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 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.

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

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