Australian Book Review, March 2020, no. 419

*INC GST

Louise Erdrich Beejay Silcox

Paul Kelly

Kerryn Goldsworthy

Leah Purcell

Ellen van Neerven

Privilege and The Economist Dominic Kelly

ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize $12,500 in prizes – closes May 1

The Pyrocene Tom Griffiths on a savage summer

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A D VA N C E S

1

Porter Prize

Advances

Suspense reigned on January 26 when a capacity audience joined ABR on its home turf, the Boyd Hub Community Centre, for the announcement of the winner of the sixteenth Peter Porter Poetry Prize. Our judges – John Hawke, Bronwyn Lea, and Philip Mead – had shortlisted five poems from a record field of 1,050 entries, from thirty different countries. The shortlisted poets were Lachlan Brown, Claire G. Coleman, Ross Gillett, A. Frances Johnson, and Julie Manning.

The night began, as always, with readings from Peter Porter’s work. Poet Philip Mead was followed by Morag Fraser (former ABR Chair and principal supporter of the Porter Prize for several years) and Ian Dickson, who together read memorably from Porter’s 1973 collection Jonah. Then John Hawke (ABR’s Poetry Editor), representing the judges, spoke powerfully about the importance and vulnerability of poetry.

‘We’re all aware that this is a time when the institutions that support culture are being tested,’ he said. ‘Poetry – always the most marginal of literary forms, when judged in relation to the market – is especially vulnerable in this climate.’

Morag Fraser then named A. Frances Johnson as the overall winner. Her winning poem, ‘My Father’s Thesaurus’ – for which Johnson received $7,000 – is a moving chronicle of her father’s experience of Alzheimer’s – a ‘bushfire inside the brain’, as

she describes it.

Receiving the award, A. Frances Johnson remarked: ‘Despite the confusions and word salads, in Dad’s last months, we were lucky that there were still ways of finding him, being with him, holding him. I know others have gleaned similar precious communication with loved ones in the last stages of this terrible disease. Poetry and of course music are often used in aged-care settings to enable sufferers to de-scramble, to maintain a hold on language. Poetry has certainly helped me hold Dad close.’

Threats to poetry notwithstanding, the Porter Prize will be back bigger and better next year.

A. Frances Johnson (photograph by David Johns)

Jolley Prize

The ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize, one of the world’s premier awards for an original short story, is now open. Worth a total of $12,500, the Jolley Prize is open to all short story writers writing in English. This year (following indications from past

entrants that a more even distribution of prize money is preferred), the winner will receive $6,000; the runner-up will receive $4,000; and third place will receive $2,500.

Our valiant judges this year are Gregory Day, Josephine Rowe, and Ellen van Neerven. The three shortlisted stories will appear in our August or September 2020 issue. Visit our website for Terms and Conditions and Frequently Asked Questions.

The Jolley Prize is fully funded by ABR Patron Ian Dickson, whom we thank warmly.

ABR Podcast

We’re grateful for listeners’ warm responses to The ABR Podcast. Released fortnightly on a Wednesday (next up, March 11 and 25), it’s home to some of our major reviews, commentary, and creative writing. If you enjoyed reading features such as Tom Griffiths on Australia’s ‘Season of Reckoning’ or Beejay Silcox on Margaret Atwood’s novel The Testaments, tune in.

Coming up we have Grace Karskens reading her Calibre Prizewinning essay ‘Nah Doongh’s Song’ and Peter Rose’s review of Hilary Mantel’s The Mirror and the Light, the final novel in her Thomas Cromwell trilogy – perhaps the most anticipated sequel since The Testaments.

If you haven’t already done so, subscribe to the podcast on iTunes, Spotify, or Google Podcasts, or search for us on your favourite podcast app.

[Advances continues on page 6]

The ABR Podcast Don’t miss our new fortnightly podcast.

2 MARCH 2020

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW

March 2020

Tom Griffiths Dominic Kelly Amanda Laugesen Beejay Silcox Felicity Plunkett Anne Pender Zora Simic David Holmes Yves Rees

Letters

Dennis Altman, Matthew Castle, Andrew Broertjes

Poetry

6

40 Paul Kelly (ed.): Love Is Strong As Death Kerryn Goldsworthy 41 Jennifer Maiden: The Espionage Act James Jiang

Poems

History

Belinda Rule 13 Peter Goldsworthy 30

42 Benjamin Tromly: Cold War Exiles and the CIA Mark Edele 44 Geoffrey Robertson: Who Owns History? Janna Thompson

Religion

Botany

Stuart Piggin and Robert D. Linder: Attending to the National Soul Hugh Chilton 14 Giuliana Chamedes: A Twentieth-Century Crusade Paul Collins 16

46 David J. Mabberley: Botanical Revelation Danielle Clode

Ornithology

48 Andrew Darby: Flight Lines Andrew Fuhrmann

Anthology

Science

Anthony Macris: Aftershocks Kári Gíslason 18

Fiction

Anne Enright: Actress Alice Nelson Philip Pullman: The Secret Commonwealth Peter Craven Leah Purcell: The Drover's Wife Ellen van Neerven Louis Nowra: Collected Stories Gerard Windsor Evie Wyld: The Bass Rock Amy Baillieu David Whish-Wilson: True West Stephen Dedman Anna Goldsworthy: Melting Moments Anita Abriel: The Light After the War Anne Brinsden: Wearing Paper Dresses Susan Midalia

Season of reckoning Privilege and The Economist A crisis lexicon Louise Erdrich’s new novel Catherine Noske’s new novel Christina Stead in America Carmen Maria Machado’s memoir The politics of the climate crisis Writing trans and gender-diverse lives

9 12 17 20 26 33 34 36 54

49 Henning Beck: Scatterbrain Nick Haslam Peter Wothers: Antimony, Gold, and Jupiter’s Wolf 50 Robyn Arianrhod

21 22 24 25 27 28

Performing Arts

52 Nick Fraser: Say What Happened Belinda Smaill Andrew Ford and Anni Heino: The Song Remains the Same 65 David McCooey 66 Francis Greenslade: How I Learnt to Act Tim Byrne Peter Pinne and Peter Wyllie Johnston: 67 The Australian Musical from the Beginning Gillian Wills

29

Indigenous Studies

Literary Studies

53 Victor Steffensen: Fire Country Tim Low

Clive James: Somewhere Becoming Rain Geoff Page 32

Tasmania

Interviews

56 Angela Rockel: Rogue Intensities Rayne Allinson

Publisher of the Month Jane Curry 38 Open Page Andrew Ford 58

Mexico

57 Paul Theroux: On the Plain of Snakes Gabriel García Ochoa

Biography

Jenny Uglow: Mr Lear James Antoniou 39 Stanley John Scott: Chis Colin Nettelbeck 45 Desley Deacon: Judith Anderson John Rickard 51

68

From the Archive

Elizabeth Jolley: Mr Scobie’s Riddle Lucy Frost

ABR Arts

Susan Lever Ian Dickson Jordan Prosser Elizabeth Kertesz

60 61 62 63

Jesus Wants Me for a Sunbeam The Deep Blue Sea True History of the Kelly Gang Fidelio CONTENTS

3

ABR PATRONS Supporting Australian writing Generous donations from Patrons have transformed Australian Book Review in recent years, with major benefits for writers and readers. These donations have enabled us to expand our programs, to diversify the magazine, and to be more ambitious and outwardlooking. Most importantly, we have increased our payments to contributors at a time when paid freelance opportunities are relatively few. Our literary prizes, Fellowship program, and ABR Arts are only possible because of private donations.

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AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW

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5

Yarra Valley

Writers’ festivals seem to be almost as prevalent in this country as literary prizes, but there is a welcome new one in the vinous Yarra Valley.

Programmed by playwright Hannie Rayson, the Yarra Valley Writers’ Festival will be held in pictur-

esque Healesville from May 8 to 10.

Rayson has put together an appealing selection of writers, including Helen Garner, David Williamson, and Clare Bowditch.

Visit their website for more information: www.yarravalleywritersfestival.com.

Calibre Prize

We surrender! The Calibre Prize closed in January after receiving nearly 600 essays – a record field. Judging is now underway. The winner will receive $5,000; the runner-up $2,500. Podcasts will follow the announcement in the May issue.

Letters A disturbing omission

Dear Editor, I read Sophie Knezic’s review of the Haring/Basquiat exhibition with admiration but also a sense that it avoided the tragedy of these artists’ lives (ABR, January–February 2020).

Jean-Michel Basquiat died aged twenty-eight of a heroin overdose; Keith Haring died at thirty-two from AIDS, years before effective therapies existed. Both men lived through an extraordinary period of transition in New York City, which ended prematurely for so many. This is reflected in their work, most obviously in Haring’s safe-sex messages. To review their work without acknowledging this is a disturbing omission.

Dennis Altman, Clifton Hill, Vic.

Blowback and 9/11

Dear Editor, While Andrew Broertjes’s review of Daniel Immerwahr’s How to Hide an Empire is mostly considered in its analysis, I consider the couple of paragraphs dealing with the 9/11 terrorist attacks to be disingenuous at best and egregiously partisan at worst (ABR, January –February 2020). To characterise the murder of almost 3,000 people as ‘blowback’ against some perceived injustice is wilfully inaccurate.

Al Qaeda was quite open about the role of 9/11 in prosecuting an expansionist Islamist agenda – conveniently ignored in the article – and prior to 2003 the United States was not a colonial power

in the Arab world, notwithstanding the positioning of military bases in friendly territory, unlike, for example, the French, British, and Turks. I am surprised and disappointed that ABR allowed the unamended publication of that part of the article.

Matthew Castle (online comment)

Andrew Broertjes replies:

Thank you for your response. Your issues with my review are twofold: the claim that the United States ‘prior to 2003’ was a colonial power in the Arab world, and that the 9/11 attacks were ‘blowback’ to ‘perceived injustice’ against the Arab world/the Middle East. You allege that I made these claims across ‘a couple of paragraphs’, although ‘a couple of sentences’ may be nearer the mark. But to address these points in turn: At no point in the review did I claim that the United States acted as a colonial power in the Middle East prior to 2003. The closest I came was in the following: ‘A new international order had been formed, as former European colonial empires collapsed and transformed into the proxy battlefields of the Cold War. America’s imperialism would be as much cultural and economic as martial during what was dubbed as “the short American century”. Terms like “coca-colonisation” were coined to describe the spread of American culture and ideals around the globe.’ In case it wasn’t clear in the review, ‘coca-colonisation’ is a term

that Daniel Immerwahr has borrowed to describe the use of soft power by the United States. Neither I nor, presumably, Immerwahr uses the term to mean colonialism in the classical sense of the word.

As I stated in the review, I borrowed the term ‘blowback’ from the Chalmers Johnson book of the same name. In the first edition of that book, published prior to the events of 9/11, Johnson wrote, astutely in my opinion: ‘World politics in the twenty-first century will in all likelihood be driven primarily by blowback from the second half of the twentieth century – that is, from the unintended consequences of the Cold War and the crucial American decision to maintain a Cold War posture in a post-Cold War world.’

Little has happened since then to prove Johnson wrong. Osama bin Laden had a list of grievances, including the presence of US troops in Saudi Arabia (and therefore the proximity of the infidel to the holy sites of Mecca and Medina, as expressed in his 1996 manifesto), the sanctions on Iraq post-Desert Storm that had resulted in ‘a million children dying’, and the Israeli occupation of historic Palestine. To pretend that these grievances did not exist, or that Islamic terrorism (or indeed any terrorism) exists in some sort of historical vacuum, is far closer to a position that is ‘disingenuous at best and egregiously partisan at worst’ than anything contained within my review.

Image credits and information Page 19: Leah Purcell in the 2016 Belvoir St Theatre production of The Drover’s Wife (photograph by Brett Boardman via Flickr/Belvoir St).

Page 59: Publicity photo of Marlene Dietrich for the film Shanghai Express (1932) (photograph by Don English via Wikimedia Commons)

6 MARCH 2020

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW

THANKING OUR PARTNERS Australian Book Review is assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council for the Arts, its arts funding and advisory body. ABR is supported by: the Government of Western Australia through the Department of Local Government, Sport, and Creative Industries; the Queensland Government through Arts Queensland; and the South Australian Government through Arts South Australia.

We also acknowledge the generous support of our university partner, Monash University, and we are grateful for the support of the Copyright Agency Cultural Fund, Eucalypt Australia, our tours partner Academy Travel, the City of Melbourne, and Arnold Bloch Leibler.

7

Australian Book Review |March 2020, no. 419 Since 1961 First series 1961–74 | Second series (1978 onwards, from no. 1) ISSN 0155-2864 Registered by Australia Post | Printed by Doran Printing Cover Image Gospers Mountain bushfire, New South Wales, 2019 (photograph by Nick Moir) Cover design Jack Callil Subscriptions One year (print + online): $95 One year (online only): $60 Subscription rates above are for individuals in Australia. All prices include GST. More information about subscription rates, including international, concession, and institutional rates is available. www.australianbookreview.com.au Email: business@australianbookreview.com.au Phone: (03) 9699 8822

ABR is published ten times a year by Australian Book Review Inc. Studio 2, 207 City Road, Southbank, Vic. 3006 Phone: (03) 9699 8822 Twitter: @AustBookReview | Facebook: @AustralianBookReview Instagram: @AustralianBookReview www.australianbookreview.com.au Editor and CEO Peter Rose – editor@australianbookreview.com.au Deputy Editor Amy Baillieu – abr@australianbookreview.com.au Assistant Editor Jack Callil – digital@australianbookreview.com.au Business Manager Grace Chang – business@australianbookreview.com.au Development Consultant Christopher Menz – development@australianbookreview.com.au Poetry Editor John Hawke (with assistance from Judith Bishop)

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Correspondents must provide a telephone number or email address for verification. letters@australianbookreview.com.au

Chair Colin Golvan Treasurer Peter McLennan Board Members Ian Dickson, Rae Frances, Billy Griffiths, Sarah Holland-Batt, Vanessa Lemm, Sharon Pickering, Robert Sessions, Ilana Snyder, Elissa Newall (Observership Program)

Contributors The ❖ symbol next to a contributor’s name denotes that it is their first appearance in the magazine.

ABR Rising Stars Alex Tighe (NSW, 2019) | Sarah Walker (Vic., 2019)

Acknowledgment of Country Australian Book Review acknowledges the Traditional owners of the Kulin Nation as Traditional Owners of the land on which it is situated in Southbank, Victoria, and pays respect to the Elders, past and present.

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Editorial Advisers Frank Bongiorno, Danielle Clode, Clare Corbould, Des Cowley, Ian Donaldson, Mark Edele, Kári Gíslason, Tom Griffiths, Sue Kossew, Bruce Moore, Rachel Robertson, Lynette Russell, Alison Stieven-Taylor, Alistair Thomson, Peter Tregear, Ben Wellings, Terri-ann White, Rita Wilson Volunteers Meghan Dansie, Alan Haig, John Scully Publicity & Advertising Amy Baillieu – abr@australianbookreview.com.au Media Kit available from our website

This work was developed in a Creative Spaces managed studio. Creative Spaces is a program of Arts Melbourne at the City of Melbourne.

8 MARCH 2020

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW

COMMENT

Season of reckoning

by Tom Griffiths

W

hat do we call this terrifying summer?

The special bushfire edition of ABC’s Four Corners predictably called it Black Summer.

Perhaps the name will stick, for it builds on a vernacular tradition. Firestorms are always given names, generally after the day of the week they struck. There are enough ‘Black’ days in modern Australian history to fill up a week several times over – Black Sundays, Mondays, Tuesdays, Thursdays, Fridays, Saturdays – and a Red Tuesday too, plus the grim irony of an Ash Wednesday.

The blackness of the day evokes mourning and grief, the funereal silence of the forests after a firestorm. Black and still. And when the fires burn for months, a single Black Day morphs into a Black Summer.

But does this name truly capture what is new about this season? The recent fires have left a black legacy, but the terrifying thing about them was that they were relentlessly red. Red and restless. The colour of danger, of ever-lurking flame. Acrid orange smoke and pyrocumuli of peril. The threat was always there; it was never over until the season itself turned. The enduring image is of people cowering on beaches in a red-orange glow. It was the Red Summer.

In early January, in an essay for Inside Story, I called it Savage Summer; I was writing while the fires were still burning and there was no sign of a black day-after.

Stephen J. Pyne, a great wordsmith of fire, reached for another alliteration, calling them the Forever Fires. That name signals the change Pyne perceives in fire behaviour, from occasional visitations to total engulfment, which is the predicament of the Pyrocene, a new Fire Age comparable to past Ice Ages. His term ‘Forever Fires’ also reminds us, as James Bradley did in the Guardian, that ‘this is not the new normal. This is just the beginning.’

The future will be worse than this, much worse, unless we swiftly address the cause.

Whether we call the summer black, red, or savage, we shouldn’t forget that the fires started in winter. Even the season was ruptured. Where can language go once a whole summer is declared black and the fires are forever?

What will we call the next eruption of fire? Will the black days that fused in a red summer become nameless, seamless years of inferno?

There is something personal about fire, something frighteningly irrational and ultimately beyond our comprehension. It roars out of the bush, out of our nightmares. Not only do we give the great fires names, we also assign them the characteristics of monsters: they have flanks, fingers, and tongues; they’re hungry; they know where we are; they lick and they devour. In reports of the fires of 1919, 1926, and 1939, houses were ‘swallowed’ and people were ‘caught between the jaws of the flame’.

Fire ‘with its appetite whetted … sought more victims, and fiercely attacked’, and ‘with each change of wind … made a thrust towards the township, threatening to lick up the scattered homes on the fringe’. Bushfire makes its victims feel hunted down and its survivors toyed with. Why did the fire destroy the house next door and leave mine unscathed? A Black Saturday survivor who lost his home confessed, ‘I felt as if the fire knew me.’

A book about the 2003 Canberra fires took as its title a child’s question: How did the fire know we lived here?

Fire is the genie of the bush ready to escape, ‘the red steer’ jumping the fence and running amok, the rampant beast that can savage and kill. Instead of the sprites, elves and wood nymphs that populated the forest folklore of the Northern Hemisphere, Australian colonists found that their bush harboured a rather different creature. As poet Les Murray put it, the ‘gum forest’s smoky ambience reminds us that the presiding spirit who sleeps at its unreachable heart is not troll or goblin, but an orangeyellow monster who forbids any lasting intrusion there’.

COMMENT

9

People on the New South Wales south coast referred a local or national story. Australia is the canary in the to the Currowan fire, which rampaged for seventy-four coal-mine, a belated warning of planetary peril. The world is watching us. We are the burning frontier of days, as ‘the beast’.

During this searing summer, we have seen the a warming world, the perilous cliff-edge of the Sixth best and worst of Australia: the instinctive strength of Extinction. This may be the first fire season that Ausbush communities and the manipulative malevolence tralians have tried to calculate the mortality of wildlife.

Fire was not just more extensive, intense, and of fossil-fuelled politicians. The clash between the two – symbolised by a prime minister forcing handshakes enduring; it went rogue. Australia burnt from the end on survivors – added to the trauma of the fires. As we of winter to the end of summer, from Queensland to watched our political establishment double down on Western Australia, from Kangaroo Island to Tasmania, denial, we were forced to realise that even the shock of from the Adelaide Hills to East Gippsland, in the Great Western Woodlands and up and down the eastern this season may not change our national politics.

Where does this Australian intransigence come seaboard. The season did indeed represent something from? It is embedded so deeply in our history that we new or ‘unprecedented’, to use the word avoided by can hardly identify it. It comes from a conquest men- denialists, who used history lazily to deny that anything tality that was built on denial, the denial of Aboriginal extraordinary was happening. But our long history of sovereignty and cultural sophistication. It comes from bushfire is significant precisely because it makes us the a frontier mining history and an economic dependence prime site for a global eruption. Bushfire is integral to on coal. And it comes from enduring puzzlement about Australian ecology, culture, and identity; it is scripted into the deep biological and the nature of Australia, human history of a land of a nature that British settlers drought and flooding rains. slowly learned was prone to Where does this Australian But reciting Dorothea climatic extremes that were intransigence come from?

Mackellar does not forestall natural rather than aberrant.

It is embedded so deeply in our heeding Ross Garnaut.

Dealing with the traumas of history we can hardly identify it They are not in tension, flood, drought, and fire, and for one amplifies the other. learning to expect and fight Of all developed nations, them, was part of becoming Australian. Many farmers and bush folk have been slow the sunburnt country is the most vulnerable to climate to accept climate change because they have spent their change because of her history of ‘flood and fire and lives coming to terms with extreme natural variability. famine’ and the chemistry of ‘her beauty and her terror’.

In a searing piece of reportage from the New South Their rural experience makes them sceptical about a different variability, especially when it is global, one-way, Wales south coast for The Monthly, Bronwyn Adcock and unnatural. It’s like the rules of the game have sud- was witness to ‘Australians doing everything they could, denly changed. Thus, the history of modern Australian even when their government didn’t’. If the fires revealed settlement sedated the populace against recognising its the strength of bush communities and the innate goodness of people in extremis, so too did they reveal the greatest peril.

But there are signs of hope in the exponential growth absence of federal leadership and the weakness of our of quality Australian writing about fire. Black Friday parliamentary democracy. As if neglect and omission 1939 produced one outstanding literary statement: Judge were not enough, coalition politicians hastily encourStretton’s powerful and poetic Royal Commission report aged lies about the causes of the fires, declaring that they that was included in anthologies of nature writing and were started by arsonists and that greenies prevented became a prescribed text for Matriculation English. Ash hazard-reduction burns. Yet we know that these fires Wednesday 1983 found its greatest literary expression were overwhelmingly started by dry lightning in remote in Pyne’s Burning Bush (1991), which was written in its terrain and that hazard-reduction burning – which is long afterglow. Black Saturday 2009 produced a crop of far from a panacea – is constrained by a warming clifine writing, impressive in its range and cultural depth, mate. The effort to stymie sensible policy reform after notably Adrian Hyland’s Kinglake-350, Karen Kissane’s the fires has been as pernicious as the failure to plan in Worst of Days, Robert Kenny’s Gardens of Fire, Peter advance of them.

The recent fires delivered a liminal moment for the Stanley’s Black Saturday at Steels Creek, Chloe Hooper’s The Arsonist, and Peg Fraser’s Black Saturday: Not the nation, landing us on the beach of a fearsome planetary future. There can be no evacuation. Whatever we call end of the story.

This savage summer has already germinated a very this summer, will we make it a season of reckoning? g different forest of literary reflections. Writing sprouted immediately from active firegrounds, and it described Tom Griffiths is the author of Forests of Ash: An ensomething that was neither an ‘event’ nor just ‘Austra- vironmental history (CUP, 2001) and co-author, with lian’: it was a planetary phenomenon. Fire is no longer Christine Hansen, of Living with Fire (CSIRO, 2012).

10 MARCH 2020

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW

The new novel from the award-winning author of The Toymaker

J A PA N

11

The enemy of privilege?

A timely history of The Economist

Dominic Kelly LIBERALISM AT LARGE: THE WORLD ACCORDING TO THE ECONOMIST

by Alexander Zevin Verso, $49.99 hb, 538 pp

F

ew media institutions are revered across the mainstream political spectrum quite like The Economist. Since its founding in London in 1843, The Economist – which insists on calling itself a newspaper despite switching to a magazine format in the mid-twentieth century – has developed a reputation for intelligent, factual reporting and forthright advocacy for free trade and economic expansion. And it has weathered the digital storm far better than most publications, with print circulation now higher than it was prior to the arrival of the internet.

It is also, as City University of New York historian and New Left Review editor Alexander Zevin shows in this outstanding new history, an excellent prism through which to study and evaluate the record of ‘actually existing liberalism’. The Economist, Zevin writes, is where the bourgeoisie has spoken, ‘not as the only, or purest, expression of liberalism, but as the dominant one, with the greatest global impact for 175 years’.

Specifically, Zevin analyses how The Economist has responded to the three broad material and ideological forces that have shaped liberalism since the mid-nineteenth century: ‘radical demands for democracy, the ascent of finance in the global capitalist order, and imperial expansion, conflict, cooperation and continuing dominion’. His conclusions make for uncomfortable reading for all those who cherish their subscription to The Economist as an indicator of their capacity for reasoned and civilised thought.

Scottish hat-maker James Wilson was initially moved to establish The Economist as a way to campaign against Britain’s protectionist Corn Laws, 12 MARCH 2020

but the enthusiastic free marketeer and internationalist soon had much grander ideas. ‘We seriously believe,’ he wrote in his prospectus for the newspaper, ‘that FREE TRADE, free intercourse, will do more than any other visible agent to extend civilization and morality throughout the world – yes, to extinguish slavery itself.’ The Economist’s founding, writes Zevin, was ‘a milestone in political and economic thought, a bugle blast of the first age of global capitalism’.

The influence of the publication – and its editor – grew quickly. Wilson entered the House of Commons in 1847, and thereafter advised prime ministers on economic matters in both formal and informal capacities. Amusingly for Australian readers, he was later put forward for the role of governor of Victoria, but the appointment was blocked by the sovereign herself: Queen Victoria was not having a commoner in charge of the colony that bore her name.

Instead, Wilson was sent to India to work on taxation and financial matters in the aftermath of the Rebellion of 1857. Here, in Zevin’s telling, Wilson resembles a proto-neoliberal, relishing the power of his office and ‘seeking to apply in under one year policies that had taken decades to enact in England’.

One is immediately reminded of the shock therapy carried out by Milton Friedman’s ‘Chicago Boys’ in Pinochet’s Chile, or imposed by the International Monetary Fund on the former Soviet bloc states in the 1990s.

For all of Wilson’s passion and influence, however, it was his son-inlaw, Walter Bagehot, editor from 1861 to 1877, ‘whose output and reputation are in a class by themselves in the history of the Economist’. Bagehot carried

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW

on Wilson’s habit of exerting political influence, with Gladstone calling him a ‘supplementary Chancellor of the Exchequer’ and consulting him on matters of finance. Bagehot’s reputation continued to grow throughout the twentieth century, and his The English Constitution (1867) is still considered a seminal work on the British political system. (Many students of politics have no doubt returned to it in the futile hope of making sense of the Brexit mess.)

While acknowledging his contributions as a prolific writer on an extraordinarily wide range of topics, Zevin presents Bagehot as somewhat less of a model liberal thinker than his admirers choose to imagine. He was an unabashed élitist, hostile to all attempts to expand the franchise to the ‘lower classes’. Virtually alone, he regarded Louis-Napoléon as a genius, and praised his Second Empire to the bitter end. During the American Civil War,

The influence of the publication – and its editor – grew quickly he was scathing about Abraham Lincoln and sympathetic to the Confederacy. With regard to the British Empire, ‘Bagehot showed the same breezy, flexible confidence in imperial destiny as he did in English political economy’.

As Zevin demonstrates with great panache, this strain of imperial adventurism has been a mainstay of The Economist’s pages ever since. Whether Britain was seeking to prolong its centuries-long subjugation of nearby Ireland, or conquering far-flung territories in southern Africa, the Middle East, the Indian subcontinent, East Asia, and almost everywhere in between, The Economist urged it on. An exception to the rule occurred in the lead-up to and during World War I, when editor Francis Hirst urged neutrality and then a negotiated peace. For such heresy he was sacked in 1916.

The Economist became even more jingoistic as Western imperial power shifted across the Atlantic, forcefully backing the United States as it invoked the com-

munist threat to bully smaller nations into serving its political and economic interests. It was outrageously wrong about almost every aspect of the US débâcle in Vietnam: the massacre at My Lai was a ‘minor variation on the general fallibility of men at war’, it shrugged. The Economist maintained its support for the war long after most sensible observers had acknowledged its immorality and futility.

As American imperial incursions and atrocities piled up – Indonesia, the Dominican Republic, Greece, Cambodia, Chile, Nicaragua, Grenada, Iraq, Afghanistan – the cheerleading continued. The Economist ‘never saw a war it didn’t like’, as its veteran foreign editor Johnny Grimond said to nervous laughter at his retirement party in 2012. Even

after the disaster of the second invasion of Iraq in 2003, it remained adamant that US military might is a force for good in the world.

The Economist was similarly unrepentant in response to the global financial crisis of 2008. The near-total collapse of the international banking system did nothing to shake its belief in neoliberal economic orthodoxy and the institutional power of unregulated finance. ‘Steadfast,’ writes Zevin, ‘it acted as a kind of automatic stabilizer for a liberal ideological order suddenly racked with self-doubt.’

So, how has The Economist responded to democratic demands, imperial expansion, and the ascent of finance over the course of 175 years? Zevin per-

suasively and comprehensively shows it to have been spectacularly wrong on all three questions. Further, it remains blissfully unaware of the consequences of its worldview: ‘Averting their gaze, liberals have scratched their heads at the political volatility of the present, unable to recognize their handiwork.’

‘The Economist,’ we are told on its website, ‘considers itself the enemy of privilege, pomposity and predictability.’

Zevin has proved the emptiness of such claims with this masterful book. g Dominic Kelly is an Honorary Research Fellow at La Trobe University. He is the author of Political Troglodytes and Economic Lunatics: The hard right in Australia (La Trobe University Press, 2019).

Birds

Retired, my father tells me things.

He saw, far out to sea, a great Pacific gull, hefty, hook-beaked, hound a crow, slim brushstroke of ink.

Then, from the saltbrush, a shadow. A second crow,

arrowing in fast – in my father’s voice the thrill of the rescue rising – you could not tell if they were even friends, or it were just a question of iron martial honour

that crow always fights for crow.

When I am old, I will have no children to tell what he did to me. Did you know a man can pick a child up

by the head? I think we are born with an honour that means we cannot know that

till we do.

Belinda Rule Belinda Rule’s poetry chapbook, The Things the Mind Sees Happen, came out with Puncher & Wattmann’s Slow Loris series in late 2019.

PUBLISHING

13

‘Australian Soul’

A stellar work of Australian history

Hugh Chilton ATTENDING TO THE NATIONAL SOUL: EVANGELICAL CHRISTIANS IN AUSTRALIAN HISTORY 1914–2014

by Stuart Piggin and Robert D. Linder Monash University Publishing, $49.95 hb, 656 pp

E

ighty-one per cent of American evangelicals are said to have voted for Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential election and, with little variation, plan to do so again in November 2020. That number sparked four years of intense debate and a slew of books, signalling the latest chapter in a fascination with evangelicals and politics dating back to at least 1976 when Newsweek proclaimed the ‘Year of the Evangelical’ upon Jimmy Carter’s election. Whatever one wonders about just who counts as an ‘evangelical’ and what might be said about the broader movement in the age of hyper-partisanship, it has certainly been a boom time for histories of evangelicalism in the United States.

Given that it has been thirty years in the making, it is striking that Stuart Piggin and Robert D. Linder’s two-

volume history of evangelicals in Australia has appeared at such a time as this.

Following on from The Fountain of Public Prosperity: Evangelical Christians in Australian history, 1740–1914 (Monash University Publishing, 2018), which was reviewed by Paul Collins in the October 2018 issue of ABR, Attending to the National Soul takes the story up to the present. It is a story of a diverse movement of ‘biblical experientialist’ Christians engaged in the making of modern Australia and shaping the global evangelical movement in farreaching ways. It was long overdue but worth the wait. It is among the most significant works of both Australian history and global religious history in decades, and shows how being an evangelical in Australia has meant, and does mean, very different things from those in America.

This is a work of rare scale. When combined with the first volume, it runs to more than one thousand pages, supported by hundreds of references. The lens moves across the continent, around the world, and across time. While Sydney Anglicanism and Australian evangelicals’ experiences in wartime are its two deepest foci, the book demonstrates a commanding grasp of all parts of the movement across denominations, locations, and issues. From Japanese prisoner-of-war camps to heresy trials, from mainstreaming multiculturalism to pushing for the criminalisation of child pornography, evangelicals appear everywhere.

This is, after all, a history of evangelical Christians in Australian history, not just evangelicalism as a movement.

One of the great strengths of the book is its interweaving of a huge number

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14 MARCH 2020

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW

of personalities to illustrate the larger concerns of the movement and the nation. Some are well known. Alan Walker was a household name as leader of the Methodist Mission to the Nation in the early 1950s (forerunner of the hugely influential 1959 Billy Graham Crusade), founder of telephone counselling service ‘Lifeline’ at Sydney’s Central Methodist Mission (now the Wesley Centre), and one of the most outspoken critics of Australia’s involvement in Vietnam. Governor-General Bill Hayden called him the ‘conscience of the nation’.

The serious evangelical commitment of Reverend John Flynn, the Royal Flying Doctor Service founder whose face adorns the $20 note, appears alongside that of Aboriginal inventor David Unaipon, who features on the $50 note.

Others have long been missing from the story. Though well aware from Piggin and Linder’s first volume of the key role of evangelicals in the formation of the union movement and the Labor Party, I was surprised to learn about several of its evangelical postwar leaders, such as lay preacher Norman Makin, federal member of Parliament for long periods between 1919 and 1963, first Australian ambassador to the United States, and first president of the United Nations Security Council.

In a movement often derided as patriarchal, women feature prominently throughout Piggin and Linder’s account, not just in the extensive treatment of the female-ordination debates of the 1970s to 1990s. The prologue traces the life and activism of Mary Bennett, tireless champion of Aboriginal rights and lately hero of first-wave feminism. As they did with their study of First Fleet astronomer William Dawes in the prologue to their first volume, the authors show how historians have flattened Bennett (and so many others) by being deaf to the critical role of evangelical faith in motivating and mobilising her ‘dynamic altruism’.

Those familiar with Piggin and Linder’s considerable output of articles and books (the former’s 1996 Evangelical Christianity in Australia seeing three editions) will appreciate the wider mountain range across which this work, detailed as it is, traverses. Their patronage

of a generation of scholars in Australia European pasts. He told a big story, and their cultivation of transnational net- a human story, and provoked a response. works, chiefly through the Evangelical Piggin and Linder’s masterful work History Association, formed in 1987, gives a fresh account of evangelicals’ envia its journal Lucas and the print and gagement in the Australian story across digital Australian Dictionary of Evan- the last century. Like Clark, their big gelical Biography, is reflected in the range claims invite disagreement and debate. of studies drawn on. Many are by the The authors do not refrain from bracing dozens of students Piggin supervised judgements, especially about the tenbefore his retirement from Macquarie sions between ‘inclusive’ and ‘exclusive’ University in 2018 – including several forms of Anglican evangelicalism in insiders to the movement. The authors’ recent decades and the consequences own archival and oral history work over three decades is also substantial.

Thoroughly researched and highly readable, this is first-rate scholarship.

Beyond its scale and sensitivity to its subjects, the most significant contribution of Attending to the National Soul lies Mary Bennett teaching Bessie and Nardie to cook in her home. Mt Margaret Mission, 1934 (photograph courtesy of the State Library of Western Australia) in its title. Piggin and Linder address foundational questions about what it for the global church. The diversity of has meant to be Australian and what the movement, a theme throughout the part evangelicals have played in defining book, shows how crude it would be to asand nourishing both the conscience and sume that the identity concerns of conthe consciousness of the nation. They temporary American evangelicals are argue that the assumption of Austral- those of Australians.

Whatever one makes of their arguians’ innate secularity is just that, an assumption, and they show how, even after ments and evidence, Piggin and Linder’s the shocks of the 1960s, the ‘Australian definitive study ought to stimulate much soul is a very “Christianised” one’. They more attention to the crucial influence complicate the negative view of evan- of religion in Australian history and gelicals’ role in the nation that Manning encourage historians to look beyond the Clark did so much to establish. Far from standard categories of race, class, and being ‘cretinous puritans’ inimical to the gender. It ought to encourage them to ‘lively, interesting and creative’ society attend more to the national soul in their Australians might forge, they were al- own questions, looking for how actors ways engaged in the life of the nation. have aimed to ‘sensitise its conscience, Withdrawal was no option. Their chal- strengthen its moral energy, inform its lenge, entering the twenty-first century, consciousness, and fire its imagination was to avoid fighting so much with with a vision for the future’. g one another and to unite in a common response to the challenges of secularism. Hugh Chilton’s first book is EvanFor all the faults of Clark’s ap- gelicals and the End of Christendom: proach, its attraction to so many beyond Religion, Australia and the crises of the the academy lay in his bold thesis about 1960s (Routledge, 2020). He is Vicethe forces animating Australia and President of the Evangelical History Australians across their Aboriginal and Association. ❖ HISTORY

15

Two powers Paul Collins A TWENTIETH-CENTURY CRUSADE: THE VATICAN’S BATTLE TO REMAKE CHRISTIAN EUROPE

by Giuliana Chamedes

Harvard University Press (Footprint) $85 hb, 432 pp

T

he papacy’s role in international affairs is often underestimated.

A recent example is Pope Francis’s participation in the 2015 negotiations leading to a détente between Cuba and the United States. It helped, of course, that Barack Obama was president and that Raúl Castro had replaced his brother Fidel in Havana; but it was Francis, building on the work of his predecessors who had maintained continuous relations with the Castro regime, who brought the two sides together, and who persuaded the United States to drop its sanctions against Cuba.

Giuliana Chamedes’s A TwentiethCentury Crusade recognises the importance of Vatican diplomacy. Her focus is on Vatican internationalism in Europe between World War I and the Second Vatican Council of the 1960s.

She argues that, according to the papal analysis, the Great War was the result of the decline of church influence in European public life. Throughout this period, papal policy was centred on re-establishing a kind of pope-focused Catholicism, while attempting to eliminate the influence of both communism and secular-liberal democracy.

As the popes saw it, the key to maintaining a ‘uniquely Catholic international European order’ was the concordat, a binding agreement between church and state that guaranteed that human society was based ‘on the solid ground of Christian justice and Christian law’: in other words, a confessional state in which the law, particularly in matters of marriage, divorce, and education, would be in line with papal teachings. The ultimate aim was to have Catholicism declared the state religion with other faiths relegated to secondclass status. The notion of a secular, let 16 MARCH 2020

alone atheist, state was anathema.

The great champion of concordats was Eugenio Pacelli, who was successively nuncio in Bavaria, then Berlin, and, from early 1930, papal secretary of state. He was elected pope as Pius XII in March 1939. It was Pacelli who negotiated the disastrous Reichskonkordat in July 1933 with the newly elected Hitler, giving the Führer the international respectability he craved, while achieving little to protect German Catholics.

Papal policy, characterised by Chamedes as a ‘crusade’, was successful when it coincided with the aims of dictators like Mussolini, Hitler, Augustinas Voldemaras in Lithuania, and Franco in Spain. At the heart of this crusade was the attack on communism. The opening salvo was Pius XI’s encyclical Quadragesimo anno (1931), which was as critical of capitalism as it was of socialism and communism. But it was the encyclical’s anti-communist stance that many Catholics embraced.

In Australia, it was this encyclical that first influenced Bob Santamaria’s deepseated anti-communism and his unsympathetic assessment of capitalism.

One of Chamedes’s unique discoveries is the Vatican’s Secretariat on Atheism, a body that has been neglected by historians. It led the papal assault on communism by employing all available media, including using travelling exhibitions, sponsoring radio programs (Marconi opened Vatican Radio in 1931), publishing journals, and even promoting novelwriting contests and film scripts. It also worked with other anti-communist elements, including fascists, Nazis, and right-wingers in Europe and North America. But Chamedes also shows that there was articulate opposition within Catholicism to Vatican policies on church–state relations and religious freedom. Italian priest and politician Luigi Sturzo, French philosopher Jacques Maritain, and US theologian John Courtney Murray opposed the notion of the confessional state and spoke out in favour of democracy and pluralism.

While the Vatican maintained the crusade until Pius XII’s death in 1958, postwar Catholic leaders like West Germany’s Konrad Adenauer and Alcide

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW

De Gasperi in Italy were not interested in establishing confessional states. After the deaths of António Salazar in 1970 and Francisco Franco in 1975, Portugal and Spain, the last two autocratic Catholic strongholds, embraced democracy and pluralism. The church itself jettisoned confessionalism in the Vatican II decree Dignitatis humanae (1965), which unequivocally accepted the separation of church and state and the right of everyone to conscientious religious freedom.

Chamedes’s book is an important addition to papal studies. However, by limiting her purview to Europe she misses the real struggle that was occurring within Catholicism. It’s true that until Vatican II the popes supported the confessional state in majority Catholic countries because this was the ‘natural order’ of things. ‘Error has no rights’ was the catchcry. But in democratic countries like Australia, where Catholics were in a minority, Rome reverted to realpolitik by accepting a reality it could not change. It was Murray who highlighted the double standard promoted by a doctrine whereby what was ‘heresy’ in one country was acceptable in another. Murray also showed that there was a more ancient tradition that went back to Pope Gelasius I (492–96 ce) who spoke of ‘two powers by which the world is ruled’: the sacred and secular.

The irony is that separation of church and state is rooted in this ancient Gelasian tradition. Murray also showed that ‘error has no rights’ was meaningless nonsense. While Chamedes briefly mentions Murray, her book would have been strengthened if she had tackled this theological debate. In fact, the one important thing missing from the book is a serious engagement with the underlying theological issues.

The popes had inherited the medieval notion of church and state as two sides of the same coin. This was reinforced by the First Vatican Council (1870) when it defined papal primacy, essentially making the pope dictator of the church. This crude theology was only finally abandoned at Vatican II, when Catholicism eventually caught up with twentieth-century reality. g Paul Collins is a past ABR Fellow.

Crisis lexicon

A

Amanda Laugesen

s I write this, Canberra is once again under threat from the Orroral Valley fire south of the city. This comes after a summer of intense and incredibly destructive bushfires and, for Canberra, endless days of smoke haze, followed by a damaging hailstorm. The coronavirus also dominates the daily newsfeeds as a global health emergency takes hold.

Our public language in the last months has been transformed by these crises. Here at the Australian National Dictionary Centre, we continually monitor the language, looking for new words and studying the various changes in our ways of speaking.

Bushfires have of course long been a part of Australian life. The lexicon of bushfire is an important part of Australian English. The word bushfire itself is an Australianism, first recorded in 1832. From the late nineteenth century, we record many bushfire compounds, including bushfire risk (1892), bushfire threat (1895), bushfire country (1901), bushfire smoke (1870), bushfire season (1876), and bushfire menace (1906). Many of the terms we have seen mentioned in this recent bushfire crisis (a term dating from at least 1932) date back to the early decades of the twentieth century. These include bushfire plan, bushfire survival plan, bushfire warning, bushfireaffected, and bushfire emergency.

Our ‘emergency’ vocabulary has also expanded in recent years (and months) with a variety of technical and other terms entering the lexicon. We now find ourselves looking to see what the AQI (air quality index) is and whether it has reached a hazardous rating so we can use our P2 mask; we have become familiar with what a pyrocumulus, an ember attack, and a fire tornado are; and we know the difference between watch and act, emergency warning, and fires operating at advice level. Phrases such as stay and defend and too late to leave have entered our consciousness and, for some of us, have informed lifechanging decisions.

Our recent bushfire disaster has taken place within a broader debate around climate change. Anthropogenic climate change has steadily transformed our public language, despite the presence of climate denialism. We

have talked for some time now about the climate crisis and climate emergency, both terms that have dramatically increased in usage. Oxford Dictionary’s Word of the Year for 2019 was climate emergency, Collins Dictionary selected climate strike.

Words that speak to the threat to humanity’s very existence have become more prominent. We see increased use of terms such as climate breakdown, tipping point, apocalypse, and mass extinction, and we have been introduced to the idea of omnicide. The latter, defined as ‘the killing of everybody or everything; the destruction of all living things’ was coined in the 1950s, but few of us were familiar with it until it started to be used in the media in recent months.

Although the bushfire crisis may pass for now, our public language is likely to have been changed forever.

Will a language of crisis become what we live with? Will it help to motivate a feeling of urgency about doing something? How do we learn to live with a feeling of endless crisis? Eco-anxiety and climate change distress are now things many of us are experiencing.

Language does matter. A language of crisis can help to impart a sense of urgency and to make people more aware of the significance of the issues at stake. But it also might have counter-productive consequences. Perhaps most notably we have seen that the Morrison government, although no longer able to avoid discussing the consequences of climate change, appears to be developing a language that repeatedly uses phrases such as new normal. Such phrases run the risk of making us think only of adapting to consequences rather than, for example, addressing the need for our country to take immediate drastic action to curb carbon emissions, or to reduce our consumption. And the new normal is likely not to remain normal – things will almost certainly get worse.

Climate activism offers us the hope that we may be able to do something to effect change. School strikes, climate strikes, people’s climate assemblies, and climate protests might help to raise awareness. We now talk of climate justice. Calls for sustainability and living sustainably are more broadly informing our lifestyle choices, and community and volunteer efforts will help to make a difference to things such as the regeneration of the bush.

Resilience, climate mitigation, and (deep) adaptation are words we are hearing more of, as we learn to find ways to live, if we can, with a hotter planet and country. The increased spotlight on Indigenous ways of managing land offers one path. Zena Cumpston, a Barkindji woman and research fellow at the University of Melbourne, recently called for Aboriginal people to be restored as custodians of Country. There is much to learn from cultural (or traditional) knowledge of the environment, cultural fire-management practices such as cultural burns, and the leadership of Indigenous fire practitioners. g Amanda Laugesen is director of the Australian National Dictionary Centre, ANU. LA N G UAG E

17

A multifarious mind Kári Gíslason AFTERSHOCKS: SELECTED WRITINGS AND INTERVIEWS

by Anthony Macris

UWA Publishing, $29.99 pb, 349 pp

A

t the beginning of this wideranging collection of criticism by the novelist, critic, and academic Anthony Macris, the author notes wryly that an early candidate for the book’s title was Personality Crisis, such is its diversity of topics and styles.

The implication here is that reviews and essays form a kind of autobiography.

I’m not sure I would use the word ‘crisis’ to describe it, but certainly the portrait we have in this case is of a writer driven by very different kinds of curiosity: about literature and writing but also the art forms that lie beyond them – and, as centrally, by a social and political curiosity about the ways those forms change when they respond to the world around us.

Macris’s own part in that world began in Brisbane in 1962, where he grew up in a house at the back of his parents’ fish-and-chip shop. In 1998, Macris’s first novel, Capital, earned him a place in the Sydney Morning Herald ’s list of Best Young Australian Novelists.

The work was the first in a series about the impact of market forces in people’s lives; the second novel, Great Western Highway, appeared in 2012. Along the way, Macris has worked as a Creative Writing academic at the University of 18 MARCH 2020

Technology Sydney, has been a regular reviewer in the national media, and has published a memoir and, most recently, a collection of short stories.

Given Macris’s varied career, it is not surprising that a collection of his criticism yields many different subject matters. The title he ultimately chose alludes to the ‘subterranean forces that have shaped the first two decades of the 2000s’. For Macris, these are terrorism, climate change, and neoliberal economics. But books are at his work’s core, as well as a rich assembly of writing about films and exhibitions, interviews with visiting artists, and essays on more scholarly topics such as literary realism and Macris’s reflections on the writing process.

Those reflections open the book, along with essays about the novel as a form, the role of art, and an insightful piece about the troubles of the Norwegian memoirist Karl Ove Knausgaard and why we seem so captivated by them.

Here, Macris joins the sensibilities of a writer with the broader awareness of a theorist. He situates Knausgaard in an Aristotelian tradition that puts action ahead of character, an approach that sponsors Knausgaard’s self-concern but also his less concerned characterisation of others.

The fusion of theory and practice appears again towards the end of Aftershocks in a series of interviews with Macris himself. In one from the Los Angeles Review of Books, he comments on the role of the novel as a witness to ‘capitalism’s terrible dynamism, its crushing prevalence’. Perhaps more unusual, though, is how Macris positions this witnessing as a formal question as much as one of subject matter.

It is fascinating to read a writer’s reflections on his practice when he is so consciously positioned in terms of literary movements. As Macris puts it, he has been trying ‘to take the spirit of the modernist tradition, always an internationalist spirit, and to see and speak things that haven’t been seen or spoken before, at least in the form of the novel’.

Whether the short review pieces that occupy the middle sections of this book do enough to bear out such inter-

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW

ests is another question. Macris writes very good reviews. Though he is clearly motivated by sociopolitical concerns, he is also an open and responsive reader.

Despite the brevity of the reviews, in some he is able to include wider theoretical concerns. This is particularly the case in his reviews of Don DeLillo, Michel Houellebecq, and Martin Amis. As a number of their books are reviewed, we get the chance to relate them and indeed to connect them to the collection as a whole.

I wondered whether his short reviews belonged in the same collection as the essays, interviews, and sociopolitical analyses. Naturally, they are intended for newspapers and magazines, where the task is to respond quickly to new work.

But in the context of a collection like this, they seem fragmentary, over before they really begin. Perhaps because of this, they have been gathered in sections based on the geographical origin of the works being reviewed: American Fiction and Nonfiction, British Fiction and Nonfiction, and so on. These parameters add categorisation and a sense of unity to this part of the book, but of course less in thematic development and weight.

Another inclusion one might question is that of three previously unpublished pieces about film, which Macris wrote in the late 1990s. While the short reviews suffer from having a very specific purpose, these earlier works struck me as still searching for theirs.

The ideas are developing on the page, almost as explanations and notes to himself. And yet, this may well be the point of featuring them here, for they do illuminate the personality of the author through the longevity and multifariousness of his obsessions.

An earlier title for that appetite was ‘split personality’. Perhaps that wasn’t so very far from what Macris went with in the end. The aftershocks he has in mind are those of a post-9/11 world, but, as much as that, they are the unpredictable and varied reactions of a writer willing to be affected by it. g Kári Gíslason teaches creative writing and literary studies at Queensland University of Technology.

19

F I C T I O N

The Termination Bill Louise Erdrich’s languorous new novel

Beejay Silcox THE NIGHTWATCHMAN

by Louise Erdrich Corsair, $28.99 pb, 464 pp

‘If you should ever doubt that a series of dry words in a government document can shatter spirits and demolish lives, let this book erase that doubt. Conversely if you should be of the conviction that we are powerless to change those dry words, let this book give you heart’ Louise Erdrich

L

ouise Erdrich would never write again. The National Book Award-winning author was bereft of ideas and exhausted by a tenacious winter virus. She surrendered to sleep, heavy with the certainty that her literary career was over. ‘Hours later, I was jolted awake by some mysterious flow of information,’ Erdrich explains in the afterword of her new novel, The Nightwatchman, a glorious rebuke to her fever-addled defeatism. A message beat in her brain: go back to the beginning.

‘I made myself a shaky cup of tea,’ she writes, ‘and then, as I’ve done so many times in my life, I began to read letters written the year I was born, my grandfather’s letters.’

Erdrich’s grandfather, Patrick Gourneau, was the tribal chairman of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa in the early 1950s, a time when there was a ruthless congressional push to sever the US government’s obligations to the treaties it had made with American Indian nations. Announced on 1 August 1953, House Concurrent Resolution 108 – the Termination Bill – called for the end of all tribal recognition. ‘In the newspapers, the author of the proposal had constructed a cloud of lofty words around this bill – emancipation, freedom, equality, success – that disguised its truth,’ Erdrich writes. ‘Termination.

Missing only the prefix. The ex’.

Erdrich’s grandfather wore himself 20 MARCH 2020

ragged fighting the Termination Bill; campaigning during the day and writing letters during the night, barely sleeping.

The Nightwatchman takes its inspiration from his vigilant resolve. ‘This book is fiction,’ Erdrich explains. ‘But all the same, I have tried to be faithful to my grandfather’s extraordinary life.’

Thomas Wazhushk is a nightwatchman at a factory that makes jewel bearings for military ordnances and fancy watches. In the long quiet of the night shift, he attends to the mounting responsibilities of his post as tribal chairman, a job that was supposed to pay thirty dollars a month, but there’s never been enough money to draw a salary. ‘There weren’t enough jobs. There wasn’t enough land … There just wasn’t enough of anything and if he didn’t save what little there was from disappearing there was no imagining how anyone would get along.’

Thomas is part of the ‘after-thebuffalo-who-are-we-now generation’, the first generation born on the reservation. ‘His generation would have to define themselves,’ Erdrich writes.

‘Who was an Indian? ... How should being an Indian relate to this country that had conquered, and was trying in every way possible to absorb them?’

These are elemental, pressing questions; rumours of the Termination Bill are swirling. ‘We have survived smallpox, the Winchester repeating rifle, the Hotchkiss gun and tuberculosis. We have survived the flu epidemic of 1918, and four or five deadly United States wars,’ Thomas thinks to himself in the echoing dark of the factory. ‘But at last we will be destroyed by a collection of tedious words.’

Thomas has a family to support, a marriage to keep strong, a father slip-

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW

ping away, a community to unite. As sleepless days turn into weeks, he begins to wander into waking dreams, his mind stretched too taut. ‘There was a hollow feeling, a thrumming, a sense that his body had become a drum. That anyone could knock on him and get a sound.’

On the factory floor, Thomas’s niece Patrice ‘Pixie’ Paranteau (a nickname she’s desperate to shed) works as a jewel-setter, her mind as dextrous as her fingers. She too feels attenuated, emptied: ‘like she was stretched across a frame, like a skin tent’. Her father is a cruel, volatile drunk and her sister, who left Turtle Mountain for the promises of city wealth, has vanished into the Minneapolis underworld. Pixie’s rate of eighty-five cents per hour is ‘the only barrier between her family and disaster’.

At least two young men are ‘moony’ over her, but she is wary of their peacocking; she has seen what marriage brings: ‘girls who got married and had children were worn down before the age of twenty.

Nothing happened to them but toil.’

Her body still carries the bruises from the last boy she said no to. In Thomas’s story we see what it means to fight; in Pixie’s we see why the fight matters.

Like the quilt on Thomas’s bed – pieced from generations of family coats – The Nightwatchman is a patchwork of lovingly stitched vignettes. There are few contemporary writers as generous as Erdrich; few who throw open the doors so wide and so warmly. Each of her novels feels like an invitation. But they are more than invitations, they are the pieces of a grand argument: you can only understand what is at stake, her books tell us, if you take the time to listen. And so we meet Turtle Mountain’s young romantics, aging secret-keepers and wakeful ghosts; its teachers, lech-

ers, and leaders. There is grand humour here: a pair of amorous horses disrupts a parade; two boxers spend the month before their bout conspicuously faking injuries; a pair of hapless Mormon missionaries can’t stand the sight of each other. There is also a quiet hymn to the natural world, its ‘swirling, seething’ energy. ‘How intimately the trees seized the earth,’ Pixie reflects. ‘How exquisitely she was included.’

There are few writers as generous as Erdrich; few who throw open the doors so wide and so warmly But circling above it all like some black-winged, bureaucratic vulture is the Termination Bill. Its sponsor, Arthur V. Watkins – a Republican senator from Utah – is a righteous man (in real life, Watkins’s deportment at the Termination Bill hearings was described as ‘convey[ing] an air of rectitude that was almost terrifying’). How can you fight such intractable certainty? How can you even be heard? In our era of political corner-taking, these feel like the questions of the age. Erdrich’s novel suggests they always have been. As the Trump administration flirts with termination-era policies, history is certainly repeating.

The politics inside The Nightwatchman is urgent, but this is not an urgent book. Erdrich’s narrative may be driven

by Thomas’s and Pixie’s overlapping tales, but it takes the scenic route, a languorous immersion in Turtle Mountain life, from the quotidian pleasures of cracking nuts on the porch to the ferocious rivalries of amateur boxing tournaments, and via dark and desperate detours, from sex trafficking to prison mortality. Sitting in the winter sunshine with his father, Thomas thinks: ‘he should hold onto this. Whatever was said, he should hold on. Whatever gestures his father made, hold on.’ That is precisely what Erdrich does, so carefully and so beautifully: she holds on. g Beejay Silcox is an Australian writer, literary critic, and cultural commentator.

Tidal pull Alice Nelson ACTRESS

by Anne Enright

Jonathan Cape, $29.99 pb, 264 pp

A

nne Enright has never been able to resist the tidal pull of mothers; her novels are animated by complex, ambivalent maternal presences, women rendered on the page with duelling measures of hatred and hunger, empathy and censure. There is the mercurial tyrant Rosaleen Madigan of The Green Road (2015), ‘a woman who did nothing and expected everything’. There is the hapless, hazy Maureen Hegarty of the Booker Prize-winning The Gathering (2007), erased by her endless pregnancies and too many children; ‘a piece of benign human meat, sitting in a room’.

‘We pity our mothers,’ Enright says in The Gathering, ‘what they had to put up with in bed or in the kitchen, and we hate them or we worship them, but we always cry for them.’ This elegiac sense pervades Enright’s novel Actress, which is also a fraught hymn to a complicated mother, but in this new work something has gone awry. There is a strange slackening of vitality and a failure to fully penetrate the hidden recesses of individual lives that results in an oddly unsatisfying novel, though one that is not without its quietly luminous moments.

One of the difficulties of Actress, which is cast as a daughter’s diligently rendered posthumous account of her famous mother’s life, is that it inhabits almost entirely what James Wood calls the ‘pressureless zones of retrospect’.

Like The Gathering, this novel is concerned with the reanimation of one painfully evanescent life through reflection and reimagining. Unlike that masterful earlier novel, Actress feels hobbled by the dutiful restraint of the biographer.

Norah FitzMaurice, daughter of the long-dead Irish star Katherine O’Dell, recounts the story of her mother’s life and career in one long sweep of narrative. Darling of the Irish stage and screen, Katherine was the beautiful daughter of strolling players, making her

stage début at the age of ten. A role as a young Irish nun in a film called Mulligan’s Holy War catapults her to fame and fortune, and her legion fans later delight in her appearance in an iconic television advertisement for Irish butter. Subject to all the usual insecurities of the ageing beauty with diminishing prospects, Katherine’s life is clouded by scandal after she somewhat inexplicably shoots a film producer in the foot.

Then we see her addled in an asylum, paranoid and speaking gibberish, her insanity rattling away ‘like the lid of a boiling pot’. Tethered as it is to the past, the only forward momentum that the novel has is Norah’s attempt to resolve certain questions about her mother. In the end, these questions are not urgent enough to sustain the story.

Enright herself has forcefully eschewed the antic, performative nature of plot, calling it an ‘externalised mechanism of revelation’, privileging instead the intimacy of story, which she conceptualises as ‘telling it into someone’s ear’. Her privileging of style places her in a fine tradition; it was Flaubert, after all, who wrote that the most beautiful novels are those with the least matter, that the subject of art is irrelevant and literary style itself the absolute way of seeing things. But abandoning the machinations of narrative relies upon the incantatory power of voice. In Actress, the monologic narration that has served Enright so brilliantly in her other novels falters.

The sedulously rendered account of Katherine O’Dell’s life has a static quality, and for all that Norah tells us about her mother’s commanding presence, she never comes fully into focus.

Instead, her attempts to explain her mother frequently devitalise and reduce her. Norah informs us: ‘And Katherine O’Dell was an artist. She was all about sincerity, courage, self-sacrifice. That was the whole point. With each iteration or draft or performance she gave it everything she had. Everything!!’ There is something anodyne and clotted about these kind of summations, something unworthy of Enright.

Despite its missteps, Actress still has its flashes of brilliance. The crystalline prose of Enright’s earlier novels is frequently on display, as is her inimitable FICTION

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turn of phrase and her mordant humour.

Watching her husband sleeping, Norah reflects on ‘the disaster of the body when it does not know itself, or realise that someone else is there’. A priest looks like ‘a pocket version of God’. A poet sounds testy when reading his work aloud, ‘as though obliged to expose his yearning to the crowd’. Enright has always been a virtuoso when it comes to writing about sex; its enigmatic singularity and mechanistic sameness, its violence and tenderness coexisting in equal portion.

Of Norah’s disbelieving joy in her first sexual encounter, she writes: ‘This first surprise was quickly lost in a larger astonishment, that such a thing could happen inside you − a place I had not properly considered − it felt like he was going up into my head, right into my mind.’ Later, she writes about an exploitative encounter with a man who is ‘so inward, so inert in his pleasure’ that ‘it did not feel like he was fucking me, he was just trying to find and catch his own pleasure’.

It is insights like these that makes us yearn for more of Norah’s interior life than Enright allows us. But just as Norah has finally seized hold of our imagination, the curtain falls and she is gone. We mourn the slenderness of her presence, just as we mourn Enright’s failure to deliver a fresh and fully imagined fiction when we had greedily expected so much more. g

Alice Nelson’s most recent novel is The Children’s House (2018).

Dante-dark Peter Craven THE BOOK OF DUST, VOLUME TWO: THE SECRET COMMONWEALTH

by Philip Pullman

Penguin and David Fickling Books, $32.99 pb, 784 pp

P

hilip Pullman must be one of the weirdest figures to emerge from the sometimes dark woods of children’s writing. Not the least striking thing about him is that the woods can be very dark, Dante-dark, indeed.

At the same time, he does not have the ballast of those two mutually despising inklings to whom he is routinely compared, C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien, in having the deeper comforts of anything like the Christian mythology that feeds into the Narnia books, or the way in which The Lord of the Rings summons up a universe of Gothic and Germanic ring-lore and then shows how it works with tremendous moral force and with snow-white magic against all the putative and primeval Nazism in the world.

But these are the parallels with Pullman. At the very moment when J.K. Rowling showed herself to be a phenomenal popular writer on a par with, say, Agatha Christie, the trilogy

of Pullman’s His Dark Materials (1995–2000) proffered some kind of literary masterpiece that was immeasurably deeper and more disturbing.

The title came from Paradise Lost, and Pullman’s vision was in sharp contrast to the essentially Catholic benignities of the other two, so radically protestant that it looked like an atheism atomising itself into a hailstorm of mythopeia all the weirder for being homemade in the radical, bewildering way that William Blake is.

In Pullman’s universe, dominated by a sinister and morally ambivalent Oxford, where the gargoyles loom amid the vision of grace in stone, everyone comes with a daemon equivalent to their soul but taking the form of an animal that communes and confronts and fights for them. The world is ruled by a ghastly life-denying Magisterium that represents the face of the Church at its most authoritarian, kindling the flames to quench heresy. Conservative Christians wanted the film of The Golden Compass (2007) banned, while its Catholic star, Nicole Kidman, denied that it was antireligious. Pullman, who says he would hear the voice of God in the St Matthew Passion if he believed it existed, presents a vision that might almost be Calvinistic in its grimness. A vision, too, where the face of the mother is like the face of Clytemnestra.

Recently, Pullman has been at work on a new sequence. In La Belle Sauvage (2017), the first volume of The Book of Dust, Lyra, the twelve-yearold heroine of the original trilogy, is a baby. In The Secret Commonwealth, the action is set ten years on from the trilogy.

Lyra is at Oxford and finds herself in conflict with her daemon Pantalaimon, the pine marten. The Magisterium is limbering up for new acts of worldenslaving horror with the suave and

Gerald Murnane: Another World in This One Out now in the Sydney Studies in Australian Literature series sydneyuniversitypress.com.au (portrait by Zan Wimberley 2019)

22 MARCH 2020

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW

sinister Marcel Delamare pulling the strings. It is also a world where Lyra Silvertongue, formerly known as Lyra Belacqua, is in fact in love with a stalwart scholar, Malcolm Polstead, who appeared as a boy in La Belle Sauvage.

Lyra becomes separated from her soulmate Pan and goes in quest of him to lands of Roses (which are mysteriously treasured). The book also makes much of the atomised treasure Pullman calls ‘dust’. It is all as weird and as self-generated as the prophetic book aspect of Blake, and it is not for nothing that the epigraph is from him: ‘Everything possible to be believ’d is an image of truth.’

The weird thing about Pullman, who, on one level, represents the fantastication of something like a Christopher Hitchens–Stephen Fry level of atheism, is that he is superabundantly imaginative, and every strange byway or epically defiant lurch he takes into a world of conjured horrors is embodied in a way that defies the mind, dazzles the soul, and tugs at the heart in a way that recreates, as if by some principle of recapitulative miracle, the danger and darkness and spellbound excitement with which we meet King Arthur or discover the Holy Grail at the age of eight or ten.

Pullman really is that sheerly talented and remarkable. God knows what he is doing concocting these parabolic extravaganzas at a moment in literary history still dominated by the afterglow of David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, by

‘This is a truly exceptional book. The research is colossal, the analysis nuanced, the argument highly original, and the story-telling gripping.’

Bain Attwood

www.publishing.monash.edu

ISBN 978-1-925835-68-7

Jeffrey Eugenides’s The Virgin Suicides, and all that unpredictable suburbanisation of a postmodernism that seemed to be fading.

Somehow, against all the odds, Pullman is a master storyteller who is also a writer of great emotional range and moral gravity. He has a sheer command of narrative that is some distance ahead of most literary novelists who can do plot; he is also a writer where all the imaginary gardens not only have real toads in them but where the toads glow and gloat and mutate.

All of this will sound very odd indeed to anyone who wouldn’t go within cooee of fantasy or anything written for

children, but they will be mistaken. This is fantasy writing that is either great art or something that overleaps the category. One clue to this is that many millennials think of Pullman as their Homer figure. Some of their parents would be appalled at the darkness of the vision he discloses; others might have discovered that he speaks to something deeper in them in this ongoing saga of innocence and experience than can usually be seen through any glass darkly.

And it does not depend on the things of childhood or an outmoded idiom of simplicity. g Peter Craven is a Melbourne critic.

‘a truly exceptional book’ Bain Attwood

On Red Earth Walking The Pilbara Aboriginal Strike, Western Australia 1946–1949 Anne Scrimgeour

Anne Scrimgeour

In 1946 Aboriginal people walked off pastoral stations in Western Australia’s Pilbara region, withdrawing their labour from the economically important wool industry to demand improvements in wages and conditions. Their strike lasted three years. On Red Earth Walking is the first comprehensive account of this significant, unique, and understudied episode of Australian history.

Using extensive and previously unsourced archival evidence, Anne Scrimgeour interrogates earlier historical accounts of the strike, delving beneath the strike’s mythology to uncover the rich complexity of its history.

The use of Aboriginal oral history places Aboriginal actors at the centre of these events, foregrounding their agency and their experiences. Scrimgeour provides a lucid examination of the system of colonial control that existed in the Pilbara prior to the strike, and a fascinating and detailed account of how these mechanisms were gradually broken down by three years of striker activism. Amid Cold War fears of communist subversion in the north, the prominence of communists among southern supporters and the involvement of a non-Aboriginal activist, Don McLeod, complicated settler responses to the strike. This history raises provocative ideas around racial tensions in a pastoral settler economy, and examines political concerns that influenced settler responses to the strike, to create a nuanced and engaging account of this pivotal event in Australian Indigenous and labour histories.

The Pilbara Aboriginal Strike, Western Australia 1946–1949

Anne Scrimgeour

On Red Earth Walking

On Red Earth Walking The Pilbara Aboriginal Strike, Western Australia 1946–1949

Philip Pullman (photograph by K.T. Bruce)

Distributed by 9 781925 835687 > Australian History

www.publishing.monash.edu

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Rewriting Lawson Ellen van Neerven THE DROVER’S WIFE: THE LEGEND OF MOLLY JOHNSON

by Leah Purcell

Hamish Hamilton, $32.99 pb, 288 pp

L

eah Purcell has described how her lifelong fascination with Henry Lawson’s iconic 1892 short story provided her with abundant creative ammunition. Her mother read her the story when she was five; it held a special place for them both. ‘I’d say the famous last line: “Ma, I won’t never go drovin ... she’d tear up”.’

If you haven’t read Lawson’s story or need a refresher: a nameless woman is left by her drover husband in an isolated hut with their four young children.

Engulfed by sundry threats, she spies a snake. She and her dog Alligator sit up all night to guard the sleeping children.

The story has been adapted by many Australian writers, including Frank Moorhouse, Barbara Baynton, and Ryan O’Neill. Purcell is the first Aboriginal writer to tackle it. The medium of choice here is her first novel, after a critically acclaimed play that premièred at Belvoir St Theatre in 2016. A film adaption is in post-production, and a television series is on the cards.

Purcell resolved to tell her version of ‘The Drover’s Wife’ while on location in the Snowy Mountains making Ray Lawrence’s film Jindabyne (2006).

Purcell’s descriptions of this place in her novel are heightened by a striking cover design featuring a photograph by Murray Fredericks. We read about this country and its snow gums and inevitably think of the recent catastrophic fires.

Purcell’s novel examines gender politics through its central characters.

Molly encounters Yadaka at a time when both need each other. Yadaka is on the run from the authorities, and Molly is in labour. Through Molly and Yadaka, The Drover’s Wife contrasts the struggles of white women with those of Aboriginal men during colonial times.

24 MARCH 2020

Even when Molly cuts off Yadaka’s collar – symbol of property – they are not of equal status. The white authorities will not be happy until Yadaka is killed and Molly returns to the domestic sphere.

In the nineteenth century, the new colony was a ‘man’s world’, though white women were not mere victims. Historian Marilyn Lake has written of white women’s double identity as ‘both colonising and colonised’. White women participated in and benefited from colonial violence through the theft and mistreatment of land, the killing of Aboriginal people, and the separation of families. ‘White women civilised while white men brutalised,’ Aileen Moreton-Robinson writes in Talkin’ Up To the White Woman: Indigenous women and feminism (2000). Purcell’s writing of this becomes more complex at the novel’s twist (which I won’t spoil).

There are many Aboriginal characters in Purcell’s novel, in contrast to their minor roles in Lawson’s story. The local Ngarigo have an active presence, both as spirits and among the living. The bush in The Drover’s Wife is a place of spirituality and healing, to be understood and lived with rather than feared and fought against.

Molly demonstrates what is seen through a Eurocentric contemporary reading as masculine qualities; at seven she could ‘kill, skin, gut, cut and cook’ a roo. She uses native plants for medicine or food. Her breast milk draws out a lurking snake, which she kills.

(Yes, you did read that sentence correctly.) Molly is closest to her eldest son, Danny. Sensitive and thoughtful, he possesses a combination of feminine and masculine energies. Unlike the other children, he seems to intuit his mother’s secrets.

The book’s prelude foreshadows a friendship between Danny and Louisa Clintoff. Louise, a newspaper proprietor, has encouraged Danny to write poetry by Louisa. Henry Lawson’s writer, publisher, and suffragist mother, Louisa, began a journal called The Dawn. Louisa published and encouraged Lawson’s first writing. She also founded The Dawn Club, which became the hub of the suffrage movement in Sydney. Although Purcell honours her legacy, the character

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW

feels representative of a movement and is one-dimensional in comparison to Molly, Yadaka, and Danny.

Yadaka could be the embodiment of the man with his head held high in Lawson’s story. He’s troubled and pained but not ashamed of who he is. He’s from Guugu Yimithirr country – land of rainforest and coloured sands, his mother’s country – and trying to get back there. Purcell explores her own inherited stories through Yadaka, who is based on her great-grandfather, another Queenslander. Like Yadaka, he was made to tour South Africa as a circus performer.

Like the legendary Uncle Archie Roach, who released his memoir Tell Me Why in 2019, Purcell is an impressive all-rounder. I saw her rousing performance in her stage version, which won several major awards. As an aspiring theatre-maker, I read the outstanding script. I have been a fan of Purcell’s drama since the strong, lean writing that emerged from Box the Pony (1997).

As a novel, The Drover’s Wife can drag. Point of view changes abruptly from third to first. It feels as though Purcell is using tools straight out of cinema. The numerous ‘angles’ can sometimes create lag. If anything, this work suffers from coming after a successful play. Purcell mentions that material from both have been borrowed for this novel, permitting the addition of back-stories and characterisation. The set-up in Purcell’s prose leaves us craving action.

Ultimately, we are rewarded. After the reveal, the book blisters at great speed to its well-executed ending.

The extent to which Lawson’s story has fuelled Purcell’s work is evident in the high level of detail faithfully transferred from the original. Purcell has written herself and her mother into Molly Johnson’s story because they recognise themselves in it. This layered adaptation reminds me how retellings by those who can offer a different perspective can unsettle the status quo. More appropriations and contestations of ‘the classics’ by First Nations writers, please. g Ellen van Neerven’s new poetry collection, Throat, will be published by UQP in April 2020.

Larrikins Gerard Windsor COLLECTED STORIES

by Louis Nowra

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Arden, $40 pb, 331 pp

ollected Stories is a misleading title for Louis Nowra’s new publication. It’s nothing as uniform as that. Apart from poetry, is there any genre in which Nowra has not made his mark? He’s a playwright, screenwriter, novelist, memoirist, local historian, essayist, reviewer, feature journalist – and the author of one enduring Australian gem in Così (1992), in all its multiple forms. Yet he has scouted out other territories and the results jostle together in Collected Stories. Such a title conjures up a lifetime’s labour in the genre – gatherings of Anton Chekhov or John Cheever or Alice Munro. But Nowra’s volume is essentially a ragbag of disparate writings.

For example, we’ve got a Young Adult novel, a hundred-page satire on Sydney society, four pages on how to kill and cook rabbits (which may or may not be a spoof ), ‘Ten Anecdotes About Lord Howe Island’ (which may or may not be historical), an imagining of a dark moment in Alfred Deakin’s later life, and two short stories, undoubtedly so because they were published in 1985 in Overland and Southerly.

Different breeds of larrikin dominate the pages, and I sense that’s the company where Nowra is most at home. For one thing, it allows for all sorts of cheeky throwaway mots whose ownership, you suspect, might be shared equally between Nowra and his characters. We get ‘jobless actors whose commitment to animal rights is based on the fact that directors treat them like cattle and they identify with dumb animals’, and feminism ‘is merely the continuation of the ancient war between the sexes, only this time one side has an ideology’.

Comedy seems Nowra’s forte, but this collection shows his readiness to try anything rather more than it demonstrates any outstanding success

in one or another mode. At least part of the reason for this must be a lack of editorial input. The giveaway is the slovenly proofreading; time and again whole words have just dropped out.

More substantially, however, pieces don’t realise their potential: the initial idea is good, but it’s never twisted or taken up to a new level. There is too much bloat – too many repetitions of similar plot episodes – and a certain tedium sets in. ‘Murdering the Wardrobe’, for example, is a thirty-eight-page account of an American film producer in Moscow researching a movie about a Soviet nuclear-submarine disaster.

The story details his dealings with a Russian interpreter who’s been hired to set up meetings with the submariner survivors. The man is incompetent, a liar, an alcoholic, and a thief. Within five pages all four qualities are clear to the reader, but the narrator only notices on the last page. As a character, he has been utterly naïve, passive, putty in the hands, etc. The cycle of adjourning to bars and non-event interviews makes the reader want to scream at the narrator for being such a dope or, more fairly, at Nowra for wanting us to accept such a spineless ingénu as a seasoned movie producer.

The most successful piece is the Lord Howe anecdotes. There doesn’t seem to be any other voice than Nowra’s own, and the telling is sober, finely gauged Australian yarning.

‘The Realm’, the book’s secondlongest piece at seventy-four pages, is best read as a Young Adult novella.

A fourteen-year-old girl, fat, bullied, and with issues at school, is parked by her actress mother on an otherwise deserted island with her mother’s ex, a man the girl has hardly met. Whoa!

Not a good move. But Nowra doesn’t go down that dangerous, if obvious, path. Instead, his book is part dystopian thriller, part Alice in Wonderland underground adventure, and part Bildungsroman helped on by a cyclone. General mood, you could say, serious to grim.

Then Nowra follows immediately with a satirical romp for ninety-seven pages, and it’s very funny. ‘The Wedding in Venice’ is a lightly fictionalised and embroidered version of the 1990 Sydney succès de scandale when a gay

Qantas flight attendant became engaged to Primrose ‘Pitti Pat’ Dunlop.

The tie that bound was the groom-tobe being ‘Prince Giustiniani, Count of the Phanaar, Knight of St Sophia and Baron Alexandroff ’. He was also, more provably, a Vietnam veteran, having served there in 1967 as a lance corporal in the 8th Field Ambulance. He was, by numerous accounts, a kind, thoughtful man, popular in his job.

The wedding was about to take place in Venice when the groom ran off with his best man, his ‘best friend’ from their days together in Vietnam.

Nowra’s story should be read in tandem with the account on the Sydney Morning Herald website, unsigned but probably by the supremely tart gossip writer Daphne Guinness. Nowra’s debt to the facts is undisguised; his priest for the story is a Father Bliss. The original was Father Vincent Kiss, who got eight years for fraud in 1992 and topped this with nine years for paedophilia in 2002. Nowra’s groom, Cosimo, a hotel concierge, remains true to his original; while his motivations and affections are still enigmatic, he is the sole nondespicable character in Nowra’s story.

But ‘The Wedding in Venice’ certainly goes beyond a journalistic retelling. This time Nowra does give a twist to the ending, and he extends the farce with the creation of both a boorish father of the almost-bride and of a narrator, a gay male gossip writer and restaurant reviewer. The story is overlong but a good yarn – a quintessentially Sydney one. g

Gerard Windsor’s most recent book is The Tempest-Tossed Church: Being a Catholic today (2017).

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Splintered by salt Felicity Plunkett THE SALT MADONNA

by Catherine Noske

Picador, $32.99 pb, 368 pp

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rom the mainland, the fictional Chesil Island appears to float on the horizon. Perched above its bay, a statue of the Virgin Mary spreads its arms, its robes ‘faded and splintered by salt’. This icon of the miraculous and maternal, crafted from trees and symbolic of the invasion and settlement of Indigenous land, is imposing and worn, revered and neglected.

The sometimes-narrator of Catherine Noske’s potent début novel is Hannah Mulvey, who was raised on the island but left to finish school on the mainland.

Her narrative is like the salt-worn Madonna’s presence. Like the statue, it is a faded, uncertain imposition.

Hannah has returned to spend time with her terminally ill mother and to teach at the local school. One of her students is Mary, though Hannah later admits this isn’t really her name: ‘I am lying about that. I think of her as Mary because that is who she became – the silent one, necessary and yet not really thought of, not really part of it.’

The story is and isn’t Mary’s, and it is and isn’t truthful. She may be the ‘figure, the symbol at the centre of the story’, but Hannah is also unable to know her, or unable to bring herself to imagine her life. At times the shards of Mary’s story blast into Hannah’s 26 MARCH 2020

perception. Mostly, Mary recedes into imposed silence and the unknowable.

One of Noske’s epigraphs is from Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), that novel’s narrator’s apology ‘that there is so much pain in this story’ and that ‘it is in fragments, like a body caught in crossfire or pulled apart by force’.

Noske’s novel is similarly shattered.

It is about what Hannah cannot or refuses to know, and the failures of imagination that frame and abet colonial and misogynistic violence. Her firstperson narrative begins The Salt Madonna, describing her vision of a girl in the classroom who looks like Mary and the skeletal history of Hannah’s forebear, Mulvey, who ‘dragged pasture out of undergrowth, fouled the water, ringed trees with deep scars and cleared them’ to produce the familial line.

Among the slivers of uncertain and haunted narrative the novel collects, the story of Mulvey lurks. His diaries, which Hannah reads, describes the invasion and settlement of Chesil Island.

Indigenous people are ‘not real to him’, numbered rather than named, imagined as ‘some malevolent manifestation of the place itself ’. While some of his account celebrates the island’s natural beauty, he also details the atrocities that he perpetrates with scant awareness of the horror and burden of his actions.

This history abuts a present in which the ways women are imagined and treated are a central concern.The local priest is a recent widower, but his late wife is alongside him in more powerful ways than his circling parishioners with their needy generosity and foil-covered casseroles. At one stage, he throws these gifts onto the back lawn, their ‘strange bounty’ defrosting in the sun as he fasts his way into vertiginous communion with his wife.

As he recedes into these rituals, the veils between history and the present thin. His wife merges with the statuette of the Virgin Mary on his windowsill, ‘a little dream, a little dream-puffed memory’. Harmless, except that in this dreamy state, a crime might masquerade as a miracle, a violated child might look like a visitation, ‘sublime, haloed and pure’, and a community’s deceit and

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW

fear might morph into fervent delusion.

Noske, a writer and academic who edits Westerly, offers a sharp examination of faith and lies. The novel’s form brilliantly expresses this, splicing a fastpaced mystery with intense and lyrical contemplation of place, memory, and history. Its shifting between memory and the present, first- and third-person narrative, and action and lyric conveys a powerful sense of the provisional nature of storytelling and the ethically dubious nature of narrating someone else’s story.

Salt is preservative as well as corrosive – capable of healing and injuring.

When it crusts the statue, a luminous miracle might eclipse dark truth. As Hannah’s own past trauma surfaces to obscure her vision, the community is drawn as though by a sea current into a ‘sort of shared hallucination, communal and projected’. A mythic story can blanket crimes that people would rather not acknowledge, and the possibilities of faith as an alternative to science lure the islanders as they face environmental decline and fear.

‘The Virgin was a mirror’, Hannah thinks: ‘we all saw in her what we wanted to’. When Hannah finds herself unable to imagine Mary’s life, she thinks of the girl herself as a mirror, in which ‘it is myself I am struggling to see’. Hannah tries to intervene on Mary’s behalf, but balks at the gate of the girl’s home.

When she tries and fails to make another important visit, she wonders how often ‘can one person stop at a gateway, doing nothing?’

This question pulses through the novel. We might witness something or instead reimagine it in the image of comfortable delusion. Faith might sustain or corrode. Women’s stories, including those of Indigenous women, might be shunted to extremes of adulation and obloquy. The Salt Madonna, compared in its media release with Charlotte Wood’s formidable The Natural Way of Things (2015), melds the fabulous and allegorical as it searches questions of witness, violence, and hope. g Felicity Plunkett’s new poetry collection is A Kinder Sea (University of Queensland Press, 2020). She is the current ABR Patrons Fellow.

Bearing witness Amy Baillieu THE BASS ROCK

by Evie Wyld

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Vintage, $32.99 pb, 359 pp

n a 2013 interview with British literary magazine Structo, Anglo-Australian author Evie Wyld recalls lamenting to a writing tutor that she wanted to write a big action thriller, ‘something with Arnold Schwarzenegger and machine guns and blood and explosions’ but was always writing ‘really quiet little paragraphs about Dads’. These paragraphs evolved into her haunting début novel, After the Fire, A Still Small Voice (2009). Wyld’s Miles Franklin Award-winning second novel, All the Birds, Singing (2013), was followed by a graphic memoir produced in collaboration with Joe Sumner, Everything Is Teeth (2015), detailing childhood summers spent on Wyld’s grandparents’ sugar cane farm and her shark fixation.

The Bass Rock, her new novel, may not be a big action thriller either, but it is far from quiet and there is plenty of blood.

The novel takes place largely in North Berwick, site of Scotland’s first mass witch trials in the 1590s, and in view of the eponymous rock, once a prison and now a seabird sanctuary. It revolves around three separate women: Red-headed Sarah, accused of witchcraft in the early 1700s; Ruth (loosely inspired by Wyld’s paternal grandmother), who has just moved to North Berwick with her husband and his two young sons in the aftermath of World War II; and Ruth’s granddaughter Viv, who is staying in Ruth’s now-empty house in the present.

The Bass Rock expands on themes explored in Wyld’s previous novels: from the trauma of war and the intergenerational impact of violence, to her continued interest in food, mental illness, and the uncanny. Wyld’s skilful pacing, nuanced characterisation, astute observations, and rich sensory images will also be familiar to her readers.

Her descriptions are often vivid and disconcerting. A smell ‘scratches’ in ‘like

a finger behind the eyeball’. A sleeping man’s hairy buttocks are like those of a ‘diseased bear’. A dying woman’s mad grief is likened to ‘birds sewn under the skin’, while another woman’s biceps stand out ‘like tangerines’. At one point, Viv observes that her mother’s ‘mushroom book is growing mushrooms’.

Wyld also has a keen eye for details: from a carelessly abandoned sandwich to the evolution of an unsettling version of hide and seek. Some elements recur through the novel: among them dogs and wolves and foxes, pineapples, a small wooden box, packages of stewing steak, tickling, permutations of a pop song, ghosts and wolfmen, the pervasive smell of stinkhorn mushrooms, and – because this is Evie Wyld – at least one shark.

Wyld has a knack for the arresting opening. In this tense, gothic novel it is the discovery made by a child walking with her mother and dog on a Scottish beach. While looking for cowries, the girl finds a woman’s body in a ‘bulging’ black suitcase. The stump of a finger showing through the broken zip reminds the six-year-old of the ‘miniature plaster ham’ from her dolls’ house. As her mother drags her away, telling her not to look, the girl spots an eye through the pale fingers, ‘an eye that seemed to look back at me, that seemed to know something about me and to ask a question and to give an answer’.

Violence against females has been a constant theme in Wyld’s work – from the murders and domestic abuse that occur on the periphery of After the Fire, A Still Small Voice, to the brutal treatment of Jake in All the Birds, Singing, and even the harsh prawn-farming techniques mentioned Everything Is Teeth. Here it takes centre stage. In a powerful monologue raging against societal amnesia and femicide, freespirited Maggie (a self-declared witch who befriends Viv) wonders, ‘What if all the women in the world that have been killed by men throughout history were visible to us, all at once. If we could see them lying there.’

Bearing witness is clearly imperative to Wyld: in this novel she homes in on North Berwick in an attempt to conjure the shades of the women murdered and abused there over the centuries.

Ruth, Viv, and Sarah’s compelling stories are punctuated by a series of brutal vignettes. Presented without headers or page numbers, the horrors they contain have a sense of timelessness. The cumulative effect can be overwhelming, while the final fragment offers heartbreaking insight into an earlier incident, bringing the story full circle.

Wyld’s provocative novel explores the myriad ways in which abuse can affect or abbreviate women’s lives. It could make a good fictional companion to recent works of non-fiction on the subject, including Jess Hill’s See What You Made Me Do (2019). The violence is not only limited to women – Wyld touches on institutionalised abuse by clergy and boarding masters – but it is the spectrum of male violence against women that is central. In The Bass Rock, women are variously raped, murdered, abused, institutionalised, and objectified. Some are content or complicit in their circumscribed lives, others try to be, and others rebel. Many drink.

Thankfully, there are flashes of hope, warmth, humour, and catharsis. Female friendship is a balm and there are some kind, well-meaning male characters, but this is a dark, confronting book.

The controlled fury at the bleak, defiant heart of this impressive novel is as relentless as the waves crashing against the Bass Rock, forcing the reader to bear witness and to accept that maybe ‘there’s no difference between these women and me, or you and your mother, or the lady in the tea shop. We’re just breezing in and out of the death zone.’ g

Amy Baillieu is Deputy Editor of Australian Book Review.

FICTION

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City of shadows Stephen Dedman TRUE WEST

by David Whish-Wilson

Fremantle Press $29.99 pb, 257 pp, 9781925815702

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rue West is the latest historical crime thriller from David Whish-Wilson, author of The Summons (2006), Perth (2013), The Coves (2018), and the Frank Swann series.

True West is set in Western Australia in 1988, the time when Jack van Tongeren’s Australian Nationalist Movement (ANM) was papering the city with hundreds of thousands of racist posters, and when John Howard and Ian Sinclair were calling for a reduction in Asian immigration. True West ’s protagonist, seventeen-year-old Lee Southern, is on the run from the Knights, a Geraldton-based bikie gang whose marijuana plantation he torched in retaliation for his father’s murder.

Southern tries to set himself up in business in Perth as a rogue tow-truck driver, listening in on police radio for reports of accidents in the hope of getting there first. He falls foul of drivers from True West Towing.

True West’s boss, Kinslow, is also a major figure in the fictional neo-Nazi Australian Patriotic Movement (APM); Kinslow recognises Lee, and offers him protection from the Knights at a price.

Lee’s SAS-trained survivalist father, Jack, one of the founders of the Knights, had hidden caches of military weapons around the state as well as making his 28 MARCH 2020

son sleep with an MK II hand grenade under his pillow to toughen him up.

Kinslow, who served with Lee’s father in Vietnam, believes the APM will need those weapons and the names of Jack’s suppliers for the coming race war, and tortures Lee to try to learn the locations of the caches. Lee wakes up to find himself in an APM safe house in the care of Francesca, a nurse who steals drugs from the hospital for the APM and injects him with enough morphine for him to be somewhat functional. Kinslow introduces him to the skinheads who are torching Chinese restaurants and pasting racist posters around Perth ahead of the election, when Kinslow intends to run for parliament as a farright candidate.

Lee finds a gym owned by old excons where he can practise kickboxing, and reunites with his girlfriend Emma, a boarder at one of Perth’s private schools, and participates in bank robberies for the APM while working for True West Towing. Then Kinslow takes him to meet the APM’s real leader, who tells Lee just enough of their murderous plans for Lee to realise how much danger he’ll be in if he doesn’t cooperate.

Whish-Wilson, now a Creative Writing lecturer at Curtin University and one of the founders of the Northbridge Crime guided walking tour, previously taught Creative Writing in Western Australia’s prison system.

Inmates inspired him to write Line of Sight (2010), based on the murder of Perth madam Shirley Finn. Like Line of Sight and its sequels, Zero at the Bone (2013) and Old Scores (2016), True West draws heavily on the darker side of the history of the City of Lights. Readers won’t need to know much about Jack van Tongeren, the ANM, or the murder of wrongly suspected informant David Locke to find this a disturbing and gripping read – partly because neo-Nazis and racist right-wing politicians haven’t disappeared from the news, but mostly because the story and its characters (apart from shock jock Howard Sattler) are fictitious and the plot twists entirely original. That said, for anyone who lived in Perth in the 1980s the novel’s description of the posters with which the ANM defiled the city and suburbs will

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be an uncomfortably evocative element in Whish-Wilson’s vivid picture of Western Australia, good and bad, from its wildflowers and birds to Sandman panel vans, road trains, and the stink of the live-sheep ships. Fortunately, it doesn’t come with a soundtrack, though if you want to play some heavy metal or 1980s classics to accompany some of the scenes, feel free.

As well as being an excellent hardboiled crime novel and a treat for lovers of Australiana, True West is a coming-of-age story driven as much by character as by plot. Lee’s character has been shaped by four generations worth of toxic machismo from men who fled city life to survive alone in the bush, living off the land while fossicking for gold. His mother disappeared when he was too young to remember her, leaving him with only a few ex-library books to read. His grandfather, an intermittently suicidal Rat of Tobruk, and his speed-freak father both suffered from PTSD, and raised Lee on a diet of tiger shark and kangaroo meat, Nietzsche, Bakuninist anarchism, The Turner Diaries (the ‘race war’ fantasy novel beloved of Timothy McVeigh and other white supremacists), and a little LSD. Lee is the first of his line to reverse the course and head towards civilisation (well, Perth, anyway), but after fleeing one group of violent sociopaths, he is almost instantly ensnared by another he must adapt to in order to survive. He gradually finds himself developing something painfully like a conscience, but only in the final chapters does he have to make an irreversible choice. g Stephen Dedman is the author of five novels. His most recent novel is the crime thriller Immunity (2018).

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Inner worlds

Three débuts about female experience

Susan Midalia

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hree recent début novels employ the genre of the Bildungsroman to explore the complexities of female experience in the recent historical past.

Anna Goldsworthy, widely known and admired as a memoirist, essayist, and musician, has now added a novel, Melting Moments (Black Inc., $29.99 pb, 240 pp), to her list of achievements. Set mainly in Adelaide from the 1940s until the end of the century, the novel charts the life of Ruby Jenkins from youth to elderly widowhood during a period of rapid social change. The title refers to sweet biscuits and acts as a metaphor for the domesticity with which Ruby defines her identity and sense of purpose. But while she remains a model of feminine compliance and middle-class respectability, she also has ‘moments’ of yearning or regret. Her discontent is partly symbolised by a recurring memory of sexual frisson with a married man, which she describes as ‘a summons.

As if she had somehow misplaced her life.’ Her compensation is her ‘dream home’ and garden: ‘It seems to her that if she had this house – this one thing – it would allow her to give [her husband] everything else.’

Ruby also becomes adept at avoiding the unpleasant or disturbing. One striking example is her refusal to hear the details of what she intuits as her husband’s wartime trauma. When he finally gives her the opportunity to ask, she ‘suddenly feels dizzy’ and makes a cup of tea.

The novel implies that there is a price to be paid – in this case, the loss of a more meaningfully intimate marriage – for adhering to bourgeois seemliness.

Ruby’s story is also that of a changing social landscape, sometimes plotted through the contrast between the lives of mother and daughter. A child of second-wave feminism, daughter Eva chooses to become a doctor; disdainful

of traditional ideas of femininity, she reads Gray’s Anatomy with ‘an avidity that strikes Ruby as unladylike’. Her expectations of marriage also differ from those of her more conservative mother.

Indifferent to public opinion, Eva divorces her unfaithful husband. When her mother praises him for continuing to be a good provider, Eva protests: ‘Is that the best I can hope for? Provision?’

A skilful blend of wit and pathos, Melting Moments is also a formally interesting narrative. Unlike the traditional Bildungsroman, which works through a gradual unfolding and amplification of events, the novel’s dominant mode is the moment or the scene. This narrative strategy makes for many deeply moving insights into Ruby’s inner and external worlds, from an early scene of fumbling marital sex to a late scene in which Ruby bathes the body of her elderly father.

But this mode can also create gaps in which significant events tend to be summarised rather than imaginatively realised. This includes Ruby’s loneliness as a young mother; her son’s maturation; her husband’s physical decline; and a granddaughter who changes from a toddler to a university student with startling alacrity. Nevertheless, there is much to enjoy in this accomplished novel: resonant moments of tenderness or acerbic observations; the contradictions and complexities of character; and a stylistic poise that makes the writing feel uniformly, deceptively effortless.

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n contrast to the familiar setting of Adelaide, Anita Abriel’s novel The Light After the War (Simon & Schuster, $32.99 pb, 320 pp) is set in ravaged, postwar Naples and various locations across the globe. Based on the true story of Abriel’s mother’s escape from a train bound for Auschwitz and her struggle to forge a new life, the novel follows the journey of a young woman,

Vera, and her childhood friend Edith as they search for emotional stability and financial security in Naples, and then in economically prosperous but stiflingly patriarchal Caracas in Venezuela, and then, for Vera, a more liberated and autonomous life in 1950s Australia.

There are sections in the novel of considerable ethical and emotional power, in which survivors of concentration camps recall the dehumanisation to which Jews were subjected. Here is one anguished recollection: ‘First they took my suitcase with the photographs and pieces of jewellery sewn into dresses …

Then I was taken into a dormitory with nothing but a prisoner uniform, and I thought, they can’t hurt me anymore, they have taken everything … But every day they took something more: the gold fillings in my teeth, the flesh that covered my bones.’ Such moments, rendered with eloquent simplicity, remind us of the ethically imperative injunction – one that Abriel recalls in the preface – that we must ‘never forget’.

What also matters in this novel is courage, resilience, and a fundamental belief in human goodness. However, the depiction of romance – a central source of hope in the novel – is marred by the use of pulp-fiction clichés. Bodies tremble; hearts race or pound; a man’s eyes are ‘liquid brown’, his cheeks ‘smooth as butter’. Pedestrian dialogue is further weakened by the fact that the characters rarely ‘speak’; in distractingly overwritten speech tags, they variously retort, muse, soothe, murmur, announce, declare, protest, gush, or implore. There is also a problem with narrative priorities. The arrival of Vera and Edith on Ellis Island, for example, is dismissed with a mere reference to ‘pass[ing] the health test’, while descriptions of social outings, glamorous dresses, and handsome suitors are often lavishly detailed. Even allowing for the youth of FICTION

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the characters and the novel’s focus on hope, such choices are symptomatic of a novel that at times hovers uneasily between Holocaust literature and popular romance. While the ethical intentions of The Light After the War are laudable, these stylistic and formal problems detract from the powerful story it wishes to tell.

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nne Brinsden’s novel Wearing Paper Dresses (Macmillan, $32.99 pb, 387 pp) returns us to Australia. Set mainly in the Mallee region in northern Victoria in the 1950s and 1960s, the novel is a sensorially vivid evocation of nature’s influence on the rural community. The creation of the social environment is similarly convincing: resisting the temptation of nostalgia, the rural community is represented as insular as well as emotionally generous, as shadowed by domestic violence while also supportive of the vulnerable.

Wearing Paper Dresses is also centrally concerned with gender. Rural masculinity in 1950s Australia, embodied in husband and father Bill, his father Pa, and the schoolboy Jesse, is either stoical and emotionally inarticulate, curmudgeonly, or compassionate. But it is troubled femininity that dominates the novel. Bill’s wife, Elise, is a psychologically astute and deeply moving portrait of the creative urban outsider who, isolated and frustrated, descends into depression and psychosis. Her daughter Marjorie, at first defiantly unconventional, becomes a pitiable figure of abjection. Stricken by an irrational sense of guilt, she leaves the family farm for the city and for a life of anonymity and emotional paralysis.

Here, too, there is the possibility of hope in a blighted psychological landscape. Hope is symbolised by the ‘magic’ of Elise’s paper dresses, made for the local school play; the Juliet costume she fashions is ‘a work of art, drifting in the late-afternoon light, surrounded by the ministering spangles of Mallee dust’.

A ‘delicate papery creation’, the dress symbolises Elise’s creative ingenuity and her gift of beauty to the community. Hope also underpins the steadfast love of the father and grandfather, and the skilfully rendered meetings, late 30 MARCH 2020

in the novel, between Marjorie and her mother. Marjorie’s friendship with Jesse is also tenderly affirming; they are two young people who ‘sculpted a tiny, secret life for themselves in the middle of the night, hidden inside the reality of their wintry daytime lives’. The tentative intimacy of these relationships is one of the highlights of this increasingly dark but ultimately uplifting novel of suffering and recovery. In real life, and some years ago, Brinsden has referred

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW

to the encouragement she was given by the acclaimed Indigenous writer Bruce Pascoe, who having awarded her first prize in a short story competition, urged her to ‘keep writing, girl’. Wearing Paper Dresses – an intelligently written, thoughtfully paced, and moving novel – is evidence of Pascoe’s faith in its fledgling author. g Susan Midalia’s first novel, The Art of Persuasion, was published in 2018.

Vegas Yes, death was a good career move for Mr Elvis Presley, but for those of us yet to leave the building, cancer offers a lifeline, bringing family fame, at least, and a careering mind, especially during the long night-watch, when what happened in Vegas comes home from Vegas, as always, and takes roost in the witness coop, fluffing its lurid ostrich feathers like a goose, and the self sits in judgement of itself and rules against it, on every count, offering neither amnesty nor amnesia, at least for the natural term of your jellied memory, and you realise yours is no minority opinion of yourself, when even the bed, whose support you took for granted, but which always seemed to like you, tosses you out, and you find a safe seat next to a misty-eyed pot of tea, and set down words such as these, in big print so you can read them in the morning, although soon enough your goose quill begins to whisper across the paper, as if thoughts brewed so long, in darkness, needed no second thinking, spilling out complete, like music, like words dusted with a little night magic, a sparkle of dandruff shaken from the shoulders of Mr Amadeus Mozart himself, who wrote notes with this same smooth single-draft ease, and would have loved Vegas, and you feel less absolved than cured, all over again, and even your bed takes you back, conditionally, and you sleep till dawn, when you remember that Mr Mozart has also long left the building, cut down mid-career, and that cancer is not just another job, like dying, but a way of life.

Peter Goldsworthy Peter Goldsworthy’s most recent poetry collections are The Rise of the Machines and Other Love Poems (2015) and Anatomy of a Metaphor (2017).

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HISTORY

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James on Larkin Geoff Page SOMEWHERE BECOMING RAIN: COLLECTED WRITINGS ON PHILIP LARKIN

by Clive James Picador $24.99 hb, 106 pp

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o some it may seem solipsistic to be reviewing what is, in effect, a collection of reviews, but when the reviewer in question is as smart as the late Clive James and the subject is as substantial as Philip Larkin (1922–85) this is unlikely to be the case.

Even if Somewhere Becoming Rain were not as good as it is, the very fact of its existence would still be moving.

Knowing he is in his final months of life, a poet more famous for almost everything else but who believes his poetry to be his most important achievement pays tribute to a poet whose work outshines, and will continue to outshine, his own.

A further dimension is how the dedicated and admiring reviewer of the poet’s work is to defend that poet’s reputation when posthumously published letters reveal Larkin to have been something of a racist and misogynist. It can be difficult to defend the work against such personal shortcomings without seeming to excuse them – or indeed, at worst, being seen to share them. It’s unfortunate, then, that James spends so much time defending Larkin’s poetry against those who would 32 MARCH 2020

seek to belittle it because of its author’s personal failings. James concedes that Larkin’s serial and ongoing deception of several women caused them real pain, but he insists that Larkin appears to have been unfailingly polite to everyone he met, irrespective of race or sex. Significantly, the published poems are resolutely free of any such blemish.

In the second paragraph of Somewhere Becoming Rain, James addresses the point directly with his observation that Larkin ‘was just an ordinary man – too often he thought himself less than that – but behind his show of diffidence ... there was a well-developed sense of duty to his gift ... Would he really have put such ingenuity and effort into hoodwinking the several women who loved him if he had not realised his need for affection was matched by an equally consuming need to be alone?’

Although this compilation only runs to one hundred pages, one of its virtues is its comprehensiveness. Clearly James, like most of us, considers Larkin’s best poems as his main achievement, but he also pays full, if passing, tribute to Larkin’s two early novels (Jill [1946] and A Girl in Winter [1947]), his writing on jazz (All What Jazz [1970]), and his incidental prose (Required Writing [1983]). Through all three areas, James notices the continuing importance of Larkin’s incisive, though not flippant, wit (a matter close to James’s own heart, as we know).

To those few readers who (like this reviewer) have an equal love for both poetry and jazz, being reminded of Larkin’s smart but unfair (even tin-eared) dismissal of modern jazz greats such as Charlie Parker and John Coltrane will undoubtedly be annoying. James makes a persuasive case, however, that Larkin’s real ars poetica is to be found in these now somewhat fugitive pieces praising pre-modern jazz masters (such as Sidney Bechet) while rejecting bebop and what followed. It’s hard to be convinced of Larkin’s insight, though, when he declares that Coltrane ‘sounds like nothing so much as a club bore who has been metamorphosed by a fellow-member of magical powers into a pair of bagpipes’.

Coltrane could be relentless at times

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW

(especially at the end of his career), but that does seem excessive.

Once or twice the book risks losing focus when James turns aside to a relatively peripheral issue, such as whether Larkin was more influenced by Hardy or Yeats (a needless binary), but some of the border regions surveyed (e.g. James’s review of Tom Courtenay’s ‘verbatim’ play about Larkin, Pretending to Be Me [2003]) are definitely of interest.

More central to the life, if not the work, are James’s reviews of the two biographies of Larkin – Andrew Motion’s Philip Larkin: A writer’s life (1993) and James Booth’s Philip Larkin: Life, art and love (2014). Both books provide grist to the seemingly ineluctable ‘Is the work vitiated by the life?’ mill, with James concluding that Booth’s biography has probably been the less damaging of the two.

It’s all an issue that James repeatedly wishes away but to which he cannot help returning. Of course, Larkin’s poetry, if not the man himself, needs to be defended and not allowed to slip from the canon because the writer’s ‘personality’ is now seen to have been less than adequate. It can be hard to ignore the Twitterati these days, especially the academic ones, but too vigorous a defence can, unhappily, begin to seem as if the warrior ‘doth protest too much’.

A nice sense of James’s overall view of Larkin can be had from his five-page poem ‘A Valediction for Philip Larkin’, also included here. In it James regrets, in considerable journalistic detail, that he was on a television safari in Africa when Larkin died. Significantly, the artificiality of the poem’s slightly rough rhyme scheme enabled James to say much that is true about the recently deceased Larkin – and about himself.

It’s hard to sample fairly, but these five lines are a good point to close on: ‘The truth is that you revelled in your craft. / Profound glee charged your sentences with wit. / You beat them into stanza form and laughed: / They didn’t sound like poetry one bit, / Except for being absolutely it.’ g Geoff Page’s many books include Aficionado: A jazz memoir (Picaro Press, 2014).

Stead’s America Anne Pender CHRISTINA STEAD AND THE MATTER OF AMERICA

by Fiona Morrison

Sydney University Press, $45 pb, 186 pp

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n spite of the hundreds of scholarly articles, dozens of monographs, and two biographies on the life and work of Christina Stead (1902–83), critics, curiously, have not generally sought to divide up Stead’s career into her Australian, European, and American periods for the purposes of their analysis. Most of them have regarded her career as more integrated, recognising the fact that Stead responded to all the places in which she lived and that her interest in the people around her drove her approach to her work, informed her settings, and nourished her understanding of ideology and its impact on human behaviour. In this compact study of five of Stead’s novels, Fiona Morrison seeks to explore Stead’s particular interest in American politics and culture and their specific influence on her writing.

Stead is one of the great authors to emerge from Australia in the early twentieth century. Her fiction continues to absorb scholars and to divide them, although her novels are not widely read.

Morrison’s monograph follows a recent comprehensive study by Michael Ackland, which documents Stead’s life, her education, and her sustained political engagement and political values. Ackland points out that, because she was not a US citizen, Stead was prevented from joining the Communist Party of the United States of America in the late 1930s while living in New York City with her de facto husband, Bill Blake.

This may have liberated Stead from being too easily labelled or identified for her socialist leanings. Later in her life, Stead sought to allay any easy association of her work with her communist sympathies. Ackland works through what he calls Stead’s ‘literary subterfuge’ as a response to both her strong and unwavering commitment to the left and the pressure of conforming to the

party line. Stead’s fascination with US political culture, and more particularly with characters who embodied warring ideological convictions, is broadly the subject of Morrison’s analysis.

This monograph is at times microscopic in its focus is rather narrow in its overall conceptual framework and in its approach to Stead’s American fiction. Morrison shies away from new arguments, timidly following the line of one or two others: she states at the outset that she is ‘echoing David Malouf (1982) and Margaret Harris (1992)’, thereby ignoring much of the scholarship on Stead, even Ackland’s account of Stead’s socialist pedigree and its detailed analysis of her fiction up to her first American novel, Stead’s bestknown work, The Man Who Loved Children (1940). Morrison offers two chapters of discussion on this novel without reference to Ackland’s analysis, except to note its existence in her introduction.

It is a pity that Morrison has missed the opportunity to engage with recent scholarship, as this diminishes any sense of the range and depth of the field. The other problem is that she offers no clear rationale for the study: its stated premise is that ‘Stead arrived in the United States as a committed, if experimental and deeply original, mid-century realist’. Morrison overlooks questions about how Stead’s American experience shaped her writing and implies that she came to the United States fully formed as an author. Notwithstanding this criticism, this short book offers some insights into Stead’s American odyssey and makes a case for considering The Man Who Loved Children the first of her American novels; Morrison invokes several American critics in support of this view.

Morrison settles on the term ‘fellow traveller’ to characterise Stead’s political identity, arguing that this allowed her both ‘stability and literary energy’ up until the late 1940s, and that capitalism in the United States offered an ‘irresistible subject’. Morrison categorises the American fiction as domestic (The Man Who Loved Children), picaresque (Letty Fox: Her Luck, 1946), and even a tragedy (I’m Dying Laughing, 1986), a novel also categorised in this study as a chronicle. She avoids reading the nov-

els as satires, as other critics (including myself ) have done.

For me, the discussion of the mode and scope of the writing is not convincing in the introductory remarks or in the chapters that offer close analysis of the texts. Morrison overlooks the performative, experimental, self-consciously artful style and political colour of Stead’s American novels. She acknowledges that Stead’s broader project is one in which she offers ‘catalogue and critique’, referring to her massive last, unfinished novel, I’m Dying Laughing, as a ‘tragicomic chronicle’. Morrison focuses on what she regards as Stead’s original ‘vision of gender and American identity’ in spite of Stead’s many attempts in interviews to distance herself from women’s liberation movements and feminist ideology. She homes in on Stead’s ‘keen and iconoclastic interest in the American girl’ in The Man Who Loved Children and in Letty Fox, recognising Stead’s affinity for realism and her pursuit of a portrayal of lives as they are, with the author noting Stead’s avid attention to the ‘theatre of gender relations’ in all of Stead’s American novels.

Stead paid a high price for her expatriate life: constantly on the move, for many years unrecognised by critics and living on a small income. She left Australia as a young woman of twenty-six, and did not return until 1974, when she was seventy-two. She also paid a high price for her internationalist ideals. It is a delightful paradox that she could write wherever she was living. Morrison’s book further develops an understanding of the American years and of Stead’s profound engagement with the nation in a critical period of history. g

Anne Pender holds the Kidman Chair in Australian Studies at the University of Adelaide.

LITERARY STUDIES

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A genre of her own A groundbreaking memoir of abuse

Zora Simic IN THE DREAM HOUSE: A MEMOIR

by Carmen Maria Machado Serpent’s Tail, $32.99 hb, 288 pp

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he opening dedication in Carmen Maria Machado’s groundbreaking memoir In The Dream House reads: ‘If you need this book, it is for you.’ Here, Machado offers a gift but also a clue. She wrote this book because she needed to. For close to two years, she was in a lesbian relationship in which her partner was abusive to her. In making sense of it, Machado found a few books here and there, but mostly there was nothing – a meaningful silence. In deft strokes that should humble historians and other theorists of the archive, Machado contemplates the ghosts that haunt it. The ‘abused woman’ only became a ‘generally understood concept’ fifty or so years ago. Since then, other ‘ghosts’, including the female perpetrator and the queer abused, have become legible, while remaining shadows. She offers her own memoir – by design, ‘an act of resurrection’ – to the archive of domestic abuse, placing herself and others into ‘necessary context’.

In the Dream House débuts and exits as queer history, with necessary caveats about the specificity of Machado’s experience and further reading provided in the afterword. Throughout, and like other queer thinkers she cites with admiration, such as the late José Esteban Muñoz, Machado finds new ways to ‘queer’ the evidence, including by find-

34 MARCH 2020

ing meaning in and for what otherwise might be dismissed as ephemera. Various encounters with pop culture – ranging from the original version of the film Gaslight (1940) through to the 1980s pop hit ‘Voices Carry’ by ‘Til Tuesday – are mined for the insights offered into patterns of abuse. Machado also pursues conventional modes of historical enquiry – she knows her landmark cases and has read her way through lesbian magazines – and respectfully consults existing literature. Yet as vital and illuminating as these chapters are, In The Dream House is both too multivalent and too singular to be easily reduced to the descriptors of memoir or queer history. In transcending genres and trying many of them on for size, Machado creates a new one altogether.

Without wanting to unnecessarily damn this deliciously inventive book as ‘meta’ or ‘experimental’, In The Dream House is at once a ‘real’ story and an extended adventure in storytelling. As a book-about-writing-a-book, Machado plays with points of view and sometimes moves the writing process and her present self to the foreground, but never for the flashy sake of it or at the expense of an unfolding story that needs to be told.

The story of her relationship with the ‘woman in the Dream House’ and how to best tell it are entwined. Machado’s

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW

higher purpose is truth-telling, which, as she superbly demonstrates, can be highly compatible with her other calling: telling stories. She merges form and content to dazzling and clarifying effect.

To a wider world that still asks the same condemning questions about domestic abuse and the people who find themselves subject to it – questions she has asked herself, like why not leave or say something – Machado tells her story in as many forms and from as many angles as it takes to get across what she needs to understand and say. The healing or transformative power of stories has been reiterated to the point of cliché, but on this front Machado prefers to

In The Dream House is both too multivalent and too singular to be easily reduced to memoir or queer history show rather than tell. Via occasional footnotes, she also aligns her story to the folkloric tradition, as catalogued in American folklorist Stith Thompson’s multi-volume Motif-Index of FolkLiterature (1955–58), but never labours the point. Machado does not need to: her narrative skills mean that she knows how to keep her reader’s attention.

Machado’s identity and development as a writer are central to In the Dream House, as is her evolution as a queer woman. She meets her soon-to-be lover in Iowa City, where Machado is a graduate student at the world-famous Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Both are writers. Addressing her past self, Machado’s prose drips with unabashed desire: ‘she touches your arm and looks directly at you and you feel like a child buying something with her own money for the

first time’. Soon, the new lover ‘haunts’ her ‘erotic imagination’. They are both ‘perpetually wet’. Their mutual delight with one another extends to their shared vocation: ‘You love writing across from her, the two of you tapping away with verve and purpose.’ The story would not make sense without these details. As Bildungsroman – another literary form that Machado brazenly releases from its historical masculinist grip – In the Dream House is a narrative about the end of innocence and the coming of hard-won wisdom, where ‘Everything tasted almost like an epiphany.’

The glorious opening phase of her new relationship affirms Machado’s queerness, but as her lover’s abusive side reveals itself, the fact that it is a woman doing this to her compounds her confusion and isolation. Machado’s account of domestic abuse confirms and enlarges what is already known about the topic, including that many abusive relationships are not necessarily or primarily physically violent. Much of what she describes should have resonance with any person who has had firsthand experience. To select one passage, Machado writes: ‘She makes you tell her what is wrong with you. This is a favourite activity; even better than her telling you what is wrong with you. Years later, it is a habit that is hard to break.’ Yet Machado makes it clear she is not aiming for a universal story about domestic abuse, and it is in this commitment that In the Dream House attains its greatest power. Against a culture that ‘does not have an investment in helping queer folk understand what their experiences mean’, Machado writes with bracing honesty and focus about what happened to her, how it felt, and why it matters.

Machado’s first book, the audacious short story collection Her Body and Other Parties (2017), continues to be justly lauded, and its genesis is woven into In The Dream House. As companions, they share a risk-taking spirit, but whereas Her Body occasionally floundered into failed experiment, In The Dream House maintains its force. She has taken her father’s exam advice to ‘write down everything I know about a topic’ into her literary life to remarkable effect. As an insight into Machado’s process, and her astonishing memoir, it’s as good as any: ‘Where I had doubt, I’d fill the space with what I remembered, what I knew to be true, what I could say …

Let it never be said I didn’t try.’ g

29 F E B – 4 A P R IL S Y D NE Y O P E R A H O U S E 9 – 18 A P R IL C A NB E R R A T HE AT R E C E N T R E 23 A P R IL - 10 M AY A R T S C E N T R E ME L B O U R NE

B Y W IL L I A M S H A K E S P E A R E D IR E C T O R P E T E R E VA N S B E L L S H A K E S P E A R E .C O M . A U

Zora Simic is a Senior Lecturer in History and Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of New South Wales.

MEMOIR

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COMMENT

Suddenly last summer The politics of climate change in Australia

by David Holmes

T

he nuclear scale of the inferno that delivered our Black Summer will be remembered as a turning point in the debate about climate change. It was the summer when the monster of energy stored up in the earth’s oceans and atmosphere revealed itself in the most dangerous climate drivers; the summer when Australia could no longer take for granted the evolution of precious species and their habitats over millions of years, with more than a billion animals dead and more than ten million hectares of forest burnt. But it was also the season in which climate-denying politics was comprehensively trumped, no matter how much spin, media massaging, and misinformation was employed to make the fires, and their link to climate change, go away.

Throughout the entire summer, different parts of Australia were burning. The size of the fires was far beyond any previous fires: Ash Wednesday, Black Friday, Black Saturday. The latter consumed 450,000 hectares and, with help from ultra high-octane eucalyptus leaves, released heat equivalent to 1,500 Hiroshima bombs. You don’t need to do the maths to figure out the forces unleashed last summer in order to understand the apocalyptic scenes or how such forces created their own weather: in one case, a fire tornado that lifted a ten-ton fire truck, killing a firefighter.

These forces were unleashed at the intersection of Australia’s driest and hottest year on record, not because of fuel-load and arson. New South Wales, where most of the forest was burnt, had doubled its area of hazard reduction between 2018–19. It made no difference. No amount of clearing of forest will suffice if the entire landscape has dried out as much as it had.

Political smokescreens

As unfathomable as the scale of the fires was the response from the Australian government. In early December 2019, when the trending story was how unusually early the fire season was and how fires were starting all over New South Wales, Prime Minister Scott Morrison sought to disconnect the fires from climate change by calling it ‘political point-scoring’. However, journalists and commentators were really pointing to the physics, not the politics. That 36 MARCH 2020

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW

the fires could be described as political is a function of the way that the decades-long ‘culture wars’, vigorously pursued

by News Corp and by the Minerals Council of Australia, have made climate change a political plaything for Coalition governments. When pressed on the scale of catastrophic fires that were burning in places they had never burnt before, government ministers insisted that ‘Australia has always had fires’. This did not cut through when it became evident that firefighters were helpless to protect all but some targeted properties.

With millions of hectares burnt and the physics obvious, Morrison was nowhere to be seen; he stayed well away from journalists who had begun to attribute the fires to climate change. Monash University research shows that, whereas only five per cent of articles about Black Saturday mentioned climate change, by mid-December 2019 the climate change references were up to forty-nine per cent.

By now the conflagration had become politically dangerous for the prime minister. Social media was highlighting the link to climate change and the message that Australians had been abandoned on climate policy, reinforced by Australia’s wilful obstruction of progress at the Madrid climate summit in December 2019.

Unwilling to face the cameras, Morrison’s decision to take his ‘quiet Hawaiian’ holiday during the crisis drew anger and contempt, even from some conservatives. Upon returning, the prime minister’s photo-ops with the exhausted and the mourning, soon after paying $190,000 to consultants on how to show compassion to farmers, came undone as firefighters refused to shake his hand and communities berated the government’s abject failure to protect them. Such efforts at stage-managed remorse would not have gone down so badly with the public had Morrison taken a stand on real policy reform on emissions reduction.

But this would have meant ceasing the culture wars and listening to the science. Instead, the government recycled the clichés that Australia was meeting and beating its Paris commitments. These are founded on a web of factchecked zombies that has shielded Australia from accountability on responsible C02 abatement for more than two decades.

When the firestorms really started

coal mine in the mega-basin. After spending $60 million In 1997 the Howard government brokered such a low on election advertising – more than all the other political Kyoto target on emissions that it was mandated that Aus- parties combined – the Coalition owes Palmer for their tralia’s emissions could actually rise as long as it reduced unexpected majority. the amount of land-clearing. Since then Australia’s emissions have increased in most years, with the largest annual Fixated on coal rises occurring since the Coalition came to power in 2013. Clive Palmer is merely a symptom of the Coalition’s broader Because the Kyoto targets were so modest, meeting or commitment to coal and mining, which has been a policy beating them was always going to be easy, partly because fixation for years now. so much renewable energy had been introduced by state Scott Morrison may well be ridiculed for brandishing government initiatives. a chunk of coal in Parliament in February 2017, but the Most concerning here is that many Australians don’t subsidies to the mining industry in Australia are something appreciate how poorly Australia is performing. To do so both the ALP and the Coalition have been party to for over requires addressing the science and ignoring misleading a decade. For every dollar that mining companies provide soundbites. The best that journalists have to work with are to the major political parties, they receive $2,000 in return. the international rankings that Rebates for diesel fuel for Ausreveal that Australia has gone tralian mining is $2.5 billion Most concerning here is that many annually, almost $1 billion of from bad to worse. In 2014 Australia was ranked ‘bottom which goes to coal companies.

Australians don’t appreciate how of the barrel’ in a Globe InYet substantial funding for poorly Australia is performing ternational report on sixty-six fighting the fires only began to countries; in 2019 it was ranked flow when it was clear the govlast out of fifty-seven countries countries in the Climate ernment had to save its political skin. It remains dwarfed by Change Performance Index. funding that is directly compounding the problem.

If these metrics aren’t bad enough, what the domestic Even on purely economic terms, decades of not putting target hides are scope three emissions that are generated serious money into addressing climate change has now out of exports of coal and gas that bring Australia’s total damaged the economy, with tourism, summer sports, and emissions to 4.8 per cent of global emissions. Because Aus- outdoor events being compromised. tralia plans to use its surplus credits from Kyoto towards Ironically, during the Paris commitments (out of step 2019 federal campaign, the with nearly all other countries), government became a mouthand because only domestic piece for big oil by declaring emissions of 1.3 per cent are that the electric car would becounted in the process, it is come a war on the weekend – misleading to claim that Paris ‘It won’t tow your trailer. It’s goals will be met ‘in a canter’. not going to tow your boat’.

Even with all of this dubious Now, it seems, climate change national accounting, recent has declared a war on Australanalysis shows that the govia’s entire summer, regardless ernment still won’t meet its of what car you drive. targets. What makes Australia’s With ten out of Australia’s situation so much worse is the 132 million hectares burnt by fact that in just three months fires, with much of the forest to February the fires alone had not likely to recover owing to Smoke haze in Sydney, 8 January 2020 released almost a year’s worth climate change-induced heat (photograph by Sardarka via Wikimedia Commons) of C02 emissions. In addition, stress, there is much more the forests that have been lost forest still to burn. How many won’t be able to recover C02 from the atmosphere. animals, humans, and communities must suffer before With its abundant wind and sunshine, Australia could Australia changes direction on climate and puts behind it be a renewable energy superpower, but it shows no signs of the culture wars? With the environmental, emotional, and transitioning away from coal. Instead, in the lead-up to the economic toll already apparent, if 2020 is not the time to fires, Adani won approval for a coal mine in a coal basin the act, then when is? g size of the United Kingdom in the Galilee Basin. Adani is significant not only because it opens up the basin but David Holmes is Founder and Director of the Climate because Clive Palmer, who bought up the voting margin Change Communication Research Hub at Monash University for so many of the seats the Coalition needed to win at the and co-editor of the forthcoming Edward Elgar 2019 federal election, has now put his hand up for another Research Handbook in Communicating Climate Change.

COMMENT

37

Publisher of the Month with

Jane Curry

What was your pathway to publishing?

My first job was with Time Life Books in London; I started there straight after university. As a junior editor on the series Library of Nations, I spent many hours checking facts in libraries. I still love libraries.

How many titles do you publish each year?

Fifteen to twenty. We like to have a new title per month so our reps have monthly contact with booksellers. It is a front-list world.

takes me to a place of deep and productive solitude - and I now no longer fear where my writing might take me.

What kinds of books do you enjoy reading?

A good fiction book is my constant companion; I still take print books on planes. I read literary fiction for pleasure with some ‘must read for work’ titles added into the list to better understand the market. I love a good crime novel – respite from all the Zeitgeist hoopla.

Which book are you proudest of publishing?

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

Do you edit the books you commission?

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

What qualities do you look for in an author?

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

Katherine Johnson’s The Better Son represented the company’s coming of age. Our first fiction title, it heralded the rebrand to Ventura, launched our distribution agreement with Simon & Schuster, and is our bestselling novel to date. (I have also just sold it into China.)

It’s the most wonderful book.

Yes, I do. With our recent anthology Split: True stories of leaving, loss and new beginnings, I had the idea and then worked with Lee Kofman on the content. With fiction, I have input into the structural edit, character development, and narrative arc.

Humanity and the ability to connect. Writing that is surprising, engaging, and meditative.

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

To work collaboratively and to publish them into the market with passion and professionalism, both here and internationally. Since ours is a small list, I work very closely with our authors in a way the larger houses cannot match. I know their books and their passions.

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

I have always published the books that reflect what I would like to write myself, which is why our list champions the female voice so well and also mental health issues. I did start a memoir a few years ago. But it was too gloomy for me to write let alone for someone to read.

My father had died the same year so I see now it was completely the wrong time. It was such hard work to find my voice and so lonely a task that I have the utmost respect for writers. However after a trip back to England for Christmas, I find that the words are flowing. Writing 38 MARCH 2020

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW

At university I loved all things Virago, and I wanted to be Carmen Callil. My company is called Ventura as a homage to her and to those halcyon feminist days of Virago’s stunning books with their suffragette-green spines.

Not at Ventura. As it is a private company, we can take risks, such as with Angela Meyer’s genre-defying A Superior Spectre. In such cases, we answer to no one but the readers.

It has to be a satisfied author, since that often reflects good reviews and good sales. We work very closely with our authors as we build their readership and profile. It’s a total collaboration.

What’s the outlook for new writing of quality?

Quality writing will always find a market, but it can be a waiting game for the author. To match the writer with the best editor and publisher often takes an astute agent or the serendipity of an unsolicited manuscript being read and championed. Out of respect to writers, we review and reply to every submission we receive.

Jane Curry has worked in book publishing for more

than twenty-five years. She joined Time Life Books in London straight from university in England before coming to Australia in 1985. Over her career she has been Managing Director of Weldon Publishing, Lansdowne Publishing, Macquarie Library and National Book Distributors. She published her own list at Pan Macmillan Australia prior to establishing her own publishing house, Ventura Press, in 2002.

Flippety-chip James Antoniou MR LEAR: A LIFE OF ART AND NONSENSE

by Jenny Uglow

I

Faber, $49.99 hb, 560 pp

t is no great coincidence that many of the best nonsense writers – Edward Lear, Mervyn Peake, Stevie Smith, Dr Seuss, Edward Gorey – were also prolific painters or illustrators.

Nonsense poetry often seems like the fertile meeting point of visual and verbal languages, the place where words are stretched to dizzying new limits, used as wild brushstrokes on a canvas of imagination. It is no small irony, as well, that Lear, who virtually invented the genre with poems like ‘The Owl and the Pussycat’, ‘wanted above all not to be loved for his nonsense but to be taken seriously as “Mr Lear the artist”’.

In Mr Lear, a formidable biography by Jenny Uglow, he has finally got his wish.

Lear was born in 1812 into a middle-class family in Holloway, North London. With more than twenty children, the Lears led a pinched existence, and at the age of four Edward was rejected by his parents and sent away from the home to live with his older sister Ann. The rupture was the first of many difficulties in the young Lear’s life: he also suffered bullying, unspecified (probably sexual) abuse, the need to suppress his homosexuality, and severe epilepsy, the latter of which Uglow describes as ‘the root of the profound loneliness he felt all his life’. There were, however, moments of richness: he formed a close bond with Ann, who helped educate him and read him stories, and by sixteen he had artistic ambitions.

First, he stayed at Knowsley Hall near Liverpool to sketch the birds in the earl of Derby’s extensive menagerie.

His ornithological passion yielded some of his most impressive works of art: in 1832 he produced a book of stunning parrot illustrations, every bit as detailed and vivid as John James Audubon’s classic The Birds of America (1827).

‘Birds gave Lear joy all his life,’ Uglow

explains; ‘they nest and fly and swim through [his] rhymes’. The exotic names of Knowsley’s many birds and animals were irresistible to Lear, and would inspire later poems such as ‘The Quangle Wangle’s Hat’. It was a great time for naturalists, a time when ‘the world expanded before the eyes of Western savants’, and Lear certainly feasted. Knowsley Hall also sharpened his sense of the overlap between human and animal: ‘the more Lear looked at the smart society set on the one hand, and the animals on the other, the more he seems to have asked, “What does it mean to be human?”’

Lear then travelled to Rome and began painting topographies, the beginning of a peripatetic life that much of the book is devoted to charting. He travelled across Europe (Italy in particular) throughout the 1840s, and later around Palestine, Egypt, and India, and he seems always to have been immersed in beauty. He was even associated with the Pre-Raphaelites briefly, though he found their technique ‘too arduous and fussy’. He inhabited an easy-going world of artists, ‘tolerant of affairs with both sexes’, yet he never grew to accept being gay, despite a friendship with the ‘Uranian’ poet John Addington Symonds, who wrote often on same-sex affairs. During this period he also established a long and complicated friendship with Alfred and Emily Tennyson (documented in depth in the online exhibition Learical Tennysons). The success of his Illustrated Excursions in Italy (1846) led Queen Victoria to ask him for drawing lessons; but in the end his paintings did not sell well, and it is not always easy to reconcile his nonsense writings with these somewhat straightforward landscapes, which went out of fashion with the ascent of photography.

Which brings us to the nonsense.

Uglow writes that ‘Lear took up nonsense when tired, or bored, or when it was too dark to paint, images and words swimming up from a realm below reason’. His Book of Nonsense, published in 1846, sold fast. Conceived originally as a ‘semi-private pleasure’, it proved to be the channel through which the latent anarchism that runs through his earlier letters and drawings could finally find

expression. Uglow writes that it ‘showed him to be a lyrical poet whose metres were as varied as … Tennyson[’s] and whose moods could embrace yearning sadness as well as wit’. There is also an uneasiness throughout the poems, such as in this limerick: There was an Old Man of Whitehaven, Who danced a quadrille with a raven; But they said – ‘It’s absurd, to encourage this bird!’

So they smashed that Old Man of Whitehaven.

This is a particularly violent poem, but it also displays some of Lear’s main devices and themes: non sequiturs, sharp vicissitudes, that blurry boundary between human and animal. His poems are grounded in everyday sights, sounds, and objects, giving them a sharp satirical edge, while poems like ‘The Scroobious Pip’ may be some of the ultimate expressions of eccentricity. In that poem, other animals clamour to categorise the mysterious ‘Scroobious Pip’, but his only reply is: ‘Flippety chip – Chippety flip – / My only name is the Scroobious Pip.’ It is the appeal to individuality that makes such poems poignant. Lear was the best type of eccentric, someone who through his non-conformism allowed others, at least vicariously, respite from the ceaseless demands of the crowd. He speaks to the inner eccentric in us all, the inner animal who wants nothing more than to turn things upside down and howl in the face of convention. It can be tempting to try to impose meanings on Lear’s poems, to psychoanalyse them, wring sense out of them, but to do so would be to miss the point entirely.

Uglow understands this, and takes a similar approach to his life. Only the gentlest interpretations are offered, and the prose skips along throughout, with its own yearning for this brilliant, tormented man. Mr Lear will surely become the definitive biography of Edward Lear for a generation, and one rather envies the reader with no prior knowledge of the man, who can approach the book and discover a fascinating life, and a whole world so vividly, lovingly evoked. g James Antoniou is a Melbourne critic.

BIOGRAPHY

39

Home and haven

tongue.’ But Moushegh Ishkhan puts the case for one’s cradle tongue in ‘The Armenian Language is the Home of the Armenian’:

Kerryn Goldsworthy

The Armenian language is the home and haven where the wanderer can own roof and wall and nourishment.

He can enter to find love and pride, Locking the hyena and the storm outside.

LOVE IS STRONG AS DEATH: POEMS CHOSEN BY PAUL KELLY

edited by Paul Kelly

Hamish Hamilton, $39.99 hb, 432 pp

T

he assertion that ‘love is strong as death’ comes from the Song of Solomon, a swooning paean to sexual love that those unfamiliar with the Old Testament might be startled to find there. Songwriter and musician Paul Kelly has included it in this hefty, eclectic, and beautifully produced anthology of poetry, which has ‘meaningful gift’ written all over it.

In a brisk but friendly and contentrich introduction, Kelly addresses the anthologist’s Big Three: parameters, ordering principle, and criteria for inclusion. The first involves a decision ‘not to include song lyrics … However, when you make the rules, you’re allowed a few exceptions,’ he says, listing the handful of songs included. The ordering principle is simple and strong: the poems appear in alphabetical order by title. This is partly because Kelly didn’t want the book to look ‘textbooky’, but also, he says, because it allows the poems ‘to jostle one another in a democratic manner … [the poets] all get to hang out together and have sparky conversations’.

Kelly’s main criterion for inclusion is also very simple: ‘if I love a poem, it goes in, no matter how worn out others may think it to be’. This book is a kind of memoir, a self-portrait created not by looking in the mirror but by pointing to the bookcase. It’s clear that his imagined readership is made up of general readers: of people who might choose the book because it was Paul Kelly who chose the poems.

Many of those poems are indeed about love or death, but sex and language also get a good run. ‘Immigrant Blues’ by Li-Young Lee begins: ‘People have been trying to kill me since I was born / a man tells his son, trying to explain / the wisdom of learning a second 40 MARCH 2020

Like language, sex makes a frequent appearance in this book, often in poems that are ostensibly about something else.

Some of the titles are quite startling in this respect, notably ‘Ode to the Clitoris’, and the mystifying ‘Keats Is Dead So Fuck Me From Behind’. There’s also Donne’s classic ‘To His Mistress Going To Bed’, the seventeenth century’s high-culture equivalent of Joe Cocker singing ‘You Can Keep Your Hat On’.

Australian poets are also well represented in this field: there’s the tender ‘Why I Love Your Body’ by Dorothy Porter, a breathtakingly erotic poem by Kevin Hart – ‘Your Kiss’ – and another

by Alison Croggon, whose ‘Seduction Poem’ is a direct invitation: ‘Unbutton all your weight, like a bird / flying the night’s starred nakedness’.

The alphabetical juxtaposition of poems can enrich the reading of them in unexpected ways, especially if this involves poems you already know well.

I felt physically jolted by the sight of two poems I’ve loved since my teens, Yeats’s ‘An Irish Airman Foresees His Death’ and Cavafy’s ‘Ithaka’, sitting side by side. Each of these is a gently closing fist around the heart, and here they reveal their common preoccupations: the idea of home, and the balance of movement and stasis in narratives of progress and moments of equipoise.

Even more surprising is the joint appearance of ‘Lead, Kindly Light’ (hymns and psalms, it seems, get a pass) with ‘Leda and the Swan’, where the newly canonised Cardinal Newman’s gentle, regretful plea for guidance is followed

by Yeats’s sonnet about bestiality and rape. But they have something weighty in common: considered in the light of each other, both of them are about obedience and submission to a god.

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW

Within the alphabet’s solid and immovable structure, there is room for many poems to move across cultures, countries, and centuries. Aboriginal writers are well represented, as are poets from across the world. There is a lot of Irish verse, including three mesmerising female laments: translations from the Gaelic of two ancient, anonymous poems, ‘Donal Og’ and ‘The Hag of Beare’, and contemporary poet Paula Meehan’s ‘The Statue of the Virgin at Granard Speaks’: But on this All Souls’ Night there is no respite from the keening of the wind.

I would not be amazed if every corpse came risen from the graveyard to join in exaltation with the gale, a cacophony of bone imploring sky for judgement and release from being the conscience of the town.

There are cinematic scenes from The Iliad and The Odyssey side by side with the twentieth-century Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai, clearly a favourite of Kelly’s along with Thomas Hardy.

There are poets you’ve never heard of, and poems you know by heart. Most of all, there is Shakespeare, represented by a number of sonnets and many of the best-known speeches and soliloquies: Cleopatra’s burning throne; Julius Caesar’s friends and Romans and countrymen; Portia’s quality of mercy; Macbeth’s tomorrows; and Henry V’s speech to his band of brothers upon St Crispin’s Day. Buy this book of riches and give it to the people you love. Then nag them to learn some of these poems by heart, and learn some yourself. (‘By heart’: what a revealing expression.) If you find yourself in a terrible situation, if you get arrested or your lover leaves or the car breaks down or the fire traps you or you must sit patiently waiting in the emergency ward for news, poetry remembered and recited can lift you up and away, out of the murk to better times. g Kerryn Goldsworthy has edited four anthologies of Australian writing.

Fringes of sleep James Jiang THE ESPIONAGE ACT: NEW POEMS

by Jennifer Maiden

Quemar Press, $18.50 pb, 84 pp

W

.H. Auden once rebuked Percy Shelley for characterising poets as ‘the unacknowledged legislators of the world’. To think this way is to confuse hard with soft power, coercion with persuasion.

Poetry, as Auden famously wrote, ‘makes nothing happen’; he instead bestowed Shelley’s epithet upon ‘the secret police’.

But in an age of surveillance and information warfare that has militarised the channels of everyday communication, the line between hard and soft becomes more difficult to draw. The very notion of a random or innocent signal seems laughably naïve as we are inundated by new suspicions and suspicions of news.

But the state of mind in which there is always more meaning to be had is one that poetry invites us to inhabit.

For Shelley, poems were ‘hieroglyphs’ and the poetic imagination an ‘imperial faculty, whose throne is curtained within the invisible nature of man’. Is the poet an agent, then, of this secretive control? Perhaps Shelley was on Auden’s side all along.

This latest suite of poems by Jennifer Maiden deals with the political, cultural, and sexual drama of espionage.

The Espionage Act invites the reader to view an array of contemporary events (from the arrest of Julian Assange to the Syrian Civil War) through the prism of twentieth-century intelligence history.

Maiden shows herself immensely literate in the varieties of jargon employed by spies and their agencies; one of the pleasures afforded by this volume is its constantly shifting lexical register, from the cartoonishly slangy ‘honeypot’ (sexual entrapment) to the technobureaucratic scientism of ‘the Overton window’ (the range of acceptably ‘mainstream’ policies).

Since Maiden’s celebrated book Friendly Fire (2005), her work has consistently sought to dramatise the

aftershocks of geopolitical upheaval at the level of the domestic and intimate.

The Espionage Act continues in this vein: we have the return of the couple, George Jeffreys and Clare Collins, aid workers blown about by the hurricane of American force projection. In Friendly Fire, they found themselves in New York on 9/11. It is a testament to Maiden’s tact and humane imagination that one can still read this sequence of poems without wincing at sentimentalised overstatement or aesthetic opportunism.

The Espionage Act also continues two genres peculiar to Maiden: the ‘diary poem’ and the imaginary conversation.

Unlike the conversations composed by Walter Savage Landor, Maiden’s pieces pit contemporary with historical figures: in The Metronome (2017), Maiden had Hillary Clinton consulting with Eleanor Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln, Jeremy Corbyn with Constance Markievicz, Malcolm Turnbull with William Bligh. The element of fancy is married to a concrete formula; each conversation typically begins with X waking up in Y next to Z. As Maiden has noted, critics cannot resist ‘being arch about the woke-up thing’, but as the conversations in the latest volume suggest, the fringes of sleep are important for lending the colloquies not only their veil of surrealism, but also an air of vulnerability.

Waking up is not only an immensely private experience, it also marks a recovery of innocence – that first moment of free and fresh apprehension before the clouds of calculative forethought gather.

The possibility of such a recovery in a world webbed with murderous design is the unspoken hope that marks so many of the new poems.

One of Maiden’s great strengths is her ability to preserve a tender awareness in the midst of privation and intrigue. It is there in Gore Vidal’s solicitude towards a sleeping Assange in ‘Gore Vidal Woke Up in Belmarsh Prison’: ‘Assange’s face had gentled younger, perhaps / due to the lack of close eyesight, to white light / from the barred window, the small television / with its simplifications like childhood.’

In ‘Dorothy Wordsworth and the critic’, the latter catches ‘her eyes show[ing] the wall a compassion that she must /

have wished for herself ’. Animals and children are often privileged objects of such awareness. In another instalment of the ‘Brookings’ poems, the poet basks in the reflective innocence of her pet marsupial: ‘And who am I to take away his comfort, / who has offered me such comfort with his trust?’ But as with ‘Diary Poem: Uses of Alan Turing’, innocence is shadowed by complicity; the poet’s pet is named after a political thinktank and Turing’s relish for the fairy tale of Snow White foretells his

Maiden’s work has consistently sought to dramatise the aftershocks of geopolitical upheaval doom. The arc of such poems bends toward satire, but they leave enough room for sentiment to be unstiffened from the wry sangfroid with which most of the political commentary is intoned.

Maiden’s best lines have a fierce eloquence, but The Espionage Act is marred by occasional sententiousness. That ‘it is not the dark / that makes us mad, nor waiting’s violence, but still what terror / always springs in sudden police arrival, the new fatal manacles’ veers towards literalism. When the poet asks ‘Is / loyalty to corruption in itself corrupt?’, one wonders if this would even be a question for anyone other than Donald Trump.

Still, one is grateful for ‘the nude’s kinetic honesty’, a phrase memorably inserted into the mouth of Jackson Pollock. In Assange’s ‘casual baritone / deferential with explanatory energy’, Maiden wrings music out of recalcitrant syllabic material and shows the intuition of a keen moral psychologist.

‘Literature,’ Ezra Pound once said, ‘is news that stays news.’ While Maiden’s poetry has never failed to be topical, the demands of keeping up with every twist in the bowels of the deep state have been a drain on her rhetorical powers. Weariness has set in for the poet and her characters. Whether it is a ‘weariness that draws old energy from sea beaches’ remains to be seen. g James Jiang is a writer and academic based in Melbourne.

POETRY

41

Murky worlds

A careful study of the Cold War

Mark Edele COLD WAR EXILES AND THE CIA: PLOTTING TO FREE RUSSIA

by Benjamin Tromly Oxford University Press, £75 hb, 352 pp

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van Vasilevich Ovchinnikov defected to the Soviet Union in 1958.

After three years in West Germany, he had had enough of the West with its hollow promises. He was a farmer’s son, and his family’s property had been confiscated and the family deported as ‘kulaks’ during Stalin’s assault on the Russian village in the early 1930s.

Ovchinnikov managed to escape the often deadly exile, obscured his family background, and made a respectable career. Brought up in a children’s home, then trained in a youth army school, the talented youngster eventually entered the élite Military Institute for Foreign Languages in Moscow. In 1955, now an officer and a translator, he was sent to East Berlin as part of the army’s intelligence unit. This was a quintessentially Stalinist career of a quintessentially Stalinist social climber: most Soviets had something to hide about their past in this hyper-suspicious state, which opened opportunities only for children of the ‘right’ (i.e. proletarian) backgrounds. Then, catastrophe: his kulak father threatened to become known to his superiors, and Ovchinnikov used his position in East Germany just as he had earlier used the chances provided by Stalin’s state. The building of the Berlin Wall was still in the future; it was relatively easy to pass over to West Berlin.

Thus Ovchinnikov ‘joined the émigré anti-communist political scene with enthusiasm’ in 1955, as historian Benjamin Tromly writes in his careful study of US entanglements with Russian anti-Bolsheviks in the early Cold War. These were years of CIA sponsorship of Russian exiles, promising to help ‘liberate’ Russia from the Soviets. But like many others, Ovchinnikov soon 42 MARCH 2020

grew disillusioned. An anti-Soviet Russian patriot as well as an anti-Semite, he found the exiles working for the Americans a bunch of ‘Russo-phobes, Jews [and] Soviet spies’. He also became convinced that the years of what he perceived as Jewish rule over Russia were over: in 1957, Nikita Khrushchev had defeated the opposition against him in the Communist Party’s leadership.

To Ovchinnikov, a ‘Russian national government’ had now taken over from the Jews, presumably because one of the four main players in the ousted opposition group – Lazar Kaganovich – was known to be Jewish. Thus Ovchinnikov returned to East Berlin in 1958. He was promptly arrested and sentenced to death for treason, eventually commuted to ten years in the Gulag.

Ovchinnikov’s fateful decision took shape in the context of a post-Stalinist campaign to entice émigrés to return to the homeland. All would be forgiven, they were told, if they would surrender themselves. The campaign was moderately successful: between 1954 and 1959, some 10,000 exiles repatriated.

We know little about their collective fate, although it does appear that some were allowed to live a quiet life upon their return, under the watchful eyes of the security services.

Ovchinnikov was part of the third wave of Russian emigrants, a mini-wave of postwar defectors. The first group of post-revolutionary émigrés was the largest: probably around two million people (not all of them ethnic Russians). The second wave left during World War II, as prisoners of war (POWs), slave labourers for the Germans, or collaborators with them. Most were returned under forced repatriation agreements

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW

reached at Yalta, but some 32,000 Russians (and many other non-Russians) avoided this fate. According to secret Soviet statistics, some 5,700 of them went to Australia.

Despite attempts by leading émigrés and their sponsors in the US government, these groups never coalesced into a unified Russian diaspora, as Tromly shows in detail. Too big were the divisions between them. The White émigrés of the first wave had been formed ideologically and personally during the pre-war political crisis, World War I, revolution, and civil war.

They were divided internally between a few liberals and larger numbers of non-Bolshevik socialists, monarchists, and fascists, all struggling to recalibrate their politics to fit the new realities of the emerging Cold War. As is the custom among Russian intellectuals, they formed groups and ‘movements’, parties and journals, only to split and split again, call one another names, and wallow in mutual recriminations and resentments. During World War II, they could become ‘defensists’ who supported Stalin’s regime as the current incarnation of Russian statehood; ‘defeatists’, who hoped that a Soviet surrender would reignite the civil war they had lost; or outright fascists who delusively believed they could build a Russian state in alliance with the Nazis.

This fractious world of émigré politics then confronted the second wave, people who had largely grown up under the Soviets. They included a hard core of active anti-Stalinists who had crossed the frontline to fight with the Nazis against the Bolsheviks; a much larger group of refugees who had collaborated to escape near-certain death in German

POW camps; and others washed up outside the Soviet Union who did not dare to return because they assumed it spelled incarceration or worse.

Tromly’s book tells the story of émigré politics in great detail. It will remain an essential guide to the murky world of covert operations, anti-Soviet plots, and propaganda in the early Cold War. The third wave of postwar defectors saw eye to eye neither with the second wavers, who they often thought were traitors to the motherland who should have fought as long as the war raged, nor with the first wavers, whose politics seemed archaic. They returned at a time when life was getting better in the West in more dramatic ways than in the Soviet orbit and when émigré political entrepreneurs and the CIA had established opportunities for employment in the murky world of espionage, psychological warfare, and propaganda. Tromly doubts their political motivations, although he might put the bar rather high in his discussion of opportunism versus ideological conviction.

The book provides a sobering tale for advocates of area studies (of which I am one). Much US engagement with the Russian émigré communities was driven by ‘liberationism’ – ‘an intellectual and political position that advocated US support for the freeing of Russians from communist rule’, as Tromly explains.

A central figure in this current of foreign-policy thought was George F. Kennan, author of ‘containment’, head of the Policy Planning Staff at the Department of State in 1947–50, and later US ambassador to the Soviet Union (1952). Kennan was deeply steeped in the language, culture, and history of Russia, and so were many other State Department Russian hands. They held ‘a conservative and Russophilic reading of Russian history, from which they derived the notion that exiles were not just vital parts of the Russian nation but also harbingers of the country’s non-communist future’.

This vision they had acquired from their language, literature, and history teachers – often Russian émigrés – during three-year stints at European universities, which were to equip them with deep knowledge of the enemy. They returned blinkered not only to the realities of contemporary Soviet life but also to the disconnections between émigrés and the country they claimed to represent. Meanwhile, the funds funnelled into anti-Soviet projects empowered the bolder among the émigrés to lie to their handlers about the supposed resistance cells they were building in the Soviet Union, all the while ‘drink[ing] champagne’ and buying ‘camel’s hair coats and new briefcases’. As one of them summarised the relationship with his American sponsors: ‘God gives, we drink.’ g Mark Edele is Hansen Professor in History at the University of Melbourne. His most recent books include Stalin’s Defectors: How Red Army soldiers became Hitler’s collaborators (2017) and The Soviet Union: A short history (2019).

RUSSIA

43

Hellenic loot Janna Thompson WHO OWNS HISTORY? ELGIN’S LOOT AND THE CASE FOR RETURNING PLUNDERED TREASURE

by Geoffrey Robertson Knopf, $39.99 pb, 304 pp

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fter his success in forcing the British Natural History Museum to return skulls and bones of Tasmanian Aboriginals, the human rights lawyer Geoffrey Robertson was asked by the Greek minister of foreign affairs to ascertain whether international law could be used to induce the British to return the Parthenon Marbles to Greece. Although the project found favour with a succession of Greek prime ministers, the Tsipras government decided not to act on Robertson’s recommendations. This book is a revised version of his report, along with a discussion of demands for the repatriation of other cultural treasures.

Many people have argued for the return of the Marbles. Robertson’s main contribution is a survey of legal reasons for repatriation. A UNESCO Convention prohibits the illicit exportation of cultural property, though it only applies to property stolen after 1970.

The United Nations General Assembly has passed resolutions favouring repatriation. The International Court of Justice has the authority to provide an opinion on cases that involve a continuing wrong, and human rights law, by supporting the ability of a people to maintain their culture, suggests that they 44 MARCH 2020

ought to have access to items essential to it. Robertson admits that none of these conventions provides a firm basis for legal action by the Greek government.

But he believes that they add up to a ‘ripening’ norm that makes it customary for states to return cultural property to victims of wrongful appropriation.

As an example of this trend, he refers to French President Macron’s recent support for the return to Africa of cultural property now in French museums.

Most people now agree that Lord Elgin’s removal of the Marbles from the Parthenon was of doubtful legality. Robertson conclusively establishes Elgin’s guilt. He had no permission from the Ottoman court, only a letter from an official allowing his party to make casts of the Parthenon friezes and to take whatever they could scavenge from the rubble around the building.

Elgin’s men stripped figures from the frieze and cut away statues from their niches. ‘The words “vandalism” and “looting” are appropriate descriptions of Elgin’s actions.’

If everything wrongly taken has to be given back, the result would be the mass exodus that museum directors fear. But Robertson is not advocating a wholesale return of items stolen in past centuries. He lists conditions that should be taken into consideration when states make claims for the return of cultural property. They must prove a historical connection to the objects they claim or a spiritual relationship that remains relevant. They must be able to care for them in environments that are optimal for the appreciation of their aesthetic value. They must not have the intention of using them for deceitful propaganda purposes, and they must not be violators of human rights.

The Marbles rightly belong to the Greeks, Robertson says, because they are the key to Greek history and culture. But what is so special about the Greeks? The art, philosophy, and politics of ancient Athens are integral to Western cultural development. They have probably influenced the art, tastes, ideals, and ways of thinking of presentday British people as much as those of present-day Greeks. We can support the Greeks’ claim to the Marbles and still

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wonder what it is about their culture and history that gives them a better claim. Robertson provides no answer.

The best reason for repatriation is aesthetic. The Marbles, Robertson points out, are an integral part of the frieze and other sculptures constructed for the Parthenon. They were meant to be seen and appreciated in context, and they would now best be viewed in the gallery that the Greeks have constructed near the Parthenon, where visitors looking through the windows can see how they fit into the artistic scheme for the whole. The sculptures are more likely to work their magic in this place than in a room in the British Museum.

Robertson uses his list of repatriation conditions to discuss other cases.

There is good reason, he believes, for returning at least some of the Benin Bronzes taken by the British during a punitive military expedition in Africa, though return should be conditional on the ability of Nigeria to house them safely. The British unjustly looted treasures from the Summer Palace outside Beijing during one of the Opium Wars, but Robertson has doubts about returning them to China because of its record on human rights. The shield appropriated by Captain Cook after an encounter with Aboriginal people on his landing at Botany Bay should be returned to Australia. It has little meaning to the British but special significance to Indigenous and other Australians.

In his discussion of these cases and the factors that ought to be taken into account, Robertson is trying to balance the legal and moral requirements of reparative justice with the imperative to protect aesthetic values; the meaning of cultural objects for people of a nation with cosmopolitan values. How to adjudicate between these requirements needs more discussion, but Robertson’s book is a passionately engaged and wellargued contribution to the Parthenon Marbles controversy and to the issues raised by increasing demands for repatriation of cultural property. g Janna Thompson is a professor of philosophy at La Trobe University. Her books include Taking Responsibility for the Past: Reparation and historical injustice (2002).

Insights Colin Nettelbeck CHIS: THE LIFE AND WORK OF ALAN ROWLAND CHISHOLM (1888–1981)

by Stanley John Scott

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Ancora Press, $40 hb, 219 pp

n his lifetime, Alan Rowland Chisholm was widely regarded as an Australian national treasure, and the new biography by Stanley John Scott is compelling evidence that he deserves to remain recognised as one today.

This is a book that might have languished as an unpublished typescript, or indeed simply disappeared. Its author died in 2014, having twice withheld it from publication.The first time was due to frustration with MUP, which had promised to bring it out in 1983, then dithered. Later, when a different publication opportunity arose, Scott felt it needed reworking but lacked sufficient motivation to do so. In the months before his death, he was persuaded to change his mind. Thanks to the perseverance of Wallace Kirsop, the publisher of Ancora Press at Monash University, and editor Meredith Sherlock, it is finally available.

Chisholm’s name is legendary in French Studies. During his long tenure at the University of Melbourne (1922–57), where he became foundation Professor of French in 1937, he created a veritable ‘school’: mastery of the language was combined with literary history and textual analysis in a holistic method underpinned by the conviction that scholarship and critical thought were not mere intellectual exercises but vectors for the highest aspirations of human experience.

The impact of this ‘model’ was enduring: it was to be transmitted and developed by various of Chisholm’s students, who became leaders in their field – in Australia, Britain, and the United States.

Chisholm’s specialist area of scholarship was French symbolist poetry, and his exegetical work on Mallarmé, in particular, is still – including in France itself – considered as a high-water mark.

That he was the first Australian to be promoted to the rank of Officier in the Legion of Honour is a fitting symbol of Chisholm’s achievements in

his chosen profession, but Scott’s book demonstrates that this was only one dimension of a life story that, beyond the academic world, intersects in multiple significant ways with Australia’s broader history and cultural development, providing illuminating insights both into a remarkable individual and the times and society in which he lived. A striking example of this is his service in World War I. While there was nothing overtly heroic in his successive jobs in signals, the wireless corps, and intelligence, as the diminutive Chisholm (he was just above 5’ 2” tall) crawled about among the trenches ensuring vital communications (and eventually contracting sepsis in the foot that would bother him for the rest of his life), his powers of observation and his ability to reflect on what was happening made him very different from stereotypical images of the Aussie Digger. His war diary – which Scott rightly argues deserves a separate publication – is an amazing document in which the immediate experience of the war is depicted alongside his multilingual reflections on his prodigious reading (including Dante in the original) or his learning of new languages (Russian, Spanish) to extend the French, Italian, and German in which he was already fluent. (He would later add Hebrew, Arabic, and Japanese to the mix.)

In the interwar period, Chisholm’s self-avowed conservative bent and anticommunist ideology led him into dangerous waters, at least in his voluminous private correspondence with his old friend Randolph Hughes. David Samuel Bird, in his Nazi Dreamtime (2012), oversteps when he describes Chisholm as a Nazi enthusiast and a ‘hater’; he fails to distinguish adequately between paths that might have been taken and those that actually were. Nonetheless, some of Chisholm’s thinking at this time – which includes undeniable anti-Semitic elements – is a timely reminder of the dangers of seeking simple solutions to the complexities of unstable times and of the neglected historical reality that the Australian experience of the 1930s ideological conflicts often mirrored the better-known temptations of many European societies, including France.

In contrast to the private exchanges

with Hughes, when World War II broke out, Chisholm, in addition to his university duties, took to journalism, publishing weekly articles in The Argus for the Allied cause. After France collapsed, he assumed a leadership role in supporting the Free French and Charles de Gaulle. These eloquent and often fiery articles put paid to any idea of Chisholm as a fascist.

Chisholm’s lifelong promotion of Australian literature, through such journals as Meanjin, the Australian Quarterly, and the wider press, led to Robert Menzies naming him to the Commonwealth Literature Board. Some of Chisholm’s own literary ventures remain virtually unassessed: Scott believed that the poetry warranted publication but was unsuccessful in achieving that goal.

Today, such things as his efforts to render Mallarmé into Latin verse seem distinctly arcane. There can be little doubt, however, about the value of the memoirs he wrote after retirement: Men Were My Milestones (1958) and The Familiar Presence and Other Reminiscences (1966) are beautifully written and full of wisdom for anyone interested in the development of Australia’s cultural identity.

Scott’s biography, drawn from a rich array of sources and pointing to many more, is one of those books that is likely to stimulate the writing of others.

Chisholm’s life opens differently and surprisingly in differing directions. Behind each of his major undertakings – family, war, the history of ideas, literary criticism and creation – one revels in a unique, always intriguing intelligence and a charismatic humanity.

Scott’s life of Chisholm has drawn on a vast array of sources, but Chis may not remain the definitive account of the achievements and significance of Chisholm’s multiple and multi-faceted roles. As the author himself points out, there is still a great deal of unpublished material: diaries, letters, poetry, commentaries. Some readers may be irked by the fact that several important quotations in French are left without translation. g Colin Nettelbeck is an Emeritus Professor at the University of Melbourne, where he held the A.R. Chisholm Chair of French.

BIOGRAPHY

45

‘Dripping with gum’ A lavish account of Australian botany

Danielle Clode BOTANICAL REVELATION: EUROPEAN ENCOUNTERS WITH AUSTRALIAN PLANTS BEFORE DARWIN

by David J. Mabberley NewSouth, $89.99 hb, 372 pp

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lants are one of the first things botanical work of Joseph Banks, James the exquisite artwork of illustrators you notice when you arrive in Edward Smith, Jacques-Julien Labil- such as Pierre-Joseph Redouté and Ferdinand Bauer as well as many Australia: the swathes of others. olive-green trees and a crisp euThe book is constructed calypt scent on the air. It was the around the antiquarian botanical first thing many explorers noted, books and paintings collected by too, whether in Abel Tasman’s Peter Crossing, who (in conjunc1642 description of an ‘abuntion with the State Library of dance of timber’ or in Willem de New South Wales of which he Vlamingh’s 1694 descriptions of is the current Foundation Board trees ‘dripping with gum’ and the chair) has previously produced ‘whole land filled with the fine books and exhibitions on John pleasant smell’ of native Callitris Lewin, Bauer, and other colonial pines. It did not take long for painters. accounts and samples of AusWith such a rich resource of tralian vegetation to make their fine botanical artwork and books way back to Europe, although to draw on, supplemented with it took significantly longer for the original specimens from herany systematic scientific work to bariums, Botanical Revelation can be completed on our distinctive be aptly described as a lavish and flora. magnificent hardback production.

Botanical Revelation enThe text, written by Professor compasses this early European David J. Mabberley, provides a exploration of Australian botany, fascinating account of the trials, from the first collections and treasures, and tribulations of Ausdescriptions in the seventeenth tralian botanical research from century to the arrival in Sydney Eucalyptus resinifera (red mahogany, Myrtaceae). Henry both shipboard exploration and in 1836 of Charles Darwin, who Cranke Andrews, coloured engraving, in HC Andrews, early colonial work. Mabberley famously noted ‘the extreme Botanist’s repository, vol. 6, 1804, tab. 400. Drawn from plant no doubt draws on his considuniformity in the character of in Lady de Clifford’s garden, Paddington, London, 1804. erable experience as a botanist the vegetation’. The book devotes substantial chapters to the pioneering lardière, and Robert Brown, featuring in Europe and Australia and on his

46 MARCH 2020

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW

previous research into botanical history, expedition in Vanikoro, which occurred It is difficult to assess the contribuparticularly relating to Banks, Bauer, shortly after leaving Australia. tions different people have made to our Nor did the earlier colonial botanists understanding of Australian botany and Brown. This expertise is invaluable in untangling the often underestimated have it much better. While demand for over time. In the most famous examcomplexity of historical ple, Banks, often noted botany, particularly in as the ‘father of Ausrelation to taxonomy, tralian botany’, made publication, and sciensubstantial Australian tific precedence. collections but failed to There is no denypublish his accounts in ing that botanists often his lifetime, frustrating made uneasy bunkmates many of his fellow botaon board naval vessels nists and minimising his of exploration, even on legacy in the scientific French vessels explicliterature. Nonetheless, itly charged with and his generosity and supemployed for scientific port for other botanists, research by the governeven French rivals, had ment. English explorawidespread benefits for tion vessels, confounded the botanical sciences. with public–pr ivate The name ‘eucalypt ’ partnerships such as (named after the characBanks’s, were even more teristic gumnut cap) was fraught. After Captain coined by Charles-LouCook’s experiences with is L’Héritier de Brutelle Banks’s large retinue on from the specimens he his first voyage, and with saw while sheltering the Forsters on his secfrom an international ond (who pre-emptively botanical contretemps published their account in Banks’s library. Simiof the voyage, despite larly, Banks was responpromising not to do so), sible for ensuring that Cook apparently refused Labillardière’s collecto have scientists on his tions, which had been third voyage at all. Simiseized by the English, larly, successive French were returned to the voyages struggled with botanist, rather than Banksia coccinea (scarlet banksia, Proteaceae). Archibald Menzies collected this their civilian scientific the French government, in 1791. Ferdinand Lukas Bauer, coloured engraving, in FL Bauer, Illustrationes staff and, after the Baugreatly facilitating the florae Novae Hollandiae, 1813, tab. 3. Drawn from his own colour-coded pencil sketch (destroyed), King George Sound, 1801. Also copper plate, Natural History din expedition, employed publication of one of Museum, London (with more detail than the watercolour Bauer produced for the naval pharmacists and the first substantial and Admiralty before 1812). physicians to do the work systematic accounts of (a strategy that paid off Australian botany. handsomely). For their own part, the Australian plants was high in Europe, It is impossible to do full justice to botanists frequently complained about conditions in the colony were not always the breadth and detail of the entertainthe lack of time and resources avail- conducive to art and science, although, ing stories of Australian botany scattered able for collecting and about the great as Mabberley points out, horticultural through this beautiful and impeccably risks to which their delicate and bulky interests ranked high in a colony strug- produced book. Like the plants it repplant collections (both living and dried) gling to produce its own food supply resents, Botanical Revelation will be a were subjected on board ship. Plant and battling the debilitations of scurvy. treasured addition to many collections, collections and ships seem an inevitably Nonetheless pictures, descriptions, and and it makes a fine contribution to hazardous, if unavoidable, combination, plants alike soon found their way to the Australian botanical history. g as illustrated by the complete loss of the opposite side of the world, into English botanical collections of Lapérouse from and French gardens, notably in Kew Danielle Clode’s forthcoming book Botany Bay in 1788, now known only by Gardens, the Jardin des Plantes, and the is a biography of the French botanist a poignant handful of seeds and hardy Empress Josephine’s garden at Malmai- Jeanne Barret from the Bougainville banksias from the shipwreck of the son, beautifully illustrated by Redouté. expedition.

B O TA N Y

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Birds and gadgets Andrew Fuhrmann FLIGHT LINES: ACROSS THE GLOBE ON A JOURNEY WITH THE ASTONISHING ULTRAMARATHON BIRDS

by Andrew Darby

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Allen & Unwin, $32.99 pb, 335 pp

t’s late July and high over the foggy green waters of the Sea of Okhotsk, a solitary Grey Plover beats its way south. Within sight of Sakhalin Island, the former Russian prison colony documented by Anton Chekhov, she veers west, heading for a vast tidal flat in Ul’banskiy Bay, not far from the rural settlement of Tugur Village. It’s hard to imagine a more isolated situation, and yet even here, in this empty theatre of sky and water, there is an audience.

Nestled under the plumage on her back is a small satellite transmitter. An aerial extending beyond her tail feathers broadcasts her progress to the world.

The history of our pursuit of migratory birds goes back a long way. As early as 1804, the Franco-American ornithologist and artist John James Audubon was tying lengths of silver wire to the legs of Eastern Phoebe nestlings caught in the woods near his house in Pennsylvania. He wanted to know if the same birds returned to the same breeding sites every spring. Some ninety years later, Danish prodnosing naturalist Hans Christian Cornelius Mortensen inaugurated the modern practice of bird banding by clamping metal rings on the legs of European Starlings and other species.

Mortensen’s experiments with hand-bent strips soon inspired others. The practice spread rapidly around the world.

Today, many millions of birds are banded every year by scientists and citizen scientists. Metal rings are sometimes combined with colourful plastic bands that can be interpreted by observers from a distance, without the need for retrapping the birds or shooting them.

Neck collars, nasal saddles, and piercings are also used. More recently, shorebirds have been tagged using ticky-tacky colour-coded plastic flags that stick out 48 MARCH 2020

from the leg and can be read at even greater distances.

Thanks to advances in the design and miniaturisation of electronic tracking devices, we are in the midst of another revolution in the quest to surveil our feathered friends and peer into the mysteries of their migrations.

As with whales, wolves, and wallabies, the movement habits of waders can now be scrutinised in real time. Exact flight paths can be plotted. Breeding sites and wintering grounds can be connected. Staging areas can be identified. Distances can be tallied. Feeding patterns and breeding successes can be deduced. Environmental pressures can be identified and monitored.

The history of our pursuit of migratory birds goes back a long way In Flight Lines, Australian journalist and nature writer Andrew Darby tells the story of two Grey Plovers trapped and tagged in southern Australia and tracked to an island fastness deep in the Arctic Circle. He retraces the parallel paths taken by the birds, visiting the places they visited, documenting the threats faced by migratory birds along the way, and reflecting on the way technology changes how we think about the natural world.

The Grey Plover, like most shorebirds, lives on the hard-to-reach margins, on mudflats, tidelines, and wetlands, on beaches piled with fetid seagrass wrack, and on exposed sandbanks patrolled by biting insects. We have been slower to accumulate knowledge about its migratory behaviour in our flyway (the East Asian-Australian Flyway) by comparison with other waders, and yet we know that the Grey Plover’s annual transit is one of the most ambitious, shuttling between extreme ends of the world. Darby’s two females, for example, were tracked from Thompson Beach in Gulf St Vincent to Wrangel Island in the East Siberian Sea, last known home of the woolly mammoth.

This and subsequent tracking projects have gone some way toward filling out the picture. It confirmed the impor-

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW

tance of the threatened tidal flats of the Yellow Sea. Darby describes the deleterious impacts of hunting, pollution, wind turbines, and, most ominously, land reclamation and the construction of hard coastlines in coastal Chinese provinces like Jiangsu and Hebei. Over the past three decades, vast stretches of the Chinese and South Korean coastlines have been transformed by seawalls and breakwaters, with much loss of shorebird habitat. Ironically, the undeveloped western coast of North Korea is now something of haven.

Darby doesn’t soft-pedal the dangers faced by shorebirds, but Flight Lines is not a doom-and-gloom narrative. The tone is more often one of wonder and curiosity. But what is more wonderful, the birds or the gadgets? Darby is dutifully impressed by the achievements of his two ultramarathon migrants; but what really seems to inspire him – and a lot of the people he interviews – is the achievement of tracing these plovers across three continents.

Indeed, this book has the atmosphere of a boffin’s pilgrimage as Darby searches for totems and symbols along what he calls the ‘arc of possibility’, the zone of potential staging grounds in East and South-East Asia. Darby was diagnosed with cancer during the writing of Flight Lines. He describes how his interest in satellite telemetry helped him to survive this terrifying and profoundly depressing experience. He even suggests that the positive results of his immunotherapy treatment justify, or in some way connect with, the work of gathering data about bird migration.

And so this book, on top of everything else, is a statement of faith in the scientific method. It is, however, sometimes hard to credit Darby’s belief that science will save the birds. Surveillance doesn’t in itself do very much for them.

Conservation efforts are helped by access to good data and scientists have an important role to play in shaping the debates that determine how the business of the world is conducted; but the really needful thing is and always has been political willpower. That seems to be in short supply. g Andrew Fuhrmann is a past ABR Fellow.

Staying fallible Nick Haslam SCATTERBRAIN: HOW THE MIND’S MISTAKES MAKE HUMANS CREATIVE, INNOVATIVE AND SUCCESSFUL

by Henning Beck

NewSouth, $29.99 pb, 336 pp

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nce, when we humans reflected on what made us special, we latched on to those qualities that distinguished us from the rest of creation. We were smarter, more rational, more cognitively capable. The philosopher Joseph de Maistre, for example, proposed that ‘the concept of number is the obvious distinction between beast and man’. More recently, with the onrush of the digital age, we have come to feel less confident in our mental powers. We may understand numbers better than other beasts, but our phones can carry out arithmetic calculations at inconceivable speeds and beat the brainiest among us at chess.

Rather than concede mental superiority to computers, we must find new ways to define our human specialness.

We decide that it is human to err and reach for an assortment of Romantic virtues that we believe we embody but that machines unerringly lack: emotion, imagination, creativity. In Scatterbrain, German neuroscientist Henning Beck extols these virtues as inherent capabilities of brains, which, although they may appear to fall prey to countless errors and biases that do not trouble computers, are in fact better adapted to the changing demands of everyday life. Our mental foibles make us more fit for purpose than any app or algorithm.

Beck lays out the evidence for this bold claim in fourteen chapters that range far and wide over cognition, emotion, and motivation. He explores the deficiencies of memory and learning – the fallibility of our recall and our struggles with rote memorisation – but argues that we are better for having a cognitive system that is flexible, dynamic, and constructive rather than a flawless archive of facts. As he observes,

‘The brain is not a data storage device.’

Similar analyses of our elastic and imprecise senses of time and number suggest that our apparent biases and inaccuracies enable us to form memories and judgements that capture what matters. In a rapidly changing environment, where context is crucial and complexity is ever-present, we need minds that generate plausible understanding, not exact information.

Beck moves beyond the realm of cognition to investigate choking under pressure, boredom, distraction, motivation, and stereotyping. His conclusions are almost Panglossian, as if all of our mental frailties were in fact strengths, or at least side effects of strengths. Stereotyping simply reveals a brain that is engineered to seek patterns. Boredom highlights the value of daydreaming.

Being distracted by our smartphones demonstrates our curiosity. ‘If we were unable to be interrupted,’ Beck writes, ‘we would, of course, be resistant to distraction, but also to inspiration.’

It is our proneness to distraction and mind-wandering that nurtures our creativity. The concluding chapter on perfectionism continues in this vein to deliver the moral of the story. Seeking perfection works against being adaptable and closes off the opportunity to learn from our mistakes. We should, instead, ‘stay fallible’.

The book has been translated sensitively from the German and extensively retrofitted with Australian references (Leigh Sales is likened to the cingulate cortex). The tone is amiable, steering just to the right side of corny humour. The book is saved from being airport nonfiction by a steady reliance on recent research literature. Beck presents the science lucidly, without needless technical detail and with a gift for apt analogies. He wears his sophistication lightly and the book will speak to anyone with a basic scientific interest. Along the way, the reader will reap a harvest of interesting and often counter-intuitive experimental findings and a smattering of neuroanatomy, such as the medial orbitofrontal cortex, ‘located directly under the glabella, the (usually) hairless area between your eyebrows’.

Scatterbrain is a fine example of the

popular neuroscience genre. Even so, its survey of the mind and its peculiarities is perhaps too expansive, whipping through a varied list of topics at great speed. A little breadth might have been sacrificed for depth and a more structured ordering of topics. Chapters also vary substantially in whether they only document our mental limitations or also go on to demonstrate how strengths hide within these weaknesses. Some offer prescriptions for overcoming weaknesses, self-help style; others do not.

At times the book seems unsure whether it is an owner’s manual for the brain, a how-to guide for self-improvement, or an argument about the nature of human rationality. It also has two distorting features that typify the genre. For one, it plants a flag on a large quantity of oldfashioned psychology research, examining mind and behaviour without reference to any associated brain processes, and claims it as neuroscience. Perhaps half of the science cited in the book has been given this shiny new materialist branding. In addition, Beck sometimes lapses into homuncular language when explaining what different brain regions do, as if they are tiny people wrestling for control within the skull. Creating a dramatis personae of inner agents is commonplace in accounts of the mind – think of the Superego, the Anima, and the Inner Child – but it is a special problem for attempts to explain how our thoughts, feelings, and actions arise from singular, integrated brains.

Scatterbrain is a reassuring and enlightening read for those of us who lament our sieve-like memories, puny concentrations, and myopic decisions, as well as anyone who feels epistemically threatened by the computer revolution.

Computers, Beck says, are fast but stupid rule-followers – merely ‘dumb a little faster’ than they were in decades past – and we humans, slower and more error-prone, have brains that operate in a radically and beneficially different fashion. g Nick Haslam is Professor of Psychology at the University of Melbourne. His most recent book is An Introduction to Personality, Individual Differences and Intelligence (2017).

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Finding order Robyn Arianrhod ANTIMONY, GOLD, AND JUPITER’S WOLF: HOW THE ELEMENTS WERE NAMED

by Peter Wothers

Oxford University Press, $40.95 hb, 280 pp

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magine you’re trying to make sense of the universe five hundred years ago, when astronomers believe there are just seven visible ‘planets’ wandering about the Earth: the sun and moon plus Mercury to Saturn. Intriguingly, there are also seven known metals: gold, silver, copper, iron, tin, lead, and mercury. For hundreds of years there have been just seven known ‘planets’ and seven metals. Wouldn’t you be just a little tempted to see more than a coincidence here? Take gold, for example, which ‘does not react with anything in the air or the ground, and so retains its brilliance seemingly forever’: surely its power is similar to that of the evershining sun?

Then there’s fast-moving Mercury, an obvious match with the flowing metal originally known as ‘quicksilver’, while red Mars glows like red-hot iron, and so on. In Antimony, Gold, and Jupiter’s Wolf, Peter Wothers offers many tantalising titbits about the properties and etymologies of the first-known elements. But things become even more interesting when Copernicus transforms astronomy, new metals are discovered, and most of the coincidences that led to the ascription of sympathetic correspondences in alchemy and astrology are seen to be just that, coincidences.

Nevertheless, those early analogical attempts at finding order in the universe encoded a surprising amount of knowledge, much of it gained by miners. For example, Wothers reproduces 50 MARCH 2020

an engraving from a 1617 text showing a wolf devouring a king, and a wolf standing in a fire from which the king re-emerges. At first glance, it looks like a moral allegory, but it’s something much more fascinating: an illustration of the process of using the metal antimony to purify gold. After heating, the antimony and other impurities evaporate, leaving pure gold, the only metal the ‘wolf ’ – antimony – cannot devour.

Then there’s ‘Jupiter’s wolf ’, a name that arose from the ancient association between Jupiter and tin; the ‘wolf ’ here is ‘wolfram’, a rock containing the element tungsten and often found with tin ore. Wolfram’s similar density to tin ore made the two difficult to separate, and wolfram also made tin brittler: it was said to ‘steal and devour’ the tin, ‘like a wolf ’ – a metaphor that lives on in the symbol W for tungsten.

And so Wothers’s story of chemistry unfolds: Antimony, Gold, and Jupiter’s Wolf begins in antiquity, but it takes us right up to the 2016 announcement of names for the most recently discovered of the 118 currently known elements.

Like most of the elements discovered in the past century, these last four were created in the lab – only eighty-eight stable elements occur naturally (plus a few unstable ones with short half-lives).

Not all these elements are metals, of course. The discovery and naming of the elemental gases making up air and water are particularly exciting, because air and water were long considered to be elements themselves. The evolution of our understanding of the true nature of these vital, ubiquitous substances – via the bold experiments and intellectual leaps of brilliant experimenters such as Antoine Lavoisier, Carl Wilhelm Scheele, and Henry Cavendish – makes gripping reading.

So does the discovery of helium, the first element that was initially discovered ‘off-world’ in the sun’s atmosphere.

In deference to ancient practice it was named after Helios, the Greek sun god, and its identification was enabled

by William Hyde Wollaston’s thrilling discovery of spectroscopy in 1802.

There are many other compelling stories in this, Wothers’ first book for the general reader (he’s a chemistry

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW

Teaching Fellow at Cambridge whose previous works are textbooks). His device of building the narrative around the naming of the chemical elements is an innovative and engaging way of telling an accessible story about chemistry.

The periodic table itself remains a shadowy presence, although the nonlinear narrative gradually builds up a partial picture of why Dmitri Mendeleev grouped the elements the way he did, and how chemists worked out the atomic weights that gave the elements their places in his original table, and the atomic numbers used in today’s version.

Still, if the book is short on certain specifics, and the naming of a few of the elements makes less than scintillating reading, overall Antimony, Gold, and Jupiter’s Wolf offers a host of intriguing historical details, colourful personalities, and valuable insights on the emergence of scientific thinking.

Among the extraordinary cast are two women. Polish-born Marie Curie discovered and named polonium and (with husband Pierre) radium at the close of the nineteenth century, while her French student Marguerite Perey discovered and named francium in 1939.

The dedication of these scientists was astounding. The Curies famously sifted through tonnes of ore to isolate a tenth of a gram of radium. The delightful William Ramsay discovered four noble gases hidden in the air (helium is the fifth) – an amazing feat, since xenon, for example, makes up just 0.0000087 per cent of the air. The prolific Humphry Davy discovered seven elements, but nearly lost an eye when heating a new substance (fluoric acid) that proved unexpectedly explosive. Indeed, the labours of many of the chemists discussed appear truly heroic as they tinkered, tested, and retested, showing just how much pure research it takes to produce useful new knowledge (politicians take note).

There’s so much more in this novel, deeply researched book. If you’ve ever wondered what’s in a name, Wothers shows that in chemistry the answer is clear: a great deal of fascinating folklore, science, and history. g Robyn Arianrhod’s latest book is Thomas Harriot: A life in science (OUP, 2019).

‘Will of iron’ John Rickard JUDITH ANDERSON: AUSTRALIAN STAR, FIRST LADY OF THE AMERICAN STAGE

by Desley Deacon

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Kerr Publishing, $58.99 pb, 520 pp

n the past we have tended either to ignore or to marginalise cultural ‘expatriates’. In today’s cosmopolitan culture, we are more used to varied career paths, but it is still possible for someone who has made most of their career abroad to be overlooked. Judith Anderson is a case in point. Born in Adelaide in 1897, Francee Anderson (her first stage name) made her professional stage début in 1915 in Sydney, but from 1918 she was, virtually for the rest of her life, based in the United States. Desley Deacon’s substantial, superbly illustrated biography rescues Anderson from obscurity and reveals the full extent of her remarkable career on stage, in film, and on television.

Anderson, the youngest of four children, was identified by her mother, Jessie, as the one destined for great things. Her father, James, had initially prospered in the racing industry, but gambling and drinking proved his downfall and Jessie sought and gained a separation. Described by Deacon as having ‘a will of iron’, Jessie now focused her energy on Francee’s career in theatre. As that developed, the future star became the family decision-maker. In 1917, while touring with a production in New Zealand, she boldly decided it was time to pursue her career in America and cabled her mother to sell up and pack their bags.

The first destination was the rapidly expanding movie industry in Hollywood, where from a distance it was easy to fantasise about being ‘discovered’.

Alas, she did not fit Hollywood’s image of the ingénue. Undeterred, mother and daughter moved on to New York where she succeeded in getting work in a travelling stock company. She began to get noticed in reviews, and within a year had become the female lead with an

impressive salary of $100 a week. It was now becoming clear that her strength was as ‘an emotional actress’ who could engage an audience in dramatic roles.

Anderson was never shy; if she thought circumstances warranted it, she could be decisively proactive. In 1923 she heard that well-known actor Peter Keenan was looking for a young actress to perform opposite him in the play Peter Weston. Anderson knew the work and believed she was right for the part: ‘the anguished daughter of a dominating and unfeeling father’. Somehow she got through to Keenan on the phone: impressed by both her audacity and her voice, he saw her immediately.

Later he recalled that, although ‘she had a long nose, and her eyes weren’t big’ and he thought she ‘wouldn’t last a day in motion pictures’, in half an hour she’d convinced him that the part should be hers.

There was only one thing wrong: ‘her sappy ingénue name’. After throwing names around they came up with ‘Judith’, which ‘sounded strong enough for a serious emotional actress’. It wasn’t just her voice that attracted attention: there was an eloquence about her body and the way she used it. She also knew how to wear clothes and was to become a fashion icon. She was on her way to joining the élite group of ‘leading ladies’ of American theatre, which included Katharine Cornell, Lynn Fontanne, Ruth Gordon, and Helen Hayes.

She became associated with particular roles, most notably Lady Macbeth (her sleepwalking scene was spellbinding) and, much later, Medea, adapted for her by Californian poet Robinson Jeffers. Laurence Olivier was her first Macbeth at the Old Vic; later she would join Maurice Evans in the Scottish play both on stage and television; she was Gertrude to the young John Gielgud’s celebrated Hamlet. And then there was her extensive career in movies, most famously as the sinister housekeeper Mrs Danvers in Hitchcock’s trailblazing version of Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca.

Deacon marvellously evokes the legendary stage presence of Anderson, at the same time characterising her offstage personality. Yes, she could be difficult: like her mother, she had a will of

iron. But in spite of two brief, disastrous marriages, or perhaps compensating for them, friendships with both women and men were important to her. And she was loyal in providing for her family.

The book has a rather awkward structure, with seven ‘Acts’, thirty-six ‘Chapters’, and nine ‘Scenes’ (which are not scenes in the conventional theatrical sense, but actually locations). But it reads well and the rambling ‘Contents’ could be said to bear some similarity to an actor’s life, with its random, disjointed character. Sometimes there is a lack of context. The Great War is a shadowy background presence, except for the death of her admirer and mentor Oliver Hogue in the Spanish flu epidemic. A more serious criticism is that Deacon writes about the 1930s without mentioning the Great Depression, which saw some theatres either close or turn to the new talkies.

Anderson was also capable of great generosity. She took up the cause of young Australian actor Zoe Caldwell, who, like herself, was pursuing her career on Broadway. In 1982 she made the grand gesture of playing the Nurse to Caldwell’s Medea.

When Judith Anderson brought Medea to Australia in 1955, there was some confusion about whether she was Australian or American, but she was certainly treated as a celebrity, and a few years later she was made a Dame Commander of the British Empire. In 1992 she was also made a Companion of the Order of Australia, as if to reassure her that she was definitely Australian. g

John Rickard is the author of Australia: A cultural history (2017). In his youth he worked as an actor and singer.

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Reflecting Belinda Smaill SAY WHAT HAPPENED: A STORY OF DOCUMENTARIES

by Nick Fraser

Faber & Faber, $45 pb, 400 pp

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eature-length documentary film has seldom been as commercially successful as fictional drama at the box office. Nevertheless, Nick Fraser tells us that it is now ‘common to hear documentary film described as the new rock ‘n’ roll’. It is exactly this energy, influence, and popular appeal of documentary that Fraser wants to tap into with this book. He seeks to further enliven the documentary aficionado’s appreciation of the genre and to expand their knowledge of titles and filmmakers.

Say What Happened: A story of documentaries is a selective contemplation of films and the historical moments in which they took shape. Told from a personal perspective, it winds through Fraser’s own biographical narrative.

Without a clear rationale as to why certain films are left in and others left out, Say What Happened is a book for documentary enthusiasts, not students of documentary tradition and style.

Fraser makes it clear that this is not an academic book. Instead, this is a reflection on Fraser’s personal interest in documentary over decades.

Fraser is well placed to write such a book. He has worked for decades as a producer and commissioning editor. He created the BBC’s Storyville, a regular television slot that commissions international feature-length documentary.

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Involved with Storyville for seventeen years, Fraser has won Oscars, BAFTAs, and Peabody Awards. He recounts working on documentaries such as Man on Wire, One Day in September, and Project Nim. Chapters are anchored in an intimate knowledge of media institutions (especially the BBC) and the motivations of filmmakers.

The most compelling insights are those that offer detail about the production or circulation of particular films. In 2014, Fraser travelled to Delhi to work on India’s Daughter, a film about the horrific rape and murder of Jyoti Singh in 2012. The case sent reverberations around the world and highlighted the problem of sexual crimes against woman in India. Fraser paints a picture of working on the film in the heat of pre-monsoonal Delhi and his role in liaising with Singh’s parents.

After being banned in India, the film was released and a global storm of controversy followed. Fraser describes this episode as one of the most extreme experiences of his career. The debate he had hoped for – how rape could be more easily prosecuted – did not come to pass. India’s Daughter demonstrates the power of documentary. But the book also laments how easy it is for individual documentaries, indeed for messages, to become lost in a media sphere that has expanded exponentially in recent decades. Many examples are cited over the course of Say What Happened, but a handful of documentaries appear to cut through and stand above the rest. Marcel Ophüls’s film The Sorrow and the Pity (1969) seems to have shown Fraser how affecting and influential documentary could be. He saw this film about the collaboration between the French Vichy government and Nazi Germany in his youth; its revelations stayed with him, shaping his future aspirations.

Although at times the book describes contemporary documentary film as beset by a lack of clarity of purpose and influence, it is also critical of the new mode of ‘social impact’ documentary. These are films that are decisively produced within campaigns or activist communities and that are designed to maximise audience responses in a range of ways. Australia’s own 2040, released

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW

in 2019, is one example. For Fraser, ‘there is a line between film-making and advocacy’, and ‘you could make a film that became a campaign, but that wasn’t the same as making a film that was part of a campaign’. While this is a valuable sentiment, one that preserves the even-handed integrity of the documentary project for audiences, the range of films now produced in the impact mode offer a richness of style on its own terms. Given the intimate ties that bind the history of documentary and propaganda, moreover, it seems like an overreach to make these kinds of claims for the integrity of documentary.

While such claims may vex some readers, they also signal the opinions of a powerful industry insider and thus offer compelling insight into one small facet of documentary culture.

Say What Happened forges together opinion, anecdote, and knowledge of a broad array of films and filmmakers.

It wants ‘people to see docs in the present for which they are made’, rather than recount a formalised history of documentary. In this spirit, the book offers chapters on the French vérité tradition and the American direct-cinema movement of the 1960s. So much has been written about both of these and the book covers well-trodden ground; these chapters do not have the same energy as the more biographical sections. It focuses on well-known films, many of which have enjoyed at least limited theatrical release, and well-established models for commissioning documentary, especially via public service broadcasting. Despite the fact that influential new funding and distribution modes such as streaming portals and subscription television) have changed the environment for documentary filmmakers significantly, their importance is downplayed in the book. Still, Nick Fraser’s book exhibits the passion of a true documentary devotee. Connoisseurs of the genre will find it most compelling when it goes behind the scenes to reveal the humanist musings of Frederick Wiseman or the ‘raffish arrogance’ of Nick Broomfield. g Belinda Smaill is an Associate Professor in Film and Screen Studies at Monash University. ❖

Shaping the land

Indigenous fire management in Australia

Tim Low FIRE COUNTRY: HOW INDIGENOUS FIRE MANAGEMENT COULD HELP SAVE AUSTRALIA

by Victor Steffensen Hardie Grant, $29.99 pb, 240 pp

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hen country needs burning, timing is everything, and the grasses, by how cool or warm they feel, tell you exactly when to light up. Victor Steffensen is a master of timing. His book about Indigenous fire management came out just weeks after Australia’s unprecedented fires inspired calls for more Indigenous burning to quell the danger.

Over most of Australia, Indigenous expertise was lost generations ago when Aboriginal people were forced from their lands. This puts Steffensen in a special situation. He grew up in the northern Queensland rainforest town of Kuranda, with European forebears as well as an Indigenous grandmother who died when he was five. As a restless teenager and university drop-out, he went on a fishing trip to the small town of Laura on Cape York Peninsula, and soon found himself working for the local Aboriginal corporation and lodging in the house of Tommy George (TG), one of two elderly brothers who would shape his life.

Born in the 1920s, TG and George Musgrave (Poppy) narrowly escaped becoming stolen children. The pastoralist Fred Shepard employed their parents on his Cape York station, and hid the boys in mailbags whenever the police came seeking Aboriginal kids to remove. In a matter-of-fact way, Steffensen writes about the boys seeing men and women in chains with whip marks on their bodies, walking for miles, sometimes unable to continue. Thanks to Shepard, the boys stayed on Country and learned its stories and how to manage with fire.

They became stockmen and eventually acquired native title over their land.

Fire became a fascination for Steffensen in childhood when, by setting

fire to some old banana fronds, he nearly burned down his father’s chicken coop. Earning the friendship of TG and Poppy, the last speakers of Awu-Laya language, he learned about fire on their hunting and fishing trips and from later work filming them. Fire Country details his long and passionate quest to understand fire and, in the face of many obstacles, to teach fire management to national park rangers and Indigenous groups across eastern Australia.

His cool burns reduce the fuel available for wildfires, but his writing about fire goes well beyond logistics. ‘Most of the vegetation has developed in a perfect way to encourage the right fire for the soil and country it lives on,’ he says. ‘It is amazing how Mother Nature has created the balance of no-fire and firedependent systems to provide tolerance and courtesy between them through fire … The country loves us when we fit into the divine beauty of being a part of it. The old people would sing to the country all the time, through songlines and dances. Old TG would talk to the country and let everything know that we are about to apply the fire.’

One view held today is that national parks can’t be considered natural because Aboriginal burning shaped the vegetation. In his famous book The Biggest Estate on Earth (2011).

Bill Gammage goes so far as to say that ‘Australia in 1788 was made, not natural’. The nature–culture dualism is a Western construction, so we shouldn’t be surprised at Steffensen for depicting ecosystems (he uses this word) as systems that are natural but need input from people. They are also animated.

The trees change the qualities of the soils and ‘become the Elders of the

landscape, maintaining their gift of providing life and prosperity’. The water is a living thing, not a dead substance.

Some places deceive. Poppy warned him about devil-devil country in which the land is ‘trying to trick you’ by putting trees that signify early burning on hard ground that should be burnt late.

Environmental philosopher Val Plumwood has talked of the multiple forces shaping nature that we deny if we label it a human artefact or estate.

Steffensen repeatedly downplays human agency, explaining, for instance, that nature is ‘arranged in such a way that it can be kept healthy by burning habitats in a sequence signalled by their readiness to burn’.

Gammage and Bruce Pascoe in Dark Emu (2014) have both lifted Australian awareness of Indigenous management, but both relied for information on white experts and observers.

Pascoe, in his chapter on fire, calls for a shift to real knowledge coming from Aboriginal Australians. What Steffensen delivers is authentic enough, but it doesn’t fit Pascoe’s larger narrative about Indigenous farming. No mention is made of the Awu-Laya tilling or sowing seeds. The cool burns to protect yams and other bush foods fit the narrower notion of ‘fire-stick farming’ invoked by archaeologist Rhys Jones in 1969 to stress that the hunter-gathering lifestyle involved management.

Steffensen doesn’t mention Pascoe, Gammage, or other writers. His focus is fixed on his vision of Australia under Indigenous fire management with Indigenous people gainfully employed as fire managers. ‘We need to see three-year training courses of learning out on the country to graduate our Indigenous fire practitioners,’ he says. He tells of bringing confidence to Indigenous communities in south-eastern Australia, helping them at times to direct flames against weeds such as African lovegrass and lantana. Western science tells us that fire regimes in tropical and temperate Australia are ver y different, but if Steffensen had any issues bringing his expertise south, we do not hear of them.

Early in the book,TG grumbles about some careless burning: ‘Those bloody national park rangers, they should be INDIGENOUS STUDIES

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learning from us.’ Steffensen conveys the impression that even today, no worthwhile burning happens in national parks, which is not true. Some is practised for endangered species such as orange-bellied parrots and northern bettongs. Most of this tries to match Indigenous burning, but the measure of success is different. Steffensen rejects this approach: ‘Managing the country

wholistically for all the animals is how we must look after those animals that seem to be the most endangered of all.

If we make the land healthy, then we look after all of them.’

That assurance might sound convincing, but it is not supported by examples, and that will leave managers uneasy. Lore that has worked for thousands of years might need adjusting for

Surging into the spotlight Writing trans and gender-diverse lives

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Yves Rees

ix years after the ‘transgender tipping point’ proclaimed by Time magazine in 2014, the trans and gender-diverse (TGD) community continues to surge into the spotlight. From Netflix and Neighbours to the MerriamWebster Dictionary (which named ‘they’ its 2019 word of the year), transgender experience is enjoying well-deserved recognition and representation. Visibility, however, is not without its problems.

Internationally, growing awareness has triggered an anti-trans backlash, with the TGD community becoming a conservative scapegoat du jour. The United States is experiencing a spate of antitrans violence, while ‘bathroom bills’ proliferate in red states. In Australia, the 2016 moral panic over Safe Schools was followed in 2019 by The Australian’s anti-trans campaign (with sixty-eight articles, ninety-two per cent of them negative, published in six months), as well as the transphobic fearmongering of TERFs (trans-exclusionary radical feminists) over Victoria’s birth certificate reforms – not to mention Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s attacks on ‘gender whisperers’.

There are still reasons to celebrate trans visibility, not least of which is the prospect of TGD people telling their own stories. Although memoir has long been a staple of trans culture – dating back to Lili Elbe’s Man into Woman (1933) – since 2014 trans life writing 54 MARCH 2020

has entered the literary mainstream.

Today, some of the world’s leading publishers are giving TGD writers a platform to counterbalance cultural scripts that dismiss trans people as freaks or victims. Few of these trans books are, as yet, notable for their literary quality, but almost all merit reading for their insights into a misunderstood and often sensationalised identity.

Among the most successful of this new crop is Jonathan Van Ness’s Over the Top: A raw journey to self-love (Simon & Schuster, $32.99 pb, 273 pp). A hairdresser, podcaster, and social-media dynamo, Van Ness is best known as one of the ‘Fab Five’ of Netflix’s rebooted Queer Eye, in which he won hearts as an ebullient grooming expert with a full beard, lustrous mane, and penchant for stiletto heels. In 2019, Van Ness came out as genderqueer and non-binary, joining pop stars Sam Smith and Janelle Monáe in the small but growing club of genderdiverse celebrities.

Over the Top, which follows the author from childhood to the present, introduces readers to a darker Van Ness than the glittering queen of Queer Eye. An effeminate child whose gender-nonconforming proclivities were far from welcome in Quincy, Illinois, he was bullied and ostracised from earliest childhood. Alongside these gender struggles, Van Ness was also a victim of childhood sexual abuse, a trauma that launched

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a world in which, for example, cats now prowl after fires.

Steffensen is a good storyteller with a passion for his vision. Australia should be doing more to integrate Indigenous and Western fire skills, and he is well placed to help with that. g Tim Low’s books include Where Song Began (2014). ❖

him into a troubled adolescence and early adulthood marked by PTSD, depression, sex work, disordered eating, drug addiction, rehab, and relapse. Rock bottom came as a grief-fuelled meth bender, followed by a HIV diagnosis.

From there, Van Ness’s story launches into a quintessentially American narrative of triumphant self-actualisation.

Thanks to yoga, therapy, and a solid dose of Brené Brown, Van Ness shook off his self-destructive habits and became the out-and-proud gender-bender we know and love today. The takeaway is clear: self-love and self-acceptance are the cure. Is it saccharine? At times, yes. Platitudinous? Undoubtedly. But the book is redeemed by Van Ness’s signature cocktail of Midwestern sincerity and high-camp patois. Especially charming are the Russian pseudonyms employed for side characters, inspired by Van Ness’s passion for the Romanovs.

The prose is also enlivened by his trademark verbal tics, including feminisation of inanimate nouns. ‘I loved the newsroom. She was hustle. She was bustle,’ he writes. Presented with such flair and fortitude, we can’t help but love Van Ness in turn.

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ince publishing Over the Top, Van Ness has emerged as a formidable advocate for LGBTQ+ rights.

For a primer on this new line of work, he might turn to Rebekah Robertson’s About a Girl: A mother’s powerful story of raising her transgender child (Viking, $34.99 pb, 344 pp), a memoir that chronicles the Australian battle to remove the Family Court’s jurisdiction over medical treatment for trans youth.

Robertson is the mother of Georgie Stone, a trans woman whose story

first made headlines in 2010 when she became, aged ten, Australia’s youngest recipient of puberty blockers. Bruised by their encounter with the court system, Stone and her family embarked on a marathon fight to transfer medical approvals from the courts to families and their doctors. Success finally came in 2017, when the Family Court found that hormone treatment for transgender youth no longer required court authorisation. Along the way, Robertson also founded Transcend, Australia’s first support group for trans families.

About a Girl provides an insider’s view of this mammoth law-reform campaign, while also narrating Stone’s journey as an indomitable trans girl struggling for acceptance. Told from a parent’s perspective (with a preface

by Stone), the memoir functions as a moving and accessible ‘trans 101’ for cisgender readers. In conversational yet resolute tones, Robertson invokes the moral authority of the devoted mother to demolish naysayers who continue to question the existence of trans children.

Georgie insisted that she was a girl from age two, Robertson explains, and never once wavered from that resolution.

How could any loving parent not fight for their child in that situation?

This is a resolutely binary transgender narrative, a ‘born in the wrong body’ tale low on the self-doubt, internalised transphobia, and ambivalence over transition perhaps more typical of TGD experience. Although Robertson, to her credit, insists that her daughter’s story is far from representative, there is a danger that Stone’s ever-growing celebrity (she recently débuted on Neighbours) will lead her singular experience – binary gender, unequivocal self-knowledge – to be misconstrued as Australia’s benchmark ‘trans narrative’. As her media profile attests, Stone’s clear-cut identity and self-assured intelligence make her a compelling public face for trans advocacy. Yet it is essential that the airtime given to such trans icons should be accompanied by the social inclusion, cultural representation, and legal protections of all TGD peoples – however messy, troubled, and nonbinary they may be. In a nation with a transphobic prime minister, all and any

trans storytelling is cause for celebration, yet we must also ask: whose voices are being amplified and why, and who is yet to be heard?

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ne group still struggling for representation are transmasculine people, sometimes known as FTM (female-to-male) or AFAB (assigned female at birth). Although AFABs have begun to flood gender clinics, transfeminine people remain the public face of global trans culture – think Laverne Cox, Caitlyn Jenner, Janet Mock.

In an attempt to even up the scales, British publisher Jessica Kingsley issued a call for transmasculine content in 2017, resulting in Caspar J. Baldwin’s memoir Not Just a Tomboy: A trans masculine memoir ($32.99 pb, 248 pp).

It is a poignant account of his ‘tomboy’ childhood, traumatic female puberty, undergraduate mental health struggles, and multi-year transition that followed his realisation, aged twentytwo, that he was transgender. Baldwin, a Northumberland-based PhD graduate without a public profile, offers a window into everyday trans existence, showing to great effect how ordinary and even mundane TGD lives can be.

There are no court battles, media appearances, or celebrity cameos in his story; Baldwin’s world is a polite middle-class England of caravan holidays, school discos, uni lectures, and nights in the pub – all infused with crippling gender dysphoria.

Baldwin writes more for fellow transmasculine people than for cisgender readers, seeking to provide the sense of recognition and belonging he craved when coming out: ‘I had wanted kinship and the relief which comes with knowing I wasn’t the only one.’ In Not Just a Tomboy, Baldwin offers the story he wanted to read back in 2011. In contrast to the ‘hero’s journey’ arc of Over the Top (and, to a lesser extent, About a Girl), Baldwin tells a more subdued tale, kept from triumphalism by his English reserve and controlled fury at the outrages inflicted by a transphobic world. The resulting book brims with anger and pain, providing an emotional suckerpunch that belies Baldwin’s unassuming voice.

Read together, the three TGD narratives provide insight into the rapidity of cultural change. Van Ness and Baldwin are millennials, born in 1987 and 1989 respectively, and both stress the dearth of language and concepts to give meaning to their childhood gender struggles. As a result, neither came out until the 2010s, when they finally found words to name their difference. By contrast, Georgie Stone, born in 2000, had her ‘gender identity disorder’ (as it was then known) diagnosed as young as seven. Since then, there has been an exponential increase in self-identified TGD youth. By 2017, Melbourne’s Royal Children’s Hospital Gender Service was handling more than 250 new referrals each year, while researchers now believe that one per cent of youth are transgender – much higher than previously thought.

Yet while recognition and support grow, the maladaptive coping strategies featured in all three narratives attest that TGD people continue to struggle under the burden of stigma and prejudice.

Baldwin sought validation in academic achievement, while Van Ness used sex, drugs, and eating to numb the pain of exclusion and difference. Stone also struggled around food, experiencing a period of undereating and low weight that stemmed from her ‘desire for bodily autonomy and control’. Such experience is all too common: a fifth of trans youth have a diagnosed eating disorder, while two thirds have restricted foodintake. Even worse, three-quarters have been diagnosed with depression, while almost half have attempted suicide.

As we enter the 2020s, the hope is that trans memoirs like this trio may build empathy and reduce stigma to the point where such dire statistics are no longer a feature of trans life. g

Yves Rees is a David Myers Research Fellow in History at La Trobe University and co-host of the history podcast Archive Fever. ❖ MEMOIR

55

Seasonality Rayne Allinson ROGUE INTENSITIES

by Angela Rockel

UWA Publishing, $26.99 pb, 346 pp

‘H

ow we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives,’ writes Annie Dillard in The Writing Life, her timely appeal for presence over productivity in modern life. Turning the page on a new year reminds us of the seasonality of time, its familiar cycles of life, death, and rebirth. But flipping through the empty pages of a calendar can also remind us that time is a human construct designed to regulate our lives for maximum efficiency and output. In today’s attention economy, where time is treated as a currency by the technologies we use to satisfy our animal need for connection, how might we rediscover the joy of being present in a moment, a body, a community, a place? In other words, how are we to live?

This is the urgent question at the heart of Angela Rockel’s Rogue Intensities, part memoir, part journal, part ecological commonplace book, chronicling five revolutions of the solar year on her farmstead in southern Tasmania, where she has lived for thirty years. Her answer lies partly in the unusual structure of the book itself. Each chapter is named for a month of the year, and for a germ of observation taken from the world around her – ‘Fire’, ‘Black Cockatoos’, ‘Seed’ – which Rockel then swirls around her consciousness, elaborating, explicating, or simply bearing witness to 56 MARCH 2020

the thoughts and emotions that follow.

Moving slowly, chapter by chapter, month by month, we become attuned to the familiar rhythms of daily life, to the pulse of the seasons, the flow of germination and decay, the accumulated patterns of belonging. After five cycles through the calendar, we come to realise that it is in the mundane pleasures, small joys, and ordinary sorrows of daily experience that time’s true value lies, each moment waiting for the light of our attention to make it luminous.

The calendrical structure of Rogue Intensities aligns it with the ancient genre of the almanac, an annual record of weather events, crop cycles, and celestial occurrences used by the Babylonians for divination purposes, by medieval scholars for compiling astronomical data, and by modern farmers for planning harvests. Rockel is similarly concerned with the weather, or rather, the climate: she records the frequency and intensity of rain, sleet, and wind (the ‘roaring forties’ that periodically batter the south-west coast of Tasmania), noting varying yields in honey from her bees and milk from her cows, but also the increasingly dry winters, intensifying summer heat, and the escalating threat of fire.

(In 2019, wildfires consumed nearly 200,000 hectares in Tasmania’s Central Highlands and south-west, including vast areas of the Wilderness World Heritage Area.) The precarious balance of life and death is a recurring theme, and the ancient topography of Tasmania offers Rockel an allegorical way of seeing, reexamining, and reconfiguring herself, as well as coming to terms with the loss of friends and relatives: ‘This place moves through me; it shapes me as I attend to it.’

Rockel’s vision is both environmental and historical, aware at once of her own participation in the human story of migration and in the more-than-human community of plants and animals. At times these worlds collide with comic charm: one summer day she discovers that a skink has set up home in the scanner on her desk and watches as it ‘strolls out from the depths of the machine onto the expanse of the paper tray, as onto a patio’, leading her to ponder the evolutionary history of Australian rep-

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW

tiles. At other times, the fundamental otherness of an animal like the platypus reminds her of her own foreignness as a New Zealand immigrant of Irish descent, struggling to feel at home in a postcolonial landscape: ‘Neither fish nor flesh nor fowl, I was set against myself, invader and invaded, the old wars still present in me.’ By empathetically exploring the consciousness of other lives around her, Rockel invites us to reflect on the multitudinous nature of our own identity, while reminding us how very much it matters to live in open-hearted fellowship with everything that shares our cosmic blink of existence.

The first law of ecology is that everything is connected to everything else.

Fittingly, Rockel’s attention ranges far and wide, from the chemistry of plant colouration to the Icelandic Prose Edda, from Neolithic cave paintings to the neurochemical modifications induced by microbial parasites in mammalian hosts. While this ever-shifting focus reflects the natural, associative patterns of daily thought and an ardent curiosity for the world, some might find the encyclopedic weight of information distracting rather than satisfying. Although the book is listed as a memoir, it is not confessional or revealing of personal layers beyond the factual; we learn more about Rockel’s relationship with her cows Elsie and Maggie than with the elusive ‘T’, presumably the husband she describes moving to Tasmania with thirty years ago, but who is only mentioned indirectly. Instead, what we encounter is a solitary mind in conversation with itself, filtering experience from its environment, synthesising knowledge into understanding. The great strength of this book lies in its ecological exploration of identity, its attentiveness to the wonders of the everyday, and its reminder that the accidents, interruptions, and serendipitous moments we experience offline are so often what give our lives meaning. g Rayne Allinson is a writer based in southern Tasmania. She has a DPhil from the University of Oxford, and is the author of A Monarchy of Letters: Royal correspondence and English diplomacy in the reign of Elizabeth I (2012). ❖

Mexican musings Gabriel García Ochoa ON THE PLAIN OF SNAKES: A MEXICAN ROAD TRIP

by Paul Theroux

Hamish Hamilton, $35 pb, 436 pp

A

t seventy-six, Paul Theroux drove from his home in Cape Cod to Chiapas, Mexico’s southernmost state. On the Plain of Snakes: A Mexican road trip is his account of this adventure, at times misinformed, on occasion tedious, enlivened with some entertaining, well-researched discussions about the scintillating complexity of Mexico.

From the outset, Theroux eschews tired tropes and delves into elements of Mexican life and culture that are seldom examined. He discusses the causes and consequences of the rising cult of la Santa Muerte (Holy Death), a new religious movement said to have ten million followers. Theroux scrutinises the idiosyncrasies of small towns in the south-east of Mexico. There is Santa María Ixcatlán, with locally made straw hats used as currency; and Camula, where images of saints can be excoriated if they are unresponsive to their supplicants’ prayers, part of the Zapotec–Mayan–Christian religious syncretism endemic to the town.

One of the most interesting passages in the book describes a meeting with Subcomandante Marcos, leader of the separatist Zapatista Army of National Liberation, a charismatic figure who has dedicated the last thirty years to defending the rights of the Mayan people.

Notwithstanding Theroux’s interesting anecdotes and clever dissections of Mexican culture, lengthy sections in On the Plain of Snakes are clogged with tedious details. Do we really need page-long descriptions of the assignments Theroux’s students produced during his writing workshops in Mexico City? Plaudits to Theroux for taking Spanish classes in Oaxaca, but must he include transcriptions of his conversations about Dan Brown’s works with fellow students? Putting aside the

tedious, Theroux’s commentary on the social fabric of Mexico is contentious.

Yet some of his observations are acute.

For example, when he examines the consequences of Mexico’s culture of corruption, he goes beyond the patina of obvious malfeasance around funds and lack of infrastructure and grasps the subtle effects that living in such an environment has for ordinary citizens: a focus on self-sufficiency, creativity, and resilience; dependence on friends and family, the only ones who can be trusted. Unfortunately, nuanced observations such as these are few, and they are interspersed with shallow generalisations. Throughout the book, for example, Theroux homogenises the socioeconomic complexities of Mexico.

In a patronising, reductionist way, he implies that ‘the poor’ are good, hardworking victims dependent on tradition for a sense of identity, while ‘the rich’ are their unequivocal exploiters, immoral and heartless, ‘fat cats, for whom life is a shuttling back and forth in limousines’.

In Mexico, like everywhere else, privilege and poverty exist in a complex spectrum. To reach conclusions about the moral character of individuals based on their wealth is as misguided as doing so on the basis of their poverty. It is the opposite side of the same coin, and the currency is prejudice. Unquestionably, Mexico has dire issues of inequality and injustice, exacerbated by, inter alia, internal racism, interventionism, and a colonial legacy that has not been properly dealt with, points that Theroux ignores in his analysis.

Theroux dedicates part of his book to discussions of Mexican literature and the genre of magic realism. These are some of the most disappointing passages in the text. Describing authors of magic realism as abused children who hide the brutal reality of their homes through stories, Theroux refers to the genre as a literature of denial, ‘a fiction that has arisen out of embarrassment, a literary reaction to shameful circumstances or origins’. Quoting Joyce Cary, he goes on to compare the works of Gabriel García Márquez to ‘farting “Annie Laurie” through a keyhole. It may be clever but is it worth the trouble?’ It is disappointing to see an author who can be analytical

and witty indulge in crass, obtuse statements of this nature. Theroux does not touch on Cuban author Alejo Carpentier’s development of lo real maravilloso (the marvellous real) in the 1940s or his attempt to create a uniquely Latin American literary style. There is no mention of Jorge Luis Borges or Julio Cortázar, no understanding of how these literary influences converged to propel the Latin American Boom of the 1960s.

Magic realism is not a literature of avoidance but of belief. It portrays a mindset where belief in the supernatural permeates the way people live. This does not necessarily entail ignorance, denial, or intellectual immaturity: it can be a conscious decision to focus on the possibilities of the unknown. García Márquez explains in The Fragrance of Guava that his novels do not present metaphors but nuances of reality that realism cannot convey given its ‘static and exclusive ... vision of reality’. Magic realism does not shrink from pain or suffering. What of the Banana Massacre of 1928, where 3,000 workers were murdered by the United Fruit Company, an event discussed in One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967) when José Arcadio Segundo ends up in a train full of corpses ready to be dumped in the sea? Or Isabel Allende’s denunciation of the sadism suffered by the victims of Augusto Pinochet’s regime in The House of Spirits (1982)? It is clear that magic realism is not to Theroux’s liking, presumably because he missed the point.

To write with contempt simply because he doesn’t understand seems puerile for a writer of his calibre. g

Gabriel García Ochoa was born in Mexico City and now teaches at Monash University. His first novel, The Hypermarket, was published in 2019.

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with

Andrew Ford Where are you happiest?

At home. I’ve never much liked going out. I think better at home and can find the peace to compose. I have to go up to Sydney for two days each week to do The Music Show. While I enjoy the program, it’s a pleasure to return to the Southern Highlands.

What is your idea of hell?

Camping. I like a view, but I don’t want to be in it.

What do you consider the most specious virtue?

Temperance. Not everything is better in moderation.

What is your favourite film?

Charles Laughton’s The Night of the Hunter (1955) is a gorgeous piece of work.

And your favourite book?

Ivan Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons (1862).

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

Johannes Brahms, W.H. Auden, and Helen Garner, though possibly not all at the same time.

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

Fulsome, used to mean full. I’d like to see the return of fulsome in its true sense – there’s no single-word alternative.

Who is your favourite author?

Elizabeth Bishop. I’m not a great rereader, except of poetry, and I reread Bishop’s poetry all the time.

And your favourite literary hero or heroine?

J. Alfred Prufrock.

Which quality do you most admire in a writer?

Keen antennae. The best poets are all great noticers.

Bishop makes you feel you’ve never seen a dog or a moose or a dentist’s waiting room before. But Garner does it in prose. Also Alan Bennett.

Which book influenced you most in your youth?

George Orwell’s essays. There was a four-volume Penguin set. I learnt a lot about the use of language and how to structure a piece of writing.

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

Dylan Thomas. I find his work consciously poetic.

What, if anything, impedes your writing?

Other people. Inertia.

What do you think of the state of criticism?

The idea that reviewing books, concerts, theatre, and the visual arts was part of the function of a journal of record has practically gone. Now if you’re reviewed at all, you’re lucky to get a paragraph. The flip side is the blogger, with no constraints on length, who writes thousands of ill-disciplined words. Obviously, magazines such as ABR have taken up some of the slack, but there’s only so much they can do. When it comes to charting and evaluating daily arts practice, our newspapers have abnegated their duty.

And writers’ festivals?

Love ’em – on and off the stage.

Do you read reviews of your own books?

Yes, and of my music. I’ve seldom had stuff panned, but increasingly I find things are liked for the wrong reasons. I’ve read reviews of my work that glow with praise, yet seem not to have comprehended the first thing about the book or piece of music.

Are artists valued in our society?

By ordinary readers and listeners, yes – more than ever, I think. But not by politicians, who regard us as their enemies. Artists are good at spotting lies.

What are you working on now?

A seventh string quartet with an ad-lib part for didgeridoo. It’s called Eden Ablaze and is for the Brodsky Quartet, which will give the first performance in Bristol in April with the great William Barton.

Andrew Ford is a composer and writer. He also presents The Music Show on ABC Radio National.

Opera Australia presents a new production of his opera Rembrandt’s Wife (libretto by Sue Smith), in Sydney and Melbourne seasons this September and October.

(Photograph by Jim Rolon)

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59

Jesus Wants Me for a Sunbeam

I

Susan Lever

made the mistake of rereading Peter Goldsworthy’s 1993 novella before seeing Steve Rodgers’s adaptation of Jesus Wants Me for a Sunbeam at Belvoir St Theatre, so I knew the play’s advertised surprise ending and may have been resistant to its emotional charge.

At its première production for the National Theatre of Parramatta at the Riverside Theatre in 2018, it was said to reduce audiences to tears. At Belvoir, some audience members could be seen wiping their eyes after the opening night performance.

The novella sets up a rather hypothetical situation, where a symmetrically perfect family of four is confronted with the random tragedy of a fatal disease.

Dispassionately, Goldsworthy depicts these stereotypical suburban parents, so absorbed in family love (a form of self-love, after all) that they lose any sense of an outside world. The narrative voice being cool, careful not to develop too much sympathy for its characters, it leaves the central ethical question open.

Embodied in a group of actors, Goldsworthy’s archetypal characters necessarily develop individual personalities that invite varying degrees of sympathy, slipping away from authorial control. Rodgers’s adaptation considers the possible consequences of the events in the novella, so it begins with the quest of the eighteenyear-old son, Ben, to understand his parents’ decisions six years earlier. Liam Nunan plays Ben as an engaging teenager, intelligent and reflective as he asks questions of the adults around him. Grace Truman commands a range of emotions in her smaller role as his suffering sister, Wol. At times, these children appear more adult in understanding than their parents; they offer the potential for the play to take a clear ethical position on its potentially dangerous subject matter.

As the play shifts to the past, the parents dominate, often speaking to the audience to explain their thoughts and responses. Matthew Whittet’s Rick appears to be the humorous and understanding father idealised in televi-

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sion commercials, while Emma Jackson’s Linda brings an edge of hysteria that suggests more fragility. Well versed in literature and religion, they are both educated, churchgoing Christians. Their familiar jokes about parenting and the conflicting attitudes of grandparents invite us to share their perspectives. Valerie Bader and Mark Lee give all the supporting parts – grandparents, doctors, clergy – an air of sympathetic generosity, never seriously confronting the weaknesses in Rick and Linda’s logic.

The play’s title, of course, refers to a saccharine Sunday-school song taught to children, but under the stress of illness the couple stops going to church regardless of the children’s desires. The Christian notion of the afterlife seems to linger as they plan for the future.

Indeed, the logic behind their final act is never made clear, and Ben finds little explanation for the deprivation he has suffered. The play poses serious questions but never ventures far from Goldsworthy’s novella, sometimes content merely to illustrate it rather than explore its possibilities.

While Emma Vine’s simple storybook set, with its central bookcase full of old books, suggests that this may be a fairytale, a drama populated by people who prefer fiction to reality, some unnecessary film projections push the play back towards the mundane and illustrative. Other elements indicate a critical interpretation of events: Rick and Linda’s narcissistic pleasure in each other and their children; their disposal of a television set; the cutesiness of their Winnie the Pooh obsession; Linda’s refusal of news from the wider world, especially when it suggests that all families are not caring and happy. In one excruciating scene, Wol’s moment of intimacy with her brother is interrupted by her parents who stifle her demand to be allowed to stay awake. The child is not even allowed ownership of her disease. These people appear both infantilised by parenthood and yet all-powerful. A shift in emphasis might have developed this in interesting ways, allowing Ben a final word.

In the end, the play evades serious critical engagement with issues that require Belvoir’s ‘trigger’ warnings for the unsuspecting and are usually treated with more care than this. The lights fade, the Allegri Miserere begins to play, and the audience is invited to feel sad about a selfish and stupid decision.

While the acting is consistently engaging and the set clever, and while the play addresses challenging issues, it cannot maintain the balance between sympathy and criticism that is essential to its subject matter. Indeed, the sentimentality of its ending appears to endorse a disturbing series of decisions, in ways likely to cause concern in the wider community. g Jesus Wants Me for a Sunbeam is being performed by Belvoir St Theatre until 8 March 2020.

Susan Lever is general editor of Cambria Press’s Australian Literature Series.

The Deep Blue Sea

T

Ian Dickson

he seismic shift which occurred in the British theatre with the success of John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger in 1956 left Terrence Rattigan high and dry. Writing for the ideal audience member he dubbed ‘Aunt Edna’ – a very different creature from her flamboyant Australian namesake – he supposedly fashioned plays that were designed to entertain the middle classes without disturbing them unduly. But a close reading of his more serious plays proves him to be every bit as trenchant a critic of British society as the ‘angry young men’ – Osborne, Arnold Wesker, and John Arden – who took over the theatre in the 1950s and 1960s.

A homosexual born into upper-middle-class Britain in 1911, Rattigan had to learn to live a double life and was well aware of the constraints and hypocrisies of the society in which he flourished. In a late play, In Praise of Love (1973), the protagonist, Sebastian, states what is an underlying theme in all Rattigan’s work: ‘Do you know what “Le Vice Anglais” is? Not flagellation, not pederasty ... It’s our refusal to admit to our emotions.

We think they demean us, I suppose.’ As Michael Billington writes, Rattigan’s ‘whole world is a sustained attack on English middle-class values: fear of emotional commitment, terror in the face of passion, apprehension about sex.’

Hester Collyer, the protagonist of The Deep Blue Sea (1952), is a woman who choses physical love with the younger ex-fighter pilot Freddie Page over her warm but passionless relationship with her barrister husband, Sir William, and is mired in a relationship with a man who lacks the resources to cope with her needs. For some, The Deep Blue Sea is a gay play in which the main character had to be transposed into a woman to appease the Lord Chamberlain, the censor of the time. Certainly, it is based on an actual incident in Rattigan’s life. His younger lover, Kenneth Morgan, left him for another man and killed himself when that relationship collapsed.

Writing to John Osborne after the end of censorship in Britain, Rattigan said: ‘At last I can write about my particular sins without Lord Chamberlain induced sex change dishonesty … Perhaps I should rewrite TDBS as it was really meant to be.’ But the play is much stronger with Hester, not Hector, as its protagonist. In 1950s England, a gay imbroglio would have been kept under wraps and the participants would have gone about their everyday lives unscathed. But for a woman to leave her famous, successful husband for a much younger man would immediately make her a social outcast. For Hester, the stakes are much higher than they would have been for Hector.

On paper, the combination of a strong cast and a powerful play promised much. On the stage, however, on opening night, after a visually stunning opening, it was only in the final act that the play reached its potential. David Fleischer’s revolving set worked well and Nick Schlieper’s lighting was effective as always, but the performances were oddly detached. Paige Rattray’s direction seemed directionless. The cast roamed the stage laughing, crying, and yelling on cue, but only occasionally did one get any real sense of who they were.

Perhaps the most successful was Vanessa Downing’s landlady, Mrs Elton. Mercifully eschewing the usual lovable cockney shtick, she gave us a decent, bewildered woman, out of her depth but supportive of the woman whom she has decided is her favourite tenant, though she considers attempted suicide to be a sin. In a telling comment, she says: ‘Sad, isn’t it, how one always seems to prefer nice people to good people, don’t you think?’

As Hester’s neighbour, Mr Miller, a doctor who has been jailed and deregistered for what is hinted to be a homosexual act, Paul Capsis at first overdid the camp flourishes, but he came into his own in the final act as the voice of experience. At one stage in his confrontation with Hester, when a line of his produced an unwanted laugh, he fixed the audience with a killer stare that was worthy of Julie Bishop at her most formidable.

Sir William Collyer is a prime example of Rattigan’s typical Englishman, well-meaning but emotionally stitched up. Matt Day provided the stiff upper lip but didn’t show us the vulnerable side of the man; his performance remained one-dimensional. Fayssal Bazzi as Freddie Page, on the other hand, had two modes, quiet and loud. He bellowed his way through his drunken tirade, but in quieter moments showed us glimpses of the confused boy–man who cannot cope with the passion he has aroused.

Marta Dusseldorp’s Hester was at first a rather soft, passive creature, with none of the brittle edginess one might expect. She was not helped by the fact that her major confrontations were with the stolid Day and the hyper Bazzi. But by the third act she was firing. Her breakdown in front of Sir William, her final rejection of him, and the withering, amused contempt with which she listened to advice from a well-meaning neighbour were devastating. But it was the desperate vulnerability with which she sought advice from Capsis’s weathered Miller that capped a performance that will surely develop during the run.

The entire production felt underexplored; one hopes as the season continues this talented cast will find the depth to which their director seems to be unable to guide them. g The Deep Blue Sea is being performed by Sydney Theatre Company at the Roslyn Packer Theatre until 7 March 2020.

Ian Dickson has degrees in drama from Yale and the University of New South Wales.

ARTS

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True History of the Kelly Gang

opponent in a bare-knuckle boxing match. A roaring punk anthem fills the room, and from that point on the cunning anachronisms keep coming thick and fast. The camerawork becomes increasingly handheld, the dialogue more freewheeling and naturalistic. We start to notice some familiar faces in the cast: Earl Cave (son of Nick, no stranger to the lore of Northern Victoria) as Ned’s younger brother Dan; musician Marlon Williams (a Kiwi bluesman speaking in ‘I lost my own father at 12 yr. of age and know what it is to be an American drawl); the ever-welcome Uncle Jack Charles; raised on lies and silences my dear daughter you are presently too the cabaret artist Paul Capsis; and even noted sex industry young to understand a word I write but this history is for you and advocate Tilly Lawless. will contain no single lie may I burn in Hell if I speak false.’

By the halfway point, as Ned is transitioning from ‘Boy’ to ‘Man’ to myth, the film is transitioning as well – away o opens Ned Kelly’s personal journal, addressed to his from period drama and towards contemporary pastiche, future daughter. The irony of this heartfelt promise, retaining its plot but gleefully abandoning all pretence of of course, is that Kelly never kept a journal. Even his historical accuracy. The Kelly gang recruits wear modernunborn child and her mother are inventions of Peter Carey, day cardigans and Blundstone boots, rocking sleeve tattoos author of the much-acclaimed True History of the Kelly and chunky jewellery, giving scenes the look and feel of a Gang (2000). The ‘truth’ in the title of his work, and now Brunswick share house as opposed to a nineteenth-century in the adaptation directed by Australian filmmaker Justin bush hideout. The film crackles with homoeroticism, takKurzel – Snowtown (2011), Macbeth (2015) – is a deliberate ing Carey’s themes of transvestism and running with them provocation. It dares the reader (or viewer) to take umbrage full pelt in a queer viewing of outlaw life that feels deterwith any of the fanciful details contained therein. minedly twenty-first century. The Glenrowan Inn, the site The suggestion that any single retelling of the story of of the Kellys’ last stand in 1880, is presented as a brutalist the Kelly Gang might come metal structure, an angular close to ‘true’ is laughable, monolith foisted on the but by drawing attention natural backdrop, all steel to this fact at the outset, walls and slitted winCarey gives himself unfetdows, resembling a certain tered creative licence to iconic helmet. Here the embellish the tale. And Kellys are thrown into a while the aural-visual mekaleidoscopic, strobe-lit dium of filmmaking could bloodbath against a planever hope to recreate the toon of rave-ready police unique interiority of Carey’s troopers wearing reflective Kelly or the breathtaking rain ponchos. poetry of his loquacious, Filmmakers would first-person prose, Kurzel’s usually avoid such anachfilm nevertheless succeeds, ronisms like the plague, positioning itself less as a dibut in True History they George MacKay as Ned Kelly (Stan) rect adaptation and more as are the entire point. Kuran invocation. It summons zel’s bare-chinned, anthe same restless spirit as the novel, and permits itself those drogynous, beatnik bushrangers are shown to be no different same grand liberties with the so-called ‘truth’. from the teens and twenty-somethings of today. When The most interesting of the film’s many departures from the outlaws first construct their steel-plated uniforms, veracity have to do with the period setting itself, and how they delight in lining up to be fired upon by their fellow malleable it becomes in the hands of Kurzel and his team. gang members, like an episode of Jackass set in the snowy In the film’s first act, titled simply ‘Boy’, Kelly is played by Wombat Ranges. This True History strips the Kellys of the Orlando Schwerdt, indentured to Russell Crowe’s twinkle- pomp and padding of traditional history, reminding us just eyed bushranger, Harry Power. At this point, viewers might how young they were to have had such atrocities committed be under the impression that they are watching a well- against them, and to have committed so many themselves. researched historical drama, replete with period-appropriate Keeping this expressionistic treatment grounded are costumes and locations. But by the time George MacKay impeccable performances from MacKay (with the same appears as adult Ned in the second chapter (‘Man’), he is bug-eyed intensity he brings to Sam Mendes’s 1917) and sporting a mullet and speaking in a broad Aussie accent, Essie Davis as Ellen ‘Ma’ Kelly, masterfully playing the Lady channelling the on-stage energy of Australian rock front- Macbeth to her would-be outlaw king. Cinematographer men Kirin J. Callinan or Gareth Liddiard as he whips an Ari Wegner adeptly handles the film’s escalation towards

Jordan Prosser

S

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AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW

total visual anarchy, and the music by Jed Kurzel (brother of Justin) seems to spring from the blasted landscape, all percussive strings and sub-aural drones.

Naturally, a two-hour runtime demands that certain events and character arcs from the book be trimmed, conflated, or omitted altogether. Screenwriter Shaun Grant pulls this off almost imperceptibly. It is only during the Stringybark Creek ambush, where Ned seals his fate and becomes the ‘big man’ his Ma always wished him to be, that his journey feels unfairly abbreviated. In Carey’s novel, Ned faces nearly three hundred pages of discrimination, injustice, and scorn before he resorts to murder in cold blood. In the film, this agonising transition is hemmed down to a handful of key sequences and a few bad role models.

This necessary streamlining also has the eerie effect of making the vast colonial landscape appear almost empty.

One of the delights of Carey’s novel is its density: Kelly’s punctuation-free stanzas allow a vast amount of action and information to pour forth, creating a hugely detailed and richly populated world. But here, there are no busy high streets, no weddings in raucous pubs, no hawkers or prospectors popping up along the old Melbourne Road.

Fidelio

B

Elizabeth Kertesz

eethoven struggled with his only opera, Fidelio, for more than a decade, composing, rearranging, and composing anew until, in 1814, he declared that the opera would earn him a ‘martyr’s crown’. This tale of Leonore, who infiltrated a Spanish prison disguised as a man to liberate her husband, Florestan, allowed the composer to express his deepest thoughts on justice and freedom.

In 1814–15, Fidelio enjoyed twenty-one performances during the Congress of Vienna, when, in the wake of Napoleon’s defeat, it enabled Beethoven to communicate his hope for a new order under an enlightened monarchy. It entered the operatic repertory only after its 1822 revival in Vienna, when its message aligned with the political concerns of German nationalists and liberals, in their opposition to oppressive censorship laws and the brutal suppression of popular uprisings across Europe. It also became a star vehicle for the young Wilhelmine Schröder-Devrient, who won audiences across Europe for her dramatically charged interpretation of the loving, faithful wife who also acts as liberating hero.

Melbourne Opera indicates its commitment to the opera’s two great themes by adding ‘Love. Justice. Freedom’ to the title, but this production of Fidelio, directed by Hugh Halliday and conducted by Anthony Negus, shines a spotlight on Beethoven’s music, even more than the opera’s political message. The hybrid structure juxtaposes light

At times it feels as though the Kellys and their adversaries are the only living beings on Earth. The Kelly selection sits on a dry lot of land surrounded by scorched gum trees, their naked branches splitting the sky. When characters move from place to place, they ride on horseback by cover of night, illuminated by alien-green floodlights as if being divinely transported from one preordained outpost to the next, galloping helplessly towards their fates.

At one point in his journal, Kelly writes that ‘a myth is more profitable than a man’ – a keenly prophetic observation with regard to his own life and legacy. For better or worse, the outlaw Ned Kelly is perhaps the most profitable of all Australian myths. While myths might be profitable, they are also far from sacred. They demand scrutiny and reinterpretation if they are to remain relevant. Every generation gets its own version of the history of the Kelly gang. With its revisionist visuals, shifting gender roles, and unflinching violence, it seems fitting that this ‘true’ history is ours. g True History of the Kelly Gang is available on Stan.

Jordan Prosser is a Melbourne-based writer, director, and performer.

scenes approaching comic opera style with long, reflective numbers and a dramatically static, cantata-like finale (added in 1814), in which Beethoven sets forth his ideals.

Beethoven demands our attention from the outset, with an overture both dramatic and lyrical, and Maestro Negus drew a performance of admirable clarity and precision from the Melbourne Opera orchestra. His choice of brisk tempi lent the whole opera considerable energy, although ensemble with the singers occasionally suffered. On opening night, it was as if Negus had used tempo to maintain dramatic momentum and to alleviate some of the possible longueurs inherent in the composition itself. Given the surfeit of music in Fidelio, the inclusion of Beethoven’s Leonore Overture No. 3 before the finale of Act II was puzzling, as it effectively recapitulates the preceding drama in fifteen minutes of absolute music in the middle of an act already musically rather than dramatically driven. One can’t deny the Overture’s beauty, but it seemed under-rehearsed on opening night, compared with the orchestra’s strong performance of the rest of the opera.

Fidelio is punctuated by spoken dialogue, and Melbourne Opera chose to stage the whole work in German.

Despite evidence of careful preparation, this lent a certain awkwardness to the acting in the fast-paced, at times comedic dialogues of Act I, and the diction in the sung German was inconsistent. The dubious poetic qualities of the German libretto should relieve any qualms about translation, and Beethoven’s complex ensembles may have been more convincing if performed in English.

In the ‘harmless human love-tangle’ (pace Donald Tovey) of the opera’s opening scene, the casting of young singers Rebecca Rashleigh and Louis Hurley as MarzelARTS

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line and Jaquino gave energy and just the right touch of adolescent awkwardness to their misunderstandings, and they rewarded the audience with vocally and dramatically engaging performances. Once Rocco (Marzelline’s father, the prison warden) and Fidelio (Leonore, disguised as his assistant) entered, the action continued at a cracking pace, but it became harder to accept the essential premise of the love triangle in the setting of an anonymous modern office, with the cast in nondescript everyday dress. The banality of this farce was swept aside by the justly celebrated Canon quartet, in which each of the four characters shone vocally as they retreated into self-absorbed reflection, their imitative vocal lines answered by the orchestra, enhanced by a lighting design that spotlit each character individually.

Act I closes with a complex scena, which finally enunciates the great theme at the opera’s heart: the hope for liberty and justice. In a wholehearted portrayal of the suffering, ragged, light-starved prisoners, the men of the Melbourne Opera chorus sang with their usual commitment. Some of Beethoven’s most successful dramatic writing frames the injunction to ‘speak softly’ as they are ‘watched with ears and eyes’, a passage in which more pronounced dynamic contrasts could have further highlighted the oppressive sense of constant surveillance.

We are plunged into the depths of the dungeon in Act II, and this is where Bradley Daley soared as the exhausted, half-starved Florestan. He rose to the necessary paradox of a character near total physical collapse singing at the height of his vocal powers, and he unleashed his full expressive range when singing the great duet with Kirstin Sharpin.

After navigating the awkward trouser role of Fidelio, Sharpin joined Daley in revealing the full glory of her rich voice with her transformation into Leonore.

Warwick Fyfe was a commanding vocal presence as the prison governor Pizarro. His incarnation of the dastardly villain became almost parodic with a physical performance that embodied the twisted evil of this malefactor. This was in sharp contrast with the natural acting and vocal ease of Adrian Tamburini as Rocco, who encompassed with grace the varying demands of the role, from comic opera paterfamilias to earnest liberator of the imprisoned.

The final tableau was both effective and moving: warm lighting diffused the despairing gloom of the Act II dungeon, and the gathering townspeople held photos of their ‘disappeared’ loved ones behind the high fence. As the benevolent minister Don Fernando, Roger Howell brought warmth and gravitas to the role, joined by the full Melbourne Opera Chorus singing with their customary verve.

This was a momentous contribution to the 2020 Beethoven celebrations from a dynamic company that operates without public funding. We owe Melbourne Opera a debt of gratitude for giving Melbourne (and Bendigo) audiences the rare opportunity to hear and see Fidelio. g Fidelio was performed by Melbourne Opera in February 2020.

Elizabeth Kertesz is a Research Fellow at the Melbourne Conservatorium of Music, University of Melbourne.

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AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW

Stage Whispers

Klippel at TarraWarra Museum of Art

Surely no one missed Assembled, the recent exhibition of the art of Robert Klippel at TarraWarra – a welcome opportunity to revisit the work of this inimitable sculptor, who died in 2001. Curator Kirsty Grant represented different aspects of Klippel’s long career: the early sculptures and drawings made in London and Paris in the 1940s; the ‘assemblage’ works of the 1960s and 1970s; and the late timber works.

Klippel’s magnum opus in metal is the stupendous No. 247 Metal construction 1965–68, which dominated the main gallery at TarraWarra. When No. 247 was first exhibited at Bonython Art Gallery in 1969, Daniel Thomas reviewed the show. He wrote ‘the sculpture’s delicate antennae send off a shower of visual sparks [and] it electrifies the room …

Won’t someone commission a cluster of mile-high Klippel towers to energise the atmosphere of Sydney?’

Sydney clearly wasn’t listening! We hope they will later this year when AGNSW publishes Australian Art: Recent past, a compilation of Daniel Thomas’s art criticism over the decades, edited by Hannah Fink and Steven Mitchell.

Meanwhile, Patrick McCaughey is reviewing Assembled for ABR.

Visitations

‘I am not a village writer, but the village brought me forth, and so I am still a slow-talking villager, not a city person, a big-city person least of all.’ So wrote the Swiss author and playwright Friedrich Dürrenmatt (1921–90) at the start of his essay ‘Document’, one of many included in a welcome new compilation of his Selected Essays (Seagull Books, translated by Isabel Fargo Cole).

The Visit – memorably filmed in 1964 with Ingrid Bergman as the avenging Karla Zachanassian – was the ‘slowtalking villager’s’ most famous play. The National Theatre is currently reviving it in London: an adaptation by Tony Kushner, with the glorious Lesley Manville as Zachanassian and Hugo Weaving as Anton Schill. Let’s hope it travels to Australia to expunge memories of the shambolic 2003 MTC production with Zoe Caldwell in her Australian swansong.

Disgustedly yours

Opera, one of our favourite arts magazines, is celebrating its seventieth birthday. Founded by Lord Harewood in 1950, it offers a unique coverage of performances around the world.

John Allison, the current editor, is noted for his discerning journalism and his withering editorials – especially on the subject of English chauvinism and Plácido Domingo’s longevity. Not all of his readers have appreciated his regular philippics on Brexit’s implications for cultural exchange.

In the February birthday issue, one correspondent writes, ‘I’ve had enough. Your editorial is … a disgrace to a serious publication. Sir, you disgust me.’

Clearly Opera magazine is doing something right.

Many happy returns!

Rock on David McCooey THE SONG REMAINS THE SAME: 800 YEARS OF LOVE SONGS, LAMENTS AND LULLABIES

by Andrew Ford and Anni Heino,

La Trobe University Press, $32.99 pb, 288 pp

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n 1973, aged six, I heard the song ‘Rock On’ by David Essex. I was obsessed by its sound. While I couldn’t have put it into words, I half understood that the song was made sonically exciting not just through its inventive arrangement (a song about rock and roll with no guitars!) but also its production techniques, especially the use of reverb and delay to ‘stage’ the vocal and instrumental performances.

‘Rock On’ isn’t mentioned in The Song Remains the Same (though ‘Rock That Thing’ and ‘Rock Your Baby’ are), but the excitement that song gave me is found throughout this superb collection of essays on ‘800 years of love songs, laments and lullabies’. Ranging from a hymn by Hildegard of Bingen to Sia’s ‘Rainbow’, the seventy-five songs discussed in The Song Remains the Same cover bossa nova, ‘art songs’, gospel, jazz, national anthems, and more. There is almost nothing, it seems, that Andrew Ford and Anni Heino can’t write about. This isn’t surprising: Ford is a prize-winning composer, writer, and broadcaster; Heino a musicologist, writer, and editor.

David Essex’s ‘Rock On’ is one of millions of songs not discussed

by Ford and Heino. The authors themselves list numerous songwriters they reluctantly excluded. But this book, despite its range, is not an encyclopedia of song, nor is it about ‘liking or disliking individual songs’.

Just as they are vehicles for their performers, so these songs are vehicles for Ford and Heino, allowing them to discuss not only the individual song in question, but also scores of others, illustrating how song can be understood in sociological and biographical ways, as well as strictly musicological ones.

While Ford and Heino write com-

pellingly about the simplest of material (‘You Are My Sunshine’, for instance), they shine when discussing songs that are musically a little odd: ‘Stardust’, ‘America’, ‘Lush Life’, ‘Night and Day’, ‘Fast Car’. The last of these, by Tracy Chapman, provides one of the collection’s many high points. Ford and Heino give a stunning reading of the song, one far more complex than its hypnotically repetitive guitar part might suggest.

As the essay on ‘Fast Car’ shows, Ford and Heino can walk the line between scholarly analysis, which requires musicological knowledge beyond the general reader, and popular music journalism, which too often focuses unduly on the lyrical content of a song.

As well as being able to explain the role played by harmony and structure, Ford and Heino can also brilliantly elucidate those moments – especially prominent in vernacular and popular song – that resist conventional analysis: a particular inflection, a yelp, whatever.

Ford and Heino have a genius for uncovering intertextual connections that most of us would miss. Some of these links concern musical borrowings. John Lennon, for instance, reworked a riff by Bobby Parker in ‘I Feel Fine’. The famous alto sax solo from Gerry Rafferty’s ‘Baker Street’ lifts (and transforms) Steve Marcus’s soprano sax part from ‘Half a Heart’. But Ford and Heino go well beyond such debts. Throughout the book they trace complex transnational and transhistorical connections between apparently divergent material. For instance, the essay on ‘Thule, the Period of Cosmography’ by Thomas Weelkes (the Elizabethan composer who once urinated on the dean of Chichester Cathedral from the organ loft) becomes an occasion to discuss the role of long and outré words in song lyrics.

Of course, songs make more immediate connections in time and space, most notably between performers and audiences. Even when we are alone, when we hear a song that we know we often begin to sing. This social element of song is powerfully present in The Song Remains the Same. It is seen in the discussion of explicitly relational and collective song forms, such as lullabies, hymns, and anthems, as well as the

social practices associated with songs.

The essay on Queen’s ‘We Will Rock You’, for instance, teases out that song’s relationship with the call-and-response form of work songs.

The emphasis on communities is also seen in the essays concerned with the political power that song can engender, found in tracks such as ‘Gracias a la Vida’, by the Chilean songwriter Violeta Parra, and ‘Strange Fruit’, the extraordinary song about lynching made famous by Billie Holiday. (Women, so often sidelined in music – both ‘élite’ and ‘popular’ – are impressively present throughout these pages.)

The essays in The Song Remains the Same, then, are not merely randomly organised but are connected through the book’s numerous repeating themes.There are also links (often playful) between contiguous essays. For instance, the essay on Kate Bush’s ‘Oh England My Lionheart’ is followed by an essay on ‘Ja nus hons pris’ by Richard the Lionheart. The whole book is organised like a perfectly sequenced playlist. Indeed, Heino’s companion Spotify playlist is an invaluable resource for readers of this book.

Song is culturally central in large part because of its affective power. What other form can so quickly produce such intense and various somatic responses?

Songs make us cry, laugh, and dance.

But more cerebral responses are equally important, as this stunningly good book shows. Ford’s and Heino’s essays are not only full of insights about individual songs, classes of songs, and song in general, but they are also full of jokes and wit. They are masterclasses in the shortessay form. Like a good song, they are brief, memorable, and compelling. Here’s hoping for a Song Remains the Same 2, with an essay about ‘Rock On’. g

David McCooey is a poet, academic, and musician.

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Behind the mask Tim Byrne HOW I LEARNT TO ACT: ON THE WAY TO NOT GOING TO DRAMA SCHOOL

by Francis Greenslade

Currency Press, $29.99 pb, 192 pp

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t’s perhaps a dubious thought, but the life of an actor invariably triggers something prurient in the audience, some desperate need to peer past the mask, to see beyond the curtain. Books by and about actors indulge this prurience, whether or not they are intended to. Works like Konstantin Stanislavski’s An Actor Prepares (1936) or Stella Adler’s The Art of Acting (2000) deal academically with the interiority and motivations of acting, but they still offer a glimpse into the process and the perceived trickery of creation. The most fun are the intentionally salacious ones, like David Niven’s The Moon’s a Balloon (1971) or Scotty Bowers’s Full Service (2017), which detailed the sexual proclivities of Hollywood’s closeted élite. Anything to get us closer, to get us into the inner sanctum.

Australian actor Francis Greenslade contributes to the genre in a minor key with How I Learnt to Act, a dual-purpose work that throws some autobiographical light on what is often referred to as a ‘jobbing actor’s’ career, while offering some sage advice to his fellow thespians. It’s not particularly titillating, and it’s hardly the kind of actor’s bible up-and-comers will cling ferociously to, but, like most books on acting, it has its pleasures and moments of genuine insight. In some ways, the book is the 66 MARCH 2020

very antithesis of Year of the King (1985), Antony Sher’s extraordinary diary of his preparations for the Royal Shakespeare Company’s Richard III. How I Learnt to Act is a work that punctures the balloon of self-regard, that concentrates on what it’s like to act for a living.

In this regard, Greenslade is the perfect guide. Best known for his work with comedian Shaun Micallef, currently on ABC’s Mad as Hell, Greenslade has worked in every medium in a career that spans decades, from long-running serialised dramas to mainstage productions for the state theatre companies. He has worked with major directors such as Simon Phillips and Michael Kantor, and acted beside such luminaries as Julie Forsyth and Pamela Rabe. Most unusually, in an industry where the vast majority of actors are out of work at any given moment, he’s been almost consistently employed.

It gives him a perspective that tilts towards the utilitarian: never smug or self-aggrandising, he prefers to underplay that sense of desperation or profound need that drives most actors.

The book is structured as a journey from blundering amateurism, through professionalism towards a kind of reluctant pedagogy, but it is difficult to shake the feeling that Greenslade would have just as happily become a mechanic or science teacher as an actor. If it’s proof that the acting profession is made up of all types, it’s also mildly deflating; no one wants to find a mechanic behind the mask.

Yet this perspective, that sees creative endeavour as a work practice that can be honed and sharpened merely by time and effort, is also necessary, even slightly subversive, in an age that still believes in the Promethean spark.

How I Learnt to Act is made up of short chapters with titles such as ‘Prince of Numbskulls’, ‘Moving’, and ‘Status’; they refer to the show Greenslade is in at the time, to a biographical upheaval, and in some cases, to an acting lesson.

These latter sections won’t challenge the history of performance in any way, and are standard concepts familiar to high-school drama students, but they are worth repeating, and Greenslade’s pragmatic approach gives them a roughhewn force. His take on the difference

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW

between dramatic and comic acting – namely, that there isn’t one – is substantiated by examples from his own successes and failures, from his realisation that ‘if you don’t approach comic texts in the same way you approach non-comic texts, then you won’t engage the audience’.

Greenslade is refreshingly honest about his own inadequacies as a performer, and uses these to demonstrate truisms of the craft. He talks about the power of stillness on stage, and how his own tendency to shuffle his feet during a production of David Williamson’s The Club weakened the part. He speaks of the strange disconnect that can occur when an actor feels that he or she has failed to hit a certain emotion, only to be told by an audience member or fellow performer that it was ‘the best you’ve ever done it’. There is a beautiful sense of the craftsman who knows he can never perfect his craft, the idea that there is always something to learn, unlearn, and learn again. Only recently, in a production of The Odd Couple for the Melbourne Theatre Company, Greenslade realised that ‘the audience wanted to like me. And I didn’t need to be scared of them (which I had been ever since Grade 2, if I’m honest with myself ).’

The subtitle to How I Learnt to Act is ‘On the way to NOT going to drama school’, which hints at some ambivalence around traditional avenues to the profession, and perhaps a touch of self-doubt. One hilarious chapter deals with reviewers, and singles out The Australian’s Chris Boyd for what Greenslade perceives as a preconceived bias (it’s lucky Greenslade stopped reading reviews before he got to mine).

These moments of vulnerability – including a particularly touching chapter on the death of his infant son, Sam – are beautiful reminders that even our most successful actors live their lives on the edge of fragility. This book might be a rather quotidian peek behind the mask, but it is no less revealing for that. g Tim Byrne is a freelance writer and theatre critic for ABR and Time Out Melbourne. He is currently working on a novel.

Surveying the musical Gillian Wills THE AUSTRALIAN MUSICAL FROM THE BEGINNING

by Peter Pinne and Peter Wyllie Johnston

Allen and Unwin, $79.99 hb, 432 pp

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hat is the musical’s appeal?

Performing arts venues in Australia’s capital cities stage them year after year; a lucrative box office seems to be virtually guaranteed. The feel-good mix of song, melodrama, and vibrant dance – not forgetting the bonus of a happy ending – can lift the spirits and entertain the entire family. Recently, Chicago (Melbourne, Brisbane), West Side Story, and Billy Elliot (Adelaide) secured packed houses.

Australian classics such as The Boy From Oz, Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, and Eddie Perfect’s Beetlejuice confirm the country’s stellar contribution to the art form, but the rise of the local musical and the triumphs and tribulations of those who championed the genre have gone undocumented until now.

The Australian Musical from the Beginning is a charming and superbly illustrated volume. Lovingly and meticulously researched, it is crammed with intriguing cameos, insightful detail, and sorry tales of artistic misadventure.

Authors Peter Pinne and Peter Wyllie Johnston are industry veterans.

Johnston is director of the Australian Music Theatre Research Institute, and the composer and lyricist of Tamarama.

Pinne and Don Battye have written seventeen musicals. In 1995, Pinne and Battye’s Prisoner Cell Block H: The Musical, based on the television series Prisoner, opened at the Queen’s Theatre, London, to much acclaim.

Post-Federation Australia, as the authors remind us, remained ideologically and sentimentally connected to Britain and was in the thrall of American culture. The entrepreneur J.C. Williamson exploited this mindset. Through his eponymous company he ensured

the musical’s popularity by importing much-loved American and British shows. He produced only two Australian musicals. Some creatives – notably Jack Fewster, known as Australia’s Irving Berlin – longed to produce Aussie shows every bit as fêted as their overseas equivalents.

Slowly, the gathering national pride unleashed a desire for homegrown product. Among the first crop of quintessential Aussie shows were those created by women such as May Brahe, Ella Airlie, Edith Aird, Varney Monk, and Dot Mendoza. Nonetheless, their substantial contributions are largely unknown. Today, women are once again ardent contributors to the form. In Tasmania, Fran Armstrong’s Aussie Rules: The Musical met with acclaim. In her wake came composer, lyricist, and performer Joanna Weinberg, Megan Shorey, Fiona Thorn, and Carolyn Burns.

Kate Miller-Heidke’s Muriel’s Wedding, with music and lyrics co-written with Keir Nuttall, was lauded when it opened in Sydney in 2018.

The ambition to create a seminal Australian musical was not for the fainthearted, and it attracted larger-than-life characters. Brahe first made her name as a songwriter. Considering the local market for her songs too meagre, the then twenty-three-year-old abandoned her husband and young children and went to London, promising that she would return when she had earned enough money.

Brahe’s contemporary Oscar Asche lived in a cave near Jervis Bay and mused on whether he should become an actor.

After breakfasting on eggs and oysters, he would recite Shakespeare on the beach and imagine that the waves crashing onto the shore were thunderous applause. In 1916, Asche created the book and lyrics for Chu Chin Chow and commissioned English composer Frederic Norton to write the music. It opened in August 2016 at His Majesty’s Theatre, London. Five years later, it had chalked up 2,238 performances and was the longest-running show in the world. Its popularity was eventually surpassed by Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Show Boat.

The lack of philanthropy and government grants, and the reluctance of producers to fund the home-grown,

were continual thorns in the side of creative enthusiasts. Clement John De Garis wrote the score, music, and lyrics for F.F.F., which was produced by Hugh D. McIntosh, who persuaded De Garis to invest his own capital in his oddly named show. It ran at a loss and De Garis found himself in debt to the tune of £420,000 before his suicide in 1926.

If the drive towards Australian content in musicals was slow, there was an even longer wait for First Nations people to be reflected in storylines, let alone to power an entire musical. In Monk’s Collits’ Inn, a tokenistic corroboree enacted on stage was a notable standout in Frank Thring’s production.

Fewster’s Yantabinjie, the tale of a theatrical troupe stranded on an outback cattle station, featured an Aboriginal cook and his wife.

Fast forward to 1990, and composer– lyricist Jimmy Chi’s trailblazing Bran Nue Dae, which premièred in Perth.

It was risqué and tongue-in-cheek; at the end of one song the audience was showered with condoms from the set’s ‘Condom Tree’. Bran Nue Dae, the first Aboriginal musical, was adapted into a major feature film starring Ernie Dingo, Geoffrey Rush, Missy Higgins, Jessica Mauboy, and Deborah Mailman. The film earned $7.5 million at the box office and inspired The Sunshine Club by Wesley Enoch and John Rogers, and the gritty Corrugation Road.

This is the first comprehensive and scholarly consideration of the musical in Australia. It surveys the genre’s poignant, triumphant, and frustrating climb towards global and national recognition. The A–Z features snapshots of three hundred Australian musicals selected from a possible seven hundred.

The inclusion of these musicals’ most significant songs unveils a rich seam of previously neglected repertoire. The Australian Musical from the Beginning is not only a pleasurable read; as a catalogue of musicals, it will no doubt become a valuable resource and a catalyst for staging revivals of these forgotten works. g Gillian Wills is the author of Elvis and Me: How a world-weary musician and a broken racehorse rescued each other (2016).

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From the ABR Archive

Elizabeth Jolley’s Mr Scobie’s Riddle won the 1983 Age Book of the Year Award (her first major literary prize). Lucy Frost reviewed it in the April 1983 issue of ABR. The review (shortened here) is one of myriad features from the print edition being added to our digital archive going back to 1978, accessible by subscribers.

T

he time is always four o’clock in the morning when Night Sister M. Shady (unregistered) is on duty at The Hospital of St Christopher and St Jude.

The punctual milkman is swearing as he falls on the broken step, the elderly patients are having a water fight or an altercation or a game of cards. Whatever may or may not be going on, Mrs Shady will record with confidence ‘nothing abnormal to report’.

Mr Scobie’s Riddle conjures up a world where the bizarre seems to be the rule. The night sister is quite right: nothing is abnormal in such a topsy-turvy world. Ordinary signposts for judging normality have been removed, leaving confusion in their wake. This removal job has taken place in the very first pages when Elizabeth Jolley offers her ‘Guide to the Perplexed’. The guide is a twentieth-century version of the table of contents one expects to find in novels like Tom Jones. Jolley’s ‘Guide’ is more dangerous: it threatens to discourage potential readers. Times have changed and tastes have changed, and few late-twentieth-century readers are attracted by a fivepage series of incomprehensible fragments set alongside a broken sequence of page numbers. It’s to be hoped that no one will be put off, because, far from being a ponderous novel self-consciously concerned with linguistic structures and form, Mr Scobie’s Riddle is delightfully entertaining.

Jolley has an eye for the eccentric and an ear for the incongruous. She can make a reader laugh at matters our social conventions tell us are not funny. A badly run institution for the aged is one of these. It seems a more likely subject for investigative journalism than for a comic novel, and yet Jolley wrings laughter from ‘The Hospital of St Christopher and St Jude’, which is no more a hospital than it is the ‘old people’s home’ of common parlance. It is a place which has much stronger ties to the local bank manager than to the revered saints under whose protective covering it shelters. The hospital is presided over by a matron-owner-manager whose surname is naturally ‘Price’, and whose unnatural first name, Heather, is fittingly kept down to a purely functional ‘H’. Matron Price should be investigated. She feeds her patients on beetroot, dried peas, and lentils, and her medical remedies are limited to menthol camphor and Epsom salts. Only Jolley’s prose keeps the reader from moral outrage. Like a gifted comic actor, Jolley’s timing is brilliant. She knows how to embed the serious within the farcical and to shift attention to the incongruous for light relief. Matron Price, who is never anxious about diarrhoea and haemorrhage as physical states, worries about how to spell them.

Without its comedy Mr Scobie’s Riddle would be 68 MARCH 2020

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW

sentimental. Jolley needs the amusing flamboyance of Heather Hailey, who cannot understand why the Town Clerk should take offence when he receives the ode in which she has ‘tried to look with renewed rapture and entirely new images at his water works’. Miss Hailey’s insouciance and theatricality are counterpointed by the pathos of the three elderly men in Room One who hate the place and long for their homes.

Crammed together, they lack all privacy in a space so tiny that even the most basic furniture makes it impossible to operate the door, which therefore remains permanently wide open. Mr Scobie tries to explain to his fat, cigarsmoking niece what this means: ‘Joan dear, I don’t think I want to stay here at St Christopher and St Jude. I don’t think I can manage even to stay one day, not another day. I want to go home.’

‘Why on earth Uncle?’

‘There’s no dignity,’ Mr Scobie said, ‘absolutely none whatever. You can’t even shut the lavatory door, dear, and when I go down there someone else always seems to need to go ...’

Jolley’s compassion for the people who ordinarily slide by without attention has always given her fiction a special kind of gentleness. In the stories of Five Acre Virgin (1976) and The Travelling Entertainer (1979), in her novel The Newspaper of Claremont Street (1981), the gentleness has an edge to it which keeps it from going soft. It is the edge created by comedy when the distorted in life evokes laughter rather than tears. The cumulative effect of the laughter in situations which are not intrinsically funny is to create a sense of unease in the reader. The distortions are funny, but they are also distortions and as such threaten to become sinister. Matron Price’s anxieties about spelling, whimsically amusing though they may be, are also disturbing reminders that the matron is not troubled by similar anxieties about the old people over whose lives she has far too much power.

Jolley’s work has been well served in the past by the stylish productions of Fremantle Press. Unfortunately, the problem of distribution faced by small presses has meant that these volumes, together with the novel Palomino (1980) published by Outback Press, have been difficult to find outside Western Australia. For those of us who live elsewhere, the publication of Mr Scobie’s Riddle by Penguin will make the novel easily available, and it is to be hoped that many new readers will be gained for this polished and talented writer. g

Jolley Prize 2017 2020 ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize

The Australian Book Review Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize is one of the world’s major prizes for an original short story, with $12,500 in prizes.

It honours the work of the Australian writer Elizabeth Jolley.

The Jolley Prize is open to anyone in the world who is writing in English.

First prize: $6,000 • Second prize: $4,000 • Third prize: $2,500 Judges: Gregory Day, Ellen van Neerven, Josephine Rowe The closing date is 1 May 2020 previous winners 2019 Sonja Dechian

2018 Madelaine Lucas

2017 Eliza Robertson

2016 Josephine Rowe

2015 Rob Magnuson Smith

2014 Jennifer Down

2013 Michelle Michau-Crawford

2012 Sue Hurley

2011 Carrie Tiffany & Gregory Day

2010 Maria Takolander

The Jolley Prize is funded by Mr Ian Dickson

Full details and online entry are available on our website: www.australianbookreview.com.au