Australian Book Review, June-July 2020 issue, no. 422 by Australian Book Review

Advances Calibre Essay Prize

When the Calibre Essay Prize, now in its fourteenth year, closed on January 15, there was an oddly shaped, menacing elephant in the room. Few people were aware of the coronavirus, though it had been detected in China the previous month. Not until January 25 was the first case diagnosed in Australia. By the middle of March, of course, the full extent of the catastrophe was apparent, with untold consequences for society, the economy, and the arts. For Calibre, the theme uppermost in people’s minds was undoubtedly climate change and the recent bushfires that had ravaged large part of Australia – some of them previously unaffected by bushfires. Then there was the customary range of subjects: literary criticism, philosophical speculation, travel writing, personal memoir, childhood memories, and domestic subjects, often poignant, sometimes harrowing. Next year, we suspect, the balance will be upset by something called the pandemic. This year we received almost 600 copies from twenty-nine different countries – by far our largest field to date. The judges this year were J.M. Coetzee (Nobel Laureate), Lisa Gorton (poet, novelist, and essayist), and Peter Rose (ABR Editor). Often, the two winning Calibre Essays are very different, reflecting the multifarious nature of the field. Last year, for instance, Professor Grace Karskens, the overall winner, introduced us to the remarkable Nah Doongh, one of the first Aboriginal children to grow up in conquered land, while the second prize went to Sarah Walker’s highly personal account of an abortion. (Sarah, who went on to become one of the first ABR Rising Stars, has a wonderful essay in this issue on the loss and commemoration of her mother at the start of the pandemic: see page 20.) This year it’s very different: both essays deal with aspects of gender, difficulty, health, overcoming, becoming – the endless stages of self-realisation. The winner of this year’s Calibre Essay Prize is ‘Reading the Mess Backwards’ by Yves Rees, a writer and historian who teaches at La Trobe University. Dr Rees has published widely on Australian gender, economic, and transnational history, and also writes on transgender identity and politics. ‘Reading the Mess Backwards’ is an absorbing account of ‘trans becoming’ in a personal context, addressed without rancour or self pity. It explores how we come to understand and perform our gender in a world of restrictive binaries and male dominance. Yves Rees told Advances: I am honoured to be awarded the Calibre Essay Prize. In my essay, I’ve sketched the kind of narrative I hungered to read: a story of trans becoming that digs into the messiness of bodies, gender and identity. My hope is that, as such stories proliferate, we will all – men and women, cisgender and trans – be liberated from the prison of patriarchy, with its suffocating gender binary.

The recognition afforded by the Calibre Essay Prize is an important step in that struggle.

Our runner-up this year is Kate Middleton, the Sydney poet and critic, who began contributing to the magazine while still a student almost twenty years ago (one of her first reviews appears in From the Archive on page 68). Kate’s essay, entitled ‘The Dolorimeter’, is a riveting meditation on ill health over many years. We look forward to publishing it in the next issue. In addition, the judges commended five other essays. They are Sue Cochius’s ‘Mrs Mahomet’, Julian Davies’ ‘A Small Boy and Cambodia’, Mireille Juchau’s ‘Only One Refused’, Laura Kolbe’s ‘Human Women, Magic Flutes’, and Meredith Wattison’s ‘Ambivalence: The Afterlife of Patrick White’. We look forward to publishing some of these essays in coming months. ABR gratefully acknowledges the generous support from Mr Colin Golvan AM QC and Peter and Mary-Ruth McLennan, whose donations make the Calibre Prize possible in this form. We look forward to presenting the Calibre Prize for a fifteenth time in 2021.

The lurking horrors

Most poets’ centenaries go unnoticed in this country, but Gwen Harwood’s feels different. When she died in Hobart in 1995, aged seventy-five, she was ‘undoubtedly Australia’s most loved poet’, as Peter Porter, not exactly unpopular himself, noted in an illuminating review of her posthumous Collected Poems (University of Queensland Press, 2003). Most loved? So Harwood perhaps remains twenty-five years after her death, certainly among Australian poets. When ABR invited a number of them to contribute to a special podcast tribute, the response was swift. Readers include old acquaintances of Gwen’s – Stephen Edgar, Andrew Taylor, Chris Wallace-Crabbe, Andrew Taylor, Stephanie Trigg, our Editor, whose first collection she launched in verse back in 1990 during a rare visit to Melbourne (her travels were few, and she never left Australia; perhaps, like Emily Dickinson, she felt, ‘To shut our eyes is Travel’); her biographer, Ann-Marie Priest (whose long-awaited book has been pushed back to 2021 because of the pandemic); her editors Alison Hodinott and Gregory Kratzmann; and composer–collaborator Larry Sitsky, who reads ‘Night Music’, Gwen’s 1963 response to his music. Porter’s review – well worth revisiting (TLS, 9 May 2003) – is illuminating. He notes that Harwood’s poetry is ‘suffused with music’ and rates her as having ‘as natural a feeling for tetrameter as Auden’ – high praise coming from him. Then there is this classic Porterism: Harwood’s regular metric and rhymes swathe the lurking horrors in suburban reasonableness. She might have found another way A U S T R A L I A N B O O K R E V I E W J U N E – J U LY 2 0 2 0

Australian Book Review June–July 2020, no. 422

First series 1961–74 | Second series (1978 onwards, from no. 1) Registered by Australia Post | Printed by Doran Printing ISSN 0155-2864 ABR is published ten times a year by Australian Book Review Inc. Studio 2, 207 City Road, Southbank, Vic. 3006 This is a Creative Spaces managed studio, Creative Spaces is a program of Arts Melbourne at the City of Melbourne. Phone: (03) 9699 8822 Twitter: @AustBookReview Facebook: @AustralianBookReview Instagram: @AustralianBookReview www.australianbookreview.com.au Editor and CEO Peter Rose – editor@australianbookreview.com.au Deputy Editor Amy Baillieu – abr@australianbookreview.com.au Assistant Editor Jack Callil – digital@australianbookreview.com.au Business Manager Grace Chang – business@australianbookreview.com.au Development Consultant Christopher Menz – development@australianbookreview.com.au Poetry Editor John Hawke (with assistance from Judith Bishop) Chair Sarah Holland-Batt Treasurer Peter McLennan Board Members Graham Anderson, Ian Dickson, Rae Frances, Colin Golvan, Billy Griffiths, Sharon Pickering, Robert Sessions, Ilana Snyder ABR Laureates David Malouf (2014) | Robyn Archer (2016) ABR Rising Stars Alex Tighe (NSW, 2019) | Sarah Walker (Vic., 2019) Editorial Advisers Frank Bongiorno, Danielle Clode, Clare Corbould, Des Cowley, Mark Edele, Kári Gíslason, Tom Griffiths, Sue Kossew, Johanna Leggatt, Bruce Moore, Rachel Robertson, Lynette Russell, Alison Stieven-Taylor, Alistair Thomson, Peter Tregear, Ben Wellings, Rita Wilson Monash University Editorial Interns Perri Dudley, Elizabeth Streeter Volunteers Alan Haig, Margaret Robson Kett, John Scully

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Image credits and information Page 27: Surveillance screens, former Stasi prison, Hohenschönhausen Memorial, Berlin (Novarc Images/Christian Reister Alamy) | Page 57: Elizabeth Taylor with Dame Margot Fonteyn at London Airport,1958. File Reference #1014 005 THA © JRC /The Hollywood Archive. All Rights Reserved. Image ID: PM4K12 2 A U S T R A L I A N B O O K R E V I E W J U N E – J U LY 2 0 2 0

ABR June 2020 LETTERS

Jenny Hocking, Roger Rees, Elisabeth Holdsworth, Bronwyn Mills, Lindy Warrell, Iradj Nabavi, Wayne Eaton, Tom Gutteridge

POLITICS

8 10 11 14 15 42 43

Judith Brett Glyn Davis Frank Bongiorno Benjamin T. Jones Kieran Pender Alex Tighe Lyndon Megarrity

A Bigger Picture by Malcolm Turnbull The New Despotism by John Keane Becoming John Curtin and James Scullin by Liam Byrne Democratic Adventurer by Sean Scalmer Law in War by Catherine Bond Net Privacy by Sacha Molitorisz Trials and Transformations, 2001–2004, edited by Tom Frame

POEMS

16 26 34

Stephen Edgar Gwen Harwood Jaya Savige

‘Dawn Solo’ ‘Carnal Knowledge I’ ‘Back to the Fuchsia’

LITERARY STUDIES

17 18 44

James Ley Sophie Cunningham Dan Dixon

The Trials of Portnoy by Patrick Mullins On Robyn Davidson by Richard Cooke Spinoza’s Overcoat by Subhash Jaireth

ESSAY

Sarah Walker

‘Contested breath: The ethics of assembly in an age of absurdity’

MEMOIR & BIOGRAPHY

24 45 46 47 49

Ronan McDonald Jacqueline Kent Susan Varga Peter Craven Tali Lavi

Parisian Lives by Deirdre Bair Radio Girl by David Dufty Untethered by Hayley Katzen Apropos of Nothing by Woody Allen Daddy Cool by Darleen Bungey

HISTORY

Sheila Fitzpatrick

The Ratline by Philippe Sands

FICTION

28 29 31 31 32 33 35 35

Naama Grey-Smith Nicole Abadee Declan Fry Laura Elizabeth Woollett Lisa Bennett Margaret Robson Kett Rosalind Moran Chloë Cooper

Rise & Shine by Patrick Allington A Treacherous Country by K.M. Kruimink Elephants with Headlights by Bem Le Hunte The Rain Heron by Robbie Arnott Smart Ovens for Lonely People by Elizabeth Tan Three new fantasy novels for younger readers Fauna by Donna Mazza State Highway One by Sam Coley

CALIBRE ESSAY

Yves Rees

‘Reading the mess backwards’

LANGUAGE

Amanda Laugesen

‘Coronaspeak: Tracking language in a pandemic’

COMMENTARY

Robert Wood

‘Literary journals and freedom of expression’

SOCIETY

50 51

Kerryn Goldsworthy A Lasting Conversation, edited by Susan Ogle and Melanie Joosten Grandmothers, edited by Helen Elliott Zora Simic The Better Half by Sharon Moalem

ENVIRONMENT

Natalie Osborne

POETRY

53 55 56

Luke Beesley Three new poetry collections Geoff Page A Gathered Distance by Mark Tredinnick The Mirror Hurlers by Ross Gillett Chris Wallace-Crabbe A Little History of Poetry, edited by John Carey

ARTS

58 59 60 61 63 64 65 66 67

Ian Dickson ‘A night at the opera’ Tim Byrne Take Me to the World Nicholas Tochka ‘Government versus artists during the Spanish Flu’ Jordan Prosser Hearts and Bones Meg Foster The Whole Picture by Alice Procter Luke Stegemann The Stranger Artist by Quentin Sprague Jane Sullivan Intrépide by Clem Gorman and Therese Gorman Tali Lavi Cock, Cock ... Who’s there? Ben Brooker The Plot Against America

FROM THE ARCHIVE

Kate Middleton

The Citizen’s Guide to Climate Success by Mark Jaccard

Of a Boy by Sonya Hartnett A U S T R A L I A N B O O K R E V I E W J U N E – J U LY 2 0 2 0

to shock her contented nation, but she chooses to outfit her demons with the reassurance of perfected form.

Porter, who regarded Harwood as ‘a great thinker in poetry, very much the Empson “argufier”’, rightly considered her neglect overseas ‘deplorable’. What more did they want in London or New York? At the time, Porter’s closing remarks may have seemed a little surprising, even heretical to some – but not in 2020, when Harwood’s wit, emotional range, and metrical gifts seem ever more treasurable. Porter wrote:

‘Love Songs’. She declined. Years later, she remarked to Greg Kratzmann, ‘What other kind of knowledge is there?’ We’re delighted to be able to reprint ‘Carnal Knowledge I’ on page 26.

A nation of thinkers

What authors need most – especially right now – is a sense of security: the freedom to advance a major project with the kind of financial ease that the rest of the community takes for granted. Right now, with a noticeable tightening in the publishing sector and the postponement of many trade It looks, after all, as if lovers of Australian titles, this security is in short supply. poetry have been getting their messages Which makes the Copyright Agency’s crossed. Gwen Harwood turns out to be Fellowships for two creative writers and one the most accomplished poet the country visual artist even more significant. As Kim produced in the twentieth century. Williams, Chair of Copyright Agency has stated, ‘We’re really pleased to be able to ofA coming episode of the ABR Podcast fer even more support for our members who (due to be released on June 4) features work so hard to make Australia a creative some of Harwood’s most celebrated poems, nation as part of a broader aspiration to be including ‘The Twins’, ‘Dialogue’, and ‘Suba nation of thinkers.’ Gwen Harwood urban Sonnet’. The podcast concludes with Past Fellows have included James ABR Laureate Robyn Archer’s sung version Bradley, Kathryn Heyman, Melissa Luof the latter poem. cashenko, Stephen Orr, and Jeff Sparrow. Advances liked this anecdote about another of the featured Each Fellowship – two of them literary, one artistic – is poems, ‘Carnal Knowledge I’. When The Australian published worth $80,000. Applications for close on 29 June 2020. More it in 1972, an editor asked Harwood to change the title to information is available on Copyright Agency’s website.

Letters A want of disclosure

Dear Editor, In his response to my article, ‘At Her Majesty’s Pleasure: Sir John Kerr and the Royal Dismissal Secrets’ (ABR, April 2020), the Director-General of the National Archives, David Fricker, acknowledges that there have been ‘unacceptable delays’ in dealing with access requests, accepts that the National Archives has spent close to a million dollars contesting my legal action in the ‘Palace letters’ case, and yet claims the National Archives is a ‘pro-disclosure organisation’ (ABR, May 2020). I address just one part of Mr Fricker’s response to my article, which discusses this legal action seeking access to the secret Palace letters, between the Queen and the Governor-General Sir John Kerr, relating to Kerr’s 1975 dismissal of the Whitlam government. While conceding the historical significance of and the great public interest in the Palace letters, Mr Fricker writes that they are ‘personal’ records and are therefore governed by their own access conditions agreed to by the National Archives with Kerr, which must be adhered to. To do otherwise, Fricker says, would constitute a ‘massive breach of trust’. In denying public access to these historic letters, the National Archives argues that it is merely upholding the condi4 A U S T R A L I A N B O O K R E V I E W J U N E – J U LY 2 0 2 0

tions for access specified by the depositor, Sir John Kerr, as it must for all personal records. As David Fricker describes, the Palace letters were deposited after Kerr left office by the Governor-General’s official secretary, Mr David Smith, ‘as Sir John Kerr’s agent with the Australian Archives in August 1978. In accordance with Kerr’s instructions, their release would occur sixty years (later changed to fifty) from the end of Kerr’s appointment, “only after consultation with The Sovereign’s Private Secretary of the day and with the Governor General’s Official Secretary of the day”.’ That parenthetical ‘later changed to fifty’ neatly masks two critical facts about Kerr’s instructions that Mr Fricker fails to mention, and without which it might appear that Kerr himself had changed the conditions of access – not an unreasonable conclusion since, according to Fricker, the letters must be dealt with ‘in accordance with Kerr’s instructions’. In fact, the changes to Kerr’s conditions were made after Kerr’s death, and on the instruction of the Queen. The access conditions currently over the Palace letters are not those set by Kerr. There were two changes made to Kerr’s conditions, the second of which was the most significant and which Mr Fricker also fails to mention: Kerr’s requirement that the letters only

be released after ‘consultation with’ both the Sovereign’s Private Secretary and the Governor General’s Official Secretary was changed to now require the ‘approval of’ both the Sovereign’s Private Secretary and the Governor General’s Official Secretary. It is this change that has given the monarch an effective final veto over their release, potentially indefinitely. David Fricker’s insistence that ‘[s]tewardship of personal records requires a respect for the depositor’ is impossible to reconcile with these definitive changes to Kerr’s access conditions over the Palace letters, made after his death and on the instruction of the Queen. Jenny Hocking, Kensington, Vic. Dear Editor, I read with interest David Fricker’s ‘Questions of Access’ defence of the National Archives (ABR, May 2020). Unfortunately, this response reads like the usual cover-up and evasion as to what happened when a twice-elected prime minister was dismissed by the monarch’s Australian representative. In her article ‘At Her Majesty’s Pleasure’, Professor Jenny Hocking questioned the extent of the monarch’s control over disclosure by the National Archives of the dismissal letters. This is the focus – not whether tens of millions of people access services of the National Archives. The Archives’ Director-General’s statement that ‘the facts will speak for themselves’ is an example of evasion. Surely more openness could direct energy towards exposing the unnecessary deceits of everyday politics, which in this case allows the monarch to maintain control over a most significant event in Australian history. In this matter, the criteria as to what is proprietary and lawful is still determined by the monarch. The Australian public’s right to know remains gagged. No matter how long it takes, the dismissal letters will eventually be revealed. Let’s end this monarchical cover-up now. Roger Rees, Goolwa, SA

This worried world

Dear Editor, I commend ABR on the gutsy decision to create the Behrouz Boochani Fellowship. Australia Council, please note! And I offer my heartiest congratulations to the 2020 recipient, Dr Hessom Razavi. His first offering could not be more timely. His modestly titled article, ‘Notes on a Pandemic’, is remarkable (ABR, May 2020). I have rarely read such an insightful work covering so many areas concerning us at this time. There is the history of the outbreak, the painfully slow gathering of evidence as this beast spread itself around the world, firsthand accounts from those on the frontline, epidemiological considerations, informed speculation about the future, and a detailed explanation of how Covid-19 behaves in the body – all presented in an engrossing fashion. Rereading the essay several times, I was struck by how little there was of Dr Razavi in the essay. No grandstanding here – he shines the spotlight on others. But we do learn that he and his wife (also a doctor) are about to welcome a daughter into this worried world. She will be blessed by having such brave parents. I look forward to reading more of Hessom Razavi’s work. Elisabeth Holdsworth, Morwell, Vic.

Dear Editor, What a sane and moving commentary on the situation engendered by the Covid-19 pandemic. I listen to the ABR Podcast as a US citizen living in Costa Rica, where the response was immediate, very community-minded, and effective. To date there have been only seven deaths. Friends with other conditions that need attention are now crowded out by huge numbers of Covid-19 patients. A small percentage are hospitalised, and a smaller proportion of those are in the ICU. What the disease has also done is reveal the threadbare responses of so many countries, the United States being by far the worst. Those of us in or from the so-called First World have been living in a world where compassion is deemed less and less necessary and where community bonds are fragile. Now we are paying the price. If only we could change our ways, oust the corrupt, ignorant, cruel politicians and work towards a better world. In the case of the United States, that will be an uphill battle. As for Hessom Razavi’s comment about US sanctions: do not expect any humanity on the part of the present US government. Its leader does not lead, and his minions are fanatics with no perceptible mercy. Bronwyn Mills (online comment) Dear Editor, Thanks for an absolutely marvellous article. It is the best thing I’ve read on this topic. Lindy Warrell (online comment) Dear Editor, Why is Dr Razavi so critical of the Iranian government while saying nothing about US sanctions against that country? The Iranian government should certainly be blamed, but we should be even-handed. Dr Razavi also doesn’t commnent on why the situation in the United States, as elsewhere, is much worse than in Iran? Iradj Nabavi (online comment)

Cart before the horse

Dear Editor, I completely agree with Peter Mares’s assessment of Liz Allen’s book The Future of Us: Demography gets a makeover (ABR, May 2020). While this passionately argued and engaging polemic examines an aspect of Australian political and economic life from an interesting angle, Allen does ‘put the cart before the horse’ in attempting to present demographics as a solution to our woes rather than a the merely analytic tool which it is. Wayne Eaton (online comment)

Misogyny

Dear Editor, Wow! Lisa Gorton’s poem ‘’On the Characterisation of Male Poets’Mothers’ is beautifully written, it is also a devastating analysis of the culturally embedded nature of misogyny (ABR, May 2020). How painful to think of all those mothers receiving slap after slap in the face from their anxious, needy, entitled, selfish, infuriatingly talented sons – wanting to support, but flayed for doing so! Tom Gutteridge (online comment) A U S T R A L I A N B O O K R E V I E W J U N E – J U LY 2 0 2 0

Our partners

Australian Book Review is assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council for the Arts, its arts funding and advisory body. ABR is supported by the Victorian Government through Creative Victoria; the Queensland Government through Arts Queensland; the Western Australian Government through the Department of Local Government, Sport and Cultural Industries; 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; the City of Melbourne; and Arnold Bloch Leibler.

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Politics

Failures of judgement

Turnbull remains unsure exactly what role Scott Morrison and his supporters played in the events of that week, but he was relieved that it was Morrison and not Dutton who became Memoirs of an unlikely Liberal leader prime minister. Turnbull’s take on Morrison is the only pubJudith Brett lished close-up view we have so far of the man who is now our leader. Turnbull regards him as a purely political animal, with few policy convictions, and widely distrusted by his colleagues. He also believes that Morrison’s compulsive leaking as treasurer derailed the government’s policy options, such as on the GST and negative gearing. There are detailed chapters on his government’s major domesA Bigger Picture tic and foreign policy achievements. He is especially proud of the by Malcolm Turnbull same-sex marriage legislation’s victory over the Coalition’s right Hardie Grant Books wing. Many of the staunchest advocates of ‘traditional’ marriage, $55 hb, 704 pp he notes, were the keenest practitioners of traditional adultery, alcolm Turnbull looks us straight in the eye from the a comment he repeats when discussing the ban on sexual relations cover of this handsome book, with just a hint of a between ministers and their staff, which he introduced after the smile. He looks calm, healthy, and confident; if there affair between Barnaby Joyce and his erstwhile media adviser are scars from his loss of the prime ministership in August 2018, became public. He had already had to speak to several ministers they don’t show. The book’s voice is the engaging one we heard about this kind of thing, he writes, leaving us to wonder who. Turnbull’s singular failure was not achieving an energy policy when Turnbull challenged Tony Abbott in July 2015 and promised a style of leadership that respected people’s intelligence. He that took seriously Australia’s responsibility to lower its emistakes us from his childhood in a very unhappy marriage, through sions. Turnbull’s support for Kevin Rudd’s Emissions Trading scheme was the catalyst school and university, his asfor his losing the Liberal tonishing successes in media, Party leadership to Tony business, and the law, his entry Abbott in 2009, and he into politics as the member for trod softly on climate Wentworth, and ends with his when he became leader exit from parliament. a second time. After the It is a Sydney story, full of first loss he went into a the Sydney identities Turnblack depression, the first bull worked with as he made time this ebullient, gifted his name and fortune: Kerry man had risked serious Packer, of course, but a host of mental illness. While he others, and the politicians, like considered leaving poliNeville Wran and Bob Carr, tics for good, he stayed, who were his friends. Like the and he believes that he young Paul Keating, Turnbull emerged from the darksat at the feet of Jack Lang. The ness a better, stronger, stories of his successes, friendless self-absorbed perships, and enmities before son. It was this better he entered politics are lively person, determined to conand well told, but they have a sult widely, whom many of rehearsed feel, the jagged edges Scott Morrison with Malcolm Turnbull before the 2016 Budget us found so frustrating. worn away. The book’s energy (Andrew Meares/SMH, from the book under review) Why wouldn’t he ‘do a is in his three years as prime Gough’, crash through minister (2015–18) which or crash in a confrontation with the climate deniers? This book occupy more than half the book. The brutal twists and turns of the week in August 2018 when helps us understand. The prime minister Turnbull is most like is Whitlam, both Peter Dutton challenged Turnbull make for compelling reading, not least because Turnbull is so frank in his character assessments brilliant, ambitious Sydney lawyers with big visions and big egos. of the key players. He was amazed that anyone, including Dut- But where Whitlam was able to ride a hunger for change in ton, could seriously think he was a viable candidate for leader. Australia, the times did not suit Turnbull. He was not a partisan He believed that Greg Hunt was motivated solely by his desire warrior in a parliament that had become polarised, at least since to be foreign minister in Dutton’s cabinet. He was hurt by what John Howard and toxically so under Abbott; and he was not he saw as betrayal by Mathias Cormann, whom he had come to sufficiently tribal for the Liberal right, which believed he was a Labor Trojan horse. trust and had thought was his friend.

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There have always been rumours that Turnbull tried to join the Labor Party. However true these are, he concluded, rightly, that he belonged in the party committed to individualism and free enterprise, not the party of collectivism and the unions. He hoped he would be able to steer the Liberals back to the centre, closer to its liberal foundations, and as prime minister he worked hard to build consensus. He eschewed ‘captain’s calls’ and restored proper processes of cabinet government after the Abbott debacle. He didn’t hate Labor, and he was widely criticised by his side for not running a negative campaign in 2016. Nor did he heed the many warnings from his colleagues about whom not to trust, which was pretty well everyone in the senior team. If he had, he writes, ‘I would not have been able to work with any of them’, nor achieve anything.

Why wouldn’t he ‘do a Gough’, crash through or crash in a confrontation with the climate deniers? This book helps us understand Paul Keating said of Turnbull, ‘brilliant, utterly fearless and no judgement’. This book gives plenty of evidence to confirm all three qualities. The achievements of his early adulthood are astonishing: courting the great and powerful; achieving extraordinary successes, like defeating the British government in the Spycatcher case; and making serious money. Other reviewers have criticised some of these accounts as a little self-serving, and no doubt they are. Most people are unreliable narrators of their own lives. It was the lack of judgement that most interested me when I read the book, and Turnbull’s buoyant, unrealistic optimism. When he first became prime minister, Turnbull kept telling us that this was the most exciting time to be an Australian, to be alive even, full of challenges and opportunities. Really, I thought, compared with the booming Australia of the 1950s, or the first days of the Whitlam government? And what about the sense of dread so many of us feel about the heating planet and the degraded natural world our grandchildren seem set to inherit? As leader, there were two spectacular failures of judgement. The first was the Godwin Grech affair of June 2009 when, as leader of the Opposition, Turnbull accused Prime Minister Rudd of giving special treatment to a mate on the basis of emails that Grech, a public servant, leaked to him. He liked and trusted Grech, but the emails turned out to be fake and he was hugely embarrassed. The second was his decision to take the country to a double dissolution election in July 2016. It was a foolish decision, which I can only put down to an over-optimistic reading of his government’s electoral chances. A normal election could have been held as soon as August, and the trigger was unconvincing – to pass the Building and Construction Industry bills. Turnbull thought the election would deliver a more workable Senate. Instead, the Coalition barely scraped home, and he destroyed a massive amount of political capital. A Bigger Picture gives us clues to the origins of this lack of judgement in its first chapter on Turnbull’s childhood. His parents, Coral and Bruce, were ill-suited, an ambitious, intellectual woman and a good-looking, knockabout guy. They married a year after Malcolm was born, but the marriage didn’t last. When

Malcolm was about eight, his mother left for New Zealand with another man. He was sent to boarding school, where he was desperately unhappy, and Bruce brought him up. The story Bruce told his young son was that Coral had gone to study and that she loved him more than anything else on earth. Maybe she did, but she had left him, and this truth only slowly became apparent to him as ‘her absence crept up on me like a slow, cold chill around the heart’. By sheltering him from the truth, Bruce was protecting his son’s self-esteem, but perhaps he also weakened his reality-testing capacities, leaving him vulnerable to unrealistic optimism and misplaced trust. In one important life matter, though, Turnbull’s judgement was impeccable. He wed his wife, Lucy, forty years ago this March, and together they have built a loving, supportive marriage of equals and raised two children. He told Leigh Sales that he had always had ‘a stronger sense of Lucy and me than I do of me’. Turnbull lost the leadership twice because of his belief that climate change was real. In office he was unable to act effectively on this belief. Seeming to promise so much, he turned out to be a disappointment, as leaders so often do. For all the hopes we project onto them, our political leaders are only people, trying to do their best with the circumstances and the colleagues fate gives them. I finished this book with a great deal of sympathy for Turnbull. He failed to defeat the climate deniers in his party, but at least he tried. g Judith Brett’s most recent book is From Secret Ballot to Democracy Sausage: How Australia got compulsory voting (2019).

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Politics

Democracy’s parasite

of popular sovereignty. The challenge for Keane is shape-shifting despotism. Every despot is different, from foghorn extremes to subtle local variants. Is despotism our future? Keane includes a wide array of countries in the category, from Glyn Davis Turkey and Iran to Brunei and Singapore, with particular attention paid to China and Russia. He argues that despotism is not an old style of government revived but a ‘form of extractive power with no historical precedent’. There is no single definition offered for this protean concept. Instead, Keane builds, chapter by chapter, a set of despotism’s The New Despotism characteristics, exploring each angle in detail, complete with local by John Keane terms and topical jokes to show how general trends play out in specific regimes. Harvard University Press (Footprint) Despotism, argues Keane, makes a virtue of avoiding the $69.99 hb, 320 pp divisions and conflict of democracy. Despots emphasise national ohn Keane is Australia’s leading scholar of democracy, with character, the unity possible under a single ruler. They offer ultrawork that demonstrates an impressive command of global modern states, keen to be seen as more efficient than democracies, sources. Keane’s most widely cited book, The Life and Death more responsive to popular opinion. Rulers present themselves of Democracy (2009), included new research on the origins as voices of the people, ruling in their name. of public assemblies in India many centuries before the familBehind this façade is the apparatus of surveillance, tight control iar democracy of Greek city-states. Keane located the origins of of social media, and the ability to make critics disappear. Despots democracy in non-European traditions, in part by tracing the use public-opinion surveys to understand popular moods, and tame linguistic origins of the concept. media to lead public discussion. Violence is always the implicit threat, but the aim is stability. What despots want, above all, is voluntary servitude. This many achieve, ruling through seduction rather than terror. Across the globe, Keane reports the willingness of citizens to surrender political involvement for a quiet life. A clever despot ‘lures subjects into subjection’ so eventually ‘the slave licenses the master’. In particular, argues Keane, the middle class proves fickle about demo-cratic principles. It can be bought with good services, cash payments, and being left alone. Older political theory expected a prosperous middle class to demand representation. Yet any assumed link between a bourgeoisie, capitalism, and democracy is daily disproved around the world. Early in The New Despotism, Keane suggests that he might follow the example of Machiavelli’s The Prince and describe the inner dynamics of power outside democracy. This proves hard to deliver, since despotic regimes are rarely open or accessible to independPresident Donald Trump shakes hands with Chairman of the Workers’ Party of Korea ent research. So there is less Machiavelli than Kim Jong Un in 2019 when the two leaders met at the Korean Demilitarized Zone. Montesquieu or Tocqueville, intelligent observers (Official White House Photo by Shealah Craighead via Wikimedia Commons) trying to make sense of the gap between form This engagement with language and evidence is deployed and substance in every despotic state. once more in The New Despotism, an ambitious study of the Despots embrace many of the outward symbols of accountnon-democratic world. Despotism as a term fell out of use in the able and legitimate democracy. They use elections to test the twentieth century, replaced by concern about totalitarian states. public mood and identify potential opponents. Such contests are Keane seeks to revitalise the concept, not as a mirror image of rarely free or fair. Despots proclaim the rule of law, yet everyone democracy but, worryingly, as something that can grow out of understands that courts can be manipulated by corruption or by democracy. As his many examples show, this century has seen the state using the law to close down its enemies. Despots promote the closing down of accountability and free elections until states social media to ensure lively public discussions yet just out of sight retain the formal institutions of democracy but not the reality wait the censors, those cyber units that influence opinion, release

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Politics disinformation, discredit other voices, and silence unwanted conversations. There are armies of Winston Smiths from 1984, trained to create a simulacrum of free speech. Hence the claim of novelty. These new despots are not dinosaur authoritarian regimes, the lumbering dictatorships of North Korea or Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe. They are instead flexible regimes led by ‘learning despots’, determined to develop long-term regimes, using ‘whip-smart ruling methods’. Despots point to failed democratic states to say there is no obvious alternative. Should neighbouring democracies prove robust, they can be disrupted by the same cyber units developed for domestic control. The New Despotism is important because it brings an acute understanding of democracy to focus on its potential fate. The first chapter in particular is a tour de force about the overly optimistic reading of the future after 1989, when democracy briefly became the dominant form of government around the world, only to slide away in many states.

Violence is always the implicit threat, but the aim is stability. What despots want, above all, is voluntary servitude Keane argues that this was not just an unsuccessful transition to democracy. It was instead a reaction to the perceived failure of democracy, the inefficiencies associated with party competition, the cynicism of people who see around them high levels of inequality, poor leadership, the hollowing of social life, dark money in elections, cuts to public services and repressive responses to terrorism. At some point, the promise of strong government and order through despotism becomes attractive. And so a book on despotism completes its circuit, starting and finishing with democracy. If nations committed to popular rule do not address internal deficiencies, they risk populism and illiberal movements. Despotism is not the opposite of democracy, but a parasite that resides within, waiting for its opportunity. Will Keane succeed in reviving the concept of despotism? Though boundaries blur and a single definition remains elusive, he makes a strong case in The New Despotism for the urgent need to understand this global trend. Keane offers not just a lively argument with numerous examples, and a rich assembly of sources through detailed endnotes, but also a writing style that commands attention. Democracy faces ‘desolation row’ but is marked by ‘braided tempos and multiple rhythms’. The patron–client relations that run through despotic societies mean that ‘every soul is implicated in nested circles of soiled solidarity’. The analysis embraces a poetics of power, offering cumulatively a description as dark as Machiavelli on principalities. Here is no historical portrait but our times made stark. Democracy may once again become rare in a world dominated by despotic empires with no commitment to the rule of law. As John Keane, scholar of democracy, asks in his final sentence: is despotism our future? It is a disturbing but pressing question from a major new study. g Glyn Davis is CEO of the Paul Ramsay Foundation and Distinguished Professor of Political Science at the Australian National University.

Myths and realities

Two Labor prime ministers from gold towns Frank Bongiorno

Becoming John Curtin and James Scullin: The making of the modern Labor Party by Liam Byrne

Melbourne University Press $34.99 pb, 194 pp

ohn Curtin and James Scullin occupy very different places in whatever collective memory Australians have of their prime ministers. On the occasions that rankings of prime ministers have been published, Curtin invariably appears at or near the top. When researchers at Monash University in 2010 produced such a ranking based on a survey of historians and political scientists, Curtin led the pack, with Scullin rated above only Joseph Cook, Arthur Fadden, and Billy McMahon. Admittedly, this ranking was produced before anyone had ever thought of awarding an Australian knighthood to Prince Philip, but the point is clear enough: Curtin rates and Scullin does not. Liam Byrne’s pairing of the two men in this book is therefore in some ways a peculiar one. Scullin and Curtin are not usually considered in the same frame. The touching Peter Corlett statue in Canberra is of Curtin and Ben Chifley, a truly famous wartime partnership, rivalled in Australian politics only by the more fractious one of Bob Hawke and Paul Keating four decades later. But Byrne reminds us that in Parliament House during the war, Scullin occupied the office between those of Curtin and Chifley. Byrne’s pairing of Scullin and Curtin draws attention to the entangled lives of these men in the early Australian Labor Party. Both were products of Irish Catholic working-class families from provincial Victoria. More specifically, each came from the Ballarat district, Scullin from Trawalla, Curtin from Creswick. That in itself tells the reader something important. In a highly urbanised country, the country town has been a nursery of political and cultural vitality, and Victorian gold towns especially so. But gold towns were also places to leave. Both men would head for Melbourne, Scullin some way behind Curtin. Byrne’s subtitle is The making of the modern Labor Party, yet this is something of a misnomer. It is a peculiarly Victorian political milieu that he evokes, and he does that skilfully enough. But Byrne does have a point. While the Labor Party in Victoria was something of a Cinderella among Labor branches until the 1980s, it has exercised a remarkable influence well beyond its borders. It is not just that it generated these two Labor prime ministers. It also produced New Zealand’s first, in Michael Savage in 1935, while the fate of the Victorian branch of the party would be decisive in shaping Labor’s national fortunes – mainly for the worse – in the seemingly interminable Menzies era. For Byrne, Scullin was a ‘moderate’ and Curtin a ‘socialist’. He treats these as two quite distinct traditions, even allowing A U S T R A L I A N B O O K R E V I E W J U N E – J U LY 2 0 2 0

that they shared some common ground. I am less certain how meaningful this distinction is for the Victorian labour movement of the early twentieth century. It is true that Curtin’s rhetoric was more aggressive, and he was more willing, as a young man, to contemplate the use of the general strike for political purposes, such as in stopping the outbreak of war. His understanding of the

professional benefits and personal associations may well tell us more about the reasons for Scullin’s close relationship with the AWU than any particular ideological commitment to moderation. It was the AWU that paid Scullin as a country organiser, and the AWU that came to the rescue with the editorship of a labour daily in Ballarat when Scullin lost his seat at the 1913 election. What is most striking is not the cigarette paper’s difference between the ideologies of two men who regarded themselves as socialists, but the ideas and aspirations they had in common. Both were tribally Labor. Both saw parliament, and not the union movement, as the main pathway to the realisation of their ideals. Both fully understood that Rome wasn’t built in a day, even if Curtin was more inclined to put aside that insight in the interests of his next speech or newspaper article.

At Parliament House during the war, Scullin occupied the office between those of Curtin and Chifley

Prime Minister James Scullin in Canberra, 1931 (National Library of Australia, nla.obj-161732766)

causes of such conflict bears more than a passing resemblance to the ideas of Vladimir Lenin, not least, as Byrne shows, because it had similar roots in the radical liberal ideas of British author J.A. Hobson. But by the end of World War I, Scullin’s understanding was hardly very different from Curtin’s. Where Curtin cut his political teeth in the Victorian Socialist Party under the mentorship of British socialist Tom Mann and English migrant Frank Anstey, Scullin was closely associated with the powerful Australian Workers’ Union, the successor to the old shearers’ union, a bastion of political caution and pragmatic wheeling and dealing. Byrne does show that Scullin shared some of that organisation’s preoccupation with causes such as land reform. But the AWU was also Scullin’s patron. He first entered the federal parliament as the representative of a rural electorate, and two of his sisters were married to AWU officials. These 12 A U S T R A L I A N B O O K R E V I E W J U N E – J U LY 2 0 2 0

Both have been recalled as tragic figures. High office helped ruin the health of each, even if Scullin came to be treated as a failure for his Depression-era prime ministership (1929–32) and Curtin as a hero for inspiring wartime leadership (1941–45). It may well be time to alter this balance. Scullin’s task in the Depression was impossible in a way that Curtin’s job of wartime leadership was not. The economic policy on which Scullin’s government eventually settled in 1931, while not quite what it wanted, rightly received the praise of John Maynard Keynes. A conservative government might not have been able to achieve that without considerable civil disobedience. Meanwhile, the Curtin myth remains so potent and alluring that one sometimes has the suspicion of being taken for a ride. How much was it the strain of war, and how much was it too many cigarettes, too much stodgy food, too much grog, and the temperament of a deep worrier that drove him to an early grave? Byrne is a lively writer. If Australian labour history has on occasion been a bit dour, it’s not a fault we find here. Of an early communist speaking at a union conference in 1921, he writes: ‘[ Jock] Garden replied that he could not outline how to overthrow the system in the five minutes allotted. The conference, therefore, politely granted him an extension to ten.’ Socialism, as Byrne points out, is once again on the political agenda in a way that would have seemed inconceivable in the aftermath of 1989. That has happened for similar reasons to the upsurge of the early decades of the twentieth century: it makes increasing sense as a lens through which to view both the world as it is and the world as it might be. Scullin and Curtin pursued socialism through the Labor Party. Byrne, while critical of the present Labor Party’s lack of vision, is more optimistic than me about its capacity to respond to the challenges and opportunities of our times. g Frank Bongiorno is Professor of History at the Australian National University. His first book was The People’s Party: Victorian Labor and the radical tradition 1875–1914. He lives in Scullin in the Australian Capital Territory.

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Politics

The Prahran grocer

An influential if obscure Victorian leader Benjamin T. Jones

Democratic Adventurer: Graham Berry and the making of Australian politics by Sean Scalmer

Monash University Publishing $39.95 hb, 349 pp

ustralians have a healthy appetite for political memoirs and biographies at a federal level. It is not only the scandal-ridden set of recent prime ministers with juicy details of political assassinations that sparks interest. The popularity of David Headon’s First Eight Project has demonstrated that the lives of Australia’s first national leaders are still a source of deep fascination. Even Earle Page, who only held the top job for nineteen days, is being rediscovered, thanks to Stephen Wilks’s 2017 PhD thesis from ANU. That Barnaby Joyce, one of Page’s distant successors as party leader,could secure a book contract speaks more to popular interest in federal leaders than to the quality of his prose. The ongoing public fascination with federal actors on the political stage sits in stark contrast to the relative indifference to their colonial predecessors. This is surprising, as the scandals and drama that filled the columns of colonial newspapers were every bit as sensational as the revelations that excite our modern Twitterati. The subject of Sean Scalmer’s rich biography is a case in point. The career of Graham Berry (1822–1904) was as exciting as they come. It is a tale replete with sex scandals, class antagonism, democratic struggle, constitutional crisis, and threats of revolution. And yet, despite being a three-time Victorian premier (1875, 1877–79, 1880–81) and a leading colonial politician for four decades, at his death the newspapers commented on the underwhelming crowd and felt obliged to remind readers whom they were mourning. Much could be written on why Australians neglect their colonial past. In the early twentieth century, it was perhaps the ongoing embarrassment of the ‘convict stain’ that was better left in the past. In the early twenty-first century, it is often the uncomfortable truth of Indigenous dispossession that is avoided. The result has been that 1901 forms a precise and tenacious line of forgetting. The career of Alfred Deakin falls ever so slightly on the ‘right’ side of this line. Despite being the nation’s second prime minister, he was the first of Headon’s First Eight to be honoured when the project launched in 2018. The year before, he was the subject of Judith Brett’s award-winning biography. All the more remarkable then that Berry, one of Deakin’s most important political mentors, has received little scholarly treatment since Geoffrey Bartlett’s PhD thesis in 1964 (also from ANU). Scalmer has rescued not only the man but his key ideas and intellectual legacy. The protectionist movement that profoundly shaped the early 14 A U S T R A L I A N B O O K R E V I E W J U N E – J U LY 2 0 2 0

Commonwealth was not an invention of Deakin and Barton, nor even of the influential proprietor of The Age, David Syme. If it has a single intellectual progenitor, it is probably Berry, though Scalmer rightly notes that these ideas were circulating even before his conversion. The Eureka Stockade of 1854 is often seen as a novelty of sorts in Australian history. Like Canada’s Rebellions of 1837–38, it can too easily be dismissed as an uncharacteristic tantrum from an otherwise well-behaved child of the British Empire. But the democratic convictions that led to that fatal shootout, and the popular demand that (white) Victorian men were entitled to a gun, a vote, and land, was not extinguished with the granting of responsible government. Berry, who was one of the jurors to acquit the Eureka rebels in a highly popular miscarriage of justice, was a key figure in moving the democratic campaign from violent to intellectual combat. The battle lines would no longer be drawn at makeshift forts on the goldfields but inside that eminently British institution, the Victorian parliament.

Berry, one of Deakin’s most important political mentors, has received little scholarly treatment Scalmer skilfully unpacks the way Berry responded to early electoral defeats and took charge of his political narrative. When his blueblood opponents used his supposedly Dickensian origins as a slur, he returned fire to expose their snobbery. The ‘Prahran grocer’ would use – indeed exaggerate – his humble beginnings to frame himself as a genuine tribune of the people. Trained initially as a London draper and running a successful family business, he was working class but no Oliver Twist when he set sail for Melbourne. At the heart of this book is the struggle between the popular lower house and the conservative upper house. It was an intellectual contest for the ‘true’ meaning of the unwritten constitution seen, in many variations, around the British Empire. After little Nova Scotia distinguished itself as the first British colony to receive responsible government in 1848, the limits of democracy were negotiated all over the British world. One of Scalmer’s real achievements in this book is demonstrating the ferocity of the democratic struggle in Victoria and the way Berry utilised the first organised political party to push the pendulum in the people’s favour. This is no hagiography. Scalmer is quick to point out just how narrow Berry’s conception of ‘the people’ was. First Nations Peoples and the Chinese were certainly not part of his democratic adventure. While open to expanding the Victorian polis to women, this was not high on his political agenda either. Scalmer maintains a disciplined focus on Berry’s political life and presents this engrossing story in fewer than 300 pages, excluding notes. He resists the urge to draw on the rich reservoir of personal correspondences in the Berry Papers and to paint a broader picture of colonial society, a tendency that has resulted in a some Brobdingnagian colonial biographies (Don Baker’s colossal treatise on John Dunmore Lang comes to mind). Scalmer states

plainly that the menu card Berry perused in the members’ dining room is of no interest to him. For this reason, the book maintains a sharpness throughout, and Berry’s heavy influence on Victorian and Australian democracy becomes all the more clear. Democratic Adventurer is a valuable contribution to our knowledge of Berry and deftly demonstrates how the democratic battles of a nineteenth-century colony shaped a twentieth-century nation. There are moments of rhetorical excess. Was Berry the most gifted and controversial colonial politician, as the author claims? In Victoria perhaps. Charles ‘Slippery Charlie’ Cowper, in New South Wales, was just as skilful politically and just as effective in establishing democratic norms. Lang, the irascible preacher, politician, republican, and occasional jailbird, was just as radical

and controversial. If Scalmer’s admiration for his subject occasionally shines through, it is not to the detriment of this excellent book. This is a historian at the top of his game. Democratic Adventurer will be required reading for those who study colonial Australia, but its clear focus, accessible style, and the excitement of the tale will attract a popular audience also. g Benjamin T. Jones is a lecturer in history at Central Queensland University and a Foundation Fellow of the Australian Studies Institute. His most recent books are This Time: Australia’s republican past and future (Redback, 2018) and History in a Post-Truth World: Theory and praxis (Routledge, 2020). ❖

Politics

‘The laws are not silent’

How war can distort ideas of right and wrong Kieran Pender

Law in War: Freedom and restriction in Australia during the Great War by Catherine Bond

NewSouth $34.99 pb, 246 pp

s with many authors, Covid-19 forced Catherine Bond to cancel the launch event for her new book. But unlike most authors’ work, the contemporary relevance of Bond’s latest book has been considerably heightened by the ongoing pandemic. Indeed, in the midst of this crisis it is hard to imagine a historical text timelier than Law in War: Freedom and restriction in Australia during the Great War. A century later, lessons from that era are still instructive today. Covid-19 has had a dramatic impact on people’s lives. At the time of writing, Australians cannot leave their homes except in narrowly defined circumstances. Domestic and international borders have been sealed. The government is effectively underwriting the economy. In a society governed by law, these changes have been brought about by hastily drafted legislation and regulation. The extent of the power now lawfully wielded by Australia’s federal and state executives is unparalleled in living memory. Yet there is some precedent. On two other occasions in this federation’s 120-year history, external events – world wars – have precipitated fundamental changes to the compact between citizen and state. As Bond writes in Law in War, a lively study of legal developments on the home front between 1914 and 1918, World War I saw a ‘revolution of a government against its people, motivated by a higher cause: victory in war’. A century later, Bond’s analysis of the tools of that revolution is insightful as our laws are again

co-opted, this time to defeat Covid-19. Prior to Law in War, this subject was largely overlooked. Historian Charles Bean, commissioned in the 1920s to oversee the Official History of Australia in the War, had at first agreed to include a substantial section on domestic legal manoeuvrings. At the urging of federal solicitor-general Sir Robert Garran, Bean backflipped, noting that it was ‘doubtful if such a chapter is called for’. Garran, the man who wrote most of Australia’s wartime laws, thereby effectively ensured that there would be no sustained reflection on their impact. By providing the first ‘holistic examination of Australia’s First World War legal regime’, Bond aims to fill that ‘gap’. She does so thematically across eight chapters, each focused on one or a handful of characters. This methodology was deliberate: ‘All too often,’ the academic writes, ‘I have found law to be divorced from people.’ Bond argues that this is a collective failing of the academy: ‘law is all about people. Individuals write the law. Individuals interpret the law. Individuals are held accountable by the law.’ She thus recounts the tales of an eclectic range of individuals – from Prime Minister Billy Hughes to suffragette Adela Pankhurst, from drug-makers George Nicholas and Harry Woolf Shmith to Indigenous serviceman Douglas Grant – to tell a broader story.

The extent of the power now lawfully wielded by Australia’s federal and state executives is unparalleled in living memory Bond ranges widely across different areas of law. She considers a statute that cancelled the intellectual property rights of German companies (spurring a local pharmaceutical industry), and another that limited the ability of ‘enemy subject’ employees to contest their termination, empowering widespread employment discrimination. Bond notes that a federal police force was created overnight by regulation after Queensland cops refused to arrest protesters who had egged Hughes. She also discusses the discriminatory legal barriers to Australians of non-European complexion enlisting, which prevented many Indigenous and Asian Australians from serving on the frontline. A U S T R A L I A N B O O K R E V I E W J U N E – J U LY 2 0 2 0

Bond is at her best when discussing the draconian limitations on civil and personal liberties enacted during World War I. The story of Franz Wallach is harrowing: a Frankfurt-born merchant, Wallach had lived in Australia for more than two decades by 1914, and had renounced his German citizenship. Despite no evidence of disloyalty, Prime Minister Hughes’s personal dislike of Wallach and his metal-trading company saw the trader interned for four years. Wallach successfully contested his internment in the Victorian Supreme Court, but the federal government promptly issued a revised regulation. Wallach was rearrested before he could depart the courthouse. As one Labor MP quipped during legislative debate over detention powers, ‘the war seems already to have distorted our ideas of right and wrong’. The government’s approach to political dissent had a similarly dictatorial hue. Bond outlines the various legal tussles of activist Pankhurst and her peers, which ultimately concluded unsuccessfully in the High Court. Despite a powerful dissent from Justice Henry Higgins – ‘constitutional limitations are not suspended; we have to decide in accordance with the Constitution’ – a majority upheld the validity of Pankhurst’s conviction for protesting. Bond, though not blind to the unusual imperatives of war, suggests that the judicial branch failed to maintain adequate scrutiny of the executive. She quotes Justice Edmund Barton in another case: ‘We have nothing to say as to the wisdom or otherwise of any regulation: that is a matter for the Legislature.’ This approach, says Bond, is ‘disappointing’. With limited legislative scrutiny and an executive making law by regulation, ‘the courts were one of the few avenues available to the Australian people for a rigorous

review of these wartime laws’. The High Court declined that role. Law in War is written with scholarly rigour, complete with abundant primary and secondary sources, while remaining accessible for a generalist audience; this is no law textbook. Bond crisply explains legal concepts and is adroit at providing necessary context along the way (‘it is helpful to pause here to note’), rather than all at once. Despite the book’s often technical subject matter, she writes with flair and wit: ‘Resources and reputation enabled Franz Wallach to fight the law. Of course, the law won.’ Any possible critiques are minor: Bond is overly fond of internal cross-references (‘as noted earlier’), and chunky legislative extracts sometimes feel unnecessary. A lengthier book (Law in War is barely 200 pages long) might have considered the wartime legal experience elsewhere – was Australia typical or exceptional? But these shortcomings hardly detract. Bond’s latest book is engaging, insightful, and important. Above all, Law in War offers a timely reminder that in situations of great upheaval, the law is not always a reliable guarantor of justice. During World War I, Australia’s laws served as tools of ‘discrimination, oppression, censorship, and deprivation of property, liberty and basic human rights’. Too often, lawyers and the judiciary were complicit. With Australians facing another era-defining challenge, we should learn from our mistakes. Law in War provides a helpful guide. As a British jurist once remarked, ‘amidst the clash of arms’, or, perhaps, personal protective equipment, ‘the laws are not silent’. g Kieran Pender is an Australian writer and lawyer.

Dawn Solo

First light beside the Murray in Mildura, Which like a drift of mist pervades The eucalypt arcades, A pale caesura Dividing night and day. Two, three clear notes To usher in the dawn are heard From a pied butcherbird, A phrase that floats So slowly through the silence-thickened air, Those notes, like globules labouring Through honey, almost cling And linger there. Or is it that the notes themselves prolong The time time takes, to make it stand, Morning both summoned and Called back by song.

Stephen Edgar Stephen Edgar’s new and selected poems, The Strangest Place, is due out later this year from Black Pepper. 16 A U S T R A L I A N B O O K R E V I E W J U N E – J U LY 2 0 2 0

Literary Studies

Unsolicited smut

A nation of prudes and wowsers James Ley

The Trials of Portnoy: How Penguin brought down Australia’s censorship system by Patrick Mullins

Scribe $35 pb, 329 pp

kay, I’ll tell you what’s wrong with this country. For a start, we have this profoundly stupid and deeply irritating myth that we’re all irreverent freedom-loving larrikins and easygoing egalitarians, when it is painfully obvious that we have long been a nation of prudes and wowsers, that our collective psyche has been warped by what Patrick Mullins describes, with his characteristic lucidity, as ‘a fear of contaminating international influences’, and that we are not just an insular, conservative, and deeply conformist society, but for some unaccountable reason we take pride in our ignorance and parochialism. And let’s not neglect the fact that we are cringingly deferential and enamoured of hierarchy. Oh yes, it’s all master– slave dialectics and daddy issues around here. Why the hell else would we keep electing entitled, smirking, condescending autocrats? In fact, there are few things your average patriotic Australian likes better than the authoritative clamour of some deadeyed, bull-necked crypto-fascist bashing on the bathroom door and demanding to know what we’re reading in there. Which, for most of the twentieth century, was not much. We banned Balzac, for fuck’s sake. We banned Lawrence and Huxley and Nabokov. We banned Hemingway, Baldwin, Vidal, Salinger, Donleavy, Burroughs, Miller, and McCarthy. We banned Ulysses, then unbanned it, then realised our mistake and banned it again. We prosecuted Max Harris for publishing a poet who didn’t even exist. For a while there, the list of banned books was banned. But then what happens if I read one of them by accident, Dr Spielvogel? Mullins has all the receipts. For years it was ‘assumed incontrovertibly by common law that obscene writings do deprave and corrupt morals, by causing dirty-mindedness, by creating or pandering to a taste for the obscene’. Who stands a chance against such impeccable circular reasoning? No wonder the country is a neurotic mess. No wonder we can’t even get philistinism right. When the attitude of our guardians of public morality for most of the last century was ‘I have no idea what this is or what it might mean, and I have no intention of finding out, but I don’t like it’, declaring ‘I know what I like’ represented a significant advance. Saying ‘I know it when I see it’ qualified you as an intellectual. Of course, the whole wacky censorship regime was justified on the grounds that it was upholding ‘community standards’, disregarding the obvious point that if the community had any standards there would be no need to uphold them. What standards? Artie Fadden’s trade minister, Eric Harrison, thought he knew

what they were, but only because he copied out all the rude bits of Ulysses and mailed them to some church groups. Apparently, they weren’t impressed. He should have referred himself to the vice squad – I mean, what kind of creep sends unsolicited smut to little old ladies? This is all in Mullins’s book, if you’re interested, which you should be, because believe me the same clueless creeps are still in charge. Mullins wrote a biography of Billy McMahon, so he understands better than most that the dominant genre of Australian political life is farce. The Trials of Portnoy is about a rare instance of sanity prevailing, though of course a regime of unrelieved idiocy doesn’t just collapse of its own accord. It needs to be brought down. A few cheeky student publications were never going to achieve anything. No, it took a novel of perverted genius, a novel backed by a major publisher, a novel about a compulsive onanist that’s so funny that anything it touches instantly becomes ridiculous. Fight farce with farce was the basic idea. And hoo-boy did it work. It was like that Monty Python sketch about a joke that’s so funny it kills people. The book immediately sells 100,000 copies and they’re debating whether or not it meets ‘community standards’. A communist bookstore over in Western Australia sold so many copies they were able to renovate with the profits! It’s brilliant when you think about it. I don’t know, Dr Spielvogel. For some reason, I find debates about ‘literary merit’ incredibly funny. And I find the thought of lawyers debating literary merit before bewigged judges even funnier. Imagine writing a book that’s basically an extended psychiatrist-couch gag about a guy who can’t Philip Roth, 1968 stop pulling his putz (Photo by Bob Peterson/The LIFE Images and it leads to a string Collection via Getty Images/Getty Images) of court cases trying to establish if it’s ‘obscene’. If! Imagine them all in their robes, scratching their beards, trying to work out if a novel about a neurotic jerkoff has ‘depraving’ effect. Well, they all read it. They should know! Picture a procession of the nation’s finest literary minds summoned as expert witnesses. Such experts! James McAuley, Vincent Buckley, Patrick White, Fay Zwicky, Dorothy Hewett – all taking the stand to attest to the literary merits of a novel about a guy who whacks off into his sister’s brassiere. But what about the bit where he sticks his schlong in the raw liver? Oh, that bit’s especially meritorious, m’lud. Some academic called the book enriching. I mean, this is Alexander Portnoy we’re talking about here. If he’s enriching, where’s a guy supposed to go for a little depravity? A qualified psychologist testified that the novel had ‘the truth of a tone poem or landscape’. When that happens, you know you’ve won. It’s a funny thing, Dr Spielvogel, I can’t quite explain it, but reading Mullins’s book actually made me feel a little better. g James Ley is a Melbourne essayist and literary critic. A U S T R A L I A N B O O K R E V I E W J U N E – J U LY 2 0 2 0

Literary Studies

‘The thing I mostly am’ The many treks of Robyn Davidson Sophie Cunningham

On Robyn Davidson: Writers on Writers by Richard Cooke

Black Inc. $17.99 hb, 96 pp

he women that Robyn Davidson had a powerful effect on, Richard Cooke tells us, include author Anna Krien, adventurer Esther Nunn, and his wife. ‘I watched as the power of this book and its author, their energy and weight, worked an entrainment across cultures and generations,’ writes Cooke. In some ways his essay charts his struggle with that power. How not to fall into the trap that others who have tackled Davidson have fallen into? ‘I lagged decades of writers and pilgrims, interlopers and fans. Reading interviews to try to chicane through the questions already asked was pointless. They most often sought answers about the same thing – her first book, now published forty years ago.’ That book, of course, was Tracks. Everyone wanted a piece of Davidson before, during, and after its publication, but the more she insisted on her desire to be alone the more people wanted to get close to her. There was a deep, slightly pervy fascination with a twenty-six-year-old woman undergoing a 2,500-kilometre journey from Alice Springs to the coast of Western Australia, with three camels and a dog, in the late 1970s. The people who made versions of that journey not irregularly, Indigenous Australians, were treated with contempt. A white bloke would not have garnered the same attention. In Tracks, Davidson talks at length about the racism and sexism that fuelled social relations in central Australia, and Cooke draws on this to make interesting observations on the ways in which Davidson’s book changed the way we understood our First Peoples and their lands (though even as recently as 1996 the difference between Davidson’s first book, Tracks, and her second, Nomads, was reviewed thus by Rosalind Sharpe in the Independent: ‘Australia, with its empty, hygienic spaces, sprinkled with people who understand English, was unimaginably different from India.’) Cooke also does a good job of conveying Davidson’s extraordinary charisma – informed, to be sure, by a real intelligence, grit, determination, and all-consuming rage – a charisma that catapulted her across a continent, into the public’s consciousness. I appreciated his insight into one of the sources of that charisma: the desert itself. ‘By venturing into the desert, Robyn Davidson was also entering a literary landscape.’ As I read Cooke on Davidson, however, I was aware of a distance between the critic and his subject, one that was not in the other Writers On Writers books I have read. In On Patrick White, Christos Tsiolkas discusses the impact of Manoly Lascaris, 18 A U S T R A L I A N B O O K R E V I E W J U N E – J U LY 2 0 2 0

Greece, and spirituality on White’s work in ways that convey intense excitement. In On Kate Jennings, Erik Jensen takes us behind the scenes of a life to create a portrait that changed how I read Jenning’s work. In On Shirley Hazard, Michelle de Kretser homes in on Hazard’s craft and art. These books are enlivened, even electrified, by the unexpectedness of these writers’ responses. That passion is missing in On Robyn Davidson. Perhaps that is a good thing. Other writing on Davidson has been heavy on the passion and light on perspective and analysis.

There was a slightly pervy fascination with a twenty-six-year-old woman undergoing a 2,500-kilometre journey Cooke, an intelligent and forceful writer, lays out the problem he’s up against. Not only is Davidson too much written about: she does not, in fact, consider herself a writer. We should start with something she is not: Robyn Davidson does not like to call herself a writer, or at least not a Writer.This was self-deprecation, I thought at first, but her hesitancy was so pronounced and recurrent when we spoke that it had to be something more. A writer is ‘the thing that I mostly am’, she would admit, while a ‘real writer’ is someone ‘who knows that’s what they want to do’ ... A writer was someone else, in other words. After forty years and five books – one of which has sold more than a million copies – Davidson is still not sure that writing is what she is good at, or what she wants to do.

I would have loved to see Cooke interrogate Davidson’s self-representation more, see him pick the fight Davidson is always spoiling for. If not a writer, what is she? Is Davidson’s assertion that a real writer is someone who knows what they want to do in any way a meaningful one? Not by my reckoning. Cooke does, however, acknowledge that Davidson equates the written word with constraint and with loss of freedom. He nudges us towards what is interesting about Davidson’s position: the way she interrogates the meaning, or erasure of meaning, in the creation of narrative. In Tracks she writes, ‘I did not perceive at the time that I was allowing myself to get more involved with writing about the trip than the trip itself. It did not dawn on me that already I was beginning to see it as a story for other people, with a beginning and an ending.’ This is similar to her rage about being looked at. Feeling as if some essential part of herself is being stolen, commodified, she is angry – with herself as much as anyone – for allowing this to happen. Is Davidson contrary just for the sake of it, or is her position a more profound interrogation of narrative and the self ? Or both? Cooke at times seems defeated by Davidson’s refusal not just of easy answers but of any answers at all. By the end of the book, he decides to take her at her word. She may never finish her final trek – the hard slog of writing her memoir, a project that has hung over her for twenty-five years – and if she does finish it, it might take many years yet. g Sophie Cunningham’s most recent book is City of Trees: Essays on life, death and the need for a forest (2019).

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Essay

Contested breath

The ethics of assembly in an age of absurdity

by Sarah Walker

here’s a script for everything. Someone, voice wavering, says, ‘She’s dead’, and you say, ‘What?’ They say it again, and you say, ‘Oh, my god.’ You ask the usual questions, and then hang up and everything is incredibly quiet. You tell your boyfriend, and you both walk around the house trying to pack useful things: a sleeve of Valium, warm socks. You call your brother in London. He texts to say it’s five am there, can it wait? You call back. Before he even answers the phone, he knows. Over the Westgate Bridge, the light sits flat and brooding over the city. Mike, my boyfriend, drives. We stop at an Exeloo public toilet five minutes from her house, because neither of us wants to interrupt a police conversation by needing to pee. The stainless-steel cubicles reek of piss. Mine is out of toilet paper. I wonder if someone heard the latest news and sat here pressing the button that dispenses six sheets at a time, until they had enough to assuage their fear of shortages. Overhead, the toilet plays a piano cover of ‘What the World Needs Now is Love, Sweet Love’. I round the corner to find her draped in a white blanket, a mess of triangles. She looks like a house packed up for a season, furniture shrouded in sheets, waiting. I reach for what I think is an elbow and feel fingers instead. The world whitens, the exposure ratcheting up. I try to pull up the blanket to reveal her face. I get as far as her hair, the soft grey of it blending perfectly with the shag carpet. The fact of that hair, the corporeality of it, shatters me. I have to ask the young cop, eight months on the job, to do it for me. She pulls the blanket back like a game-show prize. And there is my mum. In Australia, on average one person dies every three minutes and eleven seconds. That’s around 452 per day. Hundreds of foreheads taking on the great, hard cold of death, where the skin 20 A U S T R A L I A N B O O K R E V I E W J U N E – J U LY 2 0 2 0

seems absurdly thin over the smooth arc of the skull. Sometimes, in dreams, I try to speak but can’t make myself understood. The words turn to nonsense in my mouth. The people listening frown politely. In the kitchen, I am asking the senior officer how to organise a cremation without using a funeral home. He is talking about the funeral he organised for his wife, at a restaurant. ‘But how do I get her to the cremation? Who do I call?’ He chuckles about the decorations they chose. I feel as though I’m speaking air, the words evaporating like steam. I had called her twice as she lay stiffening on the lounge-room floor. She didn’t pick up. I had been annoyed. In hindsight she had a very good excuse. Seventy per cent of Australians say they would prefer to die at home. This is not the scenario people generally imagine. After the initial terror, the conversation becomes horribly normal. We are just four people, drinking instant coffee in a suburban kitchen. The body on the carpet is some surreal glitch in the image. It is dense, somehow. It draws the eye. ‘How has it been for you guys, with the coronavirus?’ we ask. ‘Hasn’t affected us at all,’ they say. A pause. The older cop clears his throat. ‘Is there another room we could move to? It’s getting a bit smelly in here.’ She had been a nurse. When we were children, she refused to keep us home from school when we were ill. She was unflappable in the face of sickness. Her last job was at an IVF hospital. She would show me letters from women thanking her for her kindness, sending photos of the babies that cost so much money and fortitude. The staff on the ward seemed to get pregnant at an alarming rate. The patients would lie in recovery after endless rounds of useless, invasive procedures that failed to give them a child, and would stare at the swelling stomachs under the nurses’ scrubs with a desperate, naked longing.

The phone rings and rings. People ask, ‘What happened?’‘I don’t At the funeral home, we are greeted by a woman whose hair is know,’ I tell them. Or they say, ‘Oh my god’, and I say, ‘I know, carved into a perfect oval around her face. She holds out her hands. I know.’ ‘We probably shouldn’t,’ we say. ‘I don’t care,’ she replies, and A third of Australian funeral homes are run by a corpora- presses her palms to ours. When we leave, we rub sanitiser into tion that buys up family-run businesses, inflating prices and our fingers and feel the air move cold over them until the alcohol pushing one-size-fits-all funeral plans. The process is known evaporates. as the McDonaldisation of funerals. In the dark, the floors still I refresh the ABC, the Guardian, and Twitter over and over, smelling of bleach, Mike watches me hunched over Google, looking for a sign. I watch the indoor gathering size shrink from calling companies with a high, tight voice. I find a local funeral 500 to 100. I become mouse-like, scuttling after my brother. ‘Should home. They are not for profit and they use the proceeds to provide we cancel?’ I wonder. ‘I think we should cancel.’ He is steadfast, low-cost services to people below the poverty line. I feel a swell of bullish. ‘I don’t think it’s ethical for us to hold this event,’ I say. hope. When I hang up, Mike looks questioningly at me. I burst ‘What if someone dies because they came here?’ He turns to me. into grateful tears. ‘They’re the ones,’ I say. ‘They’re the good ones.’ ‘You’re worrying about hypotheticals. Our actual mum is acWe make decisions. She tually dead. She’s dead. And had died alone. It seems imeveryone is forgetting about it portant, somehow, for people already because of this virus. I to come to the house, to bring want to have people here, acan offering of life as some costually here, to remember her.’ mic apology for the isolation He was always her biggest of her passing. The funeral supporter, her kindest crutch. will be in her backyard. There He poured love into her will be drinks and dogs and through all the cracks, always, laughter. I find the scrap of no matter how hard it was. I paper on which she wrote out nod and bite back tears. a handful of songs a decade Artist Genesis Breyer before. We post an invite on P-Orridge dies, age seventy. Facebook, headed with a The captions on Instagram photograph I took of her. tributes all say the same thing: She is lying on the sofa, her ‘Genesis has dropped h/er hands buried in her dog’s soft body.’ I like this phrasing, the fur. Her head is tipped back, way it frames the ill body as roaring with laughter. only tenuously housing the Julie Walker (photograph by the author) The world begins to shift. spirit. Ready at any point There is a charge in the air, a to be let fall, like clothing to darting of eyes, the brittleness the floor. It is the season of of people about to cry or shout. Supermarket shelves are emptied, recognising the brittle hold we have on life. The incredible vulexhumed. We clutch tiny bottles of hand sanitiser like talismans. nerability of the body, the suddenness with which death arrives. My email inbox fills with cancellations. My diary becomes blank We have all pictured dying surrounded by family, soft and gentle. and bone-white. I blow fragments of eraser rubbings from the We all come to understand that we may go abruptly, violently. pages. That we may die alone. I pay for my brother and his girlfriend to fly home from The worst fears are on Twitter. Panic reigns. Every day I tell London. They arrive bleary, red-eyed. We hold each other with myself I won’t look. Every day I scroll and scroll and scroll. grief and with joy. Without my realising it, he has become a man. My brother and I are alike: stubborn, efficient, decisive. We I watch their friends file into our house, bringing food and booze lace up sneakers and run along the foreshore, breathing life and cigarettes and a VCR to play old home videos. They hug my and pain into our bodies, watching the light shimmer on the brother and his girlfriend, pull one another so close. water, the reflections scribbled and erased. We breathe hard. He Twelve hours later, the government passes laws that all return- goes further than me, opening blisters on the arches of his feet, ing travellers must self-isolate for fourteen days. ‘Lucky,’ people bleeding into his socks. While I wait for him to return, I stand say. ‘Just made it.’ Now and then, someone coughs. in the shadow of a weedy tree and call the coroner. People stroll The telephone becomes the nexus of everything, the object past with ice cream. ‘Yes,’ I say, ‘I consent to you conducting an through which the intangible, messy world comes to us. Friends autopsy.’ Sweat beads behind my knees. call. They pour out sympathy, lament the distances between us. We write updates online: Please, if you’re feeling sick or scared, Inevitably, the conversation turns to the fear bubbling up like don’t come. We’ll record the speeches. We’ll meet again in a year. Meswater through earth. I sit, throat tightening, making attentive sages of apology flood in, and we reply to each one: Thank you. noises as people gasp about the rising death tolls, the government You are doing the right thing. response. The virus fills every gap in conversation, expands like Her iPad pings with group chat notifications. ‘What happened?’ putty into the pauses. someone asks. ‘Fell and hit her head.’ ‘How?’ ‘Dunno. I only know A U S T R A L I A N B O O K R E V I E W J U N E – J U LY 2 0 2 0

as much as you do.’ I wonder what my duty is to these people, what they are owed. My aunt tells my grandmother that it was a heart attack. It’s easier, comprehensible. She says she didn’t suffer. My grandmother has Alzheimer’s. They have to tell her again and again, until finally they write it down on her calendar: Julie died. If it had been a week later, of course, we would have had to cancel. It would have been easier, somehow. The precision of it. The cool line of the law. Easy to follow. We are lucky, in a way. Lucky and terrified. In the Bunnings carpark, I am rubbing hand sanitiser between my palms when I notice movement through a nearby windscreen. An older man is sitting in the driver’s seat, sanitising his hands. Our wrists twirl in the air, drying the alcohol from our fingers. Our eyes meet and we laugh, hold our hands up as if to say, isn’t it silly, what we need to do to be safe? Rumours spread. A runner passing by could catch you in their slipstream. She had fallen from a ladder. Masks worked or didn’t work. She had been ill or she hadn’t been. Alcohol was involved, a little or a lot of it. Either way, soap and hot water did the most good. I imagine charts showing the spread of the virus. I picture every person at the funeral seeing five other people, and five other people, and sickness reaching fingers through the country. I think, we cannot ethically say we are doing the right thing. We lay out medical gloves and sanitiser made from tattooing supplies. The yard fills with people. An old family friend trailing Chanel No. 5 raises an arched brow and says, ‘You know, the elbow is the new erogenous zone.’ Some people say, ‘I don’t care about any virus, I’m going to hug you.’ Every time, I hold my breath as the arms cross me. Dogs circle and bark. We hover around my father, trying to keep people from touching him. ‘I can’t lose two parents in a month,’ I say, joking and not joking. When I was an actor I could never cry on cue, couldn’t break down in front of an audience. We gather people under the corrugated plastic. I act as MC. I play the video I made when mum and I travelled to America. She hams it up for the camera. People call out, ‘That’s her! That’s so her!’ Laughter and sniffles ripple through the crowd. I think of the argument we had on our last night in New York, the hot anger that flooded through me as I stalked the Brooklyn streets. I say my piece and throw open the floor. ‘Does anyone have a speech burning in them? Step on up!’ We sanitise the microphone between speakers. I joke like a bad bingo host. There is an ache between my shoulder blades.

Midway through the speeches, I take a photo of the assembled crowd. I say it’s because I want to capture the view, of all these loved ones gathered to remember my mum. I don’t say it’s also so that I can count heads after the event, to gauge risk, heart in mouth. After the eulogies, I am flooded with exhaustion. I stand in the backyard with a glass of wine, swaying slightly. A woman approaches me. ‘I live on the street,’ she says. ‘I didn’t know. I found out just now because I was walking my dog and someone asked if I was coming to the funeral.’ She glares at me. ‘I’m sorry,’ I say. ‘It must have been a shock, to find out that way.’ ‘Yes,’ she says. ‘It was. It was a shock. I’m very shocked.’ I say empty somethings. My head aches. Later, one of my brother’s friends is drunk, glassy-eyed. He finds me in the backyard, the security light yellowing his skin. His mother died when he was a child. He is talking to me and using my mother’s name, but his eyes are elsewhere. He’s rambling, trying to be a guide, the one with eighteen years’ experience of grief. Despite his height, he is still eleven. ‘Watch The Lion King,’ he tells me. ‘The moment when Rafiki shows Simba his own reflection, tells him Mufasa is there.’ I nod. ‘They live in you,’ he says, sweat beading on his brow. ‘They live in you.’ He is talking to stay afloat now. I am so tired I’m seeing double. For a second, though, his eyes focus on me. ‘You might find it hard to breathe, because she’s in you now. You’re breathing her breaths, too.’ There is an official name for the pandemic: These Strange Times. Every message, every email. How are you doing, in these strange times? The same neighbour turns up on our doorstep late on a Sunday night. ‘Has your brother been self-isolating for fourteen days?’ she asks. ‘No,’ we say, ‘he arrived back before it was compulsory. We’ve been monitoring everyone’s symptoms. We’re in lockdown now.’ She is indignant. ‘I work at a hospital!’ she exclaims. ‘My sister is extremely worried that I might have been exposed because of him.’ ‘Okay,’ we say. ‘Again, we did everything we could.’ She stares at us. ‘What do I do?’ I start having trouble breathing. My chest feels crushed. I wake in the night, hot-faced. I take my temperature obsessively. My head throbs. The funeral director calls. ‘I have bad news,’ she says, spreading the vowels like kneaded bread. ‘We can’t do the viewing, and you can’t attend the cremation.’ I ask if she’s sure. I tell her my brother hasn’t seen his mother. She sounds strained. ‘I’m so sorry,’ she says. I know it’s anxiety, not illness. It’s the same pressure I felt in

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e Garret Podcast

January when the skies turned red, when smoke rolled in across the ocean. This is the year of contested breath. Still, I panic each time I inhale, listening for a wheeze. The next day, the funeral director calls back. Everything is back on. I ask how she’s doing. She exhales. ‘It’s been chaos.’ She describes calling dozens of gutted families to tell them their cancelled funerals can go ahead. The way that good news becomes as hard as bad news, the way that change is the worst news of all. Mum becomes reduced to a handful of narratives: Loved dogs. Loved a bevvie. Loved her friends. Terrible cook. She becomes small. You can hold the idea of her between cupped fingers. She becomes a handful. It is not the same type of handful she was when she was alive. When we arrive for the viewing, the funeral director does not shake our hands. She directs us to several boxes of elbow-length, bright-blue medical examination gloves. We pull them on. We look like débutantes, ready for the ball. The room contains ten chairs, absurdly spaced. In the tiny coffin, Mum’s skin is slightly dewy, as though she has just broken a fever. My brain sees phantom breath lift her chest. I hadn’t expected the makeup. The foundation is good, leaving only a breath of the raw skin underneath. Her stumpy eyebrows, plucked to nothing over decades, are traced in, thick and full and arched. She looks, somehow, like an evil stepmother. The lipstick is applied beyond her natural lip line, fuller than she ever wore it. They’ve painted the tiny stubs of her nails. They have pinked her hands, and this of all things is the most false. Mum had terrible circulation. Even in summer, she wore gloves, would idly massage the sickly white knuckles to try to bring some life to them. We joked that she was practising dying from the fingers up. In the casket, her hands are plump and pink. This is how we know that she is dead. I say the things you say – thank you and I’m sorry and how did you fit two babies inside your tiny body? – and then sit in an armchair in the waiting room and listen to my brother sobbing through the glass. He comes to fetch me, eyes shining. We stand and look down. ‘Little mama,’ he says. ‘She was so small.’ I show him the medical tape skating across her chest. We both admit to wondering what her eyes look like under the closed lids. In the car going home, he asks, ‘What sort of weird art shit did you do to her? You cut some of her hair, didn’t you?’ I protest. I admit to having taken one photo. ‘I knew you’d do something,’ he says. ‘I knew you’d be doing some sort of weird voodoo shit.’ Every time my phone lights up, my stomach leaps with fear. I am waiting for the call that says, ‘I have it. I got it because of you. Nobody is safe.’ Going through her old things, I find a magazine from a hospital she’d worked at. There is an article about reducing the spread of infections in the wards. There is a photo of her, holding her hands under a soap dispenser. The caption reads: Nurse Julie Walker knows the importance of hand washing. We sit in a glass-fronted viewing room at the cemetery, staring at the cremator. It looks like an industrial kitchen appliance: all pinch point warnings and emergency stop buttons. The staff have pulled in panels around it, almost hiding the other five units. We have scheduled an early morning cremation. The fees go up after eleven am. The panels are printed with a calming garden view, full of fountains. The staff, in high vis, open the door, and

slide the coffin fast into the white-hot chamber beyond. They leave us in the viewing room for exactly fifteen minutes. A metal plinth holds sixteen plastic bottles of water. My brother’s girlfriend fixes the cremator with a thick gaze. ‘This is very weird for me. Jews don’t do cremations.’ I nod. ‘Because of the thing where you have to be buried in the condition you were born, right?’ I ask. She hesitates. ‘Well, yes,’ she says. ‘There’s also, you know, the ovens.’ We watch the fire glow in the tiny window in the metal door and think about the Holocaust as my mother burns. No moment ever runs how you imagined it. Mike and I arrive home. Inside, blowflies circle. I find a peace lily coated with fuzzy white growths, strands like cotton suffocating the leaves. I cut the stems, spray them with insecticides. The vegetables in my garden are infested. Tiny green caterpillars, aphids, snails, harlequin beetles. At first, the sad, desiccated leaves look still. As my eyes adjust, they teem with terrible life. According to her bank balance, my mother is still living. Digitally, she straddles the space between worlds. A ghost paying direct debit bills, receiving earnest emails from dozens of businesses pledging how they will keep her safe from Covid-19. I dream of her for the first time. We are in the front room of her house, drenched with sunlight. I am rubbing the belly of my dog as he squirms on the sofa. My mother is laughing, wrapped in a blue sarong. ‘You can come pat him,’ I say. She steps forward and stumbles on the hem of the fabric. She only just catches herself. In the dream I think, it is so easy to fall. Every few days, a new phone call. A middle-aged woman, inevitably, asks, ‘Have you heard anything from the coroner?’ ‘No,’ I say, ‘it’ll take months.’ Always the same catch in the breath. The insistent fear: How did she die? Will I die that way, too? How scared should I be? I sit on the back porch, under a sky strewn with stars. The air is cold and clean. Under my skin, pistons whir, pumping blood and air, pulling the world in and pushing it back out, running the mysterious processes that keep me alive. In the supermarket, running along the river, hugging my brother: how scared should I be? My chest gets heavier and heavier. We walk the dog on an overcast evening. A street away from home, I am swamped with dizziness. ‘I don’t feel good,’ I say, skin clammy, heart racing. There is a sensation of the world sinking, the ground sloping away. I take Valium and lie face-down on the bed as it unbraids the panic. All at once, the muscles in my chest and back unlock, like a clenched fist opening. I take three deep breaths and then burst into tears, hot, sudden, heavy. Mike rubs circles on my back. Four dark spots grow on the fitted sheet: two from my eyes, one from my nose, another from my mouth. I look up at Mike stupidly. ‘It’s hard when your mum dies,’ I say, and then I start crying again. The sound I am making is less like sobbing and more like a long, broken vowel. It is jagged and rough. Time passes. I lie there quietly, breathing, easy. In and out. For a moment, everything is still. g Sarah Walker is a Geelong-based writer, photographer, and fine artist. Her essay ‘Floundering’ was runner-up in the 2019 Calibre Essay Prize. She is the inaugural ABR Rising Star (Victoria). A U S T R A L I A N B O O K R E V I E W J U N E – J U LY 2 0 2 0

Memoir

An accidental biographer Leapfrogging over the literary clerisy Ronan McDonald

Parisian Lives: Samuel Beckett, Simone de Beauvoir and me by Deirdre Bair

Atlantic Books $29.99 pb, 352 pp

uly 1970. A graduate student in English at Columbia University was feeling bogged down in her PhD topic. She was only a year or so in and reckoned that there was still time for her to make a switch from medieval sermons to a modern author. She wrote on index cards the names of numerous writers she liked, including James Joyce, Joseph Conrad, Samuel Beckett, T.S. Eliot, and Virginia Woolf. She then arranged them alphabetically. Beckett came out on top (presumably Auden didn’t make the cut). ‘That was how my life in biography began,’ explains Deirdre Bair, who died in April 2020, in time, fortuitously, to see this book published late last year. Bair, the mother of two young children, had returned to college after working for a decade as a journalist and reporter. The skills she had developed in hunting for stories and sources inclined her towards life writing, against the temper of the times in which ‘literary theory’ was surging. Her thesis dwelt on Beckett’s life as well as his work. Nearing the conclusion, she began contemplating a biography of the famously reclusive writer. She wrote to him: to her amazement, he wrote back, offering to see her. ‘So you are the one who is going to reveal me for the charlatan that I am,’ was his opening gambit when they met in Paris in 1971. Although she went on to produce lives on diverse subjects, including Carl Jung (2003) and Al Capone (2016), it remains her first two biographies, those on Beckett (1978) and Simone de Beauvoir (1990), for which she is best known. It is to these two figures, and her experience writing their lives, that this enjoyably candid book is devoted. We find out about both her subjects and their idiosyncrasies. But we also meet the figure who, for objectivity’s sake, stayed marginal in her previous biographies: Bair herself. We discover a young woman overcoming practical obstacles, grappling with self-doubt, emerging from the cocoon of her own naïveté, as she stumbles falteringly into her vocation. While the story is shaped by both hindsight and her own partisan perspective, readers will be appalled by the treatment she received from both the academic and literary establishment and the circles who gathered around her subjects. For the Beckett crowd – the ‘Becketteers’ – Bair had more than just jumped the queue. Unwittingly, she had leapfrogged over the entire academic and literary clerisy. Who was this woman with no credentials or scholarly record,who was writing the biography of the greatest living writer? It slowly dawned on her that most, in24 A U S T R A L I A N B O O K R E V I E W J U N E – J U LY 2 0 2 0

cluding Beckett himself, did not take her seriously. They assumed that she would never actually complete the biography. She had to push through a gallery of sycophants, bar-room boasters, leeches, and lechers to do so. She is subject to derision and humiliation, including by academics. One charmer tells her at a conference that he well knows what ‘a bitch’ she is. Others insinuate that she only managed to get the biography by sleeping with Beckett or by offering sexual favours to her sources. Her tenacity and determination see her to publication, but the book is greeted by some savage reviews, most devastatingly by Richard Ellmann, author of the justly venerated 1957 biography of James Joyce. ‘Stomping over his desire for privacy,’ he remarks, ‘Deirdre Bair has managed a scoop which in literary history is like that of Bernstein and Woodward in political history.’ (Deliciously, the latter phrase turned up in a later edition as a jacket puff.) Her Beckett biography undeniably has flaws and errors. Bewilderingly, even here she only admits to one. But its merits far outweigh its deficiencies, and it remains a path-breaking achievement. Parisian Lives sent me scuttling to the Beckett letters to find out what he actually thought of her. In some letters, he speaks warmly of the young American, though she is right that he probably did not think she would finish the biography. He was by and large kind and courteous to her before and after her book’s publication. Her final assessment of him is, in turn, a gracious tribute. In many ways, Beckett was naïve. He became angry when she tried (as was her job) to uncover things about his personal life: his youthful affair with Peggy Guggenheim; his psychoanalysis under Wilfred Bion. Bair’s biggest coup, for which alone Beckett scholars owe a huge debt, is her deployment of the cache of letters to his friend and confidante Thomas MacGreevy. Beckett’s instructions that they be destroyed were thwarted just in time. They have been a bulwark of academic Beckett studies for decades. Beckett seems not to have thought through what writing a biography of him would inevitably mean: private aspects of his life made public. It was not until James Knowlson’s 1996 authorised biography (after Beckett’s death in 1989) that his ongoing affair with Barbara Bray, who was highly hostile to Bair, was made public. Biography, Beckett seems to have reluctantly concluded, was a necessary evil, and he probably knew there would be another attempt. Therefore, he chose a decent, thorough, and scholarly academic, one who was sympathetic to him: Knowlson. Bair hints that Knowlson’s book is too hagiographical, which I think is unfair. It is in turn a monumental achievement. But, as Knowlson does acknowledge in that book, he builds on Bair’s foundations, even as he corrects many of her errors. Simone de Beauvoir lived not far from Beckett but, as Bair discovers, they had an animus, deriving from her early rejection of a piece by Beckett in the magazine she edited with Jean-Paul Sartre, Le Temps Moderne. Bair comes to write the life of this titan of twentieth-century feminism spurred by her own personal experiences of sexism. She vividly captures the process of weaning information from her subject, whose fading grandeur is shot through with vulnerability and volatility. The differences between her subjects are remarkable. Whereas Beckett forbade note-taking of any sort, Beauvoir insisted upon accuracy and record-keeping. She sought to control the content of the biography directly, while

Beckett monitored remotely through friends. Beauvoir was cordial, though explosive; on one occasion, she pushed Bair out of the door in a rage. She is attended upon by an adopted daughter, and possible lover, Sylvie Le Bon-de Beauvoir, who is the cause of some of the tension and awkwardness. Ultimately, Bair feels humbled that her life has intersected with these outstanding cultural figures. That sense of privilege and modesty combine with a winning directness, candour, and clarity. It must have been gratifying that she got to settle some scores before her death. Despite being an ‘accidental biographer’

(the original title for the book), her own life seems propelled through a sort of arc, with her last book granting that elusive sense of an ending which Frank Kermode claims we yearn for but are usually denied. g Ronan McDonald holds the Gerry Higgins Chair of Irish Studies at the University of Melbourne. His books include The Death of the Critic (2008) and the edited collection The Values of Literary Studies (2015). He was director of the Beckett International Foundation between 2004 and 2010.

History

Hunting Nazis

Philippe Sands and the Wächters Sheila Fitzpatrick

The Ratline: Love, lies and justice on the trail of a Nazi fugitive by Philippe Sands

Weidenfeld & Nicolson $34.99 pb, 432 pp

unting Nazis is an almost guaranteed reading pleasure – the joy of the chase, plus the moral uplift of being on the side of virtue. I started Philippe Sands’s book with a sense both of anticipation and déjà vu. A respected British international human rights lawyer with the proven ability to tell a story, Sands should be giving us a superior version of a familiar product. Many readers will remember his book East West Street (2016), which wove together the Nuremberg trial, some family history, and the pre-war intellectual life of Lemberg/Lviv. The latter produced not only Raphael Lemkin, theorist of genocide, but also the lesser known Hersch Lauterpacht, theorist of crimes against humanity, as well as Sands’s maternal grandfather, Leon Buchholz. In 2018, Sands came to Australia spruiking the book, of which he had made a musical version (East West Street: A Song of Good and Evil) with two narrators, including himself, a singer, and a pianist. I did not attend his performances (which in retrospect I regret), but I did participate in one of Jenny Brockie’s Insight programs a few years back in which a friend and collaborator of Sands who appears in East West Street – Niklas Frank, son of the Nazi governor-general of wartime occupied Poland – gave a star turn, denouncing his father and showing clips of himself visiting the Jewish Museum with tears in his eyes. This made me feel a bit squeamish. But Niklas is not Sands’s only friend whose father was a prominent Nazi. The other is Horst Wächter, son of Otto Wächter, wartime governor of Galicia, based in Lemberg, and the subject of The Ratline. Unlike Niklas, Horst – born in 1939 and named

for the Nazi ‘Horst-Wessel song’ – is a staunch defender of his father, though not of the Nazi regime as a whole. In 2015, Sands made a BBC documentary called My Nazi Legacy: What Our Fathers Did, which featured the two of them arguing their respective cases. It’s obvious where Sands’s sympathies lie, but what’s interesting is that, even after the documentary and several private conversations in which Sands made clear that he regarded Otto Wächter as a war criminal, Horst continued to invite him to the ‘dilapidated baroque castle’ in Austria, where he had made his home, to supply him with materials from the family archives. That sheds an unusual light on both of them. The Ratline – which also started life as a BBC documentary in 2018 – tells the story of Otto Wächter and his wife Charlotte from their marriage in the early 1930s, through the war and into the early postwar period. It is based largely on materials kept by Charlotte and which Horst inherited. Otto became a fugitive in the spring of 1945, hiding out first in the Austrian mountains and then, after a brief reunion in Salzburg ended by prying neighbours, in Rome, hoping to get on the ‘ratline’ that took Nazi war criminals from Rome to safety in Latin America. Otto never made it out: in Rome in 1949, a healthy forty-eight-year-old, he suddenly took ill and died. Some thought he had been poisoned. Otto, son of an ‘ardent monarchist’ general in the AustroHungarian Army of Czech descent and an early Nazi, was involved in 1933 in the unsuccessful plot to overthrow the antiNazi government in Austria that ended in Chancellor Dolfuss’s murder. He and Charlotte were newly married then. She was in hospital after the birth of their second child when he went on the run to escape trouble after the murder. Otto went to Germany, where he rose through the ranks of the SS. It was two years before the family was reunited in Berlin. When the Anschluss of 1938 brought Austria into the Reich, Otto’s old friend Arthur Seyss-Inquart (Horst’s godfather) became its governor, and Otto a state secretary. In 1939, after the Germans occupied Western Poland, Otto became chief administrator in Krakow (under Hans Frank) before being promoted to the governorship in Galicia in 1942. Horst – who barely knew his father but felt enormous love and loyalty for Charlotte – always insisted that, to the extent that his father was complicit in killing and mistreating Jews, it was the result of orders from above that he tried to mitigate. There is little evidence to support this, judging by the material at Sands’s disposal, but there is also little evidence that Otto, though A U S T R A L I A N B O O K R E V I E W J U N E – J U LY 2 0 2 0

a convinced Nazi, was a particularly zealous anti-Semite or enthusiastic killer. He met the administrative challenges of his job to the best of his ability, and he and Charlotte enjoyed the perks and acquaintance with top Nazis that went with it. Once the war was over, Otto did not waste any time on vain regrets or guilt. Life had presented him with another challenge, this time to stay ahead of his pursuers. Charlotte, never a strongly political person, was also not preoccupied with remorse but rather with looking after her six children and finding a tolerable place in the new postwar world. She kept in touch with Otto, meeting him regularly in the years he was on the run and bringing food, clothes, news, and moral support. While there were obstacles to be overcome by a wife of a leading Nazi official, she was able to find a new home and a job in Salzburg, where her brothers had managed to set up a new business after the war. When Otto went to Rome, she worried, as always, that his eye would stray to other women. Perhaps it did, but Otto’s main occupation in Rome was cultivating contacts close to the Vatican that might help him get out, and avoiding being caught by Allied intelligence, the Soviets, the Poles, or Jewish Nazi-hunter groups. Some of these seem in

fact to have been on his trail, although not, apparently, with any marked zeal. Cooped up in a monk’s cell, Otto chafed against the lack of exercise and rashly went swimming in the polluted Tiber River. The mystery of his death, which is nicely played by Sands, is not exactly solved, but Sands does come down with a ‘most likely’ hypothesis which I will not reveal, other than to say that it sounds convincing. In view of Sands’s propensity to set his lawyerly investigations to music, I wondered if The Ratline would make a good opera. It has the advantage of a female as well as a male lead, plus sympathetic supporting characters in Horst Wächter and Sands himself. For best theatrical effect, he might need to change the ending and play up the melodrama. It is one of Sands’s virtues as a historian that, while he likes melodrama as a narrative device, he builds his analysis on logic and evidence. g Sheila Fitzpatrick is the author of three memoirs, My Father’s Daughter (2010), A Spy in the Archives (2013), and, most recently, Mishka’s War: A European odyssey of the 1940s (2017). She is an Honorary Professor at the University of Sydney.

Carnal Knowledge I Roll back, you fabulous animal be human, sleep. I’ll call you up from water’s dazzle, wheat-blond hills, clear light and open-hearted roses, this day’s extravagance of blue stored like a pulsebeat in the skull. Content to be your love, your fool, your creature tender and obscene I’ll bite sleep’s innocence away and wake the flesh my fingers cup to build a world from what’s to hand, new energies of light and space wings for blue distance, fins to sweep the obscure caverns of your heart, a tongue to lift your sweetness close leaf-speech against the window-glass a memory of chaos weeping mute forces hammering for shape sea-strip and sky-strip held apart for earth to form its hills and roses its landscape from our blind caresses, blue air, horizon, water-flow, bone to my bone I grasp the world. But what you are I do not know

Gwen Harwood Gwen Harwood (1920–95) published five volumes of poetry. ‘Carnal Knowledge I’ appears in Collected Poems (UQP, 2003). The poem is reproduced with kind permission from the Harwood estate. 26 A U S T R A L I A N B O O K R E V I E W J U N E – J U LY 2 0 2 0

F I C T I O N A U S T R A L I A N B O O K R E V I E W J U N E â&#x20AC;&#x201C; J U LY 2 0 2 0

Fiction

Hungry for something An imaginative take on dystopia Naama Grey-Smith

Rise & Shine

by Patrick Allington

‘W

Scribe $27.99 pb, 240 pp

hat is the use of saying, “Peace, Peace” when there is no peace below the diaphragm?’ asks Chinese writer Lin Yutang in The Importance of Living (1937). The subject of food and its manifestations – sustenance, communion, gluttony, longing – has claimed a place in the books of every era and genre, from heavenly manna in the Book of Exodus to starving gladiators in Suzanne Collins’s multi-billion-dollar The Hunger Games franchise. Writers as varied as Marcel Proust and Margaret Atwood have prioritised this theme in their work. So it is with Patrick Allington’s second novel, Rise & Shine, set thirty-four years after a global catastrophe that demarcates the Old Time from the New Time. In a world where plant and animal life are distant memories and rain is toxic, humanity’s tumour-ridden survivors feed on war footage, screened daily from ubiquitous autoscreens. Their leaders, Walker and Barton, have found a means to feed the people that relies on their being moved by human suffering. To meet the citizens’ need for ‘regular fresh footage’, the leaders have set up ‘the enterprise of making war, and filming war’. But when a mysterious illness appears in the city-states of Rise and Shine, some citizens descend into anhedonia, unable to feed off even the best battles. Others, like grief-stricken Malee, long for something else: her computer password, in Rise & Shine’s typical gallows humour, is ‘Hungryforsomething01’. This bold premise of war footage as food – a disquieting metaphor in the era of addictive social media feeds – could easily be an episode of Charlie Brooker’s Netflix series Black Mirror. True to the novel’s dystopian exposition, the theme of surveillance looms large. Rise’s institutional gaze – by government, medical, and prison agencies – has a Foucauldian panoptic quality. Sala, an élite soldier, accepts that she’d given up her right to privacy but dislikes ‘the one-sidedness of it ... she would have liked some reciprocity: why couldn’t she see the face, the name, the life history, the grief levels of the person watching her?’ Complicating the matter is the benevolence of the city-states’ leaders. Intrusive technology is used for the common good and with unsettling, sometimes comic, politeness: ‘I do apologise for the intrusion,’ says an officer as he places a gag on the woman he arrests, ‘but it’s unavoidable under the circumstances. Let’s not make a fuss or worry your neighbours.’ A gap grows between the New Time leaders’ noble intentions and their own slip into Old 28 A U S T R A L I A N B O O K R E V I E W J U N E – J U LY 2 0 2 0

Time failings, such as ‘Old Time management speak’, the use of flags (Walker remembers ‘the way bigots wielded them like semi-automatics in the last years of the Old Time’), and public adulation of leaders (‘the very excesses of the Old Time that caused the mess in the first place’). Rise’s leaders are guarded against these behaviours, yet they seem doomed to repeat them in the name of their peaceful new society. Where dystopias almost universally pitch dissenter protagonists against a tyrannical government enemy, Rise & Shine makes the original, perhaps radical, choice to highlight the perspectives of the New Time’s leaders, themselves survivors. The omniscient narration divulges the thoughts of a (sometimes unwieldy) motley crew of characters, many in positions of power. Does this, by implication, excuse their propaganda and disciplinary measures? In the fight for collective survival, is compliance a necessary evil, a compromise for those between the devil and the now-poisonous blue sea? Or is it possible ‘the new way now needed its own new way’? Like Allington’s first novel, the Miles Franklin-longlisted Figurehead (2009), Rise & Shine does not shy away from the complex moral terrain of political agency. Carefully, subtly, Allington lets the tension between multiple propositions build: that law and order form a part of collective survival; that service of the people can too easily slip into control of the people; that people want a leader; that effective leadership requires multiple perspectives; that people can change; that some people don’t. Allington sustains the tension until the final pages, where he offers a thought-provoking ending worthy of this imaginative take on dystopia. The upsurge in fiction examining environmental collapse has been the subject of much literary discussion. In last month’s ABR, J.R. Burgmann’s insightful review of Ghost Species by James Bradley – aptly titled ‘Five Minutes into the Future’ – placed Bradley’s novel within the broader context of climate fiction (‘cli-fi’). Common, too, are debates on what constitutes science fiction, speculative fiction, and dystopian fiction – and indeed the usefulness of the terms. While some authors have demurred from these descriptors of their work, others, such as David Mitchell, whose Cloud Atlas (2004) was shortlisted for the Arthur C. Clarke Award for science fiction and the Man Booker Prize, have embraced both the so-called ‘genre’ and ‘literary’ aspects of their work. It is refreshing, then, to see publisher Scribe take the broad view, describing Rise & Shine as ‘literary speculative fiction’. There is something uncanny about reviewing a post-apocalyptic novel from the confines of self-isolation during a global pandemic. As I read Rise & Shine, phrases like ‘Chief Medical Officer’, ‘data on the strange illness’, and ‘we must all do our part’ began to blend with news updates. More disquieting still were the questions the book raised about the social contract in times of crisis, self-sacrifice for the good of the majority, and the trade-off between surveillance and survival. It is to Allington’s credit that his pre-Covid-19 writing rings true in the unusual moment of its publication. In this, Rise & Shine is a timely reminder that keeping a society free requires constant vigilance. And that, as it were, is food for thought. g Naama Grey-Smith is an editor, publisher, and critic based in Fremantle, Western Australia.

Fiction

Gabriel’s grave mission A confident début from the Vogel winner Nicole Abadee

A Treacherous Country by K.M. Kruimink

Allen & Unwin $29.99 pb, 256 pp

asmanian writer K.M. Kruimink’s first novel, A Treacherous Country, a witty, cracking tale set in Van Diemen’s Land in the 1840s, has more than a hint of Dickens and Moby-Dick about it. It won The Australian/Vogel’s Literary award, established in 1980 for an unpublished manuscript by an author under thirty-five, which has launched the career of Kate Grenville and Tim Winton, among others. The award sets high standards – it was not awarded in 2019 due to a ‘lack of quality’. Kruimink, who described it as an ‘absolute life-changer’, is a worthy recipient. The narrator is Gabriel Fox, aged twenty-five, from Norfolk, who is the third son (‘he who does not matter’) of a baronet and gentleman farmer, Sir Alfred Fox and his wife, Apphia Fox. Gabriel has made the long, arduous journey by sea from England to the colonies on a mission, which he describes variously as ‘an Odyssey’, ‘a Grave Mission’, and ‘my great Purpose’. The said mission is to find Maryanne Maginn, who was transported from England as a convict more than thirty years ago, when she was fifteen. He has been set that task by Maryanne’s great-aunt, the formidable Mrs Prendergast, with whose great-grand-daughter, Susannah, Gabriel is love. He believes that if he returns to England with Maryanne, Mrs Prendergast will consent to the marriage. The events of the book take place over three days, and, as with all odysseys, Gabriel encounters several obstacles. In Sydney, he loses almost all his possessions at a card game, receiving in exchange two harpoons. When he arrives in Hobart, he buys a horse, which is later stolen from him. Things start to look up when he meets an Irishman who works at the Montserrat whaling station, a day’s walk north, and who suggests that Gabriel should accompany him there and try to sell his harpoons to the owner, Mr Heron. Displaying all the prejudices of the English aristocracy, Gabriel decides the man must be a cannibal because ‘the Irish on this Isle [are] all Cannibals’, but nonetheless decides to go with him to the station. On the way he has a number of adventures, including an encounter with a convict chain-gang. The narrative gathers speed when he arrives at Mr Heron’s station and takes part in a whale hunt, which turns into a life-and-death struggle. Gabriel is a fascinating, fully drawn character. He is clearly a well-educated man; he describes a sailor as looking like Richard III, and makes regular references to Greek mythology – the horse he buys is ‘a Grecian beast, worthy of an Odyssey such as mine’, and he curses Poseidon for his rough voyage from England. His

mother is also highly educated – she speaks French and quotes Petrarch. Gabriel is interested in science – he often contemplates Sir Isaac Newton – and is something of a philosopher, who wonders, ‘If I and everyone I knew were mad, did that not mean all were quite typical specimens and therefore sane?’ Despite (or perhaps because of ) his education, he is not without his prejudices – as mentioned above, he assumes, mistakenly, that the Irishman is a cannibal, referring to him presumptuously as ‘my Cannibal’, and later opines that there is ‘no such thing’ as an ‘honest Vandemonian’.

As with all odysseys, Gabriel encounters several obstacles Gabriel is also witty, especially in the first half of the book, as he makes his way to Montserrat station. He stops at a pub where he sees a young boy and observes that there is ‘a Law of Nature’ that there is a certain type of child who ‘by virtue of some … Scientifically measurable confluence of poverty, dimples, freckles, impudence, wit, selfishness and charm, can only be called an Urchin.’ The urchin in question is straight out of a Dickens novel. There are hints from the start that something is amiss with Gabriel’s family. He says of his father, ‘I do not like him and am not like him,’ and refers, without further explanation, to his mother being ‘gently detained in the attic for her own good’. One brother has ‘cold-hearted intent’. It is not until late in the book that the reader learns the dreadful story of his dysfunctional family. Kruimink is a shrewd observer of society, especially that of nineteenth-century England. Gabriel regrets that he and Susannah must communicate through ‘many layers of politeness and convention’. He notes that in that society, ‘the difference between a pair of white shoulders angled ever-so-slightly towards one and ever-so-slightly away from one can spell triumph, or ruin’. Later, he refers to his mother’s temporary expulsion from society, ‘a well-defended fortress’. A striking feature of A Treacherous Country is Kruimink’s precise and evocative language. During the whale hunt, ‘the water bounced us like babes on Mother’s knee’. After a few drinks, Gabriel speaks with ‘the precision of the careful inebriate’. After he has spent one night at the whaling station, ‘already [he] could sense the thick aspic of ennui solidifying the air and suspending the men in a drifting aimlessness’. By the end of A Treacherous Country, it becomes apparent that the true purpose of Gabriel’s Odyssey is not so much to locate Maryanne Maginn, as he thought, but to undergo a painful journey to self-knowledge. As he encounters various hardships along the way, he is forced to reflect more closely than he has before on his own character and his past behaviour, and to take proper responsibility for his actions and failures to act. A Treacherous Country is a highly accomplished first novel from a young writer worth keeping an eye on. g Nicole Abadee writes about books and other things for Good Weekend. She has a new books podcast, Books, Books, Books, where she speaks to Australian and international writers about their latest books. A U S T R A L I A N B O O K R E V I E W J U N E – J U LY 2 0 2 0

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Fiction

Neel and Mae

Rippling outward

Declan Fry

Laura Elizabeth Woollett

A serendipitous third work

An imaginative allegorical novel

Elephants with Headlights

The Rain Heron

Transit Lounge $29.99 pb, 294 pp

Text Publishing $29.99 pb, 288 pp

by Robbie Arnott

by Bem Le Hunte

erhaps reflecting the long gestation period of Bem Le Hunte’s third novel, the term ‘Asian Century’occurs early on in Elephants with Headlights. The sobriquet is certainly apt. Induction into this vaunted space does not befall a country haphazardly: its temporal aspect serves to remind us that the fate is written in centuries-old geopolitical legacies. Before there was an ‘Asia’ to eponymise in this fashion, a wealth of cultures simply went about their business. But the determinations of capital and colonisation were made long ago, and now we live with the press. The century is a source of both anxiety and excitement for the middle-class Indian family at the centre of the novel. Mae, Byron Bay child of sun-and-surf Australia, has fallen in love with Neel during a trip to Goa. His parents, Siddharth and Tota, having all but given up hope of finding a suitable match for their daughter, the headstrong Savitri, are in no mood to welcome the newcomer. Determined to see the relationship undone, Tota sets in motion a chain of events that will test both cultural and familial bonds. Le Hunte writes with undeniable tenderness and humour. Her facility for crafting tangible human relationships is one of the book’s joys. Several crucial turning points in the novel feel a little engineered, however. During one typically happy coincidence, Neel marvels at the serendipity of events; how ‘perfectly beyond comprehension’ are the circumstances in which he finds himself. It is a sentiment some readers may be inclined to agree with. The novel also indulges in an uncomfortably wide spectrum of cross-cultural vampirism. At one point, Mae enlists a bazaar trader to help her stitch ‘Australian Indigenous designs’ on to pillows to sell back in Byron. Perhaps the manoeuvre is intended to punctuate Le Hunte’s thesis that the meeting of cultures contains liberating potential. More often than not, the only thing that feels liberated is a strong desire to ask – is this necessary? Elephants with Headlights highlights the generative forces: of class, family, maternity, and, perhaps most powerful of all, change. It is about seeking a break from tradition even as tradition’s afterlives provide succour to those who inherit them. g Declan Fry is an essayist, critic, and proud descendant of the Yorta Yorta. Born on Wongatha country in Kalgoorlie. His work has appeared in publications including Meanjin and Overland. ❖

n an unnamed land under the thrall of a mysterious coup,mountain-dweller Ren wants only to live off the grid, undisturbed by human contact. Ren’s familiarity with the natural world becomes a liability when a band of soldiers comes seeking information that only she can provide: the whereabouts of a fabled bird with the ability to make it rain. Despite a decided ambiguity about exactly where and when The Rain Heron takes place, Robbie Arnott conjures locations with a richness that belies their generic signifiers (‘the valley’, ‘the mountain’, ‘the port’, etc.). This results in a world that, while less idiosyncratic than the Tasmania of Arnott’s critically acclaimed début, Flames (2018), feels equally true to the author’s imagination and is expressive of his trademark flair for imbuing landscapes with symbolic resonance. Although shifts in setting and perspective are handled gracefully, a level of trust in the author is a prerequisite, as the thrust of the narrative is not always clear. Such trust pays off generously. One of the starkest transitions – which takes the reader from the action in the mountains to a cold seaport where a girl learns the ancient art of harvesting squid ink – is also revelatory, its significance rippling outward to inform the wider narrative. Arnott has a knack for sketching frontier communities. Often, his characters are extensions of their environments, less notable for the words they speak than the way they hold themselves and the scars they bear. It is easy to believe in the power the land has over its inhabitants, as Arnott writes it: a land where humans and squid symbiotically exchange fluids, crops flourish on the favour of ancient birds, and animal wrath determines the course of history. The Rain Heron’s environmental concerns, paired with its allegorical quality, could be didactic in less assured hands. By privileging the laws of his fictional universe without reference to contemporary debates, Arnott weaves a narrative that feels both timely and timelessly engaging. A powerful meditation on human greed and frailty, The Rain Heron also leaves room for redemption. This bracing follow-up to Flames will reinforce Arnott’s reputation for unusual, risk-taking literary fiction. g Laura Elizabeth Woollett is the author of a short story collection, The Love of a Bad Man (2016), and two novels, Beautiful Revolutionary (2018) and The Newcomer (forthcoming in 2021). She is the City of Melbourne’s 2020 Boyd Garret writer-in-residence. A U S T R A L I A N B O O K R E V I E W J U N E – J U LY 2 0 2 0

Fiction

Marvel of quirks

A delightful first collection of short stories Lisa Bennett

Smart Ovens for Lonely People by Elizabeth Tan

Brio Books $29.99 pb, 320 pp

hough its origins are unknown, the earliest sense of the word ‘quirk’ was as a subtle verbal twist or a quibble. Over time, its definition has become more nuanced: a quirk now also refers to a person’s peculiar or idiosyncratic traits, chance occurrences, and sudden, surprise curves appearing on paths or in facial expressions. Quirks can also be accidents, vagaries, witty turns of phrase. Elizabeth Tan’s first collection of short stories, Smart Ovens for Lonely People, encapsulates quirkiness in complex and compelling ways (without the sneer of saccharine cuteness this adjective often evokes). Its opening move, for instance, is a bold one. The lead piece is a work of flash fiction, so there’s little space for it to act as the spokes-story for the rest of the collection, and its tone is deceptively soft. In well under two pages, ‘Night of the Fish’ offers a glimpse of development in an ordinary Australian suburb – a slide removed, a playground paved over – that is at once both beautiful and wholly unnerving. This vignette captures the almost unbearable tension, nostalgia, and self-delusion that come with change, and renders terrifying humankind’s continued desire for – and dread of – progress in the Anthropocene. We might tell ourselves otherwise, this piece whispers, but we are all vulnerable. Powerful. Culpable. Afraid. We are all agents and victims of the Earth’s destruction. All of this in fewer than two pages. In clumsier hands, the social, satirical, and political commentary driving this collection’s twenty stories might have weighed them down, but Tan’s touch is consistently light, her prose utterly delightful. Mostly set in or around Perth, these tales take readers a few steps off track into a possible future, one that’s weirdly familiar and stubbornly resilient; a not-quite-now viewed through the persistent haze of corporate greed and global warming. In this reality, the ‘cosy lie that worlds can only be one way, which means, most of the time, predicated on capitalism’ persists. People in this same-old new world still desperately want to buy happiness. Only now, many of them struggle with the cost. ‘A Girl Is Sitting on a Unicorn in the Middle of a Shopping Centre’ reads like a lament, its omniscient perspective taking in the mall’s food court, its Miranda Kerr poster and ‘unbelievable markdown’ flyers, its makeup counters and artificial trees, before sweeping back to the little girl sitting on a mechanical unicorn in her Frozen T-shirt and tutu, dreaming of being like other little girls, even as she listens to the unicorn explain how sad it is, so sad 32 A U S T R A L I A N B O O K R E V I E W J U N E – J U LY 2 0 2 0

that it wants to die. Juxtaposed with the mall’s many must-haves, this silent conversation between child and mythical robot evokes a mood that’s reminiscent of the ubi sunt (‘where now?’) motif in Old English elegies. However, this story isn’t bemoaning the loss of wondrous things in life, but rather anticipating the end of these things with equal parts hope and sadness. ‘One day the girl will stop and the unicorn will stop and the light will stop and the pyramids of cruelty-free bath bombs will crumble into nothing’, but even so, ‘all the beautiful things of the world would still be there’ just as ‘all the sad things of the world would still be there’. Obsolescence, loneliness, and happiness are inextricably bound together in these stories. In ‘Eighteen Bells Karaoke Castle (Sing Your Heart Out)’, patrons of the karaoke club do what they always do – get drunk and sing their hearts out – while teleprompters flash videos of Perth as it was, ‘before the Year of Unprecedented Ecological Terror’. These visions of a bygone world cut the singers ‘deep and quick like glass, and they could not stop their sadness from billowing out’. Bearing witness to this everyday ritual of glad-sadness, Pike, a giant rabbit employed at the club, observes, ‘I do not mean to make it sound like Eighteen Bells is an unhappy place. I think it is more accurate to say that most people are simply unhappy – here and everywhere – and don’t actually realise it.’ This is certainly true of Shu in ‘Smart Ovens for Lonely People’, who is prescribed a cat-shaped smart oven – a cooking implement but also a therapeutic device – after suffering a traumatic break-up with her partner: ‘I found that I could be both desperately lonely and profoundly happy; I could always be both.’ Likewise, in ‘.pptx’ Pippa is ‘ready to become extinct … ready to die unloved’; Allan, a rogue agent in ‘Pang & Co. Genuine Scribe Era Stationery Pty. Ltd.’, exudes an aura that is both angry and thrilled; and Nora lives with her grief by transforming it into something troublingly lovely in ‘Excision in F-Sharp Minor’. The impossibility of ever choosing one state over the other is dramatised in another very short but formidable piece, ‘Would You Rather’: ‘would you rather be responsible for the murder of two little girls, or concede the possibility of permanently and irreplaceably losing a very specific type of thing, any day, any time?’ In a collection of consistent highlights, the brilliance of some stories is particularly blinding. Told from the perspective of eight mermaids in a restaurant’s enormous display tank, ‘Our Sleeping Lungs Opened to the Cold’ is a mesmerising feminist metaphor about the objectification of women, our culture’s obsession with youth and beauty, and the freedom that comes with rejecting social expectations. Even more cutting in its satire, ‘Happy Smiling Underwear Girls Party’ shreds media representations of young women in its reimagining of underwear advertisements and the vacuous gaggle of girls ‘lucky’ enough to feature in them. Finally, articulating the moon-driven adventures of one neighbourhood’s cats ‘Yes! Yes! Yes You Are! Yes You Are!’ is an unforgettable marvel of quirks. g Lisa Bennett is a Senior Lecturer in English and Creative Writing at Flinders University. Under the name Lisa L. Hannett, she has published more than seventy short stories across a variety of publications.

Fiction

The power of witches

Three new fantasy novels for younger readers Margaret Robson Kett

his month’s survey features three bewitching novels from authors intent on transporting younger readers to other worlds. In Alison Croggon’s latest fantasy novel, The Threads of Magic (Walker Books, $19.95 pb, 380 pp), Pip and his sister El are living in a poor but snug apartment in the city of Clarel, bequeathed to them by Missus Pledge. Pip, always on the lookout for opportunities, scoops up a silver box from the sidelines during a street brawl. The opening of this box burdens Pip with an ancient and grisly relic: the shrivelled black heart of a child. Pip carries the child’s desiccated heart with him, even as it becomes apparent that assassins and other powerful enemies will kill, kidnap, and alter the known universe to repossess it. The heart belonged to a child named Clovis. Throughout the novel, his voice and power combine with Georgette’s to help the young people face their demons and win a kingdom for themselves. King Axel II’s daughter Georgette can’t wait to be a queen, to exercise power in her own right, but she is also troubled by dreams of a child sobbing uncontrollably. Her betrothal to the evil and enigmatic King Oswald is forced upon her; there will be a wedding in an indecently short time. Georgette flees to the comfort of her old nurse and friend, Amina, and there meets Amina’s daughter Oni, who, with El and Pip, is fleeing her pursuers. Amina’s identity as a witch places her in particular danger in a country that has an Office for the Extermination of Witches, but a greater horror is waiting – spectres who seemingly cannot be killed, created by the misuse of magic. Croggon is assured in building a fantastical world. Readers are soon immersed in the forbidding alleys, velvety darkness, and dark dealings reminiscent of Leon Garfield’s writing, complete with cliffhanger chapter endings. Pip is an arrogant upstart kept in check by his responsibilities towards Clovis, who veers between the personas of petulant toddler and a supernatural force. Georgette and Oni, strong young women, are united in their protection of the innocent El. The brutality of some scenes – in particular, torture – put this at the upper end for middle-grade readers.

altkin is fifteen-year-old Iris’s faery friend in the garden where Iris grew up. They are happy in their own company and counsel in Euphoria Kids (Echo, $19.95 pb, 252 pp) by author Alison Evans. Non-binary Iris is contented living with Clover and Moss, close to the bush realm where they can com-

mune with dryads. A rose quartz worn around their neck invites friendship with Babs, and fire flashes between the two. The only trouble is that Babs flickers in and out of invisibility, an advantage when she wants to escape the attention of teachers at school, but not great when Iris wants to get to know her better. A witch’s curse is behind it all, and they work with a new arrival at the school to undo it.The malevolence of the fae in the bush realm, and a blank book from an op shop, complicate their plans. In endeavouring not to make gender the central ‘issue’ in the novel, Evans has instead created a mystic mash-up. The line between realms is blurry: texting and video watching and homework assessments co-exist alongside talking trees and faeries preening their gossamer wings. The strength of the characters’ convictions, and the seductive quality of the enchanted bushland, are captivating. The complete lack of other students in the narrative makes the school experiences of Iris, Babs, and the boy much harder to read. This skilful writer could have provided a little more context here. The importance of finding your people is never more important than at this age and stage of life, but there should be some minor characters to bounce off first. The three protagonists, despite their differences, are blessed with sympathetic adults in their lives. Their mothers, the owner of the café where they hang out after school, their art teacher, and even the witch who cursed Babs are all sensitive listeners who treat the teens as equals. All of them are ready with the comfort of candles, herbs, and tea, and this is the bubble of encouraging empowerment that the reader is invited into. (There’s only one incidence of gender ignorance by an adult, and it is resolved through respectful enquiry and listening.) The dryads and Saltkin are the most parental figures, whose warnings and advice are appropriately disregarded by the three.

empest, called Tempe, is diving into the depths of the sea from her home on The Equinox in Astrid Scholte’s The Vanishing Deep (Allen & Unwin, $19.99 pb, 423 pp). Since the Old World drowned, new societies have formed to eke out a living on the rocks that remain. The nearby island of Palindromena, where Tempest’s mother and father worked as head warden and head botanist, respectively, has sustained itself with a terrible industry directed by Nessandra. Dead bodies are kept in suspended animation in the macabre Aquarium until loved ones can raise the Notes (their currency) to revive them for a final goodbye. The catch is that the dead can only be reanimated for twenty-four hours, and during that time they mustn’t suspect that they’re dead. It’s not her parents that Tempe wants to resurrect – they disappeared after a boating accident – but her sister Elysea, who drowned two years before. Nessandra’s son Lor is working in the depths of the Aquarium that day, assuaging his guilt for the accidental death of his best friend. He reluctantly agrees to act as warden for Tempe’s reunion with Elysea, who reveals that she knows that their parents are still alive, and proposes that she and Tempe go and find them together. As Lor is covering for his friend Raylan, and wearing the echolink monitoring Elysea’s revival, he must follow them. Scholte has created a completely believable watery world, A U S T R A L I A N B O O K R E V I E W J U N E – J U LY 2 0 2 0

where most characters are doing more than floating just above the waves. The Equinox reads like a floating Brunswick Street, in contrast with the sepulchral civic bastion Palindromena. This reader’s favourite supporting characters were the Remorans, pirates of this world, who make two attempts at profiting from the sisters. The separate angers of Lor and Tempest are fully realised and propel them through the novel, taking the reader with them.

The story’s chapters are told in their alternating voices, as they inevitably draw closer together. The denouement, back on Palindromena, is both shocking and satisfying, like a plunge into a cool ocean. g Margaret Robson Kett is a Melbourne-based writer and editor and recently founded Kettlestitch Press.

Bach to the Fuchsia In thrall to thresholds, drawn to every brink, at three weeks old an infant’s eye adores the frames of things, the joinery that holds each smudge in place, and individuates.

in the forge of an inhuman heatwave. I emphasise the hipjolt of each step, to simulate the rocking of the womb, as if I knew. My crude technique appears to do

It feasts on edges, architraves and jambs, the skirting boards of portals, vistas, stairs – the sinews of a monochrome Matisse above the couch – a rim of tortoiseshell

the trick – that glassy stare, as though he hailed from a pond of jellied frogspawn, his visa from the commonwealth of zonk. I am a roving gum, and this koala is my son. His pupils rowing

that clasps a lens – jawlines, bevels, hems. Collecting motley verges, most of all, it relishes the glinting blade of gold that flashes in the gaps between the blinds

back toward the main, weary of their cargo, shove off their oars and drift onto a eucalyptus reef, as curbside fuchsias, wilting in a kiln of scorching bitumen, collapse in heaps

(a second birth, a scimitar aflame, that fattens on each careless ghost of wind) – as if it knew the brilliant strip contained some future proof technology for life.

of silk and taffeta upon the street like lurid ballerinas on the nod, the victims of a batch of iffy pills. Back home, some Bach to help us both relax, Partita No. 2 but on the lute – and as

The leavings of a star have cast this spell, summoning blood and chlorophyll – and so, the summer of his birth, I find myself orbiting the block, hammering our bond

the plucked notes run, I learn to count the cost my gaze extracts – how every glance beseeches him to concentrate on me, the toll it takes to hew a face from scratch and animate the world.

Jaya Savige

Jaya Savige’s new collection, Change Machine, will be published by University of Queensland Press in 2020. 34 A U S T R A L I A N B O O K R E V I E W J U N E – J U LY 2 0 2 0

Fiction

Instincts

Reluctant road trip

Rosalind Moran

Chloë Cooper

A novel exploring the riskiness of motherhood

An absorbing first novel

Fauna

State Highway One

Allen & Unwin $29.99 pb, 310 pp

Hachette $32.99 pb, 352 pp

by Donna Mazza

hile having a child is an act of hope and joy for many, it is also risky. One can heed expert advice, prepare, even throw money at the endeavour,but there is no guarantee that the creation or nurturing of a child will go as planned. In Donna Mazza’s Fauna, motherhood is riskier than ever. Set in the near future, the novel explores the impact of experimental genome-editing technologies on individuals, families, and the question of what it means to be human. The protagonist, Stacey, desperate for another child, is recruited by genetics company LifeBLOOD® to carry, birth, and raise a child who is biologically hers and her husband’s, but whose cells have also been blended with Neanderthal DNA. The story follows Stacey as she nurtures a child who is ‘human enough for her’ but never human enough for society. Unlike Mazza’s first novel, The Albanian (2007) – a work of historical realism – Fauna is speculative fiction. Mazza has clearly researched Neanderthals and de-extinction technologies in writing this novel; her weaving of science into the story is compelling. Fauna is striking for how it humanises ethical issues present in technological advancements. The novel is above all about family, and about the human cost of granting life within morally opaque parameters – and motherhood is still an underexplored lens through which to write speculative fiction. In this sense, Fauna is reminiscent of recent acclaimed Australian fiction such as Alice Robinson’s The Glad Shout (2019), a cli-fi novel noteworthy for its focus on mothers and children. Fauna is also topical for its exploration of power and control, especially in the context of women’s bodies. Privacy invasion becomes a strong theme as Stacey and her family grow increasingly aware of LifeBLOOD®’s invasive presence. Vital information is strategically, unethically withheld, and rights are unwittingly signed away. Fauna is a gripping novel that raises thought-provoking questions. Granted, it falls short on characterisation, with Stacey’s husband and her two ‘normal’ children slotting into the familiar moulds of well-meaning blokey husband, smart daughter, and outdoorsy son. Perhaps this is partly indicative of the protagonist’s limited perspective: Stacey’s relationship with her youngest daughter is all-consuming, as is her desire to protect her. This desire is instinctive; even animalistic. In love, we are all fauna. g Rosalind Moran is a writer of fiction, non-fiction, poetry, satire, and reviews. ❖

by Sam Coley

n this absorbing first novel – which won the 2017 Richell Prize for Emerging Writers – Sam Coley tells the story of Alex, a young Aucklander who returns home from abroad after the sudden death of his parents. Alex and his estranged twin sister, Amy, set off on a reluctant road trip through New Zealand to reconnect with each other and their home country. Moving backwards and forwards in time, the novel shifts between the present-day road trip and Alex’s memories of his early life. Through these shifts, we discover a childhood filled with privilege but rife with emotional neglect. Left by their famous film-director parents to largely to raise themselves, the twins develop an uneasy relationship, one full of jealousy and tension. As the pair journeys together, their deeply flawed characters are revealed and longstanding wounds start to fester.

The novel shifts between the present-day road trip and Alex’s memories of his early life Amy, bossy and self-assured, has always been the dominant twin; she thrives on ordering others around. In contrast, Alex is deeply unsettled and easily bruised by his sister’s actions. Alex’s deep loathing for his family is clear from the beginning when, three years prior to his parents’ deaths, he hurriedly leaves New Zealand for an internship in Dubai, bitterly cutting off all contact with his parents and sister in the process. It is not until the end of the novel that the catalyst for this act becomes apparent, but Coley peppers the narrative with just enough hints to make State Highway One a suspenseful page-turner. With each step in the long journey, Alex’s emotional and mental states start to unravel, and Amy begins to show a long-hidden tenderness towards her brother. Coley masterfully crafts Alex’s distress and reveals just enough history to make the narrative both believable and utterly compelling. The book is, at its heart, about repressed grief, trauma, and the ties that bind us. Humorous, insightful, and ultimately affecting, State Highway One unpicks the uneasy nature of family and the difficulty of escaping your past. g Chloë Cooper is a Brisbane-based freelance writer, a contributing editor at Peppermint magazine, and a bookseller at Avid Reader bookshop. A U S T R A L I A N B O O K R E V I E W J U N E – J U LY 2 0 2 0

Calibre Essay Prize

Reading the mess backwards by Yves Rees

hen I’m ten or so, my brother appears shirtless at the dinner table. Ever the eager disciple, I follow his example without a second thought. It is a sweltering January day, and our bodies are salt-crusted from the beach. Clothing seems cruel in these conditions. As my brother tucks into his schnitzel, tanned chest gleaming, I grow conscious that the mood has become strained. Across the table, my parents exchange glances. The midsummer cheer of recent evenings is on hold. I look down. Two small nubs peak from my rib cage, barely the beginnings of breasts. My torso is white and soft, a reptile’s underbelly to my brother’s hard brown exoskeleton. I realise: this chest of mine does not belong in public. It is somehow obscene, something to be hidden rather than flaunted. My brother and I differ in this crucial respect. Excusing myself, I flee upstairs and don a T-shirt. Back at the table, there is a palpable sense of relief. Chatter resumes. All is well with the world. When I am eleven, I cut my hair. The yellow river that poured down my back is snipped onto the white tiles of the David Jones salon. It’s a massacre of blonde. In the mirror, a new person emerges. Strong jaw, sceptical gaze, broad cheekbones no longer softened by a gold mane. Nothing feminine to see here. Here I am, fresh from the chrysalis of girlhood. On the way out of DJs, Mum and I browse the children’s clothing department. In the boy’s section, the racks of navy blazers speak of an entire world, one where urbane flâneurs stroll through some nameless European metropolis. I want one. I fondle the silk lining, inhaling its promises. Here is all I cannot have. That year, I graduate from family beach cricket to my very own team. Dad had been a star wicketkeeper before a car accident put paid to his dreams of a sporting career, while my brother is a Zeus on any sporting field. Now it’s my turn. In the absence of a local girls’ team, I join a boys’ club. I acquire the regulation cricket whites, and the whole family sinks into the rhythm of mid-week trainings and endless Saturday mornings beside a sun-bleached oval. I am bemused when the coach’s wife, febrile with good 36 A U S T R A L I A N B O O K R E V I E W J U N E – J U LY 2 0 2 0

intentions, assures me that I am accepted alongside the boys. Why wouldn’t I be? I know where I belong. It soon emerges that I’m an abysmal fielder (too afraid of the ball), a middling-to-poor batsman, but a dab hand as a bowler. Word gets round at school, and soon the Year Six boys allow me into their lunchtime matches. The day the invitation comes to open the bowling, I abandon my orange Sunnyboy and girl posse like so much trash. I’m one of the boys now. One day after cricket training, I’m at the supermarket with Dad. We’re playing our favourite game: a competition to greet the most people we know. Not surprisingly, my father – a middleaged professor – always trounces me, the shy pre-pubescent. The contest is rigged, but I love it anyway. This afternoon, as we wheel the trolley to the car, Dad pauses to chat with a colleague. ‘It’s lovely to meet your son,’ she says. I see myself: cropped hair, blue shorts, white crewneck. My second skin. Does this equal boy? Dad laughs awkwardly. ‘This is Annie, she’s going to high school next year.’ In the car going home, neither of us speaks. That summer, my brother grows muscle, stubble, pimples. He starts sleeping until noon, and his sentences become barnacled with expletives. I am left behind. Frantic to catch up, I understudy his new role like a pro. I learn to make Warhammer sets, then listen to Jack Johnson on repeat. Next I buy a skateboard, spending afternoons cruising the foreshore in my cargo pants. I never manage any tricks, but my first online handle is sk8ergirl88. At high school, I learn that I am wrong. ‘Why do you have a boy’s haircut?’ the Year Eight boys jeer. A girls’ cricket team starts, and I join, but soon miss the boys’ easy camaraderie. Within a season, I abandon the sport for good. The nubs on my chest turn into pillows, and overnight I become fat. My body is both too little and too much. Then I discover the answer: stop eating. My lunchtime sandwiches, oily with salami and swiss cheese, are replaced by a green apple, consumed in birdlike mouthfuls. I jog to and from class. Sometimes, as

a special treat, I nibble a single rye crispbread. By summer, my shoulder blades jut out sharp and proud, trophies that proclaim my labours to the world. I sunbake facedown at the ocean baths, revelling in the dull pain of hipbone against concrete. Breasts disappear and periods dry up. I am right again. Or am I? ‘She’s disgusting,’ mutter the boys clustered round the school gates. ‘We’re worried about you,’ the year adviser scolds me. Too much girl, not girl enough. I can’t get it right. At a sleepover, when giggles and teases became tickles and wrestling, a cold voice rings through the darkness. ‘Oh my God, you must be a lesbian!’ Hot with shame, I crawl back into my sleeping bag. Does tickling equal lesbian? I have no idea what lesbians do; I only know that they are wrong. Like me, again. When Year Twelve comes around, I fall into friendship with a fey scamp of a girl. She’s all freckles and puns, topped off with an encyclopedic knowledge of Agatha Christie. During study periods, we walk, brazen, out the school gates and gorge on gelato at an Italian café down the road. On stormy afternoons the beach calls. We throw ourselves about in the rough surf for hours then sit shivering over hot chocolates. I have never felt so right. As final exams approach, we shop for formal dresses. Her choice is a cheongsam-inspired gown, black with red panelling, a daring creation found at the city’s first designer store. I can’t wait to be seen beside her on the night. Next week in class, a message is conveyed: Sam – charming Sam, secret crush of all the girls – wants her as his date. At the formal, I sit alone and miserable as Sam twirls her on the dance floor, black dress flaring just as I’d imagined. My friend is giddy with joy, but everything is wrong. Wrong casting, wrong lines, wrong me. With my strapless aqua gown, I am no match for besuited Sam. The blazer has won again. It’s the early 2000s in an oversized town populated by redundant steelworkers and their surfer sons. The streets are dense with empty shops, and a frothy cappuccino is the height of sophistication. ‘Gay’ is an accusation, not an identity. ‘Trans’ means only the drag queens teetering across the outback in Priscilla, Queen of the Desert. ‘Diversity’ is the occasional Greek surname, or the solitary pair of Hong Kong-born sisters at school. Beneath the vacant blue skies that keep us ‘relaxed and comfortable’, my unruly body has desires I cannot name. Only at the beach, where the world is water and light, do I slip free from the wrongness that stalks me into each new scene. ‘How to explain, in a culture frantic for resolution, that sometimes the shit stays messy?’ writes Maggie Nelson in The Argonauts (2015). In her telling, the ‘born in the wrong body’ trans narrative obscures the fact that many belong in the messy middle, forever betwixt and between. When your gender is a dog’s breakfast, how do you know whether this is your own mess or the world’s? Was I always trans, part boy beneath my skin, or did I land in a place where ‘girl’ was a container so small it could break your bones? The pallid feminism dished up in the Howard era told us that ‘girls can do anything’.They can be athletes, they can be doctors, they can run a business. They can even be prime minister. (That didn’t

work out so well.) To be a feminist, I learn, is to challenge and grow what ‘woman’ can contain. You want to skate like your brother? Great, you’re a feminist. You want short hair? Feminist gold star for you. But my guilty secret is that ‘woman’ never feels like home. I don’t want to be a ball-breaking superwoman, smashing glass ceilings with my shoulder-pads, while my husband tends the stove. I want that David Jones blazer and the body to fill it out. Why, indeed, would any child embrace ‘woman’ when they are the seeming losers, the victims, the Penelopes who get left behind? The men in my life are the ones who jet off on international business trips, eat meals cooked by others, have their sexual currency increase with age. My father moves to a beachside apartment with his coiffed new wife, while my mother inflates with grief. She dishes up mid-week spag bol and watches reruns of The Bill; he buys a Bose sound-system and quaffs pinot noir against a backdrop of 1980s synth jazz and Japanese cologne. In the battle of the sexes, I know who will win every time. Yet make no mistake: for all my cricketing exploits, I am no rough-and-tumble tomboy, running riot with the lads. That ‘born in the wrong body’ conviction is never mine. My shit is messier than that. For all that my aesthetic signals ‘boy’, I am the quiet child who gravitates towards books and make-believe – sedate, acceptably feminine pastimes. I have Barbies and I like them. Most days, it’s not so hard to pass as female. Without a language to express this mess, I leave my body behind. I smother its unruly desires beneath textbooks, prizes, degrees. Photographs are to be avoided at all costs. Shopping is an exercise in drag. I buy the dresses, the skirts. I go through the motions of performing ‘girl’. I even go on dates when men ask me, halfamused they can’t see through the farce. I learn that a ready smile and a sympathetic ear are the only props required to impersonate a woman. The performance becomes so familiar I almost forget that it’s staged. There are only occasional moments of rupture. Talk of marriage, breast fondling, beauty salons, being called ‘Miss’ – all induce revulsion and panic. At one big white wedding in Greece, I spend the reception shaking in the toilets while the other guests dance in raucous circles. There’s only one possible explanation: it must be all my mother’s fault. Wasn’t she supposed to have taught me how to be a woman? Her blunt style and aversion to fashion and makeup must be the reason why I lack some essential understanding of femaleness. If only I had a different mother, a mother who wore mascara and kitten heels, I would have learnt the passwords, the secret handshake. Or so I tell myself. The day before my brother’s wedding, Mum and I drive to a beauty salon for obligatory mani-pedis, a bonding exercise with the bride-to-be and the women of her clan. ‘How does it work? I’ve never done this before,’ Mum proclaims on arrival, announcing her ignorance for all to hear. She doesn’t even know to be ashamed, to see that she’s failed femininity and failed me in the process. I turn to ice and refuse to look at her. In the car going home, arms crossed, I spit out her shortcomings, one by one. Anger provides a refuge from confusion and fear. A U S T R A L I A N B O O K R E V I E W J U N E – J U LY 2 0 2 0

The next day, I watch my first YouTube make-up tutorial. Maybe I can acquire the secret handshake elsewhere. But I don’t go back to a beauty salon for years. Without Mum on hand to play the naïf, surely my own ignorance would be obvious. I can’t afford to be unmasked in the citadel of womanhood.

When your gender is a dog’s breakfast, how do you know whether this is your own mess or the world’s? Through it all, I keep myself small and lean. No womanly curves, the merest hint of breasts, muscular quads – androgyny to the max. When I’m not studying I’m exercising; either living in my mind or keeping my body under wraps. Cake, ice cream, chocolate are all verboten. Even alcohol is suspect: too many empty calories. Feminism tells me this is patriarchy in action: women are not allowed to have large bodies that claim space. My body regulation is surely just another artefact of a sexist world. Yet it isn’t size I fear so much as hips, buttocks, and breasts, those expanses of flesh that scream ‘woman’ to the world. No J.Lo booty for me, however toned. Heroin chic is more my style. Deep into my twenties, the wrongness persists, unnamed and unnameable, my constant friend. Words are my instruments, language my drug of choice, but something festers beneath the surface of what can be seen and known. Unnamed, unnameable. Until one day, I look at my reflection and see a man staring back at me. It’s Saturday night and I’m slumped against the window of a swaying train, returning home from the city. The reflective glass shows someone familiar. Strong jaw, sceptical gaze, broad cheekbones. Unquestionably male. A second later, he’s gone. I yearn to run after him, as though after a childhood friend glimpsed in a crowd. In his place I see only a sad simulacrum of a woman, with wonky lipstick and a wig-like mane. She huddles into her coat, face pinched and hungry. Six months later, at an airport far from home, my Kindle suggests a novel: Nevada by Imogen Binnie. On the plane, I race through the virtual pages. It’s a trans remake of the classic American road story. Our hero is a trans woman on the run from New York, who befriends a young man questioning his gender deep in the Wild West. The youth confesses to fantasies of having sex as a woman, known as autogynephilia. I pause, jolted into unwilling recognition. Squashed into my plane seat, I remember all the times I imagined myself with a penis, penetrating a woman. Later Google will tell me this is autoandrophilia, a condition controversially associated with ‘transsexualism’. Back home, I disintegrate into a ‘major depressive episode’, a collapse that once would have been more poetically termed a nervous breakdown. One grey day, in the car with Mum, I stutter a confession. ‘I’m concerned about my gender. I read a book about trans people and I recognised some things.’ She’s distracted, preoccupied by traffic, focused on keeping me alive. ‘I wouldn’t worry about that. Let’s just get you home, have 38 A U S T R A L I A N B O O K R E V I E W J U N E – J U LY 2 0 2 0

some lunch.’ My words have skated off the surface of the moment, as though they’d never been. Later, she’ll have no memory of this conversation. A year passes. One day I wake up, alone in British Columbia after a night experimenting with local cannabis, with a pronouncement flashing across my mind. ‘Wearing women’s clothes is drag. You’re not really a woman.’ By midday, I sport a new tattoo to mark the occasion. From there, the mess unspools, unravelling in all directions. It starts slowly. I bundle my dresses into a bag in the back of my wardrobe. I abandon the lipstick, the earrings, the mascara. My high heels sit unworn. Slowly I am less girl. Slowly I am more me. The next step induces terror. Late one Friday evening, when the masses have gone home to their wine and Netflix, I feign a casual stroll into the men’s section of Kmart. I’m soon deep in a khaki forest of shirts and slacks, breathing quick and shallow, stomach clenched, mind on high alert for the inevitable voice shooing me away. Grabbing clothes at random, I scurry into the fluorescent changeroom like a criminal, only to discover that nothing fits my woman’s frame. Even after months of push-ups, my shoulders are dwarfed by the wingspan of a men’s XS shirt. I’m reduced to a child in his father’s clothing. Absurd. Internet research leads me to a store that specialises in slim-fit men’s shirts, a favourite of the Asian students who animate the inner city. While interstate for a conference, I muster my courage and venture into the tiny boutique. I’m immediately assailed by three shop assistants. No other customers in sight. The staff assess me with cold eyes, sizing up their prey. Avoiding their gaze, I sidle up to the racks. ‘So what can we help you with? Are you looking for a gift?’ ‘No, for me.’ ‘For you? A new look?’ She asks, with thinly veiled scorn. I nod inconclusively, mute, eyes fixed on the clothes. Several minutes of searching rewards me with three shirts that might just possibly fit. Plain white, navy, checks. I can picture him, the man from the train window, bringing them to life. ‘Could I please try these on?’ I whisper. I’m shown to a cubicle in the middle of the store. It’s a blank box, no mirror inside. There’s only a communal mirror next to the registers. ‘Don’t you have any other changerooms?’ Of course they don’t. I cannot stomach the humiliation of three assistants gawking while I try on shirts that will, most likely, sit all askew on my puny woman’s frame. I cannot let them see my awkward, most intimate desires. I thrust the shirts at the closest assistant and flee into the roar of Broadway. Empty-handed, again. A whisper in my ear tells me that testosterone would be the solution. Within a few months, my shape would change, I’d begin to approximate the man I saw in the train window. The shirts would begin to fit. My psychologist, a specialist in gender identity, can barely conceal his impatience with my reluctance to grasp this lifeline. For him, gender dysphoria = transgender = hormone replacement therapy. Simple. Problem solved, fixed by the miracle of modern medicine. ‘Transitioning to male is easy, really,’ he tells me. ‘The tes-

tosterone can work wonders and you just gain male privilege.’ terone that annihilates all doubt. It lasts maybe twenty seconds, If only it were so straightforward. a minute at most. On Instagram I find other creatures like me. Following the For the most part, I belong not in the M camp or the F camp hashtags – #FTM, #transmasc, #TransformationTuesday – takes but in the murky middle – or more accurately on a different plane me down a rabbit hole into a land of second becomings, of AFABs altogether, one where we’re all just bodies, living and dying, in (assigned female at birth) remaking infinite, marvellous configurations. themselves into the muscled, bearded The struggle is to craft that gender in mammals we call men. Hours disembodied form, to somehow fashion flesh appear in a blur of gym selfies and and blood that confounds the gender binabefore-and-after pics. An infinite sery, that refuses to be categorised as F or M. quence of washboard abs, of tattooed Most days, that task seems impossible. chests (to hide the top-surgery scars), A trans blog suggests a solution of arms padded with muscle to distract for my fashion woes: boy’s clothes. from the lingering, ineradicable curvature ‘Male’ clothes in smaller sizes, at half of a female pelvis. The holy grail is a V-tathe price. The only trouble is the endper: the triangular torso, with shoulders less dinosaur and robot prints. Not to wider than hips, that our world equates mention the dearth of brands that go with ‘man’. beyond a boys’ size 8, which is too small There is so much here to lust after and even for me. so much more to critique. Is this chiselled I finally hit the jackpot at Zara heft the only alternative to the cage of Boys, a calm oasis upstairs from womanhood? This is a monoculture of the frenetic women’s section. The choice synthetic maleness, reeking of beer, leathis limited – half the size of the pink and er, and sweat. I yearn for that jawline, that sparkly girls’ section – but at least the flat chest, but balk at the narrowness, the aesthetic is neutral, classic, with blessedly endless reproduction of normative heterofew robots. I scour the selection for white masculinity. Where are the dandies, the shirts, T-shirts, chinos, a navy blazer – all fops, the besuited gentlemen, and the the while trying to project the image of scrawny artists? After months gorging on a mother shopping for her son. Totally Yves Rees (photograph by Susan Papazian) the images, I am queasy, overfull. Every normal, nothing to see here. selfie begins to look the same. The change-room mirrors reveal that In truth, despite what the psychologist’s questionnaires tell me, I’m a perfect boys’ size 12. Shirts, pants, jackets – they all fit. I’m no more M than F. I’m not a man trapped in a woman’s body; Finally, the man from the train smiles back at me, suave in a I’m a trans person flailing around on this strange binary earth. blazer that could have been tailored for him. Twenty years after Transmasculine, not male. Neither side of the gender binary our first encounter, the boys’ blazer is now mine to take home. It feels like home. has silk lining, interior pockets, and fits like a glove. My fear is that testosterone would merely transport me from And that just might be enough, for now. g the F camp into the M – which, from the outside, seems riven with random violence, all hard fists and swallowed tears. I couldn’t Yves Rees is a writer and historian living on unceded Wurundsurvive there. After thirty-one years in a female body, fear of men jeri land. At present, Yves is a Lecturer in History at La Trobe is implanted deep in my cells. I can no longer live as a woman, University and co-host of the history podcast Archive Fever. Yves but nor can I bear to be banished to the parallel universe of men. has published widely across Australian gender, economic, and My shit will stay messy, I can tell. transnational history, and also writes on transgender identity And yet. When I catch up with a transmasc acquaintance and politics. Yves is a regular contributor to ABC Radio and deep in the second puberty of transition, the whiff of their new The Conversation, and their work has appeared in Australian Book teenage-boy sweat has me reeling, suckerpunched by envy. In Review, Overland, Guardian Australia, Inside Story, and Archer that moment, I’m overcome by want, a raw hunger for testos- magazine. This essay won the 2020 Calibre Essay Prize.

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Language

Coronaspeak

Tracking language in a pandemic Amanda Laugesen

he Covid-19 pandemic has affected all our lives, and little else has featured in the media for weeks. Unsurprisingly, this has led those of us who work with words to track the language of the pandemic (coronaspeak) closely. Here at the Australian National Dictionary Centre (temporarily WFH, of course), we have been compiling a database of the words emerging from the pandemic; from anti-lockdown protest to zumping (being dumped via Zoom), the Covid-19 isolation lockdown has generated its own vocabulary. The Oxford English Dictionary team recently undertook corpus analysis to look at how the Covid-19 pandemic has affected the language, drawing on English-language sources from across the globe. This analysis, as might be expected, shows the enormous increase in the frequency of mentions of coronavirus and Covid in the past few months. It also reveals that in March 2019 the top twenty keywords were all coronavirus-related, the top five being Covid-19, pandemic, distancing, coronavirus, and self-isolate. The language generated by the pandemic and responses to it reflects different aspects of the experience. Most notably, perhaps, there is the technical, medical, and public health vocabulary with which many of us have become familiar, such as PPE, viral load, super spreader, cluster effect, community transmission, reproduction number, suppression phase, and, of course, flattening the curve. Linguist Tony Thorne, who has been collecting examples of coronaspeak, talks about this as the ‘medicalisation’ of our everyday language. While it might seem that these terms are transparent, they can have complex histories and meanings. An example of this is social distancing, which has prompted some debate as to whether it is the right term to use: should we call it ‘social’ or in fact ‘physical’ distancing? The term social distancing has its origins in sociology and psychology, and is used in terms of one’s relationships to members of an outgroup; in this sense, it has nothing to do with keeping your physical distance. The language of lockdown, quarantine (quazza), and isolation (iso) has also generated a range of words, mostly relating to what we are doing, eating, or drinking: for example, coronacuisine, driveway drinks, iso-baking (and various other ‘iso’ activities), quarantini, and zoombombing. Panic buying, which was such a phenomenon at the beginning of the shutdown, has led to panic buyer’s remorse as well as a variety of hashtags used on social media, mostly relating to the toilet-paper buying panic, such as #toiletpapergate. Tony Thorne identifies several themes aside from the ones already mentioned. He notes a category of words that relate to ‘describing the new realities’ that includes such words as coronaverse, quarantimes, coronapocalypse, and coronanoia. Another category that Thorne identifies is words relating to the security/safety measures we are taking: these include elbump (for the elbow bump), coronadodge (swerving to avoid passers-by), and corona-shaming. Slang terms have featured, as we try to adapt to yet another ‘new normal’. Some are mentioned above. Thorne has collected other amusing ones, including the rhyming slang Miley Cyrus 40 A U S T R A L I A N B O O K R E V I E W J U N E – J U LY 2 0 2 0

(virus), doomscrolling (obsessively reading online news), coronacranky, and covidiot (a variant of this: morona). The language of the coronavirus has been largely a global one, but some Australianisms also feature in the vocabulary of Covid-19: abbreviations such as iso, quazza, rona, and sanny/sanno (for sanitiser) have proven popular, and the coronavirus has even been dubbed the cozza. We have seen talk of yob-dobbing and ronadobbing, and discussions about how to restart the NRL saw mention of a possible NRL Island.

Here at the ANDC we have been compiling a database of the words emerging from the pandemic ... the Covid-19 isolation lockdown has generated its own vocabulary Yet while coronaspeak has been mostly globally shared, we have also seen localised attempts to mobilise language. Prime Minister Scott Morrison, in particular, has invoked the Anzac spirit and Team Australia as ways of trying to inspire the population to support control measures and restrictions. The Anzac spirit was recently evoked in the bushfires and attests to the ongoing importance of Anzac to our national identity and political rhetoric. Paul Daley, in a recent piece in the Guardian, cautioned against such an invocation of Anzac. Other countries have compared the pandemic to a war and have called for wartime spirit in combating it, but such language has its dangers. Team Australia, on the other hand, is a term of more recent vintage. It was popularised by Tony Abbott – the Australian National Dictionary Centre had it on the 2014 Australian Word of the Year shortlist – and has a likely origin in sport. It is perhaps not surprising that the prime minister, a sports fan, would invoke this term. It remains one worth watching closely, because it is clearly important to the way our politicians are engaging with, and attempting to shape, ideas of national identity. What factors have helped coronaspeak evolve? Obviously, some terms are descriptive of features of the pandemic, but we can see with, for example, slang terms, that they not only serve to describe aspects of our experiences but also help us come to terms with them. Slang functions to make the unfamiliar familiar and manageable. We’ve seen in previous times of crisis – notably wartime – the way in which language helps us manage the new realities we face. Social media has also played a role in this pandemic; hashtags in particular have been an essential way in which we as a community can share our concerns and anxieties – and try to cheer each other. Those of us interested in language will continue to monitor the language of the pandemic – as well as of the covexit – closely. It will no doubt continue to reveal something of our preoccupations and our anxieties. g Amanda Laugesen is a historian and lexicographer. She is currently the director of the Australian National Dictionary Centre (ANU) and Chief Editor of The Australian National Dictionary. Amanda has published widely in areas such as the social and cultural history of war, book history, and the history of Australian English.

Commentary

Rights and responsibilities Literary journals and freedom of expression

by Robert Wood

number of recent political events in Australia will have enduring and wide-ranging impacts on freedom of expression in this country. They include the denial of access to archival papers concerning the Whitlam dismissal, which Professor Jenny Hocking detailed in the April 2020 issue of ABR. There are also mounting concerns about raids on and threats to journalists, especially the mixed decision in the High Court in April 2020 concerning Annika Smethurst and the possibility of charges against her. More recently, Peter Dutton has proposed changes that would give home affairs agencies more power to influence the circulation of information and the privacy of individual citizens. No less concerning are the closures of media outlets, including regional newspapers, BuzzFeed, Ten Daily, and AAP. Coupled with the non-funding of literary journals by the Australia Council, this points to a systematic attack on freedom of expression. Here, we might pause to note that freedom of expression, and more specifically of the press, is not simply a right that gives citizens the ability to say what they want. That is a limited, if prevalent, view. Freedom of expression includes the ability to share one’s thoughts in public, provided, of course, that they do not constitute hate speech. Freedom of expression is also a structural matter. It implies that we have a right to information and, to a lesser extent, an expectation of diversity in the ideas that circulate publicly. The lack of diversity of media ownership undermines freedom of expression precisely because it denies an oppositional voice within the established parameters of discourse. If we take this view of freedom of expression, it becomes our responsibility to hear many perspectives and to ensure that diverse voices are heard. This definition has consequences for how we should respond to the present challenges. It is not enough to say that we expect literary journals to receive funding. It is not enough to call for funding with a sense of outrage or entitlement. Writers and editors have been doing that since George Brandis’s funding cuts

in 2014, or going right back to the conception of the Australia Council fifty years ago. The sector also needs to re-articulate and influence the terms of debate precisely because of the political conditions in Australia today. Literary journals and arts publications don’t just contribute to the artistic excellence of the nation. They complement freedom of expression in the broadest sense of that term. This is where literature and criticism are distinct from painting or dance. The latter do, of course, play a role in expression; but the rights, expectations, and responsibilities weigh differently in language. This is where the non-funding of journals like Overland, Sydney Review of Books, and The Lifted Brow, and publications like eyeline, Artlink, and Art Monthly Australasia, must be looked at in the context of the disappearance of country newsrooms, the death of online reporting outlets, raids on journalists, the denial of archival access, and changes to the privacy of citizens. When it comes to writing specifically, this is part of a wider discussion about access to information, the right to press diversity, the concentration of media, regional representation, and the professional rights of writers, critics, and editors. Here, our allies are not only fellow literary journals and arts publications but also the Media and Entertainment Arts Alliance, unemployed reporters and other media staff, and a range of those who work in language itself and are under pressure including casuals and sole traders. The decision to deny funding to ABR is a blow to the publication itself but also part of a wider culture war that does a disservice to everyone. It undermines one of the pillars of the nation – freedom of expression, which means the circulation of ideas that allow our democracy to encourage citizens to be the best version of who they are. g Robert Wood is Chair of PEN Perth and is interested in media ownership, minority languages, and decarceration. He is the author of three books, and has held fellowships at Columbia University and the University of Pennsylvania. ❖ A U S T R A L I A N B O O K R E V I E W J U N E – J U LY 2 0 2 0

Surveillance

Techlash

Examining data privacy Alex Tighe

Net Privacy: How we can be free in an age of surveillance by Sacha Molitorisz

NewSouth $34.99 pb, 368 pp

pare a thought for the other existential crises. Remember climate change? Wealth inequality? The rising tide of fascism? Then there’s our newest apocalypse: bad technology. When we look back, the three years from late 2016 to early 2020 will go down as the time the scales fell from our eyes. Maybe the devices we have insinuated into nearly every moment of our lives had their own aims for us all along – our time, our attention, our outrage. In 2018, the runner-up for the Oxford Dictionary’s word of the year was ‘techlash’: ‘A strong and widespread negative reaction to the growing power and influence of large technology companies, particularly those based in Silicon Valley.’ If we are writing a history, that reaction began in earnest with the Cambridge Analytica scandal in March 2018, the revelation that a private company with a background in cyber-war psychological operations was now weaponising Facebook data to sway voters (most notably in the Brexit vote and the Trump election, both whisker-thin results). In the years since we have heard former Silicon Valley executives say that they would never allow their kids to use tech products; we have seen unprecedented scrutiny of tech giants from both journalists and regulators. In 2019, Facebook was fined US$5 billion by the American consumer watchdog, an amount two hundred times the size of the previous record fine. We saw, if not accountability, the beginnings of it. Then the pandemic hit, and the tech giants responded ... well? Microsoft was one of the first big companies in the United States to have employees work from home. Twitter and Facebook, followed shortly by Google, began to promote the health messages from governments and the World Health Organisation. Apple and Google announced a science-fiction-like contact-tracing project to help suppress the spread of the virus, while Netflix, Amazon, YouTube, and Spotify have become some of our few remaining portals to culture. Stuck at home, people have been reminded of the genuine magic of technology: that from a distance it allows us to be with friends, family, loved ones. ‘Has Coronavirus Killed the Techlash?’ Wired magazine asked. ‘What Techlash?’ began a headline in The Information, ‘Virus Could Remake Industry Giants’ Image’. Spare another thought, then, for Sacha Molitorisz. His new book, Net Privacy, seizes on the moment just passed; it is a screed on how new technology alters our privacy that ends on a call for better regulation, to strike while the iron is hot. ‘The encouraging news is that the mood has shifted, and once moves for globally 42 A U S T R A L I A N B O O K R E V I E W J U N E – J U LY 2 0 2 0

aligned privacy protections take hold, momentum can build,’ he writes. His postscript is dated January 2020. Is it even worth reviewing Net Privacy? Perhaps, if only to point readers with limited time to books that are similar but better. Molitorisz sets as his goal the task of applying the philosophy of Immanuel Kant to questions of internet privacy – a noble aim, if you believe (as I do) that a large part of the misery in the world is owing to widespread ethical thoughtlessness. And yet it’s hard to figure out who Net Privacy is for. With its references to ‘relational privacy’ and ‘cosmoikopolis’, it is too academic for a general reader, but for readers already interested in internet privacy the book covers a lot of familiar ground. Someone drafting or enforcing privacy laws might be helped by the genuinely excellent literature reviews in the book, but when it comes to the actual question of applying ethical principles, Molitorisz is strangely hands-off. At the end of the book, he quotes Facebook’s new, post-Cambridge Analytica privacy commitment in full, and writes, ‘This is a concise and commendable statement of the value of privacy and the role of consent. It needs to be enforced.’

Maybe the devices we have insinuated into nearly every moment of our lives had their own aims for us all along As for similar books, the late 2010s produced a literature that both reflected and galvanised the resistance to bad tech. Foremost is Shoshana Zuboff ’s The Age of Surveillance Capitalism (2019), the most comprehensive look at the lucrative economics of data extraction and behavioural manipulation. Tim Wu’s The Attention Merchants (2016) situates digital advertising in the history of attention capture and resale, and James Williams’s Stand Out of Our Light (2018) reminds us exactly what we have to lose when that advertising overwhelms us. This year the Sydney Writers’ Festival (vale) was going to be headlined by Anna Wiener, whose Uncanny Valley (2020) is a spare and lucid first-person report from inside the moral vortex of Silicon Valley. The pandemic hasn’t exactly killed the privacy movement – privacy concerns are still alive. Zoom, the video conferencing company that jumped from ten million users last year to two hundred million in March, has been widely censured for data leakages and lax security. But the criticism hasn’t slowed Zoom’s growth; clearly, in the time of coronavirus, connection is seen as more important than control of our data. Yet it’s this false dilemma that fuelled the techlash in the first place. Connection and privacy: we can have them both. The other crises – climate change, fascism, inequality – will still be there on the other side of the pandemic. Our ability to deal with them will depend on our tech platforms, on our ability to focus and communicate and organise. Right now, the rest of our lives is in the same place our data privacy has been for years: we have very little control over either. When we emerge from the pandemic and reassert control over our offline lives, we ought to do the same, for the first time, over our online ones. g Alex Tighe is a writer and editor. He is the current ABR Rising Star for New South Wales.

Politics

Ambiguous Howard John Howard’s third term Lyndon Megarrity

Trials and Transformations, 2001–2004: The Howard government, Volume III edited by Tom Frame

UNSW Press $39.99 pb, 464 pp

ueensland MP Charles Porter’s book, The ‘Gut Feeling’ (1981), relates the story of former prime minister Billy Hughes being pressed in the 1940s to pass judgement on a Liberal Federal Council statement on an industrial issue. ‘No bloody good,’ he pronounced. ‘Not sufficiently ambiguous!’ If, as Hughes implied, ambiguity is a key virtue needed for political survival, then by 2001 the Howard Liberal–National Party Government appeared to have embraced it. Indeed, any objective analysis of the Howard era is fraught with difficulties because of these two factors: the verbal, unrecorded nature of some political incidents,and the emotive left-versus-right culture war that marked John Howard’s prime ministership (1996–2007). Trials and Transformations is the third in a projected series of four books on the Howard years edited by historian Tom Frame. Like its predecessors, it is the product of a conference in which academics, public servants, commentators, and former politicians were invited to discuss a specific time period in Howard’s term in office. Contributors have provided essays that cover the thirty-seven months between August 2001 and September 2004. A substantial proportion of the book discusses the Howard government’s reactions to the highly charged political atmosphere that developed during the latter half of 2001. Faced with the terrorist attacks on 9/11, the collapse of Australia’s second major airline, Ansett, as well as the beginning of a new wave of refugees seeking entry to Australia by sea, a majority of voters chose to re-elect Howard and his government in November 2001. While terrorist threats and Ansett’s misfortune captured much public attention at the time, it was the Howard administration’s approach to asylum seekers that became the most politically controversial aspect of the electoral campaign. To what extent did the Coalition attempt to use the divisive issue of ‘boat people’ to achieve their 2001 victory? If they did so, to what extent did such efforts have the desired effect? The answers to these questions are by no means clear. Certainly, when the government in October 2001 was given information suggesting that asylum seekers on the SIEV-4 vessel had thrown children overboard, Howard used this report to shore up his government’s image of being tough on the control of national borders: ‘I don’t want in this country people who are prepared, if those reports are true, to throw their children overboard.’ (The italicised clause appears thus in the book.) As the general public later discovered, the reports turned out to be false. Frame’s chapter on the scandal

attempts to separate fact from folklore, and comes to the unsatisfying but justifiable conclusion that We should not expect to find a document proving Howard [and other senior ministers] … were informed that the initial advice was incorrect before 10 November 2001 [i.e. the election date] and we should not imagine we will find another document showing they conspired to perpetuate the children overboard ‘lie’.

Elsewhere, Murray Goot suggests in his analysis of the 2001 election that Howard’s strident championship of sovereignty and an orderly immigration program was a crucial factor in redirecting One Nation voters back to the Coalition in marginal seats. However, while Pauline Hanson’s One Nation Party had become notorious for its racist stance on non-European immigration, the party’s poor organisation and bitter internal divisions may also have encouraged former One Nation supporters to switch their votes. As Frame points out, a clear understanding of the history of the Howard years is made more difficult by the strongly partisan journalism and books of the era, which were relentlessly critical of the regime and made little effort to present a balanced view of the administration. Howard’s preference for the ‘three cheers’ version of Australian history clashed sharply with the frequently more critical (and depressing) version of the past favoured by prominent left-wing commentators such as Robert Manne and Henry Reynolds. This may be why the relatively non-partisan ‘Discovering Democracy’ educational initiative, set up by the Howard government with the laudable aim of encouraging awareness of Australia’s political system among school children, is now largely forgotten. An excellent chapter on the topic, by Zareh Ghazarian and Jacqueline Laughland-Booÿ, may encourage historians to re-examine civics and citizenship in the Howard era. Kim Murray’s piece on national identity during the Howard years is another standout. The author reminds us that Howard built on, rather than created, the public fascination with Gallipoli as a symbol of Australian nationhood. Howard’s contention, however, that the World War I campaign was ‘the most defining event in our history’ relied on privileging the old-fashioned historical assumption that the ultimate test of ‘national character’ is war rather than the way we have achieved goals such as Federation without war. There are a couple of ways in which this book could have been strengthened and enhanced. First, the decision not to encourage a contributor to tackle the 2004 election and its immediate aftermath deprives the book of a sense of forward momentum and direction. Without a detailed understanding of the results of the 2004 election, the outcome of the political decisions and actions of the Coalition, Labor, and the minor parties between 2001 and 2004 is unnecessarily left up in the air. Second, a selection of relevant photographs would have increased readerly interest in the political events described in the text. Nevertheless, Trials and Transformations does what it aims to do. It provides an overview of the Howard government between 2001 and 2004 that will undoubtedly provide guidance for students and scholars seeking to explore this somewhat enigmatic period in Australian history. g Lyndon Megarrity is the author of Northern Dreams: The politics of Northern Development in Australia (2018). A U S T R A L I A N B O O K R E V I E W J U N E – J U LY 2 0 2 0

Literary Studies

Prodigal son

Conversations with readers and writers Dan Dixon

Spinoza’s Overcoat: Travels with writers and poets by Subhash Jaireth

Transit Lounge $29.99 pb, 288 pp

or some of us, love for a work of literature brings with it a desire to learn about the work’s gestation. All the literary theory in the world can insist that a piece of writing is not a question to which the author holds the answer, but whenever a book or poem or essay catches our interest, we want to know more about the person behind it. For Subhash Jaireth, this desire to comprehend the authors he loves, to imagine their inner lives and motivations, functions as an organising principle. Spinoza’s Overcoat gathers together Jaireth’s rigorously researched essays on writers and their work, all obvious products of passionate curiosity. These are Montaignesque essays, with a persuasive authorial presence, self-reflexivity, equivocations, and charming self-criticisms. Each essay nominally focuses on a particular author – Franz Kafka, Mikhail Bulgakov, Anne Carson, and Boris Pasternak, among others – but they usually open with some story of Jaireth’s past, before making excursions through biography and literary history and analysis. The book draws its authority from twin poles, shifting between a dependence on Jaireth’s extensive knowledge of his subjects and then examining his own feelings about them. Jaireth showcases an impressive level of expertise, and each essay constitutes a reflection on how he might balance a considered analysis of an author’s work and style with that love. The repeated grounding of these stories in Jaireth’s own life (his journey to a house in Paris where Russian poet Marina Tsvetaeva once lived; a visit to Bulgakov’s apartment; watching a video of famed Iranian poet Simin Behbahani’s funeral) reminds us of how our desire to not just read a writer but to feel as if we know them can be both a foundational pleasure of reading and a fool’s errand. ‘I feel,’ he writes, ‘as if I am looking for a home where I, the prodigal son, can return and find salvation.’ A literary translator and author of poetry, non-fiction, and fiction, Jaireth sometimes seems to be working in the discursive tradition of W.G. Sebald, who is quoted at length in the opening essay. There is a gentle ease to his writing, often conversational and speculative, although, unlike Sebald, there are flashes of excessive ornament and sentiment. Jaireth often figures writing as organic, a living thing. He imagines Behbahani writing one of his favourite poems: ‘like a loving mother, she would have groomed it carefully before it was ready to walk into the world’. He refers to her poems, which were self-censored to prevent ire from the Iranian regime, as ‘bruised 44 A U S T R A L I A N B O O K R E V I E W J U N E – J U LY 2 0 2 0

or maimed’. In one essay, Jaireth inhabits the perspective of Pasternak’s poem ‘Hamlet’, which operates as a kind of anthropomorphic vehicle through which to deliver insights into both the life of Pasternak and the texture and form of his poetry. In the title essay, Jaireth takes on the voice of Celan. Such fantasising is always risky, and it does at times sound strange to hear Celan speaking as if he had learnt about his life by trawling through his own archive, with various (and, to be fair, often fascinating) minutiae of the poet’s biography knocking up against each other for the sake of their having been found rather than for their enriching quality.

These are Montaignesque essays, with a persuasive authorial presence, self-reflexivity, equivocations, and charming self-criticisms The most striking thing about Spinoza’s Overcoat is the sense of insistent honesty, with Jaireth confessing every tender thought and self-doubt as he contemplates his attachments to these writers and attempts to make sense of their lives and legacies. Discussing a poem of Celan’s that is painted on a wall in Leiden, Jaireth writes, ‘I don’t want to believe that the editors went for a non- or less-confronting poem of Celan. “Todesfuge” (“Deathfugue”), his most well-known poem, was perhaps too long to fit on the wall. I’m sure it was too confronting as well.’ This remark typifies the frank hesitancy that underpins and links the essays. Jaireth wants to have faith in the editors’ intentions but recognises that they didn’t live up to his hope, each sentence tracking his train of thought. In the opening essay, Jaireth struggles with his own fury at the death of Kafka’s sister Ottla, who was murdered in Auschwitz, her fate partly attributable to Joseph, her non-Jewish husband, who didn’t try to help her flee the Nazis. Jaireth admits that, ‘For Joseph, as readers must have already guessed, I feel contempt. Yet I don’t know his side of the story. To blame him is quite convenient.’ Later, he concludes that, ‘To blame is easy. To feel compassion and to forgive is quite hard.’ Jaireth is contending with how we might stay true to the feelings we develop for those we know only by their writing or their being written about, while recognising that those feelings so often outpace what we can know. Throughout these essays, Jaireth is in two simultaneous conversations, one with the reader, the other with his subjects. The final essay, for example, addresses Canadian poet Anne Carson directly. He tells her, among other things, about the sadness he feels when reading poems in translation, his sense of loss, and wonders whether Carson feels the same. The wonder Jaireth describes is the curiosity upon which all reading is predicated, the space in which we ask the author unanswerable questions about who they really are and why they really write. Spinoza’s Overcoat rushes in as if to fill that space, wise enough to know it can’t quite. g Dan Dixon is an English academic who teaches at the University of Sydney. He writes about essays, politics, and American literature and culture. His work has appeared in The Guardian, Meanjin, The Sydney Review of Books, and Overland.

Biography

The Magnificent Mrs Mac Australia’s woman radio pioneer Jacqueline Kent

Radio Girl: The story of the extraordinary Mrs Mac, pioneering engineer and wartime legend by David Dufty

Allen & Unwin $29.99 pb, 302 pp

t first glance, this biography does not look especially compelling. Why should we want to know about Australia’s first woman radio pioneer? But David Dufty calmly and quietly shows why Violet McKenzie is well worth celebrating. From her earliest days, Violet, born in 1890, showed great flair for practical science. She became a high school maths teacher but was determined to study electrical engineering. She qualified, but her gender meant that she was refused admission to the university course and also to a technical college diploma. Meanwhile, her elder brother Walter had become an electrical engineer and was running his own business in Sydney. This was 1912: seduced by the new moving-picture craze, Walter had ploughed all his profits into a ‘flickergraph training school’, teaching people to operate cinema projectors. Unfortunately, Walter went broke and Violet, aged twentythree, used her savings from several years of teaching to buy him out, setting up her own electrical business, including a shop. After she successfully wired a suburban house, she was allowed to enrol in the diploma course, though not for a degree; she never received one. By the 1920s she was taking on large wiring projects and employing men; council inspectors grudgingly approved the quality of her work, though sometimes they told her she should be at home washing dishes. Violet’s career blossomed with the advent of radio, a communication revolution. She bought a range of small radio components, which she sold to enthusiastic ham radio operators in her shop. The word spread quickly and people came from all over Australia: Violet’s Wireless Shop became sensationally successful, the Apple shop of its day. She also saw advantages in helping women understand and use the new all-electric stoves that were gradually replacing gas cookers in many homes. Her All Electric Cookery Book, the first of its kind, adapted standard recipes for the new technology. It sold thousands of copies, even during the worst of the Depression. When war came again, Violet was a wealthy woman approaching fifty who did not need to work again. However, she set up a school to teach women Morse code, on which signals communication depended. Within six months she had one hundred and fifty students, later increased to five hundred women signallers. She taught them to send and receive Morse code to Royal Australian Air Force standard, as well as training them in the basics of electronics. Knowing that the RAAF was desperately short

of competent signallers, she offered it the services of ‘my girls’, but the Advisory War Council wouldn’t hear of that. They even tried, without success, to find retired male telegraphists so they wouldn’t have to hire women. An exasperated Violet approached the Royal Australian Navy, which was happy to have ‘her girls’ and which eventually employed them to teach Morse code to male cadets. The other services eventually followed suit; by the end of 1941 more than one hundred of Violet’s successful students were working as signallers. Astonishingly, Violet’s school was being run solely by volunteers, without any payment or subsidy from the Australian government. She was supported by the money she had made in business during the 1930s as well as by her husband, Cecil, an electrical engineer. By the end of the war, she had given signals instruction to almost 10,000 servicemen, from not only Australia but also from the United States, India, Britain, New Zealand, and China. Her work continued after the war. Between 1946 and 1953, almost everyone who became a qualified pilot in Australia – for Qantas, TAA, Ansett, and Butler Air Transport – was trained in signals by Violet’s school. It closed in 1955, but in other premises she continued to train merchant seamen. Violet gave up her school in the late 1950s. She died in 1982, and members of the Women’s Royal Australian Naval Service who had been students of ‘Mrs Mac’ formed a guard of honour as her coffin left the church. A poignant vignette illuminates Violet McKenzie’s character. In 1957 a young sailor struggling with Morse code was told she could help him, even though she had retired. They made no headway until she realised that he had dyslexia, a learning disorder that was hardly recognised at the time. After a lot of work, the sailor passed. (The whole episode could be a scene in a feature movie based on Violet’s life, possibly directed by Bruce Beresford.) Dufty tells Violet’s story matter of factly, without speculation or writerly flourishes: he does not engage with her inner life. This approach is appropriate for the biography of a woman who was, above all, practical rather than introspective. She dealt with male hostility and sexism by simply ignoring them. The project was the important thing. Second-wave feminists have tended to ignore the work of women in World War II, possibly because, like Violet, they worked alongside men without antagonism. (Dufty could have spent more time examining this.) But now we have biographies of Marie Curie, Ada Lovelace and her work on early computers, Rosalind Franklin and her work with Watson and Crick on DNA – not to mention the television series The Bletchley Circle. Our pioneer women scientists and technicians are at last coming into their own, and Radio Girl makes a significant contribution to this strand of women’s biography. A nice touch is the addition of the Morse alphabet and the translation of chapter headings into Morse code. g Jacqueline Kent is a Sydney-based writer of biography and other non-fiction. Her biography of the former prime minister, The Making of Julia Gillard PM (2010), has been updated and released as a Penguin Special, Take Your Best Shot. A U S T R A L I A N B O O K R E V I E W J U N E – J U LY 2 0 2 0

Memoir

A sevenfold whammy

questions and questions. The book quickens when a bushfire sweeps through the area and Jen’s house is destroyed. Hayley helps her to rebuild, and The burdens of self-doubt during these trying times they move in together. The new house is Susan Varga an improvement, but the long-drop loo remains, as does the dusty two-hour drive to town, the lack of a single shop, and a social life limited to fortnightly piss-ups at the mud-brick hall where ‘men with long beards’ and a few forlorn women gather. Will Hayley find a life there independent of her love for Jen? How many sacrifices do you make for love? Is there a niche for everyone, a ‘forever home’? Or are these things illusory when you Untethered are as deracinated as Katzen? by Hayley Katzen The next ten years are a seesaw of ups and downs. A flair for Ventura Press acting might be the way. Katzen writes and produces a play about $32.99 pb, 367 pp asylum seekers. She volunteers for the fire brigade. She tries to hat tethers you to your life? For most people it is the help Jen as much as she can on the farm while beating herself up filaments of connection – family, place, friends, work. for not having Jen’s innate country skills. Eventually, she settles Hayley Katzen becomes untethered in multiple on writing stories and essays, part of writing degree. The work ways in this engaging and highly readable book. Many will iden- absorbs her and the monthly writing group is a lifeline. Yet she tify with that period of life when you are technically a functioning clings to her concept of herself as someone who needs the stimadult, but there remains a long, long journey ahead to real adult- ulus of city life. Often, she is just plain lonely. Sometimes the reader gets impatient. Will this eternal selfhood. Katzen has a sevenfold whammy: a broken family life; the trauma of immigration; losing her Jewish heritage; discovering doubt ever end, or will it destroy her – and the reader’s interest? But the empathy we feel for her keeps us readherself as a lesbian; dropping out of a career; ing – that and her deepening understanding moving to the country; and falling in love with of the community she lives in. There are many an ‘unsuitable’ woman. vivid portraits: There is Jack, Jen’s devoted sideThis memoir could be classified under a kick at the farm. Jack has a gaggle of brothers, burgeoning genre: ‘How the hell did my life turn all unmarried, mostly illiterate, who speak out this way?’ But there is another deeper strand an impenetrable dialect called ‘Fletcher-ese’ that Katzen taps into: the eternal Ulysses quest by locals. There’s Nessy, the eighty-something to find meaning in the daily round of chores, writer of bush poetry whom Katzen befriends, commitments, contrary feelings, and pressures helping her to compile a last book before her of a life. death. And a neighbour, Terry, the self-builder Katzen’s restless mind doesn’t settle for easy whose dreamhouse in the bush takes so long that answers. She arrives in Australia after an ostensibly it destroys his marriage. privileged South African childhood. Her parents Hayley Katzen It is Jen who is the real spine of the book. divorce when Hayley is six. Her mother remarries, but the blended family is not a happy one. The death of her father She is grounded in the earth and has a wry wisdom expressed in a few well-chosen words. The great questions of life ping-pong when she is twenty-two catapults her to leave South Africa. In Australia, she finishes a law degree and is headed towards an between them, with Jen often providing an infuriating comacademic job. As a new lesbian, she enthusiastically embraces the mon-sense conclusion. Katzen provides some lovely insights along the way: ‘Perhaps subculture. But this is only a partial answer as to who she really is. partnerships could be just as resilient as landscapes?’ and ‘Was There are still lonely nights. Her mother and stepfather follow her, but the fissures in the my thinking – the expectations, resistance, beliefs and patterns family only grow deeper. She escapes Sydney to take up an academic – my prison rather than my life itself ?’ Yet she returns to doubt job in northern New South Wales. She finds new friends who talk and self-examination like an alcoholic to drink. This is where the her familiar talk of books and ideas. She has a contract to write book falters, forgetting that the reader has already got the point; a legal textbook. But the real journey begins when she meets Jen. rearticulating themes begins to irritate. Katzen’s writing has many strengths. She has an excellent ear Jen is eleven years older, country born and bred. Her sense of herself is strong. After teaching domestic science for a few years for dialogue and sensitive eyes for the small details of the bush. in the city, she threw it in and bought a marginal bush block. She She is fearless in tackling difficult subjects. In strong and revealing built herself a basic house and has led an almost subsistence life prose, she arrives at a hard-won sense of self. Being an outsider is actually a gift to a writer. Once Katzen accepts that, she will for twenty years; it is a life she loves. Despite or because of their total dissimilarities, the two be formidable. g women fall deeply in love. For some years they live separate lives, seeing each other every second weekend. The question is, can Susan Varga has written memoir, fiction, and poetry. Her most such different people make a life? Jen just accepts what is. Hayley recent book was the poetry collection Rupture (2016).

46 A U S T R A L I A N B O O K R E V I E W J U N E – J U LY 2 0 2 0

Memoir

Bailed out by luck

Woody Allen’s controversial memoirs Peter Craven

Take Two!

Australian Book Review is delighted to offer a range of joint subscriptions with other Australian literary journals. Apropos of Nothing by Woody Allen

Arcade Publishing $39.95 hb, 498 pp

hatever you think of Woody Allen, you will probably find his memoir, Apropos of Nothing, compelling. It’s likely to convince you that he didn’t molest his adoptive daughter Dylan all those years ago. The resurgence of this accusation, first aired in 1992, has caused such widespread concern that Hachette pulled this book because of vehement objections by Ronan Farrow, Allen’s biological son with Mia Farrow, sometime partner of Allen and the woman who accused him of molesting Dylan. This was in the wake of her discovery that Allen had begun a romance with Farrow’s twenty-one-year-old adoptive daughter Soon-Yi Previn, to whom he has been married since 1997. The immediate context was a widespread office rebellion at Hachette. In 2018, Dylan had gone on television attesting, Allen believes sincerely, to what he asserts is a false memory. The question of what Allen did to his seven-year-old daughter was exhaustively examined at the time. In 1993, two investigative teams concluded that the accusation was false and that there was a distinct possibility that Mia Farrow had coached Dylan. Nonetheless, in the wake of the #MeToo movement, Allen (director of umpteen films since What’s Up, Tiger Lily? in 1966) has struggled to have a new film distributed in America. This memoir shifts between telling the story of Allen’s life and leading his own defence against the ancient and none-too-credible charges that continue to jeopardise his professional life at a bizarrely late age. He claims that when he invites people to work with him some of them say, ‘I waited all my life for this phone call, and now I can’t take the job’ for fear they will be blacklisted. Apparently, Timothée Chalamet told Allen’s sister that his agent said it would be better to denounce Allen if he wanted to have a chance of winning an Oscar for his role in Call Me By Your Name. Allen says, ‘God forbid anyone should say, “This accusation has been thoroughly investigated and found to be untrue.” Although I’m told Joy Behar did make that point on TV. I should mention others who I’ve been made aware have come out publicly in my defense: Ray Liotta, Catherine Deneuve, Charlotte Rampling, Jude Law, Pedro Almodóvar, Alan Alda.’ It’s that kind of book: intensely repetitive, an old man’s book, perhaps born of a tape recorder, and seemingly different from the one Hachette was set to publish. The upshot is a rough, sometimes oddly affectless autobiography, though this in no way diminishes the authority of the work, the sense of conviction it carries, even

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though the overall effect is raw and garrulous. It has the unusual quality of sounding rambling and obsessive. Every so often, Allen indicates – despite a modesty that can seem pathological at times – just how much greatness he has had thrust upon him. Here he is, on his hero, Ingmar Bergman: I dined with Bergman and had a number of long phone conversations where we just gabbed … He was, I felt, the best filmmaker of my lifetime and he had the same fear I had. If he doesn’t know where to put the camera to make the most effective shot, how would I ever know? … Bergman invited me to his island a few times. But I always ducked it. I worshipped the guy as an artist, but … I’m not that dedicated.

There’s a lot of this stuff where he seems not to have got the tone quite right. What comes across overwhelmingly – if inadvertently, for he seems to derive little pleasure from it – is that Allen has been phenomenally successful for something like seventy years. When he was still at high school, he was earning as much writing jokes for New York newspapers as his mother was as a house cleaner. He rapidly graduated to writing scripts for the greatest television comedians in America, including Sid Caesar. Jack Rollins (whose name is to be seen among the producers in the closing credits of Allen’s movies) persuaded him to do stand-up despite his reservation about his abilities as a live performer. By 1965, at the age of thirty, he’d written What’s New Pussycat? for Peter O’Toole, Romy Schneider, and Peter Sellers. He was underwhelmed by the greatest comedian of his day and says absurdly of O’Toole – the man Alan J. Lerner wanted for the film of My Fair Lady – that he hadn’t learned how to do comedy. After Pussycat, he had total control over every film he directed. There are the early farces like Love and Death (1975), which are expert and pretty enchanting. He went through a couple of marriages – first to Harlene Rosen, a seventeen-year-old college girl with psychological problems, and then to the actress, Louise Lasser, who looked like Brigitte Bardot. In 1977 Allen made Annie Hall with his favourite actress, Diane Keaton. He emphasises that their romance was over by the time he made the picture, which won every Oscar in sight. This is the period of the mellow humane romantic comedies of which Manhattan (1979) is a poignant example, brilliantly shot by Gordon Willis, the Prince of Darkness (so called for his love of chiaroscuro), the cinematographer of The Godfather. Stardust Memories (1980), in which Allen takes a shower with Charlotte Rampling, is a kind of homage to Fellini’s 8 1/2. Broadway Danny Rose (1984) has Mia Farrow in a brilliant incarnation of a mafia moll. After this, the films become quite variable. He says that September (1987), with the great Elaine Stritch as Farrow’s mother, had all the qualities of Chekhov except his genius. It had in fact been anticipated in emulative impulse by Interiors (1978), with Geraldine Page, which is imitation Bergman, but Allen was gratified to hear that both John Gielgud and Ralph Richardson liked it. He says he was appalled to have to replace Gielgud as the narrator of the mock-doco Zelig (1983) because of his grandeur, and that he must be the only director on earth to have removed 48 A U S T R A L I A N B O O K R E V I E W J U N E – J U LY 2 0 2 0

Vanessa Redgrave from a film because what he shot with her did not tally with the rest of the film. The account of Mia Farrow’s systematic attack on Allen and the alleged curdling of her daughter’s memories is convincing and makes you think that Alan Dershowitz is right when he says that we live in an age of trial by accusation. This is a likeable, ramshackle, almost amateur book by a genius who has almost successfully convinced the world that he’s a schlemiel. He comes across as an honest man, without vanity about his talent or much else. The jokes are hit and miss, but I liked the stories about how Judy Davis was such a great actress that he never dared say more than hello and goodbye to her. And this book has the irresistible charm of its cold-eyed ironies. ‘How would I sum my life?’ he says. ‘Lucky. Many stupid mistakes bailed out by luck. My biggest regret? Only that I’ve been given millions to make movies and I’ve never made a great film.’ After such knowledge, every kind of forgiveness. He even jokes about his misfortunes and the last American election. ‘Hillary Clinton wouldn’t even accept Soon-Yi’s and my donation to her campaign for President and we couldn’t help wondering if another $5,400 to spend would have enabled her to carry Pennsylvania, Michigan or Ohio.’ g Peter Craven writes regularly for both the Fairfax and Murdoch press about literature, film, television, and theatre. He won the Pascall Prize in 2004. Memoir

Sweet Man

Unriddling a mercurial father Tali Lavi

Daddy Cool: Finding my father, the singer who swapped Hollywood fame for home in Australia by Darleen Bungey

‘“I

Allen & Unwin $32.99 pb, 231 pp

must remember accurately,” I told myself, “remember everything accurately so that when he is gone I can re-create the father who created me.”’ This is Philip Roth exhorting himself while witnessing his declining father bathe in Patrimony: A true story (1991), a memoir that opens when Herman Roth is diagnosed with a brain tumour. The book, tender but also brutal, slips between the present and the past. Philip Roth, after all, is the writer. The matter of accuracy feels particularly perilous when the subject is the writer’s parent, if the intention is not to write a hagiography. It takes a particular kind of courage to countenance a parent’s failings when not motivated by revenge.

Darleen Bungey’s literary pursuit of her father is taken up an alcoholic makes it worse. There is the struggle to reconcile this from the other side of his death twenty-six years ago. The driving version of her father with the one that is loved. force is an attempt to understand him, a sometimes troubled man whose past as a famed singer was elusive to her. Alice in Wonderland, Why did Bungey not know more about a story she has vivid memories of her father reading to her at her father, whose singing, both private night when she was six years old, frames the book. She professes and public, was not secret? that ‘words were important to him’; his delivery of the wondrous tale is perfectly pitched, like the songs he sang. By the book’s close we realise that this intimate performance is a love song to The origins of Lawrie’s fractured psyche lie in his childhood. both his daughter and his delight in words. The book’s epigraph He was conceived in an apocalyptic landscape; the 1906 earthcomes from Alice herself, ‘Who in the world am I? Ah, that’s quake and fire destroyed much of San Francisco. But it is not the the great puzzle.’ only fault-line in his upbringing. Two weeks after his birth, his Bungey’s search revolves around her American father’s life much doted upon brother died at the age of two. The grief shatbefore he settled down with his fourth tered his parents’ marriage. In their wife, her mother, Gloria, in suburban divorce case, the judge proclaimed Sydney. As the subtitle attests, the them to be ‘guilty of moral turpitude’ life he lived as Robert Ahern Cutter after hearing evidence of affairs, and was startlingly different from the one removed the young Robert to his he pursued as Lawrence, or Lawrie, grandparents’ care. Although they Brooks, a name adopted in 1939, were a source of stability and love, in his early thirties, to remake a repuforever after he was in pursuit of his tation tarnished by a fractious divorce beloved father. and an accident. As art flowed through the veins of Daddy Cool often sits more comthe Boyd family, music and particufortably in the realm of biography larly words were, and continue to be, than of memoir. Bungey is adept at Lawrie’s family’s mode of expression. this form, having previously written Lawrie’s medium was manifold: award-winning biographies of two cosongs, stories, and copious letters, inlossal Australian artists (Arthur Boyd: cluding a close epistolary relationship A life, 2007, and John Olsen: An artist’s with his firstborn American daughter, life, 2015). She contemplates whether Miki. The impulse to write has been those earlier biographies may have inherited by both Bungey and her originated from the unarticulated deyounger sister Geraldine Brooks. sire to ‘unriddle’ her father. An affectTheir mother, too, had a knack for ing Wonderland-inspired refrain plays writing. across the book when Bungey frets at Initial suspicions of Gloria being the limits of her investigative skills, ‘but a parochial housewife too concerned I was too late’; evoking the perennially with her neighbours’ regard are late white rabbit. She chides herself quickly disabused. One of this book’s for not finding out more when Lawrie delights is to behold her vivifying was alive. Gloria did not openly speak presence. Gloria’s story is of a young about her husband’s early life and woman who became highly successGloria van Boss and Lawrence Brooks marriages, while Lawrie rarely referred ful at broadcasting in the 1930s and after their engagement in 1946 to his past. 1940s and whose witty, lively charThere are cameos by a string of screen and music legends, acter was as charismatic as her husband’s stage presence. Their including Peter Finch and Bing Crosby; a second wife who relationship, when not beset by Lawrie’s bouts of drinking, was was both screen siren and a genuine femme fatale. Audiences characterised by warmth. While Lawrie might have ‘shed a life clamoured to hear the ‘Sweet Man’. The writer’s preoccupations of glamour and travel for a packed lunch … a nine-to-five job’, sometimes work to undermine the pleasures she accrues in uncov- the settling was in the quieter mode, not in his life partner. ering stories of Lawrie’s glamorous past and all that shimmering Lewis Carroll’s classic opens with a prefacing poem, ‘All in a bedazzlement. Why did she not know more about her father, Golden Afternoon’. There are various golden periods depicted in whose singing, both private and public, was not secret? Her more Daddy Cool – of Hollywood and radio – but it is the writer’s golddistressing concern is the origins of his darkness. Lawrie, in both en age of childhood, of being loved by her father and mother, that of his iterations, had a fondness for alcohol with ruinous conse- is the most halcyon. For Lawrie Brooks, her subject, the restoraquences. This is where the portrait takes on a chiaroscuro effect; tive influence of his last family’s love is positively amber-hued. g the darkening influence of drink on his family is painful, casting looming shadows. The knowledge that Gloria’s own mother was Tali Lavi is a Melbourne writer, reviewer, and public interviewer. A U S T R A L I A N B O O K R E V I E W J U N E – J U LY 2 0 2 0

Society

Not what they used to be Pre-pandemic reflections on elders Kerryn Goldsworthy

Grandmothers: Essays by 21st-century grandmothers edited by Helen Elliott Text Publishing $34.99 pb, 271 pp

A Lasting Conversation: Stories on ageing

edited by Dr Susan Ogle and Melanie Joosten Brandl & Schlesinger $29.95 pb, 222 pp

randmothers are not what they used to be, as Elizabeth Jolley once said of custard tarts. It’s a point made by several contributors to Helen Elliott’s lively and thoughtfully curated collection of essays on the subject, Grandmothers, and it partly explains why these two books are not as similar as you might expect. A Lasting Conversation: Stories on ageing – edited by Dr Susan Ogle and Melanie Joosten – is an anthology of previously published short stories, some of them decades old, from a grab-bag of Australian writers; it focuses on the personal experience of ageing, particularly as it affects bodies and brains. Grandmothers, on the other hand, is a collection of new essays that focus on the grandmother role itself and the ways in which the contributors have experienced it. The assortment of stories in A Lasting Conversation covers the broad spectrum of experience that is the ageing process, and the waywardness with which that process bestows its gifts and its calamities. The back-cover blurb gives an idea of the book’s projected readership: ‘This collection will be a resource for the baby boomers who are approaching old age, older people, their families, carers, doctors and medical students.’ The editors’ purpose in putting this book together seems mainly utilitarian and pragmatic. Certainly, there is a lot here to spark recognition or realisation in the reader. An early Kate Grenville story called ‘The Test Is, If They Drown’ tells a tale of two characters, one young and one old, who are essentially alike yet find themselves in a violently inimical moment. The same thing happens in Sonya Hartnett’s breathtaking and heartbreaking ‘Any Dog’. Cate Kennedy and Tony Birch take as their common subject the fraught experience of scattering the ashes of the dead when you are already old yourself; Birch’s story also chimes with several others in its delicate

treatment of romantic love in old age. And if the purpose of this book is to serve as a resource, then the several stories here that deal with dementia – especially the pieces by Hartnett and Helen Garner – offer insights that more and more of us, sadly, will find useful in the coming days and years.

ew of the contributors to Grandmothers: Essays by 21stcentury grandmothers show any interest in discussing the ageing process; their focus is on their relation to family members and the role they play in family life, and in the life of the world. Several of them discuss the archetypal grandma as the embodiment of old age, the little old white-haired lady in the rocking chair with her knitting and her cat (or being eaten by a wolf ), and are at pains to point out that this image no longer applies. Helen Elliott has chosen her contributors and commissioned these essays with great care, and the result is not only a satisfying representation of cultural and racial diversity but also an eclectic mix of personal and professional backgrounds. Among the twenty-two contributors, those best-known as professional writers – including Garner, Joan London, and Ali Cobby Eckermann – are surprisingly few, but artists from other forms also appear here: former ballerina and actress Carol Raye, painter Katherine Hattam, and weaver Cresside Collette, among others. Food experts Stephanie Alexander and Maggie Beer rub companionable shoulders with retired politicians Cheryl Kernot and Jenny Macklin. This lively eclecticism has its downside. Style is sometimes sacrificed to content, and, as is often the case with non-fiction, there is significantly more focus here on the topic than on the writing. That is a perfectly legitimate approach, especially when the topic is so full of juice, but one unfortunate result of getting non-professionals in to mix it up with the best of them is that the juxtaposition can make the former look bad, if only in their intermittent struggle to rise above formula and cliché. Love for grandchildren is expressed in almost every essay, but even some of the professional writers seem to have forgotten that baldly naming an emotion is the least effective way of conveying or describing it, and some of these moments, no matter how sincere, come across as soppy and trite. Some of the non-professional writers have also given little thought to structure, simply plonking down one thought after another with no consideration for the gestalt of the piece, or piling up the simple declarative sentences without any variation in the rhythm of language or the reflectiveness of thought. But every contributor has something real and vital to say, and some of them are standouts. Garner again demonstrates her stellar gift for exactly the right word in exactly the right place. A

SINGING Bones SAMUEL CURKPATRICK

MANIKAY SINGERS OF ARNHEM LAND DISCUSS ANCESTRAL CREATIVITY AND COLLABORATION sydneyuniversitypress.com.au

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Society sparkly, punchy piece from Kernot and a polished, steely one from Gillian Triggs reveal a couple of people you’d very much like to have beside you in the trenches, if it ever came to that. And there is an impassioned, almost anguished piece from Anastasia Gonis on the lifelong tension between her ambition to be a writer and her Greek-Cypriot family’s ‘fundamentals of what is expected of a woman: family first, no negotiation’. I have pencilled annotations and underlinings all over this essay, and at the end I’ve written, ‘This one is an absolute killer.’

Baldly naming an emotion is the least effective way of conveying it, and some of these moments come across as soppy and trite What stands out the most is the way that certain ideas and preoccupations emerge and recur in different contexts from one piece to the next: hopes and fears for the future, and the importance of handing on knowledge and experience, are common themes. Garner and Kernot both write about the advantages and the joys of intergenerational living. Gonis and Judith Brett both emphasise the importance of the family house as a place of safety and a repository for memory and dreams. Eckermann laments the fracturing of Aboriginal families: In my experience, it is a different and often difficult role as a Stolen Generations grandmother … For me, there has been no easy path around the relinquishment of my son and the issue of adoption … As an Aboriginal grandmother, I feel I am constantly punished for a decision I was forced to make when I was a teenager …

This finds an indirect echo in Ramona Koval’s experience as the daughter of a Holocaust survivor: ‘Here was I at the bottom of the world, a child with no grandparents. At special school assemblies, when grandparents filled the rows, I sang for nobody.’ Given the way publishing schedules work, these essays will have been finalised and prepared for publication months before any of us had heard of Covid-19. Since then, some of the contributors will have spent weeks in isolation with their grandchildren, others under enforced separation from theirs. Some relationships will have changed forever. Recently written and future-focused as all these essays are, a brutal and unexpected line has been drawn under them. They already feel to the reader like voices from another time. g Kerryn Goldsworthy won the 2013 Pascall Prize for cultural criticism, and the 2017 Horne Prize. She is a former ABR Editor and Fellow.

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The X Factor

Women’s ‘immune privilege’ Zora Simic

The Better Half: On the genetic superiority of women by Sharon Moalem

Allen Lane $29.99 pb, 288 pp

ll authors who are releasing new books during the global pandemic are at a disadvantage, but some less so than others. It helps to have a title that speaks to the moment, which The Better Half, with its central thesis that women are ‘genetically privileged’, certainly does. The coronavirus, we have learnt, tends to affect men more severely than women. Some have attributed the discrepancy to men being more likely to engage in risk-taking or health-compromising behaviours, while other experts have advanced a genetic explanation. Clinical trials have begun in which male patients with Covid-19 have been injected with oestrogen to test the hypothesis that women are advantaged by their greater production of sex hormones. In The Better Half, physician and genetics researcher Sharon Moalem proposes a related theory: the female’s XX chromosomes are why ‘women are simply stronger than men at every stage of life’. No surprise then that his captivating thesis has animated a number of think pieces on men and the coronavirus, even though his book was written well before it. Pandemic aside, The Better Sex, with its provocative premise about women’s genetic superiority, was bound to get attention. Moalem’s tone is breezy and appealingly authoritative; his arguments are digestible and easy to follow; and his suggestions for how scientific and medical research could be less sexist are politely made – indeed, he’d never use such a blunt word as ‘sexist’. The Better Sex is custom-made for excerpts in weekend magazines, luring readers with a finely honed blend of absorbing facts, commonsense logic, and palatably right-on sexual politics. Now onto his fifth book of popular science – previous titles include The DNA Restart: Unlock your personal genetic code to eat for your genes, lose weight and reverse aging (2016) – Moalem has obviously cracked the formula for success in a market that thrives on titles about sexual difference. In this problematic genre, he stands out as an agreeable and trustworthy narrator who appears to be genuinely motivated by compassion, curiosity, and a desire to reform his profession for the greater good. It’s a pity, then, that in most chapters his central premise is stretched to its limits. Moalem’s argument is that the female XX chromosomes have given women the genetic edge, endowing them with genetic diversity and a more robust immune system. On average, they live longer, die in fewer numbers from serious diseases like cancer, are less likely to have autism, are better at fighting viruses, and are more likely to survive epidemics and famines, compared to humans A U S T R A L I A N B O O K R E V I E W J U N E – J U LY 2 0 2 0

Environment with XY chromosomes. The extra X chromosome is key. Whereas it was once scientifically assumed that one X was ‘silent’, the other ‘active’, it turns out that about a quarter of the genes on the ‘silenced’ X chromosome are ‘still active and accessible to female cells’, providing ‘extra genetic horsepower to each cell’. Hence, ‘women are the stronger sex’, with ‘more tools in their genetic toolkit’. There are potential downsides to what Moalem calls ‘immunological overactivity’, most notably that women are far more likely to be affected by an autoimmune condition like lupus or multiple sclerosis. In general, however, from birth right through to death, females have ‘immune privilege’.

From birth right through to death, females have ‘immune privilege’ For many of us, Moalem’s arguments help explain what we instinctively or anecdotally know to be the case, at least when it comes to less controversial and well-documented phenomena such as women outliving men. At his best, he does not overplay his hand and takes care to refine and qualify his overarching thesis. Occasionally, he even leaves it open-ended under the banner of ‘we need more research’. There is still a lot we don’t know, for instance, about the role and effects of hormones. The introduction and the opening two chapters are clearly the strongest, offering both a primer on chromosomes (including recognition of chromosomal diversity) and a larger case for why better understanding the human immune system is an urgent imperative. We may no longer need reminding, but it was nevertheless still bracing to read in the midst of lockdown that ‘surviving in the pathogenic soup we live in is one of the biggest challenges we face as human beings’. Unfortunately, however, The Better Half, while often compelling, does not quite cohere. One clue as to why is in the title. As Angela Saini documented so effectively in her 2017 book Inferior: How science got women wrong, research into sexual difference has historically been oriented towards ‘proving’ that women are the weaker sex. Accordingly, it’s been very well-funded. Under scrutiny, much of it does not stand up, inflating minor differences into truth claims that support the gender status quo. In flipping the script, Moalem offers an antidote and challenge to historical and enduring trends in scientific research, but he does not quite escape the essentialist conventions of the ‘women are this, men are that’ format. He sincerely endeavours to break the generic boundaries, giving overdue credit to female scientists and the occasional nod to social context and behaviour. But in order to prop up a central idea about sexual difference, Moalem goes on unnecessary tangents, padding out his chapters with vaguely relevant travelogues and case studies. At one point, women are likened to potatoes; at another, he shares one of his ‘breakthroughs’ as a physician – his patient Samantha was not suffering from incontinence during sex, but rather she was ejaculating. Once again, the thesis is proved, more or less. g Zora Simic is a Senior Lecturer in History and Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of New South Wales. 52 A U S T R A L I A N B O O K R E V I E W J U N E – J U LY 2 0 2 0

Climate sincerity

The myths that undermine action Natalie Osborne

The Citizen’s Guide to Climate Success: Overcoming myths that hinder progress by Mark Jaccard

Cambridge University Press $27.95 pb, 304 pp

ritten by a prominent economist with a long career in emissions reduction and policy modelling, this engaging book attempts to debunk eleven myths that undermine effective climate action. Jaccard also offers a ‘simple’ path to climate success, built around strong regulatory action, carbon pricing, a system of carbon tariffs, and supporting poorer countries in energy transitions. Jaccard focuses on emissions reduction in the transport and energy sectors, in line with his areas of expertise. The myths Jaccard interrogates are not those of climate denialists but, rather more interestingly, ones believed by those who support action on climate change. He scrutinises claims like ‘energy efficiency is profitable’ and ‘we can be carbon neutral’, drawing on a career’s worth of experience and research to question or debunk them partly or in full. This myth-busting would be of particular interest to those working in emissions reduction or policy development, as well as to more casual observers of climate politics and policy. Some of these myths are discounted more convincingly than others, and at times who and what Jaccard leaves out of his analysis may cause one to question his conclusions. For instance, he sees a significant role for biofuels in emissions reduction, and favourably discusses how Brazil has reduced CO2 emissions using sugarcane ethanol. He does not discuss the food security or biodiversity implications of this approach or the potential for deforestation, troubling omissions given that Jair Bolsonaro, president of Brazil since January 2019, has opened the Amazon to sugarcane production (admittedly the book’s manuscript likely predates Bolsonaro’s decree, but it was also not an unforeseeable development). This book is consistently engaging and accessible, partly because of how Jaccard weaves in history and personal experience. Some of his historical parallels are more helpful than others (I am unaware of anyone arguing that climate change is like the Apollo Program or the Manhattan Project, so I am unsure why he bothers extensively arguing the reverse), and the elements of memoir range from charming to somewhat limiting. Jaccard writes with endearing pride of his many former students doing valuable work in this field, and his incorporation of their work into this text is exactly what a good academic mentor should do. Elsewhere, however, the way Jaccard centres himself in the narrative comes at the expense of more thoughtful analysis. In the conclusion, Jaccard congratulates his own participation in civil disobedience; what activ-

ists and organisers might find irritating here is that Jaccard admits this was his one and only foray into direct action. He conflates the long-term work of community organising for climate action and climate justice with one arrestable action taken by a prominent professor. Indeed, elsewhere in the work he seems impatient with or dismissive of other front-line climate activists, including many without his status or privileges.

Who and what Jaccard leaves out of his analysis may cause one to question his conclusions Ultimately, Jaccard is firm in his view that systemic politicaleconomic change is not necessary for substantial emissions reduction. Indeed, he devotes one chapter to debunking the ‘myth’ that capitalism must be abolished for energy transition. As someone who does tend to think that social-ecological sustainability and justice are inconsistent with capitalist hegemony, I turned to this chapter with great curiosity. I was disappointed to find it little more than a critique of Naomi Klein’s This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the climate (2014), rather than a substantial grappling with the contradictions and fractures of capitalism presented by climate change. Jaccard argues that ‘climate-sincere’ politicians can enact regulations and policies that trigger substantial emissions reduction without broader systemic change. He reflects, sadly, that sincere politicians are few, and acknowledges that powerful and wealthy fossil fuel interests can influence or mislead politicians. However, he does not interrogate the often incestuous entanglements of these groups or consider the ways in which capitalism can dangerously subvert democratic processes. Jaccard’s theory of change seems to rest on electing smart, sincere people, and equipping them with sensible and well-informed analyses of the relative economic and political merits of different policy options for emissions reduction. Critical climate scholars and activists might find such liberalism naïve or Sorkinian, but Jaccard balances this with the frustration and occasional cynicism one can expect from a scholar who has been in this game a long time. I admire his stamina in a field beset by frustrations and setbacks. But the contradictions get a little messy: he argues that we need to broaden the policy window, but openly scoffs at abolishing fossil fuel subsidies. He scolds ‘environmentalists’ for not giving Canada’s Trudeau government enough credit for their actions on climate change, just because that same government also supports the Trans Mountain pipeline (an expansion Jaccard himself argues against earlier in the book). Jaccard makes no mention of the extensive resistance of indigenous peoples to this project, nor does he show any understanding of why indigenous peoples might be less inclined to dismiss Trudeau’s support as a mere ‘wart’ on the face of an otherwise climate-sincere administration. Similarly, he praises Bill Gates and his investment in emissions reduction with wistful affection, without mentioning Gates’s heavy investment in fossil fuels. The Citizen’s Guide to Climate Success would have benefited from considering who and where this imagined citizen is, and indeed the idea of citizenship itself. Notwithstanding some references to ‘poorer countries’, Jaccard by and large ignores questions

of justice and equity, as well as the long-standing struggles for climate justice led by indigenous people, people of colour, and poorer people. At times, this oversight undermines his analysis and arguments (his account of Hurricane Katrina makes no mention of race, despite overwhelming evidence this disaster was racialised). More a book for policy operators than activists, Jaccard’s ‘citizen’ is flat, universal – sometimes entirely conflated with ‘consumer’ (a common error of economists), sometimes with ‘consumerplus-voter’ (a common error of liberalism). g Natalie Osborne is a Lecturer in the School of Environment and Science at Griffith University, teaching and researching in environmental planning and critical geography. ❖ Poetry

‘A universal hum’ Three new poetry collections Luke Beesley

f I were to make gauche generalisations about the poetics of MTC Cronin, Jordie Albiston, and Michael Farrell, I might respectively write conceptual,technical,and experimental.But these established poets – each in their fifties, highly regarded – display fluency with all these descriptors, especially in their latest books. In God is Waiting in the World’s Yard (Puncher & Wattmann, $25 pb, 210 pp), Cronin’s twentieth collection, contemporary gothic imagery is gruesomely and artfully tossed against the edges of its prose poems. Let’s talk about these edges. Other than the free-verse poem ‘Sitting Worldside’ on the first page (where we find a sleeping kitten), all of the poems on the left-hand side of this collection’s spine have a rusty right-ragged margin. These poems have different titles: ‘The Brunt of God’ or ‘God Has a Stroke’, etc. They are sometimes blackly comedic and present a ‘sociopathic god’, a flippant, lazy god, a ‘philanthropic eponym’, a reflection. All of the poems on the right side of the page are called ‘The World’s Yard’. They are small prose blocks with a justified blade-sharp right margin, little rectangles. The first line of each of these poems is ‘Right at the back of the world’s yard I am sitting’. To give you a taste of the book’s blood meridian, either side of the spine we have corpses, splinters, mourners, guns, skulls, guts, surgeons – and dirty pissing angels with steel-capped boots. It’s treacherous ground for original poetry, but, in Cronin’s steady, often lyrical hands, there’s nothing quite familiar: little surgeries performed on the Cubism of a real god’s nihilism. A U S T R A L I A N B O O K R E V I E W J U N E – J U LY 2 0 2 0

‘Then lightning, as it comes to art.’ That’s the final line of a poem that includes: ‘Carnivorous / laughter filters through the woods’. I read ‘Carnivorous’ as coronavirus. This book was an eerie read during lockdown. Perhaps it’s the night’s new silence (at times, Cronin’s horror is disarmingly gentle) and the space for a mind returning to a furrow in the middle of the night. Cronin constructs a collective nightmare, and ‘God is the unavoidable text. “R” might be the / dog letter, trilling on the tip of my tongue but the letter / for god is thrilling. It’s all about oath. And how what you / say can kill you.’ Over the course of two hundred pages, the poems thicken with intertextuality. There are fifty-three endnotes referencing poets and thinkers. Via Barbara Wright, Raymond Queneau’s repetitive exploration of the same scene in Exercises in Style is an apt parallel. Elsewhere the surrealist legacy, via Luis Buñuel, is conjured or re-shot, in images such as ‘a juggler who tosses then swallows an eyeball with / stitches’ or ‘little black ants’ that act like heads of a typewriter. I joked to myself about Un Chat Australien as an alternative title for the collection, but, although several of the first-person poems sit in a local domestic landscape, there’s a universal hum to them. They undeniably, disturbingly, share a truth with the violence (particularly towards women) underwriting recent history; the book’s pertinence is terrifying. Emerging from these heavy shadows, the opening of Albiston’s Element: The atomic weight & radius of love (Puncher & Wattmann, $25 pb, 70 pp) reads free and skipping. She has a nimble sense of the poem’s sounds in sync with the words’ rhythms, the vocal cords engaged from the lips to the curled licks of the tongue on teeth, to clicks at the back of the throat. Here is part of the first poem, ‘hydrogen’: Kororoit Creek becomes one with the cloud above Bass Strait & Cherry Lake & the place where we combine you are in everything everywhere the sun consumes you as you consume me 600 million tons per moment day day night

Syntax in orbit, flaring, softening. The two-stanza poems of Element follow the periodic table. The first letter of each poem is the abbreviated element, followed by an em-dash and a free-associated direction such as ‘H—ome’, or, as in the ‘sulphur’ poem, ‘S—ilvia Plath said …’ Shorter, left-aligned openings to each poem have the same number of words as the element’s atomic weight (e.g. H = 1). Beneath this, an indented stanza has the same number of words as the element’s radius (H = 53). With expanding weight and radius, the poem’s content extends beyond the chemistry of one relationship; Albiston circles the encyclopedia, from Melbourne to the outer galaxy, to tell (not unlike Cronin) the often violent story of history. I was nervous when I read the second line of ‘hydrogen’: ‘stars shine only because of you’, but Albiston, who is one of the most technically adept poets in the country, knows what she is doing, and she follows the familiar with the brilliance of ‘transmuting 54 A U S T R A L I A N B O O K R E V I E W J U N E – J U LY 2 0 2 0

yourself into always and light’. A further formal layer is applied to the poems by an intricate, no-doubt precise (but unsolvable), internal rhythm. When a more overt rhythm is paired with strong internal rhymes, it gives the poems a distracting, almost Seussian galumphing: ‘churches and houses the crossroad between / no dirty no dead think cosmic-ray-spallation instead … think / Silly Putty … think happiness things … a cheap Pyrex rock in / a cheap chintzy ring.’ Elsewhere, the beat is restrained, as in the twenty-first poem ‘scandium’ (weight = 44, radius = 144). The poem’s language – ‘soft halide arcs sweep up’ – glitters towards the finale: ‘moving in me … swaying with me in nuclear spin / inventing this moment of love & decay … everything’s a symbol’. What a musical exit-gallop! Albiston’s poem displays a confidence to connect jittery fragments, which is a key part of Michael Farrell’s performance over five full-length collections. The poems in his latest one, Family Trees (Giramondo, $24 pb, 128 pp), contain his usual crackling wit and punning Australiana oddity: ‘Goannas flow upwards and across our communal vision / like r’n’b heroines.’ He rinses idiom and pop culture with a queer-eyed urbanity. Cringe, as always with Farrell, has an entirely new sound. The poem ‘Acts’ works like a series of headlines. Listen to this, I said to my partner, one evening: Poem ‘Mosquitoes should be left in peace’ wins pub slam. No other entries allowed on fear of crop death Moon’s face on wanted poster. Honey for sale sign by burrow. Koala on chain gang for peppermint theft Unemployed poet wears tracking device in bush … … Currawong writes poem, signs it The Kookaburra

There is a powerful melancholy and seriousness in these funny, crafted poems. What to do with the pervasive Australian culture in the face of one’s erudition and its associated isms? Farrell, who grew up in country New South Wales, isn’t dismissive, is empathetic, ‘a / conduit of something that’s almost / a sorrow, a feeling of mercy’ (from ‘Avec Merci’). More so than in his previous collections, Farrell conceals some of his language hijinks in seemingly traditional forms: several four- and five-line stanza poems. His sestina, for example, slyly reinterprets the traditions back to front, as if classical music spun backwards or ‘a hybrid cheese that / Melts at the sound of Ravel’. I noticed something else new in Family Trees: dexterous cinematic – or is it novelistic? – detail. In one poem: ‘The plan is for all poets to double themselves, turn up to / the party in pairs and scare the novelists.’ On reading the following gorgeous sequence, those novelists would surely quiver in their boots: ‘We always called movies vehicles. “Are / you going to the Streep vehicle?” our mother would / call, hearing us lifting our coats from the rack in the hall.’ g Luke Beesley is a Melbourne-based poet, artist, and singer–songwriter. His fifth poetry collection is Aqua Spinach (Giramondo, 2019).

Poetry

‘Morning carries on’ Two new poetry collections Geoff Page

A Gathered Distance: Poems by Mark Tredinnick Birdfish Books $29.95 pb, 127 pp

The Mirror Hurlers

by Ross Gillett Puncher & Wattmann $25 pb, 83 pp

or Mark Tredinnick, best known so far as a nature poet employing distinctive and often ingenious imagery, A Gathered Distance is a brave book – even a risky one. It’s essentially the diary of a family breakup or, more accurately, its immediate aftermath. As with most poetry in the confessional genre, the poet is explicit about some people and reticent about others. From the poetry itself, it would seem that the breakup was occasioned by the poet’s leaving his family (a wife and three children) for a new love. We are not told much about the two women involved, and it is clear that the poet was estranged from his children for some time and felt the pain intensely, a pain articulated in almost every poem in the book. Even the nature poems are part of it. For many readers such anguish, or something loosely analogous, will not be unfamiliar. There may therefore be a limit to how often they want the issue raised. In his acknowledgments, Tredinnick shows he is aware of the dangers involved: ‘This is not a memoir. These poems are the sense that poetry could help one human make of a great sadness, “that rust upon the soul”, as Samuel Johnson puts it, that came his way with the end of a marriage and the fracture of a family.’ Later he adds: ‘Things are much better now for them, and me, but there were hard times and they deserve this witness.’ The poems embodying this witnessing are arranged in four parts with a one-poem prologue and epilogue. Sections 1 and 2, ‘Pavane’ and ‘On Dusk’, plumb the depths. Sections 3 and 4, ‘Four Rooms’ and ‘First Light’, show the incremental exit from the impasse. It’s affecting to see how small some of these steps could be. Most of the poems here, understandably, have an acute poignancy, one of the most distressing being ‘A Boy, One Afternoon’. In it the poet remembers one of his sons walking past him without acknowledgment after school in ‘the silent creed he’d been / Recruited to ... / his hand-me-down rage his own for now.’ A complementary sense of what the poet is missing is vividly found in ‘Talking Death Down’, where the poet recalls ‘when winds buffeted / The car, I sat with my daughter and read with her, // Scout and Atticus again. If that’s / Not life then life’s not worth a single phrase.’ The poem ends: ‘Turns out my children / Love me, though I’ve made it hard.Their courage // Warrants my life in return. Joy comes. I tell / The morning this, and morning carries on.’ A few readers may find a sentence like ‘Joy comes’ sentimental and the personification of ‘morning’ a little excessive. Nevertheless, the final phrase, ‘and morning carries on’, does provide

something of an antidote, and is more than true to the patience demanded in the situation.

he Mirror Hurlers,Ross Gillett’s third collection,is the product of ten years’ work. (The title poem was shortlisted for the 2019 Peter Porter Poetry Prize.) Its opening and closing sections are packed with poems that simultaneously challenge and entertain and do indeed have the three qualities claimed for them in the back-cover blurb: ‘intensity, complexity and clarity’. The middle group, by contrast, is something of a miscellany with the poet inclined to reach for difficult objectives that can sometimes elude him. There are a few love poems here, though ‘jealousy poems’ might be a better term. The most memorable work in the section is probably ‘Istán and Other Places’, an eight-page quest poem set mainly in southern Spain. It has a striking, somewhat surreal geography and a powerful sense of history. ‘Where are you now in the inexplicable / republics, those satellite dependencies // with their cold check points / further north than anywhere I’ve been. // I see you walking the stormed streets, / the wrecked squares. A mist // of tear gas, the whiff of history / stinging your eyes.’ Images like these foreshadow the fabulist impress of central European poets such as Miroslav Holub, Zbigniew Herbert, and Vasko Popa in the book’s final section. Its opening poem, ‘Finding Poetry’, is an index to the pleasures that follow: ‘Go to the bravest shelves. / Let your fingers climb the alphabetical cliffs. / Put your head on sideways to read the narrow titles.’ The poem concludes a few lines later with: ‘How will you get through the day // with this rearrangement of yourself. / Your upside-down mind, / your translated heart.’ The Mirror Hurlers ends with a rush of clever, playful poems that also contrive to be moving in their own idiosyncratic way. Among the most memorable is the title sequence ‘Thirteen Ways of Thinking about a Chainsaw’. It bears little resemblance to the Wallace Stevens’s archetype, but is jokily disturbing nonetheless. Here’s one ‘way’. ‘Never take a chainsaw out while drunk. / You might ask it to dance.’ In a very different mood, there is also a putative suicide note, ‘Apology’, an effortlessly rhyming sonnet, as seen here in its opening quatrain: ‘I cannot make it. I hope it all goes well. / The life you plan to have sounds interesting, / although I must admit it’s hard to tell / these days, what with the world and everything.’ The Mirror Hurlers ends with a suitably airy nine-part sequence, ‘Buying Online’, which turns around the joys of buying poetry on the net, then seeing what turns up – and in what condition. Don’t be upset, the poet suggests, if your book is water-damaged: ‘Think of the weather wanting to get into the poem, / the rain being interested enough.’ It’s a nice foreshadowing of the sequence’s final poem that neatly, and ironically, ends the book: ‘They are spindrift words. / They hang back / from the main point ... // Feel their faint rain, / thoughts that fade as they hit you.’ In addition to all this, there’s the opening section of The Mirror Hurlers, a light-hearted and observant recollection of childhood, rather in the manner of early Bruce Dawe. It, too, is a pleasure not to be missed. g Geoff Page is a Canberra poet and novelist. A U S T R A L I A N B O O K R E V I E W J U N E – J U LY 2 0 2 0

Poetry

Finding the stars

down to the nubs and gists of things, or of people, with an admirable clarity. We could say that he, too, makes everything greener or a bit more sparkling. His wit renders things clear, almost too Delicious utterances and just quotations boldly at times: he seems the genuine communicator. So readable. Chris Wallace-Crabbe Thus he writes of the medieval riddle poems, ‘They are tricky. Some remain unsolved after a thousand years.’ And of Milton’s fall of Adam, ‘Why does God let it happen? He knows everything, including the future, so why doesn’t he step in and stop it?’ Later, he reminds us that even Emily Brontë ‘has joyful poems, too’, while he rises splendidly to the steppe grandeur of Lermontov’s A Little History of Poetry battle poetry. Metaphorical again, he gives us Marianne Moore like this: ‘Disguise, admired in the pangolin, was something she edited by John Carey practised herself.’ Yale University Press (Footprint) Many of his other insights and distillations will give potential $43.99 hb, 312 pp readers a kick, or even an agreeable sigh. I do like his sense that, must admit to being intrigued by any self-proclaimed ‘His- in ‘The Faerie Queene’, Spenser invented the robot. There’s sci-fi tories of Everything’, so I leapt at the prospect of a dense for us all! In fact, poets were not all that good at science-fiction, history of my favourite creative art and how it flourished in preferring rural landscapes, personal heartbreak, and red wine, our past centuries, right down to a couple of writers who died in like Scotland’s Robbie Burns. In particular, Carey is compelling on the dodgy, charmingly 2019. And occidental only: that is, apart from a sidelong glance at Hafez, Tagore, and Li Po’s fellow poets. Unless you regard the transatlantic modernist T.S. Eliot, who ‘excludes everything pretty and decorous, and his language is a rag-bag of strange words, some Russians, that is – bridging East and West. from dialect, some his own invention’. Yes, John Carey’s A Little History That’s pretty good, isn’t it? But then, this of Poetry runs from Sappho’s ‘first debook is much like a yummy Christmas scription of the symptoms of passionfeast or a children’s party: full of deliate love’ in Western literature, down cious utterances and just quotations. through great, intransigent Catullus It winks and invites a wary reader to and the classics, all the way to tumultuenjoy the party, even if Baudelaire’s ous Ted Hughes and self-doomed Sylvia ‘self-pity can pall’ or, worse, Lewis Plath: into the former’s sense that ‘what Carroll ‘had a weakness for scantily-clad feeds the universe is the death of anylittle girls’. Or of the Big Wal, ‘Many of thing in it. / Even a gnat’s death feeds Stevens’ poems are baffling. You cannot the stars.’ Even a short life nourishes tell who is speaking or to whom or those heavenly bodies, then, like those about what.’ But can we tell that with of Wyatt, Keats, and Lorca, among Pope or Pushkin, except for the fact that so many practitioners of the language the latter ‘left many discarded women art over centuries, especially in earlier, in his wake’? armoured ages; not that we know much The only Australian to get a guernabout the Gawain Poet’s life. sey for his poetry here is, no, not Peter In many cases, ‘belief had its comLes Murray (Black Inc.) Porter or Judith Wright, but Les Murforting side’. As Vaughan was to write, ray, who comes stoutly in to bat with ‘I saw Eternity the other night; / Like a great ring of pure and endless night.’ He was very lucky in his ‘down to earth’ values on the very last page. Alas, we seem to remain antipodeans down here. But Murray is in the sturdy, that respect. We find here that long lives come seldom into the making of ever-eloquent company of Ireland’s Seamus Heaney. No doubt he great poetry, at least until recent times. More often, the pained would have been happy enough with that. As our author reflects sprinters did well. Whereas ‘Auden did not improve with time’, on another recent poet, ‘Defeat is inevitable. But that does not alter the poet’s responsibility.’ well, allegedly. Careful, there, dear scholar! There are odd occasions when a bold anthologist of poems Carey presents us with Rilke’s reinvention of Eurydice, in the German’s lyrical assertion that ‘she too was full of her immense and poets can sound a little too much like some downright death / which was so new she could not take it in’. These modern- ratbag journalist. Carey is not often tempted, I’m glad to say. ist poets pounded their languages into new forms, very much as And he keeps us reading. After all, he can write like a hypnotist elegant Andrew Marvell had in the last season of the Renaissance, – or even an inky angel. Any reader of poetry will get swags of for all that he had those light-fingered quatrains, ‘annihilating all joyous information from this book. g that’s made / To a green thought in a green shade’. Yes, he made Chris Wallace-Crabbe is the author of more than twenty colall poetry greener: and kept it vegetally witty. Oh yes, Carey is a stylish, even witty writer himself. He gets lections of poetry.

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A R T S

Epiphany

Applause, applause The education of an operamane Ian Dickson

Cover of the 1962 recording of Rigoletto from Sadler’s Wells, starring Peter Glossop and Elizabeth Harwood (His Master’s Voice)

t is a truth, maybe not universally acknowledged but a truth nonetheless, that epiphanies tend to happen earlier rather than later in one’s life. Soul-shattering, life-changing experiences occur more regularly when the soul is tender enough to be shattered and the life malleable enough to be changed. I am an excited seven-year-old. Today I am going to what I have been informed is London’s grandest theatre to witness the World’s Greatest Dancer in the ballet Cinderella. I am no theatre-going virgin. I have seen Peter Pan and clapped furiously to bring Tinker Bell back to life and have been to a children’s matinee at Doris Fitton’s Independent Theatre on a return to Australia, but it has been made clear to me that today’s experience will be of a different standard altogether. Lunch is at the Trocadero in Piccadilly Circus, long since turned into a sort of pinball parlour but then a bastion of rather faded Edwardian grandeur. We walk to the theatre. I am a little surprised that it is right next to a vegetable market, but the building itself lives up to expectations. The uniformed doormen loom majestically over the entrance, the lobby is imposing with its grand staircase, and then there is the auditorium. Rudolf Nureyev, fresh from the grandeur of the Mariinsky and the Paris Opéra was apparently unimpressed by Covent Garden’s décor, but for this seven-year-old, the tiers stretching up into the heavens, the royal box, and the vast red curtain make it the epitome of glamour. I am given the aisle seat so that I can lean out and not have a view impeded by the adult in front of me. The lights dim, the music starts, the curtain rises, the ballet begins – but the earth does not move. I am not bored or disappointed. The scene changes are magic. I enjoy the Ugly Sisters, they’re funny and I’m pleased that one of them is an Australian like me. I like the World’s Greatest Dancer. She has a nice smile and makes it clear that she is sad to be bullied by her family, excited to be going to the ball and, finally, happy to be with her prince. But she is so old. I do find it rather annoying that just as the story is heating up everything stops and somebody I’ve never seen before and who 58 A U S T R A L I A N B O O K R E V I E W J U N E – J U LY 2 0 2 0

has no connection to what has been happening dances and then disappears, never to be seen again. The ballet finishes, the curtain descends, there is a pause, and then it rises to reveal the corps de ballet in formation advancing to the front. The applause begins. This is when I realise that there is a difference between clapping for Tinker Bell and really clapping. This is exciting. The curtain descends again and I’m outraged. Aren’t we going to see the soloists? But a gap in the curtain opens and out they come, some solo, some in pairs. Here come the Ugly Sisters. The audience really like them. The prince arrives, regally acknowledging his reception. Now there is another pause and I am getting worried. Has the World’s Greatest Dancer had an accident? Has she gone home already? At last she appears and now I really hear applause. The house explodes. Adults are standing and shouting. Through the commotion she smiles and curtsies, coolly accepting the adulation. So this is what performers can reduce their audience to. I am vaguely beginning to understand the power of live performance. As we leave, I am wondering if perhaps next time we could have less ballet and more applause.

am twelve and going to my second opera. The first was not a success. If you are trying to encourage an eleven-year-old to appreciate opera, perhaps a static, poorly acted, if well-sung, performance of The Flying Dutchman is not the best choice. The second will be Rigoletto, and my dauntless mother is determined not to make the same mistake. For my birthday I am given a recording, the Callas, Gobbi, di Stefano version with the La Scala façade on the cover. My older brother has the score and cajoles me into singing one of the heroine Gilda’s arias, ‘Tutte le Feste’, to his accompaniment. Many years later he tells me it was chosen because the piano reduction was easy, but at the time it didn’t occur to us or our parents that an aria in which the heroine describes her abduction and rape to her father was not perhaps the most suitable vehicle for my boy soprano voice. This performance is at the much less grand Sadler’s Wells theatre, but the cast is first grade. Rigoletto and his daughter, Gilda, are sung by two young performers who will go on to distinguished international careers: Peter Glossop and Elizabeth Harwood. Because I know the opera, I enjoy the first two acts, but something special happens in the third. Rigoletto has come to the duke’s palace in search of his daughter. The courtiers try to fob him off, but suddenly the distraught Gilda appears from the duke’s chambers. Rounding on them in fury, Rigoletto drives them off and turns to comfort his daughter. Harwood begins ‘Tutte le Feste’ and I realise the oceans of distance between my amateur warblings and the emotional anguish this wonderful singer can put into the aria without breaking the line. The two singers launch into the passionate ‘vendetta’ duet that ends the act, and I am beginning to understand the combination of technical control and emotional abandon that makes the best opera so powerful. I have become an opera addict for life. g Ian Dickson has degrees in drama from Yale and the University of New South Wales, and is the co-author of the musical Better Known As Bee.

Music

The virtual woods

Celebrating Sondheim’s ninetieth birthday Tim Byrne

Meryl Streep, Christina Baranski, and Audra McDonald in Take Me to the World: A Sondheim 90th Birthday Celebration (photograph via YouTube)

ate into Take Me to the World, the live-streamed ‘isolation concert’ that celebrated Stephen Sondheim’s ninetieth birthday, Nathan Lane quips that the composer has ‘been so under-appreciated all these years. I can’t believe there’s never been a tribute to this unsung musical genius.’ It’s a delicious routine, because every fan of the indisputable master of the American musical knows just how many Sondheim tributes are extant, and how unlikely it is that this will be the last. For a while it seemed as though this one might just slot in with the others, a standard – if, given the format, unorthodox – collection of musical performances showcasing Sondheim’s particular talents. But it soon became apparent that something unique, indeed historic, was occurring. With each separate tribute, all individually streamed from the singers’ homes using natural lighting and standard computer cameras (the sound a little variable), a grand narrative emerged, one that tapped into Sondheim’s primary modes of longing, reflection, and regret. Context is the key – apt for Sondheim, whose guiding artistic principle is ‘Content dictates Form’. The concert was organised by broadway.com, and the spirit and mood of New York City enlivened each performance; it often threatened to crack the surface of the performance space. The theatres in Australia (indeed worldwide) have gone dark, but there is no more symbolic a closure than that of Broadway. Grief and loss seemed to infect the concert as surely as a cluster of Covid-19. The result wasn’t tragic, though: it was profoundly moving, ‘a spark to pierce the dark from Battery Park to Washington Heights’. It started conventionally enough. Stephen Schwartz (himself a legendary composer, from Godspell to Wicked) played beautifully the prologue from Follies (1971), which was followed by an orchestral rendition of the overture to Merrily We Roll Along (1981). This was a gentle reminder that Sondheim, renowed as a lyricist, also writes rich, complex musical compositions divorced from the wit and wordplay of his lyrics. Of course, he is foremost a dramatist, which Sutton Foster demonstrated with ‘There Won’t

be Trumpets’ from Anyone Can Whistle (1964), a song that teaches us that ‘the biggest things that happen to you are often the quietest’. Her reading evoked the doctors, nurses, and frontline responders to the Covid-19 pandemic as much as it did knights in shining armour. That exquisite, silky texture to her voice was on full display, and it proved a galvanising opening. Several solos followed, some of them beautifully controlled, like Judy Kuhn’s ‘What Can You Lose?’ from Dick Tracy (1990), and some a little too cutesy, such as Neil Patrick Harris’s ‘The Witch’s Rap’ from Into the Woods (1986). One of the great delights for Australian audiences was the introduction of singers unfamiliar to us, such as Melissa Errico and Elizabeth Stanley: the former created a small one-act play out of ‘Children and Art’ from Sunday in the Park with George (1984), and the latter gave what will surely go down in history as a signature ‘The Miller’s Son’ from A Little Night Music (1973). The concert was not without big hitters: not just famous stage legends who cut their teeth on, and were made famous by, Sondheim’s work – both Mandy Patinkin and Bernadette Peters appeared – but also Hollywood stars including Meryl Streep and Jake Gyllenhaal, who may have come late to the Sondheim party but have certainly proved themselves since. Patinkin delivered an a cappella performance of ‘Lesson #8’ from Sunday in the Park that was heartbreakingly true: lines like ‘George would have liked to see people out strolling on Sunday’ assumed an almost impossible resonance, given that Central Park is filling up with bodies. Sondheim is, of course, an excoriating wit, so naturally much of the concert was hilarious. Streep’s appearance, a trio with Christine Baranski and Audra McDonald, was a booze-soaked rendition of ‘The Ladies Who Lunch’, from Company (1970). It was riotous, raunchy, and – given how many of us have taken to drink in isolation – savagely relevant. This was undeniably a highlight, but it shouldn’t become the sole popular cultural takeaway. Because the true meaning of Take Me to the World is that the greatest art (and Sondheim is rightfully mentioned here in the same breath as Mozart and Shakespeare) soaks up and enfolds new meanings, adding layers of significance like fossils in sediment; it not only incorporates contemporary events but mirrors those events back at us in real time. Thus, a song like ‘I Remember’ from Evening Primrose (1966), a television film about people living their entire lives inside a department store, took on a tragic lilt. When Laura Benanti sang, ‘And at times I think I would gladly die for a day of sky’, it didn’t feel remotely theoretical. The concert ended, fittingly, with Bernadette Peters singing ‘No One is Alone’ from Into the Woods. In a city with more than 15,000 Covid-related deaths, the line ‘sometimes people leave you halfway through the woods’ acquired an unbearable weight. But there was also a kind of flinty, hard-won hope there. ‘Hard to see the light now; just don’t let it go.’ This is what made Take Me to the World so special: it can never be repeated; it was a case of content dictating form. g Take Me to the World: A Sondheim 90th Birthday Celebration was live-streamed from broadway.com on 27 April 2020. Tim Byrne a freelance writer and theatre critic. A U S T R A L I A N B O O K R E V I E W J U N E – J U LY 2 0 2 0

Commentary

‘Fear of the latent germ’

Government versus artists during the Spanish Flu

by Nicholas Tochka

n 1919 a major outbreak of pneumonic influenza threatened the livelihoods of actors and musicians throughout Australia, and forced a tense confrontation between artists and government officials in Melbourne. In contrast with the current pandemic, Australians had plenty of time to prepare. Prompted by reports from abroad of a deadly disease that was killing thousands, authorities in November 1918 ratified a plan for responding to the threat. Strict travel restrictions, however, only delayed the arrival of the virus. On 29 January 1919, Victoria joined New South Wales in implementing a federal order that ‘all theatres, picture theatres, music or concert halls, and all public buildings where persons assemble for the purposes of entertainment or instruction, shall be closed forthwith, and not again used until permission is given’. Thousands of musicians, actors, stagehands, ticket-takers, and ushers found themselves idle overnight. Given six hours’ notice, theatre impresarios in Melbourne and Sydney scrambled to cancel shows and refund tickets. The Rigo Grand Opera Company paused its season after just three performances of Rigoletto; musicians postponed recitals indefinitely. While the order allowed restaurants, churches, and outdoor venues such as racetracks to remain open if attendees wore masks, it remained silent on the question of compensation for those affected by the closures. For a privileged minority, the compulsory break provided an opportunity to relax and recharge. Actor Frank Harvey planted a vegetable garden and grew a quarantine moustache. Actress Muriel Starr claimed she would use her downtime to study Shakespeare, though another report found the leading lady ‘boating, bathing, camping, walking, riding, swimming, golfing, playing tennis, dozing, reading, sewing; in fact, doing everything but working’. The modish Starr visited posh Melbourne nightspots in style, heeding expert advice with ‘an elegant face mask of pink chiffon, tied with baby-ribbon – a confection she had purchased at one of the most fashionable shops’. For the vast majority of performing artists in Australia’s two largest cities, quarantine brought anxiety and straitened financial circumstances. Theatre managers in Sydney decried the shutdown as an ‘ill-advised and drastic action [that], if anything, is likely to accentuate any lurking spirit of panic’. In Melbourne, members of the Musicians’ Union and Theatrical Employees’ Union immediately called an emergency meeting. They demanded lost wages and pledged to stand united with theatre managers in asking the government for relief. Petitioners in Melbourne emphasised that they were not seeking handouts. Musicians preferred to ‘battle through’, their union secretary argued, ‘rather than accept the assistance the 60 A U S T R A L I A N B O O K R E V I E W J U N E – J U LY 2 0 2 0

Government now offers’. Yet the Victorian minister of public health’s stance against all public performances, even those held outdoors, made this impossible. After several councils in greater Melbourne organised outdoor events, the conservative minister had ordered their suspension. Flouting this pronouncement, the Musicians’ Union Orchestra then scheduled a fundraiser at the Melbourne Cricket Grounds. In Sydney, groups such as the Scarlet Gaieties, a popular music revue, were giving outdoor shows without sanction. (The group’s usual theatre, now closed, was being used as a clinic for influenza inoculations.) Back in Melbourne, tensions mounted. When they closed the theatres, experts warned that the disease spread in close proximity, advising city-dwellers to seek out ‘open air – morning, afternoon and night if possible’. Yet tightly packed racetracks and churches remained open. If track aficionados and worshipers could congregate safely in masks, why shouldn’t art-lovers gather, too? ‘Apparently the germ of pneumonic influenza is particularly

Muriel Starr, c.1910-13, photograph: gelatin silver, toned; on mount. (photograph by Mina Moore/State Library of Victoria H38782/1223)

bitter against the gentle pantomime patron or picture lover,’ a critic of government policy sniffed, ‘for no suggestion has ever been made that those who visit the theatres might wear a gauze mask, and thereby prevent contagion.’ With the restrictions showing little promise of abatement, mutual antagonism between workers and government officials boiled over. The health minister sent a letter to the unions proposing that Victorian hospitals could hire out-of-work artists, conscripting them into a more ‘essential’ industry, a proposition that provoked widespread anger. ‘I should like to express the thanks and gratitude of myself and others of my profession to Mr. Bowser for his kind and generous offer to turn us all into hospital wardsmen,’ actor Frank Harvey wrote in a scathing letter to The Argus. ‘I should also like to assure Mr. Bowser that if, in the event of a short-sighted, misguided Government placing him temporarily out of employment, I would be delighted to offer him the position of my dresser.’ Frustrated by what they perceived as bad-faith negotiations, performing artists pointedly argued the government owed them a debt for their recent displays of patriotism. Not only had actors and singers made wartime fundraising appeals from the stages of their now-empty theatres, but these very venues employed hundreds of recently returned soldiers. Why should the government now drag its feet in offering relief ? A new insinuation: officials used public health policy to pursue an agenda of social reform. After all, churches had remained open; had theatres, music halls and public houses been targeted to curb purportedly immoral behaviour? ‘While one might tie up his face and listen to a sermon with perfect immunity,’ an observer in The Age acidly noted, ‘it would never do to let him tie up his face and listen to a comic song.’ Protestations culminated in a rally at Flinders Park on a Sunday afternoon in late February. Nearly two thousand Melburnians attended, including members of unions representing not only musicians and theatre employees but also liquor traders. The Liberty League, a libertarian group of anti-prohibitionists formed the previous year, had called the meeting, which the Trades Hall Council chaired. ‘It was a gross anomaly that many thousands of people should be prevented from following their lawful occupations,’ said the chairman of the Trades Hall Council, ‘while restaurant keepers, drapers and others were allowed to carry on business.’ What accounted for the distinction? ‘Wowserism!’ a voice called out, referring to the reform movement against moral turpitude in all its guises. With quarantine closures approaching four weeks, calls to reopen society gathered momentum. Infection rates had slowed, while businessmen increasingly shared artists’ economic pain. As the Medical Journal of Australia cautioned that overly zealous polices threatened ‘to cripple industries and to upset the whole social machine’, plans were announced to reopen first public houses, and then theatres and concert halls. The Australian public had no doubt missed their evening entertainment. Yet opening night, a Monday in mid-March, featured ‘no wild rush’ of patrons. ‘Fear of the latent germ may have had something to do with it,’ suggested a commentator in Table Talk, ‘but the habit of staying at home, inculcated for six weeks, had possibly more.’ Sporadic influenza outbreaks would lead to

shorter periods of quarantine over the next eighteen months. By the end of the year, authorities had approved a fund to support those workers barred from employment by compulsory closures. Our situation today may not be, in the strictest sense of the word, ‘unprecedented’. Parallels with the past – the speed with which so many artists found their lives turned upside down, the complexity of debates over how best to balance public safety with individual rights – are striking. But the contrasts are more striking still. Virtual platforms allow many performing artists to maintain their connection with an audience, and in some cases, an income stream. With the current shutdown affecting such broad swathes of Australia’s economy, the government today has more rapidly rolled out aid programs. One thing, though, remains uncertain. In 1919 the performing arts bounced back fairly quickly. Our current economic pain may not compare with what awaits us. The story of how we will exit this current crisis remains to be told. g Nicholas Tochka is Head of Musicology and Ethnomusicology at the Melbourne Conservatorium of Music. ❖ Film

Catharsis

An Australian film about PTSD Jordan Prosser

ost-traumatic stress disorder is a slippery condition to pin down and portray. Cinema in general struggles to convey the depth and nuance of mental illness, especially when it stems from trauma. We’re often left with frenzied flashbacks, bombastic sound design, and overripe performances that skirt dangerously close to parody. A mental illness is like a haunting, which may be why genre cinema – especially the horror genre – has recently found such success exploring the topic. Luckily, Hearts and Bones begins with a sequence so brutally efficient in its devastation we need no further convincing of Daniel Fisher’s (Hugo Weaving) ongoing condition. It takes up no more than five minutes A U S T R A L I A N B O O K R E V I E W J U N E – J U LY 2 0 2 0

of screen time, but this tragedy signifies a tipping point in the war photographer’s lifelong balancing act between observation and culpability. The second feature from Ben Lawrence (who wowed us with his 2019 documentary début, Ghost Hunter), Hearts and Bones is a restrained and delicate dance of shifting responsibility, empathy, and guilt. As a lauded, white Australian war photographer Dan Fisher makes for an instant and ingenious stand-in for so much of the Western world’s voyeuristic fascination with war zones, conflict, and tragedy. He has documented atrocities across the globe, and, while his critics level accusations of ‘misery porn’ against his more explicit images, Dan simply asserts that he ‘shoots what his conscience tells him to’. This line is a clever bit of armour on Dan’s part. We all know that even the most objective observation comes with an element of accountability.

After the film’s harrowing prologue, Dan has returned from Iraq to Sydney and is struggling with his escalating PTSD when that accountability comes knocking at his door in the form of Sebastian Ahmed (Andrew Luri), a South Sudanese refugee-turned-taxi driver. Sebastian heard an interview with Dan on the radio and wants him to document the community choir he runs for other African and Middle Eastern refugees. At first, Dan prevaricates, offering to sign a book of his photos and find Sebastian a more willing photographer. But when Dan’s partner Josie (Hayley McElhinney) reveals she is pregnant and Dan has a panic attack, Sebastian is the one to rush him to hospital. This is the beginning of a moving but complex bond between the two men. Dan visits the community choir, hears the other refugees’ stories, and even meets Sebastian’s family: his wife Anishka (Bolude Watson) and his daughter Kalmira (Arrawai and Samira Masiang). Anishka has another child on the way, same as Josie, and we discover that Dan’s reluctance to start a family stems from further trauma that he and Josie are yet to 62 A U S T R A L I A N B O O K R E V I E W J U N E – J U LY 2 0 2 0

properly reconcile. It weighs down their every interaction; silent, heavy, and oppressive. Hearts and Bones is filled with lovers and families sharing their lives in every outward sense yet isolating themselves emotionally. Dan documented a massacre in Sebastian’s village in South Sudan fifteen years earlier, but doesn’t even remember it. It’s just another war-torn village in a long line of war-torn villages. What’s more, his memory has holes in it from the PTSD, and from one too many close encounters with rogue mortar fire and IEDs. Dan is preparing a retrospective exhibition of his work, and Sebastian has one request: that he not display any of the photos from his village. They’re ‘a door to the past’ and a world of trauma he has spent his entire adult life escaping – not to mention hiding from Anishka. What to do when one man’s personal history is another’s life’s work? Both have witnessed terrible things – the difference is, Dan was profiting from the act of observation. He was there by choice. The film cleverly conveys the starkly contrasting lives of its central couples. A shot of Sebastian discovering a plume of blood on a hotel sheet at his industrial laundry day job intercuts bitingly with Dan and Josie calmly observing the new washing machine in their apartment. The script from Lawrence and Beatrix Christian highlights Dan and Josie’s privilege without ever condemning them for it, and wrings immense sympathy from Sebastian and Anishka’s situation without ever feeling exploitative. And while the film never quite returns to the same intensity of that opening sequence, that’s okay. With so many things on its mind, it’s only right that Hearts and Bones takes time to ruminate, scrutinise, and ultimately resists easy answers. The film is at its best when it trusts its own subtext – when we’re watching Dan and Sebastian wrestle silently with their correlating traumas. At its weakest, the film veers toward melodrama as the script and performances strain under the weight of some questionable character choices, improbable coincidences, and arbitrary conflicts that feel over-engineered to bring the narrative to a head. Even a thirdact bombshell, suggesting that the script might yet have a few tricks up its sleeve, is quickly folded into the existing drama and effectively waved away. No matter, though. The film’s provocations are ultimately more important than its specifics. It’s a work of unwavering and commendable empathy, holding space for characters both privileged and disenfranchised and sensitively underlining a raft of tragic commonalities that connect us across divides of race, country, and culture. During one of their most moving exchanges, Sebastian acknowledges that Dan has seen terrible things and suggests that he is ‘not strong enough to bear witness alone’. If Hearts and Bones has a message to proclaim, it’s that nobody is strong enough to bear witness alone. Trauma forces us inward where its poison spreads unchecked. The best, and most difficult, thing is to open ourselves to others. Dan and Sebastian’s relationship is a timely reminder of this, and the cathartic closing of a loop between observer and observed. g Hearts and Bones (Madman) is available on digital platforms. Jordan Prosser is a Melbourne-based writer, director, and performer.

Art

Missing from view Museums as sites of contestation Meg Foster

The Whole Picture: The colonial story of the art in our museums and why we need to talk about it by Alice Procter

Hachette $39.99 hb, 304 pp

ou are looking at a book. On its cover is a painting of a person of colour. But you can only see a portion of the piece. The face is obscured. One dark eye takes up the middle third of the page, while one nostril fills the bottom righthand corner. The painting is covered in a layer of fine cracks – presumably due to its age. These lines show that myriad individual pieces make up the image before you, but this is still only one part of the picture. Frustratingly, you cannot see the face as a whole. The cover belongs to art historian Alice Procter’s first book, The Whole Picture: The colonial story of the art in our museums and why we need to talk about it. Contrary to the common adage, this is a book that you can judge by its cover. Procter wants us to see the cracks in the narratives we are told by museums about the objects they house. She wants us to see the deep fissures that are papered over when museums claim to be neutral spaces; the histories of violence, genocide, cultural appropriation, and European élitism that are obscured behind museums’ claims to objectivity. This book aims to make us aware not of only institutional power but of our personal biases and that colonial history has a contemporary legacy. It confronts us with the fact that in museums the whole picture is always missing from view. Sitting comfortably at the nexus of postcolonial studies, art, public, imperial, and settler colonial histories, The Whole Picture is an example of interdisciplinary writing at its best. Framed as a guide to colonial museums, the book is divided into four sections to reflect four categories of museum spaces: the palace, the classroom, the memorial, and the playground. The chapters within each section unpack the history and significance of a particular object, work of art, or museum controversy. Alongside this thematic separation, the book builds chronologically, moving from the ‘great white men’ who created the first museums (as well as remarkably resilient ideas about what constitutes ‘art’), through to contemporary artistic interventions that seek to alter, critique, or hold a mirror to museums in an attempt to challenge these colonial legacies. This book was born of Procter’s experience running ‘Uncomfortable Art Tours’ about the colonial history of art in British museums, and this inheritance clearly shows. There is a remarkable symmetry between Procter’s book and the museums and stories that she describes. In the opening to this review I have mimicked Procter’s writing style as she starts each chapter with a vivid de-

scription of you, the reader, encountering the object or work of art under discussion. The conversational style, first-person narration, and visceral descriptions make for an immersive experience. The book is designed to draw the reader in and situate them in the narrative. This not only makes for an engaging read, but makes us feel our complicity in the colonial stories that Procter is telling, as well as our power to change them. While Procter crafts a careful and incisive argument, this point about empowerment ensures that the book does not replicate the same unequal power dynamic as the museums it critiques. The Whole Picture provides readers with not simply an alternative history but with the analytical tools and insight for them to critically engage with these stories themselves. In this way, Procter’s work reflects a shift in public history that sees historians as facilitators rather than as the sole authorities of the past. Time and time again, with historical and contemporary examples, The Whole Picture illustrates the disruptive potential of the museum visitor. Sacred objects meant to be approached with reverence can be desecrated; art designed to probe past injustice can become fodder for selfies. But equally, a work of art can be read against the institution that houses it; marginalised voices can be articulated and heard through thoughtful design and a willingness on the part of the visitor to engage.

The conversational style, first-person narration, and visceral descriptions make for an immersive experience The Whole Picture focuses on physical museums and art galleries, but its message can easily be extended to the virtual museum spaces that have proliferated since the outbreak of Covid-19. While digital galleries may appear inclusive and democratic by virtue of their accessibility, they are just as fraught as physical museums. Whether physical or digital, we need to be critical of these spaces. Procter pushes us to ask: what items do museums display, and why? Whose voices are receiving a platform, and whose voices are being silenced? Who has power over a museum’s narrative? What do they choose to say? This book explodes the notion that we can ever access the whole picture when it comes to colonial art and museums. There is never one perspective from which to view history, just as there is never one way for a visitor to engage with art. Art and engagement are always about choices. There is nothing inherent or inevitable about them. With discernment, reflexivity, empathy, and care, Procter shows us how to access the layers of meaning that are hidden beneath museums’ claims to truth, and how to recognise our own place in these narratives. With that knowledge, we are better equipped to approach museums as sites of contestation, politics, emotion, and change. The stakes are clear. Once we know the colonial story of the art in our museums, we are no longer beholden to history; we can start changing it. g Meg Foster is a historian and writer who specialises in settler colonial, ethnographic, and public history. Her prizes include the 2018 Aboriginal History Award from the History Council of New South Wales. ❖ A U S T R A L I A N B O O K R E V I E W J U N E – J U LY 2 0 2 0

Art

Calcified visions

Immersion in an art movement Luke Stegemann

The Stranger Artist: Life at the edge of Kimberley painting by Quentin Sprague

Hardie Grant Books $39.99 pb, 304 pp

he Stranger Artist is a finely structured and beautifully written account of gallerist Tony Oliver’s immersion into the world of the Kimberley art movement at the end of the twentieth century; the close relationships he developed over the following years with painters such as Paddy Bedford, Freddie Timms, and Rusty Peters; and the creation of Jirrawun Arts as a collective to both promote and protect the artists and their work. How these artists, under Oliver’s practical guidance, came to assume the mantle of the legendary Rover Thomas and took Kimberley art to the world provides a compelling narrative: from fascination to enthralment to disillusion. Dreams are born, bear fruit, and die. Like many a fine work of art, The Stranger Artist attracts with a brilliant surface while fascinating with its deeper layers. Behind the thrill and wisdom of the painting – so new and old, so luminous and dark – lurk the tragedies of history and dysfunctional politics. This book – how could it be otherwise? – is peopled with spectacular characters, art, and landscapes. Appropriate to this remote corner of Australia, it is full of intense colour and eccentricity, while also permeated with great sadness. The subterranean channels of Quentin Sprague’s narrative lead the reader to explore more profound questions about the nature of art, of its capacity to inform and perhaps heal; to consider how Indigenous expression works within white cultural frameworks, and how such expression plays out in the broader context of Australian culture and its ambitions. This is a powerful story of Indigenous art and its relationship to our often bloody history. The book also provokes questions about representations of reality – of how the Kimberley artists rendered their world, and how the driven, obsessed, and perhaps slightly mad Oliver held together his visionary project through both doubt and ecstasy. For the Indigenous artists, painting was the revelation of ceremony and Law, and their relationship to the origins and nature of the world. It was also a way of accounting for history: the largely untold story of the dispossession and massacres of the Gija people in the late nineteenth century. Sprague rises to a difficult challenge: the meeting point between the English language – both generous and limiting – and the art under examination. For here are a series of translations and mutations, from the nuanced folds of the Kimberley landscape to Indigenous art, to the language of the writer, each time filtered through eyes, memory, sense, and the shifting mirrors of the human heart. Writing of Rover Thomas’s art, Sprague displays his deft 64 A U S T R A L I A N B O O K R E V I E W J U N E – J U LY 2 0 2 0

rendering of potentially difficult subject matter: ‘sublime beauty … fields of open colour cut through by lines of ragged dotting; the surfaces were dusty and tactile, in themselves a gentle revelation’. The reader is in good hands. Sprague understands, as did Oliver, that the Kimberley art movement – in its heterogeneous collective, one of the great visions splendid of recent Australian culture – emerged from a formally ruinous social space, of communities hidden away in decaying homes, too often dependent on the ‘arrogant paternalism’ of the local white population. Alcoholism and suicide deplete one Indigenous generation after another; somehow from this bleakness, teased out by Oliver’s relentless drive, comes astonishing pictorial light. Yet even as Oliver decamps from the distractions – social and grog-related – of Kununurra and relocates the Jirrawun workshop south to Crocodile Hole, then to Bow River, back to Kununurra, and, finally, to the realisation of his gallery at Wyndham, there is a sense of collapse, despite the supreme efforts of the assorted Kimberley artists – a sense that all this could only last so long, threatened not just by ongoing structural poverty, age, and ill health, but also by greed, remote community politics (often involving white administrators), clashing personalities, the whims of fashion, and, parallel but still important, the financial malfeasance and collapse of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission (ATSIC). ‘[A] patchwork,’ Sprague notes, ‘of unresolved histories, a mess of competing visions calcified.’ Even when great success comes, most notably through the fame and fortune of Paddy Bedford, there is a sense that it might not be true: Bedford, Sprague notes, ‘had used paint to transcribe his Dreamings and received in exchange a thick wad of fifty-dollar notes’. Was this, in some sense, all too easy? While many marvelled at the new worlds revealed and their undeniable, even indescribable power, it was only a matter of time before the mundane but inescapable laws of commerce and productivity took over. Sprague convincingly portrays Oliver as both observer and, at times, participant in the flowing translation of history and law into art. Unlike white painters he had known, hemmed in by anxieties of influence, worried by the anticipated public and critical response that can determine (or undermine) the very nature of a work of art, the Kimberley artists were oblivious to such concerns. Their work seemed ‘effortless: a simple combination of lines and colour and dots reworked in endless variation’. There is something to be said, in this observation, for the enduring power of tradition; for the power of belonging, and for having deep roots in the world, and drawing on the stability that provides. It was not a stability that would protect Tony Oliver. Key artists and other figures central to one of our nation’s most important art movements began to die; Oliver ultimately seeks a form of resolution in Vietnam. Sprague had described him as operating along a ‘schizophrenic edge’, attempting to satisfy the demands of two worlds while balancing his own inner conflicts. Around him whirled the complex rivalries of the Kimberley collective, its ambivalent relation to money, fashion, and influence, all within the ongoing context of Indigenous political affirmation. g Luke Stegemann is based in southeast Queensland. His next book is Amnesia Road (NewSouth, 2021). ❖

Art

Many flights of stairs Australian women artists in France Jane Sullivan

Intrépide: Australian women artists in early twentieth-century France by Clem Gorman and Therese Gorman

Monash University Publishing $34.95 pb, 268 pp

rt and Paris meant everything to Agnes Goodsir. ‘You must forgive my enthusiasm,’ she wrote. ‘Nothing else is of the smallest or faintest importance besides that.’ Goodsir was the Australian artist who painted the iconic portrait Girl with Cigarette, now in the Bendigo Art Gallery. It depicts a cool, sophisticated, free-spirited woman of the Parisian boulevards. When Goodsir created it, in 1925 or thereabouts, she had lived in Paris since the turn of the century. Apart from brief visits back to Australia, she stayed there until her death in 1939. Goodsir is one of the better known of the twenty-eight artists whose careers are followed in this engaging and often enlightening book: other stars include Margaret Olley, Margaret Preston, and Stella Bowen. The authors are a husband-and-wife team: Clem writes on the visual arts, and both are working on a biography of the Sydney artist Wendy Sharpe. The real strength of their research here is to uncover the history of many more Australian women artists working in France in the early twentieth century who are now little known, and in some cases forgotten. As the Gormans demonstrate, they deserve much wider recognition. This is a subject that resonates with me because of my own family history. Although my mother, Victoria Cowdroy, never made it to Paris, she was one of those forgotten women artists of the early twentieth century who have won belated attention from contemporary art scholars. What were the twin attractions of art and Paris to these women, who all found this intoxicating combination every bit as important to their lives as Goodsir did? Before World War I, and then between the wars, the City of Light was the world capital of art. It had the best art schools and teachers, galleries and salons, and was the home of exciting new movements like Cubism and Modernism. An artist could rent a modest Left Bank atelier, albeit up many flights of stairs and often without running water, and pop out to the lively local cafés to network with mentors and peers, or simply to enjoy the heady bohemian atmosphere. Anyone expecting wild tales of louche women letting down their hair and dancing on tables will be disappointed. A few did embrace the bohemian life, but they were all there to work, and they took their work very seriously. Hilda Rix Nicholas, who went to Paris with her mother and sister, was a typical ‘decent, provincial Australian’; though her art developed and blossomed, she herself stayed that way.

Male artists were drawn to Paris, too, but a female pilgrim had far more obstacles in her path, which means that she truly deserved to be called intrepid, especially when she came from half a world away and from a background that didn’t value art as a calling for women.

Male artists were drawn to Paris, but a female pilgrim had far more obstacles in her path Money was the main obstacle. Many of these women came from wealthy families who supported them, but not all. Marie Tuck, who spent fourteen years in France, saved the money she earned from ten years of teaching art in Australia until she had enough to travel to Paris. Then she cleaned the studio of Australian expatriate artist Rupert Bunny so that she could pay him to teach her. Anne Dangar, a disciple of the Cubist painter Albert Gleizes, slaved away in the garden of an artists’ commune to earn her keep. She had little help from her rich family. The mother of her longtime friend Grace Crowley was proud of her daughter’s art until it started to look like a profession. When young Grace took a break from art school, mamma sacked the maid, expecting her daughter to perform her household duties. Crowley was happy in Paris and embraced Cubism. Her career was just beginning when a family illness summoned her back to Australia. The illness was nowhere near as serious as had been made out. The authors speculate that the family threatened to cut off her allowance if she didn’t return. Most of these women were single (and some, surely, were lesbians, though we know very little about their private lives). But was it any easier for those supported by husbands? The trials of Stella Bowen with her demanding and spectacularly unfaithful husband Ford Madox Ford have been well documented elsewhere, but she wasn’t the only woman to find marriage a mixed blessing, to say the least. Devoted as she was to her husband, Eric, Constance Stokes commented: ‘Any creative work is a difficult life for a woman if she is a wife and mother.’ Both Dora Meeson and Ethel Carrick were tireless in their promotion of their husbands’ artistic careers, at the expense of their own work. Some women’s shy and self-effacing temperaments held them back from the kind of relentless self-promotion that a successful career often demands. Even so, their achievements, whether they followed a traditional path or broke away into Modernism, were astonishing. Those who returned to Australia introduced a parochial, backward, and sometimes wowserish culture to new ideas and techniques that they promoted through exhibitions, teaching, and their own example. Inevitably, the question will be asked: were these women at least as good as their male counterparts in Paris? The authors are in no doubt, and their crusading spirit is infectious. While it is difficult to evaluate each individual artist’s work from the small number of colour reproductions in the book, I hope this text will be the start of a wider and deeper appreciation of what these artists did, and the many obstacles they overcame. g Jane Sullivan is a literary journalist and novelist based in Melbourne. Her latest book is Storytime (Ventura Press). A U S T R A L I A N B O O K R E V I E W J U N E – J U LY 2 0 2 0

Theatre

A woman with agency

Samira Elagoz’s Cock, Cock … Who’s There? Tali Lavi

Samira Elagoz (photograph by Adam Forte)

amira Elagoz understands the contested qualities of the rape narrative. She understands this as someone who has experienced rape twice. The first time she tells us, she is alone on stage, a chair her single prop. She is a young everywoman, slight, with ripped jeans, someone who, walking down the street, the viewer might imagine, would not attract much attention. This calmly spoken version of Elagoz confesses, ‘It’s exactly six years since my dumb boyfriend forced himself on me.’ Horror is communicated in an envelope of banality, ushering us into a work that investigates the repercussions of rape and explores an alternative to the position of victim; a woman with agency, even if the avenues she uses to gain it are sometimes profoundly troubling. It is important to note that before Elagoz walks onto the stage two things have already been revealed on the large screen backdrop. The first is a white text on a black screen. It begins like a fairy tale, but the story quickly becomes monstrous with its application of pornographic language. Lasting only a few minutes, it sets a tone of unease and violence. We next watch a film that erupts as psychedelic, a mélange of camp, disco, and porn. Elagoz is a performance artist and writer who sets out to produce a work that is intensely destabilising. As her story unfolds, the mechanism of disruption and eruption is employed continuously, except when she is onstage speaking. At one later point, a screeching sound reaches a painful dissonance, as if to make sure that we are not getting too comfortable. As the title denotes with its allusion to a ‘Knock, Knock’ joke, Elagoz uses an audacious kind of humour along the way. The Elagoz on stage is intensely familiar with the visual image. We are told that from the age of fifteen her younger self experiences being sexualised by men and constructs a facial ‘twitch’, half-pout, half-sneer. The flood of images, of selfies, that follows is increasingly sexualised. In all of them she sports a rendition of this expression, sometimes in various states of undress. The experiments are threefold. On the website Craig’s List, she posts a call for meetings with men in their apartments. The resultant footage is deeply disturbing. Elagoz’s camera captures these, for 66 A U S T R A L I A N B O O K R E V I E W J U N E – J U LY 2 0 2 0

the most part, much older men from various different countries. Several speak of sexual depravity. Some of the men are rendered uncomfortable in the view of the camera, an interesting subversion of the male gaze. Sometimes Cock, Cock … Who’s There? feels unrelentingly brutal because of its voyeuristic impulse. Elagoz refers to herself as both ‘scientist and test rat’. She is not the first artist to produce an artistic response to her own rape. Elagoz’s work is closer to British artist Tracey Emin’s confessional work than to Renaissance painter Artemisia Gentileschi’s forms of visual testimony. But the performance artist does verbally articulate the revenge fantasy of killing her rapist, as Gentileschi did when she painted herself as Judith beheading her rapist Agostino Tassi, recast as Holofernes. The fantasy is voiced by Elagoz after the second time she is raped, this time by a friend in Japan. Elagoz now travels around the world, but she returns to her hometown in Finland to interview childhood friends about their responses to her rape. Most do not know what to say. In one frame she appears with her mother and grandmother, a singular moment of opening herself up to the compassion of others. There is an impulse to locate the authentic Samira as the one who appears without makeup or artifice alongside her mother and grandmother and her childhood friend Otto. But to do so would be erroneous. It would be making the fallacious judgement that selves performed in the digital world are inherently inauthentic. For Samira and others of her age or younger – she was born in 1989 – the selfie as a performed self is a way of being in the world. Elagoz would probably argue that hers, charged as they are with eroticism, are a revelation of desire, of a sexualised self. This Samira is another version of herself but no less authentic. The day after witnessing this play, I attended a session at Adelaide Writers’ Week where writers Bri Lee and Lucia OsborneCrowley appeared. Both are survivors of sexual assault. Lee said that in writing Eggshell Skull (2018) a kind of therapy was enacted through gaining ‘control of every single word’, by deciding ‘what the narrative’ would be. Osborne-Crowley spoke of trauma as calcifying if the story is repressed. In creating her own performance and in the curation of her many narratives, Elagoz is exercising a control denied her by her two rapists. It should be noted that the work was created in 2016, before the #MeToo movement exploded and stories of sexual assault flooded the web. Let’s pause for a moment at the work’s title. Cock, Cock … Who’s There? We cannot discard the first part. After all, without the cock, there would be no rape in this case. But the title’s real resonance lies in its second part which might be recast as follows: ‘Who’s There?’ ‘Samira.’ Which leaves us with the more complex question of ‘Who’s Samira?’ – a question too difficult to answer. There are a multitude of versions of Samira evident in Cock, Cock … Who’s There?, not as a direct result of being fractured by her experience of rape – which is not to say that she hasn’t been – but because this is who Elagoz is, as an artist, as a woman in the world. g Cock, Cock … Who’s There? was presented by the Adelaide Festival in March 2020. (Longer version online.) Tali Lavi is a Melbourne-based critic.

Television

The plot against decency

HBO adapts Philip Roth’s counterfactual novel Ben Brooker

Zoe Kazan and Morgan Spector in The Plot Against America (photograph via HBO/HBO/TNS)

ith theatres, cinemas, and concert halls shuttered worldwide due to Covid-19, the so-called ‘golden age of television’ may have just entered its platinum phase. Television production, like everything else, has been forced into hibernation or hurried workarounds, but the plethora of content on various streaming services grows apace. Those seeking more substantial fare than Netflix’s trashy hit Tiger King will no doubt alight on The Plot Against America, HBO’s adaptation of Philip Roth’s 2004 novel of the same name. With David Simon and Ed Burns at the helm, the series seems preordained to enter the growing pantheon of the network’s prestige offerings, including the masterful The Wire, one of Simon and Burns’s early collaborations. The Plot Against America is not the equal of The Wire, but, then again, it is a limited series, incapable of the absorbing narrative expansiveness afforded by multiple seasons. Instead, Roth’s long, counterfactual novel, which takes as its main conceit a fictional Charles Lindbergh presidency during World War II, is compressed into six one-hour episodes. Set in Newark, New Jersey, both the book and series show the triumph of famous aviator and America First-er Lindbergh over Franklin D. Roosevelt in the 1940 presidential election, and the country’s subsequent descent into isolationism and rampant anti-Semitism, through the eyes of one Jewish family: Beth and Herman; their young boys, Philip and Sandy; Alvin, Herman’s adult nephew; and Evelyn, Beth’s sister, as well as her paramour, the Lindbergh-admiring Rabbi Bengelsdorf. As the country fractures, so too does the family. The Plot Against America is old-fashioned television with newfangled production values. Earnest and slow moving, it has virtually no libidinal charge whatsoever. While it replicates the book’s attention to detail, transmuting Roth’s long, accumulating sentences into fluid, Steadicam-heavy cinematography, it largely jettisons its comic tone. For the most part, the series is textural rather than dramatic, foregrounding mood – namely, a sort of creeping dread – over incident. It’s also beautiful to behold. Cinematographer Martin Ahlgren’s recreation of 1940s America, clearly influenced by Edward Hopper and his fellow mid-twentieth-century realists, is meticulous and warm-hued. Much has been made of Winona Ryder’s performance as

Evelyn, but it’s nothing special. Nor is Morgan Spector’s Herman. Square-jawed and handsome, he convinces as a leading man but not the everyman Roth, I suspect, had in mind. Far better, though likely to be underappreciated on account of its restraint, is Zoe Kazan’s Beth, strong not in the modern, ‘kick-ass’ sense, but in a way that feels almost lost to contemporary film- and TV-making. She is resilient and quietly forceful, a woman whose innate power is utterly compromised by the restrictive gender roles of the time. The child actors are terrific, especially Azhy Robertson as Roth’s ten-year-old surrogate, Philip. John Turturro, one of America’s best character actors, is ideally cast as the buttery, southern-accented Bengelsdorf. Prior to his death in 2018, Roth apparently cautioned Simon not to draw too close a parallel between Lindbergh and Trump. For one, Lindbergh was a popular hero prior to his embrace of Nazism; Trump was never anything except a shonky businessman and TV host – a putz, as Herman might put it. But, just as the novel in its day was read by many as a roman-à-clef for the warmongering administration of George W. Bush, it is inevitable that the series will be widely interpreted as an allegory for Trump’s rise to power, and the poisoning of the US body politic by his tacit and overt endorsements of xenophobia, racism, and bigotry. Whether Simon heeded Roth’s advice is unclear. The series is peppered with dialogue ostensibly about Lindbergh, but it is clearly a projection aimed squarely at the incumbent president. He doesn’t mean what he says he means. There’s a lot of hate out there, which he knows how to tap into. As Herman says, ‘That man is unfit. He shouldn’t be the president. It’s as simple as that.’ Like any good writer, Roth feared the reduction of his novel into an easy parable for any one historical moment. But why make the series now, more than a decade after the book’s publication, if not out of a sense of urgency to arrest the Trump presidency before a bewildered and betrayed portion of the electorate, and an embarrassingly ineffectual Democratic Party, conspire to guarantee a second term come November? Trump is not a fascist; to say so is a category error that diminishes both our understanding of fascism and of the man himself. He’s something far slipperier than that – a self-aggrandising huckster, a narcissistic crybaby, a demagogue by accident rather than design, and, yes, a kind of America First-er – which makes him harder to mobilise against. This is where the comparison to Lindbergh, at least the maverick figure of Roth’s imagination, is useful. It reminds us that we should be worried less about the importation of European-style fascism into America than about the gradual exclusion of minorities from the American Dream – what is left of it – by the deeply regressive tendencies of what now passes for mainstream conservatism. Much as we might wish it, it is unlikely that Trump will disappear in a puff of smoke as the Lindbergh of The Plot Against America does, lost in a conspiracy theory-stoking plane flight. Instead, we will have to do what Philip Roth, and this adaptation of his book, doesn’t: reckon with a time not safely exorcised of state-sanctioned hate but pregnant with it. g The Plot Against America is on HBO. (Longer review online) Ben Brooker is a writer, editor, critic, playwright, and essayist. A U S T R A L I A N B O O K R E V I E W J U N E – J U LY 2 0 2 0

Fiction

From the Archive Sonya Hartnett’s novel Of a Boy won the 2003 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize and The Age Book of the Year Award. Kate Middleton – runner-up in the 2020 Calibre Essay Prize – reviewed it in the September 2002 issue of ABR. The review is one of thousands in our extensive digital archive going back to 1978, all accessible by subscribers.

t primary school we were shown a video warning children not to get into strangers’ cars. We were told to note the places with Safety House stickers on the way home. I remember wondering if, on being pursued, I’d be able to run all the way to the nearest one. Every so often, we heard about a kidnapping on the news, so we took these warnings seriously. Sonya Hartnett’s novel Of a Boy, written for the adult market after her many successful Young Adult novels, begins with a kidnapping, which provides a counterpoint to the central story of nine-year-old Adrian. Veronica, Zoe, and Christopher Metford go to the milk bar one afternoon to buy ice cream, and never return. Adrian watches this news story with interest and trepidation, asking his grandmother if it happened nearby. Adrian keeps a list of his ordinary fears. Reading a newspaper article about a sea monster found off the coast of New Zealand, he ‘adds the sea monster to the list of things he finds disquieting’. Just as he remains attentive to the story of the kidnapped Metford children, he searches throughout the course of the novel for more information regarding this sea monster. His list of fears includes the concrete (he ‘dislikes seeing his cupboard door ajar, especially at night’: this is common sense), but it also encompasses murkier fears. Adrian is afraid of everything, especially being left alone. Removed from his mother, Sookie, then abandoned by his father, Adrian now lives with his maternal grandmother and his uncle. Removed from one school at which he was an outcast, he clings to a shadowy marginality at his new school, where he meets his best friend, Clinton Tull, over a tin of Derwent pencils. His relationships with friends and family are etched with quiet precision: the warmest, and, one senses, the most hopeless, is his relationship with his Uncle Rory. Rory, too, is haunted by living. Having once been involved in a car accident that caused the death of a close friend, Rory is now unable to leave the house, and, though he wants to help Adrian, he proves as incapable of this as everyone else in Adrian’s life. The reader feels the immediacy of their failures, which are presented in the present tense. When a family moves into the house across the street, Adrian befriends the three children. Nicole, the eldest, speaks for them all, and is peculiarly reticent to answer Adrian’s questions. Their appearance, and Nicole’s evasiveness, play upon both Adrian’s and the reader’s expectation about the missing children. This is made explicit when Rory says: ‘Two girls and a little boy. 68 A U S T R A L I A N B O O K R E V I E W J U N E – J U LY 2 0 2 0

Like those kids we saw on the telly.’ The friendship that develops between Adrian and Nicole is at the heart of the story, and is successfully and sympathetically portrayed: the fits and starts of their interactions providing a natural tension and shape to the unfolding narrative. Hartnett’s observations of the children are acute. Her creation of Horsegirl (Sandra, a student in Adrian’s class from St Jonah’s Orphanage) is particularly memorable. ‘Not really an orphanage,’ Clinton informs Adrian, but ‘an orphanage for kids whose mums and dads are still alive.’ Horsegirl is the most far-gone of the marginal children. Unruly, easily enraged, ‘defiantly crazed’, she is left to do what she likes, which is to be a horse. Showing up at school with a bridle and reins, Horsegirl whinnies and neighs, providing an example for all the students of what it is to fail utterly. The children of St Jonah’s are a source of terror for Adrian, who feels akin to them. He, too, is living away from his parents, and has experienced the loneliness of being a misfit. His precarious friendship with Clinton stands between him and another social failure. With the disappearances in his life – his mother, his father, the Metford children – Adrian grows more afraid of being cast out. This book is full of the domestic details of Adrian’s life, and they are lovingly rendered. Reminding me somewhat of Joan Didion’s essays of the 1960s and 1970s, Hartnett provides the contrast between the world stage and the suburban landscape. Establishing her story, she lists significant events of 1977: ‘the United Nations banned the sale of arms to South Africa, US President Carter officially pardoned those who’d draft-dodged the Vietnam War’. In contrast, she situates the small scale of her own story: ‘three children bought no icecream, did not return home’. Descriptions of household objects are returned to, just as the news stories Adrian follows and his relations with friends and family are skilfully threaded through the story. It is wonderful to see such a well-written and adult book focusing with shifting degrees of tenderness and darkness on Adrian. Given her solid reputation as an author of Young Adult fiction, and given the youth of its central character, this novel may have difficulty in finding its audience, which would be a pity. Hartnett’s style is well-suited to adult fiction, and Of a Boy is a rewarding novel. Full of the complexities of its characters’ perceptions and Adrian’s immobilising fears, it is a deeply moving story. g