Philip Morrissey Lionel Fogarty Chaos in Kabul James Curran Fraught relations with China Kieran Pender and Kevin Foster on havoc and moral failure in Afghanistan
Michael Hofmann Elizabeth Hardwick Tara McEvoy Seamus Heaney in Australia
GST*INC
Vladimir Putin
Sheila Fitzpatrick
A new environmental festival
Regional festivals often prove more intimate and congenial than boisterous metropolitan ones, and it’s hard to think of a more atmospheric setting for Australia’s newest one: the Mountain Writers Festival, which will run from 4 to 6 November 2022 in Macedon. MWF (though we doubt that will catch on without some contestation from the older festival [Advances continues on page seven]
First up is the emphatically titled Lohrey, a needed study of the author of Camille’s Bread, The Philosopher’s Doll, and The Labyrinth, winner of the 2021 Miles Franklin Literary Award. Brenda Walker reviews Lohrey on page 31. Coming titles in the series include Tanya Dalziell on Joan London and Emmett Stinson on Gerald Murnane – just in time for his Nobelisation perhaps?
Amanda Lohrey (Text Publishing)
Tracy Ellis, winner of the 2022 ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize.
Contemporary takes Given the paucity of new literary monographs in this country, it’s with some relief that we welcome the creation of Contemporary Australian Writers, a new series from the Miegunyah Press. Melbourne University Press will publish two titles each year. The series editor is Melinda Harvey, of Monash University. Nathan Hollier, Publisher and CEO of MUP, told Advances: I still think there is a great value in talking about literature and what it says about our worlds, because creative writers can say things about those worlds that other writers can’t; they can represent the complexity of the world in a way that other forms of writing and other artforms can’t.
Tracy Ellis wins the Jolley Prize
Music, Dance and the Archive
NOVEMBER 2022
Edited by Amanda Harris, Linda Barwick and Jakelin Troy
AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW SEPTEMBER 2022 1 Advances
Sydney writer Tracy Ellis is the winner of the 2022 ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize for her story ‘Natural Wonder’. From an overall field of 1,338 entries, she was named the overall winner at an online ceremony on 11 August. Ellis receives $6,000 from ABR. This year’s judges (Amy Baillieu, Melinda Harvey, and John Kinsella) described ‘Natural Wonder’ as having ‘a gently melancholic undertow … The story is remarkable for its quietness, acknowledgment of knotty feelings, and the room it makes for small miracles.’ (The judges’ full report, and a list of the longlisted authors, is available on our Ninawebsite.)Cullen was placed second ($4,000) for her story ‘Dog Park’; and C.J. Garrow, a former runner-up, was placed third ($2,500) for ‘Whale Fall’. Our three winners read their stories in a recent episode of the ABR Podcast. We look forward to offering the Jolley Prize for the fourteenth time in 2023. As always, we thank Ian Dickson AM for his continuing and most generous support.
Acknowledgment of Country Australian Book Review acknowledges the Traditional Owners of the Kulin Nation as Traditional Owners of the land on which it is situated in Southbank, Victoria, and pays respect to the Elders, past and present. ABR writers similarly acknowledge the Traditional Owners of the lands on which they live.
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Image credits and information Front cover: Families board a US Air Force Boeing C-17 Globemaster III during an evacuation at Hamid Karzai International Airport, Kabul, Afghanistan, 24 August 2021. US service members are assisting the Department of State with an orderly drawdown of designated personnel in Afghanistan. (US Marine Corps photo by Sgt Samuel Ruiz, American Photo Archive/Alamy) Page 25: Leonard and Virginia Woolf (Science History Images/ Alamy) Page 59: Count Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy, known as Leo Tolstoy, photographed in 1897. Image digitally restored and retouched (IanDagnall Computing/Alamy)
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The Whitewash by Siang Lu Jesustown by Paul Daley Two recent medical thrillers Lohrey by Julieanne Lamond HarbourFreya
Australia’s fraught relations with China Seamus Heaney in Australia
Tracy Ryan, Jim Dal, Naim Kassar, Stephen Kimber
The Christian Invention of Time by Simon Goldhill Open Page AnnaNope K. The reopening of the Sydney Concert Hall Reading Madame Bovary by Amanda Lohrey
The Cowra Breakout by Mat McLachlan
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Tara JudithPaulDianeTroyRobbieDavidBenjaminPhilipRoseJudithSeumasP.MichaelSarahPeterPeterGregoryJudithHessomBrendaDebraSusanDilanAnn-MarieTheodoreMichaelKillianTimothyAlisonKevinKieranLukeSheilaMichaelMcEvoyGarbuttFitzpatrickStegemannPenderFosterBroinowskiJ.LynchQuigleyHofmannEllPriestGunawardanaMidaliaAdelaideWalkerRazaviBishopDayMcPheeEdwardsGorySextonKishoreSavalSparkBeveridgeLucasMorrisseyHufT.RuniaArnottHarwoodStubbingsKildeaArmstrong&BIOGRAPHYPOEMSLITERARYFICTIONESSAYSPOLITICSAFGHANISTANRUSSIACOMMENTARYLETTERSSTUDIESMEMOIRHISTORYPOETRYECONOMICSRELIGIONINTERVIEWARTSFROMTHEARCHIVE
Telltale by Carmel Bird
The Man Who Understood Democracy by Olivier Zunz Persons of Interest by Pamela Burton, with Meredith Edwards Life with Birds by Bronwyn Rennex Bench and Book by Nicholas Hasluck
Veiled Valour by Tom Frame Good International Citizenship by Gareth Evans A Question of Standing by Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones
August in Kabul by Andrew Quilty
The Elizabethan Mind by Elizabeth Hackett
The New Economics by Steve Keen
The Museum of Mankind Putin by Philip Short
Rain Towards Morning by Robert Gray New poetry collections from Theodore Ell and Nicholas Powell Harvest Lingo by Lionel Fogarty
This Devastating Fever by Sophie Cunningham
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The Uncollected Essays of Elizabeth Hardwick, edited by Alex Andriesse Tiepolo Blue by James Cahill
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Tracy Ryan, Toodyay, WA
Far from being trivial and a forgoing of the poet’s brief, these lines are an intertextual play with a well-known poem by a Hawkesbury/Sydney poet, and appear not to have been understood by the reviewer, giving a false impression of Aitken’s ‘The Fire Watchers: A memoir (in the Sydney Style)’.
The Amateurs Dear Editor, One thing that struck me about The Amateurs (reviewed by Tim Byrne in ABR Arts, July 2022) was its playing, first, of humans’ relatively long trip into the modern, and then the relatively short trip into post-modernism with the arrival of Brian Lipson’s character, the person of the now. The lived, present feeling in the theatre of our togetherness and inter-reliance was strong and powerful, in the way or parallel to the way the Noah and the Ark story presents itself.
Perhaps Mason is unaware that, in these lines, Adam Aitken is referencing Robert Adamson’s famous and nottrivial poem ‘My House’, from Where I Come From (1979).
Jim Dal (online comment) Il Trovatore Dear Editor, Ah, a refreshing review. I loathed this production (attended on the same day) and was tempted to walk out on numerous occasions. The whole thing was a disgrace; the singing shocking; the sets hideous.
Letters
Tracy Ellis’s ‘Natural Wonder’ Dear Editor, I like the quandary of the time travelling young wonderer who may well want to go back and fix up fate differently with his mother, or is that just the grandmother’s take on his question. A lovely impressionist collection of telling and slightly blurred details; harbour, shark beach, boats adrift, and needing their anchors cut free, evaporation.
Adam Aitken and Robert Adamson
Naim Kassar (online comment)
AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW SEPTEMBER 2022 7
Staff changes at ABR James Jiang left ABR in late August after sixteen months with the magazine as the ABR/JNI Editorial Cadet and Assistant Editor. We wish James well in his new role at Griffith Review We’re delighted to welcome Dr Georgina Arnott, who has joined ABR as Assistant Editor. Georgina, an author and academic, first wrote for the magazine in 2006. She is the author of The Unknown Judith Wright (2016) and Judith Wright: Selected writings (2022). Recently she undertook a year-long ABC Top 5 Humanities media residency. Readers will recall her illuminating August 2020 cover feature ‘Links in the Chain: Legacies of British slavery in Australia’. g Georgina Arnott
Stephen Kimber (online comment) down the Calder Freeway) was twice delayed because of Covid, but it arrives in confident shape, with an impressive line-up. The organisers state that this will be ‘the first Australian writers’ festival to focus exclusively on the environment – the most important topic of our times –with a forever theme of “Place, Story, Nature”’. Speakers will include Evelyn Araluen, Claire G. Coleman, Tim Flannery, Declan Fry, and Anna Krien. ABR, with its keen interest in these subjects, is pleased to be a sponsor of the festival. Historian Billy Griffiths (Deputy Chair of ABR and Macedon resident) will chair the ‘Trouble in the Outback’ panel on 6 November, with panellists Kate Holden, Joshua Kemp, and Tyson Yunkaporta. The Festival will take place, mostly, at the capacious Jubilee Hall in Macedon. Early bird weekend and day passes go on sale on 5 September; single session tickets will follow on 20 September. Visit mountainwritersfestival.com.auhttps://
Dear DavidEditor,Mason, in his review of the anthology The Language in My Tongue (ABR, August 2022), writes: ‘I feel a bit unfair picking on Adam Aitken, whose poems open the book by virtue of alphabetical order, but his lines too often forgo the poet’s brief in favour of triviality: “Reaching forty now I ask: Why did Mum / never sew the hems of my jeans, even if Death on the TV / reminded her of her children?”’
For
This year’s judges are Sarah Holland-Batt, Des Cowley, and James Jiang. more information, visit: australianbookreview.com/prizes-programs place
Entries are now open for the nineteenth Peter Porter Poetry Prize, one of Australia’s most prestigious poetry awards. Worth a total of $10,000, the prize honours the great Australian poet Peter Porter (1929–2010).
First
Category 8 AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW SEPTEMBER 2022
$6,000 Four shortlisted poets $1,000 each Entries close 3 October 2022
On being elected in May, Anthony Albanese and his ministers moved quickly to strike a new tone for Australian diplomacy. They declared ASEAN centrality the lodestar of their regional approach and moved to assuage anxieties in the Pacific over China’s strategic reach and climate change. While the fledgling government has broken with the Morrison government’s tenden cy to shout at China, it does not wish to be wedged by its political opponents on national security matters so early in its term.
A ustralia’s fraught journey with China continues. The Albanese government now wrestles with the same harsh global and regional realities as its predecessors.
AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW SEPTEMBER 2022 9
The crisis brought about by US House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan in early August now appears to have ruptured much of the initial attempts on both the Australian and Chinese sides to at least begin talking to each other again. That cautious resumption of ministerial contact with Beijing at the defence and foreign ministerial levels had not ushered in any re prieve from Chinese economic coercion. Two Australian citizens –Yang Hengjun and Cheng Lei – remain incarcerated in China.
All of this shows just how much Australian relations with China continue to represent something of an odyssey. As former Prime Minister Gough Whitlam instructed Stephen FitzGerald, the first Australian Ambassador to China in 1973: the new envoy would have to ‘steer a course between the Scylla of unnecessary suspicion … and the Charybdis of apparent carelessness’. Whit lam was stretching out the tightrope that subsequent governments would have to traverse. While many commentators in Australia hoped for an im mediate reset with Beijing with the coming of the new Labor government, such expectations were both undefined and unreal istic: the ‘China threat’ narrative and rhetoric still pulse strongly through the security and intelligence apparatus so dominant in Australia’s global outlook. The key advisers who shaped the policy response to China under Scott Morrison have been left in place. That means the harder thinking about the connection between economic and national security is not being done at the highest levels.
A long way to go Australia’s fraught relations with China by James Curran
This means that Canberra and Beijing are once more talking past each other. The crisis over Taiwan has only sharpened the rhetorical swords. When Foreign Minister Penny Wong joined with her American and Japanese counterparts to condemn China’s display of brute force over the Taiwan Strait – in what amounted to a virtual blockade of the island – the Chinese embassy in Canberra resorted to its ‘wolf warrior’ diplomacy, demanding that Australia treat its handling of the ‘Taiwan question with caution’, and reminding Canberra of Japanese aggression towards Australia during World War II. Before this crisis erupted, Albanese said there is still a ‘long way to go’ with China and that the relationship will remain ‘problematic’. In the wake of Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan and its em boldening effect on belligerents in both Beijing and Washington, those words now seem quaint. Australia is now intimately linked to possible war in the Taiwan Strait by bipartisan policy Thus Wong’s earlier talk of ‘stabilising’ the Australia-China relationship may well prove to be a forlorn hope. In her early weeks in the job, Wong engaged in an awesome schedule of shuttle diplomacy across Southeast Asia and the Pacific to pro mote a renovated image of Australia to the wider world. But the prevailing climate of a ‘new Cold War’ with its decreed fault-line of autocracies versus democracies has the stronger hold. Indeed, on a visit to Madrid for the NATO summit in July, Albanese appeared to give at least rhetorical support to the idea that the world was now a ‘single theatre’ of operations, with the ‘West’ facing Russia in Europe and China in Asia. He hoped that Beijing would learn the lessons of Russian aggression. He seems to buy the line that the West must defeat Vladimir Putin in Ukraine so that it stands as a warning to Xi Jinping. Then Defence Minister Richard Marles, having preached the virtues of ‘reassuring statecraft’ in a major speech at the Shangri-La Dialogue in June, showed his true colours during a visit the following month to Washington for talks with US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin. While there, Marles delivered a major speech on the relationship between Australia and the United States. He spoke of the alliance in terms much like his predecessors did in London at the height of the British Empire. The relationship was not only bound by the ANZUS treaty, he said: it was a ‘network of people’ committed to a ‘shared project’. But he went further. Marles ushered in a new concept for the alliance. Australian and US military forces would henceforth be not only interoperable but ‘interchangeable’. Spelling it out, he said the two forces could then ‘operate seamlessly together, at speed’. Marles is still sending former defence minister and now opposition leader Peter Dutton’s message (albeit a little differently) that Australia is readying for war.
Commentary
10 AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW SEPTEMBER 2022
Negative attitudes towards China in the political culture and populace are now entrenched. Over the preceding four years, the chief proponents of the view that Australia faces an existential threat to its security and prosperity – particularly those in the press, security services, intelligence agencies, and government –marshalled an array of slogans that touched on powerful memo ries in the national psychology. They put historical experience into a straitjacket and indiscriminately applied the supposed lessons of ‘Munich’, ‘appeasement’, and the Cold War.
The Australia–China relationship has enjoyed three sustained periods of political and diplomatic sunshine: from the 1970s to the late 1980s, from late 1996 to 2007, and then again from the end of 2009 to 2017. These high points of the relationship occurred not only because of astute management by successive governments in Canberra, which recognised that China’s opening was a positive for the national and global economy, but because China was broadly set on a path to gaining global acceptance as a major economic and political power.
The US alliance has become a path to safety and reassurance for both sides of Australian politics. A bedrock reality in Australia’s strategic past and present is that it has no real alternative to the US security relationship. But since at least the late 1990s, the task of defining the parameters of self-reliance has been discarded. Doing more for the United States, irrespective of whether the Americans will ever concede they are satisfied, has become a default policy setting for both major political parties in Australia. The result is that Australia is little more than an auxiliary in whatever strategic decisions the United States makes. For many in the national security community in Canberra, the US alliance has become a way of life. As Marles’s visit to the American capital shows, there is now an official and formal Australian policy of ‘alliance maintenance’. This is a strategic gamble, possibly the greatest in the history of Australia’s relations with the world. Its politicians bank on a hope that the internal strife in the United States is but a passing phase, that once again America, as it has in the past, will recover its purpose following a period of drift and chaotic introspection. Yet the socio-cultural conflict that predated the coming of Don ald Trump, and which he exploited while in power, has thrown doubt on America’s resolve to once more assume the role of world leader. The United States will not turn away from the China challenge – that would be against its very nature, and its primacy is at stake. But it may well find that the gap between its resolve and its capability has Ifwidened.thepast four to five years have been challenging, the next few will very likely be harder. In all likelihood, Australia will be dealing with a president who has lost control of Congress. The discipline of the Biden administration in resisting the policies and intellectual environment of a new Cold War will likely be eroded. Then, within the next term of the Australian electoral cycle, the prime minister will need to deal with a United States conceivably led from the White House by Trump himself or a Trumpian figure in his image. It is possible that this would follow a tightly contested presidential election, with the potential for yet more domestic dis array in the United States. The Trumpian obsession is a managed trade with China, where the United States can deal with China, to the exclusion of its allies. This would not only bring further economic costs to Australia; it would also have the potential to inflame the European Union and damage US alliances with Japan and Korea. The inescapable reality, however, is that Labor – as much as its political predecessor – has banked on American resolve in resisting China. More than at any point since World War II, Canberra is tucked into the blanketing embrace of US Asia pol icy, a policy that is still in formation. The Albanese government endorses that stance even as it continues to craft a new language to set out Australia’s role and place in the world. g
Australia is now intimately linked to possible war in the Taiwan Strait by bipartisan policy
During these periods, too, Washington was either distracted by the Soviet Union and then the hubris of its unipolar moment at Cold War’s end or focused on the Middle East in the War on Terror. Even so, at nearly every point, even in the late 1950s, the Americans dropped enough hints – privately and publicly –that revealed nervousness about the warmth of Australia’s China embrace. From the election of John Howard in 1996, successive Australian governments made sure that the US alliance was reinvigorated – structurally, institutionally, and emotionally.
James Curran is Professor of Modern History at Sydney Uni versity and the author of Australia’s China Odyssey: From eupho ria to fear (NewSouth, 2022). His next book is a study of Paul Keating’s world view and foreign policy. This is one of a series of politics columns generously supported by the Judith Neilson Institute for Journalism and Ideas.
Nancy Pelosi and President Tsai Ing-Wen at the presidential palace in Taipei (Image credit © Taiwan Presidential Palace via ZUMA Press Wire/Alamy)
Short writes that, in Putin’s first decade as president, ‘Russia had a genuine multiplicity of voices and of economic and political actors. But the limits within which they could operate were de creed from above.’ The economy grew, buoyed by high oil prices, until around 2008, when it started to stagnate. Putin, meanwhile, Fair means and foul
Vladimir Putin and Prince Charles during the Russian president’s state visit, 2003 (Kirsty Wigglesworth/PA Images/Alamy)
That said, Putin was never a hundred per cent ‘Westerniser’ in the old Russian dichotomy of Westernisers and Slavophiles, and he acquired negative impressions of the West as well, notably with regard to the substantial interference of the United States in the 1996 Russian presidential elections, which left him strongly convinced of Western hypocrisy on such matters.
He saw, perhaps in exaggerated terms, signs of similar Western interference in Ukraine’s Orange Revolution in the mid-2000s, which Putin interpreted as the United States ‘stealing Ukraine from under [him]’. Putin had long thought that Russia had got the rough end of the stick over the breakup of the Soviet Union, citing Ukraine’s resistance to any cessation of discounted prices for Russian oil and gas as an example.
AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW SEPTEMBER 2022 11 Russia Putin: His life and times by Philip Short The Bodley Head $39.99 pb, 864 pp
In the era of Russia’s war in Ukraine, who would be a ‘Putinversteher?’ (‘Putin-understander’) is the disdainful German term used for someone trying to negotiate the perilous path between Putin-apologist and Putin-denouncer. Understand ing Vladimir Putin means grasping how Putin himself sees the world he is operating upon. Philip Short, a former BBC foreign correspondent in Moscow, has committed himself to this path, and more power to him, say I.
A measured biography of Vladimir Putin Sheila Fitzpatrick
Some readers will fault him for his failure to match the ‘evil genius’ rhetoric of most Australian media reports on Putin. But anyone seriously interested in Russia and Ukraine should read this book, regardless of their preconceptions. True, its heft – the paperback is almost six centimetres thick – may deter some, but that is largely the result of Short’s thoroughness. He examines the evidence for each of the specific allegations that have been made of Putin’s personal responsibility for political assassinations and other acts of malfeasance, for which thankless effort we should all be grateful. All I can say to a potential reader is: give it your best shot, preferably resting the book on a flat surface. Do not attempt to read it in bed unless you have very large hands.
Putin’s KGB service and years as an intelligence operative in Dresden in the 1980s are often seen as the key to understanding him. Short does not discount this, but he stresses other formative experiences as well. The first was the working-class, pro-Soviet milieu in the hardscrabble of postwar Leningrad in which Putin, born in 1952, grew up. Volodya was a self-directed child, thin, shy, prickly, and resistant to authority if he felt he was disrespected. He found his niche in the martial arts. By the time he reached his teens, things were looking up for the family: they acquired a refrigerator and even, remarkably for the times, a car, which his mother won in a lottery. Watching Soviet spy movies, as all his age group did, he formed the aspiration to join the intelligence services, which he did after graduation from law school at LeningradTheUniversity.collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, which shocked Putin, and his subsequent work in Anatoly Sobchak’s post-Soviet Leningrad/St Petersburg administration as deputy mayor, were equally formative. Putin, at this point, had no evident political ambitions but ‘saw himself as an administrator’ whose ‘job was to keep the City government running’. Boris Yeltsin’s presidency (1991–99) was the era of ‘wild capitalism’, and Putin’s job brought him into contact with both organised crime and foreign capi talists. Putin himself was not ‘blatantly corrupt’, according to Short, but ‘could live with those who were’; he also eschewed the conspicuous consumption embraced by many of his colleagues. Though never an easy socialiser, he got on well with some of the resident foreigners (including an unabashedly gay American), having concluded that the only way for Russian industrial pro duction to upgrade was via capitalist competition. Russia was ‘part of European culture’, Putin told a BBC interviewer in 2000. He ‘could not imagine my country in isolation from Europe’ and could even envisage Russia joining NATO at some future time –as long as Russia was treated with respect as an equal partner. The next year, after the Twin Towers attack in New York, he went out on a limb (and copped some domestic flak) by quickly offering support to the United States in its ‘war on terror’.
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Russia
Dostoevsky had warned as far back as 1871, in The Devils, of the intimate connection between political utopianism and despotism. The Russian Revolution of 1917, emerging from the messy and tragic geopolitics of World War I, was mother to the brutal state that was the Soviet Union; in hindsight, its eventual collapse seems more probable than its birth. For the Russian Rev olution might easily not have happened; it was a time when the paths open for European political futures were multiple, unstable, and highly contested. And when the revolution did happen, it might not have been Lenin’s Bolshevik faction that gained the upper hand. On the back of a world war, a global pandemic, a civil war, and constant internecine political struggles, the Bolsheviks set the tone for the rest of their regime: ruthless, addicted to power, uncompromisingly violent, stubbornly convinced of their own ‘historic mission’ to build a new society, and thus, like most utopians, murderous for those who stood in their way. It soon became obvious that this had nothing to do with ‘the proletariat’ and everything to do with power and control. In the broader sweep of Russian and Soviet history, the line of autocratic misfits that were the Romanovs is later mirrored by
Luke Stegemann Collapse: The fall of theSoviet Union by Vladislav M. Zubok Yale University Press US$35 hb, 559 pp
g Sheila Fitzpatrick’s most recent books include The Shortest History of the Soviet Union (2022), On Stalin’s Team: The years of living dangerously in Soviet politics (2015), and White Russians, Red Peril: A Cold War history of migration to Australia (2020). She is a professor at Australian Catholic University.
‘By fair means and foul,’ Short concludes, ‘Russia has reasserted itself as a major actor in international affairs.’ Agree or not, that’s something to think about.
Too little, too late
In these relentless times, thirty years ago might be prehis tory; events now appear to move so breathlessly that the ‘world-changing’ and ‘historic’ occur with terrible regularity. The flip side of this relentlessness and hyperbole is that wars, floods, financial disasters, coups, and political murders are just as quickly forgotten. As we enter a global recession brought on by the twin pincers of the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the lin gering Covid-19 pandemic, it is easy to forget two other events still shaping our world: the global financial crisis of fifteen years ago, never fully overcome, and the 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. These key moments emerged, in their turn, from another which has been singularly influential in shaping our world today: the global political and cultural realignments brought about by the end of the Cold War, the end of communism, and the collapse of the Soviet Union between 1989 and 1991. Far from signalling the end of history, these years were seminal to a new era whose unstable foundations continue to shift and loosen. Putin’s nostalgia for a lost – albeit failed – empire is just one indication that the end of the Soviet Union is a story still unfolding: it will play out on a timescale beyond the lightning immediacy of social media and trending topics.
Short’s Putin is a pragmatist, increasingly souring on the West for what he sees as rebuffs, end-of-Cold-War triumphalism, and hypocrisy. He is not crazy (Short sees him as playing the Nixon card of acting crazy, by implication capable of anything, as a form of deterrence); and, despite the current Western consensus, the invasion of Ukraine was not necessarily a ‘fatal error’, viewed in cold realpolitik terms rather than through a human rights prism. Short notes that not only are China, India, and Indonesia hedging their bets on the invasion, so are ‘notional US partners’ like Saudi Arabia, the Gulf States, and even Israel. The invasion may not have won public expressions of respect from the West (clearly the opposite is the case), yet may nevertheless have secured tacit Western recognition that Russia has returned as a global player – arguably the primary aim of Putin’s foreign policy.
From Bolshevism to gangster capitalism
The Shortest History ofthe Soviet Union by Sheila Fitzpatrick Black $24.99Inc.pb, 248 pp was moving towards increased intolerance of dissent, coupled with an evidently increasing conviction that Russia needed him to stay at the helm. His social attitudes, probably influenced by his close alliance with the Slavophile Russian Orthodox Church, were becoming more traditional. This suited the older genera tion, raised with puritanical Soviet mores, but tended to turn off the more cosmopolitan urban younger generation. Political assassinations, whether or not directly ordered by Putin, became more common, provoking outrage in the West. While reporting political opponent Oleg Navalny’s allegations that Putin had built a palatial residence on the Black Sea, Short remains sceptical that money is a major motivator for Putin, noting that in the event that Putin fell or withdrew from power, ‘his future [would] be assured, as Yeltsin’s was, not by money but by the protection of those who [came] after him’. This biography, researched and written over eight years, seems to be moving towards a conclusion in which an ageing and in creasingly detached Putin retires (gracefully, Short surmises) and/ or assumes an elder statesman role in Russia. Putin’s Ukrainian adventure in 2022 obviously came as a surprise to Short, as it did to many well-informed observers, prompting some abrupt re-routing of his argument as well as the addition of a seven-page ‘Afterword’ dealing with recent developments. Short’s interpre tative emphasis throughout is on Putin’s concern with Russia’s standing and respect in the world (to which NATO membership for Ukraine posed a threat), not with Ukraine and Slavic broth erhood per se. He sees the acquisition of the Crimea in 2014 as opportunistic, Putin seizing a chance for major gain while the Ukrainian government was in turmoil. He got away with it, and eight years later judged that the international situation offered ‘a window of opportunity for one last push to bring Ukraine to heel. It would be a gamble. But if he could carry it off, correcting what he viewed as the cardinal sins of his predecessors, it would be the crowning achievement of his career.’
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an equally eccentric and dangerous series of communist rulers: the vile Lenin, the tyrant Stalin, the wily Khrushchev (clever enough to have his rival Beria shot), the morose and turgid Brezhnev. At last, in 1985, Mikhail Gorbachev emerged as a sane and capable technocrat, only to fail spectacularly. Gorbachev was followed by the clown Boris Yeltsin and the sinister figure of Vladimir Putin. Barely have the Russian people (or those other nationalities of the broader Eurasian empire) had any say in the election of this largely malignant cast that has served up the corruption and misgovernment that have plagued them from tsarist times.
Fitzpatrick quotes Tocqueville: ‘the most dangerous moment for a bad government is generally that in which it sets about re form’. Gorbachev’s attempts to radically change the basis of both the Politburo and the Soviet economy met with the resistance of inertia, personal ambitions, and incomprehension. For some, he moved too fast; for others, too slowly. Elsewhere, events were unstoppable: stunned by the suddenness of change, not only Gor bachev’s Soviet Union but so too the United States under Ronald Reagan and George Bush Sr fumbled about for strategies to play a newly unrecognisable chessboard. The United States became distracted by the first Gulf War, Kuwait, and Iraq – until then a significant Soviet ally and buyer of Soviet armaments. In a major foreign policy shift, the Soviet alliance with the United States against Saddam Hussein further boosted Gorbachev’s status in the West; in November 1990 he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. At the same time, the program of market reforms, along with the attempt to secure Western and Israeli financial backing, was in tatters: as Zubok remarks, ‘the Soviet Union fell victim to a perfect storm and a hapless captain’. Gorbachev’s ambition of having the West as a partner in the great scheme of Soviet modernisation was not realised. Internally, the Soviet house was deeply divided, while also dealing with outbreaks of ethnonationalism along its vast borders. Damningly, there was ‘no will or imagination among Western leaders to seize the unprecedented and historic oppor tunity to consolidate democracy in Russia’. To this extent – if not his aggressive expansionism, dangerous nostalgia, and appalling record of human rights abuses – Putin is our failing too.
Dostoevsky had warned as far back as The Devils of the intimate connection between political utopianism and despotism In her compact history, Sheila Fitzpatrick shows how the Soviet Union, with its structural inequalities, privileged élites, hopeless economic management, suspicion of democracy and pluralism, and even deeper suspicion of intellectuals – not to mention everyday racism – was barely much of an advance on the old tsarist system. For all its industrialisation and talk of world revolution, the Soviet Union was often characterised by a deeply provincialist isolationism, fed by paranoid fears of the ‘capitalist’ other. ‘Aggressive cultural insularity’ is Fitzpatrick’s term, a com bination of ‘boastfulness and inferiority’. Its brutality softened from the 1960s to the 1980s as world prosperity grew, but the Soviet Union was trapped in cumbersome centralised planning and single-party government, unable to grasp the opportunities offered by increasing democratisation and rapidly developing newFitzpatrick’stechnologies.work is an admirable compression into 200 pages of seventy years thick with intrigue, war, murder, and geopolitics. It is an easy and engaging read from a historian who has dedi cated her life to the field. Less clear is the intended audience for this book. In a time-poor world, there is a market for condensed histories – who now would dare read Gibbon? – but surely those fascinated by Russia and the Soviet Union gravitate towards the tomes as large as the country itself? Never mind Tolstoy, Grossman, or Solzhenitsyn; one only need recall recent epics such as The House of Government by Yuri Slezkine (a former stu dent of Fitzpatrick’s) or Secondhand Time by Svetlana Alexievich to understand the appeal of the marathon read for those wishing to interpret this extraordinary continent, its history, and its people.
V ladislav Zubok is a case in point. Collapse is a long, un sparing, and meticulous account of the last days of the Soviet Union. The author is damning in his criticism of Gorbachev, so much a darling of the West, for his timid lead ership and economic mismanagement of a disintegrating em pire. His key policies of openness, or glasnost, and structural re forms, known as perestroika (buzzwords of the 1980s) promised everything but delivered too little and too late. Zubok builds his narrative around two broad themes: the economic stagna tion of the late Soviet years, which added further frustration to a society both exhausted and desperate for change; and a tightly plotted account of the complex web of intrigues, ambitions, and Western influence that led to the dramatic months of mid-late 1991 when, after the complete failure of an attempted hardline communist coup to take back control from Gorbachev, the So viet Union finally disappeared, the last of the dominoes toppling after the fall of the Berlin Wall two years previously.
A sense of nostalgia pervades both these books: the role of Sovietologist is, like so many twentieth-century professions, in the process of disappearing. The next generation of historians who write on the political and cultural milieu of the Soviet Union will have had no direct experience of it. As it recedes from lived reality to historical artefact, its dubious moral weight is still felt; under the guise of ‘liberation’, the Soviet Union was simply another exercise in the brutal enactment of power. This is still evident today in Ukraine; communism and fascism were always the closest of cousins. The Soviet Union provided a highly centralised and authoritarian template for any number of intellectually, financially, and morally corrupt governments across the globe. Meanwhile, the grotesque inequalities in contemporary Russia are testament to the fact that the Soviet Union’s centrally controlled command economy unwittingly prepared the ground for the worst forms of gangster capitalism. A nation of highly educated citizens who were nevertheless unschooled in the opportunistic narcissism of the West stood no chance against lawlessness and unbridled greed. There had been little education in or experience of how liberty and markets work, and how their inevitable excesses are to be controlled – little if any moral readiness for such a collapse. g Luke Stegemann is the author of The Beautiful Obscure and Amnesia Road. He is currently writing a social, political, and cultural biography of Madrid.
Quilty, a nine-time Walkley Award winner who had lived in Kabul since 2013, almost missed the shock ing events that would become the basis for August in Kabul. Just as the rapid march of the Taliban into cities across Afghanistan in early August last year took Western intelli gence by surprise, so too it blindsided Quilty, who was in France at the time, attending a wedding. And so on 14 August, ‘as anyone with the means of leaving Kabul’ was exiting the country, the Australian was on one of the last Emirates flights into the country. This is where August in Kabul begins, and it was in Kabul that Quilty stayed, chronicling the chaos of the American exit and the early months of Taliban rule, until returning to Australia last November. He was one of the few foreign journalists in the country during the fall – indeed, one of the few working journalists, as many local reporters were forced into hiding.
The book is focused on particular figures: Captain Jalal Sulaiman, commander of several Afghan National Army outposts in Maidan Wardak, two hours south of Kabul; Hamed Safi, a press attaché in former President Hamid Karzai’s retinue; Najma Sediqi, a female journalist (who, harrowingly, purchases a knife: ‘before they take me, I will kill my self’); and more. They deliver heart-wrenching human stories. Through them Quilty offers a broader narrative, of state failure, foreign policy missteps, and, ultimately, government betrayal. The book is full of minor details that, cumulatively, serve as a condemnation of counterproductive American methods –such as the use of local intelligence operatives disguised as humanitarian workers. ‘In 2018, such practices resulted in bans on house-tohouse vaccination campaigns in Talibancontrolled areas and the subsequent spikes in the spread of the polio virus,’ the author recalls.Quilty, an assured narrator, lets the facts speak for themselves, but imbues the story with this wider perspective informed by his long stint in Afghanistan. When he does offer judgement, it can be damning: ‘The Taliban’s military victory would never have come without the ineptitude and malfeasance of successive administrations in Kabul and their armed forces, and the hubris of the American-led international military coalition.’
Fuelling the fire
Andrew Quilty’s first draft of history
Andrew Quilty (Melbourne University Press)
Kieran Pender
The rural experience of the two-decade war ‘was one of deprivation and disaffection – a story less often told’, and a central explanation for the US failure in Afghanistan. The ‘punitive ne glect of the rural class’ was ‘creating an increasingly unbridgeable gap between rural Afghanistan and the central government’. (Quilty won an Overseas Press Club of America award for his investigation into massacres committed by CIA-backed militias, a ‘lack of accountability’ that was ‘self-defeating’ and, he suggests, ultimately ‘the war’s essential theme’.) Then Kabul fell, and ‘made the themes I’d followed in Afghanistan over the preceding six years all of a sudden seem less urgent’. Perhaps – but Quilty’s wider contextual understanding informs August in Kabul, making it an incisive and analytical read.
Two stories stand out. The book begins with a finely detailed account of a stand-off between the army’s Antenna Post, overseen by Sulaiman, and a local Taliban contingent, in the months prior to the fall of Kabul. Quilty tells the story of the siege of this out post – on-and-off fighting, lack of interest from army headquar ters in Kabul, impact on the surrounding community – through Sulaiman’s eyes and those of his Taliban counterpart, Abudajanah.
This was not the book Quilty initially set out to write. He admits at one point that a project had been on his mind since 2020, after the Taliban signed the Doha Agreement with the United States to mark the beginning of the end of American-sup ported Afghan government rule. ‘I saw the Doha Agreement as a death knell for the Afghan Government, but I never anticipated it would come so quickly,’ he says. Instead, Quilty wanted to write about the gulf between rural Afghanistan and those in the cities, particularly Kabul.
Afghanistan
August in Kabul is thus a first draft of history, a work drawing on Quilty’s own experiences of those two weeks (including ten hours in Taliban detention), informed by his eight years report ing across the country, and supplemented by more than one hundred interviews. In a prefatory note, he concedes that ‘more forensic retellings of the last days of America in Afghanistan will be written as information is declassified and others who were involved come out of self-imposed public exile’. Until then, he continues, ‘this book represents the most accurate accounting of events – collected as they happened and in their immediate aftermath – that I can offer’.
AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW SEPTEMBER 2022 15
This book will at times quite literally take your breath away. A deeply reported account of the fall of Afghani stan’s capital, August in Kabul tells the harrowing stories of those who escaped and those who were left behind in the maelstrom of those two weeks between the arrival of the Taliban on 15 August 2021 and the final US flight to depart – at one minute to midnight on 30 August. Compelling, vivid, and dis tressing all at once, it is a damning indictment of the Taliban’s wanton cruelty and of the domestic and foreign policy failures that allowed them to return. It is an impressive book-length début by one of Australia’s pre-eminent photojournalists.
August in Kabul: America’s last days in Afghanistan by Andrew Quilty Melbourne University Press $34.99 pb, 304 pp
Matheson Library atrium, University, (photograph by Dianna Snape)
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The diseased orchard
Nadia’s story has a positive ending; she managed to escape from Afghanistan in April 2022. But so many have been left behind, in cluding many who worked for Australian forces – offered minimal assistance by the former and current Australian government and in a constant state of fear of Taliban retaliation. Any faults in the book are minor ones. The level of detail is at times overwhelming and can require close readerly attention. The book proceeds largely chronologically in covering the two weeks as Kabul fell, filling in the necessary context on recent Afghan history as the issues arise. This is done well, providing the detail when relevant rather than opening with a priming chapter, but readers with little knowledge of Afghanistan may feel disoriented.
Reflecting on the frantic days in the lead-up to the final US airlift, Quilty quipped that ‘I didn’t do a good job as a journal ist in those two weeks’, given his preoccupation with the city and efforts to help evacuate locals. Any deficiencies in Quilty’s reporting during the fall – real or imagined – have been more than made up for by August in Kabul. This is a heartfelt account of one of the greatest tragedies of our era. Long-form, first-hand journalism at its finest. g Kieran Pender is a writer and lawyer. He is on the board of Women Onside, a non-profit sporting organisation that assisted with the evacuation of the Afghan Women’s National Football Team and supported the team following their arrival in Australia.
$49.99UNSWbyallegationsTomFramePresspb,456pp
As it turned out, the Australians in Afghanistan were doing a lot less and a lot more than they were prepared to reveal. They were doing a lot less in the sense that the mission’s political goals extended no further than demonstrating the nation’s support for the United States as it struck out against its enemies in the wake of the 9/11 attacks and launched the War on Terror. Accordingly, Aus tralia’s mission in Afghanistan was accomplished simply through the presence of its forces there. The exact nature of the forces’ task, what they were doing in Afghanistan, was an operational afterthought that presented the ADF’s senior command with a confounding military challenge – how to pin a strategic tail on this political donkey. They responded by committing the special forces to counter-insurgency operations, identifying and interdicting prominent Taliban operatives. Meanwhile, the regular forces were organised into Reconstruction (and Mentoring) Task Forces whose assignment was to deliver nation-building projects in Uruzgan Province – roads, healthcare facilities, schools, training the nurses, electricians, plumbers, and bricklayers needed to run and renew them, and safeguarding these assets, and the country’s security, by mentoring Afghanistan’s burgeoning army and police forces. Despite the political and strategic vacuum they emerged from, these missions still generated occasional good-news stories about the ADF’s efforts to improve life for the Afghans. Yet the Australian public rarely heard about this work because, petrified by the potential for bad news, the Department of Defence erred on the side of caution. For all but the final twelve or eighteen months of a twelve-year deployment, it corralled the media within the ADF’s Tarin Kot base and prevented journalists from moving ‘beyond the wire’ to report on the contest with the Taliban for influence and territory. The great silence that ensued was more than a missed public relations opportunity for the ADF. It helped facilitate the years-long concealment from senior command, politicians, and the public of increasingly plausible rumours that elements within the Special Air Services Regiment (SAS) had killed unarmed prisoners, non-combatants fleeing violent contact (‘squirters’), as well as dozens of innocent Afghans.
Australia’s collective moral failures in Afghanistan Kevin Foster
Almost fifteen years ago, struck by the paucity of infor mation in the media about the ADF deployment to Afghanistan, I edited a short collection of essays that posed a modest question: What are we doing in Afghanistan? (2009). I wish I had known then half of what Tom Frame reveals about the ADF’s activities in Central Asia in his new book, Veiled Valour
AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW SEPTEMBER 2022 17 Afghanistan Veiled Valour: Australian Special Forces in Afghanistan and war crimes
Quilty also tells the story of Nadia, a nineteen-year-old wom an, who tried unsuccessfully to leave via Kabul airport during the chaos, only for her family to try and marry her off to a Talib, to save themselves. Living in an abusive home, Nadia is repeatedly beaten by her father and brothers; in one sickening scene, she is flailed with the plastic hose ordinarily used to connect the family’s stovetop to a gas bottle. When she attempts suicide by slitting her wrist with a razor, her mother suggests taking her to the hospital; her brother simply scoffs: ‘Let her do what she wants.’ (Remarkably, Nadia retains some empathy for her family against the backdrop of the Taliban’s return – ‘she empathised with her father’s predica ment and reasoned that her brothers were only acting out of fear’.)
It is unusual for its inclusion of Abudajanah’s perspective –a tale of cruelty at the hands of the state that pushed Abudajan ah towards the alternative: the Taliban. Quilty does not excuse the Taliban’s inexcusable acts, but this perspective does help explain. He recalls a night-time raid by US-backed forces on a local madrassa that saw five students mercilessly executed. It is unclear if they were students or Talibs – or (most probably) both – but there is little room for fine distinctions under international humanitarian law in the case of extrajudicial killing of unarmed individuals. ‘And regardless,’ Quilty writes, ‘the effect … [was] akin to fuelling the fire rather than putting it out.’
On the whole, though, August in Kabul is gripping, accessible, and empathetic. Quilty’s photographic background shines through with vivid, scene-setting prose, plus the inclusion of over a dozen jaw-dropping images midway through the book.
Almost twelve months later, just a day before the first anni versary of Kabul’s fall, Quilty was in Canberra speaking at the local writer’s festival. It was a world away from the chaos he left behind. But on the panel, it was clear that Quilty’s heart is still in Afghanistan. ‘It was my home,’ he told the audience.
Ironically, while the SAS were allegedly concealing their execution of ‘persons under control’, planting radios and weap ons (‘throwdowns’) on the bodies of their victims to justify their use of lethal force, there were those in the regiment who were desperate for publicity. They felt that because the mainstream media could not witness their covert missions to kill or capture Taliban commanders and bomb makers or laud the individual acts of heroism performed in their commission, they had been denied the acclaim they merited. Worse still, it seemed that their rivals in the Commando regiments were receiving the publicity the SAS believed was their due. Occupying segregated areas of Camp Russell, like a divorcing couple living in the same house, the SAS and the Commandos carried on like the Real (but better-armed) Housewives of Tarin Kot, denigrating one another’s performance and attributes to anybody who would listen and plotting bigger and bolder demonstrations of their prowess. Alerted to an upsurge of bad behaviour in the regiment, David Irvine, the former Director-General of ASIO and ASIS, was brought in to review Special Operations Command, within which the SAS and the Commandos sat. He found an organi sation in a state of decay and men who had forgotten who they were and what they were there for. The humble self-confidence of the Special Forces operator had been replaced by boastfulness and arrogance, ‘can do’ thinking had become an ‘only we can do’ mentality. Élitism had crossed over into entitlement: ‘“Special” no longer meant different; it meant “superior” and applied to individuals and not their missions.’ In this context, the secrecy that routinely marked Special Forces’ actions was now employed to cloak their misdeeds and evade accountability. The rules-free ethos that developed encouraged the growth of a ‘warrior culture’ in which combat performance was the currency of authority and experienced Troop Commanders, battle-hardened non-commis sioned officers (corporals and sergeants), accrued unassailable power, undermining the chain of command. Irvine suggested that, in part, the roots of this organisation al collapse lay in the repeated rotation of SAS force elements through Afghanistan and the unforgiving operational tempo when they were there. Taking a longer perspective, Tom Frame looks back to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in late 1979 and the organisational and moral collapse of its 40th Army, its descent from a conventional military force into an assembly of rapacious criminal gangs that murdered and pillaged the Afghans at will. It’s a striking allusion, if not quite a comparison, espe cially in light of events in Ukraine. Frame argues that like the 40th Army, when the ADF was sent to Afghanistan it had no concept of the human or social terrain it was entering. Clueless about the enormous complexity that clan and family affiliations brought to the distribution, exercise, and transference of power in Afghanistan, the conceptual frameworks through which the Australians sought to understand and master the country and its people were hopelessly ill suited to the reality on the ground.
Frame’s invocation of the Russians takes the book into po tentially contentious territory when he asks the reader to consider whether it was conceivably Afghanistan’s ingrained political cor ruption, the shameless shifting of loyalties among its warrior class, and the country’s indecipherable cultural and moral codes that had corroded the occupying forces’ moral armour and set them on the road to perdition. This is not a proposition that bears scrutiny.
As Mike Martin’s extraordinary study of the conflict in Helmand, An Intimate War (2014) demonstrated, efforts to reduce the fight ing to simplistic oppositions between government and Taliban, pro- and anti-coalition, insurgency and counter-insurgency, good and evil, merely exposed how out of their depth were the Australians and their coalition colleagues.
Afghanistan may have been a political hall of mirrors, a military quagmire, a cultural conundrum, and a profound challenge to conventional Western moral values, but these facts do not absolve from responsibility those who ignored their training, abandoned their principles, and succumbed to savagery. Afghanistan was not something that happened to the SAS. It did not turn its rogue operators into anything they were not already, though it may have hastened the transformation. They never surrendered agency.
Frame’s (indecent) exculpatory proposal is familiar from Vietnam, which purportedly did terrible things to wholesome American boys sent there; Northern Ireland, whose tribal polarities similarly led good British men astray; European colonies in Africa and India; and all those other conflicts where the mask of civilisation suddenly fell away. It is no truer for all its repetition.
18 AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW SEPTEMBER 2022
Responsibility for the moral failures laid out in Veiled Valour extends to every Australian who complacently professes faith in the inherent combat prowess of the nation’s forces, who believes in the moral and military exceptionalism of its servicemen and women, in the proposition that its military virtues are among the country’s defining – and best – qualities. The refusal to counte nance the fact that, like soldiers from every other national force, our soldiers might transgress, egregiously so at times, first delayed and then obstructed the path to accountability and the discovery of the truth about what we were doing in Afghanistan. g Kevin Foster is Head of the School of Languages, Literatures, Cultures and Linguistics at Monash University. His most recent book is Anti-Social Media (2021).
Frame’s book unerringly demonstrates that the SAS’s alleged crimes in Afghanistan arose from Australian political, strategic, organisational, and moral failures. At a political level, the failure to define campaign outcomes, to describe what success might look like and when it might be achieved, the failure to provide a vision for the operation beyond the validation of support for the United States, required the nation’s military commanders to knock up a DIY strategy and compelled them to remain in Afghanistan as long as the United States was still there. Within Special Operations Command, the failure to exercise close and effective oversight over the SAS and to enforce military discipline and strict accountability for infractions disempowered the chain of command, enabled the reign of the charismatic troop commander and entrenched the warrior ethos as the only measure of military competence. Once the killing had started, the failure of some troopers to restrain themselves, or of others to report their com rades’ cold-blooded crimes, and their fear of retribution – even death – should they do so, illustrates how easily a once-disciplined military force could begin to operate more like a death squad. Organisational collapse magnified and multiplied individual moral failures. The crimes in Uruzgan were not the product of a few bad apples: the whole orchard was diseased.
Good International Citizenship: The case for decency by Gareth Evans Monash University Publishing $19.95 pb, 90 pp
AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW SEPTEMBER 2022 19 Politics
Evans’s book was finished in late 2021, before the recent federal election. Now we live in hope that the Albanese govern ment may recall Menzies’ statement in 1955 that Australia was uninterested in a disastrous war over islands in the Taiwan Strait.
reputation delivers tangible benefits. Having consistent ‘purposes beyond ourselves’ (Hedley Bull’s ex pression, which Evans recalls) is an investment in the soft power on which a middle-sized country like Australia depends. To be seen as unselfish, reliable, and constructive provides a basis for reciprocity. But Australia’s record denies us any such reputation. Our governments voluntarily joined wars of aggression in Viet nam and Iraq where we did more harm than good, as Evans says: and there were more. The United States is perpetually at war, and so Australia is too. We even want the United States to want us to fight, Evans adds. Repeatedly since 1945, Australia and our allies have fought losing wars and retreated. We fail to prevent nuclear proliferation, and now with AUKUS we may exacerbate it. But when other nations act aggressively, Australian govern ments confect outrage, citing the US-invented ‘international rules-based order’. Russia and China have taken to responding with reminders about the international law-based order to which Australia used to subscribe.
Evans’s diligent ‘work in progress’ that is R2P, despite its acceptance by the UN General Assembly, has been suspected in some countries of being another plot of the West against the rest. Dressing an initiative up as R2P doesn’t give rich and powerful nations the right to take action in troubled states. Speaking of ‘protection’ rather than ‘intervention’ fails to convince those who have seen it all before. Evans’s hope to have R2P become the humane substitute for military action, using sanctions and crim inal prosecutions instead, is principled and pious. But it hasn’t succeeded in reducing armed violence or geopolitical rivalry, for much of which, including war crimes, the United States and Australia and their allies are responsible. Unlike Australia, the United States doesn’t even recognise the International Criminal Court, and America under President Donald Trump actively obstructed it. As John Menadue observed in Pearls and Irritations on 3 August, the United States is a bel ligerent nation which ‘has been at war 93 per cent of the time. These wars have extended from its own hemisphere to the Pacific, to Europe and most recently to the Middle East. The US has launched 201 out of 248 armed conflicts since the end of World War II.’ Australia, having been complicit in some of these more recent wars, has its own morality and responsibility for war crimes to deal with. Another problem with international perceptions of R2P is its selectivity. Does R2P, for example, justify intervention in Afghanistan on behalf of women – half the population – who may be even more oppressed under the Taliban government than ever before? Or those in Saudi Arabia? Evans doesn’t mention women, but he does raise Uighurs. Does R2P justify intervention in China on their behalf, in response to allegations by US-funded expatriate groups of genocide, which the PRC denies? What sanctions and criminal prosecutions – the tactics of R2P – will work in these cases? Under Louise Adler’s expert guidance, Monash University Publishing’s In the National Interest rewardingly takes the place of MUP’s ‘On’ topics. Both series of small books make important contributions to discussion currently absent from the mainstream media. There, questions about Australia’s global citizenship, or our current hostility to Russia and China, are rarely asked or answered. Nor is there any argument about the failure of war itself to resolve international conflict. g
The United States always wants a coalition: if Australia, Japan, and South Korea were to confirm their disinclination to join one against China, that disaster might be averted.
Purposes beyond ourselves
Over the course of a long and distinguished public life, Gareth Evans has held fast to his conviction that as in dividuals aspire to personal decency and moral behav iour, the same should be replicated among nations. As a foreign minister and an author, and in his international organisations and academic roles, Evans has consistently advocated ‘good in ternational citizenship’. Care for our common humanity he sees as both a moral imperative and a national interest.
However, Australia’s record as a good international citizen has ranged from patchy to lamentable. Evans measures it against four criteria: foreign aid (ODA), human rights, peace and se curity (including refugees), and collective action in the face of existential threats. Labor’s internationalist approach to these activities, he recalls, was displaced after 1996 by the Coalition’s reversion to promoting ‘national values’ based on our European heritage. Australia steadily fell to much lower levels than its OECD counterparts in ODA, trustworthiness, media freedom, and peacefulness. Australia’s grudging and minimalist perfor mance, as Evans describes it, on human rights and Indigenous people, and our miserliness towards refugees, asylum seekers, environmental degradation, and climate action, have been in ternationallyDiplomatscriticised.knowthat
The test of Evans’s lifelong promotion of good international citizenship depends on its application in practice. He and others worked for years to devise the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) doctrine and steer it through the United Nations, culminating in its adoption in 2005. With Rwanda as his starting point, Evans cites how recurring violence was halted in Kenya, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Guinea, Gambia, Côte d’Ivoire, and Kyrgyzstan, and how R2P attracted the unprecedented attention of the Security Council with regard to situations elsewhere. But he knows that failure is publicly more noticed than success. Some R2P inter ventions, he admits, were only partially successful, and he counts as failures Sri Lanka, Myanmar, Yemen, and Syria.
Gareth Evans on promoting decency Alison Broinowski
The joyously quotable
Forget, for the moment, genius, unwise, and nerves; consider merely ‘brilliant’ and ‘unweird’. It does as a description of her ‘Still all air and nerve’
Elizabeth Hardwick
It’s Hardwick’s boom that is perhaps the unlikeliest of the three. Her death is the newest, her output the most seem ing-ephemeral. She has not come back to us bearing robust novels and stories and poems, but mainly articles, opinions, reflections, journalism. (Essentially, the gift she bears is herself.) She was longest and most deeply sunk into the Lowell story, as the saint and then the shriven martyr of his biography. In the twenty-odd years of their marriage, she coped with innumerable iterations of his cycles of mania, desertion, and depression, all of which she dealt with steadily and discreetly. Just as interest in Bishop was renewed and intensified by the publication of the letters she exchanged with Lowell (in the book called Words in Air, from 2010), so the rediscovery of Hardwick as a writer was accelerated by the publication of her correspondence with Lowell in The Dolphin Letters from 2019, when he was in England and Ireland with Caroline Blackwood, who was to become his third and last writer–wife. There is almost a sense of all these books as terminal, genre-valedictory publications: last book of writers’ letters, last book of reviews, last book of belles-lettres
Michael Hofmann
The Uncollected Essays of Elizabeth Hardwick edited by Alex Andriesse New York Review Books US$18.95 pb, 295 pp
The American poet Robert Lowell (1917–77), I don’t suppose, intended to eclipse his contemporaries, compet itors, rivals, wives, any more than in one of his poems the new esplanade along the Charles River intended to stamp down ‘grass and growth’, as he rather vaguely puts it, with ‘square stone shoes’, but it’s what he did. Now, in the almost half a century since his passing, and the end of ‘the age of Lowell’, as one critic christened it back in the 1960s, his largely unintended oppres sion has unbent; as in the Grimms fairy tale called ‘The Frog King’, one hears the succession of hoops giving way. Take Elizabeth Bishop, long thought of as ‘the poet’s poet’s poet’ (the wag’s wag’s term is John Ashbery’s). Well, her repu tation has sailed past Lowell’s – as I daresay her sales have too. The novelist Jean Stafford (1915–79), Lowell’s first wife, has achieved canonisation with two collected volumes of novels and stories (published in 2019 and 2021 respectively) in the Library of America series. Elizabeth Hardwick (1916–2007), Lowell’s second wife, is being assiduously reprinted and recollected. There are no fewer than five of her books now available from New York Review Books, including Seduction and Betrayal (on women in literature), the fabulously unconventional novel Sleepless Nights (which she described as ‘a short-wave autobiography’) and a Collected Essays, mainly book reviews from the New York Review of Books, which she helped co-found in 1963, weighing in at 600 pages. The latest of these is an exhilarating book of Uncollected Essays, with freer and more adventurously chosen pieces (what the French call thèmes) on feminism and summer, celebrity mur ders and the New York ballet, Faye Dunaway and Susan Sontag, George Wallace and Monica Lewinski, grits soufflé and Maine.
It’s perhaps time to adapt the old saying to something like this: in front of every great woman there is a dwindling man.
20 AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW SEPTEMBER 2022 Essays
Elizabeth Hardwick, 1967 (Everett Collection Historical/Alamy)
Many readers unfamiliar with Hardwick’s work will have come across her portrait in the poem ‘Man and Wife’ from Life Studies: ‘Oh, my Petite, / clearest of all God’s creatures, still all air and nerve: / you were in your twenties, and I, / once hand on glass / and heart in mouth, / outdrank the Rahvs in the heat / of Greenwich Village, fainting at your feet – / too boiled and shy / and poker-faced to make a pass, while the shrill verve / of your invective scorched the traditional South.’ Small, defensive, voluble presences in his work all seem to signal some connection to Hardwick – even Lowell’s nineteenth-century Union soldier ancestor, Colonel Robert Shaw, with his ‘angry wrenlike vigilance’ in the poem ‘For the Union Dead’. Well, it’s a memorial of sorts. Later, there were others, many in the 1973 book called For Lizzie and Harriet, like this one, citing their then teenaged daughter, Harriet: ‘ours sees me, “Genius, unwise, unbrilliant, weird,” / sees you “Brilliant, unwise, unweird, nerves.”’
AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW SEPTEMBER 2022 21
Michael Hofmann’s publications include Where Have You Been? Selected essays (2014) and One Lark, One Horse (2018).
‘What is interest,’ mused Wallace Stevens, ‘is it a form of liking?’ Probably not, but there is nothing else worth pursuing.
It’s perhaps not a surprise that ‘interest’ is repeatedly hailed in Hardwick’s writing as the ultimate value. Susan Sontag is described, wrongly, I think, as ‘the most interesting American woman of her generation’. (Unlike Hardwick, she was too inter ested in being interesting. Professionally interesting. Not enough unweirdness.) To the actress Faye Dunaway, who surely missed her generation (her best films would have been made in the 1940s and been shot in black and white), she offers this: ‘But to the thoughtful, the electricity of the negative qualities gives her an extraordinary interest.’
Each word is complex, fought over, delicately assertive. Wine words, not lager or lemonade words
virtues as a critic, and a writer. What first struck me, reading these Uncollected Essays and others of her writings, is her unusually large and well-aired vocabulary; these are not dictionary words, but part of a natural eloquence and resource. I offer three examples from her work – like three hairs from her head – to show what I mean: ‘thrift’, ‘baneful’, and ‘balky’. Not one is recherché, but each has depth: the unfashionable, somewhat unattractive virtue, the adjectives with their delayed or immediate consequences. Each one is complex, fought over, delicately assertive. Wine words, not lager or lemonade words. The contact they seek to make with the reader is lingering, not superficial. ‘This,’ she writes, ‘is what I had brought from home in Kentucky to New York, this large bounty of polemicism, stored away behind light, limp Southern hair and not-quite-blue eyes’. To me, right now, no writer feels more joyously quotable. Witty, acerbic, original, true. Maybe Coleridge, whom I haven’t read. Hardwick shimmers between personal and impersonal, general and particular, crushing and amusing. Her pairings of adjectives and nouns or verbs and objects are often astounding. From Sleepless Nights there is ‘a putative mink’, ‘a rather pleasant carelessness’, ‘recipes with unexpected olives’, ‘harem resignation’, ‘the wan rosiness of a beaten sofa’, ‘and the heavy, dry, freckled, tufted Dutchmen, homely and reassuring’. The book she is trying to write is ‘a tumorous companion made up of the deranged cells of learning, experience, thinking’. She writes about ‘the fumes of a mésalliance’, about sandwiches coming in three fillings, ‘mud, glue, and leather’, about ‘dim soups from fresh vegetables’, about ‘the retarded dahlia, forever procrastinating, finally blooming in its liverish purples’. Then there is the suppleness of her syntax, the richly composed, provocative, sententious sentences – big subject, big predicate, great big décor – that leave the reader with little option than an ‘Ah’: ‘Difficulty inhabits Maine like the great spruce trees.’ ‘The tomb-dwellers look on from their decaf espres sos.’ ‘The conditions for all literature are unknown, accidental, and unpredictable.’ ‘The landscape of America seems often like one of those endangered kingdoms in old sagas. Nightly, Grendel steals upon the knights sleeping in the hall and slays the fairest and the weakest alike.’ That from a piece on elections, and this next on the subject of taste: ‘Its arena of consequence is limited.’ Say it again: ‘Its arena of consequence is limited.’ Her similes have become famous – and if not, they deserve to be. She has an electrifying way with a sidestep ending, turning American exhaustiveness and American impertinence on itself, seeming to say: You think this is a big deal – I got more, plenty more. In fact, I’m just getting started. A piece on murder ends with the televangelist fraudster and pervert Jim Bakker, ‘sentenced for fraud to sixty-four years – and nobody missing’; a piece on the Kennedys ends: ‘Just two celebrity murders, like that of John Lennon?’ It all chimes, one might say, with her love of ‘the impossible art, ballet’, the bustle and the stillness, the leap and the balance. The precise movement, the daring movement, the unexpected movement, the beautiful movement. Then there is that ability to make a quotation sail that Lowell ascribed to Randall Jarrell. Time and again in these essays one comes upon not just a few words or a line or two, but a good chunk of writing, and often from some wholly extraneous source. In this way, everything Hardwick wrote also functions as a commonplace book. That in cludes the novel, Sleepless Nights, which has Apollinaire on its first page, and then refers to Goethe, Nietzsche, Borges, Pasternak, Leconte de Lisle, Victor Hugo, and Ibsen, all in its first ten pages. It’s as though no one thought to tell Hardwick that being literary was a no-no. Or they did, and she told them where to get off.
And at the same time, she is closer to ‘the culture’ than most of her cohort, seeing the delivery boy in Manhattan, and knowing what he schleps with him in what she calls his ‘archival load’: ‘low-sodium seltzer water, kosher hot dogs, low-cholesterol mayo, Perdue chicken breasts, Weight Watchers margarine, four-grain bread, Ben and Jerry’s Chocolate Cherry Ice Cream, Paul New man’s marinara sauce …’ Everybody rails, everybody inveighs, appeals, exhorts, but not like this. Dumbing down was alive and well, but it didn’t have a name yet, and she sees the ‘unusual squalor, or perhaps a usual squalor spreading its scrofulous blight over the American landscape’ and ultimately pays witness to ‘the drastic diminishment of the civil and political life of the nation’, without a blink or a glimmer of hope or ignis fatuus of happy end. Here is America the tacky, America the timid, America the full-on inadequate. Her piece on George Wallace, racist once and future governor of Alabama, written sixty years ago, seems retro-projected in its prophetic dinginess. No outsider could have come up with such a classic diatribe compounded of jeer, balance, diction, transfixing detail, rhetorical power, and murderous hatred: a portrait of the Pharisee as rat-catcher as rat: ‘but neither he nor Lurleen ever stepped aside from an undeviating lower-mid dle-class glumness, discomfort, a faithful consumption of catsup and the more shoddy offerings of Main Street. Wallace in his plastic-like, ill-cut suits, his graying drip-dry shirts, with his sour, dark, unprepossessing look, carrying the scent of hurry and hairoil: if he were not a figure, a star, he would be indistinguishable from the lowest of his crowd. […] It is as if he were a sort of mythical bearer of the meagerness and the power of America.’
‘Yet the most interesting,’ she says, writing of essays, ‘will have the self-propelled interior life of imaginative literature, and this is true even when they are responses to an occasion’. Hers sure do. g
Think of Nobel Laureate Seamus Heaney and you mightn’t automatically think of Australia. What the name invokes for most readers, I would hazard, are the vivid landscapes of Ireland (‘The cold smell of potato mould, the squelch and slap / of soggy peat’). Heaney (1939–2013) might have been a man of the world, but he was rooted half a world away.
To Irish eyes, the landscape bore the mark of unreality: palm trees lining the promenades, pos sums peering out from gum trees, those rows upon rows of Victorian houses with their verandahs, their ornamented parapets. I’d never before seen an Australian Magpie, a Myna, or a Fairywren; I googled their names frantically on my phone as they flitted by me in the streets (‘Australian Birds’, ‘Birds in Melbourne’). At home, it was the peak of summer, one of the hottest on record, but here it was ‘Christmas in July’: mulled wine and gingerbread hawked from carts; fake snow pumped out of machines. As Melbourne was waking up, my friends and family were going to the pub or going to bed. Heaney had visited the city once, in the mid-1990s, and I would wonder, as I walked around (from Newman College to the State Library, down Swanston Street; around Princes Park or Carlton or Brunswick), what he must have thought of it then. Through the tight-knit Irish studies community in Mel bourne (and largely thanks to the generosity of Dr Val Noone), I began to get some sense of Heaney’s relationship to Australia, the broad brushstrokes. In the archive at the St Mary’s and New man College Academic Centre, I came across one of the earliest Australian critical engagements with Heaney’s work: an MA thesis by Helen O’Shea, under the tutelage of Vincent Buckley. She had submitted the thesis to the University of Melbourne in 1980. By this stage, Heaney had published five collections: Death of a Naturalist (1966), Door into the Dark (1969), Wintering Out (1972), North (1975), and Field Work (1979). Internationally, his star was rising. Helen later told me: ‘I first encountered Heaney’s work in 1977, when a friend lent me a copy of Death of a Naturalist. I had begun a part-time research MA on William Blake’s poetry, but immediately decided to change topics. I was enchanted by Heaney’s work.’ Further, she told me that during a research trip to Ireland, the Heaneys (Seamus and his wife, Marie) had become to her ‘a kind of surrogate family. They welcomed me into their home and from January 1979 I and Marie Heaney’s sister minded their Dublin house while they spent spring semester in Boston, during Seamus’s first appoint ment at Harvard.’ An interview with Seamus Heaney, conducted during Helen’s time in Ireland, appeared in Quadrant in 1981. With an Australian mind ing their house in Dublin, the Heaneys forged a friendship with another Australian couple in Massachusetts: Peter Gebhardt, a teacher from South Australia Commentary
22 AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW SEPTEMBER 2022
As I embarked on a research project, ‘Seamus Heaney in Australia’, earlier in the year, I wondered if there might be an element of folly to the endeavour. I’d applied to undertake the annual O’Donnell Fellowship in Irish Studies, offered by the University of Melbourne, on the basis of the limited archival research it was possible to do from Ireland (the country I’m from, where I recently finished a PhD on the Northern Irish poetry of the 1960s and 1970s). To my surprise, the application was successful. So there I was in a taxi to Belfast airport (the city in which Heaney remains beloved, where he’d been to university and taught briefly); queuing for a sandwich at London Gatwick; running for a connection in Dubai; and, finally, touching down in Melbourne, the furthest I’d ever been from home.
‘The verity of his company’ Seamus Heaney in Australia by Tara McEvoy
Vincent Buckley and Seamus Heaney, 1977 (Marie Heaney)
Everyone I met, it seemed, had a Heaney story to tell. When the poet Joel Deane introduced me to the editor of this very magazine, I was delighted to find that he, too, had a Heaney connection.
Peter Rose showed me a page from his 1994 journal. Heaney was here as a guest of the Melbourne Writers Festival. Rose sat next to him during the Victorian Premier’s Awards dinner: Kevin Hart came and we talked about John Ashbery. Heaney compared him brilliantly with Swinburne, saying that Ashbery writes a kind of pure poetry. I told Kevin he would have to write the monograph. Heaney’s admiration for Ashbery has increased in recent years. He likes the way he conducts himself, without nonsense or Atgrandiosity.theFestival, Heaney appeared in conversation with WallaceCrabbe at the Merlyn Theatre; on the panel ‘God Moves in Mysterious Metres’ with Robert Gray, Gwen Harwood, and Kevin Hart, also at the Merlyn (the panel was recorded, with clips broadcast on ABC Radio, and later transcribed and published in Eureka Street); and in conversation with Edna O’Brien at the Town Hall. He was interviewed by fellow Irish poet Louis de Paor (then resident in Melbourne) for 3CR, and the interview was subsequently published in the fourth issue of the journal Seamus Heaney and Robert Adamson in Dublin, 2005 (Juno Gemes)
The line applied to those discussions I had about Heaney during my visit to Melbourne: reminiscences were entries into further reminiscences, anecdotes entries into further anecdotes.
AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW SEPTEMBER 2022 23 (later a renowned judge) who had gone back to study at Harvard and wound up in Heaney’s classes, and his wife, Christina. Peter would later commemorate the period in a poem, ‘Seamus Heaney’s Poetry Workshop’: ‘So I went away and began / To do what he had called me to do, / Seize the word and make palpable / The lives and lines we take ...’ Other connections emerged. I learned of a number of significant poetic cross-currents between Ireland and Australia, beginning in the 1970s and continuing right up until Heaney’s death. Some examples: in 1978, Rosemary Wighton extended an invitation to Heaney to travel to Australia and participate in the Adelaide Festival; Heaney initially accepted but, as the pressure of numerous other commitments mounted, he with drew (stating, in a letter to Wighton, ‘The chance to visit Australia probably only comes once, and I did not withdraw lightly.’) In 1980, Heaney contributed a long piece on A.D. Hope to the London Review of Books, in which he revealed his broader knowledge of, and deep engagement with, Australian poetry: ‘Australian poetry is stronger now than it has ever been, and talking to Australian poets one gets an impression of renewed confidence in their separate, even separatist, enterprise.’ (He later selected Hope for inclusion in an anthology he co-edited with Ted Hughes, The Rattle Bag (2005), another sign of his admiration.) In 1981, the Irish-Australian literary critic D.J. O’Hearn wrote on Heaney for the first issue of Scripsi, the influential journal published from the University of Melbourne. Peter Steele, a poet and academic who resided at Newman College, wrote extensively on Heaney’s work, and dedicat ed the poem ‘Horse’ to his Irish friend. A cursory perusal of the ABR archive revealed that it was littered with references to the poet, and a Google search for ‘Seamus Heaney and Robert Adamson’ threw up an early 2000s photo of both writers, alongside the photographer Juno Gemes, in Glasnevin Cemetery, Dublin. As you can see, links proliferated. Perhaps Heaney’s most significant ties to Australia, however, came in the form of his friendships with three Australian poets: Vincent Buckley, Les Murray, and Chris Wallace-Crabbe. Heaney met Buckley in 1973, at the Yeats Summer School in Sligo; Mur ray at Rotterdam Poetry Festival in 1977; and Wallace-Crabbe in 1987, when he joined Heaney on the staff at Harvard as Visiting Professor of Australian Studies. Each of them stayed on friendly terms with Heaney after their first meetings. Heaney and Buckley spent further time together in Ireland, along with Buckley’s wife Penelope, and kept up a correspondence – selected letters are now housed in the archives of UNSW Canberra. In a letter to Penelope after Vincent’s death in 1988, Heaney wrote, ‘I loved the verity of his company, and always felt that his approval was worth more than most clamours of reputation.’ Heaney saw Murray occasion ally at professional events over the years, and later championed him as ‘very much a presence’ on his imaginative landscape, ‘one of the “ironic points of light”’. Murray’s work, Heaney noted, was ‘original, obstinate, word-hoarding, wild-ranging, regenerate’. He stayed close, too, with Wallace-Crabbe, who later acted as a guide for Heaney when he visited Melbourne. Wildly different in terms of poetics, politics, and personality, each of these three men would nonetheless have some marked influence on their IrishHeaneycontemporary.wasfond of – and often quoted – one Buckley line in particular: ‘Language is an entry into further language’. (As the critic John Dennison notes, ‘the formulation coincides neatly with his stress on possible pluralistic futures embedded in linguistic origins’.)
Tara McEvoy is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Trinity Col lege Dublin, and a 2022 Ciaran Carson Writing and the City Fellow at Queen’s University Belfast. In 2021, she was awarded the O’Donnell Fellowship in Irish Studies at the University of Melbourne. ❖ This article, one of a series of ABR commentaries addressing cultural and political subjects, was funded by the Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund.
24 AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW SEPTEMBER 2022 RePublica. He gave an interview to The Age, in which he spoke about his uncle, who had migrated to Australia in the late 1920s; the Australian poets he had read (Harwood, Hope, Judith Wright, Kenneth Slessor, and Rosemary Dobson) and those he’d met (Buckley, Murray, Wallace-Crabbe, O’Hearn, and Evan Jones). Gebhardt accompanied him to the bookshop Collected Works and later wrote a poem about the excursion (‘You were com fortable, at ease among the rows of books, / All friends of yours, going back for years. / And yours, like the “Glanmore Sonnets” / Were welcomed into the company of shelves withHeaneycheers.’)made it out of Melbourne, too – to Queens land, and to Hobart, where he delivered the 1994 James McAuley Memorial Lecture (‘Speranza in Reading: On “The Ballad of Reading Gaol”’) at the University of Tasma nia. In Melbourne, everyone I spoke to about Heaney’s visit to Australia remembered the occasion with great fondness; everyone commented on his humility and benevolence, in addition to his brilliance. One year after his trip, Heaney received the Nobel Prize for Literature. This happy news was cause for celebration in Melbourne, with an event at the Old Colonial Inn on Brun swick Street including tributes from several locals: among them Gebhardt; Penelope Buckley; Wallace-Crabbe; de Paor; the comedian Mary Kenneally (another former student of Vincent Buckley’s); a schoolmate of Heaney’s, Paddy Donnelly; satirist John Clarke; and the broadcaster Ramona Koval. In 2013, on Heaney’s death, there was once again an outpouring of emotion in Australia. The University of Western Australia hosted an event commemorating the poet’s life; obituaries were published in The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald among a range of other Australian publications. In the Australian Senate, on 12 November, Wicklow-born Senator Ursula Stephens of the Australian Labor Party paid tribute to Heaney, reminiscing about her friendship with the poet and his memories of Australia and perspectives on the country’s politics: ‘In 2008 on a visit to Ireland I spent a lovely afternoon with Seamus and Marie at their cottage in Wicklow […] He talked about coming back to Australia – he had been here in the 1990s – and about how pleased he was by our apology to the stolen generations. It struck him as justice that had waited a long time to be served.’ Two days later, a motion proposed by Stephens – to formally acknowledge Heaney’s importance to Australia and to ensure that the country offered its respects – was passed by the Senate. Heaney’s last collection, Human Chain, had been published a couple of years before his death, in 2011, but he continued to write individual poems until the end of his life, poems that remain uncollected. One such work is ‘A Section’, the poem which Heaney contributed to Travel ling Without Gods: A Chris Wal lace-Crabbe companion, produced to celebrate Wallace-Crabbe’s eightieth birthday. The book was published in 2014, after Heaney passed away (in August 2013); as its editor, Cassandra Atherton, notes in the book’s introduction, Heaney’s poem ‘may well have been one of the last he wrote before his death’. It is also no table for being one of very few poems in which Heaney directly discusses Australia: A section of sugar cane, a trim short stick I found in Queensland on cleared ground where my letter-writing uncle –a good hand, stubber of stumps –wrought in the 1920s a bit of sunburnt stalk, a flute with its stops all blocked, I would raise it even so and set it to my lips … In Melbourne, I strained to hear the echo of this music: a generation later, ten thousand miles from home. How had Heaney’s words reverberated here? Heaney may have spent his life writing about Ireland, but his themes were universal, and his global footprint sizeable. His poetry, it turned out, had resounded in Australia, and it was resounding still. g
Seamus Heaney, 1994 (Juno Gemes)
OCFITIN
One of the dangers of academia is that ego interferes with the formation and sharing of knowledge. Colleagues are enemies, discussion is manipulation, subject matter is weaponised. British author James Cahill studied at Oxford and Cambridge, worked at a gallery in London, and recently joined King’s College London, but his first novel, Tiepolo Blue, is burdened with a feeling that these environments have few re deeming features. In a different tone, the novel could have been a satire, but if Cahill exposes his characters to ridicule, it is to make us recognise the sadness and loneliness behind the veneer of dignity. Cahill’s vision is tragic, not absurd. In Tiepolo Blue, love, for persons as much as for intellectual subjects, is stifled by power plays and abominable behaviour. Cahill’s academia is self-defeating because it poisons self-knowledge. Cahill’s protagonist, Don Lamb, is an art historian at Peter house, Cambridge. His fame rests on a 1980s radio documen tary in which he toured Venice, describing the art. He is also a fearsome self-appointed champion of high ideals and correct interpretation. His one instinct is to dominate, his one gift, to parade. Yet the novel opens at a moment in the mid-1990s when Don’s tightly controlled persona begins to unravel: while out on his bicycle, he is distracted by a pair of young men and careers off the path. Meanwhile, a new sculpture has been installed in the front court of Peterhouse: SICK BED, a collection of bottles and tins arranged around an old bed frame, which Don dismisses as ‘a pile of rubbish’. Debate over the installation soon descends into a mannerly war, whose political purpose – the ousting of an unpopular college Master – is obvious, but which Don believes (or thinks he believes) is an aesthetic crusade. The most strident critic of SICK BED, he is also the least effectual member of the college clique. He can do nothing without taking advice from Professor Valentine ‘Val’ Black, his sometime doctoral supervi sor and a figure as glamorous and cool as Don is graceless and difficult. As the SICK BED debacle drags on and Don clashes publicly with one of its advocates, a visiting American writer, Val cajoles and humours Don, and when finally Peterhouse becomes intolerable, uses his position as trustee of a London gallery to appoint Don as its director, even putting Don up in his own heavily curated Dulwich home. By this stage, the machinations hardly matter and neither does art. Don is possessed by images of male beauty and mem ories and impulses of lust. His work falters. His project to chart the geometry of the skies in ceiling-paintings by baroque mas ter Giovanni Battista Tiepolo appears to be an excuse for not looking at the vigorous bodies in the foreground. Don’s criticism is a redirection of suppressed passions; his administrative roles are excuses for masking insecurity. When he falls in love with Ben, an art student at the progressive and theory-heavy Gold smiths, Don begins to make a fool of himself. Heavily closeted, he over-compensates with bluster and ranting – denouncing as vulgar a Caravaggio exhibition in his own gallery – and lurches from one embarrassment to the next, as though longing to destroy himself before other longings take over. The more learning Don professes, the more he reveals he has learnt nothing about relationships, and the more we suspect the one he most needs to convince of his value is himself.
Tiepolo Blue by James Cahill Hodder & Stoughton $32.99 pb, 342 pp
Theodore Ell
Theatres of cruelty
The novel parallels Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice to the point that on a London bus Don encounters a character straight out of that work, a foppishly dressed elderly man with rouged cheeks. In one conversation, Don characterises himself with irony as the bereft Aschenbach. Such knowing and heavy-handed references are the great drawback of Tiepolo Blue. Cahill over loads the novel with allusions to iconic stories, symbols, and personifications of gay love as an open secret. Val ‘knew’ Auden; the previous tenant in Dulwich has retired to Taormina; at the Caravaggio opening, Don’s predecessor reads the description of Oberon’s jealousy of Titania’s ‘lovely boy’. The tendency to draw attention to meaning instead of building or suggesting it extends to the narrative style, which is excessively explanatory, leaving no room for evocation and very little for mystery. Don’s response to every situation is predetermined and inevitable. He and the visiting American writer are programmed to misunderstand and offend one another; the reader cannot speculate on the motives for Val’s largesse, because the novel states outright that it is ‘the ritualised performance of friendship’. This is narrative as spun by a scholar, an explainer. The characters are animated because the novel tells us they are. The reader is not allowed to conjecture.
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The novel’s over-exposition might be justified by its function as a morality tale, its characters cyphers for condemnation of social cruelty, but nevertheless Tiepolo Blue falls short stylistically. In fiction whose protagonists are intellectuals who live through art, reading, and commentary – consider John Williams’s Stoner or J.M. Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello – the narration needs to be declarative to a degree, for only by voicing thoughts can it reveal the dramas going on inside their heads. Yet Stoner and Elizabeth Costello are evocative and arresting because their protagonists’ thoughts are never prescriptive – the mind-reading still surprises. Despite fine ideas and great erotic potential, Tiepolo Blue loses spontaneity and emotional effect because Don’s experiences can not breathe. Cahill’s narration imposes too much of the discipline the story rejects.
g
Theodore Ell is an honorary lecturer in literature at ANU.
A morality tale about the perils of academia
Don’s tragedy is that the exploitative ruthlessness of academia, to which he has given his soul, sharpens the shame with which older generations have branded homosexuality. Don has accept ed self-loathing. The young men he pursues have been spared, by history, the sense of disgrace that he has endured. They can happily get on without him.
Sophie Cunningham’s new novel Ann-Marie Priest
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This Devastating Fever by Sophie Cunningham Ultimo Press $32.99 pb, 310 pp
Early in This Devastating Fever, a writer named Alice has a difficult conversation with her agent, Sarah, about the novel she is working on, which she is considering calling This Devastating Fever. The novel is supposed to be about Leon ard Woolf, left-wing journalist and activist, novelist, publisher, best-selling memoirist, and husband of Virginia Woolf, whom he outlived by almost thirty years. Things are not going well for Alice, however. She cannot settle on a theme (the parallels be tween Leonard’s era and her own proliferate alarmingly) or an approach (experimental approaches have failed her, historical fiction bores her), and her agent is increasingly concerned. In its current iteration, the book is both fiction and non-fiction –which makes it potentially unsaleable, Sarah tells Alice sternly. Forced to choose, Alice picks fiction. I was not very far into the book before I began to wish that she – or, rather, the extra-textual author, Sophie Cunningham, of whom Alice is a refraction – had chosen differently. The meta fictional frame comes with few benefits, and some very obvious disadvantages. Alice, hard-pressed and perpetually anxious, is not an engaging guide to Leonard Woolf’s life and significance. An overtly non-fictional narrator might have been able to deploy the techniques of a good personal essay or memoir (genres in which Cunningham is adept) to create a sense of warmth and intimacy. The fictional Alice, by contrast, feels distant, her narrative oddly stilted and uneasy. Too often her humour feels arch, while her self-excoriation, over the two decades her book is in progress, is wearing.Thebook alternates between scenes from Leonard Woolf’s life – the straight historical fiction Alice deplores – and scenes from Alice’s as she goes about researching and writing her novel. The Alice sections, written in the third person, constitute ‘an exploration of the writing process’, an attempt to provide ‘the kind of conventional narrative readers seem to require’. (I confess I felt mildly affronted at being told – and so dismissively – what I required.) Alice fears she is not good enough to write this novel, or any novel, and her self-doubt seldom wavers. She is hypervigilant in anticipating any and every possible criticism. Why write about Leonard and the Bloomsbury set, those upper-mid dle-class twits? Why bother to write still more about Virginia, one of the most-written-about women of the twentieth century? Why write at all, since novels themselves are pointless, words meaning less? Even Leonard and Virginia join the pile-on. Ghost Virginia tells Alice that her desire to write about Leonard is a symptom of her ‘investment in patriarchy’, while Imaginary Leonard declares her novel to be ‘a product of our imperial culture’. These spectral characters, Alice’s imaginary friends, bring a welcome gleam of lightness to the book, popping up from time to time, individually or together, to give Alice their views on their own lives and, in a more limited way, on hers. Unfortunately, Alice does not give them enough air. They never quite manage to surprise us, to become more than what Alice finally declares them to be – parts of herself. This is particularly frustrating when it comes to Leonard, whose life has been beguilingly told in non-fictional form by Vic toria Glendinning (Leonard Woolf: A life, 2006). Alice does a good job of depicting the violence and mental confusion of his time as a colonial administrator in Ceylon (present-day Sri Lanka), a position to which he was appointed in 1904, at the age of twentyfour, straight out of Cambridge. The experience opened the young man’s eyes to the catastrophic effects of British imperialism, and he returned to England in 1911 aflame with anti-imperialist ideals. At this point, however, Alice turns her attention to his marriage, not even touching on his conversion to socialism (as a result of his exposure, through Virginia’s friends, to the pov erty and suffering in London’s East End) and his long career as a left-wing journalist, stalwart of the British Labour Party, active member of the League of Nations Society, and expert on world economics. What Alice draws from Leonard’s life is his sense of failure rather than his tireless efforts to make the world a better place. This sense of failure she equates with her own inability to finish her novel – and by extension her depression and despair over the decline of civilisation. In the 2021 section of the novel, Imaginary Leonard suggests that she simply stop working on her book: ‘As much as I’ve enjoyed the attention, this novel, it doesn’t matter. We don’t matter. Nothing really does.’ Alice gets the same advice from her long-suffering agent, who tells her to hand over whatever she has by the end of the month so that she can try to sell it. Alice agrees, partly, it seems, because she needs the money: she wants to build a Woolfian greenhouse. There is a certain risk involved in this depiction of ‘the writ ing process’. If nobody believes in this novel – not its (fictional) writer, nor her (fictional) agent, nor her imaginary friends – why should the reader? It’s hard not to feel that Alice is palming off on her eager public an inferior product simply because she’s sick of the labour of writing and needs an injection of cash. And yet the final sections of her novel are unexpectedly moving. Has Alice finally found her way to the beginning of her interminable project? Perhaps she is not so much the author’s avatar as her plaything, and the novel is a brilliantly parodic meditation on the failure of the contemporary writer to write her way through the myriad catastrophes of our time. Or perhaps it is simply what Alice tells us it is: a torturous attempt to rescue a failing his torical novel by turning it into a metafictional one. Either way, I couldn’t help but feel that Leonard Woolf has been somewhat short-changed. g Ann-Marie Priest is a literary scholar at Central Queensland University and author of My Tongue Is My Own: A life of Gwen Harwood (LaTrobe University Press, 2022).
Spectres and refractions
In recounting the story of JK Jr’s rise and fall, The Whitewash provides vital commentary on institutional racism and the nature of fame in a social media-centric world, in a humorous and ac cessible way. However, these more interesting sections are often interrupted by the obnoxious ramblings of its characters – some with ostentatious names like Baby Bao and Yolo Zhang – who interject inane thoughts and platitudes in a dude-bro patois. For Zhang, ‘It’s all about the BRANDING, dawg!’ According to ‘bogan’ Aussie paparazzo Damon ‘Damo’ Smith, all celebrities are fair game for a crotch shot. Even JK Jr frequently comes across as an insufferable jock: ‘The audiences want to see my face, my abs.’ While their personae are reflective of the toxic world they inhabit, their long, pinballing monologues are often grating. While Lu’s prose is consistently droll, some jokes fall flat. At one point we’re introduced to a sleazy producer’s assistant, Jodie Foster, but she’s not the Jodie Foster. His previous assistant was called Dwayne Johnson, but he wasn’t the Dwayne Johnson. That’s it, that’s the joke. Dropping in non sequiturs like these amid the unrelenting wackiness is like adding sugar to a sticky toffee pudding. This speaks to a wider problem in The Whitewash: when humour is all pervasive, it loses its impact. This ‘more is more’ approach extends to the characterisation of JK Jr; it might be argued that Lu inserted constant allusions to JK Jr’s physical attractiveness – almost every character waxes lyrical over his chis elled body – as a counter to historical perceptions of Asian men in cinema as ‘inscrutable, studious, unathletic … and the object of no sexual desire’. However, in trying to create his idealised Asian male lead, who embodies the ‘sex appeal’ of Bruce Lee, the ‘masculine charm’ of Chow Yun Fat, and the ‘soulful sensitivity’ of Leslie Cheung, Lu lumps the reader with a bland, unrelatable protagonist whose ups and downs elicit little more than a shrug.
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The Whitewash by Siang Lu University of Queensland Press $32.99 pb, 282 pp Hong Kong’s hottest property, JK Jr, has it all: boyish charm, acting chops, and a set of ‘crazy ripped’ abs. He’s set to star in Brood Empire, a spy thriller backed by the financial might of Hollywood and China, and destined to smash box-office records in all markets. However, the new era of mainstream western films featuring hunky Asian male leads must wait, as the whole enterprise suddenly falls apart. Enter a not-so-humble web tabloid to piece together this sordid tale of hubris and unfulfilled dreams from the debris.
Dreams and debris Siang Lu’s ambitious début novel Dilan Gunawardana Siang Lu (UQP)
Dilan Gunawardana manages the ACMI website and edits its Stories & Ideas section.
Conveyed as an oral history – less Svetlana Alexievich and more Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace – for the fictional web publication Click Bae, the fiasco of The Whitewash is recounted by a rollcall of eccentrics and narcissists working in and around Brood Empire’s production, in sleazy film companies, in stodgy academic circles, and in the dank depths of online clickbait journalism. Running in parallel to this narrative in Siang Lu’s ambitious début novel is a fascinating timeline of Asian representation and whitewashing – the practice of casting white actors in non-white roles – on screen over the last century. These ac counts, delivered by a fictional academic, include the Chinese detective Charlie Chan being played by various white men in ‘yellowface’ for two decades from the 1930s; the cultural impact of Bruce Lee and the choice to cast David Carradine, a white American man, as a Shaolin monk in Kung Fu (1972–75) instead of Lee; the critical and commercial success of films featuring all-Asian casts, such as The Joy Luck Club (1993) and Crazy Rich Asians (2018); and China’s financial backing of Hollywood productions, leading to big-budget films being censored and produced to appeal to Chinese audiences.
The Whitewash is ripe for a screen adaptation, specifically as a mockumentary television series à la The Office (2001–03) or Parks and Recreation (2009–15), one that makes best use of its colourful cast of talking heads and its many tangents and footnotes. Indeed, it seems likely that Lu had the current appetite for bookto-screen adaptations on streaming platforms in mind in conceiving the novel as an oral history. In a meta, tongue-in-cheek moment, a character dreams of a Justin Lin-directed HBO adaptation of The Whitewash with Steven Yeun and Awkwa fina as its leads. The Whitewash has already spilled out onto other media with the launch of ‘The Beige Index’ [thebeigeindex.com], a companion website cre ated by Lu and Jonathan O’Brien that presents a visualisation of casting diversity data in 250 major (according to IMDB) films and provides ‘a Bechdel test for race’. While irreverent, it is an eye-opening snapshot of just how ‘creamy’ early Hollywood was compared to today. Listed films feature comical footnotes written by Lu and O’Brien; for instance, the entry for Charlie Chaplin’s The Kid (1921) features a graphic of an uncredited black child actor that reads ‘Where’s my IMDB credit, bitch?’ As a minor nit-pick, it must be noted that the data includes Indian films. Curiously, it places all Bollywood actors – including the fair-skinned Amir Khan and Kareena Kapoor – in the darkest skin tone category, ignoring Bollywood’s own toxic analogue to whitewashing where actors with lighter skin tones are preferentially cast in lead roles. Often insightful and delivering the occasional belly laugh, The Whitewash is the ideal primer for those wishing to learn about Asian representation on screen through the ages. However, you must wade through some textual dross to get there. g
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Jesustown: A novel by Paul Daley Allen & Unwin $32.99 pb, 364 pp
The construction of history Exploring the impact of colonialism
As a work that blends history and fiction, Jesustown is also highly readable. While overt political commentary sometimes intrudes into the narrative, the plot is absorbing, the writing stylis tically assured. The novel creates a vivid sense of regional and urban spaces, and moves deftly from the sardonic to the melancholy, the visceral to the bitingly satiric. The dialogue is convincingly natu ralistic and sometimes caustically, enjoyably humorous. The novel also cleverly combines Patrick’s self-lacerating flashbacks with the forward movement of his discoveries, propelling us to the final revelations and refusing white readers the convenience of moral absolution. Jesustown is an invaluable addition to Daley’s impressive body of work. It is also implicitly asks, as an urgent national issue, white culture to respect the integrity, sense of community, and desire for self-determination of First Nations people. g
The title Jesustown both refers to the name of a fictional for mer mission town in remote regional Queensland and serves as a symbol of Indigenous people’s suffering. Drawing on his wide reading of anthropologists, consultations with national museums, and extensive discussions with Aboriginal people, Daley has produced something akin to an Antipodean version of Heart of Darkness. Like Joseph Conrad’s novella, Jesustown uses a frame narrator and the structure of a literal and symbolic journey from England to Australia to reveal the horrors of colonialism. The novel’s ethical ‘heart’ is a fictionalised version of the collaboration during the 1930s and 1940s between Australian and American scientists, explorers, and adventurers in search of Indigenous cultural material. In the aftermath of Australia’s frontier battles and massacres, these expeditions involved the widespread theft of Indigenous art and the removal from traditional burial grounds of Aboriginal remains. These plunderers either saw themselves as noble chroniclers of the extinction of an uncivilised race or were simply keen to make money. Either way, as the novel insists, the thefts show white culture’s profound disrespect for the beliefs and practices, for the very humanity, of Indigenous people.
Renny’s journals, photographs, and newspaper articles – the novel’s evidential texts – contain detailed and shocking accounts of the barbarity of white culture. He describes, for example, how the Reverend George Pyle locked Indigenous men in cages and left them to rot in their own filth. He describes savage beatings, systemic rapes, the chaining of Aboriginal people, appalling miscarriages of justice. But his archives, particularly his ex tensive audiotapes in which we hear his compassionate, angry, and sometimes boastful voice, also reveal his contradictions as a self-styled white saviour. Like several of the historical figures on which his character is loosely based, Renny is both dedicated to ‘saving’ the traditional culture of the Indigenous community and unwittingly complicit in the grievous damage suffered by the people he putatively respects. Renny is no Mr Kurtz – the atrocities are committed by men like Pyle or the aptly named, pathologically narcissistic Fergal Suckler – but his so-called good intentions have had disastrous consequences for those he calls The People. His tapes also, and importantly, express his belated admission of guilt and shame. This is history-as-confession and a rewriting of the self-serving myths of benevolence and progress on which white Australia is founded.
Susan Midalia
Jesustown is not only about history; it is also centrally con cerned with the construction of history itself. While the novel uses a range of Indigenous voices, often to criticise white cul ture’s racism or hypocrisy, its narrative perspective is white. It’s an ethically circumspect decision by a non-Indigenous writer of fiction. The novel’s frame narrator, Patrick Renmark, an expat Australian living in London, is the author of bestselling works of historical biography. His books are designed to ‘make readers feel good about their myths and fables’ by deliberately erasing the ugly facts. He sees no need for his book on Lachlan Macquarie, for example, to mention the fact that Macquarie ‘stole native children from the sites of the massacres he’d ordered’. Patrick’s journey to enlightenment begins when, in flight from the scan dal of an adulterous affair and the death of his young son, he reluctantly accepts a publishing deal to write the history of his renegade grandfather Nathaniel (Renny) Renmark. Patrick has long been aware of Renny’s legendary status as a man who lived harmoniously for years with the Indigenous people of Jesustown, but when he flies there to research Renny’s archives, he has no idea of the horrific stories he will discover.
Paul Daley will be familiar to many readers as a respected journalist expressly committed to exposing the blind spots of white culture’s dominant myths about Indigenous his tory and Australia’s national identity. Daley is perhaps less well known as a novelist and playwright. These two interests in his work – historical research and imaginative writing – inform his powerful second novel, Jesustown, Daley’s seventh book, and one which he felt ‘compelled’ to write.
The two male narrators are also psychologically astute studies in a particular version of masculinity. Indifferent husbands and neglectful fathers who egotistically crave public recognition, they are both victims of emotionally stunted or abusive fathers. But the novel scrupulously avoids presenting this cycle of mas culine dysfunction as commensurate with the intergenerational trauma experienced by Aboriginal people. Nor does it allow the men’s personal grievances to dominate the narrative or to have the last word. The story that must ultimately matter most is the exploitation and abuse to which Aboriginal people were subjected by a rapacious, uncivilised white culture. I suspect that many white readers will know little about the ubiquitous theft of Aboriginal art, skulls, and bones, the consequences of which are still being suffered by Aboriginal people today. As one such reader, I feel indebted to Daley’s novel for making this aspect of our history more widely known.
The Registrar by Neela Janakiramanan Allen & Unwin $32.99 pb, 357 pp byCutSusan White Affirm Press $32.99 pb, 328 pp Even so, she takes a long time to shake off the odious Toby, only doing so when she sees how deeply invested he is in the boys’ network she is up against. This covert relationship is the spine of the story and as such represents all its strengths and weaknesses. On the one hand, it is a romance to the point of cliché: in one scene, Carla’s heart supposedly skips a beat (and these people are doctors!) when Toby hands her a gift she secretly hopes is a ring. The flaws and imbalance in this relationship flash red lights from the start yet remain unnoticed by the highly intelligent Carla, while Toby himself is too flat and stereotypical to be convincing. On the other hand, the relationship symbolises the perversion of power played out on a wider scale in the novel’s overall project to expose misogyny on the cusp of the global #MeToo movement. Here the young, the female, and in Carla’s case the physically small, junior doctor is perpetually judged by a supposedly objective standard. Her formal complaint to the hospital about two male doctors exercising inordinate powers and either perpetrating or condoning behaviour from the casually sexist to outright sexual abuse seems to be backfiring, but at the end a more resilient and confident Carla soberly makes her way back to the surgical career she loves. Doubtless the story is not so positive in the real hospitalClichésworld.like hearts skipping beats along with problematic villains and stiff, wordy dialogue detract from Cut’s obvious merits. These include an imaginative structure offering short flashbacks to the incident leading to Carla’s breakdown, alternating with chapters named with medical terms that are both poetical and in context sometimes ironic – ‘poor historian’, ‘debridement’, ‘evis ceration’, and so on. The Registrar, by contrast, offers a straight forward linear narrative and uses the present tense, which does not necessarily create immediacy, contrary to popular opinion, but risks flatness of expression. The novel also comes with endorse ments from nearly a dozen doctors, all testifying to the story’s honesty and medical authenticity. Still, trying to concentrate on the novel as a novel, in which fictional authenticity is something quite different, I find a more compelling storyline, partly due to its less cluttered cast and sharper focus. In the character of Emma Swann, whose speciality is orthopaedic surgery, once more we find a small female figure adrift in an indifferent to cruel hospital system. The bitter com petitiveness and backstabbing among Emma’s colleagues are downright pleasant compared with the structural and personal impediments to the progress of her career. While we all know doctors are not deities, despite the universal reverence accorded them, unfortunately the villains here are also two-dimensional.
If these novels are designed to reveal the truth about the hospital system that devours its best and brightest young trainees then they could hardly have done a bet ter job – any prospective medical trainee, female or not, reading Cut or The Registrar would surely reconsider their career choice, so savage are their portrayals of the abuse of power – but let us proceed on the basis that these are primarily works of fiction.
Emma’s own flaws include a stubborn blindness to flattery from a senior surgeon whose oily manipulation practically oozes from the page. When she eventually submits to her abuser, she tells herself that not only is she unable to reject ‘love and validation, whatever form they take’, but that he has made her ‘feel clever and important and understood in a way no one else has’. This is so not believable: she is, after all, the wife of an adoring and supportive man, the high-achieving daughter of a loving mother (although her father is a driven, callous former surgeon), and the sister to a devoted and helpful older brother whose own story provides another central crisis of near-tragic dimensions. Maybe Emma
Obviously, personal experience has inspired and informed both novels. One can see the writers’ festival panels assembling already. Perhaps these authors have written their books to expose a fractured system, or perhaps they have just identified a good story. Either way, it’s true that popular critical reception of so-called issues-based fiction always focuses on the themes in common, to the extent that the novels themselves are rarely evaluated as novels. More on that shortly.
Debra Adelaide
Cut’s Carla is a mix of vulnerability, innocence, ambition, and ruthlessness. Fellow surgical trainee and secret lover Toby is her ‘dream man – beautiful, clever and with a sureness about him’. Carla allows herself to be distracted and compromised by him at work just before an operation, a brief encounter that initiates a series of events with near-fatal consequences for the patient.
30 AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW SEPTEMBER 2022 IFictiontcan
Cut’s Carla di Pieta and The Registrar’s Emma Swann are also subjected to punishing work schedules and a patriarchal misogyny that occasions sexual and other forms of predation. Each novel also includes highly detailed descriptions of hospital and surgical procedures, health conditions, and other medical matters, sometimes possibly too technically precise for the gen eral reader (though the frustrated surgeon in me was fascinated).
Both stories deal in urgent and serious matters, at the heart of which are exploitation, sexual assault, and bullying on a major scale. Each of these protagonists is oppressed and abused by the same system they paradoxically yearn to enter. Fierce ambition (albeit coupled with self-doubt) and conflicting experiences lead them to some foolish choices, desperate actions, and, ultimately, painful self-recrimination.
only be coincidence that two very similar novels have been produced by contemporary doctors, but the overlapping characters and themes of Cut and The Registrar are so strik ing that it’s hard not to visualise their authors, Susan White and Neela Janakiramanan, getting together somewhere to sketch out their early drafts. Both novels feature young female protagonists working in teaching hospitals, who are as dedicated to their pa tients as they are to advancing their careers.
Serious matters
Two recent medical thrillers
Charlotte Wood describes Lohrey as a ‘naturally independent thinker’; her fiction demonstrates that she is also an observant and formidable reader who transforms literary designs rather as Erica remakes the design of her labyrinth.
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byLohreyJulieanne Lamond
The Miegunyah Press $29.99 pb, 173 pp
The novel (reviewed by Morag Fraser in the October 2020 issue of ABR) is superb: thoughtful, socially astute, and en gaged, in a most sophisticated way, with literary form. This is unsurprising. Lohrey’s earlier novels and her non-fiction show a similar level of distinctive and original formal engagement.
A critical study of Amanda Lohrey’s writing Brenda Walker
Interestingly, neither novel references the greatest health crisis of our time. In the case of Cut, this is due to the story having been written before 2019, while in The Registrar no time is specified. There may be practical reasons for this, yet both books have been published well after the initial pandemic and have still resisted its impact. Perhaps Covid-19 offers such creative and formal challenges that it requires more processing before it can successfully be represented in fiction. If so, then doctor–novelists are just as doubtful and unconfident as ordinary ones. g
Debra Adelaide is the author of The Innocent Reader: Reflections on reading and writing (2019).
The success of The Labyrinth, which won the 2021 Prime Minister’s Literary Award for fiction and the wonderfully named Voss Prize (which has no association with White), will direct many back to her six earlier novels and her considerable body of non-fiction: reviews and extended essays on subjects of political importance. Julieanne Lamond’s critical study Lohrey, part of an MUP initiative designed to showcase Australian writing, will consolidate Lohrey’s significance.
In the introduction, Lamond offers a summation of Lohrey’s writing and an account of its shaping influences: ‘Lohrey is al ways looking both outwards and inwards: to political, social and economic structures and how they shape the possibilities and experiences of our inner lives. As chronicles of lived experience in Australia across four decades, her books are strongly tethered to the material world of institutions and money and the everyday. At the same time, they are interested in the role of that which we do not understand in driving and sustaining us.’
Politics and religion are crucial in Lohrey’s work. As a child, Lohrey was encouraged by the men in her family to read within the literature of class consciousness: A Short History of the Com munist Party of the Soviet Union was one of her grandfather’s recommendations. Lohrey was also being educated by nuns with fantastically repressive views. The religious and political tensions of the 1950s – she was born in 1947 – must have been immediate for her, but she considered or evaded them, developing an intel lectual independence that is visible in all her work. Lamond feels a kinship with Lohrey, partly it seems on the basis of a shared religious education, partly because her own job as a political staffer resulted in her being attuned to Lohrey’s political sensibility. Lohrey is aware of the specificity of politics – the ‘political, social and economic structures’ identified by Lamond. Yet a desire for personal significance which transcends material necessity and an impulse toward transformation and self-transformation are also strongly apparent in Lohrey’s fiction. Perhaps this frustrated those reviewers who expected a certain kind of political focus, but Lamond recognises that transformation narratives arise from particular conditions. They have a political dimension.
T he Labyrinth begins with a woman walking through her childhood home – a decommissioned asylum. In middle age she moves to a run-down house by a wild and dan gerous sea, where she notes her vivid and prophetic dreams. The house is convenient because she needs to be close to her son, an imprisoned artist. She befriends a stonemason who offers to carve her a gargoyle (which she refuses). Together they design and build her version of a labyrinth, a prayer or meditation path most famously realised in the great medieval cathedral of Char tres, although Lohrey’s antipodean labyrinth is not a homage to the Chartres labyrinth, or an imitation.
Literary Studies would succumb to this sexual predator, but for other reasons. Or maybe she simply should explain herself less.
Her innovation usually manifests as a command of traditional varieties of narrative, which she reworks to suit her purposes.
Reworking the narrative
The novel is seemingly Gothic, but just as Lohrey’s character Erica applies her hard-edged survivor’s eye to the construc tion of an actual labyrinth that answers her requirements, so Lohrey’s Miles Franklin Literary Award-winning novel takes the gothic and remakes it in a tough and tailor-made form for our time and our place. The result is a story about the deep resilience of a determined woman, living in a rational and creative way with a bad hand of cards. In this novel the paranormal can flourish where it belongs – in dreams – but the daylight world is all about geometry and splicing cheap stone into the low walls that will guide both eye and footfall into a pathway that ends in a seat by a fire.
However, The Registrar offers several unexpected twists and revelations, meaning Emma’s own prejudices and ambition-led assumptions are eventually exposed. These include revising her opinions of other doctors whose humanity and compassion offer some humbling lessons before the novel’s end. A confrontation with her ridiculously pompous father is also very satisfying.
Lamond divides her study into four thematic categories.
Brenda Walker is Emerita Professor of English and Literary Studies at the University of Western Australia. Freya Scene like a Banksy mural: tiny Flower Thrower lobbing blood and vernix onto our chests, squirming pinkpurple skin gliding on Māmān, alien as amniotic fluid, charging the night with witchery and colostrum, red-cheeked grace that remakes the ride home, each minor pock, each distant car a quandary to skirt until home: white muslin drifts into the hallway, raider cloaked at the threshold, no return as natural disaster hits revelation – singularity – we who fancied ourselves faithless know a goddess has arrived. Hessom Razavi Hessom Razavi was the ABR Behrouz Boochani Fellow.
First, she discusses the issue of transformation: ‘Lohrey’s fiction examines shifts not just in social practices but also in human con sciousness over the past four decades. Perhaps the most profound of such shifts is the interior life of spiritual belief and experience.’ This is contextualised as part of a community disengagement, in Australia, from conventional politics. The second section consid ers Lohrey’s fictional critique of a disabling kind of masculinity, a ‘damaging masculinity’ that requires impossible feats of effort and competitiveness from men who have been harmed or even brutalised by other men. A chapter on Lohrey’s environmental concerns opens into a fine discussion of how dysfunctional im ported traditions of the pastoral can be. Finally, Lamond writes about Lohrey’s use of reading as a complicated and variable point of connection, especially with the past. The book finishes with an extended interview – a two-yearlong conversation conducted in person and on email, that gives us a sense of the underpinnings of Lohrey’s work: ‘I want a lot from a novel. I want a rich subtext but I also want a plot. I like a story. I like to wonder what’s going to happen next, and in that sense I like the writing to be ahead of me. And to feel, oh of course!
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You don’t see the developments coming.’ Lohrey speaks of the pleasure of being ‘skilfully ambushed by a master storyteller’. This originality within recognisable form, an originality which often includes unexpected insights as well as unpredictable events, is one of the features of Lohrey’s own writing. The interview, which allows Lohrey to speak from within a study of her work, is consistent with a book that gives the critic herself a voice. Lamond inserts her own experiences: education, work, responses to environmental catastrophes, film, teaching –and this grounds her criticism in the personal. How wonderful it would have been to be a fly on the wall as her students put together ‘a mashup fan fiction’ of Melissa Lucashenko and Christina Stead. Lamond provides a dynamic form of criticism, a presence within the text that is as welcome as her understanding of Lohrey’s books and their place in Australian life and politics. Lohrey is a necessary consideration of Amanda Lohrey’s writing and an indication of the health of Australian literary studies, if Julieanne Lamond is an example of how well our generation of younger critics perform. g
American Gestapo?
These caricatures, argues this terrific new history of the CIA, are just that: they inflate the glaring failures (of which there are many) and ignore considerable successes (often hidden because of the secrecy of coun terintelligence) of this very human and thus very political spy agency. The CIA Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones depicts is neither hero nor villain. Rather, it has been a crucial part of US foreign policy success (like winning the Cold War) and failure (like the Iraq War debacle). Instead of a year-by-year chronology, the author adopts an essayistic style and deals in key events or themes. He avoids acronyms and code names – a challenge given his chosen terrain – and succeeds in giving us a very readable account of a controversial topic. The writing is clear, concise, and critical without descending into moral hand wringing. This is how a democracy uses covert means to advance its interests – deal with it. The book makes two key arguments. First, the agency’s ‘standing’ is crucial to its effectiveness. Jeffreys-Jones makes this claim his title and his central thesis. If its director lacked standing
Demonstrators wearing Henry Kissinger and pig masks protest against US involvement in Angola in front of the Capitol, 1976 (CSU Archives/Everett Collection Historical/Alamy)
To those sceptical of American power, the acronym ‘CIA’ has the same connotations as ‘KGB’ has for Russophobes. There is something inherently sinister and undemocratic about its agents. Worse, when the Central Intelligence Agency was born after World War II, it was derided by conservatives as an American ver sion of the recently defeated Nazi Gestapo. The red-baiting Joseph McCarthy berated it. Unchecked, it would become a socialist Big Brother. Through the 1960s and 1970s, the indictment flipped. The left came to see the agency as the vehicle for nefarious imperial istic ventures in Cuba, Vietnam, and Chile, to name a few.
Iwas once subjected to a lecture by a Dublin taxi driver ‘on the extensive inequities of the Central Intelligence Agen cy’. Its every atrocity, in Southeast Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East, was relayed to me. It was an object lesson in the popular contempt in which the CIA has been held since its founding in the 1940s.
A Question of Standing: The history of the CIA by Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones Oxford University Press $43.95 hb, 312 pp
A new history of the CIA Timothy J. Lynch with the president (his boss), his tenure would be ignominious. See Jim Woolsey under Bill Clinton. When a stolen Cessna crashed into the White House, one wag joked that it was the CIA director trying to get an appointment. The opening years of the Clinton administration were marked by a series of foreign policy failures, emblematic of the poor standing the CIA enjoyed with the Democratic president. But when the agency’s standing was strong, great national causes could be advanced. Allen Dulles’s tenure as director of central intelligence (1953–61), the longest in American history, under Dwight Eisenhower, laid the groundwork for a Cold War won three decades later. When the CIA enjoyed the confidence of the president and the public, its work was enhanced. When it did not, it was stymied. This makes the agency part of, not separate from, democratic politics – unlike the Gestapo or KGB, or even MI6, its British equivalent. The UK government took decades to even acknowledge the existence of its intelligence outfits. In contrast, says Jeffreys-Jones, ‘The democratic genesis of U.S. secret intelligence was potentially a step forward for mankind.’ His second argument is that the CIA mostly works. The author, pace my taxi driver, does not elide the horror show of CIA misadventures. The agency’s covert actions, he argues, ‘were the greatest single cause of anti-Americanism in the post-World War II era’. This antipathy to US machinations was not the preserve of poor states. ‘Even in a predominantly white nation like Australia,’ says Jeffreys-Jones, ‘there were accusations of CIA interference.’ Both Salvador Allende (in Chile) and Gough Whitlam were targeted by the CIA for removal (achieved just over two years apart) because they were ‘ruining the economy’ of their respective nations. This linkage is something of a stretch and the author offers not much more than a paragraph of standard Labor/republican interpretation of the dismissal. The Chilean coup gets more detail and argumentation.
AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW SEPTEMBER 2022 33 Politics
Timothy J. Lynch is Professor of American Politics at the Uni versity of Melbourne.
This is not a history of the CIA’s perfection or beneficence. It is an account which recognises the many inevitable failures of having to protect the interests of such a disputatious nation.
Jeffreys-Jones is not an apologist for US power; he provides a recurrently sceptical lens on the myriad missteps of the CIA. But he is basically sympathetic to what the CIA has endeavoured to do: to inform ‘the U.S. president about events, developments, and threats that he and his policymakers might not otherwise be able to perceive’. This means the author’s criticisms carry much more weight than do the more usual left-wing critiques. Indeed, most recently it has been rightish Trumpism that has painted the CIA as part of the deep-state swamp requiring drainage. Jeffreys-Jones also writes with the freedom of a foreigner observer – a Welshman based in Scotland with extensive US experience – and can thus avoid the ideological bias that mars too many American accounts. He reminds us that the reputation of the CIA is ‘far from uni formly toxic’. But, also, that its intelligence gathering on Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction was a ‘disgrace’. The book is the best kind of constructively critical history, told with a refreshingly wry and dry sense of humour – qualities that are all too rare in extant accounts. g
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The CIA works, argues the author, because it makes possible the collection of intelligence under democratic oversight. In this regard, the CIA ‘has inspired emulation, and has been a spur to the study of secret-intelligence morality’. We should remember the disaster which gave us the modern CIA: the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor (1941). The failure to predict or pre-empt the attack made the creation of a central intelligence agency imper ative, just as it made its operation subject to democratic control instead of nationalistic revenge. The CIA has had to balance, mostly successfully, these competing pressures.
Judith Bishop Judith Bishop’s most recent collection is Interval (2018).
Harbour As if the black window at the solitary pass from I to this (or you or now) could let a human mind slip through the glass let’sonce,practise seeing water, looking hard at the harbour, that detritus of worn mussel shells, rock ledges writingofwithgraffitiedanecstasylichen,wavesoutthe riddles of asforbreathharmonics,heldamomentElizabethBishop in her posthumous voice says cold dark deep and absolutely clear to the innermost air, despite the murky distance, greysurfacinglikea wandering seal, as our minds try colluding with existence in a fantasy of what we might be doing, or imagining we do, standing at the sheer bald windows of our corneas, beside a grey harbour on a careful winter day, feeling sharpened, conjugal and stuck
The wonder is not how World War II created an all-powerful spy agency. It did not. The CIA, in the tradition of Pearl Harbor, went on to miss Sputnik, get Vietnamese nationalism wrong, fail to pre-empt the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, not see how quickly the USSR was crumbling, not stop the 9/11 plot, and exaggerate Saddam Hussein’s weapons’ threat. The wonder is that it has retained enough standing within the US system of government, given these setbacks, to be seen as a crucial pillar of American soft power.
On the fourth day, the Algerian cavalrymen outflanked the ex hausted French and were waiting in ambush on the edges of the Macta marshes. Trézel’s men suffered a complete rout, with several units abandoning the field in panic. By the end of the day, 300 French soldiers were dead or missing; many more were wounded. The shaken survivors who managed to board the supply vessels at Arzew were evacuated to Oran. According to Colonel Charles Henry Churchill’s Life of Abdel Kader (1867), ‘written from his own dictation and compiled from other authentic sources’, [t]he Arabs knew no bounds to their exultation. Shouts of joy resounded, and the glare of torches flashed to and fro in the defile all through the night. An aerial spectator might have seen one part of it occupied with busy architects. Drawing near, he would have seen something growing up from the ground like a pyramid. Bending down and listening, he would have heard frantic cries of ‘more heads, more heads!’ A closer inspection of this work of art would have revealed to the astonished gaze hundreds of French heads, piled up promiscuously.
The Museum of Mankind by Michael Garbutt
The skulls come from many different parts of the world, unit ed by the fact that at some point over the past three centuries they had the misfortune to come into contact with French civilisation.
Some of these forlorn remains may finally be returned to their countries of origin. Researchers have established the identities of the contents of five hundred boxes, including those of thirty-six Algerians. Pending identification, the rest will remain in the basement. In response to concerns raised on social media, the manager of the collection is at pains to stress that the skulls and human heads (some retain hair and skin) are not on public display.
M. Chirac also explained who these peoples were to whom France wished to pay homage, and what ‘history’ had done to them: Peoples injured and exterminated by the greed and brutality of conquerors. Peoples humiliated and scorned, denied even their own history. Peoples still now often marginalised, weakened, endangered
∞ Algeria, June 1835. General Camille Alphonse Trézel’s expedi tion to pacify the western tribes had failed. Under the leadership of Emir Abdel Kader, Commander of the Faithful, the Algerians had bloodied the French invaders badly. Outnumbered and com pelled to withdraw to the port of Arzew to resupply, Trézel’s col umn fought desperate rearguard actions for three days and nights.
Commentary
∞ Paris, 2020. The fluorescent lighting in the basement of the Musée de l’Homme, the Museum of Mankind, in the Place du Trocadéro, is less dramatic than the burning torches of Macta, but the 18,000 skulls under its cold white glow would make a far more impressive pyramid. Naturally, the Museum employs a storage method that avoids any hint of ‘promiscuous piling’. Each skull occupies its own hand-numbered cardboard box, neatly lined up with its neighbours on the multi-level rows of steel shelving that fill the Museum’s vast basement. On the front of each box, a transparent plastic window allows staff to see the contents at a glance.
The president’s use of the word ‘history’ was adroit. It al lowed him to avoid saying ‘France’ twice in the same sentence. Try replacing ‘history’ with ‘France’. It doesn’t sound as elegant.
∞ The strength of the Museum’s commitment to preserving human dignity was demonstrated in June 1940. After Paris fell to the Germans, Paul Rivet, the Museum’s founding director, and his staff established le Réseau du Musée de l’Homme, the Museum of Mankind Network. It was the first organised group in France to resist Nazi occupation. The Museum Network set up escape lines for refugees, allied airmen, and prisoners of war. It also published the clandestine Résistance and Vérité Française newspapers, and supplied the British with military intelligence. By mid-1942, the Network had been shut down, betrayed by a double agent work ing for the Germans. Ten members of the Museum staff – seven men and three women – were sentenced to death. The men were executed by firing squad, the women deported to concentration camps.The Nazis tortured, shot, or enslaved the staff at the Museum of Mankind, but they left the collection intact. Half a century later, President Jacques Chirac adopted the opposite strategy: he left the staff intact – completely ignored them in fact – but eviscerated the Museum’s collection of ethnographic artefacts. It was part of a long-overdue historical accounting. As Chirac explained in 2006 at the opening of the Musée du Quai Branly, where much of the Museum of Mankind’s collection had by then been relocated, ‘France wished to pay homage to peoples to whom, throughout the ages, history has all too often done violence’.
AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW SEPTEMBER 2022 35
inexorable advance of modernity a nudge by resuming nuclear testing at Mururoa Atoll in French Polynesia. The Quai Branly Museum was the president’s personal legacy project. Its mission to ‘study, preserve and promote non-European arts and civilisation’ would help restore the dignity of all those people to whom ‘history’ had done violence. The new museum was designed by French super-architect Jean Nouvel. ‘It is a building,’ M. Chirac noted with justifiable pride, ‘of masterful architecture, suffused with respect for the visitor, the environment, the works and the cultures that produced them.’ The artefacts installed at Quai Branly came from institutions where their cultures had not always enjoyed such respect. One was the National Museum of the Arts of Africa and Oceania, formerly known as the Museum of France Overseas, the supposedly permanent home of what had started out as the no-need-for-euphemisms Colonial Exhibition of 1931. The Museum achieved a final act of expiation for its colonial past by closing down and transferring its collection to Quai Branly.1
The rest of the Quai Branly collection came from the Museum of Mankind, another institution that Chirac evidently decided should make amends for its past associ ations with the French colonial project. Perhaps it was the memory of the Museum’s heroic role in the Resistance that saved it from being completely shuttered. Its continuing existence also resolved the inconvenient question of what to do with the 18,000 skulls and other human remains, whose presence at Quai Branly would have jarred with the new museum’s mission to pay homage to peoples to whom, throughout the ages, history had all too often, etc. etc.
After six long years of intense discussion, debate and stakeholder consultation, the Museum was able to give three unequivocal answers, and thus articulate its vision for the twenty-first century. The years of self-interrogation had not been wasted. As its website boldly states, the Museum’s mission is to address three important questions: Who are we? Where did we come from? Where are we headed?Itwas a stroke of genius. ‘We’ no longer referred to the Museum of Mankind but to All Mankind. In 2015, the Museum finally reopened its doors to the public, revealing a €92 million renovation of its interior and a completely new exhibition design. The exhibits are divided into three sections: ‘Who are we?’ ‘Where did we come from?’ ‘Where are we headed?’
So the Museum of Mankind survived, but it faced an uncertain future. Most of its collection was gone and what remained largely consisted of unexhibitable body parts. A less resolute management might have despaired, but this was an institution whose staff had shown in domitable courage and resourcefulness in the face of Nazi terror. It would not be daunted by the challenge of reinventing itself merely because it had nothing to exhibit.
Chacapoya mummy at the Museum of Mankind (photograph by Velvet via Wikimedia Commons)
36 AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW SEPTEMBER 2022 by the inexorable advance of modernity. Peoples who want their dignity restored. It was a powerful speech. The word ‘history’ also implied that the greed and brutality belonged to a distant past. President Chirac did not mention his own decision in 1995 to give the
In ‘Who are we?’, visitors discover that we are human beings and that our scientific name is Homo sapiens. The key message of this section is that we are a species of great diversity, as illustrated by various images and busts on display. But in the end, we learn, there is far more that unites than divides us.
The Museum closed its doors to the public and began a period of intense self-reflection, grappling with the three fundamental questions every organisation at a crossroads must address: Who are we? Where did we come from? Where are we headed?
∞ The skull of the philosopher René Descartes, missing its jawbone and upper set of teeth, rests on a plinth between the cranium of a 30,000-year-old Cro-Magnon Man and a plastic bust of the re tired footballer Lilian Thuram, the most capped player in the his tory of the French national squad. Apparently, this arrangement compromises no one’s dignity. The three exhibits reinforce the important message that we humans are on a journey that has seen us progress from club-wielding troglodytes to philosophers and soccer stars. The sign underneath the philosopher’s skull states that it belongs to ‘René Descartes (1596–1650) Homo sapiens’. As it happens, the literal translation of Homo sapiens is ‘wise man’, which is a good description of one of the most influential thinkers of the past half millennium. The label on the plinth offers more Descartesinformation.wasburiedin Stockholm, where he had been invited by Queen Christine. During the exhumation of his remains in 1667, with a view to their transfer to the church of Saint-Germain-desPrès – where they would only be re-interred in 1819 – it was noticed that the skull was missing. After many transfers from collector to collector, it was spotted at an auction in 1861 and sent by the chemist Jons Jacob Berzelius to Georges Cuvier. An inscription on the skull shows that it was stolen by the captain of the guards who was in charge of the exhumation.
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The answer to ‘Where do we come from?’ is that we evolved from proto-hominids, and other pre-human ancestors. From a curatorial perspective, the beauty of this section is that real skulls and bones from the Museum’s collection can be displayed and no one is going to complain about the indignity they suffer.
‘Where are we headed?’ is the most speculative section. Cat astrophic climate change, nuclear holocaust, and universal peace and harmony are mooted options. This still leaves the 18,000 human skulls in the basement, a few of which will be returned to their countries of origin, while the rest languish in cardboard boxes awaiting identification and repatriation. In the meantime, one distinguished specimen is already at home. It’s on permanent display among the ‘Who are we?’ exhibits on Level Two.
Clem Christesen and Stephen Murray-Smith were giants of the world of Australian books and writing from the 1940s to 1980s. Jim Davidson – the second editor of Meanjin – traces the commitment of Christesen and Murray-Smith to this ambitious cultural project and how it attracted many of the key writers and thinkers of those years. Available at mup.com.au
‘An inscription on the skull …’ Now that so many of us have texts inscribed on our bodies, and even facial tattoos hardly attract a second glance, the fact that the whole of Descartes’ frontal bone is covered in handwriting seems unremarkable. Like old tattoos, the ink has faded with the centuries, though unlike ageing skin, the skull is still taut and firm. The inscriptions were written by for mer owners of the skull, with the notable exception of Descartes himself. Disappointingly for fans of irony, the philosopher’s most famous dictum – Cogito ergo sum – ‘I think therefore I am’ – is not among the inscriptions. Like tourists with Sharpies at a historical monument, most collectors just wrote their name and added a date, though a more erudite vandal contributed some Latin verse.
Parvula Cartesii fuit haec calvaria magni, exuvias reliquas gallica busta tegunt; sed laus ingenii toto diffunditur orbe, mistaque coelicolis mens pia semper ovat. (This small skull once belonged to the great Cartesius, The rest of his remains are hidden far away in France; But all around the circle of the globe his genius is praised, And his spirit still rejoices in the sphere of heaven.)
There may be many reasons why Descartes’s spirit still re joices in the sphere of heaven, but having his scribbled-on skull exhibited at the Museum of Mankind is probably not one of them. On the other hand, as a man of science, Descartes would recognise the potential value of the forensic studies that have recently been conducted on the skull. He believed that the soul acted through the pineal gland and would be curious to learn about his post-mortem involvement in the field of mind, brain, and cranial studies. The Museum of Mankind has been associated with this research ever since it acquired the Gall Collection.
The members anxiously repaired to the Society’s library to consult the relevant entry in the Encyclopaedia Britannica. They were soon reassured by what they read. In the early sixteenth century, a wandering band of just forty Spaniards had stumbled onto the territory of the 70,000-strong Chilca nation. As any competent phrenologist could have predicted, the Chilcans simply surrendered en masse without a fight. If the Chilcans had turned out to be a warrior race that resisted the Spaniards to the last man, it would have been very awkward, as one contributor to the Society’s journal freely ad mitted. Happily, this was not the case. Phrenology had proved its worth again. In the end, the writer noted with an air of triumph, ‘Unwarlike submission in Peru differs not from unwarlike sub mission in Malden’sChiloa.’letter also solved a puzzle. Despite the skull’s late owner’s lack of firmness and his excessive tendency to venera tion and wonder, the members understood from the start that its form indicated a mind of considerable intellectual acumen. This was inconsistent with what was known of the history of the Chilotes, a race of poor fisherfolk who spent their lives hunkering before the fierce winds that batter their desolate island. Now the truth was revealed. The skull belonged to a member of the noble Chilca branch of the Inca nation. Boasting palaces and temples of unmatched grandeur, the Incan empire once stretched for a thousand miles, a sizeable chunk of which the Chilcans had
38 AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW SEPTEMBER 2022
∞ In the first decades of the nineteenth century, Dr Franz Joseph Gall, a German-born neuro-anatomist practising in Paris, in troduced the world to the science of cranioscopy, subsequently known as phrenology. (Cranioscopy describes the act of observ ing and measuring the skull, whereas phrenology is the study of the mind/brain, based on cranioscopic observations.) According to Dr Gall, discrete regions of the brain, acting independently of each other, are the location of specific mental and moral fac ulties such as ‘Agreeableness’, ‘Acquisitiveness’, ‘Firmness’, and ‘Self-esteem’. Gall’s theory was based on a study of the skulls and the death or life masks of three populations: public figures distinguished by their intellectual, social, or artistic achieve ments; psychiatric patients; and criminals. Gall bequeathed his own skull to the collection, which now belongs to the Museum of Mankind. On the basis of Dr Gall’s dubious contribution to science, a strong case could be made for classifying his skull as a member of at least two of the three populations he studied.
The study was a very satisfying confirmation of the power of the phrenological method. The secretary of the Society wrote to Mr Malden to inform him of their findings. Some months later, when the agent’s letter of reply eventually arrived, it contained disturbing news. He pointed out that the members had misread his handwriting, mistaking a ‘c’ for an ‘o’. The skull was not from Chiloa with an ‘o’, in southern Chile, as they had thought. It was from Chilca with a ‘c’ in Peru, three thousand miles to the north. He only dealt in Peruvian skulls, Mr Malden reminded them.
Gall’s analyses of the relationship between talent, madness, criminality, and cranial forms produced a diagram of the brain that resembled a political map of a nation state divided into thirty-seven regions, each representing a trait or faculty. The phrenologist’s task was to determine the relative sizes of these regions in order to identify an individual’s dominant traits. Since Gall believed that a direct correspondence existed between the surface of the skull and the structure of the brain, a detailed measurement of the former would reveal what lay within the latter. Like a surveyor in uncharted territory, a phrenologist would inspect the contours of the subject’s skull, measuring and recording its topographic features. By cross-referencing these to Dr Gall’s map of the interior, one could then calculate the sizes of the various regions, revealing the character of the individual and the race to which they belonged.
∞ Inspired by Gall’s work, the Edinburgh Phrenological Society was founded in 1820, the first of many such bodies in Europe and North America. The value of the Edinburgh Society’s con tribution to knowledge is illustrated by a case study published in its journal of 1827. The Society had a special interest in South American crania and was building a museum for its growing col lection of skulls and casts. The members were naturally delighted when a new specimen arrived from their South American agent, Mr Malden. In an accompanying note, Malden explained that the skull had been acquired in Chiloa, where it had been lying in the centre of a circle of other specimens. As the members discovered when they consulted the Encyclopaedia Britannica in the Society’s library, Chiloa is a remote island off the coast of southern Chile. The phrenologists set to work, studiously following Dr Gall’s methods. They measured the dimensions of the skull’s exterior features and then plotted a chart of the corresponding regions of the brain. The findings were revealing. The Chilote’s brain would have exhibited marked deficiencies in ‘Firmness’, combined with a significant over-development in the areas of ‘Veneration’ and ‘Wonder’. It was doubtless as a consequence of this particu lar combination of faculties that when the Conquistadores first arrived in Chiloa, the Chilotes prostrated themselves in awe of the white gods who had come to rule over them.
Team Charlier asked the questions we would all like to have answered: might parietal lobe expansion have had something to do with the fact that Descartes wrote a compendium of music at the age of eighteen, which suggests that he may have played a musical instrument and therefore enjoyed at least a modicum of manual dexterity? Is the fact that Descartes is thought to have performed autopsies further evidence of keen eye and hand co-or dination attributable to those enlarged lobes? Might they also be associated with the philosopher’s better-than-average grasp of maths and visual ideation? Possibly, Charlier et al. conclude, inconclusively. ∞ One of the most interesting parts of the study is team Charlier’s visualisation of the digital endocast. Six rotated views, rendered in chocolate brown, illustrate Descartes’s brain, from top and bottom, left and right, front and back. Displayed in two rows of three divided by neat black borders, the brain views resemble an assortment of Guylian Sea Shells, and could make an interesting souvenir for Museum visitors. To judge by the large discounts on offer, sales of current gift shop merchandise are sluggish. A nineteenth-century ‘phrenological head’ reproduced in Strat ford-style cracked porcelain is a case in point. Described on the Museum’s website as an ‘extremely interesting and original gift, a valuable interior décor’, it would have been snapped up by members of the Edinburgh Phrenological Society. But times have changed. The fifteen per cent discount offered to first-time online buyers suggests that demand for porcelain pseudoscience is in decline. The shop also sells a ‘small plate skull’ – a china dish with a frontal view of a skull on it. The skull’s identity is not indicated, but it has a mandible and full set of teeth, so it’s not Descartes’s’. The dish is on sale for €17.50, reduced from €25. A ceramic beaker is also available. It features a profile view of a skull, possibly the same one that appears on the plate. The beaker too has been reduced, by thirty per cent. If the discounts encourage a final clearance of existing stock, new, more popular lines can be introduced. One candidate is a no-brainer: miniature praline-filled chocolate endocasts of Descartes’s skull. Professor Charlier’s team already has the 3D digital files. The packaging could include a short introduction to Des cartes’s thought, which is the one thing missing from the current display in the Museum. It would be a challenge to condense a series of monumental philosophical works to a statement that fits onto a box of chocolates, but it’s worth trying. Descartes’s ideas are key to understanding many aspects of contemporary Homo sapiens’ condition, including the reason why institutions like the Museum of Mankind came to exist, why some contain enormous collections of skulls they can’t exhibit, and where we all may be headed.
Consider this thought experiment: suppose a Master Illusionist turned the world into a giant illusion. What could you be certain of? Nothing. You would have to doubt everything. Everything except the fact that you doubt. Thinking proves that you exist. Correctly applied, your mind’s power to reason can make sense of everything, because it’s all just dull matter. Even your body. Once you understand matter, you can become its master. Robert Oppenheimer knew this. When the father of the atom bomb witnessed the first nuclear explo sion in 1945, he said, ‘Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.’
AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW SEPTEMBER 2022 39 meekly surrendered to a handful of Conquistadores. The members recalled with excitement that Mr Malden had found the skull in the centre of a circle of other specimens, leading them to conclude it had belonged to a Chilote headman. In reality, it was now exceedingly probable that the cranium was instead that of a high-ranking Chilcan, perhaps one of the Incan royal Priests of the Sun. Mr Malden believed it might be possible to acquire the skulls of other Incan royals, if the members so wished. They would of course understand the extreme rarity of such objects and the costs involved in locating and acquiring them. ∞ It is easy to dismiss phrenology as nineteenth-century racist bunkum, but the notion that a skull can offer a key to under standing the brain/mind is not entirely without foundation. These days, our models of neurological structure and methods of investigation are more sophisticated. Descartes and the Mu seum of Mankind have been at the forefront of this research. In collaboration with the Museum, Professor Philippe Charlier, the director of the medical and forensic anthropology unit at the University of Versailles St Quentin, has conducted two studies of Descartes’s skull. In 2014, as part of a broader investigation of disease, death and its rituals, Charlier and his team pub lished a paper in the British medical journal The Lancet entitled: ‘Did René Descartes have a giant ethmoidal sinus osteoma?’2 To answer the question, Charlier ran a CT scan on the skull at the Pitié-Salpêtrière teaching hospital. The result: probably yes. The study also concluded that the tumour appears to have played no role in the philosopher’s death from pneumonia. In 2017, Charlier and his team published another paper, this time in The Journal of the Neurological Sciences. Dr Gall would have been fascinated. The new study attempted the far more difficult task of determining what Descartes’s skull revealed about the philosopher’s brain. What evidence remained of the ‘I’ that thought and therefore was? In the past, making an endocast – a cast of the cranial cav ity – involved pouring liquid plaster into the upturned cavity, waiting for it to dry, and then carefully sawing the skull in two, removing the cast, and (optionally) glueing the two halves back together. Less invasive techniques now exist. Charlier’s team used the teaching hospital’s General Electric High Speed HAS scanner to run another CT scan. Data were exported as a .obj file to a Zbrush 3D package, which produced a digital endocast of the internal surface of the skull, effectively the external structure of the brain. In the discussion of their findings, Charlier and his team report the unsurprising fact that the endocast displays all the classical anatomical features of Homo sapiens and that its dimensions are within the range of variation observed in a sample of extant modern humans. However, compared to the controls, the endocast exhibits a large expansion on the parietal lobes, an area known to be associated with manual dexterity.
∞ The Philosophy of René Descartes in Ninety-Nine Words
After Descartes introduced the revolutionary distinction be tween the conscious, living mind and the dead world of matter, Homo sapiens – in the first instance, Homo sapiens europeensis – embraced the seductive idea that the human mind was the measure of all things. The gods that once inhabited earth and air, water and fire were gone, replaced by Reason. Everything could now be measured and managed according to the demands of the thinking mind. If you had a large enough knife and fork, the world and everything in it could be sliced up and served on a plate. Of course, the application of reason to exploit the environment and its peoples did not begin in 1637 when Des cartes published Discourses on Method of Rightly Conducting One’s Reason and Seeking the Truth in the Sciences. The silver mines of Peru, for example, and their ore-refining ponds in which thou sands of indigenous labourers were forced to wade knee-deep in mercury-laden sludge, had been operating since the Conquista dores first arrived over a century before. All Descartes did was to provide modernity with a manifesto that privileged the power of reason above all else. It would be wholly inaccurate and, well … unreasonable to blame the man for environmental destruc tion, imperialism, colonialism, industrialisation, urbanisation, commodity fetishism, capitalism, communism, fascism, geno cide, atomic weaponry, phrenology, the patriarchy, the climate crisis, or any of the other ills of the past four centuries. It would,
Michael Garbutt is a Senior Lecturer at UNSW Sydney’s School of Art and Design. His essay The Museum of Mankind forms part of a broader investigation of image-making practices in nineteenth- and twentieth-century France. ❖
2. An ethmoidal sinus osteoma is a slow-growing neoplasm of the paranasal sinuses, occurring mainly in the frontal and ethmoid sinuses. It is benign and relatively https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17476198common.
‘The Museum of Mankind’ was shortlisted for the 2022 Calibre Essay Prize. Publication is generously supported by the Judith Neilson Institute for Journalism and Ideas.
1.EndnotesTheQ uai Branly runs along the Left Bank of the Seine between the Beir Hakeim and Alma Bridges, close to the Eiffel Tower. Since 2016 the museum has been officially known as the Musée du Quai Branly-Jacques Chirac.
40 AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW SEPTEMBER 2022
The skull of René Descartes (©MNHN/JC Domenech) however, be fair to say that the distinction Descartes introduced between the thinking mind and the dead matter it could think about has led us to many unanticipated places, some of which have been dark and very dangerous. Just ask the 18,000 skulls in the basement of the Museum of Mankind. g
A lifetime
Weaving and brewing of bookish immersion
It is clear that Bird’s Brer Rabbit would certainly not be the same as that of the African-American slaves whose stories it purports to tell. Likewise, the night sky of Bird’s Tasmania has peacock constellations along with emus, another numinous detail of the kind of hybrid haunting unleashed by the book-obsessed, bird-loving, violent British Empire. It’s what Telltale manages to do with such dark materials that makes it so engaging, especially right now, as Australia moves finally towards a more regenerative relationship with the country’s First Nations. And therein lies a key stimulus in Bird’s oeuvre, as well as here in the teeming reflections of Telltale. What claims to be singular is never so. One nation is actually hundreds, one book a universe, and a different universe in each person’s hands. g
Fittingly, the chronicling of Bird’s reading life is framed by the motif of a bridge, the Kings Bridge at Cataract Gorge in Launceston, where she pictures herself, on 9 March 1945, as a young girl, going for a picnic with her family. Cataract Gorge is a landscape Bird has written about before, perhaps most notably in her tricksterish novel The Bluebird Café (1990), and here again she meditates on the idea of the trickster in literature, which she encounters for the first time via the character of Brer Rabbit in a ‘racially stereotyped’ wartime edition of Stories From Uncle Remus, given to her by her aunt as a birthday present. The copy is still on her shelves, easy to find ‘with a lot of other green books’. As she takes it down, the signature chiaroscuro that has defined so much of her writing once again takes flight. ‘How innocent children are in the hands of authors who teach and entertain them,’ Bird remarks, reflecting on her first reception of Uncle Remus and the facts she subsequently learnt about the sinister nature of its production. ‘I see the clear racial stereotype and prejudice now,’ she says, while noting that ‘the tales themselves are still alive and Thisfascinating’.willingness to allow for alternative, contradictory, and co-existent perspectives is a feature of Telltale. It is particularly focused in the recurring flashback of that small child crossing the bridge with her family at Cataract Gorge. Bird braids the seemingly innocent prospect of a picnic in a park full of pea cocks with the chthonic terror that possesses her as she crosses the ancient river. Dark atavistic rock is everywhere, the tragic silencing of local culture too. It is also the day when the United States will air-bomb Tokyo. Suddenly, even to the child, what appears peaceful – the picnic basket, the tollbooth, the prospect of the flamboyant peacock tail – seems the result of the decisive operations of a merciless power.
Gregory Day
AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW SEPTEMBER 2022 41 Memoir
At the heart of Bird’s method is the time she takes to im merse us in the provenance of specific illusions she inherited in her youth about the brutal history of the island where she grew up – lutruwita – Tasmania – Van Diemen’s Land. She also admits the pleasure she takes in the cultural products of that self-same colonial empire she is native to. That she still delights in a variety of Edwardian-inflected aesthetics speaks honestly to how, for better or worse, a large portion of who we are is culturally deter mined, and therefore hybrid. Bird’s self-interrogating approach shows how any wholesale denial of inheritance is a thing to be wary of and in this way she stands as a mature and resolutely playful thinker about her own complex slice of human history.
Telltale: Reading writing remembering by Carmel Bird Transit Lounge $32.99 hb, 274 pp I n 1985, the American poet and essayist Susan Howe deftly jettisoned any pretensions to objectivity in the field of literary analysis with her ground-breaking critical work My Emily Dickinson. The possessive pronoun in Howe’s title says it all: when a writer’s work goes out to its readers, it reignites in any number of imaginative and emotional contexts. What rich and varied screens we project onto everything we read. Fast forward to 2020. Carmel Bird is locked down in what she calls ‘the great Covid enchantment’, confined to her home full of the objects of her life, including many, many books. With more time than usual to contemplate editions she hasn’t looked at for a long time, she rediscovers her library as a sanctuary of highly personal artefacts, an intimate archival site of the various selves she inhabited when she first read each volume: the joyful, intuitive girl of eerie 1940s Tasmania; the cosmopolitan student of French at the Sorbonne in the 1960s; the married writer liv ing in Los Angeles in the 1980s; the prolific novelist and short story writer of renown here in Australia; author of Cherry Ripe (1985), Cape Grimm (2004), Field of Poppies (2019), and many other books. Detecting the spark of a fresh narrative method in the history of her reading, Bird decides to tackle the retrospective process head-on, to stalk her own past selves through the rooms of her library in order to discover ‘the story of the story’. What ensues – Telltale: Reading writing remembering – has been described by Hilary McPhee as ‘a rare thing, an ingenious memoir’. The books in Bird’s library, in all their aromatic, tactile physicality, provide the impetus, but more than that it is the bridge between individual imagination and published text that shapes this superbly dialectical deep dive.
This kind of wrangling with Bird’s own enculturation via a lifetime of bookish immersion gives Telltale its layered and properly complex traction. As she proceeds randomly through her library, we encounter a range of voices, every one of which is determined by the evolving textures of her eclectic mind. In her love of fairytale we find a template of her vivid yet noirish aesthetic; in her appreciation of writers such as Vladimir Nabokov and W.G. Sebald we see the enthusiasms of the literary formalist. Accordingly, Telltale becomes a fine balancing act between Bird’s insouciant creativity and her intuitive thirst for truth and justice. Thus the stories accrue, as have the books, with each of them having at least two sides, just as the places of her childhood have at least two names. ‘I am mining and I am weaving and I am brewing’, she tells us, as her past comes alive again in her hands.
The book’s subject is demanding, and we can understand some of those demands by looking at a single word that appears throughout the book: ‘melancholy’. In the Elizabethan age, the term melancholy ‘referred to both the humoral substance in the body – black bile – and the psychological state it produced’. It referred as well to the black, dark, and sluggish planet Saturn, which principally governed the humour. At the same time, Jean Bodin and others claimed that Africans suffered from an excess of black bile and melancholy because the hot climate made Africans ‘swarthy and deeply black’.
Meanwhile, Aristotle’s Problem XXX, and the philosophy of the Florentine Platonist Marsilio Ficino, among other influences, promoted a vision of what came to be called ‘genial melancholy’, which gives rise to exceptional creativity and intellectual power. And for this very reason, melancholy was a fashionable pose of the day. Melancholy, therefore, emerged in this age as a condition whose features were at once emotional, psychological, physiolog ical, astrological, racial, cognitive, imaginative, and social. Not all of these implications, moreover, were operative in any given usage of the word. The book’s subject is difficult, therefore, because a single idea from the age can transcend our usual categories for describing an experience. The book’s topic is also demanding because of the period’s intellectual diversity. Hackett makes clear that the ‘Elizabethan mind’ was by no means something univocal. The account above, for example, presupposes a certain integration of mind, body, and cosmos. And yet, such integration of the mind and body also co-existed with more dualistic accounts. Hackett discusses how the influence of Platonism and Stoicism, Paul’s letters, the hag iography and iconography of martyrdom, Protestant devotional practices, and Catholic spiritual exercises tended to promote, in diverse ways, either a dualism of mind and body or a greater spirit of inwardness. Hackett also claims that the mind emerged in Elizabethan literature as an ‘inner space’ and ‘a kernel of per sonal authenticity which outward appearance might conceal or falsify’. Therefore, the Elizabethan age at times emphasised the integration of inner and outer realms of experience, and at other times their distinction or even contention.
Greenblatt’s historicism thus discovers a new openness, and a new experience of the unwritten and the unthought, in history. But Hackett does not possess Greenblatt’s philosophical acuity.Rather than discover a new openness and mystery in her jux taposition of literary and non-literary texts, Hackett sees poetry as a datum to be used in a historical explanation. In discussing Hamlet’s ‘To be or not to be’ soliloquy, for example, Hackett remarks on the soliloquy’s ‘use of metaphors that operate on several levels’. She adds:
The Elizabethan Mind: Searching for the self in an age of uncertainty by Elizabeth Hackett Yale University Press US$35 hb, 420 pp T he Elizabethan Mind attempts nothing less than a com prehensive summary – within the limits of existing scholarship – of the literary, philosophical, theological, religious, scientific, political, social, emotional, and cosmic con texts for understanding the nature of the mind in the age of Elizabethan England. Insofar as is possible for a cultural history of this kind, the book succeeds. It is an impressive achievement. The prose is not only lucid, but at times positively breezy. And yet, within the confines of its particular approach, The Elizabethan Mind does not betray the complexity of its subject in achieving this lucidity.
42 AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW SEPTEMBER 2022 History
Hackett makes clear that the ‘Elizabethan mind’ was by no means univocal
The following remark from the book gives us a sense of what I mean: ‘As medical, theological, and philosophical writing bur geoned during the late sixteenth century, many literary authors became preoccupied with representing the “very image of the mind” in writing.’ The key word in Hackett’s sentence is ‘repre senting’. Hackett does not see art as a presentation, expression, or vision, but rather as the ‘representation’ of something that is already there. A vision has a certain irreplaceable uniqueness, but a representation can be more easily categorised, classified, and explained. It is no accident that Hackett’s statement dissolves the distinction between poetic and functional attitudes to language.
Explaining the Elizabethan mind
One achievement of the book is to help us see the kind of intellectual diversity I have described. The accounts I have given, however, cannot exhaust the riches of the book, which ranges across politics, race, gender, religion, and theology, among many other disciplines, and engages with a diversity of literary forms, including devotional poetry, rhetoric, female complaint, autobiography, the sonnet, prose, and the dramatic soliloquy.
Transcending categories
I admire the range and depth Hackett’s scholarship, but if there is a reservation at the heart of this review, it is about the limits of Hackett’s kind of historicism. When applied to art, one danger of historicism can be its excessive confidence in those explicitly formulated doctrines, ideas, or ‘points of view’ that can be collected under the category of ‘historical evidence’. Such a confidence prioritises an objectified context over every other kind of expression, and elides the difference between poetry and drama on the one hand, and propositional, representational speech on the other.
P. Kishore Saval
In the very best academic historicism, such as in the work of Stephen Greenblatt, the crossing of borders between poetic and propositional language achieves something new. Greenblatt’s historicism often places ‘literary’ and ‘non-literary’ writing sideby-side, but the effect of his juxtapositions is to discover elements of silence, obliquity, and mystery that we would not expect to find in the apparently ‘non-literary’ writing.
An insightful
P. Kishore Saval is Senior Lecturer in the Western Civilisation program at Australian Catholic University.
Tocqueville’s latest biographer, Olivier Zunz, is the consum mate Atlantic liberal intellectual. He was born in France and has a PhD from the Sorbonne, where he met the anti-Marxist historian François Furet during the student revolt of 1968. Furet has remained ‘the surest of guides’ for him. Since 1979, Zunz has been at the University of Virginia and celebrated for his work on the history of US urban society, notably of Detroit, and of US philanthropy, as well as being a leading authority on Tocqueville. His biography of the brilliant French aristocrat is both a homage and a masterpiece. The book is superbly produced and illustrated, as befits Princeton’s reputation and Zunz’s achievement.
theorists of cognition assert that metaphor is an essential mental tool: that we habitually process our perceptions, form concepts, and articulate them, by identifying one thing with another … Certainly, in ‘to be’ Shakespeare uses metaphor … to create the effect of Hamlet working out a complex problem in his mind, and taking us through that working out with him.
An
AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW SEPTEMBER 2022 43
Hackett threatens to lose sight of poetry, the very thing about which she is writing here, by presupposing that metaphor is a ‘mental tool’ that a thinking being can ‘use’. The passage above identifies thinking with the processing of perception and the formation and articulation of concepts. But poetry prioritises the inarticulable over the articulate, the non-conceptual over the conceptual, and vision over mere perception. The assumptions above, instead, reduce poetic thinking to a function of proposi tionalSuchthinking.reservations should not diminish our admiration for Hackett’s gifts as a literary critic and historian. Hackett reads a breathtaking diversity of literature with great sensitivity, and her book is as impressive as such a work of historical explanation can be. But poetry is not just a thing in need of explanation. By its very nature, poetry is refractory to explanation. Poetry does not simply exist inside of a ‘history’ that can be objectively for mulated. Instead, poetry discloses another way of being historical in the first place. g
The trip, ostensibly to study penitentiary systems, was also to result in one of the classics of early sociology, Democracy in America (2 vols, 1835, 1840). In the conclusion, Tocqueville re flected on the fundamental changes he was observing across the Western hemisphere, but worried about where these might lead: ‘The nations of our time cannot prevent the conditions of men from becoming equal, but it depends upon themselves whether the principle of equality is to lead them to servitude or freedom, to knowledge or barbarism, to prosperity or wretchedness.’ By ‘equality’, Tocqueville meant democracy, or at least white manhood suffrage. The central conundrum for him was how to avoid democracy becoming ‘the tyranny of the majority’, or worse: his family’s trauma was embedded in his anxiety. His optimism for the United States was based on his admiration for Americans’ enterprise, community spirit, and scepticism about the role of government, despite the drab conformism of public opinion. Tocqueville’s command of English was improved by his nine months in North America. His views were also formed by subsequent travels and acute observation of poverty in England and Ireland. After a series of desultory relationships, in 1835 Tocqueville married an older and middle-class Englishwoman from Portsmouth, Mary Mottley, with whom he evidently had a companionate and happy, if childless, life. Zunz’s biography, however, is very much an intellectual portrait: the individuals of Tocqueville’s milieu are all there in careful detail, but this erudite volume explores the complexities, hesitations, and passions of observer intellectual portrait of Alexis de Tocqueville Peter McPhee
The measure of Tocqueville’s intellectual eminence is that he was able to rise above the traumatic history of his own family to reflect incisively on the social and political changes through which he was living. Dismayed by the Revolution of 1830, which overthrew the Restoration monarchy of Louis XVI’s younger brothers, Tocqueville arranged to travel to the United States in 1831–32 with his close friend Gustave de Beaumont. Throughout his travels, his passion for personal freedoms was confronted by his hard-headed realisation that he was observing an evolving new world. At the heart of his quest was, as he wrote to his celebrated uncle Chateaubriand in 1835, ‘a feeling carved deeply into my heart: the love of liberty [and] an idea that obsesses my mind: the irresistible march of democracy’.
BiographyPresent-day
The Man Who Understood Democracy: The life of Alexis de Tocqueville by Olivier Zunz Princeton University Press US$35 hb, 472 pp A lexis de Tocqueville was born in 1805 into an eminent Norman aristocratic family, with ancestors who had participated in the Battle of Hastings and the conquest of England in 1066. This was a family and social milieu that was to be deeply scarred by the French Revolution of 1789–99. His parents were Hervé, Comte de Tocqueville, formerly an officer of the personal guard of Louis XVI, and Louise Madeleine Le Peletier de Rosanbo, a relative of the powerful political figures Vauban and Lamoignon. The couple married in 1793; the fol lowing year they barely escaped the guillotine. Louise’s grand father Malesherbes (Louis XVI’s minister and defence lawyer at his final trial) and both of Louise’s parents were condemned to death, as were her elder sister and her husband.
Tocqueville’s mind rather than his personal emotions and rela tions. He seems to have been a shy and reserved man, more at home with writing earnest letters than exchanging pleasantries.
44 AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW SEPTEMBER 2022
Under the July Monarchy (1830–48) and Second Republic (1848–51), Tocqueville personally sought to embed the practices of constitutional government and electoral politics in French political life. He was a parliamentary deputy and minister before abandoning public life after Bonaparte’s nephew Louis Napoléon seized power with the army in December 1851. He then devoted himself to writing The Old Régime and the Revolution, one of the great classics of historiography, a work unfinished at his early death from tuberculosis in 1859.
Biography
Zunz shares Tocqueville’s judgement that greater social equal ity is inherently threatening for liberty and that the strength of the United States’ ‘democratic experiment’ stems from economic freedoms. There are many who would contest such a premise. Certainly, however, Tocqueville’s untimely death spared him from witnessing the socialist Paris Commune of 1871, which would have reinforced his worry that democracy and liberty could not coexist, and the American Civil War, where his satisfaction at the survival of the Republic and the abolition of slavery would have been tempered by his dismay at the carnage of racial hatred and civil discord. g Peter McPhee has published widely on the history of modern France and is currently the Chair of the History Council of Victoria.
A controversial diplomat and bureaucrat Peter Edwards
Tocqueville was intransigent about abolishing slavery which he saw as ‘violating the most sacred rights of humanity’ – and was proud that France had done so during its revolution. But the lifelong struggle between his heart and head was to be evident in his emotional responses to suffering – his disgust at the treatment of Native Americans, Algerians, and the poor in England and Ireland – but also in his hard-headed acceptance of such cruel hierarchies as embedded in all societies. Despite castigating the horrors of President Andrew Jackson’s forced deportation of the Chocktaw Nation from Alabama and Mississippi in 1831, the ‘Trail of Tears’, Tocqueville concluded that the ‘Indian race’ was both inferior and ‘doomed’. Indeed, he came to see the colonisation of Algeria and a forced separation of colonists and Algerians as the French equivalent of the US frontier, promising the flourishing of the ‘small-scale capitalists’ he so admired. At times, the understandable esteem in which Zunz holds Tocqueville leads him to soften his superb portrait of a brilliantly insightful observer who also accepted social and racial cruelties as the price of social order. Nowhere was this more apparent than in Tocqueville’s admiration for General Léon Lamoricière, notorious for his uncompromising, even exultant, killing of re sistant Algerians after 1830 and of insurgent Parisian workers in June 1848. Democracy may have been one manifestation of the modern world that Tocqueville accepted as inevitable and man ageable, but ‘socialism’ was not. The insurrection of impoverished Parisians in 1848, calling for a ‘social republic’ and unemployment relief, was described by him as a battle over ‘property, family, and civilisation – in short, everything that makes life worth living’.
Persons of Interest: An intimate account of Cecily and John Burton by Pamela Burton with Meredith Edwards ANU Press $60 pb, 412 pp P ersons of Interest does not fit readily into any familiar genre. It crosses the borders of biography, psychology, Cold War history, and family studies. When Pamela Burton and her sister Meredith Edwards decided to write a book about their parents, they realised that different readerships would be attract ed to different parts. Who would be interested in a book about the marriage, and the post-divorce lives, of a man who had been a central figure in public controversies many decades ago and a sensitive, introspective woman who was little known to the pub lic but for whom their daughters felt far greater sympathy? By crossing those borders with what their prologue calls ‘a unique, intimate and candid account of our parents’ complexities and in terweaving relationships’, they have written a book that will be ‘of interest’ to many readers, no matter what their usual focus. In the early years of Australia’s Cold War, John Burton (1915–2010) had been a ‘person of interest’ to Australia’s do mestic security organisation, the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO). Many on the right suspected that he was closely involved with those members of the Department of Ex ternal Affairs, of which Burton was appointed Secretary at the age of thirty-two, who were known to have supplied classified documents to the Soviet Union. More generally, his opposition to the Menzies government’s foreign policy, his eagerness to travel to what was then called ‘Red China’, and his view that Washington was as culpable as Moscow for the outbreak of the Cold War, led to his being seen as at least a ‘fellow traveller’ with the communists.
Tocqueville’s main argument about the French Revolution was the continuous power of central authority, from the central ising state of Louis XIV (1638–1715) to Napoleon Bonaparte, who seized power with the army in 1799. The most radical change through the Revolution, according to Tocqueville, was the destruction of the institutions of feudalism, both the traditional institutions dominated by the nobility and the vestiges of the feudal or seigneurial system in the countryside. The Revolution sought to replace the ancient feudal structures with new insti tutions based on popular sovereignty, civic equality, and liberty. Unlike the United States, however, where a society developed based on private property, pragmatic religious pluralism, and individual freedoms, he argued that in France people still relied too much on central authority.
Public and private lives
The marriage to John was clearly destined not to last. Even tually, while John held an appointment at the Australian National University, they divorced. Cecily married Robert Parker, a leading political scientist, whose ex-wife, Nancy, married Geoffrey Sawer, a legal academic recently widowered. This marriage-go-round was a topic of gossip in ANU tearooms for decades afterwards, but the sensitivity with which Pamela and Meredith discuss the marriages and extramarital relationships of John and Cecily raises this ‘intimate account’ far above mere prurience.
Cecily and John Burton in London, 1939 (from the book under review)
AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW SEPTEMBER 2022 45
By placing the intimately personal and psychological in the foreground and the public and political in the background, Persons of Interest casts fresh light on Australian public life and its often damaging interaction with Australians’ private lives. g
While some readers will be interested in the discussion of Burton’s official and academic careers, and others in Cecily’s introspective soul-searching, others will be attracted by the in teraction of the two stories. Whether the central figure is Henry VIII, John F. Kennedy or Bill Clinton, the reading public has long been fascinated by the private lives affected, damaged, or even destroyed by controversial public figures. There are echoes here of Mary Trump’s Too Much and Never Enough (2020), on the dynamics of the former president’s family, and Troy Bramston’s Bob Hawke (2022), which records both Hawke’s public life, as a mostly successful trade union advocate and prime minister, and the appalling strains that his womanising, drinking, and egotisti cal ambition placed on his first wife and his family. (Hawke even makes a cameo appearance in Persons of Interest, as Meredith sees him flirting with a woman with whom, as the daughters realised before their mother, Burton was engaged in an affair).
Although the Petrov Royal Commission (1954–55) led to no charges against Burton, some people remained suspicious. To the surprise of many, in 2011–12 Desmond Ball revived the allegation that Burton had ‘probably’ been a Russian agent. Pamela Burton rebutted this assertion at the time, and the matter was probably put to rest, in most eyes, by David Horner’s The Spy Catchers (2014), the first volume of the official history of ASIO.
The contribution of Persons of Interest to this protracted saga is to demonstrate that Burton’s most admired international leader was neither Josef Stalin nor Mao Zedong but Jawaharlal Nehru. The theme of his book on Australian foreign policy, The Alter native: A dynamic approach to our relations with Asia (1954), was that Australia should seek the closest possible relations with the nations emerging from the decolonisation of European empires, such as Nehru’s India and Sukarno’s Indonesia, rather than clinging to such ‘great and powerful friends’ as the United States and Britain. It is not hard to guess how Burton would have reacted to the announce ment of the AUKUS agreement. While clearing him of the charge of being a KGB collaborator, the authors also show that their father was a considerably more complex, mul ti-faceted, and interesting individual than either his critics or his admirers realised. Between the controversies of his diplomatic and political life and those of his later academic career as a pioneer of conflict resolution and peace research, this alleged communist sympathiser proved to be an innovative farmer (although his ideas about chicken farming had little in common with free-range principles) and small business entrepreneur. He not only ran a bookstore but fitted out a bus as a mobile shop, taking books, foreign newspapers, and other items through perilous roads to an appreciative clientele: the workers on the Snowy Mountains Scheme. But the order in which Burton and his first wife, Cecily (1916–2007), are named in the subtitle is no coincidence. Pamela Burton and Meredith Edwards have much greater empathy for Cecily, the beautiful and sensitive woman who fell in love with John but found it impossible to live with him. The radical foreign policy thinker and admirer of Third World revolutionaries was distressingly traditional in his attitude to women. Always more of an assertive individualist than a team player, he seemed to need acolytes in his public dealings and an ‘accommodating wife’ at home, who had to cope single-handed with the extraordinary demands he placed on her and their young children.
Peter Edwards has written extensively on Australian foreign policy and policymaking, including Prime Ministers and Diplo mats (1983).
The authors’ principal focus is therefore on their ‘remark able, non-judgemental and much-loved mother’ and Cecily’s successful, albeit often painful, evolution from an apparently dutiful 1940s wife to the ‘undisputed matriarch’ of the family. Her daughters sympathetically record a remarkable experience that would have then been called ‘a nervous breakdown’, followed by Cecily’s discovery of Jungian psychology, which formed the basis of her psychic reconstitution and her subsequent career as a psychologist and counsellor.
The first example loses energy because of the easy rhymes and lack of enjambment. Gray’s visual fluencies need the freedom that free verse offers, not the restrictions of rhyme. The rhythms in ‘The Creek’ are so much more poised, even restful as compared to the constricted flow in the former poem.
A further Selected Poems from Robert Gray Judith Beveridge
Too often the rhymed poems haven’t come to terms with constraints of the rhymes or heaviness of syntax. The syntax in Gray’s free verse poems is more effortlessly yoked to his ob servations and thoughts. Compare these lines from the heavily rhymed, ‘Description of a Walk’ to the rhythmic flow of lines from ‘The Creek’: Uphill, warped arcades of bush, rack on rack; reiterative as cuneiforms. Bacon redness of bark, or smooth wet trunk of caterpillar green, and some with a close dog’s fur, greyish black. Grey weather between the high-grown, thickly gathered trees, the sparse-leavleaned eucalyptus poles, shelved,parsley- but with frail grey-green leaves, and down the slope the kettle-black lower amongboleswhich the water’s glimpsed – the secret creek in khaki that beats like a vein at the throat of who’ssomeonelying hidden.
Rhyme in the right hands can be glorious, but often in Gray’s poems the rhymes struggle. One wonders what might have become of poems such as ‘The Shark’, ‘Description of a Walk’, ‘To John Olsen’, ‘The Circus’, and ‘Ekphrasis’ had they been written in free verse. The formal poems which are more successful – ‘Harbour Dark’, ‘In one ear …’, ‘Wing Beat’, ‘Thomas Hardy’, and ‘The School of Venice’ – work because they employ clearer rhythmical structures. ‘The School of Venice’ succeeds because the lines are of varying lengths, the enjambment makes the syntax more fluid, and consequently the lyrical intensity is less forced and carried by the flow of thought.
The poem ‘Black Landscape’, after a description of cicadas, ends with: ‘if you tilt your hand, you can make / a light, pale blue and frail / as after sunset. I told a girl once, in Ireland, of cicadas; / she said, ‘We only ever had a snail.’ Or this from ‘The Circus’: ‘I look back and there is an elephant / being hosed, that’s lambent’.
Poetic choreography
Rain Towards Morning: Selected poems and drawings by Robert Gray Puncher & Wattmann $29.95 pb, 238 pp
Part of the problem with Gray’s adoption of formal procedures is that the ear competes with the eye. Hardly anyone can match Gray’s resplendent imagistic acuity, his ability to draw out details and scenes with immense depth and perspective, his persuasive and startling comparisons, his moral and philosophical enquiry, his use of both loose and taut lines to pull a reader through his cadences and movements of thought. Unfortunately, his formal templates draw too much attention to themselves and put his natural voice under pressure with rhymes that are often weighty and overdone.
Gray is not an innately lyrical poet; his strengths lie in nar rative, description, juxtaposition, exposition, and in noting and appreciating phenomena. His imagery achieves an exactness and inventiveness which brings both mind and matter into power ful cogency. He will often evoke sensual panoramas to explore abstract questions, mostly involving principles of morality and the nature of reality, or create tableaux of rumination and mood, the subtle nuances of which can be most compelling. Many poems are transactions between human sentience and insensate landscapes, most memorably the mid-north coast of New South Wales. His work glories in what can be seen and apprehended by the senses, and while his earlier poetry resonated with Buddhist ideas, his later work is more linked to Western philosophers and is moreCertainly,expository.this volume shows the breadth of Gray’s poetic enterprise throughout his career, and I imagine this has been a strong impetus behind the choices. He has not been one to rest on
A ccording to his author’s note, Rain Towards Morning is ‘a definitive book’ of the poems Robert Gray wishes to preserve. Nameless Earth (Carcanet, 2006) is the most generously represented of Gray’s previous eight books. This is followed by his mid-career volume Piano (1988) in which he first began to publish a range of poetry with tight rhyme schemes and controlled rhythms. More than a third of the poems Gray has chosen for Rain Towards Morning are these formal or semiformal compositions, indicating that he wishes to showcase this aspect of his work. Fewer poems have been chosen from his free verse books Grass Script (1978), The Skylight (1983) and Afterimages (2002), arguably his best books. Readers will find a great many of Gray’s most admired works included in this new selected: ‘The Meatworks’, ‘For the Master, Dōgen Zenji’, ‘Late Ferry’, ‘Flames and Dangling Wire’, ‘Dharma Vehicle (but only part 1), ‘The Dusk’, ‘Diptych’ , ‘Memories of the Coast’, ‘Curriculum Vitae’, ‘Harbour Dusk’, ‘Life of a Chi nese Poet’, ‘After Heraclitus’, ‘In Departing Light’, ‘The Drift of Things’, ‘The Fishermen’, ‘Flying Foxes’, ‘Wing Beat’ – poems which have established Gray as one of the finest free verse poets in English over the past fifty years. However, I regret the omission of such poems as ‘A Sea Shell’, ‘Pumpkins’, ‘The best place …’, ‘Bondi’, ‘Mr Nelson’, and especially the magnificent ten-and-ahalf-page, free verse poem ‘Under the Summer Leaves’ (surely the best poem in Piano), which he dramatically reduced to thirty-four lines in Cumulus: Collected poems (2012). These would be much better inclusions than some of the rhymed poems, as only a few of these, I believe, are successful.
46 AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW SEPTEMBER 2022 Poetry
Two bold poetry collections Rose Lucas Trap Landscape by Nicholas Powell Hunter Publishers $24.95 pb, 88 pp Beginning in Sight by Theodore Ell Recent Work Press $19.95 pb, 72 pp experience of fear and dislocation: … andQuaysideforestbluffs quaked at our first steps, turned us flimsy as medicine in phials. Through starched days, long passage. Rumours in whitewashed wards, inklings of blood in caught breath, the sudden empty beds where a propped head lay only yesterday.
Npoetic.icholas
Ell’s poetry brings us repeatedly to this interstitial space, where what is difficult might be confronted and where change might be embraced: ‘The curb to pause upon, skirting blown wreckage – / drift to ease the passing, the moving over.’ We can look forward to seeing the unfolding of this exciting new
hisPoetryhaunches and repeat the same compositional procedures, even if his foray into formal poetry has not been entirely successful. He has tried to replenish his approaches and extend his range of skills by employing both short- and long-form free verse, haikulike vignettes, prose poems, syllabics, formal and semi-formal constructions. However, it appears that Gray has an unsettled relationship to his work, given that he has published a number of ‘Selecteds’ over the years (more than any other Australian poet), which often contain (sometimes substantial) revisions of poems. Some of the poems in this latest volume have had changes, albeit only minor ones, made to them since their appearance in Cumulus, which Gray also described as the decisive versions. This said, Rain Towards Morning is a book of immense pleas ures. The best poems are wonderfully evocative and impressive for their supple and kinetic free verse style, their incomparable imagistic choreographing set alongside profound philosophical exploration. g Judith Beveridge teaches creative writing at the University of Sydney.
Labours of disruption
AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW SEPTEMBER 2022 47
In the poem ‘Sojourners’, Ell uses the first-person voice of someone infected with disease to take us across the ‘endless stroke’ of ‘swell’ to a place of quarantine. Line by line, evocative phrase by phrase, the reader follows through this surreal yet visceral
While suggestive of the early twentieth century of the Span ish Influenza, this poem also inevitably speaks to contemporary experiences of contagion and isolation and to the re-engagements with both mortality and communitas which it has brought.
‘Those whom life turns against have never loved it / as now’: the tremulous imagery of a poem such as this reminds us again of the precarity and the preciousness of a necessarily limited experience and of the human tenacity to find a way through. The compression and startle of some of the images and associations throughout Ell’s work draw the reader into a heightened alertness to what is and what might yet be possible.
Powell’s first collection, Water Mirrors, won the Thomas Shapcott Poetry Prize in 2011. His new book, Trap Landscape, scrambles expectations of poetry and the ways in which poetry might make its meaning. This is a poetic of
One of the many life-challenging things that poetry can do is to prise open unexpected spaces and take us some where entirely unanticipated, whether it be in terms of how we live, how we understand the world, or how we link the fabric of textual utterance with that of our lived experience. These two new poetry collections set about this labour of disrup tion in very different ways, demonstrating some of the pathways available between poet and reader. Beginning in Sight is Theodore Ell’s début poetry collection. A Calibre Prize winner in 2021 for his essay about the 2020 explosion in Beirut, Ell ranges across place and time with the white light of clarity. As the opening lines of the poem ‘Mole cules’ suggest, it is a clarity that is distilled from a nuanced flow of metaphor and association: Storms have been holding off – wind-shy, turned away, barred at the ranges – through multiplying summers. Evenings still slip under an early shadow that we recognize – there was no outrunning … The reader is invited to lean into an unfolding of images, to be lead across the open territory of the dash with all its possibilities for what remains unarticulated.
The longer sequence ‘Verges’ brings us to ‘brinks’ of various kinds – those places where what may appear stable and sure give way to something not yet clear or defined. As a place of transition, the verge is a place on an edge, where what lies ahead or beyond might signify loss or danger, but also the possibilities of the new.
The verges in this poem range from a dizzying high-speed car ride – ‘We’re away … we sneer over, throttle and sheet, skewered / for huge yelling moments’ – to the view of a gear-laden cyclist in the rear-vision mirror ‘wavering left, back left, at each rightward tilt;’ and to the ‘detour’ in memory that leads to places that can’t be spoken: ‘her quiet shrug. / The empty thoroughfares. There is no telling.’
If nothing else, Lionel Fogarty’s longevity as a poet should bring him to our attention. Kargun, his first work, was pub lished forty-two years ago amid the ferment of utopian Black Panther politics, discriminatory legislation, and racialised police violence. Fogarty’s finest work, Ngutji, published in 1984, drew on his experience growing up in Cherbourg Aboriginal Settlement, but the breadth of his poetic vision was already evident. Some of the early poems such as ‘Jephson Street Brothers Who Had None’ and ‘Remember Something Like This’ originate in Fog arty’s experience of Cherbourg Aboriginal Mission and radical politics, but the poems’ truths are non-propositional and essen tiallyFogartyhuman.is a poet who remembers each poem he has ever written and the circumstances of its composition, and his devo tion to poetry, the language art, is absolute. It needs to be said that, despite the praise and recognition of fellow poets and the explicatory work of critics and scholars, Fogarty remains a niche poet, and an enigma for many readers – the man who is dutifully allotted his twenty minutes at writers’ festivals but whose poetry remains dense and incomprehensible to some. The practical con sequence of this for Fogarty has been that honours have been few, which is odd given the breadth and quality of his work and the magnitude of his contribution to Australian literature and Indigenous culture.
48 AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW SEPTEMBER 2022
In the poem ‘Open Pit’, we peer from a plane to see ‘cubist paddocks approaching Paris’. The cubist metaphor is potentially a useful one here: when the artist / poet looks at the world, rendering that process with the various tools of their trade, it refracts into the particular, the endless point of view. Is the art of the poem able to reassemble what falls into such shining and particulate matter, or can it only mirror that Babel-like fall?
Ah, there’s the question. g Rose Lucas’s most recent poetry collections are This Shuttered Eye (Liquid Amber Press, 2021) and Increments of the Everyday (Puncher & Wattmann,Harvest2022).
Poetry surprising juxtapositions that continually disrupts any neat line ar or lyrical flow. The question it poses is therefore fundamental to the art of poetry: in opening up perception and challenging previous modes of understanding the world, does the poem pro vide access to new, perhaps more appropriate maps of meaning, or does it tip us into fragmentation? Or is the landscape of poetic language a kind of wasteland where such longed-for patterning is revealed as mirage, an endless deflection of meaning?
The opening poem, ‘Establishing Shot’ does indeed identify this poetic space of radical disruption and dislocation: Descent by plastic parachute, running about the garden in a way that flattens the plants.
The[…] baby was shy and did not make friends with strangers. That cannot be solved with a dictionary, in a single room in a hospital, songs, or hair. They hung said thesaurus from a tree and shot it. Kindly direct me to a chemist. Powell’s poetic deconstructs the logic of the metaphor –that one thing can point meaningfully to another in a process of elucidation. In postmodernist terms, the reader is sent on a helter-skelter quest for what seems always elusive: can these piecemeal observations of life, knowable only through the re fractions of the linguistic text, be ‘shored’ into a settled meaning, as T.S. Eliot might have hoped in The Waste Land, or are they at best only the playful banter of hollow signifiers? Perhaps this is the nature of the ‘trap’ – that we meander through the landscapes of experience and of language expecting – or at least hoping for – coherence, only to realise that we have wandered off the verge and into uncharted territory. As in the poem ‘Long Camera’, this can be an atavistically dangerous activity: Camera and subject rigid with max opening width of jaws so a shallow depth requires an axe or saw to dislodge, less you act. The image and the threat of the axe appear again in the prose poetry sequence ‘Figures in Waiting’. In this poem, line ation and enjambment – so often poetic strategies that might point to moments of coherence – are left behind and the search for the ‘I’ gives way to the simulacra, the violence of the inau thentic:Alight burp lets out a large TV. Before life, the constant operation, a first incision without end. Touché, library. That we leap until replaced by someone I looks exactly like, corridor and all. Let the spider, spiders, roam, for we might matter in water. Drifting axe, stop in horror for this imposter. Water feature, drop from my hands.
Harvest Lingo is divided into four sections: Sections One and Two are the most cohesive. Section One has an elegiac quality and is in many ways the meditation of a senior poet on the passage of time, change, and the evolution of relationships. To appreciate the resonances of the often polysemic imagery, I read the section several times without pause, occasionally out aloud. Three poems
Absolute devotion Lionel Fogarty’s unique poetic consciousness Philip Morrissey
Lingo: New poems by Lionel $25GiramondoFogartypb,85pp
NEW
AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW SEPTEMBER 2022 49 in particular invite comment.
‘Intruder Wants the Writer’ begins, ‘To write as a child to be a man’. Does one write in order to become a man, or aspire to be a man who can write with the innocence and directness of a child? The poignancy of the poem is emphasised in the final lines, which evoke the helplessness and vulnerability of early childhood:Breathe well inside the walls of rooms helplessly undecided No baby’s cries touch my raiment saddest crutch lost of mum’s death. Those life survivals by childhood happenings are snapped
By swine trample readership
India’, we once again participate in the poet’s experience of the everyday supernatural. Responding to the visual splendour of India, Fogarty conjures a succession of images: alleys, towers, trucks laden with people, cows, gods, dancers, temples which coalesce in ‘Sense of Elation, Tranquil lity’: ‘Ascend fragrance hopes in acceptance / Immense enjoying workers in acceptance’. Two poems that address politics in radically different ways are ‘Aloha for Aotearoa’ and ‘Al Qaeda Means the Word of God (The Word of God Sometimes Means Dog)’. The former is the collection’s most accessible poem. Acknowledging his initial dis like of Māori after witnessing a bar room brawl between Māori and Murris, the poet describes the development of mutual respect and knowledge between himself and Māori co-workers in a ring barking camp. The title of the poem ‘Al Qaeda Means the Word of God (The Word of God Sometimes Means Dog)’ is also its final line. The poem itself suggests that, Fascism is the dead flower for every dead Terrorismvoice is not sovereignty breeding And in this context the triteness of the God/Dog wordplay in vites our reflection. In prison slang, ‘dog’ is the term for someone who breaks ranks and informs on other prisoners; or, conversely, ‘dog’ can be read as signifying actual dogs – faithful, loving, and seeking love, seeking community.
In ‘Deprivation’, we’re struck by the contrast between the poem’s languid rhythm and sensual imagery and the dominant mood of sadness and regret: ‘The glory of determination lasting a century / Unravels young man’s face tousled a complete silence. / But slender the eyelashes chiselled names in cloud.’
WithDHANYAVAAD‘SectionTwo:
Seasons are the timeless fields Set them to write speak sing the struggles, but to gain justice with the rice wind hail stars morning first sun lights. This world guts rich people to their gutter fears. The earth smiles for flowers are the plant by small people’s big loves.
In ‘Yo I am the Man’, Fogarty asks: ‘Yo who your name means / What voice gives sound to the works of a poet’. This leads on to questions of signification and meaning: Where the name spun by White man name up A black man using the name for message. What gave the name rights man right to rewrite history By giving change to land names Who really is ‘the name rights man’: the white person who has the apparent rights to the names, or the First Nations poet who rewrites rewritten history?
Fogarty was once described as ‘Australia’s strongest poet of Aboriginality’, and this description is still true as long as such praise does not circumscribe the breadth of his concerns as a poet. ‘Amour Lionel’s Love Poem’, written in French, speaks of love between individuals and as a universal force. Several poems in Section Four explore the challenge of being human in a global world of algorithms and AI, and words such as ‘hyperactivity’, ‘modules’, ‘ethernet’, ‘bitesized’, and ‘interfutures’ are part of their lexicon. Gaston Bachelard once described the poetic mind as ‘purely and simply a syntax of metaphors’. In some ways, this points to the apparent difficulties of some of Lionel Fogarty’s most profound poetry, and also explains his openness to the diversity of human culture and experience. If we read with trust and an openness to Fogarty’s unique poetic consciousness many of these difficulties disappear. g
RECENT WORK PRESS recentworkpress.com POETRY OUT HETHERINGTON AMPLITUDE PAUL MUNDEN
Philip Morrissey is the senior editor of Lionel Fogarty: Selected Poems 1980-2017 (re-press, 2020).
The refinement and broad sympathy evident in Harvest Lingo, and this section in particular, bring to mind cultural theorist Paul Gilroy’s vision of a planetary humanism. For example, these mem orable stanzas in ‘Modern Canvas Boats Comfort Who Cares’: Written lips are wisps from what’s read into books.
RAGGEDNOWDISCLOSURES PAUL
White space of the unknowable A daughter’s fragments of memory
Rennex is also an artist and former gallery director, and her eye for visual modes of storytelling comes through in the inclusion of images, rendered in black and white and embedded throughout the text – her father in uniform, family photographs, letters, army records. Uncaptioned, they remind us of the way W.G. Sebald used images in Austerlitz (2001), intrinsic to the story at hand rather than merely illustrative. Interestingly, like Austerlitz, Life with Birds is a haunted text about the messy aftermath of war and the slipperiness of memory.
Sarah Gory
Life with Birds: A suburban lyric by Bronwyn Rennex $29.99Upswellpb, 204 pp
Ostensibly, Life with Birds is about the author’s search for her father, a Vietnam War veteran who died when she was young and whose story she hardly knew. As I read it, though, I was reminded of a line from Svetlana Alexievich’s seminal oral history The Unwomanly Face of War (2017): ‘Wom en’s stories are different and about different things.’ In the end, Life with Birds is less about men and war than about the wom en left behind – in this case, three daughters and a wife – and the shape of their lives in the wake of his silence, and then his absence.One of the text’s central questions is whom we are looking for when we delve into the past. Bronwyn Rennex’s father remains almost as obscure to us at the end of the book as he does at the beginning. ‘What am I trying to do?’ she asks. ‘Put bones back into a ghost?’ Life with Birds is haunted by the father, the war, the faceless institutions that govern our lives, but Rennex seems to be piecing together not her father’s life so much as her own memories. She begins, after all, with extracts from her teenage journal. A war story perhaps, inasmuch as it is a reckoning with time and grief and spectral presence. Yet where her father remains elusive, Rennex draws her sub urban home and neighbourhood, and the mother who presided over it all, in sharp detail. This is rendered not through narrative or adjective-laden descriptions, but rather through attention to the quotidian and the specific: the brand of booze her mum would drink in front of the television; the ‘choker of small shells’ Rennex wore to her christening; the various (and varied) pet birds animating the streetscape of her childhood. Despite the heft of much of the subject matter, Rennex handles the content effortlessly – and not without a certain wry humour. ‘It had never occurred to me before,’ she observes in the midst of a passage about precancerous cells in her ovaries, ‘how much E.T. looks like the female reproductive organs.’ This book is not sentimental, which is not the same thing as saying it is not deeply felt. Take, for example, a recollection of the author and her mother on the Ferris wheel. Moments prior, the mother had critiqued her daughter’s choice of shirt in the hurtful way unique to mothers. Atop the Ferris wheel the wind is strong, and the mother’s wig is dislodged. The daughter sees ‘her straight white undergrowth sticking out around the edges’, and the tenderness is palpable. Rennex’s language throughout is pared back, which helps to ease us into the world she is painting – a world of secrets and backyards and everyday love. If this is a book about suburbia and family and the way great events play out in our homes and hearts, it is also one about the institutional erasure of the individual. In her attempts to retrieve documents about her father’s war years from various govern ment departments, Rennex encounters a series of Kafkaesque roadblocks. When the requested copy of her mother’s claim for a war widow pension arrives in the post, for instance, half of the letter has been cut off by the photocopier. Apparently, Rennex is told, this is because the letter is foolscap and so cannot fit onto an A4 page. ‘But you can copy it on two pages,’ says Rennex. ‘Am I going mad?’ This bureaucratic web is exemplified in the double-page prose poem of collected acronyms: ‘CWGC Commonwealth War Graves Commission DCO Defence Community Organisation DFISA Defence Force Income Support Allowance’ and so on, and so on. Absurdity yes, but also tragedy – as in the case of Veteran Bird, whose years of requests for support were rejected by the Department of Veterans Affairs because his trauma conditions were not considered ‘permanent and stable’. ‘Jesse’s conditions finally became permanent’, write his parents, ‘when he ended his life’. Resisting the temptation to editorialise or moralise, Rennex tells Bird’s story by reproducing the letters his family wrote to Veteran Affairs. This same sense of restraint is evident in the text’s compo sition. Rather than filling in the gaps with narrative, the book is structured through a series of titled fragments comprising prose, poetry, photographs, lists, letters, army records. Just as Rennex uncovers slivers of her father’s past, so the story is told in fragments, a case of content and form mirroring one another. In fragmentary form, what is absent turns out to be just as resonant as what is present – the white space of the unknowable.
The final thread running through Life with Birds is, of course, the titular birds. I’m not always certain how they connect to the book at large, other than for the accounting of a life and the strange ways that memories of one thing become entangled with another. And then, in a fragment towards the end, Rennex recounts clearing out the garage after her mother dies and finding a dusty Myna bird that had been trapped there for who knows how long. Perhaps, Rennex thinks, drawing on Irish folklore, the bird was the spirit of her long-dead father, having ‘hung around the tool shed long enough to look after her [mother].’ If Life with Birds is a ghost story, Rennex seems to be telling us that it is a love story too. g Sarah Gory’s essay ‘Ghosts, Ghosts Everywhere’ was runner-up in the 2022 Calibre Essay Prize.
50 AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW SEPTEMBER 2022 Memoir
Contested seascapes
The Poseidon Project: The struggle to govern the world’s oceans by David Bosco Oxford University Press £22.99 hb, 315 pp In early 2020, as the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic took hold, a special kind of viral hazard appeared upon the surface of the sea. Offshore from Sydney, Yokohama, San Francisco, and elsewhere loitered cruise liners turned floating hot spots. As they awaited permission to dock and disembark their passengers, the boats became an inadvertent exhibition of cruising-indus try foibles. Behind sluggish and patchy Covid action plans, we learned, lurked other forms of misbehaviour, from grotesquely unscrupulous labour practices to sys tematic tax avoidance. The high seas, it seemed, really were wild. A new book from the legal scholar David Bosco helps us understand what was – and still is – going on. The Poseidon Project: The struggle to govern the world’s oceans is a magisterial history of a well-known but poorly understood ideology of marine governance known as ‘freedom of the seas’. This is the doctrine that has come to hold, among other things, that a vessel travelling outside territorial waters is subject to no authority but that of the nation where it is registered. It is also, and uncoincidentally, the logic that has made popular the ‘flag of convenience’ arrangement, whereby a seagoing boat – a cruise ship, say – flies whatever ensign happens to incur the least onerous regula tory compliance. Neither natural nor inevitable, the freedom of the seas emerged from and exists under conditions of contingency and dispute. Whether it is likely to survive the present, as sovereign governments and international agencies claim more and more control over oceanic space, is The Poseidon Project’s ultimate concern. If the freedom of the seas has a history, then what preceded it? In Bosco’s nimble telling, ancient and medieval protocols of marine governance were diverse in their origins but united in their preoccupations. From the Indian Manusmriti to the Rhodian Sea Law to the Islamic Treatise on the Leasing of Ships and the Claims between Parties, premodern frameworks for managing maritime affairs were less concerned with refereeing territorial rights to the sea than with the finer points of regulating seagoing travel and trade. Priorities shifted – in and from Europe, above all – follow ing the transoceanic, state-sponsored navigations of Christopher Columbus, Vasco da Gama, and Ferdinand Magellan in the fif teenth and sixteenth centuries. Novel questions arose regarding how a sovereign power might assert and exercise command over part or all of the world ocean. Novel answers appeared, too: as burgeoning imperial powers like Spain and Portugal struck trea ties to divvy up the seas, maritime space became internationally politicised in unprecedented ways. As other aspirants to marine dominion arrived on the scene, the issue of who controls the oceans became increasingly con troversial. Around the turn of the seventeenth century, a series of unsavoury maritime incidents prompted a juridical debate that Bosco calls ‘the battle of the books’. The skirmish was scholarly, but it was not disinterested: the lawyer Hugo Grotius, whom history has crowned the winner, was arguing on behalf of the Dutch United East India Company, a chartered entity then em broiled in violent disagreements with the Portuguese respecting Indian Ocean trade. Grotius’s Mare Liberum, or Free Sea (1609), contended that it is impossible to possess the ocean in the same way as land, because to own something one must be able to occupy it. His position’s great strength, Bosco observes, was that it was based not in divine authority but in natural law. As the seas were becoming free, they were also becoming modern.
The aircraft carrier USS Constellation in the South China Sea during the Vietnam War (GRANGER - Historical Picture Archive/Alamy)
The leaky ideology of marine freedom Killian Quigley
AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW SEPTEMBER 2022 51 Politics
Whatever its philosophical merits, what made the freedom of the seas endure was its convenience for Earth’s emerging maritime hegemon. As its navy grew and its overseas entanglements multi plied, Britain became an outspoken proponent of open oceans and the benefits they furnished. Here and elsewhere, Bosco reminds us that commitments to marine mobility have always manifested ‘positively’ as well as ‘negatively’. That is, they have always taken shape as much through the active policing of pirates and other nuisances – perceived or actual – as through the forswearing of claims to saltwater territory. The privilege of maintaining this equilibrium fell to the power capable of enforcing it. From the
latter part of the eighteenth century to the eve of World War I, that power was overwhelmingly British. Unsurprisingly, there fore, if the ‘Grotian ideal’ was by the early 1900s ‘in full bloom’, its flowering was neither globally representative nor universally beloved.Nor could it survive the Great War unscathed. Two interrelated phenomena conspired against it: submarine warfare upon merchant vessels and the ensuing, extraordinary enclosure of maritime space by nations desperate to protect shipping. The securitisation of the sea only intensified before and during World War II, and its legacy persisted into peacetime – if not in the form of military blockades, then in ‘protective zones’ designed to safeguard national fisheries. A newly ‘acquisitive’ era was be ing born, thanks particularly to the rising fortunes and brazen unilateralism of the United States. Claims to sovereign control over continental shelves and water columns proliferated, and the Grotian ideal continued leaking. The postwar pursuit of marine territory helped set the stage for momentous efforts toward oceanic internationalism. Especial ly pivotal were the labours of Arvid Pardo, Maltese ambassador to the United Nations and theorist of a possible successor to Grotian freedom. At a series of UN conferences on marine law, Pardo helped lead the case for designating the sea-bottom and its mineral treasures the ‘common heritage of mankind’. This was a potentially transformative swerve away from the winner-takes-all status quo, and its prospects for acceptance by the historical win ners were correspondingly dubious. Nevertheless – and despite the concerted interference of the United States – when the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) finally came into effect in 1994, it included among its innovations the International Seabed Authority (ISA), a body exercising jurisdiction over some one hundred and fifty million square miles of ocean floor – over ‘more territory’, in Bosco’s words, ‘than almost any head of state’. Still, if UNCLOS has a defining legacy, it is probably the Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ), an instrument for consolidat ing national control over oceanic resources as far as two hundred nautical miles beyond a country’s shoreline. The freedom of the seas, therefore, was getting squeezed from two sides: from the sovereign expansions effected by EEZs, and from multilateral mechanisms like the ISA. For Bosco, it is the volatile interplay of all these energies that has constituted the state of marine govern ance in the twenty-first century. Whether this unsteady ‘maritime compromise’ survives ongoing struggles for dominance in the South and East China Seas, among other places, is unknown.
Whatever eventuates, writes Bosco, the ‘idea of the high seas as an unowned and minimally regulated space’ continues – and will continue – to weaken. Issuing from a study as marvellously learned as The Poseidon Project, the prediction feels well earned.
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It reads, at the same time, as ironically uncontroversial: if the scholars of the present are at variance respecting the likely fate of this endlessly contentious idea, Bosco leaves those differences aside. Cruise ships, meanwhile, are returning in numbers, as if to remind us that for certain interests, seascapes of lawlessness are still with us after all. g Killian Quigley is a research fellow at Australian Catholic University’s Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences.
There are signs of haste in the research and writing of this book. Early on McLachlan writes that ‘Australia’s internment program is a fascinating and overlooked chapter of the Second World War’. Peter Monteath, Christina Twomey, and Yuriko Nagata, to name three scholars, have written at length about World War II internment in Australia, with Nagata’s work of particular relevance to this book. Over the past thirty years, she has produced original and important work on Japanese prisoners in Australia. A stronger command of these sources may have led McLachlan to temper some conclusions: indeed, there is much ‘astonishment’ and indignation in his findings. Are his findings new, or is he just late on the scene? It isn’t always clear. There is a scattering of typos, and instances of repetition and contradiction, which a stern editor would have cut.
An archipelago of internment camps emerged across rural Australia in World War II. Several of these camps were at Cowra, about 230 kilometres west of Sydney. Cowra was home to prisoners of war from different backgrounds, including many Italians and, most famously, Japanese prisoners. On 5 August 1944, about 1,000 Japanese POWs attempted to break out of their camp, with around 380 succeeding in escaping into the countryside beyond; most simply waited to be recaptured. These statistics give Cowra an unlikely place in history as the site of one of the world’s largest prison escapes. In a series of detailed chapters, arranged chronologically, McLachlan explains the motivations and catalyst for the breakout, and its tragic aftermath. For some Japanese POWs, crippled by the shame of being taken prisoner, their motivation was simple. They wanted to die, and saw the breakout as a means to achieve this. Wartime escape stories lend themselves to false notes, the pain and subjugation of prisoners made trivial in the pursuit of a romantic, stirring story. McLachlan does well to avoid this trap, making clear that the Cowra breakout was defined by death. Around 230 Japanese died brutal and gruesome deaths in the mass escape. Some killed themselves. Five Australian soldiers also died. Histories of the break out usually have that number as four, but McLachlan makes a convincing case for adding the name of Sergeant Tom Hancock to the list of Australian deaths. Hancock’s name is not usually linked to the breakout because his death occurred in Blayney, a town about seventy kilometres from Cowra. But he too was a victim of the breakout for he died while on duty as part of the Australian response to the mass escape. He was killed when a gun discharged accidentally.
The Cowra Breakout by Mat $32.99HachetteMcLachlanpb,322pp
W
McLachlan writes about this postwar history with feeling and verve. This is perhaps the most interesting and important aspect of the Cowra breakout, and the least known. If there is a story in this book that deserves a wider telling, Mat McLachlan finds it in the last few pages. g Seumas Spark is co-author of the two volume Dunera Lives (Monash University Publishing, 2018 and 2020). by death
After the war, the people of Cowra were quick to care for Japanese graves in their midst, their actions made all the more noble given the bitter anti-Japanese sentiment of the period. ‘Weary’ Dunlop aside, not many Australians were brave enough to choose forgiveness over animosity when it came to the war time enemy. From this and other humane gestures there arose a remarkable connection between the people of Cowra and some Japanese connected to the breakout, their link strengthened by a shared commitment to peace and goodwill. The most powerful evidence of this commitment is the Japanese war cemetery at Cowra, opened in November 1964. It is the only Japanese military cemetery in the world outside Japan.
Defined
AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW SEPTEMBER 2022 53 History
Another take on the Cowra breakout Seumas Spark
hy do publishers do this? The cover of this book screams that the Cowra breakout is an ‘untold’ story, and ‘the missing piece of Australia’s World War II history’. Neither claim is remotely true, as the author himself acknowledges. Once we get past the sensationalist cover and into the text, Mat McLachlan notes that the story of the Cowra breakout has been told several times before, and well: he even salutes Harry Gordon’s Die Like the Carp!, first published in 1978, as the ‘definitive’ account. So this is hardly the missing piece of an Australian military history jigsaw. Another stretch is the suggestion in the shoutline that the breakout was a conven tional military ‘battle’. These cover claims tell us as much about the marketing plan for this book as its contents. I suspect that McLachlan and his publisher had an uncritical audience in mind. The first pages follow the Peter FitzSimons model, with events and interactions extrapolated from seemingly scant evidence. I qualify the claim because there are few references, meaning that readers cannot check the evidence for themselves. FitzSimons has described himself as a ‘storian’ rather than a historian, a position which allows for the idea that telling a good tale counts for more than the pesky facts, or lack of them. It’s not an approach that de mandsAnotherimitation.feature of this work is the resort to clichéd language and stale concepts of wartime identity. The stereotype of Italian soldiers as inept and emotional has a long history in Australian military scholarship, and it appears here. Italian prisoners at Cowra were ‘slightly comical’, ‘passionate and dramatic’, and ‘naturally charismatic’. Japanese soldiers, meanwhile, were devoid of ‘individuality’ and ‘independent thought’, though evidently the author knows otherwise for he offers examples to the contrary. The pity of all this is that McLachlan can write. Despite the clichés and other detours to the easy and comfortable, I enjoyed this book. McLachlan is a natural, engaging writer, his voice strongest and most appealing when not imitating the approach of others.
Prior to life on the bench, Hasluck was a barrister; he makes an astute observation of that side of the profession: ‘To enjoy life as a barrister one has to be supremely self-confident, be unaffected by doubt, and have a thick hide. The reality is that my skin hasn’t been thick enough and my imagination has been too fertile, too conscious of the pitfalls.’ There are, of course, exceptions to this generalisation, but not many in my own experience at the Bar.Hasluck includes accounts of some of the civil and criminal cases over which he presided as a judge, although it must be acknowledged that civil cases, such as building disputes and insurance claims, while of great importance to the parties, are seldom of general interest.
Hasluck is very protective of the reputation of his father, Paul Hasluck, a long-time federal minister in the Menzies era and later governor-general. There is, however, no reference to the fact that, as foreign minister between 1964 and 1969, his father was one of the architects of Australia’s involvement in the Vietnam War. There is much debate about his reputation in that role.
The language used by lawyers aims for precision, in court or in drafting documents or while advising … This eventually entrenches a belief in most legal minds that one needn’t bother about literature because it simply doesn’t count. It speaks in a way that is imprecise and often misleading. It doesn’t lead to tangible results.
54 AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW SEPTEMBER 2022 Memoir Bench and Book by Nicholas Hasluck $44Arcadiapb, 348 pp Nicholas Hasluck is that relatively rare combination of practising lawyer and accomplished writer. A former judge of the Supreme Court of Western Australia, he has also produced more than a dozen novels and as many works of non-fiction. This duality of roles is not unknown. Two con temporary examples that come to mind are Jonathan Sumption, who was on the UK Supreme Court and is a medieval historian, and Scott Turow, a Chicago attorney whose works include the trial novel Presumed Innocent (1988). It is, however, still unusual, both in Australia and elsewhere. As Hasluck himself points out, there is little respect in the legal profession for those few mem bers who have an interest in literature:
Given that so few judges write about what they do, Has luck’s book is a valuable account of judicial life, particularly for non-lawyers, and not least because it underlines the vagaries and uncertainties of litigation. Most litigants are convinced of the merits of their case but, as this book indicates, once a matter goes to court there are inevitably going to be arguments on both sides and it is often difficult to predict how it will ultimately be resolved. This is why, even in the High Court, there are occasions where the seven judges divide four to three on the result in a case.
It is no consolation – quite the contrary perhaps – to the losing litigant that he or she persuaded three of the nation’s leading legal minds that the arguments for that side were correct. g
Michael Sexton has since 1998 been Solicitor-General for New South Wales. He is co-author of the leading Australian text on defamation law and the author of several books on Australian politics and history.
Tangible results
Hasluck spends quite a lot of time travelling to other parts of the country for meetings of the Literary Board and the Australia Council. The deliberations of the Board over which authors are to get federal financial grants do not sound particularly edifying, as Board members engage in horse-trading over their choices. The meetings of the Australia Council sound even worse, full of bureaucratic language and rendered more unintelligible by a hiredInfacilitator.theseroles, Hasluck was a constant attendee at interstate literary festivals. At one point, he complains about the lack of differing viewpoints at writers’ festivals, despite the ostensible desire for diversity of opinion. This was a complaint made in 2000; if he were to attend a literary festival now, he might deem the situation much worse than it was twenty years ago.
Reflections of a literary jurist Michael Sexton
It has always struck me as an endearing trait of those who work within the legal system that if a chap works five days a week at the law, and spends his weekends playing golf or yachting, he is thought to be treating the law with the respect it deserves. On the other hand, if a fellow works five days a week at the law and then goes home and writes novels about truth and justice, he is often thought to be somehow, well, rather … frivolous.
He speculates on one of the reasons for this view:
The book takes the form of diary entries for the years 2000 and 2001 when Hasluck was, for most of this time, a member of the Western Australian court and also chair of the Literature Board of the Australia Council. Diary entries are a difficult spe cies of literature. It is easy to say that Harold Nicolson’s diaries from the 1930s and 1940s were a great success, but Nicolson was not only a good writer: he was moving among the nation’s leaders and against a background of momentous events, including World War II. The first entry in Bench and Book is far from promising: ‘A busy day at Bar chambers, checking mail at my desk and a new brief. Later, over a beer in the common room, badinage with fellow barristers about a rumour doing the rounds that I might soon be filling a vacancy on the Supreme Court.’ This rather lacks the sardonic touch of Rumpole, but things do improve after that. Subsequent entries give a good picture of judicial life, including the difficulties of presiding over criminal trials and the sometimes harrowing decisions as to whether to send convicted persons to prison or not, although many of Hasluck’s colleagues on the bench do not seem to be much affected by these life-changing choices.
Antinomian economics
Steve Keen, 2013 (Screenshot from Me Judis via Wikimedia Commons)
Economics is ever maligned, especially after a crisis. It also keeps bouncing back
The New Economics: A manifesto by Steve Keen $26.95Polity pb, 218 pp In November 2011, amid the Occupy Movement that fol lowed the 2008–9 recession, seventy-odd Harvard students walked out of their introductory economics course taught by Greg Mankiw, author of the world’s bestselling economics textbooks. The students protested that Mankiw’s faith-in-mar kets economics had little relevance for their crisis riddled world. The walkout proved more than a campus stunt. Similar protests followed in universities across the world. Senior academics threw in support. New networks and organisations emerged, proposing alternative economics curricula, forums, and ideas. Their aim, as one campaigner put it, was to combat the ‘fantasy world of neoclassical economics – a faith-based religion of perfect mar kets, enlightened consumers and infinite growth that shapes the fates of Economicsbillions’. – Thomas Carlyle’s dismal science – is ever maligned, especially after a crisis. It also keeps bouncing back. This latest student-initiated attack did not overthrow the emperor. Not yet. A decade on, the rage still burns. Maverick Australian economist Steve Keen’s The New Economics: A manifesto is a program for disaffected economics students and, potentially, scripture for a reformed re ligion. Keen, who retired from London’s Kingston University in 2018, has long been a critic of what he calls neoclassical economics – the mainstream account of rational consumers with unlimited wants – including in his popular earlier work, Debunking Economics (2001). He takes this mission seriously. Keen ran for the Senate in the recent federal election on a platform informed by his work. He concludes this book by warning that ne oclassical economics poses an ‘existential threat’ to ‘human civilization’. The stakes are high.Keen’s charges against mainstream economics are damning. Intellectually, it promotes ‘ingrained dishonesty’ and ‘insane propositions’, modelling human behaviour in a manner that is less ‘rational’ than ‘prophetic’. The profession ignores evidence that contradicts accepted models and teaches those models as a monoculture without alternatives. Most damaging are the politics. Equilibrium models are stripped of power and class, and assume that income is merit-based. This view supports wealthy interests and lulls the indoctrinated towards a utopia where financial crashes seem unlikely and climate change trivial.
Steve Keen’s affront to received wisdom
Benjamin Huf
While this book follows a long line of heterodox thinkers proposing a ‘new’ economics, Keen’s principles are in a dialogue with the present. Following the 2008–9 crash, money can no longer be wished away in models as a substitute for barter, but must be recognised as fuelling economic activity, created through a banking system that makes economies dynamic but inherently unstable. Economies are, accordingly, complex systems not re ducible to equilibrium equations. Energy is not nature’s free ‘gift’ but indispensable to any analysis of production. Assumptions in models should be reality-based, not simplifying fantasies. Those acquainted with Keen will find a concise recapitulation of his lifelong projects. For the uninitiated, it is a highly readable affront to received wisdom. It also demands hard thinking. There are stratospheric excursions into mathematics and physics. Read ers are directed to Keen’s computer-modelling program to test his claims. Other evidence – including a graph illustrating the tight correlation between global energy consumption and GDP growth – are chillingly clear. Climate change is where Keen says economists have done their worst work, failing to incorporate the laws of thermody namics that link output with energy. The main culprit is William Nordhaus, winner of the 2018 Nobel Prize for economics, who has declared that a six-degree rise on pre-industrial temperatures would only lead to an 8.5 per cent decrease in economic output. Such divergence from scientific consensus – a two-degree rise appears catastrophic for human life, let alone capitalist production – is only possible by ignoring tipping points, equating climate with weather, and assuming that most production can continue indoors. Yet these models seep into IPCC reports and stoke climate denialism.Noteveryone will be convinced. Critics – mainstream economists – may argue that Keen caricatures the profession and ignores the diverse work economists do today. Many share his concerns. Keen might reply that his target is the dross stu dents are taught – Mankiw’s textbooks receive repeated scrutiny – while recent developments are mere modifications (‘rationality’ is now ‘bounded rationality’), not serious reassessments. Others might criticise Keen for presenting nothing new. Keen might say that’s the point. He catalogues dozens of decades-old, heterodox papers that neoclassical economists continually ignore.
AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW SEPTEMBER 2022 55 Economics
‘manifesto’ is to make economics ‘more like a science and less like a religion’. Yet he also admits that economics is more in need of a Martin Luther-like ‘reformation of a degenerate religion than a standard scientific revolution’. As ever, then, economics remains suspended between the sacred and profane. What kind of reformation might economics undergo? If Luther challenged the Church’s role mediating between God and man, some heterodox economists today are similarly dismantling the sacerdotalism of the economics priesthood: the indulgence of formal mathematics; GDP as the measure of all things; and, for economist Kate Raworth, replacing the iconography of demand curves with a doughnut depicting the economy’s inner (basic needs) and outer (ecological) limits. Keen doubles down on the maths. Policymakers like numbers, so why cede that authority to neoclassical orthodoxy? Where mainstream economists assume that economies are stable and tend towards equilibrium, Keen says that equilibrium is a fantasy ironing out the chaos and conflicts of capitalism. Economies are better understood as complex systems with emergent properties not built into the models and better studied using system dy namics measuring loops and fluctuations. Replacing one sacred tongue for another – complexity for equilibrium – Keen might be accused of the ‘physics envy’ long levelled at economists. But Keen’s primary concern is with politics. Here, surprisingly, his disdain for equilibrium models echoes neoliberal progenitor Friedrich von Hayek, who also framed the economy as a complex system to argue market spontaneity was beyond government planning. Keen is no closet Hayekian. He advocates debt jubilees to quell private debt bubbles. And unlike Hayek, Keen quarrels with long-run equilibrium modelling not out of respect for market complexity but out of political urgency on climate action. Maybe markets will eventually balance. Can we afford to wait and see? As Keynes warned of long-run equilibrium predictions: ‘In the long run we are all dead.’ g Ben Huf is a Melbourne-based historian.
The Christian Invention of Time: Temporality and the literature of late CambridgebyantiquitySimonGoldhillUniversity Press $66.95 hb, 500 pp Long gone are the days when the discipline of classics was almost exclusively focused on the golden ages of fifthcentury Greek and first-century bce Roman literature and their antecedents. During the past decades, under the leadership of the indomitable Peter Brown and others, the period of later antiquity has become a burgeoning field of research. Yet it can not be said that the study of specifically Christian thought and literature has been fully integrated into this development. Too often it has remained the domain of departments of theology and religion and of their associated vehicles of publication. In his thought-provoking and stunningly erudite new cultural history of time, the distinguished Cambridge classicist Simon Goldhill not only diagnoses this state of affairs but also seeks to remedy it.
A new history of time
56 AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW SEPTEMBER 2022 HistoryKeen’s
When studying Christian views of time, where else should one start than with the theme of God’s time? For the founda tional poets of Greek literature, Homer and Hesiod, the gods live in time, but in not being subject to death or decay they do not experience it. In contrast, the opening chapters of the foun dational Jewish and Christian text, the Bible, leave the reader in no doubt that God creates time, and so necessarily must himself exist outside of time. Though profound, this view might seem relatively straightforward, as it was for the Jewish thinker Philo. But as soon as key doctrines of Christian theology are adduced, God’s time can become deeply contested, as in the Arian view that there was a time that the Son was not. What happens, Goldhill asks, when the concept of God’s time changes? How does this change the relation between humans and the divine? What does this change mean for the narratives of late antiquity?
In the second part of the book, Goldhill’s focus is narrowed to a selection of Christian literary works from the fourth and fifth centuries. Thematic discussion gives way to close reading of texts, though again set against a backdrop of more than a millennium of earlier literature. The two long epic poems of the fifth-century poet Nonnus, currently receiving a good deal of attention, are treated first. The lesser known is a paraphrase in epic language and metre of the Gospel of John. In contrast to the Gospel’s ‘in the beginning was the Word’, it begins with the words ‘timeless (achronos), unattainable was the Word in
The chapter on God’s time is the first of ten which taken together constitute the first part of the book. On ten themes, each examining an aspect of temporality, they explore how the traditions of Greco-Roman and Jewish culture are transformed through the ascendancy of Christianity. In addition to God’s time, these themes include: a key moment of time, namely death; telling time; time experienced in waiting; time and exemplarity; simultaneity; timelessness of the now; time as represented in a lifetime. Any attempt to summarise the contents of these essays in a short compass would be wholly futile. Goldhill emphasises that it is not the philosophers’ theoretical discussions of time that interest him most but rather ‘how theological arguments about time come to ground the experience of time in daily practice and the engagement of individuals in a temporal world’. Such interaction between theoretical exposition and social practice gives rise to a ‘discourse of time’. This is what he succeeds in sketching in these ten chapters.
How Christianity transformed antiquity
David T. Runia
The gift of ABR!
Central part of a large floor mosaic, from a Roman villa in Sentinum (now known as Sassoferrato, in Marche, Italy), c.200–250 ce. Aion, the god of eternity, is standing inside a celestial sphere decorated with zodiac signs. (Detail from a photograph taken by Bibi St Pol at the Glyptothek, Munich/Wikimedia Commons)
Recipients can access new issues, archival material going back to 1978, and discounted prize entries. Gift subscriptions cost $80 for digital only and $95 for print plus digital.
AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW SEPTEMBER 2022 57 the ineffable beginning’. The change is of course grist to the author’s mill. The Word shares in God’s time, which is outside time. Paraphrastic poetics is consciously adapted to the exigencies of theological controversy. Stranger altogether is the Dionysiaca, the longest poem in ancient Greek, entirely pagan in its narrative, though avoiding heathen ritualism. Here ‘all-nourishing eternity (aiôn)’ takes centre stage, ensur ing the cosmos’s continuity. There is no need, Goldhill claims, to interpret the two poems as representing two differing poetic stances. Nonnus ‘provides the most vivid testimony of what the Christian invention of time can do to the narrative of epic’. Nevertheless, he also uses the term ‘hybridity’ for the author’s achieve ment. From a historical viewpoint, one can understand the cultural and apologetic aims of such ‘transform ative poetics’, but to appreciate and enjoy them is more difficult. The close readings of the hymns of Ambrose and Prudentius, and of the histories of Sulpicius Severus and Orosius, appealed to me more. The volume, which concludes with a fifty-page bibliography of scholarly studies, many of them very recent, is a tour de force. Its breadth and brilliance are astounding, but does it convince? The title is a patent exaggeration, perhaps prescribed by the sales depart ment. This is evident in the book’s own oscillation be tween claims that Christians ‘invented’ and ‘reinvented’ time. It is in fact the latter that occurred. Drawing on the biblical tradition, Christians rejected existing notions of time, both in theory and in cultural performance, and recast them into patterns of practice, some of which are still familiar. The seven days of the week, going back to Jewish sabbath observance and the biblical creation account, and festal days of the Christian liturgical year such as Easter and Christmas, are obvious vestiges, though often not well understood in our secular age. More subtle is a lingering eschatological sense, the feeling that we are living in the end times as the consequences of our own actions threaten to overwhelm us. Goldhill’s thesis of a profound Christian transformation of time that still exerts its influence is persuasive, and this makes his study an important book. Throughout the work, Goldhill adopts a sympathetic pose towards Christian doctrines and literature. There is the occasional hint, however, that it is not his own tradition. Just once he speaks of ‘we Jews’, noting the many different calendars that provide alternatives to the ‘imperialism’ of calculating time from the birth of Christ. Scattered through the book are brief discussions of rabbinic and talmudic discussions of time, pointing to Jewish con ceptions that, too, have been transformed in the dominant West ern discourse. Only the Christian doctrine of supersessionism tempts him into mild polemic. As a classicist, Goldhill is an insider, as a Jew an outsider. These contrasting perspectives have arguably sharpened his vision of a third, distinctive, and influ ential tradition. g David Runia is Professorial Fellow at the University of Melbourne and Honorary Professor at Australian Catholic Uni versity. ❖
This is by far the easiest question for me to answer. I do have a favourite podcast, and it’s called Fall of Civilizations. The title pretty much sums it up. I love it so much. Listening to it feels like being taken to a world with more textures.
Publishing)Osborne/Text(Mitch
What’s your favourite film?
Any meeting that goes for more than half an hour. What do you consider the most specious virtue?
Jiro Dreams of Sushi (2011). And your favourite book? Old School (2003), by Tobias Wolff. Name the three people with whom you would most like to dine. I have some friends who died young, so I’d go to the pub with them. Which word do you most dislike, and which one would you like to see back in public usage? Learnings (or any corporate jargon). Every time I hear jargon, I feel as if the world loses a bit of colour. I’d like to see blood referred to as claret more often. It reminds me of my grandfather, and the vibrant way he would use language and colloquialisms. Who is your favourite author?
Which book influenced you most in your youth?
What qualities do you look for in critics, and which ones do you enjoy reading?
The Redwall series, by Brian Jacques. Name an early literary idol or influence whom you no longer admire. J.K. Rowling.
Are artists valued in our society?
Open Page with Robbie Arnott
What’s your idea of hell?
What are you working on now?
I don’t think about it much. I just try and get on with things.
Robbie Arnott’s début, Flames (2018), won a Sydney Morning Herald Best Young Novelist award and a Tasmanian Premier’s Literary Prize. His follow-up, The Rain Heron (2020), won the Age Book of the Year award, and was shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Literary Award, the ALS Gold Medal, the Voss Literary Prize and an Adelaide Festival Award. His latest novel is Limberlost (2022). He lives in Hobart.
I have a great relationship with my editor at Text Publishing: David Winter. He champions my work, supports me when things aren’t going well, guides my writing in better directions, drinks beer with me, and makes my books better.
I like criticism that engages deeply with a work and brings interesting readings to the text that I might not have seen myself. For those reasons, I admire the writing of Oliver Reeson and Khalid Warsame.
They’re great. I like getting about and meeting readers, and I like talking with other writers. The thing about festivals I rub up against are the themes and titles of all the panels – ‘writing strong characters’, ‘creating imaginary worlds’, ‘finding your voice’, etc. They often feel arbitrary and limiting.
How do you find working with editors?
And your favourite literary hero or heroine? Philip Marlowe. He’s compelling, charismatic, and funny. Despite all his toughness and bluntness, he is kind to people who need kindness. Which quality do you most admire in a writer? Curiosity.
The two main ones are distraction and the need to make money through non-writing work. I’m about to become a father, though, so I imagine that will take top spot.
What do you think of writers’ festivals?
58 AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW SEPTEMBER 2022 Interview
Do you have a favourite podcast, apart from ABR’s one of course?
What, if anything, impedes your writing?
Passion (or the dreaded Vision). I think both are often used as excuses to treat others poorly.
I don’t know. Sort of? Not as much as athletes, that’s for sure.
The final edits on my third novel, Limberlost. And a nursery. g
If you could go anywhere tomorrow, where would it be, and why? I’ve always wanted to go to Patagonia. Even thinking about it fills me with a sense of adventure and isolation and natural beauty. I feel as though if I went there I’d come to some new understanding of things. It’s a silly feeling, but I can’t shake it.
I find this hard to answer, because there are many writers who have written books I adore, but I don’t necessary love their whole body of work. So I’m just going to say Annie Proulx. Her writing means a tremendous amount to me.
ARTS
In various interviews, Peele has revealed that he wanted Nope to be a commentary on our dangerous inability to look away from spectacle, but also on the exploitation of animals and people in the entertainment industry, as well as the erasure of African Americans from Western cinema and history, while still being a Spielbergian science fiction, horror, adventure, western film. This list is hardly exhaustive. The wealth of tiny details, references, and clever symbolism is impressive. Peele’s ambition to say so much is admirable, and a lot of what he does say is frighteningly true. However, rather than weaving his themes together in a naturally cohesive manner, the film’s final act instead muddles them with conflicting results. The antagonistic force haunting the ranch seemingly rep resents the vicious, indifferent machine that is the entertain ment industry. Its unique design even mimics that of a camera. Other times, though, it assumes the position of a pitiful victim of said industry; akin to the horses which OJ is desperate to save throughout the story. This mixture of allegories ultimately undermines the film’s final conflict and the effectiveness of the characters’ motivation. The story proposes that such a force should be destroyed (in a celebratory fashion, no doubt), yet when the antagonist has also been portrayed as a victim that needs saving the impact becomes unintentionally confused. What should be taken as literal or allegorical seems inconsistent and unable to cope with the sheer number of thematic ideas Peele toys with. Despite these tangled themes though, Nope succeeds most where it counts – as spectacle. Peele employs his vast budget to cre ate a film so striking in its atmosphere and excitement that he more than proves the absolute, magnetic power that visual entertain ment can hold over us. Sometimes that truth is an unsettling one, but for Nope itself, it’s merely the sign of a talented filmmaker. g
IFilmt’s
easy to forget that it has only been only six years since Jordan Peele’s directorial début. Get Out (2017) was both a strikingly confident addition to the horror genre and a re markably influential step forward for black representation in film, instantly making Peele a household name. His third film, Nope (Universal Pictures), is backed by a $60 million budget. This makes it his biggest project yet, costing more than three times as much as his previous film, Us (2019). Unsurprisingly, he delivers a spectacle that would make even Steven Spielberg proud.
At the heart of the film are OJ (Daniel Kaluuya) and Emerald Haywood (Keke Palmer), two estranged siblings who begin to reconnect after a recent family tragedy. While Emerald has been chasing a life of her own, OJ remains dedicated to the Haywood family business: training horses for film productions at their fam ily ranch in the mountains of outback California. This isolated rural setting is the perfect backdrop for strange happenings that begin to haunt their home. The iconography often associated with Area 51 and Roswell, New Mexico, is a staple of Nope. There’s a kind of comfort in the film’s ambience, one that dangles you between the safety of your viewing space and the eerie happenings onscreen. The howling wind, the wide-open ranges shrouded in darkness, the chilling suspicion that something is out there among the stars, watching us, lingers throughout the film. Peele concocts familiar sounds, visuals, and ideas from pop culture to form this specific mood. There is even a clever concoction of sound effects that subtly mimics the iconic high-pitched, Theremin tune often associated with alien encounter films from the 1950s. From the slow, sinister uncovering of what is hiding in the desert ranges, the film smoothly transforms into a thrilling adventure. The camerawork is grandiose in scope, the music rousing, the performances all strong. Given Peele’s background in comedy (most notably his sketch series Key & Peele), he also gives his characters a certain amount of wit and levity. Sometimes it works, as in Kaluuya’s dry, down-to-earth performance as OJ. Other times it doesn’t, as with a certain minor character whose singular, distractingly cartoonish quirk is that he is obsessed with his camera at the expense of everything else.
Troy Harwood Daniel Kaluuya in Nope (image courtesy of Universal Studios)
I am sure Peele would love nothing more than to vindicate the comparison given that two of his primary inspirations for Nope are Jaws (1975) and Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977). Even if he hadn’t publicly revealed these inspirations, they are written all over the film. Just as the recent Tom Cruise stunt-ridden extravaganza, Top Gun: Maverick, was a throwback to the action blockbusters of the 1980s, Nope is a classic Spielbergian adven ture film, right down to its additional coat of horror. Through its tone and atmosphere, the film perfectly captures the electric mix of excitement, fear, mystery, and fun that Jaws so memorably launched in the 1970s.
Muddled allegories redeemed by spectacle
Troy Harwood is a freelance arts reviewer and video editor.
60 AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW SEPTEMBER 2022
Strange happenings
Familiar though the folkloric UFO motifs and Spielbergian influences are, Peele adapts them in surprising new ways. This is what separates Nope from Top Gun: Maverick and the seemingly endless factory-line of nostalgia-driven projects produced now adays. Nope doesn’t rely on brand recognition or a collection of sequels, prequels, and reboots. It is an original story with a litany of fresh ideas, including thematic ones. As in Peele’s previous films, Nope is noteworthy for its allegorical depth. Peele leaves you with much to think about during and after the film. While this is a welcome feature of his work, he may be juggling a little too much on this occasion.
Their idyll is shattered when they wake to discover a press pack outside the hotel and the internet in overdrive reporting news of their affair. Anna just wants to get to work – she is putting together an exposé on sexual harassment in the banking industry – but she decides to lie low until the feeding frenzy has diedAnna’sdown.affair – and the tabloid representation of that affair as the selfish abandonment of her son and a repudiation of family values – subjects her to a tsunami of online abuse. Miller’s focus here is not so much the whys-and-wherefores of the hatred and vitriol that spew forth on social media, nor why women are more viciously targeted than men (for Miller it’s sufficient to blame misogyny and move on). Rather, Miller concerns herself with the impact this invective has on Anna and whether or not she will break under its burden.
No one expects Miller to recreate the complexity of Tolstoy’s work within the confines of a ninety-minute play. However, in mapping her own play against the principal checkpoints in Tolstoy’s plot – the unhappy marriage, the handsome soldier, the aggrieved husband, the lost child, the jealousy, the loss of faith in the lover, the emotional breakdown, and even the train (here rattling past the hotel every few minutes) – Miller both limits how responsive she can be to the social and moral context of twenty-first-century characters (are we really so affronted by ex tramarital affairs and divorce?) and creates a situation where Anna is lurching from one emotional state to another, the transitions between them far from credible. That it’s possible for even the most successful of women to fall prey to despair under such circumstances is not in doubt, yet Miller offers little to explain Anna’s particular descent into hopelessness. Why would a woman with Anna’s professional rep utation wilt so quickly, foregoing all agency, in the face of a bom bardment of paparazzi and tweets? Has she not been the subject of online trolling before? Can she find no women to support her apart from a sister-in-law and a colleague (both played by Louisa Mignone), who counsel her to toe the line and return to her husband? Are we meant to believe that there are no sympathetic voices in the public sphere coming to Anna’s defence? By failing to even suggest answers to questions such as these, the play is without the scaffolding to support the most powerful moments in the play, including Anna’s last-minute assertion of her own worth, her selfhood. Anna’s monologue here operates more as a deus ex machina than the culmination of any sort of dramatic arc. Even so, it’s of sufficient force and emotional texture to make you wonder how much more effective this play might have been had Miller structured it, like Prima Facie, as a monologue.Fundamentally, Anna K is inhibited by its own dramaturgy (the play was developed with director Carissa Licciardello). Restricting the action within a grand hotel room (set design by Anna Cordingley) captures Anna’s feeling of entrapment and her escalating obsession with what’s being said about her. But it also forces much of the dramatic action – Anna’s increasingly fraught phone conversations, the clamour of the journalists, and the barrage of social media abuse – off-stage, thus choking any tension before it has a chance to breathe. That there is not even a hint of sexual attraction or passion between Anna and Lexi – in either the performance or the rather bland assertions of lust in the script – only adds to the play’s credibility problems (are we really meant to believe Anna would jeopardise her career and her relationship with her son for such a damp squib of an affair?). What ultimately undermines Anna K, however, is the super ficial nature of Miller’s treatment of the subjects of slut-shaming, online trolling, and misogyny. In this, it is little more than an Op-Ed piece, one that relies largely on stereotypes and preaches to the converted. Miller makes no attempt to introduce ambiguity – ambiguity that might have perhaps been drawn from Anna’s work, her dedication to journalistic truth, her own contribution to the media milieu that is now feeding on her – to make us question our outrage or complicate our certainties.
Preaching to the converted
Diane Stubbings is a writer and critic based in Melbourne. (A longer version of this review appears online.)
insipid
TheatreAustralian playwright Suzie Miller is having something of a breakthrough year. Two of Miller’s play are having their mainstage premières – Anna K and RBG, Miller’s ode to American jurist Ruth Bader Ginsberg (STC, October–December) – and her award-winning play Prima Facie (2019) has been a sell-out smash in London’s West End. A rage against the legal system’s treatment of sexual assault victims, Prima Facie is a monologue delivered by Tessa, a determined young lawyer. Tessa revels in her ability to master the beast that is the legal system, only to find that beast turning on her when she herself is raped. A play that deftly clarifies and concentrates the moral and ethi cal fault-lines within sexual assault laws, Prima Facie underlines the differential treatment of victims and perpetrators in sexual assault cases. By comparison, Anna K (Malthouse Theatre) is an insipid and somewhat dispiriting affair. As its title suggests, Anna K takes as its template Leo Tolstoy’s classic novel of desire, family, and faith, Anna Karenina (1878). Anna (Caroline Craig) is an investigative journalist, renowned for her pursuit of truth at all costs. One of her recent stories involved élite SAS soldier Lexi (Callan Colley), who has exposed the brutal beating of a young recruit by a superior officer. Despite their seventeen-year age difference, Anna and Lexi are now having an affair. Anna has decided to leave her husband and, for the time being at least, her ten-year-old son, to be with her lover. Secreted away in a hotel room, they plan a future together.
An new play from Suzie Miller Diane Stubbings
AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW SEPTEMBER 2022 61
American playwright Tony Kushner has written that when we experience theatre it’s not enough to be among those who share our faith: we need to be among those who share our doubts. It’s this sense of doubt that’s missing from Anna K. Compelling theatre forces us to ask questions not just about society but about ourselves. Those questions may bring us to the same conclusions, but if a play such as Anna K doesn’t at least attempt to expose something of the perspectives and prejudices that shape our certainties, it becomes difficult to see its point. g
drinks following the first performance of the recent soldout run of Gustav Mahler’s Symphony No. 2 (Sydney Symphony Orchestra), conductor Simone Young chatted to mezzo-soprano Michelle DeYoung, the latter’s hoarse voice alarming the two of them. ‘We need to call Debbie,’ Young told a colleague, wary of what the morrow would bring. ‘Right now!’
The Debbie concerned is mezzo Deborah Humble, whom Simone had conducted many times in Hamburg and who had cut her teeth on such dramatic jump-ins. The circumstances are always different, the routine pretty much the same: an archival video link of the production is pored over during the lunchtime flight, followed by half an hour with either conductor or stage manager in order that the curtain might rise on time. In this in stance, Humble knew the symphony’s exquisite fourth movement, ‘Urlicht’ (what self-respecting mezzo doesn’t?), yet the long finale was another matter. That was Thursday morning’s task, while she waited to see if DeYoung got any better.
Yet there was so much else to admire in this movement: oboist Diana Doherty’s single-breath solo, which traces the voice in its magical phrase, ‘How I wish I were in heaven!’, before going on alone to show us just what that heaven might sound like. And concert master Harry Bennett’s awkward-key solo, which must breathe and turn on a dime despite the intransigent clarinet obligato on his back, its character so different from that of his barn-fiddle duo with flute in the third movement. This was all exemplary ensemble work, a reminder of how an extremely good orchestra remains a microcosm of the best possible society.
Whether or not this is the case, it must be acknowledged that nothing quite prepares listeners (or conductors, for that mat ter) for the dispiriting first chord of the evening in the Joan Sutherland Theatre, our ears hastily recalibrating so we might get through it with some of our initial optimism intact.
Acoustical atonement
AMusict
Fortunately, there has been atonement aplenty. In her speech following the performance, Young said that they all had been ‘steeling ourselves for it just to be a bit better’, which is why in the acoustic tests in the previous weeks they couldn’t quite believe what they were hearing. The best analogy she could muster was for us to imagine an opulent room with every stick of furniture in it left exactly as it had been, but because the lighting was now completely new, everyone who entered the space would see it in a fundamentally different way. And those fundamentals matter. This was an orchestra whose winds have traditionally played at least twice as loud as is polite just to cut through the acoustic morass, whose strings could never quite get across the footlights the myriad instrumental techniques at their disposal, settling instead for a more corporate sound. These are players used to watching when they can’t hear and guessing when they can’t see. How revolutionary to have an acoustic where a violinist can hear a flute player breathe in and phrase or attack accordingly? Mahler is the perfect test case for a new hall. After Hector Berlioz, composers littered their scores with ever more specific technical instructions, happy as well to let their imagination roam offstage when the need arose. How brilliant to hear with such clarity, then, the amazing string colours in the second movement: the subtle glissandi, perfectly judged (not too early, not too late); the long, bouncy spiccato passages, all perfectly in sync; the dif ferent muted sounds, breathy or hushed; the sheer grunt of thirty or so violins playing on their G strings; the long cello phrases once the bows had all stopped bouncing, so beautifully shaped by Catherine Hewgill. How strangely hypnotic, then, to hear the offbeat broom taps of the rute in the third movement, forming a nice sonic connection to the Aboriginal rain sticks in William Barton’s lovely opener, which featured the Sydney Children’s Choir and Gondwana Indigenous Children’s Choir under Lyn Williams. And how thrilling to hear the offstage brass at the be ginning of the finale, a mad hunt interrupted by the most perfect imaginable union of flute and piccolo. Or the onstage horns in the same movement, ‘mit aufgehobenen Schalltrichter’ (bells up), the triangle player directly behind them grinning like a loon. Berlioz memorably mocked the traditions and excesses of French grand opera – the choruses of nuns and parades of devils, the stinking thuribles and glowing monstrances – though he
62 AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW SEPTEMBER 2022
So, this gala reopening of the Concert Hall at the Sydney Opera House on 21 July was steeped in even more drama than a complete refurbishment and acoustic reimagining of the space would normally allow. And Humble did a beautiful job, as was ev idenced by the expression on soprano Nicole Car’s face during the creamy ‘Urlicht’, Humble’s rubato carefully judged, her sound rich, her text beautifully placed, Young looking after her at every turn.
SSO triumphs in a new acoustic Paul Kildea Simone Young (image courtesy of the SSO)
And the evening really was all about best society. Could state government intervention atone for the sins inflicted on this mighty opera house when previous state government intervention led the architect, Jørn Utzon, to abandon the project in 1966? The late architect Ken Woolley, who in 2010 published a compelling, forensic dissection of the building based on archival documenta tion, decided that the acoustic compromises of the building were stitched into Utzon’s architectural plans, alas, long before the ac rimonious split. (Woolley was motivated to undertake his analysis because of his dissatisfaction with the narrative that had emerged from the fiasco, of philistine Australian engineers and politicians driving away the visionary, single-minded European architect.)
AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW SEPTEMBER 2022 63 retained some of the dramatic conventions in his own works. So too Mahler, whose idea of symphonic scale was monumental almost from the start. ‘Hier folgt eine Pause von mindestens 5 Minuten’, Mahler specifies in the score at the end of the first movement (which might be translated on this occasion as, ‘Conductor to yak with concert master, who has also jumped in recently because of Covid, to praise his playing and direction’). Mahler was mindful of the need to breathe and collect thoughts before continuing the journey, conscious of the large mountain on the near horizon. Yet before then – before the offstage skir mishes and Mahlerian grandeur – is some of the most intimate chamber music imaginable, a tenderness connecting players, all the more precious and fragile for the knowledge that it will be blasted away in the final minutes of the symphony. These, more than any other moments, were when the hall breathed with the players. The audience too. That large mountain was scaled in the company of the Syd ney Philharmonia Choirs, doing their director Brett Weymark proud. They ranged from perfectly articulated forest whispers to the defiant mix of prayer and assertion that ends the piece: ‘The blows you have struck will carry you to God!’ And the existential tussle that occurs between soprano and mezzo in this movement – so much less sickly than a similar dialogue in Edward Elgar’s Dream of Gerontius – was exquisite, Car and Humble forming a terrific timbral pairing. And so a great orchestra has a hall and conductor to match (or as the SSO Chairman said, a ‘world-class’ venue, orchestra, conductor, acoustic, skirting around the fact that the world has so many different classes of concert hall). After so long, after so many tribulations and so much investment, it must be tempting to sit back and just enjoy the trip. Yet when Esa-Pekka Salonen became Music Director of the LA Philharmonic in 1992 – moving into the astonishing Disney Hall eleven years later – he redefined the role of the orchestra and its relationship with audiences, players, composers, philanthropists, and patrons. He made it a microcosm of the best society. It would seem more important than ever to do a similar thing here; such wholescale opportunities are elusive, after all. More over, in the speeches before and after the gala and in the articles written about the refurbishment (the word doesn’t do the results justice) and the structural changes to the hall’s surroundings, there has been much mention of the need for a hall that can support the many visiting acts whose one ambition is to play at the Sydney Opera House. Theirs is a valiant and understandable ambition, yet in most instances this new, crystalline acoustic will mean very little to those operating the sound desks and the imported rigging, or indeed those playing within it.
It was good to hear the Opera House’s Louise Herron talk about the importance of launching this new hall with the SSO, and of Young talking about how they had all now embarked on a journey together, its destination unclear but exciting. (And Young is a great exponent of contemporary composers; will audiences and composers here come along for the journey, as they have in LA, should she take this entrancing byway?) Yet it is historically and culturally vital that this orchestra be allowed to develop its relationship with the hall and with those who come to experi ence its acoustic transformation. In the space of a few weeks, it is already changing the way it plays; dare to imagine where this journey might take us all! g
Paul Kildea is the author of Benjamin Britten: A life in the twen tieth century (2013) and Chopin’s Piano: A journey through Roman ticism (2018). He lives in Melbourne and is Artistic Director of Musica Viva. The Sydney Symphony Orchestra playing in the Concert Hall (Daniel Boud)
At twenty to thirty pages on average, the stories in Lohrey’s collection also satisfy, partly because they are lengthy enough to offer a contained narrative encapsulating a quite complex and eventful mini-plot. The penultimate story, for example, ‘John Lennon’s Gardener’, invokes the history of a small, idealistic settlement (‘not a commune’, insists one of its members) in a remote valley first inhabited by Europeans in the 1860s. Two large German families arrived and built simple but beautifully finished stone houses, which their descendants ultimately abandoned to new people of vaguely hippy persuasions; but in the end, this second community also breaks up, and the lovely, isolated valley is left to nature – or developers. The place itself has a beginning, a middle and an end, its life providing a quiet backdrop to dramatic events and clashing interaction, particularly when set in motion by the central character, a forceful, imperious woman who seems ill-adapted to pastoral idyll. So what does happen? Well, you must read it for yourself.
Somewhat to Kirsten’s surprise, Madame Bovary proves better than expected, as well as helping the hours to pass in the small, dank cabin where the children can’t intrude. Because they are Tom’s problem, aren’t they? Four-fifths of the way into the novel, however, she has a flash – the equivalent of ‘Madame Bovary, c’est moi!’ She does not actually speak the words, and in any case would have no idea that Flaubert said them first, but she does register the similarities between her sulking, resentful self and the dissatisfied heroine pining for a more glamorous life. She makes a determined and successful attempt to improve, involving herself in the preparation of meals, telling the children stories about the Australian bush, and on the last night dealing with a minor crisis while Tom sleeps. Pleased, she congratulates herself: ‘She was cold, she was uncomfortable, but she had done a good deed.’ Unfortunately, the problem is not really solved, and its after-ef fects make her dangerously ill. During her hazy recovery she begins to feel sorry for ‘poor Emma … too constrained too early’, and vaguely thinks of ending her own relationship with Tom. She probably won’t be drawn to any more Flaubert, but as she drifts off into the ‘limp repose of the convalescent’, we sense that she has moved on in ways that were not open to poor Mrs Bovary; nev ertheless, the unlikely French romantic has indirectly stimulated both small and larger upheavals in Kirsten’s life and behaviour.
In another example, the title story foregrounds an adventur ous young Australian woman called Kirsten, to whom the name of Flaubert means virtually nothing. The titular novel is mentioned only twice. Kirsten embarks on it simply because it is the only book on hand after she has reluctantly agreed to help Tom, her schoolteacher boyfriend, take a group of underprivileged kids for a ten-day barge trip on an English canal. We understand how Kirsten and Tom met, why they find themselves on this shabby, unreliable boat and, more lengthily, what it is like being cooped up in a confined space in foul weather with a motley assortment of badly brought-up twelve-year-olds.
A third and arguably less important aspect of these stories is the one vaunted on the back cover – their confrontation with the realities of ‘modern life’. While not untrue, this hardly constitutes a criterion, as evidenced in the shortest and least successful, ‘The Art of Convalescence’. The girl with the lump loses an ovary, but gains a love of classical music. The facile ending is atypical of the bulk of these high-standard, engaging and enjoyable stories, which are well polished but not too obviously crafted. g
I do not share her preference, tending to enjoy looking forward to the next chapter of, say, War and Peace. But I am also an avid consumer of Chekhov’s short stories, one of the reasons for their strength being the way they compel us to mull over the extended, unwritten conclusion which preoccupies our minds well beyond the final full stop, and which makes our ruminations an organic but invisible complement to the author’s intention.
a clutch of novels including the awardwinning Camille’s Bread (1996), Amanda Lohrey has now turned to shorter literary forms, notably two Quarterly Essays (2002, 2006), a novella (Vertigo, 2008) and this new col lection of short stories. At the 2009 Sydney Writers’ Festival, she publicly confessed her new leaning, arguing the benefits of genres more easily completed by both writer and reader and less likely to produce guilt if cast aside unfinished.
64 AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW SEPTEMBER 2022 FFictionrom
A different reason for enjoying these stories lies in their persuasive internal logic. Lohrey presents us with a number of individuals from a variety of walks of life – a brain surgeon engaged in a bout of loquacious self-reflection, a woman with a suspicious lump and no private health insurance, a man paralysed by a mid-life crisis, a family affected by a temporary change of dwelling – all of whom think or act, one might say, in character. By this I do not mean that they are predictable, rather that they are all convincingly themselves, reacting with authenticity to new challenges, ongoing dilemmas, or whatever life serves up.
From the Archive
Amanda Lohrey’s reputation as one of Australia’s foremost novelists was secured when The Labyrinth won the Miles Franklin Literary Award, the Voss Prize, and the Prime Minister’s Literary Award all in the same year. Having led a distinguished career as an academic and teacher, Lohrey is now the subject of scholarly scrutiny herself (Brenda Walker reviews Julieanne Lamond’s new monograph in this issue). Yet the success of Lohrey’s novels has tended to overshadow her versatility as a writer. In the October 2010 issue of ABR, Judith Armstrong reviewed Lohrey’s short story collection, Reading Madame Bovary, a set of ‘high-standard, engaging’ pieces bound together by ‘their persuasive internal logic’.
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