hears it.

I wake alone in our bed; Irene stays with the baby in the living room overnight so I can have a solid block of sleep to better manage things during the day. We have a mattress on the floor and everything Irene needs is positioned within reach. When I come in she is feeding the baby by the window and reading aloud: at the bottom of the ocean is a layer of water that has never moved.

She marks her page, closes the book. Irene has not slept much. I don’t ask the details but she recounts statistics: nappy changes, feeds, one long hour of crying and rocking. Her voice is thin, she is far away, bunkered inside this scaffold of routine.

I make her breakfast and a cup of tea, a cheese sandwich for me, then I pack the baby into her carrier, set a timer for her next feed, and we head out the back door.

This is what we do each day. The baby and I. She’s strapped to my chest and we head past the gum trees at the top of the paddock then down towards the creek. She seems to like the rhythm of walking, the sound of long grass against my boots and the movement of my chest. She sleeps longer this way, while Irene has more time to rest.

As I walk I begin a new podcast, about a man who robbed a tobacco shop one Saturday afternoon.

With the robbery complete, the perpetrator went for the door just as an elderly man was entering the shop.

It was unclear to witnesses whether the old man was trying to interfere with the crime, or whether he was caught by surprise, but the pair scuffled and the gun went off. The old man was shot and the perpetrator ran along the street towards a local park where he was captured by police a short time later.

The baby’s head is turned to the side. I can’t tell if she’s asleep yet or whether she can breathe freely.

Sometimes I hold my phone out and snap a photo to see how she’s positioned: I see a squashed cheek and misaligned mouth. She’s okay. She’s asleep.

The podcast resumes in the present, a man introduces himself as James. He has pleaded guilty to armed robbery and murder, and now lives with a sincere-sounding regret for his actions. He thinks every day of the old man who was killed and of the family who miss him, he says. But there’s always more to it in these stories, isn’t there?

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Sometimes I drift off into a podcast as I walk, then I come to with a start as I picture my boot catching on a fallen branch or a rock, my body coming down against the grass, baby crushed against me. I think this is normal, to constantly check that your baby is still alive and to imagine all the ways you might accidentally kill her. She’s our first baby.

Our only one, I mean. So I tuck a hand around the shape of her. She stirs, then sleeps again.

My alarm chirps. It’s time to turn around.

has the baby slept, has she had enough sleep or am I doing something terrible to her brain by not knowing how to make her sleep? And yet, the days grow so long when you’re not going to work, immersed in routine, that time on the larger scale begins to unravel, reflect. You forge links with your own childhood in this way, reconnect with the long past while the life you had just months ago becomes distant, foreign.

My alarm chirps. I turn back.

Irene has her feet up on the verandah rail and leans back in her chair.

‘Did you get a nap?’ I say.

She shrugs. There is a pot of tea beside her. Her laptop rests on her thighs. I pull back the side of the carrier to show the baby’s sleeping face, her mouth slack and cheeks piled against my chest.

‘I thought I could hear crying.’

‘No, she’s fine.’

Irene closes the laptop and places it on the floor.

In the sunlight I can see the long veins that run along her ankles.

‘When we first came up here I was planning on tidying this place,’ she says. ‘But I’m not sure if there’s any point. It just has this smell, doesn’t it?’

This doesn’t make sense to me right away.

‘What does it smell like?’ I say.

‘I don’t know.’ It seems she’s given up, but she goes on: ‘Do you remember how strong smells used to be when you were a child? The smell of other people’s houses, so different and unpleasant?’

I do remember that. It’s true.

‘But you could never smell your own house,’ she says. ‘It has no smell, except just for a moment, when you come home after time away, a holiday. You smell it for a second. It’s unfamiliar – then it’s gone.’

Most evenings Irene sleeps while I hold the baby on the couch and watch shows on television or the laptop. The baby’s cries signal the end of my shift and I wake Irene so she can take her place in the living room. I go off to bed and fall asleep right away. It’s all the walking, I’m not used to this level of physical activity. Until now exercise was always planned, not something incidental, and never unavoidable. Sleep too was something I could schedule or delay and not the driving force it has become.

At first, when the baby would wake on our walks, I would find something nice to show her, let’s lie under this tree and watch the leaves in the wind. Do you see the flowers, the kookaburra? And the baby would take it all in, or seem to, but then a switch would flick and she would begin to scream for milk.

She won’t take a bottle, or I haven’t tried enough, and once she’s screaming the screaming only escalates. Screaming only goes in one direction, you know, so it’s hard to do anything but wrap my arms around her and rush through the bush back to her mother.

So now I run a timer on my phone. How long until the next sleep, the next feed? It’s all about time, with babies. We measure their lives in days and then weeks: once trivial blocks of time that must now be counted, changes catalogued, remarked on. But it’s a slippery slope, isn’t it? The accounting of time, that’s where it begins. How long until I can sleep, how long 34 SEP T MBER 2019

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW

I dream I am travelling on a train. It is dark and I cannot get a bearing on the landscape outside, which at times looks like either desert or forest. The carriage is empty, although I have a sense of various people passing along the hall. At first I wait for them, I know they are looking for me, though I can’t recall why. As my anticipation grows I begin to question their intentions, and a mood descends – I must escape. I head into the corridor, lugging my backpack.

It is large, equipped with straps and pockets for hiking, the kind of bag I haven’t travelled with since I was nineteen or twenty and still committed to an image of myself that would have been compromised by a suitcase. I make it to a window and see that we are now travelling over a bridge above an ocean or some other body of water. There is no one out here, but I know they are coming, so I hurry towards the end of the carriage and force open the toilet door and shove my backpack through. The zip splits and there is a terrible cry. A suspicion has been growing but now I am certain; the baby is inside. I have forgotten about my baby.

When I wake I am lying on my back and there’s no sound. I can’t hear Irene or the baby. I creep along the hall and open the door to the living room. Irene is asleep on the floor bed, the baby curled in the crook of her arm. It all looks so peaceful by comparison, and I am tempted to lie beside them but I don’t want to disturb a rare moment of rest. I wait in the doorway until my breathing has calmed and I am confident the dream has been replaced.

The curtains are open but it is too dark to see anything outside.

The next morning Irene tells me the baby has cried

all night. She doesn’t think she has slept at all, and I am not sure it would be helpful to contradict her.

Instead I make breakfast, then I strap the baby into the carrier and we set out. She stares into the distance as we walk, blinking into the sun for a few minutes before the rhythm takes her to sleep. I continue the podcast about the tobacco store robbery.

It goes on for a while about the investigation, the court case, the whereabouts of the stolen cash. Now the reporter is asking the man convicted of the crime, James, about his memories of that day.

James is silent for a long time.

‘I was in the park when they found me.’

His voice is rough, hesitant.

‘Yes, but what do you remember about that, exactly?’

The baby wakes. I can tell by the way she tenses, squirms against me. I do a deep bend of my knees and bounce to calm her.

I’m testing a new app, a pedometer to track the length of our walks and the routes we take across the property towards the creek. I open it to see a blue line curved across the map. It seems to lag a moment or two behind what I estimate to be our actual position, so I pat the baby as we wait for it to catch up. It jags across the map as if I have just now turned a right angle. I turn to correct a few steps, still bouncing my legs. She is almost asleep, but the line continues to move without us and I draw a breath in protest (keep bouncing, do not wake her). I can’t tell to what degree this is an issue with the app, or just because the signal out here is patchy. But the baby is now still. I abandon the app, slide the phone into my pocket and wrap my hands around the baby’s ankles as I walk. I am surprised to feel her skin. One of her socks has slipped off and her little foot is bare.

I switch the podcast back on.

It’s revealed that James can’t in fact remember anything about the crime he’s been convicted of but has never doubted his guilt because he was a drug addict for some years. He can’t recall a lot of his life from that time, he says, and what he does remember is pretty bad, so this crime is conceivable as something he must have done.

The transcripts of James’s police interviews don’t suggest coercion. He couldn’t give an alibi. We are reminded that he was in possession of the gun used to shoot the old man. And so, as advised by his lawyer, James pleaded guilty.

‘Do you remember anything about the gun?’

‘Yeah. I remember the gun in my hand.’

‘Shooting it?’

‘No. Actually, no. Just having it.’

‘So it’s possible you found it? Or someone gave it to you?’

James is silent.

‘Have you seen this? It’s CCTV, from the robbery.’

The reporter narrates the footage as it plays:

A man enters the tobacco store, balaclava over his face. He pulls a gun and, regardless of the low resolution, you can tell his hands are shaking. By comparison, the man behind the counter and the only customer, a woman in her fifties, do not move at all.

Now the reporter pauses the video, draws our attention to the height of the man in the balaclava against a stand of chocolate bars. He has measured the stand. The same exact stand, in the same store, it’s still there and it’s one hundred and eighty centimetres high. That’s a bit over five-ten, he says. The footage shows the man with the gun is no taller than the stand. He couldn’t be more than five-ten, the reporter surmises; James is a clear six-foot-four.

‘Is that you, James?’

James shakes his head, we’re told. And when he speaks he sounds more confused than relieved.

‘It’s not me.’

Irene has found a box of old hats in her grandparents’ closet. She tries hats on the baby and takes photographs and posts them on social media. Off to the opera! she captions one. On another she writes, Has anyone seen my pipe? The photos rack up likes and comments; what a character, a sweetie, etc.

In one of them the baby wears a sailor hat. It must have belonged to a child, but it sits crumpled and oversized on her tiny head. Ahoy! Irene has written. But there is something off about this photo.

It preoccupies me as I lay in bed, my recollection of it, of the strange look in the baby’s eyes.

I think I must be misremembering and so I reach out in the dark and flick open my phone. I scroll to find the image, but it’s as I recall. Something dark reflected in her eyes.

No one has liked it.

As the days pass our walks grow longer and the baby more alert.

Her head tilts back and she stares with eyes and mouth wide at the bright sky. I show her the kookaburra, the grasshoppers, but the rhythm of the grass against my boots still lulls her to sleep, her little head arched back, mouth gaping at the size of it all. We haven’t found the creek. Is there a creek?

We haven’t reached the end of the property, but we must be coming closer. Sometimes we hear the sound of running water and I pick up my pace, but still …

We return from a walk and Irene is not on the verandah. The baby is awake yet calm, and so we head inside. Irene is in the kitchen, on her knees beside a bucket of water. The cupboards are open, contents spread across the bench.

‘Don’t you think something smells off in here?’

She holds a sponge in her hand.

I squat to get closer.

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35

‘All I can smell is cleaning spray.’

‘No, smell through that,’ she says.

I stretch my head into the cupboard. ‘I’m not sure how.’ The baby begins to squirm, unhappy with my crouched position. I stand and unstrap her.

‘It’s driving me up the wall,’ Irene says. She washes her hands and carries the baby to the sofa and so I take over the cleaning. There’s a lot of dust; we should have cleaned this sooner, it’s the kind of task that, once begun, reveals the extent of the dirt all around us. I scrub the rest of the cupboards as Irene feeds the baby and the two of them rest in bed. I stand on a chair and do the top cupboards, too, and my shoulders ache when I’m done. After a while Irene brings the baby out to the kitchen. She stands and assesses the smell.

‘It’s still there,’ she says. ‘Underneath.’

I dream of a train passing over a bridge, a body of water. I carry my backpack reversed, on my chest, and the straps wear lines into the skin of my shoulders.

Sometimes there’s a muffled cry and I am overcome with a sense I have been here before.

‘You know how my grandfather always said there was a creek at the back of the property?’

We’re in our chairs on the verandah. Irene rests her feet on an upturned basket she has found in a cupboard somewhere. The baby is between us, lying on a crochet blanket.

‘I thought there was a creek,’ I say.

‘Have you seen a creek?’

‘I thought you told me there was.’

‘Haven’t you been up there?’

‘We never get that far before she needs a feed.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘What do you mean am I sure?’

‘It’s not that far,’ she says.

I shrug. We walk for hours. I don’t know what to say.

On warmer days I wear my jacket over the top of the carrier so I can remove it without disturbing the baby. I dress her in cotton but it’s difficult to judge her temperature against my own. There is no avenue for the communication of subtleties with a baby; she is crying, or she is not.

Today she is not and I set a determined pace to lull her to sleep. After a short walk I pause to snap a photo and check her position; her bottom lip has collapsed inwards, her deep-sleeping face. I turn on my podcast, the episode begins with a conversation with James, who we now know probably did not commit the crime at all.

‘Why do you think you never questioned it?’ the reporter asks. He hypothesises that James must have carried some residual guilt, for something, in order 36 SEP T MBER 2019

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW

to be so placid about his fate. James has no reply.

‘Do you think you felt you deserved jail?’

And because the weight of the reporter’s psychological insight cannot be shrugged off, James comes to admit that he was in fact guilty of a crime, a murder he was never charged with but which he remembers well and which continues to weigh on his conscience.

He recounts a time, outside a bar of some sort, a rough part of town. He is accosted by a man, the man wants his money, or drugs, he can’t quite remember the start of the altercation, but the man has a gun and he points it at James. But James, who as we have learnt is six-foot-four and, now we also learn, quite strong, wrestles the gun from the would-be attacker. With the gun in his hand he could threaten to shoot, he could frighten the man or simply run away, but he does not. He shoots the man in the head, point blank.

So, the narrator asks, it all balances out, right?

A pause.

There was a murder and now there is punishment.

I suppose this is deliberately provocative. But then another twist as we delve further into James’s past.

‘So was that the first time you’d shot someone?’ the reporter asks.

‘Yes,’ James says, and then, ‘No, not exactly.’ He explains he has held a gun to someone’s head before.

He has held a gun to his father’s head.

‘Your father? A loaded gun?’

I hear the whir of frogs rise up beyond my headphones.

‘It was a game he made me play. Sometimes it was loaded. Sometimes not.’

What follows is a depiction of a childhood fragmented by violence. It is difficult not to be moved by the idea of this child so betrayed. So, then, who is guilty and what is the nature of guilt? When it’s placed in a story it’s all so neat – the childhood, the drugs, the murder, the cycle – and the answer to the question it frames, who is to blame, seems complicated yet clear at the same time.

In the throes of all of this I think about the frogs (how are there frogs if there is no creek? are their frogs that live without water?) and walk further than before, deep into the property. I must have forgotten to set an alarm. I check the time, but it’s meaningless without a reference point. When did I leave home?

I take my headphones out and look around.

I think I hear running water, but it’s so distant I can’t be sure. We’ve never made it this far and I want to go on, just to see it, prove it is there. I continue a few steps but the baby stirs and the sound slips from my grasp. I reconsider and we head back.

By the time I reach the house the baby is crying anyway, clawing for a breast. I could have gone on –

what difference, a few more minutes?

Irene stands as we approach, begins to unbutton her dress.

‘I thought I was imagining it,’ she says.

I pull the baby from the carrier and pass her over and the crying becomes muffled and stops.

‘What happened?’ Irene says.

I don’t tell her I forgot the timer. I am out of breath and unsettled by the baby’s cry. I take a chair and sit and catch the back of my leg on a nail that’s sticking out.

I forget to ask about the frogs.

As I hold the baby on the couch that night, I push in my headphones to listen to the rest of the podcast.

Something about it has left me uneasy and I am keen to be done with it, for reasons I can’t yet unravel.

The reporter first speaks with a lawyer about the future for James and the likelihood of a retrial. The wheels turn slowly, the lawyer explains, yet because of the podcast they are now at least turning. This ties things up, but the reporter is not satisfied. He will now investigate the story behind James’s real crime; what the podcast and all of its fans have been calling the point-blank murder.

I begin to google as I listen. The status of James’s case remains unchanged in the weeks since these interviews occurred. I search the point-blank murder, an urge to undercut the manufactured suspense of the podcast, but my scrolling and clicking unsettles the baby, so I relent and slide the laptop closed, press the baby tight against my chest. When she continues to stir I stand and the two of us sway across the dark living room of Irene’s grandparents’ house, with its exposed wood ceilings and bookcases stacked with non-fiction. The curtains are open but there’s little to see outside. A slim moon, acres of dark bush.

Through a conversation with police, the reporter reveals that there is no physical evidence of the point-blank murder. Nothing has been found at the location described, certainly no report of a murder that matches this description.

We head to the bar in question – a surge of background noise sets the scene. The voice of a bartender, the owner, the voices of regular clientèle. The place has not changed at all, they say. The reporter shows them James’s photograph and explains the story.

The owner scoffs, some of the patrons laugh, their answers are all the same. There is no way someone was point-blank murdered here, they say. There is no body, no murder, this is not that kind of place.

Again, a pause; what is truth, after all, the silence seems to say, in the smug tone of the podcaster.

The baby is crying. I can no longer quiet her with my movements, so I head to the bedroom where Irene wakes and slides from bed to begin her night shift

without a word. I bring a glass of water as she feeds the baby on the sofa, then I ready her blankets, kiss her cheeks and go to bed.

I don’t listen to the rest of the podcast. I know how it will likely end: meditations on the unreliable nature of memory. Unable to define the size and complexity of a single life, it will sketch the shape of a universal meaning instead.

I climb into bed, but sleep brings erratic dreams, a sense of unease. After some time I sit up and reach around in the dark for my phone. Squinting, I open a map and wait for the icon to indicate my location. It takes a moment for my eyes to adjust, then I zoom in and assess the property’s boundaries, as I have before. They are unclear, a block of green.

I attempt to zoom in closer, but the blue lines that would represent a waterway are absent. No rivers, creeks or other bodies of water. But what do I know of creeks? Do they shift, evolve? There was no creek here before. Perhaps there is now.

I flick on the bedside lamp and find my jacket, my sneakers. On the back of the wardrobe door is a grey shopping bag I use to carry a water bottle and spare nappies. I take it, fill the bottle from the bathroom tap and head along the hall. I open the living room door.

Irene is asleep, pillow pushed onto the floor. Her head rests flat on the mattress, the baby curled beside her. Our baby, Raia.

The curtains are open and there is enough light to make out the shape of our chairs on the verandah.

Beyond that, a mass of shadow, a slim moon.

I take light steps to the kitchen and choose a banana from the fruit bowl to add to my bag.

At the back door I turn the knob as slowly as I can. Even so it makes a creak. I swing the door open a fraction. Night sounds enter, a wave, a weight. Louder than traffic, yet not made of anything I can recognise. I am sure it will wake Irene and Raia, and so I freeze, searching for a way to explain what I am doing, where I am going, and why. But they don’t wake, and in the end I wait so long that tiredness settles over me again, a resignation, and I close the door, locking the three of us away from it all, in here, together again. g Sonja Dechian is the author of the short story collection An Astronaut’s Life, which won the 2016 UTS Glenda Adams Award for New Writing and was shortlisted for the Steele Rudd Award the same year. She has co-edited two books of children’s writing about the Australian refugee experience, No Place Like Home and Dark Dreams. ❖ The quote on page 33 comes from Anne Carson’s book Red Doc> ( Jonathan Cape, 2013) JOLLEY PRIZE

37

Do not turn Naama Grey-Smith WOLFE ISLAND

by Lucy Treloar

Picador $29.99 pb, 392 pp, 9781760553159

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ith Wolfe Island, Lucy Treloar joins a growing number of novelists whose fiction is marked by anthropogenic catastrophe. Her latest offering confronts two urgent global crises: the climate emergency, and the plight of refugees.

Treloar reveals startling connections between the two through the shared thread of displacement in a work that is more than powerful: it’s transformative.

Treloar’s second novel is as impressive and haunting as her awardwinning début, Salt Creek (2015), and just as bleak. While Salt Creek looked unflinchingly into the past, Wolfe Island turns its steady gaze towards the future.

Common to both works is the notion that, ‘You cannot outrun the past. It will gather itself and find you.’ That Treloar handles dystopian fiction as deftly as historical fiction is proof of her exceptional talents.

The absorbing narrative is structured in three parts – The Island, Journeys, Home. Narrator Kitty Hawke is the last resident of Wolfe, a sinking island turned marshland. She and her wolfdog, Girl, lead an isolated but peaceful life, attuned to the island’s subtlest moods. Kitty fossicks around the shore, ‘mudlarking’, turning debris into sculptures. Her life changes when unexpected visitors arrive, among them her granddaughter, Cat. They are on the run, desperate for sanctuary for reasons that unravel as the novel progresses. What follows is their hair38 SEP T MBER 2019

raising voyage through a land rife with danger. ‘Hell, darlin’, the law don’t even care about the law these days,’ opines one gun-wielding vigilante. But Kitty carries a gun of her own.

Treloar’s grim vision requires an alarmingly small departure from reality: refugees running for their lives into hostile lands; children forcibly separated from their Spanish-speaking parents at a southern border; people dying because they cannot afford health care; lifethreatening pregnancy terminations; homes and farmlands lost to rising seas and salination. Treloar applies an ostranenie lens – turning the familiar strange – to make us see our world anew.

Indeed, Kitty Hawke is an anti-heroine for our times.

Like Salt Creek, Wolfe Island is a deeply felt exploration of the role of place in people’s lives. For Kitty, ‘Nothing on Wolfe is truly strange to me.

I have a memory for every part of it’. On its loss, she reflects, ‘no one can explain what it’s like to leave a place they love, that has held them and their family safe for as long as memory’. This seems a wise thread to follow in a political climate marked by division, since the wish to conserve a beloved place is a rare bridge between conservatives and conservationists.

The blurb locates the story in ‘a dying island sinking into the wind-lashed Chesapeake Bay’, off the US east coast.

An image search of the region’s sinking streets – Daliesque houses crumbling into Atlantic blue – goes some way to explaining the novel’s eeriness. In her acknowledgments, Treloar states her Chesapeake Bay island is fictitious, and she thanks ‘the people of this beautiful region, especially Smith Island and Tilghman Island’. Another island that seems to share some of Wolfe’s attributes is Tangier. Colonised in the seventeenth century, Tangier Island is home to a small community with a proud heritage – watermen who speak with a distinct accent and work the water for crabs and oysters. Tangier’s devout Christian population supports Donald Trump, who in 2017 was reported to have assured its mayor ‘not to worry about sea-level rise’. In the novel, ‘a politician claiming some importance’

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW

tells Wolfe’s mayor ‘not to worry; everything would be fine’. Kitty Hawke’s conclusion: ‘He turned out to be the biggest liar of all.’

Truth-telling and accountability rise like a tide through Wolfe Island.

Early on, Kitty notes, ‘You decide for yourself the things you want to know about yourself ... you choose not to peer down into the mess of it all. That’s what I do, I’ll admit it. I turn away.’ But Kitty changes. When a man unleashes violence and blames his victims, she makes him face the facts: ‘He did not. She wasn’t yours. Look at that. Do not turn from that. Know that.’ Kitty’s trajectory from island recluse to protective lioness is marked by her choice to confront the sad or shameful realities that make others turn away.

A small qualm: two biblical citations are misquoted in significant ways, perhaps deliberately but to the work’s detriment. The first, from Revelation, reads: ‘The island is sinking. The isles fled away and the mountains were not found.’ The quote’s invented first part is unnecessary: it turns an already yielding true quote into an overplayed false one. The second citation, from Isaiah, reads: ‘The lion will not lie down with the lamb’. Inserting not is clearly deliberate – a rejection that, in the story’s context, calls attention to the failures of the Church. No issue there. But what of Isaiah’s original ‘wolf ’ replaced here with the oft-misquoted ‘lion’? (Canines and felines play a symbolic role in the novel – in Kitty’s abiding love of dogs, in the island’s name of Wolfe, and in the naming of characters: Kitty, Cat, Lionel.) These revisions diminish the quotes’ impact in a book where allusions are otherwise deployed to great effect.

This is Treloar’s second novel, but she is already in full possession of her powers, as assured and ambitious as Barbara Kingsolver or Isabel Allende.

Her work sounds a warning for the future should we fail to face today’s inconvenient truths. It holds the possibility of hope, if not hope itself, while staring into the darkness. Wolfe Island is not to be missed. g Naama Grey-Smith is an editor, publisher, and critic based in Fremantle.

Out of sight, out of mind James Halford FROM HERE ON, MONSTERS

by Elizabeth Bryer

Picador $29.99 pb, 272 pp, 9781760781132

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he most charismatic of the many monsters in Elizabeth Bryer’s début novel is the conceptual artist Maddison Worthington, who commands attention with her lipstick of ‘Mephistophelian red’ and her perfume of ‘white woods, musk and heliotrope’. From the solitude of a labyrinthine mansion, Worthington devises headline-grabbing installations, and performances that often incorporate hidden-camera footage of her audiences. Her ideas, though provocative, are largely stolen from her assistants or from little-known artists in developing countries. Worst of all, Worthington has accepted a lucrative – some would say Faustian – commission from the Department of Immigration for a project called ‘Excise Our Hearts’.

Far-fetched? Perhaps. Emma Cox’s excellent 2015 study, Performing Noncitizenship, shows that artistic responses to Australia’s post-2001 border regime have, almost by definition, been supportive of asylum seekers and critical of the government. The real question about this corpus of well-intentioned activist art, Cox suggest, is how effectively it advances the interests of asylum seekers.

Does a given representation question the conceptual foundation of illegal non-citizenship in Australia, or does it accept the terms of debate and simply consolidate artists, and audiences’ visions of themselves as ethical Australians?

To dismiss Worthington’s anti-asylum art project as improbable, then, misses the point. The policy reality in this area long ago passed into territory that exceeds novelistic imagination. For example, the notion that the entire Australian continent could be ‘excised’ from the migration zone for the purpose of boat arrivals might have seemed implausible

until it became law in 2013.

Bryer’s entry into this challenging terrain looks to unsettle our assumptions about asylum. From Here On, Monsters audaciously departs from journalistic, documentary, and testimonial approaches. It might be more fruitfully read in the tradition of aesthetically radical engagements with the topic by performance artists like Mike Parr, Mireille Eid (Astore), and Shahin Shafaei, or theatremakers like Victoria Carless and Ben Eltham. The novel flaunts historical verisimilitude in order to expose fictionality as a rhetorical mode that saturates the public discourse around asylum seekers: from John Howard’s fictions of queue jumpers and children overboard, to Peter Dutton’s risible recent insinuation that pregnant rape victims on Nauru are ‘trying it on’. Bryer’s text signposts its concern with fictionmaking in a variety of ways, but the most significant is its depiction of an alternative Australia in which large numbers of ‘irregular’ asylum seekers live secretly in the community, like the sanspapiers in France or clandestinos in the United States, instead of being held in detention centres. It is as if the novel refuses to see the camps – ‘What is unpronounced tends to non-existence’, reads the epigram from Czesław Miłosz – but insists on seeing the people inside them, who are relocated to the centre of an unnamed capital city very like Melbourne.

While the exact nature of Worthington’s ‘Excise Our Hearts’ project is part of the mystery that keeps us reading, we know it will involve her hallmarks of deception, performance, and embodiment. It also requires her naïve assistant Cameron, the novel’s narrator, to dress up as a bureaucrat – as if participating in the Stanford Prison Experiment – and to invent border-related euphemisms for hours on end. Cameron’s gradual discovery of the project’s goal – to ensure ‘a degree of disposition toward compliance’ with the government’s harsh new border-protection policies – undermines her admiration of Maddison and eventually leads her to rebel: the main character arc of the novel.

In a second crucial narrative strand, Cameron shelters an asylum seeker, Jhon Dikua Mba, a polyglot lawyer from

Equatorial Guinea. Cameron gives Jhon informal work at the secondhand bookstore she inherited from her mentor and boss, Alister, whose sudden suicide fifteen months earlier has left her feeling ‘quarried out’. Both host and guest find solace in this encounter and throw themselves into intellectual projects. As Cameron is drawn deeper into Worthington’s maze of deceit, Jhon grows ever more frightened of his nights alone in the bookstore, convinced that he can hear a monster bellowing in the building opposite.

At the same time, both become obsessed with the task of translating a mysterious codex that once belonged to the missing historian George Szilard (the surname is one of the novel’s many allusions to eminent intellectual asylum seekers of the century past). Szilard’s eccentric vision of history writing as material embodiment leads him to write his final academic monograph in medieval Spanish on palm leaves in emulation of the source: a long-lost thirteenthcentury translation of Sinbad the Sailor from the One Thousand and One Nights.

The highly imaginative and entertaining history of this manuscript, interpolated into Bryer’s novel, serves as evidence of cultural exchange between Muslims and Aboriginal Australians prior to 1788.

Through its imaginative recuperation of non-white history in the Pacific contact-zone to Australia’s north, From Here On, Monsters looks to counterbalance racially exclusionary narratives of settler-colonial nation building.

While the novel is suspenseful and well-paced, the onward rush of events necessitated by the genre limits its opportunities to deeply explore character.

As a result, the asylum seekers seem thin and somewhat idealised, and the climactic confrontation between the monstrous artist and her protégée lacks emotional weight. Nonetheless, there is much to admire about the book’s formal risk-taking and narrative energy, as well as the breadth and inventiveness of its ideas. g James Halford is the author of Requiem with Yellow Butterflies (2019). He teaches Creative Writing at the University of Queensland.

FICTION

39

A sense of belonging David Whish-Wilson SHEPHERD

by Catherine Jinks

Text Publishing $29.99 pb, 226 pp, 9781925773835

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ne of the few advantages a contemporary writer of historical fiction has derives from working in a context with laxer censorship laws. Representations of sexuality and violence once proscribed can be incorporated to better approach the social conditions of the period. With regard to narratives about Australia’s convict history, Marcus Clarke’s For the Term of His Natural Life was written after transportation had ceased to the eastern Australian colonies, while farther west Fenian convict John Boyle O’Reilly’s Moondyne was published after he had escaped from Western Australia and found sanctuary in the United States.

Reader interest in the convict period has never flagged, however. More recently, Jock Serong’s magnificent Preservation (2018), together with Peter Cochrane’s terrific The Making of Martin Sparrow (2018) and Rohan Wilson’s award-winning double act of The Roving Party (2011) and To Name Those Lost (2017), are nuanced and comprehensive readings of the barbarism visited upon both the convicts themselves but also upon Australia’s First Nations peoples.

Catherine Jinks’s Shepherd, which was shortlisted for the 2018 Text 40 SEP T MBER 2019

Prize for Young Adult and Children’s Writing, similarly evokes the terrible conditions of the frontier for both convict and Aboriginal subject alike, in the cloth of a highly readable, richly characterised, beautifully written novel. Much like Wilson’s To Name Those Lost, which draws suspense from a central chase plotline, Shepherd too is structured around a pivotal incident, which sets off a chain of violent events and maintains its narrative intrigue from a sustained pursuit.

Set in 1840 New South Wales, Shepherd ’s first-person narrator is fourteen-year-old convict Tom Clay, transported for poaching in his native Suffolk. While we are immediately introduced to the novel’s principal antagonist, the brutal absconder Dan Carver, notable for his absence from the early scenes but a strong presence in the aroused fears of Tom and hutkeeper Joe Humble, it is Tom’s previous occupation as a poacher that is key to his reading of the new country and ultimately to his survival once the chase intensifies.

Jinks’s writing is clear and spare, skilfully utilising period diction, slang, and the evocative names of things to draw a picture of Tom’s vulnerability as a shepherd on a remote frontier, while also suggesting the traits that will hold him in good stead in this new and alien country. Tom is clear-minded and resourceful, having suffered the early loss of his mother and father back in the old country, but it is his affinity with animals and his trained instincts for observation and quiet reflection that give him an edge over his fellow Europeans, who are universally ignorant of, and dismissive toward, the land and the people they have occupied. Tom Clay is a beautifully rendered character, as is his inseparable dog, Gyp. Tom knows the names of each of his sheep; he is curious about the natural world around him and the fleeting presences and haunting traces of the Aboriginal people who have learned from bitter experience to avoid deliberate contact with the settlers. It is in Tom’s observations of the natural world that Jinks’s descriptive talents come to the fore, where, for example, ‘sheep spill from the bush like a foamy tide’. Tom might be fourteen,

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW

he might feel as though he’s ‘lost in this place as I would be in the middle of London’, so that ‘[e]very step I take, the earth feels strange to me. I wish I had someone to teach me what I need to know,’ but he is also wise enough to ask himself, ‘How can anyone live in a place without knowing it?’

It is the mysterious arrival of a new man, Rowdy Cavanagh, extrovert to Tom’s introvert, that changes everything. Rowdy’s appearance is the precursor to the return of the vicious Dan Carver. While Carver’s propensity for violence towards Aboriginal people has been hitherto exploited by the freeborn landowner, Mr Barrett, when Carver turns on his own kind and murders two whites, a subsequent incident between Carver and Tom results in an oath of bloody revenge. Out there in the bush, an absconder and outlaw, wounded and aggrieved, the malevolent Carver haunts Tom’s dreams.

When Carver finally returns, Tom and new chum Rowdy set off to warn the others, with Carver in hot pursuit.

The tension ratchets up and never dissipates, although Tom has some advantages. He might be the hunted in this situation, but his experience as a hunter allows him to read the country for clues, even while Rowdy is completely out of his depth. It is Tom, for example, who points out to him the direction they need to take based on his observation that in the Great Southern Land ‘moss grows on the south side of trees’. It is a mark of Tom’s character, and his willingness to learn and adapt, that, as the chase intensifies, his earlier feelings of ‘distance’ from the new world diminish as his senses are sharpened by fear, necessity, and the reawakening of the skills taught to him as a child. This beginning to see things clearly has immediate practical benefits for Tom and Rowdy, but its metaphorical slant is also worthy of recognition – the coming into an outsider’s consciousness of a new respect for the land and her Aboriginal peoples, manifesting as a first tugging sense of belonging. g David Whish-Wilson’s new novel, True West, will be published by Fremantle Press in November 2019.

ABR ELIZABETH JOLLEY SHORT STORY PRIZE

Miracle Windows

by Raaza Jamshed

T

he call of a bansuri rising to her window from the street below awakens Mehr. It is a crooked call; the initial notes, delicate and malleable, make all the right turns inside the hollow of a bamboo reed, but soon miss the swivel that all sounds must make to morph into melodies. The magic that happens between a human mouth and a hollow reed reaches her when she’s still half asleep.

A raag paws at the cobwebs of her mind, dyes it in bursts of ochre and green, before a breath at one end of the bansuri attempts a pitch too high; too soon the notes crash against one another, the sound screeches out through the other end of the reed.

Mehr jolts awake. Some amateur is fiddling with an instrument down the road. Mehr begins the day with a premonition of missing a turn, an inexplicable sense of possibilities leading to dead walls.

Half a year has taken its turn since the time Mehr first saw Meer. It was a cold morning; fog leaked from the asphalt on the road, rolling onto the tyres of Meer’s motorbike as he tailed Mehr’s college bus.

Seasons have changed, it is almost summer now; she sees it in the slow-moving blades of the fan hung from a hook on the ceiling above her single bed, feels it in the sweat beads forming on her forehead. But when her hand runs across her bedsheet, her fingers, in an attempt to stall the day, find pockets of coolness in its creases. She wants to lay her body still, to drink in the coolness her hands have discovered, but the staccato of ladles and pots from the kitchen remind her that she has little say.

Mehr drags herself out of bed, leaving an impression of her body on the limp mattress. She puts on her college uniform, a white Patiala shalwar with a hundred pleats that billow around her knees, inad-

vertently drawing attention to what it must conceal, a brief kameez barely reaching down to her knees, tapering around her thin waist. Over one shoulder she drapes a blue dupatta, a long, rectangular piece of cloth dried stiff by the starch her mother prepares from boiling rice until it dissolves into a sticky liquid. She looks in the mirror of her vanity, its oval, wrought-iron frame rusty at the edges, and dabs talcum powder on her face before walking away.

She attends a home economics college, one that prides itself on producing the best housewives in the city. All day she will surround herself with the hum of sewing machines working with cotton and silk for her clothes and textiles class, she will pore over textbooks on caring for children and elderly at home, she will handle hot bread with bare hands in her food and nutrition practicals, while her mind turns to snippets of conversations she has had with Meer over the phone. Hushed conversations, midnight dialogues, carried out only when the others at home are deep in their slumber, only when Meer’s mates in the hostel have turned deaf to the world. Meer studies at the only veterinary university in Lahore, its campus large and sprawling on the borders of the inner city. The campus houses animals ranging from cows to horses to rare cranes procured from tribes on the outskirts of the Himalayan Mountains. Mehr thinks about the crane Meer is caring for, wonders if it will survive the day. She has never seen the crane, or his university campus; she hasn’t seen his face in a few days, but at college she types in the name of his university, looks at the still lives archived there as the screen blinks at her to make it her home page.

She has memorised the address of Meer’s university.

Mehr crosses her living room where her JOLLEY PRIZE

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fourteen-year-old brother lounges in front of the television screen – another day off from school. He is watching a Bollywood actress twerk across the screen, but flips to the news channel when he sees her. The kitchen is without a door; a floral-print curtain is draped across its threshold. From a split in the curtain, she sees her mother’s back hunched over her stove; white fumes rise above her head. Despite being a decade old, the stove smoulders throughout the day. Smoke tendrils have lacquered the wall it rests against, have made the design of a singed lotus whose blackened petals reach up to the ceiling.

Her mother’s rotund figure stands in the centre of this burnt logo; rolls of flesh under her cotton shirt jiggle with the movement of hands working between steaming pots. As Mehr parts the polyester curtain, she realises the stove has two additional cauldrons next to the usual chai pots and curry pans.

The cauldrons, large and spherical, are steaming away.

The girl goes forward tentatively and kisses the side of her mother’s head, catches a drop of sweat from her mother’s brow on her lips. ‘Come home early from college,’ the mother declares. ‘We are receiving visitors today.’ There is finality in her words. Mehr knows who the visitors are. Any other guests would come unannounced, not needing to send a notice in advance for her mother to prepare the house and a suitable feast.

Mehr turns on her feet, retreats into the living room. The phone is sitting in its handle, silent so early in the day. ‘Who are you calling, Mehru?’

Mehr’s younger brother hurls the question at her, loud enough for their mother to hear it all the way in the kitchen. ‘Not your concern, get away,’ she hisses, picking up the receiver. But she knows full well her brother is not going anywhere. He comes over and stands close enough to be able to make out the voice on the other end; he will know it’s not a woman’s voice his sister is calling for. ‘Get away from me.’ She sticks out her elbow and takes a jab at him.

‘Ma, Mehr is calling someone, and she hasn’t even asked you,’ he hollers. Mehr bangs the receiver back in the handset. She flashes kohl-rimmed eyes at her brother and retreats to the kitchen.

‘The boy’s people are bringing him over today.

He is in the country on leave from work. They might bring mithai with them. The boy has a foreign passport. Such a good family, such a good proposal.’ The talk of her marriage has been making the rounds in the house since she turned fifteen two years ago.

Mehr has always known that one of these days a stranger dressed in a suit and a tie will cross the threshold of her house, right into her drawing room, the one that remains locked until important guests like relatives from overseas come to visit. He will recline on the good sofa, the one that is kept concealed under a white bedspread so as to preserve its 42 SEP T MBER 2019

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW

newness for just this occasion. He will sit back and ogle her while she serves him and his family tea and biscuits. She will be marked according to the colour of her tea and the flexibility of her hand as she lifts a dainty cup off the tray, places it on a matching saucer, and presents it to her guests. Bonus points for her height if she is taller than the man’s mother, her skin colour if it is a shade lighter than that of the man’s.

‘Ma, I’ll come home when the bus brings me back. You know that already.’ As soon as the words snap out of her mouth, she bites her lip. Her mother’s brow furrows, she scratches her shock of greying hair as if searching, with her fingers, for an answer lodged in there. Before her mother can open her mouth and tell her to skip college that day, Mehr blurts out lies. ‘Ma, I have an exam today. Final exam. I have to leave. Now.’ She hurriedly kisses her head again and turns to leave. ‘Where are you running off to?

You’ll leave when the bus comes to take you, no?’

She places a ladle in a pan, frees both her hands and crosses them over her heaving chest. ‘You know, we don’t want you to do any finals-shinals. What’s the point? Even the boy’s family doesn’t want a girl with a degree. He earns in dollars. Dollars. You might as well not go today. Waste of time. Waste of money.’

One hand waves in the air, shooing away a fly Mehr cannot see.

Mehr needs to leave the house. She needs to reach Meer, somehow, to tell him of the visitors coming today. She hopes he will volunteer to have his mother call her mother to initiate a proposal for her marriage to him before the stranger’s family arrives, inspects her, and – to seal the deal – puts a piece of sweet laddoo, half in her mouth and the other half in their son’s. She takes one look at the telephone hanging on the peeling wall, sees her brother still standing next to it, hands bunched in fists on his sides. Adulthood has begun to inscribe itself on his body. His whole being seems to be reaching out for something. His limbs have grown rapidly in the last year, his neck disproportionately long, giraffe-like, his head bobbing on top, a smattering of hair furnishing his chin. But his voice is stubborn, the last to release him from childhood.

‘Who are you calling, Mehru?’ he squeaks at her again.

Mehr ignores the child.

‘Ma, I’ll talk to Mansur Saab and see if he can pick us up early. I promise, I’ll come home early today.’ The college bus honks outside her front gate.

Mother and daughter stand for a moment, appraising each other. Finally, Mehr’s mother abandons the stove, wipes her brow with her dupatta, carelessly flings it over her head, and walks her daughter to the gate. ‘Don’t buy anything from the canteen today. Your skin turns dark black when you stand in the queue under the sun for too long.’ She places a banana and an apple in Mehr’s hands. Mehr jams

the fruits in her bag and crosses the small garden between the front foor and the gate where a swing still hangs from her childhood days.

Mehr’s college bus is your usual dabba, a regular box that picks her up, as well as a group of other girls living in the area, and drops them off at the college gates. It’s a shabby affair of rusty steel and loose bolts, hastily put together in a run-down garage after it was totalled. The empty space at the back is fitted with two low benches facing each other.

The driver, Mansur Saab, must have picked them up from a roadside café. Mehr heads to one of the plastic benches, mindful not to leave shoe prints on the other girl’s pristine white shalwars. She finds her seat and looks out at an overcast sky, sunlight further muted by a scrim of dust coating its back screen. A trail of paw prints are etched in the thick dust; a cat must have made a home on the roof last night as she argued with Meer over the phone.

Mehr can still see her mother wedged between two halves of a split gate, her body in the worn-out clothes she only wears at home, carefully concealed behind the gate from any neighbours who might be watering their front gardens, or the dense hedges surrounding the house, thick enough to veil it from the street. Head poking above the gate, she watches the bus. Just before it lurches round the corner, Mehr spots a boy sitting on a grassy patch. He is thumping his bansuri with his palm, as if reprimanding a dog.

Mehr’s insides rattle as the bus jumps over a speed bump. The other girls on board giggle at one another, from the front seats to the back, for having their bodies jostled indecently by the road-theatrics of their finger-thin driver. A honk behind the bus, a clean-shaven boy on a motorbike smirks at the girls. He is one of many boys who follow such buses throughout the city in the mornings on their motorbikes, abandoning their own journeys, depending on the amount of attention they receive from the passengers. Nadia, sitting in the front row, calls out to Amina, her cousin and closest friend, sitting opposite to Mehr on a bench. ‘Look Amina, your husband is here.’ Neither Amina nor the other girls remember seeing this particular boy before. Amina feigns a look of martyrdom, an expression the girls will all wear on their wedding day. With a downward droop to her mouth, she summons tears, puts a wrist against her forehead and cries out, ‘Ma! Nahi! Don’t send me away so soon.’ Mansur Saab, sensitive to the slightest currents of excitement running in his vehicle, lurches the bus around a sharp turn and glares at the girls from his rear-view mirror. The girls catch a peek of a few strands of hair flying loose on top of an otherwise bald head and reach out for one another’s hands, dissolving into fits of laughter.

Most days, Mehr loses herself amid the frivoli-

ties on the bus, spends the ride with her hand over her mouth, stifling peals of laughter. Today when Samira, after a remarkable flip of tyres, shouts, ‘Mehr, still on board or have you flown out the back?’

Mehr doesn’t reply. She looks out the window at the trees trembling in the breeze, its glass permanently jammed shut.

‘M

ehr,’ he asked last night on the phone, ‘do you know what your name means?’

She smiled into the receiver. ‘Mehr. It’s one of the names given to the full moon.’ She tasted the full texture of her name on her tongue for the first time.

‘You know, animals go mad during the full moon,’ he said. ‘Last night, a skinny mutt bolted out from behind a tree, bared fangs and all, and took off with a piece of flesh from a horse’s leg. We had been treating the same leg for days. It was the fourteenth night of the moon. Last month a koonj, this migratory crane, went dancing around its cage, crying for its partner.

We couldn’t sleep the whole night. The racket it made.

The partner died days ago but why do you think the bird only remembered to lament its death a week later? Full moon. That’s what your name does.’

She knew he was teasing, could imagine a sly smile softening his angular face. His mellow jabs were meant to reflect his affection for her, but she

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Translating Traditional Tales and Folklore Stephanie Smee French & Swedish Ruth Singer Australian Indigenous languages Omid Tofighian Persian/Farsi Book here for this free event: aalitra.australia@gmail.com

14 September 2019, 1.30 to 5.30 pm Multicultural Hub, 506 Elizabeth Street, Melbourne

JOLLEY PRIZE

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felt as though the world had suddenly turned hostile.

Bloodthirsty mutts, ailing horses, koonjs left behind crying for lost lovers – all because of her. She tried to field the allegations half-heartedly but soon lost the image of his face smiling, and hung up the phone feeling exhausted.

W

hat if he doesn’t send his parents over to ask for her hand? The thought sloshes around in her head as it knocks against the window pane. She charts a plan. Instead of entering the gates of her college, if she hides behind the old, dusty tree next to the boundary wall and waits for Mansur Saab to leave, she can walk towards Meer’s university for a few streets and then hail a rickshaw at a main road to take her the rest of the way. They have never met in person before; Meer dropped his phone number through the open window of the bus once after tailing hers for over a month. But Meer is no stranger, she knows him well. She has spent many nights whispering to him on the phone.

She lists the risks involved. She could get pulled out of college if her mother or brother received a phone call regarding her absence. She could lose her way, be abducted, or get sold in the red-light district.

Morning newspapers were filled with such headlines.

Meer could turn out to be a stranger, interested only in her voice in the secrecy of the night. She empties her wallet for all the silver coins that she can use for the rickshaw fare, lets them pile in the palm of her hand; she rubs each face, feels the raised surface where a crescent and a star are embossed under the rough beds of her fingertips, while her mind pushes away one possibility of disaster after another. When she looks up again, her mind made up, the bus has pulled onto the canal road towards the city centre, the only road that Mehr knows to be lined with so many trees. As the trees inch past them in the thick traffic, she spots swimmers gathered at both sides of the canal in anticipation of the rain that might fall soon and raise the water level enough for them to go for their morning dips.

Mehr has never walked along an open road on her own before. She imagines the crunch of asphalt under the plastic soles of her shoes. Her hand reaches for the apple in her bag. She takes it out and looks at its bruised surface. She knows there are patches of russet blooming just beneath the red skin, but she polishes its surface on the back of her sleeve and takes a bite anyway. Sweet juice leaks onto her tongue.

She takes a bigger bite, savours the foamy texture in her mouth. Her eyes roll back to the canal, to an over-excited swimmer already wading knee-deep in the muddy water, dirt plastered over his thighs.

He cups the runny mud in his hand and throws it above his head. He bends over to scoop up muddy water; his muslin sarong slips down his haunches.

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Mehr catches a glimpse of bare skin, and the nectar in her mouth turns muddy. She shudders, jams the bitten apple back in her bag, and looks away.

An uneasy pulse spreads out in her head; elliptical thoughts hover around her. Unable to keep up with the easy camaraderie inside the bus, Mehr’s eyes gravitate back to the roads. The path to the college is varied. Shaded roads take sharp turns, and open on to clusters of tall colonial buildings, old and decrepit, standing in defiance to the passage of time; tall buildings lead to dusty fields and little boys playing cricket with makeshift bats. The idea of her walking down these roads, making the trip that she has dreamt of countless times, pricks at her skin from the inside. Her cheeks flare in a fury she does not quite understand. Tiny specks of rain land on her window pane, perforating the screen of dust.

The bus turns onto the busiest street leading up to the entrance of her college. It’s a slow drive here, and the road is flanked by shops on each side, the strip of shops named Anarkali Bazaar after the royal concubine who was concreted alive in a wall by a jealous vizier. Mehr knows of this history in an impersonal way; the legend’s darkness bears no traces of the childhood memories of eating cotton candy and fried samosas from its road-side stalls.

The morning’s grey clouds, scattered before, have condensed into an umbrella above the bus. The air is still, like everything on the road is holding its breath.

The light sprinkle from before has ceased for the moment. Amina, sitting opposite to Mehr, waves her hand across her face, ‘Oye, Mehru, where are you lost today?’ Mehr shifts her eyes to her friend’s hand, feels the currents it makes in the stillness of the air at the rear of the bus. She withdraws her face, diverts her eyes to the snack stalls, and the smoke clouds hovering above them, to the dense clutter of shops.

The bus snails ahead.

On a footpath, a group of boys in uniform is gathered around a stall. The stall owner has a grin on his face while he roasts one corn cob after another in a wok of sizzling sand, a small fire crackling underneath it. The boys snatch the cobs from his hand, fall on them with bared teeth. The bus hasn’t progressed two feet before the sky gives in. Rain starts to splatter the street. It comes pelting down on the roof of the battered bus; Mehr winces, instinctively puts her hand over her head. Pedestrians shed their facades of civility as they scamper around for shade, pushing and jostling against one another, ignoring advancing automobiles. The girls laugh and hoot at this untimely rain – it is not a monsoon month – and clap their hands while Mansur Saab puts his own hand on the horn, and forgets it there.

Rain has a way of washing away pretences. The group of uniformed boys who had pretended to be sated by the corn cobs throw away their soggy pur-

chases. Thrilled to be caught in the rain, thrilled to be running in packs, they put their faces defiantly to the sky. The girls in the bus, caught in the excitement, look around the road wildly. One head pokes out of the window seeking its share in the rain.

And that is all it takes.

The boys swoop down on the bus, circle it from all sides, hitting the window panes with fists clenched tight. Mansur Saab hisses from the front, his voice tight with nerves, ‘Girls, keep your eyes on the road.’

The girls, intimidated by the proximity of the boys and the slow speed of the bus, obey the driver for once. One boy breaks into a song, ‘Ae Masuam Rangeelay suhanay, Jiya nahi maanay …’ The rest join in the chorus while circling the bus. The raucous cackles grow louder while the girls, trained by life to recognise the sound of danger, shrink in their seats, flinging their dupattas over their heads, clutching hands. Mansur Saab remains seated, something in the boys’ voices glues him to his seat. He yells, ‘Don’t you boys have mothers and sisters at home?’ while brandishing his skinny fists from behind the safety of his window shield.

‘Get the girls out, old man, you only want to keep them for yourself ? Share, share. The weather demands it of you.’

Rain seems to egg the boys on. A boy’s face pops up next to Mehr’s window, close enough for her to see rain dripping down his chin, wet hair plastered over his broody brows. He has let his hair drape over his eyes, like a hero would in a Lollywood movie, but the part of the eyes still visible belie the grin on his face; the eyes seek revenge for what Mehr does not comprehend. Fear curdles in her stomach. The boy slams at her window, once, twice, thrice. He tries to pry it open, but the window is sealed shut. The girl’s hands race to smooth out the creases gathering in her lap, to tug at the hem of her shirt, to force it down over her knees.

The boy abandons Mehr’s window and circles to Nadia, the girl sitting next to the window that is stuck open. There is a lull between the face looking up at Mehr, hate brimming in the eyes of a laughing boy, and the next scene, when Nadia has howled.

Mehr has witnessed the space between disbelief and belief. In that quaint order.

In moments to come, she will look down at her finger, run her thumb along its surface, expecting to feel the velvety texture of blood; there will be none.

She will look around the bus, at Mansur Saab driving and honking at the same time, his mouth uttering expletives not meant for her ears. She will catch sight of the old man’s flyaway hair visible to her in his rearview mirror, but she will also see Amina’s face opposite hers, tears slipping down her cheeks, and this time, she will not laugh. There will be silence in the bus, from the front rows to the back. Along the sides

of the roads she will witness rivulets rage. A gutter will lie open, its contents bubbling out. She will recall scene by scene the boy’s face next to her window, the hate in his eyes; she will remember the miracle of her sealed window, will recall a hand pass the threshold of the front window left open. Her eyes will return to the sewage on the road. It will finally come to her, the moment of disbelief when the hand reached out and grabbed Nadia’s face, the same face that looked out of the window minutes before soaked in child-like glee, the brutal jerk that forced it out, the spit that landed on Nadia’s face, how it felt like the shock when a needle on a sewing machine pricks through the soft bed of a fingertip, drawing blood; the fleeting disbelief that this could happen, quickly replaced by a certainty that this has happened, that it could have happened all along. The disbelief in recollection will be muted around the edges, its contours softened, almost forgotten, but the belief that a violation has happened, has passed, has entered the realm of finality, will remain with her.

Mehr will leave the bus at the entrance of her college gates, will spend the day with the girls from the bus, huddled together in the common room, each looking in the private spaces of their minds at their communal violation. Mehr will go home early that day, on the same bus, will spot a reed flute, a cheap thing that cost someone fewer than two rupees, abandoned near the lip of a gutter next to her front gate.

Meer will call her in the late hours of the night, after she has been betrothed under her family’s approval to a stranger who has deemed her compatible with him, basing his judgement on an esoteric algorithm that has calculated her worth down to the newness of the sofa in her drawing room. Meer will not tease her, for once. In a faraway voice, he will recount the difficult journey that Demoiselle Cranes make from Mongolia across the Himalayan Mountains to Pakistan; will marvel at their resilience in reaching their destination, flying high over altitudes with almost no oxygen. He will tell her that the crane that he nursed after its partner’s death did not survive the lonely weather of the day. She will let him speak until sleep overcomes him. This will be their last conversation. She will tell him nothing of her day, placing her faith, for all days to come, in the miracle of windows jammed shut. g Raaza Jamshed is a writer and researcher drawn to the poetics of gender, language, and identity. She is a Doctor of Creative Arts candidate at Western Sydney University and is currently compiling her short fiction in a collection. Two of her recent stories have been published in Meanjin. Raaza was born in Lahore; she currently resides in Richmond, New South Wales with her husband and two children. ❖ JOLLEY PRIZE

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Pano Crusader Hillis THE PILLARS

by Peter Polites

Hachette $32.99 pb, 260 pp, 9780733640186

T

he 2019 federal election result confirmed that housing prices, upward mobility, tax cuts, and limited immigration are powerful motivators for Australian voters. Peter Polites’s second novel, The Pillars, with its themes of social and material advancement in Sydney’s western suburbs, captures this spirit of the time perfectly.

Pano, the main character, studies people – those better off, more favoured, those who thrive and make it look easy – and wants a better life for himself. Tertiary educated and an avid observer, Pano has studied the habits, codes, dress, and attitudes that will disguise his secondgeneration Greek migrant status. He knows how to read a room and knows the room is always reading him, right down to his choice of labels, how he grooms himself and his vocabulary.

A struggling writer and poet, Pano has left his Bankstown roots to live in the new, cookie-cut suburb of Pemulwuy in western Sydney. The houses are identical; the gardens are sparse; the roads have no potholes; neighbours rarely meet. Named after an Eora man, the historical Pemulwuy was a warrior in Australia’s bloody but unrecognised frontier wars. Insights into Australia’s complex history abound in the novel and include the dispossession of the owners of the land, ruthless land speculation, bushranger hangings, waves of immigration, interclass struggles, and 46 SEP T MBER 2019

a constantly shifting palette of faiths, colours, and social conventions.

Pemulwuy is a place of aspiration, a community gated not by walls but by the force of will of its homeowners to keep property values high. It is a suburb where Australians escaping their class and second-generation migrants escaping their families dream of social advancement and erase inconvenient facts from their past. Here, Pano can maintain his mask as an aspirational urban gay, while spying on residents in their houses at night.

Pano lives with Kane – well-built, attractive, decidedly Anglo. Kane’s aspiration to be an A-list gay means that he fills his house with designer replicas while repeatedly reminding Pano that he is his landlord, not his housemate.

Sex happens regularly in the house accompanied by online hook-ups and the occasional meth-fuelled sex party.

Sometimes Kane has sex with Pano, prompting the latter to fantasise a future together.

The novel offers a fresh lens on gay life, placing it irrevocably within the aspirational class, its members ready to turn their back on an inconvenient background without a flutter of regret.

Here, being gay means social mobility and opportunities to move up the ladder because of the outward markers of fashion, taste, looks, and sex.

The novel opens with the news that a mosque is being built in the suburb.

Kane, worried about its effect on house prices, forms an unlikely alliance to oppose its construction. Pano, despite misgivings, agrees to help, believing that it will bind him to Kane. The campaign takes a bizarre turn when Pano agrees to masquerade as a gay Albanian Muslim opponent of the mosque for a queer media campaign focused on homophobia within Muslim communities.

As in his first novel, Down the Hume, a mother is a major character; the mothers in each novel share a history of trauma and mental illness. Pano clearly has a conscience – much of his time is spent on working out his single mother’s needs – but his desire to abandon his roots is equally important. His understanding of the place of women in Greek–Australian culture is nuanced

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW

and perfectly pitched, with acute observations on the place of Greek mothers in myth and as stereotypes.

Back in Bankstown, Pano meets up with Basil, his athletic high-school crush, who enlists him to write his biography. Basil has it all: he owns properties; he’s fit, tanned, and muscular; he keeps his elderly father in comfort.

His girlfriend, Kamilla, not only manages his business but is an Anglo who has remodelled herself to look like a classy ‘wog girl’ – dyed long hair, makeup, nails, and clothes to match the local look. When Pano bumps into an ex-university friend in a Newtown café, he tells him that his vanity piece on Basil is ‘a character interrogation of aspirational diasporic communities’. It is a phrase that perfectly describes the intention of The Pillars.

Pillars are a recurring motif in the novel. There are the pillars of belief that sustain the characters; the pillars of the southern European immigrants who replicated their lives of grass and trees back home with pillars of concrete and statues of lions across western Sydney.

Personally, Pano is conscious of a pillar inside him, the spine that allows him to stand up straight and keep moving.

The chapters are short and selfcontained, and the narrative moves backward and forward in time, building to a discursive final section. The sentences are short, sharp, and crisp. There is never a misstep in Polites’s confident writing. His descriptions of physicality are exquisite, whether he is talking about the impact of a spied-upon and isolated body part, the grooming habits of Bankstown men, or the endless preoccupation with hair removal among the southern European communities he sprang from. A highlight of this rich and compelling novel is that Polites takes what is seen as marginal and puts it at the centre. So-called Australian values are dissected and dismissed as unformed culturally or imaginatively. Nor is Pano cast as a victim. His lucid insight and big-picture view of the world offer him access to social mobility and a way forward. g Crusader Hillis is a Melbourne-based writer, editor, curator, and producer.

Irish times Chris Flynn BEING VARIOUS: NEW IRISH SHORT STORIES

edited by Lucy Caldwell

Faber $29.99 pb, 304 pp, 9780571342501

P

laywright and author Lucy Caldwell raises the issue of national identity early in her introduction to this long-running anthology series. She grew up in Belfast but lives in London. Her children sing Bengali nursery rhymes and celebrate Eid. She holds two passports, neither of which adequately captures who she is.

‘I feel apologetic and fraudulent to varying degrees, depending on who I’m with, or where I’m going.’ ‘Who is more Irish?’ she asks. Is it the writer born in Ireland who consciously chooses not to live there, or the writer born elsewhere who moves to the island? What about the writer born outside of Ireland whose parents maintain their link to the country through songs, St Patrick’s Day, and a romanticised sense of patriotism for a place they may have never visited?

Or, in a scenario that will be recognisable to many contemporary Australian authors: ‘A writer born in Ireland to parents from elsewhere, who constantly has to answer the deathly question, No, but where are you really from?’

The right to identity in a world of porous borders is arguably the greatest philosophical issue of our times.

Caldwell chooses an all-encompassing approach in her author selection, commissioning stories from born-and-bred residents like Kevin Barry and Sally Rooney alongside expats Adrian McKinty, Eimear McBride, and Kit De Waal. We are also treated to work from new arrivals, notably Arja Kajermo (Finland), Melatu Uche Okorie (Nigeria), and Chinese sensation Yan Ge. Caldwell plays her Chinese ace straightaway, understandably so. Yan Ge’s kinetic prose illustrates the possibilities of the short form by further exploring the issue of identity in ‘How I fell in love with the well-documented

life of Alexander Whelan’. Claire (real name Xiaohan) meets Alex at a Foreign Movies No Subtitles screening. They flirt and she adds him to Facebook.

Next day she learns that he has died overnight. Worried that she might be in some way responsible, Claire explores Alex’s social media accounts, going so far as to meet up with his friends. The tone is off-kilter, compelling, and richly humorous. Commonplace technology is weaved seamlessly into the narrative.

The dialogue is scathing and funny.

Ge has only recently begun writing in English. On this evidence, the Dubliner is a truly exciting new Irish voice.

Such a strong opening could have been risky, but the quality is maintained throughout the collection. Being Various contains an embarrassment of riches.

Early stories from Danielle McLaughlin and Louise O’Neill deal with the excruciating awkwardness of breakups.

Pregnancy and its associated travails – a recurring theme – are taken to their nightmarish extreme in Elske Rahill’s ‘Stretch Marks’. Okorie’s transgender protagonist navigates the choppy waters of race and internet dating in the memorable ‘BrownLady12345’.

Unusually for a literary compendium, science fiction makes an appearance in three stories: Jan Carson’s Black Mirror-esque ‘Pillars’, which sees hovering affirmation monoliths allocated to depressives; Nicole Flattery’s ‘Feather’, wherein men are reduced to animalistic companions without speech who must be walked on a leash; and Sinéad Gleeson’s ‘The Lexicon of Babies’, which sees children born as letters of the alphabet, causing a breakdown in traditional societal hierarchies.

A flurry of brilliant stories towards the end (there are twenty-four in all) ensures a winning finish. Barry’s ‘Who’s-Dead McCarthy’ typifies his unique take on small-town Ireland and highlights his mastery of banter when the narrator keeps bumping into a man with comprehensive knowledge of unusual local deaths. McKinty – who lived in Melbourne for a time – contributes a story set in post-Troubles Northern Ireland. ‘Jack’s Return Home’ sees the exiled lesbian daughter of a crime boss granted a reprieve to attend her father’s

funeral in Carrickfergus. This tense affair, throughout which she is in mortal danger, ends with a proposition that will take Jack down a path that may shock some readers but will be familiar to anyone versed in the politics of that tumultuous province. McKinty is arguably the best crime writer in the world right now.

Rooney is also enjoying widespread fame, thanks to her novel Normal People. Her contribution here, ‘Colour and Light’, was published in The New Yorker earlier this year. Aidan, a hotel receptionist, is introduced to a friend of his brother’s, a bored, aloof film producer.

She takes a flirtatious interest in young Aidan, although her motives are impenetrable. The manner in which she toys with him, leaving the inexperienced boy confused and irritated, is a joy to behold.

Rooney’s skilful dissection of unspoken communication and misread signals speaks volumes to her understanding of how people interact.

The final word goes to Kajermo, a Finn who has lived in Dublin for forty years. Harking back to the themes mentioned in Caldwell’s introduction, Kajermo’s ‘Alienation’ sees a CzechSlovak-Hungarian woman trapped in Dublin after her husband goes to the pub for a pint and never returns, leaving her with two adult children and no official visa status. To survive, she writes a syndicated newspaper column that views Ireland through the doe-eyed filter of an acclimated immigrant, while facing daily discrimination because of her unshakeable Eastern European accent. This is contemporary Ireland in microcosm, a situation mirrored across the developed world at a time when no one is really sure how to describe who they are anymore. g

Chris Flynn is the author of three novels.

FICTION

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ABR ELIZABETH JOLLEY SHORT STORY PRIZE

Rubble Boy

by Morgan Nunan

1.

Growing up, my brother and I lived with Dad in a Housing Commission flat among a row of identical flats. Back in those days, we played Greatest Hits of the 70s through a subwoofer on the back deck. During the guitar solo in ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ we howled over the music and the neighbourhood dogs followed our lead, continuing their cries long after the song was finished. This was after Mum had passed away. Dad couldn’t find any work so he spent each day drinking Bundaberg Rum mixed with Coke and creating sculptures out of junk that he collected in a trolley he found dumped by the creek behind Safeway.

Dad called himself an artist (he was a cabinetmaker by trade), but he never sold a work. Instead, he would ‘donate’ his finished products to the public – he left them on nature strips, playgrounds, the carpark behind the fish-and-chip shop. Dad always said he was ‘not-for-profit’.

2.

On the nature strip opposite my high school Dad built a piece he called Perspective. It was basically twelve copper pipes bound together in the middle then twisted at the ends like open palms, or a flower in bloom, but really it just looked like a bunch of copper pipes. Dad said he came up with it after he passed out in our driveway: he woke up to water splashing over his face from a down pipe affixed to the side of the house. I was in year seven.

‘Your dad is a retard,’ said Holly, a girl in the year above, whose own dad was a bikie with the Hells Angels. ‘Only a retard could make a sculpture that shit.’

Holly followed me home that day. She threw 48 SEP T MBER 2019

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rocks at me until we reached the flat and when she saw where I lived she burst into feverish laughter.

Dad kept the junk he collected for his art in the front yard. The odds and ends resembled a garbage tip and included stacks of discarded couches and a collection of traffic cones.

‘Look at Rubble Boy go into his rubble home,’ Holly said.

3.

Stolen cars were often left in the carpark behind the local footy club. It was a good place to do donuts, skidding the car through the stones in figure-eight patterns around a small island of shrub (my brother Pete and I had our fair share of joyrides there).

When the thieves were finished they would fill the car with petrol and throw in a lit match. Usually the cars would be towed away within a week, but one time a burnt-out car was rolled down the hill behind the carpark. It hit a gum tree and was lodged there long enough for grass to grow up through the bonnet – giving Dad the idea for a work he called Botanical.

Botanical gave Dad his first taste of fame. What he did was tow that burnt-out car to the flat where he gutted it, cut out a sun roof, and gave the car a paint job (all white, five or six coats). Then he filled the car with soil and planted a wattle tree in the centre. The branches of the tree extended from the sun roof and when it bloomed the car was showered in gold. It is still my favourite work of his.

For his efforts, Dad made it into the local paper.

There was even talk of an exhibition until the car got pinched from out the front of the flat. It was left in the carpark behind the footy club, burnt out all over again.

4.

When Pete was eighteen he got himself into a bit of strife and had to go inside for a while. Dad was pretty upset. We both were. Pete told me he had just held onto some money for a mate, but it turned out that Pete’s mate was Holly’s dad, the Hells Angels bikie. Pete held quite a lot of money for Holly’s dad, as well as a sawn-off shotgun.

I think Dad blamed himself for the direction Pete was headed in. He stepped away from his art and hit the drink a lot harder then. He even got himself banned from the members’ bar at the RSL Club.

5.

On my twenty-first birthday Dad put on a party at the flat. He cleared out most of the front yard and set up a marquee and a keg. One of my mates from school made a speech. He told the story of how I came to be nicknamed ‘Rubble Boy’. I could tell Dad was embarrassed.

‘Well, fuck me,’ Dad began his speech. ‘I guess that makes me Old Man Rubble!’ There was a bit of laughter and somebody yelled out ‘Sure does’, but it soon went quiet while Dad scanned the yard, as if daring somebody to say another word.

‘Fucking Rubble Boy, eh?’ Dad said before pausing again. He seemed to be deciding whether to continue with the speech. ‘I’ve taken a lot of shit from this world. Let’s see one of you cunts walk a second in my shoes.’

Dad left the party then. He walked straight out of the driveway and down the middle of the street.

6.

I picked Dad up from the hospital one day. He was a diabetic and he’d had multiple surgeries in the space of a few years – a total of four toes removed.

After his appointment with a surgeon he demanded we stop at the bottle shop on the way home.

‘Are you sure you’re meant to drink, Dad,’ I said.

‘With the diabetes I mean?’

‘Don’t bloody worry about my drinking,’ he said.

‘You’re worse than your bloody mother ever was, you know that? These surgeons are all full of shit.

They’re overeducated. You know, the only letters after my name are F.F.E.’ ‘All right, Dad. I know.’

‘F.F.E. Form Four Education. That’s all I’ve ever needed.’

After the bottle shop, we returned to the flat.

There was an eviction notice in the mail.

7.

Dad wasn’t the only one being evicted. It turned out the whole block was to be demolished. Pete had got wind of it before the notice arrived but assumed it

would be years before the process started so he never mentioned it.

‘Probably for the best,’ I said to Dad, trying to be positive. ‘You could barely get up the driveway before your surgery. And the place is falling to bits.

I reckon you must have two dozen possums living in your roof.’

‘Bastards of things,’ Dad said. ‘I told you to give me a hand trapping them. If you take ’em over water they can’t ever find their way back. Bloody easy fix if you gave me a hand. We could just drop them off in a park across the other side of a creek.’

‘You’ll be right, Dad. They’ll sort you out with a newer place. We’ll ask for somewhere closer to the shops, save you walking on those bung toes as much.’

‘I’ll be walking just fine, don’t bloody start with that. It’ll just be a shame if there’s nobody to fix up the windmill.’

The Windmill was Dad’s latest project. He said he was inspired by a documentary he saw on the Discovery Channel, about wind farms in the Netherlands. He had started building a windmill in a playground across the street from the flats. He built four identical blades from sheet metal and PVC pipe and attached the blades to a steel support that had once held a basketball hoop.

‘Kids love that thing – and there’s plenty I’ve still gotta do. I just hope they realise.’

‘I don’t know if the windmill will be around either, Dad. Pete reckons the whole block is getting developed. They’re putting up townhouses for the uni students. The whole block, Pete reckons.’

Dad was quiet then.

After that day, we never talked much about the move, except for practical things like how we would use Pete’s van to move Dad’s stuff, and whether we should try to dig up the lemon tree in the backyard.

The tree grew lemons the size of coconuts just about all year round.

The Windmill remained unfinished.

8.

Dad credits Pete’s time away as his wake-up call.

Afterwards, the wildness in Pete from those earlier days was gone, in its stead was a more patient (if somewhat muted) resolve. Pete got a job as a bricklayer and reunited with an old girlfriend, Vicky, from his early high school years. Soon they married and started a family.

Pete’s family and I would visit Dad on Christmas and Easter. We would celebrate with Dad on his birthday and go round to watch the grand final. Before the move, Pete, Dad, and I would sometimes go out to the back deck, put on Greatest Hits of the 70s, and howl together into the night, just enough to let the neighbours in the surrounding flats know that JOLLEY PRIZE

49

the Reeves boys were still around.

That was how we spent Dad’s last night in the flat.

9.

They eventually found Dad a little house on a leafy street a few suburbs over. There was an IGA with a bottle shop next door. The street was flat enough for Dad to use his wheelchair when his feet were sore (they often were).

But Dad was lonely there.

He didn’t know any of the neighbours like he had back at the flats and he no longer enjoyed notoriety as the de facto (and self-proclaimed) neighbourhood artist-in-residence.

Pete got Dad a pet budgie which he called ‘Bluey’. Dad let Bluey sit on his shoulder and peck at his food on the dining table. Pete and I thought Bluey seemed to help.

10.

It was around this time that Dad’s memory began to slip – just idle comments here and there, mixing up the grandkids’ names (Pete had two girls by then), or which day of the week it was. One morning he spoke about an old widower, Fay, who used to live next door to us back at the flats. He spoke as if Fay was still on the other side of the fence, complaining to Dad about the music or the smell of urine from the lemon tree.

‘She doesn’t ever let up,’ said Dad. ‘I’ve got half a mind to go over there now and give her a taste of her own medicine.’

‘That was at the old place, Dad,’ said Pete. ‘She’d be long gone by now.’

‘I know that,’ said Dad, ‘I know that. I’m just saying … she was an old bag that one.’

Dad got up to put the kettle on, but we knew Pete’s correction had unsettled him.

11.

I started to check up on Dad more often. I was worried that he might forget to feed Bluey or to read the expiry date on the milk. I would stop by with some groceries and cook him sausages and mash or baked beans on toast.

Besides the dodgy memory, he still wasn’t in the best way physically. The years of hard drinking and cigarettes showed: his face was bloated and dry, and he’d have coughing fits that turned his cheeks from red to blue.

12.

Bluey learned to mimic the sound of the telephone.

One afternoon I rang the doorbell a few times and I could hear Bluey in his cage in the kitchen. After each ring Bluey would follow with a telephone ring – but Dad never answered the door. I searched the house, the IGA, the bottle shop, the RSL Club. Pete 50 SEP T MBER 2019

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suggested I check the nearby bus stops (this was a running joke between Pete and I after we’d found Dad passed out at a bus stop the morning after my twenty-first).

It was getting late. Dad was nowhere to be found.

13.

The buildings on our old street were gone. At one end of the block, through the grates of the temporary fencing, I could see that fresh foundations had been poured. Elsewhere, a single red-brick wall remained in an otherwise empty lot. The wall was covered in overlapping layers of graffiti, so that the remnants of the prior layers obscured the more recent additions.

Dad’s wheelchair was left on the footpath across the street from where our old flat had been. I could see him hobbling around a bare concrete slab, stopping every few steps to inspect a patch of overgrown grass, his figure backlit by a streetlamp at the other end of the block.

‘You all right, Dad?’ I called from the car. ‘It’s getting late.’ At this point he was leaning over as if to tie his shoe. I didn’t think that he heard me, because he remained bent over, slightly swaying, his weight shifting rhythmically between each leg, even as I approached.

He smelt like a brewery and was humming the tune of ‘Stayin’ Alive’ by The Bee Gees in long guttural heaves between coughing fits. When I touched his back he jerked so suddenly that he lost his balance and tumbled over. I wiped my hand on my jeans to remove the sweat that had soaked through his shirt.

Dad’s face was bursting at the seams, as if he were suffocating. He lay there with his eyes wide open but unable to focus, like he was trapped in some nightmare that caused his body to seize up then flinch. He muttered half-baked sentences now, his voice lilting dramatically as if midway through a story.

Then he went quiet for a moment. His eyes finally registered me.

‘Rubble Boy digs for his rubble dad,’ he said.

In his hand he held a thin piece of sheet metal that curved at one end like the outline of a shell.

I could tell it was one of Dad’s windmill blades because of the PVC piping attached to the inside.

It probably sounds strange, but in that moment I thought about Dad’s theory on possums: that if you take a possum over water they can’t ever find their way back. Dad had crossed two creeks to get to our old street that night.

‘Come on, Dad,’ I said. ‘Let’s get you home.’ g Morgan Nunan is an emerging Australian writer and practising media lawyer. He currently studies creative writing at RMIT University. His short fiction has been published in a number of Australian literary magazines. ❖

The state of Ibsen Portrait of a ‘skaldic poet’

Kári Gíslason HENRIK IBSEN: THE MAN AND THE MASK

by Ivo de Figueiredo, translated by Robert Ferguson

Yale University Press (Footprint), $74.99 hb, 704 pp, 9780300208818

O

ne of the strongest markers of identity in my birthplace, Iceland, is the idea of independence. The country takes great pride in how it reacquired full independence from Denmark in 1944; one of the main political parties is called the Independence Party, and the most famous Icelandic novel is Independent People by Halldór Laxness. Being an independent-minded person is seen as a defining quality. But I have often felt that only a small country in which everyone is either related or closely connected could be so strident about being independent.

In almost all respects the opposite is true.

It would probably be unfair to compare Henrik Ibsen (1828–1906) with a rocky island in the North Atlantic. But as I was reading Ivo de Figueiredo’s captivating new biography of the playwright, I was struck by how Ibsen was rather like Iceland in some of his insistences. The ‘state of Ibsen’, as de Figueiredo puts it, was convinced of its own isolation, as certain as Ibsen’s character Dr Stockmann (in An Enemy of the People) is that ‘the strongest man in the world is he who stands most alone’.

The portrait of Ibsen that emerges in this book is of a man who saw himself and his artistic practice in this way. He preferred to examine from the outside rather than from within, and felt that he was writing for eternity rather than as a reflection of his times. He was often unpleasant with his friends and colleagues, and harsh towards his critics and competitors. When living in Italy, Ibsen even kept a scorpion under a beer glass on his desk, seemingly a reminder of his role as a writer: to strike poison where society needed it.

Such, in any case, was Ibsen’s self-

conception, and one of the many strengths of this biography is that de Figueiredo does not deny its importance to the playwright. Clearly, seeing himself as an island state helped Ibsen, especially as his writing moved from early nationalist and historical plays to works like A Doll’s House (1879) and Ghosts (1881), which confronted audiences with their depictions of family life. But this biography also reveals how Ibsen’s representation of himself might be incomplete, and how it does not give us a full understanding of how he developed as a writer. The picture that emerges in this book is that Ibsen’s life and career were as much about connections and relationships as they were about independence and individuality.

The first of these relationships is expressed in the structure of the biography, which is organised according to the places where Ibsen lived. He was born in the small port town of Skien in Telemark, a fact that might once have been seen as remarkable, for why would such a talent as Ibsen’s emerge from provincial Norway? But de Figueiredo is careful to show that Ibsen did not necessarily have to fight the society around him in order to become an artist. Skien was, after all, a port connected to the wider world by trade, and the mid-nineteenth century of Ibsen’s youth saw a ‘peripheral cultural awakening’ in the whole of Scandinavia, not just in the capitals.

This is not to say that Ibsen did not possess a special talent – rather, that his talent and creative work emerged as part of changes in the society around him. As a boy, he made puppet shows that were admired, and his first friends recognised that he could write and were among his earliest advocates. Later on, and despite his acerbic manner, Ibsen

made many friends and found loyal supporters. Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson was a fellow writer and competitor, but also his friend and the godfather of Ibsen’s son, Sigurd. Bjørnson was often privately critical of Ibsen, but pressed his case publicly when Ibsen needed it. In Bergen and Freetown Christiania, Ibsen was valued and given theatre positions, jobs he claimed to dislike but which, on balance, were successful and gave him training in the practical aspects of thea-

When living in Italy, Ibsen kept a scorpion under a beer glass on his desk, a reminder of his role as a writer: to strike poison where society needed it tre production. He often expressed hostility towards Norway, especially after its failure to support Denmark during the Second Schleswig War of 1864, and came to see himself as an exile living in a condition of ‘banishment’. But he also received regular stipends from the Norwegian parliament and he supported Sigurd’s return to their homeland.

By highlighting such dualities, de Figueiredo’s study reveals that over the years readers and critics may have been a little too willing to accept a portrait of Ibsen that accorded with notions of the struggling, isolated artist. In this light, the story of how Ibsen’s father, Knud, fell on hard times and became bankrupt is presented as part of the commercial realities of the time. As well as looking at how Ibsen and the family were affected by their money troubles, BIOGRAPHY

51

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we might consider how well Ibsen recovered in the period that followed, and how he still had opportunities for literary success. Similarly, his teenage years as an apothecary’s apprentice in Grimstad, sometimes seen as his ‘lost years’, did not prevent him from developing his writing. Instead, they offered him a period of artistic growth outside the more formal environment he would otherwise have encountered.

There is little doubt that Ibsen could be socially very awkward; he came to be known as ‘the most dogged individualist in literary history’. But this study of his life also reveals his ability to maintain relationships. He and his wife, Suzannah Daae Thoresen, were close, and he relied heavily upon her. Ibsen corresponded with his most influential critics, most famously Georg Brandes.

He had a slightly distant but sustained relationship with his publisher Frederik V. Hegel, a leading publisher in Scandinavia. In other words, many people were willing to ride the bumps of his personality and his stated autonomy as an artist.

Most biographies of authors are also anatomies of authorship. In this work, we see a form of practice in which the author’s desire to stand outside the world was part of how he engaged with it. When he began to be received at royal and aristocratic courts, Ibsen compared himself with the travelling Icelandic skalds of the Viking Age; his place, he said, was ‘that of a skaldic poet at the foot of his prince’. If so, he was like the skalds in other respects, as well.

They had a duty to tell things as they saw them: to do otherwise would be an insult to the king. By the standards of the day, they were quite free, for they could leave the king’s court. But this usually meant going to another court, and if not, then back to Iceland, where people were independent and also very connected and endlessly concerned with one another. We should be thankful that Ibsen’s version of the skald’s life involved a deep commitment to knowing and portraying others. g Kári Gíslason teaches creative writing and literary studies at Queensland University of Technology.

Night Flight As my plane drops down in turbulence I think of you and of Salt Lake City, I think of ice stealing over the Great Lakes and of Omaha and of adamant plains.

I think of all the places I have never been: Caracas, La Paz, Kingston. I think of the way our bodies puzzled together in that room over pine woods where night deer passed in the snow, their lonesome inscrutable tracks sluicing in the morning’s melt, I think of your eyes that are almost the colour of mercury, of their unbearable weight, I think of the plateau of your chest rising, rising, and of your hand resting on my right thigh, of the slim glint of your wedding band in the dove predawn light.

I think of how everything is defined by distance: how close we were, how far from steel mills in Pittsburgh and those killing Chicago winds and union towns near Detroit, Michigan where loyalty is the only religion.

I think of the sound of your breathing, which is the sound of fields of blond Illinois wheat bent down, I think of those silver silos of harvest corn we saw in Schuylerville, barns blazing in all that silence as we drove through what we could not think or say. There is no grace in this kind of longing, there is only pain, pain which I have always preferred anyway – it is where I live, and called love by any other name.

Sarah Holland-Batt

Sarah Holland-Batt’s most recent book of poems is The Hazards (UQP, 2015).

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53

Pharmakon Rachel Robertson HEARING MAUD

by Jessica White

UWA Publishing $27.99 pb, 288 pp, 9781760800383

H

earing Maud begins and ends with the notion that the narrator’s life has been defined by a pharmakon, an ancient Greek term denoting something that is both poison and cure. This subtle and more complex version of the ‘gift or loss’ dilemma common in disability memoirs avoids oppositional thinking and embraces instead paradox and nuance. This is typical of Jessica White’s remarkable work of creative non-fiction, which is a sophisticated hybrid of memoir, biography, and critical disability studies.

White’s initial pharmakon is the dose of antibiotics used to treat her meningitis at age four, which leaves her with almost no hearing. Over time, White realises that deafness, too, can be both poison and cure. It takes many years, and an exploration of the history of deaf education and the life of Maud Praed, before she can understand and accept the true significance of the pharmakon motif in her life.

Maud Praed (1874–1941) was the daughter of Australian novelist Rosa Campbell Praed (1851–1935). It was during her doctoral research in London after reading Rosa Praed’s novels that White discovered in the archives that Rosa’s daughter, Maud, was born deaf.

This fascinated White, who undertook more detailed research in the United 54 SEP T MBER 2019

Kingdom and Australia to discover all she could about the lives of both mother and daughter. White’s unfolding of their unusual lives is wonderfully done. The historical details she conveys are never boring, and she is scrupulous about indicating when she is using imaginative reconstruction. Here, for example, she imagines the scene for a séance: ‘I imagine Rosa in Dowden’s drawing room in 15 Cheyne Gardens in Chelsea. The London light, extraordinarily strong for a May afternoon, pours through the French windows.’ In such instances, White provides endnotes indicating her sources, as she does for all the factual information in the book.

Although Rosa experiences loss and grief, it is Maud’s life that is more tragic.

She is sent to an asylum for patients suffering from insanity at age twentyeight and lives there until her death four decades later. White describes Maud’s experiences with great empathy, identifying the way deafness and the social mores of the time may have contributed to her mental breakdown and then her failure to recover. It is through comparing her own experiences of deafness with Maud’s that White begins to question the treatment and education of deaf children. The focus on orality (teaching deaf children to speak rather than use sign language) that dominated until fairly recently, and its consequences, are explored and critiqued. White does not herself identify as Deaf (with a capital D to indicate that deafness should be viewed as a culture), but she recognises the value of this position for some deaf communities.

White regrets that she didn’t have the opportunity to learn sign language as a child, but she understands why her parents made the choices they did. The early sections of Hearing Maud portray her large, supportive family and White’s sense of inclusion: ‘With these people, I never felt deaf.’ Her ongoing closeness to her family, especially her brother, forms a strong thread in the book.

Nonetheless, White’s childhood, adolescence, and early adulthood were full of loneliness and experiences of isolation, not just because of her inability to hear, but because of the lack of social skills that resulted from this. Noting

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW

she had ‘never overheard a conversation’ between two people, White says she had ‘little idea of the nuance and complexity of social rules’ and describes how interacting with others ‘seemed to hurt my skin’. This continues into adulthood, making dating and romance particularly challenging. White also describes the many other ways in which deafness makes life difficult, sometimes even dangerous.

If isolation is the poison, then the cure for White is writing. She directly links her lifelong passion for reading and writing literature to her deafness.

She discusses how, even as a child, she knew that she ‘couldn’t be part of a conventional narrative’. She also discovered her core theme as a writer at a young age: ‘the absolute redemption of a love that absolved the awkwardness and anxiety of being out of place’. This theme is evident in her two novels, A Curious Intimacy (2007) and Entitlement (2012), as well as in Hearing Maud.

White identifies other skills she has developed as a result of her deafness, such as excellent pattern-recognition, finely tuned intuition, resilience, and resourcefulness, all evidence of what disability scholar Rosemarie GarlandThomson describes as the generative epistemic resources resulting from the experience of non-normative bodies/ minds. White’s marginal position, crossing the border between deaf and hearing worlds, provides the reader with new perspectives on human relationships.

White’s focus on ‘hearing’ Maud allows us to hear White. Her voice is engaging, her prose deeply pleasurable.

It is exciting to read a book that demonstrates a writer exploring her own past, the lives of other women, and the history of deaf education to construct her identity and to ‘come out’ proudly as a deaf woman. Hearing Maud makes a major contribution to Australian literature written by people with lived experiences of disability and deafness, while also being an engrossing work of creative non-fiction and a personal story of great poignancy and authenticity. g Rachel Robertson is senior lecturer at Curtin University and author of Reaching One Thousand (2012).

The Whiskey tragedy Ben Smith THE NIGHT DRAGON

by Matthew Condon

I

University of Queensland Press $32.95 pb, 295 pp, 9780702260209

n 2013, Matthew Condon published Three Crooked Kings, the first in his true crime series delving into the murky, sordid, and often brutal world of police corruption in Queensland.

That year, he wrote in Australian Book Review that, after finishing his trilogy, he planned to ‘swan dive into the infinitely more comfortable genre of fiction’.

The story of disgraced ex-commissioner Terence Murray Lewis concluded with All Fall Down (2015), but there was no swan dive. The book was quickly followed by Little Fish Are Sweet (2016).

Condon evidently had more to ask of that era of bagmen, crooked cops, and unsolved crimes. He returns to Brisbane’s underworld with The Night Dragon, part character study of psychopathic criminal Vincent O’Dempsey, and part investigation into his role in Brisbane’s Whiskey Au Go Go massacre and its links to a decades-old cold case: the 1974 murders of Barbara McCulkin and her two young daughters.

Just after 2 am on 8 March 1973, the Whiskey Au Go Go nightclub in Fortitude Valley went up in flames.

Fifteen people died, making it Australia’s worst mass murder since the frontier wars. Two men were arrested: John Andrew Stuart and James Richard Finch. Both protested their innocence, and doubts about the nature of their involvement continue. Less than a year later, McCulkin and her daughters vanished from their home in Highgate Hill. McCulkin knew too much about what happened that night.

As with its predecessors, The Night Dragon is impressive in its depth of research, rich with circumstantial details that deepen and solidify the writing.

Condon again weaves snatches of interviews, official statements, and evoca-

tive description into a seedy tapestry of crime and misconduct. The Night Dragon diverges from Condon’s earlier works in its singular focus, however.

Where the Three Crooked Kings trilogy sprawls, The Night Dragon burrows.

And what it burrows into is particularly harrowing. O’Dempsey – explosives expert, alpaca breeder, rapist, murderer – stalked Queensland for decades. While the book provides an abundance of detail about the man, O’Dempsey emerges as a deadly, intriguing, but finally unknowable presence haunting the state.

O’Dempsey is the eponymous ‘night dragon’, although his life is mainly explored to link the fire to the murders.

His varied criminal activities are not the book’s true focus; Condon is more concerned with the implications of police involvement in the tragedy, its cruel intersection with the lives of three innocent people, and the circumstances that allowed O’Dempsey to remain free for decades. More than anything, it is the gaps that seem to obsess Condon, history’s failure to explain the events. And few events in Brisbane’s history raise as many questions as the destruction of the Whiskey Au Go Go. Condon wisely avoids direct commentary about the night of the inferno; he presents it in a horrifying montage of eyewitness accounts, anchoring it in the testimony of survivors, for whom the night endures. Centring the depiction of the blaze around those who live with its memory is moving and effective, a reminder that many of the era’s most dangerous questions remain unanswered. Who organised the fire?

How did O’Dempsey remain at large?

Was Finch’s confession fabricated by corrupt police? If so, why?

Condon’s decision to begin and end the book with O’Dempsey’s recent court appearances reinforces the truth that the dark consequences of his actions persist into the present. When reading about O’Dempsey’s letter bomb, which disfigured an innocent woman, or about a birthday party the McCulkin girls attended the night of their disappearance, the reader is confronted by the enduring horror of these events.

Condon’s compassion for the victims is a strength of the book. While The Night

Dragon is planted in the true crime genre, its concern is neither the depravity of its subjects, nor the gritty details of the suffering they caused. Instead, Condon works to connect lines of cause and effect before they sink into the past, to shed light on the well-guarded secrets that linger today.

How much light can be shed is another question. There is a necessary haziness to the era: many police records were destroyed to hide illegal operations, and the criminals of whom Condon writes operate by a strict code of silence. At one point, O’Dempsey states that ‘a fish that doesn’t open its mouth can’t get caught’. He is clearly wrong, for he is now serving multiple life sentences, but the unfortunate result is that some of the more tantalising links the book suggests are not confirmed.

Corrupt detective Roger Rogerson claims that a man named Vince tossed a Molotov cocktail down the Whiskey’s staircase, although this claim has been contradicted elsewhere. Other sources say the Whiskey plot was cooked up

by Brisbane businessman John Hurrey.

Condon emphasises Finch’s claim that his confession was fabricated by police, suggesting corrupt interests stymying investigation into the massacre. Hard evidence of police involvement in such a crime would be earth-shattering, but the extent – and reality – of this coverup remains unclear.

It would be conjectural to do more than suggest these links. More than forty years after the massacre, a coronial inquest has been announced following O’Dempsey’s 2017 conviction for the McCulkin murders. This may be the year when the truth behind the Whiskey tragedy is at last laid bare. g

Ben Smith teaches at Flinders University. He is currently working on a true crime book about undercover policing and corruption in 1980s Queensland.

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The long view David McInnis HOW THE CLASSICS MADE SHAKESPEARE

by Jonathan Bate

Princeton University Press (Footprint) $49.99 hb, 361 pp, 9780691161600

B

en Jonson famously derided Shakespeare’s grasp of ‘small Latin and less Greek’, and vocal sceptics in our own time refuse to believe that a grammar-school education was sufficient to enable the man from Stratford to write the plays attributed to ‘Shakespeare’ (of course it was). Rather than create another study documenting Shakespeare’s narrative and dramatic debts to the classics, Jonathan Bate attempts to cover ‘the diversity of Shakespeare’s direct and indirect encounters with the classics’ (his emphasis) in this new book. To address the question, ‘What kind of a thinker was Shakespeare?’, one needs to appreciate the extent to which classical culture – its literature, philosophy, and politics – pervaded Elizabethan England. To better understand the shaping of Shakespeare’s mind by the classics, Bate suggests we need to look beyond ‘his school-room education and his direct reading’. This study thus builds on, but extends in interesting ways, Bate’s earlier account of Shakespeare and Ovid (1993) and his recuperation of the much maligned but classically inflected Titus Andronicus (which Bate edited for the Arden Third Series).

Much of the book originates from the Gombrich Lectures and the Gresham Lectures delivered by Bate in London, and he has purposefully avoided altering the form of writing when presenting this material in book form. Readers have the pleasure of a 56 SEP T MBER 2019

lucid, engaging style, but one that does not compromise in its erudite coverage of sophisticated rhetorical devices and classical conceits. The flipside, and my one minor criticism, is that the origin of the book in oral delivery sometimes means that transitions between paragraphs and ideas aren’t as readily apparent in print: the storytelling that captivates an audience isn’t always what the reader expects in print form.

Bate situates Shakespeare’s work as ‘part of a national project to invent a new cultural heritage on the model of ancient Rome’ (including through resistance to modern Catholic Rome).

This model of ‘succession through resistance’, he notes, is evident through the nomenclature and architecture of Shakespeare’s London, was commented upon by travellers of the time, and featured in the education of the grammar schools – in short, it so completely engulfed the young William Shakespeare that it is no surprise his works owe a substantial but remarkably diverse debt to the classics. In one chapter, Bate uses the example of a Latin epigraph, one referencing Jason and the Argonauts on a monument in Shakespeare’s parish church in Bishopsgate, as the entry point for discussing how Shakespeare’s England maintained a meaningful cultural connection to Ancient Rome despite Henry VIII’s breaking with the church. Elsewhere, he examines how Cicero’s concept of ‘civil war’ (made famous by Julius Caesar) coloured Shakespeare’s conception of the Wars of the Roses, and how the translatio imperii trope that imagined London (Troy Novant) as the reincarnation of Troy and Rome affected a Londoner’s perception of their place in the world.

The creation of the English nationstate in the sixteenth century required ‘a distinctively national body of English tradition’ that was nevertheless ‘built on the classical tradition’. While the role of grammar schools and educational advances in the creation of this national culture were important, it is by overwriting or exceeding the ancients that Shakespeare helped establish a national, vernacular literature for England. How the Classics Made Shakespeare is thus also a study of ‘Shakespeare’s quick-witted

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW

and fast-paced reanimation of the powers of the classical imagination’; how Shakespeare brought the ancient world ‘into the presence’ of his audiences and readers.

Within the book there is still scope to attend to specific classical texts that influenced the young Shakespeare. Bate explores Shakespeare’s schooling and immersion in the classics from an early age; how his imagination was fired by the ‘deliberative technique’ he acquired through rhetoric classes, and how the classical ‘uses of history, of illustrative parallel, of tale and fable’ had a formative effect on the young writer’s creative powers. He notes that it was classical works, including Plutarch’s Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans, that led Shakespeare to ponder the big questions in politics: ‘monarchy versus republicanism versus empire; the choices we make and their tragic consequences; the conflict between public duty and private desire’. Cicero, Horace, Ovid, Seneca, Tacitus, and Virgil in particular receive this kind of attention in Bate’s study, but, as he describes it, his argument has a broader, dual purpose: it encompasses ‘Shakespeare and the classical tradition’ and ‘Shakespeare becoming the classical tradition’ for subsequent generations.

With that declaration of the study’s relevance to the present comes an attendant sense of urgency for Bate’s book, written at a time when the classical tradition ‘is in danger of burial beneath the avalanche of the information revolution, and where its spirit of dialogue between different languages and cultures is ebbing rapidly away’. A study such as this is needed now precisely because there is a risk of ‘the long view of the past’ becoming ‘flattened by the simultaneity of data derived from the digital world’. Modes of thinking are changing, familiarity with the classics cannot be taken for granted, and Bate exploits the curious vantagepoint available whereby an analysis of a culture saturated with the classics can be offered from the perspective of a culture that is potentially drifting away from them. g David McInnis is a Senior Lecturer in Shakespeare Studies at the University of Melbourne.

Menzies in architecture The building of Australia House

Jim Davidson CAPITAL DESIGNS: AUSTRALIA HOUSE AND VISIONS OF AN IMPERIAL LONDON

by Eileen Chanin Australian Scholarly Publishing, $49.95 pb, 436 pp, 9781925801316

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n the 1970s, before Malcolm Fraser (ahead of his time) tightened security and made most of the place a no-go zone, Australia House – a regular embassy – also functioned as an informal social amenity for visiting Australians. There was a howling disjunction between their friendliness to compatriots, and the sombre, almost processional formality of the central hall. Newspapers were spread on long tables: manna from Oz. The fustian nature of the place was a constant reminder of how removed Australia then was from the rest of the world.

In four years of living in England, I heard ‘God Save the Queen’ at public functions only twice: once at Covent Garden for Princess Margaret, and then at a concert in Australia House.

Eileen Chanin’s exhaustive study of the building makes it plain that such convergence was its prime purpose.

Australia (contrary to the common view that it became a nation in 1901) was still largely seen as ‘an imperial unit’ – albeit one with its own distinctive character.

Chanin draws attention to the way that George V personalised the link.

Twice he had been to Australia, once to open the first Federal parliament in Melbourne’s Exhibition Buildings.

So it was entirely appropriate that he should both lay the foundation stone and return to open the building in 1918.

On that occasion shouts of ‘Cooee!’ echoed down the Strand. Australians felt they had a home in the imperial capital.

Chanin sites the building of Australia House within the context of the reimagining of London as an imperial capital: the development of The Mall as a processional street, and in particular the creation of Kingsway, where

all the buildings were to be faced in stone. Development there was tardy: the construction of Australia House nearby gave it a much-needed boost and also acted as a spur to other British Dominions to build comparable establishments. Moreover – beyond the bounds of this book – the imperial vision, expressed in stone, extended to the inauguration of New Delhi, the Union Buildings in Pretoria, and even, in a minor key, to Canberra. The style chosen here would be the French Beaux-Arts, with its classical colonnades and aspirations to timelessness (suggesting imperial permanence).

The result was a massive monumentalism. The convict colony had arrived.

The Australia House site was a strategic one, halfway between the financiers of the City and the politicians at Westminster. The newspapers of Fleet Street were just down the road, while Australia House fronted on to London’s most frequented street, the Strand. That was important for attracting immigrants; Australia was lagging badly behind Canada. People would also be drawn to the various exhibitions planned for the ground floor hall.

For a long time nothing happened.

While various schemes swirled about after slum clearance, wildflowers grew on the site. The respective agents-general carried on the business of each state as if the Commonwealth did not exist. Meanwhile, the London City Council resisted selling the freehold, although the Victorian government was able to secure part of the site to build Victoria House. The architect did draw up plans for an Australian building covering the whole corner site, but there was no progress. Nonetheless, the idea of the proposed build-

ing enjoyed wide support in Australia.

The deal eventually concluded, ideas of a competition or of having an Australian architect were soon discarded: the Scot Alexander Marshall Mackenzie was chosen (in partnership with his father). This led to a greater insistence on Australian materials being used in the building, wherever possible. While Australia House would have the new steel frames and other innovations, in appearance it would be traditional.

Marble, stone, and timber would be required – and all of these would be sent across the seas from Australia.

The result was a massive monumentalism. The convict colony had arrived Building was slow. There were stoppages and, once the war began, long interruptions in the supply of materials: ten tons of Victorian marble had to be shipped to London every fortnight.

Unforeseen difficulties included a standoff between the sculptor of the pieces that were to flank the entrance and Mackenzie, who insisted that they should harmonise with the building.

Australia House was slow to advance beyond the three jagged storeys that were in place when the war began in 1914.

There were broader problems.

Victoria House had been integrated with the new building; New South Wales wanted matching quarters on the east side. None of the other agentsgeneral moved in, as had been hoped.

Meanwhile, it had become plain that Australia House would cost nearly ten times as much as the new Commonwealth offices in Melbourne; people ARCHITECTURE

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began talking of the ‘white elephant’ on the Strand. The high commissioner soon found it expedient to move into the building when it was far from finished. It was not even complete when the king inaugurated it, nine years after Victoria House was open for business.

The muted wartime opening nonetheless brought accolades – not least from Queen Mary, who thought the building ‘Very fine inside, marble & wood from Australia, very good taste’.

The scholarship evident in this book is daunting; the text is sometimes discursive. But Capital Designs is moved along by some fine passages. There are deft portraits of advocates for Australia House such as King O’Malley, while George Reid, usually regarded as a slob, is here presented as urbane, quick on his feet, and good at getting things done.

Chanin is skilful in analysing architecture, explicating sculpture, and atmospheric in describing the great occasions.

Understandably, Chanin tries hard to argue for the building, but concedes it is grandiose. That was the point: it was deposited by the high tide of Edwardian imperialism. It is not pathetic like Perth’s London Court, a mock-Tudor tribute to Olde England. Nor is it in the style of Melbourne’s GPO, which, now it has lost its function, stands out more clearly as an artefact of Empire.

Indeed, the building could almost be said to have the last laugh. Australia House is now the longest continually occupied foreign legation in London. g Jim Davidson is writing a double biography of the editors Clem Christesen of Meanjin and Stephen Murray-Smith of Overland.

Want all the latest news from ABR? Sign up to our free EDMs – eNews, ABR Arts, and Book of the Week on our website today 58 SEP T MBER 2019

Towers and Powers

A prodigious and controversial architect

Patrick McCaughey MAN IN THE GLASS HOUSE: PHILIP JOHNSON, ARCHITECT OF THE MODERN CENTURY

by Mark Lamster Little, Brown, $49.99 hb, 510 pp, 99780316126434

P

hilip Johnson – lagging well behind the founding fathers – may not be the most profound architect of the twentieth century. Nor does he have the resonance of Louis Kahn or the form-changing genius of Frank Gehry, among his contemporaries. Yet the pattern of twentieth-century architecture cannot be fully understood without him. Mark Lamster’s biography lodges him vividly in that pattern.

A critical biographer in every sense, Lamster appears overly concerned not to let the charming, wise, and witty Johnson pull the wool over his eyes.

A disparaging undertone accompanies much of his commentary. ‘Johnson was moved by aesthetics, not the travails of working men and women – especially if they were Catholic or Jewish – a condition foreign to his experience.’

At eighteen, Johnson’s life was fundamentally changed. His father settled his fortune on his three children. Philip received a large parcel of stock in the Aluminum Company of America, now Alcoa. By the time he left Harvard in 1927, he was a millionaire when the word still meant something. Alfred North Whitehead had dissuaded him from pursuing a life in philosophy.

Johnson, a rich young man in search of a life, found it in the architecture of Europe, most notably the discovery of modernism in the work of J.J.P. Oud, the Dutch architect who deserves relief from his obscurity.

Back in America, Johnson made two important friendships: with the young Alfred H. Barr Jr, poised to become the founding Director of the Museum of Modern Art, and with Henry-Russell Hitchcock, the architectural historian. Why not include a

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW

department of architecture in the new museum, Johnson boldly proposed? The Bauhaus had been an inspiration to Barr as he framed MoMA, and he readily assented, especially as Johnson would fund the department himself.

With Hitchcock in tow, Johnson toured the sites of modern architecture in a luxurious Cord convertible collecting materials for an exhibition at MoMA: Modern Architecture: International Exhibition. Opening in February 1932, it became a landmark in the evolution of modern architecture and named the new European architecture of Mies van der Rohe, Walter Gropius, Le Corbusier, J.J.P. Oud, and their American followers as The International Style. Lamster is good on the genesis of the exhibition and the stress it placed on the young Johnson, then twenty-six years old. He ducked the opening and ‘checked himself into the Alice Fuller Leroy Sanitarium, a private hospital on the Upper East Side that catered to the well-heeled’. Dealing with Frank Lloyd Wright, nearly forty years Johnson’s senior, would put anyone into a sanitarium.

Two years later, Johnson followed it up with another enterprising exhibition, Machine Art. The show ranged from an aeroplane propeller to a vacuum cleaner to a dentist’s X-ray machine.

Johnson’s installation was a masterpiece of minimalism. Nelson Rockefeller, a rising force at MoMA, lavishly praised Johnson: ‘I do not think that the Museum has ever put on a more beautifully arranged or interesting exhibition and the trustees … are extremely proud of the work you have done.’

Then ‘the boy king of New York’ lurched out of architecture, rightwards into fascism, from the home-grown

variety of Huey Long and Father with the latter’s active participation. ing redeemed Third Avenue in New Charles Coughlin to the vortex of Lamster claims that as ‘a monographic York, and its controversial cousin, the Nazism. Lincoln Kirstein published architectural exhibition [it is] still un- AT&T building on Madison, with its Johnson’s notorious essay ‘Architecture surpassed in its influence’.

Chippendale-inspired roof, added to in the Third Reich’ in Hound & Horn It stamped Johnson’s Miesian cre- the Manhattan skyline. in 1932. Naïvely, JohnBurgee increasingly son believed the new sidelined Johnson, and big Germany of National buildings of little architecSocialism would adopt tural merit went up across the International Style America in the firm’s name. as its own. He associFrustrated and impotent, ated with American Nazi Johnson played a meddling sympathisers, moving on game from the touchline to Ulrich von Gienanth, until Burgee drew up aba German diplomat at surd conditions for Johnthe Washington Emson’s limited participation bassy in charge of Nazi in the office. The firm was propaganda, from whom renamed, clumsily, John he sought admission to Burgee Architects, Philip a Nuremburg rally. He Johnson Consultant. Lamtoured northern Poland ster’s account of the disinwith Viola Heise Bodentegration of the firm reads schatz, a German Amerilike a Bellowesque novella. can whose brother-inJohnson lived that Philip Johnson’s Glass House in Connecticut law was GÖring’s Chief down, and the ignominy (Carol M. Highsmith’s America, Library of Congress, of Staff. In September of accepting work from a Prints and Photographs Division, via Wikimedia Commons) 1940, Johnson ‘joined young New York developer the foreign press corps on a supervised dentials, voiced superbly in his Glass called Donald Trump. In his last years, junket to the front under the aegis of House (1948–49) in New Canaan, Con- he became a revered architectural sathe Propaganda Ministry’. He shared a necticut. Built entirely in glass and steel vant, sought out by a rising tide of major room with William L. Shirer, the emi- on a brick base, set on the edge of a cliff talents such as Frank Gehry and Peter nent journalist, who disliked him and in a clearing of wood and field, no house Eisenman. suspected him of being a German spy. marries so transparently the built and Johnson died in 2005 at ninetyThey witnessed the battleship Schleswig- the natural. For the decade and a half nine, the emblem and idol of American Holstein shell and the Luftwaffe bomb following the Glass House, Johnson’s architecture. g the defenceless industrial port city of architecture had real distinction, from Gdynia. ‘We saw Warsaw and Modlin the early houses to his contribution to being bombed. It was a stirring specta- the Seagram Building, the sculpture garcle,’ was Johnson’s considered response. den at MoMA to the Dumbarton Oaks Johnson was a chameleon. During galleries. Johnson’s reputation soared, the war, he abandoned his right-wing but his office remained light on jobs. politics and enrolled in the Harvard In 1966 Johnson made his FausSchool of Architecture, determined to tian bargain for Towers and Powers, become a full practitioner. He found as Lamster calls it: he took on John a plot of land on Ash Street just off Burgee as his partner. Burgee came fashionable Brattle and built himself a from a large commercial practice in Miesian bungalow where he entertained the Midwest. A businessman architect, his fellow students and the faculty with efficient, hard charging, well versed in the aid of his maid and Portuguese but- corporate speak, Burgee was personally ler. Johnson, a celebrity in architectural ambitious. At thirty-three he demanded circles, had no difficulty in getting his a full partnership. The office expanded; Ash Street house accepted as his final- large-scale buildings began to flow in. year thesis.

Some notable work came out of the Patrick McCaughey is former DirecAt the end of the war, Johnson el- partnership, such as Pennzoil Place in tor of the National Gallery of Victoria, bowed his way back into the Department Houston, the final salute to Mies with the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford of Architecture at MoMA. In 1947, he shaped twin towers in a taut curtain Connecticut, and the Yale Center for curated a classic exhibition on Mies of glass and steel. The Lipstick Build- British Art. ARCHITECTURE

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What if ?

Ilana Snyder JEAN BLACKBURN: EDUCATION, FEMINISM AND SOCIAL JUSTICE

by Craig Campbell and Debra Hayes

I

Monash University Publishing $34.95 pb, 458 pp, 9781925835274

n the foundation Jean Blackburn Memorial Lecture in 2014, David Gonski observed that Australian schooling was unfairly funded – that the money wasn’t going where it was needed. To our national shame, this is not a new phenomenon. Successive governments in Australia have adopted school-funding policies for which there has been little educational justification and which have contributed to the profound inequality of our schools.

But it could have been different.

What if our governments had believed that no children or young people should be held back from a good education because of the circumstances of their parents or the under-resourcing of their schools? What if our governments had decided to fund the public education system to make it among the best in the world? Some parents would still have chosen private schools, but most would have stayed with the public ones, making sure their taxes were used for a schooling system that provided a fair go for all.

When reiterating the arguments that Jean Blackburn had made forty years earlier, Gonski referred to the continuing relevance of her contribution to an ambition still not yet achieved – a schooling system that offers all children and youth access to the finest liberal education possible.

Craig Campbell and Debra Hayes, have done education in Australia a service by undertaking a biography of Jean Blackburn. Readers who have not heard of Blackburn and who care about education in Australia, as well as readers who know of her leadership in educational reform, will learn much from this book. Readers interested in a social and cultural history of Australia, through the lens of education, from the Depression through World War II, 60 SEP T MBER 2019

postwar reconstruction, the Cold War, the Whitlam era, and the rise of neoliberalism in the late 1980s will also not be disappointed.

This absorbing book examines the life of probably the most influential female educator in Australian history, who had a major impact on the transformation of school education in the last three decades of the twentieth century. Jean Blackburn was a woman with a fierce intellect, who was a notable scholar, a courageous and creative thinker, and a compassionate and inspiring advocate of reform.

Born in 1919, into a working-class family and a home devoid of books, dominated by a tyrannical and parsimonious father and an eventually supportive mother, Jean Muir secured a place at University High School and then at the University of Melbourne, where she took out a degree in Economics in 1941. At university, she joined the Labor Club and the Communist Party, which was a crucial factor in her intellectual development.

In 1943, she married Dick Blackburn, son of the redoubtable Maurice Blackburn, and went to live in Adelaide where she raised her three children while teaching, studying, and immersing herself in democratic socialist and feminist thinking. It wasn’t until 1969, at age fifty, that her career as an educational reformer really took off, when she was appointed as research secretary to an inquiry into education in South Australia.

It marked the beginning of a working partnership with Peter Karmel, economist and vice-chancellor of the ANU, who observed that the ‘extremely intelligent’ Blackburn ‘wants kids to emerge from school who can read and write and reason’.

Karmel made sure that Blackburn was appointed to the Australian Schools Commission in 1974 as an inaugural Schools Commissioner. Blackburn’s work, especially through her responsibilities for the flagship Disadvantaged Schools Program (DSP), had immediate and enduring success in establishing new policy settings for addressing inequality in education.

Blackburn described the early years of the Schools Commission as ‘just

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW

about the most exciting time that there has been in the history of Australian education’. The Commission gave her the opportunity to create a vision for schooling in a democratic society. To develop policy related to the schooling of women, the Commission established a group chaired by Professor Ken McKinnon that included Blackburn and many well-known feminists of the day.

In 1975, Girls, School and Society was produced, a revolutionary document that underwrote efforts to reduce inequalities by improving and expanding the education of girls.

Blackburn’s contribution continued when she was invited in 1983 by the Cain Labor government in Victoria to tackle one of the toughest issues in education: how to make an effective certification process that marks the end of secondary schooling. The Blackburn Report was released in 1985. It was broadly accepted in Victoria and developed national significance influencing reform in other states and territories.

By the end of the 1980s, neoliberal reforms were taking hold in education, and Blackburn found herself outflanked on education policy, though she still had several significant appointments in the early 1990s including the foundation Chancellor of the University of Canberra. She died in 2001.

Blackburn was a shining example of leadership in policy advice at a time when there were few women in senior executive positions. But she was also a woman of her era who had to manage her responsibilities as a mother and as a wife, grapple with bouts of depression, and negotiate the male-dominated policy environments in which she worked to achieve progressive reform.

This meticulously researched book, with a thorough index and some intriguing black-and-white photos, will inform and inspire others who choose to continue Jean Blackburn’s work, those who see quality education as young people’s fundamental right to develop their talents and equip them for a successful and constructive working life. g Ilana Snyder is an emeritus professor in the Faculty of Education, Monash University.

Imbalance Dean Biron THE AGE OF CONSENT: YOUNG PEOPLE, SEXUAL ABUSE AND AGENCY edited by Kate Gleeson and Catharine Lumby UWA Publishing $29.99 pb, 175 pp, 9781760800314

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uch talk around the abuse of children centres on the desire (or demand) for justice. Unfortunately, justice is not easy to attain.

To begin with, it tends to require a justice system. This introduces all manner of creaking bureaucracy and complicated, sometimes outmoded laws. Justice outcomes are also hugely influenced by race, gender, and inequality. Nor does it help when our political leaders ladle out injustices upon young people, whether by perpetuating outrages against child refugees or by disparaging those who dare to take a stand against the ruinous environmental practices of their elders.

The Age of Consent is an edited collection that provides a powerful commentary on many contemporary issues in youth justice, agency, and sexuality.

As society has surged into the information age with little chance to stop and wonder about its impact on young people, so this book attempts to address some of the paradoxes, loopholes, and – most significantly – fictions that abound. In a country where conservative mythmaker Andrew Bolt can rail about the ‘weaponising’ of sexual abuse allegations in the Family Court, and ‘sex therapist’ Bettina Arndt operates a ‘fake rape crisis campus tour’, clearly there are no shortage of figments to debunk.

All seven chapters offer valuable insights – I will highlight just four here. To establish what children as young as eight think about sexuality, technology, and potential harms, Tobia Fattore does something unexpected: he asks them. Emphasising a theme that recurs throughout the book, he finds that, although young people are ‘rarely attributed the competence or reflexivity’ needed to evaluate the risks inherent in digital interactions, they in fact have a

pretty nuanced understanding of the dangers involved. Murray Lee and Thomas Crofts come to a similar conclusion on alarmist responses to sexting, suggesting that the inner lives of young people are far more complex than adults typically credit. Unsurprisingly, the heedless rush to criminalise teen sexting has caused more harm than good.

Elsewhere, Terri Libesman and Hannah McGlade skilfully summarise the callous and contradictory treatment meted out to First Nations children since colonisation. They detail a history bedevilled by lies, ignorance, and ham-fisted interventions that have done virtually nothing to improve Indigenous lives. In their introduction, Kate Gleeson and Catharine Lumby note the astonishing finding of the child sexual abuse royal commission that ‘one in five of the survivors of residential abuse were Aboriginal’; yet our Indigenous policy responses remain mired in a hapless cycle of increased policing and more imprisonment. In an astute contribution titled ‘Sympathy for the Devil’ (the Rolling Stones reference is intriguing in light of infamous tales of rock musicians and their carnal associations with young fans), Kelly Richards stomps out the mythical connection between child victims and future offending by pointing out that ‘while most victims of child sexual abuse are female, most perpetrators are male’. She goes on to ask how much longer society will keep adhering to the myth of the ‘otherness’ of the child sex offender as a way of avoiding confronting deeper cultural issues.

The Age of Consent is not as bogged down in methodological strictures and formulaic language as writing in the social sciences frequently is. Its authors should be lauded for venturing at least partway across the mine-strewn no-person’s-land that separates much scholarly publishing from the public domain.

Chapters like Zora Simic’s eloquent historical account of the nebulous, patriarchal age-of-consent concept provide a paradigm for differently located scholars writing in a way that fosters broader social engagement. Nonetheless, the book at times evokes a sense of academic distance. Laypeople who can actually find the thing still have to con-

tend with all of the intellectual frolics involved: four hundred-plus endnotes; sporadic appearances of deathless action words such as ‘interrogate’ and ‘unpack’; the book asserting its own uniqueness through claims of challenging ‘received mainstream and scholarly ideas about how and why child abuse occurs’.

When it comes to the political urgency of confronting the power imbalances underpinning the repression and exploitation of young people, no one individual or group has all the answers.

In this context, it is worth highlighting just how much deeply thought, culturally relevant writing on youth sexuality and maltreatment has in recent years been penned by quasi-academics and non-academics alike, including abuse victims. I gravitate here to the likes of Russell Marks in Overland and The Monthly, Una Cruickshank in Going Down Swinging, S.J. Finn in Overland, Andrew Pippos in SRB, and Bri Lee in Griffith Review, to name just a few.

While New Yorker critic Joshua Rothman is overstating the problem when he calls academic writing part of a system propelling everything ‘toward insularity’, it is nevertheless a system that needs bucking. Too much scholarly prose continues to lumber under the influence of a positivist disdain for the subjective and the poetic. There needs to be more lucid, visceral, even eccentric writing that can prove persuasive to specialists and neophytes alike. There is also scope for more publications to house scholarly and other authors under the same roof, where the different styles might begin to meld together as forceful agents for social change.

Doubtless some working in disciplines like criminology and the law would consider such calls mere anarchy loosed upon the world. But surely everyone who is researching and writing to redress social injustices or to better the lives of young people has the same objective of raising, to borrow Theodor Adorno’s wonderful image, the stone under which the monster lies brooding. g Dean Biron teaches in the School of Justice, Queensland University of Technology, and the School of Criminology and Criminal Justice, Griffith University.

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A continuous spectrum From Baudelaire to Carson

John Hawke THE PENGUIN BOOK OF THE PROSE POEM

by Jeremy Noel-Tod Penguin Classics, $69.99 hb, 480 pp, 9780241285794

I

n his infamous 1955 review of Patrick White’s The Tree of Man, A.D. Hope’s dismissal of the book as ‘illiterate verbal sludge’ focuses on a perceived confusion between the categories of poetry and prose. White ‘tries to write a novel as if he were writing poetry, and lyric poetry at that’, writes Hope; however, ‘the imagery, the devices of poetry are effective because they are wedded to metre. Practised in prose they look absurd and pretentious.’

Hope’s rigid alignment of poetry with metrical verse typifies the view of many Anglo-American critics in the middle of the twentieth century, a time when, in critic David Antin’s words, ‘the blight of Auden lay heavy on the land’.

This was especially the case in English poetry circles, where the anti-Modernist trajectory of Hardy–Yeats–Auden dominated poetry anthologies until only recently. Yet this conservative interregnum now seems anomalous within the history of twentieth-century poetry, subsumed by two great waves of experimentation: the first emerging from Paris and spreading through European languages from the pre-World War II period; the second extending through US and other English-language poetries from the 1950s onwards. Jeremy NoelTod’s important collection of international prose poetry acknowledges this history in relation to currents within contemporary English poetry in an unprecedented manner: as he states in his introduction, the anthology foregrounds ‘an alternative history of modern poetry and an experimental tradition that is shaping its future’.

At the centre of this re-evaluation is an acknowledgment that the accepted distinctions between poetry and prose cannot be so easily restricted: Hope’s 62 SEP T MBER 2019

formulation would eliminate the novels of Joyce, Woolf, and Beckett, as well as such dense examples as José Lezama Lima’s Paradise (1966) and Gabriel García Márquez’s The Autumn of the Patriarch (1975). As Ron Silliman points out in The New Sentence, his seminal 1977 study, prose and poetry are best regarded as a ‘continuous spectrum’, since ultimately ‘all writing is a mixed mode’: there is only the art of language. The introduction to this volume explains that this recognition can be traced back at least as far as Wordsworth, but certainly came into currency, along with the prose poem itself, with the inception of Modernist practice toward the end of the nineteenth century. For Stéphane Mallarmé, the crucial distinction is between stylised literary language and ordinary speech, or more expository writing denigrated as ‘journalism’. Critics who emerged from within the literary avantgarde, such as Roman Jakobson, assert a broader definition of ‘literariness’ that is inclusive of both metrical verse and literary experiments in prose. Perhaps the central figure within this volume is the American Cubist poet Gertrude Stein, whose question, ‘What is poetry and if you know what poetry is what is prose?’ is cited as an epigraph. Her melodic incantations, resisting the usual descriptive functions of words, are definitively ‘poetic’ despite their appearance as prose.

Although Noel-Tod describes her as ‘the most original prose poet in the English language’, Stein provides an extreme example, pushing language to the verge of abstraction and deliberately evading direct communication.

In sacrificing the prosodic resources of traditional verse, prose poetry instead foregrounds a range of alternative poetic devices, making it impossible to define

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW

in any generalised way. The more influential model here is Rimbaud’s poems in Illuminations, with their collage-like juxtaposition of elements, denying the linearity of narrative; and their striking conjunctions of synaesthesic imagery, which would particularly influence the Surrealists. Rimbaud’s ‘After the Flood’ provides the cover illustration for this volume – and it appears in translation

by John Ashbery, one of his main inheritors from the ‘second wave’ of poetic experimentation.

The strictly chronological arrangement of Noel-Tod’s selection invites an historical reading and provides an opportunity to trace modern poetics to its sources. The form is first given shape against a background of urban modernity in Baudelaire’s Le Spleen de Paris (1869): he is followed by other nineteenth-century French Symbolists, such as Mallarmé and Rimbaud, as well as by their English aestheticist counterparts, Oscar Wilde and Ernest Dowson. Avant-garde Modernism appears with the Russian Futurist Velimir Khlebnikov in his 1911 work, ‘Zoo’.

His international equivalents are Stein, whose Tender Buttons appears in 1914, and Parisians associated with the Cubist painters, such as Pierre Reverdy and Max Jacob. William Carlos Williams, whose key influences were both Stein and Apollinaire’s essays on Cubism, is represented here by an excerpt from Kora in Hell, a work that shifts assuredly between prose and free verse.

Surrealism emerges in the 1920s through the collaborative automatist experiments of André Breton, Philippe Soupault, and Paul Éluard, and aspects of the surrealist approach are evident across many examples of the form.

This includes particularly the infectious absurdism of Henri Michaux, whose work appears here alongside the previously mentioned Auden (a surrealist incongruity). It can also be seen in the defamiliarising approach to ordinary objects of Francis Ponge, whose writings strongly informed a certain strand of postwar American poetry. The widespread proliferation of these influences across European languages is exemplified in the work of such far-flung poets as the Peruvian

Cesar Vallejo and the Martinican Aimé Cesaire, whose work extends Surrealism to issues of colonialism.

Octavio Paz has noted that the innovations of this period only emerge in Anglo-American poetry in the 1950s, through the ‘cool’ surrealist approach of Frank O’Hara and Ashbery, and in the Beats adoption of the declamatory style of Vladimir Mayakovsky and Blaise Cendrars. This second wave of experimentation demarcates what Noel-Tod terms ‘The Postmodern Prose Poem’, a period which sees a broadening of the international modernist style, and the influence of translation on practitioners

such as Robert Bly and the Michauxian Russell Edson. The model of Stein is recovered and celebrated in the 1970s through the procedural works of poets such as Bernadette Mayer and Lyn Hejinian. And at this point we find Australian responses: Laurie Duggan’s objectivist found poetry; the fabulism of joanne burns; and Pam Brown’s nouveau roman observational poetry.

This projects naturally into the selection of twenty-first-century examples: Noel-Tod includes familiar names such as Anne Carson and Claudia Rankine alongside such outliers and radicals as Keston Sutherland and

Sean Bonney, in what is naturally the most contestable section of his volume. One can’t help thinking of local examples that would stand up just as well – Peter Boyle, Philip Hammial, Anna Couani, and Ania Walwicz are some of our leading practitioners in this field – but the terms of this anthology are unfailingly inviting and inclusive. g John Hawke is a Senior Lecturer at Monash University. His books include Australian Literature and the Symbolist Movement (2009) and Poetry and the Trace (co-edited with Ann Vickery, 2013).

Advantages of Stopovers Writing a line, as if from bed, on a lovely, handmade organ based on Gerald Murnane, the Goroke novelist last seen pouring a glass of amber silk and swaying imperceptibly enough to be called coincidental to Hot Chocolate. I would not be the writer I am if I forebore to mention the snowy peaks outside, being an analogy of actual peaks. You see me out there gesturing at their anti-poetic line, my hand perhaps making a mosquitoey movement in the air, a veritable range-splainer or Attenborough in Asia Sentences erode like

It started with a kiss and if a lengthy trial must be undergone, it is not too shabby a thing to wake in a room like this. What, I’ve been asked is the tension between a sentence and a stanza? (Or you might say: between a block of flats and a plaza.) This is a question for the infinite forest to ignore, but I must give it some thought, in order not to begin to sound like a mechanical monkey, however cute, based on Broken Hill essayist Evan de K – not their real name, last seen dropping a dingleberry into someone’s coffee, perhaps at the

ripped earth, as if an editor or technological malfunction (how can a malfunction be bad when it sounds so good? you can’t spell a-b-c-d without b-a-d) were large yellow machinery with the name Cat, or Komatsu. Do you believe like me, in a different way, in Spinoza, in deconstruction? It is not, to return to the trope of the handmade musical instrument, as if wood is dead, I mean wood as word or key. Call science (but how? where?) romantic then, I may add there are rows of yellowing aspen in clear view like I might – going blonde in midlife

height of their humour, and irony So I begin to chop in earnest as if I earn money from making salad, or it’s my passion: lettuce under the knife, just needing freshly roasted advice to bring its yellowing heart back to life Should prose rhyme? Another question I’ve never been asked, but on a night when you know that sleep will make you ill, and road fatality statistics arise like clapped-in topiary at an impatient neocon convention – I’d marry Time, but I just turned seventeen and by the next day the voice on the radio says it doesn’t remember me

Michael Farrell

Michael Farrell won the 2018 Judith Wright Calanthe Award for I Love Poetry (Giramondo), which was also shortlisted for the Kenneth Slessor Prize.

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Tick-tock Paul Kildea THE SILENT MUSICIAN: WHY CONDUCTING MATTERS

by Mark Wigglesworth Faber & Faber $26 pb, 259 pp, 9780571337903

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f all the tributary footage screened in the days following the death of Bob Hawke, one short sequence jarred. In it, Hawke conducts the Sydney Philharmonia Choirs and orchestra in the ‘Hallelujah Chorus’ from Handel’s Messiah, jerking and twitching in response to the welldrilled ensemble, showing admirable bravura in the face of such a magnificent disconnect between cause and effect.

‘Confidence gets you a long way in conducting,’ Mark Wigglesworth writes in this new manual on the art form he has spent his life practising and perfecting. ‘Even some prime ministers have thought they could have a go.’ Wigglesworth is here disparaging Edward Heath, a former British prime minister, who at least had some form as a pianist and organist. Yet his point remains: why do people think conducting is something almost anyone can do?

The dust jacket is more circumspect.

The book is ‘for all who wonder what conductors actually do, and why they matter’. And so Wigglesworth sets off on his picaresque journey through this most singular practice, his own career hovering over the narrative, drawn on whenever a point needs making or a plane needs landing. He is far more than an amiable guide, for Wigglesworth is a smart, serious musician who brings curiosity and courtesy to everything he 64 SEP T MBER 2019

does, which has included some turbulent tenures and boards, and management sabotaging the role he carefully delineates in this book.

First curiosity: Michael Black, the chorus master of Opera Australia’s production of Peter Grimes some years ago, phoned me in Berlin to describe and laud the way Wigglesworth would follow director Neil Armfield around the rehearsal studio as Armfield did some of his horse-whispering with the cast, adding his own take on whatever issue arose. (I name names here for reasons we’ll get to.) This is uncommon practice in a world in which conductors often arrive late to a rehearsal period, only then to fight tooth and nail with the director over (artistic) dominance or pre-eminence.

This courtesy is what occasionally lets down the narrative. When reading about ‘an old recording of Verdi’s Requiem made by one of the more infamous tyrants’, it is not prurient of me to want to know whether Wigglesworth means Arturo Toscanini or actually has Wilhelm Furtwängler in mind. I also want to know the name of the Russian conductor who cancelled a concert because the final rehearsal had been so brilliant he thought it could never be bettered.

Similarly, I think it is hardly a breach of taste for Wigglesworth to say whether or not he is referring to Claudio Abbado when he writes, ‘One or two of the most respected conductors have even been renowned for the boredom of their rehearsals.’ These details matter, for they flesh out both a musical role, which has only really been with us since the second half of the nineteenth century, and Wigglesworth’s ability to comment on this role with authority and authenticity.

These people, these events, were real – or, the reader is entitled to ask, were they?

The Silent Musician is slow to start – there is an enormous amount of throat-clearing in the prelims and first two chapters, a consequence of the book’s origins as an occasional blog for Gramophone – but then settles into a more grounded, poetic, and philosophical approach to the task at hand.

Wigglesworth is terrific on tempo, for example, a curiously complex part of the job. ‘The stereotypical reason

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW

that young conductors often conduct faster than old conductors is simply that their heart is beating faster. The stress of doing something for the first time creates an adrenalin rush that distorts your sense of time.’ So far so good, but Wigglesworth unpacks these truisms to explain what age has brought him: a more rational heartbeat; a dislike of performances lasting the same duration every time regardless of musicians or hall or audience; an understanding that people ‘listen to music in part to escape the tyranny of the clock of life, subjugating the tick-tock of reality to the illusion of something less mundane’. Nice.

There are quirks in his thinking.

The three ‘easily defensible’ periods of operatic stagings, he argues, are the date the piece was written, the date it is set, or today. He justifies this eccentric view by saying that a conductor would never ask an orchestra to imagine it was performing the piece in the 1920s, so it incongruous to ask singers to do the same. Yet these are two completely different aesthetic arguments. Historically informed performance is interested in the first of Wigglesworth’s frameworks – the date the piece was written – and has no interest in the second. If Verdi’s Otello can plausibly be set in 1604, 1886, and 2019, it seems perverse not to explore how the opera’s themes might play out, for instance, in 1920s Italy.

Largely, this is a book by a literate musician interested in demystifying a profession in the hope that it will long continue. He is right to argue that the classical music industry is sowing the seeds of its own demise through its concentration on an ever-narrowing band of repertory. The Los Angeles Philharmonic has for two decades or so shown the way around such thinking, forging relationships with living composers, demanding that audiences treat the resulting works with the seriousness and respect that their predecessors did when encountering operas by Verdi or symphonies by Brahms. Who will follow its lead? g Paul Kildea is a conductor and author, most recently of Chopin’s Piano: A journey through Romanticism (2018). He is the new Artistic Director of Musica Viva.

Art | Dance | Film | Music | Opera | Theatre

Arts

Anchuli Felicia King in rehearsals for Golden Shield (photograph by Deryk McAlpin)

Tim Byrne reviews Golden Shield Film

Palm Beach

Jake Wilson

Epiphany

Becoming Electra

Jane Montgomery Griffiths

Theatre

A Room of One’s Own Lisa Gorton

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

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(CCP) or US multinational corporations. Golden Shield spotlights the ugly hegemony that arises when big tech gets into bed with Big Brother, with a special emphasis on the individual victims that unholy marriage precipitates. In this regard, it brings to mind Stephen Sewell’s anti-capitalist cri de cœur Dreams in an Empty City (1986). But King is less polemical than Sewell, and she eschews maximalist symbolism and apocalyptic rhetoric for something more measured and contemplative, though arguably just as angry. The result is less a fevered thriller than a steely-eyed procedural, white hot to the touch.

The title refers to the security system the CCP set up to control its citizenry even while it opened its markets to the world, a chief element of which was an internet firewall built in the lead-up to the 2008 Beijing Olympics.

King has based her play on a legal case several Chinese he great Spanish novelist Javier Marías includes a nationals mounted against a US tech company that they scene in A Heart So White (1992) where a translator claimed aided China’s crackdown on political dissidents. In deliberately mistranslates a conversation between Golden Shield, the Chinese government employs the briltwo characters who obviously stand in for Margaret liantly named Onus to help improve ‘efficiency’ around the Thatcher and Felipe González. He does this to send a coded network, even though both agents know the ramifications message to the other translator in the room, his future wife. this will have on personal freedoms and political discourse.

It is an extraordinary set piece, a serio-comic exposé of The case is a tricky one, turning on a legal technicality and the translator’s power but also of its limits. An individual, dependent on a single bullet point in a meeting between Marías seems to say, can manipulate communication be- Deputy Minister Gao Shengwei (Gabrielle Chan) and Onus executives Marshall McClaren ( Josh McConville) and Larry Murdoch (Nicholas Bell). It is a meeting where both parties clearly hope the onus will fall on the other.

Julie Chen (Fiona Choi) is the lawyer who intends to prosecute the case, but her Mandarin isn’t up to scratch. She hires her younger sister Eva Chen ( Jing-Xuan Chan) to act as her translator, even though she knows that familial tensions may threaten the outcome. The sisters haven’t been close since their abusive mother died; Eva deeply resents Julie’s abandonment of her to study in the United States, and King cleverly suggests that the differences in their language proficiencies have profound emotional resonances too. Julie is the more rigid, obstinate thinker, a perfect legal attack dog but not wholly responsive to cultural nuance. Eva is a savvy Yuchen Wang, Gabrielle Chan, Josh McConville, and Nicholas Bell in Golden Shield (photograph by Jeff Busby) drifter, arrested rather than freed by her globetrotting lifestyle. Choi tween authoritarian states for private gain but ultimately and Chan brilliantly navigate the fissures and fixations of these siblings, never letting the characters’ metaphorical can’t safeguard against that authority.

Playwright Anchuli Felicia King is equally fascinated implications intrude on the psychological verisimilitude.

Director Sarah Goodes elicits fine performances from with the translator, the translated, and the untranslatable.

She also has much to say about authoritarianism, whether the entire cast, as they navigate a large and intimidating that comes in the form of the Chinese Communist Party playing space and some demanding technical requirements

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Tim Byrne

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW

(the brilliant set, designed by sisters Esther Marie and Rebecca Hayes, recalls one of those hideously brutalist corporate foyers, all grey concrete and hidden cameras).

McConville is superb as the crassly egotistical Marshall, a man convinced his moral turpitude suits the age that he and his Silicon Valley mates have come to dominate, and Sophie Ross brings such a clear demarcation between her dual roles as an astute legal eagle and a human-rights advocate that it’s hard to reconcile they’re being played by the same actor. Gabrielle Chan is poised and noble as Mei Huang, the wife of Julie’s sole plaintiff; but it is Yi Jin as that plaintiff, Li Dao, who makes the greatest impression of the night.

Dao, an academic, is softly spoken but resolute in his moral and political convictions; he’s precisely the kind of galvanising figure of resistance the CCP had in mind when designing their firewall. But he proves a wary and reticent plaintiff, one who will need to be cajoled and – in an act of mistranslation that will have devastating consequences – lied to if he’s going to help the sisters win their case.

Jin is astonishing, his every gesture contained but potent, a convincingly great man caught between larger, if lesser, forces.

The scenes between the professor and his wife are performed entirely in Mandarin, translated for us by a character King uses to tie all her thematic strands together, one she simply calls The Translator (Yuchen Wang). This character doesn’t just translate the Mandarin, though; he constantly steps out of the action (in a way, he’s never really in it) to give us context, or subtext, as well as some insight into the difficulties and problematic nature of translation itself. Wang is perfect in the role, sanguine and attentive but also increasingly disturbed by the discovery of things beyond translation, by the intractability of miscommunication. The final moments, where the translator realises that not only are there things that can’t be interpreted but that people may not even want to understand one another, is an existential crisis he implores us to share.

And it’s here that King’s true thesis becomes clear: whether we are talking about nations or sisters, about fundamental differences in ideology or the minutiae of individual relationships, our ability to communicate is only ever predicated on a shared language. Her vision of a world where the only true international bridge is one of corporate law, of money and money’s influence, is an entirely recognisable one, but King provokes us into wishing for more.

Golden Shield is a powerful argument for a new mechanism in dealing with the perceived battle between East and West, that of the translator who can navigate and interpret opposing world views. Anthony Burgess called translation ‘degrees of loss’, but maybe it’s our only hope? Certainly, this extraordinary, vital play points the way forward. g Golden Shield, written by Anchuli Felicia King and directed by Sarah Goodes, continues at the Sumner Theatre, Melbourne Theatre Company, until 14 September 2019.

Tim Byrne is a freelance writer and theatre critic.

My Dearworthy Darling

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Tali Lavi

n the beginning there is the sound of deep breathing and a heartbeat. Woman, the electric Jennifer Vuletic, lies writhing on a rock, splayed as if for sacrifice. Is she in a state of anguish or ecstasy? My Dearworthy Darling ushers us into a space fraught with uncertainty, the kind where questions beget more questions. Fortunately, we are in the deft hands of THE RABBLE, a feminist theatre collective that rejects theatre as a comfortable form of entertainment. The play is an amalgam of the ‘holy theatre’ that Peter Brook wrote of in his ground-breaking work The Empty Space (1968) and the deconstructing feminist gaze of Caryl Churchill.

Directors Emma Valente and Kate Davis have positioned My Dearworthy Darling as a highly embodied work; Vuletic is ablaze with the physicality of her role.

But language is its anchor and its wings. Alison Croggon has produced a radical new work, one that merges realms of the sublime and the prosaic. As Woman confesses, ‘I’ve lost the words / I don’t know if I ever had the words.’ And yet, this is a play fecund with them. Words are feverish with visions and poetry. Devotional words in Middle English are recited as incantations by a cowled Chorus. Words are accusatory weapons that obliterate.

Then there are the words that would make one howl with laughter if only their deadening emptiness weren’t the kind we have come to hear from world leaders on a daily loop. As messenger of these statements, Woman’s sister, Natalie Gamsu (Ladies in Black) delivers them with great relish. ‘They reckon history is coming back … I mean that it stopped for a while and now it’s started again.’ This natural register of speech appears in conversations between Woman, her husband, and her sister, most of which operate on different frequencies.

Ben Grant (Hir), as a seething husband with a fading career as an insurance agent, is frightening in his whitehot rage.

Croggon’s mastery of suspense, evident in many of her novels, is on display here; the play’s mounting sense of dread is intensely discomfiting. The domestic scenes are invariably interrupted by signs and sounds of the household; the low-level pitch of an electric toothbrush, the abrasive ARTS

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noise of a vacuum, the slurp of a drink through a straw. flame forcing open every portal of my body.’ In their A crescendo of discordant sound builds; any sense of book of correspondence, The Feminine and the Sacred harmony is absent from these relationships.

(1998), Julia Kristeva and Catherine Clément explore And yet, not all is dissonant. My Dearworthy notions of the feminine sacred and give much attenDarling is haunted by rapturous states. Woman experition to the visions of saints. Kristeva claims, ‘Until ences visitations. There modern times, women’s may be another Woman, familiarity with their Croggon’s play ushers us into a space intense and evasive body one from centuries earlier, also played by Vuletic, or fraught with uncertainty, the kind where made their religious exthey may be one that is perience a confrontation questions beget more questions merged. The work is powith abjection precisely, rous, courageously so, open and with nothingness … to the audience’s interpretations. Blood, burning, and the sacred was the space where woman could give free madness appear as leitmotifs. rein to that abjection and to that pleasure, to nothingCroggon was inspired by what she terms ‘mystic ness and its glory.’ Eroticism, the deeply embodied exwomen’, particularly fourteenth-century Margery perience, is deeply embedded in the religious language Kempe, whose book is known as the first autobiography of devotion. Croggon and THE RABBLE channel this with their visual and textual language.

For much of the play’s duration, the set is framed by aluminium glomesh. It acts as both a shimmering frame and a screen and is suspended above the stage.

The device itself only becomes a thing of splendour when, by clever design, it morphs into something else entirely. In a coup de théâtre, Woman is birthed out of it revealing that ‘Beginnings are brutal’. Indeed they are, especially when rebirthing is required for survival.

Throughout the play, the husband and sister attempt to discredit and undermine Woman. The former confronts her with, ‘Would you really know?

Jennifer Vuletic in My Dearworthy Darling (photograph by David Paterson) Your memory is shot.’ Her sibling tells her that she’s ‘not written in English. Sections of this text are worked normal’. Woman professes, ‘I open my mouth and the into the script, woven into the Chorus’s chants, lit up world goes deaf.’ This, ultimately, is all of their fates; by surtitles that display them whole and fragmented. they each feel unheard, rendered voiceless by societal Perhaps if we pay close enough attention to the sound structures – their workplaces, the corrupt and emas– which is strangely beautiful – and the sight of these culating systems around them. Woman is the only Middle English phrases, revelation will follow. When one attempting to listen, even if she must place a glass Vuletic breaks out into glorious song accompanied by above the earth’s surface to do so. In opening herself the Chorus (played by Monash University performers), up to these otherworldly voices, she experiences a which surrounds her, the scene, with its use of Christian kind of ecstasy, a transfiguration. As a work of theatre, iconography, feels like a fearsome encounter with the My Dearworthy Darling is itself transfiguring. g sublime.

My Dearworthy Darling was performed at the Beckett Theatre, Kempe’s words speak of desire, of a body marked Malthouse Theatre, in August 2019. (Longer version online) with pain, of love and devotion. Her experiences dovetail Tali Lavi is a writer, reviewer, and public interviewer.

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AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW

A Room of One’s Own

reading one of Woolf ’s novels, in which different points of view and modes of feeling interrupt one another. One of the achievements of the play, in fact, is to reveal how essential such drama is to Woolf ’s writing. ‘Stream of consciousness’ may be the usual term for it, but this play, with its drama n this intelligent and unusual play, director Peta Han- of different voices, probably gives a truer sense of how her rahan arranges Virginia Woolf ’s great essay A Room writing works. of One’s Own into an hour-long play for four voices.

Much of the energy of the play comes from its sudCuriously, perhaps, it works so well as a play because of den shifts from one mode of thinking to another. Now it how well Hanrahan has read the essay. The play derives is thought hesitatingly inventing itself; now it is rapture; its drama from the essay’s dramatic elements. Like the es- now it is anecdote; now it is the statement of an argument. say, the play has what might be called an inward dramatic It is a different kind of dramatic conflict. Each actor, each form: its imaginative backdrop is not voice, needs to establish, against the living room or the moor, but the the others, repeatedly, its own mind. It is a play of thought, as Woolf pace, and kind of feeling, and so singularly knew how to invent level of feeling. On opening them: many-voiced, self-questioning, night, perhaps the ending, for that stark, and sensuously wordy. minute when the voices weave The essay originated in two together, did not find its right lectures that Woolf (denied a formal pacing. For the rest, the actors education herself because of her were compelling and strong in gender) gave in Cambridge in 1928 their differences – their ability to on the topic of ‘Women and Fiction’. keep alive the play’s tension beShe opened the topic out through a tween its quick-changing modes sequence of radical questions, and of argument, lyric, history, and tested these against daily experimemoir. ence. Her essay had, from the first, In this, too, the play holds the dramatic form that its pronouns true to Woolf ’s writing. Her set out in its first paragraph: ‘one’ essay rings with the word ‘But’. and ‘I’ and ‘you’. It sets up a conflict ‘But then one would have to between her stark questions and all decide … but here I was … but the various accidental often humor…’ From the first beadle who ous encounters and shocks of her rises up to warn her off the experience over a few days in Camgreen college grass, she keeps bridge and London. And her ‘I’, in meeting incarnations of the perthe essay, is not single. ‘Here then son from Porlock. Her essay takes, was I (call me Mary Beton, Mary even into its form, these sudden Marissa O’Reilly in A Room of One’s Own Seton, Mary Carmichael or by any (photograph by Tommy Holt) refusals and interruptions. It is, name you please …).’ Mary Beton, she sees, something that the men Mary Seton, and Mary Carmichael were ladies-in-waiting in their venerable colleges, in their comfortable armchairs, to Mary, Queen of Scots. The ‘I’ in Woolf ’s essay, then, was after their rich dinners, in their long conversations, cannot many-charactered. ‘One has only to read, to look, to listen, imagine. She makes a new form out of it. Sentient Theatre’s to remember.’ inaugural production has, with integrity, given Woolf ’s essay Hanrahan has discovered, in reading Woolf ’s essay, an a new incarnation. interplay of four voices. She has cast these as four characNinety years after Woolf ’s essay was first published, ters, named in the program as Actor I – the Questioner, many of the questions that she asks in it still feel vital.

Actor II – the Diplomat, Actor III – the Sceptic, Actor Why are women poor? What effect does poverty have on IV – the World. They are played, respectively, by Anthea the would-be creative mind? Why, when they hold so much Davis, Marissa O’Reilly, Anna Kennedy, and Jackson power, are men still angry? What would have happened to Trickett. O’Reilly, rightly, plays the Diplomat as something Shakespeare’s equally talented sister? And why, we could more than a diplomat. Her actor is the voice in Woolf ’s add, do works as interesting as this have to struggle for essay of joy in the world. From all four actors the play de- proper funding? g mands a prodigious feat of memory. It holds to the various glories of Woolf ’s prose – its shining anecdotes, quips, stops, A Room of One’s Own, revived by fortyfivedownstairs and La Mama Theatre as a Sentient Theatre production, was performed in July 2019. and sudden turns. Against the bareness of its set, on its traverse stage, the language of the play creates vivid scenes. Lisa Gorton’s new poetry collection is Empirical (GiraWatching the play is strangely like the experience of mondo, 2019).

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Lisa Gorton

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Palm Beach

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Jake Wilson

uriously, there are now two feature films titled Palm Beach, both named for the same upmarket suburb in Sydney’s Northern Beaches. The first, made in 1979 by the late avant-gardist Albie Thoms, is a ragged detective story improvised from Thoms’s outline by an ensemble cast. The new Palm Beach is a much more conventionally polished comedy–drama, directed by the actress turned director Rachel Ward, who co-wrote the screenplay with the playwright Joanna MurraySmith.

While the new Palm Beach is not a remake of its predecessor, the two have a few things in common, even beyond the title and central location. Both feature aerial shots in which the camera swoops along the same beaches to the same mushroom-shaped headland; both unfold over the course of a weekend and depict the reunion of old friends; and both star Bryan Brown, who has been married to Ward since 1983, and who could presumably shed light on this mystery if anyone can.

Moreover, the two films could be described as snapshots of the same baby-boomer generation forty years apart. Ward underscores this with a soundtrack resembling the playlist of a local golden-oldies radio station (starting, inevitably, with ‘Friday On My Mind’).

While Thoms mourns the loss of an egalitarian, countercultural dream, Ward is content to celebrate the haves without giving much thought to the have-nots – to the point of frankly describing the film to journalists as ‘aspirational’.

Even Brown is a long way from his usual everyman roles. He plays Frank, the former manager and member of a one-hit-wonder 1970s rock group called the Pacific Sideburns, and more recently the owner of a successful T-shirt company. For his birthday weekend, he and his therapist wife, Charlotte (Greta Scacchi), have asked a few friends to stay at their palatial Palm Beach home.

The guest list includes the two other surviving Sideburns, journalist Leo (Sam Neill) and ad-man Billy

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(Richard E. Grant), and their respective wives, Bridget ( Jacqueline McKenzie), a younger ex-teacher, and Eva (Heather Mitchell), a one-time screen siren.

Also on hand are some representatives of the younger generation, including Frank and Charlotte’s adult daughter Ella (played by Matilda Brown, Brown and Ward’s daughter). Gone but not forgotten is the Sideburns’ female lead singer, whose death in the 1980s led to the end of the band itself, and whose memory seems likely to be at the centre of the present-day drama.

This does not, in fact, occur – and nor, for quite a while, does anything else of major significance. Wine flows, prawns sizzle, the men jostle for position or head off to surf, while the women practise yoga or trade sex tips. Political issues are not up for discussion, and a couple of the would-be comic moments – especially Charlotte’s brutal treatment of a former patient – convey a disconcerting contempt for the great unwashed.

Disconcerting too, in a 2019 film, is the absence of even a token nod to ‘diversity’: every character of consequence is white, middle-class, and heterosexual, as far as we can tell. It seems possible that Ward is setting us up for a fall, reinforcing a complacency that will ultimately be undermined, but while a few personal secrets do eventually come to light, it is hard to understand them as carrying any broader social implications.

Most of the visible angst belongs to the men: Leo emerges as easily the most interesting character, Neill’s stiff body language and faraway gaze hinting at pain that the film cannot quite account for explicitly. As for Frank, he has been an erratic husband and a generally unsatisfactory father, and he has failed to fulfil his artistic ambitions, whatever they might have been. He regrets selling his business, relies on antidepressants – something he cannot admit to his wife – and is, by his own admission, impotent. Even as all this is brought to light, none of it is given enough weight to risk undermining the premise that he and his friends are living the good life on the whole.

Again, all this is a far cry from Thoms’s Palm Beach.

Still, the two films side by side do leave the impression that Australian gender politics have not changed that much over the past forty years. Men are little boys, maintaining their petty rivalries to the end; women are more contented and mature, though doomed to spend their lives catering to male whims. On this front, Palm Beach is a bit like Sex and the City for women who have stuck with marriage over the long haul, and who fantasise not just about material comfort but about the hope that their emotionally absent blokes might suddenly wake up to themselves, apologise for their bad behaviour, and vow to mend their ways. That, you might say, is aspirational with a vengeance. g Palm Beach (Universal) is directed by Rachel Ward.

Jake Wilson is a freelance writer who lives in Melbourne and reviews films regularly for The Age.

EPIPHANY

Becoming Electra

by Jane Montgomery Griffiths

A

s a teenager, I was a Greek tragedy tragic. While my friends had crushes on George Michael and Boy George (in retrospect, not the most promising objects of desire), I was crushing on Sophocles. It was 1983: shaggy perms, rolled-down leg warmers, cheap synthetic leggings, winklepickers, and a school Portakabin that reeked of fumes from the paraffin heater. It was a miserable Tuesday in January, with nothing but three more months of winter and a new set text to look forward to. The text was Sophocles’ Electra.

We began without much enthusiasm. Our hennaed, green eye shadow-wearing, CND-lapelled teacher allocated parts and we started to read. Frankly, it was dull: two blokes talking about a shrine to some god and one of them being like an old racehorse, all conveyed in the toneless nasal drone of adolescent girls with runny noses. But then, something extraordinary happened. At line eighty-two, a cry from inside the palace – a woman’s cry, one of total pain that the men ignore as they turn their backs and walk away. For the next 800 lines we live with the echo of that cry, entering the world of women and words, of passion and hatred and desire and agony and humiliation and defiance and despair and yet more unending pain.

And that was it; I was smitten. I had fallen for Sophocles’ Electra, the twisted, degraded, haggard remnant of the most dysfunctional of all families in Greek mythology – a character with such an extraordinary ability to seize the whole expanse of being that she stole my passions whole.

I was in love, I was obsessed, and I had to do everything in my power to make that love requited. So I learnt Greek every Saturday morning with our retired vicar, devoured books on acting, and wrote letters to the artistic directors of the Royal Shakespeare Company and National Theatre begging them to program the play. Three years later, I found myself studying Classics at Cambridge, still trying to make a go of a relationship with my beloved.

In January 1989, my wishes, I thought, came true. The RSC was to do Electra, with Deborah Warner directing and Fiona Shaw playing the role. I was already a fan of both: I’d regularly binged on RSC productions at Stratford, staying at the youth hostel and hanging around the stage door to talk to my acting idols (Fiona included). I had been turned

into a gibbering mess by Warner’s extraordinary Titus Andronicus (1987) that had left me feeling more sick and more exhilarated that any production I’d ever seen.

The production was agony, not because it wasn’t good, but rather because it was so good. Or at least Fiona’s performance was. She was my Electra – the raw, endlessly picked scab I had imagined and had longed to act. She had stolen my beloved and made her her own. But the revelation that came from watching that performance, in its naked, brutal honesty, was a sudden understanding of what acting could be. Not the attitudinising I had thought of as great acting, but the ripped-open vulnerability of a performer who lays herself bare, who delves into the abject so deeply that she becomes sublime and the ugliness makes of her pain a thing of beauty.

Three years later, my relationship with Fiona Shaw and Electra entered a whole new chapter. The production was to be remounted and so, of course, I bombarded Warner with letters until she agreed to meet me and then cast me as company understudy. ‘This will be the most painful job of your career,’ she warned me, and she was right. I held eight separate roles in my head with only the faintest of chances of ‘going on’, I made tea for everyone, gave Fiona shoulder massages, nightly screamed the death cry of Clytemnestra (who didn’t want to strain her voice), and sat in my understudy’s perch watching each nuance of Fiona’s performance.

I admired her tricks, I watched her technique, I noted the waxing and waning of energy, and I learned more from that experience than from any drama school training.

Ten years later I did end up playing Electra on a sixmonth national tour that was more gruelling yet more exquisite than anything I could have imagined in my teenage fantasies. This was now a new Electra, my Electra, but I remembered what Fiona had taught me. I remembered to search for the beauty in the ugliness and the sublime in the abject. I remembered the epiphany that she engendered, and for that I’ll always be grateful. g Jane Montgomery Griffiths – actor, playwright, and Professor of Theatre Practice at Monash University – is currently playing Titus Andronicus in Bell Shakespeare’s production at the Sydney Opera House. ❖ ARTS

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From the ABR Archive

Markus Zusak’s celebrated novel The Book Thief was published by Picador.

Lorien Kaye reviewed it in the October 2005 issue of ABR.

T

he Book Thief marks a departure for Markus Zusak. It is his first novel for adults, has broader concerns than his earlier work, and makes clearer his ambitions to be considered a serious writer.

His first three novels, for young adults, were primarily focused on the masculinity of the boys in a workingclass Sydney family. His next book, The Messenger (2002), foreshadowed the development we see in The Book Thief. Presented for young adults, The Messenger could easily have been marketed as a ‘crossover’ novel.

It took Zusak into new and strange territory with a story about a young man mysteriously chosen and directed to intervene in other people’s lives.

In The Book Thief, Zusak abandons contemporary Australia for World War II Germany. In doing so, he inevitably signals his intention to raise those intractable existential questions that go along with writing fiction about Nazi Germany, its treatment of Jews, and its bombing by the Allies. He signals his intention even more obviously by using an anthropomorphised and almost passive Death as a narrator, and having Death address the reader to tell us that this story is one of a ‘small legion’ he carries, ‘each one an attempt – an immense leap of an attempt – to prove to me that you, and your human existence, are worth it’. You can’t get much more thematically ambitious than this, although perhaps we shouldn’t take Death’s ambition as equivalent to Zusak’s. According to the tenets of postmodern fiction we are alerted to the constructed nature of narrative, and here is the other theme of the book, the nature and importance of books, words, reading and writing.

The conceit of the narrative is that Death has rescued the book containing the autobiographical writing of the young Liesel Meminger, the book thief. Liesel and her brother are to be given up by their mother and fostered out, but on the way to their new home her brother dies. At the cemetery where he is buried, Liesel scavenges a book the apprentice gravedigger has dropped, The Gravedigger’s Handbook. Illiterate, Liesel can only understand the book as a talisman. It reminds her of the last time she saw her brother and mother.

But with the help of her foster father, she learns to read, and gradually books and words become ‘everything’.

A few years later, with the war at its peak, Liesel begins to write a memoir, an act that literally saves her life.

Apart from the tenacious Liesel, The Book Thief is

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almost exclusively peopled by characters destined to die within the pages of the book. Death warns us of their fate: ‘Mystery bores me. It chores me. I know what happens and so do you. It’s the machinations that wheel us there that aggravate, perplex, interest and astound me.’

It is these machinations that form the story that Death relates, as he overtly chooses how to order the telling.

These doomed characters are mostly the inhabitants of Molching, the small town near Munich where the Hubermanns, Liesel’s foster parents, live. They are variously committed, indifferent and resistant to the Nazi regime. But the other main character is Max, a Jew who seeks and is given refuge with the Hubermanns, to honour an old promise. Both Max and Liesel are ravaged by nightmares, are scrappy fist-fighters, and are beholden to books and writing. They form a deep bond in the fictional world that they inhabit and are counterbalances to each other in the narrative.

Despite the obvious differences, there is much in common between Zusak’s previous work and The Book Thief. His first four books were more literary than much writing for young adults, and the essence of Zusak’s prose style has remained the same: at once muscular and poetic. Sentences are often short but are structurally plain or complex. Zusak enjoys inventive language use and delights in describing the world on a slightly skewed angle. While for the first time his primary character is female, his interest in masculinity is also still evident, if secondary, through the character of Liesel’s adoptive father, the caring and moral Hans Hubermann (surely it’s not a coincidence that his name sounds similar to Übermensch). The ‘brute strength of the man’s gentleness’, a typical Zusak paradox of masculinity, is the basis of Liesel’s strong relationship with Hubermann. So with these similarities, is the new work definitively a book for adults? Rights have been sold in the US to the children’s division of Knopf at Random House rather than to an adult publisher. But the grander scope surely justifies the Picador imprint of Zusak’s Australian publisher, and the adult tag.

It is easy to wring emotion and narrative drive from this grander scope, the raw suffering of World War II and the Holocaust. It is harder to create something more substantial. Markus Zusak goes well beyond the superficial, at least partly due to his prose style, but there are depths that remain just beyond his reach. g