Australian Book Review - March 2023, no. 451

Advances

National Cultural Policy

Much has been written since the prime minister launched Labor’s new National Cultural Policy at a popular music venue in Melbourne on 30 January, and Advances suspects there is a lot more to come.

Mostly, the response has been positive – one of relief even. Here, after a decade of neglect, ministerial contempt, and fiscal raids, was a federal government prepared to acknowledge the importance (and precarity) of the arts and to propose, in a holistic form known as Revive, new ways of celebrating, administering, and funding the arts.

The proof of the pudding, of course, will be in the eating. Money that George Brandis notoriously ripped from the Australia Council budget in 2015 will be restored, though commentators noted that – allowing for CPI – the budget has decreased in real terms over those eight years. Literature’s share of that budget is lamentably small – about four per cent. If more writers are to receive grants, more magazines like ABR to increase payments to writers and help lift industry standards, literature’s proportional share of funding must increase. We all look to the federal government for a substantial injection of funds into the new Writers Australia, which from 2025 will provide direct support to the literary sector.

The establishment of a Poet Laureate must be a good thing. Here, the selection process will be sensitive. A savvy, persuasive Laureate – with full autonomy and sufficient resources – will play a vital role in the promotion of poetry to the broader community.

The removal of the prime ministerial veto in the Prime Minister’s Literary Awards is similarly welcome. As recently as the December 2022 issue, ABR has lamented past indulgences and interference. It will be a great day, too, when these pivotal awards are announced punctually to support the book industry’s promotion of featured titles.

ABR readers – like our many contributors (more than 300 of them each year) – appreciate the importance of federal grants for this publication. Many of you expressed your disappointment and solidarity when the Australia Council decided not to fund ABR in the 2021–24 round. Soon after the announcement of the new National Cultural Policy, ABR submitted its EOI for the 2025–28 round. Just one of our goals, as stated in this document, is a commitment to raise our rate for freelance writers substantially in 2025 – if we are

funded. We will keep our readers apprised of the outcome in coming months.

Jennifer Mills – author, critic, and director of the Australian Society of Authors – writes about the new National Cultural Policy in this issue. (Her article, ‘A Revival Meeting at the Espy’, begins on page eight.)

Meanwhile, we wish the federal government and the Australia Council well as they set out to implement this ambitious and much-needed policy.

Tours galore

This week we’re off to Adelaide again, where it all began for ABR in 1961. Once again we have a full contingent for our week-long tour, which is presented in association with our commercial partner, Academy Travel.

Months out, ABR’s Vienna tour is close to filling up, so be quick if you are interested in joining the twelve-day study tour based in Vienna.

Christopher Menz – who will lead both of these tours with Peter Rose – is interviewed about Vienna and design on the ABR Podcast, a good way to get to know ABR’s popular cicerone

Jolley Prize

The ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize is now open for entries until 24 April. We are looking for original works of between 2,000 and 5,000 words. These single-authored stories should be written in English and can be written in any style or genre.

The Jolley Prize is worth a total of $12,500, with the winner receiving $6,000. The judges this year are Gregory Day, Jennifer Mills, and Maria Takolander. The Jolley Prize unfailingly unearths exciting and fresh talent and work. Past winners include the 2022 Miles Franklin Literary Award winner Jennifer Down and Madelaine Lucas, whose 2018 Jolley Prize-winning short story ‘Ruins’ has evolved into part of her forthcoming novel Thirst for Salt (April, Allen & Unwin).

Correction

The print version of Timothy J. Lynch’s commentary ‘Enough already! Post-Trump America returns to the centre’ (ABR, January–February 2023) referred to ‘Senator Liz Cheney’. This should have read ‘Congresswoman Liz Cheney’. g

Australian Book Review

March 2023, no. 451

First series 1961–74 | Second series (1978 onwards, from no. 1)

Registered by Australia Post | Printed by Doran Printing

ISSN 0155-2864

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Image credits and information

Front cover: Shirley Hazzard at Villa Emma in Posillipo in the 1980s. This photograph appears in Shirley Hazzard: A writing life by Brigitta Olubas (Virago, 2023) and is reproduced here courtesy of the author.

Page 27: Salman Rushdie via Twitter (https://twitter.com/ SalmanRushdie/status/1622974008106041345, last accessed 20 February 2023)

Page 63: Sheridan Harbridge as Tessa Ensler in Prima Facie (photograph by Brett Boardman/Melbourne Theatre Company).

COMMENTARY

INDIGENOUS STUDIES

UKRAINE

BIOGRAPHY

MEMOIR

LITERARY STUDIES

Jennifer Mills

David Kearns

Eleanor Hogan

Nick Hordern

David Horner

Frances Wilson

Joachim Redner

Johanna Leggatt

Sue Kossew

Susan Sheridan

Killian Quigley

Benjamin Madden

Labor’s new National Cultural Policy

Black Lives, White Law by Russell Marks

Unmaking Angas Downs by Shannyn Palmer

Zelensky by Serhii Rudenko

A Message from Ukraine by Volodymyr Zelensky

The Young Menzies edited by Zachary Gorman

Shirley Hazzard by Brigitta Olubas

Endless Flight by Keiron Pim

Infidelity and Other Affairs by Kate Legge

J.M. Coetzee and Neoliberal Culture by Andrew Gibson

Middlebrow Modernism by Melinda J. Cooper

Seduced by Story by Peter Brooks

Critical Revolutionaries by Terry Eagleton

PUBLISHING

FICTION

Brenda Niall

Laura Elizabeth Woollett

Geordie Williamson

Debra Adelaide

Mehrdad Rahimi-Moghaddam

Jennifer Mills

Naama Grey-Smith

Michael Winkler

ARCHITECTURE

ART

POEMS

Philip Goad

Sophie Knezic

Ben Silverstein

Julie Janson

Stephen Edgar

Judith Beveridge

Damen O’Brien

POETRY

MUSIC

ECONOMICS

SYRIA

HISTORY

Jennifer Harrison

Prithvi Varatharajan

Andrew Ford

John Tang

Tom Bamforth

Philip Dwyer

Francesca Sasnaitis

Miles Pattenden

Andrew Markus

A Maker of Books by Michael Richards

Dark Mode by Ashley Kalagian Blunt

Victory City by Salman Rushdie

Three new novels

Nights of Plague by Orhan Pamuk, translated by Ekin Oklap

A Country of Eternal Light by Paul Dalgarno

Tiny Uncertain Miracles by Michelle Johnston

The Bell of the World by Gregory Day

Australian Architecture by Davina Jackson

Credo by Imants Tillers

Masked Histories by Leah Lui-Chivizhe

Kurraarr Far Country

Lapis Lazuli

Hawkesbury

The Pelican Feeder

Slack Tide by Sarah Day

Three shapely new poetry collections

The Philosophy of Modern Song by Bob Dylan

The Currency of Politics by Stefan Eich

Syria Betrayed by Alex J. Bellamy

War by Beatrice Heuser

Shadowline edited by Jacquie Houlden and Seumas Spark

The Pope at War by David I. Kertzer

The Humanitarians by Joy Damousi

ESSAYS

TECHNOLOGY

CRICKET

INTERVIEW

ABR ARTS

FROM THE ARCHIVE

Ben Brooker

Dante Aloni

Diane Stubbings

Barry Scott

Jordan Prosser

Diane Stubbings

Jarrod Zlatic

Judith Brett

Abandon Every Hope by Hayley Singer

Machines Behaving Badly by Toby Walsh

The Bodyline Fix by Marion Stell

Publisher of the Month

TÁR

Prima Facie

A Peter Tyndall Retrospective

R.G. Menzies by John Bunting

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The ABR Podcast

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

Shirley Hazzard

Brigitta Olubas and Peter Rose

The teals

Dennis Altman

Vienna

Christopher Menz

Celebrating Peter Porter

Morag Fraser and others

‘Leaving Elvis’

Michelle Michau-Crawford

The uprising in Iran

Zoe Holman

Peter Porter Poetry Prize

The 2023 shortlisted poets

‘Slut Trouble’

Beejay Silcox

Our partners

Australian Book Review is assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council for the Arts, its arts funding and advisory body. ABR is supported by the South Australian Government through Arts South Australia.

We also acknowledge the generous support of our university partner Monash University; and we are grateful for the support of the Copyright Agency Cultural Fund; the Judith Neilson Institute for Journalism and Ideas, Australian Communities Foundation, the City of Melbourne; and Arnold Bloch Leibler.

Arts South Australia

A revival meeting at the Espy

Labor’s new National Cultural Policy

by Jennifer Mills

Policy announcements are a peculiar kind of theatre, and Labor’s launch of its new five-year arts plan, Revive, was a strong example of the genre. It was held at Melbourne’s iconic Espy in St Kilda, a venue where arts audiences were treated to words of encouragement from Minister Tony Burke on his speaking tour to spruik the submissions process in 2022, and where ‘DJ Albo’ once entertained a modest crowd.

I watched it on the livestream, along with more than sixteen hundred others from around the country. Onscreen, the name Revive was superimposed on an ochre horizon under a pale sky. Someone in the design department understood just how parched the Australian arts and culture sector had been feeling after a decade of cuts and compounding crises.

Like a big-ticket book launch, numerous speakers and performers were invited to pad out the announceable material (concrete policy changes and budget figures). Opera singer and composer Deborah Cheetham let her voice soar. There was a poetry reading by Sarah Holland-Batt. Music and literature were a clear focus. This was fitting, given that these two areas have been worst served in recent years. With scarce government funding increasingly skewed to protected major performing arts companies such as The Australian Ballet and Opera Australia, and to the bare survival of our biggest institutions, music and literature have often been left to the private sector, with little incentive for big publishers to support local content. Australia Council CEO Adrian Collette has called literature ‘our most under-funded art form’.

For many years, the arts has been a site of ideological combat. Each incoming federal government has trampled on the previous government’s approach. Creative Australia, the last attempt at an arts and culture policy, was announced in 2013 after a long and arduous process of consultation, but was torn up within months when Tony Abbott took office. Creative Nation, from 1994, fared little better, lasting only two years before it was shredded.

Revive is a five-year plan from a government that clearly expects to remain in power for at least two terms. It is also a government that is willing to allow arts and culture to take centre stage for a moment, with a policy launch from the PM himself –introduced, of course, as ‘the artist formerly known as DJ Albo’.

Labor likes to celebrate its legacy. There were numerous references to Gough Whitlam’s vision for the arts, the contribution of Paul Keating’s ministry and Creative Nation, and Creative Australia

(Simon Crean, arts minister at the time, was in the audience). Albanese was not shy in referring to the past ten years as ‘a decade in which opportunity wasn’t so much missed as thrown away’, characterising the Coalition’s approach as one of ‘calculated neglect’.

The prime minister skipped the internally divisive parts of that legacy, describing his own era as ‘a political culture of building common ground’. Tellingly, he also explicitly sought to recruit artists and arts workers to the Voice campaign, perhaps the first great test of his leadership. In doing so, he acknowledged the power of arts and culture to strengthen positive messaging and national unity. Artists’ fortunes might rise and fall with the whims of governments, but they need us at least as much as we need them.

Burke, a seasoned performer and a charming speaker, let the emotional affect show, as Albanese often does. He, too, made claims of unity, of ‘the culture wars disappearing in cultural policy’. But Revive is a firmly Labor policy, and the arts remains intensely partisan. Burke’s personal passion for the arts is both good and bad for a sector that has been traumatised by successive ministerial whims. Music and literature have been neglected, but they may also be getting more attention simply because Burke enjoys them. The announcement that Australia will appoint a poet laureate from 2025 was clearly overdue, but it was also performative: an emotive, highly visible gesture that will pay dividends in good optics.

For at least a decade, arts advocates have had to choose between two forms of value: the warm, fuzzy aura of intangible social benefit and the cold hard numbers of economic worth. Burke made it clear that these two facets should not be in competition. He emphasised both cultural value and economic contribution. ‘You touch our hearts and you are a $17 billion industry,’ he told the room, emphasising the conjunction. ‘You are entertaining and you are essential.’ As the poet did in Holland-Batt’s moving poem, ‘The Gift’, I hated myself for noticing Burke’s poetry, for enjoying and being moved by the repetitive phrasing. There is such a thirst for statements like Albanese’s ‘arts jobs are real jobs’, or Burke’s ‘you are essential workers’, you could almost hear the dust hiss as they landed. Intangible things do matter: worth, care, value, meaning. But you can’t live on that stuff alone.

Apolicy launch might be performance art, but policy is also architecture. Fortunately, Revive goes some way to constructing a much-needed material transformation in the arts. Restoring funding to pre-2013 levels to the rebrand-

ed Creative Australia (the Australia Council name will remain only in reference to the Board) is a great start, though, as Alison Croggon has pointed out, the new annual budget of around $250 million will remain slightly lower than the $220 million budget of 2013 when adjusted for inflation. Much more money is needed to bring a sense of security to the sector’s long-suffering practitioners and small-to-medium ecosystem. And more is expected from the new organisation, with four new bodies to be set up under its umbrella: a First Nations body to ensure autonomy and resourcing of First Nations arts; a Centre for Arts and Entertainment Workplaces, which will manage pay rates, codes of conduct, and workplace safety; Music Australia, to be set up this year to administer funding and advocate for musicians and the music industry; and Writers Australia. There is $19.3 million earmarked for Writers Australia. This represents a welcome allocation, with little detail about distribution. Nerves are frayed by previous failures like the Book Council of Australia and Writing Australia. Scheduling Writers Australia’s implementation to coincide with the next federal election runs the risk of inflicting another self-destructing gift on the literary sector. However, lasting change takes time, and Burke has promised further consultation.

For published writers, the only immediate change to our incomes is likely to come from the introduction of Digital Lending Rights (DLR), which will expand the existing Lending Rights scheme to include eBook lending from public libraries. DLR is funded to the tune of $12.9 million for the first four years and $3.8 million a year thereafter. DLR is the low-hanging fruit that has taken many years to pluck, a result of long advocacy from the Australian Society of Authors and many others, with strong support from libraries and the Australian Library and Information Association (ALIA). According to the ASA’s latest report, authors average $18,200 a year from their creative work; lending rights contribute ten to twenty per cent of this, and currently provide some income to more than 10,000 writers. EBooks can stay in circulation longer than paper books and are accessible to a more diverse range of readers. With eBook lending accounting for an increasing proportion of library loans, it is past time that the scheme caught up with changing readerly habits.

Taken together, DLR and Writers Australia are the two most significant investments in Australian literature in decades. Literature has been under-served by the Australia Council, often bearing the brunt of funding cuts from which major organisations and other sectors have been protected. There is little institutional support to promote reading or Australian writing. The Australia Council currently spends less than seven per cent of its overall funding budget on literature, with only $1.8 million in project grants distributed to just forty-five authors and organisations last year. The scarcity has resulted in some shocking decisions, such as the notorious 2021–24 funding round, when only one literary journal received funding (it wasn’t ABR).

In the 1970s and early 1980s, with a population half the size, there were a hundred such grants a year, many of them fellowships equivalent to the average wage. Labor has a long way to go before it approaches Gough Whitlam’s legacy.

Two other changes will have an impact on writers’ lives, eventually. The first is the promise of conditional funding on fair

pay and other conditions, with pay rates for artists and writers to form part of the Review of Modern Awards later this year. The second is a gesture towards something that was not mentioned in Creative Australia: the consideration of creative work under mutual obligation, potentially making practising artists and writers eligible for unemployment benefits.

The latter is a mere suggestion at present (with a promise to ‘develop information’ about the idea), but the former is a significant and welcome shift in approach, with the new Centre for

Arts and Entertainment Workplaces set up to administer fair pay, minimum rates, and workplace safety. The Centre will provide advice, develop codes of conduct, and ‘refer matters to the relevant authorities’ – presumably with an overhaul to Fair Work also in sight. This will include the adoption of the National Association for the Visual Arts (NAVA) code of practice in the visual arts, and consideration of ASA and Media, Entertainment and Arts Alliance (MEAA) freelance rates. For the first time, we have a commitment to making arts funding conditional on fair pay.

Conditional funding will be transformative – if it can be achieved. At present, impoverishment is the norm in literature, a field that relies heavily on unpaid and underpaid work. If every publication that receives funding has to pay industry standard rates, total funding will have to rise significantly. It is understandable, then, that Writers Australia will not be established for two years; there is much detail to consider, and organisational budgets will need time to catch up.

Writers Australia will also be responsible for directly funding writers, conducting research and advocacy, determining the Prime Minister’s Literary Awards (no longer subject to prime ministerial intervention), and appointing the poet laureate. Like Creative Australia as a whole, it will be expected to work across public, commercial, and philanthropic streams. It will have to balance the demands of publishers, authors, readers, and institutions fairly; there will be questions about its independence and the power differentials inherent in these relationships. Structural change is expensive, so it’s unlikely that there will be a significant increase in grant funding to writers in the short term.

When Revive was announced, many arts organisations were finalising their expressions of interest for the 2025–28 funding round. Budgets may not have been affected by the proposed changes, but the eternal flux of policy is unsettling, and even good news can be destabilising. When the relief and celebration die down, few in the arts will find that they can muster the confidence that Labor seems to have in its own longevity.

To have a policy of any kind so soon after the election is encouraging, and this one has more detail than many were expecting. It is hoped that the May Budget will bring further relief and greater detail, with the National Library’s Trove and the National Archives under particular threat, both essential resources for the

Much more money is needed to bring a sense of security to the sector’s long-suffering practitioners and small-to-medium ecosystem

creation and preservation of literary works. Importantly, Revive begins with an understanding of the inherent value of arts and culture. It acknowledges that ‘culture permeates every facet of the human activities and economies which it is government’s role to enable, manage, and regulate’, and reiterates the need for a whole-of-government approach.

In an encouraging attempt to break what has become a mendicant mindset in the arts, Burke left his audience not with an expectation of gratitude, but with a carefully pitched invitation to make a contribution. ‘Over to you, typewriters loaded, a blank page ready to write the next chapter,’ he said, sounding like someone’s dad at a graduation dinner. Missy Higgins sang the outro: a stirring version of The Triffids’ ‘Wide Open Road’.

Indigenous Studies

Reckoning with the truth

Indigenous sovereignty and Australian law

David Kearns

Black Lives, White Law: Locked up and locked out in Australia

by Russell Marks La Trobe University Press

$34.99 pb, 360 pp

Brendan Thoms was born in New Zealand in 1988. He lived permanently in Australia from 1994 but never applied for Australian citizenship. Thoms had long-standing familial connections to Australia. His maternal great-great-grandmother, grandmother, and mother were all born in Queensland. They were Australian citizens and recognised members of the Gungarri People. Thoms’s brother had also been living in Australia since 1994, while his sister was born in Queensland in 1995. She was a citizen and, like Thoms, identified and was recognised as Gungarri.

Daniel Love was slightly older. Born in 1979 in Papua New Guinea, Love lived in Australia from 1984. Like Thoms, although not a citizen, Love had close familial connections in Australia. His paternal great-grandparents were born in Queensland and were descendants of First Nations people. Love’s paternal grandfather was born in Queensland and served during World War II in the Australian Military Forces in the Middle East, New Guinea, and Papua, settling in Papua following the war, where he met Love’s paternal grandmother. Papua was, at the time, under Australian authority, and she became an Australian citizen in 1961. Love’s father, too, was a citizen, as was his sister. Love identified as a member of the Kamilaroi People, and was recognised as a member by one Elder.

Thoms had not left Australia since 2003, nor had Love since 1985, but in 2018 both were convicted of assault occasioning bodily harm, receiving eighteen- and twelve-month prison sentences,

It was a calculated blend of nostalgia and possibility. Albanese had his picture taken with Higgins, then turned for a selfie with the crowd. The photos were up on his socials within the hour, and we were left blinking in a sudden stillness, bodies still braced against the wind. g

Jennifer Mills’s latest novel, The Airways, was shortlisted for the Aurealis Awards and longlisted for the Miles Franklin Award in 2022. She is a current director of the Australian Society of Authors.

This article, one of a series of ABR commentaries addressing cultural and political subjects, was funded by the Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund.

respectively. Section 501(3A) of the Migration Act 1958 required that the then Minister for Home Affairs, Peter Dutton, cancel the visa of anyone sentenced to imprisonment for twelve months or longer, triggering their removal from Australia. Thoms and Love appealed to the High Court, arguing that the Mabo judgment recognised the ‘connection which Aboriginal people have with land and waters in Australia’, and accordingly had ‘recognised that Aboriginal persons “belong” to the land’.

In international law, the status of non-citizen is generally considered coterminous with ‘alien’. But Thoms and Love contended that the relationship between First Nations people and land in Australia was incompatible with alienage; each was a ‘non-citizen, non-alien’, precluding their removal. To establish indigeneity, the plaintiffs proposed a test based on Justice Gerard Brennan’s Mabo judgment: Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander descent; self-identification; and recognition by an Elder or person holding traditional authority.

The last of these criteria worried the High Court’s judges. For Chief Justice Susan Kiefel, in a statement echoed by Justices Stephen Gageler and Patrick Keane, determining legal status by reference to the authority of Elders was tantamount to ‘attribut[ing] sovereignty to Aboriginal groups’. Since Mabo, the judges claimed, Australian courts had consistently rejected Indigenous sovereignty. The High Court has, in fact, rejected it for even longer: in Coe v Commonwealth (1979), Justice Harry Gibbs held that ‘[t]he contention that there is in Australia an aboriginal nation exercising sovereignty, even of a limited kind, is quite impossible in law to maintain’. Instead, as Chief Justice Murray Gleeson and Justices William Gummow and Kenneth Hayne put it in 2002:

what the assertion of sovereignty by the British Crown necessarily entailed was that there could thereafter be no parallel law-making system in the territory over which it asserted sovereignty. To hold otherwise would be to deny the acquisition of sovereignty … that is not permissible.

Judicial assertions of the Crown’s exclusive sovereignty and the concomitant denial of First Nations sovereignty provide the impetus for Russell Marks’s Black Lives, White Law: Locked up and locked out in Australia. In the past decade,

First Nations activists and scholars, including Professor of Law and Tanganekald and Meintangk woman Irene Watson, and Palawa activist and lawyer Michael Mansell, have asserted the importance of recognising First Nations people’s continuing sovereignty. Similarly, Teela Reid, a Wiradjuri and Wailwan lawyer and activist, has demanded that Australia ‘embark on a reckoning with the truth of its past’ through recognising the violence experienced by First Nations people and their unceded sovereignty.

Marks frames his contribution to this argument as a response to the over-representation of First Nations people in Australia’s prisons. As he writes, thirty-one years after the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody sought to reduce First Nations people’s incarceration rate, Indigenous incarceration has increased colossally. As the Uluru Statement from the Heart put it, First Nations people in Australia ‘are the most incarcerated people on the planet’. Marks presents the statistical evidence:

If you’re an Indigenous man, you are now more than fifteen times more likely to be locked up than a man who isn’t Indigenous. If you’re an Indigenous woman, you’re more than twenty-one times more likely to be locked up than non-Indigenous women. Even more glaring are the disparities among children. In Western Australia, for instance, an Indigenous child is more than fifty times more likely to be locked up than a non-Indigenous kid.

Black Lives, White Laws argues that following the violent and illegal implementation of Crown sovereignty in Australia, settler Australia has subjected First Nations people to a criminal justice system that denies their sovereignty with devastating results. Marks presents his case in two parts. The first focuses on the historical implementation of criminal law jurisdiction over Indigenous people – the establishment of exclusive sovereignty. The second looks at the current practice of Australia’s criminal justice system, focusing on the Northern Territory, where Marks has worked as a defence lawyer for the North Australian Aboriginal Justice Agency (NAAJA).

For Marks, the key features of Australia’s criminal justice regime were established early: the asymmetrical governance of settlers and Australia’s first people in courts that practised ‘settler law’; and the denial of a parallel Indigenous legal system. Settlers tried for murdering First Nations people were typically acquitted on the basis that Indigenous people were not Crown subjects, as the defence counsel argued in the 1827 acquittal of Nathaniel Lowe. But crimes against settlers by First Nations people were punished with incarceration and execution.

Violence between First Nations people progressively came under settler jurisdiction through the nineteenth century. The standard justification was that Indigenous people were too backward to meet the threshold for sovereignty, and thus required governance by settler law. As Justice William Burton put it in R v Murrell (1836), ‘the various tribes have not attained … amongst them to such a position in point of numbers and civilization, and to such a form of Government and laws, as to be entitled to be recognized as so many sovereign states governed by laws of their own’.

Courts gradually recognised the difficulties inherent in applying settler law to Indigenous people who rarely understood it, often didn’t speak English, and lived their lives predominantly in terms of the laws of their own communities. The solution, according to Marks, was the judicial maxim ‘sentence, but leniently’. Courts would make a symbolic show of sovereignty – the trial and conviction of the accused – before a performance of clemency: a suspended sentence, justified either because the crime was an act required under tribal law or would otherwise be punished under tribal law.

Sentence, but leniently was an imperfect solution, and it relied on an imperfect understanding of Indigenous law. Defence lawyers representing First Nations clients accused of sexual assault or domestic violence would often attempt to excuse the violence on the basis that Indigenous society was violently patriarchal. Courts accepted these claims. But as Marks points out, this ignored contrary evidence about First Nations cultures. According to Women’s Business: Report of the Aboriginal Women’s Task Force (1986), ‘settler courts’ punishments for very serious crimes like rape and murder were “significantly milder” than punishments offenders would receive under Aboriginal law’. Where violence occurred, First Nations women argued that Indigenous law was not to blame, but the introduction by settlers of ‘a standard of violence and a culture of abusing alcohol’.

The resulting backlash against lenient sentencing ignored this evidence. Instead, it began from the premise defence lawyers argued and courts accepted – Indigenous communities were inherently violent – and proceeded to justify the aggressive implementation of settler law. This backlash, ostensibly motivated by concerns over the safety of First Nations women and children at the hands of a violent Indigenous culture, is exemplified by the 2007 Northern Territory Emergency Response (NTER). But direct implementation of exclusive sovereignty hasn’t made First Nations women and children safer. It has locked them up. By 2017, the number of First Nations women imprisoned in the Northern Territory had tripled; for children it had doubled.

Marks draws a direct line between the logic of early cases such as R v Murrell and the NTER. Again, First Nations people in Australia were adjudged incapable of sovereignty. The result has been the implementation of a settler sovereignty expressed through a legal system that actively discriminates against the country’s first people. The criminal justice process remains a key front in the extension of this colonial regime across Australia; stereotypes of violent (or drunk, or drug-addicted) First Nations people are among the principal weapons in this cause.

The Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody recognised that the Australian history of Indigenous dispossession, removal, and forced assimilation was a key cause of the rate of incarceration of First Nations people. Among its proposals was self-determination. As Marks argues,

empirical research demonstrates the human need to be self-determining. The more people perceive that they have some measure of control over their lives, the healthier they tend to be – and the less often they experience or perpetrate violence, self-harm, suicide, mental illness.

But First Nations people haven’t been given this opportunity. Instead, maximum sentences have been increased. The Northern Territory has implemented mandatory minimum sentences. Remand is used to induce guilty pleas. As Professor of Indigenous Health and Mununjali and South Sea Islander woman Chelsea Watego has argued, punitive responses to domestic violence and the expansion of definitions of domestic violence have resulted in skyrocketing convictions of Indigenous women. Traumatised children are sent to violent and authoritarian youth detention centres – when they aren’t sent to adult prisons. Public drunkenness laws allow police to lock up people on the basis that they appear drunk, regardless of whether they have consumed alcohol.

If this is intended to reduce incarceration, it is not working. The Northern Territory has the highest recidivism rate in Australia. As Marks points out, aggressive state intervention is likely responsible: research shows that ‘punishing an already traumatised person may induce more of the unwanted behaviour’. At the same time, police who have killed First Nations people are acquitted. Alice Springs judge Greg Borchers described one defendant as behaving ‘like a primitive person’ and accused a woman of participating in ‘that great Indigenous fashion of abrogating your parental responsibility’, but was found not to have committed serious judicial misconduct. In this context, organisations like NAAJA have a critical advocacy role, but Marks laments the organisation’s reluctance to use its power to speak out against injustice.

Concluding, Marks provides glimpses of an alternative future. The Uluru Statement from the Heart demands recognition of the unceded sovereignty of First Nations people in Australia. Australia’s reliance on incarceration is not ‘a fact of nature’ but a product of choice; First Nations legal systems have never used it. Alternatives to incarceration have positive effects. Marks concedes he doesn’t know the solution; Black Lives, White Law is pre-eminently a demonstration that ‘the status quo offers no solution’. But empowering First Nations people, respecting Indigenous law, and recognising that prison is not necessary, point towards a better future.

Though Marks does not discuss Love v Commonwealth; Thoms v Commonwealth (2020), the case appears to fit into his framework. First Nations men are convicted of crimes and respond by asserting their rights as members of Indigenous communities who have inhabited these lands for tens of thousands of years. They are confronted with a judiciary that denies their rights and asserts the exclusive sovereignty of a Crown that dispossessed them and whose law systematically discriminates against them. But Kiefel, Gageler, and Keane were in the minority; Love and Thoms won.

The majority judgments reveal an account of Australian law that complicates Marks’s story. They did not recognise First Nations sovereignty: their arguments were ‘directly contrary to accepting any notion of Indigenous sovereignty persisting after the assertion of sovereignty by the British Crown’. But they held that Indigenous rights could restrict Crown sovereignty. For Justice Virginia Bell, for example, although the power to determine and expel unlawful aliens ‘was an attribute of every sovereign

state … the exercise of the sovereign power of this nation does not extend to the exclusion of the Indigenous inhabitants from the Australian community’. Love and Thoms, as First Nations people, could not be classified as aliens, and could not be removed from Australia. Indigenous rights, in this instance, trumped sovereign power.

Marks claims that ‘settler law doesn’t even recognise First Nations law’. But Love suggests that First Nations law may have more authority than he gives it, as rights attaching to indigeneity – a status determined in part by the authority of Elders –restricted the exercise of sovereignty. Indeed, though native title law does not involve direct recognition of Indigenous laws and customs, as Brennan put it in Mabo, it ‘has its origin in and is given its content by the traditional laws acknowledged by and the traditional customs observed by the indigenous inhabitants of a territory’. In other words, native title is grounded on the continued observation of First Nations laws and customs.

Brennan himself conceded that sovereignty ‘carries the power to create and to extinguish private rights and interests in land’. But High Court judges have contemplated placing native title on a surer footing. In Coe, former Whitlam government attorneygeneral and High Court judge Lionel Murphy suggested that First Nations land rights could only be extinguished by paying compensation. In Mabo, Justices William Deane, Mary Gaudron, and John Toohey all argued that Indigenous consent or compensation was required to extinguish native title. Love’s restriction of sovereign power in the name of Indigenous rights represents both a continuation and an expansion of these earlier arguments.

Black Lives, White Law provides a scathing attack on the failures of Australia’s criminal justice system, highlighting how people from police to politicians have disenfranchised First Nations people, inflicting acute mental and physical suffering on them. But Marks’s treatment of ‘settler law’ as a monolithic institution that upholds a one-sided regime favouring the Crown’s exclusive sovereignty neglects how High Court judges have worked to curtail sovereignty in the name of Indigenous rights.

Marks defines sovereignty as the ‘the power to govern, to make laws, to set the rules about who’s in and who’s out and what happens here’. But Love shows that sovereignty in Australia does not always extend this far regarding First Nations people. If rights based on Indigenous laws and customs are potentially superior to sovereignty, then ‘sovereignty’ may not be the only form of legal authority. Sovereignty, like incarceration, is not natural. It is a term and practice of governing with its own history. In Australia, recent High Court developments have resulted in its reduction. If the use of incarceration is a choice, perhaps the focus on sovereignty is too. g

David Kearns is Lecturer in Legal History and Philosophy at the University of Queensland. His work focuses on the Australian reception of the common law.

This article, one of a series of ABR commentaries addressing cultural and political subjects, was funded by the Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund.

On Anangu Country

A deeply storied place in Central Australia

Eleanor Hogan

Unmaking Angas Downs: History and myth on a Central Australian pastoral station

by Shannyn Palmer Melbourne University Press

$39.99 pb, 287 pp

In Unmaking Angas Downs, researcher and writer Shannyn Palmer seeks to understand why a derelict pastoral station in Central Australia, once a hub for First Nations people and a popular tourist destination en route to Watarrka Kings Canyon, was abandoned. Established by white pastoralist Bill Liddle in the late 1920s, Angas Downs is 300 kilometres south-west of Mparntwe Alice Springs at a place known as Walara to Anangu. Curious about the shifting fortunes of Angas Downs, Palmer travels to Walara to uncover the ‘histories that are obscured by the single, fixed idea of the pastoral station’.

Unmaking Angas Downs is a recalibration of Central Australian history spanning the seismic shifts in Indigenous–settler relations during the mid-twentieth century, from the pastoral era through the assimilation period’s ‘ration times’ and welfarism’s ‘sit-down times’, the expansion of tourism, to the emergence of selfdetermination and the return-to-Country movements. The effect of Anangu stories, recounted to Palmer and included here, is an unravelling of station mythology with its romanticised conceptions of Territorian life during the twentieth century.

Unmaking Angas Downs is based on Palmer’s doctoral research and reflects her commitment to developing a community-engaged ethnographic practice with Anangu. Palmer first became aware of Angas Downs through anthropologist Frederick Rose’s book The Wind of Change in Central Australia: The Aborigines at Angas Downs, 1962 (1965), a materialist analysis of the impact of the cash economy on Anangu through their encounter with the burgeoning tourist industry. She travelled to Imanpa community, about seventy kilometres from Angas Downs, where many Anangu with connections to Walara now live. They directed her to Tjuki Tjukanku Pumpjack and Sandra Armstrong, senior people whose families were among the earliest arrivals at Angas Downs, with the authority to speak for the place.

For over four years from 2012, Palmer travelled to Walara and beyond with Armstrong and Tjuki, accompanied by interpreter and translator Linda Rive. Tjuki and Armstrong collaborated willingly on the project, recounting stories relating their deep connection to Walara for future generations. Excerpts from these are interwoven in the text and signalled by a different font.

While Palmer’s project has its roots in the immersive participant observation practices of Western anthropology, it is a recuperative, place-based ethnography informed by her Anangu guides’ ‘itinerarising’ mode of storytelling as a way of unsettling

chronological historical tropes. The alternating rhythm of ananyi (travelling) and nyinanyi (camping) associated with this mode is fundamental to how Anangu experience Country, visiting ‘an inventory of places encountered along a lifetime of travelling’, anchoring stories to specific locations and reflecting the ancestors’ travels as they created the physical world. Through following these ‘story tracks’ with Tjuki and Armstrong, Palmer comes to understand Angas Downs ‘as a deeply storied place – not only lived in, but (un)made by the Anangu who lived there’, layered by local First Nations languages, stories, and knowledge, and the intricate interrelationship between Tjukurpa, Country, humans, and other species.

As a researcher, Palmer employs an open-ended, nuanced approach to understanding the ‘storied landscape’ beyond Angas Downs, and resists drawing simplistic conclusions, discarding some of her original assumptions in the process. In revisiting the monolith of the Territorian station in the outback imagination, Palmer observes that pastoral colonisalism never grafted successfully onto Central Australia’s harsh geography. Angas Downs was a relatively small, marginal enterprise compared to the pastoral empires of northern cattle barons, and the isolation that pastoralists like Liddle experienced in Central Australia fostered their interdependence with local Anangu for survival. While not dismissing the power asymmetry between Anangu and white settlers, Palmer recounts that Tjuki did not view the exchange of labour for tea, sugar, blankets and so on in working with Liddle as exploitative, but as a way of maintaining some autonomy and connection to Walara.

Intriguingly, Angas Downs was wholly run by First Nations people in its heyday as a tourist port-of-call during the 1950s and 1960s, after Bill Liddle sold the property in 1948 to Arthur and Milton, two of his sons with his Arrernte wife, Mary. By the 1980s, many Anangu shifted to Imanpa when it became a service centre or returned to the Anangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara lands through the homelands movement. After Arthur Liddle’s death, the property was sold to Imanpa in 1994, but subsequent proposals from senior Anangu to revive Angas Downs as a tourist enterprise for younger generations at Walara came to nothing. For Tjuki and Armstrong, whose identities were rooted in their nguraritja (custodianship) of Angas Downs, these developments were deeply traumatic.

Unmaking Angas Downs is an immensely readable, clear-eyed, often moving account of the dislocation experienced by Anangu in mid-twentieth century Central Australia, rich in insights and observations drawn from Palmer’s conversations with Tjuki and Armstrong. Like Kim Mahood’s writing, Palmer’s Unmaking Angas Downs is grounded in sitting and travelling with First Nations people in remote Australia over significant periods of time. In this respect, her book, like Mahood’s, diverges from the more common trajectory of white male settler writers on a journey to the Centre in search of metaphysical or political enlightenment. With its focus on the densely layered microcosm of Anangu stories and connections to Country beyond an obscure derelict pastoral station, it is a shame that Unmaking Angas Downs may be overlooked in favour of writing that embraces more readily recognisable tropes and terrain. There is certainly more scope for recuperative ethnographic work of the calibre of Palmer’s Unmaking Angas Downs g

Contingent political hero

An insider’s take on Volodymyr Zelensky

Nick Hordern

Zelensky: A biography

by Serhii Rudenko Polity Press

$25 hb, 222 pp

A Message from Ukraine

by Volodymyr Zelensky Hutchinson Heinemann

$24.99 hb, 138 pp

It has been a long time since the West had a hero like Volodymyr Zelensky, who is frequently ranked alongside Winston Churchill as a wartime leader and orator, Mikhail Gorbachev as a reformer, and Emmanuel Macron as a political disruptor. However deserved these comparisons may be, they deflect attention from the murky post-Soviet environment which shaped his career. The collapse of the region’s communist economy has left a legacy of corruption which, together with the deep

and he praises the Ukrainian president (elected in 2019) as a courageous and inspirational wartime leader. But the bulk of his book is about Zelensky before he became a hero – and before he became a vehement critic of Vladimir Putin. Zelensky now thunders against the Kremlin, but before he became a politician he avidly pursued a career in Russia’s television industry, long a mouthpiece for Putin’s regime. Zelensky has recently ruled out any ‘compromises as to the sovereignty, freedom and territorial integrity of my country’, yet he came to power calling for a negotiated solution with Moscow – a solution which, his opponents said, would have involved just such a compromise.

Zelensky, like many Ukrainians a native Russian speaker, got his start in a comedy team called Kvartal 95, named after a suburb in his home town, the industrial city of Kryvyi Rih. Kvartal 95 served its apprenticeship in KVN (to use its Russian acronym), a comedy and entertainment game show which originated in the Soviet Union, then went international. In 2003, Zelensky founded a production studio, also named Kvartal 95, which became the platform for his successful film and television career, culminating in his starring role in the series Servant of the People, in which an obscure history teacher becomes president of Ukraine.

Prior to the 2022 invasion, there were two crucial moments in the country’s post-Soviet history: the 2004 Orange Revolution and the 2014 Revolution of Dignity. These were mass protests aimed at stopping Moscow’s puppet, the sometime prime minister and president Viktor Yanukovych, from strengthening the Kremlin’s hold on Ukraine. Many protesters died in the Revolution of 2014, which drove Yanukovych into exile in Russia and triggered Moscow’s initial invasion of Ukraine. Zelensky remained aloof from the popular uprising. At that point, he still had a career in the Russian entertainment industry and he didn’t want to jeopardise it by identifying with the anti-Russian cause. Rudenko characterises Zelensky’s approach at this time as ‘nothing personal, just business’.

intertwining of Ukrainian and Russian society, means that Zelensky’s case is not as clear-cut as it may seem to outsiders.

Journalist Serhii Rudenko is an insider. He finished writing Zelensky two months after the Russian assault of February 2022,

Similarly pragmatic was the relationship between Zelensky and the oligarch Ihor Kolomoisky, recently in the news when his home was raided by police as part of an anti-corruption drive. One of the richest people in Ukraine, he was at one time the owner of the country’s largest bank, PrivatBank. Kolomoisky also owned a television channel called Channel 1+1, which, between 2015 and 2019, was screening Servant of the People, starring Zelensky. During these years, Kolomoisky fell foul of Ukraine’s fifth president, Petro Poroshenko, who nationalised PrivatBank; Kolomoisky retaliated by derailing Poroshenko’s campaign for re-election. To do

Volodymyr Zelensky and Joe Biden at the White House, December 2022 (Oliver Contreras/Pool via CNP/MediaPunch/Alamy)

2023 ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize

The Australian Book Review Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize is one of the world’s major prizes for an original short story, with $12,500 in prizes.

The 2023 Jolley Prize closes on 24 April 2023.

It will be judged by Gregory Day, Jennifer Mills, and Maria Takolander

The Jolley Prize honours the work of the Australian writer Elizabeth Jolley. It is open to anyone in the world who is writing in English. Entries should be original single-authored works of short fiction of between 2,000 and 5,000 words.

First prize: $6,000 • Second prize: $4,000 • Third prize: $2,500

previous winners

2010

Maria Takolander

2011

Gregory Day & Carrie Tiffany

2012

Sue Hurley

2013

Michelle Michau-Crawford

2014

Jennifer Down

2015

Rob Magnuson Smith

2016

Josephine Rowe

2017

Eliza Robertson

2018

Madelaine Lucas

2019

Sonja Dechian

2020 Mykaela Saunders

2021

Camilla Chaudhary

2022

Tracy Ellis

ABR warmly acknowledges the generous support of ABR Patron Ian Dickson AM.

our website: www.australianbookreview.com.au

this, Rudenko tells us, Kolomoisky used his protégé Zelensky, backing the comedian’s own run for president, which leveraged the premise of Servant of the People – that an outsider could fix Ukraine’s broken political system. Zelensky’s win seemed like a victory for the little man, but without the backing of the vengeful oligarch he would never have been elected.

Thirty-three months elapsed between Zelensky’s inauguration as president and the renewed Russian invasion. Rudenko’s criticism focuses on his performance during this period. Zelensky, he tells us, vowed to avoid nepotism but then stacked his administration with friends and cronies from his Kvartal 95 stable. He promised to crack down on corruption but failed to pursue members of his own political party who had been accused of taking bribes. In October 2021, the leaked Pandora Papers revealed that prior to his election, Zelensky himself had maintained offshore banking accounts; his response has been that this was necessary in order to insulate his media business from political interference. More broadly, Zelensky and some of his appointees showed themselves to be out of their depth in matters of law, finance, and economics, but failed to recruit more capable people. Rudenko’s argument is that Zelensky promised to break the bad old mould of Ukrainian politics, but then slipped comfortably into it. And then the Russian onslaught changed everything.

Rudenko could have made his case more clearly. He describes his book as a ‘mosaic’, by which he means that instead of being a sequence of narrative chapters, it is divided into thirty-eight fairly random ‘episodes’, all drilling down to a granular level of detail. The lack of an index makes it even harder to keep track of people. Rudenko shows us the trees rather than the wood.

Whatever Zelensky’s weaknesses may be, an inability to put his case is not one of them. The Ukrainians have outmatched the Russians across the whole spectrum of conflict, but in one particular sphere, the information war, they have excelled, and a key part of their campaign has been Zelensky’s speeches, of which A Message from Ukraine is an authorised collection. Aimed at an international audience, Zelensky’s core message is that Russian aggression is everyone’s problem, not just Ukraine’s: as he said during his visit to Washington in December 2022, US aid to Kiev is ‘not charity, but an investment’. He is a highly effective speaker: his address to the US Congress was credited with bolstering support for Ukraine among sceptical Republicans. But for all Zelensky’s skills as a communicator, the drift of Rudenko’s book is that had it not been for the Russian invasion, his administration would by now be moribund – it was the war that gave him the chance to shine.

Zelensky’s oratory is one ground for the comparison with Churchill, one that Zelensky himself isn’t shy of making. But the comparison with Churchill – who, if he had not been thrust into wartime leadership, would now be remembered as a failure – is perhaps more apt than many realise.

To say this is to diminish neither Zelensky’s wartime leadership nor the cause of Ukraine. It is a reminder just how contingent is the idea of the politician as hero. g

Nick Hordern, a former diplomat and journalist, is co-author of Sydney Noir: The golden years (NewSouth, 2017) and World War Noir: Sydney’s unpatriotic war (NewSouth, 2019).

House and garden

Examining Menzies’ early life and career

David Horner

The Young Menzies: Success, failure, resilience 1894–1942

edited by Zachary Gorman

Melbourne University Press

$39.99 hb, 224 pp

Robert Menzies retired as prime minister more than fifty-three years ago and died in 1978, yet he remains not just a dominant figure in Australian political history but a strong influence on modern political affairs. As Zachary Gorman, editor of this latest book on Menzies, argues, ‘it has become almost a cliché to say that he built or at least shaped and moulded modern Australia’. He created the Liberal Party that has governed Australia for fifty of the past seventy-three years, and modern Liberal politicians still draw on Menzies’ ideals.

This book grew out a conference at the Robert Menzies Institute in 2021. Opened in 2021 at the University of Melbourne, the Institute commemorates the life and legacy of Australia’s longestserving prime minister, so it might be expected that this book would provide a favourable view of Menzies. That is certainly the case; nonetheless, the chapters are by accomplished and distinguished scholars, and they all make persuasive cases.

Rather than a straight biography, the result is a series of think-pieces on various aspects of Menzies’ early life and career. The background and qualifications of the authors is key to understanding their approach and conclusions, and it is therefore disappointing that the book does not give us any information about them, though many readers will be familiar with them. Gorman, academic coordinator of the Menzies Institute, is the only one whose qualifications are indicated. The first chapter, a fine and perceptive general assessment of Menzies, is by David Kemp, but it would have been useful to be reminded that he is a former Liberal MP, the author of books on Liberal politics, and deputy chair of the Institute.

The description of Menzies’ school days is written by Troy Bramston, author of successful biographies of Hawke, Keating, and Menzies. Bramston argues that Menzies’ early years established his values, virtues, and vices. In a book that is largely free of contrary views, Bramston concludes that when Judith Brett claims that ‘Menzies wanted to kill his father and have sex with his mother’, her view ‘is utterly bonkers’.

The co-authors of the chapter on Menzies and the law – James Edelman, a Justice of the High Court of Australia, and Angela Kittikhoun, a lawyer – bring deep understanding of legal affairs. They argue that it is often overlooked that despite a relatively brief legal career before he entered the Victorian state parliament in 1928, Menzies made an enormous contribution to law in Australia.

The chapter on Menzies’ promotion of education is by Associate Professor Greg Melleuish from the University of Wollongong, author and co-author of books on liberalism and Menzies. Melleuish argues that Menzies believed that good education, particularly in the humanities, was crucial for the survival of democracy. In this era of ‘fake news’, it is relevant to note Menzies’ view that: ‘The new ambition was to breed a race of people to whom leisure was the chief end of life and the insistence upon a standard of accuracy abhorrent.’

The analysis of Menzies’ debt to Deakinite Liberalism is by Judith Brett, who brings special expertise as the author of a book on Menzies’ ‘Forgotten People’ and another on Alfred Deakin. Brett suggests that the sort of liberal philosophy expounded by Menzies owed much to that put forward by Deakin four decades earlier, and that possibly ‘Menzies looked to Deakin as a role model for the welllived Liberal political life’.

The chapter on how the Presbyterian faith of the young Menzies nourished his philosophy of liberalism is by David Furse-Roberts, a research fellow at the Institute. Menzies’ advocacy of the individualistic ethic of the Liberal Party was rooted in the biblical concept of being ‘my brother’s keeper’, whereby individuals took responsibility for the welfare of their neighbours. At the same time, Menzies took an ecumenical approach that transcended the sectarian divide, causing dismay in his strict Protestant family.

The chapter on peace and war by Anne Henderson, deputy director of the conservative Sydney Institute, is to some extent deceptive. It is not about Menzies’ leadership during the first two years of World War II, but rather is a defence of Menzies’ attitude to appeasement before the war. As the author of biographies of Enid and Joseph Lyons, Henderson understands the politics of the 1930s. More importantly, in her book Menzies at War (2014) she made a strong case that Menzies’ achievements as war leader were far more substantial than other authors have allowed. She might at least have discussed Bramston’s claim (in his own book) that in September 1939 Menzies told the high commissioner in London that ‘nobody really cares a damn about Poland’ and that for years he sought to keep these embarrassing views hidden from researchers. Unfortunately, this most important period of Menzies’ life before 1942 is not examined in any chapter.

Professor Frank Bongiorno of the Australian National University has written extensively on labour politics and Australian politics in general. His chapter examines the surprisingly cordial relationship between Menzies and the wartime Labor prime minister, John Curtin, which says much about the character of

both men and the nature of politics in a different era.

The central theme of the book is that Menzies was a man of intellect and reflection who developed a broad philosophy of politics based on principles rather than short-term political gain. In their chapter on Menzies as a ‘learning leader’, Scott Prasser and the late Dr Graeme Starr remind us that essentially Menzies was still a politician who knew that to implement his policies he needed to win at the ballot box. Starr was a former director of the New South Wales Liberal Party and author of several substantial books on Liberal politics. Prasser is a senior fellow in the Liberal

think tank, the Centre for Independent Studies, and was a senior political adviser to federal Liberal government ministers.

The final chapter looks at Menzies’ ‘Forgotten People’ radio talks, in which he declared that ‘one of the best instincts in us is that which induces us to have one little piece of earth with a house and a garden which is ours’. The author, Nick Cater, executive director of the Liberal think tank, the Menzies Research Centre, argues that with this philosophy the Menzies government of the 1950s and 1960s sought to provide opportunities for Australians to become homeowners – a successful policy that shaped modern Australia.

The fact that many authors are conservative commentators does not invalidate their views. This is an engaging book that makes a further and contemporary contribution to our understanding of Australia’s longest-serving prime minister. It raises the important question of what sort of intellect and political philosophy modern-day prime ministers bring to their task. g

David Horner is Emeritus Professor in the Strategic and Defence Studies Centre, Australian National University.

The War Cabinet in session in the Old Legislative Council Chamber, Queensland Parliament, Brisbane c.1940 (State Library Victoria reference H99.201/2584)

Yearning for the centre

A judicious account of a vanishing age

Frances Wilson

Shirley Hazzard: A Writing Life

by Brigitta Olubas Virago

$34.99 pb, 571 pp

Shirley Hazzard challenged Auden’s line that poetry makes nothing happen. In her case, she said, poetry made everything happen. It was because she learned Italian as a teenager in order to read Leopardi in the original that she was sent, aged twenty-six, by the United Nations, to Italy, where she wrote ‘Harold’, the story about the awkward young poet that was published in the New Yorker in 1960, after which ‘everything changed’.

In Hazzard’s self-mythology, the story about the young poet was the first she submitted to the New Yorker, but, writes Brigitta Olubas, she had sent others to the magazine before which had not been published. Hazzard’s first New Yorker story, appearing in 1961, was in fact ‘Woollahra Road’, which was written in Siena but set in suburban Sydney, where Hazzard was born in 1931. Her relations with her natal land were always ambiguous, and it was in keeping with her reinvention that Hazzard would later root her genius in the Old World rather than the new one.

Born, she believed, with the Western canon embedded inside her, Hazzard described reading as ‘the marvellous adventure of my life’. Reading was a form of remembering; from the age of four, poetry was her lodestone and guiding star. Because no other adult, apart from her teachers, cared for books, Hazzard – one of the twentieth century’s great autodidacts – grew up with the sense that she was on the periphery while the ‘centre’ was somewhere above the equator where ‘things like the seasons were in the proper order that was given in literature’.

Hazzard came of age in Hong Kong, where her father, Reg, was posted as a diplomat in 1947. Her formal education now complete, she worked for the British Combined Intelligence

Services and fell in love with a White Russian named Alec Vedeniapine, twice her age. He would be the first of her older men. In the East she felt, as she put it, ‘in a great land that wasn’t looking to anywhere else’, that ‘didn’t feel the tyranny of distance’. The family’s return to Sydney in 1948 was recorded in her diary as ‘the end of life for me … A dying, a death.’ Wellington, where her father was next posted, was ‘just as dull as it possibly could be’.

Hazzard’s relations with her natal land were always ambiguous

In 1951, the Hazzards moved to New York, where Shirley found a secretarial job with the United Nations, an organisation she would later feel even more animosity towards than she did for Australia. Reg, leaving his wife for his mistress, now disappeared from the scene and Hazzard’s relationship with Alec similarly foundered. ‘The sorrow of that first, devastating romance,’ observes Olubas, never left her.

Hazzard’s novels were Jamesian, and so too was her early life. A bright-faced young girl in pursuit of the best that has been thought and said, Hazzard propelled herself forwards like a damaged Isabel Archer. ‘I know that I am starved for affection and love and security and this makes me what I am,’ she wrote in her notebooks. Olubas charts with great care the pattern of romantic disappointment between the ages of seventeen and thirty-two, and the increasingly fractious relations with her mother and sister. Until she discovered southern Italy in 1956, Hazzard was, as she put it, ‘miserable to the point of derangement’. She was saved by Naples, which became her parent and companion. Hazzard’s celebration of the city can be seen in her second novel, The Bay of Noon (1970), where Gianni tells Jenny that Naples ‘knows something … like an important picture, or a book’. After a year of living there, Jenny herself knows, for the first time, what ‘joy’ is.

Hazzard’s introduction to the Vivante family, who took paying guests in their dilapidated old house on the outskirts of Siena, completed her rebirth. The Villa Solaia contained the ‘underswell of literature and poetry’ she had been searching for, and she now wrote her first stories. The Vivantes became Hazzard’s replacement family, and time spent in Solaia would be recalled, Olubas shrewdly notes, like precious childhood memories. Hazzard read like a hare, but her four great novels appeared with tortoise-like slowness. Her writing grew in the soil of Solaia

Genocide Under the Red Sun

Roostam Sadri

Sid Harta Publishers

ISBN: 978-1-922958-08-2

Available from your local bookstore, BOOKTOPIA, eBook and online stores.

Tatars were subjected to assimilation policies by both the Tsarist and the Soviet regimes, causing them to resist such policies for many generations. The most turbulent periods of the 20th century have been briefly depicted in this book as the background of the struggle for survival by the Sadri family, who endured the genocidal policies of the communist regimes of Russia and China, eventually coming to Australia to live prosperous and happy lives.

“The grey ashes of the cruelty of mankind has blown over me since reading Genocide Under the Red Sun. Thank you Roostam for your history of your family and the Tatar peoples. I highly recommend this book.”

— Judith Flitcroft, author of Walk Back in Time

This book details the struggle for survival of three generations of a Tatar family who lived through the most turbulent periods of Russian and Chinese history.

because Italy, she felt, was the past and being in the past gave Hazzard a sense of deep belonging. ‘If you come to live there,’ says Jenny in The Bay of Noon, ‘come to know it, you will live in other times.’ For the next five decades, Hazzard spent half the year in Italy, principally in ‘dear lovely, loved’ Capri, the kingdom of Tiberius.

After her stories appeared in the New Yorker, Hazzard was able to leave her loathed job at the United Nations. In 1963, Muriel Spark introduced her to the Flaubert scholar Francis Steegmuller. Twenty-five years older than Hazzard, Steegmuller was the personification of ‘other times’. Tall and austere, he dressed beautifully, knew everyone, and drove a Rolls Royce. Hazzard, aged thirty-two, had at last found a husband.

The Steegmullers were culture itself, civilisation at its highest. In London they stay in the Connaught, in Rome at the Hassler, in Paris they have a room in the Ritz (‘ordinarily that of the Comtesse de la Rochfoucauld’, Hazzard explains, ‘absent in winter’), in Florence they are the guests of Harold Acton. The Rolls accompanies them on their European jaunts, driven by hired chauffeurs. Hazzard’s diaries now pay less attention to her emotional weather and more to listing the names of the VIPs they mix with. Over a randomly selected two pages of the biography, we learn that on a stretch of deserted beach near San Raphael the Steegmullers run into the brother of Isadora Duncan; in the Château de Castille near Uzès they sleep beneath a painting by Leger; in Venice they discuss Cocteau with Peggy Guggenheim, and in London they dine with the Trillings and Isaiah Berlin, and talk about the Nobel Prize for Literature. The dreariness of the name-dropping is occasionally relieved by a catty observation. The wife of Anthony Burgess, for example, affected ‘a bohemianism I’d have thought about 50 years out of date’.

As the routine of their ‘lovely life’, as her mother bitterly called it, takes hold, Hazzard disappears into her Missoni jackets and Ferragamo shoes. She has become a double act, and Olubas is now effectively writing a joint biography. Was the marriage a success? On one level, yes, but there were no children and Steegmuller, as Hazzard learned, was largely homosexual. She described in her diaries ‘the crushing, the neurotic coldness and moodiness’, but, as Olubas puts it in a magnificent sentence,

What remains, and remains important for Shirley Hazzard’s life and work, is that she found happiness in marriage to a man with inclinations towards literary and artistic figures and subjects marked by complexity rather than transparency, with a preference for the undisclosed rather than the vaunted truth, interests that drew her to him, which she shared.

Hazzard was furious with Patrick White for describing her life as ‘unusually charmed … writing away in your NY apartment and Capri villa while collecting your celebrities and charmers and pairing them off around the world’. ‘Patrick,’ she said, ‘knows

nothing of our life.’ One of the things he knew nothing of was the ongoing saga with Kit, Hazzard’s now bipolar mother, whose daily care fell to the Australian writer Elizabeth Harrower, who became an epistolary friend of Hazzard’s until she was invited by the Steegmullers to Italy and relations broke down. In her handling of this material, Olubas is at her most sensitive, not least because Hazzard’s disregard of her mother and condescension towards Harrower was, from the start, appalling.

It is hard to get the measure of Hazzard as a friend. Her routine monologues, we soon realise, stifled the voices of her companions, making intimacy a chore. She was disliked from the start by Elizabeth Hardwick and Diana Trilling, who equally disliked one another, and she fell out with Muriel Spark, who fell out with everyone. She was not a feminist, and Olubas notes that she lacked sympathy for the wives in the love triangles she wrote about, as well as the love triangles she involved herself in.

Olubas’s style in this elegant and powerful biography is to show Hazzard in both light and shade, while never taking her eye off the writing. For example, if the critic Don Anderson noted Hazzard’s ‘apparent ignorance of contemporary Australian thought and letters’, her correspondence with Harrower, Olubas tells us, ‘reveals a sustained and detailed discussion of Australian political and cultural affairs’. Radiant reviews of Hazzard’s ‘Tolstoian’ achievements are balanced against the warier responses, such as John Docker’s opinion of Greene on Capri (ABR, October 2000): ‘The book claws at the reader, calling admire me, admire me.’ The only time I am not persuaded by Olubas’s judicial fairness is when she suggests that Hazzard was as interested in ordinary folk as she was in her cultured friends. The telling detail is that she would apparently bring ‘a little girl or an old lady’ back to her apartment in Capri, and ‘give them copies of her books’.

After Steegmuller’s death, aged eighty-eight, in 1994, Hazzard began work on The Great Fire (2003), her fourth and final novel, which won the National Book Award in New York, and the Miles Franklin Award in Australia. It was described by one critic as ‘the masterpiece of a vanished age of civility’, which might be said of Hazzard herself.

Hazzard, who died in 2016, suffered in her final years from dementia; in a painful image, Olubas describes her sitting in a café in Capri, not knowing where she is. Predeceased by all her friends and increasingly alone and penniless, there was a desperate sadness to the last decade, but also a sense of completion. Hazzard’s life ended as it began, with an isolated figure in the margins, yearning for the centre. g

Frances Wilson is an award-winning biographer and the author of six books, the most recent being Burning Man: The ascent of D.H. Lawrence (2021). This article, one of a series of ABR commentaries addressing cultural and political subjects, was funded by the Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund.

Shirley Hazzard, 2007 (Christopher Peterson via Wikimedia Commons)

The vein of betrayal

A deft memoir of infidelity

Johanna Leggatt

Infidelity and Other Affairs

by Kate Legge Thames & Hudson $34.99 pb, 210 pp

When journalist Kate Legge’s husband of twenty-five years – former Fairfax CEO Greg Hywood – cheated on her with one of her girlfriends, she was discouraged from taking revenge in her most natural of forums: the printed word. Legge, who at the time worked as a features writer at The Australian newspaper, was lucky enough to have a wise adviser and fellow wordsmith discourage her from an impetuous dash to publish and be damned, or what Legge refers to as ‘every writer’s therapeutic reflex’. Instead, Legge, aware that the aftermath of an affair is not the time for momentous declarations or public confessions – and wanting to protect their two sons – adopts a double life: smiling grimly through workdays and functions, while internally afflicted by grief, self-hatred, fury, and an increased vigilance of her husband and his devices. When she discovers not one but two mistresses, she forwards the emails of one paramour to the other, puncturing any fantasies that they were unique in Hywood’s eyes.

Infidelity and Other Affairs was written more than a decade after Legge’s marriage came apart. While the work benefits from hindsight, it is clear the wound is yet to fully heal, although Legge is impressively restrained when meting out blame. The deceit must have been breathtaking. She was with Hywood for close to three decades; longer than she had known her own mother, who died when she was twenty-three. They enjoyed a life of shifting addresses, of setting up home in foreign cities and re-establishing routines and journalism careers in new places. They enjoyed a circle of close friends and holidayed with other couples. Hywood’s betrayal was with a woman whom Legge had once considered a close friend. Legge is a stylish writer, given to thoughtful and considered expression, and yet the most powerful moments are ones of telling brevity: ‘He called us quits,’ she writes after Hywood, whom Legge still calls her husband, moves to Sydney to helm a media company. When a letter of apology arrives from the mistress on grey Basildon Bond notepaper, Legge informs us drily: ‘I shredded it.’

Mercifully, the recounting of the affair is more than just a tragic story of broken vows and its impact on children. Legge does well to bring a freshness to a well-worn subject that this critic doubted was possible. Engaging and revealing, Legge spares us the sordid details of her husband’s trysts but exposes the full range of her emotional intelligence and her willingness to renounce the intoxicating role of victim and explore her cul-

pability for the state of the union. There are attempts at making the marriage work – reigniting the passion through lingerie and marriage therapy – and the expression of these stories seems fundamental to Legge’s sense of self. Like many writers, she has an urgent need for truth-telling, to pen the impact of a trauma for her own sake rather than the sugar hit of revenge or to meet an audience’s desire for prurient details. She discovers a lineage of infidelity in her husband’s family history, and chides herself for not perceiving Hywood’s potential for deceit sooner:

I gave no thought to the vein of betrayal coursing through my husband’s family. There was a story that his grandmother on his father’s side had also taken a lover. If I had done my homework, I would perhaps have been better prepared for the possibility that monogamy would pinch at my husband’s toes.

The book proceeds in a haphazard fashion during its second half, with an extended essay devoted to Hywood’s family history of infidelity and how this exposure may have shaped his own proclivities. Yet the notion that infidelity has a genealogical component is not fully explored beyond a couple of cited studies and Legge’s question that just as ‘violence, addiction, political allegiance and even vocations’ may filter through generations, why not infidelity as well? Subsequent chapters are devoted to her family upbringing, her mother’s mental illness and early death, her father’s assuredness, and an uncle caught up, tragically, in the Petrov Affair. Legge shares her fears about climate change and her disdain for her former newspaper’s coverage of the environment, which prompted her retirement from the masthead. We read about her predilection for the occasional joint and the joys, discovered later in life, of walking in nature, of living alone.

These later essays lack the emotional honesty of the first one hundred pages – their insights are quotidian and hardly ground-breaking – and seem crudely tacked on to what is essentially a deft memoir of betrayal. Legge’s work would have benefited from a structural edit to develop a through-line binding the second half of the book to the first. Instead, the reader discovers early in the book the nature and outcome of her relationship with Hywood (and what he thinks of her writing this book, whose title he suggested), a denouement that signifies a natural conclusion to the work. As the work proceeds without this tension, the essays feel deflated, even rushed.

There is a clear intention, perhaps desperation on the publisher’s part, to turn Legge into Australia’s answer to American writer Lisa Taddeo – the covers are strikingly similar – with the press release proclaiming: ‘What Lisa Taddeo did for female desire, Kate Legge does for adultery.’ Taddeo is the author of the mesmerising Three Women (2019), a story that came together after painstaking research and immersive interviews conducted over many years. Legge gains nothing from such a poor comparison. She is not Taddeo – nor is she trying to be. There is much to admire about this work, but the structural issues and the attempt to shoehorn Infidelity and Other Affairs into the mould of another writer detract from the work and leaves the potential of the book largely unrealised. g

Johanna Leggatt is a Melbourne-based journalist and editor.

An edgy affair

J.M. Coetzee and Neoliberal Culture

by Andrew Gibson Oxford University Press

£70 hb, 279 pp

Anyone who has read J.M. Coetzee’s Diary of a Bad Year (2007) will vividly recall the character Alan – annoyingly brash, unethical, self-serving and sexist; one of a new generation of tech-savvy investment consultants. For British academic, literary critic, and writer Andrew Gibson, in this new study of Coetzee, these are among the typical traits of neoliberal individualism that Coetzee’s body of writing resists and critiques. Gibson characterises contemporary global neoliberalism as having led not just to the impoverishment of modern culture but to a lack of planetary care, resulting in climate change, precarity, and depleted resources. The book’s dustjacket brings these issues closer to home; it features an apocalyptic image of the thick orange smoke from the 2019 bushfires at the New South Wales coastal town of – appropriately – Eden. (Gibson was in Australia at this time as a Visiting Professor at the J.M. Coetzee Centre for Creative Practice in Adelaide.)

Gibson describes himself as a ‘neophyte’ in Coetzee studies, having only started reading his novels in 2005 while staying at the home of a colleague in Paris, a belated response to the exhortations of his friend, Coetzee scholar Yoshiki Tajiri, to read them. This enables him to propose new readings of Coetzee’s literary works from a more contemporary and global perspective, signalling, for the most part, his difference from those critics who came before. He aims to move away from interpretative literary criticism to what he calls interventionist criticism via the method of ‘strong reading’ proposed by Jean-Jacques Lecercle. For Gibson, this involves focusing on a particular problem – that of how to resist neoliberal culture usefully – and then to ‘work alongside’ Coetzee’s work, by analysing the literary means by which the texts

perform this ‘politics of the aesthetic’ (Jacques Rancière’s term).

Gibson finds echoes of his own almost polemical critique of neoliberal culture in his readings of Coetzee, whose thought, he writes, ‘is at odds with the normative parameters of disingenuous neoliberal discourse’. He admits, though, that this critique may often be identified more as a tone in the writing than as direct thematic engagement. Even so, he proposes nothing less than ‘a Coetzeean ontology’ that includes its own ‘especial form of dissidence’, emphasising the heft and contemporary importance of Coetzee’s literary work.

The book’s preface makes the case for the continuing relevance of such a critique despite what Gibson suggests might seem like the incipient ending of neoliberalism in recent times. While neoliberalism is most often regarded in terms of economic theory (think Thatcherism or Reaganomics), he is interested in neoliberal culture, an interest informed by his considerable knowledge of and expertise in philosophical, socio-political, cultural, theological, and literary theory. Although the style is somewhat dense and the text replete with references to the likes of Schopenhauer, Kant, Derrida, Foucault, and Badiou, it has a more informal tone at times, using examples from popular culture that make it more accessible.

Gibson repeatedly poses questions about his own method as well as about the nature of neoliberal culture and the role of criticism. He carefully avoids the reductive assertion that Coetzee is simply antagonistic to neoliberal constructions of subjectivity, despite describing him as seemingly ‘allergic’ to those qualities of contemporary culture that ‘afflict him, not just with distaste, but [with] a kind of horror’. Rather, he states that Coetzee ‘takes the neoliberal terms on board and turns them inside out’, an approach that takes into account the writer’s characteristic ambiguity and refusal of an either/or. This is neatly evidenced in the book’s first chapter that focuses on Coetzee’s autobiographical writings. Gibson notes, for example, that the wannabe writer ‘John’ in Youth (2002) is not portrayed merely as a ‘loser’ in a world of apparent winners, but that he accumulates strength of character quietly and secretly, in what Gibson calls a ‘constructive process’ of finding his subjectivity and his writerly voice. This is a finely tuned reading of Youth’s tone.

Furthermore, in contrasting the commodified neoliberal ‘self-promoting subject’ with Coetzee’s self-presentation, Gibson suggests that the writing ‘points in a different direction to it, if a painful one’ (my emphasis). So he insists on Coetzee’s refusal to take the moral high ground – or to adhere to the ‘good story’

J.M. Coetzee’s ‘especial form of dissidence’ Sue Kossew

David Harold Tribe Poetry Award $12,000 for

unpublished poem.

of positive self-representation and ‘boosterism’ that neoliberalism promotes – while also drawing attention to his awareness of ‘certain [writerly] duties and responsibilities’ in relation to truth-telling. This insightfully captures the counter-currents in Coetzee’s writing of the self.

Each chapter considers an aspect of neoliberal culture in relation to strategic readings of selected Coetzee texts. Gibson does not claim to present a ‘totalizing’ study of the works but, rather, aims to use his method ‘tactically’ so as not to ‘overpower’ the writing with the criticism. His readings are prefaced by in-depth explications of an element of neoliberalism by means of a historicised or theoretical account. So, for example, in the chapter entitled ‘Sobriety and the New Eudaemonism’ he contrasts neoliberalism’s commercialisation of happiness with the ancient Greek-derived moral virtue of eudaemonia (living well and productively within society). The contemporary pseudo-scientific ‘happiness industry’, he suggests, was generated by the positive psychology movements prevalent in the United States in the 1990s. He reads Waiting for the Barbarians (1980) and Slow Man (2005) as profoundly at odds with this trend and, instead, as incorporating themes he sees as central to much of Coetzee’s writing: states of shock, the ‘unliveable life’, and catastrophe.

This contextualised approach through multiple disciplines proffers, in some cases, new ways of reading Coetzee’s texts. His analysis of The Lives of Animals (1999) and Elizabeth Costello (2003), for example, under the rubric of ‘the refusal of theodicy’, presents a number of original insights. In the case of other texts, Gibson’s analysis provides not so much a radical rethinking as a suddenly illuminating phrase, such as his reference to Magda’s ‘aesthetics of impoverishment’ in In the Heart of the Country (1977). While approaching the work from a new angle, he comes to many of the same conclusions that other scholars have arrived at – its refusal to offer comforting answers to big questions, its lack of resolution, its tone of radical doubt, and its avoidance of fixed positions. This is summed up by Gibson’s comment that reading Coetzee ‘turns out, again and again, to be an edgy affair’.

In considering the role of literature – and, I suspect, literary criticism – in the age of the Anthropocene, Gibson proposes that what matters is whether it ‘asks sufficiently awkward questions

about our unthinking confidence in the human being – its freedom and its rights’. He clearly backs Coetzee’s oeuvre as doing exactly this, outlining the subtle and various ways that the writing provides a corrective to the kinds of lazy thought that he identifies in this book. Whilst it is not always easy reading, inviting as it does hard thinking about Coetzee’s literary works and about theories of contemporary society, this new study emphatically, even pas-

sionately, re-emphasises the continuing global relevance of Coetzee’s literary-politico-philosophical corpus. At the same time, Gibson makes a persuasive case for the importance of nuanced and complex literature in general, and for what he calls ‘imaginative reason’, in a post-truth world. For all these reasons, this book deserves our serious attention. g

Sue Kossew is Emeritus Professor at Monash University and the co-editor (with Melinda Harvey) of Reading Coetzee’s Women (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019).

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Queen Elizabeth II receives J.M. Coetzee at Buckingham Palace, 2000 (Fiona Hanson/PA Images/Alamy)

No cause for optimism

Shifting allegiances in Eleanor Dark’s work

Susan Sheridan

Middlebrow Modernism: Eleanor Dark’s interwar fiction

by Melinda J. Cooper Sydney University Press

$45 pb, 288 pp

In recent years there has been a resurgence of interest in Eleanor Dark (1901–85), which singles her out from the group of women who dominated the Australian literary scene in the 1930s and 1940s, and attends to the literary significance as well as the political and historical contexts of her work. While Miles Franklin and Katharine Susannah Prichard have been the subject of massive biographies, there have been no major critical studies of their writing. Their contemporaries such as Nettie Palmer, Jean Devanny, M. Barnard Eldershaw, and Dymphna Cusack have fallen out of sight. But since the publication of Eleanor Dark: A writer’s life by Barbara Brooks in 1998, there has been a steady stream of essays and book chapters, a special issue of the journal Hecate, a second biography, and now a critical monograph on the work of this novelist.

As well as the intrinsic interest of Dark’s ten novels, the establishment of a writers’ retreat at her former home Varuna, in the Blue Mountains, has no doubt contributed to this upsurge of attention. A further factor has been the re-emergence of modernism and modernity as key issues in literary studies, and a concern to reposition the study of Australian literature outside a nationalist paradigm so as to enter more fully into this transnational conversation.

This is the context of Melinda Cooper’s scholarly study of the ‘middlebrow modernism’ of Dark’s interwar novels. This apparently contradictory term signals its thesis that Dark ‘repackaged experimental devices and progressive ideas in accessible and entertaining stories’ that ‘provided readers with a winning combination of both quality and entertainment’. Middlebrow Modernism focuses more on the ideas than on readers’ reception of the novels, with chapters offering an extended analysis of each of Dark’s first six titles.

Eleanor Dark was born in Sydney in the year of Federation: a ‘modern girl’. Her father, Dowell O’Reilly, was known as a writer as well as an advocate of women’s suffrage, and her education encouraged creative as well as scholastic and sporting achievements. On leaving school, Dark set herself an apprenticeship in writing magazine stories. Cooper’s discussion of these stories suggests that the young writer made free use of romantic conventions to explore the optimistic possibilities that modern life opened up to women. They led to Dark’s first published novel, Slow Dawning (1932), whose heroine is a young woman struggling to establish her first medical practice and assert her right to an independent life in a country town in the 1920s. Quintessentially modern in its

focus on female independence, but stylistically conventional, this novel was later disowned by its author as she strove to establish herself as a serious writer.

By the time Slow Dawning appeared, some years after its composition, Eleanor had been married for a decade to Eric Dark, a doctor who was a veteran of World War I. They lived in Katoomba with their son, Michael, and Eric’s son by his first marriage. Eleanor’s outlook on life was changing, as was her husband’s. With the onset of the Great Depression, the rise of fascism and the threat of war in Europe, the Darks came to share a commitment to socialist humanism. Eric wrote about health and social justice, and Eleanor was active in combating censorship with the Fellowship of Australian Writers.

Her novels of the 1930s followed Slow Dawning in rapid succession: Prelude to Christopher (1934), Return to Coolami (1936), Sun Across the Sky (1937), Waterway (1938). These novels extended her initial interest in marriages and small communities, but involved wider circles of characters and conflicts of social class and political allegiance, engaging with current social and political ideas. Modernity was no longer cause for optimism.

What makes these novels distinctively modernist is the mode of writing: its focus on the characters’ inner lives, their emotions, sensations, dream states, and differing perspectives. In Waterway, for instance, a group of characters – ranging from an ageing professor to a group of children, from the local doctor to a radical journalist to an unemployed working-class man, from an abused wife to an idle socialite – all live at Watsons Bay. Their various lives are disrupted, on a single day, by a demonstration against unemployment in the city and a fatal ferry accident on the journey home.

It seems that for Dark this novel, with its harbour setting and epigraphs taken from early colonial historical records, set her on the path to the historical trilogy inaugurated in 1941 with The Timeless Land, her best-known work. While Waterway’s glance at Sydney’s past makes no mention of the original inhabitants, The Timeless Land sets itself the challenge of creating Aboriginal characters and imagining their reactions to the arrival of the invaders.

Cooper includes it in her study of the interwar fiction because it shows up both the power and the problems raised by ‘Dark’s liberal humanist vision and middlebrow modernist aesthetics’. She demonstrates the appropriation involved in modernist primitivism, that envisaged ‘an indigenised settler community’ that would draw strength from the very culture that it was in the process of destroying.

While it is good to see Dark treated as a writer seriously engaged with ideas, and as part of a wider, and more widely defined, modernist movement, I am baffled by the attractions of the category of ‘middlebrow’. This belittling epithet surely belongs in the 1920s, its point of origin. It was revived in recent years as a way of rescuing writers, mainly women, who were not deemed to measure up to the exacting standards of experimental modernism. It has been used, too, to characterise aspects of publishing. But as a central critical term in accounting for Dark’s distinctive qualities as a writer? I am less than fully convinced. g

Susan Sheridan’s latest book is The Fiction of Thea Astley (2016).

The books that Bolton

A legendary Canberra bibliophile

Brenda Niall

made

A Maker of Books: Alec Bolton and his Brindabella Press

by Michael Richards National Library of Australia

$49.99 hb, 471 pp

‘Ihear that those new people have decided to have books in their library,’ remarked Edith Wharton disdainfully. That put-down, from an eminent novelist and book lover who was also a wealthy member of upper-class New York society, was delivered without ambiguity in the 1920s. The ‘new people’ were using books as interior decoration. They would never disturb the display of handsome volumes in their unused library by taking one from the shelf. Could they even read? Probably not, Wharton thought: they had been too busy making money.

Today, Wharton’s words no longer carry the same dismissive meaning. It is indeed possible to have a library without books in it, assuming that the definition of a book involves paper and print. We have e-books and talking books. Last time I looked around the magnificent domed Reading Room at the State Library of Victoria, most of the readers were intent on their screens. Today’s joys, which include Trove and other digitised sources, have changed the scholar’s world, and mostly for the better. There are losses – the serendipity of finding a misplaced or unknown document might be one. Touching the original of a letter, even with a gloved hand, brings its writer closer. Another loss is the diminished companionship in a Manuscripts Room. But does anyone really want to be an internet Luddite?

There needn’t be a choice. As well as the newer ways of transmission, the book in its traditional form still flourishes. There are books in the National Library of Australia, as always. The Library now celebrates fifty years as a publisher with the remarkable story of Alec Bolton, the first director of its publishing program.

Michael Richards’s fine scholarly work A Maker of Books: Alec Bolton and his Brindabella Press isn’t a conventional biography. There is far more about the books than the man. Richards might more accurately have chosen as title: ‘The Books that Alec Bolton Made’. Yet he doesn’t spend much time on the books that Bolton published for the Library. The real subject is Bolton’s passion for letterpress printing, which first of all gave him a weekend vocation and, on his retirement from the Library at the age of sixty-one, brought him an absorbing new life.

A book doesn’t exist until it’s published. How it is published is part of its meaning. For Bolton, a dedicated maker of books, it was a struggle for perfect unity between the text and its chosen paper, typeface, page design, jacket, or cover. Richards celebrates Bolton’s creation, the Canberra-based Brindabella Press. In telling the story of the press, he gives a number of case studies that show how Bol-

ton brought authors and designers together in creative enthusiasm. Richards’s book is often over-informative for all but the specialist reader. Few will want to know that Geoffrey Serle’s Percival Serle was ‘machine-set in Monotype Baskerville by FitzHarding–Bailey with 2 point leading’. Yet the author’s admiration for Brindabella and its creator lights up the book and kindles interest in a quixotic project.

The author’s admiration for Brindabella and its creator lights up the book

Bolton began his career at Angus & Robertson in Sydney in 1950, when the redoubtable Beatrice Davis ruled, and the editorial team was talented, dedicated, and alert to new writing from Australian authors. It was there that Bolton met the gifted poet Rosemary Dobson. Their marriage in 1951 began a remarkable and happily united partnership in life and art. They were both creators for whom the words on the page were as essential as the air they breathed. Their time at Angus & Robertson was a crucial period in Australian literature. In that small, struggling, and underrated world, the ties between author and publisher were close, though not always easy. Davis expected her editors to be ‘patient and self-effacing’. If any rewriting was needed, it had to be in the author’s own voice. With that background, Bolton was well equipped to deal equably with the people he brought together for his Brindabella books. All aspects of design and production, the paper, typeface and binding as well as the nature, size, colour and placing of illustrations, had to be brought into the right relation with one another.

Once or twice, Bolton miscalculated. Eager to enlist the Adelaide writer and wood engraver Barbara Hanrahan in his Brindabella list, he invited her to work on a collection of poems by Canberra poet and academic Dorothy Green. Writing to Hanrahan, he warned of the risk that ‘a powerful artist might run away with the book’. With tactless candour, he said that the illustrations should be subordinate to the text. Back from Hanrahan came a firm disagreement. She wasn’t an illustrator, Hanrahan said, and she could not accept the principle that her engravings should be subordinate to Green’s poems. Text and illustrations should be equally strong. Moreover, she could only work with ‘writing that [she] related to intensely and felt deeply about’. Bolton took the rebuff calmly. What Dorothy Green thought is not recorded. Bolton found another artist for Green’s book, and after some time had passed he went back to Hanrahan with an open offer, asking her to choose any Australian author for whose work she felt an affinity. Hanrahan didn’t hesitate. ‘I would love to do Shaw Neilson,’ she wrote. The result was one of Brindabella’s most beautiful books. The engraving for Neilson’s ‘The Orange Tree’ won special praise.

All in all, the Brindabella Press was a happy experience that ended with Alec Bolton’s sudden death in 1996. It never made money for its creator, but many of its books survive as collectors’ items that show what a book can be when words and images unite in perfect harmony. g

Brenda Niall’s most recent book is My Accidental Career (Text Publishing, 2022).

The power of narrative

The storification of reality

Killian Quigley

Seduced by Story: The use and abuse of narrative

by Peter Brooks New York Review Books

US$17.95 pb, 176 pp

One of the more addictive podcasts I heard in 2022 was BBC Radio 4’s The Coming Storm, a history of the QAnon conspiracy theory and its connection to the attack on the US Capitol in January 2021. In a late episode, host Gabriel Gatehouse ponders the disturbing implications of his topic for how we think about narratives, and about the role narratives play in all our lives. ‘In a democracy,’ he says, ‘the winner is not always the one who has the best ideas. The winner is the one who tells the best story – and QAnon, this tale of a looming battle between good and evil, that’s the stuff of myths and legends.’

It is not news that stories matter – for identities, knowledges, and cultures as much as for politics. The Coming Storm’s great insight will therefore strike many of us as partly trivial. Still, Gatehouse’s worry points to a growing consensus that we inhabit historically fractured narrative worlds, where the varied tales we hear and tell may be growing increasingly, even violently, incommensurable. Right or wrong, this view exemplifies what the critic and novelist Peter Brooks terms the ‘narrativist position’ in contemporary thought, a dominant tendency to understand life and culture as not just reflected in stories but constituted by them. Where this tendency comes from, and whatever are its merits, are the subjects of Brooks’s compelling, if ultimately frustrating, new book.

Brooks begins Seduced by Story: The use and abuse of narrative with two premises. The first is that from popular art to political propaganda to corporate branding and everywhere in between, story and storytelling have become public culture’s prevailing energies. Brooks sees this development as ‘the storification of reality’, and he recounts awakening to it while listening to George W. Bush introduce the members of his first Cabinet. ‘Each person has got their own story that is so unique,’ pronounced the new president of his appointees, ‘stories that really explain what America can and should be about.’ At once numbingly bland and alarmingly ideological, this is the sort of calculatedly fuzzy ‘storying’ that troubles Brooks and that, he convincingly shows, should trouble the rest of us as well.

Seduced by Story’s second opening premise is that the ‘narrative takeover’ of the societal mainstream has esoteric origins. Over the last few decades of the twentieth century, numerous academic fields turned toward ‘narrativity’ as a crucial (and previously undervalued) analytic in not only literary studies but psychology, sociology, anthropology, and so on. What makes Brooks’s account of this phenomenon unusually interesting is the fact that he was

pivotally involved in it. With books like Reading for the Plot: Design and intention in narrative (1984), Brooks built an influential career arguing that stories are key features of how we all experience ‘human temporality’ and strive to articulate ‘meaning in general’. This new book is, therefore, a kind of personal as well as intellectual reckoning with narrative turns and what may be their less salubrious legacies.

Hope consists, for Brooks, in making us better critics. In popular media as in novels, stories that fail to live up to fundamental principles of narrative credibility – or that flout such principles altogether – deserve our contempt. For something more integral, Brooks looks to literary fiction that functions not only to ‘absorb’ its audiences but to prompt ‘reflection’ on ‘how stories come to us and work on us’. Pre-eminent among the creators of such metafictions are Marcel Proust, William Faulkner, and, above all, Henry James, each of whom takes the problem of understanding the world through storytelling as the ultimate theme of the stories they tell. Brooks calls this the problem of ‘narrative epistemology’, and his favourite subjects are those that dramatise its difficulties with persuasive force.

Brooks’s deepest concern is not that we overrate the ‘cognitive value’ of stories but that we fundamentally misconstrue that value. The idea that narratives are spontaneous expressions of unfiltered worldly knowledge is a seriously naïve one. It becomes profoundly dangerous when exploited by powerful interests – politicians, partisan media outlets, and corporate PR squads, say – who treat story as though it were immune to critical scrutiny. Here, Brooks writes, is where our superlative prose fictions show their extraordinary and enduring worth. Far from presuming to boil life’s meanings down into smoothly consumable form, these are stories that stage and restage the ‘vertiginous drama’ that our search for such comprehension actually entails.

This is an argument on behalf of a specific and – Brooks would have us recognise – uniquely novelistic type of realism. Evidence arrives from the psychological sciences, which teach us (among other things) that invented characters afford their readers perspectives on life and self that ‘real persons’ may not. It bears iterating that for Seduced by Story, these insights do not reach us as neatly assimilable data but as unstable, ‘tricky’ knowledge that issues from the dynamic circumstances of a narrative’s being shared and received, or what Brooks memorably calls ‘the living situation of storytelling’.

Storytelling’s situations are lively, and Brooks is dead right both to remind us of this truth and to sensitise us to its occlusion. But if Seduced by Story succeeds in alerting us to the fact that story is rampaging, ‘unanalyzed’, throughout ‘contemporary reality’, in the end the book is not equal to its subject’s phenomenal scope. A final chapter, ‘Further Thoughts: Stories in and of the Law’, offers some preliminary notes toward a literary theory of legal narratives while ironically implying – in its furthering – that these are basically extraneous to story’s true home in the novel. One imagines Bush declaring, in smug response to Brooks’s entreaties, that the tales he deploys just aren’t fictions – and so what? We need a good answer, and we await it still. g

Killian Quigley is a research fellow at the Australian Catholic University’s Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences.

The wider web

A topical début thriller

Laura Elizabeth Woollett

coincidental first meeting, days after her sighting of the corpse. While we are clearly not meant to trust Bryce, Reagan tentatively does, out of some ineffable combination of hope, loneliness, and vulnerability. Their tepid courtship is rife with tension, as Reagan is torn between caution and the desire to open up. Blunt expertly captures the double bind of intimacy in the shadow of trauma, and it is through Reagan’s relationship with Bryce, and the selftalk and second-guessing surrounding it, that she becomes most plausible.

Dark Mode

by Ashley Kalagian Blunt Ultimo Press

$34.99 pb, 389 pp

An early-morning jogger. An alleyway. A young woman’s mutilated body. A set-up familiar enough to warrant its own Television Tropes category (‘Jogger Finds Death’). Yet before catching sight of the latter-day Black Dahlia being pecked at by ibises somewhere off Enmore Road, unlucky passerby Reagan Carsen is caught in a spider’s web: a simple but effective visual metaphor for the wider web that connects her to the first victim of the fictional ‘Sydney Dahlia’ serial killings.

More compelling than the question of whodunit, initially, is Reagan’s bizarre reaction to her discovery. She is panicked by the victim’s resemblance (or imagined resemblance) to herself. She refrains from calling the police, fearful of being tied to the scene and interrogated. While far from heartless – she notes the colour of the victim’s nail polish, shoos a scavenging bird – Reagan chooses to flee, leaving the corpse exposed to the elements on a sweltering Sunday morning.

Following on from a memoir, How to Be Australian (2020), and a thriller novella, My Name Is Revenge (2018), Dark Mode is the first full-length crime novel of Canadian-born Sydney-based author Ashley Kalagian Blunt. Though billed as a psychological thriller for the online age, the action of Dark Mode is largely IRL. Beginning exactly seventy years after the original Black Dahlia murder, in the days surrounding Donald Trump’s inauguration, as Sydney experiences record high temperatures, Dark Mode is a self-aware crime novel that wears its influences and politics openly. Blunt’s pre-#MeToo Sydney is a powder keg of misogyny, offline and on.

Despite Dark Mode’s lurid opening, readers drawn to the promise of dark-web intrigue may find its fulfilment slow, as Blunt takes her time world-building and establishing her protagonist’s backstory. Reagan is a well drawn if unorthodox inner-city twenty-six-year-old: bankrolled by her emotionally withholding mother, she runs an ailing hipster plant shop, lives alone, and has few contacts. She is also scarred by a mid-noughties chatroom relationship gone wrong, to the point of opting to use a dumbphone, pay in cash, and have no personal email address. That is, until business concerns and the polite encouragement of digital marketing whiz love interest Bryce cause her to let down her guard.

Bryce is simultaneously bland and too-good-to-be-true. ‘He was almost attractive, though something was a touch off […]. The dimensions of his face, maybe,’ Reagan observes upon their

Aside from Bryce, Reagan’s only intimate connection is with Min Lee Chasse, a friend made during an exchange year in Korea while Reagan was fleeing the horrifying aftermath of her teenage chatroom experience. Min is older and, by Reagan’s own admission, ‘a hundred times more together’ than herself, with a loving husband, a live-in mother, two young children, and a stylish, colourful wardrobe. She is also, conveniently, a true crime author: a narrative expedience that allows her to educate the naïve Reagan on everything from the 1947 murder of Elizabeth Short to online child porn rings, and to draw on a network of detectives, reporters, and hackers when necessary.

Acceptance of Min as a character and of her friendship with Reagan requires a level of suspended disbelief on par with the novel’s central conceit, of a Black Dahlia copycat serial killer operating in Sydney in 2017. Min often seems more like an expositional device than a living, breathing human with complex motivations and frustrations of her own, and the dynamic between the two women can seem one-dimensional: Reagan is squeamish, Min has a cast-iron gut; Reagan is clueless, Min is a mine of information; Reagan needs help, Min is available. While early on some mention is made of lapsed contact between the women, along with Reagan’s feelings of displacement after Min marries and has kids, in practice, Min is exceptionally present and accommodating of her out-of-touch young friend for a busy mother of two with a thriving career and wide social circle.

Why and how this exchange-year friendship survives despite clashing interests and life stages is never satisfactorily answered. Nor is the question of what Min sees in Reagan. Their relationship gains some verisimilitude partway through the book, when Min confronts Reagan about concealing information. Yet this is a rare moment of push-back. If less emphasis had been placed on Min’s superwoman qualities, and more time devoted to exploring the inbuilt tensions of adult female friendships, as well as fleshing out Min’s attachments and motivations beyond helping Reagan, Min’s large role in the narrative and its denouement would have had more emotional resonance.

In spite of these shortcomings, the second half of the novel succeeds in delivering a series of narrative sucker-punches, in which the intersection between online abuse and real-life violence against women is starkly demonstrated. It is a rich subject, for which Blunt elegantly sets up the possibility of future explorations with her final cliffhanger. If not always convincing, Dark Mode is a captivating and topical crime début that exposes – in the tradition of many great thrillers, from The Stepford Wives to Gone Girl –how deeply some men hate the women who share their beds. g

Laura Elizabeth Woollett’s most recent novel is  The Newcomer  (Scribe, 2021).

Fabulous happenings

Salman Rushdie asserts literature’s freedoms Geordie Williamson

Victory City

by Salman Rushdie Jonathan Cape $32.99 pb, 342 pp

Salman Rushdie has long inspired ambivalence among readers. His talent has never been seriously in question – witness the swift canonisation and enduring affection accorded his second novel, Midnight’s Children (1981) – nor have his bona fides as a public intellectual who has stood against intolerance and cant, even under the threat of death. Yet his body of work has been marked by fictions that run the gamut from interestingly flawed to merely self-indulgent. Now comes his thirteenth adult novel – published in the wake of a brutal public attack by a fanatic nursing a decades-long grievance, which left the author blind in one eye and without the use of a hand – and it proves to be a triumph in every regard. It is as if Rushdie anticipated the threat of violence hanging over him was about to be realised and found courage and focus in that knowledge.

Victory City is a shrewdly constructed tale, ambitious in scope, written in prose that slips between registers with acrobatic litheness. Rarely has a narrative been so unillusioned in its world view, while refusing to relinquish its idealism. Never has Rushdie so successfully married imaginative play and considered political impulse.

The story it tells, of a young girl who is both blessed and cursed by a Hindu goddess with extraordinary longevity and magical powers – a woman of modest birth who grows a great city from a handful of seeds and then presides over its fortunes throughout two and half centuries – combines myth and contemporary concerns, literary experiment and folkloric plainness. The result is a book that makes the old doubts about Rushdie’s work seem petty and wrongheaded.

Just as poet Karthika Naïr’s recent collection Until the Lions rescued from the Mahabharata stories of those relegated to the margins of the original text, so, too, does Rushdie employ an idiosyncratic echoing of that South Asian epic to assert literature’s freedoms in a moment characterised by autocratic drift and rising illiberalism.

The novel’s framing device reinforces this sense of historical reclamation. Readers are told they hold the modern translation of a newly rediscovered text – an ‘immortal masterpiece’ known as the Jayaparajaya (‘Victory and Defeat’), composed in Sanskrit and stored in a clay pot, where it lay, unknown, for four and a half centuries in the ruins of an Indian temple complex. This verse chronicle tells the story of a city, Bisnaga (the ‘Victory City’ of the title), and its people. Bisnaga, we learn, produced a culture of improbable

richness. It was a beacon of tolerance and openness in its time – a pre-Mughal empire which achieved not one but three golden ages. This almost-Utopia was lost to history, claims the translators, until now. Rushdie proceeds to relate Bisnaga’s extended efflorescence as a fiction embedded in the actual fabric of India’s past.

Pampa Kampana, purported author of the epic, is nine years old when her parents die. Her father, a simple potter, is killed during a one-sided battle that saw the destruction of the minor principality in which the family lived. Her mother immolates herself, along with all other women of their village, in ritual suicide following the conflict. The orphan girl is traumatised by these events, but also ennobled by them. A Goddess chooses her as a divine vessel and grants her powers, including an attenuated lifespan, in order that the girl might raise up a great city, and indeed an empire. Pampa does so in a series of swift, miraculous gestures, and the narrative that follows enters the lives of the kings and queens, courtesans and courtiers, astrologers and holy men, street vendors and Portuguese travellers who form its human fabric.

Rushdie, however, is alert to the ways in which pre-modern epics – oral in nature, characterised by repetition, bald coincidence, and what Vladimir Nabokov called ‘fatidic riffs’, in which everything happens in triplicate – can seem over-determined to present-day readers. Instead, he uses the device of the faux translation to brilliant effect. Yes, we are in a world of fabulous happenings – and Rushdie’s prose admits an Ovidian relish for transformation, rendering Bisnaga in unashamed technicolour – but the exegetes of the present keep interrupting the text, apologetically noting that their rendering is but a pale imitation of the original.

Under the cover of their admitted inferiority, Rushdie smuggles in language, concepts, and modes of thought that would have been alien to the chronicle’s author. So it is that a passage of exquisite, courtly prose is given texture by some ironic flourish, obliquely pointing to our political present – that, or a well-placed obscenity or reference to a gastric complaint.

Beyond this tactical bathos, Rushdie, through Pampa, envisions a society in which, if only briefly (and courting the forces of reaction when it does), equality between the sexes becomes settled fact; same-sex relationships are unblinkingly accepted; art, poetry, and music are valued as much as military valour; and religion is welcomed but kept at arm’s length from the state.

This ideal society falls, of course, though it rises again and again before its final dissolution. Such breadth of perspective would be impossible without Pampa’s multi-generational existence. What begins as a bit of playful magical realism takes on increasing emotional heft as the narrative proceeds. Hers becomes an intensely moving account of a life lived halfway between immortality and the tragic restrictions placed upon human life.

There is an eerie quality to the final sections of the novel, in which Pampa, wearying of her efforts and sensing that her city is set to fall, is blinded by her husband, the King, in a moment of madness. It is as this point that Pampa and her creator come to share an affliction. Both have created worlds using nothing but a kind of magic. And both have lived long enough to see their ideal vision snuffed out. Each has suffered defeat, certainly. Yet Pampa and her author remain equally adamant in their refusal to despair. g

Mysteries and motivations

Three new novels

Amarshmallow is a common confectionery, white and pink, made of gelatin, sugar, and water. We put them in hot chocolate, toast them over campfires. Marshmallow is also a plant, Althea officinalis, containing a jelly-like substance which has been used for medicinal purposes as far back as the time of Ancient Egypt. A marshmallow can also describe someone who is soft to a fault, even vulnerable. That there might be anything approaching complexity linked to this word is unlikely, but by the end of Victoria Hannan’s second novel, Marshmallow (Hachette, $29.99 pb, 292 pp), it is obvious that something as apparently innocuous as that confectionery and medicinal ingredient can have many implications; the intriguing title is an early indication that much will be going on, none of it straightforward.

Five close friends are approaching the first anniversary of a devastating event, what should be the third birthday of a child who has died. As this is clear upfront in the novel – as early as page fifteen – the mystery at the heart of the story is not that this happened, but how it happened and, more importantly, why not only the child’s parents but also the other three friends feel as implicated, indeed as guilty, as they do.

In contrast with Kokomo (2020), Hannan’s acclaimed first novel, Marshmallow is a slow burn. Readers who relished the former’s audacious beginning may need to be more patient as the author gradually folds together the intersecting lives of her characters and begins to scatter hints regarding the story’s central crisis. Softened, too, is the sharp wit which, while exhilarating in that first novel, might have been hard to sustain, and risk sounding facile. Set over two days and tightly structured, Marshmallow offers a somewhat more restrained tone and is the better for it. In any case, the subject matter here demands a sober approach.

The key event, the one brief but crucial action that everything else leans towards, which is in the back, middle, and front of the minds of the characters as they go about their respective business, is revealed perfectly (if that is the right word for such a tragedy) about three-quarters of the way through. We all know that people grieve in different ways, and Hannan confronts these miseries head on. For instance, Annie, the mother of the dead boy, is uprooting her beloved front garden the day before his birthday anniversary; the father, Nathan, is off in his own world, addicted to online card games and avoiding work, as well as handling the selfish cold grief of his materialistic parents. Neither is capable

Debra Adelaide

of speaking their child’s name, for obvious reasons, and it is not articulated until late in the novel. ‘Toby,’ Annie finally says, ‘I’m going to make Toby a birthday breakfast.’ It is a heartbreaking moment.

But why should the novel commence not with the parents but with a friend? We meet Al as he is gripped by a Friday morning panic attack anticipating the next day, which ‘would be a year since it happened’. Consumed with anxiety, he obsessively revisits the death of a friend when he was a teenager, then googles news reports of the recent incident. Distanced from his partner, Claire, who is secretly considering accepting a new job in another city, Al is a consummate emotional mess, but as the past unfolds via backstory, it becomes clear why.

Why too should the one remaining friend who was there on the day of the incident, Ev, be the most supportive, practical, and functional of the group? Especially when on the surface she feels the most responsible for the death of the child?

The answer is that there is no ‘how to’ book, brochure, or set of rules for grief, especially when it comes to losing a child. There are no correct words. No script. One of my litmus tests for a good novel is that I learn something yet never suspect the author is trying to instruct me. The great gift of this thoughtful, tender, and moving novel is to expose the maddening emotional effect of suffering, and the illogical, individual, and thus unique way people deal with their common experience of grief. The next time I consume a marshmallow I will pause and reflect on this.

Comparisons may be odious, but here they are unavoidable given the brief. So, by contrast, while Kira McPherson’s first novel, Higher Education (Ultimo Press, $34.99 pb, 323 pp), offers a promising idea, problems of style and structure occur from the start. The protagonist Sam is a law student, struggling with her independence, her sexuality, and her family. So far so good – the coming-of-age narrative is always ripe for exploitation. While academically a high achiever, Sam also feels constrained by her suburban working-class background and thus pursues a mentorship with a woman from a different class, understanding that this will validate her choices, possibly even propel her into insider status in the legal world.

Though promoted as ‘deeply funny’, Higher Education is mostly deadly serious, distinguished by a combination of overthinking as well as limitations of thought. The former is demonstrated in overlong scenes, for example tutorial sessions that might have been intellectually engaging in real life but on the page are the

kiss of death, or intense scrutiny of interactions that simply try too hard; the latter is seen in the consistently short sentences and short paragraphs that prohibit the development of an idea.

Even without the unaffected authority of Marshmallow as a benchmark, Higher Education reads clunkily. The extreme brevity of sentences and paragraphs is exacerbated when the present tense of the main narrative kicks in. This is a shame because there are treasures here, flashes of insight within the unnecessarily detailed scenes and exhausting blow-by-blow dialogue. For instance, the complex dynamics of Sam, her legal mentor, Julia, and her husband, Anselm, are wryly noted: ‘Something that felt unknowable to Sam becomes clear … Anselm and Julia can perform their relationship for her, and she can change it through the act of observation.’ The novel also provides a lively and engaging domestic account of Sam’s family, with her menacing stepfather in particular depicted with great conviction.

My first reading of Laura McPhee-Browne’s Little Plum (Text Publishing, $32.99 pb, 256 pp) was quick and I admit to returning to it reluctantly. I am not an antipresent-tense crusader by any means, but here a deflated style adds nothing to a lean story. The protagonist, Coral, has a destiny defined by her name – her mother is called Topaz, her grandmother Beryl, her best friend Amber – and the story involves a gemstone as a symbolic token. A reporter for a community newspaper, Coral meets Jasper (yes) while on assignment at a crime scene. Soon Coral is pregnant and decides not to inform Jasper or to see him again, yet it is never indicated why she quickly flips from attraction to rejection.

The bulk of the novel tracks the pregnancy with Coral’s curiosity about the creature growing inside her, the ‘little plum’ (provided by an epigraph from Anne Sexton’s poem ‘Hansel and Gretel’), mixed with emotional indifference. Motivations remain unexamined, access to the characters’ interior lives is limited, actions are told rather than shown, distancing us from the story, and while Coral is anxious and naïve, this does not explain the childlike voice of the prose. Towards the end, when a nurse tells Coral her baby is a boy, she ‘doesn’t know what this means’. But she names the baby Flint, presumably tying up the novel’s mineral theme. I was puzzled too. g

Debra Adelaide has published eighteen books, including novels, short fiction, and essays, the most recent of which is The Innocent Reader (2019).

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East–West collisions

A magnificent historical fresco

Mehrdad Rahimi-Moghaddam

Nights of Plague

by Orhan Pamuk, translated by Ekin Oklap Hamish Hamilton

$32.99 pb, 683 pp

Orhan Pamuk’s latest novel, Nights of Plague, is set on a fictitious island called Mingheria, the twenty-ninth state of the Ottoman Empire, located in the Eastern Mediterranean Sea. In 1901, following the order of Sultan Abdul Hamid II, a steamer carrying an eminent Ottoman delegation consisting of various Ottoman officials entrusted with mitigating political animosity between China’s Muslims and European powers sets sail for China.

Notable among the steamer’s passengers are Dr Bonkowski Pasha, the Ottoman Empire’s Chief Inspector of Public Health and Sanitation; his assistant Dr Ilias; Princess Pakize, the newlywed daughter of the deposed Sultan Murad V, and her husband, Prince Consort Doctor Nuri Bey; and Major Kâmil, the officer assigned by the palace to guard the delegation. Soon we learn that Dr Bonkowski Pasha and his assistant Dr Ilias are not headed to China and will disembark at Mingheria to investigate a possible outbreak of the plague.

Populated by Muslims and Orthodox Greeks, Mingheria functions as a microcosm of the Ottoman Empire in its ailing years. Immediately after his arrival, Dr Bonkowski learns that Mingheria’s governor, Sami Pasha, is reluctant to admit the existence of the plague on the island, attributing such claims to domestic and foreign enemies of the Ottoman Empire. Acting as a catalyst, the outbreak polarises the island’s political scene, with Greeks blaming Muslims, and Muslims blaming Greeks.

In Pamuk’s Mingheria, space plays a manifest social and political function, resembling boundaries based on class, religion, and nationality. Muslims and Greeks, Ottoman governors, princes and princesses, pashas, dervishes, sheikhs, pharmacists, romantic nationalists, religious sects, and lodges all have their own space in Pamuk’s fictional island. Whether the plague is discovered in a Greek or Muslim neighbourhood is of crucial importance, for it leads to completely different political intrigues. One is reminded of Franco Moretti’s thesis: ‘Without a certain kind of space, a certain kind of story is simply impossible.’ Pamuk masterfully builds and delineates such a space, laying the groundwork for the interplay of various fissures that marked the final years of the Ottoman Empire. The mysterious murder of Dr Bonkowski Pasha adds another twist to the ongoing tensions.

Upon receiving news of the murder, the Sultan commissions Prince Consort Doctor Nuri to head towards Mingheria, asking him to solve the mystery and contain the outbreak. Arriving on the island and observing developments alongside her husband,

Princess Pakize starts writing letters to her sister, Hatice, in Istanbul. The novel’s purported author, a historian called Mina Mingher, has based her story on these letters. Unanimous denial of the plague by political and religious leaders – who resort to conspiracy theories, exploiting the outbreak to advance political manoeuvrings – the announcement of what we can call the ‘state of exception’ (Giorgio Agamben), formation of Quarantine Regiments, the resistance of the locals and the businesspeople against the quarantine, are described in extensive detail.

Gradually, the quintessential Pamukian theme emerges between the lines: East–West collisions. Whereas in My Name Is Red (1998) the story was focused on two antagonistic artistic camps, those preferring Western-style portraiture rather than traditional court miniatures, in Nights of Plague the central clash is between science and religion – modern-style pharmacists (Société de Pharmacie de Constantinople) versus traditional herbalists; quarantines and lockdowns versus consecrated amulets and talismans; rational calculated approaches to the outbreak versus Fatalism and resignation – which epitomises the discrepancy between West and East. Finding the killer becomes a question of method: Western-style inductive reasoning, dubbed ‘the Sherlock Holmes method’, a favourite of Sultan Abdul Hamid II, versus the traditional flogging of suspects until one of them surrenders and confesses, a method preferred by Governor Sami Pasha. Through these contrasts, Pamuk portrays the final years of the crumbling Ottoman Empire and its gradual and foundational transformation in the face of the West.

Following the blockade imposed on the island by the European powers, lest the plague spread to their own countries, some political figures seize the opportunity to declare Mingheria independent. In the wake of the emergence and establishment of state nationalism, we also witness the spread of nationalism to every corner of the island; the development of Mingherian language; the initiation of onomastic studies to revive age-old Mingherian names; the commissioning of archaeological excavations to discover the history and culture of ancient Mingherians; the indoctrination of the island’s children through its pedagogical institutions; the exclusion and suppression of the island’s national minorities. We see the birth of an ‘imagined community’ (Benedict Anderson) and the ensuing ‘invention of tradition’ (Eric Hobsbawm) in the novel’s second half. The novel’s allegorical structure will be obvious to readers familiar with Türkiye’s contemporary history and Pamuk’s oeuvre. Furthermore, the novel has no dearth of irony, especially in chapters where we witness the ‘Mingherianisation’ policies. The irony at the heart of the second half is displayed in the simultaneous portrayal of a state-imposed nationalism and of its assertions about a primordial Mingherian identity.

Nights of Plague merges historical novel and detective fiction in a slow-burn interwoven plot that requires patience from readers to appreciate its panoramic, multi-layered, and extremely rich world. For readers less conversant with Orhan Pamuk and his penchant for being at once a ‘naïve and sentimental’ novelist, starting with Nights of Plague might be a risky choice. At times, the book’s descriptions seem excessive and repetitive, making the reading experience tedious and exhausting. Readers familiar with Pamuk’s earlier works will also discover his creative genius in this magnificent historical fresco. g

Human constellations

Paul Dalgarno’s chatty ghost

Jennifer Mills

A Country of Eternal Light

by Paul Dalgarno Fourth Estate $32.99 pb, 311 pp

When a book takes its title from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, you can expect the shock of something supernatural. But although Paul Dalgarno’s A Country of Eternal Light is narrated by a dead woman, there is little here to horrify.

Margaret Bryce is a self-conscious and self-questioning narrator. We find her shuffling, or being shuffled, through scenes from her life like old photographs. Neither tragic nor spooky, Margaret is pragmatic, a self-described Episcopalian who soon lets us know her impatience with the whole arrangement, declaring: ‘I don’t believe in souls.’ If she seems uncomfortable in a story like this, that’s part of her charm. While her enthusiasm for eager explanatory digressions sometimes seem to belong more to the author than his character – I sometimes wondered if Margaret had access to some afterlife version of Wikipedia – for the most part this chatty ghost is observant company, both enjoying and perturbed by her memories, determined to puzzle out some pattern or purpose in them. She is doing her accounts, the way the dying often do, setting things right as best she can from the elevated, if slippery, perspective of an afterlife.

In his work so far, Dalgarno has proven himself to be very good at evoking life in its details, particularly the minutiae of human relationships. His previous novel, Poly (2020), was a slow suburban relationship drama, a painfully honest blow-by-blow of the insecurities that can attach to polyamorous relationships. Told with a meticulous and sometimes uncomfortable level of detail, that novel – like its characters – struggled to find a balance between honesty and oversharing, but often found quick redemption in self-effacing humour.

Dalgarno’s strong ear for dialogue and his direct style are a natural fit for domestic realism, so it is encouraging that he has set himself the challenge of writing in a slightly different register here. But even though it looks at death, A Country of Eternal Light remains more interested in the living. This novel is suffused with nostalgia for a Scottish childhood. The textures of a range of times and places – Scotland, Australia, Spain – are carefully interspersed and often beautifully drawn. The emotions are bigger, the scenes more freighted, as Dalgarno tackles heavier subject matter. This book about grief and loss, denial and faith, stays steeped in the dailiness of human existence, tethered to the real.

Dalgarno is primarily interested in families, in the feelings that are fired up or contained by their structures, in how those structures

support or condemn their members. He comes across as psychologically literate, with characters informed by therapeutic models. In these models, we are who we are in constellations with each other, with narratives, and with our pasts.

As in Poly, the daily life of parenting provides the author with endless material. Dalgarno writes the anxiety and delight of raising young children beautifully, and it’s that energy that hums through this book, leading us to the puzzle’s eventual resolution. There must be a resolution, for this ghost wants to be put at rest.

All ghost stories are about justice, and A Country of Eternal Light fulfils the brief, with the narrative culminating towards a reckoning with past wrongs – nothing so dangerous as evil, but the kind of human failure that steers a life off track and can quickly spin a family out of its orbit. The lived consequences of this are tragic for Margaret’s family, with each character hurtling into his or her own variation of traumatic replay.

Like the tales Margaret’s daughter Rachel tells her own children, stories that are a form of play therapy for herself and the children, A Country of Eternal Light has a meandering structure. It can seem sprawling, like her husband’s mind: ‘no beginning or end, a story snagged in medias res’. This can slow the compact novel’s pace, and repeat clues, making the twist a little predictable.

However, the success of a first-person narration comes down to character, and Margaret’s company is a pleasure. Disarmingly direct in a late-life (well, after-life), no-fucks-left way, she’s honest with the reader, even when she’s not being honest with herself. It is always good to meet an older woman in fiction who remains complex and human and flawed, never a victim of her life and never a villain. She is fully embodied to such an extent that she sometimes forgets she doesn’t have a body at all.

There are some irritants, such as the tendency to sing-song in the language, paired words (dropsical/popsicle; nemesis/emesis; an oxcart of oxytocin, and so on) that disrupt the storytelling and add nothing to a sense of character. But when she speaks clearly, the observant, reflective Margaret has a winning combination of carelessness and meticulousness, humour and sorrow. She can be very funny.

Though many fragments from Frankenstein are peppered throughout this novel, the narrative veers away from the monstrous, homing back to the domestic scale and the more forgivable, quotidian crimes of neglect, bitterness, and failure. The idea that the stories we tell are not what they seem is not new, but it is well articulated. That ‘grief drives us out of our minds’ is true enough, even if this novel is ruled by a simpler moral logic, the nineteenth-century reference point perhaps more Charles Dickens than Mary Shelley.

Dalgarno, who works as a journalist and has two books out this year, has no shortage of energy. He has a flair for emotional nuance and much to offer in the way of feeling. A Country of Eternal Light invites the reader to suspend their cynicism and allow the heartstrings to be played. Sentiment steers the reader away from difficult waters, reaching for something very lifelike, but ultimately cleansed of real danger. Dalgarno conjures a tender and warm-hearted world, where – if you can believe it – some light remains in grief, and no one ever really disappears. g

Jennifer Mills is an author, editor, and critic living in Adelaide.

How magical can we be?

Looking for God in the emergency room

Naama Grey-Smith

Tiny Uncertain Miracles

by Michelle Johnston Fourth Estate $32.99 hb, 327 pp

‘The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of true art and true science.’ Albert Einstein wrote these words, originally in German, in his book The World As I See It (1934). He went on to describe the ‘knowledge of the existence of something we cannot penetrate’ as constituting ‘the truly religious attitude’, adding he ‘cannot conceive of a God who rewards and punishes’.

The first of these quotations, and Einstein’s sentiments more broadly, are proffered in Michelle Johnston’s second novel, Tiny Uncertain Miracles. The story is set in the labyrinth of a giant public hospital, where the walls of the wards ‘had deaths fossilised in them like rubble’. Here, protagonist Marick – a guilt-stricken schlemiel estranged from his ex-wife, child, and faith – takes up the role of hospital chaplain. Marick soon befriends Hugo, a hospital scientist who believes the bacteria in his covert basement lab are producing gold. The mystery sparks an unforeseen chain of events, within and without the hospital walls. Meanwhile, a twin narrative gradually unfolds to reveal Marick’s story of love and loss.

The theme of gold at the heart of the work is extended to its presentation. The book’s production is a statement of confidence: unusually for a novel, Tiny Uncertain Miracles is packaged as a sizeable hardcover, with attractive cover artwork printed entirely in gold metallic foil over white Wibalin. The eye-catching motif of tiny, organically clustered particles repeats on the cover, in the golden endpapers, and internally as a section-break glyph. The result is an elegant volume with ample shelf presence that suggests HarperCollins means business.

The intersection of theology, science, and fable – as much historical as it is literary – is apparent from the epigraph page, which quotes from the Book of Job, Isaac Newton’s Praxis, and Rumpelstiltskin by the Brothers Grimm. Each quote mentions gold, but more is suggested: Job is a central text in the theological study of suffering, while Praxis is an alchemical treatise that reminds us that modern science did not emerge whole like Athena out of Zeus’s head but rather was wrested from the jaws of superstition through the persistent application of reason (the British economist John Maynard Keynes wrote that ‘Newton was not the first of the age of reason: he was the last of the magicians’).

The question of meaningless suffering that dogs Marick is amplified tenfold in the setting of an emergency department.

Marick’s first visit as hospital chaplain is to the putrid-smelling room of a sixteen-year-old girl whose life has ended violently. His jaw hangs, ‘slack on its hinges’, as he discovers ‘a different God from the one floating among the sermons and the choirs up the hill’. Stunned, Marick wonders, ‘What sort of God presides over circumstances such as this?’

Johnston, who is a staff specialist at the Royal Perth Hospital Emergency Department and a Professor of Emergency Medicine at St John of God Murdoch Hospital, is well placed to describe the brutal reality of an inner-city trauma centre. Tiny Uncertain Miracles touches on such difficult subjects with a light hand and a gentle tone, delivered through clean, supple, accessible prose. There is a deceptive simplicity to the work, which, on closer inspection, turns out to be the elegance of a right fit. Johnston has skilfully crafted a cohesive and engaging tale.

While I felt confused by various characters’ reactions to the gold-producing bacteria (would the average modern Australian, let alone a scientist like Hugo, posit ‘alchemy’ or ‘miracle’ rather than ‘interesting scientific discovery’?), a series of subplots sweeps the reader along as Johnston explores faith, doubt, and the human hunger for the mysterious.

Years ago, a friend of mine – a scientist studying nanotechnology – described a similar sentiment to me, quoting from the song ‘Hur lyckliga kan vi bli’ (2006) by Swedish singer-songwriter Emil Jensen: ‘How happy can we be / we who know what the stars are made of / And how magical can we be / when we know what brains are made of.’

The reader’s next thought is on the risks this kind of thinking could engender in today’s world, where false news travels faster than fact. Johnston anticipates this. Marick asks Hugo: ‘But hasn’t this sort of thinking opened the door to the plague of conspiracy theories? By downgrading rigorous truths to ideas that can be trumped by opinion?’

Johnston leaves no doubt as to Marick’s views on conspiracy theories: on hearing an anti-vaxxer ‘influencer’ encourage people to ‘rise up against health officials’, Marick ‘would almost have preferred the Devil’. Marick’s own hearing loss is the result of a missed measles vaccination in infancy. By establishing the parameters of her enquiry, Johnston creates a thoughtful space in which readers are free to explore the questions of science, God, and faith as philosophical matters.

While the novel’s cast will elicit a range of responses (wifely and motherly characters get a rough trot by my reckoning), a character that sticks in the reader’s mind is the nameless emergency doctor whom Marick occasionally spots. He finds her sitting outside the hospital, ‘staring beyond the bitumen, beyond everything’, or else trying to write in a notebook, though ‘the stories in this hospital defy translation into words’. Every encounter with her offers sober insight into the reality of an emergency physician, of ‘trying to patch up all the broken things at the final stop’. She rejects suggestion of a new wellness space for staff with the assertion that ‘We don’t need wellness and yoga and chat. We need society fixed.’

It is this worn and weary doctor who impresses upon Marick that perhaps what we do is more important than what we believe. In this, Michelle Johnston leaves the reader with an empowering message of hope and meaning. g

Jugulating torrents

Gregory Day’s new novel

Michael Winkler

There are frequent echoes of Patrick White, notably the third section of The Aunt’s Story and Memoirs of Many in One. In that amusing final novel, White wrote: ‘Some of the dramatis personae of this Levantine script could be the offspring of my own psyche.’ The final sentence of Day’s author’s note is, ‘It is perhaps worth mentioning too that not all of the ingredients that have gone into the novel can be described in words or even heard in the conscious mind.’

The Bell of the World

by Gregory Day Transit Lounge $32.99 hb, 408 pp

Early in Gregory Day’s new novel, Uncle Ferny reads Such Is Life aloud in a Roman bar. His niece Sarah observes listeners’ ‘confusion, amusement, their disdain, their curiosity, and also their rapture’. A similar range of responses might be manifested by readers of The Bell of the World

This is a novel in which Ferny’s extolling of Joseph Furphy’s genius erupts in a ‘jugulating torrent’ of words. There are characters called Sarah Hutchinson and Sara Atchinson, two women called Maisie, and three males called Joe. Plot threads rise and disappear like floodwater. There are florets of poetry, both conventional and concrete, and skeins of wild philosophy. Jugulating, indeed.

The constant is Sarah Hutchinson, returned from boarding school in England and travels in Europe to live in the fertile region south of Geelong, first with one of the Maisies and later at Ferny’s property Ngangahook, at the end of the first decade of the twentieth century. The narrative is arranged less around plot and more around shifting foci: conflict over a planned belltower; the co-binding/ combining of Such Is Life with Moby-Dick to form a ‘compounded epic’; an extended epistolary relationship between Sarah and John Cage foregrounding mushrooming and avant-garde music.

This is a book of much-too-much, and views on whether that is its glory or its failure – or indeed both – will vary. By page five I was looking up ‘epizeuxis’ and ‘diacope’, seeking a name for the prose tic Day was employing, but the technique is abandoned several pages later and does not return. Elsewhere, Day becomes bewitched by twinning, not just with character names but through pairs of waterfalls, hallways, other phenomena, before again moving on. The authorial restlessness intoxicates; it can also infuriate.

In an interview several years ago Day said, ‘In a way, literature is a type of compost and we’re all rewriting each other’s books and the books of the past.’ The Bell of the World can be approached through the literary equivalent of synthetic chemistry, inviting the reader to isolate and identify references and resonances. Doubtless I missed myriad connections, but antecedents that appear to be referenced include: Walt Whitman, not least for his poem on the composting process that ‘gives such divine materials to men, and accepts such leavings from them at last’; Iris Murdoch’s The Bell, for the central motif and the sexual triangulation of two men and one woman, but especially for the use of plot as vehicle for philosophy; Ezekiel, chapter one; Brideshead Revisited, with Uncle Ferny as an antipodean Sebastian Flyte, similarly gregarious, intellectually daring, wilfully unconventional; Helen Garner’s This House of Grief

Some of the describable ingredients include a pyramid of dead cockatoos on a prepared piano, Zen Noh plays, the skull of Gellibrand, Wadawurrung culture and disappropriation, Daphne du Maurier, Henry Cowell, the velar nasal, Luigi Russolo’s theories of noise, and a sproutness of mushrooms.

Recent ecological hypotheses about mycorrhizal networks –that mushrooms are the visible fruit of deep underground webs connecting trees and other organisms through linked threads of mycelium – undergird the book’s primary philosophical preoccupation. ‘We are both perceiver and perceived, without beginning and end, Ourself and the Other; we are hybrids and One, here in the breathable atmosphere, the zone of life.’ There is a lot of this sort of thing.

Another theme is art versus nature. Day seems to be arguing for unmediated experience, while wholly immersed in the full efflorescence of culture. ‘We grab for things the sounds remind us of … rather than letting them be the sounds they are.’ He writes of the magic lantern’s singular power ‘not to render but to dilute the reality of our thereabouts’. Literature, however, can illuminate and intensify. The mad possibilities of the interpolated Furphy and Melville tomes – literal intertextuality – are adumbrated but never fully explored: ‘One book intoned on the profound depths of the swirling blue paddock, the other on the vast interior of this dry continent, which it occurred to me, was a natural terraqueous counterpoint.’ The Furphy–Melville link was first made in 1929 by C. Hartley Grattan, who said they had ‘the same capacity for mingling the most abstruse speculation – discursive essays in history, sociology, morals, anthropology, and Shakespearean criticism – with veridic glimpses of actuality’. Douglas Stewart referred to ‘Furphy’s intolerable discursiveness’, not necessarily as a negative, and a similar assessment might apply to Day’s novel. Stewart likened Furphy to Cervantes, but argued that ‘the novel is not a crossword puzzle, and whimsical fellows have no right to lead their readers up a gum-tree’. Some readers, of course, do not mind transportation into the branches of a eucalypt, especially if veridic glimpses of actuality are provided.

At a time when terse, functional prose is ascendant, Day’s elaborately brocaded sentences, cascading nouns, and thesaural calisthenics are restorative. John Kinsella’s description of Day as ‘a singer of place’ is borne out repeatedly through his intricate, entrancing writing of the natural world.

Contemporary commercial publishing is choked with inessential fiction that does not go hard enough, does not risk enough, and has no meaning beyond saleability. Day’s unconventional novel, bristling with bravura prose, stands against that and should be welcomed accordingly. It is, however, an almighty tangle. A tough editor could have carved something superb from this material, rampant with the spirit of the bookbinder Jones of Moolap who possessed ‘the profound good sense to know that he therefore had to fall properly. To fall thoroughly. To fall into Art.’ g

A so-called ‘critical revolution’

Terry Eagleton appraises the theorists

Benjamin Madden

Critical Revolutionaries: Five critics who changed the way we read

by Terry Eagleton Yale University Press

US$20 hb, 288 pp

For generations of English literature graduates in the Anglophone world, Terry Eagleton’s name has become synonymous with literary theory, not because he has been its leading practitioner or fiercest advocate, but because he published Literary Theory: An introduction in 1983. This widely assigned primer conceals a deep ambivalence behind its innocuous title: in his conclusion, Eagleton announces that the book has been ‘less an introduction than an obituary’, in the sense that ‘literary theory’, like literature itself, only pretends to name a bounded field of enquiry. Nonetheless, the enterprise of theory rumbled on largely untroubled for two decades (who knows how many of the undergraduates assigned the book made it to the conclusion), and so After Theory (2003) was much less demure: ‘The golden age of cultural theory is long past,’ Eagleton announces on page one. In the preface to the same work he remarks, with disarming bluntness, that theory’s contemporary orthodoxy fails to ‘address itself to questions searching enough to meet the demands of our political situation’.

What those questions might entail is demonstrated in the stream of volumes Eagleton has produced since, mainly directed at an extramural readership, with titles including Humour, Tragedy, Radical Sacrifice, The Meaning of Life, and Why Marx was Right. Taken together, they comprise a decent (if allusive) picture of Eagleton’s sensibility. Critical Revolutionaries: Five critics who changed the way we read is the latest addition to this corpus, and the context of its author’s larger project matters in at least two ways. First, its intended audience might help to explain the slightly unctuous ‘we’ in the book’s subtitle: few literary critics today would acknowledge a methodological debt to F.R. Leavis. Second, the five essays that make up Critical Revolutionaries amount to a survey of the modality (‘movement’ would be a more natural-sounding term, but implies too much unanimity of purpose) within literary studies that theory is often thought to have displaced, and one which, Eagleton notes, ‘helped to form’ him.

These five essays sketch a history of the so-called ‘critical revolution’, which took place at Cambridge during the 1920s and after, and is largely responsible for the institutionalisation of literary studies within academic life, as we have come to know it. They follow a roughly chronological succession moving from T.S. Eliot to the slightly younger I.A. Richards, to the contemporaries (and open foes) William Empson and Leavis, to Raymond

Williams, whom Eagleton describes as his ‘teacher, friend and political comrade’.

Literary texts had, of course, been studied in universities for some time, either under the guise of philology, or as a species of belletristic delectation carried out by gentleman amateurs. Opposed to scholarly myopia on the one side and amiable triviality on the other, the essence of the critical revolution was the view that language and life are completely imbricated, and that therefore ‘the close reading of literary texts was a profoundly moral activity which cut to the heart of modern civilisation’. Eagleton quotes the Cambridge éminence grise of those years, Ludwig Wittgenstein, to that effect: ‘To imagine a language is to imagine a form of life.’

The methodologically rigorous and morally serious study of literature was a way to ‘take the moral temperature’ of our society. Infused with missionary zeal, Richards pursued this procedure through his teaching and in works like Principles of Literary Criticism (1924) and Practical Criticism (1929). But it was Eliot from whom Richards drew many of his critical bearings (and who returned the favour through several admiring references to Richards in his own critical essays), and so it is with Eliot that Eagleton’s récit begins. Eliot’s doctrine of impersonality, his concept of the dissociation of sensibility, the objective correlative, and, above all, tradition resonate throughout Critical Revolutionaries; they establish a paradigm for criticism that remains visible, albeit much modified, even in Williams and his structures of feeling.

In his Culture and Society, 1780–1950, Williams places Eliot among a cast of reactionary thinkers who read culture symptomatically. In his retrospective thoughts on that work, Williams comments that his subjects had ‘put the right questions but gave the wrong answers’, a surprisingly equanimous judgement given the radical he had become. But it is a stance shared by Eagleton himself. So we hear about some of Eliot’s less familiar political commitments, as well as the more notorious ones. Eliot’s conservatism sets him against (in his own words) ‘the deformation of humanity by unregulated industrialism’. His sense of place might resonate in our own time, Eagleton avers, ‘as a rebuke to global capitalism’. For all their political differences, Eliot and Williams share a view that capitalism tends to impede human flourishing.

The conservative Eliot, the liberals Richards, Empson, and Leavis, and the Marxist Williams: this is the political matrix against which several of the recurrent themes in Critical Revolutionaries appear. Normativity is one: for each of these critics, literary form and language are expressions (sometimes as a negative image) of a society’s deep mores and commitments. Moreover, the literary text makes those commitments available to reason about and argue with; this, not the disinterested collection and display of socio-historical specimens, is the purpose of criticism. Criticism’s intersubjectivity is another, related theme: if criticism is not a scientifically objective enterprise (perhaps to Richards’s mild disappointment), nor is it just a matter of expressing personal feelings. The form of a critical judgement, according to Leavis, is ‘This is so, isn’t it?’ Neither agnostic nor dogmatic (although at times Leavis could certainly be this), criticism is an invitation to conversation.

Eagleton has a capacious definition of literary theory as any

systematic reflection on what it is that literary critics and scholars do; by this account, all the critics treated in Critical Revolutionaries are theorists. But ‘theory’, as the term is often used in the academic context, picks out a specific intellectual constellation that began to emerge in the 1960s, often (but not exclusively) inspired by French intellectuals. Whereas theory tries to ground the practice of scholars and critics in methods and paradigms derived from linguistics, philosophy, anthropology, and so on, Eagleton’s critical revolutionaries held (notwithstanding many fascinating interdisciplinary peregrinations) that criticism’s proper footing is to be found on ‘the rough ground of everyday life’.

There is a recent intervention by a younger scholar lurking somewhere behind this book: Joseph North’s Literary Criticism: A concise political history. There, North describes the theory wars as largely a distraction from the more fundamental tussle between scholars and critics, that is ‘between those who treated the study

Architecture

Foundations and landmarks

An ambitious look at Australian architecture

Philip Goad

Australian Architecture: A history

by Davina Jackson

Allen & Unwin

$30.95 pb, 368 pp

It is more than fifty years since anyone attempted to comprehensively describe the history of Australian architecture.

In 1968, Sydney academic J.M. Freeland’s Architecture in Australia: A History was a landmark publication. The timing of its release was intended to celebrate 180 years of building on the continent since formal European invasion, marked by the arrival of the First Fleet in 1788. As with any ambitious documentary exercise, Freeland’s book was greeted with a mixture of admiration and scorn.

The same might be reserved for Davina Jackson’s new book, Australian Architecture: A history, which bravely sets out to map an even greater time range. It tries to make sense of today’s architectural scene and to fill in some of the gaps that she has identified along the way. To a large degree, Jackson succeeds. That this book was written during the first two years of Covid-19, when access to archives and libraries was severely limited, is no mean feat. Australian Architecture is thus to be welcomed and the author congratulated. Its publication will invite public interest with its easy and approachable writing style and the attractive selection of archival images and colour photographs. At the same time, it will stir, even annoy, historians and scholars with some of its claims and frustrate with the lack of a clear narrative framing.

of literature as a means by which to analyse culture and those who treated … [it] as an opportunity to intervene in culture’.

North’s analysis reminds us that Critical Revolutionaries is an Anglocentric book and that the critical revolution’s turn to the right took place mainly in America courtesy of the New Critics; this helps to account for the lingering aversion it can evoke in literary academia. But the institutional purchase that the critical revolution won for literary studies is now subject to unprecedented threat. Therefore, it is hard not to hear in Critical Revolutionaries a call for an academic criticism no longer bound to either philological quietism or French-derived meta-discourses, but situated once again on the rough ground, addressing (and arguing with) what remains of the extramural reading public. g

The book is structured into ten chapters arranged chronologically, each covering a span of twenty to thirty years, with the exception being the first, which covers – startlingly – pre-contact history to 1799. The inclusion of Indigenous architecture in that first chapter is welcome. Freeland had nothing on the topic and Jackson’s acknowledgment of Paul Memmott’s important book, Gunyah, Goondie + Wurley: The Aboriginal architecture of Australia (2007) is apposite. But five and a half pages devoted to Indigenous architecture in a chapter of twenty-three pages is not enough. Later in the volume, Jackson rightly mentions contemporary Indigenous architects such as Dillon Kombumerri and Kevin O’Brien, and her section titled ‘Architectures of Conciliation’ is one of the best in the book. But throughout the volume there is nothing on Australia’s shameful treatment of its Indigenous peoples, as illustrated through the story of mission architecture, which persisted well into the 1950s and was found across the entire continent. Nor is there discussion of the government’s failed attempts in the 1960s and 1970s to deal with Indigenous housing issues or even the appearance in Canberra of the Aboriginal Tent Embassy in 1972. To be fair, Jackson does make occasional mention of moments when Indigenous peoples were moved on from urban sites to make way for major public buildings such as Victoria’s Parliament House (1855–91) in Melbourne. But the opportunity to embed Indigenous presence across the entire ‘history’ and to bring the story of Australian architecture into line with other recent survey histories of Australia is one not taken.

Instead, Jackson gives a lively and inclusive account of building types and architectural styles over two and a half centuries, and to a large degree she succeeds in this aim. Important inclusions are Jackson’s notes on the active role played in the country’s nineteenth-century settlements by theatres as places of popular entertainment. She also highlights a significant series of flatroofed Sydney houses that might be understood as precursors of the modern. On the other hand, this exhaustive focus on building types means that coherent historical narratives are hard to trace throughout the book. The problem is that in attempting to be comprehensive there are countless paragraphs that read as lists of

Benjamin Madden is the former editor of Modernism/modernity and teaches literature at the University of Adelaide.

buildings (many undated), particularly in the last few chapters. As a result, there are moments when the book reads not as a history but as a gazetteer.

There is also the curious inclusion of special inserts on buildings and places that one might visit, such as Perth Town Hall or the Bowali Visitor Centre in Kakadu National Park. This is

minor, in totality their sheer number undermines an argument for the book’s definitiveness.

not necessarily a bad thing, but the choice is random and the motivation unclear. After all, this is not and does not set out to be a guidebook. There are also double-page inserts on styles and influences, where Jackson resorts to made-up terms like ‘Neo-Moderne’, ‘Blobitecture’, and ‘Datatecture’, which are not helpful to the architecturally uninitiated and, for the informed reader, come across as fast and loose journalese. Further, she uses international examples to illustrate terms such as ‘Minimalism’ and ‘Postmodernism’. Why not use Australian examples?

Elsewhere in the text, in describing buildings such as Sydney Town Hall as ‘wedding cake architecture’, Jackson falls into the trap of easy negative tropes that have long denigrated the socalled Boom Style architecture of the 1880s. Jackson also uses her own made-up terms like ‘Matchstick Mannerism’, which, in certain circles, makes light of the seriousness and diversity of late twentieth-century design practice. There are also multiple errors of fact and omissions. For example, Australia’s architect-representative for the United Nations Headquarters in New York was not ‘Guy Sollieux’ but Giles A. Soilleux. Image captions omit Marion Mahony Griffin from the design of Newman College and Evan Walker from the Canberra School of Music. These are just three examples, but they point to a book that could have waited another year for a thorough checking. While they might seem

Perhaps the greatest problem with Jackson’s book is its lack of spatiality. There is little sense of buildings and structures being erected across a continent of extraordinary scale and diversity of landscapes, or of the distinctive architectural cultures concentrated in its disparate capital cities. For the international reader, there is no map of the entire country, no plans (apart from Colonel William Light’s plan for Adelaide) of any Victorian era city or regional town, or any subdivision patterns that help to describe the emergence of the narrow-fronted terrace house (which garners no discussion anyway). There is little mention of suburban vernacular traditions or buildings associated with agriculture such as shearing sheds, or mining and its related infrastructures and townships – activities that defined a nation and, in large part, distinguished aspects of Australian architecture from the rest of the world until around 1960. Insufficient attention is paid to twentieth-century government efforts in the provision of social housing in urban, suburban, and regional settings. Nor is there a sense of Australia operating as one element in an expanded spatial/global network of empire in the nineteenth century. Here, for example, reference to Alex Bremner’s book, Imperial Gothic: Religious architecture and High Anglican Culture in the British Empire, 1840–1870 (2013), and Jaynie Anderson and her fellow authors’ recent monographs on Archbishop Goold and architect William Wardell’s St Patrick’s Cathedral in Melbourne, would have illuminated any discussion of the hundreds of churches built across the country in the nineteenth century.

Despite its failings, Jackson’s book – like Freeland’s – will have some impact. Its breadth of ambition is commendable, but it will serve, as Freeland’s did, to prompt current and future generations of historians and writers on architecture to frame more precisely and more responsibly any survey accounts of Australian architecture. Significantly, it will prompt serious scholarly attention on accurately describing styles, theoretical ideas, and the groupings of architects and buildings, especially those of the past forty years. Perhaps most important of all, it will inspire others to contextualise Australian architecture as geographically, climatically, politically, spatially and materially placed, with design traditions that have deep as well as contemporary histories. It will usher forth architectural histories that address the inherent tension between settler colonialism and Indigenous understandings of shelter on Country and question the role of architectural production and environment from a longitudinal and contemporary standpoint. In short, it will prompt a better form of story. g

Philip Goad is Chair of Architecture and Redmond Barry Distinguished Professor at the University of Melbourne.

Perth Town Hall as shown in a British Library digitised image extracted from Western Australia in 1891 by Francis Hart (1892) (British Library HMNTS 10492.ee.25. via Wikimedia Commons)

Theatre of memory

Imants

Sophie Knezic

Credo by Imants Tillers Giramondo $26.95 pb, 185 pp

In the early sixteenth century, the Italian Renaissance poet and philosopher Giulio Camillo conceived an imaginary structure for universal knowledge named The Theatre of Memory; essentially a classical amphitheatre that inverted the position of spectator and stage, turning the auditorium into a tiered structure that fanned into rows of encyclopedic knowledge. Imants Tillers makes no mention of Camillo’s theatre in his anthology of essays, Credo, but the structure could be a parallel schema for his own expansive project The Book of Power – an ongoing inventory of all the canvas board panels Tillers has painted since 1981, which totalled 102,663 by 2018.

Born of immigrant Latvian parentage, Tillers is a renowned Australian artist who garnered national attention in the late

1970s and, through his customary strategy of appropriation, came to typify Australian postmodernism. He is best known for his modular paintings comprising multiple panels of canvas boards which are assembled into grids, fracturing the surface into a matrix of semi-unified parts. Fragments of images from disparate artists and writers interlock into collaged compositions, making his works compendia of literary and artistic quotation.

While paintings have been his primary output over the past fifty years, Tillers has also written essays. Credo is a collection of fourteen of them dating from 1982 to 2019, all previously published, apart from ‘The Sources’ (2019). It is this last essay that elaborates The Book of Power and takes the format of a dictionary of Tillers’ key artistic and literary influences, including Giorgio de Chirico, Marcel Duchamp, Georg Baselitz, Jackson Pollock, Sigmar Polke, and Colin McCahon, Novalis, and Stéphane Mallarmé. Committed to continuing his over-arching project, Tillers nonetheless notes, ‘Something [is] always missing – that is, the next work, the next reference, the next source, the next allocated number as it heads in the impossible direction of infinity, never to reach finality or terminus.’ There is a voracity here yet the linking of each of these artists back to his own oeuvre has a touch of self-aggrandisement.

It is a tendency that Tillers mostly skirts, although the latter essays do become more self-referential. The earlier essays written in the 1980s and 1990s, however, show Tillers to be a sharp cultural critic. ‘Fear of Texture’ (1983) wittily punctures the pretensions of paint manufacturer Chromacryl in promoting a product overloaded with signifiers of rugged authenticity.

Chromacryl’s new line of Atelier Impasto Acrylic proclaims its ‘tactile meaty impasto’, its retention of ‘vitality of gesture’. For Tillers, ‘It is as though the precariously flat and provisional surface of Australian art up to now is about to be given some “depth” and integrity by the extrusion of tonnes of paint.’ He mentions the Australian National Gallery’s purchase of Jackson Pollock’s Blue Poles in 1973, but what interests Tillers is less the public outcry at its price tag of $1.3 million than the fact that, despite the popular press’s sensationalising of its surface – purportedly studded with cigarette butts and glass fragments – the painting, up close, reveals the shock of its flatness. For Tillers, a consequence of the photographic reproduction of art is that it suppresses the true tactile qualities of surface and leads not only to a distorted view of an artwork but a uniquely Australian fear of texture.

The consumption of artworks via photographic reproduction, preceding their direct encounter, is for Tillers emblematic of the Australian cultural condition or what he calls our ‘second-hand reality’. This is further discussed in ‘Perpetual Mourning’ (1984), where Tillers argues that the lack of direct access to international artworks renders us immune to the complexity of their aura and authority (and surfaces); the process of photographic reproduction levelling out difference and rendering all manner of images equivalent and interchangeable. Such an assessment seems more relevant than ever as digital interfaces dominate our world, amplifying this logic of decontextualised immediacy and equivalence.

The issue of mediated access leads back to the topic of provincialism, and Terry Smith’s definitive essay on the subject, ‘The Provincialism Problem’ (1974), looms large in the background. Smith’s iconic diagnosis of the cultural condition of artists in geographic peripheries (principally the global south) as caught in a bind of inevitable subservience to a hierarchy of cultural value determined elsewhere (with New York as the epicentre) is contested by Tillers, who argues by 1984 things have changed. Suddenly, ‘mimicry’ rather than derivation has become a virtue, a way of turning the charge of provincialism into a badge of honour. The terms ‘regionalism’, ‘quotation’, and ‘appropriation’ ripple through these early essays, and while strategies of image appropriation and deconstruction are now seen as orthodox and somewhat dusty tactics of postmodernism, it is nostalgic to read Tillers’ lyrical endorsements of them during the era’s height.

In many of the essays Tillers champions the rise of Indigenous art and celebrates the fact that, by the 1980s, Indigenous paintings are no longer viewed as ethnographic objects but as contemporary art, often eclipsing those by white Australian artists. Tillers

fully acknowledges the history of genocide, yet his advocacy of Indigenous culture belies his own problematic relation to it. In ‘Locality Fails’ (1982), Tillers discusses the attempts at ‘cultural convergence’ by white artists in the mid-twentieth century such as the Jindyworobak poets and the painter Margaret Preston, who invoked the notion of ‘Aboriginality’. Tillers resuscitates the term to claim that the difference is that now contemporary art can approximate the ‘look’ of traditional Indigenous artefacts and, more egregiously, that ‘“Aboriginality” is a ubiquitous quality which is no longer the exclusive domain of “black” Aboriginals’. Such claims highlight the way in which strategies of appropriation can remain wildly insensitive to the autonomy and sovereignty of Indigenous knowledge and culture.

A case in point that Tillers breezily narrates in ‘Poetic Justice – A Case Study’ (1994) concerns his painting The Nine Shots (1985), which appropriated an image from the German artist Georg Baselitz alongside one by the Indigenous artist Michael Nelson Jagamara. He acknowledges that this is the painting that implicated him in the debate of the postmodern appropriation of indigenous imagery but remains defensive. He dismisses the contemporary Chilean Australian artist Juan Davila’s critique of his appropriative act, which subsequently inspired the Indigenous artist Gordon Bennett’s painting The Nine Ricochets (fall down black fella, jump up white fella) (1990) as a riposte.

When the curators of an exhibition at the Institute of Modern Art in Brisbane in 1993 propose that Tillers collaborate with Bennett, Tillers contends, by detecting fragments of his own paintings in Bennett’s The Nine Ricochets, they were already enmeshed. One day, staring at a reproduction of Giorgio de Chirico’s painting Greetings of a Distant Friend (1916), Tillers determines that the collaboration will be a reworking of de Chirico’s image – a decision allegedly conveyed telepathically by Bennett. Tillers reprints Bennett’s wary response to this proposition with the latter’s reasonable definition of a collaborative work as ‘one that is produced on an equal basis’. Bennett, justifiably, goes on to write, ‘Your idea just seems a little too convenient and I must say a little patronising as well.’ Bennett refuses the role that Tillers assigns him but Tillers, stubbornly he admits, goes on to make the painting, which he titles Painting for Closed Eyes – An Experiment in Thought Transference From an Image Received Telepathically From Gordon Bennett at 1.30pm on July 27, 1993 (1993). This wilful deployment of Indigenous artists recurs through Tillers’ essays and betrays his insouciant attitude to appropriation, despite his promotion of Indigenous culture.

When he sidesteps such troublesome politics, Tillers is inquisitive and exploratory, and his discussions of the immigrant experience are particularly astute. Underscoring many of his essays is an encyclopedic impulse and the belief in a world in which ‘locality fails’ – where we are not limited to our immediate circumstances but open to a world brimming with possibility. Mallarmé’s elliptical dictum, ‘a throw of the dice will never abolish chance’, crops up intermittently as shorthand for Tillers’ intrigue with the contingency of life events and his thrill at their unexpected and mysterious connections. g

Sophie Knezic lectures at VCA, University of Melbourne and the School of Art at RMIT University.

Imants Tillers, 2018 (Corinna and Dylan via Giramondo)

Kurraarr Far Country

The humpy sits in majestic isolation in ngurrampaa, country

Washing flaps white on a line and I fly back to a kuthi song from the blue blinding sky

The river and the hot shack of tin, sticks and cardboard from the tip

Where you boiled water from the Darling in the forty-four-gallon drum

We hung the children’s nappies on barbed wire over white dust

By our river, my kaathii sister

The sun shone, burnt, and broken glass glinted

The nuns rode past on bikes in long blue saris

What were they doing there amongst the Ngyempa people?

Not needed in India alongside Mother Theresa

Reserve house walls thin, corrugated and whitewashed

The way our history was whitewashed

No killing happened in this land all happy smiling brown people eating nuts and berries

Let us weep

And Jenny taking down the china cups and saucers from the suitcase to fill with tea and Sunshine powdered milk, to drink with yellow damper from a fire in the middle of her shack. And Golden syrup

Where four children slept with mum

And Manny bought a live sheep to soothe with kind words before cutting its throat

To feed a barbie to a big mob from the reserve

Where old Murri men spoke of their initiation and showed us scars

Sharing a flagon

Of walking at thirteen years old, for days in the semi desert of mulga and bones with only a bottle of kali water - a Schweppes glass bottle.

Of catching gulbree emu by lying on your back and shaking legs in the air

The curious bird beaten and cooked

Or the green eggs broken, kapukaa cooked in a huge cake for everyone

Essie Coffey and her house of beaten fibro in Dodge city, Brewarrina

Her movie and her making light as air dampers on the fire for thirty Her dancing the hula while her hubby played a ukulele

A Muruwari woman of high regard

Of Uncle Bill Reid the Pastor and his kind heart that shook when he heard those stories about Major Nunn’s campaign when troopers mowed down Blacks like tin rabbits in a shooting gallery, We weep

The reserve a place of love and gunjies driving past at midnight hovering, waiting to bash a Murri man

A humpy home with Laminex table and a meat safe and tins of camp pie

Of women dubais cross legged on the ground playing bingo

And washing flying in hot Bourke wind

The day Jenny and I walked into the Railway Hotel

Ladies Lounge for a lemonade in searing heat

Forty-five fierce degrees and the men in singlets glared into their beers

We laughed and bounced our babies on our knees

Until the publican came to ask her to leave

Being dark skinned but me being blond

He quietly held open the glass door and I yelled

But we left wanting to spit in their eyes

Until late that night the banging on my door

She stood black eyed and terrified, my kaathii sister

They took Manny to the cop station and belted him

For drinking in his humpy on the Reserve

His home: we cried yungakirri

Running in my nightie to beg for his release

Being blond, they looked me up and down and sniggered

In ngurrampaa, country

Julie Janson

Julie Janson’s ‘Kurraarr Far Country’ was longlisted in the 2023 Peter Porter Poetry Prize.

Sharing stories

Turtles as meat, symbol, and material

Ben Silverstein

Masked Histories: Turtle shell masks and Torres Strait Islander people

by Leah Lui-Chivizhe

The Miegunyah Press

$39.99 pb, 240 pp

Turtles, Leah Lui-Chivizhe shows us in Masked Histories, are at the centre of Torres Strait Islander lives. They follow the Pacific currents and slipstreams, arriving in the Islands in the mating season of surlal, making available their eggs, their meat, their shells. For millennia, marine turtles have provided Islanders with material for subsistence and ceremony – allowing them to practise ceremony with turtle shell masks so evocative of Islander cultures and histories.

One result of more than a century of colonial intrusions into Islanders’ relationships with turtle has been to remove the masks from the islands and from Islander contexts, disrupting social relationships in the Torres Strait and surrounding the masks with colonising story. Today, many of these masks sit in museums in Australia, England, and elsewhere, having been taken by a succession of colonial visitors and collectors. In these museums, with this provenance, the masks have historically been made to speak of social dissolution, of inexorable processes of loss forming a backdrop to the salvage expeditions that gathered them up.

Alice Te Punga Somerville has described the often painful practice of clearing away the accumulated junk of colonial storytelling to catch a glimpse of an alternative future, of a place that ‘allows your people to live in it’. Masked Histories shows us what

happens when the story of turtle begins with that glimpse, pushing aside colonial stories conducive to extraction and dispossession in favour of stories of strength and relationship. The book opens with a sensitive and fraught account of two meetings with turtle shell masks now in the British Museum. Picture Alick Tipoti, a Badu artist, dressed formally in a suit for the occasion but taken back, on arrival, to find that the masks were disconcertingly mixed and set out in a research lab. How to approach this jumble of masks of different kinds from different places? In the same room, Lui-Chivizhe had a different encounter, one mediated by her relationship with the masks as both Islander and research student. Following family advice, she introduced herself to the masks before studying them from all angles, examining them under light, measuring, sketching, noting, photographing. Then she thanked the masks and said goodbye.

Both Tipoti and Lui-Chivizhe have since engaged with masks to tell Islander stories. For Lui-Chivizhe, this book is an outcome of that work, placing turtle back in the context of ‘Islander-oriented’ histories. This re-placement and re-storying is not a simple return to a time before colonisation but represents a reorientation, working across an array of sources to reconnect these masks with their human and more-than-human histories.

Masked Histories shares stories of turtle in the Islands. It begins by mapping Islander–turtle relationships; providing a deep history of practices of hunting, butchering, and preparing, carried out by people for whom turtle is meat, symbol, and material. In chapter two, we learn that turtle were attractive to those outsiders who intruded with increasing frequency from the late eighteenth century onwards.

Chapter three turns to the story of a large turtle shell mask, adorned with human skulls and seashells and coated with red ochre, which was stolen from Auridh in 1836. Lui-Chivizhe narrates its theft and the way it was made to stand in imperial thinking as proof of the ‘murderous savagery’ of Islanders, licensing the destruction of the village from which it was taken. Clearing away this framing, Lui-Chivizhe provides a nuanced reading of the mask, not as a ‘gruesome trophy’ but as an espe-

cially significant and living ritual object once stored carefully in a ceremonial keeping place, where it would help relate sea and land, living and dead, across time and place. Masks, we learn in chapters four and five, represent enduring histories. They have the power to connect Islanders today – as they did 150 years ago – with cultural heroes and with the wisdom of ancestors. They hold and communicate valuable knowledge about Islander (and colonial) pasts. The masks themselves have agency: the Auridh mask’s power, perhaps, explains how it has survived almost two centuries in exile, through multiple fires, while its thief faced a spiral of bad luck, incapacity, and ‘depression of spirits’.

This story culminates in a wonderful final substantive chapter that shows how Islanders engage with masks today to re-story them, to become turtle, to enliven relationships between themselves and the more-than-human world, to connect with and through their history. These are different ceremonies, of creative expression, of curatorship, of social research. Frank David of Iama, for instance, devoted hours to closely examining images of turtle shell masks, carefully reading them to uncover their stories. Rosie Ware of Moa/Mer was inspired by images of ancient masks to carve their likeness into lino, printing them onto fabric. The illustrations of these and other Islander artistic responses in Masked Histories are stunning.

Masked Histories does not toy with a kind of decolonising representation in which a return to a pre-colonial past is possible. Nor does it imagine that period as a moment of authenticity prior to colonising influences. Rather it sits seriously with the life of these masks when they were in the Islands and since their removal. It imagines a future in which Islander representations can shadow imperial networks, in Tracey Banivanua-Mar’s phrase, disposing of the idea of an essential authenticity in favour of inexorable relationality; not erasing but working through the past century of dislocation to connect across place and time.

This work, in turn, transforms the stories imperial institutions tell of masks. When Alick Tipoti met the kodal krar – a turtle shell mask representing his totem, the crocodile – in that lab at the British Museum, he lowered his body and became a crocodile, making his way on all fours across the room to introduce himself. For a moment, Lui-Chivizhe writes, the British museum ‘became an Islander cultural space’ in the heart of empire. That moment endures. Tipoti’s fibreglass re-creation and response to the kaigas krar – a turtle shell mask of the giant shovelnose ray, incorporating four other totemic animals – now sits alongside the original, which was acquired by the British Museum in 1886.

Tipoti’s mask enacts relationships with ancestors and with natural and spiritual worlds. In ‘Living on Stolen Land’, Ambelin Kwaymullina describes a decolonised future based in the ‘places where different worlds meet’, when those places are refigured as sites of ‘connection, enrichment and transformation’. In gifting us glimpses of this future, Masked Histories shares with us new stories and new possibilities. g

Ben Silverstein is Postdoctoral Research Fellow in History and Lecturer in Indigenous Studies at the Australian National University, and author of Governing Natives: Indirect rule and settler colonialism in Australia’s north (2019). ❖

Tumult and poise

Sarah Day’s ninth poetry collection

Jennifer Harrison

Day

Slack Tide by Sarah

Pitt Street Poetry $28 pb, 107 pp

This is Sarah Day’s ninth collection and one of her most thematically diverse to date. She brings to the poems a thoughtful mix of environmentalism (particularly the unruly yet quiet presence of Tasmania’s natural beauty), her British roots (some of the best poems in the collection refer to the poet’s grandmother’s incarceration in an asylum), and a teacher’s precision with free verse. The poems are not overly experimental in terms of lineation, metre, language, or punctuation, and yet freshness of perspective and authenticity arise inevitably from the poet’s liquid observational engagement with the world’s affairs, whether this be with landscape, the global pandemic, racism, or science (planetary, oceanographic, microscopic).

While reviewing Slack Tide, I was reading the New Collected Poems of the late Irish poet Eavan Boland (1944–2020). I felt uncanny resonances between Day’s and Boland’s fine, linguistic intelligence, the pure melody of their poems, and their feminism’s intense engagement with the world and its histories, as filtered through the lens of mythic reinvention and domestic experience. There are some wonderful ekphrastic poems in Day’s collection (a favoured form of Boland’s). For instance, in the poem ‘House like a Folktale’, a mysterious house in Glenbrook – ‘The bowed house / rests comfortably on earth / itself a resting hen’ – assumes the qualities of a Chagall painting where a rhetorical, surreal conversation takes place between locale and visual imagery, and the poet muses, ‘Rules are what people think, / they aren’t a law of nature.’

Day shares with Boland a wonderful aptitude for situating local intuitive concerns into a dialogue with the larger world and its histories. Lockdown is imagined as an Edward Hopper interior. Four-hundred-year-old Neopolitan music on the radio (‘In the Air’) unpacks thoughts of environmental degradation, yet the poem leaves us with lingering hope, ‘notes were made on a score – / the compassionate moment hangs in the air’. Even the collection’s smaller observational sketches – such as ‘School Strike for Climate’, with its opening lines ‘They held our planet in their hands / the way that I once held an orange or a ball’ – coolly and compassionately reflect a kind of looking forward into the generations. Here, also, are some lines from ‘Penstock Lagoon’, a reflective poem about the Ukraine war, selected by editors Jeanine Leanne and Judith Beveridge for Australian Poetry’s Best Australian Poems 2022: ‘Up here, in the tent at night / by an

effort of will, the world’s troubles / shrink from the mind’s large screen …’ The poet continually hears an indecipherable sound in the silence, which is finally identified: ‘it is not a falling pearl but a musk duck’. The poem then widens its perspective:

Mirror-like, on its ancient glacial plateau, the lake is non-partisan in its view of civilisations.

Mayflies are hatching on its surface for their single day of life.

I hope these lines convey something of Day’s superb skill in layering and contrast: here, the ordinance of the natural landscape is stilled against the brutality of a distant war. The poem moves continually between time perspectives.

Freshness of perspective and authenticity arise inevitably from the poet’s liquid observational engagement with the world’s affairs

This collection seems to embrace the struggle of belonging to both a local and a global culture. There are few answers (the poems work best when lightly questioning what to make of our times). Early on, the book introduces us to the concept of ‘slack

Research Centre, further notes: ‘although the surface of the water may appear almost to be stationary, it is no indication that the same is true beneath the surface; the various competing forces may give rise to a diversity of currents, some even flowing in opposite directions.’ This is a collection, therefore, that holds unseen tumultuous experience in conflict with surface poise. Again, the poet looks to make sense of the chaos ‘behind things’ and, in this way, the titular poem ‘Slack Tide’ holds the landscape close:

Water’s insistence grips the thighs, disturbs and pacifies; deep mud reminds us we were never invulnerable; silver eels with intelligent faces examine ours, assess our aptitude. The swoosh of waders draws us into a primordial past, and, in the watery iridescence, towards a vision of sorts –

Many poems grapple with contemporary meaning-making, including ‘Transhumanence’: ‘the air smelt / different, birds and all winged / things were the first to notice’; ‘Light Boats’: ‘It’s my own silence that is confused’; ‘Aldinga Cliffs, South Australia’: ‘At all times / there is this living with what some of us have done, / there is this under-the-skin knowing.’ A sense of discomfort shadows many poems. For instance, ‘Aral Sea’ begins bluntly, ‘The loss of a sea somehow reminds me of my missing kidney’, yet ends remarkably, ‘nor have I been to Uzbekistan. This does not mean the Aral Sea / has not lived in my imagination or that I have not felt its loss.’

Although some poems intimately address asylum seeker experience and the power imbalance between rich and poor communities, underpinning all experience is the planet. In a poem such as ‘Utopia’, the observer tries to fathom the rules of nature’s imperfect perfections:

Sea foam’s behaviour is flawless, each macaroon island waits its turn to break from mass and form a line, no shove or jostling to join the slipstream where the tannin creek runs full tilt at the blue sea.

tide’: ‘the brief lull in the body of tidal water when the tide is neither coming in nor going out’.

This singular metaphor resonates throughout the collection, embracing wider dissonances, which question how best to live an ethical life. The definition of ‘slack tide’, quoted from Dr John R. Hunter, from the Antarctic Climate & Ecosystems Cooperative

The slack tide’s hidden turbulence is, surely, how global warming, the pandemic, the impact of colonialism increasingly affect voice, language, the essence of poetry making. I was moved, particularly, by Section 4, which references the mysterious mental health history of the poet’s ‘missing grandmother’, Alice (‘Standish’). The poem’s final lines – ‘I write these words in anger / and in tenderness. A harm was done’ – allow the poet full inhabitation of familial lived experience, as ‘The ear’s stylus / follows the rise and fall of accent’. Another turbulence is identified beneath the surface of familial history and, as in all these masterful poems, le travail humain does not dominate the natural world, but is explored compassionately in all its non-romanticised actuality, with it. g

Jennifer Harrison’s latest poetry collection is Anywhy (Black Pepper, 2018).

Sarah Day (Pitt Street Poetry)

Squares and rectangles

Shapely poetry in three new volumes

Prithvi Varatharajan

Paul Hetherington’s Ragged Disclosures (Recent Work Press, $19.95 pb, 112 pp) choreographs its prose poems carefully, which is unsurprising from the co-author and co-editor, respectively, of a scholarly book on prose poetry and Anthology of Australian Prose Poetry (both 2020). His new collection employs a lyric-dramatic mode, which Fernando Pessoa described as ‘lyric poetry put into the mouths of different characters’. It features a ‘he’ and a ‘she’ with a ‘shared / Australian vernacular’, in a long, glancing dialogue. These appear most direct in nine ‘Ragged Disclosures’, each comprising three square poems which are bordered and interlinked. ‘Ragged Disclosures 1’ offers a clue to the text: ‘Their ragged / intersections make an unjoined, / searching rapport.’ The poems between these seem to represent this ‘searching rapport’ through shared experience in Rome, Venice, and various other locales, with pronominal shifts to ‘I,’ ‘we’, and ‘you’. The language is introspective and brims with feeling, as here in ‘Snow’:

They read Chekhov. Words bring snow and a view of a tangled orchard. Ghosts haunt the trees, their own speech fails to catch, the air is chary of sunshine. Someone is playing backgammon as centuries weigh …

It can be vivid, as in ‘Sidling’, which shows the text’s preoccupation with (often ‘unjoined’) time: ‘A flight of birds; an updraught of air. I watch the estuary / fade; handle my arms, feel your touch on my skin like / drapings of silver water – a few hours, a decade ago.’ Square and rectangular poems, columns of text bordered left and right, and poems within encompassing ‘walls’ – likely connoting restriction – abound. One anomaly is ‘Francis Bacon Triptych’, where a stanza’s walls don’t meet, suggesting aesthetic/emotional ‘slippages’ (the section title) or ‘disclosures’. Another is a sequence of square prose poems with a disorderly final two lines, skittering abruptly out of bounds. It is hard to recall another collection where material surrounding the text felt so important to meaning. The afterword, echoing the blurb, states that Ragged Disclosures explores the prose poetry sequence in relation to ‘the current climate emergency and the COVID-19 pandemic’, focusing on ‘intersubjectivity’, ‘human intimacy’, and ‘the meshing of time and space’. This would have been better as a foreword, to help any intimidated

readers grasp the formal and thematic contexts. While I have no illusions about the budgets of small poetry presses, a graphic treatment of sections (like the section pages in Bella Li’s Theory of Colours, 2021), or the use of extra blank pages, would have better supported the sustained reading that this complex work requires.

Much of John Foulcher’s Dancing with Stephen Hawking (Pitt Street Poetry, $28 pb, 79 pp) is crafted meticulously, with care given not only to sound but to the weighting of each word. The final stanza of the first poem, ‘Facing Medusa’, is exemplary:

If I’m quick, perhaps I’ll slip from her stare and catch the world spinning forever, see always the wind-driven trees, the silk, crumpling ocean, convulsions of rain, sunlight salting the waves, the birds like an ink-spatter. No matter, I am here. I will turn, take one step.

Note the tight confluence of imagery and sound (soft and hard phonic contrasts, and assonance, in the vivid ‘silk, crumpling ocean, convulsions’; the alliterative and graphic ‘sunlight salting’) and its delicate but effective binding (e.g. half-rhyme ‘forever’ / ‘matter’; internal rhyme ‘ink-spatter’ / ‘matter’; the assonant echo in ‘matter’ and ‘step’).

The collection’s subjects are various, but memory is a constant. This is the work of an older poet, reflecting on a life’s experience. The end of the final poem, ‘Revising Casuarinas’, addresses this aphoristically: ‘I think of my poems, how time will burn them. / What’s gained, other than all that I’ve learned?’ Several refer to pop culture: David Bowie; Jurassic Park; the astronauts Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, Mike Collins, and Bill Anders; the titular Stephen Hawking. Foulcher consciously blends the ‘high’ culture of poetry, Greek mythology, and the Bible – in one instance via Nietzsche – with the (televised) ‘low’: a method I now associate with an older generation.

‘Running Towards Elizabeth’ and ‘The School Band’ represent adolescence awkwardly. The latter recalls a cool bass guitarist friend leaving a party, ‘his arm around the busty girl / who tinted us with just a glance.’ The dated language results in unintentional kitsch.

The middle section, ‘The Theory of Anything,’ contains prose poems in an ekphrastic sequence, written in response to Gregory Crewdson’s 2017 photography exhibition Cathedral of the Pines These are interspersed between short lyrics titled ‘Standing’, ‘Sitting’, and ‘Lying’. The prose poems respond obliquely to these

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states, observing human interactions ‘among the pines’. They evoke a camera panning slowly, as in a quiet and visually arresting film, but are not as powerful as the tauter lyrics, especially those that make up the first section. The contemporary lyric can feel tired, but there is some skilful and affecting craft here: ‘In the clear light, the fields are born / again’ (‘Prodigal’).

Literary surrealism was contemporary to the blossoming of non-lineated verse in France in the early twentieth century, and it is the dominant mode in Misbah Wolf’s Carapace (Vagabond Press, $25 pb, 48 pp). Within its pages, images continually blur into each other, and time feels sluggish or suspended.

Readers opening this slim volume will notice that all but one of Wolf’s poem titles have ‘House’ appended: ‘All We Ever Wanted Was Everything House’; ‘Hounds of Love House’; ‘Mrs Robinson’s House,’ etc. (the exception is the wryly titled ‘H is For’). The word ‘house’ also features in the body of many poems. I was puzzled at first by this titular motif. I played with different interpretations: each prose poem formally evokes a house, which is a ‘carapace’ for Wolf’s imagination; the poems are set inside various houses or ‘carapaces’; connected to these two interpretations, the speaker of the poems dwells in and continually moves between houses/prose poems. The collection also reminded me – thematically not formally – of Omar Sakr’s These Wild Houses (2017). The publisher’s website says that Carapace: ‘archives the journey of a young girl towards developing, losing, and leaving relationships within share-houses.’ It is fluid enough to sustain all these readings. Here is a sample of its poetics, from ‘Master Builder House’:

It nestles its haunches upon the sinking reeds. Headless water lilies, aqueous ink plucked by leathery hands find themselves in designated jars around the ordinary house, and a group of us commit to memory the shape of spangled seawater …

Moments of realism bleed into surrealism, with the latter often peaking: ‘I fall through the egg and find myself lying in sand’ (‘Memories of Green House’). The poems are vivid, especially when sex enters the picture, as in ‘Under the Pink House’: ‘Your / tits sent our [sic] whips that lassoed me to the bed, and your pussy adopted / the same penetrating gaze, a cabalistic cipher where occult forces dimly / sounded.’ Such lines often combine eroticism with absurd comedy. ‘Rebel Girl House’ begins: ‘She is obsessed with reading other people’s clitorises. Sometimes she / skips to the ending and sometimes she reads them aloud to herself.’

The represented experience is both fleshy and of the unconscious. I was initially disoriented by the highly associative and sometimes random connections in the work. Then I told myself I was searching needlessly, in the absence of lyric compression, for narrative resolution. Carapace delivers something else entirely, asking you to give in to its dream logic. g

Prithvi Varatharajan is a poet, essayist, and sometimes literary audio producer. His début collection of poems and prose, Entries, was published in 2020 by Cordite Books.

The song is you

The never predictable Bob Dylan

Andrew Ford

The Philosophy of Modern Song

by Bob Dylan Simon & Schuster $59.99 hb, 359 pp

‘You got a habit, a bad habit. You fell in love with the hard stuff. You fell for the foxy harlot, the vamp who lives around here somewhere, and you’re silly about her, she’s got you hooked.’

Those words, straight out of some 1950s film noir, are by Bob Dylan, and they open his discussion of a famous song from a Broadway musical that no one, I imagine, has previously considered in quite these terms. My Fair Lady is hardly classic noir. Dylan, though, isn’t concerned with the musical but with Vic Damone’s 1956 recording of ‘On the Street Where You Live’, a song that does indeed nowadays sound as though it were about stalking.

Songs may be about things, but, like all music, they also are things. They are mechanisms with working parts, and Dylan is good at revealing these. ‘On the Street Where You Live’, for example, ‘is all about the three-syllable rhyme: street before, feet before, heart of town, part of town, bother me, rather be’. And then, because he’s Dylan: ‘Vic Damone. Sick at home.’

In The Philosophy of Modern Song, Dylan writes about songs composed by Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht, Stephen Foster, Big Bill Broonzy, Billy Joe Shaver, Rodgers and Hart, and Doc Pomus (to whom the book is dedicated), as sung by the likes of Bing Crosby, Rosemary Clooney, Nina Simone, Marty Robbins, the Clash, and Little Richard. The singer is as important as the song, because each version of a popular song will be different. Dylan underlines this when he writes that Roy Orbison’s ‘Blue Bayou’ is ‘both a spectacular song and a spectacular record’.

It is a wide canvas, and if Dylan seems more concerned with a song’s lyrics than its music, that is perhaps to be expected. After all, sixty years’ worth of literature about Dylan has tended to do the same. That said, Dylan frequently disarms us with musical observations, often expressed metaphorically: Bobby Darin’s recording of ‘Mac the Knife’ ‘keeps on modulating till you think it will go through the roof’; with Dean Martin, ‘words dissolve into runs of vowels without the traffic lanes of consonants’; Alvin Youngblood Hart’s guitar turnarounds (on ‘Nelly Was a Lady’) are ‘a slow cakewalk between heartbroken verses’.

Dylan’s connections bring us up short. In the precision of the Temptations – the quintessence of Motown – Dylan hears ‘a link to old-school doo-wop’; the Grateful Dead are ‘essentially a dance band’, having ‘more in common with Artie Shaw and bebop than they do with the Byrds or the Stones’; the Osborne Brothers’ bluegrass is ‘the other side of heavy metal … two forms

of music that visually and audibly have not changed in decades’; ‘Blue Moon’ has ‘a melody right out of Debussy’ (not sure about that).

Dylan is also very funny. Writing of Elvis Costello (the song is ‘Pump It Up’), Dylan mentions Elvis’s early resemblance to Buddy Holly, a commonplace observation, but adds that he ‘had Harold Lloyd in his DNA as well’. I doubt that anyone else has made the connection with the bespectacled silent film clown with the boater. Later, commenting on Costello’s versatility and his embrace, alongside rock and roll, of chamber and orchestral music, country and soul, and Burt Bacharach, he adds: ‘When you are writing songs with Burt Bacharach you obviously don’t give a fuck what people think.’

Songs may be about things, but they also are things – mechanisms with working parts

There are diversions. The chapter on ‘Blue Moon’ considers other moon songs; Carl Perkins’s ‘Blue Suede Shoes’ prompts a riff on songs about shoes; the Drifters’ ‘Saturday Night at the Movies’ leads to thumbnail reviews of films such as Ace in the Hole, On the Waterfront, and The Heiress; ‘Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood’ detours into a discussion about the difficulties of translating the opening line of Camus’s L’Étranger; and Edwin Starr’s ‘War’ leads to one of the longest pieces of writing in the book – on the subject of war, specifically the two Gulf wars of Bush Sr and Bush Jr, via a meditation of ‘the sins of the father’, all culminating in a line that brings ‘Masters of War’ full circle: ‘And if we want to see a war criminal all we have to do is look in the mirror.’

It is kind of Dylan to say ‘we’. Really, he means ‘you’. From the outset, this is a second-person book: ‘In [‘Everybody Cryin’ Mercy’] you’re hemmed in, going round and round the loop, doing full turns … you’re loaded to the rafters, smacking, and slapping at things, buttoned down, no holds barred, going nonstop in a direct line, and everybody’s patting you on the butt.’ ‘In [‘Your Cheatin’ Heart’], you’re the swindler who sold me a faulty bill of goods – beguiled me, double crossed me, and now you’re out of moves and soon you’ll be groaning with prolonged suffering. “How do I know? I just know”’; ‘By the time you get to Phoenix it will be morning where she is, and she’ll be just getting out of bed.’ He doesn’t spell it out, but he’s making it clear nonetheless. These songs are about you. All songs are.

More than half a century has passed since Dylan released Self Portrait, his double album of demo-quality new songs alongside covers of Simon and Garfunkel’s ‘The Boxer’, Gordon Lightfoot’s ‘Early Mornin’ Rain’, the Everly Brothers’ ‘Let It Be Me’ and, yes, ‘Blue Moon’; and Greil Marcus, in his Rolling Stone review, demanded to know ‘What is this shit?’ Since then there have been albums of traditional songs and blues, another of Christmas songs, and a triptych of albums devoted to songs sung by Frank Sinatra.

We should have seen this book coming. g

Andrew Ford is the co-author (with Anni Heino) of The Song Remains the Same (2019).

A man without papers

Joachim Redner

Endless Flight: The life of Joseph

Roth

by Keiron Pim Granta

$49.99 hb, 537 pp

Joseph Roth (1894–1939) has been well served by translators, especially Michael Hofmann. His works are widely available and at least two are acknowledged masterpieces: Job (1930), a lyrical evocation of the fading world of the East European Jewish shtetl, and The Radetzky March (1932), Roth’s elegy for the lost Austro-Hungarian Empire. Until now there has been no English biography. Keiron Pim takes up the challenge with Endless Flight: The life of Joseph Roth. It is the product of wide-ranging scholarship, a deep immersion in Roth’s oeuvre, and travels in Ukraine, where Roth’s hometown Brody is now located. He shows us Roth as journalist and novelist ‘tracing the continent’s trajectory between the wars in prose of sublime lyricism’ and creating a voice for ‘the marginalised, the alienated and the dispossessed’.

Roth was a man of many gifts – blessed with a brilliant intellect, a rare capacity for empathy, loyal friends, the love of women – but, like the biblical Job, he was marked out for great suffering. He never knew his father, who was declared insane just before his birth. His impoverished mother managed to give him a classical German education, the passport to university, but he found her love stifling. A brilliant student, he was accepted into Lemberg (Lviv), then Vienna University in 1913, but was soon drawn into the Great War. The 1920s – roaming across Europe, reporting for the Frankfurter Zeitung – were happy at first. Then, in 1929, exhausted by their peripatetic lifestyle, his young wife, Friedl, succumbed to schizophrenia. Guilt-stricken, Roth often feared for his own sanity. In 1933 he fled into exile. Stateless and financially dependent on friends, he drank constantly, and suffered an excruciating death from alcohol poisoning in 1939. Friedl was murdered by the Nazis in 1940.

These are the bare facts; Pim gives us the full tragic history. He doesn’t see Roth as simply a victim of his circumstances, however. Struck by the parallels between Roth’s fractured life and the lives of his characters – the returned soldier Franz Tunda, for example, in Flight Without End (1927), who ‘was not at home in this world’ – he sees Roth’s homelessness as a psychological state and the key to his character. Following David Bronsen, author of the 1974 standard German biography, Pim argues that Roth’s identity was ‘split’ or at best ‘hyphenated’: a provincial East European Jew living the life of a cosmopolitan Viennese man of letters. Applying Sartre’s concept of ‘authenticity’, Pim decides Roth was so conflicted about his Jewishness that he felt

‘inauthentic’ as an Austrian.

It is an oddly old-fashioned approach; human identity is understood as multi-faceted nowadays. But Pim argues that Roth internalised the anti-Semitism in his environment, felt a fraud as an Austrian, blamed his Jewishness – and suffered from pathological ‘self-loathing’. Drawing on studies of ‘Jewish self-hatred’, he applies the term to Roth. The trouble with this explanation is that self-haters don’t normally display Roth’s steely self-confidence. Assured self-irony is his typical tone. In a witty letter written in June 1930 to Kiepenheuer, his publisher, Roth tells him: ‘He is the most courtly man I know. So am I. He got it from me […] He believes in me. So do I.’ Roth is not always this relaxed about his identity, but he was stubbornly convinced he was both an Austrian and a Jew. There is a simple historical explanation for his preoccupation with this question.

Before the war, ethnic minorities across the Habsburg Empire, including Roth’s Galicia, were citizens of the Dual Monarchy and therefore also ‘Austrian’. When Austria-Hungary was carved up in 1918, Roth found himself redefined as a citizen of Poland, but refused to relinquish his Austrian identity. No one was going to tell him who he was. Determined to recover his lost citizenship, he invented a Schwabian German father and acquired a fake baptism certificate. ‘A man without papers,’ he once said grimly, ‘is worth even less than papers without a man.’ He was often angry, occasionally using anti-Semitic language to express hostility to fellow Jews, but there is no evidence that he turned this anger on himself. His assimilated co-religionists were the usual target. Their snobbish disdain for Ostjuden like him drew his ire: ‘Every form of assimilation is a flight from the sad society of the persecuted.’ And he deplored their complacency in the face of rising fascism. Roth regained his Austrian citizenship in 1921, but it remained tenuous. Henceforth he lived in a state of inner exile, unable to accept the loss of the old order, deeply suspicious of the extremist politics contaminating the new.

It is true, as Pim observes, that Roth’s habit of embellishing his threatened Austrian identity became increasingly egregious; he was not above fabricating imaginary war experiences. It is also true, as Michael Hofmann comments in A Life in Letters (2012), that these small lies often expressed emotional truths. Roth did sometimes feel, like Tunda in Flight without End, that the mass graves of the unknown soldiers yawned for him. But his sadness is subtler and more self-aware than Pim allows. Self-pity quickly generates self-irony: ‘I have no home; aside from being at home in myself [...] therefore I take great care to remain within myself’ (from a letter dated 10 June 1930). He can laugh at his own pain while teasing his reader. Pim describes Roth as still ‘playing’ the old-world Austrian gent up until his death. His friends saw him rather as a man struggling to maintain his dignity in the face of the cascading indignities of exile.

Speaking for all the wanderers on God’s earth, Roth once lamented: ‘Oh – the whole world thinks in such tired, worn, traditional clichés.’ Pim might have done without the cliché of Jewish self-hatred. Nevertheless, his biography offers a wealth of insight into the tragic life of one of Europe’s greatest writers, and is more than welcome. g

Joachim Redner is a writer and translator.

The first English biography of Joseph Roth

Lapis Lazuli

i.m. Robert Adamson

I couldn’t get there, but looked on from here, Through the live-streaming lens, An unseen absent presence, moved to watch This gathering of your friends, And all it comprehends:

Love, praise and memories, your poems of course. But, I don’t know, what may Have been most moving in the whole occasion Was, following that display Of photographs, the way

Your voice broke in, and there you were on film, Chatting and answered by Spinoza (so he’s learned to talk?), with his Impossibly blue eye Of lapis lazuli.

The first time that we saw him, Judy wore Earrings of that same stone, And Spin perched on her shoulder, where he had Immediately flown, To claim them for his own,

Or try to, pecking, jabbing, without success. And now I think of Yeats And his determination to believe That gaiety mitigates, Indeed transforms our fates,

Beyond the tragic scene on which we stare, Transfiguring that dread –An image carved in lapis lazuli The talisman which fed The faith he credited.

Not sure I share it, but, while the footage played, I wanted to comply, Watching you chat and chuckle with Spinoza –Brief days before you die –Eye to glittering eye.

Hawkesbury

i.m Robert Adamson

Above the cliff a Brahminy kite circles on an updraught, holds the scene in the keen, yellow charge of its eyes. Earlier I watched a sea-eagle ride a disc of air –then suddenly pull its wings into a deft stoop,

a high-speed dive before it let down its talons like a set of stevedoring hooks, snatching up a rat lying in a warm coil of rope on the dock. Perhaps the kite will take a fish from the water, or another nesting rat.

Now it simply circles, a slow enchantment whose purpose seems impossible from so very high up. And you are gone, Robert, from your high place above the water, gone from the mudflats and the river where your words

conjured a raptor’s view, the Hawkesbury surveyed with your sharp, rapturous eye. I walk back to the wharf, a crow calls with a voice of charred gloom. The kite has drifted away to circle and hunt elsewhere. I watch

crabs on the mudflats work their claws around mangrove roots pegged out like snorkellers. And I think of you, Robert, pen in hand, breathing easily – words angling deeply – poem after poem pulled from the river.

Judith Beveridge

Judith Beveridge’s most recent collection is Sun Music (Giramondo, 2018).

Stephen Edgar

Spinoza (Spin) is a satin bowerbird which Robert Adamson rescued and raised. Stephen Edgar’s most recent collection is The Strangest Place (Black Pepper, 2020).

Robert Adamson,1943–2022 (photograph by Juno Gemes)

Money as public good

The politics of monetary thought

John Tang

The Currency of Politics

by Stefan Eich Princeton University Press

US$35 hb, 339 pp

What is money? To most, it is currency in the physical form of bills and coins. To others, it encompasses any form of financial credit that mediates present versus future consumption. To the author Stefan Eich, it is an institution that was historically conceived to promote social justice and democracy, but over time has been neutered of its political nature as a public good.

Over six chapters bookended with a short introduction and epilogue, Eich traces a genealogy of monetary thought from Aristotle to Karl Marx to John Maynard Keynes, who each

wealth (chremata). According to Eich, this linguistic distinction mattered in that, while wealth can be measured with currency, the use of the latter also represented reciprocal exchange among equals and solidarity with the values of a democratic state.

Furthermore, the issuing of money by government, as opposed to its modern creation by private banks, demonstrated that communal values superseded individual interests and that divergent needs could be made compatible through a common form of exchange. Missing from Eich’s version of coinage history is that, while Athenian citizens may have valued equality and democracy, the widespread practice of slavery undermined these ideals.

The book’s selective historical lens continues with an abrupt elision of thirteen hundred years in the chronology, when, according to Eich, the political symbolism of money was usurped by the theory of sound money. Eich views this paradigm shift – that money had an intrinsic relationship with scarce precious metals – through the work of English philosopher John Locke and the belief that secure property rights demanded that the nominal value of currency remain constant over time. In the context of highly volatile supplies of gold and silver during the second millennium and the problem of devalued coinage, Locke justified limiting government manipulation of money (e.g. devaluation) as an issue of public trust in sovereign pledges, even if it entailed social costs like deflation and reduced spending. As sound money policies like the gold standard were increasingly adopted in western Europe, money became ‘depoliticised’ and adherence to orthodoxy was legitimised. In Eich’s view, this conception of money merely masked its political nature and reflected the interests of democratically unaccountable elites.

Eich contrasts this revisionism with sound money detractors like the German philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte, who argued unsuccessfully in 1800 for the creation of fiat money that would decouple currency from precious metal supplies. Fichte’s proposal was motivated in part by growing international commerce and its attendant economic competition, which he believed were sources of international conflict, imperialism, and domestic inequality. By creating a money system independent of precious metals and closing its borders to trade, a country could, without international repercussions, issue as much money as it needed to sustain domestic spending and consumption. The value of a currency would derive from a country’s reputation, whose legitimacy was derived from its people and would thus prioritise their collective interests instead of those in industry or overseas, demonstrating Aristotle’s view of money as a public good.

differed on what money represented but agreed on its symbolic value, not just its transactional use. In doing so, Eich aims to recover money’s political past so that governments might become accountable for the social consequences of restrictive monetary policy and use it to reduce economic injustice and inequality.

Economists usually describe money by its functions: a store of wealth, a medium of exchange, and a unit of account. As a political theorist, Eich challenges this technical definition in his opening chapter with a discussion of ancient Greek coinage, where the word for currency (nomisma) differed from that for

Fichte’s later compatriot Karl Marx was similarly concerned about rising inequality and social welfare, but less concerned with rejecting metal-based currency. Believing that money was like capital in representing the labour value of production and thus accumulated through exploitation, Marx considered monetary reform to be futile since the financial system was a crucial component of advanced capitalism and would collapse on itself. Thus, expanding credit beyond precious metal supplies would only delay the inevitable emancipation of labourers. Eich suggests, however, that Marx’s support for sound money was more nuanced in that he saw it as possessing social value, albeit in a negative sense. To Marx, since money was a crystallisation

A bank run in Berlin, 1931 (Georg Pahl, German Federal Archives via Wikimedia Commons)

of human labour, its exchange and accumulation effectively dehumanised that value and those who contributed to creating it.

Eich’s most sympathetic treatment is reserved for John Maynard Keynes, who, after seeing the economic consequences of the gold standard in the Great Depression, advocated an end to central bank rigidity in managing a country’s money supply. While Keynes’s views on monetary policy have been overshadowed by his fiscal policy recommendations, both were consistent about active government intervention to limit damage from economic downturns. Unemployment in exchange for price stability (as was prescribed for an internationally traded, metal-backed currency) would no longer serve societies with an expanded franchise that demanded greater transparency, accountability, and social justice. To both Keynes’s and Eich’s regret, however, sound money remained a marker of macroeconomic prudence with the US dollar replacing the British pound as the hegemonic currency tied to gold in the postwar Bretton Woods period.

While Keynesian policies were dominant in the mid-twentieth century, their inability to address supply-side shocks, starting with the 1970s oil shocks, meant that fiscal and monetary restraint regained ascendancy. Furthermore, President Richard Nixon’s announcement that the US dollar would no longer be pegged to gold marked the end of international sound money. Eich notes that fiat money, which could have been used to redistribute economic gains, was instead wielded by unelected central bankers to target price stability, which meant increased unemployment and economic recession. This democratic deficit became even more apparent with increased wealth disparities in the subsequent neoliberal decades and the preferential treatment

of private banks in the aftermath of the Great Financial Crisis.

The book concludes with a reassessment of how money can re-emerge as a political institution with democratic legitimacy, including recommendations to recreate national postal banking systems and use central banks as open laboratories promoting social welfare. Missing from this discussion are considerations as to whether progressive populist policies such as modern monetary theory (MMT) are more legitimate than conservative ones like sound money, and whether democratically elected leaders like Donald Trump or Boris Johnson would use money to improve social welfare as it was originally intended.

Readers may wonder about the target audience for this book, given the frequent references to obscure political philosophers and academics, as well as eighty-one pages of endnotes. The seemingly arbitrary lineage of monetary theorists and the exclusively Western bias also narrow the scope to those who appreciate the ‘natural’ connections between money, democracy, and social justice. These ideological and cultural blinkers notwithstanding, more important is how salient is the book’s central argument, and this remains unclear. Had this book been released a year earlier, before the rapid increase in inflation refocused attention on price stability, its main thesis might have resonated more strongly with those seeking continued pandemic-era public spending and redistribution. Until grubby practical concerns about money are addressed, Eich and sympathetic progressives who want to reclaim it as a political institution may have to wait. g

John Tang is Senior Lecturer of Economics at the University of Melbourne.

An illustrated anthology showcasing many of the most exciting poets writing in English across the globe.

Just another strategic sideshow

Syria’s descent into carnage

Tom Bamforth

Syria Betrayed: Atrocities, war, and the failure of international diplomacy

by Alex J. Bellamy Columbia University Press US$35 hb, 427 pp

As the war in Syria enters its second decade, the human scale of the catastrophe is difficult to comprehend. Shocked by the security service’s torture of children who had graffitied the words ‘Down with the regime’ on a wall in the city of Daraa in 2011, nationwide demonstrations rose up against Bashar al-Assad’s tyrannical government. When I ask my now-exiled Syrian colleagues what life was like under the Assad family, they struggle for historical parallels before agreeing that, for them, it resembled Stalin’s Soviet Union and North Korea (a regime the current president’s father, Hafez Al-Assad, looked to for inspiration).

During the Arab Spring of 2010–12, as one after another of the region’s ageing kleptocrats fell, many Syrians felt they could throw off the shackles of the Assad family that had come to power in a military coup in 1971. The Syrian opposition threatened to overwhelm Damascus, only to be driven back by Russian airpower and Iranian ground troops; it was also undermined by internal division.

The United States, under President Barack Obama, committed to ending the ‘forever wars’, was wary of another potential Middle Eastern quagmire. Obama doubted the ability of an opposition coalition of ‘farmers and pharmacists’ to take on the Syrian government, with its Russian and Iranian backers. Under Donald Trump, the focus, for want of a better term, of US policy was on combating the perceived threat of extremism rather than on the state-based terrorism of Assad. Despite the suffering of civilian populations, in John Bolton’s words Syria was little more than a ‘strategic sideshow’ to US administrations. But in the brutal struggle for Syria’s future, torturing children was just the beginning.

Of Syria’s pre-war population of around twenty-one million people, fourteen million people have been forcibly displaced (seven million have fled as refugees and another seven million remain displaced within Syria’s borders). In the north-west of the country, an area still controlled by opposition groups, 4.4 million people occupy the ‘new Gaza’ – an area caught between the frontlines and an EU-funded wall that runs the length of the Turkish border. Hyperinflation, chronic shortages, and an economy controlled by the kleptocratic Assad family mean that seventy-five per cent of households across the country now cannot meet their basic needs. In what was once a middle-income country, half a million children now suffer from malnutrition and stunting,

and 2.5 million children do not attend school.

Civilian suffering is a deliberate military strategy, now being practised in Ukraine. The use of chemical weapons and barrel bombs, targeting hospitals, schools, markets, and aid convoys, has defined the regime’s war on its own people. The statistics fail to convey the country’s suffering and devastation. After the murder of George Floyd in the United States, empathetic murals appeared in Syria along with his tragic last words, ‘I can’t breathe’, the local reference being to the effects of sarin gas. One colleague told me that he can no longer bear to look at the family photos he managed to salvage when he fled: too many of the people in them are dead. Every few days, local aid workers operating near the frontlines send out graphic images of dismembered bodies in bombed-out houses.

What can be described, however, is the systematic failure of what some misleadingly call the ‘international community’ to bring an end to atrocities in Syria. Alex J. Bellamy – Professor of Peace and Conflict Studies and Director of the Asia Pacific Centre for the Responsibility to Protect at the University of Queensland – has brilliantly documented how international actors with the power to bring an end to the conflict ultimately succeeded in enabling Syria’s descent into carnage. In the words of veteran peace negotiator Lakhdar Brahimi: ‘Everybody had their own agenda and the interests of the Syrian people came second, third or not at all.’

With the Security Council deadlocked by Russian and Chinese vetoes, few meaningful resolutions, except those articulating weary phrases about ‘grave concerns’, were allowed to pass. Zombie peace processes filled hotel rooms and conference venues in Geneva, meandering on even when it was clear there could be no negotiated settlement. Veteran international diplomats Kofi Annan and Lakhdar Brahimi floundered under the regime’s intransigence and the impossibility of achieving a peaceful transition of power, one that, at Russia and Iran’s insistence, left Assad in the presidency. This was the one proposition that the otherwise fractious opposition groups, with separate and disunited backers in Saudi Arabia and Qatar, could jointly oppose. Their successor as negotiator, the hapless Staffan de Mistura, introduced a policy of localised ‘de-escalation zones’ that brought temporary peace in one place while allowing Assad, operating under military advice from Iranian general Qasem Soleimani, to concentrate his forces on besieging another. The effect of this doomed peace initiative was to facilitate the regime’s military strategy. Russia and Iran provided Assad with vital political and military support, with Syrian skies controlled by the Russian air force and an annual budget in Iran of US$6 billion for military support of Syria.

The United Nations comes in for harsh criticism, not only for the inertia of the deadlocked Security Council. UN operating agencies provided material support to Assad. In 2015, for example, ninety per cent of the US$900 million in humanitarian assistance delivered in Syria passed through government hands. In 2016, the UN funded US$500 million in contracts to companies connected to the Syrian government, while ninety-six per cent of food aid went to government held areas. The Assad family’s Four Seasons Hotel in Damascus, used to accommodate UN staff, has earned them more than US$80 million since 2014. While humanitarian support

to refugees in neighbouring countries has alleviated suffering, this material support in regime-held areas has enabled the Syrian government to redirect scarce resources to its military efforts. The United Nations has, as Bellamy writes, ‘aided and abetted the government’s atrocity crimes’.

Despite its own political and military objectives relating to controlling Kurdish areas in Syria, Turkey comes off as the country that has done the most for Syrians. Turkey has intervened militarily, taking on the Syrian army to create the Euphrates Shield safe zone to the north of Aleppo. It has also intervened effectively against armed extremist groups. Turkey now hosts 3.5 million Syrian refugees, though attitudes are hardening against Syrians living in Turkey. (The threat of waves of refugees to Europe has been instrumentalised by the Turkish government in exchange

History

Politics by other means

Philip Dwyer

War: A genealogy of Western ideas and practices

by Beatrice Heuser Oxford University Press

£35 hb, 444 pp

Writing in the eighteenth century, Jean-Jacques Rousseau argued that the life of a king was made up of two objects: to extend his rule beyond the frontiers; and to make it more absolute within them. Reading those lines, I couldn’t help but think of Vladimir Putin, whose primary political goals seem to mirror those of absolutist monarchs. Rousseau was implying that war was an instrument wielded by capricious princes to serve their own interests. Not long after Rousseau, AntoineHenri Jomini was the first military strategist to unpack the idea that war is the continuation of politics by other means. Many politicians and military strategists throughout the nineteenth and into the twentieth century agreed, whether democrats, fascists, or communists. General Ludendorff, Marshal Shaposhnikov, and Mao Zedong all came to the same conclusion: war and politics – one and the same thing.

These are two different explanations for why states go to war. For another kind of explanation that also echoes Putin’s behaviour, we can go back to the Peloponnesian War (431–04 bce). ‘If leaders of individual entities,’ writes Beatrice Heuser, ‘do not regard other entities as having the right to self-determination and independent statehood, the stronger may be tempted to swallow up the weaker.’ The Peloponnesian War was thus an example of a tendency among larger powers to eliminate smaller powers.

I am not arguing that Rousseau, Jomini, or the Peloponnesian

mainly for financial concessions.) Bellamy criticises the lacklustre Western strategy that has failed to back up negotiated positions with credible force. How could peace negotiations succeed when Assad and, latterly, Vladimir Putin saw only military solutions?

As the international focus shifts to Ukraine, and amid growing calls for ‘normalisation’ of relations with the Assad regime, the Syrian crisis is not going away. Assad presides over a shattered state. The cost of protecting him cannot be borne forever by Russia and Iran. The haunting question at the heart of Alex J. Bellamy’s book is: ‘Why did the international legal obligations established after the Holocaust to protect civilians from exactly this type of violence amount to so little?’ g

Tom Bamforth is a writer and aid worker.

War are adequate historical models that help explain Russia’s invasion of Ukraine – readers will understand the reasons are much more complex – only that a number of what might be called universalist principles of warfare and statehood appear to have remained largely the same for millennia. When one country decides to wage war and invade another, for example, there will inevitably be an appeal to the ‘national interest’, to security, and to a kind of toxic patriotism in which it is good to die for one’s country/ group/clan, killing being an honourable thing to do. This does not mean that countries which seemingly appear irredeemable, like present-day Russia, cannot change; think of how much Germany’s or Japan’s militaristic societies have been transformed since 1945.

Rousseau was implying that war was an instrument wielded by capricious princes to serve their own interests

Beatrice Heuser, a professor of International Relations at the University of Glasgow, has written an overview of three thousand years of ‘Western’ ideas and Western practices of war. The word Western is in inverted commas because Heuser also includes the larger Middle East. She examines many of the key texts, all fundamental to understanding changing attitudes and ideas about warfare through the ages, from the Bible and the Iliad through to Carl von Clausewitz (about whom Heuser has written before). After a short typological survey of enduring and recurring patterns in Western warfare, we get chapters on the ethical, political, and legal concepts of war; on the drivers of war; on the notion of ‘just war’; on why countries go to war and their aims; reflections on who fights and who the enemy is; the traditional and legal constraints on war, and the rules surrounding the practice of war. Heuser presents the reader with an astonishing amalgam of insights into ideas around warfare.

If there are a number of universalist principles, it is also obvious that the conceptualisation and the practice of war have changed over time, constantly recast to meet differing strategic and geopolitical requirements. We thus see incremental attempts

Swallowing up the weaker

over the centuries, to focus only on one aspect of warfare, to alleviate the suffering of non-combatants. For thousands of years, when war was waged, civilians invariably suffered the most; they were killed, enslaved, raped, driven out of their homes, and often stripped of all they owned so that they starved to death. It was only from the late medieval period on that élites began to question the morality of targeting civilians, and really only in the past two hundred years or so that human rights have been articulated in such a way as to prevent civilians being the target in warfare.

The problem is that, as we have recently seen in Ukraine, war is conducted by people, and the in-principle humanitarian gains made by one generation can be lost by another. This illustrates the disconnect that often exists between ideas on warfare, even those

people in the world today would argue war is a bad thing, but this is a relatively recent development. For most of Western history, war has been considered a good thing – good for the men fighting it, and good for society and civilisation as a whole. In the nineteenth century, this idea developed into an ideology – Social Darwinism – the concept that war is good in absolute terms because it strengthens the character of the people pursuing it, shaking them out of the complacency that supposedly comes from long periods of peace. Warfare cleansed and even healed society. If it were not for conflict, humans would still be scratching around in caves. This kind of thinking cut across European societies but was especially strong in countries like France and Germany, where militarism had a long tradition. The idea that war is good has not entirely died out. We still find contemporary thinkers – Edward Luttwak and Colin Gray among them –arguing that we should ‘give war a chance’.

This is a demanding book, so I can’t recommend it to the general reader. A much more accessible book on warfare is Margaret MacMillan’s War: How conflict shaped us (which Rémy Davison reviewed in the April 2021 issue of ABR). Heuser’s work is something that students and academics interested in war would use as a reference, possibly even something that politicians and their staff might consult to get a broader perspective on some of the things going on in the world today, dipping into the book for lessons on a particular topic.

that have become embedded in international law, and what happens on the ground. Nor has warfare necessarily diminished (an ongoing debate among historians and political scientists). Despite the humanitarian gains that might have been won since the end of World War II, the causes of civil wars have not disappeared, which means that people flee to save their lives. The UNHCR estimates that by the end of 2021 almost ninety million people had been forced to flee their homes. Tens of millions were displaced internally, but around twenty-seven million were refugees.

The refugee crisis is one of the reasons the vast majority of

At the end of the book, after telling us that warfare in the future will evolve into something entirely different, Heuser reflects on whether war might one day be abolished. It was certainly the hope of an array of theorists and practitioners from the fourteenth century through to the founders of the League of Nations, the United Nations, and the European Union. It is true that enormous strides have been made in that direction, but I fear that with the development of air and sea drones, cyberattacks, and military robots, we still have some way to go. g

Philip Dwyer is Professor of History and the founding Director of the Centre for the Study of Violence at the University of Newcastle.

A trench during World War I (Dom Slike/Alamy)

Wartime fates

A remarkable snapshot from Dunera Francesca

diaries’ appeal is partly due to his many literary and musical references, his self-awareness and passion for self-improvement, for learning everything from languages to carpentry to mathematics. One might interpret his many obsessions as a survival mechanism, distractions from the grim reality of internment, but they also speak to an eclectic interest in science and the arts. He is saved from arrogance only by the occasional foundering of his convictions.

Shadowline: The Dunera diaries of Uwe Radok

edited by Jacquie Houlden and Seumas Spark Monash University Publishing

$34.99 pb, 189 pp

Uwe Radok was born in 1916 in East Prussia to a family of Christian converts who identified as German Protestant. Nevertheless, after the Nazis came to power in Germany, the Radoks were classified as Jews – their five children Mischlinge, of mixed ancestry. In 1938, the family applied to emigrate to Australia. When their visas finally arrived in August 1939, it was too late.

This is a familiar story: family scattered. By late 1939, Uwe and his two younger brothers had left for Britain, his father had been arrested and sent to a concentration camp, and his eldest brother was completing military service in Germany (still required of Mischlinge until 1941); only his sister and mother remained at home. What is more astonishing is that they all survived the war and that Uwe left twelve notebooks documenting the years of his internment as a Class A enemy alien.

The diaries begin aboard the SS Arandora Star in 1940 and end in Melbourne in 1943. His account of those three years – the sinking of the Arandora Star, the voyage to Australia aboard the infamous HMT Dunera, life in internment camps, and the relative freedom of working for the Australian Army’s Employment Company – is impressively even-handed and without rancour. Only occasionally does Radok succumb to ennui or allow a note of sarcasm to creep in, betraying his bitterness:

There are people who were treated particularly badly every time the democracies expressed themselves compassionately, and now they sit behind the democratic barbed wire as dangerous enemy aliens, while outside the fight for justice and freedom is being fought. Redesign required.

Otherwise, Radok is constantly pushing himself to learn, to work, to give meaning to his enforced isolation from normal life. He is articulate about the effects of the Arandora Star’s torpedoing – constant dread, panic, ‘trembling like an animal’ – but generally takes the cataclysmic events in his life without undue perturbation. ‘This is one of the milder of wartime fates,’ he says of the looting aboard the Dunera. His philosophical attitude to the barbarities inflicted on the internees by the Dunera guards can be attributed to the numbness induced by shock: ‘suddenly everything loses its meaning; one cannot do anything more than die. A strange sense of calm at this thought alone.’

Radok comes across as an intellectual, a cultured man. The

Most interestingly, it is not to resolve any persistent trauma that Radok begins reading Freud and Jung, but to glean some understanding of what he refers to as his neurosis. It is at the internment camp in Tatura, about 180 kilometres north of Melbourne, that the tenor of the diaries changes. Here, Uwe meets and becomes infatuated with Fred, a narcissistic individual with whom he has a volatile relationship. Uwe’s attempts to please, to educate, and to influence backfire. He has time to reflect, not only on his future beyond release from internment but also, importantly, on his sexuality. Although his language is couched in euphemism (‘hunger’ for desire; ‘starvation’ for abstinence) and his sexual experiences remain cryptic (‘snoozing’ for intercourse?), Uwe is remarkably open about his attraction to both men and women. It is in Tatura that he meets the fifteen-year-old Anita Holper, whom he will later marry despite warnings from friends that she is not his equal. The diaries end on an encouraging note: ‘She’s not the proper person yet altogether, but more completely than anyone before her.’

Understandably, the diary entries of this period speak of fragmentation and anxiety. At one point, Radok proposes listing the pros and cons of suicide – ‘too theoretical to be of value’, he concludes. He equates sexual frustration with loss of energy and an uncertainty that affects his ‘purpose and ambition’, and has trouble reconciling same-sex desire with fulfilment in a heterosexual marriage. That ‘the objective after all is marriage’ is undisputed.

In what is a perspicacious piece of literary criticism, Radok unwittingly provides us with a key to reading the diaries. After ‘a weary start, annoyed at having to get into stride,’ he finds Dostoevsky’s Demons ‘fascinating’.

This is the way a book ought to be written – not a minute explanation of complicated feelings and experiences that it is far more satisfactory to have for oneself, but a terse collection of facts and remarks, from which one has to get the mental position of the persons presented. It takes some capability to integrate things seen from near, to the picture they represent from a great distance.

From fragments to bigger picture, this remarkable document is a snapshot of extraordinary resilience written by an ever-inquisitive man with the capacity to express the results of his self-analysis. If the selected diary entries are at times impenetrable, it must be remembered that Radok wrote for himself alone – ‘Why is it things I feel completely sure about get blurred when I try to put them into words for others?’ – not for strangers. Further elucidation from the editors – his daughter Jacquie Houlden and historian Seumas Spark – would have been welcome. A familial interpretation from Houlden might also have provided an interesting counterpoint, but I imagine she wanted her father’s perspective to stand without comment, as it does. g

Sasnaitis

Death by a thousand cuts

A new study of a tainted pontiff

Miles Pattenden

The Pope at War: The secret history of Pius XII, Mussolini, and Hitler

by David I. Kertzer Oxford University Press

$55.95 hb, 658 pp

Eugenio Pacelli, Pope Pius XII (1876–1958), bears the dubious distinction of being the twentieth century’s most discredited Catholic – and also the millennium’s most controversial pontiff. The case against Pius, prosecuted most famously by John Cornwell (‘Hitler’s Pope’), is that he aided and abetted, or at least did nothing to prevent, the Nazi regime’s unprecedented crimes against European Jews. A stiff, diffident Roman patrician, he was simply too steeped in cultural anti-Semitism to see the importance of speaking out against Nazi racial ideology or the genocide it encouraged.

As pope (1939–58), Pius prioritised the institutional Church’s

covered up child sexual abuse ‘for the greater good’ is obvious. Pius’s actions, or rather inaction, leave a stain on the Church comparable to those deriving from more recent scandals. What claims to moral leadership can his successors have when they fail even now to condemn his dishonourable example? Many were disgusted when Benedict XVI declared him venerable in 2009, a status which put him on the path to sainthood.

David I. Kertzer has long established himself as one of the foremost experts on the modern papacy, not least concerning its role in fomenting anti-Semitic sentiment. The Pope at War is his contribution to the debate around Pius personally – its rationale coming from Pope Francis’s recent decision to open the files in the Vatican Archives from Pius’s reign. Yet what access for researchers to these official documents and correspondences really adds to the already polemical positions of Pius’s critics and defenders is not entirely clear. I mention defenders here, because, although the case against Pius can seem compelling, he is not without his apologists: pious Catholics who stress the complex and evolving relationship between Church and State in fascist Italy and the extraordinary circumstances in which he found the fate of so many to be in his hands. As his most recent successor so pithily put it, in another context, ‘Who are we to judge?’

The full case for Pius goes like this. A virtual prisoner of Mussolini’s Italian fascist regime, he was never in a strong position to speak out against it and had to consider the potential consequences of doing so. He sought accommodation with Mussolini and Hitler, not from sympathy for their policies but because his capacity for seeking meaningful alternatives was severely limited. Quixotic condemnation could have made him feel virtuous but might easily have backfired if it led to the curtailment of the Church’s prerogatives and the persecution of Catholics as well as Jews. The war’s early phase favoured the Axis powers, generating enthusiasm for martial activity among Italians. Pius therefore had to be careful, planning for the eventuality that Hitler would indeed emerge victorious. Many in Italy and Germany were only nominally Catholic at best, so Pius even had to wonder what they would really do if he forced them to choose between him, their Duce, and the Führer. Moreover, he could scarcely have known what Hitler was sanctioning in Central and Eastern Europe, for it was unprecedented and many even among the Allies failed to give enough credence to the full horror of accounts which reached them.

survival above all other considerations – even when that meant accommodating unspeakable evil and breaching every tenet of the teachings he claimed to have inherited from Christ. The parallel with a later generation of Catholic leaders who have

Kertzer positions himself midway on the spectrum of Pius’s historical judges. He grants a measure of validity to some of these arguments which exculpate Pius for – or, at least, explain – his silence. Moreover, it is clear that Kertzer does not view Pius as a kindred spirit to either Hitler or Mussolini: their differences of outlook were profound, if only because they were substantially classbased. For Pius, the élite paternalist, the rabble-rousing ways of fascism, National Socialism, and their variants were at least as distasteful as Jews. On the other hand, Kertzer paints an extremely critical image of his subject who was prone to timidity, myopia, and vacillation. His Pius is a man who was never happier

Pope Pius XII visits the Lateran after the bombing of Rome in 1943

(Associated Press via Wikimedia Commons)

than with his pet canary hopping up and down on his shoulder – in other words, not merely otherworldly or a ‘useful idiot’ but weak-willed, mousy, and a touch pathetic.

Kertzer’s basic thesis is that both Mussolini and the Nazi leadership had Pius’s measure and were ruthless in taking advantage of this. Consummate diplomat he may have been as Secretary of State to Pius XI during the 1930s, but he simply lacked those convictions about the world – a moral compass, if you will – which had guided his predecessor (and, indeed, animated his own Secretary of State, the fascinating Luigi Cardinal Maglione). Thus, while Pius XI used his last breaths to try to rally the Church against the fascist regime, once he had seen which way the wind was blowing, Pius XII was repeatedly enticed, or cowed, into false and self-serving optimism. He accepted reassurances (implausible now) from Hitler, Mussolini, and their minions that the Church would be respected. Death came by a thousand cuts, with small breaches turning into bigger ones while the helpless, hapless pontiff looked on aghast.

Kertzer’s book may not shift the dial on Pius much, but it is still one of the best accounts of his wartime pontificate. Kertzer had already acquired a reputation as an elegant stylist with a commanding gift for explanation. That reputation will be further burnished by this tome. Yet, since the debate about Pius is essentially insoluble – or, at least, is most unlikely to be resolved by discovery of ‘smoking gun’ documentation – this book does really raise the question: what further value is there to be added? Almost every fragment of information surrounding Pius is already subject to complex and multiple interpretation. Some readings of the evidence may be perverse and disgraceful – I would certainly not wish to appear to condone the sorts of abuses of history perpetrated by David Irving and chronicled by Richard Evans in Telling Lies about Hitler – but reasonable views will always vary within a certain frame. How much one finds Pius culpable depends as much on the subjective values one ascribes to this factor or that as to any inherent set of facts which, in the cliché, ‘speak for themselves’.

The problem may lie with us – in our determination to put figures like Pius on trial and find them guilty or not guilty. This can occlude more valuable questions about such persons’ historical significance. One obvious counterfactual we ought to consider is what would have happened had Pius died in 1944? Could the cardinals, under Nazi domination, have elected a new pope and what legitimacy would such a man have had when the war was over? Should not both Catholics and the Allies be grateful to Pius for making sure he stayed alive to prevent such a profound constitutional crisis?

In the end, though, it is hard to have much sympathy for Pius. If he was really an unfortunate innocent trying to make the best of a bad lot, then even he must have accepted long-lasting ignominy as the weighty cross he would likely bear for his compromises and his omissions. Perhaps he really is up there in heaven suffering still for humanity’s sins. Since we cannot know, there is little point in speculating. On earth, it seems his reputation is unlikely to be rehabilitated any time soon. g

Miles Pattenden is a Senior Research Fellow in Medieval and Early Modern Studies at ACU.

The Pelican Feeder

Squid-ink sky, so the birds come in: Larry and Curly and split-beaked Moe. Larry he saved from a propeller’s blade,

Curly was hooked in a fisherman’s catch, the silver tips tearing his rubbery throat, opening it like a gardening glove.

Nobody knows what happened to Moe: a jet-ski’s figure-eight or the careless gaff from a zealous owner of undersized Muddies.

They’re not his children, both down South as far from the reach of his belated atonement as a continental shelf will allow.

Nor are they the needy reincarnations of his long dead parents, safely under dirt. Each is an obligation he distrusts.

When the wind blows in like the hair of a dog and the clouds white the water into foam, the pelicans come in to take fish from his hand, angling closer on oblique arcs, cutting rough ripples to the tepid foreshore, peddling past the heron’s wry gatekeeping, rocking and rolling like mariners who’ve been weeks at sea. First Larry, then Curly, then sidelong Moe, still as suspicious as the day he was found.

He cuts up the pilchards and keeps them on ice in the wide laundry sink, the blood slushing around the snub heads of lever-lid homebrew.

They’ll take the fillets cautiously, snatching them down, their grave eyes unblinking and honest. Over time they’ve come closer, he’s nearly been domesticated. They have almost discharged their duty – a life for a life. A few more handfuls of fish. A few more storms to clear the nets from his head.

Damen O’Brien

Damen O’Brien won the Peter Porter Poetry Prize in 2017. ‘The Pelican Feeder’ was longlisted in the 2023 Porter Prize. He is the author of Animals With Human Voices (Recent Work Press, 2022).

Unearthing details

A major contribution to humanitarianism

Andrew Markus

The Humanitarians: Child war refugees and Australian humanitarianism in a transnational world, 1919–1975

by Joy Damousi

Cambridge University Press

$141.95 hb, 360 pp

Professor Joy Damousi was the ARC Kathleen Fitzpatrick Laureate Fellow at the University of Melbourne between 2014 and 2019. The ARC Fellowship made possible the scale of the now published book, enabling research not only in Australia but also the United States, Britain, and Europe. The book evidences the potential of richly funded historical research.

Damousi’s work is a major contribution to the expanding field of humanitarianism, presented as an Australian case study focused on child war refugees. Through a historical lens, it explores complex, multilayered, and shifting meanings. It brings into focus the intersection of humanitarian concerns and broader political questions related to immigration, race, ethnicity, and gender in the era of White Australia.

The chapters are structured around four overlapping concepts: saving, evacuating, assimilating, and adopting. They encompass a range of activities including fundraising, aid and development schemes, child sponsorship, the establishment of orphanages, and inter-country adoption. The study is theoretically positioned within Barbara Rosenwein’s concept of ‘emotional communities’, in which individuals and their collectives define the valuable and the harmful, ‘the modes of emotional expression that they expect, encourage, tolerate and deplore’.

Spanning six decades, Damousi’s study traverses the two world wars, the Armenian genocide, the Spanish Civil War, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War. The transnational positioning follows the humanitarians on their travels to sites of conflict, the bringing to Australia of new ideas, languages, and causes, and the taking of Australian perspectives to the global community.

A distinctive feature of the study is its framing around biographies, primarily of women and with attention to less wellknown activists, some of whose roles in global movements have been inadequately recognised. These include Cecilia John, a left-wing activist during World War I, a supporter of Vida Goldstein’s electoral campaigns, and an attendee at the 1919 Women’s International Peace Congress in Zurich.Affected by images of starving children,John established an Australian branch of the Save the Children Fund.

In 1937, Esme Odgers, a member of the Australian Communist Party, travelled to Britain and then to Spain at the time of the Civil War. She worked to establish children’s hostels, managing a home near the French border with 300 children. She agitated for financial support, writing emotive accounts of the needs of the children for the Australian press.

Aileen Fitzpatrick, social worker, was involved in attempts to rescue Jewish children during and after World War II, alongside efforts to repatriate child refugees from the Greek Civil War in the 1940s and 1950s.

Margaret Watts, pacifist and Quaker activist, had an extraordinary career dating from World War I, when she helped form the Brisbane branch of the Children’s Peace Army, to the 1970s when she worked for the adoption of Vietnamese war orphans. Other activities included her reporting in the 1920s on the famine in Russia, her role as welfare officer for the NSW Society for Crippled Children, and advocacy for the admission to Australia of German orphans and teenage girls after World War II.

Arguably the one gap in the book relates to the forced removal of Aboriginal children, who could be considered as victims of war and within the scope of Damousi’s study. These removals link with themes of the book, including the limits of the humanitarian imagination.

While the treatment of Aboriginal children is not addressed at the conceptual level, there is passing mention of Indigenous issues. It is noted that Ernest and Mary Bryce, concerned with the plight of Armenian children, were distinctive among humanitarians in seeing parallels with Australia, referencing violence, displacement, and genocide. Ernest Bryce campaigned for investigation into the treatment of Australian Aborigines, commenting in 1926 that it is ‘dreadful to find such apathy amongst Australians about these unfortunate people’.

The one substantive discussion is in the context of the Save the Children Fund’s work with Aborigines in country Victoria. In the 1950s, the Fund, led by Sister Melba Turner and with full-time workers, sought to provide benevolent, assimilationist assistance. There is, however, no explanation for the focus on Victoria; no broad context to locate issues pertinent to Aboriginal children.

The book’s concluding chapter references relations between Indigenous and other Australians, and observes that the ‘devastating and violent removal of children from Indigenous families which was entrenched in government policy … resonated within Australia’. This is a surprising comment in a historical study that has not explored that resonance.

Despite this proviso, readers of The Humanitarians are treated to a book based on meticulous research, knowledgably positioned within the international literature. It will be recognised as an authoritative work and will stimulate local and international interest. The clarity and precision of its writing, the concise narratives which deftly navigate the wealth of unearthed detail, engage the reader, introducing activists and their changing perspectives. It is unfortunate that the high cost of this edition will limit access to this important study. g

Andrew Markus is Emeritus Professor in Monash University’s Faculty of Arts. His publications include the co-authored Struggle for Aboriginal Rights (1999) and Second Chance: A history of Yiddish Melbourne (2018).

The book evidences the potential of richly funded historical research

The banality of meat

A quietly ambitious book about suffering

Ben Brooker

Abandon Every Hope

by Hayley Singer Upswell $29.99 pb, 165 pp

There is a slaughterhouse-like logic to the way humanity’s mistreatment of animals tends to be written about. Repetitive. Relentless. Atrocity piles upon atrocity, with no hope of remedy. Readers, probably appalled by the abattoir to begin with, likely vegetarians or vegans or animal fosterers, discomfort themselves yet again in the name of … what exactly? Duty? Academic interest? A renewed sense of the righteousness of animal liberation? We read on grimly, plumbing the depths of a despair that would feel commonplace if it didn’t remain, always, so excruciatingly raw.

Abandon Every Hope, the first book by Hayley Singer (no relation to Peter, doyen of animal rights in this country), is a short, experimental collection of fragmentary essays. It both deploys well-worn tropes of slaughterhouse literature and attempts to nudge the form forwards or, perhaps more accurately, sideways. Ellipses and caesuras dot the mostly brief paragraphs, bespeaking the absences that define Singer’s subject.

Primarily, Abandon Every Hope is a book concerned with the idea of disappearance, how the plight of animals raised for human consumption is elided by obfuscation and euphemism (while reading, I was periodically reminded of David Brooks’s writings on how language shapes and distorts animal–human relations). It is a sort of thanatological diary, an accounting of the unaccounted for – a lament for the unlamented.

‘That was my first experience of disappearance,’ Singer writes about when her grandmother would feed her corned tongue sandwiches, ‘old-world Jewish comfort food’, about which she felt not revulsion but curiosity. ‘It had,’ she reflects, ‘been neatened’, utterly divorced from its origins, a process Singer describes as ‘banal magic’.

Just as the provenance of meat is made to disappear, so too are the means of its production, its conjuring. Singer writes fascinatingly of how slaughtering facilities gradually shifted out of public view in the mid-nineteenth century, including in Melbourne, where they were pushed further and further into outer urban communities to the west and south-east of the city centre. This creep has catalysed, according to Singer, ‘abattoir amnesia – a forgotten place of wrong. Not a secret, but a disregarded depth.’

With the fervour of a polemicist and the lyricism of a poet, Singer plunges us into these depths, forces us to look. Lab experiments on animal suicides. The slaughterhouse’s ‘sensorium of horrific sounds’. The way cows are suspended upside down, have their

jugular veins cut by not one but two knives. The language of mass death abounds: eviscerate. Eliminate. Depopulate. ‘How can I speak the mutilated world without mutilating it further?’ Singer wonders, her writing never less than visceral. The attempt takes its toll on author as well as reader. ‘I get the feeling that tiny pieces of glass are stuck in my throat,’ she writes. ‘Writing does things to every body.’

Singer is frank about her self-medication with alcohol. She drinks a lot, and no wonder. A university lecturer, she ruminates on how, by the time a two-hour tutorial is over, two thousand chickens will have been killed – not just killed, but hung, dragged, electrified, neck-slit, and boiled – in a single abattoir in Australia. Singer writes:

I sit alone with this fact and I’m filled with the sense of touching an infinity of dead others. I get the jolt of an urge to build altars of pure and tangible shock, of unending absence, of meaninglessness itself, of sadness and all that holds it back. As if this will restore the broken order of things.

Abandon Every Hope, though, is not merely a catalogue of extant horrors. It is also intensely generative, and asks the reader to envision what a society might look like in which animal suffering was not relegated to the fringes of its imaginary. In one passage, Singer outlines the three acts of a summer blockbuster about slaughterhouses. In another, a novel on the pain of horses kept in so-called ‘pee barns’, where their urine is harvested for the production of a hormone replacement therapy drug. These are intriguing and provocative thought experiments. As Singer observes in one essay, ‘narrative is one of the theatres in which the war on animals is fought’.

Despite its brevity and piecemeal form, Abandon Every Hope is a quietly ambitious book. Singer opines that ‘writing, if it is capable of doing anything at all, has to incite total animal liberation. Has to move society towards a new form of existence, or it will be a failure.’ By this measure, is Singer’s book a failure? I think not.

Where it succeeds is in stripping away the banality of meat, and reinscribing it with the shocking violence that is its true source. In its way, the book also reminds us that the project of animal liberation is intimately entangled with our own freedom – from the ‘need’ to kill on an industrial scale, and the psychic wounds that factory-farmed meat can’t help but inflict on those who produce and consume it. The pain of animals, Singer makes clear, is written on the human body too.

In the final essay, titled ‘Inferno’, Singer writes of the mass euthanasia of animals in North American slaughterhouses during the Covid-19 pandemic. ‘Pigs,’ we’re told, ‘[were] shot, gassed, administered an anaesthetic overdose or killed with blunt force trauma, which means piglets [had] their heads slammed against the ground.’ Workers contracted the virus en masse but were ordered to stay on, manning the production lines while feverish or vomiting. A man whose job it was to saw the legs off pig carcasses died alone in hospital.

The book ends abruptly, jarringly, as though we might still be anywhere within it. This, too, is a kind of abandonment, a brokenness ours now to restore. g

Moral machines

Why technology needs philosophy

Dante Aloni

Machines Behaving Badly: The morality of AI

by Toby Walsh La Trobe University Press

$32.99 pb, 275 pp

We like to think that we would stick up for ourselves after being wronged. No one wants to be a coward. Often, though, faced with the realities of power, wealth, and superior resources, we shrink from the good fight. More worryingly, humans can misdiagnose or externalise an issue, rationalising it away. We take a problem grounded in interpersonal relationships, politics, or some other social arrangement, and convince ourselves it is an objective, natural state of being. After all, as distinguished artificial intelligence researcher and author Toby Walsh, author of Machines Behaving Badly: The morality of AI, says: ‘We are, for example, frequently very poor at explaining ourselves. All of us make biased and unfair decisions.’

The last in a trilogy exploring the near and far future of AI, Machines Behaving Badly should be commended for its focus on the relationships being constructed with new intelligent machines. Walsh is clearly passionate about AI. For him, the topic of machine intelligence is one requiring compromise, self-improvement, and clear communication. Building fruitful, equitable AI requires the patient nurturing of a healthy relationship, like friendship or romance. Unlike some breathless accounts of AI, for Walsh, there are no easy fixes.

Morality is a question of politics and a vision of the good life. Politics and the good life are, of course, open-ended questions. Walsh is aware of this: ‘There is no universal set of ethical values with which we need to align our AI systems.’ The reader gains a general understanding of Walsh’s values in Machines Behaving Badly. He is concerned with AI’s impact on equality, racial and gender bias, and climate change. Intervening effectively in the development of AI requires making the case, based on an ethical philosophy, that others should care too.

The trouble with machines is that we can’t make them moral –at least no more so than ourselves. ‘We cannot build moral machines, but we will let them make decisions of a moral nature.’ If machines are reflecting our human failings, the way forward is to rethink or rediscover morality. The first step would be to lay out a clear vision of what makes a moral human being and society, and then explain how machines could fulfil such goals. Walsh’s prose is dexterous when mulling over the limitations of a specific technology, like self-driving cars. But his analysis of AI ethics gets bogged down when he compares lists of principles produced by technologists and technocrats, from Asimov to the European Union. Walsh’s reliance on lists throughout the book limits the

imaginative scope of his critique and stalls the writing. For example, Walsh states: ‘Autonomy, on the other hand, is an entirely novel problem.’ This might be convincing if Walsh meant only in relation to technology. But based on the counter examples, his meaning is that autonomy is a completely novel problem brought about by AI. Walsh is an engineer, not a humanities scholar. But theorising on the political concept of autonomy – the ability to make an informed, uncoerced decision – has been with us since the Ancient Greeks. Couldn’t their wisdom assist in the labour of love that is AI development? Like any other form of labour, it is characterised by relationships. And relationships are subject to that sociological favourite: power. For Walsh, ‘power does not trump ethics’. Maybe it shouldn’t, but all too often it does.

Take an example that Walsh offers about the ethical outcomes of his own AI research. He has written algorithms to tackle ‘travelling salesperson problems’, where the best route for a fleet of trucks is calculated. Walsh’s algorithm, and others like it, can routinely cut transport costs, total kilometres, and fuel emissions by ten per cent. This is a win for CEOs, drivers, and the environment – until you consider the long history of new technological efficiencies that only extend exploitation, consumption, and surveillance. These are concerns which Walsh discusses in other sections of his book, and which he wants to see changed. But any reckoning with AI has to consider the interconnectedness of algorithmic systems, where efficiency gains in one area lead to effects in others. This is why something like Amazon’s sameday delivery doesn’t result in less consumption but increased algorithmic sorting and advertising on their shopping platform, which leads to more trucks on the road. The tension between ethical AI and power lies in the path of cascading algorithms.

Walsh argues that we should hold AI to higher standards than humans. First because, unlike us, machines are unlikely ever to be held accountable. This isn’t simply a legal loophole, but a practical problem of the limits to machine intelligence in relation to consequences. ‘Machines do not suffer or feel pain. They cannot be punished … They are made of the wrong stuff to be moral beings.’ AI discipline does not work.

Second, AI should be held to a higher standard because, in Walsh’s view, we can legally and technically. Practically, this would require sweeping regulatory and technical intervention in the production and application of machine learning. One innovation that Walsh thinks has real promise is moving from cloud-based AI to ones housed in personal devices, disconnected from the broader ocean of user data. Who will build these devices when the economic model of technology companies relies on the network effects of constant, shareable surveillance?

It is fitting that Walsh is so concerned with AI’s effects on climate change. He is in the same embattled position as climate scientists explaining global warming to sceptical audiences in the early 2000s. Walsh is at his most insightful and engaging when explaining the complex decision matrices of AI. And there is a need for talented technical educators to explain these baffling technologies. Yet, even at its most reasonably optimistic, Machines Behaving Badly never goes beyond the ethical haunts promoted by Silicon Valley. g

Dante Aloni is a PhD student at Monash University. ❖

Fielding among potatoes

A ripping cricket yarn

Diane Stubbings

The Bodyline Fix: How women saved cricket

by Marion Stell University of Queensland Press

$34.99 pb, 304 pp

At the conclusion of the third women’s cricket test against England in 1935, Victorian all-rounder Nance Clements souvenired her name plate from the Melbourne Cricket Ground scoreboard. What she discovered on the reverse side of the plate, as Marion Stell recounts in The Bodyline Fix: How women saved cricket, was the name Larwood.

Harold Larwood was, of course, the English bowler who had terrorised Australian batsmen in the Bodyline series not two years before. The brutal bodyline tactic – designed to unnerve batters by firing short-pitched balls at their bodies while stacking the legside field – helped England to a series win. It also strained diplomatic relations between England and Australia.

The banner that Clements begged from the MCG scoreboard attendant – hers and Larwood’s names like two sides of the one coin – demonstrated more than frugality. According to Stell it ‘symbolise[d] the close connection between the two [test] series’.

It hardly matters that Stell’s thesis – that women cricketers ‘were tasked … with showing the world … that the old standards and judgements of “it’s just not cricket” were true and worth defending’ – is a long bow to draw and only superficially argued. For what Stell narrates here is an absolutely ripping yarn, one that requires no contrived hypothesis to justify its telling. The ‘persistence, dedication and single bloody-mindedness’ of the women whose lives Stell documents is justification enough.

Persistence and bloody-mindedness were demanded from the get-go. While a small handful of the original test team acquired their skills playing cricket at school or through university clubs, most had little access to the requisite fields and equipment. Some women made innovative use of broomsticks, tin cans, or tennis balls attached to a clothesline. Others managed to acquire a disused market garden from their local council, recruiting family and friends to help them clear a pitch. One player (Kathleen Commins) recalled ‘fielding among the potatoes that were still growing’.

Planning for an inaugural women’s test series between England and Australia began in 1931, but it wasn’t until 1934 that a fifteen-strong touring party captained by Betty Archdale (who later emigrated to Australia and became headmistress of Abbotsleigh Girls School) voyaged towards Australia. As they did so, the press speculated: would there be a repeat of Bodyline?

Few, if any, of the women had the physical capacity to bowl short enough and fast enough to endanger their opponents. Even so, any impulse to emulate bodyline bowling was quickly suppressed.

The England Women’s Cricket Association – in a regrettable concession – ‘had laid down a number of measures designed to make their cricket acceptable and non-threatening to the men who controlled the game’, including the prohibition of bodyline bowling.

Off the field, the English team had ‘an Australian experience replete with indigenous encounters, sheep stations and native animals’. On the field, they dominated. Crucially, the tour had been embraced by the public, crowds at some test matches exceeding 5,000 a day.

In 1937, an Australian women’s team travelled to England for a second Ashes series. This time, the Australians triumphed, winning two of the three tests and playing over the course of the tour to more than one hundred thousand spectators. ‘We may have been able to teach the Australians something in 1934,’ Archdale recalled, ‘[but] they are now repaying us, plus a thumping interest.’

As with England’s tour of Australia, Australian cricketers were required to provide all their own equipment and contribute £75 –the equivalent of almost six months wages – to cover their costs. (By contrast, the men’s team that had recently returned from a tour to England had all their expenses covered and each was gifted a £600 bonus.) In a country still suffering from the effects of the Great Depression, such a requirement was onerous. Many of the women relied on raffles and fundraising. Others, such as spin bowler Anne Palmer, were unable to raise the necessary funds and were denied their place: ‘My father was not working then and there was no way we could have raised [the money].’

The tour coincided with the coronation of George VI. Stell notes her frustration that so many of the women she interviewed recalled more about the coronation (‘the most thrilling experience of their visit’) than they did about the games themselves. Also recalled in detail were the billets where the women stayed, many of them ‘posh’ houses replete with butlers and ladies’ maids that amused and bewildered them in equal measure. In anticipation, team chaperone Olive Peatfield had spent time during the voyage to England schooling some of the women in the finer points of etiquette: ‘I didn’t even hold my fork the right way,’ fast bowler Nell McLarty mused.

The light shed on issues of class is an unexpected bonus of The Bodyline Fix. Insights into class-based inequalities of opportunity – inequalities which tend to be masked in surveys of the men’s game, where the focus veers more towards statistics and strategies – are here thrown into sharper relief. Significant, too, is what these women’s stories reveal about the relationship between class and fealty to empire.

One weakness of Stell’s account is her failure to address the double-edged sword of women’s cricket associations encouraging the players to not ‘take their cricket too seriously’, as though in order not to subvert social norms too drastically, or unduly threaten the pre-eminence of the men’s game, women must situate themselves as keen and jolly amateurs. How this in turn impacted on the diminishment of the women’s game – at least in terms of its visibility –during the latter half of the twentieth century deserves scrutiny.

What makes The Bodyline Fix such a treasure is that Stell has allowed her primary sources to dominate the narrative. We owe her a debt of gratitude for having found these women and recorded their voices. Their joy and humour – and, vitally, their lack of pretension – make for irresistible reading. g

Publisher of the Month with Barry Scott

Barry Scott is the publisher at Transit Lounge, an independent press he started with fellow librarian Tess Rice in 2005. He has worked in literary programming, been the recipient of an arts management residency in India and a Copyright Agency grant to research small press publishing in the United States. Beginning with an emphasis on writing about other cultures, particularly Asia, Transit Lounge is now focused on publishing an eclectic mix of Australian literary fiction and non-fiction.

What was your pathway to publishing?

Being a librarian who worked in the literary programming space, I decided that publishing was the obvious the next step. I was involved with administering the Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards in 2003 when the Unpublished Manuscript Prize was conceived. At that stage, I became acutely aware that there were many talented writers unable to achieve publication. Transit Lounge always has been and always will be about giving some of those new writers a voice, as well as publishing more established authors.

How many titles do you publish each year?

In 2023, Transit Lounge will publish ten books – all fiction. In years where we have published non-fiction as well, that number may be twelve to thirteen. I find with ten we can truly focus our marketing energies and deliver the best outcomes for our authors.

Do you edit the books you commission?

No, the wonderful freelance editors we employ do a brilliant job. Editing is both a craft and a true art, especially when it comes to literary fiction. That said, I do like to give the author some broad-brush suggestions to consider before their manuscript goes to editing.

What qualities do you look for in an author?

Originality, verve, and an understanding that publishing is a collaborative process that requires a huge amount of effort on the part of all involved.

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

It has been an absolute thrill to publish talented authors who thought their work might never find a home and to see them go on to critical recognition and awards listings – for example, A.S. Patrić winning the Miles Franklin with Black Rock White City – and to publish some of the authors (Carmel Bird, Angela Savage, Philip Salom, etc.) I first met when organising library literary events. The biggest challenge is author disappointment when their work doesn’t do as well in the market as they hoped.

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

Janet Frame talked about the will to write not always being

accompanied by the indefinable essence or gift one might wish for. With so much talent out there, I have learnt that my skill is in making books out of other people’s amazing work.

What kinds of books do you enjoy reading?

I’ve just enjoyed Olivia Laing’s The Lonely City. It’s all about outsider artists. I keep returning to Firmin by the late Sam Savage. The story of a rat who lives in a bookshop and devours literature, it has both the hook line and heart that publishers dream of.

Which editors/publishers do you most admire (from any era)?

I was lucky to meet the publisher of Firmin, the late founder of the US-based Coffee House Press, Allan Kornblum. He saw an opportunity to create the sort of publishing house that he wished existed in the world and he did it. I admire what Rhonda Hughes has done at Hawthorne Books in Portland Oregon. Both local and national in feel, and not publishing just for the sake of filling a schedule. We have shared the odd author. It worries me that multinational publishers are increasingly creating ‘indie’ imprints to monopolise every niche market.

What advice would you give an aspiring publisher? Run with your passion, but learn the economic realities of the market.

How significant, in a protean age, are book reviews?

They are gold, even when negative. As Oscar Wilde said, ‘There’s only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.’

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

Well, BookScan can foster a sort of copycat, rear-vision mirror writing and publishing that is dispiriting, but whatever the genre or subject matter, I ultimately believe that fresh and individual voices are what most independent publishers are looking for.

What’s the outlook for new writing of quality?

I think it is challenging, but there are hopeful signs. The consolidation of publishing companies is creating enormous opportunities for indie presses to give voice to the best and most individual of Australian writers. g

Maestro

Todd Field’s magnificent new film

grows sensitive to invasive sounds, like the rattling of a car’s airconditioning or the hum of a refrigerator. She is sent mysterious packages. Field adorns his frame with eerie background figures and unsettling negative space. Externally bedevilled though she may be, it is Lydia who is the spectre at her own feast; her own reckless obsessions which threaten to unmask her, forcing what was private into public. This is how TÁR quietly asserts its position on the cultural arguments at its core, clarifying that while greatness offers prodigious opportunity for both altruistic and amoral behaviour, it is ultimately an individual’s choices which will cement either their renown or their ruin.

Surely there are no other artists quite so rarefied as maestros –those top-billed superstars who mount the podium, silently turn their backs on us, then remain that way all night. Their performance is measured by the power they wield over others. Perhaps this is why writer–director Todd Field chose to centre his new film, the magnificent TÁR, on the conductor. The role holds a unique and inherent duplicity; what those in the conductor’s inner sanctum see is not what the rest of the world sees. Their lives are a delicate balance between public and private performance.

TÁR is many things: a treatise on authority and its innate corrosiveness; a blistering satire of the classical music industry; a chilly European ghost story; and a career-best performance from Cate Blanchett. Yes, this is also a film about ‘cancel culture’. But TÁR trumps most stories that have attempted to grapple with this thorny concept in recent years. It is everything both the decriers and proponents of moralistic mob justice are not: nuanced, detailed, and painstakingly thorough.

Lydia Tár (Blanchett) is not a real person, and this is not a biopic. We meet her onstage at a New Yorker event, in conversation with real-life staff writer Adam Gopnik. The conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic, she shares a home, and daughter, with the first violinist and concertmaster, Sharon Goodnow (the brilliant Nina Hoss). She wears suits by Egon Brandstetter, flies in private jets, and appears on Alec Baldwin’s podcast. She is about to release her memoir (TÁR ON TÁR) while preparing to record Gustav Mahler’s Fifth Symphony, her white whale, the crowning achievement of her life’s work. But her assistant, Francesca (a captivatingly strung-out Noémie Merlant), has been receiving troubling emails from one of Lydia’s ex-protégées, a young woman named Krista Taylor. When Lydia blatantly undermines a blind audition for a new cellist in order to hire the beautiful young Olga Metkina (Sophie Kauer), it becomes clear that this is a pattern of behaviour which Lydia’s status has thus far enabled her to indulge in unchecked – but which may be about to catch up with her.

Here the film shifts gears from poised character study to simmering psychodrama. Lydia is afflicted by phantom pains and

As an actor, Todd Field played the pianist Nick Nightingale in Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut (1999), supposedly shadowing the great director on set and absorbing everything he could. It shows to this day – TÁR is nothing if not Kubrickian in its intentionality. As a film about control, every moment is fittingly deliberate, and technically flawless. Field and his cinematographer, Florian Hoffmeister, capture the brutalist environments of Lydia’s life and work with restrained admiration. Actors are arranged in compelling wide shots that build more and more tension the longer they are held (one early sequence, in which Lydia dresses down a Gen Z Juilliard student, unfolds in a single, breathless take). Hildur Guðnadóttir – referenced in the film itself as a trail-blazing female composer – oversees the original music. Every piece of furniture and item of clothing is beautiful, considered, and somehow insidious. Equally exacting are the choices Field makes regarding which parts of the story we see, and which parts we do not. Seemingly pivotal plot points are omitted in favour of moody, symbolic detours, and the back half of the film is cunningly constructed in such a way as to force us to see the world through Lydia’s eyes, through the lens of her self-aggrandisement. This could be misread as an attempt at forced empathy, but Field isn’t asking us to pick a side – simply imploring us not to look away.

When discussing the music of Bach, Lydia suggests that good composers understand ‘it’s the question that involves the listener – never the answer’. Todd Field understands this, too. It’s hard to remember a modern film which treated its audience with this much respect, or trusted them to do so much work to get at the heart of a movie – but in TÁR the clues are everywhere, both visual and sonic. When they are assembled the right way, not only do the film’s many thematic threads coalesce into a remarkable symphonic whole, but you realise, somewhat surprisingly, just how bleakly funny it all is. The closing stretch is a staggering grace note (or punchline, perhaps) which lands once the film seems to have wrested control from its own domineering protagonist. At the start of the movie, scenes last ten or fifteen minutes at a time – the audio is mixed in mono – the hermetically sealed interiors that Lydia frequents are perfectly and oppressively silent. But over its hefty 160-minute runtime, the film changes – imperceptibly at first, then more noticeably. The pacing accelerates and the sound mix opens up, letting in more of the organic noise of the actual, real world. TÁR moves with the serene, sickening pull of inevitability, taking on new life as Lydia Tár loses control of hers. It is a film in perfect sync with the medium, with its creator, and with our times. g

A longer version of this review appears online.

Jordan Prosser

Cate Blanchett in TÁR (Universal Pictures Australia)

Heart and soul

The return of the Griffin production

Diane Stubbings

Since first being produced at Sydney’s Griffin Theatre in 2019, Suzie Miller’s play Prima Facie – a legal drama about consent and sexual violence – has become something of a phenomenon. Awarded Griffin Theatre’s playwriting prize in 2018, the subsequent production was enthusiastically received by audiences and critics alike. A 2022 West End production – propelled by the star power of Jodie Comer (Killing Eve) –garnered international acclaim. In 2023, the London production moves to Broadway, the Melbourne Theatre Company’s six-week remounting of the original Griffin production (until 25 March) sold out before its first performance. If that wasn’t enough, a screen adaptation of the play is in the works, so too a novel, both helmed by Miller.

Miller’s writing has long been concerned with themes of social justice and the equitable negotiation of relationships, whether those relationships be marital, familial, or sexual. In Prima Facie, these themes are actualised in the plight of Tessa Ensler (Sheridan Harbridge), a criminal barrister who finds herself on the wrong side of the judicial process. Here, Miller borrows a trope frequently employed in medical narratives: the surgeon who finds themselves under the knife, the oncologist enduring chemotherapy. Tessa’s accusation that she was raped by one of her colleagues exposes her to the deficiencies of a legal system in which she has, as a lawyer herself, invested so much faith.

In interviews, Miller notes that since she traded in her own law career for playwriting, she has been aware of the dramatic potential in the tension between (to quote from the play itself) ‘a woman’s experience of sexual assault … [and] the male-defined system of truth’ that underpins our system of justice. When she finally turned that idea into a script, Miller found few theatre companies interested in taking it on, and it wasn’t until it won the Griffin Prize and was championed by Griffin’s then artistic director, Lee Lewis, that Prima Facie was given its opportunity.

Prima Facie is an expertly crafted monologue, and a gift for any actor to play, but that in itself doesn’t explain the extraordinary

response the play has received. Indeed, one suspects that the play may well have suffered the fate of most other fine Australian plays – a short run of performances and a flurry of favourable critical notices – were it not for the serendipity of its timing.

In 2017, #MeToo became a global movement. While feminists had been agitating for decades about defects in the way the legal system handled cases of rape, the amplifying effects of social media succeeded in focusing unprecedented attention on the profound power imbalance that drives sexual assault against women and the obstacles women face in bringing perpetrators to justice.

Prima Facie not only speaks to the #MeToo moment, it crystallises the experience of women who suffer sexual assault. Crucially, it also painfully demonstrates how, in enforcing the right of the defendant to a presumption of innocence, the law imposes an undue burden on women not just to prove their case but to justify their right to be believed. The experience of rape, as Tessa reminds us, is not remembered in the ‘neat, consistent, scientific parcel’ that the law demands.

Sheridan Harbridge’s Tessa begins all sass and confidence. In an expertly conceived opening scene, Tessa describes the adrenalin rush of cross-examination. It is a sport, a competition (‘You’re only as good as your last brief’), and Tessa takes a shameless delight not just in winning, but in winning in a way no one – not the prosecution, not the defendant, not the witness – sees coming. Unapologetic about her tactics, she doesn’t get emotionally involved: she just plays the game within its rules.

She is, Tessa tells herself as she probes holes in the evidence of a sexual assault victim, merely doing what she has been trained to do. If her client is found not guilty, she reasons, the blame lies with the police and prosecutors who have not done a thorough enough job of proving their case. She trusts in her mantras: there is ‘no real truth, only legal truth’, ‘defence is about human rights’, ‘he did not know there was no consent’.

If there is a question Miller might have interrogated more deeply, it is why so many women like Tessa are, consciously or unconsciously, complicit in the undermining of other women? Why, as Prima Facie suggests, do we need to find ourselves on the other side of the equation before we recognise the insidiousness of the particular social or legal structures we are upholding? Why are we persuaded to believe that trying to beat men at their own game is the only way for women to make their mark?

Miller goes some way towards answering these questions in giving Tessa a working-class background and a compelling need to prove herself worthy of her place in prestigious chambers, surrounded as she is by the offspring of judges and products of the private school system. For all her mockery of posh schoolgirls and ponderous judges, Tessa can’t shake the chip on her shoulder. While this impels much of her allegiance to the ‘legal truth’, it doesn’t entirely account for her refusal to acknowledge the full emotional toll being borne by the women she cross-examines. In allowing Tessa to doubt the law but not her own loyalty to it, Miller perhaps lets Tessa off too lightly.

As Tessa, Harbridge skilfully navigates the currents that carry her from exhilaration to confusion to despair. In a perceptively calibrated performance, Harbridge brings not only emotional heft to Tessa’s story but also a striking physicality, notes heightened

Sheridan Harbridge as Tessa Ensler (photograph by Brett Boardman).

by Lee Lewis’s sensitive direction. As Tess manoeuvres a single black office chair (set design by Renée Mulder), we witness the joy she takes in her own body, from her embodiment of those people she mimics and mocks to her abandoned dancing on a night out with colleagues. Not only does the sexual assault rob Tessa of her own agency in her body – her delight in her own sexuality – there is in Harbridge’s performance a palpable sense of the deadening shift in Tessa’s centre of gravity.

Watching Prima Facie in 2023, it is impossible not to feel the echo of what was, in effect, the trial of Brittany Higgins as she sought to press a case of sexual assault against her colleague Bruce Lehrmann. While  Prima Facie deftly encapsulates the issues arising out of that aborted trial, there is now a sense that

Art

Looking at something

The enigmatic art of Peter Tyndall

Jarrod Zlatic

Praise Be by Peter Tyndall (Peter Tyndall exhibition, Buxton Contemporary, the University of Melbourne, 2022–23, courtesy Anna Schwartz Gallery, Melbourne. Collection: The artist and Anna Schwartz Gallery Melbourne. Photograph by Christian Capurro)

Although Peter Tyndall’s art is littered with the breezy, post-pop imagery of cartoons and illustrations, there is a sparse and unrelenting quality to his work. When assembled together, as in the current retrospective at Buxton Contemporary (until 16 April), they threaten to blur into one. Though this is by design, every painting and print here is a fragment of a single work that has been unwavering in its consistency over the past fifty years.

Since the late 1970s, Tyndall has consistently made use of relatively limited means. Most of his works revolve around the same organising motif: an ideogram of a ‘painting’ (a square with two lines sticking out like prongs), usually arranged into an endlessly repeating diamond-like pattern. His palette is often restricted to black and yellow on white, and his paintings are all hung in a uniform fashion (suspended from the walls by two strings,

this is a play running behind the news rather than ahead of it. Notwithstanding, both the play and its real-life mirror ask the same pivotal question of our judicial system: why are the women in these cases forced to lay out their heart and soul for ‘the law’ to pick over, while the men are permitted not only to remain silent but also to let ‘the law’ do their speaking for them?

Prima Facie may offer no answer as to how we might make the legal system more equitable for victims of sexual assault while still enforcing a necessary right to the presumption of innocence. Nevertheless, it is a forceful and moving argument against the status quo. g

Diane Stubbings is a writer and critic based in Melbourne.

mirroring his ideogram). The exhibition labels also act as extensions of the works; each artwork shares the uniform title; ‘detail/ A Person Looks At A Work Of Art/someone looks at something … LOGOS/HA HA’. While this preoccupation with the fundamentals of art (viewership, material supports, institutional infrastructures, and so on) is indebted to both conceptualism and minimalism, there is little dourness to his project. Tyndall’s contemporary, the artist and critic Robert Rooney, compared him to a television comedy writer in his ingenuity in rewriting the same joke over and over again. The strength of Tyndall’s work is in the balance he achieves between an unwavering austerity and rigour, and his reflexive and subtle humour.

While there have been survey shows in the past dedicated to Tyndall, the current retrospective, curated by Samantha Comte and Simon Maidment, is the largest to date; it fills both floors of the Buxton Contemporary. The ground floor traces the development of Tyndall’s style from his early beginnings in abstraction through to the present (the earliest work is a small painting from 1972, the latest is his painting ideogram applied to the doors of the second-floor elevators). After various deployments of his ideogram across decidedly painterly works in the second half of the 1970s, he had settled on his signature approach with a degree of finality by 1980. After that it becomes difficult to determine when a painting is from, and it is only from small changes in his iconographic motifs that chronological clues are given as to when over the past forty years they were made.

The works themselves are unclear on their temporal status. Many carry two dates, often with large gaps of time between (the longest being 1974 and 1991). It isn’t clear what either date implies, the artworks usually lacking any obvious signs of amendments or additions. This timelessness is partly due to Tyndall’s abandonment of any obvious signs of painterliness. His works are decidedly ‘cool’ and non-visceral, and from a distance appear almost mechanically produced. Up close, the blocks of white and black retain visible brushwork, as do the stripes of yellow where paint pools at their edges. Yet this is of an anonymous character, and there is something of the signwriter in his paintings. Indeed, many are almost billboard-like in their size, spreading across two or three canvases.

While the exhibition is comprehensive in regard to Tyndall’s

painting work, there are some notable absences. The section of the show focused on his Slave Guitars project is a case in point. The installation itself is not especially forthcoming; in a section on the ground floor, the instruments/props/sculptures are mutely on display. That Slave Guitars was an actual musical project – a novel attempt to combine the Australian hard-boogie minimalism of ACDC and Lobby Loyde with the New York hard minimalism of Glenn Branca – would be lost on many visitors to the show. This is not only due to the absence of explanatory texts throughout the exhibition (which in itself is not a negative), but to the curatorial decision to exclude any sonic component. Given that Tyndall is an artist for whom music was as an important influence and who was actively involved in the multifaceted Melbourne art/ punk crossover of the 1970s and 1980s, the absence is disappointing (I am reminded of a complaint once made to me by a former artist/ gallerist now musician that ‘nobody in the art world cares about music’).

Given the familiarity and stability of Tyndall’s signature style, it is the earlier 1970s works that are the surprises of the exhibition. The first room of the exhibition is dominated by two large paintings from 1973 and 1974 that are of a grotty, abject sort of abstraction that feels decidedly contemporary. This deflated, anti-heroic approach to abstraction continues in the earliest works, which Tyndall undertook as part of his unified painting project. These early works, part of an ‘Untitled’ series numbering at least one hundred pieces, are small parodies of painting. The emergence of Tyndall’s serialism is evidenced here, each work maintaining a uniform, modest size and design (the first version of his painting ideograph). Some are direct parodies of other Australian artists: Untitled Painting No. 58 a Fred Williams Painting raining (1976) miniaturises Williams’s style into something like smeared mud, possibly even scatological. As with his earlier abstracts, there is timeliness in their approach. It is only the wooden frames and large patches of unpainted, untreated brown linen that betray their age.

Although Tyndall was among the first wave of both postminimalists and post-modernists in Australia (he was included in the controversial 1982 Popism exhibition at NGV), these earlier works also point to his emergence from an older and more local painting tradition. Tyndall was in many respects one of the last contemporary Australian artists working in a European idiom whose trajectory was via a pre-war model of independent training; he studied art part-time through the Victorian Artists Society rather than at the National Gallery School.

There is also prescience in Tyndall’s repeated grid (what he refers to as a ‘matrix’). Although it appears at first simply a pastiche on minimalism and geometric abstraction, an appropriation of both Sol LeWitt and Piet Mondrian, it is the organising principle of Tyndall’s philosophy of art. While at one level this is a device that links each of his individual works into one single overarching work, there is also the implication that Tyndall’s

work itself forms part of a wider grouping of all paintings (and images). No artwork is in itself isolated, not only within a wider scheme of art history (whether socially or formally related), but on the individual level. Each viewer brings to an artwork the sum total of all other artworks they have seen. Even the artworks are conceived as extensions of the audience with the medium for each work listed as ‘A Person Looks At A Work of Art/some-

one looks at something … / CULTURAL CONSUMPTION PRODUCT’ rather than oil, acrylic, canvas, paper, etc. Here, Tyndall’s grid becomes something of an analog for our present network society. Tyndall’s painting ideograph is not unlike a diode, and his ever-repeating matrix itself starts to appear like a never-ending circuit board. Although Tyndall’s ongoing online blog-work bLOGOS/HA HA has not been integrated into the exhibition, the wall of works from 2018 on the second floor has something of the logic of internet content. There are more than one hundred individual works, painted quickly onto sheets of unstretched canvas (the dating suggests that he was doing one painting a day). Recalling the pithy and transient nature of online posting, these works form a scattered collection of cryptograms, fake band posters, art puns, poems, and cartoons that share the ephemeral quality of memes, user comments, and blogposts.

It could be that Tyndall views his matrix as a fishing net. There are several nods to fishing throughout the exhibition. A highlight of the show is a 1984/2008 painting that depicts the torso of a fisherman. The woodcut-like design has been overloaded with dizzying textures, while the twisting fish is overlayed with Tyndall’s yellow painting matrix. It seems possible that the hanging wires on every painting are fishing wire, and that, as in a scene in a cartoon, the audience and artist are two fishers who have both hooked onto the same old boot thinking they have caught a fish. g

Jarrod Zlatic is a musician and writer from Melbourne.

A longer version of this review appears online.

Installation view of Peter Tyndall exhibition, Buxton Contemporary, the University of Melbourne, 2022–23, courtesy Anna Schwartz Gallery, Melbourne. Collection: Geelong Gallery Scotchmans Hill Vineyard art prize 1989, the artist and Anna Schwartz Gallery Melbourne and Anna and Morry Schwartz (Photograph by Christian Capurro)

From the Archive

Robert Menzies is on our minds yet again. In this issue, David Horner reviews a collection of essays from the new Menzies Institute at Melbourne University. And it seems whenever the Liberal Party loses an election or endures a leadership tussle, the word ‘Menzies’ becomes both a touchstone and a sword. In her June 1988 review of R.G. Menzies: A portrait, by John Bunting, historian Judith Brett searches for the true Menzies – wit and ambition, shyness and ease, inner and outer. Brett would go on to write Relaxed and Comfortable: The Liberal Party’s Australia (2005), articulating the enduring appeal of ‘Menziesism’.

John Bunting’s portrait of Robert Menzies is a book for fans. Beautifully produced, with a handsome cover, tartan endpapers, and a royal blue marker, it is an ideal gift for those who agree with Bunting’s judgement that Menzies was ‘grand and magnificent, the best man of his time’. It will also please those who, though more reserved in their admiration than Bunting, remember Menzies with respect and admiration.

Bunting was a member of the Prime Minister’s Department for the last seven years of Menzies prime ministership, and a senior officer in that Department from the beginning of Menzies long postwar reign in 1949. He feels that Menzies suffered a bad press after his retirement in 1966 and has often been misunderstood; as he can speak with the authority of experience, he has taken up his pen to write of Menzies as he knew him.

Bunting knew the mature Menzies, after the sharper edges of his personality had been blunted by the humiliation of his first period as prime minister (1939–41) when he lost the confidence of his party and resigned, virtually handing the government to Labor. Very little of the Menzies of the 1930s and 1940s with his biting wit and impatient ambition survives in Bunting’s portrait of Menzies in power. Instead, he draws a genial, confident, avuncular Menzies.

One of the criticisms often made of Menzies was his lack of interest in younger politicians, evidenced most notably in the leadership gap after his retirement. Here, Bunting shows him as remarkably considerate of his senior public service staff and attentive to their morale. True, they were not in the direct line of succession and so no immediate competition, but it does suggest that Menzies did have the capacity to foster the careers and talents of younger men.

Alexander Downing, also writing of Menzies in the 1950s and 1960s, says of his relationship with John Bunting, ‘I am sure of all the people in Menzies’s life he regards Bunting as one of his closest friends.’ This is how their relationship appeared to one outsider; but Bunting does not seem to have regarded himself as one of Menzies’ closest friends. The friendship between them was warm and affectionate, though both were men of propriety and thus stayed within the conventions proper to relations between politicians and public servants. Significantly, though, Bunting does not feel he knew the inner Menzies. Nor does anyone else who has written about Menzies. Bunting says that Menzies’ friends

were in compartments and that he had no ‘universal friendship’, though he does see something special about the friendships Menzies formed in the 1920s and 1930s, before the great smoothing out of his public personality after 1941.

Bunting explains this apparent lack of intimate friends by Menzies’ shyness. Paul Hasluck, describing Menzies very controlled public self, also refers to his shyness. In his Mannix lecture on Menzies, he suggests that behind the façade of Menzies’s public self was ‘a very shy man, a man who was slow to expose himself and slow to give away even to those close to him his inmost feelings’. I’m unconvinced by the explanation of shyness; shyness seems hardly an appropriate description of someone so at ease in company as Menzies was. I am convinced, however, that both Bunting and Hasluck felt there was something missing from Menzies’s friendships, some withholding of the self that was unusual even amongst such restrained and controlled men as themselves. Just how this is to be explained is another matter.

Bunting was Secretary to the Cabinet in the last part of Menzies’ prime ministership, as well as during those of Holt, Gorton, McMahon, and Whitlam. He obviously regards Menzies’ time as the golden age and has an interesting discussion of the way Menzies ran Cabinet. Under Menzies, Cabinet had a much less powerful role to play in government than it does today. Menzies regarded its role as secondary to that of the ministers. Cabinet was there to be used by the ministers when they wanted to discuss an issue with their colleagues, but it did not have authority over them. Bunting thinks that since Menzies’ time ministers have surrendered too much of their authority to Cabinet.

The book is a mixture of anecdote and reflection. Bunting has worked hard at trying to understand Menzies and to reconcile the man he knew with the many trenchant criticisms made of him both during his lifetime and since. He concedes a little to Menzies’ critics, but not much – that Menzies was vain, that he could have been a little more attentive to backbenchers. He is left puzzled by Menzies’ hostility to the press. Generally, though, Bunting accepts Menzies as he presents himself to him in the 1950s and 1960s. Refracted through Bunting’s book is Menzies as he wanted to be seen, and as in many ways he saw himself, now that the grandiose, ideal self of his earlier life coincided with the circumstances of his real life as much as anyone can expect. g

ABR ’s unique critical archive

1978 Mungo MacCallum reviews a biography of Don Chipp

1979 John McLaren reviews Patrick White’s The Twyborn Affair

1980 Nancy Keesing reviews Clive James’s Unreliable Memoirs

1981 Veronica Brady reviews David Foster’s Moonlite

1982 Brian Dibble reviews Elizabeth Jolley’s The Newspaper of Claremont Street

1983 Don Watson reviews Geoffrey Blainey’s The Blainey View

1984 Kerryn Goldsworthy reviews Helen Garner’s The Children’s Bach

1985 Laurie Clancy reviews Peter Carey’s Illywhacker

1986 Judith Brett reviews James Walter’s The Ministers’ Minders

1987 Gerald Murnane reviews Murray Bail’s Holden’s Performance

1988 Manning Clark reviews Kate Grenville’s Joan Makes History

1989 Paul Carter on the speeches of Patrick White

1990 Stuart Macintyre reviews Peter Read’s biography of Charles Perkins

1991 Robert Dessaix on the uses of multiculturalism

1992 Harry Heseltine on the fiction of Thea Astley

1993 Peter Straus reviews David Malouf’s Remembering Babylon

1994 Cathrine Harboe-Ree reviews Helen Demidenko’s The Hand That Signed the Paper

1995 Bernard Smith reviews Joan Kerr’s Heritage

1996 Inga Clendinnen reviews Robert Manne’s The Culture of Forgetting

1997 Geoffrey Blainey reviews Grace Karskens’s The Rocks

1998 Chris Wallace-Crabbe reviews John Forbes’s Damaged Glamour

1999 Peter Craven reviews Peter Porter’s Collected Poems

2000 Carmel Bird reviews Robert Drewe’s The Shark Net

2001 Martin Duwell reviews Gwen Harwood’s Selected Poems

2002 Neal Blewett reviews Bob Ellis’s Goodbye Babylon

2003 Alan Atkinson reviews Inga Clendinnen’s Dancing with Strangers

2004 Daniel Thomas on the reopening of the National Gallery of Victoria

2005 Mary Eagle on Grace Cossington Smith

2006 Kate McFadyen reviews Alexis Wright’s Carpentaria

2007 Brian Matthews on Manning Clark and Kristallnacht

2008 Richard Holmes’s Seymour Lecture on biography

2009 Brenda Niall reviews Peter Conrad’s Islands

2010 Brigitta Olubas on Shirley Hazzard

2011 Margaret Harris on rediscovering Christina Stead

2012 Melinda Harvey reviews Michelle de Kretser’s Questions of Travel

2013 Helen Ennis on Olive Cotton

2014 Lisa Gorton reviews David Malouf’s Earth Hour

2015 Catriona Menzies-Pike reviews Lisa Gorton’s The Life of Houses

2016 Alan Atkinson on the Australian national conscience

2017 Michael Adams’s Calibre Prize winner ‘Salt Blood’

2018 Felicity Plunkett reviews Behrouz Boochani’s No Friend But the Mountains

2019 Beejay Silcox reviews Margaret Atwood’s The Testaments

2020 Mykaela Saunders wins the ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize

2021 Theodore Ell’s Calibre essay on the explosion in Beirut

2022 Kieran Pender on the Bernard Collaery case

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