Our interests and connections extend around the globe, and we know from surveys that 68% of ABR readers travelled overseas last year. In a first for Australian Book Review, we are delighted to be partnering with luxury travel company Abercrombie & Kent to offer one lucky ABR subscriber the chance to win a ten-day adventure for two in India worth up to AU$8,250.
The prize is Abercrombie & Kent’s ‘Essential India’ tour, a seven-day private journey from Delhi to Agra to Jaipur, staying in luxury Taj hotels throughout, plus the winner’s choice of a three-day extension to either Ranthambore, Udaipur, or Varanasi. To be in the running to win this magnificent prize, subscribers need to tell us – in fifty to one hundred words – about a book that has inspired them to travel.
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ABR BEhrouz Boochani FEllowship
Hessom Razavi is the recipient of the ABR Behrouz Boochani Fellowship.
The Fellowship, worth $10,000, honours the artistry and moral leadership of Behrouz Boochani, the awardwinning author of No Friend But the Mountains (2018), who has been imprisoned on Manus Island since 2013 and is now in New Zealand on a temporary visa. Dr Razavi will make a significant contribution to the magazine in 2020 with a series of substantial articles on refugees, statelessness, and human rights. He was chosen from an impressive international field.
Hessom Razavi is a writer and doctor based in Perth. He was born in Iran in 1976. In 1983 his family fled Iran to escape political persecution. He completed his studies as an ophthalmologist in 2015 and has visited Manus Island and Nauru in a medical capacity. He also writes essays and poetry. He describes himself as an exile, migrant, professional, and ‘perennial outsider’. His early experience of exile and state violence, and his subsequent qualifications as a writer and clinician, give him an unusual perspective on the plight of the millions of people around the world who are oppressed, anathematised, and endangered.
Hessom Razavi told Advances: ‘It’s an honour and delight to receive this Fellowship. My goal will be to help shift awareness and raise empathy among those Australians who remain uninformed or ambivalent, particularly moderate conservatives, young people, and those who are open to reason. Ultimately, I work to contribute to the collective moment –medical, legal, artistic, political – that advocates for more humane, sustainable outcomes for vulnerable people who seek protection in Australia.’
uwa puBlishing
There is much disquiet about the University of Western Australia’s cavalier decision to shut down UWA Publishing, whose proud publishing record goes back to 1935. Thousands of writers, scholars, publishers, and readers have signed a petition deploring this decision and seeking a review by the University.
On page 2 of this issue, Robert White – Emeritus Professor of English Literature at UWA –reminds us of similarly misguided attempts to close UWAP in the past. He notes UWAP’s contribution to the University’s reputation among the world’s top 100 research universities.
Judith rodriguEz
Graduate Women Victoria is offering a scholarship to commemorate Judith Rodriguez (1936–2018) as part of its program to support disadvantaged female students at university. Judith, a GWV member, was a staunch supporter of these scholarships. The award in her name will be open to PhD students in the fields of literature, poetry, and the visual arts.
Applications close on 31 March. Full details will be available by midDecember on the GWV website: https://gradwomenvic.org.au
Hessom Razavi
Buildings or books ‒ what makes a university?
by Robert White
Word gets around quickly. Within a week of the University of Western Australia announcing the closure of UWA Publishing after eighty-five years, and the peremptory sacking of its staff, a petition had gathered almost 10,000 signatures. This is nothing new. Proposals to close UWAP in 1973, 1990, and 1996 were soundly defeated, after being robustly debated at UWA’s Academic Board, Convocation (alumni), and Senate. This rescued UWA from vociferous criticism voiced nationally and internationally.
In a recent memorandum foreshadowing the closure, innocuously titled ‘UWA Publishing: Proposal for Change’, only one intriguing justification was advanced: ‘Currently, only a small proportion of the authors and content published by UWA Publishing relate directly to the University and its work.’ Even if it were true, this shows an astonishing unawareness concerning the role of the 500 university presses around the world.
UWAP, like every other university press, is decisively not intended to showcase ‘authors and contents’ relating directly to UWA today. Nor is it primarily a publicity or marketing organ for UWA, though it does have this value as a significant outcome. Instead, the expert, peer-reviewing process maintains the independence of UWAP from parochial interests and institutional pressures. Its aim is to publish, in finely crafted books, excellent research across all disciplines and fields, written by experts for an international readership and of interest to the wider community. This is commensurate with the educational missions of any reputable university, to advance learning on an international scale and to nurture community links. These aims are very different from those of commercial publishers.
Some world experts on scholarship relating directly to Western Australia will obviously be working at UWA, but their books undergo the same stringent peer review as manuscripts by international scholars. As a corollary, it is not surprising that experts on Western Australia based elsewhere will approach UWAP, since it is the appropriate channel for publication. In fact, without UWAP the world would be uninformed about Western Australia, except as a tourist destination, given the isolation of the state from the east coast and media indifference.
The memorandum dismisses UWAP as ‘small’ and ‘academic’ and describes its output in only minimally inclusive terms: ‘non-fiction books in the areas of Western Australian history, natural history, art, fiction, poetry and some other scholarly works.’ As a corrective, the very informative history A Press in Isolation: University of Western Australia Press 1935–2004, edited by professional historian Criena Fitzgerald, lists more than 500 titles from 1935 to 2004. Since then there have been about the same number.
Subjects include public health, physics, environmentalism, economics, history (of all countries and ages), Indigenous studies, languages, architecture, urban planning, art history, theatre, business management, educational theory and practice, international politics, migration, music (contemporary and classical), cultural issues, biography, literary history, and a host of others. For some years, there was an important series of quality, prize-winning children’s books published by UWAP under the Cygnet imprint, as part of UWA’s wider educational mission, feeding into primary and secondary educational curricula in Australia and beyond. Opening up new readerships, most recently the list includes quality literary fiction and poetry emanating from creative writing students and staff at universities across Australia.
Some books are revered classics and collectors’ items, such as George Seddon’s Sense of Place, which has taken on new significance in the environmental debate. The multivolume Dictionary of Western Australians is invaluable, while there are definitive and beautiful volumes on the flora and fauna of Western Australia, marine biology, shipwrecks off the Western Australian coast, and others. All are lavishly illustrated reference works, cited and consulted by scholars in libraries around the world.
Each book bears UWA’s logo, which has contributed to UWA’s reputation among the world’s top 100 research universities. To be visible beyond this ‘isolated’ region, the University and state need – more than most – a distinctive publishing outreach to make its impact felt internationally.
An article in The Conversation pours scorn on the ‘Open Access’ model of publication that the memorandum advocates. Other universities that have followed this line have sunk into oblivion overnight.
Even in commercial terms, closing the press makes no sense, since book consumption is burgeoning, with flexible print-on-demand, e-books, sale of individual chapters, and huge online publicity machines.
It seems regrettable that, once a decade, all these reasons for consolidating UWA Publishing – intellectual, educational, reputational, and financial – need to be rehearsed. ‘Executives’ on short-term appointments come (and go) without corporate memory of what UWA’s historical excellence is built upon. They can be sucked into thinking that short-term cost-cutting and rhetorical ‘Operational Strategies’, alongside new multi-million-dollar buildings, are a worthier legacy than the rich and ongoing ‘in-kind’ contribution of UWA Publishing over its first eighty-five years. g
Robert White in 2018 was Senior Visiting Research Fellow at Magdalen College, Oxford, and is now Emeritus Professor of English Literature at The University of Western Australia.
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REVIEW OF THE MONTH
Tilted
Examining Weinstein and Kavanaugh Zora Simic
SHE SAID: BREAKING THE SEXUAL HARASSMENT STORY THAT HELPED IGNITE A MOVEMENT by Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey Bloomsbury Circus, $32.99 pb, 352 pp, 9781526603272
THE EDUCATION OF BRETT KAVANAUGH: AN INVESTIGATION by
Robin Pogrebin
and Kate Kelly Portfolio, $49.99 hb, 304 pp, 9780593084397
The worldwide women’s marches of January 2017 were sparked by the election of Donald Trump, a self-proclaimed ‘pussy-grabber’, to the US presidency in November 2016. Among the millions who marched was movie producer Harvey Weinstein. As with Trump, rumours of inappropriate behaviour with women had long plagued Weinstein, but he also had a history of aligning himself with feminist causes. He had supported Hillary Clinton’s failed presidential bid and, as co-founder of Miramax, had helped launch the successful careers of many women, including Oscarwinner Gwyneth Paltrow.
Over in California, Christine Blasey Ford, a research psychologist, attended her local women’s march. Her politics had become more progressive since moving to the west coast from Maryland, but apart from participating in the occasional protest and making small donations, Ford was not especially political. Her work and family life kept her busy and satisfied, though she occasionally saw a therapist to discuss the ongoing trauma of a rape she had endured while still in high school.
The Trump presidency is an unrelenting saga, a revolving door of controversies and outrages. The women’s marches of early 2017 seem a long time ago, as does the nascent feeling of global solidarity they seemed to herald. But what happened next, first to Weinstein, then to Ford, did mark a historic moment in gender relations: the #MeToo era. On the second anniversary of #MeToo going viral, the publication of two new books – each co-written by journalists at The New York Times – reminds us just how deeply the #MeToo and Trump eras are entangled.
The first of these, She Said: Breaking the sexual harassment story that helped ignite a movement, is from investigative reporters Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey, who in October 2017 scooped the first story about Weinstein’s abuses and his history of covering them up. For this exposé, and their follow-up reporting, they won the Pulitzer Prize. Kantor and Twohey’s riveting account of how they broke the story is a welcome addition to #MeToo literature, though it could have been otherwise. What else is there to say about Harvey Weinstein that they and others (like Ronan Farrow, who was investigating the story at the same time) have not already told us? It turns out quite a bit. She Said is not a rehash but a masterclass in old-fashioned investigative reporting in the digital age. As we learn, it takes a lot of work to bring a man as influential, wealthy, and well connected as Weinstein to public accountability. (Weinstein will go to trial in January 2020 on multiple charges of rape, sexual assault, and intimidation.)
She Said is admirably taut and focused. The bulk of the book is devoted to the Weinstein case and what it took to break it. Kantor and Twohey were not the first to pursue the story, and the obstacles they faced included a trail of non-disclosure agreements, a phalanx of lawyers (including self-styled feminist crusaders Gloria Allred and Lisa Bloom), and Black Cube, a covert Israeli organisation hired by Weinstein to run interference. Weinstein was further enabled by a wider culture still tilted in favour of powerful men and against any woman who speaks out about sexual abuse. These are weighty themes, ripe for digression. Sensibly, Kantor and Twohey
resist psychological scrutiny of Weinstein; they let the facts and those who know him condemn him instead. These include Bob Weinstein, who, in an email to his brother, later obtained by Twohey, refers to at ‘least one hundred’ occasions when employees came to his office to report verbal and emotional abuse from Weinstein. Bob’s complicity is stark; there’s no need for Kantor and Twohey to labour the point.
The title She Said is a pointed recasting of the hesaid/she-said dynamic that continues to capsize legal cases and public discourse. It is also a mission statement. Kantor and Twohey foreground the voices of women who spoke on the record, but they also include, where possible, those who did not. All of these women struggled with their decision about whether or not to go public. They include famous actors like Paltrow and Ashley Judd, Weinstein employees who lost or left their jobs, and women outside the entertainment industry, such as Kim Lawson, a McDonald’s employee whose case Kantor profiled to much less fanfare. Without universalising #MeToo (they are not blind to class, race, or fame as mitigating factors), Kantor and Twohey extract larger meaning from the Weinstein example. They want the reader to know what the stakes are.
point out, Kavanaugh – a ‘life-long Republican and an observant Catholic’ – ‘had worked his whole life towards a Supreme Court nomination’. Unlike Weinstein, he was not a serial predator, though like Weinstein he also liked to promote himself as a champion of women (in Kavanaugh’s case, somewhat more convincingly). They endeavour to comprehend Kavanaugh, who, despite a long career in public service, is presented as a somewhat elusive figure. (Unlike Ford, Kavanaugh declined to be interviewed.)
Weinstein was enabled by a wider culture tilted in favour of powerful men and against any woman who speaks out about sexual abuse
During their ten-month investigation, Pogrebin and Kelly tapped into their élite networks to situate Kavanaugh, and his accuser, Ford, among their people – alumni of the Washington, DC private-school system (where Kavanaugh and Ford were both educated) and Yale (Kavanaugh and Pogrebin are graduates), as well as Ford’s friends and supporters in the Silicon Valley enclave Palo Alto. They also spoke to Deborah Ramirez, a Yale classmate who shared with The New Yorker her memory of Kavanaugh allegedly exposing himself to her at a party.
Kantor and Twohey describe the #MeToo aftermath of Weinstein as a ‘reckoning’, with multiple and unforeseen effects. These include Christine Blasey Ford becoming ‘an instant symbol for women who had been abused’ and a ‘focal point for the backlash’ once she went public with her account of allegedly being raped at a party by then-Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh when they were both teenagers in 1982. Kantor and Twohey did not break the Ford story; as they reveal, The New York Times was pursuing it at the same time as The Washington Post, but did not go ahead for lack of corroborating evidence, the same problem the FBI purportedly encountered when they investigated the case (though notably the FBI did not interview Ford or Kavanaugh). Their point here is not to doubt Ford, whom they clearly admire and find credible, or to champion The New York Times as a beacon of quality journalism (though there’s a bit of that). Rather, they narrate Ford’s bruising experience as a halting form of progress, post #MeToo. Even Donald Trump praised Dr Ford’s testimony.
The Education of Brett Kavanaugh: An investigation, by Robin Pogrebin and Kate Kelly, opens with the Kavanaugh’s successful nomination to the Supreme Court, but the reporters do not linger there. Pogrebin and Kelly hesitate to make bold claims about the significance of their book, but they also have aspirations beyond thorough treatment of the #MeToo controversy that threatened Kavanaugh’s nomination. As they
As a fresh take on Kavanaugh and, to a lesser extent, on Ford, The Education of Brett Kavanaugh does offer some illuminating, if occasionally claustrophobic, context. Private schools, Ivy League colleges, the right-leaning Federalist Society, exclusive golf clubs (Kavanaugh’s and Ford’s fathers are members of the same one), Palo Alto – these are privileged, cloistered worlds, which Pogrebin and Kelly describe in sometimes unnecessary detail. Some features discussed, like the binge-drinking culture Kavanaugh enthusiastically participated in as a young man, do have a wider salience that enriches their analysis.
Unlike She Said, however, The Education of Brett Kavanaugh never quite transcends reportage, despite the chapter headings in Latin. It drags in parts, only really hitting its stride in the last chapters covering the hearings. Reflecting on Kavanaugh’s intractable testimony – his refusal ‘in the age of #MeToo’ to apologise for any harm done to Ford or to acknowledge the ‘possibility that he could have been involved in the Ford incident but not remembered it’ – Pogrebin and Kelly offer a persuasive explanation for Kavanaugh’s uncharacteristic tirade. ‘In the age of Trump,’ they argue, ‘a nuanced response would have doomed Kavanaugh’s nomination.’ Only time will tell whether Kavanaugh, the Supreme Court judge, continues to pander to Trump and his base. As for Ford, her testimony led to a dramatic spike in sexual assault disclosures, but she remains unsafe and has not gone back to work. g
Zora Simic is a Senior Lecturer in History and Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of New South Wales.
‘To
stand the blows’
The flexile diaries of Helen Garner
Peter Rose
YELLOW NOTEBOOK: DIARIES, VOLUME I, 1978–1987 by
Helen Garner
Text Publishing, $29.99 hb, 253 pp, 9781922268143
‘Several new perceptions of the unfortunate creature that I am have dawned upon me consolingly.’
Franz Kafka, 7 January 1911
Anyone who keeps a diary day in, day out for decades knows why Helen Garner, a few years ago, destroyed her early ones, deeming them boring and self-obsessed. Incineration has a long, proud history: think of Henry James, late in life, at his incinerator in Rye, burning all his letters and private papers – that lamentable blaze. The sheer misery and tedium of our early journals can be dejecting. ‘What is the point of this diary?’ Garner asks herself in 1981. ‘There is always something deeper, that I don’t write, even when I think I’m saying everything.’
Few of us know why we keep diaries, and few of us actually consult them, but nor can we imagine how people (especially writers) manage to get through life without them. What do they do with their mornings, their midnights?
According to Cynthia Ozick, ‘Journal entries, those vessels of discontent, are notoriously fickle.’ But they can also be antidotes for boredom, panic, heartbreak, slights – those esprits de l’escalier Harry Kessler, one of the greatest of diarists, wrote on 18 September 1888: ‘When I am alone like this evening it often strikes me what an infinitely small proportion my outer life … bears to my inner life, the life I live with myself; hardly the spray that is thrown off the ocean by the wind.’
Of the life ‘lived with herself’, Garner has been diarising ‘for almost all of her life’, we are told on the jacket of this new compilation of diary entries from 1978 to 1987 – her first, but assuredly not her last (Volume I, the jacket
proclaims). While retaining the years, Garner has excised the dismal dates that can give journals such a leaden quality, the chronicling of the quotidian being such a ‘poor method of self-preservation’ (Nabokov).
While a few acquaintances are named (Frank Moorhouse, Elizabeth Jolley, Raymond Carver), most of the players, especially the intimates, are reduced to initials. At the beginning, Garner is in Paris. Monkey Grip behind her, she is trying to write screenplays and fiction. She has met F, the Frenchman who will become her second husband and then leave her for one of her sisters. Already there is a certain fractiousness: they quarrel when Garner won’t show F a fan letter she has written to Woody Allen. By 1986 she writes, ‘No wonder he can’t stand me. I can hardly stand myself.’
Much later, there is L, ‘an unfairly handsome man who was at the festival’. (The adverb is as choice as a goodlooking man.) By 1987 she must choose between L and V, the writer who will become her third husband. When V tells her in a letter that he wants to see her, ‘a gong of terror’ sounds in the bottom of her stomach. ‘Something chilling in him. His intellect.’ He praises her handwriting (‘nicely childlike, and yet not’), and her response is characteristic: ‘Why would anyone so brilliant … want to have anything to do with me?’
The men in this book (some famous, some not) are vivid yet somehow extraneous. They seem like Garner’s straight men, or bent men (incidental, malleable as a draft) as she works out how much she needs them, how much they need her. Trust doesn’t seem to come into it. In 1986 she writes, ‘I see that what I am doing, in this diary, is conducting an argument with myself, about these two
men, and myself, and men in general.’
Nathaniel Hawthorne once described his wife as the ‘Queen of Journalisers’ on being shown her Cuban diary. What sobriquets will Garner’s exhusbands and lovers deploy on reading this volume?
Throughout, there is a pedal note of self-loathing. The eleventh entry reads, ‘I have a lot of trouble with selfdisgust.’ Later, Garner ‘crashes’ into ‘appalling bouts of self-doubt, revulsion at my past behaviour, loathing for my emotional habits’. She carries around ‘an inventory of my crimes. Everyone else is busy with their own.’ The note of violence throughout is pointed: ‘I need to find out why I so often get myself into situations where people have to symbolically murder me.’ (Kafka: ‘This morning, for the first time in a long time, the joy again of imagining a knife twisted in my heart.’)
Garner has often spoken of her abiding sense of rage. We’ve heard her do so at literary festivals and independent bookshops, those most pacific settings. She reminds us at times of Sylvia Plath – her fury at the world, her indignation at a renegade husband. Elizabeth Hardwick, in her peerless essay on the American poet, writes: ‘The sense of betrayal, even of hatred, did not leave her weak and complaining so much as determined and ambitious. Ambitious rage is all over Ariel.’
It also vivifies these diaries.
What we don’t find here are many literary insights into other writers. Seldom does Garner dwell on technical matters. Jane Austen, we learn, never describes the appearance of her characters; D.H. Lawrence ‘uses the same word over and over again till he makes it mean what he needs it to’; Elizabeth
Helen Garner has kept a diary almost all her life. Now she’s sharing it with her readers.
Yellow Notebook spans a decade from just after the publication of Monkey Grip. Her accounts of her observations, frustrations and joys provide an insight into the life of one of Australia’s greatest writers.
A scorching new crime novel from the master of rural noir. Constable Paul Hirschhausen runs a onecop station in a small, dusty South Australian town. It’s been quiet this Christmas. Until a strange, vicious incident sends a ripple of violence through the community.
‘Gold standard.’
Chris Hammer
What happens when we view the world from an Indigenous perspective?
Sand Talk is about everything from echidnas to evolution, cosmology to cooking, from sex and science and spirits to Schrodinger’s cat. Tyson Yunkaporta challenges us to think differently—and save the world. ‘Read it.’
Bruce Pascoe
A definitive collection of essays, speeches and musings from one of the world’s great thinkers. Life: Selected Writings offers insight into the wondrous complexities of our natural world. ‘A master storyteller.’ Australian Book Review
A reinvigoration of the ethereal and enigmatic novel that has haunted the Australian imagination for half a century, including a specially commissioned introduction by Miles Franklin-shortlisted author Romy Ash. ‘Deliciously horrific.’ Observer
Book club notes available
A treasure trove of anecdotes and littleknown facts about the history of buying secondhand. In this elegant hardback Robyn Annear brings her light touch and signature wit to the origins of the op shop as well as eBay, up-cycling and how new became normal. ‘Enchanting.’ Age
One of the most influential and beloved works of apocalyptic fiction. Originally published in 1957 and famously filmed by Stanley Kramer, Nevil Shute’s On the Beach tells the gripping story of Australia reeling in the wake of nuclear war. This handsome hardback includes a major introduction by Gideon Haigh.
When award-winning Australian writer Peter Temple died in 2018, there was an unfinished Jack Irish novel in his desk drawer. The manuscript reveals a writer at the peak of his powers. This expansive collection of stories, essays and brilliant book reviews pays tribute to the master, and includes an introduction by Temple’s publisher Michael Heyward.
Winner of the 2019 Prime Minister’s Literary Award for fiction. Art historian Noah Glass is found floating face down in a swimming pool. A Palermo museum is missing a sculpture, and Noah is a suspect. His grieving children retrace his steps, seeking the truth. What does it mean to discover our parents’ secrets?
Bowen is ‘very good of course in an infuriating English way’ – but that’s about all.
Garner’s real subject is her own dogged, uncertain progress as a writer. The diary, though often self-flagellatory, is a spur to industry and acclamation. Like an athlete she goads herself, wills herself – full of doubt (‘My mind is full of stories but I lack the nerve to catch one and try to pin it down’) but always ambitious, unswerving. She frets about negative reviews. When she is shortlisted for a premier’s award, she ‘wants that prize’. Upon winning a festival award, she trembles at the knees.
Not for nothing does she choose this epigraph from Primo Levi: ‘We are here for this – to make mistakes and to correct ourselves, to stand the blows and hand them out.’ To an unusual degree, Garner the diarist is vividly and ineluctably present.
Casual eclecticism characterises the best diarists. We think of Thomas Mann: ‘Brief evening walk in a silk suit, downstream among the bats, which I am afraid of’; or this from William Gerhardie: ‘Played tennis in the afternoon; then had a woman; then a bath, and afterwards witnessed a revolution.’ Rarely does Garner skip a minor epiphany. Always she is noticing, practising, flexing her immaculate prose (‘My problems are never syntactic’):
In the shack I get up to take the kettle off the fire and see through the narrow window a pretty sight: a blue wren flirting with his own reflection in the outside mirror of my car. He flips up, whirring his wings like mad, performs a caracole and a pirouette in mid-air before the glass, then perches on the mirror’s rim and looks around in confusion – then back he goes and does it all again.
By now we know many things about Helen Garner, or think we do. We have been reading her novels and stories and journalism for more than forty years, and she has supplemented these with regular self-commentary. Non-fiction works like The First Stone (1995) and Joe Cinque’s Consolation (2004) have reinforced her reputation as a ceaseless
judge of others and herself (‘I am very much a moralist,’ she writes in 1986). What these diaries do is restore our sense of what a superb comic writer she is: ‘I called P in Paris, and heard $29.30 worth of information about her vaginal infection.’ Then there is the young male photographer who exhorts her to smile (‘Big smile. Love those big smiles’):
‘Please don’t tell me to smile.’
‘You look starched.’
‘I am starched. I am a starched person.’
Aftermath
Johanna Leggatt
COVENTRY: ESSAYS
by Rachel Cusk
Faber & Faber
$32.99 hb, 248 pp, 9780571350445
Two years before Rachel Cusk published the first novel in her acclaimed Outline Trilogy (2014–18), she wrote a searing account of her divorce, entitled ‘Aftermath: On Marriage and Separation’, which ignited a brouhaha in her homeland, the United Kingdom. The dramatic excoriation of marital life aroused apoplexy among critics and readers; they bristled at Cusk’s subjective and one-sided storytelling, as if any other account of divorce were possible. It wasn’t the first time Cusk’s work had raised eyebrows: her memoir, A Life’s Work: On becoming a mother (2001), offended many a book-club member with its frank and unflattering descriptions of motherhood.
If the invisible narrator of the subsequent Outline novels was an attempt to move away from story and subjectivity, Cusk remains no less obsessed with these ideas. In Coventry, a new collection of memoir, literary criticism, and essays, which includes ‘Aftermath’, Cusk explores the way story – who controls it and its relationship to the truth –shapes our reality. The most compelling contribution is the titular essay, in which the word ‘Coventry’ refers to the English idiom of ‘being sent to
Starched or not – severe, unbending, falling about at the absurdity of the world – Helen Garner emerges as a moralist rippling with intent and mirth. The diary, clearly, is her true métier. And now we have successive volumes to anticipate. The titular promise and confidence are typical of this brilliant, defiant book. g
Peter Rose is Editor of Australian Book Review. Some of his Editor’s Diaries appear on our website.
Coventry’, meaning to be ignored and isolated. We learn that Cusk’s parents periodically suspend contact with her over some slight that Cusk has failed to detect or to mitigate. Doubtless, her parents stop communicating in an attempt to revive waning parental power. She is brilliant at elucidating the reasons for their behaviour: ‘It is in fact failure, their failure to control the story, their failure to control me. It is a failure so profound that all they have left to throw at it is the value of their own selves, like desperate people taking the last of their possessions to the pawnshop.’
When teenage girls send one another to Coventry it becomes a form of ‘elemental bullying’, an immolation of another’s identity. ‘If other people pretend you’re not there,’ Cusk asks, ‘how long can you go on believing you exist?’ Long-married couples stop talking to one another too; Cusk eyes them at her local pub, picking at their food and staring past each other. She wonders if their silence is caused by the problem of reconnecting to reality once the family story is over. Indeed, a friend with adult children tells Cusk that she would like to see all of the family accoutrements she has bought, the mountains of Barbie dolls and Nintendo games, piled in front of her to assess their objective worth. It is as if the real story of her friend’s family life has eluded her and that the mountain of stuff would symbolise the loss of another life, one she could have experienced had she believed in something else entirely.
In ‘Making Home’, Cusk examines our modern tendency to create temples
of style from our houses so that visitors become messy impositions, potential vandals of our artfully curated spaces. She speaks enviously of her friend’s ability to let crap accumulate across the kitchen bench and up the stairs, and not in a self-conscious, bourgeois way either, but in a freeing fashion that strips the surrounding objects of any authority. As Cusk writes: ‘in overthrowing the power of objects she was simultaneously removing them as a last line of defence. Anyone could access her; there was no governed terrain to keep a person out.’
Not every essay contains Cusk’s trademark tautness and perception, and sometimes her postulations seem rather weak. In ‘On Rudeness’, Cusk wonders whether displays of hostility are the blunt instruments of those who have been outplayed their whole lives by more sophisticated thinkers and articulators, but it’s far too simplistic a conclusion to be satisfying. Even stranger is when Cusk rhetorically asks at one point ‘what Jesus would do’, not so much as a religious invocation but as part of a ponderous tangent that is insufficiently unpacked. Similarly, the second section, ‘A Tragic Pastime’, examines the role of creative-writing courses and what constitutes women’s writing, among other topics. Despite Cusk’s enthusiasm for the subject matter and her considerable intelligence, the writing lacks her usual brilliance.
The final section, entitled rather prosaically ‘Classics and Bestsellers’, is also underwhelming until Cusk tackles Elizabeth Gilbert of Eat, Pray, Love (2006) fame and the rather questionable brand of self-discovery literature that is Gilbert’s milieu. As Cusk notes, selling pleasure to ‘overcommitted women’ is lucrative work, and Cusk is refreshingly hostile to the performative nature of these ‘girlish giant-slayers’ and their demand for an audience to inspire their Damascene life changes. These paragraphs are razor sharp, beautifully written, and among the best in the book.
Cusk’s prose is most effective when she is combining social commentary with confession, uniting her personal story with her meticulous, almost scientific, appraisal of the world. While she
once feared the ejection from the story that Coventry represents, these days she no longer cares. Stories can enslave, and being ejected from one narrative allows immersion in an entirely different reality. Cusk has been ejected twice: first from her parents’ reality and then from her marriage. From the vantage point of Coventry, alongside her two daughters, she can see that without the old,
predictable narrative governing their new-look family unit, they belong more fully to the world.They are more open and capable of receiving. As Cusk suggests, ‘should the world prove to be a generous and wondrous place, we will perceive its wonders’. g
Johanna Leggatt is a Melbourne-based journalist and critic.
‘The ear that always hears’ Memoirs of the ultimate whistleblower
Brian Toohey
PERMANENT RECORD by Edward Snowden Macmillan, $32.99 pb, 347 pp, 9781529035667
Edward Snowden was a model employee of the National Security Agency. After realising that the vast electronic surveillance organisation often failed to backup its advanced computerised systems properly, Snowden offered a solution. His bosses readily agreed to let him build and run a comprehensive backup system. He subsequently copied huge amounts of highly sensitive information, which he took with him when he left the NSA in 2013, aged twenty-nine, to become the most important whistleblower in intelligence agency history.
Snowden says in his memoir, Permanent Record, that he was motivated by the NSA’s decision to build the most extensive global mass surveillance system ever devised. Called Stellar Wind, its goal was to collect, analyse, and store all digital data from around the world. The bulk interception of Americans’ data broke US law, but the NSA still intercepts foreigners’ data globally.
Snowden said he released documents on a program called PRISM to show the public the extent of the illegality. PRISM enabled the NSA to routinely collect data from Microsoft, Yahoo!, Google, Facebook, Paltalk, YouTube,
Skype,and Apple,including email,photos, video and audio chats, web-browsing content, search-engine queries, and all their cloud-storage data. The NSA also routinely captured data directly from the switches and routers that shunt the internet’s traffic worldwide. Signals intelligence agencies in the United Kingdom, Australia, and other partner countries cooperated with the NSA.
Snowden’s 2013 revelations forced the US agencies to adhere more closely to the Constitution’s protection of freedom of speech and freedom of the press. Because Australia lacks similar protections, its intelligence agencies are not subject to the same constraints that apply in the United States and many other countries.
To Snowden’s disappointment, no mainstream media journalist was present when the CIA’s Chief Technology Officer Gus Hunt warned at a media conference on technology in March 2013, ‘You should be asking the question of what are your rights and who owns your data.’ This issue underpinned Snowden’s concern about the Australian government’s law forcing communications companies to store all their customers’ phone and internet metadata (digital fingerprints) for two
years. Around eighty agencies can access the data without a warrant. Snowden said this was the first time a ‘notionally’ democratic government had established this sort of ‘surveillance time machine’, which allows it to ‘technologically rewind the events of any person’s life going back months and even years’.
Snowden justified his decision to become a whistleblower by arguing that he had sworn an oath of service, not to an agency or government, but to the public in defence of the US Constitution ‘whose guarantee of civil liberties had been flagrantly violated’. He said the same agencies that had manipulated intelligence to create a pretext for a war in Iraq in 2003 – and used kidnapping, torture, and mass surveillance – didn’t hesitate for a moment to call him a Chinese double agent, a Russian triple agent, and worse: ‘a millennial’. Snowden also noted that shortly before he began disclosing key documents, the then NSA head James Clapper lied to Congress by denying that it collected any type of data on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans. Clapper escaped unscathed. Snowden makes a distinction between governments leaking classified information and whistleblowers exposing wrongdoing. Snowden says unnamed senior government officials often leak classified information to journalists to ‘advance their own agenda and the efforts of their agency or party’. US intelligence officials even leaked a detailed account of a conference call in August 2013 between the Al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri and his global affiliates. Snowden suggests their motivation was to deflect attention from criticism of the mass surveillance program he had just disclosed. Although the leak alerted Al-Qaeda to change to a more secure communications system, no one was charged.
Likewise, tame journalists in Australia are often briefed by intelligence officials. The journalists simply assume the intelligence is accurate, heedless of the lesson of how the United States used phoney US intelligence about weapons of mass destruction to justify the disastrous 2003 invasion of Iraq. Despite a media campaign to protect press freedom, many journalists rarely test the boundaries. A low point came when the ABC boasted in January 2018 that it had received hundreds of classified cabinet documents but refused to report any of the contents in case this endangered public safety. Cabinet submissions never contain such material. However, behaving more like an East German state broadcaster than a public broadcaster, the ABC asked ASIO to come and remove all the documents.
Snowden worked directly for the CIA as well as being a contractor to it and the NSA. He rarely set foot in the contractors’ offices. Although this is not uncommon in the United States, Snowden became a systems engineer without even a community college degree. While his memoir is easily understood, no one should doubt that Snowden has complex technical skills. He says he created time to gather his whistleblowing material by writing programs that automated his formal work. He also used tiny storage devices to smuggle huge numbers of documents out of his workplace at the NSA in Hawai‘i. He then selected journalists he trusted to publicise this material, primarily in The Guardian, The Washington Post, Le Monde, and Der Spiegel, and used his own powerful encryption to protect the data he was sending them. He said it would take well over fifty million billion years to decipher: ‘By that time, I might even be paroled.’
Snowden saw a much wider role
for encryption. While a person’s bodily presence can only be in one place at a time, he explains that multiple versions of their data wander the globe, where they are open to interception. He hoped that showing people how to encrypt their data would enable them to foil the surveillance state. However, in late 2018 Australia became the first country to introduce laws forcing tech companies to weaken their computer systems to give the government access to the unencrypted version of the data.
Snowden and Lindsay Mills, a blogger, acrobat, and photographer, have been together since 2009. Partly to protect her, he did not tell Mills about his plan to leave the NSA and go to Hong Kong to meet some of the journalists he was supplying with classified documents. His subsequent flight to Moscow had not been planned. Mills joined Snowden there in 2014. They married in 2017 and appear content living in rented apartments in that vibrant city. He earns an income from participating in virtual forums outside Russia. Snowden insists he didn’t take copies of any documents to Russia – its government could read the complete online archive.
Snowden can be proud that he curbed America’s mass surveillance system, which he calls ‘The ear that always hears, the eye that always sees, a memory that is sleepless and permanent’. The Australian government is building its own version, against growing opposition. g
Brian Toohey began his career in journalism as a political correspondent at the Australian Financial Review in 1973. His most recent publication is Secret: The Making of Australia’s Security State (Melbourne University Press, 2019). ❖
SYDNEY OPERA HOUSE 29 FEB – 4 APRIL
CANBERRA THEATRE CENTRE 9 – 18 APRIL
ARTS CENTRE MELBOURNE 23 APRIL – 10 MAY
Being in the room Angela Woollacott
PENNY WONG: PASSION AND PRINCIPLE
by Margaret Simons
Black Inc., $34.99 pb, 368 pp, 9781760640859
Every biographer has a relationship with their subject, even if they have passed away. A real advantage for biographers of the dead is that the subject cannot say what they think about the book. The relationship between Margaret Simons and Penny Wong was fraught. That this mattered is evident from the opening sentence: ‘Penny Wong did not want this book to be written.’ Simons, a journalist, biographer, and associate professor at Monash University, uses her preface to complain about how difficult it was researching the book without Wong’s assistance and against her will. Finally, well into Simons’s writing, she was invited to Senator Wong’s office, where Wong gave her ‘a hard time’. The relationship thawed and Simons was able to conduct six interviews. Readers will be glad that Wong overcame her resistance to this intrusion into her life: the stories in Wong’s voice and her personal memories are rich elements of the book. Yet there are recurrent reminders of Simons’s tense relationship with her subject.
Penelope Ying-Yen Wong was born in 1968 in Kota Kinabalu, the capital of Sabah in the North Borneo part of Malaysia. This was her father’s home region, where his Chinese ancestors had moved in the late nineteenth or early twentieth century. Francis Yit Shing Wong was a Colombo Plan student of architecture at the University of Adelaide in the 1960s; he had married Jane Chapman and returned to Sabah with her. People in Borneo suffered severely under Japanese occupation in World War II, including Penny Wong’s paternal grandmother, father, and his siblings. She loved her grandmother, and did not want one particular family story included in the book – but Simons tells us that, and includes it regardless. When Penny was eight, her parents separated. Jane, Penny, and her younger
brother, Toby, immediately moved to Adelaide, where her mother bought a house in Coromandel Valley in the hills, not far from where her own English ancestors – who went back to the founding of South Australia in 1836 – had farmed. At Coromandel Valley Primary, Penny and Toby had a terrible time because of the racist bullying they suffered. Racism became part of the children’s everyday experience. Life improved greatly when Penny won a scholarship to the élite Scotch College. She thrived and excelled academically, as well as shining in drama and sport. Toby joined her at Scotch, where he did less brilliantly. Toby’s story is a tragic part of Wong’s life. He dropped out of school, took up music (and drugs), and became a chef. In 1988 John Howard, leader of the opposition, announced the Coalition’s new immigration policy of One Australia to reduce Asian immigration. In Wong’s view, this legitimated the kind of racist abuse she and Toby had received. Ten days after the 2001 election, which first took Penny into the Senate, Toby killed himself. In a powerful maiden speech in August 2002, Wong paid special tribute to Toby, called for Australia to unite as a compassionate country, and condemned the racist division of Australian society exacerbated by Pauline Hanson and John Howard. At the University of Adelaide, Wong studied law and political science. In her second year, she became active in student politics and was elected to the students’ association and the board of the university union. Wong describes herself as a social democrat. She started to the left of the Labor Party, but in 1988 in the heat of debate and student protest over the introduction of the HECS scheme, she became convinced that it was more important to ‘be in the room’ to influence policy. She joined the ALP and has been on its left ever
since. In 1989 Wong was elected general secretary of the university Labor Club; others viewed her as the one in charge. Wong quickly transitioned from student politics to being active in the Labor Party at state level, and then nationally – with the help of powerful supporters such as Nick Bolkus. Before she finished her degree she began work as a paralegal with the Federated Furnishing Trade union. After graduating, she took a full-time organiser position there just as they were amalgamating with the CFMEU. At the end of 1994 she moved to Sydney to work for the CFMEU. Following the 1995 NSW election, she became a policy adviser to a minister in the new Labor government. In late 1996, Wong, at the invitation of the SA ALP’s left, returned to Adelaide to seek preselection for the Senate. She took a job in industrial law with a firm that represented unions on the left, then moved to the Miscellaneous Workers’ Union to work with Mark Butler, president of the SA Labor party. In 1998 she was selected as the left faction’s candidate for the Senate ticket. In 2000 Wong applied to have her Malaysian citizenship revoked, which it was in 2001. Later that year, at the ‘Tampa’ election won by John Howard, Wong was elected to the Australian Senate.
In the Senate from 2002, Wong would find her feet as a politician and gradually rose within the ALP. With the ‘Kevin 07’ ALP victory, she became minister for climate change and water, a frontbench heavyweight. It was the climate-change portfolio that enabled her to shine on the international stage. In 2013 she became Leader of the Government in the Senate, the first woman to do so, and later the upper house’s Leader of the Opposition. In 2016 she was made shadow minister for foreign affairs.
The biography covers Wong’s personal life, albeit very briefly compared to the politics, by far its main focus. Simons notes Wong’s long-term partners, firstly her five-year relationship with Jay Weatherill, future premier of South Australia, which began while she was at university and he was an industrial officer for the Australian Workers’ Union. After Weatherill, her relationships were with women. Her first
long-term woman partner, Dascia Bennett, whom she met in 1995, had two children, so Wong became a stepmother. In 2006 Wong met her current partner, Sophie Allouache; together they have two daughters, Alexandra, born in 2011, and Hannah, in 2015. Along the way, we learn about Wong’s beliefs (she believes in God and was baptised in the Uniting Church as an adult, but accepts all religions as equal) and values – her absorption of her father’s emphasis on education and ambition, and her mother’s feminism and sense of social justice. And we see, over and over, how racism was so pervasive in her life that inevitably it became the paramount issue for her.
Perhaps because of the tension in her working relationship with Wong, Simons is repeatedly critical, describing Wong as being occasionally bad-tempered to staff and others, aggressive, and as having learnt ‘unappealing political skills’ at Adelaide University while engaged in ‘student politics at its worst’. On the other hand, she is ‘principled, intellectual, private, restrained and sane’, generous to her staff – which is loyal to her. Simons notes that Wong’s Liberal opponents have only good things to say about her (as does the cleaner in charge of ministerial offices at Parliament House), and that she is commonly regarded with a mixture of fear and respect.
We should all be grateful that Simons has given us this clear, wellresearched, and comprehensive biography, and that Wong eventually contributed the personal memories and views that round it out. As the ALP digests its recent report on how it lost the 2019 election, some commentators are calling for a change of leadership. If Labor does find a seat in the House of Representatives for Wong, she would immediately be a highly qualified candidate for the top job, due to her intellect, political and policy acumen, as well as her speaking skills, compassion, and determination. Whether as prime minister or foreign minister, there is a good chance that she will yet be one of our top leaders, which is a compelling reason for us to know more about the making of Penny Wong. g
Angela Woollacott’s new book is Don Dunstan (Allen & Unwin, 2019). ❖
Australian Sappho
Brenda Niall
THE SHELF LIFE OF ZORA CROSS
by Cathy Perkins
Monash University Publishing
$29.95 pb, 285 pp, 9781925835533
Just over one hundred years ago, Sydney readers were speaking in hushed tones about a shocking new book by a young woman, Zora Cross. A collection of love poems by an unknown would not normally have roused much interest, but because they came from a woman, and were frankly and emphatically erotic, the book was a sensation. It wasn’t, as a Bulletin reviewer said demurely, a set of sonnets to the beloved’s eyebrows. It was ‘well, all of him’. It broke the literary convention that restricted the expression of sexual pleasure to a male lover. Cross took Shakespeare’s sonnets as her inspiration. Her Songs of Love and Life (1917) was a long way from being Shakespearean, but it roused huge admiration. Cross was hailed as a genius, ‘an Australian Sappho’. Queensland-born Zora Cross began her literary career as an unstoppable contributor to the ‘Children’s Corner’ in the Sydney-based Australian Town and Country Journal. Cross was only nine when she wrote from home on Pie Creek Road, Gympie, to the Corner’s editor, ‘Dame Durden’, who, as everyone knew, was the bestselling author Ethel Turner. Although she seldom encouraged her Corner children in career ambitions, Turner liked the fresh and funny letters from Pie Creek Road. When Cross came to live in Sydney, she was invited to Turner’s house in Mosman for advice on how and where to publish. In 1911, Cross confided that she was four months’ pregnant. Turner wasn’t censorious but was concerned that Cross’s life might be ‘like fighting through an endless wood’. She was relieved when Cross married the presumed father of her child. That marriage, however, was over within a few months. The child, a daughter, died soon after birth. In 1914,
Zora’s son by an unnamed father was left in the care of her parents for five years. Cross’s career had reached its peak in 1919 when she formed a permanent relationship with the Bulletin literary editor David McKee Wright. He had a teenage son, from an early marriage in New Zealand, and four young sons in Sydney. He was to have two daughters with Cross. Their life together was as harmonious as it could be, given their financial stress, frequent illnesses, and the discomforts of living in a ratinfested house in Glenbrook, on the lower slopes of the Blue Mountains.
While McKee Wright had encouraged the sensuous direction of Cross’s poetry, he thought ‘the wine god boozing at the breast of Aphrodite’ might be ‘a trifle over the odds’. Cross’s most important friend and patron was the Sydney publisher George Robertson, who gave unreserved support and friendship for many years. He struggled to persuade Norman Lindsay, then famous for his erotic drawings and paintings, to illustrate Songs of Love and Life. Lindsay was appalled by Cross’s outpourings of ‘libidinous frenzy’. Her trouble was probably ‘a torpid husband or no husband at all’. Lindsay singled out a clunky line: ‘when passion gnawed me with his thundering ire’. Eventually, he consented to design the cover of Zora’s book, complaining all the way about her ‘amorous piffle’.
Cross’s biographer, Cathy Perkins, sees the ironic comedy in Lindsay’s shocked reaction to a woman trespassing into his own territory. She does not, however, make large claims for Cross’s literary achievements. She quotes liberally, and the reader may judge whether or not the comparisons, made in Cross’s time, with Elizabeth Barrett Browning as well as Sappho and Shakespeare are at all persuasive. Nettie Palmer’s view that Cross had ‘genuine poetic abandon but not the corresponding restraint’ seems fair comment.
An actor as well as a writer, Cross brought an element of theatre to her presentation of self. Nevertheless, it took courage and self-belief to live for writing, as Cross did.
Perkins shapes the narrative in a series of more or less self-contained chapters,
each of them centred on an important relationship. With the exception of Cross’s young brother, who was killed in World War I, they are all literary figures. Cross’s friendships with Ethel Turner and Mary Gilmore open and close the story. In between these two well-established writers, Bertram Stevens, George Robertson, David McKee Wright, and John Le Gay Brereton make their contributions. So, in a different way, does ‘Bernice May’, Cross’s journalistic alter ego, whose columns for the popular Women’s Mirror kept the pot boiling. Rebecca Wiley, George Robertson’s assistant, was one of several friends whose patience was worn down by the ever-demanding Cross. Wiley sewed and knitted for Cross and sent parcels of
books on demand from Sydney to Glenbrook, before rebelling, as did Robertson whose warm and friendly letters turned into chilly replies to ‘Dear Madam’.
When Cross died in 1964 at the age of seventy-three, she left an unfinished trilogy set in ancient Rome. A reader’s report had described this ambitious work as ‘melodramatic and undisciplined’. Nothing had changed.
The Shelf Life of Zora Cross is a beguiling narrative of a literary career that never quite matured. Cross’s chaotic life story is splendidly told by Perkins, who has explored many boxes of manuscripts, letters, and newspaper cuttings in the State Library of New South Wales. Zora Cross is allowed to speak for herself and is given an even-handed
measure of admiration and understanding. This enigmatically titled biography conveys the pleasures of Cathy Perkins’s search for the many-faceted author. g
Brenda Niall’s most recent book is Can You Hear the Sea? My grandmother’s story (Text Publishing, 2018).
The Resident
We have the White Louse. His name is Donal Dump. He is the Resident, and he heads the Dump maladministration, squillionaires and a sprain-surgeon, a Cabinet of all the talons. They call him a racial spigot. He sees it as he calls it, which makes him spigot. He squitters Twitter on the shitter, and we titter after. He only squeaks for us. He is our mouth-squeeze. He has a background in constriction. Bill the Wall! Bill the Wall! He owes the Dump Hotel, wright here in DeCease. He is a self-dealing man who once in his youth wore out the uniform. Then bone spurts struck, and he invalidated to the venereal front. A ployboy and a much-married man and father to the fair Larissa-without-portfolio who he’d love to give one to. Or even several. A stately plump buck who takes the time to vent before the chopper with his luxury hair and tie blowing bravely in all erections. Fake nudes! Fake nudes! To me he is a crevice to the orifice. The economy is re-relegated like you wouldn’t believe. Unvironment too. Offense Dept. going bangbusters. Eye ran. Blat! Mixed Tans. Blat! Gerry mans. Blat! He achoos new tariff-farts every day, whining easy-peasy dread wars, slapping stanchions on Shiner and our other alloys. (All except Rusher, on account of Poo-in.) He is surely flushing in the dawn of a brand-new Yellow Rage. Grate again! Grate again! GAGA! GAGA! We are a Nation of Lawns. (He flogs golf off a tetchy handiclap.) We have the suppuration of pars. There is the Supreme Bought, also the Senilate and the House of Unrepresentatives (tho cuntly in Demographic hands). We stand by the corruptibility of our unstitutions, and the wisdom of the Foundering Fathers.
Michael Hofmann’s most recent collection is One Lark, One Horse (Faber & Faber, 2018). ‘The Resident’ appeared first in the New York Review of Books (10 October 2019). We thank NYRB for allowing us to reproduce it here.
Michael Hofmann
Putting the terror in extraterritoriality
by Christina Twomey
Iam from a very large island, a continent in fact.
Yet smaller islands have meant more to me – trips to Bribie Island with my grandmother to drink shandies and eat crab sandwiches; two years living in an expatriate Australian community on the Malaysian island of Penang; an object lesson in the power of oceans while visiting American Samoa, when my then boyfriend and I were carried by the tide beyond the coral reef we were exploring with snorkels. In my part of the world, small islands often connote tourism, but they also serve other objects. There is a vanishing point where paradise becomes isolation, where utility meets strategy and where purpose matters more than people.
My island continent is surrounded by a string of small islands that have always loomed large in Australia’s national imaginary. This is perhaps more the case now than at any time since World War II. Then, Australians were acutely aware that their troops were fighting Japan on the nation’s doorstep in the external territory of Papua and in New Guinea, which Australia administered under the ‘sacred trust’ conferred by a League of Nations mandate. Manus Island formed part of that mandate. There were other islands that Australia held under similar terms. One of them was Nauru. Australia and its Allies managed to hold out in New Guinea, but Manus Island and Nauru were occupied by Japan, which also recognised their value for its Pacific campaigns.
This war in ‘the islands’ remained a topic of conversation in my family into the 1970s and 1980s. My grandmother’s childhood friends fought in New Guinea, as did her brother. By the end of the war, one in twenty Australians had spent time in Papua or New Guinea. The roots of this connection went further back, and not just for the planter class. Recently, perusing the notes I had taken twenty years earlier, talking with my grandmother about her Townsville childhood, a reference to my great-grandmother working before her marriage as a domestic in ‘the islands’ to Australia’s north caught my eye in a way it had not before.
After the war was over, these ocean and island territories remained in Australia’s orbit, under a Trustee-
ship system established by the new United Nations. Their blend of isolation and intimacy, external territory which might allow a liberal democracy to invoke dread, became manifest in new ways. The Australian Military Court convened three war-crimes trials on the Australian mainland, at Darwin, but almost three hundred others were run offshore. A few were held in the British colonies of Singapore and Hong Kong, but most were convened at New Guinea’s capital of Rabaul, and on a host of other islands, including Manus Island. Surrendered Japanese were held at detention centres on Manus Island, and in Rabaul, and sometimes those found guilty of war crimes were hanged in these places.
Family memories of the war seeded my knowledge of older island possessions; a nerdy childhood hobby made me aware of others. What self-respecting philatelist in the 1970s could forget the bright shells, birds, fish, and ships of the Cocos (Keeling) Islands and Christmas Island stamps? I could not have known then, as we made family trips from our Royal Australian Air Force home on Penang to Singapore, that a mere two decades earlier Cocos (Keeling) and Christmas Islands had fallen within its territorial boundaries.
Not satisfied with its brooch in the Pacific, after the war Australia began to collect external territories like pearls strung on a necklace. In the mid-1950s, Australia acquired from Singapore control of the Cocos (Keeling) Islands, then Christmas Island. As Britain began to dismantle its empire, it gifted to Australia new territories in the Indian Ocean to complement its Pacific holdings.
Yet Manus and Christmas Island have become bywords not for security but for desolation. On a recent family holiday, when we arrived at miserable accommodation in the Northern Territory that had promoted itself as ‘safari tents’, the first comment my teenage daughter made was, ‘My God, it looks like Manus Island.’ While the specific situation was a first-world problem, the reach for Manus Island as metaphor for misery and for rows of tent to visually cue an Australianrun detention centre is telling. My daughter has grown up seeing footage of ‘regional processing centres’ on the
nightly news, hearing accounts of suicide, death, and suffering within them, and stories about asylum seekers sewing their lips together to protest their detention at centres on Manus Island, Nauru, and Christmas Island.
Recently, the same daughter took part in the climate strike. The day before the strike, when I checked our mail box on the way in through the front gate, my copy of the New York Review of Books had arrived. A photograph of Behrouz Boochani was on the cover. J.M. Coetzee had written the lead essay, entitled ‘Australia’s Detention Islands’. There are periodic, and smaller, demonstrations in Australia about the fate of asylum seekers in immigration detention, but their fate has yet to inspire hundreds of thousands of people to march through our city streets.
in nature. The Kafkaesque nomenclature of ‘Operation Sovereign Borders’ from 2013 was bettered only by the Back to the Future creation of a ‘Department of Home Affairs’ in 2017.
There is a vanishing point where paradise becomes isolation, where utility meets strategy
Extraterritoriality in the form of islands has bequeathed the Australian state the capacity to practise terror in the name of its citizens. The language hardens in each successive iteration of the strategy. In the first decade of the twenty-first century, the ‘Pacific Solution’ allowed the government to excise islands from Australia’s migration zone yet house intending migrants on them. It was Pacific in spatial terms, but not peaceful
Forms of territoriality, such as Australia exercises over places like Christmas Island, remain an anomaly in an international system committed to decolonisation. It is not among the ‘non self-governing territories’ on the United Nations’ watchlist, and nor are other island territories held by the United States, France, and Britain, which are merely deemed to have undergone a ‘change of status’. In 2010 the United Nations commenced its third International Decade for the Eradication of Colonialism, but it seems to have no plan to address the profound issues raised by extraterritoriality. Australia’s use of such zones to violate the rights of people under international conventions for refugees would suggest that terror is the operative word in extraterritoriality. g
Christina Twomey is Professor of History at Monash University. Her most recent book is The Battle Within: POWs in postwar Australia (NewSouth, 2018).
Classical Allegory
To hell with what you think of me. I’ve started drinking martinis at three. I wake, I walk, I write, I sleep. I snooze the alarm. I doze. I read. Sometimes I listen to Carmen McRae and pity you an inch. Not often. Mostly I think about who’ll be next now you’re gone. I stay out extravagantly late. I buy myself a new coat, oysters, peonies. I take long baths with a flute of champagne. In bars, I sip whiskey straight. I pet stray cats on stoops. When it’s hot I laze around in French lingerie. Why not? You’ve gone; the world hasn’t stopped.
Sarah Holland-Batt’s most recent book of poems is The Hazards (UQP, 2015).
Sarah Holland-Batt
Impeachable you
The bigot who succeeded Abraham Lincoln Samuel Watts
THE IMPEACHERS: THE TRIAL OF ANDREW JOHNSON AND THE DREAM OF A JUST NATION
by Brenda Wineapple
Random House, $52.99 hb, 572 pp, 9780812998368
Andrew Johnson’s first day in the White House was less than promising. Whether, as his supporters claimed, he was suffering from illness and had attempted to self-medicate or had simply been celebrating his new position as vice president, Johnson was devastatingly drunk. It was 3 March 1865, the Civil War was rapidly drawing to a close, and the recently re-elected President Lincoln was to deliver his second inaugural address. In prose that would eventually be inscribed across the walls of his marble memorial, Lincoln reflected on God, war, and the emerging challenge of how to rehabilitate a divided Union. The vice president’s words that day were barely decipherable and after prostrating himself before a Bible and subjecting it to a long wet kiss, he was quickly ushered away.
Within weeks, Lincoln would be dead and the same Republican congressmen who would later play a leading role in Johnson’s impeachment looked hopefully to the former tailor from Tennessee to guide a nation in mourning through the challenges of peace and Reconstruction. For many, he was the ideal candidate for this task. A Southern Democrat who had owned slaves, yet who had also fought hard and risked everything to stand up against secession and for the preservation of the Union and the Constitution – who else could hope to unite and heal such a fractured, wounded nation?
As Brenda Wineapple’s meticulous study highlights, Republicans did not have to wait long for such thinking to be exposed as wishful. It soon became obvious that Johnson planned to welcome the Southern states back into
the Union without requiring them to recognise and respect the rights and liberties of the four million formerly enslaved people, despite these rights being central to the moral justification for the war itself (post-1863, at least).
As Wineapple demonstrates, it was not one action that brought about Johnson’s impeachment but rather a litany of executive usurpations of power, a refusal to cooperate with Congress or to respect the norms of the office, and a singular devotion to the idea of white supremacy that caused the president to be impeached by the House and acquitted by one vote in the Senate. The president, as Wineapple argues, much more than Charles Sumner, Thaddeus Stevens, or Benjamin Butler combined, bore the greatest responsibility for his own impeachment and the subsequent Senate trial. Although Johnson would survive the trial and serve out the remainder of his term (1865–69), he would leave the White House without any friends or allies in either major party and with a reputation for vindictiveness, arrogance, obstinacy, and bigotry.
The Impeachers is a landmark historical study – arriving as the House of Representatives prepares to impeach the current president and as political pundits furiously debate the merit and function of impeachment. Wineapple began researching and writing this book well before Russia, Ukraine, or Donald Trump’s candidature for the presidency, and it shows. Rather than a clunky, quickly assembled historical analogue to contemporary events, Wineapple presents an impressively crafted analysis of impeachment, Reconstruction, and the drama of high politics.
Scouring letters, diaries, and records in archives across the country, Wineapple’s research enriches her portraits of impeachment’s chief protagonists, in much the same way as Doris Kearns Goodwin did in her Team of Rivals: The political genius of Abraham Lincoln (2005). Similar to Goodwin’s collective biography of Lincoln and his cabinet, The Impeachers is no slim volume, yet, like Team of Rivals, it is historical writing at its finest, building tension with each passing chapter and drawing the reader deeper into the emotional lives of these men.
Beyond her skill as a writer, this tension comes about because of what Wineapple argues was at stake in impeachment. It was, of course, about much more than a president defying Congress and simply breaking the law; it was not even really about testing Madisonian democracy and the proper separation of powers. Rather, impeachment signified an intervention by Congress to affirm and determine the course of a new multiracial democracy, one that affirmed the sentiment of the Declaration of Independence but denounced its hypocrisy.
It is here that Wineapple avoids the pitfalls that other popular writers (particularly in the United States) fall into when describing similarly momentous historical events. Rather than presenting a portrait of great men debating great and lofty principles, Wineapple presents a series of flawed but fascinating characters who were attempting to grapple with a totally unprecedented situation for which the country’s founders had left little instruction. Rather than appealing simply to notions of freedom, equality, and American exceptionalism, Wineapple highlights the devastating consequences of Johnson’s Reconstruction policy for African Americans and Republicans in the South. These included the reinstatement of former Confederates to government offices only months after the end of the war, many of whom took revenge for defeat out on formerly enslaved men, women, and children. Murder, rape, and intimidation were key instruments of white supremacy, and Wineapple doesn’t shy away from highlighting this fact or its connection to Johnson’s poli-
cies and rhetoric. For historians of this era, this is nothing new, but for many readers this will be the first time they learn of the violence of this era, of the Memphis and New Orleans Massacres, and that is itself significant.
Although Trump is not mentioned, comparisons between the two presidents are not hard to find. Johnson was a populist who distrusted intellectuals, believed the country should return to some past mythical utopia, and called his political foes enemies of the people, who themselves called the president a demagogue. He loved to campaign and deliver speeches on the stump, yet his inability to stick to the script frustrated aides and was a constant source of political strife and outrage. He even exhorted crowds to hang his congressional opponents in 1866.
As the title suggests, however, The Impeachers is not about Johnson or Trump but rather a group of individuals earnestly attempting to provide a peaceful resolution to a political conflict that threatened to spark another Civil War. For these lawmakers, impeachment meant interrogating the moral purpose of the war and the direction of the country. As Wineapple puts it, impeachment ‘spoke beautifully and with farsighted imagination of the road not yet taken, but that could exist: the path toward a free country, a just country, a country and a people willing to learn from the past, not erase it or repeat it, and create the fair future of which men and women still dream’. g
Samuel Watts is a PhD Candidate in History who researches and writes about the experiences of African Americans in the Deep South during Reconstruction. He is the managing editor of ANZASA Online, a US studies blog. ❖
Another Europe
Addressing the democratic deficit
Paul Muldoon
HOW TO DEMOCRATIZE EUROPE
by Stéphanie Hennette et al.
Harvard University Press (Footprint), $49.99 pb, 224 pp, 9780674988088
The import of this book is best summed up by pinching one of its section headings: ‘another Europe is possible’. In this other Europe, this better one, the ‘democratic deficit’ that has bedevilled the European project from the outset has finally found a satisfactory resolution. A dream? Not at all. For the authors of this book, it is a ‘realistic utopia’, fully achievable if the right measures are taken. All that is needed is an agreement on a treaty and the dismantling of a Trojan Horse. The proposed Treaty on the Democratization of the Governance of the Euro Area (‘T-Dem’ for short) is the centrepiece of this book and provides the common reference point for its various contributors. In Parts One and Two, the four editors – Stéphanie Hennette, Thomas Piketty, Guillaume Sacriste, and Antoine Vauchez – make their case for the treaty proposal and outline its particulars; in Part Three, a range of responses is given; in Part Four, the editors offer their rejoinders. This turns the book into a deliberative forum whose points of agreement and disagreement on the possibility of democratising Europe repay attention. But first a word about that Trojan Horse. The failures of European integration are often assigned to an unresolvable tension between the national and the supranational. Project Europe, we hear, is immobilised by the crosswinds created by state actors seeking to preserve their sovereignty and regional actors seeking to facilitate federation (Brexit being but the latest manifestation of this stasis). In Chapter One, Sacriste and Vauchez offer a different account of the troubles. After the agreement on Economic and Monetary Union (EMU), they suggest, an extramural governance
structure emerged to manage the euro. The ‘central nucleus’ of this governance structure is a body called the Eurogroup, which operates in the ‘unmonitored space between the politics of member states and the politics of the European Union’. Comprising financiers from a range of national and supranational institutions, but all schooled in the same monetary principles, the Eurogroup and its affiliates operate as an unaccountable transnational fraternity whose power over the eurozone has grown exponentially since the sovereign debt crisis. To Sacriste and Vauchez, it is a ‘democratic black hole’. By virtue of its technical expertise, the Eurogroup has marginalised the parliaments (national and European) and reordered the European project after its own image: austerity before welfare, economy before society. ‘T-Dem’ belongs to what, following Karl Polanyi, might be called the countermovement against this financial reordering, or ‘euro-ization’, of Europe.
The purpose of ‘T-Dem’ is to create a Parliamentary Assembly of the Euro Area (separate from the European Parliament), one capable of exercising political oversight over the process of monetary union. Membership of this Parliamentary Assembly would comprise a mixture of representatives from national parliaments (eighty per cent) and the European Parliament (twenty per cent), with the number of seats from each of the member states being determined on the basis of population. By incorporating elected representatives from the states of the eurozone into the Parliamentary Assembly, the proposers of ‘T-Dem’ hope simultaneously to borrow legitimacy from the national parliaments and refigure the European project as an extension of
the democratic sovereignty of peoples. Not implausibly, ‘T-Dem’ is being sold to member states as the ‘democratic compact’ needed to counterbalance the ‘fiscal compact’ of EMU.
The respondents collected in this volume overwhelmingly support the diagnosis of a ‘democratic emergency’ provided by the editors. All of them agree that governance of the eurozone has become less transparent and accountable since the sovereign debt crisis and that ‘another Europe’ is not only possible but necessary. Indeed, for Jeremy Adelman and Anne-Laure Delatte, ‘T-Dem’ holds out the promise of the ‘constituent moment’ Europe never had – the moment when it finally found itself as a democratic polity. None of the others is quite so enthused by the remedy. The concerns range widely. How will the new Assembly relate to the existing European Parliament? How are the legislative powers of the Assembly to be shared with the Eurogroup? Can these legislative powers be exercised without encroaching on the national parliaments? Wouldn’t it be better to appoint a ‘euro-area finance minister’, responsible to the European Parliament, to oversee monetary union? Might not the Assembly deepen divisions between the eurozone and the rest of the EU? Would the ‘T-Dem’ gain the approval of the German Constitutional Court? And so on.
Precisely where the technical stops and the political begins can be difficult to work out here. Although everybody declares their allegiance to principles of transparency and accountability, technical questions relating to the institutional architecture of the EU play a subtle role in obscuring the political stakes. Exactly what vested interests are being protected in this discussion about the best way to democratise Europe would take some time to work out.
The more of this commentary one reads, the more one wonders whether the ‘T-Dem’ is quite as radical as it first appears. Assembly – the gathering of the people – has long enjoyed a special aura in theories of emancipation. But it is difficult to suppress the feeling, stoked by essays from Christian Joerges and Iphigénie Kamtsidou, that representative institutions are insufficient
to combat the power of finance capitalism. Why should this ‘chamber of national chambers’, as Pierre Moscovici describes it, prove more effective than its domestic counterparts in curbing executive/financial rule and restoring the constituent power of the people? By reducing the problems of Europe to the power exercised by a small but unaccountable financial élite (that secretive Eurogroup), the editors may have exaggerated the difference that political oversight of euro-area governance could make. Capitalism is surely much harder to tame.
Nevertheless, since lament over the power of an opponent can easily turn into self-justifying resignation, practical attempts to resolve the democratic deficit in Europe should not go uncredited. If ‘T-Dem’ ultimately seems inadequate to the democratic emergency, the editors can scarcely be faulted for seeking the democratic regulation of financial power. Their proposal (and the book debating it) deserves to be read carefully. g
Paul Muldoon is a Senior Lecturer in Political Theory and Global Politics at Monash University. ❖
Political persuasion
The foundations of Ben Chifley’s internationalism
David Lowe
J.B. CHIFLEY: AN ARDENT INTERNATIONALIST
by
Julie Suares
Melbourne University Publishing, $49.99 pb, 432 pp, 9780522874693
One of the risks in writing about the history of Australia in world affairs is the ease with which ideas and visions can be flattened. If you start from the premise of Australia’s small-to-middle-power standing and diminished agency among other nations, you might conclude that ideas mattered less than adroit lobbying and alliances. Even if you find greater Australian activism by elevating the role of trade, pointing to the hard-headedness in trading with important partners such as Britain, Japan, and, more recently, China, this doesn’t necessarily invite exploration of world views. If the search for security in a rapidly changing region is the metanarrative, then, arguably, what you need are powerful and reliable friends more than innovative thinking about alternatives. But, as Julie Suares demonstrates in her persuasively argued book, this should not apply in the case of Ben Chifley and Australia in the world.
For Chifley, the middle decades of the twentieth century were meant to
reveal the full benefits of arbitration and regulation, both domestically and internationally. Having witnessed the hardships endured during the Depression years of the 1930s, he also saw the period as one that demanded great learning. He read voraciously on the related themes of economics, trade, finance, and international relations, and his appointment to the Royal Commission into Banking in 1935 hastened this learning process. Conscious of the dominant role of trade in Australia’s productivity, he emerged in the 1940s determined to support measures that would increase trading opportunities, and efforts to build an international regulatory framework designed to prevent rogue behaviour and maximise trade through such measures as ease of currency exchange. As treasurer in the Curtin government (1941–45) and prime minister from 1945 to 1949, Chifley was able to bring his considerable powers of political persuasion to bear in pursuit of these aims, but his task was far
Calibre Essay Prize
Worth $7,500 • Closes 15 Jan 2020
The 2020 Calibre Essay Prize, one of the world’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.
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We gratefully acknowledge the long-standing support of Colin Golvan AM QC and Peter and Mary-Ruth McLennan.
from easy. His bruising encounters with Jack Lang in New South Wales, and his accumulated learning from watching power and procedures at work in the Labor Party, enabled him to bring the party with him (only just) to endorse the main outcomes of the Bretton Woods Conference held in the United States in 1944. This was where the basics of the new monetary system were hammered out, providing for fixed exchange rates, and setting up the International Bank of Reconstruction (later called the World Bank) and the International Monetary Fund. The planned International Trade Organization was scuppered, but in its place the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade set out to eliminate barriers to trade. Chifley stared down the likes of Eddie Ward and Arthur Calwell, who were hostile to what they saw as the new ‘Money Power’ rising in the United States, to argue that these measures provided the best path to greater opportunities for Australian exports. This was an economically driven form of new internationalism, matched by a strong sense that it best served Australian interests, and accompanied by faith in the regulations provided and in the rule of law and arbitration underpinning the new United Nations.
The economic foundations of Chifley’s internationalism also informed his attitude towards European colonialism in Asia. Having travelled in Southeast Asia (a phase in his life that Suares suggests has been too readily overlooked), Chifley saw firsthand the appalling contrast of impoverished workers and their colonial masters. As the Dutch found when attempting military actions against nationalists in Indonesia in 1948, Chifley had little time for colonial powers wanting to rebuild their empires after the war.
An intriguing feature of this book is Suares’s exploration of the closeness in thinking and personal affinity between Chifley and India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru. Chifley admired his Indian counterpart and took the lead over his mercurial External Affairs Minister, Dr H.V. Evatt, in working to maintain India’s membership in the Commonwealth as it became a republic. Chifley shared Nehru’s view that
improvements in social and economic conditions held the key to orderly decolonisation in Asia, rather than great power/Cold War politics. Suares argues that the Prime Ministers’ Conference in London, in 1949, saw ‘an extraordinary convergence’ of the world views of the two men. They shared a conviction in the need to adjust to changes, in internationalism and the role of the United Nations, and in rejecting both the Cold War lens through which London and Washington were inclined to view the world and the remaining manifestations of Western colonialism. There are limits to the ‘parallel lives’ argument that Suares tentatively invites here. Nehru’s thinking and stature in Asia mattered more to Chifley (and subsequently to an Australian-focused historian) than the other way around, but although their encounters were brief, they also seemed to enjoy each other’s company.
The connection to Nehru underlines a broader point. For all of Evatt’s well-documented energies, Chifley, argues Suares, was a key shaper of his government’s foreign policy more generally. In addition to resisting Cold War interpretations of events, Chifley was also prepared to embrace a less punitive approach to the terms of a peace treaty with Japan – again, a position that was consistent with his economic internationalism and which ran against the grain of much party thinking and public sentiment.
None of this is to suggest that Chifley’s internationalism surmounted his local and political circumstances. Just as economics lay at the heart of much of his thinking, so too did economics provide the basis of his insisting on the White Australia policy. Jobs and wages would be threatened if immigrants of different races arrived. Nor did Chifley overlook opportunities to safeguard Australia’s defence, agreeing quickly to the British proposal in 1946 for long-range missile testing in the Australian desert.
An interesting sub-theme of this book is the view of internationalism glimpsed from the country rather than from Canberra exclusively. Suares makes good use of Chifley’s speeches during the 1930s that were fully reported in The National Advocate , a
pro-Labor daily newspaper in his home town of Bathurst. She reminds us of the importance of public speeches in setting out the ideas of leading politicians, and in doing so signals the need for more explorations of rural-based internationalism – made easier now by Trove’s easy searching of Australia’s regional newspapers up to the mid-1950s. Her fine study of Chifley’s internationalism illustrates the benefits of research that connects local, national, international, and transnational. g
David Lowe holds a Chair in Contemporary History at Deakin University. His most recent book, with Carola Lentz, is Remembering Independence (Routledge, 2018). ❖
Republican Surges
‘There were many moments during the interview that left a viewer scratching her head in confusion or, indeed, finding herself beset by mounting surges of enraged republicanism. In what world does anyone, not least a father of two young daughters, accept the hospitality of a convicted pedophile because “it was a convenient place to stay”? … The most riveting moment in the interview came at the very end. The Prince, finally acknowledging Epstein’s deeds, said, “Do I regret the fact that he has quite obviously conducted himself in a manner unbecoming? Yes.” Maitlis immediately dispensed with the inappropriate euphemism. “Unbecoming? He was a sex offender,” she replied, forcing the Prince to reckon with the brute fact. Being challenged: Prince Andrew must have found that experience unsettling and unfamiliar ‒ even further from his rarefied experience than eating pizza, taking selfies, and recognizing the personal autonomy of members of the serving class, those people passing through whom one doesn’t need to notice.’
Rebecca Mead, ‘Letter from the UK: Prince Andrew’s Noxious Interview about Jeffrey Epstein’, The New Yorker, 18 November 2019
‘The
war against nature’
Understanding the Mallee Lilian Pearce
MALLEE COUNTRY: LAND, PEOPLE, HISTORY
by Richard Broome et al.
Monash University Publishing, $39.95 pb, 429 pp, 9781925523126
Mallees contradict the green pompom-on-a-stick notion of treeness. The word ‘mallee’ stems from the Wemba Wemba word ‘mali’ for a form of eucalyptus tree; one with a shrubby habit with a multistemmed trunk branching out from a lignotuber (a woody life-support system at or below the ground). Highly adapted to challenging environments, more than 400 species of the genus Eucalyptus are considered mallee. The diverse and unique ecosystems that they define evolved within the bewildering contexts of aridity, salinity, heat and wind exposure, and soils devoid of nutrients.
The Mallee is shaped by the presence and absence of water. Go far back enough in time to the Miocene and an inland sea really did exist. Progressively, vast tracts of exposed earth were leached of minerals and massive salt reserves accumulated underground. The First Peoples of the Mallee were sustained by the rich life-giving rivers, while in arid areas their ‘mastery of their environment’ allowed both fixed and mobile settlement. The Mallee lignotuber, among other plants, provided important water storage that supplemented collection – for the Ngargad through dug-out ‘soaks’ in surface clays; for the Nyungar through gnamma holes in granite outcrops. Water also navigates devastating tales, the Murray River being the site of multiple frontier massacres and ongoing violence to Indigenous peoples.
Written by Richard Broome, Charles Fahey, Andrea Gaynor, and Katie Holmes – four esteemed academics specialising in fields of Aboriginal, agricultural, and environmental history – Mallee Country is ambitious. Structured in four parts – Mallee Aborigines and European Intruders to 1880; Trans-
forming the Mallee 1800–1945; The State and Mallee Lands 1945–1983; and Living with the Mallee 1983 to the Present – its 392 pages are densely packed with attentive scholarship. It recounts nuanced stories that complicate simplistic histories. It is a welcome contribution to a growing body of work by Australian historians offering critical perspectives on agricultural Australia (for example, Deb Anderson’s Endurance: Australian stories of drought [2014], Cameron Muir’s Broken Promise of Agricultural Progress: An environmental history [2014], and Rebecca Jones’s Slow Catastrophes: Living with drought in Australia [2017]).
The biophysical realities of the Australian continent made the impact of settler-colonialism unique in its calamity. The combined forces of rabbits, sheep, horses, diseases, crops, machinery, rails, roads, and water-diverting technologies desecrated large tracts of inland Australia, leaving soils fragile and devoid of an exoskeleton. Time and again, the land resisted through droughts, floods, salt and dust storms, locusts, aphids, mice, poison plants, and other afflictions worthy of Old Testament vengeance.
An often devastating environmental history, Mallee Country exposes the frictions between ecological definitions of Mallee ecosystems and social constructions of Mallee country. Since European colonisation, the Mallee has been pushed to extremes by a succession of negligent land-allocation schemes informed by national dreams and anxieties, trust in the promise of science and technology, and the volatility of world wars and neoliberal markets. Desperate measures were taken. Resilience and tenacity are still celebrated in those who
waged war on the Mallee and persevered. Yet those who held on thinly to ‘success’ do so through the misfortune of others, human and otherwise. As Ron Brown, Gnowangerup Shire president and farmer stated in 1981: ‘We have won the battle against the Mallee but lost the war against nature. We have to learn to live with our environment and stop fighting it.’
Multiple royal commissions found irresponsible settlement schemes and inappropriate farming practices. These moments of clarity provided occasion to change direction, yet governments repeatedly failed to learn from the past. Instead, they drove farmers further inland and further into debt, while eating away at ecological life-support systems. How this manifested differed by state, demonstrating the various ways that local policies and local environmental particularities intersect.
In the past thirty years, the neoliberalisation of economic systems has completely dominated what has happened to the environment, to farming, and to Mallee communities. Historically supported through finance, knowledge, machinery, and infrastructure schemes, Mallee farmers now (for the most part) are being left to battle alone. Even the conservation of Mallee ecosystems, emerging from the early 1900s as a social good, is increasingly being delivered by notfor-profit private organisations. Growing interest in mineral sands mining portends further trouble for Mallee country.
Mallee Country provides detailed accounts of daily lives from personal diaries and land-title archives, while sculpting a story pertinent to understanding contemporary national identity and ecological and climate catastrophe. With such a history in hand, the broader forces that rural communities operate within can be discerned. These forces, their roots ensnared in colonisation and global neoliberal markets, continually insist on the need for greater endurance in the people of the Mallee and greater sacrifice of country, while those in power evade responsibility. Threats are imminent, enduring, and devastating.
This book elicits astonishment and anger. It is a rich compendium that ex-
poses the roots of many callous policies that continue state-sanctioned assaults on people and ecosystems. As tales of mass fish death, of drought-relief packages, and of billions of dollars allocated to dams and pipelines inundate the news, Mallee Country is a sobering reminder that we’ve seen it before. What is different now is the scale and urgency of the problems.
The
Mallee
is shaped by the presence and absence of water
Mallee Country is an urgent environmental history for these troubled times. As the authors forewarn, the superimposition of rapid climate change will bring longer-term and wider-reaching consequences to the Mallee. The resilience and creativity demonstrated from communities today is a tribute to all people who care for the Mallee, but overall this is an honest, not hopeful, story. No quick modernist fix can bring us out of the mess we are all in. Reflective and generous social change that attends to a collective deep-time history is required.
Now, more than ever, we must learn from the past and identify alternative pathways. Mallee Country can be read as a history for the future; a warning of what happens when we forget to remember. g
Lilian Pearce is a Kyneton-based researcher and writer, and a part-time research fellow on the Australian Research Council project Owning Nature: Mapping the contested country of private protected areas (University of Tasmania and RMIT). ❖
Serial muse
The invincible Alma Mahler
Ian Dickson
PASSIONATE SPIRIT: THE LIFE OF ALMA MAHLER
by Cate Haste
Bloomsbury, $44.99 hb, 469 pp, 9781408878323
When it comes to serial muses, Alma Maria Schindler Mahler Gropius Werfel was in a class of her own. Lou AndreasSalomé may have included Friedrich Nietzsche, Rainer Maria Rilke, and Sigmund Freud among her conquests, and Caroline Blackwood scored Lucian Freud, Robert Silvers, and Robert Lowell, but Alma’s conquests were more and varied. Antonia Fraser is supposed to have claimed that she ‘only slept with the first eleven’; although Alma would not have understood the reference, she would have agreed wholeheartedly with the concept. Gustav Klimt, Alexander Zemlinsky, Gustav Mahler, Oskar Kokoschka, and Walter Gropius were major notches on her belt, and if the reputations of the author Franz Werfel and the political theologian Johannes Hollnsteiner have faded, they were big in their time.
Reactions to this Viennese Circe have always been definitely pro or con. Elias Canetti wrote a withering description of her as ‘a large woman overflowing in all directions, with a sickly-sweet smile’ who asked him: ‘Did you ever see Gropius? A big handsome man. The true Aryan type. The only man who was racially suited to me. All the others were little Jews. Like Mahler.’ To Ernst Krenek, she had ‘the knack of turning life into a dizzying carousel’. She reminded him of ‘an extravagantly festooned battleship … Wagner’s Brünnhilde transposed to the atmosphere of Die Fledermaus’. On the other hand, Thomas Mann found her amusing. She was one of the few who could pacify the demanding Hans Pfitzner, and the reserved Otto Klemperer, bipolar before such a condition had been defined,
opened up to her about his depressions and found her understanding and supportive. The same divergence of opinion applies to her biographers. Among recent biographies, Oliver Hilmes leads the prosecution with his book Malevolent Muse (2015). Now Cate Haste comes to the rescue with Passionate Spirit.
Alma Maria Schindler was born in Vienna in 1879. Her father, Emil Jakob, was a fashionable landscape painter admired by the Austrian Crown Prince Rudolf among others. Although he died when she was only thirteen, she idolised him all her life. ‘I am the daughter of an artistic tradition,’ she grandly proclaimed in one of her notoriously self-serving and unreliable memoirs. Her stepfather, Carl Moll, was a co-founder of the Secessionist movement, and Alma grew up surrounded by the cream of creative Vienna. From an early age, she showed musical talent both as a pianist and as a composer. The promising young composer Alexander Zemlinsky thought enough of her songs to agree to take her on as a student; from this there developed a rather tempestuous amitié amoureuse, which foundered when Vienna’s musical master, Gustav Mahler, took an interest in the attractive and vital young woman.
‘I am not a Gropius and so I cannot call myself Gropius either. My name is Mahler for all eternity,’ Alma wrote to her second husband, Walter Gropius, as their doomed marriage disintegrated. It is her carefully constructed and much contested narrative of the nine years she spent with the composer that has kept her reputation alive. It was difficult for the vibrant young woman to learn to play second fiddle, and much has been
made of Mahler’s insistence that she stop composing, but the claims that he thereby destroyed a major career are spurious. Towards the end of his life, Mahler began to encourage her to write more lieder. When he died she was only thirty-one and could easily have taken up composition again. In a moment of clear-sighted honesty, she wrote, ‘I don’t lack talent, but my attitude is too frivolous for my objectives, for artistic achievement.’
Depending on one’s attitude to Alma, her passionate affair with the handsome, virile young architect Walter Gropius, which took place while she was still married to Mahler, was either the breaking free of an unsatisfied, takenfor-granted wife or the underhand selfish betrayal of a faithful, affectionate husband, a betrayal that shortened his life. Certainly, it set up a pattern in which Alma moved on to the next affair before she had entirely finished with the previous one.
After Mahler’s death, Alma kept Gropius dangling while she embarked on a feverish, SM-flavoured relationship with Oskar Kokoschka. Although Alma eventually put an end to their affair, their sexual rapport lasted all their lives. The abandoned, in both senses of the word, Kokoschka ordered from the dollmaker Hermine Moos a life-size replica of Alma with the instructions: ‘please make it possible that my sense of touch will be able to take pleasure in those parts where the layers of fat and muscle suddenly give way to a sinuous covering of skin’. Even though the delivered doll was a great disappointment, Kokoschka kept fantasising along the same lines. Decades later, he writes to the then-septuagenarian Alma promising to make her ‘a life-sized wooden figure of myself’ that ‘should have a member in the position you made it for me’ – a proposition that gives new meaning to the phrase ‘morning wood’. World War I added a further layer of complexity to their tangled relationships. Both men signed up and suffered mental and, in Kokoschka’s case, physical injury. Alma’s petulant letters to them show an appalling lack of awareness. When mistaken reports of Kokoschka’s death reached Vienna, instead
of grieving, the ever-resourceful Alma gained access to his atelier, removed her incriminating letters, and snaffled a few sketches as well.
Alma’s marriage to Gropius was over almost before it had begun: by then she had met the man who would become her third and final husband. The sheer improbability of Alma’s long-term partnership with the writer Franz Werfel takes one’s breath away. The staunchly monarchist, right-wing matriarch, whose inbred Viennese prejudice against Jews was hardening into a virulent anti-Semitism, and the younger, anti-establishment, physically nondescript Jewish writer, would seem the most unlikely of couples. But, for Alma, Werfel combined the two essentials: sexual affinity – although it took her a while to come to terms with his fetish for the physically mutilated –and talent. What made him especially enticing was the fact that his talent was latent, and it was she who would nurture it. Werfel realised this too. He admitted late in life: ‘If I hadn’t met Alma I would have written a few good poems and gone to the dogs.’ Although they quarrelled incessantly and Alma continually put Werfel down in public, it was Alma’s strength and determination that got them through their hair-raising escape from Nazi-occupied France, and she was a constant support to him in his final illness.
Their life in America was made considerably more comfortable by the phenomenal success of Werfel’s novel The Song of Bernadette (1941). Alma gathered around them other Austrian and German exiles in both Los Angeles and New York and made new conquests, among them Erich Maria Remarque, who was won over not so much by Alma’s charm as by the fact that she could match him glass for glass.
After Werfel’s death in 1945, Alma retreated to New York where she spent her time working on her memoirs. With constant reference to Alma’s memoirs and diaries, Haste tells this story almost entirely from Alma’s point of view. The problem is, as Norman Lebrecht has pointed out, ‘nothing she writes can be accepted without corroboration’, except for her unexpurgated diaries. Haste
however quotes liberally from her published and unpublished memoirs which were carefully polished to put her in the best possible light. But Haste also pulls no punches when it comes to Alma’s anti-Semitism, quoting her approving remarks about Hitler and her almost unhinged rants about Jewish domination. This, after all, was a woman who was capable of calling her children with Jewish fathers ‘half-breeds’.
Haste’s very readable book gives us a positive slant on a fascinating, contradictory figure. Albrecht Joseph, who became Werfel’s assistant and later married Alma’s daughter, Anna, was no fan of Alma’s, but he spoke for many when he said that Alma’s gift was a ‘profound, uncanny understanding of what it was that (creative) men tried to achieve, an enthusiastic, orgiastic persuasion that they could do what they aimed at, and that she, Alma, fully understood what it was’. g
Ian Dickson has degrees in drama from Yale and the University of New South Wales.
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Books of the Year
Felicity Plunkett
Denise Riley wrote Time Lived, Without Its Flow (Picador) after her son’s death, the lyric slivers of her essay considering atemporality and mourning from the ‘instant enlargement of human sympathy’ she evokes. Charmaine Papertalk Green’s Nganajungu Yagu (Cordite) is a generous work of poetic witness and respect for ancestors, culture, and language inspired by a ‘red journey suitcase’ of letters between the teenage poet and her mother. Michelle de Kretser’s On Shirley Hazzard (Black Inc.) offers a masterclass in reading – Hazzard’s work and beyond. The layers of de Kretser’s exhilarating, writerly rereading collect other people’s observations. It would be difficult to read this wonderful book and not return to (or embark upon) reading Hazzard’s work. I raced through Elliot Perlman’s Maybe the Horse Will Talk (Vintage, 12/19), pausing to admire the meticulous architecture and loping, syncopated pace of its anatomy of corporate greed and human tenacity. Ali Smith’s Spring (Hamish Hamilton, 6/19) continues her urgent, virtuosic, ethical seasonal quartet.
Grace Karskens
Samia Khatun’s Australianama: The South Asian odyssey in Australia (University of Queensland Press), fiercely and beautifully written, signals a breakthrough in Australian history, moving far beyond British colonial frameworks to uncover the powerful histories of the South Asian diaspora in Australia. Khatun’s imaginative narrative moves across time and languages,
through places, cultures, and stories. I am enchanted by Favel Parrett’s novel There Was Still Love (Hachette, 11/19), which similarly transports readers into different realms, this time the intimate worlds of children who are loved and cared for by grandparents, no matter the difficult and bewildering world outside, and the sorrows of their lives. Absorbing and moving, it reveals the beauties and comforts of small things. Jasmine Seymour and Leanne Mulgo Watson’s exquisitely illustrated book Cooee Mittigar: A story on Darug Songlines (Magabala Books) introduces children to the Aboriginal stories, images, and language of Darug Country. Children, parents, and grandparents will love this book.
Frank Bongiorno
This year I stuck to my knitting: it was mainly Australian history for me. I was impressed with Marilyn Lake’s Progressive New World: How settler colonialism and transpacific exchange shaped American reform (Harvard University Press, 3/19). Lake covers a period which I thought I knew better than any other, but it was startling to see Australia’s famous legislation of the decades around Federation making its way into United States political debate. Romain Fathi’s Our Corner of the Somme: Australia at Villers-Bretonneux (Cambridge University Press) is a bold account of a long-running case of national narcissism. Dennis Altman’s Unrequited Love: Diary of an accidental activist (Monash University Publishing) seemed to me a beautifully crafted insight into one of the
most influential Australians of our times. Michelle Arrow does many intelligent things with a turbulent decade in The Seventies: The personal, the political and the making of modern Australia (NewSouth Publishing, 4/19).
Alice Nelson
‘If the world is torn to pieces,’ writes Terry Tempest Williams, ‘I want to see what story I can find in fragmentation.’ This desire is the animating principle of all my favourite books this year, including Williams’s own hauntingly beautiful Erosion: Essays of undoing (Farrar, Straus and Giroux). The fraught necessity of steering a course between despair and hope is also explored by David Carlin and Nicole Walker, who have collaborated in an exquisitely digressive essay collection in epistolary form called The After-Normal: Brief, alphabetical essays on a changing planet (Rose Metal Press). Tessa Hadley’s incisive and powerful Late in the Day (Jonathan Cape) is about the complex and shifting dynamics of long marriages. A particularly impressive Australian début comes from Bindy Pritchard, with her short story collection Fabulous Lives (Margaret River Press), which contains a fascinating tangle of ideas about loss and reconfiguration, rendered in crystalline prose.
Trent Dalton
I’ve been immersed this year in some excellent nonfiction books by some brilliant Australian journalists. Matthew Condon’s The Night Dragon (UQP, 7/19) explores one of Queensland’s most notorious and calculated underworld killers, and why it took forty years to bring him to justice. Every Australian politician – every Australian, to be sure – needs to read Jess Hill’s See What You Made Me Do: Power, control and domestic abuse (Black Inc., 9/19) if they are serious about addressing our national domestic abuse crisis.
Dan Box’s Bowraville (Penguin, 8/19) is a harrowing bookend to the journalist’s relentless investigations into the murders of three Aboriginal children. And I hope Santa’s sack is filled this year with a million copies of David Leser’s Women, Men and the Whole Damn Thing (Allen & Unwin, 9/19) and the big guy drops them down from his sleigh over all of us sunburnt blokes at the cricket.
Billy Griffiths
Underland: A deep time journey (Hamish Hamilton, 10/19) is English nature writer Robert Macfarlane’s most ambitious book to date. It is haunting and urgent and beautifully written. Christina Thompson’s Sea People: The puzzle of Polynesia (William Collins, 6/19) is a lively and lucid journey through Polynesian history, written with respect, wonder, and a keen awareness of the politics of knowledge. I was swept away by Yōko Ogawa’s sinister yet poignant novel The Memory Police (Pantheon, published 1994, translated 2019), an
allegory of loss, a meditation on the fragility of inner lives, and a reminder of the profound dangers of historical amnesia. And don’t miss Anna Krien’s first novel, Act of Grace (Black Inc., 10/19). Like her nonfiction, it is brave, bracing, and alert to complex truths.
James Ley
This year I am on the bandwagon for Lucy Ellmann’s retro-modernist behemoth Ducks, Newburyport (Text Publishing, 12/19). Yes, it is sprawling and ungainly and more than a little maddening; and yes, it has its longueurs, but its great torrent of associations and its rich humour come closer than anything else to capturing that weird combination of anxiety and inanity that is the hallmark of our troubled times. I also think Luke Carman’s essay collection Intimate Antipathies (Giramondo) hasn’t received the credit it is due, possibly because a few of its more (ahem) controversial inclusions overshadowed the self-deprecation and pathos of its more reflective pieces. But its intimacy is every bit as good as its antipathy. And for anyone interested in a better class of airport novel, I can recommend Andrew McGahan’s The Rich Man’s House (Allen & Unwin, 9/19), a trashy but thoroughly entertaining disaster story about an impossibly tall mountain. The descriptive passages gave me vertigo.
Susan Wyndham
Two novels about American families wowed me. The Dutch House by Ann Patchett (Bloomsbury), made perfect by her narrative skills, follows a brother and sister who spend a lifetime trying to understand their parents. Lucy Treloar creates a disturbing but beautiful sense of place in Wolfe Island (Picador, 9/19) as lapping water and social anarchy force a sculptor out of seclusion. Helen Ennis puts flesh on a fine artist in her biography Olive Cotton: A life in photography (Fourth Estate). Helen Garner’s Yellow Notebook: Diaries Volume 1, 1978–1987 (Text, 12/19) proves she can’t write a bad sentence, even in private.
Brenda Walker
Susan Sontag once described herself as ‘gleaming with survivorship’. Anne Boyer’s The Undying: A meditation on modern illness (Allen Lane) looks at what cancer survival can mean. Her book is not a celebration of personal gleaming; it is a ferocious account of the cost of survival and the use of cancer patients as sentimental emblems of fortitude, or ‘another person’s epiphanies’. On Shirley Hazzard, Michelle de Kretser’s joyous work of appreciation, marks a high point in Black Inc.’s Writers on Writers series. Confident and discriminating, Hazzard is the forebear of many Australian novelists who write with literary poise and a great command of character, including de Kretser and Charlotte Wood. I can’t think of a finer account of Hazzard’s stylistic and political distinctiveness.
Tara June Winch’s The Yield (Hamish Hamilton, 8/19) gathers up family, Country, and spirituality, blanketing one part of rural Australia in Indigenous history and language in an impressive rebuking of loss and colonialism.
Beejay Silcox
Cities under cities, Paleolithic art galleries, bronze-age tombs, warehouses of toxic doom, and a forest internet powered by empathetic mushrooms: Robert Macfarlane’s Underland is an awestruck and awestriking catalogue of the world underneath us. ‘To understand light,’ Macfarlane writes, ‘you need first to have been buried in the deep-down dark.’ Here is nature writing at its most exigent and magnificent: equal parts elegy, map, metaphysical disquisition, and exultant sensory surrender. When I finished Underland, it felt like surfacing. I felt the same breathlessness reading Charlotte Wood’s The Weekend (Allen & Unwin, 11/19) a blisteringly intelligent novel about rifts of another sort: the ‘strange caverns of distance’ that are wrenched open in grief. Wood’s new novel of precarious friendships is an elegantly self-contained fury – a thunderstorm in a bottle.
Paul Giles
Ian McEwan’s Machines Like Me (Jonathan Cape, 5/19) weaves his familiar preoccupations – technology, war, politics – into a darkly comic alternative history of Britain and is perhaps the most successful novel he has written. Toni Morrison’s The Source of Self-Regard: Selected essays, speeches, and meditations (Knopf) is an indispensable collection of non-fiction by perhaps the most important writer of our age, addressing topics as varied as opera, time, and memory, as well as issues relating to race. James Simpson’s Permanent Revolution: The Reformation and the illiberal roots of liberalism (Harvard, 7/19) is a revisionist account of the seventeenth-century emergence of liberalism from an Australian scholar in exile, which sheds new light on how evangelical religion continues to shape contemporary politics. And the exhibition catalogue Janet Laurence: After nature, edited by Rachel Kent (Museum of Contemporary Art), offers a handsomely illustrated and informative account of this important Australian visual artist.
Gregory Day
As the various tropes of crisis heighten, I return to strangeness, the strangeness of pre-commodified voices. So this year it was back, or perhaps forward, to Emily Dickinson, and how! Cristanne Miller’s Emily Dickinson’s Poems: As she preserved them (Harvard University Press) is a suitably immense way to experience Dickinson’s ‘pierless bridge’. The product of various championings of the poet’s distinctive methods and voicings down through the years, it reinforces the fact that Dickinson is the nature writer for our histrionic
and overmediated times. As someone working the seams of a new novel dealing in realms of early bush media, I also enjoyed Wendy Haslem’s From Melies To New Media: Spectral projections (Intellect Books), which offers a delicate survey of the way the tactilities and textures of analogue days determine so much in our digital present. The chapter on the Tate’s Eadweard Muybridge app, Muybridgizer, is worth the price of admission on its own.
Ali Alizadeh
This was a good year for philosophy, and for horror. My philosophy picks are from the same publisher (Bloomsbury): Marx: An introduction by Michel Henry (trans. Kristin Justaert); and Happiness by Alain Badiou, translated from French by Australia’s own A. J. Bartlett and Justin Clemens. Plenty in both books to prove that Marxism isn’t, and never was, a cold, anti-humanist economistic doctrine. Badiou even has things to say about affect and pleasure! My fiction picks: Paul Tremblay’s Growing Things and Other Stories (Titan Books) shows that he’s a ridiculously talented – and genuinely terrifying – storyteller. C.J. Tudor’s The Taking of Annie Thorne (Michael Joseph) is an addictive fusion of supernatural horror and crime, and indicates that she’s no one-hit wonder.
Fiona Wright
My favourite novels this year were Carrie Tiffany’s taut and haunting Exploded View (Text, 3/19) and Elizabeth Bryer’s wonderfully strange and often enigmatic From Here On, Monsters (Picador, 9/19). I loved two collections of short stories: Josephine Rowe’s masterful Here Until August (Black Inc, 9/19) and Alice Bishop’s A Constant Hum (Text, 11/19), both of which handle their separate griefs with great delicacy and luminosity. In non-fiction, I loved Luke Carman’s Intimate Antipathies for its alternating cheeky wit and devastating heartbreak, and Chris Fleming’s On Drugs (Giramondo, 11/19) for its clear-eyed incisiveness and intellectual curiosity.
John Kinsella
Again, for me, it’s a poetry year. Charmaine Papertalk Green’s Nganajungu Yagu is a living poem-text of affirmation and intense confrontation with injustice (‘Society slavery here’); Omar Sakr’s The Lost Arabs (UQP), of which I wrote in a blog review: ‘This is not an easy journey on which to accompany this remarkable poet, but join him and see how anger can bring compassion, and how compassion can show why there is anger. The Lost Arabs offers ways not only into Sakr’s personal poetics and psyche, but into a polyphonous sense of community and communities’; Lisa Gorton’s conceptual-textual activism in Empirical (Giramondo, 10/19), with its layered questions of agency, legacy, historical residues, and invasiveness. Like nothing else,
not even his previous works, is J.H. Prynne’s largeformat, red-ink print Of Better Scrap (Face Press). With conversations happening between poetry books on my desk, a revered Samuel Taylor Coleridge speaks from Gorton to Prynne and back again. Prynne’s poem ‘Familiar Left Hand’ begins: ‘Frost at noon, singular and fragile assign rapier point / aftermath as well indent’, and its lyric-political intensity lifts only as lightning can ‘lift’ nature. Of Better Scrap has poems of insectclose intensity.
Jacqueline Kent
Bill Goldstein’s The World Broke in Two (Bloomsbury Circus) is a brilliantly constructed, imaginative collective biography of Virginia Woolf, T.S. Eliot, D.H. Lawrence, and E.M. Forster in 1922, when they were writing their most celebrated novels. Robert A. Caro’s Working: Researching, interviewing, writing (Bodley Head) balances the importance of research, intuition, and knowledge of human nature in essays that form a masterclass in the art of life writing. Andrea Goldmith’s Invented Lives (Scribe, 4/19) is a novel of exemplary clarity and insight examining questions of exile, belonging, and history.
Lisa Gorton
Written in the voice of Alan Turing, Will Eaves’s novel Murmur (Canongate) is simultaneously trancelike and analytical, and brilliantly free in its exploration of consciousness and artificial intelligence. I loved Evelyn Araluen’s piece in the Sydney Review of Books, ‘Snugglepot and Cuddlepie in the Ghost Gum’ (11 February 2019), so wildly clever that it reminded me of Italo Calvino’s way of turning the mind inside-out and back again. I found Xia Jia’s short works of science fiction strange and memorable, dream-like satires on technology’s new empire (in translation online at Clarkesworld Magazine). And I’m already rereading Jessica L. Wilkinson’s Music Made Visible (Vagabond), a poetic biography of George Balanchine. Closely researched, the work of years, its poems are all in movement, sudden, and vital.
Andrea Goldsmith
Miriam Sved’s second novel, A Universe of Sufficient Size (Picador, 4/19), is a superbly structured novel of family, history, secrets, trauma, and mathematics, stretching from 1930s Budapest to Sydney in the 2000s. Very impressive. Deborah Lipstadt is a fearless and free-ranging intellectual. Her latest, Antisemitism: Here and now (Scribe, 8/19), is an accessible, punchy account of anti-Semitism, filled with relevant historical perspectives. It is also a practical book, supplying numerous strategies and techniques to use with a wide range of bigots. My highlight of the year is All the Lives We Ever Lived: Seeking solace in Virginia Woolf (Atlantic Books, 11/19) by Katharine Smyth.
This book combines childhood memoir with grief over a beloved and deeply flawed father, difficulties with a very much alive and misunderstood mother, and the power and intimacy of reading. It’s a personal book with a far reach, and I loved it. Imagine a young Susan Sontag, with the welcome addition of humour. MilleNnial essayist Jia Tolentino, in Trick Mirror: Reflections on self-delusion (Fourth Estate, 8/19), writes like a hand-crafted speedboat, drawing on the likes of Erving Goffman, C.S. Lewis, and DJ Screw as she guides you through the contemporary cultural swamp.
Astrid Edwards
This was a banner year for Australian women writers. Anna Krien’s Act of Grace is a masterpiece. Rarely does a writer’s first move from non-fiction to fiction display such heart and literary craft. Claire G. Coleman continues to entertain (and educate) us with The Old Lie (Hachette, 9/19), reinvigorating Australian speculative fiction in the process. Her reinterpretation of Wilfred Owen’s ‘Dulce et Decorum est’ is haunting. Alice Bishop may be the début writer of the year with A Constant Hum, a collection of short fiction about the 2009 Black Saturday fires. No list would be complete without non-fiction. Jess Hill’s See What You Made Me Do should be compulsory reading for all.
Chris Flynn
My number one pick for 2019 goes to City of Girls (Bloomsbury), Elizabeth Gilbert’s ode to joy. Set in the 1940s New York theatre scene, costumier Vivian Morris indulges in sex, booze, and dancing without the usual boring patriarchal consequences. It is a refreshing literary gin fizz, and an antidote to the seemingly endless cavalcade of misery fiction. The Aussie poke in the eye this year comes from Tony Birch. The White Girl (UQP, 8/19) deals with the Stolen Generation and white Australia’s messed-up attitude towards its Indigenous people, with Birch’s trademark humour and grace. Is it tempting fate to call this one next year’s Miles Franklin winner?
Brenda Niall
Don’t mistake Helen Garner’s Yellow Notebook: Diaries Volume 1, 1978–1987 for ‘something sensational to read in the train’, as an Oscar Wilde heroine characterised her own diaries. Garner’s are spare, quiet, reflective: a portrait of the artist and her world, observed with scrupulous honesty. The identities of others are so carefully protected that only insiders will try guessing who is who. Another distinctive voice comes from the reclusive artist Ian Fairweather. Letters from his Bribie Island retreat, with their total concentration on the essential act of painting, are quirky, opinionated, dedicated. Ian Fairweather: A life in letters (Text, 11/19) is superbly edited by Claire Roberts and John Thompson, and generously produced. Kathy O’Shaughnessy’s In
Love with George Eliot (Scribe) is a riveting novel underpinned by impressive scholarly work. And welcome back Kate Atkinson and her grumpy sleuth Jackson Brodie in Big Sky (Doubleday).
John Hawke
Australian poetry titles are represented only fleetingly (if at all) in bookshops, so it is necessary to check the websites of leading independent publishers, such as Giramondo, Vagabond, Cordite, and Puncher & Wattmann, for the range of current practice. The outstanding book this year was funded through the goodwill of subscribers, and the generous work of its publisher, Alan Wearne, and its editor, Judith Beveridge. Robert Harris’s The Gang of One (Grand Parade Poets, 8/19) is an authoritative selection of work from one of the most important poets of his generation, and appears a quarter of a century after his death. Melbourne poet π.O. has produced another major collection: Heide (Giramondo), 600-page documentary poem, is a critical survey of Australian cultural history, focusing on the local reception of modernism in art and poetry. This documentary approach is also evident in recent volumes by Lisa Gorton, Natalie Harkin, and Jessica L. Wilkinson, though in each case with distinctive results.
Kieran Pender
Since The New York Times published allegations of sexual harassment against Harvey Weinstein, the #MeToo movement has reverberated across the globe. The impact continues to be felt in 2019, and has given rise to several compelling books. In She Said: Breaking the sexual harassment story that helped ignite a movement (Bloomsbury Circus, 12/19), Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey – among the reporters who earned a Pulitzer for the Weinstein reporting – provide a gripping consideration of the past, present, and future of #MeToo. Australian David Leser in Women, Men and the Whole Damn Thing offers a male perspective on the persistence of misogyny, discrimination and harassment in society. This was risky – his own daughter told him ‘it’s time for men to shut up and listen’ – but Leser’s honest reflections resonate. Both books remind us of the long road ahead for those seeking a gender-equal world.
Ellen van Neerven
My books of the year include the stunning Nganajungu Yagu by Charmaine Papertalk Green. Charmaine is from the Wajarri, Badimaya, and Southern Yamaji peoples of Western Australia, and the bilingual Nganajungu Yagu springboards from the letters Charmaine and her mother exchanged in 1978–79 when she was living away in Perth for school. This collection reminds me of the close relationship I have with my mother and other older women in my family, as does
The White Girl by Tony Birch, which introduces us to one of my favourite characters in recent Australian writing: Odette, proud grandmother to Sissy. Odette is a protector, creator, and nurturer against the rough backdrop of a rural town in the assimilation era. Birch’s touching narrative had me bawling.
Glyn Davis
The Breeding Season by Amanda Niehaus (Allen & Unwin, 10/19) is an assured first novel, testing human relationships against biological fieldwork. The story of Elise and Dan is both a ballet of ideas and carefully signalled drama. Science makes us look at the world anew in Donald D. Hoffman’s The Case Against Reality: Why evolution hid the truth from our eyes (W.W. Norton & Company), which offers a startling thesis that consciousness does not map reality but invents it. He turns the hard problem on its head: how does consciousness create a physical reality? A troubled mind, and delusions that can run through our actions and memories, is the theme of The Hilton Bombing: Evan Pederick and the Ananda Marga (Melbourne University Press, 12/19). Imre Salusinszky interviewed the Hilton bomber over seven years, and presents his story with sympathy, but also a sense of gaps and confusions. The work recalls passions and controversy from an earlier generation in well-crafted prose that moves across decades.
Marilyn Lake
More than thirty years have passed since feminist historians first insisted on the gendered nature of political power. This year a new crop of political histories illuminates this insight from new angles. In The Blackburns: Private lives, public ambitions (Melbourne University Press, 4/19), Carolyn Rasmussen shows how a joint study of the intertwining romantic and political passions of Maurice and Doris Blackburn gives us a fresh perspective on Victoria’s distinctively progressive political culture in the early twentieth century. Michelle Arrow’s The Seventies has at its heart an investigation into the Royal Commission on Human Relationships, created by the Whitlam government, whose radical initiatives led to long-term social (if not political) transformation. In her splendid biography of the path-breaking South Australian premier, Don Dunstan: The visionary politician who changed Australia (Allen & Unwin, 10/19), Angela Woollacott confirms that even as politics remained a masculine pursuit, gender relations were changing.
Gideon Haigh
Best non-fiction: Patrick Radden Keefe’s Say Nothing: A true history of murder and memory in Northern Ireland (Doubleday), a melancholy retelling of the Troubles and their remembering. Best fiction: the Vintage reprint of Butcher’s Crossing, John Williams’s 1960
novel of the American frontier, big, bold, and bloody, like a prose Deadwood, and a less baroque Cormac McCarthy.
Ceridwen Dovey
Alice Gorman’s Dr Space Junk vs the Universe (NewSouth) passionately describes the material culture of outer space, and reclaims space as a cultural landscape, not as a blank canvas onto which we can project whatever techno-utopian fantasies we like. Gorman, a founder of space archaeology, has a gift for making space feel accessible to ordinary outsiders – showing it’s not just the realm of sci-fi geeks and rocket fanatics. Nicola Redhouse’s Unlike the Heart: A memoir of brain and mind (UQP) is a wise, elegant book about so much more than mothering. Redhouse is unafraid to dive right into psychoanalytic theory and the complexities of neuroscience, weaving these bodies of knowledge into more personal reflections on the post-natal body, mind, and brain. And finally, I greedily read and loved both Nam Le’s On David Malouf (Black Inc., 5/19) and Michelle de Kretser’s On Shirley Hazzard
Bronwyn Lea
I was surprised that so many books I loved this year were actually published in 2018 and therefore ineligible. But three 2019 titles leap out: Carrie Tiffany’s Exploded View is a dark coal of a novel compressed into a diamond; Josephine Rowe’s Here Until August marks her as one of the best short story writers going; and Emma Lew’s potent Crow College: New and selected poems (Giramondo, 5/19) continues to disturb my waking dreams.
Zora Simic
This year I decided to track my reading on Instagram. My one rule was to post an image and write a short review as soon as I finished, keeping it fresh. Looking back, I’d revise at least half of my hot takes. The ones that have stayed with me, in the order in which I read them, are The Bridge (Scribe, 6/18) by Enza Gandalfo (sad and beautiful), Sigrid Nunez’s The Friend from Little, Brown (wise), Luke Carman’s Intimate Antipathies (for the essay set in the waiting room of a medical centre), The White Girl by Tony Birch (his best yet), Fleishman Is in Trouble by Taffy Brodesser-Akner from Wildfire (funny and worthy of the hype), and (for sheer audacity) Peter Polites’s The Pillars (Hachette, 9/19). Most of those are novels, but if I had to pick one book of the year it would be non-fiction – Jess Hill’s powerful See What You Made Me Do. She has such respect for the stories of women and children who have endured domestic abuse. Is it too much to hope that Pauline Hanson and Kevin Andrews read it before the forthcoming federal government inquiry into the family law system they will be running?
Kerryn Goldsworthy
Angela Woollacott’s Don Dunstan: The visionary politician who changed Australia is the first full biography of Dunstan, himself such a complex and brightly coloured figure that Woollacott’s scholarly, detailed, emotionally neutral approach nicely balances her material. She steers a steady course between hagiography and its opposite, giving a warts-and-all yet unsensationalised and affectionate account of Dunstan’s style, his personal life, his true political and social vision of an ideal state, and his unique achievements in government. The Weekend is Charlotte Wood’s intensely engaging novel about friendship and grief, exploring the harsh terrain of old age in women’s lives. It doesn’t flinch from the humiliations of the ageing body, from the sadness of inevitable loss, or from the revelations that can shed unwelcome light on the past. Wood’s frank but generous view embraces the full range of this experience, all the way from scenes of utter devastation to moments of laugh-out-loud comedy.
Geraldine Doogue
Trent Dalton’s Boy Swallows Universe (Fourth Estate) is a triumph. Its crackling energy and sheer heart consumed me. Can it really be a first novel, with that level of proficiency and galloping pace? Yes, the plot becomes somewhat fantastical towards the end, but I was transfixed, especially by the Brisbane newsroom scenes, surely some of the best-ever depictions of the vulgar, idealistic, aspirational mix that characterises a good news hub. I would almost read Howard
Jacobson’s letter to his dog, such is my devotion to his humour, his generosity to characters. Live a Little (Jonathan Cape) may not be a vital read, but it is replete with Jacobson’s conviction that no one is beyond redemption. L’chaim! Taffy Brodesser-Akner’s Fleishman Is in Trouble – a tale of the moment – relentlessly mines modern Manhattanites’ search for meaning and the elusive life of good values. Exhausting, neurotically sexy, and somehow cautionary.
Paul Kildea
I’m currently halfway through Orlando Figes’s intriguing account of the phenomenal soprano Pauline Viardot, her husband, Louis, and her lover, Ivan Turgenev. The Europeans: Three lives and the making of a cosmopolitan culture (Allen Lane) is far more than a biography, however: Figes places these three smackbang in the centre of the huge shifts in European culture brought about by railways, industrialisation, and national unification. Some years back Willem de Vries wrote a vitally important book about the Nazi looting of Jewish music collections. It has now been translated into French – Commando Musik: Comment les nazis ont spolié l’Europe musicale (Buchet Chastel) – and launched in France, the country that suffered so grievously in this regard. He’s a friend, which is why I’m thrilled Dennis Altman has written such a good book. Unrequited Love: Diary of an accidental activist is part memoir, part explanation for Altman’s failed love affair with the United States, with some fabulous cameos. g
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The Fountain of Sound Advice
Examining the Australian Treasury
Geoffrey Blainey
CHANGING FORTUNES:
A HISTORY OF THE AUSTRALIAN TREASURY
by Paul Tilley
Melbourne University Press, $44.99 pb, 544 pp, 9780522873887
Paul Tilley classes the Treasury, now housed in Canberra, as ‘one of Australia’s great enduring institutions’. It began humbly in 1901, in a smallish stone building that still stands at the corner of Collins and Spring Streets in Melbourne. That handsome structure appears to be just about the correct size for its initial staff of five. Just across the street stands a statue of Sir William Clarke, a rich pastoralist of that era who, had he sold some of his properties and sheep, might easily have paid for all the salary cheques signed by the nation’s Treasury in its first weeks.
George Allen, son of a Geelong bootmaker, was the first secretary or head of the Treasury. Transferred from Victoria’s own Treasury, which stood only a punt kick away, he saw himself primarily as a bookkeeper and accountant. But in an infant federal government with only a few ministers and departments, the federal Treasury was soon assigned other tasks. In the first decade, it opened an Audit Office, conducted by John Israel, and the Bureau of Census and Statistics led by Sir George Handley Knibbs.
Contrary to the prevailing belief that Aboriginal people were not even counted until the success of the 1967 referendum, Knibbs had set out as best he could to count them. The resultant 1911 Commonwealth Census must have been one of the more ambitious in the history of the world. With the advent of nationwide age and invalid pensions, the Treasury was entrusted with paying them. The first federal banknotes were printed in 1913; Allen signed them and his department issued them. Already the Commonwealth government had imposed its first tax – on big landed estates – and it was the Treasury
that collected the tax, thus creating what became our Taxation Office. World War I soon called for a federal income tax.
It is not easy to grasp how simple was the administration centred on parliament house, then in Melbourne. Until 1911 there was not even a prime minister’s department. That gap was barely noticed when Andrew Fisher, the former Gympie gold miner, led his strong pre-war Labor governments, for he was both the treasurer and prime minister. Such a concentration of power in the same hands was again preferred by Joseph Lyons in the 1930s and, for the last time, by Ben Chifley, who finally lost office at the federal election of 1949. Tilley’s readable book concentrates on the post-Menzies era. By the mid1960s, Sir Roland Wilson, memorable for his electric car, had become second only to George Allen in his long tenure as secretary. By then the economic disciples of the long-dead John Maynard Keynes were influential even in this conservative department. The idea of balancing the budget was no longer the first commandment.
In its heyday, Treasury was a remarkable department. It almost monopolised the presenting of economic advice and analysis to the government. More than perhaps any other federal or state department, it recruited talented university graduates and tried to promote the best. On Friday evening, after work, its staff ‘drink’ parties at Hotel Canberra were much talked about, especially by those who did not attend. Hailed as normally the sole Fountain of Sound Advice, Treasury had just moved to a grand headquarters, where Norma Redpath’s exotic bronze fountain could be seen and heard.
Treasury was better prepared than Gough Whitlam for the massing of rain clouds. Whitlam’s government, elected in 1972, resolved to be Father Christmas. His sacks full of toys for the nation were breathtaking as well as widely welcomed at first. After he had held office for less than two years, his new budget predicted that annual expenditure would increase by a mammoth thirty-two per cent. In fact the year’s increase proved to be thirty-nine per cent. There was no likelihood that higher taxation and other sources of income would match the expenditure. Inflation was high and unstoppable, for Canberra’s spending spree coincided with the surge in international energy prices. By the end of the year, it was hoped that Dr Jim Cairns, as the new treasurer, might throw overboard the next sack of Christmas toys, but he had no intention of doing so. He told businessmen he must look after the unemployed – their numbers were increasing rapidly – and ignore inflation and debt.
According to Tilley, Cairns’s personal office was ‘chaotic, he did not deal well with paperwork, and he appeared to have no consistent policy framework’. Cairns and a few colleagues began to organise overseas loans that would not only keep the government afloat but speed it along. Cairns himself worked through his friend George Harris, president of the Carlton Football Club, who would receive a commission if he raised overseas loans. An illegal transaction, it ended Cairns’s political career.
Meanwhile, the government tried to raise a loan through Tirath Khemlani, who might be described as ‘a gentleman of Middle Eastern appearance’. On learning that he was raising the money
through a Swiss bank, two Australian public servants went to Zurich where they learned that the bank had not even heard of Khemlani. In the collapse of the Whitlam government, John Stone and other senior members of the Treasury played a large part; and in Tilley’s view their part was justified.
An early and unexpected effect of the brief Whitlam era was the formation in 1976 of two separate departments, Finance and the Treasury. Sir Fred Wheeler, a big gun of the 1970s, is described as ‘perhaps the last of the old-style pub-
lic servants who effectively ran much of the business of government behind the scenes’. When he retired as head of the shrunken Treasury, he assured his Christmas party that the ministers – he called them ‘bastards’ – rarely understood ‘the system over which they preside’. Not knowing that a journalist was listening, Wheeler must have been both dismayed and proud when his accusation appeared in The Canberra Times. Tilley writes at length, and mostly appreciatively, about two of the most influential treasurers in our history,
‘A system of our own’
A lexicographical version of the Civil War
Bruce Moore
THE DICTIONARY WARS: THE AMERICAN FIGHT OVER THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE by Peter Martin Princeton University
Press
(Footprint), $43 hb, 368 pp, 9780691188911
The title of this book refers to the battle for market dominance between the editors and publishers of two rival dictionaries, the one edited by Noah Webster and the other by Joseph Worcester. This battle took place largely between 1829 and 1864, and it was played out in the newspapers and by means of pamphlet warfare, with such titles as A Gross Literary Fraud Exposed, Relating to the Publication of Worcester’s Dictionary in London
The title also alerts us to the fact that its wider narrative begins in 1783, the final year of the American War of Independence (1775–83), and ends in 1864 in the midst of the American Civil War (1861–65). 1783 was the year Noah Webster (1758–1843) published his first influential work, the Blue-backed Speller, aimed at teaching schoolchildren to spell. Royalties from this work underwrote many of Webster’s later lexicographical enterprises, and the development of the spelling bee in American schools was a significant offshoot
of the Speller. 1864 was the year of publication of An American Dictionary of the English Language by Noah Webster, the edition of Webster’s dictionary that marked its triumph over all competitors. Webster’s first dictionary war, like the War of Independence, was with Britain. The political revolution began in 1775 during Webster’s first year at Yale. After graduation, law did not provide a satisfactory living, so he turned to teaching and the publication of school textbooks. He became particularly concerned about the influence of British textbooks in American schools, and about the high prestige of Dr Johnson’s A Dictionary of the English Language in America. Following America’s successful political break from Britain, Webster came to the belief that there needed to be a linguistic break as well. An American national language should be seen as central to an American cultural War of Independence. In 1789 he wrote: ‘As an independent nation, our honor requires us to have a system of our own,
Paul Keating and Peter Costello. Thereafter come the tumbling years marked by a high turnover of governments and of treasury secretaries and the frequent failure of budget forecasts. Policy, too, is a victim. The reality, writes Tilley, is that, ‘policy development has been dominated by political manoeuvring’. g
Geoffrey Blainey has written many books on Australian and international history, his latest being a memoir, Before I Forget (2019). His first book, The Peaks of Lyell, was published in 1954.
in language as well as government.’
An American dictionary became a necessary part of this linguistic and cultural revolution, but it was not until 1828 that Webster produced his major dictionary. Along the way, he converted to Calvinism, spent ten years pursuing some outdated theories of etymology, and developed some fairly cranky ideas about the reform of spelling and orthography. Some of the reforms introduced in this dictionary stuck, and we would all recognise them as distinctive features of American English, such as the change from -re to -er at the end of words such as metre and theatre or the absence of consonant doubling in the past tense of some verbs (traveled for travelled). But other proposed reforms such as aker for acre, porpess for porpoise, tung for tongue, and numerous others, did not survive.
In 1829 an abridged version of the dictionary was produced by the publisher Sherman Converse. He organised editorial assistance from the
young scholar and lexicographer Joseph Worcester and from Webster’s son-inlaw Chauncey Goodrich, professor of rhetoric at Yale. Through a series of manoeuvres, Webster was sidelined from most of the editorial process, enabling the editors to correct many of his weaknesses in spelling and orthography, pronunciation, and etymology, and reducing the length of some of the long-winded definitions that often had a heavy Christian emphasis. Thus began the dictionary version of the Civil War that would later break out into a series of skirmishes between American lexicographers, scholars, universities, families, and publishers.
Joseph Worcester is not well known now, but he was in every way superior to Webster as lexicographer and scholar. Webster was angry with what Worcester and Goodrich had done in the abridged version, but he was even angrier when Worcester produced his own rival dictionary in 1830. Webster accused Worcester of plagiarising material from the 1829 abridged version that he had worked on. Accusatory pamphlets were flung about on both sides. Peter Martin shows us that Webster’s charges were nonsense. Webster died in 1843 (‘clutching a copy of his speller’, Martin tells us), and through a complex series of legal and financial events the control of the dictionary eventually came into the hands of the publishers George and Charles Merriam. Worcester continued to produce dictionaries that were well reviewed, and the Merriams saw Worcester as the greatest threat to the success of their Webster’s dictionary. The second greatest were the Websterian weaknesses that were still in the dictionary. To solve the first threat, the Merriams embarked on a campaign of denigration and vilification of Worcester and his dictionaries: more pamphlet warfare, the ‘planting’ of newspaper articles, and the generation of ‘scholarly’ articles by mercenary academics. To solve the second, they continued the process of de-Websterising Webster’s lexicography. At the same time, however, they encouraged the canonisation of Webster himself as the great linguistic nationalist and teacher of the nation.
Entrepreneurship (we might now
call it ‘fake news’) triumphed over truth. The Merriams won, and Webster’s became the standard American dictionary. Its influence is evident in the fact that James Murray and Oxford University Press kept it closely in mind when making decisions about the length and extent of the OED. Ironically, the Merriams were too successful, since the courts eventually decided that ‘Webster’ had become a generic name for ‘dictionary’, and that any publisher could include the term ‘Webster’ in the name of any dictionary. You’ve probably got a ‘Webster’ on your shelf – take a squiz at its publishing details!
There were no comparable dictionary wars in Britain, although the editors of the OED certainly had their battles with the Oxford syndics. In Australia we had a mini-war between the Macquarie group with their Webster-like nationalism and the group led by Bill Ramson that produced the Australian
National Dictionary (modelled on the OED). In an account of this skirmish in his book Lexical Images (2002), Ramson describes the fourteen-page telex from the Macquarie Library’s Kevin Weldon, railing against the decision to offer the publishing rights of the Australian National Dictionary to OUP, as ‘a uniquely Australian document’.
But Australian telex warfare is no match for the virulent publishing warfare that dominated American lexicography in the first half of the nineteenth century. The Dictionary Wars is a fascinating account of these battles, and gives appropriate attention to Joseph Worcester, the greatest casualty of the conflict. g
Bruce Moore, editor of the second edition of the Australian National Dictionary (2016), was director of the Australian National Dictionary Centre from 1994 to 2011.
Crossing the Tasman
Five New Zealanders explore the ‘West Island’
Brian Matthews
WEST ISLAND: FIVE TWENTIETH-CENTURY
NEW ZEALANDERS IN AUSTRALIA by Stephanie Johnson Otago University Press, $39.95 pb, 284 pp, 9781988531571
Australians and New Zealanders know it as the Tasman Sea or more familiarly The Ditch: for Māori, Te Tai o-Rēhua. Significant islands in this stretch of water are Lord Howe and Norfolk. As seen from New Zealand, the island most Australians probably don’t know offhand and, when they are told about it, might feel inclined to reject its name as, well, cheeky: it’s West Island – Australia in short.
Stephanie Johnson’s West Island is breezy, carefully and impressively researched, ambitious, labyrinthine, yet, in the end unobtrusively well organised and, finally, confronting. It might bring
to mind two vaguely similar literary enterprises – Howard Jacobson’s marvellous television documentary Brilliant Creatures and Ian Britain’s book Once an Australian, both looking at Germaine Greer, Clive James, Barry Humphries, and Robert Hughes. These might usefully compare with West Island if this sort of narrative were identifiable as belonging to a genre (which it isn’t). They nevertheless all share some interesting common ground: it’s not just the intense interest in expatriates; there is also the task of following a number of individual lives without losing a sense of narrative unity and concentration,
without dropping, despite all efforts and ploys to the contrary, into a now-thisone, now-that-one routine. Johnson manages this with élan by immediately treating the reader as a member of a time-travelling tourist group:
Dress warmly now, you visitors from the future, because tonight we’re going out into a Sydney winter of around 70 years ago, pre-climate change, when the world was several degrees colder. The streets are dark because it’s toward the end of World War II and the city is in blackout.
For some readers, this dramatic opening will resonate as a reminder of Johan Huizinga’s similar narrative strategy in The Autumn of the Middle Ages (‘When the world was half a thousand years younger … The cutting cold and the dreaded darkness of winter were more concrete evils’), but, in any case, we follow the warmly dressed strollers to ‘Macquarie Galleries’ where we ‘keep an eye out for the artist, Roland Wakelin’ and come across other New Zealanders in the crowd – ‘all first-generation Pãkehã … Wakelin, Dulcie Deamer, Eric Baume, Jean Devanny and Douglas Stewart’. And so, with no fuss and much panache, Johnson manages the tricky business of marshalling her cast. The curtain is about to go up on West Island but, as it turns out, not quite as expected. ‘When Wakelin, Baume, Devanny and Stewart crossed the Tasman, they were motivated by hopes for better prospects and higher incomes. Dulcie Deamer got on the ship for love and was married when it docked at Perth. My reasons for going were more like hers than the others’, but didn’t result in marriage –and just as well.’
Johnson’s entry into the narrative with her own West Island story is surprising and seems initially selfindulgent. It is, however, a nicely timed change of pace and focus, providing the colour, heightened intensity, sense of personal cultural upheaval, and sheer risk at the heart of the apparently easy ‘leap’ across the Ditch – a reminder that Johnson as novelist and playwright has won New Zealand’s most important literary awards in both genres.
As she follows each of her five
peripatetic New Zealanders, Johnson examines and reveals their personalities, aspirations, how and why some were forced or tempted from their planned West Island path, and, in that process, she sketches vividly the nature of the times that they, and the native West Islanders, had to endure or in good years enjoyed. So, Wakelin, after modest success, leaves Australia for London in 1922, and goes to Paris the following year. Of a Van Gogh exhibition he wrote, ‘It burst upon me like an explosion … It was a revelation; none of the few prints we had seen in Sydney could
reproduce the vitality of the paint itself.’
Dulcie Deamer, arriving as a young bride, ‘loves her new life’, is overwhelmed by Sydney, ‘staggered … by this metropolis. Hansom cabs everywhere – and motor cars’, and, for the time being, at least, is undeterred by realities like a ‘one-quid-a-week room in Barcom Street, Kings Cross’. Douglas Stewart, as editor of The Bulletin’s ‘Red Page’, remembers this time as ‘tremendously exciting … We did feel that we were at the centre of the movement of Australian culture at that time.’ Eric Baume lives, as ever, flamboyantly and irresponsibly, and Jean Devanny continues to write, falls out of love with the Communist Party and in love with Queensland. As in Britain’s Once an Australian, each character requires
a precise biography that Johnson provides with what we come to recognise as expert ease. These include details of the plots of various novels – a necessary but occasionally ponderous recourse, which introduces some longueurs into a complex narrative – and some smoothly infiltrated speculation: ‘Perhaps on …’; ‘Perhaps who …’; ‘It could be …’; ‘Let’s imagine …’
There are deliberate departures from the West Islanders and their adventures: the section called ‘Baume’s Novel HalfCaste’, for example, begins, ‘First, a digression’ and goes on to discuss some ‘lost’ New Zealand classics. Johnson chooses Maori Girl by Noel Hilliard (1960), in which Netta, the Māori girl, is abandoned by her Pãkehã lover; and The Witch’s Thorn by Ruth Park (1951), which ‘suffers from the incipient and highly damaging racism of the time’. Johnson’s last pages – ‘A Comedy Really’ – also seem digressive until the tow-truck driver recalls his visit to Melbourne. ‘He didn’t like the number of Asians coming in [and] … on a tram … couldn’t spot any Aussies at all that he recognised.’
In the afterword, West Island ’s quiet but gnawing subtext, one of incipient racism in New Zealand and constant, often official, racism in Australia, is confronting: ‘Despite decades – centuries – of immigration from all over the world, Australia is racist.’ As for the relationship, ‘the situation, in light of our shared history, is barbaric’.
West Island is engaging, deceptively playful, written with great style and brio, and, on reflection, provides a disturbing and apposite portrait of the way we Islanders are in the first decades of the twenty-first century. g
Brian Matthews’s Manning Clark: A life (2008) won the National Biography Award in 2010.
Stephanie Johnson (photograph by Annabel Lomas)
White knight
Elliot Perlman’s misguided new novel
Chris Flynn
MAYBE THE HORSE WILL TALK
by Elliot Perlman
Vintage, $32.99 pb, 384pp, 9780143781493
Elliot Perlman’s fourth novel is tentatively billed as a corporate satire and has a striking opening line: ‘I am absolutely terrified of losing a job I absolutely hate.’ The man in this all-too-familiar predicament is Stephen Maserov, a former English teacher turned lawyer. Maserov is a lowly second year in the Terry Gilliam-esque law firm
Freely Savage Carter Blanche, which, apart from sounding like a character in a Tennessee Williams play, is home to loathsome dinosaurs in pinstripe suits and an HR department referred to as ‘The Stasi’.
Kicked out of home by his wife and concerned that he is about to become surplus to requirements at work, Maserov seizes a risky opportunity when Malcolm Torrent, CEO of a powerful construction company, visits Maserov’s feared boss, Mike Hamilton. Four women have lodged sexual harassment claims against Torrent Industries. When Hamilton dismisses the cases out of hand, Maserov accosts Torrent, promising to take the cases more seriously and to make them go away. All he needs is one year
and secondment to his own office over at Torrent. The book’s title comes from the parable of a jester fallen from the King’s grace who buys himself some time by promising to make the King’s horse talk within a year.
in the workplace and confront the #MeToo movement head-on, bringing the bad guys to justice and saving some damsels in distress, while learning a few lessons about women along the way. Tellingly, the cover illustration features a man in corporate attire with the head of a white steed. Never fear, subordinate women, your hero has arrived!
The stage is thus set for the beleaguered, misguided underdog to peel away the layers of sexual harassment
The resulting story sets off so many alarm bells, it is hard to know where to begin. Let’s start with Jessica Annand, the head of HR at Torrent Industries, who falls in love with Maserov as soon as he opens his mouth. She is described thus: ‘Of Indian heritage, she was beautiful, frighteningly, with dark, soft eyes and the sort of bouncy black hair one only sees in advertisements for hair conditioners, lustrous yet manageable.’ Initially useless at her job and terrified of her own harasser, she soon gets a handle on this tricky human resources business once Maserov sets her straight. When they finally sleep together, Maserov admits that he has been thinking about her breasts since they met. One of Maserov’s colleagues, Fleur Ward-Gelding, is,
Elliot Perlman (Penguin Random House)
THE FLIGHT OF BIRDS: A NOVEL IN TWELVE STORIES
by Joshua Lobb
Sydney University Press
$35 pb, 340 pp, 9781743325834
Humans cannot imagine avian perspectives, Joshua Lobb admits, but his stories explore what we might learn from the attempt. Some of Lobb’s strategies are familiar from much recent fiction with ecological themes, such as the use of an educated, intellectually curious narratorprotagonist whose wide reading provides a convenient means of introducing diverse facts and anecdotes about birds into lyrical, richly figurative prose. Others are more adventurous, including shifts in grammatical person and tense. Far from being gratuitous, they foreground substantive questions of intergenerational responsibility.
Across twelve interlinked stories, Lobb works through imperfect analogy and nuanced juxtaposition between human and nonhuman species to derive critical distance on human behaviours and socio-legal systems, and their impact on birds and our shared world. Meanwhile, a troubled family history is progressively (but only partially) revealed. Readers may disagree as to whether the result amounts to ‘a novel’, and some of Lobb’s experiments deserved to be taken further, such as the projection of one of multiple possible futures for the protagonist’s daughter in ‘Aves Admittant’. Instead, the storytelling is brought up short by extensive ‘Field Notes’ – Lobb’s reflections on the research and writing process, which would be a valuable instructional model for graduate Creative Writing students, but which may test other readers’ patience, given that the stories themselves are already so self-reflexive and fragmented (this self-proclaimed ‘Novel in Twelve Stories’ includes one titled ‘Six Stories About Birds, With Seven Questions’). It is a testament to the depth and subtlety of Lobb’s showing that much of his telling feels expendable.
It does, however, clarify Lobb’s intention in calling Flight a novel: to connect its disparate elements, readers must practise the kind of provisional, pluralistic thinking Lobb proposes is needed to renovate our relations with other species – a challenge urgently topical given recent reports of declining bird populations globally, amid the broader climate crisis.
Sascha Morrell ❖
‘strikingly attractive with blue eyes and thick lustrous hair the colour of cruelty.’ The corporate world inhabited by Maserov is apparently akin to Themyscira. The physical attributes of the male characters are not remarked upon.
Maserov takes forever to get around to reading the affidavits of the four victims. When he does, three of them are immediately set aside and not mentioned again until the closing chapters of the book. We never meet these women or hear their voices. They are sidelined in favour of Maserov’s tone-deaf moral quest to help Carla Monterosso (‘dark, almond-shaped eyes framed by thick jet-black hair’), whose assault is described in graphic detail and should come with a trigger warning.
While reading Monterosso’s account, Maserov becomes so distressed that he shouts, ‘Get up!’ when she is pinned to the floor by the perpetrator. Upon completion, he says, ‘The paragraphs in Carla’s affidavit told a story, not of sex, but of humiliation and power, the arbitrary exercise of power in the expectation of almost complete impunity.’
This mansplaining, virtue-signalling, Op-Ed style sits very uneasily in the novel’s jaunty, comedic context. In addition, telling a victim what they should have done during a violent assault is unhelpful, dismissive, and evinces a startling lack of empathy. It also feeds directly into the white-knight syndrome that lies at the heart of the book.
Is there an appetite for male saviour #MeToo fiction? One might argue the importance of having men involved in the movement; that their presence enables other men to understand the error of their ways; that it is vital men be seen supporting women. The counterargument is that men should shut up and listen for a change, stop trying to dominate the narrative, and ‘fix’ things. By blundering in where angels fear to tread, Perlman has placed himself in an awkward position. If Maybe the Horse Will Talk is indeed a satire, it is a clumsy one, poorly timed. If it is meant to be a clarion call for gallant men to come to the rescue of our sisters, why are women portrayed in such a cringeworthy fashion? Maserov is constantly praised by an array of beauties for being
a good, decent man. In fact, that’s all the women talk about – men. Bechdel Test abject fail.
Issues multiply as the narrative skips blithely along. The characters are two-dimensional. No one has a backstory, not even Maserov. We are told he used to be a teacher, and that’s it. He goes from being a cowed underling
This mansplaining, virtue-signalling style sits uneasily in the novel’s jaunty, comedic context
to a stiff-backed alpha ready to bring down the system in a matter of pages. What is perhaps most distasteful is that Maserov’s cockamamie scheme to save the reputations of four wronged women (well, Monterosso and three also-rans) is conducted for personal gain. Maserov wants to impress the starry-eyed HR girl and win back his estranged wife by securing substantial payouts for the victims. Money is equated with justice. Monterosso’s trauma – never much evidenced in the first place – vanishes when she sees how many zeros are on the cheque.
Given the appalling way in which women’s complaints are often handled in the real world, Maybe the Horse Will Talk teeters on the precipice of being a disastrous idea for a novel. Perlman’s heart is presumably in the right place, but diving headlong into the complexity of sexual harassment brings with it a lot of responsibility. The pervasive idea of women here is as helpless subalterns who just need the assistance of a capable man to sort out their problems, preferably a handsome one who views them as delicate, pretty objects to be cherished and protected. It might be wise to keep peddling the satire line, because a bubbly, old-fashioned romantic comedy set against the backdrop of violent sexual assault risks drawing nothing but enmity from the very audience it purports to defend. g
Chris Flynn is the author of A Tiger in Eden (2012) and The Glass Kingdom (2014). His third novel, Mammoth, is forthcoming in May from UQP.
Mommy, ducks, Newburyport
Shannon Burns
DUCKS, NEWBURYPORT
by Lucy Ellmann
Text Publishing
$34.99 pb, 1,032 pp, 9781922268938
Lucy Ellmann’s ambitious seventh novel stages the workings of a mind as it digests – or fails to digest – life-altering experiences. Ducks, Newburyport is, for the most part, the ruminating inner monologue of a bewildered and frightened woman. It spans a thousand mostly artful pages and is an undeniably impressive accomplishment. However, for readers who relished Ellmann’s brilliant comic novels, Ducks may lack the energising charge – absurd, erotic, and darkly funny – that is so satisfyingly prominent in her earlier work.
Its chief narrator is a well-educated American mother of four afflicted by sharp anxiety. Her concerns include: the existence of President Trump; repeated mass shootings; the threat of nuclear war or climate catastrophe; male violence; and precarious health care. Her inner life is expansive but oriented around a handful of personal wounds, many of which are recast in the parallel story of a hunted lioness in search of her babes. Leaving aside a memorable sexual encounter, the latter resembles a children’s fable, a similarity that is knowingly signalled when the narrator recalls ‘some Disney movie about an escaped lion that wonders around some town’.
The experience of reading Ducks, Newburyport will be familiar to those who relish or despise modernist fiction. The oscillation between excited interest and trying boredom over a lengthy spell is an acquired taste. The best way to approach it may be to dip in and out as the mood takes you, wandering slowly, perhaps skipping clumps of pages, traversing its territories in instinctive and idiosyncratic ways –much like the novel’s roaming lioness.
The primary narrative takes the
shape of a long and stuttering suspended sentence. The following sample features one of its key obsessions:
... the fact that I think people are just trying not to think about their mothers, the fact that I think that’s all anybody’s doing most of the time, all over the world, Mother Earth, the fact that everybody’s either thinking about their mothers or trying not to think about them ... the fact that the world seems indifferent to mothers, yet when they die it’s so empty, the fact that Mommy’s illness broke me, broke me ...
This rhythmic and repetitive style is perfectly adapted to a mind that thinks ‘in spirals, dizzying spirals’, but it can also be grindingly dull. Ellmann registers this, through her narrator, with dry little doozies like: ‘the fact that Philip Glass can get a little repetitive’; ‘the fact that that Wagner Opera I went to was so long it nearly killed me’; or even, given the fact that ‘the fact that’ appears nearly twenty thousand times and the novel is heavily populated with QIstyle facts: ‘the fact that I think there’s maybe too much emphasis on facts these days’.
We can add to these the observation that Ducks, Newburyport features the word ‘Mommy’ or a variant more than eight hundred times. The narrator comes from ‘a long line of mother-worshippers’, and the novel could reasonably be construed as an act of extended mother-worship, or mother-mourning, or mother-need. Approximately halfway through, we read ‘Mommy, ducks, Newburyport’ – which is, perhaps, the novel’s truer title, even if it dilutes the playful association with Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio (1919). If sentiments like ‘my mommy, Mommy, the fact that I want my mommy’ seem infantile at first glance, they make psychological sense by the end.
Ellmann’s narrative technique often produces unsettling and enlivening associations, like:
the fact that somebody said Trump’s raped thirteen-year-old girls, the fact that I wish he’d just quit it, I mean the presidency, but it would also be good if
he quit raping little girls, ‘Malignant narcissist,’ the fact that there’s a picture of me sitting on Daddy’s lap when I was about eleven ... the fact that it must be about the last time I ever sat on his lap though, because he shied away from stuff like that once we hit puberty
What does this passage say about the narrator’s father, or her feelings about fathers and fatherhood, or men in general? Nothing obvious, but the sequence of thoughts keeps us alert, even when it sinks into a kind of mental Tourette’s: ‘Pol Pot, pot luck supper, pot au feu’.
Ellmann has fashioned a drenchingly topical contemporary document in a largely out-of-date (if not nostalgic) form. This combination produces a striking effect, not unlike viewing the present through the eyes of a modernist past. From this salvaged vantage point, we’re left with the strong impression that an unlikely president terrorised the psyche of early-twenty-first-century America. Ducks, Newburyport kicks back against that fate as much as it succumbs.
Compelling reminders that the inner world of a single person is immense and rich but largely concealed are always worthwhile. The narrator of Ducks notes that ‘there are seven and a half billion people in the world, so there must be seven and a half billion of these internal monologues going on’. Ellmann wields an important irony in this context, which serves to deepen the novel’s insight: the mind we inhabit for close to a thousand pages has no talent for inhabiting other minds, and she knows it: ‘the fact that maybe nobody understands anybody, if you think about it, the fact that even my own husband and children are complete mysteries to me, not strangers but mysteries, the fact that everybody’s a mystery to me’. Ellmann’s narrator is just one of several billion people whose vast interiors are constrained by the narrow range of their understanding. She is, in that most vital sense, an everywoman. g
Shannon Burns, a former ABR Fellow, is a member of the J.M. Coetzee Centre of Creative Practice at the University of Adelaide.
Here and now Astrid Edwards
GRAND UNION: STORIES
by Zadie Smith
Hamish Hamilton
$32.99 pb, 245 pp, 9780241337035
Zadie Smith’s commanding collection Grand Union puts our contemporary lives and mores under the microscope. She sets her sights on the insanity (and inanity) of social media, the internet, and ‘call-out culture’, but leaves room to consider the tensions inherent in post-colonial nations, including race, gender, and sexuality.
pondering the ambiguities and contradictions of twenty-first-century life, and the distance between our inner selves and the personas we construct. As Smith writes in ‘The Dialectic’ (the first piece in the collection, set in a beachside resort), ‘I did not say that I am. I said that I should like to be.’
The collection grows increasingly scornful of social media. Many of the pieces expose the gap between what we are and what we pretend to be, or what we want to be and what we are too lazy to be. This ambivalence prevents the collection from forming a consistent whole. Perhaps that is the point – Smith is allowing the reader to experience the randomness, and seeming meaningless, of contemporary life. This is made explicit in several pieces, notably ‘The Lazy River’, where the ‘obscene bulge’ in the skinny white jeans of Rico and Rocco are actually iPhones, ‘the existence of which we have decided not to reveal to them for many years, or at least until they are twelve’.
Smith, born in London to a Jamaican mother and British father, has spent a decade as a professor of fiction at New York University. She is known for her mastery of the novel, including On Beauty (shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2005) and Swing Time (longlisted for the same prize in 2017), however Grand Union is her first full-length short story collection. Not that Smith is new to the short form: at least seven of the nineteen pieces in the collection have been published before, many of them in The New Yorker between 2013 (‘Meet the President!’) and 2018 (‘Now More Than Ever’).
The collection will leave readers
Grand Union feels unnervingly current. Even when pieces focus on one experience or story, they take place against the politics of the here and now. The #MeToo movement is present, but less than one might expect. Both Christine Blasey Ford and Brett Kavanaugh feature in ‘Downtown’, though their presence is muted. In the background, we are reminded that ‘Dr Ford was testifying’ and events unfolded ‘just in time for Brett to make his case’. And one cannot escape the existence of Donald Trump in ‘Mood’, where ‘they’re still behind him. He makes them feel good. They want him to just go ahead and shoot somebody on Fifth Avenue like he promised.’ ‘Now More Than Ever’, a piece originally published in July 2018, drew criticism at the time, not least for its last two words ‘me, too’.
The collection ranges across time, viewpoint, and genre – there is no single theme. Smith is not interested in the idea that only someone with lived experience can write about it. She plays with
point of view, and her suite of characters are male, female, and transgender, with some slipping into first-person narration. How much of this first-person narration is actually Smith is a question for the reader. In ‘Parents’ Morning Epiphany’, the narrator drops tantalising hints about language, storytelling, and structure, and the reader is left questioning whether Smith believes these statements or not. Then there is ‘For the King’, written as the autofiction of a writer who goes out to dinner with an old friend. The reader cannot help but wonder to what extent Smith is playing with them. Is she revealing herself with full deniability, or simply creating a fictional flight of fancy that we may mistake for her?
By playing with point of view, Smith is courting controversy. ‘Blocked’ is written from the viewpoint of God ‒ not only that, a God that is trying to explain Creation (‘when you create something out of nothing at such a tender age it’s just a lot to take on, psychologically’), why they withdrew from the world (‘you can’t be in every household, sitting at a person’s shoulder’), and why they are depressed these days (‘at a certain point, given the way things are, it’s a fair and rational response’). It stands as a brilliant commentary on how humanity may have missed the point.
‘Two Men Arrive in a Village’, first published in 2016, is a heartbreaking parable, one self-consciously aware it is a tale told the world over. Gender-based violence and the quest for power and control don’t seem to date, after all. And then there is ‘Kelso Deconstructed’, a reconstruction of the final days of Kelso Cochrane, who was caught up in the very real race riots in Notting Hill in 1959.
Grand Union is a deft collection. It allows readers to dip in and out of Smith’s worlds as they desire, pondering her interpretations of the travails and complications of contemporary life. However, while fans of Smith will relish this myriad of insights into her craft, they may crave more – perhaps an entire novel in which Smith explores these themes in depth. g
Astrid Edwards is the host of The Garret: Writers on Writing. She teaches writing at RMIT University.
Zadie Smith
(photograph by Dominique Nabokov, 2016)
Interrogating fairy tales
Lisa Bennett
THE BEE AND THE ORANGE TREE
by Melissa Ashley Affirm Press
$35 hb, 384 pp, 9781925712018
In their earliest incarnations, fairy tales are gruesome stories riddled with murder, cannibalism, and mutilation. Written in early seventeenthcentury Italy, Giambattista Basile’s Cinderella snaps her stepmother’s neck with the lid of a trunk. This motif reappears in the nineteenth-century German ‘The Juniper Tree’, but this time the stepmother wields the trunk lid, decapitating her husband’s young son. In seventeenth-century France, Charles Perrault’s Bluebeard kills his many wives because of their curiosity, while in his adaptation of ‘Sleeping Beauty’, the Queen’s appetite for eating children drives her to commit suicide out of shame. Jealous, Snow White’s stepmother (and in some versions her biological mother) wants to kill the girl and eat her innards, but is ultimately thwarted; her punishment is to dance herself to death wearing red-hot iron shoes.
Traditionally, these and countless other classic fairy stories have been read as cautionary tales. Ostensibly aimed at keeping children in line, their morals more pointedly reflect the cultural norms and anxieties of the times in which they were recorded – fears often made manifest in the restriction of women’s social and sexual lives. That so many of these narratives depict maids locked in towers, duplicitous brides, sinister crones, and ‘difficult’ women (to name but a few recurring images) has been the subject of much revisionist feminist scholarship in recent decades. Numerous fictional retellings, perhaps most famously Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber (1979), have reinvented, challenged, and subverted these tropes.
A follow-up to her award-winning
first novel, The Birdman’s Wife (2016), Melissa Ashley’s The Bee and the Orange Tree continues the important trend of interrogating fairy tales, their motifs and many authors, and the social and intellectual worlds that shaped them. Promoted as the ‘untold story of the woman who invented fairy tales’, Baroness Madame Marie Catherine d’Aulnoy, this work of historical fiction is much more complex than its somewhat misleading tagline indicates. Splitting its focus between three female characters – the celebrated conteuse, Marie Catherine; her daughter Angelina, a once-cloistered young woman, now an emerging writer in her own right; and Nicola Tiquet, an extremely wealthy but oppressed socialite whose future is uncertain – this novel uses fairy tales to delve into ideas about writers, the writing process, and the horrific realities of women’s lives in the stifling patriarchy of seventeenth-century France.
For much of the book, Marie Catherine, a once-prolific storyteller, suffers from writer’s block. Her inability to create new tales at a moment when contes des fées are in literary vogue is not only poignantly portrayed, but it also underscores the scant opportunities women have to improve their situations or to escape the status quo. Though hardly a pauper, Marie Catherine, without the income her writing brings, is effectively rendered mute in a world that speaks the language of money. Clear parallels are drawn between the female characters in her fairy tales (snippets of which are woven in the novel) and those in Marie Catherine’s immediate circle of friends and family. ‘I was those women,’ Angelina observes, recalling the many years she spent isolated in a convent, ‘I felt what they felt, every word of it.’ Tiquet’s imprisonment for an alleged attack on her husband dramatises many of the grotesque ways in which women are treated in fairy tales and in this historical period. ‘Her attempt to improve her circumstances had come to naught … She could not tell if the harshest beatings had already been carried out or if they lay in wait.’
Literary salons situate Marie Catherine as the once and future queen of fairy-tale authors in The Bee and the
Orange Tree, offering lively vignettes of Parisian literati in the late 1600s that feature several notable authors, such as Charlotte-Rose de Caumont de La Force (whose life and Rapunzel tale are reimagined in Kate Forsyth’s Bitter Greens, 2013), Henriette-Julie de Murat, Perrault, and Marie-Jeanne L’Héritier de Villandon, all mingling with established and aspiring raconteurs. Perhaps unsurprisingly, there are frequent discussions in this book about the nuances of craft and the joys and difficulties of writing; they are delightfully timeless. Likewise, Marie Catherine’s often frustrating interactions with her Dutch publisher will be achingly familiar to creative artists negotiating today’s market-driven industry.
[H]e had heard the fairy tales of Charles Perrault were most edifying for young ladies … maybe she could imitate Perrault’s style of closing each story with a morality poem, six lines of verse in which the theme of the story was distilled, along with a warning to the reader on how to avoid a similar plight? What did she think of that idea? There was perhaps a market opening for children’s tales across the Channel … Had she heard of Mother Goose?
These scenes underscore one of the novel’s strongest themes: the subversive power of women’s writing. ‘An author must be brave,’ said Marie Catherine. ‘You can say whatever you like in your writing. It’s your opportunity to reimagine the world as you would have it in turn.’ The Bee and the Orange Tree does just that. Without anachronism, it offers women writers as much power as is credible in their historical context, giving their revolutionary ideas a voice and an audience. In the end, Marie Catherine reflects, ‘[p]erhaps the visions in her fairy worlds did not match the lives of the women around her, but at least, with her pen, she could have her say’, and in so doing, inspire change. g
Lisa Bennett is a Senior Lecturer in English and Creative Writing at Flinders University.
Malaise sells
David Jack
SEROTONIN
by Michel Houellebecq, translated by Shaun Whiteside William Heinemann
$32 pb, 309 pp, 9781785152245
Serotonin is Michel Houellebecq’s eighth novel and appears four years after the scandalous and critically successful Submission (2015), a dystopian novel that depicts France under sharia law. In Serotonin, we are again presented with the standard Houellebecquian narrator: white, middle-aged, and middle class, seemingly in the throes of some mid-life crisis of a predominantly – but not exclusively – sexual nature. Through a series of Proustian reminiscences, we discover Florent-Claude Labrouste, forty-six, a middle manager for the French government. He once worked for Monsanto but found the company too cynical even for his tastes. He has a marked preference for Hotel Mercure (was the novel financed by the group?) and an irrational hatred for wheeled suitcases of the Samsonite variety. These are the only two issues which Labrouste, admittedly a heavily medicated depressive, is capable of getting worked up over; these and France’s anti-smoking laws, which he views as both draconian and a serious infringement on individual freedom. In this respect, even his beloved Mercure falls short. After hatching a plan to abandon his previous life and his Japanese lover, Labrouste finds himself in the peculiar space reserved for Houellebecq’s narrators, ‘deprived of reasons to live and of reasons to die’. So live on he must, without reason and without hope. It is basically downhill from here.
Despite the graphic descriptions one is used to in a Houellebecq novel, Serotonin is less about sex than love, or precisely its impossibility: failed love, lost love, doomed love. Houellebecq’s narrators tend to blame society for their inability to love (Labrouste calls society ‘a machine for destroying love’) when clearly these men are simply, and by their own admission, not up to the task. Houellebecq has always been an outspoken critic of the concept of free will, but in Serotonin this is starting to sound like a cop-out. Musing on the opportunity to make a life together with a former lover, Labrouste concludes that life ‘had decided otherwise’. There is redemption of sorts in the form of an oddly Christian epiphany, but it comes too late for Labrouste. There are other things besides love at stake in the novel, which also grapples somewhat halfheartedly with ‘bigger issues’ such as the climate crisis, GM foods, the rights of farmers and animals, and the devastating effects of free trade on national industries.
Houellebecq is on to a good thing: malaise sells, which says more about late capitalism than about his novels. He also discovered a formula for the contemporary novel that he reiterates in Serotonin: ‘let’s get back to my subject which is me, not that it’s especially interesting, but it’s my subject’. This is an approach Houellebecq assumed in his first novel, Whatever (1994), which the narrator describes as ‘a succession of anecdotes in which I am the hero’. This proved a bankable formula for Houellebecq, held together by vague and shifting narrative frameworks. Whatever worked for two reasons: these anecdotes were interspersed with commentary on aspects of everyday life of interest to the late-capitalist reader (ATMs, paying bills, buying a bed); and it was a short novel (just over 100 pages). Serotonin is not only long, but the narrator is scarcely relatable and there are fewer of the pithy insights Houellebecq is known for. There is humour, but it is largely overwhelmed by the more unpleasant aspects of the narrator’s personality. Serotonin is Houellebecq stripped back, a kind of take-me-or-leave-me with little narrative subterfuge or essayistic digres-
sion. Even the episode of the farmers’ revolt, said to have presaged the Gilets jaunes movement and primarily what the novel is celebrated for, is just that: an episode.
Labrouste’s world view is a tired one. No doubt Houellebecq is tired too. The question is, do we care? Do we care about a narrator whose most successful act consists of contaminating the recycling bins of his apartment building with rubbish and food scraps? We don’t have to care for a book or its themes for it to be a good book – but it helps. What does Serotonin offer but the all-toofamiliar Houellebecquian utopia where romance and pornography are combined in equal parts? Labrouste appears much older than forty-six, prompting one to speculate that this book is the musings of a man in his sixties, much like Houellebecq himself. Labrouste inhabits a dated binary world where men are from Mars and women from Venus and alternate sexualities are dismissed as ‘faggot’ and ‘queer’.
So just who is Houellebecq writing for? I am reminded of Gertrude Stein’s answer: ‘for myself and strangers’, presumably in this order. Yet he is read, largely because his reputation precedes him. Like all Houellebecq novels following Atomised (1998), Serotonin was an instant bestseller. Sure, one gets it: these are not the views of the author, it is a satirical portrait of men like Labrouste whom Houellebecq supposes to be typical. Towards the end of the book, however, I experienced something I haven’t experienced before with a Houellebecq novel: the desire to skip pages; not so much to find out what happens, but because I simply lost interest in Florent-Claude Labrouste, his troubles, his reveries, his observations. The paradox Serotonin presents is that we are just not that interested in other peoples’ problems; we have enough of our own. The irony is that Labrouste – and indeed Houellebecq – would probably agree. g
David Jack recently co-edited a special edition on Michel Houellebecq for the Australian Journal of French Studies and is currently working on a monograph on Houellebecq based on his doctoral thesis. ❖
Death and Sandwiches
by Andrew Broertjes
Two hundred and fifty-four years before the first hour, John Montagu, the fourth earl of Sandwich, was gambling.
Unwilling to break up the game in order to eat properly, Montagu ordered his servants to bring him a meal comprising meat between two slices of bread. This unorthodox culinary innovation inspired his friends in subsequent gambling sessions to order similar. Thus, the sandwich was born. Scholars in the field of sandwich studies, however, have traced earlier incarnations of this type of meal throughout England in the late-medieval and early-modern periods, primarily through the assessment of popular culture. Plays of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries make references to ‘bread and meat’ and ‘bread and cheese’. Corporal Nym in Shakespeare’s The Merry Wives of Windsor utters the line, ‘I love not the humour of bread and cheese.’ While Montagu gave his name to the sandwich, it cannot be claimed with any confidence that he invented it. Montagu would go on to be the First Lord of the Admiralty during the American War of Independence. While Britain lost the war, sandwiches would flourish in the United States, becoming ever more elaborate and cleaving to regional distinctions and names – a culinary delight that was suitable for, and could be adapted to, any occasion, even ceremonies of farewell for deceased loved ones.
The day before the first hour, Emma was tired. She became more tired as the day progressed, but she had been sick before. In the evening, I took her to hospital.
The first hour was the bereavement booklet. I was with Emma’s parents in a small lounge off to the side of the Emergency Department. It was a nicer set-up than the general waiting room. Sofas were provided, rather than plastic chairs. This was my first hint, when the doctors brought me there a few hours earlier, that something was wrong. They had already explained to me what had happened. Now they told Emma’s parents. In the days to come, I would return again and again to the hospital to seek clarification
as to what had happened in those hours. No answer was satisfying. For now, the focus was on me. One of the nurses who had been part of the support team looking after Emma came in, along with a case worker. For sudden deaths, you as the ‘significant other’ are assigned a case worker, who acts as a counsellor in the aftermath. The nurse, a little shamefaced, was holding something.
‘This is for you,’ he said, handing me the Bereavement Booklet: Information for Family and Friends. There was a soothing coastal scene depicted on the cover.
‘Thanks.’ I noticed a slip of paper tucked inside.
‘Yeah, you don’t have to fill that in,’ the nurse began. It was a feedback form. For the bereaved to let the hospital know how useful they found the booklet. Everything needs feedback these days.
‘We have to put it in there,’ the nurse said lamely. ‘I mean, you can fill it in, or throw it away. No one’s expecting you to …’ He trailed off as I nodded. The booklet opened with useful advice like: ‘The first steps after someone has died’ (‘Inform family and friends’ – presumably filling in the feedback form comes later); ‘Practical and legal matters’, ‘Organ and tissue donation’; ‘Registering a Death’. A little later comes advice on managing grief, the importance of getting help if overwhelmed, how to tell children that loved ones are no longer with them, and lists of phone numbers for support services. And then the final page:
Disclaimer: The advice and information contained herein is provided in good faith as a public service. However the accuracy of any statements made is not guaranteed and it is the responsibility of readers to make their own enquiries as to the accuracy, currency and appropriateness of any information or advice provided. Liability for any act or omission occurring in reliance on this document or for any loss, damage or injury occurring as a consequence of such act or omission is expressly disclaimed.
It was very moving. I’m not sure at the time what struck me more: the tone of ‘deep sigh, our lawyers
insisted we put this in’, or the flagrant disregard for Oxford commas. But in the midst of my grief, being presented with a fact-checking task to focus on was a relief. Who knows what else I might have been thinking about.
The first day after the first hour were the phone calls. Or at least, delaying the phone calls for as long as possible. And I discovered something remarkable as I tried to sleep. She wasn’t dead yet. She was still alive as far as most of the world was concerned. She would only die when I made the phone calls. Two years later, all the bills are still in her name. As far as the utility companies are concerned, Emma is alive. She pays her bills on time. She was still alive on Monday morning, the fifth of December, hours after the doctors had claimed that she had passed. The process would begin properly once I started the calls.
Informing the people around you requires a ranking system. Parents. Immediate family. Close friends. Friends. Friendly acquaintances. Primary school friends I added on Facebook in 2007 and haven’t corresponded with in twenty years. Her parents already knew. My parents did not. They would be first. My father broke down almost immediately. As happens so often in these situations, I was the one comforting him, assuring him that everything was going to be fine. That one call was enough. It was almost 11 am. Was it worth bothering my closest friends at work? No. I allowed procrastination to take over. Better to call them later. After work perhaps. That would be better. I wasn’t sure how people were going to react.
My parents came over immediately. In the first stage of grief, the mind will do anything to distract itself. In my parents’ case, it was my mother’s parking. No sooner had they walked in the door, tears streaming down their faces, than my father had looked outside at the car park in front of our (my?) unit.
‘Ailsa, you’ve parked over the lines,’ he admonished my mother.
‘No, I haven’t.’
‘Come and look.’
‘Oh, right.’
Searing, mind-numbing grief at the loss of my partner of thirteen years was one thing, but such a breach of parking etiquette could not stand. The necessary adjustments were made, and the less serious business of grieving could begin. Later that day my sister weighed in. Her aid came in the form of fifteen ham-and-cheese sandwiches. Later, she told me the intention was to make just a couple, but she zoned out and, like Topsy, it just grew. Uncertain how to wrap so many sandwiches, she opted for a collective rather than an individual approach. They were wrapped together, as a whole. Imagine a basketball, composed not of rubber and leather, but of sandwiches. This unlikely object was handed
over to me two hours after the parking incident, ten hours after Emma died, with the line, ‘I thought you might be hungry.’ I wasn’t, and to this day I’ve never had the heart to tell her that the sandwich ball sat in my fridge untouched for nearly a month before I threw it out.
The second day after the first hour was with Emma’s parents.
I had spent the previous night in their sprawling mansion, phoning friends, drinking, messaging friends via social media, drinking. Tuesday I slept in, only to be woken by calls. It was now my turn to receive, rather than give. No one knows what to say. Grief amplifies every emotion you feel a thousandfold, including mild irritation.
‘Andrew?’
‘Hey.’
‘I … there are no words.’
‘Then why are you calling?’
Of course, I didn’t say that out loud. I would get used to hearing ‘there are no words’ over the coming weeks, as it has now decisively replaced ‘I’m so sorry’ as the layperson’s go-to line when dealing with loss. The morning was spent mumbling replies over the phone to the condolences of friends, before the first mourner arrived at the house. Sister Teresina had known Emma for years and was a close friend of her parents. An elderly Irish-Catholic nun, she ticked all the boxes in terms of the clichés of her kind: wicked sense of humour; self-deprecating references to potatoes. Today she had moved firmly into ‘spiritual warrior’ mode. Not for the first time, I appreciated the tremendous power organised religion wields in these moments. There are no bereavement booklets or expressions like ‘there are no words’. Instead, the weight of two thousand years of tradition is brought down on the situation, starting with the card stating that a mass had been said in Emma’s name earlier that morning. I didn’t have the heart to point out that we were both atheists. It’s the thought that counts, a friend would remind me a few days later.
‘It doesn’t matter if you don’t believe in it, Teresina does.’
In terms of handling my grief, she was all business.
‘It’s a terrible loss, Andrew, a terrible loss.’
‘Thank you.’
‘I am so terribly sorry.’
‘I know, it’s awful.’
‘There will be a void in your life.’
‘Um, sure.’
‘A void that you will want to fill.’
‘I’ll see how I go.’
She meant well. At the same time, I knew enough about religion to know that this was when they got you. Given the circumstances, was it a faux pas to resist the call to surrender my rationally held beliefs and embrace the divine?
The first week after the first hour was contacting the funeral directors.
We decided on a burial. Or rather, I decided on a burial. I’m not sure that there would have been any arguments
to the contrary. It’s still a blur as to how we chose the funeral directors, but we went with a well-known national company with an all-female staff. Rhonda was sent out. On the Wednesday of the first week, we all sat down in Emma’s parent’s front room to make the arrangements. I had no idea what was going on. To evade grief, your mind bombards you with fogginess and confusion instead. To make things ‘go more smoothly’, Rhonda decided the first thing I should do was fill out the death certificate, just to make sure all the paperwork was in order. It was explained clearly, with helpful stickers at each section, what I needed to fill out and what I needed to sign. It took me two attempts. The first attempt I went into another room, filled out a third of the death certificate, and froze. No. Not doing this. I walked back to join the others, who didn’t speak.
‘I just need a minute,’ I said. Still nothing. Expectation hanging in the air. I was holding everyone up. So back to it.
With the difficulty of the paperwork out of the way, the rest of the planning could go ahead. A series of questions were thrown, or perhaps lobbed gently, at us. Since it was going to be a burial, what sort of coffin would we like? What sort of coffin would Emma have wanted? Was price an issue regarding said coffin? As I flicked through the glossy pamphlet, my mind turned to Jessica Mitford’s The American Way of Death, her 1963 exposé of the funeral industry, which she described as being ‘a huge, macabre, and expensive practical joke on the American public’. All the tricks and cons that funeral directors engaged in were presented unvarnished to the American public, tricks that kept coming back in flashes as I looked through coffin prices. In one anecdote, Mitford relates how a friend reluctantly told her of her experience in arranging the funeral of a brother-in-law. Seeking to save the widow expense, she chose the cheapest redwood casket in the establishment and was quoted a low price. Later, the salesman called her back to say the brother-in-law was too tall to fit into this casket, she would have to take one that cost a hundred dollars more. When my friend objected, the salesman said, ‘Oh, all right, we’ll use the redwood one, but we’ll have to cut off his feet.’
There was no proposal to cut off Emma’s feet. However, our first choice of casket, the ‘Poplar’, turned out to be unavailable, something that was not revealed until an email was sent two days later. Plan B was the ‘Berwick’ (solid hardwood, rosetan crêpe interior, Victorian cherry stain) for $4,700. Plan C, included because the funeral director had mistaken our derision for enthusiasm, was the ‘Last Supper’ (solid hardwood, rosetan crêpe interior, pecan stain), which featured a gaudy colour reproduction of Leonardo’s Last Supper on the interior lid, visible to the funeral attendants, if one had an open-casket ceremony. That particular bit of tastelessness would cost you $6,250. The Berwick it was. We would be able to view her just before the ceremony. Music would be playing during that time if we wished.
‘What music?’ I asked.
‘We usually play Enya.’
‘Haven’t I suffered enough?’
‘Okay, no music.’
Rhonda scribbled a quick note, and we moved on.
Next came the organisation of the post-service reception. Much like the catalogue of coffins, a dazzling array of finger-food options was placed in front of us. Sausage rolls, spring rolls, biscuits, and sandwiches. So many sandwiches. John Montagu’s legacy to the world, laid out in a selection of different menu items. I was beginning to wonder if anyone would care. We were due to meet more caterers for the wake at Emma’s parents’ house. How many different kinds of sandwiches did we need? Once again, I was paralysed by indecision, unsure of the consequences at the post-service reception should I make the wrong choice:
‘Andrew, there are no words. I am so sorry for your loss.’
‘Thank you.’
‘Emma was such a wonderful girl.’
‘Thank you.’
‘With that said, though, these sandwiches are a fucking disgrace. This is the worst funeral I’ve ever been to.’
There were four main options: A, B, C, and ‘Premium’. Each option was dominated by a selection of club sandwiches, all of which included meat. Vegetarians and vegans, it seems, do not require funeral catering.
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We went with option B, for fifty people: $700 worth of sandwiches (Roast Beef, Cheese and Lettuce! Salmon and Cream Cheese! Tuna, Mayonnaise and Alfalfa!), spring rolls, and mini sausage rolls. Finally, the decision had to be made as to what clothes Emma would be buried in. I would find something and get it to them, I said. That broke me. I was done for the day.
The first Friday after the first hour was meeting the celebrant.
The funeral home had assisted with sourcing a celebrant. Like a morbid dating site, we were asked for personal preferences, before Clare was produced. Clare was lovely, but sitting down with her to discuss her role in the service it became obvious that general knowledge was not high on her list of gifts. She was to give a straightforward biographical account of Emma’s life before I would give the eulogy. The first red flag came when Emma’s mother told her that Emma had spent a year studying at the Sorbonne after graduating high school.
‘Lovely,’ Clare said, writing it down. ‘Where’s the Sorbonne?’ Emma’s mother and I looked at each other, then back at Clare.
‘France,’ we said simultaneously. She earnestly wrote that down too. We worked on the order of service, the music that was to be played: Puccini’s ‘One Fine Day’ as people were coming in to the chapel, the overture from Wagner’s Tannhäuser (‘We are not playing the whole thing,’ Emma’s father grumbled) as people reflected after the eulogy, and Leonard Cohen’s ‘If It Be Your Will’ as people filed out to the burial site. Clare’s eyes glazed slightly as she wrote this down. It was clear she hadn’t heard of any of these people. We didn’t judge her. At least not too much. Being a celebrant is a calling. Emma’s mother wanted a passage from Anna Karenina included as part of the final ceremony at the burial site, but couldn’t remember the exact wording. That was fine, Clare said, we could email it to her early next week.
The second Wednesday after the first hour was my personal viewing of Emma.
I had been to see her in the morgue the previous Wednesday, before the funeral planning and celebrant booking had begun. I’m still not sure why. In the end, shivering in the cold and holding her hand, I apologised for not getting her to the hospital on time. On the second Wednesday, I was going to see what she would look like for the funeral on Friday. The clothes, the makeup, the hair. The funeral home had a number of different locations around Perth. Her newly made-up and freshly dressed body was being held at the North Perth branch, and I could view (visit? ... the terminology was getting confusing) her at 3 pm. The summer heat was relentless as I arrived via bus. I gave the man at the front desk my name and Emma’s.
‘Right,’ he said, tapping his computer. ‘Well, this is awkward.’
‘What is?’
‘She’s not here.’
‘Well, she can’t have gone very far.’
‘Hang on.’ A phone call was made. The phone was passed over.
‘Andrew? It’s Rhonda. I’m terribly sorry, I sent you an email an hour ago, you mustn’t have checked it. We moved Emma here. She’s in Subiaco. But our viewing hours end soon.’
‘Um, okay, I’ll …’
‘I’ll come and pick you up. Stay there.’
I waited in the North Perth branch as Rhonda drove to get me. Checking my phone, I saw that an email had been sent: ‘Could you please come to Subiaco to spend some time with Emma at 3 pm instead of North Perth as Emma has been bought into my care this afternoon.’ The wording was quite something. I lingered over ‘spend some time’ and ‘into my care’. The feeling rose up for the first time since the first day, she wasn’t actually dead. How could she be? I’d just been invited to spend some time with her. To her credit, Rhonda broke the speed limit and was profusely apologetic as we drove back to Subiaco. I assured her that Emma was fairly disorganised while she was alive and that there was no need for that trend to end just because she was dead. I’m not sure that came out well, as Rhonda breathed in sharply and said nothing further.
The second Friday after the first hour was the funeral, and the wake.
I had been to funerals, but I’d never spoken at one. My eulogy had been reviewed by Emma’s mother, by Clare, and by a couple of friends. Everyone thought it was fantastic. A bit of light editing, and it was good to go. When the service began, everything went smoothly ‒ until panic set in. It was happening too smoothly, too quickly. Why were we rushing? Clare had finished her introductory speech. Surely something should have gone wrong by now. I was up there, reading. And I was doing it clearly, decisively, without any tremor in my voice. This was a disaster. I had seen other eulogists break down before they even started speaking. What was wrong with me? When I had read it out, rehearsing to myself, I had broken down at several points. Now I was reading past those anecdotes and remembrances with confidence. Perhaps my background as a lecturer used to addressing large audiences had kicked in, but this didn’t look good. Funerals were a time for wailing and gnashing of teeth, for rending garments. A confidently delivered eulogy and well-chosen sandwiches were not the done thing. By the time I made it to the last page, emotion had welled up. Thank God. I wanted to be seen to be devastated, not just feel it. As I read, and began to cry, part of me had stepped aside to analyse my performance, realising that it was a performance. A performance that was not quite over yet, but one in which the present act was coming to an end. I sat down, as Clare announced the time for reflection and mispronounced ‘Wagner’. People then filed out of the chapel to the burial site.
This ceremony was much shorter. Clare spoke briefly as she prepared to read the final passage that Emma’s mother
had chosen from Emma’s favourite book.
‘And now I will read a passage from the novel Tolstoy, by Anna Karenina,’ Clare solemnly intoned. A ripple went through the mourners, followed by murmurs. I exchanged looks with a friend sitting across on the other side of the plot. It should have been a look of shared grief, a recognition of loss unendurable. Instead, he gave me a quizzical look, and mouthed, ‘What the fuck?’ Later, when Emma’s parents and I looked back over the email exchange between ourselves and Clare, we realised it could have been worse. Initially, she was under the impression that the novel was called Tall Story, and it was by Anna Kramer. We probably should have picked it, but grief had shunted our powers of observation out of the way. Her mistake did not detract from Tolstoy’s words:
And the light by which she had read the book filled with troubles, falsehoods, sorrow, and evil, flared up more brightly than ever before, lighted up for her all that had been in darkness, flickered, began to grow dim, and was quenched forever.
The wake, unlike the burial, went off smoothly. People still had ‘no words’, but there was alcohol, endless bottles of wine flowing from the four thousand-strong cellar Emma’s parents had accumulated. Normal conversation ensued, bringing a sense of familiarity back to the world. People stopped saying ‘there are no words’ and started wondering exactly what Hillary could have done differently in the recent presidential election, and how exactly Brexit was going to work. Sandwiches were consumed with no complaint. Unlike the reception, vegetarian options had been found for the wake. A little later, a friend of Emma’s parents came up to me as he was leaving.
‘It’s a terrible thing. But you spoke beautifully today.’
‘Thank you.’
‘You should read the Stoics. Seneca. It could be useful.’
He ambled off.
Seneca was a philosopher of the Stoic school who wound up as an adviser to Emperor Nero. Stoicism encourages a certain approach to life, including the resistance to being overcome or mastered by emotion, and the acceptance of whatever fate throws in one’s direction. Writing to his friend Lucilius in the final years of his life, Seneca makes several references to the process of grieving, but is alarmingly silent when it comes to sandwich options at funerals. On public mourning, he writes:
When one has lost a friend one’s eyes should be neither dry nor streaming. Tears, yes, there should be, but not excessive lamentation … In our tears we are trying to find means of proving we feel loss. We are not being governed by our grief but parading it. No one ever goes into mourning for the ben-
efit merely of himself. Oh, the miserable folly of it all – that there should be an element of ostentation in grief!
In a later letter, he writes:
To lose someone you love is something you’ll regard as the hardest of all blows to bear, while all the time this will be as silly as crying because the leaves fall from the beautiful trees that add to the charm of your home … at one moment chance will carry off one of them, at another moment another; but the falling of the leaves is not difficult to bear, since they grow again, and it is no more hard to bear the loss of those whom you love and regard as brightening your existence; for even if they do not grow again they are replaced. ‘But their successors will never be quite the same.’ No, and neither will you. Every day, every hour sees a change in you, although the ravages of time are easier to see in others; in your own case they are far less obvious because to you they do not show. While other people are snatched away from us, we are being filched away surreptitiously from ourselves.
It was the last line that got me. Seneca would have been a lousy grief counsellor. Time was going to change me as I got further away from the point when Emma was still alive, and from the time when my grief was still raw. I would cease to be the person I was in those first two weeks after the first hour. But the person I became carried the bleak absurdities of those two weeks after the first hour.
Twenty-three months after the first hour, I was at another funeral.
An old school friend, Richard, had died. He had been diagnosed with a brain tumour about five years previously. His former classmates, many of whom had not seen him in years, had come to pay their final respects. The eulogies were given by three of them, those who had known him best. All started with tears and broken voices. Part of me was proud of my previous emotional control. Part of me was irritated. That is how you do public grieving, I thought. Good work all round. After the service we adjoined to the reception area, and I found myself next to Richard’s older brother Simon, whom I had spoken to at an old boys’ lunch a month or so previously. We shook hands.
‘I’m terribly sorry. It’s weird, we were talking about Richard a few weeks ago.’
‘Yeah.’
‘How are you holding up?’
‘Okay. Arranging this was difficult.’
He paused. ‘They do give you a lot of sandwich options for the reception, don’t they?’
‘Yeah.’ g
Andrew Broertjes received his PhD in history from the University of Western Australia in 2007. He is currently working on a book about controversial US presidential elections from 1800 to 2000. His essay ‘Death and Sandwiches’ was commended in the 2019 Calibre Essay Prize.
Is blood everything?
Four new Young Adult novels
Emily Gallagher
Awhistleblower’s child hides from a drug ring in the Blue Mountains. A sixteen-year-old rolls through life like an armadillo
A Melbourne high-school graduate wrestles with her insecurities. The daughter of a Chinese restaurateur juggles her responsibility to care for her siblings as her mother’s health deteriorates.
Four lives, four fragile families, and four exquisite books. Jannali Jones’s My Father’s Shadow (Magabala Books, $14.99 pb, 232 pp, 9781925936704), Vikki Wakefield’s This Is How We Change the Ending (Text Publishing, $19.99 pb, 320 pp, 9781922268136), Nina Kenwood’s It Sounded Better in My Head (Text Publishing, $19.99 pb, 304 pp, 9781925773910), and Wai Chim’s
The Surprising Power of a Good Dumpling (Allen & Unwin, $19.99 pb, 400 pp, 9781760631581) are recently released Australian coming-of-age novels. Together, they grapple with many of the traditional themes of Young Adult fiction: school, first love, sex, friendship, bullying, violence, drugs, and mental illness. They all also explore the strug-
gle, particularly by parents, to preserve their families.
‘Blood is everything,’ Dec tells his son Nate in This Is How We Change the Ending. ‘Family time together is most important,’ declares Anna Chiu’s mother in a precious moment of lucidity in The Surprising Power of a Good Dumpling. Each family has its secrets but, as these authors reveal, not all are as harmless as others. Although these authors do not completely give up on the redemptive power of family, the secrets and lies that trouble the families in these books are hardly of the Brady Bunch variety. While the teen protagonists dream of a normal life, they are caught up in an exhausting struggle to maintain an illusion of normality. When this illusion shatters – as it inevitably does – feelings of hopelessness, anger, and betrayal can take hold.
It is precisely the feeling of parental betrayal that unites these four novels. In the opening pages of Kenwood’s It Sounded Better in My Head, eighteenyear-old Natalie calls her parents out on their dishonesty. ‘So, you’ve been lying to me all year?’ she asks. ‘Not lying,’ her father replies. ‘Pretending a little. Omitting details.’ Like Natalie, the teen protagonists are confronted by their parents’ manifold failings. It is not just that they have realised their parents are human – though this is certainly part of it – but that something more sinister is going on.
Of the four novels, Wakefield’s
much-anticipated This Is How We Change the Ending stands apart. Set in Bairstal, a fictional working-class suburb on the urban fringe, it explores the cycle of abuse governing the lives of some of Australia’s most disadvantaged youth. There are good things in Bairstal. There is also a lot of bad stuff: ‘hate, racism, crime, dirty politics, segregation, terrorism, drugs, neglect, false religion, the wrong kinds of love, and more hate’. Against all odds, Wakefield’s sixteenyear-old protagonist Nate McKee has not yet been broken by the system. He recognises ‘how fucked up everyone is’ and worries about everything: climate change and animal cruelty; being a good person; becoming his father.
Stirred to action by his altruistic English teacher and an angry graffiti artist at the local youth centre, Nate struggles against apathy. Peppered with pithy proverbs, startling moments of personal introspection, and piercing questions, This Is How We Change the Ending has a shrewd allegorical undertow. This is not just a book about changing the ending but about surviving to see the end. It is a raw and poignant work of storytelling, a clever melding of poetry and prose with a compelling narrator, curt dialogue, and gritty realism.
Compared with This Is How We Change the Ending, Jones’s, Kenwood’s and Chim’s novels are lighter reads. My Father’s Shadow, which won the
2015 black&write! Indigenous Writing Fellowship, is Gunai writer Jannali Jones’s début. It follows the story of seventeen-year-old Kaya Lamb, one of two surviving witnesses to a drug crime she cannot remember, as she flees from a drug ring. Struggling with the debilitating symptoms of PTSD, Kaya hides with her mother at their family holiday house in Mount Wilson, a small garden village in the Blue Mountains.
From the outset, the premise of My Father’s Shadow – hiding in your own holiday house – seems a bit of a stretch. Many of the loose ends that Jones avoids with the six-month time-lapse between the preface and first chapter are left unresolved; they become distracting plot holes. Loose ends aside, My Father’s Shadow is a fast-paced Young Adult thriller. The opening garden scene is strangely dystopian, and the eerie sense that Kaya is being hunted intensifies throughout the novel. As the mystery unfolds, so too does Kaya’s fractured relationship with her mother.
The rocky relationship between a Year Twelve student and her parents is also a theme of Melbourne writer Nina Kenwood’s début It Sounded Better in My Head, the winner of the 2018 Text Prize. After being ambushed by the ‘bombshell’ announcement that her parents are getting a divorce, Natalie spends a weekend at a holiday house where she is drawn into an unlikely
romance with her best friend’s older brother, the kind of popular attractive party boy whom, normally, she would ‘instinctively avoid’.
Natalie’s relationship with Alex brings her face to face with her greatest insecurity: her skin. Teenage acne has left Natalie with scars that run far deeper than the pockmarks on her back and shoulders. Her self-worth, personality, and behaviour have been irrevocably affected by her acne. She hates the beach, fades into crowds, inspects her make-up in toilet cubicles, never wears bikinis, and is suspicious of Alex’s affections. For many readers, this will be an all-too-familiar story. By giving an authentic and funny voice to the awkward experience of adolescence, Kenwood bravely documents the often-invisible legacy of cystic acne, offering a glimmer of hope to those struggling to see a future away from the bathroom mirror.
Unexpected romance is at the heart of Wai Chim’s novel The Surprising Power of a Good Dumpling. Year Eleven student Anna Chiu is spending her school holidays working in her father’s kitchen when she interviews Rory, a skinny, brown-haired, early school leaver with a flair for English and theatre, for a delivery job. As the two begin to fall for each other, Anna and her sister, Lily, desperately try to hold their home life together as their mother’s mental health deteriorates. With their father sleeping overnight at his restaurant in Gosford, the two sisters are left alone at their parents’ apartment in Sydney’s inner west. ‘My father won’t fix anything,’ realises Anna. ‘He’s just running away.’ Strengthened by a sense of duty as the eldest daughter, Rory’s steady support, and an unassailable love for her family, Anna fights against the shame and rage ‘bubbling up’ inside her.
There is much to admire about The
Surprising Power of a Good Dumpling. Chim has skilfully woven colloquial Cantonese and Chinese culture into a heartfelt story about the burden and stigma of mental illness, first love, and family. There are, however, some missed opportunities. The portrayal of Asian racism, bullying, and hospital psychiatry feel strained, reinforcing familiar, sometimes crude, clichés. Elsewhere, barring one or two exceptions, the charms of the inner west are largely obscured behind car windshields. Where Chim could have explored community and the urban space, she has turned inwards to Anna and the safety of a small cast of characters.
Aside from Nate McKee, the teen protagonists in these books are largely disengaged with the world around them. They are loners and bookworms rather than debaters, bullies, or school captains. This tendency towards introverted protagonists, while not unusual in the Young Adult genre, reflects the strong autobiographical aspects of these four novels. Though parental betrayal might be the defining feeling of today’s youth, these are also stories about yesterday’s youth; a time before the school strike for climate, Brexit, and Donald Trump. They champion the individual’s – not the collective’s – capacity for change. g
Emily Gallagher is a PhD student in the School of History at the Australian National University
Parallax
A study of time and modernism
Philip Mead
BACKGAZING: REVERSE TIME IN
by
MODERNIST CULTURE
Paul Giles
Oxford University Press, $125.99 hb, 336 pp, 9780198830443
Paul Giles is a critic for whom it is important where he lives, although not so much in terms of location as of literary and imaginative perspectives. He began as an Americanist literary scholar, in voluntary exile from the United Kingdom, where he was trained, writing about the global remapping of American literature and, more recently, having moved to Australia, about Australasia’s constitution of American literature. He likes redrawing the critical maps of literary study, but also following the reverse and inverted orbits of writers themselves. Part of this impulse includes rethinking the hemispheres. Giles’s book about Australasia and US literature, for example, was titled Antipodean America (ABR, August 2014). If it wasn’t too much of a mouthful, you’d say he was a serial re-territorialiser.
In this study of time in Modernist culture, Giles has taken an even more committedly Australian perspective; his title, after all, is drawn from a poem of R.D. FitzGerald’s. As he admits in his preface, this is the first book he has written entirely in Australia. Literary studies in this country is greatly in his debt for the way his thinking about global positioning has shaped and influenced these readings of Modernism and modernity. There’s nothing gestural about this approach. Giles isn’t adding some Australian writing to the margins of a predominantly northern understanding of the great wave of literary cultural modernity. His antipodean reorientation of the chronologies of modernist writing – that’s his specific interest here – is the result of what he refers to as a ‘parallax’ view of modernist culture. Parallax sight foregrounds
where one is looking from, but also the fact of relativity, countermanding the idealised perspectives of supposedly ‘world’ or Archimedean points of view. This view not only integrates Australian literary and cultural history into a complex world system, but it simultaneously opens fissures in the NATO-centric version of modernity and Modernism.
This means that reading the temporal unconscious in geomodernist writing for its reversibility, the way in which it turns against the normalised sequences of historical progression, highlights the many effects of retrograde narrative in modernist writing. Thus, Conrad, alongside Furphy, alongside Proust, where The Secret Agent’s plot circles back on itself; and memory and belatedness shape everything Furphy and Proust wrote. James Joyce’s sister Margaret’s emigration to New Zealand as a Sister of Mercy, and their correspondence, allows Giles to follow up the antipodean dimensions in Finnegans Wake, its thematising of contrarieties, including hemispherical time: Tossmania, the Māori lyrics to the Haka, and Now Sealand. The reading of Katherine Mansfield alongside Henry Handel Richardson contrasts their variously deviant writing with the heterodox version of the imperial centre represented by Bloomsbury.
An important thread running through all Giles’s readings is the idea of the burlesque, which he sees as integral to the modes of Modernism. Emblematic here is the effect the strolling players have on Gustav von Aschenbach in Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice and the ‘Burlesque’ movement of Mahler’s Ninth Symphony. In a chapter about poetry, the readings of Kenneth Slessor,
R.D. FitzGerald, and T.S. Eliot explore disparate levels of voice and personae, recognising their affinities; likewise, Elizabeth Bishop and Wallace Stevens alongside A.D. Hope’s antipodean burlesque, imagining anniversaries backwards, and impropriety and obscenity unfurling in reverse, as in Hope’s poem ‘Observation Car’.
Two of the bravura readings at the centre of this study are of Thomas Mann and Eleanor Dark. It’s worth reading this book for these alone. The reading of Mann is led into with a preface about retrograde ideas of time in Theodor W. Adorno – vis-à-vis European fascism and organicist version of time – Heidegger and Thomas Wolfe, as well as in the music of Alban Berg, Arnold Schoenberg, and Mahler. Giles concentrates on Mann’s Buddenbrooks, Joseph and His Brothers, and The Magic Mountain, as well as Mann’s ideas of primitive regression in Germanic modernism. The perspectives on time in this reading of Mann’s fiction revolve around the insight of Hans Castorp, the central protagonist of The Magic Mountain, that ‘there is nothing “actual” about time’. With the reading of Dark, there is a sense of pique, understandably, about the ‘lamentable state of Australian literary criticism’ in the mid-twentieth century that saw her remarkable novel Waterway, for example, pretty much ignored in Australia, while reviewed widely in the United States. But Giles is most offended by the thickheaded reception of The Timeless Land trilogy and the lack of understanding by local critics of both Dark’s knowledge of the intellectual currents of her time, including liberalism, eugenics, and socialism, as well as the metafictional dimensions of her fiction. Giles reads Dark’s work in tandem with her close American contemporary James Farrell, who had an involvement with Australia in the immediate postwar years, visiting Australia and publishing in Meanjin. There are many fascinating points of difference with Dark. There is also a fascinating interlude about H.G. Wells, his entanglements with Australia, and his The Conquest of Time (1942), with a fitting preface about Douglas Sirk’s 1937 film To New
Shores (Zu neuen Ufern). This film was an attempt by a Nazi cultural organisation (pre-World War II UFA GmbH films) to ‘incorporate the other side of the world within its propaganda orbit’. Wells’s visit to Australia also just before World War II, to speak about the advancement of science in Canberra, was a kind of political antithesis to Sirk’s film, where he invoked Australian history and space in an ‘acidic negative sense, to demystify the narratives of popular nationalism that had cluttered up the Old World with, in 1939, such deadly consequences’. Not that anyone in Australia listened to him.
Giles concludes this book with a reading of Patrick White, Sidney Nolan, and Robert Lowell. This is about late Modernism and draws in the writing of Djuna Barnes and W.H. Auden as well as the music of Igor Stravinsky and Benjamin Britten. But the central figure here is White, particularly his later fiction (A Fringe of Leaves, The Twyborn Affair, Memoirs of Many in One) and the autobiography Flaws in the Glass, where White’s ‘savage demystification’ of humanist centres of social and artistic life are awash with camp, burlesque, the antiphonal and problematic sexual identity. Rather than any Australian compatriot, Giles’s White has more in common with writers like Samuel Beckett, Jean Genet, and Vladimir Nabokov. In among these flourishes, Giles discerns White’s particular traducing of ‘time’s linear sequence in favour of a circular structure where the present recoils upon the past and the future is inherent within the present’. And he sees White’s project as a powerfully ambitious one: ‘Rather than projecting Australian time as a counterpoint to American time or European time, White sought … to universalize antipodean time, to make its rhetoric of belatedness and anachronism stand metonymically for the fate of Western culture more broadly.’
There is much else besides in this study of time and Modernist culture, including about Virginia Woolf, Nancy Cunard, Marianne Moore, William Faulkner, Thomas Wolfe, and Anthony Powell. These are all readings that don’t issue from the capitals of culture and literature. Giles’s emblem for the kind
of reading he exemplifies so brilliantly is The Fifth Continent by E.O. Hoppé, the German-born English photographer, published in 1931, a book of photographs about Australia and the surprising excess he encountered there. What Giles reads in Hoppé’s work is an analogy of his own reading in modernist writing: the cover of Hoppé’s book ‘showed the photographer atop a globe looking back at a map of Australia, and it is this kind of attempt to reconstitute the world in relation to an alternative spatial perspective that provided the impetus’ for the photographer’s work, and for the literary critic’s. g
Philip Mead held the inaugural Chair of Australian Literature at the University of Western Australia.
More than stories
Reflections on books and writing
Susan Sheridan
THE INNOCENT READER: REFLECTIONS ON READING AND WRITING by Debra Adelaide Picador
$29.99 pb, 272 pp, 9781760784355
WILD ABOUT BOOKS: ESSAYS ON BOOKS AND WRITING by Michael Wilding
Australian Scholarly Publishing
$39.95 pb, 202 pp, 9781925801989
The Innocent Reader, Debra Adelaide’s collection of essays reflecting on the value of reading and the writing life, also works as a memoir. Part I, ‘Reading’, moves from childhood memories of her parents’ Reader’s Digest Condensed Books to discovering J.R.R. Tolkien and other books in the local library, and to the variable guidance of teachers at school and university. Its centrepiece is the powerful essay ‘No Endings No Endings No’, which juxtaposes the shock of discovering that her youngest child has cancer with her grief at the death of Thea Astley in 2004. The last words of Astley’s final novel, Drylands (1999) give this essay its title. Adelaide draws
out the hope that they suggest as she tells how reading – aloud to her son in hospital, and to herself when he was too ill to listen – enabled her to survive this terrible time.
While three of the ‘Reading’ pieces were previously published and exhibit exploratory qualities characteristic of the literary essay, the material in Part II, ‘Writing’, mostly addresses more practical issues, often drawn from Adelaide’s experiences as a teacher of creative writing. She wants her students to realise the importance of learning to read well and of listening attentively, of understanding that ‘a novel is much more than a story’, and that ultimately creative writing is ‘an experiment in failure, a midnight
excursion into the dense bush, with neither torch nor map’. Yet her desire as a teacher to emphasise the value of taking risks and even failing is constantly frustrated by an ‘over-regulated and heavily accountable tertiary education system’ where ‘everything that is taught has to be set in stone’.
The third section, ‘Reader + Writer’, contains the title essay, which reclaims readerly innocence not as a blank slate but as a continuing faith in the idea of the ‘intimate conversation’ that exists between writer and reader. The final essay, ‘In Bed with Flaubert’, extends this idea, so that the book becomes a faithful lover, there for you whenever you want it ‘to open up at your desire’. Other essays offer an insider’s perspective on the literary world, drawing on Adelaide’s experiences as a reviewer and a fiction editor. ‘Author/Editor/Reader’ is most informative as well as entertaining, as she tries out various metaphors for the editor’s work – as first reader then as literary backseat driver (or, preferably, as navigator) in the writer’s vehicle. There is an elegiac memoir of her friend and colleague Pat, who was herself a gifted editor; and a marvellous essay, ‘Reading to the Dog’, about how children with reading difficulties can overcome them by reading to a canine friend – just the latest demonstration, she writes, that our relationship with dogs is fundamental to being human.
Michael Wilding’s Wild about Books is also a collection of essays about books and writing, but as a reading experience it could not be more different from The Innocent Reader. Adelaide’s is an artfully structured book, comprising fourteen reflective essays, elegantly presented by Picador with a 1970s art nouveau design. Wilding’s contains dozens of short
occasional pieces about books, writing, publishing, and the literary world, apparently arranged in chronological order from the 1980s until the present (there is no information about their original publication). There is, perhaps inevitably, a good deal of repetition, and most pieces are too short to require much readerly engagement.
The longer essays are more interesting: ‘Milton’, for example, evokes Wilding the young lecturer who intrigued undergraduates at Sydney University in 1964 with his vision of Milton as a heroic radical thinker, rather than (as I had expected) a boring old Puritan wanting to justify the ways of God to Man. Wilding’s accounts of how he came to write his three historically based ‘documentaries’ are interesting in themselves, and serve to underline the prodigious range of work that he has written, edited, and published over the past fifty years.
Most of the essays are anecdotal, replete with yarns and arcane details about writers. Literary gossip of past and present is sometimes entertaining, but there is a good deal of namedropping and recycling, and in the latter pieces the paranoia about surveillance, internet and other digital censorship, and political correctness becomes tedious. That’s a pity, because Wilding can be very funny indeed when he’s writing fiction, including fiction driven by those very obsessions, as with his novel Academia Nuts (2002).
It is a strange experience, as a literary woman of Wilding’s generation, to read a new book in which women are almost completely absent. The population of Wild about Books, from Milton to Marcus Clarke to the Bohemians of the Bulletin to twentieth-century writers of utopian novels or private-eye detective stories and Wilding’s literary colleagues,
is male. The only woman writer to get a guernsey on Wilding’s team is the formidable Christina Stead, whose leftist politics and commitment to literary realism earn his praise.
A number of essays in Wild about Books rightly rage against ‘the purge of our libraries’, especially the Fisher Library at Sydney University, where Wilding taught for many years. At Fisher, it used to be possible for a researcher to roam the stacks at will. Now, like most university libraries, it has shed so many of its reference books and relegated so many ‘old’ books to off-site locations that such pleasures are no longer available, and indeed the loss of actual books invites accusations of censorship such as he makes.
This lament for lost libraries brings to mind the quotation from Ali Smith’s Public Library and Other Stories (2015): ‘Because libraries have always been a part of any civilization they are not negotiable. They are part of our inheritance.’ And Adelaide’s emphasis on the vital importance of books in our lives recalls Beejay Silcox’s urgent questions, at the end of her review of Syria’s Secret Library in the October 2019 issue of ABR: ‘As libraries around the country wither and close, literary opportunities shrink, and arts funding is razed: What hard work are we willing to do? What risks are we willing to take?’ g
Susan Sheridan’s latest book is The Fiction of Thea Astley (2016).
Murder and redemption
Jacqueline Kent
THE HILTON BOMBING: EVAN PEDERICK AND THE ANANDA MARGA
by Imre Salusinszky
Melbourne University Press
$34.99 pb, 338 pp, 9780522875492
Since 9/11 and all its attendant horrors, the story of the bomb that exploded outside Sydney’s Hilton Hotel early on the morning of 13 February 1978, killing three people and injuring nine others, has largely been cast aside. However, it is considered the worst terrorist act perpetrated on Australian soil. It had wide ramifications at the time, and murky issues still surround it.
Imre Salusinszky gives a clear account of what happened then and later. In the absence of anyone claiming responsibility for the bombing, and because twelve national leaders were staying in the hotel for the first Commonwealth Heads of Government Regional Meeting, conspiracy theories blossomed. There were demands for state and federal inquiries, even a royal commission. The plot thickened considerably: Tim Anderson and two other young men, all members of the India-based radical religious and spiritual movement Ananda Marga, had been found guilty of the attempted murder of Australia’s most prominent neo-Nazi. Before too much longer, Paul Alister, Ross Dunn, and Anderson were named responsible for the Hilton bombing too.
Ten years later, after a confusing farrago of accusations, counter-accusations, trials, witnesses reliable and unreliable, plots and pardons, a man came to the police with an unexpected confession. Evan Pederick, another member of Ananda Marga, who had also been in his early twenties in 1978, claimed responsibility. He said the Hilton bomb had been aimed at the Indian Prime Minister Morarji Desai, who
had imprisoned the Marga’s spiritual leader Ánandamúrti. Pederick said he had been recruited by Anderson, who had got hold of the explosives and the remote-control device to detonate them, and who wanted someone to plant the bomb. Because it had failed to go off at the time, Pederick had assumed it was a dud and left, with some relief. Not until the following day did he learn that, when the garbage collectors emptied the bin in the small hours, the bomb had gone off, killing one policeman and two garbage collectors.
Pederick’s confession was clear and uncompromising, although, coming so long after the bombing, he said he was unable to recall some of the details. But what he said had happened didn’t really clarify matters: Anderson, who denied having anything to do with this, was still believed by some to be responsible. Even though Anderson was acquitted, Pederick was condemned – not for what he had done but because he was not believed. He was considered an attention-seeking fantasist.
The somewhat elusive character of Evan Pederick is the focus of Salusinszky’s book. Salusinszky, who describes it as an authorised biography, enables Pederick to tell his whole story in public for the first time. Over seven years author and subject spoke often, and Salusinszky consulted Pederick during his research and writing. He presents a clear, sympathetic, and comprehensive account of Pederick’s life, from his upbringing as the son of a Methodist minister in an emotionally stifled Perth family, through his somewhat aimless years at university, his meeting with members of the Ananda Marga in Tasmania, the nature and results of his recruitment by the movement, and his confession, imprisonment, and later redemption as an Anglican clergyman in Perth.
Salusinszky shows us an intelligent, aimless young man, easily led, a drifter who fell into the orbit of the Ananda Marga and became dominated by them. Salusinszky adds that to some extent he and Pederick have had parallel lives: both were academic overachievers who started university at the same time, were only sons with heavy parental expectations, and
were swept up into the counterculture. This is fine as far as it goes, but for the reader to understand exactly what in Pederick’s nature and previous life experience made him deliberately commit murder, we need to know more about the Ananda Marga and what it meant to him. Salusinszky is not a great deal of help here. He doesn’t really get into who the Marga were, what their disciples had in common, what they believed, or how successful they were –in short, why Pederick, and others, were so successfully seduced by this murderous group. Indeed, Salusinszky more or less dismisses the Marga as just another example of the counterculture.
There may of course be legal issues here, and Salusinszky’s perspective may also be limited because he has chosen to rely on what Pederick has told him. Often people find difficulty in explaining their motives, especially if they are ashamed of something they have done, as Pederick clearly is. It is probably true, too, that anybody is capable of anything given the right circumstances. However, because the tone of the book is rather impersonal, it is also difficult for the reader to sympathise with Pederick as fully as Salusinszky obviously intends – let alone feel the connection between author and subject that he invites.
By and large, this is an interesting, readable account of a disturbing episode in Australia’s recent history. For anyone with a vague memory of the Hilton bombing without remembering all the details of what followed, this is a useful guide to the story’s twists and turns, with some salutary information about the grinding wheels of officialdom in several guises. But as a portrait of an intelligent man who has made an extraordinary journey from being a member of a cult and a self-confessed murderer to becoming a respected member of the community, the book is less successful. It would have been more valuable had the author delved deeper into the reasons why somebody like Evan Pederick followed the path he did. g
Jacqueline Kent’s most recent book is Beyond Words: A year with Kenneth Cook (UQP, 2019).
Critiques
Robyn Arianrhod
THE BEST AUSTRALIAN SCIENCE WRITING 2019 edited by
Bianca Nogrady
NewSouth
$29.99 pb, 320 pp, 9781742236407
Reading good science writing is not just pleasurable and informative: it’s also necessary if we want to live engaged and examined lives in today’s hyper-technological, climatechanging world. The Best Australian Science Writing 2019 offers readers all these things – the delight in good writing, the satisfaction of learning, and the sobering reckoning with our society’s environmental impact and lack of political engagement with science. Yet it’s not afraid to challenge science itself on occasion – showing ‘its flaws as well as its finer moments’, as editor Bianca Nogrady puts it.
One of the beauties of this anthology is that you engage with topics you’d normally pass over. For instance, I never thought I would ever become entranced by krill. But biologist Stephen Nicol weaves an enchanting story about the beauty and ecological importance of these fascinating creatures, the threats to their survival, and what it takes to study and understand them in their own habitat. This last point entails a critique of old-style biology, when ‘bugs’ were captured, killed, and studied back in the lab under a microscope, where ‘one krill body suspended in formalin looked much like the next’ and nothing was learned about their individual and group behaviour.
A number of other stories also involve critiques that show the complexity (and the humanness) of science and the way it is evolving. Jane McCredie shows the ill-informed nature of some reports and policy around foods that supposedly cause cancer, a refreshing change from the premature lifestyle and medical ‘breakthroughs’ that often dominate ‘science’ news. In the context of the academic pressure to ‘publish or perish’, and of the wastefulness of
‘sloppy science’ in commercial R&D, Jon Brock discusses the ‘replication crisis’ uncovered by C. Glenn Begley: the ‘growing recognition that many published findings cannot be reproduced by independent scientists, and may, therefore, be untrue’. It’s a dramatic wake-up call that Begley hopes will lead to (even) better science.
Similarly, Ellen Broad’s piece on a current philosophical debate around the application of machine learning emphasises a vital question: at what stage of development is there enough theoretical knowledge to safely proceed with new technologies?
Annabel Stafford’s discussion of the rise, fall, and rise of tuberculosis underlines the way cultural and economic attitudes have shaped people’s responses to illness; how our bodies are often treated differently, morally and practically, according to class and race.
Or gender: Melissa Fyfe’s delightful ‘Getting cliterate’ shows that it took a woman, Australian urologist Helen O’Connell, to discover the extraordinary anatomy of the clitoris. This led not only to the updating of textbooks, but put paid to Sigmund Freud’s pronouncements on the ‘immaturity’ of clitoral orgasms. A proper understanding of the anatomy shows that broadly speaking such orgasms are the only kind, as many women could have attested. O’Connell’s work has also paved the way for the same care to be taken of women’s sexuality as men’s during pelvic surgery.
Ceridwen Dovey explores gender issues, too, via the macho culture around space exploration. And the benefits of sharing Indigenous and Western knowledge are highlighted in John Pickrell’s piece on a newly discovered dinosaur ecosystem in Western Australia, and in Jo Chandler’s account of rare butterflies in Papua New Guinea. Barbara Saunders’s poignant poem brings to life the way Indigenous women ‘just out of Alice’ gather, prepare, and ‘pop under the tongue’ bush tobacco, a ‘remedy for sadness and fatigue’ far superior to the cigarette smoking taken up ‘in communities living “white way”’.
Nogrady’s introduction invites readers ‘to be transported, enlightened, delighted and hopeful, but we also need
you to be angry. Because anger can inspire action, and right now that’s what we need most of all.’ She’s speaking of the environment, and ‘our collective grief for the world we are steadily destroying’. Indeed, Helen Sullivan describes the dire effects of the climate crisis on the Great Barrier Reef, as studied in a lab on Heron Island, where tanks containing miniature reefs are subjected to varying temperature and carbon dioxide levels. Cameron Muir shows that on ‘pristine’ Lord Howe Island, shearwaters ‘are slowly feeding their chicks to death with plastic’, thanks to the vast amount of debris discarded by humans in just a few decades. Fortunately, there’s good news, too, such as John Read’s article on an ingenious method of painlessly euthanising feral cats in the wild.
Other topics include gene editing in the egg industry to cull male chicks humanely, before they’re born; the politics of a sugar tax; a grim snapshot of Australia’s climate in 2040; the properties of sodium as a poetic metaphor; a proposal to send skilled writers and artists into space to convey the wonder of the universe that science has opened up; and more.
My only quibble is the choice of stories that offer little conceptual exposition. Understandably, given the planet’s dire state, there’s a predominance of nature writing, yet even the two chosen pieces by climate scientists (Linden Ashcroft and Lesley Hughes) use ‘soft’ – albeit intriguing – approaches. Overall, the collection made me wonder anew what it means to speak of the ‘best’ science writing. Is it simply the most accessible: the easiest to read, emphasising context rather than explaining important scientific concepts? Is it writing ‘about’ science, rather than ‘science writing’?
Still, the writing here is excellent. Collectively, it gives readers a feeling for both the fascination and the necessity of science, as well as for its limitations, and I enjoyed every piece. g
Robyn Arianrhod is an affiliate in the School of Mathematics, Monash University. Her latest book is Thomas Harriot: A life in science (OUP, 2019). ❖
Twin passions
Judith Brett
GEORGE
SEDDON: SELECTED WRITINGS
edited by Andrea Gaynor
La Trobe University Press
$32.99 pb, 334 pp, 9781760641627
Ayoung George Seddon smiles boyishly from the cover of his Selected Writings, a midtwentieth-century nerd with short back and sides and horn-rimmed glasses. This collection of Seddon’s writings on landscape, place, and the environment is the third in the series on Australian thinkers published by La Trobe University Press in conjunction with Black Inc. The other two, Hugh Stretton and Donald Horne, were also on mid-century men. Born in the 1920s and reaching their intellectual adulthood in the expansive years after World War II, these three were all of wide and eclectic learning. They taught in universities, participated in public debates, and engaged with governments in the making of informed public policy in the areas in which they had special knowledge and interest: Stretton with economics, housing, and urban planning; Horne with citizenship and the arts; and Seddon with environmental policy. Their politics were formed before the rise of neoliberalism, and they shared a social democrat’s faith in the capacity of governments to solve problems. They were also confident in their autonomy as public intellectuals, inhabiting a very different academy from the auditdriven universities of today, where publication in prestigious international journals reaps more points than sustained engagement with one’s fellow citizens on matters of shared concern.
Like Stretton and Horne, Seddon began his academic career studying for a Bachelor of Arts, in his case in English Language and Literature at the University of Melbourne. Appointed as a lecturer in English at the University of Western Australia in 1956, he was intrigued by the difference between the landscape and vegetation of the south-west corner of the continent
and his native Victoria, and he enrolled part-time in an undergraduate science degree in Biological and Earth Sciences. In the mid-1960s he completed an MSc and a PhD in geology at the University of Minnesota. With deep professional training in both, Seddon convincingly straddled C.P. Snow’s two cultures of science and the humanities. In 1974 he was appointed the founding director of the Centre of Environmental Studies at the University of Melbourne, going on to become Dean of the Faculty of Architecture and Planning.
As Tom Griffiths says in his perceptive introduction, Seddon’s twin passions were landscape and language. He was a skilled bushwalker and canoeist and an enthusiastic gardener, as well as a prolific and erudite writer whose best-known books are Sense of Place (1972), on the coastal plains of Perth’s Swan River; Searching for the Snowy: An environmental history (1994); Landprints: Reflections on place and landscape (1997); and The Old Country: Australian landscapes, plants and people (2005). He also wrote many essays and some influential government reports. What makes Seddon’s writing on landscape and the environment distinctive is his capacity to understand both the physical patterns of the land and the way humans have used, transformed, and imagined it, all presented in crisp, jargon-free prose.
My favourite essay is the first, ‘The Rhetoric and Ethics of the Environmental Protest Movement’. It was written in 1972 when Australian environmentalism was shedding the polite gradualism of the conservation movement for angry direct action. Here Seddon’s deep knowledge of English literature is on full display. He names one of the environmental movement’s rhetorical modes the Jacquard, after Jacques in Shakespeare’s As You Like It , who personifies a melancholy despair. Seddon is impatient with hand-wringing, instead looking for practical, achievable solutions to urban and environmental planning and to fostering an ethic of custodianship.
The editor, Andrea Gaynor, a West Australian environmental historian, has divided Seddon’s writings into three sections: landscape and place; gardens;
and reports from consultancies. Himself a gifted gardener, Seddon notes that ‘gardeners are one of the most important groups of land managers in this country, since between us we manage more than 50 percent of the all urban land in Australia’.That was written in 1997.Would it be true now as larger houses take up more land on smaller blocks?
Many of these essays were written last century. Reading them now prompts reflection on what has changed in Australia’s engagement with its urban and natural environment. Our population is much bigger, more habitat has been lost, and the climate crisis threatens a sixth mass extinction and a radically changed planet. But there is also greater popular environmental knowledge and awareness and a much better understanding of the way Indigenous Australians managed and transformed the land. Seddon has a profound grasp of our continent’s geology and of the impact of European settlers, but he has little to say about Indigenous settlement. When he was writing, this was not part of public general knowledge in the way it now is, thanks in large part to the publication in 2011 of Bill Gammage’s monumental study of Indigenous land-management techniques, The Biggest Estate on Earth, and more recently of Bruce Pascoe’s bestselling Dark Emu (2014), on Indigenous agriculture.
Tom Griffiths’s introduction does a superb job of placing Seddon’s writing and practice in its historical context. Seddon had faith in his fellow citizens, a democratic commitment to landscape and urban planning that brought enjoyment and amenity to as many people as possible, and a practical optimism about what could be achieved. While much of his writing is of mainly historical interest, his persistent and courteous practice as a teacher, writer, and consultant to government is a stellar object lesson into how to be an effective Australian public intellectual and a reminder of the importance of the humanities in grounding a sense of historically informed civic responsibility. g
Judith Brett is a political historian and Emeritus Professor of Politics at La Trobe University.
Where are you happiest?
In my tiny inner-suburban backyard garden, mooching around with compost and growing things. At dinner with my family. Or with my feet up and a good book in my favourite chair in the living room.
What’s your idea of hell?
Childhood sporting humiliations have left me with a dread of being in places where somebody might throw a ball towards me and expect me to do something with it. Other than that, venues where the noise is too loud for good conversation.
What do you consider the most specious virtue?
Self-effacement – when it is a cover for cowardice.
What is your favourite film?
Unforgiven (1992), directed by Clint Eastwood.
And your favourite book?
Impossible to choose; it depends on my mood and what I’m doing at the time. During times of stress I return to Jane Austen. The Great Gatsby is the most perfect handling of structure and theme. Joan Didion’s collections of journalism and essays – particularly After Henry – have inspired me and shown me it is possible to do journalism differently. Anything by Toni Morrison. I could go on …
Name the three people with whom you would most like to dine.
Vita Sackville-West (we would discuss gardening), Margaret Atwood, Walt Whitman (though he might disappoint). Can I have a fourth? William Shakespeare.
Which word do you most dislike, and which one would you like to see back in public usage?
Dislikes: ‘upcoming’ and ‘impactful’ and ‘stakeholder’. Back in common usage – not a term but a phrase to describe an important function of journalism ‘journal of record’.
Who is your favourite author?
He was a difficult and misogynistic old bastard, but nobody does sentences like Hemingway. For wit and structure – Austen. For meritorious courage in observation – Didion.
And your favourite literary hero or heroine? I can’t think of a single one. Shakespeare’s Henry V through the three plays in which he is depicted. Such character progression! Elizabeth Bennet, of course –ditto. George Milton in Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men.
Which quality do you most admire in a writer? Courage.
Which book influenced you most in your youth?
My mother used to quote Shakespeare as part of everyday life. His wit and language were part of my landscape long before I was old enough to read him for myself. My mother’s other great love was Alexander Pope. I think these things influenced me almost without my noticing while I was busy reading the Narnia books and Biggles.
Name an early literary idol or influence whom you no longer admire – or vice versa. W.E. Johns. I mean, really!
What, if anything, impedes your writing? Like all writers – fear.
What do you think of the state of criticism? I don’t think of it.
And writers’ festivals?
Very varied. Sometimes great fun and inspiring. Sometimes a sausage machine.
Do you read reviews of your own books? Yes, but not immediately.
Are artists valued in our society? Yes, but not always in obvious ways.
What are you working on now?
A Quarterly Essay about the Murray-Darling Basin, and a recent history of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation – as well as a lot of jobbing journalism.
Margaret Simons is a freelance journalist and author. Her new book, Penny Wong: Passion and principle (2019), is reviewed on page 16. She is an Associate Professor in the School of Media, Film and Journalism at Monash University.
(Photograph by Dave Tacon)
Anwen Crawford on Judy and Punch 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.
Damon Herriman as Punch in Judy and Punch (image via Madman Films)
Oil
Laura Hartnell
It is scary to contemplate a world without oil. Whether we acknowledge it or not, oil is at the heart of our everyday lives. The Western world has depended on it for over a century. It has given us heat, light, comfort, and control. But modernity is built on a finite resource, and we are hurtling towards a time when there will be no more oil left to tap. What will happen then?
Young English playright Ella Hickson’s Oil (2016) takes the history of humanity’s addiction to oil and renders it in a beautifully rendered portrait of a mother–daughter relationship. When we first meet May (Daniela Farinacci), she is pregnant and living in an overcrowded family farmhouse in 1889 Cornwall. The food is rotten, the candles barely cut through the darkness, and everyone is freezing and hungry. It seems like a miracle when a Texan businessman (Darcy Brown) arrives in the middle of a winter’s night with an oil lamp that burns like daylight. May dips her finger in the kerosene, and brings it up to her face, enchanted.
‘There are millions of years, right there on the end of your finger,’ says the businessman.
‘How can a million years fit on one person’s finger? Magic?’
‘Near enough.’
It is as though this first encounter with oil instils in May the ability to step into the future and become a sort of time-travelling everywoman. As she traverses 162 years, May and her daughter Amy become the conduit for Hickson’s exploration of the Western world’s reliance on oil; they travel from Cornwall to 1908 Persia to modern-day Iraq and into the future. But this is not a climate-change play but one about mothers, daughters, and the price of dependency and power.
Oil was a huge success when it opened in London in 2016. Red Stitch Actors’ Theatre has given the play its Australian premiere in its new venue, the Cromwell Road Theatre. Directed by Ella Caldwell, this production doesn’t quite rise to the challenge posed by Hickson’s demanding script, but it still contains enough energy to
sustain the three-hour epic. It suffers from being in a venue that is unfamiliar to the ensemble and director. The traverse seating, with the audience lining either side of the stage, makes it almost impossible to see all the actors at once. In a play that is so much about connection and relationships, the staging makes the performances feel fractured and underdeveloped.
The play also suffers from some poor lighting design. The long opening scene, set in 1889, is lit solely by candles and oil lamps, resulting in near darkness. The decision to use historically accurate light sources in the opening scene is ambitious, but poor execution and dimly lit faces prevent the audience from connecting with the characters for the first twenty minutes. This makes for a slow start. As we move through the decades, the pace improves.
Oil has a ten-person cast, which is significantly larger than many of Red Stitch’s productions, and it feels like unstable ground for the ensemble. Caldwell’s direction has a frenetic quality, full of awkward blocking and a tendency to skim across important moments in the script. The production is at its strongest in scenes between Amy and May; domestic intimacy is closer to Red Stitch’s (and Caldwell’s) comfort zone, and it shows. As international politics play out – literally – around the kitchen table, May and Amy come into their own.
Farinacci gives an intelligent and considered performance as May; her dexterity allows her to maintain May’s core personality while changing her physicality with each shift in time. As with many of the cast members, Farinacci struggles to maintain her West Country English accent. As Amy, Hannah Fredericksen moves from childhood to middle-age throughout the play. While her physicality isn’t as assured as Farinacci’s, she portrays an earnest young woman full of conflicting desires. The fierce and troubled love between mother and daughter drives the play; together the two women give us some of the more intimate moments of the play.
Oil uses Amy’s growth to map the development of the oil industry, positioning the Western world as though in late adolescence, consumed by an uneasy combination of hedonism, arrogance, and uncertainty. ‘It’s my job to protect her future from the passions of the present,’ says May about Amy. But as mother and daughter live out the future consequences of the Western Empire’s greed, we are left with the troubling impression that it may be too late for us all. The Age of Oil is ending – it gave us a perceived freedom, but there are consequences that we are only just beginning to acknowledge and that may yet leave us shivering, powerless, in the dark. g
Oil is being performed by Red Stitch Actors’ Theatre from November 17 to December 15.
Laura Hartnell is a writer, critic and feminist academic completing her PhD at Monash University. She also works at 100 Story Building, a creative writing workshop space for children and young people in Melbourne’s west.
MThe Irishman
Aaron Nyerges
artin Scorsese, as the world well knows, makes movies about Italian restaurants. Sure, he makes bloody crime films, too, but at some level he seems to be asking: what’s the difference? In Goodfellas (1990), a man crashes into a pizzeria, one hand shot to pieces and bleeding all over the place. He’s kicked out, and the film cuts to a platter of deli meats surfing through a crowded eatery.
Restaurants are so common in Scorsese’s world they are easy to overlook. Two characters might be making a salad, talking about where to get the best red-wine vinegar, but what they’re really saying is: ‘so-and-so is about to kill so-and-so’. In Scorsese’s careful studies of mob society, there seems to be an intimate and inexpressible link between eating and murder, between a restaurant brimming with bodies and a man dying alone in the back room.
The Irishman – based on Charles Brandt’s book I Heard You Paint Houses (2004) – rounds off fifty years of directing. It crystallises, into a brilliant diamond of a film, the abiding interests of Scorsese’s career: the prospect of redemption for the unredeemable, the cracking of bones and the breaking of bread, the sensuous brutality of the American mafia.
Scorsese’s ambivalent affection for mob masculinity finds its most challenging treatment in Frank ‘The Irishman’ Sheeran, a role that no one could pull off like Robert De Niro. Sheeran is a heart-numbed thug. Remorseless to the end, he executes violence automatically. Only the classic Scorsese/De Niro pairing could find the human pulse of a character whose morals are as humane as a .38 calibre revolver. Scorsese has never bothered with the reluctant criminal, having little time for the good-kid-gone-bad moralism of a Horatio Alger story. His characters can’t wait to ‘get into the life’. Sheeran buys his way into the mob through their stomachs, using his gig as a truck driver to hijack beef carcasses and deliver them to the mafia’s steakhouse. Before long he’s ‘painting houses’ – spraying walls with the ghastly pink of brain and skull. He is not a good fellow, yet this is his film; at its core, it’s a love story, as unlikely as that sounds.
The Irishman is a movie about what the world afforded men at a particular time, and what kinds of attachments surprisingly survived. Notably, only one of Scorsese’s films has a female protagonist (Alice, from Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore [1974]); even so, The Irishman is perhaps his most resolutely masculinist. While Goodfellas and Casino (1995) both explore the travails of mobster-wives, there is none of that here. Coming closest is Peggy Sheeran (Anna Paquin), Frank’s daughter, a compass point around which the film pivots. Its main arc, however, encompasses the surprising recognition of manly affection, nourished in a
world of dispassionate harm. Perhaps no film has ever so quietly evoked the kind of love that might emerge between two men bound for the same homicidal terminus. In the epic scope of the film, this intimacy of brutality and affection is less a contradiction in terms than a contour of American history. The film looks back on an age defined by the social-democratic state, where the US Army, the labour movement, and the Italian-American mafia offered strong and strangely overlapping institutions of belonging. This is an era of intergenerational family living, in which atomised individuals were the exception, misogyny, homophobia, and racism were toxins in the water, and ethnicity implied affiliative civic membership rather than grounds for annunciating personal identity. The figure that cuts this historical edge most sharply is that of Jimmy Hoffa (Al Pacino), the charismatic leader of the Teamsters Union who mysteriously vanished in 1975. Pacino delivers his performance, predictably, with the caps lock on. Even his sotto voce might benefit from tapping the volume down. Some hamminess notwithstanding, Pacino’s dynamite-bright Hoffa allows Scorsese to look warmly at a time when an American labour leader was a household name.
Aside from its moral complexity and historical ambition, The Irishman is a magisterial display of editorial control. Thelma Schoonmaker has cut every Scorsese movie since Raging Bull (1980), and while her latest triumph will grab attention for its digital de-ageing process – which shaves about thirty years off the visages of Pesci and De Niro – there is something tremendously quiet, patient, and masterful about the film’s composition. As cinephiles never tire of saying: filmmaking is nothing if not the manipulation of time.
In The Irishman, two cutting-room masters hit the acme of their collaborative power, splicing multiple timelines into a seamless gem. All the flashback sleight of hand might be disorienting if it were not for how methodically it reinforces the characters’ experience. And then there is the perfectly musicless twenty-minute climax, reminiscent of the painfully quiet chase sequence through Berlin’s UBahn in Wim Wenders’s Der amerikanische Freund (1977).
The Irishman might produce as many reactions as it has viewers, and Netflix audiences could approach it, lengthy as it is, as a pauseable series rather than as a cinematic epic. For those, however, with an affection for gangster films, it will delight – reprising the big-screen collaborations of De Niro and Pesci; Scorsese and Schoonmaker. This is their swansong to a receding historical moment: of working-class immigrants, their mob-handed masculinities, and their unspoken affections for one another. Seeing it in the cinema might be like going to your favourite Italian restaurant one last time, before it closes. g
The Irishman, directed by Martin Scorsese, is a Netflix release. Aaron Nyerges is a lecturer in American Studies at the United States Studies Centre at the University of Sydney. (Longer version online)
Judy and Punch
Anwen Crawford
The fictional town of Seaside is ‘nowhere near the sea’, state the opening credits of Judy and Punch. Fine, but where or even when this film is set remains a puzzle throughout. The two titular characters, puppeteers Judy (Mia Wasikowska) and Punch (Damon Herriman), speak with an Irish lilt. The rest of the townsfolk – who come bedecked in grimy pirate shirts and motley, corseted gowns – possess an array of Scottish and English accents. The film opens with the medieval spectacle of three accused witches being stoned to death, and yet Seaside also boasts a uniformed police constable. Enough eucalypts are glimpsed
in the background to alert any attentive viewer to the fact that, wherever Seaside is meant to be, this film was shot in Australia – in Eltham, Victoria, as it happens. Yet no reference is made to Australia at any point.
This temporally anachronistic and geographically inconsistent melange might have worked if first-time feature director and writer Mirrah Foulkes had made it a deliberate feature of the script. Given that Judy and Punch is Foulkes’s attempt to critically examine the storytelling conventions of Punch and Judy puppet shows, a more overt and reflexive sense of Seaside’s storybook nowheresville would have greatly aided the film. Instead, we seem to be expected to take as given its far from seamless blend of eras and locations. The result is befuddlement rather than surety.
The story begins with Judy and Punch, who are married and have a young child, returning to Seaside with their puppet show. Mr Punch, as he is deferentially referred to, is a celebrated puppeteering talent, and not one given to humbleness. ‘I’m an artist, it is not for me to question my gift,’ he says to Judy when she ventures to ask him if their
act has become too ‘punchy’. Violence, we are quickly made to understand, permeates the marriage as well as the stage show; Punch is a frequent and volatile drunk, and the couple’s previous absence from Seaside was an involuntary exile brought about by his aggressive behaviour.
If only a film about puppeteers had involved more puppetry! The Punch and Judy show, in those few scenes where it features, is wonderful to see, and the trompe l’oeil effect of a stage performance happening within a film only adds to the enchantment. Yes, we’re meant to question why the stories always end with the Punch character beating up Judy, and for laughs, but the dubious gender politics can’t take away from the visual intrigue of puppetry itself. The human Judy appears to sense this, too – it’s clear that she takes pride and satisfaction in her skill as a puppeteer, bringing her own living energy to these otherwise inert objects.
But soon – too soon – the plot turns away from Judy and Punch’s craft to their relationship. A sudden, dreadful event, played out as something in between a slapstick joke and a magical illusion, sets in motion the rest of the film’s narrative. The tonal shift here is badly handled: what should be tragic is merely bizarre. Nor is either lead actor really given enough to work with. Wasikowska shows early hints of defiance that later bloom into full-scale rebellion, but vengeance becomes too much the sum of her character, and of the plot. Herriman is almost literally a cartoon villain: one wonders how Punch ever gained a wife in the first place.
Surrounding these two are the townsfolk: Benedict Hardie as the well-meaning but ineffectual police constable, Derek; Tom Budge as the two-faced bully Mr Frankly; Terry Norris and Brenda Palmer as elderly servants Scaramouche and Maid Maude. It is the latter two actors who best succeed at bringing a three-dimensional aspect to their characters. Physically frail but morally upstanding, Scaramouche and Maid Maude bear the weight of events.
This is, ultimately, a kind of morality play in which the wicked are punished and the wronged live to clear their names. These ends are never really in doubt, which means that much of the film becomes, for a viewer, a matter of waiting to see just how the resolution will be staged. When it does come, it’s violent but also anti-climactic. The sense that we’re watching events occur outside a real time or place distances us from them. The film’s main achievement is in visual design: the insalubrious yet elaborate costumes, the rich colour scheme of reds and golds, and the various tents, caravans, and cottages all add up to a world that feels claustrophobic in its enclosed, small-town parochialism, as it’s meant to.
Which means that a ‘heretic’s camp’, as it’s called –a picaresque gallery of outsiders and eccentrics, perched on Seaside’s outskirts – must generate the film’s concluding, creaky moral lesson that difference is strength and that the bullied will triumph. Well, it’s a nice story. g
Judy and Punch (Madman Films), 105 minutes, written and directed by Mirrah Foulkes.
Anwen Crawford is a Sydney-based writer and critic.
Mia Wasikowska as Judy in Judy and Punch (Madman Films)
The Selfish Giant
Peter Tregear
‘Victorian’ may have become for us a byword for hypocrisy and repression, but it’s not hard to find literature of the day that plays against this grain. The Victorian fairy tale is certainly one place where authors did find covert way to explore challenging social themes, albeit under the cover of the prescription ‘for children’.
Authors who experimented with this modernised folk genre include Juliana Horatia Ewing, Mary de Morgan, W.M. Thackeray, Ford Madox Ford, Rudyard Kipling, and, most famously perhaps, Oscar Wilde in his The Happy Prince and Other Tales, first published in 1888.
Today our knowledge of Wilde’s fate at the hands of Victorian society inevitably informs how we interpret his tales. In Brian Gilbert’s 1997 biopic Wilde , for instance, portions of The Selfish Giant are used to suggest that its opening premise, the sadness of children who are banned by a giant from playing in his beautiful garden, reflects the distress of Wilde’s own children at losing their father to his ‘selfish’ pursuits. At the very least, as has been noted by biographers, Wilde was a large man for his time. It is not difficult to imagine that he did indeed identify himself with a giant.
into a fine comic ensemble.
In other respects, both librettist and composer are comfortable with convention, whether that be the judicious use of rhyming verse, or the gentle late-Romantic harmony and lyricism of the score. But there is an overarching honesty and directness in their work that gives The Selfish Giant a refreshingly unforced sincerity and expressive force.
Above all, they are aided and abetted in this by a standout performance by rising baritone Stephen Marsh, who sang with consummate skill and ease, delivering a dramatically assured, empathetic performance as the giant. Other impressive performers among the young cast include Chloe Maree Harris (Second Fairy), Michael Dimovski (Snow), and Darcy Carroll (Frost). The small chamber ensemble, conducted by the composer, was especially fine, as was the musical preparation of the chorus.
Whatever the case, Wilde did imbue this tale with particular allegorical force. The giant’s selfishness in banning children from his garden also suggests capitalist greed, which leads ultimately to a perpetual winter (Wilde was, after all, soon to pen The Soul of Man Under Socialism). We might also recognise an allusion to Alberich’s disastrous coveting of the Rheinmaidens’ gold in Wagner’s Ring Another Wagnerian theme (this time from Parsifal) later emerges in the form of a particular child who arouses firstly the giant’s pity and then his love. Spring returns and after many years so does the child, now as Christ personified, to take the soul of the dying giant to heaven.
In an imaginative and carefully wrought reworking of Wilde’s tale into a new one-act opera by Simon Bruckard (composer) and Emma Muir-Smith (librettist) for Victorian Opera’s Youth Opera, this overt Christian overlay is removed. It’s a wise decision. Wilde’s invocation of imagery such as stigmata could easily come across today as overly sentimental or maudlin. While themes of forgiveness and redemption remain central, Muir-Smith decides to focus more on the role of the children themselves, as well as fleshing out the characters of Wind, Snow, Frost, and Winter
Cameron Menzies’ stylised direction and James Browne’s excellent costumes and set helped frame the production with an appropriate sense of otherworldliness. But in a plot that centred on the changing of seasons (or lack of them) and the overarching beauty of a garden, the lack of reinforcing lighting, plus the inclusion of two snarling silhouettes of trees at the rear of the stage, made the set ultimately feel more like something out of The Cabinet of Dr Caligari than, say, Dr Seuss. To be sure, it is not the beauty of the garden but the beauty of the giant’s soul that we are asked to celebrate in the end, but the two, Wilde is suggesting, are not merely coincidental phenomena. As Alex Ross noted in an essay on The Picture of Dorian Grey from 2011, the representation of beauty, was not only ‘the deepest and most lasting of his passions … it is now the most radical thing about him’.
This seems to have become a common theme in Victorian Opera productions; we got little sense of the deliquescing beauty of Klingsor’s magic garden or the similarly deceptive attractiveness of the forest of Allemonde in their recent productions of Parsifal or Pelléas and Mélisande.
In our own age of children-led environmental-awareness campaigns, one in which the possibility of an eternal summer, not winter, holds the greatest threat, the lack of a beautiful garden therefore struck me as a missed opportunity. But this only reinforces the fact that Muir-Smith and Bruckard have delivered a new work that stakes a claim as an attractive and relevant addition to the repertoire, well deserving of revival. g
The Selfish Giant was performed at Gasworks Arts Park by Victorian Opera from 16–19 October 2019.
Peter Tregear is a Principal Fellow of the Melbourne Conservatorium of Music.
Stephen Marsh as The Giant and the youth chorus in The Selfish Giant (photograph by Charlie Kinross)
DFrom the ABR Archive
Thea Astley’s novel Drylands shared the 2000 Miles Franklin Literary Award with Kim Scott’s Benang. Kerryn Goldsworthy reviewed it in the September 1999 issue of ABR. Her review is one of hundreds of early features from the print edition being added to our digital archive, accessible by subscribers.
o not attempt to judge this book by its amazingly beautiful but iconographically confusing cover. A close-up photograph of a single leaf shows its veins and pores in tiny detail. The colours are the most pastel and tender of creamy greens. Superimposed over this lush and suggestively fertile image is the book’s oneword title: Drylands
I love Thea Astley’s writing and always have. I love its densely woven grammar, its ingrained humour, its uncompromising politics, its demented metaphors, and its undimmed outrage at human folly, stupidity, and greed. I love the way that even at its most savage and despairing, it has always had a suggestion of redemptive energy working away somewhere in the plot, no matter how subterranean, outmanoeuvred, or comprehensively beaten down.
Her new book has all these qualities except, alas, the last. Drylands is Astley’s The Waste Land, with a cast of exhausted and alienated characters wandering through it in the deathgrip of entropy, pursued by fin-de-siècle furies and other personifications of failure and defeat. In the small town of Drylands, there are no fragments shored against anybody’s ruin (well, there are, but even the fragments get vandalised and tossed), and there is certainly none of the peace that passeth understanding.
In one of these Eliot-like character/narrative strands, Benny Shoforth, unacknowledged son of a violent whiteboss rapist father and a twelve-year-old Aboriginal housegirl mother, has been driven out of his home and has taken up residence in a cave in the bush, accompanied by his late mother’s threepiece Genoa velvet lounge suite. Eventually, his malevolent white half-brother Howie Briceland, town councillor, drives him out of there as well. Benny confronts Briceland in a public meeting –‘I’m your brother!’ – and is hushed up and hustled out by a couple of self-appointed bouncers. On one level, as is clear from this sequence of events, Drylands can be read as a dystopian millennial fable and national allegory, a grim encapsulation of Australian history in general and race relations history in particular on the eve of its Federation centenary.
Astley’s body of work over the last forty years adds up to a protracted study in the way that full-scale violence and tragedy can flower extravagantly from the withered seeds of malice and resentment, and this book is no exception. The perps are all her usual suspects: racists, developers, hypocritical gung-ho civic do-gooders,
and assorted unreconstructed male-supremacist swine. This time, though, a new kind of offender has been added to the mix: computers. It’s difficult for a reviewer when a novel by a writer she likes is largely based on three premises with which she disagrees: that kids can’t read and don’t care that they can’t read; that the world is going to hell in a handbasket; and that computers are the invention of the devil. One would conclude from this book, moreover, that these three things are closely linked.
The first of the classic Astley drifters to whom we are introduced, the widowed Janet Deakin, is ‘writing a book for the world’s last reader’. Janet spends much of her time in mournful meditation on the odium of screen culture in general, and on the passing, as she sees it, of the pleasures of reading and writing:
Out there, yes, out there all over the wide brown land, was a new generation of kids with telly niblets shoved into their mental gobs from the moment they could sit up in a playpen and gawk at a screen, starved of those tactile experiences with paper, the smell of printer’s ink, the magic discovery that black symbols on white spelled out pleasures of other distances.
Print literacy is figured in this book as the thing that could have saved us but is being destroyed; the page and the screen are presented as mutually exclusive and morally opposed.
If you simply don’t believe this, it makes Drylands hard to read because you want to keep arguing with it. Some people like to read and others don’t; this has always been true and will go on being true. Literacy isn’t vanishing, and neither are the tactile pleasures of reading. After all, Astley wrote this book; it got published; it smells lovely, like all new books; and now I’m sitting here writing about it and soon you will be reading what I write. In front of me there are 294 pages and two screens (one of which, while it has no smell, is a beautiful golden colour) and they all appear to be co-existing quite harmoniously.
I am reminded by this book of a non-literary friend who often claims that words are cheap. If she really thought that, surely she wouldn’t bother to say it; but they are words in whose power and value she clearly believes. Astley’s case seems to me to be much the same. If she really believed that the screen had horribly taken over from the page, would she have written a book about it? g
