Australian Book Review, November 2019, issue no. 416 by Australian Book Review

Media censorship

It’s not often that Australia’s media organisations come together in a display of solidarity, but so they did on October 21, when virtually every newspaper in the country led with a redacted front cover above the stark message: ‘When government keeps the truth from you, what are they covering up?’ The Right to Know coalition (‘an unprecedented show of unity between competitors’, to quote Fergus Hunter, a Fairfax reporter) could hardly be more timely. By stealth and attrition, successive federal governments have eroded press freedoms, intimidated whistleblowers and journalists, and defended a culture of secrecy. The June AFP raids on the Sydney headquarters of the ABC and the home of News Corp’s Annika Smethurst represent a new threat to press freedom. Like the Right to Know coalition, ABR deplores these repressive measures. In our cover story, Australian lawyer Kieran Pender examines some of the present risks. As he states, ‘The only winners are those who wish to cloak government operations in a shroud of secrecy.’ Clearly, it’s up to writers and journalists and citizens to reject these punitive, censorious tendencies of government.

The University of Sydney

Umbrage greeted the announcement in mid-October that the University of Sydney will not be replacing the outgoing Chair of Australian Literature, Professor Robert Dixon. It beggars belief that such a wealthy university can abandon the professorship. We don’t have enough chairs in Australian literature to allow them to lapse in such a cavalier fashion. On page 48 we’re pleased to be able to run an official statement from the Association for the Study of Australian Literature.

Rising Stars

On a brighter note, we are pleased to name our first two ABR Rising Stars: Sarah Walker (Victoria) and Alex Tighe (New South Wales). Rising Stars – a new initiative supported by Creative Victoria and Create NSW – is intended to encourage outstanding young ABR writers and critics around the country. Sarah and Alex, who have made such an impression since first publishing with us, will receive a number of paid commissions over the next twelve months. Sarah Walker, who was placed second in the 2019 Calibre Essay Prize, told Advances: In a cultural climate where intelligent, long-form writing is becoming increasingly rare, and where opportunities to establish a sustainable writing practice are dwindling, ABR’s commitment to supporting new writers is quite remarkable. As a young and emerging writer, I was surprised and gratified that the publication of my Calibre essay was only the beginning of a rich relationship with the magazine. To have been treated with such respect and care by ABR has been most validating. As a fledgling writer, being supported with well-paid publication opportunities and careful editing has been hugely important. As a freelance artist, the opportunity for a year of close editorial association through the Rising Stars program means the ability to create a sustainable writing practice, to find my feet in the industry, and to learn and grow as a writer. I am completely chuffed.

With support from state governments, we hope to extend the Rising Stars program to other states.

Gumtrees and emus

With this issue we revive our language column, which has been mute for a while. Amanda Laugesen’s column on Sidney J. Baker and Australian slang

is the first in a bimonthly series of articles on the etymology, politics, and sheer quirkiness of Australian English. The column emanates from the Australian National Dictionary Centre (ANDC), of which Dr Laugesen is the current director, and with which ABR has a long connection. It’s little wonder that H.L. Mencken – author of The American Language (1919) – described Baker’s Dictionary of Popular Slang (1941) as ‘extremely pungent and original’. Baker, to paraphrase Bill Ramson, first director of the ANDC, was an unremitting fossicker, with a keen ear for the exceptional idiom. Let’s all hope to ‘kick the arse off an emu’ (enjoy good health) and to avoid for some time ‘seeing our last gumtree’ (being near death).

Prizes galore

When the Peter Porter Poetry Prize closed on October 1, we had received 1,050 entries – our largest field to date. Judging has begun, and we look forward to publishing the five shortlisted poems in the January–February issue. Meanwhile, the Calibre Essay Prize remains open until 15 January 2020. The judges on this occasion are J.M. Coetzee, Lisa Gorton, and Peter Rose.

Free gift subscription

We’re feeling generous again! New and renewing subscribers can now direct a free six-month digital subscription to ABR to a friend or colleague. Qualify for this special offer by renewing your current ABR subscription – even before it is due to lapse. Renew for two years and give away two free subs, etc. To arrange your gift, contact us on (03) 9699 8822 or at business@ australianbookreview.com.au. We will then contact the nominated recipient. Terms and conditions apply. See our website for more information. A D VA N C E S

Letters Three voices

Dear Editor, It’s nice to be alive still in September 2019, a month that saw three pivotal public statements (none of them by men), moments of remarkable drama directed to high principle and the future: by Brenda Hale in the UK Supreme Court, re the Westminster system of government; by Nancy Pelosi in Washington, re the impeachment of Donald Trump and the foundations of power in the United States; and by Greta Thunberg at the United Nations, re the future of the planet. Altogether a moment to be unpicked in any number of books. Alan Atkinson, Dawesville, WA

Paedophilia and climate change

Dear Editor, I would like to comment on the last sentence of the first paragraph of Tim Flannery’s review. It may well be that polluters and those who pander to them are threatening our future and that of our children, but to compare this to being as repulsive for his children’ future as paedophiles is a comparison that will be painful to many readers and suggests a level of innocence and ignorance about the impact of a paedophile on a child. Yes, climate is a serious and threatening issue, but Flannery’s comparison is a dreadful one, likely to cause pain and alienation for many readers. Joanne McDonald, Frankston South, Vic.

E minus for the UN

Dear Editor, I am grateful for the review of my book Global Planet Authority: How we’re about to save the biosphere (ABR, October 2019). However, contrary to Tim Flannery’s review, I give the nation states, their multilateral efforts, and the United Nations an E minus for their protection of the biosphere since the Stockholm Declaration of 2 NOVEMBER 2019

1972. I ridicule the Paris Agreement and hold up Montreal as a broken model. In the book, I advocate that humanity must practise global governance for the first time through the tried and tested method of mass allocation of personal sovereignty. Going past the nation state is absolutely necessary. Unlike Greta Thunberg and supporters of Extinction Rebellion, who are shouting at a system that, due to its fractured nature, cannot guarantee global biophysical security now or in the long term, Global Planet Authority advocates a revolution at least equal to the greatest seen since the Westphalian agreement of 1648. Tim Flannery may deem that quaint, but I don’t think he has accurately reported the central tenet of my book. Angus Forbes (online comment)

Greta Thunberg

Dear Editor, Congratulations to everyone at ABR and to the contributors to the Environment issue (ABR, October 2019). The cover portrait of a furious and unforgiving Greta Thunberg could not be more timely. I read Tim Flannery’s review of books by Thunberg, Angus Forbes, and the group of young writers who contributed to This Is Not a Drill with much interest. In 2005 I reviewed Tim Flannery’s The Weather Makers for The Monthly. The book has stayed with me as I mark off each of the predictions Flannery made then: ever-increasing cycles of drought; greater extremes of weather; and the collapse of species, among other depressing prophesies. I live in north-east Victoria, where we have been in drought on and off for the past five years. From December 2018, it did not rain for five months. Our village had to truck in water from Seymour, eighty kilometres away. We

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW

were fortunate, for we can access bore water on our property, but we do so at the expense of compromising the aquifer that lies beneath this region and that is a major contributor to Melbourne’s water supply. We have also witnessed the collapse of the local koala population. Small birds, bees, and butterflies have disappeared. Recently, I celebrated Rosh Hashana ( Jewish New Year) with some three hundred or so others. For three hours we celebrated the creation of this wonderful planet. At the end, the rabbi gave an unexpected sermon about the bravery of Greta Thunberg, who so eloquently has held world leaders to account. I applaud this articulate young generation. I am ashamed that I have not done more. I applaud Tim Flannery for his tireless work in writing and lecturing on the effects of climate change. Thank you, ABR, for your own contribution. Elisabeth Holdsworth, Strathbogie, Vic.

Tim Flannery responds:

I appreciate Angus Forbes’s letter further elucidating his book. I believe that I was correct in describing his approach as ‘supranational’ (meaning that it transcends national boundaries and governments), though I remain unsure just how ‘the tried and tested method of personal mass allocation of personal sovereignty’ will be enacted. I apologise to Joanne McDonald for any pain and alienation brought about by comparing the damage done to our children by climate change to that done by paedophiles. Let us hope that we can avoid the horrendous future scenarios, which some believe will involve the deaths of billions of people, that our current climate path appears to be leading our children into. And thank you Elisabeth Holdsworth for celebrating Greta Thunberg. She is a hero fit for our age.

November 2019 Kieran Pender Morag Fraser Sophie Knezic Paul Kildea Jane Cadzow Lyndon Terracini Felicity Plunkett Beejay Silcox

Letters

Alan Atkinson, Joanne McDonald, Angus Forbes, Elisabeth Holdsworth, Tim Flannery

37 38 39 40

Memoir

Language

46 ‘One’s last gumtree’ Amanda Laugesen

Politics

Environment & Astronomy

Paddy Manning: Inside the Greens James Walter 23

Biography

Fiction

Favel Parrett: There Was Still Love Anna MacDonald Carmel Bird: Field of Poppies Gregory Day Meg Mundell: The Trespassers Amy Baillieu Alice Bishop: A Constant Hum Debra Adelaide Jhumpa Lahiri (ed.): The Penguin Book of Italian Short Stories 41 Rita Wilson 53 Yumna Kassab: The House of Youssef Sonia Nair 54 Joey Bui: Lucky Ticket Cassandra Atherton

Chris Fleming: On Drugs James Antoniou 20 Katharine Smyth: All the Lives We Ever Lived Ann-Marie Priest 55 Jane Sullivan: Storytime Margaret Robson Kett 56

Tom Segev: A State at Any Cost Ilana Snyder Suzanne Robinson: Peggy Glanville-Hicks Jim Davidson Robyn Arianrhod: Thomas Harriot Elizabeth Finkel Sabine Cotte: Mirka Mora Carol Middleton

The erosion of democratic accountability Ian Fairweather’s letters A periphrastic history of a gallerist The glamour and vainglory of Susan Sontag Hilary McPhee’s second memoir Sydney needs a new lyric theatre Charlotte Wood’s new novel A different reading of Margaret Atwood’s novel

8 13 15 17 18 22 32 35

47 Robert Macfarlane: Underland Alison Pouliot 49 Tom Bamforth: The Rising Tide Ceridwen Spark 50 Fred Watson: Cosmic Chronicles Robyn Williams

True Crime

51 Steven Schubert: Mandatory Murder Russell Marks

44 45

History

53 Joshua Specht: Red Meat Republic Cameo Dalley

Finance

Poetry

Adele Ferguson: Banking Bad Alan Kohler: It’s Your Money Michael Roddan: The People vs The Banks Daniel Ziffer: A Wunch of Bankers Ben Huf 26

57 Michael Farrell (ed.): Ashbery Mode John Hawke

Publisher of the Month

58 Madonna Duffy

Indigenous Studies

From the Archive

Bruce Pascoe: Salt Steve Kinnane 29

72 Marele Day: Lambs of God Caroline Lurie

ABR Arts

Robyn Archer et al. Tali Lavi Alison Stieven-Taylor Dilan Gunawardana Fiona Gruber

60 66 68 70 71

Arts Highlights of the Year Anne Frank: Parallel Lives Civilization: The Way We Live Now Joker Anthem CONTENTS

THANKING OUR PARTNERS Australian Book Review is assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council for the Arts, its arts funding and advisory body. ABR is supported by: the Victorian Government through Creative Victoria; the NSW Government through Create NSW; 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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Cover Image Tokyo Compression #80 (2010). Photograph by Michael Wolf, courtesy of M97 Shanghai. This photograph appears in the Civilization exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria, which we review on page 68. © Michael Wolf/laif 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 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 their first appearance in the magazine. Acknowledgment 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. 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.

Australian Book Review | November 2019, no. 416 Since 1961 First series 1961–74 | Second series (1978 onwards, from no. 1) ISSN 0155-2864 Registered by Australia Post | Printed by Doran Printing ABR is published ten times a year by Australian Book Review Inc. Studio 2, 207 City Road, Southbank, Vic. 3006 Phone: (03) 9699 8822 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) ABR Rising Stars Alex Tighe (NSW, 2019) | Sarah Walker (Vic., 2019) Editorial Advisers Frank Bongiorno, 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, Alistair Thomson, Simon Tormey, Peter Tregear, Ben Wellings, Terri-ann White, Rita Wilson Volunteers Eloise Cox (Monash University Intern), John Scully Publicity & Advertising Amy Baillieu – abr@australianbookreview.com.au Media Kit available from our website

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COMMENTARY

Hot water

The erosion of democratic accountability

Kieran Pender

‘It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once.’ David Hume, 1742

t is a famous parable. If a frog is dropped in boiling water, it will immediately leap out. But if placed in tepid water that is gradually heated, the frog will not notice the increasing temperature until it is boiled alive. The parable may be biologically inaccurate, but it remains instructive in the context of civil liberties. As far back as the Ancient Greeks, Aristotle warned that ‘transgression creeps in unperceived and at last ruins the state’. Societies, the classical philosopher cautions, must ‘guard against the beginning of change’. When the Australian Federal Police (AFP) arrived at the home of News Corp journalist Annika Smethurst on a crisp Canberra morning in June 2019, the water was warming. The AFP raids, in relation to a story Smethurst had published about intelligence matters, were swiftly condemned; her employer decried them as a ‘dangerous act of intimidation’. A day later, the AFP executed a search warrant at the ABC’s Sydney headquarters, in response to whistleblower-sourced reporting on the conduct of Australian defence personnel in Afghanistan. More public outrage followed. ABC News executive editor John Lyons asked: ‘Is this the new normal?’ Yet the frog was not jumping. The erosion of government transparency as a result of political action and inaction in distinct but related spheres has led Australian society into hot water. As the

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federal government has overhauled official secrecy laws, failed to provide robust protection for whistleblowers, cracked down on public servant free speech, and frustrated Freedom of Information (FOI) laws, democratic accountability has suffered. Because these wounds have been inflicted by a thousand cuts, abetted by weak constitutional protections and courts unwilling or unable to intervene, the impact has not been fully appreciated. Australians neglected to heed the advice offered by American Founding Father James Madison: ‘It is proper to take alarm at the first experiment on our liberties.’ Having failed to do that, we must now ask: is it too late?

t 6.04 pm on 7 December 2017, Malcolm Turnbull introduced a new bill into the House of Representatives in Canberra. The attention of onlookers was elsewhere – marriage equality had become law minutes before. Journalists wrote frantically about the momentous development; there was an exodus in the public gallery as activists rejoiced. But while the nation celebrated, Turnbull proposed legislation ‘to counter the threat of foreign states exerting improper influence over our system of government’. Hidden within this bill, and barely mentioned in Turnbull’s subsequent remarks, were the most significant revisions to Australia’s official secrecy laws in a century. Reform was needed. The relevant provisions of the federal Crimes Act (1914) had been hurriedly legislated

following the outbreak of World War I; they were draconian and outdated. In 2009 the apolitical Australian Law Reform Commission (ALRC) published Secrecy Laws and Open Government, an exhaustive 642-page report proposing sensible change. The ALRC sought to reconcile the tension between the necessary role of official secrecy in a Whitehall/Westminster system of government and the centrality of transparency and public accountability in a representative democracy. Its proposals, the ALRC argued, struck ‘a fair balance’ between such competing, and compelling, public interests. Rather than adopt these considered suggestions, the bill introduced by Turnbull doubled down on the protection of government information. The proposed changes increased tenfold the maximum term of imprisonment for unauthorised disclosures, adopted expansive definitions, and imperilled whistleblowers and journalists. Civil society pleaded with parliament to amend the draft law. The Human Rights Law Centre condemned the bill as having ‘no place in a healthy democracy’, while Human Rights Watch compared the proposal to measures in ‘repressive countries such as Cambodia and Turkey’. One expert simply described it as ‘creeping Stalinism’. The bill passed in mid-2018, with only minor revision.

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uch laws do not operate in a vacuum. Their full impact on government transparency can only be assessed against a broader context. The ALRC recognised this in its 2009 report, highlighting the role of whistleblower protections as an ‘essential element in an effective system of open government and a necessary complement to secrecy laws’. By their nature, secrecy laws prohibit unauthorised disclosure of information – if robust channels are implemented for authorised disclosure, the risk to public accountability by penalising unauthorised leaks is diminished. Here, too, the government has failed to accept informed, apolitical advice. The concept of whistleblowing has deep roots. The Ancient Greeks celebrated the notion of parrhesia, or fearless speech. The idea that societies should encourage individuals to speak out against wrongdoing has persisted. A seventh-century British king financially incentivised whistleblowing; more than a millennium later, the Civil War-era False Claims Act did much the same in the United States. Despite these origins, the traumas of the twentieth century saw whistleblowers feared rather than lauded. ‘Snitch’, ‘traitor’, and ‘spy’ remain common synonyms. When South Australia enacted the Whistleblower Protections Act in 1993, it became a world leader, one of the first jurisdictions globally to adopt a stand-alone statute to protect and empower public sector whistleblowers. Every other Australian state and territory followed suit, but it was not until 2013 that the federal parliament passed the Public Interest Disclosure Act (PID Act) in a rare display of bipartisanship. Notwithstanding the

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COMMENT

two-decade delay, the PID Act was hailed as a major the importance of gradual changes because our experiadvance for integrity and transparency in public life. The ence teaches us that we needn’t worry much about small new law established proper channels for public servants changes – but unfortunately this trait sometimes leads who wished to blow the whistle on fraud, corruption, us to unwisely ignore a sequence of small changes that maladministration, and misconduct within government. aggregate to a large one.’ It also gave whistleblowers a strong shield against reprisAnother puzzle piece gained attention earlier this als. The authorised channels for disclosure even included year when the High Court ruled against a public servthe press, in certain circumstances. ant who had been terminated for tweeting criticisms of Jubilation at this legislative progress was short- government policy via a pseudonym. Michaela Banerji lived. An independent statutory review in mid-2016 was fired for her political comments in 2013, and subwas scathing; Philip Moss, in his sequently commenced what would review, stated that ‘the experience of become a protracted court battle The only winners are whistleblowers [under the PID Act] against her employer, the Departthose who wish to cloak ment of Immigration. When she is not a happy one’. In September 2017, a joint parliamentary com- government operations in won in the Administrative Appeals mittee observed that ‘whistleblower Tribunal (AAT) in 2018, the Tribua shroud of secrecy protections remain largely theoretinal observed that the termination, cal with little practical effect’. Moss in circumstances where there was articulated thirty-three recommendations for improv- no visible connection between Banerji’s anonymous ing the PID Act. Three years later, not a single one has tweets and her employment, bore ‘a discomforting rebeen implemented. semblance to George Orwell’s thoughtcrime’. Australia’s ineffective protections for prospective Silencing sixteen per cent of the Australian workwhistleblowers matter because they expose the disso- force – approximately the number employed by federal, nance at the heart of harsh new official secrecy laws. In state, and local government – should have caused the a democratic society where public transparency is valued, High Court to pause for thought. Instead, in March robust restrictions on unauthorised disclosure of official 2019 the seven judges unanimously gave the governinformation could only ever be justifiable if authorised ment sweeping authorisation to continue its crackdown channels alleviate the adverse effect of these limitations. on employees who dare to speak out, overturning the Official secrecy is not, in itself, a legitimate end. AAT’s ruling. ‘There can be no doubt,’ the Court held, Secrecy is a justifiable pursuit when it serves a compel- ‘that the maintenance and protection of an apolitical and ling public purpose in a proportionate manner. Other- professional public service’ is consistent with Australia’s wise, the scales should always be weighted towards open- constitution. ness. As Justice Paul Finn of the Federal Court observed Several years ago, the Department of Prime Minister in 2003: ‘The vices of excessive secrecy in the conduct and Cabinet urged public servants to ‘dob in’ their tweetof government, its effect on the quality of public debate ing colleagues, while current guidance from the Ausand, ultimately, on the practice of democracy itself, have tralian Public Service Commission warns against even more recently been both exposed and addressed in this ‘liking’ an anti-government post. Emboldened by the country.’ outcome in Banerji, these efforts will no doubt continue. Perhaps no longer. The federal government has Combined with harsh secrecy laws and ineffective instead put the cart before the horse. By on the one whistleblowing channels, the High Court’s decision in hand threatening whistleblowers (and journalists who Banerji erodes transparency and openness in Australian report their disclosures) with heavy jail sentences, and political life. As Justice Finn said in the only Australian on the other failing to provide official channels for the case to invalidate Banerji-style limitations, ‘it is not possame whistleblowers, the executive has created a chilling sible to divorce official secrecy from public comment by catch-22. The only winners are those who wish to cloak a public servant, as if the two were in unrelated fields of government operations in a shroud of secrecy. discourse.’ Otherwise, our society would risk institutionalising a ‘“dialogue of the deaf ” between those who do hese are two pieces of a broader puzzle. Yet the not know and those who will not or cannot tell’. interrelation between official secrecy, whistleblower protections, and other puzzle pieces has astly, Australia’s FOI regime, an underlying too often been neglected in assessing political developguarantee of transparent government, is being ments. Considering these actions and inactions in isolaroutinely treated with contempt by those it is tion has been a collective cognitive failure. While each intended to hold accountable. The relationship between is individually concerning, the severe cumulative impact the people and the state in Australia changed profoundly on public transparency and government accountability in 1982 with the passage of the Freedom of Information has not been appreciated. As Professor Eugene Volokh Act at federal level. As Gough Whitlam had argued when writes in the Harvard Law Review: ‘We underestimate first proposing such a law a decade earlier, the aim was

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AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW

‘a less secret society, a more open society, a more cooperative society, a better informed and involved society’. In recent years, the law’s noble intentions have been patently ignored. An investigation in January 2019 by The Guardian found that FOI refusals are at record levels, thousands of requests are not being processed within the prescribed timeframe, FOI teams with government departments have shrunk, and the regulator is ‘chronically understaffed’. The Department of Home Affairs, which receives the most FOI requests, has been accused in the Senate of ‘simply ignoring its obligations in law’. A whistleblower indicated that departments are deliberately delaying the release of documents to minimise embarrassment: ‘In the current age it’s all about managing the message, and FOI is just inconvenient.’ Calls for law reform have been ignored, as has the advice of an independent 2013 review by Allan Hawke, which recommended a comprehensive overhaul. All the while, there seems little concern on either side of politics about the impact that wilful hostility to open government has on the quality of Australian democracy. The words of a Senate standing committee, opining on draft FOI legislation in 1979, have long been forgotten. ‘Secrecy in government, where excessive or unnecessary, is in fact destructive of the very foundations of a democratic society,’ the committee warned. This article has highlighted four developments that together represent a grave threat to transparency, and more broadly to press freedom and free speech, in Australia. This list is not exhaustive. A recent parliamentary submission by the Human Rights Law Centre also identified the impact of metadata retention laws, the absence of sufficient safeguards for journalists when warrants are sought, and the ‘maze’ of laws that ‘criminalise some acts of journalism’. A holistic approach to these distinct but related developments is urgently needed. Only then will the true impact be perceptible.

ollowing the raids, News Corp and the ABC commenced proceedings challenging the respective AFP warrants. The Federal Court heard the ABC’s case in October; News Corp will argue its position before the High Court in November 2019. Somewhat ironically, News Corp’s challenge to the constitutional validity of secrecy laws relates to the pre-reform provisions, as the warrant was granted in early 2018, before the amendments passed. Even if the media organisations are successful – and recent free-speech litigation offers little optimism – the degradation of public transparency will not be reversed overnight. Limited judicial victories would neither halt the prosecution of Witness K and his lawyer in the East Timor spying case, nor aid Australian Taxation Office whistleblower Richard Boyle, who faces a 161-year prison sentence. There is no panacea. In response to recent develop-

ments, some have demanded a bill of rights. Australia’s lack of explicit constitutional protections for civil liberties makes us an outlier among liberal democracies. Attorney-General Christian Porter recently instructed the Director of Public Prosecutions not to prosecute journalists for official secrecy offences without his (discretionary) approval; Senator Rex Patrick responded by tweeting: ‘Constitutional change is what’s required to properly protect Australian journalists.’ Enshrined human rights might be a helpful step, although the US experience – with its Bill of Rights – suggests this is only a partial remedy. The US treatment of public sector whistleblowers is patchy, and the First Amendment has been missing in action for several decades of Supreme Court jurisprudence on the speech rights of government employees. Only limited progress has been made since 1892, when Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes quipped: ‘T h e petitioner may have a constitutional right to talk politics, but he has no constitutional right to be a policeman.’ While we await constitutional change (it may be a long wait), Australians should collectively be alert to these creeping, multifaceted threats to our political system. We must all appreciate the bigger picture and resist small intrusions that hinder public accountability. The ongoing parliamentary inquiry into press freedom, due to report in late November 2019, is an important contribution, even if not everyone is so concerned. ‘Is there a crisis around press freedom? No, I don’t think so,’ Home Affairs tsar Mike Pezzullo told the inquiry. Sure, the frog is still alive. Australia remains a robust liberal democracy, receiving ninety-eight points out of one hundred in the latest Freedom House rankings. But that is no reason for complacency in the face of these gradual encroachments. The AFP raids set off alarm bells around the world; a Pakistani television anchor told The Sydney Morning Herald: ‘It freaked me out. It tells you that no one is safe.’ We should never take our rights and freedoms for granted. Justice Finn, while on the Federal Court, observed that: ‘Official secrecy has a necessary and proper province in our system of government. A surfeit of secrecy does not.’ By unquestioningly accepting the former explanation as the government pursues its agenda, we have failed to heed his latter warning. Finn’s words are quoted by News Corp as part of its challenge to the AFP raid. We can only hope the High Court is listening. In Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, Mike Campbell is asked how he went bankrupt. ‘Two ways,’ he quips. ‘Gradually and then suddenly.’ If the current trends continue, Australia will succumb to a surfeit of governmental secrecy, with its corresponding consequences for our civil liberties, slowly and then all at once. And the frog won’t jump. g Kieran Pender is an Australian lawyer and writer based in London. COMMENT

Calibre Essay Prize Worth $7,500 â&#x20AC;˘ Closes 15 Jan 2020 The 2020 Calibre Essay Prize, one of the worldâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s leading prizes for a new non-fiction essay, is now open. The Prize is worth $7,500 and is open to all essayists writing in English. We seek essays of between 2,000 and 5,000 words on any subject and in any genre: personal or political, literary or speculative, traditional or experimental. The judges are J.M. Coetzee, Lisa Gorton and Peter Rose. For information about terms and conditions, frequently asked questions, and past winners, please visit our website: australianbookreview.com.au

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AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW

REVIEW OF THE MONTH

Artist, nomad, epistler Ian Fairweather as an avid sponge

Morag Fraser

IAN FAIRWEATHER: A LIFE IN LETTERS edited by Claire Roberts and John Thompson Text Publishing, $59.99 hb, 600 pp, 9781925355253

rtist, hermit, instinctive communicator, a nomad who built studio nests for himself all over the globe, Ian Fairweather is a consistent paradox – and an enduring one. In an art world of fragile and fluctuating reputations, his work retains the esteem with which it was received – by his peers – when he landed in Australia in 1934 and, with their help, exhibited almost immediately. His way of life – eccentric, solitary, obsessive – was extraordinary then, and continued so until his death in 1974. Success never sanded off his diffident, abrasive edges. When presented with the International Cooperation Art Award in 1973, he mused, in a letter to his niece, Helga (‘Pippa’) Macnamara: And what am I to do–with the beautiful bronze medallion–I have no one to leave it to–you wouldn’t want it … I suppose the Butcher Birds who have been my friends for many years–and driven away all the other birds– whom I should so much prefer–like the Kookaburras– the Laughing Jackass The Spirit of Australia’

All Fairweather’s letters, intimately intertwined with his physical world, read with a stream-of-consciousness fluidity (abrupt dashes for punctuation) that parallels the spontaneity of his art. ‘A master of fluent design full of springing energy and fine colour,’ wrote Bernard Smith in 1962 in Australian Painting, 1788–2000. Small wonder, then, that he continues to intrigue writers and cultural historians as well as art critics, museum directors, and auction houses (his 1963 painting, Barbeque, sold recently at auction for $1.4 million). The editors of Ian Fairweather, Claire Roberts

and John Thompson, credit writer Murray Bail with providing ‘the foundation upon which this volume of letters is based’. Bail’s Ian Fairweather, enlivened by the inclusion of Fairweather’s letters, was published in 1981 and revised, with more letters, as Fairweather in 2009. Roberts and Thompson have cast their research nets very wide, the consequence being that their volume now includes 354 of the known 700 letters written by Fairweather between 1915 and 1974 from multiple locations – a German POW camp, Canada, Shanghai, Melbourne, Mindanao, Peking, Brisbane, Manila, London, and many other ports – until he settled (if that is ever the word with Fairweather) on Bribie Island, off the Queensland coast. In keeping with the contradictions of Fairweather’s life, particularly his apparent alienation from family, the letters project was endorsed by his nephew, Geoffrey Fairweather (the volume’s dedicatee), and had ongoing support from other members of his family. Fairweather himself exemplified throughout his life the strange tribal-domestic familiarity that far-flung members of the Scottish diaspora exhibit: I wrote home on the strength of that Bali picture getting into the Tate–I thought this was something perhaps they’d like–so I wrote–and they’ve been really very nice about–so thank God for the moment I am not at war with my ain folk–that is a rotten state of affairs– (Letter 28, to William ‘Jock’ Frater, from Peking, 1936.)

Fairweather’s ‘ain folk’, as the editors’ perceptive notes indicate (and Fairweather’s letters confirm), REVIEW OF THE MONTH

had much to do with the formation of this complex, driven man. Born the last of nine children to parents who were prosperous servants of the British Raj, Fairweather was brought up by maiden aunts in Scotland. Forty-plus years later, he writes to Pippa: How I wish I could write like Arthur Koestler–his Autobiography ‘Arrow in the Blue’–the right attitude I think–detached analytic–he looks back over his life and tries to see a pattern in it … How much I would like to try that–the things that shaped ones life … the old aunts and sickness that gave me–an unnatural aversion to old age and physical contacts. (Letter 82, to Helga Macnamara, from Bribie Island, 1954.)

The editors’ chronology note is pertinent: ‘Census records him residing in Lewisham with Jane Fairweather, then aged sixty-four …’ When his parents returned from India and settled on Jersey, the island was the first of many Fairweather gravitated towards during his life. And the enclosed, impacted life he first experienced with his aunt was replicated again and again, not least in the POW camp in Friedberg, Germany, where he was frequently held in solitary confinement after failed attempts at escape. The editors point, with admirable discretion – no cod psychology – to the formative experiences of Fairweather’s life. However, they truly have let him ‘speak for himself in print’ in his letters. They have also published (in a hauntingly beautiful book, designed by W.H. Chong) enough of Fairweather’s drawings and paintings and various locales (all well documented) to show just how fully his longing for ‘a pattern in it’ found expression in his work, in that ‘fluent design and springing energy’ that Bernard Smith noted with such approbation. Roberts’s particular interest in Chinese art makes her an appropriate if implicit judge of the way Fairweather incorporated his considerable understanding of Chinese calligraphy. A further fascinating aspect of the book’s structure – letters, deft editorial commentary, photographs, illustrations – lies in its crosshatching way of presenting Fairweather as an avid, inveterate sponge, soaking up the visual and social stimuli of towns, island ports, people, weather, and every culture (including Australian Indigenous culture) he encountered throughout his peripatetic life. The counterbalance comes in the way the letters and notes also record his uninhibited critique of his surrounds. He can be an unreconstructed son of Empire – querulous, arrogant, and impatient. He castigates the Chinese for the flat backs of their heads. They have ‘sinister sub-human eyes’. He hates ‘their’ music. Australia in 1934 is a place of ‘colossal monotony’: oh, the Sundays–the Salvation armies prowl the empty streets–If I stay I will have to work in abstractions–it 14 NOVEMBER 2019

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW

would be too irreverent to represent such wholiness. What is it in Australia that stimulates these multiplications–the sheep–the prickly pears the rabbits … and yet in six long years of wandering it is here for the first time I feel I am not a criminal–trying to make a living by painting. They have been very kind … (Letter 6, to Jim Ede, from Colombo, 1934.)

While profoundly illuminating, the volume is neither a hagiography nor a paean to artistic genius. Prickly, unexpurgated (thank heavens) Fairweather was sometimes paranoid, perpetually anxious, and uncertain, if relentless, about his art. The editors express it this way, offering an insightful connection between state of mind and state of living/working conditions: One disturbing manifestation of Fairweather’s suspicious disposition is his repeated disavowal of authorship of works irrefutably painted by him, and his distrust of the art world generally. Fairweather painted at night in a studio lit only by the soft irregular light of kerosene lamps, making it difficult for him to recognise his own works in photographic and printed form, or on the walls of the Queensland Art Gallery, where in 1965 he saw for the first and only time a large number of paintings from different phases of his life hung, framed and lit in a white cube environment.

Ian Fairweather: A life in letters is not a book to read through at one sitting. The man will drive you mad with his desperate scrabbling for money, his intemperate swivels of mood, his harassing of friends, his sudden shifts of sympathy. But you might also treasure, as I did, his persistent bursts of self-awareness, his minute observations of nature, his honesty – no looking over his shoulder to wonder how posterity will regard him. The book can leave you heartsick at the human tragedy of a life, and exultant at its fulfilment in Fairweather’s works. So read it as a series of door-opening invitations: to explore, for example, Fairweather’s long epistolary friendships, with Jock Frater, with Margaret Olley (‘Miss Olley’), and with Harold Stanley ( Jim) Ede, one-time curator at the Tate, who went on to create Kettle’s Yard in Cambridge, one of the most perfect and moving small museums in the world. Read it as a reminder to revisit Robert Hughes’s criticism (always stimulating) or as a prompt to delve into Donald Friend’s diaries, where Fairweather is reported as being both ‘extremely dirty and smelly’ and ‘a genius’ for his ‘absolute refusal to make any concession at all to the outside world’. The book is a vivid and subtle guide to Australian art in the twentieth century. It is also a profound, idiosyncratic meditation on the nature of art, its exhilarations, the pursuit of its ‘patterns’, and its devastating exactions – in any age. g Morag Fraser is writing a biography of Peter Porter.

Reminiscence over analysis A periphrastic history of a gallerist

Sophie Knezic PRESENT TENSE: ANNA SCHWARTZ GALLERY AND THIRTY-FIVE YEARS OF CONTEMPORARY AUSTRALIAN ART by Doug Hall Black Inc., $59.99 hb, 448 pp, 9781760641702

hen invited by Morr y Schwartz, Anna’s husband and proprietor of Schwartz Publishing, which owns Black Inc., to write an account of the Anna Schwartz Gallery (ASG), Doug Hall initially declined but changed his mind after realising that it would enable him to write with a fresh perspective, having returned to Melbourne after twenty years as director of Queensland Art Gallery. The result, Present Tense: Anna Schwartz Gallery and thirty-five years of contemporary Australian art – which takes its title from the 52nd Venice Biennale (2007), Think with the Senses – Feel with the Mind: Art in the Present Tense, curated by Robert Storr – is a periphrastic straddling of art history, social history, and biography, inclined to reminiscence over analysis. Featuring eighty-nine chapters of varying length, the text mostly provides overviews of the artists represented by ASG, set within a chronicle of Anna Schwartz’s evolution as a gallerist. This broad narration is interspersed with chapters on a few key late-twentiethcentury art dealers – sometimes to narrate artist defections to ASG – as well as state museum redesigns, biennales, and even a chapter on Anna’s wardrobe. Given that the title’s emphasis on the present and its subtitle, the book’s initial focus on colonial Australian art is off-subject, and while the early chapters sketch Anna’s Polish Jewish migrant history, the multiple references to midcentury modernists Albert Tucker and Sidney Nolan and nineteenth-century painters Tom Roberts and Frederick McCubbin (who punctuate later chapters) are extraneous.

Much of the discussion of the artists represented by ASG focuses on their resumés, offering abbreviated exhibition histories that read as reworked artist biographies, interfused with direct quotes by the artists. In his preamble to the text, Hall refers to the extensive interviews he conducted with the artists, yet these are unsourced and undated, which makes it impossible for the reader to situate the artists’ thinking in a broad chronology. The discussions are uneven; a lengthy text appears on the artist Mike Parr, while the chapter on Ian Burns is a single paragraph, and the one on Shane Cotton fewer than a hundred words. There is little substantive critical engagement with artworks, and brief passages that describe an artist’s practice use a fogeyish vernacular. The conceptual sound artist Marco Fusinato, known for high-amplitude noise installations and non-objective line drawings made over twentieth-century experimental music scores, is curiously described by Hall as ‘classicising human form and action’ and applauded for being international rather than provincial. Callum Morton’s sculpture and public art practice, based on modernist architecture, is cast by Hall as having a ‘soft grandeur’ and ‘humanist romanticism’, while a later chapter conflates these descriptors by attributing Daniel Crooks’s videos with a ‘soft romanticism’. Hall’s text often betrays a conservative bias, describing the notoriously hidebound John McDonald as the Sydney Morning Herald’s ‘trouper art critic’ or punctuating the text with his own moralising. His discussion of the postmodernist artist Maria Kozic admits her work’s brashness but leaps to invok-

ABR

Rising Stars We are delighted to name Alex Tighe and Sarah Walker as the ABR Rising Stars for New South Wales and Victoria, respectively. In addition to their previous contributions to ABR, they will each receive a number of paid commissions to advance their journalism.

Alex Tighe

Alex Tighe is a writer, editor, and the ABC/Kidney Health Australia’s inaugural Mark Colvin Scholar.

Sarah Walker

Sarah Walker, a Melbournebased writer, photographer, and fine artist, was runner-up in the 2019 Calibre Essay Prize.

australianbookreview.com.au

ART

ing the artist’s ‘personal humility and reserve’, as if the brazenness of the art needs to be redeemed by the artist’s embodiment of the tropes of femininity. Fiona Hall’s work in the Australian pavilion at the 56th Venice Biennale in 2015 is dismissed as a ‘scatty yet wellcrafted arrangement of the obvious … a reminder that notwithstanding the best of intentions, if you wish to save the planet, be a scientist’. Hall often valorises artists simply by praising their

of discussing the represented artists with any critical acumen or in terms of their correlation to the movements and discourses of international contemporary art. Several of the author’s assertions are contestable; in lauding the early achievements of the Ewing and George Paton galleries (attached to Melbourne University), Hall claims that in recent history it’s difficult to find a similarly innovative institutionally aligned gallery, bluntly disregarding the salient example of the Monash University Museum of Art, currently directed by Charlotte Day and formerly under the helm of Max Delany, now artistic director of the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art. Hall is at his most buoyant when discussing architectural commissions: an Anna Schwartz with Katharina Grosse’s The Horse Trotted Another Couple of Metres, Then It Stopped, Carriageworks and Anna Schwartz Gallery, Sydney (2018) elaborate section on Denton work for not being ‘didactic’, an adjec- Corker Marshall’s design for ASG’s tive used liberally throughout the text. Flinders Lane premises, with a parallel In spite of his advocacy of contem- section devoted to the firm’s redesign porary art, Hall’s pronouncements are of the Schwartz’s Carlton residence often patronising or bombastic. ‘Too (named Zinc House), which segues often a technical command of new me- into a summary of projects by Morry dia overwhelmed works of unoriginality Schwartz’s development company Pan and marginal interest,’ he opines, in loose Urban, featuring commissions by artists reference to contemporary video art; represented by ASG. Hall is attuned to ‘a style council of threadbare content and the vicissitudes of urban development theatricality in unison’, approximating and the relocations of gallery spaces, the arch tones of the American art critic and happily trails into overviews of state Hilton Kramer chastising Bruce Nau- gallery or museum redesigns, including man’s 1973 retrospective at the Whitney ACCA and the NGV, proffering forthMuseum as ‘boring and repugnant’. right opinions on their architectural Hall frequently reiterates Anna’s merit. commitment to supporting abstract and The book mostly reads as a social conceptual art, yet he never develops history, filled with photographs of this into a sustained discussion of the Anna over her lifetime. At times, this art-historical genealogies of geometric mode of history works; the chapter on abstraction, or conceptual or post- the emergence of art magazines in the conceptual art. In spite of taking swipes 1970s and 1980s, which focuses on Paul at ‘provincialism’, he seems incapable Taylor’s Art & Text and glints with a 16 NOVEMBER 2019

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW

sense of the 1980s Zeitgeist. The brief chapter on the artist-run gallery Store 5 – whose founding artists were later represented by ASG – also captures a sense of the era. One particularly engaging anecdote stands out: an exhibition of young Russian artists curated by Anna in her early days at City Gallery. Titled Made in Formani: Current Soviet Avant-Garde Art (1990), the exhibition was nearly derailed by the obstructionist bureaucracy entangling the transport of the artworks out of the Soviet Union. It’s hard to know the publication’s target audience: if for a general readership, this doesn’t subdue Hall’s glee in decrying its philistinism; if for an arteducated audience, the text provides a paucity of critical insight. Unlike other recent publications on consequential Melbourne museums and galleries – When You Think About Art: The Ewing and George Paton Galleries 1971–2008 (2008), edited by Helen Vivian, Kiffy Rubbo: Curating the 1970s (2016), edited by Janine Burke and Helen Hughes, and Pitch Your Own Tent: Art Projects, Store 5, 1st Floor (2005), edited by Max Delany – Present Tense falls noticeably short of comparative standards of arthistorical scholarship. Quite simply, Hall often seems more beguiled by museum architectural commissions and building renovations than by contemporary art, which makes him a flawed choice as the author of what might otherwise have been a rigorous art-historical account of the significance of the artists represented by Melbourne’s pivotal commercial gallery. g

Sophie Knezic is a Lecturer in Critical and Theoretical Studies at the Victorian College of the Arts, The University of Melbourne.

Rustling in the breeze

The glamour and vainglory of Susan Sontag

Paul Kildea SONTAG: HER LIFE by Benjamin Moser

Ecco, $59.99 hb, 832 pp, 9780062896391

am Leith, literary editor of Spectator magazine, recently put author Benjamin Moser on the spot. ‘Do you think her work will last?’ he asked, referring to the writings of Susan Sontag, whose biography Moser had not long finished. ‘And if so, which of it?’ Moser dissembled bravely. ‘Well, I hope so ...’ Yet was it dissembling? Or even brave, for that matter? Sontag’s oeuvre need not survive for Moser’s book – seven years in the making – to be a success, which it undoubtedly is. But, as one instance of monstrous behaviour gives way to another, we are left hoping that the work does survive, that it is forever recognised as a milestone in twentiethcentury intellectual history, that the words exculpate the person. Otherwise, what’s the point? Such a hope ends up being an onerous responsibility for the slim volumes that Sontag released throughout her life. ‘Notes on “Camp” ’, one of her most famous essays (1964), began life as dot points in her journal (she liked her lists) – scribbled down in Paris or New York (though she was not yet a regular at Warhol’s Factory) – and does not always manage to shake off its origins. ‘Faggot taste in interior decoration (bars, Sandy + Mary’s apartment): stripes – black, white, red; painted plates, Indian rugs, modern furniture, blue + pink Picassotype paintings (acrobats, sad youths), coaster for the glasses’: from such flimsy materials Sontag built her house. Yet in book form, Notes on Camp (1966) had real traction, The New York Times Magazine observing that ‘the favorite parlor game of New York’s intellectual set this winter has been to label those things that are Camp and those that are not Camp’. It was much as Nancy Mitford had done in the previous

decade, creating a taxonomy of English language usage against the backdrop of class in the country of her birth – upperclass (U) and middle- or lower-class (Non-U), each category holding on to the vital distinction between scent and perfume, napkin and serviette – and of equally dubious importance. Moser is good at contextualising Sontag’s books, and he doesn’t shy away from her tyrannical moods and the hostage-taking that became more common as the years passed. When, at dinner at Stanford in the 1990s, the inventor of the birth control pill (no less) tells her that he much admired ‘Notes on “Camp”’, Sontag lets loose. ‘How can he say such a dumb thing? ... He is behind the times, intellectually dead. Hasn’t he ever read any of her other works? Doesn’t he keep up?’ The other guests look on in horror, no doubt glad that it was the kindly professor who drew her fire, politely aghast nonetheless. The walk-on characters are fabulous, whether Andy Warhol, Jackie Kennedy, Thomas Mann, or Leonard Bernstein. ‘I’ve done everything I could to become famous’, she told Noël Burch, and the post-Camp fame provided her access to the exclusive nightclubs and restaurants, high tables, and amphetamines. When Stephen Koch asked her how she had found such fame so quickly, she replied: ‘It’s very simple. You find some limb, and you go out on it.’ Some of these limbs were none too sturdy – Sontag in North Vietnam in the early 1960s, trying to come to grips with the dislocation between what she ‘knew’ and what she observed, much like Evelyn Waugh in Abyssinia in 1935, both writers trying to tame the natives. Yet other limbs were magnificent. Illness as Metaphor (1978) is a moving

exploration of the shame felt by people with cancer, of the victim blaming threaded through the language used to describe them and their treatment, Sontag one such patient. (Christopher Hitchens was typically lucid and terse on these matters when he was later undergoing treatment for cancer, though Sontag had gotten there first.) Then in 1989 came AIDS and Its Metaphors, a bitter coda to Illness as Metaphor, in which AIDS has replaced cancer as Western society’s principal stigmatising disease. ‘Plague’, ‘invasion’, ‘defence’, ‘punishment’: these words clung grimly to the disease, helping to define society’s response to the epidemic, so shameful in so many instances. Whatever its merits as a piece of history, AIDS and Its Metaphors was a powerful corrective to those church leaders and politicians who did nothing as thousands died. Camille Paglia – by then Sontag’s foe – was not alone in thinking the book was her attempt at playing catch-up after decades of silence on gay liberation and indeed her own sexuality. Yet this in no way undermines the importance of its argument or its impact on social policy. Some of Sontag’s worst behaviour was directed at her final lover, the photographer Annie Leibovitz. ‘People couldn’t bear to be at dinner when she was with Annie,’ the writer Joan Acocella told Moser, ‘because she was so sadistic, so insulting, so cruel.’ Sontag would scorn her to her face, or describe her to a new friend as the stupidest person he’d likely ever meet. Her son, David Rieff (who authorised this biography), told her more than once that she either had to be nicer to Leibovitz or leave her. Yet Leibovitz came back for more, a victim of Stockholm Syndrome or some such. Nor did she come empty-handed: BIOGRAPHY

in an interview with their accountant, Moser discovered ‘that over the course of their relationship Annie gave Susan at least eight million dollars’. Moser is so diligent, so even-tempered in the face of all the awfulness he must put in print (though occasionally hostage to his voluminous sources). His hope that her work will last is probably in vain: it was so of its time. A more accurate prognosis was published in The Harvard Crimson after the release of her film Brother Carl (1973), Michael H. Levenson writing that Sontag would not be remembered for her books or her movies, but that she nonetheless performed an important function. ‘She is thinking all the time and she rides the crest of every new fashion … When the cultural wind shifts, she rustles in the breeze.’ Indeed. g Paul Kildea’s most recent book is Chopin’s Piano: A journey through Romanticism (Penguin, 2019).

The data of your life

‘All you wanted to do was to read – to take part in that most intensely intimate human act, the joining of minds through language. But that was more than enough. Your natural desire to connect with the world was all the world needed to connect your living, breathing self to a series of globally unique identifiers, such as your email, your phone, and the IP address of your computer. By creating a world-spanning system that tracked these identifiers … the American Intelligence Community gave itself the power to record and store for perpetuity the data of your life … This is the result of two decades of unchecked innovation – the final product of a political and professional class that dreams itself your master. No matter the place, no matter the time, and no matter what you do, your life has now become an open book.’ Edward Snowden, from his memoirs, Permanent Record, published in September 2019. 18 NOVEMBER 2019

‘Cracked wide open’

A second memoir shot through with regret

Jane Cadzow OTHER PEOPLE’S HOUSES by Hilary McPhee

Melbourne University Press, $34.99 pb, 226 pp, 9780522875645

n the spring of 2003, a person from based personal private secretary of Hilary McPhee’s past got in touch Prince El Hassan bin Talal, the uncle with her. McPhee did not remember of King Abdullah II of Jordan. Would the woman’s name but recognised her McPhee go to Amman to discuss writimmediately when they met for coffee. ing an autobiography of the prince? At high school they had played hockey First-class air tickets would be arranged. together for a team called the Colac McPhee was not to discuss any of this Battlers. The woman had been working with anyone. Did she sensibly tell the for years as a personal assistant at a pal- caller she wasn’t interested, thank you ace in Jordan, and her purpose in con- very much? Of course not. It was, she tacting McPhee wasn’t merely to remi- writes, ‘an escape into an adventure that nisce. At one point in their conversation, I could not have resisted’. she lowered her voice, glanced around The prince, her old hockey-playing the busy inner-Melbourne café and said friend’s boss, was the younger brother that McPhee might hear from some- of the late King Hussein. The BBC one in Amman, the Jordanian capital, referred to the prince as ‘the voice of about a writing project. reason from a troubled region’. McPhee This thrillerish scene is the starting had no idea why she had been chosen for point of the second volume of McPhee’s memoirs. In the first, Other People’s Words (2001), McPhee told the story of her early life and her career in publishing, culminating in her co-founding and running the independent publishing house McPhee Gribble. The firm’s financial struggles and eventual buy-out meant the book ended on a rueful note, but McPhee subsequently went on to do other big things, including chairing – and reorganising – the Australia Council for the Arts. By the time of the odd little reunion in the cafe, she had long been a highly respected and influential figure in literary and cultural circles. But she was restless. When her mother died in 2005, McPhee went to stay with a friend in England. One day her phone rang. The caller identified herself as the LondonHilary McPhee (Melbourne University Press)

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW

the job, nor what, exactly, was expected of her. But after her first visit to the royal compound in Amman, she was charmed and intrigued, and agreed to return. Back in Australia, her husband – the writer Don Watson – broke to her that he wanted to end their marriage. A few weeks later, McPhee flew to Amman ‘as if to another planet’. McPhee’s first memoir was as much about the Australian publishing industry as about her. After a lively description of her girlhood, details of her personal life were scant, and she slipped them in casually, as if they were peripheral to the story. ‘I left Australia in 1965 with a painter who was also a classical guitarist,’ she wrote. ‘We’d been married a few months before …’ Later she mentioned, almost in passing, that after she returned to Melbourne and went to work at Penguin Books, she and her two young children moved in with Penguin’s general manager, John Michie. Later still, she noted briefly the unravelling of her marriage to Michie and reported that she fell in love with Watson. I finished the book full of admiration for McPhee’s achievements and delighted by her turn of phrase – she is a sharp, incisive writer – but feeling that I hadn’t really got to know her. The new volume has a completely different tone. In part, it is a vivid account of the more than two years she spent in Jordan, interviewing the prince with recorder and notebook in hand, then struggling to put together his book while contending with palace politics and a never fully explained brief. But at heart, Other People’s Houses is an exercise in introspection. McPhee is as always an acute observer, interested in everything that is happening around her, particularly in this case the turmoil in the Middle East. But the central subject here is McPhee herself. She tells us that on the first anniversary of her mother’s death she wrote in her diary: ‘I am motherless, fatherless, husbandless, cracked wide open.’ When she made that entry, she adds, ‘I felt something like wild joy beneath the pain.’ She had never felt so alone, nor so vulnerable. On one of her trips home to Melbourne, her doctor sent her for mammograms, then surgery. When

eventually she went back to Amman after a course of radiotherapy, she was advised by her old hockey-playing friend to avoid mentioning cancer because the word carried such stigma. McPhee completely understood. To her, the diagnosis felt like a cause for shame, just as did being left by her husband. In her mind, she had somehow brought it all upon herself. Only after she returned to Australia at the end of the assignment and started picking up the pieces of her old existence did she begin to recover her oomph. McPhee hasn’t lost her ability to obfuscate. For some reason, the friend who gave her a ukulele to take to Jordan is not identified as the writer Helen Garner. More significantly – and to me, bizarrely – she doesn’t name Watson in this book, referring to him only as ‘my husband’. But it is clear that, at this point in her life, she is in the mood to do some reckoning. She writes that, post-Jordan, she reconnected with Diana Gribble, the once bosom buddy with whom she created the publishing house. The two had always avoided talking about the traumatic end of McPhee Gribble, but once they started they couldn’t stop. For months they met once a week at different cafés: ‘Two women in their late sixties, weeping and raging and clutching each other’s hands before staggering out into the daylight, white-faced in dark glasses.’ What a fabulous image. McPhee’s book, though shot through with regret, is a kind of triumph. g

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MEMOIR

The last bulwark James Antoniou ON DRUGS

by Chris Fleming

Giramondo $29.95 pb, 222 pp, 9781925818048

iterature inspired by drugs tends to swing between extremes. On the one hand, drugs are the very doors of perception, gateways to Xanadu; on the other, they are a source of grim addictions, lotus plants that tempt one into indefinite living sleep. In recent decades there have been the highs of William S. Burroughs, Tom Wolfe, Hunter S. Thompson, and Irvine Welsh, but rarer are those memoirists with experiences of addiction and philosophy who can reflect on the subject in the tradition of Thomas De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (1821). Well, cue Chris Fleming’s On Drugs. Fleming is a philosopher at Western Sydney University who developed a serious and life-threatening addiction to drugs during his twenties. As his options in life narrowed, drug addiction ‘became the last bulwark against nihilism’. ‘As agonising as unmet needs can feel,’ he writes with a painful clarity, ‘there is still something life-affirming in wanting something, anything at all.’ Drugs could both addle and stimulate his mind; he wrote most of his honours thesis ‘while stoned’ and obtained a score of ninety-five per cent, which led him to the unfortunate surmise that ‘pot might offer an almost unethical advantage in intellectual creation, an analogue to steroids in sport’. His self-examination is cool-eyed, sensitive, and granular. The memoir 20 NOVEMBER 2019

overall is cerebral, non-linear, and avoids self-dramatisation, but it is enlivened by many vivid anecdotes. At one point, Fleming is chased by a bull while searching for mushrooms; at another, the need to cover up an addiction to Nurofen Plus leads him to visit multiple pharmacies a day, part of an intricate routine. He even scores some drugs while his first child is being born, and he often sees ‘the landscape [around him] in terms of deals and dealer-friendly architecture’. These are memorable reminders that the source of an addiction is normally just one thread in a complex web of symbols and narratives binding the addict. Fleming is an incisive cultural critic. He ponders ‘to what extent pharmaceutical companies rely on drug addicts in the same way that poker-machine companies rely on problem gamblers’ – a question that has, controversially, come to the fore recently in the Democratic Party primaries in the United States. The most moving parts of the book are the most personal. Early on, he tenderly and humorously describes his childhood in a Catholic family. Unconvinced by ‘hippy Jesus’, he writes, ‘To me, at least, Catholicism … was mostly about smelling, touching, eating and drinking things’ and that ‘the Eucharist was like some metaphysical endurance biscuit’. Both the Eucharist and the Rolling Stones valorise inhalation and intoxication in Fleming’s young mind, while his OCD at the time is also evoked in painstaking detail. Drugs come to symbolise both transmutation and self-apotheosis, and an initial flirtation with alcohol leads him to try pot as if in ‘some grand tradition of rebellion which imposed on [him] no cost whatsoever’. He writes that ‘cannabis produced what modern art tried to do – a defamiliarisation of so-called “consensus reality”, making what was natural appear alien’. Pot then opens the gates to the likes of acid. In a passage that could have been lifted from De Quincey, Fleming states that when on acid: A stray look, cough, laugh, fart or sneeze risks summoning a chaotic and uncontrollable flux of sensations, thoughts and

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW

feelings, and with these, the risk that the whole perceptual system, already delicately balanced, will somehow tip over and new, unruly worlds will explode in the mind of the tripper …

For Fleming, the appeal of drugs is mostly intellectual. ‘Drugs weren’t a matter for me … of “dropping out”,’ he writes, ‘I wasn’t trying to get out of it, but into it.’ As a student, he is captivated by the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis – that language is constitutive rather than descriptive of thought – and says that ‘drugs … animated the intellectual possibilities’ of that hypothesis. But he is also candid about his own struggle to coordinate his feelings and his intellect, avoiding what David Foster Wallace calls ‘a compulsive and unhealthy relationship to [his] own thinking’. He writes sensitively about other people, too, which bodes well for any future books he may write. In one chapter, he describes an old friend known as ‘C’, who has been hospitalised after a suicide attempt; their final encounter is especially fraught and affecting. Narrative sometimes gives way to extended meditations, not all of which are as readable as the stories he tells. But the conclusions are satisfying and hard-won, and should be valuable to many people who suffer from addiction. He says that: ‘Addictions, at the base, are mostly just maladaptive, compulsive attempts to block desperate feelings, which end up casting bigger and nastier shadows than any of those feelings might have done by themselves.’ These insights are justified by the absence of sentiment or self-pity, in prose that can be aphoristic and even veer towards insouciance but that never lack rigour or focus. On Drugs is anything but a comfortable read, but it is vital and, for those who brave it, a rewarding experience. While the depths of addiction are conveyed precisely and unsparingly, the voice is so sober and awake that it really does offer hope that addiction – of any kind – can be overcome, and something made of it. g James Antoniou is a Melbourne-based critic. ❖

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ENVIRONMENT

COMMENT

A lyric future

Enabling the Sydney Opera House to fulfil its potential

by Lyndon Terracini

he recent speech by young Swedish climate-change activist Greta Thunberg has provoked much comment and controversy. It also caused me to ponder the future of our planet and how our cultural lives will be affected by the environmental changes that will inevitably take place by the middle of the twenty-first century. In 2006, when I was Artistic Director and CEO of the Brisbane Festival, I invited Mikhail Gorbachev, former president of the USSR, and a number of international scientists and thinkers to a World Forum in Brisbane. Called Earth Dialogues, it was directed towards sustainable development, climate change, and resource management. We conducted the Forum in association with Green Cross International, of which Gorbachev was president. And I must say Anna Bligh, who was treasurer of Queensland at the time, ensured there was enough money to support the project, and without this it would never have happened. Earth Dialogues, held long before these issues became fashionable, was an extraordinary event. The Brisbane City Hall was packed, and the Forum generated tremendous enthusiasm and goodwill. The state government and the Brisbane City Council contributed to setting up a branch of Green Cross International in Brisbane, and there were great expectations for change. Unfortunately, this momentum dissipated over time and little was done. Thirteen years later, there seems to be a genuine wish for change to be accelerated. Thunberg’s speech leads me to contemplate a future scenario for our cultural life in Sydney and Australia as a result of the changes to our lives that will inevitably take place because of the effects of resource management, sustainable development, and the climate crisis. The recent changes to our public transport system, with the reintroduction of trams, point to the inevitability of inner Sydney becoming a car and bus-free zone. That could only be a good thing. The centres of most major cities in the world are free of cars and buses and are consequently healthier, cleaner, more efficient, and far more attractive. With the current work in Sydney on the reintroduction of a tram or light rail system, I find it odd that, unlike most other major opera houses around the world, no underground railway station is being planned for the Sydney Opera House (SOH). Ultimately, there will be no cars or buses in the Circular Quay and Opera House areas. Car parks will thus become redundant. The most obvious redundancy will be the one beneath the forecourt of the SOH. Needless to say, that car park was not part of Jørn Utzon’s original design, so the 22 NOVEMBER 2019

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heritage argument for its preservation is not valid. So let’s consider this. If the car park were to be removed and replaced with a state-of-the-art lyric theatre, Sydney and Australia would have not only one of the great opera houses of the world on the outside, but also on the inside. This new lyric theatre could be built without disturbing the exterior of the SOH, for the existing car park is large enough to accommodate a 2,000-seat theatre. The public would enter the main entrance of the SOH and then take an escalator or an elevator down to the new theatre. A subway stop at the Sydney Opera House would be the obvious solution to transport audiences to and from another train station or to a car park outside the CBD. It is clear that Sydney urgently needs at least one other major theatre. The Joan Sutherland Theatre, despite the ongoing renovations, is not a twenty-first-century opera theatre. The orchestra pit is too small and the wing space facilities make it virtually impossible to present works of scale. As we all know, according to Utzon’s original design, this theatre was never intended to be an opera theatre. Globally, there is now a genuine desire to protect the health of our planet. Creating a genuine opera theatre as part of the SOH by removing the car parking station would be a responsible action towards preserving our future culturally and environmentally. In recent days, one of the world’s leading directors refused Opera Australia’s offer of a new production in Sydney because the Joan Sutherland Theatre is not equipped to stage a large production. As a consequence, we will now stage this production in another Australian city before it transfers to the Metropolitan Opera in New York. Opera Australia has tripled its turnover since 2011 to $145 million in 2020. During that time OA has also tripled the size of its audience. The world’s greatest singers and conductors regularly perform with OA, which has become one of the world’s major opera companies. But the extraordinary opera houses recently built in China, for example, are far superior to the Joan Sutherland Theatre and are capable of staging the largest opera and theatre presentations in the world. The Sydney Opera House is a magnificent work in progress, but for it to fulfil its potential it is essential that a 2,000-seat lyric theatre replaces the car park beneath the forecourt. Only then will the greatest opera house in the world be in Sydney. g Lyndon Terracini is the Artistic Director of Opera Australia. ❖

The third force

Internecine warfare in the Greens

James Walter INSIDE THE GREENS: THE ORIGINS AND FUTURE OF THE PARTY, THE PEOPLE AND THE POLITICS by Paddy Manning Black Inc., $34.99 pb, 540 pp, 9781863959520

n 2016 John Kaye was dying. Once leader of the Greens in New South Wales, he had a final message for his party. ‘This isn’t and never has been about changing government … This is about changing what people expect from government.’ In our era, dogged by chronic distrust of parties and government, it might have served as a rallying cry for people to transform politics by demanding more of their representatives. But Kaye was a man of the left, and in the context of an impending election, as the Greens descended into vicious factional brawls over preselection for his seat, his words unleashed a storm of controversy over the direction of the party. This is just one among many eruptions of internecine warfare over the purpose of the Greens chronicled in Paddy Manning’s comprehensive history. The survival of the party since 1992, despite the elaboration of a program, and despite its professed commitment to consensual democratic processes, has depended on its leaders: the iconic Bob Brown, then Christine Milne, and lately Richard Di Natale. Leader-centrism has contained but not ameliorated deep-seated divisions in the Greens. The disputes are between the left and progressive liberals over anti-capitalism, post-materialism, or reform; the party as one of protest or of policy; a change agent provoking parties of government to improve or itself a contender for government – and how ecological responsibility figures in all of this. That battles over fundamental purpose have never been resolved begs a bigger question: what has been gained and what has been lost by translating

an effective protest organisation and a burgeoning social movement into a conventional political party? Manning has given us the means to address this question in a readable narrative of extraordinary detail. Sympathetic to the Greens’ cause and convinced of its parliamentary mission, he makes a persuasive case for the party’s achievements. Yet he is not blind to its failure to achieve the cleaner politics it preaches, citing hit-and-miss preselection procedures, dispute resolution fiascos, toxic feuds, and resistance to grass-roots engagement in referenda or the selection of the party leader. His tacit agenda is to teach us, and to remind the party, of what is to be valued in, and what needs to be improved by, the Greens. Most of this – the bulk of the book – is achieved through a lengthy and fairminded history: among the best we have of a political party. Antecedents – parliamentary engagement alongside public protest – are traced back to the early 1970s and 1980s. Some threads go back to ‘Green bans’ and to precursor ‘third force’ parties – the Democrats and the Australia Party – but more fundamental were activist groups such as the United Tasmania Group, the Nuclear Disarmament Party (in Western Australia) and its landmark campaigns to save Lake Pedder and the Franklin River, and against logging, pulp mills, and nuclear weapons. Here is where early stars – Bob Brown, Jo Vallentine, Christine Milne – gained public profile and eventually electoral success in state and federal parliaments. At the same time, the Greens incursion into local government began.

In 1992, the party proper was inaugurated. By now Saint Bob was uncontested as the national face of the Greens. He would remain its personification until his retirement in 2012. In the half century since the 1970s, as Manning details, the Greens have had a significant presence in local, state, and federal government, influenced a raft of policy changes, stopped some of the more egregious instances of environmental destruction, and vigorously advanced the progressive cause in debates on wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, marriage equality, banking chicanery, and asylum seekers, among others. Above all, the party has survived longer than any of its precursor third-force parties. Yet it was survival against the odds – against the Coalition–Labor ‘cartel’, the well-documented ‘Greenhouse mafia’, the hyper-partisan warfare of the Murdoch media, and not least its own unwieldy structure of loosely unified and disputatious state parties, and the increasingly fractious factions within them. In managing this, Brown and subsequent leaders circumvented the party’s professed commitment to bottom-up, grass-roots engagement by secretive confrontation with troublesome dissidents, closed-door decision-making, and deals that were unveiled as a fait accompli (especially when it came to leadership succession). Manning shows us all of this, but then, in the most thought-provoking section of the book, he turns from history to what needs to be done now. In four final chapters, he addresses the future, recapitulating what matters, what has gone right and wrong, and how to realise the four pillars of the party’s POLITICS

platform commitment to confronting the climate emergency, tackling inequality, pursuing peace, and cleaning up democracy. It is a compelling demonstration of how sensible policy elaboration might ripple out from a party with protest in its genes and climate sensibility at its core. I would like to believe it, but here is the rub. Reputable research, by the CSIRO among others, has shown for some years that the climate crisis is a serious concern for a majority of voters. Between sixty and seventy per cent of voters consistently acknowledge their anxiety over climate change, but the Greens vote remains stubbornly stuck around ten per cent. The punters are worried, but the Greens are not widely seen as the solution. Political parties, including the Greens, have failed voters on this front. The Coalition record is the most egregious, but Labor, too, has failed to carry through, and the Greens have had a part in it. The Greens cavilling over the Rudd government’s admittedly compromised Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme

sank it and contributed to the downfall of Kevin Rudd. Its subsequent support for Julia Gillard’s Clean Energy Future package was too late: there was no time for this ‘better’ scheme to bed down and win community support and acceptance against the rampant opposition of Tony Abbott and the Coalition. Manning makes the best of this, accepting the Greens’ arguments that the CPRS was too dreadful to contemplate. Yet rereading the late Philip Chubb’s critical case study of climate policy under Labor (Power Failure, 2014) and his analysis there of why the CEF was better than the CPRS, though the Green’s failure to support the former was still a catastrophic own goal, it is hard to be convinced. It is here that what has been lost by the Greens’ entry into parliamentary politics and policy negotiation becomes pertinent. Allowing climate change to compete in the policy domain with every other problem leaves voters, no matter how concerned, open to arguments that it needs to be ‘balanced’ against other threats, to security and viable economies, for example. And

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this in the face of economists and the security services warning that economies and security will collapse if global heating remains unchecked. One need not agree entirely with Naomi Klein’s defenestration of capitalism to accept her proposition that climate heating ‘changes everything’ (This Changes Everything, 2014). In short, climate change is not merely one policy problem among many, it governs everything else. Manning makes a clear case for how the ecological pillar can inform other elements of Greens policy determination. But is the problem that the parliamentarist route has eroded the Greens social movement imperative: to make clear that the challenge is universal and paramount? This is a fine book, but it does not go far enough. Read it and see if you agree. g James Walter is emeritus professor of politics at Monash University. His latest book is The Pivot of Power: Australian prime ministers and political leadership 1949–2016 (with Paul Strangio and Paul ‘t Hart, 2017).

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‘Etched into my heart, very, very deep’

An important biography of David Ben-Gurion

Ilana Snyder A STATE AT ANY COST: THE LIFE OF DAVID BEN-GURION by Tom Segev, translated by Haim Watzman Head of Zeus, $49.99 hb, 804 pp, 9781789544626

n Israel’s recent election, Benjamin Netanyahu desperately defended his position as Israel’s prime minister, but perhaps also as a free man, because he may soon face trial for corruption charges. As Israelis learn more about his lavish life style, many yearn for the days of David Ben-Gurion (1886–1973), whom they recall as an ascetic statesman of vision and integrity. Netanyahu is seen as the opposite of Ben-Gurion. So mused Israeli historian and journalist Tom Segev, author of this important biography of Israel’s first prime minister, in Haaretz newspaper. But, he added, Netanyahu has in many ways followed in Ben-Gurion’s footsteps, especially in his view that Israel’s conflict with the Palestinians can at best be managed, not solved. In A State at Any Cost, Segev establishes that, from the beginning, BenGurion saw no solution to the difficulty of relations between Jews and Arabs. As early as 1919, he knew that peace was not possible: ‘We want Palestine to be ours as a nation ... The Arabs want it to be theirs … I don’t know what Arab would agree to Palestine belonging to the Jews.’ Ben-Gurion believed that Arab–Israeli enmity was a permanent condition. To manage it, Israel’s major

task was to convince its Arab neighbours that the Jewish state was indestructible, notably by building up its military force and bringing to Israel as many Jews as possible. When war came in 1948, BenGurion hoped for a state containing as few Arabs as possible. If they fled, fine; if they had to be expelled, so be it. Segev includes two stories that Ben-Gurion often told to indicate that there was no basis for an agreement with the Arabs. The first was the murder of a Jewish farmer before his eyes at Sejera in 1909. The second was shortly before his expulsion from Palestine by the Turks in 1915. When Ben-Gurion ran into one of his university classmates and told him that he was to be expelled, the young man responded that as his friend he was sorry for him, but as an Arab nationalist he was very happy: ‘That was the first time in my life that I heard an honest answer from an Arab intellectual,’ he said many years later. ‘It was etched into my heart, very, very deep.’ As one of Israel’s ‘new historians’, whose work has stripped away the mythology surrounding the birth of the state of Israel, Segev argues that the Zionists always knew they were dealing with a national movement. The hope of emptying Palestine of its Arab inhab-

itants had been part of the Zionist discourse from its first days in the late nineteenth century. Its earliest incarnation appears in the diary of the father of Zionism, Theodor Herzl: ‘We shall try to spirit the penniless populations across the border by procuring employment for them in the transit countries, while denying them employment in our own country.’ Drawing on Ben-Gurion’s prolific writings, historical archives, and previously undisclosed archival material, Segev documents the life of Israel’s most iconic and controversial leader who spurred others to join him in his relentless pursuit of a state of Israel. Both admired and vilified, Ben-Gurion emerges as an enigmatic man of contradictions. He was self-centred, humourless, obsessive, an unfaithful husband, an indifferent parent, and often ruthless in pursuing his political goals, one of which was total power over the Zionist movement. Ben-Gurion was deeply moved by his people’s suffering but incapable of showing it. He had trouble reconciling the expulsion of the Arabs with the humanist values he claimed to live by. However, he was at peace with the fact that between five and six hundred thousand Arabs had been

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BIOGRAPHY

displaced: this was the price of Jewish independence. Originally published in Hebrew and translated well by Haim Watzman, the book begins with Ben-Gurion’s early life in the small town of Płońsk in tsarist Poland, through his emigration to Palestine, to leading the labour movement and organising trade unions, to his leadership role in the founding of the state of Israel in 1948, through the austerity and conflict of the first two decades of statehood – including the 1967 war, which left him worried about increasing the number of Arab refugees – up until his death shortly after the devastation of the Yom Kippur War in 1973. A voracious autodidact, Ben-Gurion read his way to expertise on subjects ranging from Jewish history, ancient languages, and philosophy to modern science and economics. A lingering image from the book is of Ben-Gurion, on the eve of Gamal Abdel Nasser’s move to nationalise the Suez Canal in 1956, poring over Plato’s position that rulers are permitted to lie in the service of their people. But Ben-Gurion also consulted with a fortune teller, claimed to have seen a UFO, and, in search of pain relief for his chronic lumbago, became an early adopter of the mind–body exercise techniques of Moshé Feldenkrais. He even visited Burma seeking serenity with Buddhism. During the thirty years preceding the foundation of the state, Ben-Gurion played a decisive role in moving the Zionist project forward and in establishing the political, military, social, economic, and cultural infrastructures that made it possible to establish a Jewish state as soon as the British left. Except for a brief period in 1954–55, Ben-Gurion was prime minister from 1948 to 1963. He oversaw the arrival of hundreds of thousands of Jews from around the world, many from Arab countries, whose lives were threatened once the state of Israel was created, and many who had survived the Holocaust. He championed a controversial reparations agreement with West Germany for Hitler’s murder of six million Jews in the Holocaust. This saved Israel’s economy in the early fifties. 26 NOVEMBER 2019

Despite international pressure and internal opposition, he established the country’s nuclear program. Segev observes that since the beginning of the twentieth century, tens of millions of humans have been murdered or turned into refugees after being expelled from their homes. But the tragedy the world has never ceased talking about is that of the Palestinian Arabs. The only explanation Segev offers is that it’s because people on every continent have displayed a special sensitivity in regard to everything that happens in the Holy Land. Further serious discussion of this perplexing phenomenon is warranted. The book’s central argument is captured in its apt title – a state at any cost. Ben-Gurion was willing to pay

any price to realise the Zionist vision; at the same time, he was prepared to make tactical concessions and pragmatic compromises. Segev has said that together his books comprise a collective biography of Israel. This book makes an excellent contribution to the enterprise. It is a meticulously researched critical biography of Israel’s visionary founding father, but it’s also a critical history of the Zionist project that resulted in the creation of Israel as an independent and sovereign state and the concomitant tragedy of the Arab refugees. g Ilana Snyder is President of the New Israel Fund Australia and an emeritus professor in the Faculty of Education, Monash University.

The Money Power

Perfidy and greed in Australia’s financial sector

Ben Huf

ank bashing is an old sport in Australia, older than Federation. In 1910, when Labor became the first party to form a majority government in the new Commonwealth Parliament,they took the Money Power – banks, insurers, financiers – as their arch nemesis. With memories of the 1890s crisis of banking collapses, great strikes, and class conflict still raw, the following year the Fisher government established the Commonwealth Bank of Australia, ‘The People’s Bank’, as a stateowned trading bank offering cheap loans and government-guaranteed deposits to provide stiff competition to the greedy commercial banks gouging its customers. A century on and Labor’s hostility towards the banks may have significantly eased but public animosity has not. Australia’s big banks enjoyed a moment of glory navigating the most recent financial crisis of 2008–09, celebrated as Australia’s ‘first line of defence’ against the Global Financial Crisis (GFC). A decade later and that reputation, despite the AA ratings and the

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW

soppy television commercials, has been trashed. For good reason, too. At least seventy-six good reasons, according to Royal Commissioner Kenneth Hayne. Hayne’s year-long Royal Commission into Misconduct in the Banking, Superannuation and Financial Services Industry – completed in February 2019 – has made public a decade of fraud, forgery, and criminality in Australia’s financial sector that has cost thousands of people their livelihood and wellbeing. Fees charged to customers receiving no service, even to the accounts of the dead. Insurance, mortgages, and credit cards aggressively sold to the vulnerable and those unable to afford it. Drought-stricken farmers hit with hefty penalties for defaulting on their loans. Billions sucked out of retirement savings in fees by bank-run super funds. All this, and more, as the banks recorded annual profits of $5 to $10 billion. CBA’s centrality in these scandals, thirty years after privatisation, speaks volumes about the rot that has set in.

Royal Commissions are often cynically dismissed as stalling devices of government. Despite some highprofile sackings and pending class actions, this may ultimately prove true of this inquiry, too. Yet the Hayne Royal Commission captured the imagination. From the government’s initial politicking against the inquiry – Scott Morrison called it populist hubris, John Howard ‘rank socialism’ – through to a desperately grinning Josh Frydenberg receiving the final report from a frowning, handshake-refusing Hayne, it was national theatre. Public enmity fed not only on the harrowing revelations, but a national mood darkened by wage stagnation, growing inequality, and everdeepening distrust of once-venerated institutions. Several journalists who helped convey this Zeitgeist have now penned longer reflections that attempt to make sense of the banks’ descent.

here to begin this story? The Royal Commission’s terms of reference limited the inquiry to misconduct since 2008. Yet, as Adele Ferguson makes clear in Banking Bad (ABC Books, $34.99 pb, 405 pp, 97807333340116), to assume bad banking has resulted from complacency that set in after the GFC, or from the handiwork of a few ‘bad apples’ – two narratives bankers liked to pedal through the Royal Commission – is to suffer a convenient bout of amnesia. Ferguson rightly begins her account much earlier, with the deregulatory shifts enacted by the Hawke government in the early 1980s. The Australian dollar was floated, capital controls abolished, and banking licences opened to foreign firms. The imperatives that motivated these changes, including persistent stagflation and the global dismantling of the Bretton Woods system, are not mentioned, but Ferguson does provide sufficient context for understanding a dramatic alteration in banking practice. Financial deregulation enhanced prosperity by making credit more accessible and helped Australia withstand global shocks. It came at a cost. From the mid-1980s, Australian banks sought novel methods to build market share, selling controversial foreign-currency

loans that carried lower repayment rates but exposed borrowers to international currency fluctuations. Sold a dream, many farmers and business were ruined. Aggressive business lending helped induce the 1990–91 recession, which resulted in the privatisation of CBA and the implementation of the Four Pillars policy in the 1990s, prohibiting CBA, ANZ, NAB, and Westpac from merging. These policies were intended to secure competition. They created four financial behemoths. Through the 1990s, the big four swallowed up smaller competitors, innovated new financial products, which they sold through US-styled marketing tactics, and placed commission-based advisers in their branches. Staff were set sales targets that were dutifully enforced by executives whose remuneration packages were tied to increasing shareholder value. A CBA manager at Goulburn, for example, was told to sell 150 loans a week, in a community with only 10,000 income-earning adults. The banks then embarked on strategies of vertical integration, acquiring wealthmanagement firms and expanding into insurance and the newly created superannuation scheme, completing what Ferguson describes as the banks’ rapid transmogrification ‘from service providers to sellers of products’. The Money Power attained unprecedented reach and influence. Ferguson has built a stellar career exposing the consequences of these transformations. Much of Banking Bad recounts scandals covered by Ferguson since the late-2000s. She revisits the fraudulent behaviour of CBA financial adviser ‘Dodgy’ Don Nguyen, the antagonist of her award-winning 2014 Four Corners story, who was rewarded with extraordinary sums for pushing products and risky portfolios on to unknowing clients. She also recalls the complacent practices of ANZ-backed Timbercorp that cost modest investors millions, the NAB’s predatory lending to customers that could never repay, as well as CBA’s horrendous treatment of life-insurance clients, using outdated medical definitions to deny cancer patients their claims. Ferguson’s reportage revealed that

seemingly isolated incidents stemmed from structural practices. Each exposé encouraged more whistleblowers and victims to come forward. In alliance with Nationals Senator John ‘Wacka’ Williams – himself a farming victim of the foreign-currency loans scandal – momentum built towards a Royal Commission. Ferguson compassionately shares victim’s stories, including not just the loss of homes and farms but relationship breakdowns and suicide. She lauds courageous whistleblowers, many of whom were subjected to smear campaigns by their former employers. The grudging announcement of a Royal Commission in November 2017 marked a triumph for Ferguson, the whistleblowers, and the victims. However, in outlining the inquiry’s proceedings through the book’s second half, Ferguson repeatedly expresses disappointment at the range of topics the Commission either hurried through or entirely overlooked. Granted a year, the Commissioner chose to examine only twenty-seven ‘representative’ case studies from thousands of submissions of wrongdoing.

ichael Roddan’s The People vs the Banks (Melbourne University Press, $34.99 pb, 352 pp, 9780522875188) traverses much of the same terrain, addressing the Royal Commission and its back stories thematically rather than chronologically. This approach enables Roddan, a journalist with The Australian, to disentangle the political and corporate subplots that fed into the Royal Commission. He unpacks with skill and clarity how banks and financial-service providers systematically exploited agribusiness, superannuation, and Indigenous peoples in remote communities. Roddan’s best chapters are those that step back from the Royal Commission and examine how bad banking has impacted the Australian economy more generally, especially the housing market. He shows how banks have preyed upon the RBA’s decade of rate cuts, which successive governments have relied upon to stimulate economic growth against a dwindling mining boom. Lowering rates has also triggered FINANCE

near-identical declines in the interest paid on deposits and government bonds. Egged on by lucrative tax arrangements, investors seeking higher yields (many for retirement) have been increasingly pushed into property investment. As the Royal Commission highlighted, those doing the pushing have been ‘independent’ financial advisers and mortgage brokers paid trailing commissions by the banks to sell their loan products, especially notorious interestonly loans. By 2016, reports Roddan, one in every two mortgage approvals was for a landlord. Housing prices have ballooned under such conditions, as lax lending and over-leveraged investors pumped up one of the riskiest housing bubbles in the world, locking out of the market a generation of first homebuyers in the process. All this makes for sombre reading. Yet at times the Commission played out like a dark comedy, as a parade of executives bumbled and deadpanned their way through questionings. Ferguson likened the performance of Jack Regan, head of finance at AMP, to a Monty Python sketch. Unable to explain why he had issued an ‘unreserved’ apology on behalf of his firm, he had to be walked through the twenty-one times his department had blatantly lied to ASIC.

t is such absurdity that Daniel Ziffer repeatedly captures in his aptly titled A Wunch of Bankers: A year in the

MONASH UNIVERSITY PUBLISHING LAND, PEOPLE, HISTORY

Richard Broome, Charles Fahey, Andrea Gaynor and Katie Holmes

MALLEE COUNTRY tells the compelling history of mallee lands and people across southern Australia from Deep Time to the present. Carefully shaped and managed by Aboriginal people for over 50,000 years, mallee country was dramatically transformed by settlers, first with sheep and rabbits, then by flattening and burning the mallee to make way for wheat. Government-backed settlement schemes devastated lives and country, but farmers learnt how to survive the droughts, dust storms, mice, locusts and salinity — as well as the vagaries of international markets — and became some of Australia’s most resilient agriculturalists. In mallee country, innovation and tenacity have been neighbours to hardship and failure. Mallee Country reveals how land and people shape each other. It explains how a landscape once derided by settlers as a ‘howling wilderness’ covered in ‘dismal scrub’ became home to people who delighted in mallee fauna and flora and fought to conserve it for future generations. It is the story of the dreams, sweat and sorrows of people who face an uncertain future of depopulation and climate change with creativity and hope.

www.publishing.monash.edu Distributed by

ISBN 978-1-925523-12-6

9 781925 523126 > www.publishing.monash.edu

28 NOVEMBER 2019

BROOME FAHEY GAYNOR HOLMES

MONASH UNIVERSITY PUBLISHING

uch revelations have prompted renowned business commentator Alan Kohler to offer lucid advice

on how to negotiate the finance industry in It’s Your Money: How banking went rogue, where it is now and how to protect and grow your money (Nero, $34.99 pb, 289 pp, 9871760641016). Kohler offers an eminently readable account of where the banks went wrong in a swift fiftypage summary – much of it mirroring Ferguson’s story – before decoding financial jargon and processes for the honest punter. Not for the first time, he cautions special care with superannuation, regretting Paul Keating’s initial failure to properly regulate the system. These books differ in their conclusions as well as emphases. Where Roddan is relatively lenient on the regulators, ASIC and APRA, absolving their shortcomings for a lack of resources, Ferguson, like Hayne, finds no excuse for their ‘cosy’ relationship with banks, the mediations behind closed doors, and instances of co-drafting media releases. There are disagreements over Hayne’s report, too. When he announced the Royal Commission, Malcolm Turnbull declared that ‘it will not put capitalism on trial’. Accordingly, Hayne’s seventysix recommendations were mostly about conserving the banking system through subtle changes aimed at reforming culture. Roddan agrees with Hayne’s assessment that any sudden, wholesale rearranging of the financial sector might destabilise the economy. According to Ferguson and Kohler, however, Hayne should have tackled vertical integration,

The Shelf Life of

Zora Cross Cathy Perkins

‘Perkins brings Cross out of the shadows into the light she deserves.’ Caroline Baum

MALLEE COUNTRY

‘This finely written biography fills a significant gap in the history of Australian women writers.’ Peter Kirkpatrick AUSTRALIAN POET and journalist Zora Cross caused a sensation in 1917 with her book Songs of Love and Life. Here was a young woman who looked like a Sunday school teacher, celebrating sexual passion in a provocative series of sonnets. She was hailed as a genius, and many expected her to endure as a household name alongside Shakespeare and Rossetti. While Cross’s fame didn’t last, she kept writing through financial hardship, personal tragedies and two world wars, producing an impressive body of work. Her verse, prose and correspondence with the likes of Ethel Turner, George Robertson (of Angus & Robertson) and Mary Gilmore place Zora Cross among the key personalities of Australia’s literary world in the early twentieth century. The Shelf Life of Zora Cross reveals the life of a neglected writer and intriguing person.

The Shelf Life of Zora Cross • cathy perkins

MALLEE COUNTRY

MALLEE COUNTRY LAND, PEOPLE, HISTORY

New from

Hayne Royal Commission (Scribe, $32.99 pb, 362 pp, 9781925849363). In a rollicking and witty blow-by-blow account of his year covering the Hayne Royal Commission for the ABC, Ziffer attends to the more grotesque malpractices unearthed by the Royal Commission. ‘Introducer’ commissions, for example, were paid to solicitors, accountants, and property developers for referring customers to the NAB for mortgages that totalled $24 billion over three years, a practice that festered with bribery, fraud, and unconscionable loans. Drawing heavily on hearing transcripts, Ziffer delights in replaying the squirming, verbal contortions of witnesses under the inscrutable questioning of Hayne and the counsels assisting. Ziffer’s most poignant moments come in his dissection of the meeting minutes, emails, and memos tabled to the Royal Commission, which clinically detailed executives’ knowledge of misconduct and their decisions not to act to protect shareholder value. When the CBA considered abolishing broker commissions in 2017, recognising the benefits to customers, it quickly abandoned the idea fearing ‘first-mover disadvantage’ if other banks did not follow. ‘These were processes,’ writes Ziffer, ‘focused on getting a sale at all costs.’

LAND, PEOPLE, HISTORY

Richard Broome, Charles Fahey, Andrea Gaynor and Katie Holmes

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW

The Shelf Life of

Zora Cross Cathy Perkins

www.publishing.monash.edu

MONASH UNIVERSITY PUBLISHING

‘A rare gem … boldly conceived and brilliantly written.’ Mark McKenna

forcing the separation of product selling from advice giving. Such laws were a common feature in Western economies before the 1980s and have again featured prominently in the US and UK reforms since the GFC. It has had less traction in Australia. Some banks have themselves partially abandoned the strategy since the Royal Commission, selling off their wealth management arms. But they are free to return to it. Roddan describes his book as a ‘first draft of history’, a fitting epigraph for the others, too. Writing in a hurry but with purpose, and enlivened by their journalists’ contacts, Ferguson, Roddan, and Ziffer eschew organising concepts such as neoliberalism and globalisation, which are now routinely deployed to explain these fractured times. (Kohler frames the deregulating 1980s in terms of an economic rationalism inspired by Milton Friedman.) Rather, as Hayne also concluded, they explain this history as one of raw, institutionalised greed. The bad actions of advisers, brokers, tellers, and call centres were rewarded with handsome commissions. These actions were endorsed by executives because they inflated the banks’ share price and thus their huge remuneration packages. Such remuneration was accepted by major shareholders because it seemed to drive up their returns. There are, however, global and conceptual challenges that need to be explored. As Ferguson notes, what has occurred in Australia extends an international pattern. Banks the world over have been shamed – if not failed – on account of poor practices that can be traced back to the reforming 1980s. Such circumstances should raise more fundamental questions about how banks can be made to better serve society. Roddan recalls Ben Chifley’s remarkable attempt to nationalise the banking system and Menzies’ civic ideal of home ownership. While Ziffer finds these old ideas venerated among banking victims, they are not presented in these books as viable policy options but as historical curiosities. If scrutinising banks – bank bashing – has not waned, perhaps the accompanying appetite for the institutional experimentation of yesteryear has.

Nonetheless, these books force us to think hard about the role banks play in our everyday lives, an omnipresent power we allow to be almost invisibly exercised. For Roddan, this means challenging our unthinking ‘Dollarmite to death’ monogamy with banks. For Kohler, self-education is key. Yet Ferguson and Ziffer fear that politicians have learned little and sense this moment of introspection may already be slipping away. Memories are short and consequences are soon forgotten. The Morrison government has already declined to enforce Hayne’s most significant recommendation to outlaw mortgage-

broker commissions. Ferguson is doubly pessimistic given that whistleblowers – the chief weapon against bad banking over the past decade – are now pursued by authorities in new, frightening ways. In this light, these books are essential, urgent reading. They remind us of the integral role fearless journalism plays in maintaining open societies. They remind us that banking is too important to be left to the Money Power. g Ben Huf is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Laureate Research Program in International History at the University of Sydney.

This salted earth

An eclectic and engaging collection of writings

Steve Kinnane SALT: SELECTED STORIES AND ESSAY by Bruce Pascoe Black Inc., $34.99 pb, 320 pp, 9781760641580

ruce Pascoe’s Salt is a wonderfully eclectic collection of new works and earlier short fiction, literary non-fiction, and essays written over twenty years. Structured thematically across six themes – Country, Lament, Seawolves, Embrasure, Tracks, and Culture Lines – Salt moves between the past and the present with Pascoe’s distinctively poetic voice. Readers of Dark Emu (2014) and Convincing Ground (2007) will be familiar with the style and subject matter but will discover newly released or reworked gems. The title speaks to memories and ghosts triggered by the smell of salt; its ability to clean, to render flesh and skin from bone, to preserve evidence, to signal cumulative impacts on Country. The prevalence of salt speaks to the power and closeness of sea Country and our dwindling salty river systems, increasingly threatened by human intervention. Pascoe’s characters are richly drawn from this salted earth and exposed to the light and the elements.

Whether presented as fiction or the voices of shared histories, his characters are grounded within the seasons and Country. So, too, in Pascoe’s view, are their possibilities of reviving this salted earth through heeding Indigenous knowledge and experience. The narrative draws on Pascoe’s long, revealing exploration of the foundations of Indigenous knowledge accumulated over tens of thousands of years and evident in the layered history and culturally infused ecology of the Australian continent. Pascoe’s wonder at the ingenuity, practicality, diversity, and intricacies of these inherently sustainable relationships with Country and between peoples is juxtaposed with his lament at the lack of respect for Indigenous knowledge, culture, and history. Debates surrounding Australian history inform Salt. In ‘The Imperial Mind’, Pascoe introduces the Doctrine of Discovery by Pope Alexander VI in 1493 as a defining moment in Western history, whereby anthropocentric FINANCE

Abrahamic religions lay the foundations for hierarchies of privilege justifying war and the appropriation of Indigenous lands and waters in what he describes as ‘the allure of denial’. These debates are contextualised through an interrogation of the archives and the social, cultural, and political context of their making, juxtaposed with oral evidence of Aboriginal experience and Pascoe’s own journeys. Pascoe moves back and forth across time, elaborating present journeying, witnessing, and debate. His questioning narratives act like a salt bath that gently strips back layers of myth and denial inherent in the colonial mindset, ingrained in the wood of the nation’s history. Pascoe’s more considered approach works on the complex layers of Indigenous and non-Indigenous histories to consider an Australian future in which Indigenous ingenuity, culture, ownership, belonging, and inclusiveness are not only valued and recognised but also embraced and experienced. Exploration of identity is a central theme here, personally and collectively. Pascoe questions the choices Australians must make with respect to belonging and existence within diverse Indigenous countries of this continent. The responses to Pascoe’s decision to claim his Bunurong identity are respectfully, lovingly, and at times sardonically discussed. Reframing the colonial mentality that underpins these ongoing narratives of disconnection, denial, and self-interest is Pascoe’s aim, with neither blame nor anger but rather a considered appraisal of the bones of our shared histories and future possibilities as distinct peoples within a transformed nation. In ‘An Enemy of the People’, Pascoe affirms: ‘if we can learn history we can embrace the past, and for many, it will be an embrace of family denied’. Link-

ing reconnection across the divides of race and the knowledges that underpin thousands of years of living sustainably on Country, Pascoe writes: ‘We live in a seriously compromised country, but why have we let it become such a problem? We should relish the complexity, the depth – the length of the history. We should feel a tiny bit smug that we know we know things people from other countries don’t … Let’s share the guiltless embrace of true love.’ Pascoe stakes a claim as a gifted storyteller as well as a reader of history. Salt is layered with tender, ribald, and at times dark characterisations of people, place, memory, and belonging – deeply informed by Pascoe’s humanist values. These narratives are drawn from Pascoe’s writer’s eye and ear and from his personal experience of Australia and Australians over a lifetime of traversing Aboriginal countries spanning the continent. This tacit experience of peoples and country is the volume’s strength. The touch and feel for story are evident in Salt ’s visceral descriptions of living, working, hunting, loving, hoping, and struggling on country. ‘Embrasure’ unpicks the lives of colonists escaping their own pasts. Amazed by the country they have come to for refuge, they revel in the light, the possibilities, the fertility, all rendered with the intimacy and sensuality of their unfolding love and freedom. Their embrace of this country, their growing sense of belonging, are tempered by the realisation that it is not their land to claim or to till and that with each new construction or ploughed furrow they are interlopers, making a beachhead of invasion on other people’s land. In ‘Thylacine’, Pascoe transports the reader into the world of the bush at night, the intensity of life lived in isolation from other people, intensely close

Songs

from the

Stations 30 NOVEMBER 2019

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW

to the ground. The sounds and smells of the bush, the majesty and wonder of trees set against the night sky, are haunted by a sense of something hidden, visceral, yet fragile – the Thylacine: ‘There are some things, the man knew, that could never be denied. A man’s spirit is built thus … To the tiger the man just became another night animal, and the man knew it and revelled in that pride.’ Gathering together works created over a long period is always challenging. With Salt, the editors have chosen well, enabling the stories to stand alone yet link across the volume, resonant with Pascoe’s voice, his eye for the intimate and the wondrous. There is much hopefulness in Salt – hope for understanding and for a better future for the nation based on reckoning with deep Indigenous knowledge and ownership. Pascoe wants us to achieve what he describes as ‘an awakening of the nation to the land itself ’, in the belief that ‘we need non-Indigenous Australians to love the land’. g

Steve Kinnane is a writer and researcher in Western Australia. He is currently a member of the Curatorial Team of the New Museum Project (WA), a Scholar at ANU, and a Member of the AIATSIS Council. He is also a director of Magabala Books, the publisher of Bruce Pascoe’s award-winning work of non-fiction, Dark Emu. ❖

Through the wajarra songs of the Gurindji people, Songs from the Stations reveals a rich history of cultural, linguistic & musical exchange. “an important work – an invaluable work” National Indigenous Times sydneyuniversitypress.com.au

Fiction

Beejay Silcox on Margaret Atwoodâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s The Testaments

Charlotte Wood

Favel Parrett

Carmel Bird

The Weekend

There Was Still Love

Field of Poppies

Felicity Plunkett

Anna MacDonald

Gregory Day

FICTION

REVIEW OF THE MONTH

Dreams and beasts Charlotte Wood’s shell-like new novel

Felicity Plunkett THE WEEKEND by Charlotte Wood

Allen & Unwin, $29.99 pb, 259 pp, 9781760292010

‘W

hat kind of game is the sea?’ asks the speaker of Tracy K. Smith’s poem ‘Minister of Saudade’. ‘Lap and drag’, comes the response, ‘Crag and gleam / That continual work of wave / And tide’. It is not until the end of The Weekend that the sea’s majestic game is brought into focus, and then the natural world rises, a riposte, to eclipse human trivia. Before this, Charlotte Wood’s novel is emphatically domestic, the sea a backdrop to the tight dynamics of decades-long friendship, its presence only occasionally noticed as it ‘[slaps] against the seawall in lazy, rhythmic sloshes’.This, too, is a kind of riposte, since ‘domestic’fiction, especially by women writers, has long been disparaged. Three women in their seventies meet at the coastal holiday house of their friend, Sylvie, who has died. Wood’s novel moves slowly from one character to another, drawing back and forth like the tide, patiently accumulating expository details. The women’s collective narrative is shell-like: its weathered surface curls protectively around secrets and tenderness. In some parts this surface has worn translucent; in others, callouses and scars have formed over injuries. As if on holiday, each woman is severed from her ordinary life, becalmed for a few days between the past with its detritus and treasure, and a future lit by flares of hope and fear. Unlike a holiday, their occupation is the work of mourning, including the emotionally freighted business of preparing Sylvie’s disorgan-

32 NOVEMBER 2019

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW

ised house for sale. It is hot, almost Christmas. Sylvie’s absence limns the places where the women’s friendship has become brittle, or holds together provisionally or by habit. Their bond is frangible, their irritation with one another so manifest that the continuance of their friendship seems unlikely. A shell is itself a house emptied by death – the exoskeletal form of an organism that has died. It is beautiful in some lights, when considered apart from the mortality it evidences. Looking back at the early days of the women’s friendship is, to Adele, a once-acclaimed, out-of-work actor, like ‘looking through water; some things were magnified, their colours more intense’. She remembers its beginnings, being ‘drawn into the current of each other’. This current has subsided; the friendship ‘left drifting’. As a shell forms around an animal, so the nonhuman animals in the novel occupy its centre: fish washed onto the shore, cicadas, a chicken ready to be roasted, and Wendy’s dog, Finn. The women’s belated identification with these creatures is foreshadowed when Jude, formerly a celebrated restaurateur, finds herself facing a dish of lambs’ brains with disgust, ‘revolted’ by the ‘colour and taste of moths or death’. She eats them, because ‘it was part of her code: you did not refuse what was offered’. Yet she is assailed by the image of the three lambs: ‘each one its own conscious self, with its own senses, its intimate pleasures and pains’.

The experience makes her want to say to Daniel, her pacing what the women deny. He is deaf, incontinent, lover of many years, ‘I don’t want to die.’ But, ‘of course’, lost. Yet his restless click and skitter becomes, steadily, she does not say this. Throughout the novel, the unsaid scritch and balm, and each woman finds in him some thrums beneath the women’s exchanges. Jude, especially, consolation. Finn, ultimately, is an emblem of ‘the great observes the unspeakable rising. She rages internally gathering, the loosening of all things’ the novel moves when Daniel tells her that his cousin has died; she holds towards. He brings into the women’s sphere the natural her hand to her mouth to stop her urge to spit, or to world of which they seem largely unaware. spit out the words: ‘Of course Andrew died… what did ‘Dreams and beasts,’ suggests Ralph Waldo EmDaniel expect? Everybody died. But not Sylvie.’ But, erson, ‘are two keys by which we are to find out the again, Jude lies ‘in all the expected ways’. She tells herself: secrets of our own nature.’ From this epigraph ‒ as the ‘Don’t be so hard on people, novel’s compelling tide and Jude,’ but grief has ‘opened up whorl bring the women closer great oceans of anger’ in her, to their secrets – dreams and and the lid she places on her visions quiver at the edges feelings is insecure, buckled by of their confrontation of the bitterness. bare animal realities of ageing, Wendy, a writer and public desire, and death. intellectual, feels a similar tide For Jude, an aching longrising. When people express ing, an ‘insistence’ wakes her sympathy for Sylvie’s partner, with a ‘quiet but urgent desire Gail, wondering how she to go to church’. This flares can bear the loss of her life’s like the arthritis in her thumb beloved, Wendy looks away, – she imagines this longing as concentrating on not shouting: decadent, symptomatic. Cog‘But I did, I lost the love of my nitive decline, Jude thinks, life.’ She remembers the death slapping it down: ‘frontal lobe of her adored husband, Lance, shrinkage, doubtless’. She as akin to watching someone Charlotte Wood (photograph by Chris Chen) places this call ‘from the world being born: ‘the primal inof sleep, from her dreaming stinct, the exhaustion of it, the panting animal labour’. self ’ in the realm of decrepitude, a sign of weakness. Now it returns to her, with Sylvie’s death,the two twined Yet this urge rises, the novel splicing epiphanic and knotted. This entwinement – the enlacing of lives slivers with the stubborn corporeal, transcendence with and experiences – is central to the novel, as is Wood’s decay. Although she holds fast to hope, Adele’s dreams clear-eyed, compassionate focus on the unbeautiful. are elusive, ‘the thread of a dream’s edge’ slipping from Decades’ accretion of the unspoken both sustains and her grasp. The body’s upkeep obsesses her, as does her weighs on the friendship. Sylvie’s death leaves the women image. With the neediness and uncertainty imagined as ‘suddenly mystified by how to be with one another’. the province of adolescence, she checks her Instagram The ‘spectre hanging over them’ is the vulnerability they and posts flattering selfies, basks in emojis and flatanticipate as they age. Finn, Sylvie’s gift to Wendy after tery, then experiences savage disappointment about an Lance’s death, symbolises this. At seventeen, he is enor- insufficiently worshipful response. On the train, she is mous but frail, his unclipped claws scrabbling and clack- horrified by another passenger, with her flesh-coloured ing as he circles, anxious and trembling, ‘all failure and stocking socks, transistor radio, and undyed hair. collapse, all decay’. Finn, ‘moth-eaten, crippled, dirty’, Wendy, as lacking in vanity as Adele is defined by makes up the quartet of ‘failing, struggling, creatures’. it, starts to sense that there are ‘energies – wrong word, Moth-eaten animals or eating animals that taste a crude approximation, but it would do for now – surglike moths: Erasmus Darwin’s maxim ‘eat or be eaten’ ing all around her’. These are in the curving gestures of hovers. Though Jude dismisses Finn as ‘a poor animal angophora trunks, or in the shady light, and she knows kept alive for too long’, with ‘nothing mysterious or they will somehow help her shape and frame her new ghostly about his pathetic aged body’, she glimpses in novel. The ‘fizzle of important discovery’ lights the way for him some lustre, turning at one stage to meet not his Wendy; her new book will be ‘not linear, yet not without eyes, but Sylvie’s. For Adele, Finn’s frail tenacity says order.’ ‘Here I am’. In an ecstatic moment late in the novel, she The Weekend, Wood’s sixth novel, followsThe Natural imagines something larger, ‘the ailing dog was teaching Way of Things (2015), which won the 2016 Stella Prize her, showing her’ – her own ‘animal self ’ might be the and was joint winner of the Prime Minister’s Literary way to embrace the future: ‘all creaturely receptivity’. Award. (It was recently voted the eighth most popular Mostly, though, he exemplifies decay. He is ‘the novel of the twenty-first century by ABR readers.) ghost creature’ who circles the invisible, facing and outWhile The Weekend returns to the realism of Wood’s FICTION

earlier fiction, in some ways it is a corollary to The Carraway in The Great Gatsby, of ‘the vast, vulgar, Natural Way of Things. Where The Weekend is about older meretricious beauty’. Sylvie, like Gatsby, is an elusive women, The Natural Way of Things studies a group of conductor. young women imprisoned and demonised in the wake of Wood’s characters are all tethered by ghosts, not various sexual experiences, including brutal sexual asjust Sylvie’s. One loss echoes another, the latest renewsault. Its allegorical vision takes the stigmatisation of ing the older. Wood keeps her insightful focus on the women to an extreme, women, with other characimagining the humiliation ters – Daniel, Lance, Adele’s The women’s collective narrative of what one woman thinks lovers, and Wendy’s adult is shell-like: its weathered of not as herself, but her ‘ children – fleeting figments, surface curls protectively around fleecy, punishable flesh’. stories. The house heats up, Misogyny and women’s sexand, despite hard work, the secrets and tenderness uality are explored from anstuff in the cupboards seems other angle in The Weekend. never to end. Too much has Older women’s intimate and erotic lives – conventionally been stored and stashed; too much unspoken and ‘insoignored or derided – are part of Wood’s terrain. Collectlent inadequacies of the body’ promise to let all this loose. ivity, the female homosocial, and the body return as motifs, Wood’s cast – restaurateur, public intellectual, and along with imprisonment, this time in figurative terms. actor – is not diverse, so there is no opportunity to conThe body is another kind of shell, and the characters sider the intersections of more various facets of identity in The Weekend are divided in their attitudes to this. affecting ageing. Its assay is particular, and the women Adele maintains her exercise routine, imagines herself form a composite portrait of women from this specific seen and admired and tries out her charms, ‘bestowing demographic. ‘Unaccommodated’ woman – where and her warmth’ upon a taxi driver, who has no idea who how each woman will live – is part of the work’s focus, she is, and later – in the novel’s climax – in a pitch but is not inflected by questions of class or ethnicity. That courting triumph or humiliation. When she wonders none of the women has anything but hostile connections why Wendy does ‘nothing about her appearance’, fear with older or younger people suggests Wood’s interest in falls across her like a shadow: ‘Adele was afraid for her, engineering isolated circumstances to focus her drama. the way she exposed herself.’ Preparing to be looked at is Ignoring the natural world – or projecting onto Finn a defence, and she knows ‘that in some ways this frivolity a sometimes-sentimental anthropomorphic or hagiohad damaged her life’. graphical haze – prefaces nature’s fury. The enclosure of Yet admiration surfaces, as the friends swing bethe house and friendship, and a degree of solipsism in tween fear and fearlessness. Adele, Wendy thinks, could each woman, heightens the narrative’s intensity. ‘reach inside herself and strike a match, light the lamp The past in The Weekend is ‘through you, through of herself, and turn it up. Then the suitors came, moths your body, leaching into the present and the future’ – to flame.’ And Wendy, Adele remembers, was formiits striations ‘streaky layers of memory, of experience’. dable. She could ‘transfix you’; her insouciance ‘made In Gwen Harwood’s ‘At Mornington’, her poem about her sexy’. She was described by others – ‘interviewers, a different kind of long friendship, harmonious instead filmmakers’ – as ‘having a powerful blazing allure’. Adele of fractious, her speaker examines memories ‘Iridescent, thinks of her efforts to be admired as taking ‘part in the fugitive / As light in a sea-wet shell’. She imagines being: world gently, with civility and attractiveness’, a way to enhance the world, ‘to create even the smallest pocket seized at last of beauty’. She imagines everything as a stage – the and rolled in one grinding race rickety inclinator that lifts visitors to Sylvie’s house, the of dreams, pain and memories, love and grief, deck, the rooms. from which no hand will save me, Wood creates a sense of a staged drama. As with the peace of this day will shine The Natural Way of Things, this is an assay – a meticulous like light on the face of the waters weighing of ideas. The holiday house and grief function as catalyst and test tube. If the characters exemplify The curl and whorl of this absorbing novel – its tidal types, the drama centres on the chemical reactions their draw and rush; its ‘continual work of wave and tide’ – is, equation produces. As a storm builds, the natural world like that of Wendy’s novel, neither linear nor shapeless. It becomes a deus ex machina. As large and decisive an moves steadily inwards towards that moment of ‘dreams, event as King Lear’s storm scene, Wood’s tempest empain and memories, love and grief ’, secrets and the phasises human smallness: that ‘unaccommodated’ man, unspoken finally erupting amid the storm’s ferocity. g as Lear says, is a ‘poor, bare, forked animal’. The Weekend is a novel of experience – of the ‘rich, Felicity Plunkett is the current ABR Patrons’ Fellow. tawdry, unjust, destroyed and beautiful world’. This A Kinder Sea, her new poetry collection, is due in early recalls the vision of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s narrator Nick 2020 from the University of Queensland Press. 34 NOVEMBER 2019

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW

Meanwhile in Gilead A fine line between glut and gluttony

Beejay Silcox THE TESTAMENTS by Margaret Atwood

Chatto & Windus, $42.99 hb, 432 pp, 9784717842324

here was never any question that The Testaments, Margaret Atwood’s coda to The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), would be a gargantuan blockbuster, a publishing Godzilla, giddily hyped and fiercely embargoed. Bookshops across the world counted down the minutes until midnight on September 10 (GMT), when the envygreen volume – already the odds-on favourite for the Booker Prize – could be unboxed. One hundred and fortyfive journalists travelled from fourteen countries to cover the London launch; in the United Kingdom alone, a hardback copy was sold every four seconds in the book’s first manic week. The Handmaid’s Tale was an ‘antiprediction’ or literary inoculation, Atwood explained in a 2017 essay: ‘If this future can be described in detail, maybe it won’t happen.’ Penned in 1984, that Orwell-haunted year, early reviews praised Atwood’s artistry but declared the dystopian horror of her post-American patriarchal theocracy, where fertile women are kept as captive breeders while environmental catastrophe looms, to be outlandish. Now, a boastful sex-pest is in the White House, the world’s schoolchildren are striking for action on the climate crisis, and women dressed as handmaids, at rallies in defence of their reproductive rights, carry signs that read ‘Make Margaret Atwood Fiction Again’. Atwood’s reluctant prophecy has furnished us with an iconography of female resistance: crimson capes and snow-white bonnets. It has also provided the source material for a lauded, grisly television series (2017–). You could buy handmaid costumes this Halloween and add a surveillance ear tag or scar to mimic the televisual torment.

As Jia Tolentino writes so incisively in The New Yorker: ‘The Handmaid’s Tale has long been canonical, but was once a novel. It is now an idea that is asked to support and transubstantiate the weight of our time.’ The frenzy around the release of Atwood’s new book is a defiantly joyful celebration of this idea, equal parts pop-cultural cool and revolutionary zeal. Nolite te bastardes carborundorum, bitches. The Testaments could never live up to its predecessor; what an impossible yardstick. No book could compete with thirty-four years of readerly devotion, let alone this mighty collision of Zeitgeist. To measure it against The Handmaid’s Tale is to focus on the wrong literary legacy. What matters is how this new work – in so many ways the obverse of its forebear, its mirror twin – unwittingly damages what came before. For three decades, Atwood resisted calls to extend The Handmaid’s Tale. She could not imagine reinhabiting the novel’s quietly mutinous heroine, Offred. ‘You can climb the Empire State Building barehanded once,’ the author explained in a recent interview with The New York Times. ‘When you try again, you’ll fall off.’ Impelled by Donald Trump’s election in 2016, she found her way back into the Republic of Gilead’s autocratic universe by considering the fate of its second generation. Fifteen years ago, Offred stepped resolutely into an unmarked van: ‘whether this is my end or a new beginning, I have no way of knowing’. The former handmaid has survived, smuggled across the border into Canada with her baby, who has become a ‘poster child for Gilead’. The republic is intent on reclaiming ‘Baby Nicole’ as a matter of increasingly urgent national pride:

‘for God’s kingdom on earth, [Gilead] had an embarrassingly high emigration rate’. Gileadean ‘missionaries’ roam suburban Canada, hunting for leads and for vulnerable young women – ripe-wombed and wretched – to entice over the border. In Toronto, sullen teenager Daisy is sick of hearing about the missing child, who would now be her age: ‘I’d basically disliked Baby Nicole since I’d had to do a paper on her ... I’d got a C because I’d said she was being used as a football by both sides, and it would be the greatest happiness of the greatest number just to give her back.’ Daisy’s textbook angst masks a deeper unease: the couple she knows as her parents are twitchy and aloof, too careful with her: ‘It was like I was a prize cat they were cat sitting.’ Meanwhile in Gilead, Agnes Jemima is being prepared for marriage: ‘Wedlock: it had a dull metallic sound, like an iron door clicking shut.’ Suitors circle, including the odious Commander Judd, whose too-young wives have a convenient habit of perishing once the sexagenarian letch gets bored with them. Agnes’s only alternative to marriage is to pledge herself to the Aunts, Gilead’s puritanical coterie of taser-wielding uber-nuns. It is the notorious Aunt Lydia, architect of Gilead’s handmaid system of socially sanctioned rape, and an assiduous keeper of its leaders’ most incendiary secrets, who is the dark heart of The Testaments – J. Edgar Hoover in an itchy brown habit. A high-ranking Gileadean is collaborating with the activists who liberated Offred and Baby Nicole. Aunt Lydia knows the identity of the mole, but she also knows that the republic is politically shaky; there is a possibility here, not for power (she is already ‘swollen’ with it) but for vengeance. FICTION

A regime-toppling revolution would just be a gratifying side effect. Simultaneously a sequel and prequel, The Testaments alternates between Daisy’s and Agnes’s witness statements to an unknown authority, and Aunt Lydia’s furtive journal, tracing her ascendancy from prisoner to power broker: ‘Over the years I’ve buried a lot of bones; now I’m inclined to dig them up again – if only for your edification, my unknown reader.’ The girls’ intersecting stories are forgettable fun – an exuberant, escapist romp. When covert geopolitical machinations conspire to bring them together, their odd-couple dynamics – arsekicking, streetwise, smartarsed Daisy versus pious, wide-eyed, bookworm Agnes – are the stuff of buddy-cop action movies (‘You want to have this conversation right now? I am fucking sorry, but we are in a hot mess emergency here!’). We always know who the good guys are; the bad guys get walloped in the windpipe. There is more than an echo of The Hunger Games in this teen-saviour subplot, replete with a transformation montage, as Daisy, anointed by destiny, trains for a secret mission to bring down Gilead from within – from sulky teen to warrior queen. It’s a fascinating cultural loop, watching Atwood play in the genre her 1980s novel helped to invent. But it is Aunt Lydia we have come to see, the novel’s slippery, ruthless ringmaster. A family court judge in her pre-Gilead days, she is not interested in apologies or absolution: ‘Regrets are of no practical use. I made choices, and then, having made them, I had fewer choices.’ Her account of those choices – some desperate, some conniving, all ferociously pragmatic – is a potent reminder that complicity is not evil but banal, easy, and often terrifyingly sensible. ‘Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, and I took the one most travelled by,’ she explains with characteristic frankness. ‘It was littered with corpses, such roads are. But as you will have noticed, my corpse is not among them.’ Aunt Lydia is a deliciously acerbic companion, a master strategist who is as loathed as she is legendary, as proud 36 NOVEMBER 2019

as she is disgusted with what she has wrought. Atwood delights in her paradoxes. But there is nothing we learn about Aunt Lydia that we could not have imagined when we first met her in The Handmaid’s Tale. In that novel, her imperious cruelty inspired speculation: zealot, victim, collaborator, psychopath, sadist? All of the above, perhaps, or none at all. Now we know. In the last pages of The Handmaid’s Tale, having spent the novel immersed in Offred’s insistent mind, we learn from a panel of future historians that her account may not be real. Atwood’s final line is an audacious postmodern wink: ‘Are there any questions?’ Of course we have questions, we burn with them. Her book’s brilliance was always its obdurate, careful silences. Yet now she has returned to Gilead with bountiful answers – comeuppances to administer, loose ends to snip, almost in rebuke to her original premise. ‘The Testaments was written partly in the minds of the readers of its predecessor, who kept asking what happened after the end of that novel,’ Atwood explains in her acknowledgments. It is a particular curse, to get exactly what you ask for. In our culture of entertainment maximalism – of reboots, sequels, reunions, and peak television – we seldom question the notion that every space should be filled. If we love a cultural product, surely we should have – we deserve – more of it. But there’s a fine line between cultural glut and cultural gluttony. As Agnes Jemima reflects: ‘Where there is an emptiness, the mind will obligingly fill it up.’ Here is the unnecessary tragedy of Atwood’s coda, captivating though it is (this is Margaret Atwood, after all). The dark hollows and crannies of The Handmaid’s Tale are mostly gone, and with them, space for obliging minds. The only space that’s left is a convenient time gap – room for the Hulu/MGM series to brutalise its way onwards. Where there was doubt, now there is certainty; where there was an imagined future, now there’s a chastised present, replete with fake news, mistrusted experts, and echoes of #MeToo – undeniably timely but forever achored. And where there was restrained interiority,

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW

now there is plot, plot, plot – whizzing and fizzing along. A tale to gobble, not to savour. The human truth beating at the heart of The Handmaid’s Tale was that Offred was ordinary, she could have been anyone. In The Testaments, as in the television show, she has been recast as Gilead’s political keystone, her story no longer a serendipitous insight but the too-convenient beginning of a grand fairy tale of the resistance. Atwood’s Gilead project is no longer about ordinary women and the quiet power of witness, but about extraordinary, fantastical heroism. Farewell Anne Frank, hello Katniss Everdeen.

We always know who the good guys are; the bad guys get walloped in the windpipe Fairy tales demand happy endings, and Atwood is inclined to oblige. Perhaps, having unwittingly summoned a monster thirty-five years ago, she is trying to use her literary sorcery to conjure a more hopeful future for us, an injection of cultural optimism and aspiration in a despondent political age where, as Aunt Lydia describes: ‘giving up was the new normal, and I have to say it was catching’. Or perhaps she is just having a boatload of fun. Canada’s most famous novelist doesn’t have to give a rat’s hindquarters about her legacy: ‘Will this ruin my future, my literary reputation? If I were thirty-five, you would be absolutely right to ask that question,’ she told The New York Times. ‘But it’s not a chief concern of mine.’ Fair enough. But having read The Handmaid’s Tale nearly every other year since I was sixteen, I can’t imagine when I’ll return to it again – not as some petulant tantrum, but because there’s no space for me in the novel anymore, I’ve been forced out. I’ve gained a sequel, and lost something far more precious. g Beejay Silcox is an Australian writer, literary critic, and cultural commentator, and the recipient of ABR’s Fortieth Birthday Fellowship. She is currently based in Cairo.

The forgotten and the invisible Anna MacDonald THERE WAS STILL LOVE

by Favel Parrett

Hachette $29.99 pb, 211 pp, 9780733630682

avel Parrett’s tender new novel, There Was Still Love, explores what it means to make a home and how a person might be free in a world ruptured by political as well as personal upheavals. Moving backwards and forwards in time (from 1981 to 1938) across vast distances – from Prague to Melbourne, via London – between first- and third-person narrators, past and present tense, Parrett beautifully captures one family’s complicated twentieth-century inheritance. Readers of Parrett’s first two novels, Past the Shallows (2011) and When the Night Comes (2014), will be familiar with certain aspects of this new book: the child’s-eye view of an abstruse and often dangerous world; the sumptuous rendering of place, including the narrow, lived space of a family home. There Was Still Love extends the territory of these earlier books. The family history it narrates is principally imagined through the grandchildren of Máňa and Eva, twin sisters who were cruelly separated by forces beyond their control. The novel alternates between the parallel perspectives of Malá Liška or Little Fox, the granddaughter of Máňa and her husband, Bill, who emigrated from Czechoslovakia to Melbourne; and Luděk, the grandson of Eva, who remained in Prague. It explores the stillunfolding effects on one family of the German occupation of Czechoslovakia, the violent suppression of the Prague Spring, and ‘The Curtain’, which, as Eva describes it, will, after 1968, ‘become solid, made of steel and concrete, and it will not bend, it will not open. They were all stuck inside – forgotten.’ There are many references to the forgotten and the invisible throughout this novel, allusions to people and places

made ghostly by historical events. In Prague in 1938, Máňa feels that ‘[t]he world has let us down, thrown us away’. In 1980, when she and Bill visit Eva, they attend the Spartakiáda, an immense gymnastic display that Czechs are told will be broadcast across the globe. Ludék asks: ‘Is the world really watching?’ Bill responds: ‘If Poland and Hungary and Russia are the world, then yes.’ And, more obliquely: ‘We are invisible.’ Over the whole narrative, there is a sense that the world has turned its back on Czechoslovakia: from the Munich Agreement of 1938, which permitted the German annexation of Sudetenland and opened the way to further occupation – ‘People wonder how Hitler took my country without one shot being fired,’ Bill tells Malá. ‘Well – it was handed to him on a silver plate!’ – to the Soviet tanks that, in 1968, ‘roll on and on in a thick rumbling line, cracking the old streets’, rendering Eva’s city unsafe, more so because she knows that ‘[n]o one is coming. Just like before. No one is coming to save them.’ The world turned its back on Czechoslovakia, and, Máňa and Eva, in an attempt to salve their trauma, turned their backs on the past. As Ludék tells it: No one ever talked about before … Photos of before were hidden away in the back of cupboards. Stories of before were never told. Before had been forgotten, blacked out. But sometimes it was there if you looked carefully enough. There were little traces of before – like those gold and garnet earrings on Aunty Máňa’s earlobes, the same as Babi’s. Like that old suitcase in the roof space, battered and worn and locked up tight.

Traces of the Czech past are everywhere: in Melbourne as well as Prague, across generations, passed down and, as Malá has it, ‘there in my blood, there in my bones’. Every day, Máňa and Malá walk to the market in Melbourne where they buy Kaiser rolls, Swiss cheese, Pariser sausage, rye bread with caraway seeds, and a jar of gherkins. When he wants to, Bill can conceal his origins – he ‘lost’ his name, Vilém, and he can lose his accent. Máňa, however, cannot. Her accent, Bill thinks, ‘does not

want to leave. Maybe she can’t let it go because it is the one thing she still has from home. The one thing that totally belongs to her.’ From these and other traces, Máňa and Bill make a home in Melbourne; they make a home for Malá in which she puzzles out her complicated inheritance. This is a home made out of love which, like Máňa’s accent, holds out stubbornly against the suffering of the Czech people and the world that refused to see it. Love is an ‘invisible force … too strong for the world to beat’. Ludék can also conceal himself. Unbeknown to Eva, he spends his days running unseen through Prague, bearing witness to the city, ‘intense with life’. His mother, Alena, a member of The Black Theatre of Prague, is, according to Malá Liška (who sees her perform when the Theatre travel to Melbourne), ‘one of the invisible people. One of the ghosts that made all the objects move, made the magic real.’ Alena, like the other dancers in the company, is ‘terribly awake and alive’. Ludék, too. In one of the instances of mirroring that knit his and Malá’s stories together, his mother, ‘graceful and slim in her black velvet suit, [is] hidden from him, but there all the same’. Like so many of the hidden stories Ludék and Malá have inherited, Alena is awake, alive, and making the magic of their shared past real. g

Anna MacDonald is a writer and bookseller based in Melbourne. Her début novel, The Weight of Water, is forthcoming from Splice in 2020. FICTION

Tree change Gregory Day FIELD OF POPPIES

by Carmel Bird

Transit Lounge $29.99 hb, 241 pp, 9781925760392

hen Claude Monet lived in Argenteuil in the 1870s, he famously worked in a studioboat on the Seine. He painted the river, he painted bridges over the river, he painted snow, the sky, his children and his wife, and, famously, a field of red poppies with a large country house in the background. Argenteuil is to Paris roughly what Heidelberg and Templestowe are to Melbourne. Once a riparian haven for plein air painters interested in capturing the transient optics of natural phenomena, it is now a suburban interface with a diminishing habitat for anything but humans. Actually, Heidelberg and Templestowe are in good shape when compared to Monet’s old river haunt. When he was living in Argenteuil, the population was fewer than 10,000 people, most of whom were asparagus farmers, vintners, fishermen, and craftspeople. Now the suburb is home to more than 100,000, many of whom are commuters making the train trip into Paris every day to work. The only shimmering light of interest would probably come from their phones. Where once a stream was a noun denoting a house of fish, now it is a verb describing digital product. We stream music, we stream audiobooks, movies, and news. In Carmel Bird’s new 38 NOVEMBER 2019

novel, Field of Poppies, the chatty narrator, Marsali Swift, likes to plonk down in front of her Chromecast television to enjoy the sequence of random images constantly displayed in the absence of the stream. ‘I like this,’ she says. ‘It’s mesmerising and weirdly diverting.’ One day she sees her favourite painting, Monet’s Poppy Field Near Argenteuil float across the screen, and her reverie is broken by its intense familiarity. ‘No line of exclamation marks, no treasury of powerful words could convey my astonishment and thrill,’ she writes. It turns out that for Marsali it is a copy of Monet’s painting, rather than the original painting itself, that has sparked her obsession. When Marsali was a child, her great-aunt Clarissa, who used to set up her easel not on a boat on the Seine but among the fruit trees of her Yarra bank garden in old Hawthorn, painted beautifully faithful copies of European masterworks. Clarissa’s version of Monet’s Poppy Fields near Argenteuil had ever since held Marsali under her spell. So much so that it became a dream image she would actively pursue in her own adult life. Pulling up sticks in Melbourne, Marsali and her erudite doctor husband, William, move to a fictional central Victorian town called Muckleton. They buy a historic property called Listowel where, yes, Marsali can have her own field of poppies and her own grand house looking over it. Muckleton is a gentrified hotspot of post-urban ‘bobos’ (bourgeois bohemians) and sceptical locals. Marsali immerses herself in the variously entitled pursuits that a bobo might in such a place. She joins a book group, goes to local recitals, laments the empathy deficit of Western civilisation, and appoints her rustic property with the eclectic accoutrements of a middle-class fantasia. Of course, it was never going to work, and the unravelling of precisely how it goes awry is the tale the novel unfolds. But this is a tree-change story told in an unusually pithy manner. Like the Chromecast stream or the teeming internet, Bird’s novel is structured in bricolage, patched together from scrolling sequence of character studies, anecdotes, opinions, facts, and recollec-

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW

tions that both fillet and bolster what is essentially a crime plot with the feel of Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries. This is a book of unpretentious, free-ranging confidence, by a novelist for whom the written page is an entirely natural habitat. Bird builds her narration via a disarmingly vivacious and, at times, even frivolous voice, only to lay down some key tragedies of the culture in which we live. In this assemblage, nearly all woke issues are touched on, as she describes the mismatch of Marsali’s rural fantasy with the utilitarian realities of Muckleton, and, ultimately, her and William’s eventual return to an apartment on the forty-second floor of Melbourne’s own slice of hairy-chested architectural kitsch, the Eureka Tower. On the way the Listowel house gets robbed, a violinist named Alice is murdered, the book group ransacks Lewis Carroll as if for clues, a gold mine called Red Opium Poppy is kickstarted by a Chinese consortium, Aboriginal massacres are eulogised, roadkill statistics are analysed, and the history of red poppies, from Monet through to their militarisation via the pathos of Flanders Field, is discussed. The novel is an collection of digressive fascinations both light and dark, knitted together with a focused tone of irony, wisdom, and joy. In this sense, Field of Poppies is a deceptively emblematic book by a mature and unzipped writer. It disarms the more typical literary expectations of pacing and plot in favour of the faulty happenstance to which we are daily prone. Not Monet but a copy of Monet. Not a copy of Monet but its simulation on an automated screen. In Carmel Bird’s hands, our increasingly hackneyed dystopia is a both a darkly revisioned wonderland and a touchscreen of self-reflexive humour. Like Barbara Pym or Elizabeth Taylor, she doesn’t plumb the depths, but the point is that you know she’s been down there. What she brings to the surface is variegated and alive. There’s no point meekly surrendering to the absurd levels of commodified gloom after all. In the end, you do have to laugh. g Gregory Day’s most recent novel is A Sand Archive (2018).

Echoes Amy Baillieu THE TRESPASSERS

by Meg Mundell

University of Queensland Press $29.95 pb, 278 pp, 9780702262555

s the ship carrying nine-yearold Cleary Sullivan and his mother, Cate, sets sail from Liverpool, there is a ‘flurry’ among the passengers. A ‘violent slash of red; tall as a house and shining wet’ has appeared on the dock, visible only to those onboard. Cleary’s mind fills with images of ‘some diabolical creature of the deep, blood erupting from its mouth’. The reality is more prosaic – some spilt paint – but it is an ominous beginning. Like Meg Mundell’s début, Black Glass (2011), The Trespassers takes place in an unforgiving near-future. Cleary is one of more than three hundred masked passengers escaping a pandemic-riven United Kingdom. Their passage to Australia has been arranged through the ‘Balanced Industries Migration’ scheme, indentured servitude in all but name. The old-fashioned mode of transport and technological restrictions imposed on the passengers, combined with sailors casually shooting down drones, and terms like ‘shippers’, ‘sanning’, and ‘the stream’, give the novel an almost timeless quality, though its concerns are very much of the moment. The Trespassers is told through three idiosyncratic voices: Cleary, watchful, Irish, ‘small for his age’, survivor of an almost fatal ‘super-flu’ that left him only able to hear ‘shadow-noise, remote and muffled, like an afterthought’; intense Glaswegian singer Billie, traumatised by her experiences in the ‘death wards’ and plotting to escape the BIM system and make her fortune entertaining miners and executives on the fringes of Australia’s ‘Third Boom’; and Tom, an anxious young Englishman working as a teacher after his family fortune dissolved in ‘the crashes’. His is the only narrative presented in the first person; it reveals a weakness for pills, maritime puns, and a handsome Scottish seaman.

All three hope that what awaits them in Australia will make their time in this ‘floating rabbit warren’ worth it. After the ship makes its way like a dystopian icebreaker through the ‘floating debris, clearing a temporary trail that vanished as the rubbish reconverged’, the passengers are finally free to remove their medical masks. For Cleary, mostly reliant on lip-reading and makeshift sign language to communicate, this is momentous as it ‘return[s] language to the faces around him’. However, it’s not long before a sailor is found murdered. Sickness leaves the crew and passengers of the under-equipped Steadfast struggling to survive and to uncover the truth. There are several resonances with the New Zealand-born Mundell’s previous works. The name Steadfast was used in an earlier short story (‘Narcosis’, commended in the 2011 Jolley Prize and published in her 2013 collection, Things I Did for Money). However, the novel shares more than just the name of a ship with Mundell’s other works. Informed concern for the vulnerable and marginalised infuses The Trespassers. (Mundell is a former Big Issue deputy editor and the editor of We Are Here [2019], an anthology by writers who have experienced homelessness.) Other preoccupations recur, such as the importance of home and belonging, the value and perils of investigative reporting in an era of clickbait and online comments, the bonds of friendship and family, and an endearing interest in birds. Mundell also explores the ways in which social hierarchies can assert themselves and then break down under pressure. She writes perceptively about isolation and exile and their relationship to survival and tribalism, the importance of hope, the contagious nature of fear, and the galvanic force of anger. As one character notes: ‘Anger is a dangerous emotion, so the experts say: too often misdirected, to easily turned inward. But surely there are times when it’s the only just and right response.’ The Trespassers is intelligent, provocative fiction that uses unsettling echoes of historical and contemporary events to conjure a depressingly plausible future. Margaret Atwood has noted there is nothing in her seminal novel

The Handmaid’s Tale that ‘human beings had not already done somewhere at some time’. The Trespassers offers a similarly disturbing ring of authenticity, drawing as it does on history and current events. These include the typhus-plagued ship the Ticonderoga, quarantined outside Melbourne at Point Nepean in 1852; the migration of ‘Ten Pound Poms’ following World War II; and more recent governmental responses to refugees and those seeking asylum. The impact of the looming climate crisis isn’t highlighted as directly here as in other recent speculative fiction, but it is evident in the floating bottles that are ‘like a layer of scum on soup’, the ‘abandoned beachfront homes’ left ‘half submerged’, the casual asides about toxic spills, and the references to ‘fatal floods in California, food riots in India’. Mundell deploys new technologies and folk superstitions to great effect, and subtly weaves in allusions to Greek mythology, including a brief but devastating nod to the Stygian ferryman Charon. Her writing is richly textured and atmospheric, and her characterisation is nuanced. There are villains here, but Mundell is careful to show complexity in individuals and flickers of humanity and compassion in groups. It is easy to see why this unflinching novel has been optioned for television. The narrative trajectory of The Trespassers has a certain relentless inevitability, but there are some genuinely shocking moments. Fortunately, there are also some flashes of hope and humour amid the sickness, menace, oppression, and death. As one character flippantly remarks to an insincere external medic, ‘They promised us pina coladas … I’m thinking of suing.’ g

Amy Baillieu is Deputy Editor of ABR. FICTION

Remnant ash Debra Adelaide A CONSTANT HUM

by Alice Bishop

Text Publishing $29.99 pb, 240 pp, 9781925773842

hanks to the internet, the 24/7 news cycle, and social media, certain books are preceded by their reputations. They arrive freighted with so much publicity hype that reading them with fresh eyes is almost impossible. A Constant Hum is one such book, very much the product of a reputation established well before publication, due to the airing of individual stories in places like Seizure and Meanjin, along with several prizes and shortlistings. Despite my resistance to googling this book and its author, plus bypassing the considerable prelim pages of glowing comments by famous authors and from other literary reviews, I still came to my reading of A Constant Hum armed with too much knowledge. A sense of anxiety prevailed: would it live up to its reputation, would I be disappointed, would I feel intimidated if I had to disagree with the likes of Tony Birch and Fiona Wright? If you are one of the few readers who have not heard of this book, a quick precis: A Constant Hum is short fiction based on one of Australia’s worst contemporary disasters, the Black Saturday bushfires of 7 February 2009, in which 173 people died and about 40 NOVEMBER 2019

2,000 houses were destroyed. The first question is, how does an author – any author, but especially an emerging one – confront these shocking details and then fictionalise them? How does she turn personal tragedy on such a scale, including her own, into fiction? I read these stories fearing that the author was going to trip up, that they would collapse under the weight of their own emotional burden, that they would lapse into sentimentality. Arranged in three sections, the book comprises forty-seven stories. This may seem a lot for one collection, but some are so short they are not even stories, just a paragraph or a few sentences. They are wisps of conversations, thoughts, or observations, like the remnant ash of the aftermath of a bushfire, floating briefly past, never settling. Nevertheless, I grasped one of these, ‘Coppering’, which is less than a page long. Here is the opening: You remember mostly, three am: they found our neighbours in clusters, mostly in amalgam fillings and tyre rims trickled into what looked like snowy earth – silvers, gunmetal greys and black so petrol-shiny you’d think of a currawong’s wing, of a bush pigeon’s neck, flecked.

This one sentence is emblematic of everything that Bishop seems to be trying to achieve in this book. You need to reread prose like this, to realise the author has knocked you down with that phrase, ‘mostly in amalgam fillings’, and demanded your attention. What is it that might actually look like ‘snowy earth’? How many currawongs or bush pigeons survived this holocaust? And then there is the disturbing effect of that word ‘petrol’. This is poetic prose, but also rough, jarring, as if designed to keep us on our toes. It is crunchy with punctuation, adjectives where normally you would not want them, words repeated where an editor might have itched to cut. But the cumulative effect is of capturing the unsayable, articulating the unthinkable – of giving voice. Trauma often results in silencing, but Bishop’s remarkable achievement is in puncturing those

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW

silences. She allows her survivor characters to speak to us in voices frank and tender, chaotic and bewildered. The stories commence with more oblique pieces in the first section, ‘Prevailing’. A woman is caught shoplifting in Woolworths on the anniversary of the bushfire weekend; a man is obsessed with chainsawing new growth around his new home; a schoolgirl who has lost her mother and aunt is asked to list three things she would save from a burning house. By the final section,

How does an author confront these shocking details and then fictionalise them? ‘Northerly’, things have shifted gear into more physically confronting territory, dragging us back to the actual catastrophe, its acrid smells – burnt plastic shoes, rubber soles – and ultimately its eerie emptiness: ‘there’s no bush left to muffle anything anymore’. Set three days after the fires, ‘Highway Lines’ portrays the quiet anguish of a woman in a Best Western motel, driving a rental car, one string bag containing all her belongings. The real hurt is knowing that her husband ran off from the fire that destroyed their home and left her there. ‘Kindling’ gives us a man tended by a community nurse who has to pick melted cotton sock fragments from feet charred from trying to save his cows. Many of these voices are affectless, like the schoolboy narrator of ‘Woodwork’ who remarks blandly that terminally ill kids are often lavished with gifts but that his two dead brothers never received anything. Perhaps reporting on what has happened is all that can be expected. Alice Bishop leaves it up to us to process this. These are brave, heartbreaking stories told with a mix of ardour and pragmatism. Despite my early suspicions, all that praise is warranted. g Debra Adelaide is the author of two short story collections, Letter to George Clooney (2013) and Zebra (2019). Her latest book is The Innocent Reader: Reflections on reading and writing (2019).

Backwards game Rita Wilson THE PENGUIN BOOK OF ITALIAN SHORT STORIES

edited by Jhumpa Lahiri

Penguin Classics $49.99 hb, 515 pp, 9780241299838

n 1942, Elio Vittorini managed to circumvent the Fascist censors and publish Americana, a landmark anthology of thirty-three American authors. The aim of this massive project – over a thousand pages with translations into Italian carried out by ten significant literary figures of the time, including Alberto Moravia, Cesare Pavese, and Nobel Laureate poet Eugenio Montale – was to introduce iconic American voices to Italian readers. In assembling her substantial collection of forty Italian short stories, Jhumpa Lahiri set herself the same objective but in reverse: to introduce Italian authors to American readers. Lahiri declares Vittorini was her ‘guiding light’, not only for the general design of the work but also ‘in writing the brief author biographies – intended as partial sketches and not definitive renderings – that preface each story’. Many writers included in Lahiri’s collection may be familiar to nonItalian readers (Italo Calvino, Primo Levi, Leonardo Sciascia), while others, such as Natalia Ginzburg and Antonio Tabucchi, have been introduced to English-language readers by new translations in recent years. A few, like Silvio D’Arzo and Antonio Delfini, are little known, even in Italy. Two ‘basic parameters’ governed Lahiri’s selection of authors: removing all living authors from the list, and limiting the number so that the book would not become ‘an unwieldy physical object’. More interesting are the motivations that led to this initiative: to bring together the greatest possible number of authors who had inspired and nurtured her love for Italian literature, giving priority to women and lesser-known writers; to produce a volume that ‘others would be excited to teach from, and that students, ideally,

would be eager to read’. The final list effectively constitutes a personal canon: Lahiri has chosen authors, who, like her, have ‘questioned and redefined themselves over time, some defiantly distancing themselves from earlier phases of their work’. The stories are arranged in reverse alphabetical order by the authors’ last names. It may be, as Lahiri claims, that this is ‘an arbitrary sequence’ and that it is ‘serendipitous that Elio Vittorini appears first’, but the reverse ordering also recalls Tabucchi’s famous ‘gioco del rovescio’ (‘backwards game’), which rests on the assumption that there are always two sides of a coin and invites the reader to pierce the surface of the text to see the ‘reverse side’ of the writing. Lahiri invites us to see the other side of the authors she has included in her selection, all of whom were, at the same time, ‘almost always other things’: scientists, visual artists, politicians, musicians. Remarkably, ‘the vast majority were translators, living, reading and writing astride two languages or more’. Her own literary evolution, marked by the well-publicised decision she made in 2012 to move to Rome and to read and write only in Italian, may have made her particularly alert to this aspect. She explicitly affirms her affinity with those for whom the ‘act of translation [is] central to their artistic formation’ and with those who made choices to write in other languages ‘complicating their texts and their identities further still’. Language has a very particular relevance for this particular anthology. As a first step, Lahiri had to find translations of the selected stories, or translators for previously untranslated stories: sixteen of the stories had not been published before in English and nine have been re-translated for this collection. Lahiri translated six stories from Italian herself, thus further immersing herself in the fabric of the language. Her translations are clean and elegantly executed throughout. Lahiri pays special attention to form, hence the variety of styles that we encounter in the selected stories. Pleasingly, the new translations and re-translations capture the nuances of the polyphonic, individual styles of

the various authors. It is not possible, in the space of a short review, to do justice to all of the vibrant stories contained in this volume. The ones I preferred were those that focused on the thematic triad of time, place, and memory, such as the strange journey described by Tabucchi (‘Against Time); the painful parody by Pavese (‘Honeymoon’); journeys that are no less difficult in memory (Anna Maria Ortese, ‘A Pair of Eyeglasses’, Alba De Céspedes, ‘Invitation to Dinner’). And memory is not always mythical, as in Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s ‘The Siren’. More often, it is a perilous swamp (Fabrizia Ramondino, ‘The Tower’) or a container of painful symbols (Romano Bilenchi, ‘A Geographical Error’). A highlight of the anthology is a very short story by Goffredo Parise, entitled ‘Melancholy’ and translated by Lahiri, in which a seven-year-old girl experiences the emotion in a deeply personal social context before her grandfather puts a name to it. It is an act of translation between the felt and the spoken. This is an emotionally resonant anthology, diverse in content and a great introduction for English-speaking readers to unfamiliar and renowned writers from Italy. A final point worth noting is that Lahiri has completed her backwards game by publishing an Italian version of the collection, two months after the release of the Penguin volume. Racconti italiani (Guanda) has been enthusiastically received in Italy, demonstrating that translations and anthologies can also be used to return an image of a culture that goes beyond the literary mainstream. g

Rita Wilson is Professor in Translation Studies in the School of Languages, Literatures, Cultures and Linguistics at Monash University. ❖ FICTION

Struggle, with grace notes An Australian composer becomes American

Jim Davidson PEGGY GLANVILLE-HICKS: COMPOSER AND CRITIC by Suzanne Robinson

University of Illinois Press (Footprint), $54.99 hb, 338 pp, 9780252084393

ustralian classical music. Not quite an oxymoron, but certainly an unfamiliar phrase. Yet Australian literature has been promoted by a battery of university courses overseas, following the beachhead established by Patrick White’s Nobel Prize. Similarly, Australian art has twice had great moments of impact: the Whitechapel exhibition of 1961 for the Nolan–Boyd generation, and now the continuing worldwide interest in Aboriginal art. Our rock stars have repeatedly made worldwide reputations; in classical music, Australian singers have regularly risen to the top. But classical composition has been something else. Apart from the quirky Percy Grainger – deftly working in small forms, sometimes with large resources – no Australian composer has had a significant influence overseas (though Brett Dean is shaping up as a contender). Grainger had to abandon Australia to do so, eventually taking out American citizenship. Suzanne Robinson’s book tells the story of another Australian composer, Peggy Glanville-Hicks, who took US citizenship, but who, unlike Grainger, devoted much of her energies to opera. And whereas Grainger had earlier integrated himself with the English folk music movement and leading composers, Glanville-Hicks, through her journalism and organisational

42 NOVEMBER 2019

skills (in addition to her compositions), would win for herself a place at the centre of New York’s musical world. PGH (as she often abbreviated herself ) was born in 1912, in Melbourne, the daughter of a professional fundraiser who also published poetry and short stories – providing a loose template for her own attributes. Studying at the Albert Street Conservatorium, she developed her interest in vocal music under Fritz Hart, himself the composer of a string of operas. PGH soon broke open her piggy bank, she would joke, to buy a one-way ticket to Europe. In London, she studied at the Royal College of Music, with Ralph Vaughan Williams, and there encountered another bright student, Stanley Bate. Soon she would throw in her lot with him, abandoning studies in Vienna for Paris, where a fraught relationship with the famous teacher Nadia Boulanger was balanced by the Australian Louise Hanson-Dyer of L’Oiseau-Lyre publishing some of her music. Not long after, following a short return to Australia, the couple headed for New York, then emerging as the prime centre of modernism. In high modernist style, PGH had her hair cropped, wore a skirt ‘of a masculine cut’ together with collar and tie and a hard-edged felt hat. (Later she took to wearing capes.) Feminist asser-

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW

tion was her aim, rather than expressing lesbianism; she would have few women friends. What PGH became increasingly aware of was that she would have to perform better or more tellingly than men in order to be considered a serious player. There were still many blocks to women’s advancement. As a college dean’s wife remarked to her ruefully, ‘We married what we wanted to be.’ Many creative people have not so much a fatal flaw, as Manning Clark would term it, but a central contradiction. In PGH’s case it was, as Robinson puts it, ‘her feminist nature clashing with her instinctive call to service’. Having married Bate, she put her own career on hold in order to advance his; masculinising her appearance may partly have been a strategy to make herself more attractive to him, since he was homosexual. It did not work. He beat her severely. The marriage ended, but not their friendship. Indeed, for much of her life, PGH was drawn to gay men. As she wrote apologetically to Virgil Thomson, her love occurred ‘through the mind first, and one isn’t aware of what’s happening until it’s too late to escape’. He backed away. With Paul Bowles, initially better known as a composer than as a novelist, her relationship was more enduring: there were occasional flings but more importantly a lasting affinity.

PGH owed Bowles much: she had followed him into musical journalism but declined to join him in a bohemian life in Morocco. New York had become her scene. As her friend Yehudi Menuhin noted, ‘she flowed easily’ there, ‘with her elegance, her knowledge, her wit and her natural way of being’. As a critic and organiser of composers’ concerts, she was a conspicuous figure; as someone put it, ‘a gold needle in a tray of old safety pins’. Dedicated to her composing, PGH’s was a life of relative poverty: for much of the time in New York she lived in one room. Journalism was not quite enough to live on; she was saved by occasional fellowships. (At least she had graduated to a number of affairs with straight men.) Glanville-Hicks became the first American woman to be commissioned to write an opera, The Transposed Heads, which was based on a story by Thomas Mann (1954). Her preference generally was for melody and rhythm over harmony, and this suited the Indian subject matter, particularly at a time when performances of Indian music were unknown in

the West. Her greatest triumph, though, was Nausicaa (1961), her libretto drawn from the novel by Robert Graves, postulating that the Odyssey was written not by Homer but by a Greek princess. Produced in a classical setting in Athens, the opera tested PGH’s considerable entrepreneurial talents and ate into her own money. But it was a triumph, receiving some sixty international reviews. Later there would be Sappho (1963, recorded by Toccata Classics to mark the centenary of PGH’s birth). Both operas centred on the challenges facing women as artists, an extrapolation of her own condition. Apart from The Transposed Heads, it’s the smaller works that have survived best. These include a Sonatina for treble recorder, Concertino da Camera, some early songs, and Letters from Morocco, which Robinson considers PGH’s masterpiece. When working on Nausicaa, PGH abandoned New York for Athens, later retreating to the Greek islands. The increased tourism she hated at least made her property valuable. With helpful advice from Sir Ian Potter after their sale, she spent her last years in

Sydney in unaccustomed comfort. She had become very sour about atonalism and electronic music, and in this respect Australia proved a congenial backwater. But like Christina Stead around the same time, and despite influential younger friends, PGH found the return difficult. She felt she had been forgotten. When she died in 1990, she directed that her Paddington home should be set up to provide composers’ residencies, as it has done successfully since. Suzanne Robinson has been working on this book for many years. She has sleuthed through documents (notably PGH’s diaries), interviewed a wide range of people, and seems to have been to all the relevant places. PGH is always placed in context, while there is lucid musical analysis of the works at appropriate points. This is not only a fine biography of Peggy Glanville-Hicks; without stridency, Robinson has established her as a feminist icon. g Jim Davidson is the author of Lyrebird Rising: Louise Hanson-Dyer of L’OiseauLyre (1994) and a memoir, A Führer for a Father (2017).

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BIOGRAPHY

Prodigy Elizabeth Finkel THOMAS HARRIOT: A LIFE IN SCIENCE

by Robyn Arianrhod

Oxford University Press $45 hb, 370 pp, 9780190271855

alileo and Kepler went down in history for prising European science from the jaws of medieval mysticism and religion. But where was England’s equivalent? Newton would not make his mark for another century. Surely the free-thinking Elizabethans also had a scientific star? They did: Thomas Harriot (c.1560– 1621). Most of us have never heard of him, for Harriot did not publish his findings. His day job was teaching navigation to Sir Walter Raleigh’s ship captains. Queen Elizabeth’s favourite was intent on colonising North America for the Crown. But it was also down to Harriot’s personality: retiring, cautious, and meticulous. Harriot was not entirely lost to history. He was famous in his time, so much so that Kepler wrote asking him to share his theory and data on light refraction. ‘Now you, O excellent initiate of the mysteries of nature, reveal the causes.’ For 150 years after his death, most of Harriot’s work was lost. In 1784 his manuscripts were discovered ‘under a pile of old stable accounts’ by a descendant of the ninth earl of Northumberland, his patron. Since the 1950s, historians and mathematicians have painstakingly attempted to piece together Harriot’s contributions to modern maths and science. Now the lay reader has a chance to become acquainted with Harriot thanks to the elegant, vivid prose of Australian mathematician 44 NOVEMBER 2019

and physicist Robyn Arianrhod. Her previous books, Einstein’s Heroes (2003) and Seduced by Logic (2011), brought her scientific heroes to life: Isaac Newton, James Clark Maxwell, Émilie du Châtelet, Mary Somerville. Newton famously claimed to have ‘stood on the shoulders of giants’. It was Arianrhod’s attempt to find Newton’s English giant that led her to Harriot. Her quest also unearthed a family connection. Arianrhod’s grandmother, Evareen Throckmorton, often regaled her with the story of their relative Bess Throckmorton, a lady of the Queen’s Privy Chamber who risked her sovereign’s wrath by becoming Raleigh’s lover and then wife. As only a mathematician can, Arianrhod dives into Harriot’s small, quilled scrawl to witness his mental machinations at work. ‘As I read through Harriot’s pages, sometimes puzzling over them, sometimes smiling with joy at his tours de force, I was moved by the intimacy they afforded.’ The diaries are no dry history. As Arianrhod’s book makes manifest, they resurrect a life lived in science during one of the most fascinating eras in history. The queen deploys a mix of feminine wiles and congenital political cunning to entwine and dominate the power-hungry men of her court. In 1569 Francis Drake has just repeated the first circumnavigation of the world in. Now the contest is on with Spain for naval supremacy and for the land and riches of the New World. There is the high culture of the English renaissance. But there is shocking brutality – drawing and quartering is the punishment for treachery – and treachery is rife. There are endless plots to topple the Protestant monarch. Brutal sectarian campaigns see the slaughter of people at home and abroad. Science struggles to gain sway over medievalism, morality over corruption. It’s all recorded by the most iconic writers of the English language. So where does Harriot fit in? Navigation by the stars was the hottest topic of the day. At twentythree, the Oxford-trained Harriot (via a scholarship, since he came from plebeian stock) was held to be the pick of the crop, and Raleigh scooped him

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW

up to bring his navigators up to speed. Joining Raleigh’s 1585 expedition to Roanoke Island off the coast of what is now North Carolina, he developed a phonetic system to capture the language of the indigenous Algonquin. His pamphlet A brief and true report of the new found land of Virginia (1588) represents the only work to be published in his lifetime. Back in England, finding himself in the orbit of the highrolling young earl of Northumberland, Harriot began exploring the rules of probability, perhaps to demonstrate the folly of gambling to his patron. Harriot’s exceptional gift for maths and experimentation led him to many firsts, including how to measure the area of curved triangles (what you need as a navigator to travel the Earth’s curved surface), the laws governing the refraction of light and why a rainbow forms, and the laws describing falling objects and ballistic motion, leading to his epithet, the ‘English Galileo’. Mathematically inclined readers will be surprised to discover that he was the first person to solve quadratic equations in modern symbolic form as he leapt ahead with algebra, the abstraction of maths from real objects into an agile language with the ability to divine universal laws, leading ultimately to revelations like E=MC2. He also adhered to atomic theory, as blasphemous in England as heliocentrism was for Galileo in Italy. Some of Harriot’s proofs are not as polished as the published works of Kepler or Galileo. For Arianrhod, the point of the exercise is not to rank Harriot but to show that he was in their league. The lesson is that science does not advance by the flashing insight of a lone genius; rather, ideas travel like dandelion seeds in the wind, inseminating thinkers across the world. Maths lovers will rejoice in Arianrhod’s scholarly explication of Harriot’s achievements. But those who are not maths geeks will still find this book an intellectual feast. By threading in Harriot’s story, Arianrhod’s book reveals the full intellectual tapestry of the Elizabethan age. g Elizabeth Finkel co-founded Cosmos magazine and is now Editor at Large. ❖

Living art Carol Middleton MIRKA MORA: A LIFE MAKING ART

by Sabine Cotte

Thames & Hudson $49.99 hb, 256 pp, 9781760760298

year after her death, Mirka Mora is still regarded as a ‘phenomenon’ in the Melbourne art world, not least for her vibrant personality and provocative behaviour. Now Sabine Cotte, a French-Australian painting conservator, in this modest account of her research into the artist’s methods and materials, offers a new perspective on Mora’s creative process and the significance of her work. Mora – a creative innovator until her death at the age of ninety – was a dedicated, self-taught artist who studied the Old Masters and refined her painting techniques. She is widely known for her dolls (soft sculptures), her tapestries, and her murals. People who took part in her textile workshops often report that she changed their lives. Her public art is still visible in cafés, bookshops, railway stations, and on St Kilda Pier, guaranteeing her a continuing presence in Melbourne’s cultural and social life. Artwork that is displayed in public places is vulnerable to the elements and to contact with human bodies. Sabine Cotte, who worked with Mora to conserve her work in her final years, has written a book about the artist’s processes and materials that illuminates the way for future art historians and curators tasked with restoring or preserving Mora’s work. In this simple yet scholarly account, Cotte eschews the tradition of seeing artists as geniuses and adopts ‘a more human approach to the artist as an innovative maker’. Cotte’s first contact with Mora was in 2003. Six years later she was commissioned by the National Trust to undertake conservation work on Mora’s Flinders Street Station mural. This was just one of several collaborations between the two women. There is an animated photograph of them, taken

during the conservation of the mosaic at St Kilda Pier in 2010, which suggests a close relationship between the two, both born in France and active in the Melbourne art world. Unfortunately, there is little of that animation in the account of their collaboration. Cotte stays distant, ever the observer, keeping the focus on her subject in a way that is both admirable and frustrating. There are some extracts from their discussions on conservation and art, but I would have liked to have been privy to more of their informal discussions and to Mora’s trademark irreverence. After a brief and impassioned foreword by Mora’s friend, theatre impresario Carillo Gantner, spiced with a few choice anecdotes, Cotte takes up the baton with an introductory chapter about the background to writing the book, which grew out of her research on Mora’s practice and materials for her PhD thesis at the University of Melbourne. Unfortunately, this introduction retains a dry academic tone. It does explain the author’s methodology, tailored to Mora’s personality and using Cotte’s collaboration on the restorations, oral history techniques, her study of Mora’s diaries, and her observation of the artist at work in her studio. In Chapter One, ‘A Life Larger than Life’, the tone lifts and we are given a fascinating account of Mora’s childhood in Paris, where she was born in 1928 to Jewish parents, a seamstress and an antiques dealer. This may not be new material, but it gives the reader some understanding of her origins and her artistic heritage. On her arrival in Melbourne in 1951 with her husband, Georges, and son Philippe, they became part of the local artistic community and formed lasting relationships with John and Sunday Reed, Barbara and Charles Blackman, Joy Hester and John Perceval. Their famous Collins Street studio was a hub for artists, who were wined and dined lavishly by the European couple. Mora’s artistic education continued throughout the years she was busy cooking and entertaining guests and raising her sons, both at home and in the cafés that she and Georges started – Mirka Café, Balzac Restaurant, and the Tolarno Hotel. She created a mural en-

semble at the Tolarno, filling the bistro’s walls with angels, children, lovers, and mythological creatures. By now she was experimenting with space, volume, and texture, and moving between materials, from paper to canvas to plaster walls. By 1970 she and Georges were separated and their teenage boys were living with their father. From then on, Mora dedicated herself fully to her art practice. She followed the Old Masters by studying her library of precious art books, learning the rules and then breaking them. Her art – alive, ever changing – reinvented a variety of techniques: fourteenth-century egg tempera in her ‘dough drawings’; soft sculptures and embroidery; mosaic and murals; masks and theatrical sets. By now the barren days for Australian artists were over, literary and art journals proliferated, and the arts were linked to political idealism and activism, including feminism. Mora chose not to be a militant feminist – she was far too attached to her feminine dresses and beloved dolls, and Cotte does not labour this point. Instead, she demonstrates how Mora expressed the intensity of her personal life through artworks that embodied feminism and the craft movement, as well as community-art policies of the 1980s. In Mirka Mora: A life making art, Cotte demonstrates her conviction about the importance of doing conservation work in collaboration with living artists, making a clear distinction between ‘refreshing’, to be done only by the creator’s hand, and preservation of the original, the task of conservators. In showing how she worked together with Mora, we are treated to a revealing portrait of this innovative and eccentric artist. g

Carol Middleton is a journalist, arts critic, and author based in Melbourne. BIOGRAPHY

One’s last gumtree

by Amanda Laugesen

idney (Sid) J. Baker (1912–76) is undoubtedly one of the most influential figures in the history of Austra lian slang lexicography. Born in New Zealand, Baker worked in Australia as a journalist, writing for publications such as ABC Weekly, The Daily Telegraph, and The Sydney Morning Herald. He was also the author of a number of books about Australian slang, one of which is A Popular Dictionary of Australian Slang (1941). I recently added a copy of the third edition (1943) to my collection of dictionaries and lexicons. This slim volume is particularly special: it is signed by Baker, but is also inscribed ‘Gift from Constance Robertson’. Constance (Connie) Robertson was an editor, writer, and war correspondent. She was also the daughter of The Bulletin’s ‘Red Page’ editor A.G. Stephens, himself a collector and champion of Australian slang. Baker acknowledged his debt to the work of Stephens in his preface to A Popular Dictionary. While it is unclear just why Constance Robertson signed this copy, it might be because of this connection. Editions of dictionaries are fascinating snapshots into the times in which they are written and produced. Baker compiled the first edition of his dictionary in 1941; he spent that year as a Commonwealth Literary Fellow researching and collecting Australian and New Zealand slang. The 1943 edition is a significant revision and extension of the 1941 work. Produced during World War II, it contains many new words that are annotated as ‘War slang’, ‘Digger slang’, ‘RAAF slang’, or ‘RAN slang’, such as bludgasite (a variant of bludger), to do a Penang (to run away), and squeak (a sergeant). Baker was a tireless researcher and many of the terms in his collection had not been previously recorded. As his Australian Dictionary of Biography biographer, Bill Ramson (the first director of the Australian National Dictionary Centre, which I now head) writes, ‘[Baker] fossicked unremittingly’ and ‘his fascination with the vitality and life of Australian English [was] endless’. To that extent, while it can sometimes be difficult to find any supporting evidence for a lot of Baker’s entries (and some have turned out not to be Australian), it is likely he heard them from someone, somewhere – even if they were never widely used. In the pages of A Popular Dictionary, Baker captures some marvellous expressions (as H.L. Mencken writes in

46 NOVEMBER 2019

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW

his jacket blurb, ‘extremely pungent and original’), even if some are more fanciful than likely to be used in everyday speech. Some that caught my eye include: to be as free from sense as a frog from feathers, to have seen one’s last gumtree (to be near death), that’s one up against your duckhouse (a description of a setback to a person’s plans), to be as happy as a boxing kangaroo in fogtime, and to be able to kick the arse off an emu (to be in good health). Slang dictionaries reveal the prejudices of their times, however, and Baker’s is no exception. It can be tempting to simply dismiss slang terms that are best characterised as slurs and epithets as lexical relics, but they attest to the racism and sexism of Australian society at a certain point in time. The lexicographer himself was not immune: not only does Baker include these terms – something that could be argued for in terms of being comprehensive and recording the full breadth of the slang lexicon – but he also has an occasional tendency to let his own prejudices colour his definitions. Baker includes, for example, a number of slang synonyms for sex workers (prostitution is a popular domain for slang lexicographers). These include endless belt, ferry, half-squarie, mallee root, and turtle. These are all recorded in a matter-of-fact way, with a simple definition of ‘a prostitute’. But there are also a number of terms that he defines as ‘a harlot’. These include bush scrubber (‘a country harlot’), chippy, and poncess (‘a harlot who keeps a man’). A Popular Dictionary of Australian Slang was a preliminary foray into documenting Australian slang, and Baker followed it up with his magnum opus, The Australian Language (1945). He also intended to compile a comprehensive dictionary of Australian and New Zealand English, but it never eventuated. His work remains significant not just for his recording of slang, but also because of its impact as a contribution to the building of a cultural myth. Baker believed his dictionary would contribute to the making of a cultural nationalism and maturity. As he wrote in his preface: I nurse a seemingly unpopular, and hence somewhat lonely belief that one day Australians will write about themselves in terms of their own environment more enthusiastically than they do today. If they are to write about that environment they will have to know something of the language of Australians. … I offer the native product – terse, apt and often colourful – and if it does not serve to rid Australians of the noxious belief that all our worthwhile slang is imported from abroad I shall be disappointed.

From statements such as these, which built on the legacy of the 1890s cultural nationalists who sought to find Australian distinctiveness in speech and slang, a powerful myth that Australian English is all about a certain type of irreverent, colloquial style of language has taken root, and continues to shape our relationship with words. g Amanda Laugesen is director of the Australian National Dictionary Centre.

Netherworlds

Probing the depths of the human condition

Alison Pouliot UNDERLAND: A DEEP TIME JOURNEY by Robert Macfarlane

Hamish Hamilton, $45 hb, 496 pp, 9780241143803

nderland is English nature writer Robert Macfarlane’s longest and, by his own admission, deepest and strangest book. It took almost a decade to write. From the remote mountain peaks of his first book, Mountains of the Mind (2003), Macfarlane embarks on an intrepid journey into the subterrain; plunging through chasms and catacombs, mines and sinkholes, secretive spaces, shadow places. He offers ways to navigate these netherworlds but also probes the depths of the human condition, exploring how we are both stirred and disturbed by what lies beneath. Macfarlane’s escapades are organised into three ‘chambers’: Seeing, Hiding, and Haunting. Within these he examines three recurring themes – Shelter (memories, precious matter, messages, fragile lives); Yield (information, wealth, metaphors, minerals, visions); and Dispose (waste, trauma, poison, secrets) – and the paradox that ‘into the underland we have long placed that which we fear and wish to lose, and that which we love and wish to save’. His stories push limits and teeter on thresholds. Like the dark-matter physicists he meets, they traverse the boundaries of ‘the measurable and the imaginable’. His are ‘descents made in search of knowledge’, burrowing through Parisian passageways, spelunking in Slovenian sinkholes, plummeting through Greenland’s glacial terrains and beyond. Underland – a narrative non-fiction adventure – is more ‘peopled’ than his earlier books, especially The Wild Places (2007). Macfarlane’s meticulously researched account blends histories, both human and geological,

philosophical reflections, and collective imaginings, often through the eclectic voices of those he meets en route. Among them we meet Merlin the mycologist, extreme cavers, and maniacal miners, glaciologists, activists, and other kooky cataphiles (lovers of the below). At times, however, the individual character of their voices merges with Macfarlane’s own, reducing their authenticity. My copies of Macfarlane’s books are all heavily annotated. There are many gems to revisit. His luminous prose and affinity for etymology reveal unexpected associations. ‘To understand,’ he explains, is ‘to reveal by excavation’, ‘to descend and bring to the light’. Macfarlane’s craving for not just topographic extremes but linguistic ones steers the reader through a lexicon of arcane terms – eldritch, reliquary, ruckle, plastiglomerate. He salvages old words and pops tangy new ones in our mouths. Keep your dictionary close at hand. Landmarks (2015) and The Lost Words (2017; illustrated by Jackie Morris) showcase Macfarlane’s lexical longings, but all his books attest to his profound love of language. Extreme environments demand an extreme and exacting lingo. Macfarlane absorbs it from his caving comrades: ‘The language of extreme caving is often openly mortal and tacitly mythic: stretches of passageway “dead out”, one reaches “terminal sumps” and “chokes”, the furthest-down regions are known as “the dead zone”.’ Macfarlane also ponders how language shapes perceptions of place: ‘An aversion to the underland is buried in language … height is celebrated but depth is despised … we are disinclined to recognise the underland’s presence

in our lives, or to admit its disturbing forms to our imaginations.’ Yet his trawl through classical literature reveals ‘something seemingly paradoxical: that darkness might be a medium of vision, and that descent may be a movement towards revelation rather than deprivation’. In the final chapter, he asks how we might communicate the threat of buried nuclear waste to ‘unknown beings-to-be across chasms of time’. This question spawned the field of nuclear semiotics, accentuating the onerous challenges of communication across indeterminate timeframes. Macfarlane is an astute observer and a powerful writer. His words create visual impressions more evocative than those he provides pictorially. Rarely does one read such captivating accounts of rock as in his description of karst in ‘Starless Rivers’, guiding the reader through a ‘fabulously complex and imperfectly understood’ labyrinthine landscape. Books about the subterrain are inevitably about rock. However, it is the interface of soil surface–subsurface where Macfarlane becomes aware of the symbiotic mycorrhizal tapestry uniting fungi and plants, the ‘intricacy of interrelations’ often dubbed ‘the wood wide web’. This notion obviously made a deep impression: ‘Occasionally – once or twice in a lifetime if you are lucky – you encounter an idea so powerful in its implication that it unsettles the ground you walk on.’ Macfarlane’s descents beneath the planet’s surface are about moving beyond human scales of time and space. The allegorical potential of fungi took him further, forcing not just a reconsideration of the temporal and spatial but the limiting frameworks and binaries through which we have ENVIRONMENT

historically attempted to understand the natural world. Underland is packed with adrenaline-charged accounts of heroic explorers and his own near-death deprivations, squeezing between subterranean snags, careering through claustrophobic caverns. The death count is high. But beneath the adventuring lies a deeper exploration of pressing questions around our future survival in an apocalyptic Anthropocene. It is a hard time to be a ‘nature writer’, but Macfarlane unsettles thinking around the genre. As the earth pukes up histories of abuse, writing about encounters with the natural world takes on a darker timbre. He asks how we might reconcile ‘past pain and present beauty’ in a landscape that ‘enchants in the present but has been a site of violence in the past’. The implications of living in the Anthropocene have heightened his sense of urgency and politics, less apparent in earlier books. As I visualised the many caves and crypts into which Macfarlane descends, I couldn’t help imagining how an Australian version of Underland might unfold. I thought of the strange subterrains of Nullarbor sinkholes, abandoned opal mines and desert dugouts, the drains and chambers of Melbourne’s Cave Clan. I wondered how a writer – perhaps a little more playful and more au fait with uncertainty – might negotiate Indigenous knowledge of Country and the underland of this vast, ancient, less concreted continent. The radical recent rise in global tourism has increased the traipsing and trampling and pummelling of the earth. Once no-go zones, places like Antarctica, Svalbard, and Chernobyl have already been Facebooked and Instagrammed to death. Perhaps

48 NOVEMBER 2019

the next wave will follow Macfarlane on journeys to the centre of the earth through its thirty million miles of ‘tunnel and borehole’. At a time when many writers are reconfiguring the genre of nature writing and pushing it to new and interesting extremes, I look forward to reading what will no doubt

be another of Macfarlane’s remarkable achievements. g Alison Pouliot is an environmental photographer, ecologist, and honorary fellow at the Australian National University. Her most recent book is The Allure of Fungi (2018).

Australian literature at Sydney University

s the largest and one of the oldest literary associations in Australia, and the peak body representing Australian literary studies, the Association for the Study of Australian Literature (ASAL) joins with its affiliated associations in expressing the gravest possible concern about the non-appointment of the Chair of Australian Literature at the University of Sydney following Professor Robert Dixon’s retirement this year. There is no ambiguity about the value and importance of this Chair. At a time when Australian literature and Australian cultural work are so strong and diverse, with such dynamic, sustained, and path-finding engagements from so many writers – especially Indigenous writers and those from diverse cultural backgrounds – there is a matching and energetic interest from readers, students, and teachers across sectors and from academic researchers both here and abroad. For these audiences, the value, quality, and diversity of Australian literary writing and literary study are obvious. At this moment of strength and energy, therefore, the University of Sydney Chair in Australian Literature is a position of the greatest importance. Any delay in this appointment is difficult to understand. Even more than the critical role of ethical custodianship of intellectual work and literary history, the University of Sydney Chair of Australian Literature is a key figure to focus the present momentum of Australian literary studies both inside and outside the University. As researcher, teacher, and advocate, this senior academic (as evidenced by the work of Professors Wilkes, Kramer, Webby and Dixon) can support, direct, and foster communication in ways that assist national and international dialogue in this significant field of enquiry. To lose this Chair, and indeed any Chair in Australian Literature, is to lose a leader who has the vital capacity for coordination, outreach, and consultation, and who may advocate for and represent this important work, which brings enduring benefit to both the nation and the world. We therefore join with our colleagues at the University of Sydney and across the field to voice our insistent support for the continuation of the Sydney Chair of Australian Literature. This is an edited version of the statement originally published on the ASAL website.

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW

Giving a damn Ceridwen Spark THE RISING TIDE: AMONG THE ISLANDS AND ATOLLS OF THE PACIFIC OCEAN

by Tom Bamforth

Hardie Grant Books $29.99 pb, 263 pp, 9781743793077

uring cold southern winters, the islands and atolls of the Pacific seem to offer an idyllic escape. Advertisements for cheap flights to Fiji or New Caledonia present smiling ukulele players and al fresco massages. More bleakly, despairing islanders, by virtue of their place of birth, experience the devastation wrought by urbanisation and the climate crisis. For Melbourne writer Tom Bamforth, the Pacific is much more complex than either of these extremes. Over ten years, he has pursued and discovered a collection of layered and interesting places, learning much about the unique delights and challenges of life in our neighbouring Pacific nations. Bamforth has worked for more than a decade in humanitarian response and international development. He has travelled extensively in the Pacific region as an aid worker, other times as a self-funded ‘tourist’ and writer. He captures his experiences and insights in his second book, The Rising Tide: Among the islands and atolls of the Pacific Ocean. Gentle, funny, entertaining, this is an excellent book to read beneath a coconut tree. But The Rising Tide succeeds on other levels too, as an informative and thought-provoking text about the region Australians call home. Published in outlets such as Granta, Griff ith Review, and Meanjin (and ABR) Bamforth’s writing is vivid and easygoing, though he tackles some difficult subjects, including the effects of the climate crisis. Take, for example, his description of swimming in a lake in Palau with millions of jellyfish that have evolved not to have stings: Frequently I would feel a soft and gentle blob against my skin, little harder

than a breath of air, and I developed an instant affection for those wonderful, ridiculous and harmless creatures. And yet, by 2016, after thousands of years of evolution, the great Jellyfish Lake of Palau would be under threat.

We learn, too, of the effects of nuclear testing in the Marshall Islands, a place about which Henry Kissinger once said: ‘There are only 90,000 of them. Who gives a damn?’; and about the less obvious effects of the climate crisis, such as the increasing and unsustainable urbanisation that is occurring throughout the region. In many of these places, it has become impossible for the inhabitants to survive off the land and sea that hitherto provided so richly for them. With a particular interest in the urban Pacific, I was impressed that Bamforth captures one of the often overlooked but obvious effects of urbanisation in the region, namely the boredom and purposelessness that can characterise the lives of the unemployed of these burgeoning cities and towns. Discussing his conversation with the forthcoming members of the ‘007 gang’ he meets in Port Moresby, Bamforth writes: Several had been involved in an ‘urban youth resilience program’ run by some NGO. ‘It was useless,’ they agreed. ‘We spent a week learning about “life skills”, they told us to be nice to each other, and there was a day on gender, a day on how to manage a bank account. But there was nothing about jobs and we’ve never been in a bank’.

In such circumstances, it is little wonder these young men, as with their counterparts in other Pacific towns, seek the sometimes deadly escape offered by ‘jungle juice’: fermented fruit alcohol as readily available as the air of torpor surrounding them is toxic. The above reflection also indicates another of the book’s strengths, namely the insight it offers into the sometimes bizarre and meaningless attempts that occur in the name of ‘development’ in the region. Though Bamforth is an insider in this world, he possesses a healthy cynicism about it. Cases in point are the wry

descriptions of the disbanding of the ‘Pacific Taskforce’ in New Caledonia and the delightfully unproductive ‘exciting new institute’ in the Solomon Islands. While the humour is memorable, the most notable aspect of The Rising Tide is perhaps its breadth. As he writes in the epilogue, Bamforth has ‘visited eleven of the region’s twelve independent states … and three of its dependent territories’. This range of experience is reflected in the chapters that lead us from the French-speaking and barely Melanesian Nouméa to the outer reaches of Kiribati and the derelict mine in Bougainville. Few people have travelled so extensively in the region, not least because most of those who visit tend either to be tourists or those working in aid and development. As someone loosely in the latter camp, I have been to almost as many of these places as Bamforth. Despite some occasional moments about which anthropologists and others who pride themselves on ‘depth’ might nitpick, Bamforth’s ability to capture the similarities and differences between the range of Pacific places, even their essence, is impressive. Tackling some difficult subjects, The Rising Tide is never ponderous and remains highly readable throughout. The author’s curiosity, appreciation of those he meets, and willingness to gently poke fun at those who deserve it underpin a book that represents great travel writing but is also much more than this description usually suggests. g

Ceridwen Spark is a Vice Chancellor’s Senior Research Fellow in the Centre for Global Research at RMIT University. ENVIRONMENT

Star jockeys Robyn Williams COSMIC CHRONICLES: A USER’S GUIDE TO THE UNIVERSE

by Fred Watson

NewSouth $32.99 pb, 256 pp, 9781742236421

‘Oh, look, there’s a nebula. Didn’t see that yesterday. Better give it a name. How about 141244+031227B? What? Used that last week? Damn. Oh wait – it’s gone. Smudge on the lens. Where’s the Windex?’ And so on.

red Watson’s inspiration as a lad was the legendary telly astronomer Patrick Moore, who presented the BBC’s show The Sky At Night for more than fifty years. At the end, when others such as Chris Lintott began taking over, Moore was simply wheeled in at the start of the show in his wheelchair, to mumble a couple of sentences, then wheeled off again, out of the way, looking on wistfully. Watson and Moore have a lot in common: both British, both immensely informed, both musical performers. And they both showed not just deep knowledge of deep space but also the essential emotional commitment to the vast tapestry they were investigating. I well remember the night when the first pictures of the far side of the moon came to Moore, live on air. As he showed them to the television audience, he simply cried, talking in choked tones as tears streamed down his face. I visited Moore in his large house by the sea in Sussex when he was semiretired. He greeted me with exuberance, announcing he was the fastest speaker in England and the most right-wing. He did a brilliant interview about the Moon, then played me the xylophone after which his factotum, Woody, announced serenely that lunch was ready and, if ‘Sir would like to do up his fly’, we could repair to the dining room. Watson came to Australia decades ago having trained on the engineering 50 NOVEMBER 2019

side as well as in the bewildering frontiers of astrophysics. He, too, was drawn to the public communication of science, and he did so across all media, but with the gentle flair and clarity that kept the excitement while in no way being didactic or bombastic, as Moore and some other star jockeys were wont to be. ‘So, what is an astronomer?’ he asks in one of his short chapters and offers a glimpse of the nerdy, anorak-clad stereotype:

No, he insists, and he’s right. It’s not like stamp- or star-collecting. It’s about the science, trying to answer big questions by looking for evidence. In the last century, that effort has been one of the great triumphs of modern intellectual life. And that is what this marvellous book is all about. Why a ‘User’s Guide To the Universe?’ This comes from its handy and easy structure, with twenty-one chapters ranging from a set on the Earth and our precinct, another on the planets, then the wider universe, and, finally, the bigger challenges of astrophysics with those black holes, dark matter and energy, and even ET – where is he or she? There are surprises throughout, written in Fred’s typically conversational style. Did you know that Mr Dennis M. Hope of Garnerville, Nevada, claims to own the Moon (he can show you the paperwork) or that the near-Earth asteroid Eros (also claimed by a bloke from Idaho) contains more platinum, gold, silver, zinc, aluminium, and other metals than you could ever extract from the Earth’s crust? It’s worth, conservatively, is about $30 trillion. Or, did you know that one theory of our moon’s origins is that it ‘somehow popped out of northern Australia’? These nuggets, far from being ephemera for your pub quiz, are the asides in lively discussions of the future of space industry and the origins of our planets and their moons. I had forgotten that the reason why

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW

we must adjust our clocks by leap seconds every few years is that the Moon is moving slowly away from us, diminishing its effect on Earth’s rotation. Or did I ever know this? Nor, did I know, despite have covered umpteen space shots, that the cost of sterilising spacecraft, for every US$1 billion spent on a mission, is US$100 million. It’s not cheap trying to protect the cosmos from our germs. Then there is the depiction of quantities in terms we can imagine: yes, there is plenty of water on Mars, but then, what if the amount at the southern pole alone were to melt? Watson informs us, citing the source, that it ‘would produce enough water to flood the entire planet to an average depth of 11 metres’. Looks like enough water to keep us going should we one day try to live there. While writing and broadcasting these ideas, Watson has been helping to run the Anglo-Australian Telescope at Siding Spring Mountain near Coonabarabran, working on his own special field of mapping the cosmos by using the optical fibres that have revolutionised this field of research he has helped pioneer – and, of course, playing his acoustic guitar and singing his own songs about Uranus and suchlike. This is a book to keep close by and to consult whenever one of the main topics of astronomy comes by. It gives you a briefing with not just information, history, and anecdote, but the big ideas as well. It is a joy to read and fun to quote. It also shows why Watson was given the Eureka Prize for the communication of science in 2006. Unlike Patrick Moore in his day, Watson is entirely comfortable speaking in pubs or junior classrooms, all the while maintaining his research and investigations at the frontlines of science. And he has a Yorkshireman’s sense of fun. Who else would tell you, and apparently it’s true, that the high-powered nuclear outfit CERN in Switzerland has an Animal Shelter for Retired Computer Mice near its cafeteria, complete with water, straw, and ‘protection from marauding computer cats’? Lovely! g Robyn Williams has presented The Science Show on ABC Radio National since 1975.

Injustice Russell Marks MANDATORY MURDER: A TRUE HISTORY OF HOMICIDE AND INJUSTICE IN AN OUTBACK TOWN

by Steven Schubert

ABC Books $32.99 pb, 306 pp, 9780733339394

BC journalist Steven Schubert’s first book, Mandatory Murder, could have been a definitive account of the bizarre sentencing of Zak Grieve for the murder of fellow Katherine resident Ray Niceforo in October 2011. To achieve this, it had to dig deeper and cover greater territory than existing accounts, including Dan Box’s mediocre documentary, The Queen & Zak Grieve, presented in six ‘webisodes’ on The Australian’s website. Unfortunately, Mandatory Murder’s first 273 pages are given over to a fairly standard true-crime account – complete with shocksploitative details and policestyle sardonic humour – of the investigation into Niceforo’s murder and the subsequent trials of Grieve, his mate Chris Malyschko, and Chris’s mother, Bronwyn Buttery (Niceforo’s partner). A third young man, Darren Halfpenny, separately pleaded guilty to murder. Although he doesn’t need to, Schubert seems to want to amplify the shock value; we even get gruesome colour photos supplied by police. True crime is a genre that often precludes illumination of the narratives of class and trauma that propel criminality in general, and this criminality in particular. True crime is also a genre that, because it relies heavily on populist judgement of criminals, doesn’t lend itself easily to a story of injustice in which the convicted criminals are also victims, of a kind. But that’s the pivot Schubert attempts to make in the book’s concluding chapters, where he drops the sardonic tone and takes up an urgent plea for law reform. Schubert has Supreme Court Justice Dean Mildren explain the Northern Territory’s mandatorysentencing laws. Malyschko, who killed

Niceforo by repeatedly hitting him in the head with a spanner, could have his minimum twenty-year, non-parole period reduced, but Grieve could not, despite the Court’s finding that he wasn’t present at the time Niceforo was killed. This sentencing disparity, widely seen as unjust, is the element that makes this particular murder more notorious than it might otherwise be. Readers are introduced to the policy idea behind it: a conviction for murder in the Norther Territory will see a person jailed for twenty years before he can apply for parole, unless he’s eligible for a discount for ‘exceptional circumstances’. A judge can only find exceptional circumstances in murder cases where the victim’s ‘conduct and condition’ ‘substantially mitigates’ the offender’s actions. Readers are introduced to Mildren’s reasoning: the judge could take into account Niceforo’s violence against Malyschko and his mother when sentencing Malyschko, but not when sentencing Grieve. Readers are introduced to the politics behind mandatory sentencing laws, with parliaments full of reactionary politicians attempting to exert control over the sentencing of offenders. Readers are introduced to some of the efforts to overturn these laws, and to the current conservative disposition of the High Court. We learn of Grieve’s application for mercy, which was ultimately successful. All of this introducing is crammed within a mere thirty pages, at the end of the book. It’s possible to imagine a different book, one that selects these areas as the places to dig for details and narratives; that resists the temptation to exploit the trauma of a victim of domestic violence and the stupid brutality of a group of very young men; that looks more broadly and more incisively at the systems of race and class and poverty and policing governing the town of Katherine. We don’t learn much about Grieve’s Aboriginality, or about the experience of being Aboriginal in Katherine. (His brother, Trevor, once worked for the North Australian Aboriginal Justice Agency in town.) We don’t learn much, though it’s implied, about the cultures of policing in the town and their responsiveness to allegations of domestic

assault. All this is, of course, largely irrelevant to a ‘true crime’ account. But it’s central to the story of mandatory sentencing. Schubert’s narrative style creates difficulties, because in labouring the details of the crime itself, readers are allowed to doubt the judge’s finding that Grieve was not present at the murder. Certainly, there is some evidence that he wasn’t there, but there is also evidence to the contrary. This uncertainty, while largely irrelevant to the law prohibiting murder, detracts from the moral force Grieve’s sentencing has for the prospects of law reform, which will be this terrible affair’s principal legacy for those unconnected with the participants. I lived in Katherine for two years, as a lawyer, in the wake of Grieve’s sentencing. His social circle is one that doesn’t fit neatly into Schubert’s triumvirate typology of Katherine’s populations that ‘didn’t mix much’ (tradies and small-business owners; Aboriginal people; blow-in professionals). Grieve belongs to a stratum of Aboriginal families that live permanently in Katherine and that work to establish and maintain communication between the other groups, including Aboriginal people who come in from remote communities. I’d hoped for more explanation, more analysis, more reflection of the Katherine and the Northern Territory that I was briefly and bewilderingly a part of than Mandatory Murder provides. But true crime aficionados will finish the book with a sense of the abominable injustice that mandatory sentencing perpetrates, especially on a dispossessed population that is excessively surveilled, arrested, and incarcerated. g

Russell Marks is a Melbourne writer currently based on Waiben (Thursday Island). TRUE CRIME

The Employee Millionaire Chronicles of Sherlock Holmes David B. Beckwith $29.99 paperback 978-1-4568-6939-7 also available in ebook www.xlibris.com.au

How to Use Your Day Job to Become a Millionaire with Rental Properties H. J. Chammas From identifying and closing deals, getting approved for loans, renting out properties, dealing with tenants, and capitalizing on opportunities, The Employee Millionaire helps you achieve financial freedom while being employed. $32.95 paperback 978-1-5437-4494-1 also available in hardcover & ebook www.partridgepublishing.com/Singapore

Do you know enough about the famous Sherlock Holmes? In Chronicles of Sherlock Holmes, David B. Beckwith uncovers tales that will satisfy your curiosity about this brilliant detective. Readers are treated to the spectacle of Sherlock Holmes masterfully unraveling mysteries that confound even the police. All five stories feature intriguing mental puzzles set to engage one’s analytic and deduction skills.

The Absolute Bull of New Zealand How to Get Away with Pure 96.5% Murdher Denis Joseph A satire of the judicial system of New Zealand, as debated by three characters — a bull, a meerkat and a shark. Plus a 76 stanza parody of a cricket match! $30.95 paperback 978-1-5434-9528-7 also available in hardcover & ebook www.xlibris.co.nz

Ron and the Wild Men No Time for Toys Gail Annette Tregear $29.99 paperback 978-1-9845-0018-2 also available in hardcover & ebook www.xlibris.com.au

Pat Cooney The book deals with the achievements of an expedition, the people involved, especially Ron and his lover, Gwen, and those who try to sabotage it or take share of the glory. $39.99 paperback 978-1-9845-0265-0 also available in hardcover & ebook www.xlibris.com.au

The Prison Planet Handbook

In January 1818, Sarah Elizabeth Thatcher found herself at the age of 4, alone in the colony of New South Wales. When she arrived at Port Jackson, there was no Victoria, no Melbourne, no Canberra, and no Australia. She saw these all happen in her lifetime, but in her very hard childhood, there was No Time for Toys.

52 NOVEMBER 2019

Denis Goodwin Sometimes, the reality prescribed to us doesn’t explain what we experience. If you too know something isn’t right and want to see the bigger picture, the bottom line is here. $46.95 paperback 978-1-5434-9516-4 also available in hardcover & ebook www.xlibris.co.nz

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW

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Beef stakes

An ambitious history of beef in America

Cameo Dalley RED MEAT REPUBLIC: A HOOF-TO-TABLE HISTORY OF HOW BEEF CHANGED AMERICA by Joshua Specht Princeton University Press (Footprint), $53.99 hb, 339 pp, 9780691182315

uring a steamy Brisbane summer in the early 1990s, my father planned an outing for his preteen children, an adventure that would punctuate an otherwise predictable cycle of sleepovers, movies, and trips to the swimming pool. At the time, Dad was a board member of the Queensland Abattoir Corporation, and his idea of entertainment was a guided tour of the nearby Cannon Hill abattoir. During our half-day outing to the ‘works’, we visited the cow and pig slaughter chains and the boning and meat-packing operations. In the cow-slaughter room, along a narrow passageway, I was momentarily separated from the group, surrounded by hulking carcasses suspended from a ceiling-mounted track line overhead. Jerked by a post-mortem, parasympathetic muscle spasm, a wayward bovine limb collected me. Perhaps it was at this point that I should have recognised my own inextricability with the Australian beef industry. Years later, I somewhat unexpectedly found myself recording oral histories with retired meatworkers in the Kimberley region of Western Australia. The famed setting of Mary Durack’s nostalgic stories of pastoral entrepreneurialism, the Kimberley, from 1919 to 1985, was the location of one of Australia’s largest meatworks (also referred to as an ‘abattoir’). The tiny port town of Wyndham is now a shell of its former glory, and the retired meatworkers who remain were keen to retell the stories of its heyday. So, it was with considerable interest that I came to Joshua Specht’s history of the US beef industry: Red Meat Republic: A hoof-to-table history of how beef changed America. Specht, an American historian

teaching at Monash University, has undertaken the ambitious task of charting the various historical factors – political, economic, technological, social, and otherwise – that have influenced the formation of the US beefcattle complex. Covering a remarkable breadth of original source material, Specht describes the period from the settlement of the Plains country in the late nineteenth century to the ‘meat riots’ of the early twentieth century. In a clever chapter structure, the book leads the reader through histories of War, Range, Market, Slaughterhouse, and Table, comprising the major elements of what he terms the ‘cattle-beef industry’. The core of Specht’s analysis is that the cattle industry, and its dissected product beef, has fundamentally shaped the contemporary geopolitical landscape of the United States, often in ways that have been rendered invisible by the passage of time. This is particularly true of the foundational violence and dispossession of American Indians and the hunting of (native) bison to near extinction, a devastating history brought about by the aspirations of ranchers to expand their cattle enterprises. In his synthesis, Specht carefully navigates the dual roles of the market and the regulatory state in determining patterns of industry development. This is especially the case for the regulation of cattle markets where collusion facilitated price fixing at sale yards and surplus labour available to slaughterhouses meant that the poor treatment of workers was rife. The advent of particular technologies and automation, with applications to the movement of cattle across the country and their butchering, also played a role in guiding changes, as did

THE HOUSE OF YOUSSEF

by Yumna Kassab

Giramondo $26.95 pb, 275 pp, 9781925818192

umna Kassab has utilised the sparse economy of short stories to craft her début collection, grounding universal diasporic themes such as generational disconnect, cultural loss, and the weight of familial expectations in the distinct Lebanese-Australian social milieu of western Sydney, where she was born and raised. Short story collections often lack a certain cohesiveness, but Kassab’s characters each move in the same fictional yet exceedingly real world where Muslim Australians – straddling the line between being hyper-visible and invisible – are both demonised and studiously avoided. Characters with the same names recur from time to time, not always the same characters; reading Kassab’s stories requires a meticulous attention to detail to deconstruct and decipher how various individuals relate to one another. The eighty-four-page ‘The House of Youssef ’ is heartbreaking in the slow yet deliberate way the family at its centre breaks down, but the preceding stories are striking for the poignant moments of unbelonging and loss they capture in so few pages. ‘Hold True’, ‘Son’, ‘The Rest Of His Life’, and ‘Dead End’ capture the hopeless monotony of being a disenfranchised young Lebanese-Australian man. This discombobulation is elevated in ‘9/11: Before and After’ as an unnamed male narrator closes in on himself after the terrorist attack. Kassab’s stories are quietly devastating; her characters rebel in small ways instead of sweeping gestures, but mostly they go about their lives. Kassab’s prose is unsparing and frank yet unstinting when examining the push and pull of being a second-generation Lebanese-Australian who carries her invisible audience of family, friends, and cultural expectations wherever she goes. Similarly in the latter half of the book, she expertly inhabits the psyche of firstgeneration migrants who live in one place yet dream of another. It’s in her ability to bridge the chasm between the two that Kassab shines. Sonia Nair HISTORY

LUCKY TICKET

by Joey Bui

Text Publishing $29.99 pb, 256 pp, 9781922268020

ucky Ticket is a brave and haunting début collection of short stories by VietnameseAustralian writer Joey Bui. In erudite stories of the displaced and dislocated, Bui’s characters are glistering survivors. Many of their voices ring out against the bleak political backdrop of Saigon, making the reader aware of the tyrannical government control and the lack of basic civil and political rights. Bui’s memorable characters are a testament to the deft way she crafts dialogue and to the interviews she undertook with a range of Vietnamese people from refugee backgrounds to better understand the intricacies of their existence. In the stirring titular story, the disabled protagonist is a war veteran who sells lottery tickets. This serves as a brilliant metaphor for the entire collection, where ‘fortunes rise and fall’. The narrator has lost his legs to a ‘Chinese bomb’: ‘One hundred Vietnamese soldiers run through a field and umph, umph, umph, umph! ... Two hundred legs fly off ! You are ruined, you cannot fight them anymore, but you have to keep living.’ Far from being a war hero, he is ‘a burden to Vietnam, one more cripple to look after’. There are similar tropes in ‘Hey Brother’, where the narrator recounts his experience on a refugee boat, pushing overboard a soldier with a gangrenous leg. These gritty, abject moments enhance the determination of the characters. Incredible resolve is also evident in ‘Mekong Love’, a mesmerising parable where characters Comma and Slip must survive a series of threats to the consummation of their marriage, and in ‘The Honourable Man’, dedicated to Nam Le, where a father considers his obligation to his unwanted son. Lucky Ticket explores resilience in times of political unrest and the unfailing tenacity at the heart of dispossession. Bui’s narratives are profound and unforgettable. Cassandra Atherton 54 NOVEMBER 2019

No. 2. Taxidermist’s Department of the Kansas Pacific Railway. Buffalo heads used for advertising purposes. Detail from a photograph by Robert Benecke, 1873 (DeGolyer Library, Southern Methodist University via Wikimedia Commons)

the centralisation of the beef industry among the ‘Big Four’ agribusinesses that still dominate in the US today. The US-centric view of many of these trends means that Australian readers may find themselves at a disadvantage with some of the US pastoral nomenclature. Cattle ‘ranching’, ‘antebellum ranching’, and ‘meatpacking’ are all concepts particular to the United States, whereas in Australia ‘farms’, ‘stations’, and ‘meatworker/abattoir worker’ are the lingua franca. Though a superficial issue, this does point to one of the difficulties of Specht’s task: moving between broad socio-economic trends while also describing the local instantiations of relations that ultimately make for the most compelling reading. The most successful and enjoyable parts of the book, and there are many, are those where Specht steps away from chronicling historical events to describe trends in broad terms, illustrated with vignettes from personal diaries and oral histories. Finding the intimacies of the beef industry seems the most powerful means of communicating its transformative impact on the United States. Specht has avoided the recent push within the social sciences and humanities to take what some have described as an ‘animal-centric position’ on meat consumption, or to extend ideas of personhood to include non-human animals. Likewise, though the environmental impacts of pastoralism are flagged in parts, they are not the focus of Specht’s work. While the historical,

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW

human-centred approach may not appeal to the appetite of every reader, it is from this perspective that Specht is able to detail, for example, the macabre spectre of the slaughterhouse, of human flesh decaying through the unsustainable physical demands of dismembering bovine bodies. We also learn that the modern-day factory assembly line derives its origin from the disassembly lines of the American slaughterhouse, namely the pork packinghouses of 1860s Cincinnati. Red Meat Republic’s ambitious historical scope makes it an important contribution in laying bare the foundations of beef in the formation of the United States. Such is the potency of its message that one hungers for a similarly incisive book to be written of Australia’s own beef-cattle complex. Pastoralism’s domination over the Australian landscape is maintained by the perpetuation of values, policies, and practices underpinned by the nostalgia of settlercolonial history. Understanding the emergence of the cattle-beef complex and the mythology surrounding ‘Aussie farmers’ and ‘Aussie beef ’ may go some way to redressing the power that these narratives have in guiding Australia’s political economy. g Cameo Dalley researches the beef industry in Northern Australia, including relationships between Aboriginal people and pastoralists. She is currently a Research Fellow at Deakin University in Melbourne. ❖

‘To want and want’ Ann-Marie Priest ALL THE LIVES WE EVER LIVED: SEEKING SOLACE IN VIRGINIA WOOLF

by Katharine Smyth

Atlantic Books $32.99 hb, 320 pp, 9781786492852

t first glance, the premise of this book seems dubious. Katharine Smyth, an American woman in her mid-twenties, turns to the life and work of Virginia Woolf for solace after the death of her father. There is no doubt that Woolf writes brilliantly about death, particularly in the novel Smyth focuses on, To the Lighthouse (1927), which fictionalises the death of Woolf ’s mother, Julia Stephen. But what comfort could Smyth hope to find in the work of a writer who herself refuses any of the usual consolations? After losing her mother and her elder half-sister, Stella, in her early teens, and then her father, Leslie, and her elder brother, Thoby, in her twenties, Woolf knew that there was no solace to be found. Her only comfort was that at least ‘the gods (as I used to phrase it) were taking one seriously’. Smyth, to her credit, is not seeking to turn Woolf into some kind of selfhelp grief guru. The novelist’s cool and unflinching acknowledgment of death’s dominion is what attracts Smyth. She explains that when she first read To the Lighthouse, she was appalled by Mrs Ramsay’s sudden death in Part II. Mrs Ramsay had seemed to be the central character, the woman at the heart of the richly realised, late-Victorian family that, in Part I, is holidaying on the Isle of Skye. How could she be dispensed with so simply? Smyth was horrified not just by the fact of Mrs Ramsay’s death but by the way it was portrayed – in ‘detached and oddly graceless language, trapped between the bars of a parenthetical aside’. Yet even as a twentyyear-old, she was aware that ‘it was life’s cruel trick and not Woolf ’s own’. Rather than being repelled by this supremely

reader-unfriendly section of Woolf ’s novel, she was drawn in more deeply. Smyth’s world is almost entirely unlike that of Woolf and To the Lighthouse. She grew up in Boston, the only child of architect parents, one English, one Australian. She was not yet in her teens when her father was first diagnosed with cancer, and his long dying cast a shadow over her youth and young womanhood. She adored him, but she is unsparing in her analysis of his life and character. He was full of a potential he was never able to realise; his alcoholism was part of a larger surrender to fate, a refusal to fight, a refusal to care. Yet he was, for Smyth, the magical parent, her own Mrs Ramsay, enchanting the space of childhood, showing a ‘deference’ to his daughter’s ‘vision’ that helped bring her into the world. Structurally, this would make Smyth’s mother, Minty, the equivalent of Mr Ramsay, but Smyth is quick to assert that Minty is nothing like Mrs Ramsay’s needful and difficult husband. Minty is a troubling presence in this book, a character with virtually no emotional weight. Given Woolf ’s preoccupation with mothers both literal and metaphorical, it seems odd that a book inspired by her should be so in thrall to the paternal. What matters to Smyth, as she interweaves the story of her father’s life and death with that of her own encounters with Woolf ’s life and work, is not the correspondence between her life and Woolf ’s but the way Woolf deals with grief. Woolf does not seek to either mitigate or exaggerate it, to pretend it is not there or to pretend it is everything. ‘To want and not to have,’ muses Lily Briscoe in Part III of To the Lighthouse. ‘And then to want and not to have – to want and want – how that wrung the heart, and wrung it again and again! Oh, Mrs Ramsay!’ The cry is wrenched from her in a moment of utter anguish. Sheer unassuageable need brings her to her knees. ‘To want and want and not to have – my god, the primal, powerful injustice of that phrase!’ Smyth comments. ‘And the terrible simplicity of the problem, insoluble, that death presents us with.’ For Smyth, there is solace – of a grim kind, certainly – in the confirmation that solace is impossible. She takes

a perverse comfort in Woolf ’s affirmation of the intractability of loss. In To the Lighthouse, Woolf proposes that through art we may learn to live with this knowledge. In the third part of the novel, her artist–figure, Lily, works on a picture of Mrs Ramsay as she stands on the lawn of the Ramsays’ summer house. The rhythm of her brush strokes becomes the rhythm of the waves, the rhythm of her thoughts and murmured

Smyth is not seeking to turn Woolf into some kind of self-help grief guru words, the rhythm of the lighthouse beam across the bay. As the painting finds its form, Mrs Ramsay’s intolerable absence becomes fleeting presence. Smyth herself writes with the idea of creating a ‘perfect portrait’ of her father, one that will magically ‘raise him from the dead’. Unlike Mrs Ramsay, Smyth’s father does not appear. Even Smyth remains a shadowy figure. Does she have a job? Does she have friends, lovers, children? Where does she live, and on what? She never tells us. She exists solely as a grieving daughter – and as a reader of Virginia Woolf. In this latter capacity, she is at her best. In her hands, To the Lighthouse unfolds and unfolds; the distance between Woolf ’s world and our own comes to seem no more than a step. g

Ann-Marie Priest is a senior lecturer at Central Queensland University, and the author of A Free Flame: Australian women writers and vocation in the twentieth century (UWAP, 2018). MEMOIR

Cupid and Pisk Margaret Robson Kett STORYTIME: GROWING UP WITH BOOKS

by Jane Sullivan

Ventura Press $29.99 pb 346 pp, 9781925384673

aryanne Wolf ’s excellent book about the reading brain, Proust and the Squid: The story and the science of the reading brain (2007), quotes Marcel himself: There are perhaps no days of our childhood we lived as fully as those … we spent with a favourite book … they have engraved in us so sweet a memory (so much more precious to our present judgment than what we read then with such love), that if we will happen today to leaf through those books of another time, it is for no other reason than that they are the only calendars we have kept of days that have vanished, and we hope to see reflected on their pages the dwellings and ponds which no longer exist.

Jane Sullivan asserts in Storytime that ‘it’s no exaggeration to say that reading has made me what I am’. Sullivan is a journalist, essayist, and novelist, who currently writes ‘Turning Pages’, a column in The Age and Sydney Morning Herald. (She also contributes to ABR.) The young Jane was brought up in London during the 1950s, the daughter of two Australian artist–cartoonists. Here, she re-examines ‘about a dozen’ books that remain fixed in her memory. The writer lays out her framework: I will first record my memories of them, which might be hazy, or quite wrong. Then I will read them again, and record my new reactions. Because I have a jour56 NOVEMBER 2019

nalist’s curiosity, I will also look around the periphery of the book – at the author, and so on. But I won’t stray too far into the territory of the biographer or the psychologist or the literary critic. This will not be a book about books. It will be a book about my experience of reading those books.

As someone who has never left the world of children’s books behind, I have regarded other such essays by adult writers with suspicion bordering on scorn. They haven’t put in the hard yards! Is it because children’s books are one of the few markets experiencing sales growth that people are turning their attention to them? I am usually won over by the possibility of gaining a new perspective on the familiar, and meeting new books, as I did here. Sullivan beautifully sketches how imperfect memory leads to conflation of narratives. Her summary castigation of her younger self at getting one or two things wrong is matched with pleased amazement when she finds that she has remembered accurately. We meet the young Jane reading a book in bed, by fading daylight, in St John’s Wood: H.A. Guerber’s The Myths of Greece and Rome (1908). She’s taken it from her parents’ bookshelf and is enjoying the tale of Cupid and Psyche, whom she calls Pisk. It’s details like this – a child’s pronunciation of an unknown name – that bring this book to life. Sullivan is upfront that her list of chosen books is not a catalogue of classics. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865), The Wind in the Willows (1908), and Winnie-the-Pooh (1926) are included, but so are contemporary works like Tove Jansson’s Finn Family Moomintroll (1948), Gillian Avery’s The Warden’s Niece (1957), and Alan Garner’s The Weirdstone of Brisingamen (1960). Enid Blyton, of course. She includes the ephemeral precursor to the graphic novel, the girls’ school story in comic-strip digest form, as well as essential expat reading: The Magic Pudding (1918). Exploring the links between these books and her home and school life makes for compelling and affecting stories of their own. Sullivan throws in hypotheses about exactly what she was

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW

looking for, in terms of characterisation, plot, and design elements. Do we expect the books we read when young (Proust’s calendars) to go on delighting, surprising, and frightening us as they once did? Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women (1868) is the revisiting that intimidates Sullivan most: ‘Can I be right or wrong about a book?’ The inclusion of this title epitomises the ‘classic’ conundrum – why did everyone else seem to love it so much, when young Jane disliked it intensely? Sullivan’s exploration of the ‘right or wrong’, including the niggling thought that the book’s heroine Jo influenced her own career choice, makes this chapter particularly entertaining. The book design invites the reader to engage with the collected short reminiscences of childhood reading by other famous writers and readers sprinkled throughout. This will be a kind of fallback for readers disappointed not to find their own favourites on Sullivan’s list. It’s harder to see why the publisher has chosen to use breakout boxes with sentences from the text. I found this journalistic device distracting and irritating. On page 194, the opening sentence of a paragraph is set in this way, right beside the same text. Sullivan, with a journalist’s acumen for the contextual backstory, sticks to her stated intention of examining the personal. (She doesn’t make any broadbrush generalisations about children’s reading today.) Sharing the books that contributed to making her who she is, Sullivan invites all readers to reflect on remembrances of books past. g Margaret Robson Kett is a Melbourne writer and editor who recently founded Kettlestitch Press.

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The tribe of Ashbery John Hawke ASHBERY MODE

edited by Michael Farrell

Tinfish Press US$20 pb, 126 pp, 9781732928602

he recent death of Les Murray can be likened in its significance to the passing of Victor Hugo, after which, as Stéphane Mallarmé famously wrote, poetry ‘could fly off, freely scattering its numberless and irreducible elements’. Murray’s subsumption of the Australian nationalist tradition in poetry, including The Bulletin schools of both the 1890s (A.G. Stephens) and 1940s (Douglas Stewart), has delineated an influential pathway in our literature for more than fifty years. Yet the death in 2017 of the American poet John Ashbery might be viewed as equivalent in its effect, given the impact of his work on several generations of local poets, which has in many respects constituted a counter-stream to Murray’s often narrowly defined nationalism. Ashbery’s voice has been infectiously dominant in English-language poetries over several decades, in a manner similar to T.S. Eliot’s impression on poets of the earlier twentieth century. Critic Susan Schultz, the publisher of this volume, has charted the dynamics of its transcultural influence in her aptly titled collection, The Tribe of John (1995). But Ashbery’s connections to Australian poetry, especially in its reception of modernist stylistic approaches, are more particular. It is an association that commences with his purchase of The Darkening Ecliptic by notorious hoax-poet ‘Ern Malley’ in a Gotham bookshop in the 1940s, after which Malley apparently became one of his favourite poets. The Malley poems were then included by Ashbery in a special ‘Collaborations’ issue of the journal Locus Solus in 1961, alongside seminal avant-garde texts by Breton, Soupault, Marinetti, and William S. Burroughs. If Ashbery’s style is characterised by

its incorporation of French modernist sources – cubist juxtapositions and surrealist conjunctions, as well as a tendency to humour – then ‘Ern Malley’ is the local poet who fits the bill. Australian poetry during the postwar period precisely defined itself by its rejection of the Malley example. Unremittingly serious and determinedly antimodernist, poets like Judith Wright set themselves the task of finding symbolic correlatives for white Australian experience in a traditional mode. The fulcrum for a renewed reception of modernist poetics was Donald M. Allen’s The New American Poetry, published in 1960 though banned here for several years. It was through this American model that Australians approached the (mainly untranslated) techniques of avant-garde modernist practice. While Allen’s anthology offered a wide survey of ‘postmodern’ examples, Ashbery and related New York School poets were particularly valuable in connecting local practitioners with prior European experiments in collage, proceduralism, and surrealist imagery. Ashbery’s early volumes were being circulated among Melbourne poets like Ken Taylor by the late 1960s; however, the principal conduit for his influence was Sydney poet John E. Tranter (the ‘E’ stands for ‘Ernest’, as in Malley, of whom he was also an enthusiast). Tranter’s looping, discursive style of the 1970s, marked by collage-like disjunctions, directly adapts the Ashbery mode to urban Australian experience. It was Tranter who acted as celebrant for Ashbery’s highly successful 1992 reading tour (recollected here in a poem by David Prater), where the American performed to packed halls in Sydney and Melbourne. And Tranter’s online journal, Jacket, launched in 1997, established itself as an essential resource for a globalising poetics in the digital era, with a markedly New York School emphasis: this deliberate internationalism repudiates the nationalist concerns inherited by Murray. Michael Farrell’s commemorative anthology of recent homages to Ashbery, mostly collected from the past decade, demonstrates how this influence now spans several generations.

It is notable that some of the liveliest poems in the volume are from its youngest contributors, Andrew Mahony and Oscar Schwartz, written while both were in their early twenties. The collection also demonstrates how the range of Ashbery’s writing, as it moves through distinct periods – from the lyricism of Some Trees (1956), through the expansive meditations of his celebrated middle period, to his quirkily Rimbaudian later style – cannot be restricted to a singular approach. Tranter, for example, is represented here not by his most explicit tribute poem, ‘The Anaglyph’, a composition which utilises the terminal words of Ashbery’s ‘Clepsydra’ to create its own commentary on anxieties of influence. Instead, we have the challenging ‘Electrical Disturbance’, which draws on Ashbery’s experiments with procedural techniques in The Tennis Court Oath (1962): in this case, the poem transmutes an interview Tranter conducted with Ashbery through speech-to-text computer manipulations, with startling if rarefied results. This experimental approach has been incorporated within the longstanding practice of many poets here, including veteran figures such as Javant Biarujia, Chris Edwards, Hazel Smith, and Ruark Lewis. They have been joined more recently by a younger generation. For post-Jacket poets of the internet age, such as Tamryn Bennett, A.J. Carruthers, Bella Li, and Toby Fitch, these procedural techniques can now be taken for granted. Their work stands alongside established poets, such as Gig Ryan and Peter Rose, for whom the Ashbery mode has been thoroughly incorporated within a distinctive and fully developed personal voice. The modernist aesthetic of collage and disjunction, which had so incensed the perpetrators of the ‘Ern Malley’ hoax that they provided excellent examples of their own, is now accepted and absorbed within the practice of contemporary Australian poetry: this specialised anthology is a handy representation of its currency and scope. g John Hawke is a Senior Lecturer at Monash University. POETRY

Publisher of the Month with

Madonna Duffy What was your pathway to publishing?

An Arts degree and a youthfully optimistic view that I could land a job in publishing when I was living in London in my twenties. Working at Penguin Books in the wake of Penguin’s publishing Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses was an exciting and dramatic time. I was sold on the courage, the passion, and the literary life around me.

How many titles do you publish each year?

Up to fifteen titles. This has traditionally been across fiction, poetry, and non-fiction at UQP, but I’m focusing more now on non-fiction.

Which book are you proudest of publishing?

Each year that answer changes, but in 2019 it is most certainly Too Much Lip by Melissa Lucashenko, not only because it won the Miles Franklin Literary Award, but because it is the bravest, most important, and most original novel I’ve read this year.

Do you edit the books you commission?

It depends on how developed they are upon contracting. I am very involved in offering editorial feedback and support as manuscripts are being written and also doing structural notes when they’re finished. I have worked as an editor at earlier points in my career, so I don’t think I’ve ever stopped reading and thinking like an editor.

What qualities do you look for in an author?

Dedication to craft, discipline to write, and devotion to promotion. In the work, I look for originality of style, authenticity of voice, and control of story.

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

There is nothing more rewarding than seeing a manuscript that I have had a hand in developing and publishing go on to earn that writer critical and commercial acclaim. It means I have done my job properly. Seeing that book connect with readers, win awards, and sell enough copies to make the author a living are the greatest pleasures of my work. The challenges occur when, despite the best efforts of author and publisher, these outcomes don’t eventuate. 58 NOVEMBER 2019

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW

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

I have not a single creative impulse to write. My writing is limited to back-cover blurbs, sales copy, and letters of support for my authors for grant applications. My reading has informed my work as a publisher, but I don’t think I would have the necessary distance and objectivity if I, too, were a writer.

What kinds of books do you enjoy reading?

For leisure I usually try to read outside of Australian fiction, as it is so much a part of my job. Sometimes an Irish novel (going back to my roots) or a novel in translation, usually recommended by my excellent local bookseller.

Who are the editors/publishers you most admire (from any era)?

Diana Athill, Beatrice Davis, and Hilary McPhee – women who, in their own ways, carved careers that have paved the way for the generations of women who came after.

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

Not at UQP. We celebrate independence and individuality here; it is one of our points of difference from larger multinational houses.

On publication, which is more gratifying: a brilliant launch, a satisfied author, encomiastic reviews, or rapid sales?

A satisfied author is the best reward, but the reason for the satisfaction can differ from one author to the next. But I have never seen an author or a publisher unhappy with rapid sales.

What’s the outlook for new writing of quality? Buoyant and hopeful. I remain a stubborn optimist.

Madonna Duffy has been Publishing Director at the University of Queensland Press since 2006. She has worked in publishing in London and in Sydney and is proud to be the publisher of 2019 Miles Franklin Literary Award winner Too Much Lip by Melissa Lucashenko.

Arts

Arts Highlights of the Year

Theatre

Anthem

Fiona Gruber

Art

Civilization

Alison Stieven-Taylor

Film

Joker

Dilan Gunawardana

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

SURVEY

Arts Highlights of the Year

To celebrate the year’s memorable plays, films, television, music, operas, dance, and exhibitions, we invited a number of arts professionals and critics to nominate their favourites. (We indicate which works were reviewed in ABR Arts on our website, and when.)

Robyn Archer

Zizanie, Meryl Tankard’s new work for Restless Dance Theatre, premièred at the Adelaide Festival: a work of such charm and intelligence it makes you wonder what the word ‘disability’ actually means. The work deserves to be seen Australia-wide. Back to Back Theatre gave us The Shadow Whose Prey the Hunter Becomes. Typically dangerous, the creator/performers debate the use of the word ‘disability’ and do so in the most minimal theatrical style. Devoid of artifice yet wholly theatrical, this is the most provocative company in the country. At NGV Australia, Rosslynd Piggott’s survey show I sense you but I cannot see you went from early botanicals, through objects and air of cities, artisan collaborations and vapour paintings. These recent Japan-inspired oils are created with alchemical mastery. There’s an indescribable energy in this ultimate minimalism. A word on philanthropy. Without Naomi Milgrom’s private collection and assistance we would lack a comprehensive grasp of all that William Kentridge is and does. His Wozzeck was in Sydney (ABR Arts, 1/19), That Which We Do Not Remember graced AGNSW and then AGSA, where we were additionally treated to Adelaide-born, Berlin-resident Jo Dudley’s terrific Guided Tour of the Exhibition: For Soprano with Handbag. Thanks to all inclined to support the arts with such generosity.

Felicity Chaplin

This year’s Alliance Française French Film Festival featured a strong program, including new films by Jean-Luc Godard and Claire Denis, and the second feature from Louis Garrel. Charlotte Gainsbourg’s 60 NOVEMBER 2019

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW

exuberant performance in Eric Barbier’s La Promesse de l’aube was a standout for me, but the real highlight was the darkly comic, metaphysical western The Sisters Brothers (sadly not released since), which screened at the Astor accompanied by a Q&A with director Jacques Audiard. The Astor was the perfect setting for Benoît Debie’s majestic cinematography, and Joaquin Phoenix gives a captivating performance as an unpredictable gun for hire. Audiard said that directing Phoenix was like working with ‘a little devil’. Other highlights of 2019 included Richard Lowenstein’s documentary Mystify for its intimate and absorbing portrait of Michael Hutchence, and Jennifer Kent’s harrowing and atmospheric colonial thriller The Nightingale for the revelation of Baykali Ganambarr in a breakout performance as local Aboriginal tracker Billy.

Tim Byrne

It is always fascinating to see the wheel of fortune returning a classic work to the forefront of our consciousness; it tells us as much about our present as our past. This year it was Arthur Miller’s A View From the Bridge (ABR Arts, 3/19). Directed by Iain Sinclair, this breathtaking MTC production rendered Eddie Carbone’s act of betrayal as a catastrophic rift in the social contract, an act of madness against himself, his community, and his future. In another return, Melbourne Worker’s Theatre produced an extraordinary polyphony of contemporary voices, primal screams, and competing iterations of our national character with Anthem (ABR Arts, 10/19). Andrew Bovell, Patricia Cornelius, Melissa Reeves, Christos Tsiolkas, and Irine Vela reminded us that agitprop is the beating heart of all theatre,

the original call to attention. Best of all came early in the year. Malthouse brought out Ars Nova’s production of Underground Railroad Game to open their season. It was one of the most accomplished, provocative, and thoughtful works in years. Reaching deep into the history of slavery and oppression in the United States, it threw an uncompromising light on our own racial inadequacies. The past is always present.

Gabriella Coslovich

during, and after the AIDS crisis). Joel Bray’s intimate confessional/participatory dance theatre work Biladurang (in a hotel room on the forty-fourth floor of the Sofitel on Collins in Melbourne’s CBD) and Daddy (Arts House, North Melbourne Town Hall) both explored Aboriginality and queerness in a way that was playful, tender, confronting, and inclusive. My favourite piece of new writing was See You Next Tuesday, Perth playwright Samantha Nerida’s delirious monologue in three voices about teenage female sexuality, adventure, and danger, intelligently directed

Two of the most profoundly moving works I saw this year brought me face to face with a past that, as author Bruce Pascoe has shown, is well documented but that white Australia largely chooses to ignore. Indigenous soprano–composer Deborah Cheetham transformed the requiem – a mass for the dead, traditionally sung in Latin – into a work of bold contemporary relevance, recasting it in the language of the Gunditjmara people to honour the fallen on both sides of the resistance wars on Victoria’s south-west coast. With its passages of terror, grief, and beauty, Eumerella, a War Requiem for Peace unified non-Indigenous and Indigenous choirs with the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, and rightly won a prolonged standing ovation at its single performance at Deborah Cheetham performing in Eumeralla: A war requiem for peace Hamer Hall. with the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra (photograph by Laura Manariti) Tasmanian Aboriginal artist Julie Gough’s exhibition Tense Past, preby Alexa Taylor at The Blue Room Theatre. Finally, sented by the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery the most spectacular international show I saw was and Dark Mofo, was born of an equally deep enquiry Dimitris Papaioannou’s darkly humorous work of corinto the impact of colonisation. Gough’s outdoor poreal theatre, The Great Tamer, at the Perth Festival. installation Missing or Dead, at Dark Path in Hobart, was the most perturbing element. In the heaviness Michael Shmith of a Hobart mid-winter night, I was confronted by a It takes bravado for an opera company to bring dimly lit, nightmarish expanse of trees upon which neglected works into the repertoire. The year was were hung or nailed posters of 180 Tasmanian Abobookended by two such productions. In February, riginal children lost or stolen during the early years of Victorian Opera brought to the cavernous Palais the colony. Theatre, in St Kilda, the first fully staged Melbourne production of Parsifal (1882). Conducted by the comHumphrey Bower pany’s artistic director, Richard Mills, and directed by My theatre highlight in 2019 was the Belvoir/ Roger Hodgman, this was a sterling effort that went Co-Curious co-production of S. Shakthidharan and to the heart of Wagner’s Bühnenweihfestspiel. Eamon Flack’s sprawling Sri Lankan-Australian saga In October, from IOpera, came the Australian Counting and Cracking at the Adelaide Festival. Two première of Ernst Krenek’s jazz-inspired opera, Jonny outstanding location- or community-based works in spielt auf (1927). Conducted by Peter Tregear – a real Perth were 5 Short Blasts by Madeleine Flynn and labour of love and scholarship – this one-off concert Tim Humphrey (in a small boat on the upper reaches performance was a vivid reminder of what was once of the Swan River and Fremantle Harbour) and The the most popular opera in the world. Lion Never Sleeps by Noemie Huttner-Koros (a walkA quick mention of galvanising performances by ing tour of queer Northbridge and its history before, ARTS

the MSO and its departing chief conductor, Andrew Davis, of a Stravinsky double bill: Perséphone and Le sacre du printemps (ABR Arts, 7/19).

Des Cowley

The Stonnington Jazz Festival (ABR Arts, 5/19) delivered a week of outstanding performances, including the Australian première of Peter Knight’s composition The Plains, based on the Gerald Murnane novel. Elsewhere, jazz and film came together in a memorable concert by the Adam Simmons Creative Music Ensemble devoted to the music of the late Polish jazz composer Krzysztof Komeda, best known for his scores for filmmaker Roman Polanski. Miles Okazaki’s brilliant and unorthodox interpretations of the music of Thelonious Monk, as arranged for solo guitar, was a personal highlight at this year’s Melbourne International Jazz Festival (ABR Arts, 6/19). But nothing could surpass the masterful performance by the Art Ensemble of Chicago as part of Melbourne’s Supersense Festival. Celebrating their fiftieth year, the augmented Ensemble, led by the unflagging seventynine-year-old Roscoe Mitchell, one of the AEC’s two remaining original members, unleashed a 100-minute single piece flow of music that ran the gamut from classical to African rhythms, swing and free jazz.

Susan Lever

In July, Meyne Wyatt brought his first play City of Gold to the Griffin Theatre. This witty, confronting performance reminded us how little life has changed for those on the margins while we city dwellers live in comfort. Most of the audience left speechless with awe and shame. In a complete contrast, Whiteley (ABR Arts, 7/19) celebrated that comfortable middle-class life. With its melodic score by Elena Kats-Chernin and massive screens showing some of Whiteleys more colourful and optimistic paintings, it offered art as pure pleasure, with any darkness deftly smoothed over. I left thinking the real genius on display was Kats-Chernin. The same week, the Sydney Chamber Opera staged another new Australian opera, Pierce Wilcox and Elliott Gyger’s adaptation of Peter Carey’s Oscar and Lucinda (ABR Arts, 7/19). While Gyger’s music became a little monotonous, Wilcox’s libretto turned a prolix novel into a pithily philosophical drama, brilliantly acted and sung by the young cast.

Peter Rose

The Adelaide Festival brought many highlights. One performance (sadly not repeated elsewhere) that shook me to the core was the 600-year-old a cappella Sretensky Monastery Choir, with its six virtuosic soloists and its phenomenal sonorities and surges. Monsieur Crescendo himself (Rossini) would have been on his feet at the end, as we all were. The Sydney Symphony Orchestra’s concert ver62 NOVEMBER 2019

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sion of Peter Grimes (ABR Arts, 7/19) reminded us what remarkable metaphysical angst Britten depicts in his first opera. What is home? Where is home? Stuart Skelton, in the title role, offered an acute study in exhaustion, social estrangement, and defeat. Nicole Car, making her role début, was a radiant Ellen Orford. Opera Australia and David McVicar’s luminous production of Così fan tutte (ABR Arts, 5/19) finally came to Melbourne and convinced some of us that it might just be Mozart’s finest opera. In an exceptional cast, Jane Ede and Anna Dowsley stood out as the equivocating sisters. Bravo to Red Stitch for giving us Caryl Churchill’s hilarious, unnerving satire Escaped Alone (ABR Arts, 6/19). Julie Forsyth was magnetic, her closing monologue (‘Terrible rage’) quite unforgettable.

Alison Stieven-Taylor

My first review for ABR was David Goldbatt: Photographs 1948–2018 (ABR Arts, 11/18), an expansive collection of works by one of South Africa’s most insightful photographers. This exemplary expression of the documentary form was followed by Ballenesque, Roger Ballen: A Retrospective (ABR Arts, 3/19). Bizarre, thrilling, and at times repellent, Ballen’s work is at the other end of the photographic spectrum to Goldblatt, but both artists challenge conceptions of humanity, politics, and power. Hoda Afshar’s breathtaking Remain features portraits of asylum seekers on Manus Island. Shot in secret in a makeshift studio, Afshar’s work is unequivocally political, portraying the beauty in suffering. Dina Goldstein’s satirical series Gods of Suburbia brilliantly questions religious faith in the era of technology. Oded Wagenstein’s Like Last Year’s Snow, a lyrical dissertation on ageing, moved me to tears. Both featured in Head On Photo Festival (Sydney). And my final highlight: Civilization: The Way We Live Now (ABR Arts, 9/19). Exhilarating and apocalyptic, this is the show of the summer.

Will Yeoman

Recorded music aside, I’ve spent a lot of time this year listening to WASO, especially when principal conductor Asher Fisch was in town. His ability to galvanise the orchestra in performance, while continuing to shape and refine its technical and artistic qualities, is a constant source of wonder, especially when orchestra and conductor share the platform with superb international artists. Three of this year’s WASO concerts stand out for me. An Evening with Gun-Brit Barkmin (ABR Arts, 8/19) – Beethoven, Wagner, Richard Strauss – showcased not only the interpretative range of this fine German soprano but Fisch’s considerable fluency in German operatic repertoire. To hear Fisch conducting Danish violinist and conductor Nikolaj Szeps-Znaider in a superlative performance of Elgar’s Violin Concerto, followed by Szeps-Znaider conduct-

ing Fisch in Schumann’s Piano Concerto – well, that took things to a whole new level.

twenty-four hours, it excavated contemporary gender roles in an utterly compelling fashion.

Gillian Wells

Barney Zwartz

Spartacus is a Bolshoi Ballet specialty. Aram KhachaMelburnians, as always, had a rich choice of operas turian’s romantic score is lyrical and lush, and Yuri from several companies. Opera Australia, unsurprisGrigorovich’s ambitious choreography captures the ingly, led the way with a brilliant co-production of plight of the gladiatorial slaves and the phalanxes Rossini’s Il Viaggio a Reims (ABR Arts, 5/19), comand testudos of Roman military tactics. In the recent posed for the 1824 coronation of Charles X, lost for Bolshoi production presented by The Queensland 150 years and given here in its Australian première. Performing Arts Centre, the superbly synchronised The other OA highlight was a concert performance of military sequences made an ideal foil for the breathAndrea Chénier (ABR Arts, 8/19), with superstar solotaking airborne artistry of Igor Tsvirko in the leading ists in Jonas Kaufmann and Eva-Maria Westbroek. role. In Concert Seven of this year’s Bangalow Music Festival, the Orava Quartet’s performance of Wojciech Kilar’s rarely heard Orawa thrilled the crowd. The Quartet’s crystal-clear, lovingly precise vibrancy was like a portal through which the sights, sounds, and colours of a Polish rural scene were indelibly revealed. The Tyalgum Music Festival presented a stunning performance of Strauss’s Four Last Songs by soprano Greta Bradman and the Tinalley String Quartet in the festival’s Friday Gala. Another highlight was an airing of Schubert’s Fantasie in F minor. This work for four hands is a Sian Sharp and Shanul Sharma in Opera Australia’s production of Il Viaggio a Reims treasure, though in the hands at Arts Centre Melbourne (photograph by Prudence Upton) of the unimaginative it can be witheringly repetitive. The Viney-Grinberg Piano Duo’s superb interpretation Baritone Ludovic Tézier almost stole the show. breathed with such fresh insight, drama, and edgeVictorian Opera’s best was an outstanding of-the-seat silences that every repetition was a joy. Parsifal, again with a fine cast led by Burkhard Fritz, Peter Rose, and Katarina Dalayman, with the luxury Ben Brooker of Teddy Tahu Rhodes as Titurel. Perhaps the most Sometimes there is so much bad theatre around you’re interesting was tiny IOpera’s witty and inventive conleft wondering what you ever saw in the medium in cert performance in the Australian première of Ernst the first place. And yet, when the reminders come, Krenek’s 1927 sensation Jonny spielt auf. Twice before as they always do, the effect can be incendiary. Three planned and dropped by bigger companies, the opera performance works qualified in the past twelve made it thanks to the passion of Krenek specialist months: Counting and Cracking, S. Shakthidharan’s Peter Tregear, who conducted masterfully. astonishing epic (and début play!) about four generations of one Sri Lankan family; SHIT/LOVE, fortyRichard Leathem fivedownstairs’s double bill of equally brilliant one-act ACMI may have closed its doors for much of 2019, plays by Patricia Cornelius, high poetess of Australia’s for redevelopment, but not before it screened the underclass; and The Second Woman, Nat Randall and ultimate movie montage. Christian Marclay’s twentyAnna Breckon’s marathon work for stage and video. four-hour opus The Clock (2010) delivered a masAcross a single scene repeated one hundred times over terclass in film editing. The Clock features clips from ARTS

thousands of films made since the creation of cinema; each scene contains a time corresponding with the actual time. Suspense builds without ever being released. Cinema has been described as the art of time; Marclay’s addictive installation took the practice of time manipulation to the ultimate degree. Cinema of a more traditional length reached its acme, as ever, at the Melbourne International Film Festival. This year the Georgian-set And Then We Danced showed how beautiful art can come from harsh reality. Levan Akin’s response to seeing members of the LGBTIQ community in his home country being violently attacked was a rapturous celebration of self-expression in defiance of oppressive traditions.

Sophie Knezic

The year featured three outstanding exhibitions by established artists in full command of their medium. The Garden of Forking Paths: Mira Gojak and Takehito Koganezawa, curated by Shihoko Iida and Melissa

seamless work deftly balanced the live and the recorded, whose overlappings became an affective metaphor for the probing of memory and reflection. A survey exhibition of one of our most interesting artists working with digital animation, Arlo Mountford: Deep Revolt (Shepparton Art Museum) highlighted the tautness of Mountford’s work, its mash-up of art history, manga, and genre film exposing our entanglements in the mediatised world.

Patrick McCaughey

Richard Serra has taken over Gagosian’s prime spaces in NYC this fall. The huge, multi-piece Forged Rounds at West 24th St sets the key: ‘Weight is a value for me … I have more to say about the balancing of weight, the diminishing of weight … the disorientation of weight, the disequilibrium of weight …’ The drawings, Diptychs and Triptychs, at the mother house on Madison Avenue exemplified the theme, and the 99’ length of Reverse Curve added dynamism. I admired Kristin Headlam’s illuminations of Chris WallaceCrabbe’s long poem The Universe Looks Down at the Baillieu Library in Melbourne. Although the poem has brilliance and liveliness on the page, it is not an easy work. Headlam’s spirited responses – a bestiary of the poem – drew my attention to overlooked passages. I returned to The Universe Looks Down imaginatively refreshed with a new awareness and admiration.

Francesca Sasnaitis

The musicians’ joyous engagement with one another and with the audience was the highlight of Silkroad Ensemble’s performance in Perth. Opening with an impassioned dialogue between Cristina Pato’s gaita (Galician bagpipes) and Vaishnavi Suryaprakash and Sukania Venugopal in Counting and Cracking Wu Tong’s suona (Chinese horn), (photograph by Brett Boardman) and travelling through Brazilian, Vietnamese, Indian, and Sephardic traditions, and the compositions of György Ligeti, Keys at Buxton Contemporary, offered a rare opporAntonín Dvořák, and John Zorn, the exhilarating tunity to see a cluster of Gojak’s materially poetic and program was truly representative of founder Yo-Yo literally incisive works surprisingly well-paired with Ma’s ideal of cultural exchange and collaboration. Koganezawa’s exuberant drawings and animations. The survey exhibition Tom Nicholson: Public MeetComposite Acts by David Rosetzky – a one-nighting at ACCA, in Melbourne, proffered a spectacular only exhibition as part of the Channels Festival – argument in favour of socially driven arts practice that showed him excelling in the role of artistic director. combines arresting visuals, profound thought, and an Featuring a video of dancers Shelley Lasica, Arabella ongoing conversation with community. Nicholson’s Frahn-Starkie, and Harrison Ritchie-Jones choreodeployment of text as both graphic element and nargraphed by Jo Lloyd (two of them performed on the rative vehicle in projects, such as Towards a monunight), with ludic sculptures by Sean Meilak and a ment to Batman’s Treaty (2013–19) and After action poignant score by composer Duane Morrison, this 64 NOVEMBER 2019

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for another library (1999–2001/2019), multiplied and challenged readings of contested colonial histories with surprising emotional intensity.

Ian Dickson

It is fitting that in a year in which the concept of masculinity has been put firmly in the spotlight and populist movements have sought to demonise ‘the other’, three undoubted highlights concerned themselves with flawed men, outsiders who are brought down by their otherness. In his searing production of Alban Berg’s Wozzeck for Opera Australia, William Kentridge’s familiar charcoal drawings summoned up a hellish World War I nightmare. As the increasingly isolated and paranoid Wozzeck, Michael Honeyman gave a career-defining performance. Isolated, paranoid, pitiful, and brutal are all adjectives that could also apply to Peter Grimes, the eponymous protagonist of Benjamin Britten’s opera, which was given a magnificent semi-staged performance at the Sydney Opera House. David Robertson led a superbly in-form SSO, and the Sydney Philharmonia Choirs rose to the occasion brilliantly. Their stentorian cries of ‘Peter Grimes’ nearly blew Utzon’s sails into the Harbour. But it was the superlative cast that set the seal on this incomparable evening. Can there be any doubt that Stuart Skelton is the reigning Grimes of the moment? He has all the power of Jon Vickers but also a tenderness that the great Canadian lacked in this role. It says much for the rest of the cast, especially Nicole Car and the American baritone Alan Held, that they were all performing at his level. The story of the third outsider, John Grant, the schoolteacher in Kenneth Cook’s Wake in Fright (ABR Arts, 7/19), was given a brilliantly radical retelling at the Malthouse. Director Declan Greene worked seamlessly with the extraordinary Zahra Newman, who played all the characters and provided a devastating introduction. The staging of the two-up game and the roo shoot were bravura moments of theatre.

Kim Williams

Three things standout in particular for me in the 2019 year – all epic in vision and realisation. Counting and Cracking from Belvoir St Theatre (Sydney Festival and Adelaide Festival). A huge, valiant production written by S. Shakthidharan in a collaboration with director Eamon Flack, who realised an indelibly memorable production about four generations of Sri Lankans moving between Sydney and Sri Lanka in a beautiful and tragic epic. It was cast with a large, entirely non-Anglo Celtic troupe that delivered gripping storytelling. The new film from Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, Never Look Away, is even better than his last (The Lives of Others, 2006). Loosely based on the

German artist Gerhard Richter, this sweeping piece of cinematic storytelling is almost perfect in terms of realisation, and devastating in impact. It addresses the artistic sensibility, mid-twentieth-century politics, humanity, and, above all, love. Meryl Tankard’s restaging of her remarkable work Two Feet for the Adelaide Festival (ABR Arts, 3/19), with the twenty-first century’s greatest ballerina, Natalia Osipova, in a solo role that portrayed the tragic, tempestuous life of the twentieth-century heroine Olga Spessivtseva, provided a wondrous chamber work with devastating impact.

Tali Lavi

Watching The Australian Dream (ABR Arts, 9/19) on opening night in a near-vacant suburban cinema rendered the devastation twofold. The documentary examines the state of this country’s heart, made rotten by racism and the disavowal of Indigenous Australia’s centrality to the national narrative. Adam Goodes and Stan Grant stand as beacons of dignity. Sometimes artists are so ingenious that their works induce a heightened state of wonder. Bryony Kimmings’s I’m a Phoenix, Bitch (Arts Centre Melbourne) was a melange of puppetry, subversive song, encounter with the woods of Grimm, and multimedia, as Kimmings revealed her experiences of post-natal depression and having a sick child. Honourable mentions: THE RABBLE’s feverish production of Alison Croggon’s poetry-infused My Dearworthy Darling (ABR Arts, 8/19) and Nakkiah Lui’s Black Is The New White (STC/Melbourne Festival), where racial and sexual politics were subversively and outrageously skewered amid audience dancing and joyfulness.

Michael Halliwell

This has been a good year for offerings from Opera Australia, but two stand out, for different reasons. Wozzeck (a co-production with the Salzburg Festival), directed by artist William Kentridge, dazzled as a visual feast with a kaleidoscopic array of images punctuating Berg’s bleak look at struggling humanity. Of similar impact, Strauss’s Salome (ABR Arts, 5/19) was distinguished by the outstanding performance of the title role by American soprano Lise Lindstrom. Salome is an almost impossible role, visually and vocally, but Lindstrom’s lithe and alluring physical presence and steely tone were as close to perfection as is possible. Revisiting a well-loved play for the first time in nearly forty years has its perils. Sydney Theatre Company’s production of Tom Stoppard’s quasiautobiographical, meta-theatrical meditation on love and betrayal, The Real Thing, paid homage to the play’s 1980s social, and particularly musical, context, but made it a searingly contemporary experience. g ARTS

Anne Frank: Parallel Stories

Tali Lavi

arlier this year, not being able to find my childhood copy of Anne Frank’s The Diary of a Young Girl for my eldest daughter, I bought another one. It seemed bigger than I had remembered, but the cover had the same recognisable photo of the demurely smiling Anne gazing somewhere into the distance. The book bore a label that seemed to be making a dubious claim: ‘The Definitive Edition’. Was it more definitive than the journal I had read when I was a similar age to the girl who wrote it, as my daughter is now? The diary became more than a diary in 1944, when Anne heard an exiled member of the Dutch government express his desire to collect eyewitness accounts of Dutch suffering after the war. She began to edit and write for an audience other than herself. This book was for me one of the many entry points into the Holocaust, an event that simultaneously went beyond language and yet demanded a precision of language and, at times, the creation of a new language to describe its horrors. The youthful, articulate telling of Anne’s experience of hiding from the Gestapo was ruptured by her capture in August 1944, whereas my grandmother’s fractured, reluctant oral telling many years later incorporated her liberation. And yet, to stop at the personal is to be short-sighted. The cover of the new copy states that more than thirtyfive million copies have been sold worldwide. As it turned out, an essay written by the Jewish American writer Cynthia Ozick, ‘Who Owns Anne Frank?’, which originally appeared in The New Yorker in 1997, was elucidating. The new ‘definitive’ version, first published in 1995, is a third longer than the one I had read. Published after the death of Anne’s father, Otto, it reinstated passages he had removed, in particular sections that related to sexuality, criticism of her mother (Edith), anti-German sentiment, and overt expressions of her Judaism. Some of these excisions are easier than others to reconcile as the protective acts of a grieving father. In 2001, five more pages of Anne’s writing were discovered and published. Ozick argued that Otto Frank’s censorship was one of the many instances – Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett’s Pulitzer Prize-winning

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play The Diary of Anne Frank (1955) was another – where Anne’s journal had been appropriated to fit a narrative that was hopeful, inspirational. Ozick being Ozick did not mince words. She refers to it as ‘Evisceration … By uplift and transcendence’. This phrase struck me so deeply that I approached Anne Frank: Parallel Stories with this question niggling at my conscience, or my kishkes, as us Eastern European Jews with sensitive gastrointestinal tracts would term it. Who was making the documentary, and for what purposes? The title gives little away. While the documentary is an Italian production, it is narrated in English by Helen Mirren. Significantly, it has been co-produced by Anne Frank Fonds, a foundation established by Otto Frank and in possession of the diary and its copyright. Other documentary material about the Frank family is plentiful, and access was given to the original diaries and the annex itself. The film is written and directed by Sabina Fedeli and Anna Migotto, award-winning journalists. As Mirren discloses, Anne would have been ninety years old this year is she had survived. Anne’s entries reveal a voice that encompasses perspicacity, satire, ‘exuberant cheerfulness’ (as she herself termed it), despair, and fear. Throughout the film, Mirren reads several to us. Mirren was born in London a few months after the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp was liberated, a few months after Anne perished there of typhoid. Why didn’t the directors have a teenage girl read the entries? Besides the issue of dramatic gravitas, which Mirren brings, it goes back to that niggling question of appropriation. Fedeli and Migotto have made an astute decision; a teenage actor might have attempted to identify with Anne. Instead, Mirren is able to demonstrate pathos without the audience imagining her as Anne. Rather than appropriate the voice, she reads it as readers do, keenly aware of the devastating knowledge of what is to come and, at times, seemingly overcome with emotion. While the Anne Frank House does feature in the film, the small darkened space where Mirren sits has been reconstructed to look like Anne’s room by the Piccolo Teatro di Milano – Teatro d’Europa. The parallel lives of the title are those of five women, themselves all survivors of the Holocaust: Arianna Szörnyi (Italian), Sarah Lichtsztejn-Montard (Polish/ French), Helga Weiss (Czech), and sisters Andra and Tatiana Bucci (Italian). It is never made explicit why these particular women have been chosen. Their testimonies hold the urgency of remaining survivors. In his fascinating work Admitting the Holocaust: Collected essays (1995), Lawrence Langer, Holocaust scholar and professor of English, expresses it thus: ‘Holocaust testimony enacts a resistance against the efforts of time to erase experience without a trace.’ That issue of ‘without a trace’ is doubly weighty given that Hitler’s masterplan included the explicit desire for annihilation (‘I hope to see the very concept of Jewry completely obliterated’).

thing I have not yet mentioned. It has been provoking Part of the overwhelming work of Holocaust recovery a certain disquiet. When the title of the documentary was, and is, reclaiming names and fates of the obliterated. appears on screen, it is as #AnneFrank: Parallel Stories. The testimonies of these survivors, Anne Frank’s writThe documentary is framed and punctuated by the figure ing and story, the Shoah Foundation and its archives of of a dark-eyed, dark-haired teenage girl who is in search oral testimonies, the work of Primo Levi, Elie Wiesel, of Anne. She travels from Bergen-Belsen to the WestViktor Frankl et al., work towards reinstating these erbork transit camp, Netherlands, via Prague and Paris, traces and making the event less obscure. Within this and eventually to the annex, work there is little place for now known as the Anne Frank redemptive narratives. As Levi House. Her voice emerges solely reminds us in The Drowned through her Instagram feed, and the Saved (1986), ‘We are @KaterinaKat, as she takes those who by their prevaricaphotos with an inscrutable tions or abilities or good luck expression. Perhaps she is overdid not touch bottom. Those whelmed, horrified, moved. If who did, those who saw the we don’t understand her motivaGorgon, have not returned to tion immediately, her red phone tell about it, or have returned cover with the cut-out heart mute.’ clarifies it. She is older than her It is through the incorporasubject; probably about twenty tion of these testimonies that years old. One of her posts prothe use of Anne Frank’s diary duces a kind of white heat in as an ‘uplift[ing]’ document is me, the sort I feel on learning challenged. The testimonies, that in 2017 Anne Frank’s face together with footage of arwas appropriated by extremist rests, deportations, killings, and Italian football fans for their concentration camps, enter the anti-Semitic stickers. In a post at spaces where Anne’s testimony Bergen-Belsen, Katerina posts could not. All of these women, the asinine ‘Could we have been who were children or teenagers friends? #onyourside’. The teenat the time of their arrest, are ager in me suppresses the desire survivors of Auschwitz-BirkAnne Frank and her sister, Margot (photograph via Sharmill Films) to respond with social media’s enau, some of them Bergenversion of an intellectual/poetic Belsen, among other camps. rejoinder, ‘#WTF?’ But I don’t have Instagram and Anne was taken to both of the former. Fanny Hoch@KaterinaKat doesn’t exist; she is a fictional character baum, who survived the war as a young child in hiding, playing an Everyteen. appears briefly in the documentary. As does the haunting A second viewing brought new understanding. The figure of ninety-three-year-old Czech survivor Doris film’s intended audience is Katerina’s age. In Reading Grozdanovičová, who hobbles each week to Terezín to the Holocaust (1998), Inga Clendinnen claims, ‘In the bear witness to the four years she survived there. face of a catastrophe of this scale so deliberately inflicted, All five of the featured women have published books perplexity is an indulgence we cannot afford.’ Anne’s of their Holocaust experiences; the most celebrated writings and the oral testimonies of Arianna, Sarah, being Weiss’s Helga’s Diary: A young girl’s account of Helga, Andra and Tatiana, Fanny and Dora, work to life in a concentration camp (2013), which incorporates dispel the fog of inscrutability. So too does the film’s her childhood drawings hidden in Terezín. There is use of historical footage, interviews with historians, a moment when Lichtsztejn-Montard – a woman visits to Shoah memorials around Europe, and discuswhose exuberance and gestures are reminiscent of Mirka sions of survivor trauma and testimony, of second- and Mora, who was herself a survivor of the Pithiviers third-generation epigenetics, of post-memory, of the concentration camp and hid in French forests – recounts terrifying rise of anti-Semitism and racism. In all but a brief encounter with Anne Frank at either Auschwitzthe hashtag strand of Anne Frank: Parallel Stories – the Birkenau or Bergen-Belsen. (Although the camp is Australian release has done well to drop the hashtag unspecified, they were inmates at both.) Lichtsztejnreference in the title – Fedeli and Migotto work against Montard performs the smile she recalls as ravissement these indulgences, or reductions, or ‘eviscerations’. g (charming). We remember that there are no photographs of Anne after she goes into hiding. It’s a fleeting, tanAnne Frank: Parallel Stories (Sharmill Films) is written and directed talising glimpse of Anne through the face of an aged by Sabina Fedeli and Anna Migotto. (Longer version online). survivor. Tali Lavi is a Melbourne-based reviewer. ‘Evisceration’. That word pursues me. There is someARTS

Civilization: The Way We Live Now

Alison Stieven-Taylor

n an age of the image, photography being omnipresent, what can pictures tell us about ourselves as individuals and about the human race? What does an image of the constructed world reveal about our relationship to one another? Does our pursuit of tomorrow render the present expendable? Has avarice, the lust for the new, for more of everything, consumed the consumer? Are our everexpanding, networked cities creating a chasm that leaves us disconnected? These are some of the questions that the exhibition Civilization: The Way We Live Now, at the National Gallery of Victoria, prompts the viewer to consider. Through the enquiring minds of more than one hundred photographers from around the world, Civilization holds a mirror to society, its scope ranging wide to create a rich visual tapestry that conveys the wonder of humankind’s capacity to innovate and adapt. But this collection, which features more than two hundred works, also acts as a warning, reminding us that, in the rush to embrace the next thing, we are in jeopardy of losing our humanity, and our planet. Born as a collaborative project between the Foundation for the Exhibition of Photography (Switzerland) and the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (Korea), Civilization is an international touring exhibition comprising imagery from Africa, the Americas, Asia, Australia, and Europe. Each iteration is unique, curated to fit specific spaces and to reflect the host country’s photographic contribution to this global conversation. It is the summer drawcard at the Ian Potter Gallery, and the Melbourne version has a unique local flavour with a number of prominent Australian photographers included, such as Anne Zahalka, Trent Parke, Adam Ferguson, Ashley Gilbertson, Daniel Berehulak, and Rosemary Laing. There are also works by international luminaries including Richard Mosse, Lee Friedlander, Amalia Ulman, Edward Burtynsky, Dona Schwartz, Lauren Greenfield, and Michael Wolf. Curators William Ewing and Holly Roussell perused ‘hundreds of thousands of images’, the selection process informed by the affecting capacity of each image. Pictures that invited a dialogue or sparked curiosity rose to the surface. As the collection began to take shape, the pair

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noticed the emergence of thematic groupings that were representative of the social concerns and interests of the photographers. These areas of investigation inform the presentation of the work, which is segmented into eight themes – Hive, Alonetogether, Flow, Persuasion, Control, Rupture, Escape, and Next. Taking direction from the curators, I decide to navigate Civilization by engaging with the first pictures in each thematic that capture my attention, from both an aesthetic viewpoint and narrative depth. In Hive, it is Cyril Porchet’s lyrical picture of a swirling mass of humanity from his series Crowd. This image is almost painterly. This untitled image with its ambiguous beauty invites me to ponder why these people have gathered, why some are animated and others are still as if in a meditative trance. Is this a cultural celebration, a sporting event, a religious gathering? It is an exhilarating first encounter with Civilization. The next thematic is Alonetogether; here, I find myself drawn to several images. Australian Cherine Fahd’s The Chosen series taken in Paris during the heatwave of 2003 captures individuals in rapturous repose as they find escape from the sweltering conditions. These moments of surrender are exquisite. Then there is American Dona Schwartz’s Expecting Parents: couples are pictured in the nurseries they have created for their child. Juxtaposing these images is her series Empty Nesters, where parents are photographed in what was a child’s bedroom. Hung together, these works create a powerful narrative about changing identities, parental love, and hope for the future. Australian Adam Ferguson’s portraits of soldiers Skyping home, their faces illuminated by the computer screen, the only light in the dark, exemplifies how we can be connected and disconnected at once. Persuasion reveals one of the most provocative images in the exhibition, Mark Power’s picture of the live broadcast in Poland of Pope John Paul II’s funeral. This composite image shows a monolithic wall of technology dwarfing the mourners. The defining lines between humans and machines blur, technology becomes the master, ever-present even in the most human of moments. After Persuasion comes Control, which features Australian Ashley Gilbertson’s photograph of 1,215 American soldiers praying in Iraq before pledging to re-enlist. Noh Suntag’s Red House 1 presents a tableaux vivant of the choreographed movements of hundreds of North Korean soldiers performing with their weapons at Pyongyang Stadium. These events create spectacular visual patterns, but there is something chilling about these narratives of conformity. As a thematic, Control ’s military tone holds the least interest from a visual standpoint, whereas I find Rupture fascinating. Taryn Simon’s The Contraband series is extraordinary. Over five days in November 2009, Simon photographed items that were seized by US Customs at JFK Airport, including weapons, rotting food riddled with maggots, and illicit drugs. Again my eye is drawn to Michael Wolf ’s work. Tokyo

Compression features portraits of commuters crammed confronting. Images of people clothed in spacesuits, into underground trains, their anguished faces framed by hooked up to machines by long cables; robotic faces the windows they are pressed up against, the condensaand limbs that are frighteningly real; and gardens of tion on the glass further emphasising their discomfort. metal trees. Here, I encounter what is, for me, one of These pictures talk to concepts of power and authority, the most profound images in Civilization, and the last subservience and resignation. Here is the treadmill picture before the exit. German photographer Michael that is the modern urban existence. This is one of my Najjar’s photograph of a rocket launching into space may, favourite bodies of work, the book a prized possession, on first viewing, be an innocent statement about human so it is exhilarating to see these images in the gallery. innovation, the mastery of science, and our desire to go Rupture also conveys narratives of displacement and where no one has been before. But it also suggests that, inequity. Richard Mosse’s brilliant Heat Maps features having abused Earth, we are now searching for another panoramic vistas of European migrant camps. Each planet to inhabit. I find this image both exhilarating large-scale photograph is made by assembling a thousand smaller images taken with a thermographic camera. These panoramas are designed to engage the viewer in a dialogue about the way society treats those fleeing conflict and persecution. While Mosse’s approach to the migrant crisis is more conceptual, Rupture also features the work of visual journalists Francesco Zizola, Sergey Ponomarev, and Gjorgji Lichovski, whose images capture the anguish of migrants as they traverse sea and land in search of a brighter future. Rupture is the most photojournalistic of the themes and includes powerful imagery from Australian Daniel Berehulak, whose work on the Ebola crisis in Liberia in 2014 brings Brooks Brothers, World Trade Centre, New York, 12 September 2001 an important human (photograph by Sean Hemmerle © Sean Hemmerle) dimension to the crisis. After Rupture comes Escape, where images remind and depressing as I contemplate the rocket as a symbol us that desire often comes at the cost of liberty. Shengof achievement and defeat. Wen Lo’s White Bear conveys this sentiment in a single Civilization is provocative, exhilarating, and at heart-wrenching image of a polar bear in captivity. times terrifying. It does exactly what art is meant to, Richard Misrach’s On the Beach, where a tiny figure floats and asks society to consider how we can live in greater in a vast expanse of turquoise sea, captures our apparent harmony with one another and the planet. Through the insignificance when faced with the majesty of nature. coalescence of individual thought may come a collective Edward Burtynksy’s series OIL depicts our reliance on response that allows a deeper dialogue around what we fuel for leisure pursuits, the Kiss concert parking lot want next. And that’s a conversation worth having. g in South Dakota a sea of motorbikes, the Truckers Civilization: The Way We Live Now is at the National Gallery Jamboree in Iowa a showcase of gas-guzzlers. of Victoria until 2 February 2019. (Longer version online) As I enter the final thematic, I feel the life force of the other photographs desert me as I am propelled Alison Stieven-Taylor is a journalist specialising in into a future that seems stark, somewhat soulless and photography and social documentary. ARTS

Joker

Dilan Gunawardana

train carriages and commuters to elude a pair of detectives on his trail, à la The French Connection (1971). He wails to the heavens like Howard Beale, as ‘mad as hell’, in Network (1976), and not since Her (2013) has a camera lens been more smitten with Joaquin Phoenix’s face. Undoubtedly, it is Phoenix’s deeply committed physical performance as Arthur/Joker that carries the film. He twists, flails, and poses the thin, sinewy body he cultivated especially for this role. With that endlessly malleable, intriguing face, he morphs from childlike to birdlike, innocent to coldly sinister, in a heartbeat. Clearly, Phillips gave Phoenix free rein to improvise and fully inhabit his character. In one curious scene, Arthur, at a low point in the narrative, absentmindedly empties his fridge, shelves and all, and climbs inside. When he closes the door behind him, the camera jolts from static to shaky hand-held mode, as though the cameraman suddenly exclaimed, ‘Wow, I wasn’t expecting that!’ When Arthur becomes Joker, he vibrates with righteous fury and gesticulates floridly, as though his new make-up, clothes, and persona have conferred upon him superpowers, or the hollow confidence of an alt-right ‘provocateur’. Working in concert with Phoenix’s performance are the striking visuals. Joker’s world looks grimy and lived-in, and the CGI cityscape of art-deco Gotham is imposing and labyrinthine. The most recent iteration of visually incontinent DC superhero films often features a desaturated colour palette in a misguided attempt to convey a sense of ‘grittiness’ and realism. In DC’s Justice League (2017), the reverse is true; pathetically, the colours were saturated in postproduction to capitalise on the success of the more lively Marvel superhero films. In Joker, cinematographer Lawrence Sher uses all the textures of powder, cosmetics, felt, and blood to hit the sweet spot of striking and grotesque. Aside from the rich, bleak cello score by Icelandic artist Hildur Guðnadóttir (who recently provided the soundtrack to the excellent HBO Chernobyl series), the music was at times used inappropriately. It was off-putting to hear the triumphant, psychedelic ‘White Room’ by Cream or the upbeat ‘Laughing’ by The Guess Who as Joker danced and swaggered around like a film star, cigarette in hand, after committing yet another atrocity. Is the audience supposed to revel in his violence? Todd Phillips has populated his film almost entirely with antagonists. A disturbing question arises: are we supposed to sympathise with this murderous clown? While it’s affecting to learn the myriad ways Arthur has been subjected to cruelty throughout his life, it is equally repulsive to see him act violently in response, especially in light of so many disturbed young men committing vile acts in the real world. However, Phillips doesn’t seem to be interested in moralising; as an artist, perhaps it’s not his job to do so. But the nervous giggling that followed Joker’s disturbing deeds at the screening I attended was slightly unnerving. After all, it only takes one clown ... g

ince his creation in Batman #1 in 1940, there have been many attempts to flesh out the psychological make-up of the Joker, chief antagonist to the (arguably more) heroic Batman, in various comic and film adaptations. Perhaps the earliest ‘serious’ attempt was Alan Moore and Brian Bolland’s 1998 graphic novel, The Killing Joke, which endeavored to humanise the hapless Arthur Fleck and to explain his transition to the psychopathic Joker as a result of disenfranchisement and falling into a lake of transfiguring chemicals (instead of simply the latter, as depicted in more light-hearted early versions). In the most recent iteration of the Joker, director Todd Phillips sensibly eschewed the absurd trope of a super villain being created as result of a chemical accident, in favour of a purely psychological basis for his villainy. Drawing on thrillers in the vein of Martin Scorsese films set in grimy metropolises of 1970s and 1980s America, and Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy, Phillips largely succeeds in providing an iconic character with a satisfying backstory, thanks largely to a nuanced and mesmerising performance by Joaquin Phoenix in the titular role. Phoenix plays Arthur Fleck, an impoverished professional clown whose aspirations as a stand-up comic are curtailed by bouts of uncontrollable laughter (a real condition called Pseudobulbar affect) and various other maladjustments. Another hindrance is that he isn’t funny, as corroborated by his ageing mother, Penny (Frances Conroy). Arthur is at the bottom of Gotham City’s food chain, emotionally and physically demeaned by children, his fellow clowns, corporate jocks, the billionaire philanthropist Thomas Wayne (Brett Cullen), and the talk-show host Murray Franklin (a miscast Robert De Niro). As Arthur receives blow after blow and uncovers troubling facts about his past, he surrenders to his violent urges. Word of his crimes against Gotham’s ‘élite’ rouses the city’s damaged and disenfranchised, giving rise to Arthur’s twisted alter ego, Joker. Aside from the obvious comparisons between Phillips’s version of Joker and Scorsese’s Travis Bickle (Taxi Driver, 1976) and Rupert Pupkin (The King of Comedy, 1982), Joker borrows imagery and set pieces from a number of films made since the 1970s, so much so that it feels like Frankenstein’s monster, neatly sewn together from the highest quality cuts. Joker dances like a Clockwork Orange (1971) droog down Joker (DC/Warner Bros) is directed by Todd Phillips. a steep concrete stairway similar to the one Father Karras is hurled down in The Exorcist (1973). He weaves between Dilan Gunawardana is an arts writer and digital publisher.

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Anthem

Fiona Gruber

onversations on a train, scene one: we’re on the Eurostar and a white woman and a black man, both young, begin to talk. We know immediately that they are middle class and have prospects; the clothes and reading matter proclaim it. He identifies himself as an Australian resident in France; she’s an English student. They speculate: is the delay due to a protest by the Gilets jaunes? A refugee on the line? Those yellow vests are protesting against austerity, says the man, with a dash of sympathy. They’re populists, not to be trusted, a bit like the Brexiteers, she responds. The Brexiteers were also voting against austerity, the loss of jobs, loss of community, he argues. The Brexiteers are racist, antimigration, white xenophobes in the grip of nostalgia for a past that never existed, she responds. No, he counters, ‘that’s too simplistic, that’s just hashtag politics. That response evades the question of class.’ Anthem’s opening scene, staged on an elevated balcony above the main action, metaphorically lobs this un-Australian social concept like a grenade onto the set below. It’s an austere space that doubles as a train carriage and a station concourse, a place of mingling, where people from a multiplicity of backgrounds, income groups, and ethnicities rub shoulders in the grind of getting from A to B and back again. The politics of Europe have been replaced by the divisions that cleave a cross-section of Melbourne commuters. They turn out to pivot around similar issues of deprivation, identity, and race. Class, specifically an underclass, is a theme the authors have all explored before, individually and together. Anthem, commissioned by Arts Centre Melbourne, reunites playwrights Andrew Bovell, Patricia Cornelius, Melissa Reeves, and Christos Tsiolkas. Twenty-one years ago, they collaborated on the much-lauded play Who’s Afraid of the Working Class?. The structure of Anthem is similar, a series of scenes written by individual writers but linked by characters who appear in one another’s stories and by the use of a commuter chorus that creates bridges between the scenes.

The pace, with a cast of twelve exceptionally well-honed actors under the direction of Susie Dee, rarely falters as we hurtle along the tracks of Melbourne’s commuter system and into its social faultlines. Snaking between the text is music composed by Irine Vela, who was part of the original 1998 team. A duo of violin and double bass ( Jenny M. Thomas and Dan Witton) punctuates the scenes, and Ruthy Kaisila, as a busker, belts out Australiana, including the national anthem, I Still Call Australia Home, and Waltzing Matilda. She is the only one promoting shared values, but no one’s going to toss her a coin. Using class as an exploratory device today has a different feel compared to the late 1990s. Then the term ‘working class’ had a greater solidity; today it feels as antiquated as a cardboard tram ticket. The historical roots of Anthem chart how far we’ve travelled (not in the sense of progress) in two decades of economic rationalism, both in societal and theatrical terms. Who’s Afraid of the Working Class? was a product of the Melbourne Workers’ Theatre, whose first production in 1987, State of Siege, explored what it meant to be a unionist. Who’s Afraid of the Working Class? was performed at Melbourne’s Trades Hall, with, from memory, several broadsides against the Victorian premier of the time, Jeff Kennett. It was very local and it spoke to a sense of audience solidarity. The MWT bit the dust in 2012, and agitprop theatre has shifted away from its Brechtian roots. Anthem references a far more international hinterland with its political digs – Donald Trump has replaced Kennett as the epitome of political evil – and the cast reflects our more racially diverse society. The railway carriage includes a trio of threatening siblings, mouthy, insecure, and, despite having fathers from different continents, racist; a middle-aged woman who, we learn, is homeless and has been abandoned by her husband; a Sri Lankan student cheated of his wages; a Chinese woman in a violent marriage; a young mother with a short fuse and a hyperactive kid; and an elderly Greek couple who have lived through far greater hardships in a time of war. Everybody may have a mobile phone (and in a chilling scene of racist bullying, there’s a rare show of unity when several commuters whip out their devices to video the abuse), but few are sharing the same reality or expressing much empathy. Anthem is bleak and often confronting, but it manages to avoid being didactic. We the audience may not be let off the hook, but the play crackles with humour and there’s a lyricism and springiness to the writing that reminds you what a fine team this is and how rarely we get to share in a project of this kind. g Anthem was presented at Arts Centre Melbourne during the Melbourne International Arts Festival in October 2019.

Fiona Gruber is a journalist and producer with twenty years’ experience writing and broadcasting across the arts. ARTS

From the ABR Archive

Marele Day’s novel Lambs of God, recently adapted as a miniseries, was first published by Allen & Unwin. Caroline Lurie reviewed it in the August 1997 issue of ABR. Her review is one of hundreds of pre-2011 features being added to our digital archive, which is available free to subscribers.

uns supply the world with a wonderful source of all-singing, all-dancing, laughing, or weeping material, from The Abbess of Crewe to A Nun’s Story, from The Sound of Music to Nunsense. Where would novelists and filmmakers be without the sisterhood? Catholic girls have strong feelings about nuns, often bitter but sometimes affectionate. The rest of us find them fairly remote figures, eccentric perhaps but generally benign. In Lambs of God, Marele Day has abandoned her more habitual line of detective fiction for something altogether more ambitious. Her new novel is a quaint fable set in a remote and crumbling convent inhabited only by three nuns, the remains of the Order of St Agnes, and a flock of sheep believed to be the reincarnations of the dead Sisters. Presumably, the return of the nuns in sheep’s clothing is a jokey comment on the Catholic church. In their utter isolation from the world, Sister Iphigenia, Sister Margarita, and Sister Carla (the youngest, found as a baby on the doorstep and with origins we only learn at the end) have developed uncivilised habits. They eat with their hands, dress in rags, and don’t wash very much. Sister Iphigenia has an exceptionally well-developed sense of smell, comparable to that of Perfume’s hero, but bodily odours don’t offend her, simply forming part of her fabulously complex scent catalogue. The Sisters while away the long evenings by telling one another stories, garbled fairy tales and myths – Beauty and the Beast, Ulysses and Penelope, Neptune, Athena, Sleeping Beauty. Their year is punctuated by events like Shearing Day and Haircut Day, when they shear and snip and gather the wool and hair together for later use. On the table were wool and hair from last year’s harvest, all washed, spun, dyed and skeined. The fresh crop of hair lay in a basket ready to be put through the same process. Sister Margarita sometimes wondered whether it wouldn’t be altogether simpler if they just started knitting the hair directly from the head. They could leave the needles eternally in place and knit another row when the hair was long enough. The pain suffered by sleeping on knitting needles could be offered up for the sins of the world.

Into this primitive idyll steps a man, his smell proclaiming his presence to Sister Iphigenia some hours before his arrival at the monastery. The sisters confuse 72 NOVEMBER 2019

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him with the priest who visited them many years ago, Father John; but this is Father Ignatius, an ambitious, entrepreneurial young priest intent on climbing the ecclesiastical ladder. He has very modern designs on the monastery, seeing it as an ideal holiday resort once the decaying buildings have been restored to medieval grandeur. He has plans for a swimming pool, a helipad, 4WD access. The only problem is the three nuns. He had not realised they existed. Innocent as they appear, the Sisters are resourceful. Father Ignatius’s scheme appals them, not only because it is ungodly and would shatter their accustomed way of life, but because he is tactless enough to admit the Agnes sheep would have no place in his future and would therefore be slaughtered. The nuns themselves slaughter and eat a sheep now and then, but in a spirit of deep respect. The same act has a quite different meaning when performed for different ends. So they resolve to detain the sacrilegious priest by all means at their disposal. They drug him, encase his legs in plaster, and feed him turnips and nettle tea, their own habitual fare. They steal his clothes, dispose of his car, and take over his mobile phone, even learning (improbably) how to use it to their own ends. Father Ignatius is seriously outmanoeuvred and deeply mortified. Lambs of God is a funny novel – funny peculiar and funny humorous. The humour lies both in the absurdity of the situation and in puns and wordplay. Acerbic little asides, clever juxtapositions of ancient and modern concerns and language, together with a deliberately shocking emphasis on bodily functions – from sex to farting – all enrich the brew. The peculiarity could more politely be called originality. Lambs of God is different from any other novel you are likely to read this year. Although it has elements of thriller, satire, and straight novel with serious undertones, it is none of these, quite. Some readers will find this mixing of genres clever and entertaining; others may find it unengaging. The writing is generally competent, apart from the occasional unforgivable slip. (Has it been entirely forgotten that there is a difference between ‘lay’ and ‘lie’? And that a phrase like, ‘as equally overgrown as everywhere else’ is grammatically incorrect as well as ugly?) From time to time, a rich, exotic imagination informs Day’s prose, giving promise of even more interesting work to come. g