Australian Book Review - June 2024, no. 465

Miranda Johnson Race politics in New Zealand

Matthew Lamb

Copyright and its discontents

Natasha Sholl Calibre Essay Prize

Peter Rose Hazzard and Harrower

Seumas Spark Bruce Pascoe

AUKUS in the dock

Questions and challenges for the government

by James Curran

‘A heartfelt and beautifully written homage to Scholfield-Peters’ forebears, who were caught in the 20th-century horrors of fascism and anti-semitism, and, in her loving portrait of her grandfather, to the survival of the human spirit. A moving contribution to the literature of the Shoah and its ricochet effect down the generations.’

– Anna Funder

Advances

The season of giving

Close readers of our Patrons page will note many new additions to this month’s listing, including several substantial donations. Some of these followed a Melbourne function on 1 May, at which ABR Editor Peter Rose, ABR Chair Sarah Holland-Batt, and ABR Laureate Robyn Archer all spoke. This was an opportunity for ABR to thank its many supporters and to highlight new developments and opportunities.

The Editor also spoke about ABR’s funding predicament. At present, the magazine receives no federal funds – for the first time in at least three decades. Happily, we have had success in Creative Australia’s crucial 2025-28 multi-year round (we sympathise with those arts organisation that missed out). But this leaves us with 2024 to negotiate. (We have applied for a small grant covering July to December 2024, but the outcome was unknown as we went to press.)

This federal reality is compounded by the diminution of state funding, doubtless caused by the depletion of arts budgets around the country.

To give you a sense of the challenges facing literary magazines, here is a stark comparison. In 2019, ABR received a total of $245,000 from the erstwhile Australia Council and from a total of five state arts ministries (Victoria, New South Wales, South Australia, Western Australia, and Queensland).

This year we have received a grand total of $12,000 – all from Arts SA. It seems ironic that the only government presently supporting the magazine is the one in South Australia – where the magazine started in 1961.

The lack of funding from Creative Victoria since 2019 seems lamentable and myopic, given ABR’s location in the heart of, and immense contribution to, the City of Literature. Obviously, the magazine continues to seek funding wherever it can, while also maintaining diverse programs and paying writers fairly. We thank everyone who has donated to ABR in recent months. Your donations are stirring and enabling.

Our donations flyer accompanies this issue. Those wishing to donate can also do so safely via the website.

The ABR Inglis Fellowship

While arts budgets are notoriously strapped (especially when it comes to literature, the poor cousin of arts funding in this country), cultural philanthropy assumes new and visionary forms.

Recently, friends and associates of the late Ken and Amirah Inglis approached the magazine with a view to

commemorating the Inglises’ interests and achievements through the creation of a fellowship intended to encourage young writers and scholars. A number of prompt donations have enabled us to proceed with the ABR Inglis Fellowship, which is open to those thirty-five and under. Writers of all kinds have until 1 July to apply. The chosen Fellow will work closely with the Editor and will, over the course of twelve months, contribute three review essays or commentaries in the field of Australia history and culture.

Professor Frank Bongiorno, one of the organisers, told Advances: ‘The ABR Inglis Fellowship was created to honour the remarkable Ken and Amirah Inglis, whose writings and participation in Australia’s cultural and social life enriched this country. Ken and Amirah were generous in encouraging young scholars and providing them with rare opportunities; this Fellowship seeks to acknowledge that legacy.’

Full details appear on our website.

ABR Arts forever!

Recently, out of the blue, the magazine received an extraordinary grant of $5,000 from the Sidney Myer Fund ‘ in recognition of the exemplary work your organisation undertakes in the course of its everyday activities’.

To celebrate this most welcome grant, we will draw on it each month to support one of our arts reviews. This month, it is Anwen Crawford’s critique of Goran Stolevski’s new film, Housekeeping for Beginners, on page 40.

It seems opportune to advance the ABR Arts section from the back pages. Henceforth, our arts reviews will sit at the heart of the magazine – where they emphatically belong!

At the Melbourne function mentioned above, Robyn Archer made the point that arts criticism – apart from its pleasures and provocations – provides an essential record of creative endeavour in this country.

Apodcast of one’s own

Devotees of podcasts in addition to our own shouldn’t miss Julia Gillard’s new monthly Book Club episodes of A Podcast of One’s Own, which the former prime minister is co-hosting (on an alternating basis) with Sarah Holland-Batt, celebrated author of The Jaguar and other poetry collections. (The other co-host is author-journalist Kathy Lette.) In their first episode together, Gillard and Holland-Batt delved into Anna Funder’s Wifedom, a biographical account of George Orwell’s wife, Eileen O’Shaughnessy. g

Time, Tide and History: Eleanor Dark’s Fiction

Edited by Fiona Morrison and Brigid Rooney

JUNE 2024

Australian Book Review

June 2024, no. 465

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Front cover : The Virginia-class, nuclear-powered, fast-attack submarine USS North Dakota (SSN 784) travels up the Thames River to return to its homeport at Naval Submarine Base (SUBASE) New London, 2019. (US Navy photo by Chief Boatswains Mate Michael Santiago/Released/APFootage/Alamy)

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ABR June 2024

James Curran

Miranda Johnson

Matthew Lamb

James Ley

Seumas Spark

Paul Giles

Corey Cribb

Nathan Hollier

Anna Couani

Claire Potter

Peter Rose

Diane Stubbings

Anthony Lynch

Shannon Burns

Laura Elizabeth Woollett

Patrick Allington

Naama Grey-Smith

Joachim Redner

David Jack

Malcolm Gillies

Patrick Flanery

Andrew Fuhrmann

Anwen Crawford

Neil Armfield

Iain McCalman

CALIBRE

SOCIETY

POETRY

FROM THE ARCHIVE

Natasha Sholl

Clare Monagle

Julienne van Loon

Astrid Edwards

Felicity Plunkett Sam Ryan

Dave Witty

Krien

Questions and challenges for the Albanese government

Biculturalism on the rocks in New Zealand

Copyright and its discontents

Knife by Salman Rushdie

Black Duck by Bruce Pascoe with Lyn Harwood

Dark-Land by Kevin Hart

Every Man for Himself and God Against All by Werner Herzog

Occidental Preacher, Accidental Teacher by Shannon L. Smith

‘Summer Winter’ ‘Black Market’

Hazzard and Harrower edited by Brigitta Olubas and Susan Wyndham

Only the Astronauts by Ceridwen Dovey

The Gorgon Flower by John Richards

Caledonian Road by Andrew O’Hagan

Pheasants Nest by Louise Milligan

Safe Haven by Shankari Chandran

Bright Objects by Ruby Todd

Selected Stories by Franz Kafka

Change by Édouard Louis

Mahler’s Song of the Earth

The Adelaide Art Scene by Margot Osborne

AGSA 500 edited by Rhana Devenport

A Case for the Existence of God

Housekeeping for Beginners

Backstage

Open Page

‘Hold your nerve’

Netflicks by Tony Hughes-d’Aeth

We Are Free to Change the World by Lyndsey Stonebridge

The Relationship Is the Project edited by Jade Lillie and Kate Larsen

The Asking by Jane Hirshfield

The Blue Cocktail by Audrey Molloy

Ekhō by Roslyn Orlando

Forest Wars by David Lindenmayer

John Büsst by Iain McCalman

The Best Australian Stories 2005 edited by Frank Moorhouse

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ABR Podcast

Our weekly podcast includes interviews with ABR writers, major reviews, and creative writing. Here are some recent and coming episodes.

2024 Calibre Essay Tracey Slaughter

Albanese’s quiet government Frank Bongiorno

Anne Manne’s Crimes of the Cross Scott Stephens

A profile of Peter Dutton Patrick Mullins

Tony Birch on Kim Scott Tony Hughes-d’Aeth

Peter Goldsworthy on cancer Michael Shmith

Frank Moorhouse Sascha Morrell

‘Hold your nerve’ – an essay Natasha Sholl

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Arts South Australia

AUKUS in the dock

Questions and challenges for the Albanese government by

James Curran

When the former Labor prime minister Paul Keating appeared at the National Press Club in March 2023 to savage the bipartisan commitment to acquire nuclear-powered submarines under the AUKUS agreement, he did so only days after Anthony Albanese had stood alongside his British counterpart Rishi Sunak and US President Joe Biden in San Diego to announce the ‘optimal pathway’ for the agreement. Fluttering above them were the respective flags of the three nations. In the background lay berthed the USS Missouri, a Virginia class submarine lined with American sailors and festooned with its own bunting. But as Keating noted in typically pungent fashion, on that day ‘there was only one payer: the Australian prime minister … there’s three leaders standing there … [but] only one is paying … our bloke, Albo. The other two, they’ve got the band playing, happy days are here again.’

Happy days are most certainly not here again for AUKUS, especially for its Pillar One component, which envisages Australia acquiring between three and five US Virginia class submarines from the United States in the early 2030s, and then, from the early 2040s, eight new SSN-AUKUS submarines: British designed, partly Australian built, and with an American weapons and combat system. But the spectre of cost blowouts and production delays already haunts the agreement. The Australian government will hand over around $5 billion to the British government over the next decade to subsidise an expansion of British submarine production capacity and a down payment on design work for the new SSN AUKUS. That comes on top of the $6.81 billion Canberra will be pay to Washington over the period 2024-33 to assist America’s submarine industrial production line

As we approach the third anniversary of the surprise unveiling of the deal in September 2021, when Scott Morrison was prime minister, scepticism about AUKUS has only grown, and not just from Australian observers. During a recent visit

to Sydney by a former senior US senior military official who had served under former president Donald Trump, Keating’s blistering remarks on the deal resurfaced. Speaking on the condition of anonymity, the American said that, although he disagreed with much of Keating’s address to the Press Club, the former prime minister was ‘absolutely right on the point that AUKUS cannot be a transfer of wealth from Australia to the United States. But now I see that you have signed two outbound cheques, one to the US and one to the British. So what Keating predicted is actually happening.’

Keating, along with strategist Hugh White, has been at the forefront in raising a number of questions related to AUKUS. They are questions the Albanese government steadfastly refuses to answer. Keating could not fathom why Albanese remained so proud of taking the decision, as Opposition leader, to back Morrison on the agreement when he was given less than twenty-four hours to consider it. Keating also lamented that there was ‘no White Paper, no major ministerial or prime ministerial statement to explain to the Australian people what exactly is the threat we are supposedly facing and why nuclear submarines, costing more than any national project since Federation, [are] the best way to respond to such a threat’. Keating wants his name ‘clearly recorded among those who say it is a mistake’.

In a long essay for Australian Foreign Affairs (issue 20, February 2024), Hugh White argued that the deeper lessons of the ‘AUKUS debacle’ will need to be confronted and learned, especially the vast gulf between ends and means, between the ‘commit[ment] to major defence capability investments without careful analysis of the outcome we want to achieve, and the most cost-effective means of achieving it’. For White, at the root of AUKUS is a failure to properly understand that Australia may, in the long run, be unable to rely on the United States to ‘keep Asia stable and Australia secure the way we have for so long’.

AUKUS, then, at its core, represents a huge strategic, intellectual, and fiscal gamble on American staying power and military industrial capacity. Just don’t expect to hear that pop out of any Australian government press briefing or political speech. AUKUS itself has been grafted onto the tribal discourse in which the United States alliance is revered and almost mysticised. As Keating and White, and indeed other analysts, have found out, to criticise any component of the agreement is to be seen as trashing a revered idol.

Labor has failed to provide a compelling strategic rationale for the acquisition of nuclear-powered submarines

Like its Coalition predecessor, Labor has failed to provide a compelling strategic rationale for the acquisition of nuclearpowered submarines. Prime Minister Albanese, when he speaks about AUKUS, often boasts about the job opportunities it will create domestically, particularly in South Australia. Defence Minister Richard Marles prioritises the role the submarines will play in protecting critical trading routes in the Indian Ocean and the South China Sea, and Foreign Minister Penny Wong assures her Southeast Asian counterparts that the new capability will help create a new strategic equilibrium, or balance of power, in Asia. All three routinely confirm that the Virginia class submarines will remain under Australian sovereign control.

But the Albanese government is losing control, if it ever had it, of its AUKUS Pillar One policy. The passing of legislation through the US Congress in late 2023, which enabled so much of AUKUS Pillar Two to proceed – this part fosters deeper integration of security and defencerelated science, technology, industrial bases, and supply chains – also set out strict conditions that effectively allow both a future American president and Congress to stop the submarine sale to Australia if it is not deemed to be in the US national interest, and especially if it will ‘degrade US undersea capabilities’. Australia, too, has to prove it has the capacity to operate the vessels. In essence, the conditions reveal that the United States has already plotted a path out of the project. The highly respected Congressional Research Service has also provided Congress with options for not providing the Virginias to Australia. Indeed it has come up with a proposal for what it calls a ‘US-Australia military division of labor’, whereby Australia does not acquire US nuclear-powered submarines but is instead tasked with conducting other joint US-Australian missions in the Asia-Pacific. As the report states, one option would be for Australia, ‘instead of using funds to purchase, operate, and maintain its own SSNs [to] instead invest those funds in other military capabilities (such as, for example, producing long-range anti-ship missiles and/or purchasing US-made B-21 long-range bombers), so as to create an Australian capacity for performing non-SSN military missions for both Australia and the United States’.

All of this has only made more critical swift improvements

to America’s own submarine production capacity. On that front, everything appears to be pushing in the wrong direction. In May 2022, some Republicans in the US Congress requested an immediate plan from the White House to lift production of Virginia class submarines from 1.2 to a minimum of 2.5 per year, since, as they set out in their letter to President Biden, ‘the administration’s current plan requires the transfer of three US Virginia class attack submarines from the existing US submarine fleet without a clear plan for replacing these submarines’. In March 2024, however, the Biden administration ordered only one Virginia class submarine in its proposed 2025 budget, rather than the expected two. Concerns were only exacerbated by the revelation soon afterwards from the US Secretary of the Navy, Carlos Del Toro, that the production of Virginia class submarines is running two to three years late, with an unprecedented number of submarines in dry dock or requiring servicing. As Politico reported, key problems include worker shortages at many of the nation’s shipyards, especially the struggle to find skilled labourers. This is despite multiple programs to recruit and train welders and other workers in recent years.

Bear in mind too that Elbridge Colby, a former Pentagon official in the Trump administration, who is likely to serve at a senior level if Trump returns to the White House in January 2025, has strongly criticised the proposed transfer of Virginia class submarines to Australia. ‘The US has far too few available,’ he told The Australian’s Washington correspondent. ‘Many are in maintenance and the production schedule is way below what we need. We cannot and should not do something crazy. The best way to avoid a serious problem on this is for Washington and Canberra to face facts and adapt early, rather than wait until it’s too late to miss the iceberg.’

So far, Colby’s warning has not reached the policy watchtower here, though there are some in the broader Australian submarine community who have, for some time now, conceived of ways to optimise the ‘optimal’ pathway. Nevertheless, Australian government statements continue to proceed on the confident assumption that the United States will be able to turn around their submarine production rates. When Foreign Minister Wong was asked by this author what the Plan B is if the US Virginia class submarines do not materialise in time, she simply said ‘We have to make Plan A work.’ There could be no better encapsulation of the triumph of hope over experience. Little wonder that polling in March this year showed that support for AUKUS among Australians had slipped below fifty per cent.

With that growing scepticism and falling support has come a rallying cry from AUKUS advocates, both here and in the United States. The first indication, from the Australian side, has been to call for the creation of an AUKUS ‘public diplomacy arm’ along the lines of the NATO information service established at the dawn of the Cold War. Its purpose, according to its proponents, would be to ‘explain the purpose of the partnership, counter misunderstanding and disinformation of it, especially from China, and coordinate external communication of the partners’. It seeks to address the ‘cacophony of opposition’ to the agreement. To their credit, the

proponents of this strategy concede that the public in all three countries need ‘to be provided with clear factual information about the intentions, processes and yes, the challenges in accomplishing the AUKUS mission’. Still, to call for a specific arm of the state to be created to push the AUKUS line reflects the level of concern that is starting to permeate the very think tanks where its strongest advocates reside.

The second came from US officialdom via the newly promoted Deputy Secretary of State, Kurt Campbell. Campbell is well known in Australian strategic circles as the author of the US ‘pivot’ to Asia under President Barack Obama, and was a key architect of AUKUS alongside Andrew Shearer, the current head of the Office of National

to tell a ‘better’ story to the Australian people. But it was one which had the offices of the prime minister and defence minister caught in something of a bind: unable to respond directly to his comments and reliant solely upon their previous statements on the AUKUS agreement. Speaking in Washington in April, Campbell revealed publicly and bluntly what the AUKUS submarines are really intended for: a potential war with China over Taiwan. But he did much more than that. Campbell took a barely disguised swipe at the Albanese government’s public claims about AUKUS’s capacity for domestic job creation, and said that more money is going to be required to realise the audacious plan. That is more funding on top of the projected $368 billion the government

Intelligence. Before his promotion, Campbell served as President Biden’s top White House adviser on Indo-Pacific affairs. Speaking in Washington earlier this year, Campbell admitted that the United States could do much more in reassuring its Australian and British partners on the progress of AUKUS. ‘We could tell the story better,’ he said. ‘The truth is the steps that have been taken towards AUKUS in all three countries are very substantial.’

Campbell well and truly duly delivered on his promise

continues to quote as the total cost for both the US Virginia class and later SSN AUKUS submarines.

In remarks delivered at the Center for a New American Security in March, Campbell spoke of the ‘practical circumstances in which AUKUS has the potential to have submarines from a number of countries operating in close coordination that could deliver conventional ordnance from long distances. Those have enormous implications in a variety of scenarios, including in cross-strait circumstances.’ The stark

Anthony Albanese, Joe Biden, and Rishi Sunak during a trilateral meeting at Point Loma naval base in San Diego, California, 2023. The three leaders of the AUKUS security pact agreed to expand their nuclear-powered submarine fleet. (Adam Schultz/White House Photo/Alamy Live News)

translation is that AUKUS submarines will be able to bomb the mainland of China. At the very least, Campbell finally let the AUKUS cat out of the bag.

The problem for Canberra is that his comments run directly counter to Albanese’s and Marles’s insistence that Australian sovereign control over operational use of the submarines would be maintained. Campbell’s intervention raises fundamental questions that the Australian government must now answer, including concerns about a likely blowout in the cost.

The United States has already plotted a path out of the project

In February 2023, Albanese said emphatically that ‘Australia will maintain our sovereignty’ in the event of a military contingency where Canberra had a difference of view with either London or Washington. Defence Minister Richard Marles, speaking the following month, said that Australia’s ‘next-generation submarines will be Australian sovereign assets, commanded by Australian officers, and under the sovereign control of Australia’. Then, at Labor’s July 2023 party conference, a resolution passed expressly stating that AUKUS ‘does not involve any ante facto commitment to participate in, or be directed in accordance with, the military operations of any other country’. These messages do not appear to have filtered through to Washington. Even if they had, it is most unlikely Campbell would have kept them on file. A great power will do what it can and what it must.

In those same remarks in Washington, Campbell expressed particular frustration that Albanese sells AUKUS to the electorate, and especially Labor’s trade union constituency, as being primarily about job creation. Campbell said that AUKUS is ‘not a jobs program’ but rather ‘a security partnership that is profoundly constitutional and has the potential to … create fundamentally new realities on the ground really in the water in Asia’. But both the British prime minister and the US president have sold the agreement to their electorates on the basis of the employment opportunities it will create.

What Campbell meant by ‘profoundly constitutional’ is not clear. AUKUS is neither a pact nor a treaty: it is an agreement, and to this day, the terms of the agreement have not been made public. But it shows that US thinking, clear all along, has only ever been about what it perceives as Australia’s military obligations to the United States at a time of war. Campbell merely confirms what AUKUS sceptics have consistently pointed out – namely, that Washington would not transfer the jewel in its military arsenal – nuclear-powered submarines –unless it retained ultimate operational control over them. Campbell has form. He told European Union officials privately in 2022 that AUKUS was about ‘getting Australia off the fence. We have them locked in now for the next 40 years.’ In July 2023, he said publicly that ‘when submarines are provided from the United States to Australia, it’s not like they’re lost’ to the United States. Campbell has been a chief

alliance whisperer to Australian prime ministers, ministers, and officials for the best part of twenty years, holding Australian hands down the strategic aisle. But Campbell’s comments go well beyond whispers or homilies about alliance intimacy. They have serious implications for the Australia-US alliance.

It should not be forgotten that a generation of Australian leaders in the 1960s wore out a path to the White House asking the Americans to set down conclusively what the Americans understood to be their obligations to Australia’s security under the terms of ANZUS. The Americans never did, and Australia eventually gave up asking. The roles are now reversed. Campbell is now spelling out publicly the expectations Washington has of Australia to fight alongside it in the Taiwan Strait. He simply assumes Australia will be there.

Unless it changes course, and soon, the Albanese government will have a policy albatross around its neck, not only for the remainder of its time in office, but in the eyes of history. The major problem with AUKUS was of course the secrecy in which the project was originally conceived by Scott Morrison. That meant that the detailed policy consideration in Canberra concerning the risks of going down this path, not to mention the feasibility of AUKUS, was never properly assessed. But the delays besetting both the American and British shipyards now mean that the US Virginia class submarines may not be delivered at all, and that the SSN AUKUS may get caught up in the multitude of problems affecting Britain’s existing submarine construction commitments.

Nevertheless, it should not be missed that the Americans, irrespective of whether the Virginia class submarines are transferred to Australia or not, will gain much indeed – not only a golden handshake from Canberra to increase their own submarine production capacity, but also the ability to base facilities in Western Australia for their nuclear-powered submarines. Australian political leaders talk of AUKUS as the hardest, biggest project ever undertaken in the defence space. They label it a ‘whole of nation’ exercise. But while their rhetoric continues to trumpet AUKUS as the badge of Labor’s national security reliability, there remains no AUKUS tsar in the Australian public service, no Essington Lewis-type figure, to begin the mammoth task of marshalling the required resources to make it happen. Even more alarming is the everwidening gap between the rhetoric of a deteriorating security situation and Australia’s capacity to confront it. For the next twenty years or so, Australian defence looks very much as though it will be trapped between two stools, between the diagnosis of strategic urgency and the reality of bureaucratic inertia and apathy. g

James Curran is Professor of Modern History at Sydney University and foreign affairs columnist for the Australian Financial Review

This article is one of a series of ABR commentaries on cultural and political subjects being funded by the Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund.

Marked man

The perfidy of zealots, and some other writers

James Ley

TKnife:

Meditations after an attempted murder by

Salman Rushdie

Jonathan Cape $36.99 pb, 209 pp

he opening pages of Knife give an account of the attempted murder of Salman Rushdie at a speaking engagement in upstate New York on 12 August 2022. His assailant charged out of the audience and onto the stage, where he attacked the author, using one of several knives he had brought along, for exactly twenty-seven seconds. Rushdie is precise about that detail, which one imagines is rather a long time if you are being stabbed. By the time he was restrained, the would-be assassin had seriously wounded Rushdie’s left hand, punctured his torso multiple times, slashed his neck, and stabbed him in the right eye deeply enough to destroy the optic nerve.

Rushdie refers to this horrific near-fatal assault on several occasions in Knife as a loss of ‘innocence’ – an odd characterisation coming from someone who had lived as the world’s most famous marked man for more than three decades. Given that the threat against his life has not disappeared, the word seems credible only if he means innocent in the sense of ‘naïve’. Ayatollah Khomeini’s fatwa calling for Rushdie’s murder, declared in February 1989, was reaffirmed as recently as 2017. There was still a multi-million-dollar bounty on Rushdie’s head, as he was no doubt aware. He had long anticipated the moment. As his attacker runs toward him, he thinks: ‘So it’s you. Here you are.’ Yet one can hardly blame him for entertaining the idea that, after all this time, things might have cooled down enough for him to lower his guard, if only a little. ‘Surely the world had moved on,’ he writes, ‘and that subject was closed.’

Knife is Rushdie’s record of the aftermath of the attack. The book follows the slow progress of his recovery, detailing with grim good humour all the painful medical indignities visited upon his gravely injured body, including the toe-curling experience of having his ruined eye sewn shut. It is also an uxorious tribute to his wife Eliza, who stays by his side throughout the whole ordeal. But its unavoidable subject is the meaning of the attack itself. Rushdie spends much of Knife willing himself to consign the whole wretched business to the past and to reclaim his life. He makes a show of disdain for his attacker, whom he refuses to name and openly scorns as an asinine loser. There is more than a touch of fuck-you-I’m-still-here about this book, and fair enough, though that in itself speaks of its defining paradox. If someone really means nothing to you, you don’t have to tell them.

The international uproar that followed the publication of Rushdie’s fourth novel, The Satanic Verses (1988), is arguably

the most extraordinary and far-reaching literary controversy in history, but is has always seemed like an easy one, ethically speaking. On one side, there was a work of fiction: a perfectly legitimate mode of expression, imaginative exploration, philosophical questioning, satire, and cultural criticism. On the other side was incitement to murder, which is the very definition of illegitimate speech.

Many struggled with this distinction at the time. Rushdie has certainly not forgotten (and why should he?) that there were quite a few authors – he names John Berger, Germaine Greer, and Roald Dahl, among others – who saw the indefensible fatwa as an occasion to chastise him for causing trouble. One might have expected pusillanimous responses from simpering politicians, who can always be counted on to call for religion to be respected whenever it reveals itself to be undeserving of respect. But it remains astonishing that there were writers, living representatives of the principle of freedom of conscience that was being unambiguously attacked – people whose job is to express the truth as they see it and who render themselves useless if they don’t – who came out in support of the weaselly proposition that novelists should avoid sensitive topics and watch what they say.

Admonishing voices were subdued in the wake of the gruesome attempt on Rushdie’s life. It is all fun and games until someone loses an eye, as Aunt Ethel used to say. One of the notable effects of the historical distance between the incident and the original controversy is to make it impossible to ignore the inherent absurdity of claiming to be violently enraged by a novel. That distance, as much as anything else, draws Rushdie back to the puzzle of his twenty-four-year-old assailant, who is currently awaiting trial for attempted murder. The fact that ‘A’ (as Rushdie refers to him) has decided to plead not guilty, even though the attack took place at a filmed event in front of an auditorium full of people and he was apprehended at the scene, suggests he is not much of a thinker. He claims to have read no more than two pages of the novel, published ten years before he was born, that has notionally motivated his attempt to stab a septuagenarian to death. His knowledge of Rushdie was mostly gleaned from YouTube videos, which led him to conclude that the author was ‘disingenuous’.

Rushdie latches on to this intriguing choice of word, because he recognises that to write fiction is indeed a way of being disingenuous. He reflects that, as a novelist, he has spent his life trading in imaginative fancies, finding great value and delight in them, despite being a rationalist and an atheist.

Religions are fictions too, of course – highly implausible fictions. Their way of being disingenuous is to pretend they are not fictional, claim for themselves the right to dictate terms, regulate conscience and behaviour, and place themselves above criticism. This is also their essential vulnerability and the underlying reason why contemptible theocrats like Khomeini – who was the embodiment of pretty much everything a decent person should be against – hate and fear literature. Works of unfettered imagination are proof that people can have minds of their own. The moment a religion is recognised as myth, a human invention, it becomes simply one story among many, open to competing interpretations and thus to criticism. It can no longer compel belief or demand obedience. The fraudulence of its special pleading becomes ob-

vious and the nonsense concept of blasphemy evaporates.

The contrast, perhaps as much a matter of sensibility as of philosophy, is set out in the undesired ‘intimacy’ between Rushdie and his attacker. Despite his strong desire to move on with his life and leave the foolish young man to face the legal consequences of his actions, Rushdie fantasises about confronting him, interrogating him about his motives and beliefs. Knife eventually gives itself over to a series of imagined conversations between them. ‘I want to understand you,’ Rushdie writes.

This is where the novelist’s imagination fails him, albeit in an apposite way. Rushdie is genuine in his desire to give the man who tried to kill him the space to explain himself, but the figure who appears before him remains unforthcoming, obtuse, vaguely angry – in fictional terms an unconvincing character, lacking sufficient motivation and psychological complexity. Their dialogue never moves beyond the fundamental impasse between literature and religion, which is also to say irony and dogma.

Williams and Soeharto

Australia’s most vital diplomatic asset?

Nathan Hollier

TOccidental Preacher, Accidental Teacher:

The enigmatic Clive Williams, Volume One, 1921-1968

by Shannon L. Smith

Big Hill Publishing $34.99 pb, 252 pp

hirty years before the Australian career criminal Gregory David Roberts travelled to Bombay and sought to make for himself, in the words of critic Peter Pierce, ‘a good Asian life’, another socially alienated Australian pursued such a life, in Indonesia, one which in its own way was as remarkable as that novelised by Roberts in Shantaram (2003).

Clive Williams went to Java in 1951, at the age of thirty, as a Jehovah’s Witness missionary. After three years of puritanical proselytising, with little success, he was ‘disfellowshipped’, a form of shunning and the strongest censure the JWs can impose on a member of their flock. Why? A number of possible reasons can be canvassed but one probably doesn’t need to look past Williams’s homosexuality.

Williams successfully sought help from his local parliamentary member, back in Geelong, to enable him to continue living in Indonesia. In agreeably unregulated medical environs, he set up a chiropody practice, in Semarang. He also began to teach English: almost inevitably, it seems, given the surging demand for this language.

Newly independent Indonesia had identified English, rather than Dutch, as the international language for its people, and by September 1960 Radio Australia received requests for and de-

‘Literalism is a mistake,’ says Rushdie. ‘The Word is the Word,’ his attacker replies.

Rushdie handles these themes lightly, less out of a sense of delicacy than from an understandable weariness. ‘Sometimes I think I belong to another age,’ he muses at one point. His arguments about the fundamental importance of freedom of expression have been worn smooth by repetition over the years, but they are presented in Knife with the unhappy knowledge that cultural attitudes have shifted in a more censorious direction over the past decade or so. No one knows better than Salman Rushdie what is at stake in such a shift. Near the beginning of Knife, he remarks that ‘whatever the attack was about, it wasn’t about The Satanic Verses’. It should be obvious enough by now that the fatwa never really was either. g

James Ley is an essayist and literary critic who lives in Melbourne.

livered some 260,000 booklets to accompany the English lessons it had begun broadcasting in October the previous year.

From the late 1950s, Williams developed a special teacherly rapport with Tien Soeharto, the wife of a rising army officer. He taught Soeharto as well and would become, for him, a supremely trusted confidant, adviser, translator, and intermediary: an honorary member of the family and, in his biographer’s estimation, ‘Australia’s most vital diplomatic asset anywhere in the world’ from the 1970s to the 1990s.

After Soeharto became acting president in 1966, Williams moved into an adjoining house in Jakarta. The properties were connected, meaning that Williams had unfettered access to the new ruler. As Smith shows, this relationship was important for Soeharto in a personal but also in a public sense. Most crucially, as Soeharto sought to formulate an economic plan (based on US aid), derive constitutional arrangements through which he could become and remain president, and put forward a credible stance for Indonesia in world affairs, Williams, as his intermediary, ‘divulged vital information that would have a significant influence on US foreign policy towards Indonesia’. The United States, like its ally Australia, would support and buttress the Soeharto regime, before finally withdrawing its support and ending Soeharto’s reign during the Asian Financial Crisis of the late 1990s.

Thus, through his closeness to and influence on Soeharto, a major figure on the world stage, Williams can also be seen to have been a significant figure in world history in his own right; one who, through both choice and circumstance, kept determinedly in the shadows. He is only now being drawn out by his equally determined biographer to receive his due credit.

But what credit is that, exactly?

From one point of view, this study by Shannon L. Smith, the first of two volumes, is a most admirable undertaking. It is based on voluminous research, proficiency in Bahasa Indonesia, and the energy and single-mindedness to proceed with publication and distribution without fully professional editorial or publishing assistance. The story related, full of interest and colour, adds to our knowledge in a number of areas, especially to our

understanding of what Soeharto and his circle knew of the 30 September movement in advance of its attempted coup: more than had been previously realised.

From another point of view, this work is let down somewhat by the writing and editing, some tangential excurses (into the history of the JWs for instance), valuable narrative threads left hanging (such as the experience and even first name of the Bahasa Indonesia-speaking ‘Mrs Gorton’, who impressed her hosts greatly on a state visit), and questionable historical interpretation. More importantly, it is undermined by an insufficiently critical attitude towards a still dominant Western interpretative framework in which Soeharto’s bloody rise to decades of oppressive authoritarian power is perceived as the result of social dynamics that were internecine, inevitable, and, ultimately, good – or at least for the best. ‘The outcome’ of the Soeharto coup, or counter-coup, Smith writes, ‘came as a relief to the Australian Government’ because the ‘regional neighbourhood was undergoing widespread change and disruption throughout the 1960s’.

For Smith, who notes that the nation’s first free elections, of 1955, were primarily a contest of (Sukarno’s) Nationalist, Socialist, and Communist parties, Soeharto’s ‘authoritarian government’ from 1965 ‘was considered by some as one of the most deadly and corrupt, and by others as one of the most economically and developmentally successful in modern history’.

marked distance. A central point made by Smith is that Australia’s representatives were slow, if not derelict, in grasping the value of this Indonesian-based asset.

In obtaining such closeness with Soeharto – a man who was, in addition to being an admirable people manager, clear-eyed diplomatic strategist, loyal family man, and golfing enthusiast, a mass-murdering, mass-oppressing, mass-scale embezzler – did Williams also obtain, in the end, a sense of deep personal satisfaction, accomplishment, and equanimity, as Jean Piaget suggested

The possible value of the alternative path to development for Indonesia, suggested by the widespread hunger for English at the start of the 1960s, the popular political activism of the Sukarno period, and that president’s spurning of US economic aid is not registered. Nor is the full human cost of the decades of social, cultural, and educational retardation that followed on from the hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, murdered by the Soeharto regime.

This brings us back to Mr Williams and his good Asian life.

For Williams, living ‘a comfortable bachelor lifestyle in the foothills of Semarang’, as Smith writes, there was clearly pleasure, interest, and human connection. A German Jesuit priest recalled coming across Williams, ‘a very fat man, sitting there and treating us to steak’, in 1965. He travelled in Singapore, Hong Kong, and Europe, buying branded bags and accessories for Tien and taking large amounts of cash for depositing offshore. He was a vital conduit between Soeharto, US Ambassador Marshall Green, and other US diplomats, and to a lesser extent between Soeharto and the Australian diplomatic corps: part of a recognisably boozy, insular expat world memorably portrayed in Blanche d’Alpuget’s Monkeys in the Dark (1980), from which Williams socially kept a

a person, towards the end of life, might?

We can wait and read what Smith finds, in the second volume; but it does seem that Williams’s own anti-Enlightenment belief system made him well suited to psychologically accommodating the extraordinary role and position that fate afforded him. Following his abandonment of JW puritanism, Williams’s religious yearnings found a home in Javanese spiritualism; Smith considers, intriguingly, that Soeharto may even have looked up to Williams as a spiritual leader. ‘At most’, as Smith writes, Williams ‘was probably indifferent … [to] the slaughters that occurred’.

Missing, here, is the kind of awareness of moral complexity and contingency, within human life, shown by the criminal but world-wise and philosophical narrator of Shantaram. Nonetheless, Occidental Preacher, Accidental Teacher is a valuable addition to scholarly understandings of the Soeharto regime. g

Nathan Hollier is Manager of Australian National University Press.

This article is one of a series supported by Peter McMullin AM via the Good Business Foundation.

President General Soeharto of Indonesia and his wife, Madame Tien Soeharto, with Queen Elizabeth II and the Duke of Edinburgh at Buckingham Palace before a State banquet in their honour, 1979 (PA Images/Alamy)

Pascoe’s vision

Musings on life and Country

Seumas Spark

IBlack Duck: A year at Yumburra by Bruce Pascoe with Lyn Harwood

Thames & Hudson

$34.99 pb, 303 pp

’m a whitefella who has never met Bruce Pascoe, but I’ve heard a lot about him. For the past few years, I have worked across Gippsland in the field of Aboriginal cultural heritage, and many of the people I meet mention his name. Experience has led me to try and dodge most of these conversations, knowing that our discussion will probably satisfy neither party, but I’m not having much luck. People want to talk about Pascoe, and often it is unpleasant. I have heard him described as a charlatan and worse, usually by those who have not met him, spoken with him, or read his work. Most of these critics are whitefellas, preoccupied with questioning or discrediting his Aboriginal heritage.

I find this preoccupation both odd and depressing. As with so much about Aboriginal culture and identity, some whitefellas want to frame the debate and force their say – Aboriginal matters decided on whitefella terms, as has been the case since colonisation. By contrast, the Aboriginal people I know have little interest in throwing barbs about Pascoe and his background. Rather, they want to speak about Country and how we might work together to heal the calamities that more than two centuries of colonial practice have inflicted on the landscape. To my mind, that tells us two things: that Aboriginal culture is inherently generous, and that Aboriginal people are often better at identifying the matters that warrant attention.

Pascoe’s books on Aboriginal history and culture, these criticisms ring true. But here’s the nub. The informed criticism offered by Gammage and Griffiths was just that, and not a rejection of all that is good and enlivening in Pascoe’s work. Gammage has co-authored a book with Pascoe, thus demonstrating that it is possible to be both critic and colleague. Other critics, however, see only the oversights and missteps in Pascoe’s writing, dwelling on those to the exclusion of all else. To do that is to miss the spirit and purpose of his work.

A few years ago, I fell for the writing of Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuściński. I read every one of his books that had been translated into English, then read about him, including the biography by Artur Domosławski. From Domosławski’s fine book and other bits and pieces, I learnt that Kapuściński had been in the habit of manipulating details, or inventing them, to suit the story he was telling. These revelations had no effect on my love for his writing. Kapuściński’s The Shadow of the Sun, a paean to the Africa he cherished, remains one of my favourite books. As the man himself said, when challenged by a critic: ‘I’m not writing so the details add up – the point is the essence of the matter.’

While Pascoe’s Aboriginal heritage is a personal matter, there are legitimate questions to be asked about his approach to history and his use of evidence. Bill Gammage has suggested that Pascoe can push evidence too far; Tom Griffiths that Pascoe has not always acknowledged appropriately the writers whose scholarship and ideas have informed his work. While I haven’t read all of

I am not suggesting that historians should abandon truth and detail; Kapuściński’s approach is not one to emulate. Nor am I implying anything about Pascoe. He makes mistakes, as we all do, but that is no sin. Rather, I cite Kapuściński to make the point that some scholars you read not for the nitty-gritty but to think anew and to dream, and so it is with Pascoe. Few writers are so bold in presenting a different vision for Australia and what it might be. This is what Black Duck offers, as did Dark Emu (2014) before it. Black Duck is an invitation to consider a just and equitable Australia, where the ways of the Old People are studied and adopted to inform a better future.

Pascoe wrote Black Duck with his partner, Lyn Harwood. They live at Yumburra, a farm on Yuin Country near Gipsy Point in far east Gippsland. Yumburra, the black duck, is the most important Yuin totem. The farm is the base for Black Duck Foods, where Pascoe and his team grow tubers, grasses, and other foods that sustained Yuin life for tens of thousands of years before colonisation. Their goal is to revive traditional foods and methods of cultivation to benefit Aboriginal economies, and Country itself.

Black Duck is two things: a record of a year in the life of the farm, and a collection of musings on life and Country. Pascoe and Harwood write lyrically of the rhythms of life and its everyday joys, such as bird behaviour and song. Birds fill the book, characters through which the authors tell of the changing seasons

Bruce Pascoe at Yumburra (Lyn Harwood)

and moods at their property. We learn of waterways, songlines, Yuin Country, and the life and customs of the Old People, whose mark is imprinted on the land. Mention is made of the benefits and difficulties generated by the success of Dark Emu, without Pascoe dwelling on the attacks he has endured. He sees no point in pursuing critics who are uninterested in reasoned argument. Moreover, his energy is waning and he has important work to do, including convincing Australians to manage the land according to Aboriginal principles.

At Yumburra, the work of the farm follows ancient, proven Aboriginal knowledge. As Pascoe and Harwood make clear, this transformation from modern to ancient is a necessary step, not a token gesture. If Australians are brave enough, and sensible enough, to adopt Aboriginal land management principles, we can help ensure food security, fight erosion and climate change, and prevent the firestorms that torch this country with increasing regularity. This is Pascoe’s vision. He hopes for a country where Aboriginal knowledge is treasured and respected not to honour a culture, or not only that, but because it’s necessary – honour through use.

Who could object to that? Well, the usual suspects I am sure.

Black Duck is a rich and rewarding book, but its central points are not new. It restates many of the themes and challenges expressed in Dark Emu, and, inevitably, will prompt more attacks and vitriol. Pascoe knows that each time he publishes he will suffer, and yet he persists, determined to repeat the message until Australians hear it. There are many admirable aspects to Pascoe’s work, resilience among them. A less committed soul would have given up years ago.

In my cultural heritage work, it has been my good fortune to spend time with the GunaiKurnai elder Uncle Russell Mullett, whose judgement and wisdom are respected across Gippsland. Often, I have heard Uncle Russell encourage people to listen – to the birds, to the wise, to silence – for everywhere there are lessons, and by listening, we learn. Might we take this counsel and listen to Bruce Pascoe? I hope so, for there is much to gain. g

Seumas Spark is co-author of the two volume Dunera Lives (Monash University Publishing, 2018 and 2020). With Kate Garrett and Andrew McNamara, he is working on a book about the Dunera internee and art historian Ernst Kitzinger, to be published by Berghahn.

Summer Winter

winter nights days of looking at the flames and into the ashes in the house with wood-panelled walls and summer nights nights of warming after long summer days

black dog in the bush pool neglected concrete pebbled aggregate that lingering emptiness where things don’t quite meet my friend become stranger strange friends that disappeared or strange that they disappeared or not given the circumstances

drifting like tumbleweed called panicum effusum aptly because it was like panic running away not looking back connections that failed strange emptiness an aggregate of circumstances summer winter always the wrong one at the time

hot nights at the fire hot days at the pool stretched long on the concrete disappeared too quickly come back too soon

not looking back till it was too late

Anna Couani ❖

Whither Waitangi?

Biculturalism on the rocks in New Zealand

by Miranda Johnson

From across the ditch, New Zealand can look like a place where settlers and Indigenous people have forged a successful, postcolonial modus vivendi. The image conceals more than it reveals. As in Australia, relations between Indigenous people and the state are fraught. At the November 2023 election, right-wing minority parties won electoral support by rejecting what they have characterised as special privileges to Māori. And a long-standing, bipartisan consensus on ‘biculturalism’ is breaking down.

At this year’s Waitangi Day celebrations, held annually to mark the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi between Māori rangatira (leaders) and the British Crown in 1840, the leaders of the new right-wing coalition government, led by Christopher Luxon, were drowned out when they spoke on the Treaty grounds in the Bay of Islands. Forceful challenges were issued by Māori leaders about the coalition’s policies regarding the Treaty, a proposed referendum on the Treaty’s principles, and the matter of co-governance. Protests and ongoing debate in mainstream and social media underline hard feelings about the issues at stake for a range of New Zealanders.

What is this all about? Many Māori are protesting a rolling back of policies undertaken by Jacinda Ardern’s Labour government. Those included a deepening of biculturalism through an expansion of the use of the Māori language in the public service and the design of a new compulsory history curriculum for schools that focuses on Māori history and colonisation. The Ardern government also pursued what were called ‘co-governance’ initiatives. In 2022, Labour created a separate, national Māori health authority. Perhaps most controversial was the ‘Three Waters’ policy to centralise ailing water infrastructure. Currently managed by local councils, the government designed regional advisory groups that would be established according to a fifty-fifty split in representation between local councils and mana whenua (local Indigenous authorities). Around seventeen per cent of New Zealanders identify as having some Māori ancestry, and a growing number of these identify with at least one iwi (tribe), though a smaller proportion of Māori are formal tribal members.

To critics of the Ardern government’s policies, cogovernance looked like a special privilege to Māori as a race and disproportionate power to iwi. During the 2023 election campaign, two smaller right-wing parties – ACT

(the Association of Consumers and Taxpayers) and New Zealand First – argued against such ‘privilege’. An ACT spokesperson claimed that the ‘Three Waters’ reforms were ‘divisive, dangerous and [that it is] totally inappropriate to give iwi a seat at the table just because of who their ancestors were’. Such claims propelled support for ACT and New Zealand First, which together won nearly fifteen per cent of the vote and have formed a three-way coalition with the senior party, National. Under this government, the Māori health authority has been disestablished and the Three Waters legislation overturned. Further, at the behest of their coalition partners, Luxon’s National Party has agreed to support a parliamentary bill through to select committee that will revisit ‘Treaty principles’, particularly ‘partnership’.

The idea of such principles was first mandated in the Treaty of Waitangi Act 1975 that created the Waitangi Tribunal to investigate Māori grievances about breaches of the Treaty by the Crown. Norman Kirk’s Labour cabinet (1972-74) believed that such principles could be derived from the Treaty in order to aid in its interpretation. The Treaty was itself a very brief document, comprising a preamble and three short articles. The English language text was hastily translated into the Māori language, which is the version that most rangatira signed. From the 1970s on, the status of this translation has been much debated. Was it accurate, or a ruse? Was it too quickly undertaken and poorly explained to those gathered at the approximately fifty meetings held across the islands? Did the British authorities bear humanitarian intent towards Māori? Could anyone have predicted what would happen next – mass white settlement and the almost complete dispossession of iwi?

In recent political life, questions have increasingly focused on sovereignty. Did rangatira cede their sovereignty to the British Crown, as the English version stated? Or did they retain their rangatiratanga – the exercise of chiefly authority – as the Māori language text promised? For their part, historians and other scholars have often regarded the matter of sovereignty as a problem to be investigated in terms of the context of what was said and understood in the 1840s. This is because the Treaty – and the Māori text in particular – has come to be viewed as a founding, constitutional document. Yet it was what was happening in late-twentieth century

New Zealand that illuminated the problem of sovereignty and Indigenous rights. Examining this more recent context is important for understanding the marked shift in policy alignments today.

In the 1980s, New Zealand was re-founded in terms of biculturalism. This idea was adopted as official policy by the state as a means of recognising that New Zealand was founded by two peoples, with two cultures, that did not have to become one. It followed widespread activism in the 1970s by Māori, who protested cultural assimilation, demanded land rights, and asserted the value of Indigenous language and culture. The policy of biculturalism, which in part was a strategy for containing the threats posed by Māori dissent to national harmony, was a striking departure from the previous national idea of unification-as-assimilation.

The identification of Treaty principles became another strategy for managing the claim of Māori sovereignty. Crucial here was the principle of ‘partnership’ between Māori and the Crown. Partnership is a vague term. It does not necessarily impute equality, nor does it propose how power might be shared or negotiated between the partners. A principle of partnership does not recognise a claim of unceded Indigenous

with the local project of biculturalism, including support for the Waitangi Tribunal process and the negotiation of major Treaty settlements with iwi, was maintained by successive National- and Labour-led governments through the 1990s until Ardern’s Labour-led coalition took power in 2017.

By then, the complex effects of the 1980s reforms were being felt throughout New Zealand society. High rates of child poverty, particularly among Māori and Pacific families, declining literacy rates, long hospital waiting lists, and a younger generation locked out of home ownership, all brought the market orientation into sharp question. Changes in migration policy radically changed the ethnic and cultural make-up of the country. Today, around a quarter of New Zealanders are foreign-born, may have little familial connection to the history of colonisation, and do not see themselves represented in the bicultural binary which by default imagines the second culture as that of Pākehā, or white settler descendants.

Significantly, iwi Māori are now in a ‘post-Treaty settlement’ phase of growth and development. Most iwi have negotiated settlements with the Crown about historic breaches of the Treaty and are investing settlement moneys in property, forestry, dairy, and tourism. Ten postsettlement iwi are estimated to hold assets worth over NZ$8 billion. Ngāi Tahu (the major iwi of the South Island) alone manages assets of nearly $2.3 billion. Overall, the Māori economy is valued at seventy billion and is set to grow to $100 billion by 2030. (To put these values in perspective, in 2023, New Zealand’s GDP was just over $400 billion in total.)

sovereignty. Furthermore, it has not been codified in law or described in a constitutional document (New Zealand does not have a single written constitution). Rather, the substance of partnership is evolving in judicial decisions, policy, and Waitangi Tribunal reports. In these institutions, partnership is understood to confirm that iwi Māori have a distinctive political relationship to the Crown that is based on their consent to the Treaty as iwi. This relationship is one that needs to be recognised in ways that may chafe against other normative principles of liberal democracy such as equality and individual liberty.

The establishment of biculturalism took place in the context of other radical reforms of the state and economy. In the 1980s, David Lange’s Labour government opened up what had been a highly protected national economy to globalisation, deregulated financial markets, devolved significant areas of public administration, and sold off key state assets. It also reformed migration policy, focusing less on race or culture and more on economic contributions. The pairing of neo-liberalism

In other words, if biculturalism was intended to manage dissenting Māori activism in the 1980s, today a very different political reality is setting in. Tribes are no longer only claimants to state power, but are developing their own human and economic capacities within the nation and internationally. Tribal capitalism makes Indigenous power and authority real in ways that may be less dependent on the state but that nonetheless may seek to challenge governing arrangements and shape policy making from a position of growing economic strength. Yet this reality is not always appreciated in the wider society, where non-Māori often view Māori primarily as victims of dispossession. The Māori Party, which won six out of the seven separate Māori electorate seats in the last election – the party’s best result ever – is notably the only party to make its position on Indigenous self-determination clear. Ultimately, it aims to create a separate Māori parliament.

Ardern’s Labour turned its fortunes around in 2017 on the promise that it would address socio-economic inequality, and child poverty in particular. The strategy was in part motivated by a return to ideas of redistribution – though Ardern’s government did not engage in substantive enough tax reform to achieve this. Another shift involved creating new bureaucracies

Waitangi Day Solidarity Hīkoi, Te Whanganui-A-Tara Wellington, 2024 (Pakoire via Wikimedia Commons)

for health and welfare. At the same time, as mentioned earlier, the Labour coalition recommitted to key aspects of biculturalism. Following a landslide victory in 2020, Labour, now able to govern alone, somewhat paradoxically tried to connect re-centralisation to the idea of power-sharing with iwi Māori (tribes), according to the principle of Treaty partnership.

The Labour government used the less familiar term of ‘co-governance’ to describe this power sharing. The term was adopted from other developments such as the co-management of natural resources, including waterways and national parks, by iwi and local councils (or the Department of Conservation). Those arrangements have often been negotiated as part of Treaty settlement packages, in lieu of returning property rights directly to iwi over places and resources that are used by both Māori and non-Māori. Such arrangements are not well understood by most New Zealanders. Despite this unfamiliarity, Labour applied the term ‘co-governance’ to the national-level initiatives mentioned earlier (the new health authority and water management), which were reviled by some as denoting racial separatism but celebrated by others as evidence of a progressive, postcolonial politics of recognition.

ACT’s bill proposing new Treaty principles responds to what the party and its supporters argue is a profound threat to liberal democracy in the form of co-governance. The party disputes the claim central to the re-founding of Aotearoa New Zealand as a postcolonial state: that Indigenous peoples’ distinctive rights are premised on their prior occupation and/or ownership of the lands that settler colonists usurped. The party’s intentions are laid out on its website, where it proposes its own Treaty principles matched to its libertarian political identity. These include a reduction in the role of government; a free-market orientation that upholds individual rather than collective property rights and an ethos of individual responsibility; and an emphasis on rights of equal, individual, citizenship held by all New Zealanders. Further, the repudiation of the political terms of partnership/ co-governance has been accompanied by claims on the part of ACT and New Zealand First that biculturalism has gone too far and that Māori language should not be so widely used in the public service – or on road signs. Further highlighting the political complexity of the present moment, some of the politicians leading these attacks are themselves Māori –including the New Zealand First leader Winston Peters and his deputy, Shane Jones, who is a fluent speaker of the Māori language. These figures have parallels in Australia, in the Indigenous politician Jacinta Nampijinpa Price and academic Anthony Dillon.

ACT’s proposed Treaty principles Bill has not yet been tabled in parliament. Its idea of a referendum on the same has been taken off the table, for now. The smaller parties’ success in persuading National to even contemplate such ideas highlights that a major policy realignment is underway that is undermining the previous bipartisan consensus on biculturalism.

Neither side of New Zealand politics is adequately reckoning with growing iwi power in an ever-diversifying country, one that is facing the headwinds of an unstable global economy and climate change. ACT does not propose

undoing Treaty settlements (this would not be legally or politically feasible), and it does not explain how New Zealand governments should best engage with iwi as both economic and cultural entities that are mandated to represent their tribal memberships. Deracinated, market-led liberal individualism does not much help in facing the new reality.

iwi Māori are now in a ‘post-Treaty settlement’ phase of development

For its part, the political left has not established a justification for power-sharing arrangements that is persuasive to a larger constituency. Such arrangements can no longer be justified solely in terms of a leg-up for Māori (a belief in the antipodean ‘fair go’ that underwrote the Kirk government’s support for creating a Waitangi Tribunal in the first place).

As in Australia, advocates of co-governance refer to the 2007 United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP), which recognises a non-secessionist right of self-determination. But such international reference points mean little to most New Zealanders.

Although the role of the Treaty in the public and political life of this country has produced a quite distinctive discourse of Māori rights and biculturalism, the reshaping of political partisanship in the 2020s bears striking similarities to trends in Australia. In the failed Constitutional Referendum of 2023, a right-wing attack on special rights for Indigenous Australians drew on echoes of the purportedly non-racial ‘fair go’. Yet in neither country does the right wing promise a return to the egalitarianism of the immediate postwar decades.

What has changed and what has not? Inequality in both countries continues, disadvantaging Indigenous families and communities the most, although class differences within the Māori population are becoming more significant. Despite the Ardern government’s promises and programs, child poverty rates have not improved significantly. Post-pandemic inflation and an economic recession, along with even longer hospital waiting lists, suggest that experiments in postcolonial democratic practice that are not clearly spelled out may be ill-timed. Meanwhile, Indigenous corporate and tribal entities are investing in and developing their communities in ways that were unimaginable in earlier decades. Conceptual frameworks have not kept up with these radically changed circumstances. We urgently need new analyses that grapple with the global and local forces that have produced these unanticipated dynamics. g

Miranda Johnson is the author of The Land Is Our History: Indigeneity, law and the settler state (Oxford University Press, 2016) and co-editor of Pacific Futures: Past and present (University of Hawaii Press, 2018). She is currently president of the New Zealand Historical Association and is an Associate Professor at the University of Otago. ❖

This article is one of a series supported by Peter McMullin AM via the Good Business Foundation.

‘Flies

in the Nirvana’

An illuminating and sisterly correspondence

Peter Rose

‘EHazzard and Harrower:

The letters

edited by Brigitta Olubas and Susan Wyndham

NewSouth

$39.99 pb, 366 pp

veryone allows that the talent of writing agreeable letters is peculiarly female.’ So said Jane Austen in Northanger Abbey. Even allowing for Regency hyperbole, there is some truth in the sally. We think of the inimitable letters of Emily Dickinson, who once wrote to a succinct correspondent: ‘It were dearer had you protracted it, but the Sparrow must not propound his crumb.’ In 2001, Gregory Kratzmann edited A Steady Stream of Correspondence: Selected Letters of Gwen Harwood, 1943-1995. Anyone who ever received a letter or postcard from Harwood –surely our finest letter writer – knows what an event that was. She was nonpareil: witty, astringent, frank, irrepressible. Now we have this welcome collection of letters written by Elizabeth Harrower and Shirley Hazzard (unalphabetised on the cover, in a possible concession to the expatriate Hazzard’s international fame).

Hazzard and Harrower is unusual in a few respects, not just because of its span – from 1966, when ‘Shirley H-S.’ wrote to ‘Elizabeth (if I may call you that??)’, to Christmas 2008, when ‘E’ sent ‘S’ ‘This card – a light in the darkness’, shortly before dementia eclipsed Hazzard. Few published literary correspondences last so long or tell so much – lightly, warmly, absorbingly.

All letters withhold and dissemble to a degree, but these ones are surprisingly open, and mostly generous and encouraging – surprisingly so perhaps for two major writers, one of whom, already prominently married and situated at the outset, became internationally famous in her late forties, while the other, strikingly successful in the 1960s, retired hurt from the field and became almost anonymous until Michael Heyward of Text Publishing reprinted her novels, restored her reputation, and persuaded her to publish a late novel (all this well after the span of this book and the sending of that ‘light in the darkness’).

The editors – Sydney journalist-author Susan Wyndham and Hazzard’s biographer, Brigitta Olubas, a professor of English at the University of New South Wales – have turned 400,000 words of correspondence into ‘a more acceptable book length’. In a country with a more resilient biographical and epistolary tradition, we might have expected the entire correspondence, given the stature of these two writers. For the time being, we must make do with this entertaining and not insubstantial entrée. Nonetheless, the omission of explanatory footnotes is surely regrettable.

It was Hazzard’s mercurial mother, Kit, who brought the two women together. Already, by 1966, Harrower was a kind of companion or carer to Kit (‘charming, lonely, and mentally fragile’,

as the editors write in the Introduction). It would become a kind of lifelong responsibility – curse even – one that Harrower’s friend Patrick White considered a major factor in her lengthening creative silence. Writing to Harrower in 1971, he said: ‘Were alarmed to hear that Mrs Hazzard had broken a leg & was returning to Australia. Keep well away, or you’ll be landed with her for ever.’ White was a great admirer of Harrower, especially her fourth novel, The Watch Tower (1966) – ‘Harrower’s greatest achievement and one of the greatest Australian novels,’ according to the editors. Characteristically, White withdrew his own novel of that year, The Solid Mandala, so that his friend could win the Miles Franklin Award. (She didn’t.) In the end, White gave up trying to persuade her to write (‘Too many vampires make too many demands on her.’)

Hazzard’s conduct during the decades of Kit’s dependency on Harrower – which amounted to near-servitude for the Sydney writer – seems dubious and exploitative. Hazzard is a courtly tactician. In 1973, she writes: ‘Elizabeth, you have done so much and one blushes to ask further. Could you possibly hand in the application and ask whether questions might be relayed or answered by you? I would send the application to you; it would need my mother’s answers on a few dates …’

At times, the reader wonders why the moneyed Hazzard and her husband, Francis Steegmuller, who divided their time between Manhattan and Italy, didn’t simply buy an air ticket and fly to Sydney to alleviate the pressure, especially in 1980, when Harrower was once again left to mop up. ‘That you and Margaret [Dick] should have undertaken the monstrous task of closing up MM’s [My Mother’s] flat has been a sort of last straw of ultimate largeness of heart,’ Hazzard wrote with a kind of polished contrition.

We know from Olubas’s admirable biography, Shirley Hazzard: A writing life (Virago, 2022), that Hazzard’s filial relations were disastrous from the start. When Shirley was six or seven, Kit asked her to join her in putting their heads into a gas oven so that they could die together. Kit was the most capricious and ungrateful of mothers. The two writers were mystified by the turmoil of Kit’s domestic arrangements, and her emotional instability is a constant in the book – and mostly a unifying one. Kit was incurably peripatetic – fleeing Sydney, hating London, despising the Steegmullers’ tony life in Manhattan, then bolting back to Sydney.

For Hazzard, who rarely spoke of her mother with any fondness, Kit was ‘pretty close to unhinged a lot of the time … It is amazing how much horror, and strenuous horror at that, this little being managed to generate. Knowing her makes for a weird inimitable bond – like having been together in a shipwreck.’ Well into the friendship, Hazzard wrote: ‘You were utterly marvellous, as ever, to take MM for birthday lunch. I am sometimes desperate about her state [my italics].’

As Cicero reminds us, a letter does not blush.

Only rarely, and circumspectly, does Harrower presume to give her friend advice. In 1973, when Kit was being impossible and suicidal again, Harrower risked: ‘If you can give your mother something to look forward to, some idea that she’ll see you again, this will be what will settle her and calm her, I think.’ (How cautious and forbearing is that ‘I think’.)

Still, Harrower understood, better than most, the impossible side of ‘YM’ (Your Mother): ‘She can be exceptionally winning, and she can be merciless. They say that every difficult soul affects the lives of fourteen others.’

Along the way, there are wonderful surprises and insights. Writing about a play by Kylie Tennant, Hazzard notes: ‘I have always envied playwrights – dialogue is what I like to write, I sort of wait for it to come along on the page.’ Christina Stead (a vivid, poignant presence in the letters) is quoted as telling Harrower: ‘Patrick & Manoly [Lascaris] are your brothers.’ Hazzard describes Francis’s lifelong work on Flaubert: ‘Also Ms. pages of Mme Bovary fascinating to see – incredibly overwritten with every change, seething with intense intention!’ She declares that she wouldn’t stay in Italy if the Fascists (‘or for that matter Communism’) took over – ‘There is always a fly in the Nirvana.’

About Muriel Spark, who had introduced her to Francis, Hazzard is canny: ‘What a clever little creature MS is, when she can cut away all the rubbish. Good initials, too, for a writer.’

Hazzard is instinctively aphoristic: ‘People think they want tranquillity; but what they mostly want is for things to go wrong.’ Then she can be confidential: ‘What has any self-respecting person ever been, of recent centuries in their country but in exile? What has old Shirl ever been, in all her life, but an exile? What is any writer worthy of his salt but an exile.’

We forget what fine old lefties both women were. During Watergate, Hazzard writes: ‘Oh E, it is utterly engrossing, the unveiling of Nixon’s paranoia, his feuhrer (sp?) complex … The power these people have had, and the Nazism they expound …’ Harrower provides an anguished record of the Whitlam government. Her long letters of 17 and 30 November 1975 contain some of the great reportage on the Dismissal. Harrower was in Canberra on Remembrance Day, visiting Christina Stead:

Telephone rings. I hear Christina saying many times, ‘But that’s terrible. That’s terrible.’ Finally she came in. ‘What’s happened?’ ‘Malcolm Fraser is Prime Minister. Kerr has got rid of Whitlam.’ Horror. Horror and stupefaction. People very nearly fell down in the street with amazement and dismay. Manning Clark (our most splendid historian) said he was literally sick. Switched on radio which was dooming away in stunned voice. Chris offered gin, brandy, sherry, while I paced about holding head and listening to reports. Finally knocked off some Nescafe and took taxi to Parliament House. People surged there from everywhere. It was so AWFUL. Everyone was outraged. Our votes meant nothing. Moderate reform is not allowed to take place here. The new leaders came out on the balcony and laughed like Nazis.

From Olubas’s biography we know what a cultivated and bookish life the Steegmullers led in New York and Europe. Hazzard’s appetite for, and retention of, poetry (none of it Australian) was formidable. She knew reams of it by heart – loved it, lived it in a way. Famously, on first meeting Graham Greene, she capped a Browning quote for him. In New York the Steegmullers would think nothing of reading Thucydides or Dante or Tolstoy right through on their rare evenings alone (they were constant hosts). Few of these heroic bibliophilic feats infiltrate Hazzard’s letters. ‘Shirl’ grows too fond and comfortable to feel the need to

show off, as she often does elsewhere, however unconsciously. But the letters are full of authors and books – and frequent clippings. It is fascinating to keep up with what they are reading, sharing, discovering: Judah Waten, Edmund Wilson, Elizabeth Hardwick, Frank Moorhouse (‘trendy sex’) on Harrower’s part; Hal Porter, Edward Albee, Nadine Gordimer, even Thomas Pynchon and Arnold Bennett on Hazzard’s. Endearingly, she ‘cannot abide Woody Allen, nor get the point’. Now and then she is acerbic. In 1980, when Francis’s edition of the Flaubert letters appears, she writes of the reviews: ‘… since they would not be reviewers if they really knew anything, and since it is all favourable, no complaints.’

Hazzard is mordant about Murray Bail, who was then a trustee of the National Gallery of Australia: ‘Murray not only has no eye for painting; his eyes are closed. The visual arts in Aust are – what? – a busy desert.’ We find out why in the Olubas biography: a letter from Bail had led the Steegmullers to abandon their plan to bequeath their not inconsiderable art collection to the Art Gallery of New South Wales.

In 1979, Patrick White read the galleys of The Transit of Venus and was underwhelmed: ‘You are inclined to strike attitudes and pirouette around yourself, but only here and there.’ He went on, for the jugular: ‘… to me you do lead an especially charmed life writing away in the NY apartment and Capri villa while collecting your celebrities and charmers …’ This was too much for Hazzard. Writing to Harrower, she said: ‘It is, furthermore, dispiriting to find a really great man like Patrick writing the letter of any spiteful old quean.’ It was easy (still is perhaps) to parody the Steegmullers’ gilded existence – the ‘lovely life’ that Kit liked to mock, despite her reliance on their generosity.

The Transit of Venus, Hazzard’s magnum opus, came out in 1980 and survived White’s monstering. It won Hazzard the National Book Critics Circle Award and changed everything. Later, after Steegmuller’s slow decline and eventual death in 1994, The Great Fire (2003), her fourth and final novel, won the Miles Franklin Literary Award.

Never – despite the laurels, the distance between them, the brave solo travels in her latter years – does Hazzard stop encouraging Harrower or hoping for a new novel from her. It seems likely that she admired Harrower’s writing more than Harrower admired hers (with the exception of the early short stories published in The New Yorker).

There are hints, now and then, concerning the Steegmullers’ formidable social orbit in New York. When the Isaiah Berlins come to town, they expect to dine with them (‘in pursuance of Lovely Life’, Hazzard notes). One New Year’s Eve they head to the Met: ‘we were the guests at the opera in the box of the manager who is a chum of ours … [Joan] Sutherland, in glorious voice, proceeded to sing a high-camp and highly entertaining Daughter of the Regiment, to thunderous applause.’

Then there is this classic from 1982, when they hoped that Harrower might stay with them in New York: ‘The only problem is that most of their pictures will be out of the house – ‘we sometimes send them to the Metrop Museum summer loan show, particularly if we’re having a room painted or something of the kind.’

In the 1980s, there was a rupture in the friendship, doubtless traumatic for both women. For years the Steegmullers had begged Harrower to visit them in Italy or New York – as their guest.

It is a kind of insistent refrain in their letters. In 1971, Francis, who often added fond postscripts to Shirley’s letters, wrote: ‘We must meet – it seems almost weird that we actually haven’t met!’ Hazzard was equally importunate, ending one letter: ‘More soon, dearest Elizabeth, and tremendous good wishes from us all. And utter determination on the Steegs’ part to arrange a reunion in ’73.’ (More intuitive hosts might have got the message and desisted, but not the Steegs.)

In 1984, Harrower – not an inveterate traveller, and wary about money – finally succumbed and met them in Rome. Harrower was tetchy from the start, complaining that her room at the Hassler Hotel, where the Steegmullers always stayed in Rome, did not have a view, and resenting Hazzard’s touristic bossiness (‘There you go again; I don’t accept orders’). Harrower stayed with them on Capri then decamped, skipping New York and returning to Sydney.

We know all this from Hazzard’s diary – not from the correspondence. Henry James wrote of the letters of Robert Louis Stevenson: ‘One has the vague sense of omissions and truncations – one smells the thing unprinted.’ The women hardly referred to the Roman debacle. And yet, rather movingly, a new kind of rapport entered the friendship. ‘Interestingly,’ the editors write, ‘from this coolness, this shifting of tone and focus, a new warmth develops, at least within the scope of the letters, which provide a less fraught account of their days and lives.’

Throughout, there are some choice episodes, none weirder than the one in 1973 when the Nolans visit Sydney, intent on

monopolising Harrower. Cynthia Nolan takes great exception to Harrower’s decision to go on a cruise and refuses to see her, as Harrower reports to Hazzard:

I said what about relenting for half an hour and we’d talk of noncontroversial things, but she said it would upset her too much and there we are. I’m sad about it, but she is fragile, and I’ve seen her ill, and down physically and psychically – all ways. She thinks I am used, apparently, and credits me with a rather frailer and simpler characters than I possess.

Frail or simple neither of these artists was. There are some classic letters here that would be worthy of a second edition of The Oxford Book of Australian Letters, should Brenda Niall be persuaded to revisit it. One example is Hazzard’s gleeful, excoriating letter of 15 May 1982 in which she describes a rancorous dinner that Sumner Locke Elliott was forced to endure chez Patrick White. When Sumner flees, White appears on the verandah and calls out ‘Come back’. Sumner does, sensing remorse on White’s part. ‘Whereupon Patrick yelled, “Not you! The dogs!”.’

Hazzard and Harrower teems with gossip, whimsy, illuminations, reassurance, disappointments – and a rather Australian kind of informality and sisterliness, perhaps not something we might have expected from Shirley Hazzard. g

Peter Rose is Editor of ABR

Black Market

From a certain point, there is no more turning back. That is the point that must be reached.

It moved. Like something a double agent might stifle. The wind turned it inside out and blurred it, nightfall made it louder.

In some way, you were father to it, chasing it side-to-side like a vagrant fish in your black coffee, my mind its solitary jetty. Last week the weather felt different, almost maternal. I put a suitcase of seedlings into your hands but piece-by-piece, the leaves broke off and your hands melted away like a sun and a moon that were candles.

Earlier, from twenty-five to thirty-two I followed you in obeisance. Took a plane from city to city and then a train underground—

Franz Kafka

In the shadow-play of cafés, nightcaps, the heat of summer rain, when lights turn red, they smell of you.

It comes again, too often. The questions mired in amber, the palms of electricity, the sharpness, from a certain point of view, of supposedly losing it all. No more silver into the hard green mouth of the well. No more wishes drawn from a wish-soaked heaven.

Cold happiness. The company of thieves—the darkberried timber, your blue eyes looking back as I sit on the staircase and glimpse the pollen-nest we gambled into the breeze.

Tonight I forge a promise: When nobody is home, and the bills are all paid, I will visit.

Claire Potter ❖

‘We,

the Tamponauts’

Lurching between lyricism and farce

Diane Stubbings

IOnly the Astronauts

by Ceridwen Dovey

Hamish Hamilton

$34.99 pb, 275 pp

n late 1999, NASA announced that its Mars Climate Orbiter, a multi-million-dollar robot probe designed to study the weather and climate of Mars, was lost somewhere in space. The craft had failed to manoeuvre into its optimal orbit, ending either on a course towards the sun or in a fatal collision with the red planet. Investigations uncovered the source of the blunder: one team working on the orbiter had been using metric measurements, another team had been using imperial.

A similar sense of miscalculation hangs over Ceridwen Dovey’s Only the Astronauts, a collection of five stories told from the perspective of a variety of objects that have, since the earliest days of the space race, been launched by humans towards the moon and beyond.

In essays published in Kill Your Darlings (2022) and Sydney Review of Books (2023), Dovey casts Only the Astronauts as an adjunct to the narrative experiments she began in her rightly acclaimed collection Only the Animals (2014). Comprising ten stories told from the viewpoint of animals, Only the Animals relies for much of its effect on readers’ preparedness to recognise within animals an essence approaching not merely the emotional, but also the spiritual.

To imbue objects made of metal, plastic, or even cotton with a comparable inner life – or ‘life force’ (to borrow from Italo Calvino, whom Dovey acknowledges as an influence) – is a more onerous task, one that eludes Dovey. Dovey’s omniscient object-narrators – Elon Musk’s ‘starman’, the International Space Station (ISS), the Voyager crafts, a hand-sized aluminium statue left behind by one of the moon missions, and a crew of tampons – lack the symbiotic consciousness welding together object and human that Dovey intends, the objects instead becoming little more than expositors on the lives of those humans with whom they have come into contact.

‘Starman’, for example, is narrated by the space-suited mannequin strapped into a Tesla Roadster that SpaceX launched in 2018.  There are occasional flashes of radiance – ‘I am a circling speck in the solar system. The sunlight falls on me, or does not fall on me. I measure time in stripes of light. I am a planet unto myself’ – and as an ode to Starman’s unrequited love for its narcissistic creator, it almost succeeds. However, a mid-flight rendezvous with Ivan Ivanovich, a mannequin jettisoned, according to the story, by a Soviet space crew (but, in fact, purchased in 1993 by US presidential hopeful Ross Perot), eventually sabotages

any suspension of disbelief readers might be willing to accept. Like ‘Starman’, much of Only the Astronauts lurches between lyricism and farce, insight and inanity, inducing in the reader a level of motion sickness. Promising ideas are undermined by dialogue that has all the finesse of a B-grade movie. ‘We, the Tamponauts’ is a glaring example. Tangentially extolling pioneering astronaut Sally Ride, the first American woman in space (there is no recognition of Valentina Tereshkova, the cosmonaut who preceded Ride by twenty years), ‘We, the Tamponauts’ is a screenplay – written by the granddaughter of a tampon and who is herself, presumably, a tampon – that tells of a crew of ‘menstrual sanitary items’ travelling to Mars. Much is made of the symbolism of the ‘red’ planet, and the strings of the approximately 100 unused tampons Ride discarded during her expedition morph into ‘tiny cosmic strings that make up the entire universe ... eternally woven … into the fabric of space-time’.

The slightness of the plot and the clunkiness of the dialogue – ‘nothing could be more out of place than a tampon in space’ declares a chorus of tampons – are the least problematic aspects of ‘We, the Tamponauts’. What humour there is in the story is stretched stratosphere-thin (the story occupies almost half the volume), and to celebrate women’s achievements in space through the synecdoche of a tampon is as reductive and dated as the patriarchal discourse it seems to be critiquing, reinforcing rather than subverting the idea that women are little more than their menstrual cycles.

The three remaining stories – ‘The Fallen Astronaut’, ‘Hackgold/Hacksilver’, and ‘Requiem’ – demonstrate something of what Only the Astronauts might have been. In ‘Requiem’, for example, the ISS muses ‘I’m not immune to the pull of Earth’s atmosphere. I’ve had a taste of what it will be like to give in to that pull, to stop resisting … It is as inevitable as ageing.’ But any synergy between the space-objects and their significant humans quickly dissipates. The objects operate as little more than loquacious chatbots, trundling through Wikipedia-style summaries of the lives of Neil Armstrong, Carl Sagan, and various astronauts and cosmonauts who have lived and worked on the ISS. Consequently, there is a second-hand feel to the narratives; they lack their own creative pulse. As Voyager 1 says in ‘Hackgold/Hacksilver’, ‘we discover, or we die’.

Abortive experiments ultimately generate new questions, and Only the Astronauts is no exception. What, for example, might a superannuated spacecraft feel as it plunges towards death? What might it suffer as it languishes in a ‘spacecraft cemetery’ deep in the Pacific Ocean? How might the profoundly interdependent relationship the ISS has shared with its crew impact its perceptions? What sort of metaphor for our excursions into space might the statue of the ‘fallen astronaut’ have become had it been allowed to express its own subjectivity? What might a spacecraft experience as it is blasted on a trajectory towards the edge of the solar system, or abandoned on a distant planet?

In Only the Astronauts, Dovey has commemorated the ability of space-objects to extend into the farthest extremities of the universe the physical reach of humanity. What she fails to exploit is their capacity to extend our imaginative reach also. g

Diane Stubbings is a writer and critic based in Melbourne.

Dark flowering

An

inspired début short story collection

Anthony Lynch

IThe Gorgon Flower

by John Richards

University of Queensland Press

$32.99 pb, 286 pp

n Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899), the sailor Charles Marlow recalls captaining a river steamer in the Belgian Congo, a venture that becomes a search for the colonial agent Kurtz, said to be a brilliant if infamous ivory trader, who is ill and possibly mad. Marlow’s journey, of course, becomes a passage into psychological as well as (to the European mind) geographical darkness, and offers a damning portrait of Western imperialism.

The title story of The Gorgon Flower, John Richards’s inspired début short story collection, follows a similar trajectory to Conrad’s canonical, but problematic, novella. Conveyed almost entirely through journal entries, it emulates the diaries of colonial explorers, and tells of (the fictional) Lord Tobias Edmundson’s 1861 journey up river and his trudge through dense jungle in Borneo in search of the eponymous flower. Thirty years earlier, Tobias’s botanist father was the first European to find the Gorgon flower, an elusive plant notable for its great size and striking appearance but also for its carnivorous appetite and hypnotic hold over nearby creatures – a grip that, to us as readers, seems to include its human attendees (think of the gorgons of Greek myth). Edmundson Sr had brought a specimen back to England, feeding it creatures living and dead. But both father and flower were lost when a fire swept through the father’s conservatory. The rediscovery and mapping of the plant by an English explorer in 1860 sets Tobias, also a botanist, on his journey.

Tobias tells us repeatedly that he will be frank in his journal entries, a ‘faithful scribe’. But, as with Marlow in Conrad’s novella, we can discern Tobias’s unreliability as a narrator. Despite his insights, his vivid descriptions (‘we must hack our every step through the choking jungle like lice through matted hair’), and lively portraits of senior crew, he is naïve, blind to the hardships of the men hauling his extensive equipment, and his optimism is misplaced. The trek through jungle is endlessly arduous. The bodies of white missionaries materialise on the river and in the jungle, victims of a ‘flesh-attacking infection’. The indigenous population appears untouched. Tobias remains obsessively focused on his search for the flower. When he shows a sketch of the flower to the two ‘natives’ among the otherwise all-white male crew, they (wisely) flee.

Richards doesn’t engage directly with the repercussions of colonialism, but nor does he fall prey to the shortcomings of Conrad’s novella – in which, arguably, the imperialism critiqued

is also upheld. Both are quest stories, but ‘The Gorgon Flower’ is ultimately an unsettling and entrancing Gothic horror, with echoes of Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Mary Shelley, wherein our narrator’s Enlightenment adherence to rationality, science, and the ‘moral order’ is challenged and violently laid waste.

Occupying more than a third of the book, the title story is really a novella, but the six stories flanking it deal similarly with disruptions of the rational. The opening story, ‘A Fall from Grace’, shortlisted in the 2021 ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize, sees the life of a gifted artist in early eighteenth-century France cut short after he falls from a horse. However, works deemed to be unequivocally from the artist’s hand, albeit with disturbing Bosch-like imagery, continue appearing. Did the artist, never seen again in person, really die? Richards’s omniscient narrator feeds us clues that charm with their faux art-historical research. The result is an intriguing story comparable to the fabulist works of Italo Calvino.

‘Jacksi Packsi’ recalls a child’s attachment to her brilliant grandmother, a mathematician of international standing who finds the mathematical basis for alternative universes, and possibly a means of entering them. But unlike the self-absorbed hero of the title story, the narrator’s gifted Nana is a loving carer, fondly recalled. Meanwhile her residence is watched over by a mysterious man, or series of men, dubbed ‘the Man Who Watched’. Part sci-fi and part noir thriller (if not quite ‘tech noir’), it is an absorbing and tender story.

Many stories, like the above, involve a highly intelligent central character whose knowledge and expertise are shared with only a select few. In ‘Emanation’, a ‘thought-clotted physician’ in 1892 grapples with the mystery of a deceased man whose cadaver fails to decay. Not wishing to cause alarm, he and his immediate colleagues keep this ‘new and startling knowledge’ to themselves. Set in a small village in the Italian Alps in 1266, ‘The Wolf-boy of Ruggianto’ provides a darkly comic portrayal of religious superstition while preserving elements of the fantastical. Can a lone outsider save a boy accused of being a werewolf?

Richards’s collection roves widely in geographical settings, and most stories are set in the past. Two, however, are set in the future. Both involve technology-enabled interventions into violent or anti-social conduct. Indeed, the first of these is titled ‘The Intervention’. Despite our growing awareness of AI, virtual reality, and online and street-level surveillance, authors writing dystopian futures still must fill knowledge gaps for readers of their yet-to-be worlds. Richards mostly does this skilfully, but ‘The Intervention’ produces rare instances of clunky explanatory dialogue (‘the manner of our intervention is of course limited by what the team Intervention Master can fashion from the circumstances in which we intervene’). That said, both this story and, in particular, ‘The Malumbra’, which closes the collection and impressively fuses crime fiction, speculative fiction, and ghost story, create lucid worlds and characters whose unfamiliar lives achieve narrative traction.

The Gorgon Flower plays inventively with genre, displaying impressive, but never overplayed, historical research and virtuosic powers of description. Richards’s Jolley story was, apparently, his first published one. To produce this imaginative and highly original collection just three years later is a remarkable achievement. g

Life support

Passionate arguments for purification

Shannon Burns

OCaledonian Road

by Andrew O’Hagan Faber

$34.99 pb, 656 pp

ne of Caledonian Road ’s primary characters, Milo Mangasha, tends to speak in political slogans, which his childhood friend identifies as ‘college talk’. Readers may recognise in Milo the rhetoric of characters in Andrew O’Hagan’s previous novel, Mayflies (2020), a popular and critical success that was subsequently adapted for television. Like Mayflies, Caledonian Road is stridently certain about its political and moral positions. It reads like a passionate argument for purification. In this fictional world, set in contemporary Britain, a person who maintains ties with corrupt and wealthy conservatives, while voicing left-wing principles and ideals, risks a ‘crackup’. Failing the test of moral consistency turns you into a cipher, a hollow man, a danger to yourself and others.

Alice is a story of groundbreaking insights, legal intrigue and improbable friendships. Pinpointing the likely causes of the next financial crisis, Alice reveals the fight to build a safer, fairer financial future.

This is the position that Campbell Flynn – an art historian and public intellectual with a working-class background – finds himself in. Campbell enjoys modest fame among young people due to ‘a BBC podcast that often went viral’ but is constantly worried ‘about money and his failure to be as well-off as he should be’.

We meet Campbell just after he has just written a self-help book professing to address the contemporary plight of men, which is to be published anonymously. He hopes that its sales will help relieve his debts. We learn that Campbell borrowed money from an old-school friend, William Byre (one of the novel’s capitalist villains), to maintain his family’s lifestyle, and has stopped paying taxes. He uses self-soothing apps on his phone to cope with a sense of dread. From the blurb onwards, the novel signals the approaching catastrophe. O’Hagan builds tension by noting, repeatedly, that something bad is going to happen to his protagonist.

Campbell is both aware and unaware of the crisis enveloping him. In the opening pages, we learn that he sees himself as

a thinker in danger of becoming thoughtless. At fifty-two, he knew himself to be a traitor to the class of his youth and a freak to his own moral understanding. You can’t live your life being celebrated for beautifully preaching what you will never practise, and this was the certainty that had begun Campbell’s trouble ... He knew that hypocrites live on by defending their position against outward reality, but that year, that season, Campbell knew that he could no longer get away with it in his own conscience.

Tessa Morris-Suzuki brings Monte Punshon’s story of keeping up appearances, painful memories and personal desires to life in this extraordinary biography.

Available 18 June 2024

Mixed Fortunes explores Australia’s history of tax reform. It assesses both the political economy issues of policymaking and the quality of the tax reforms that have been achieved in Australia.

Campbell appears to have already diagnosed his problem and partly prescribed its solution: practise what you preach. Yet just two pages later, after hearing that Byre is being investigated for corrupt business dealings, Campbell again begins to ‘wonder if his own values might be tainted’ by his friendship with the man. Campbell repeats variations of the same query about himself throughout, apparently suffering from a form of amnesia that makes him forget his own moral realisations.

O’Hagan has little interest in subtlety or ambiguity. His good guys are unmistakably decent and his bad guys are definitively terrible. Two of the novel’s decent people – Tara, a tenacious but reflective journalist, and Moira, a principled Labour MP – voice the theme of the book while discussing their own social connections to wrongdoers. Moira says: ‘We must call it out ... We can’t bend just because the offenders are in our contacts ... Because the world will never be right until these people are named.’

Caledonian Road deals with a broad range of contemporary social issues and features a large cast of characters, including a duke who thinks Hitler had some good ideas, a pernicious columnist, an activist-hacker with utopian dreams, a handsome but buffoonish actor, a Russian oligarch and his hot-headed gangster son (straight out of every action film), fashion designers, publishers, people smugglers and their victims, and a dying matriarch who lives out her days on a cruise ship. Most characters run in the same social circles or are connected to each other at a small remove.

As his crisis takes hold, Campbell develops a strong fascination for his former student, the politically assertive Milo. Campbell sees him as ‘an association’ that ‘might replenish him and force him to embrace the change that frightens him’. The only real suspense in the novel is drawn from Milo’s enigmatic interest in Campbell: why is he ‘testing’ him and what is his long game? Milo believes that Campbell ‘thinks he’s one of the good guys’, yet we know, from the earliest pages, that Campbell doesn’t think this at all – he sees himself as a hypocrite – so the insight doesn’t hold. Still, Milo clings to the idea that he is gradually revealing Campbell to himself, as does the narrator. This seems like a structural flaw.

If Campbell is guilty of maintaining connections with people who exhibit signs of corruption and brutality, Milo is his opposite: he seeks to expose corruption and wrongdoing wherever he finds it and to break ties with an immoral society. When the scale of Byre’s criminal behaviour is revealed, Campbell is sickened: ‘If feeling implicated can be experienced as a form of pain, then Campbell was in agony.’ Milo experiences no such anguish. One of his friends is implicated in a violent crime, but his relative disadvantage absolves him from responsibility in Milo’s mind.

mask and addresses the state of Britain ‘in her most serious voice’. She says: ‘The whole country’s on life support.’ Because she is dying, and deathly sincere, and because she has lived an unerringly decent life, we know this isn’t intended to be funny – we should not see her as a comically cartoonish symbol – but it’s a tough ask. With few exceptions, O’Hagan’s characters are props devised to hammer home political or moral proclamations.

Caledonian Road is lively and full of promise for much of the first half, where it maintains a satirical edge. The hypocrisy

and self-centredness of upper-class society is a rich source of humour, and there are echoes of contemporary satires like Ruben Östlund’s The Square (2017). But Campbell is ultimately a pathetic figure with few redeeming features, and the source of his crisis and nature of his fall are unconvincing. This makes for a hollow creation. g

Milo’s mother succumbs to Covid during the early stages of the pandemic, isolated in a hospital bed. As she speaks her last words to her family, via FaceTime, she pulls down her oxygen

Shannon Burns is the author of a memoir, Childhood (Text Publishing, 2022).

Andrew O’Hagan, 2023 (Christina Jansen)

Reverberating violence

Louise Milligan’s fiction début

Laura Elizabeth Woollett

APheasants Nest

by Louise Milligan Allen & Unwin

$32.99 pb, 312 pp

mid-career genre change is always cause for attention. Best known for her fearless investigations into institutional sexual abuse, it is hardly surprising that Louise Milligan should transfer her journalistic nous and commitment to social justice into the realm of crime fiction. Pheasants Nest is part of a movement in post-#MeToo crime fiction, which has flourished in Australia and abroad in the past decade. It challenges the norms of the genre to centre victims and amplify the reverberations of violence against women (recent examples include Jessica Knoll’s Bright Young Women and Jacqueline Bublitz’s Before You Knew My Name).

What sets Milligan’s fiction début apart is her willingness to draw explicitly on her personal and professional background. Kate Delaney is the ‘right’ sort of victim – ‘middleclass, pretty, educated’ – and she knows it, having covered cases of victimised women in her work as an award-winning journalist. For a reader versed in Australian crimes of the past few decades, there is satisfaction in finding real-life parallels to the cases in Pheasants Nest. A clear inspiration for Kate’s violation and abduction is the 2012 murder of Jill Meagher, an Irish national and ABC worker who was intercepted while walking home from a night out in Melbourne’s inner-north, and whose partner, like Kate’s, was an initial suspect (Milligan even interviewed Tom Meagher at the time). A murder that Kate reports on, which occurs in an isolated locale renowned for its shallow gene pool and haunted colonial jail, has echoes of the Janelle Patton case. Pheasants Nest is titled after and partly takes place around an actual bridge in New South Wales, which Kate associates with suicides and the real-life, tragic deaths of two teenagers in 1989.

Kate is also, like Milligan (and Meagher), Irish-born – a fact that contributes to both her character and her gothic conception of traditional Dharawal and Gundungurra land. While Kate’s sense of outsiderhood in Australia and her white woman’s fear of the bush could have been explored more acutely, Milligan effectively contrasts the natural fertility of the land with the refuse of settlement: ‘One of those old-school Neapolitan ice-cream containers […] half full of muddy water. A soiled disposable nappy in a plastic bag. A rather nasty-looking black dildo.’

While the novel begins in the backseat of the vehicle in which Kate’s rapist is hurtling away from the site of her opportunistic assault, this Black Water-esque claustrophobia is forfeited in favour of a roving perspective. Milligan jumps beyond Kate to her rapist,

her boyfriend Liam, two policemen, her best friend Sylvia, and her would-be sister-in-law Mandy. This expanded scope allows Milligan to show off her understanding of police procedure and explore various masculinities: the violent misogynist; the sensitive city boy; the PTSD-afflicted country cop. Yet the novel often feels hampered by an excess of backstory combined with lukewarm attempts at humour, such as Sylvia dropping off her toy dog at her mother’s house before hitting the road to chase leads.

How to handle the characterisation of a violent misogynist – and the extent to which such men should be characterised at all – is a central challenge of victim-centric crime fiction. Milligan follows predecessors such as Knoll by leaving Kate’s abductor nameless, referring to him simply as ‘the Guy’. However, the Guy is a recognisable ‘type’: a gym-junkie and self-identified ‘bogan’, who sees women as types (namely, ‘bogans’ and ‘mods’). He is also recognisably dim, the kind of criminal who, after raping a woman, shoves her in his backseat without disposing of her cell phone.

Although the Guy’s lack of intelligence is not unrealistic –white male criminals often get away with a lot, through sheer force of privilege and police incompetence – it often detracts from his menace. It takes some suspension of belief to accept that a man who is capable of violating a woman just because she turned him down in a humiliating manner would baulk at killing her (see Margaret Atwood: ‘Men are afraid of women laughing at them. Women are afraid that men will kill them’). Likewise, Kate’s assurance of her intellectual and cultural superiority seems somewhat overstated, within the context (she bristles at being offered Pringles to eat while starving, for example).

Moreover, Kate’s sense of cultural superiority introduces a shadow of classism, which extends beyond the Guy. Kate is what the Guy calls a ‘mod’ (basically, a chick who reads and listens to Morrissey) – a type that he considers to be above his station, unlike his ex or the stripper that he has previously assaulted. Although these hierarchies undeniably exist in society, and impact the ways that crimes are investigated, prosecuted, and portrayed in the media, their persistence in the mind of Milligan’s heroine is relatively unexamined. There are some striking moments in which Kate reflects on the optics of victimhood, such as her difficulty finding a photo of a brutalised nineteen-year-old that ‘didn’t make the poor thing look comical and vain’. I can’t help thinking that there is a more interesting novel nesting within Pheasants Nest, one that expands on these moments to critique the ways that the inner-city media elite may be complicit in the construction of some victims as more worthy of justice and compassion than others.

Nevertheless, Milligan’s efforts to raise up her victim-protagonist and those most impacted by her abduction are commendable, and an improvement on narratives that implicitly lionise violent men by presenting them as more mysterious and crafty than they actually are. Pheasants Nest also poses some important questions with regards to sexual desire in the wake of violation, through the space it gives to Kate and Liam’s rose-tinted relationship, though these questions remain largely unresolved. g

Laura Elizabeth Woollett’s most recent novel is West Girls (2023).

The Not Knowing A novel oceanic in subject and scope

Patrick Allington

YHaven by Shankari Chandran Ultimo Press

$34.99 pb, 310 pp

ou need to look closely at the cover of Shankari Chandran’s novel Safe Haven to notice the sharp edges of the deceptively inviting image it depicts: the handcuffs, the barbed wire, the boat that seems to sit on top of the waves and yet be at the bottom of the sea, and the rebuke contained in the book’s title.

Chandran’s sprawling follow-up to her Miles Franklin Literary Award-winning Chai Time at Cinnamon Gardens (2022) is oceanic in subject and scope. In part, Chandran uses fiction to make geopolitical and social commentary: Safe Haven is a furious statement about the Sri Lankan civil war, Australia’s listless engagement with the treatment of the Tamil people, and Australia’s policies towards, and treatment of, asylum seekers, including its use of private offshore-detention facilities. But the novel is also a political thriller, complete with interagency tensions, cool technology, intricate and unlikely plans, much intrigue, and a shout-out to John le Carré. It is also a character study that dwells upon the many possible meanings of friendship and familial and romantic love. And it is a meditation on faith and religion, trauma and death, courage and guilt, curry pies, and much more. There are flashes of humour, too, though these are less prominent than in Chai Time at Cinnamon Gardens.

At the story’s centre is Sister Serafina Daniels (Fina), a Tamil Carmelite nun who is one of twenty-five survivors of a boat that sank on its way to Australia, resulting in eighteen deaths by drowning. Fina’s short-term Safe Haven Enterprise Visa allows her to live in the New South Wales town of Hastings with a mother and son – Louisa and Cash – who are dealing with their own trauma. Fina also conducts frequent pastoral visits to the remote Port Camden Detention Centre, where fellow Tamil survivors of her sea journey sit in political purgatory.

After two deaths at Port Camden, one of which affects her deeply, Fina embarks on a course of action that she knows will jeopardise her future. From this foundation, Chandran unfurls a plot involving an inquiry into the two deaths by a young high-flyer investigator from the Office of Special Investigations. Lakshmi – known as Lucky – is a Tamil-Australian woman with a commitment to finding the truth, regardless of her personal safety, a refusal to submit to intimidation, and the ability to break and enter.

Although Lucky’s investigation shapes the novel, Fina stays at the heart of the story, partly because Lucky sees through her

façade, and partly because Fina’s commitment to the dislocated and traumatised people she helps is unrelenting. Chandran’s prose is at its most affecting and potent in a scene where Fina and Lucky talk with the Tamil women living in the detention centre, including Selvi, a deeply distressed mother mourning the death of her son. Then and at other moments, Chandran captures detention centre life with a mix of compassion and fury: ‘Days of not knowing their fate quickly became months and slowly became years. The not knowing became known as The Not Knowing.’

In Hastings, Fina makes Louisa’s dysfunctional home functional. She cleans up. She replaces backpacker lodgers with refugee families. She also cares for eleven-year-old Cash in ways Louisa cannot, tending to his practical and emotional needs. The boy relies on Fina, sometimes needing to sleep in her room. His compassion for her is profound: he comforts her when she wakes, ‘sometimes screaming’, from dreams about her past. Chandran does a fine job of depicting an unusual adult-child relationship without resorting to neat comparisons about their respective trauma and without ever forcing Cash to appear prematurely or conveniently adult-like in his wisdom or capabilities.

Fina’s relationship with Louisa is more complex: although they have come to love each other, each of them can be fiercely critical of the other: ‘Are all nuns this bossy?’ Louisa is one of several significant characters whose portrait is sketchy within the crowded story. A mix of people and their backstories compete for attention, including Professor Jafari, a pure mathematician from the University of Tehran who now works at DeLuca’s Hardware; a military doctor called Henry, who schemes and mourns his son; a Norwegian sea captain called Magnus, who came to the rescue of Fina’s sinking boat and now sends her tender emails; the rigid Commanding Officer of Port Camden; several malicious, damaged detention centre staff, ‘contractors or sole traders in matching uniforms’; and a group of Hastings locals with the smarts to support Fina, including Jill, a school counsellor with a high-powered legal background.

All these elements – the politics, the busy plot, the many characters who are pieces in the story’s intricate puzzle – stitch together unevenly. I am not suggesting that Chandran should simplify her vision or constrain herself to the rules of a single genre. But on its own terms, it is hard to settle into the world this novel offers.

Chandran also has much background context she wants to share, including in the novel’s awkward opening pages and in the use of dialogue to feed information to readers. Still, her prose persistently draws startlingly simple and powerful observations from the story’s multiple layers: ‘Hastings’ small primary school had sunshades like sails stretching over the playground that reminded her of UN tents, though these were of much better quality.’

In a later part in the novel, as veneers of truth unravel, Lucky says to Henry: ‘I think we both know that nothing is as it seems here.’ She is voicing her suspicions; she is asking Henry to answer her questions honestly. She might also be summarising Safe Haven, a novel about lies, hidden truths, contested histories, and the callous expediency of institutions and governments. g

Patrick Allington’s latest novel is Rise & Shine (Scribe, 2020).

Safe

Invincible summer

A celestial journey to the limits of grief

Naama Grey-Smith

OBright Objects

by Ruby Todd Allen & Unwin

$32.99 pb, 424 pp

ne of the joys of reading – and a point of difference from narratives told on the various screens we turn to for leisure – is imagining a story’s mise en scène. Our mental pictures (termed phantasia by a group of British neurologists) are a strange alchemy of images from our memories, thoughts, and dreams. Though visualisation is not a universal experience, many readers may comment that a book-to-film adaptation was ‘exactly as I pictured it’ or else ‘nothing like what I saw in my mind’s eye’.

Bright Objects, the début novel of Melbourne-based writer Ruby Todd, excels in evoking the imagination. Todd achieves this not through the quantity or level of detail of her descriptions but through their quality. Her astute observations range from the pitch of a character’s voice to the font of a poster, and her imagery is fresh and richly hued: distance between characters is ‘like skin kept clean around a wound’, while the habitual counting of cars is ‘a rosary to measure time as it disappeared’. That this is Todd’s first book bodes well for Australian literature.

Narrated in the first person, Bright Objects tells the story of Sylvia Knight, a young widow living in the fictional small town of Jericho, New South Wales. Grief-stricken over the death of her husband, Sylvia lives a cloistered life, working at a funeral home with ‘the tight-lipped atmosphere of wood polish and plush carpet and heavy drapes’. To avoid her own reflection, she has stuck over her bathroom mirror a poster of a seventeenth-century still life by Willem Kalf depicting ‘the remains of a luxurious meal abandoned in haste’. Time passes slowly for Sylvia, and her only sense of purpose – to find the hit-and-run driver responsible for her husband’s death – is frustrated at every turn.

The catalyst for Sylvia’s character evolution is the fictional Comet St John. The novel charts the comet’s passage in the night skies, commencing with its discovery in 1995 and concluding with its perihelion in 1997, when its proximity to the sun makes it brightest above Jericho. The approaching comet brings pilgrims into the small town and reveals the ‘various registers of fear, hope and hubris’ in the community, from the comet’s discoverer, astronomer Theo St John, to Jericho local Joseph Evans, whose messianic preaching attracts a dangerous following.

The work’s four-part structure – ‘Dark Skies’, ‘Closer’, ‘Arrival’, and ‘Departures’ – mirrors the comet’s celestial journey. In the novel’s prologue, titled ‘Divinations’, Sylvia explains that this journey is bookended by her own first and second deaths – exposition that establishes Sylvia’s narrative as bound to the

comet’s, while also setting up the questions that drive the plot. If the narrative tension occasionally wanes on this orbit, it is of little concern since the writing remains unfailingly engaging and wise. It is also darkly humorous and witty: Sylvia observes new grief is ‘an alien planet’ and, in the same breath, quips that ‘it is not therapeutic for all in its exile to be faced with the finer decisions of commemorative slideshows and casket sateens’.

The catalyst for Sylvia’s character evolution is the fictional Comet St John

In a note to readers, Todd explains that the story draws on the real events surrounding the Heaven’s Gate sect in the United States during the appearance of Comet Hale-Bopp in 1997. However, Todd’s exploration of the significance of comets is much broader as she probes ‘the cultural, religious and scientific history of human beings responding not only to comets, but to the possibility of hidden or higher orders of reality in the universe’. These philosophical investigations are the shining light of Bright Objects. Sylvia often wonders ‘how we might appear through the eye of a comet, making its icy passage through our galaxy, in a journey whose timespan couldn’t tally with the dimensions of our human lives’. She reflects on the rational self versus the shadow self ‘who wanted desperately to believe there was more than this: bodies bound to a continental crust, seeing out our time before necrosis, alone in space on a planet formed by accident’. She feels ‘the stirring of synapses in some region of my brain, the region still primed to look for meaning in happenstance’. Sylvia recognises that ‘For some without faith, and for mongrels like me, I supposed it would always be like this – a bereft and stumbling feeling, grasping now and then in the dark, but always returning to the conclusion that nothing about being here, alive in the world, would ever quite make sense.’

Appropriately, the novel’s twin epigraphs are from Seneca and Albert Camus. The first relates to comets, while the second is a declaration of resilience from Camus’s ‘Return to Tipasa’: ‘In the midst of winter, I finally learned that there was in me an invincible summer.’ (The two epigraphs share a connection to Rome – Seneca was a Roman statesman while the Algerian town of Tipasa, loved by Camus, is known for its Roman ruins –a connection that befits the novel’s study of mythology, with many celestial bodies named after Roman deities.)

Bright Objects offers a fine narrative and intriguing astronomical insights, but most compelling, for this reader, is its evocation of grief. Sylvia’s search for meaning in her ‘shipwrecked hours’ is deeply moving, especially as she reaches the limits of a life lived in mourning. It so happens that this book found me, the reader, in the midst of my own winter of grief, and for this its resonance was magnified. Readers who value a ‘naked and steely’ look into questions of meaning – those who don’t mind ‘peering through the crack between logical reality and oblivion’ – perhaps have most to gain from this profound, gentle, clear-eyed story. It is the story of someone who has known suffering, borne witness to it, and decided to keep going, meaning or no meaning. g

Naama Grey-Smith is an editor, publisher, writer, and critic.

A man made only of words

Hidden humour in the interstices

Joachim Redner

ISelected Stories by Franz Kafka translated and edited by Mark Harman

Harvard University Press

US$29.95 hb, 304 pp

n Selected Stories, Mark Harman gives us crisp new translations of Franz Kafka’s best novellas and tales and also a substantial scholarly introduction to his life and work. Like most biographers, he explores Kafka’s painful relations with his family, particularly his father, and his anxieties about marriage. The women in Kafka’s life – particularly his twice-rejected fiancée Felice Bauer and his gifted Czech translator Milena Jesenská – are powerful presences. But Harman looks beyond Freudian family romance for insight. He sees Kafka as a man in search of transformative experience. Kafka tried to enlist during World War I; he reflected with increasing urgency on what it meant to be a Jew; he wrestled with philosophical and religious doubt. Set against all this, there was his absolute commitment to an ascetic writing life, which he sometimes feared was no life at all, making him a man made only of words, a literary fiction, truly absurd – and so in the midst of all these struggles he laughed, primarily at himself. Irony is thus the hallmark of his writing, with, as Harman says, ‘humour hidden in the interstices of his sentences’.

The stories are presented in chronological order, from ‘The Judgement’ and ‘The Transformation’ (1912) to ‘The Hunger Artist’ (1922), the proofs of which Kafka was correcting at the time of his death from tuberculosis in 1924, at the age of forty. The title of the famous story, beginning ‘Gregor Samsa awoke from restless dreams’ one morning and ‘found himself transformed into a monstrous insect’ is usually translated as ‘Metamorphosis’, but Harman considers this misleading. In Kafka’s world, unlike Ovid’s, there is no received mythology, no divine explanation for the terrifying changes in human destinies. Kafka makes the point himself with characteristically mordant wit in ‘Poseidon’ (1920), in which the old Greek god is depicted as an overworked bureaucrat, too busy in his office on the sea floor to go riding the waves. Kafka’s God, the monotheistic God of Judeo-Christian tradition, is not so easily dismissed.

Harman explains why. Kafka once told Max Brod, his closest friend: ‘We are nihilistic thoughts in God’s mind’, implying that God is to blame for our inability to believe in Him, but also ruefully acknowledging that as nihilists we are responsible for the sinister consequences of our unbelief. This statement sounds like Friedrich Nietzsche but is also wittily reminiscent of the comical quarrels with God familiar from Yiddish literature. Religion was not emphasised in Kafka’s upbringing. His family, like most others in the middle-class German-Jewish communities of Prague, was

semi-assimilated, his education rigorously secular. At university, he absorbed Nietzsche’s philosophical doubt in the existence of God, truth, knowledge, or the possibility of a just social order. But he later turned his own sceptical intelligence against Nietzsche, first by imagining in detail the kind of world nihilism projects and its dire consequences for individuals, then by showing with what ingenuity, tenacity, and even sheer effrontery they may cope with a hostile universe.

Gregor’s family find their great bug of a son repulsive and eventually exterminate him, but he has small victories: he gets off his back onto his feet; he forces his bullying employer to beat an undignified retreat. Other stories dramatise reverse transformations. In ‘A Report for an Academy’ (1917), an ape caged and tormented by humans finds a way out by imitating their worst habits – spitting, smoking, swilling brandy – then, having learned to speak, he shames them with his superior civility. In the great novel contemporaneous with these stories, The Trial, Joseph K.’s condemnation to death is foreordained, but here, too, the end is not all that matters. K.’s struggle against ferocious injustice may be futile, but it is sexually and intellectually energising and infinitely preferable to the passive waiting for illumination unto death endured by the supplicant in the parable of ‘Before the Law’. The ending of The Trial is absurdist art at its best, horror edged with humour. The two officials who walk K. to his death are clowns; bad actors who can barely control him between them. For K., who knows the score, sets the pace.

How can Kafka afford to laugh in the face of a hostile universe? Harman argues that he drew strength from Jewish tradition. He turned first to Yiddish theatre, inspired by its exaggerated mimicry, farcical elements, and gallows humour; then he gravitated towards Jewish mysticism, even asking to be introduced to the influential Hassidic Rabbi of Belz in 1916. His last love was Dora Diamant, daughter of a devout Jew who wouldn’t allow her to marry a man fallen so far from faith. By contrast, enlightened Jewish thinkers such as Gershon Scholem saw Kafka as a modern kabbalist. And Walter Benjamin found intimations of religious hope in Kafka that made his nightmarish visions, soon to become reality in Nazi Germany, almost bearable: ‘Kafka’s world [...] is the exact complement of an era preparing to do away with the inhabitants of this planet on a considerable scale’, he wrote to Scholem, in 1938, but he also stressed Kafka’s ‘self-possession’, his moments of ‘radiant serenity’.

Harman closes his Introduction with a similar thought, recorded in Brod’s biography of Kafka. Is this evil world of ours ‘a sin of God’, Brod enquires. ‘No,’ Kafka says: ‘We are just one of God’s bad moods’ – prompting Brod to ask if this means there is hope. ‘Plenty of hope for God,’ Kafka replies, ‘only not for us.’ But he was smiling calmly.

Ironies like this lurk in Kafka’s fiction: in dry, dispassionate sentences that deliver disconcerting changes of perspective and in slyly matter-of-fact descriptions of uncanny events. Harman’s translations recreate these subtle effects with admirable precision; and by uncovering the veins of humour and hope in Kafka’s dark art, he may well win new readers for this gentle master of the absurd. g

Joachim Redner is a Melbourne-based professional translator of literary and scholarly works.

Conditions of escape

Avenging the humiliations of childhood

David Jack

AChange:

A novel by Édouard Louis translated by John Lambert

Harvill Secker

$42.99 hb, 288 pp

utofiction differs from autobiography in that, to use Jean Genet’s formula with which Édouard Louis opens his latest novel, Change: A novel, the self is nothing but a ‘pretext’. In Louis’ case, it is a pretext for exploring the self as a sociological, rather than psychological, phenomenon; the enduring product of the social class in which it was forged. Change (first published in 2021 as Changer: méthode) opens with the narrator, Édouard (né Eddy), sitting at his desk writing what will become the novel we are now reading. His objective: ‘to fix the past in writing and, I suppose, to get rid of it’. This will prove easier said than done. As Édouard later discovers, the past has a way of reinstating itself, like a pendulum which is always restored to equilibrium. It is, however, less this resting place than the oscillations that Louis is interested in recording.

Louis’ childhood is a common theme in his work, in particular the poverty, violence, bullying, and homophobia he was subjected to growing up in the working-class village of Hallencourt in northern France. His novels all deal in one way or another with class, sexuality, transformation, and the intersection of life and fiction. Change, Louis’ fifth novel, tells the story of Édouard’s ‘escape’ from the village to a lycée in Amiens, the closest city, where he quickly sets about transforming himself to blend in with the new class of leftist élites to which he so desperately aspires.

For Édouard, Amiens was a place he could reinvent himself, a place to start over, a place where ‘I had no reputation, no past and therefore no history’. It was where he first ‘got a glimpse of an existence in which I could have a place’.

It was also, however, the place where he confronted for the first time what he calls the ‘concrete’ reality of social class: ‘you have to enter those worlds to feel how real, how omnipresent the difference is, not only in terms of money but in the ways of thinking, walking, breathing, everything.’ In short, Édouard discovers an entire catalogue of what sociologist Pierre Bourdieu called ‘distinctions’; and while he can adopt ‘the social codes of a new social class’, he can never be truly at home.

He quickly assumes the status of ‘outsider’, one which reflects Louis’ position vis-à-vis the Paris literary scene. Édouard is not aspirational in the narrow sense of seeking wealth for wealth’s sake. His ambition was, unashamedly at first, to avenge the humiliations of his childhood, to vanquish the petty and bigoted world view of his father, to whom he addresses a significant portion of the book. Amiens soon becomes too small for Édouard,

who sets his sights on Paris and the prestigious École Normale Supérieure, a goal even he must admit is virtually unattainable for someone with his background – virtually, because Édouard absolutely refuses to accept his social destiny: ‘naivety’, he writes, ‘is a condition of escape’.

For all its gesturing towards Louis’ life, including footnotes correcting certain details and photographs of the ‘author’ at various stages of his transformation, Change is a meticulously crafted work of autofiction, with a complex system of cultural cross references, including social theory, literature, film, music (especially requiems), and painting. The ease with which the story unfolds belies Louis’ masterly hand. Édouard calls the book ‘an odyssey’, and it is formally a quest narrative in which the narrator searches for ‘a type of existence in which a body and a story like mine would be possible’. Above all, it is a ‘quest for revenge’, against his upbringing, yes, but also against the class which somewhat patronisingly accepted him as one of its own.

Fame was to be his penultimate revenge, and it soon becomes clear to Édouard that the only way to achieve this was through writing books. For Édouard, books and writing are not ‘primary things’ but merely means to an end. He learned to read books and write them in much the same way as he learned to speak, walk, dress, and eat. There is a ruthlessness about Édouard which is only marginally tempered by the precariousness of his social position and the self-reflexive musings as to his character. Among all the plans, dreams, aspirations, and, at times, betrayals, there remains the lingering question: ‘Was I becoming a bad person? Was I hateful?’ So focused is Édouard on being accepted by this new milieu that he never considers that it might want nothing to do with him, or that he would be ultimately repelled by it. Indeed, it doesn’t take Édouard long to recognise the ‘class violence’ behind the gestures, the classical music, the walls of books, the particular way of speaking or holding a knife and fork, nor to understand just how pervasive class is, how even sexual desire can be transformed by it: ‘There was,’ he writes, ‘no difference between my physical and my social desire.’ Nonetheless, these realisations are not enough for him to moderate his ambition or his methods: ‘Questioning the violence of the world was not a luxury I could afford, the key thing was to keep going.’

And keep going he does. Change is in equal parts about the nebulous and insatiable nature of desire, and the gradual realisation that success is a wholly relative endeavour, the mountain peak of ambition disappearing into the clouds of an unreachable Olympus. Ironically, the vanity of Édouard’s quest is amplified by the sudden nostalgia he feels for his childhood and the regret at having ever distanced himself from his past. Perhaps the moral of the story can be summed up by Pascal’s observation that ‘we never actually live, but hope to live, and since we are always planning how to be happy, it is inevitable that we should never be so.’ Or, as Édouard puts it: ‘It’s the present that I miss.’ But the present is not for Edouard, any more than is the past. Each success quickly fades in the light of a new possibility, a new conquest, a new revenge, and Édouard becomes the absurd Sisyphean hero ‘doomed always to hope for another life’. g

David Jack is a freelance writer and editor. He holds a PhD in Comparative Literature from Monash University.

Copyright and its discontents

Frank Moorhouse’s battle to defend authors by

Matthew Lamb

It is only a coincidence that my book Frank Moorhouse: Strange paths, the first in a two-volume cultural biography of the Australian author, ends in 1974 – the same year that Copyright Agency was incorporated – and that it was published in time to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of this incorporation. As Moorhouse himself always argued, such coincidences, chance happenings, and historical accidents are often far more important in shaping our culture than we like to concede.

One limitation of conventional biography is that focusing on an individual life tends to push other individuals who shared that life into peripheral or supporting roles. One of the (many) reasons I was drawn to Moorhouse as a biographical subject, however, was because he self-consciously rejected this individualist conceit. He always considered himself a detached observer, and ironic participant, in events, always working alongside other people. His fascination with committees, meetings, and institutions as ways of organising social experience – of harnessing coincidence, chance, and the accidental – informed his thinking and his writing.

Nowhere is this individualist conceit more clearly demonstrated than in the public’s view of Moorhouse’s involvement in the landmark copyright case in the early 1970s. It is usually referred to as ‘The Moorhouse Case’ or ‘Moorhouse vs UNSW’. This elides the involvement of Moorhouse’s publisher, Richard Walsh, and Angus & Robertson, who were co-plaintiffs. In fact, the case appearing before the Supreme Court of New South Wales in April and May 1974 was Moorhouse and Angus & Robertson (Publishers) Pty Ltd v University of New South Wales. Moorhouse’s publisher shared the risk of paying costs if they lost the case, while Moorhouse’s personal indemnity was guaranteed by the Australian Society of Authors (ASA).

This also points to the broader institutional background of the case, predating Moorhouse’s involvement. That story begins with the author Dal Stivens initiating the formation of the ASA in 1963. Australia was at the time in need of a new copyright Act. It was still operating under a 1912 Act, which, in 1959, the Copyright Law Review Committee (the Spicer Committee) recommended updating. But the political will was lacking. The advocacy of the ASA put copyright back on the agenda. It was Gus O’Donnell who drove the idea. A former

farmer and soldier, known for always wearing a bushman’s hat, Gus had joined the ASA as an author but quickly became passionate about copyright and its discontents. He pulled together various organisations with an interest in copyright and from 1964 until 1968 he led a successful campaign to get the federal government to develop what became the Copyright Act 1968.

In January 1968, the Australian Copyright Council interim organisation was formed. It started out as basically a drawer in an office of the ASA, with Gus as chair and sole employee. Over the next few years, this expanded into a single-room office which Gus shared with two young lawyers – David Catterns and Peter Banki – whom he had hired as legal research officers. Their salaries were initially paid for by a grant from the Australia Council for the Arts (now known as Creative Australia).

In that room, they were always discussing and arguing and planning. Their initial focus was on lobbying and advocacy, as well as on giving free advice to authors and copyright owners. Occasionally, Gus declared the need for ‘a bash’, where one of the three would pick a secret lunch venue and they would spend the rest of the day there in extended conversation. The first ‘bash’ Gus arranged was a picnic in Centennial Park. David once organised a boat, while Peter hired a mobile home, parked near a train station.

Around the same time, photocopy machines were becoming more readily available, especially in university libraries. Gus thought this created the conditions for a wholesale infringement of copyright. David investigated and wrote an opinion suggesting that universities – such as the University of New South Wales – were ‘authorising’ their students to breach copyright. But this required a test case to be proven before the courts. And so, on Friday, 28 September 1973, Paul Brennan, a young journalist and graduate of UNSW, entered the photocopy room in the library at his alma mater and made two copies of various stories from the library copy of Moorhouse’s The Americans, Baby (1972).

It was important that Moorhouse didn’t know in advance what had happened, to ensure he hadn’t ‘licensed’ the copying of his book. But what is not widely appreciated is that Moorhouse had spent the decade prior researching and thinking about media communications technology. This

included, in May 1973, a lecture series on the implications of new communications technologies, including photocopying and other forms of phototransmission. So, when Moorhouse was called into a meeting with Gus, David, and Peter, soon after his book had been copied, and told about the breach and the strategy of the test case, he didn’t need much convincing to come on board.

At the heart of the test case was the issue of ‘authorisation’, to establish that, by providing photocopy facilities, institutions were effectively ‘authorising’ individuals with access to those facilities to breach copyright. George Masterman QC and Robert Hulme appeared for Moorhouse and Angus & Robertson. They did so pro bono. Peter and David spent many hours each week working on the case, researching the law of authorisation and its overseas equivalents. They were, in effect, juniors helping counsel. This also necessitated many meetings over drinks with Moorhouse, as well as the occasional ‘bash’.

But the initial case was not an unambiguous win. It was found that the University had not authorised the particular breach by Brennan, but that generally it had ‘authorised such breaches as occurred by the photocopying of the whole or part of the library copy of the said book’. In June 1974, the University of New South Wales appealed the second order, against the general breach, while Moorhouse and Angus & Robertson cross-appealed the first order, regarding Brennan’s particular breach.

That same month, Copyright Agency Limited – the proposed organisation to negotiate, collect, and distribute copyright fees associated with copying – was incorporated.

In August 1975, the High Court of Australia upheld the appeal of UNSW regarding the general breach. Significantly, they also upheld the cross-appeal, confirming that, The Americans, Baby having been copied, UNSW had indeed authorised a particular breach. This decision provided the necessary leverage for the Copyright Council to begin to develop, within the framework of Copyright Agency, a practical licensing scheme to ensure that copyright holders in Australia were fairly remunerated for the distribution, copying, and dissemination of their work.

The case gave David and Peter an international profile, as this was one of the first successful cases in the world holding

an educational institution liable for copying done by its staff and students. This proved to be the beginning of successful law careers in private practice. Moorhouse would come to refer to them as the ‘Starsky and Hutch’ of copyright, after the 1970s American cop show.

Gus worked for the Copyright Council part-time. Along with his continued involvement with the ASA, his advocacy work took time and energy away from his own writing. Like Gus, Moorhouse also joined the cause because he was a writer. However, the immediate case didn’t seem to diminish his enormous capacity for juggling various projects. While working on the case – which he did voluntarily and without any remuneration – he was also in the process of writing his third book and producing his first feature film. But he did become far more involved in the area of authors’ rights, and for far longer, than he predicted when he was first approached to become involved in the test case. For more than the next decade Moorhouse took on leadership roles in both the Australian Society of Authors and the Copyright Council –and all the committees, meetings, and negotiations between institutions that this involved – to ensure Copyright Agency was established on a firm foundation. When he took over as chair of the Copyright Council, on Gus’s retirement after seventeen years, he referred to Gus as ‘our professor, professor to the copyright community’.

Moorhouse’s involvement did take time and energy from his writing projects. The gaps between his publications began to widen in the 1980s, and several works were unfinished. He never complained, for he considered the work he was doing, along with many others, as something bigger and more important: a legacy. And it is a legacy, writ large, that continues in the form of Copyright Agency, and in its Cultural Fund’s commitment to support creators (and organisations such as ABR) in addressing contemporary challenges. It is a legacy expressed also in its Frank Moorhouse Fellowship for Young Writers, which helps emerging writers create new work. g

Matthew Lamb is the author of Frank Moorhouse: Strange paths (Knopf, 2023). Sascha Morrell reviewed it in the April 2024 issue of ABR. The author thanks David Catterns and Peter Banki for assistance with this article.

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The lonely heart

A

chamber reduction of Mahler’s song cycle

Malcolm Gillies

Despite what it packs into barely an hour, Gustav Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde (hereafter, Erde) is insufficiently long to fill a subscription concert. Hence, the Australian Chamber Orchestra’s brief first half, which featured two suitably complementary works.

Richard Wagner’s Siegfried Idyll originated as a birthday gift to his wife Cosima on 25 December 1870, honouring their infant son, Siegfried. The ACO took this opener at quite a lick, sacrificing some of its laidback pastoral connections – heard in Wagner’s then almost completed opera, Siegfried – for more emphasis on the energetic birdsong and sunrise references, mentioned in the Idyll’s fuller title. This opener, with its crisp section joins and speed, appropriately contrasted with the wallowing, dirge-like renditions of many famous conductors of yore.

Three early short songs by Alma Mahler-Werfel, wife of Mahler, followed, in a chamber-orchestra arrangement especially commissioned by the ACO from David Matthews. The thirteen-piece orchestra, led by Richard Tognetti, and soloist, mezzosoprano Catherine Carby, were nicely balanced and pursued their varied inflections in support of the work’s short love story. For Carby, with strength across the range and effortless control of tone and vibrato, it was a welcome warm-up for greater tests to come after interval.

Mahler’s A Song of the Earth (1908-9) is an incredible work that absorbs three decades of his experience with song cycles into a large-scale and profound development of his symphonic conception, by then expressed in eight monumental symphonies. Erde’s first five songs, with texts adapted from traditional Chinese poems that resonated with Mahler’s own social and ecological values, might pass as part of a song cycle. But not his last movement, ‘Der Abschied’ (‘Farewell’). There, his use of voice and of instruments transcends anything hitherto in his symphonic output. Even Mahler’s Ninth and incomplete Tenth symphonies are unable to rival the symphonic profundity of Erde’s half hour

of farewell.

How then does a chamber ensemble of fewer than twenty players, including two voices, grapple with such a monolith, composed by a master conductor for a large, late-Romantic orchestra? Fortunately, master orchestrator Arnold Schoenberg had attempted a chamber setting in 1921, which was completed in 1983 by Rainer Riehn. With many players doubling on instruments, especially woodwinds, and skilful use of three keyboard instruments, an amazing facsimile of Mahler’s Erde is possible. This arrangement maintains the original tenor and alto vocal parts, and has Mahler to thank for his highly soloistic featuring of instruments, particularly wind and brass, in the full-orchestra original. It is, however, the reduction of the strings from some fifty orchestral to just five chamber players that poses an irresolvable challenge in terms of emulating Mahler’s original balance and sheer tonal sheen. In this chamber arrangement, the strings, and especially the two violins, will often struggle to be heard. With one of those violins being music director, and occasional conductor, the challenge is heightened. On the other hand, the voices and other instruments are better heard, bringing into higher relief detail that is sometimes aurally submerged in Mahler’s ‘big sea’ of sound.

Stuart Skelton, with a truly Helden pedigree, excellent diction, and stylistic sympathy, was ideally cast as the alternating soloist across Erde’s six songs with Carby’s mezzo-soprano voice. He artfully rendered the very high writing for the tenor part in his first Drinking Song, and fluently dovetailed with talented members of the woodwind quartet (Sally Walker, Shefali Pryor, Olli Leppäniemi, and Todd Gibson-Cornish) in their solos celebrating ‘Youth’. Yet Skelton seemed to be out of puff by the time we reached ‘The Drunkard in Spring’. Or was this a case of acting the part? His final lines are, after all: ‘What do I care about spring? Let me be drunk!’

Carby was, throughout, in top form. In her three featured movements, she delved into the darker, deeper depths that had caused Mahler to designate this an alto (also, allowing a baritone) role. Counterpointing with the cello (Timo-Veikko Valve) in ‘The Lonely One in Autumn’, she revealed her full expressive range, while later, in ‘Farewell’, she demonstrated the chilling expressionlessness that Mahler demands of the role, almost causing time to stand still. Her middle movement, ‘Of Beauty’, evidenced her skills of diction and projection in the gabbling account of a horse in full flight, where many a soloist has come to grief.

It is, however, in this final long ‘Farewell’, with its extensive instrument-only developments, that Erde reaches its apogee. The voice becomes just another instrument in a magnificent exploration of the wanderings of the ‘lonely heart’, and leaving of the ‘world’, before the final lines of hope for the ‘earth’: the greening brought by spring, and the shiny, bright, and blue horizons of hope, forever.

The ACO’s rendition of this ending, with Carby, showed their excellent individual musicianship. But it was too cautious. This work needed the ultimate dictating of a non-playing conductor to wind it finally down to infinity. g

Malcolm Gillies is a Canberra-based musicologist, and former music and opera critic of The Australian.

Stuart Skelton (Nic Walker)

Artful Adelaide

Two new reference books

Patrick Flanery

SThe Adelaide Art Scene by Margot Osborne Wakefield Press

$120 hb, 743 pp

AGSA 500 edited by Rhana Devenport

Art Gallery of South Australia

$69 hb, 543 pp

tudies of ‘regional modernisms’ have frequently framed the non-metropolitan in strictly Northern Hemisphere terms, construing London or New York as centres of innovation, and cities and towns further afield – but still in the same country or region as those art-world capitals – as the belated adopters of phenomena that are often perceived as the province of metropolitan actors and audiences. Margot Osborne’s monumental volume The Adelaide Art Scene: Becoming contemporary 1939-2000 tells a far more complex story of modernism’s reach, impact, and legacies in twentieth-century art practice. In forensic detail, Osborne and her contributors explore the ways in which modernism’s significance was expressed in and affected a city that found itself both connected to and rival with Sydney and Melbourne, as well as with the established international centres. Whether through the training or travel of artists who called South Australia home at one point or another in their lives, Adelaide has been an important node in those movements for longer than many might imagine.

As Osborne writes in her introduction, the book’s ‘primary focus is on the cultural history of Adelaide’s networks of artists, galleries and societies’, and on their role in relation to the ‘fostering, the development and public appreciation of modern art’. Proceeding through a chronological investigation, Osborne provides overviews for each of the six decades covered, and has marshalled sixteen further contributors, whose case studies allow the book to zoom in and out from the general to the highly specific; chapters range in their focus from migrant artists in the postwar period, to the impact of the Adelaide Central School of Art in the 1980s, to Osborne’s own fascinating work on South Australian photography in the last two decades of the twentieth century.

Osborne is a compelling narrator for a story that is presented less as a coffee-table book than as a serious historical and scholarly volume with rich illustration that complements rather than supersedes the quality and clarity of the writing. There are, for those of us who are comparatively new to the city, genuine surprises. Osborne writes of the 1939 Exhibition of French and British Contemporary Art in Adelaide, ‘brought to Australia’ by Sir Keith Murdoch; featuring works by Cézanne, de Chirico, Dalí, Gauguin, Matisse, Picasso, and van Gogh, it offered ‘the first opportunity for the Adelaide public to view cubist and surrealist art’. While the attendance was modest compared to the show’s

Melbourne iteration, Osborne contends that its ‘impact on the Adelaide artistic scene was both immediate and far-reaching’. Among this book’s many strengths is telling a story that is as much about the visibility of international modernism in Adelaide as about local production. After an initial efflorescence of progressivism, Adelaide saw a mixed picture combining serious engagement with modernism and considerable public resistance to the avant-garde. Osborne notes that American modernism only arrived in Adelaide in the 1960s, for instance, despite the prevalence of Abstract Expressionism in New York from the 1940s. This sense of belatedness and mixed public reception is, of course, one facet of a complicated picture, and by no means unique to Adelaide.

Aspects of this struggle are evident in the Art Gallery of South Australia’s beautifully produced AGSA 500, a book comparable in size to Osborne’s volume but aimed at a very different audience. As Rhana Devenport, outgoing director of AGSA, writes in the introduction to this selection of five hundred of the Gallery’s works, AGSA has, since its establishment in 1881, grown to be ‘one of the largest and most significant’ art galleries in the nation. ‘With more than 47,000 works of art’, it is larger than important collections like the Norton Simon in Pasadena, California, though smaller than the National Gallery of Victoria. For its size, however, it does extraordinary work, aiming to be as representative as possible, particularly given the disproportionate modesty of its buildings and the absence of state support for acquisitions in the past decade. Thanks to patrons like Max Carter AO (who funded the production of this extravagant volume), there have been remarkable acquisitions in recent years, including works by Edvard Munch, Giorgio de Chirico, Jeffrey Smart, Chris Offili, Gilbert & George, and emerging video artist Ida Sophia.

The largest proportion of the book is rightly dedicated to the Gallery’s Australian collection, which ranges from Aboriginal art and objects to early colonial painting, furniture, significant works of modernist painting, design, photography, and contemporary work across media; each piece is accompanied by a text written by an AGSA curator or affiliate. The Gallery has, as Devenport attests, an ‘unrivalled’ collection of works by twentieth-century Australian women artists, including such notables as Dorrit Black, Grace Cossington Smith, and Clarice Beckett; complementing this is ‘the finest collection of British Post-Impressionism and early Modernism … outside the Tate’.

Devenport notes that in 1939 the Gallery ‘became the first Australian state art museum to acquire a work of art by an Aboriginal artist’, securing Albert Namatjira’s Illum-Baura (Haasts

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Bluff), Central Australia, made that very year, as the first in a collection of work by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander artists that now numbers more than 2,000 pieces. It is a pity, then, that there is not more evidence of important recent acquisitions in this area: Vincent Namatjira goes unrepresented, for example, and I had hoped to find Timo Hogan’s breathtaking painting Lake Baker (2021) or Kayleen Whiskey’s ludic Seven Sistas Sign (2021). Perhaps the comparatively recent acquisition of such works precluded their inclusion. There is at least Daniel Boyd’s magnificent Untitled (TBOMB), which combines a Seurat-inflected approach to group portraiture with the formal qualities of Aboriginal dot painting to produce a luminous depiction of a family picnic.

The Australian section of AGSA 500 includes a number of colonial works (still lives, landscapes, decorative objects) that, historical interest notwithstanding, might generously be described as unexceptional. Several nineteenth-century depictions of Indigenous Australians could have had more robust framing to explain the value of such works or to interrogate the offensiveness – in some cases – of their depictions. When an image like Eugene von Guérard’s Arcadian painting Stony Rises, Lake Corangamite (1857), with its depiction of ‘an Aboriginal camp’, is framed (for example) as referring ‘to our nation’s difficult history’, there might have been more forceful interrogation of the exoticist depictions of Aboriginal people in the image, and some explanation of the work’s representativeness.

In place of (or at least in addition to) such pieces, I would have preferred to see recent acquisitions of works by Karla Dickens, Karen Mills, or James Tylor, and a more thematic organisation would perhaps have given us a clearer picture of the strengths of the Gallery’s Australian holdings. That story is undoubtedly there in this beautiful book, but the reader must work to decipher it. The book’s other sections – on Asian and International art –do not face the same kinds of ideological issues, and both offer compelling narratives for the breadth, seriousness, and ongoing relevance of the collections in these areas.

25 JUL – 11 AUG ARTS CENTRE MEL BOURNE

In the end, AGSA 500 is an excellent coffee-table book rather than a scholarly one, notwithstanding Devenport’s lucid and uncompromisingly intelligent introduction and overview of the Gallery’s history. She reminds us that an art museum’s role is ‘to offer meaningful engagement rather than mere entertainment and to enrich and expand the ideas, emotions, sensations and memories that works of art can offer audiences’. Devenport celebrates AGSA’s ‘nuanced approach to the presentation of its collection’, noting that it juxtaposes ‘works that transcend the constraints of time, the divisions of nationhood and the hierarchies of artforms’ in an ‘asynchronous, transcultural and polymedia approach’. At its best, AGSA 500 reflects that spirit, even as one might have wished for the kind of narrative framing that Osborne’s volume so brilliantly offers. Together, however, these two books stand as essential monuments and guides to the ongoing ways in which Australia’s fifth-largest city continues to participate in, and offer an outsized contribution to, national and international flows of art and culture. g

Patrick Flanery is the Chair of Creative Writing at the University of Adelaide and the author of four novels.

Twilight time

Samuel D. Hunter’s portrait of heartland America

Andrew Fuhrmann

It is twilight in a small town in southern Idaho. There is a housing crisis, widespread poverty, rampant drug addiction, and high levels of crime. Lost jobs, lost souls. Shuttered shops and hollow hearts. The sun is going down on the American dream, and in the modest office of a Main Street mortgage broker there’s a man who thinks his problems will be solved by taking on more debt and still more debt.

Is this a boiler-plate scenario for yet another jeremiad on the declining quality of life in heartland America? Well, yes, sort of, but the story Samuel D. Hunter has built on these commonplace beginnings is nonetheless moving. In fact, A Case for the Existence of God, which won the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award for best play in 2022, is nothing less than a beautiful tearjerker: an emotionally rich drama about friendship, fatherhood, and the persistence of hope in dark times.

Ryan is trying to finance the purchase of some land that his great-grandparents once owned. Keith is his mortgage broker, and most of the play’s ten or so scenes happen in his sparsely furnished office. The two men are a study in contrasts. One, the broker, played by Kevin Hofbauer in this fine Red Stitch production, is black and moderately wealthy, the college-educated son of a local lawyer. The other, played by Darcy Kent, is poor and white, a man whose parents were drug addicts and neglected him badly. Nonetheless, a real friendship develops, one of those intense alliances in which each man seems to recognise himself – as Jacques Derrida writes – in the eyes of the other.

Initially, the two men bond over the pleasures and travails of fatherhood. They are both devoted dads, and yet they both struggle with a fear of losing their child, or rather of having their child taken from them. Ryan, it emerges, is navigating a custody battle, while Keith, who is single, is fostering a child he hopes to adopt. Hunter’s nuanced intertwining of their respective joys and anxieties, their faltering confessions of doubt, is deeply moving. This is an unusually sensitive and faceted portrayal of fatherhood.

We are told, however, that there is a deeper affinity between the two, something that goes beyond the common experience of parenthood. There is, it seems, a spiritual connection. Early in the play, Ryan observes in a moment of unusual eloquence that the two men share a ‘specific kind of sadness’. The insight surprises and intrigues Keith, who can’t quite reconcile this version of Ryan with the version he remembers from high school. This is very much the Kernsatz – the central figure – in Hunter’s meditation on the malaise in middle America, which is repeated several times throughout the play.

What is this sadness? In fact, it is not specific at all, but vague and difficult to articulate. It may, of course, stem from Ryan and Keith’s fear of being separated from their daughters, but Hunter hints at a deeper, more existential grief. Perhaps it is the sorrow of an impossible desire, a longing to redeem a past that is irredeemable? It is, in any case, something to do with loss and inheritance.

For Ryan, this sadness is most clearly expressed in his futile efforts to buy back the land once owned by his great-grandparents. He grapples with mental health challenges and, at times, seems possessed by spectres of the past, as if he were succumbing to the same psychosis that led his great-grandfather to kill himself. Kent is excellent in this complex role, baffled between self-doubt and loyalty to his new friend, between black depression and guileless optimism.

Hofbauer’s performance is equally commendable, particularly because of his ability to show the comic and the tragic in Keith’s situation. Ryan is a strange choice of confidant, and there are many misunderstandings and moments of awkwardness. The dialogue is always breaking up on difficult words and the difficult experiences to which they refer.

Despite its twilight mood, the play has plenty of gritty detail. The symbolism of the town’s name – Twin Falls – is rather heavy. Ryan and Keith, of course, are the twins – at one point Keith is even referred to as the uncle of Ryan’s child – and they both fall hard. On the other hand, Twin Falls is also a real town: the yoghurt plant where Ryan works is one of the largest in the world. The frequent references to the geography of southern Idaho adds a layer of authenticity to the story. These elements are not merely decorative but create living connections between the two characters and the environment they inhabit.

Director Gary Abrahams handles the play’s pacing efficiently, avoiding lingering silences and making a few subtle cuts to maintain momentum. There is no moping or brooding; this is not an ostentatiously gloomy production. It moves briskly, with purpose, but never feels rushed. Emotion is built through a clear rendering of the text and its exquisitely broken rhythms, to which Abrahams and his actors are superbly attuned. The result – for the audience, at least – is an extraordinary carnival of sniffles and tears.

Set designer Jeremy Pryles has set the small office adrift in a pool of black water surrounded by walls lined with shiny black plastic. At the end of each scene, props that are no longer needed are tossed into the pool where they either sink or float off into a corner: an effective but unobtrusive device. It reinforces the anxieties that plague Keith and Ryan – that sense of impending doom, the feeling that things are out of control and the world might disappear – without exaggerating them.

But what about God? If there was ever a title that drew attention to itself, then this is it. The spiritual pretensions of the play are, I think, just that: pretensions. Those moments that appear calculated to evoke the work of grace in the world – in the sense of a transformative power that helps individuals endure suffering – are the least successful. Indeed, it’s almost as if such moments – for example, Keith and Ryan’s inebriated debate on the origins of early harmonic music – are placeholders for deeper insights that Hunter hesitated to fully explore.

Hunter, it seems, wants to convince us that it is not twilight in America but rather dawn. Whatever Keith and Ryan are suffering now – this too shall pass. Whether or not you find this perspective convincing – or comforting – it doesn’t detract from appreciating the other achievements of this affecting production. g

Andrew Fuhrmann reviews books and theatre and is dance critic for The Age.

Hectic energy

Goran Stolevski’s new film

Anwen Crawford

Anyone who has lived in a sharehouse might recognise the hectic energy that defines Goran Stolevski’s third feature, Housekeeping for Beginners (Maslow). Cinematographer Naum Doksevski’s handheld camera hovers so close to the actors that it seems almost to get beneath their skin; the film opens on a lounge room singalong, loud and unabashed, and barely lets up from there.

This sharehouse is located in present-day Skopje, North Macedonia. It functions, we quickly discern, as both a long-term home for presiding lesbian couple Dita (Anamaria Marinca) and Sauda (Alina Șerban), along with Sauda’s daughters, and as an unofficial shelter for young queer people estranged from their families. Being gay is not illegal in North Macedonia, but same-sex marriage and adoption by gay couples are; homophobia is prevalent. The house, then, which Dita has inherited from her politician father, is a space intermittently threatened by outside forces, but it is also, for its inhabitants, a (mostly) joyous living place. Its staid, old-fashioned furnishings are comically at odds with the rag-tag band of outsiders assembled there; Dita’s old friend Toni (Vladimir Tintor) lives in the house, along with his new lover, Ali (Samson Selim).

But sorrow is looming in this makeshift haven. Sauda is diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, and the prognosis is poor. Her urgent wish is for Dita to legally adopt her two biological daughters, teenage Vanesa (Mia Mustafa) and five-year-old Mia (Dzada Selim). In order to do this, Dita will have to marry Toni. No one seems especially thrilled at the prospect, least of all the two girls, who are reluctant to view either Dita or Toni as a parent.

Stolevski is adept at sketching the complex dynamics at work in this group. Sauda and her daughters are Roma, while Dita and Toni are both white. Romani people are a stigmatised minority in Europe, and Sauda, with conviction born of bitter experience, is desperate for Vanesa and Mia to evade the racism that has cruelled her own prospects. She wants her daughters to

take Toni’s surname, just as she wants Dita and Toni to pose as a straight couple for the purposes of a legal adoption. Șerban, who is herself Roma, is magnetic in her role as Sauda, a woman who holds little social status yet wields considerable domestic power, and who rules the household with a fierce will and a volatile temper. Sauda, who seems incapable of being anything but herself, nevertheless demands disguise from her loved ones – in order to protect them, she thinks. But is such a form of protection worth the strain? Can the subterfuge last?

The film’s ensemble cast is uniformly strong, including tiny Dzada Selim as kindergartener Mia, raucous yet wise beyond her years. Mia forges an unaffectedly tender sibling relationship with eighteen-year-old Ali, who is also Roma: the two of them paint each other’s nails, nap together, and play together. Each recognises in the other someone in need of parenting. Stolevski is skilled at directing young actors and non-actors, as he showed in his previous feature, Of An Age (2022), which was set in suburban Melbourne.

The unselfconscious quality of such performers suits his own verité filmmaking style. Mia Mustafa as Vanesa, Sauda’s older daughter, convincingly portrays an adolescent mix of principled rebellion and petulant self-absorption: at one point, Vanesa calls the police on Dita for ‘kidnapping’ her, wilfully endangering the whole household, including her little sister.

Beyond the house, the main location of the film is Šutka, or Shutka, a majority-Romani area of Skopje where Vanesa’s family still live. While viewers will soon work out that Shutka is shunned by non-Roma Macedonians, I did find it helpful to read afterwards that it is also the only Romani-governed municipality in Europe. A bit like the sharehouse, Shutka is a necessary refuge from the wider world’s discrimination. Stolevski, who was born in North Macedonia before migrating to Australia as a child, makes no concessions to foreign viewers when it comes to the minutiae of local politics, which have to be gleaned from the banter and bickering of the householders. A frequent topic of conversation is marrying for the sake of a work visa: North Macedonia remains outside the European Union, and the local unemployment rate is high. Gay people are not the only residents in Skopje who marry for convenience’s sake.

A lot happens in this film, and for all the bureaucratic traps that Dita, in particular, must navigate, many of the plot turns are muddles of the characters’ own making. The pace of events, combined with the relentlessly close-up camerawork, starts to tell; the tone at times veers close to melodrama. Dita is a grounding force. The reluctant mother could, all too easily, have become a villain character, but Marinca plays her with an intelligent and quietly affecting blend of grief and reserve. Left unspoken is the security of a social establishment that Dita may have previously forsaken, in order to pursue her cross-racial, cross-class romance with Sauda, and to forge this unlikely and tentatively happy family. The house itself may be hers, but the household belongs to everyone who shares in it. g

Anwen Crawford’s most recent book, No Document (Giramondo, 2021), was shortlisted for the 2022 Stella Prize.

This review is supported by the Sidney Myer Fund

Samson Selim as Ali, Vladimir Tintor as Toni, Anamaria Marinca as Dita and Sara Klimoska as Elenai (photograph by Viktor Irvin Ivanov/Maslow)

Neil Armfield Backstage

Neil Armfield is an Australian director of theatre, film, and opera. He has directed for all of Australia’s state theatre companies, Opera Australia, The Welsh National Opera, The Bregenz Festival in Austria, Zurich Opera, Canadian Opera, Houston Grand Opera, English National Opera, The Lyric Opera in Chicago, and the Royal Opera House, London. He was co-founder of Sydney’s Belvoir Theatre and was its Artistic Director for seventeen years. He was joint Artistic Director of the Adelaide Festival with Rachel Healy from 2017 to 2023.

What was the first performance that made a deep impression on you?

In 1970, when I was fourteen, the RSC toured Australia with two ravishing productions: John Barton’s Twelfth Night and Trevor Nunn’s The Winter’s Tale, with a company that included Donald Sinden as Malvolio, and Judi Dench as Viola/Hermione/Perdita. (It was one of the last performances in Sydney’s magnificent old Theatre Royal, destroyed the following year to make way for the MLC building.)

When did you realise that you wanted to be an artist yourself?

In 1972, aged seventeen, I directed my first production: Toad of Toad Hall at Homebush Boys’ High. The great Indigenous director Brian Syron was judging all school theatre productions in participating high schools across New South Wales. He met me in a classroom after the show and asked me if I knew what I wanted to do with my life. I said I thought I’d become a teacher. He said, ‘Because if you want to be a director, you know what you’re doing.’ That was all I needed.

What’s the most brilliant individual performance you have ever seen?

Two: Geoffrey Rush in Diary of a Madman at Belvoir in 1989; and Robyn Nevin in Jim Sharman’s 1979 A Cheery Soul.

Name three performers (present-day or historical) you would like to work with?

Gloria Dawn, Judi Dench, Judy Davis (again).

And your favourite play and opera?

Hamlet and Peter Grimes. Or Jenůfa.

Who is your favourite writer – and your favourite composer?

Patrick White and J.S. Bach.

Do you have a favourite song?

‘The Daniel Jazz’ – the setting of the poem by Vachel Lindsay which I learned at school and I sing when I’m on long drives. It lasts ten to fifteen minutes depending on my level of daring,

and a few renditions make the time fly.

How do you regard the audience?

The completion of the circle of my work, and the people who, I hope, share my taste and sense of humour.

What’s your favourite theatrical venue in Australia?

Belvoir St Theatre.

What do you look for in arts critics?

Context – a sense of what has come before.

Do you read your own reviews?

I don’t seek them out. But I love it when they really get it.

Money aside, what makes being an artist difficult –or wonderful – in Australia?

We are far enough away from the rest of the world to create our own traditions. This can be limiting of course, but it can also be liberating.

What’s the single biggest thing governments could do for artists?

Defund private schools and teach music to all infants and primary and secondary students, as in Finland, which, since abolishing private education and mandating universal music education, has consistently boasted the highest measure of happiness in the world, as well as producing the greatest number of orchestral conductors per capita.

What advice would you give an aspiring artist?

Seize every opportunity. And make it count.

What’s the best advice you have ever received?

Make the finest work possible, but remember that it’s only a play.

What’s your next project or performance?

Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller in Sydney’s Theatre Royal in May, Watershed: The Death of Dr Duncan by Joseph Twist in the Sydney Opera House in June, and Brett Dean’s Hamlet in the Sydney Opera House in July. g

Hold your nerve

by Natasha Sholl

Ihave not told anyone that there is a small child growing in my bedside table drawer. The Ziplock bag containing E’s hair, a mass of tangled brown. A handful of baby teeth. I had brought E into Emergency with shooting pains down his legs. His gait wobbly. One leg doing a strange kick with each step. A fever. They thought it could be meningitis and performed an MRI. At 2 am they came back to tell me the MRI showed normal activity in the brain. It was clear. It was good news. At 2.03 am they came back and said, ‘Could we have a word outside?’ We moved into the hallway, under the fluorescent lights, surrounded by other people’s tragedies.

‘When they were looking at the MRI of the brain, they found something else. Lower down. In his chest. Here,’ the Emergency doctor said, pointing to a blur. ‘A mass.’

‘Are you saying that’s ...?’ Maybe if she doesn’t say the word and I don’t say the word it won’t be true.

Before either of us can say anything, there is a loud thump. More, a thud. More, a crack. And a scream. E is screaming. He has fallen from the hospital bed. A thump. A thud. A crack, face down onto the hospital’s linoleum floor. Everyone rushes to lift him as he continues to scream. His body is a stiff plank, for reasons that aren’t yet clear but will become clear soon. They put him in a neck brace. They roll him gently. I hover, trying to be useful but feel like I am just getting in the way. They manoeuvre him back onto the bed, and a nurse with a tight blonde ponytail clicks the bed railing. Click.

‘You have to leave the side of the bed up,’ the nurse says directly to me. ‘And you should never leave the room,’ she adds, as if I had wilfully left him alone with the side of the bed down, as if I wasn’t just told to leave the room by a doctor to tell me my son has a mass in his chest.

And this is the way I will always remember finding out my son has cancer. The thump. The thud. The crack. The scream.

Being scolded like a small child.

We are taken to ICU and the hallways are decorated with massive decals. Hungry Caterpillar themed. We are in Room 1.

On Monday he ate through one apple. Across the hall is a piece of chocolate cake, a strawberry ice cream cone, a pickle, a slice of Swiss cheese, a slice of salami, a lollipop, a piece of cherry pie, a sausage, a cupcake, and a slice of watermelon. Things will be ok, I think. Nothing bad could happen next to a giant pickle; it would be perverse.

And in the days that follow, when his oxygen levels drop and he is intubated, the ventilator hissing and tubes down his throat, and when they place him in a coma and when they tell me the results of the biopsy, a pinkish scar forming on his collarbone where a lump once was, and when they tell me that his body, in response to the cancer, has released antibodies which have destroyed his motor nerves and that he can no longer move, can no longer breathe on his own, can no longer swallow, I will look across the hallway and I will think: That fucking pickle

I am handed a fraying white towel and toothbrush and lock the door of the small bathroom attached to E’s ICU room. My knees buckle. My breath staggers. I strip and run the shower as hot as it will go. I position myself on all fours. I heave and retch and gasp. I rock back and forth, the water hitting my lower back, the steam filling the room. I rock and sway, pulsing through each contraction of pain, breathing, breathing. I birth my fear, sticky with vernix, pink limbed and flailing. I get up. I turn off the taps. I wait for the steam to clear.

The doctor asks if we had noticed any symptoms prior to admission. Night sweats? No. But maybe? Weight loss? No. Well, yes. I mean no. He was twelve and having a massive growth spurt. He seemed stretched. Like a string bean, we had said. His shoulders had broadened. But yes, he had lost

his baby fat. A cough? No. I mean not really. When he laughed he had developed a chesty kind of rumble. A deep kind of rolling laugh that became a cough. We thought it was his voice breaking. Literally cracking through somehow, every time he laughed. Unexplained fatigue? No. I mean fatigue, yes, but not unexplained. He was a social kid, always at sleepovers. Parties on Saturday nights. He never stopped. And so he was sometimes tired. ‘Such a teenager,’ we had started saying, when he was too tired to go for a bike ride with his brothers and dad. We rolled our eyes and smiled when we had said this. Pain? No. Once or twice. He said he had aches in his legs. Growing pains, we had assumed. And it becomes clear now, in hindsight, the way we thought his body was turning from boy to man, but in reality there was a threat lurking. Not a milestone looming. And the context strips away (the late nights, the hair under his pits, the bathroom door always locked when he showered, the smell of Lynx, the shadow of hair above his lip, the thick muscle of his biceps), and instead there are just warning signs we missed. We had thought we were bearing witness to his transition from boyhood to manhood. In fact, we had been standing idly by as his childhood was being stripped from him.

When E begins to wake from his medically induced coma, the speech therapist brings out a board of coloured letters for him to communicate. We point to each line of letters. Two blinks for no. One long blink for yes. Is it on this line? ABCDE. One long blink. We point to each letter. A? Two blinks. B? Two blinks. C? Two blinks. D? Two blinks. E? Two blinks. We pause. His eyes widen, his frustration palpable. Start again? we say. One long blink. And so it goes.

W-h-a-t-i-s h-a-p-p-e-n-i-n-g-t-o-m-e? he asks. Letter by letter. Blink by blink.

We begin again. As we always do. From the beginning. But no one really knows where the beginning is. Or the end. As we unravel ourselves. The days swim past. As we wait for the cancer treatment to work. For the tumours to shrink. For motor nerves to regrow. Like roots. Like vines.

A nurse called Cathy grows beans in her garden. Her husband cooks them in broth with sticky rice. She brings them in for her lunch and brings in extras for E. He can’t swallow properly yet, but he chews the softened beans in his mouth, soaks up the broth.

Georgia, one of the junior doctors, comes each day to see E. She takes out her tiny hammer. She taps his knee. Nothing. She taps his elbow. Tap tap. She holds his limp wrist. Tap tap. She was one of the first doctors to see us, when the Emergency Department sent for the neuro team. I find her presence a comfort because she met E when he could talk. When he could walk. When he could move each limb. She is the link from the afterlife to the before. As if she might somehow feel more responsibility to return him to that state. Then one day she stops coming. All the junior doctors who have been looking after our son disappear and are replaced with completely new doctors. Rotated out, rotated in. All the ICU doctors. The oncologists. The neurologists. Georgia no longer comes. No tap tap. There is no one here that has seen E walk. Or talk. Or move his arms.

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That night E’s eyes roll back, and his eyelids flicker and he is unresponsive. The nurse presses the emergency buzzer and the doctors rush in. A new junior doctor grabs his hand. ‘Can you hear me?’ he says, ‘Squeeze my hand if you can hear me.’

‘He can’t,’ I say, my voice cutting through the beeping and the buzzing and whirring of activity in E’s room. ‘Even if he can hear you, he can’t squeeze your hand.’

He looks at me and then looks at E.

‘He’s paralysed,’ I say. ‘He can’t move his hands.’

The nurse lifts his eyelids with her gloved thumb and shines a light in his eyes. She repeats his name over and over. The junior doctor stands there.

‘Squeeze my hand if you can hear me,’ he says again.

Fucking Georgia.

When I try to remember the name of the condition that has destroyed his motor nerves my mind draws a blank. I have to google. Acute motor axonal neuropathy. I think of an axolotl. A childhood fact floats up from somewhere deep down. Axolotls can regrow their arms and legs and tails. I hold E’s cold hand. I squeeze it. Grow. I send a message from my hand to his.

When his thick, shoulder-length hair falls out in chunks from the chemo, our barber comes in to shave his head, tendrils of brown curls gathering on the floor. I ask the nurse if she has something we can keep the hair in once it is shaved off. She hands me a large Ziplock specimen carrier bag with a huge yellow triangle on it. WARNING: TOXIC WASTE. The next time I come home for a shower and for some fresh clothes I place it in my bedside table drawer, with loose cables and batteries and notebooks and paper clips and bookmarks and a small collection of my children’s baby teeth that have gathered in the corner. I put the bag of hair by the teeth. A golem of sorts. I wonder if I need some kind of incantation to bring the hair-tooth child to life. I open the drawer, release the trapped woody smell. Grow. I send a message to the drawer.

We have been playing a giant game of tag. You’re it. One parent home with the siblings. One parent in hospital. One parent on nights. One parent on day shift. We do not make eye contact with each other for days on end. We text updates rather than speak. We text the times we’re coming and going (who is collecting which children from where, who will pick up dinner, who will be home for bedtime, who will stay at the hospital). We sleep in separate rooms so the person on night shift doesn’t wake the person on day shift. Until one day we accidentally break the unwritten rule and he says look at me and we accidentally on purpose look at each other right there deep into each other’s eyes and we see reflected back to us the horror and the nightmare and the fear and the terror and I fall onto my knees and gasp for air and we rock together right there on the cold, cold tiles.

And I say:

gggggggggggggggggggggggg

My Instagram algorithm knows I am sitting in a hospital with a critically sick child, scrolling aimlessly while he sleeps.

My social media feed is just sick kids. Sick kids who are dying. Sick kids who make a miraculous recovery. The comments section is filled with heart emojis and the praying hands emoji and God is good and God is great and Thank you Jesus and prayers and blessings and Wow! I can’t believe crypto mining is real I just invested $2,000 and got back $20,000 in just three hours thank you so much DM @babes_tabby. A chiropractor from Canada keeps popping up in my feed. Small children are crying and she’s moving their hips and at first I think what a quack but then five reels in I wonder if she could help us. She holds a small baby up in the air, its feet in her palms, she holds it upright like a circus performer and it wobbles and bobs and then she brings it down and she seems pleased. As if she has performed some miracle. Christ-like. Healing hands. Etc. And I think, again, what a quack. But my fingers keep flicking, flicking, scrolling down. I would kneel at her altar, I would take her wafer on my tongue, I would let her touch the feet of my children and my children’s children.

The drive to hospital is a straight line down the Princes Highway. At Clayton Road I wait to turn right. The Australian Lighting store on the corner of Clayton Road means I am minutes away from E. Usually two light sequences. The window of the lighting store is painted over. SALE 20% OFF. EVERYTHING MUST GO. FREE TUB OF HONEY WITH EVERY FAN SOLD. The sign is old and peeling. I wonder at the desperately hot families buying a fan for relief in summer and then opening a sticky, melting tub of honey. I imagine the golden tendrils. I imagine a tub with a yellow lid. On the drive in when I bring the boys to visit their brother we stop at the lights and we all say FREE TUB OF HONEY WITH EVERY FAN SOLD. Then we brainstorm why this would be until the lights change. Money laundering. Honey laundering. A fan-honey pyramid scheme. They have a hive out the back. We promise that one day we will find out. We will call. We will walk in and ask. We will buy a fan. And if they do not offer us a tub of honey, we will demand one.

The barista in the hospital cafe looks at E and whispers to me: Was he born like that?

In the hospital foyer I bump into another mother whose son is in ICU. She asks after our son. Asks when his tracheotomy will be removed, the tube through the front of his neck, creating an airway through his windpipe, a tube allowing him to breathe. I ask when they might replace her son’s skull. There is a giant sign above her son’s bed, on printed A4 paper: NO BONE FLAP. They have removed part of the bone from his skull temporarily until the swelling in his brain goes down. Soon, she says. Soon, I say. As if this is a normal conversation to be having.

On the way from hospital to collect our other children, I swing past the supermarket to grab some cereal, some milk, some bread. In aisle four a small child is screaming, holding a small toy. The mother patiently asks him to put the toy back as she compares washing detergents. He screams and cries as he runs back down the aisle with the toy. He stops at the place where he should put it back, pauses, turns on his heels and runs back to his mother, screaming and crying, toy still in hand. As he passes me, I move to put my foot out. To trip him. I bring

my foot in only at the last second. He makes it to his mother unscathed, still screaming about the toy he wants. I stare at him for a minute. With his skull in one piece, with his windpipe clear. I can still feel the ghost-movement of my unkicked leg.

I begin to pull at my hair. Always my left hand. Always the same patch at the top left corner. I run each strand between my thumb and second finger, I do a swift flick halfway down and loop my hair between my middle and fourth finger. When I get to the bottom I start again at my scalp. The pull of it soothes me. The shhhhwoop sound it makes. As a small child I used to love wrapping presents. Used to run the scissors to the ribbon on an angle, and the ribbon would flick in loops. The same shhhhwoop sound. I think of scissors on ribbon. I pull. Thumb. Second finger. Quick loop. Middle. Fourth finger. And again. Sometimes I feel a pop and the hair comes loose in my hand. I finger it lightly, feel the bump of the follicle between my fingers. I let the hair fall to the ground. I run my hand through my hair again, huge chunks between my fingers from root to scalp. Three times. And then I start again and take another singular strand. My hair begins to thin. More strands come out. The hair that regrows is short and spiky. I run my finger along the patches of regrowth. As the new hair grows, it changes texture. It is thick and bristly. I continue to run my fingers along it, mapping each strand. Finding the unique ridges and divots. I run my fingers from scalp to root three times. Shwoop, shwoop, shwoop.

I overhear some nurses talking about how Erica has been given the palliative care shift. She waits outside the room down the hallway, covered in beach-themed decals. The sandcastle. The bucket. The spade. It is three months before I make the connection that this is where children come to die. She’s been given all the bad shifts lately, they say. Poor thing. Yesterday her shift was in E’s room.

On day 190, after our son asks again when he can have his tracheotomy removed, the tube right through his windpipe, a doctor says: It’s called being a patient because you need to be patient.

‘I think he’s been pretty fucking patient,’ I say, and a heat rises up in me. My hands turn to claws and the hair on the back of my neck rises. I move to speak again but instead I hiss. I roar. I pounce and my nail-claws dig into her face and I rip and rip and rip and tear until her skin becomes tendons, becomes blood.

‘I think he’s been very patient! Ha,’ is what I actually say. I smile. I enunciate the word: Ha.

Ha. I add again in case she thought I was being aggressive. When the doctors leave the room my fingers are bloodied, bits of scalp beneath my nails, still attached to strands of hair. I run my fingers through my hair again. Thumb. Second finger. Quick loop. Middle. Fourth finger. And again. And again. And again.

Free Tub of Honey with Every Fan Sold. I run my fingers down two strands of hair. Three times. Shwoop. Shwoop. Shwoop. I do not tell the doctors there is a small child growing in my bedside table drawer.

When E has been in hospital for 345 days, a doctor tells me about another patient she has who is unable to move any part of his body. She tells me he is able to work in data entry. He uses his eyes, she says. Data entry. She says again. E wants to be a doctor, I don’t say. And I don’t ask about his guitar playing fingers. I don’t ask about his legs that used to sprint up and down the basketball court. I don’t ask about his first kiss or whether he will stay out past his curfew and whether I will get him in trouble. I don’t ask which countries he might travel to and whether his friends from childhood will be his friends in adulthood and I don’t ask whether, when he turns fifteen, he will get his first job, maybe at McDonald’s or maybe at a supermarket or maybe coaching basketball or maybe babysitting. And the unasked questions hover in the air above the words DATA ENTRY and I shake my head to get rid of the thoughts like an Etch-a-Sketch, shake shake, and now all I can think is: Free. Tub. Of. Honey. With. Every. Fan. Sold. g

Natasha Sholl is a writer and lapsed lawyer based in Melbourne. Her work has appeared in The Guardian, The Age, The Sydney Morning Herald, Good Weekend, SBS Voices, Kill Your Darlings, and Mamamia. In 2020, she completed the KYD Mentors Program. She was shortlisted for a Varuna Fellowship in 2020 and attended a supported residency in 2022. Her first book, Found, Wanting, was published by Ultimo Press in 2022. ❖

‘Hold Your Nerve’ was runner-up in the 2024 Calibre Essay Prize. Calibre is worth a total of $10,000, of which Natasha Sholl receives $3,000. The Calibre Essay Prize was established in 2007 and is now one of the world’s leading prizes for a new non-fiction essay. The judges’ report is available on our website.

ABR gratefully acknowledges the long-standing support of Patrons Peter McLennan and Mary-Ruth Sindrey.

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Upside Downs

A cogent guide to the age of streaming

Clare Monagle

NNetflicks:

Conceptual television in the streaming era

by Tony Hughes-d’Aeth

UWA

Publishing

$22.99 pb, 120 pp

etflicks is the first book in UWAP’s ‘Vignettes’ series. The series’ brief is to introduce readers to contemporary scholarly thinking about pressing issues of modern life in the format of short, lucid books. Judging from the first iteration, ‘Vignettes’ promises to offer complex and coherent readings of the world we live in now, informed by deep knowledge but wearing its learning lightly. Netflicks is written in accessible prose that invites the reader into the scholarly analysis of television, should they be new to it, with clear and uncomplicated language. When technical concepts are introduced, the author makes sure to provide a definition and to justify his deployment of what might seem to be jargon.

As an academic myself, I might not be considered the best person to judge whether Netflicks succeeds in offering an accessible rendition of scholarly ideas. I am happy to report, however, that I conducted an unscientific investigation and read out paragraphs of the book to non-academic friends and family. I asked them merely whether they could follow the ideas and understand the prose in the short sections they heard (selected randomly). My listeners affirmed that my hunch was correct: that Tony Hughes-d’Aeth’s prose was cogent and engaging to the general reader.

a set length. And a series itself can be any number of episodes. We are liberated, then, to binge or nibble as we see fit.

Hughes-d’Aeth suggests that this shift of conveyance does not produce old wine in new bottles, whereby the product remains the same and is merely rolled out on a new platform. He considers the affordances of digital delivery aesthetically and conceptually, arguing that the television of the streaming age amplifies certain types of narratives or anti-narratives, and also ruminates upon the existential dread that attaches to global capitalism and climate crisis. He focuses on streaming dramas that he describes as ‘conceptual television’. Conceptual television, in his telling, refers to dramas that are premised upon an elaborate concept. Under this rubric, he considers programs that are structured around notions of dystopia, amnesia, time loops, and disassociation. To be sure, Hughes-d’Aeth is not arguing that any one of these notions are definitively new; he points out the longer screen history of each. Instead, he argues that these devices have recurred with intensifying frequency in the short history of streaming. For dystopia, think of the barren world of The Walking Dead or the repressive United States of The Handmaid’s Tale. Under amnesia, he explores the dislocation produced by fractured memories in I May Destroy You and Homecoming. To explore the ludic possibilities of time-loop narratives, the book considers Russian Doll and The Rehearsal. Finally, for disassociation, Hughes-d’Aeth looks at shows such as Severance and Counterpart, in which characters actively decide to sever their consciousness of real life.

Having stressed, however, the readability and availability of the analyses of Netflicks, I also want to acknowledge its intellectual incisiveness. The book asks us to consider whether the streamed series constitutes a new televisual genre, not only in the sense of being delivered differently from the network television series of old, but in the larger sense of being governed by a new set of formal rules and refracting the temporalities of the digital age. In the past, we watched television programs at the time set by the network. If we wanted to engage with the show as it was unfurled to the viewer, and as part of the viewing collective, we needed to surrender to the schedule of the programmers, as well as to the advertisements that were spliced into the episode. Since the advent of streaming, however, often the entire series of a program is deposited on the streaming site at once. Episodes need not be

Finally, Hughes-d’Aeth lingers on the Netflix hit Stranger Things, in which a group of teenagers stumble upon the ‘The Upside Down’, a nefarious other world populated with monstrous creatures and villainous scientists. Stranger Things is part teenage drama and part horror. The program combines a profound sense of the uncanny with the quotidian turmoil of youthful love and enmity, set in the familiar 1980s suburban landscape of E.T. and The Goonies. As Hughes-d’Aeth explains, Stranger Things is the text par excellence of this new televisual landscape. In Stranger Things, life is banal and normal and small, but haunted and stalked by the Upside Down, a place that is proximate but elusive at the same time. As viewers, we are always uneasy for our teenage protagonists, even when they are blithe. We know that their world is governed by malign, unseen, irruptive forces. Netflicks, with its deft prose and helpful taxonomies, offers the reader an explanation for their own unease as a television viewer in the streaming age. The programs explored in the book mirror our own experience of living in a world governed by opaque algorithms and impossibly complex supply chains. Tony Hughes-d’Aeth has offered a generous, perspicacious guide to viewing in the shadow of our myriad Upside Downs. g

Clare Monagle is a Professor in the Department of History and Archaeology at Macquarie University.

Tony Hughes-d’Aeth (UWA Publishing)

An enlarged mentality

Thinking imaginatively with Hannah Arendt

Julienne van Loon

WWe Are Free to Change the World: Hannah Arendt’s lessons in love and disobedience by Lyndsey Stonebridge

Jonathan Cape $59.99 hb, 290 pp

e Are Free to Change the World, an intellectual biography of Hannah Arendt, is Lesley Stonebridge’s seventh book, and is informed by the author’s expertise in twentieth-century literature, history, law, and political theory. Stonebridge is a Professor of Humanities and Human Rights at the University of Birmingham, and a regular contributor to the New Statesman. A successful scholar, she is also used to communicating to audiences beyond the academy.

Rowan Williams employs the label ‘intellectual biography’ on the book’s back cover, but I admit that I am not entirely comfortable with the categorisation. Intellectual biography is most often employed as a subtitle, self-selected by author or publisher, as in, for example, Giovanni Fresu’s recent Antonio Gramsci: An intellectual biography (Palgrave, 2023), which the publisher describes as ‘a comprehensive overview of the process of development of Gramsci’s philosophical-political thought’. Broadly speaking, an intellectual biography emphasises the way the subject’s lived experience has informed and shaped their thinking over time. Stonebridge’s book on Arendt does operate as intellectual biography in this way, but it is also doing something more.

The ‘something more’ is signalled clearly with a preface titled ‘A Note on Imagination’. Stonebridge writes:

Hannah Arendt was committed to what Immanuel Kant called ‘an enlarged mentality’ which she believed to be the grounding for good judgement. This type of critical imagination is not creative, and nor is it necessarily empathetic. ‘You think your own thoughts but in the place of somebody else,’ she instructed her students. In this book I have tried to think my own thoughts in the place of Hannah Arendt. All direct quotations from her writing are in italics and referenced. I have imagined plausible scenarios in her life only where evidence permits. Despite these precautions, there may be moments in what follows when Hannah Arendt also thinks her thoughts in my place.

This preface is more than a note to suggest that Arendt’s words and phrases might enter the author’s lexicon. For me, Stonebridge’s note presents as an invitation, because I don’t yet understand how her use of ‘enlarged mentality’ as method is going to shape the form and meaning of the writing to come. I turn the page because I want to understand. To the extent, therefore, that Stonebridge’s book is intellectual biography, it could also be read

as an enlarged or imaginative or intersubjective or experimental biography. It is worth noting that the book’s subtitle does not reference the genre of biography at all.

Hannah Arendt is an iconic twentieth-century thinker. Born in 1906 in Hannover, Germany, Stonebridge describes her as the ‘loved and cherished’ daughter of ‘educated, progressive, secular Jews’. Arendt began her intellectual education in Kant’s Königsberg: ‘Arendt grasped the radical simplicity of Kant’s central insight early and never lost sight of it,’ writes Stonebridge. ‘She would go on to challenge his cool rationality, but she never gave up on the importance of his central moral promise: because we have reason and moral agency we can, indeed we must, act to make the world a good place, whatever the cost.’

We Are Free to Change the World offers readers who are not experts on Arendt an immersive and thorough introduction to the woman and her thinking. The book opens with a convincing argument as to why, in our post-truth era, Arendt’s contribution to political philosophy is more important than ever. Stonebridge’s interest in making Arendt’s thinking relevant to our times is prioritised throughout.

In ten chapters, Stonebridge surveys Arendt’s best-known contributions to philosophy, including The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), The Human Condition (1959), On Revolution (1963), Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963), Crises of the Republic (1972), and The Life of the Mind (1978), mostly in chronological order. Stonebridge highlights the key events that shaped Arendt’s thinking, such as her relationship with her philosophy professor – one Martin Heidegger – at the age of eighteen. ‘Thinking was existence itself. Thinking was passion – and passionate,’ she writes on this phase of Arendt’s life. Then follows Arendt’s period of flight as a refugee: ‘In 1938, following the Nuremberg Laws, Arendt was formally stripped of her citizenship … Statelessness was a new weapon in the modern armory of twentieth-century human cruelty.’ Later, Stonebridge chronicles Arendt’s migration to New York via Paris and Lisbon, and then her journey back to Europe to cover the trial of Eichmann, a commission for The New Yorker.

Stonebridge defends a number of charges made against Arendt and her thinking during her lifetime, some of which had more to do with her gender than her intellect. She stakes a claim for her enduring contribution to modern thought:

She was one of the first, in fact one of the few European intellectuals to grasp that the organised barbarity of modern totalitarianism was not an aberration belonging only to Nazi Germany or Soviet Bolshevism but was a piece with a longer imperial and colonial history of dog kicking and dog burying.

But this is no hagiography. Stonebridge’s own thinking comes at the reader lively and lucid on every page. She questions Arendt’s motivations where necessary and calls her to account, particularly in the chapter titled ‘How to Think – And How Not to Think – about Race’, in which Arendt’s judgement on matters to do with race in her newly adopted country, especially her writing on the actions of teenager Elizabeth Eckford (one of the Little Rock Nine who dared to take up her lawful place at the previously segregated Central High), fall achingly short of her own standards.

Emblematic of the success of We Are Free to Change the World are those sections of prose in which we witness Stonebridge thinking with Arendt. This occurs not just within the bounds of Arendt’s biographical life story, but beyond it, as demonstrated in her discussion of Arendt’s influence on a new generation of revolutionaries during the struggles in Lebanon in 2019, as well as her portrait of Hannah Arendt Haus, a library dedicated to ‘stories of flight, of new beginnings and of resistance’ that has sprung up in Arendt’s birthplace of Hannover.

Mary McCarthy, a long-time friend of Arendt and an early reader of the manuscript that became The Origins of Totalitarianism, wrote in a letter to Arendt of her enthusiasm for the work, describing it as ‘engrossing and fascinating in the way a novel is, i.e. that it says something on nearly every page that is novel, that one could not have anticipated from what went before but that one then recognises as inevitable and foreshadowed by the underlying plot of ideas’. I think the same could be said of Stonebridge’s accomplishment with We Are Free to Change the World. I cried at the end. ‘Real freedom,’ concludes Stonebridge, channelling Arendt, ‘requires the presence of others so that we can test our sense of reality against their views and lives, make

Damascene moments

A book about split psychological selves

Paul Giles

KDark-Land:

Memoir of a secret childhood

by Kevin Hart

Paul Dry Books

US$19.95 pb, 250 pp

evin Hart’s Dark-Land is the memoir of a distinguished poet and scholar who was born in England in 1954, moved with his family to Queensland when he was eleven, and migrated again in 2002 to the United States, where he is currently Professor of Christian Studies at the University of Virginia. Dark-Land is well-written and amusing, with memorable vignettes ranging from his time in a London primary school to his bonding as an Australian teenager with his cat Sooty. On a wider spectrum, though, Dark-Land addresses more weighty concerns around time, memory, and intellectual or religious illumination. He recalls as a child listening to a BBC performance of the allegorical journey invoked in John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, and he describes himself now as ‘still clambering up the hill I had known since childhood in London’. The title of his memoir signals this putative passage from darkness into light.

The dark land described in the first half of the book encompasses ‘the entire grimy part of London in which we lived’, the outer London suburb of Barking where he attended primary

judgements, probe and learn.’ It is this courageous agonism – both respectful and open-ended, or, to use the keywords from Stonebridge’s subtitle, both loving and disobedient – that is central to Arendt’s vision for an affirmative and inclusive politics.

I am a slow reader, largely because my reading time tends to be confined to those precious minutes outside paid and domestic labour obligations, early morning and late evening, when the world quietens, and thinking and reading can happen in solitude and with minimal interruption. It takes me a few weeks to finish a book like We Are Free to Change the World. The test of a book’s quality or ‘fit’ for me as a reader can often be measured by whether it occupies me during the day and, relatedly, whether I am looking forward to returning to its world in the evening. In the case of Stonebridge’s imaginative/intellectual biography, I felt both occupied and called back every single day. Was it Hannah Arendt’s thinking I sought to be reunited with, or was it Lesley Stonebridge’s imaginative play with Arendt’s thinking? The answer is both/and. g

Julienne van Loon is an Associate Professor in the School of Culture and Communication at the University of Melbourne. ❖

school in the early 1960s, when the area was still recovering from World War II. As someone whose childhood was spent just a few miles to the east, in the Essex suburb of Brentwood, I found the anecdotes in these sections to be evocative and perceptive: rivalries between West Ham and Tottenham football supporters, the Green Line buses that took apparently mysterious routes into rural areas, and so on. But I also thought Hart’s reminiscences to be at times oddly condescending in tone, especially in their attempts to imitate cockney patois: ‘Blimey, look at ’im, ’e’s all ’oly now.’ As Gavin Jones suggested in his critical work Speech Acts, literary representations of local dialects as ‘inferior’ to standard English have tended to reinforce conventional notions of what is proper and what isn’t. But such linguistic stereotyping accords with Hart’s general representation of East London as dark and degraded, an unredeemed world.

Things improve, however, when Hart’s parents move as ‘ten quid migrants’ to the ‘syrupy heat’ of Queensland. Here, free at last from bullying London schoolmasters, the author experiences, like Saul on the road to Damascus, a wondrous clearing of his mental ‘fog’ during a mathematics class at Oxley State High School. This ‘academic transformation’ enables him henceforth to see the world ‘in sharp relief’. Abandoning his meagre earlier ambition to be a chef in London, he believes he has discovered a new mathematics theorem, which he boldly names ‘Hart’s theorem,’ though he is brushed off by a professor at the University of Queensland who gently informs him that for academic algebraists this equation is old hat. Nevertheless, having acquired a copy of Wallace Stevens’s poems for twenty-five cents and the gift of a Bible from his parents, the author extends his intellectual compass to the worlds of poetry and religion, developing a particular interest in the Southern Baptists and eventually becoming confirmed in San Francisco as a member of the Anglican Church. This also puts him ‘well on my way to becoming Catholic’, which he aptly de-

scribes as ‘another migration’. He admits to still feeling sick at the memory of his London schools, saying that ‘I have written these words in order to be rid of that feeling, if possible’, so this memoir is presented partly as a form of catharsis.

Such an emphasis on self-therapy, however, ensures a subjectivist focus that militates against any attempt at objective representation. This is primarily a book about split psychological selves and the intellectual process of conversion, the metamorphosis of one state into another, though these transformations are interwoven with twists of time that, for the narrator, bind together past, present, and future. Emigration is the most visible and obvious aspect of this trajectory, with the book being divided almost equally into two halves, the first focusing on England, the second on Australia. But its overarching theoretical perspective derives more from America, predicated as it is upon a retrospective vantage point from which Hart describes his lifelong quest to evade the ‘looming grayness that threatened to engulf me forever’. It is this estrangement that gives him the power to choose Catholicism ‘of my own free will’, with this intellectual freedom being presented as different in kind from the world of his father, for whom ‘all churches were basically the same’.

Yet such an idealisation of transcendental freedom carries its own risks of self-delusion and blindness, something that Hart recognises when he refers here to ‘the self-righteousness of a convert’. The way he volitionally exchanges religions as well as countries is categorically different from how most people internalise religion and country as ingrained habits or inheritances, and Hart is smart enough to appreciate how these cultural variations manifest themselves. Dark-Land is an intensely self-conscious work, whose self-deprecating irony is trained on authorial perspectives as much as on the corrupt material worlds he inhabits. He acknowledges how his own childhood was ‘composed of silences, of things withheld’, and several long-standing family secrets are revealed towards the end of the book. More broadly, though, Hart’s own narrative is haunted by the limits of language and representation, their tendency to always come

up against walls of silence. In this sense, the memoir is entirely compatible with the negative theology that Hart has explored in his academic writings on religion and in his poetry, where in ‘Facing the Pacific at Night’ he evokes ‘the darkness between two stars / Or between two thoughts’.

Despite its dense (but mainly latent) theoretical infrastructure, this is an eminently readable autobiography. Its most obviously accessible features turn on recollections of class-ridden East London in the early 1960s, which is contrasted with the more easy-going manners of Brisbane, where his parents, with the constitutional anxiety of migrants, are fearful of complaining about the school bus driver who regularly repairs to the pub during his daily runs, in case they should ‘upset the apple cart’.

What differentiates Dark-Land is its focus on the narrator’s ‘solitude’ and ‘inner life’, from which he surfaces ‘only every so often, like a train coming out of a long tunnel before disappearing into another’. If he had been a child in Oxley today, such unsociable behaviour would no doubt have seen him diagnosed as autistic and enrolled in the NDIS. Yet the idiosyncrasy of these inversions and displacements, both geographical and intellectual, make for a thoroughly engaging memoir as well as a significant, if somewhat oblique, contribution to Hart’s impressive academic oeuvre. Returning to ‘the two dark schools’ of his London childhood, he says he has got to know the East End better as an adult than when he was a boy, and this exemplifies Hart’s characteristic idiom of rhetorical doubling, the philosophical recursion to a prior condition in order to explicate it more lucidly. Hart records how as a faculty member at the University of Virginia he walks every day past the room where Edgar Allan Poe was an undergraduate in 1826, and something of Poe’s interest in ‘encrypted’ secrets and the ways in which memory will characteristically ‘adjust itself to fit our sense of the past’ resonate through Hart’s equally elusive and engagingly self-reflexive narrative. g

Paul Giles is Professor of English in the Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences at Australian Catholic University.

The gift of ABR

Recipients can access new issues, archival material going back to 1978, and discounted prize entries. Gift subscriptions cost $80 for digital only and $100 for print plus digital.

Kevin Hart (Sashanna Hart via Paul Dry Books)

A curious cinéaste

The enigma of Werner Herzog

Corey Cribb

WEvery Man for Himself and God Against All

by Werner Herzog

translated by Michael Hofmann

Bodley Head

$49.99 hb, 355 pp

erner Herzog is perhaps the only cinéaste from the epoch sometimes referred to as the ‘golden age of art cinema’ whose reputation as a pop cultural figure eclipses that of his films. One of the key members of the New German Cinema movement, and the director of celebrated feature films such as Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972) and The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser (1974), Herzog has come to be known among internet users for his drawling Bavarian accent and his existential musings about solitude, despair, and the brutality of nature. However, as Herzog’s new memoir, Every Man for Himself and God Against All (translated by Michael Hofmann) reveals, behind this ironically morose façade lies a sentimental and deeply thoughtful man who is endlessly fascinated by the human soul and the superhuman drive to transcend what we thought possible.

This fixation with the extraordinary, the unthinkable, can be found everywhere in Herzog’s films. In 1973, he shot The Great Ecstasy of Woodcarver Steiner, a documentary which follows Walter Steiner’s attempt to break the world record for ski jumping. As recounted in Every Man for Himself and God Against All, what captivates Herzog about Steiner is not simply that Steiner succeeded in bettering the record by almost ten metres, but that, in the process of doing so, ‘several times he almost flew to his death because the ramp was not built for a flyer like him’. Captured in slow motion by Herzog’s telephoto lens, Steiner glides gracefully like an animal whose natural habitat is the sky, disregarding his own mortality in pursuit of humankind’s most ancient dream. Above all, it is this blind ambition, this temptation to fly too close to the sun, notwithstanding the consequences, which preoccupies Herzog as a filmmaker.

Like Steiner, Herzog’s own life is characterised by improbable acts of profound stupidity, or profound imagination –depending on how you look it at it. In 1972, Herzog walked for twenty-two days from Munich to Paris in the conviction that only his footslog could spare the life of his dying friend Lotte Eisner. Eight years later, Herzog consumed his own shoe on camera after unsuccessfully betting that Errol Morris would never complete his documentary film Gates of Heaven (1983). Most infamously, as documented in Les Blank’s The Burden of Dreams (1982), when directing Fitzcarraldo (1982) Herzog demanded that his cast actually drag a 320-ton steamship over a 100-metre hill when recreating the exploits of the Peruvian rubber baron Carlos Fermín Fitzcarrald. These feats, revisited in Every Man for

Himself and God Against All, are as much part of the mythology of Werner Herzog as his films, a mythology to which Herzog’s book adds both style and substance.

As the conventions of the genre dictate, Herzog’s memoir covers his family, his life, his work, the places he’s been and the people he’s known. However, there is a sense that, in spite of his many artistic and worldly accomplishments, Herzog does not view himself as the protagonist of his own story. While the book is vaguely chronological in structure, it is filled with many fabulous digressions and amusing anecdotes that, more often than not, speak to the existence of people who might, in cinematic terms, be described as extras. This is not to say that Herzog is lacking in pride or ego, but that his natural inclination is to assume the role of the story’s chronicler, not its subject.

The first eighteen of the book’s thirty-six chapters are largely dedicated to Herzog’s genealogy, youth, and adolescence, whose misadventures help explain the formation of his eccentric character. Herzog was born into poverty, in a small village named Sachrang, nestled among the German Alps. His well-educated parents were early supporters of the Nazi Party. By the age of fourteen, Herzog had witnessed the bombing of the German town of Rosenheim by Allied forces, engaged in petty crime, and converted to Catholicism. Driven by what Herzog describes, upon seeing Rosenheim in flames, as a curiosity to know the world, before directing his first feature film, Signs of Life (1968), at twenty-six years of age, he spent several years living in the United States, where he studied filmmaking and occasionally entered rodeo competitions for money.

The book’s second half is predominantly focused on Herzog’s filmmaking career and the many precarious, and sometimes dangerous, situations into which his unrelenting vision for cinema led him. During the production of Fitzcarraldo, for example, Herzog and his crew camped in a remote department of Bolivia, far from the nearest settlement, which resulted in several fatalities and serious injuries. When shooting Scream of Stone (1991), Herzog and two crew members were stranded on a mountain during a snowstorm for more than forty-eight hours. His cameraman, ‘a tough and experienced climber’, was fortunate to survive the incident. Even more sensational than this brush with death are Herzog’s tales of ‘the maniacal wild man Klaus Kinski’: the star of five of Herzog’s most acclaimed films, with whom he maintained a famously tense, yet productive friendship, underscored by the occasional exchange of death threats.

Every Man for Himself and God Against All effortlessly glides between personal meditations, character portraits, production histories, and descriptions of the historical incidents which inspired them. Herzog’s memoir is a book that will supply even the most seasoned of Herzog enthusiasts with new insights and oddities and should compel the uninitiated to investigate his oeuvre. As the book attests, Herzog’s persona is more complex than the self-parodic statements that have authorised his status as a meme effect convey. Herzog is a man who has lived, reflected, and created, and his book artfully documents these achievements, without hyperbole or conceit. g

Corey Cribb holds a PhD in Screen and Cultural Studies from the University of Melbourne. ❖

Difficult questions

An iterative collaboration

Astrid Edwards

TThe Relationship Is the Project: A guide to working with communities edited by Jade Lillie and Kate Larsen with Cara Kirkwood and Jax Brown

NewSouth

$34.99 pb, 287 pp

he Relationship Is the Project is a guidebook to working with communities. The work explicitly asks the reader to consider not only how art is created but from where that art comes – and it so often comes from community.

Originally conceived by Jade Lillie, this work came together through a multi-year collaboration with Kate Larsen, Cara Kirkwood, and Jax Brown. The overall process is a demonstration of the ethos espoused in the work – relationships matter. Each of the four editors brought a different perspective and experience, making this collection an iterative collaboration coming closer to representing what communities within the arts and cultural sector have expressed a desire for.

This book is an unusual work, demanding to be reviewed for its content as well as for its stated purpose. To consider only one would be to misunderstand the work, which articulates not only that relationships matter, but also that context and positionality and perspective always matter.

Let us start with the purpose: to provide a foundation as to how organisations work with communities, and to consider how effective that work may be for the storytelling and publishing industries. If you read literary reviews, you are likely to have thoughts on not only books and literature but also the broader ecosystem from which books and literature spring – in other words, our literary, cultural, and arts spaces. The Relationship Is the Project, a collective work with more than forty contributors, is designed to prompt questions about those spaces and suggest best practice for how those spaces work.

Viewed through the lens of literature and literary institutions, its purpose is to make visible the difficult questions around cultural gatekeeping and suggest ways of navigating them. These questions are asked at the individual level and the institutional level. For example, a legitimate question is whether I am an appropriate reviewer for this work. The act of my writing this tells you that I think I am, but the book asks us all to interrogate that choice, as well as the processes behind that choice which led Australian Book Review to commission this review.

Writing and ideas are not created in a vacuum. The Relationship prompts questions to consider when we consume art or when we are working with people who create art. Was the writing driven by lived experience? Were the pathways to publication fraught, and how can they be improved? Who were the gatekeepers and who was left out? Who edited the work and was

that done with appropriate cultural competency or from relevant lived experience? Is the creator being supported after publication and, if so, for how long?

Moving from the individual to the organisation viewpoint, The Relationship outlines a series of strong prompts for organisations to interrogate their own actions and evaluate the status quo they uphold. These prompts include discussion on public and philanthropic funding, and not only how this affects the bottom line of an organisation, but also how it may constrain the extent to which an organisation can fulfil its stated mission. The work suggests ways for leadership to consider how the supporters and stakeholders of an organisation – ticket purchasers, donors, or those who engage on social media – perceive funding and how this alters the extent to which they may continue to support the organisation.

This book is an unusual work, demanding to be reviewed for its content as well as for its stated purpose

In 2024, the chapters on duty of care are particularly relevant. Of course, management and boards have a duty of care to the staff in and the artists who work with those organisations, but too often what this duty of care means is not articulated. The Relationship raises pointed queries about the material state of employment and pay, but it also considers the safety of those individuals experience when in, or profiled by, the organisation. Think of the duty of care writers’ festivals have to authors exposed on stage or the duty of care publications have to reviewers who are attacked for critiquing a work harshly.

This is the second iteration of The Relationship. Original contributions have been updated and an additional twelve essays included. This new edition includes, for the first time, essays on class (Nina Ross, Lizzy Sampson, and Jessie Scott) and online communities (Seb Chan), as well as adaptation to the climate crisis through relationality (Jen Rae and Claire G. Coleman), art and climate justice (Karrina Nolan and Alex Kelly), and creative practice and disaster recovery (Scotia Monkivitch).

There are too many contributors to list, but they include Esther Anatolitis, Claire G. Coleman, and Eleanor Jackson. This poses a challenge for a traditional review, as the editors have taken care to showcase the writing style and personal flair of each contributor. Not all are literary, and some are quite casual. This is appropriate, given the approach of the work.

I have crafted a review from the perspective of how The Relationship Is the Project is relevant to literary and storytelling spaces, spaces with which I am familiar. But the reach of this work is broader, and it is relevant to anyone – and any organisation –working in community-engaged practice.

Both editions of this work were supported by Creative Australia, and the first edition received funding from Creative Victoria. It is a reminder that community-driven work takes time and resources but contributes more than the sum of its parts. It is an ongoing project for us all. g

Astrid Edwards hosts The Garret: Writers on Writing.

‘Let them not say’ Poems for a changed future

Felicity Plunkett

JThe Asking: New and Selected Poems

by Jane Hirshfield

Bloodaxe Books

£14.99 pb, 341 pp

ane Hirshfield writes a poem on the first day of each year. ‘Counting, New Year’s Morning, What Powers Yet Remain to Me’ is one of the new poems in The Asking, along with poems selected from nine collections published since 1982. It begins with a question the world asks (‘as it asks daily’): ‘And what can you make, can you do, to change my deep-broken, fractured?’

Outside the window is a mountain: ‘For years, I woke each day first to the mountain, / then to the question.’ Counting things the speaker can make or change – ‘black-eyed peas and collards’, a pudding made from late-season persimmons, a light bulb – she observes the way the world brings sorrow after sorrow. Some are immovable as a mountain; others change, as questions do. ‘The feet of the new sufferings followed the feet of the old, / and still they surprised.’ To these she brings postcards and stamps, daily trying to respond.

Among the poem’s long lines is a couplet built of spare, clipped sentences. Stone, Hirshfield writes ‘did not become apple. War did not become peace.’ How then, asks this poem, like many by Hirshfield, do we continue to face the world’s pain?

Along with the arrival of new wars, new stones, the speaker finds what endures: ‘Yet joy still stays joy. Sequins stay sequins.’ Then there are words, which ‘still bespangle, bewilder’. The poem’s ending produces the collection’s title, The Asking. Although the speaker wakes answerless, still the day urges: ‘don’t despair of this falling world, not yet’ and, after a pause: ‘didn’t it give you the asking’.

This question, without a question mark, rests between asking and answering. The poem’s depiction of everyday actions and reflection – steaming greens, writing a letter to oppose violence – expresses one of its through-lines. Hirshfield’s line is a fulcrum, weighing opposites to open questions. The unsaid and unknown sit on the page’s white space, which she never fills with certainty or sermon. Poised between loss and gain, restraint and directness, Hirshfield’s poems never rush towards closure or pretend to know. Instead, they are oriented towards witnessing and porousness, and dedicated to expressing the questions humanity faces. ‘Let Them Not Say’ was published in Ledger in March 2020, just as Covid restrictions began. Written in 2014, with the climate emergency in mind, it was first shared by the American Academy of Poets in 2017 as part of its Poem-a-Day program on the day of Trump’s inauguration. It became their most widely circulated poem. It begins: ‘Let them not say: we did not see it. / We saw.’

The poem imagines a future generation that might not need

to question what ours has or has not done. Hirshfield describes it as a poem ‘hoping to make itself someday incomprehensible’. Its gaps suggest intervals of time, between now and moment of future reckoning. Its responses are blunt: ‘We saw.’ ‘We heard.’ ‘We did not-enough.’ Its lines urge action and flower into an image of ‘A kerosene beauty’, next to which the poem’s ‘we’ warms up, reads, praises while the world burns. Yet the poem emphasises the importance of our actions. As invitation and invocation, it holds open hope as despair burgeons; hope dependent on action as well as reflection.

Hirshfield’s poems never rush towards closure or pretend to know

In a housing project in New York built for World War II veterans, Hirshfield was raised by non-religious Jewish parents, whom she once shocked by announcing that she liked the idea of becoming a Catholic nun. While the ideas of the divine she encountered in childhood didn’t resonate with her, the idea of contemplation did. Decades later she became a Zen monk.

Hirshfield is meme-famous for a comment about poetry and Zen: ‘Zen pretty much comes down to three things – everything changes; everything is connected; pay attention.’ Now, she finds

the last two words sufficient. Hers is a poetics of paying attention, a currency endangered by the pace of our lives and the amount of information we access. Attention remains the ‘natural prayer of the soul’, as Walter Benjamin writes, alluding to French philosopher Nicolas Malebranche.

Often, through paying attention to the small, the poems expand. ‘The Bowl’, published in Ledger, spoke to the pandemic conditions people suddenly faced. It begins simply: ‘If meat is put into the bowl, meat is eaten.’ This springs from Buddhist monks’ practice, known in Japanese as takuhatsu, of accepting

Jane Hirshfield (Curt Richter via Bloodaxe Books)

whatever is placed in a bowl they hold out. Although the monks are vegetarian, if meat is given as alms, ‘meat is eaten’. Our own experience is given:‘[w]ars, loves, trucks, betrayals, kindness’. In an interview with Krista Tippett of the podcast On Being, Hirshfield comments that the poem considers the question: ‘How can I meet this in a way which both lets me open my eyes the next day and also, perhaps, if I’m lucky … be of service to a changed future?’

Part of her restraint involves distillation and sparseness, yet metaphor, opening the window to the imagined, is central. Hirshfield’s lines often place the figurative alongside the closely observed. In her TED-Ed animation ‘The Art of the Metaphor’, she argues that poetry’s power lies less in literal truth than in metaphor’s power to ghost ‘past the logical mind’. Metaphors are ‘like handles on the door of what we can know and what we can imagine’.

So, a poem’s titular opening line contains the literal and figurative: ‘Body, mind of the ransacked thrift shop.’ ‘Vinegar and Oil’ begins with a contrasting metaphor: ‘Wrong solitude vinegars the soul, / right solitude oils it.’ The last lines of ‘A Blessing for

What time is it?

Two very different collections about identity

Sam Ryan

IBlue Cocktail

$28 pb, 75 pp

dentity is a hard thing to define. What makes us who we are? We have social identities, shaped by our affinities and proximities to social groups, cultural identities informed by values, languages, rituals, traditions, and a whole multitude of different phenomena that combine to make us who we are.

In Roslyn Orlando’s literary début, Ekhō, identity is linked to voice and agency; I am who I am because of what I say and my ability to say it. In Audrey Molloy’s second collection of poetry, The Blue Cocktail, identity is linked to place; I am who I am because of the places I inhabit. Both books have more complex theses and focuses than can be summed up in a few snappy opening paragraphs. For example, Orlando condemns technology as a simple echo of knowledge, and Molloy raises questions of belonging. Identity links these two works and provides a key to understanding their intricacies.

The Blue Cocktail traces portions of Molloy’s life, beginning in Ireland, then Australia. It grants readers an intimate insight into her life and the cultures and landscapes that have helped form her identity. Molloy’s first collection, The Important Things (2021), won the Anne Elder Award and was shortlisted for

a Wedding’ ask: ‘Let its the fierceness and tenderness hold you / Let its vastness be undisguised in all your days.’ The beautiful love poem ‘For What Binds Us’ counts ‘strong forces, weak forces’ among what binds ‘two people [who] have loved each other’ and finds in scars a fabric ‘nothing can tear or mend’. The metaphor shifts from flesh to fabric, human to non-human as the poem celebrates what is called ‘proud flesh’ on horses.

Humour radiates through the poems. In ‘Advice to Myself’, the speaker finds a computer file with this name, empty: ‘thus I meet myself again / hopeful and useless.’ In ‘Like Others’, when ‘Fire!’ is shouted: ‘some ran toward it, / some away – // I neck-deep among them’. Finding this likeness and connection is part of the poetry’s wisdom. In another poem, Hirshfield writes ‘I go out, / I count myself part’. It is this decades-long practice of generosity, attentiveness, and humility, and the poems that are arise from it, that The Asking celebrates. g

Felicity Plunkett is a poet and critic. Her latest work, A Kinder Sea, is published by UQP.

the Seamus Heaney First Collection Poetry Prize – after reading The Blue Cocktail, I can see why.

Ekhō is a very different work. This book-length, three-part narrative poem takes the Grecian myth of Echo and Narcissus and intertwines and transforms it with that other famously voiceless and ventriloquised figure, Amazon Alexa (via the Echo Smart Speaker). I can’t imagine a better way to retell and reinterpret the myth. Ekhō began life as a video and sound installation, accompanied by Orlando’s poetry, which must have served as an early draft of these poems. While the multidisciplinary nature of Orlando’s work has led to some neglect of the poetic quality, and might be seen as a weakness, it is at the same time one of the book’s most interesting aspects.

The first section of Ekhō begins with a retelling of the original myth, then goes into the inner thoughts of the now-voiceless nymph who, in this retelling, which seems to be an amalgamation of different versions of the myth, has become a mountain. The work leaps between poems with fairly standard stanzas and is then invaded by the formats of other disciplines. ‘iii’ consists of ‘Corrections’, which read as a publisher’s errata, inserting the nymph’s clarifications, such as ‘I had a crush on Hera, / there I said it.’ The final poem in this first section begins ‘Redacted minutes from Council 20.36 million’. Membership of the council is made up of rivers and mountains from Greek myth: Helicon, Parnassus, Ptoion, and Parnitha. These minutes are not necessarily poetic – ‘So what / if I have?’ reads one comment from Helicon in that forced enjambment – but the form gives a nod to Orlando’s suspicion of technology. Meeting minutes are a technology of thought, an arrangement of statements recorded for posterity, which are themselves nothing but relatively voiceless echoes. The books’ second section introduces us to Alexa, with a prologue consisting of Amazon’s stock performance from 1997 to 2022. I am not sure why this has been included – it doesn’t read as poetry and seems only to let readers know that this is Amazon Alexa™, while skirting copyright concerns. The poems variously

Ekhō by Roslyn Orlando Upswell

$24.99 pb, 75 pp

The

by Audrey Molloy Pitt Street Poetry

include Alexa’s inner thoughts and the questions she fields, ‘Alexa, / what / time / is / it?’. As with Echo, Alexa is a tragic figure with little agency of her own, cursed to repeat information gleaned from the internet at the whim of her inquisitive owner. Orlando has cleverly replaced Narcisus with the internet.

The third and final section of Ekhō is a play in one act in which Echo and Alexa are at a party attended by ‘abstract silhouettes of various cultural and political figures’. Our protagonists are cursed to recount and re-enact the occasion. Their repetitions turn into a tragic love story, resisting the moral of the original myth while also endorsing it: it ends in ‘and / and / yes / and’. They can only ask questions and repeat the other’s. Their lack of voice leaves their identity neutered.

Where Orlando takes myth and technology and combines them to create a work that is more complex in its construction than in voice, Molloy’s voice is so strong that by the time you finish the collection you may feel as though you know the poet intimately.

Place and culture permeate Molloy’s collection. Pubs –those very Irish institutions – feature heavily in the early parts of the book, and the early parts of the poet’s life. In ‘The Entrance Fee’, we are treated to a bit of Irish wisdom: ‘all you really needed / was the loose change for a Guinness Extra stout’, since a larger glass reveals your progress and may lead the barman to ‘swipe your nearly empty glass’. The ‘amber bottle’ of the Guinness Extra hides your progress and allows you to sit for an afternoon, perhaps until a kindly stranger buys you another. However, she ‘found, with halter-neck and fitted jeans, / I didn’t even need the entrance fee’. Her identity as female excuses her from the need to use this trick.

In ‘Whiteout’, mist is ‘dry ice at a concert, where the artists are ravens / and a black cockatoo’. In ‘Learning to Swim’, ‘Cornflower air fills art-deco arches. / Beyond – the harbour, dotted with goose- / wing boats I no longer sail.’ Surrounded by booze at a pub in Ireland, Molloy learned how to get a free drink, and in Australia surrounded by birds and water (two tropes in Australian poetry), she becomes at ease in her new home – she no longer needs to sail. Has her identity transformed? I am not sure, but it is subject to compounding experiences in her former and current homes.

I am taken with the ease of Molloy’s voice. Not once did I have to reread a line or stop to try and find the poems’ melodies. Throughout the collection, complexity stalks her command of rhythm. ‘A Legacy to Seven Men I’ve Loved’ consists of seven tight couplets, each dedicated to a historical fling. She writes, ‘to the third, a cloud confected from the contents / of a beachball, which is to say, nothing at all’. Even the seemingly desperate reach for alliteration in ‘confected’ is skilful; like wisps of sugar blowing up to a glass dome turned into fairy floss, the poet’s third love was sweet and fleeting.

These poets’ artistic practice differs greatly. Both succeed in their own way: Ekhō questions the nature of voice while also retelling myth; The Blue Cocktail skilfully links identity to place.

It would be remiss of me not to add a note on footnotes. More and more I see stanzas degraded with a superscripted number at the end of a line in the style of academia. More and more I see pages of notes at the end of collections of poetry that seem either unnecessary or simply lazy. Notes are fine in a collection if they provide context or clarification. If a line can’t contain the information the poet seeks to convey, the poet should rewrite it or rethink it. Orlando frequently inserts a footnote to explain a reference. For example, in ‘xiii’, Orlando footnotes ‘Sometimes I dream / of electric sheep’ and then, in the notes section, explains that this references the Phillip K. Dick novel that asks ‘the enduring questions of machines’ capacity for empathy and morality. This assumes that Dick’s metaphor is simply not clear enough and must be explained. There are many other examples of this in the book, which would be just as good were there no notes at all.

Molloy eschews footnotes and opts for a notes section which explains some of the Irish words which readers may not know. Although I would rather not have them at all, they do enhance the work.

Are poets so worried about accusations of plagiarism that they feel the need to footnote each literary reference as if writing a scholarly essay? Or are they admirably attempting to open up the form to a wider readership? g

Sam Ryan is a PhD candidate at the University of Tasmania.

on our website. www.australianbookreview.com.au

The future of forests

A critique of Australian forestry

Dave Witty

SForest Wars:

The ugly truth about what’s happening in our tall forests

by David Lindenmayer

Allen & Unwin

$34.99 pb, 288 pp

hortly after Black Saturday, David Lindenmayer was giving a seminar on post-bushfire recovery when a member of the audience yelled out, ‘If it wasn’t for you greenies, none of this would have happened.’ Lindenmayer’s response was neither defence nor attack, but rather to rephrase the man’s words. ‘Your hypothesis,’ he said, ‘is that a fire in a forest that is logged and regenerated will be less severe than a fire in an intact forest.’ Many years of research followed this heckle. The result? A counter-intuitive finding that fire severity increases in logged forests.

This anecdote, recounted in Lindenmayer’s latest book, goes to the heart of his character: a philomath inspired to ask questions; a tireless ecologist who has explored and worked in the same forests for more than forty years. But there is a second Lindenmayer, a more recent creation: an accidental celebrity who has become increasingly outspoken as his detractors have escalated their attacks. It would, as he once said in an interview for the Wonderground journal, be morally irresponsible if he did not communicate what he has learned.

For those researching Lindenmayer online, it can be hard to sift through the rubble of brickbats and sensational headlines and find the scientific work that makes Lindenmayer one of the world’s most oft-cited scientists. For this reason, The Forest Wars is a necessary compendium, a summation of four decades’ worth of research against the backdrop of a rapidly changing industry. Indeed, the timing of this book could not be more opportune. Shortly after Lindenmayer finished the first draft, the Victorian government announced that the cessation of native logging was to be brought forward from 2030 to 2024.

Perhaps ‘The Future Forest’ would be a more appropriate title for this book. ‘Forest wars’ calls to mind the environmental blockades and guerrilla warfare so famously described in Anna Krien’s Into the Woods (2012) With the war superficially over (the forestry industry vanquished, and the environmentalists celebrating only the most pyrrhic of victories), it is this sense of postwar uncertainty and the clouded future of forest management that pervades Lindenmayer’s book.

The Great Forest, Lindenmayer’s previous book, was a pleasant surprise: a coffee-table book celebrating the forests of the Central Highlands. Previously, he had mainly published textbooks on topics such as natural asset farming or ecological monitoring. The style of his latest book is noticeably different. One by one, thirty-seven myths about forestry are laid out and refuted. The

tone is personal, the prose more stylised. As Lindenmayer acknowledges, he has been ‘trained as a scientist to write in a dense and formulaic way’. This is his attempt at a layperson’s book, one that is ‘a little less boring than it might otherwise have been’.

For the most part, Lindenmayer succeeds. A wealth of information is conveyed in fewer than 300 pages, the science elevated by anecdote and personal reflection. The only downside to this structure is repetition: the same facts and conclusions are used in the refutation of different myths.

At times, Lindenmayer dispenses with nuance, such as when he accuses VicForests of bastardry and environmental sabotage for deliberately logging areas already reserved for national parks (an accusation it strongly denies). But it would be wrong to label Lindenmayer the obstructionist that some critics accuse him of being. For many years, he worked alongside VicForests in pursuit of more sustainable logging practices. It is only recently that he has adopted a more hardline stance. As he says in the Wonderground interview: ‘Why would you keep pushing a loss-making industry that employs just a few hundred people whilst screwing over the water supply, boosting carbon emissions, and making places more fire prone?’

The day I finished The Forest Wars, I read an article in which the Dja Dja Wurrung Clans Aboriginal Corporation (DJAARA) accused Lindenmayer of ‘speaking down’ to traditional owners. The article relates to Myth Eleven in which Lindenmayer suggests forest gardening, a practice where forests are thinned to bring them closer in appearance to the pre-European landscape, is an attempt by VicForests to ‘rebadge its logging operations under the banner of Traditional Owner forest management’. The DJAARA’s call for The Forest Wars to be withdrawn from sale feels like an overreaction, but Lindenmayer’s assessment of forest gardening does highlight two criticisms that may reasonably be levelled at Lindenmayer.

First, forest gardening is as much about regenerating the landscape through soil improvement and selective plantings as it is about simply removing a few trees. By focusing so much energy on debunking one particular element, Lindenmayer is, to paraphrase the saying, letting a few trees cloud his vision of the wood. Second, his concern that thinned forests are more fire prone than intact ones. There is empirical research to back this finding and he recounts these studies in Myth Thirteen, but the research he cites is that of his colleagues. Where are the countervailing studies and his responses to their claims?

Writer Georgina Reid has described Lindenmayer as a forest of a man. A more fitting symbol might be the tree on the book’s front cover. A mountain ash. Strong. Resolute. Indefatigable. In a country that lops tall poppies, what could be more enticing than cutting down the tallest flowering tree in the world?

While this book will inevitably attract controversy, it is, at its heart, a paean to the forest. Lindenmayer, despite his critique, is a self-described ‘person of hope’. ‘I am confident,’ he writes at the start of Chapter Twelve, reflecting on how humpback whale populations recovered from near extinction, that ‘our native forests will also recover if we stop logging them and manage them well’. It is a compelling message, and it comes at a critical time. g

Dave Witty is the author of What the Trees See (2023). ❖

‘Good on you, mate!’

A fearless and charismatic environmentalist

Anna Krien

TJohn Büsst: Bohemian artist and saviour of reef and rainforest

by Iain McCalman

NewSouth

$36.99 pb, 263 pp

he ‘Bastard of Bingil Bay’ features on no banknote or coin, nor is he listed in any roll-call of ‘important Australians’, and yet, if it were not for John Büsst, it is likely that twenty-odd national parks and rainforest reserves on the far north-east coast of Queensland would not be so designated and might in fact have been obliterated. It is also probable that, without Büsst, today’s fight for the Great Barrier Reef would have already been lost, the vast ecosystem fragmented into a slew of cement quarries and cheap limestone pits. Considering the extent to which this vast coral labyrinth has shaped the identity of modern Australia, the relative absence of Büsst’s influence from the historical record is doubtless representative of the many such travesties historians seek to rectify.

It could be said that correcting such omissions is simply part of the job for historians – but for Iain McCalman, one of Australia’s most public-spirited and accomplished humanities scholars, the absence of John Büsst from the pages of Australian history made him uneasy. McCalman, author of The Reef: A passionate history (2013), a fascinating history of the Great Barrier Reef told in twelve tales, had featured Büsst as an important figure alongside Judith Wright and forest ecologist Len Webb in the exhaustive campaign to protect the Reef from being drilled for oil, dredged for fertiliser, and quarried for cement in the 1960s and early 1970s. McCalman named them ‘the poet, the painter and the forester’, and deftly portrayed their friendship as a kind of enlightenment in which the arts and sciences came together, sparking the social movement that led to the Great Barrier Reef marine park. But had he, McCalman worried, emphasised the painter’s role in what was effectively the initiation of environmental policy in this country? Had he conveyed the significance of this incisive, energetic man? After all, hadn’t Wright herself said that Büsst had masterminded the campaign? After one tactical victory, Wright wrote to him: ‘Good on you, mate!’ – adding that their success was ‘All because of YOU.’

Enter McCalman’s new book, John Büsst: Bohemian artist and saviour of reef and rainforest, a biography dedicated to this unlikely conservation hero. McCalman begins in Bendigo, where Büsst was born in 1909 to an upper-middle-class Irish Catholic family of considerable wealth and influence. Horatio Busst (whose son later added the umlaut, wrongly believing they had German heritage) had high hopes for his children: John and his older sister, Phyllis. A mining warden (a position, McCalman later

notes, that provided an important education for Büsst when he found himself in front of another mining warden arguing against a proposal to dredge a coral reef for fertiliser) turned managing director of what is now Bendigo Bank, Büsst Sr sent his children to private schools in Melbourne. Attending Wesley College, Büsst formed a lifelong friendship with future prime minister Harold Holt, later studying law at the University of Melbourne. At the age of twenty, Büsst, along with his sister, dropped out and fell in with Melbourne’s growing bohemian scene.

But for John Büsst, twenty-odd national parks and rainforest reserves might have been obliterated

Here, McCalman depicts the smoky salons and artistic colonies of the city’s interwar years, a time when Büsst also seems to have come to life. Dropping out to become painters was a bit of a fig leaf, an attempt to assuage horrified and embarrassed parents at the time. But the bohemian scene was far more than a change of occupation, as McCalman illustrates; the Büsst siblings and their peers strove to live in a way that was in itself a work of art, rejecting

society’s expectations and conventions. This decision, along with subsequent psychic distancing, created an irreparable rift between siblings and their father, though he continued to pay his children a living allowance.

It is much easier for the privileged to rebel. McCalman acknowledges this and suggests something quite vital about his subject. For it could also be said that Büsst, who blossomed as a craftsman, had embraced his privileged status with a keen sense of opportunity and, later, of duty to his country. His ability to stay connected to society, never rejecting it entirely, would prove invaluable. Later, while living in a failed artist colony on Bedarra Island in tropical Queensland, with its fringing coral reefs, Büsst fell in love with the natural world. The sea, he would later ob-

Len Webb and John Büsst (from the book under review, J. and D. Webb, Janelle Devery, Wildlife org)

serve, held at least twenty-three different types of blue. While he hoped to be a painter, ultimately he conceded that he had little talent. But as a conservationist he thrived. After taking lessons in ecology from Webb, Büsst became a person of considerable zeal and influence, of a kind that North Queensland may not have been prepared for. In correspondence with Webb at the start of

Büsst, who blossomed as a craftsman, had embraced his privileged status with a keen sense of opportunity and, later, of duty to his country

what would become a massive decade-long campaign to ‘Save the Reef’, Büsst wrote about living and breathing the Reef for nine weeks as he and colleagues mounted a court case. ‘You got me into this you bastard – and I’m enjoying every minute of it,’ he wrote. Büsst became known as the ‘Bingil Bay Bastard’ to his enemies: these included the military, keen to conduct Agent Orange experiments on remnant forests; local politicians who saw themselves as pioneers in Australia’s search for oil, and a sugar cane farmer who was keen to exploit ‘a dead reef’ for cheap fertiliser. Büsst wore the nickname with pride.

Perhaps the sobriquet also highlights the reasons why Büsst is not widely celebrated. It was one thing to promote the Great Barrier Reef and the remaining Gondwana canopies of forests as calling cards for Australia’s unique beauty and to serve as cre-

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dentials for being a good environmental citizen, but it was quite another to remember the ratbag conservationist who had fought for their protection. Enjoying one while loathing the other, this speaks to an ongoing incongruity when it comes to conservation in Australia where many are content to reap the subsequent accolades and profits but refuse to renege from general perceptions of conservationists as cranks, ratbags, and sentimental losers. McCalman rightly draws our attention to the missing piece that is Büsst. But his biography does much more than this. By bringing to light Büsst’s immense energy and political canniness – successfully influencing three serving prime ministers (including his dear friend Harry Holt), and a future one, Bob Hawke, who went on to persuade key unions to announce a blockade of oil rigs on the Reef – McCalman highlights the value of political and class unity when it comes to environmental campaigns. Büsst knew this, exploiting his connections in political circles and his raffish charm at the local Innisfail sugar cane festival, writing decisive letters of urgency to heads of agencies and respectable scientists to whom many others would have been too scared to say ‘boo’. At first Büsst’s confidence unnerved Webb, who came from a working-class background, then it delighted the forester when Büsst’s bold lobbying proved fruitful. Such was Büsst’s faith that his opinions mattered. What he did with his voice, even as it was literally taken away from him by throat cancer, was formidable.

After the publication of The Reef, residents of cyclone-ravaged Mission Beach just south of Cairns, where Büsst had lived and orchestrated numerous campaigns to survey and protect Queensland’s remnant tropical forests and the Great Barrier Reef, approached McCalman and told him of their plans to use his account of the friendship between Wright, Büsst, and Webb in order to rebuild their community. He accepted an invitation to Ninney Rise, the home Büsst had designed, complete with bamboo ceilings and still filled with his crafted furniture and paintings. Ostensibly the main headquarters of the Save the Reef campaign, the homestead was in a state of decay, though McCalman noted its enduring charm. The residents of Mission Beach wanted to see Büsst’s home heritage-listed and restored with the aim of its becoming a centre for artists and for reef and rainforest environmental research – a place of strength and commitment to art and ecological beauty.

McCalman became involved, his own commitments undoubtedly aligned. In the 1960s, Büsst not only fought the military’s plans to defoliate Queensland’s rainforests; he also persuaded them to become a powerful ally in the cause of conservation. Büsst knew his vision had to be shared to succeed – working those on the left and on the right, winning over conservatives such as Garfield Barwick and Labor lefties like George Georges.

Perhaps it is inevitable that few people know his name. Büsst was a conservationist who was never hemmed into a tribe or a group. ‘To drop quietly from a twig,’ a devastated Webb wrote of his beloved friend when he died a few years before the decision to protect the Reef. Now, with this fine book by Iain McCalman, we are able get to know the affable and effective ‘Bastard of Bingil Bay’. g

Anna Krien’s books include Into the Woods: The battle for Tasmania’s forests (Black Inc., 2010). ❖

Iain McCalman

Open Page

Iain McCalman was born in Nyasaland in 1947, and educated in Zimbabwe and Australia. He writes British, European, and Australian histories of popular science, politics, conservation, and literary cultures. His books include The Reef: A passionate history (2013) and Delia Akeley and the Monkey (2022). His new book is John Büsst: Bohemian artist and saviour of reef and rainforest (NewSouth, 2024). He is a former President of the Australian Academy of the Humanities and was Co-Founder and Co-Director of the Sydney [University] Environment Institute (2011-21). He was awarded Officer of the Order of Australia in 2007 for ‘services to history and the humanities’.

If you could go anywhere tomorrow, where would it be and why?

I would dash with my partner, Kate Fullagar, to Sorrento on the Amalfi Coast to repeat a sublime holiday of twenty years ago, drinking Campania wine and eating Caprese salad.

What’s your idea of hell?

Trapped in prison forever with a rich bombastic male narcissist intent on persuading me to buy his version of the Bible.

What do you consider the most specious virtue?

Assertiveness, which is sometimes an excuse for bullying.

What’s your favourite film?

La Nuit de Varennes by Ettore Scola. Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, attempting their failed flight from France, are followed by a coach containing radical Tom Paine, pornographer Restif de la Bretonne, and the queen’s hairdresser. Their coach, however, collides with that of the raddled old rake, Casanova. History has never been funnier or more poignant.

And your favourite book?

Anthony Powell’s twelve-volume A Dance to the Music of Time, which is loaded with dry wit, nostalgic melancholy, and crass characters whom we have all encountered.

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

Three people from Africa: Nelson Mandela, who liberated South Africa; Nadine Gordimer, whose novel Guest of Honour is reminiscent of my father’s time as a District Commissioner in Nyasaland; and Alexandra Fuller, author of the hilarious Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight.

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

I’d like to restore the word ‘momentarily’ with its original meaning of ‘for a very short time’ instead of its widely used new meaning of ‘very soon’; and I would love a return of Shakespeare’s insult ‘cream-faced loon’.

Do you have a favourite podcast?

I don’t listen to many podcasts but love the Travels Through Time series produced by British historian Peter Moore

Who is your favourite author?

Robert Darnton, the brilliant American historian whose research and writing has revealed how a vast literary

underworld of political pornography helped to create the French Revolution.

And your favourite literary hero or heroine? Flora Poste, in the wonderful comedy Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons. Her sceptical barbs are delivered without fear or favour.

Which quality do you most admire in a writer? Clarity, precision, and wit.

Which book influenced you most in your youth?

E.P. Thompson’s electrifying The Making of the English Working Class (1963) calls on historians to rescue the artisans and labouring poor from ‘the enormous condescension of posterity’. This gave me the inspiration to write a book asking that the same understanding be granted to a forgotten English Radical Underworld during the age of the French Revolution.

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

As a teenager, I thought Jane Austen wrote sentimental romances. I now realise that she possessed a rebarbative genius.

What, if anything, impedes your writing?

My sons say that only a bomb exploding in my office would stop me from scribbling.

What qualities do you look for in critics, and which ones do you enjoy reading?

I seek fairness and empathy, but also enjoy exposures of arrogant pontificators.

How do you find working with editors?

All my editors have helped to lift my ambitions and abilities, but the team of editor Ben Ball and copy-editor Meredith Rose most of all.

What do you think of writers’ festivals?

I prefer the smaller writers’ festivals that offer writer communities rather than encounters with literary celebrities.

Are artists valued in our society?

They seem to be valued mainly according to their monetary value, but artists are crucial to the foundations of our society.

What are you working on now?

I’m writing a memoir about growing up in, and revisiting, my original Malawian homeland. g

WFrom the Archive

In this issue, Frank Moorhouse biographer Matthew Lamb tells of his subject’s part in the early 1970s copyright wars, which led to the establishment of Copyright Agency, currently celebrating its fiftieth birthday. Moorhouse’s civic commitment to his profession extended into the 2000s, when he took the unusual step of accepting submissions from unpublished writers as editor of The Best Australian Stories. James Ley, in his review of The Best Australian Stories 2005, explains that ‘Moorhouse’s generous offer to read absolutely anything anyone cared to send him was withdrawn for his second turn as editor.’ This review is one of thousands in our digital archive going back to 1978 – all available to ABR subscribers.

hen Frank Moorhouse took over the editorship of The Best Australian Stories in 2004, he promptly announced that he would be accepting submissions from anyone, regardless of whether they had a publishing history or not. He received and read, by his own estimate, about 1,000 stories and gave six unknown writers the chance to be published for the first time. To his credit, he also took it upon himself not only to talk up the edition, but to make the case for the importance of the short story as a distinct literary form – one that is often under-appreciated. There was no doubting Moorhouse’s enthusiasm for his new role. Having read the work of around 600 writers, he could claim with some authority that short fiction was thriving, despite limited opportunities for publication. Indeed, the 2004 edition, he boasted, ‘set a new benchmark in the standard of the short story’. Now steady on, Frank.

Moorhouse’s generous offer to read absolutely anything anyone cared to send him was withdrawn for his second turn as editor. Time was becoming a factor, apparently. He now believes it is ‘beyond a single editor to read all the stories that are out there’ – which is less surprising than the fact that he ever thought it possible. Nevertheless, an admirably inclusive editorial policy remains in place. Moorhouse claims he tried only to select work of the highest quality, and did not set out to promote new talent ahead of established authors. In practice, however, this is what he has done. Apart from a few familiar names, such as Peter Goldsworthy, Janette Turner Hospital and Gillian Mears, the 2005 edition of  Best Stories, like its predecessor, is of particular interest because it contains the work of many writers who are relatively unknown. And some of them are very good indeed.

The selection process, Moorhouse argues, is ‘not simply subjective’, but is informed by his years of experience as a reader and writer. Still languishing in the realm of the subjective, I confess that I found a few of his choices to be underwhelming and a couple genuinely irritating. But to read the work of Patrick Cullen – one of four writers published here for the first time – is to understand what Moorhouse is talking about. Cullen is the kind of writer editors must dream about discovering. The style and mood of his stories reveal him to be very obviously in thrall to the Raymond Carver school of American realism. The understated tales of fraught domesticity, the polished sentences, the sly symbolism, the flatness of tone belying an emotional intensity – these all sing directly from the Carver songbook. But if Cullen has not quite transcended his influences, the quality of his writing is undeniable. The decision to include a suite of three of his stories, when every

other contributor has only been granted one, is absolutely justified. The kind of crisp Chekhovian realism that Cullen writes has been the dominant short story tradition for a century, so it is not surprising that some other inclusions adopt a similar approach. In fact, most of the stories provide an intimate perspective on human relationships. A clear majority are concerned, in one way or another, with the issues of love and sex. Several are based around small moments of interpersonal friction over something trivial: a set of missing keys, for example; or who gets to hold some passports. This, in turn, leads to a quiet epiphany that reveals a deeper well of sentiment.

This is an effective technique when it is stylishly done, as it is in the stories from which I took the above details of the keys and the passports, by Charlotte Wood and Janey Runci, respectively. But it is also a very familiar technique. As a result, among the stories in realist mode, I tended to be more attracted to those that had a certain grit or bluntness about them. Tara June Winch’s very brief ‘Cloud Busting’ is a touching story told in a lively vernacular style. While Alejandra Martinez’s thoughtful ‘If You Don’t Like It Leave’ eschews the politeness of imagery to address social and cultural questions directly, it inadvertently draws attention to the lack of interest most of these stories have in the small matters of race, class, religion, and politics.

Those contributions that are more adventurous in a formal sense make up a substantial minority. These stories contain some of the most interesting and original writing in the anthology, but are less consistent than those that do not stray from the path of realism. Paul Mitchell’s ‘The Favourite’ did stand out, however, thanks to its droll appropriation of Freudian imagery and the brash manner in which its narrative slips back and forth between different levels of reality and different points of view.

The Best Australian Stories 2005 is, overall, a strong and diverse collection. It should be essential reading for anyone interested in contemporary Australian fiction. Moorhouse has good reason to believe in the value of the short story. Indeed, he is one of several eminent Australian writers – including Peter Goldsworthy, Robert Drewe, and Peter Carey – whose first published book was a collection of stories. If these writers were beginning their careers today, they would be unlikely to receive the same opportunity – at least, not from any major publisher. But if there are any publishers out there who give a damn about quality or who have somehow retained the ability to think beyond next Christmas, then perhaps they might look to the future and consider publishing a book of short stories by Patrick Cullen. g

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